The web's original sin

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2016/03/the_webs_origin.html

by Isofarro • 10 years ago

123 127 10 years ago

Finnucane3• 10 years ago

"The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does."

I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad.

The reason I use adblockers on my browsers has less to do with jus not wanting to see ads but the fact that ad servers cause terrible site performance--the responsiveness of many sites speeds up considerably when you suppress the ads.

creshal2• 10 years ago

I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad.

Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™ (supposedly, I wasn't too impressed by most…). If you tell someone you spent $200 on, say, Android apps, you're going to get funny looks.

It's circular reasoning at its finest: Paying that much money for mobile games is unreasonable, therefore you only get garbage games, therefore paying that much money for mobile games is unreasonable.

Finnucane3• 10 years ago

Actually, some people _are_ paying out that much on games on mobile, but they're doing it by way of in-app purchases rather than up-front licensing.

jalfresi• 10 years ago

I think I paid £12 for X-COM when it came out on iOS. It was great and totally worth every penny.

I don't really see the problem here; nobody is preventing games companies (or app makers in general) from charging more. The problem is they want to have their cake and eat it too; they want huge numbers of downloads and huge profits, and unfortunately that means they may actually have to put some WORK into it; not only in the content they produce but in determining the best price point.

But apparently, as a potential customer, thats MY fault. I think there is a misplacement of entitlement here.

thaumasiotes2• 10 years ago

Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™

A 3DS comes with at least 6 different (convenient!) buttons and a thumbstick. This affects the quality of the games. Not just the existing games, but the games that potentially could exist. The phones, with their one available input, lend themselves to games where you can only do one thing (or at least, where at any given moment you can only do one thing), like endless runners (jump), angry birds (shoot), or farmville (harvest). You can divide the screen into areas that respond to touch differently, but then you run into the problem that people's fingers are enormous compared to a phone screen.

jeffehobbs• 10 years ago

I've said this for years. If there had just been a payment layer built into the web browser spec, we'd be in different world. A monetizable world. It's still not too late.

kefka2• 10 years ago

"To read this content, please pay $0.01"

Yeah. That wouldn't at all be abused.

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

You say that like the ad-supported model is abuse free, or like people would not adapt and develop mechanisms to avoid the abuse.

marssaxman• 10 years ago

The monetizable world is old and boring. We already know how it works. The web was interesting because it offered something new: an opportunity to develop patterns of communication and information exchange that simply would not be possible with the friction of payment or the need to generate a profit.

nas3• 10 years ago

Look at the iOS and Android market. What a utopia of high quality content. /s

CapitalistCartr• 10 years ago

I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo.

P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. Too many nasty or stupid sites out there.

thaumasiotes2• 10 years ago

You can do this now by running dosbox on your phone. A cursory search shows that somebody's selling "dosbox turbo" on google play for $2.50.

I tend to think the impoverished nature of phone games is related to the available controls. You see a lot of phone/tablet games that amount to "wait for something to become clickable, and then click on it". Maybe we need to provide an input method beyond "fat-finger your screen".

If that happens, though, the phone basically loses the portability that is its only advantage.

cousin_it2• 10 years ago

I agree that touch is a lousy input method, because it's imprecise and you can't see what you're touching. But phones have other input methods, like the accelerometer. Even early iPhones had a ball rolling game that you could play by tilting the phone. With a modern phone, a controller, and something like Google Cardboard, you could make a decent VR FPS game. And by making imaginative use of the camera and microphone (both movable), you could probably do even more.

swiley• 10 years ago

Once upon a time handhelds had hardware buttons (some even had qwerty keyboards in addition to larger hardware buttons) but these have unfortunately been replaced with inaccurate touch screens.

bunkerbewohner• 10 years ago

You and me, both! I've been waiting so long that in the mean time I have started developing my mobile, civ-like game on https://nationsonline.net. But I'm not a professional game developer, and we're only two programmers, no artists. I'd much rather a big game developer with artists, game designers and the capacities to finish it in a reasonable time frame would create such a game. Civ Revolution was a big disappointment for me, unfortunately.

adrianN• 10 years ago

Battle for Wesnoth runs on phones iirc.

qwertyuiop924• 10 years ago

Yes, but only version that's any good is on IOS. all the android versions are sucky and outdated. If you want to make a good one, please do.

SimonPStevens• 10 years ago

There are some. Civilization Revolution is available for iOS and Windows Phone. I'm not sure why they never did an Android version.

I played the Windows Phone version back when it was released. It was fairly decent. I'm not a civ aficionado though, so I don't know how well it stands up when compared to other editions.

The thing is though, if I'm going to play a decent game that takes time and thought, I sit down at my laptop or console. It's not really what I want from a phone. I want a game that I can play for 2 minutes while I wait for something else. It's not that I'm not prepared to spend £+ for a decent mobile game, it's that when I want to buy a decent complex game, I tend to choose a different platform to buy the game on.

bryanlarsen• 10 years ago

Civ Rev 2 is on android.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.t2kgames.c...

scott_s• 10 years ago

The Final Fantasy Tactics port to iOS is actually quite good. I played it on my iPad, and it seemed almost perfectly suited to a touch interface. The only issue was a slight interaction delay/misfire for when I would press on-screen buttons, but since it's not a twitch game, it's a minor thing.

There's an Android port as well, for $13. That's a great price to play a great game - although I'm not sure how well it plays on a phone.

