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?

Comments

What's the issue?

[The Good Reverend]

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.

Re:What's the issue?

[iceT]

I think you can approach micropayments and click-thru ads from a straight cost-persective..

Micropayment/click-thru add schemes have to pay for the bandwidth that they use to display them. If you get a micro-payment for each click, but you only get a click after displaying some graphic 1000 times at 10k/graphic, then you're not recooping the bandwidth that your spending to send the graphic... now, if the image uses the vendors bandwidth (remote image tag), the micropayment might be more cost effective.

Mocking other media is the key

[grovertime]

As I am preparing to unveil on my own site in less than one month's time, it is time for the internet content sites to establish advertising or sponsorship in a similar manner as radio, television or print. That is, mixing content and advertising does not work. One most be of total focus, even if just briefly, for an advertiser to feel assured that their product, service or message is cutting straight through to the audience member. Why not more interstitial advertising that loads briefly (3 secs) while new content is freshly disseminated? Break up sections on a site with pointed, totally focused and focus-pulling advertising that is there and gone quickly? Prospective sponsors have responded very well for my upcoming relaunch and I expect it to be very, very successful.

1. 
   what the?
   

Re:Mocking other media is the key

[Minstrel78]

Why not make interstatial advertising? Because people like me will stop going to websites that try to turn the internet into television.

Fund Raisers

[psin psycle]

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.

Get the ISPs to pay somehow

[Ed Avis]

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.

Re:Get the ISPs to pay somehow

[jafac]

I know, AOL could merge with a cable company, and provide it's service over the cable, and just add a small fee to your regular cable bill, then add on more money for users who visit partner sites with premium content. . . no, wait. . .

Banner ads

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Banner ads

[sulli]

Don't forget:

(3) Banner ad leads to TCP_error or 404 or missing page or somewhere else.

Enough of these have reduced my click-throughs due to wasted time.

Re:Banner ads

[jesser]

You've stopped clicking on banner ads because pop-up ads annoy you? I don't quite understand that logic, and I hope your response doesn't cause website owners to use more pop-up ads "because banner ads don't work".

Re:Banner ads

[Apotsy]

(3) The banner ad's URL contains something like:

/345677346/this/is/a/tracking/and/privacy/invadi ng /program/blah/blah/blah

Privacy issues aside for the moment, the problem with URLs like that is they are so long I can't even see the end of them and know where they are going to take me. If I could just hover over the banner ad and see something simple like "www.mycompany.com", I'd know where it was going to take me, thus I'd be a lot more likely to click it.

Advertising model is NOT failing

[NineNine]

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.

Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[baptiste]

Agree 100% I was chuckling today reading about various .coms laying off half their workforce. "We're still making $$ and plan to be around for a while but needed to preserve our capital, etc, etc" Since when does it take 100 people to run a website? Yes, the larger sites take a lot of people and bandwidth does cost money. But nobody said you had to hire dozens of people to do it.

Growth comes from making enough money to expand, not expanding fast enough to keep up with expenses. The latter will bankrupt you anyday (even after the Shrub sticks it to the poor slob with too much debt)

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Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[SetiMike]

Hey there's a good idea, I want to have 30 browser windows start popping up everytime I visit any web site. And half of the pop up windows start opening up other windows.

Seriously, how do people put up with that? My thinking is that a large portion of people visiting those sites must be waves of newsbies getting on for the first time. I guess some people must think the content is very good to put in credit card number and put up with all those windows of ads.

Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[acroyear]

Growth comes from making enough money to expand, not expanding fast enough to keep up with expenses.

Nice quote. Trouble is that the "imagination" got away with the CEOs and VCs out there. They got their initial "hits" of advertising dollars and eyeballs and "customers" in many cases, saw a growth curve, and then expanded as if that growth curve would remain constant or even exponentially explode. After all, that's what happened to Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Compaq, Dell...

Only it didn't. It levelled off. In order to keep "growing", the .coms took part in major acquisitions (yahoo, altavista, excite) or expanded their categories of merchandise to the point of redicule (amazon). Yet the curves continued to level off. There just weren't all THAT many buyers out there for stuff they could get even easier the old-fashioned way.

