Slashdot Mirror
End of the Free Internet
efedora writes: "The End of Free keeps a list of the various transitions to paid services from free net sites. The list is getting longer. When I think of an individual site that's really worthwhile I say to myself, "Sure, that site is worth $4.95 a month". The problem is there are going to be lots of sites at $$$ a month and it sure adds up." Of course even Slashdot is planning on rolling out subscriptions-for-no-banner-ads sometime soon, so I suppose we're not entirely immune to the subscription bug either.
this is the first i've heard of this and this is the dumbest thing Slashdot can do. No one will pay. I don't care about the banner ads at the top. I ignore them anyway. Have you done any market research to back this up? Is there an official announcement that I missed?
Get in touch with reality. Jesus.
Well I sure hope that for whatever fee you guys are gonna charge, you're gonna provide spell-checked and fact-checked submissions. Otherwise, I doubt a lot of people will pay to be anoyed. Banner-ads are far from the top of anyone's list of "thing that anoy you about Slashdot".
Companies start charging money for no banners, and then start putting more and more banners, and pop ups and all sorts of stuff until the website is 90% ads. They think this will annoy people so much they will start paying for no ads. Sad thing is, people just stop going to the site because of the morality the site has shown it doesnt have.
/. is the one place where the ads are targeted at me. I kinda like 'em, and I consciously try and click on the interesting ones, to give /. money.
Where else would I find out about the nifty program Compaq has to give you shell acount on spiffycool computers or what the latest Thinkgeek stuff is?
Of course, I'm tired of this DNS crap.
-David
.
I suspect we'll eventually see editorial services that combine a large group of websites under one payment plan. For example, slashdot would have a hard time going pay, but, say if all andover's websites went to a subscrption, costing $2/month for unlimited access for everhting, they would probably fill a few pockets.
Also, I'll bet money that after people begin feeling comfortable with paying for content, the ads will come back. It's just the nature of the beast.
The Internet is generally stupid
realistically many people would just avoid sites you directly pay for.
I'd rather donate a few bucks to slashdot once in a while (I'd really do it) than paying a fixed subscription. Subscriptions scare people IMO.
I wonder if the subsciption option would be for all of OSDN or just Slashdot, and if it would include extras apart from no ads.
If slashdot wants people to pay to get rid of the banners, the banners had better got a lot more annoying than they are now.
You guys have been too nice for your own good!
Doesn't everyone use Junkbuster? What are these "banner ads" you refer to? =)
Kevin
Is that all $5 is going to buy? No banner ads?
/. not a less bad one /.
If so, I can't imagine there will be many takers. Plenty of people use proxies like junkbuster to get rid of the banner images already for free.
To encourage people to pay, subscribers need to get a better
I've said before that I wouldn't mind paying for a Slashdot subscription, but I have a few reasonable (in my opinion) requests that would probably have to be fulfilled if I were to pay around $60 a year (assuming ~ $5.00 for monthly access):
- You can keep Katz. I don't hate the guy as much as most people around here. He's not a moron, and he writes interesting articles. BUT, please ask Robert Cringely to write an article or two every month. I'm not sure if this would violate his contract with PBS, but he would be a nice addition to the Slashdot staff (perhaps he could even write an open-source/free software slanted column in addition to his PBS gig).
- No banner ads for subscribers, of course.
- Some "free" item every six or twelve months, perhaps. I'm talking small here, like a travel coffee mug of a relatively aesthetically-pleasing t-shirt with a slash and a dot on it.
- Ability for more customization than non-paying users. I'm thinking of some nifty themes, perhaps (everyone loves the apple./..org gfx, let's get some more good looking stuff). Also, subscribers should be able to moderate more often. I probably earn at least five karma points a day on my two accounts but haven't been able to moderate for MONTHS.
- Perhaps a general forum with a few different categories where subscribers can post questions, etc. I'm imagining an "Off-Topic" room, a "General hardware" room, and a "Software" room right now. Of course, this would all be OSS/FS-related chit chat for the most part (except for silly OT posts).
Eric Krout
is there a swimsuit issue with CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal?
Subscription based service for a site with no ads??? How anal can you be. First of all Slashdot only really has one ad anyway. People that subscribe to services to take ads off sites must be the same people that buy those boxes that cut out all TV commericials. Fact is I like slashdot's ads. ThinkGeek is beautiful and usually they are very pertinent.
Would you pay for slashdot?
1) Yes.
2) No, ill take my business elsewhere.
3) Only of CowBoyNeal does.
As boneheaded VC money dries up, web businesses will have to have a meaningful revenue stream. To me, there are maybe 10 sites on the net that have compelling content worth paying for.
If I could make micropayments to content providers, I would have no problem chipping in. I'd pay 3-5 cents/hit to IMDb if the content is kept up to date and free of Amazon's sales pitches. Yes, I know the content is updated by its users, but how many would continue to work for free on a pay site?
Soon End of Free will start charging users to see the list of free net sites transitioning to paid services.
And if the ads -really- bother you, you can just right-click on them in mozilla and select "block ads from server". not to mention ad blockers, but I'm just saying that's the easiest way for a mozilla user to do it. :)
/. start taking on more obnoxious/intrusive ads... Though again, with Mozilla's ability to prevent pop-ups, I can't see how that's possible without having 1024x768 banner ads.
Though maybe this will make
The enemies of Democracy are
Time to register freeslash.net ...
_bustaa_
/. is one of the few sites I use regularly whose ad server is not redirected in my host file. I see them, and occasionally click on them in order to support financially (and indirectly - none of my money involved). I'd rather let some company's marketing budget support these sites than out of my own pocket.
My 0.02$ anyways.
Not because of some Evil Conspiracy to try to convert to a pay service. Bandwidth is expensive, folks. Any Internet site that is too popular will eventually become too expensive to be free. Stay small and niche-ish, and your home DSL line will be just fine.
With the dotcom kablooie, Universities are going to become the only organizations interested in providing high bandwidth without any interest in a return on investment. Businesses won't be interested in spending money without some sort of return in the future. Why shell out major bucks for a big server and fat pipe unless you expect to get revenue for it?
Large free pages are going to turn into pure marketing vehicles. Anything with a great deal of meaningful (ie, non-company specific, non-techsupport) content will have to be a pay site.
We'll all be back to using NNTP.
i worked at one of these companies. we all remember back in 97 and 98 when the free stuff just wouldn't stop coming. And the headhunters grew on trees, and the option agreements were printed with liquid silver typefaces. It was never going to last forever, and it was never, never going to sustain itself on advertising.
oh well.
It seems like the latest trend in 'net advertising is larger, flashier banner ads. When are the advertisers going to get the idea that THIS DOES NOT WORK! Pop-Ups, Pop-Unders, "Intersicials" (between page ads), Ads that make noise, Ads that flash and blink. It's all just detracting from the real message of th ad. Look at Google. Reports say that they may be profitable, and most of their revenue comes from... guess what... ads! But when do you see an ad on Google? No pop-ups, no banners, just "Sponsored Links". Non-intrusive and relevent to your search. Bigger banners don't get more clickthroughs. Learning what the user wants and targeting banners to them does (Yes, there are privacy concerns - but you don't have to track users to find out what they may be interested in.). The solution is to cut costs and make banners less annoying - and more informative. Instead of poorly done marketing, how about a simple link. Imagine this at the top of Slashdot: "P4 2.2, 1024mb DDR, 120gb HDD, 17" TFT, DVD-RW, Radeon 8500 - $1600 from X Computers". This is targeted. Most people wouldn't understand what this says - but I bet that 95% of the /. crowd would. Advertising is about getting the message accross to the righ people and giving people what they want. A P4 2.2 with a TFT and DVD-RW for $1600? Who wouldn't click? It's a good offer that makes you want to learn more. It's advertising that works.
Doesn't everyone use Junkbuster? What are these "banner ads" you refer to? =)
For those running Squid, I wrote BannerFilter.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The internet was never free. Hosting websites costs money--a lot of money, actually--and for a while companies thought that they could pay those bills with advertising. It shouldn't surprise anyone that it turns out that advertising isn't always so lucrative.
That said, I'd rather see popular websites try to find more creative ways to make money than monthly fees. This is probably going to be modded as serious flamebait, but how about (with Slashdot as an example here), make the fees correspond with mod points? The idea would be that site members who cared enough about the site to pay for it would also care enough to be sensible in their moderations (as in clicking on the links in posts they mod as informative, so that they don't waste their investment). I know that Slashdot people will probably shit their jeans, since information wants to be free ("like beer" whatever the fuck that means), but I'm tired of those same people simultaneously complaining about a broken moderation system (which is not to say that it isn't broken; just that the solution might not be exactly like open source software).
I think this is worth discussing. Perhaps other people might have similar ideas about how to use a pay system to fix Slashdot moderation (+ moderated sites in general)?
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
The problem real comes down to popular sites having to cover their bandwidth costs. Unfortunatly with the drop in impression / click thru pay offs even this is hard to do without adding 5 ads to every page. Sites try subscription based deals and some people do go for that but it usually cripples their user base.
:(
The fact is this: You have content I like, GREAT! You want to charge, I'll just go to another site that offers the same thing you do for free.
The internet is not designed to support subscription based sites really other than porn and a few other exceptions.
Sux though that adcritic went belly up
Ok so banner advertising with the cpm / click through model is failing... so we need to find other sources of income so now we charge a fee to our user base for them to browse our wonderful site without the banners.
... Oh right, no one sees them..."
/. for instance has almost entirely OSDN banners. I would never pay to remove these, I like the OSDN sites and love the thinkgeek banners. So how exactly would this model bring people to subscribe?
Somewhere else in the office someone says... "Why is our banner model not working again?
But really, that model stopped working a while ago so now most sites run "house" banners, advertising partner sites and various sections / products within their own sites.
Let sites like NYT or Disney charge; who cares--you don't have to go there.
There are a few commercial/retail sites that won't let you in unless you have an account ($10) with them. They refund you the $10 with your first purchase, but you have to be charged first. (www.buttonstaiwan.co.tw I think that's right.) Basically, you have to buy something before they let you see the catalog.
-C
The price of the net is one of its greatest assets. As much as I hate pop ups I hate paying for sites (or registration for that matter) a lot more. How many of you watch TV or listen to radio? I'll put up with 30 seconds of ads instead of paying to watch my favourite shows. And the afore mentioned point of multiple subscriptions costs is spot on. Add to that the cost of your ISP and prices skyrocket.
NO WAY IN HELL WILL I PAY TO VIEW SLASHDOT!!
The good thing is that there will always be some free amateur sites worthy of attention.
The bad thing is that bandwidth isn't free. When amateur sites are good, they get popular, and their bandwidth cost increases without bound.
The solution. It'd be nice if the bandwidth costs were paid by users. We already pay money to our ISPs. In an ideal world this money should pay for the bandwidth costs of the http requests that we send *and* the contents that we receive in return. Fan sites would no longer fear the bandwidth costs of the slashdot effect. They would only have to worry about the server not crashing. And for that we have prayers.
While lots of sites have changed from free to paid Slate.com did just the opposite.
It change from paid to free.
And only charge for user ID's greater than #3088, and have incremental weights based on this number for payments, so those of us with lower numbers get paid to surf slashdot.
A happy troll is a paying troll. Or is that a toll?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and explain why I'd be willing to cough up some cash for a Slashdot subscription.
