I know these anti-ad posts are a dime a dozen here, but this is one of the more self-entitled pieces of dreck in the genre. She spends the first part of her essay slagging on WIRED ("Wired has dabbled in and eventually succumbed to the technology it once skewered and analyzed. Its latest efforts inevitably include pandering to the Instagram crowd."), implying that she's too good for their lowbrow content, and then the rest of it is about how dare they have the temerity to make her resort to using cURL to read their content. Or is this post supposed to be a sly retelling of the joke in Annie Hall? [1]
What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The WIRED thing annoys me too but when they've got a good story, I'm willing to give them the adnetwork revenue. Forbes, on the other hand...that whole thing with their infected ad network, I've just stopped going to Forbes articles, period, even when they're posted here. It's been a long time since I can remember Forbes exclusively breaking a story...most of the time, it seems their articles are from their "contributor" network just blogspamming someone else's story.
See for me, the strangeness of this post is not the anti-ad message, though she does lay it on a bit thick, it's the solution. That said, I'm quite happy with most anti-adwall points of view, I share them. :)
Maybe I'm just not enough of a techie any more, but "switching between Android and iOS" doesn't strike me as unusual enough that any one site is the only place with the right answer. So long before I break out curl and write little python scripts I'd hit at least two non-paywalled sites for an answer. Or in the case of Wired turn JS off and happily read all their content. Either is much quicker than the simplest scripting moment...
I'll save the scripting moments for the sites that appear to be the only place with an answer to something esoteric, like the single hit for a driver or kernel issue.
> What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk?
The whole point of the post was that I'm doing something inordinately ridiculous to access a little bit of good content. Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. A media that is sick cannot provide us with good news and content that we can use to further our critical thinking, and we should be worried and thinking about how we can possibly solve this problem instead of trying to bypass it.
We'll know that ad supported content is dead when AOL, or "Aol.", or whatever, and Demand Media, go bust. They will not be missed.
Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime.
Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes; Wired, no. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes; pundits, no.
The trend we're seeing in advertising is that only Google and Facebook really matter to advertisers. The third-party ad industry is mostly bottom feeders, and it's getting worse. (See earlier article today about Forbes distributing malware.)
As an advertiser, yes absolutely Google and Facebook are king. No one else even comes close to touching their level of audience segmentation, results reporting, and knowing that their inventory is good from both a viewability/advertiser standpoint as well as a half decent customer experience standpoint.
I know it's not truly micropayments, but a number of podcasts I listen to support themselves via Patreon, and most of those are from people I'd qualify as pundits.
Just a small point about micropayments. The current system is not micro. Micro is hundredths of a cent or less. At that price point it might be possible to use them. Sadly not even bitcoin (afaik) can handle such transactions. Transaction costs are too high under every system. Even IBM's research- a few years ago, bottomed out at 25 cents.
Economist and FT, yes. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, I'm not so sure any more, unless everywhere ends up paywalled.
Haven't we all got used to getting our news buffet style? We'll take a few articles from the BBC, the Guardian, the NYT and the Washington Post? Twenty years ago I'd have a broadsheet paper to read on the commute and over lunch. Now I'll skim multiple quality news sites to get a similar amount and breadth of content. I believe, mistakenly perhaps, that I get a better spread that way.
Micropayments don't cut it a) because I don't want all your content like I once did, and b) you want far, far too much per article compared to the £1 or two to buy your actual paper output with dozens or hundreds of articles, but nowadays I might only read a couple a day, or even a week, instead of twenty+ daily.
It is much easier for 'bottom feeders' to exist outside of walled gardens (e.g. Facebook, Google). That doesn't mean that most of the 3rd party ad industry are 'bottom feeders'.
The negative side of ads is much more pronounced amongst the 3rd party ad industry because there are easier attack vectors in the open market than in walled gardens. There are large 3rd party channels that have clean inventory, honest clients, and perform well for advertisers (Taboola, Outbrain, Criteo, AdRoll, etc).
I always thought the adsense content network was just a way for google to avoid paying publishers directly for listing their pages in their results. All content, including "bottom feeders" is valuable to Google. I believe it will come to a point that google will start paying publishers directly by a portion of the money they made by having their content in their results.
As for facebook, I think it is overselling its ad business.
I wonder how long Google is going to continue to matter. Adblockers can filter out Google search ads, and if Google decided to make their ads "stealthy" it would probably precipitate a fairly large user-base exodus.
Facebook on the other hand has fairly strong lock-in, though I expect their engagement numbers would take a big hit.
