Salon Sans Ads, For A Price

Judg3 writes: "Salon.Com announced Tuesday that their readers will have a choice: Continue to read for free, dodging new, bigger CNET-style ads, or they pay $30 a year to read Salon's daily news and views, plus bonus content, in a blissfully ad-free environment." Is it worth doing something like that here? I don't read Salon enough to care, but I'd love it if a few bucks removed the ads from CNN. Slashdot's ads aren't really all that obtrusive, most of the time anyway :( If it's something people want, we could certainly consider it.

Comments

How about this?

[Iscon in Siiscon]

I will sell you JunkBuster for $30/yr. Then you can read CNN.com with no ads.

Re:How about this?

[Kool Moe]

Ads suck, sure.
But hey, you want to read the content for free, then don't block the ads!
Folks who do this are directly contributing to the crap we're seeing now- FlashAds, BigAds, VerticalAds...
I think this is a fine idea- I wish cable could do this. I'm already paying for cable, yet I have to suffer through ads anyway? THAT deserves a Junkbuster concept. But online...you want free, deal with the ads. You don't want ads, pay for the content.
By trying to have it free and ad-free, people who use such junkbuster-like software are largely responsible for the death of sites which can't survive the overhead, and will utlimately be repsonsible for the increased commercialization of the net.

Exception- ad services which use sneaky tracking practices like doubelclick- filter them. Companies which use such web-bugs and things, I redirect those URL's to my own webserver using the hosts file. But banner sites that don't pull that crap, I happily deal with adverts to get the content for free.
KM

Re:How about this?

[ceesco]

Or, you can just edit your /etc/hosts file to redirect adclick.com and other to 127.0.0.1. And, I'll only charge $20/yr. for that wonderful service ;)

Re:How about this?

[hey!]

Any web admin with half a brain could get around this with server side processing. The ad payload could be delivered in the same URL as the content. Of course, junkbuster would still prevent doubleclick.net from using cookies to figure out you're the same person who looked at their ads from a different site.

Removing ads

[Bob McCown]

Junkbuster, or one of it's derivatives, a decent set of rules, and a tweaked hosts file is alot cheaper....

um, no.

[BilldaCat]

we're smart enough to block them, thanks.

Re:um, no.

[shinji]

Who ever mod'd this up needs to think again. If sites like Salon continue to make no money they will soon go out of business then you will have no Salon to read. No ammount of blocking will get you a site that has gone out of business.

If you like a service you should be willing to provide some revenue for them, either subscription or ads. It amazes me, people will pay for cable and magazines both of which have subscription cost and ads but expect all online e-zines to be free.

Re:um, no.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Yeah, anyone who fast-forwards through a commercial is a communist.

--

Re:um, no.

[Tuzanor]

it's not the ads most of us mind, its the ad companies. i block the ad companies i don't like because i am on the internet SO much (i know, i know...no life) that i don't want any one company to know that much about me no matter how. so if the website handles the ads themselves, then they get through, if they leavee it to doubleclick or admonitor, they are not getting through,. sorry guys.

Re:um, no.

[BilldaCat]

incorrect. I run a website and I'd rather have people who are NOT going to click ads not view them, as it wrecks click through ratios even more than they already are. If you aren't interested enough in ads to go to the point of installing blocking software, you obviously aren't going to click, so it's no skin off my back.

Re:um, no.

[VC]

Id pay $10 a year for a @slashdot.org address. Then atleast your getting somthing tangable for your $$

Re:um, no.

[Xerithane]

Not everyone has tivo. Nor records everything before they watch it.

Granted, I haven't watched TV in some years but I dont think that feature is in there yet.

Re:um, no.

[Ephol]

I worked on a fairly large scale network of websites for a couple years, and I can tell you that there are a lot of websites that get paid based not only ad clicks, but on ad views (a certain dollar amount per x thousand, or whatever). So ad blocking software can still hurt a site's revenue..

Re:um, no.

[BilldaCat]

I admit, this is true. But advertising has gone so far down the crapper that most advertisers are not willing to pay for views, but want clicks instead (even though views build branding).

It doesn't really matter, the whole advertising market is fucked anyway. There's been too many ad networks that have screwed over/not paid their websites that a lot of websites are going to a donation form (be it paypal, amazon, etc.), and we'll see how that turns out. It's working ok for me.. I'm not covering my hosting costs, but it's no longer breaking my wallet. And I don't have to worry about being screwed by a company such as eFront.

Re:um, no.

[Mike Schiraldi]

And not everyone blocks ads. Your point?

--

Re:um, no.

[belroth]

Your Sig:

Waitress: You, sir, are drunk!! Winston Churchill: And you, Madam, are ugly, and tomorrow I'll be sober.

It wasn't a waitress, it was Lady Astor. In the House of Commons Bar IIRC.
----

Re:um, no.

[Xerithane]

Blocking ads is technically feasible. Sitting and watching late night tv and pushing fast forward on your TV during a commercial is not.

I could be wrong, but I've yet to see bandwidth like that over your standard cable.

Re:um, no.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Sure it is, if you have a Tivo. Buying a Tivo is analogous to installing ad filtering software. The fact that it costs a bit more doesn't harm the analogy.

--

Re:um, no.

[Xerithane]

Uhm, no.

Not even close to the same. Buying a tivo is expensive, with a monthly service fee. Installing ad filtering software is.. well, free.

Buying a tivo unit, you are supporting another business. Installing filtering software, typically you aren't (unless you use a commercial product).

It's like comparing ecstacy and crack. Granted, it was slightly funny.

Re:um, no.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Buying a tivo is expensive, with a monthly service fee. Installing ad filtering software is.. well, free.

If i snapped my fingers and made Tivos free and ad-blocking software expensive, would you then declare that Tivos were evil and ad-blocking software okay?

Buying a tivo unit, you are supporting another business. Installing filtering software ... you aren't

But regardless, i don't see what this has to do with the price of tea in China.

--

Re:um, no.

[Xerithane]

I was merely stating that the two are different. If you block ads, then you aren't supporting whatever it is you are watching/reading/etc. Pure and simple. However, it is completely different than fast forwarding through commercials because.. well, you can't. Even with a tivo it's not the same as filtering ad banners.

The reason why if you install filtering software you aren't supporting a business, is because that site that you are blocking will go under if people don't support it. This is a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong though, I dislike the adverts plastered on the page and the methods between them. The digital adverts are different than anything else because on TV most people are forced to watch them (and that is true, because not everyone can get a tivo or the service, etc while anyone can install blocking software [to draw the connection]).

I would say that if tivo's entire purpose was to block commercials then it is evil, especially on tv because tv ads dont track where you are going. Ad filtering softwares entire purpose is to screw the site that you are looking at.

Re:um, no.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Interesting.

Still, i currently know (i.e. on a personal basis) about eight people who own Tivos and zero people who use ad-blocking software. And they're not all tech-heads. And just about everyone i know has a VCR and uses it to fast-forward over commercials. It's only a matter of time before Tivo techonology is as popular as the VCR.

It's my opinion that if you give something to me, and you haven't asked me to sign a contract, i can do whatever i want to it.

Because if we don't stand up to this, pretty soon you'll hear an ad instead of a dial tone. I read a great article about what life would be like in such a society, and regrettably i have not been able to find it, but it included stuff like: You wake up and push the button that turns on the lights. It changes to say, "Nothing says good morning like a fresh copy of The New York Times. Would you like to order a subscription? [No] [Yes]"

If someone doesn't want me to block their ads, they'd better ask me to sign a contract saying i won't. Otherwise, if they're just going to publish information for all to see, let the vendor beware.

--

Re:um, no.

[binarybits]

Fine, but then you should be willing to pay for the content you consume as salon is asking its readers to do. Otherwise you're mooching off of the money or click-throughs of other readers. One way or the other you're a free-rider.

The fact that they can't affordably prevent you from free-riding doesn't make it right. If everyone blocked ads *and* refused to pay subscription fees, all the content on the web would dry up and blow away. You can certainly mooch off the rest of us if you want to, but I don't think it's right. One way or the other, you should pay your fair share-- journalists have to eat.

Re:um, no.

[binarybits]

However, it is completely different than fast forwarding through commercials because.. well, you can't. Even with a tivo it's not the same as filtering ad banners.

You can and it is. If you start watching a show 10 or 15 minutes after its live airtime, you can skip by the commercials in a couple of seconds. That's indistinguishable from having them filtered out for you.

There are only two fundamental differences. First, TiVo is more expensive than blocking software. It's only a matter of time before it gets cheaper. Two, TiVo is only effective if you start watching a show several minutes after it goes on the air (so the commercials can get buffered out) but that's not a big deal, and if you run out of buffer you can pause and come back in 10 minutes when the buffer's filled back up.

Beyond that, the analogy between TiVo and blocking software is perfect-- TiVo can be used to painlessly filter out TV commercials, and blocking software painlessly filters out ads. If things go as I think they're likely to, both will lead to large drops in their respective ad revenues and major changes in the structure of the web and TV industries.

Personally I'm not sure if that's a bad thing or not. I think subscription-based services might be better in some ways, as it promotes reader loyalty and provides a more stable revenue stream. On the other hand, only the cream of the crop will be able to get subscription revenue, so maybe that's not so great. Either way, though, TiVo and add blocking are fundamentally similar in terms of their function and their likely effect on their respective industries. I don't see how you can really be for one and against the other-- either advertising is a good way to fund content or it isn't.

Re:um, no.

[Xerithane]

The difference between ad delivery, and commercials is you can only estimate how many people are watching your show very crudely through surveys and such.

With online adverts you know without a doubt how many ads have been served, how many have been clicked through.

That is why the analogy isn't perfect. I just had to sit through an hour meeting listening as to why digital adverts are suffering more than television and print adverts... it is too easy for people to just not pay attention. Even with a tivo, are you going to really start all your shows 15 minutes late? I know (granted, i dont watch tv but if I did) I wouldn't, it's a pain in the ass.

It all breaks down, I just wish there was a standard tip jar out that was reliable and not backed by amazon.

Re:um, no.

[binarybits]

OK, but the only way this really affects them differently is that while online advertising revenue can theoretically go to zero (if everyone uses blocking software) commercials will always have some people who sit through them. That's a valid point. However I don't think the difference is as big as you might think.

First, I think the number of people who would skip commercials if they had a TiVo is higher than you'd think, There are lots of ways to use a TiVo to skip commercials. For example, you can watch two stations at once, and every other show you switch between them, thus allowing you to watch two hours of TV in an hour and a half by skipping the commercials. Or, if you find a long show you like, you can watch the first segment, hit pause, and then go make dinner or something, come back, and the thing's all buffered up for you.

In addition, a *lot* of people will find it convenient to use the "always record show X" feature to just record the shows they like and watch them at their convenience. The main reason people don't do this with VCR's now is that it's a pain and you have to buy new tapes all the time. The combination of the fact that TiVo knows what's on TV (and does a hell of a lot better job than VCR+) and the fact that a random-access digital device doesn't need to worry about "recording over" another of your favorite shows means that people can set things up to record several hours of content, and then can sit down and watch that content whenever they like, commercial free, and it'll probably be better than whatever's on live TV anyway.

On the other hand, I strongly doubt adbuster type software will every achieve 100% market penetration. The reason is that long before that happens the ad-makers will get creative about how they package the ads to defeat the filters. There are lots of ways to do this. First, you can make the ads different sizes. Second, increase the number of servers you serve from, or better yet, serve ads from the same domain that you serve your content from. Sure it's a pain to keep track of, but the big sites shouldn't have any problem. You'll get an arms race between adsters and filters, and the vast majority of web users will remain behind the curve and still see a lot of ads.

So ultimately I think both forms of advertising are in trouble in the long term, and that in the short term neither is going to be hurt that much because the market penetration of these respective technologies is fairly low. But once people start buying TiVo's, the effect on TV revenues will be every bit as devastating as when people install ad-blocking software on their browsers.

Re:um, no.

[Xerithane]

Very good points, but still the TiVo isn't for blocking commercials.. Ad filtering software is.

I just wish that people would support the sites, and ad companies find a legit way that isn't intrusive to deliver their media.

Re:um, no.

[waynem77]

Fine, but then you should be willing to pay for the content you consume as salon is asking its readers to do. Otherwise you're mooching off of the money or click-throughs of other readers.

Say I view a web site but simply ignore the ads. Is that acceptible behavior? If so, how is it different from simply blocking the ads? If I load but ignore the ads, I am still "mooching off the click-throughs" of other readers. Both actions are morally equivalent.

It's the same as when I'm watching a show on television and see an ad for McDonald's, but don't immediately rush out and buy a Big Mac. I'm enjoying the program which is supported by other people who do in fact patronize McDonald's, and I don't feel the least bit guilty.

If everyone blocked ads *and* refused to pay subscription fees,

They won't. Advertising isn't an all-or-nothing enterprise; it's based on statistics. Advertisers plan on having a certain percentage of a certain demographic purchasing a certain amount of a certain product. They know that not everyone will respond; some people get their entertainment (or web site, or whatever) gratis. Advertisers know this and plan for it accordingly. Any advertiser who plans for 100% response won't last long in the industry.

all the content on the web would dry up and blow away.

This statement is so utterly ridiculous that I don't know where to begin.

Perhaps some commercial content would dry up. (Briefly... read my next paragraph.) But you're buying into the current perception of the Web as a giant shopping mall or catalog. But it's so much more than that. Some sites don't depend on commercial success. University sites will survive. Science sites will survive. (I don't think I've ever seen an ad on www.nasa.gov.) Personal sites will survive. (I myself host a comparitive review of Medieval European calligraphy on my site. When I started, there was nothing on the Web similar to it. Yet I've never made $0.10 off it. There's lots of personal pages like that.)

The other thing to remember: if advertising turns out to be a failure, people will find another way to make money off the Web. It's that simple. I don't know how; I'm not a prognosticator. But I know that if money can possibly be made, someone will find a way to do it. Commercial sites might go away briefly, but I guarantee that they'd return, soon, and with a vengeance.

Some people use ad-blocking software. If I were you, I wouldn't let that keep me awake at night.

Re:um, no.

[Mike Schiraldi]

Well done.

Imagine a world where Linux was only put out by companies, and the companies supported themselves by sticking ads all over Linux.

People would find a way to turn those ads off, and others would complain, "Linux will dry up and blow away if the companies can't make money!"

Linux flourishes without ads. Apache flourishes without ads. If Slashdot dried up and blew away, something would replace it. Perhaps a peer-to-peer system.

--

Re:um, no.

[Tuzanor]

oh ok, thanks...i think :-)

Re:um, no.

[binarybits]

I agree that people should pay for the content they use, no question about it. I am strongly considering becoming a salon member. My point, though, is that while TiVo is not "for" blocking commercials, it makes it ludicrously easy, and so functinoally there isn't any difference. Blocking commercials is one of the the *major* functions of a TiVo, even if it isn't the only function.

Re:um, no.

[belroth]

No problems, it's my fave quotation from Churchill too. :-)

----

Why pay?

[Wakko Warner]

...when Junkbuster does this for free?

- A.P.

--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

Re:Why pay?

[rde]

why pay...when Junkbuster does this for free?
Err... because $30 a year is nothing when you consider the quality of the writing on Salon?

Of course, most people will feel as you do, and Salon is relying on those happy few who consider their $30 to be well spent. They'll probably be happy enough with people who click occasionally, too.
I haven't decided which I'll be doing, but certainly Salon is well worth reading, and well worth paying a paltry sum for. And if I don't, I'll be happy to click on the occasional ad.
If I had a slow connection, things might be different, but when download speed isn't a factor I see no reason to not support them.

Re:Why pay?

[madro]

For the same reason people give to National Public Radio -- they want to support content they like without forcing the stations to resort to ads.

Not that there's anything wrong with blockers, Tivo, et al. It's just more user choice to make ad-free subs available, which is a good thing. A subscription is better than letting Amazon get a chunk through their honor program or whatever ...

Re:Why pay?

[jmauro]

Salon's quality has gone way down in recent months. Most of the stores are just fed from the wires, so the same stories appear on Salon, CNN, Yahoo, etc. The unique stuff is updated very infrequently, although it is of a better than avage quality still. I believe this has a lot to do with firing a good part of their staff. $30 dollars is a little to much for the small amount of content offered.

I don't think slashdot could support a fee service. Mainly because it is a complete rehash of other web sites and the authors put so much support behind "free sofware". The community would backlash if this was tried.

Re:Why pay?

[dachshund]

They can certainly make the layout of their site unfriendly to ad-filtering programs. These new ads are enormous. If they tweak their layout enough, they can make the pages unpleasant to read without serious re-working. I think their plan (and the $30) is a little too ambitious, though. I love Salon, but I think this is going to hurt them.

Re:Why pay?

[Cplus]

They're not looking for donations, they're looking for subscriptions. A big difference.

Re:Why pay?

[phil reed]

They can certainly make the layout of their site unfriendly to ad-filtering programs.

Having or not having the ads show up won't make any difference - if the layout is bad, it's bad either way.


...phil

Re:Why pay?

[MrBogus]

Because this is the first step towards a Members Only content area. Junkbuster can't get you past a login screen.

Content sites that can't make it on ad revenue really only have once choice, and that's the porn model - free teaser content, and a subscription service to get at the rest.

Re:Why pay?

[VAXman]

Dude, information wants to be free, they can't charge $30 a year for something which is free to provide. You can encode any Salon article as a number. So it's like they're charging for numbers! What a scam! We can just put the articles on Freenet and remove the ads - they won't be able to catch us that way.

Re:Why pay?

[Nexx]

At the risk of sounding like a zealot, I must put in my 2 cents. Free software has nothing to do with the price, but everything to do with freedom. Read what RMS says about the GPL. The synopsis is that you can charge whatever price you can for the GPL'ed software, but with the software distribution, you must give the buyer the ability to easily obtain the source, and let them modify it at will, provided that they release their modifications under GPL (emphasis mine).

Now, I do agree that /. readers will probably revolt if /. went to a transitionary-subscription-only model, but then, that's life. I'm probably willing to pay for salon, CNN, et. al, but most likely, I won't pay as much for /. as I would for some of the others I've mentioned.
--

Re:Why pay?

[angelo]

And Besides, The Romp tried this pay for play service. While original, the Romp's quality isn't high enough for me to pay $30/year.

Some of their works (OZ vs OZ) are great, but certain others (Booty Call, Cooties, Sex in the Inner City) have either sucked from the beginning, or have continued downhill for far too long. Perhaps when they get their $3000 a year, they'll be able to pull up quality. However, I doubt people are going to be willing to pay for play on a buncha stupid flash games.

Re:Why pay?

[rde]

Dude, information wants to be free, they can't charge $30 a year for something which is free to provide
I don't read Salon for the news; I read it for the opinion columns. Whereas a fair number of stories do seem to be written by someone with his[^H^Her] head up their ass, a lot of them are interesting, literate and definitely worth reading. I imagine those columnists want to be paid, so pay I will. Maybe. I certainly won't be using junkbuster or downloading them from freenet (this attitude subject to revision should they do something that really pisses me off.)

Re:Why pay?

[volsung]

provided that they release their modifications under GPL

For those in the audience, this quote is a little misleading. The GPL requires that if you distribute the modified software, you must distribute the source code for your changes. This is one of the more common misconceptions about the GPL. You can take the Linux kernel and modify it to run better on your tweaked-out custom server hardware and never show anyone your changes. Try and send it outside your organization (sales, etc.), and you'll have to give your changes only to the entity which receives the program. They, in turn, can use the code you have provided in accordance with the GPL.

I'm not implying that the parent author didn't already know this. The sentence, however, was a bit misleading, and I wanted to clarify it.

Re:Why pay?

[johnnyb]

Obviously a troll, but I'll respond.

Charging is not the problem. Noone has a problem with charging. The problem comes that if I pay my $30, and then want to email the article to a friend. If I can't do that, it's bad, if I can, it's good. Information wants to be free, as in, have freedom, not as in "not paid for".

Re:Why pay?

[volsung]

Dude, information wants to be free

I think this is the first time I've seen this phrase in post that wasn't using it in the context of criticizing the people who espouse it. I was almost starting to think it was made up by the critics. I guess people really do say it.

Re:Why pay?

[ruzel]

Information wants to be free -- like stock quotes and phone numbers. Opinion editorials, novels and songs (in some cases code) are not information -- they are forms of human expression. They're protectable by copyright so that they can be made for sale (at the creator/author/musician's benefit). The facts of an article, the information contained within the expression will become free (and distorted) over time. The way in which that information is expressed is dependent on the one human who did it. That's worth money. $30 a year for good writing on Salon would be well worth it to me; just like owning an original Van Gogh and not a poster would be worth $15 million instead of ten bucks.

