11 ms·

It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web

215 points by plg 12y ago

ewzimm 12y ago
It's interesting that the article ends with buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. We definitely need new ways of transmitting value, and I wonder if these advertising models will lead to exactly the desired result. Algorithms are becoming more accurate at modeling the value of things, and by understanding user preferences, we can understand what has value to a user and allocate micro payments appropriately. Stellar-style peer-to-peer credit systems are exactly what we need to pay for this value. If we could calculate what is giving us value, how much to pay for it, and do so without significant transaction fees, we would have the result of multiple business models reaching a common conclusion.
tikhonj 12y ago
> Users will pay for services that they love. Reddit, the lively recommendation and discussion community, sells Reddit Gold subscriptions that give users special privileges and the ability to turn off ads. Users do pay for those services, but not very much and not very often. There are simply too many obstacles in the way, both technological and psychological. To make it practical will require both social change and a much easier way to make small transactions. Not because it's difficult in any absolute sense, but because even the slightest practical barrier is enough to make people reconsider. The most successful payment models now seem to be app stores and in-app purchases, which are certainly marked by convenience. You just give your credit card details once and then you can buy things with no hassle. A model like this for web content is the minimum for moving off of advertising! More generally, though, this change is not something we can achieve unilaterally. We'd have to convince everyone else to go along with it, to choose paid services over free. Not an easy proposition at the best of times and, given the nature of the internet, not something we can force. (Fundamentally, this is actually a good thing because it means the internet can't easily be controlled, which is also why the emergence of gigantic, largely self-contained web properties like Facebook is decidedly troubling.)
- kbatten 12y ago
  I've bought reddit gold several times and it was incredibly easy. What specific obstacles are you talking about?
  - tikhonj 12y ago
    Sure, but that's because you're already used to and invested in Reddit. Initially, you had to sign up with your credit card, fill out an annoying form and go through a few intimidating screens. That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something. This is particularly relevant since one of the main reasons we're worried about the ad model at all is because it threatens the internet's decentralized nature. Replacing this with a model where you only make payments inside a few centralized organizations would not address this core issue. That process won't scale to a whole bunch of random, disparate sites especially if you're not heavily invested into them. If you come across a cool blog post and want to tip a bit of money, you'll have to go through the same process, which is just not worth it. And that's before getting into transaction costs! There have been various services that tried to fix them, but none so far that are convenient and ubiquitous enough to change things. And we really need change: this is, to a large extent, a social problem more than anything. The most important piece for moving away from ads is to make small payment expected and, for lack of a better phrase, socially accepted. We already have this for small physical goods: it's easy to imagine buying a piece of gum or a magazine at a random newspaper stand. But a similarly small purchase online is both less convenient and less accepted, so it ends up being much less likely. That's the core problem.
    - kbatten 12y ago
      I don't see this as any different than buying something from amazon though, which anyone can do. Micropayments are a problem, but as long as you buy a few dollars worth of reddit gold it is more akin to buying a gift card than a micropayment. The psychological issues are valid, but I'm not seeing technological issues in this specific case.
aaronetz 12y ago
I've just thought of a crazy idea: what if there was a subscription service, like Netflix for websites, where you'd pay a fixed monthly amount and get unlimited access to premium websites / webapps, with guaranteed privacy and no advertising? The said service would then pay royalties to the participating websites, depending on the usage.
- api 12y ago
  Interesting idea. Micropayments have been a perennial failure, but I wonder if anyone would actually use this? I might if your "Netflix for web sites" was full of really high quality content that wasn't reachable elsewhere, but I'm not sure if I'm representative.
  - aaronetz 12y ago
    I would definitely be more inclined to pay a single entity and get a "bundle" than make individual purchasing decisions. But you're right, it is all dependent on the content that would be offered. Something like this would probably need a big upfront investment to get going...
- Shivetya 12y ago
  wow, almost like Cable but for websites. its been proposed many a time, the problem being that everyone wants it to be their payment scheme and every site wants more than users are willing to pay.
  - baddox 12y ago
