Doesn't this end up spiralling, though? As we've seen with Netflix, nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed.
Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads, and so on.
Recently I've noticed that the Uber app (which I grudgingly use instead of Lyft due to a decline in drivers over the years in various areas near where I've lived to the point where it wasn't a viable option most of the time) will show me adds when I open it to check the ETA during a ride. This is something where I'm not paying a subscription but literally paying for the ride itself, because I obviously don't check the ETA of anything when I'm not riding. I guess this is their way of trying to find a path to profitability other than self-driving cars, but I'd genuinely rather pay an extra dollar or two per ride than have an ad take up close to half my screen.
Things that are super time sensitive should never have distractions present. The Uber app trying to get me to buy cold upside down delivery food while I'm trying to get a ride is a terrible UX. Another example is Waze, the once most amazing map app ever made until bought by Google, has Jack n the Box ads (ok yeah I'm eating jack n the box right now, who cares!) overlaying my fkking map while I'm driving.
oh, tell it to the tram schedule app, popular in Poland.
You pay subscription or you watch unskipable ads. Very cool when you have 3 minutes before your trap.
And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so.
Much worse with Indian Railways. The website is riddled with ads. And if you need to book an emergency ticket, the portal opens 10AM for everyone in India. Obviously the traffic gets too much. I keep the network tab open and its painful to see requests for ads hogging up the resources when you're trying to book an emergency ticket in a race against the nation.
Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even tried to involve advertising into these captchas. You had to type out some specific detail from the ad to get past it.
oh, polish trains site is made by drunk students for a bottle of vodka... It is just terribly bad and haven't changed to the good side since like 10 years. They added some ads though and broke login for me during this time :D If you need to ride using several changes - just don't. You need to book each ticket separately.
German had a lot of useless steps.
Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs.
I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D
Have you found an optimal way to book Tatkal (emergency) tickets with higher success rate apart from paying private agents or paying a premium on ixigo app ?
Lyft started doing the same thing. It's slightly annoying.
Jet Blue is also showing mandatory ads on the video display in front of you. They last for around 5 minutes and you cannot turn off the display while these ads are showing. This is highly annoying.
I carry black electrical tape for all those eye-piercing LEDs on the hotel TV screens I never turn on - guess I'll add pieces of felt to cover seatback displays because I REALLY don't want my toddler blasted with that when he's actually going to sleep.
Now taxi cabs play ads on a screen directly in front of you during the ride, I've seen TVs playing ads in hospital waiting rooms... talk about a captive audience.
Complain to the FAA about it as a safety issue. I always do this when flight attendants are forced to read credit card ads over the PA. It just trains passengers to ignore the crew.
Not showing the user ads is also only half the problem. As the article said, those who pay not to view them are the more valuable advertising targets. There's nothing about those plans, as far as I've seen, that says they're not still tracking usage patterns, viewing habits, etc... and selling that info on to others who don't have a paid ad-free option.
As far as I understand, the paid plans only opt you out of the ads but not the rest of the growth hacking bullshit that all commercial social media platforms do to some degree.
I don't really object to ads as much as I object to the tracking that comes with them. Ad-free services that still do the tracking aren't really much of an improvement in my book.
Large companies which have monopolies or near monopolies (Google with Youtube for example) will unfortunately likely go this way as they can get away with bullying users a lot before they are in any danger of losing market share.
2043: you have been fined for having an unlicensed social activity. Please ensure all future social activity is properly arranged via Facebook groups or a registered chat application.
2053: your social credit score was decreased because of unlicensed social activity and dropped below an acceptable level. You were not fined and you still have a lot of money, but that doesn't matter, because you are not allowed to participate in any monetary transactions (in optimistic version: besides buying basic food).
2063: Your MetaFeed has not been accessed for 7 days in a row. Due to the inactivity, your MetaReality Bank account has been suspended. This is to protect all parties from potential unauthorized intrusion. You have 7 days grace period to contact our MetaAI Agent to reinstate the account by passing the EZ-Reverse-Turing-Test (v0.513) to prove you are a fully biological human. After the grace period, we will donate the assets held in your MetaReality Bank account to the NeoSingularity project for the benefit of greater humanity. In case you require financial assistance, you can always sign up to sell your brain compute for Meta Coins at the rate of 35MC/hour.
There are various groups that post popular stuff from one social media site to another, so this could be seen as a sort of piracy* I guess.
You can’t “pirate” Social Media’s original intended functionality, social interactions, because the content isn’t really the point. The connections are.
*I mean, if we have to misuse the term, which is actually about threatening to kill/killing people and robbing their boats, to mean unauthorized copying
Naive question, but when you sign up to pay for a service you are promised various functions or improvements, one of them is no-ads experience. If company then starts showing ads, isn't that breaking at least some consumer-protection laws?
They're allowed to change the offering. They're not allowed to offer you one thing, but supply another. YouTube is currently testing their legal waters. They currently offer an "ad free" experience with the subscription of Premium. Despite this, they still serve:
* In-feed ads. These include ads for content prominence (preferential placement for creators), articles with link-out, ads for Google products and services like purchasing movies and shows in their store, and ads for Google product features.
* Modal ads in videos which they facilitate. That is, pop-up ads in content.
* Ads for merchandise under the content.
* Ads for paid subscription to channels.
* In-content ads in the form of creator sponsorships. These are becoming egregious.
The official app is absolute GARBAGE now. I can't even turn off shorts anymore. I'm on the verge of cancelling Premium. Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock.
> Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock.
this is weird. are we sure this is a thing in the EU? because the idea of having some sort of regulation forcing a private company to have their product offered by some other party raises so many issues. it's not like youtube is some sort of public good, it's a product offered by a private company.
who pays for the bandwidth, engineers, data centers? will the 3rd party pay for these things? if youtube is forced to break it's own TOS, and this leads to users moving away from YouTube but still somehow taking advantage of YouTube's offerings, why even provide the service at all, what exactly would be the point as the product would be loss making? and will capping access be back in the cards (we can't offer any more of these videos because it will cause losses)? and what about tracking viewers, how can we track these viewers when they're coming in from some 3rd party?
YouTube is a monopoly and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription. They don't get to hide behind "it's not a public good, it's a private company". Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.
> and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription
i pay for youtube premium. never seen an ad.
> Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.
i fear you are thinking about a different product. youtube is not a monopoly and it's not preventing fair competition as TikTok is even bigger.
everywhere it's the same. the problem is that it makes no sense for a state entity to force a company offer their product via a 3rd party without taking into consideration the myriad of questions that arise.
In general if Google is already paying for the engineers, etc to support their US offerings, then the EU can regulate their way into “paying” for the additional cost of supporting their users. Should be pretty cheap, no R&D costs.
If they go too far and Google leaves the EU market, I suspect nobody will be all that sad, goodbye giant competition, a boon for the local service providers.
I think what you are misunderstanding is: countries will sometimes be protectionist toward their own companies, but they don’t actually care if foreign companies have a viable business model, especially for non-critical things like YouTube. Asking the EU to care whether or not YouTube has a viable business model is not really reasonable.
I imagine it depends on what's in the terms and conditions. I expect companies structure these to provide considerable flexibility.
Plus, I'd guess it also depends on how you define what constitutes an "advertisement". For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? What if it is related to another show you watched? What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? To the company, and per their T&C, these may not be "ads".
> For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature. They're clearly pushing it regardless of my preferences.
> What if it is related to another show you watched?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because they are most likely pushing the cheapest crap they can that keeps me watching.
> What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because I can't tell if they're just trying to be helpful or steer me toward something with higher margins for their benefit.
I don't think any consumer-protection laws require a company to continue offering a service forever. They could surely stop the ad-free service and start a new service with ads.
But perhaps there are laws requiring companies to get explicit consent and not simply consider it a change in the existing service nor automatically sign people up for the service with the new terms (ads)?
I think there should be. I'm not a fan of companies changing their terms at will without clear notification. Clear meaning a plain English description of what's changed, not just "We've changed our ToS, read this long legal document again."
Just one of the many reasons why I won’t let my kid use YouTube Kids and instead manually look up everything I’m ok with him watching on the main “Enhanced” site and watch it with him, then download the stuff he likes for use with VLC.
Yeah, this is one of the problems with for-profit.
Even if the company could make the bottom line with only a subscription fee. Someone is willing to pay a lot for visibility, and they pay more the less other ads there is. So the paper/service/blog accepts one well paying ad. And nobody minds because it was just one ad.
But look at that money, let's do another ad, just once. But this isn't the first and only so they pay a little less. So maybe we could put in two ads, I mean they are relevant and nobody cares.
And suddenly ads are a commodity but you already have a ad-selling department and people willing to pay a little...
I mean I don't think ads are exclusively bad, but it's just the nature of the system that they will get worse until they are bad.
