Medium and Twitter founder: ‘We put junk food in front of them and they eat it’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Turn on your ad blockers. Destroy addiction as a business model. The only content that will remain will be subscription-based, commissioned by crowds or individuals, or written for free. It will be better.
Yes, because it doesn't have to be a direct exchange of money.
For example I feed live data to Wunderground, Flightradar24 and several other smaller sites and in exchange they give me ongoing advertisement-free subscriptions to their services.
That costs me a few pence per day in electricity, on top of initial equipment acquisition, but neither of those costs is tied to one particular service. I could change from Flightradar to Planefinder or Flightaware, for example, and receive the same benefits.
You might block "27 Thoughtful Wedding Gifts" because it has product links, but there is chance some of those links would actually be useful to people looking for wedding gifts.
Such a blocker would have to block the entire Buzzfeed, for instance.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buzzoff/jhnikgaddd...
Unless Google is automatically deleting stuff it's really sure about straight away?
What I have noticed, however, is that I am now getting more and more telemarketing phone calls (robo calls) on my cell phone than I am spam hitting my inbox. It's reached the point where I keep my phone on silent all of the time because I get 5+ robo calls each day.
As a reader, I don't care that much if an article is paid or not. If it convinces me to buy something, it'll usually be something I can return.
As a citizen, it is terrifying that journalism and advertising may one day be indistinguishable.
I'm a lot more cynical of articles, though, and like you I generally treat any positive piece (even down to forum posts if they smell fishy) with a degree of suspicion.
Large actors should never have too much control over the media.
But once they do it better it becomes rather problematic ethically. What good is a "this contains PP" label if it's the standard and you can't identify it. I guess once we cross that bridge my only recourse is non consumption. I guess there might be a disruption opportunity there somewhere where you can pay for content without the PP which requires shooting TV/movies/sports broadcasts in two different modes. Doubt there would be many customers for that though...maybe the other way around, dynamic programming with custom tailored PP.
But this would suggest Google monitors what I do in my Chrome browser then suggests an affiliate embed a casual link in an e-mail based on the friend he is writing. That sounds kind of evil and improbable. Anyone ?
Also, I absolutely hate the current trend in tv shows to put a sticker over a logo on _every single_ computer. Real world does not look like this, it is ridiculous.
More recently I saw a show about clothing where they put some duct tape over Nike logos on shoes.
Are there laws that prohibit you from showing brands in videos shot in public places now? If Nike did not want to be recognised they would not put their giant logo on everything.
No, but that doesn't stop the companies from filing lawsuits or threatening too if they don't like the context their brand was shown in.
The free cobbled together ones where you maybe get pizza and some soda are the ones where I learned the most.
No one is going to build this stuff unless it has some sort of personal gain for them. There's nothing wrong with that at all, it's just the way things work.
I would love to have a basic income, or an endless supply or money and be able to work on what I want, when I want. At the moment I'm not quite there, so have to find the odd day or two per week to work on more interesting 'stuff' than paying bills.
It's interesting that there is this huge contingent of programmers who have a picture of what they would do if they had basic income, and that that picture is very different from what they do at their "day jobs."
It's part of why I think basic income experiments are so very interesting. Just this question of what would people do? What new things would happen? How would software change? How would everything else change?
It's a very interesting field. I'm not waiting around for it to happen though, especially in the UK which is a very conservative country in the main.
I'm actively building my business so that I can take a back seat, or sell it within 3 years and thus spend more time solving different problems (that may or may not have a monetary end-game for me).
At the moment they are just side projects!
Turn on your ad blockers (and destroy addiction as a business model)? Yeah, right. Really, you're kidding, right?
Even podcasts don't do that well as a business. The longest lasting podcasts are the ones that are essentially one large advertising vehicle for products or services owned by the individual or company running the podcast.
open source, another example of this, has pushed many individuals out of business because they give away many of the same set of features for free and then charge for support. A support company doesn't scale well with a single person or even a couple. This is why pretty much all popular open source projects are funded by large corporations. I can't think of one that isn't.
The pattern has been pretty clear in the last decade: push to give something away for free, the big corps take over because the individual can't compete with free, complain that big corps are ruining everything, and the latest: we now need a basic income because there are no jobs left.
