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Avoiding The Content Apocalypse?
ObligatoryUserName asks: "Recently, a gaggle of Amazon Honor System, and PayPal logos (or cheeky text equivalents) have been proliferating on a number of great, beloved and/or famous/infamous web sites. While still other sites are turning to membership programs. The advertising model seems to have failed (or is in the process of failing) and according to yesterday's great interview, micropayments aren't going to work out either. So, I was wondering, how can we save these sites? Is the major cost bandwidth? (Sites with bandwidth sponsors seem, so far, less likely to ask for micropayments.) Is most of the money going to the salaries of content creators? If some non-profit organization or the government (as per PBS) were to pay for bandwidth for exceptional/popular sites, how much would it help?" It's a decent question, and one that I keep bringing up because a workable solution has yet to present itself. Before, the chorus was micropayments (as the minor chord chimes in with the yet-to-be-tested Street Performer's Protocol). With micropayments in doubt, what other routes can sites follow for the funding they need to exist?
I think some similar/complimentary sites should colocate or share bandwidth some other way and charge monthly/yearly or one-time fees for access to the collection of sites. It would simplify things in some ways. I'd go for it. Any thoughts?
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when your site is down most of the time.
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Je t'aime Stéphanie
Though Paypal's been around for a while, Amazon's honor system is pretty new. They're popping up all over the place because they're new, and because a lot of site operators are just testing the waters. It doesn't hurt me to have a couple little logos on my site, especially if they might bring me cash to run the site. It's a free system to let users who are interested donate - of course it's popping up everywhere.
I think it's FAR too early to say that micropayments are a failure, and that we need to Save Our Sites. Most folks run sites out of love, and will continue to do so. Micropayments are just a way that we might be able to make some cash doing what we would do anyway.
The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else.
what the?
great comedy company.
But....
;) (That was a joke :)
What about... A JOB!!!
No really, If the site cannot support itself then how about finding a job and doing what you can with a site ehh?
I mean think about it... If you simply cant make money on a site but you just want it to stay around why not get a job to pay for your habits ehh?
Some of the time you just have to sacrifice 100% of your attention for one thing in order to at least to just keep something around.
Otherwise... you will be SOL.
That is that.. the web is about information exchange not making tons of money. It provides a great convenience but how can a site that usually just provides textual content really expect to make money.
People write books and GIVE them away (Bruce Eckel) and you can go buy a book for say 40 dollars right now. So why would I pay for content on some website such as news when there is TV and Newspapers that are just as convenient. Newspapers may cost say a dollar but people totally have the mindset that they are NOT paying for a website.
It just wont happen because there is not enough mas acceptance of Micropayment etc.
Give it up! It wont work! Get a job all you hippie content providers
That is my suggestion at least..
Jeremy
You could get everyone to pay a fee to become a member but I think thats a bad idea. Rther why not use bandwiths or the governmet. The goverment is will ing to fund anything if you can can convince it.
Diplomacy is the art of letting people have your way
There is a local radion station that uses fund raisers to raise the money it needs to stay on the air. They figure it costs about $250 to stay on the air for one hour. Twice a year they spend 10 days trying to raise enough money to keep broadcasting for another 6 months. It is the longest run public radio station in Canada. (They only have about 1 commercial an hour... I do not think they are government funded) Their product is radio waves. Unlike the RIAA they have discovered that people really are willing to pay for content that they can recieve for free.
;)
I usually donate once a year. I donate based on what I can afford. The first time was only $10. The next was $100... the next, who knows.
The radio station is at www.ckua.org. Please don't slashdot it unless you plan on making a donation
Point being: Fund raising can be a good way to earn the money needed to stay in business. Ask for donations, and make it easy for people to donate as much as they can afford.
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
In countries where you pay per-second phone charges to call your ISP, there are many 'free' ISPs which take a proportion of the call charges. This is a perfectly reasonable business model - there is actually money coming in, you're not relying on advertising.
Anyway, the longer a user stays online, the more money the ISP makes. If these free ISPs could track what sites users are visiting, they could pay a small proportion (perhaps 10%) of the profit to the website owner. That's a tiny, tiny amount, but it could add up if you have a popular enough site. In this way the free ISPs might encourage sites to develop content tailored to their subscribers. (To avoid just randomly giving away money, the ISP might pay only those sites with which they have an agreement, or which belong to some 'association of penniless websites' which provides a mechanism for payment.)
I don't know whether there is a level of payment low enough to make the ISPs try it, but high enough to sustain websites. It would probably never work. But I'd like to see at least one provider give it a try.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Banner advertisers largely have themselves to blame. I've stopped clicking on banner ads, even ones that I'm curious about, because all too often, either:
(1) I'm bombarded with dozens of pop-up windows that won't go away, and I wind up either killing netscape, or in extreme circumstances, killing X-windows and logging back in.
(2) I get an incredibly complicated page loaded down with strange javascript and java things that crashes or hangs my browser.
