Login button below the fold? That's a back button.
Animated ads? That's a back button.
Shifting content? That's a back button.
More than 2 pages? That's a back button.
Need to be logged in to Facebook. That's a back button.
Unexpected video? That's a back button.
Unexpected sound? That's a back button.
Overlapping ads & text in my browser? That's a back button.
Overlapping ads & text at 800 x 600? That's a back button.
No horizontal scroll bar to get beyond right fold? That's a back button.
Flash? That's a back button.
pdf? That's a back button.
Slideshow? Oooh, you better believe that's a back button.
Freezes my computer? That's a battery removal.
The future of reading on the web is easy to change, all we need to do is pay some money for each article we want to read without adverts...
Unfortunately, the primary impact of putting up a paywall for premium content seems to be to raise huge arguments about why "information wants to be free", not the reality of what happens without one.
The fallacy there is that there is nothing to prevent ads from creeping in even though you do pay. That's been the history of cinema, cable, and internet radio.
I don't know about most people, but I don't read many articles from the same source: I read a few from some online newspaper, then some from another, then a blog post, etc. Now take NYT.com: the minimum subscription is $15/month - it's absurdly expensive for the three or four articles I might read there.
You need to solve micropayments to make paywalls work.
I'm still hoping that something like Flattr can work. It should be possible to have a middle ground between "everything is ad supported" and "everything requires subscriptions or credit cards", especially for niche "small" content (that don't take months or years to produce) where the audience can appreciate the work done and its value.
Why? Most popular consumer magazines don't even cover the cost of printing and postage with their subscription fee.
If Time magazine no longer needs to print and mail their product, should't they be making MORE money?
One of the fundamental problems that no one mentions is that advertisers have been grossly overpaying for print ads for decades. They had no measure of the effectiveness or reach of their ads except "X magazine has Y subscribers".
With digital targeted advertising, we know exactly how many views, clicks, length of view, not to mention tons of demographic data on the reader. That's worth something. It's worth a lot more than an untargeted ad on a page in a magazine that might go straight from the mailbox into the garbage.
I'm not claiming to know what will happen in digital advertising, but I really don't think paywalls or micropayments are the future. My guess is something like major media companies will get rid of their entire ad sales staff, outsource advertising to Facebook/Google, and deliver their content through multiple channels/feeds/API which can been interpreted by various apps or devices to be viewed in the way the consumer likes.
"...Ad networks like The Deck come to mind..." everytime someone says this I just switch off. The Deck and other hipster brand ad networks are not a workable solution for 99.99% of bloggers, please stop using them as an example of how advertising can be "good"; they're an example of why it can't.
Why? Is it because The Deck is selective? Because if that's the reason then there you have a problem to be fixed by another startup. Bloggers of the world, unite?
(I know there are already a couple of offerings and people working on new ad networks.)
This has been the future of reading on the web for about the last 10 years. It's now so bad that my default browser setup (the one I use for sites I've never visited before / known offenders, as opposed to my online bank) is Firefox + AdBlock + RequestPolicy + NoScript + FlashBlock. Yes, I know some of these overlap. Yes, I probably want to look at Ghostery too. I also run a fairly aggressive filtering proxy on another server on the LAN and all LAN HTTP/HTTPS traffic goes through that by default (with exemptions for some sites that fail to cope). I don't care about your ad dollars. The chances are I don't actually care about your content either, but it's something to do to pass the time. If you want to throw up a paywall, knock yourself out - if the content is good enough, I will pay.
Around this time of year, every dickhead with a WordPress install seems to discover the same crappy JavaScript snow plugin, so that gets a special regexp all to itself in my filtering proxy. I didn't pay for a fast quad core CPU so you can animate snowflakes / leaves / puppies in the most inefficient way possible.
Amusingly the mobile experience is actually better in some ways - a double tap to zoom often fits the actual content postage-stamp-sized region to the screen, and I don't see the rest of the page...
I dislike the trend towards light grey text on a white background. Unfortunately, the article itself is guilty of this. It's fine for timestamps and other page noise, but why dim a blockquote?
My "favorite" "feature" is when you arrive on the web page for the first time in your life and you are being prompted with a popup to take a survey on the web site you never seen before...
The issue is (primarily for me) the new wave of popup ads that don't let you view the content until you find the 30x30 pixel close area. And secondly the sites where ads have become more important than content (reflected in the design.) And thirdly the dozen social media buttons on every single page.
Non-horrid advertising should be possible for any respectable website. Advertising that abuses your users is only going to be tolerated for so long, and pushes more people to use adblock.
