Agreed; so figuring out how to sustainably meet (and ideally exceed) people's basic needs is important to safeguard content production.
Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
Free content will continue to survive, some people simply enjoy creating and helping others and quite a lot of content is in the public domain. There are also many services which are supported by paying customers and also offer a free tier. If not, there's always open source.
All in all, I don't think much will be lost. We have such an abundance of content, from stories to music, graphics and movies, that we would need lifetimes to enjoy it.
The advertising industry is not the benefactor that you're trying to paint them as, just a bunch of people trying to make a buck by exploiting others in a legal way. And soon, some of those ways will not be legal any more.
You can have free without ads if the consumers shoulder the distrubtion themselves. Decentralized p2p content distribution is the key. The more people consume want it the more will contribute resources.
In order to maintain access to (currently) free services without making one's computer unusable.
The problem I see is that the processing and bandwidth used by advertising are currently "as much as advertisers can get away with" and I think it's leading to a tragedy of the commons.
But I see no need to eliminate ads and free services either. There just needs to be a cap enforced on the resources used.
I've actually made this observation myself. Some products will be consumed by a wide audience, making them more like media. Some products will provide a targeted service, making them more like traditional software.
It's crazy to think either that all internet services will tend to free, or that no startups can offer services for free. Like most things in life, the sustainability point is somewhere in between.
Free is not dead and it never will be. Going forward people will always be able to distribute information for a negligible cost and many will chose to do so freely. From a business perspective the advertising business model is the only one that has had any widespread success for content and there aren't a lot of reasons to see this changing.
I definitely agree that there will always be and should be services that are free while others that are paid.
However, I think what we saw in the last 5 years was an unhealthy focus on free where products that people may have been willing to pay for were driven to free because they were either subsidized by VC dollars, subsidized by cash cow business like Google's search, or eventual acquisitions by acquirers not necessarily looking for sustainable businesses. This may well have eroded a lot of potential value in that consumers have gotten used to these services being free and will likely not be willing to pay for them in the future.
I think lots of smart people with lots of energy have spent lots of time trying to solve this problem with respect to getting customers and keeping them. It's a hard hard problem. Subscription supporting the free-with-ads IMHO seems to be the sweet spot.
Yes, I suspect the people who can afford to pay for these services are exactly the people the advertisers are targeting. Without them the free part of the model would fall apart.
That's true -- but only so far as absolute statements are usually wrong at the fringes. But the simple-minded retort that "other people will provide content for free, so you will too" is laughable.
Pay models are clearly going to become much more important, if only because the cost of good content isn't going down, while ad rates are dropping like a rock. Consider the fact that it's effectively impossible to make someone look at your ad on the internet (it's only a matter of time before ad-blockers become common), and it's pretty clear that the ad-supported internet model is on the wane.
Plenty of services were free prior to commercialization of the web because they generated nom-monetary value (community, knowledge, etc.). Plenty of creators and artists also make money directly via donations (Patreon, etc.). I'm not sure we need the existing ad model for either free content or to make money on the internet.
As in, should most web content be free if more and more people are declining to have display advertising render properly in their browser? It can't be at scale and consistently without a revenue engine of some kind.
>If someone successfully exploited the web and created a business relying on ads, that's fine, but he don't have an implicit right for that. Internet users are not obliged to display data he provides through http the way the creator expects.
No, they're not. As this trend continues, the assumption that underwrites a lot of free content will stop being nearly as true. When the assumption stops being accurate, that business model fails, and more free 'content' winds up being ads gussied up as content. This is not exactly what the visionaries of the web had in mind, but them's the breaks.
In print, there are free publications handed out on street corners and in boxes. They tend to have low ad rates because the distribution is unverifiable. On cable, ad rates are still super-high, because the distribution is verifiable, and the cable networks have all the data they need about you on your cable bill + viewership surveys to aggregate for sale to advertisers.
What free services are you using that aren't ad supported? You don't use Facebook or visit any major site (without a subscription)?
And value isn't determined by whether you think it's essential or not but your actions in using it. If you're consuming content/services, then you're getting value.
No one seems to agree with you. Everyone wants online and mobile content for free, and very few care how it happens. So either someone else pays for it (advertisers) or those people become the product (selling their data to marketers). I don't see that attitude ever changing, but I do anticipate traditional approaches to paying for content getting more intrusive or slowly disappearing in favor of other models.
Conclusion: you don't actually intend to pay anything but somehow think freeloading should be respected. Quality content doesn't come for free: if you valued Ars' content either unobtrusive ads or $5/month are good options for ensuring that they'll be there next year.
Ya people want their cake and eat it too. Or we want a free and open internet and that means ads or we really don’t want ads and that means to the app/platform/creator/website to go private and with a paywall. It will never be sustainable to have something free out there without ads and quality. Quality in anything won’t just come out of nowhere when it require investment, sweat and tears.
"It's always interesting to me when people build on top of a service that is free with no guarantee of it existing in the future."
1. free
2. no guarantees
Think of a web site that is free to access, e.g., one that lets a user query a web crawl or a database of user-submitted personal photos, that also sells ads to anyone wanting to buy.
"Customers" are allowed to buy ads, but how far into the future?
Meanwhile, I don't think consumer expectation of free service is likely to change, and expect there's a market for ad-free reimplementations of existing services.
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