10 ms·

I don't want to dunk on a single out-of-context quote, and I'm sure that Mr. Tetzchner fully understands what I'm about to type as he seems like a brilliant guy

• abandonliberty 4y ago
  I'm curious whether advertising or paid usage has the higher potential profit. You can look at it as a mostly closed system. Users buy the products, ultimately paying for advertising. Alternatively, if VCs/failing companies pour money into advertising that fails, this money does not come from users. In this scenario, users get content for free and, combined with the above, the total potential profit of the system is greater with advertising than without. Advertising both alters what people buy and gets them to buy more. As a result, I suspect that even if users are willing to pay for content, the potential revenue in a system that uses advertising is greater. This makes it a rather intractable problem in an unregulated revenue-maximizing capitalist society, requiring both an attitude change from consumers along with regulation.
• tyingq 4y ago
  He does seem to be specifically ranting about the privacy invasion of deeply targeted advertising, rather than ads in general.
  • JohnBooty 4y ago
    Very very true. But, I feel the answer is the same. Advertisers are spending money for ads and they of course want the best possible return for their money and this involves as much tracking and intelligence-gathering as is technically possible. If one is now creating an advertising-supported site, you are now at the whims of advertisers. There are alternatives, but I've never seen them scale. For example some independent blogs and other content creators have "hand picked" ads from selected partners. For example, DaringFireball.net runs one ad per week and he appears to work carefully with advertisers to select ads he feels comfortable running. But I've never seen this scaled up very far. (not that everything needs to be scaled up)
• RobotToaster 4y ago
  >Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such? And nobody really cared. People made content because they wanted to, and it was generally better quality than the corporate blogspam we have now. The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.
  • auggierose 4y ago
    That's the same as saying that commercialisation of life was a mistake. I am not disagreeing, but let's just call it for what it is.
  • antiterra 4y ago
    Back then people also got hit with ludicrous internet bills the moment their site had large scale use and banner ads were the only real path to managing that cost. Adding a paywall would have created a severe amount of bad will.
    • sethammons 4y ago
      Lots of sites just turned off after a given amount of load and you would have to try again later, usually the following day. I think that is an appropriate trade off. It is one reason why mirror sites popped up.
    • impossiblefork 4y ago
      These days though, that could be solved with things resembling bittorrent for websites etcetera though. I think some fairly complete solutions already exist in the video space, like peertube.
    • convolvatron 4y ago
      the problem isn't that moving bits is too expensive. its that moving bits is _almost_ free. you would think the best model would be each of us ponying up a couple dollars a month to support the whole thing but in the US at least we don't trust anything unless its delivered to us by a long chain of scammers 'innovating'.
• pmoriarty 4y ago
  "The reason why everything is ruined by advertising is because nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is." The internet was doing just fine before corporations and advertisers swarmed on to it in the first great internet gold rush.
  • jefftk 4y ago
    Are you saying it was great up until ~1995? The web has had a large commercial component for over two decades, and it was very small before then.
    • kps 4y ago
      Today is Sunday, the 10785th of September, 1993.
    • Linosaurus 4y ago
      ‘Eternal September’ possibly started as far back as 1993, so this particular nostalgia isn’t unique.
  • luckylion 4y ago
    Yeah, but it was also very much a thing for academics to play around with. Commercialization democratized the internet and let normal people access it. That usually makes it more crowded and degrades peak quality. And, to be honest, I much prefer today's internet and technology with all the flaws to what was there in the 90ies. Commercialization and turning it into a mass market is what drove innovation.
  • zaphar 4y ago
    If you define "doing fine" as only available to a limited few and barely sratching the surface of what was possible with the technology then sure. But to scale it to a broader audience and to empower more business models than just hobbyist site and university faculty pages you needed a way to fund it. I was there before the gold rush. If you had a page on the internet and it got at all popular half the people who visited would see either a notice from the hosting company that the page was no longer available because some limit had been reached or you would get some outrageous bill from your ISP. Only a limited few people could afford to visit the internet let alone publish on it. It had a certain exclusivity that came with certain benefits. But I'm not sure that staying exclusive was either a good idea or useful to society at large. Advertising in the early days helped the internet provide real value to more people than ever before. Like many good things though taken to extremes it has particular failure modes that we are seeing now. That doesn't mean introducing advertising was the problem necessarily. It does mean that controlling the failure modes of advertising is probably necessary for a well functioning society.