Re:Why pay?

[EllisDees]

Dude, you finally get it! Glad to see you come around after all this time.

I like Salon.com, I'll probably even plonk down the $30 just to show my support, much like I've been plonking at fairtunes.com

Re:Why pay?

[BradleyUffner]

The information isn't free to provide, they have to pay for bandwidth, the server, electricity, and staff.
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\ =\=\=\=\

Re:Why pay?

[Quikah]

It looks like a magazine or newspaper article now. No big deal if you ask me, I have been used to this sort of thing ever since I started reading the newspaper.

Re:Why pay?

[Xerithane]

Obviously a troll, but I'll respond.

In defense of the parent poster (VAXman) I think it's called a joke. While it is hard to distinguish the two sometimes, this is (from my perception) most definitely a joke. And actually rather funny.

And if you pay your $30, and email it to your friend then have your friend look at an advert. Everyone wins, except for the digital advertisement companies.. oh wait, I work for a advertisement company - Damn you all! -- joke.

Re:Why pay?

[linzeal]

Can't you force someone to download an ad or not allow them to download the content. This seems like it could be done in a variety of ways. Why have I not seen it done?

Re:Why pay?

[spudnic]

I wouldn't mind paying $30 a year for a slashdot subscription (maybe a $15-$20 student rate for those of you who are still broke ;). With a username costing $30, it would certainly cut down a lot on the s/n ratio.

It would make it a much more enjoyable experience for everyone who cared enough to stick around. Those are the people who make it interesting.

I know I get more enjoyment out of /. over the course of a year than I would with the 1.5 DVD's I could buy with that money. I learn so much here, I might even get my employer to pay the bill!

The problem is that we're all spoiled. We expect things to be free (as in beer). That's not the way the world works. It may sound great and idealistic when you're in college or just starting out, but get to be 31 like me (geez, I'm old) and you'll understand.

--James

Re:Why pay?

[spudnic]

Maybe the next big wave for advertisers is to have some of the page content as a part of the ad banner. Block my ads and you lose a chunk of the article along with it. Could be done on the fly really quickly and with small (k) images resulting.

Re:Why pay?

[johnnyb]

It did have too many obvious trollmarks. You're right it was probably humorous. I'll have to reboot my funnybone.

Re:Why pay?

[susano_otter]

What makes $30/year so ambitious? That works out to a $2.50/month magazine subscription. Last time I checked, people were happy to pay twice that much for magazines with ads in them. Or did you mean that Salon's content doesn't rate $2.50 a month? Neither does People Magazine's, but everybody subscribes anyway, don't they?

Re:Why pay?

[outlier]

Because Junkbuster can't provide users with Salon's promised "premium content."[1] I hate ads, and I don't see them. This is actually a Good Thing for advertisers because it raises their click-through rates, since I wouldn't click anyway.

[1] I'm not sure if I buy the whole "Premium Content" thing, I think of it much like the term used to describe pre-checked opt-in spam as "valuable offers."

Re:Why pay?

[Sloppy]

Because using Junkbuster doesn't give any economic incentive to the content provider. Thus, it only solves half the problem, while making the other half worse.

---

Re:Why pay?

[Nexx]

You know? I never thought of it that way. $30/username, and if all freebies were reduced to AC's, the S:N ratio would *probably* go up enough to the point where I would pony up.
--

Will they pay me $30 a year

[SpanishInquisition]

If I read it with double the ads?
--

Re:Will they pay me $30 a year

[stilwebm]

AllAdvantage tried this idea. We can see how well that worked out.

Re:Will they pay me $30 a year

[UltraBot2K1]

You can laugh, but I know a lot of people that actually make money from that sort of thing. While I personally hate ad banners, and will stop at nothing to prevent them, my mother-in-law's daughter told me about a service that does pay users to view banner ads.

Sites like AllAdvantage (no referral ID in link) as well as a few others, place targeted ad banners on the top of your screen while you're connected to the internet, and pay users per hour that they have the program running. Most of these companies only pay $0.40 - $0.50/hr for the service, but for college students and others who might not have that much money, an extra $20-$50 bucks a month can be quite helpful. You can buy a lot of ramen noodles with that.

Re:Will they pay me $30 a year

[peccary]

but for college students and others who might not have that much money, an extra $20-$50 bucks a month can be quite helpful.

'course, if you don't have much money, why would I want to advertise to you? Employ you, maybe, but try to sell you stuff? No thanks, I'll stick to selling things to people who HAVE money, thank you.

Re:Will they pay me $30 a year

[sulli]

Um, AllAdvantage is toast. As is your link.

Taco Says ----

[cOdEgUru]

........
Slashdot's ads aren't really all that obtrusive, most of the time anyway
.......

It would, if you start reading Slashdot as often as we do.

Finally.

[Saxgod]

I have been waiting for years for this to happen. The Internet is finally catching some of it's newspaper roots: you can either sell space to advertisers and have a cheap newspaper, or charge money for the newspaper and not give space to advertisers. In any case, there isn't a free lunch.

Re:Finally.

[Genom]

The problem comes when you take the "over the top" nature of advertizing technologies when they relate to the 'net.

First it was spam.

Then it was banners.

Then more spam, and more banners.

Then (people started catching on to spammers grabbing email addresses from innocuous-looking forms) gated "valid email address" pages that send some form of "password" to your address - you use the password, they know your address is real, and put it on the "verified real-deal email addresses" list, which they then sell to spammers.

Now - since none of that is working - places like CNet have decided that ads need to be BIGGER, and take over the content area to the point that they quite literally interrupt the browsing experience. (which of course is the point of advertizing anyway)

This is only going to get worse. Soon the ads will be larger and more abundant than the content itself.

Soon it'll be hard to tell what is "content" and what is an ad - pages will be designed not to display the article or content that it's audience will be looking for, but rather to "effectively" display the ads.

People will look for options to get rid of them - and they'll start to pay micropayments, or yearly/monthly/daily/hourly fees to get HALF of the ads stripped out (but you know they're going to pass some through even to the paying crowd)

So, people will turn to blocking software like Junkbuster -- at which point, I fully expect there to be a rash of "campaign contributions" to various elected officials, and some law making it illegal to block ads to be bought^H^H^H^H^H^Hvoted into law.

Re:Finally.

[m00t]

"pages will be designed not to display the article or content that it's audience will be looking for, but rather to "effectively" display the ads"

I'd say they already are in some cases.

As a not quite direct example, look at CNN's video clips. They force you to watch an ad before they play the real clip. You can't skip it thanks to The New Great Features in Media Player and Real Player. It won't be long before you're force to click through ads to read the article.

obtrusive ads

[josu]

Slashdot's ads aren't really all that obtrusive

Except for those distracting animated gifs, which I guess are just about all of them...

Disgruntled Jewish Guy Tax

[ExtraTrstl]

The stupid people that do this "First Post" BS is a prime example of why I support the DJGT so much. See my post in the thread about spam to get the full effects of the DJGT. Thank you, and Good DAY!

Not needed on /.

[Brownstar]

While some sites out there could definately be improved by removing all of the adds. Slashdot only has 1 add per page (that happens to be the same height in pixels as 1 click with the scroll button on a mouse;)

Good Idea

[rabtech]

It is obvious that the current round of banner advertisements isn't going to hold up against bandwidth and hardware costs. Internet advertising needs time to remake itself. I imagine that /. had a better click-through rate than most sites, since the advertisements are generally geared toward the audience, something most people forgot to worry about.

All that said though, I would still like to be able to browse without ANY advertisements at all. I think $30 is too high myself, but if Slashdot offered a membership for $10/yr, I'd gladly sign up and I think many others would as well, especially since that would help prop up the ol' budget against this recent dot-com madness.
-------
-- russ

"You want people to think logically? ACK! Turn in your UID, you traitor!"

Re:Good Idea

[david614]

I agree. I would be willing to pay up to $30.00 a year for ad free access to Slashdot.

Hell, I pay more than that for magazine subscriptions that are becoming increasingly unreadable -- because of the increasing number of ads. See PC Magazine for a good example of a magazine that is fast becoming (if it isn't already) a sales brochure for computer companies.

Sign me up if you want to conduct "pilot" tests of the subscription model.

D

Re:Good Idea

[Mr. Slippery]

I think $30 is too high myself, but if Slashdot offered a membership for $10/yr, I'd gladly sign up and I think many others would as well,

Hmm. And how would such an ad-free membership work?

Username/password? 100 people could all use the same account. Heck, if I was feeling generous (or contrary) I could post my paid login for everyone to use, a la the famous cypherpunks/cypherpunks combo.

Send a "registered" cookie to my browser? Can easily be copied by the tech-savvy; and are the tech-non-savvy supposed to buy one subscription for home, one for work?

I just don't see how this idea would work, technically. Any ideas?

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

Re:Good Idea

[MrBogus]

Really, I can't imagine that Slashdot's ads are that bothersome. I'm pressing PgDn before I even see what the ad is, and then there's a ton of content before one is forced to view another ad. (Although Netscape tends to hang while displaying the nested tables, forcing you to look at the ad for a longer period of time.)

PC Mag has another problem, one that's shared by most of the print computer magazines -- sales have fallen way down because people read about computers on the Internet. This has forced them to drop ad rates and cut content, and thus become thin little things that are 75% ads. (However, I would argue that even at it's peak 10 years ago, PC Magazine was 75% sales brochure content anyway.)

Re:Good Idea

[NineNine]

The average reader isn't going to do this. Granted, some slimebuckets will, but the majority will pay the $30, and read Salon ad free. Right now, I gladly pay for info at consumerreports.org, and morningstar.com. True, I could find somebody else with a membership and leach off of the, but A. It's not worth the trouble and B. I'm not one of the aforementioned slimebuckets.

Besides, all they have to do is to combine a user/login with a randomly generated cookie, and you've got a system that's fairly tough to crack.

Re:Good Idea

[segfaultcoredump]

Simple, use both.

when you login, a session cookie gets sent to your browser and all other sessions are destroyed.

If you give your password out to a friend, then the two of you cannt browse the site at the same time without constantly logging in again. (For extra fun, the browser with the old cookie gets locked out for X minutes )

so yes, there are ways of making password sharing a real pain in the ass

Re:Good Idea

[heytal]

Ever heard of not allowing 2 simultaneous logins ?

I have seen sites which throw away the older logged on computer out, if there is an attempt to log on from another computer. The latest login survives

Re:Good Idea

[Joey7F]

Sure, you can always get around it, but that is not the point.

Most people would pay a low fee to download mp3s off napster. I would. 5 bucks a month or so, with one major caveat, THEY MUST BE NONENCRYPTED and freely transferable to any medium anywhere, and able to be edited.

People, in general are willing to pay for services, as long as they feel they are getting their money's worth. I personally find the /. ads not obtrusive in the least, so /. wouldn't get money from me :-D

--Joey

Re:Good Idea

[_marshall]

It probably wouldn't be hard to implement a system that keeps track of currently logged on users, getting mostly rid of the "everybody uses 1 ID" problem (You'll still have people loggin on at different times, but this can't be stopped I presume). As for 1 ID at home, 1 ID at work.. this probably wouldn't be needed if their was some sort of "Auto-Logout" feature that logs you out after so much time of inactivity(ala yahoo).

<sarcasm>
Maybe we should get 10 karma points for signing up as well.. since that's so treasured here. ;)
&lt/sarcasm>

-------------------

Re:Good Idea

[shyster]

I personally find the /. ads not obtrusive in the least, so /. wouldn't get money from me

Aaaarrrggghhh!!! Don't let /. know that! Now we're going to start seeing Flash Ads before every comment! =)

I personally find /.'s ads very obtrusive, and am constantly finding myself clicking on them accidentally because they take up so much of my screen. Then, I always end up buying something just to get back to the original article. So, /., please stop using such obtrusive advertising. Thank you.

[whisper]See, now they won't change anything....hehe[/whisper]

I like the idea!

[decipher_saint]

If sites (that I think are worth my revenue) asked me to pay a nominal fee to remove banner ads for a year, I'd go for it. Unfortunatly, I don't read Salon.

-----

Re:I like the idea!

[decipher_saint]

P.S. I know junkbuster-type software is free, however I wan't to keep the sites that I read alive!

-----

The real problem..

[Tarnar]

..isn't that people don't want to pay for content. I think it's that said contents value is different in everyone's eyes.

Suppose for a minute that you spent your life on one website, and it was your main source of daily happenings. Then a $30/yr price would seem fairly sweet. Suppose tho, that you only visit a website maybe twice a week. Or twice a month. The price suddenly becomes larger in your eyes.

I would have no problem throwing tips in a jar for sites like /., Sluggy Freelance, K5 or any of the other links on my toolbar. However, I don't want that price to be dictated to me. Consider a restaraunt.. I always feel like the proprieters don't trust me whatsoever when they put the tip on the bill for me.

Anyway, that's my CDN$0.02

Re:The real problem..

[lamasquerade]

Consider a magazine subscription, which is a hell of a lot more analogous to a website than a restaurant. And the fact that in a restaurant (in the US) it is looked down upon not to tip, wheras on a website where there is no one to look at you in disgust people are far less 'generous'. Also consider that the people running the website have bills to pay and possibly salaries, it is easier to rely on a number of subscribers at a set price than the very small number of people that seem to be inclined to make very small donations very infrequently. Lastly, the price of this content, well $30/year to my mind is a little excessive, just a little though. I don't read salon regularly, but if I did $20 would be the right price. Comparable to a magazine subscription, but the content is updated more frequently and has more functionality (hypertext etc.).

Re:The real problem..

[Tarnar]

I disagree. How many weblogs are out there? How many places are there to get your fill of content for only the annoyance of ads? Dozens. I mean, you can go to the portals, you can go to /., you can go to the source (AP wire, CNN, etc).

Now, turn that around. There must be something special about the sites that you frequent. That is what you're more or less paying for. The content isn't really in question. Information is abundant. You should be paying for what you feel is exceptional. Hence, comparing it to a tip system.

Re:The real problem..

[davewill]

If you only visit a couple of times a month, then ads shouldn't be a big deal. Sounds like a good move on Salon's part.

Re:The real problem..

[Robert Frazier]

There is an interesting point here. Why can't
there be differential fees, for differential access/content?

Use slashdot for example. For nothing, one gets the headlines (with ads). For 10USD one gets the headlines + comments. For 20USD one gets to respond. Etc.

Re:The real problem..

[singularity]

A few years back (pre-IPO), I bought a Slashdot T-Shirt from http://www.copyleft.net/ in part because some of the proceeds went to Slashdot. I use some blocking software that eliminates most ads from web sites, and I figured that the percentage of the shirt sale that went to Slashdot made up for any lost revenue.

Take a look at http://www.copyleft.net/info_donate.phtml

I do not have a problem with /. offering a paid ad-free version. As others have said, it is not so much the point that I want to avoid ads (I already do), but rather that I like /. and want to see it continue without "selling out". I would pay $15-$20 a year...

Options are never a bad thing.

If it meant paying a small fee and still seeing ads, I would probably go for it.

The only problem I have with Salon's model is the "extra content." I hate web sites that put links for more content, but then tell you that you have to be a (paying) member to access. How many web sites has that made me immediately send in a check? None.

Can you imagine Slashdot offering "extra" JonKatz articles for paying memebers?

Re:The real problem..

[AnarchoFreak_00]

..isn't that people don't want to pay for content. I think it's that said contents value is different in everyone's eyes. ,

The thing is, do web-sites like salon have as much content as a mag, or newspaper? Sure there are advantages of the net, but most people, seem to prefer mags and newspapers. They usaly have more content. And the content has more of a chance of being original, unlike the web, since it's so easy to copy artical.

BTW, that extra content salon will be giving to subscribers had better be good...

Re:The real problem..

[Sloppy]

people don't want to pay for content.

Any generalization about what people are willing to do, or unwilling to do, is wrong. Different people have different values. The nice thing about dynamically generated pages and user logins, is that you don't have to generalize. You can try multiple revenue models in parallel. Might even be able to come up with something that makes everyone (except the "I-want-something-for-nothing" people) happy and makes money too.

---

I can see it now...

[phunhippy]

Ppl will pay 30 dollars a year for slashdot.org stories and will get the follwoing benefits :)

1. Automatic posting at +2 (+4 for 100 dollars a year)
2. I pay for slashdot and all i got was less adds and this stupid t-shirts (with DeCSS on the back)

Would be quite humorous

There is a word for this

[stud9920]

There is an english word for this : Blackmail

We're Coders, we can fix this

[Apreche]

The solution is simple. Write a web browser or plugin for existing web browser that detects and does not display ads of any sort. Of course the idea is simple, actually coding it might not be as easy. But somebody should give it a try. I would, but I'm in college and I have to code the schoolwork that I'm assigned leaving no time for fun projects.

Slashdot's ads aren't very intrusive I really don't even notice them. However it is quite obvious that the internet needs a new advertising model. The banner ad is going down the hole. Me and most people I know click on a banner ad like once a century. I can't even remember the last banner ad I glanced at. I see a think geek banner ad right now, but I already visit that site regularly :)

I would have an idea for a new internet advertising model, but then I would have lots and lots of money wouldn't I?

Re:We're Coders, we can fix this

[maetenloch]

This already exists. Check out the Proxomitron at http://www.computerstuff.net/prox/. Its default filters eliminate almost all ads and java annoyances. Furthermore you can write your own filters to handle any site. Best of all it's free (or at least Shonenware). I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's made the web a much more pleasant place. Currently it's for Windows only, but maybe the author could be persuaded to port it to Linux.

Re:We're Coders, we can fix this

[jchristopher]

Check out the icab browser for Macs at http://www.icab.de. You can filter ads based on their pixel sizes or the server they come from, and it's user customizable so you can add your own. A great idea we'll never see from IE or NS I imagine!

Gated Communities

[Pedro Picasso]

Never charge people to read. I would be willing to pay $0.50 per month to post on Slashdot and stay active in the community, but I would never pay money to read it. That sort of thing people fully expect for free, and wouldn't pay for it. It would kill.

And really, on this site, if even minimal payment were mandated, about four fifths of the (trolls) accounts would drop off.

-the Pedro Picasso

--

Re:Gated Communities

[peeping_Thomist]

I would be willing to pay $0.50 per month to post on Slashdot and stay active in the community, but I would never pay money to read it.

Same here. But would $0.50 be enough? How much would that raise per month?

Re:Gated Communities

[Shocker69]

Pay for posting your opinion. That reminds me of those: "We'd like to hear your opinion" Please call 1-900-IMA-SUKR to vote yes or 1-900-IAM-DUMB to vote no. Only $4.95 per call. I could just see some idiot voting twice to get their views across.

Re:Gated Communities

[Thordain]

if even minimal payment were mandated, about four fifths of the (trolls) accounts would drop off.

And your problem with that would be what?

I hope they're not betting the farm on this

[rw2]

It seems like a wash at first glance, but there is actually *no way* that they are getting $30 in advertising from existing users (I run the site in my .sig and looked into advertising a while back).

So one can only conclude that they are looking for a new source of revenue. Given that they produce their own content, people must go there if they want to read it but will they be willing to pay in order to skip the ads? No way.

This is nothing more than an insincere wall to protect themselves from people bitching. For everyone who writes and complains, the form letter will go out saying, 'Oh, sure we know they are annoying but we *value* you most greatly as a client and have come up with a way to remove the ads in our new subscription plan.'

Don't believe the hype.

--

Re:I hope they're not betting the farm on this

[madro]

Check out www.consumerreports.org ... $24 a year, making (last I heard) enough to cover their online presence. They're not getting rich, but they've got their service out there ...

Re:I hope they're not betting the farm on this

[NineNine]

Well, I also doubt that many people will subscribe to it jsut to avoid ads. What does work is something like Wall Street Journal or Consumer Reports, where the content is known to be of excellent quality, and people will gladly pay to get to it. I read Salon daily, and I know the writing is top-notch. If they were to simply lock it up, I'd pay $30/year for it. I already have subscriptiosn to the WSJ, CR, and Morningstar.

not a big deal

[s20451]

I see ads on buses, on billboards, on vehicles, on TV, and even in the bathrooms. I'm pretty much attuned to them, and I'm willing to wait a second for them to load in order to get my content for free.

I can see a bandwidth issue where there might be an incentive for disabling ads for a fee ... e.g., someone who pays $5/min to get 9600bps over INMARSAT might be willing to pay a few bucks to get the ads taken off.

