Comparing ads to direct payments is false dichotomy, there are countless other ways to monetize content. Also, most ads as we know are not fast nor passive.
Imho content blocking is just a harsh realization your content not worth as much you thought until you could force everyone to pay for it through ads, and now you have to play catch up. Let the market handle it.
Not really. When you get to fundamentals, it's either:
- direct payment (subscriptions, micropayments, donations, anything that involves you directly transferring funds)
- indirect (ads or another 3rd party subsidizing like the BBC by the UK government, which is just funded through taxes though so it might just be direct anyway)
That is the dichotomy and there's nothing false about it.
> Also, most ads as we know are not fast nor passive.
It seems you're referring to implementation problem I mentioned, nothing wrong with the concept of advertising itself. By fast and passive, I'm talking about the lack of decisioning needed to determine the actual monetary value of something. Figuring out whether you want to purchase every single page view will quickly cause mental friction far beyond the attention that ads take.
> Imho content blocking is just a harsh realization your content not worth as much you thought until you could force everyone to pay for it through ads
I dont understand how content blocking changes the value of the content. The fact that you are consuming it means that you attribute value to it. Nobody is being forced though so if you don't find it valuable or you think the ads demand too much attention in exchange then you are free to stop reading that content.
I feel there are some concepts washed together, e.g micropayments need not be direct in any way, and meaning a 3rd party subsidizing might just regarded as direct is false imho.
>Figuring out whether you want to purchase every single page view will quickly cause mental friction far beyond the attention that ads take.
Depends what you sell by the piece. Publishers do this with research papers, no problem. Or if you sell a stream for an event, go ahead. If you want to split your latest top10 diets to 10 pages, sure, you will have problems. Subscriptions might work for that. Again, there are many ways depending on your business, lets not paint it all the same color.
>I dont understand how content blocking changes the value of the content.
It does not. It presents a more accurate valuation by giving direct control to your users. It works both ways, imagine you have a paywall and no ads and your revenues start to skyrocket. But somehow very few sites are bold enough to take that bet.
Presenting the invasive nature of ads as an implementation problem feels a bit dishonest to me, as we have all the tools necessary to make them less obtrusive. See popups/modals. They are made to be that way and to me is clearly a design decision.
Still we just have to wait how things unfold, it is up to the content providers to react to blockers gaining popularity.
> Publishers do this with research papers, no problem.
Are you kidding? What's the first complaint you hear whenever a news article based on (and most likely distorted from) a new scientific study goes on Hacker News? "I'd love to look at the original study, but it's behind a paywall." Moreover, have you ever seen the à la carte prices of journal articles on these sites? Over $30 per article in many cases! The number of citations in an average journal article is in the dozens, not to mention the articles read but not cited. They might get a few suckers or truly desperate people to pay the à la carte price, but IMO the real purpose of those prices is to keep university libraries and corporations paying for already ruinously-priced journal subscriptions since paying for individual articles would bankrupt most research groups in short order.
This is how I fear a subscription-based model would actually work if it became more widespread -- you would end up paying hundreds of dollars a month to read the articles in Hacker News. The ability of advertising to support a habit of reading articles from thousands of sites is one of the great benefits of the internet. In fact, I would enthusiastically support an ad-supported version of Elsevier if it meant I didn't have to pay for individual articles or a subscription, even if the ads were as intrusive as those on 4chan or The Pirate Bay.