    It's exactly like cable, and I think it would suck for the same reason I think cable sucks. Packaged deals like that are only convenient to the customer because payments are brill inconvenient. So you get stuck paying for a bunch of shows and programs you don't want, and thus funnel money away from content creators you enjoy and toward content creators that are good at making deals with the cable company.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
api 12y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've come to this conclusion: Free (as in beer) is the enemy of free (as in freedom). It's the enemy of privacy, security, and human dignity as well. In the beginning there was the bubble. Well, actually there was DARPANet and such, but our story begins with the Internet bubble of the late 1990s. In the early 90s the Internet hit mainstream. I was there. I got online (first by umm... borrowing accounts at my local university at 14) in 1992, then moved to a legal ISP when such things became available in my area. I basically watched the whole thing unfold. When the Internet and the WWW went big there was a huge flurry of innovation, lots and lots of companies and open source efforts and various DIY projects and personal home pages and everything else. The small scale stuff was -- and often could be -- a volunteer effort. To this day there are millions of independent sites and blogs and OSS projects. But the big stuff was expensive. Building a site that is usable, content-rich, curated, and available for hundreds of millions of visitors is expensive. Building massive services like search engines is expensive. Building really high quality software is expensive. Making the gears turn is often the easy part... the polish that it takes to make something great often takes at least twice as long as it takes to do the "techie" stuff and get a working prototype. There was always a search for ways to make it pay, ways to finance the new medium, but in the beginning it didn't feel urgent. We were building the future, and damn the torpedoes. (By now I was doing it for my day job, so I was there in the trenches coding up early dynamic sites in PHP and Java, playing with Linux, hacking network code in C.) Lots of things were tried: early freemium models, paywalls and subscriptions, and of course ads. Only ads worked. Freemium can work but only if your costs per user are super-low, which they aren't for content creators or computationally expensive or bandwidth-heavy centralized services. Paywalls and subscriptions? Nobody wanted to pay. Everyone wants free. Total failure. Then the bubble popped and all the companies that couldn't find a way to make it pay went out of business. The only ones left standing were those who used the Internet as a secondary channel (print magazines and such) and ad-driven sites and services. But wait... it gets worse. Ads work but they don't. People, it turns out, hated intrusive ads, popup ads, and ad clutter in general. Ads were the only way to make the net pay (for most non-b2b businesses), but the more ads you have the uglier your site becomes. Back then they started calling it "portalitis" -- named after the buzz-word "portal" for sites like Yahoo and ICQ (remember that?) that became ad-encrusted messes. Then Google appeared. They dropped everyone's jaws when they launched with a search engine that not only worked but was incredibly clean. I remember seeing it... a text box and "search." That's it. Lots of people think PageRank was responsible for Google's success, but I think the clean site was a lot of it... maybe as much as half of it. The techies loved it. The users loved it. But the business folks, I'm sure, were like "huh?!? how!!!?!?" I'm not sure if Google planned their model or figured it out as they went, but eventually they did introduce ads. The ads were targeted, mixed into results and clearly marked. People clicked them because they were relevant. Genius. Google conquered the world. Google also did something else. They demonstrated a new and now trendy Silicon Valley business approach: launch a free service everyone loves, get a ton of users, then figure out how to monetize. It's that approach combined with the information needed to underpin finer and finer grained ad targeting that led to the real disaster. The real disaster wasn't ads. Ads are fine. The real disaster was surveillance as the business model of the Internet. Facebook was the second massive company to follow in Google's footsteps business-wise with launch first, get big, then monetize. Google kind of tiptoed into the surveillance business model by way of their ad targeting needs, but Facebook found that mass surveillance was the only way to really monetize. Again I'm not sure if Zuckerberg had this in mind from the get-go or not. I tend to think not. But how else do you monetize a massively expensive to run centralized social networking site where everyone just happens to post all kinds of personal data? The Internet, which was supposed to be our great liberator and engine of learning, became George Orwell's bidirectional TV set. It's a TV set that watches you. ... and it all goes back to free. The need to be free (as in beer) has led to a dystopian nightmare. That's because I'm sorry folks, but nothing is actually free. It has to be paid for somehow. Governments do it with taxes. But private entities? They've had to get creative. Unless we somehow challenge "free," I think it's only going to get worse. Surveillance will get worse. Google Glass failed but it's not the end... pretty soon there will be an effort to normalize the idea of your smartphone