Let's be honest, why they shouldn't block adblock? The ads bring them money. And they need money to survive and, if they lucky, develop. The writers have families or plan to have ones, they need to be rewarded for their work. It may be their main or only source of income. Now, if they also provide a valuable information for you, I think that trying to trick them into giving it for free (ad free) is wrong. I think and it may controversial here, but every valuable site that lives on ads should block adblock. And don't get me wrong, I actually use adblock myself, but I'm more than happy to add exceptions for the sites I need or value.
Just remember that "adblock" doesn't block ads - it blocks ad networks. If publications ran their own ads (like they do in print) the ads would likely a)be of much higher quality, and b) not be blocked by "adblock"
>Let's be honest, why they shouldn't block adblock?
Because if the goal is to keep the doors open, that's a terrible strategy.
The phrase "the customer is always right" doesn't mean the customer is always literally correct, it means that if you try to tell the customer they are wrong, they'll go elsewhere.
Customers don't want ads. That's clear. Telling them they can't read your stuff without reading the ads means they won't read your stuff. Mindshare is hard to build and losing it is often a killing blow.
Ironically, that makes you the kind of person that the advertising company is the least interested in. You're not interested in buying what they're selling, you just want to cost them money. That means your "ethical" stance isn't really sustainable in the long term. In a world where everybody blocks ads by default, but unblocks them as a form of compensation of content providers, advertisements themselves will have little to no business value. Over time, as advertisers realize they no longer getting any ROI, the funding will dry up.
it's kind of like what I do at my local bakery/patisserie. I hate that I have to ask for something from behind the counter, and the person wants to handle my extremely dirty cash with the same fingers that they use to take out and give me what I ask for. It's disgusting.
So I just reach behind the counter (technically quite easy) and take it out, without bringing cash into the equation. It's not my fault they make it so easy for me to leave without paying them. The fact that they have a broken business model isn't my fault!
How is it up to them to say "You can take this from behind the counter, but you have to let us take and handle your cash and then give you this dirty version" when I can just take the clean version myself!
In what way is it up to them to dictate what they will and won't serve me!
If they want me to stop taking their pastries without paying, they need to make it not technically possible.
/s
(how I feel people sound when they talk about their right to use ad blockers over the wishes of the people who the ads would be paying and whose servers are serving the content.)
the possibly naive pr{e,o}mise of the early web was that it would be a place for people who created content for the joy of creating it to share said content with people who would discover the delights of gatekeeper-free media consumption. "premium" content, that people were trying to make a living from selling, could go behind a paywall or into subscriber-only emails, the way books and magazines worked pre-web.
sadly, the implicit contract was broken on both sides. people didn't want to pay for content, but they also wanted to consume (pirated) premium stuff, rather than commons material, so there was never a concerted push to have better discovery mechanisms atop the freely-provided web. likewise, producers wanted to impose user-hostile measures like drm and geographic segmentation on a medium that was not conducive to them, making piracy the more attractive option even if you didn't care about free-as-in-beer.
professional producers had to go free because it was not a case of paid professional content competing with free amateur content; it was a case of paid professional content competing with free pirated professional content. that also sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the amateur ecosystem; who wants to dig through the virtual slushpile when you can get pre-curated professional material for free?
i'm sad about the whole thing because i was really looking forward to seeing if the creative commons would compete on its own merits as a mass entertainment option. once the reward of putting something up is not people reading and appreciating it, but money from ad clicks, though, the producer's incentives are suddenly misaligned with the consumer's, and we end up with the web of today :(
This +1000. The guardian, a paper I used to buy regularly, has transformed itself comprehensively into a hell of lazy ill informed clickbait, uncritically repeating unsupported conclusions from nonsense science and refusing to differentiate their serious analysis from crappy user generated content. Now I can't even bring myself to pay the 3 quid a month subscription even though the crossword alone would probably be worth that.
I saw a talk by a product manager at the Guardian, and as I understand it, that transformation was a reaction to declining print sales, shaky ad revenue, the rise of Facebook & Google, the success of sites like Buzzfeed & Vox, etc. They've been losing money for a long time and have been slashing costs as much as they can, but that doesn't make a business sustainable.
Nowadays, most people will get to a news article from a friend sharing it on facebook, or from reddit or hacker news, etc, not the Guardian homepage, and that means clickbait pays the bills.
The Guardian has gone, in Claire Graves' Spiral Dynamics terms, gone FS centric: basically treating truth as context dependent and thus completely relative. This makes for unreadable & highly subjective and sarcastic reading without much point beyond the authors own self interest in writing (and presumably making a living from it..).
