
It's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web - plg
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/
======
cromwellian
Does everyone really want tolls and meters for every click and paywalls
everywhere?

One of the beauty of the ad model is that it influenced the vast majority of
people to publish information in a way that did not require accounts,
authentication, or any kind of barriers.

It meant things like crawlers and search engines could exist and scale to the
entire Web, without having to make millions of indexing deals or paying
micropayments just to index content. It means archive.org and wayback machine
can exist.

It meant people could click on a link transaction free.

Though it may displease the people working in the news business, I for one,
want to keep the Web as transaction free as possible.

The mobile world of app stores, install apps, and constant freemium nags to
buy DLC I hope does not move to the web.

On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's
content consumption in exchange for some of their attention. It's a worthy
trade for many people. I grew up poor, my parents didn't even have credit
cards, we didn't pay for tv, and I had to sell my comic collection just to buy
my first computer.

Being able to consume the world's information, ad supported, or charity
supported, would be a far better model for my inner city neighborhood of youth
than micropayment paywall madness.

~~~
pyre
> On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's
> content consumption in exchange for some of their attention

It's more than that. You subsidize by giving up your privacy as these ad
companies profile you via tracking as much of your web history as they can.

~~~
arjie
Presumably if you have tolls on every service, you're spending at each
location you're interested in. Presumably if you're doing this over the
Internet, you're doing this with a credit card. Now you've just decided to
give the credit card companies some nice information. In fact, this
information is even more specific: it's the list of things you're actually
willing to pay to use.

So then we're going to decide to change cash (not credit) for Bitcoin (and
hope that guy doesn't sell the address to a marketer) and use that everywhere.

So the question then is who you want to be tracked by.

~~~
edent
Not really. Your ISP could - for example - see which sites you are visiting
and then make a payout on your behalf, aggregated with all its other users.

~~~
sp332
Flattr does this. You pay Flattr once a month, and they pay each site once a
month. They just count up how much each user owes each site and makes a lump
charge/payment.

------
tikhonj
> _Users will pay for services that they love. Reddit, the lively
> recommendation and discussion community, sells Reddit Gold subscriptions
> that give users special privileges and the ability to turn off ads._

Users _do_ pay for those services, but not very much and not very often. There
are simply too many obstacles in the way, both technological and
psychological. To make it practical will require both social change and a much
easier way to make small transactions. Not because it's difficult in any
absolute sense, but because even the slightest practical barrier is enough to
make people reconsider.

The most successful payment models now seem to be app stores and in-app
purchases, which are certainly marked by convenience. You just give your
credit card details _once_ and then you can buy things with no hassle. A model
like this for web content is the _minimum_ for moving off of advertising!

More generally, though, this change is not something we can achieve
unilaterally. We'd have to convince everyone else to go along with it, to
choose paid services over free. Not an easy proposition at the best of times
and, given the nature of the internet, not something we can force.
(Fundamentally, this is actually a good thing because it means the internet
can't easily be controlled, which is also why the emergence of gigantic,
largely self-contained web properties like Facebook is decidedly troubling.)

~~~
mbesto
> _There are simply too many obstacles in the way, both technological and
> psychological. To make it practical will require both social change and a
> much easier way to make small transactions. Not because it 's difficult in
> any absolute sense, but because even the slightest practical barrier is
> enough to make people reconsider._

This is basically why Dogecoin became so successful. The pyschological factors
were basically eliminated ($0.0001 tip to someone because they wrote a
thoughtful response and takes me 2 seconds to type in "dogetip
/u/username"...no big deal) but the technology factors are still high for non-
techies.

I think this is the sweet spot for cryptocoins...I imagine a future where
1,000,000 YouTube views is adless because 500,000 of those people tipped
$0.0001 each.

~~~
sillysaurus3
People barely click the "like" button or upvote/downvote, let alone donate.

~~~
anigbrowl
So very true. In general the number of 'Likes' relative to views on Youtube is
about 1%.

