
The web's original sin - Isofarro
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2016/03/the_webs_origin.html
======
Terr_
> Free content entitlement, that’s what.

From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen. Sure,
everyone still pays for the bytes, but consider how much _less_ it costs, per-
viewer, to distribute a paragraph on the web versus printed on paper.

Want to communicate quickly and cheaply, without paying for stamps or
surcharges for expedited delivery? E-mail.

Can't find a publisher willing to take a golden-master and create thousands of
CD-ROMs? Sell your own software online.

> This sounds sober and serious, but it omits one crucial clause: the people
> who create free online content expect to get paid.

The real issue is that there are _middlemen_ who promise "I will convert your
consumer-visits to cash" that also expect to be paid. Many happen to be ad-
networks, and the profit motive (both from producers and middlemen) has led
towards practices that harm consumers _and_ (indirectly, long-term) the
producers.

Privacy invaded, malware distributed, computers slowed, load-times
skyrocketing, etc. Absent a reaction from producers or consumers, the most-
ruthless ad-schemes tend to rake the most profit, so it becomes a race-to-the-
bottom.

In this sense, consumer-driven ad-blocking is _ecologically-necessary_ to make
that "Visitors-To-Cash" industry refocus on other mechanisms and better ways
of interacting with their two main stakeholder groups. In a very broad sense,
it's their _job_ to find a better solution.

~~~
m52go
> but consider how much less it costs, per-viewer, to distribute a paragraph
> on the web versus printed on paper.

From my understanding of publishing, most of the cost is in creation, editing,
design, and marketing...not in actually printing it.

It's common to assume that electronic versions of paper media should be cheap
(if not free) but that's very mistaken.

~~~
Terr_
True, but even some of those aspects are lessened, ex:

1\. It makes sense to invest a lot to minimize defects (e.g. typos) before
printing, but digitally it's much easier to issue a revision.

2\. Marketing is less-critical for reaching "already interested" consumers,
due to search-engines and the ease of passing links around.

3\. Marketing is less-critical for pushing copies into "nearby retailers",
because consumers can reach your presence directly.

~~~
m52go
I see what you're saying with your first point, but does that mean it's more
acceptable for people to put out less-polished professional work now that it's
easier to go back and correct it? I hope not.

Regarding points two and three, very few authors have an adequate following of
"already-interested" customers.

Sharing is easier with digital networks and social networks, sure, but the
siloed nature of these media is a new challenge for authors/publishers.

There's a big struggle right now within publishing to figure out discovery.

------
liotier
When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" \- I
am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial
functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug.

Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.

~~~
mikeash
That seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one
communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on,
enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes
and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing.

Take a look at the original web site:

[http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html](http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html)

That's clearly a non-interactive (aside from navigation) one-to-many system.
What is that if not "content"?

~~~
notahacker
I don't know about the OP, but I'd say many objections to "content" is less to
do with it describing a web composed of documents and more to do with it
describing a web composed of documents conceived as a _means_ rather than an
end.

"Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves
our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search
queries and/or social clicks". Which certainly wasn't the intention of the
original web either.

Journalists, authors, researchers and people blogging for the joy of blogging
generally don't refer to their output as "content", and do think their work is
primarily intended to communicate, albeit _mostly_ in one-to-many fashion.

Of course regardless of how idealistic their intentions, most journalists have
always produced much of their output for publications whose management teams
largely consider it as something to wrap ads around, but that approach is far
more pervasive and metrics-driven on the modern web.

~~~
mikeash
_" Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves
our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search
queries and/or social clicks"._

I guess that's the disconnect. I see that some people use it that way, but to
me it's far more broad than that. I would certainly refer to blogs and other
such things as "content" too.

~~~
adiabatty
Maybe the most widely-agreed-upon definition of "content" is "others' writing
and things they publish".

Consider NSBlog, a fantastic blog full of interesting and useful information
for programming for OS X and iOS. I don't think of my blog as a content
source, but I do think of NSBlog as one.

I wonder under what conditions mikeash thinks of his blog as "content" — as
far as I remember, the only time I think of my blog/website as content is when
I'm looking at the whole thing and thinking "Man, there's not much here. I
should write more often." However, when I'm writing something that goes on it,
I don't think of myself as "producing content", I think of what I'm doing as
_writing_.

Maybe people call things "content" only when they're sufficiently removed from
the specifics of what is being written/filmed/drawn?

~~~
mikeash
I never thought of my own blog like that, nor did I think of it _not_ like
that, it just never occurred to me.

Maybe it's just generality versus specificity. My blog has "programming
articles," your blog has "writing," blogs in general have "content" (they
might have images or video or who knows what). And just like you wouldn't say
"objects" when you could say "people," maybe I wouldn't say "content" when I
could say "articles."

And now these words have lost whatever little meaning they had to me!

------
DenisAyumu
I browsed the web for 15 years without an ad blocker because I could care less
about harmless banners and text ads. It was a good time.

