Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and the integrity in benchmarking (I still vividly remember when they noticed an issue with HPET in Windows affecting their benchmarks, and promptly pulled all of them offline until they could reassess). Chips and Cheese is great but only covers a certain segment of it.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)
> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
> needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
Mind this is sort of how it used to work.
Outside of broadcast TV and radio, you either subscribed to everything (newspapers, magazines, newsletters) or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand.
A problem with modern subscriptions is that they auto renew, and thus can be hard to cancel, and they tend to be quite expensive (everyone wants a “mere” $10/month).
>...or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand...
100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe to the New York Times for £90 per year because I only want to read about 5 to 10 NYT articles a year. Why can't I pay £1.50 for 15 articles? That would be about the same as buying a physical copy of a paper from a newsagent; if I buy a physical copy I probably read about that many articles from it before it gets recycled. Instead I either don't read the article I've found to or I try to find it on the internet archive which is really irritating. I would like to read articles in a range of papers; say 3-4 UK broadsheets, occasionally some international papers like the NYT, Le Monde and a couple of trade papers. If I subscribed to 4 UK broadsheet newspapers I would already be paying >£400/year in newspaper subscriptions. Who does this? I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money and why they can't come up with a better solution. If the problem is card fees on micro transactions why don't they club together and create some kind of patreon type thing that agglomerates transactions together?
I used to buy magazines in the 90s that cost upwards of $6-8 a magazine each, that's $18 in today's dollars.
You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'
The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.
Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.
Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.
Also, we did use to pay for the dead ends by just buying a paper with some ads in it. You haven’t explained why this model doesn’t work anymore? The newspapers have reintroduced the ‘you read it you pay for it’ with paywalls but they’ve overshot, now it’s like you go into the newsagent on the corner and they are shouting ‘you read it, you buy a years worth of that newspaper’ when you see one headline that interests you.
I’ve never heard of Blendle or post.news. I want a source of news that’s a known quantity and has been around for a while. I know where I stand with The Guardian[0] or The Financial Times or The Telegraph or Le Monde or the New York Times. None of these have tried micropayments to my knowledge.
[0]I know it’s not paywall currently but I don’t know how long they will go on like that.
"Dutch startup Blendle's early success in Europe has already attracted 550,000 users, the majority millennials, to read and pay for individual articles from publications like The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post."
https://www.businessinsider.com/blendle-to-launch-in-the-us-...
I looked up blendle and it seems to be a subscription service not a micro payment service. For the UK it only has The Guardian and The Independent. The first a reliable paper with opinion columns that lean left. The second a bit more tabloid. I can already read the guardian for free. I can’t tell if I can access US or EU newspapers or what they are. Post.news doesn’t seem to exist. Neither seems to be doing what I described which is the equivalent of being able to buy a digital equivalent of a one-off purchase from a news stand. I don’t think a service like this can work without some big names.
Last year the NYT cost $2.50 at the newsstand. GP wants to pay ~$1.50 for 15 individual articles. There are more than 15 articles in a single edition of the NYT, so that sounds pretty reasonable to me.
Hell, bump it up to $2.50/yr for those 15 articles/yr, same price as a single physical edition. GP would probably still be ok with that, and that doesn't seem unreasonable.
I'm not sure what magazines you were buying in the 90s for $6-$8 each, but they were certainly on the high end and not representative of your average newspaper, which were on the order of 35-50¢ at the time. Full-color glossy mags cost a lot more to produce than a newspaper, so I'm sure that's part of it.
Much like with books, the 10-15 best sellers a publisher has fund the thousands of duds. Newspapers are as cheap as they are because the filler content gets subsidized by the good stuff. And it is rare that a publisher will know what is good before it is released.
Newspapers are as cheap as they are because they are still filled with ads. Not that i mind it, ads on paper are 1000x more tolerable than the blinking, spying popovers one get online.
It's the micro-payment conundrum again. I happen to have a friend who is deep into payment tech, and he told me that publishers would love to sell single digital issues for a small, small fee, but customers are not buying.
This seems to cover most stuff where the transaction value in question is low, e.g. newspapers, single songs, and so on. The UX seems to be inadequate. I'm not privy how my buddy's company is trying to address this, but I guess it is hard to beat a news stand where I drop a few coins and get a newspaper and chewing gum.
I’m talking about a general newspaper like if I go to the newsagent now and buy a broadsheet newspaper like the FT or The Guardian or The Telegraph it costs something between £1.50 and £2.50 ($2-3USD) which gives me access to about 100 articles of which I might read max 10-15 of a weekend. So I think charging the same price for the same number of articles read should work no? If that transaction used to work with physical paper why do you think it doesn’t work with digital? Obviously for more specialist articles you would charge more and it would be better for those publications because they would be able to reach a wider audience because I’m not going to subscribe to Farmers Weekly to read that one article about tractor hacking but I might buy a one time access.
Isn’t that exactly why having the option to buy a set number of articles would be better? If you get weirded out by your newspaper of choice you can try some other ones without subscribing for a year. Or even better regularly dip into newspapers from all sides of the political spectrum to get a balanced view on a topic.