Then the dumb competitors entered (did we really need 12,15,30 different online music stores, all dealing in the same stuff? Did amazon really have to enter that market as well?). Instant saturation to the point of uselessness. The entire world turned into shoeshops.

The only successes are the ones that stayed small, in terms of content and customer base -- "The Artist Shop", e.g., a speciality music store for discerning prog-rock listeners. Other successes are those for which the online catalog was merely that -- an online mail-order storefront that was an add-on to their real storefront.

Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[jafac]

In many cases, staffs have grown largely because of the politics of business. Managers push for more people on their team, regardless if they need them; they can always be laid off later when the money dries up (sound familliar?). A larger team means more "status" for that manager, possibly higher pay, an easier job meeting performance numbers, etc.
A company that's overstaffed, is prepared, prepared for rapid growth. The tech industry expected rapid growth, because everyone knows that if you are first in the game, you have a much better chance of gaining dominant marketshare, and if you gain dominant marketshare, you have a good chance of acheiving a monopoly, and then, as Microsoft has demonstrated, you can pretty much sit back and rake in the profits. Microsoft was the model everyone expected Netscape, and all the other dotcoms to follow. Sure, there was bound to be blood at some point, but the risk was worth it, if you invested in a winner, you were rich. The effect was so profound, that even before the game started to play-out, money came pouring in. Everyone wanted to get rich from this "new thing". but the game hasn't played out the way people expected - I think that the conditions that led Microsoft to it's position are no longer there, possibly because Microsoft was able to head off these other companies (except for AOL). When it started taking longer than people thought for these companies to turn a profit, the money flow slowed, and the corporate bloat caught up with them - and it started a vicious circle, or death spiral.
Unfortunately, good companies with sound business plans and plenty of profit have also been bloodied in the process. Kind of sucks there. But I liken the stock market to the study of stampeding lemmings these days.

Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[TOTKChief]

Ahhhh, but not every content business is like the porn industry. With porn, you have to pay:

• Talent.
• Photographers.
• Web developer/graphic designers.
• Site manager.

For me to be similar with our ezines, I'd have to pay:

• Our writers.
• Our editors.
• Web developers/graphic designers.
• Site managers.
• Marketroids.
• PR flacks.

With porn, once the image is captured, you're done. Porn talent can, er, display their wares anywhere they choose. My talent all get exclusivity clauses in their contracts, because our writers make our ezine. Also, except for sites focused around specific talent, I don't imagine that "viewers" want to interact with the talent. With writing, it's vitally necessary to the creative process.

I never thought I'd come to comparing my writers [as Chief Editor, I think of them that way, though I'm younger than almost all of them] to porn talent. I just hope like hell they don't find this thread...=)

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Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[freek_daddy]

When there's that much capital to be had, you create the impression in people that they're intrinsically worth what they're being paid. This has lead to gross excesses and marginally talented people and offerings getting more than their due share and feeling like they are entitled to it. They're figuring out that they're not, and it was bound to happen.

On the other hand, slapping up 10 pictures you got from usenet isn't the same thing as creating daily content. Don't kid yourself into thinking that the "excellent adult sites" are de facto excellent web sites. Some porn sites which are truly excellent web sites might exist, but I've never seen/heard of one.

I agree (whatever that is worth) with your premise though - there's space for judiciously-run content-oriented websites.

Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[TOTKChief]

Actually, it's a lot more expensive than you might first think. A good bit of adult sites now use streaming video, which not only eat up bandwidth like you wouldn't believe, but also costs a LOT to license to use. Also, most adult sites have to pay constantly for new content (whether it be pictures, stories, etc.).

The pay for talent gets the latter. I should have mentioned site costs on the former, but I was focusing primarily on staffing. We've actually joked about running our own porn site, but my morals keep me from it. =)

Now, you mention that an e-zine needs marketing and PR people. Why? Marketing for a standard content site can be as easy as going to places like Lycos' Affiliate Program and signing up. Boom. Ad space is sold. Why complicate the matter and hire 6 figured executives to do the same thing? And why does a site need PR? If the content is useful, people will find it though links from related sites, search engines, etc. A web site that needs PR needs PR because the niche that they're trying to fill may not be there. I seriously doubt that magazines that cater to specific content areas have PR people.

We don't have 'em yet. I hope we never do. Personally, I find talking with people invigorating, so I have no problem being a PR contact. [It just cuts into my sleep time, that's all.]

