at the same time, i don't know how comfortable i feel about incentivizing ad distribution companies to become more stealthy.
The problem is ad distribution companies here and now. The problem won't be gone until they're gone.
Given the choice of paying $1 for a podcast or pirating said podcast, sufficient number of people would not choose the first option to make it a viable business.
1. People who are adblocking are saying that they are not willing to pay with attention. You can only compare their relative willingness to pay with attention vs money when you provide both options fairly.
2. I don't take it as given that businesses have the right to make money however they want. There are human right principles and I think an important fundamental right missing from the UN Declaration is the right to not be subjected to subtle influence techniques that compromise your beliefs (even if those belief are about which soap you should buy). Any business strategy that goes against this principle should be illegal and if certain industries and businesses die as a result, so be it. I would take no economic growth over compromised human rights any day.
No.
As a person who's adblocking, that is not what I'm saying. I'm perfectly willing to pay with attention; I'm not willing to pay with my data, I'm not willing to be tracked across sites, and I'm not willing to let my browser execute whatever garbage the ad network is sending down the pipe at me.
Myself, I'd prefer to pay with my data if the terms were clear. I have an issue with manipulation, and I'll be blocking all ads I can until the ones that are left are non-attention-grabbing, non-interactive, not manipulative, related to the site I'm in, moderated, and preferably pull, not push.
What does that leave? I don't pay for YouTube, for example. Not that I care that much, because the stuff I watch on YouTube is mostly not the stuff I would miss. The stuff I would miss would probably be available even if YouTube didn't exist (e.g. Zero Punctuation).
Since we're talking about paying, here's another question: do I resort to piracy? Yes, because there are often good reasons to do so.
Movies and shows? Netflix and Amazon mostly don't have subtitles in Spanish, so when I wanna watch something with my wife, sometimes the only way is to download it.
Music? I'd love to be able to come to some agreement with Spotify that lets me save a number of songs a month or a year and let them be mine, so they'll never disappear from my playlist just because Spotify pulled them.
Books? Usually the first book I read from an author I haven't read before is a book I'll pirate. If it's good, I'll buy it and buy that author's subsequent books. We used to use libraries for that kind of stuff.
As you can see, most of those problems aren't solvable by ads.
Here's a question for you, though: do you think Wikipedia would be better off with ads?
Can you please explicitly list those alternative payment methods you had in mind?
When I last researched this, alternatives like micropayments, Flattr, cryptocurrency, digital wallet donations, etc are not viable revenue amounts in comparison to credit-card subscriptions or sponsored ads.
As for the mobile phone payments that are more popular than credit-cards in China and Africa, those are not privacy-preserving from what I can tell.
Then there's also Blik, which is the same except I don't even have to log in on the web page; I read a random six-digit code off my bank's app, enter it on the payment intermediary site, confirm again on the phone, and money moves.
The conventional wisdom is that ads are more convenient. I hope that, sooner or later, this will stop being true and we'll have a variety of better ways of supporting content.
i strongly disagree. everyone's beliefs need to be challenged. that is the only way we have progressed as a society throughout the ages.
This is why I love Patreon, it has the possibility to shift us back into the "for the joy of it" production - removing the need to shill on a month-by-month basis. If enough people support you directly then advertising loses it's appeal by spurning potential listeners. Meanwhile your hobby is getting support from the other hobbyists and people with a slight interest can dip their toes in and explore the world.
On the web, put up an add with no tracking (effectively a digital billboard) and I'll stop using my ad blocker. The advertising might be annoying, but the surveillance is a human rights violation (according to the UN).
Why not?
I watch baseball games on the MLB streaming service and when they go to commercials, the screen goes to a static image with no sound. It's kind of jarring and I think I would prefer to have something still playing. The best thing would be if they just went to a wide shot of the ballpark with ballpark sounds, but the normal ads are better than silence IMHO.
The only reason people don’t choose free over paying is if the convenience or cost is worth it. For music, organizing and having easy access to all music files is worth $10/month or less to many people versus risking copyright infringement charges. But raise that to $100/month, and see what people do...
The ease of transferring data on the internet and high bandwidth connections tilts the favor in choosing the free version.
Perhaps paid podcasts are possible if it’s easy enough, I might not mind 50 cents or $1 via Apple Pay in my podcasts app, or a subscription service that eliminates all ads.
Even if we ignore the piracy angle, an additional problem is if a vendor provides a service for free or cheaper with ads, people choose that one over one that is paid. So for items meant for mass consumption, such as podcasts, the more lucrative ones will be the ones with ads. Similar to how no one can compete with free offerings from Google or Facebook.
The problem is that often it's hard to get anything but an ad-buttressed solution because everyone wants to double-dip (e.g. NYTimes, Hulu). Further the conversation often comes up for things that have lower value, but the creators hope it's their payday. There are countless podcasts that seem low effort -- usually a group of guys chatting with no preparation or work about things -- that I have to imagine people turn on as background noise, but if faced with a pay wall would abandon quickly (examples would be Accidental Tech Podcast or the like, the Daring Fireball one, etc -- the "how can I print money with zero work" podcasts).