~~~
nfoz
You can't like a video on Youtube without being logged into a Youtube/Google+
account.

~~~
anigbrowl
So? I don't think that's evidence that another 49% are desperate to dispense
tips but can't do so because they haven't signed up for a free account.

------
egypturnash
Patreon seems to be working for a growing number of creators. Personally I've
seen mine slowly rise to $70 per page of my graphic novel (before fees),
during a time when I've been pretty slow on new pages. I'm really not offering
anything beyond seeing new pages a day or two before everyone else, either.
I'm not gonna be rich off of this any time soon, but if things continue, I'll
probably be making a comfortable solo living drawing weird comics.

My first goal for Patreon was 'turn off ads on the current project'. It's
REALLY nice to have them gone.

I don't know if there are any multi-person projects that're paying a serious
chunk of their living expenses with Patreon yet, but I wouldn't be surprised
to see it happen sooner or later.

------
aaronetz
I've just thought of a crazy idea: what if there was a subscription service,
like Netflix for websites, where you'd pay a fixed monthly amount and get
unlimited access to premium websites / webapps, with guaranteed privacy and no
advertising? The said service would then pay royalties to the participating
websites, depending on the usage.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _a subscription service, like Netflix for websites, where you 'd pay a fixed
> monthly amount and get unlimited access to premium websites / webapps_

Isn't that what ISP is? Except for the royalties part, of course.

~~~
aaronetz
Actually, that was my first thought - that the ISPs could pay royalties to
websites, but that reminded me too much of cable companies -- too centralized.
But who knows, this may actually happen with wireless internet providers
offering unlimited Facebook bundles and the like...

------
owenversteeg
> Users will pay for services that they love. Reddit, the lively
> recommendation and discussion community, sells Reddit Gold subscriptions
> that give users special privileges and the ability to turn off ads.

Reddit's not profitable.

------
api
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've come to this conclusion:

Free (as in beer) is the enemy of free (as in freedom). It's the enemy of
privacy, security, and human dignity as well.

In the beginning there was the bubble. Well, actually there was DARPANet and
such, but our story begins with the Internet bubble of the late 1990s.

In the early 90s the Internet hit mainstream. I was there. I got online (first
by umm... borrowing accounts at my local university at 14) in 1992, then moved
to a legal ISP when such things became available in my area. I basically
watched the whole thing unfold.

When the Internet and the WWW went big there was a huge flurry of innovation,
lots and lots of companies and open source efforts and various DIY projects
and personal home pages and everything else.

The small scale stuff was -- and often could be -- a volunteer effort. To this
day there are millions of independent sites and blogs and OSS projects. But
the big stuff was expensive.

Building a site that is usable, content-rich, curated, and available for
hundreds of millions of visitors is expensive. Building massive services like
search engines is expensive. Building really high quality software is
expensive. Making the gears turn is often the easy part... the polish that it
takes to make something _great_ often takes _at least_ twice as long as it
takes to do the "techie" stuff and get a working prototype.

There was always a search for ways to make it pay, ways to finance the new
medium, but in the beginning it didn't feel urgent. We were building the
future, and damn the torpedoes. (By now I was doing it for my day job, so I
was there in the trenches coding up early dynamic sites in PHP and Java,
playing with Linux, hacking network code in C.)

Lots of things were tried: early freemium models, paywalls and subscriptions,
and of course ads.

Only ads worked.

Freemium _can_ work but only if your costs per user are super-low, which they
aren't for content creators or computationally expensive or bandwidth-heavy
centralized services.

Paywalls and subscriptions? Nobody wanted to pay. Everyone wants free. Total
failure.

Then the bubble popped and all the companies that couldn't find a way to make
it pay went out of business. The only ones left standing were those who used
the Internet as a _secondary_ channel (print magazines and such) and ad-driven
sites and services.

But wait... it gets worse.

Ads work but they don't. People, it turns out, hated intrusive ads, popup ads,
and ad clutter in general. Ads were the only way to make the net pay (for most
non-b2b businesses), but the more ads you have the uglier your site becomes.
Back then they started calling it "portalitis" \-- named after the buzz-word
"portal" for sites like Yahoo and ICQ (remember that?) that became ad-
encrusted messes.

Then Google appeared. They dropped everyone's jaws when they launched with a
search engine that not only worked but was incredibly _clean_. I remember
seeing it... a text box and "search." That's it. Lots of people think PageRank
was responsible for Google's success, but I think the clean site was a lot of
it... maybe as much as half of it.

The techies loved it. The users loved it. But the business folks, I'm sure,
were like "huh?!? how!!!?!?"

I'm not sure if Google planned their model or figured it out as they went, but
eventually they did introduce ads. The ads were targeted, mixed into results
and clearly marked. People clicked them because they were relevant. Genius.
Google conquered the world.

Google also did something else. They demonstrated a new and now trendy Silicon
Valley business approach: launch a free service everyone loves, get a _ton_ of
users, then figure out how to monetize.

