[HN Gopher] The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting wor...
___________________________________________________________________
The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting worse in the
process [video]
Author : rglullis
Score : 160 points
Date : 2023-07-11 23:37 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tilvids.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tilvids.com)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's gotta be ironic that the most recent comment on a video
| about ads is some spam advertising a get-rich-quick scheme.
|
| The sad fact is that there still seem to be more than enough
| _utterly braindead_ marks on the Internet that fall for these
| scams and thus make the spam campaigns, scare ads and other crap
| "worth the effort".
| jstarfish wrote:
| > The sad fact is that there still seem to be more than enough
| utterly braindead marks on the Internet that fall for these
| scams
|
| Defense is a game of resource exhaustion. Even security experts
| get tired/drunk/overwhelmed and make errors in judgment. I
| _almost_ fell for a recent phishing exercise myself.
|
| A growing number of these "utterly braindead marks" are people
| like your own parents and grandparents, whose brains are in
| fact degrading. Meanwhile the threats continue to evolve and
| new vectors arise. It's like applying for jobs. The more
| scammers try, the higher the chances an attempt will eventually
| succeed.
|
| PSA: Expecting an inheritance? Keep your parents out of trouble
| or you'll never see it. The power-of-attorney scam is alive and
| well.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Defense is a game of resource exhaustion. Even security
| experts get tired /drunk/overwhelmed and make errors in
| judgment. I almost fell for a recent phishing exercise
| myself._
|
| It's also a game of numbers. I once _did_ fall for a phishing
| exercise, because by pure coincidence, the email looked
| perfectly legitimate in context of my unusual, specific and
| temporary circumstances. There were some minor red flags, but
| I missed those as I got the email while waiting in the
| airport. Basically, a one in a million lottery win.
| Fortunately, it was a company exercise, so all I lost was a
| bit of self-esteem and a lot of self-confidence.
|
| But that's the thing: when you can send a message like this
| to a couple million people for approximately $0, then "one in
| a million chance" turns into a guaranteed win.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > The sad fact is that there still seem to be more than enough
| utterly braindead marks on the Internet that fall for these
| scams and thus make the spam campaigns, scare ads and other
| crap "worth the effort".
|
| And that despite the size of Google, modern advancements in
| technology such as large processing power, AI and LLMs, all the
| tracking and anti-abuse mechanisms (that often misfire and ban
| legitimate accounts with no recourse), this shit _still_
| manages to get through while being super obvious.
|
| We used to filter this crap out on forums back in the good old
| days with much more primitive tools (regexes and basic keyword
| matching + queuing for moderator's manual approval), but Google
| wants us to believe they can't while in reality they just don't
| care because they're not liable, have a monopoly and those
| spammers still contribute towards "engagement".
| belorn wrote:
| He mentioned linus tech tips but they have already started
| pivoting away from the ad-based economy and into branded
| merchandise with more and more of their revenue being made from
| their store. They also has their own platform and subscription
| service. They are basically planning ahead for the day when
| youtube is no longer a main source of income.
|
| I am personally not that worried about what the future will be
| without ads. Some creators will switch to a subscription based
| platform, others will use pateron-like services or tips (doesn't
| work for everyone and often depend on whales), and others will
| find alternatives sources like grants and sponsors. Others might
| use their creative efforts as a platform for self-advertisement,
| sell merch, or just create content as a personal outlet.
| seydor wrote:
| Online ad spending keeps increasing every year, so it can't be
| dying
|
| https://www.insiderintelligence.com/topics/storage/02a371186...
|
| It's just that google + fb are increasingly keeping bigger and
| bigger piece of the pie for themselves, which among others
| enriches their workers to the detrimment of content creators.
| Monopoly is to blame here, not a natural death
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Something increasing in spend every year doesn't mean the
| overall profits from it are increasing (I am not sure whether
| or not they are).
|
| People spend more on food delivery every year. The profits
| remain elusive as the cost also climbs.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The divisor is also getting bigger.
|
| Ads were pretty comfy in the age of print (there were only so
| many physical copies people were willing to buy), but now there
| is effectively unlimited real estate on the internet, people
| keep throwing up new sites (real and spam) that fight for the
| pie, and there are always new people looking to make it as
| influencers or streamers, which are now the most common answer
| in the US to "what do you want to be when you grow up". So now
| an "easy" way to get money has quickly become a race to the
| bottom.
| gleenn wrote:
| His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying
| because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems
| to almost actively be killing Twitter (which the poster even
| states). Reddit screwed Apollo and then many of the most popular
| subreddits protested and did things like show porn on otherwise
| usually SFW content to prevent Reddit from showing ads and thus
| killing their profits. Those are big sites, but those are
| definitely attributable to other obvious confounding factors. I
| would definitely argue they should be the first data points
| thrown out in asking "is the ad biz on the internet dying?". I do
| think ads have gotten worse but I definitely don't think it's
| going anywhere for a long long time. Way too many companies have
| built their whole revenue model around them. And companies may
| spend less to post ads but they definitely still will because
| there really aren't that many alternatives.
| darepublic wrote:
| Both of the blunders you mention are recent no? (Elon /
| Apollo). And these companies were never making money so
| blunders can be considered errors forced by the need to
| monetize quickly.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| > His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is
| dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon
| seems to almost actively be killing Twitter
|
| I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated
| multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Haha, what is a superapp?
| andreygrehov wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app
| a1o wrote:
| Something like wechat, like payments, messages,
| socialmedia, shopping, ...
| bamfly wrote:
| AOL but in the 21st century. Possibly minus the ISP part.
|
| All the shit you do on the web, but controlled by one
| company, in their app, so they can rent-seek the hell out
| of everyone else's business.
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| He also threatened to "thermonuclear name and shame"
| advertisers who paused spending.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-
| adverti...
| andreygrehov wrote:
| That was a sarcasm. I should have stated that he doesn't
| care as much as other companies. Elon, being the richest
| person on the planet, is uniquely positioned and has a
| competitive advantage. He can risk losing ad revenue to
| achieve his goals - minimize censorship and create a super-
| app.
| nativeit wrote:
| Is he still the richest twat in the pot? I would have
| thought his liabilities would have taken their toll on
| his net worth. Hair plugs can get pricey.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Yes. Elon is still the richest person on the planet. If
| you thought otherwise, you might want to reconsider your
| understanding of how wealth is both preserved and
| accumulated -\\_(tsu)_/-
| croes wrote:
| > how wealth is both preserved and accumulated
|
| By shifting your debts on the company you bought with
| that debt, so other people take the risks of his
| failures.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Honestly, it sounds like you are cheering and rooting for
| him to fail with Twitter.
| croes wrote:
| Easy to say if you are not the target, especially from a
| guy who called others pedo guy
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Yes. It's easy because I'm not attacking Elon, so he's
| not attacking me.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| The man that literally censors views he doesn't like.
| itake wrote:
| As someone who works for an asian "superapp", the grass is
| always greener.
|
| Superapps are self-limiting, because the app-size is too
| large for many user's phones (Uber has famously had this
| problem too, and thus split up their apps [0]).
|
| The UX also tends to be a bit weird. Everyone wants to use
| the superapp differently and so the interface ends up being
| the lowest common denominator across all product families.
|
| [0] https://apps.apple.com/in/developer/uber-technologies-
| inc/id...
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Maybe, but none of that matters at the moment. These are
| after-the-fact problems.
| Medh_Suk wrote:
| Marketers have ruined internet with deceptive and click baity
| ads.
|
| I dont have a problem with ads, just dont sell my data to
| everyone who knocks on your companies doors. Happy to support
| ethical ads.
|
| Twitter ads are aweful, showing unknown, click bait ads on its
| platform.
| drdeca wrote:
| I don't even have a problem with what ads I'm shown being
| based on _some_ information about me. I 'd happily provide
| additional information which I think would, if it were used,
| result in less ads being wasted on me (showing me ads for
| horror movies/game is never going to benefit the movie/game
| company, and I find the ads unpleasant. Not showing me ads
| for horror content, and showing other ads instead, should be
| a win-win. But the only topics google lets me restrict ads
| for are "gambling", "alcohol", "dating", and like one or two
| others that I don't remember. Maybe "parenting"?)
| LaundroMat wrote:
| ... deceptive and click baity _content_ too.
| spacemadness wrote:
| It's interesting we hear a lot about how engineers need to
| understand ethics, but nobody says a peep about the field of
| marketing which focuses on psychological manipulation and
| deception.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think that's because everyone already knows that the
| marketing field is slimy and don't expect differently from
| it. There is still hope for devs, though.
| armini wrote:
| Big platforms are slowly decaying but alternatives are also
| slowly getting traction with new business models. This is an
| example that's slowly growing in the lofi-music community
| https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtR9Lnav1GH/?igshid=MzRlODBiN...
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| woooooo wrote:
| I recently googled some random topic (drag race engines I
| think) and got some fairly-decent article from 5 years ago that
| satisfied my curiosity.
|
| The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping
| up all over the place, the works.
|
| Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since
| written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as
| possible, one performance review cycle at a time?
| soared wrote:
| Interesting thought that for content where no competition
| exists, the owner can maximize profit by drowning it in ads.
| Doesn't seem like there is much of an alternative outside of
| legislation or action from google to enforce stricter ad
| standards(like how pop ups got killed)
| [deleted]
| HEmanZ wrote:
| Have adds been getting worse? Adds I get in the last 3 years
| have been way too good for me, so my personal experience has
| been the opposite (or maybe not? Definitely makes me want to
| buy more stuff). I guess I'm easily targetable
| HWR_14 wrote:
| It's possible that the density of ads has increased (gotten
| worse) thus leading to you buying more items. And some bias
| in your recall makes you think they've gotten more effective
| at targeting you, instead of the same conversion rate but far
| more opportunities to convert.
| warbeforepeace wrote:
| The official reddit app has an add every 4 posts i swear.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Twitter and Reddit ... have made huge blunders
|
| In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first
| place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for
| other people's content - if the content producers leave, they
| don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the
| content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't
| have any value even if they did. There's a weak value
| proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people
| to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to
| it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize
| just how precarious their position is/was.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I think this is really what we're seeing now.
|
| One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to
| the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just
| _was_ no path forward for them simply because there 's not
| much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just
| see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| There were many obviously lucrative paths Reddit could have
| taken. They have incredible amounts of data on users who
| self-select their own interests. They were making money
| selling subscriptions even. They could have monetized all
| sorts of things in non-annoying ways, like secret santa
| (pay to verify users or have direct anonymous shipping?),
| subreddit sponsorships (want to own /r/steam, Valve pays
| for it), etc.