I'm happy to pay for great content - avoid link-bait titles, avoid stupid tiresome "fanboy" flames, use long form content.
I leave ads turned on. There are some ads that just make me close the tab even if I haven't got the content - almost anything with sound will cause an instant tab close.
Isn't that a false dichotomy? You left out completely free content, which is still abundant and could hold your attention each and every day. It seems most ad-driven sites are fueled by screen scraping or opining on external content without adding much value.
Why don't we start by trying to raise the quality and therefore effectiveness of ads on the Internet? A fundamental shift in how ads work and what they're trying to do needs to be done.
The ads you see on websites right now are remnants from the newspaper, nearly identical to their print counterparts.
Creating a "prettier ad network" or "other way to be profitable" is only patchwork. We need to completely rework the execution of "I have something to sell and I'd like to tell your readers / customers about it".
"Solving this" implies that there are users who like, value, and want advertising. I don't feel that there are that many people who do.
The better thing to solve is "how can websites make money without ads"? How did TV networks stay on the air before commercial breaks? Maybe a similar model can be applied.
This is driving me crazy. I feel the author's pain.
It's gotten so bad I've created a web site that gives me plain headlines of all the tech, science, world, sports, and political stories I might want to read. Phase 2 is walking the links and using something like Readability to make those readable as well. http://newspaper23.com
I didn't do this as a for-profit startup kind of thing -- it's for my own sanity. Everywhere you go folks are screwing with you instead of just giving you content. I wanted a place I could go to just catch up quickly on the opinion of the day. No bullshit.
I also feel like it is a mistake to blame this on SEO. SEO has nothing to do with it. I have a few sites optimized for SEO myself, and the only thing I want to do is present plain, simple, easy-to-understand text. How else would people easily consume it and recommend it to others?
Nope, the problem is stickiness. Everybody wants their site to be sticky and entertaining -- to the point of popping up email sign-ups, ads, social crap, you name it. SEO just means getting people to visit. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is annoy them. It's the folks who already have large audiences that are crapping all over the net. And they're not doing that for new eyeballs, they're doing that to keep the eyeballs they already have -- it's called engagement. Content providers make a clear and decisive design statement when they decide to screw over readability for stickiness. (Yes, some small-traffic sites do this, but only because they could care less about the audience in the first place. Any visitor for them is a mark. These are the guys who are never going to grow and stay big and simply don't care.)
I don't think the issue is just stickiness, I think it's more about publishers trying to squeeze out the next dollar, and the one after that. They're all gradual steps down into reading hell that is horrible when looked at from afar, but easier to understand when you consider them on their own.
Add one more promo spot for a few extra bucks. I guess. OK.
Make the header banner larger. OK.
Boss wants a Send To Friend feature because they heard about someone using one, once.
Maybe trial an interstitial because it will cover the costs of the new SEO guy.
Etc.
This is just the beginning guys! Big web properties are becoming more like a TV Network. They interrupt you with an ad because they think that if their name is not some power of 10 then they have to use this TV-like experience. Maybe they're right but if this "platformization" thing catches on then you will _not_ have option to block them out!
I don't know the solution but I'm (we're) trying with our startup.
I'm an AdSense publisher and I get emails from Google suggesting that I add more ad blocks to my site, and also tips on where to place them to get noticed most - above the fold, primarily. They also coach on making the ads stand out by using bold/bright colours. I suspect you'd have to go above and beyond with your ad placements to frustrate Google...
I think I have mentioned this in the past on other articles about advertising. The overall game of creating aggressive advertising has not changed, they just now have more tools to do it.
If your going to force me to have a fullscreen ad before reading your content then at least allow me to dismiss it easily with a single click on the ad and not having to hunt for a close button (if there even is one).
The amount of times I've had a fullscreen ad completely block a page with no way to remove it..
Regards content, I think this is partly just a function of so many people now reading stuff online.
With more people reading things on smartphones/tablets on their way to work on the bus etc there is a market for more "tabloid" style writing that can be consumed quickly.
There are still plenty of people writing high quality content and lots of it gets linked to here on HN.
People will just be more discerning about the content portals they use.
I don't think that Daring Fireball is a good example for a membership based blog. Gruber made all feeds freely available in August 2007. The membership button is still there, but besides a T-shirt, it doesn't provide you with anything new.