• nixpulvis 4y ago
  Free -> open -> editable Paid -> closed -> broken and outdated Funded -> quality?
• IvanK_net 4y ago
  People writew Wikipedia for free, people answer at StackOverflow for free, we got used to it.
  • JohnBooty 4y ago
    Wikipedia is an aggregator of knowledge and content created elsewhere. It's a wonderful resource and success story. That "hey, pitch in whenever you feel like it" model works wonderfully for some things but is not a universal or automatic solution.
• kmbfjr 4y ago
  I can't say you are wrong since that was the original deal when it came to broadcast entertainment, but it lacks nuance. Not only was advertising on broadcast media somewhat regulated (by the government) or controlled by industry ad boards (the networks themselves), at no point did radio, TV or newsprint ever report back so much information to the advertisers. It isn't a matter of expecting everything to be free. For example, look at attending a professional hockey game where there is absolutely zero expectation of anything free, yet attendees are deluged with advertising upon entering the venue. There are often breaks in game play, just for advertising. With respect to the internet, the ad industry has managed to ingrain itself where ads may never be shown. Google (an ad company) provides site analytics for free, and those analytics can be used by Google to steer advertising on sites far removed from the site being monitored. Take an hour and watch the DNS traffic from any streaming app, free or paid, and watch the privacy circus unfold. This industry simply can't help itself from figuring out ways to look over everyone's shoulders. Recall that I mentioned that at no point did radio, TV or newsprint report back so much information, even that has been changing. ATSC3 TV receivers by default will report back location information and viewing habits not only to the TV stations, but to any number of ratings services. Over the air guide data is intentionally hobbled so one must use the internet to get it, providing metadata on viewing habits. Online subscriptions to newspapers require use of readers, again reporting home on reading habits. While I think you are correct to raise the point that in some ways it is the price of free, the advertising industry has managed to wiggle their way into data collection for things that are not free, and on devices for which we pay a considerable amount of money to own. It may be wrong to say they've taken over the internet, but they've sure come into our lives uninvited in increasingly intrusive ways.
  • JohnBooty 4y ago
    I love your post, though I was by no means defending the intrusive privacy mess we have now. It is indeed orders of magnitude more disturbing than what was possible 25 or 100 years ago and I deeply hate it. I was only pointing out how/why people have been conditioned to tolerate the current state of affairs.
  • sizzle 4y ago
    Appreciate the time you took to write this. What is the solution to rein in control from advertisers? Adopt an EU style approach to regulation?
• jhoechtl 4y ago
  > nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. as it has been the first years of the internet? I did pay back then ... with my taxes. Public funded Universities were large back bones of the internet. Then it all got privatized and we are in the sump were in right now. The internet is a public good and should be financed accordingly.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Yeah I was on the internet back then. It was basically useless for decent content when I was in college in the mid 90s For reference, my first paid work i did involving development was making modifications to a Mac/HyperCard based Gopher server.
• jefftk 4y ago
  > Why does everybody want everything to be free? Personally, I want it to continue to be free because: * It's very low friction: you can go from site to site without needing to provide payment details, sign up, or consider whether a sites per pageview charge is reasonable. * It lets everyone participate. If you have some form of paying money for content then I expect that amount gets set high enough that it excludes a large fraction of the population.
  • ehsankia 4y ago
    Exactly. I think given the choice of having a free experience with ads vs the subscription model, the majority of people would pick the former. This model won because this model works best. The hardest part is getting users, and as you say, ad-model is low friction. Most people won't subscribe to thousands or random small sites.
• hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
  What if you just charge people? TBH I don't want to pay because I don't need the content. It's good but optional. Turn it into paid and I simply go away. People may view your content just because it's free.
