His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter (which the poster even states). Reddit screwed Apollo and then many of the most popular subreddits protested and did things like show porn on otherwise usually SFW content to prevent Reddit from showing ads and thus killing their profits. Those are big sites, but those are definitely attributable to other obvious confounding factors. I would definitely argue they should be the first data points thrown out in asking "is the ad biz on the internet dying?". I do think ads have gotten worse but I definitely don't think it's going anywhere for a long long time. Way too many companies have built their whole revenue model around them. And companies may spend less to post ads but they definitely still will because there really aren't that many alternatives.
In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.
One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
the real value for them is in knowing your preferences and building a profile on you where they can categorize you with people who have similar interests.
Look at the facebook ads platform from the perspective of a small business looking to advertise. It is incredibly effective in how it can target people.
Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.
YouTube has its own internal micro economy of channels, networks of channels, etc that is thriving from ad revenue. Binging with Babish was “a guy cooking food from tv” a few years ago and is now an entire platform of channels. I think those companies can all be considered separately from the operator of the marketplace.
You typically won't see rising ad revenues during a recession. When times are hard, or look like they could get hard, advertising is the first thing cut. Its a well established pattern. Eg, from https://www.createwithnova.com/blog/the-history-of-advertisi... :
> After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%, magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and digital 2%.
> Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly every single company reported a significant dip in advertising revenue:
> Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from about 9% to 30% — worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.
At the scale of Google/Meta plateauing could just mean market saturation, not that ads aren’t working anymore. I’d be interested to see data showing that RoI has also been decreasing for advertisers or that advertisers have started to pay less because they don’t find ads worthwhile.
Google and Meta each have something like half the world as users in any given month? And most of the people who aren't using them are not on the internet?
At some point, you literally have no more people you can get in your service.
I read that the new cheaper ad based Netflix tier was really successful. So maybe a future of all paid products but a cheaper option for a worst experience with ads?
some of the decline is attributed to companies pulling back on marketing spend due to declines in consumer spending and also because of iOS changes that has led to decreased efficiency in targeting.
It’s interesting we hear a lot about how engineers need to understand ethics, but nobody says a peep about the field of marketing which focuses on psychological manipulation and deception.
I'm not supporting any ads anymore ever again.
My trust in the industry has been eroded so much that I can't imagine them going the right thing even when they claim to do so.
I don't even have a problem with what ads I'm shown being based on some information about me. I'd happily provide additional information which I think would, if it were used, result in less ads being wasted on me (showing me ads for horror movies/game is never going to benefit the movie/game company, and I find the ads unpleasant. Not showing me ads for horror content, and showing other ads instead, should be a win-win. But the only topics google lets me restrict ads for are "gambling", "alcohol", "dating", and like one or two others that I don't remember. Maybe "parenting"?)
I recently googled some random topic (drag race engines I think) and got some fairly-decent article from 5 years ago that satisfied my curiosity.
The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping up all over the place, the works.
Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as possible, one performance review cycle at a time?
Interesting thought that for content where no competition exists, the owner can maximize profit by drowning it in ads. Doesn’t seem like there is much of an alternative outside of legislation or action from google to enforce stricter ad standards(like how pop ups got killed)
The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. They don't want to see ads and the ads they do see they want them to be uninformed and general. They want everything free. This just encourages subscriptions. Which we're seeing become more and more common.
> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps
Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.
> They want everything free.
It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.
> This just encourages subscriptions.
There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.
Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.
Most of the apps I use are in fact free, and do not have ads to pay for them. Someone wanted something to exist, so they made it, and then they gave it away for free to everyone because computers are magical and there's no marginal cost to do that. The ad based Internet dying would leave hobby and academic content, significantly cleaning up the signal:noise ratio on the web, which would be great. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to be Google to index it all if it weren't filled with AI generated SEOd blogspam garbage trying to make money from ads.
Reasonable ads are fine. Its when we go to websites that have ads that make the website load 100x slower, roll video content, and other shitty behaviors made people go to ad blocker. Simple ads really didn't bother anyone. Advertisers destroyed the ad economy themselves by allowing really shitty behavior. Even google search is a joke with the number of ads you get with a single search. Sometimes i see more adds than results.
I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face. Unfortunately many services don't even give an option to pay with money, so I've been trying to find alternatives, for example I've been starting to migrate away from Gmail to Protonmail. I understand things cost money, so let me pay you for your services. I just despise ads with a passion.
> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps.
Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.
It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.
Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.
They want a tax funded internet and shareholder companies gone after the worst bath in history. All it takes is one state to start and give it's citizens the chance to distribute the tax anonymously and the whole advertising industry dies.
Elon is such a good guy. Spending $43B to rid society of the trash fire that is twitter. It's a sacrifice not many could make. I am incredibly thankful to him for that and I hope he succeeds at running it into the ground.
Driving away lucrative advertising, replacing with much less sustainable premium subscriptions. Then there's cutting the moderation and safety teams to the bone.
One thing he has done is push the paid replies to the top of every tweet. So now every tweet is full of low quality replies at the top and you have to scroll to find the higher quality ones below.
Not sure why you're downvoted, as your observations are completely correct. In fact, there's so much more activity that they've been trying different ways to keep the UX efficient and stable. But, of course, some of the things they've tried haven't worked out so well, so people just like to cherrypick those to make incorrect arguments against Twitters newfound viablity.
1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that used to advertise there.
2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many followers but users are now forced to see it over higher quality users).
3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post, following hundreds of accounts.
4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken over.
5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.
Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience. Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic, looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place that you could get news from verified sources, follow public figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a Nazi bar.
Only from bots. I mean, this is not even disputable, saying that twitter has more genuine activity now or somehow better content is in the reals of fan fiction.
Even the pre Apollo saga, reddit ad revenue was nowhere close to facebook. Same with twitter, before Musk its ad revenue is not good. And both platforms are now trying to emulate facebook with heavy control on the app and the API.