Then you added tracking cookies that followed me wherever I went.

Then you added sound to your ads.

Then you added video.

Then you added full screen popups, seizure-inducing flashing ads and banners
that mimic'ed Windows alerts.

Then you added transparent Facebook "like" buttons over GUI elements.

You created the ad blocker phenomenon, not me.

~~~
barney54
Yep. The problem is not free content entitlement, it's bad ads. Ads that are
intrusive. Ads that are ugly. Ads that kill the user experience.

How much content is actually worth paying for?

~~~
Supraperplex
>>How much content is actually worth paying for?<<

This is the real question in the pot.

------
carsongross
_" I’m seriously questioning the idea that all content on the web ought to be
free."_

It shouldn't, and it isn't. But free and good enough is going to beat _any
cost_ and better _by any amount_ for most people most of the time.

 _" The expectation that everything online is free is an entitlement, an
unearned privilege, on the part of consumers. There’s nothing inevitable about
it."_

Looking at the huge, swollen, abusive and sclerotic layers of our
entertainment, publishing and news industries, I do see quite a bit of
entitlement, but not on the side of consumers.

~~~
iolothebard
So charge for it. I don't see what the big deal is.

I've built a good amount of software. I never did any of it for free, although
it's why I've never came up with anything like Facebook, etc. I could never
figure out how the 'magic' of making money off ads worked. Google's makes
sense, pr0n websites to an extent. Everything else is largely not worth it or
fighting in a world where everyone else gives it away for free (news, etc.).

------
avivo
What about Patreon or Blendle? These are at least two potential solutions
right now which have proven effective in similar specific circumstances
(though they may not solve the whole problem).

[https://patreon.com](https://patreon.com) gives you continuous paying
supporters without the Kickstarter cycle (ideally it would be easy for a
company to count supporting open source via patreon or equivalents in a way
that's nice for accounting/taxes).

[https://blendle.nl](https://blendle.nl) enables micropayments for articles,
with the caveat that they are always refundable if you don't like them. More
context: [http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/a-money-back-guarantee-
how-...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/a-money-back-guarantee-how-blendle-
hopes-to-convince-dutch-news-readers-to-pay-by-the-article/)

------
exelius
We all do things that we enjoy that may not make us money. We do them because
we enjoy them.

The cardinal sin of the web is that it makes it really easy to take something
that someone did for fun (and for free) and copy it for the benefit of people
who might want it commercially. By doing this, you may be putting someone who
makes a living selling the info you collect for free out of a job. This also
means that if you do something for free, then start trying to charge for it,
someone else is likely to start offering it for free and undercut you.

But we shouldn't stop people from sharing the results of their labors of love
- it just means that the skill the professional had wasn't as valuable as they
thought it was. At the same time, we should only do these things so long as we
derive enjoyment from them, so if the author hates doing it, he should stop.
He owes "the community" nothing.

------
CapitalistCartr
I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung
Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its
out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games
on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo.

P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad"
blockers; they're malware protection. Too many nasty or stupid sites out
there.

~~~
thaumasiotes
You can do this now by running dosbox on your phone. A cursory search shows
that somebody's selling "dosbox turbo" on google play for $2.50.

I tend to think the impoverished nature of phone games is related to the
available controls. You see a lot of phone/tablet games that amount to "wait
for something to become clickable, and then click on it". Maybe we need to
provide an input method beyond "fat-finger your screen".

If that happens, though, the phone basically loses the portability that is its
only advantage.

~~~
cousin_it
I agree that touch is a lousy input method, because it's imprecise and you
can't see what you're touching. But phones have other input methods, like the
accelerometer. Even early iPhones had a ball rolling game that you could play
by tilting the phone. With a modern phone, a controller, and something like
Google Cardboard, you could make a decent VR FPS game. And by making
imaginative use of the camera and microphone (both movable), you could
probably do even more.

------
cousin_it
Without ads, people would still put up tons of free content. Not just for the
love of humanity, but also because receiving attention is a kind of power.
People crave to influence what others think. As long as you have that, you can
always rationalize away the lack of money.

~~~
pc86
And this is certainly a generalization/assumption, but _all else being equal_
it will probably be easier for the person with a tech blog getting 150K
uniques in a month to get a job than the person without it.

