
Advertising cannot maintain the Internet - ultrasociality
http://evonomics.com/advertising-cannot-maintain-internet-heres-solution/
======
teknopaul
Article treats online journalism as "the Internet". The Internet is fine, the
web is fine, online journalism has problems. What do they expect after a
couple of years of the worst journalism the world has seen. Clickbait is not
viable, well good riddance. Write something factual that we don't know
instead. When journalism reports facts again in a manner that treats us like
adults people might read it.

They might trust the economic advice along side the article too. But when have
newspapers ever taken the stance that advertising should be informational and
beneficial for the user. If people don't click it's not just the article that
is inappropriate, the advert is too.

~~~
afarrell
> people might read it

But will people pay for it? You cannot pay your rent or student loans with
exposure.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Plenty of people pay for the FT, New York _Times_ , Economist, New Yorker,
Atlantic, _et cetera_. One can't complain about click bait/advertising _and_
paywalls.

~~~
jasode
_> Plenty of people pay for the ..._

It is true that many pay for digital subscriptions but I did not interpret the
_" will people pay for it?"_ as just a non-zero number of subscribers.

Instead, _" will people pay for it?"_ is often interpreted as shorthand for
"would _enough_ people pay _enough_ money to make it economically viable?"
(E.g. good salaries for journalists, strong profits for the publisher, etc.)

Yes, those websites you mentioned are attracting paying subscribers to avoid
paywalls but as far as I can tell, _nobody_ is making significant profits from
it. For example, NYT digital subscriptions are growing -- and ad revenue from
online is growing -- but the profits (if any) are not replacing the lost
profits from traditional print ads. For online subscriptions, many publishers
are losing money or barely breaking even. No newspaper including NYT has
solved the economic puzzle of digital subscriptions bringing the type of money
that 1990s paper classifieds + ads brought. So far, the answer to _" will
people pay for it?"_ appears to be _" no"_.

From what I can tell, the kind of publishing that works very well on
subscriptions is industry-specific for a specialized audience. For example,
the NationalJournal (costs $7000 to $25000) for following blow-by-blow
legislation in Washington DC or Gartner Group (~$20k/yr) for business analysis
news. On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is
replicated on too many other free sources. As a result, mainstream publishing
will always depend more on heavy-handed advertising rather than subscriptions
for the majority of revenue.

~~~
Bartweiss
> On the other hand, the mass audience journalism like NYT and USAToday is
> replicated on too many other free sources.

This is huge. For a story that anyone can cover ("Cat Stuck in Tree!"),
there's mass-market competition where a hundred players can run their own
versions of the same story. If one of those players is willing to work for
free (or Reddit karma, or 'exposure', or whatever else), then the value of
that information drops to ~$0.

Mass market journals used to get by on marginal costs, but those are ~0 too
now. What they have left to offer is writing quality and accuracy, but its
increasingly looking like those aren't worth what they cost. And the quality
dilution of high-end journalism has made the problem worse, by driving
journalists into ever-more-direct competition with the free sources they can't
possibly outprice.

------
boznz
I pay my ISP $70/month for a home internet connection.

I pay my mobile provider $40/month for 2GB Data

I pay $100/Yr to a hosting service for my ad-free web site and email for my
business which will always be there while my business is running (as will the
ad-free web sites of most other businesses I know of).

In addition to the above I pay various donations and subscriptions to certain
sites I like and buy almost exclusively on line.

It seems to me there is plenty of money to keep the internet going without
advertising.

To the multitude of news/media/blogs/click-bait sites duplicating the same
content and that rely on advertising for their business model then good luck
to you all, unobtrusive advertising was and still is ok with me, but because
of the bad-apples it is now in your face and I ad-block everything.

~~~
alwaysdownvoted
I'll bet a lot of folks would keep paying those prices even if all they did
was use email. I'll bet further that is still the _main_ reason many people
have a home internet connection. That and internet banking, etc.

Things subsidized by ads like YouTube and myriad other distractions are a
bonus. If they were to disappear no one would be dropping their internet
connection. Trust me, with bandwdth as it is, free video is not going to
disappear.

All things considered I think _non-commercial_ websites like Wikipedia or
Internet Archive are actually the most valuable ones. And even without ads
they will not disappear because passionate dedicated people create them for
non-commercial reasons. And the cost for the individual to store data and
publish online keeps decreasing.

The internet has heaps of inherent value that has nothing to do with
advertising. Especially with today's computing power and bandwidth. It's like
long distance calling anywhere in the world for a set monthly fee. And anyone
can write software to send and receive over the network. Sign me up. For life.