turning on its microphone and listening to your conversations. That data will be mined for product name drops. I'm sure more creative ideas will be explored. I had a nightmarish thought the other night. Full text analysis and meaning extraction is getting good, and it's only going to get better in the future. How long will it be before Google Docs, Dropbox, etc. start data mining the documents stored on their systems and extracting valuable... umm... information? Picture this: you're writing a novel. It's a really original plot. Then you see an ad for a Hollywood movie. It is your novel, verbatim. The characters are different but the basic plot points are all there. The story is there. Gotta monetize those data storage services somehow! I've started to even wonder if free (as in beer) open source needs to go. The idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free gets polished to the level that anyone uses it. The market expectation that software should be free leads software writers to look for other ways to monetize, which brings us back to surveillance and data mining. Look at some of the creepy stuff mobile apps can do, for example. Pay for it, or it pays for you.
greglindahl 12y ago
What if there was a discussion site that didn't use link-baity titles for articles? Then I'd know if I wanted to click through in advance. In this case: "Free: The Internet's Original Sin" is 100x better than "The Internet's Original Sin".
- dang 12y ago
  Agreed about link-bait, but in this case (as in many) we can just use the article's subtitle.
  - greglindahl 12y ago
    Much better. Thanks.
sparkzilla 12y ago
This is absolute nonsense. We spend our days using free services and reading free content which is all supported by advertisers. Google, Facebook, Tech blogs, newspapers. It's not a "sin" -- it's an incredible success. If you don't like clickbait then don't support publishers who use it. It's easy to avoid Buzzfeed and Upworthy. If you don't like "native ads" don't click them. Support publishers who respect their readers and make a clear distinction between content and advertising. I made such a pledge on my news site. http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-one-weird-trick/ http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-o...
- deleted 12y ago
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- adventured 12y ago
  It's a very, very small group of people that argue this position, and they constantly recycle it; they just happen to be loud about it. Meanwhile, a large portion of the Internet only exists because of advertising, and that will always be true. A big portion of the reading and watching public will never want to pay for all their content. The article might as well proclaim that the advertising that supported radio, newspapers and magazines was the devil too. Because that worked out so terribly for a century, right?
  - idlewords 12y ago
    As the article ponts out, pre-Internet advertising lacked the kind of tracking tools that make online advertising such an effective engine for permanent, mass surveillance today.
  - neumann 12y ago
    It kinda did. Free TV is mostly horrendous where I am. Tons of ads, terrible content. Radio as well. The only sources with quality and range are community radio (free but dependent on subscriptions) and community television (only people willing to show World Cup, but now unfortunately needing ads to support themselves) and premium services like HBO. Private models with advertising as the revenue eventually seem to be a race to the bottom to get eyeballs on ads with as creativity and production cost as possible.
dalek2point3 12y ago
Its kinda ironic this notice on the Atlantic website: "Ghostery found 25 trackers www.theatlantic.com" 25 is a LOT!
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Disconnect blocks 44 and adblock 30.
m52go 12y ago
Flat fee model + modify HTTP headers to allow paying users to skip intrusive crap? Like DNT but with $ attached. Unregistered users unaffected. Seamless for everyone. Thoughts?
- xxs 12y ago
  What makes you think I am not going to send those headers anyways - they are darn plaintext. Now if you have to sign and verify, it's another story but then again what stop people sharing those keys. For the record I resent ads in all their forms TV/Radio/Internet - the latter are trivially avoidable though.
  - m52go 12y ago
    There would have to be some kind of dynamic security setup so people couldn't do that. Like always-changing RSA tokens, etc.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    It would be pretty easy to make the system work with private keys and signed headers or even client certificates. You could stop people from sharing by putting a high enough limit on how much you could access or even just from how many ips (ie only two distinct ips in any given 60 minute window) it could be access from. Normal users would never hit those limits, of course, but pretty quickly you would hit those if you shared your access tokens.
    - xxs 12y ago
      Limiting by IP is a horrid (or worse) idea as they are dynamic, esp . nowadays with free wifi access and 3G (or 4G). There are ways to implement quotas based on certs and revocation but it's too cumbersome to become mass use.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  I've got a protocol design which includes this as a step.
Natsu 12y ago