/. because it points me to a lot of interesting news stories, and because it also provides a lot of different opinions on said news stories. Stories that I would probably miss if I didn't read the site. Some people seem to come here expecting a grand bastion of journalism, but they're definitely looking in the wrong place.
/. provides me with a magazine-like service, I'd be willing to pay a magazine-like subscription fee. Something like $10/month would be too much, but I would seriously consider something in the neighborhood of $20-$25 per year, which is what I am used to paying for magazines.
My view is this: It's like subscribing to a magazine. Except the magazine is updated very frequently and covers a much broader spectrum of news than any print magazine.
Yes, it's not perfect. Sometimes I don't agree with what editor X says, or what comment Y says, or what comment Y is moderated as, but it's the same as any other aspect of life: there are good and bad parts. It's an imperfect system, but I like it anyway.
I like
Since
Anyway, that's just my ignorant, pigheaded opinion. I do suppose it's a wee bit off-topic but I figure that a lot of posts on this thread will be talking about this very issue.
What is needed is a subscription network. As many will no doubt point out, paying $5/mo to a bunch of sites adds up.
There needs to be a network. Users who want to subscribe to sites can go into the network and click a checkbox for all the sites they want, at a low price per site (more along the lines of $1/mo or something.) Then the total charge is added up and run through their CC once. This would help reduce credit card and processing charges for the individual sites; they'd just get a check every month from the network for all their subscribers.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
How much do you pay for your cable channels? ... which one you would pay more? Which one cost more to produce?
:)
Less then 4.99$ a month.
Does the content on TV worth more then the Internet based content?
If you compare cnn TV and cnn.com
4.99$/month is way too much for internet content.
1.99$ / month is worth the content of a regular website. No more...maybe less.
They gonna have a hard time until the net content become more complete, including video.
I would maybe pay for a geek package. Include 10 good sites for 9.99$/month...maybe but paying for one site, at the moment, no way.
haaa, another example. Would you pay 4.99$/month for www.playboy.com while you can leech porn for free?....who cares about the articles
Greg
Going through The End of Free, I found one site, Netsurfer, that posted a pretty good explanation of why they were shifting to a subscription model.
To recap my understanding of the issue, regular print periodicals are either completely paid for by users (mostly books, and your more distinquished journals), or by a combination of user fees and ad fees (most magazines and newspapers). A few periodicals get by purely on advertising (Village Voice, for instance)
It should be noted that in the mixed fee case, advertising provides the vast majority of revenue. Subscription fees pretty much are just used as a signal to advertisers that people are actually reading, and therefore willing to pay for, a magazine.
Since online pubs can completely verify readership, the signalling aspect of subscrber fees should have been rendered unnecessary. Also, since distribution of online content is cheaper than regular paper pubs by several orders of magnitude (though certainly not free, as was once touted), online pubs were thought to have an advantage over offline pubs in that regard.
Somewhere along the line, this new paradigm has, at least temporarily collapsed. I suspect a lot of it has to do with poor understanding of market forces and implemantation rather than the ultimate unfeasability of ad-supported, free online content.
evanchik.net
I have a friend who just started a business doing that- offering subscription website "bundles."
Something you're all forgetting: when you consider paying $4.95 to Slashdot, you're not just paying to get rid of the banner ads. You're also making a donation because you like the site and you want to support them.
When I bought a Slackware Linux CD set and polo shirt, I wasn't paying $90 for the convenience of the extra discs (I'd already downloaded and burned install.iso) and a nice shirt to impress people at work (my boss loved it). I was making a donation to the guys who put together the distro I've been using since 1998, and that powers the web hosting company my friend and I run. The Slackware team has managed to survive after being acquired and fired by WindRiver, and still produce one of the nicest, cleanest distributions out there - and it keeps getting better.
Current uptime on my Slackware box at home:
10:45pm up 110 days, 4:26, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Free beer and free speech are NOT the same thing. Support free speech - pay for stuff that's cool, whether you're required to or not.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I wouldn't pay $4.95/month to have ads removed from slashdot.
...but I would put a $5 bill down CowboyNeal's g-string in exchange for a lapdance.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
One thing that has been missed here is that /. is mostly links to other content providers. I'm not saying that it does not provide a service, but there are 2 ways you can look at this fact if more sites require subscriptions:
/. only to need to subscribe then to all it's sources...
1) Slashdot will simply be links to sites that require a per month fee.
2) The number of sources drop because there is no free content.
Even worse about #1 is that you may have to subscribe to
my $30 payment for AdSubtract goes a long long way. i especially like turning on pinball sounds and hitting stileproject.com. cha-ching!
Where else can I pay for a site that's basically a dumping ground for links to other stories on other sites with a bunch of morons leaving their 2 cents worth at the bottom!
Sign me up!
What these sites that want to charge for content fail to realize is that (as others have mentioned), it all adds up. I'm already appalled at my "communications bill" every month. $70 for DirectTV. $90 for telco/ADSL. $150 for two cellular phones. $99/yr for Tivo. Luckily, I don't have a pager, or that'd be another $7 a month.
We're getting nickle and dimed to death on all the stuff, and after a while, people are going to stop being willing and/or able to pay. *I'm* not paying $4.95 a month. And in SlashDots case, unless the ads suddenly start taking the whole screen, I don't even notice them. Some sites are in my firewall database so I never see the content anyway.
And incidently, how effective are these ads? It appears that ThinkGeek advertises a lot, but I never click through to them. I can probably count the number of ads I've clicked through on.
Now, for one time fees, like Opera, it's worth paying the $$$ to get rid of the ads. THOSE types of ads use screen space you can't get rid of, since it's integrated into the browser. For SlashDot type ads, they scroll right off the screen.
So does SD really think anyone will pay $4.95 for ad free, *other* than as a method to support the site (ie, they'd pay anyway, but this way they feel like they're getting something for their money?)
And speaking of nickles and dimes, anyone check their phone bill recently? New charge: Infra Structure Upgrade for disasters. Greaaat. And I'm not even done grousing about paying for 911 service on a line that I never (in fact, can't) make a voice call from.
--John (running out of nickles and dimes)
I'd love to pay $4.95 a month for The End of Free!
Oh, wait...
Annoy is spelled with 2 n's.
Only if I could get storage to work like that...
Is somebody testing the audience to see how would we react to a change of policy from slashdot?
It's just a BloJJ
The "internet" was originally comprised mostly of "geek types. They had bandwidth and webspace either from work or school. The only people that had homepages back then were all of the form
http://cs.someuniversity.edu/~yourusernamehere
then along came compuserve/prodigy/et al. and the whole world got onto the internet, and it escaped from the nerd world, where the internet could leech off of university and corporate connections. People now had to start paying for things, as usage increased so did bandwidth requirements, and as anyone knows real bandwidth isn't cheap. If you didn't have the luxury of free personal webspace (work or school) you had to become a publisher on your own dime, and no one likes that, especially the unwashed masses. So the internet went commercial. "Content" sites, and "free"-webspace fueled by ad revenues abounded, and they survived (in theory at least) from their ad revenues
Now however, the banner-ad, pop-up, pop-under revenue model is not working out like the marketing people wanted it to, so the ad supported sites need to find a new resourse to leech off of. Now it seems that the actual users will be the ones caught footing the bill for the internet. It may be hard for some people to stomach, but all that bandwidth, (non-)content, etc. cannot be provided gratis, someone has to foot the bill. First it was the universities, then the advertisers, and now the users. The big problem everyone is running into is how to impliment such a plan. The internet doesn't lend itself very readily to subscriptions, micro-payments scemes are immature at best, besides no one likes the idea of pay-per-view internet, and no other really viable alternative has presented itself as of yet.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
Things like:
- subscriber posts can only be moderated by moderators working for slashdot.
- Access to stories 5 minuets before they showup for nonsubscribers.
- Auto-cached websites to get around the slashdot effect.
- etc
They need to give us quality not just no adds.I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
I would be willing to pay for /. as it is today, but inevitable charging money would drive a certain portion of the demographic away and then it's value as a level-playing field debate venue would be diminished.
/. can't secure funding and maintain its grassroots democratic feel in today's economy, then it makes a pretty compelling argument against capitalism and 'free market' theory for supplying people with what they want.
Of course, I come here because it is simply the best place to get well-informed views about geeky topics. The question is could it maintain its top-ranked position if it started charging?
Depends on too many factors to be sure, but I'll say one thing, if
Take a look over at arstechnica. They are trying some interesting things to keep the site free.
./ is happens to be discussion, but maybe there could be more... Anyway something to think about before just throwing up the ads while hoping readers can deal with them.
Basically what they have done is package some of their content and index it in a way that is worth some money each year.
The casual browser can still stop by and catch the news or discussion, but the interested user can subscribe and get nicely made PDF's of various articles and other things.
So much of what
I find it hard to believe that all the brains concentrated on this site a couple times a day that we cannot come up with something worth paying for.
Whadda think?
Blogging because I can...
- Purchasable karma - for a small additional fee, of course
...
- VIP chat with (insert your most-loved Slashdot editor here)
- Voting-out of (insert your most-hated Slashdot editor here)
- Priority consideration in the story-submission queue
- Higher rankings in comment submission
Suggest a few of your own! (I've kept my ideas non-obscene, since this is just meant in good fun).Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
I'm sure there are a lot of folks that think /. is worth $5/mo. I'm not one of them. I can't think of a site anywhere that I would pay anything for actually. The internet is all just amusing noise and it's not worth a thing. Since the "global village" was founded I've learned one thing: that nobody else has a clue either and I'm not interested in paying for that confirmation on a monthly basis. I'm sure ya'll will miss me. :)
There are a couple of sites I would am already supporting:
With buying T-Shirts: Userfriendly
With buying books (via o'reilly): Perl, PHP, TCL, PostgreSQL and MySQL, BIND.
With buying the CDs: FreeBSD.
I know I can find all the stuff I need on the internet, via man-pages et al. But I support them by buying their stuff.
Yes, I would like to pay for Slashdot (just like I pay for my subscription to Wired) and SourceForge (they're providing services for me).
How much? I don't know. Is E 100 per year too much for the services SourceForge is offering? Not really, that's less than I pay for the site which is hosting my domain, my website and which is acting as my mail-relay.
In the past I paid for subscription to BBS's because they offered me services, I paid for shareware (QEdit, 4DOS, X00) because it were things I used everyday: Things on the internet are free as in speech, not free as in beer!
bash$
This "I would surely pay for Slashdot!!" is coming from the same people who refuse at any cost to ever pay for software, pirating if they have to. Of course, I don't know where they would get the subscription money, considering they give their software away for free for a living. You losers need to learn that you can't just rely on your wives to feed your baby daughter. You people make me sick, absolutely sick. You are an abomination to everything good on this earth and just have to try and screw things up for the rest of us.
First off dude fix your sig ;)
I think it's a great shame that worse is better.
It's just the way it is, more intrusive marketing dose improve sales.
It's sad but true.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
I think the question that needs to be asked is what is the ultimate underlying reason websites are being forced to charge for their services?
Advertising is what used to pay the ISP bill, but lately i've seen many virtual webhosts and colocation providers put limitations on traffic, and charge by the gigabyte when you go over. Are the ISPs getting charged more by their ISP's?
Can anyone offer some insight on who's getting greedy here?
Hmm... seems like ppl are divided between having to pay for website access and having banner adds.
The services that websites provide are undoubtedly useful. How useful depends on the user. Nevertheless the services need to be financed to ensure continued survival.