All the ones I get are just PDF's... but the the trouble is I have already read all the content on the internet from other web sites a few months ago :(.
I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings. Mine offers 3 day access to the NYTimes web site for free. There is a bit of a friction as I must first log into my library account and click a link. Then I have to log into my NYTimes account if I'm not already. Bam! Full access to everything for 72 hours. It can be endlessly renewed if that's your thing. I tend to use it about once a month.
I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings.
Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.
> I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money
NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.
"The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "
I don't subscribe to the NYT, but I do have a WaPo subscription. I'm considering canceling it. Most of what I read I can get syndicated elsewhere, or the same information presented with similar quality, elsewhere, for free.
(Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.)
I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission.
Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free.
I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?
Because the product isn't the newsprint, it's what's written on it.
By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc.
The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.
In a country of ~300 million people and with billions of people speaking English or having English as a second language that doesn’t sound like that many? If I bought the paper edition of the NYT most days for $2 that would be ~$600/yr in which case the online subscription would be good value and they would probably keep those subscribers as they are already demonstrating that they are dedicated repeat customers. If they also added the option to add 15 article reads to your account every now and then for $2 they would create a digital equivalent for the kind of person who buys a paper now and then.
I'd also like to subscribe to some rate-limited plan for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. I can usually find some workaround but it's too much hassle to do that for all the sites I'd like to read (and where I would be willing to give some limited amount of money).
After being away from it for a couple of years, I checked out Apple News+ again, and it's added a lot of newspapers and magazines in the time I was away.
The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines.
It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests.
Internet Archive is irritating. Just archive.is it and 9/10 times it's already archived. Especially with articles here on HN. And if it's not archived it will be archived on the spot.
Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.
Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.
It can't be conscious site by site. It has to be a toggle or setting that's a browser standard, backed by your IAP platform of choice, and pages check then drop the paywall and don't show ads. Call it IWP, In-Web Purchase, total up fractional costs until it makes sense to charge them, then charge them, on the same user/device IAP platform rails.
Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.
It's self defeating.
. . .
PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.
This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
If it isn't conscious site by site, you're not volunteering your payment data to the site: you're giving it to a middle man.
Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.
Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).
I'm saying all this is built into your platform of choice, both IAP frameworks available on your platform of choice, and browsers available through that platform's distribution of choice, therefore let publishers register with the platforms (or post keys and coordinates in DNS, or whatever), and the platforms distribute that to the publishers.
Google shouldn't even care if they lose a percentage of ad revenue if they get the same percentage of direct subscription. Meanwhile, Apple gets the benefit of pennies per traffic (not a cash flow they are in today) without the tarnish of being for the advertisers instead of the users and creators.
Brave (with BAT) and others have toyed with such models, but they're from the wrong vantage, and the marketplace needs too many legs of the stool built to bootstrap. Leveraging legs that are already there could make this plausible.
Thank you for trying it out -- "top stories" is a generic feed; I'd encourage you to sign up for a free account and follow authors and topics you're interested in.
That said, this point --
> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
I hear you, however, firms that took ad sales back in house instead of auction, and went back to pairing ads with content instead of profiling each visitor, found they increased both ad revenue and user satisfaction. They were able to cover costs again. Separately, many who took time to build, say, substacks, found they could cover costs if audience and content were a match.
Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better.
Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.
> or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content
Cable still exists. People wanted the ability to sub to whatever they wanted (often leaving out sports for example). That's happened and now people want it all in one place. It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free, which is leading Netflix to have an ad-tier. Though, re-bundling is going to take some time as consolidation happens.
I just want to pay a reasonable (I'll get back to this) price for the things I actually want.
Netflix was OK with me (and I think a number of others) despite being a subscription service not because it was a subscription.
It was OK because it was
- the only option
- reasonably priced
- and had "everything" one wanted
So what is reasonable?
I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd, although I'd accept if they adjusted a little for inflation.
So use the Apple TV store (formerly iTunes Store). There you can buy nearly anything from any studio, and you pay per episode or per season. Whether the costs are reasonable or not is in the eye of the beholder but I don't feel ripped off by it.
Nothing is for sale at the Apple TV "Store". You pay for a license to stream a piece of content, that lasts until Apple or the content owner decides to revoke it.
I have a bundle of Downton Abbey that is no longer for sale on iTunes and I can play it, but (for a while, they may have fixed it) at the end of an episode you had to navigate to the next episode by selecting the show and scrolling horizontally through every single episode. Technically possible but very irritating.
(Funny thing: I was watching the show when the switch happened… I watched two or three with the obvious play next episode in series behavior and then it suddenly stopped working… apple support finally told me it seems like it was related to it being taken off in favor of a bundle with the film included.)
> Books yellow and age and rot. No content you have ever bought lasts forever.
Many libraries all over the world have books which have lasted for centuries, far longer than a single person's lifetime. The books I bought as a child can last longer than my own body. That's close enough to "lasting forever" for most practical purposes.
Centuries-old books have had special care to preserve them.
