Whatever monetization strategy Websites choose to fund their content is up to them. If ads are the best way to support free content then that should be their choice.
In a lot of places Users who don't want ads can subscribe to access ad free content. If that was a superior monetization strategy most websites would adopt it.
Well kinda. The business wanting to market themselves certainly isn't your problem, but the "how does the website monetize itself" is exactly your problem, or rather, it's part of the interaction between the owner of the website you're visiting and you.
You could say "oh, they should just charge for their content", and some definitely do. But the ad model allows for really interesting price discrimination in terms of "who pays for the content". So, if someone buys say.. a Tesla through a website, that conversion subsidizes a million poor kids who don't have to pay anything. In some ways the ad-supported model is the most progressive way to pay content creators - the people who end up paying are the people who spend the most money online.
I don't know if I agree. I like showing that revenue models that are not ad-based can be viable. Maybe we can break the ad-supported business model that has destroyed the web by showing there are alternatives.
Behind a privacy respecting paywall if they want. Let the market decide if their content is worth some dollar amount. Advertisement is never the answer, IMO.
You're right, and you bring up a good point. Almost nothing is free, and there is always a cost. So it makes sense that ads started coming into the web in the beginning, so that people might click them and people who hosted the content might get money that way. However, nowadays, that's not enough. There's usually more than just one ad.
Obviously my comment was the "cynical" view, and looked at a future that may not even come to fruition. There are some benefits too. However, I think that I would prefer that the web be supported in different ways. I haven't thought long and hard about the "best way", but it makes me think of websites that limit how many times you can view their content. Take the New York Times for example. If I remember correctly, they let you view ~10 articles or something, and then from there, you have to pay to see more. That could be a potential way to keep content supported? Let the websites choose themselves how they want to monetize content. Maybe that's better than Google holding accounts for anyone who wants to access the ad free web? I'm not sure what the best solution is.
In the fantasy future I mentioned in the first comment, I could see there being a pay-to-entry model for the web, if the ad free and ad versions of the web started separating and they just "killed" off ads. Then, to access the web in the first place, payment would be required, and would have to be refilled.
This is one reason I love HN - discussions get me thinking. I appreciate your comment, and you're right. All content just can't be free. I guess I just don't like the possibility of the web turning into a pay-to-view model. I'd rather let the sites choose individually, that way, no one has control over it all. But yeah.
Paying for content is pretty much idiotic. You want your content to spread, it costs zero to spread, and so hanging some ads around it is by far the most effective way to monetize.
Right. If there was a monetization model that worked as well as ads, they would do it in a heartbeat. And so would the entire web. Unfortunately that doesn't exist yet...
No one who runs a web site actually likes putting ads on it. They detract from the content, affect usability and it's more overhead. But it's done because it's the only thing that pays for the site's existence.
If a site offers the choice between either funding via "good" (Non tracking, no malware etc) ads, and a fee, then I'm completely happy with their business model.
A lot of sites however, don't do this.
Of course, the reality is that if they _did_ use "good" ads, then the free version wouldn't make enough money (at least not in today's ad market). So either the free version couldn't exist, OR it would need to be subsidized by the paid version being even more expensive.
But this problem could go away if "bad" ads weren't allowed or possible. Because then the price sites get per impression on those ads could go up, as advertisers can't simply pay more for precisely targeted ads.
Now, there are a few risks with this: 1) There is every risk that money on the regular web dries up, as targeting is more effective in apps and other siloed environments. We have already seen this to some extent 2) If online advertising is less efficient because of worse targeting, then traditional advertising will again be relatively more attractive, so some of the money would leave the internet economy that way, returning to traditional advertising.
1 and 2 taken together might mean that a lot of "free" content (and I use scare quotes) will simply disappear. And I think that's a risk we should be willing to take. And not only that: I'd go so far as saying that even if 90% of internet users answered in a survey that "I don't care about tracking ads, I just want free content", that's not something regulators should care about at all.
But what do you see as the alternative for funding sites? The site we're on is funded by (declarative, non-personalized, non-obtrusive) ads. I would rather have ads than paywalls.
Ads are the least bad option. The Web functions best if content is available without paywalls. The Web is about friction-free use, you click a link, you are faced with walls. If we went to a micro-transaction based Web, where every link was behind a payment service, it would destroy crawlability, hamper sharing, and cast a chilling effect on people's behavior with respect to consuming content.
The people producing content do need to eat and datacenters cost money too. You can either turn the entire Web into a giant App Store Mall where you pay for everything on demand, or we can have a free, open web, where 'curl' works, but you have to suffer the annoyance of banner ads and profiling (which people can do anyway with paywalls anyway)
To me, it's a worthwhile tradeoff. I'd rather not see the Web behind a bazillion freemium pay-me links like we have on native.
The real debate should be over how to make ads less annoying, more relevant, more pleasant, and let those who don't want to make the tradeoff make a micro-payment instead to opt-out of ads.
If I could pay $50/year for an ad-free YouTube experience I probably would.
I think charging money (paywall, donations) is the only acceptable way for sites that can't do "big player" ads such as finding sponsors or having native advertising.
Either that or publicly funded. Giving customers the choice to opt into ads is another option – if those ads on provide value, as advertisers like to claim.
I don't think so. If they introduce ads it introduces the opportunity to have perverse incentives. Right now they want to have the best content for the most people. When you make money off ads it is all about page views, content quality is an afterthought.
Imagine a wikipedia where each sub-section is paginated to generate more page views like Salon or Newsweek. This is why I think we should support wikipedia directly, so that wikipedia's goal is to make and awesome experience so that we donate again.
Micropayments have never worked well on the internet, not for technical problems, but likely more that the market isn't really there. I know I just want free stuff and I'm not going to pay to read a news article or blog post no matter how well written or researched.
So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, because many of the content producers and curators won't waste their time for no return.
I don't like ads, but I like my free content, and ads are an acceptable way of financing it.
Edit: I get that some of you really don't like ads, but the quality of comments here is abysmal. You guys are living in some kind of dreamland if you think you can just kill of advertising and not lose something in the trade off (PS imagine a world with no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) I honestly expect more intelligent commentary from HN, consider both sides of your argument.
Ads enabling free online content is a bit of a glazier's fallacy. Yes, when ads are an option most content producers will be funded by ads. it's simple to implement and does not require end user consent but as soon as the degenerate strategy is removed new strategies become viable such as micro-payments.
I disagree with your conclusion. I am familiar with several sites who have no problem taking in significant ad revenue on content websites. The problem is that you can't just dump random ads on a site and expect that to work, it takes a lot of effort. The best ads tends to be curated to the point of being recommendations basically, but that may or may not work for every site.
Ads are not the only method for monetizing content, they are merely the laziest.
Content makers have been using the web for over two decades, and figuring out how to do it profitably as well. There are innumerable models for doing it, but it requires putting in the leg work to actually care about how your work is supported. Sure it's seductive to think that someone working in some "noble" pursuit should be able to avoid having to do that, but that's not really true of anyone anywhere, why should it be true of content makers?
My main argument against paying for web content is that people who care about ads probably don't want to see them at all. What's the use to pay for a few sites but others don't offer a pay model and still molest and track you? A better model would be to pay the ad networks which in turn give money to the website operators (similar to those music flats) but I think that's unlikely to happen.
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