So even having this large block of free content can have a direct financial
impact on the creator without syndication/ads/sponsors etc.

~~~
mooreds
I have a blog that gets about 12k visits a month. I certainly don't have
people beating down my door to hire me, but more that one interviewer has
mentioned my blog as a plus.

If you're _the person_ known for browser compatibility tests, I can imagine
that would be helpful for certain classes of jobs and consulting assignments.

Note this doesn't mean that I think the author should continue posting awesome
content for free. It's his life, he can do what he wants with it! If it isn't
generating the required job or life satisfaction, he should definitely quit
doing it.

------
egypturnash
> I suppose a Kickstarter campaign could work, but this would again cost me a
> lot of time working on something I’m not familiar with, and even if it
> succeeds I’d have to start thinking about next year’s Kickstarter campaign
> pretty quickly. Still, this might be a solution.

> I added a donation link to my site-wide footer. So far the response has been
> minimal, though two or three people did send me small amounts. (Thanks!) But
> a donation drive needs a lot of attention as well — it won’t run itself.

Patreon. He wants Patreon. It combines the good parts of KS and a donation
link, it runs itself a lot better than a PayPal donation widget or whatever.

------
DanielStraight
I find it strange he didn't mention _selling something_ as a possible way to
make money.

Free web content that you can buy in other forms (ebook, paper book) or buy
extras for (videos, email support, courses) seems like a pretty common model
these days.

In the board and card game world, you've got games where you can download a
PDF board or PDF cards but if you want a professionally produced version, you
can buy it.

In software, you've got the paid support model.

There's plenty of actually valuable things you can sell for minimal additional
effort on top of producing the content in the first place. And remember the
bar for "actually valuable" is pretty low: SQLite sells licenses for public
domain software after all.

~~~
ivan_ah
Good point. The "book format" in particular has a lot of future. For example,
packaging a series of blog posts into a short ebook on a topic, then investing
time to polish the content can turn into an excellent "product" to be sold
through the website. Fuck ads for other people's products, advertise your own!

It makes sense for blog posts to be free since they are "draft quality," but
once an editor has put some thought into making a coherent and comprehensive
guide to subject X, it's totally OK to charge for this extra work. And I mean
"OK" not as a moral "is allowed to," but in the market "people will
buy"-sense.

The extra work the author invests is called _information distillation._ The
author "processes" a lot of information (primary sources like books, research,
other webpages) and produces a comprehensive summary of the topic in question.
Blog posts are "best effort" acts of information distillation; books are more
thorough and deliberate efforts.

I can attest from personal experience that people are interested in
information distillation today (I sell math books). I think this trend will
continue into the future—the more information out there, the more people will
need secondary sources to help them make sense of it.

------
lukifer
I recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future" for more on this subject; the
takeaway is that an ecosystem that defaults to free is a recipe for the
digital feudalism that now makes up most of the tech world, as only the
largest companies can manage to derive enough revenue through selling data and
eyeballs. (And "free" in this case includes low-margin paid services, such as
Amazon and Uber.)
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F)

The concept we're wrestling with comes down to Zero Marginal Cost: no one has
to do any additional work when I view a web page or download a copy of a game.
At first blush, it seems the first step to a post-scarcity world; instead, it
creates a psychological barrier to buying, and a classic Tragedy of the
Commons.

------
jackcosgrove
I subscribe to Pandora to block the ads. That's a viable business model. I am
stunned by the amount of crap that comes my way when I happen to browse
without an adblocker. Advertisers went too far, and now there's a
counterreaction. I understand many media businesses are not viable without
lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a
subscription model. The problem is that it's easier to dupe advertisers into
thinking consumers will like content than it is to convince consumers to like
content. If consumers really like content, they will subscribe to it. All that
has happened is that the curtain on advertising effectiveness has been lifted,
and buyers of ads are getting a better deal along with consumers. The media
enjoyed decades of profitability due more to a lack of competition than a
high-quality product. I don't pity them.

~~~
chc
> I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of
> advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription
> model.

It doesn't matter if nobody is preventing them from doing something that
doesn't work. Making a living selling subscriptions to something that isn't
ridiculously premium doesn't seem all that viable. The likely outcome is that
you'll reach fewer people and still won't make enough to support yourself.

I was with a newspaper that converted to online subscriptions. Online ads were
a relatively poor revenue generator, but subscriptions were even worse.

~~~
RUG3Y
So what's the problem? Apparently, content creation isn't good business
anymore.

~~~
chc
Your second sentence would seem to answer the first.

~~~
jackcosgrove
No one is entitled to the job they like. If people won't pay for your goods
and services, you need to find another job.

------
Jordrok
I think ad blockers will "destroy" the web in the same way that file sharing
"destroyed" the entertainment industry. There will be skirmishes back and
forth with no clear victor until new platforms spring up which allow for an
alternative which is acceptable for both producers and consumers, if not ideal
for anyone.

I just hope that it doesn't degenerate into the same toxic legal battles where
the entrenched corporations go after individual consumers for ludicrous
amounts of money. It's already starting to sound like that when you hear
claims about the supposed $22+ billion that adblockers are costing the
industry.

------
yorik
One nice thing of the internet is that it forces openness and rewards it.

If some site goes behind a paywall, what it really does is to remove itself
from the internet, giving more visibility opportunities to people who want
primarily to communicate and share ideas, instead of strategically monetizing
content (or whatever it is called today).