If you want your personal books to last most of your lifetime, then there needs to be a modicum of care taken, which isn't always possible, especially while you're in transit and moving from one place and into another. How many books have been lost that way?
The whole point was someone lamenting digital license may not last forever (though Apple's has, so far) and I'm just reminding everyone that physical media doesn't last forever either.
Part of the concern is "I can keep it longer if I take care of it or if I keep track of it properly", eg if it gets lost or ruined its due to some lack of care by the end user, vs "I only get to keep it until some third party decides I don't get to have it any more".
Interesting. I have paperback books that my grandmother owned in the 40's that are a little fragile, but still easy to read without damaging. Perhaps they were a more expensive production process than yours.
My father-in-law (RIP) used to be a paper engineer and he had a huge collection of paper at home. He used to make his own paper for fun and I had the pleasure to assist him on a few batches. Interesting, if time-consuming hobby.
Anyhow, comparing different paper types you can see, feel, and smell the differences in quality. It starts with good raw materials, recycled low-quality paper will never make high-quality paper. That's because for high-quality paper you want long cellulose fiber in the paper. The longer the fiber the hardier the paper. The less acidic the paper, the better. You add chalk to make paper less acidic. The best paper has very long cellulose fiber and is virtually acid-free. If your paper turns yellow and "brittle" over time it is because of acid.
Now, the paper-surface is treated to create different effects (e.g. glossy, water-resistance). IIRC, that is called "coating". Coats may introduce acid again. Note that untreated paper is rather smooth and yellow-white-ish. To get this recycled, natural, rough look that is en vogue at the moment, you actually have to treat the paper to look like this. From an environmental point of view you would be better of with a smooth white paper. For longevity you want to coat your paper with an acid-free solution.
It is a little bit ironic, but engineering improvements in paper manufacturing allowed us to produce paper with lesser and less raw materials and worse pH values (e.g. industrial mills need far less water for a ton of paper than a century ago). This cheaper paper replaced the cheap paper from before, therefore degrading the paper quality, making modern cheap books less hardy than old cheap books. Cheap paper from 1930 will last a century or longer, cheap paper from 1970 will last maybe 50-60 years under normal storage conditions, ie. in an open bookshelf.
Now, that's only the paper. The printing ink and the binding also play a role in longevity. First, ink adds acid to the process, which is always bad, but depending on the ink type (dye or pigment, fountain pen enthusiasts will know this) the ink itself will fade faster or slower. Ancient inks are all of the pigment variety (or maybe at least those we know of). They have very long staying power. Modern inks are mostly dye and as a rule of thumb add more acid and fade faster. Bindings have little impact on readability, but are of course vital to the survival of the book as a book. A glue binding will degas over time. It becomes hard and breaks in a few decades. When single pages break out of the book you see the cheapest of the cheap bindings. Exposure to heat will accelerate this process, so if you like your glued books, keep them out of the sun.
High-quality books are saddle-stitched and work differently. First of, you do not stitch individual pages but fascicles, a bundle of paper, each paper holding four pages, which are then again stitched together in bigger bundles and finally into the book cover. This requires some forethought in the layout of the book and is very, very expensive. I own an archival hardcover print of _Also sprach Zarathustra_ from 2002, which was sold for about 300 EUR at the time. It was gifted to me for some accomplishment then. That's a book truly in its own league. I own a few other archival hardcover prints, but none this good. But I digress. I wanted to say that with good paper, coating, ink, and proper storage those books have virtually no end of life.
Sorry for the long post, brought up a lot of memories.
> I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd
I'm confused. A typical streaming service has hundreds or thousands of what would typically be a physical DVD. So how much should they charge?
Also, the vast majority of the cost for most content is in the creation of the content.
The tl;dr is that we've demanded things with such enormous production costs that were basically almost entirely subsidized on a socialized model, where the big appeal of the big ones subsidized the costs of the less successful ones, in a way that would make them not reliably financially viable in isolation.
But the content that is so specific it only appeals to 1-10% of people is both the most memorable and also often the content that is basically guaranteed to not hit for 90% of people. So your math on who's going to pay to consume it changes drastically when the ceiling is so much lower, especially when the effective price required is so much higher that it's going to drive even more people away.
So it's a much larger risk pool to hope you'll make your money back with the error bars so much narrower, and businesses being businesses, they go for the bland thing with a lower risk pool 99% of the time, and then wonder why their returns keep shrinking.
> It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free
I'd say this is provably false based on the popularity of streaming services, specifically the rise of Netflix's streaming service. That is the opposite of free.
Netflix is not offering ad tiers due to a lack of subscribers; they are doing it because there were a handful of quarters where revenue stagnated. This does not mean it was a bad business model; it means they want perpetual growth to satisfy shareholders. Same old story.
The reasons cable was and is bad and was destined to be replaced:
- No ability to unbundle (as you said)
- Messy time-shifting (DVRs, PPV, all that nonsense)
- Complicated and limited setup (proprietary hardware; extra fees for multiple devices; no ability to view on a computer or mobile device)
- Tons of fun trying to cancel
Cable has two real advantages:
- Fast channel switching
- Garbage exclusivity contracts
Streaming doesn't solve exclusivity but it certainly doesn't make it worse. In fact, making it easier to subscribe and cancel makes it significantly better.