This feels slightly ironic coming from the Atlantic [1]. Though I suppose that one might hope that this implies that they wish to put such things behind them. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/15/the-atlantics-scientology-problem-start-to-finish/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/1...
deleted 12y ago
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owenversteeg 12y ago
> Users will pay for services that they love. Reddit, the lively recommendation and discussion community, sells Reddit Gold subscriptions that give users special privileges and the ability to turn off ads. Reddit's not profitable.
egypturnash 12y ago
Patreon seems to be working for a growing number of creators. Personally I've seen mine slowly rise to $70 per page of my graphic novel (before fees), during a time when I've been pretty slow on new pages. I'm really not offering anything beyond seeing new pages a day or two before everyone else, either. I'm not gonna be rich off of this any time soon, but if things continue, I'll probably be making a comfortable solo living drawing weird comics. My first goal for Patreon was 'turn off ads on the current project'. It's REALLY nice to have them gone. I don't know if there are any multi-person projects that're paying a serious chunk of their living expenses with Patreon yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen sooner or later.
cromwellian 12y ago
Does everyone really want tolls and meters for every click and paywalls everywhere? One of the beauty of the ad model is that it influenced the vast majority of people to publish information in a way that did not require accounts, authentication, or any kind of barriers. It meant things like crawlers and search engines could exist and scale to the entire Web, without having to make millions of indexing deals or paying micropayments just to index content. It means archive.org and wayback machine can exist. It meant people could click on a link transaction free. Though it may displease the people working in the news business, I for one, want to keep the Web as transaction free as possible. The mobile world of app stores, install apps, and constant freemium nags to buy DLC I hope does not move to the web. On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention. It's a worthy trade for many people. I grew up poor, my parents didn't even have credit cards, we didn't pay for tv, and I had to sell my comic collection just to buy my first computer. Being able to consume the world's information, ad supported, or charity supported, would be a far better model for my inner city neighborhood of youth than micropayment paywall madness.
- pyre 12y ago
  > On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention It's more than that. You subsidize by giving up your privacy as these ad companies profile you via tracking as much of your web history as they can.
  - blutoot 12y ago
    As far as I am concerned (and I suspect it applies to many others), giving up my privacy to a machine that generates customized ads (or even risking losing it to third parties for more ads without my consent) is a much smaller price to pay than the inconvenience of going through paywalls and stuff. This is true especially when there's no guarantee that the article/post/whatever-content being accessed is gonna be of super-high quality. These things have been well captured through theories like Privacy Calculus [0] which basically posit that privacy concerns can often be trumped by the benefits of sharing resulting in a net positive utility. [0] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=privacy+calculus&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C33&as_sdtp= http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=privacy+calculus&b...
spo81rty 12y ago
I don't mind ads. They teach me about products and services I didn't otherwise know about. They are also critical to the success of my business as we do a lot of advertising.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  In theory you are right. Unfortunately ads tend to be for crappy products. The better a product is the less advertising it needs - the utopian side-effects free cure all cancer pills would need only a single CNN interview to take over the world. "One weird trick" ads need to run constantly because they are crappy. Ads run up against human nature to want to share useful knowledge. If ads were really good we would have places to go to see ads.
boldpanda 12y ago
Instead of complaining about Facebook and their ads, use it as a competitive advantage in your life. And by use it, I mean don't use it. Just as gambling is a tax on the ignorant, Facebook is a tax on the bored and undisciplined. If you can use Facebook even half as much as the average person, you'll have a huge productivity and happiness advantage.
- than 12y ago
  Oh man. That second sentence.
- fidotron 12y ago
  The true genius of Facebook is it's practically impossible to not use it, even if you're not signed up. If anyone mentions you, or happens to post a picture with you in you're in it. The same applies for Google, where if you happen to be in the background of a photo which isn't shared but gets uploaded to G+ quietly as a backup of an Android phone (which they do by default) then Google (and by extension the US gov) know where you were, as per their demo at I/O about 3 years ago.
- boldpanda 12y ago
  I must be getting downvoted by Facebook employees.
Paul_S 12y ago
Websites are free to choose either one, both or neither. I think it's a good setup.
pothibo 12y ago
The irony of this article being hosted on the atlantic whic has an ad popping up.