It's gotten to stage where I go straight to the comments on HN rather than to the story when I see that the source is the Gaurdian. You know it's going to be some ill informed opinion piece rather than any actual journalism. Like you, I used to buy the physical paper back in the day - and felt the paper represented a continuation of the institution so admired by Orwell. I'm not sure which is more depressing - that it's so rubbish now or that it's become so commercially successful with its current approach to content.
I agree very much, and think that a lot of the problem comes from the fact that as a society, we are not taught enough about how to think (and especially read) critically. In combination with floods of data coming in 24/7, people's compasses start getting out of whack, and online journalism becomes a marketer's dream. I'm guilty of it too, even though I try to make a conscious effort to pick my sources more carefully now.
I agree with the author concerning content and ads, but find it ironic that the article's title is so click-baity and misleading (considering she never implies content is actually dying, just that its business model is).
https://blendle.com/ is attempting just this. They have a beta service available now, and its rather nice. You pay a few cents per article and you can easily get refunds if you don't like the article or if it isn't what you expected.
It would be incredibly bold for a major subscription content vendor, such as the NYTimes, to set up such a program. You sign into your NYTimes account, and sites around the web either become available to you, hide their advertising for you, or offer extra premium content just for NYTimes subscribers.
Basically, the app store model built upon the NYTimes, where you get the basic news from the New York Times and the niche stuff from content partners who the NYTimes will reimburse for page views, out of the subscription fee they are already collecting.
This would be so bold that I doubt it will happen from an existing print content vendor like NYTimes. Seems like something Amazon might do as a Prime benefit, though. Basically like Prime video, just for text.
So, the author didn't even think to question her assumption that she is entitles to get the content for free, without paying dorectly or through being subjected to ads?
> today can’t epxect to put out mostly junk filler
I wonder if that's a litmus test to see if people finish reading. Great article, perfect sentiment, last paragraph has the only typo in the entire thing.
And I totally agree. There are shitloads of people on the internet making money from content. Hell, I make some sometimes. If you build a real audience, listen to them, then solve their problems. Then content isn't dead.
If you're trying to be mass media that appeals to everybody and nobody at the same time. Then content is dead.
I mean, shit, look at someone like GaryVee or Casey Neistat, or even Kim Kardashian. They all make shitloads of money from content.
And if you're looking for examples closer to HN home. Look at Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, or even Ramit Sethi. They might not make tens of millions, but they def print millions of dollars with their content businesses.
(Disclosure: I write full-time for Wired, but I'll try to leave my feeling about our content aside here)
Even if you pay for a subscription to The Economist, you're still going to see ads, both on their website and in their apps. Even though I'm a subscriber and logged in, Ublock Origin is showing over 100 blocked requests on an article I just pulled up there, some of them coming from the same third party ad networks everyone else uses. And my $1 a week subscription only buys me access to three articles a week.
So while, as the OP points out, The Economist's Tom Standage [1] believes that ad revenue isn't a futureproof business model, they still appear to be heavily reliant on it.
I don't know anything about the Economist's overhead, but the reason subscribers are still subjected to ads is very likely that subscription fees come nowhere near covering their costs. The truism in newspaper publishing is that subscriptions don't even cover the cost of printing and delivering the paper to a subscriber.
Subscription-only business models have historically been tough.
A lot of people ask "why can't all advertising be like The Deck," but the trouble there is that The Deck probably doesn't bring in enough revenue for publishers to operate a large newsroom [2]
Personally (not speaking for my employers) I like Brave browser's idea, but they're already facing legal threats. And while they're promising publishers 70 percent of their ad revenue, but even if that's a larger percentage I don't know if that will work out to more than publishers get through the third party networks they use now.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Adblock is going to cause ads to become MORE invasive, not less. Native ads, native content, and other "partnerships" are going to drive revenue-all of which are much worse that what we have now, privacy-wise. Adblock is only fueling an arms race between consumer and publisher.
In the future, we might see a viable micropayment solution but there are some fundamental problems with this approach.
Why not just open firebug and delete the ad overlay? The author is either trying to 'show off' or is just genuinely oblivious that there's a much easier way.
I'm not against ads per se, I have quite a few sites 'white listed' but when they beg for ads like Wired, then it's an automatic nope!
Wired has always been garbage. You're just getting old enough to realize it.
There's always going to be garbage content sources that are more popular than the quality content sources. If you appreciate quality content, your duty is not to bitch about the garbage content but to support quality content.