• lapcat 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point. He's clearly not against advertising per se, nor against free content; rather, he's against online tracking. > "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. “The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn’t be afraid of being monitored. > he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place. > He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren’t following you." Advertising has existed for as long as business has existed. But for most of business history, advertisers could not track you. A magazine or a billboard can't track you or personally identify you.
  • dreen 4y ago
    Local radio stations can advertise local businesses which could be an example of good/useful targeted ad. The difference is of course the targetting is "passive" and they don't know me, at a downside of being only able to estimate the number of listeners. I'd welcome some passive system like that on the internet but have no idea how it could work.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    > The internet is supposed to be open and free, Ok > and you shouldn’t be afraid of being monitored. If it's open, people will see you. Don't be afraid.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    Sites were profitable because the average person couldn't create a site easily, so they had little competition. This very site exists because the creator got a gob smacking fortune for a web store, something that you can literally create by a following textbook today.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• agumonkey 4y ago
  Agreed, and I'd go further.. this is inherent to modern societies. Business invades every space possible, they need ads, enough people like it, it provides jobs (shitty ones probably) .. it makes some part of the economy runs, and maintains itself. Free internet would require people with enough self sufficiency to keep doing deep and joyful activities and share it. It's rarely the case, any activity soon requires more investment, more hands.. and then you need money inflow, you'll get it one way or another. Patreons and the likes are too brittle for many (unless you're really recognized as a worthy person, in which case lots of money going your way. But as some recent events, like the javascript polyfill guy, even that is not guaranteed)
• traverseda 4y ago
  >The money has to come from somewhere, so advertising it is. Does it though? If you completely removed profit incentive from some subset of the internet would we really be worse off? Sure, the content would be less professional, less glossy, and there would be less of it, but the content that remained would probably be pretty good and it wouldn't have to compete with mega-corporations with huge advertising budgets.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    People like glossy.
  • JohnBooty 4y ago
    If you completely removed profit incentive from some subset of the internet would we really be worse off? Solo hobbyist and crowdsourced community efforts have always existed online and those of course would continue to exist just fine. Lots of other stuff doesn't happen unless folks get paid. Journalism (actual, primary-source journalism, not talking about somebody else's journalism on your blog) takes time and money. You have to go places, sometimes thousands of miles away, see things, talk to people, and sometimes you spend three months or six months working fulltime on a story and it doesn't pan out. That costs money and lots of it. You can't do it in your spare time while you work a day job. Citizen journalism is cool, and vital, but it can't do everything. It's also awfully tough to create art for free in your spare time. It can take a lot of time or money. Certainly a lot of great art was created that way, but think of the great works of art that have survived for decades or centuries. Shakespeare. Michaelangelo. Van Gogh. Dudes were getting paid for making their art full-time, either by selling it directly or via patronage. You think Shakespeare's plays happen on some hobbyist basis while the guy works fifty hours a week shoveling mud or tending sheep? Probably not.
• bobajeff 4y ago
  I think the reason that the internet is a cesspool of privacy invading malware and fraud is because of get rich quick schemes. Basically the same thing that's affecting the majority of the cryptocurrency use. That's why there's always clickbait sites and auto generated content dominating search results and you're constantly being recommended crappy sponsored videos with no real content in them. It's not that people don't want to pay for things or they don't expect the pay for things. It's that most people don't know how to run a legitimate business but running a get rich quick scheme that's another ballpark.
• GeekyBear 4y ago
  > blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted The problem isn't advertising. The problem stems from combining advertising with relentlessly spying on everyone all the time. Television, newspapers, and glossy magazines had their content funded through ad sales without spying on the public for decades, so we know the spying on people part is not a hard requirement.
• jonathanstrange 4y ago
  People want something for free when the service offered does not have enough value for them to pay for it. The whole economy of startups is somewhat delusional and in a sense bubble (if you ignore advertising). Having success for giving away something for free is not a measure of economically viable success. If you add up what many startups request in monthly fees, almost no one will be willing to pay that sum. Many people also couldn't possibly pay if they wanted. Most people don't even have the discretionary salary to pay for a few non-essential services per month, let alone dozens or hundreds.