215 points by plg 12y ago

It's interesting that the article ends with buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. We definitely need new ways of transmitting value, and I wonder if these advertising models will lead to exactly the desired result. Algorithms are becoming more accurate at modeling the value of things, and by understanding user preferences, we can understand what has value to a user and allocate micro payments appropriately. Stellar-style peer-to-peer credit systems are exactly what we need to pay for this value. If we could calculate what is giving us value, how much to pay for it, and do so without significant transaction fees, we would have the result of multiple business models reaching a common conclusion.

tikhonj 12y ago

> Users will pay for services that they love. Reddit, the lively recommendation and discussion community, sells Reddit Gold subscriptions that give users special privileges and the ability to turn off ads. Users do pay for those services, but not very much and not very often. There are simply too many obstacles in the way, both technological and psychological. To make it practical will require both social change and a much easier way to make small transactions. Not because it's difficult in any absolute sense, but because even the slightest practical barrier is enough to make people reconsider. The most successful payment models now seem to be app stores and in-app purchases, which are certainly marked by convenience. You just give your credit card details once and then you can buy things with no hassle. A model like this for web content is the minimum for moving off of advertising! More generally, though, this change is not something we can achieve unilaterally. We'd have to convince everyone else to go along with it, to choose paid services over free. Not an easy proposition at the best of times and, given the nature of the internet, not something we can force. (Fundamentally, this is actually a good thing because it means the internet can't easily be controlled, which is also why the emergence of gigantic, largely self-contained web properties like Facebook is decidedly troubling.)

kbatten 12y ago
I've bought reddit gold several times and it was incredibly easy. What specific obstacles are you talking about?
- tikhonj 12y ago
  Sure, but that's because you're already used to and invested in Reddit. Initially, you had to sign up with your credit card, fill out an annoying form and go through a few intimidating screens. That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something. This is particularly relevant since one of the main reasons we're worried about the ad model at all is because it threatens the internet's decentralized nature. Replacing this with a model where you only make payments inside a few centralized organizations would not address this core issue. That process won't scale to a whole bunch of random, disparate sites especially if you're not heavily invested into them. If you come across a cool blog post and want to tip a bit of money, you'll have to go through the same process, which is just not worth it. And that's before getting into transaction costs! There have been various services that tried to fix them, but none so far that are convenient and ubiquitous enough to change things. And we really need change: this is, to a large extent, a social problem more than anything. The most important piece for moving away from ads is to make small payment expected and, for lack of a better phrase, socially accepted. We already have this for small physical goods: it's easy to imagine buying a piece of gum or a magazine at a random newspaper stand. But a similarly small purchase online is both less convenient and less accepted, so it ends up being much less likely. That's the core problem.
  - kbatten 12y ago
    I don't see this as any different than buying something from amazon though, which anyone can do. Micropayments are a problem, but as long as you buy a few dollars worth of reddit gold it is more akin to buying a gift card than a micropayment. The psychological issues are valid, but I'm not seeing technological issues in this specific case.

aaronetz 12y ago

I've just thought of a crazy idea: what if there was a subscription service, like Netflix for websites, where you'd pay a fixed monthly amount and get unlimited access to premium websites / webapps, with guaranteed privacy and no advertising? The said service would then pay royalties to the participating websites, depending on the usage.

api 12y ago
Interesting idea. Micropayments have been a perennial failure, but I wonder if anyone would actually use this? I might if your "Netflix for web sites" was full of really high quality content that wasn't reachable elsewhere, but I'm not sure if I'm representative.
- aaronetz 12y ago
  I would definitely be more inclined to pay a single entity and get a "bundle" than make individual purchasing decisions. But you're right, it is all dependent on the content that would be offered. Something like this would probably need a big upfront investment to get going...
Shivetya 12y ago
wow, almost like Cable but for websites. its been proposed many a time, the problem being that everyone wants it to be their payment scheme and every site wants more than users are willing to pay.
- baddox 12y ago
  It's exactly like cable, and I think it would suck for the same reason I think cable sucks. Packaged deals like that are only convenient to the customer because payments are brill inconvenient. So you get stuck paying for a bunch of shows and programs you don't want, and thus funnel money away from content creators you enjoy and toward content creators that are good at making deals with the cable company.
TeMPOraL 12y ago