Anyone who used the internet in the late 80's early 90's before commercial
activity was permitted, when bandwidth was limited and expensive, knows this.

By all means argue for ads if it's your cash cow - try you best to save your
golden goose, but spare us the absurd arguments that ads are what give the
internet value.

~~~
ktRolster
_but spare us the absurd arguments that ads are what give the internet value._

Indeed. Some would argue they reduce the value of the internet.

------
pmontra
> Examine this truism — that you would never pay a nickel for a New York Times
> article that you enjoyed. What? Ten minutes of your time isn’t worth five
> cents?

Some questions:

\- Do I have to pay in advance, before knowing that I enjoyed an article?

\- How would I feel skimming in 30 seconds through an article that I had to
pay for and move on to the next one? This is something I do routinely. Would I
keep paying for that or would I totally skip paid-for articles?

\- Why should I pay for that NYT article and not for a free one from Reuters
with about the same content? Should we differentiate between plain news,
opinions, investigative journalism?

I understand that somebody writing a blog gets paid by something else and the
journalist gets paid by that very article, but the journalist is competing for
reader time (time, not news) with so many other things, from instant messaging
to casual browsing.

To answer the question... 100k readers * 5 cents = 5k. Too much or too little?
Did the article took a hour, a day, a month, a year to write? If it's a hour,
no way, even 1 cent would be too much. If it's a month it's spot on, maybe
even cheap. But competition from free news, even the ones reporting on that
article, is hard to beat.

~~~
jmhnilbog
Isn't the value of the article completely divorced from the time it took to
write it? (I don't pay more for a movie that took five years to make than one
that took a week.)

News is one of the more obvious examples that things become less valuable as
more people have access. If I am the only person in a room to have read an
article, I am more interesting at a party. If everyone read it, I might as
well be discussing the weather. If I find out about an earnings report a
microsecond before other investors, that news is much more valuable to me than
it is to them.

Journalists also have to deal with instances where weeks of effort failt to
uncover anything worth writing about. The patron/artist model might be the
only way to support individual journalists. It might turn out that journalism
looks a LOT like private investigation or corporate espionage.

------
sna1l
A lot of people not in the Hacker News/tech world will definitely won't want
to pay for internet content. People grew up with the internet being free,
which alone will make most people extremely hesitant to pay for content.
People LIKE the free crap content on the web. There is a reason websites like
Buzzfeed, upworthy, <fill in click baity website here> have become popular.

~~~
jakub_g
I grew up accustomed to not paying for stuff because 1) it was free 2) I had
no money.

Now with the quality of stuff going downway spiral and my dev salary allowing
me to pay, I could be potentially paying for quality content if a good,
seamless micropayments standard emerged.

I think ideal smooth, frictionless micropayments solution could be integrated
on the browser level. It is hard a problem due to UX considerations, fraud
(clickjacking) etc. but imagine this:

There's a UI control built-in with the browser that is a button like 'pay
0.05$ for this article' (amount and some payment metadata embedded in the HTML
page). The payment method is controlled somehow by the browser. On Android it
caould be maybe integrated with Play Store payments, which already allows me
e.g. to add a fee to my ISP phone/internet invoice.

For security, the payments would not be instant, but require an interaction
with a browser built-in special page that lists to whom you pay how much and
make you verify/correct it ('will pay 0.30c to NYT for this and that article
and 0.15c to WSJ for that, proceed?'). You will get a notification from
browser once in a while.

With such model it is voluntary micropayments though which may not seduce big
players though.

~~~
x0x0
$.05 as the author mentions is a ludicrous sum; less than a penny (your 0.3
cent or 0.15c!) is a laughably small sum, and I doubt sustainable (it doesn't
take much fraud to eat all your profits when you make so little per user.
Think Google's customer service is horrible? Just wait...) If a customer
service agent costs $25/hour all in (terrible wages, desk, taxes), every hour
they clock in consumes the profit from 500 articles at $0.05 per, even before
any other costs.

Consider the nyt sells their cheapest digital subscription for $0.60/day. Why
on earth should they price articles for less than that, considering you
probably aren't going to read an article every day? They certainly don't want
to cannibalize their subscribers already paying $0.60/day. And note that
keeping eg a reporter in Egypt is expensive.

Further, even if you reply that they're only getting 5 cents for the ads you
see (they get more: probably $100+ cpms for pmp ads), they can't afford to
trade one-for-one: the people most likely to pay not to see ads are often the
ones who advertisers most want to advertise to. ie people with disposable
income.