I treasure my attention and so I've spent some time to opt out of ads. 5 years ago I couldn't tell what DNS was, now I've got an OPNsense router at home running ZenArmor/Unbound and I can can link to it from my phone over wireguard.
Using ublock I've made a point to prune the pages I visit, so classes like "header" "breadcrumbs" "recommended" "sponsor" &c. are hidden. I self-host my media collection so I avoid spotify et al.
It all leads to a deeply pleasant digital life for me and my family; I saw fewer ads/distractions in 2023 than any year before. I know most people won't go through all the steps I did, but I'm surprised there isn't a pricey service rich folks can buy to get this sort of experience out of the box.
My children are fascinated with the ads they occasionally see at their friends' homes. Due to their self-hosted media collection and prolific ad-blocking tech at home, they are rarely influenced by manipulative advertisers or inappropriate content suggestions. I consider it my duty as a good parent to keep up the fight.
Kudos to you all; this is what I’m hoping to hold the line on with my kid. We rarely watched TV or really any sort of video entertainment before he came along, so we didn’t have to change our consumption habits.
It’ll be interesting to see how my kid reacts to the always-on TVs at my relatives over Christmas…
So far, he only gets to watch stuff I’ve downloaded or specifically looked up (no recommendations has really quieted things down) on an old laptop. He’s learned how to skip to the next video in VLC, but as I have it set to display a text list of titles, still has to ask me to put on a specific one. That’s fine; it keeps my temptation to park him in front of the screen and do something else in check.
Ironically for being the only American kid at his Kindergarten (German preschool), he has no idea who the American cartoon characters on his classmates’ backpacks and jackets are.
Forgot to mention, I've got an invidious instance set up too. I also make much use of yt-dlp. Also miniflux for rss, a remarkable tablet w/ rmfakecloud for my ebooks, and prob some more stuff.
On the YT side it feels good paying a few bucks a month for each channel i like and getting to skip the ads. I hope that picks up. I don't like paying for YT premium because then my identity is tied to my watch history.
There is a small cottage industry of privacy focused products that do some section of the heavy lifting (adguard comes to mind, and there is a paid DNS service that essentially does what pihole does with easier configuration as well) but no "one stop shop" as of yet, and I think in part its because
- the market isn't conditioned to want these services
- awareness of their benefits aren't obvious
- Its still within the realm of the technically literate to understand its purpose
Particularly that last point. I've tried setting up blocking for my friends / relatives, just a simple uBO setup in the browser - their main concern is what happens when it breaks the page or doesn't work. I've explained to them how they can disable it for that page or report a filter list issue, but they just don't seem to "get it" and usually end up uninstalling the blocker. I think to get mainstream a service would have to provide technical support on the grandma-can-barely-click-the-mouse level.
I do think though that people can understand the benefits of adblocking. For example the digital video recorders that cut ads out of broadcasts, that was/is a successful product. And my friends complain about the ads - it is just that the blockers are not at a level where they can use them.
Ad-blocking/privacy as a service has a problem in that it's only a matter of time before your data (DNS queries for example) will be logged and sold to advertisers. Enshittification is inevitable, the cloud can't be trusted, and neither can the state, so the people who want privacy focused products will naturally want to self-host instead of creating an account that can track them before handing over all their data to one or more third parties with nothing but a non-binding privacy policy promise by some for profit company not to look at or sell any of it.
If it's a DNS based privacy service (such as the mentioned "DNS service that essentially does what pihole does with easier configuration") they'll need to see your DNS traffic to know when to block the traffic.
If you use services like Google or Cloudflare to provide DNS over HTTPS they've got access to your traffic and you're vulnerable to being tracked by them anyway.
I need to get back on this. I ran PiHole for years which worked really well. Something broke with my network which messed up IP provisioning and the PiHole got permanently disabled.
Is there a particular guide you followed or did you put this strategy together over time?
Check out NextDNS. It's easier than hosting your own DNS filter. It's got plenty of knobs and switches plus lots of blocklists to choose from. (The Hagezi lists are particularly good.) Also, if you run it on your devices (in addition to your router), it filters on any network you happen to join.
I put things together over time. I also started w/ PiHole before moving to OPNSense (on a box i got from protectli)
If you're looking to get into it I'd recommend that path. OPNSense works pretty nice out of the box, the documentation is great and there's a million switches for you to experiment with. There's even a tool to link your configuration to a git repo so that if anything ever breaks you can always go back.
There’s this local newspaper. While I’m on a logged in account (EDIT: paid) the ads seem to take up at least 25% screen real estate at all times. The best ones are the ones that graciously show up while scrolling, dynamically—it’s like wathing TV (again)! My favorite place though is the gym. Which costs a lot when you just go there to use frickin’ weights and cardio equipment. LCD screens with ads running (for local businesses—how nice and cozy) so that your peripheral vision gets distracted by irrelevant stimuli (for some reason I automatically have to look when it seems like something is “happening” all of a sudden, an urge I have to repress).
I wonder if this ad/paid dichotomy is some tech startup fairy tale. Like, [we burnt capital on building an effective monopoly]^W [gave away our product for free] but now the [entitled lusers]^W [users]^W don’t want to pay 10$ a month in order to be on a social network that mostly only their one-generation-or-older relatives are daily active on.
> your peripheral vision gets distracted by irrelevant stimuli (for some reason I automatically have to look when it seems like something is “happening” all of a sudden, an urge I have to repress)
If you figure out how to do this, please let everyone know. I don't think it's possible. I think humans have it baked in to them to pay attention to, for lack of a better word, information.
I used to have a long commute driving along a highway with trees and mountains along the side and, some mornings, the sky would light up from the brilliance of sunrise. Billboards tracked the highway for kilometres. Billboards were always in view and somehow they were louder than everything else. Like, if you looked at an entire landscape and the billboard, with its clickbaity text, was an absolutely small area of your vision -- it would disproportionately occupy your attention and space in your mind. Just like how you can hear your heartbeat when it's very quiet. It's not gone when you can't hear it -- the quiet things are still there and unchanged but you can't experience them when something else is being loud. In the very same way you can no longer travel down that road and experience the joy of not being sold anything,
I observe this in myself. It's virtually impossible for me to be in a restaurant/bar that has a TV up on the wall, and really be present with my friends/family. I catch myself being drawn into TV content that I'm entirely uninterested in, drifting off, and I hate it.
Yeah your brain might be tuned in to that artifact that is projecting input which is unlike the expected environment and which is constantly changing. Oh news-cut to an explosion. Ugh.
> If you figure out how to do this, please let everyone know. I don't think it's possible. I think humans have it baked in to them to pay attention to, for lack of a better word, information.
I agree, but more than that; if we would find a way to avoid paying attention, a more pervasive way of pushing the adds would be invented.
I'd even argue that internet, while it was seen as a counter-balance to the ad infected tv and radio space, has become WORST than watching a TV.
If I want to show something on YT to my friend, and I don't know exactly which video is correct, well lots of luck to me to find it in first few tries, as EACH video I click on will first show me a two unskippable ads, no matter how short the video is
While the internet may have gotten worse then TV with ads, the internet being on-demand and interactive, and being mostly on computers instead of appliances, means you can skip/bypass 99% of the ads by using adblockers.
I refuse to use the modern web without adblockers, and have a very friendly media usage experience without ads. Every time I listen to radio in the car, or see TV at frieds or parents I'm amazed by the volume of advertisements being hurled at the consumer. In my own environment I never get to see all this crapware.
I'm in the same boat, but even worse than radio and TV is using a non-adblocked browser. I'd rather not use the internet than like that. I don't know how others do it.
Yea, I adblock the living hell out of my internet, so I am jaded, but I was at an older persons house with regular broadcast TV on and it was so much worse then I remember TV being when I was young.
The amount of actual show time seems to have dropped even further. The TV ads seem to be all gambling and drugs. It was pretty terrible.
Something went wonky with ads in general and it may just be a coincidence that the internet happened at an overlapping time. I fondly remember memorable, interesting and funny ads. It's like shittification happened on the quality of ads, maybe they got lazy because they could just target a specific demographic, maybe it's all the incompetent and lazy gen-whatevers joining the workplace, or maybe we're all collectively not accepting of ads anymore because of their quantity and pervasiveness.
Maybe it's because the technology has progressed to the point where any idiot can make an ad, so now ads are made by idiots. It's not the first industry to be so affected.
Exactly right. Good luck using a for-reference video where you have to seek around a lot to exactly the parts you need. Have fun watching the same two unskippable ads every time.
Meanwhile (on TV) my parents just record the shows they want and wind through the ad breaks that come up on a set schedule.
One day we’re gonna have sandboxes that run through web assembly ad infested garbage dumps and then recreate it for you with ai directed obfuscated versions
With a little creativity it can work well. The essentials include an olympic bar and weights, barbells, squat rack, and bench. The upfront cost isn't too bad (maybe a few years worth of gym membership). The space requirements can be prohibitive. Setup can also be annoying with limited space because it can mean dragging all the equipment to another location to use, then back again to pack it up.
