> We need publishers to be able to make money from content
Do we? For some types of content maybe but for others it will only attract people who are only there to make money and won't care about quality if they can use tricks to get content in front of viewers instead of better content that was made available for free by people actually interested in the topic.
I some way, being able to monetize websites is THE cause for the drop of quality in the web. Maybe other forms of monetizaition might provide slightly better incentives than ads but the core problem remains - when there's money to be made, the will be people trying to make it without regards to anything else.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization?
The problem I see is that there's just too much supply compared to demand, thus the price of content is literally zero. Even the monetization models that are (still) available are on borrowed time.
Ultimately there's easy way to profit off something that is already plentiful and that there's a never-ending stream of passionate people happy to produce said content altruistically out there.
> No business model that involves selling content can get around a fundamental fact: Content can only be consistently good if its creators can make a living from it.
Not really. And this is probably why the 'professional' media is having so much trouble.
Because there are lots of people out there who are willing to provide high quality for free on a regular basis, and it makes people hesitant to spend money on the same from those trying to sell it.
All that high quality content being available for free is exactly why written content has so little value any more and why platforms can't monetise it. Because there will always be people willing to provide their work for less money than you.
I'm not sure. the main problem with the net isn't that you can't make enough for good writing using ads - but that it's extremely easy to copy someone else's hard work, maybe package with clickbait and make more money.
And i suspect that even when money would be involved, it may still make sense to create content using someone else's hard work.
> If it’s no longer feasible to create such high quality content, it won’t magic itself into existence on its own. It’ll all be just crap and slop in a few years.
Except it kind of does. Almost all high-quality free content on the Internet has been made by hobbyists just for the sake of doing it, or as some kind of expense (marketing budget, government spending). The free content is not supposed to make money. An honest way of making money with content is putting up a paywall. Monetizing free content creates a conflict of interest, as optimizing value to publisher pulls it in opposite direction than optimizing for value to consumer. Can't save both masters, and all. That's why it's effectively a bullet-proof heuristic, that the more monetization you see on some free content, the more wrong and more shit it is.
Put another way, monetizing the audience is the hallmark of slop.
> Frankly, I want less commercial content. I want to read and watch stuff put out by hobbyists, people who are excited by what they're doing, who would do it without compensation anyway.
The fact that someone would do it without compensation doesn't mean that if they do get compensation they wouldn't spend more time on it. It's precisely for hobbyist-level stuff where web monetization can really shine.
>> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content. There's got to be a better way than cobbling together five platforms under a Patreon account, giving all of them 10-50% along the way.
I'll tell you how: pay-per-view content
But don't do it by individual silos. I want a service where I pay monthly, say, $50, and I can go to ANY content to get what I need: Bloomberg, WSJ, wikipedia, Medium, CommonSenseMedia, Gamespot, whatever. Stop forcing me to view these sites daily to maximize my return (ie. newspapers). I want ala cart that pulls from a common fund. I don't want to sign up for 20 different sites with recurring fees that I have to remember to cancel when I don't use it anymore. Anyone can put what they want in ($5, $50, $100) and the premium content pulls from that. Per article. Per visit. Per 5 requests, whatever.
> In my opinion, the solution lies in better content curation tools. None of this would be a problem if search engines surfaced quality content once in a while.
Agreed!
Unsurprisingly, search engines funded by advertisers surface content which is effective at serving ads, rather than quality content. Do you see how this might be a problem?
> Affiliate marketing is a deal with the devil, but it's still a deal worth making. They let me work full time on building a useful resource and offering it for free. I can work with dignity, without having to beg for money, and still without selling out.
> It's unfair to demand all costs from content generation to hosting to be borne by the "owners."
That's, like, your opinion... man...!
> For the web to work better, we need more aligned incentives, not to disregard the understandable demand of creators of websites and services to get somehow compensated.
I disagree. I think of the web and the internet like art. Nearly all of the (arguably) best art was produced without compensation.
> Also, even when websites are built without any intention of monetization, there are still goals which the creators want to achieve.
Yes, but financial gain shouldn't be the primary motivator. When it is then it has a tendency to corrupt everything.
> Lots of people are making all kinds of websites.
> We need better ways to pay for content. Preferably one which rewards good content. Today everything is clickbait and the idea to pay for clickbait is extremely off putting to me.