Money is a necessary evil. It can give even the individual more power over their own life. I'm just surprised that so many people here advocate the voluntary shift in power away from the individual and into the hands of big corporations.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole progressive movement does exactly this. In the Nordic countries for instance, it's nearly impossible to run your own company due to the crippling taxes and regulations involved. Your only choices for employment are big corporations and the government.
I hope I'm around in the future, and I hope that other websites will see the light and follow good practices.
Today, we seem to be fighting for this false binary of either a web with ads or one without. What the old world of print might teach us is the importance of quality, limited, relevant advertising. When done well, people are not only OK with advertising, they embrace and look forward to it. Magazines were best at this...but they've gone down the path of devaluing their ads by moving towards more and more paid content (advertorials) and by overwhelming the content with the quantity of ads.
I think in the end, publishers will have no choice but to see what you see or else perish.
Only in the mind of some advertising execs, what on earth makes you think people bought magazines for the adverts?
Computer Shopper.
Lucky.
The site runs on WordPress so I just use one of the ad rotation plugins available [adrotate pro]. Most campaigns are for some set number of weeks or months and the plugin takes care of that.
I track clicks and advertisers track referrals traffic plus whatever other metrics they want to on their own websites. Because a number of advertisers renew regularly, I trust that they are happy with the results they are seeing. For payments, it kind of depends on the customer, but basically I just invoice them.
It's almost impossible to read a well written popular piece of content today that isn't selling something either directly or indirectly.
I think we will see advertising in the form of a piece of promotion attached to other content is going to disappear as we become better and better at injecting it into our normal content.
People sell themselves just by brushing their teeth in the morning, so that they're more marketable than the slob that doesn't.
I am selling you my influence right now.
You're pounding round pegs into square holes and just ignoring the shredded bits that went flying when you did that.
Everybody markets.. some are just better at it than others.
You exist to market yourself.
The moment you partake in a social group, whether it's through one more person, or through a nation, you have marketed.
And I really don't see why you're so committed to generalizing marketing and sales terminology into a general human philosophy, save for your lack of familiarity with the existing, perfectly suitable terminology.
More importantly, human identity is complex and multi-faceted, and is not entirely defined by human individuality. I can see myself as an individual, and maybe I'm selling something there, but if I see myself as a living creature, there is nothing for me to sell myself to, since rocks and stars don't give a shit what I'm 'selling.' Humanity itself is not selling anything, and my ability to see myself as an agent of humanity precludes me from selling anything in that role. So anything I do in service of those goals isn't marketing.
Imagine you just stubbed your toe. You've just participated in life. Now what are you 'selling' by doing that? Nothing.
C.W. Mills
Nature has given us needs that needs to be full filled, like thirst and hunger. There is also higher level needs, like need to fit in and seen as a desirable mate.
What do we get in return of this pursuit? Pleasure in some cases or relief from pain, in other. In other words, it is a fair game, IF you consider that pleasure and pain are "real".
Now ads are evil because the create needs that often conflicts with our natural drives. For example, a man who loses sleep, or does not spend time with family for advancing in career, often so that he can buy more stuff. In this case, the man sees pleasure in seeing his bank balance increase and makes him afford more and more expensive stuff.
Now this pleasure, I say, is a lie. Because it is not natural, and does not serve a natural purpose. Also, this manipulation by Ads also serves to distract people from constructive thinking.
Imagine all the revolutions and all the breakthroughs of the world. They came from People who think freely. When you are distracted 24x7 by ever increasing ads, where do you have time to think for yourself? I am not saying that all the creativity from the world has disappeared. But imagine if the great artists of the past were distracted by Ads like we have today? Do you think the great works in arts and literature would have been created?
I am not even considering ads that Inject fear and insecurity into the minds of the masses to make then spend, spend, spend all day long..../rant
Also, consider the fact lot of subscriptions have poor overall value. Advertises allow you to try and move on without making any commitments. If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.
Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model. Subscriber churn is almost always ongoing threat putting significant pressure on aquition pipeline. If TV channels went subscription only, most would die quick horrible death. The open secret in media industry is that advertisers are forced to pay lot more money than return they would actually get which ultimately "subsidizes" the content creation.