True. I purchased my weights before covid and was very happy the moment the lockdowns started here. Ultimately, I started my home gym because this way I have no excuses to not train. It's next to my computer and everytime I feel the urge to train I can do that immediately (not on a training scheme right now). Put on some nice music (without ads) and defy gravity, usually without changing to gym clothing (yes, they go in the laundry afterwards).
Depending on what you pay for a gym membership of course, I think I started saving money after 1,5 to 2 years (cheap gym membership compared to relatively cheap equipment at home).
On a 1-10 scale of "difficulty to workout", I'm an 8 or 9. Most of my problems are psychological, motivational, ADHD/executive function related. Buying home gym equipment would do absolutely nothing for me because I would just stare at it and procrastinate.
I just started doing personal training, which is terribly expensive but it's one of the only things that motivates me to go. The other thing that helps is being around other people who are exercising, and in a brightly-lit space.
Finally, I wanted to share that doing personal training, we spend 70% of the time doing calisthenic-type exercises that require basically no equipment at all. So if someone has the motivation, do your squats, stair-steps, stretches, running, and maybe all you need to buy is a set or 2 of free weights (by "set" I mean literally two weights of specific values, not a set of all possible weights). Other cheap and small accessories are rubber bands that go around your legs, a mat so you can crawl on the floor and not get dirty, plastic frisbee-like plates so you can do leg stretches on the carpet. I know this is all "no shit" type information for people who work out a lot, I just want to share that for someone who wants to exercise for cheap, you do NOT need a towering multi-gym set to get started. There's TONS of exercises you can do right now if you just have the motivation.
Thanks for the reply. To each their own indeed. I had to learn to like it, and that meant I had to hold back and space out the input energy over multiple days. I used to go all-in once in a while, hurt my body and than not do it for a long time. The first year of taking weight training more seriously was really nothing more than using the same light weight, doing exactly one set for one exercise each day and just getting my body used to it.
A gym membership is a complete road block for me. I get distracted by women and that kind of thing. And I don't want to wait for available equipment. Besides I want to make the noises without people looking at me, or me thinking people look at me.
I prefer public gyms by far but you can build a very capable home gym that fits under half a bed. Forget squats, deadlifts and bench presses and bring in unilateral variations at higher rep counts and you won't need much more than a handle and a pair of 45's for years.
I just measured the footprint of my home gym (only weights, a small bench and a pullup rack) and it's like 2 (two!) square meters. Take another 2 square meters for exercising and lifting, and I'm good to go.
Caveat, I parked my bench inside my pullup rack (don't have to move it before training though).
>so that your peripheral vision gets distracted by irrelevant stimuli
As this becomes increasingly more common place, I'm left wondering if there is a risk of a reduced quality of life for those with neurological issues (ADHD for example), in the worst case their exclusion from society.
(author here) I’m sorry but this looks like fake news. :/ I visited the webpage again (it’s not every day) and there were barely any ads this time. Did I misremember?
I usually notice when I log in since I can barely click on any stories without getting told that it’s for subscribers only.
But is this not a fundamental problem if you expect everything to be available for free? For journalism, this has become an existential threat as web-users generate nowhere near as much revenue than selling printed paper.
Not only that, but back in those days, the ads probably generated the lion's share of their revenues, along with the "classified ads" section (which is also ads, just not so commercial). That $0.10 you paid for the paper only really covered the cost of printing and distribution, if that.
Unlike today, though, the ads in newspapers weren't annoying: they were just print, and didn't pop up dynamically in front of the article you were reading, and no one tried to shame you for not looking at them, unlike today's HN users.
Nor did they monitor what you looked at on the page, track how you "interacted" with them, and sell all that data about you to anyone who would give them a couple of bucks.
> That $0.10 you paid for the paper only really covered the cost of printing and distribution, if that.
AFAIK for most newspapers and magazines, the cost on the label was mostly there so that readers would feel like the publication was serious - differentiating them from the free papers which were clearly spam and / or propaganda
Yet, despite the newspaper being fully supported by plain, simple, black-and-white print ads (and maybe some color inserts later which were easily discarded), they managed to pay for serious journalists, and they didn't whine about how they need to track you and spy on you and force you to look at obnoxious pop-up ads to make enough money to survive.
As a side note, I figure I wouldn't mind web ads if they were non-animated black and white. Some super forward thinking ad agency should do this and set a trend!! ;)
Hard to say, nobody has managed to replicate the old IRL newspaper business model. You used to be able to get a subscription, or just buy a single paper from a store or a box. The latter is much more convenient, but the former was the only one implemented for the web.
For example, I don’t care to have a subscription to the economist, so I didn’t read this article. If I could pay like $1 for it, I probably would. But it would require a new service, I’m not going to make an account to pay $1, a good number of newspapers would have to work out a shared system before this sort of thing would be interesting.
Unfortunately the ad-net has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for this kind of business model.
Apple’s podcast client has some ability to subscribe to the premium version of some podcasts. So they seem to have something vaguely like this. It still appears to be a monthly/yearly subscription thing though.
I decided to poke around the news app based on your comment, but I only see monthly subscriptions, sadly.
I get that newspapers want the reliable recurring subscription instead, but it just seems to weird to me that they were willing to concede to users and sell a single issue when the papers were, well, paper, but not digital. I mean it should be easier with digital, they don’t have to even make any projections about how many to print!
I mean yeah you can't pick articles ala cart from Apple News, but you can pay for one subscription to get access to a bunch of different news sources, and it presumably distributes your subscription fee (minus Apple's cut) to news sources depending on what and how many articles you actually read. Which is sort of like what you were talking about?
Oh, I didn’t realize that it was offering a single “Apple News+” subscription, I thought it was like the premium offered in Apple Podcasts.
That’s a little more interesting.
IMO an architecture that was a little more distributed and ala cart, as you say, would be nice. But it is definitely neat that at least somebody is taking a swing at this kind of solution.
What they need is to combine and meter. I.e. one $x0/mo subscription gets you access to a network of X newspapers, all with one log-in, no ads, and maybe coupons or some other perk. Then it gives you say 30 articles a month, and pays the publisher based on what you read. You're never going to get rid of freeloaders, so maybe have free-tier AI-generated articles and put thoughtful, detailed investigative reporting behind the paywall. Or (for the case of a local paper) have the free-tier not include photos, or grayscale photos, etc. Just tease them to pay for the real version.
Another way to monetize is to make it interactive and bring back comments. Allow a well-regulated peanut gallery for each article, but have it actively moderated, require people to use their real names, and set a high bar for what comments are even allowed. Have journalists actively engage with them. A comment will only be published if it adds value. Then encourage people to have spirited discussion about each article. And guess what, actively commenting will cost you admission.
I think a system of N articles per month invites these low-effort AI articles that you mention, and adds a huge inter-company political problem of policing what exactly a low effort article is. The incentive is to be the company that is engaging with the system, but putting in the least effort per article, while still passing the “worth money” bar.
On top of financial motivations, newspapers often have different political alignments for example, I suspect some of them basically hate each other; a system where they get along and engage in good faith is too much.
I’d rather see an account where you dump money in, the site can say “buy this article for $x”, and it asks your account for that money. It doesn’t even really need to be a centralized site, it could be an API that multiple services can implement, or whatever.
This is nothing new but the article hits hard. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is after my attention but a good chunk of the economy seems to depend on it. There has to be a better future than this?
The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody is on my bike ride grabbing my attention, and at least for now, my DAW is safe
Eventually those places will be premium real estate for ads. Some one will find a way to bring ads to our kitchen or to mount fiji. Maybe they will fly planes overhead, or do crop circles, put put them in hiking trails.
I once was at Miami Beach and there was a boat mounted with giant-ass LED screens riding by. Where I live, there's new electric "bikes" with large boxes mounted to them and 3 sides of the box display ads. People get paid to just ride this through everyone's field of view, or park it for a while at conspicous locations. I feel impotent rage at this increasing terrorization of the populace.
The Ted Kaczynski approach works until you want to engage with the world outside your kitchen and you step outside and realize that the dynamic (personalized?) billboards are now across from your apartment complex. And the local park.
Yeah I get what you mean. I’m not like, a luddite, or anything, I just don’t agree with the authors notion that advertising is particularly all-encompassing, especially when you’re not actively using a computer.
The challenge highlighted in the article is that adds are increasing in areas that are harder to avoid such as billboards, hotel rooms, airline seats, ride-hailing apps.
Billboards? Is that a new thing? Airline seats? First-time ryanair flyer? If you're determined to never see an ad in your entire life, that was never possible, but if you just want to spend a lot of time without seeing ads this is just as easy as ever.
"without seeing ads this is just as easy as ever."
