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Who's doing this to my internet?

• Buetol 11y ago
  Basically, a basic income would solve this since people are doing it because they need money to survive. Sometimes I think that money is corrupting everything and in the future it will be seen as an aberration. Hard to tell. EDIT: It's not money directly than corrupts human to do not do the right things. It's forcing people the earn money to survive.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • NoGravitas 11y ago
    [Money is a sign of poverty.][0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    I don't think this is being done for survival; I think it's being done because it can be done and it's asymmetrically lucrative. Petty theft of a jar of peanut butter may well be solved by a basic income. Ad-free internet business models will not be created by a basic income.
    • panic 11y ago
      Sure, but with a basic income, it would be easier to run a site like SoundCloud without ads. You could switch to an alternative site once SoundCloud started pushing ads.
  • tremon 11y ago
    The people that are buying up these sites and walling them off hardly need more money. The blandness of profit-driven sites has nothing to do with the incentives of artists and everything to do with mindless "optimization" towards the middle by non-artists.
  • JorgeGT 11y ago
    Money is just a tool to separate the value of goods and services from the goods and services themselves, allowing us to trade and chain-link them - it's not inherently bad. For instance, I can't obtain my bread from the baker by trading my scientific publications with him, because he is not interested in turbomachinery acoustics. But a chain of value-trading is established linking funding companies, their customers, me, all the way to the baker using this tool. He can continue the chain by purchasing a TV without needing to send X amount of bread to Samsung. Also, he can't store bread without going stale and worthless, but he can store money. Amazing invention! I doubt complex economies and products could be feasible without it. As for the "wrong turn" of the internet, I think it's just the transition from amateur to professional, same as it happened with sports in the XX century: > Before the advent of the Open era of tennis competitions in April 1968, only amateurs were allowed to compete in established tournaments, including the four Grand Slams. There was no prize money and players were compensated for travel expenses only [Wikipedia] Nowadays people can (and does) live by practicing a sport or publishing content on the internet, so it is only normal that the strategy has changed into a more business-oriented focus.
  • JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    I'm just not following the connection from ads on the internet to a basic income. I've heard some good arguments for as well as against a basic income. I've never heard ads on the internet as one of them.
    • Buetol 11y ago
      The connection is in the "why". Why do website switch to an ad-based revenue model ? (and so, against their initial will). Because the people running it needs money. If you have a basic income, it's easier for people to run websites for free without ads.
      • kjdal2001 11y ago
        I would guess that the cost of running the business is higher than their personal expenses. Whatever the benefits of basic income, the idea isn't to subsidize a business.
        • Buetol 11y ago
          The operating cost of running a website today is cheap enough to not even worry about it IMHO (5$/month for a basic server)
      • JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        I still don't get this line of thinking. Most basic income levels are just above poverty level. And, so, if a web page is run by someone making a basic income and showing no ads, that person will only ever stay at that level. They would still need to show ads or something to make more money. They are already doing this. I just don't see this as a valid argument for basic income. It is fodder for basic income opponents is what it is.
        • Buetol 11y ago
          If the basic income is at a comfortable level, then most people won't look to make more money, I think, but improve the things they have. And this is the whole debate I think, are people hungry for the money even with a comfortable income or with a sufficient income they are not gonna look to earn more ?
• icebraining 11y ago
  This timeline is a little skewed. Google+ started in 2011, way before Project Loom was announced. SOPA was introduced to the house in 2011 as well. And none of this is new. Before SOPA and PIPA, the DMCA raised similar discussions. Ads have been degrading the experience at least since Tripod introduced popups. And the Tumblr arguments are almost the same as back when Geocities was bought - in fact, by the same company!
  • krick 11y ago
    Probably 2012 is the year when OP got the Internet connection or something…
• ohitsdom 11y ago
  Really enjoyed this post, but I think some of her thoughts point to the root of the problem. > I started by trying to buy each of them separately. > $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song So she wanted to compensate each artist for the songs she loved, but only at an amount of her choosing? I'm assuming she was expecting 99 cents, so we're essentially haggling over $0.50 here. This shows why the advertising model is so prevalent- people don't want to pay for content, even if it's a song that the person listens to 10 times a day. That being said, the giving credit card info to an unknown domain is a real concern and I totally understand that. But it was mentioned second, after price, which feels more like justification for not being willing to pay $1.50 for a song.
  • mcv 11y ago
    The credit card situation is a completely separate concern, but a very big one. I still don't understand why there's no better international online payment method. There's a great Dutch online payment method, but that's only used by Dutch sites and a few really big ones (like Steam) that can afford to implement national payment systems. Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.
    • icebraining 11y ago
      My bank offers free Virtual Credit Cards with a configurable limit. I've heard that some US banks (BofA?) do as well. That limits the exposure to the amount of the payment. And you can still chargeback.
      • mcv 11y ago
        Sounds useful if you can make one credit card for each payment. But you first need to configure that before you can actually pay. What we need (and what Netherland has) is something that just works right away where you really only authorize that one payment without exposing any vulnerable information, using the security of your own bank.
        • 11y ago
• icebraining 11y ago
  Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.
  • DarkTree 11y ago
    Exactly. What I took away from this article is that, despite everyone being frustrated by the inoculation of ads into our beloved 'free' services, we are still not frustrated enough to actually pay the premium to eliminate these annoyances. It's the old cliche, "you can't have your cake and eat it too".
    • pi-err 11y ago
      Or it says that there's an untapped opportunity for low friction, micro-transactions instead of "ads" or full-fledged purchases on unknown websites. It's clear by now that ads are for lazy. If your plan is to monetize your site with ads, today just like 10 years ago, you lost. Edit: surprised by the negativity on her reaction for _hacker_news. She's rebuffed by the $ and time investment for a single song ("unknown website, takes time to create an account, multiply by times she wants to buy a song). As she says: > and not enough to pay to risk giving my credit card to an unknown third party. This is a UX challenge, not some morale lecture.
      • icebraining 11y ago
        The UX challenged has been solved, though; there are multiple well known websites selling music and which allow you to bundle all songs in a single order. You just can't force the artist to use them.
        • pi-err 11y ago
          Yes and no - streaming and iTunes are pretty good for most things "mainstream" music. Soundcloud though: there's no excuse for them at least not to _try_. Just like for her, ads and passive aggressive song selection are killing the experience. Then for content at large, there's pretty much everything to do. Not surprised if Stripe and ApplePay, both focused on this micro-amount market, take it all.
