Reddit to Give 10% of Its 2014 Ad Revenue to Non-Profits Picked by Its Users
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Exactly.
Seems a big part of the Reddit appeal is the love for feeling a part of the collective.
All at once this reinforces that sense, lends a suggestion of passive nobility to using the site and pre-emptively defends an increase in advertising.
I expect they'll also see some jump in guilt tripping by the community around adblocking as well.
0: http://www.reddit.com/r/CoDCompetitive/comments/1ssvjm/if_yo...
1: http://www.reddit.com/r/nerdcubed/comments/1w2h95/adblock_di...
So you want to be an investor now?
You can see "gilded" comments in real time. Gilded is when one user gives a month of reddit gold to another user (it doesn't include people buying it for themselves).
I'd say it's most definitely a success.
You can be not-profitable forever and still have a working company.
In fact, some organizations are even specifically set up to be "not profitable."
Although nominally non-profits such corporations are fairly indistinguishable from partnerships.
(Although "non-profit" is the common name, in this sense it's better to think of it as shorthand for "not for profit", meaning that achieving financial profits for its owners/insiders is not its legal purpose.)
See also: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/taxes-nonprofit-corp...
So it's not just a matter of convincing their userbase to stop blocking ads, you'd need to tell their current userbase to go away, and invite a better userbase to come and click on ads.
Reddit created this problem by fostering a culture of anti advertising early on.
Reddit should probably just become some non-profit foundation like wikipedia and show begging adverts.
[citation needed]
Who wouldn't want to see adverts for cool gadgets, toys, houses, suits, holidays, etc?
[1] Depending on your definition of rich.
It's more in line with wikipedia.
Whereas if it is not yet profitable, then revenue could be tiny - i.e. you might be 'vetoing' (with your comment) a $50 expenditure that serves to generate huge amounts of free advertising and goodwill for Reddit.
Frankly with this level of analysis, it would surprise me greatly to learn that you have any money remaining to invest.
Such a move only strengthens this image. This in turn makes their users very faithful (as long as they manage to live up their image) If they manage to (directly or indirectly) sell a no-bullshit product/service that appeals to their users then they are going to be a very successful company. (What's more, trust is a "resource" potential competitors can not easily imitate)
Sure, they haven't really found anything yet but building up trust will capitalize if the right product/service is found.
If there really exists is no such product then our whole society would have quite some serious flaws ...
Why, then, is it laudable if an org decides to give to charity instead of paying taxes? This takes the decision of how to spend for the public good away from the public and instead the company decides. Is it because in practice we distrust the government and our decision-making procedures too much and we trust private companies more?
Yes, but without any personal discretion or choice. For example, I personally think a woman's access to birth control and abortion is an essential right, but because this is by no means a popular viewpoint, I donate directly to charities that support my views.
Taxes aren't a way to support specific, desirable public goals, they only maintain the status quo. If your view had merit, Bill Gates would try to pay taxes to encourage redesign of condoms to improve Third World family planning outcomes (one of Gates' current projects). But Gates knows this won't work -- as far as a vocal minority of American are concerned, family planning is the work of the devil.
> As a democratic society, supposedly we already have mechanisms in place to decide how to spend this money for the public good.
You have a distorted idea of democracy. Democracy is not a centralized decision-making process in which various views are amalgamated into a single choice of action for all. Not to oversimplify, but democracy respects the rights of individuals and diverse groups to act in a way that doesn't interfere with any other group's similar rights. On this basis, private charity accurately represents democracy much better than centralized taxation does.
There is a very small minority (even among Catholics) that believe that birth control is immoral, let alone that government should impose that moral view. Nowhere in the near future will there be popular support, even within select states or counties, for banning birth control.
So what's the issue? One of them is that there are cases before the Supreme Court, including one involving Hobby Lobby, regarding whether private businesses should be forced to pay for birth control (by means of tax penalties) over moral objections. The "vocal minority" in question is struggling to maintain their freedom of personal discretion in this respect.
In arguing that people should have personal choice, you are indirectly agreeing with the very same minority you caricature.
If you live in the U.S., you're out of touch with popular opinion. The majority are in favor of birth control, but there is certainly popular opposition to birth control.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012...