No. It. Is. Not.
The problem is you've internally moved the goalposts on what you consider an ad, from what would have more historically been considered an ad.
Those clothes with a big nike swoosh on them, those are ads. Individuals wear ads around everywhere. Objects are covered in their own advertising. If you have any electronics on you, god only knows what metrics they are collecting. Hell, these days if you're with anyone else that has electronics there is a non-zero chance those devices are spying on and tracking you.
This is true, but I have to buy in to open myself up to it. Until they start giving away whatever VR headset it is, and until hell freezes over and I actually put it on, I’m safe. But the thought of it does make me sick/sad.
I mostly ride on back roads and side-streets, my city banned billboards and is very small and close enough to the woods to not feel like one. But I get what you mean.
This makes sense. City I am coming from haven't done this and the billboard/advertising agency is very close with the city mayor, meaning, all the (main) streets are littered with advertising. Everytime I come home for holidays (from a large EU city, mind you), I am overblown by just how many billboards are around. Crazy.
The ad-free internet has already been here for a long time if you are willing to spend 10 minutes install ublock origin. Paying is actually worse on all aspects, even if you ignore the cost, because it shows the fact that you have some amount of disposable income and are willing to pay for things, which greatly increases the value of advertising to you specifically.
While I use ublock and ad blocking DNS, this particular ad-free Internet isn’t sustainable.
For better or worse, the business model behind many of these sites rely on the ad revenue to continue existing, and ad blocking only works as long as most people still aren’t doing it.
Don't worry about sustainability. There was life before YouTube and Facebook and there will be life after. I am not sacrificing my mental well-being for a false economy. If the internet rots out its own Ponzi Scheme, we will build something else
> The ad-free internet has already been here for a long time
> Don't worry about sustainability. There was life before YouTube and Facebook and there will be life after
Which is it? The point is that this version of the ad-free doesn’t actually exist in the long run. In a discussion about a move away from the “false economy” you highlight via paid subscriptions (presumably not a false economy), it seems odd to say that this already exists while also admitting that it doesn’t/can’t.
Internet existed before it was commercialized up the wazoo. The way I see it, if all the so-called platforms (Google, Facebook, etc) went bankrupt tomorrow, the internet as a whole would be better, not worse.
If you don't tolerate ads, you could just... not visit the site? Close the tab?
I don't like paying for things, but I've never been in a transaction where I could say "you know what, I don't like the price of this, I'll just take it and give you no money. Deal?"
It's not a very good analogy. In your hypothetical, at that point, the other party would obviously say no deal and not provide you with what you want. The browser ad equivalent would be not serving up their content to you.
I am entitled to decide what runs on my computer and how. They only option another party has is whether or not they will provide service to me.
Most other things are fully a "take it or leave" it deal - pay or you can't get access. If I take food from the grocery store without paying then they will call the police.
Most ad supported websites aren't like that. They let anybody access the content and only then try to insert ads. That's like trying to close the barn door after the horse has left, and it's a fundamental property of the medium of web publishing.
You can do things to push back against it - put the site behind a username/password and block users who aren't looking at the ads - but this prevents people from discovering the site in the first place.
This is ultimately a mismatch between the desires of the business and the medium they have decided to use, and it's on _them_ to figure that out, not end users.
I don't believe that. An image or music in the computer medium is just bits. It's still a copyright infringement to copy it and publish it without license. Text is just bits. So what is the point of GPL? The goods in a shop are just atoms. There's no law of physics that stops be from just taking all the stuff I want.
Just because the medium allows you to do something that doesn't mean it's right to do it. Anyway what do you propose? That every website with ads stops using the web, creates their own non-standards-compliant browser with their own transfer protocol, and tells users to just use that? You can still reverse-engineer and crack it, because everything in a computer is just bits. They've done something similar with smartphone apps and everyone hates that.
Then what instead? If you decided you can just do whatever you want because of the medium, the business will seek methods beyond the medium to get what they want. You'll have to pay for subscription to access any and all content. And guess what, users hate that too! And that still won't stop users from just abusing archive.org and other proxies to copy paste entire paywalled articles to post it on the internet. Blatant copyright infringement. Thinking they're right because it's still just bits in the end.
Honestly the more I think about it the more it feels like users just think they're entitled to free content and it's impossible to satisfy them with anything else.
This whole thing feels like a "right to repair" situation to me. When I pull up a website, it's like it lands in my yard. If it's so jam-packed with ads that I can't find what I need, it's like it's broken. So, I tweak it a bit to make it readable again – kind of like fixing it up so I can actually use it. Just trying to make the web work for me, you know?
I'm actually OK with "product placement" ads as long as they don't interrupt the content. It IS annoying when a YouTube creator interrupts the content to say "And now an ad for a VPN which has NOTHING to do with what you are watching or care about..." but I've seen some YouTube creators actually integrate the product being sponsored into their content in a way that makes sense and serves both purposes.
For example, I was watching a "maker" video where they 3d printed some models for the project that were provided by their sponsor for use in the project they were showing you how to make. That type of "advertising" I can support. It doesn't detract from the content or distract, the product is relevant to what you are watching and, as you said, it doesn't track you other than tracking aggregate viewing numbers and how many people skip that section of the video.
Classic examples would be things like Apple paying to have their laptops or computers used as the props in movies. Or a car manufacturer having their vehicles shown. As long as it doesn't take you out of the content and make you feel like you've been interrupted to be advertised to then that's the one and only form of advertising I don't hate.
I guess there's also "opt in" stuff, like the user taking deliberate action to subscribe to a product magazine or newsletter is fine too... emphasis on "opt in" and "deliberate action", however. Nothing gets me to avoid doing business with a company faster than if their "Sign up to your newsletter" checkbox is default checked or, worse, there is no check box and you've been auto signed up and need to unsubscribe. Thanks for punishing me by doing business with you, assholes.
>Classic examples would be things like Apple paying to have their laptops or computers used as the props in movies. Or a car manufacturer having their vehicles shown.
Ah, this takes me back! I remember the days before Facebook, YouTube, and heck, even before Google was a thing. Anyone else remember using Altavista? Those were simpler times online. When you opened a webpage, it was all about the content – dense, to the point, and no beating around the bush. It was high-quality stuff and, best of all, ad-free.
I really miss those days. There was something special about the internet back then. It felt more like exploring a vast library full of hidden gems rather than being in a mall bombarded with ads and clickbait. Dreaming of a return to that kind of internet feels like wishing for a time machine, but hey, a person can hope, right?
They do require a certain degree of technical understanding, but the extension system on most browsers is fairly mainstream so I don't think it's for this reason alone.
Can it be as simple as the idea that almost all of media is universally disincentivized from talking about them? Of course there is a lot of content on ad-blockers out there, but the pressure may still be high enough to suppress cut-through to the mainstream. If that's the case it would be a nice example as to the extent of media influence more broadly.
This article is a case in point, where you would have thought that ad-blockers may have been relevant. And as a side point, perhaps also a good example of where you don't even have to be rich if you are knowledgable. Technical literacy is in itself a kind of digital affluence.
Modern internet is not in business of producing content and using ads as means of paying for said content production and delivery. Modern internet is in business of selling ads and is using content producers as means of keeping users in front of screens while ads are being shoved into their faces.
So, yeah, internet would be different, but to me it isn't obvious how it would be any worse or less in value.
I think the internet would be worse. No matter how you put it, the ads are funding content. If ads weren't viable, we wouldn't have a different kind of content. We'd simply have less content.
If there's a content business that can exist in this ad-free internet, it would already exist in the current ad-ful internet.
I don't know what kind of internet anti-ads people envision, but I'm afraid the whole thing is very damn fragile and rocking the boat will more likely break it irreparably than make it better.
The article is effectively an ad[1] for the tech startup scheme:
1. “Give away” access to build a network effect
2. Get a network
3. Act with righteous indignation when some killjoy like the EU comes and says that you cannot just harvest whatever user data you want at will and users don’t opt to pay the proposed ransom money
[1] Presenting their worldview as just a given, something obvious.
Although "cookie", more like terror, banners show the immense list of advertisers if you have a slight misconfiguration in your content blockers. And newspapers won't even load more than a paragraph without an explicit consent cookie, unless you pay for every site, usually monthly. But at least in germany, not automatically recurring: they don't actually want to sell subscriptions.
If you’re on any social media, then you see ads. If you use any search engine, then you see ads. There are ads even on Wikipedia. You can see them even if you use all of the adblockers.
That's funny, because I'm a PAID subscriber to The Economist, and on opening the page, there is a big ad banner on the top and other on the right, filling more than half the space. (I don't bother using adblockers,though). Newspapers have always shown ads even for paying consumers. As the very article ends with: "Users who pay to block ads in some areas are still likely to find them popping up in new ones."