It's that approach combined with the information needed to underpin finer and
finer grained ad targeting that led to the _real_ disaster.

The real disaster wasn't ads. Ads are fine. The real disaster was
_surveillance as the business model of the Internet._

Facebook was the second massive company to follow in Google's footsteps
business-wise with launch first, get big, then monetize. Google kind of
tiptoed into the surveillance business model by way of their ad targeting
needs, but Facebook found that mass surveillance was the only way to really
monetize. Again I'm not sure if Zuckerberg had this in mind from the get-go or
not. I tend to think not. But how else do you monetize a massively expensive
to run centralized social networking site where everyone just happens to post
all kinds of personal data?

The Internet, which was supposed to be our great liberator and engine of
learning, became George Orwell's bidirectional TV set. It's a TV set that
watches _you._

... and it all goes back to free.

The need to be free (as in beer) has led to a dystopian nightmare. That's
because I'm sorry folks, but _nothing is actually free_. It has to be paid for
somehow. Governments do it with taxes. But private entities? They've had to
get creative.

Unless we somehow challenge "free," I think it's only going to get worse.
Surveillance will get worse. Google Glass failed but it's not the end...
pretty soon there will be an effort to normalize the idea of your smartphone
turning on its microphone and listening to your conversations. That data will
be mined for product name drops.

I'm sure more creative ideas will be explored. I had a nightmarish thought the
other night.

Full text analysis and meaning extraction is getting good, and it's only going
to get better in the future. How long will it be before Google Docs, Dropbox,
etc. start data mining the documents stored on their systems and extracting
valuable... umm... information?

Picture this: you're writing a novel. It's a really original plot. Then you
see an ad for a Hollywood movie. It is your novel, verbatim. The characters
are different but the basic plot points are all there. The story is there.

Gotta monetize those data storage services somehow!

I've started to even wonder if free (as in beer) open source needs to go. The
idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free
gets polished to the level that anyone uses it. The market expectation that
software should be free leads software writers to look for _other_ ways to
monetize, which brings us back to surveillance and data mining. Look at some
of the creepy stuff mobile apps can do, for example.

Pay for it, or it pays for you.

~~~
adventured
You mean, like free as in radio. Terrestrial radio has been free for a century
and it worked out perfectly well, while not becoming Orwellian. It produced
shows as diverse as Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, it helped launch tens of
thousands of musicians, it provides sports news, it provides weather, it
helped change the culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Even today it's one of the
best sources of local news / weather / happenings. I should know, I owned a
bunch of radio stations in a smaller market, and we made all of our money on
advertising.

The only reason the Internet is becoming a nightmare, is because the US
Government is becoming fascistic. Free is absolutely in no way an enemy of
freedom; large, powerful, violent, police states are a threat to freedom, see:
Ferguson.

~~~
krapp
But how much money would your ad time have been worth if most of your
listeners could have simply ignored the ads altogether while still listening
to the program, or refused to listen as soon as an ad came on?

One of the motivating factors for the ever more intrusive nature of
advertising on the web is precisely the assumption on the part of users that
it should be all free all the time. Radio comes from a much older age, people
treat it like television - they expect ads.

Also there's less content overall on the radio, and a much higher barrier for
entry into radio and tv than the internet.

~~~
marcosdumay
At least for now, there is no technology capable of blocking all possible ads
in a web page. If somebody wanted to include unblockable ads on their sites,
they would. Yet, most sites keep displaying the easiest ones to block, because
they violate their readers privacy, and advertizers pay for that violation.

If used ad-blockers, we'd be in a situation that's much more similar to radio.

------
Natsu
This feels slightly ironic coming from the Atlantic [1]. Though I suppose that
one might hope that this implies that they wish to put such things behind
them.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-
wemple/wp/2013/01/1...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-
wemple/wp/2013/01/15/the-atlantics-scientology-problem-start-to-finish/)

------
ewzimm
It's interesting that the article ends with buttons for Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, and Google+. We definitely need new ways of transmitting value, and
I wonder if these advertising models will lead to exactly the desired result.
Algorithms are becoming more accurate at modeling the value of things, and by
understanding user preferences, we can understand what has value to a user and
allocate micro payments appropriately. Stellar-style peer-to-peer credit
systems are exactly what we need to pay for this value. If we could calculate
what is giving us value, how much to pay for it, and do so without significant
transaction fees, we would have the result of multiple business models
reaching a common conclusion.

------
spo81rty
I don't mind ads. They teach me about products and services I didn't otherwise
know about.

They are also critical to the success of my business as we do a lot of
advertising.