That's garbage. The NYT isn't clickbait. Neither is WaPo, BBC, NPR, Reuters, AFP and many others. If you want more tech focused content there is The Information, Stratechery, Pando Daily.
For nearly all of those there is an easy way to pay, or someone else is paying on your behalf.
There is not. There are, however, many even worse ways to finance the web, as the article says.
Money has to come from somewhere. Either you the reader pay for content--which users have proven overwhelmingly unwilling to do--or your advertising views pay for content. I don't like it either, but polite, non-disruptive ads are the best possible solution. We need to push content and advertising provides to insult on those and only those.
> Their proceeds allow websites to exist and motive entrepreneurs to create them in the first place.
The desperation about monetising ads usually makes them crappy website creators. They would just fill pages with low quality articles propped up by SEO. I prefer the sources that don't earn money on advertising for quality of content.
>I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment.
The thing is, historically speaking this kind of content has been free. The goal of the world wide web was to provide people with the ability to publish for themselves, and it was a smash hit success because it turned out that when you give people the ability to publish their work, they may only write two things in their entire life but they care so much about those things they're a lot higher quality than what you get out of forbes today.
With a whole internet full of people only writing (or filming, or recording, or coding, or whatever) one or two things, there's a world of fantastic content out there. Lots of it is in old forums, some of it has been monitized by ads (youtube), but most of it is still free as the authors intended.
But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along, and with it came the concept of clickbait. Quality took a dive and formerly free content got jailed up behind paywalls or plastered with ads. The amazing conceit was that the people who did this think because they did the work, they deserve to get paid. It never crosses their mind that we might wish they hadn't done the work in the first place.
The honest truth is, I'm tired of low quality content too, so I'm blocking ads to try and kill of the companies making it.
> How can good content be monetized in a way that allows it to remain independent and not succumb to warping its content to feed that monetization? How can it be audience driven instead? Is such a thing even possible? Right now good monetization strategies beget bad content.
I don't think such a thing is possible in present society. As you kind of get to, there are two audiences: The people for whom your content is useful, and the people for whom your platform can make money. Appeasing the latter will invariably ruin your content, but their financial resources dwarf the former's, and they're more than happy to use those resources, since the result is that they end up with more.
You would need to create an ecosystem that rewards public good more than private capital. To do that, you would have to start with an enormous amount of capital, and be willing to essentially give it away.
In theory, that's what government is for. In practice... not so much.
(edit: my cat submitted this post half-finished. I've completed it now.)
> The market favors clickbait, not necessarily truth.
This seems super related to the lack of a decent way to pay for one-off articles and the need to show ads. If there were a medium between adware and a $10/month subscription, I firmly believe the articles would bulk up again. Gaming for page views necessarily trends towards zero content per page view. Competing for money itself would lead to some sort of qualitative difference in content--a huge win for consumers.
> You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable.
Not necessarily. There is a threshold of value that must be met to make people pay directly for it. For example I run a niche site that gets 5K uniques each month - clearly I'm providing some value - but I doubt that what I provide is enough to make people pay me directly. Ads are the most effective way of solve that problem: reward content producers that can't meet that threshold but still add some value.
> Bloggers post content which is sold to readers, and readers can profit by promoting the good content to other people.
One of the problems with this model is that the incentive for sharing content is to get paid, rather than to share genuinely good content. The system will be gamed by people who are sharing as much as possible without regard for quality.
At the risk of sounding elitist, the types of people you want sharing your material are not the same types of people who will be excited about earning a few cents by sharing an article.
> This model has proven to work, and it is now time to bring this model to the greater online community.
This model (paying for access to content) is already available to the greater online community in the form of paywalls. They are not popular unless the content is very good and can not be accessed elsewhere.
> Good content is a commodity worth paying for.
I agree with this, but who is paying? It appears that you will buy articles from bloggers and pay readers to promote them. So where does the money come from?
Do we? For some types of content maybe but for others it will only attract people who are only there to make money and won't care about quality if they can use tricks to get content in front of viewers instead of better content that was made available for free by people actually interested in the topic.
I some way, being able to monetize websites is THE cause for the drop of quality in the web. Maybe other forms of monetizaition might provide slightly better incentives than ads but the core problem remains - when there's money to be made, the will be people trying to make it without regards to anything else.
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