The advertising model is NOT failing. What is failing is these top-heavy companies with huge staffs and outrageous expenses. Again, look at the porn industry. There is HUGE evidence there or advertising for revenue working just fine. That's because most people who run adult web sites run them aggressively, and keep costs low. You don't need hundreds of people to run a content web site, period. You don't need scads of marketing and other random management people. You don't need huge, glamorous offices in the most expensive real estate market in the world. You don't need TV ads.
Many excellent adult sites are bringing in VERY large amounts of purely advertising revenue. If non-adult websites would simply follow this business model (it usually takes them a few years to catch up), then we wouldn't see as many failures. Advertising works fine. There's plenty of room in the world of non-adult websites for ad-drive, content sites, if they are run with an eye on the bottom line.
Of course, if we had a well-developed caching infrastructure, and people designed sites that cached well then we wouldn't have the bandwith needs in the first place.
I currently work for a company that has several large websites. Our goal for last year was 300 million visitors. Unfortunately (!) we had 1.6 billion visitors. This nearly killed us. We had the bandwidth, but the *cost* of that bandwidth was huge. The ad sales just don't cover the costs.
How did we fix it? We haven't. The higher ups set the goal for this year of 300 million visitors (again). So we have to try to find a way to keep people away from the site, but not drive everyone away. It also means trying to co-brand with other companies (where they pay us), and not updating the content as much).
Oddly enough for today's climate, our eCommerce activities are actually making money, and keeping the rest of the sites afloat.
Will we be able to make it? We'll have to see...
Most content sites simply aren't WORTH paying for - that's the plain truth. The amount of information available for free is astounding, making the pay-for-access model look increasingly less attractive as time goes on.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Simple solution:
Pay for your own pipe.
Publish your own content.
Comercial content is just that: Comercial, The only comercial sites I regularly to visit are /. and my yahoo mail account. The reason for this is simple, comercial content sucks. Flash and banners take forever to load, News is spun to the advantage of the owner and real information is scarce. I have learned much more from sites put up by Universities and geeks with a personal interest in the subject then from comercial sites.
The formula is simple; If you know something share it.
100 Million webservers running in 100 Million closets will accurately represent the current state of culture and knowledge on the planet.
We just have to destroy the corporate monopoly on information.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you'd better start looking for a carpentry job.
The micropayment model failed, or is failing, because of lack of incentive. When I go to SatireWire, or Penny Arcade, I am hopeful for the future of these sites because of their micropayment models, but I am in fact not at all compelled to shell over cash, simply because somebody else will do it.
/.ers, because it will ultimately lead to the homoginization of content, as conglomerates such as eFront seek to level their content base.
I see a couple of possible futures for niche-based content sites. On way is conglomeration, where media companies buy up successful sites and implement their own advertising models. Such an example of this is Geeknews, which is now a subsidiary of eFront. This solution is one to be detested by
The concept of government subsidised content is interesting, and my favorite. I would elect that an entire department of the federal government be set up to manage citizen-produced content. Sites, publications, even broadcasters could receive initial funding with a grant-like application process, and receive additional funding on the basis of popularity, so that the government is assured they are providing money to the information and entertainment that interests the citizens.
The concept of government supported content borders on socialism, but appropriate checks and balances - which we all should remember about from fourth grade - would insure that content is not censored on any basis, except for popularity. And censoring isn't the right term, either. Popular content would simply be encouraged by the agency, which could perhaps be called the Department of Information and Entertainment, however Orwellian that may sound. Any other sites, ones which appeal to only a very small clientelle, would still receive funding from the DIE (hee hee, taht is a good name), but would also need to find revenue elsewhere. Wouldn't you all like it if Slashdot were funded by Uncle Sam, as long as control of the site remained in community hands?
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
I am very much of the belief that it is far too early to make any statements about micropayments failing. The "free" content support network is collapsing at a staggering rate. Read the efront logs to understand fully the financial underpinnings of advertisement driven sites.
Again I, and I know there are many like me, am entirely willing to support sites (though not a voluntary "tip" jar because such concepts fade very quickly while everyone presumes everyone else tips. It's like the 15% standard tip for serving staff...most people are too much of weasles to follow it [and let's face it : If everyone DID tip that much that would be the job to have]) through a "micropayment" type system, though this is under the condition that there is almost no transaction fees, and _I_ am in control, not the content provider.
Disclaimer: Again when I say micropayments I am referring to small payments : Not necessarily per graphic or article. Could be a subscription based model.
What happens when a Zamey does a yafla?
I've been using an "honor system" via PayPal since October of last year, and it ain't panning out too well. I'm sure additional site traffic would help, but all in all, I've collected about $150.
Now, I can look @ site logs and compare the number of downloads of my fonts to the number of payments, and less than 1% of the people that visit my site are actually going along with the "honor system"... Depressing and demoralizing, but oh well. If worse comes to worse, I'll stop giving away my fonts entirely and just sell them outright. At least, that way, I'm guaranteed to get a bit of money for my work.
I suppose it's nice if you're a smaller site, like me, though. Every week or so, a couple people will donate a few bucks, and I've gotten a few checks in the mail, some nice cards and notes, etc., so that is kinda cool.