For the most part, I do agree with your sentiment: the gaming experiences I have read about, seen and experienced on smartphones and tablets tend to not be what I'm looking for. For example, I started playing Bastion on my iPad, but eventually stopped because I really want a gamepad for that kind of game. Same with a lot of the other Square ports.

carsongross• 10 years ago

"I’m seriously questioning the idea that all content on the web ought to be free."

It shouldn't, and it isn't. But free and good enough is going to beat any cost and better by any amount for most people most of the time.

"The expectation that everything online is free is an entitlement, an unearned privilege, on the part of consumers. There’s nothing inevitable about it."

Looking at the huge, swollen, abusive and sclerotic layers of our entertainment, publishing and news industries, I do see quite a bit of entitlement, but not on the side of consumers.

iolothebard3• 10 years ago

So charge for it. I don't see what the big deal is.

I've built a good amount of software. I never did any of it for free, although it's why I've never came up with anything like Facebook, etc. I could never figure out how the 'magic' of making money off ads worked. Google's makes sense, pr0n websites to an extent. Everything else is largely not worth it or fighting in a world where everyone else gives it away for free (news, etc.).

tacos• 10 years ago

It goes right back to the spec. The W3C drones on and on for 132 words as to what "NO CONTENT" means. But devotes merely seven words to commerce. From that, all that follows.

https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...

liotier• 10 years ago

When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug.

Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.

DanielStraight2• 10 years ago

Why can't it be both?

Right now, we're communicating, sure. But a book like Eloquent Javascript (http://eloquentjavascript.net/) isn't content?

The postal system is a communication medium, but you can still buy mail (magazines, for example). I don't see why this is a problem.

mikeash3• 10 years ago

That seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on, enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing.

Take a look at the original web site:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

That's clearly a non-interactive (aside from navigation) one-to-many system. What is that if not "content"?

JupiterMoon• 10 years ago

Didn't the original browser that was built at the same time as that site include editing tools that would work for any visitor? I.e. making it a many-to-many medium?

thebaer• 10 years ago

I think the analogy is apt. The medium, unlike a printed newspaper for example, enables communication as much as it enables one-way publishing. And isn't the latter a subset of communication?

Think of a personal site. What is that, if not communication about oneself? And once you blog on that site or publish essays [1], the line between a publishing / communication medium heavily blurs. There's nothing inherent about the web that says it must be one thing or the other — it's how people have and continue to use it.

There's also a lot to be said about the "fun" of creating things on a global communication platform. Many free tools like YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter are popular because they let the average person utilize the same power of the web we've always had. Some people monetize what they create on those platforms; others use it to communicate; commercial entities create "content" on it; and yet more people use it just for fun. It's all about how you use the medium.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

notahacker• 10 years ago

I don't know about the OP, but I'd say many objections to "content" is less to do with it describing a web composed of documents and more to do with it describing a web composed of documents conceived as a means rather than an end.

"Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks". Which certainly wasn't the intention of the original web either.

Journalists, authors, researchers and people blogging for the joy of blogging generally don't refer to their output as "content", and do think their work is primarily intended to communicate, albeit mostly in one-to-many fashion.

Of course regardless of how idealistic their intentions, most journalists have always produced much of their output for publications whose management teams largely consider it as something to wrap ads around, but that approach is far more pervasive and metrics-driven on the modern web.

geon2• 10 years ago

The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium

Is that a reqirement for "communication"? Email is often non-realtime, many-to-many. No one would claim that disqualifies it from being "communication".

jacquesm4• 10 years ago

Go back a step further and look at project Xanadu. The WWW is basically Xanadu 'light', so without all the royalty and origin tracking, and one way instead of two way links.

woah• 10 years ago

Have you ever spent any significant amount of time writing something, or making a video, or an image for the web?

nmrm22• 10 years ago

Yes. Most people who used the early web spent huge amounts of time making one or more of these. And posted them. Not just for free, but even on shared hosting plans they paid for. People paid money to share their "content" for free.

GOML

iolothebard3• 10 years ago

Never heard of FOSS & GNU I take it? What a bunch of chumps, right? Linux, what a scam.

kps• 10 years ago

Yes; WorldWideWeb was written in 1989, when commercial ‘content’ on the Internet was approximately zero.

return0• 10 years ago

An analogy with printing press would be more apt.

mudil• 10 years ago

When a web publisher produces a content, it constitutes someone's work. It's different than talking to your neighbor.

fenomas• 10 years ago

This is a non-argument. When you chat with your neighbor you don't deliver comprehensive lists of browser quirks, carefully researched news stories, wikipedia articles, and so forth. Yet the web has such things, and they are content.

DanielStraight2• 10 years ago

I find it strange he didn't mention selling something as a possible way to make money.

Free web content that you can buy in other forms (ebook, paper book) or buy extras for (videos, email support, courses) seems like a pretty common model these days.

In the board and card game world, you've got games where you can download a PDF board or PDF cards but if you want a professionally produced version, you can buy it.

In software, you've got the paid support model.

There's plenty of actually valuable things you can sell for minimal additional effort on top of producing the content in the first place. And remember the bar for "actually valuable" is pretty low: SQLite sells licenses for public domain software after all.

ivan_ah• 10 years ago

Good point. The "book format" in particular has a lot of future. For example, packaging a series of blog posts into a short ebook on a topic, then investing time to polish the content can turn into an excellent "product" to be sold through the website. Fuck ads for other people's products, advertise your own!