• inversionOf 11y ago
  Ah, the good old days of....2012. It's tough to make it past the first few paragraphs.
• panic 11y ago
  How can a web site survive without ads? You can charge a subscription fee, but many users who would tolerate ads will just leave when faced with a paywall. You can ask for donations. Or you can run the site as cheaply as possible and try to support it out of your own pocket. Given these alternatives, it's easy to see why people support their site with ads. So how can we make these alternatives more attractive? Or is there some other way for web sites to survive?
  • mcv 11y ago
    You don't have to have a single solution. You can do "freemium": free with ads, premium without ads. Everybody gets what they want, though it is a bit of extra work.
  • nandhp 11y ago
    It would be really exciting to have something like Google Contributor go mainstream: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ Basically, solving this problem by allow users to set up a prepaid fund with Google and have them deduct website ad revenue from there instead of showing me an ad -- and have it work everywhere Google ads are displayed.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• kenny-log_ins 11y ago
  I vehemently disagree with the authors taste in music, but she makes some good points. Soundcloud is just a platform though, and if you live by the sword of constantly available unlimited new content all the time then you kind of have to die by it, too. Content producers change styles to chase trends, tracks get taken down and everything changes when more money and popularity is involved. Enjoy free online content for what it is, but support a scene by buying releases/merch, going to events and spreading the word - it wont implode just because soundcloud changes.
• georgefrick 11y ago
  So it all starts with some guy having the genius idea to "rebrand" the internet. Now it is "The Cloud", a fancy term for 'server'. Then all the late millenials fall for it. "It's cool, it's in the cloud, I stream my <everything>". I thought it was fairly obvious that the cloud meant 'turn the internet into TV stations'. Which is a mostly completed process at this point. Now it's the good ol' days of 2012 when there was still bait on the line. 2012? Companies have been trying to transform the internet for a long time, and users have been helping by refusing to: a) pay for anything. b) create sites/content the way we used to. It wouldn't kill you to order an album, drop it in a CD drive and rip it. My apologies for implying hard labor. You want your MTV.
• aidanhs 11y ago
  This article is interesting because there seems to be an assumption that there is some ideal the web should strive towards ("free exchange of information"), when actually everyone is optimising for their local maxima. Google wanted to challenge Facebook and had a huge userbases on lots of different platforms...you can see the reasoning which would lead them to add everyone to an umbrella google social network. The Verge saw a way to make money with relatively little investment on their part - a seductive offer. Soundcloud (presumably) found a business plan with a clear path to profit and evaluated it to be the best option. In the end, all of these companies exist to make money. Those that do stick around to be criticised, those that fail are irrelevant! Buzzfeed is a great example because it's so polarising - it's criticised for having low quality content, and yet it's extremely popular, a perfect example of something that people clearly do actively want to use. If you had an isolated choice reduce your userbase by 20% but increase profit by 10x, that's an easy business decision to make. I just find it difficult to make sweeping criticisms of these companies and the internet as a whole - these are independent evolutions, each of which can be criticised on their own demerits. Of course the internet will evolve to consist mostly of what the majority wants - this isn't inherently good or bad.
• coldcode 11y ago
  Until we have a system on the internet that everyone accepts that allows for a collection of a small fee to access things (posts, songs, photos, etc) ads will never go away. Of course no one will ever agree on such a system, or even worse it will be owned by a big for profit company.
• jblok 11y ago
  I think the other business model is that of donations. The obvious example being Wikipedia, which has done incredibly well to not have ads or a subscription service and still be top 5/10 most visited site on the planet (I don't know what it's exact 'rank' is)
• dmschulman 11y ago
  Here's a radical idea: pay for the services you love to use. The author mentions she pays for an NYTimes subscription presumably because she gets a lot of value from their content. I pony up the same for a handful of websites and services that I choose to support. It's certainly not a democracy but there is some logic to "voting with your wallet". I hate ads as much as the next person but one thing I hate even more is a great service or product going the way of the dodo because there's no viable way to make something free forever.
  • grokas 11y ago
    | "Voting with your wallet" Oddly enough thats exactly how our 'democracy' works... what would it be without political donations? Back to the point though, if you want to make something free forever, buy it outright one time and its yours for the keeping... Subscription services like buying a car then going to TitleMax and giving them the title, wait for them to take your car away when you can't pay.
    • dmschulman 11y ago
      In a big D Democracy, you're correct. I don't consider the modern web to be a big D Democracy though.
  • CrLf 11y ago
    "Here's a radical idea: pay for the services you love to use." Here's another radical idea: trying to understand why people are unwilling to pay. To me it's pretty obvious. People don't value those things they're supposed to "love" enough to pay for them. They don't actually "love" them, they're just induced necessities. If the whole Internet was turned into a pay-it-or-leave-it model, I wouldn't be surprised if most people just left it. However, it this rare to see someone considering this possibility. It's much easier to discard users as being "cheap" or "freeloaders" than to think the all-so-important content on the Internet is just an extra on people's lives. The article does make the point that other types of monetization besides ads or paywalls should be pursued.
    • 11y ago
• Steuard 11y ago
  I feel old. This article begins by pining for the good, old-fashioned 'net of 2012. I know that I'm not the most attentive person on this topic, but honestly I don't feel like the big picture has changed much in years. Services like Twitter started up, grew wildly, and then looked for some way to make money for pretty much that whole time. Social networks sprout up; some make it, some don't. Big companies do some cool things and some cruddy ones. Lean new browsers burst onto the scene and then gradually bloat. Advertisers find new ways to intrude into formerly pristine conversations. (The rise of clickbait sites isn't even remotely as disruptive today as the rise of spam and sporge posts was to Usenet, just for instance.) So I suppose my point is that I don't see any reason to think that the sky is falling today. Yes, some beloved sites and valuable modes of interaction are changing. But it's not the end of the internet: this has been going on since the beginning. We'll adapt, as we always have, especially if folks who care about creating vibrant communities and rich flows of information keep finding ways to innovate.
  • binxbolling 11y ago
    You're right, author has rose-colored glasses. I almost thought it was a joke at first—2012 as the good ol' days? The internet ruined in the last three years? Come on.
    • madaxe_again 11y ago
      "Septembering" should be the term for this phenomenon.
      • JupiterMoon 11y ago
        I would have thought that that would be over by now. Surely all of America is online by now already?
        • acoard 11y ago
          Eternal September doesn't have to do with new users to the internet, but new participants within a community. It's essentially the problem of digital immigration (which is much easier to do than physical immigration).