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Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
blog |
I didn't really see anyone metioning this yesterday, so I'll bring it up now - what he said people didn't want is to have recurring charges or automatically incurred charges. I don't want those either.
What he didn't say would fail were things like tip jars or single payment system, like once a year or once whenever. He just didn't consider those to be micropayment systems, even though I see collecting even 10 cents as possibly usful in a tip jar.
As he said, finacial institutions will come around to support whatever level of payment people want them to support. If a whole bunch of places spring up that take $.10 through PayPal, then you can bet that eventually you'll be able to do the same through a bank, someday. Until then there is PayPal, whish is not perfect but is much better than anything else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.bomis.com/tipjar/
(So now you'll know about my other life, when I'm not fighting for content freedom. :-) )
--Jimmy Wales
Wikia
Why hasn't anyone come up with zhtml or something similar? Wouldn't it be trivial to compress content before sending it over the internet? Obviously, somethings wouldn't compress well at all, like jpegs, but what about clear text html? xml? tables output from servlets or asp? It wouldn't make download sites any faster but I bet it would speed up sites like slashdot, amazon, or ebay. It would obviously require a compatible browser, but that's not hard.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
I'm not sure if micropayments can work very well, but asking for donations can work. For a lot of smallish sites, it only takes a few decent sized donations to keep them afloat. I've donated money to one of my personal favorites because I want to see it stay around. It's not only a very useful site in its area of interest, but IMO also one of the best designed sites I've ever seen and one that I recommend as an example of good use of linking. If everyone would just give a $10 donation to a single site once in a while (instead of $0.10 to a bunch of sites), it would work just fine.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Ask most any content producer what they want to get paid with, and they'll reply, "Micropayments." But it's because we use the term the wrong way.
After carefully reading Clay Shirky's comments on micropayments, he makes sense: paying before you're sure about the quality of something is a bad idea. Even with a respected content producer, how are you sure that they will maintain standards?
Case in point: Tom Clancy. I haunt alt.books.tom-clancy, and much discussion has raged there about the declining quality of his novels. Some have stated that they will never again rush to their bookstore on release day and pay full price for a first-edition hardback. I am almost to that point myself--because the quality hasn't been maintained.
What most of us content producers want is to charge, but not charge highly. We can't do it with credit cards--most folks know about the charges there. [What, you think Visa stays solvent just with our high balances? =) I wish.] So "micropayments" is our answer, although the traditional micropayment method [pay $0.NN for my bit o' content] isn't really what we want.
Here's where we are probably going:
If anyone has comments on this system, I'd love to hear them. Since we're an ezine, we can try to adapt the magazine business model to the Internet, all the while trying to kill the notion that information and storage are combined. My rationale on charging for archive access is just like asking us to store your old copies of Sports Illustrated--as long as you don't mind if we peruse the swimsuit issue. [Carol Alt: yowza!]
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-- Geof F. Morris
So, what can you do? It isn't like the site is paying my bills or anything. The banner revenue just gives me a little extra money to blow on my expensive road cycling hobby. My real problem is that I'm having trouble to find advertisers these days. You would think a site geared toward Solaris admins would be pretty good demographics, but I don't get that many bites even though the click through rate is over 1% for the banners I host.
The moral of the story in my opinion is that it doesn't matter what value your particular banners are, the whole notion of banner advertising is in the toilet. I need a new way of doing things, but I haven't come up with anything that doesn't involve selling out majorly. I'm lucky though. This is just my hobby and it really doesn't cost much. If push comes to shove I can remove the banners entirely, but if I do I won't get cool bike stuff. ;)
-- Solaris Central - http://w
If there's one thing history has shown us, it's that adult entertainment leads the way in both technology adoption and maxmimizing revenue. So let's look at the current state of the adult internet industry as a model for where everyone else will be in a couple of years.
/.) can generate huge amounts of pageviews, and (hopefully) make money by getting percentages on revenue they drive to advertisers, either hard goods or for-pay content sites.
The reason the adult industry is always ahead of mainstream industries is the complete lack of "wishful thinking" business plans. Well, that's not entirely true. How about, "the complete lack of funding available for 'wishful thinking' business plans"? There is nobody to give you $20 million in the adult industry; if you want that kind of money, you have to get it the old fashioned way: by earning it.
For that reason, bad ideas die quickly... whereas in the so-called real world, bad ideas can persist for years if the people responsible have the right connections and are good with powerpoint.
So let's move on to how people are really making money on the net.
The adult industry is stratified into two key market segments: pay sites and free sites. Pay sites charge membership fees, usually between $9.95/month and $29.95/month. The subscriptions are typically auto-renewing. General stats show an average of about 3 months/signup, or revenue on the order of $80/signup (gross).
Free sites act as feeders to pay sites. The sole purpose of a free site is to send traffic to one or more pay sites, in return for a percentage on sales. Free sites run banners for the affiliate programs they participate in, and want to minimize free pageviews before sending people to the pay sites.