But marketing and PR is a little more necessary for ezines than porn. Porn is something people want and crave. Sportswriting...they can take it or leave it. We have to do a little offline promotion, but I seriously doubt you'll be shilling ninenine.com on your local talk radio station. I have done that with TOTK.com on our local sports talk station. Granted, it was the cost of my time, but someday, the opportunities might get to the point where someone else has to do it...

No, I really think that the business models of adult sites and e-zines are almost exactly the same, with the only difference is that one is paying for writers, and the other is paying for pre-prepared content. There are very large adult web site companies such as IDG which are making money hand over fist. I don't think that their business model is that different, from say, Salon's.. Other than content, it's exactly the same. The difference is mindset. Most people in the adult industry are the kind of people who want to run a business as best as they can, and who start in their basements witha single PC and a dialup account. More 'traditional' companies, on the other hand, are started by manager types, and start out with bank loans, offices, etc. They're expensive from the get-go because the management doesn't know any other way to do it.

You're right: they shouldn't be. I'd argue that perhaps the talent costs of writers are higher than porn, but then 1) I'm not paying my guys right now [hell, I don't get paid to edit their stuff OR write] and 2) I'm not going to look into the costs of porn talent. =)

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Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[Squid]

It's possible that adult sites are apples to oranges in this discussion. Porn is a bit like cocaine: you simply can't saturate the market, and advertising it is basically a matter of saying "we have some." People probably click through porn banners more often, because it's ALWAYS well-targeted - if you're on the Net hunting for Live Teen Fuck Sluts, someone's likely to have a banner advertising it, and you're gonna click it and probably stick around once you get there.

Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[jafac]

Well, skills were in short supply, and this just underscores my point. When an idiot is hired, it's not skills that were needed, it's headcount. What suckerpunches my kidneys is when I run into someone in an executive position who is so laughably obviously just a buzzword-spouter and nothing more, and these people continue onward and upwards in their career, year after year, with no display of skill or knowledge or talent justifying it. You have to really come to despise the passtime called "golf".

My former company was the poster child for this business model, but since the acquisition (we were bought!), things have improved GREATLY. Seems the new parent company is full of people who can spot phonies, and fire them, a mile off.

Re:Advertising model is NOT failing

[fprintf]

How many of these adult websites actually pay for their content? Or are they just scanned pictures from paper-copy magazines?

Also, provide some links to these advertising sponsored adult websites. It seems they all require a membership.

Too Many Visitors!

[ps]

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...

Exactly...

[TopShelf]

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.

Re:Exactly...

[Golias]

I completely agree.

It used to be axiomatic to say that nothing is on the web except for that which somebody considered it worth the trouble to put it there.

Since a lot of very optimistic people thought they could eventually turn a site that gives content away into a for-profit site, there was a gold rush of speculators trying to get on the bandwagon.

Now that it turns out that making money via web publishing is not going to be easy, and only those who planned for the extremely long haul are ever going to see a profit, the brief and shining moment of free professionally-made content is coming to a close.

So, the day when we could take advantage of VC folly by getting lots of free stuff may be ending. A few places, like /. and imdb are still going strong, but many others are soon to drift into the ether... We all had to know that this day was coming.

Let's take this in stride. Were things really so bad in the days before Slate and Salon?

Re:Colocation

[d.valued]

Still.. A LOT of smaller sites have to pay through the nostrils to get hosted.

Pipe costs less today than last year, granted, but offering up sweet MP3/Ogg Vorbis audio and glitzy, high-grade vids will still eat up bandwidth.

Sometimes, a back-to-basics approach is called for. Simplifying your index.html (getting rid of extraneous tags and fancy font calls) may be minor, but if you get a thousand.. ten thousand hits, those bits add up.

If you're in a major metro area, you could try DSLing your own personal web server.. if you're sure the provider is reliable (and you can afford the symmetric DSL rates... )

Still.. As with most things that are worth it, getting a website up, hot, and active takes money.

Right now, though, don't count on your website to be your day job (unless design, creation, and maintenance thereof IS your day job, in which case, bravo!)


Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)

Ain't working too well for me...

[superdan2k]

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.

----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!

You have misunderstood what he said about micropay

[SuperKendall]

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.

