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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content. This has been the subject of endless discussions over decades and just yesterday there was a large HN conversation over too many video subscriptions causing people to turn to piracy again. Not to mention it negatively affects the vast majority of people who can't afford to pay for everything they consume.

It's possible to enable advertising while maintaining privacy and security. What was missing was legal and regulatory forces to push advertisers and adtech into it. Now it's here.

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The biggest barrier is that there is no money in honest business. In other words, people want to pay for useful content (e.g. wikipedia is still up and running), it's just what they want to pay is nowhere near multi-billion-dollar valuation that VCs are used to. Can Google Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android and so on exist without ads and tracking? Absolutely. It's just this business would become non-profit.

I'm not sure what you mean by "honest business" or what any of this has to do with non-profits.

Nothing is free. You either pay with cash that you earn, or you pay with your attention with ads. Option 2 is faster, easier, more passive, more affordable and more equal. That's why billions of people prefer to monetize attention on-demand for their content instead of paying cash upfront.

He is arguing that Google could make money with cash, only less than what they currently make with ads, because people spend cash cautiously, whereas they spend data wildly.

None of that has to do with being non-profit. Google is a trillion dollar company. Yes it can make less profits and still survive.

Whether people would pay enough to get anywhere near the costs however, is probably unlikely given how little they pay for far cheaper content on the internet today. Wikipedia is not comparable since the vast majority is unpaid volunteer work and user-provided content.

There is nothing more equal in it. It's outright criminal. The today's adtech is when you walk into a grocery store, get stuff for free, while in the meantime the store takes notes what car you drive, who you likely are, packages all this info and sells to whoever pays, including criminals.

I would say it's a combination of:

- convenience: do not underestimate it, lots of supporting evidence that people want maximum convenience. Notice how a small UI change as "one click purchase" increased Amazon sales significantly or why they even make/sell those buttons to put around the house to press and refill periodic stuff

- access: like I was saying in another reply, it's simply the case that in a lot of situations, users (because of age, location and economic status) simply have no good means to pay electronically

- affordability: 10 cent/view pay seem like nothing to us but in many places that can add up to a few USD per month that may be the cost of food of a family for a week. So now you'd have to do geographical location based pricing, dealing with all the crap that comes with it (people using proxies to avoid it, etc)

Convenience and access have been tried by several startups (including a project that we did a few years back). It's being attempted yet again by the Brave browser with blockchain tech. With micropayments, there's a big problem with decision fatigue.

Affordability is the largest factor by far though because most people just cant pay for everything they consume for free today. When you look at video content especially, it can easily add up to several dollars per day in spend.

> - convenience ...

Just run something like a Radius server, which any website could query, and which could log usage.

> access: ...

Provide a wide variety of payment options. As many VPN services and VPS hosts do.

> - affordability: ...

I don't know specifics, but I can't imagine how users in places so poor generate the same ad income as users in wealthier places. So just adjust cost/view to generate the same income that the current system does.

> The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content.

Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels.

With the Web, dotcoms were focused on IPOs (and so the appearance of possibly being a player in the future), everyone was focused on adoption, there was also a lot of finance opportunism. Then most all of the the business models switched to spying/control, or just more finance scams. For which free content still makes sense.

If you end the spying/control business model, and the current growth-oriented investment schemes, and maybe breakup a few megacorps that never should've been allowed to happen... then maybe we'll get better options for low-friction content payment, and presumably some people will resume paying for content with value.

Also, the US piracy culture needs to stop. One of the reasons that's been hard to argue, starting in the MP3 days, is that some of the most directly affected content organizations (e.g., MPAA, RIAA) had awful reputations. But to the extent that piracy culture affects legitimate economic sustainability for other content (e.g., subreddits that institutionalized pasting news article full text, or rehosting webcomics on imgur), we need to fix the culture, and make it not socially-acceptable.

> Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels.

Sure, but newspapers, magazines, cable TV and premium channels have never really lived off of customer payments, they were always ad-based businesses first (there are exceptions, such as small newspapers and HBO).