See what's going on here? Pay sites don't *pay* anyone to run banner ads. It's a market solution, where free sites are constantly hunting for sponsors who have higher conversions, pay out more, etc. It is up to the free site to generate pageviews (preferably by good content and word of mouth, but all too often by spam and fraud).
However, free sites are really the entry level of the industry. There are a few that make some real money, but the fast majority make hundreds to the low thousands of dollars a month; not enough to support a real business.
Still, there are thousands and thousands of hobbyists making those hundreds to low thousands of dollars, and they in turn generate huge traffic volume for pay sites, where much higher revenues are concentrated among fewer players.
Why does it work that way in the adult internet? Because the people involved are running actual businesses that depend on cash flow and profitability.
What we're seeing in the mainstream internet is the crash and burn of the "lose money on every pageview, but make it up in volume" approach. And the "we'll lose a fortune, but people will really like our site" approach.
Bottom line: it costs real money to create (most) content, and it costs *real* money to operate a real business. That money can either come from the business itself (profitability), or from outside investors (funding, loans, selling stock). The first approach is what energy folks would call renewable; the second approach is basically just buying time.
The mainstream internet is already starting to evolve to more colosely resemble the adult industry. Community sites (like
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
So what's wrong with supporting sites by providing an occasional click-through to their ad banners, that no one has brought it up? I make a point of going through my favorite content sites (shameless plug for Sluggy here, as an example), reloading the page and clicking-through on the banners a few times. It's not tons of revenue, I'm aware, but it helps - and if more fans did that on occasion, wouldn't the sites get a bit of a boost?
I'm aware that, at some point of saturation, click-throughs would be meaningless to the ad vendors and payments would decrease/cease altogether, but it's a nice intermediate way to provide a little help to artists/writers/producers-of-things-of-value-to-me in the current atmosphere.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
Bandwidth isn't even a problem, the problem is wasteful spending from the inception of a site which has carried over, and or continues within the company (of the site) often leading to fund cutting by investors who've ran from NASDAQ and may not look back for now.
Think about costs some of these companies have put into their high tech sites, I've posted on this yesterday and I'll reflect more on it today with harsher numbers.
4 Sun E450's (for databases) 100,000.00
Rack space at Exodus 25,000.00 monthly (mini cage)
20 Misc Servers Apache, etc. VAR501's 3,000.00
Admins for the hardware software 6,000.00 monthly
Content, programmers, etc authors, 6,000.00 monthly
Office space 6,000 monthly
Lets just guesstimate 50,000.00 monthly with the company gaining a measly even 10,000.00 in banner revenue, its a losing battle.
These figures are minute to whats out there and its hard for a company with little to no real world experience to keep up with no revenue coming in. You can talk an investors ear off, but if the investor sees himself throwing away his money he will pull out no matter what you propose. Whats happening often is these companies haven't fully understood this, and are now trying to revamp their business models which will also scare investors away, as the company does not have a solid game plan for success.
Micropayments, banner ads are the gist of it all, these companies need to overhaul and cut spending drastically and show they can compete with close to nothing in order to get more funding.
Money Talks
360 degrees of Karma
I'm not sure the banner advertisement method can be religated to the dustbin as of yet. Yahoo has shown revinues, and even profits for a time using it.
What does bandwith cost? typical ADSL w/ 384 up and some static IP's is around or less than 100/month. Thats three nice dinners out. At a meger $12CPM, you only need 10,000 page views to be self-sufficient.
Sites fall into two categories (with some obvious blurring); they are done for love or money. Sites done for money can close if they don't make it; sites done for love will stay open as long as the creator still has an interest in it and puts money into it (as they would with any other hobby).
Government sponsorship of sites that are not popular enough to pay for themselves is not the right answer. If it's so popular that I wouldn't want to visit what justifies my tax dollars going to pay for it?
-- Greg
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
No site *needs* to exist. A site may *want* to exist but I can't think of a single site I couldn't live without.
__________________ Hey Moderators!! Fuck Off! Thanks.
Porn sites are the most profitable ones on the Internet right? Well what if every content web site also ran a porn web site on the side? Then the porn site could subsidize the content site.
Now I'm off to get my money's worth off http://www.slashdotporn.org... Mmm... Naked Cowboy Neal...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'll be out of the best job in the world if this business model tanks.
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Yes, a PBS style system would be _much_ better. I think many more people would give than the micropayment system.
Most importantly, notice how PBS doesn't ask you if you would like to donate money to Antiques Roadshow, or any other specific program, but they ask for money for the cause.
I, for one, would donate more easily to a Public Content Service, or some such thing, which funded many quality non-commercial web sites. I wouldn't doubt it if corporations would feel the same way.
Would any and all owners or operators of websites please stop sleazing in free page views by posting their "here is what we are doing on my site" with a handy link. Most of these modded up pieces of shit say the same thing as either the posted links to articles or the aritcle itself.
Fuck people. Try good content that people will read or consume rather than exploiting every opportunity to get people to visit...
Content will never just disappear, there will always be people willing to make sites on a shoestring budget just because they like doing so. There will always be a few websites that have high quality content on a pay basis because there is a market for it. There will always be advertisers paying for advertisement on websites because.. well thats what advertisers do. Don't worry, the world wont end, there will just likely be some changes.
