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Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

> Our attention is the only valuable thing left.

That's...just not true, though.

You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.

The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.

A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.

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Nah, that's not true. People just don't like to spend money, especially when they are rich.

Most people in the US love spending money. It's considered a recreational activity.

Hmmh, so why do so many people complain about paying for all the different streaming services like Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon prime, etc.? It's really peanuts compared to the value delivered.

"Value" is a very personal thing, though. You may find something is great value for money, and others may not, and neither is wrong.

Personally, I don't find that the streaming services are good value. I don't complain about it, though. I just don't subscribe to them.

Also, buying services doesn't satisfy the "shopping as a recreational activity" itch. A big part of the recreation is the actual shopping, and coming home with physical stuff.

That's true. And that's why people having enough money is not an alternative solution to software / digital content financed by ads.

Eh it was great value when it was just Netflix or just two services but now I feel like there's often only 0-1 shows on a given platform that I'm interested in at any one time. It isn't "good value" to pay $15+ a month each for Netflix/Prime/Disney/HBO/Hulu/AppleTV and only use one or two of them in a given month. Because Prime Video is bundled with regular Amazon Prime I keep that active and activate and deactivate the others based on when they come out with seasons of shows I care to watch. I also think a lot of complaints are about the platforms increasingly making the experience worse like making me pay to remove ads when I'm already paying for the service, or what Netflix is pulling with their family plans.

About a decade ago I used to pay $45+ a month for a very basic cable package that contained mostly public stations and a few of the standard stations that you get a hotels, etc. At the same time my parents paid around $100+ a month for their cable package with a better channel selection.

So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.

Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.

I think it depends. All else being equal in terms of your daily commute, owning a big and expensive car is often seen as better than owning a more affordable smaller car.

If you consider "the value delivered" to be the totality of all the content on the platforms, then sure. But that's not actually valuable to most of the people subscribing, so it's ultimately a useless way of looking at it.

Any given person is only going to care about some small fraction of the media available for watching, and when that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming services, the "value" they're getting from any single one of those is fairly small.

Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us remember when we could get basically all that content on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the content providers could be making reasonable amounts of money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the reason they decided to launch their own service is one part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the customer".

There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to the effect of "the streaming services really need to remember that their entire value proposition is being slightly more convenient than piracy."

Seems to me the insatiable desire here is that of the customer for free or nearly free stuff. What is a reasonable amount of money? You know that Amazon spent $465 Million dollars on just one season of Lord of the rings, right?

Because the ones who enjoy paying for them do not complain so you believe the complainers are a majority.

> A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money

Sounds like money isn’t valuable as a target if it doesn’t exist.

But fwiw the scarcity of disposable income is why there is such an arms race with advertisers- they’re all chasing the same fleeting dollars across the internet.

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