|
| Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their
| interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and
| mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's
| faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features
| like live chat and video hosting.
|
| Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in
| charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.
| LakeBoat wrote:
| [flagged]
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is
| dying because those two companies have made huge blunders.
|
| Even worse - they never had good ad revenue.
|
| If ad revenue model is dying it would suggest companies like
| facebook and google see ad revenue dying.
| phaedrus wrote:
| The YouTube channel Second Thought recently put out a video
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gSzzuY1Yw0) whose thesis was
| that even being cheaper than fossil fuels is not / will not be
| enough for green energy to win, because under capitalism a
| cheap thing that also has low profit margin will not attract
| investment compared to a bit more expensive thing which can be
| exploited for more profit. I wonder if a similar effect affects
| sites like Twitter and Reddit: the more efficient they are at
| connecting users and providing value for user's efforts, the
| less room there is for profit margin. As a coworker once
| pointed out to me, the parameter which represents "profit" in
| an economic system would correspond to "inefficiency" in an
| engineering context.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| True until it can be "monopolized". I guess in the near
| future govt will regulate green energy to some model that can
| give enough profit margin for corporates, and that will
| increase green energyp price to near fossil fuel, with bigger
| margin. Subscription based solar panel and electric vehicles
| come to mind.
|
| As for reddit and twitter it's not the efficiency and room
| for profit, it's the cost to provide said content outweigh
| the revenue gained from ads. Hosting and maintaining global
| social media is expensive, which is there's no many players
| in that field.
| nevdka wrote:
| You don't need a monopoly, you need competition. Renewables
| sell into the same energy market as fossil fuels, and get
| paid the same price. So you end up with low cost renewables
| making higher profits than high cost fossil fuels, and so
| attract more investment.
|
| Long term, when renewables have displaced fossil fuels,
| then profits will fall. But that only happens _after_ the
| renewables get investment.
| themitigating wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by efficient, that Reddit gets
| people to the information they wanted as fast as possible?
|
| I thought the whole idea behind Reddit and other sites was to
| keep people browsing with algorithms that keep them
| interested. Wouldn't that be what makes them efficient?
| brewdad wrote:
| Your coworker is wise. Economic theory holds that in a truly
| efficient market, profits approach 0.
| doliveira wrote:
| Probably I had already heard it in a longer version but
| wow, summing it up like that really hits home.
| convolvatron wrote:
| does that mean that investment is fundamentally beholden to
| market inefficiency?
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| We ship fruit from Argentina where it is grown, to
| Thailand to be packaged, to the United States to be
| consumed.
|
| While it may be efficient from the perspective of a
| spreadsheet, its inefficient due to the external costs,
| ie pollution from shipping, the delicate nature of just-
| in-time shipments, etc.
|
| Your fruit cup might cost a bit more if it was to be done
| all in one place, but I would call that a cost for a less
| fragile system.
| bordercases wrote:
| "Market failure", "Market gap"
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| Exploitation of a knowledge gap and existing market
| constraints.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If all you can think of are services, maybe. But the
| people that make things don't agree.
| barrysteve wrote:
| no more than engineering is fundamentally beholden to
| imperfect science.
| sclarisse wrote:
| That's economic profits that approach 0. You can still run
| an accounting profit, it's just not bigger than it would be
| if you invested your money somewhere else, like land or
| mining or coffeeshops or whatever.
| rchaud wrote:
| Economic profit is still there, it's abnormal profits
| that would go to zero. With zero EP the opportunity cost
| of staying in business would be to high.
|
| With 0 AP, the industry is in equilibrium, with no
| companies dropping out, and no companies entering the
| market.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| That video makes no sense. If renewables are cheaper, then
| fossil fuels have even worse margins. The video claims for
| some reason that fossil fuels are "more exploitable" and more
| profitable, but assuming you're baking storage into cost, a
| lot of energy is fungible. Furthermore, solar can easily be
| installed on prem and many energy users have plenty of unused
| roof space, so even if all energy providers conspired to keep
| energy prices high, energy _users_ can install their own
| solar.
| mhh__ wrote:
| "Green energy cheaper why not using it" => it's not cheaper
| under a broad enough definition of cheap.
|
| Junk bonds have high yields, why don't why all buy them?
| specialist wrote:
| Amusing video. 0/
|
| I have a different theory.
|
| But first...
|
| New projects have stalled because of permitting bottlenecks.
| 1/
|
| Investment in '22 was $1.1 trillion dollars. Another record.
| https://about.bnef.com/new-energy-outlook/ 2/
|
| There's plenty of other investors. Like utilities, NGOs,
| govts, and customers. Here's the list of projects in Bhadla
| Solar Park. https://cms.mercomindia.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/03/List-... Where's Big Oil, Vanguard,
| Blackrock? Scanning some dozen other marque projects tells a
| similar story.
|
| Further, IIRC, the ROI for mega projects are largely
| predetermined via PPAs and such. Think of them as bonds.
| There seems to be no shortage of investors (for feasible
| projects).
|
| Okay, back to my theory...
|
| Big Oil knows this is the end game. But they want to
| compensated for all their soon-to-be stranded assets, real
| and (more likely) imaginary.
|
| So this is a hostage negotiation. They've redoubled their
| efforts to up the stakes. "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"
|
| It's just straight up extortion.
|
| I have no sense for how it'll play out.
|
| My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies.
| Then put all their execs (say Director on up) and board
| members in solitary confinement for life. Stage some show
| trials at The Hague for ecocide or whatever, to add a veneer
| of legitimacy.
|
| Though I recognize opinions may differ.
|
| --
|
| 0/ I prefer my socialism to be advocacy-oriented, vs
| whinging, but tastes differ.
|
| 1/ Separately, post IRA, the billionaire funded reactionary
| astroturf campaign is now in full swing. For instance, every
| single offshore wind farm has been opposed, farmers adopting
| solar are being harassed, ad nauseum. So even as permitting
| is reformed, brain worms will likely slow our transition.
|
| 2/ Early reports post-IRA suggest new investment, in
| everything, has gone bonkers. With potential for even more as
| the Biden Admin firms up the implementation. David Roberts'
| Volts podcast is one of my primary sources, highest
| recommendation.
| https://www.volts.wtf/podcast/archive?sort=new
| intrasight wrote:
| > "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"
|
| Well it used to be "Pay us! And we kill the planet!"
|
| My opinion is that the "or" operator is an improvement over
| the old. It implies that there is a chance to save the
| planet.
|
| >My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies
|
| This will have exactly the opposite effect as you are
| envisioning. Having every citizen benefit from fossil fuels
| will make them much harder to keep in the ground.
|
| If you haven't already done so, read Kim Stanley Robinson's
| article on this topic: https://www.noemamag.com/paying-
| ourselves-to-decarbonize/
| specialist wrote:
| > _...will have exactly the opposite effect as you are
| envisioning._
|
| Sure.
|
| Or not.
|
| At some point, like with coal before it, oil's price will
| fall thru the floor. What then?
|
| The fate of the countries listed will vary.
|
| Foreseeing the inevitable, some of the Gulf States and
| Norway have been diversifying for a while. China is
| racing to create the post carbon future, hoping to outrun
| the bear. Russia is choosing oblivion. The others will
| fall somewhere in between. Or in the schizophrenic USA,
| somewhere(s).
|
| > _read Kim Stanley Robinson 's article_
|
| Ok, have done. Meh.
|
| Aside: "The Ministry for the Future" presents an
| absolutely best case scenario, in all its terribleness.
| Pretty unconvincing.
|
| There's no reactionary movement actively thwarting
| progress, no emergent right wing eco-fascism.
|
| Technological progress always begets social upheaval.
| Globe spanning wars were fought over much lower stakes
| (than climate crisis).
|
| That said, I have _no idea_ how any of this will play
| out. Can 't even guess. But I expect the worse.
|
| And I'm an optimist.
| lettergram wrote:
| I keep asking this because I don't understand - how is Elon
| "killing" twitter?
|
| I've frankly not seen any difference, at all. If anything
| there's slightly more activity
| waynesonfire wrote:
| Its a Facebook narrative to get you to use Threads. Twitter
| is doing just fine.
| sdsd wrote:
| Everywhere online is pronouncing twitter dead, but I agree.
| As a user, it seems more alive and vibrant than ever.
| warbeforepeace wrote:
| Its becoming a far right cesspool. And its making even less
| money than the little that it did before. Most people i know
| don't use it anymore.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| If anything, it's just become more centered, now that
| people aren't getting banned for not conforming to the
| political whims of the flow of information.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Due to an excessive censorship prior to the acquisition,
| Twitter was a far left cesspool. All these users are still
| active after the acquisition, however many right-wing
| accounts were reinstated. Consequently, from the political
| perspective, Twitter is now more balanced than ever. One
| can be sure of this by tuning their feed - follow a
| politically diverse groups of people.
|
| > Most people i know don't use it anymore.
|
| Twitter hasn't really changed much. If you know people who
| no longer want to use the platform, then their decision is
| likely driven by the propaganda. In a way, it's not their
| personal decision, but the result of influence from
| elsewhere.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Not sure why you're downvoted, as your observations are
| completely correct. In fact, there's so much more activity
| that they've been trying different ways to keep the UX
| efficient and stable. But, of course, some of the things
| they've tried haven't worked out so well, so people just like
| to cherrypick those to make incorrect arguments against
| Twitters newfound viablity.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Some differences that I've noticed:
|
| 1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with
| nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless
| stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that
| used to advertise there.
|
| 2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any
| reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw
| no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low
| effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many
| followers but users are now forced to see it over higher
| quality users).
|
| 3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a
| post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that
| are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post,
| following hundreds of accounts.
|
| 4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie
| OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while
| tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken
| over.
|
| 5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed
| the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure
| accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who
| watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.
|
| Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience.
| Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic,
| looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups
| every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place
| that you could get news from verified sources, follow public
| figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar
| and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a
| Nazi bar.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Driving away lucrative advertising, replacing with much less
| sustainable premium subscriptions. Then there's cutting the
| moderation and safety teams to the bone.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| I thought everybody hates advertising, no? Let's do a
| thought experiment and imagine Elon brought _more_
| advertising on Twitter. Everyone would bullshit on him for
| that. In reality, we have the opposite situation. There is
| _less_ advertising. On top of that, ad revenue is now being
| shared with creators. What 's bad about it?
| lettergram wrote:
| This is kind of a selling point to me, I can't use
| Facebook any more because the obscene number of ads.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| > There is less advertising.
|
| There's _way_ more ads. Now every blue checkmark tweet is
| an ad, paid for placement. So I click on a tweet and all
| I get are pages of ads with the real tweets buried at the
| bottom.