api 12y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've come to this conclusion: Free (as in beer) is the enemy of free (as in freedom). It's the enemy of privacy, security, and human dignity as well. In the beginning there was the bubble. Well, actually there was DARPANet and such, but our story begins with the Internet bubble of the late 1990s. In the early 90s the Internet hit mainstream. I was there. I got online (first by umm... borrowing accounts at my local university at 14) in 1992, then moved to a legal ISP when such things became available in my area. I basically watched the whole thing unfold. When the Internet and the WWW went big there was a huge flurry of innovation, lots and lots of companies and open source efforts and various DIY projects and personal home pages and everything else. The small scale stuff was -- and often could be -- a volunteer effort. To this day there are millions of independent sites and blogs and OSS projects. But the big stuff was expensive. Building a site that is usable, content-rich, curated, and available for hundreds of millions of visitors is expensive. Building massive services like search engines is expensive. Building really high quality software is expensive. Making the gears turn is often the easy part... the polish that it takes to make something great often takes at least twice as long as it takes to do the "techie" stuff and get a working prototype. There was always a search for ways to make it pay, ways to finance the new medium, but in the beginning it didn't feel urgent. We were building the future, and damn the torpedoes. (By now I was doing it for my day job, so I was there in the trenches coding up early dynamic sites in PHP and Java, playing with Linux, hacking network code in C.) Lots of things were tried: early freemium models, paywalls and subscriptions, and of course ads. Only ads worked. Freemium can work but only if your costs per user are super-low, which they aren't for content creators or computationally expensive or bandwidth-heavy centralized services. Paywalls and subscriptions? Nobody wanted to pay. Everyone wants free. Total failure. Then the bubble popped and all the companies that couldn't find a way to make it pay went out of business. The only ones left standing were those who used the Internet as a secondary channel (print magazines and such) and ad-driven sites and services. But wait... it gets worse. Ads work but they don't. People, it turns out, hated intrusive ads, popup ads, and ad clutter in general. Ads were the only way to make the net pay (for most non-b2b businesses), but the more ads you have the uglier your site becomes. Back then they started calling it "portalitis" -- named after the buzz-word "portal" for sites like Yahoo and ICQ (remember that?) that became ad-encrusted messes. Then Google appeared. They dropped everyone's jaws when they launched with a search engine that not only worked but was incredibly clean. I remember seeing it... a text box and "search." That's it. Lots of people think PageRank was responsible for Google's success, but I think the clean site was a lot of it... maybe as much as half of it. The techies loved it. The users loved it. But the business folks, I'm sure, were like "huh?!? how!!!?!?" I'm not sure if Google planned their model or figured it out as they went, but eventually they did introduce ads. The ads were targeted, mixed into results and clearly marked. People clicked them because they were relevant. Genius. Google conquered the world. Google also did something else. They demonstrated a new and now trendy Silicon Valley business approach: launch a free service everyone loves, get a ton of users, then figure out how to monetize. It's that approach combined with the information needed to underpin finer and finer grained ad targeting that led to the real disaster. The real disaster wasn't ads. Ads are fine. The real disaster was surveillance as the business model of the Internet. Facebook was the second massive company to follow in Google's footsteps business-wise with launch first, get big, then monetize. Google kind of tiptoed into the surveillance business model by way of their ad targeting needs, but Facebook found that mass surveillance was the only way to really monetize. Again I'm not sure if Zuckerberg had this in mind from the get-go or not. I tend to think not. But how else do you monetize a massively expensive to run centralized social networking site where everyone just happens to post all kinds of personal data? The Internet, which was supposed to be our great liberator and engine of learning, became George Orwell's bidirectional TV set. It's a TV set that watches you. ... and it all goes back to free. The need to be free (as in beer) has led to a dystopian nightmare. That's because I'm sorry folks, but nothing is actually free. It has to be paid for somehow. Governments do it with taxes. But private entities? They've had to get creative. Unless we somehow challenge "free," I think it's only going to get worse. Surveillance will get worse. Google Glass failed but it's not the end... pretty soon there will be an effort to normalize the idea of your smartphone turning on its microphone and listening to your conversations. That data will be mined for product name drops. I'm sure more creative ideas will be explored. I had a nightmarish thought the other night. Full text analysis and meaning extraction is getting good, and it's only going to get better in the future. How long will it be before Google Docs, Dropbox, etc. start data mining the documents stored on their systems and extracting valuable... umm... information? Picture this: you're writing a novel. It's a really original plot. Then you see an ad for a Hollywood movie. It is your novel, verbatim. The characters are different but the basic plot points are all there. The story is there. Gotta monetize those data storage services somehow! I've started to even wonder if free (as in beer) open source needs to go. The idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free gets polished to the level that anyone uses it. The market expectation that software should be free leads software writers to look for other ways to monetize, which brings us back to surveillance and data mining. Look at some of the creepy stuff mobile apps can do, for example. Pay for it, or it pays for you.

