4 ms·

> "people" shell out tons of money on casual/social Facebook games and such The vast majority of the money in those are from a select minority of players with

> "people" shell out tons of money on casual/social Facebook games and such The vast majority of the money in those are from a select minority of players with very deep pockets, addictive tendencies and mechanics that exploit those tendencies. And in some cases, ads. A strength of closed platforms, I guess. Not sure how you would translate that to online content of this sort. Nor that you would want to; how sustainable is such a model in the long term? >they are incredibly price sensitive to content like news or videos. When they can find almost the same content for free, often without ads? Yeah, they're not going to go out of their way to pay for it. Perhaps one simply can't expect to make money off of such content without the quality/product being vastly above and beyond what others will do for free. >They also use AdBlock to basically steal content I wasn't aware that Adblock actually deletes things off of servers now. Anyways, are impressions alone still worth that much? Or (reaching a lot here) is there some tacit acknowledgement of people clicking on ads they would have otherwise preferred not to see?

manigandham 12y ago
I worked on one of the top social Facebook games. Yes the majority of the money is from a small group, but there is a long-tail of low spenders who don't mind a few bucks a month. With content though, quality isn't cheap but the mainstream isn't interested in paying for quality. They would rather read crappy articles like BuzzFeed or the Daily Mail because its "good enough". In that case there's just not enough demand for high-quality content, and what demand there is doesn't understand the value enough to pay for it. Why is paying $4 for Starbucks nothing but $5 a month for a great site so much? Anyways, the basic agreement is you're reading content, produced at cost by the publisher, for free by agreeing to view ads along with the article. If you use AdBlock, you're removing your part of the deal while consuming for free, and declining to let publishers recover or make any money. If that's fair to you, fine, that's your personal thing. But it's a simple situation. And yes, impressions have value. Same way billboards or any advertising has value. You can test the results between a lack of ads and showing them and there's always a measurable difference. The industry isn't this big because it doesn't work.
- panglott 12y ago
  Anyways, the basic agreement is you're reading content, produced at cost by the publisher, for free by agreeing to view ads along with the article. The problem with your argument is that readers did not actually make an agreement to see the ads. Why doesn't your argument go farther? If there's an implicit deal for the readers to see the ads, why is there not an implicit deal for the readers to not scan over the ads? Or an an implicit deal for the readers to carefully examine each ad? Or an implicit deal for the readers to carefully consider each ad and click on the ones that interest them most? There is no default, implicit agreement for readers to do any of these things, because the publishers are making their content freely available on the Web for anyone to read. Many people make their media freely available, for a wide variety of reasons: to educate the public, to entertain their friends, or simply for the Maslowian need for self-expression. When people make their work freely available, there is similarly no obligation to pay them for it. Lots of businesses, even digital media businesses, can work fine behind a paywall. Book-length writing and digital music, for example, where the media is actually unique and valuable. But the democratization of publishing means that people can volunteer all kinds of high-quality mediaand the bar for media of high-enough value to be worth paying for is getting higher. It's not just listicles and quizzes that are low value, the 79th article about a widely-reported story also has really low marginal value. People do not deserve to be paid for media of such little value that nobody would pay for it, especially when they're already giving it away for free. =/ The value to me of my first cup of coffee in the morning and the value of the fifth article treading over the same story everyone else is reporting, even if it is important, is just your basic water-and-diamonds problem.
  - manigandham 12y ago
    1) Please stop just assuming lots of things can "work fine behind a paywall". If you haven't run a content business then you just don't understand the costs involved and how advertising is the only viable method for lots of the sites out there. 2) If content has low value, then there wouldn't be visits. But people are still going to all these sites and still reading it so obviously there is lots of value they're getting. 3) The agreement is implicit. There are plenty of legal constructs for this, not everything has to be a signed physical contract. Our society would not exist like it does if that's the only way for binding agreements to be made. 4) The publisher is responding to your request for content with their article + ads. They already take the risk of you not seeing the ads for various reasons. We've had this in other media forever, like how you can just walk out of the room when there are commercials on a tv show. It's a priced in risk. When you actively tamper with that though, then there are problems. AdBlock actively changes what you get by going against what the publisher meant to be delivered for your request. You wanted an article for free, they agreed to give it to you with some ads included. Changing that on the fly is not "ok".

manigandham 12y ago

I worked on one of the top social Facebook games. Yes the majority of the money is from a small group, but there is a long-tail of low spenders who don't mind a few bucks a month. With content though, quality isn't cheap but the mainstream isn't interested in paying for quality. They would rather read crappy articles like BuzzFeed or the Daily Mail because its "good enough". In that case there's just not enough demand for high-quality content, and what demand there is doesn't understand the value enough to pay for it. Why is paying $4 for Starbucks nothing but $5 a month for a great site so much? Anyways, the basic agreement is you're reading content, produced at cost by the publisher, for free by agreeing to view ads along with the article. If you use AdBlock, you're removing your part of the deal while consuming for free, and declining to let publishers recover or make any money. If that's fair to you, fine, that's your personal thing. But it's a simple situation. And yes, impressions have value. Same way billboards or any advertising has value. You can test the results between a lack of ads and showing them and there's always a measurable difference. The industry isn't this big because it doesn't work.

panglott 12y ago
Anyways, the basic agreement is you're reading content, produced at cost by the publisher, for free by agreeing to view ads along with the article. The problem with your argument is that readers did not actually make an agreement to see the ads. Why doesn't your argument go farther? If there's an implicit deal for the readers to see the ads, why is there not an implicit deal for the readers to not scan over the ads? Or an an implicit deal for the readers to carefully examine each ad? Or an implicit deal for the readers to carefully consider each ad and click on the ones that interest them most? There is no default, implicit agreement for readers to do any of these things, because the publishers are making their content freely available on the Web for anyone to read. Many people make their media freely available, for a wide variety of reasons: to educate the public, to entertain their friends, or simply for the Maslowian need for self-expression. When people make their work freely available, there is similarly no obligation to pay them for it. Lots of businesses, even digital media businesses, can work fine behind a paywall. Book-length writing and digital music, for example, where the media is actually unique and valuable. But the democratization of publishing means that people can volunteer all kinds of high-quality mediaand the bar for media of high-enough value to be worth paying for is getting higher. It's not just listicles and quizzes that are low value, the 79th article about a widely-reported story also has really low marginal value. People do not deserve to be paid for media of such little value that nobody would pay for it, especially when they're already giving it away for free. =/ The value to me of my first cup of coffee in the morning and the value of the fifth article treading over the same story everyone else is reporting, even if it is important, is just your basic water-and-diamonds problem.
- manigandham 12y ago
  1) Please stop just assuming lots of things can "work fine behind a paywall". If you haven't run a content business then you just don't understand the costs involved and how advertising is the only viable method for lots of the sites out there. 2) If content has low value, then there wouldn't be visits. But people are still going to all these sites and still reading it so obviously there is lots of value they're getting. 3) The agreement is implicit. There are plenty of legal constructs for this, not everything has to be a signed physical contract. Our society would not exist like it does if that's the only way for binding agreements to be made. 4) The publisher is responding to your request for content with their article + ads. They already take the risk of you not seeing the ads for various reasons. We've had this in other media forever, like how you can just walk out of the room when there are commercials on a tv show. It's a priced in risk. When you actively tamper with that though, then there are problems. AdBlock actively changes what you get by going against what the publisher meant to be delivered for your request. You wanted an article for free, they agreed to give it to you with some ads included. Changing that on the fly is not "ok".