"I will pay for content", they say. "I just don't like your 25MB flash ads."
Link to crap, and HN screams.
"Is journalism dead? This stuff is just click bait. I appreciate good writing and quality content."
Put up a paywall and HN screams.
"Why u make me pay?!?!?!?"
And if a community of educated, well-informed, and frequently like-minded technology professionals can't come to a semblance of consensus about this matter, don't be surprised if the day comes when publishers -- with an audience far more diverse in opinion than HN -- just throw up their hands and do all three: ads, paywalls, and click bait.
I don't mean to point fingers, as much point out an unfortunate reality.
HN will pay for content, but they won't pay under these terms.
All of these behaviors 1) are hostile to high-quality accessble content and 2) are fundamentally driven by advertising (or its failure).
Information is a public good. This doesn't mean it costs nothing to produce (the contrary), but high-quality public information has a high positive externality to the common wealth (that is, the commonwealth), and is essential in a democratic society.
Some see the solution as micropayments. I disagree strongly, see Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Hal Varian as to why not. Superbundling might work, but the ultimate superbundle is a highly aggregated, means-based fee. Either a direct tax (income or wealth-indexed) or bundled into broadband services. The former strikes me as more equitable, the latter as more viable.
The costs are low. A $100/year average fee per $30k in income, charged only among OECD nations, would cover all online advertising revenues. A $500/30k rate would cover the entire advertising industry. ($30k is chosen as roughly median OECD per capita income.)
(Note: corrected from earlier figures which applied to worldwide population: $20/person and $100/person would cover everything, if paid by everyone, though I see an argument for progressivity applying the tax to developed nations.)
The distortions, perverse incentives, inefficiencies, privacy invasions, security risks, and more, of the present model simply aren't worth it.
HN's policy is that paywall-based stories are acceptable. I disagree strongly with this view. The WSJ is trying to play both sides of the subscriber-only / viral content game. And are providing increasingly slanted, unreliable, Murdoch-tainted content to boot. I view it as barely above spam.
There are other sources, they should be allowed and encouraged. WSJ should be blacklisted.
And yes, I absolutely would like to see an alternative publication financing model pursued. I'm not holding my breath. But supporters of the model I've proposed include Richard M. Stallman of FSF and Phil Hunt of Pirate Party, UK, among others.
Previously, on global advertising spend, publishing models, and per-capita costs: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/post /adKy4gM317c
Several posts on content syndication, and inherent problems of information goods and markets: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=content+syndic...
Hal Varian (UC Berkeley economist, Google's chief economist) on information goods and markets: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/index.h...
So my initial reaction to their arguments was that none of their complaints matter as long as it's cheap enough. The fact that my water is metered doesn't make me anxious about usage, because it's too cheap to care.
But of course, that's because water is fungible. I have no fear that the water company is going to start sending me expensive mineral water while I'm in the shower to run up my bill.
But the exact same forces that lead sites to ridiculous extremes of obnoxious advertising, are likely to push up their micro-costs high enough that people can't ignore them, and most likely stop visiting.
The only way I can see it ever working is if there were some way to regulate the costs to avoid this. But I'm not sure there's any way to do that for something so non-fungible.
Make the individual item payments small enough, and quite literally, it isn't worth my time to have to decide on the value. You see, transaction costs matter, and the actual price paid itself is a very small component. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs
Again: the amount of money necessary to eliminate advertising completely is all but inconsequential. The frictions, costs, inefficiencies, and negative externalities of fractional-mill per-page costs would be stupidly inefficient.
E.g., I can read ~50-100 web pages/day. That's, roughly, 36,000 pages, tops, per year, or $0.002 per page. Should I really have to decide one hundred times a day if a page was worth reading?
And to what end?
If I'm broke enough that that's a concern, then there's a tremendous social inequity in denying me the information.
If I'm rich enough that it's not a concern, just bill me the 0.33% out of my income tax that it would cost to provide this. I don't care, literally, it isn't worth my time, and I'm subsidising access for the poor in my own country and around the world.