It makes sense for blog posts to be free since they are "draft quality," but once an editor has put some thought into making a coherent and comprehensive guide to subject X, it's totally OK to charge for this extra work. And I mean "OK" not as a moral "is allowed to," but in the market "people will buy"-sense.

The extra work the author invests is called information distillation. The author "processes" a lot of information (primary sources like books, research, other webpages) and produces a comprehensive summary of the topic in question. Blog posts are "best effort" acts of information distillation; books are more thorough and deliberate efforts.

I can attest from personal experience that people are interested in information distillation today (I sell math books). I think this trend will continue into the future—the more information out there, the more people will need secondary sources to help them make sense of it.

mjevans• 10 years ago

People are also shockingly bad at economics. I remember from the econ101 course I was required to take that it's just the possible intersection of curves between what supply can cost and what demand is willing to pay in order to maximize profit.

A missing element is that often someone who has a copy of the content has a choice between buying another copy for someone else to read or loaning their own copy (book lending). If the marginal cost of buying a new copy is less than the overhead involved with lending another copy (often beneath impulse buy price) someone is MUCH more likely to buy a copy as a gift. Think about how much someone is willing to pay for a newspaper. I think 0.25 USD or less would be the natural price per copy. Copies should NOT have DRM. Just price them inexpensively enough that people don't feel a need to share it for free.

wimagguc• 10 years ago

Free is all fun and jokes until someone loses an eye. PaaS companies had a rough year in 2015, with many companies closing down and Heroku changing their pricing. (A great article is here: https://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited)

This consolidation will happen to all industries where companies keep underselling their products. The weak ones will go down and eventually everyone else will raise the prices. Maybe it's not even a bad thing, just the way evolution works.

FussyZeus• 10 years ago

Supply and demand rule everything. Right now there is simply an insane amount of supply when it comes to news, blogs, and the written word in general and so it is made worthless. When a site demands a subscription or puts up an adblocker wall, I can simply put the title into Google and find an extremely similar story elsewhere. As a consumer, if you want me to look at your site, you need to make the case for ME to want to do that.

I honestly have no problems viewing ads (they're annoying, sure, but so are children and I can be around them just fine) but the advertisers have completely fucked this relationship by going further and further. More monitoring, more tracking, more privacy invasions, downloading megabytes of Javascript and then there's the malware too for an extra level of screw you.

If it's static image content, fine. No HTML ads, no Javascript ads, no epilepsy triggering gif ads, none of that garbage because this is MY computer, not YOUR billboard. Deal with it.

Diamons3• 10 years ago

I don't understand. This article claims users feel entitled to free content on the internet and then goes into a rant about pricing and ad blockers while doing nothing to address the glaring fact that he himself thinks he's entitled to make money off of content.

The internet is for the people. It is a free and open service for anyone to use. The only one entitled is the content creator who feels that they have a right to make money for what they produce. Simply no. The internet is for people, not for businesses.

true_religion• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why you are implying that "for the people", means excluding organized groups of people, especially profit focused groups.

AlexandrB• 10 years ago

The internet is for people, not for businesses.

This doesn't square with the fact that, at the end of the day, someone has to pay for hosting and bandwidth - not to mention that content creation costs time (money) as well. Ignoring these realities and pretending that the internet is free just externalizes the cost onto those who aren't savvy enough to use an ad blocker or avoid ransomeware.

Diamons3• 10 years ago

That's not my problem. You're not entitled to that hosting and bandwidth. If I wanted to, I could host a website off my laptop for a couple hours a day if I wanted to. There is no law of the internet that guarantees a user can be subjected to ads without their consent. The only rule is that any device with a browser can view your content across the world.

A user is not entitled to pay / reward a content creator for creating content. That content creator made the content of their own free will. A website is a tool that drives revenue. If there's something to buy or purchase, I can buy it. But a content creator cannot tell me I should not be using an ad blocker because it's how they make money.

mwcampbell• 10 years ago

The internet is for people, not for businesses.

Businesses are just people trying to make a living, which just about everyone has to do.

Finnucane3• 10 years ago

Indeed, some of my best friends are businesses.

Diamons3• 10 years ago

There are plenty of ways to make a living. If starbucks can sell you $5 coffee, you can make money from a website. But if your creativity is limited to create content + place ads, you have 0 right to bitch and moan about consumers using ad blockers.

cousin_it2• 10 years ago

Without ads, people would still put up tons of free content. Not just for the love of humanity, but also because receiving attention is a kind of power. People crave to influence what others think. As long as you have that, you can always rationalize away the lack of money.

pc86• 10 years ago

And this is certainly a generalization/assumption, but all else being equal it will probably be easier for the person with a tech blog getting 150K uniques in a month to get a job than the person without it.

So even having this large block of free content can have a direct financial impact on the creator without syndication/ads/sponsors etc.

mooreds• 10 years ago

I have a blog that gets about 12k visits a month. I certainly don't have people beating down my door to hire me, but more that one interviewer has mentioned my blog as a plus.

If you're the person known for browser compatibility tests, I can imagine that would be helpful for certain classes of jobs and consulting assignments.

Note this doesn't mean that I think the author should continue posting awesome content for free. It's his life, he can do what he wants with it! If it isn't generating the required job or life satisfaction, he should definitely quit doing it.

hoompadoompa• 10 years ago

Might be little off-topic, but here goes nuthing.

What is content, what is ad?

What is product, what is payment?

In not-so-distant future, the lines between those two would blur.