Also, the author is doing some confusion on who feels entitled =)

~~~
Touche
The author is confused about what is (monetarily) valuable content. The brutal
truth is that text articles are plentiful, easy to produce and therefore worth
close to nothing to users. If you don't give it away someone else will.

Hollywood movies, on the other hand, are valuable. So they get to _change_ the
web (Web DRM) to suit their business model.

------
pikzen
To reuse the words of another HN reader on the same topic: I don't care.

I don't care that it costs you money to host your website, and I don't care if
you stop publishing. Other sources just as good will pop up sooner or later.

You get the ability to spread your word to the entire world in exchange,
instead of just a closed circle of friends, or anything. That's why it costs
you money. Yes, a website will be a net loss for you. From there on, you can
either accept this loss or find other ways to monetise it. Sell books, sell
software, put ads (hint: I'll be blocking your ads, because I don't care about
them either), anything.

Now I am definitely guilty of not paying for apps on phones, but that's
because having seen how terrible 95% of mobile apps are, even if yours is in
the top 5%, I just won't trust that my investment is good. For all I know your
app could be a total piece of crap. Not that I actually use my phone much more
than calling people, sending messages and browsing the internet anyways.

------
FussyZeus
Supply and demand rule everything. Right now there is simply an insane amount
of supply when it comes to news, blogs, and the written word in general and so
it is made worthless. When a site demands a subscription or puts up an
adblocker wall, I can simply put the title into Google and find an extremely
similar story elsewhere. As a consumer, if you want me to look at your site,
you need to make the case for ME to want to do that.

I honestly have no problems viewing ads (they're annoying, sure, but so are
children and I can be around them just fine) but the advertisers have
completely fucked this relationship by going further and further. More
monitoring, more tracking, more privacy invasions, downloading megabytes of
Javascript and then there's the malware too for an extra level of screw you.

If it's static image content, fine. No HTML ads, no Javascript ads, no
epilepsy triggering gif ads, none of that garbage because this is MY computer,
not YOUR billboard. Deal with it.

------
lmm
I think the teleology is correct. The web had competitors. Some of them
weren't free. See which ones won.

If your collective action requires that everyone not do something that's fun
and that ordinary people can do (blogging) then it is doomed to failure. As
people realise there is no money in web content, there will be less web
content. That's ok. There will still be more than enough.

------
kelvin0
"The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not
make any sense, but everybody pretends it does. It’s one of the minor
mysteries of the mobile world(...)"

The barrier to entry in the mobile dev world is definitely lower than on
PC/Console. Simply put, when you buy a PC game you can expect AAA content
which necessitates vast amounts of resources (game studios?). Of course there
are exceptions to the previous statement. But the memory and CPU constraints
of a mobile platform simply cannot compete with what is available on PC. Its a
simple equation, if you need more resources to crank out a product, its also
is going to cost more.

------
louisphilippe
Virtually all high quality content on the web is written by either a full-time
practitioner who is trying to build a reputation or gain some amount of
recognition.

For example:

Entrepreneur and investor bloggers such as Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, Brad
Feld, Sam Altman, plus the dozens of founders who post their articles to
Hacker News produce the best writing available on founding a business. They do
this because if they provide good information, they build their own brand.*

The best posts on software engineering come from bloggers and Hacker News
commenters who again, are trying to build their own brand.

The best posts economics or finance come from those actually working in the
field, or from obsessed amateurs who spend hours each week studying the issues
on their own.

The best posts on criminal justice issues comes from Peter Moskos, who was an
actual Baltimore Cop, and is now a professor of criminal justice (
[http://www.copinthehood.com/](http://www.copinthehood.com/) ). Even if he
charged micropayments for his posts, there is no way he is going to make money
off of his site. Yet the information he provides is order of magnitude better
than any journalist who has no domain knowledge of the subject matter.

Most beat reporters producing run-of-the-mill news are entirely dependent on
their sources for information. If these beat reporters were simply paid by the
sports team or institutions that they covered, and essentially worked as their
communications office, it would be a more honest relationship and the quality
of coverage would be no worse.

Basically, I don't see what the role in the world is for the professional,
full-time "content" provider. There is simply no need for anyone to be an
intermediary between the practitioner and the audience. If you are a
professional practitioner, then the financial benefits in terms of building a
brand dwarf any benefits from earning micropayments. Thus I don't think the
existence of micropayments would result in any greater amount of high quality
content.

* Note for the pedantic, this is not to imply that all content produced by people trying to improve their own reputation is good content. 98% of everything is crap.

------
Finnucane
"The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not
make any sense, but everybody pretends it does."

I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you
could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad.

The reason I use adblockers on my browsers has less to do with jus not wanting
to see ads but the fact that ad servers cause terrible site performance--the
responsiveness of many sites speeds up considerably when you suppress the ads.

~~~
creshal
> _I 'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware
> you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad._

Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are _less
powerful_ than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I
have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's
somehow okay because they are Real Games™ (supposedly, I wasn't too impressed
by most…). If you tell someone you spent $200 on, say, Android apps, you're
going to get funny looks.

