Comment by CrankyPants | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CrankyPants | Hacker News Reader

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I've moved to paying for content. In fact, at one point I shut off all content I wasn't directly paying for. A few things happened:

• 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.

I didn't do it by drawing a line between paid content and content-with-advertising, but over the past two years I've also dramatically cut the amount of TV I watch. I watch about one to three hours of non-sports television per week, on Hulu Plus or Netflix. My sports-watching is mostly background material while doing other stuff, and I don't have cable, but subscribe to things like MLB.TV for it, which (like Hulu Plus or cable) is a paid + advertising model. I did it as an experiment when moving to see how long I could get by without cable and a DVR and hours of TV shows per week, and found out I just didn't miss it that much at all. But for the stuff I do watch, I enjoy the big production budgets that advertising pays for.

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.

But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do.

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.

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