Over the last few years we have seen the rise and decline of online advertising. Mostly due to lack of its effectivness. I can only speculate that this is due to: software that limits the display of these adds during browsing or ppl's growing aptitude at "ignoring" them or just lack of well targeted advertising resulting in minimal hits.
The alternative for online service providers is to introduce subscription based products (who will porbably form aliances whereby a subscription to one service grants access to other similar sites. The pr0n industry does this well).
Personally I don't mind either but preffer the adds. I try to make use of the adds on sites that I like so that they contine providing the service that I use (I visit and shop at think geek regularly). But it seems that most would just ignore the adds thus giving no income to the very ppl that provide something they need. How do these ppl give back to the net community. We can't just take forever...
Besides, with the unrelenting need for bigger proffits, the subscription based services will put up adds anyway. Won't happen stright away but it will happen. What then?
I guess there will always be young talented ppl who will try to start a new service. To get ppl into it they will do it for free, because they want to do it... but its unreasonable to expect those ppl to work for nothing... but that is another argument which touches on open source, copy right and lots of other issues. I guess the Net is not the utopia we've been waiting for after all.
Is your name in reference to that Orb tune with woman going on about the little fluffy clouds in Arizona?
Be careful about charging for slashdot, becuase you'll be shooting yourslef in the foot. Even losing a few thousand readers means a few thousand less people to submit, which means less content, which makes even more people leave. It will spiral down faster than you can say "Slate".
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Of course even Slashdot is planning on rolling out subscriptions-for-no-banner-ads sometime soon, so I suppose we're not entirely immune to the subscription bug either.
That's not the same thing, you're still offering the people who doesnt want to pay to freely use your site;
- people paying will a) feel good about themselves and b) help support slashdot
- people not paying can still access everything but will have to live with the ads and (possibly) support slashdot that way
It's a fair deal, someone's got to pay the bills.
Anataka suki desu. Itsumo. Itsumademo.
I've had ad-free slashdot for ages. It's called Junkbuster.
So, when will we see the ability for editors moderate each other's story postings on the front page so the understudy trolls know when to chime in? ;)
Another point along these lines is that many of the big players in print media are becoming the big players in web media. This is for a couple of reasons, one of them being that they have the vehicle to drive traffic to their sites.
On the other hand, the first thing they attempt to do is transfer the print media revenue models directly to the web.
as a web developer for a large canadian newspaper, the hardest part of my job is dealing with ad reps who's backround is selling print media.
People need to start looking at the web in different ways, developing new revenue models.
PRINT REVENUE MODELS DO NOT WORK ONLINE!
"Of course even Slashdot is planning on rolling out subscriptions-for-no-banner-ads sometime soon, so I suppose we're not entirely immune to the subscription bug either."
Now I hope the subscription plan doesn't elevate the obnoxiousness of the advertising, kind of like what happend on Salon. As much as I like Slashdot, I'd have to stop visiting then. I probably visit Salon less than 1/10th the amount I used too.
You can get slashdot without the banner ads already, just do a google search on squid ad filtering, set up a proxy and you are good to go. Here are a couple links for you lazy people: http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/adx .org/squid/squid-bannerfilter. htmlzap/
http://www.redhatbo
Slashdot is one of the extremely rare sites where I actually ever click on the banners. The power of (semi-) targeted ads, I suppose.
- Chris
not one page, never, nohow. If you want me to pay for your content, convince me that it's worth it, then send it to my by email, if I sign up that is.
Otherwise, they can all go "invoice" themselves....
The way Downside views this data, it's not when the company dies, it's when the stockholders die. And they're already dead; the stock is down 99% (yes, 99%) from its peak. There are ways a company out of cash can continue to operate, (dilute, take on debt, sell off assets) but they're all terrible for the stockholders.
Charging for Slashdot looks like a last-ditch effort to give that asset some value for resale.
The problem with free sites is that the economy of the internet isn't currently capable of handling them. If we look at a parallel to normal society, the content sites would be like TV and radio stations and the ecommerce sites woudl be like the brick & morter retail and wholesale stores. Typically, brick&morter pay advertising fees that fund the media. However, on the internet, this is skewed. There is a far greater ratio of sites dedicated to content than ecommerce sites that find it profitable to advertise on the media sites. Many successful ecommerce sites advertise on more conventional radio and TV formats as they get better response than from banner ads which the bulk of the users of the internet have chosen to ignore or block out completely.
I have chosen to avoid ads alltogether on my site. If I get to the point that I need revenue to fund my site, I'll sell products from within to fund the bandwidth. Sure, I wouldn't get THAT many sales if the purpose of my site isn't to promote the products but rather content, but any sales are 100% mine I'm not feeding off pennies from banner ads purchased by other companies.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I would want a member-only Slashdot mirror of all links in front page articles. Oddly enough, I would be paying Slashdot to avoid the Slashdot effect!
David
They are tasteful, unobtrusive (no fscking pop-ups, etc.), and more importantly (hey, marketers, listen up!) they're about stuff I'm interested in!
I guess that's a novel concept, but hey, even as I sit here typing in this post I see the ad at the top for the Sharp Zaurus that I'll probably click on to because I'm a Geek and that looks interesting. And, if that helps Slashdot stick around, so much the better!
$0.02 (CDN)
I could maybe donate some bucks, but I'll never subscribe.
What makes Slashdot great are the users comments, not just the articles. If many users leave because of the subscription, Slashdot will simply die, then we'll have just to wait someone to put on a Freedot or Slashfree site somewhere.
Other people have said it already, Slashdot readers are not going to pay for Slashdot. They cry like babies whenever a subscription-based service is mentioned.
Hell, even NEW, GOOD services, that require some sort of payment, get dissed on Slashdot daily... the TV schedule download subscription of Tivo... eliminating a DSL/cable bill using NANs... etc
Whenever someone in the open-source world needs money, everyone here posts about how they hope people chip in, and the few that DO chip in sure as hell make sure they post! But the reality is, a small, small fraction of Slashdot readers will pay for anything. They already don't pay for their OS, games, music, movies, etc... why would they pay for Slashdot?
Being of the ./ crowd, the right people that would be targeted, I wouldn't click; because, being knowledgable about computers, I wouldn't touch a P4 based system with a ten foot pole, tft's aren't good gaming, and purchasing a dvd player would be helping out the mpaa.
Contrary to your belief that net is composed of well educated people who see pressure and are not subdued by it, you are wrong. Advertisements DO work, like spam, capturing small population slice.
This is unfortunate, and i think most major providers must attempt to block such nonsense.
I do not mind unobtrusive ads, like on google, that actually flow along with your query, and sometimes help find extra information!
I think barrier will be broken once ads will offer something to user in exchange for paying attention to it. Have you seen shoot, zap smash the monkey ads?(duh!) Well that ad provides entertainment for web user that surfs very rigid content.
Ad that offers something to the user, may catch attention of one , pass the threshold of filtering and annoyance ad dismissal, may bring magnitude large set of audience than otherwise large square pop up ads about sun and oracle bits they are willing to sell for a small fortune.
Ad must say, here is something free, that you might need, in return of taking it(enteratinment, info), learn about our product and maybe have a deal.
As for websites turning to subscription models, they have clearly have not grasped what the net, is. Perhaps they will capture some people who transalete from newspaper world into webworld, but those are not the futre of the net.
New media distribution models will be coming to lower the cost of distribution, such as multicast(I assume with IPv6, cuz one for IPv4 is dead). Once that is everywhere, one may be able to cast from garage to everyone in the world, and take exactly 1 times bandwiths, as unicasting to a buddy. Leveraging smart ways of technology is what internet is all about. Its about being able to take new stuff, maybe make your own and do one man show that will make drone megacorporations silly.
If you do that though, you might fall under many laws promoted by corporations into power, that attempt to raise barrier to market entry trying to cut out joes with super cool ideas that can embarrass their multimillion IT departments, with flick of a finger, few key strokes and some ingenuity.
Fuck isn't it whats all america was all about, not a pathetic piece of (s.h*i-t), manned by mighty dollar and interest for profit. Not even a human being! But I digress.
It seems to me that the various subscription oriented sites are going to spend a lot of effort on various stupid activities. I'm specifically thinking about the endless marketing campaign Sluggy Freelance is forced to run.
:)
It seems to me that someone should start an "interesting website" charity. They could provide hosting to sites which were deemed to "significantly improve or diversify internet culture." It would be a kind of united way for interesting web sites. The really nice thing about this type of charity is that it can seek large donations from signle sources, in addition to large numbers of small donations.
This may exist to some extent. I notice large numbers of realitivly independent online comics being hosted by the same service, but I expect that the hosting service is not a charity.
btw> The real question is would this hypothetical charity host goatse.cx. It dose add *something* to internet culture..
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
will be happy when this low quality site is forced off the web with all the anonymous idiots spouting off crap here all the time.
http://internet.junkbuster.com/
It's GPLed.
Pay $4.95 for this shit? No fucking way!
Veramocor
Veramocor
You can have the most annoying banners of any site out there. Because so long as I am in a text browser, links, all your banners look like this: [IMG]
Add to that browsing in light mode and I would not even notice if you had a full page banner advert between every post/comment.
Now if you offered a nntp.slashdot.org then I would gladly pay $5 a month. Then I could take fixing the moderation system into my own hands.
Who would not love to have a ~/.Score file built with a slashdot section?
Ascii artist &
I would pay $19.95 for the chance to throw baseballs at a dunktank filled with wet Cowboy Neal gummies and Jon Katz sitting on the plank. Hell, I'd pay $49.95 for that opportunity.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This is not surprising. The net has grown way faster than bandwidth costs have fallen. This means that for any given level of bandwidth, the percentage of the net population required to consume all your bandwidth has fallen.
For example, slashdot would have a hard time going pay, but, say if all andover's websites went to a subscrption, costing $2/month for unlimited access for everhting
I think this is a good thing. It would require us to have a REAL revenue stream without having to rely on VC. People have to get used to the fact that someone needs to pay for the bills.
With Reptile we are going to integrate payment systems (paypal, merchant, etc) so that you can subscribe to content based on reputation..
This way you can subscibe to your favorite sites like slashdot or kuro5hin and and at the same time get access to a very high rated Salon article.
Of course a lot of this is still under development but we would love to get your help!
why do all these sites need to charge subscription charges? answer: to cover cost and hopefully to make a small profit. right? they have tried to do this with ads. but the revenue from ads don't cut it. so it is understandable to charge a monthly fee. but is anyone about to shell out $4.95/mo for all the different sites they might like to use/access? no, they'd go broke. somthing along the lines of 50 cents per month would be more in line with what people could afford. but that's not enough to support these great sites. why? one simple reason: the cost of bandwidth. the large telecommunication companies have a strangle-hold on bandwidth and its killing the the new "internet" economy!!!!! checked the prices for a T1 lately? why arn't they following moore's law? bottom line: we must find a way to create inexpensive universally available high-speed internet access for all. it's a national imperative! otherwise the internet will become more and more a realm for the haves, and less and less for the have-nots. thank god linux and apache came along. lord knows where we'd be if they hadn't! imagaine the additional costs for our beloved sites if they HAD to run microsoft products! not to mention, /. wouldn't even exist!