greglindahl 12y ago

What if there was a discussion site that didn't use link-baity titles for articles? Then I'd know if I wanted to click through in advance. In this case: "Free: The Internet's Original Sin" is 100x better than "The Internet's Original Sin".

dang 12y ago
Agreed about link-bait, but in this case (as in many) we can just use the article's subtitle.
- greglindahl 12y ago
  Much better. Thanks.

sparkzilla 12y ago

This is absolute nonsense. We spend our days using free services and reading free content which is all supported by advertisers. Google, Facebook, Tech blogs, newspapers. It's not a "sin" -- it's an incredible success. If you don't like clickbait then don't support publishers who use it. It's easy to avoid Buzzfeed and Upworthy. If you don't like "native ads" don't click them. Support publishers who respect their readers and make a clear distinction between content and advertising. I made such a pledge on my news site. http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-one-weird-trick/ http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-o...

deleted 12y ago
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adventured 12y ago
It's a very, very small group of people that argue this position, and they constantly recycle it; they just happen to be loud about it. Meanwhile, a large portion of the Internet only exists because of advertising, and that will always be true. A big portion of the reading and watching public will never want to pay for all their content. The article might as well proclaim that the advertising that supported radio, newspapers and magazines was the devil too. Because that worked out so terribly for a century, right?
- idlewords 12y ago
  As the article ponts out, pre-Internet advertising lacked the kind of tracking tools that make online advertising such an effective engine for permanent, mass surveillance today.
- neumann 12y ago
  It kinda did. Free TV is mostly horrendous where I am. Tons of ads, terrible content. Radio as well. The only sources with quality and range are community radio (free but dependent on subscriptions) and community television (only people willing to show World Cup, but now unfortunately needing ads to support themselves) and premium services like HBO. Private models with advertising as the revenue eventually seem to be a race to the bottom to get eyeballs on ads with as creativity and production cost as possible.

dalek2point3 12y ago

Its kinda ironic this notice on the Atlantic website: "Ghostery found 25 trackers www.theatlantic.com" 25 is a LOT!

Houshalter 12y ago
Disconnect blocks 44 and adblock 30.

m52go 12y ago

Flat fee model + modify HTTP headers to allow paying users to skip intrusive crap? Like DNT but with $ attached. Unregistered users unaffected. Seamless for everyone. Thoughts?

xxs 12y ago
What makes you think I am not going to send those headers anyways - they are darn plaintext. Now if you have to sign and verify, it's another story but then again what stop people sharing those keys. For the record I resent ads in all their forms TV/Radio/Internet - the latter are trivially avoidable though.
- m52go 12y ago
  There would have to be some kind of dynamic security setup so people couldn't do that. Like always-changing RSA tokens, etc.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  It would be pretty easy to make the system work with private keys and signed headers or even client certificates. You could stop people from sharing by putting a high enough limit on how much you could access or even just from how many ips (ie only two distinct ips in any given 60 minute window) it could be access from. Normal users would never hit those limits, of course, but pretty quickly you would hit those if you shared your access tokens.
  - xxs 12y ago
    Limiting by IP is a horrid (or worse) idea as they are dynamic, esp . nowadays with free wifi access and 3G (or 4G). There are ways to implement quotas based on certs and revocation but it's too cumbersome to become mass use.
jacques_chester 12y ago
I've got a protocol design which includes this as a step.