Have adds been getting worse? Adds I get in the last 3 years have been way too good for me, so my personal experience has been the opposite (or maybe not? Definitely makes me want to buy more stuff). I guess I’m easily targetable
It's possible that the density of ads has increased (gotten worse) thus leading to you buying more items. And some bias in your recall makes you think they've gotten more effective at targeting you, instead of the same conversion rate but far more
opportunities to convert.
The YouTube channel Second Thought recently put out a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gSzzuY1Yw0) whose thesis was that even being cheaper than fossil fuels is not / will not be enough for green energy to win, because under capitalism a cheap thing that also has low profit margin will not attract investment compared to a bit more expensive thing which can be exploited for more profit. I wonder if a similar effect affects sites like Twitter and Reddit: the more efficient they are at connecting users and providing value for user's efforts, the less room there is for profit margin. As a coworker once pointed out to me, the parameter which represents "profit" in an economic system would correspond to "inefficiency" in an engineering context.
That video makes no sense. If renewables are cheaper, then fossil fuels have even worse margins. The video claims for some reason that fossil fuels are "more exploitable" and more profitable, but assuming you're baking storage into cost, a lot of energy is fungible. Furthermore, solar can easily be installed on prem and many energy users have plenty of unused roof space, so even if all energy providers conspired to keep energy prices high, energy users can install their own solar.
True until it can be "monopolized". I guess in the near future govt will regulate green energy to some model that can give enough profit margin for corporates, and that will increase green energyp price to near fossil fuel, with bigger margin. Subscription based solar panel and electric vehicles come to mind.
As for reddit and twitter it's not the efficiency and room for profit, it's the cost to provide said content outweigh the revenue gained from ads. Hosting and maintaining global social media is expensive, which is there's no many players in that field.
I'm not sure what you mean by efficient, that Reddit gets people to the information they wanted as fast as possible?
I thought the whole idea behind Reddit and other sites was to keep people browsing with algorithms that keep them interested. Wouldn't that be what makes them efficient?
There's plenty of other investors. Like utilities, NGOs, govts, and customers. Here's the list of projects in Bhadla Solar Park. https://cms.mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/List-... Where's Big Oil, Vanguard, Blackrock? Scanning some dozen other marque projects tells a similar story.
Further, IIRC, the ROI for mega projects are largely predetermined via PPAs and such. Think of them as bonds. There seems to be no shortage of investors (for feasible projects).
Okay, back to my theory...
Big Oil knows this is the end game. But they want to compensated for all their soon-to-be stranded assets, real and (more likely) imaginary.
So this is a hostage negotiation. They've redoubled their efforts to up the stakes. "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"
It's just straight up extortion.
I have no sense for how it'll play out.
My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies. Then put all their execs (say Director on up) and board members in solitary confinement for life. Stage some show trials at The Hague for ecocide or whatever, to add a veneer of legitimacy.
Though I recognize opinions may differ.
--
0/ I prefer my socialism to be advocacy-oriented, vs whinging, but tastes differ.
1/ Separately, post IRA, the billionaire funded reactionary astroturf campaign is now in full swing. For instance, every single offshore wind farm has been opposed, farmers adopting solar are being harassed, ad nauseum. So even as permitting is reformed, brain worms will likely slow our transition.
2/ Early reports post-IRA suggest new investment, in everything, has gone bonkers. With potential for even more as the Biden Admin firms up the implementation. David Roberts' Volts podcast is one of my primary sources, highest recommendation. https://www.volts.wtf/podcast/archive?sort=new
Both of the blunders you mention are recent no? (Elon / Apollo). And these companies were never making money so blunders can be considered errors forced by the need to monetize quickly.
> His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter
I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.
As someone who works for an asian "superapp", the grass is always greener.
Superapps are self-limiting, because the app-size is too large for many user's phones (Uber has famously had this problem too, and thus split up their apps [0]).
The UX also tends to be a bit weird. Everyone wants to use the superapp differently and so the interface ends up being the lowest common denominator across all product families.
I'm not going to watch this entire video. I just want to ask, what the fuck is going on with those disgusting body horror ads we see all over the internet? Close ups of pimples and wounds and bizzare diagrams of human anatomy that all appear designed specifically to draw the eye (at any cost) but personally just repulse me. There's a whole cross section of websites I won't visit, including some major news sites, because apparently the best they can attract are these garbage advertisers.
Usually those types of display ads show up when targeting isn't possible, or your anonymized such that the CPMs for your session are low enough that it's cheap enough for these types of ads to make money.
There are really only 3 buyers of banner/display ads when no targeting is available:
2) Scams, body horror, YMYL, click-trick, etc. This is what you're seeing. Info products, garbage cosmetics and scam courses have such huge margins that they can spend on broad-targeted placements for very cheap CPMs, with aggressive creatives that are A/B tested to death to get people to click. As long as the CPM is cheap, and the CTRs are high enough, the numbers work.
3) "Inexperienced" ad buyers
I'm not commenting or interested in debating the ethics of tracking and the internet data economy, but a side effect of removing 3rd party targeting is that as attribution goes away, buyers of ads pay less since they can't attribute dollars to campaigns, so you have to move to attribution methods more common in radio and TV. And as costs fall, it gives opportunities to the slimey shit you've been seeing.
I looked further and the key thing that viewers are doing (based on 600k app store reviews which seem to be mostly real) is trying to "give the girl a chance for once" "help her cause nobody else is" etc...
These companies want clicks and views. They used to lure you in with curiosity, then with distracting colours and animations, and now with other emotions. Outrage ads and disgust ads get clicks. Any strong emotion that will get your eye drawn to their crap is worth exploiting.
They're also experts at using psychological warfare like well-positioned faces and expressions to trick your eyes into looking at their general area. That's why every clickbait thumbnail has some form of a face with an extreme expression in it.
