Manton Reece: I hope iAd fails | Hacker News Reader

Manton Reece: I hope iAd fails

manton.org

6 pointspietrofmaggi6 comments

Great quote: http://twitter.com/petterihiisila/status/22602545109

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you are the product being sold."

He's pushing a false dichotomy in business models - subscriptions versus advertising - when the real world is made of both. I'm all for bootstrapping and charging customers directly for providing real value and all that 37signals rah rah rah stuff but come on, it's not the only way to make money online. How many newspaper sites have you paid for? Or any sites at all, like blogs? Remember tipjoy? I'm still waiting for the micropayments revolution (hint: it's been hyped in 3 year cycles since the beginning of the web. It's not coming).

iAds might create some of the same specialization as the overall web:

* some are task-centric apps that should charge people directly and don't need a lot of repeat usage to prove their worth.

* some are content-centric, rely on repeat visits to provide fresh content and support themselves through advertising or subscriptions.

And the fact that Apple is standardizing the format to be less intrusive (fixed height, no flashing crap) than your typical web banner shows that they still put the end user first, rather than trusting developers to not crap up their apps.

That's the whole problem: iAds is, to a large extent, a capitulation to the fact that in 20 years no one has figured out how to make money in online digital goods with anything other than an advertising model.

Apple has gotten the closest—I'm amazed that they haven't gotten more good press about 99c TV show rentals, as it's essentially a la carte ad-free cable, which is supposed to have been the holy Grail of video content for the last two decades—and the fact that iAds and AdMob have become so popular so quickly is a sad indicator of how difficult it is to make money by actually making something, even on iOS.

False. Facebook is a billion dollar market driven by virtual good sales.

Sorry, should have qualified that. "No one has figured out how to make money on the Internet except by making games that people will pay not to play[1], somehow managing to sell poorly-animated GIFs for a buck as 'birthday presents' [file under thanks-but-no-thanks], or advertising."

Also note that Facebook's only actual revenue stream is ads.

[1] http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/content/cultivated-p...

Facebook expects fees from credits transactions to be a significant revenue source.

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