If cable TV taught us anything it is that you can charge outrageous amounts of money and still force your customers to watch ads. Paper newspapers are also full of ads, even the ones the reader pays for. I can not think of any reason why the web should be different. Ads will stay, monetization will just be income on-top.
There are less incentives to ruin the experience for those who are directly giving them money.
Post-purchase is technically still there, but less obtrusive to me.
I've been working on a recipe website for a while; it's a slow burner project. I have a bunch of feature/UX ideas that I think will improve things a lot, and I also want a site that's not full of nonsense like ads and "oh, you scrolled to see the actual recipe description HAHA FUCK YOU, here's a newsletter popup first instead" and "allow us to send you our fucking notifications" popups and whatnot. It's always hard to be sure, but overall I think it would be pretty viable business.
But ... how do you monetize this without ads? Ask for donations? Things like Patreon have made this more common in the last few years and it could work, but it sure is starting a business on hard mode. The easier all of this becomes, the better there's a chance that a viable sustainable alternative will even exist in the first place.
A big reason why this is a slow burner project is because I just don't rate the chances of actually earning significant amount of money with this in 2-3 years as very high unless I resort to adding ads (and my bar for "signifiant" is really low by the way, maybe €1000/month of turnover). Even though this is very much a project that I built purely because it's the kind if site I want to use myself, it's just really hard to justify spending a lot of time on this right now in the current "internet economy".
So in short: no, it won't guarantee anything, but it does open up new possibilities.
That seems high for a slow burn recipe site which is a commodity.
While it's an interesting prototype right now, actually finishing it will be quite a lot more work as there are some technical challenges remaining in the way I want to do things. Half a year at least, but let's round that up to 10 months because I'm probably underestimating things. If we consider a monthly salary of €3,000 (pretty low for a senior dev) then I'll spend €36k on building the thing, a further €36k building up revenue, so it'll me 6 years to recoup this investment with €1,000/month. In short, I don't think €1,000/month is very high at all.
And this doesn't account for any marketing or other costs. Actually building a platform is one thing, but getting useful content (in this case, recipes) is another. Simply copying existing content would be pointless, so this requires further investment.
Of course, the "start-up way" to do this is to find some investor who will give you money, but that investor will expect a return on their investment (which is reasonable enough) and it means I will need to maximize profit and it'll be like all the other sites that I mentioned before. What I really want is a site built by someone who likes cooking for other people who like cooking. I think the world would be better if it's easier to build something like this while still earning a reasonable amount of money (and €1,000 is very much on the low end of that IMO).
As for "being a commodity", sure. But in my opinion a lot of them aren't very good for various reasons, and I think it can be a lot better.
A forum for cooking that’s well done (harhar) enough to get 100 people to pay $10 a month to support seems possible - but you might need to enlist a YouTube celebrity cook to get it started. Try a partnership?
I don't think you need to be a UX genius to realize that you can do better than [1] (load without adblocker for the full experience). The ridiculous space devoted to ads and popups is the most striking, but hardly the only thing: there are so many things that can be improved on that page if you just spent some effort and brainpower on it. Sometimes I wonder if the designers of those sites ever used it themselves. AllRecipes is hardly the exception; most sites are like this. This is just the biggest one.
[1]: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/214931/oven-roasted-aspara...
Email me if you want to chat about this. Good luck otherwise.
(I already get quite a bit of money through Patreon/GitHub Sponsors for some other things btw)
Make something that people want instead of doi g the same as 163648462 others?
There was a time where you earned money if you added something to the mix
Point in case: half the articles posted to HN from medium.com have complaints about their (ad-free) monetization strategy. From what I can tell, Medium is not even profitable either; they're doing their best to find something that works without plastering every article full of ads, but thus far haven't found it yet. Even Twitter has the same problem: they've got some ads but unlike e.g. Facebook it's not full of them, and they're not profitable either.
None, of course. It's possible to disable ads for users with Web Monetization, but it's also possible to be greedy and use both at the same time. But remember, we're not talking about big companies or anything of the sort, it's more for small scale personal blogs, or, as i pointed out, institutions like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia, so greed is IMHO unlikely and will probably be rare.
In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you.
Why should everyone block the lowest friction way to pay creators? Besides the security argument which speaks more to JS, IMO.
IMHO setting up ads on your website is higher friction that web monetization is.
Of course there are still plenty of lazy product landing pages and wordpress blogs that don't work without JS and any time I see a hamburger menu I know I'll be navigating the site 'manually'. But many of the bigger news and information sites that used to deliver a blank page at least now deliver some bastardized version of their text content (though usually not their images).
Web monetization is lower friction.
Wikipedia on the other hand makes lots of money with one of the most obtrusive ads on the internet (giant banner that slowly rolls down stating some variant of "if everyone donates just $5 we can stop annoying you right now"). But despite getting more and more donations every year they don't make the ad less annoying or run it shorter. So I have zero confidence that giving them another revenue stream will help
That is why personal blogs do not create content on the scale and depth required to be sufficiently high-profile and monetizable. If your blog can't be found on the first page of Google for questions people are asking, it may as well not exist to anyone but yourself.