Whose 'fault' would be that outcome?

Big players will say, "Can't be helped, consumers want content without paying."

Small consumers will say, "Can't be helped, big players shove ads without giving product."

Wait, is this trend of content-morphing-into-ads a 'fault'?

Isn't it more likely it is a upcoming 'feature'?

Isn't it more likely it is the natural trends of things in the coming age where the private enterprises have swallowed the public space awhole?

Product is ads, content is ads.

Everything is ads.

Art is propaganda in 21th century style, perhaps?

The funny aspect of this trend is this,

Small people always pay.

First, you pay by providing your connectivity (Electricity, gadgets and so on)

Second, you pay by providing your credits (Fiat money by governing states)

Third, you pay by being surveiled.

Fourth, you pay be your attention.

Fifth, you pay by your time.

The emphasis seems to be on the second aspect of paying-the fiat money, while the greater dialogue is needed in the other FOUR aspects.

First, connectivity issue is already being conquered by big players; Google's baloons, drones, lasers, Facebook's 'Free' Basics

Third, the web is built in nature to be surveiled by powerful authority, whether that authority is legal(state) or technical(corporation) are irrelevant, as one submits to the other. Where the state is stronger, the corporation submits; where the corporation is stronger, the state submits.

Fourth, ADHD is not a disease or deviance. It is natural state of modern humanity, as humans are not evolved enough to be this much overwhelmed to consume what is being over-produced. Supply of attention-seeking-media is too much for even 8 billions.

Fifth, the only capital of proles are the time it has. As the labour is irrelevant by upcoming robot labour which never sleeps, tires, eats, shits nor complains about being not paid enough.

Now, this debate of 'adblocking war' is another misdirection by the big players.

You always pay, whether you block some 'ads' to see another 'ads'.

It matters little.

Little guys always pay.

lukifer• 10 years ago

I recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns the Future" for more on this subject; the takeaway is that an ecosystem that defaults to free is a recipe for the digital feudalism that now makes up most of the tech world, as only the largest companies can manage to derive enough revenue through selling data and eyeballs. (And "free" in this case includes low-margin paid services, such as Amazon and Uber.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F

The concept we're wrestling with comes down to Zero Marginal Cost: no one has to do any additional work when I view a web page or download a copy of a game. At first blush, it seems the first step to a post-scarcity world; instead, it creates a psychological barrier to buying, and a classic Tragedy of the Commons.

pikzen• 10 years ago

To reuse the words of another HN reader on the same topic: I don't care.

I don't care that it costs you money to host your website, and I don't care if you stop publishing. Other sources just as good will pop up sooner or later.

You get the ability to spread your word to the entire world in exchange, instead of just a closed circle of friends, or anything. That's why it costs you money. Yes, a website will be a net loss for you. From there on, you can either accept this loss or find other ways to monetise it. Sell books, sell software, put ads (hint: I'll be blocking your ads, because I don't care about them either), anything.

Now I am definitely guilty of not paying for apps on phones, but that's because having seen how terrible 95% of mobile apps are, even if yours is in the top 5%, I just won't trust that my investment is good. For all I know your app could be a total piece of crap. Not that I actually use my phone much more than calling people, sending messages and browsing the internet anyways.

exelius• 10 years ago

We all do things that we enjoy that may not make us money. We do them because we enjoy them.

The cardinal sin of the web is that it makes it really easy to take something that someone did for fun (and for free) and copy it for the benefit of people who might want it commercially. By doing this, you may be putting someone who makes a living selling the info you collect for free out of a job. This also means that if you do something for free, then start trying to charge for it, someone else is likely to start offering it for free and undercut you.

But we shouldn't stop people from sharing the results of their labors of love - it just means that the skill the professional had wasn't as valuable as they thought it was. At the same time, we should only do these things so long as we derive enjoyment from them, so if the author hates doing it, he should stop. He owes "the community" nothing.

dangoor2• 10 years ago

There are cases of individuals who make money charging for content (Ben Thompson comes to mind: https://stratechery.com/) and others who give away their content but have managed to put together revenue streams that don't annoy their users (http://daringfireball.net/).

If someone has unique content that other people want, especially as an individual rather than a multi-person business, there are ways to make money. It's not "baked into the web", so it may require being creative about how the offering is put together... but, it's still doable.

What makes Ben Thompson an interesting example is that there is no shortage of people writing about trends in tech. But he has a focus and style that are unique enough that people pay to subscribe to his updates.

yorik• 10 years ago

One nice thing of the internet is that it forces openness and rewards it.

If some site goes behind a paywall, what it really does is to remove itself from the internet, giving more visibility opportunities to people who want primarily to communicate and share ideas, instead of strategically monetizing content (or whatever it is called today).

Also, the author is doing some confusion on who feels entitled =)

Touche• 10 years ago

The author is confused about what is (monetarily) valuable content. The brutal truth is that text articles are plentiful, easy to produce and therefore worth close to nothing to users. If you don't give it away someone else will.

Hollywood movies, on the other hand, are valuable. So they get to change the web (Web DRM) to suit their business model.

egypturnash• 10 years ago

I suppose a Kickstarter campaign could work, but this would again cost me a lot of time working on something I’m not familiar with, and even if it succeeds I’d have to start thinking about next year’s Kickstarter campaign pretty quickly. Still, this might be a solution.
I added a donation link to my site-wide footer. So far the response has been minimal, though two or three people did send me small amounts. (Thanks!) But a donation drive needs a lot of attention as well — it won’t run itself.

