(This breaks down some for internet display ads where there are privacy concerns with the data being tracked, unlike with broadcast-to-everyone TV ads; I'm not aware of how much data is shared between advertisers and such with this program for W8 apps to know just how big of an issue that might be.)
• The S/N got astonishingly better.
• The time spent on it was much lower.
• What I got out of it was more nuanced, and impacted me more deeply.
Now, a few other things happened: I missed some things, some of which was good (well-reasoned debates on HN, for example), some of which was the equivalent of junk food (tech news updates), but still not without some utility and applicability.
I also decided some of my subscription content really wasn't worth it, because it started to feel an awful lot closer to the ad supported stuff I'd just detox'd off of, than the higher quality stuff I was paying for.
I also missed some really, really good 'blogs from people who are respected industry figures, and run the 'blog more to make sure they stay respected industry figures, than to directly profit from them. Those are back in the (much reduced) fray.
Which is all to say: I think if we paid directly for the content we consumed on TV, it could work out OK. And, once the industry realizes its model is unsustainable, everything will cost less to produce, and, hopefully, buy. (Think of sending $5-7 to an artist for their album, as opposed to paying ≥$10-15 to pay a lot of guys whose ability to add value is ever declining.) I'd just as soon watch 2-3 really superb TV shows per week and pay $100-300/year than spend that (or more) for the same stuff, plus a whole lot of noise and bloat. I think we'd come out of the other end better for it, and with more to show.
At the risk of being hastily axiomatic, I could say that everyone's beholden to someone. Or, at least, content creators who want to be paid for their work, are. I'd rather they be primarily beholden to the customer, than to the advertiser, or the political climate and/or government, etc. Any other arrangement, to me, seems too compromised, if for no other reason than because a direct wallet-vote seems to be the most powerful.
But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do. Commercials just pretty much wash over me (and internet banner ads I usually don't even notice at all). Sure, there's a not-really-personally-noticed branding effect, especially with interruptive TV ads, but I just don't care if my purchase of paper towels or whatever ends up subconsciously influenced by commercials.
But, all that said, and more back to the original topic, ads in apps are one of the areas where I'm more frequently willing to pay to remove them. It's a question of consuming versus using, and wanting to maximize my screen space.
And I think it's fascinating how easily iOS and Android (I don't remember any ads in Symbian smartphone apps, though I never really used Windows Mobile, so maybe they were there?) slipped the idea of in-app ads into the world, after the desktop app world avoided them for so long.
I agree, but I also factor my time, patience, stress levels, and other things into the cost. (That said, I'm probably more bothered by this stuff than most, so my costs are not your costs.)
Where I disagree is that I think big production stuff can happen without ad dollars, but without data to support it, I'm just supposing.
And I also think that, on a per-dollar basis, we might even wind up paying less. Similarly suppositional, but I think we underestimate the amount of ad budgets baked into products we'd buy either way, the amount of worthless junk we pay for–either directly, or indirectly–but wouldn't, if our collective view of things was a bit more grounded and mature, and so on.
And, yeah, a trojan horse in the shape of shiny phones has certainly done wonders for that. All I can think is that perhaps desktop apps being more the domain of earlier adopters and business users, at least relative to phone sales, must be part of it.
That said, developers were doing it before iOS had an ad network, and before Android, so one could take the good-faith assumption that they were more concerned about developers making bad, annoying ads that would spoil it for everyone else (I vaguely remember Apple making some comments about that at the time), and I'm sure Google didn't want someone besides them controlling how things were presented and doing a bad job of it.
I assume that everyone is doing what they think is in their own best interest.
I'm just not sure consumers are, on balance, right in their assumptions.
In fact, if there is a difference, it's that operating systems are far more integrated into both my personal and professional lives, both in terms of time and functional integration. The last thing I want is for the rest of my life to be as whored out and substance-free as television.
Greed gets in the way, as a consumer you've got too little power to say no. It's use the service with ads or get nothing.
It's exploitation, but what can you do?
In my opinion forced ads are an overall societal drain, a niggling little evil cheapening all our lives, but as I said, what can you do?
Consider if Photoshop had ads. Yes it's a ridiculous concept but hear me out. For most people, a Photoshop license is not priced in such a way for them to get it. Not everyone can get the student license. But what if you had an ad-supported version to allow you to use it? For people to try it out and open their doors to image editing, that would be a great experience. The alternative being pirating or using smaller programs or ones without the same industry-vetting.
