"If you are not paying for it..."

http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256046

by acangiano • 16 years ago

142 91 16 years ago

gkoberger• 16 years ago

We've created a culture where we want everything for free, even going as far as to block ads with AdBlock... and then we complain when things don't go our way.

This can't be sustained forever. If we want legitimate content producers to take the Internet seriously as a platform, we need to start forking over money.

Edit: To anyone replying to me, we can debate this forever. The Chris Anderson v Malcolm Gladwell debate proved it's a controversial topic. However, I don't know where you're getting "close to zero." A good engineer or other employee is at least $100k a year. It may cost almost nothing for new headlines to show up on Digg every day, however Diggs 100 or so employees all need to put food on the table somehow.

kiba15• 16 years ago

On the contrary, free stuff is the overriding trend for stuff that have the marginal cost of replication close to zero. It is not so much culture that is driving it, but the economic forces that does.

Also, the allegedly common complainers who only want free stuff is unquantified. You will need some evidence to show that most people are conscious freeloaders who complain a lot.

siglesias4• 16 years ago

The marginal cost of replication for things like news, drugs, and software, especially software, have always been close to zero, and your economics would suggest that these would have trended toward marginal costs of a few bucks per CD, but that's the wrong way to think about it. Software has large development costs that must be recouped, so marginal cost doesn't really play into what's going on here.

Xk• 16 years ago

I disagree, and your comment is a case in point. An incredibly large portion of the valuable content on the internet is written by people who expect no payoff in the traditional sense of the word. You don't get anything money by writing that comment, yet you write it none the less. This is becoming more and more the case.

_delirium4• 16 years ago

Indeed, if anything I notice a slight negative correlation. The most unabashedly "capitalist" content providers, in the sense of doing it mainly for the money, are the tabloidish blogs: gawker, valleywag, gizmodo, etc. They produce pretty mediocre content (and we don't even have to discuss the content farms).

The top content imo comes mostly from folks not being paid, at least not being paid directly for the content: university professors, essayists like Paul Graham, tech bloggers like Yosef K, and so on, who write about stuff that interests them, and publish it online. Some of them do some low-level monetization of their content via Amazon links and a few ads, but many don't even do that. It's not a pure anti-correlation, because there is good commercial stuff and crappy free stuff, but I certainly don't see a strong positive correlation either.

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

we need to start forking over money

I like how you say we should pay, as opposed to we should ask users to pay. The funny thing about internet entrepreneurs is we want to get everything for free, yet charge users for something.

acangiano• 16 years ago

> The funny thing about internet entrepreneurs is we want to get everything for free

On the contrary, I'd say that entrepreneurs love rewarding fellow entrepreneurs who create a valuable service or product.

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

> We've created a culture where we want everything for free, even going as far as to block ads with AdBlock... and then we complain when things don't go our way.

I think you're overestimating the power of AdBlock. In fact, I know friends who aren't tech savvy to whom I've shown AdBlock, and when they get a new computer, they don't even remember to install AdBlock. We tend to be annoyed by web ads because we're tech savvy, but many average users couldn't care less that they're being bombarded by a constant stream of corporate propaganda.

Because of this, while it might be exceedingly difficult to monetize a site geared towards tech savvy users (Reddit, for example), many other sites (like Facebook) get by just fine.

edanm2• 16 years ago

I'm a techie who doesn't use AdBlock. And I've actually noticed something very different. I rarely look at ads on most sites, but on Tech-oriented sites, the ads tend to be much better. This is because they're more focused on my niche.

For example, I've clicked on dozens of ads on Stack Overflow, and even subscribed to a few things that way. I honestly think turning on AdBlock is depriving me of valuable information, on those sites at least.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

> Diggs 100 or so employees all need to put food on the table somehow.

I think that's the real problem here. People don't give a damn whether Digg's employees can afford food; they want what they want, when they want it, and for the price that they want it. That, or they expect someone else to do the paying for it.

greenlblue2• 16 years ago

There is another reason people expect stuff to be free and it's because business people in general don't know of any other way of framing things. The last 50 years has been all about advertising and so the business culture knows how to tie ads with content but they don't know how to create great content and convince users to pay for it.

eru3• 16 years ago

Are you sure? I buy my books without ads.

Alex39172• 16 years ago

"This can't be sustained forever. If we want legitimate content producers to take the Internet seriously as a platform, we need to start forking over money."

Right now there's only a tiny trickle of good content being created on the Internet. Of the hundreds of thousands of posts being written each day, there are maybe 5 at best that don't completely suck. What we really need is a system where the authors of the best 25 articles of the day each take home 100K or so. For the nominal cost of less than a billion dollars a year we could spark an intellectual renaissance to rival any other in human history.

billybob2• 16 years ago

"Of the hundreds of thousands of posts being written each day, there are maybe 5 at best that don't completely suck."

I'm sorry, but that's just silly. 1) You're not reading the whole internet, 2) you're not the intended audience for much of what's written, and 3) opinions vary.

Are you proposing we replace the free market of authors and readers with some central judging authority? How would these people filter through all this content, on what basis would they judge it, and how would they be funded? How do we protected against government meddling and political bias?

