Tear down this paywall

here’s what Jon Schwarz thinks of it, and i tend to agree a little bit.

the comments are interesting too :)

Is there reasoning behind the 20 percent upper bound, or is the number strictly ex aero?

I would be amazed if it were possible for sites to block you for using Adblock Plus – AFAIK it is a client-side technology that simply hides the ads once they’ve come down the pipe to you.

The worst that could happen is that they manage to get some ads through the filter. And Adblock Plus allows you to whitelist certain sites, so even if they are using some kind of groovy flash challenge/response whatsit, you could always still just allow ads for that domain, as annoying as that would be.

It seems clear to me that if you are talking overall content (absent any quality threshold) versus attention, that attention is the scarce resource. So in some sense the content consumer will continue to have the upper hand. And I do think that “Web 2.0” type content creation will continue to push this.

Now of course large organizations pursuing their narrow economic self-interest can (and do) play the Web 2.0 game as well. What I see is increasingly sophisticated blending of “advertising” into content (Analagous to infomercials on TV and product placement in TV shows and movies… and one clearly interpretation of “regular” TV news, sports etc. is that they are lifestyle infomercials.) Actually I see this as part of a general trend in society (Question: My assumption is that the total “adverstising” pie is increasing, is there any data on that?), the increasing ubiquity of advertising woven into the basic fabric of life.

But the margins of the global dance of commerce are adequate to fund a pretty cool Internet – and right-minded folks can easily separate out the wheat from the chaff… (Ah, self-delusion – the straw that really stirs the drink.)

The part I wonder about is how long people will continue to supply quality UGC (user-generated content) for no compensation. That is, I don’t doubt that there will continue to be considerable amounts of it, but one has to wonder at one point the people creating the high quality material will decide that they want something in return and aren’t willing to do it for free. This would suggest that more of this limited pot of ad revenue would have to be split with content of that sort and while I’m not sure right now what exactly that implies for the above, it seems like it would complicate things further.

whyfirefoxisblocked.com used to be a rant-site used as redirect for firefox users, on the grounds that they might have adblock installed. It seems to have declined in lucidity of late; I don’t know about usage.

Personally I am mostly OK with adverts unless they are animated. Animations are bad, and Flash is extra-super-bad.

…one has to wonder at one point the people creating the high quality material will decide that they want something in return and aren’t willing to do it for free.

It serves as a springboard for ambitious amateurs to become professional musicians, pundits, journalists, etc. Being noticed is what they get in return; those who turn professional will probably stop producing for free but they will be replaced by new cohorts.

Thanks for the mention!

On the demise of advertising and the transformation this will force in journalism (since subscription revenue is also hard to get) I highly recommend the speculative analysis by Doc Searls, Toward a new ecology of journalism. He argues that advertising is itself an inefficiency that is being boiled out of the market.

“He argues that advertising is itself an inefficiency that is being boiled out of the market”

Please note that no reasonably falsifiable statements are made, and it’s all in the service of marketing.

Honestly? I don’t mind the ads. In fact, one of the things I miss about getting the Sunday Times at home is the Magazine, whose raunchy excess is a kind of cheap thrill/voyeuristic journey into the minds of the rich and ultra-rich.

I also think the NY Times folks looked at the future landscape of news publishing and said, “You know, the lion’s share of newspaper ad publishing online is ours to lose.”

The days of a metro area like the Twin Cities supporting two major newspapers are over, and there’s some question about what shape/form even the Star Tribune, the larger and more established of the two, is going to take. Almost all the educated professionals I know here in town read WaPo and NYT online every morning (and, if they’re a little more educated and to the left, The Guardian), and maybe get around to the Strib if there’s something local going on. In effect, online advertising for the NYT has a much higher possibility for growth, as they start to go after local advertising targeted by readers’ account zip codes (should they decide to do this).

As for UGC, well–depends on what they’re looking for. A smart ad-writer or designer or techie who builds a strong blog audience can probably make a lot more from the marketing presence that builds than they can from their site’s direct revenue–or than they’d otherwise have been able to make shaking out consulting/freelance gigs the old-fashioned way. For more wonky, content: group blogs like CT don’t make much (have you ever tried? No need, but curious…), but TPM evidently does all right, as does Kos. So there’s a new market, too.

I think what we’re seeing is the apprentice mode getting shifted from small papers to blogs, with the big hitters gaining even bigger market share/more revenue than was ever possible before. I don’t like the model much (w/shrinking of weeklies/dailies in local markets, there’s no editor to teach you how to sculpt a piece; no senior reporter to teach you ethics/how to source/etc), but it’s not hopeless.

Doug,

Funny you should ask: My wife just started an executive management program at the U of MN and one of her profs basically told the class, “Subscribe to The Financial Times.” We haven’t actually done so yet, but apparently, yes, we can get the paper edition–and reasonably priced (much cheaper than the Times, which used to cost me a fortune when I got it daily).

Newspapers, namely the AP as an organization, blew it by not taking the Net seriously enough soon enough and therefore not charging Yahoo and other “content providers” high enough rates to recoup enough money.

If those rates had been charged, folks like Yahoo might well have instituted a “Yahoo Select,” and, eventually, people would have come to accept it.

We haven’t even mentioned the ongoing Darwinian escalation between Net ads and Net ad-blocking software. Unlike “passive” media like the newspaper and TV, ads definitely don’t work if they’re not even being seen.

…if that gets me blocked from ad-dependent sites.