Bomis parody

[jwales]

The Bomis.Com search engine is running a parody of this type of thing...

http://www.bomis.com/tipjar/

(So now you'll know about my other life, when I'm not fighting for content freedom. :-) )

--Jimmy Wales

Compression?

[infinite9]

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.

Re:Compression?

[sith]

Actually its been done. Apache/php can do it (using zlib), and im sure a number of other combos can too. The savings arent' that great though, considering that most of a sites bandwidth isnt taken up spitting 10k text files but in spitting 60k jpegs and 10mb movies (or whatever your content is).

Re:Compression?

[Jason Earl]

mod_gzip works with most non-ancient browsers, YMMV. Check it out

Re:Compression?

[acroyear]

You're missing the bottleneck. Text (html or plain) is rarely the hog, in and of itself. Sites are slow because 1) there's a lot of images or media being downloaded, and none of that is further compressable; 2) the generation of the text is taking time.

Slashdot, Ebay, Amazon all are 100% database driven sites. The entire "page" is constructed using data from a database query or two (or two dozen). If the database is being overloaded by too many requests, there's absolutely nothing that compressing the text coming out of it will achieve.

Re:Compression?

[acroyear]

Good point. But I think that Server suppliers out there will start seeing an alternate "bump" in usage -- yes, their bandwidth will be reduced, but at the expense of CPU usage going through the roof with the compression algorithms. No, its nothing like mp3 enconding, but it is a busy algorithm, and doing 100 at a time will be a significant hit on the CPU, especially when they're competing with the database, the O/S, etc...

Compressing on the fly will increase CPU usage to the point that it will likely slow the site down to the point of uselessness. Moving the compression to a second box will continue the slowdown, because now the second box has to re-assemble the original packets in order to get optimized compression ratios, then retransmit. Its just not a viable solution.

Re:Compression?

[Wesley Felter]

I disagree; CPUs are cheap these days, and I think the CPU time needed to compress outgoing pages is likely to cost less than the bandwidth saved, thus saving money overall.

Re:Compression?

[acroyear]

CPU time is still cheap for 1 or two pages, maybe. But slashdot gets several thousand hits a minute, several hundred a second; more when a Napster or M$ story comes along. When was the last time you got your own linux box to compress 100 SEPARATE files in a second. Try it sometime. (Yes, I acknowledge that file-io is the primary bottleneck, but hopefully you get my drift).

It can work- use macropayments

[rgmoore]

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.

Confusion on Micropayments

[TOTKChief]

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:

1. Maintain our public archives for N months--probably a quarter. IOW, you can see stuff from 01/2001-03/2001, but you're screwed before then.
2. Maintain our email lists as no-charge subscriptions for those who don't wish to pay. Place ads on those lists.
3. Offer access to six years of articles in the archives if you're a subscriber. [Cost: $2-5/mo. That range is broad because we haven't done market research yet.]
4. Offer ad-free email lists if you just want the straight poppo. [Cost: $5-10/mo, depending on the list, market research, and how much it costs us in lost revenue. We probably wouldn't seek to make up all the "lost" ad revenue--probably offer a break of, say, 20-25% over what we'd bring in with ads.]

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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Re:Confusion on Micropayments

[lizrd]

Make more money that way cuz really people pay for news... the only ones that go to archives are people writing reports.

While you have an interesting hypothesis there, I doubt that it's exactly true. There are many different (free even) ways of getting the news and have been for a long time. What is difficult is finding what was news a while ago when you're doing research. People are not ever going to be willing to pay very much for the convenience of getting today's news, that's what TV and the paper are for. The only people who are going to pay for news are the people digging through the archives to write reports.

If you take a look at most news sites you'll see that this model is how they actually charge. The New York times is a good example. Somehow, they manage to sell what they give away for free (today's news, free online you can buy it on dead trees) and then sell what other people throw away (charge for news from the online archive while others charge to haul away yesterday's paper).

The future of all things dealing with the internet is going to be giving away content and selling some additional service. This service may be advertising or the convenience of searching the archive or something else or a combination of these things. This is how Ameritrade et. al. make money too. They give away content (stock quotes, research etc.) and charge for the service (dumping tech stocks).

