We'll know that ad supported content is dead when AOL, or "Aol.", or whatever, and Demand Media, go bust. They will not be missed.
Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime.
Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes; Wired, no. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes; pundits, no.
The trend we're seeing in advertising is that only Google and Facebook really matter to advertisers. The third-party ad industry is mostly bottom feeders, and it's getting worse. (See earlier article today about Forbes distributing malware.)
As an advertiser, yes absolutely Google and Facebook are king. No one else even comes close to touching their level of audience segmentation, results reporting, and knowing that their inventory is good from both a viewability/advertiser standpoint as well as a half decent customer experience standpoint.
I know it's not truly micropayments, but a number of podcasts I listen to support themselves via Patreon, and most of those are from people I'd qualify as pundits.
Just a small point about micropayments. The current system is not micro. Micro is hundredths of a cent or less. At that price point it might be possible to use them. Sadly not even bitcoin (afaik) can handle such transactions. Transaction costs are too high under every system. Even IBM's research- a few years ago, bottomed out at 25 cents.
Seems awkward (and pricey, as mentioned) to handle an actual transaction each time. Why not just have a browser extension that aggregates and bills monthly? Like the opposite of an ad-blocker, an ad-unlocker.
How would you do that without needing a way to deal with many of the same issues: to authorize every pageview, track account balances, deal with fraud, and correct errors?
You definitely couldn't afford to interact with the financial system (ACH, credit cards, or even Bitcoin) for every pageview, but you'd have the same challenges to solve.
Not 100%. But what about 80%? Even 50%? Is it still worth it for publishers? The greatest cost of digital fraud in a case like this would be perceptual... given the current paradigm.
The cost of fraud would be roughly the same as browsing with an adblocker now.
But probably the hardest part of creating any system like this is getting everyone on board at once. There's a big incentive not to join the system. (People who don't want to or can't be bothered to join will visit your site instead.)
I think it would be quite straight forward to develop an extension that does client-side analytics of your browsing history, just to show you which sites you visit and how much time you spend per url/ TLD. It would be on your honor to choose to give 'patronage' and the code is auditable as a browser extension.
frictionless. if i had an extension that let me put an amount into it at the begining, and then let me divide up who i thought was worthy of my pledge at the end of the month... no need to find tip jars and make a bunch of payments
Economist and FT, yes. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, I'm not so sure any more, unless everywhere ends up paywalled.
Haven't we all got used to getting our news buffet style? We'll take a few articles from the BBC, the Guardian, the NYT and the Washington Post? Twenty years ago I'd have a broadsheet paper to read on the commute and over lunch. Now I'll skim multiple quality news sites to get a similar amount and breadth of content. I believe, mistakenly perhaps, that I get a better spread that way.
Micropayments don't cut it a) because I don't want all your content like I once did, and b) you want far, far too much per article compared to the £1 or two to buy your actual paper output with dozens or hundreds of articles, but nowadays I might only read a couple a day, or even a week, instead of twenty+ daily.
It is much easier for 'bottom feeders' to exist outside of walled gardens (e.g. Facebook, Google). That doesn't mean that most of the 3rd party ad industry are 'bottom feeders'.
The negative side of ads is much more pronounced amongst the 3rd party ad industry because there are easier attack vectors in the open market than in walled gardens. There are large 3rd party channels that have clean inventory, honest clients, and perform well for advertisers (Taboola, Outbrain, Criteo, AdRoll, etc).
I always thought the adsense content network was just a way for google to avoid paying publishers directly for listing their pages in their results. All content, including "bottom feeders" is valuable to Google. I believe it will come to a point that google will start paying publishers directly by a portion of the money they made by having their content in their results.
As for facebook, I think it is overselling its ad business.
Overselling how? I'm interested what you mean by this - that's a pretty hand-wavey response for the main business model of the 5th most valuable company.
I wonder how long Google is going to continue to matter. Adblockers can filter out Google search ads, and if Google decided to make their ads "stealthy" it would probably precipitate a fairly large user-base exodus.
Facebook on the other hand has fairly strong lock-in, though I expect their engagement numbers would take a big hit.
Comments
We'll know that ad supported content is dead when AOL, or "Aol.", or whatever, and Demand Media, go bust. They will not be missed.
Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime.
Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes; Wired, no. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes; pundits, no.
The trend we're seeing in advertising is that only Google and Facebook really matter to advertisers. The third-party ad industry is mostly bottom feeders, and it's getting worse. (See earlier article today about Forbes distributing malware.)
As an advertiser, yes absolutely Google and Facebook are king. No one else even comes close to touching their level of audience segmentation, results reporting, and knowing that their inventory is good from both a viewability/advertiser standpoint as well as a half decent customer experience standpoint.
I know it's not truly micropayments, but a number of podcasts I listen to support themselves via Patreon, and most of those are from people I'd qualify as pundits.
Just a small point about micropayments. The current system is not micro. Micro is hundredths of a cent or less. At that price point it might be possible to use them. Sadly not even bitcoin (afaik) can handle such transactions. Transaction costs are too high under every system. Even IBM's research- a few years ago, bottomed out at 25 cents.
Seems awkward (and pricey, as mentioned) to handle an actual transaction each time. Why not just have a browser extension that aggregates and bills monthly? Like the opposite of an ad-blocker, an ad-unlocker.
This has probably been discussed somewhere...
How would you do that without needing a way to deal with many of the same issues: to authorize every pageview, track account balances, deal with fraud, and correct errors?
You definitely couldn't afford to interact with the financial system (ACH, credit cards, or even Bitcoin) for every pageview, but you'd have the same challenges to solve.
It's all done client side? Except auth.
The client can't be trusted.
Not 100%. But what about 80%? Even 50%? Is it still worth it for publishers? The greatest cost of digital fraud in a case like this would be perceptual... given the current paradigm.
The cost of fraud would be roughly the same as browsing with an adblocker now.
But probably the hardest part of creating any system like this is getting everyone on board at once. There's a big incentive not to join the system. (People who don't want to or can't be bothered to join will visit your site instead.)
I think it would be quite straight forward to develop an extension that does client-side analytics of your browsing history, just to show you which sites you visit and how much time you spend per url/ TLD. It would be on your honor to choose to give 'patronage' and the code is auditable as a browser extension.
If it's "on your honor", why not just ask for donations?
frictionless. if i had an extension that let me put an amount into it at the begining, and then let me divide up who i thought was worthy of my pledge at the end of the month... no need to find tip jars and make a bunch of payments
a tip on upvote button?
Economist and FT, yes. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, I'm not so sure any more, unless everywhere ends up paywalled.
Haven't we all got used to getting our news buffet style? We'll take a few articles from the BBC, the Guardian, the NYT and the Washington Post? Twenty years ago I'd have a broadsheet paper to read on the commute and over lunch. Now I'll skim multiple quality news sites to get a similar amount and breadth of content. I believe, mistakenly perhaps, that I get a better spread that way.
Micropayments don't cut it a) because I don't want all your content like I once did, and b) you want far, far too much per article compared to the £1 or two to buy your actual paper output with dozens or hundreds of articles, but nowadays I might only read a couple a day, or even a week, instead of twenty+ daily.
It is much easier for 'bottom feeders' to exist outside of walled gardens (e.g. Facebook, Google). That doesn't mean that most of the 3rd party ad industry are 'bottom feeders'.
The negative side of ads is much more pronounced amongst the 3rd party ad industry because there are easier attack vectors in the open market than in walled gardens. There are large 3rd party channels that have clean inventory, honest clients, and perform well for advertisers (Taboola, Outbrain, Criteo, AdRoll, etc).
I always thought the adsense content network was just a way for google to avoid paying publishers directly for listing their pages in their results. All content, including "bottom feeders" is valuable to Google. I believe it will come to a point that google will start paying publishers directly by a portion of the money they made by having their content in their results.
As for facebook, I think it is overselling its ad business.
Overselling how? I'm interested what you mean by this - that's a pretty hand-wavey response for the main business model of the 5th most valuable company.
I believe they are not very effective, but that's just my opinion.
I wonder how long Google is going to continue to matter. Adblockers can filter out Google search ads, and if Google decided to make their ads "stealthy" it would probably precipitate a fairly large user-base exodus.
Facebook on the other hand has fairly strong lock-in, though I expect their engagement numbers would take a big hit.