> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
[0] https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412
--
EDIT: fixed grammar.
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
Media, art, and info distribution are never static targets, and even if a stable equilibrium exists and can be reached that does not mean that society will not oscillate around it.
In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
If anything this is a good thing, competition happened before Netflix could dominate completely.
Exclusive licencing is the problem, giving a 'monopoly' of sorts on streaming particular content. If everything was available everywhere, they just paid pay per view royalties say, then we'd have proper competition on pricing models & the quality of service provided.
This "competition" increased prices, which is not the desired result from competition. The problem is that copyright holders have too much power over their content, especially older content. If copyright holders were required to license content to anyone who wished to publish or redistribute it after, say, 10 years of initial publishing, that would be a form of competition that would decrease prices.
That would have happened anyway.
The only reason early Netflix was so cheap was because they negotiated streaming access to large swathes of content, because the rights holders thought licensing for streaming was worthless and leased them for a pittance.
That sweetheart deal was never going to last past Netflix's original gen contract expirations.
It's a HUGE fuckin shame that American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. was decided the way it was. Otherwise, Netflix could get out of the stranglehold that the movie studios surely have it in by buying DVDs and either mailing them or streaming their contents to subscribers. [0]
[0] The implication here is that the movie studios are threatening to refuse to renew streaming licenses for their movies if Netflix goes back to mailing DVDs at scale. If Netflix could format-shift those DVDs in real time with a one-customer-per-DVD setup, not only would Netflix have some leverage, they wouldn't be beholden to arbitrary and capricious licensing agreements at all.
In practice, of course, monopolies under capitalism exist specifically to exploit it, making things far worse for customers in the long run.
Steam is, to me, the closest we have to a benevolent monopoly. A monopoly that exists purely because it offers the best product.
I've heard people on this site argue that Apple has a monopoly on smartphones because they don't like Android and so their only choice is iPhone and since Apple controls iPhone 100% it's therefore a monopoly.
In the context of smartphones, the vertical integrations don't help with the "monopoly" perception, either. Once you've decided to get an iPhone hardware device, your only choice is to use the Apple app store, and if you want something out of the Apple app store, your only choice is to get an iPhone. Android phones are a little more lenient in that there are at least multiple app stores, but you still have the tight coupling between the hardware and the OS despite smartphones fundamentally being ARM devices with touchscreens.
Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google Play, or Amazon stores to install apps. Or, perhaps you'd prefer to buy a Samsung Galaxy S24 and put iOS on it, and install apps from any of the many app stores just the same.
I'd be at least as irritated with the PC market if I had to buy a Dell PC to access Steam and it only allowed installing from Steam, an HP PC was linked 1:1 with the Epic store, Alienware PCs were linked 1:1 with the Origin store, etc. and building your own machine was no longer possible, though at least you'd still have more options than with phones.
It's never been like that. What you wrote is fundamentally the same idea as: "If consumer computers more like consumer computers, you could buy a MacBook Pro and run RedHat Linux on it, then run any of the macOS applications or Linux applications that exist in the world."
While the mobile computing ecosystem and details are quite different, it's mostly same cocktail of things: Commercial hardware that is either open or closed, a [maybe commercial] OS, and applications that execute under version X of the OS and version Y of a runtime.
Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tidal all manage to have almost comprehensive music catalogs for me to stream. It's rare that I find something on one platform that isn't on another (Some artist exceptions exist, and are rare).
Pick 10 random films off the AFI top 100 list and tell me how to stream them. How many services do I need to watch them "for free".
Consumers want a single point of access to content. If I want to listen to a song I go to my music platform, if I want to watch content I go to the web to find out who has it... That friction is what consumers dont want or need.
You can tell that's the case because practically every piece of music created has been put on youtube while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free.
So your spotify equivalent for tv/movies is going to cost $100+ a month, perhaps more because tv/movies are that much more expensive to make and that's what you were paying for cable back in the day.
But people think everything could cost $20 at most, so that's why we're going to have 10 or so streaming services and frankly that's way better than the old cable days.
