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Comment by jordanpg | Hacker News Reader

Right now, there's teams of people at companies like Spotify and Stitcher, frantic in front of whiteboards, trying to plan a future for podcasts wherein it will be harder/impossible to skip the ads.

First, they have to control the distribution. Then, they have to build the tech, which will obviously involve some kind of DRM.

To say that I hope they fail is an understatement.

But I know they'll try because in the internet economy, companies simply must fight, kick, and scratch for every last fraction of penny of advertising revenue.

I hope that they are unable to wrest sufficient control over the distribution channels to force this ugly future upon us. Indie podcasts will be safe, but the well-produced, mainstream podcasts will go the way of cable TV and it will be gross. Ads ruin everything.

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I'm waiting for a podcast app with crowd sourced timestamp like sound cloud for people to mark ads. Alternatively for injected ads, it would be somewhat trivial to run the same podcast episode downloaded in different regions through transcription services and clip over the difference. Or build fingerprints of similar sounding clips from different podcasts to single out ads. I suppose you'll also have people manually clipping out ads once podcast piracy becomes more prevalent as shows become platform exclusives.

There was a post about NPR raking in ad dollars yesterday, and I've heard in passing that their research team have evaluated DRM before.

A lack of balance is why we can't have nice things. There has to be a middle ground where publishers make money to keep publishing and consumers of those publishing keep consuming the content without being annoyed to the point of wanting to abolish all ads.

The result of extremism here is that it wouldn't be viable financially to produce content. Paid subscription models don't seem to work leaving advertising the only revenue stream publishers have.

I'm saying all this from a content consumer point of view, not a publishing one.

'What about my business model' is not a valid argument. You are not in fact entitled to one. Personally I'd rather see 95% less 'content' on the Internet if it meant it were ad free. I'd rather have no Facebook than one that serves you personalized ads. I'd rather have no online news media than news websites that serve ads. I'd rather have no television programs than watch programs with commercials. 'Content creators' often overestimate how much people care about their 'content' and they think we couldn't do without them. Well, most of us can. And most of us hate ads.

I'm sure, in an ad-free world, that content creators who really care would find a way to make it work. Maybe there'd be less content this way, but so be it. Quality isn't quantity.

You do, and that's fine for you. But I rather have a reasonable amount of ads to support content, than have no content at all. I do use Facebook as a means to communicate with a lot of people and catch up with friends and family. I consume content form sites that do have ads. I agree the situation is not balanced at the moment, but cutting out 95% of the internet is not a solution. There has to be a balanced middle ground.

You're conflating 'no content at all' and 'cutting 95% of the Internet'. Honestly there's so much stuff out there that you wouldn't even notice even if 99.9% of the Internet content were removed overnight. There are always people somewhere willing to create content without serving you ads. This much content, however little (in proportion to the rest) should be enough to satiate anyone's needs. Who needs the rest.

Pretty good odds that the content you care about is in that 99.9%, so people would certainly notice except for those with such broad/pop tastes that they are easily satisfied with anything, which seems to be the only people you're talking about.

Maybe 10% or less of Facebook's current per-user ad viewing time would be enough to sustain a service that allows to keep in touch with people (thanks to economies of scale) but the problem is, once you introduce ads, greed comes along for a ride and that's why we can't have nice things. Since "being reasonable" isn't a thing that ad people understand, I'm happy for their entire shitty industry to die and burn in hell.

Not that I'm opposed to it going the way of the dodo, ad free Facebook just isn't viable. The product is shit and nobody would pay for it just like how the majority* would never pay for email. And why should they? They're already paying for their internet bill.

*HN users not withstanding

Ad-free Facebook would not be viable at its current (extreme) valuation. A honest business providing Facebook-like features would be viable if they don't have to pay back billions to investors.

Note that the product is shit because it's designed to waste your time ("engagement" and "growth" and all these bullshit words). The product would improve significantly if it was paid because then the incentive would be to deliver value to their users so they keep using the product & paying for it.

