SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Atlantic has posted an interesting article on internet advertising calling it The Internet's Original Sin. Written by Ethan Zuckerman, who worked at Tripod during the birth of online ads, the article does a good job identifying the issues with relying on ads as the primary source of funding behind the internet. Ethan also speculates on some possible solutions to the problem—which mostly lean toward subscriptions as funding.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Advertising: the Internet's Original Sin
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 26 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I don't want a pickle,
I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.
And I don't want to die,
I just want to ride on my motorcy.
Cle.
-- Arlo Guthrie
(Score: 4, Insightful) by schad on Tuesday August 19 2014, @01:05AM
The problem with subscription is that people often jumps between different sites.
That's not a problem with the subscription model, that's a problem with the sites in question not having enough content to be worth paying for. If I read one article per week on your site, then it's frankly not worth any amount of money to me. As long as it's free I'll read it, but the instant you require any payment from me -- even "payment" so trivial as creating a user account -- I'm gone forever.
And this is more than a little circular. Why do sites go for breadth rather than depth? Well, the more pages, the more page views; the more page views, the more advertising dollars. You get stuck. You can't get away from advertising, because nobody will pay for a subscription because your content is so poor. But you can't get better content because you don't get enough money from advertising. (Not unless you're lucky enough to be bought by Google or Facebook or whatever.)
And sometimes it's not the site that has the value, but the users that it attracts.
I understand your point but the fact is that those services do provide some value. In the case of sites like SN, it's a forum (in the traditional, non-Internet sense) where we can gather to talk about things which interest us. But there are tons of fora on the Internet; why do we come here instead of those other places? Well, many of us are here specifically because we didn't like the software on a certain other site. And we stay because we think the editors and other staff members are doing a better job. This is the value that SN specifically brings. That's not to say that we commenters don't bring value too, just that it's not only us.