I'd imagine the NYT would need $2+ per article for the economics to work for
them. And quite possibly much more.

~~~
douche
$2 an article would be ludicrous, when you can get the dead-tree version of
the whole paper delivered to your doorstep for a dollar a day.

~~~
x0x0
You conflate a subscriber who pays $450/year with a person buying a one-off
with no further obligation. A profitable business will charge them wildly
different unit prices. Much like itunes will sell you a song for $1.29 each
and spotify will charge you $5/mo for unlimited music.

I'd charge $5+ for the article. Again, you also have to avoid cannibalizing
subscription revenue.

~~~
douche
It still doesn't really make any sense. I bought the Grantland Quarterly (RIP,
Grantland), for $20, and it's a hard-bound book with ~35 articles in it. $.57
per article, and that's high-quality, longform pieces.

$5 will almost buy a paperback book of several hundred pages that will keep
you occupied for at least a day or two.

Text is cheap

~~~
x0x0
Not everyone can be a dilettante's hobby project financially supported by
espn. You don't think Grantland actually made money do you?

------
gcb0
author is clueless about online everything.

just like I'm now commenting that he's wrong, if this gets enough votes,
should he sends the proceeds of the article to me?

internet content now is forums, user generated videos, etc. useless
entertainment journalism is dead not because advertisement can't pay the bill.
because it's dead.

------
ares2012
The "End of Advertising" on the web is something I hear fairly often, and the
argument that paying for content is the only solution follows soon after.
Unfortunately, both history and all of our data suggests otherwise.

For example, the mobile app ecosystem (the only large scale experiment we've
run in online media since the web) started with a pay-for-use business model
in the form of paid apps. While this worked for a while, it quickly gave way
to free apps supported by advertising or other business models. Today, unless
you are a game, it is almost impossible to build a business using pay-for-use
exclusively. Reversing to a free model was forced by the low cost of entry
into the market and resulting commoditization of mobile apps. You can't charge
for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free.

I'm not a huge supporter of online ads and I do think the industry needs to
improve. However, we continue to see that it is the only stable economic model
for online media considering the volume and diversity the model needs to
cover. Until someone shows something else working at scale, let's not throw
away the only thing that is working.

~~~
onion2k
_You can 't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for
free._

If that's true, and at the same time people dislike adverts enough that a
significant proportion will refuse to interact with them or even block them,
then the market won't generate enough money to pay for the production of those
apps. In the short term people will pay to make those apps by subsidising them
with investment money (and lose it all if they don't make any money back), but
in the long term we simply won't have people making the apps.

At that point the market will be underserved, customers who have a demand for
the product will start to pay, and the pay-for business model starts working,
driven by revenue rather than DAUs and ad impressions.

There's no reason to believe the end for advertising means the end of media.
There is a demand for the products, and suppliers will continue to provide
such products. What's needed is a working business model that both sides of
the market are happy with. That doesn't _appear_ to be advertising-lead.

~~~
stevesearer
I'd be interested in your feedback on my site (in my profile).

It is advertising-driven but I maintain some standards which my readers have
appreciated: ads must relevant, not animated, and they are self-hosted. At
this point I don't think advertisers have had any issues with those rules and
because of my repeat customers, I believe they get the results they are
looking for.

It might be possible to charge readers, but I'm more interested in trying out
good advertising practices instead.

~~~
tombrossman
Not OP but I'm privacy conscious and have multiple restrictive add-ons
installed in Firefox so I had a look. Here's a screenshot of how your most
recent article appears with Firefox + uBlock Origin + NoScript + Privacy
Badger - not bad! -
[https://i.imgur.com/FhH0vkx.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/FhH0vkx.jpg)

The site loaded very quickly and the top menu worked fine with JavaScript
disabled. The ads in the right sidebar aren't explicitly marked as ads but
it's pretty obvious what they are. I don't mind visiting a site like this and
seeing a mix of original content and ads, all of which are relevant.

If more sites followed you lead here, more people like me would see ads. And
if they upped their technical game and used server logging to measure visits
instead of outsourcing it to third-party analytics providers, they would have
a more complete picture of who is visiting their site.

------
thebigspacefuck
Here is an idea. We put a hidden tag on pages that don't use ads for support,
and couple it with a browser extension that would save that tag information
over the period of a month. The extension would log how long you spent
actively on that tagged page. At the end of the month you could pay what you
choose, say $10, and it could subdivide that $10 based on time spent on a
page, and factors like page type (for instance if you only want to support
small blogs or news sites). This allows people to vote on content with their
dollars. They don't have to click donate on every page and they keep their
donations in their budget.

