Content Is King (1996)
web.archive.org
web.archive.org
And that was back in 1996..
They may be additionally compensated for having created something (or contributing to the creation of something in a collective effort), but it's that stretch between conception and emergence that is most critical, and for which the market, as it stands, has no answer. And cannot have an answer.
This is more like 300 fanatical content consumers deciding to give a certain person $5 a month so that they spend as much time as possible producing content.
Allocating this as a tax would more than replace all present spending on authors, screenwriters, journalists, and musicians.
The current problem isn't that we can't or won't pay, or we can't or won't accept advertising. It's that each generation of adtech becomes more and more user-hostile until we're forced to fight back.
So the popup became the pop-under, and devolved into popup bombs until browsers were forced to act. Tracking has gone from associating an ad-view with its context, to growing that context across their entire ad network until they've profiled exactly what demographics and markets you fit into, and browsers are starting to fight back.
It's not that we won't accept advertising. It's that advertising is in a constant race to the bottom. And I think - I hope - we're about hitting the bottom of the current generation of adtech.
* It's intrusive.
* It's distracting.
* It promotes a host of anti-usability features
* It's creepy, and you're creeping me out.
* Ads themselves price-discriminate -- though how and when I can never be certain
* The mechanisms of advertising networks pose security issues
* The goods and services which are most highly advertised are those which I'm least inclined to buy.
* It's not relevant.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24107v/forbes_...
Adding to the above, from four years ago, I've since realised that advertising:
* Promotes crap content.
* Kills quality content.
* Undermines truth and liberal democracy. Supports and sustains demagoguery, fascism, and institutional oppression.
See Dwight McDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culturei" (https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...) (1953) (PDF), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totaltarianism (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=arendt%20origins%20tota...), and Gerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television* (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Mander+arguments+elimin...), for starters.
Hamilton Holt's excellent 1909 lecture, "Commercialism and Journalism", available from the Internet Archive, addresses most of the modern complaints against advertising, at a time when it was just beginning to massively re-shape (and, to be fair, enable) the modern media landscape.
Apart from NoScript, are there other good ways to handle "subscribe to my mailing list" modals?
Information is a public good.
https://www.scribd.com/document/370801872/Joseph-Stiglitz-Kn...
It already happens in Portugal for eg. LUSA News Agency is a funded by the Government in order to guarantee exactly what I just described. LUSA is not perfect but it's role should be treated as a public good.
"The Debate Over Public Policy and the Emergence of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1927-1935"
http://www.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v021/...
When the BBC was formed in the UK, the concept of allowing media ownership to be in the hands of private corporations was considered unthinkable.
Government funding has its own set of considerations, though in balance it seems generally preferable, most especially if funding and control are separated.
I've 2 niche blogs and tried several ways of monetisation along the years. I only kept a direct ad (that adblocks can't detect) and amazon affiliates. I ditched Adsense (from 50€ it dropped to 1€/month) and tried donations (patreon, buymeacoffee, paypal) but it's not the right niche for that (art students).
If you keep your content focused/niche enough I think overtime you should have a nice following.
I would love to discuss the problems with your two blogs, I'm actually trying to solve them.
Not sure why we haven't added some such one-click "pay $0.2 for this article/video/etc" option to our web browsers. That was the whole promise of micropayments back in the day.
Good Content would be peer reviewed by its readers, like it happens here on HN, and those reviews would in return garant those contributing some discount or even reward.
We are so far away from that like earth from mars.
Imagine this: (1) The publisher starts writing quality content in order to gather as much subscribers as possible. (2) Th publisher gets a comfortable amount of subscribers. So it starts to wind down the content quality, thus reducing his costs. (3) Now the users aren't getting the quality they are paying for. (4) Maybe slowly, but surely the subscribers will cancel their subscriptions and ultimately lose their trust in the publication itself. (5) The world is balanced once again.
Now this last point is important, the relationship between the producer and the consumer is based on trust.
But either way, maybe the world would be better if content wasn't free, if it wasn't trivial and inexpensive to artificially inflate access to attention. As it stands our "marketplace of ideas" is at best a market for lemons.
When did we go from the shiny, utopian visions to this advert-overloaded cyberpunk future of attention hackers [1] and panoptic sousveillance?
[1] https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention-economy...
> But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won't be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You'll just click on what you want, knowing you'll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.
> This technology will liberate publishers to charge small amounts of money, in the hope of attracting wide audiences.
> Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products-a marketplace of content.
I wonder what happened to the future of 1996..
It's also possibly because the internet and content is in the midst of an endless race to the bottom. People are giving away their work for free, so people have come to expect that as the norm and are less incentivised to pay for anything further down the line (because if they do, their free competitors will eat their lunch). It's a lot like what's happening in the smartphone app market, where due to all the ad supported/free/99 cent apps available, anyone trying to sell an app for more than a few dollars is going to lose most of their audience.