• criley2 4y ago
  Is it because the majority of people in American society are struggling financially and have less real money than their parents or grandparents, and are being nickel and dimed as their entire existence is converted to a subscription mechanic, from rent, to Amazon, to Netflix? Is it because they desperately seek out non-monetized content to spend what little free time they have in peace without losing what little money they have left? Nah...
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    The ad monetized content is mostly garbage though. But it's dangled in front people to attack out lizard brains. The non-ad-monetized content is better.
  • drstewart 4y ago
    So before ~2000, living in houses, buying goods, and watching movies was free? Weird, I must have missed all of that, because I sure as hell was paying rent and $5 to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Can you point to where all these free resources were that I missed out on?
    • criley2 4y ago
      Lol as someone who lived quite some time before 2000, we had all kinds of ways of bootlegging. Ear worms would bootleg grateful dead shows, we would tape everything we could off public TV, we'd record radio to tape, we'd trade it. Radio was free and ubiquitous, cable TV didn't come around until the 80s and even then public access TV was much bigger pre HD and Y2k. And of course we simply spent more time together, something which our cultures has wound down quite effectively these last few decades. Just saying, humanity has always found ways to be entertained for free, and Blockbuster is a short aberration in a long history of human culture. The aggressive monetization going on right now is not the story of history, and it's IMO not sustainable.
• philliphaydon 4y ago
  [dead]
• scarface74 4y ago
  And the article also says he complains about paywalls. I don’t have a problem with paywalls. I like the plain simple model of “I pay you money and you give me goods and services”.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    The main problem with paywalls is when you don't know what you are getting and the teasers are deceptive.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      Which sites are deceptive?
• robinsonb5 4y ago
  Why does everyone expect everything to be free? I'd argue that while money's part of it, the more important aspect is friction. Much of the time the internet is a platform for procrastination (he says, posting here while waiting for Vivado to do its thing!) - if I'm just idly reading a page or two and I'm interrupted by the need to create an account and worry about payment details then I'd have to be heavily invested in what I was reading to bother jumping through such hoops, instead of just going somewhere else. I'd also argue that advertising itself isn't the problem - it's the fact that the goal of maximising returns for advertising spends incentivises sleazy behaviour (not just the tracking, but also obnoxious audio ads and videos that partially obscure the content the user's trying to read.)
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    Most of the things I read online, I would probably not be willing to pay much for. For example, for “news” opinion pieces, my analogy is to a long form version of something one might find posted on a bulletin board at a coffee shop. Sure it is entertaining to skim and might be vaguely informative, but it isn’t really journalism and if someone tried to charge me to read it, I’d happily move on. I don’t expect everything to be free, I expect things to be priced in line with their value. Listening to somebody’s rant on something—I mean, therapists charge for it!
  • _9omd 4y ago
    I think friction is a big part. I’ve never paid for a website subscription but I have several subscription apps on my iphone because the payment (and cancellation) process is streamlined.
• KrugerDunnings 4y ago
  Let me give a slightly different explanation: if you look at the capitalisation of the global market of consumer's household budget reserved for education and entertainment vs the capitalisation of the global market for company's budget reserved for advertisement it is a two order magnitude difference. I don't remember exact details but it was like 1 trillion vs tens of trillions. Like even if you wanted the sell consumers their entertainment you don't have the same budget as someone giving it away for free. There is no easy fix for this, the information economy has reached the point of post scarcity and you don't really want to fix that.
• MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  This would be true IF websites ran just enough ads to keep the lights on. But no you can make PROFIT with ads. Which gave us BuzzFeed.
• nerdponx 4y ago
  Lest we forget that banner ads date back to the late 90s at least. "Free by default" was enabled largely by advertising from the first, or as a sort of loss leader for traditional media companies. It's more of a sophisticated chicken and egg scenario than you are making it out to be. It sounds like you are just victim blaming for people not demanding to be charged money for online content.