I don't care if it's hard to build a business on subscriptions. The alternative—building a business on addiction and manipulation—is immoral. I will happily watch it die.
So what would people do with the money if ads didn't exist? Make quilts out of bills? People are going to spend it all, that's the whole purpose of money, ads just redirect who gets it.
There are studies showing that people don't use their garages to park their cars, because they are full of stuff.
Ads constantly remind me that the newer model of the blender that I have will make me sooo much cooler (blender is just an example). But the last year's blender that I have works perfectly well. Why should I like the fact that the website tells me that I'm old and boring because I don't have a perfect body and I have last year's blender model?
Garbage content is not an improvement over no content, no matter what your demographic. I'm also skeptical that there's a very large demographic for whom even $10/mo in subscription fees would break the bank.
> If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.
Sounds great to me. Most of the time I spend on the internet is spent looking for decent content, and most of that time is spent sifting through garbage.
> Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model.
Excellent. I really hope the Buzzfeeds of the world go out of business.
Advertisers and the garbage they fund make the world a worse place. They prop up businesses that provide negative value. They drain resources from businesses that provide value but have to advertise to the level of their competition's advertising. They introduce insecurity and complexity to our infrastructures. They waste the talents of thousands of brilliant minds who could be solving real problems. They sell people things they don't need or want, for prices they can't afford. Worst of all, they poison the collective consciousness with ignorance and outright lies. They deserve to go out of business.
People are willing to pay for what they actually want, and people want good content, so creators of good content will be okay. The creators of garbage who need ads to legitimate their sorry existence, on the other hand, can burn.
But what can you buy with $10/m? The subscription to a single newspaper is more than that (and you often still get ads).
I wholly disagree. You think from the perspective of an US citizen but there are other places on the map where 10$ would be a great deal. This would restrict these people's access to information that they might need just as mush as you do. The side effect would be effectively closing off parts of the internet to a great array of people. You'd eventually get at the same impasse the film industry is now. Bad distribution, unserrviced areas, article piracy would pop-up.
My father earns ~300 EUR/month. How would you convince him to pay 10$/month for a website that publishes maybe ~5 articles that seem interesting to him a month?
And your information staple is not just _one_ provider, but many providers, and you'd probably have to pay them all.
The presence of paywalls would not necessarily exclude the existence of rubbish. Look at newspapers before internet, bad press also existed then, tabloids existed then. And people paid for them. No, the reason bad content exists is not because of the payment model, it's because people _like_ it. They enjoy shitty articles, they let themselves emotionally manipulated by factless press. We, as a collective, are pretty weak.
But open, even ad-based access to information can improve this. Open access leads to a more diverse information stable and eventually, people settle for the, it not best, at least better information alternative. Thing that would not happen if you were stuck in your information bubble, as is with a sole or few information providers.
If you are thinking of blocking ads then that will hit not only the pockets of junk content creators(which is fine) but also that of good content creators who will then eventually turn to the junk.
Don't worry. When, someday, ads are gone, you can probably subscribe to some product recommendation service if you so desire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_u...
The reason many people don't like it are:
* it feels like a third-party license fee due to how it is charged (e.g. you have to pay it yourself and it is charged per household rather than per citizen)
* prior to the simplification of the rules in 2013 many people would be subjected to "inspections" by the media companies, with ethically and legally dubious behaviour like peeking into bedroom windows and rummaging through trash cans (in the days of tv magazines)
* it costs money, unlike most private channels (via satellite or antenna)
* you have to pay even if you don't use it or don't want it
* despite being something you have to pay for, there is no obvious way to influence the programming
* although they are the only channels that are required by law to feature a certain amount of educational and cultural programming, in practice a lot of it is basically "entertainment for the elderly" (like telenovelas and cheesy romance flicks) or game shows
Personally I'm also extremely annoyed that they give free airtime to the dominant religious groups (Catholic Church of Germany, Evangelical Church of Germany and sometimes Jews or Muslims) "because culture", to the point that they always invite religious ministers or monks for ethical debates and frequently give them more weight than secular arguments (though to be fair: the religious representatives usually come off as fairly progressive although their arguments are of course still entirely based on theology).
Plus, of course, the fact that while BBC subscribers get Terry Pratchett we only get Rosamunde Pilcher -- and German actors, who are mostly horrible and take themselves too serious.