A couple days ago I ran into Wired's ad-blocker blocker so I just clicked my Instapaper toolbar button. Worked like a charm. I wonder if or how often Wired makes an effort to block Instapaper.
When you can count your lines of Python code on your fingers, it's probably faster to just write up a script than it is to search for existing software.
[+] [-] danso|10 years ago|reply
What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The WIRED thing annoys me too but when they've got a good story, I'm willing to give them the adnetwork revenue. Forbes, on the other hand...that whole thing with their infected ad network, I've just stopped going to Forbes articles, period, even when they're posted here. It's been a long time since I can remember Forbes exclusively breaking a story...most of the time, it seems their articles are from their "contributor" network just blogspamming someone else's story.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?item=qt0373261
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
Maybe I'm just not enough of a techie any more, but "switching between Android and iOS" doesn't strike me as unusual enough that any one site is the only place with the right answer. So long before I break out curl and write little python scripts I'd hit at least two non-paywalled sites for an answer. Or in the case of Wired turn JS off and happily read all their content. Either is much quicker than the simplest scripting moment...
I'll save the scripting moments for the sites that appear to be the only place with an answer to something esoteric, like the single hit for a driver or kernel issue.
[+] [-] vkb|10 years ago|reply
The whole point of the post was that I'm doing something inordinately ridiculous to access a little bit of good content. Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. A media that is sick cannot provide us with good news and content that we can use to further our critical thinking, and we should be worried and thinking about how we can possibly solve this problem instead of trying to bypass it.
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime.
Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes; Wired, no. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes; pundits, no.
The trend we're seeing in advertising is that only Google and Facebook really matter to advertisers. The third-party ad industry is mostly bottom feeders, and it's getting worse. (See earlier article today about Forbes distributing malware.)
[+] [-] jsonne|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric_the_read|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virmundi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anexprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
Economist and FT, yes. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, I'm not so sure any more, unless everywhere ends up paywalled.
Haven't we all got used to getting our news buffet style? We'll take a few articles from the BBC, the Guardian, the NYT and the Washington Post? Twenty years ago I'd have a broadsheet paper to read on the commute and over lunch. Now I'll skim multiple quality news sites to get a similar amount and breadth of content. I believe, mistakenly perhaps, that I get a better spread that way.
Micropayments don't cut it a) because I don't want all your content like I once did, and b) you want far, far too much per article compared to the £1 or two to buy your actual paper output with dozens or hundreds of articles, but nowadays I might only read a couple a day, or even a week, instead of twenty+ daily.
[+] [-] jamiequint|10 years ago|reply
The negative side of ads is much more pronounced amongst the 3rd party ad industry because there are easier attack vectors in the open market than in walled gardens. There are large 3rd party channels that have clean inventory, honest clients, and perform well for advertisers (Taboola, Outbrain, Criteo, AdRoll, etc).
[+] [-] return0|10 years ago|reply
As for facebook, I think it is overselling its ad business.
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|10 years ago|reply
Facebook on the other hand has fairly strong lock-in, though I expect their engagement numbers would take a big hit.
[+] [-] kukx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leereeves|10 years ago|reply
Ads are hiding the content, tracking people, and even distributing malware.
Publishers need to make money, of course, but they need to find a way to do so that respects other people.
[+] [-] Sir_Substance|10 years ago|reply
Because if the goal is to keep the doors open, that's a terrible strategy.
The phrase "the customer is always right" doesn't mean the customer is always literally correct, it means that if you try to tell the customer they are wrong, they'll go elsewhere.
Customers don't want ads. That's clear. Telling them they can't read your stuff without reading the ads means they won't read your stuff. Mindshare is hard to build and losing it is often a killing blow.
[+] [-] sparky_z|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeformed|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retra|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logicallee|10 years ago|reply
So I just reach behind the counter (technically quite easy) and take it out, without bringing cash into the equation. It's not my fault they make it so easy for me to leave without paying them. The fact that they have a broken business model isn't my fault!
How is it up to them to say "You can take this from behind the counter, but you have to let us take and handle your cash and then give you this dirty version" when I can just take the clean version myself!
In what way is it up to them to dictate what they will and won't serve me!
If they want me to stop taking their pastries without paying, they need to make it not technically possible.
/s
(how I feel people sound when they talk about their right to use ad blockers over the wishes of the people who the ads would be paying and whose servers are serving the content.)