|
| Ads aside, there are host of other ways he's ruined
| twitter from censorship to blocking anon access to
| amplifying his own terrible tweets.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| My day job is helping sell ad-free, subscriptions, so I'm
| a fan of the idea. That said, Elon is driving away the
| lucrative advertisers and not dropping ads entirely. Even
| Blue subscribers still get ads, albeit fewer.
|
| At their scale and in their market the premium
| subscriptions model doesn't appear to work, unless their
| costs can be reduced much, much further.
|
| Sharing revenue with creators is great. Not everything
| being done is bad. On the whole it just doesn't seem
| sustainable and sometimes even petty and foolish. Almost
| appears as if he's trying to bankrupt the company.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| The Twitter acquisition happened 7 months ago, on October
| 27, 2022 to be precise. 7 months is effectively 3
| quarters. Let's take "Elon Musk" name out of the equation
| for a moment. How much do you think is possible to do
| with one of the largest social network companies in the
| world within 3 quarters? I work at AWS and I must say
| everything is really slow here.
|
| What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is
| "demanding" too much from Elon. Additionally, there is a
| weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is
| something I strongly stand against.
| rglullis wrote:
| Why should we be rooting for his _success_?
|
| Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is
| needed?
|
| Why would I want to live in a world where you have _one_
| company in control of the "town square"?
|
| Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think
| that any ad-funded business is bad for us. But if you
| tell me that Elon's long term game is to make it
| something _even more dystopian than it ever was_ , then
| yes I will do everything in my power to see him fail and
| fail catastrophically.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| > Why should we be rooting for his success?
|
| Rooting for someone's success is not about personal
| preferences or endorsing their actions. It's about
| fostering a positive and supportive environment that
| encourages growth and achievement.
|
| > Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp"
| is needed?
|
| Super-apps already exist in other markets. Entrepreneurs
| want to create ones in the US market to foster the
| diversity of options. This is a healthy process. You live
| in the world with wars, but you want to do everything in
| your power to see Twitter fail. That's strange. A world
| catered only to your preferences is unlikely, so you have
| to be realistic.
|
| > Why would I want to live in a world where you have one
| company in control of the "town square"?
|
| I don't know. You don't have to live in that town.
|
| > Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I
| think that any ad-funded business is bad for us.
|
| Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads,
| one way or another. However, as I said, Musk doesn't care
| about ads. In fact, he wants even fewer ads on Twitter.
| That being said, his goals kinda align with what you
| want.
| rglullis wrote:
| > It's about fostering a positive and supportive
| environment that encourages growth and achievement.
|
| Not when this "growth" and "achievement" is something
| that affects part of the society negatively, or when
| there might be unknown consequences.
|
| > Super-apps already exist in other markets.
|
| And they are enablers of authoritarian states and
| continuous centralized power over a handful of
| corporations.
|
| > You don't have to live in that town.
|
| Just on another thread I was being accused of being
| "socially inept" for refusing to use WhatsApp.
|
| If we live in a world where so much power is centralized
| into a few corporations, they affect everyone's lives,
| even if they don't participate directly on it.
|
| > Pretty much every business in the world is driven by
| ads
|
| Does it help you sleep at night to be telling yourself
| this kind of _bullshit_ , or are you just apathetic?
|
| > he wants even fewer ads on Twitter.
|
| You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| > You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.
|
| Emotions are the enemy of a constructive dialogue. I
| bail.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| Also, Paul, if you think Elon is doing something
| completely wrong, I encourage you to jump on Twitter
| Spaces and explain your concerns directly to him. He is
| live from time to time and happily chimes into a
| conversation with mere mortals.
| spacemadness wrote:
| [flagged]
| Phaedor wrote:
| One thing he has done is push the paid replies to the top of
| every tweet. So now every tweet is full of low quality
| replies at the top and you have to scroll to find the higher
| quality ones below.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| I don't personally agree with your observation, but setting
| that aside, would you consider that (pushing the paid
| replies to the top) the definition of "killing" Twitter?
| Phaedor wrote:
| I actually think it might. My experience is that the
| people who pay to get their replies to the top do it
| either because they have something to sell, or because
| they agree with Elon's politics. So the result is that
| every tweet I view have pretty much the same low quality
| answers on the top. That has made the experience much
| worse for me, and I personally would quit if there were a
| good enough alternative.
|
| It also depends on how you define "killed". I dont think
| twitter will be gone, but there is a chance it will
| become a lot more similar to truth social or parler.
|
| Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they
| introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others
| every time?
| andreygrehov wrote:
| > Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if
| they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above
| others every time?
|
| If a paid tier alone puts your comment above others, then
| the result is negative. However, I do not believe
| Twitter's algorithm simply ranks by the presence of a
| blue checkmark. It is a signal amongst other signals and
| not a sole criteria. My feed has improved after all the
| changes, which is why I could not share your observation.
|
| Truth social exists because of a censorship. The idea of
| a social network with high censorship results in a state
| of content being a walled garden. While the intention
| behind censorship may be to create a safer and more
| controlled environment, it often comes at the cost of
| limiting diversity of thought, stifling creativity, and
| hindering the progress of society.
|
| Censorship, when implemented excessively, can lead to a
| state where only certain viewpoints and information are
| allowed, effectively creating an echo chamber that
| reinforces existing beliefs and discourages critical
| thinking.
|
| Twitter has the potential to become the next Truth
| Social. If Meta enforces excessive censorship in Threads,
| people might perceive it as a more "positive" social
| network, offering the illusion of a better alternative.
| With media support, people could gradually migrate
| towards Threads, leaving Twitter in decline. However, if
| Elon achieves his super-app goal, Twitter's current form
| will no longer exist, rendering these social media-
| related issues irrelevant. Consequently, Twitter and
| Threads would evolve into a completely distinct
| applications.
| warbeforepeace wrote:
| Truth social exists to spread propaganda from china and
| russia.
| andreygrehov wrote:
| I'm not saying or asking what Truth social is doing today
| (this is subjective), I'm explaining what was the driving
| force to create Truth social in the first place.
| troupe wrote:
| It might depend on who you follow. For the small number of
| people I follow who also have a small number of followers,
| it means that people who are more invested in Twitter show
| up at the top of the replies. So it hasn't made it any
| worse...if anything it is better. However, I could see that
| happening more if you are following people with millions of
| followers. (Though their replies have always been a mess.)
| mikrotikker wrote:
| Elon is such a good guy. Spending $43B to rid society of the
| trash fire that is twitter. It's a sacrifice not many could
| make. I am incredibly thankful to him for that and I hope he
| succeeds at running it into the ground.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| What examples of ad based rising companies do you see ?
|
| My first thought was Google, and it's started to plateau in the
| recent years:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/rev...
| .
|
| Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of
| the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid
| staying on a stagnating market.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| TikTok and IG continue to see good ad rev growth
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's interesting that those aren't really available on the
| open web and require the app.
| code_duck wrote:
| Instagram can be accessed with a web browser.
| w-ll wrote:
| I still dont know how IG hasnt stopped the very obvious bot
| spam.
|
| [1] This recent post on @bloombergbusiness for instance, it
| just takes 1 fold of comments to be all scammers, multiple
| accounts, same or near same message, pointing to the same
| account.
|
| Sometimes in app its swipe up to go to the next thing,
| sometimes its swipe left, sometimes i have no clue and
| trigger an ad event.
|
| And then the "game" ads I get, cant seem to tell IG the ad
| irrelevant enough times.
|
| 1. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cuk_35AMXeE/
| syntaxing wrote:
| I don't use it but TikTok
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Total ad spending is growing slower than the economy [1].
|
| [1] https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-
| expenditu...
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| At the scale of Google/Meta plateauing could just mean market
| saturation, not that ads aren't working anymore. I'd be
| interested to see data showing that RoI has also been
| decreasing for advertisers or that advertisers have started
| to pay less because they don't find ads worthwhile.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think the two biggest players plateauing is in itself an
| interesting indicator.
|
| For instance sister comments are mentionning TikTok growing
| in revenue, but if Google/Meta were already saturating the
| market, it means that growth is eating from the other less
| successful players (Twitter/Reddit ?), and at some point
| Google and Meta will also see dramatic decreases or
| TikTok's growth will stop.
|
| That also
| pentagrama wrote:
| I read that the new cheaper ad based Netflix tier was really
| successful. So maybe a future of all paid products but a
| cheaper option for a worst experience with ads?
| rebeccaskinner wrote:
| Unfortunately, ad revenue is a poisoned well. Even if you
| are paying for the ad-free tier, you will be limited to
| content that was developed with a mind toward
| advertisements. Once you serve any ads, everything is under
| pressure to be optimized for ads.
|
| Even if you don't mind the changes to the content, there's
| a constant pressure driving up costs and driving down
| convenience to continue avoiding ads. If you're paying for
| an ad-free experience then you have money, and you're
| willing to spend it. You are essentially forced into a
| bidding war for your own attention.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| I'm sure they sell your usage data even if you pay to opt
| out of ads as well so it isn't like you've even
| completely escaped by paying to start with.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Google and Meta each have something like half the world as
| users in any given month? And most of the people who aren't
| using them are not on the internet?
|
| At some point, you literally have no more people you can get
| in your service.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| YouTube has its own internal micro economy of channels,
| networks of channels, etc that is thriving from ad revenue.
| Binging with Babish was "a guy cooking food from tv" a few
| years ago and is now an entire platform of channels. I think
| those companies can all be considered separately from the
| operator of the marketplace.
| rchaud wrote:
| That's just syndication, though, is it different from
| having a bunch of blogs that cross-promote content but are
| ultimately reliant on Google Search and Google Ads to bring
| in traffic and revenue?
| rcme wrote:
| Apple's ad business is growing.
| makestuff wrote:
| Amazon has a growing ad business, but imo it seems more like
| a "listing fee" that is required to have any sales on their
| store.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Ah, perhaps this why almost the only time I buy things on
| Amazon I have usually found the listing through Google...