Firefox doesn’t seem to block the entire site, but I’ve had some difficulty filling out online forms, and so forth. It doesn’t seem to work that well in general. It’s probably a matter of tweaking the preferences– time I’m unwilling to spend (like now!).

If I could figure how to turn the whole darn thing off, I would.

And then adblock could run the all scripts provided in ads, in case they do any ping backs, but not bother rendering it still.

I may be completely wrong, but couldn’t a website make adblock ineffective just by using the same subdomain for ads as it does for image content, since adblock works by blocking images from particular subdomains?

Instead of these sophisticated adblock scripts, you could try to download the hosts file from here (if you’re running Windows).

Look, free media comes with an implicit promise (a promise predicated on a system effect): if you look at our sponsors’ ads, we’ll give you this content for free. We can gauge how much to spend putting this together based on feedback from our sponsors, who know (more or less) how effective their ads are for any given audience. The larger the audience, and the better the ads (and products), the more we’ll have to spend putting our free media together. To the extent that our sponsors are not getting results, we’ll have less money to put together our news, documentaries, sit-coms, sports coverage–whatever.

What’s more: you are in the driver’s seat. If you don’t like Thomas Friedman, don’t click on his articles in The Times. They’ll notice. If you love Paul Krugman, read his article–and maybe check out the Subaru or Visa or Weinstein Co. ad while you’re there. What does it take up? 50K of bandwidth and 200 pixels of your screen? Is that so inconvenient you can’t stand it?

As for Kid Rock: if you don’t want to listen to him, don’t. But if you like Tapes-n-Tapes or Tom Waits or Thomas Ades, buy their damned album. If you think Jerry Bruckheimer only puts out dreck, don’t watch it. But if you love Pedro Almodovar or Wong Kar-Wai or the Coen Brothers, buy their DVD. It’s not an argument to say, “I download it free because they suck anyway.”

This just isn’t that complicated–or expensive. And it’s certainly not “dangerous.” What’s also not dangerous, exactly, but is troubling and hard to figure out a way around (blogs are one answer, in part), is that, for instance, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s revenue is down something like 25 percent this year. That Village Voice Media is bleeding money and increasingly runs wire articles in The City Pages, which used to be–until very recently–an incubator of great national editorial and reporting talent. And that the same thing is happening all over the country.

I think there’s plenty of room for gift economies of arts, for professionals otherwise-subsidized to participate in our arts and journalistic culture, for actors and musicians (alas, much harder for writers) to make a living with live performances, etcetera. If Ticketmaster and Clear Channel went away tomorrow, I wouldn’t shed a tear. But if The New York Times slashed its editorial room by half or Viacom dropped The Daily Show because half its audience found it easier to watch it on YouTube or The Criterion Collection had to double its DVD prices because everyone was getting Andrei Rublev via BitTorrent (and bloody hell, they’re expensive enough as it is), I would be really, seriously bummed.

I don’t care about the bandwidth. I just don’t like being sold crap I don’t want and probably can’t afford 24 hours a day. And yeah I’d hate to put the Guardian out of business (I’m not so sure about the New York Times). Maybe I’d consider sending a donation if it was possible. But I still don’t see why I am under any obligation to read their ads. If I had actually made the promise that you are talking about then I would consider myself bound by it. But I haven’t, so I don’t.

free media comes with an implicit promise (a promise predicated on a system effect): if you look at our sponsors’ ads, we’ll give you this content for free. [etc.]

And advertising depends on the idea that we’ll give you free content if you (some of you) buy this stuff. Unless the notion of implicit promises and system effects is doing some work here, I still don’t see what the difference is supposed to be between “If no one looks at the ads, media will go out of business” and “If no one buys the products, media will go out of business.”

And people have used an argument like yours to claim that it’s immoral to watch TV programs without the ads (my snarky response in comment 6), so it isn’t like there’s no slip in the slope.

I didn’t defend BitTorrenting and downloading, btw. What do you think about BugMeNot, though? Logging on under someone else’s name is a violation of an explicit contract, I’d bet.

Yes: the moving, unannounced, obscures-the-article-I”m-reading-in-mid-sentence ads are annoying. As is any site (are you listening, ESPN?) that auto-loads audio or video content.

I’m not trying to say that no one should ever click “skip this ad” or block pop-ups, just that: to the extent that I or you or anyone does, and that we remain unwilling to pay subscription fees, we’re encouraging an increasingly hostile arms race for ads and eyeballs–or setting up the conditions under which we’ll lose free media altogether. And to pretend otherwise, or to be outraged by it, is not really to get the dynamic at work here.

Matt @37: you know who I blame for the omnipresent, mid-show (or for Sci-Fi channel, it seems, ALL-SHOW) advertising crawl? TiVo.

Lord knows I don’t know the tech side of it, but Daily Kos identified the people using adblock and put up a nag on them – right where one of the ads would be was a very polite but fairly long message asking that if they were going to deprive the site of ad revenue, please subscribe.

I actually don’t mind ads on websites. Unless we’re talking about audio on ads, in which case, I am filled with sudden burning rage and a loathing so strong it can only be assuaged by plotting the imminent demise of the corporate entity that sponsored that evil.

Yeah, I know I can turn off my computer’s audio entirely, and I do a lot of the time, but it sucks when I’m listening to MP3s or audiobooks, surfing the web and I get hijacked by some stupid shill!

What’s the source for the graph?