:T:R:A:N:S:
Currently, Slashdot banner says in ascii [click here!] on my mozilla browser. :)
:)
Ive been using ad filters for over a year now, and its speeds up surfing by turning off ads. I love it. CNN and MSN have about 10 ads per page filtered. Thats 10 pictures or swf files I dont download. If you want it, its free for windows, its proxomitron and a nice forum where people design updated filters. A nice new filter I just got closes the "This site is supported by Ads, click here to continue" ads. I never see them.
What ever happened to micropayments?
/. is encouraging subs for people whose :-(
That is the only sane way to charge for web site
access mainly because you may not need a site
every single day.
Take windrivers.com. Great site but unless you're
big business, how often are you going to access
it?
Ah, there, I said it... big business.
So
companies either don't care or don't mind throwing
money around. And I always thought you were on
the little guys side
Well, I've gotten used to banner ads, heck even
popups don't bother me as I just don't visit those
sites as often as I used to. As for 4.95 a month
to stop banner ads? No way. Sorry dudes,
you're gona have to make those ads a damn sight
more annoying or go to popups before I even
consider paying that much.
I actively filter banner ads.
Slashdot is one of the few sites where I allow the banner ads through as I find them relevant and on occasion useful. If something annoys me it gets filtered and I save bandwidth in the process. They can charge if they want to - I can get no banners for free so why pay.
Slashdot is great for two things:
1 - Its user base.
2 - The plain fact that it's not slashdottable.
You've two choices: force users to pay, and most will leave, myself included, or make a real business out of your networks building and tuning skills.
My question now is: do you *really* need to ask for money from your users, or this is just the Bad Idea (squeeze money in any way you can without care for anything) from some typical narrow minded businessman?
Ummm... so we're supposed to pay for a site that links to free sites?
I'd like to see that poll
/. -
Would you pay for
Yes, I am addicted
Yes, I feel we should support the developers
Yes, Get rid of the commercializism
Maybe
No, information should be free
No, I don't pay for anything on the net
No, I'm paranoid about giving my credit card to CowboyNeal
"Sure, that site is worth $4.95 a month". The problem is there are going to be lots of sites at $$$ a month and it sure adds up."
What do you do all day surf for porn????
LMAO!!!
Pay for Slashdot!?!!?!
YEAH RIGHT!!!!
One key is to charge people as indirectly as possible. Some other ideas:
pay for more bandwidth
micro ads (mentioned below)
personalization: xxx@slashdot.org email, rdf headlines sent to your pda.
pay for more functionality: message your friends. A more customizable moderation system: ignore the mods of your foes/ ignore "offtopic" mods, etc.
subtract free functionality but only for the hardcore users. I.e. best set up is if the average user didn't notice a big difference (no huge page filling iframes). Say the typical user could only post 15 comments a month. Then you'd have to pay {small amount} for unlimited postings. Note that by logging in as AC this still lets the po' folk post, but it's targetted at the hard core guys who are more likely to pay.
How these changes are done is often as important as what the changes are:
I think this would be a good "Ask Slashdot" topic. Seriously. Why not lay out the finances, what's needed and how soon, and then let's bandy about some ways to make a subscription site like this work. Why do it behind closed doors? You might find some pretty clever ideas from the user base. Aslo, I for one, would have great respect for any company that honestly dealt with its users and included them in the decision making process. Or at least made some gestures in this direction. It would bring you so much goodwill. And we know you gotta pay the bills (little taquitos might loom on horizon. Somebody has to feed Katz.). But instead of making us feel like we are being led by the nose to a more and more annoying site until we pay (i.e. the Salon approach) -- be upfront about what's needed and we'll help you make slashdot work.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
seems to me that the real possibility for charging is in the archives, which will be very valuable in the end. Then again, google will have to cooperate ;-)
www.airwindows.com
www.ampcast.com/chrisj
The deal is, the first is my web hosting and the second is my music. If you visit them, YOU do not pay- it's like a printed fanzine or something, I pay for the hosting.
I understand that bandwidth costs muchos, but I still dislike the idea of being charged solely for information- particularly if I'm not keeping it around. I pay for paper magazines- MacAddict, Cinefex- but those are kept. Someone had to print 'em up. Even then, they're heavily paid for by advertisers...
I just think some people are imagining a heavenly land where everyone on the Internet is paying them a penny because they're so wonderful, and this is wishful thinking... in order to charge people you gotta really be GIVING them something, and it's not enough to just have good information. There's tons of information, everywhere. What else ya got?
just after I pay for spam^H^H^H^Hhotmail.com on a per message received basis.
Best things will always be free. And banners are fine. Konqueror has that cute feature - "Stop animations" - per picture and persistent, and Flash can be also turned off by unchecking the Play context-menu-item.
What people confuse with "free" is in reality "paid by others". Do you trust the advertisers/investors/whomever to not try and influence the site's contents to be more to their liking?
Indeed. It already happens in other environments.
My wife occasionally manages to drag me out to a movie (or I go otherwise willingly on the rare occasion when there's one that seems worth going to). I tend to have her pay for the tickets to avoid the sinking feeling as the majority of a $20 bill disappears in to the vortex that is the box office (and we haven't even come near to the snack bar yet).
But what the heck. I eventually get a comfortable stadium-style seat in a nice theatre with a good screen and decent sound. I'm all set to watch the movie. And, of course, I might get a chance to see the trialer of another movie I'm looking forward to. Or I might have to suffer a string of Hollywood drivel and note what I may (or most likely) not rent if I'm really hard pressed for a movie at home. But what do I get?
20 minutes of commercials. Not movie trailers. Commercials. For soda. Cars. Washing detergent. You'd almost think I'm home watching television. Except I paid a premium price for the privilege.
you're expecting LINUX users (i.e. the cheapest people on the planet) to pay for slashdot?
it's good when you volunteer to donate to slashdot. support the cause (IMHO there are better causes to donate to)
but if an accessible slashdot means i have to pay for it (if changes progress along this line), it's the death of a unique, open, and free online community.
Sorry, but I had to do it...
If anybody is interested in a growing site that gives you access to some public domain (Project Gutenberg, Internet Wiretap, etc) works in a nice, user friendly html formatted manor, check out my site:
The PG Reader
...ok, I feel like a sellout now...
Why would I pay for a banner free subscription of anything if there are nice products like WebWasher for free? It even keeps my Opera-Banner away :-)
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
"Subscriptions for no banner ads" on /.? What are you all smokin' up there in the NOC? Give me some because you're obviously stoned straight through the bone...
/. has oh, I don't know, perhaps .25M users, stick to $1.00/month for whatever it is...
Anywhere else, I *might* understand this "business opportunity", but here? Come on... We're GEEKS and NERDS! We either:
a) Ignore the ads
b) Run some kind of filter (vis a vis http://www.webwasher.com) and don't even see them to begin with...
c) Mod the hosts file to hide the ads...
d) Filter on size...scripting... whatever...
Either way, why in the hell would I want to pay for something that I can get for free?
Give me something of true value, and I'll pay... And given that
Come on guys. Nothing is ever free. There is always a cost. Whether it's a financial cost, opportunity cost, or others, in the end, someone has to pay for it. We have to realize that the last couple of years has been a fluke in the whole economic cycle. There is no possible way that that cycle could have continued.
What I see is that (and it has already started happening in the last year or so) all these little web sites will be bought up by a conglomerate and mergered together. The economics of this is quite smart. I mean, it's not really economical for one small company to have a 10K server and a 1k/month internet connection. If 10 of these sites have been merged together, they would come to 1/10 (maybe a little more) of the original cost. Examples of this are seen here at Slashdot, eVite by Excite, and others.
Even then, these conglomerates will still not be able to afford to make a decent profit (I mean, that's what companies are there for..making money) So they might in the end look towards a pay for content plan. So it becomes, people will only pay for content that they care about or are interested in. Content that they read frequently. In the end, it becomes a choice for the consumers where demand sets the price.
Now for the point of this post. I would gladly pay $2-5 (approximately the price of a newstand magazine) for access to quality content. I would definitely pay that much for access to read articles and post on slashdot. In addition, this would be a great raise the quality of the content (ie posting).
Also, a number of people have posted about using ad-blocker programs. In the end, those programs are only hurting yourself and everyone else on the internet. Company need the small amount of money coming from these advertisers to barely stay afloat. These programs only go to convince the advertisers to pay significantly less for the ads because less and less people are viewing the ads. Think about it this way, would advertisers pay millions of dollars to advertise during the Super Bowl if they found out that there was a technology that a good population of TV watchers are using to block the super bowl ads?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
I agree that few people would pay for a banner-less slashdot sice the banners are not very irritating.
But what if Slashdot would increase the banner-load on the non-paying version?
I sure HATE those vertical or big square flash- banners you see on other news-sites...
Although I remember reading a banner at shacknews (or shugashack as it was called at the time) which advertised a good price on ram. Clicking on the add took me to a site which said the offer was only 4 US and Canadian residents. This happened a couple times, since then I gave up. I don't what percentage of users on the net are from North America but nearly all the advertising seems to target them. So when a advertiser look at web activity stats they should factor in where the users are from before choosing to advertise on site.
If you ad porn, to every article I think you could get alot more subscriptions!
more insulting than that is ads at the cinema peddling cinema advertising itself
"over 4 bazillion stupid eyeballs per month! advertise here!"
I see more and more sites shutting down due to the high price of bandwith and the low income they receive from advertising.
Is it me or is bandwith resellers not reacting to a supply and demand issue. they are essential providing a service which when not utilised is lost....surely the response is to lower bandwith prices, or are the major customers (the large corporations)within the market place who can afford the charges forcing the providers to keep their prices at the same level. Thus enforcing a level of control over a media outlet that otherwise they have no control over?
Why should I pay for the privelege of some AC saying things about my mother???!!!
;-p
Information wants to be beer.
You should just have naked pictures of CowboyNeal for $4.95 a month a la salon.com!
If /. stars a subs service, you're not paying for the information, you're paying to support their continued ability to deliver you with responses to your http get requests. That is a service, and services cost money. Ample evidence of the aforementioned to be found in their net losses.
/. should charge, it's how their revenue model should look.
/. should be approaching this one, though I do have an excellent suggestion to make.
And since they already do respond to your http get requests, you can safely assume they pay for the ability. This simply means what we've al known for so long but have conveniently ignored for maybe the last decade:
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
It's no longer a question of whether
I agree that the technique adopted over at arstechnica seems interesting, but I'm not sure how successful it will be.
Honestly, I have no idea how
/. has unfettered access to the best minds out there currently; use them. Start an 'Ask Slashdot' thread to come up with an appropriate revenue model, then use a poll to evaluate the most likely alternatives.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
On a positive note, I have actually clicked on relevant banners (not that most sites have them) and more importantly, I have clicked on text links to advertisers. Without relevant (to the website) ads, I never would have found Small Dog Electronics, RamJet, and even CD Now. All of which I have plunked down a large chunk of change at, as well as some other sites. Problem most websites have is that they don't use targeted ads, or they just have a banner that is for a site, instead of like MacInTouch and MacNN that have text links announcing deals for those web sites surfers when they click the links (which I have received some great deals by doing so).
I have banner images turned off in OmniWeb, manly because banner ads are typically junk, but I like relevant text links, or text ad boxes, because advertising works (and I want it to work) when advertisers do a good job. Text links require better targeting, and are more likely to be clicked.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
How many of the "I'LL NEVER PAY!!! NEVER, DO YOU HEAR ME??? NEVERRRRRR!!!" people play Everquest? at what is it, $10/month? Remember the Everquest article a couple of weeks ago?