Adblockers are the only solution. Whether you go with uBlock or AdNauseam, the only way to make this stuff go away is to make their business model unviable.
Super low cost ads that lead to super low cost horrible clickbait content.
You can blame companies like outbrain and taboola for purposefully having horrible advertiser quality standards, and websites who are willing to have that junk on their site. The cycle repeats endlessly, as the horrible sites have.. horrible ads.
> what the f is going on with those disgusting ads we see all over the internet?
"we see" ? Who is "we" ? Your feed is not my feed, and I don't know what you're talking about.
What's up is an algorithm is taking a guess at what engages _you_. It may be failing badly. Although, you noticed enough to comment, and that's engagement! Rage clicks are still clicks. Understand that and you're closer to knowing what's wrong with all VC-funded social media.
But it's not what "we" see. Ad-wise, there is no such thing.
When I used Facebook I was spammed these "people falling and hurt themself" or car accident videos.
I hate those videos but I got more and more. I think it was because I stopped scrolling and tried to figure out what user was posting those to mute them which the algorithm maybe counted as "engagement".
Or maybe I was more likely to stop scroll the feed and switch tab when those came up, which maybe also counted as engagement.
Etc.
I don't think the algorithm can distinguish like and distaste that good.
I've seen those before but haven't in awhile. I assume they are eye-catching. Holes in hand, hand pulling wet cloth, jellyfish on hand, spider, hair, etc.
Yes, what the fuck!? Facebook has started to show this filth in their shorts, that are un-blockable. I have to access Facebook for work and this is just repulsive. I guess if anybody still had any doubt wether the people at Facebook were degenerated perverts, at least there is no such doubt anymore.
I agree with recent TWiT discussion on this : we've had it good for a while - the promise of free internet but all those services cost money to keep running.
I don't have an issue with paying Youtube Premium Lite. Where I have an issue with the subs model is you're pay subs to so many services, YT Netflix Twitch, etc. It adds up pretty quickly, and costs way more than traditional TV used to cost.
Then there's the issue of online magazines. I find most even including Wired, to be too random in terms of content. Itś really easy for me to rationalize the worth of YT : irreplacable. But all those online "news" site that churn out tons of SEO optimized articles and "top ten (insert random hardware)" lists etc? Really difficult for me to warrant a subscription.
Now if someone maintained a really big forum, like there ś a few still running with tons of sub forums where you can spend an hour everyday and get a ton of interaction. Sure, I'd sub to that.
Even Reddit for me it's hard to think why I'd pay for it, even though it is also irreplacable in some way. Perhaps because it is primarily a social site, there is so much abuse, so much idiocy, so much "hive mind" and so much negativity/sarcasm overall - it easily shadows the good side of reddit : the helpful/kind replies, the sharing of useful guides etc.
So huh.. Maybe it is like the TWiT panel agreed, the "free for all" internet is dying, and some sites/ services may well disappear and maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe there are better ideas to replace them.
If it was just me I´d bring back huge forums. There's gotta be a way to monetize those through Patreon/etc. Theres lots of small perks you can give to forum members. Maybe they still have a life in them, but they were just made seemingly obsolete for a while by "social media" sites like Twitter and Instagram.
A problem with many paid services is that they still have ads.
Was watching something with my wife the other day (I think it was on HBO streaming) and there were ads? I'm like "hang on we're paying for this, and still have to watch ads?"
Yeah it's pretty ridiculous, that's the reason why I don't sub to anybody on Twitch even though I am super grateful for some streamers I've watched for years : you still get ads on all the other channels... which is ridiculous since by nature the site is supposed to encourage you to browse and discover lots of creators. It would be like you sub to a channel on TV and they remove ads, but as soon as you switch to another channel you gets ads. The F?
WIRED, among many other periodicals, is available online through https://libbyapp.com at my local tax-funded public library (I'm in the USA). I do wonder how things would change if most people started using the library for most of their entertainment and education, as I do.
>It adds up pretty quickly, and costs way more than traditional TV used to cost.
I have trouble understanding this complaint.
There's way more content than ever before; why wouldn't it be more expensive to get everything? You don't have to subscribe to it all, but the ability to pick and choose providers a la carte, as well as cycle subscriptions on and off seems like a huge win to consumers.
Well, true, except entertainment consumers want a good variety. And ideally, they'd like it priced like a utility, a monthly payment they can budget for.
Before it was taken over by infomercials and reality tv, cable offered unprecedented variety, all for one manageable monthly payment. this is still what people want. This will be what the market gravitates towards, and we see it happening now with cheaper ad-supported tiers and even many 100% free with ads small players. Streaming is, in effect, slowly becoming cable tv all over again. Hell, some of these free channels- like PlutoTV- even look like cable. I predict eventually which aggregator you choose- Roku, Firestick, AppleTV- won't matter, it will be the same galaxy of choices.
I think that will drive a lot more self-funded communities. People talk about how expensive it is to host websites, but they're talking about sites several orders of magnitude larger than what most communities need. A single Discord server could effectively be hosted on a Raspberry Pi, the market price among cloud hosts for which is "free", or at most ~$10 a month.
That's not "We need to charge for access" level pricing that's "One motivated party funds the entire site" level cost.
To make this happen, we need better open source forum software. A group of us have been searching for a good self-hosted forum to replace /r/BuyItForLife and have trialed quite a few, but they are just... Really bad.
Don’t underestimate how much cable TV costs: I did my budget recently and added up all my services together, having Netflix (highest tier), YT Premium (family, includes music streaming), Discovery+ (ad-free), and Hulu (ad-free), an all comes in at about $62.
That’s about the same price as live cable as a standalone product, and yet cable has advertisements which none of the above services have.
About the only complaint you might have is that I haven’t covered every single television studio (not included: Max, Paramount+, Disney+), but you could always rotate subscriptions in and out and still have a lot of them active at the same time.
