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> And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocal
by giantrobot 3y ago
> And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads.
For me the problem is not ads but the inevitable AdTech pushed under the guise of "ads". Too many sites want me to enable what they call ads but are really incredibly invasive spying systems. Many are compromised and actually deliver malware.
The whole situation is made worse by the "ads" serving up a bunch of shit I didn't ask for. The text content of some article is a fraction of the size of the tracking scripts and auto-playing video. Everyone could save a lot on costs by not serving me a multi-megabyte video next to a 30kB blog post.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI took ads off my websites years ago. I have no problem with the HN crowd being anti ad. I'm just saying we have the means to pay content creators right now and the reality is people mostly expect free content and implicitly assume that if you have sufficient traffic, you are making money and the reality is that assumption de facto has baked in an ad-based monetization strategy. Micropayments as people would like to imagine them don't yet exist. Good writing takes time. You want more of it, you should find a way to make it pay and, no, implicitly assuming an ad-based revenue model where you don't have to take a crowbar to your wallet and put it open and explicitly blocking ads and wanting nothing to do with them adds up to "Hello? Exactly how do you expect creative to make rent?"
- inconceivable 3y agopeople are making tons of money on substack. so why not you?