Re:Life After Content Blocking
by amyjess on Monday August 31, 2015 @12:24PM
(#10147538)
I remember people talking about micropayments for articles when the dot-com bust happened in 2000. It didn't happen, because people aren't going to keep making purchases when browsing the news or their favorite blog or what have you.
Sure, we have some more infrastructure in place now than we had 15 years ago, but we're still not going to put up with (for example) Google Pay or Apple Pay confirmation dialogs every time we click on a link to a news article. And don't think they can just bury the confirmations: app stores have gotten into huge trouble in the past for not providing enough security surrounding IAPs, and we had enough stories of children unknowingly running up their parents' credit cards with IAPs that the FTC had to get involved. We're not going to see anything that lets you unknowingly run up a credit card while browsing the web.
Social media has probably done more to make paywalls more difficult than anything that existed in 2000, too. If you post an article to social media, your friends are going to complain when they click a link and find out they have to pay to read the article. Thus, people don't submit hard-paywalled links to social media so as not to piss off their friends, and hard-paywalled sites find their mindshare and thus their relevance evaporating in favor of sites that don't do this. To get around this, paywalled publishers like the New York Times poke holes in their paywalls for Facebook referrers, because they'd rather lose a bit of paywall revenue then get shut out of social media and see their mindshare drop like a rock. So many people nowadays get their news from links posted to social media that the NYT must be taking a huge hit from their Facebook exceptions. It's a catch-22: they directly lose money by poking holes in their paywalls for Facebook, but they'll also indirectly lose money through loss of relevance if they tell everyone who wants to share their articles on Facebook to pound sand.
Honestly, the best case scenarios are:
- Patreon-style crowdfunding models, where enthusiasts pay content creators before the content is created, and then it's available to everyone with no strings attached.
- Content is offered as a loss leader in order to get people onto the website in order to buy the real moneymaking product. What the real product is, that's up to marketing departments to decide, but it's not the content, and it's not the ad space.
Sure, we have some more infrastructure in place now than we had 15 years ago, but we're still not going to put up with (for example) Google Pay or Apple Pay confirmation dialogs every time we click on a link to a news article. And don't think they can just bury the confirmations: app stores have gotten into huge trouble in the past for not providing enough security surrounding IAPs, and we had enough stories of children unknowingly running up their parents' credit cards with IAPs that the FTC had to get involved. We're not going to see anything that lets you unknowingly run up a credit card while browsing the web.
Social media has probably done more to make paywalls more difficult than anything that existed in 2000, too. If you post an article to social media, your friends are going to complain when they click a link and find out they have to pay to read the article. Thus, people don't submit hard-paywalled links to social media so as not to piss off their friends, and hard-paywalled sites find their mindshare and thus their relevance evaporating in favor of sites that don't do this. To get around this, paywalled publishers like the New York Times poke holes in their paywalls for Facebook referrers, because they'd rather lose a bit of paywall revenue then get shut out of social media and see their mindshare drop like a rock. So many people nowadays get their news from links posted to social media that the NYT must be taking a huge hit from their Facebook exceptions. It's a catch-22: they directly lose money by poking holes in their paywalls for Facebook, but they'll also indirectly lose money through loss of relevance if they tell everyone who wants to share their articles on Facebook to pound sand.
Honestly, the best case scenarios are:
- Patreon-style crowdfunding models, where enthusiasts pay content creators before the content is created, and then it's available to everyone with no strings attached.
- Content is offered as a loss leader in order to get people onto the website in order to buy the real moneymaking product. What the real product is, that's up to marketing departments to decide, but it's not the content, and it's not the ad space.