"I have 12 accounts and I want FIFTY"
"I just bought the upgrade and I'm signing up now.."
and so on..
just wondering...
Why is it that people pay for magazines, yet when they get their info off'f the net, it HAS to be free? Not only do you get better information, WITH a lot of feedback from people in the know (I'd like to see a magazine do that without e-paper :)), but you get more information (refreshed more-than-daily in /.'s case, compared with once a month in the case of a scientific american subscription), and up to date information. And you want all that free? We all know there are costs involved, so why are we against it?
I do agree that $5/month is way too high, as it all adds up, but what about a buck a month? I can spare that (and say another $4 for the other four sites I check daily) for information I wouldn't otherwise have such easy acces to.
TFTs aren't that nice for gaming and movies don't look as nice on them, but *damn* emacs looks sharp on them. The sharpness and the sharpness alone would probably make me get one if I were coding ten hours a day. It's *much* more comfortable to be staring at something that isn't fuzzy.
Isn't it obvious? Slashdot will sell vanity points. They will be selling that "louder voice". Of course only the very vain will buy into that kind of thing, but then again vanity seems to be what Slashdot was made for.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
Hmm I thought that you could block the banner adds on slashdot and quite alot of banner adds ,where the banner add is ment to be there is always a big white "add blocked sign", where his freebsd router with whatever software he has installed on it removed the banner add.
,quite non intrusive adds which display an item which could possibly have some relevance to me , as opposed to big flashy adds offering me something which I do not want to look at let alone purchase or give money to.
,bias towards high paying advertisers and journalists ignoring facts and certain news because it does not tow the pary line or because it annoys some advertiser.
,(and still do to a certain extent ),that the internet would be immune to such a trend of centeralisation of content and that if such a thing were to occur i.e a lot of media sites being bought out and blatantly manipulated that other independent sites would spring up and that people would switch to thoese sites , what is changing my mind these days is the transformation of the internet into a tv like medium.
,like time warner/aol , where what you are paying for is not internet usage primarily but rather content , I can see big isps with deep pockets buying up huge amounts of content and offering it exclusively to there users.Over a period of time the small indepent isp's would be picked off one by one as the cost to provide there users with content rise's higher and higer and as legal bill's accumulating become to much to for the small isp to cope with,(These bills would probably arise from defending there users ).I can see the internet turning into a playground run by a handfull of big players and if you want there users to see you you would have to basicly tow there line and pay the highway man in cash and shed what ever blood he wants you to shed.I can see how the internet can and probably will turn into tv.
.I would rather be subjected to targeted advertisements , than to a internet which is like tv.
via the correct software . When ever I go to my friends house and I view slashdot and a number of other site's
If you can block slashdot and other sites adds any way I do not see why people would pay for an add free slashdot.
Also on the subject I do not think applying traditional tv / newspaper ecomonics to internet sites is nessecarily the best idea if this was to happen I could envision websites content being mirrored on p2p networks very fast . The content would be virtualy Identical to the original bar for example the ability to post a comment.
I agree with many other posters , I think the way google handels its advertising is very promising
The trouble with alot of media,tv especialy,is when content becomes centeralised, when all the main popular sources of new's get bought up and managed by one big company or a couple of big companys,this is in my view is a dangerous phenomenon as it leads to very agendised reporting
I always thought
I can see it starting with isp's
My point is that paysites , or group's of sites which incourage you to pay for exclusive access to there content incourages this phemomenon.If it came down to a choice between paying for slashdot and not reading slashdot I think I would have to just let slashdot go
_________________________________________________
One: Most people aren't getting free internet. They're paying for it, and if they think of it like cable TV, they're expecting there to be some content. I realize that isn't how it works, but I'm sure there are many out there who don't. Regardless, the fact that people are paying 10 to 50 or more dollars per month just for the connection reduces the leftover pool of money people are willing to spend on internet content.
Second:
Most sites that are doing this free service/premium service thing, or just switching to pay-only don't seem to realize that there is a HUGE gap between zero dollars and 5 (or more) dollars per month. If I was perfectly happy with my free 6 meg Yahoo mailbox, what makes you think I wanna pay 60 dollars a year to make it 20? (Especially since POP access is also free?)
Maybe if they offered incrementally better service at smaller increases in price...say, 10 dollars a YEAR for double the space or a few extra features, more people would bite.
I mean, no joke it would add up. Just the sites I visit everyday would be at least 40 dollars a month if it was 5 bucks a month. Content providers can't expect that people will think it's worth that to their viewers, unless they are providing information which has either extreme entertainment value (like porn), or stuff which has practical, valuable use to the customer, which does NOT have a comparably useful free alternative.
UID 180114
# of comments posted: 3
Am I the only one that finds this just a little suspicious? Is this perhaps an editor account?
AvantGo is weeding out what they call "Custom channel abuse". Basically its 8 or more people creating a custom channel to a site that doesn't pay up for a licence. See the Register article here and the AvantGo announcement here.
This means that things like Slashdots own palm friendly version and my AvantSlash (along with thousands of other non-profit making sites who provide an ability to view their content for free) are going to be left a little out in the cold.
I've been recommended Plucker for the Palm and Mazingo for the PPC - not tried either though.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The problem with what you propose is that it assumes that the only ones willing to pay for mod points are the ones who should have them. I tend to think that the exact opposite is true.
"Those who desire power the most often deserve it least." It's an old cliche, but it's only stuck around because it holds true so often. Slashdot attempts to work as a meritocracy, and even if it isn't entirely successful, that doesn't mean the ideal should be abandoned. The ability to buy mod points just invites abuse, and the ones who would suffer are the casual readers, wanting to read a good cross-section of opinions at their threshold.
hmm, I think it would be much better if slashdot was more like $20/year.
Various posters have explained the problem in terms of bandwidth and server costs, and suggest that the solution lies in finding ways to pay for these. But surely, if costs are the problem, the solution is to reduce the costs. It's not a technically hard problem to deploy web content without requiring the original site to serve every req
This is sooo typical. I know I'm just painting everything in (very) broad strokes here, but if 'they' would pay the same price for banners or flash (shudder) advertisment as they pay for it on TV, maybe sites could continue to be free. People ignore comercials on TV too, you know. I don't know what Google is charging for their very clever targeting ads, but I somehow get the feeling it is a lot less than a popular tv station charges for 30 sec.
When an ad behaves enough like a virus to fool McAfee, I'd say it crosses the line between aggressive and offensive. And most conventional marketers will tell you that you don't sell products by offending the customer.
I get ads which want to install software on my computer without asking, ads which persist long after I've stopped reading their attached content. All these do is make people cynical towards ads, and I don't think I'm alone in reflexively looking away from the screen the moment these ads come into view. It's a bad habit in some cases; after all, they're paying for the content I'm reading.
But the morality becomes difficult when the majority of the time, these ads are for things which are illegal, immoral, or otherwise contrary to my belief systems. Personally, I *like* the ads on Slashdot. They are generally relevant, can be helpful, and are sometimes even entertaining. But I can't help but feel that most of the advertisers out there are poisoning the market by putting up sleazy ads.
Hearing that story everyone not living in your country is lucky concerning bandwidth!
Second, your extraction engine ought to be looking at a realtime EDGAR provider, not SEC EDGAR. VA filed their Q4 numbers yesterday, and you are still picking up the Q3 numbers. Since the difference between these two is .... the entire VA Linux Systems business; the divestiture of everything except OSDN and Sourceforge, this is a pretty significant source of error. The loss these days is $9.7m/quarter, with cash burn of $6.9m.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Subsricption for Slashdot? Ok.
But then also Micropay me back for what I post!!!
Based on Modlevel if you will.
That's the whole point:
In the Web, money flows from user to ISP and content provider to ISP. There's something wrong here, isn't it?
If every ISP would offer micropayment to content providers for bandwidth USED and each user of the Web would pay, all could make their share, quality would increase rapidly and nobody would have to cry just because standard economy kicks in on the WWW.
But the way we have it now, it (the Web) will still allways be just a nerdy pasttime that actually costs a substancial amount of money to obtain, and not that universal media and information highway everybody got so excited about a few years ago.
I wouldn't be suprised if establishing a sane economy model would actually strengthen ISPs that where/are actually also Netproviders like AOL or T-Online. What's with them? Do they offer an ISP cost refund if your site is popular and therefore contributes to the popularity of their service (and therefore brings in the bucks)?
Why hasn't anybody done this yet?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I would pay for slashdot if only to see CowboyNeal act out the suggestions from polls.
my auntie claims she gets lots of bandwidth and telephone for a small monthly fee from Clear.
1. Do you remember when the internet were free? (or, paid by the universities) What did we use back in the day? That's right, the usenet. I don't see why we can't get back to usenet, where people have absolute free speech and everyone can custom build spam filters.
/. to the point where it is a windows advocate site.
/. as high quality reading material? Or more like entertainment news?
People also talked about the merging of commercial sites like cable TV. I'm currently paying for nntp services, cheerfully. For $10 a month, I get 40,000 active newsgroups to choose from, many discussion groups carry up to 6 months of postings. No censorship or big sponsors. I can create a new group anytime, say, comp.os.homebrew
2. Everybody talks about subscribers paying for Karma. If I were Bill Gates, I'd just hire a buncha people to mod
3. Do you really consider
4. I hate Katz just as much as the next guy, but why should I pay just to shut him up?
I've finally come to a revelation about banner ads.... of course I came to this conclusion a while ago, but have yet to say anything here:
Banner ads, the idea behind them, does work. The problem is that people have come to the decision that they will only pay for banner ads that are quantifiable... I.E. Click Throughs.
This is not, and should not be the case. Banner ads should be sold on the number or visits on a site, and the popularity of the site.
Just like advertisers want to be seen during superbowl.... Why? Many, many eyeballs. So their willing to pay a hefty price!
I don't see a comercial during the superbowl and go... "Whoa... I gotta have that!" and then leave to go to the store.... NO! I finish watching the superbowl and then at a later date, with the proverbial commercial seed planted in my brain, I go and purchase that product.
The same goes for banner ads. It's a form of advertisement. I'm not going to drop everything to go and head over to that site..... I'm here at slashdot or where-ever for a reason. I'll do what I have to, and then later.... When I'm not too busy.... I'll head over to thinkgeek and buy that hat.
Yes I purchased many a thing at ThinkGeek and elsewhere, because of banner-ads (I would not have known about them otherwise) but I have NEVER purchased anything by means of a click-through.
So in quantifiable means, the banner ad didn't work. There was a click through but no purchase.
Ah, but I did purchase. Just at a later date.
I can't stress this fact enough.... We do not drop everything when we see a tv ad and head to the store... we do it later. Does this mean because we didn't drop anything that TV ads are failing?
Time for a philosophy change.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
I use a loaded HOSTS file, edited proximitron so it looks like IE 4.0, and I use Mozilla (2001091303). I hated Slashdot ads so I right clicked on the ad and went to the selection "Ban images from this server" Problem on this site solved.
josh Crawley
Maybe we can get back to the good old days when most of the net was free. Seems I remember a time that every site wasn't about making money, but was about someone who had an interest is some particular subject. Almost every ISP offers personal space these days, many up to 20MB. Some people run commercial websites on them but most are still put together by people who want to say something rather than sell something.
I think our perspective has changed as these sites still exist, and there is still a kind of "undernet" out there, that is often ignored by the search engines (free pages), or are simply not linked to by the "mainstream" net sites because they offer no opportunity to make a buck. It's still a neat place to spend an evening surfing around, just for the sake of surfing.