Cable really just is that bad. Or, alternative take, cable sucks your dollars away and sends them to live sports and cable news.
I can't agree that it costs more. I'm a pretty profligate spender and just subscribe to everything even though I don't actually watch that much television. So right now, my household is subscribed to YouTube Premium, Peacock, Paramount+, Disney+, Max, Apple TV+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Curiosity Stream. I'm honestly not even sure what it costs, but guessing somewhere in the arena of $10 a month or so on average, since some are more, some are less. That's $100. The last time I was subscribed to premium cable with at least HBO, Showtime, and ESPN, it was $180 a month. In 2011 dollars. That was also linear, not on-demand, so quite a bit worse service. We had to pay extra for a DVR that could record stuff and I don't even remember how much extra that was.
When people make the comparison to the cost of cable TV and so forth - I feel like people forget: you were paying for TV and still got shown a ton of advertisements. About a quarter of air time was just advertising. That is usually higher than anything you’ll see on the Internet even for content you aren’t paying for. I’m not even including all the weird product placement aspects and other such things.
Paying for these services to not see ads is still a win compared to most cable tv…
"I agree with recent TWiT discussion on this : we've had it good for a while - the promise of free internet but all those services cost money to keep running."
Most internet users pay for internet access. When I first got connected the fees were paid by employers and universities. Later, "ISPs" offered service to the home. The internet was never free. But there has always been free content on the internet, even before there were ISPs. Before the term "monetisation" was ever used to refer to websites, there was plenty of "free" content published on the internet.
Will it disappear if advertising fails to suffice for "monetisation". There is no proof of this outcome. It is heavily biased speculation.
There is proof however that free content can exist on an internet even in the absence of such "monetisation".
I mean I don't think the criticism that it costs more than traditional TV is valid. Traditional TV is a linear stream where you are sending out one signal for everyone. On demand is a different beast altogether, so even if it were the exact cost or more, then it'd still be a win. That's not even including the fact that the content that gets made of YouTube or Twitch wouldn't have ever been made on old TV. If you had told me 20 years ago that it would cost the same or even a bit more but you get all this, I'd've signed up in a heartbeat.
As someone who "grew up" on the internet and was very active in internet forums and places in the early 00s as early as age 10, I struggle to see how kids are going to continue to be a huge part of internet discourse and consumption if everything is behind a paywall. That's, like, literally the only problem I have with this line of thought. Other than that, I completely agree. I'd rather pay than have ads be there in the first place in most cases.
This is EXACTLY what cable companies predicted would happen when we went a la carte. They were using their monopoly power to drive down the overall price of packaged TV and by de-bundling, we end up paying more overall. For once they were correct and I apologize for questioning it 15 years ago.
That said, I am ok with SOME advertisements to keep the web running. There are two big problems with this:
1. Market investors expect their stock to continue to rise, forever. When it doesn't, they push for more revenue, but instead of adding new products or functionality, they push for ad revenue instead.
2. Ad revenue as a model for revenue generation means that we need more ads, as opposed to building better products. This means that the entire web is inundated with advertisements that overwhelm the overall experience and will continue to get worse and worse over time.
This is a product of investment and lack of reinvestment in new products/function and instead more immediate revenue gains as opposed to slow-and-steady rise in value. Investors want to cash in NOW and not over time and thus we have entered a time where 3 ads precede every video alongside in-video sponsorships and more traditional 15-30 second ads within each. It's absurd.
Most streaming services are around $20-$30/month and allow month-to-month plans.
You can fairly easily rotate among 4-5 services, using 2-3 at a time, to keep costs lower than with traditional cable. This works pretty well if you have non-specific TV interests. Where they really get you is with sports - that market is super fragmented and getting most of NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB can cost a fortune.
> They were using their monopoly power to drive down the overall price of packaged TV and by de-bundling, we end up paying more overall.
This is complicated. Piracy sold Comcast broadband Internet connections for many. Napster long predates Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal, when it became a content maker.
So even in the last two decades, looking at one company, it played some, or all, sides of the producer ecosystem, in complex ways, sometimes 200% changing (sticking a minus sign in front of) how it benefits from consumer trends. If you want to analyze any specific thing about cable TV pricing, you're going to need to write a whole dissertation about it. Meanwhile "whatever the consumer is willing to bear" will get you most of the way there.
If you're paying more you're probably getting more.
Old cable TV had about 5 channels that I ever watched and 50 that I did not care about.
A sports network + Netflix is not more than cable. If you subscribe to much more than that, you're probably getting more than a bundled cable deal used to provide.
A significant number of the streaming services people complain about paying for offer services that cable companies never did.
Plus, I can choose which streaming services I want, and how long I want to pay for them. And everything is on-demand. And there are no ads (except on YTTV).
> That said, I am ok with SOME advertisements to keep the web running.
Personally, I have no problem with ad-funded stuff. The problem that I have is with the spying that comes along with online ads. I can see no way that could ever be acceptable.
I hope I won’t be faulted for not “reading” the OP, but it’s a 17 minute video. I watched a little, but I don’t understand the thesis.
It does seem ironic though that on a video about the ad-based internet dying, there are several ads in the page, the video maker in the first segment has a lengthy ad where he praises whatever he is advertising, probably VPN stuff, there is a bunch of begging for paid subscribers in the summary, and comments in the comment section from third party ad spammers directing people to what appears to be MLMs.
YouTube can be used with youtubetranscript.com (free) which will turn a video into a clickable transcript that takes you to the corresponding section of the video when clicked to see the corresponding visuals. It uses the Google auto transcription so not sure about whether the accuracy will be acceptable for you.
YouTube has pretty decent transcriptions with timestamps, especially for channels that bother implementing actual subtitles. They're hidden by default and not searchable on every platform, but they're excellent for skipping to the important parts.