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| You typically won't see rising ad revenues during a
| recession. When times are hard, or look like they could get
| hard, advertising is the first thing cut. Its a well
| established pattern. Eg, from
| https://www.createwithnova.com/blog/the-history-of-
| advertisi... :
|
| > After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined
| by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%,
| magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and
| digital 2%.
|
| And yes, it happened this time too. From
| https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-advertising-
| recession-... :
|
| > Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings
| reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly
| every single company reported a significant dip in
| advertising revenue:
|
| > Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from
| about 9% to 30% -- worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad
| revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of
| 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions
| and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Even the pre Apollo saga, reddit ad revenue was nowhere close
| to facebook. Same with twitter, before Musk its ad revenue is
| not good. And both platforms are now trying to emulate facebook
| with heavy control on the app and the API.
| warbeforepeace wrote:
| After musk its ad revenue is worse.
| jhaenchen wrote:
| The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay
| for their apps. They don't want to see ads and the ads they do
| see they want them to be uninformed and general. They want
| everything free. This just encourages subscriptions. Which
| we're seeing become more and more common.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads
| pay for their apps.
|
| Why do you think that people don't understand this?
|
| > This just encourages subscriptions.
|
| Which is the lesser of the two evils.
| FreshStart wrote:
| They want a tax funded internet and shareholder companies
| gone after the worst bath in history. All it takes is one
| state to start and give it's citizens the chance to
| distribute the tax anonymously and the whole advertising
| industry dies.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Everyone understands that ads pay for sites. You can want
| something for free while still understanding how adverts
| work.
| timmg wrote:
| Honest question: how can you expect stuff for free without
| ads?
| Gigachad wrote:
| As a user that isn't my problem. If a service is being
| given away for free, I will take advantage of that for as
| long as its available.
| epidemian wrote:
| Depends on the definition of "for free".
|
| Depending on where one lives, but many people have access
| to "free" government services, ranging from roads,
| education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more.
| The costs of these services are payed by taxes.
|
| Some "free" services are sustained via donations.
| Wikipedia is a good example of this.
|
| Some people might say that those are not examples of "for
| free", because someone is paying for those things, either
| via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society.
| Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free
| either: the advertisers are putting the money to run
| those services, and the society is also paying a huge
| cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down
| the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Flip side: Why doesn't YouTube pay users for the work
| they perform on their platform, re- impressions,
| interactions, training? The more often and "better"
| someone interacts with their services, the more "free
| minutes" without ads they earn. If someone is a big
| producer of value, they earn access to tiered UHD/4K/8K
| or "premium" content, or they're cut a check / given
| credits.
|
| YoutTube is making money, somehow, off of us. Is it not
| our right to reclaim the excess value we are creating for
| them? Why is only okay for trillion dollar companies to
| have free lunch?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Good lord, no. "Excess value" is a frankly pants-on-head
| stupid notion that should have died in the 19th century.
| It assumes businesses should operate with not only zero
| profit but zero margin for expenses or growth. It is
| beyond stupid and I find it unbelievable that there are
| so many followers who really should know better on
| several level.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Conversely, profit now is less used for expenses or
| growth, and redirected to stock buy-backs and
| shareholders.
|
| Excess value is real, measured not from the margin, or
| even money that goes back into the org, but value that is
| 100% extracted from the organization, often at the
| detriment of the org for the sake of shareholders. Its
| very often just parasitic.
|
| People are so entitled now, "nooo i need my investments
| doubled at all costs". I have little sympathy for
| professional investors that have tied the global economy
| to short term private gain over long term sustainable
| growth. Its a rich child's game.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Using VC money? It's not even people's fault as well. For
| more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect
| internet to just work for free.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > For more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect
| internet to just work for free.
|
| For more than a decade the fed has spoiled VC to expect
| that money could just be borrowed for nearly free.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Linux, github, open source games/office suites/tools/etc,
| fediverse, irc, free cloud compute... You can live
| comfortably online for free without adds if you stick to
| the free/os world.
| dingaling wrote:
| > Honest question: how can you expect stuff for free
| without ads?
|
| Require something in return.
|
| Flightradar24 gives ad-free subscriptions to users who
| pay $20 or so for an RTL dongle and feed it data.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| I am totally fine with subscription only. Ads should be
| banned.
| rchaud wrote:
| > The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads
| pay for their apps.
|
| Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney
| and others.
|
| It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something
| worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a
| public access tv channel full of amateur content ---
| consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going
| to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds
| about that.
|
| Google could have carved out obviously premium content and
| put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-
| based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library
| as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they
| provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible
| offering.
| warbeforepeace wrote:
| Reasonable ads are fine. Its when we go to websites that have
| ads that make the website load 100x slower, roll video
| content, and other shitty behaviors made people go to ad
| blocker. Simple ads really didn't bother anyone. Advertisers
| destroyed the ad economy themselves by allowing really shitty
| behavior. Even google search is a joke with the number of ads
| you get with a single search. Sometimes i see more adds than
| results.
| skydhash wrote:
| > The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads
| pay for their apps
|
| Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown
| something he does not find interesting or important, even if
| they say that they will. So if you believe people should
| watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a
| bubble.
|
| > They want everything free.
|
| It would be nice if everything were free, but only small
| children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars,
| houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's
| valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them.
| If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because
| its value is 0.
|
| > This just encourages subscriptions.
|
| There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone,
| internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for
| music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance
| (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart
| from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New
| feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new
| version.
|
| Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service
| (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a
| month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So,
| I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole
| app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative
| of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I
| will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the
| 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just
| good content.
| drdeca wrote:
| > If they don't use something unless it's free, that's
| because its value is 0.
|
| I'd say that it is because the value is less than the
| transaction cost of any payment, not zero.
| RandallFlagg wrote:
| I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money
| as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face.
| Unfortunately many services don't even give an option to pay
| with money, so I've been trying to find alternatives, for
| example I've been starting to migrate away from Gmail to
| Protonmail. I understand things cost money, so let me pay you
| for your services. I just despise ads with a passion.
| soundnote wrote:
| One reason I like Brave having a subscription for ad-free
| search.
| vel0city wrote:
| Google absolutely wouldn't mind if you paid in money for
| your mail. They sell it to lots of paying subscribers.
|
| https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/
|
| No ads in workspace, they don't mine your data for
| advertising.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > prefer to pay for a service
|
| There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy
| goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then
| while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay
| $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do
| they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like
| that).
|
| While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a
| webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not
| getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the
| subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a
| hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article
| - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane
| after all - small transactions on the internet are a _huge_
| hassle. There 's a lot of friction around tracking down my
| credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my
| personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it
| stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is
| there, but the way it works now ain't it.
| code_duck wrote:
| >a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and
| not getting anything back from it
|
| I wouldn't exactly say he's not getting anything from it.
| Per Wikipedia,
|
| >Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of
| $500,000 a year.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I think another, bigger, piece is that people have more
| issue paying for upfront costs than marginal costs. Most
| people will have some sort of outrage that their
| medication costs the manufacturer 30c to produce when
| they're told it'll cost $30 to buy. Sure, there was the
| whole discovery process that had an upfront cost, but to
| most people's intuition, the cost of goods should be
| "cost to make + some small markup".
|
| For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero.
| Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had
| to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the
| server to my phone looks like rounding error.
| rchaud wrote:
| > I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my
| money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in
| my face.
|
| You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when
| it comes to B2C pricing.
|
| Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price
| increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:
|
| a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins
|
| b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher
| than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily
| subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that
| future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc)
| will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't
| part of that equation here.
|
| This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e.
| ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets
| available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Most of the apps I use are in fact free, and do not have ads
| to pay for them. Someone wanted something to exist, so they
| made it, and then they gave it away for free to everyone
| because computers are magical and there's no marginal cost to
| do that. The ad based Internet dying would leave hobby and
| academic content, significantly cleaning up the signal:noise
| ratio on the web, which would be great. As a bonus, you
| wouldn't need to be Google to index it all if it weren't
| filled with AI generated SEOd blogspam garbage trying to make
| money from ads.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a
| result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically
| paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.
|
| Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where
| they might sell a couple products, open source resources
| built by a community, etc.
|
| I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a
| commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because
| reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and
| unobtrusive.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Some of the best content I've found on the internet was
| a result of someone's hobby and desire to share,
| typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.
|
| Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the
| web is this sort of site.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Same video from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdTLj-
| xcqGM
|
| (I have no particular love for YouTube but at least sponsorblock
| works there!)
| zer8k wrote:
| I work in the ad industry. I have some expertise both on
| witnessing the alleged decline and counter-acting it. Before
| anyone asks about my moral compass I do not like ads, I never
| have, but they're an inevitability. The problems big ad tech face
| are unique and very hard especially w.r.t. to data.
|
| Anyway, ads are not dying. By and large ad quality is getting
| better. There are several companies that exist now to pre-screen
| ads for major websites (youtube being one of them) that
| specialize specifically in making sure not only the ads are
| relevant but also safe. You may see niche (gross) ads on places
| like 4chan. But on any major site you can be sure the ads have
| gone through several reviews not only for quality, but accuracy,
| and relevancy. As for the counter-acting part several companies
| specialize in guerilla advertising and this business is BOOMING.
| The author probably has no idea they are constantly being
| advertised on nearly every popular youtube video. There are so
| many ways we can slip ads in to someone's feed that you will not
| avoid it no matter what you do.
|
| What bothers me is the author of this video seems to think the
| internet can exist without ads. In it's current form it cannot.
| Every free service you use, every video you watch, etc would have
| to be paid in full otherwise. This is the definition of an
| information economy. The video goes on to whine and cry about how
| many ads are being shown on youtube, or how reddit torpedo'd
| stuff in the name of ads. The _ONLY ALTERNATIVE_ is a paid
| solution. The author seems to be channeling the levels of
| undeserved hubris only Stallman can achieve. This is the
| fundamental problem of open source software only marginally
| reframed. A bunch of ivory tower morons talking about how
| software should be free but unwilling to help /donate/code to
| make it happen. Users of ad-powered websites are legitimately no
| different.
|
| So you have a fork in the road. Watch a couple ads occasionally
| to help fund the website you're leeching from or pay for the
| service. The video frustrates me especially because the industry
| itself is doing a lot of very hard work to drive relevant content
| to users. For example, you won't see an ad for clorox bleach on a
| sysop video.
|
| Nothing is getting worse. You are watching a system built on
| advertising revenue to provide a "free" experience degrading
| because the revenue is getting smaller. If you like the service
| turn your ad blocker off. If you cannot do that, you legitimately
| have no place to complain. You do not have to use these services.
| In the case of Youtube you can pay for the ad-free experience.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is: if you're a content leech watch a
| couple ads. If you're an OSS leech, consider donating :).
| hightrix wrote:
| This is what I'm expecting to be coming soon, a barrage of
| articles blaming and shaming users for not wanting to be
| bombarded by ads.
|
| > if you're a content leech watch a couple ads
|
| No. Never. Sorry, your industry has destroyed any goodwill it
| ever had. I'm not just an ad blocker, I'm hostile to ads. I
| hate them and I hate the industry.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| It's also a matter of equity. The instant the cost moves off of
| "free", hundreds of millions of people are excluded.