It's circular reasoning at its finest: Paying that much money for mobile games
is unreasonable, therefore you only get garbage games, therefore paying that
much money for mobile games is unreasonable.

~~~
Finnucane
Actually, some people _are_ paying out that much on games on mobile, but
they're doing it by way of in-app purchases rather than up-front licensing.

~~~
creshal
Which is the ass-backwards financing problem the author was talking about: It
would be much more reasonable for everyone involved to have a clear, up-front
cost structure (even Bethesda DLCs are less scummy than the average Android
app's in-purchases). Yet, consumers are not willing to do that.

~~~
Godel_unicode
I think it's a little bit the momentum of the industry, but mostly it's
straight up economics. If exploiting game theory allows you to in-app purchase
your way to AAA-game revenue without putting in AAA-game resources, why
wouldn't you?

------
dangoor
There are cases of individuals who make money charging for content (Ben
Thompson comes to mind: [https://stratechery.com/](https://stratechery.com/))
and others who give away their content but have managed to put together
revenue streams that don't annoy their users
([http://daringfireball.net/](http://daringfireball.net/)).

If someone has unique content _that other people want_ , especially as an
individual rather than a multi-person business, there are ways to make money.
It's not "baked into the web", so it may require being creative about how the
offering is put together... but, it's still doable.

What makes Ben Thompson an interesting example is that there is no shortage of
people writing about trends in tech. But he has a focus and style that are
unique enough that people pay to subscribe to his updates.

------
Animats
There are people who think that because they were able to "monetize" content,
they have a right to do so indefinitely. That may not be the case. If ad
blocking makes the entire third party ad industry go away, that's a win.

(Thought for the day: the main use case for WebAssembly will be to lock down
content tighter and break ad blockers. That was the main application for Flash
in its later years. Flash died because abusive Flash became more prevalent
than useful Flash, and everybody started blocking it. WebAssembly may be
headed in that direction.)

------
dpc_pw
> For a desktop computer game, $/€25 is considered a reasonable price — and
> physical board games are often much more expensive. But as soon as people
> are invited to spend that money on an iOS or Android app, they soberly point
> out that that’s a LOT of money and they aren’t sure the app is worth it.

Mobile devices are terrible for playing games. I can't imagine playing
something > 100 hours on a phone/tablet...

I actually stopped considering using mobile devices for anything that is not
commute/alarm/on the go communication related too.

~~~
nas
It is such a terrible comparison, I'm surprised he used it. People who buy €25
PC games have very little in common with people who buy mobile games for $2 or
buy gems or whatever for pennies.

------
api
For the past few years I've increasingly started thinking that 'free' can be
pathological.

The problem is that it's a lie. Everything takes effort to produce. Nothing is
actually free. Sure you can give something away-- that's a gift. But it's not
free.

Sometimes it's okay if the person or entity releasing something for free is
_intentional_ about that: "I'm going to do this because I feel like it and I
expect nothing (tangible) in return" or the corporate equivalent of "we are
going to make this free because it's part of our strategy or because we have
nothing to lose by doing so."

Then you get one of two scenarios:

(1) The original honest intent was to make X free but now it's getting so much
attention that it's becoming demanding. Now the person or entity releasing X
has a choice between a number of bad options: keep it free and continue to
sink time/money into it, abandon it, change its status to non-free, or find
some indirect way to monetize it.

(2) "Free" was a lie from the get-go. It was just a growth hack, a gimmick.
The intent was always to find some way to "flip the switch" and monetize.

The difference between these two scenarios is the original intent, but the end
result is often quite similar.

Abandonment is always an option (at least with scenario #1), and that's how a
lot of free things end up after the burnout sets in. But if abandonment isn't
an option you're basically faced with the choice between making something non-
free and indirectly monetizing it.

Revoking free status is unpopular and will probably lose you a lot of users.
The strong temptation, especially given the success of this model, is indirect
monetization.

That's where things get pathological. Indirect monetization means ads and
surveillance, and on a bidirectional medium like the Internet ads basically
_mean_ surveillance. You're turning your users into a product and selling them
out.

Unfortunately we've raised a generation to believe that "all information
should be free, man!" This is leading us directly down a terribly Orwellian
path-- to make the free lie work, vendors have to treat the user as a product.

------
Diamons
I don't understand. This article claims users feel entitled to free content on
the internet and then goes into a rant about pricing and ad blockers while
doing nothing to address the glaring fact that he himself thinks he's entitled
to make money off of content.

The internet is for the people. It is a free and open service for anyone to
use. The only one entitled is the content creator who feels that they have a
right to make money for what they produce. Simply no. The internet is for
people, not for businesses.

~~~
mwcampbell
> The internet is for people, not for businesses.

Businesses are just people trying to make a living, which just about everyone
has to do.

~~~
Diamons
There are plenty of ways to make a living. If starbucks can sell you $5
coffee, you can make money from a website. But if your creativity is limited
to create content + place ads, you have 0 right to bitch and moan about
consumers using ad blockers.