> They're already paying for their internet bill.

Why can't it just be included in your internet bill? If Facebook (or whatever paid alternative replaces it) becomes mainstream I can see ISPs just including it in their packages.

`content creators who really care would find a way to make it work` is a terrible way to think.

All that means is the barrier to entry increases from anyone, from any background and means to people who can afford to produce content already. You lose the young kids starting out, you loose those from poorer backgrounds, you loose the creatives working on their side projects while working a 9 to 5 because they can no longer afford to make content.

If _you_ don't want ads don't consume the content, you're not entitled to it. Quality might not be quantity but quantity (being able to continue to produce content without a huge financial burden) develops quality.

People are already making content without monetizing it, and have been for decades. As alien a way of thinking as it may seem to some, many human beings do not need a bizarre system of 'market-based incentives' to get anything done at all. They just do it, out of passion, boredom, to learn, or to share with friends. Are you seriously implying the 'young kid starting out' has Youtube monetization all setup in order, or has sponsors knocking on their door?

Your posts actually seem like the sort of perversion that ads have inflicted on our relationship with content and how they've trained us to value content at $0.

I don't really understand how waiting around and hoping for someone to make something out of hobby or charity is a reasonable stance when content brings me a non-zero amount of value and entertainment, when I can pay for it and get better results. Life is too short to sit and pray that someone else will feel like doing something for free that will happen to benefit me.

The idea seems a bit juvenile. Or as if we're all such simpletons that anything will please us all the same, it doesn't matter, so just wait for the next free shit.

I don't even understand how this idea survives concrete examples. If I happen to enjoy someone's free hobby content, then I directly benefit from their ability to make a living producing that content.

> Your posts actually seem like the sort of perversion that ads have inflicted on our relationship with content and how they've trained us to value content at $0.

Bingo. He's unwittingly the poster child for the devaluation of human capital.

>I don't even understand how this idea survives concrete examples.

Lol you don't understand how knowledge can be shared between two or more parties without one of them making a profit? Am I reading this right?

I think the concept you're missing is called a "gift economy". It's actually more fundamental to humans than the market economy, it underpins society, and it lets the market economy exist in the first place.

> when I can pay for it and get better results

That's called "commissioning a work of art". Or, iterated, can be turned into patronage. Unlike advertising, this is a honest and correct way of rewarding creation of art using market means.

What percentage of HN users do you think are posting because they are paid to do so?

This seems like a relatively high quality site compared to the rest of the internet.

People will make content as a hobby, but you won't see people doing it on the level (frequency or quality) they have been today. Internet likes and shares are nice but if they won't pay the bills, and a lot of creators will prioritize their time accordingly.

I have a hard time believing that someone on HN, a crowd whose primary job involves using free software and whose primary hobby is reading Wikipedia articles, would just idly speculate about things against the most blatant contrary evidence.

But then, this being HN, this sort of speculation is to be expected, heh.

Wikipedia is a great example. They have to go begging the world every few months to keep the greatest website in the world operating. HN (and dang's job) is funded by the excess of YCombinator, and the rest of us just show up to chat whenever.

But both of these sites show that:

1) Extraordinary value can indeed be created for free, simply because people want to contribute something. You'll note that all the money pays for in both cases is hosting.

2) Both sites can exist without involving the advertising industry and all its corruption.

I don't remember many young video creators before Youtube.

You know what Youtube runs on, right? It's not just the creators who get money from ads.

Young video creators have been around but not at this scale because youtube or instagram props them up and makes them influencers. They have no life experience and yet are influencing millions of other young people. The sad part is that everything is shocking content to get their visitors up. This is broken imo and can’t lead to anything good. Of course, few of them become millionares

No platform, no audience(+). No audience, no creators(+).

(+) In general.