Thirty Bucks vs Junkbuster

[pjrc]

My guess is that anyone who cares enough to pay $30 probably cares enough to install Junkbuster... which works against ads on nearly all sites, for free. This slashdot page appears with a blank spot at the top on my browser, thanks to Junkbuster, and it cost me nothing more than about 15 minutes to install.

Good idea

[ragnar]

I know that a bunch of people will chime in about JunkBuster and various other tactics, but this seems to be a good approach. All that is required is a simple flag for a user login to view the page without banners. I can envision some potential abuse, but this can be mitigated easily enough by imposing some upper limit (say 50 pages) that can be viewed banner-free per day. The abuse I'm thinking of is sharing a login with others.

I don't read Salon that often, but I might do this for slashdot. As I see it, this is one of the better solutions I have seen as it gives the end user more choices than to simply live with (or block) banner ads. I can see myself offering this sort of option with my site.

I don't think it would be necessary here.

[jmccay]

The adds are not exactly in the way. The adds are at the top of the page, and the adds tend to relate to geeky, Linux, or other stuff most of us like.
I personally wouldn't pay to view news. Let's face it. You'd be paying to here some liberal paint a verbal picture of how they want you to see the world. That's why I look at /. first. /. tends to eliminate those articles (usually with the exception of Jon Katz ;) ).
I would just find another service. If everybody charged, then I think peope would more often chose to be uniformed. The wide spread information revolution that is happening is a result of the information being free. When people have to pay, they tend to go for only the information they want to know from sources they trust as painting a decent verbal picture for them (regardless of whether or not that picture is complete).

I would be lying...

[EvilJohn]

... if I said I wasn't considering this.

With Banner Ad rates running _so low_ two things have to happen.

1) Websites are going to have to negoiate directly with the advertisers. The days of going to a third person for advertising to provide ads are pretty much over.

2) What else needs to happen is a group of websites of dissimilar content need to get together and offer a similar service. Call it $50 a year for a package deal.



// EvilJohn
// Java Geek

Re:I would be lying...

[Rick BigNail]

Bingo...

You are a business guy/gal!!:)

I am willing to pay some amount if the site is important to me. I just not sure if enough people would.

Ricky

Use Karma to block ads?

[Ronin X]

Well, blocking ads is a good solution for people with a severe distaste for them. I'll click a funny or intriguing ad in my free time...

As far as ad removal on Slashdot, this seems to be a wonderful use of karma. Maybe karma points could be spent for ad supression or control. This would give those with maxed out karma a reason to keep active!

Re:Use Karma to block ads?

[cworley]

I bet /. could sell Karma to the whores!

Re:Use Karma to block ads?

[macpeep]

That's insightful? Hello? Some logic would be welcome, not just for the moderations.

If people can block ads then the companies that sponsor Slashdot (by paying Slashtof for allowing their banners) get less visibility and they don't want to pay as much as a result. Hell, why put up ads at all and pay if nobody sees them! Slashdot can only lose money if people can block ads. So what do you propose that Slashdot gets in return. Karma? Hello? What the hell are they supposed to do with karma?

Re:Use Karma to block ads?

[Ronin X]

Wow, you didn't do so well on reading comprehension tests in school did you? People can ALREADY block ads. /. can't do anything about it.

So what do you propose that Slashdot gets in return. Karma? Hello? What the hell are they supposed to do with karma?

What is proposed is that people (read USERS) could SPEND karma (or get abilities based on high karma) to either temporarily block ads, or filter them. (Picture a check box under an ad: NEVER SHOW THIS AD AGAIN). Advertisers could get feedback on what's not working so well, Slashdot could actually build a profile of what class of ad's you prefer. Advertisers would be willing to pay MORE for this, not less.

Re:Use Karma to block ads?

[Drunken_Jackass]

macpeeps SAT scores: Math: 800 Verbal:3

Re:Use Karma to block ads?

[Da Masta]

With all that karma, maybe Slashdot could die and be reborn as raja-dot?

Re:Use Karma to block ads?

[KhaosSpawn]

Have you seen funny/intriguing ads from the following? If so please let me know. Thanks.

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Re:Use Karma to block ads?

[macpeep]

No, I read it right and for the record, english is my third language so that considering, I don't think I'm doing all that bad.

What I meant was: what good does karma going back and forth do for advertisers? They could not care less who has karma has who hasn't. All the care about is that people see their ads. ANY blocking ability is bad. Now, if people could block but blocking cost money, then that would be an alternative source of income for Slashdot. The advertisers would probably still not be too happy, but for Slashdot, it would even out. If users pay with karma.. well.. my question is.. what the hell does Slashdot do with karma? That makes no sense.

Advertisers already get feedback (click through ratios etc.) about their ads so that's not a very good argument IMHO.

I wasn't aware people could already block ads on Slashdot. I'm amazed that advertisers still advertise here in that case.

A *Good* Move

[mberman]

As useful as junkbuster is, it's still going to put some of our favorite websites out of business... I think this is definitely a step in the right direction. If I really enjoy a website, I want them to have enough income to stay alive, and the more options available to get them that income, the better. If I don't feel like paying them out of my own pocket, I can have ads pay them for me. This makes perfect sense. The next step, I guess, would be to combine this with micropayments. "Pay us $.50 to make ads disappear for this session|today|this week|etc."

Subscription

[DataPath]

anyone think this is an inflated and bloated amount? You can subscribe to a magazine for half that. This doesn't make sense to me

Re:Subscription

[TBone]

Yeah, you could. But your magazine sits there for 30 days never changing, eventually winding up in the trash. Hooray for dead trees.

Online magazines provide more content at a greater rate than just about any periodical outside of newspapers.

Too late?

[Jakob Sorrel]

Unfortunately for advertisers, it seems that most people who really wish to get rid of ads can do it without spending $30 a year.

Freeware or shareware programs such as Junkbuster allow a user to block banner ads. In addition, this can be done by editing the hosts file under Windows.

The implication for Salon and any others who may wish to implement this sort of plan is that they are selling a service (ad free viewing) that is already provided without cost. The future looks grim for professional online media, and it looks as though the entire web might revert back to an amateur effort unless means are found of making money.

Now, I am not at all against amateur content on the Internet. Indeed, many sites that I frequent are produced wholly through volunteer efforts. However, large scale editorial and news content requires the sort of financial backing that only a for-profit corporation can provide. Personally, I like having sites like Salon and CNN.com on the Internet, and I will be saddened if they are forced to terminate operations.

Topic based ads

[maybelline]

I think that you should put large topic related cnet style ads into the text of the article. And instead of the small topic graphics, you can place tiny ads next to the news items. The targeted ad placement should drive up your hit rate and annoy /. users enough that they might pay for a no ad sight. At least that way you would be whoring for dollars and not karma!

This is good news.

[JAVAC THE GREAT]

This means that the Internet is entering a new, profitable phase. It has long since been recognized that banner ads do not generate revenue, not for the site hosting the ads nor the company paying to place them. They are a waste of everyone's time, money, and bandwidth.

If premium, quality sites such as Salon and Stileproject began charging subscription rates instead of relying on ineffective, sleazy banner-ad technology, both quality and quantity of content would improve. At the same time, there would be increased competition for the consumers dollar, because they are not going to view all sites, they will pick only one site and pay for it. No longer will shitty HTML programming or empty content be acceptable. In addition, this kind of thing may mean the end of "pages" of articles, where the text is spread out over several pages for the sole purpose of increasing banner ads without increasing relative density.

I for one will be happy to pay $30 to Salon for continued quality content of insightful, well-researched articles minus banner ads and to Slashdot for troll-less message forums.
---

Re:This is good news.

[Rick BigNail]

Just wondering

What about:

3 dollars per month,

30 dollars per year?

Also you could be billed by credit card,couldn't you?

Re:This is good news.

[shyster]

If combined with a limited free read of the website, then a $3/month charge or so may work out decently. Say, you're allowed to browse thru Salon (for instance) 1 time per IP address for 15 minutes. If you'd like to continue reading Salon, then it's $3 for the first month.

There are still problems, however. First is the issue of giving up a credit card number to an online merchant for regular billing. Due to recent news stories regarding Egghead.com and others, some people may not do this. Second is that it's still a hassle to have to pay before you play and to pull out the CC for just this one purchase. Perhaps a better (and novel) idea would be to combine online reading with offline billing. Say, you sign up for the website and fill in your address. They give you 2 days of a (perhaps limited) free read while your password is sent via snail mail to your address (to verify). Then they bill you, a la magazine subscription. This doesn't rquire you to use a CC, and meshes with a magazine's subscription service. And, a cancel service should be implemnted as well.

But, what I think would be an even better idea, would be to merge offline and online. Online websites have no real tangible good to sell. If Salon were to implement, say, a monthly offline issue with the best of the month's articles (and/or unique items), then that's something they could definitely charge a subscription fee for. And, of course, they could get increased ad revenue as well. Just like a offline company (NY Times, Consumer Reports, etc) builds a name for itself offline, then carries that over to an online presence, Salon could do it in reverse. And I think that may be a winner.

Re:This is good news.

[Rick BigNail]

It sounds like a good idea.

But do they have the manpower now to do offline magazine?

I may not want to give my address voluntarily. But creditcard is OK for me. (Am i illogical here?:P)

The new dotcom business model

[geophile]

So the new business model is that they'll stop annoying you for a price? They'll end up with no readers AND no revenue.

By the way, Salon is also promising additional content for the price of admission.

Re:The new dotcom business model

[Rick BigNail]

It's still free with BIG ads.

Ricky

Instead of a few bucks...

[antiher0]

what if I sent in some Guiness? that'd hafta be worth a few banner ads!

Great Idea

[Ubi_NL]

Isn't this what we all like so much? To have a choice?
Of cource the best thing would be to get it all for free with no ads. But then again, the people that make these sites do need to get paid. One way or the other.
I'm really happy that companies (Eudora being the first one I think) give us the chance of deciding where they get their money.

.

What I'd be willing to pay for

[Serk]

I'd be willing to pay a few bucks a month to get a Slashdot free of trolls and full of content... It's gotten to the point where I rarely even read the comments anymore... -sigh-

Re:What I'd be willing to pay for

[Kevin Mitnick]

"I'd be willing to pay a few bucks a month to get a hooker free of VD and full of sperm.... It's gotten to the point where I rarely even fuck the ass anymore... -sigh-"

Filtering proxies

[BlueUnderwear]

Only problem: people motivated enough to get rid of the ads can do so for free by using a filtering proxy, some name server or /etc/hosts tweaks, firewalling rules or whatever.

And those not motivated enough, well, they do not care enough to fill out the forms, let alone pay the subscription price.

Re:Filtering proxies

[Rick BigNail]

Only problem: people motivated enough to get rid of the ads can do so for free by using a filtering proxy, some name server or /etc/hosts tweaks, firewalling rules or whatever

I think what people want is to get rid of the ads and read contents.

And those not motivated enough, well, they do not care enough to fill out the forms, let alone pay the subscription price

I agree with you. We could wait and see whether Salon's experiment works.

I still think that 30 dollars p.a. is too much.

Ricky

Slashdot Ads

[antis0c]

I don't mind Slashdot ads at all.. In fact I click on an ad once a day.. And for a simple reason, they are targetted properly. I don't see ads on how to improve my sex life, or a new blender that will change my life at the top of Slashdot. I see things I like, ThinkGeek, Web Hosting Companies, Open Source Products, ora books, etc. I would however pay maybe 30 bux a year for Slashdot without ads, and bonus content. The key would be the bonus content. Maybe more indepth stories, and more original content, ala Slashdot Exclusive or something. That would be worth some money..

Re:Slashdot Ads

[gruber76]

I completely concur: I have bought products one click from /.'s front page because the ads/products were perfectly targeted and were things I would not have discovered on my own. I would actually MISS the ads here.

Aren't I a good little consumer?

Re:Slashdot Ads

[Slothrup]

I don't mind Slashdot ads either. I don't often click on them, but I have on occaision. Even the animations are fairly unobtrusive. What I do mind are the ads with embedded cookies. Please stop this.

More information ...

[GoofyBoy]

...ironicly straight from Salon.

http://www.salon.com/letters/editor/2001/03/20/pre mium/index.html

Bit pricey

[Geaus]

I think the pay for access model will probably take over, but $30 a year is damn expensive for a website. Hell, $30 is on the high end for a newspaper or magazine so why should they charge so much?

It's all about timing

[popular]

This idea didn't work a few years ago, it won't work now, but given a year or two, it might, at least for a few sites.

This kind of support will eventually be necessary to stay alive, but there are still other free options. Nobody is really entering the market, but the shakeout isn't over just yet. When the alternatives are gone, and if people like it enough, a sufficient number of people will pay to support it.

--

Re:It's all about timing

[Rick BigNail]

For popular...

Information wants to stay free... but if you don't pay people are not going to get information at all.

If people want information to stay free, then they could generously repost what they paid.

How would you ruin Salon? I don't know whether they have sponsors. Settle down, it's just an experiment. (I am not sure whether it is calculated, risky or desperate)

Ricky

Ugh, I hate CNet ads!

[AFCArchvile]

...especially the huge Flash ads that take up the right half of the window width and almost all of the height. Also, some companies are starting to use Akamai's servers for their ads.

Ugh. My /etc/hosts file keeps getting bigger and bigger...

Re:Ugh, I hate CNet ads!

[stilwebm]

Also, some companies are starting to use Akamai's servers for their ads.

Nothing seems to slow down web surfing more than using Akamai servers for ads.

This is going to be the way it works

[HerrGlock]

The 'free' as in tv type free with ads or the 'pay-per-view' type with no ads.

I like this in that it's also the way things should be. Choice. That's what makes the 'net a great place. Don't like it? Don't pay for it. Don't bitch about the ads then either. Want to get rid of the ads? It'll cost you.

That sounds like an open market at work. The 'net is evolving, this is yet another branch in the evolution. Let's see if this pans out.

DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page

Re:This is going to be the way it works

[david614]

I don't know where you live, but my pay tv stations also have commercials (HBO, etc.)

My only concern is that, once the pay model is adopted (because I think that it will be) web sites will continue to place "appropriate" ads to reinforce a revenue model.

That would "force" me to deploy junk buster against web sites where I had a subscription -- a really paradoxical and ridiculous situation.

D

Additional Services...

[selectspec]

Subscribers will get the following additional services:

• Your personal information will be sold on the open market as soon as we go belly up!
• Your credit card number will be accessible to any third-grader with a palm pilot.
• We'll call you in the evening with great promotional offers
• We'll send you lots of email so you don't feel lonely.

Re:Additional Services...

[DwarfOrGiant]

Wow! The biting wit of sarcasm! I never expected that here. You forgot a few:

• You get the exclusivity of being one of five people who continue to read Salon
• Your sexual stamina will increase
• The people around you will recognize the power of your presence
• You will lose 50lbs in one day
• You'll get scored up to five on /. for posting anything vaguely funny within the first three minutes of a story's posting.

-i am giant

how will they stop account sharing?

[The G]

One of the big reasons that subscription models like this encounter problems is that it's easy for multiple readers to share a single account. But I don't see any info about how they're going to prevent this.

I predict that they're going to fall into the old cypherounks/cypherpunks login hole here.
--G

Re:how will they stop account sharing?

[NineNine]

That's easy. A login + a randonly generated value in a cookie that expires fixes this. One person can login at a time. Besides, do you really think that there are THAT many people who are going to go through the trouble to find a username/password and be an asshole about it and steal the content? Nah. There's some fraud with every business, but it's usually not enough to kill the business.

Why bother?

[Animats]

I stopped reading Salon when they canned Cintra Wilson, who was an old friend of mine.

Turning off JavaScript gets rid of most of the crap. I normally run with JavaScript turned off. I turn it on only for sites that actually do something useful with it. JavaScript really needs more permissions than just "on" and "off".

Browsers need the ability to disable obnoxious behavior (window opening, Flash, etc.) on a per-domain basis via a right click menu. Maybe a "Mozilla - the browser that puts YOU back in control" promotion...

Re:Why bother?

[MrBogus]

Yeah, I was pissed when Hearst didn't pick up Cintra Wilson in the new Chronicle. Too scary for Walnut Creek, I guess.

As for the JavaScript issue, it pisses me off to say this, but I wouldn't expect anything soon, if ever. Users have been screaming for more fine-grained control over the JavaScript/DOM sandbox for years and years (particularly wrt window.open()), and Netscape/Mozilla and Microsoft haven't done jack to this date.

Java has these sorts of user controls, and IE even has a dialog that allows you to manage the Java sandbox in it's 'zones' metaphor. Why not JavaScript?

Another bitch - I have IE set to prompt to run plugins (like Flash). So, it prompts me, but doesn't give any indication if the plugin is just Flash or Acrobat, or is EvilPrivacyDestroyer 2.0. And then, just to maximize annoyance, when I push "No", it pops up another dialog telling me that I just pushed "No". Thanks a bunch, MS. (Of course, this is better than Mozilla, which offers no fine-grained plugin controls at all.)

Re:Why bother?

[tregoweth]

As for the JavaScript issue, it pisses me off to say this, but I wouldn't expect anything soon, if ever. Users have been screaming for more fine-grained control over the JavaScript/DOM sandbox for years and years (particularly wrt window.open()), and Netscape/Mozilla and Microsoft haven't done jack to this date.

There's always WebWasher and iCab (iCab's a Mac browser, though).

Re:Why bother?

[Tackhead]

> Turning off JavaScript gets rid of most of the crap. I normally run with JavaScript turned off.

Ditto. Hell, I didn't even know Salon was running Javashit popup ads.

When Salon went from the "one page per article" to the "break up long articles into five pages, each one or two PgDn presses long" model, the only reason I continued reading is because I could click on "Print This" and get the article in a readable format. (Yeah, idjit web dee-zyners, some of us like to scroll! Pressing the spacebar is a lot easier than mousing to a one-digit-wide URL and clicking... especially if I've got a coffee in my mousing hand!)

Of course, I'm part of the problem. I read Salon for the content, not the ads, and I have Junkbuster blocking cookies and image-autoloading off. And while I enjoy it, it ain't worth $30 to me.

But all they need to do to get rid of me is take away "view the whole article with one click".

Re:Why bother?

[Chris Hiner]

Mozilla 0.8 has the ability to let you block popup windows, cookies, and images on a per domain basis. It doesn't have a nice front end for editing the popup windows, but see the release notes at: http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.8/
for how to set them.

As for other features... The source is out there...

Re:Why bother?

[Znork]

Actually, the fine grained control (or at least a lot finer grained) is here in the latest Mozilla. You can disable popups from wherever you want.

Re:Why bother?

[Banjonardo]

When browsing warez sites (I know, I don't do it often though) I usually find the popups with porn to be the worst. So therefore I use NetCaptor which opens different windows in tabs. Very useful, do try. That is, if you run a winbox.

How Slashdot could make money:

[SpanishInquisition]

• Sell karma to the trolls
• Sell slashdot effect to unpopular web sites
• Sell the right to moderate and metamoderate (bonus effect: people on crack don't have money left)
  
• Sell the previlege of bypassing the lameness filter
• Sell the previlege of posting at +5
  
• Sell the previlege of beign unafected by moderation
• Offer a stable server for paying members

The possibilities are endless....

--

Revenue Model - Readership - Signal:Noise

[imcleod]

I suspect that adopting a different revenue model will have effects outside what would be anticipated at other kinds of websites. If Slashdot were to adopt more intrusive ads and add a subscription-based, "ad-free" version, several things would probably happen:

1) Some of Slashdot's current readers would stop coming to the site. I base this assumption on the somewhat virulent comments I've seen about websites with ads lately.

2) Some of Slashdot's other readers would sign up for the ad-free subscription version. I don't have any idea how many, but some would.

3) Most of the rest of us will grumble; some of us about the new intrusive ads, others about the people grumbling about the new intrusive ads.

The short-term effects therefore appear to be a decrease in readership and an increase on the noise side of the signal to noise ratio on Slashdot.

Having said that, I will freely admit that I have NO idea what the long-term effects would be. They may well be beneficial enough to offset the temporary downer described above. Anyone want to make any predictions?

Well...

[jgerman]

...or I could gather the domains that serve their ads... edit my hosts file to point to my box instead of theirs, and read mostly ad free... free.

