The Web started out life in 1990 with information that was untainted by commercial bias. There was no money to be made so people wrote whatever they believed. The Great Age of Internet Advertising, from the second half of the 1990s until around 2013, poured money into web publishing but in such a way that publishers could still write whatever they thought because advertising revenue tracked audience size. The anti-reader behavior of some publishers and advertisers has resulted in the current Age of the Ad Blocker. It is hard to imagine many readers taking the trouble to white-list favorite sites and/or sites that display relevant and unobtrusive advertising.
Publishers still want to get paid. Does this mean the advertising will increasingly be woven into the content in ways that are impossible for ad blockers to detect and thus perhaps impossible for humans to detect? Consider a car magazine. If they can’t make money from running ads, why not get paid by Toyota to write “the latest Camry is much better than the current Honda Accord” (or vice versa, of course)? In that case how will a reader ever be able to trust anything?
[Of course I recognize that the “good old days” weren’t so good, e.g., “A Whopping 20% Of Yelp Reviews Are Fake”]
The Internet user’s seemingly insatiable desire to make sure that those who create; musicians, journalists, news organizations, TV and movie actors and directors, etc won’t get paid anything for their efforts is misguided. Ad blocking and music/movie “file trading” are examples of this behavior.
If there is no money in it, the quality will certainly suffer.
Every single proposed micropayment system has completely and utterly failed. Anyone remember Peppercoin?
If there were a standard way to pay $0.001 for browsing each content item I think a lot of people would allow their browsers to pay as they surfed, if it meant no ads and that the actual authors got all the money. I know I would.
And then the advertisers might have some real incentive to stop trying to make ads as obnoxious as possible, and make them actually pleasant and informative.
The reason micropayments have failed is a mystery to me, it still seems like a fine idea.
Henry-
Micropayments may be a good idea but people don’t want to pay for something they think should be free. Same reason newspapers have ads, methinks.
I’ve been thinking about the way to do micropayments, and probably the way to do it would be a standard internet subscription, which is collected and then distributed to site owners on a formula based on site traffic.
Everyone pays for internet access as it is. Essentially the internet access fee should be divided into three parts, one to pay for infrastructure costs, one for profit to the service providers, and one to go to the content providers. This may result in somewhat higher chargers for internet access, or maybe not, depending on how much the service providers currently profit and how strongly they can defend their current rate of profit. But currently none of this money goes to the content providers.
“Consider a car magazine. If they can’t make money from running ads, why not get paid by Toyota…”
Why not both? Back in the print era, car magazines were known never to be too harsh to car manufacturers, esp. American ones. Look at back issues of car mags from the Malaise Era (the ’70s-’80s) when Detroit was turning out poorly running unreliable rust buckets and you’ll see nothing but praise for the most outrageous clunkers.
Same thing for stereo magazines, camera mags, etc. – if a publication is too harsh on the products they are reviewing, the manufacturers won’t advertise in their publications (and if they don’t advertise, who will?), their reporters won’t get invited to press junkets, etc.
It’s honestly interesting that you think this sort of paid-for news publishing isn’t the NORM yet, when it certainly has been for at least a couple of years. Consumer Reports was outed for this sort of thing a decade ago. And that’s just the obvious side. The more-sinister aspect of this trend is that there’s NOTHING that rises to the top of supposedly-egalitarian social media sites that isn’t being gamed for someone’s benefit. We supposedly live in a free society in the US, yet all popular forms of communication have been so completely subsumed that I think the Chinese leaders are probably jealous of how much mainstream thought is being manipulated by so few. In my opinion, the only avenue for real information left are personal sites like yours. I have a feed reader filled with them, but they are rare these days, and getting rarer by the year.
South park recently touched on this topic. Here’s a funny clip on the battle against the ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z696bTiP8Ro
In the past, when the world’s information was not searchable, advertisements and commercials helped get the word out. But now if I want something, I don’t need someone bashing my head every 15mins to tell me about their great new product (which in all likelihood, I don’t want or need). If I need something, then I search for it on the internet, and better yet, I can comparison shop and avoid impulse buys. I have successfully insulated myself from most ads by not buying magazines/newspapers, running adblockers and reading all my articles on the internet. I no longer subscribe to cable (or telephone – no more telemarketers) and get all my videos and news via the internet through various sources (youtube/vimeo/pbs/usenet binaries/free tv sites).
The other question to be asked is, do we even need advertisement anymore? I was just recently looking for dinosaur toys for my kids for Christmas. On youtube, I found the manufacturer’s 30 second commercial but that left me a bit unconvinced. Then I found 3 minute product review that showed me all the features and pro’s/con’s of the toy. This youtube video was made by a person who makes many toy reviews and I assume makes some money from producing these videos. This is a free and more informative advertisement than the 30 second commercial that the manufacturer paid to an advertisement agency, using a recipe sales approach designed for 1980s cartoon hours on TV.
Aside from Google, Facebook and Amazon, all the other ads providers have no real context for their targeting.
So, the most I can get is ads for products that I’ve checked or even purchased on Amazon.
In other words, they are no that relevant and hence not that helpful. Where is the service provided?
>Does this mean the advertising will increasingly be woven into the content in ways that are impossible for ad blockers to detect and thus perhaps impossible for humans to detect? Consider a car magazine. If they can’t make money from running ads, why not get paid by Toyota to write “the latest Camry is much better than the current Honda Accord” (or vice versa, of course)? In that case how will a reader ever be able to trust anything?
This is already a thing and it’s called Native Advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising). It’s already a problem but it’s very noticeable from video bloggers as it’s hard for them act on camera true enthusiasm for the product.
Here is a relevant article from one of my favorite tech writers http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2491712,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03079TX1K0000584
Native advertising has been rampant in the last several years. From what I’ve read New York Times “lead by example” and most other publishers followed soon. This does not appear to be in a a gray ethics area in journalism anymore.