Youtube itself had lots of young creators before they started the monetizing game and they were creating content for free and a lot of it was good, honest and creative. Along with the monetization and aggressive promotion everything went into a shocking craze to increase the number of followers, the number of views and the volume of content. A lot of it is just crap.

Sure, but the question is whether Youtube as a platform could survive without the ad income.

> If _you_ don't want ads don't consume the content, you're not entitled to it.

The vast majority of on-line marketing is outright hostile towards the people it targets; it's a constant battle for attention, PII, and bandwidth and it comes with side effects like actual malware spreading through ad networks. Until that changes, ads should be considered as threats, and they should be blocked at the door regardless of what the content creator thinks about it.

Music to my ears. It is always breathtaking to see the number of people who cling to the religion of ad-supported content as _the only way forward_.

Bad UX as a business model? It can't go away soon enough.

Paid subscription models don't work in presence of advertising, because advertising-based models have a huge advantage of being ostensibly free. If we could get rid of the advertising-based models, paid models would become profitable again.

(It's like observing that horses don't work for races because motorcycles outpace them. Well, get rid of the motorcycles and horse racing makes sense again.)

We can't have nice things because advertising is inherently cancerous in nature. It will grow and repurpose everything it touches until it too serves to feed the advertising machine and depends on it for survival. There's as much balance to be found here as there is with cell growth rates - you want them at the level that supports the functioning of the organism, and not somewhere in the middle between that and the fastest-growing cancer cells.

What's even worse is that customers that are actually paying for the service are the best target for ads.

They pay premium for access to those.

Why do paid subscription models not work?

Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal seem to work. Switched to Tidal recently, love the reach incl. ECM label!

(If there would be something comparable for newspapers I'd pay too, as is, I ublockorigin (or abstain))

They do work, I pay Netflix, Spotify and Prime. But there is a limit. I can't pay every single publisher. Micropayments didn't seem to have taken off, and when I hit paywalls these days I turn away - I don't want a subscription in order to consume one article. I now dread the day where content will be so distributed across publishers and subscriptions, we'd be back at the start in a cable-company style world.

I'm not saying ads are good, and no ads are great. I'm saying there has to be a balance. And publishers are best to realise this as well since the more they push, the more people will push back.

Maybe (just a passing thought as I'm typing), the ad pricing model should change? Maybe if ads were more expensive and more selective it would offset the revenue by quantity into revenue by quality ad-wise...

I can't pay every single publisher either. When I occasionally read articles from about 5 newspapers, I couldn't (well, don't want to) subscribe to all of them.

Ads are not my main issue, the trackers and the website-bloat are. If I could trust the intermediary I'd voluntarily supply my interests in order to facilitate better ads (but there would need to be a resonably small scope of where this information goes).

Trackers are indeed a big part of the problem. I have a feeling that sometime in the near future we'll see a rise of publisher-aggregators. Pay once, to access many. (that's a glove thrown there, in case anyone missed it)

Perhaps micropayments haven't taken of because of the ad industry.

The false dichotomy of "ads vs any content at all, whatsoever" plays perfectly into the narrative of the scummy advertising industry.

Consumer tastes change. Just as we saw a precipitous drop in smokers from the 1950s to now, we are witnessing a sea change where the human parasites are slowly waking up to the revelation that their business model has a sunset.

Consumers are starting to be more vocal and active in their (justified) desire to not be bombarded with advertising everywhere they go.

currently Malcolm Gladwell is doing sponsorship for Revisionist History by splicing episodes with mini 30-60sec advertorials in which he interviews AT&T Chief Marketing Officer about the awesomeness of AT&T's 5G. It's genius, because it comes across as

- informative

- non-spammy

and with the typical easy to digest Gladwellian narration.

What's egregious about it to my taste is that much like Gladwell's podcasts, it suggests to the audience that is simply the facts and totally fair, while all the questions are very much, "Is AT&T's 5G offering fantastic or awesome? And how long before I can use it?"