• digital-rubber 11y ago
  "So where are we in 2015?" That depends if you keep using those big parties that use those ad systems or if you start to realise only the sun still comes up for free. And the rest, left or right, pay up.
• Lazare 11y ago
  An ambitious post with a sweeping conclusion. However, I have some concerns about the details being presented to support that conclusion. I can't comment on much of what she says, but I do know quite a bit about Tumblr and Reddit. So when she says: > Tumblr is being reorganized and censored to make room for ads, including deleting accounts without any warning That seems a bit odd. So let's look at the links she provides: The first is to a story that notes that Tumblr has had ads for years, and speculates, with no real basis, that perhaps someday Yahoo might want to censor Tumblr, even though they've previously promised not to and are showing no signs of planning to start. And the second link about an account being deleted is no better; it's also from 2 years ago, and basically boils down to "one Tumblr user had their account deleted"; long-time Tumblr users will be well aware that this has been Tumblr's first (and usually only) solution to everything since day one. A better summary of her links would be "Tumblr is the same as it always was". And her discussion of Reddit is little better; spinning an employment dispute about which very little is known into, again, some sign of major change. But I've been hanging around Reddit long enough to remember when people were fretting about Yishan Wong ruining the site. Then about Ellen Pao. Now we're back to people worrying about Ohanian ruining the site, and now Yishan and "Chairman Pao", as her critics loved to call her, have morphed from evil oppressors of free speech to now vanquished defenders of the founder's original vision, which will now be lost as the founder's return to restore their original vision. Or something, her metaphor[1] seemed more like an excuse to link paintings to me. Either way, a dispute over the direction of the site's AMA section, which seems to have led to an employee leaving, is pretty weak evidence of some massive sea change in the internet. Especially when you realize that most of what drove the protests was frustration among the moderators about poor moderation tools and poor support from administrators, which has been a source of contention for years. The core problem was a lack of change, if anything. Plus, the actual main complaint seems to be that a service she loves is trying to find a way to make money. So when she's frantically finding a way to get a copy of the songs she loves while compensating the artists: > I clicked on one song that I loved. It took me to Amazon, but the song wasn't available on MP3, only on Audio CD or Vinyl. I immediately clicked away. I would gladly buy it on MP3 for 99 cents. But not wait for 2 days for a CD to ship. I guess I'll listen on YouTube for now, an experience also now completely ruined by ads. So she's afraid that the song may, someday, get removed from Soundcloud, so she wants a copy of her own and to give the artist money, but she won't wait 2 days for the CD? > Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song, even a song you love Right. She'll gladly pay 99 cents, but she won't pay $1.50. Nor wait for a CD to ship. It must be instant and under a dollar. > After these two songs, I gave up. I'll just risk being on SoundCloud until the other songs get taken away, I guess. Well, if the first two songs out of the "over 100" songs you have saved, and love so much you panic at the thought of not being able to listen again cost more than $1 or take more than 2 days to acquire... ...then sure, might as well give up and keep listening to anti-smoking ads. [1]: http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2015/06/reddit-was-amazing/ http://blog.vickiboykis.com/2015/06/reddit-was-amazing/ Edit: Author has clarified that it was less the $1.50 cost of the second song, and more the fact that she didn't recognize the payment processor and was afraid of fraud. Not quite as odd as it seemed, although I don't think it changes my point.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• fit2rule 11y ago
  This is why I think solutions like IPFS are the future: http://ipfs.io/ http://ipfs.io/ (tl;dr: go get github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/cmd/ipfs) Basically, the day will come when any single one of us will be able to serve our own content privately from our own machine without requiring a massive infrastructure investment, nor any kind of fancy participation in what is, essentially, branding on steroids (Internet of today), but rather all it will require to sell and control ones own art is to publish it yourself with cryptographic certainty that there simply is no middle man any more. Its the third party that degrades all art - those who have to carry the stuff from place to place in order to pimp things for the artist. Get rid of this, and give the artist direct and completely control over where and when and to whom their art is delivered, and we produce the utopia that many of us artists wish we had. It is unbearable to have to go through a third party to get to the masses; to have direct contact is the ultimate goal..
  • icebraining 11y ago
    You can already set up a website using a "website builder" which hosts it for a couple of bucks and doesn't force any branding on it. A site on Squarespace costs $8/m and gives you unlimited storage and bandwidth to distribute your music; for $18 more, you get to use the ecommerce part to sell your stuff. If artists aren't doing this already, which is much less intrusive than Soundcloud/iTunes/etc, what makes you think they'll be hosting their own IPFS sites?
    • fit2rule 11y ago
      Because you said server, and the solution is serverless. $8/month is still $8/month. I'd rather that anyone who was interested in my artistry just come and get it from me, directly. Remember the aim is to eradicate the middle man entirely. You have not done this in your position.
      • icebraining 11y ago
        Well, your aim is to eradicate the middle man. What I'm missing is a reason to believe that artists generally share your aim.
• mironathetin 11y ago
  " There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. " There, in the last sentence is the relevant insight. But, sadly, here the post stops. I must admit, for me the most relevant information was google using the computers mike through chrome. I am shocked how far companies can go and do go. I think this finally ends the discussion about google being evil or not.
  • trevorstrohman 11y ago
    The "OK Google" voice feature for Chrome is opt-in, not enabled by default. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922#c6 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922#c...
    • mironathetin 11y ago
      Well you are a google developer. All I can say is: use your eyes to see. And don't believe what people say or write, if what you see is different.
• golergka 11y ago
  Users. Users always talk that they would love to pay. The problem is, they never do. They blog and write on forums about what they would like to see, but the things they write are always very, very different from what they actually do, according to the data. You remember how in this whole Reddit debacle Pao said that "most of users don't really care about this scandal" and got downvoted to hell? It could very well be true, but users who were constantly around subreddits that were involved in the drama couldn't believe it. They are sure that evil corporate suits are out of touch with reality because they "don't even use their own service" and consume the information in form of PowerPoint presentations. But those suits are very well in touch with reality — it is a couple of SQL queries away from them, actually. (And I see that "managers" are getting more and more literate in terms of analytics, by the way — SQL and R aren't really that hard, and often you have much more user-friendly analytic services at your hands). I'm not saying that big websites don't do bullshit. Of course they do. But when they do something that users actually don't like, users punish them in the most harsh way possible: with their wallets. Don't you remember how internet used to be? The hundreds of popups, for example — turns out, users didn't like it enough to install Firefox, so these guys went out of business. I could recall more examples like this, but this comment is already too wordy; you get the picture. If you want to stop Buzzfeed, don't click clickbait and shame (in a constructive way — without calling them idiots, but making them feel a little bit low-brow, basic manipulation isn't that hard) your facebook friends for reposting such bullshit. And if you won't succeed, you'll just have to face the reality of being one in several billions.
