jgianakopoulos

Zuck to fund interstellar travel w/in decades? 2040 Breaking News: Alpha Centauri Rejects Facebook's 'Free' Internet

I'm fairly certain this has all been tried. The New York Times and many other news outlets do have a freemium model of sorts. You are allowed access to 10 news articles a month, and after you reach your limit you can pay for more.

Guess how many people subscribe to the Times and are willing to actually pay to read another article? <830,000 worldwide. Paywalls have been implemented, monetization models have been tweaked - you can't change habits. People are habituated to getting their content online for free. They're not willing to pay for it in the vast majority of cases.

If we're talking online news content, there's just a ton of different outlets and I don't see people being willing to pay individually on an article-by-article basis. Maybe if you aggregated content under one subscription model (like the music industry does wit Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) and distributed revenue to publishers based on readership, it could work for a small minority of consumers. But even that seems like a stretch.

If ad blocking keeps growing at the rate it has been, then you're correct and the web will shrink. Maybe people will pay for services or news, and maybe they won't. I do agree that some ads are intrusive and annoying, but the model of publishers using advertising as a revenue source isn't going away any time soon.

What I think is disappointing is that the quantity and quality of original content would suffer without advertising-based business models. Individual bloggers, niche news outlets, and other small publishers will be unable to monetize their content. Even the New York Times (one of the most respected and largest news outlets in the entire world) can barely get over 800,000 paying online subscribers, and that includes subscriptions for a slimmed-down NYT Now app.

If you want a web that is rich in information, then advertising is a devil you have to accept.

The mantra? This is how the majority of the web is monetized. It's not a mantra, it's a fact. People contribute content to the web and you pay with viewing ads. I don't know how you can rationalize that as being a "shitty" business model just because you purchase a device that is capable of connecting to the internet.

If what you really mean to say is that it's a bad business model because people like yourself can install ad-blocking software and consume content without paying for it, then I see what you're saying although you come off as entitled and naive.

True, but I'm from Austin Texas and just moved to San Francisco, so I have some insight into this. I'm not sure if there's as big of a demand for laundry pickup services outside of dense urban areas like New York and San Francisco (where many residents do not have in-home washers and dryers). In Austin, most people have laundry machines, so it might not make sense there.

For crowd-sourced apps more generally I think you have a valid point with respect to cost of living adjustments.

Found this on housekeeping.com:

Front loading washing machines can hold as much as 18 lbs of clothing. So how many items are in a lb. of clothing? To find out how much your loads weigh, you can weigh yourself holding a load of dirty clothing, and subtract it from your weight without the dirty load. While weight varies with type of material, these are some general guidelines. Twin Sized Quilt-3-5 lbs. Complete Child Outfit-1-3 lbs. Complete Adult Outfit-3-5 lbs.

You have $7 wash and fold places in New York? Or are you talking about laundromats? Because the ones in San Francisco run you about $25-30 a load.

The average front-loaded laundry machine can hold ~18 lbs. Washio and wash and folds cost around $1.60 a pound, so this is close to $20 cheaper. Still $10 cheaper if you get delivery.

People-based marketing has come a long way, but it still lacks deterministic evidence about purchase intent/interest/history. Datalogix does a good job connecting online profiles and advertising to offline purchases, but the industry is by and large focused on probabilistic methods to build audiences.