I'm not sure that many people would pay the $30 to remove ads. I guess if you are a frequent Salon reader it might be convenient, but for someone who reads the occasional article? I'd imagine that a person who logs in to just read a story that another site linked to is going to click on an ad in any case. This is the user that is there for a specific purpose. So essentially the users that go to the site specifically to read one article... who are (probably) the least likely to pay attention to ads are shown the ads. While the loyal Salon subscriber who checks the page several times a day just to browse, who (IMHP) is more likely to click on an ad through sheer boredom, if nothing else, is not shown the ads.

On first glance it may seem that Salon doesn't really care if the loyal subscriber does not see ads to click on, however think of it like this: 1. Loyal Subscribers no longer see ads so do not click on them. 2. Infrequent subscribers rarely click on ads. 3. The ad companies see Salon click thoughs going down big time. 4. Salon no longer can get ad campaigns, and institutes a non-free login for everyone who wants to read the articles.

I hate banners...

[JohnnyKnoxville]

as much as the next guy, and when you think $30 to be banner free, it almost seems worth it. Then I start to think that if my ten favourite sites all implemented this, suddenly I am dishin' out $300 a year for a banner free environment. I thinked I'd rather click on a few banners to keep the corporations happy, if the alternative will be paying to surf the net.

Throwback to the BBS days

[Fatal0E]

remember when they were subsidized by 'donations'? I've only been reading /. for about 8 months but I would pay $30/yr.

OTOH I don't think the exlcusive content thing could work here. The only real writer is JKatz and even thats debatable. I'm not trying to bash him (this time) but you can't have an exclusive section based around one guy's writing in a user submitted news site.

Re:Throwback to the BBS days

[jamesbulman]

I definately agree, there are a few sites that I read avidly and would be prepared to pay a subscription for preferential access.

I think the hacking account thing is overrated, I wouldn't give out my account details cos' I want slashdot to benefit!!

On this note I've been hearing about the PayPal thing, does slashdot have one of these setup?

What makes slashdot ads better?

[tawaste]

IMHO, /. shouldn't have any animated gif ads. At least some of them generate too much load with netscape & X, so my mpg123 won't get enough time. Yack!

If people believed ...

[gus goose]

...marketers then ....

"Our ads are sooo good that people should be paying to see them, not to avoid them."

This makes total sense.

[Kara B.]

Like my pimp always tells my clients:
"You want some of that ass, you gots to pay for it. I ain't givin' that shit away free, yo."

--Kara

Imagine if TV offered this

[sjbe]

Despite the general sleaziness of the concept, (kind of a shakedown if you think about it from a certain perspective) I suspect that a lot of people might lay out the bucks for no-ad TV. I'm going to be curious how successful it will be. I know I use the ISP I do, in part because it's a no-ad service. I suspect a lot of other folks do the same thing. I'd probably pony up a few extra bucks to get TV without ads too.

Will probably never happen of course, since they would probably make more money from the ads. it's nice to dream though...

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[rehannan]

I suspect that a lot of people might lay out the bucks for no-ad TV.

Uhhh... They already do. It's called cable TV. Most of those movie channels don't have any ads.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[Canonymous Howard]

This was one of the original promises of cable TV. Unfortunately, it didn't last long. Now we pay for cable and get ads as a free bonus.

On the other hand, I suspect that the original poster had this in mind and is trying to gently teach us about the future of such services on the net.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[CraigoFL]

HBO is what you're looking for. There's never any ads during the programs. The only ads you see are between programs (as one movie leads into the next, for example), and they're always for other HBO programs... no commercials for cars, soft drinks, mutual funds, etc.

In addition to being largely commercial-free, HBO programs are generally better (IMHO) than most of the crap you find on broadcast or regular cable TV. The monthly rates are reasonable too.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[klmartin]

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see a micropayment system for television programming before too long. Would you pay 50 cents to get an ad-free copy of the new episode of your favorite show, downloaded into your TiVo to watch at your convenience? I'd seriously consider it.

The reason it won't happen at the moment has nothing to do with revenue or with handling the micropayments; the problem is that once the content is delivered to the end user, there's nothing they can do to keep the end user from watching it over and over again or giving copies to friends. Until they have play-once-and-delete mechanisms in place, media distribution firms aren't going to go for this. What's to stop you from downloading the program, copying it, and giving it to three or four friends, after all? As soon as the media people get strong encryption in place and force the receivers to operate in a show-once-and-delete mode, they'll be doing this sort of thing. (All hail the DMCA.)

This is all part of the same general problem: creative content costs money to create, people want lots of it, people tend to share good creative content with their friends, and nobody wants to pay very much for it.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[Little Sister]

A new local radio station did a month of ad free radio to grab an audience in an area with a lot of local radio. It was the coolest radio ever! I had no idea how intrusive ads were until there were none.

I would love to subscribe to ad free radio or tv, however, ad free internet is still something I am not quite ready to go for yet.

It would mean a *commitment* to checking out a page often enough to get my money's worth, and I have a low attention span. I even go months without reading slashdot.org, because I find other things online to read. The internet has thousands of pages to pick from! I still listen to that radio station, now wiht ads, because there are only about 10 other stations to pick from.

-Little Sister

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[heytal]

It does !!!

Dunno about there in US, but in India, we have pay channels, which have to be paid per subscriber by teh cable tv operator, and there are no advts on that channel.. But then there are also pay channels with advts.. ;-)

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[Tower]

Only the 'premium' channels are no-ads... all of the regular cable channels have more all the time...
--

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[tigrrl]

HAH! I listen to Public Radio and watch Public TV. I have often thought that if they had a special deal during pledge week where once you made your pledge, you could avoid the 20 minutes of dunning per 1 hour of broadcast they'd get a really high return. I know that I'd be happy to pay a flat fee to avoid the ads with them.

Not so sure with the internet though - the poster who remarked on my consumer information becoming an asset to the firm has an *excellent* point.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[FatOldGoth]

This sounds fairly similar to the idea of the BBC license fee in the UK. By raising money directly from viewers, the BBC is sponsored without the need for adverts, which makes for much less irritating television and radio. In practice they derive more revenue from the sale of videos, foreign distribution rights and tie-ins with magazines.

Of course in this case the problem is that the payment is mandatory if you own a television set...

--

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[megaduck]

I suspect that a lot of people might lay out the bucks for no-ad TV

They already do. HBO, Showtime, Playboy, etc. all use this business model quite successfully. Interestingly enough, so does PBS if you stop to think about it. People are always willing to pay for premium content if the price is right.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[3dr]

I have an ad blocker on my VCR. No kidding, it has a "commercial skip" feature that, after recording a show, it goes back over the tape and marks the ins and outs of the commercial break. I don't know how it works, but it works very well. During playback, the VCR automatically FFs over the commercials -- it's a great feature.

Cable TV used to be ad-free, but that's no more. Now we pay for the ads.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[Higher Authority]

TV does offer this; haven't you heard of HoBO, or Skinimax?

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[Higher Authority]

On top of that, it'd be interesting to see what will ultimately happen if everything becomes pay-for service. Ironically, it could be the beginning of the end. Cash itself could be its own demise. Imagine.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[Sodium Attack]

I know of a PBS station which did this several years ago. Well, not exactly, but very close. A few weeks before their pledge drive was scheduled, they put on short solicitations, just in the normal break between shows. Essentially, they said, "Our pledge drive is scheduled for a few weeks from now. We know how much pledge drives annoy you, so if we get enough contributions before then to meet our goal, we'll cancel the pledge drive." The best part is, they did meet their goal and did cancel the pledge drive! I've since moved out of that area, so I don't know whether they're still doing that.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[jburst]

I'd probably pony up a few extra bucks to get TV without ads too.

I did -- I bought a TiVo. Haven't watched a commercial I didn't want to in months.

Re:Imagine if TV offered this

[Forager]

I suspect that a lot of people might lay out the bucks for no-ad TV. I'm going to be curious how successful it will be.

HBO, HBO 2, HBO 3, Starz, Encore, Cinemax, etc ...

Forager

Junkbuster == stealing ? WAKE UP!

[Faramir]

Hey people, wake up! /. costs money for someone to run, for servers, for bandwidth. If you block all their ads (or simply always ignore them), how are they going to make any money? Taco, Hemos, et al. now have a parent company (Andover), so they'll probably get paid for some time, whether /. makes money or not... but this can't go on for ever. No matter how flawed you may think the current economic system is in software, and in general even, the people who put time into this still deserve the opportunity to make a living off of this.

Thus by using Junkbusters, or some other filtration system, you are denying a web site of their principle means to support themselves. That is why ads are getting bigger and more obnoxious. That is why content driven sites are folding or diversifying. I've been expecting someone to pull a Salon for the last couple of years now. I don't expect that they'll be the first and last major news site to go back to paid content.

Re:Junkbuster == stealing ? WAKE UP!

[swordgeek]

*shrug* Yeah, so? All's fair in love and war.

Anyone who installs Junkbuster or sets up a packet filter on their system is pretty obviously NOT going to be paying attention to the ads, let alone supporting the companies placing them.

In other words, as long as Junkbuster (etc.) is a voluntary and active install (as opposed to being installed as part of the browser), it's revenue neutral for the advertisers. They don't care.

As for paying for web sites, I suspect that web-ads won't work in the long run. People don't like them, people don't read them, and people don't click on them. Sooner or later, advertisers will quit paying for them. Then we'll be faced with web sites falling into the following categories:

1) Personal interest (amateur) sites. The cost of these will be covered by ISP fees.
2) Vendor websites. These sites (toyota.com, seagate.com, ncix.com) are their own advertising, and support the company. By merely existing and serving product information (and often allowing the product to be bought online) they generate far more revenue than is needed to cover their costs.
3) The sticky one: Information portals (using portal in a more general sense). News sites, /., search engines, etc. need to support themselves, and also need to provide information for free or no one will use them. Would you pay $0.001/search on Google, followed by more micropayments to check out each result until you found the useful one? Probably it'd come to about $10/month, over and above your access fees, which is not very friendly!

Many of these portals will go out of business. Many others will be bought by profit-making companies, and advertised in a different manner. ("Google.com, brought to you by Toyota!") Still others might charge for access from ISPs, so that your monthly access fee goes up by $0.50, and you get access to Google. This might actually not be a bad idea, come to think of it.

But web-banner ads? Don't work, won't last.

Re:Junkbuster == stealing ? WAKE UP!

[Tim C]

Conversely, you are also saving whoever pays for the bandwidth you use money, be it your employer, college, or yourself. Not only that, but you're helping to reduce the overall amount of net traffic, increasing the QoS for all net users (admittedly by a tiny fraction, but imagine if there were *no* ads, at all)

I don't begrudge site owners/maintainers the ability to make money from their effort, but I don't think that ads are the best way to do it. Unfortunately, once people are accustomed to getting something for free, it's very hard indeed to convince them to pay...

Cheers,

Tim

Won't catch on.

[Rudeboy777]

I for one would pay for Slashdot, and possibly even $30 per year (although that's definitely approaching my upper threshold), but that's for my favourite website. Salon is a site I check out once a week tops, and 'unique content' isn't much of an attraction. AOL has unique content for free and nobody looks at it. I'm curious to see if they'll release any numbers w.r.t. how the service is performing. Maybe there is a business model that can be profitable for content sties, but I predict some XFL-style statistics for this venture.

Salon should be part of AOL

[humantraffic]

AOL has the right business model. Pay a bit extra and you get reams and reams of added value content.

Salon, I am sure, would appeal to the vast majority of AOL users who are well regarded on the net for their levels of erudition. I myself would consider getting an AOL subscription purely to access the wealth of good writers.

Come on, Steve Case, to the rescue of this net institution...

How They Going to Identify Paid Readers?

[bahtama]

I wonder how they hope to carry out this plan. Are they going to have usernames and passwords, screen by IP, OS, browser or what?

If it is by username and passwords then they also better make it so you can only be logged into one computer, because $30.00 shared between 30 of my friends is pretty cheap.

This is one of the biggest problems in the information age. When you don't actually make products that you can sell, it is hard to have your advertising be able to carry your business.

And I'm sure they would need my email address to start this process, so then they can track what stories I read while logged in and send me special email offers that they consider "helpful." Like my favorite on how I can add 4 inches to my... well you get it.

=-=-=-=-=

Re:How They Going to Identify Paid Readers?

[n7lyg]

Oh come on, this problem was solved ages ago by the pr0n industry! There are bots and hacks and silly software floating around all of the pr0n sites which do nothing but try to catch silly little tricks like sharing your password with your friends. A lot of time these hacks are implemented by clueless operators and applied willy-nilly. I'm sure that Salon can do a better job of making sure that only registered users get the content they paid for.

Re:How They Going to Identify Paid Readers?

[NineNine]

Well, considering how much the porn industry makes (I'm not sure why you call it 'p0rn'... are you some kind of l33t hax0r?), I wouldn't call it 'silly'. Actually, the porn insdustry's pay sites do an excellent job of tracking users like this.

Re:How They Going to Identify Paid Readers?

[tadas]

You said:
"they can track what stories I read while logged in and send me special email offers that they consider "helpful." Like my favorite on how I can add 4 inches to my... well you get it."

Funny, I keep getting those emails and I didn't even register....

FAWKING DSL!

[The Dev]

The funny thing is that most of Slashdot's ads are actually just as entertaining as the rest of the content.

Bigger Better ads?

[Alien54]

This sort of ties in with that story from the other week about the Advertising council (?) proposing more varied and unusual ad types.

As long as they don't wind up like that story in Satirewire. It is enough to make me go on a virtual shooting spree

Ads are seldom obtrusive...

[jonathansen]

When you use lynx!! No really, I'm not a luddite. But think about it: most of the stuff linked to from/posted on /. consists of articles and rants. In other words: text! Most of the ads are reduced to a short, easily-ignorable phrase, URL, or [IMAGE].
--

A new angle

[TopShelf]

That's a great point about NPR - perhaps Slate should use that kind of spin. "Free us and yourselves from the hassle of ads, by contributing..."

The real dangle would be if they could offer removing ads (or certain sizes of ads) from the site entirely, if certain fundraising goals are met through subscription. If $x is raised, the banners go. If $xx is raised, the big CNET-style ads go, etc.

Re:A new angle

[heytal]

Just like microsoft saying that if i sell xx copies of Windows2000, i'll allow free copying of it on any computer in this world ;-)

OT: included tips?

[Kool Moe]

So what the hell is up with that anyway. Tips are given dependent on the quality of service the employees provide. This is the point of tips. Ever see Resevoir Dogs? The beginning rant by Mr. Pink (?) was dead-on. Tips are NOT a given!
I do not patronize restaruants, or any type of service, where tips are included in the bill. That totally kills my leverage as a customer. Give me good service, I'll tip you 20%. Give me great service, I'll tip you 30%. Give me poor service, I might give you 10%. Give me crap service, and you get SQUAT.
I really, really dislike places that automatically include a tip in the bill, can you tell?
KM

Re:OT: included tips?

[SVDave]

Tips are NOT a given!

Actually, in the U.S. they are. The Federal tax code assumes that all waiters in a restaurant receive a certain amount of tips (computed according to the restaurant's income). Any given waiter is required to pay taxes on the "correct" amount of tips they (should have) received.

In other words, your waiter has to pay taxes on your tip, even if you don't give it to him.

Re:OT: included tips?

[Kool Moe]

I think this is a dead issue now, since replies not given the day of the post tend to be forgotten...but I must make this point:
The Fed tax rate on tips is WELL below what the average waiter/waitress actually makes. The Fed rate assumes a very low percentage (I forget exactly what).
SO, a wait-person (PC!) would have to be constantly inept in their service to not cover the taxes the Fed assumes. Any decent server can easily outstrip the assumed rate, not declare the rest, and make out sweet.
While I agree that as far as taxes go, tips *are* a given, it's not representative of what folks actually make in tips, assuming they're competant at their jobs. I still don't like places that auto-tip for me. Blah.
KM

Interesting Adds on Slashdot.

[Marty200]

Slashdot ads tend to be things I'm interested in. I actually follow a fair number of them to see the products. But thats because they have a fairly specific audience here. No one here is interested in kitchen apliances.(unless there really cool ones.) For the most part we have geek news and geek adds. If you hit CNN you end up with such a broad audience that it's almost like watching TV. You never know what your going to see an ad for.

MG

Ads on /.

[Cplus]

I think that the main thing to consider about trying something like this on /. is the nature of the site. We have a much more community oriented feel on this site and I think people feel in the back of their heads that it's about community (whether it is or not). Offering a subscription is fine for Salon, they are obviously a money-making venture, paying writers, and making some coin.

Whether /. is profitable or not, it doesn't feel like a for-profit venture and I think that offering subscriptions would take away from that. On the other hand, asking nicely for patronage through a paypal system or something similar allows /. to keep the non-corporate feel.

My take on it

[G00F]

Now I haven't read much into it. But if they do both add free with a charge and the banner infested one for free, I think it could work out.

$30 a year is a bit high for what it does. I think somewhere between 2.50 - 12.00 per year is much more resonable.

Or have the banner infested one for free, then have one with just one banner for subscibers who pay a very small amount. I never mind 1 banner as long as no women are on it, and its not trying to "trick" people to click on it.

Cutting over to strickly one or the other will cut out the readers dramaticly.

I'd pay!

[bjorky]

I'd pay $30 a year to avoid the goatse.cx links!

-----

XHTML and a Prediction

[superid]

Eventually, people (hopefully) will produced "well formed" (X)HTML documents, all tags properly nested, all attributes quoted, all tags opened and closed, etc.

When that is done, the "well formed" page can be read by an XML parser and transformed. This would allow people to develop XSL templates that can "eat" the offending web page and output only the parts you want. I can see someday that a smarter browser/agent will allow me to right click on a component of a web page, understand its context and let me "delete" it from the rendering. This would produce a unique XSL document that would be cached for the next time I visit the ad laden page.

Of course this is based on someone elses well formed input, and that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.

SuperID

Re:XHTML and a Prediction

[macpeep]

And in the meantime, people can use an HTML parser in a proxy to filter out the banners like they have done for the past 5 years.

Re:XHTML and a Prediction

[NineNine]

Well, smart advertisers would never do this. Smart advertisers include their ads server-side (ASP, PHP, etc.), and no amount of sniffing can determine the difference between ads and content.

Re:XHTML and a Prediction

[Ross C. Brackett]

Hopefully not. (IMHO, of course :-))

My hope is that the need to prevent advertisements from being stripped out is one of the things that causes the adoption of XHTML to stall. HTML is a programming language for non-programmers, and by raising the bar for what is acceptable, it widens the gap of elitism that currently confronts people trying to learn HTML on their own. HTML is designed for ordinary folks to be able to code in (and they can!), but code generation WYSIWYG programs tend to generate code so un-readable that it defeats the whole point of HTML being easy to read in the first place. XHTML makes this worse by basically forcing everyone to code every page with perfect syntax. For most people, this means that they can no longer use Notepad or Ultraedit to make webpages, they HAVE to use Frontpage or some such nonsense. At that point, web traffic might as well just be packed binary, it would be more efficient.

In fact XHTML encourages binary formats by discouraging people from coding by hand. "Why not use flash, it's prettier," people will ask, and I will be able to give them a good answer other than "it's proprietary." That's dumb.

My dismay with XHTML and some of the stupider parts of CSS2 have really caused me to lose a lot of faith in the w3c to endorse non-stupid standards.

Re:XHTML and a Prediction

[malasky]

Nonsense. XHTML lowers the bar for normal people to write web content. Simple validators will make it easy for users to fix simple syntax errors. A strong standards-based language means that people won't have to learn all the differences between all the browsers just to present their content on the web.

You can still use Ultraedit, or vi, or whatever. And you can have faith that you won't spend the rest of your life maintaining your pages, as web browsers change.

Re:XHTML and a Prediction

[Ross C. Brackett]

Here's the part I have trouble with, correct me if I'm mis-reading it:

From http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1

(from the definitions section)

Should
With respect to implementations, the word "should" is to be interpreted as an implementation recommendation, but not a requirement. With respect to documents, the word "should" is to be interpreted as recommended programming practice for documents and a requirement for Strictly Conforming XHTML Documents

Must
In this specification, the word "must" is to be interpreted as a mandatory requirement on the implementation or on Strictly Conforming XHTML Documents, depending upon the context. The term "shall" has the same definition as "must".

__________________________

4.1 Documents must be well-formed
Well-formedness is a new concept introduced by [XML]. Essentially this means that all elements must either have closing tags or be written in a special form (as described below), and that all the elements must nest.

Although overlapping is illegal in SGML, it was widely tolerated in existing browsers.

CORRECT: nested elements.