Independent websites need to get working on something similar. Whisper is pretty good but extremely CPU intensive, but there are lower cost implementations with acceptable transcriptions out there.
I usually watch the introduction and then skip to the 66% mark, those seem to be the places the actual interesting information is stored on YouTube and its competitors.
Good. The internet was really fun before the ads and monetization came.
We had forums and personal web sites. Weird blogs everywhere you looked. Some semblance of anonymity. A sense of community that wasn't about growing a following.
This sentiment reads pretty much like auto enthusiasts musing about how good things were when every car owner knew how to fix his car and things were more simple. The world has moved on, the Internet is not a hobby or specialization anymore, just like reading and writing used to be and no longer is.
Modern cars are about as easy to fix as old ones. The engine room is more cramped now so a bit more annoying though and you are often out of luck if the computers need replacements and be programmed for the car.
But most problems are fixed just like before.
I feel it is mostly an exuse to not bother doing it the "manly way" but paying a pro to do it.
The initial batch of professional "influencers" (they were called bloggers) where I live were ordinary bloggers before they started to shill products. I think it was around 2006 sometime?
They had normal blogs before profits entered the picture.
It's just that google + fb are increasingly keeping bigger and bigger piece of the pie for themselves, which among others enriches their workers to the detrimment of content creators. Monopoly is to blame here, not a natural death
Ads were pretty comfy in the age of print (there were only so many physical copies people were willing to buy), but now there is effectively unlimited real estate on the internet, people keep throwing up new sites (real and spam) that fight for the pie, and there are always new people looking to make it as influencers or streamers, which are now the most common answer in the US to “what do you want to be when you grow up”. So now an “easy” way to get money has quickly become a race to the bottom.
I think we really need microtransactions. Pay $0.05 to read this article? Sure. Whoever figures out the infrastructure for that (seems like it would be right up Stripe’s alley) is going to make trillions.
The reason why ads work is consumers do not want to spend money now that they are conditioned to get stuff on the internet for free. Every time an article on here is posted the first comment is a link to archive.is.
I agree this would be a better model, but I don’t think it will ever happen. Maybe the Web3 stuff will catch on and this will become sustainable.
> Every time an article on here is posted the first comment is a link to archive.is.
Friction matters. Making an online payment is a slow 10 step procedure currently. If it was a single effortless click it would certinaly be used more. Kind of how arcade machines worked
I think consumers are not reluctant to spend money. They are just averse to the friction of doing the paying. If nanopayments for e.g. reading a news article could become totally automated and transparent, I think this would work.
We are also conditioned that the stuff on the internet is an eyes-seeking bullshit nine times out of ten and there’s no way to mark a site, a blog or a section as “never again” so that you could know it next time. All this interaction of a user with the web is monopolized by few players who fuck them up in return. So it’s hard to blame a user for their reluctance.
This won't work, because it requires the user to build a mental budget each time they go online. That is the exact opposite of how internet use has worked since its inception.
Secondly, if there really was a big opportunity in enabling micro transactions, the main players (PayPal, Visa, etc) would already have some offering available after ~25 years of paying for stuff online.
Even infamous telco billing is more palatable than microtransactions. France’s Minitel system let services bill based on time spent on a page. That’s easy to use compared with having to type in your Apple password once again to pay $0.99 or even approve a $0 app because some parents blamed their kid for buying thousands of dollars of virtual game currency.
This is sort of a thing now with Bitcoin Lightning. You already can listen to podcasts and “stream” them a certain amount of money of your choosing. Called Value For Value and part of podcasting 2.0 spec. Whether this scales to entire internet I don’t know, but kindling is there.
I know one of the goals for Lightning Network was to cut transaction fees. Did that actually work out - is it realistic to pay someone $0.05 USD-equivalent in Bitcoin using Lightning? Or do I need to use an exchange/intermediary still?
Content farms work right now because ad views can't be refunded; by the time you've loaded the page (and realized you got tricked by clickbait/spam), it's too late and they already got paid.
A micropayment system where you are able to request refunds/dispute payments will break that model.
You joke, but this is exactly what I was hoping Brave was doing:
- become the gateway for advertisement money
- make it opt-in and share the revenue with users that see the ads.
- make it easy for the users to redistribute this earned money with the content creators they like.
Yeah, you are going to tell me that this could be done without crypto, and I will respond that micropayments are still not solved.
I will accept a criticism about Brave sticking with the token, though - they could've gone with a stabletoken and their business model would seem a lot more legit.
15 years ago I worked at Radio Shack in a mall. A woman and her daughter were looking for a cell phone.
We sold Verizon cell phone them with a 2 year contract which got you around 400 off the price. The cheapest phone with a contract was $29.00
In the mall were kiosks that sold a slight lower model phone with a tmobile contract but it was free. She asked me if we had any free phones, I said no, and she made a noise and walked out.
$30 for something you'll have for two years and we had a better service (verizon coverage) vs free
This guy's conception of The Google's role in the history of the ad-based internet is totally out of touch, which is strange because he appears to be about as old as I am, maybe even a bit older than that.
The Google didn't prove that "ads could work" to make content free. They may have become a big player, if not the biggest player in the ad space, but the proliferation of ad-supported content had more to do with timing than anything else. YouTube was born at a time where video content embedded in webpages could actually work for most users (without downloading something like RealPlayer) and be scaled up. The Google simply bought this business because it was clear to most people that YouTube represented the future, and they had the cash to do it. Not only did they have that cash, but even more cash to throw at it to create their Buffetean moat. There's nothing genius about it. Before YouTube and even Web 2.0, there was not only plenty of free written content but there were other video sites, few if any had anything to do with The Google.
