I still think the only serious options are paywalls ("pay with your money") and ads ("pay with your attention"), and in the case of the web the value of moving fluidly from site to site pushes strongly for ads.
It's true that a lot of content is supported by ads and would not exist without ads.
I want that content not to exist.
There are other ways for content to be funded:
Those mechanisms lead to higher quality and higher consumer surplus. There is not a shortage of content, there is a shortage of curation. Ads, as a funding mechanism, incentivize clickbait and virality. That causes publications to find ways to get attention, and those ways are bad for readers, but a lot of people just can't help but have their attention drawn despite consuming that content being a net negative for them. And then ads make it more of a net negative for them. And that ad-funded content does its best to pull attention away from higher-quality content with less money for promotion.
Jeff touched on this, but I want to underline the point more strongly: How do the sharing platforms themselves (Reddit / YouTube / etc) exist without ads? To be clear, I’m no fan of the audience-distorting incentives of ads… but the infrastructure for free content isn’t exactly free, either, and we need to pay for that somehow or else that otherwise-funded content doesn’t get distributed (and then the lack of distribution inherently prevents donation / patronage models from working). I’m having trouble seeing another realistic way for that to work?
We could look at Substack‘s model and say that the donation/patronage mechanisms should get subsumed by the distribution platforms, who’d take a percentage off the top of that revenue. If there are enough donations then they can afford to support the platform. As Jeff says, we’ll see how that works out for Substack; in theory it seems like this model could work, but as of now Substack is still losing millions per year. As for your other mentioned platforms: At a glance, it seems pretty clear that Reddit (which has platform-supporting ads) is still losing money (given that they were losing money the last time they shared info in 2021, and are now studiously avoiding all discussion of profitability while ostensibly preparing for an IPO), which helps explain their motivation for shenanigans like the current API pricing fiasco. YouTube is the one site of the three that is making money, and it probably only became outright profitable in the pandemic era as they increased their already-high ad loads (and expanded supplemental product lines like YT Music and TV).
post on reddit/here/etc for free
Most of those sites (and very near 100% when weighted by traffic) are funded by ads, though.
There are people on youtube supported by patreon and donations. There are periodicals/substacks/etc supported by subscriptions.
Most of these have a model where some visitors pay while others don't pay and see ads. Substack is an exception, with free users not seeing any ads, but I'd bet that this is just them being new (most new sites deprioritize advertising to maximize growth) and that in a few years they'll show ads to free users, limit how many articles you can read as a free user, or both.
There is not a shortage of content, there is a shortage of curation.
I think this is mostly not true? Unless you want to call standard journalism curation?
But this is also in the world today, one which has ads. I think you'd need to claim that even if we, say, banned ads, we'd still not see a shortage of content?
I think the only content left would be the actual art. not the stuff that only deserves the name content.
I am sort of surprised that there's no equivalent of "spotify for websites." It's easy for me to imagine a service offering an ad-supported and paid subscription that streams otherwise-paywalled websites to you, distributing the revenue as a fraction of clicks or something like that, and only displaying ads on the websites to the ad-supported tier of users. Is there some enormous technological or security hurdle that makes this much harder to do for streaming websites than for streaming music?
The big websites make more money by selling ads directly than by selling them over a federated system. If you pay the New York Times directly for your ads and the New York Times writes a story that annoys you, you can call the New York Times to complain. On the other hand, if the New York Times wouldn't sell ads directly but instead use some federated ad system, ad buyers couldn't do that.
We currently don't really have bands you have their own homepage where you can listen to the music of the band and the band makes money with selling ads.
There's Apple News+ that gives you one paid subscription and then allows you to access a bunch of otherwise-paywalled websites.
In my mind (which might be wrong; I'm not particularly knowledgable and have not thought about this deeply) the big issue with ads is the attention economy stuff that Cal Newport talks about. Monetizing (primarily) via ads means that you are competing for eyeballs, which is bad when things like outrage and jealousy prove to attract the most eyeballs instead of things like knowledge and empathy. Well I guess that doesn't automatically make it bad. It's just that it's an undesirable consequence.