  • davedx 11y ago
    > They blog and write on forums about what they would like to see, but the things they write are always very, very different from what they actually do, according to the data. That's because content providers make it fucking impossible to buy their content a lot of the time! I've been looking into this here (the Netherlands) for the last 12 months or so. It is so incredibly hard to go into a pay-per-view movie service, whether that's a cable TV video store, Netflix, Apple TV or what-the-fuck-ever-else, search for a fairly popular movie you like that came out in the last 5-10 years, and actually BE ABLE TO BUY IT. Content providers are almost entirely at fault here. (I know this as I'm currently working at a cable TV company). They insist on negotiating individual contracts for restricted selections of (movie, series, whatever) content with each streaming/VOD provider individually. They will happily let customers buy an SD movie but charge them again, 2x, for a HD movie. They throw up all kinds of hurdles when it comes to recording TV in the cloud -- it is LEGALLY DIFFICULT to just store one copy of a recording for multiple customers. The list goes on and on, it will drive you crazy if you have to deal with it. > But those suits are very well in touch with reality — it is a couple of SQL queries away from them, actually. (And I see that "managers" are getting more and more literate in terms of analytics, by the way — SQL and R aren't really that hard, and often you have much more user-friendly analytic services at your hands). Those suits are in touch with reality indeed -- they see that this business model has worked and continues to work, despite The Pirate Bay. They just need a large enough army of lawyers to maintain their dominance, both over distributors and customers (via lawsuits and website takedowns). Don't blame the users for the clusterfuck digital content distribution is. It is the content providers who are to blame. They screw the artists, the distributors, the end users, as hard as they can, for as long as they can.
• chasing 11y ago
  > "Who is doing this to my internet?" We all are. It costs money to create, host, and distribute content. We've demonstrated our unwillingness to pay a proper amount for it. (For example: "I would gladly buy it on MP3 for 99 cents... $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song...") And so companies that do this stuff have to get creative about making money. And advertising does the job. The solution is to pay much more money for the content that you now get for free.
• anentropic 11y ago
  to be honest, who gives a shit if you can't listen to "mixes" on Soundcloud (for free, without ads...) any more just find some real music and buy it
• ericson578 11y ago
  I think the revolution that will allow unfettered exchange of ideas will be peer-to-peer microtransactions. Maybe some combination of bitcoin + tor + some yet to be created tech. All of the corporate sites are going to devolve into corporate friendly zones soon enough.
• normloman 11y ago
  I agree with what's been said here about payment. It is hypocritical that the author want's ad free music, but won't pay a buck and a half for a track. That said, the ad supported web still has problems, and I don't see anyone trying to solve it. Subscriptions are great, but how do we get people like the author of this post to buy into them? What's a fair way to charge subscriptions? How do you balance getting paid with keeping your content searchable? We shouldn't stop looking for new business models.
• ilaksh 11y ago
  The society runs on money. Technology doesn't need money, but we still do.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• Marazan 11y ago
  Annoyed at "Big Corporate" taking over the internet, not willing to buy from small independent label/store. The lack of self awareness is outstanding. And astounding.
• Marazan 11y ago
  Annoyed at "Big Corporate" taking over the internet, not willing to buy from small independent label/store. The lack of self awareness is outstanding. And astounding.
• k8tte 11y ago
  grab soundcloud stream with youtube-dl,put in your itunes or spotify to sync to your phone. notice lack of ads, continue with life.
• tacos 11y ago
  2012? How about 1967, the year the 1-800 number was invented. The web is "free" because the other side is footing the bill. Quick, review the Amazon S3 bandwidth pricing chart! Now calculate how much bandwidth you're using via the idiotic model of copying the same song you're listening to ten times a day, ten times. Multiply that by ten hours or however long you're sitting there with headphones on taking money out of Fred Wilson's pocket while you pretend you're coding the next great site that's going to put money back into it. Author states that SoundCloud is "made up mostly of music connoisseurs who would gladly pay for service." Ha! The sad reality of the music business is that there's a very narrow age range when most people are "really into music" and it tends to correspond with a period of time when those people don't have very much money to spend. Now that I have money to spend, I simply do not have time to waddle through the anti-curated wasteland that is SoundCloud. Slap enough ads on it (especially ones that directly get in the way of trying to discover something to listen to) and you've guaranteed I won't go there.
• serve_yay 11y ago
  Until you really start thinking about the structural and economic reasons for these changes occurring, you'll be stuck at "but why?" forever. It's not much fun to think about, though.
• kjdal2001 11y ago
  I'm all for free and open internet, but that's free as in speech. A lot of this is complaining about how her favorite stuff on the internet is too expensive or supported by an ad model. Kind of sucks I guess, but hardly a travesty. Its entirely possible that her favorite web services had unsustainable financials back in 2012 and they are in the process of figuring out how to build a revenue stream to keep themselves going.
• sirsuki 11y ago
  Something that has always bothered me about advertisements isn't that companies are creating/using them it was that they actually work! The reason ads are everywhere is because they make money, LOTS of money. In 2010 it was estimated by "statista.com" (http://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-advertising-revenue/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-adver...) that the advertisement industry made 495 billion U.S. Dollars ranking it higher then Retail or Oil/Gas according to outdated "Wikipedia" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...). So my point is the crux of the problem is more to do with our (global) society then it does the evil plot of an industry. The best weapon against ads is to stop making them profitable. Bad flash or obnoxious java applets make money! Having a stupid mascot walk across the page offering to help makes money! Forcing people to watch and listen to ads just to see the cute kitten play with yarn makes money! Why wouldn't it be littered everywhere? Case in point: SPAM. That Viagra email poorly written and incorrectly translated actually makes the pharmaceutical companies money! Sad, real sad.
• jms703 11y ago
  We need to use the internet less and get outside.
• isaaaaah 11y ago
  How about building your own platform? Your post is a clear indicator that there is a space left in the market for services that deliver your model, without all the marketing bullshit and bigdata hype. How about a google with a proper query interface (not just +,-,")? How about a social platform for organising parties, without farmville and like this and like that? How about a platform where i can buy whole seasons of game of thrones for download or stream as soon they get released? Or how a bout a twitter for 30 seconds voice messages, that cost you a dollar for every extra minute? There is lots of money to earn. Sure i might be stupid for sharing these ideas, but id rather have them become reality instead of suffering from this dumbing down of the internet to become the TV 2.0. Yes i am paranoid, and i think i have right to be, as a member of a political party that once had the goal to preserve the beneficial part of the internet, which has now become just another political party with most of its delegates being the usual representatives of the 48 laws of power.