If anything, The Google is responsible for demolishing the ad-based internet. The quality control of their ads used to be so atrocious that of course people started ignoring most of them. Thus, traditional ads became nearly worthless. Their conclusion wasn't to turn away business from outright scams hawking B.S., but that people aren't clicking on ads because the ads aren't relevant to them! A good theory on paper, except it turns out people don't actually like feeling like they're being followed everywhere they go, and it also turns out that when they regularly buy Huggies diapers out of necessity, that doesn't mean they want to immediately see another 100 ads telling them to buy more Huggies.
All that said, I don't think ads have very much to do with the current decline in the quality of the web as a whole. The recent push to shove lots of ads in front of users, namely those that appear frequently within YouTube videos, is just a symptom of companies like The Google struggling to maintain growth when Silicon Valley isn't living life on the fast lane in Easy Street. There's also other factors like search engines failing to scale along with the web, as well as deranking or outright censorship; this is done both at the behest of advertisers but also to chase the widest possible audience.
Those of us who remember when Google first started might even remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it didn't have tons of banner ads like the search engines that came before it. In no way was it the first to prove that "ads could work", the ad-driven model was already bananas before it came out.
It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.
I agree that ads aren’t the cause. In fact I think they’re a downstream result. The root cause is that the Web doesn’t support any currency but attention. People on social media can cash in attention for self-esteem, but serious content can only really trade it for advertising dollars.
Readit News
In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.
One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
Look at the facebook ads platform from the perspective of a small business looking to advertise. It is incredibly effective in how it can target people.
My first thought was Google, and it's started to plateau in the recent years:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/rev....
Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.
> After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%, magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and digital 2%.
And yes, it happened this time too. From https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-advertising-recession-... :
> Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly every single company reported a significant dip in advertising revenue:
> Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from about 9% to 30% — worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.
At some point, you literally have no more people you can get in your service.
[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-expenditu...
I dont have a problem with ads, just dont sell my data to everyone who knocks on your companies doors. Happy to support ethical ads.
Twitter ads are aweful, showing unknown, click bait ads on its platform.
The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping up all over the place, the works.
Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as possible, one performance review cycle at a time?
Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.
> They want everything free.
It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.
> This just encourages subscriptions.
There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.
Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.
Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.
It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.
Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.
Why do you think that people don't understand this?
> This just encourages subscriptions.
Which is the lesser of the two evils.
Even worse - they never had good ad revenue.
If ad revenue model is dying it would suggest companies like facebook and google see ad revenue dying.
I’ve frankly not seen any difference, at all. If anything there’s slightly more activity
1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that used to advertise there.
2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many followers but users are now forced to see it over higher quality users).
3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post, following hundreds of accounts.
4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken over.
5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.
Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience. Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic, looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place that you could get news from verified sources, follow public figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a Nazi bar.
Only from bots. I mean, this is not even disputable, saying that twitter has more genuine activity now or somehow better content is in the reals of fan fiction.
Junk bonds have high yields, why don't why all buy them?
As for reddit and twitter it's not the efficiency and room for profit, it's the cost to provide said content outweigh the revenue gained from ads. Hosting and maintaining global social media is expensive, which is there's no many players in that field.
I thought the whole idea behind Reddit and other sites was to keep people browsing with algorithms that keep them interested. Wouldn't that be what makes them efficient?
I have a different theory.
But first...
New projects have stalled because of permitting bottlenecks. 1/
Investment in '22 was $1.1 trillion dollars. Another record. https://about.bnef.com/new-energy-outlook/ 2/
There's plenty of other investors. Like utilities, NGOs, govts, and customers. Here's the list of projects in Bhadla Solar Park. https://cms.mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/List-... Where's Big Oil, Vanguard, Blackrock? Scanning some dozen other marque projects tells a similar story.
Further, IIRC, the ROI for mega projects are largely predetermined via PPAs and such. Think of them as bonds. There seems to be no shortage of investors (for feasible projects).
Okay, back to my theory...
Big Oil knows this is the end game. But they want to compensated for all their soon-to-be stranded assets, real and (more likely) imaginary.
So this is a hostage negotiation. They've redoubled their efforts to up the stakes. "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"
It's just straight up extortion.
I have no sense for how it'll play out.
My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies. Then put all their execs (say Director on up) and board members in solitary confinement for life. Stage some show trials at The Hague for ecocide or whatever, to add a veneer of legitimacy.
Though I recognize opinions may differ.
--
0/ I prefer my socialism to be advocacy-oriented, vs whinging, but tastes differ.
1/ Separately, post IRA, the billionaire funded reactionary astroturf campaign is now in full swing. For instance, every single offshore wind farm has been opposed, farmers adopting solar are being harassed, ad nauseum. So even as permitting is reformed, brain worms will likely slow our transition.
2/ Early reports post-IRA suggest new investment, in everything, has gone bonkers. With potential for even more as the Biden Admin firms up the implementation. David Roberts' Volts podcast is one of my primary sources, highest recommendation. https://www.volts.wtf/podcast/archive?sort=new
I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-adverti...
Superapps are self-limiting, because the app-size is too large for many user's phones (Uber has famously had this problem too, and thus split up their apps [0]).
The UX also tends to be a bit weird. Everyone wants to use the superapp differently and so the interface ends up being the lowest common denominator across all product families.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/in/developer/uber-technologies-inc/id...
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There are really only 3 buyers of banner/display ads when no targeting is available:
1) Huge multinationals - think geico, coke, etc. Broad awareness campaigns
2) Scams, body horror, YMYL, click-trick, etc. This is what you're seeing. Info products, garbage cosmetics and scam courses have such huge margins that they can spend on broad-targeted placements for very cheap CPMs, with aggressive creatives that are A/B tested to death to get people to click. As long as the CPM is cheap, and the CTRs are high enough, the numbers work.
3) "Inexperienced" ad buyers
I'm not commenting or interested in debating the ethics of tracking and the internet data economy, but a side effect of removing 3rd party targeting is that as attribution goes away, buyers of ads pay less since they can't attribute dollars to campaigns, so you have to move to attribution methods more common in radio and TV. And as costs fall, it gives opportunities to the slimey shit you've been seeing.