Wait, but you can't just talk about compensating content creators without looking on the other side of the picture. Imagine a business that sells some not-very-good product at too-high price. They pay Google for clever ad targeting, and find some willing buyers (who end up dissatisfied). So the existence of such businesses is a net negative to the world, and is enabled by ad targeting. And this might not be an edge case: depending on who you ask, most online ads might be for stuff you'd regret buying.
Talking about ads online I would often get a response that as someone working in ads I was bound to support my employment. I'm now a year out from working in ads and very unlikely to return to the industry: with the economic bias removed but still knowing the industry reasonably well, what do I think of it all now?
My overall views haven't changed very much. I still think the only serious options are paywalls ("pay with your money") and ads ("pay with your attention"), and in the case of the web the value of moving fluidly from site to site pushes strongly for ads. And for sites that are supported by ads it's worth working to make them, to the extent possible, not-bad for visitors and lucrative for the site.
Sometimes technical work can improve ads on the web on both axes simultaneously. The introduction of intersection observer and ping both took something ads really wanted (logging which ads were within the user's viewport or that an ad had been clicked on) and was already possible (with the scroll event or a redirect) and made the implementation much more efficient. These were already so valuable for ads that ~all ads did them, so increasing efficiency didn't increase how often the tracking happened, it just made the web a bit more responsive. I interpret Chrome's Privacy Sandbox work as another attempt in this direction, trying to retain the economic effects of adtech being able to track users from site to site (predicting which ads users will best respond to, detecting abuse, etc) while dramatically improving the privacy situation.
In other cases, though, there's really just a fight over whether ads should be more or less intrusive, numerous, etc. Users want to see the stuff they came to the site for, publishers want to make more money. This is held somewhat in check by how if a publisher makes their site too unpleasant users will leave (or install adblockers) but only a bit: if I have a few tasteful text-only static ads for relevant things that only goes so far if other sites have flashing hovering noisy moving ads. There's a commons problem where each annoying site makes things worse for all the sites.
Ideally users could credibly say "if you make your site too unpleasant we're not going to visit", as some sort of collective, and hold publishers to a tight standard. Google actually does a bit of this, through Ad Experience Reviews. The idea is there's the Better Ads Standard for what counts as a decent experience, and if I make a site that's more annoying than allowed Chrome will block my ads when you visit my site. Another attempt here is AdBlock Plus' Acceptable Ads Program, where they'll allow ads through if they meet the criteria and you pay their fees, though I'm not keen on the non-transparent way the fees are determined.
One place, close to my former work, where my views have changed, though, is that I think it would be better if Google's display ads business (putting ads on non-Google websites) weren't part of Google. In its role as a search engine and browser manufacturer Google is in a strong position to advocate for what's best for their users, including what leads to a thriving web ecosystem. But because they also operate an adtech business, any serious efforts in this direction (something stronger than the Better Ads Standard or a simpler and faster version of Privacy Sandbox that's better for users but makes less money for sites) raises massive competition questions. Are they really doing it because they care about users, or is it a ploy to advantage their own adtech? When I worked in this area my experience was that me and my coworkers were doing things for the right reasons and were very attentive to potential competitive impact, but (a) this slowed everything down enormously and (b) isn't something visible or verifiable externally.
On the other hand, because it's tied to the rest of Google's business, the display ads portion has a lot more reputational pressure than it would if it were spun off. For example, they publicly committed not use fingerprinting as a replacement for third-party cookies and I doubt they would have done this if they were independent. I think this effect is the smaller one, though, and on balance I'd be happy to see it spun out. I don't know if the current anti-trust efforts will be successful, and I don't know if under current law Google should be broken up along these lines, but I do think the outcomes for users would be better if it was.
(I don't think this is an area I thought much about or addressed publicly either way while I worked in Google ads—and if I did I expect I would have had an awkward conversation with a lawyer—but my private view was in favor of it staying one company. I think I was too close to the implementation, and so was overly influenced by how much of a pain it would be to manage the spin out from a technical perspective.)
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