Legislatures could bring in a compulsory licensing scheme for movies similar to BMI and ASCAP.
Now they don't.
There are movies that "don't make money" because of shady accounting practices.
And I paid 100 bucks for cable for the same reason that you pay 100 bucks for internet now, lack of competition.
> while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free
There are plenty of people creating content on YouTube for what YouTube is willing to give them... and that isn't much. They have a working model because they keep creating content, not trying to squeeze every drop from the juice (over and over).
You might want to go back and look at the Paramount Decree. We would not be here if it was extended to streaming rather than allowed to expire.
> music costs barely anything to create
The last game I bought that wasn't on steam was probably Kerbal Space Program, in ~2014, and later converted my key to Steam when the option presented itself.
*Epic offers 0% cut for the first year to most indie games
GoG exists too, and just like what happened with streaming services, gaming companies have pushed out their own shitty platforms full of DRM and spying. Steam is still #1 though.
If steam went public and had the usual revolving door of MBA CEOs keen to "maximize efficiencies", you can bet that Steam would turn just as malign as the adtech industry.
A private company is not a corporate raider.
A private founder-owner-CEO combination (like Steam) might be the least vulnerable organization to many of those ills, short of a cooperative (not sure it counts as private ownership).
No, we got fragmentation. If we had competition I could pay netflix to watch the same content that I could otherwise watch on hulu if I made the choice to pay hulu instead.
Since everyone has their own exclusive content paywalled off behind their own services, we're stuck with lot of tiny monopolies.
That's why prices are skyrocketing, and we have a bunch of examples of shitty/infuriating interfaces that get in the way of users and prevent them from what they want, instead of a battle between streaming services to offer the best/most features users want at the lowest prices.
Mind this is sort of how it used to work.
Outside of broadcast TV and radio, you either subscribed to everything (newspapers, magazines, newsletters) or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand.
A problem with modern subscriptions is that they auto renew, and thus can be hard to cancel, and they tend to be quite expensive (everyone wants a “mere” $10/month).
100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe to the New York Times for £90 per year because I only want to read about 5 to 10 NYT articles a year. Why can't I pay £1.50 for 15 articles? That would be about the same as buying a physical copy of a paper from a newsagent; if I buy a physical copy I probably read about that many articles from it before it gets recycled. Instead I either don't read the article I've found to or I try to find it on the internet archive which is really irritating. I would like to read articles in a range of papers; say 3-4 UK broadsheets, occasionally some international papers like the NYT, Le Monde and a couple of trade papers. If I subscribed to 4 UK broadsheet newspapers I would already be paying >£400/year in newspaper subscriptions. Who does this? I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money and why they can't come up with a better solution. If the problem is card fees on micro transactions why don't they club together and create some kind of patreon type thing that agglomerates transactions together?
Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.
FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.
It's self defeating.
. . .
PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.
This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
That said, this point --
> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better.
Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.
Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.
Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).
I'm saying all this is built into your platform of choice, both IAP frameworks available on your platform of choice, and browsers available through that platform's distribution of choice, therefore let publishers register with the platforms (or post keys and coordinates in DNS, or whatever), and the platforms distribute that to the publishers.
Google shouldn't even care if they lose a percentage of ad revenue if they get the same percentage of direct subscription. Meanwhile, Apple gets the benefit of pennies per traffic (not a cash flow they are in today) without the tarnish of being for the advertisers instead of the users and creators.
Brave (with BAT) and others have toyed with such models, but they're from the wrong vantage, and the marketplace needs too many legs of the stool built to bootstrap. Leveraging legs that are already there could make this plausible.
Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.
The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines.
It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests.
Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'
Hell, bump it up to $2.50/yr for those 15 articles/yr, same price as a single physical edition. GP would probably still be ok with that, and that doesn't seem unreasonable.