AFAIK he gets a lot more from the weekly feed-sponsorships, The Deck ads, and Amazon referrals.
the biggest thread for reading on the web is - in my humble opinion - the swipeware deployed on multiple small and big sites (i.e.: all *.wordpress.com blogs) for mobile devices like the iPad. swipeware has a horrific user experience, adds nothing of value to the page or the article and makes it impossible to read an article from start to finish.
out of curiosity: is there anybody out-there who thinks swipeware on blogs is a great idea/experience?
Yeah, that's awful. A tip: install iCab (I'm sure there are other browsers that do the same, but I have experience with this one). You can then set your browser-id per site. So, I set in my settings that wordpress.com sends the "Safari 5/Mac" browser header, and all is fine.
"The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers.
"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.
Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.
I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah.
If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.
I use, (and pay for), Readability, and I don't really see this as a extra work or a hack or a a necessary evil on my part.
Even if these interstitials weren't there, I'd much rather hit tilde without even thinking, than have to read a page that's even 90% as nice as Readability is with my consistent settings. I do it all the time on blogs without ads or pages that are already very readable like bostonglobe.com.
It's like an office coffee pot, nobody complains that the coffee isn't already sweetened or creamed, they're fine doing the little extra step so that everyone has it the way they want it.
(The one-click send-to-kindle is a time/productivity saver that offsets the cost of that extra click, as it isn't even an option on most sites, and certainly not without hoops to jump through.)
The problem is not the poor state of the reading experience -- that's the symptom -- the problem is the per-page-view model of the online advertising, which breaks an article into pages, sharing buttons in your face... etc.
Publishers are clearly struggling to make money from their sites and decline in the quality and increase in annoyance of the adverts is the result. I wrote this a while ago (though not much has changed):
[+] [-] edw519|14 years ago|reply
That's a Back Button
(to the cadence of "That's a Paddlin'" from "The Simpsons")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFgR0m-9FmM
It's a wonder I find anything readable any more.[+] [-] ladon86|14 years ago|reply
Disable the back button.
[+] [-] einhverfr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|14 years ago|reply
Well, that should be a "Read Later" button (or, at the very least, looking for a "Print" button).
[+] [-] randallsquared|14 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how content fitting nicely in 800px is a drawback.
[+] [-] its_so_on|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EwanToo|14 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, the primary impact of putting up a paywall for premium content seems to be to raise huge arguments about why "information wants to be free", not the reality of what happens without one.
[+] [-] michaelfeathers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
You need to solve micropayments to make paywalls work.
[+] [-] m_eiman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheFuture|14 years ago|reply
If Time magazine no longer needs to print and mail their product, should't they be making MORE money?
One of the fundamental problems that no one mentions is that advertisers have been grossly overpaying for print ads for decades. They had no measure of the effectiveness or reach of their ads except "X magazine has Y subscribers".
With digital targeted advertising, we know exactly how many views, clicks, length of view, not to mention tons of demographic data on the reader. That's worth something. It's worth a lot more than an untargeted ad on a page in a magazine that might go straight from the mailbox into the garbage.
I'm not claiming to know what will happen in digital advertising, but I really don't think paywalls or micropayments are the future. My guess is something like major media companies will get rid of their entire ad sales staff, outsource advertising to Facebook/Google, and deliver their content through multiple channels/feeds/API which can been interpreted by various apps or devices to be viewed in the way the consumer likes.
[+] [-] citricsquid|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaskwhy|14 years ago|reply
(I know there are already a couple of offerings and people working on new ad networks.)
[+] [-] antidaily|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrabone|14 years ago|reply
Around this time of year, every dickhead with a WordPress install seems to discover the same crappy JavaScript snow plugin, so that gets a special regexp all to itself in my filtering proxy. I didn't pay for a fast quad core CPU so you can animate snowflakes / leaves / puppies in the most inefficient way possible.
Amusingly the mobile experience is actually better in some ways - a double tap to zoom often fits the actual content postage-stamp-sized region to the screen, and I don't see the rest of the page...
[+] [-] qjz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimbobimbo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tallanvor|14 years ago|reply
Personally, as annoying as ads are, I still prefer them being there to the content not being available at all.
[+] [-] brigade|14 years ago|reply
The issue is (primarily for me) the new wave of popup ads that don't let you view the content until you find the 30x30 pixel close area. And secondly the sites where ads have become more important than content (reflected in the design.) And thirdly the dozen social media buttons on every single page.
Non-horrid advertising should be possible for any respectable website. Advertising that abuses your users is only going to be tolerated for so long, and pushes more people to use adblock.
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
I leave ads turned on. There are some ads that just make me close the tab even if I haven't got the content - almost anything with sound will cause an instant tab close.