My whole point is that markets and information are exceptionally poorly suited. I've considered your arguments and rejected them.
Water, incidentally, is another case where the infrastructure, that is, fixed costs hugely outweight the marginal costs of delivery in most cases.
No, and the argument I was suggesting is that if the costs were low enough, no one would really need to make those decisions, any more than they need to decide whether running a glass of water is worth the cost.
>If I'm rich enough that it's not a concern, just bill me the 0.33% out of my income tax that it would cost to provide this.
Why? If a micropayment system worked well enough that no one cared about the prices, what reason would there be to involve the government?
(Not that I'm averse to such a scheme, I just think you're making a strange leap of logic here.)
> I've considered your arguments and rejected them.
It feels like you just read my first sentence, and reacted to that, despite the fact the rest of my comment argues against that position, and ultimately agrees with you (although from a slightly different direction).
Measure share of readership, and you're largely set.
You're re-iterating (best I can tell) earlier arguments, made and dismissed. HN's "only show the immediate post being replied to", particularly on mobile, makes referencing your GP comments all but impossible, but again: I and others far more intelligent than me have considered and rejected the micropayment arguments and pointed out further inequities they ignore.
One option would be similar to how performance rights organisations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_rights_organisatio...) operate in music and broadcast based on mechanical copyrights.
Another option would be to identify who the most valuable authors, reporters, composers, performers are, and provide a stable annualised income based on this and related elements.
In the UK, broadcast taxes are paid to the BBC, which funds creatives.
The details of how specifically individuals are paid isn't so important as the fact that they are, in a manner sufficient to provide the information and media necessary for a vibrant culture and society, as well as polity.
If you look at Adam Smith's discussion of compensation for labour, he comes up with a fivefold set of factors, on top of the basic fundamental imperative that wages be sufficient to live on and raise a family.
Somewhere in there lurks at least one successful formula, I'd suspect.
(I'll see if I can't find some relevant links.)
Those sound like great sources on how to monetize your IP effectively.
Who controls this? The Government? All media is now state sponsored is a questionable model.
99% of the time I'm not looking for things the ministry of foreign policy doesn't want me to know
and it is favorable toward high quality accessible content. everyone concerned about competition and the competition gave you shit that makes state run news a breath of fresh air
Privacy and metrics.
If you think about it, this is what broadcast media already accomplish nicely.
The other 1% is the news that actually matters.
The publishing site, numerous third-party metrics providers, advertising providers, ISPs, and any MITM listener has access to the full metadata, at a minimum, and potentially full data.
You'd need to disintermediate via Tor (blocked or disabled by a great many sites -- Cloudflare and Google are particularly culpable here), or other means, to avoid this.
I've made a habit of using Tor extensively for a number of reasons, tab management among them (opening trivial articles in a Tor browser and having them wash out helps, very slightly, in managing my tab explosion in Firefox/Android).
Local news? Straight to the point, no sensation, build up. Just what happened, what it means.
Military skirmish between two nations that the state has no stake in? Straight to the point.
You are concerned about the human rights abuses and political dissidents. If you need that to rationalize why you prefer to put up with privately owned news sources that can't monetize worth shit, then keep it up. They aren't exactly effective at turning people against about the establishment.
That 1% is important, and we absolutely need to make sure we have alternatives for that, but the point is that we shouldn't throw out that 99% just because it's not 100%.
Print media does have more costs, but its advertising also costs more. Print also has subscriptions/purchases to actually get the material in addition to the advertising it contained so they have 2 revenue streams, allowing the advertising to be simpler and not carry the entire cost. And it still wasn't a great business model with many outlets just breaking even.
Regardless, there were never "millions" of advertisers or publishers like we have in digital which is why selling direct does not work, unless you only want the top 1% of sites to make any money...
And that's the biggest and best publisher there is, which goes back to what I last said: even if the high-end pubs do it, mid-tier and long-tail pubs definitely couldn't handle 1st party ad serving and thus would not be able to make any money.