> In arguing that people should have personal choice, you are indirectly agreeing with the very same minority you caricature.
That's absurd and a troll. Obviously anyone who speaks in favor of free speech would have to receive the same reply from you, on the ground that free speech is by definition a tolerance for unpopular views.
Even in the link you provided, there is nobody protesting legal birth control. They are protesting being forced to pay for other peoples' birth control. If birth control was an out-of-pocket expense, there would be no issue here.
I was simply trying to point out that the government is willing to put people out of business and litigate them all the way to the Supreme Court to mandate free birth control.
You seem concerned that the government could trample over your conscience as well, and we should all be concerned about that, but it's ironic that you chose this particular issue as an example, considering current events.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/154799/americans-including-cathol...
Transparently false -- the people in the story are protesting legal birth control.
> They are protesting being forced to pay for other peoples' birth control.
That's this week's explanation. These people are against birth control, and they con't care what form it takes.
> I was simply trying to point out that the government is willing to put people out of business and litigate them all the way to the Supreme Court to mandate free birth control.
Yes, just the same way the government put people out of business and litigated all the way to the Supreme Court to mandate an end to slavery. You very clearly have no idea what you sound like.
Even if they were working (which they're clearly not), just because 51% of people want to fund wars for egotainment, the kiddie-porn collecting NSA, and the rest of the American Empire outreach program does not mean that it is just to require everyone do so.
(also: alright Reddit Incorporated, put your money where your mouth is and let Wikileaks be an option to vote for)
It's because it's much easier to stop visiting reddit than to move to another country.
Failure to pay taxes is punishable by prison time. Failure to support the local arboretum probably shouldn't be. If you really have a problem with where taxes are going (either moral or practical), you can't opt out unless you move.
With private giving, you can keep your freedom of conscience and have a democratic say (by voting with your feet and dollar) that is more granular. On a ballot you vote for the democrat or the republican. With charitable giving, you can vote for AIDS prevention, AIDS treatment, or research for an AIDS cure. Or all three. Or you can decide heart disease is a bigger problem and put your resources there.
It basically implements a system of 'one dollar, one vote'. This gives more power to those with money than those without and therefore creates the perfect framework for sort of positive feedback which allows the rich to kep getting richer and the poor poorer.
As long as private profit, or more specifically private ownership of the means of production (that which allows some to get rich from others labour) then I have more faith in the state than private interests to determine the allocation of resources. This doesn't preclude a critique of the form or functioning of democracy within state, which I think is crucial.
...except for the fact that many organizations need labor donations more than they need monetary ones.
And if donating to an organization literally makes the doner wealthier, it's not really a charity, no matter what its tax-exempt status is.
And besides, it's been getting much worse for the poor recently despite ever-growing government expenditures in social welfare programs, especially if you factor in well-meaning market distortions like the nationalization of the student loan industry.
Granted, there is a lot of grey area. But the phrase "public good" means different things to different people. For those grey areas, private donations have been important. (see Planned Parenthood, the NRA, etc.)
They're doing this to try to get their (often stereotyped as snarky and condescending) users to click on ads for the "good of the world". It won't matter because their audience's clicks don't convert into sales.
I've seen quite a lot of highly upvoted submissions like "look what my girlfriend got me!" linking to a picture of some "geeky" product. Maybe I'm a bit cynical but I can't help thinking 80% of them are just marketing in disguise.
Also, you don't even have to pay to submit those stories. I'm not sure how reddit could solve this problem.
I hope that if bitcoin (or any other crypto) takes off, then it really will be easy. Bitcoin works the way money on the internet should have always worked: easy, between individuals, nobody else's business but the people who are actually doing business. :-)
I'm fine with you using Adblock. I just don't want to hear complaining when companies go out of business and jobs are lost (which is happening right now due to this) or we end up with a few corporations supplying all of the content.
This does nothing but make it so small and independent websites can't make a living anymore and large corporations rule with content. It's the same with piracy. They can take the hit, the small companies can't.
All because you can't be bothered by seeing an advertisement .
Let's step back a little and think of how me looking at advertisements is supposed to be fueling the economy.