  • georgefrick 11y ago
    I have been greatly attracted to the idea of creating a better search engine. But people aren't generally searching for websites anymore, they're searching for content. There is a certain need for the service provided by google/ddg; and I'd be looking to provide more of an internet yellow pages so that you don't always have google funneling you back to a handful of large sites. It's hard to commit to a project like that, but I do think the idea (and your others), have merit.
• norea-armozel 11y ago
  I think the author doesn't realize that what's changed about the Internet isn't the technology. It's the people that changed. Today folks expect to get things for free with adverts. But now people don't want the adverts either so they use uBlock (I know I do). So, what's left for content and technology/service creators to do? I think micropayments would be a viable solution if a platform that's fairly secure and non-intrusive was created (I don't think Paypal or Bitcoin fit the bill). But the problem is that people today are rightly concerned about identity theft which can wind up draining their bank accounts or tanking their credit score. So, I'm not sure such a scheme would ever take off if companies like Sony can't secure their own infrastructure. Anyways, the author should realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Either you pay in advertisements and data mining your personal info or you pay up front. Honestly, I prefer to pay up front and as directly to the creators as possible.
  • drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Except we tried micropayments about a bazillion times and they have universally failed. People don't want yet another monthly bill, which is what micropayments would be. You'd "subscribe" to various sites and services and it would eat at your bitcoin or whatever that you would need to replenish monthly. Ads aren't as terrible as the average INTJ male makes them out to be. They're trivial to block as well. The OP's post is just one long angry rant. I'm not even sure what the take away here is other than how monetization works on the modern web (internet is not only the web!!). Everything about this screams, "The mainstream doesn't care about my marginalized interests and opinions!" If anything, the mainstream has it pretty good. I pay something like 1/10th for Google Music what I spent at the record store annually. As a music lover, being able to tap into 30m songs trivially is pretty amazing. Geeks used to write love letters to a future with a "universal jukebox" and here we are, yet no one is happy! Old fashioned ideas of "collecting" albums and such are bizarre to me. The people into that always seemed to do it for some kinda of social gravitas so they could show off their "taste." I just like the music. I don't need to own it, I just need access to it. Hell, it even makes radio stations based on my library or by artist, or even by song if I choose. This completely invalidates whatever questionable value radio stations provide today. What a waste of bandwidth all these FM/AM stations are. Retiring them and selling that spectrum off for better LTE makes sense to me. The old ways aren't always good, in fact, a lot of the old ways were shit. They're old compromises and dinosaur tech that's overstayed their welcome. Lets not pine too badly for the past. It was shit for the most part. As a person in his 40s, I think we have it better than ever.
• andrewmcwatters 11y ago
  Oh shut up already. We are, because people like us don't want to pay 99¢-$1.50 for songs that took time to compose, play, record, master, ship, and market, apps for mobile devices are quite literally a dime a dozen in app packs, games are at their lowest prices ever and the only sustainable model is DLC and subscriptions, and hundreds of petabytes of video storage are hosted by YouTube for no charge. It's 2015, grow up. Innovators need to make money. Maybe you'll understand one day when you make something people want.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Maybe we have too much expectation that you can make money directly doing creative works? People talk about entitlement of users, but this should work both way - when building a small app you shouldn't feel entitled to make a lot of money off it. That people may not want to buy your offerings at the price you want them to buy is the basic feature of a free market. On the other hand, I believe we need to have a serious conversation about business models. Things like spamming with ads, massive tracking and micropayments should not be encouraged. Ponzi schemes are profitable too, and so is slave labour, and there are various forms of these and other business models that are legal but still shunned by the society. And just like those, chunking up your games into million paid DLCs, abusing gullible parents or turning the entire Internet into an ad cesspoool should not be things a self-respecting, moral person would consider doing.
• jamespo 11y ago
  That's the longest firstworldproblem I've ever read
• scrabble 11y ago
  This might be a better question for an Ask HN, but this post brings it up. How do you translate hits on a web page into dollars? Is advertising the only way to make money from hits? There are plenty of sites that users will like and frequent, but would never drop pay for access. Is advertising a huge turn off for most users?
• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  I also like free things and don't like it when they are taken away from me. The author had ample opportunity to pay for content but she didn't and now we're here. So I guess the answer is "she is". Vicki Boykis is doing this to her internet.
• jonstokes 11y ago
  This article has made me realize that I'm about to start paying for sites to show me ads, and paying a lot. What do I mean? We just bought a gorgeous 15+ acre property outside of Austin with all kinds of outdoorsy stuff that I like -- horse barn, stocked pond, creek, salt water pool, woods with bike trails, etc. I've convinced my wife, a city girl, that we should all (we have three small kids) move out there and just try it out. The big problem is that there is no wired internet service of any kind at that address. Luckily, I have clear line of sight to a cluster of cell towers less than a mile away, so we get 5 bars of every carrier out there. I'll be starting out on ATT's ~$375/month plan which is capped at 50GB/month with $10 per GB(!!) overage charges. This means that for the first time in my life, I'm actually considering installing ad blocking software on our machines, because I just don't want to pay for tons and tons of ads. There are so. many. freaking. ads., and the web is so slow now. Those of us who actually pay for our bandwidth are getting screwed. I'm happy to pay for your content. I'm not happy to pay for your ads. There has to be a better way.
  • mratzloff 11y ago
    > I'm happy to pay for your content. I'm not happy to pay for your ads. There has to be a better way. Sorry, there's not. The vast majority of people are cheapskates.
• msluyter 11y ago
  There should be a name for this phenomenon. It appears that any service that attempts to remain un-gated eventually will be forced to run ads in order to stay afloat. The ads become more prevalent over time, until an equilibrium is reached. The service is now barely tolerable, with just a high enough content/ad ratio to keep you around but not high enough that the experience is actually pleasant. Say, Pandora, for example. Call it "the dismal equilibrium" or something.