Even if someone is comfortable, $100 a month can make it worthwhile to them to spend time considering and writing.
Sometimes that money just proves someone's finding big value in your continued efforts.
If I remember, Wikipedia is rather controversial, for having a ginormous war chest, but still having PBS-style begfests all the time.
I don't think they do any ads, now, except for their begging headers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
Would you care to backup this outrageous claim by demonstrating similarly popular website, awash with content, that spends less?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...
Staff expenses are harder to break down, as they don't break out who's working on e.g. wikipedia development and funding and who's working on, e.g. the social movement strategy, which is allocated approximately the same budget as running wikipedia.org: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...?
But from just the information they provided us, can you give a reason why Wikipedia in 2019 would need 33% more staff expenditure than 2018 for running the site? And similar increases in the years leading up to that?
But thats a moot point. If there is no other organisation, more efficient than wikipedia, then you have no right to call them wastefull. It shows your idea of how efficient wimipedia should be is a fantasy with no grounding in reality and would, in the long term, lead to death of wikipedia.
if once == "allYearLong" { clapYourHands() }
I don't think that I've opened a Wikipedia page in months, that didn't have a beg header.
But, to be fair, I do consider it a valuable resource; especially as a way to direct people with different language requirements to a common definition, and begfests are better than ads (as long as they don't get too intrusive, as some PBS stations get).
If everyone used an adblocker it would definitely impact you. So while I agree with the vibe and block for convenience along with security, it's an uneasy feeling knowing that such benefits for me only exist because many others aren't taking advantage of content creators like this.
Sure, but would the impact be positive or negative? While some people rightfully ask to be compensated for high quality content, money also encourages many more people to contribute to the glut of low value, derivative, and outright plagiarized content.
web is the same. tons of lazy blogs copy pasting without any effort in understanding or explaining from a different angle.
That's a fair question and not sure I have the answer to it other than stating a personal preference. Much smarter people than me have been trying to solve this content conundrum for decades now and it doesn't seem like anyone has found something workable for all parties involved.
It's a bitter pill to swallow that maybe what exists now is the best system we have and it will be around for a long time going forward.
That is already the status quo. The entire premise of this article is that web monetization will reduce the actual ads. It changes nothing if I still have to use my ad blocker. I don't think and but avery small minority of content creators will actually reduce their ads, and these might in any case be the people who are already very conscious of and respectfully of their consumers' privacy.
This is so annoying. Our office IP blocks are classified as US. So you could see folk sitting in the office in the evening, to watch Netflix content they could not see at home.
tho in fairness, some channels like gun and ww2 ones don't have another choice because youtube demonetized them and not everyone likes to use patreon or the alt tubes.
I wish they atleast put it in the beginning or the end instead of smack dab in the middle of the actual content.
The major options (as far as I can tell are):
* FreeView. This is digital TV that comes through your aerial. As the name implies, you don't pay a subscription for a base set of channels - which is quite a large number. Most of these channels have advertising. Some, like the BBC channels, only advertise their own programming, apps, etc.
* Netflix. Pay, and don't get adverts.
* Sky TV. This requires a subscription fee, and provides the FreeView set of channels plus more. There are still adverts, though, so you get to pay and also watch adverts. This is somehow a popular option!
Web ad-blocking technology is much better than cable ad-blocking technology.
Cable is mostly oligopolies, which are big on extractive behavior and revenue maximization. A lot of the good stuff on the web is individuals and small groups of people who want to make stuff sustainably but aren't focused on maximum revenue.
People will stop paying the extra money if their experience doesn't get better.
I also note that a non-open version of this that I use, scroll.com, negotiates deals with publishers. So setting some standards is a pretty obvious fix if publishers go against the spirit of things in a way that threatens the effort.
Websites that don't disable ads for subscribers will get fewer subscribers.
How does that differ from today?
Maybe it fails, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
The approach that reduces ads is to have the user bid for and win the ad slots. There are important details about running this auction fairly and cost effectively for users (Vickrey mechanics etc) but the only way to enforce user intent to control their own attention and reduce ad noise is to have the user pay towards that purpose.
We are paying data harvesters for the privilage of supplying them with the raw materials to make even more money.
This works for majority of mobile apps. This works on YouTube. People are conditioned to expect such an option.
This may be not the cheapest option, though. Consider mass media. They usually have the "three free articles" tier and "all articles + ads" paid tier. I won't mind a "N articles without ads" paid tier, even though just running an ad blocker is easier.
The challenge is that when companies are so focused on growing, they run out of ways to grow. For example, if they saturate their market, since they can't find new customers, the only way to grow is to get more money from each customer. So they seem to increase prices to those existing customers, create new products for those existing customers, or create new products for other customers (often advertisers).
I really wish the numbers on both sides increase over time.
Newspapers are dying and clinging on to a model that worked when being one had a high barrier to entry. Would you honestly think of taking out ads in a newspaper these days? Apart from for very specific things, I wouldn't.