"Of course even Slashdot is planning on rolling out subscriptions-for-no-banner-ads sometime soon, so I suppose we're not entirely immune to the subscription bug either."
;)
http://bannerblind.mozdev.org/
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
I would say that the self service advertising model is one reason it can work.
:(
People who go to the site will advertise on the site.
Look for a combination of google self-serve adwords and what is already going on. at slashdot.
What I would really like to know from both companies, is where the opensource variants of their ad software can be found? Is there software out there that I can use for my own site like this? To let the people who actually use the site become advertisers on the site which in turn will pay for the site?
I looked on freshmeat but came up blank
I guess neither google or OSDN want to free their ad software...pity
comment directly in my journal
Using ad block sw is perhaps as cool as not paying on the bus. People like you are perhaps most responsible for the ongoing free -> subscribe transition.
I seem to remember the sales pitch for the original cable television markets being something like, "Pay us up front so you don't have to see ads!"
That worked for awhile, but now we have commercials even on channels I'm already paying for.
My guess is that we'll pay for premium commercial-free content, and then discover that the ads will slowly creep in again. Fortunately, like the annoying ubiquitous music you hear in every store and restaurant, it is getting easier to tune out. Sad, but true.
You know, I actually kind of like those ThinkGeek ads common at the top of Slashdot. Sometimes I even click on them to learn more about the product. ThinkGeek has some really innovative ads.
([x] feet up, in freezing temperatures with wind... and rain. Hey, can I get a light? Sure can. ThinkGeek Delta Shockproof lighters!)
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
When I decide if a site is worth a few bucks a month, it's usually not because it will get rid of banners or put a star by my name or give some other minor feature... it's because I like the site and want to keep it around.
Slashdot would be one of those. No banner ads is worth $0.00 a month to me.. I ignore them anyway. But if my few dollars a month helps keep it around and running well, THAT is worth it.
Why do all websites have to bese themselves on commercial (ie "business") models for funding? Aren't there other options? Like goverment funding, patronage?
I've seen that in a different situation. .rxx to _rxx.gif
Renaming all
And of course every file of the archive was down to less than a meg, just to look like a legit picture. but that's totally another story. (ie: putting files on free servers while trying to hide them)
Usually, I just block the pictures mentally. So including content in a picture will have no effect on me.
(Some WILL get through and then I will get an urge to drool when I hear a bell ring or some other weird action/reaction effect #shudder#
damn you subliminal messages. and it's all the fault of that part of my brain I don't use.. lousy brain.)
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
There is no justifaction for paying for /. content - nearly all of the content is contributed free by users (story posts and comments).
/. for free, so to charge for that content is crazy! However, it does cost money to serve the content, and that's what /. should / could charge for.
The only thing to pay for is the presentation, organization, archiving of that content - i.e., server costs, admin costs, and so forth. People contribute to
To be quite frank, slashdot was more useful and more fun in the early days when there were not as many "subscribers." Back then it was one of my favourite places to get news. I even thought the stupid polls were fun.
Now, after all the changes, I find that most of what is on slashdot no longer has much relevance to me. Instead of being a daily slashdotter, I come maybe once a week.
There are other issues as well that keep me away, but I'm not going to bitch and complain too much.
Sure, having a premium service might make some sense, if your overall service was up to snuff. But right now, as it stands and for my needs, slashdot is hardly worth the investment of my time. It may soon no longer even be bookmarked in my browser.
This is kind of late, but I hope someone reads it.
Everyone here seems to love google's ad engine, so why not do something similar for slashdot. Instead of the big banner ad at the top, put text ads in a slash box next to the story. Even better would be ads in slashboxes on the front page, and in your preferences you could mark off what kind of ads interest you. If you turn off that slashbox you just get the general banner ad at the top. I know a less intrusive ad would interest me.
if slashdot became a paid subcription site, other better sites would spring up overnight. people like me who like slashdot currently would make sure of it. even the many people who wouldnt mind paying at first would eventually leave slashdot in favor of much more open much more adaptive new sites/networks that gave them more of what they want and at the moment come to slashdot for.
there are many people here that would doubt this, saying that slashdot is slashdot, and they wouldnt want to leave for anything else. id just remind them how that is what many others said about them bothering to go anywhere other than cnn or some other major media outlet when slashdot came into existence.
other than occasional well written articles, subcription reliant sites like salon and others (even when not a full subsciption site) have been a complete failure as far as that business model is concerned. while slashdot is currently talking of an opera like model of charging those who dont want banners, it is still a problem because of the overall trend that some of us have seen.
the interests of the parent company in maximizing the marketable value of the osdn, instead of maximizing the inherent value through better content and all the rest of what makes an open community like this such a good thing, are harming the "product" itself. i am not suggesting that va or anyone give up on making any money and follow a misguided and overly optimitic (think dot com bubble) economic plan... running things like slashdot and sourceforge and the rest has its costs and so does everything else that they would like to do (along with the obvious costs of basic living, etc). but how can you charge a subsciption rate of any kind or change the licensing for any part of osdn to something more restricted. are all those that contribute going to be given a share of the money?
slashdot for example isnt just a news service... what really sets it apart is its open structure, the type of news we find here, and most significantly to many the value of the comments that come from so many people that are not employees of va. are we supposed to rise up and sue just like freelance writers have done to the new york times? if you charge me for access to the site are you going to give me a consulting fee for my ideas? i dont think so, and i dont think you should, but these are some of the problems of an open source development, information, and discussion community when those that own the domains and the servers they are run on decide they arent making enough money.
what i think should be done instead is a serious focus on cost reduction. with all the technically minded people on this network it is easy to imagine the possibility for many things any one of us could not think of on our own. better cost managment and all the creativity available must have some benefit to the survivability of a very free slashdot and osdn.
also, to maximize the usefulness of all these opinions and concerns and comments and the rest we should think to develop a slashdot advocacy project/fund. it has been discussed before with little result and if it doesnt happen soon others will do something similar without the ability of slashdot to benefit from it as directly.
if all those here that care about one piece of legislation (like the dmca or sssca) or about patents or anything else want to give their feelings and comments the added teeth of a much greater impact both online and in our own world in general then what could be better than being able to contribute anything from pennies to hundreds of bucks and more (or in-kind support or whatever) to a slashdot advocacy (legal defense plus legislative/media counter-lobbying) fund with a small part of that cash going towards the maintanance and expansion of the osdn. i know damn well that if all the people here arent going to do this, someone will (hell i know i would at some point) - but no group of people are better situated at the moment to do this with as succesful a result as slashdot and osdn.
also: i completely agree with the earlier post by linuxrunner about why banner ads dont work. it isnt because of advertising itself, its because many of us have been duped into the wrong method of measuring its effectiveness and charging for it. ad rates based on click throughs make absolutly no sense... providing the clickthrough as a benefit is good because then someone who is interesed can go to that site immediately if they want without having to type in the url and search for what was advertised... but the real value of advtising on the web is no different than advertising during the superbowl and should have a similar pay model... the current failure of it being like that is just a measure of shortsitedness and bad business sense by the same ad people that never thought much of the internet to begin with.
I see a problem with the no-ads-fee:
Due to the nature of slashdot many articles and user comments contain things that the industry doesn't like. Remember the Kerberos story? What if a Microsoft-lawyer could convince a judge that Slashdot is now making money with the things that are on its website?
I think that way they could force Slashdot to censor user comments.
yea,ok..I'll get annoying ads because everyone is "going along with it".
Maybe i'll watch hour after hour of crappy commercials/infomercials on tv as well,instead of recording and fast-forwarding thru them...screw that......there goes the tv...nothing ever on anyway...
I don't need pop-ups,pop-behinds,REALPLAYER ADS,banner ads,sidebar ads,animated sprite running across screen ads,audio ads,ads in the middle of the frickn story,drop-down ads,etc,etc...
I...WANT...THE...INFO...
Give it to me or i'll get it somewhere else.
Annoy me, and i'll block everything but the text itself.
Maybe $0,01 by year.
Remember when pre-recorded videotapes first came out, and cost $75-$100? Those were the days when you paid a hefty membership fee to join a rental club. Those were also the days when piracy was rampant.
Somebody got a clue, and dropped the price to $20. The rampant (Small stuff still happens, I'll agree.) piracy all but stopped, sales shot through the roof, and rental outfits dropped the fees, sending their volumes up. Further evidence that this worked is that prices have continued to drop, so evidently they're still exploring the price/volume/profit space. (Defer rant on copyright, cake and eat it, and disc media.)
Anyway, the Web is different, because it started free. So now there's a reluctance to pay at all. Unfortunately, they're trying to break us through to the $80 videotape model. If I started paying $5 to each site I follow, my site fees would quickly exceed my broadband fee. We need low-price transactions, here. We need more of what PayPal is trying to do. We need innovation in the near-trivial fee space. Not pay per click, but below the normal profit threshold of a credit card. (I know, Cringely already said this...)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
but even with peer to peer mirroring of content you still have the reliability and convenience that being an aggregator of that content provides... i would rather go to slashdot where i dont have to hunt down the content i want than go searching for it. as far as copyright and everything else goes i of course support completely free peer to peer systems ... i dont think that the strong development of peer to peer means the end of slashdot or of television networks... they have too much content to leverage even in new models of transmission and non pay per access schemes.
End of the Free Internet You mean I'm going to have to pay for my p0rn now!?!?
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
I'm starting to get more participative, after years of just reading.
I'm even considering registering so as to provide a means of being reached.
But I often -- like 5 minutes ago -- get my messages ignored (possibly because I use Opera, which I _don't_ believe faulty).
Moderation also needs improvements. Should I pay?
I'm very pissed about this.
Why would I want to remove advertising on Slashdot?! This site contains the only banner ads which are occasionally interesting.
I don't mind advertising if it is actually on-topic somewhat. Like Google's advertisements: if I'm looking for info on Sony TVs, I don't mind seeing links to shops selling Sony TVs, or to Sony's website.
Anybody want to start a pro-banner rally?
Good ploy, guys. Let it out of the bag that you're moving to a subscription model and watch as the posts pile up on the best way to go about it. Loads of free market research. So I'll bite. Very few people will pay for a 'no ads' service when there are a million ways to block the ads already. Plus, your ads are good. They're targetted. People WILL pay for added value. You need a way to add something extra special for your paying customers. The problem I see here is this: slashdot could probably make enough money between subscription and ad banners (some of us actually click them) to keep itself afloat. But how much of VA Linux / Software / whatever-they're-called-these-days can you support? Is anything else in the company making money?
do not read this line twice.
With a site like Slashdot it's easy to do market research : you paste the idea you want to research on at the end of a related article and see what everyone says ;)
Oh, and I hand-counted twice and a paid Slashdot is a bad idea according to 98,7% of Slashdot users.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
This is currently happening in scientific research. Also, it happened a long ago in software industry which had started in a purely scientific open source form. Fortunately we have lately realized that it is better to get back to the open source model. That is, in software. Do you think the same should apply to discussions? It's pretty weird to argue "free software, free as in speech" if speech isn't going to be free anymore.
The next step is probably that the open discussion is only reserved to those who can pay for it, others will have to do with biased AOLized knowledge.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It doesn't even need junkbuster - mozilla has an image pewrmissions feature that can turn off images from specific sites, or you could use lynx. This is dumb.