I'm not sure what magazines you were buying in the 90s for $6-$8 each, but they were certainly on the high end and not representative of your average newspaper, which were on the order of 35-50¢ at the time. Full-color glossy mags cost a lot more to produce than a newspaper, so I'm sure that's part of it.
This seems to cover most stuff where the transaction value in question is low, e.g. newspapers, single songs, and so on. The UX seems to be inadequate. I'm not privy how my buddy's company is trying to address this, but I guess it is hard to beat a news stand where I drop a few coins and get a newspaper and chewing gum.
> And it is rare that a publisher will know what is good before it is released.
The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.
Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.
Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.
Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.
[0]I know it’s not paywall currently but I don’t know how long they will go on like that.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/post-the-latest-twitter-al...
They've since pivoted because they couldn't make it work.
Now try that with e-zines that are full of DRM
Mostly requiring subsidy by billionaires wanting to popularise their weird political views?
NYT adds 210,000 digital subscribers in Q1.
"The company said it had about 10.5 million subscribers overall for its print and digital products at the end of the first quarter, up roughly 8 percent from a year earlier. About 640,000 of those were print subscribers, down about 10 percent from the same period last year. "
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/08/business/media/new-york-t...
(Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.)
I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission.
Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free.
I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?
By your own math, a subscription is 65% cheaper than it once was -- but the reporting is still expensive. Try outfitting a team to go into a war zone, or maintain bureaus, etc.
The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.
> The problem is that the "good enough" free articles are usually just rewrites of the ones from the people who did the reporting.
> Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets
Cable still exists. People wanted the ability to sub to whatever they wanted (often leaving out sports for example). That's happened and now people want it all in one place. It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free, which is leading Netflix to have an ad-tier. Though, re-bundling is going to take some time as consolidation happens.
I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where I could get Westerns for 2 or 3 bucks a month, Action/super heros for 2 or 3 bucks, SciFi for 2 or 3 bucks, Romance/RomCom for a buck. Kids/cartoons for a buck or two etc. And then choose what I want to subscribe to each month. But if you are going to charge me 20 bucks a month, you had better have 20 bucks a month worth of content that I actually want to watch. (and no ads). Oh, and stop making good shows with cliff hanger endings and then canceling them!
As a counter, there is a trend of linear streaming channels increasing in popularity. Lots of people just want to put something on for a bit of time rather than doom scrolling on-demand to find something to put on. There have been times where I've spent the majority of the time I was willing to kill watching something searching for something to watch. Curated channels with content that your interested in is very compelling.
> I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where
These are definitely out there. I worked on the backed in for something that did this very thing. There was a channel for nothing but old western TV shows. Another channel that was nothing but animal related content. Another that was basically a Hallmark channel with similar content. I never did see what their pricing was though
[1] https://www.mni.com/blog/popular-streaming-services-what-is-...
And I don't want free ad sponsored.
I just want to pay a reasonable (I'll get back to this) price for the things I actually want.
Netflix was OK with me (and I think a number of others) despite being a subscription service not because it was a subscription.
It was OK because it was
- the only option
- reasonably priced
- and had "everything" one wanted
So what is reasonable?
I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd, although I'd accept if they adjusted a little for inflation.
Still there is a number of things I cannot buy or rent.
Nothing is for sale at the Apple TV "Store". You pay for a license to stream a piece of content, that lasts until Apple or the content owner decides to revoke it.
I have a bundle of Downton Abbey that is no longer for sale on iTunes and I can play it, but (for a while, they may have fixed it) at the end of an episode you had to navigate to the next episode by selecting the show and scrolling horizontally through every single episode. Technically possible but very irritating.
(Funny thing: I was watching the show when the switch happened… I watched two or three with the obvious play next episode in series behavior and then it suddenly stopped working… apple support finally told me it seems like it was related to it being taken off in favor of a bundle with the film included.)
Many libraries all over the world have books which have lasted for centuries, far longer than a single person's lifetime. The books I bought as a child can last longer than my own body. That's close enough to "lasting forever" for most practical purposes.