When I look at ads, I'm supposed to be given an incentive to buy something. I look at an ad in order to create a need in me that didn't exist before I viewed that ad. By creating that need, I'm supposed to go out and buy something I didn't want in the first place. What I wanted in the first place was to view something on some website, not to go out and give someone else money.
So, let's cut the middleman advertiser. I don't want to be given artificial needs and give someone else money. I want to give the original person money.
All because I can't be bothered to see an ad.
Silicon Valley (in the asbtract) should really think twice about being Madison Avenues bitch.
Just owning a website doesn't mean you are entitled to make ad revenue. If your website can't generate money in any other way then your business model should probably be changed. Make it easy to accept donations for exceptional quality for people who are willing to donate.
The notion of "free" has spoiled a lot of folks online and made it a tough sell. I run a site that is entirely reader supported, but statistically it's very unlikely you'd just sign up and join, even though you believe ad revenue needs to die.
It's especially tough to do on sites built on user-generated content, because someone could just start a new one that's free and they'd lose their audience.
If you know anyone who would help kick this off/make it worth while, I would love to talk more.
Also, I kind of wish more sites took the mindset of http://dodiy.org/ but thats kind of a pipe dream.
I really shouldn't have to browse muted.
Though some readers probably wish there was no advertising, most of our readers want to know what products exist because they are office designers. I try to treat it like a magazine where the ads look nice and generally unobtrusive.
I'm obviously biased because I make my living on advertising.
If I buy a car magazine, guess what... it has some adverts for cars and car related products. Some of which are interesting and useful to me.
How are the ads useful to you?
How is that bad?
Many people like advertisements though - just pick up a September issue of Vogue and you'll see over 500 pages of a 900 page magazine filled with ads. And people go out of their way to buy it because they love the ads.
@vogue: My girfriend reads those magazines also. But she is always annoyed of the ads and the ad manipulated content. Some of these have at least ads you can take out and throw away, which she does also. She does not read the magazines because of the ads but because of the name of the magazine as well as the content (which is why she stoped reading the german Cosmopolitan for excample. The content became the ad in a way it became unreadable for her).
I've never ever heard somebody say: I buy/watch this product because I like the ads. I really doubt there is a relevant ammount of people who do this...
Same with adverts in magazines. It shows me products and services I didn't know about, some of which will be useful to me.
I don't even enjoy the trailers anymore because I've seen them all already on the Internet. I don't need them. Thats why I do something I can't do with a newspaper for example: I come into the room 30minutes later. When the actual product I've payed for is being aired.
This is a luxus I don't have with newspapers, on my company computer surfing the Internet, on the street,... My brain is being attacked by those unwanted information that has been tailored to hook onto certain mechanics within my unconscious mind I can't control. It manipulates me in a way I can't do anything about it.
And it is even worse: they also lie to me. I would never rely on this information because I know there is another player on the same market claiming the same things for their product. Why should I believe them? How should a lie be useful to me? I just can't see it.
I also don't recall a single situation where an ad showed me a new product I've never heard of and was interested in. I just can't. Maybe I'm to informed but I doubt it. I asked my girlfriend. She's not even close to that nerdy as I am. She also never did that. You think that might be an coincidence?
What was your last product you did not hear about before and bought after seeing an ad?
Probably buy something each week that I saw previously advertised somewhere.
The last thing was probably some pig electric fencing that was advertised in a pig magazine last week.
You're an outlier. Perhaps you're just so determined to be against advertising you can't see the value in it. Without advertising, how would we know what products exist?
I don't know anybody behaving like you described so I can't be an outlier. At least not where I live.
Too bad you decided against continuing the discussion based on the reasons I presented but I guess this is what keeps the show running. Good luck with that.
Do you watch American Idol? Do you read celebrity gossip magazines? Do you play bingo or the lottery? Do you watch Fox news? Do you buy a newspaper? Do you click on ads?
Millions and millions of people do all of the above - they are not outliers.
On your previous point "How should a lie be useful to me? I just can't see it.", we have this problem all the time outside of advertising with general information. Look at the average news story on Reddit. It's probably biased, probably a half truth, probably out of context, probably only half the facts of the story. Everything is biased and needs careful inspection before you can take it at face value.