~~~
j_s
A couple browser extensions Google'd:

[https://www.syndicoin.co/](https://www.syndicoin.co/)

[http://protip.is/](http://protip.is/)

~~~
thebigspacefuck
Neat! That's exactly what I was thinking of.

------
Ileca
I am always comforting myself by thinking that idiots who want to tweak my
brain were throwing a lot of bucks to display ads blocked by my adblock
extension. I am more concerned about how they track us to not display ads, in
fact...

I don't remember the last time I saw an ad against my will, and if I actually
saw one, I think my brain filtered it just by the power of my revulsion. That
said, I am aware that it works at a subconscious level not always like you
want but the antidote is to fully use conscious processes in suspicious mode
when buying something, isn't it?

So, let them pay the internet? If not, you really need your product to have a
value that exceed its digital form, like you can see with Steam who appeal to
players by connecting games to social. Or you need to be really pedagogic and
make the purchase an active act of support.

Blendle is on the right direction with centralization + micro-payments but it
should add a social layer where users could build another public identity with
their stories listings, allowing them to comment, creating thematic feeds,
make them addicted with superficial achievements, like I said: extra value
other than just paying for something digital. I am not saying that's what I
want.

------
adrianratnapala
I was a bit disappointed. From the headline I thought it was an argument about
why the ad-fueled internet is economically unstastainable. Instead Brin is
mainly repeating the "moral" case against it while making some (reasonable)
suggestions about why micropayments are not so impossible after all.

The later point might be right, but only likely to be tested if there is an
advertising bust. At least Brin links to this
([http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm](http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm)).

------
zer00eyz
>Then why have all attempts at commercializing micro-payments failed? I assert
that MP constitutes an inherently different market realm, with unique problems
and incentives that demand innovative solutions, empowering payment-for-
content by individuals surfing the web.

There is a pretty simple reason for this: All the embedded players (credit
card processors, and banks) don't have the desire to deal with the extremely
high volume and low (near zero) margin business this would create for them.

Institutions who produce content aren't high on MOST users list of places to
give money to when there are plenty of ways to get said product for FREE...
You want me to give you $5 today so I can spend $0.03 of it on some article.
Maybe I forget about it (good for you) or you loose it (bad for me) and then I
have to fight to get it fixed (making this a money loosing proposition on both
sides).

The greed and avarice, of content producers and advertisers, destroyed what
could have been a workable solution (ads), I have no faith that any
micropayment platform or what ever else you can cook up is going to work
unless it puts USERS FIRST.

~~~
maroonblazer
>The greed and avarice, of content producers and advertisers, destroyed what
could have been a workable solution (ads)...

I understand how content producers can be blamed for the state of internet
advertising but I don't understand why the advertisers are also implicated.
It's the content producers who manufacture and sell the advertising product.
If an advertiser doesn't buy the product his competitor will.

~~~
zer00eyz
Totally valid question:

How does malware get into ad's, the publishers didn't put it there:
[http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-
rea...](http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-
turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware)

Meanwhile the industry itself calls ad blocking "immoral":
[http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-chief-blasts-
adblo...](http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-chief-blasts-adblock-plus-
immoral-mendacious-coven-techie-wannabes-169194)

There is this gem linked from the article where some of them admit it might be
their fault: [http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-pivots-ad-
blocking...](http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-pivots-ad-blocking-and-
issues-mea-culpa-we-messed-167583)

------
Mendenhall
Evolve or die. Besides, the net exploded in popularity before ads became
popular on it, they are not needed at all.

If you cant figure out how to make money off the net without using ads, you
have bigger problems.

------
sliken
What I've always wondered. Why do so many sites show TONS of ads likely making
incredibly small amounts of money from my eyeballs?

Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely
disable ads?

Google has some program like this for awhile anyways, but they never promised
zero ads, just less.

~~~
meric
They do this with mobile phone apps. ~$2 for an app with no ads, or use the
free, "lite" version with ads.

~~~
bigbugbag
Which is very different from a website.

------
skoczymroczny
Internet has worked before the age of widespread advertising. It will prevail.
It might just not be the internet we are having right now. Perhaps it's time
to go back to p2p services, simple lightweight websites hosted from home.

------
mark_l_watson
A nice article, but David only posted the first half with a teaser at the end.
evonomics looks like a nice site, browsing the table of contents.

Google aggregates small $1 charity donations in One a Day, and then
periodically bills you for a few weeks worth of donations. I don't see why
individual companys couldn't provide the same with micro-payments if they were
federated so one service would allow people to micro pay on any site supported
by a federated partner.