------
tacos
It goes right back to the spec. The W3C drones on and on for 132 words as to
what "NO CONTENT" means. But devotes merely seven words to commerce. From
that, all that follows.

[https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...](https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4.3)

------
pmontra
> I found an estimate that ad blockers will cost publishers $22 billion in
> revenue

My first reaction was that consumers will save $22 billions because those ads
are eventually paid by them. Well, not really, because some of those money
will go into paywalls. More or less? Instict says less because people don't
want to pay. We'll see how it plays out.

------
decasteve
This medium/protocol (HTTP) is built in a way that I can choose how I render
the information I get using the programs of my choice or the code that I
write. Those who wish to prevent this autonomy can create a new medium,
device, protocol, file format, or program, to push their advertising so that
there is no choice.

As long as I keep telling web sites "Do Not Track" me, and everyone keeps
ignoring me, then I will continue to run ad blockers. If you want to stalk my
movements, store the information, aggregate this data with everyone else's,
and sell it so that advertising can follow me around through the documents
that I read, then I will continue to block ads.

------
jkarneges

      > Although I’m a fervent Twitter user and couldn’t do
      > without it, I am fundamentally unsympathetic to their
      > plight. Why? Because they don’t even allow me to pay.
    

Of course, App.net tried this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfaduCfqpuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfaduCfqpuQ)

I, too, wish we could find a way out of the current mess. Most of the comments
here seem to be focusing on the content publisher aspect of things, but I
believe free services like Twitter (and Google, etc) are an even greater
problem because of their important utility and limited alternatives.

------
yarrel
There was no paywall for this page, so I refused to read it.

It's what the author would want.

------
wimagguc
Free is all fun and jokes until someone loses an eye. PaaS companies had a
rough year in 2015, with many companies closing down and Heroku changing their
pricing. (A great article is here: [https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-
rerevisited](https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited))

This consolidation will happen to all industries where companies keep
underselling their products. The weak ones will go down and eventually
everyone else will raise the prices. Maybe it's not even a bad thing, just the
way evolution works.

------
adamrezich
>The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not
make any sense, but everybody pretends it does. It’s one of the minor
mysteries of the mobile world, and I hope a competent psychologist will come
up with an explanation one day.

Phone screens are physically smaller than computer screens. I honestly think
that's the underlying psychology

~~~
MiddleEndian
Desktop apps and games are substantially more powerful and usable. There are
no mobile equivalents to Photoshop or Starcraft.

------
codingdave
I make tools that are free to my audience. I also provide links to items that
I know they will be buying anyway, if they are using my tools. They click the
links, I get some money, everyone wins.

If someone is feeling like the effort they put into creating content is not
returning enough value into their life, perhaps they should re-think creating
that content in the first place.

------
davidgerard
In which we are instructed as to why Wikipedia would be vastly improved by a
paywall, apparently.

Seriously, does this guy expect us to buy into this?

------
iolothebard
I'd say JavaScript instead of a strongly typed client-side interpreter. Or
maybe the ability to execute binary blobs that's cross browser compatible
(similar to Flash, yeah I know, ActiveScript is essentially JS, or ActiveX)
but sand-boxed fully and is open source to be integrated across browsers vs
independent development.

------
nnq
Am I the only one who believes app stores should have a _minimum mandatory
price_ of like $5 (maybe geographically customizable)?!

And yes, you should also be allowed to publish _free_ apps, but they should be
_really-free_ , so if you set your apps price to $0, you are _forbidden_ to
have any-kind of in-app purchases (and maybe even _forced to be open-source_
). Want to do have the in-app-purchases: then put a goddam minimum price tag
of $5 on you app and over that ask for purchases!

We should just create some _thick and solid walls between "true free" and
"paid/premium"_ stuff and destroy this murky area of "freemium" and whatever!
Some people would want to shoot me for saying this, but even consumer-
SaaS/PaaS-es like, uhm, Facebook, should be _forced by law_ to charge a
minimum fee of $1/moth or something if they are not "truly free" (eg. "if they
make any kind of profit derived from their free users' data and attention).

~~~
icebraining
Define "make profit from the users attention". Would HN have to charge? It's
certainly a valuable resource for YC, even if the profit is indirect. What
about Wikipedia? Do donations count as profit? Should search engines have to
charge?

By the way, you'd be destroying a whole lot of community-driven sites that
charge for certain extra perks to keep the lights on.

~~~
nnq
...the "destroying" part seems like a pretty good thing imho. Setting some
forests on fire to make room for some new sprouts seems pretty appealing :)

"Community destruction" in the online landscape is pretty much a synonym for
"pushing people towards better communities where they are better off
anyway"... So a _good_ thing.

(And I don't see the place of Wikipedia and donations in this. Wikipedia is
obviously not selling any in-app purchases and the software they run on is
"open source". HN is also "true free". Even their platform is open-source:
[https://github.com/wting/hackernews](https://github.com/wting/hackernews) not
that this should count that much. And donations are obvious not profit, they
are not even taxed as such. No ambiguity here.)