However, there are obvious ways to do this. For example, I "trust" Lego. That means if they advertise a new awesome Batman Lego Arkham Asylum set, I'll know it's going to be quality, and awesome, and I'll buy it. If however it's some new unheard of company, I'd probably want to go examine it in a toy shop before I buy it.
I'm not trying to convince you that advertising is useful, I don't think you'll change your mind. But hopefully you'll see that you're not in a majority, and the majority think advertising is useful.
I see that in the US stuff is different and you are a lot of people that have been educated to consume for generations and it may stack up every day but that may be part of the problem don't you think? There must be a reason why you need that many credit cards...
@reddit:I have the CHOICE to believe the single one news source posted on reddit. Or I go to different ones and try to get a better picture. I may even completely ignore the news post or the whole subreddit.
I may even go to a completely different source altogether if I am really interested in a certain information and never ever see reddit.
I can not avoid advertisement.
@LEGO: Like with politics, your LEGO example shows that you are not the target group of LEGOs advertisement. You are like the voter whos parents and grandparents voted for the same party. You are completely irrelevant. It's clear that you'll buy. You are being really only informed on what to buy and when. You are the optimal client that just need to be fed. In this way, advertisement is really useful for you because you have to consume or you'll feel "hungry".
(Funny that you chose LEGO here because LEGO is a monopolist in his niche. How about Coca Cola and Pepsi?)
But as I said, this is not what ads aim for. They aim for new customers. People who did not buy the product yet. They need to be moved to buy your product and avoid the other one.
This is done particularly through methods that are unethical as I have shown above. They have nothing to do with quality of product or any other of those highly advertised properties that an optimal version of the object in question should have. It's more a stacking up of versions of those properties or even inventing completely new properties (product x makes you more sexy to gender y for example) leading to whole millions worth marketing strategies throughout every kind of media. If they work out, people will happily carry around the product and even display the logo creating even more advertisement. All this has nothing to do with the quality of the product. It may be a good one but it doesn't have to for the marketing to work.
Which leads us back to my initial post describing the whole advertisement industry as unethical up to annoying. And only because you or "people" got used to it, won't make it better. And if somebody who produces this illusion does not know what he really does, it becomes scary.
in the case of coke, they want to sell you coke more often, and when you start becoming health conscious, they want you to consider vitamin water. if you have seen their expensive super bowl or Christmas commercials, they don't focus on the product, its features, or it filling your needs. coke sells its image to validate the refreshing feeling you know.
But you can't really say that the superbowl commercial was something to support excising customers. I'm sure it scared away a hell lot of customers who were used to the product as far as they can remember. They didn't have to do that. They could have gone for funny or sexy. Everybody likes funny or sexy. This was a attention hammer. Liberals praise CC for being brave. How many switched over because of it? I mean, we are talking about the most expensively aired commercial in US (world?) TV. You don't really believe Coca Cola would invest that much money on that spot only (or mainly) to aim for existing customers (by even scaring a part of them away)?
I have seen all superbowl commercials. I can't remember one that would aim only for existing customers like the ones I've described above.
I also said above that the product or it's quality lost relevance already. Which makes the whole concept of advertising even worse (I said this because the topic was usability of advertisement). Vitamin water, even if it comes from the same company is a different product. You can drink Coca Cola once a week even if you are health conscious just to "reward" yourself but drink the rest of the week a product made by a different company because the whole health-claim of that company seems more true to you. Thats why Coca Cola fights a new fight for NEW customers with a new product.
Sure Coke sells an image. Or better: they jump on an image that is in at the moment. Cokes image isn't the same today as it was 10 years ago. You don't do that if you aim for existing customers because they started buying the product when the image was different. The new image is mainly for new people. If you do this but your competitor don't, you of course keep existing customers but you also gain new customers from your competitors that did not jump on the bandwagon.
Coca Cola did a risky thing here hoping they get more new customers then they lose by the message.
You're a small but vocal minority.
Just like people who don't own TVs, people who don't listen to pop music, watch reality TV, indulge in celebrity gossip etc.
You're an outlier - understand and accept that the vast majority of people are not like you.
You want to think about what 'normal' people do, and like. Because there's a hell of a lot more of them.
Of course you can have success with a niche product catering to minorities, but it's a lot easier to just make something most people want.