• SolarUpNote 11y ago
  If paywalls don't work, and ads don't work, some kind of metered-browsing would be a solution. It's so far away from happening, it's hardly worth discussing, but imagine this: * let's say soundcloud could charge $.0001 (or something) for every pageview (or play, or some other interaction that the website chooses) * this fee is mostly transparent to the user, they've signed up once, and have access to all metered sites * the user would deposit money in an account ahead of time to use for the metered sites * the metering could be built-in to web browsers to display when you're on a metered site using a standard graphic (like how the lock is a standard symbol for a secure connection)
  • delroth 11y ago
    What you're describing is very close to https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/ where you can pay to replace ads with content of your choice. For the content publisher this is a completely transparent operation.
  • SolarUpNote 11y ago
    On second thought, after doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, the per-pageview fee would have to be a lot more than that. Even if you charged $.01 per pageview, that still couldn't compete with ad revenue. So nevermind.
• romaniv 11y ago
  There is a working business model that does not rely on ads: Kickstarter. The problem with making everything subscription-based is that it changes the dynamic of the website. A lot. An interesting experiment would be to allow people to pay not just for themselves, but for a few others as well. I.e. you've seen something good, you pay to get rid of ads for that item and it removes ads for N other people as well. Sure, there will be free-riders. That's the point. I postulate that those free-riders would be the people would otherwise not use the platform at all.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  • ForHackernews 11y ago
    > "There have to be other business models that free up the internet for what it was meant for: free exchange of information.” Do there? The internet began as a government- and academic-sponsored network. Even the worldwide web, you couldn't have a commercial website until 1993.
  • at-fates-hands 11y ago
    Serious question then - where do you trace this back to then? Companies abusing the freemium business model? Companies not having enough revenue to support their start-up? Where do you think the internet started having to rely on advertising? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it.
  • mseebach 11y ago
    You don't make a "very strong case", your post come off as ranty. Your analysis of why ads aren't discussed on terms that suit you better is, frankly, condescending and arrogant. Find any discussion of tracking or ads, and there will be lively discussion of blockers and plenty of posts that are very critical of advertising in general. Those two points might serve better as a model of explanation of a few down votes than a grand conspiracy on behalf of advertising would.
• switzer 11y ago
  You should thank USV for funding the companies (like Soundcloud) so that they can give you a few years of a free (e.g. money-losing) service.
• vkb 11y ago
  There is a lot of focus and discussion around the $1.50 figure I mentioned, and perhaps I was wrong to include it in the post. The $1.50 is not the point. I would pay $1.50. I gladly pay for Pinboard, Newsblur, The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, and many other online services that provide exponential value to me. And, as I mentioned in the post, I am more than happy to pay $10 a month for SoundCloud because I use it so much. My point is that instead of even offering the option of a subscription, SoundCloud immediately went to ads that are annoying and hostile and started deleting music, forcing me to scramble to other options that are just as hostile (where hostile == "first world problem" of paying with a credit card to multiple unknown vendors) because music distribution online is broken.
  • chasing 11y ago
    I understand what you're saying, and I agree: I pay for many services online and I'd be happy to pay for more if it meant the services I enjoy would get even better. Or wouldn't lose their souls to advertising. But your $10/mo and my $10/mo aren't enough. It seems like the web-o-verse has spent the last twenty years desperately attempting to figure out how to charge money in a way that enough people will shell out the necessary cash. For the most part, it's been a failure. Most people seem uninterested in paying directly for digital content. Any service built upon user-generated content -- like SoundCloud -- has an even worse path. If you charge from the start, you put up a huge barrier that will prevent people from ever using your service. But if you start changing after you've gathered up steam and have an active community, people will feel betrayed -- like you were just baiting them into using your service so you could pull the old switcheroo and force them to pay to access the community they built.
• sroerick 11y ago
  youtube-dl lets you scrape songs from soundcloud. Something like AlexandriaP2P cuts out the middleman from this equation. (disclaimer: I'm an alpha tester for AlexandriaP2P)
• dlu 11y ago
  You know how in the innovator's dilemma, the point at which the new innovator gets a foothold is also the point where the old firm has peak profits? I think there's a similar thing where the best time to user a particular service is when the service is least profitable. That's what the 2012 nostalgia sounds like to me. Back when Twitter was hosting revolutions, but still having issues with uptime (not to mention revenue). And Project Loon was alive, but mostly getting mocked by both Wall Street and charities/nonprofits (With Bill Gates being the most visible). I also suspect 2012-2014 was when SoundCloud had huge amounts of traffic and, without any way of making money, at its least profitable. I have no actual evidence of this. Personally, Project Loon always sounded like some crazy way of getting more people to use Google than actual charity. Like some weird extrapolation from, "the more people that use the Internet, the more money Google makes" and "Google's reached market saturation in current markets, we need growth in developing countries" Going off memory for all this. Sorry if I get some details wrong about Innovators Dilemma, Twitter in 2012, Project Loon and such.
• Yhippa 11y ago
  We've officially hit peak "the Internet is terrible". Whenever I see rants like this I immediately look for what the author's solution is. In this case it's "why hasn't someone come up with a solution yet?" I don't know what the answer is. I will admit I do consume a lot of free (as in beer) content on the Internet all the time. When I realized BuzzFeed was just clickbait years ago I ... stopped going there. You have that option.
• chishaku 11y ago
  How could one build a distributed Soundcloud?
• ZenoArrow 11y ago
  There are many ways to support content creators who distribute via the web, such as Flattr ( https://flattr.com https://flattr.com ) and Google Contributor (as nandhp mentioned). Patreon is becoming popular too ( https://www.patreon.com https://www.patreon.com ). As for music, my personal favourite site is Bandcamp, aside from having an interesting mix of music I believe it has a model that's good for artists and fans alike ( https://bandcamp.com https://bandcamp.com ).
• r3bl 11y ago
  I have deleted my Soundcloud account just yesterday. I had some mashups (combinations of multiple songs into one) for years posted there and Soundcloud removed three of them in a single day. Although I don't have a written permission to use them, I think that this is a creative process that falls into fair use as long as I'm not trying to make any profit with it. Unfortunately, Soundcloud disagrees. I deleted my Soundcloud profile and every track from it. It was kind of a rage response, but it had to be done.
• jameshart 11y ago
  That's not your internet. That soundcloud content isn't yours, and neither is Soundcloud. Reddit isn't yours. Tumblr isn't yours. Github, where that posting is hosted, isn't yours either. This site, where you linked to the discussion because you don't have a local comment facility, isn't yours. And it's not mine either, no matter how many comments I leave or votes I make or imaginary internet points I win or lose. Your client, your internet connection, and a server you pay for, on a domain you own, with bandwidth you pay for. That's your internet. You can use that however you want. Nobody's doing anything to your internet (well, notable exception for mobile carriers and anti-net-neutrality-campaigners). They're doing things to their own internet.