If you want your personal books to last most of your lifetime, then there needs to be a modicum of care taken, which isn't always possible, especially while you're in transit and moving from one place and into another. How many books have been lost that way?
The whole point was someone lamenting digital license may not last forever (though Apple's has, so far) and I'm just reminding everyone that physical media doesn't last forever either.
Anyhow, comparing different paper types you can see, feel, and smell the differences in quality. It starts with good raw materials, recycled low-quality paper will never make high-quality paper. That's because for high-quality paper you want long cellulose fiber in the paper. The longer the fiber the hardier the paper. The less acidic the paper, the better. You add chalk to make paper less acidic. The best paper has very long cellulose fiber and is virtually acid-free. If your paper turns yellow and "brittle" over time it is because of acid.
Now, the paper-surface is treated to create different effects (e.g. glossy, water-resistance). IIRC, that is called "coating". Coats may introduce acid again. Note that untreated paper is rather smooth and yellow-white-ish. To get this recycled, natural, rough look that is en vogue at the moment, you actually have to treat the paper to look like this. From an environmental point of view you would be better of with a smooth white paper. For longevity you want to coat your paper with an acid-free solution.
It is a little bit ironic, but engineering improvements in paper manufacturing allowed us to produce paper with lesser and less raw materials and worse pH values (e.g. industrial mills need far less water for a ton of paper than a century ago). This cheaper paper replaced the cheap paper from before, therefore degrading the paper quality, making modern cheap books less hardy than old cheap books. Cheap paper from 1930 will last a century or longer, cheap paper from 1970 will last maybe 50-60 years under normal storage conditions, ie. in an open bookshelf.
Now, that's only the paper. The printing ink and the binding also play a role in longevity. First, ink adds acid to the process, which is always bad, but depending on the ink type (dye or pigment, fountain pen enthusiasts will know this) the ink itself will fade faster or slower. Ancient inks are all of the pigment variety (or maybe at least those we know of). They have very long staying power. Modern inks are mostly dye and as a rule of thumb add more acid and fade faster. Bindings have little impact on readability, but are of course vital to the survival of the book as a book. A glue binding will degas over time. It becomes hard and breaks in a few decades. When single pages break out of the book you see the cheapest of the cheap bindings. Exposure to heat will accelerate this process, so if you like your glued books, keep them out of the sun.
High-quality books are saddle-stitched and work differently. First of, you do not stitch individual pages but fascicles, a bundle of paper, each paper holding four pages, which are then again stitched together in bigger bundles and finally into the book cover. This requires some forethought in the layout of the book and is very, very expensive. I own an archival hardcover print of _Also sprach Zarathustra_ from 2002, which was sold for about 300 EUR at the time. It was gifted to me for some accomplishment then. That's a book truly in its own league. I own a few other archival hardcover prints, but none this good. But I digress. I wanted to say that with good paper, coating, ink, and proper storage those books have virtually no end of life.
Sorry for the long post, brought up a lot of memories.
But the content that is so specific it only appeals to 1-10% of people is both the most memorable and also often the content that is basically guaranteed to not hit for 90% of people. So your math on who's going to pay to consume it changes drastically when the ceiling is so much lower, especially when the effective price required is so much higher that it's going to drive even more people away.
So it's a much larger risk pool to hope you'll make your money back with the error bars so much narrower, and businesses being businesses, they go for the bland thing with a lower risk pool 99% of the time, and then wonder why their returns keep shrinking.
I'm confused. A typical streaming service has hundreds or thousands of what would typically be a physical DVD. So how much should they charge?
Also, the vast majority of the cost for most content is in the creation of the content.
Also, if you're connecting your TV to the internet, that's a "you" problem.
I'd say this is provably false based on the popularity of streaming services, specifically the rise of Netflix's streaming service. That is the opposite of free.
Netflix is not offering ad tiers due to a lack of subscribers; they are doing it because there were a handful of quarters where revenue stagnated. This does not mean it was a bad business model; it means they want perpetual growth to satisfy shareholders. Same old story.