Natsu 12y ago

This feels slightly ironic coming from the Atlantic [1]. Though I suppose that one might hope that this implies that they wish to put such things behind them. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/15/the-atlantics-scientology-problem-start-to-finish/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/1...

deleted 12y ago

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owenversteeg 12y ago

egypturnash 12y ago

Patreon seems to be working for a growing number of creators. Personally I've seen mine slowly rise to $70 per page of my graphic novel (before fees), during a time when I've been pretty slow on new pages. I'm really not offering anything beyond seeing new pages a day or two before everyone else, either. I'm not gonna be rich off of this any time soon, but if things continue, I'll probably be making a comfortable solo living drawing weird comics. My first goal for Patreon was 'turn off ads on the current project'. It's REALLY nice to have them gone. I don't know if there are any multi-person projects that're paying a serious chunk of their living expenses with Patreon yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen sooner or later.

cromwellian 12y ago

Does everyone really want tolls and meters for every click and paywalls everywhere? One of the beauty of the ad model is that it influenced the vast majority of people to publish information in a way that did not require accounts, authentication, or any kind of barriers. It meant things like crawlers and search engines could exist and scale to the entire Web, without having to make millions of indexing deals or paying micropayments just to index content. It means archive.org and wayback machine can exist. It meant people could click on a link transaction free. Though it may displease the people working in the news business, I for one, want to keep the Web as transaction free as possible. The mobile world of app stores, install apps, and constant freemium nags to buy DLC I hope does not move to the web. On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention. It's a worthy trade for many people. I grew up poor, my parents didn't even have credit cards, we didn't pay for tv, and I had to sell my comic collection just to buy my first computer. Being able to consume the world's information, ad supported, or charity supported, would be a far better model for my inner city neighborhood of youth than micropayment paywall madness.

pyre 12y ago
> On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention It's more than that. You subsidize by giving up your privacy as these ad companies profile you via tracking as much of your web history as they can.
- blutoot 12y ago
  As far as I am concerned (and I suspect it applies to many others), giving up my privacy to a machine that generates customized ads (or even risking losing it to third parties for more ads without my consent) is a much smaller price to pay than the inconvenience of going through paywalls and stuff. This is true especially when there's no guarantee that the article/post/whatever-content being accessed is gonna be of super-high quality. These things have been well captured through theories like Privacy Calculus [0] which basically posit that privacy concerns can often be trumped by the benefits of sharing resulting in a net positive utility. [0] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=privacy+calculus&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C33&as_sdtp= http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=privacy+calculus&b...

spo81rty 12y ago

I don't mind ads. They teach me about products and services I didn't otherwise know about. They are also critical to the success of my business as we do a lot of advertising.

tomjen3 12y ago
In theory you are right. Unfortunately ads tend to be for crappy products. The better a product is the less advertising it needs - the utopian side-effects free cure all cancer pills would need only a single CNN interview to take over the world. "One weird trick" ads need to run constantly because they are crappy. Ads run up against human nature to want to share useful knowledge. If ads were really good we would have places to go to see ads.

boldpanda 12y ago

Instead of complaining about Facebook and their ads, use it as a competitive advantage in your life. And by use it, I mean don't use it. Just as gambling is a tax on the ignorant, Facebook is a tax on the bored and undisciplined. If you can use Facebook even half as much as the average person, you'll have a huge productivity and happiness advantage.

than 12y ago
Oh man. That second sentence.
fidotron 12y ago
The true genius of Facebook is it's practically impossible to not use it, even if you're not signed up. If anyone mentions you, or happens to post a picture with you in you're in it. The same applies for Google, where if you happen to be in the background of a photo which isn't shared but gets uploaded to G+ quietly as a backup of an Android phone (which they do by default) then Google (and by extension the US gov) know where you were, as per their demo at I/O about 3 years ago.
boldpanda 12y ago
I must be getting downvoted by Facebook employees.

Paul_S 12y ago

Websites are free to choose either one, both or neither. I think it's a good setup.

pothibo 12y ago

The irony of this article being hosted on the atlantic whic has an ad popping up.