Patreon. He wants Patreon. It combines the good parts of KS and a donation link, it runs itself a lot better than a PayPal donation widget or whatever.

louisphilippe• 10 years ago

Virtually all high quality content on the web is written by either a full-time practitioner who is trying to build a reputation or gain some amount of recognition.

For example:

Entrepreneur and investor bloggers such as Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, Brad Feld, Sam Altman, plus the dozens of founders who post their articles to Hacker News produce the best writing available on founding a business. They do this because if they provide good information, they build their own brand.*

The best posts on software engineering come from bloggers and Hacker News commenters who again, are trying to build their own brand.

The best posts economics or finance come from those actually working in the field, or from obsessed amateurs who spend hours each week studying the issues on their own.

The best posts on criminal justice issues comes from Peter Moskos, who was an actual Baltimore Cop, and is now a professor of criminal justice ( http://www.copinthehood.com/ ). Even if he charged micropayments for his posts, there is no way he is going to make money off of his site. Yet the information he provides is order of magnitude better than any journalist who has no domain knowledge of the subject matter.

Most beat reporters producing run-of-the-mill news are entirely dependent on their sources for information. If these beat reporters were simply paid by the sports team or institutions that they covered, and essentially worked as their communications office, it would be a more honest relationship and the quality of coverage would be no worse.

Basically, I don't see what the role in the world is for the professional, full-time "content" provider. There is simply no need for anyone to be an intermediary between the practitioner and the audience. If you are a professional practitioner, then the financial benefits in terms of building a brand dwarf any benefits from earning micropayments. Thus I don't think the existence of micropayments would result in any greater amount of high quality content.

* Note for the pedantic, this is not to imply that all content produced by people trying to improve their own reputation is good content. 98% of everything is crap.

nnq2• 10 years ago

Am I the only one who believes app stores should have a minimum mandatory price of like $5 (maybe geographically customizable)?!

And yes, you should also be allowed to publish free apps, but they should be really-free, so if you set your apps price to $0, you are forbidden to have any-kind of in-app purchases (and maybe even forced to be open-source). Want to do have the in-app-purchases: then put a goddam minimum price tag of $5 on you app and over that ask for purchases!

We should just create some thick and solid walls between "true free" and "paid/premium" stuff and destroy this murky area of "freemium" and whatever! Some people would want to shoot me for saying this, but even consumer-SaaS/PaaS-es like, uhm, Facebook, should be forced by law to charge a minimum fee of $1/moth or something if they are not "truly free" (eg. "if they make any kind of profit derived from their free users' data and attention).

icebraining2• 10 years ago

Define "make profit from the users attention". Would HN have to charge? It's certainly a valuable resource for YC, even if the profit is indirect. What about Wikipedia? Do donations count as profit? Should search engines have to charge?

By the way, you'd be destroying a whole lot of community-driven sites that charge for certain extra perks to keep the lights on.

nnq2• 10 years ago

...the "destroying" part seems like a pretty good thing imho. Setting some forests on fire to make room for some new sprouts seems pretty appealing :)

"Community destruction" in the online landscape is pretty much a synonym for "pushing people towards better communities where they are better off anyway"... So a good thing.

(And I don't see the place of Wikipedia and donations in this. Wikipedia is obviously not selling any in-app purchases and the software they run on is "open source". HN is also "true free". Even their platform is open-source: https://github.com/wting/hackernews not that this should count that much. And donations are obvious not profit, they are not even taxed as such. No ambiguity here.)

zeveb• 10 years ago

Is it really an original sin if ad-financed free content is, as the article indicates, a mere .275% of the online economy?

The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does.

I dunno, it makes a lot of sense to me: my phone has a screen which is under 11 sq. inches while my monitor is over 300 sq. inches, for a more than 28-fold difference in viewable area and hence game immersivity. I don't have a tablet handy to measure, but it's still small.

Moreover, when I use my desktop I have a full-featured input control surface, in the form of keyboard and mouse; in contrast, on a phone or tablet all I can do is tap & drag. That means that desktop games are more likely to be complex and engaging while still being usable.

Further, my desktop has many times the processing power and memory of my phone or tablet, which again means that games are more likely to be complex and engaging.

From my perspective, $25 is a steal for a desktop game and $1 is a bit of a rip-off for a phone game.

geon2• 10 years ago

I have had easily 2 orders of magnitude more fun with desktop games (CS, Portal, HL2, Mirrors Edge) than mobile ones.

tyingq• 10 years ago

ad-financed free content is, as the article indicates, a mere .275% of the online economy?

That's the percentage of advertising income as a fraction of something like "Internet GDP" which is misleading. For them to be comparable, you would have to pad the advertising figure to account for job creation, etc.

It's probably more interesting to compare total internet advertising revenue to total internet ecommerce revenue. For 2014, global internet advertising revenue was around $140 billion USD, where global B2C ecom was around $1400 billion USD. About a 1:10 ratio.

codingdave• 10 years ago

I make tools that are free to my audience. I also provide links to items that I know they will be buying anyway, if they are using my tools. They click the links, I get some money, everyone wins.

If someone is feeling like the effort they put into creating content is not returning enough value into their life, perhaps they should re-think creating that content in the first place.

ak39• 10 years ago

This is a straw man argument. Content providers who believe their content has value should build a pay wall to generate revenue.

api• 10 years ago

For the past few years I've increasingly started thinking that 'free' can be pathological.

