Slashdot Mirror
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.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Will probably never happen of course, since they would probably make more money from the ads. it's nice to dream though...
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.
Remove the spam reference to email
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?
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
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
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
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!
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!