Photoshop is an interesting example to me, because I count Photoshop as another model that has had to change with the times: it used to be for pure professionals only, at a time when professionals often worked for companies that bought their licenses. Like the sports tickets of software. Crazy expensive, but if you did it as a full-time job, it was more than easily absorbed. After all, it required expensive (and technically challenging) hardware to run it on, so that barrier was already crossed by potential customers.
Today, everyone's a designer. Alright, that's not a fair assessment, but the number of people who have design skills–ranging from minor editing to some real mind-blowing stuff–but don't depend on them to feed their family, is astonishingly high compared to just a couple of decades ago. People who never consider themselves graphic artists find a lot of utility value in Photoshop, or one of its offshoots.
So its old price point, relative to everything else, just doesn't make sense if broad adoption is their goal, unless they're totally happy to capture just the pure pro crowd, who, for perspective, can run it quite handily on hardware that costs what a night or two in a mid-grade hotel in any big city does. The technical and cost barriers have fallen dramatically.
So that's changing.
Now, consider if Photoshop were ad-supported, and had been so for long enough to where designers grew up with that being the new normal.
Then, imagine someone comes out with an ad-free image-editing program, with no ads, that costs a reasonable amount. In some ways, better than Photoshop, in other ways, probably not as specialized, not as built-out, but pretty solid.
I think there's a market there for the taking.
Adobe's trying to strike that balance, and I'm not here to say whether or not they're doing a good job at it with their current approach (that's a much longer post and I doubt my ability to think about it as clearly as I believe I can other segments of the industry), but my point is that well-made products at a reasonable price is something I still want to believe there's a huge market for.
And we tend to underestimate it because of all the sub-par stuff, our conditioning to which we don't even realize.
I'd like to think that enough humanity still has the innate thoughtfulness to be slightly skeptical when being pitched to trade hours of their life (that is, the money they earned by working) for a given product, to provide a market for it.
And if we've all reached the point where we'll happily trade our time, attention spans, compromise our abilities to focus and concentrate, and reveal a wealth of personal data so as to pay a bit less, well, then we get what we deserve. But that's probably outside the scope of this particular comment.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
I guess what I'm getting at is how do you try software without 30-day trials, ad-supported free versions, or having to pay a hefty price without test driving?
Is there a better way?
And I don't even necessarily see ad-supported free versions as the worst option. A lot of developers find the paid version winds up getting them far more revenue, and from better customers, which magnifies the gains. So if that's a good gateway for them, great, and if that's a good filter by which to learn that they should ditch the free version, even better.
I don't love it. I think a truly enlightened society would look for better ways to connect customers with the products they'd enjoy and find value in, but having an ad-supported version plus a paid version, seems to be a step in the right direction. One could argue that's what's being done by networks who broadcast their shows for free and sell them on iTunes/Amazon, but I'd like it if: they came out at the same time, and if it wasn't clear the ad-supported model is largely necessary because most of their products are garbage, and they rely on the big hits to subsidize their general lack of taste. (Same goes for the music industry.)
Now, I've made donations to sites that disable the ads for donors, and I get why they do that. I don't judge the guys who see an ad-supported version as their only potential way of gaining some traction (though I might not always agree with that assessment). They're scrappy, and doing what they have to.
What I think really drives me nuts is this frantic, 90s-like gold rush push for the ability to corner the market on every square inch at which eyeballs point, with the aim towards placing corporate sponsorship there. And hey, for the square-inches that aren't digital, let's put glasses between your eyes and it!
(Don't get me wrong, wearable displays will be massively useful, and massively 'disruptive,' to use the local dialect, but I'd just as soon get mine from someone who wants to make a really good one, and sell it to me for a profit, and then carry on designing the next, even better one, as opposed to spending most of their time thinking about how to monetize my life even more. But that's probably just me.)
I would gladly pay say 30$ a month for Hulu without adds and some people would pay 100$ a month for the same privilege, but the option is simply not there. Netflix is currently cheap and add free, but the compete for the same content which puts a lot of pressure on Netflix to insert advertising just like DVD/Blue-ray etc and just about every other way to see most of this stuff.
I have vowed never to watch anything live. Always recorded on DVR with fast forwarding through Ads. The day they disable fast forwarding Ads is the day I completely throw out my TV.
Use Linux.