[+] [-] qjz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheFuture|14 years ago|reply
9 out of 10 will take the ads, because the ads are beautiful and part of the content, but they are still ads.
That aspect of print advertising has not yet made the transition to digital. People love ads for stuff they like, are interesting, or/and funny.
The solution will not be to remove ads, it will be to improve ads.
[+] [-] CodeMage|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ticks|14 years ago|reply
If ad blocker users were more than a minority, then I would have to shut my websites down, but thankfully most people allow the ads.
The recent (and potentially upcoming recession) means ad revenue is very weak, so that's why we are seeing/using more aggressive advertising.
[+] [-] rythie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicksergeant|14 years ago|reply
The ads you see on websites right now are remnants from the newspaper, nearly identical to their print counterparts.
Creating a "prettier ad network" or "other way to be profitable" is only patchwork. We need to completely rework the execution of "I have something to sell and I'd like to tell your readers / customers about it".
Solving this requires something larger.
[+] [-] gergles|14 years ago|reply
The better thing to solve is "how can websites make money without ads"? How did TV networks stay on the air before commercial breaks? Maybe a similar model can be applied.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
It's gotten so bad I've created a web site that gives me plain headlines of all the tech, science, world, sports, and political stories I might want to read. Phase 2 is walking the links and using something like Readability to make those readable as well. http://newspaper23.com
I didn't do this as a for-profit startup kind of thing -- it's for my own sanity. Everywhere you go folks are screwing with you instead of just giving you content. I wanted a place I could go to just catch up quickly on the opinion of the day. No bullshit.
I also feel like it is a mistake to blame this on SEO. SEO has nothing to do with it. I have a few sites optimized for SEO myself, and the only thing I want to do is present plain, simple, easy-to-understand text. How else would people easily consume it and recommend it to others?
Nope, the problem is stickiness. Everybody wants their site to be sticky and entertaining -- to the point of popping up email sign-ups, ads, social crap, you name it. SEO just means getting people to visit. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is annoy them. It's the folks who already have large audiences that are crapping all over the net. And they're not doing that for new eyeballs, they're doing that to keep the eyeballs they already have -- it's called engagement. Content providers make a clear and decisive design statement when they decide to screw over readability for stickiness. (Yes, some small-traffic sites do this, but only because they could care less about the audience in the first place. Any visitor for them is a mark. These are the guys who are never going to grow and stay big and simply don't care.)
[+] [-] prawn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jetz|14 years ago|reply
I don't know the solution but I'm (we're) trying with our startup.
[+] [-] scriptproof|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prawn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbarooah|14 years ago|reply
Penalizing other people for advertising rather than relevance when they themselves make their money through advertising is going to be a problem.
[+] [-] jiggy2011|14 years ago|reply
If your going to force me to have a fullscreen ad before reading your content then at least allow me to dismiss it easily with a single click on the ad and not having to hunt for a close button (if there even is one). The amount of times I've had a fullscreen ad completely block a page with no way to remove it..
Regards content, I think this is partly just a function of so many people now reading stuff online. With more people reading things on smartphones/tablets on their way to work on the bus etc there is a market for more "tabloid" style writing that can be consumed quickly.
There are still plenty of people writing high quality content and lots of it gets linked to here on HN.
People will just be more discerning about the content portals they use.
[+] [-] jvdh|14 years ago|reply
AFAIK he gets a lot more from the weekly feed-sponsorships, The Deck ads, and Amazon referrals.
[+] [-] franze|14 years ago|reply
out of curiosity: is there anybody out-there who thinks swipeware on blogs is a great idea/experience?
[+] [-] lena|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_eiman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InfinityX0|14 years ago|reply
"The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - is relatively unattractive to most advertisers.
"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits.
Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.
I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah. If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.
Condé Nast isn't built to do this."
Via - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2966628
[+] [-] efsavage|14 years ago|reply
Even if these interstitials weren't there, I'd much rather hit tilde without even thinking, than have to read a page that's even 90% as nice as Readability is with my consistent settings. I do it all the time on blogs without ads or pages that are already very readable like bostonglobe.com.
It's like an office coffee pot, nobody complains that the coffee isn't already sweetened or creamed, they're fine doing the little extra step so that everyone has it the way they want it.
(The one-click send-to-kindle is a time/productivity saver that offsets the cost of that extra click, as it isn't even an option on most sites, and certainly not without hoops to jump through.)
[+] [-] ivanzhao|14 years ago|reply
A better paradigm has to come.
[+] [-] rythie|14 years ago|reply
http://posterous.richardcunningham.co.uk/the-problem-with-on...