Exactly. There are tons of good old paper magazines just created cause the target audience, thus ad targeting, is relatively easy to predict.

Digital technology changes some of the economics, and perhaps some of the need for advertising revenue. For example, you could sell mostly journalism "content", without the expense of printing and distribution operation.

Yet services like Netflix and Spotify thrive. Why? Because they are 1) easier to use than piracy "competitors" 2) they offer a fair deal without seemingly fleecing you, like paying for individual articles.

In my comment, I described how piracy is coming back because of too many subscription services. It certainly isn't as simple as just being easier to use, and there are issues with what people will pay for regardless of billing model.

Spotify is barely thriving and took 13 years to make its first profit. It's precariously balanced with constant problems in artist payouts and catalogs. Netflix managed to grow by getting into the content production business but is seeing challenges there as costs rise.

And both Netflix and Spotify distribute content that can be consumed multiple times. How many times are you going to read the same article? If the answer was as simple as an HN comment, the industry would've figured it out by now.

Users don't want to pay a 5$ / month subscription for content. I know I don't. Would they be willing to pay cents or even fractions of a cent for content? I'd like to see a study on that. We need the infrastructure to support that model though, which I think doesn't fully exist yet.

Most content is either just plain bad or manipulative. We should welcome the death of most content. Content makers that do it for the love of it rather than the monetary reward typically make much better content.

> people don’t want to pay for content

Most “content” isn’t worth paying for. Google’s phrasing about publishers not being able to pay to generate content made me think, “Yay, no content mills!”

Separately, people with something to say like to reach audiences. In the distant past, it was called “pamphleteering”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer

There was a web before banner ads. The content came from somewhere...

There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet?

That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. Also you don't have the same needs and wants as the billions of other people who spend time online to make a judgement that most content isn't worth paying for.

> There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet?

This thread is about your grandparent comment, ”The biggest barrier is that people don’t want to pay for content.”

Billions of people are the market, your remark opens with the judgment that people don’t want to pay for content. In other words, the market has judged most content isn’t worth paying for.

> That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same.

On the contrary, today, certainly a higher number have their words preserved online, as persistent conversations such as this one or perhaps Likes on Instagram. But a far lower percentage of those who are online today “have a home page” for example.

In the mid to late 90s a higher proportion of “web pages” were meaningful, and a much higher percentage of users were also publishers of their own web sites.

Amateur web sites unofficially organized around topics of interest were a thing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

That content is still getting created, and still getting self-published, it’s just much harder to find.

Self-published home pages like this are still cool:

https://www.gwern.net/

This one uses a kind of ethical advertising:

https://slatestarcodex.com/about/

Note the author invites patronage but says don’t worry about it: ”I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.” People with things to say will say them.

While it’s still being experimented with, it seems that quality content is worth paying for, even worth patronage:

https://patrons.theguardian.com/

This goes into more detail about content mill versus patronage model for higher value content:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-democratize-p_b_4...

// Irony of HuffPo well noted.

Not worth paying for directly does not mean worthless. Nothing is free. Let me summarize is this way.

- Option 1 is to work, turn effort into cash, then spend that cash on the internet.

- Option 2 is to just go to the internet and view ads which turn your attention into cash behind the scenes in real-time.

You're still paying but advertising is a much more seamless, passive, and equally available system, and can quickly scale on-demand. So to rephrase the argument, people want the content, and they pay for it, but they mostly don't choose option 1.

Neither of those are the option I described.

For paid content, it's either cash or attention-via-ads.

Yes there's a tiny bit that's provided for free by creators who pay for it themselves, but it's so miniscule that it doesn't matter.

How much do you pay to read Wikipedia?

How much for Arxiv with ”open access to 1,580,815 e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics”?

For huge amounts of valuable content — ideas and knowledge some people want to share and some people want to absorb — self-publishing, patronage, and private or public funding work, at scale. The “amateur web” is still here, it only seems “miniscule” thanks to being buried under the content mills trying to generate placeholder pages for ads.

The web wasn’t born as either subscriptions (pay with cash) or ads (pay with attention), it was a knowledge linking and sharing platform.