The problem is that it's a lie. Everything takes effort to produce. Nothing is actually free. Sure you can give something away-- that's a gift. But it's not free.

Sometimes it's okay if the person or entity releasing something for free is intentional about that: "I'm going to do this because I feel like it and I expect nothing (tangible) in return" or the corporate equivalent of "we are going to make this free because it's part of our strategy or because we have nothing to lose by doing so."

Then you get one of two scenarios:

(1) The original honest intent was to make X free but now it's getting so much attention that it's becoming demanding. Now the person or entity releasing X has a choice between a number of bad options: keep it free and continue to sink time/money into it, abandon it, change its status to non-free, or find some indirect way to monetize it.

(2) "Free" was a lie from the get-go. It was just a growth hack, a gimmick. The intent was always to find some way to "flip the switch" and monetize.

The difference between these two scenarios is the original intent, but the end result is often quite similar.

Abandonment is always an option (at least with scenario #1), and that's how a lot of free things end up after the burnout sets in. But if abandonment isn't an option you're basically faced with the choice between making something non-free and indirectly monetizing it.

Revoking free status is unpopular and will probably lose you a lot of users. The strong temptation, especially given the success of this model, is indirect monetization.

That's where things get pathological. Indirect monetization means ads and surveillance, and on a bidirectional medium like the Internet ads basically mean surveillance. You're turning your users into a product and selling them out.

Unfortunately we've raised a generation to believe that "all information should be free, man!" This is leading us directly down a terribly Orwellian path-- to make the free lie work, vendors have to treat the user as a product.

Terr_4• 10 years ago

Free content entitlement, that’s what.

From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen. Sure, everyone still pays for the bytes, but consider how much less it costs, per-viewer, to distribute a paragraph on the web versus printed on paper.

Want to communicate quickly and cheaply, without paying for stamps or surcharges for expedited delivery? E-mail.

Can't find a publisher willing to take a golden-master and create thousands of CD-ROMs? Sell your own software online.

This sounds sober and serious, but it omits one crucial clause: the people who create free online content expect to get paid.

The real issue is that there are middlemen who promise "I will convert your consumer-visits to cash" that also expect to be paid. Many happen to be ad-networks, and the profit motive (both from producers and middlemen) has led towards practices that harm consumers and (indirectly, long-term) the producers.

Privacy invaded, malware distributed, computers slowed, load-times skyrocketing, etc. Absent a reaction from producers or consumers, the most-ruthless ad-schemes tend to rake the most profit, so it becomes a race-to-the-bottom.

In this sense, consumer-driven ad-blocking is ecologically-necessary to make that "Visitors-To-Cash" industry refocus on other mechanisms and better ways of interacting with their two main stakeholder groups. In a very broad sense, it's their job to find a better solution.

m52go2• 10 years ago

but consider how much less it costs, per-viewer, to distribute a paragraph on the web versus printed on paper.

From my understanding of publishing, most of the cost is in creation, editing, design, and marketing...not in actually printing it.

It's common to assume that electronic versions of paper media should be cheap (if not free) but that's very mistaken.

Terr_4• 10 years ago

True, but even some of those aspects are lessened, ex:

1. It makes sense to invest a lot to minimize defects (e.g. typos) before printing, but digitally it's much easier to issue a revision.

2. Marketing is less-critical for reaching "already interested" consumers, due to search-engines and the ease of passing links around.

3. Marketing is less-critical for pushing copies into "nearby retailers", because consumers can reach your presence directly.

jacquesm4• 10 years ago

From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen.

That should have read 'the internet' not 'the web', otherwise it is pretty accurate.

Terr_4• 10 years ago

It certainly includes more than just HTTP, but you've gotta be careful not to go too far in the other direction:

On an hardware/network level "the internet" was actually about tolerating more "middlemen", moving away from single-owner corporate or governmental networks and dedicated pipes.

fit2rule• 10 years ago

From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen.

I don't think that is quite correct. The Internet doesn't function, at all, without 'middlemen' - you can't send an email without involving a third-party, or even many third-parties sometimes. This message took rather a few middle-men to get to your eyeballs.

What I think is that the Internet expanded as rapidly as it did because it is far, far, far cheaper to be a middleman on the Internet than it is in the physical world. In other words, the capital required to get involved in the Internet is absolutely minor - anyone with a computer can expand the Internet horizon, cheaply and easily, for anyone else they care to share the service with.

Where this collides with the cultural reality that preceded the Internet (and this hot mix is still in states of turbulence) is that there was, previously, a huge liability proposition to handling other peoples' stuff for them. Capitalism depended on this liability in order to function (dialectic materialism) but yet we don't have such huge liabilities with the Internet. If someone drops your packet, chances are, someone else will forward it for you on the next, ultra-cheap, try.

So what I think is happening with the current state of the war for paying consumers is that we are swinging back and forth between points of supposed plenty and imposed rarity. Somewhere in that hot mix is the sweet spot where people are happy to pay for content that they're also happy to share freely...

davidgerard• 10 years ago

In which we are instructed as to why Wikipedia would be vastly improved by a paywall, apparently.

Seriously, does this guy expect us to buy into this?

kelvin0• 10 years ago

"The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does. It’s one of the minor mysteries of the mobile world(...)"