~~~
ktRolster
Google has a program like that:
[https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/](https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/)

~~~
educar
It doesn't work the way you think it does.

------
lottin
It's basic economics. All else equal, an increase in the supply of a good
drives its price down. In the past, journalists had a monopoly on journalism.
Nowadays, anyone can write a piece of journalism and publish it, which means
now we have a larger supply and lower prices. How lower? Apparently, close to
zero, since a lot of people are willing to provide content for free. It turns
out creating content is something that can be fun.

~~~
raarts
"Creating content" is not the same as journalism. The Web as it stands now is
generally low quality. It remains to be seen if people are willing to pay more
for higher quality.

~~~
orbifold
The problem is even journalism in main stream print media is often of low
quality. This just not obvious to most people because they tend to not have
domain knowledge about the things that journalists usually write about. But
judging from how they report on things related to physics and mathematics, my
guess is they are equally uninformed and imprecise, when it comes to foreign
policy, financial or economic news. The truly competent people in those fields
do not become journalists anyways.

------
fauigerzigerk
_What? Ten minutes of your time isn’t worth five cents? What aggravates users
about current pay-for-use methods is not cost, but hassle of transaction._

That is in fact the main fallacy. I "read" about 50 articles per day. That's
18250 per year. If my attention is worth $100 per year and half of that goes
towards articles I read, that's not 5 cents per article but 0.27 cents.

------
lucaspiller
Are there any good donation platforms that are easy for both an end user and a
publisher to implement? At the end of the article is a donation section, but
instead of a simple 'donate 5c' button it asks for my personal details,
defaults to making me donate X/month and then finally redirects me to PayPal.

------
sunstone
This problem is waiting for the Netflix of publishing.

Some people think .05 per article is low when Netflix provides unlimited
movies for $10/mo.

Netflix recognizes that the cost of distribution has dropped out of sight.
Publishing needs to do the same.

------
dasil003
I have no idea what the proposed "secret sauce" will be, and the article
touches on many good point, but here's the big unavoidable problem: this is
all wishful thinking.

Usable micropayments and customers paying for online articles will not emerge
simply as a result of sufficient hand-wringing. What will make micropayments
happen isnot disenfranchised journalists or charity thereupon by techno-
utopians. Instead it will come from something with much different and forward-
looking goals, like Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually has the properties to make
micropayments viable in a way that anything resembling traditional economic
payments simply cannot because of overhead (especially considering fraud).
However Bitcoin still has to cross the chasm to mainstream usage before we can
even dream of such benefits trickling down to online journalism, and I doubt
it will because of the next problem...

Content is cheap! The article misattributes the state of online content as
caused by the "original sin" of starting advertising, as if that decision
happened in a vacuum. But of course from the very beginning the web
dramatically lowered the cost of publishing and distribution. Initially there
was at least a technical barrier to entry, but that has come down over time as
well to the current state of Medium, Facebook, Instagram. The reason people
expect free content is not because someone decided it had to be ad-supported,
but because having an audience is the first step towards any type of
monetization. Once you have an audience you can leverage it in all sorts of
ways, some involving charging (eg. The Economist) and some involving
branding/funnel-building (eg. Signal vs. Noise), but most people do not, and
therefore there will always be a stream of people ready to put out free
content just to get noticed.

The fact that this dynamic is killing journalism as we know it is not going to
change any incentives or behavior. It's not enough to say "all we need is X to
save journalism", you have to explain who is going to build X, why they will
do it, and why will users adopt it. I don't believe that enough people are
bothered by the current state of affairs that getting rid of advertising, or
paying journalists directly will resonate in any meaningful way. That doesn't
mean people won't pay for content—obviously they _do_ pay for content—but you
have to give them something they think is worth paying for. That's not to take
anything away from ambitious attempts at alternative funding methods, but
fighting against the fundamental market dynamics is not the way to do it, you
have to come up with ideas and concepts that resonate with current trends and
modes of thinking.

~~~
drjesusphd
Dies bitcoin work as a micropayment service when the miner's fee for each
transaction is itself a micropayment of about the same order?

------
tomrod
I've believed this for many years. Intrusive advertising is a cost to content
consumers, one that they can circumvent by passively or actively ignoring.

------
bnolsen
the article wa full of advertising that ground my poor ideapad to a halt. had
to close the page before i could read it all.

------
macawfish
... at worst, advertising is nothing but a tax on the quality of the internet

------
bhz
[Comment hidden - Please pay $1.50 to read this comment.]

------
awinter-py
this is by scifi author david brin! should have put that in the title. scifi
authors have opinions that are 30% valid, 130% interesting, 0% status quo.

------
eva1984
Money can maintain. People need to PAY.

