The "End of Advertising" on the web is something I hear fairly often, and the argument that paying for content is the only solution follows soon after. Unfortunately, both history and all of our data suggests otherwise.
For example, the mobile app ecosystem (the only large scale experiment we've run in online media since the web) started with a pay-for-use business model in the form of paid apps. While this worked for a while, it quickly gave way to free apps supported by advertising or other business models. Today, unless you are a game, it is almost impossible to build a business using pay-for-use exclusively. Reversing to a free model was forced by the low cost of entry into the market and resulting commoditization of mobile apps. You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free.
I'm not a huge supporter of online ads and I do think the industry needs to improve. However, we continue to see that it is the only stable economic model for online media considering the volume and diversity the model needs to cover. Until someone shows something else working at scale, let's not throw away the only thing that is working.
You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free.
If that's true, and at the same time people dislike adverts enough that a significant proportion will refuse to interact with them or even block them, then the market won't generate enough money to pay for the production of those apps. In the short term people will pay to make those apps by subsidising them with investment money (and lose it all if they don't make any money back), but in the long term we simply won't have people making the apps.
At that point the market will be underserved, customers who have a demand for the product will start to pay, and the pay-for business model starts working, driven by revenue rather than DAUs and ad impressions.
There's no reason to believe the end for advertising means the end of media. There is a demand for the products, and suppliers will continue to provide such products. What's needed is a working business model that both sides of the market are happy with. That doesn't appear to be advertising-lead.
I'd be interested in your feedback on my site (in my profile).
It is advertising-driven but I maintain some standards which my readers have appreciated: ads must relevant, not animated, and they are self-hosted. At this point I don't think advertisers have had any issues with those rules and because of my repeat customers, I believe they get the results they are looking for.
It might be possible to charge readers, but I'm more interested in trying out good advertising practices instead.
Not OP but I'm privacy conscious and have multiple restrictive add-ons installed in Firefox so I had a look. Here's a screenshot of how your most recent article appears with Firefox + uBlock Origin + NoScript + Privacy Badger - not bad! - https://i.imgur.com/FhH0vkx.jpg
The site loaded very quickly and the top menu worked fine with JavaScript disabled. The ads in the right sidebar aren't explicitly marked as ads but it's pretty obvious what they are. I don't mind visiting a site like this and seeing a mix of original content and ads, all of which are relevant.
If more sites followed you lead here, more people like me would see ads. And if they upped their technical game and used server logging to measure visits instead of outsourcing it to third-party analytics providers, they would have a more complete picture of who is visiting their site.
I've read your site before as it happens. I love a bit of architectural design. Thanks for running it. Regarding the ads, they're not especially intrusive and they're in line with the content as far as visual style goes, but I still find them distracting enough that I'd block them if I visited the site regularly.
>You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free.
ad supported ≠ free
Ads being a huge privacy issue, I prefer to stay away from ad supported. Then again the mobile app ecosystem experiment is flawed as people like me saw it was a trap and stayed away from it, so the results are biased because they miss the people who actually care about privacy.
The only mobile ecosystem I experimented with was getting apk from f-droid then loading them manually on a smartphone that was never online (no wifi, no bluetooth, no 3G or later)
For example, the mobile app ecosystem (the only large scale experiment we've run in online media since the web) started with a pay-for-use business model in the form of paid apps. While this worked for a while, it quickly gave way to free apps supported by advertising or other business models. Today, unless you are a game, it is almost impossible to build a business using pay-for-use exclusively. Reversing to a free model was forced by the low cost of entry into the market and resulting commoditization of mobile apps. You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free.
I'm not a huge supporter of online ads and I do think the industry needs to improve. However, we continue to see that it is the only stable economic model for online media considering the volume and diversity the model needs to cover. Until someone shows something else working at scale, let's not throw away the only thing that is working.