The barrier to entry in the mobile dev world is definitely lower than on PC/Console. Simply put, when you buy a PC game you can expect AAA content which necessitates vast amounts of resources (game studios?). Of course there are exceptions to the previous statement. But the memory and CPU constraints of a mobile platform simply cannot compete with what is available on PC. Its a simple equation, if you need more resources to crank out a product, its also is going to cost more.

lmm• 10 years ago

I think the teleology is correct. The web had competitors. Some of them weren't free. See which ones won.

If your collective action requires that everyone not do something that's fun and that ordinary people can do (blogging) then it is doomed to failure. As people realise there is no money in web content, there will be less web content. That's ok. There will still be more than enough.

pmontra• 10 years ago

I found an estimate that ad blockers will cost publishers $22 billion in revenue

My first reaction was that consumers will save $22 billions because those ads are eventually paid by them. Well, not really, because some of those money will go into paywalls. More or less? Instict says less because people don't want to pay. We'll see how it plays out.

dpc_pw• 10 years ago

For a desktop computer game, $/€25 is considered a reasonable price — and physical board games are often much more expensive. But as soon as people are invited to spend that money on an iOS or Android app, they soberly point out that that’s a LOT of money and they aren’t sure the app is worth it.

Mobile devices are terrible for playing games. I can't imagine playing something > 100 hours on a phone/tablet...

I actually stopped considering using mobile devices for anything that is not commute/alarm/on the go communication related too.

nas3• 10 years ago

It is such a terrible comparison, I'm surprised he used it. People who buy €25 PC games have very little in common with people who buy mobile games for $2 or buy gems or whatever for pennies.

SixSigma• 10 years ago

I did buy ppk on Javascript, I would never have done so without Quirks mode website. So there's that

jackcosgrove2• 10 years ago

I subscribe to Pandora to block the ads. That's a viable business model. I am stunned by the amount of crap that comes my way when I happen to browse without an adblocker. Advertisers went too far, and now there's a counterreaction. I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription model. The problem is that it's easier to dupe advertisers into thinking consumers will like content than it is to convince consumers to like content. If consumers really like content, they will subscribe to it. All that has happened is that the curtain on advertising effectiveness has been lifted, and buyers of ads are getting a better deal along with consumers. The media enjoyed decades of profitability due more to a lack of competition than a high-quality product. I don't pity them.

chc2• 10 years ago

I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription model.

It doesn't matter if nobody is preventing them from doing something that doesn't work. Making a living selling subscriptions to something that isn't ridiculously premium doesn't seem all that viable. The likely outcome is that you'll reach fewer people and still won't make enough to support yourself.

I was with a newspaper that converted to online subscriptions. Online ads were a relatively poor revenue generator, but subscriptions were even worse.

RUG3Y• 10 years ago

So what's the problem? Apparently, content creation isn't good business anymore.

yarrel• 10 years ago

There was no paywall for this page, so I refused to read it.

It's what the author would want.

iolothebard3• 10 years ago

I'd say JavaScript instead of a strongly typed client-side interpreter. Or maybe the ability to execute binary blobs that's cross browser compatible (similar to Flash, yeah I know, ActiveScript is essentially JS, or ActiveX) but sand-boxed fully and is open source to be integrated across browsers vs independent development.

decasteve• 10 years ago

This medium/protocol (HTTP) is built in a way that I can choose how I render the information I get using the programs of my choice or the code that I write. Those who wish to prevent this autonomy can create a new medium, device, protocol, file format, or program, to push their advertising so that there is no choice.

As long as I keep telling web sites "Do Not Track" me, and everyone keeps ignoring me, then I will continue to run ad blockers. If you want to stalk my movements, store the information, aggregate this data with everyone else's, and sell it so that advertising can follow me around through the documents that I read, then I will continue to block ads.

z3t4• 10 years ago

We badly need micro-payments! A publisher earn around 0.1 cents from ads when I read an article. I would have no problem paying that, even for mediocre "content".

It can work like when you vote on HN, you give 1 cent to the author and the one who submitted the article gets 10%. Or you get 1 cent for each like on Facebook, or 1 cent for each view on Youtube.

avivo• 10 years ago

What about Patreon or Blendle? These are at least two potential solutions right now which have proven effective in similar specific circumstances (though they may not solve the whole problem).

https://patreon.com gives you continuous paying supporters without the Kickstarter cycle (ideally it would be easy for a company to count supporting open source via patreon or equivalents in a way that's nice for accounting/taxes).

https://blendle.nl enables micropayments for articles, with the caveat that they are always refundable if you don't like them. More context: http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/a-money-back-guarantee-how-...

Animats• 10 years ago

There are people who think that because they were able to "monetize" content, they have a right to do so indefinitely. That may not be the case. If ad blocking makes the entire third party ad industry go away, that's a win.

(Thought for the day: the main use case for WebAssembly will be to lock down content tighter and break ad blockers. That was the main application for Flash in its later years. Flash died because abusive Flash became more prevalent than useful Flash, and everybody started blocking it. WebAssembly may be headed in that direction.)

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

Too many thoughts, not enough time. Generally, however, I disagree with the premis that "free" is an original sin.

Information faces two distinct quandries, at odds with one another. Stewart Brand's dictum is almost correct. Information access wants to be free, and any failure to meet this introduces tremendous social deadweight losses. At the same time, information providers, and most especialy those who create the initial works, must have sustinance.

Crucially, though, that is not the same as saying they must be paid by piecework.