For a while. Over here we expect to lose one of our three commercial TV stations in the next few years, because the market (ie. ad spending) has been moving online. Regional broadcast stations are already shutting down, because it is not worth the cost of maintaining the transmitters when people can get the same stream online.
It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free
No, it doesn't "turn out" that way at all. But if the pirates provide better service for free than the proprietors offer at any price, that can hardly be seen as my problem as a consumer.
For a few brief, shining years, it looked like the media and entertainment industries were starting to understand that. Turned out not to be the case, though.
Spotify! I used to pirate music because I couldn’t afford it otherwise, then suddenly Spotify made it so reasonable it’s genuinely worth not pirating
As for subscribing to Netflix Disney+ Hulu Prime Apple TV HBO peacock nebula discovery+ paramount+ crunchyroll YouTube premium/TV.... I may still download some stuff
Cable is laced with advertising and is linear, whereas much of the world has moved on to on demand. Further, what folks always wanted back in the days before streaming was the ability not to pay for genres they didn't want. Netflix had a reasonable low price for a while so it was worth it even if you only really watched one or two genres they had, and ignored the rest of the content. But with higher prices, it is ever more difficult to justify. Disney used to offer Disney, Hulu, and ESPN separately or as a bundle, so if you didn't watch sports, you could just get Disney and Hulu. Or if you just wanted Disney, you could get that. But they have raised prices and increasingly pushed bundling.
I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where I could get Westerns for 2 or 3 bucks a month, Action/super heros for 2 or 3 bucks, SciFi for 2 or 3 bucks, Romance/RomCom for a buck. Kids/cartoons for a buck or two etc. And then choose what I want to subscribe to each month. But if you are going to charge me 20 bucks a month, you had better have 20 bucks a month worth of content that I actually want to watch. (and no ads). Oh, and stop making good shows with cliff hanger endings and then canceling them!
> Cable is laced with advertising and is linear, whereas much of the world has moved on to on demand
As a counter, there is a trend of linear streaming channels increasing in popularity. Lots of people just want to put something on for a bit of time rather than doom scrolling on-demand to find something to put on. There have been times where I've spent the majority of the time I was willing to kill watching something searching for something to watch. Curated channels with content that your interested in is very compelling.
> I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where
These are definitely out there. I worked on the backed in for something that did this very thing. There was a channel for nothing but old western TV shows. Another channel that was nothing but animal related content. Another that was basically a Hallmark channel with similar content. I never did see what their pricing was though
Beyond the providers still offering linear TV (and the new ones being built in a new "trend" sometimes referred to as FAST TV [1]) You can see some of the linear background channel desires/trends in Twitch streaming numbers, too, and in some of the popularity of some Twitch streaming channels (such as MST3K's 24/7 MST3K channel). Also this is part of why several big "comfort events" on Twitch such as 24/7 streaming of Bob Ross or Mr. Roger's Neighborhood blew up virally.
> Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform.
In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
If anything this is a good thing, competition happened before Netflix could dominate completely.
> In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
This "competition" increased prices, which is not the desired result from competition. The problem is that copyright holders have too much power over their content, especially older content. If copyright holders were required to license content to anyone who wished to publish or redistribute it after, say, 10 years of initial publishing, that would be a form of competition that would decrease prices.
The only reason early Netflix was so cheap was because they negotiated streaming access to large swathes of content, because the rights holders thought licensing for streaming was worthless and leased them for a pittance.
That sweetheart deal was never going to last past Netflix's original gen contract expirations.
Right. This "competition" isn't, because most of it is run by the same folks that determine whether or not Netflix exists as an ongoing concern.
It's a HUGE fuckin shame that American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. was decided the way it was. Otherwise, Netflix could get out of the stranglehold that the movie studios surely have it in by buying DVDs and either mailing them or streaming their contents to subscribers. [0]
[0] The implication here is that the movie studios are threatening to refuse to renew streaming licenses for their movies if Netflix goes back to mailing DVDs at scale. If Netflix could format-shift those DVDs in real time with a one-customer-per-DVD setup, not only would Netflix have some leverage, they wouldn't be beholden to arbitrary and capricious licensing agreements at all.
Maybe not with the existing rules. I expect regions with more consumer friendly legislature might stop exclusive licensing deals (Game of Thrones exclusively on) and vertical integration (of course Disney content is exclusive to the Disney channel). Streaming has been around long enough and successful enough that you can consider it infrastructure and legislate it as such. Especially in countries where any 'lost revenue' was going to be lost overseas in any case.
Exclusive licencing is the problem, giving a 'monopoly' of sorts on streaming particular content. If everything was available everywhere, they just paid pay per view royalties say, then we'd have proper competition on pricing models & the quality of service provided.
Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far it has been all upside. The decline of Netflix and the proliferation of generally worse alternatives has not been a boon for anyone but rent-seekers. This theory of competition is not holding up here.