The web has changed things, content has a marginal cost of zero on the web therefore the price that is charged for it is going to tend towards zero. The only way to get income in that environment is to charge for a service that would be more difficult to obtain elsewhere.
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Re:Confusion on Micropayments

[lizrd]

So you figure the most profitable plan is to compete with the NYT? Go ahead!

That's not what I said at all. I just said that they had the business model I thought was most likely to be successful. If you think that your content is time critical, unavaliable from other sources and your customers are not likely to be concerned about price then the subscription plan may be useful. To have people be really unconcerned about price your content needs to serve a direct business need and provide the opportunity for financial gain. The Gartner group and WSJ are good examples of this. If you have news and opinions about fairly general topics there are a lot of free options and you're going to have a hard time getting people to pay (reference slate and salon).

I certianly don't advocate that anyone try to compete with the New York Times in the area of respected worldwide journalism centered in New York City. That would be a futile endevor. What I do suggest is looking at how they have a working business plan for providing content.
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not many options

[ragnar]

Believe me, I have been looking for alternatives for my site for some time. I already trade banners with other similiar sites as a means of cross promotion and I try very much to keep the site "old school" and refuse to litter the page with endorsements or turn it into a commercial mouthpiece.

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. ;)

Follow the adult industry, as usual

[aiken_d]

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.

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 /.) 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.

Cheers
-b

Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual

[acroyear]

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.

And because "adult entertainment" is a sure bet -- people WILL pay for it, especially if its served up in a way that maintains their privacy. They have for centuries; and they have for every new media since radio.

Nothing else available on the 'net is stuff that people, personally, absolutely will pay for. All you can do is hope. Trouble is that everything else people buy, they aren't (necessarilly) ashamed to buy in public.

You can buy CDs and VHS/DVDs in a store, with the gratification of taking it with you; the 'net can't do that. You can buy software in a store, and have the books with you right away, as opposed to having to read on the screen or waste 100s of pages of paper to print them. Books are the same way -- if there's a store that carries what you like on a regular basis, then you hit that store, and take it with you. Ditto magazines, newspapers, etc...nothing they have you couldn't get some other way.

Yes, you could get "porn" the old fashioned way, but you'd rather do it in total privacy and not deal with the anxiety of funny looks from people in or outside the "shop", or the postman delivering your "descrete plain brown wrapped package". Porn on the 'net is value added -- the value added is privacy in a form never before seen. No other market needs that particular "value added". The only anxieties 1) your sig-other looks at your visa bill, 2) your company actually looks at its web-logs, or 3) you do it so much that you exceed the download limit of your ISP, and they start charging $1/meg (back to said visa bill).

So the problem is that e-commerce will not and never will be the internet's true "killer app". Shipping costs and times are prohibitive compared to the convenience and experience of walking into a store and walking out with product, regardless of the extra availability of items online.

The "killer app" of the 'net is what it was made for -- communication mechanisms like slashdot and groups.yahoo.com and stuff like that. Only that stuff is so easy to make (relatively speaking -- especially with so much free software to build it on), nobody thinks its really worth paying for. Egroups, listbot, onelist all just finally (and cleanly) automated the process that majordomo and listservs have had (and that required a lot of "administration" for far too long) for years; my reaction was "about time".

The idea that free sites leads to pay sites in "information" sites just isn't going to work. People will too quickly content themselves with the free, because the "value added" from the pay site usually just isn't enough. As comment 19 states, most content out there isn't worth paying for.

"Net Taxes" won't work either, as it will create an entity like the ASCAP, which will unfairly redistribute its collected fees to the point that only a small portion of the sites out there will get a large portion of the cash, and most sites get nothing. ASCAP does exactly that with regards to all of its site-licensed based income like from broadcasting sites and stations, and public merchants. It goes to the top radio airplay artists, regardless of what the broadcaster is actually broadcasting.

Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual

[acroyear]

To clarify -- yes, there are some markets where free content leads to paying customers, but they just won't be in the millions that VC's want -- merely the thousands. These are some of the more particular e-zines out there, that take 'net subscribers the way they'd take paper-delivery subscribers. The market will be small, but likely reliable provided your content maintains its quality. Main examples are, naturally enough, software development zines like JavaPro.

Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual

[arkansas]

One pretty good example from the adult industry that might work for regular content are the "Age-checking" services. Essentially, you sign up at one site and then get the right to visit many sites. Then member sites then get some fraction of the total revenue (I assume) probably based on page-views. While this seems like conglomeration, which would ordinarily raise fears of homogenized viewpoints, it might not work out as such. Since the overall service would like to attract as many people as possible, a wide variety of content should be their best bet. The user advantage comes from the convenience of subscribing at one place and hopefully a transparent access system.

Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual

[jafac]

Most content isn't worth paying for, and that what is, is usually also available for free elsewhere - the old piracy debate again.

Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual

[aiken_d]

Well, I partially agree with what you've said. Certainly the net value-add of privacy does help porn to some degree, but I don't think the effect is as big as you think. I don't have current figures, but at the ia2000 trade show last year, estimates were that the net was producing about 10% of revenue in "adult content." (the remainder being traditional video and magazine sales).

I do think you've hit the nail on the head about the lack of value in much of the information out there. Just because someone puts 50 people to work creating it, and spends millions of dollars a year subsidizing it, doesn't mean it's any good!

However, I do believe that there is a real future in pay content for mainstream stuff. Not driving directions or dictionaries -- those are commodities. The trick lies in producing unique content which *has* inherent value. People have always been willing to pay for value, and always will be.

I agree that egrops, et al, are doomed to be free (or ad supported). There's not enough value there to charge monthly fees. But that's why those companies should follow the lead of free adult sites; hook up with for-pay content sites and create a revenue sharing model. Draw people in with the free content, and charge a premium for filtered / vetted / personalized content.

It's going to take a radical change. Not the smallest change will be the abandonment of the idea that people are somehow entitled to make money just because they spent a lot of time on something. If you can't or don't produce content that *is* worth paying for, either get out of the business or adapt your business to be a feeder site for those who can.

ther models may work out as well. But if I were sitting at the helm of a sinking free content site, I would be doing some serious research on the adult internet industry. Sure, not everything is applicable. But a lot of it is.

Cheers
-b

Re:I know.. this sounds weird.

[baptiste]

Oh please! There are people out there who DO do this! They enjoy providing the info and the service. Its a hobby for them. SURE they wish they could rake in dollars. But they can't so it becomes a labor of love. So don't be so quick to judge others who are more charitable than yourself.

I'm happy to pay my $$$ for SDSL and host web sites that folks find useful. But it takes a day job to pay for it.

--

Missing the problem

[deran9ed]

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

Sites; for love or money.

[Greg@RageNet]

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

Re:Sites; for love or money.

[Greg@RageNet]

Here are some ratecards, from a search for 'banner rate CPM':
Chicago Reader $25CPM
Northwest Builders $28CPM
now-see-hear $20CPM

If you are getting alot less than $12 CPM perhaps you should re-evaluate who you are brokering your banneradds through.

-- Greg

I've got an idea!

[Greyfox]

Bear with me here, OK?

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...

Babelfish: rationalization => truth

[JordanH]

• It's a decent question, and one that I keep bringing up because...

I'll be out of the best job in the world if this business model tanks.

---

Re:Pointedly providing click-throughs?

[baptiste]

Well this kind of defeats the purpose and probably violates rules when you signed up for the ads. However I've seen some sites use this tack. www.uncbasketball.com runs an extremely popular message board and they pay by the byte like many. So every so often they post to the users begging for click throughs. FOlks respond and their revenue gets up - but I find it somewhat wrong - I mean I only feel like clicking an ad I'm interested in. Heck - they'd probably be better off with a paypal setup since their fans are zealots. But begging for clickthroughs is probably against the rules and doesn't seem like a sound practice.

--

What do you want from your site?

[ChaoticCoyote]

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...

--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos

DUH!

[TheWhiteOtaku]

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.

Content-Encoding: gzip

[yerricde]

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.

Pay for information? What are you, nuts?!?!

[brianvan]

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.

Pledge Breaks

[sulli]

Can you imagine if Slashdot took two week pledge breaks every 4-6 months like public radio? My head hurts just contemplating it!

Re:Pledge Breaks

[Nexx]

...and on news today: /. DDOS took down a popular credit card gateway service for over two hours as affluent geeks tried to give money back to their beloved site, taking down vast majority of the eCommerce sites, sometimes forever.
--

Targeted ads

[booch]

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.