• mratzloff 11y ago
  So, to be clear, you are a self-described "music connoisseur" who is unwilling to support the artists you claim to love at any point while their content is freely available, yet you claim that you would be willing to pay for a subscription model. Yet when you feel that content is at risk you are also unwilling to pay if access to their music is not instant and the cost is marginally more than nothing. You are a net-negative fan. Your support does nothing for the artists and, until recently, costs SoundCloud money. When SoundCloud adjusts their business to account for users like yourself, you complain publicly with a shakily-supported premise that I believe is actually more a complaint about digital things having a cost. When I like a band or an artist, I buy their albums on CD or MP3. There's even an independent record store I like near my house, one of the last, and I frequently buy from there, because their existence enriches my life and the community. If an artist is on Bandcamp, I buy through Bandcamp and usually give more than the minimum because I know Bandcamp gets a cut and because I work in technology and have the money to do so. If you don't like the ads, buy the music and listen whenever you want. Don't be a net-negative fan and then complain when you are treated as such.
• brandonmenc 11y ago
  There are ads on Soundcloud? I use it every day, and this is news to me because I use an ad blocker. This also happened to me with YouTube - I didn't realize they were displaying ads for _months_ until I watched a video on a friend's computer. Without an ad blocker, the web is basically unusable. I don't know how people live without one.
• andrewclunn 11y ago
  This article has a click-bait title, is nostalgic for the web of... 3 years ago??? And the "awesome indie music" is... well differences in taste I guess. Looks like somebody just found out that people have to actually pay for things, and decided to throw a tantrum aiming at advertisements because they felt that would be the lowest common denominator for galvanizing support.
• netcan 11y ago
  This is somewhat tangental, but it's tangental on a couple of points so I'll bring it up anyway. Would someone please fix "podcasting," and maybe even RSS? The first tangent is 2012 (or maybe 2007, I dunno time is a blur). RSS and XML were one of the Web 2.0 buzz. Blogs were exploding and there was a lot of novel writing of a type we didn't have much of before. RSS, XML, semantic web and their friends were being brought up all the time (here too) in confusing contents. I didn't really get it but I assumed other people did. I think there was something wrong with the conceptual design of it. Podcasting though, that was a nice little bastard of RSS and ipod. She had weird hair in weirder places, but.. I'm going to abandon this metaphor ..podcast content has been getting better and better. It's terrible to use though. It's hard to find or share content. It's hard to subscribe, even if you know the name of the show. All the podcatchers suck. It has a lot os stuff going for it though. It's genuinely "web." Compared to youtube or any other centralized internet media. Anyone can host their own audio files and broadcast the feed. Apple, Sound cloud or whoever makes an app using podcast content can access all the content. They can filter, sensor and display it how they see fit. This could be great for competition, freedom of speech. Why do all the apps suck? Why is it so hard to find content. If you're below median technically, just getting from the show's site to a feed in your app is a serious challenge. I suspect the protocol is partially to blame, but I don't know. Anyway, HN… fix it?
  • sk8ingdom 11y ago
    I used to be a really large fan of RSS because it fulfilled the dream of bringing hand-picked content to the user, in one place. Why go to all the separate websites? Why have an app for EACH new agency. I can search, sort, see when articles were published, all from the comfort of a single web page or desktop client! RSS even seemed to have pretty wide adoption. That orange button was everywhere! My non-techie friends even used Google Reader circa 2006-2008. However, my love of RSS is really just a historic relic of becoming interested in computers between 2001 and 2005. Before that was Usenet and other technologies I'm probably unaware of. RSS has since been replaced by Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Google Plus, etc. Someone needs to pay the bills and it's a lot easier to monetize when you keep users in your walled gardens and control what they see. These newer technologies are also MUCH easier to use for the average consumer and have the net-benefit of being "social" which is likely beneficial for the ad conglomerates. Companies who create (or curate or distribute) content are fundamentally at odds with their users. Users want relevant, high quality, add-free content, but most are not willing to pay for it. If they do, they expect a fine-tuned user experience or physical product (a magazine or Amazon Kindle for example). Even paid subscription magazines (NewScientist, Time, etc.) have ads to help keep their pricing competitive and increase quarterly profits for investors. Hell, even my Kindle (which I PAID for) came with ads. Granted, Amazon gave me the ability to remove them for $20. But, that gives you an idea of how valuable ads are. I never understood why more websites didn't just include ads in their RSS feeds. Easier to filter out? Less control since the user isn't visiting the site? I'd be MORE than willing to pay for RSS or NNTP feeds of high quality content. To me, there is no better user experience than reading format-free text and images in Gnus, but I imagine I'm in the minority. Average consumers (my parents, non-tech friends, etc.) are more than willing to visit cnn.com in their browsers or dedicated phone app. Most people simply don't care enough. I feel like I'm constantly trying to chase the conversation of the topics I'm interested in by stringing together mostly-incompatible technologies and work flows. I'd really just like the ability to read, annotate, comment on, share, and discuss media with people who are also interested.
• ksk 11y ago
  Someone should write an article - Who's paying for my internet. :)
• eleitl 11y ago
  First world kid problems.
• RUG3Y 11y ago
  I think the reality is that content is just not worth anything anymore. There is SO MUCH content out there. The internet has democratized content creation. Now that anyone can publish content, record an album, what have you, the value of content has dropped to nearly nothing. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I'm a musician and artist myself, and I think that many artists and musicians feel entitled to success. Essentially, art and music are worthless - they feed no one, they build no bridges. I see no problem with art and music being fragmented into groups of passionate hobbyists with day jobs that produce art for the love of art.
  • logicfiction 11y ago
    I'm also a passionate hobbyist when it comes to music, but I can't disagree more. Worth is not solely measure in terms of material gains like food and bridges. Art and music have massive amounts of cultural and entertainment worth. Sure one probably requires their basic needs to be met along Maslow's hierarchy to have their life enriched by art. But I believe it's well established the impact and relevance art has. The problem with music being fragmented into groups of passionate hobbyists with day jobs is that you cannot reliably create high-quality art this way. A lot of the luxuries afforded to hobbyists, particularly in music these days, are gained from riding on the shoulders of the professionals who are innovating and driving the industry forward. Not to mention only a certain subset of day-jobber professions can actually afford to produce quality art or music (instruments, equipment, and/or professional services).