I think Steam is an anomaly, not the rule for monopolies. Steam is privately owned with long term stable leadership. They are generating a crazy amount of money and are able to be content with that.
If steam went public and had the usual revolving door of MBA CEOs keen to "maximize efficiencies", you can bet that Steam would turn just as malign as the adtech industry.
I concur on all points, though I think there's something else than public ownership at fault per se. Publicly traded corporations were once considered an innovation and improvement over private ownership. Something went awry over the years, and private equity is presently giving a bad name to private ownership too.
Private equity is a type of private ownership, even if it doesn't apply to Steam. In the broader context of business dysfunction, public-vs-private ownership is not telling the full story. Corporate raiding is also just part of the picture; MBA-driven corporate mismanagement, ZIRP and LIRP, principal-agent mismatch, short-term profit maximalism, and a number of other issues are involved too.
A private founder-owner-CEO combination (like Steam) might be the least vulnerable organization to many of those ills, short of a cooperative (not sure it counts as private ownership).
The barrier to entry to compete with steam is a newspaper ad, a CD-R writer (or usb stick) an envelope and a stamp. There are a million ways to deliver software. You can setup a website as a front to an S3 bucket and then just pay per download of the file. You have epic, origin gog, greenman gaming etc they all exist, but people choose to buy their games on steam, and publishers choose to sell their games there despite the 30% cut. I wouldn't call it "locking up", they just provide a Better Service to customers.
The last game I bought that wasn't on steam was probably Kerbal Space Program, in ~2014, and later converted my key to Steam when the option presented itself.
*Epic offers 0% cut for the first year to most indie games
> Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far it has been all upside.
GoG exists too, and just like what happened with streaming services, gaming companies have pushed out their own shitty platforms full of DRM and spying. Steam is still #1 though.
> If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk....
Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tidal all manage to have almost comprehensive music catalogs for me to stream. It's rare that I find something on one platform that isn't on another (Some artist exceptions exist, and are rare).
Pick 10 random films off the AFI top 100 list and tell me how to stream them. How many services do I need to watch them "for free".
Consumers want a single point of access to content. If I want to listen to a song I go to my music platform, if I want to watch content I go to the web to find out who has it... That friction is what consumers dont want or need.
That's because music costs barely anything to create vs tv/movies and the digitally distributed track is basically just advertising for the music creators merch, sponsorship deals, live gigs where they make their real money.
You can tell that's the case because practically every piece of music created has been put on youtube while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free.
So your spotify equivalent for tv/movies is going to cost $100+ a month, perhaps more because tv/movies are that much more expensive to make and that's what you were paying for cable back in the day.
But people think everything could cost $20 at most, so that's why we're going to have 10 or so streaming services and frankly that's way better than the old cable days.
CD's used to cost 20 bucks, artists used to make money on their sales.
Now they don't.
There are movies that "don't make money" because of shady accounting practices.
And I paid 100 bucks for cable for the same reason that you pay 100 bucks for internet now, lack of competition.
> while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free
There are plenty of people creating content on YouTube for what YouTube is willing to give them... and that isn't much. They have a working model because they keep creating content, not trying to squeeze every drop from the juice (over and over).
You might want to go back and look at the Paramount Decree. We would not be here if it was extended to streaming rather than allowed to expire.
No, that's because music licensing has been collected together into one or two monopolistic licensing schemes in every country. Most countries do it via a government agency, the US does it with BMI and ASCAP. It's actually kind of surprising the US hasn't broken up BMI & ASCAP with anti-trust, but they've got special dispensation just like the NFL.
Legislatures could bring in a compulsory licensing scheme for movies similar to BMI and ASCAP.
I am no expert on licensing schemes, but I've seen major artists like Taylor Swift remove their catalogues from Spotify and the like, which tells me they're not that compulsory when it comes to online streaming?
Almost all criticisms of monopolies comes from the abuse they enable. On an abstract level, a monopoly is the best option, because it removes so much extra cost, and has the ultimate scaling factor. Like early Netflix with it's seemingly infinite catalog.
In practice, of course, monopolies under capitalism exist specifically to exploit it, making things far worse for customers in the long run.
Steam is, to me, the closest we have to a benevolent monopoly. A monopoly that exists purely because it offers the best product.
Yes well the definition of "monopoly" seems to vary a bit on HN, often it means "large company I don't like".
I've heard people on this site argue that Apple has a monopoly on smartphones because they don't like Android and so their only choice is iPhone and since Apple controls iPhone 100% it's therefore a monopoly.
I suspect people make that argument because they are unaware of the word duopoly. Functionally, a duopoly isn't much different from a monopoly. The market would be far better off if there were 4 or more players.
In the context of smartphones, the vertical integrations don't help with the "monopoly" perception, either. Once you've decided to get an iPhone hardware device, your only choice is to use the Apple app store, and if you want something out of the Apple app store, your only choice is to get an iPhone. Android phones are a little more lenient in that there are at least multiple app stores, but you still have the tight coupling between the hardware and the OS despite smartphones fundamentally being ARM devices with touchscreens.
Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google Play, or Amazon stores to install apps. Or, perhaps you'd prefer to buy a Samsung Galaxy S24 and put iOS on it, and install apps from any of the many app stores just the same.
I'd be at least as irritated with the PC market if I had to buy a Dell PC to access Steam and it only allowed installing from Steam, an HP PC was linked 1:1 with the Epic store, Alienware PCs were linked 1:1 with the Origin store, etc. and building your own machine was no longer possible, though at least you'd still have more options than with phones.
> Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google Play, or Amazon stores to install apps.
It's never been like that. What you wrote is fundamentally the same idea as: "If consumer computers more like consumer computers, you could buy a MacBook Pro and run RedHat Linux on it, then run any of the macOS applications or Linux applications that exist in the world."
While the mobile computing ecosystem and details are quite different, it's mostly same cocktail of things: Commercial hardware that is either open or closed, a [maybe commercial] OS, and applications that execute under version X of the OS and version Y of a runtime.
No, we got fragmentation. If we had competition I could pay netflix to watch the same content that I could otherwise watch on hulu if I made the choice to pay hulu instead.
Since everyone has their own exclusive content paywalled off behind their own services, we're stuck with lot of tiny monopolies.
That's why prices are skyrocketing, and we have a bunch of examples of shitty/infuriating interfaces that get in the way of users and prevent them from what they want, instead of a battle between streaming services to offer the best/most features users want at the lowest prices.
"> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content"
I am also a bit pessimistic about this, but rather think the danger comes from LLMs making even more convincing clickbait and "facts". Cheap, easy to consume, if there are enough clicks, there is enough ad money.
Something real was misrepresented, so there was a lot of outcry? Awesome, lots of clicks. Lots of money. We can later apoligize, that the LLM summarizing made a misstake there.
As long as ads dominate where the money comes from for newspapers, not much will change.
I think another alternative here, is the existence of broad spectrum “summary as a service” is that “content for content’s sake” and blog spam and SEO become less relevant.
Oh there will be for sure lots of nergy wasted, on producing long text out of nothing - and on the other side using lots of energy to make LLM summarize that garbage again.
But yes, I also hope some good will come out of it and intent to stay in the good areas.
Brave is building something that sounds like it might be right up your alley, but adoption of their payment system has been rather low, and I doubt Mozilla has enough street cred to be more successful after the last ten years of their mismanagement and the market share hovering just above 0%.
> I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
> I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
No, that's why I didn't write that. Spotify allows nearly everyone to put their music on the platform. Just this week I listened to some music with <1000 plays that I found in a random video somewhere. I choose what I want to listen to and a part of the fee I pay gets transferred to the creator. I don't need to buy 100 different subscriptions to labels and musicians, it's centralized.
(Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform. I'm not using it as an example of a perfect end goal, I'm using it as an example of the only thing right now that gets somewhat in the neighborhood. And in the industry there are multiple platforms who distribute mostly the same content with only some 'exclusive' releases. Which is what I'd like to see for the web.)
Is that really how Spotify works? What if you listened only to that one creator, would all of the artists' portion of your subscription go to that creator? I was under the impression that with Spotify everybody's subscription goes into a big pool of money which is then distributed between all of the artists based on total plays. So actually as a listener of niche music, I am mostly paying for exactly the mainstream artists whose music I am not listening to and who don't need my support anyway. This is why I prefer to use Bandcamp, where I know there is a direct relationship between what I buy and who gets the money for that.
> Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform.
I wrote that paragraph for a reason.
> So actually as a listener of niche music, I am mostly paying for exactly the mainstream artists whose music I am not listening to
That mostly depends on how much you listen. If you listen more than average, your niche band will actually get more than they would've otherwise. At least if I have my brain math correct.
It was totally predictable that many of the same people who hated on the cable bundle also hate on a fragmented streaming landscape even though they probably pay significantly less than they did for cable TV unless they also pay for live TV anyway. (And they'd also hate on an all-inclusive integrated streaming service for the hundreds of dollars a month it would cost.)
> though they probably pay significantly less than they did for cable TV
Might be a bit of a cultural difference though. I'm in the Netherlands. TV was never as expensive over here as in the US. We also got spoiled, I guess, because the hits from the US were also on TV over here but the smaller shows weren't, so we'd get the biggest shows from Fox, CBS and Comedy Central on the same channel in some cases. And from what I remember this was <$20 a month.
I paid about $100/month for cable TV in the US and that wasn't with a bunch of premium content. (Maybe just HBO.) That was Comcast so I assume that was pretty typical. And then any streaming channels, movie rentals (which were mostly not on standard cable), etc. were on top of that.
And when I canceled cable TV I decided to just go cold turkey and do without the occasional sporting event on live TV. So depending upon how you count I'm probably paying less than $50/month for all my video entertainment these days.
It is more of content owner trying to get what they can from different part of the world. There are places in third world where HBO would be $1 / month , same thing in US is like 15-20 dollars. Buyers/local networks can always say this is price local market can pay else they will pirate.