Reddit is not an example of a successful ad solution because their ads are so out of the way and "classy" that they don't even bring in enough revenue to come close to covering their costs.
It still remains to be seen if reddit can ever build a sustainable business.
The only way to successfully advertise on reddit is through guerrilla marketing. Which of course reddit doesn't see a penny of.
I could imagine the same logic applying to someone who shoplifts, which is hopefully clearly wrong. E.g., "I prefer to support future-viable business models, and stores that allow shoplifting are not future-viable. I'm just trying to help the world reach a better equilibrium sooner by imposing extra costs on non-future-viable businesses."
What do you think is the main distinction between your position and the hypothetical shoplifter?
No, I honestly don't believe that centralized content silos are a good thing for anybody besides their owners who are hoping to become the new gatekeeper communications middlemen.
Your shoplifting analogy would only be appropriate I were saying that I run Adblock to make anti-Adblock technology stronger. The problem is not that centralized websites allow the possibility of "freeloaders", it's that in addition to being expensive, the centralization itself has harmful effects on expression, culture, and self-determination.
Just look at something like Youtube - you have content restrictions (no "porn", etc), internationalized lowest-common-denominator copyright restrictions, public pressure to hide majority-objectionable content from searches, length restrictions, extrajudicial takedowns from an algorithm rejecting a video with no legal judgment, an unchangeable UI, a UI that changes when you don't want it to, terrible search, nagging of asking for signups/G+ account linking/etc, no ability to easily download videos for later viewing or posterity's sake, limitations on video quality, and I'm sure a whole host of other features that I cannot even fathom because they're impossible to experiment with.
A market of many centralized providers will indeed correct some of these things with time, but there's always going to be details that competition will never fix, especially while battling the inherent non-linear network effects.
As another straightforward example, take something as benevolent [1] as Wikipedia. The main thing they need these massive donations for are because they distribute content by fulfilling every individual request, using a massive number of servers.
Imagine a different system instead using current technology - Wikipedia could instead publish a magnet link in DNS, which interested clients would periodically refresh and restart the torrent. If Wikipedia was not a popular site, their initial seed would be enough to handle the load of casually-interested people who retrieve what they want and close the torrent. But as they get popular, people incidentally contribute to helping them host by re-serving content.
Current torrent clients of course have limitations that would make this annoying and/or not scalable across sites. But this is merely a straightforward example meant to wet your whistle.
[1] Since their editing process is centralized as well, we can certainly question whether it's universally benevolent. But for this example, let's keep our focus on their publishing method - of course similar things can go on on the content-production side. There should really be no need for me to be submitting this comment only to news.ycombinator.com, supposedly agreeing to their terms, hoping they indefinitely rehost what I have to say, suffering the annoying dead-continuation bug on long posts, etc
The "centralized content silos" are side effects of the copyright system, which exists to ensure distribution of IP generation costs across the people who consume it.
Wikipedia doesn't care as much about this because most of the content is an aggregate of the Wikipedia community. Wikipedia's costs lay in distributing the information, not in generating content.
For most content companies that have IP generation costs, how do you propose that they distribute the costs?
Torrenting only solves the distribution cost problem.
As for the funding of big budget films and the like, I'm not terribly worried. First, they have an awful lot of fat to trim, like all those lawyers and lobbyists they hire in an attempt to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, and that whole parallel management chain of Orwellian-named "producers".
But more importantly, we're already in a post-copyright world on that front. You accept that any information can be freely propagated, and that is just a new rule of the game, and you move on. You sell things like the experience of going to a movie theatre, concert venue, and physical merchandise. You explicitly appeal for fans to directly support you, and you take preorders instead of doing big-money gambles. Things about this model aren't ideal, but it's just how it is going to be.
While there is a large quantity of user-generated IP out there, it is not the majority of what is being torrented, nor do the content holders of user-generated content have any generation cost.
Also, the lobbying, legal fees, and other "fat" costs that you allude to are necessary for larger organizations to survive, less they become subject to rent-seeking by their competition, who do participate in the agency behavior. Even if Adobe were to never spend a dime on lawyers or lobbyists again, would they no longer have to pay software engineers too?
Again, for most content companies that have IP generation costs, how do you propose that they distribute the costs?