As a non paying ublock origin user, I don't see any ads. The ad-free internet has already been here for a long time if you are willing to spend 10 minutes install ublock origin. Paying is actually worse, because it shows the fact that you have some amount of disposable income and are willing to pay for things, which greatly increases the value of advertising to you specifically.
I have never really used an ad blocker for any kind of time. I've tried on multiple occasions but then just range uninstall it whenever some random site breaks because of it and I don't realise it's because of it. Last time it was some online shop...
Regardless of the morality / philosophical questions, the modern web feels to janky and unstable for me to trust the house of cards staying standing if you throw some Adblock in there.
(But maybe I just didn't tweak the blocker enough...)
If a site breaks from adblocking it wasn’t worth my time to begin with. If an online shopping site breaks I look at it with a heavy side eye and am thankful I didn’t provide my credit card information to such a poorly engineered and secured service.
I'm a subscriber with UBlock and I still get a "Give a gift" footer. And when they deliver the print magazine, there's ads (including on the back cover) AND a flyer "give a gift." Which is annoying because the flyer always drops out.
Subscribing merely turns the "Please subscribe yourself" ads into "Give the gift of knowledge to a friend."
For real, that comment made me sad. Whenever I see the web in someone else's computer without adblockers I wonder how they didn't get off the internet altogether.
Good luck with that. The ones that can afford an ad-free internet are the same group as the ones that can afford the product you are trying to sell. Promoted links, selection/ordering of posts and other mechanisms will be use to lead ad-free people to the ads, in ways that won't look like ads. It's like gravity, there are forces in play that will make things end in the same way.
You could argue that unless the $10/mo subscription offers a dumb chronological feed then it’s not really ad-free. On the other hand consider YouTube - you pay to remove the annoyance, not the algorithmic bias, and a lot of people are happy to do that.
There is no world in which corporations will resist the temptation to serve ads to people who have demonstrated to both invest time and money in their platform.
Don't worry, you will only get the best artisanal premium ads, you will learn to love them [1].
The 5 minute airplane ad is nightmare fuel for me. How long until they kick up the brightness to wake you up. Imagine you are stuck in the window seat, forced to watch an ad you can't turn off?
I am exaggerating obviously, but I do find it egregious that they would dare show more ads when ticket prices are already extremely high.
You joke but I’m pretty sure I experienced this recently on a flight. Being shown ads when you have the ability to opt out is one thing. Being shown ads when you’re a captive audience in an already relatively high stress environment seems outright villainous to me.
Anytime you wanted to get from A to B you would be subjected to noisy TV, and it was invariably something tedious like endless repeats of Ellen or Oprah with loads of adverts.
It was hell and I am so glad the service failed and was discontinued.
The challenge is that there won't be any transparency with this sort of thing. Prices for flights are so variable that you'll probably never know if it is cheaper due to the advertisement, or because of other variables.
My main issue with advertising driven models is that the company will respond to the needs of who pays them, advertisers, and not who actually uses the service. Want to juice profits? Just sell more advertising slots, make them more intrusive, etc. Delivering quality service to customers becomes a cost burden rather than a way to gain more customers.
Airlines have already come up with a way to make sure you understand what you're saving on. They'd sell you a ticket for some base price, and then extort you for extras upon online check-in. Seat choice, extra legroom, meals, etc.
We used to have (and still kind of have?) carrier billing for receiving assets such as ring tones but also paid web content via MMS for small money, even though the powers-that-be in the mobile space have worked hard to establish verticals and subscriptions without micro-transactions. Also "we" (as in "hackers") have now for I don't know how long seen greedy telcos as our natural enemy, embracing supposedly open TCP/IP-based protocols, and turning a blind eye towards new monopolies, even though telcos live in a highly regulated market while new monopolists do not.
The problem with ad-free content is that rich people do not just want just "no adds". They do not want to be tracked, in order not to be stalked and harrassed by companies(or individuals like gold diggers or sellers or bankers). And they are rich so companies want to track them.
This is the reason you could not trust Google or Meta with ad-free stuff. They are already private intelligence(spying) agencies that already have the spying tech. Temptation is just too high.
Just pay people that create products and services without spying on you.
I know from insiders that some sports bookies would look up your address (that you are required by law to provide to betting sites) on Google Maps to figure out if you live in a rich people's house. If so, they would immediately pass the account to their most experienced seller.
The second you've paid for an ad-free version of software, you've proven that you're in the top 0.1% of people worth showing ads to. Very few companies can resist the temptation to exploit their best users. See all streaming services as an example.
Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?
I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5).
Do companies like the Economist crunch the numbers and find that they earn by more by having paying subscribers as opposed to also selling per-article?
My friend and I thought about attempting a startup in this space but it seems so clearly useful and lucrative that there must be a good reason why e.g. Stripe doesn't already provide this service.
Then, separately in 2012 they tried to launch "Google Wallet for content", offering publishers a way to sell individual articles for less than a dollar: https://9to5google.com/guides/peachpit/
I don't think either service ever took off. Probably people were just too cheap :(
I suspect that when presented with the actual "cost" of reading an article up front, most people realize that they just don't actually care that much about reading it. When the cost is indirect (via ads) and deferred (in terms of the effects on the entire system, leading to what we have today), it's a lot easier to ignore.
I am not the mainstream user, but a solution like that would have to come from someone other that Google, because it is 100% safe to assume, that Google would be mining my choices of what I want to read or would try to profile me or would put mandatory recaptcha on the pages or similar.
Credit card networks impose relatively high minimums - so transactions under ~$4 USD don't make it worthwhile. PayPal has their own microtransactions scheme (which is difficult to get approved for), I assume PayPal has enough clout to pull it off.
The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who've been burned by "use it or lose it" policies - and the difficulty of getting money back out again.
The Lightning network for Bitcoin was meant to solve the microtransactions problem for Bitcoin, but it isn't the early 2010s anymore when we (on-the-whole) were largely still Bitcoin optimists: Bitcoin as a "brand" for normal consumers is dead at this point.
One would hope that that because the major credit-card networks' processing systems are mature (as in, COBOL-mature) the fixed/marginal costs of processing transactions would only go down over time - so with inflation then we should see microtransactions become an affordable option, but that hasn't happened - I'd like to see some kind of pro-consumer regulatory investigation into Visa and Mastercard's businesses, but I doubt that's a high priority for anyone right now.
Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication.
Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it’s all an “abstraction” over some really ugly systems.
I suspect that’s why there’s no institutional movement to build something better. It requires a ton of hard-coded systems to change, in lockstep…just so banks can charge you less? It would be like trying to change the entire US electric grid from 110V to 220V to reduce the cost of transmission.
FedNow was SUPPOSED to be the answer, but I haven’t heard a word about it since it was supposedly launched over the summer. Rumor is that no bank wants to touch the system even though it’s better…
Edit: After learning that FedNow IS getting taken up slowly, I guess the analogy is more like: FedNow is like a huge 220V line running through the center of the country, and all the banks/power stations have to run a line to it now. And maintain the existing lines at the same time.
For the pedants: Yes, overhead lines don’t run at either 110V or 220V, but I felt that made more sense than talking about changing from 60Hz to 50Hz
I've been trying to find a bank that does consumer-level FedNow outbound transfers. So far, no joy. Many banks have receive-only FedNow - they can receive money, but not send it. The US Treasury's Fiscal Service, the part of the government that sends payments, is going to be using FedNow. So banks want to be connected enough to receive money faster.
There are some online services for companies that make lots of outbound payments. JP Morgan Chase and BNY Mellon offer that. But outbound FedNow at the consumer level, not yet.
Part of the problem is addressing. The clever thing about PayPal is that your email address is your inbound payments address. The banking industry hasn't figured out the consumer-facing side of this yet. FedNow at the Fed level is about the same as ACH at the Fed level - just faster. You need receiving bank account info. There's a "request for payment" mechanism (i.e. a bill), but how does that reach consumers?
Singapore handles this well through their PayNow system, addressing can be handled by phone number, QR code, or entity ID. Obviously they didn’t have the same level of technical debt as the US did, but it’s possible to do this in a consumer friendly way.
FedNow is helping a lot, but adoption takes time. The middlemen's APIs have to adopt it, test it, then the tools that use the APIs have to do their own round of that, then the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to design, develop and deploy the new features, then the users of the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to adopt those new features, and then you have adoption.
> That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication.
I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it. Give the victims time to notice and the institutions the ability to reverse transactions without loss
> I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it.
The banks must have had a good PR campaign going because I was under this impression for a long time too. Something didn’t click when I learned that mistyping a single digit in an ACH transfer means your money is gone forever…
You shouldn't make up completely wrong claims to use as an analogy. The US grid doesn't run at either 110V or 220V, it's much higher. The 50/60Hz thing doesn't make any sense as an analogy either, because there's no significant advantage to either, it's just arbitrary.