I think we're past a low point of ad-fueled low-value content. Better alternatives will arise, grow, and become ubiquitous - but then they too will grow more expensive, become corrupted, and be circumvented in turn.
Media, art, and info distribution are never static targets, and even if a stable equilibrium exists and can be reached that does not mean that society will not oscillate around it.
> Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy
I think you have it the wrong way round. Piracy is the solution to Netflix (the bloated, enshittified 'content provider') just like piracy has been the solution to all the centralised media platform monopolies that came before it, that Netflix first disrupted and then joined.
As an individual it's meritorious to pay creators and pay creative collectives (e.g. studios). But it's never meritorious to pay media platforms that act as middle men. They are in the business of ripping off both the creators and their audience ('consumers' in modern parlance). You're only a sucker if you buy into their self-serving moralising narratives. The right and moral thing is to parasite them to death, by piracy. (Or boycott them; also a valid choice.)
Nope. They had it exactly right. Notice the past tense. You're just adding more context to what they said. I was able to skip out on usenet for quite a while during the Netflix golden years because Netflix made consuming content much easier than pirating at the time. But it's back to where things were before and we've got better tools for "alternate sources" of such content.
Our economic model encourages this kind of race to the bottom enshitification of everything. Unfortunately there are no high-tech solutions to this problem. The technology we need to improve is our political/economic system.
Perhaps with wealthy country populations projected to fall dramatically we will finally be forced to find a way other than "growth" to value human endeavour. That would be the most likely path to a solution, I fear it will be rather painful.
Our economic model (is supposed to) boil down to producing our goods and services using the least amount of resources. Sure, that yields planned obsolescence and enshittification, but also cheap multi-GHz laptops and widespread Internet availability.
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
internet advertising as a means to sell garbage is overvalued, but it enables a system of pervasive surveillance that allows governments and companies to exploit your data offline too. As long as the tracking continued, the buying and selling of the most intimate details of your life would still be a massive and growing industry even if no one ever put an ad on a webpage again. Advertising is also effective at manipulating public perception/opinion though so it's not going anywhere either way.
People would pay for far more if charged a nominal markup over what their readership is considered worth when subsidized by ads.
But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one answer.
Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard like DNT except its an "I'm willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM" token, coupled to something like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems handling IAP.
Is it that different once all the additional costs are taken into account? Payment processing / refunds / customer service etc etc that you need when you're taking payments, vs just pasting some Javascript on a page and giving Google your bank account details?
I kind of like the OutsideOnline model where I pay for the apps (trailforks gaiagps) but also get access to decent content. Though I guess that is close to the old cable TV bundle model that sucked.
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork of the web. It could happen 2 ways:
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
Gemini is still client/server, so it encourages the same problems of scale that HTTP has where you can't afford to run a server unless you have a source of income. IE. it would get infested by adtech the same as HTTP if it got popular enough. IMO the only way to get something that wouldn't suffer the same fate would be to make it a peer-to-peer application where everyone using the client application was also hosting a server.
> Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
This is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. If you want to only access esoteric websites, you can do that today. If you want to block ads and tracking, you can do that today. If you want to only visit websites that don't require ad support, you can do that today.
What you need is a way to pay people for content so they don't need to have ads. Can you solve that problem?
Peer-to-peer web where people don't need to pay for servers but donate some disk space and network bandwidth to participate. The content generated by passionate people that only wants their content to be out there, not make money out of it. A p2p geocities if you will.
I'm really not a fan of crypto claiming the "Web 3.0" title, but the Semantic Web had its chance for many years, and at this point I don't think it gets to hold on to it anymore either.
I’m not familiar with json-ld, other than a quick skim of a Google search that I just did. What is so revolutionary about it (and other technologies in the space, such as…?) that it represents a whole new revision of the web paradigm, comparable from the shift from static pages in web1 to interactive sites in web2?
It is not revolutionary. It is evolutionary just like web2.0 was. That is kind of the point.
But together with other, similar technologies it extends the current with metadata etc web just like web2 extended the existing web with things like ajax interactions, drag and drop and folksonomies ("tags") and other forms of user generated content.
The (IMO) fake crypto peddler "web3" is (again IMO) "revolutionary" unlike web2 and the real web3: it is a complete break from many of the things that made the web great. I'd even hesitate to describe much of it as web at all.
>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds.
Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
That model sounds great. Low friction and impulse-buy pricing.
There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example) I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly subscription cost.
Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that a non starter.
I have the next issue of always deleting cookies when the browser closes, meaning I'd get this dialog every time I visited the site. Whitelisting a site in Firefox is relatively annoying and throw in multiple devices, that dialog will always be there.
I don't really have a better idea besides automated micropayments, which nobody has managed yet, crypto doesn't count,, so I guess we'll have to live with the current situation?
This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic.
One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back.
But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet.
Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
Also, back in the day, some of us had a fair number of magazine subscriptions. But, really, at peak it was a small percentage of the number of websites I look at at least now and then. Consumption has generally changed and most of us are skittish about subscriptions generally even if we have a few.