How does torrenting help solve the problem with the IP generation cost, considering you are claiming it's the future?
Alas, I directly answered your question in my last paragraph, by telling you how to figure out how to distribute exotic-bit-combination "generation costs":
> You accept that any information can be freely propagated, and that is just a new rule of the game, and you move on... Things about this model aren't ideal, but it's just how it is going to be.
In Adobe's case, they can strongarm prominent obviously-using businesses with some reduced notion of commercial copyright (as every software vendor has basically been doing for the past decade), set up support contracts that give access to prerelease features (currently works well for smaller, more expensive niches), or (as they're starting to do) further lock down their software by moving to a server-side model and buy time until a Free competitor gets good enough to overrule their inconvenience. If they were just starting off, asking for donations would also work, but clearly at this point they have way too much overhead for that.
Also note that if their product is deprecated by something else, then under the current regime it is considered appropriate that their costs are never recovered. Conversely, at some point their costs have been completely recovered yet they keep right on seeking rent.
You don't get to dictate to your users how they should be consuming content on the web. All you can do is present the ad and hope that it shows up.
Name one popular website that explicitly states you can browse their website ONLY if you look at ads.
The notion that your users will look at ads isn't an obligation; it's an expectation. In contrast, wages are a contractually-bound obligation. It's not morally wrong to refuse to live up to someone's expectations.
If you owned a website, would you refuse to serve anyone browsing with Lynx? They sure aren't going to be looking at any ads.
Sure, if you're using Lynx, you really don't have an option. That's fair enough. But in many other cases, it seems disrespectful to me to use somebody's site and tell them, "No, you can't have anything in return for giving me this even though you clearly wanted to." You have the option of doing your part, but you decline to do so. That isn't how I like to treat people I appreciate.
I guess I basically just don't like mooching.
It's not telling the client (the browser) "here's a bunch of HTML, but you can only use it if you show ads". There is no contract or agreement to display ads, implied or otherwise.
In the end, all you can do is simply ask the user to display ads. If you want to enforce that the user views ads, the web probably isn't the right medium for your product.
Exactly, and that costs money. Electricity costs money, servers cost money, webdev costs money. That data that is being sent to you wasn't magically discovered and offered up for free.
I dunno, jrock.us is free. I subsidize those costs for the readers.
It's not as good as the New York Times, though.
If adblock usage ever became mainstream, it'd become an arms war which advertisers would win.
It's like let's play pretend, or story time, and you're telling the story. I stop thinking about the rules as soon as I leave the card table.
You may not like ads but they heavily subsidize great content. In fact, the price of a New York Times subscription would be close to $1,500 per year if it weren't for advertisers keeping it closer to $300 (and that's if all their existing subscribers could even afford it).
Alexander Hamilton (newspaper owner, secretary of the treasury, founder of the Bank of New York) said:
"It is the advertiser who provides the paper for the subscriber. It is not to be disputed, that the publisher of a newspaper in this country, without a very exhaustive advertising support, would receive less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic."
The fact is people dramatically underestimate what it costs to produce high quality content and that as a rule you'd need to spend much more than you'd expect to have access to it.
Advertising has essentially made information free or cheap for the user for a long time. Just because you think ads are ugly and annoying doesn't change this fundamental reality.
I killed my subscription the next day.
I guess if GS wasn't sponsoring, the article would never have appeared or made frontpage, but it did.
The current "advertising model" leaves most newspapers open to foreign interests which go against press freedom almost all the time. That's why WikiLeaks published more interesting content in 5 years and made more scoops than the entire western press in ~ 30 years or so.
In this new Digital Age, the Press needs to find a new model - which mind you, I don't have a clue what exactly should be, since advertisement is what GENERALLY makes the world go round - or face extinction.
It did. In this digital age, small time publishers and blogs can now have an audience thanks to advertisers. If they're popular and providing great content they will, at minimum, make enough to cover the cost of hosting. They have a potential viewership of 6 billion people. Without advertisers, this just wouldn't exist. The internet would be different at the fundamental level.
Most people severely underestimate what advertisers bring to the table in terms of enabling content producers.
