
Why Your Favorite Sites Are Suddenly Asking for Money - johan_larson
http://www.cracked.com/blog/why-your-favorite-sites-are-suddenly-asking-money/
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johan_larson
David Wong has some interesting things to say about why online publishers are
increasingly looking beyond ads to support their businesses. The means vary,
but include pay-walls (used by such worthies as the Economist and the New York
Times) and donations, often facilitated by Patreon or IndieGoGo. The
publishers are doing this because ads pay a lot less than they used to. The
move to smaller screens has shrunk the screen real estate and ad-blockers are
increasingly common. Smaller ads viewed by fewer people means less money to
the publisher; it's that simple.

Personally, I welcome this change. Ads have grown incredibly intrusive in
recent years. I didn't mind static ads so much, but modern ads with sound and
motion are incredibly annoying. If paying for our content is what it takes to
get rid of them, that's just great. We'll need to sort out exactly how to pay
for content, but once upon a time we managed to pay for books, newspapers,
magazines, and newsletters just fine. We can do something similar online.

The world I see us heading towards is one where professionally produced
content gets paid for up front by membership. These sites typically offer some
free samples, but the good stuff is for pay. Free content remains available
because some people just can't help but commit commentary or make art, and
others use free content as advertising for their businesses. Between them lies
a semi-pro layer where content producers get a little bit of money from their
consumers, but not enough to live on, either through donations or ads.

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cosmie
> once upon a time we managed to pay for books, newspapers, magazines, and
> newsletters just fine. We can do something similar online.

Even those paid-for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters had advertising in
them. The subscription cost still didn't reflect the full economic value the
publisher was capturing per reader. So in that sense, we still weren't fully
paying for content even in those times.

And one thing with online subscriptions is that people, once subscribed,
expect all other forms of compensation to disappear (ads, analytics/metadata-
derived revenue, etc). So the publisher either needs the subscription to be
high enough to reflect the full economic value of the reader (something that
didn't even happen before) or still contain secondary revenue sources somehow
or another but in a way that's subtle or hidden enough for paid subscribers to
not complain about them.

~~~
johan_larson
Oh, sure, there were ads in newspapers and magazines. But I see a world of
difference between even full-page static ads in newspapers and pop-up full-
video ads with sound online. The latter is much more distracting. As
consumers, we have lost a lot of ground on that front. To be fair, we also
have access to a lot more content.

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Bretts89
The amount of value we've come to expect for zero cost on the internet is
pretty incredible when you think about it. The move to monetize users beyond
just throwing ads up makes a lot of sense with click rates sitting at 0.05%.
Even freemium web platforms are struggling to get paid conversion rates in the
range of 2 to 4 percent of total users.

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soared
1\. Zero cost to build and host the site, produce content, and market it?

2\. Display ads aren't meant to be clicked, they're meant to be seen. CTR is
irrelevant. Publishers are paid by impressions, not clicks.

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AndrewCHM
> Crucial internet resource Snopes.com is raising money on GoFundMe to keep
> going.

Isn't that a bad example of this? that is more of a case of their income being
not given to them by the company running their ads hosting et al?

[https://www.savesnopes.com/faq/](https://www.savesnopes.com/faq/) says they
are profitable (when not fighting themselves), contrary to this article