You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy, or edit it to eliminate the analogy that makes no sense whatsoever and makes me completely ignore whatever point you were trying to make. Maybe it's OK for some non-technical audience where they have no idea how electricity works, but this is supposed to be a technical crowd, isn't it? Or is it? Sometimes I wonder.
> You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy
I think you're being unreasonable. False/untrue analogies still work as a rhetorical device and we can appreciate the point being made.
Pedantry has its place (peer-review of scientific papers, for example), HN comments is not one of them. This is how a community develops a reputation for being hostile.
(Now I'm going to feel horrible about myself for even letting myself be tempted to respond to a comment like this in the first place)
Damn sorry I offended you with my stupidity. Like many people, I have a limit to the things I know. Any ideas on what might have been a decent way to phrase that analogy?
Your comment was fine. It added to the discussion, and even if the analogy wasn’t accurate, it made your point effectively to a lay audience. So I think that is a net positive. Ironically, the reply to your comment by the poster you are replying to added nothing and actually detracted from the discussion.
This doesn't seem that hard to get around, with a bunch of $0.99 games and in-app purchases on mobile stores. iTunes did it too with songs, before Spotify took over. Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month. If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.
The App Stores work-around that by invoicing customers once-per-month for all the accrued IAP microtransactions the user makes.
> Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month
That only works if there's enough independent publishers who agree to band-together and commit to using a single payment processor. I doubt this will happen.
> If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.
It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.
I suspect it isn't just a technical/billing issue, but a lack of willingness to pay the desired prices...
> It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.
That would require users to install an app in order to take advantage of IAP (which then means losing 30% of the revenue to Apple or Google). People aren't going to install an app just to view (and pay for) articles on whatever blog-host the writer is using.
It is the fate of any (and every) "Viewer app" to turn into a web-browser, and a sub-par one at that.
I don't want this - it creates very bad incentives around even more engagement bait crap except now I'm directly funding stuff that pulls my attention before I can even tell if it's garbage.
I prefer the substack or direct subscription model, there are risks there with audience capture leading to sometimes obscene results but it generally gives me more power to fund better quality stuff and removes the bad attention incentives of ads. If you find people that curate a diverse ideological audience that wants to give them a lot of intellectual freedom (or a specific niche) you can avoid the downsides. The quality of this type of media is far beyond any previous types imo.
Stuff Made Here, Persuasion with Yascha Mounk, The Free Press with Bari Weiss, Ben Thompson and Stratechery, etc. there are many examples.
The problem with most legacy media is that it just isn't very good, is getting worse, and it's getting outcompeted by better options.
The main problem (and reason I cancelled) is that is doesn’t disincentivize clickbait.
If you could curate the homepage to only include feeds of publications you want to pay, then the incentive would be to create a good stream of articles.
As it is, I got sick of clickbait from a few big publications, so their fucking clickbait headlines showed up, but grayed out with a notice that I’d blocked them.
Also, the recommendation system recommends exponentially more clickbait if you click on a few clickbait articles, then it goes into a spiral of garbage.
Isn't Apple News Plus just subscription news? That's not really the same as pay-per-article, where readers (not the middleman) can choose which individual articles to pay to read -- kinda like how we have pay-to-read scientific journals, but usually at the $50/article range, not <$1.
> kinda like how we have pay-to-read scientific journals, but usually at the $50/article range, not <$1.
Most of the actual payment to read papers are from universities subscriptions funded by taxpayers money. And this particular example is why people will always be skeptical of this model.
This is a space that my company operates in and we will hopefully provide this service in the future. First, publishers want more than what consumers are willing to pay per article, the credit card companies charge too much (even with special micro pricing we've negotiated) and no one has a market big enough to reasonably get $xx per month into a wallet from a massive audience. Google had tried something similar with Google Contributor but has shut it down. There was also Scroll that recently got bought by Twitter that did a wallet-type of deal though it was more complicated than a flat rate per article.
But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content?
It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and that per-purchase would incentivize clickbait and winner-take-all (not 100% sure I agree but could argue it).
The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that subscriptions are a psychological trick where people (myself included lol) overly discount future dollars and over-estimate their ability to remember and cancel subscriptions.
> But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content
The impression I've gotten from articles about OnlyFans is that the business model consists of a mix of monthly subscriptions and pay-per-view content on top of subscriptions, neither of which are typically priced at the levels that would be described as microtransactions. Is that not the case?
I think the answer is, that in sexual matters part of our brain is hardwired to attach to individual humans.
Subscriptions create an incentive to keep consuming a particular resource, you don’t need that incentive if your audience already gets an oxytocin/dopamin kick just from seeing your face.
The other industries that got that right are far more morally questionable than pornography:
Big Pharma and computer games.
I'm not sure if publishers could get enough from Brave Payments to make it worth it. Brave also blocks ads so they aren't exactly in the publishers' good graces. Some publishers would rather block Brave than try to work out a deal to accept cryptocurrency.
I'm guessing it's mostly a psychological thing. You make the decision to purchase a subscription once (and ideally for them, forget about it soon after), but if you know you're paying $.25 per click, you'll make a decision every time - and perhaps not bother.
Pay per click is also user hostile. We’ve all accidentally clicked on the wrong thing or, especially with touchscreen devices, clicked when we didn’t mean to. I really don’t need my misclicks costing me a bunch of extra money.
Agreed -- my concern is that subscriptions are really negative in long-term expectation for the consumer, and companies are profiting off that and don't want to lose all the people who are paying $10 for only $4 monthly utility. My coworker hates the subscription era and pines for the days of buying a CD-ROM with software lol
Right. I've been a subscriber to Adobe's Creative Cloud for almost 10 years now - which means I've paid them upwards of $6,000 by now - even though I only use 3 programs (Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator) and even then I only really use base-level functionality that's been present in those titles long before they became subscription-only: if it weren't for (normal and understandable) platform-obsolescence (high-DPI support, support for new formats/codecs, etc) then I'd still be happy with a boxed edition of Creative Suite I could have bought for $1200[1] back in 2013
I haven't tried any of those suggestions, regrettably; as I've heard good things about them.
But it's not just familiarity, but also about compatibility: I need to be able to open my PSD/AI files going back decades with absolute fidelity; and I know one of the dirty secrets of other programs that claim to have "PSD compatibility" is that they just read the composite version of the image, instead of being able to import individual layers with blending/effects settings, etc.
All business inherently know that the most difficult thing is to get a customer to open their wallet. A subscription commitment is far more valuable than an impulsive/interest driven one time payment
Because all customers know that the moment you open your wallet, you're marked as a sucker and there will be no end to the appeals to repeat the mistake.
I dream of the day that I can pay 0.25 to read just one WSJ or NYT or WP article that I found interesting. I think they don't want to do this though. Not because it is not possible.. but because they prefer that I get the whole darn thing AND consume the ads (or at least that's what they tell their advertisers).
They prefer me to get that $10-30-50 monthly and not use it (as I will only be actually reading 3-4 articles per month).
I like to say that the problem with microtransactions is microfraud.
The cost of having a human investigate is substantial, and independent of how large the transaction is. There's also a substantial fraud problem in advertising, but consumers don't have to get involved with that most of the time. Until they're blocked by cloudflare occasionally deciding they're a bot.
> E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?
Because the real economic cost of an article is likely a lot higher than $0.25. The newsstand price of a magazine is always more expensive than what you can get it for in a subscriptio. Companies prefer recurring revenue over one-timers and their pricing reflects that.
Apple claims to offer tons of publications in Apple News +, but they don't tell you that a) Apple News shows ads and b) the titles they carry still block off some articles and content as premium-member only.
Anytime somebody offers a flat rate for something, you have to remember that the flat cost is simply what they offer to the customer, it's not reflective of what it costs them to supply. iTunes sold songs for $1 20 years ago, but for Apple the real game was using iTunes to get customers to stick around and make it easier to sell them their next iPod.
Agree, have been thinking about this for a while. Bitcoin on lightning could do it for really cheap if you had say a browser extension wallet or something you could do sub penny payments. https://yalls.org/ (not mine) already made a demo
You have a lot of great answers here but an additional issue is payments being an unconsolidated network with high trust requirements, which adds a lot of friction to payment in aggregate if not for everyone.
I would never bother to set up an account and then payment method to make the payment of 25c in the first place. I'd be trusting my information to a news network or some random syndication shop. Most everyone will be expecting an account set up, and then be using one of dozens of payment providers. It's just a news article, which these days are closer to blog posts.
I don't exactly want one payment network to rule them all either, so in general I think that is just a currently unsolved problem.
I just don't see it happening. I remember the days of dial up internet - when I would be paranoid every minute I spent on the internet because every second I was online was costing more and more money. The sense of freedom I felt when I got fixed cost, always on broadband, was liberating.
Nobody wants to go to a system where for every single article you click on you have to go through the process of deciding whether it is worth the money or not.