For someone literate in the topic it goes beyond the normal "don't let facts get in the way of a good story" that most podcasting falls into and you can hear the AT&T ad guys writing the script. But for the average listener it is just smooth, easy listening that draws you in without you realizing it is paid advertising attempting to win you over for a financial goal.

Native ad reads can be fun and deceptive. Linus Tech Tips WAN Show has the courtesy of including timestamps that allows you to skip past ads or at minimum, identify which segments are clearly delineated as ads. I don't suppose most content producers will volunteer that information and have it marked on the seekbar or some other clear UI element to indicate when advertisement is playing. Isn't that a legal requirement for videos even on youtube? Podcast gets away with it by dumping a sponsorship disclaimer in the show info metadata.

> trying to plan a future for podcasts wherein it will be harder/impossible to skip the ads.

Aren't most podcasts selling flat rate slots to run ads?

Example: Company A gives podcast author $X amount of dollars to run a 30-60 second ad in their 1 hour podcast.

If all 10,000 listeners don't listen to the ad then the podcast author still gets the same amount of ad revenue.

My thought process on that is, if I begin to hear an ad on a podcast and it's for something I didn't plan to buy anyways, then I will skip the ad by fast forwarding within 3 seconds. But if a solution existed where I couldn't do that then I wouldn't end up making the purchase by listening to the ad. I'd probably switch the podcast off for something else until the ad played out and that comes with the risk of me not going back to the podcast because I found something more interesting.

If nobody listens to the ad, how much more episodes will the advertiser be willing to pay for?

None, but the people who skip the ads manually now are not going to buy the ad's product if they can't skip the ad. They were non-buyers in either case.

Ad skippers are generally a different type of person who won't be convinced to buy something just because they were forced to listen to it. They will however buy something on their own terms and some of them also like to show support for the things they listen to or watch by donating directly to the content provider (I do this a lot with music).

People who skip ads are, in general, just as susceptible to them as most other people. So yes, if they are forced to listen to it, they will, in general, buy more of these products.

Advertising works because it is psychology. Nothing rational about it.

That's the thing though. We're not in a Black Mirror scenario where you're really forced to listen to ads (thankfully haha).

If an ad plays, you can just flip to something else just like tons of people do on cable TV. If a podcast starts forcing ad plays then ad skippers will just switch to something else until the ad is done.

If someone really doesn't want to listen to an ad then they will find ways to avoid it. This is partly why piracy is so popular. It usually has little to do with price. It's just wanting to watch or listen to something without having ancillary content forced upon you in a distracting way.

Fair enough, I misread your original comment and my reaction was to people who automatically skip ads (through some sort of adblocker). The idea was that when you have to do it manually, you'll do it less often than when it happens automatically, and you -will- hear the advertisements and, in general, it -will- lead to more sales.

People who furiously skip the ads manually will indeed remain unaffected.

If you think about how advertising works, you can partially inoculate yourself from this by changing your perception of ads.

If two products are the same price, but only one is advertised, the advertised product must be inferior because they are using your money to try to manipulate you.

Next time you watch TV, notice the brands and consider their competitors. Advertisers tend to be inferior quality and optimizing for short-term gains over customer benefit in comparison to their competitors.

Why does Mazda advertise so much more than Toyota? Because they provide less value per dollar, and have to make that up via thought manipulation.

If nobody buys the product, the Company won't buy ads again from that podcast

The problem is us. We don't pay. We spend ridiculous amounts on nice cars, vacations, fancy clothes, but everything else gets scraps.

50 dollar for a book? Ha! 9,99 max and that's pushing it.

100 dollar to get access to a podcast with 200 hours of quality content that may change your life. Ha! 19,99 if I'm having a good day.

100-300 dollar a month for quality TV? Ha!! I'll pay 10 and then watch BS commercials all fucking day.

i will never listen to a podcast on spotify, stitcher et al for exactly this reason.

Could it be.. Native advertising for songs? /s

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