The reasons cable was and is bad and was destined to be replaced:
- No ability to unbundle (as you said)
- Messy time-shifting (DVRs, PPV, all that nonsense)
- Complicated and limited setup (proprietary hardware; extra fees for multiple devices; no ability to view on a computer or mobile device)
- Tons of fun trying to cancel
Cable has two real advantages:
- Fast channel switching
- Garbage exclusivity contracts
Streaming doesn't solve exclusivity but it certainly doesn't make it worse. In fact, making it easier to subscribe and cancel makes it significantly better.
When Netflix came out it was effectively free at $10. People want billions worth of content for $10/month. We all do, but that's not sustainable.
No, it doesn't "turn out" that way at all. But if the pirates provide better service for free than the proprietors offer at any price, that can hardly be seen as my problem as a consumer.
For a few brief, shining years, it looked like the media and entertainment industries were starting to understand that. Turned out not to be the case, though.
As for subscribing to Netflix Disney+ Hulu Prime Apple TV HBO peacock nebula discovery+ paramount+ crunchyroll YouTube premium/TV.... I may still download some stuff
I am also a bit pessimistic about this, but rather think the danger comes from LLMs making even more convincing clickbait and "facts". Cheap, easy to consume, if there are enough clicks, there is enough ad money.
Something real was misrepresented, so there was a lot of outcry? Awesome, lots of clicks. Lots of money. We can later apoligize, that the LLM summarizing made a misstake there.
As long as ads dominate where the money comes from for newspapers, not much will change.
Maybe not, but I hope so.
But yes, I also hope some good will come out of it and intent to stay in the good areas.
> I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
Amazing.
No, that's why I didn't write that. Spotify allows nearly everyone to put their music on the platform. Just this week I listened to some music with <1000 plays that I found in a random video somewhere. I choose what I want to listen to and a part of the fee I pay gets transferred to the creator. I don't need to buy 100 different subscriptions to labels and musicians, it's centralized.
(Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform. I'm not using it as an example of a perfect end goal, I'm using it as an example of the only thing right now that gets somewhat in the neighborhood. And in the industry there are multiple platforms who distribute mostly the same content with only some 'exclusive' releases. Which is what I'd like to see for the web.)
I wrote that paragraph for a reason.
> So actually as a listener of niche music, I am mostly paying for exactly the mainstream artists whose music I am not listening to
That mostly depends on how much you listen. If you listen more than average, your niche band will actually get more than they would've otherwise. At least if I have my brain math correct.
Might be a bit of a cultural difference though. I'm in the Netherlands. TV was never as expensive over here as in the US. We also got spoiled, I guess, because the hits from the US were also on TV over here but the smaller shows weren't, so we'd get the biggest shows from Fox, CBS and Comedy Central on the same channel in some cases. And from what I remember this was <$20 a month.
And when I canceled cable TV I decided to just go cold turkey and do without the occasional sporting event on live TV. So depending upon how you count I'm probably paying less than $50/month for all my video entertainment these days.
It is more of content owner trying to get what they can from different part of the world. There are places in third world where HBO would be $1 / month , same thing in US is like 15-20 dollars. Buyers/local networks can always say this is price local market can pay else they will pirate.
The big draw for me for streaming is not price, it is removal of ads.
(I say this as a happy user of Brave on Android)
Perhaps with wealthy country populations projected to fall dramatically we will finally be forced to find a way other than "growth" to value human endeavour. That would be the most likely path to a solution, I fear it will be rather painful.
I think you have it the wrong way round. Piracy is the solution to Netflix (the bloated, enshittified 'content provider') just like piracy has been the solution to all the centralised media platform monopolies that came before it, that Netflix first disrupted and then joined.
As an individual it's meritorious to pay creators and pay creative collectives (e.g. studios). But it's never meritorious to pay media platforms that act as middle men. They are in the business of ripping off both the creators and their audience ('consumers' in modern parlance). You're only a sucker if you buy into their self-serving moralising narratives. The right and moral thing is to parasite them to death, by piracy. (Or boycott them; also a valid choice.)