Plus, how many times have you read some article, only to realise it was clickbait that did not really give you anything of use or substance at all; how much worse would that be when publications were literally trying to get you to part with some actual cash.
I'm also not convinced the economics would work. The reason paid print magazines are stuffed full of adverts is that the cover price did not cover the cost of publishing them. Even online, proper journalism costs quite a bit of money. Writers, editors, proofreading: it all takes time that needs to be paid for. If you pay per article, do those who worked on the article only get paid if the article actually makes enough back to pay them? Do the publications aggregate all the payments and pay everyone out of aggragated sales? If an author is particularly popular, how do they negotiate a bigger fee? These things are not impossible to sort out, but the economics of publishing would require a big restructuring and all these things would need to be hashed out.
There have been various attempts to do this but no network effect has been large enough to make it work. And by network, I mainly mean you’d need a network of popular sites to get it started.
Flattr did this, I saw a few sites with it enabled around when it launched, in 2010 apparently. If i remember you could click a link on an article that had it enabled, which was recorded. Then, weekly/monthly funds were distributed from a pool you had added to the service, to get around the cost of making individual micro payments.
Apparently it's now owned by Adblock Plus and is hooked in to their compensation thing.
So besides the problems with transaction costs, there is the problem that the businesses selling these things would much, much rather have you pay a subscription than a one time cost. They would rather risk people willing to pay the one time cost not paying anything, then lose out on recurring revenue from a subscriber who might have preferred to pay a la carte instead.
This is not useful for the Economist as it currently exists. They'd have to charge a significant amount for an article so the engaging articles also cover for the 'boring' ones, and at that point you might as well get that full package. Which you can already buy at the store, or read at the library, but either way the entire edition is funded. The occasional $0.25 is nothing when they're looking for $209 per year from Americans or €300 from Europeans, the single issues are for the people who want to occasionally buy or gift it. The people only interested in single digit articles per year can already get given gift articles from people with a digital subscription.
It's usually because people tend to pay much less money then how much advertisers are willing to pay. Also, there's much less flexibility on customer price changes while advertisers are kept happy as long as they can have a good ROI.
The Economist costs $30 per month, which would be a 120 articles per month. I doubt anyone reads that much. I also doubt more people would pay the $0.25 rather then $30, due to mental transaction costs. I think to some extent this is also just a gym-style business model, where people pay for things they don't end up using that much because they want to be the kind of person that reads the Economist or goes to the gym.
Blendle in the Netherlands tried it for 5 years (2014-2019), but stopped because they couldn't make it profitable. I don't think it was the news outlets complaining, but just not enough articles sold to make the margin they needed, so internationally this still might scale (lots more work contracting publishers, of course).
Afaik Blendle is now a subscription service with a flat fee all you can read model.
One of the Blendle founders described this as cyclical in nature. People get bored with paying for a lot of content they don't need, so they switch to a pay-per-item service. Then they get bored of the nickel-and-dime experience (and perhaps pay more than they anticipated), so they get interested in an all-you-can-eat model again. He pointed at cable TV as an example, continually bundling and unbundling popular content to either persuade people to pay for a bundle or to pay for pay-per-view.
I'm waiting for a smart content provider that has a 'never pay more' model. Stream a movie for 6 bucks, but since the all-you-can-eat bundle price point is 30 bucks, once you watch 5 movies, the rest are free for the remainder of the month.
I think the Brave browser supports this. Give brave $10 then they provide small amounts of money to content providers. This allows money to pool up and avoid the astronomical transaction fees. I'm not sure how well it works in practice.
Also wish something like that existed.
I imagine friction of payments could be an issue. I would only use something like that if it was as easy as doing an Apple Pay transaction.
They probably have some success with the subscription model, because there are probably people who want to read the Economist to get a competitive edge in their business (owners, investors, etc.) They probably haven't even considered that most people who bounce off of their paywall are not just cheapskate version of these owner/investor types, but are an entirely new class of user that they could monetize if they could provide the right payment structure.
A 'path to profit' is the time tested lifeline of any enterprise. However this is never highlighted as it doesn't bode well with the general social psyche of humans.
For last 20 years, tech enabled startups, chose 'postpone profit' strategy adopting 'free to use' or 'ad supported' approach helped by raising high capital to build moats around the target market.
Now this trend can be either seen as a moment where the moat is complete and 'path to profit' is through captive customers. (Or) a decline/failure of the 'postpone profit' strategy accelerated by the current economic recession.
All social media and any other free to use switching to subscriptions is quite a probability now.
An ironic thing is that companies that choose to postpone profits will find that when the time comes to charge for profit, they will have burned all good will, and people might finally be coerced to pay, but they'll pay any other company.
It’s so stupid because there already is a playbook for being profitable and still giving your product away for free. It’s the free trial. Hey, we want to earn your trust, so here’s a free month of the service. If you like us, great! Here’s the price at the end. Otherwise no hard feelings.
Instead, the playbook now is:
WE ARE FREE. YES, FREE AS IN NOTHINGBURGER DOLLARS. WE ARE BETTER THAN FREE! WE WILL PROMISE YOU ANYTHING YOU WANT! PUT ALL YOUR INFORMATION HERE AND WE PROMISE TO MAKE YOU FAMOUS AND RICH!
lol jk gimme that data. Also you’re locked in/addicted to our platform. Give us your money.
The ads would disappear if people rejected the services and sites showing a crazy amount of ads. I haven't seen an ad for more than a decade because I curated my devices around ad blocking. I still don't understand the fight against ads. Do not use social media already and use adblockers for YouTube and Twitter. People do not know how to use the internet and still use the services which means they are okay with the ads. They are not bothered. It is not our problem to solve other's problems if these are not problems to them. Similar to cigarette smoking.
I resonate hard with this, and I'm glad it's being flagged as a trend. I didn't quite realize how soul-crushing ads were until I got rid of them. Now I'm on YouTube Premium and Twitch Turbo and look forward to getting rid of more ads.
Over the past 2 months I've switched from a YouTube Premium subscriber, to a regular logged-in YouTube user and finally to a no-account user. The increase in ads, particular transitioning to no-account; is staggering.
YouTube adverts have always been prominent and irritating but without an account they are downright aggressive. I think an 18 minute video I watched last night had a pair of adverts served every ~2 minutes.
I stopped Premium and deleted my account to disincentivise watching YouTube as it became a huge time sink and procrastination tool for me. My solution will either work because the ads make the entire experience unpleasant enough to not bother with YouTube at all, or I'll be driven back to Premium just to save some time.
Of course this is exactly the situation that YouTube wanted to engineer, and have succeeded in doing so, but it just seems such an awful way to incentivise subscriptions.
If anything, I like the fact that big media outlets are picking up on the ever increasing problem of ads on internet. Seems like YT seriously poked something big with their scheme of blocking ad-blockers, I noticed there recently, there were much more articles even on HN about this issue
I also run this, and it's pretty worth it, but 40$ discounts the time, and makes it sound like the perfect solution. While it is good, it isn't perfect.
I tried Pihole a couple of years ago, and while it did block every god forsaken ad, I had a lot of trouble with sites not working right, and the process of turning off the Pihole for that was annoying. Has anything changed since then?
IDK, I find the web interface pretty easy to use - you can whitelist stuff you need to use over and over again, and disable the whole thing if you encounter something one off with a single click.
Genuinely curious what you do when a site asks you to turn off your adblocker? PiHole doesn't have an option to whitelist an individual site like an extension does. Do you just leave the site or do you temporarily turn off PiHole?
What I do is toggle reader mode for that site if on mobile. That always bypasses it. I can also select the overlay on uBlock origin. If that doesn’t work I’ll disable JavaScript for the site since these popular need JavaScript. If all that fails I’ll simply not use the site.
Different options. Turn off pihole for that site. Or using something like archive.is or wayback machine. Sometimes just blocking the banner with ublock works too. Other times there are link previews like telegram quick view
A lot of folks just temporarily disable their pi-hole. This happens rarely depending on where you hang out on the internet, I can't remember the last time it happened to me
“Our clients understand that a two- to three-minute ad load is more valuable than a nine-minute ad load,” says Mark Read, head of WPP, the world’s largest ad company and Groupm’s parent firm.
It's appropriate that even the chief of the purveyors of advertisements uses the same language ("load") that clinicians use for viral infections.
Ublock is more convenient and i don't need to pay one subscription per site.
In the past, it was about selling convenience. Netflix, for example has beaten conventional torrent sites because it had almost all movies you'd ever want in a single place, steady connection and a good UX. Now there are a dozen different services to juggle, each with a constantly changing library and torrents became more convenient again.
"We use data to create the best experience for you. Together with our 172 trusted partners". Just 172 close friends?
That's what burns my gears not so much ads as the tracking. How did the Internet become a thing that follows you everywhere? An ad I Can take I look and click or not or buy or not but it's the invasive collection and tracking I hate.