The real thing that is causing the perception of this problem is the fact that for the longest time websites were operating on borrowed time. They had money coming in like nobody's business and they made business plans that reflected that. Now the bubble has burst and these sites are going to have to adjust by cutting back on expenses and getting thing more at the sane level. Some of these sites will not be able to make these changes and will die. That's life, sorry.
In the future small hobby sites that grow and turn into something else will be a little more careful and have a little less money, but it things are still doable. As costs rise and advertising isn't covering bandwidth they can do things like limit usage to paying customers during certain hourse, take micro payments, all sorts of things. The key thing to remember is that these sites don't have to be worried about this sudden loss of revenue becuase they never had it to begin with.
In short, even if most of the current content providers die (which I doubt), they will be replaced by better managed, cheaper alternatives.
All just imho.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Anyway anything that reduces capitalist exploitation of the once-free web can only be a good thing right ?
I don't believe that the advertising model has necessarily failed. I do think that the model of bloated ad revenues leading to bloated websites has failed. Brittanica.com just announced that they laid off 68 of 220 staff. What in the hell do 220 people do for a single website of this size? Ad revenue may still support lean well-run websites. But it probably will never again support sites with a staff of 200 or 400.
If some non-profit organization or the government (as per PBS) were to pay for bandwidth for exceptional/popular sites, how much would it help?
Do I want the government deciding what is "exceptional" or "popular"?
Michael
Do you have ESP?
I recently contributed to one of my favorite web comics and was disappointed in the procedure.
1.) I was taken away from the site to do it. (as opposed to having a small new window pop up.)
2.) I had several pages to click through to make the payment.
3.) I ended up at Amazon.com, and not back at the originating page.
With some work I think these honor system payments will provide an ok solution, but not for anyone providing content for a living.
For content providers who need to make money, networks might be a good idea - where a user would pay a network a set recurring fee for accessing a selected group of sites - for example I could "subscribe" to Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Everything2, Goats, and Userfriendly for $5.00/month.
The network could provide an app to generate encrypted ip + timestamp + websites allowed "network cookie" on a daily basis so sites would know who their paying customers were.
It's definitely a change in philosophy from the honor system, but it might work a little better.
I pay for my high-traffic humor site, The Conversatron all out of pocket with money from my day job. I like providing my content for free without hassling with banners or some wacky payment model. My readers like it also. It all works out.
Although this kind of begs the question, the ad/micropayment shakeout might mean that hobbyist sites become more prominent. It's only a couple hundred dollars, if that, a year to grab a domain and make a site. People will do it bevause they love the subject matter or they love the attention. (Egoboo is the 'currency' of getting your egoboosted by making something popular in an online forum) Making it pay for itself will become the exception. In some ways, this is probably bad for content in general, but I think it will be an important trend to watch.
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SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
are greatly exagerated. There is, however, a dearth of reports about payment systems advanced enough to support micropayments, but if any /. reader wants to see a micropayment today, one with low fees, immediate settlement, automation, no payment repudiation, bi-directionality, and backing by a substance scarce enough to make rational folks everywhere want to hold it rather than instantly get rid of it, just email me with an e-gold account number.
It's amazing how clueless even smart folks can be when they try to talk about money...Everyone wants the issue to be simple, but simple means you're saddled with legacy systems and bad technology the internet promised we'd escape. A currency is a contract, like it or not, and these days not many people know it, let alone like it. IMO.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
I considered running a gaming-oriented content site, back in late 1999. I bought a domain (the name was cool), and started looking to put up banner ads. Before lining up a staff and opening office space, I discovered (as would any chimp with half a brain) that banner ads weren't going to pay for a site -- so I never went live. I wrote the time off as a "learning experience", and went on to bigger and better things...
My other site, Coyote Gulch Productions, operates on a totally different financial basis: I run it because I want to, not because it makes me a buck.
Oh, all right, I have made a few bucks from the site over the years... I've sold software code libraries, sold some of my books, and used it as an online resume and distribution point for applets and open source code. The "profit" has been pretty thin, though, considering the time that goes into creating those damned little ALife applets... and regardless of its money-making potential, I'll keep doing Coyote Gulch, teaching people about neato concepts and presenting my view of the universe.
I have considered going the micropayment route for some of my book projects. Can anyone explain to me if there's something wrong with PayPal or the Amazon "honor system?" Okay, so Amazon is "patent pig" scum -- and failing scum at that. But what about PayPal?
Here's the deal: I wrote (and my wife illustrated) a children's book, which I sold to a Big Name Publisher, who was then eaten by a bigger fish, who then killed the "kid's division" before the book saw print. Rather than hunt up another publisher, I've considered putting the book online, and having people "micropay" me if they like it. Hell, if I make $50, it $50 more than the book has made me before...
But back to the central point: Your average person sees the web as an interactive TV; they're already paying for the connect, just like they pay for their cable setup. So "average Joe" thinks he's already paid for access, and he expects his content for "free", just like TV. I don't see how content-based sites can expect to pay for themselves in that kind of environment...