The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20 years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or three most eye-catching articles that twenty different publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.
I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
> Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.
I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.
Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.
RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
It's not your customers' fault that your business model is not viable, and guilting people into turning off AdBlock is manipulative and detrimental to overall human productivity.
Asking people to watch ads is simply a bad trade off, in the same way that burning trash to save on fuel is bad -- to save 1$ in fuel costs, environmental damage in the thousands is caused. To make 1$ from ads, many multiples of damage in lost productivity and bad product proliferation are caused.
Ad based businesses are as bad as door to door life insurance scammers, multi level scammers, etc.
In short, find a job that doesn't require damaging other people.
/Forgot to mention, watching ads without buying the advertised product simply decreases ad yield over time and therefore it even wastes productivity for 0 return in the long run./
The virtue signaling part of online tech discourse is probably my biggest dissatisfaction with it these days. I hope you're using Kagi because Google is unethical oh and using Matrix because Discord is evil oh but you're using Gemini because the web is all cursed and sorry you're using Signal for your private communications right? Twitter is evil now Mastodon right? Hope you aren't using Reddit but Lemmy. "Enshittification!!"
Meanwhile the numbers show where the users actually are. I pay for YouTube, Telegram, and Nebula, self host Matrix, use and run Bluesky infrastructure, and a few other things but I'm the first to admit I'm in the minority. Not only that but it's time consuming! Meanwhile in tech discourse everyone is using Kagi for everything and "it's a breath of fresh air" or whatever.
That's why the saying "actions speak louder than words" exists...
In any marketing research it is well-known that what people say they would pay for and what they actually pay for are two different things. Hence also the mantra about MVPs and going to market as soon as possible.
But specifically on AnandTech and "written journalism", I think they are right about the "written" part. These days the topic and hardware reviews are all over Youtube.
A huge part of this is because there is often no other option to pay, and when there is there's a ton of friction involved. We know how much little frictions add up when people are trying to buy a product. They have to have even more impact on someone who wants to donate. I definitely spend more on my Apple devices due to easy Apple wallet integrations. I'm not going to pretend like I'll go out and start donating to all of these websites. But if the anti-popup blocker modal had something as easy as an Apple Pay button, I'd definitely consume more of that style of content if the fees were reasonable.
I'm not sure what skeletons you think are being pulled out of the closet. I do the same as the OP, if there is an option to pay I do that, but I will always ad block. I feel for you if you can't make money without ads, but I'd rather see the world burn than be ad driven.
I pay for many many subscriptions for content I like. Also, I don't see any "virtue signalling" anywhere. I don't want ads because they are hostile and not in my best interest. They significantly lower the quality of my life. It's as simple as that.
You cannot see the virtue signalling unless you see the traffic metrics and revenue sheets.
Everyone says they pay to support, very few people actually do.
Just look at how it is a matter of course to post an archive.is link anytime a pay walled article is posted. It's so pervasive and wide spread that people don't even think about it.
> the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit
What numbers?
Where can I pay to replace ads with something that isn't orders of magnitude more expensive? Basically any single-site subscription I've seen fails that test. If you're citing that kind of subscription, then that evidence doesn't work here.
The only one I've found that passes my test (no ads if you subscribe, and equally important, all the tracking crap is also gone), is ArsTechnica. I check the stories several times a week, so I'm happy to subscribe under those terms.
The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more malicious but profitable) ads.
I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all your time on crappy sites.
I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
I don't use an adblocker out of entitlement. I use an adblocker because I don't want to be tracked, I don't want to be surveilled, I don't want my information hoarded/sold/leaked, I don't want to be influenced by legions of marketers looking to hijack my monkey brain, I don't want to be scammed by paid ads masquerading as organic content, and I don't want to expose myself to yet another vector for malware.
From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
I pay for the things I care the most about, but your comment is making the assumption that other people can focus on a small number of high quality sites like you do, and that seems unrealistic with today’s web. I can’t afford enough money to pay to get rid of ads from my life, and I don’t want to limit my browsing to a tiny number of sites and never find anything new.
I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content.
Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.
> I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example of an advertising supported site because, more than any other site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would shift and KA-CHING I’d click on an ad accidentally.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.
I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. They could have diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.
David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too.
but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn't work?
I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).
I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on their core competency which is in-depth articles and explanations.
Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before something else does, they just provide a good service.
I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option?
Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the high quality kernel reports.
Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
> And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue aimlessly in the comments.
> Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting
I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Bcachefs-Regret... clearly fabricating a juicy title by intentionally misinterpreting one of Linus' sentences. Just for the aforementioned peanut gallery watching two egos colliding like they would watch WWE.
Clickbaiting may have been the wrong word, there's not much of that, more "feeding drama to an audience he knows well" than anything. The comment section is almost Wccftech tier, these days.
Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though.
Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out.
I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
Diversity of opinion and experience is extremely important. Not diversity of your bedroom preferences or any other superficial characteristics that have no relation to technical qualities. Saying otherwise is racist and *ist by definition.
Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course.
The contact information is on the website, whoever wants to, will find it easily.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)