• johnchristopher 4y ago
  > Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question. > Is it because years of free broadcast television and radio conditioned us to expect everything to be ad-supported and "free?" > Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such? Well, we were sold the dream: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/ https://www.wired.com/2008/02/ff-free/ > But blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted. It's tangential but it's not short-sighted. There are generations being introduced to the web through Tik-tok, FB, etc., that don't know it could be/was different. A lot of money into making sure they stay in the garden.
• mfer 4y ago
  > he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place When he talks about advertisers stealing the Internet he's talking about how they operate now. Interestingly, it's become the middle men who have become really rich while the content creators only see a fraction of the money.
• matheusmoreira 4y ago
  I don't believe that. People used to pay to have their sites published just because they had something to say and wanted others to read it. This is how it should work. Why should we pay to read some guy's hot opinions? Would you pay me to read this comment? I doubt it. If you actually have something to say, you need to go out there and actively say it to people. You don't charge them for the privilege of listening to you. Truth is these for-profit sites just want our undivided attention so that fractions of that attention span might be redirected towards ads and therefore their pockets. They don't really have anything real to say. They'll say anything that brings them the desired profits. They'll avoid saying anything that could harm profits. Therefore, not only are they untrustworthy, they are essentially worthless.
  • Nadya 4y ago
    >They'll avoid saying anything that could harm profits. I'm on mobile so won't respond as well as I'd like to. But 1000000% this is why I'm vehemently against advertisements as a primary model of income. Want money? Ask for donations or sell your content. Nobody pays you? You aren't worth being paid in the eyes of the public. It's your job to convince the public that you are worth paying! All of my favorite websites and content creators are 100% funded by donations from supporters. It works because the value is high enough to be worth paying for. If the donations ever stop rolling in that speaks more about the quality - it stopped being worth financially supporting.
    • Nadya 4y ago
      I'm on desktop now so can explain a bit more in depth. Also a minor correction. Projects are often times funded out of pocket by the creator. Though due to that nature these products cannot scale or eventually must adopt a profit model - often in the form of advertisements as it is both the laziest and one of the most successful models. Not only will ad-driven models avoid saying anything that might harm profits - people who profit from ads are incentivized to have the ads been seen by as many Consumers as possible. The Producer/Content Creator's job is no longer to produce worthwhile content but to try and capture and retain as many eyeballs (views) as possible. Producing worthwhile content and capturing+retaining eyeballs are only loosely intertwined. The issue that presents itself later is that garbage content is both cheaper and often easier/faster to make and is also better at capturing+retaining eyeballs. So the quality of the content inevitably declines which results in issues later on for other people not only the Content Creator and the Advertiser - more on this later. Anything that results in more views is thus encouraged by the model. Clickbait? There would still be some because some people want to go viral or be the center of attention - but most clickbait is incentivized due to the ad model. Ragebait? Same thing - incentivized by the ad model. Gamified products that give Consumers a brief hit of dopamine so they'll keep coming back for more? Incentivized by the ad model. Simplifying or watering down complex/niche content to cater to a broader audience at the expense of the original/niche audience? Incentivized by the ad model. Showing back-to-back ads? The model incentivizes showing as many ads as a user base will tolerate watching. In fact an ad model's ideal world is one where people sit and watch a channel that is nothing but 24/7 non-stop advertisements and occasionally make purchases. Why are ads an issue? (#1) in modern times ads are often tied at the waist with invasive user tracking and (#2) Ads are rarely ever designed to enrich a Consumer's life but instead to extract value from the Consumer by convincing them to purchase a product or service even if they are not in need of the product or service. This includes abusive tactics such as making the Consumer feel worse about themselves or their lives and that buying the advertised product or service will make them feel better! Or by associating the product with good feelings. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into researching how to make advertisements as effective as possible - and the results of that research is that advertisements work best when they "plant seeds" in a Consumer's subconscious and bias later decisions or alter the Consumer's behavior without them ever having realized it. Issue #1 is an issue of privacy but the larger issue is that it feeds into Issue #2. The data collected is sold to other Businesses & Advertisers to better extract value by being able to target their advertisements at a more vulnerable or susceptible population. Remember the decline of quality mentioned earlier? There is a certain level of "garbage" that the general population will not only tolerate but will choose over a higher quality product if the higher quality product comes with a higher cost. This disincentivizes producing any higher quality content if the "garbage" is acceptable enough and can be produced more cheaply. Why is investigative and long form journalism a dying art? Not necessarily that people don't want to fund it but that people don't want to fund it when they can keep getting garbage. Garbage also isn't free to produce - it's cheaper to produce. So if you can produce more garbage and the people seem to accept it - why would anyone ever spend more to earn less? You wouldn't. This applies to more than monetary costs too - time spent on creation is another factor that gets perverted. If the monetary cost to produce garbage or quality is the same but you can churn out garbage x3 faster - you're going to churn out garbage. And much like throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks - inevitably there will be some quality things that are ad funded but it will come alongside a plethora of garbage (this is a way to say "Yes, there are some rare exceptions." but you can probably only count them on your hands.) TL;DR The ad model creates perverse incentives that harms Consumers and almost inevitably results in lower quality content by Content Creators.