~~~
icebraining
Fair enough regarding donations, but the idea that HN is "truly free" while
Facebook isn't is shows how unclear the proposal is. HN may not sell ads, but
it does have them[1], it's just for their own companies. It's more than a
little naive to think that HN makes no profit for YC and its investments.

The analogy of burning the forest to allow the new sprouts to grow is quite
pretty, but I'm not sure you'd actually get better trees in the end.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295614)

------
zeveb
Is it really an original sin if ad-financed free content is, as the article
indicates, a mere .275% of the online economy?

> The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not
> make any sense, but everybody pretends it does.

I dunno, it makes a lot of sense to me: my phone has a screen which is under
11 sq. inches while my monitor is over 300 sq. inches, for a more than 28-fold
difference in viewable area and hence game immersivity. I don't have a tablet
handy to measure, but it's still small.

Moreover, when I use my desktop I have a full-featured input control surface,
in the form of keyboard and mouse; in contrast, on a phone or tablet all I can
do is tap & drag. That means that desktop games are more likely to be complex
and engaging while still being usable.

Further, my desktop has many times the processing power and memory of my phone
or tablet, which again means that games are more likely to be complex and
engaging.

From my perspective, $25 is a steal for a desktop game and $1 is a bit of a
rip-off for a phone game.

~~~
tyingq
>ad-financed free content is, as the article indicates, a mere .275% of the
online economy?

That's the percentage of advertising income as a fraction of something like
"Internet GDP" which is misleading. For them to be comparable, you would have
to pad the advertising figure to account for job creation, etc.

It's probably more interesting to compare total internet advertising revenue
to total internet ecommerce revenue. For 2014, global internet advertising
revenue was around $140 billion USD, where global B2C ecom was around $1400
billion USD. About a 1:10 ratio.

------
Debugreality
There is also I think an issue with enough content for free. At some point
there is enough free games in a genre or enough free information on a topic
that only people very passionate about the genre or topic will be willing to
pay.

------
jbpetersen
I don't expect there will ever be a lack of high quality content produced for
free by hobbyists.

Instead of pointing your analytic engines at finding the perfect ad to send my
way, why not let me pay you to find me the best content instead?

------
cptskippy
I'm looking forward to the day when no one remembers what quirksmode was. Not
the site mind you, but where the site's name originated.

------
ak39
This is a straw man argument. Content providers who believe their content has
value should build a pay wall to generate revenue.

------
SixSigma
I did buy ppk on Javascript, I would never have done so without Quirks mode
website. So there's that

------
z3t4
We badly need micro-payments! A publisher earn around 0.1 cents from ads when
I read an article. I would have no problem paying that, even for mediocre
"content".

It can work like when you vote on HN, you give 1 cent to the author and the
one who submitted the article gets 10%. Or you get 1 cent for each like on
Facebook, or 1 cent for each view on Youtube.

------
jeffehobbs
I've said this for years. If there had just been a payment layer built into
the web browser spec, we'd be in different world. A monetizable world. It's
still not too late.

~~~
kefka
"To read this content, please pay $0.01"

Yeah. That wouldn't at all be abused.

~~~
oldmanjay
You say that like the ad-supported model is abuse free, or like people would
not adapt and develop mechanisms to avoid the abuse.

~~~
kefka
I remember discussing this back when Xanadu was first brought public.

The "hell" scenario is when every page is attempting to monetize content. Not
only that, but adverts would charge you to read them, text could be split per
word, firewalls would have to be erected for 'financial reasons', and
obfuscated pricing that makes the app/IAP scam look like standard sales.

It would erect a paywall around almost everything. And that would be eminently
sad, considering costs to access and use the net lower all the time. This
would make many areas "rich people only" places.

Instead, we should be looking at systems that reduce costs to create and
store. AT least for the second part, I'm looking at IPFS (ipfs.io) for the
storage side of the problem. And it seems they've figured it out.

The "create" is still a problem, but it is a problem I think with distributed
patronage could solve (payment before creation for established peoples with
sufficient social proof, and payment after creation with those with
insufficient social proof, and a social proof calculator that adds or
subtracts depending on worthiness).

------
strathmeyer
entitlement — an unearned privilege

Hm that's the exact opposite of what my dictionary said. Now who's acting
entitled?

------
dredmorbius
Too many thoughts, not enough time. Generally, however, I disagree with the
premis that "free" is an original sin.

Information faces two distinct quandries, at odds with one another. Stewart
Brand​'s dictum is almost correct. Information _access_ wants to be free, and
any failure to meet this introduces tremendous social deadweight losses. At
the same time, information _providers_ , and most especialy _those who create
the initial works_ , must have sustinance.