In Greece you can buy newspapers (paper or digital). You'll see ads from banks, drinks and state-owned organizations (Lottery games, etc.). So basically they are financed from the very same people they should be exposing, that's why in 40 years of bank-state back-channeling and corruption no one has ever been seriously exposed. Not to mention that freedom press in Greece 84th between Togo and Kosovo. Note that USA is 32 and UK is 29, not exactly freedom champions. It's not because they kill journalists, they fire them :-)
You see the problem?
In fact, that's where we hit the real problem: the kind of content that is covered with advertisements is usually not very good content to begin with.
This is especially true of content aggregators and meta sites such as Reddit and to some extent, this website. The content isn't even theirs: they are simply hosting a discussion forum about the content. A new-agey one instead of the old BB sites, but it's nonetheless exactly the same.
What content providers should be learning is that people are willing to pay for good content. Quality absolutely matters. The 90s and 00s were all about quantity, but now we're up to the rafters with disposable content. Look at the shows with the best ratings today: Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. Exceptional content quality, heavily pirated because the content creators have failed to adapt to new media distribution. The fact that I can torrent GoT more easily than I can view it from HBO is tragic.
So there's your dose of education for the day.
I also don't understand why Game of Thrones supports your argument. Of course the shows that are pirated the most will be the ones that are (1) popular and (2) expensive or hard to access. And of course if those shows were cheaper they'd be pirated less. But I don't see how that relates to the idea that people are willing to pay for good content. My roommates pirate GoT, but I am skeptical they'd pay even if it was available for $4.99 an episode.
> I know almost no one who pays for TV a la carte through iTunes or Amazon.
You now know of me. I spend around $50/month downloading content from Amazon, be it music or tv. I would buy Game of Thrones as it came out if I could, but I can't.
Absence of evidence isn't the evidence of absence. Especially if you've done no investigation.
>I am skeptical they'd pay even if it was available for $4.99 an episode.
$5 might be a bit steep for some, $2-3 is just about perfect. But honestly I'd still pay $5 for content created at this level, if not just to encourage the people creating this quality of content to keep doing it.
Your skepticism is powered by your lack of knowledge and research. Do the work, then come back and comment.
One thing I did try to find before asking you was data on the size of the a la carte TV/movie market. Anecdotally I know no one who buys TV shows (probably because I'm poor and tech savvy), but I thought I might be able to find comprehensive data to change my beliefs. Unfortunately my Google Fu was not good enough to find anything. I thought you might have a source you could share with me.
(To be honest, I think your response was rude and I feel a little hurt. But it's ok.)
Edit: In hindsight, some of the fault was mine. Of course there are people willing to pay at every price (that is the idea behind a demand curve). I guess what I'm really getting at is what are the best estimates of the shape of the demand curve. Would HBO make more money if they made GoT more accessible/cheaper? Is there evidence that a $2-$3 price point would be better than $5 price point? What are the price elasticities of demand? I guess I kind of wrapped up those more subtle questions into the question of people being willing to pay for content.
As long as content producers and distributors fail to find a faster way to distribute their offerings, I think piracy will continue and grow.
You could track seeds, peers, etc, and pay the media companies a license per peer (whatever). Could probably get a good picture of piracy of each piece of content as well.
Believe it or not, the subscription costs usually only cover the delivery and printing fees. Historically, subscription revenue has never been a real profit center because it's always been the best interest of a publication to build a larger circulation to increase ad rates.
Now, the internet has brought certain efficiencies to what it costs to distribute content. But it hasn't necessarily impacted what it costs to create quality content. With ad rates being lower online than they are in really any other medium, ad revenue isn't supporting the creation of quality content like it used to.
While Game of Thrones exists on a no commercial network, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and many more of your favorite cable television shows rely on both ad revenue and subscription revenue to exist. HBO has a cost north of $15 per month depending on your cable network, whereas AMC (which runs commercials) costs about 27 cents in your bundled cable package which is about 2% of the cost of HBO. That's a colossal difference and yes, advertisers, are subsidizing that dramatic cost differential.
This doesn't make sense. My understanding is that newspapers weren't primarily ad-supported until the 1920s, when new technologies enabled nationwide economies of scale for both newspapers and ad buyers. Is this not correct?