Im already paying for the Internet (either that or AT&T has some explaining to do on why they keep sending me bills every month). I will not pay for individual sites when I am already paying for access. Paying for access and then paying for sites is like paying for the privilege to walk into a store, and then still having to pay to purchase individual items.
So actually, its the access charges that should be eliminated, and content charges implemented, maybe. Regardless of which is better, its one or the other charge for access or charge for sites content not both.
Liberty in your lifetime
Numerous net studies have shown that much of those eyeballs advertisers want surf the net sometime during the work day. But there is typically a need to be a bit discreet at work. If I'm on some site, I used to be able to click my "home" button and return to the company website in a flash. With all these stupid pop windows, I can't even close out the browser quickly unless (in Windoze) I kill the entire browser task. Hence I use the net (other others) less frequently actually declining the base for the ads viewers. Also I think most people will accept ads to a certain point, but when they get truly annoying (i.e. it takes me too much work to get to the content or the adds constantly interrupt my content) I'll either switch sites and potentially actively avoid the sponsors product.
The web's a lot less obnoxious with animation disabled and javascript heavily restricted. Galeon's got those options right on the menu and I think Konqueror can also be configured that way.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My idea is to decentralize the whole thing. The "site" can be decentralized to a set of machines willing to cooperate (using Freenet-like, Gnutella-like technology). Choice of stories can be decentralized by using moderation to select stories. Some group of people is needed to get things started and keep it running, but we all know about maintaining software by a decentralized group.
The point is that all the expenses are amortized over a large group. Everyone who participates contributes a little to produce a big community. Payment is by contributing resources. Privileges (like moderation rights) would depend on the level of contribution. No need for ads, no dependency on companies with money-losing business plans, but (if implemented well) very robust and fast.
Probably someone has already done this. Speak up and save the Internet!
The whole dot-com boom was based on the flawed premise that the
Internet as a whole and the Web in particular could be use to deliver
"content" to "consumers". In other words, it would be a one-to-many
medium just like TV, radio and newspapers. But the whole point of the
Internet is that it's not like that--it's a many-to-many
medium.
The 'net is a poor broadcast medium. You can do it, but it's
expensive and troublesome. The web was designed to share information.
Its advantage is that anyone can publish to a world-wide
audience. People don't go to the net to consume content. They go
there to create it.
The dot-com boom failed because most of the companies (and their
investors) didn't get that. They tried to use the web as a broadcast
medium and the only reason that the whole thing didn't sink into the
swamp right away was that investors sent them truckloads of money,
enough to keep beating the dead horse for several years. Now that the
money's running out, most of these sites will go away. Charging for
access is just their last gasp and I don't expect most of them to
survive for long.
(Hopefully, some of the better ones will. There are some
worthwhile websites out there, Slashdot among them, that benefit from
being on the web rather than, say, a magazine.)
My prediction is that the current dieback will continue until
bandwidth becomes cheap enough to make banner-ads a viable source of
revenue, provided you run the operation cheaply enough.
Even if the fees are kept "reasonable", I'm concerned about managing the subscriptions.
At this point, I've got accounts with so many vendors, download sites, auction houses, news sites, and etc., that I simply cannot keep track. Some of them I only know I have because of the spam I receive from their hosts. Some are managed by cookies that I permit, but when some lame site wants to set ten cookies on my box and I know they're just trolling for data, they're out. Every one of these sites will suggest something like "But WE provide a valuable service - surely you understand that we require a bit of work on your part". Thousands of them later, you're swamped.
If there are access privileges and fees associated with these accounts, I'll be forced to keep records on every one. They become valuable assets in and of themselves - shoot, some may even be tax deductible.
Has any thought been given to management systems? Perhaps a central clearinghouse or one of these distributed micropayment schemes I don't hear about anymore? If they're going to make me pay, I want them to work for me. In addition to the supposed benefits of membership, I'd like it if they don't overcomplicate my life. Think there's any chance that'll happen?
Windows? Those are browser problems, not OS problems. It just happens that Internet Explorer, also made by Microsoft, is one of the few modern browsers that doesn't allow you to block pop-up ads, prevent web pages from resizing their windows, etc. Also, I think Internet Explorer is the only browser that lets a web site open a window with no title bar, which makes the window very hard to close using the mouse.
Here's hoping that Netscape doesn't strip out Mozilla's pop-up blocking feature when they make their next 6.x release.
The shareholder is always right.
This is a question that I'm surprised not to have seen in this discussion somewhere. /. staff read this far down the comments, please respond.
/. ads are among the very few that I actually see, since I have ~.*slashdot.org.*
Whether this site can turn a profit based solely on banner ads should be a pretty good marker of the viability of them. If any
And, of course, the obligatory junkbuster plug:
in my junkbuster blocklist. I am willing to deal with _targeted_ ads from sites I like...
We can always build alternatives, and that's what will keep happening.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Hell Yah!
/. tote bag.
Take a cue from PBS and public radio - every six months, run a real story then three "Oh what would your life be like without us?" stories.
But only for the freeloaders who won't pay. Once you pay your $60, the annoyance stories go away and are replaced with real stories.
For a $100 pledge you get this marvelous canvas
For those $1000 pledges, you get to throw rotten apples at Katz!
It seems to me that it isn't in the best interest of advertisers for a site to offer a pay-for-ad-free version of their site, so any such venture will inevitably result in lower advertising revenue and a catch-22. Can you have your cake and eat it too?
--- What?
When I heard they will go to a subscription based page I was sadden to hear this but once it went into effect it had little impact for me. The normal news section and reviews is still free , you just don't have access to some of the other tech info they might have. I have thought about get a subscritpion to some pages but I have no need for it yet.
Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One.
One of the reasons that I block the banner ads on Slashdot (and a lot of other sites) is because so many of them are for companies that are openly friendly to spammers.
/. was an ad for them.
Rackspace is a great example. They're one of the biggest spammer-friendly web page/domain hosts on the 'net, and it seems like every third banner on
Quit selling ad space to known spammer-friendlies, and I'll consider turning off WebWasher long enough to see if there's anything of interest to me.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I already pay $19.95 for ISP and $30 for another phone line. This is too much IMHO. If all websites start charging, I'm done with the net. When cable TV service became over 20/month, I got rid of it, when ISP charges rise to over $20/month, I'll either switch or get rid of that too. C'mon people take a stand and have enough balls to show these companies what you "should" be paying instead of being mindless consumers, As far as I'm concerned, without users, there is no slashdot. Maybe we should be getting paid.
/dTd
and damned if you don't.
The web is still viewed as a free medium... so if you charge people, you'll lose them -- they'll just go somewhere that's still free. And if you don't charge them, you keep burning through the money. And you can't do that forever if your website is your product/service. I.e., you're a Salon, Slashdot, or Yahoo.
The next few years will see a lot of companies whose website is the company focus either folding or finding new ways to generate revenue. There are already lots of experiments here. Some are successful or have the potential to be successful.
We're all very accustomed to the idea that everything on the web is, should be, must be free. But that's not a sustainable model. It's gonna change. And it's going to hurt when we can't just spend a few hours browsing without considering how much it's going to cost.
For now, it's still (mostly) free, and a lot of it will stay that way. So enjoy it. Just be aware that it's a precious thing, and some things will be changing.
-Thomas
is not unlike local computer shows. You pay a small fee for admission ($5 or so), which goes to the organizer. Then you pay for what you actually want there. This does seem excessive, but if the organizers (or ISPs) can't make charge & make money, they wont bother having the shows (internet access), and if the vendors (websites) can't charge & make money (or at least break even), then eventually, theu have to stop providing the service.
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines yet?
If anything, this makes a strong argument for the quality of ads and the importance of knowing the viewers and targetting the ads appropriately. Granted, I guess such a thing would be much harder for general interest sites like say news sites that don't have such a defined demographic. But bottom line, advertisers should be more willing to pay for ads on sites that hit their target audience, and viewers wouldn't mind the ads so much because they actually match their interests.
steve
Vote Quimby.
I think our perspective has changed as these sites still exist, and there is still a kind of "undernet" out there, that is often ignored by the search engines (free pages), or are simply not linked to by the "mainstream" net sites because they offer no opportunity to make a buck.
If you have a personal site, and you want Google to pick it up, go to your user info and put a link to your page in your signature. Also write some pages that you think will be informative in many different Slashdot discussions, and link to them whenever they're on-topic. Then whore to get a few +4/+5 posts that show through even when an article spills into indexed mode. Not only will you get a lot of hits directly from Slashdot, but also because Slashdot's static pages are linking directly to your site, some of Slashdot's high Google ranking will rub off on your site.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most of us would not mind paying for a lot of high quality services on the internet. The problem is that I (and many others) sure as heck will not pay until I know EXACTLY what I am getting. This presents the obvious problem of how to manage free vs paid accounts.
Actually, you're spot on. The adult industry figured this out several years ago. Text ads ALWAYS work better. As always, the non-adult industry is YEARS behind.
Somethingawful.com has a rather well-working pay model going. They still allow free access to the front page, but charge an one-time $9.95US fee to access the forums. They also posted a plea to help pay for a new server and over $3500 was raised within a day or so. Something similar could easily work here, instead of a per month model. If there was a $9.95 one-time fee to be able to read and post into comments, I think that a good cross section of the people here would be willing to pay for that considering the benefit that most of us get from this site.
What banner adds, you don't mean that single little one at the top of each page? I had to go looking for it after reading this article, never noticed it before.
If you want to make some money by offering a nag-free subscription, you need to make the sit more annoying. A good example is weather.com, with the multiple pop-ups one would think your at a porn site or a site that is hosted free on anglefire.(Thank Dog for Pop-up Stopper)
Nay, I doubt that you will get many subscriptions from readers who want to get rid of the little banner add. If you need cash, why not just ask? Do a fund raiser, like a bake sale without actually giving away any cookies.
... you make the WAP and PQA interfaces actually work, instead of being a novelty, and give me a direct Mozilla sidebar instead of going through an "aggregator".
Is the fact that unlike print media, the barrier to entry is not so big. It costs signifigantly less to put up a website than print a periodical. Periodicals (even daily news papers) can't report news "as it happens", yet even the simplest/cheapest website can do this. This is what has made the web what it is.
:)
Having said that, marketing has to be rethought. I am not so naive to belive that sites can operate without some kind of revenue (ads or subscriptions). My guess is that the web sites that are going to subscription services will eventually fold or no longer require subscriptions.
Speaking of this, what was the reason we were given for banner ads not making money??? Ppl are ignoring the ads...but look at the magazine industry...they still have ads, yet I can honestly say that I tend to ignore those ads as well (just turn the page or ignore that part of the page)...so, the question is where will the ad dollars come from in the future? I can honestly say that I enjoy watching/reading a GOOD ad...something different, but every industry has hordes of lazy ppl and marketing is no exception. A stoopid gimick or an ad that insists on my attention is nothing more than an annoyance.
Then again, maybe we'll all go back to using gopher
Summed up with one thought:
Charging for value added version vs. basic, original free version = good.
Charging for free version = bait and swith type tactics (bad). ** Making your customers a casuality of your "success" and bad business model is not a cool way of doing business. (imagine if NBC or CBS came out and said that they were going to adopt an HBO type business model, and now you would have to pay $10.00 a month to see your evening news...that would be uncool -- vs. it's perfectlly ok for HBO to do it, because HBO has been a pay service from day 1 -- it was in their initial business plan.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
/. works by linking to other sites, and whilst paying $2/mo for /. isn't the worst thing in the world, i'd soon find i couldn't read half the stories.
