Comment by supernovae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernovae | Hacker News Reader

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What ideas do you have for publishers to actually monetize their content? That's what most of these annoyances are there for...

It's not really MBAs running the show - its the sad fact that content is so centralized and monetized by the giants that independent publishers have to result to this stuff on a large scale to remain competitive... if you don't install trackers you don't earn premium CPMs on your ads and if you don't earn premium CPMs you start building email lists and then you start spamming people to sell crap and doing exit popups and constant reminders to subscribe now and crap like that.

content publishing is largely copycat - what works or what drives revenue pops up everywhere or becomes a pattern that publishers can subscribe to in order to ink out some revenue to pay for crap.

I run a small travel blog and i spend a lot of money on good fast page loads, global cdn, high performance/fast loading website and it pains me to have to have ads/trackers/facebook connect and crap like that but i'd love some feedback on how to do something different that people would actually support - or how to do ads in a way that doesn't scare people off...

just using google tag manager i see 40% of my traffic runs adblock.... i'd break even if this weren't true but that's the reality we face so lots of insane measures of trying to monetize a visit means the web just by and large becomes worse and worse...

> What ideas do you have for publishers to actually monetize their content?

How about either:

A) A traditional product or service, where you can skim some money off the top.

B) User donations: Patreon, Kickstarter, etc

I'm open to more ideas, but these are already in the wild, and are already working just fine.

a) such as? b) no one donates unless you have a)

a) always assumes people are writing to sell something - do we not like creative writing, journalism and such?

Adblocks also tend to block patreon and kickstarter buttons/links as well...

I don't know why you are asking me what you should sell. If it was easy to come up with a service/product to sell, everyone would do it. That's the challenging part of running your own thing.

I love Creative writing, journalism, etc. In fact, I've paid quite a bit of money via Patreon and Kickstarters for creative pursuits. The creators didn't sell anything to me. I'm not sure what you mean by this.

And if your only method for asking your users for donation money is buttons/links, then you should change it up. Plug it in your media, in your speeches, etc.

i'm asking what gets you to make the leap to support creatives - everyone "Says" they do it - but the reality is very few actually do. curious what triggers people to support something.

i'm not asking you what products or services i should offer, i'm asking what makes people embrace something enough to actually support it.

Ah, I apologize for misunderstanding you.

I can't point to any specific trigger, but I notice that I get drawn to certain creators. If I start to recognize their name/brand, and I look at their past work, I get a sense of "I want to support that".

A good example is Complexly: https://complexly.com (sorry that their website is awful)

I started getting videos sent to me by friends, and recommendations on youtube. After watching a few, I looked through their catalog, and relatively quickly and easily saw what they were creating, and I thought "I want more of that in the world".

They had a Patreon link readily available, and mentioned in the videos that Patreon was one of the ways that they funded themselves.

I know that's not a great answer, but everyone's trigger will be different.

I think for me it boils down to a few variables:

Do you have a good product that I would pay for, but aren't forced to? Am I excited for your next product, even if it ends up vastly different from your other products?

Do you consistently put out good material? (and by this I include: is your product full of ads/tracking?)

Is your income transparent?

Do you encourage people to share your work, even if you aren't going to directly make money off of every fan? Do I get the impression that you'd rather me share it with 1000 people who won't pay, or 5 people who will pay?

Do you make it easy for me to pay you, in whatever form is convenient to me?

Nobody ever fits all of this criteria perfectly (I can criticize Complexly all day long), but they have a solid product that they give to everyone, and have relatively low friction for taking my money.

Charge me money, for content. Ala NYTimes, WaPo, Wall Street Journal, etc.

Also, I'd say it's a false dichotomy of "monetize" vs. "use every dark pattern and brings-browsers-to-their-knees script".

Countless times I've clicked on a link/article, only to go through this crap, and/or have it bring my browser on a most recent generation iDevice to a crawl, and given up/closed. I'm still happy to look at ads on free content (and yes, every now and then, click on one), provided I can actually see them.

Does anyone pay for those and do you think the web could survive on paid content?

BTW, these aren't "Dark patterns" - they're industry standards - whether we like it or not. Are users interested in preserving independent media or are they mostly fine just getting what facebook and google think they should get?

I think what a lot of people are ignoring is that users support these terrible sites and that the good ones that don't join these patterns eventually just fade to oblivion

web "Surfers" need to change their behaviors just as much as content creators... if not more so - because the industry is just following the what the readers actually do...

Something can be a "dark pattern" and an industry standard at the same time.

I agree that the consumers should change their behavior, but there aren't a lot of options for supporting good news. I can't say I've ever seen a news site that was good enough that I'd actually pay money for.

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