Re:Pointedly providing click-throughs?

[ebh]

What's wrong with this is that it generates no real revenue. Sure the site running the ad can theoretically charge more based on higher clickthrough rates, but you're not clicking through with any real intention of purchasing from the advertiser.

Eventually, the advertiser will observe a low revenue-to-clickthrough ratio and refuse to pay the higher ad rate. They may even cancel the ad if they suspect clickbots or some other artificial clickthrough inflation.

Re:Colocation

[ScuzzMonkey]

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.

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.

Since the sentiment certainly seems to be there, and since distributed computing seems to be the order of the day, where's the Open Source version of Akamai type site load-balancing? It strikes me that there are a ton of geeks out there with relatively lightly used high-speed access lines, who totally love a lot of these sites that are going to have to fold if they can't get cheaper bandwidth. What's needed is a free software package that will allow those users to safely and easily mirror sites they support and a centralized setup to allocate requests to them based on traffic, location, and available bandwidth. Of course, the centralized server to distribute the load is still going to require a chunk of bandwidth, hardware, and support time, and probably rack-space at a co-lo, but with their own bandwidth payments reduced by load distribution, subscribing sites could afford to subsidize the solution by splitting those costs.

It could be that high-bandwidth line penetration is not yet where it needs to be to support many high-volumes sites, or maybe the owners of those lines aren't confident enough in the safety of their boxes to want to run the web services that would be necessary. And for database driven sites, it wouldn't work at all. But I think that the rapid proliferation of Napsterites, SETI@Home users and the like shows that it's at least possible to split up the work if you make it simple enough.

Don't you mean subscription model?

[jimmcq]

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?

Re:URL please

[MrScience]

Didn't you hear the man?? They want fewer people! Giving out the url on slashdot would really swamp them!

Re:Colocation ... and other thoughts DSLing

[ScuzzMonkey]

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.

Re:Compression? (optimised images)

[Kris_J]

Mindless automated compression is not the answer. Getting a clue about JPEGs and GIFs and possibly exploring MPEG4 for still images is the answer. It's amazing how many site's images are way larger than they need to be. I can normally shave 20-50% off the size of every image on a site with little or no noticable loss in quality. These places are wasting money they don't have with their inefficient images...

--

Yes it is.

[achurch]

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?"

--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL

Re:Yes it is.

[achurch]

No, it's you who are confused. The matter is not whether advertising is a good way of generating revenue in the first place, but that, good or bad, whether it's providing revenue. And the answer is, no, it isn't, or at least not nearly as much as it used to. Therefore, it's failing.

If you want to argue that the current advertising model was a bad idea to start with and should fail, then go for it, but don't confuse the issues.

--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL

Re:Colocation

[E1ven]

There is a system being implemented to distribute websites. Freenet.

Using systems in place on freenet, you can upload a website, and have it change daily. (though the updates aren't great yet)

It is cached on computers around the world, according to who is reading the sight.

Although a lot of people want to use freenet for a napster replacement, it's real use is as you described. as they say on their website "Re-wiring the internet"

--

This message brought to you by Colin Davis

bomis.com

[elegant7x]

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

10k?

[elegant7x]

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

1% is *really* good

[elegant7x]

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

Sam, stop making damage control !

[f5426]

> 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

Re:Colocation

[ScuzzMonkey]

Hmmm. I'd heard of Freenet, of course, and was aware that it could handle documents of just about any sort, but doesn't it require the software to retrieve them? If the viewer base has to install anything beyond their web browser then, IMHO, a distributed site system just won't work. Plus, IIRC, Freenet has some problems with rarely viewed documents dropping out of the system or becoming unretrievable.

It's not a horrible solution for information distribution (especially in contexts where anonymity is important), but neither is it a good replacement for a website, methinks.

Re:Colocation

[E1ven]

While is is true that you use external software to run a freenet node, the access is done through a web browser. Fproxy, the current primary interface, is treated exactly as a link to any other website.

You are right about less popular content being dropped however. The best way (IMO) to fix this is to run your own freenet node, and re-insert the content daily.
Then it is auto cached around the globe as people request it, and kept up as you continue to insert it.
--

This message brought to you by Colin Davis