    • RUG3Y 11y ago
      I hear what you're saying. By worth, I didn't mean value - but I wasn't clear. I think art has much value, but as a commodity in the marketplace, holds very little worth. I agree that making quality art in one's spare time is challenging. I think this guarantees that the work being completed is a labor of love that the artist truly cares about. In an ideal world, the best work would receive the greatest reward. Unfortunately, much of the best and most creative works are already coming from outside of the music industry. Before gaining recognition, these artists are essentially passionate hobbyists.
• Kenji 11y ago
  I panicked. I have over 100 songs saved in my favorites. I want all of them. How naive, haha. If you love something on the internet, download it. Download EVERYTHING you love (well maybe not child porn, that's illegal ;). There's no other way. Your favourite links break, one by one, it's only a matter of time. Download it to your HDD (space is dirt-cheap) and get a proper backup solution (RAID 1 is convenient vs. mechanical failures). You'll never be bothered by ads and copyright takedowns again.
• brokencog 11y ago
  Ad's delivered via the Internet ... gee, let's see some time around 1992 I guess I recall the first of them, they got obnoxious shortly after with pop-up's and blinky text. Which is too say nothing about today's websites has offered anything really new since the first webpage did even before that. Twitter Revolution? not about twitter, it's about the millions who went into the streets (with and without twitter). Cloud Sharing? In 1990 all my data was housed in the Cloud, my apps ran in the cloud and I was happy to have a slice of the VAX so I could send messages to my mate in the other computer room. New Browser features! Yay! stuff it that the browser is already unsafe, slow and cumbersome - make it look Different and call it Better. The point here is that the Web has always been the get rich scheme for half baked ideas ... as it ever was. Nowhere ever has any Internet based service been free. Someone Somewhere has had to pay for all of it. The only thing "new" about what this author is pining about is for the Johnny Come Lately who entered the Internet, is they assume too much -- they assume they are entitled to a free service and shouldn't have to be bothered about how it is provided. Just like they are IRL.
• crisnoble 11y ago
  Meanwhile via http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=30610 http://www.residentadvisor.net/news.aspx?id=30610 "The streaming platform's plan for monetization has been the subject of industry-wide speculation for months, particularly after Sony started pulling its tracks from SoundCloud. A leaked contract last month hinted at a new tiered listening system, and now SoundCloud chief technology officer Eric Wahlforss has confirmed plans to launch a paid subscription service later on in 2015, according to Tech Times. Details are scarce, but the first tier would allow listeners to explore SoundCloud ad-free and download a limited number of files, while the second tier would provide unfettered access to the entire catalogue."
• gad2103 11y ago
  > The New York Times (which I pay for), is making some money off its paywall, but still a lot more through digital advertising experiences, which mean it's limited in what it can truly say. disclaimer: I'm a dev at NYT. comment: As a dev at the Times in the Data Science and Engineering department, I am privy to all of our data, aware of our ad-services integrations and relationships with our advertisers, in contact with marketing and, most germane to the discussion, allowed to sit in on editorial decision-making discussions (sometimes). I can honestly say that this part of the OP's post is very far from the reality of how decisions are made here. In fact, the newsroom, while increasingly aware of a controlled set of analytics, works almost completely without concern for the financial aspects of the company. Even if a reporter wants to see analytics regarding an article he/she wrote, or a report on aggregated article performance, that information is only in the purview of an editor and, even then, limited to data that intentionally exclude information that might lead to 'click-bait' articles. While this might change over time, I can assure you that it will be very very controlled and that the newsroom has stronger veto power than marketing and advertising. I have never witnessed a scenario where an article is pushed or pulled based on what an advertiser wants and I can't fathom how that would happen. Hopefully, this will assuage the OP's fears that the news we print is somehow at the whims of our advertisers.
• eximius 11y ago
  There was a discussion... some time ago (maybe even a few years ago, actually), regarding a hypothetical web service where users deposited funds (say, a few dollars at a time) and enabled it on websites of their choosing. When they loaded a website, it could check if the user had that installed and enabled for their website. If so, it would charge them a microtransaction (a few cents, etc) and not load ads. If they did not, it would load ads. In this way, they paid services they used frequently as they used them and in increments they didn't mind. Of course, there is a lot of things undefined in this model about how it would be implemented, but it was an idea I still think has merit.
• Lazare 11y ago
  Let's imagine that someone started a "free pizza service". Every single day, rain or shine, a pizza gets delivered to users of the site. For free! Pretty good, right? But then the VC money starts to run low, and after a few experiments with printing ads on the box, the company announces the end of the service. It would be easy for me to then write an outraged blog post. I might say stuff like "who's doing this to my free pizza service?" I might plaintively suggest that there has to be a business model that allows free pizza to continue. I might even say that I'd pay a reasonable sum ($10/month, perhaps?) in order to keep the daily pizzas flowing. But, you know, there's no right to free pizzas, it's not my free pizza service, there is no business model that makes free pizza viable, and my willingness to pay clearly does not extend to the point of actually covering anyone's costs. Now, the author is talking about Soundcloud, not pizza. But I think the onus is on her to demonstrate that these examples are different. > There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. 1) No there doesn't "have to be". Free pizza is awesome, but it doesn't mean giving anyone who asks a daily free pizza is viable. Maybe SoundCloud's old ad-free model is viable; maybe it isn't. The answer doesn't depend on how much you wish it was true though. If you want to talk about business models but you're not going to talk about bandwidth costs and user growth and capex, you're not being serious. 2) Also, XKCD seems to be flourishing pretty damn well. So is Tumblr and Reddit, despite the overly-publicised prophecies of doom people keep tossing around. (Sure guys, this time you're all going to switch to Voat. No, I totally believe you.) The only one I don't know about is SoundCloud, and I'm pretty sure they'd love to be "failing" the way Reddit is failing. But sure, maybe they really can't make the numbers work. In which case, they're going to go under, but that doesn't tell us much about the internet, just about the economics of streaming media in a world where bandwidth is a scarce good. What this article seems to be looking for is a solid example of people taking a profitable service that delighted users, and making it more profitable in a way that annoyed users. What it actually has is examples of people taking an unprofitable service and trying to find a way to make it viable so they can continue to serve users. The former would be a useful stepping off point to a discussion of greed and public services; the latter is not.
• Nano2rad 11y ago
  The monetization model not looking for paying customers; the aim is to get some money from everyone even those not willing to pay. Solution is to seek new sites and technologies even if they are not convenient and publicize. if possible start your own also support financially. If free sites are to exist without corporate control, expectation also have to be low.