• bee_rider 4y ago
  A lot of stuff, even stuff that is sold as “journalism” is just re-packaged opinions. The writing that has flourished on the internet is stuff they can be produced cheaply (for example without going anywhere to do journalism). Or it is stuff that nobody would pay for, but if you stick it up with some ads, it’ll absorb some eyeballs. Or it is something that essentially benefits the author; pushing a particular opinion, trying to build a brand. All of this stuff serves to convince the user that paying for internet content would be foolish. It might be possible to build an internet that is worth paying for, but it will be a massive bootstrapping project.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  The system of roads that carries goods from point A to point B is not 'free', it's taxpayer-financed. Governments could also use tax revenue to pay for nationwide fiber-optic systems that carry information from point A to point B. Note 'paying for' doesn't mean hiring private contractors to run the system, it means having government employees run the systems while relying on the competitive private sector for things like manufacturing fiber optic cable (comparable to the road system, where equipment like road graders is privately manufactured). If congestion becomes a problem, as with roads, alternatives like trains for public transit to reduce traffic loads are also plausible. Regardless, those who claim there is a competitive free market solution to the issue of basic infrastucture are either highly ignorant or just pushing for private monopoly control with high rents.
  • seanp2k2 4y ago
    But why, when we can inject billions into the pockets of ATT, Comcast, Verizon, and friends. It’s far too lucrative an opportunity to let any more infrastructure ever be public again.
  • tensor 4y ago
    This is not a good analogy. The infrastructure, e.g. roads, is the one thing we all already do pay for via our ISP. It's the store fronts and movie theatres on the road that we want to be free, that are currently paid for by ads.
    • ronsor 4y ago
      I now wonder about the viability of an ad-supported movie theater and grocery store.
      • Digit-Al 4y ago
        Movie theaters are pretty much ad supported aren't they. From what I hear the payment we make doesn't cover the cost of the film, which is why you get about half an hour of ads and trailers before the film starts.
      • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• verisimi 4y ago
  Blaming advertising for the reason the Internet is like it is, is one possibility. But what if advertising is actually the least bad face of governmental control? This is to argue that the poor model is by design, as it allows for control and data gathering, that is actually as useful to the governance structure as it is to advertisers. If you think that we already live in a fascist governance system (where fascism is government and corporations working together) why not choose the more covert path to gather the essential information that the control structure requires for technocracy? Ie why not use corporations to collect the data (as they are perceived to be competitive), rather than the government (which would be accused of being 'Big Brother')? Similar to how verified twitter accounts = government passports.
• deleted 4y ago
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• ta988 4y ago
  There is also the problem that even the tinyiest writing or video produced in a garage by an individual is now covered in advertisements, sponsoring and hidden or not product placement.
• rapind 4y ago
  > Why does everybody want everything to be free? That's a more interesting question. Huh? How is this an interesting question? I would love it if my food, housing, transportation were free… because then i have more money for non-free things. This is like 2 + 2 = 4 level of obvious. If advertisers found a way to make food free, or cars free, or housing free, etc, then some sizeable portion of society would benefit from it in the short term while society as a whole gets shittier. The problem is figuring out the actual cost of advertising to society, and finding a way to communicate that cost to the public in a way that isn’t really abstract and sleep inducing.