I'm going to need to write a blog post about this since I'm seeing so much confusion about how we got where we are and why we've ended up with ad models we have. It may take me a month or two to get to, but I think this community would benefit greatly from it.
The fact that this model works well on dead-tree newspapers, does not mean that it should be copied on the internet. We have tools to customize how sites are displayed, ads shouldn't be a sacred exception.
???
You are off by a factor of 3, given that you're assuming no elasticity of demand.
In the last quarter, the New York Times obtained 46.8% of revenues from circulation, 47.8% from advertising, and 5.4% from other.
Once upon a time, newspapers had more advertising revenue. But today, they're already well on their way to a world of digital nickels, where they have to get their bulk of revenues from subscribers.
Reddit doesn't create content. Reddit is a content aggregation service just like HN. You could probably make the argument that some subreddits generate content, which I would not disagree with, but Reddit doesn't pay for that content creation.
Also, plenty of blogs aren't ad supported, or aren't primarily ad supported. I can't remember the last time I visited a "popular" blog and they didn't have an ebook or some other form of merchandise for sale.
It seems to me that those that are most reliant on advertisements are those that house communities or just regurgitate content from other sources. If those sites all died tomorrow, I probably wouldn't care. (That includes HN and Reddit).
What other business model do you prefer? Would you prefer that websites collect massive amounts of information about you, datamine it, and sell it to third parties? Or should reddit users have to pay a monthly fee to look at shitty maymays?
Companies will tend to abandon the ad revenue business model as soon as a superior (and just as widely applicable) model comes along.
Anyway I wish them the best but I hope they know what they're getting into.
http://www.redditblog.com/2014/02/decimating-our-ads-revenue...
I proposed a question that I thought was worth discussing considering the leaked presentation which highlights the psychological theater orchestrated by our government on a regular basis. Admittedly, I'm not nose-deep in all of the Snowden/Reddit drama either.
1. The moderation is very recent news, and something like this isn't banged out in 24 hours. Likely this has been in the works for a while, before news broke of the Snowden moderation.
2. The mods on subreddits like r/news are different people from the admins of Reddit. Obvious bias within the subreddits, but I have little reason to believe that it's a site-wide conspiracy from the admins rather than controversial decision making from subreddit mods.
Edit: Looks like possibly this story related to the r/news subreddit and not necessarily reddit in general? [1]
[1] - http://mashable.com/2014/02/27/reddit-censoring-greenwald/
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/28/why_reddit_moderators_are_ce...
4 comments responding directly to the link, 3/4 negative.
117 comments responding to randomAnonymousUser[1-4].
(Internet (Hacker News)) culture at its finest.
Also it has plenty of hidden adds crafted as submissions.
*Not a fact, just my experience.
There have been many HN posts and comments about successful paid ads in specialized communities.
It's a risky business though because if they get caught they get masses of anti-advertisement. Though one would say that best advertisement is anti-advertisement.
I don't think it will work, since Reddit already uses non-intrusive ads and the majority of people block ads on principal alone.
Users don't want ads (because it's somehow intruding on your space), nobody would be willing to pay for the site, and Reddit gold was seen as class warfare (haves and have nots).
Anything that even seems like Reddit wants to bring in money is shunned immediately by the user base.
Like most anti-capitalist Utopian groups, it's doomed.
I think that its perhaps a bit of a stretch to call reddit an 'anti-capitalist' group, but for sure the capitalists are failing to find a way to extract profit from it, and this itself really interesting
Like other 'social media' (in the broad sense) enterprises reddit uses the products of users unpaid labour to reach an audience, and it attempts to make a profit from selling this audience to advertisers. Unfortunately for those wanting to profit from reddit, its strong community is resistant to being exploited in this manner. Im not claiming here that all or even most reddit users are 'anti-capitalists', or directly opposed to the profit making of reddit, but simply that there is not (or has not yet ben discovered) a means of adequately monetising its community which doesn't give the effect of taking control from said community, and things like the revolt against reddit gold and the use of ad-block are movements in this struggle over ownership.
I dont, personally, see any resolution to this impasse which maintains both a profit for reddit and the autonomy and control desired by the reddit community, and in this we are in some sort of agreement. The two are irreconcilable. I would choose to back the other horse though.