Why Your Favorite Sites Are Suddenly Asking for Money | Hacker News Reader

Why Your Favorite Sites Are Suddenly Asking for Money

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14 pointsjohan_larson6 comments

David Wong has some interesting things to say about why online publishers are increasingly looking beyond ads to support their businesses. The means vary, but include pay-walls (used by such worthies as the Economist and the New York Times) and donations, often facilitated by Patreon or IndieGoGo. The publishers are doing this because ads pay a lot less than they used to. The move to smaller screens has shrunk the screen real estate and ad-blockers are increasingly common. Smaller ads viewed by fewer people means less money to the publisher; it's that simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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