  • paxys 4y ago
    There's a difference between wanting something to be free and expecting it to be free. We'd all like a free coffee, but people glay pay $5 at Starbucks every morning because they know things cost money. Ask these same people for $5 to install an app on their phone – that was built over years by a team of hundreds – and they will flip out. People who used to buy a single $5 newspaper or magazine from the newsstand will not pay $5 for a monthly subscription to the same paper. There's a fundamental disconnect in how people value digital assets, and that is why the internet is the way it is.
    • rapind 4y ago
      If you gave them free coffee for a few years though and then started charging $5 then it’s a lot harder to argue that it costs money to make coffee. How the hell were you able to give it away for free for the last few years if it costs money to produce?! Advertising enabled this model. It makes people value your work less because it is perceived to be free, even though in reality you might be raking in way more money due to the wider reach (no cost friction). Advertising is literally the root problem here. The expectation of free didn’t come from somewhere else. Also, not all digital assets are expected to be free. Only those that advertising got it’s claws into.
• guhcampos 4y ago
  Everybody used to make content for free in the early 2000s, that's a shallow argument. That's what communities do, they cooperate out of the mutual benefit the cooperation achieves. The monetization of content was born out of the ad business model. Someone had to pay the bill of the tools the tech giants were building, not the bill of small content creating communities and individuals. It was, and still is, relatively cheap to run a blog or a forum. Individuals can pay for it, and a couple dozen people can share the upkeep burden of relatively big forums with no issue. Now, however, everybody wants to turn everything into a profit, simply because it's so easy to do it, so "why not?". If you can monetize your own pet dog, your child, the food you eat, why not? And now we're all furbed.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  This is a common (not necessarily majority-) opinion on this startup website. I don’t understand why the theory asserts that the causality necessarily goes from the user to the business. Say some social media comes along. They want users. What reason do the users have to care? Their friends are not on it. Why pay money for that? Oh, pay X amount of dollars a month and hope that in three years the network effects will have payed off? How is that rational? But FB and Twitter (etc.) did get popular! Someone responds. Aha, but that’s just survivorship bias. The above is an argument for why the regular users have little reason to accept a paid-for option when it comes to social media. But does that mean that they necessarily (indirectly) demanded a free option? No. Because if you look back twenty years, it’s not like Social Media was some kind of innate need that people had. As is usually the case, it was a manufactured need. And who could have manufactured it? It could have simply been business people with some foresight (who knew about network effects). Did the people need social media? Not any more than they needed luxury dog grooming to be a thing. But businesses always need money. And so needs are manufactured. This woe-is-businesses who have to make their money through advertising (because of the lusers’ choices) narrative is predictable (understandable) for a startup website. But the causality might not really have started with the (l)users.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  > Why does everybody want everything to be free? To fully understand the question, we need to understand the alternative. The only viable, practical alternative to a free, ad-supported internet is basically a monthly subscription one, where your ISP charges an extra $20/mo. (or allows metered usage) and the money gets distributed through some proportion of the pages you visit and the minutes of videos you watch. Basically the same way you pay Spotify $10/mo. and the money gets distributed to the artists you listen to, more or less. But this would have required the government to step in and set this all up in a mandatory way which would have been totally against the original decentralized ethos of the internet. It requires massive tracking and so forth, and a centralized authority to manage all of the billing and payments. And basically very few people want that. Hackers and libertarians are against the centralization and tracking, left-wingers are against the poor having to pay more for internet because it's almost like a regressive tax, consumers in general don't want to pay more for internet, and so forth. Whereas nobody likes advertising, but they'll put up with it or just block it if they can. (And the other funding alternative -- micropayments -- is dead in the water because everybody hates them. Nobody wants to be constantly deciding whether it's worth $0.02 or $0.07 or $0.12 or $0.87 to read this one news article on this one site when it might turn out to be a crappy, useless article anyways.)
