Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.
> They want everything free.
It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.
> This just encourages subscriptions.
There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.
Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.
I'd say that it is because the value is less than the transaction cost of any payment, not zero.
It's either watch some ads, or work slightly harder to make slightly more money, to afford a subscribtion (or forgo some other pleasure, and reallocate that money to subscribtion instead). Both options are unpleasant, but of the two, majority of people seem to prefer ads.
A more valid experiment would require all users to be new to the platform.
Or using it with an ad blocker
Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where they might sell a couple products, open source resources built by a community, etc.
I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and unobtrusive.
Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the web is this sort of site.
YES. Not only would I find more pleasant sites, but they'd likely be of higher information quality.
Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.
You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when it comes to B2C pricing.
Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:
a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins
b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc) will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't part of that equation here.
This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e. ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.
There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like that).
While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane after all - small transactions on the internet are a huge hassle. There's a lot of friction around tracking down my credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is there, but the way it works now ain't it.
I wouldn’t exactly say he’s not getting anything from it. Per Wikipedia,
>Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of $500,000 a year.
For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero. Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the server to my phone looks like rounding error.
I'd be one of those people. $1 for a single news article is outrageously overpriced, where the coffee is only moderately overpriced.
https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/
No ads in workspace, they don't mine your data for advertising.
Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.
It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.
Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.
Why do you think that people don't understand this?
> This just encourages subscriptions.
Which is the lesser of the two evils.
For more than a decade the fed has spoiled VC to expect that money could just be borrowed for nearly free.
Depending on where one lives, but many people have access to "free" government services, ranging from roads, education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more. The costs of these services are payed by taxes.
Some "free" services are sustained via donations. Wikipedia is a good example of this.
Some people might say that those are not examples of "for free", because someone is paying for those things, either via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society. Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free either: the advertisers are putting the money to run those services, and the society is also paying a huge cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.
Require something in return.
Flightradar24 gives ad-free subscriptions to users who pay $20 or so for an RTL dongle and feed it data.
YoutTube is making money, somehow, off of us. Is it not our right to reclaim the excess value we are creating for them? Why is only okay for trillion dollar companies to have free lunch?
Excess value is real, measured not from the margin, or even money that goes back into the org, but value that is 100% extracted from the organization, often at the detriment of the org for the sake of shareholders. Its very often just parasitic.
People are so entitled now, "nooo i need my investments doubled at all costs". I have little sympathy for professional investors that have tied the global economy to short term private gain over long term sustainable growth. Its a rich child's game.
Say, for example, a certain bank where to listen to the Fed and invest massive piles of cash deposited after currency debasement into federal notes and bonds. If those notes where purchased when the story was interest would remain zero only to face 4-6% interest months later, the investor could well need a quick win to dig out from those now toxic assets that can't be sold at face value.
> other times it's to cover existing bets
This is my issue. Our economy has become a casino for these professional investment firms with lots of capital to try to strike it rich. This is not a healthy way to run a system that determines who lives or dies in a big picture sense.
The economy has become a game for people with connections. It no longer matters if a business is healthy or profitable, if it does not work within this grand casino. The search for constant growth is killing us all.