This is a pretty big problem you're creating to replace a system which, basically, seems to work fine. It would be nice to help creators make money, but you can't fix human taste.

xiongchiamiov2• 16 years ago

This is why we have Flattr, although I don't think it'll get up to 100K daily payments.

nollidge• 16 years ago

The only reason I use AdBlock is to eliminate distractions from the page. I don't mind being marketed to, but I do mind it when it gets in the way.

_delirium4• 16 years ago

Sometimes even if you are paying for it, if someone else is paying more. For example, newspaper subscribers are closer to being products than customers, since ad revenue is typically much larger than subscription revenue.

wuputah• 16 years ago

Great example. I delivered newspapers for a summer, and I realized that the cost of the newspaper was about the same as what I made for delivering it, as I got paid per subscriber. This doesn't factor in the fact that I was working for a third party company, whose goal was to made a profit on the operation.

So, it seemed the paper actually pays more just to get the paper delivered than the subscriber paid for it. Advertising pays for everything else.

(I'm curious how newsstands and other outlets work, but I'd have to guess that the papers/magazines are provided at very low cost as well, with most of the price on the sale going to the stand operator.)

_delirium4• 16 years ago

I recall reading somewhere that this is one reason there's so many ways to get magazines for free via various promotions and third-party deals and frequent-flyer miles and such. Magazines charge mostly as a way of convincing advertisers that their readership numbers are legit, rather than for the actual revenue--- if you ship 100,000 copies to people who actually shelled out $30 each, that's more convincing evidence to advertisers that people are actually reading it, versus if you mailed out 100,000 free copies. But magazines are always trying to game the system by finding various ways to get magazines to people while having them still count as "paying subscriber".

nanairo2• 16 years ago

Very true. As I've been studying this topic lately I can even provide you some hard data.

A financially stable newspaper gets around 75-80% of its gross revenue from advertisements. That's why advertisers have so much power over content, even news content. I don't know the exact figure for magazines, and it could very well be lower, but this should give you an idea.

In fact if you check the literature you'll see that a common idea is that newspapers are in the business of selling customers to advertisers, and they will try to attract a certain type of reader in order to get certain type of advertisers.

fortes• 16 years ago

> A financially stable newspaper gets around 75-80% of its gross revenue from advertisements.

In the glory days, a solid 30-40% of revenue was from classified ads, which were _way_ overpriced, but the only game in town.

You may find this of interest: http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2010/09/newspaper-ad-sales-hea...

zach2• 16 years ago

This needs to be memorialized. Understanding this, of course, explains Google's approach to customer, er, consumer service.

Much to their nonpaying consumers' chagrin, naturally. Because consumers' support and service expectation does scale with the price they pay, but not all the way to zero!

On the business side, nonpaying consumers are cheaper to scale up than any product you can sell. Which is a blessing and a curse...

bpm140• 16 years ago

The guy who said it is Andrew Lewis. Might I suggest "Lewis's Law"?

zach2• 16 years ago

I would've thought there would be a legitimate claim on the name already, but it appears not. Lewis's Law it is!

michaelfairley• 16 years ago

Google still isn't particularly good at dealing with their paying customers though. AdWords support is OK at best, but lack of support basically killed the Nexus One.

kiba15• 16 years ago

This is negative news and media is biased toward negative stuff. Moreover, it is a mention of a few well known companies and sites.

I hypothesize that the players are merely changing and that their strategy of getting large userbase fail because the quality of content is falling, rather than rising, thus decreasing the traffic quality.

This is also in conjuncture with the hypothesis that specialized interests tend to convert better than general social interests because specialized interests tend to have product related items they like to buy.

natep• 16 years ago

I think you're responding to the article, when the post links to a comment by blue_beetle, FYI.

pbw2• 16 years ago

Even if you are paying for it you might be the product being sold. Consider hip night club or a star trek convention, in both cases people pay to get in, but the crowd is really the main attraction. People spend hours getting ready for these things. I'm told.

Any crowd is going to be part of the product being sold and the market you sell into. Any crowd, online or off, is going to draw performers, whether for free or professional.

People like to be seen, they like to be noticed, they like to contribute. I don't see user-generated sites as some kind of slave mine. Most people are online of their own free will.

Qz• 16 years ago

Amended: "If you're not paying what it's worth, ..."

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

Apple announces on stage as part of its keynotes how many credit cards it has on file. In other words they're selling you right there in the open. Can you really argue that you're getting your contract AT&T iPhone for less than it's worth?

jbert• 16 years ago

...you're either the product being sold or you're enjoying a publically provided service whose costs are met by the taxpaying base.

run4yourlives• 16 years ago

i.e. You.

ugh• 16 years ago

That seems like an overly simplistic portrayal to me. You might not pay anything for using Google but that doesn’t mean that Google can do whatever they want.

The relationship between Google and yourself wouldn’t change much if they did away with the ads and charged you money. They want to keep you happy whether you are a customer (i.e. directly pay them money) or not. Paying customer or ad target, it doesn’t really matter all that much.

Two sided markets with their network effects are certainly fascinating [+] but they are also nothing new, nothing extraordinary and certainly not abusive.

[+] It is possible to get negative prices (whenever you get anything for free you can immediately start to look for the two sided market and network effects) and prices that would otherwise be above monopoly prices.

"If you are not paying for it..."

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