“I’ve been working on publishing systems on the internet for my entire career, which is coming up on 20 years now,” says Williams. “When I stepped back from operations at Twitter, I thought, OK, what’s next? There was no longer this need to make it easy. We’d checked that box. It’s easy to create a website. It’s even easier to send a tweet. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.”
It's easy to agree with this based on the media we encounter today, but this state is not an obvious result of the introduction of the internet. The network has changed our culture, and continues to change our culture, in ways that we don't yet fully understand.
A significant portion of print (and now online) pieces would be as a result of professional PR efforts.
(My wife works in PR and I used to share an office with another PR company.)
One of the problems is fairly well understood: the tendency for marginal costs to approach zero, or at least a small fraction of the fixed costs of production (look at the story over how Boeing accounts for the R&D of its 787 Dreamliner).
Another is more insidious: information isn't readily assimilarted. If you look at the advertiser's toolkit for message dissemination, what you see are all kinds of ways to drape the intended message over an assimilable one: sex, youth, beauty, fame, fear, greed, jealousy, envy, loss. Or repetition, music, disorientation, flashy elements.
Junk food (of the dietary or infotainment variety) has cognizability, a word I first ran across in William Stanley Jevons description of characteristics of money. You instantly recognise what these are. Complex truths are, well, more complicated. The geniuses who discover or explain them come up with useful metaphors or analogies: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman. Much of that is mapping a novel thought onto a familiar one.
We're not going to take that out of information, it's part and parcel of the bargain (a metaphor, incidentally, arguably a cliche). But we can try engineering systems for compensating and promoting information which don't flagrantly flog and feed junk. That's the feedback and control loops Williams talks of.
One approach is to treat information as a public good. It's what the UK does with the BBC, and it's the philosophy of a number of institutions, including CUNY's Graduate Center (who've adopted this as their motto), and Robert McChesney and John Nichols:
We can also look at the daily habits of the ordinary people who create non-junk content every day.
De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is all about this: the fertile creativity of people going about their lives, which is overpowered by the glitz of mass media and the seriousness of corporate activity.
That's where my love is, and it's the base for my anti-commercial sentiment. Power to the people.
Corporations didn't invent food, literature, math, love, cleverness, music, fishing, gardening, dancing... they are sponsors at best, tyrants at worst.
So when they try to convince me that, say, music is doomed because of "pirate copying," it really makes me laugh. I have a guitar right here, and two friends who are into folk song...
And all this goddamn stuff they think it's important to consume, including all the goddamn news. To hell with it.
Thanks for the comment though, pretty much as I'd suspected.
Another note: if the frequency is too high in any one period of time, I suspect there's burnout. Political advertising seems to hit this point -- a friend in a heavily campaigned state a few years back used to respond to candidate spots with "F--- you <name>" when yet another of the multiple-times-an-hour ads would sound.
You need repetitions, but also spacing.
There's also ... I forget the name, but "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy", a 1930s / 1940s Texas politician. Ended up governor, before getting caught up in a corruption scandal. Early name recognition came from his fame as a bluegrass / popular music performer.
Its different for each industry though, some do 90% of spend for the holidays.
If you're interested in some advertising theory, give Media Planning: A Practical Guide by Jim Surmanek[0] a shot. It's short and pretty accessible.
[0] - http://amzn.to/1Q7mGVe
With a business model exactly like BuzzFeed's, which is built on optimizing for content and titles that can be turned in native advertising. It's not changing the way how we think about the world...it's the changing the way we think about how advertisers want the world to look like.
I wouldn't even really say 'most' of the news. Unless you're in high finance or a journalist, it really is just trivia.
Weather forecasts and crosswords are probably the best bits. For the rest, you're better off reading classic novels, all scandals are history playing itself.
It feels a bit 'tragedy of the commons' to me. It's important that someone is reading the news (because otherwise democracy falls apart). But my personal utility is maximised by reading a book about tax law rather than an article about the Panama Papers.
Social networks are ok to move news around, but centralized media is more efficient to reach the masses.
Also: judging by the amount self-righteousness in this thread, HN readers would never consume 'fast-food-content', read 'a calculus book per day' and see through all the marketing spin. All while compulsively reloading HN, probably.