The need for surveillance and the potential for social control that it offers.
If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines."
Bill clearly didn't consider that the 'drawbacks of the online medium' would be eliminated by everyone having a computer in their pocket. I pay for online-only subscriptions to The Economist and The New York Times, and these apps are essentially just electronic copies of their paper cousins.
Bill also seems to have missed the possibility of not producing content but instead acting as a platform for others to produce content. The network effects of such platforms have led to wildly profitable enterprises such as YouTube, Facebook and Spotify. Given Microsoft's own network effects, it's strange that Bill didn't consider this angle.
> But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won't be writing a check or getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You'll just click on what you want, knowing you'll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.
To think this practice still isn't widespread 22 years later...!
The brave browser in particular has built in micropayments feature.
It'd be much easier to get a bunch of sites to use a decentralized currency than have someone's payment service on a "MySQL server", not to mention that cryptocurrencies have a natural equilibrium for payment fees, while such a service would only be looking to squeeze out as much fees as possible from this theoretical new way of paying for content.
micro-transactions never were, why charge a cent when you can charge 99!
alternate article: Content is not King
See for example recent article on front page here yesterday(?) about the music industry now making a fraction of its previous money. Or even the old numbers paling in comaprison to Google Facebook Amazon - information, social connection, and buying shit.
The content industry is just not that big, $$-wise, and never has been. Humans are social animals, it wins out.
I don't really see what's wrong with the subscription / paywall model, other than it means letting go of "information wants to be free" dogma and admitting Rupert Murdoch was right about something. At this point it seems preferable to the ad-driven business model.
The finance professional who lives in New York has very valuable page views. The African school girl does not. Yet, through advertising their values are averaged. The affluent subsidize the poor without even knowing it.
Putting content behind a pay-wall reduces this effect and creates an informational disparity that will only broaden the gap of equality between the two.
The New York finance professional just has to decide that the subscription is "worth" paying. The African school girl cannot make this same decision.
Beginning with the title: though often attributed to Gates, the phrase probably originates with Viacom's Sumner Redstone, a man whose wealth and fortune came not from content by by distribution -- control over content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kums8SGXHoo
http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=a0R7b5b
Information and markets are a poor match. Market pricing works best where goods are uniform (either individually or on aggregate average), their qualities are readily determined (or again tend to average out well), where the fixed costs of production are low and marginal costs of production high (relative to one another), and externalities, both positive and negative, are small relative to market price.
Information goods violate virtually all these assumptions.
* Quality is highly variable.
* Quality assessment is difficult, and often frustrated by other factors.
* Quality isn't, and often cannot, be known in advance.
* Variance of individual instances is high enough that averages rarely suffice.
* Fixed costs of production are high, particularly for research, also to an extent for selection, review, and editing.
* Variable costs of production (e.g., publication) are low.
* Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them. Occasionally they have high negative externalities -- e.g., smallpox, "superflu", advertising, or weapons research.
David Brin is amongst those who've argued for micropayments. He, along with others, is wrong.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...
Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Andrew Odlyzko have all argued this point better than I.
Successful media payment systems tend to be:
* Subscription or serial based.
* Bundle based.
* Patronage based.
(That is: they look a hell of a lot like a Viacom cable or Microsoft Office 365 service plan, not a micropayments scheme.)
The idea that content creators should be paid by the piece is another frequently-iterated myth. The purpose of compensation is to enable existence, and the intermittent and happenstance reward of creative activity is notorious for failing at this. Historically, solutions have tended toward patronage, independent wealth, control over a production venue (as with Shakespeare and his New Globe Theatre), or other forms of live performance in which the ticket booth serves as a literal gateway between audience and performer at which a toll may be levied. More recently, the notion of generally-supported creativity through public support, paid in taxes, has come into vogue, as with the UK's BBC and a small fraction of US works.
Adam Smith argued against piecework:
Workmen, on the contrary, when they are liberally paid by the piece, are very apt to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years.... We do not reckon our soldiers the most industrious set of people among us. Yet when soldiers have been employed in some particular sorts of work, and liberally paid by the piece, their officers have frequently been obliged to stipulate with the undertaker, that they should not be allowed to earn above a certain sum every day, according to the rate at which they were paid. Till this stipulation was made, mutual emulation and the desire of greater gain frequently prompted them to overwork themselves, and to hurt their health by excessive labour.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...
The notion that improved network speeds has been soundly refuted by experience. It turns out that William Stanley Jevons was right: reducings costs of a good or service (here, the time cost of information transfer) only serves to increase the consumption (or production) of that good. Or, in this case, bad. Today's webpages rival Gates's 1990s-era operating systems in both data throw-weights and capabilities as malware-distribution and surveillance-enabling systems.
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
If you want to gain something from this essay, invert it completely.