<p>here is an emphasized <em>paragraph</em>.</p>

INCORRECT: overlapping elements

<p>here is an emphasized <em>paragraph.</p></em>

4.2 Element and attribute names must be in lower case
XHTML documents must use lower case for all HTML element and attribute names. This difference is necessary because XML is case-sensitive e.g. <li> and <LI> are different tags.

4.3 For non-empty elements, end tags are required
In SGML-based HTML 4 certain elements were permitted to omit the end tag; with the elements that followed implying closure. This omission is not permitted in XML-based XHTML. All elements other than those declared in the DTD as EMPTY must have an end tag.

CORRECT: terminated elements

<p>here is a paragraph.</p><p>here is another paragraph.</p>

INCORRECT: unterminated elements

<p>here is a paragraph.<p>here is another paragraph.

4.4 Attribute values must always be quoted
All attribute values must be quoted, even those which appear to be numeric.

CORRECT: quoted attribute values

<table rows="3">

INCORRECT: unquoted attribute values

<table rows=3>

4.5 Attribute Minimization
XML does not support attribute minimization. Attribute-value pairs must be written in full. Attribute names such as compact and checked cannot occur in elements without their value being specified.

CORRECT: unminimized attributes

<dl compact="compact">

INCORRECT: minimized attributes

<dl compact>

4.6 Empty Elements
Empty elements must either have an end tag or the start tag must end with />. For instance, <br/> or <hr></hr>. See HTML Compatibility Guidelines for information on ways to ensure this is backward compatible with HTML 4 user agents.

CORRECT: terminated empty tags

<br/><hr/>

INCORRECT: unterminated empty tags

<br><hr>

What would make it worth it for Slashdot

[Photar]

I think that I would be willing to pay for slashdot if it bettered the signal to noise ratio in the forums. And removing the banner ads wouldn't be bad either except that I've been pretty well trained to ignore animated gifs. In fact if a site uses animated gifs and its NOT a banner ad I usually find myself ignoring them as well.

Why pay anything?

[pongo000]

junkbuster

Re:Why pay anything?

[NineNine]

Because if enough people use that garbage, sites like Salon will soon go out of business, and you won't have anything to use your stupid junkbuster on.

Remember folks...

[Oscarfish]

SALN is currently trading at about 38 cents per share and is in danger of being delisted.

Are you sure they'll be around for one year if you pay for the ad-free version?

What happens if this fails?

[Sell0ut]

I would have no problem paying a yearly fee for a service like this, but if this is a last ditch effort to come up with some funding, what happens if they run out of money six months from now.

Re:What happens if this fails?

[NineNine]

Simple. Then they do what most other non-porn dot-coms do. They close.

No, why would I pay for a liberal propoganda machi

[Shivetya]

Why should I pay for the lopsided to the left so far they can't turn right viewpoint?

Salon will die because they are so far out there that no one can truly relate to what they say. Just like CNN, you can't have a good popular site unless you present a balanced opinion. I love the Foxnews page, I rarely if ever find some reporter injecting their political slant into a story. (and forget CBS - Dan Rather might as well be the DNC's spokesman - he takes more swipes at Bush than the DNC itself)

but Salon, they ain't worth paying for simply because they don't provide any stories I can't find better research on elsewhere, and as before, their "editorials" (so hard to tell difference there between editorials and "reports") are so slanted they actually can cause me to laugh hard enough to vent milk ;0

;gradually losing karma to the /.PC crowd..

We'll pay not to see your ads! Hmm, actually no.

[thenerd]

OK, so every time a new advert type is invented everybody pipes up - and they say this:

"I don't want to see all these ads, it is intrusive and waste of my bandwidth. I would even pay not to see them".

Now Salon does this, and the reply is "I'm not going to pay, and besides, I can use Junkbuster to block them anyway, so why would I want to pay 30 bucks?"

Well you might want to pay 30 bucks so you can read some good stuff. Come on guys we're talking less than a buck a week for some good writing. It's pretty mean to decide that these guys aren't entitled to a single penny just because you are so used to getting stuff for free. It must cost Salon a lot to stay operational, because unlike a lot of other sites they probably pay their writers/columnists for their work. So that those writers can carry on feeding their kids, etc., as they probably live in reality, not in college.

So why not wake up and decide to reward someone who puts something good in your direction, instead of saying "I shall avoid rewarding people for their work at all costs, even if it benefits me".

ARGH!

thenerd.

I don't know

[Sheepdot]

With what I've seen lately come out of Salon, I think they don't deserve any money from this former reader. It is a no-brainer they will get massive support for current free (with bigger ads) and not as much interest in the payment-plan.

What I actually think this is:
A way for Salon to say, "We have to change our ads to be bigger, so we'll go ahead and make this democratic by giving you a choice. Say, 30 bucks a month, or bigger ads, so which do *you* want?"

But I'll get off of bashing and settle down to something more reasonable, such as paying for Internet newspapers in general. It really comes down to need.

Slashdot will have a *hard* time implementing a $5-$10 per month charge if the users are only removing one ad. Same goes with Salon or any paper. Especially since the technology (Naviscope and JunkBuster) is *extremely* effective in elminating ads already.

The only thing that could cause even users of filtering software to consider paying is to place the ads in tables in specific areas of the page, so it just downright looks bad if you attempt to use the free version with a filter.

Anyway, I'll end on this note: 30 dollars is a lot to ask for *any* online newspaper. 30 dollars is only 10 bucks less than my DSL connection, and I'd pride being able to use the Internet itself over just one site. Whoever decided on that figure is ridiculously ignorant of the Salon.com viewer-base.

While I sometimes question the competencies of the /. community, I don't question their ability to deduce what something's true value is. It is my belief that thirty dollars a month is far too great for any slashdotter to consider reasonable.

We'd pay for zero Katz articles!

[peter303]

'nuf said.

Re:We'd pay for zero Katz articles!

[FatOldGoth]

I was just thinking that I'd pay $30 a year for a goatse.cx free version of /. I wonder if trolls can be bought...
--

Only if...

[cavemanf16]

I'll pay $30 per year, only if it means every poster to slashdot that pays will *NEVER* have their content removed just because the Co$ decides to go ballistic over someone making fun of them. :)

I realize copyright infringement is wrong and for the uninformed, this was an attempt at hilarity.

Same deal with my site

[BIGJIMSLATE]

After dealing with too much going out with not enough money going in, I pulled the plug on my site. Now, I'm faced with a similar decision.

Do I set up some kind of "subscription" to the site for people to access all of the content, as well as the stuff in the archives? Do I set up the "free" stuff to be bombarded with commercials?

Believe it or not, most webmasters who really put their hearts (not to mention time and money) into a site really want to do EVERYTHING they can to avoid obtrusive ads (especially pop-ups). We know how it is to be at a site with popups and LARGE banner ads, and we don't like it any more than the rest of you do. But when you're forced with trying to find a way to finance your site, you're left with either shutting it down, or finding some other source of income. Most people are unsymathetic to this because they don't know what goes into making a large site run, and run well.

I am seriously considering this offer

[n7lyg]

I think that Salon has some of the most literate content on the net. They have had some brilliant writers featured on their site, and there is always at least one or two articles per day that I read in their entirety.

Other posters have said that they do not find banner ads intrusive. Even on a fast connection, it often takes a significant amount of time for the overloaded banner server to cough up the ad. This delays the page significantly, especially with the stupid animated banners. I have set my Mozilla image settings to animation "none" and that makes the pages appear even faster. If I could do away with the banners completely without constantly updating my Junkbuster config, I would be happy.

Of course, if all sites went to pay per view, then I would have to really make a choice which sites were worth the premium. The only magazines I pay for are Consumers Reports and Rolling Stone (other than professional society memberships and, of course, free technical rags like EETimes). I think I would pay for Salon, but probably would not pay for /. (unless they included actually interesting original content, and, no, Jon Katz does not qualify as interesting or original.)

If Salon goes under, /. lose half conent

[peter303]

Slashdot makes big use of Salon links,
as the subsequent article shows.

So...

[Brownstar]

plus bonus content, in a blissfully ad-free environment." Is it worth doing something like that here?

So taco, if you implement this, will bonus content for the user's be actual News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters?

Filtering, Try Proxomitron instead of junkbusters

[BrookHarty]

I've started filtering webpages because of all the popup ads. I was using junkbusters for awhile, but then ran across this windows proxy Proxomitron @ http://spywaresucks.org/prox/
The program gives me even more control than just filtering ads, it rewrites the page on the fly. My favorie is "Allow right mouse button" "Anti-tracker filter", "Show/Allow move frames" and the other cookie features. There are too many features to list, but surfing is much faster now, and I now have control the content.

BTW, Havnt seen a /. ad in months.
(I think I'll make a filter to allow ads for slashdot, I had to hit the bypass button to see where the Ads where. hehehe)

Salon and Subscription

[panda]

It is my totally uninformed opinion that from the very beginning the folks at Salon have wanted to be a subscription-based service. From their format and the types of stories that they run, it is apparent to me that they have wanted to be an online magazine.

For the most part, they have high-quality, original content worthy of a print magazine, and that kind of content doesn't come cheap. It will be interesting to see how the subscription model works for Salon.

IIRC, Nerve has also gone the subscription path, though it has been months since I last visited nerve. Slate also started out with a subscription model and then switched to ad-supported content, 'cause nobody would subscribe.

I'll be watching Salon to see if this model flies.

Definitely not

[moogla]

The ads are occasionally the most entertaining content on this site.

Really, there's only one ad per page, in the same spot. You don't even know it's there. There's nothing more this site could offer that anyone would want to be inconvienced to pay for. That'd be more annoying than the banner ads themselves.

I don't really read Salon.com, and I wouldn't pay $30 when I already have a subscription to the NYT. I can't imagine what sort of elitist content you would have to pay for. Somehow, I don't think they'd reserve the popular, hard hitting articles for the pay-per-view only people to read. They'd want the ad viewing general public to gawk at it, no? The only stuff of exclusive nature I might pay for online is pr0n.

Why pay 30$/Year when you can remove ads for free?

[anaZ]

I have been using webwasher since it was released for Linux. It removes banners, stops animations, filters cookies etc. etc. and it's free for personal use on Linux. So why should I pay 30$?

Re:You got the price wrong!

[n7lyg]

They are proposing $30 per year, not $30 per month! $30/year is a reasonable magazine subscription price.

Leave Slashdot alone

[Evro]

The ads on most content sites line the top, left, right, and bottom of the page. Slashdot has one ad banner. The only time I ever had a problem with the ads here was when they were annoying Java applets. If you guys want to institute a pay-for service in addition to the existing one, that's one thing. But please don't go the route of CNET and ZDNET with those big square things in teh middle of the page (or the huge ones that are 6 times as high as they are wide). Slashdot's ad system is great (from a user POV).

__________________________________________________ ___

Why not go the xfl route and give ad space away?

[tenzig_112]

New media ventures that seemed to make so much sense a year ago are dropping like flies. I remember a time when I pittied tree-meat-based publications.

Ad brokers have for some time delayed or simply refused payment to web site operators. But we small fries expect to be batted around like a ragged cat toy. But Salon?

From the story, it sounds like Salon is heading in the "tip jar" direction. [Thanks to Amazon's Honor System Program, my wallet is $1.43 fatter. Oh, yeah.] But something tells me that making payroll is going to be tough either way.

For now, all the little guys like me can do is shudder and post dimly-lit photos of the people I keep in my basement to generate hits.

Pay for Slashdot? How?

[Hazzl]

Slashdot's ads aren't really all that obtrusive, most of the time anyway :( If it's something people want, we could certainly conside it.

I would certainly consider paying for some of the sites I visit regularly. The problem is just that I wouldn't know how.

Like many people in Europe, I don't have a credit card (I just don't need one, why pay for it?). And international money orders or such are just way too expensive. Getting money from Europe to the US is difficult enough even if you don't factor in the additional complications and privacy concerns with paying over the internet.

Things like PayPal don't work either because they address the difficulty of managing micropayments, not the difficulty of transfering money over the Atlantic.

It is really ridiculous that money transfers would be so enormously expensive in the age of the internet. But as long as my bank charges me 10% of the sum transfered or $5 (whichever is more) for any money transfers, I'm not going to make lots of them any time soon.

Re:Pay for Slashdot? How?

[napsterposter]

Quoting your "I don't have a credit card (I just don't need one, why pay for it?)": most credit cards are free. so, since you CAN use it, why not get one? PayPal by the way *DOES* address the difficulty of transfering money internationally. You can withdraw to european bank accounts etc.

Browse without ads for free...

[sterno]

The problem that this concept runs into is that if I can get the same content for free as what I pay for just give or take the ad banners, I can use software to block the banners. I personally don't block slashdot's ad banners because I actually have an interest in products that get advertised here.

If you want to offer a subscription service you have to add some value to the service to make it worth the extra money other than axing the advertisements. I don't think this would be feasible on Slashdot because of how slashdot works.

---

Re:Browse without ads for free...

[sulli]

Right. Throw in some physical thing, like a t-shirt (for a cheap subscription), an MP3 player (for an expensive subscription), or a Slashdot Cruiser (for a very, very expensive lifetime subscription) and the profits on the thing fund the subscription. Just like PBS.

I hate titles like "um, no." They tell me nothing.

[angelo]

Darn, we'll have no Salon or Slate to read. Big deal. Live by the annoying ad, die by the annoying ad.

Maybe when they finally come off their "dot-high", they'll realise that positive-growth business models are what people find sexy in the post dot-boom era. Apparently this high is wearing off.

Now if we can keep them from using the "trendy" Utne Reader and Atlantic Monthly terms like "Zeitgeist" and "Sea Change" we'd be on to something.

The Free Ride and how it is killing the net

[blueskyred]

Too many replies to this story amount to "but with Junkbuster, we don't see the ads so we don't have to pay anything." I use AdSubtract, myself, and I find it to be nearly perfect. And I even paid for AdSubtract Pro...

The bottom line is this: if you enjoy the use of a service you should pay for it. But people don't want to pay anything they don't have to -- it hurts them on the road towards getting to the top of the capitalism heap. The big problem with not paying is that if you don't pay, and no one else pays, people stop making the content or providing the services you like. You might make it to the top of the heap, but it will be a heap of nothing worth having.

I find that US$30 per year is too much. But US$12? A dollar a month? No problem. I would pay Slashdot this $12 per year, as would I for Salon and CNN. There are other business models waiting to be used as well -- "buy a book from ThinkGeek and get 6 months of Slashdot Premium for free."

Advertising does not work. Gated communities don't work either, unless you have gates the size of AOL. I hope that "voluntary payments" work because if something doesn't work in the next year or two there will be no commercial Internet for content. Or context.

Re:The Free Ride and how it is killing the net

[robwicks]

I enjoyed the net when it was nothing but students and military people, and I think I will still enjoy it after a bunch of portals and other sites start charging, and I stop visiting them. I find very little on the Internet that I would pay for. The few things I would pay for give me some kind of return on investment. I could not imagine paying for any Internet service which does not ultimately allow me to make more money than I would have made without it. Slashdot is a possibility, but Salon, no way. I would consider www.swynk.com worth paying fore if I were planning to be an NT/Windows 2000 guy forever.

Sure, I'd pay. Death to ads!

[MCZapf]

Death to ads on the Internet!

There are two ways to get rid of these ads, as I see it:

1. Block and ignore them. The ads will go away, taking the sites that host them along with them.
2. Support sites directly with dirt-cheap fees (micropayments?) or donations. The ads can go away, but the sites can stay.

Two attitudes I've seen here are interesting to me. There are those who detest ads so much, they find software to block them. Then there are those who are willing to put up with ads to get free stuff - but they have the intention of ignoring them.

If these two groups of people are large enough, no wonder ads are worthless. But what's a site like Slashdot supposed to run on? Love? I don't think so.

I myself don't like the excess of ads on the Internet and off. As a relatively informed and non-impulsive consumer, I don't need to be told what to buy. So, it irritates me to know that a large of what I pay for almost any product or service goes to pay marketers who try to sell their product to me and others.

Even though I dislike ads, I don't block them, because I want to support sites I visit. However, if I could support sites directly and not have to see ads, I would do so. For the same reason, I donated to my local public radio during the last pledge drive.

I'd be willing to pay a reasonable price (a few dollars, maybe) for something like Slashdot. I liked the idea mentioned in an earlier post: free to read, but pay to post. This would cut down on alot of noise, I think.

Remember, the economy works by the flow of money, not the hoarding of it. You earn your pay, presumably, by being useful to someone. If Slashdot is useful to you, you should support it with money. That's the whole point of money.

Sure, ads make lots of content free. But maybe that's why we waste so much time with TV and the Internet. Another interesting thought just occured to me: ads make content free, but encourage us to spend money elsewhere. Wierd. Unless we ignore or block the ads, which brings me back to my original point. Why have ads then? I don't even know, I'm just ranting aimlessly...

i doubt it will work

[yoha]

I've often thought about this idea for TV and the internet, and I wonder if it will work. I doubt it for a couple of reasons. First, it is the most active and higher income users who will subscribe for this service. So, you knock out the significant part of your inventory and lower the value of what's left.

To look at the numbers is interesting. Suppose Salon sells its inventory on average $30 CPM (Cost per thousand) and they have 4 different ads per page (1 top left, 1 top middle, 1 top right, 1 below the top nav). That means for a user who sees 5 pages a week (2 stories * 2.5 pages/story * 4 ads/pages * 50 wks/yr = 1000 ads/yr), Salon breaks even. The active user who sees more than 2/stories a week is worth more to Salon than $30. They've already done this and probably aren't making a $30 but you see where this goes.

Look at TV, say you have a $100 CPM (cost per thousand viewers, 1 viewer = $0.10) for a show like "Friends." There are probably fifteen 30 sec ads during the show. So the viewer is worth $1.50 ($0.10 per viewer * 15 ads). Would you pay $1.50/show for Friends? For all the other shows on TV? Once again, any person who subscribes is going to be the exact audience an advertiser is looking for, so an advertiser will pay less for the rest of the inventory.

It doesn't really make sense for the publisher to charge the consumer directly. As much as it sucks, advertisements provide us with content.

Wait a sec!

[fleener]

Aren't the people who can afford a $30 web site subscription (for leisure reading without advertising) exactly the audience advertisers want to reach?

One question...

[[Steve]]

Could we get a refund if an off-topic/repeat story was posted? :-P

Cable used to...

[moogla]

A lot of cable channels used to be ad-free, like MTV2 and Comedy Central. Then they figured out they could sneak ads in without people complaining too much- they're already used to it on the broadcast channels. They few exceptions are the movie networks; but you can't interrupt a feature length film with ads or people wouldn't pay the extra 20 a month when they can just go to Blockbuster.

The point is if they can get away with ads, they will. I think part of the problem is that most shows on TV are formatted to be broken once or twice by commercial messages, and so there's no better use of the dead air that fills the shows to 30 minute intervals than targeted advertising.

Of course, they could always do like PBS and beg and plead with you to send them money for hemp tote bags between shows. Which is better?

I think this is a great idea

[joshamania]

I think this is great. Perhaps a little expensive, but good none-the-less. I happen to like Salon very much, they have very good writing and the site is updated very often. It's like getting Time or Newsweek, but I get to read new stories every day.

I think a lot of people will pay for the service, if for no other reason than to support the magazine. I, for one, will be one of those folks.

individual call

[zencode]

well, of course it's a matter of an individual's perception of whether the content is worth it. i'm willing to shell out a few bucks a month to read the various and sundry linux rags, but i don't do the same for sports illustrated because i don't give a rat's *** about the AFL.

i, personally, think that salon has some really, good writing - and would be willing to shell out some bucks just on principle alone - but $30/yr is about as much (or more) than some hardcopy subscriptions. since the materials probably make up a bulk of magazine costs (someone have numbers and/or a refutation?), i have to wonder why the rate is so high. if it was $15/yr i'd be writing a check right now.

My .02,

Ugh, Salon.

[update()]

Does anyone read Salon anymore? I haven't heard it mentioned in months.

I vowed to stop reading it after the Henry Hyde business (which I thought was a journalistic disgrace) but I kept going back because it was too good to miss. In the last year or so, I don't think I've even looked at it except to follow a link from Slashdot like that stupid Andrew Leonard "hacker" story. It reads like one of those godawful free "alternative" newspapers: obsequious defenses of Bill Clinton that would embarass James Carville, columnists who say "fuck" a lot and endless, tedious blathering about sex.

Didn't they try to cut costs by getting rid of a lot of their writers? It shows.

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

Re:Ugh, Salon.