• deleted 4y ago
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• cratermoon 4y ago
  What about all the businesses that provide a free tier of their service with advertising but offer a paid version without advertisements? Many smartphone apps are free but ad-supported, but you can purchase the app to remove the ads. And to be clear, the personally targeted advertising based on harvesting personal information is fundamentally different than the audience-targeted advertising in mass media. That and the interaction with the service to grab and sustain attention is what has led to Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" of the internet.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > Is it because everything was sort of "free by default" in the early days of the internet because we hadn't worked out payment systems and such? We still haven't worked out per-view micropayments. Instead, the only viable models are begging people to sign up for a subscription.
• gexla 4y ago
  Nah, I miss the hobby web. The money doesn't have to come from somewhere. I don't have to pay to see friends. I don't have to pay to walk downtown. There's a lot that I can do without having to pay people. Most of the SEO content I see is something I would rather not come across, let alone pay for. I would rather hang out with real friends than to hang out with SEO friends. It's just that the SEO crowd has the money to shove everyone else out. Maybe the issue is that we need to get back to the old school ways of finding interesting things. There was no Google back then.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  > nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet Just like newspapers and magazines, right? No? We pay for those and they also have ads? Hmm. Maybe that's not why, then!
• pessimizer 4y ago
  > nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. The concept of paying for content that isn't trade-related/educational is mostly bizarre. I hate a large amount of the content I consume on the internet, and wish I could somehow take money away from the people who published it. You can understand people paying for entertainment, but only because modern entertainment is aimed at that sort of consumption. It's largely completely empty; having nothing to say about anything other than sort of expansions of cliched aphorisms, and/or childish and simplistic anti-crime, pro-patriotic, anti-cruelty messages."Real" art has an agenda. Art built for mass consumption carefully avoids any dangerous agenda because it doesn't to alienate any potential audience unless absolutely necessary. While I have to admit that I pay for investigations because I'm curious about their outcome (which is why I'd pay an investigative journalist or a detective), other than that I support for the media that I want other people to read. The baseline assumption is strange, where I pay people to communicate something to me that they presumably find important to communicate. I'd rather pay people to shut up. Content blocking is literally about shutting people up.
• naikrovek 4y ago
  > blaming the current miasma on "advertisers" is so short-sighted. I'm not so sure. Do you work for an advertiser? (Quote marks are not for emphasis, by the way.) Morally, advertising is bankrupt at a minimum, and adversarial/predatory when taken to extremes. Advertisers will take any surface, real or virtual, which can host advertisements in a cost effective way but does not, and place advertisements on that surface, gleefully. They simply do not care what happens to the thing they place advertisements upon, and they do not care if they ruin it. They see an untapped source of revenue and they wish to tap it. Advertisers did that to the Internet. Browse on mobile for a few minutes without an ad blocker to see what has happened. To an advertiser, you the reader are a source of funds, and absolutely nothing more. Twenty years ago you were considered a crass advertiser at best if your advertisement animated or even moved in any way. Now we have full-page interstitials and half-page ads which slide in and slide out, and even auto-playing videos which cover a third of the screen. To top it all off, advertisers are upset that the ability to block ads is even possible. They say they're "losing money" when people use ad blockers, when in reality they are simply not gaining as much money as before. The motive of an advertiser is money, and money alone. Morally advertisers are bankrupt at best, and malignant and predatory at worst.
• deleted 4y ago
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• BerislavLopac 4y ago
  Content has always been free. Before the days of zero-cost copying, we were paying for the actually hard copy; it's still common for physical books to cost more based on the quality of paper and binding, illustrations etc.
  • account42 4y ago
    > it's still common for physical books to cost more based on the quality of paper and binding, illustrations etc. Is the increased price usually actually due to the increased production cost or is this just good old price discrimination?
    • BerislavLopac 4y ago
      Probably both, but it doesn't really matter: if the content is exactly (or even mostly) the same, obviously it's only the production value that justifies the price difference.
• fouc 4y ago
  > nearly everybody expects content to be free to the end user on the internet. I think this is a trope. It's a classic explanation, which may not be true at all. I think if advertising on the internet was outlawed, we would have found a different approach from the beginning, one that worked just as well, if not better.