Isn't this because they're using a middleman as an ad network, so the data goes to the middleman, and then it goes to 172 companies that interact with that middleman?
Imagine if a TV channel listed to you every company that paid to show an ad that whole day. I guess it would end up being quite a high number as well.
I get what you mean but for the context of the situation/story it was amusing. That's 172 companies wanting my info not so much showing me an add or the site would be unreadable. A TV channel advertisement doesn't track me.
> the Norwegian Data Protection Authority strongly doubts that Meta's proposed ‘consent’ mechanism, often dubbed ‘pay or okay’, complies with the GDPR. The EDPB’s decision is therefore important to avoid Meta's infringement continuing while the company is exploring its options.
As far as I understand it consent must be given freely. Currently facebook offers two options, either pay or consent to tracking. In this situation consent isn't given freely since the option to not give consent requires a monetary payment.
This seems like a legal issue. There needs to be a clear definition of ads, then a requirement for companies to offer ad free options to their services with a clear, fast way to report offenders.
the option being discussed at that part, the meta offering, only came into existence because europe mandated that users must be able to use the full functionality of a site without tracking/personalized ads. The paid option was facebooks attempt to do that - the question is over whether a paid option follows the intent of the law.
Note the mandate is not "no ads" but rather "no personalised ads"
Ah okay - that makes sense. But still - I don't understand why if one of the options is "don't use it", an option I exercise almost every day of the year, there is a legal privacy claim. This isn't a system we'd consider access/participation in it to be mandatory, like healthcare or government.
Ads are noise. Smarter noise will still sound like noise. Perhaps, making it even more obvious, the kind that irritates people.
Gradually, the noise took more and more center stage. And then, users were forced to silence the noise.
Blurring the lines of content and noise is completely backwards. Be transparent, place ads aside the content (not within it), and everyone will be happy.
Paywalls might work for some, but the key here is being ethical. Respecting the user.
The user will reward you if you respect it. It may even respect the brands that respect its attention.
As with everything, the problem here is greed. I wish more ads were respectful. I would take them more seriously if they were.
I’ve been using ad blockers for years now, mainly on DNS level. Last week I decided to test Apple’s private relay and for 5 minutes I had to deal with internet with ads. Disgusting experience.
Welcome to a niche of the web, which is a niche of the Internet, of which wants all of your money pls. Oh? The fight (ad-free or ad-ridden) alone makes more money, because, "ad money or subscription money pls", which in turn equals more clicks for them.
You can argue, "yeah, but what about ublock origin (or another ad blocker)?" To you, they'd (speculatively) say, "ye are few, why bother."
They should put open it up for free to reach the maximum audience, but to compensate for the lost revenue they could get a company to fund the article in exchange for prominently placing an image or text about said company ...
"Social networks are not the only medium allowing the group that advertisers most covet—the better-off with money to splurge—to wriggle beyond their reach"
I wonder what the median disposable income of people who use archive links to circumvent paywalls is?
Are you suggesting Reddit is ad-free? It is not, at all. Using the official app or the website that is not located at old.reddit shows a promoted post every 5 or so posts for me. Yes, you can use old.reddit and not get those ads, but then of the content, I'd estimate about 1 in 10 or so posts on r/popular are native advertising.
Reddit is one of the worst and covered in commercial, paid content. Some of it is labeled as an ad, much of it is not.
Is it just me or does it feel like this is actually a submarine article by WPP to kind of console its clients and tell them that it’s OK. Everything is OK and WPP is in control?
This is such a lame argument to make, because it could apply to an article about anything. Don’t agree with the analysis? It must be paid for by {insert lobby agency}.
Was there anything that was discussed that you disagree with?
Not directly mentioned in the article (although this is essentially what the article is about), but it’s struck me lately as very dissonant that I pay for Spotify and Youtube in order to avoid the ads, and then still have to fast forward through the sponsorship and ad reads that the content creator records into their product.
It’s a fair price to get someone’s content, and I know the revenue from that is much higher than what they’ll get from the platform’s ad share. Yet still it is irritating. The majority of content I consume idly I would never pay for. So again, a fair bargain I suppose.
There are content creators whom I’d happily support directly for the sake of the value I ascribe to their content, not just to remove their ads, but they don’t offer the option. I understand there are many reasons for any given creator why an ad supported business model may be preferable/simpler/earn more. And maybe this is just a shift in the creator economy which is more slowly dispersing than I personally would expect.
But truly from a superfan or consumer point of view, I end up valuing the paid podcasts I subscribe to on Spotify which are ad free over many pieces of content that I arguably enjoy more but are forced to skip through their ads.
I’ve paid for Ben Thompson’s content for almost 10 years now, and listen to his podcast via Spotify. I remember when he said he’d never put his podcast on Spotify, but their private/paid feed feature got him to jump and Im so glad I got to delete an extra app because of it. I’ve been listening to the McElroy brothers’ stable of podcasts for just as long, but am irritated every time I have to skip through the ad reads. I do support them through the podcast network they are a part of, Maximum Fun, but I honestly pay less than I could because I know that it doesn’t directly support them (it supports the network which in turn supports them). That’s ironic because really I should give _more_ because of that fact, but the indirection makes me uninterested in paying much above the minimum.
I love both these podcasts, and their ability to monetize are clearly different based on the product each are producing. At the end of the day though there is (in my experience) a value add provided through Ben Thompson’s business model of directly charging me for the good.
Please don’t read this as a typical HN “why doesn’t the industry cater specifically to me and the very narrow niche I inhabit”, I’m aware of many of the incentives and challenges inherent in these different business models. But as of late, with so many content creators giving the option to pay them directly in exchange for ad free experiences, paying for an ad free service like Spotify but being unable to skip ads from the creators themselves has started to really stick out to me.
I don’t know what a solution would be, nor do I look forward to paying for the majority of content I consume. In fact Im fairly confident that there is no good solution exactly because nobody wants to pay for most content and people’s time is not free. In a world where increasingly folks are putting up paywalls for content consumers see as differentiated, it starts to look more and more bleak on the ad supported side of that wall.
Part of this issue is that most podcasts were designed to be free from the beginning, whereas music was always paid.
As a user, it makes sense to pay Spotify for music access, because Spotify, in turn, pays out a few fractions of a cent to the artist. But it doesn't really make sense to use Spotify premium for podcasts, when you can just download them directly or use various free RSS-based clients.
So why do so many people still consume podcasts on Spotify? 1. Because they're already on Spotify, so it's convenient, but more importantly... 2. Because Spotify realized they make more money if most of their users are paying, yet still consuming free (podcast) content. They don't pay out on podcasts per-stream like they do for a typical song. So ultimately, a premium user who consumes 100% podcast material is more profitable than a user who consumes 100% label-published music.
It's not a coincidence that Spotify has gradually taken over its homepage with podcast promotions, and promoted your "podcast library" as a first-class citizen, even placing it above your music library. It's all about profit margins, baby!
The repeating issue in these comments: very small fiat transactions are difficult.
Crypto solves this. The barrier to entry is cumbersome because of KYC, but after that the whole ecosystem is ready to go.
People talking 25 cents for an article. The ad revenue from viewing a single page with a few well sold ad impressions at $40 CPM is like 4 cents, and more often more like < 1 cent. I keep hoping to see Basic Attention token BAT get traction for exactly these microtransaction use cases.
Does it? Transaction times and transaction fees on some of the more well-known cryptocurrencies would seem to exclude them entirely.
There’s no particular reason that it has to be a decentralised cryptocurrency that operates in the manner required - preloading a few bucks here and there, which are transferred between accounts in small amounts.
As with many things that “crypto” solves, it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Some cryptocurrencies could form part of a solution. It’s not clear they bring any specific advantages to the table though.
The last time anyone seriously considered crypto as money was 2016. Even Steam started accepting Bitcoin. You can see how it went for them [1]. Fraud, volatility, transation delays and fees were unacceptable. And that was the time before the total KYC pressure.
While some of these issues might have been solved (kind of), there's no way anyone touches crypto for end-user microtransactions with a 10-foot pole today.
To avoid generating many transactions you could also work with a classic custodian structure, i.e. prepay into your account once or periodically and it gets redistributed periodically.
Yes, or use a ZK rollup between the publisher and the client to collect transactions off-chain and then settle when it reaches an appropriate amount.
Or even better, have a ZK rollup between each client and a single intermediary, who manages ZK rollups with all publishers. Then you, as a client, don't have to worry about large amounts being trapped in escrow, and publisher payouts happen more regularly.
Coinbase is famously expensive at ~5-10%. I use them but not for transferring much. Bitpay and Cash App are some 1-3%. When I could use Bitcoin with Overstock.com it was also minimal. But whenever bitcoin is trading heavily, it's not worth the cost. Hey why not put some ads on the transaction.