There are others that are absolutely brilliant that are worth it but have some byzantine, many-islands, poorly supported way of funding them -- Anthropocene Review, 99% Invisible, Hidden Brain, etc. As we get into a small number of large podcast subscription services I expect a lot of them will see great results.
> The only reason people don’t choose free over paying is if the convenience or cost is worth it.
This is how you make a profitable business even if free alternatives (like piracy) exist. Steam managed to pull that off for videogames (their DRM is unfortunate, but it's only part of the equation here).
> an additional problem is if a vendor provides a service for free or cheaper with ads, people choose that one over one that is paid
That's very true. It's why I argue ad-based models should be made illegal. They're distorting the market, as it's very hard to compete with "free, but monetizes your sanity and/or your data".
Only anecdotally to make us all feel warm and fuzzy.
It seems pretty intuitive that people just prefer the thing that costs the least utility, whether that be time or money.
How often does one re-listen to a podcast within, say, 6 to 12 months? Maybe a year after, if it had a real impact?
At the end of the day, however, all you need is the fact that there are no successful paid podcasts, and the most successful ones use advertising. There's nothing stopping anyone from creating one, and it's not a novel idea. Same with newspapers. The very fact that one doesn't exist, when the alternative (paid version without advertising) is a known idea and easily executable, must mean that there is a problem with the business model itself.
Perhaps the problem is that it can't compete in the same environment with media that uses advertising. Perhaps a sufficient number of people simply aren't willing to pay a sufficient price for them to exist without advertising.
There are economic principles, though. In competitive markets, price is roughly what the market will bear. Physical goods have a price floor, because you can't sustainably sell such goods for below manufacturing costs. Digital goods scale for free, which removes any realistic price ceiling - that's why piracy exists, and that's why there's a market pressure to make the price close to $0.
> Perhaps the problem is that it can't compete in the same environment with media that uses advertising.
This is precisely the problem, in my opinion. Moreover, there's no actual market pressure - only creator's own ethics - to offer ad-free, paid version. With the current market landscape, if you're offering a paid product, you can only gain by adding advertising to it.
Admittedly, I haven't looked at more recent figures, but as of 2014, the highest revenue podcasts on Itunes were bringing in about 3-10 cents per listener[0]. The average podcast probably makes a lot less per user/per ad.
To people who are saying, "I wouldn't pay a dollar for each episode of a podcast": would you pay a dime? That would put your 'value' as a listener on par with some of the highest podcasting CPMs I can find online. If your CPM is less than $100, and I offer you 10 cents for an ad-free episode, it seems like it makes a lot of economic sense to take me up on that offer.
Of course, the economics probably don't work out perfectly at scale, because fewer people would be just picking up new podcasts randomly, so listening numbers would probably drop. But would they drop by 90%?
A $1 per podcast download price would be the equivalent of a $1000 CPM, which is... insane. I can't find anything online that indicates anyone is making that.
[0]: https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/celebrity/popular...
A person who will gladly pay $15 for a table-service meal, and add a $3 tip to it, for roughly 60 minutes in a restaurant, or pay $12 per seat to watch a feature film lasting 90 to 180 minutes, will nonetheless complain bitterly when paying $1 for a 60-minute podcast or e-book novella, or grumble about a $20 ticket for all-day admission to a museum.
If you don't pay for the content you enjoy, you are driving the content creators into the unctuous arms of the advertisers, and forcing them to keep their day jobs. Paying direct to the creator is one of the best ways to support their art.
$1 per podcast episode is not egregious, presuming it contains some scripted content or guided improv and some production polish, like editing and foley. It does, however, limit the number of podcasts one person can follow on a median income.
It might be a better model to lower the price of the admission ticket for podcast followers, and then sell premium physical-goods merchandise using the brand trademarks once they are in the fold, for those who can afford to spend more. That is, charge $1/month or $10/year to listen, and also sell limited-edition t-shirts, or figurines of the characters, or laptop stickers, or autographed episode scripts, or backpack/keychain fobs. A higher cost to access the lowest tier of fandom also limits the growth of the fan-base, and having a big fan-base is where the money really is, not from the mass-market canonical art, but from the exclusive perks available to richer and more dedicated fans. The end-goal of building a brand is selling one or more Veblen goods, and one of the ways to get there is by accumulating so many fans that some small percentage will be willing and able to subsidize all the others.
But you're right, I'm just an anecdote drop in a fairly small bucket.
$1 for a 30-minute podcast episode is $2/hour, which is far from "egregious" by almost any standard.
Disney back in the 90s threatened to not allow theaters to show their movies if they ran ads. I think that died though
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/10/business/disney-bans-comm...
This sounds like projection - are there any numbers or data to back this up? Because the market shows that people prefer to get things for free, either subsidized with ads or by ad blocking.
Google also tried this with contributor.google.com but they shut it down due to lack of interest.
Where ads starts to bother me is when they get invasive. If it moves, dances, or otherwise gets in the way of the content I am actively trying to consume, then I'd prefer to block it. The third party tracking is a little creepy; I understand the need for analytics, but most ad networks go too far. Even in the real world, when advertising becomes too saturating, like the billboards that blanket my city and blot out the skyline, in my opinion that's crossed a line. So... balance in all things I guess.