[oooga]

Except for about four articles in the last 2 days. It's a great site

Re:Ugh, Salon.

[Tackhead]

> It reads like one of those godawful free "alternative" newspapers: obsequious defenses of Bill Clinton that would embarass James Carville, columnists who say "fuck" a lot and endless, tedious blathering about sex.

Yeah. I read it because it's enjoyable - most of the time, I disagree with their editorial stance, but I figure that's a Good Thing; it never hurts to see things from the other side's point of view. I'll miss that.

(Of course, that said, I've pretty much skipped their political commentary too, about the time of the Hyde stories. Yeah, Salon, we know you're a mouthpiece of the Democratic party. We get it. Honest. ;-)

It's all coming true

[Tony Shepps]

This is one week after /.'s Clay Shirky interview, in which he pointed out (again) that "In the next 6 months or so, the only professional sites that will be able to survive will either find some sort of patronage (including NPR/PBS-style subsidy from users, as Evan did when he needed servers for blogger) or get bought by a company that is willing to run a media outlet as a loss leader."

It follows Shirky's prediction that micropayments will not fly and that sites have to go with subscription, aggregation, and subsidy to make money. Was that guy on target or what!

The question is not whether Salon will make money from this, but whether they can make enough to survive. I think Salon has a really good combination of dynamite content and community: writing you can't find anywhere else and people you can't find anywhere else. I plan to join as soon as the option is available.

A lot of people are referencing /. and wondering when the /. subscription service will arrive. My own two cents: I thnk /. could do well by everyone by giving subscribers pages with 15-minutes advance on stories (and 15-minute advance on the ability to post). It could include a Playbill-style list of contributors at different levels of membership (opt-in, natch). That way, in open-source style, contribution is rewarded with a stronger sense of community, a healthy ego boost, and official acknowledgement (the site is willing to "give back").

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Nah

[Etriaph]

Slashdot looks just fine considering all the content you guys have packed in here.

Junkbuster Junkbuster!

[generic-man]

Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster, Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster. Junkbuster Junkbuster, Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster. Junkbuster, Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster, Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster.

Junkbuster Junkbuster, Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster Junkbuster .

Junkbuster? Junkbuster Junkbuster. Junkbuster Junkbuster.

Someone needs to repackage these sites like CABLE.

[Shivetya]

Because even /. isn't worth 30 a month to me. Too many non-tech stories and Katz leftist ravings than I can take in one week.

But, shoud someone grab up a bunch of sites, and sell you access on a per month basis. I can see starting out at 9.95 for 5 or 6 good sites that I regularly visit. Perhaps have "premium" sites, but honestly they will seriously have to provide content I can never get elsewhere.

A pick you 5 sites from a list for 9.95 would be my favorite if I can get the following:

1. NO ADS
2. NO SPAM (I never visit sites again if they spam me)
3. No selling my name/etc to anyone else
4. More features, better AV (CNN's itty-bitty viewer windows SUCK! - I got DSL damnit, give me an option for a big window to see streaming)
5. The ability to CACHE streaming media.

Premium services to me would be:
1. the rights to use any article as reference material
2. the right to print any article/material from the site (as long as I don't resell it)
3. provide research I cannot get anywhere else, or easily.
4. pr0n (just had to throw that one in there - but it would be a premium service in this scenario)

Using this type of process even I might be inclined to "subscribe" to Salon, even if it is so far left they can't even say the word "Republican"

I think /. should just put ads in the comments.

[JiveDonut]

Not banners, mind you, but product placement. Hold on for a second while a take a sip of my icy-cold Coca Cola®. Man! That was refreshing.

By putting the product placements in the comments, they are more discreet. Like my Just for Men® hair dye. No one even knows I'm using it.

It will be tougher for blockers that way.

I've got to end this post now. My Motorola® mobile phone is ringing.

I think $30 a year is way too much

[SuperDuperMan]

I'd rather have the ads that pay that much.

Wait, Slashdot has ads?

[Joey7F]

Ads? Oh the banners for thinkgeek and stuff?

I thought it was some sort of nerd empowerment campaign.

--Joey

blackmail?

[elmegil]

It doesn't seem like a bad idea, but it sure smells a bit like blackmail. "Pay up or we'll spam you out of existence."

Fraid Not

[tomblackwell]

Sites like AllAdvantage mostly went tits-up.

How it can work

[goliard]

How does this work? That's easy. My current client is a famous research company which sells it's reports on a subscription basis (for big, big bucks) and delivers primarily via the web these days. And they're wildly successful (as in "in the black") doing this.

The thing that you're missing is that Salon's subscription service will also have subscriber-only content. Which is important. And makes it much more what my client does.

Simply put, it is in the best interests of subscribers not to share proprietary info with all their friends. It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation simple enough even your average luser gets it. Subscribers want to continue receiving very high quality content. They know that if that content isn't profitable it goes away.

Here's the big crucial clue everyone has missed so far: there is a difference between buying a virtual good -- like an e-book -- and subscribing to a a virtual service.

If you can rip off an e-book, and yeah, more or less you come out ahead. You got what you want. Authors rant about how if you don't pay for the one you want now, they won't be able to afford to make the next one. But, as everyone knows, that's a crap shoot. Just because an author wrote a book you liked doesn't mean you will necessarily care about the next book. Authors too numerous to mention have let their readers down on sequels. So the market is not terribly responsive to their pleas.

But a subscription is a relationship. You front your money with the belief that you will regularly get high quality content. If you don't think you will get sufficiently good content over the life of your subscription, you don't subscribe. And because it is a relationship, the other side can pull the plug if you cheat. But even more importantly, it is in your best interest to make sure that the company fulfilling the other end of your subscription-contract is still around to do so!

If you deprive the company with whom you have a subscription-contract of paying customers, they are going to stiff you the content you expect to get. Real simple.

Unlike with stand-alone good, in a subscription model, the seller has hostages.

Sure, there will be people who rip off a small number of articles. At my afforementioned client corp., they chalk such things up to good publicity, and just don't sweat it.

As far as security goes, the answer is to not have rigorous security. Tell people what the rules are, and if them break them, kill their accounts, no refund. If one name/password pair were to show massive simultaneous usage to multiple diverse IPs, don't you think they'd pull the plug?

Re:How it can work

[sulli]

Simply put, it is in the best interests of subscribers not to share [too much] proprietary info with all their friends... there will be people who rip off a small number of articles... they chalk such things up to good publicity, and just don't sweat it.

Having been a subscriber/ripper-off of a service much like this (maybe the same one?) I agree that this can work. Letting people rip off a few articles will actually encourage subscriptions.

It's much like the tolerance of software piracy by Adobe, because they know that it's more important for Photoshop to be the standard than for them to sell every last copy. Works for me!

Re:How it can work

[BMagneton]

There is a big problem with comparing Salon readership to Famous Research Company Tech Report (FRCTR) readership. They're not the same.

The people who buy FRCTR aren't paying out of their own pockets. They are professionals who consider FRCTR advantageous to their work, and so get their organization or grant sugar daddy to pay for the quite substatial cost (I'm guessing at least a couple thousand apiece) of FRCTR as a necessary expense. Because 1) they paid so much for it and 2) are competing with others in their field, they value the information and preserve it, as you point out. The relationship is essentially professional, and works.

Salon readers are a different animal. Thirty bucks ain't that much. And what possible competitive advantage could there be to the information contained in a witty TV review or interesting political analysis? The relationship is weakened because the percieved value is less. The product is largely entertainment, and the relationship reflects that.

And because of the low cost, there are going to have to be many, many more Salon subscribers than FRCTR subscribers. Only a few might treat the personal relationship badly enough to abuse it. But all it takes is for a critical few subscribers to defect each day/month/year, and you can't control the rip-off.

There's another factor when you start moving from a professional product to an entertainment product: the 133t HaX0r factor. J. 133t HaX0r can hack an entertainment service and get social rewards from his or her peers, because they're interested, at least a little. Design engineers don't live in that environment, and the technical product is not very interesting to everyone outside that community. So from FRCTR to Salon, you have two forces changing the behavior of the net community. The first decreases the penalties for spreading the service around, and the second increases the rewards. Relying on the same principles to keep you up is going to fail.

I suppose it's my cynical side showing itself, but I just don't think a subscription relying on relationship and professionalism is going to work for a wide-audience internet news and entertainment magazine. I suppose you could try a public television/radio model, where you count solely on the user's "best interest to make sure that the company fulfilling the other end of your subscription-contract is still around" to provide, but I don't think Salon is that far ahead of the rest of the online pack.

BMagneton

Re:How it can work

[boldra]

Simply put, it is in the best interests of subscribers not to share proprietary info with all their friends. It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation simple enough even your average luser gets it. Subscribers want to continue receiving very high quality content. They know that if that content isn't profitable it goes away.

Was your contribution profitable to you?

No? Then go away :)

My point is; free content can work.

I'd pay for no-ad Slashdot

[sulli]

if there were some additional value added (e.g. throw in a ThinkGeek t-shirt of my choice and 100 licensed MP3s from Rob's favorite techno musicians). Try it, you might be surprised at how many fans fork over the cash.

FuckedCompany

[puckhead]

Pud has instituted a premium service that is worth the money to anyone in the dotcom world. Premium Fucks.

Sounds like the business model for satellite radio

[himself]

I read an article in last month's "Worth" magazine about the two biggest players in the RSN satellite radio business, and this sounds exactly like their approach: charge people a monthly fee for 100 stations of specific-format, ad-free content (i.e., jazz or country or NPR or ag reports), or let 'em listen to the free stations (which are, alarmingly, all the same anyway). They expect to charge about $10/mo. Incidentally, the idea of making the player useable outside the car is only just catching on with providers -- that is, making the decoder a unit that could be pulled from your dashbord and then plugged into your home stereo.

Adds are fine, really..

[ColbyR]

Listen to my logic.. :> Most of the time I read (and Im SURE Im not alone) /. is at the office. What do most of us do? work in the 'tech sector' what kind of adds does slashdot run? Adds for cool things we... err our companys need. So! we can take some time out of our _BUSY_ days to glance at an add for five seconds as we hit the down button on our keyboard.. afterall it might be something we ..err out companys want.. :>

Why pay for content?

[cisko]

Sure, there will be lots of ways to get around the system (either screening out ads or sharing a premium login). These methods only have one problem -- they only work as long as Salon keeps publishing.

With Napster, it's harder to see why you should pay for the music because you're pretty sure the musicians and record labels will do just fine no matter what. This is different 'cause you know Salon is probably hanging on by their fingernails. If this model doesn't work then you lose the content, period.

Personally, I'll pay. I enjoy the writing (despite its flaws) and would hate to see it go away. Frankly, I'd rather be paying for content directly than be at the whims of advertisers, not that this solves that problem.

I still have an irrational hope that a working micropayment scheme will be here Real Soon Now...

Plenty of whitespace

[oooga]

At least in my setup, there is a ton of whitespace between the article and the comments. If that needed to be used for advertising, I'd have no problem with that.

I don't see any ads

[at10u8]

I don't see ads. I don't see the on /. I don't see them on CNN. I don't see the on Salon. I don't see them on my local newspaper. It's called Internet Junkbuster and I pay nothing for it.

nahhhh

[Lumpy]

I think it's funny how salon is charging for something we get for free by runing a junkbuster proxy. (slashdot's are commented out of course.) I guess there are enough clueless people out there that would pay for it.

Now, get me a reliable spam filter for outlook, that I would pay for.

Re:England

[radish]

If you own a device capable of receiving TV signals (which includes a TV, winTV card, Tivo, sat box, vcr etc etc) then you are legally required to buy a licence. This costs around £100 ($150) per year per household, with the money going to fund the BBC. They run 2 national terrestrial TV channels, 5 national radio stations, countless regional radio stations and a handful of digital and international sat TV stations - none of which carry any ads. News is a major part of the network, with the News24 rolling news station (digital & sat) as well as lots of prime-time news & current affairs programs.

The advantages touted by supporters of the scheme include journalistic independence, a remit to produce quality & informative shows (not just populist light entertainment), as well as the simple lack of annoying ads. Not everyone agrees however, with the main anti-licence argument being "but I never watch the BBC - how come I have to pay?".

I'm probably biased, but IMHO the BBC produce some of the best programming in the world, and I for one am happy to fund them this way. Can't see it lasting for many more years however...

Just filter the ads...

[Argyle]

I use adsubtract on my windows box. Not only does it block the ad server requests, it blocks the cookies as well.


-----

You're missing the point

[jheinen]

Everyone keeps talking about how, if they want to surf ad-free, they can just use Junkbuster. That's not the point. The point is supporting the sites which you value and want to see continue. Slashdot is a resource that I use constantly. I enjoy reading things here, and I would be willing to pay a fee to continue using it. I would even be willing to pay a fee AND keep seeing the ads, since the ads on /. are not the obtrusive. My primary interest would be to ensure that /. gets enough money to keep on doing what it currently does. If the current banner ad system is more lucrative than a subscription-based service, then keep the ads. If, however, subscriptions would generate more income, then I am more than willing to pay. Well-maintained sites need to have a source of income to continue to provide service. I for one do not relish the prospect of the Internet becoming nothing more than a collection of personal blogs and fan sites run by people as part-time hobbies. For a site to rise above that noise it needs to generate some income so the maintainers can enhance the service offered.

Rob, if you want to sell subscriptions, I will pay. I even suggest taking a look at Qpass to see if they might be a solution. They offer support for subscriptions.

-Vercingetorix

Re:You're missing the point

[MicroBerto]

Heh, but not everybody is as radical as you are in this sense. For this reason, I love what Salon is doing -- giving a choice. Now we're both satisfied, and Salon might grab a few more bucks on the way.

By giving these choices, there's nothing to get upset about.

Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto

Re:You're missing the point

[Higher Authority]

Pay-for subscription service for just about any service, at the right price, would be fine; but the major issue is to avoid alienating viewers via the chosen system of payment. I, for example, don't have a credit card; nor do I have a checking account. I would glady pay for things I enjoy, provided both the payment, and the payment options, were fair and feasible. Of course, a source for my income would be great, too.

Nobody cares because it is in French...

[f5426]

...but while many sites want to go pay-for-no-ads (salon, penisarcade, k5, for instance), one of the rare site that provided content I could pay for is moving into the opposite (ie: free without ad, while there was a membership fee before). (They plan innovative ways to finance the site).

Note that they even understand something about intellectual property and had great internal fights about it...

Cheers,

--fred

Re:Nobody cares because it is in French...

[__aawsxp7741]

I'd certainly prefer a normal banner ad to having to wait to load two gigantic pics on their home page, one of which is actually text.

Re:England

[KingKenny]

Thee BBC does not carry adverts, other than the ones for their own services and merchandise. The BBC licence (about 100UKP a year) is required by anyone that owns a TV or a device that basically has a tuning circuit that could be used to receive TV signals. However, all that dosh goes to the BBC. They put out two (whooo) terrestrial TV channels (and shit-loads of radio), more recently they've been getting more channels on to the digital satellite/cable networks (generally the same programs as terrestrial). An awful lot of people complain about the licence, especially as there are two (actually three depending on where you live) other terrestrial channels, all of which carry adverts to pay for their programming.

In recent years we've had 60+ analogue channels (including the foreign stuff) just from the Astra satellites (as far as the UK is concerned, these are "Sky" (murdoch's media outlet for the UK)). We're now dropping the analogue satellite services ('cos they're on very old satellites that have reached their life expectancy) and going digital. Pretty much all the satellite channels (analogue and digital) require addition subscriptions fees. 15UKP per month for a basic package that has fsck all sport and films, a more common package will cost 30-40UKP a month. Except the film channels, there are masses of ad's on so-called subscriptions channels which generally take up about 20 minutes of each programming hour. Originally, the UK market was told that the ad's on the satellite channels were to subsidise the miniscule subscription base. Now the numbers are up and everyone has become used to the bloody things, sky have conveniently forgotten the original promise. Unfortunately the UK public is rather dumb and suffers from amnesia.

Personally, I find the US ad's less annoying. But I don't really give a poo these days, as I dumped the TV months ago!


cat /dev/null > /dev/brain

Slashdot vs. Salon

[goliard]

I would be willing to pay $0.50 per month to post on Slashdot and stay active in the community, but I would never pay money to read it.

But Slashdot isn't Salon -- which is why I read both. I read Slashdot to participate; I read Salon to be entertained.

Yes, Salon has discussion fora, but I find them lame. What I am willing to pay for is a really good daily magazine.

Would I pay to post on Slashdot? No. Well, not unless CmdrTaco lifts the karma cap.

Unfortunately, the things which make /. cool would be killed if there were barriers to entry. (Actually, I do belong to a discussion forum with barriers to entry, and it is cool in a very different way.) /. wouldn't be /. if, for instance, the scientists who are the focus of a story couldn't find out about the ruckus here and wade in to the discussion. That sort of things happens, and it can't happen when one must pay to participate.

Talk is cheap

[bill.sheehan]

If there's one thing we have plenty of on the Internet, it's words. Most, like this posting, are ephemeral and banal. Some are ephemeral and profound. Almost none are worth paying for. There is simply too much competition from the millions of people who offer their words for free.

The Boston Globe website has a survey up on how many would be willing to pay $30 for Salon. So far, it's just over 5% of respondents.

Paper burns at 451 degrees F. E-books are destroyed at less than half that.

Buh, you're missing the point!

[JB]

The $30/year is NOT just so that there won't be any more ads. That is just a small perk they are adding. Yes you can get rid of the ads for free. Big deal. The point is that they have trouble staying afloat because net advertising is complete BS and is not a sustainable model of revenue for the vast majority of sites.

I will pay because I love Salon, I love the contect, the articles, the opinions. I happen to think it's some of the best stuff on the web today. I read it every day. Why SHOULDN'T I pay $30/year to help support something I enjoy so much?

Why the hell is every so upset at the notion of paying for something? If you think it's good you should want to support it financially, and if you think it sucks, don't read it. And my God, $30 a year. Wow, that is like so outrageous!

I think a lot of you need to take off your Open Source glasses and face reality.

And I would never pay $30 or $3 for slashdot, since it provides NO original content 95% of the time. I find maybe one story per month that is of interest to me that I probably would not have found if I did't read slashdot. But hey, that's just me.

D.

The trouble is...

[nowt]

The trouble with all these 'initially free' services on the internet is that human nature doesn't like negative change from an initial set of conditions.
This particular scenario sounds interesting and (to me) fair since nothing is being 'taken away' and is only being enhanced with the fee.

Too much "bait and switch" these days.. nice to see something more in line with fair practices.

-nowt

No choice -- Downside Deathwatch

[goliard]

They have no choice; acording to The Downside Deathwatch, financially their backs are up against the wall.

Paying for content you created?

[skoda]

The Salon.com subscription fee makes sense to me. They state plainly that they need money, and to try and get some they will be offering a subscription service, along with even more overt ads for the free service. As a consistent, multi-year reader of Salon, I'm considering coughing up the dough.

But the reason I do is because they provide information / content that I don't get elsewhere, and it's content that I value.

What I wonder is why people would pay for ad-free service at /. or equivalent. For here, the content is wholly provided by the users. I'm not interested in paying someone else for my own content.

So what about it? Why would you pay/not-pay for /.-esque content?
-----
D. Fischer

Sites I would pay to read.

[Shocker69]

The Onion / Slashdot. Problem with Slashdot is that if people had to pay to use it, the user base would drop making it much less valuable as an information source. It's not the editors stories I enjoy so much, but the dialogure that comes with them. Other than that, no other sites would be worth it to me. Slashdot ads are not intrusive, popup ads are what kill me. One of my favorite sites started popup ads, and I promptly started going elsewhere.

Less dependence on ads = better content?

[skinny23]

Consider consumer reports, they take no ads and provide a decent comparision of products. There are many cases in "old media" where advertisers have too much power and influence content. Which ultimately degrade what we are feed our brains. I haven't read Salon very much before, but I might check them out now to show support for an adless model.

change your browser to avoid ads

[awatters]

It doesn't take very much to avoid the ads entirely. I trained myself to ignore them, but before learning to block them out mentally, you can turn off plugins, turn off activeX, and turn off "animate GIFs." These are all options in Internet Explorer 5. I've found this particularly useful for the new CNET ads. They are all flash, so if you disable plugins you don't have to watch or wait! What's even better is iCab or Opera. You can block individual ads, ad servers, and images that are a certain size.

Compare that to buying a Magazine.

[lonely]

Here Wired costs 4 UKP a month. So I am payout out 48ukp a year for this publication. And I have to sit through adverts on a paper version.