~~~
tomjen3
In theory you are right. Unfortunately ads tend to be for crappy products. The
better a product is the less advertising it needs - the utopian side-effects
free cure all cancer pills would need only a single CNN interview to take over
the world. "One weird trick" ads need to run constantly because they are
crappy.

Ads run up against human nature to want to share useful knowledge. If ads were
really good we would have places to go to see ads.

------
dalek2point3
Its kinda ironic this notice on the Atlantic website:

"Ghostery found 25 trackers www.theatlantic.com"

25 is a LOT!

~~~
Houshalter
Disconnect blocks 44 and adblock 30.

------
boldpanda
Instead of complaining about Facebook and their ads, use it as a competitive
advantage in your life. And by use it, I mean don't use it.

Just as gambling is a tax on the ignorant, Facebook is a tax on the bored and
undisciplined.

If you can use Facebook even half as much as the average person, you'll have a
huge productivity and happiness advantage.

~~~
fidotron
The true genius of Facebook is it's practically impossible to not use it, even
if you're not signed up. If anyone mentions you, or happens to post a picture
with you in you're in it.

The same applies for Google, where if you happen to be in the background of a
photo which isn't shared but gets uploaded to G+ quietly as a backup of an
Android phone (which they do by default) then Google (and by extension the US
gov) know where you were, as per their demo at I/O about 3 years ago.

------
sparkzilla
This is absolute nonsense. We spend our days using free services and reading
free content which is all supported by advertisers. Google, Facebook, Tech
blogs, newspapers. It's not a "sin" \-- it's an incredible success.

If you don't like clickbait then don't support publishers who use it. It's
easy to avoid Buzzfeed and Upworthy. If you don't like "native ads" don't
click them. Support publishers who respect their readers and make a clear
distinction between content and advertising. I made such a pledge on my news
site.

[http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-
with-o...](http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-one-
weird-trick/)

~~~
adventured
It's a very, very small group of people that argue this position, and they
constantly recycle it; they just happen to be loud about it.

Meanwhile, a large portion of the Internet only exists because of advertising,
and that will always be true. A big portion of the reading and watching public
will never want to pay for all their content.

The article might as well proclaim that the advertising that supported radio,
newspapers and magazines was the devil too. Because that worked out so
terribly for a century, right?

~~~
neumann
It kinda did.

Free TV is mostly horrendous where I am. Tons of ads, terrible content. Radio
as well.

The only sources with quality and range are community radio (free but
dependent on subscriptions) and community television (only people willing to
show World Cup, but now unfortunately needing ads to support themselves) and
premium services like HBO.

Private models with advertising as the revenue eventually seem to be a race to
the bottom to get eyeballs on ads with as creativity and production cost as
possible.

~~~
e12e
This is ignoring quite a few European TV and radio channels that are funded by
(various forms of) taxation?

------
m52go
Flat fee model + modify HTTP headers to allow paying users to skip intrusive
crap? Like DNT but with $ attached.

Unregistered users unaffected. Seamless for everyone. Thoughts?

~~~
xxs
What makes you think I am not going to send those headers anyways - they are
darn plaintext. Now if you have to sign and verify, it's another story but
then again what stop people sharing those keys.

For the record I resent ads in all their forms TV/Radio/Internet - the latter
are trivially avoidable though.

~~~
tomjen3
It would be pretty easy to make the system work with private keys and signed
headers or even client certificates. You could stop people from sharing by
putting a high enough limit on how much you could access or even just from how
many ips (ie only two distinct ips in any given 60 minute window) it could be
access from. Normal users would never hit those limits, of course, but pretty
quickly you would hit those if you shared your access tokens.

~~~
xxs
Limiting by IP is a horrid (or worse) idea as they are dynamic, esp . nowadays
with free wifi access and 3G (or 4G).

There are ways to implement quotas based on certs and revocation but it's too
cumbersome to become mass use.

------
Paul_S
Websites are free to choose either one, both or neither. I think it's a good
setup.

------
pothibo
The irony of this article being hosted on the atlantic whic has an ad popping
up.

------
greglindahl
What if there was a discussion site that didn't use link-baity titles for
articles? Then I'd know if I wanted to click through in advance.

In this case: "Free: The Internet's Original Sin" is 100x better than "The
Internet's Original Sin".

~~~
dang
Agreed about link-bait, but in this case (as in many) we can just use the
article's subtitle.

~~~
greglindahl
Much better. Thanks.