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Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
The fall of the new economy has now also impact on the old economy, because the old economy has invested greatly into the new economy. The consumers have lost their faith, I mean, paying via internet wasn't all that popular in Europe, and now the US consumer is losing his faith as well, so transactions via the internet are down, with all consequences this should have. Maybe in the case that PayPal would introduce their own currency - a global internet currency - maybe we would have quite a safe way to pay via the internet, and people would have faith in doing this.
Bizar technology?
Well, i am assuming by your assumptions that you are not in the food industry. let me tell you that you are wrong. most people (at least in my area) do tip 15%. and that is still not alot of money. as a matter of fact, though 15% is still the "rule" it is rapidly moving towards 20%. anyway, don't quit your dayjob to become a waitress. trust me.
The reason these sites are getting charged up the wazoo is because they are huge! No wonder some sites pay thousands of dollars in bandwidth fees a month, their pages are 200k +! A lot of these are text based sites, which is even more perplexing. As broadband access has gotten cheaper for the masses, bandwidth for webmasters is still expensive as living hell, the difference is that they can now serve up a 500k page without worrying about the schmoe on a 14.4 modem that it would take years to load for (face it, almost EVERYBODY who uses the internet regularly has at least a 56k.) If you can make your page smaller, then you pay less for bandwidth, and get more profit. Certainly, there needs to be a better way to make money on the net, but thats only because its so easy to LOSE money running a site.
Given a reasonably level playing field, who would win a fight between a bear and a shark?
of these famous/infamous sites will die. Even with huge traffic. They will either die or become hobbies. This is the reality facing most of these sites. Just subsidizing bandwidth won't make it happen. Having a hobby is great but as most of you who have lived longer than 10 years know, they come and go. So too, will most of these sites. Even mine.
HTTP already has Content-Encoding: gzip . But the bulk of HTTP transfer (on a kilobyte basis) is already tightly compressed (PNG and JPEG images; MP3 audio; Flash, MNG, and MPEG animations; bzip2 tarballs) so this will help only for HTML and MIDI.
It would obviously require a compatible browser
Or a compatible proxy. But AFAIK Mozilla and IE (two biggest browsers) already support it.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Perhaps there needs to be some sort of concerted effort to communicate the concept of micropayments (Amazon,Paypal,etc.). The sites looking to this model could band together - much like what happened vs the CDA, etc.
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OliverWillis.Com
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
YAHOO is making money, many e-tailers are doing well, and many smaller sites should be fine. The trick is that many sites really never understood what a budget was/is because they had venture capital or IPO cash as a constant imbilical cord. Amazon.com is a classic example of too much cash. They make a lot of money from selling books but they piss through it due to poor money management, excessively large staff, and irresponsibly inventory handling. I admit it is not fair to just pick on Amazon when SO MANY sites NEVER EVEN HAD/HAVE an achievable business model but used "its a new economy" as thier excuse for justifying stupid ideas.
I do not see an end to content providers but I do see:
1. content providers downsizing staff.
2. Geting pickier about developement. Less "fluff" and carefull choosing of "value added" features.
3. Less sites but those that survive be of higher quality (and staffed by people who know what a budget sheet looks like).
I also hope really annoying ads will be banned from these sites(because they are counter productive and cause people to filter ALL banners and/or get less hits) but alas my magic 8-ball says "no".
I miss the Karma Whores.
The only consistently successful content model is value-added content. For example, a large membership organization uses a portion of the membership dues to fund "free" content for members. Some or all of the content is available to everyone, maybe some only to members. Similarly for a retail business or bank, etc. etc. you have content available to customers, current and potential. The content encourages potential buyers to make a first purchase, the current customers to be loyal, and maybe even increases consumption.
But if you expect to just make money off of the content alone, either through micropayments or banner ads, you're not going to have much success. Subscriptions are not very successful in the online world, because humans generally prefer to get something tangible in return for their contribution, like a hard copy.
Okay, over the course of human history, I believe that one thing is quite clear and obvious to everyone:
People do not like to pay for information or content. And they generally do not unless they are absolutely forced to, and there's something really good in it for them.
Here's why:
Books: We have bookstores, yes. But we also have a very large system of free public libraries. So, everything is available for free pretty much, and people buy books for convenience only. There is no pleasure in owning a book... if I had a library around the corner that loaned me every book or magazine that I wanted when I wanted it, why would I pay a cent for books? I'm very reluctant to buy books anyway, even when I DON'T have that perfect library around...
Music: People do buy CDs and cassettes for convenience. But if there was no radio (and MTV to an extent), I seriously doubt that people would buy CDs at all. MP3's make the situation worse... they present the music more conveniently than the radio does, hence eliminating the need to buy CDs in a lot of cases.