Compared to this www.salon.com for 30 USD a year seems like a bargin.

Re:Compare that to buying a Magazine.

[lonely]

Fair comment, I should have said that I used to pay for Wired.

Still I pay nearly a hundred a year for New Scientist. And I get the full version on-line and searchable.

Slashdot's banner ads well-targeted

[tibbetts]

I really hate to admit this, especially to Slashdotters, but Slashdot's banner ads are just about the only ones that I've ever clicked through. Not that it's tough to target to the Slashdot audience or anything...

Re:You got the price wrong!

[Sheepdot]

Oops.. Indeed I did..

Still a really high price for what you get. Especially when current filtering software lets me get around the ads anyway.

Ad-free Salon FREE

[GungaDan]

Salon sans ads free of charge - webwasher.

Failed Click Throughs

[StoryMan]

The interesting thing about online ads -- and a topic I've never heard anyone talk about is the problem of the "failed click-through."

I don't usually click on the ads, but occasionally -- say, for ThinkGeek, or for another company I've actually bought stuff from -- I click an ad. But what happens next is usually the step the prevents me from *ever* clicking on it again: because of the machinations necessary to record the click in the database, set a cookie (or whatever), and then, finally, actually go to the site, I've found that oftentimes I'm greeted with a blank screen -- the database is waiting for an opening for an insert, the site for the company that plants the cookie is down, whatever.

The result is that more often than not, when I do choose to click, I don't actually *get to the fucking place I'm wanting to give my business to*.

And no, it's not just my connection or my browser. I've had this happen at work, at home, you name it.

Even Slashdot is guilty of this. Occasionally, as I say, I click on the ThinkGeek ad, only to be witness to an *inordinate* delay: something is loading, something is waiting, something is not routing properly.

It's fucked. And it pisses me off. I mean (and I say this to these companies who think that advertising the be-all and end-all of their business model) if you have the ads, make damn sure they work. Make damn sure your databases are working. Make damn sure the code is debugged.

Don't just assume that because your "ad-rotator" was designed by Biff the Bohemian in Perl/PHP/ASP/Cold Fusion that Biff the Bohemian knows how to *guarantee* you that the ad will provide the clicker (me, goddammit) with the result that I expect.

And, yeah, I won't even rant about absurd paradox that goes along with advertising, the advertising model, and sites that depend upon it -- that you cannot, no matter how much you cross your fingers, toes, and wish upon all the stars in the sky -- make a revenue upon a thing -- advertising -- that people simply don't like. I don't know anyone who likes ads. Even the good ads -- the odd new Webvan ads or the fucking sock puppets -- are tiresome after two viewing. (Take the Webvan ad, for example. The Dogma 95 handheld digital camera, a person in room, washed out color. "I want to take a nap but I need diapers." It works once. Maybe twice. But when you're inundated with it -- and with many others -- it ceases to function. It becomes a parody of itself. It becomes tiresome. ("Hey, man, it's 'Think Differently' not 'Think Different!'") I mean, how many 60's counter-cultural rock and rollers will sell their anthems to the fucked up new latinate-sounding companies with their goofy spellings and dumb middle-managers? Cingular? Verizon? Accenture? These are absurd names. Absurd, one, because they *sound* absurd. But absurd, two, because they sound *absurdly manufactured.* Okay, yeah, I'll agree out of work PhDs need a place to go -- and those companies that manufacture the names are as good as any place for a lazy PhD to sit and plant him or herself for a year, but, please, enough already. Enough with the wonky ads. The wonky names. The wonky revenue models. The wonky Katzian predictions of a revolution that IS NOT A FUCKING REVOLUTION.

Enough, enough.

Enough with the digital encryption. With the self-destructing files. With Napster. Fuck NAPSTER! It's goddamn useless now! Enough with Hilary Rosen and Jack Valenti. Enough with Bluematter and (another stupid fucking name) and their stupid encrytion. Enough with the fucking clueless middle managers who think that because they have an MBA they actually have a clue. One does not go with the other, Bri ("Hey, my name's Brian, but you can call me, Bri. I'm a middle manager!") Enough with Motorola, Lucent, 3COM, and whoever else it is this hour -- this minute -- who will declare that they won't meet revenue expectations. Enough with cable and DSL and personal firewalls and Zone Alarm and Black Ice.

And enough with Telocity. ("You ain't seen nothing yet? How about this: we get acquired by Hughes and fire our management. Patti Hart, CEO, oh where are you can you go now that you've so royally screwed up customers so that they can't even *CANCEL* your "broadband" without still getting charged?") Enough with Bell Atlantic. Verizon. Ameritech. SBC.

Enough with Rhythms, Covad, and Northpoint. Face it, you'll all be giving your departing CEO's millions of dollars so that their platinum parachutes can land far, far away from wherever it is your nose cone burrows itself so far underground that it's gonna take the sorry Ameritech's and Sprint's to start excavating the messes you've caused.

Enough, enough, enough. ENOUGH!

Re:Failed Click Throughs

[F.O.Dobbs]

Dude... decaf.

F.O. Dobbs

Re:Failed Click Throughs

[superdk]

dude, you forgot NuVox...

Re:Failed Click Throughs

[dan g]

And, yeah, I won't even rant about absurd paradox that goes along with advertising, the advertising model, and sites that depend upon it -- that you cannot, no matter how much you cross your fingers, toes, and wish upon all the stars in the sky -- make a revenue upon a thing -- advertising -- that people simply don't like. I don't know anyone who likes ads.

What the hell are you talking about? Are you saying that NBC isn't making any money? Lots of companies in TV/radio/print rely on this business model and are doing just fine.

Read your own site...

[Usquebaugh]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/03/14/08020 9&cid=166

As you can see I already suggested this. It makes me so mad :-) All these people stealing my good ideas, hell I should've patented it.

As a side note, there's a lot of crap posted to /. but occasionaly there is a some good ideas. It's a shame that very few of the /. crew seem to read their own site.

Fee for slashdot

[RGRistroph]

A few people have posted below that they would pay a fee to veiw slashbot banner-free.

If I pay a fee, can I view slashdot censorship free ? I probably would, especially if it was as low as $30. By censorship free I mean that a portion of the money goes to a lawyers fund to fight Scientologists and Microsofties when they try to delete posts -- but I also want all 0 and -1 posts archived instead of being deleted. If that's too much, maybe all low ranking posts by fee paying trolls could at least be saved ? (Some idiot would of course write something to take arbitrary data, uuencode, post to slashdot, and use it as his slow networked drive . . . oh wait, maybe that and a little code to get around the filter explains a lot of slashdot traffic.) Perhaps the ordinary posts at 0 or with one -1 moderation could be left off, but those posts that actracted lots of downward or upward moderation activity could at least be saved ?

Ok, maybe I'd settle for just a guarantee that you guys would would fight lawyers from CoS and MS. But I'd pay more for the trolls also.

How about fee based bandwidth?

[heroine]

If web sites offered higher bandwidth connections for a fee they would make money. If you like watching 2 hours of 160x120 movies you might be willing to pay for faster connections to a streaming video site.

Pointed ADs work wonders

[canolecaptain]

Personally, I like pointed ads! The greatist thing about Slashdot's ads is that they are pointed at techo/geek/Linux/AltOS people like myself. Since they are all related to items I'm interested in, I don't mind. Besides, an ad at the top of the page is fine - it keeps slashdot free, and I like free. :-)

The problem with generic news sites is that they either don't know their audience, or don't know how to target ads specific to the user reading their site (based on account logins or whatever). Why would I click on an ad that doesn't interest me?

user generated content

[graniteMonkey]

I haven't seen anyone bring up the issue of where content comes from in discussing whether /. should charge a subscription fee.

Even if Salon is doing it, their content is generated in much the same way as traditional dead-tree journalism. You've got a staff of writers making (up) stories and publishing them. Here, all of the content, with the exception of JonKatz's essays and the poorly spelled one-liners after each headline, are generated by the readers.

So even if /. charges a subscription fee, you've got to ask yourself this question: If we the readers are generating the content, how much is the maintenance of that content worth?

Reading Salon, you've got a set of (hopefully) researched topics presented to you, much as if someone is preparing a service for you.

Here, the analogy is more like someone's got a big warehouse with heaps of garbage in it. You get the privelege of sifting through it, while other visitors are busy sorting that garbage for you.

So what's it worth to you?

Um, HBO? Cinemax? Showtime?

[CDanek]

n/t

Salon

[ShayAllen]

If salon.com weren't a maggot-ridden pile of liberal faggot-monger dog shite, it could be worth it.

Buh-bye now...

[Transwarp Conduit]

Considering that Salon's stock has lost nearly 92% of its value since this time last year, and has been trading for about a buck a share on good days for the last several months, you'd better believe they're betting the farm on this scheme. Apparantly, their financial situation is so bad over there that they're even stiffing freelance writers on payment for their articles, and aren't returning phone calls. And as far as I'm concerned, it's about damn time, too. Salon was a useless piece of slop who's only purpose was to promote Talbot's fantasyland view of politics while (he hoped) making him enough money to buy himself a vineyard in California and live like a mogul; the man is openly contemptuous of anything resembling "objective" reporting and, with rare exceptions, employs a stable of left-wing hacks who've never quite grasped the difference between journalism and advocacy. I, for one, shall dance on its grave when it finally reaches the end of it's well-deserved death spiral.

NOT A TROLL, morons..

[Phizzy]

This here is a thing called sarcasm. Learn to appreciate it.

//Phizzy

Look again.

[caduguid]

?? Maybe we're reading different posts, but are you sure that post was using it in a positive way?

Dude, information wants to be free, they can't charge $30 a year for something which is free to provide. You can encode any Salon article as a number. So it's like they're charging for numbers! What a scam! We can just put the articles on Freenet and remove the ads - they won't be able to catch us that way.

Seems like sarcasm to me, and presumably to whoever modded it up to (3, funny).

Re:Look again.

[volsung]

Oops, I missed the number comment. Never mind. I stil have only seen "information wants to be free" in a sarcastic context.

It's $30/year, dolt!

[Lord Vipor Scorpion]

Ummmm, do you have cable? $9.95 won't even get you HBO--fucking AOL Time Warner!

As far as what's available, your DSL connection couldn't handle much more. Without asynchronous transfer or flow control or whatever IPv6 will offer, the Net itself can't handle any better quality streaming.

As far as the rights to the content are concerned, you already have the right to #1,2,&4 Any good researcher is going to publish their findings for anyone to use (especially social studies stuff that Salon specializes in), so #3 is fairly moot. You want exclusive, home-grown research for $2.50/month? Okay, sure.

Also, if you ever read Salon you'd know they have a mixed group of writers. That David Horowitz guy is making quite a stink over there. AHhhh, but you can't even read the Slashdot stories before posting ($30/month!?).

But...

[TopShelf]

Wouldn't that amount to spreading a malicious virus?

I vote "yes!"

[coupland]

Absolutely. Like some others have said I'd be willing to pay for Slashdot even *with* the ads. (This is not to say I want to see them, I just believe in supporting a company whose management is obviously dedicated to preserving the top-notch content and community they've managed to build over all these years.) I'd love the opportunity to see Slashdot ad-free and know that my donation is helping support a great site.

However I'm still a geek so I expect payment to be easy and point-and-click. I tried to donate to Penny Arcade but the Paypal system was so cumbersome for non-USA residents that I gave up in exasperation.!

---

Most ads are just plain done wrong

[5KVGhost]

Exactly. I think the reason most banner ads fail to draw clicks is that they're poorly targeted and poorly designed. I think there are also some problems with the who banner ad implementation.

The average banner ad these days gives no clue about where the ad will take you or even what the ad is attempting to sell me. They're more interested in being clever and cutesy. I don't mind adverting, but I hate _bad_ advertising.

Examples of good ads are either engaging enough to make it worth my time, or concise enough that they don't consume my time.

Other forms of advertising have the same problem (how often have you watched a funny TV commercial, only to come away with absolutely no memory of what product was being advertised?) But other forms of advertising aren't expected to produce instantly measureable results.

And that's the other problem. Most ads are damned annoying to use, even if you're intrigued by what they're selling. If I'm reading some interesting content I'm probably not interested in just stopping in the middle and leaping off into the void for the sake of an advertisment. I might click on it when I'm done, but there's a good chance that its rotated away by then, and I'm almost certainly not going to go randomly refreshing pages to hunt for it.

One site I visited recently has some kind of an "ad clip" thing that lets you tage interesting banners to revisit at your convenience. This particular implementation seemed confusing and tedious to use, but I think the idea is pretty good. When I read a paper publication or record a TV show I occasionally do flip back/rewind to see certain ads. Can't do that on a banner ad. How about a list of advertisers for future reference, like many magazine have? Nope.

I don't think any form of advertising would work well if it were done as badly as banner ads often are.

-Bryan

Re:Most ads are just plain done wrong

[311Stylee]

Good point. You must consider those who are actually designing the ads, and who they are employed by. It seems that banner ads are designed merely to trick the surfer into clicking them, rather than tempting the surfer with interesting/useful stuff. That is, ad designers are herding clicks, rather than sales. This is not beneficial to anyone, except the person making the ad (merely because they get paid).

This is hardly surprising, considering that "front page" and "front page express" and other such mindless graphical code slaughtering programs are so common. What I'm trying to get at here is that bad banner ad design roughly correlates with bad HTML (or what have you) design: there are few webpages with intelligent features, good layout and easy navigation, however, there are at least a billion other pages that are horrible in one or more ways.

Thus, to single out banner ads is like saying "wow.. the headlights on this pinto really suck", when you should be saying "wow.. this whole car really sucks!"

yeah, just like Jaron Lanier says: people are finding out that people can't write code well in general. I suppose, in several years, in a history book someplace it will say: "Thus, the computer age served a purpose: to highlight for humans how incredibly stupid/blind they really are."

Plz blindly accept a role in consumerist culture

[Tony Shepps]

If it's simplicity you want, we'd be happy to sell you that. It's just that our research has shown time and time again that you're an early adopter, and our research has shown that early adopters will accept buggy products if you feel the company selling them to you is friendly and cool.

Our research of your own message shows that while you claim to be tired of advertising, it works on you. In fact, you were able to name several newly-monikered companies that are looking to overhaul their stodgy old-world images. We will report back to Cingular, Verizon and Accenture that not only were early adopters already able to remember their names, but identified them in the midst of a very busy, highly technology-oriented marketplace. What better evidence of marketing success do they need!

You were special, too, in that you not only had an acute understanding of the marketplace and economic factors contributing to it, but that you were keenly aware of the results of market conditions. You also picked up on the Slashdot/Thinkgeek connection. We will be reporting this as evidence of a deeper understanding in certain target markets of the alliances between aggregated sites of similar markets. Going forward, we will encourage corporate clients to develop communities that can be targetted and aggregated.

We would like to thank you, too, for pointing out an underlying resentment of middle managers that we were unaware of in this target market. Heretofore, we are re-purposing those resources to better delight you. Approximately one-third of all middle managers are going to be re-titled "Customer Experience Technicians". They will be indoctrinated in new approaches to micro-markets. Another third will be re-titled "Market-based Enablers". They will have the ability to directly affect any segment of the supply chain to improve your conception of the product ordering and delivery process. The last third will be impacted by our next reduction-in-force effort.

We determined partly through your feedback that the subtle connection between market awareness and bad business news is real. Fortunately our PR department is adept at generating bad business news by rosy forecasts that are followed by routine announcements of unmet goals. Since most of this so-called "news" is just the reaction of some investors to some information, we feel we can generate almost ridiculous amounts of awareness using this new model.

Thank you for your participation!

I like ads

[Keslin]

Okay, call me crazy, but I actually LIKE ads sometimes. On CNN when I'm just getting random shotgun ads squirted at me, I don't pay any attention to them. The Slashdot ads, though, are a service. Targeted ads for nerdy stuff that I might be interested in. I consider that useful. I frequently click on ads that I see on Slashdot, and I've learned about some interesting new products or companies because of it. I really don't see ads as a huge problem.

One thing that continues to amaze me is how the Slashdot crowd are so vehemently opposed to all things commercial. 'Ads are evil', 'software licensing is evil', etc. If you are so opposed to capitalism, then move to Cuba.

-Keslin, the naked nerd girl

It's all about the T shirts :)

[Odinson]

20-30 bucks a year and I get slashdot T-shirt, I'll byte.

As for Salon I would suggest they make the ads nominally larger for non-payers, and charge 40 bucks and offer quarterly dead-trees/CD of popular/influential stories as part of the deal.

This kinda thing will work for Linux, Open Source, and anything on the Internet.

My apologies to anyone who is pissed that the net isn't cranking out a Bill Gates a minute... on second thought I retract that apology :)

I have a great idea!

[snoop_chili_dog]

How bout this? We'll lure people in with value added services. Instead of just charging them for access to content online, we'll give them the option of having hardcopies. We'll put some of our articles online. Then we'll sell a fuller version on little glossy sheets of paper bound together. OOOH, We can call it a magazine. I think that's french or something.

Connection vs. content

[yerricde]

I'm already paying for cable, yet I have to suffer through ads anyway?

You're paying the cable company for a cable connection. The ads support the content. If cable went ad-free, every channel would likely become a premium channel.

Re:Connection vs. content

[baptiste]

Thats a nice thought if it were true - but do you realize that cable provders PAY cable channel providers to carry their channels? Used to be the other way around, but not now. So part of your cable bill is already going to the content providers i.e. the 'basic' channels you get with cable.

--

Konquerer?

[Greyfox]

Doesn't KDE's Konquerer do this? That's really the only thing about KDE I'm even remotely interested in, but it's not worth it to me to install the QT libs just for that. The BLUG guys demoed Konquerer a whole back and it looked like you could disable Java, Javascript and cookie acceptance on a site by site basis.

Re:Konquerer?

[EyesOfNostradamus]

> it looked like you could disable Java, Javascript and cookie acceptance on a site by site basis.

True, you can do that. But it still disables all of javascript, rather than selectively disabling just its most annoying features (popups).

Re:Konquerer?

[Peter H.S.]

Konqueror from KDE 2.1.X has a "Disable "window.open()"" in the "JavaScript" tab.
Not much, but better than nothing.

�How to block goatse.cx...

[yerricde]

I was just thinking that I'd pay $30 a year for a goatse.cx free version of /.

Then block it in your hosts file.

Blasphemy....

[The Breeze]

I hate online ads...except the ones on Slashdot. Most of the slashdot ads are kind of interesting. Ironic...the only website that bothers to ask my opinion on whether I should be able to pay to get rid of the ads happens to be one of the few websites with decent ads.

Had the same problem on etrade

[bataras]

One of etrade's ad gif's which they pulled from a 3rd party was down. That etrade page (which was supposed to let me do stuff with lots of MY money) subsequently hung in my browser waiting for the gif to load. NO, stopping the browser didn't bring up the rest of the page.

...and how to block JonKatz

[yerricde]

KATZ: ALL YOUR OP/ED ARE BELONG TO US

We'd pay for zero Katz articles!

You don't need to pay. All you have to do is turn off author JonKatz in your preferences.

It does make sense.

[mce]

When I buy a book I pay because, after due consideration and flipping the pages x times in the bookshop, I consider that the author has put in sufficient effort and knowledge for me to gain something from the buying/reading whole thing. Or at least, with a big enough probability. With /., this is very different. Most of the content is not worth paying for, and there is no "just flpipping the pages for evaluation purposes" concept. Therefore, if I have to pay to even find out whether something interesting is hiding between the drivel, I'm gone.

But there is more. /. is a discussion site, largely created by its users, so even charging people to write is not a good idea. I personally don't post often, but when I do, I want to be able to do it before the whole discussion is yesterday's news. At such moments, I'm not interested in first sorting out what to pay and how. In addition, I most often post when I want to contribute something I already know, not when I want to get something back. In other words, posting from home already costs me (time and money, because here in Europe there is no such thing as free local telephone connections). So I'd have to pay (even more) up front, for a service that I rarely use and often don't personally benefit from. So I wouldn't. As I know quite a few other people who would come to the same conclusion, the end result would be a lot less posts and readers.

Just for completeness: there is no way that I could convince my employer to pay a subscription for me. They probably think it's bad enough already that they have to pay me (and our provider) while I'm wasting some of their time and bandwidth over here. Yet another reason why I'd have to leave in case /. were to start charging just for reading/writing stuff.

--

Salon Going Subscript. -- Who Cares?

