Hacker News Reader

Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

Most ad-laden websites severely overvalue themselves. They're distractions - highly replaceable ones.

It turns out when you have a simple and obvious business model, it's easy to pay for content - iTunes enabled us to actually buy music (kind of, we're in the middle of screwing the artists over with bulk streaming deals and what I suspect is a lot of RIAA-contact lock ins preventing direct sales).

But really, how valuable do you think your blog post about someone else's blog post is? Or a news site reporting on what happened from Twitter, or publishing articles which are taken whole-sale from bullet pointed corporate and political press releases?

View on HN

The sites you describe are very small ones that don't make much money and don't really have problems with adblocking.

Why not think about pando daily, the verge, 9to5mac?

Sometimes just sometimes when a site has 100-1000 times the numbers of readers compared to a mere anonymous blog, they're just far more successful at generating clickbait and have more resources to waste on elaborate HTML5. Or maybe they really generate actual useful content. If we're discussing anecdotal data points everyone has a different view on a website's utility.

Personally I believe if the reader base of a site is genuine and not heavily dependent on one-hit readers, they shouldn't rely on an ad-driven model. At least, not solely. Call it guilt-tripping, donation driving, paywalling, microtransactions, anything you will. As long as it's not the ad networks actually asking for dosh. It's merely crowdfunding on a more diffuse and intimate level, since the aim is for the site to exist down the line indefinitely.

I know nothing about the last one, but the two others I imagine lots of people can do without...

This for-profit free-content model also ruins a lot of paid business models, which might otherwise be successful. We get rid of the overhead of the advertisment industry and retain more money to pay for good journalism etc.

Actually I was thinking of most of the current newsmedia sites. You know - CNN, Fox, or locally for me - Sydney Morning Herald and others. Of course there problem has ended entirely since even the effort of reading them has lost its appeal.

I literally have never heard of the 3 things you just listed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com