I have done a reasonable job at fooling Instagram to the extent where they think I'm a woman and I see horrifying ads all the time like the following:
https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1676597672667381773
I looked further and the key thing that viewers are doing (based on 600k app store reviews which seem to be mostly real) is trying to "give the girl a chance for once" "help her cause nobody else is" etc...
https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1676631706818805771
There are software engineers and designers working full time making this stuff and they should be horrified.
Do something intentionally wrong to goad a smart alec into trying to do it right.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
(I.e., the icky health ads are a major category of it.)
https://www.fastcompany.com/90843502/the-chumbox-is-still-th...
https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
They're also experts at using psychological warfare like well-positioned faces and expressions to trick your eyes into looking at their general area. That's why every clickbait thumbnail has some form of a face with an extreme expression in it.
Adblockers are the only solution. Whether you go with uBlock or AdNauseam, the only way to make this stuff go away is to make their business model unviable.
You can blame companies like outbrain and taboola for purposefully having horrible advertiser quality standards, and websites who are willing to have that junk on their site. The cycle repeats endlessly, as the horrible sites have.. horrible ads.
"we see" ? Who is "we" ? Your feed is not my feed, and I don't know what you're talking about.
What's up is an algorithm is taking a guess at what engages _you_. It may be failing badly. Although, you noticed enough to comment, and that's engagement! Rage clicks are still clicks. Understand that and you're closer to knowing what's wrong with all VC-funded social media.
But it's not what "we" see. Ad-wise, there is no such thing.
I hate those videos but I got more and more. I think it was because I stopped scrolling and tried to figure out what user was posting those to mute them which the algorithm maybe counted as "engagement".
Or maybe I was more likely to stop scroll the feed and switch tab when those came up, which maybe also counted as engagement.
Etc.
I don't think the algorithm can distinguish like and distaste that good.
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I don't have an issue with paying Youtube Premium Lite. Where I have an issue with the subs model is you're pay subs to so many services, YT Netflix Twitch, etc. It adds up pretty quickly, and costs way more than traditional TV used to cost.
Then there's the issue of online magazines. I find most even including Wired, to be too random in terms of content. Itś really easy for me to rationalize the worth of YT : irreplacable. But all those online "news" site that churn out tons of SEO optimized articles and "top ten (insert random hardware)" lists etc? Really difficult for me to warrant a subscription.
Now if someone maintained a really big forum, like there ś a few still running with tons of sub forums where you can spend an hour everyday and get a ton of interaction. Sure, I'd sub to that.
Even Reddit for me it's hard to think why I'd pay for it, even though it is also irreplacable in some way. Perhaps because it is primarily a social site, there is so much abuse, so much idiocy, so much "hive mind" and so much negativity/sarcasm overall - it easily shadows the good side of reddit : the helpful/kind replies, the sharing of useful guides etc.
So huh.. Maybe it is like the TWiT panel agreed, the "free for all" internet is dying, and some sites/ services may well disappear and maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe there are better ideas to replace them.
If it was just me I´d bring back huge forums. There's gotta be a way to monetize those through Patreon/etc. Theres lots of small perks you can give to forum members. Maybe they still have a life in them, but they were just made seemingly obsolete for a while by "social media" sites like Twitter and Instagram.
Was watching something with my wife the other day (I think it was on HBO streaming) and there were ads? I'm like "hang on we're paying for this, and still have to watch ads?"
I have trouble understanding this complaint.
There's way more content than ever before; why wouldn't it be more expensive to get everything? You don't have to subscribe to it all, but the ability to pick and choose providers a la carte, as well as cycle subscriptions on and off seems like a huge win to consumers.
Before it was taken over by infomercials and reality tv, cable offered unprecedented variety, all for one manageable monthly payment. this is still what people want. This will be what the market gravitates towards, and we see it happening now with cheaper ad-supported tiers and even many 100% free with ads small players. Streaming is, in effect, slowly becoming cable tv all over again. Hell, some of these free channels- like PlutoTV- even look like cable. I predict eventually which aggregator you choose- Roku, Firestick, AppleTV- won't matter, it will be the same galaxy of choices.
That's not "We need to charge for access" level pricing that's "One motivated party funds the entire site" level cost.
That’s about the same price as live cable as a standalone product, and yet cable has advertisements which none of the above services have.
About the only complaint you might have is that I haven’t covered every single television studio (not included: Max, Paramount+, Disney+), but you could always rotate subscriptions in and out and still have a lot of them active at the same time.
Cable really just is that bad. Or, alternative take, cable sucks your dollars away and sends them to live sports and cable news.
Paying for these services to not see ads is still a win compared to most cable tv…
Most internet users pay for internet access. When I first got connected the fees were paid by employers and universities. Later, "ISPs" offered service to the home. The internet was never free. But there has always been free content on the internet, even before there were ISPs. Before the term "monetisation" was ever used to refer to websites, there was plenty of "free" content published on the internet. Will it disappear if advertising fails to suffice for "monetisation". There is no proof of this outcome. It is heavily biased speculation.
There is proof however that free content can exist on an internet even in the absence of such "monetisation".
That said, I am ok with SOME advertisements to keep the web running. There are two big problems with this:
1. Market investors expect their stock to continue to rise, forever. When it doesn't, they push for more revenue, but instead of adding new products or functionality, they push for ad revenue instead.
2. Ad revenue as a model for revenue generation means that we need more ads, as opposed to building better products. This means that the entire web is inundated with advertisements that overwhelm the overall experience and will continue to get worse and worse over time.
This is a product of investment and lack of reinvestment in new products/function and instead more immediate revenue gains as opposed to slow-and-steady rise in value. Investors want to cash in NOW and not over time and thus we have entered a time where 3 ads precede every video alongside in-video sponsorships and more traditional 15-30 second ads within each. It's absurd.