Visual Productions: We have movie theaters and video stores, sure. We also have television. Lots of people stay home and watch TV. Lots of people get cable to really expand the selection of things to watch... as well as get stuff that isn't available on broadcast TV. Cable is more convenient than having a gigantic video store around the corner where you have to rent EVERYTHING you watch. Otherwise, people go to the movies and video stores to watch films that aren't available on TV yet and that are convenient to watch. Lots of people don't bother with that, though. And some people have descramblers to get endless movies for free, hence eliminating the need to ever leave the house.
The Internet: We know the deal. The best example I can think of... who ever paid for Infoseek searches when they cost 10 cents a piece?!?!? No one likes to pay on the Net. Even porn is available freely in massive quanitites.
Software: Shareware is hardly registered (not to the degree it SHOULD be). I bet half of Windows and MS Office installations in personal use settings are illegal to some degree (unlicensed upgrades, pirated CDs, etc.).
Now, some people DO pay for their content, but: they never pay a lot (cable TV is cheap, no one goes to the movies 3 days a week, no one buys 20 singles a week that they listened to on the radio during their commute to work, etc..), they usually pay indirectly (taxes support public libraries, they subscribe to ISPs to get Internet access, they pay the cable company for installation and convenience, they pay for the convenience of owning a good CD themselves, etc.), and they avoid buying anything that they aren't convinced that they really want or need.
I know this sounds obvious, but here's the point: Micropayments won't work because people don't like to pay for information. That is, no matter how small the payment is, it's still money out the window. And unless you're rich (the rich tend to be even more stingy), people have better priorities than dropping one tenth of a penny in the jar every time they visit CNN.com or Slashdot.
Granted, I would pay a nominal subscription fee for the websites I visit... if I were to get something good in return for it BEYOND what I'm already doing. Micropayments are essentially paying for something that has no additional value... so I won't do it.
Plus, people are more likely to pay for something they like before they see it, but they are less likely to try it out if they have to pay to look at it first.
Also, P2P networks help the micropayment problem. Not exactly sure how, but it has something to do with nodes charging for services, and content providing the demand for services. Consumers pay the nodes, who are almost like ISP's in this scenario, and the node operators pay the content producers.
Can you imagine if Slashdot took two week pledge breaks every 4-6 months like public radio? My head hurts just contemplating it!
sulli
RTFJ.
This is one idea. You have pay-for-access DNS servers. You have a bunch of little sites all access through one set of DNS servers (you put the little sites on dhcp or something so you have to resolve) I don't know quite the logistics of this and it would probably increase connection times. But it would be a way to keep the small sites alive.
The problem is that the web is not taken seriously as a media outlet. Consequently the ads are not up to the standards of sophisticated consumers. This is a direct result of the inexperience and incompetence of the ad agencies that insist of directly translating ads from other media rather than creating appropriate new content. Also, click through rates are bogus. For other media, demographics are developed and rates are based upon those numbers. The same standards should apply
That said, the issue then becomes when would micropayments and subscriptions be appropriate. Micropayments would only be needed when no ads are present or specialized material is to be accessed. Subscriptions would broadly follow the print media model, but would also require that the have content created for the web. Repackaged traditional content is not likely to be worth the money. Newspapers may be the exception, but the New York Times and Financial Times are not going to be able charge large amounts of money until they improve thier usability.
Maybe it's just me, maybe it's the 26hrs of no sleep running on nicotiene and caffiene, but why aren't ISPs providing more content? Most think providing a mail server and access to that old 386 running the newserver (whose location, by the way, is only known by a guy who retired 3 years ago) is 'content enough'. I personally think that a _large_ ISP should not be allowed to exist unless they provide news/mail servers, a web e-mail gateway, a local business/event search page, a mirror of tucows, a mirror of sunet, and a Quake III Arena Server. It would sure as hell make my life easier.
And while I'm on a rant, why the hell does it take 16 hops to get from ISP 'A' (who I work for so I can pay the bills and run my little site) to ISP 'B' (who I host my site with, cause they're cable, and I can get a cheap Static IP) when they are only 4 km away from each other.
-Yes, I know why, but you gotta think that the network guys are going to get together and build static routes to each other-
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
The key is to get highly targeted ads, like was recently proposed on Slashdot. With targeted ads in categories (and even particular ads) chosen by the viewer, the actual click-through and purchase rates will be phenomenal. Ad agencies would die for something that good.
While targeted ads are easy for a site like Slashdot, where you have a good idea of the average viewer, they are not as easy on big sites like MSN. The problem then would be getting the viewers to register their preferences. You'd almost have to track users from site to site like Double-Click already does, which brings up privacy concerns.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
and they manage to raise 50k a year, which makes up a goodly portion of their operating budget. It's a great idea, but I don't know how well it will fly on the internet...there are way too many sites out there. It would work if people only had one or two sites they were funding, but I myself look at 20-30 sites a day, it would be nuts to pledge to all of them.
I wonder how many visits this site gets... -nite
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
>I think you're pretty much dead-on with toning down the html--I've worked on bandwidth challenged sites where that has made a world of difference, especially on frequently hit pages.
/. that there are some SP that already limit bandwidth ). Could you imagine the amount of people hosting their own system, just one needs to be popular like /. and boom there goes the free ride.