|
| Each person has to evaluate their own costs and benefits, but
| services that don't charge offer value to the most poor at an
| unbeatable price.
| zer8k wrote:
| To be fair, there is a dramatic difference between the free
| you are talking about and the free that youtube, facebook,
| etc are. It's one thing to offer a small website or something
| for free. It's another thing to power a million, or even
| billion, dollar infrastructure and the supporting staff on
| charity. It's part of the reason I drew a parallel to OSS.
| The "free" it is isn't free in the charitable sense. It's
| free in the sense, ideally, you should contribute something.
| In the case of ads - it's your eyes.
|
| The excluded group you are talking about would've been
| excluded anyway. Anything that isn't a charity and held up
| with volunteers and a lot of hard work will not be able to
| sustain them. That doesn't make it okay, necessarily, but
| rather that luxury services (of which youtube for example is
| one) are just that - a luxury. It's an take-a-penny-leave-a-
| penny but there are more takers than leavers.
|
| Something more familiar to us might be the Linux kernel.
| Without the support of all of the billions of dollars pouring
| in via corporations, support contracts, etc the free Linux
| kernel would likely either be dead or not free anymore. Even
| something with an army of volunteers at that caliber cannot
| sustain the poor people who benefit from their charity and
| contribute nothing in return. A tragedy, but the value
| producers have to eat, too.
| skydhash wrote:
| > It's free in the sense, ideally, you should contribute
| something. In the case of ads - it's your eyes.
|
| No, it's not. Either something is free or is not. Either I
| chose to pay or I don't. If it's not free and I choose to
| pay, I can enjoy the service. If I choose not to pay, they
| can refuse me. If it's free, and I pay (donate), good. If I
| decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I don't
| have any obligation to you.
|
| It's not mandatory to read, watch and listen to ads. And
| most people choose not to, or they tune out, especially
| when it's not related in any way to their current activity.
| zer8k wrote:
| > If I decide not to pay, it's on you to bear the cost. I
| don't have any obligation to you.
|
| That is not how the actual world functions. This sort of
| anarcho-primitivism does not lead itself to large scale,
| widely available, systems. In society you pay taxes for
| services you perceive as (locally) free. On the internet
| you pay with ads (at least for now).
|
| You are correct that you can exploit a free service. In
| some services, the taker to giver (leecher/seeder,
| whatever ratio you prefer) is high enough that service
| can maintain equilibrium. This is largely not true for
| all but the most used services. Even food banks shut down
| because the seeder to leecher ratio is unsustainable.
| Nothing is stopping you from driving these services into
| the ground. And you will.
|
| I really hate how smug your post comes off. Do you know
| what this absurd smugness gets us? A centralized internet
| owned by 4 companies that can afford the seeder/leecher
| ratio. The 4 companies that will come to own the internet
| also hate net neutrality. Buckle up...because then we all
| pay. Even Stallman encourages people to contribute back
| to things they use. When your attitude is so smug that
| not even Stallman, the king of smug nonsense, agrees with
| you...that says something.
| skydhash wrote:
| > In society you pay taxes for services you perceive as
| (locally) free. On the internet you pay with ads (at
| least for now).
|
| The government also knows that it's the working part of
| society that pays taxes. And it has the incentive to make
| that part the biggest percentage of the population. I
| don't see the same trend with these big platforms. They
| don't want to provide a service, they want to sell ads.
| And as such, I'm not their clientele.
|
| If you really wish to provide something for free, but you
| don't have the means to do so, you can ask for donations
| or provide extra benefits for people that are willing to
| pay for it. If no one is willing, then that just means
| it's not valuable for anyone at the price it costs.
|
| The moment you start selling ads, your priority is to
| grow your audience, so you can sell more ads. Not to
| provide a better service or product, in exchange for
| money. Because the former is easy (add dark patterns)
| while the latter is more difficult.
|
| IMO, Apple has the right strategy. Provide a good
| ecosystem, that you can use by buying the hardware. If
| you don't and try to use other means of access
| (Hackintosh) don't blame them for stuff not working.
| Microsoft could have done the same and only supported
| valid Windows licenses, but they wanted to capture the
| market. And now they're showing ads driving down the
| quality.
|
| > Nothing is stopping you from driving these services
| into the ground. And you will.
|
| Nothing is eternal. If you grow beyond what is
| sustainable because of investors' money and then find out
| your product is not so valuable, and you pivot to dark
| patterns and ads, then yes, it's a failure. And if
| YouTube did not exist, maybe we would have something
| similar to Wikipedia for videos, with a drastic
| improvement in quality.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > What bothers me is the author of this video seems to think
| the internet can exist without ads.
|
| I thought he said the exact opposite: Without ads, the current
| Internet ceases to exist and he will likely have to get another
| job.
| freediver wrote:
| > I do not like ads, I never have, but they're an
| inevitability.
|
| Drinking water is inevitable. 99% percent of the web being
| monetized by ads is not.
|
| "Ads are inevitable" has become a mantra repeated by every ad-
| tech executive to keep them relevant.
|
| > What bothers me is the author of this video seems to think
| the internet can exist without ads. In it's current form it
| cannot.
|
| The current form of internet is an intelligence insulting,
| attention-seeking, malicious, privacy-invading monster exactly
| because it has been using ads as its primary monetization
| vehicle for the last two decades. Losing it would actually be a
| good thing for humanity.
|
| > The ONLY ALTERNATIVE is a paid solution.
|
| This is quite a good solution. Yes, it would instantly kill 99%
| of 'content creation', vast majority of which is low quality,
| but this is exactly what is making current form of internet
| horrible in the first place (paired with ad monetization).
|
| The 1% remaining content creation is what would pass a bar of
| 'worth paying for'. This immediately creates the right
| incentive structure for all parties involved, including for the
| author of this video. They will be given a choice - do they go
| 'pro' and try to make their content great and worth paying for
| or do they look for a new job? Seems like they are already
| half-way there, and with a bit more effort they could be making
| a living from a paid model.
| scubadude wrote:
| I am eternally grateful to the hippies who created the Internet,
| open protocols and all that, but I think making everything free
| was a mistake, which opened the door for advertising (and the
| tracking that goes with it) to step in and fill the gap.
|
| If Google search was subscription from day one, how different
| would the world be now?
| [deleted]
| kgwxd wrote:
| Didn't watch the video but I've had the opposite experience from
| the title. All the ad-driven sites have forced my hand by now.
|
| Most of the ad-driven social media site drove me far away, a long
| time ago. Reddit was the most recent and last, I'm never going to
| join another ad-drive social media platform again. I'm strictly
| on Mastodon, Lemmy and, for now, HN (I think lemmy might replace
| it). I've only been seriously using the fedivers stuff for about
| a week, I can feel a _major_ difference. I'm already trying to
| figure out exactly where I should start funneling my "Patreon
| budget" to be most effective at helping keep it's spirit alive.
|
| Ad-driven media platforms have mostly gotten me to buy into the
| ad-free tier. YouTube being the most expensive and, by far, most
| used. The family plan is, I think, 22 a month and it's the last
| subscription I'd ever end. The channels I really like, I join the
| Patreon. I know YouTube has something similar now but I will
| never use it. That separation of paid subscribers from the
| platform the content creator currently uses to post, I think, is
| really, really important. Sacred even. I think, for example, the
| Breaking Points business model is something every channel should
| strive for. Channels structured in a similar manor tend to make
| incredible content. Even when they opt for sponsor ads, they're
| usually very tasteful about it. It doesn't bother me a bit to pay
| something and still get an ad like that.
|
| Most of the movie/show streaming platforms just have me on that
| line of "doesn't cost much but they don't really have anything I
| like at the moment". When things get tight, they're the first to
| get cancelled.
|
| I've found a better internet over the past year or so. It's nice
| again. I'm sure the majority of people aren't seeing it, but it's
| kind of back to how it used to be, if you try.
| baron816 wrote:
| I think we really need microtransactions. Pay $0.05 to read this
| article? Sure. Whoever figures out the infrastructure for that
| (seems like it would be right up Stripe's alley) is going to make
| trillions.
| mikrotikker wrote:
| Remember flattr?
| supertrope wrote:
| Even infamous telco billing is more palatable than
| microtransactions. France's Minitel system let services bill
| based on time spent on a page. That's easy to use compared with
| having to type in your Apple password once again to pay $0.99
| or even approve a $0 app because some parents blamed their kid
| for buying thousands of dollars of virtual game currency.
| philposting wrote:
| I've recently used Axate (www.axate.com) on a news website. You
| top up credit, and then pay per article.
| KomoD wrote:
| I don't want to top up, I just want to be charged directly.
|
| Also "Which sites are using Axate?", I don't recognize any of
| the sites on that list.
| tredre3 wrote:
| I don't think it will ever be feasible to be charged
| directly, transaction fees are just way too high (and it's
| only marginally better on the crypto side). A postpaid
| system would work I suppose, ie you pay your total at the
| end of the month. But postpaid usually involves a credit
| check (in north america at least), so prepaid is really the
| only universal option.
| rchaud wrote:
| This won't work, because it requires the user to build a mental
| budget each time they go online. That is the exact opposite of
| how internet use has worked since its inception.
|
| Secondly, if there really was a big opportunity in enabling
| micro transactions, the main players (PayPal, Visa, etc) would
| already have some offering available after ~25 years of paying
| for stuff online.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| We already have enough content farms.
| qup wrote:
| At least in this situation they'd be identifying themselves
| up front.
| yomlica8 wrote:
| And you'd be identifying yourself up front to in order to
| pay.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Content farms work right now because ad views can't be
| refunded; by the time you've loaded the page (and realized
| you got tricked by clickbait/spam), it's too late and they
| already got paid.
|
| A micropayment system where you are able to request
| refunds/dispute payments will break that model.
| binkHN wrote:
| I thought this was a use case for cryptocurrency! Hahaha!
| rglullis wrote:
| You joke, but this is _exactly_ what I was hoping Brave was
| doing:
|
| - become the gateway for advertisement money
|
| - make it opt-in and share the revenue with _users_ that see
| the ads.
|
| - make it easy for the users to _redistribute_ this earned
| money with the content creators they like.
|
| Yeah, you are going to tell me that this could be done
| without crypto, and I will respond that micropayments are
| _still_ not solved.
|
| I will accept a criticism about Brave sticking with the
| token, though - they could've gone with a stabletoken and
| their business model would seem a lot more legit.
| themitigating wrote:
| 15 years ago I worked at Radio Shack in a mall. A woman and her
| daughter were looking for a cell phone.
|
| We sold Verizon cell phone them with a 2 year contract which
| got you around 400 off the price. The cheapest phone with a
| contract was $29.00
|
| In the mall were kiosks that sold a slight lower model phone
| with a tmobile contract but it was free. She asked me if we had
| any free phones, I said no, and she made a noise and walked
| out.