[Caraig]

I don't know how most people feel about Salon. They have the occasional flamebait article that proves amusing (like David Brin's whine about how George Lucas is anti-democracy and how Joseph Campbell is a sophomore anthro student) but most of their stuff is just plain... well, I didn't really have the word for it until someone here on Slashdot found it was mostly "literary masturbation." My apologies to the slashdotter who posted that article, I would have liked to have bookmarked it but now I can't find it. Salon is the Vanity Fair of the net, written by people who have a very high opinion of themselves. It's the one-sided equivalent of a stereotypical authors' party, all the guests trying to one-up one another with words. Look at the quality of what their writers put out, mostly in the category of sweeping generalizations. For example, "All geeks live alternative lifestyles! Look at all the wild, kinky stuff geeks do! Even Richard Stallman lives alternatively!" *sigh* I think we all remember that article. (Frankly, that was more about Richard Stallman than I ever wanted to know.) Okay, fine, some geeks living in the Valley/SanFran area live alternatively, and, sure, some geeks outside of that area have "alternative lifestyles," but, geez... ALL geeks aren't bisexual, polyamorous fetishists! (Mind you, there's nothing wrong with any or all of the above. But most of the people in the alternative lifestyle community I know of take joy in the diversity of interests: "YKIOKIJNMK," or "Your Kink Is OK It'S Just Not My Kink" is a fairly common phrase. Put another way, if we all shared the same alternative lifestyles, it would be pretty damn boring... and what the hell would we be alternative TO, at that point?) Or the other Salon gem -- this one kills me. I believe it was Vernor Vinge who presented a polite, opinion-based article about how the government should be involved with the moderation of speech on the Internet. It doesn't matter *why*. I disagree strongly with it and his reasoning, but, he had an opinion, and if you can find the article, it's well worth a read. Vinge is erudite and interesting, no matter what he's writing. The point is, however, that Salon published his article. Predictably enough, Salon then got innundated with several virtual tons of e-mail, most of them at least partly flammable if not incendiary. The upshot: Vinge's editor writes an article blasting his own author for his opinions! How's that for a stab in the back? Why the heck did Salon allow the article -- an opinion piece, not a news item -- if the editor so strenuously disliked it? I guess what I'm saying is... Salon wants to charge subscription in lieu of banner ads? Fine by me, just don't expect me to pay them. And I find it hard to see why anyone would, BUT... YKIOKIJNMK. Anyone who wants to pay to read Salon is welcome to it. =) Apologies for not being able to provide any links to the articles mentioned above. I tried to search for them but they were awfully elusive.

I'm missing the exchange rate in '72

[Interrobang]

[complaint mode] Ok, this subscription mode thing is great -- for those of you who live in the US. Go ahead, pay your $30 to Salon. I might do it, too, except for one thing. That $30 is $50 for me. And $50 is a piece of change to be reckoned with in my current circumstances.

It's the same reason why I'm not a card-carrying member of my social club, The Society for Creative Anachronism. Milpitas, in its infinite wisdom, has decreed that there shall be no Canadian membership office (even though there's an Australian one), so we wind up paying $100 (at the current ROE) for what costs Statesians $45/year.

And considering, as I've said before, that when you're talking about in-country monetary transactions, buying power, and cost of living, that $100 is a month's worth of groceries to me, or a month's transit pass and dinner out for two people, or a whole $hxtload of used books, or...or...or...even if it only buys people in Milpitas (or anywhere else in the USA) $45 worth of stuff. In other words, thanks to the moneymongerers, we are getting scrod.

So I won't do it, at least not until it's fair to the consumer, regardless of exchange rate.

Re:I'm missing the exchange rate in '72

[pen]

So I won't do it, at least not until it's fair to the consumer, regardless of exchange rate.

Oh, come on. You're no better than a USian. Should Salon now set up offices in every country in the world and carefully calculate the appropriate amount? You know, a person can live a week or two on $45 in Russia, and I'm sure that there are plenty of people there that would want to read an ad-less Salon.

Life isn't fair. Deal with it.

--

paying for it

[oogoody]

I'll pay for salon. I'd pay for slashdot. But that's because i've learned to enjoy them over time. It's unlikely as a new user i would pay money to subscribe because the value would not be obvious. Chicken and the egg problem. But once you allow a free user period people can just ride the free periods.

text browser anybody?

[jschauma]

If you use a text browser such as link (http://links.sourceforge.net), lynx or w3m you wouldn't see any ads either way. The best way to /read/ anything on the web is by using a text browser.

Re:paying for slashdot..

[jheinen]

And what an idiot you must be for replying to my post, since as you say, this is stuff you "already know."

Nothing is more ridiculous than a critic engaging in exactly what he is being critical of. What a dipshit.

Well guess what Dave, your opinions are completely irrelevant. There are a LOT of people who visit /. quite frequently, and enjoy participating in the community. I am now more hopeful than ever that /. goes to a subscription-based model since it will probably keep "3 times a week" trolls like you away.

Of course, we all know you visit /. much more than three times a week. You're a closet addict. No better than the crack head down the street. Ashamed of your addiction. Well I say come clean Dave. Admit to the world that you are like a cocaine-addicted lab rat, hitting the refresh button over and over until you're ready to collapse. You can't get enough of it, Dave. The monkey's on your back and it controls you. *I* control you. You respond to me like a finely tuned instrument. You will at first not want to respond, because you know that's what I want you to do. But you won't be able to help yourself. It will eat at you. The burning desire to flame will gnaw at your very being. It's hopeless, Dave. Flame me and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

-Vercingetorix

./ ads have utility

[setec]

Acutally, even if such a program were instituted at ./, I probalby wouldn't pay anyway. Not because I don't want to pay for the service, but because ./ ads are the only ads I ever click on. They're the only banner ads that are interesting enough.

I've purchased a couple products because I saw an ad on /., and without the ad, I would have never found the item.

Goes without saying, however, that if they became bigger or more intrusive, I'd then start to consider it more, but for now, they seem more like a feature than a nuisance.

================

the difference is...

[levl289]

That TV advertisers already paid the station to broadcast their commercial. Banner ads pay the host by the click, not in advance.

Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.

Re:the difference is...

[Mike Schiraldi]

That TV advertisers already paid the station to broadcast their commercial. Banner ads pay the host by the click, not in advance.

That's all factored in to the price of the ads. When people skip commercials, advertisers aren't willing to pay as much. But they know that most people will watch the commercials, so there's not much impact on price. It's exactly the same with blocking banner ads.

--

Re:the difference is...

[binarybits]

Q: What do you think about American Culture?

A: I think it's a good idea

Actually, it was Western civilisation, not American culture.

It'll only work if we don't sweat the small stuff

[Max Hyre]

The two comments above point up an important priciple. Any system needs some play in it: make the tolerances too tight, and everything pretty much grinds to a halt.

You can see it at work in everything from the ``war'' on drugs, through the Business Software Alliance, to vending machines. Try to prevent every single infraction, and you end up with variously a police state, incentive to use Free Software, or a candy machine with dismal sales because it rejects too many authentic-but-worn dollar bills.

That was Stephen King's mistake: trying to enforce a level of ethics on the 'net readership. If he'd simply contented himself with specifying how much cash he was looking for, and not worried about how many people were freeloading, both he and his readers wourld have been better off.

Any airtight e-security system will be too cumbersome to work without government force behind it (read: DMCA). Writers and artists will need to set their own level of tolerance for non-payment, and be happy so long as the rest supply enough cash to keep them happy.

i maybe something else

[daevt]

i would be willing to receive an advertising email in exchange for an ad free slashdot. people who don't care just wouldn't check that box off in there user preferences. once you selected the box, its sends an explorartory email, you go to the link in the email to confirm that you askes for this, and poof!, slashdot is with out ads. you just have to deal with a weekly news letter then.

Generating Revenue for Content

[Prof_Dagoski]

I'm thinking about running a webzine. I've got the technical details down, and there's some writers I want to recruit, but the one thing that hangs me up is how to generate enough money to give the writers a decent royalty. Does anyone out there have any experience in this type of thing? I know the banner ad market is in the process of imploding, but I'm looking for info on recruiting advertisers, prices and all that. Also does anyone have any experience starting up a magazine that they would like to share? Let's face it, Salon didn't get where they are overnight, they had to start somewhere--even if they did have a lot of venture capital.

Make that the Software Publisher's Association...

[Max Hyre]

...that's known for its (literal) raids on suspect businesses. Hey, I can only be right 99.44% of the time.

slashdot has ads?

[parseError]

some things you just get used to ignoring, I guess.
... please don't take this as a request to start doing popups, though :-o

One Problem...

[lanky_boy_2000]

I think in Slashdot's case, the problem could be
that the subscribers are also the content
providers. If slashdot used a subscription model,
they would have fewer people posting interesting
opinions, which would make the product worse,
which would attract fewer people and so on in
a downward spiral.

It always bothers me when I hear about the death
of the advertizing model on the web. Have they
really given this the old college try? I doubt
there is a less innovative industry than web
advertizing. How can a site possibly be supported
by a strip at the top of a page? If the content
is good, people will put up with something like
this:

1) I click on a link to an article
2) A huge, red full page add comes up telling
me how much I want to drink Coke
3) Five seconds later I am redirected to the
article

I think this sort of thing is the answer. I could
even be offered the entertaining flash version
if I have a fast connection. Or I could be made
to play a simple and maybe fun game or answer a
quiz (what's the best soft drink on earth?) or
fill out a poll. There are all sorts of ideas
but I think the general idea here is to have the
audiences undivided attention for 5 seconds and
then give them uncluttered content rather than
annoying them all the time.

Of course this sort of thing would only work if
the content was good enough, but increased
revenue would help in this regard.

That's all.

Re:One Problem...

[Yer Mom]

"People" might. I won't. That would be one site I wouldn't be visiting any more.

PS: what's with all the <BR>s? It feels like being on a BBS and suddenly coming across something posted by someone with a 40-column screen :)
--

Ars Technica has this too

[MikeyNg]

I know a fairly good portion of the slashdot population reads Ars Technica also, but for those who don't, they also have their own program like this.

Their Premier Membership has been around for a while. It uses Pay Pal or Amazon's Honor System (gak. No nice link there. You know how to find it.) or even snail mail to receive payment.

Currently the service is completely voluntary. You would "subscribe" only because you want to see the site be maintained without getting blanketed with ads. The subscription amount may be anything, and you don't get anything really cool for paying them, except a little moniker near your name in their forums, but you also don't lose anything for NOT paying them.

It's interesting how these different systems are sprouting up. We will probably see a bunch of these popping up rather soon. Eventually we may see one or two dominant methods because that's how it is with everything, isn't it?

So go check them out! And *maybe* I'd pay for slashdot, but I would imagine that they get plethora dollars from andover or whomeve is sponsoring them. :)

how about I donate $30 a year to junkbuster :)

[Travoltus]

hehe
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,

Squid

[Helmholtz]

I don't see _any_ banner ads at home thanks to squid's redirect function ....

Blast away I say, I'll never see it.

Admittedly OT

[GungaDan]

Interesting you should bring up the dead-wood PC Mag. I made the mistake of subscribing a few years ago, when it was mostly actually about PCs. Now I pick up the magazine, and at least three postcards fall out. Given that they typically fall out on my bathroom floor, it's a real bitch to have to pick them up. After removing the postcards, though, the first thing I do with every new PC Mag is rip out all of the ads that don't have content on the backside. Then I head for the brand-spanking-new "business" section and rip that out, because it's not damned "Businesses that use PCs Magazine." By the time I'm done, I'm left with a Dvorak rant and some handy notebook-carrying tips from Big Jim Seymour, and a "user-to-user" section that has devolved into the "how do I open this spreadsheet" advice column for the business-people-who-try-to-use-computers crowd that the mag is apparently targeting. It aggravates the spleen, you know? Guess I'll have to keep getting the facts from /.

Sig

[RobNich]

"Once I saved a man's life. I could have pushed him under a streetcar, but I didn't." -- L. Ron Hubbard

Interesting. Where is this quote from?

Re:Yeah, sounds good...

[dfalgoust]

SAIL magazine does this every issue. The cover of the newsstand edition is covered with text describing that month's comments, but the cover of the subscriber edition only contains the magazine logo.

Nice.

[unity]

This kind of witty reply is exactly why I still read /., thanks for giving me a great laugh.

Ummmm no

[h8macs]

I sometimes learn an equal amount through your banner ads as I do through reading /. It seems as though your banner ads are not without thought and reason. They all seem to be within the same basic topic as /. itself. This is admirable, and very much appreciated.

Is this the last post that is not a reply?

[Kevin Mitnick]

I'd be as happy as a $10 whore who has just received a $1 tip

Use Junkbuster or some other ad-filter proxy

[paulsomm]

I set up junkbuster on a linux box that my home and work PC proxy through. Rarely do I see an ad anymore (Even on slashdot) and when I do, I just add a filter for it to the blockfile. Besides, Salon is too biased anyway. They take any oportunity to slam Clinton or endorse someone else. Actually, that's typical american journalism isn't it.

Paying for /.

[calis]

I know that this comment is going to get a low moderated score, but still I have to add my two cents. Paying for /. would suck. The whole point of the internet is freedom of information. The ads here are unobtrusive and they're not that bad, sometimes even useful. Also, you'd never get that many people to subscribe and the amount of money that you make would be negated by the pain in the ass it would be to get done. Ok there's my two cents.

that damned Horowitz

[anonymous cowerd]

I must say I'd consider paying $30 a year if they include a filter so I don't have to read anything by or about that preposterous ass David Horowitz.

Long time ago he used to be a attention-craving left-wing idiot, intoxicated with the glamour of the loud mouth/empty head branch of the Black Panther Party, and now in his money-hungry old age he's become a right-winger, but the "idiot" part still shines through.

Although, come to think of it, maybe he just went "underground" like the CPUSA members did when it looks like the whip was about to come down, and what superficially appears as pro-right-wing diatribes actually constitute a sneaky left-wing attempt to discredit the right by portraying them as halfwits incapable of making a logically coherent argument.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Pay?

[Kefka Priest]

anything you have to pay for in my opinion is not worth it, unless your buying a product

/. Subscription Service

[SomeOtherGuy]

Free Servce -- AC, Post at 0

$10 year -- Have User ID, post at +1

$20 year -- Have User ID, post at +2

$30 year -- Have User ID, post at +2 15 Bonus Karma

$40 year -- Value Club UID, +2 15 Bonus Karma @ 10 free software downloads from Freshmeat.

$50 year -- Gold Club *All of the above plus unlimited browsing of "tuneup tips at linux.com" and 2% discount on VA Linux servers.

paying to read...

[mr_walrus]

hmmmm, this would mean i'd *have* to log in. no more mr. anon coward. so, for the privilege of giving say $30, they can now do demographic mapping of the articles i read, how often, etc. and sell that info to others. (of course 'in aggregate'. hahaha). Banners, junkbusters and hostfiles seem safer somehow... i do somewhat agree with an earlier post suggestion pay-to-post micropayments.

It's called PAY TV

[BierGuzzl]

Commercial free programming at a jacked up price. Happens all the time. Forget about dreaming, call up your cable company, tell them that all your commercials are belong to us, and order some pr0n channels!

Why I would pay for Slashdot and other sites

[chrisom]

For me, the difference between paying for a site and just visiting free sites is like paying for access to a BBS or not.

I don't know much about how Slashdot is funded. Obviously, they are owned by Andover. However, if more funds were made available via subscription, perhaps they would be able to bring on more writers?

I visit Slashdot every day, but am not an active poster. I'd pay the $30/year just because I think the effort that has gone into the site deserves reward and I'd love to see it progress. I don't know in what way, but if it would guarantee that Slashdot stays around in the future, that's a good thing.

Screw that

[Legion303]

Grab Webwasher and fuck the extortion.

-Legion

I have news for Salon: I already don't see ads

[Voltaire99]

Anyone using Windows learns how to block ads in five minutes' time here:

http://www.accs-net.com/hosts/

And one gets the regular updates here:

http://www.smartin-designs.com/

And on a personal note, let me add that I like Salon, and regard it as the intellectual peer of some print publications. Unfortunately for Salon, said print publications give me something in hand to take out of the house or to the crapper with me, and that substantially increases the value to the point where I'm willing to pay 30 clams a year and up. If Salon starts printing, I might subscribe.

Yet everything - every bloody word - that appears on my PC screen is ephemera. Don't even think of asking me to pay for it. And don't insult my intelligence by offering me the equivalent of a no-ads protection racket - really, do you think we've all been allowing you to pump those obnoxious things at us? Get a clue, dinosaurs; this is the Internet age. ;)

keep 'em separated...

[madeye the younger]

Before you decide whether income is necessary to 'enhance the service offered', acknowledge two things.

1. A goodly portion of the net's desirable content IS produced by people doing it as a part time hobby. It is most often for free, and in a significant number of cases, they PAY expenses to put their offering online.

2. Income is only necessary to offset two costs, the cost of delivery and the (possible) cost of content.

Why aren't these costs being separated? It would be a wonderfully efficient way to value bandwidth and content.

The cost of of sending an email should be exactly that, the cost of SENDING it. (spam would no longer be a criminally cheap nuisance). The bandwidth cost of viewing a web page should be paid by the viewer, or pre-paid by the host if they're feeling generous. The problem of ads, banners and other generally objectionable marketing gimmicks goes away when your Junkbuster filter informs your ISP that you aren't accepting collect calls from 'GoatPr0n.com', and the ad doesn't even get SENT until GoatPr0n pays the bandwidth in advance. GoatPr0n either racks up an $80,000 bill with ZERO clickthru's from irate netizens, or serves up zero ads that noone wants to look at. Either way, they go away.

In short, the viewer pays the cost of looking at what he wants, and equally important, doesn't pay to look at what he doesn't want.

I'd pay more for good layout than ad-freedom

[jaed]

Like a lot of web sites, Salon's design makes it so hard to read it's almost not worth my time. Stories are squeezed into a teeny central column between a row of irrelevant links on the left and another row of irrelevant links on the right. The front page is an exercise in scrolling - scroll down to read the first column, scroll back up, scroll sideways, scroll down again... Augh. I'd stopped reading it except when someone would tell me about a particularly interesting story.

When I found this useful script that presents the current headlines in a simple list, linked directly to Salon's reader-friendly [aka "print this page"] layout, I started reading it again. But one assumes the "Premium" Salon won't be available via this unofficial portal.

I sent them a letter to the editor to the effect that I'd be happy to pay a subscription fee for a readable, crap-free layout that let me concentrate on the stories and not my scrollbars. Admittedly, I'm more of a curmudgeon about readability than most, but I doubt I'm alone in my annoyance.

Screw the ads, they're a relatively minor annoyance. I'd rather have an ad-ridden but easy-to-read page than one with no ads and two words per column (scroll down, scroll left, scroll right) any time.

Paying for service

[Sloppy]

I'm not interested in paying someone else for my own content.

You wouldn't be paying for content. You would be paying for use of the server.

Currently, this is paid for by the advertisers, who in turn pass it on to the minority of users who buy the advertised products. This is actually a very crude and unfair correllation between those who use the service and those who pay for it.

---

Try it, Taco

[Sloppy]

If it's something people want, we could certainly consider it.

What do you have to lose?

---

Finally, somebody who understands

[wmb]

I've been waiting for the moment when companies get the idea that some people would be willing to pay for their services if only the stupid advertising was gone. Basing a business on advertising is dangerous enough especially in times when companies decide to pay less for advertising or at times when too many services want to be based on advertising. By offering a supscription type service you're also finally able to find out what your service is worth. It's a great idea and I'd be willing to accept that model for all services I use every day e.g. like Slashdot.

It doesn't have a chance

[rinkjustice]

Only a miniscule percentage of the web surfing population would actually pay cash moneyTM for an ad-free environment. Most overly sensitive surfers would rather bitch and moan and expect webmasters to take the financial hit than put money where their mouth is.

The only way I see this new Salon subscription working is if the bonus content is substantial.

Free Information at a Price?

[sddefrag]

Why would I want to pay for information I've been getting for free all these years? You can load the entire page full of advertising and I will ignore it, unless something catches my eye. There's no way I'd pay for biased info I have to filter through myself and research before I come across the truth. Just like I refuse to pay for the Houston Chronicle because everything written is someone's opinion, not news.

WebWasher

[Animats]

After reading the above, I downloaded and installed WebWasher. This is an HTTP proxy that blocks ads. I'd tried it when it first came out, and it had problems, but the current version is very nice. Available for Linux, too.

It's amazing how much more pleasant web browsing is when the ads are gone.