It's totally not. People essentially enjoy creating and sharing, and love putting up quality content about things they truly give a shit about.
The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines, and hosting their own websites where they ramble about conditional probability. Wikipedia was written by unpaid but enthusiastic curators, and no one got paid for uploading popular Youtube videos until long after it was already a staple of the internet.
I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best. It's still the best. After all, you're here reading the comments on hacker news, which we are all freely contributing too with no expectation of compensation.
Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/. It'll move to different kinds of websites depending on how people want to access content at the time, but it will still be here, just as it always has been. What will vanish is all the mediocre spacefilling bullshit. The stuff so dull you _must_ pay someone to write it because no one would do it for fun or kudos.
Yes the internet came about because of academics and hobbyists playing around in their spare time. We as people who often came up during that time have a habit of over-weighting that. The internet is not a side project anymore. The internet is the future of every industry - and absolutely the future of every content creation industry.
You can't expect every industry to be reduced to what can be produced by hobbyists working for free in their spare time.
You're implying that it's in some fashion my job to care about those industries.
I don't care what happens to buzzfeed, and I don't care what happens to the wallstreet journal. /My life/ and /my needs/ and met regardless of their existence, so I really don't give a shit whether they are sustainable or not.
Not really, they're owned by long serving members of one of the major parties. Their impartiality is directly proportional to the time until the next Icelandic election.
I don't believe that applies to even a tiny fraction of people. I work with a LOT of world-class scientists (biotech). I can tell you outright that after they leave work, the LAST thing they want to do is to spend hours updating Wikipedia or arguing in forum posts about scientific minutia. (Yes, it might be different in pure academia, where people love to publish, but even there, they're already getting compensated)
So even if we take your argument ast face value, people who enjoy sharing _ALSO_ enjoy getting paid. To take a relevant example, the primary reason Linux didn't fail (like most hobby projects do) was because companies pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay people to actually write code. You want to write a AAA game, a web browser, a compiler, an OS or any other software tool that has hundreds of millions of lines of code and can compete with the leading products, while not spending a dime? Good luck and god speed is what I'd say. So while in principle, I might agree with your proposition that one man MAY give away the fruits of their labor, and that those fruits might be very very delicious, the world is running out of things people can do in their spare time for free that is also worth looking at. Please note that I'm not talking about hacking out a tiny tool over the weekend. I'm talking about sustained efforts to produce something of value.
> The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free, because it was the best.
You need to provide a _LOT_ of evidence if you want people to believe such an outlandish claim.
You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off it. That's when the 90s internet bubble started to form. Even before the internet, services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were here, quite literally being the internet. There were local BBSs and then there were big, national BBSs like Prodigy and Compuserve. They were little internets onto themselves, and produced content themselves. At the time, they were more popular than the web itself, because the content today simply didn't exist like it did back then. No google, No wikipedia, forums were still in their infancy, etc.
> I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free
Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false. It's simply too complex for that statement to hold true. Everything from internet speeds to cheap computers played a much larger part -- the internet sucked back in the mid 90s because it took 3 minutes to load up a simple (non animated) gif file. Videos? Hah! It would take you a week to download a 15 minute clip. Due to these issues, people got fed up or were impatient and it delayed adoption.
> Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/.
That's great in some naive ideological fantasy, but it ignores a little something called human nature, more specifically, greed and/or the need to put food on the table. People will want to make money off their work and people will create content for money. Just because some people will create content for free doesn't mean they constitute a majority, or even a minority.
I was on the Internet back them and I certainly came for the freely published content... So it's not 100% false.
As someone who participated in, and helped build, this early vision of the Internet, I am very, very sympathetic to (and enthusiastic about) your statement and vision.
However, you can't look at something amazing like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/26/us/turkey-pro...
... and think that this, or some useful version of this, would come out of the amateur, self-published, enthusiast ether.
I am floored by what they've done here and how they have used static text and interactivity and video motion to present a story. This is amazing work and someone has to pay the bills for this.
I don't know how that happens but I know it's not happening for free.
Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about?
Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at?
Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and fake news amped up to eleven?
Believing that we can make content totally free is utopian. You might as well ask why to bother paying software engineers large salaries when open source software exists.
In a world where content is free, all that happens is that newspapers become the organs of plutocrats and political groups. If you want to imagine how the internet looks when content is totally free, imagine a Facebook news feed written by the Koch brothers.
The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That really chaps my ass. These are the people keep shitting in the well, then installed a pipe to inject feces directly into the well and the groundwater - and you're telling us that the only way to deliver disinfectant and filtration systems is through that pipe, and we might as well keep using their system?
> The real trouble being the more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
That does become a problem if Google is the only game in town, and you're inexplicably banned from their platform, which does tend to happen.
That is a truth. You need to already have the infra to make this change. I think it'd be too much to both successfully grow a business and try to change browsing behavior at once.
> ...The more people who use that kind of thing, the more the value of adverts goes down...
Not necessarily a bad thing. If the value of adverts drops, and this is a well known alternative it provides even more incentive to move to model where there is still money to be made. Not to mention there probably is a bit of "recapture". Of people who ran ad-blockers for the experience (ie zero-revenue providers) who are willing to pay for content. Similar to people who torrented, but instead became Netflix/Hulu subscribers when it became an option.
This is what every online newspaper has been saying for over a decade as they saw this problem approaching and didn't have a way to solve it. You can't survive this way in the extremely efficient web.
Either top quality content needs to be able to pay for itself (ie charge more), or you're left with only two successful business models: make junk-food content, or off load your content creation to people willing to do it essentially for free as a hobby.
Neither of those are good destinations for the web. They work in niches, but not across the board. Ex. I don't want my newspaper to consist of only volunteer journalists doing a bit here and there in their spare time.
I'm still in the testing phases of it, but a lot of people that I've talked to have said "Yes, I'd pay $1-3 to a site that I visit regularly if it didn't have ads"
https://www.trussapp.com/ for the curious (it's still just a hair away from being a beta product, so keep that in mind)
I was a Google Contributor user/paying subscriber for quite a while. It works to some degree. But Brave is superior and is the best thing to happen to the web since ads.
Ads are the worst thing that happened to the web.
Content creators need to be able to charge different amounts for different quality content.
In depth, well researched reporting needs to be able to earn more than a buzzfeed article. That's not possible with a flat "per-eyeball" cost, where the revenue to the content creator is uncorrelated with the cost to create or the value/quality of the content.
I wish it weren't google (who also already owns advertising), but someone large is the only one who can make it happen.
A model like this is necessary to support quality content online.