Huge amounts of content continue to be produced other ways. There are more options (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma).

> ”Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 374 million unique visitors monthly as of September 2015. There are about 72,000 active contributors working on more than 48,000,000 articles in 302 languages. As of today, there are 5,913,176 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles.” — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

That’s not so minuscule it doesn’t matter.

You're conflating several things.

There's content and distribution. Sometimes content is freely generated by users (wikipedia, stackoverflow, quora, HN, social media) but distribution costs money. These costs (content + distribution) are paid for by cash (including patronage/donations) or ads. That's it. There's no magical 3rd option.

The amount of content that's both created and distributed for free is miniscule and you haven't quoted a single example yet. Billions of consumers are not going to be satisfied with a bunch of people hosting their own blogs from their home.

On the contrary, you’re now trying to ‘conflate’ the pay-to-publish model into the two you argued meant that model didn't exist.

You weren’t talking about paying cash for publishing/distribution, because both your two options, paid subscription and free ad-supported, you were talking how the consumer pays and also cost money to publish, cancelling that dimension out.

In the pay-to-publish model, someone is deciding it’s worth their own pocket money (or patronage or sponsorship by powers that be) to publish. That makes it free to consume.

We were talking about the perspective of the content consumer, and for them, the pay-to-publish model is free. They are neither paying for the content, nor are they paying with their attention. Some entirely different actor not discussed in your models, is covering it.

That content, content creators support publishing, tends to be different in nature — someone is willing to spend “their own” money to share the ideas in it freely.

Pamphleteers paid the printing presses by cash too, that’s how they didn’t have to sell ads and how they didn’t have to charge a ha’penny a sheet.

> “Content both created and distributed for free is miniscule and you haven’t quoted a single example yet”

You’re both non-responsive to examples with factual data to back them up, and moving the goalposts. To be clear, I’m agreeing there is too much no-value content getting churned out as filler to advertise against. So much volume, so much noise, the valuable content is buried.

Perhaps we agree there’s too much ad-hosting filler content, and not enough inherent value content.

To keep saying “minuscule” perhaps you use a very different internet. Where are the ads on this site? Are you paying for it? No, someone has an interest in this site and its content being available to a special interest audience. It costs almost nothing to host contentful content of mostly plain text conveying information rather than eye candy to drive clicks. With light design but info rich text content, it’s easy for the ROI to work. Companies know this and publish for free without ads.

If you add “corporate” publishing into the mix, all the company product sites and blogs, combining company sites, academic sites, non-profit/public-good sites, government sites, WordPress home pages of everyone homesteading on the web, etc., it’s not minuscule.

But here’s some hard data from 2018:

“Ad-supported media’s share of consumer time will drop to 42.5 percent by 2021. This past year [2017], the number fell to 44.4 percent, its lowest point ever, per the research.” — https://www.pqmedia.com/product/global-consumer-media-usage-...

Ad-supported is less than half of media time and trending down.

In the beginning, profiting off web content was illegal. Is it impossible to imagine course-correcting this race to the bottom?

- - - - - -

PS. I can’t help but notice the incredibly high not at all minuscule percentage of content linked to from HN that is neither subscription based nor ad-supported, but paid for by its author, some even calling out that they’re free, such as this one from the thread on standing out as a speaker:

What does this cost?

Make your checks payable to a shell corporation I have in the Caymans. Just kidding; it's all free. I hope you enjoy it. Also, if I ever see one of your talks, it better be damn good.

I'll add to this site over time. You might be interested in watching the newest posts page.

https://speaking.io/

Once again, content published to us for free is ironically the very content worth paying for.

Content production and distribution are the 2 main costs, paid by cash (subs/donations) or ads (which is just a secondary market for attention-to-cash conversion). That's all there is.

I'm not sure what you're even arguing now. You seem to be saying that some sites exist where the creator pays both costs instead of the consumer but I don't see what point that makes. Like I said, that particular scenario is an absolutely tiny portion of the content available.

Is your argument that only content that's completely paid for by the creator is good? That makes no sense.

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