[+] [-] zem|10 years ago|reply
sadly, the implicit contract was broken on both sides. people didn't want to pay for content, but they also wanted to consume (pirated) premium stuff, rather than commons material, so there was never a concerted push to have better discovery mechanisms atop the freely-provided web. likewise, producers wanted to impose user-hostile measures like drm and geographic segmentation on a medium that was not conducive to them, making piracy the more attractive option even if you didn't care about free-as-in-beer.
professional producers had to go free because it was not a case of paid professional content competing with free amateur content; it was a case of paid professional content competing with free pirated professional content. that also sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the amateur ecosystem; who wants to dig through the virtual slushpile when you can get pre-curated professional material for free?
i'm sad about the whole thing because i was really looking forward to seeing if the creative commons would compete on its own merits as a mass entertainment option. once the reward of putting something up is not people reading and appreciating it, but money from ad clicks, though, the producer's incentives are suddenly misaligned with the consumer's, and we end up with the web of today :(
[+] [-] takno|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebola1717|10 years ago|reply
Nowadays, most people will get to a news article from a friend sharing it on facebook, or from reddit or hacker news, etc, not the Guardian homepage, and that means clickbait pays the bills.
[+] [-] dingdingdang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derriz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gheeohm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intrasight|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zem|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m52go|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qrv3w|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qq66|10 years ago|reply
Basically, the app store model built upon the NYTimes, where you get the basic news from the New York Times and the niche stuff from content partners who the NYTimes will reimburse for page views, out of the subscription fee they are already collecting.
This would be so bold that I doubt it will happen from an existing print content vendor like NYTimes. Seems like something Amazon might do as a Prime benefit, though. Basically like Prime video, just for text.
[+] [-] golergka|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|10 years ago|reply
I wonder if that's a litmus test to see if people finish reading. Great article, perfect sentiment, last paragraph has the only typo in the entire thing.
And I totally agree. There are shitloads of people on the internet making money from content. Hell, I make some sometimes. If you build a real audience, listen to them, then solve their problems. Then content isn't dead.
If you're trying to be mass media that appeals to everybody and nobody at the same time. Then content is dead.
I mean, shit, look at someone like GaryVee or Casey Neistat, or even Kim Kardashian. They all make shitloads of money from content.
And if you're looking for examples closer to HN home. Look at Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, or even Ramit Sethi. They might not make tens of millions, but they def print millions of dollars with their content businesses.
[+] [-] klint|10 years ago|reply
Even if you pay for a subscription to The Economist, you're still going to see ads, both on their website and in their apps. Even though I'm a subscriber and logged in, Ublock Origin is showing over 100 blocked requests on an article I just pulled up there, some of them coming from the same third party ad networks everyone else uses. And my $1 a week subscription only buys me access to three articles a week.
So while, as the OP points out, The Economist's Tom Standage [1] believes that ad revenue isn't a futureproof business model, they still appear to be heavily reliant on it.
I don't know anything about the Economist's overhead, but the reason subscribers are still subjected to ads is very likely that subscription fees come nowhere near covering their costs. The truism in newspaper publishing is that subscriptions don't even cover the cost of printing and delivering the paper to a subscriber.
Subscription-only business models have historically been tough.
A lot of people ask "why can't all advertising be like The Deck," but the trouble there is that The Deck probably doesn't bring in enough revenue for publishers to operate a large newsroom [2]
Personally (not speaking for my employers) I like Brave browser's idea, but they're already facing legal threats. And while they're promising publishers 70 percent of their ad revenue, but even if that's a larger percentage I don't know if that will work out to more than publishers get through the third party networks they use now.
[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage...
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-...
[+] [-] misterbwong|10 years ago|reply
In the future, we might see a viable micropayment solution but there are some fundamental problems with this approach.
[+] [-] nuttinwrong|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darpa_escapee|10 years ago|reply
Even a fraction of a penny. That's the sad truth.
[+] [-] Cozumel|10 years ago|reply
I'm not against ads per se, I have quite a few sites 'white listed' but when they beg for ads like Wired, then it's an automatic nope!
[+] [-] ebbv|10 years ago|reply
There's always going to be garbage content sources that are more popular than the quality content sources. If you appreciate quality content, your duty is not to bitch about the garbage content but to support quality content.
[+] [-] kirykl|10 years ago|reply
The Wired iPhone2Android article is and was never designed to be content. You shouldn't expect it to be either honestly.
Apple has great content on the subject for free https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201196
The 3rd party link bloat however is spot on
[+] [-] takno|10 years ago|reply
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