|
| $30 for something you'll have for two years and we had a better
| service (verizon coverage) vs free
| midoridensha wrote:
| Verizon coverage isn't important to everyone: if you don't go
| to rural areas, it won't be that useful to you.
| themitigating wrote:
| My example, a real story, was to illustrate that money
| often drives purchase decisions even if the amount is low
| and the benefits better.
|
| She didn't ask about what service we had, the benefits, etc
| nonlogical wrote:
| This is sort of a thing now with Bitcoin Lightning. You already
| can listen to podcasts and "stream" them a certain amount of
| money of your choosing. Called Value For Value and part of
| podcasting 2.0 spec. Whether this scales to entire internet I
| don't know, but kindling is there.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I know one of the goals for Lightning Network was to cut
| transaction fees. Did that actually work out - is it
| realistic to pay someone $0.05 USD-equivalent in Bitcoin
| using Lightning? Or do I need to use an exchange/intermediary
| still?
| luag wrote:
| The alternative would be to use big block Bitcoin fork
| (like Bitcoin Cash). Last time I checked, average
| transaction fee is $0.008.
|
| I personally use it sometimes to pay for some services with
| minimal transfer fee, but BCH can't seem to win the
| branding game against Bitcoin.
| nonlogical wrote:
| Lightning is a bit of a difficult system to host yourself.
| But point is you set up something akin to a running total
| between you and your friends. The nice thing here is that,
| you only lose money when you total up at the end, like
| clearing all transactions and merging them into one. You
| are becoming your own Visa/Mastercard/ACH essentially.
|
| You can certainly use a hosted wallet with lighting which
| is a sane alternative. There are still fees but only on
| cash ins and cash outs on the total amount tallied up
| between you and your friends when you chose to settle up in
| the form of BTC transaction fees. As far as I understand
| there are pretty much no transfer fees.
|
| But I am just a novice interested in this tech. So correct
| me if I am wrong.
| federalemployee wrote:
| This is one thing Ted Nelson was hung up on. It's tough to
| solve.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Micro-transactions will need to be $0.0001 or $0.00001, for it
| to ever gain acceptance.
| NiloCK wrote:
| [flagged]
| makestuff wrote:
| The reason why ads work is consumers do not want to spend money
| now that they are conditioned to get stuff on the internet for
| free. Every time an article on here is posted the first comment
| is a link to archive.is.
|
| I agree this would be a better model, but I don't think it will
| ever happen. Maybe the Web3 stuff will catch on and this will
| become sustainable.
| seydor wrote:
| > Every time an article on here is posted the first comment
| is a link to archive.is.
|
| Friction matters. Making an online payment is a slow 10 step
| procedure currently. If it was a single effortless click it
| would certinaly be used more. Kind of how arcade machines
| worked
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I think that we have enough hardware so that they user
| themselves provide the infrastructure, kind of how briar,
| peertube work
| bad_username wrote:
| I think consumers are not reluctant to spend money. They are
| just averse to the friction of doing the paying. If
| nanopayments for e.g. reading a news article could become
| totally automated and transparent, I think this would work.
| seydor wrote:
| Maybe we 'll have it with CBDCs which, among others, won't be
| able to demonetize you for arbitrary reasons
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I think 1-1 sponsorhips or (ads) will become more frequent, and I
| believe is betyer for all.
| ravenstine wrote:
| This guy's conception of The Google's role in the history of the
| ad-based internet is totally out of touch, which is strange
| because he appears to be about as old as I am, maybe even a bit
| older than that.
|
| The Google didn't prove that "ads could work" to make content
| free. They may have become a big player, if not the biggest
| player in the ad space, but the proliferation of ad-supported
| content had more to do with timing than anything else. YouTube
| was born at a time where video content embedded in webpages could
| actually work for most users (without downloading something like
| RealPlayer) and be scaled up. The Google simply bought this
| business because it was clear to most people that YouTube
| represented the future, and they had the cash to do it. Not only
| did they have that cash, but even more cash to throw at it to
| create their Buffetean moat. There's nothing genius about it.
| Before YouTube and even Web 2.0, there was not only plenty of
| free written content but there were other video sites, few if any
| had anything to do with The Google.
|
| If anything, The Google is responsible for demolishing the ad-
| based internet. The quality control of their ads used to be so
| atrocious that _of course_ people started ignoring most of them.
| Thus, traditional ads became nearly worthless. Their conclusion
| wasn 't to turn away business from outright scams hawking B.S.,
| but that people aren't clicking on ads because the ads aren't
| relevant to them! A good theory on paper, except it turns out
| people don't actually like feeling like they're being _followed_
| everywhere they go, and it also turns out that when they
| regularly buy Huggies diapers out of necessity, that doesn 't
| mean they want to immediately see another 100 ads telling them to
| buy more Huggies.
|
| All that said, I don't think ads have very much to do with the
| current decline in the quality of the web as a whole. The recent
| push to shove lots of ads in front of users, namely those that
| appear frequently within YouTube videos, is just a symptom of
| companies like The Google struggling to maintain growth when
| Silicon Valley isn't living life on the fast lane in Easy Street.
| There's also other factors like search engines failing to scale
| along with the web, as well as deranking or outright censorship;
| this is done both at the behest of advertisers but also to chase
| the widest possible audience.
| jprete wrote:
| I agree that ads aren't the cause. In fact I think they're a
| downstream result. The root cause is that the Web doesn't
| support any currency but attention. People on social media can
| cash in attention for self-esteem, but serious content can only
| really trade it for advertising dollars.
| tensor wrote:
| Those of us who remember when Google first started might even
| remember that part of it's early success was precisely that it
| _didn 't_ have tons of banner ads like the search engines that
| came before it. In no way was it the first to prove that "ads
| could work", the ad-driven model was already bananas before it
| came out.
|
| It's only much later that Google went full on awful ads. Few
| and unobtrusive ads were a huge early selling point for Google.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| Podcasts are working without ads
| tensor wrote:
| A great many podcasts now have ads of various sorts.
| paintman252 wrote:
| Homie what are you talking about lmao. As an avid podcast
| listener they're full of ads
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Good. The internet was really fun before the ads and monetization
| came.
|
| We had forums and personal web sites. Weird blogs everywhere you
| looked. Some semblance of anonymity. A sense of community that
| wasn't about growing a following.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| This sentiment reads pretty much like auto enthusiasts musing
| about how good things were when every car owner knew how to fix
| his car and things were more simple. The world has moved on,
| the Internet is not a hobby or specialization anymore, just
| like reading and writing used to be and no longer is.
| barrysteve wrote:
| The concept of an upvote didn't exist. You were primarily
| relating to people, not an audience filtered through a voting
| mechanism.
|
| It was peaceful.
| xtracto wrote:
| The usenet I remember was anything but praceful haha
| dpig_ wrote:
| The toothpaste is out of the tube though, sorry to say.
| nness wrote:
| Things get worse once someone realises how it can be
| monetised...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Some people, besides the ones who read HN, believe the success of
| online advertising service providers, including so-called "Big
| Tech" and "adtech", is based on fraud. Please distinguish the
| success of online advertising service providers, e.g., Google,
| versus the success of online advertisers, e.g., Joe's Pizza.
|
| One example is Bob Hoffman. Hoffman is an ad industry veteran who
| suggests that despite all the advances in computing, advertising
| has gotten worse, not better. That is, ads today are, for various
| reasons, less effective at creating brands than in the past. (If
| so, then one might ask "Why pay for them?" There are multiple
| answers, none of them satisfactory. IMHO. Yours may differ.)
|
| https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B007W8R8H6/about
|
| https://www.bobhoffmanswebsite.com
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/171361.Bob_Hoffman
|
| https://www.marketingsociety.com/the-library/bob-hoffman-ind...
|
| https://the-media-leader.com/making-sense-of-it-all-bob-hoff...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/ADSCAM-Advertising-Historys-Greatest-...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Skeptics-Bob-Hoffman/dp/0...
|
| https://podcasts.marketingsociety.com/episode/dave-dye-talks...
|
| https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/businessofstory/BOB_HOFFMA...
|
| https://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2023/01/ad-contrarian-b...
|
| https://stoppress.co.nz/stoppress-series/features/a-qa-with-...
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious just as a consumer that banner ads
| don't work. No one deliberately clicks on them, and meanwhile
| every major site has obvious scam ads on it. Magazines always
| had scam ads, but they were in the back pages in small print.
| Now the scam ads are quite prominent (and disgusting). People
| in general like ads: they sing jingles, they talk about funny
| Super Bowl ads, they buy the mattress their podcast host
| recommends, they cut out magazine ads as mini-posters, they
| follow Instagram influencers (glamorous product placement),
| etc. No one likes banner ads. They have had no impact on pop
| culture since "punch the monkey" and "one weird trick" (both
| scams, btw), and in general, they are worthless, so the whole
| market for them is rotten.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| How about tracking. Tracking is what Hoffman wants to do away
| with.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I mean it already died in my point of view approximately a decade
| ago, where a significant portion of internet users were using
| adBlockers for everything, and its usage has only gotten bigger
| now.
|
| The only place where ads are thriving right now is mobile, and
| companies had gone over the line from the get-go with obnoxious
| and intrusive/misleading ads and spyware. It may thrive for a
| while before the blockers make their way efficiently into the
| mobile world.
| EdSharkey wrote:
| I think fiat is dying and all the bond values are going to zero
| which will prevent the big megacorps from paying their bills.
| That collapse is a better explanation of the curious, brand-
| destroying things these companies have done recently.
|
| I noticed recently YouTube made it REALLY hard for me to download
| an mp4 for a video using VLC.
|
| Now if I were a betting man, and the collapse of Google were
| imminent, I'd bet that in liquidation, they'd want to charge to
| get an offline copy of the videos they store. Soooo, in the
| meantime before the collapse, they're making it painful/time
| consuming to download their videos so they can max out their
| post-meltdown profits.
|
| Make backups of your fav's while you can.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| I agree with recent TWiT discussion on this : we've had it good
| for a while - the promise of free internet but all those services
| cost money to keep running.
|
| I don't have an issue with paying Youtube Premium Lite. Where I
| have an issue with the subs model is you're pay subs to so many
| services, YT Netflix Twitch, etc. It adds up pretty quickly, and
| costs way more than traditional TV used to cost.
|
| Then there's the issue of online magazines. I find most even
| including Wired, to be too random in terms of content. Its really
| easy for me to rationalize the worth of YT : irreplacable. But
| all those online "news" site that churn out tons of SEO optimized
| articles and "top ten (insert random hardware)" lists etc? Really
| difficult for me to warrant a subscription.
|
| Now if someone maintained a really big forum, like there s a few
| still running with tons of sub forums where you can spend an hour
| everyday and get a ton of interaction. Sure, I'd sub to that.
|
| Even Reddit for me it's hard to think why I'd pay for it, even
| though it is also irreplacable in some way. Perhaps because it is
| primarily a social site, there is so much abuse, so much idiocy,
| so much "hive mind" and so much negativity/sarcasm overall - it
| easily shadows the good side of reddit : the helpful/kind
| replies, the sharing of useful guides etc.
|
| So huh.. Maybe it is like the TWiT panel agreed, the "free for
| all" internet is dying, and some sites/ services may well
| disappear and maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe there are
| better ideas to replace them.
|
| If it was just me I'd bring back huge forums. There's gotta be a
| way to monetize those through Patreon/etc. Theres lots of small
| perks you can give to forum members. Maybe they still have a life
| in them, but they were just made seemingly obsolete for a while
| by "social media" sites like Twitter and Instagram.
| bradlys wrote:
| When people make the comparison to the cost of cable TV and so
| forth - I feel like people forget: you were paying for TV and
| _still_ got shown a ton of advertisements. About a quarter of
| air time was _just_ advertising. That is usually higher than
| anything you'll see on the Internet even for content you aren't
| paying for. I'm not even including all the weird product
| placement aspects and other such things.
|
| Paying for these services to not see ads is still a win
| compared to most cable tv...