A basic Fios TV package is $75/month today.
Most streaming services are around $20-$30/month and allow month-to-month plans.
You can fairly easily rotate among 4-5 services, using 2-3 at a time, to keep costs lower than with traditional cable. This works pretty well if you have non-specific TV interests. Where they really get you is with sports - that market is super fragmented and getting most of NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB can cost a fortune.
This is complicated. Piracy sold Comcast broadband Internet connections for many. Napster long predates Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal, when it became a content maker.
So even in the last two decades, looking at one company, it played some, or all, sides of the producer ecosystem, in complex ways, sometimes 200% changing (sticking a minus sign in front of) how it benefits from consumer trends. If you want to analyze any specific thing about cable TV pricing, you're going to need to write a whole dissertation about it. Meanwhile "whatever the consumer is willing to bear" will get you most of the way there.
Old cable TV had about 5 channels that I ever watched and 50 that I did not care about.
A sports network + Netflix is not more than cable. If you subscribe to much more than that, you're probably getting more than a bundled cable deal used to provide.
Plus, I can choose which streaming services I want, and how long I want to pay for them. And everything is on-demand. And there are no ads (except on YTTV).
Personally, I have no problem with ad-funded stuff. The problem that I have is with the spying that comes along with online ads. I can see no way that could ever be acceptable.
It does seem ironic though that on a video about the ad-based internet dying, there are several ads in the page, the video maker in the first segment has a lengthy ad where he praises whatever he is advertising, probably VPN stuff, there is a bunch of begging for paid subscribers in the summary, and comments in the comment section from third party ad spammers directing people to what appears to be MLMs.
Independent websites need to get working on something similar. Whisper is pretty good but extremely CPU intensive, but there are lower cost implementations with acceptable transcriptions out there.
I usually watch the introduction and then skip to the 66% mark, those seem to be the places the actual interesting information is stored on YouTube and its competitors.
We had forums and personal web sites. Weird blogs everywhere you looked. Some semblance of anonymity. A sense of community that wasn't about growing a following.
It was peaceful.
But most problems are fixed just like before.
I feel it is mostly an exuse to not bother doing it the "manly way" but paying a pro to do it.
They had normal blogs before profits entered the picture.
https://www.insiderintelligence.com/topics/storage/02a371186...
It's just that google + fb are increasingly keeping bigger and bigger piece of the pie for themselves, which among others enriches their workers to the detrimment of content creators. Monopoly is to blame here, not a natural death
Ads were pretty comfy in the age of print (there were only so many physical copies people were willing to buy), but now there is effectively unlimited real estate on the internet, people keep throwing up new sites (real and spam) that fight for the pie, and there are always new people looking to make it as influencers or streamers, which are now the most common answer in the US to “what do you want to be when you grow up”. So now an “easy” way to get money has quickly become a race to the bottom.
People spend more on food delivery every year. The profits remain elusive as the cost also climbs.
I agree this would be a better model, but I don’t think it will ever happen. Maybe the Web3 stuff will catch on and this will become sustainable.
Friction matters. Making an online payment is a slow 10 step procedure currently. If it was a single effortless click it would certinaly be used more. Kind of how arcade machines worked
Secondly, if there really was a big opportunity in enabling micro transactions, the main players (PayPal, Visa, etc) would already have some offering available after ~25 years of paying for stuff online.
A micropayment system where you are able to request refunds/dispute payments will break that model.
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Also "Which sites are using Axate?", I don't recognize any of the sites on that list.
- become the gateway for advertisement money
- make it opt-in and share the revenue with users that see the ads.
- make it easy for the users to redistribute this earned money with the content creators they like.
Yeah, you are going to tell me that this could be done without crypto, and I will respond that micropayments are still not solved.
I will accept a criticism about Brave sticking with the token, though - they could've gone with a stabletoken and their business model would seem a lot more legit.
We sold Verizon cell phone them with a 2 year contract which got you around 400 off the price. The cheapest phone with a contract was $29.00
In the mall were kiosks that sold a slight lower model phone with a tmobile contract but it was free. She asked me if we had any free phones, I said no, and she made a noise and walked out.
$30 for something you'll have for two years and we had a better service (verizon coverage) vs free
The Google didn't prove that "ads could work" to make content free. They may have become a big player, if not the biggest player in the ad space, but the proliferation of ad-supported content had more to do with timing than anything else. YouTube was born at a time where video content embedded in webpages could actually work for most users (without downloading something like RealPlayer) and be scaled up. The Google simply bought this business because it was clear to most people that YouTube represented the future, and they had the cash to do it. Not only did they have that cash, but even more cash to throw at it to create their Buffetean moat. There's nothing genius about it. Before YouTube and even Web 2.0, there was not only plenty of free written content but there were other video sites, few if any had anything to do with The Google.
If anything, The Google is responsible for demolishing the ad-based internet. The quality control of their ads used to be so atrocious that of course people started ignoring most of them. Thus, traditional ads became nearly worthless. Their conclusion wasn't to turn away business from outright scams hawking B.S., but that people aren't clicking on ads because the ads aren't relevant to them! A good theory on paper, except it turns out people don't actually like feeling like they're being followed everywhere they go, and it also turns out that when they regularly buy Huggies diapers out of necessity, that doesn't mean they want to immediately see another 100 ads telling them to buy more Huggies.
All that said, I don't think ads have very much to do with the current decline in the quality of the web as a whole. The recent push to shove lots of ads in front of users, namely those that appear frequently within YouTube videos, is just a symptom of companies like The Google struggling to maintain growth when Silicon Valley isn't living life on the fast lane in Easy Street. There's also other factors like search engines failing to scale along with the web, as well as deranking or outright censorship; this is done both at the behest of advertisers but also to chase the widest possible audience.
It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.