/. gets ( they have to be way above the $ 40.00 per cpm ).
Your right, the better your content and the better you edit your code, the less babndwidth you'll use.
>As for DSLing your own personal web server, why not take it a step further--have a bunch of people DSLing your own personal web server
This will last about 1 year before your contract with the service provider changes terms ( I've read before on
IMO no mater how much I look at the problem, avalible Bandwidth will have to level off within the next few years. and at that point bandwidth price should increase.
Is the advertising model dead yet... I don't think so. On my web site, I have a bandwidth usage tool that notifies me when i've consumed 75% of my monthly allocation. When I hit that number, I reduce the amount of postings per page. This way atleast I will be able to generate more revenue because a new page will load and an ad will post.
God I wish I could get the High $ that
What will most likely happen is that very specialized portal will come around, those site will not have mega hits, but they will have such a nitched market that the advertising on them will be worth a lot $.
Would you not agree that if there was a killer site about servers, the value of an ad on that site would worth $50.00/cpm to a server company than the 5.00/cpm on a general computer site.
ONEPOINT
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Don't most adult sites use a subscription model rather than an advertising model?
(Not that I would know, or anything.)
When was the last time you saw an ad on an adult site for anything other than another adult site? Who is paying them for these ads that you say are generating revenue?
Didn't you hear the man?? They want fewer people! Giving out the url on slashdot would really swamp them!
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I run a number of sites. All of which I started for the LOVE of running them and creating something. What has it gotten me? A big fat bill every month for my hosting thats what.
I am not trying to make a mint of my sites.
I'm just trying to get them to pay for the expenses they cause me. I cannot justify taking the money it costs just to pay for the base necessities of sites which combined serve 2-3 million pages a month out of my family's mouth. And I'm not talking staff writers or PR people or junk costs like that, I'm talking a decent machine and ~30 Gigs of bandwidth.
How do you bridge the gap for sites which are getting more popular (ie over 500k-1m pages) but arent at the big time yet (ie Slashdot)? Bandwidth and hosting cost money which has to come from somewhere...
Porn doesn't need advertising. People click on tiny banners promising giant tits only to find more ads. AND THEY KEEP ON TRYING!
Porn like Pokemon is an impulse product. There's a difference between technews and gottacatchemall.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
This will last about 1 year before your contract with the service provider changes terms ( I've read before on /. that there are some SP that already limit bandwidth ). Could you imagine the amount of people hosting their own system, just one needs to be popular like /. and boom there goes the free ride.
Everyone has some sort of bandwidth cap, even if it's just the amount of bits they're physically able of pushing down the line in a second. My point is that if you distribute this around, then no one needs to hit or exceed their cap. And you could certainly design your system so that individual hosters could limit the amount of their own bandwidth that was consumed by the shared site, as well as the times it was consumed. Hell, even when I'm putting up a professional site with big pipes and heavy duty servers on the back end, I always assign some sort of upper limit, just to keep performance from slowing to a crawl if for some reason it gets hammered.
No relation to Happy Monkey
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The advertising model is NOT failing.
A friend of mine who runs a fairly large website with advertising income showed me some numbers the other day. Between January and September of last year, page views did not change significantly, but advertising income dropped 70%.
How is this "not failing?"
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
He prolly meant 1.6 billion page impressions...
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What the fuck is bomis.com?
I mean, it just looks like a port of the DMOZ open directory with some paid links, and annoying popups. Why the hell would anyone want to use that page?
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
presumably, you could get the graphic down to just 3 or 4k, and you could always hotlink to somone elses copy of the graphic :P
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
I mean, the click-through rate on banner advertizing is less then 1% right now, a lot less. so, if 1% of the people who view/download fonts is 1% I'd say you're doing pretty good.
Rate me on Picture-rate.com
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
None of which changes the fact that a lot of people use Netscape. What it suggests, is that there may be profit (?) in advertisers funding the debugging of Netscape.
Just imagine: you're trying to grab peoples' attention with your web site, but the Netscape users bitch and eventually quit coming. So you send a check to AOL and they fix a few bugs, then Netscape users start to appear in your logs again.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"The intenet is for non-commercial purposes only. All others will be Flamed by the internet community to keep business off the internet." This circa 1993 ideology is begining to seem like it is more prophetic than anyone could have imagined.
> I'm pretty sure that 1.6B page views / year would make that the biggest site on the net.
He said "several large websites".
Cheers,
--fred
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> Unfortunately (!) we had 1.6 billion visitors
Hey, sam we recognized you. You are talking about efront, and you are making numbers.
> So we have to try to find a way to keep people away from the site, but not drive everyone away
And you released those IRC logs ? Smart move...
Cheers,
--fred
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I'm off to get my money's worth off http://www.slashdotporn.org
.xxx hierarchy. So that everybody can register their paralel site.
So that's what we want the
But what about the porn sites? What would be the content of playboy.xxx?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
your idea is a good one.. shared hosting of resources, but your going to need a central system and that can't be shared to much, that's where is see the expense.
ONEPOINT
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my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.