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I can't agree that it costs more. I'm a pretty profligate
| spender and just subscribe to everything even though I don't
| actually watch that much television. So right now, my household
| is subscribed to YouTube Premium, Peacock, Paramount+, Disney+,
| Max, Apple TV+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Curiosity
| Stream. I'm honestly not even sure what it costs, but guessing
| somewhere in the arena of $10 a month or so on average, since
| some are more, some are less. That's $100. The last time I was
| subscribed to premium cable with at least HBO, Showtime, and
| ESPN, it was $180 a month. In 2011 dollars. That was also
| linear, not on-demand, so quite a bit worse service. We had to
| pay extra for a DVR that could record stuff and I don't even
| remember how much extra that was.
| russh wrote:
| This is my experience as well. We have at least 6 streaming
| services and it's still $100/mo cheaper than my direct tv
| bill.
| dangus wrote:
| Don't underestimate how much cable TV costs: I did my budget
| recently and added up all my services together, having Netflix
| (highest tier), YT Premium (family, includes music streaming),
| Discovery+ (ad-free), and Hulu (ad-free), an all comes in at
| about $62.
|
| That's about the same price as live cable as a standalone
| product, and yet cable has advertisements which none of the
| above services have.
|
| About the only complaint you might have is that I haven't
| covered every single television studio (not included: Max,
| Paramount+, Disney+), but you could always rotate subscriptions
| in and out and still have a lot of them active at the same
| time.
|
| Cable really just is that bad. Or, alternative take, cable
| sucks your dollars away and sends them to live sports and cable
| news.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| As someone who "grew up" on the internet and was very active in
| internet forums and places in the early 00s as early as age 10,
| I struggle to see how kids are going to continue to be a huge
| part of internet discourse and consumption if everything is
| behind a paywall. That's, like, literally the only problem I
| have with this line of thought. Other than that, I completely
| agree. I'd rather pay than have ads be there in the first place
| in most cases.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It adds up pretty quickly, and costs way more than
| traditional TV used to cost._
|
| I have trouble understanding this complaint.
|
| There's _way more_ content than ever before; why wouldn 't it
| be more expensive to get everything? You don't have to
| subscribe to it all, but the ability to pick and choose
| providers a la carte, as well as cycle subscriptions on and off
| seems like a huge win to consumers.
| damnesian wrote:
| Well, true, except entertainment consumers want a good
| variety. And ideally, they'd like it priced like a utility, a
| monthly payment they can budget for.
|
| Before it was taken over by infomercials and reality tv,
| cable offered unprecedented variety, all for one manageable
| monthly payment. this is still what people want. This will be
| what the market gravitates towards, and we see it happening
| now with cheaper ad-supported tiers and even many 100% free
| with ads small players. Streaming is, in effect, slowly
| becoming cable tv all over again. Hell, some of these free
| channels- like PlutoTV- even _look_ like cable. I predict
| eventually which aggregator you choose- Roku, Firestick,
| AppleTV- won 't matter, it will be the same galaxy of
| choices.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "I agree with recent TWiT discussion on this : we've had it
| good for a while - the promise of free internet but all those
| services cost money to keep running."
|
| Most internet users pay for internet access. When I first got
| connected the fees were paid by employers and universities.
| Later, "ISPs" offered service to the home. The internet was
| never free. But there has always been free content on the
| internet, even before there were ISPs. Before the term
| "monetisation" was ever used to refer to websites, there was
| plenty of "free" content published on the internet. Will it
| disappear if advertising fails to suffice for "monetisation".
| There is no proof of this outcome. It is heavily biased
| speculation.
|
| There is proof however that free content can exist on an
| internet even in the absence of such "monetisation".
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A problem with many paid services is that they _still_ have
| ads.
|
| Was watching something with my wife the other day (I think it
| was on HBO streaming) and there were ads? I'm like "hang on
| we're paying for this, and still have to watch ads?"
| wiml wrote:
| Ha, that was my reaction to cable TV, too.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Infuriatingly, Hulu sometimes shows ads even with their more
| expensive "No Ads" plans:
| https://help.hulu.com/s/article/ads-no-commercials
| coding123 wrote:
| It's almost like Unions of the 1950s was for workers. Its
| 2023 and now we need Unions for consumers.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Interestingly enough, Consumers Union -- the nonprofit that
| publishes Consumer Reports -- was started by striking
| workers in the mid 1930s for just this purpose.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| People who pay for stuff are more valuable targets for ads
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| I think that will drive a lot more self-funded communities.
| People talk about how expensive it is to host websites, but
| they're talking about sites several orders of magnitude larger
| than what most communities need. A single Discord server could
| effectively be hosted on a Raspberry Pi, the market price among
| cloud hosts for which is "free", or at most ~$10 a month.
|
| That's not "We need to charge for access" level pricing that's
| "One motivated party funds the entire site" level cost.
| tornato7 wrote:
| To make this happen, we need better open source forum
| software. A group of us have been searching for a good self-
| hosted forum to replace /r/BuyItForLife and have trialed
| quite a few, but they are just... Really bad.
| bsder wrote:
| Define: really bad.
|
| I generally find the _software_ is fine.
|
| The _problem_ is login /security and spam control. Those
| are painful things that I really, really, really don't want
| to have to deal with. Yet they are the _vast majority_ of
| the issue with self-hosting your own forums.
|
| Self-hosted forums are not a technical problem--they are a
| social problem.
| meristohm wrote:
| WIRED, among many other periodicals, is available online
| through https://libbyapp.com at my local tax-funded public
| library (I'm in the USA). I do wonder how things would change
| if most people started using the library for most of their
| entertainment and education, as I do.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I mean I don't think the criticism that it costs more than
| traditional TV is valid. Traditional TV is a linear stream
| where you are sending out one signal for everyone. On demand is
| a different beast altogether, so even if it were the exact cost
| or more, then it'd still be a win. That's not even including
| the fact that the content that gets made of YouTube or Twitch
| wouldn't have ever been made on old TV. If you had told me 20
| years ago that it would cost the same or even a bit more but
| you get all this, I'd've signed up in a heartbeat.
| garciasn wrote:
| This is EXACTLY what cable companies predicted would happen
| when we went a la carte. They were using their monopoly power
| to drive down the overall price of packaged TV and by de-
| bundling, we end up paying more overall. For once they were
| correct and I apologize for questioning it 15 years ago.
|
| That said, I am ok with SOME advertisements to keep the web
| running. There are two big problems with this:
|
| 1. Market investors _expect_ their stock to continue to rise,
| forever. When it doesn 't, they push for more revenue, but
| instead of adding new products or functionality, they push for
| ad revenue instead.
|
| 2. Ad revenue as a model for revenue generation means that we
| need more ads, as opposed to building better products. This
| means that the entire web is inundated with advertisements that
| overwhelm the overall experience and will continue to get worse
| and worse over time.
|
| This is a product of investment and lack of reinvestment in new
| products/function and instead more immediate revenue gains as
| opposed to slow-and-steady rise in value. Investors want to
| cash in NOW and not over time and thus we have entered a time
| where 3 ads precede every video alongside in-video sponsorships
| and more traditional 15-30 second ads within each. It's absurd.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > They were using their monopoly power to drive down the
| overall price of packaged TV and by de-bundling, we end up
| paying more overall.
|
| This is complicated. Piracy sold Comcast broadband Internet
| connections for many. Napster long predates Comcast's
| acquisition of NBCUniversal, when it became a content maker.
|
| So even in the last two decades, looking at one company, it
| played some, or all, sides of the producer ecosystem, in
| complex ways, sometimes 200% changing (sticking a minus sign
| in front of) how it benefits from consumer trends. If you
| want to analyze any specific thing about cable TV pricing,
| you're going to need to write a whole dissertation about it.
| Meanwhile "whatever the consumer is willing to bear" will get
| you most of the way there.
| rconti wrote:
| A significant number of the streaming services people
| complain about paying for offer services that cable companies
| never did.
|
| Plus, I can choose which streaming services I want, and how
| long I want to pay for them. And everything is on-demand. And
| there are no ads (except on YTTV).
| alistairSH wrote:
| _we end up paying more overall_
|
| A basic Fios TV package is $75/month today.
|
| Most streaming services are around $20-$30/month and allow
| month-to-month plans.
|
| You can fairly easily rotate among 4-5 services, using 2-3 at
| a time, to keep costs lower than with traditional cable. This
| works pretty well if you have non-specific TV interests.
| Where they really get you is with sports - that market is
| super fragmented and getting most of NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB
| can cost a fortune.
| garciasn wrote:
| FIOS is only available in limited areas of 9 states. It's
| not exactly widely available and should not be used as
| evidence to the contrary of this. If we're using anecdotal
| evidence, the only Internet I have available to me at my
| summer home is $110/month 25/2 DSL, without TV.
|
| That said, you are spot on, because we are no longer tied
| into long contracts you can absolutely swap in and out. The
| problem is that they carry primarily self-created content
| which, IMO, is far less attractive than what the main
| networks were able to push out previously which further
| degrades the usefulness of the a la carte model.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Cox Cable is $56/month. Pick whatever TV provider you
| want, they're all in the $50-$100 range for a basic
| package in most parts of the US.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you're paying more you're probably getting more.