Only if your preference of content happens to match what NetFlix offers, which is not the case for many/most people.
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
Web3 is things like json-ld and the like and it is tragic that scammers have been able to abuse the term for so long.
But together with other, similar technologies it extends the current with metadata etc web just like web2 extended the existing web with things like ajax interactions, drag and drop and folksonomies ("tags") and other forms of user generated content.
The (IMO) fake crypto peddler "web3" is (again IMO) "revolutionary" unlike web2 and the real web3: it is a complete break from many of the things that made the web great. I'd even hesitate to describe much of it as web at all.
Get your head out of your asses guys. There's nothing inherently bad about blockchain or decentralization.
This is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. If you want to only access esoteric websites, you can do that today. If you want to block ads and tracking, you can do that today. If you want to only visit websites that don't require ad support, you can do that today.
What you need is a way to pay people for content so they don't need to have ads. Can you solve that problem?
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
But no, when subscribing, they're expected to pay 10x or 100x or 1000x their ad-impression worth.
Subscription aggregation (a Hulu of things to read, like the firm Apple purchased* and made into Apple News+) is one answer.
Another would be a IWP (In-Web Purchase) browser standard like DNT except its an "I'm willing to buy the ad slots on this page at the median CPM" token, coupled to something like the mythical micro-transactions settlement schemes of yore that would now actually be possible on top of systems handling IAP.
* Next Issue aka Texture. I was a subscriber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_(app)
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content.
Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.
Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back.
But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet.
Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
I pay for many many subscriptions for content I like. Also, I don't see any "virtue signalling" anywhere. I don't want ads because they are hostile and not in my best interest. They significantly lower the quality of my life. It's as simple as that.
Everyone says they pay to support, very few people actually do.
Just look at how it is a matter of course to post an archive.is link anytime a pay walled article is posted. It's so pervasive and wide spread that people don't even think about it.
I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.
Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.
RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
Ad based businesses are as bad as door to door life insurance scammers, multi level scammers, etc.
In short, find a job that doesn't require damaging other people.
/Forgot to mention, watching ads without buying the advertised product simply decreases ad yield over time and therefore it even wastes productivity for 0 return in the long run./
What numbers?
Where can I pay to replace ads with something that isn't orders of magnitude more expensive? Basically any single-site subscription I've seen fails that test. If you're citing that kind of subscription, then that evidence doesn't work here.
For every thing else I use adblockers.
In any marketing research it is well-known that what people say they would pay for and what they actually pay for are two different things. Hence also the mantra about MVPs and going to market as soon as possible.
But specifically on AnandTech and "written journalism", I think they are right about the "written" part. These days the topic and hardware reviews are all over Youtube.
Meanwhile the numbers show where the users actually are. I pay for YouTube, Telegram, and Nebula, self host Matrix, use and run Bluesky infrastructure, and a few other things but I'm the first to admit I'm in the minority. Not only that but it's time consuming! Meanwhile in tech discourse everyone is using Kagi for everything and "it's a breath of fresh air" or whatever.
If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds.
Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example) I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly subscription cost.
Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that a non starter.
I don't really have a better idea besides automated micropayments, which nobody has managed yet, crypto doesn't count,, so I guess we'll have to live with the current situation?
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
In sense that they get paid thru a Patreon/Ko-Fi or something, because these hobbyists likely still want to be compensated.
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).
Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.
Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no clickbait?
Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Split-X.Org-Session reporting about a pretty pointless change just to get that sweet Wayland/X11 drama driven flaming.
Clickbaiting may have been the wrong word, there's not much of that, more "feeding drama to an audience he knows well" than anything. The comment section is almost Wccftech tier, these days.
Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out.
I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course.
The contact information is on the website, whoever wants to, will find it easily.
Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option?
Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
David Kanter doesn't write articles very much these days, but Real World Tech has always had top-shelf stuff and it's one of the few places where all the comments are worth reading too.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)