Crucially, though, _that is not the same as saying they must be paid by
piecework._

Piecework payment is instead an awfully good way to create perverse
incentives. Such as, say, disinformation, low-quality information, blogspam,
listicles, demagoguery, fear-inducing press, angst-inspiring advertising (are
you worried about your halatosis, ring around the collar, dandruff, greasies,
fashion sense, car, dogfood, body oder, spotty glassware, non-squeezable
toilet tissue, size and/or flattness of your television, long-distance and/or
mobile calling packages, child's education, and/or erectile dysfunction?).

There are a few major trends in online publishing:

1\. Free.

2\. Advertising / Surveillance supported.

3\. Paywall. Usually a subscription.

4\. Micropayments -- a small but discrete fee per item viewed.

What's generally _not_ on the table is a large, carte blanche all-you-can-eat
plan. Effectively a superbundled subscription. Call it a universal content
syndication tax and remuneration system.

As of 2013, global ad spending topped $500 billion, with 20% of that, $100
billion, Internet advertising. Projected growth rates were roughly 5%/year.

[http://adage.com/article/global-news/10-things-global-ad-
mar...](http://adage.com/article/global-news/10-things-global-ad-
market/245572/)

That amounts to roughly $90 per person on Earth (total), or just under
$20/person for Internet advertising. Or, if you felt (with some justification)
that the roughly 1 billion people in the developed world (North America,
Europe, Japan, Australia/New Zealand) might credibly be given the bill for
this, $100/year.

That is: if you were taxed $100/year, all online content would be free.

Total OECD population is actually 1.27 billion, and GDP (that is, income),
$48.8 trillion. Or $38,500 per person (roughly). Allocating our $100
proportionately by income would mean you'd pay $100 per $38,500 of personal
income, a rate of 0.26%. Consider that a content tax.

Producers of content (online) could divide that pie. I don't have a strong
sense of how many people are engaged in producing online material as a
substantively full-time job. If it were a million people, this fund would
suffice to provide a six-figure income to each.

The US BLS maintains a number of statistic related to labour, organised as a
bureau (one might even think they could create an acronym based on this
concept...). Including of professional authors and writers in the United
States (roughly 1/3 of the OECD).

Median pay is $59k, total positions 136,500.

[http://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-
and-a...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-
authors.htm)

This _includes_ advertising copywriters, but excludes journalists, editors,
and technical writers.

Editors add another 117k positions, reporters 54k, technical writers 52k,
though presumably most of these work directly for (or contract to)
organisations needing specific technical writing tasks. Incomes are roughly
comparable with writers, though generally lower, particularly for
journalistys.

So we're at about 300,000 positions. My 1 million worldwide off-the-cuff
estimate doesn't look too far from the mark. And we're _doubling_ the average
wage.

I haven't included musicians or film-makers, two other significant categories.
But a bundled payments system would more than adequately finance these at
least in a broadcast revenues substitution, from what I've seen here.

And yes, there are plenty of details over specific remuneration allocations.
The point here is to show that replacing present ads spend would more than
cover existing creative talent compensation.

------
hoompadoompa
Might be little off-topic, but here goes nuthing.

What is content, what is ad?

What is product, what is payment?

In not-so-distant future, the lines between those two would blur.

Whose 'fault' would be that outcome?

Big players will say, "Can't be helped, consumers want content without
paying."

Small consumers will say, "Can't be helped, big players shove ads without
giving product."

Wait, is this trend of content-morphing-into-ads a 'fault'?

Isn't it more likely it is a upcoming 'feature'?

Isn't it more likely it is the natural trends of things in the coming age
where the private enterprises have swallowed the public space awhole?

Product is ads, content is ads.

Everything is ads.

Art is propaganda in 21th century style, perhaps?

The funny aspect of this trend is this,

Small people always pay.

First, you pay by providing your connectivity (Electricity, gadgets and so on)

Second, you pay by providing your credits (Fiat money by governing states)

Third, you pay by being surveiled.

Fourth, you pay be your attention.

Fifth, you pay by your time.

The emphasis seems to be on the second aspect of paying-the fiat money, while
the greater dialogue is needed in the other FOUR aspects.

First, connectivity issue is already being conquered by big players; Google's
baloons, drones, lasers, Facebook's 'Free' Basics

Third, the web is built in nature to be surveiled by powerful authority,
whether that authority is legal(state) or technical(corporation) are
irrelevant, as one submits to the other. Where the state is stronger, the
corporation submits; where the corporation is stronger, the state submits.

Fourth, ADHD is not a disease or deviance. It is natural state of modern
humanity, as humans are not evolved enough to be this much overwhelmed to
consume what is being over-produced. Supply of attention-seeking-media is too
much for even 8 billions.

Fifth, the only capital of proles are the time it has. As the labour is
irrelevant by upcoming robot labour which never sleeps, tires, eats, shits nor
complains about being not paid enough.

Now, this debate of 'adblocking war' is another misdirection by the big
players.

You always pay, whether you block some 'ads' to see another 'ads'.

It matters little.

Little guys always pay.