Piecework payment is instead an awfully good way to create perverse incentives. Such as, say, disinformation, low-quality information, blogspam, listicles, demagoguery, fear-inducing press, angst-inspiring advertising (are you worried about your halatosis, ring around the collar, dandruff, greasies, fashion sense, car, dogfood, body oder, spotty glassware, non-squeezable toilet tissue, size and/or flattness of your television, long-distance and/or mobile calling packages, child's education, and/or erectile dysfunction?).

There are a few major trends in online publishing:

1. Free.

2. Advertising / Surveillance supported.

3. Paywall. Usually a subscription.

4. Micropayments -- a small but discrete fee per item viewed.

What's generally _not_ on the table is a large, carte blanche all-you-can-eat plan. Effectively a superbundled subscription. Call it a universal content syndication tax and remuneration system.

As of 2013, global ad spending topped $500 billion, with 20% of that, $100 billion, Internet advertising. Projected growth rates were roughly 5%/year.

http://adage.com/article/global-news/10-things-global-ad-mar...

That amounts to roughly $90 per person on Earth (total), or just under $20/person for Internet advertising. Or, if you felt (with some justification) that the roughly 1 billion people in the developed world (North America, Europe, Japan, Australia/New Zealand) might credibly be given the bill for this, $100/year.

That is: if you were taxed $100/year, all online content would be free.

Total OECD population is actually 1.27 billion, and GDP (that is, income), $48.8 trillion. Or $38,500 per person (roughly). Allocating our $100 proportionately by income would mean you'd pay $100 per $38,500 of personal income, a rate of 0.26%. Consider that a content tax.

Producers of content (online) could divide that pie. I don't have a strong sense of how many people are engaged in producing online material as a substantively full-time job. If it were a million people, this fund would suffice to provide a six-figure income to each.

The US BLS maintains a number of statistic related to labour, organised as a bureau (one might even think they could create an acronym based on this concept...). Including of professional authors and writers in the United States (roughly 1/3 of the OECD).

Median pay is $59k, total positions 136,500.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-a...

This includes advertising copywriters, but excludes journalists, editors, and technical writers.

Editors add another 117k positions, reporters 54k, technical writers 52k, though presumably most of these work directly for (or contract to) organisations needing specific technical writing tasks. Incomes are roughly comparable with writers, though generally lower, particularly for journalistys.

So we're at about 300,000 positions. My 1 million worldwide off-the-cuff estimate doesn't look too far from the mark. And we're doubling the average wage.

I haven't included musicians or film-makers, two other significant categories. But a bundled payments system would more than adequately finance these at least in a broadcast revenues substitution, from what I've seen here.

And yes, there are plenty of details over specific remuneration allocations. The point here is to show that replacing present ads spend would more than cover existing creative talent compensation.

Jordrok• 10 years ago

I think ad blockers will "destroy" the web in the same way that file sharing "destroyed" the entertainment industry. There will be skirmishes back and forth with no clear victor until new platforms spring up which allow for an alternative which is acceptable for both producers and consumers, if not ideal for anyone.

I just hope that it doesn't degenerate into the same toxic legal battles where the entrenched corporations go after individual consumers for ludicrous amounts of money. It's already starting to sound like that when you hear claims about the supposed $22+ billion that adblockers are costing the industry.

DenisAyumu• 10 years ago

I browsed the web for 15 years without an ad blocker because I could care less about harmless banners and text ads. It was a good time.

Then you added tracking cookies that followed me wherever I went.

Then you added sound to your ads.

Then you added video.

Then you added full screen popups, seizure-inducing flashing ads and banners that mimic'ed Windows alerts.

Then you added transparent Facebook "like" buttons over GUI elements.

You created the ad blocker phenomenon, not me.

barney54• 10 years ago

Yep. The problem is not free content entitlement, it's bad ads. Ads that are intrusive. Ads that are ugly. Ads that kill the user experience.

How much content is actually worth paying for?

Supraperplex2• 10 years ago

>How much content is actually worth paying for?<<

This is the real question in the pot.

cptskippy• 10 years ago

I'm looking forward to the day when no one remembers what quirksmode was. Not the site mind you, but where the site's name originated.

jkarneges• 10 years ago

  > Although I’m a fervent Twitter user and couldn’t do
  > without it, I am fundamentally unsympathetic to their
  > plight. Why? Because they don’t even allow me to pay.

Of course, App.net tried this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfaduCfqpuQ

I, too, wish we could find a way out of the current mess. Most of the comments here seem to be focusing on the content publisher aspect of things, but I believe free services like Twitter (and Google, etc) are an even greater problem because of their important utility and limited alternatives.

adamrezich• 10 years ago

The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does. It’s one of the minor mysteries of the mobile world, and I hope a competent psychologist will come up with an explanation one day.

Phone screens are physically smaller than computer screens. I honestly think that's the underlying psychology

MiddleEndian• 10 years ago

Desktop apps and games are substantially more powerful and usable. There are no mobile equivalents to Photoshop or Starcraft.

strathmeyer• 10 years ago

entitlement — an unearned privilege

Hm that's the exact opposite of what my dictionary said. Now who's acting entitled?

Debugreality• 10 years ago

There is also I think an issue with enough content for free. At some point there is enough free games in a genre or enough free information on a topic that only people very passionate about the genre or topic will be willing to pay.

jbpetersen• 10 years ago

I don't expect there will ever be a lack of high quality content produced for free by hobbyists.

Instead of pointing your analytic engines at finding the perfect ad to send my way, why not let me pay you to find me the best content instead?

The web's original sin

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