|
| Old cable TV had about 5 channels that I ever watched and 50
| that I did not care about.
|
| A sports network + Netflix is not more than cable. If you
| subscribe to much more than that, you're probably getting
| more than a bundled cable deal used to provide.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > That said, I am ok with SOME advertisements to keep the web
| running.
|
| Personally, I have no problem with ad-funded stuff. The
| problem that I have is with the spying that comes along with
| online ads. I can see no way that could ever be acceptable.
| aurizon wrote:
| My Ad-Antibodies have become stronger with time, even as the
| click baits proliferate. Anything that shows a morsel = click for
| next = I am gone. Some ads are tolerable - I endure, some throw
| up such a ticket = gone. Any site that asks me = gone...
| Minor49er wrote:
| When I am presented with an obtrusive popup to sign up for some
| website, I've been in the habit of just filling it in with a
| random email address pointed at the site's own domain. Funnily
| enough, some sites will stop you from submitting an email
| address associated with the current domain because even they
| know how annoying and unpleasant they are
| Devasta wrote:
| [flagged]
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm not going to watch this entire video. I just want to ask,
| what the fuck is going on with those disgusting body horror ads
| we see all over the internet? Close ups of pimples and wounds and
| bizzare diagrams of human anatomy that all appear designed
| specifically to draw the eye (at any cost) but personally just
| repulse me. There's a whole cross section of websites I won't
| visit, including some major news sites, because apparently the
| best they can attract are these garbage advertisers.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I've seen those before but haven't in awhile. I assume they are
| eye-catching. Holes in hand, hand pulling wet cloth, jellyfish
| on hand, spider, hair, etc.
| ruined wrote:
| wow i'm so glad i never look at ads
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I think the term is "chumbox".
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
|
| (I.e., the icky health ads are a major category of it.)
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90843502/the-chumbox-is-still-th...
| alasarmas wrote:
| The original(?) article on chumboxes is still the best:
|
| https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-
| intern...
| soared wrote:
| Super low cost ads that lead to super low cost horrible
| clickbait content.
|
| You can blame companies like outbrain and taboola for
| purposefully having horrible advertiser quality standards, and
| websites who are willing to have that junk on their site. The
| cycle repeats endlessly, as the horrible sites have.. horrible
| ads.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I remenber windows putting those kind of ads on windows amd
| edge
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yes, what the fuck!? Facebook has started to show this filth in
| their shorts, that are un-blockable. I have to access Facebook
| for work and this is just repulsive. I guess if anybody still
| had any doubt wether the people at Facebook were degenerated
| perverts, at least there is no such doubt anymore.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Worse are the body shaming ad/games
|
| I have done a reasonable job at fooling Instagram to the extent
| where they think I'm a woman and I see horrifying ads all the
| time like the following:
|
| https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1676597672667381773
|
| I looked further and the key thing that viewers are doing
| (based on 600k app store reviews which seem to be mostly real)
| is trying to "give the girl a chance for once" "help her cause
| nobody else is" etc...
|
| https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1676631706818805771
|
| There are software engineers and designers working full time
| making this stuff and they should be horrified.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| That is horrifying
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| That little animation at the end, was there a panel of her
| going to a gynecologist and a green mist coming from her?
|
| The older I get, the more I can see what Ayn Rand was
| getting at.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Please resist the urge to go that direction with it
|
| Genuinely, and I'm horrified of all of this, but it's
| really something we can change, it's not hopeless don't
| give up humanity.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I don't think Ayn Rand gave up on humanity at all. Just
| the worthless nonsense and the people endlessly consume
| it.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| Aynd Rand criticized the welfare state and then went on
| welfare. She was a complete fraud.
| Izkata wrote:
| I don't know what Ayn Rand thing you're referring to, but
| I'd be a lot more concerned about the beginning of the ad
| where she's poking holes in a condom...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Atlas Shrugged.
|
| Yea, that didn't register at first because she threw it
| at him, but I get it now. Wow, that's pretty low class.
| gowld wrote:
| It's the allistic version of nerd-sniping.
|
| Do something intentionally wrong to goad a smart alec into
| trying to do it right.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Usually those types of display ads show up when targeting isn't
| possible, or your anonymized such that the CPMs for your
| session are low enough that it's cheap enough for these types
| of ads to make money.
|
| There are really only 3 buyers of banner/display ads when no
| targeting is available:
|
| 1) Huge multinationals - think geico, coke, etc. Broad
| awareness campaigns
|
| 2) Scams, body horror, YMYL, click-trick, etc. This is what
| you're seeing. Info products, garbage cosmetics and scam
| courses have such huge margins that they can spend on broad-
| targeted placements for very cheap CPMs, with aggressive
| creatives that are A/B tested to death to get people to click.
| As long as the CPM is cheap, and the CTRs are high enough, the
| numbers work.
|
| 3) "Inexperienced" ad buyers
|
| I'm not commenting or interested in debating the ethics of
| tracking and the internet data economy, but a side effect of
| removing 3rd party targeting is that as attribution goes away,
| buyers of ads pay less since they can't attribute dollars to
| campaigns, so you have to move to attribution methods more
| common in radio and TV. And as costs fall, it gives
| opportunities to the slimey shit you've been seeing.
| themitigating wrote:
| Isn't there a popular fetish of watching procedures to remove
| pimples and other skin growths?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > what the f is going on with those disgusting ads we see all
| over the internet?
|
| "we see" ? Who is "we" ? Your feed is not my feed, and I don't
| know what you're talking about.
|
| What's up is an algorithm is taking a guess at what engages
| _you_. It may be failing badly. Although, you noticed enough to
| comment, and that's engagement! Rage clicks are still clicks.
| Understand that and you're closer to knowing what's wrong with
| all VC-funded social media.
|
| But it's not what "we" see. Ad-wise, there is no such thing.
| midoridensha wrote:
| Why aren't you using an ad-blocker?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You can't block Facebook and Instagram ads.
| standardUser wrote:
| Because many sites force you to disable it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| These companies want clicks and views. They used to lure you in
| with curiosity, then with distracting colours and animations,
| and now with other emotions. Outrage ads and disgust ads get
| clicks. Any strong emotion that will get your eye drawn to
| their crap is worth exploiting.
|
| They're also experts at using psychological warfare like well-
| positioned faces and expressions to trick your eyes into
| looking at their general area. That's why every clickbait
| thumbnail has some form of a face with an extreme expression in
| it.
|
| Adblockers are the only solution. Whether you go with uBlock or
| AdNauseam, the only way to make this stuff go away is to make
| their business model unviable.
| akkartik wrote:
| I'm gonna join the 2 other commenters to say: stop using Google
| Chrome.
| carabiner wrote:
| ?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Ads aren't going anywhere.
|
| But the idea that ads can be the largest market segment on Earth
| and support most of our largest companies, with profit margins
| that shields those companies from even thinking about money...
| well, that was always bullshit.
|
| Those companies were propelled there by a lot of investment
| money, gave for free to investors with taxpayers bearing the
| costs everywhere. That money is gone, and without enough thrust,
| pigs can't keep flying.
| bozhark wrote:
| Facebook. Twitter. Google. Reddit.
|
| They are all ad platforms now.
|
| Some always have been.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Ironic to see people take such a claim seriously on an ad-funded
| website.
| tempodox wrote:
| If only! Ads are sprawling and encroaching on ever more
| territory, getting ever more aggressive and unbearable.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Most advertising is wasted money anyway. Companies keep paying
| for advertising because they believe it works and out of
| tradition.
|
| If Coke stopped advertising (and I think they, or Pepsi did),
| they would have no significant reduction in sales.
|
| Ads should be for new interesting products, not things people
| have already made their decisions on.
|
| This fake advertising economy is one of the ways the first world
| keeps money cycling internally, stopping it from being
| distributed globally.
| paul_funyun wrote:
| Sounds good for me (first worlder).
| [deleted]
| mrkramer wrote:
| I wouldn't say so; I would rather say that the internet ad
| industry got more concentrated and centralized around Google and
| Facebook and that's why for example online news industry started
| rapidly losing their ad revenue and switched to subscription
| based business model. Ad-based internet is stronger than ever.
| gnicholas wrote:
| [video]
| romusha wrote:
| Install adblocks, give up and close the tab of any website where
| ads can't be blocked, not giving a shot, enjoy life, sip coffee,
| life is good
| jmspring wrote:
| Good. I don't have a problem with subscriptions that provide
| content. That said, currently ad supported content stuffed behind
| a pay wall which still has ads, or even things like Hulu which
| have "ad free" yet still show ads, there is an imbalance toward
| shoving ads down peoples throats. The sooner that goes away, the
| better.
| constantly wrote:
| I hope I won't be faulted for not "reading" the OP, but it's a 17
| minute video. I watched a little, but I don't understand the
| thesis.
|
| It does seem ironic though that on a video about the ad-based
| internet dying, there are several ads in the page, the video
| maker in the first segment has a lengthy ad where he praises
| whatever he is advertising, probably VPN stuff, there is a bunch
| of begging for paid subscribers in the summary, and comments in
| the comment section from third party ad spammers directing people
| to what appears to be MLMs.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I look forward to a future where these videos can get auto-
| transcribed (accurately) so I don't have to watch the damn
| video.
| liminalsunset wrote:
| YouTube can be used with youtubetranscript.com (free) which
| will turn a video into a clickable transcript that takes you
| to the corresponding section of the video when clicked to see
| the corresponding visuals. It uses the Google auto
| transcription so not sure about whether the accuracy will be
| acceptable for you.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| The language learning extensions do that. Like language
| reactor
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I have been incredibly impressed with whisper.cpp. A bit of
| legwork to transcribe a youtube video, but the results are
| very accurate.
| crubier wrote:
| Do you have an end to end tool that integrates whisper to
| translate Youtube videos? Share! (Or make us pay for it
| lol)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| YouTube has pretty decent transcriptions with timestamps,
| especially for channels that bother implementing actual
| subtitles. They're hidden by default and not searchable on
| every platform, but they're excellent for skipping to the
| important parts.
|
| Independent websites need to get working on something
| similar. Whisper is pretty good but extremely CPU intensive,
| but there are lower cost implementations with acceptable
| transcriptions out there.
|
| I usually watch the introduction and then skip to the 66%
| mark, those seem to be the places the actual interesting
| information is stored on YouTube and its competitors.
| classified wrote:
| All of that is the purely humanitarian impulse to save the ad-
| based internet from dying.
| ravenstine wrote:
| At the very least, the ad was for a Linux security thing I've
| never heard of, as opposed to another motherloving Nord VPN ad.
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