And I read hackernews not because of the news articles but because of the value of the hackernews comments, though I agree, it is somewhat hypocritical, I also read the news sometimes.
I don't disregard journalism, there are some journalists who I hold in very high esteem. The problem is a classic one: Journalists have a job to write up things. They seek out information and make an article out of it. This is very difficult to do right since most interesting articles emerge from an inverse process: That the writer learned or acquired valuable information first and later feels the need to share it. This kind of writing has a higher probability to contain anything of value.
Really disappointing from the Guardian.
Oh god. Please no. Kill me.
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
(not meant a snide remark, just thought it was an interesting coincidence in choice of metaphor)
"We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”
He told: ", well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”.
Content/Media on the web is bad and people are dissatisfied.
How exactly do you reach this conclusion? I mean we can all make huge assumptions about the opinions the average human have on the quality of media, but I don't think that qualifies as any form of factual commentary.
Ev was the founder of Blogger, co-founder of Twitter and now is the founder of Medium. If he's reached the conclusion that people are dissatisfied with content/media on the web it's probably because a lot of them have told him so (it's still just his opinion though, doesn't mean he's right).
Junk food like McDonald's and Snickers bars have been shown to be addictive.
They are all the same type of product. It's amazing to see those involved in tech attempt over and over again to rationalize themselves out of that obvious connection.
The though occurred to me, that those highway signs with the mini ads for the gas stations and restaurants coming up could include products you'd be able to get at said gas stations and restaurants... Snickers could be on the sign, right next to Chevron or ARCO. That would be relatively cheap for some larger brands (Coca-Cola comes to mind), but potentially huge in terms of placement.
Gah, I hate that I come up with ways in the back of my mind on ideas like this... still it's better than the over-the-top ads in the clickbait sites.
I think that the best way to fix this is to change monetization strategy from ads to premium content or paid subscriptions. When that happens, the main incentive turns from "quickly produce a lot of viral content" to "create high quality content that is worth buying". It is the easiest, the most straightforward way to properly align incentives.
I was so excited about Medium because it's a platform that had a chance to do that, and I hoped they would. Unfortunately, they have introduced ads as a monetization strategy. Too bad.
"ad-supported"
First every new social and/or blogging platform is praised as some deity that will unlock the path to fame, fortune and a life time supply of cheese puffs, and so the hype should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
That said Medium is a solid platform that has a few advantages:
1) It's got a great asethic both for readers and writers. It's clean, flows nicely and that holds true cross device.
2) It's managed by someone else. As a writer you don't need to worry about plugins, updates, themes, etc. You just write.
3) It's managed by someone else. As a reader you don't need to worry about malicious code, horrible pop-unders or aggressive ads.
4) The fact that it is a joint marketplace for publishers and supports curration supports sharing quality pieces regardless of the publisher and so for someone who otherwise would spend a lot of time trying to seed and promote their own blog content, they can focus on writing. While there still needs to be some promotion, a really well written piece on Medium can carry further.
That said it has it's downsides. While the piece may carry further, the impact may be less than your own blog where you may amass a following. You as an author can't really monetize the content on that platform as easily nor does it have flexibility if you want to show case something in a particular style, or with plugins/features not natively supported by Medium.
Medium is like any other well-designed platform. It has it's specific use-cases which it does a great job at. But it will not give you unlimited cheese puffs.
Update: so there's a monetisation API on the way. So - we'll see how those cheese puffs work out.
The challenge is that the platform of curation of interesting content for the sake of interesting content, stops working when it becomes the curation of interesting content for profit. As unless you do it based on customer satisfaction in microtransactions (oh I like your content have a cheese puff), then it's based on views or clicks.
Thus begins their decent into clickbait land where everyone gets cheesits (the crunchier, lamer and more disappointing brother of the cheese puff).
You earn low volumes of cash as you don't have a loyal readership. I earn disappointment as your title was misleading, and we both go home and cry in the fetal position at what the internet has become.
So, once again, hopefully they nail it - because right now they're pretty dandy.
That's pretty much how all businesses try to get artists/creators to work for free ("it'll look great in your portfolio"). Medium has just found another way of doing that, it seems. Well played, Ev, well played.