Forget the ny times and it's free registration problems - we'd have to pay out for another subscription for every other link!
Some of us have been using banner blocking proxies for years...slashdot has ads? :)
Rather than setup a subscription fee, why not setup some way to donate. Paypal or other service possibly? Every few months I would probably rifle off a donation for the info on slashdot. I am much more likely to give money via donation than I would if I was "required" to pay for some subscription.
As soon as some company decides how much their service is worth, I get disinterested. I hate when services think that they can dictate their worth to me. If you setup a donation option, I will pay what I think the service is worth. Slashdot would definitely get a few dollars from me. However, if it goes to mandatory subscription service, Ill probably just watch TV instead.
how stupid are u? dow u know how much money organizations like the salvation army make off of people like u? TONS!! and what the people in the third world countries get is a carton of powders which can make soup!
Right now, sites remove things of value and ask people to contribute to get that back. That doesn't seem to work.
Right now, sites add irritations (ads that aren't desired) and then charge to remove them. That doesn't work and it's obnoxious.
The answer is clearly to ADD to the site with SUBSCRIBER-ONLY tidbits.
With Slashdot, those tidbits could be quite small. A higher karma cap, for example, would cost Slashdot NOTHING, probably not change the moderation model one bit, and would encourage a TON of subscription. Hell, even a little dot next to the handle, to indicate that the poster is a subscriber, would cause people to sign up.
People want a feeling of membership! People want to feel that their contribution is meaningful! And the nice thing is... it IS.
Also, I think you got it exactly right that the collective brainpower here could be used constructively to come up with better concepts.
I've ran into this same problem with a project I ran last year (ePhotoAlbum.org).
It was a 'free' photo hosting service. It was fine when I had about 50 people on it, but soon word spread and I had well over 900 users after one month.
What I noticed was my machine was transfering over 60GB a month, and my hosting provider was getting up in arms about it.
How can a site generate revenue to pay for its overhead ? Advertisements ??
Speaking quite fankly as an internet user, I pay little to no attension to any/all advertisements I see on a page other than the content I'm after.
Besides, Companies are noticing that unless you have AMAZING traffic going to the site you have a banner on, you'll only get about 10 - 15% click throughs, depending on how deceteful your banner is ('Next 5 Pictures')
Our only chance for survival is basically charging a small fee.
The internet ad model will fail because the marketers are stuck in the "make them click to go to our website" mindset.
What the banner ads would be useful for is to let consumers know about a new product that they might otherwise have not known existed.
The problem with click-through ads is that if I click on it, then I will have to stop doing what I was doing to go off to thier site.
It's a good thing the world sucks or we'd all fall off.
I think that /. has a great opportunity to exert peer pressure. Everybody who is a subscriber should get an icon next to their name when posting commments, sort of like the shockingly cool friend/foe icon.
Slashdot might be compared to public radio; which unfortunately gets only about 5-7% of their listeners to contribute. By having a coveted icon next to their name, perhaps more people will subscribe to this forum.
Just a thought.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Nothing is free. Someone pays for it. Whether it's the user, the ad company, the site owner or the taxpayer, someone pays for the sites you visit.
I run a website that costs me $400.00 a month to have hosted due to bandwidth consumption. I get about $60.00 a month in voluntary donations from visitors, but otherwise it all comes out of my pocket.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Perhaps you could charge based on Karma boost.
+1 $4.95/month
+2 $6.95/month
+3 $8.95/month
+4 $10.95/month
+5 $12.95/month
You can get a decent site with Perl/PHP and MySQL support for around $10 a month with enough space and bandwidth for a medium sized site if you keep things like graphics at a minimum. Programming a site is easy and there are even free packages available for most common types of sites for those that aren't good programmers. I think you'll find that as many of the big free sites turn to pay or die that more small sites will show up.
:)
If you remember a few years ago there were lots of small free sites that eventually got ate by the big portal sites or just gave up as they couldn't compete for users attention with so many big name companies giving away the same stuff. Those forces are disappearing so now is your chance to have your own little slice of the Net again.
On my projects page you can see that I'm beginning to work on providing easy to use plug-n-play style components to build sites from. If anyone cares to help please do. So far I've used this exact code in several commercial sites and it's working fine so I have no reason to think it won't work for free sites. You don't need to make a profit from a site if it's not costing you a lot of money.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Try something new.
/. offers?
be a pioneer. make and set the trend.
If it don't work try something else.
it's simple.
to offset your costs, till economy ( *thus ad
revenue picks up) charge a buck a year.
Who won't pay?
1. Make it easy not a hassle to pay it.
2. Assure your customers you are committed to
true, enduring nominal fee.
This is not just a ploy to get people
used to paying a fee which will be gradually
raised.
One dollar a year from everyone who visits the
site would be nothing to sneeze at.
Do a poll at least.
Would you pay a buck a year to keep seeing
Cowboy Neal's famous moniker in poll questions
not to mention all the rest that
Choices:
Yes:
Yes:
yes:
Thank you for voting:
The Commissar
Seriously, the one thing I hated when Suck went from several small ads to one big ad was that the big ad was always from NextCard or Toyota or some POS that I would never in a million years buy.
At Slashdot you have ThinkGeek, SourceForge, various linux-related ads -- never once a stupid credit card or auto ad. I *do* clickthrough on occasion (I even shop at ThinkGeek); so long as the banner ads remain relevant I wouldn't *want to do without.
And given the nature of the audience, many who don't want ads already block them, or know how to. So a pay service may end up costing more to administer than it makes in collections.
> My comment can be quoted whenever, wherever, so long as you bloody well provide attribution! >
Being a key geek for a large media organizaiton which has tried for years to turn a profit on the internet I don't have problem with subscription based sites. I have however fought my organization at their every attempt implement them. Reason being what was stated in the orgininal post. 4.95 for a subscription times 10 is more than most people are willing to pay so it is quite likely they will subscribe to one maybe two sites (mostly the big guns like msnbc, cnn, etc...) and maybe one or two specialized sites (slashdot, coloradosprings.com, etc..) and smaller sites carriing specialized content will either go out of business (which they are on their way to now anyway) or will not be able to charge for content.
.Net initiative isn't about better computing (preaching to the quire) but about making the internet MSN. My bet is this is the route they will travel and they will use passport to leverage it. Anyway just some thoughts.
I do however think there is a solution to this issue: networking. No not vlan's and firewalls but subscription networks. Let's say I subscribe to OSDN instead of slashdot. Sure it costs me 10 dollars intead of 5 but I get a wide variety of sites instead of one. This reduces the number of sites I have to subscribe to. I'm far more willing to subscribe to OSDN or Oriellynet than I am to onJava or slashdot. Just as locally I'd be far more willing to subscribe to coloradospringsnet (fictionall) then I would be to subscribe to coloradosprings.com.
Truth is I'm begining to believe it's the only way we will be able to compete. Or stay alive. MacroHard's
-- force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins ayn rand
This whole discussion reminds me of the numerous copyright discussions that take place here. It's interesting that so many people are not willing to pay for content: "the net started out free, and I'm sure as hell not gonna pay for it now." Makes sense. Much of the content now, though, that's going to a pay-for-use system was never available on the early net anyway. It's a commercial web, now, and most of the added content was added by these commercial entities who expected they would make some money off it by improving efficiency, brand equity, revenues, etc.
Which brings me to the copyright issue. People don't seem to understand that -- at least from the law and economics view -- copyright (and IP in general) is meant to promote MARGINAL creation, not absolute creation. That is, everyone knows that there will be ideas even if there's no IP. But we recognize that there could be MORE ideas if we can provide the right incentive, so we have IP to provide incentive at the margin, hopefully reaching some optimal equilibrium (increasing social welfare).
Same with the free net, it seems to me. There was plenty of good, rich content before profit-seeking corps found it. Now we have much more content, but corps only came because they thought they could improve either the top line (the total revenues) or the bottom line (the net profits). So what's the deal? Do you think there was enough content in the early internet? Or do we need to have pay-for-use in order to reach an optimal level of content?
I don't fault Slashdot for moving to an ad-free subscription model. At least they're being upfront about it. And at least they're not bombarding us with insidious popup ads.
Frankly, I don't fault any free website from taking this route. However, I do fault any website that has been resorting to employing popup ads, esp. to coerce movement to a subscription model.
Following is a note I sent to the publisher of OpenP2P regarding their use of popup ads:
Perhaps we need to organize a war on popup ads. Many users are simply finding ways of eliminating them from their view, but who is working to get websites from using these abusive methods of advertisement?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I plan on publishing a website in the near future which, if successful, could experience out-of-control bandwidth. If bandwidth ever begins to be a problem, my plan is simple: I'll set a per-day bandwidth cap. Once that cap is reached, the site "closes" until the next morning.
Like a brick-and-mortar store that knows how many hours it can be open per day and remain profitable, I can similarly determine how much free bandwidth I can offer per day.
If users simply must use the site while closed, they will be encouraged to purchase 'after-hours' passes, which basically will offer them bandwidth allotments at the rate I pay my hosting provider. $6 for 1.5G of use will last a long time for an individual user.
One might respond that "closing" the site every night will simply encourage users to go somewhere else, and I agree. The burden is on me to provide a site that users will WANT to come back to.
I pay $50 a month for DSL right now, and I'm pretty sure that my ISP's costs are a lot less than that. I'd like to see my ISP pick up, oh, say $10 per month of subscription based services.
So if I read slash dot, cnn, new york times, the economist, use google and the local newspaper, I'd like to see my local ISP pay for a block of its customers to use those services. Not exactly micro-payments--my ISP contracts out for web content monthly and then I used it. But it still spreads the money around in a more equitable fashion.
So then I'd choose my ISP based on what content they provide, and everyone would share a bit more in the pie.
Slashdot is not a magazine, is a list recomending articles posted on other magazines. I don't read it for the news, (those I can find somewhere else), I read the comments, and those are user generated. Slashdot does not generate any content (well, except by the Jon Katz articles)
If slashdot becomes "premium" only, you will see a drop on the user comments. I'm not paying for that.
Kilroy was here!
I think if ./ did go to a pay-site format they would have to keep a free version with ads for everyone else or face inevitable doom. I'd be willing to pay $0.50/mo per site to access my news sites and search sites without ads. Anything above that I think would be a flop. Internet information should stay free but if I can help support the webmasters of the sites that I love and in return get less ads for a very very small fee I'd be keen.
Mind you I'd have to log in, and that would be a pain in the butt to have to do each and every morning to each page.
and that's how it is. as surely as the price of liberty & freedom is vigilance, the price of material (content, bandwidth) is money.
/. when it goes subscription, because i don't believe in the expectation that information should be absolutely free. it takes effort to make information free, something the editors of /. do their best to provide.
it's unfortunate when people are spoiled by getting something for free that someone else puts time, effort, and captial into. part of being human is the development of expectations (as a child, i expect to be clothed & fed, as an adult i expect to hold a job and have a car and a home), but sometimes feeding those expectations can be more costly than simply not putting those expectations forth in the first place. "freedom" will always cost something, no matter how miniscule.
we have to develop reasonable and deliverable expectations - otherwise, we risk not only being spoiled ourselves, but risk spoiling "it" for everyone else.
i'll be supporting
i expect to work for and support the things that matter to me, and i expect that what i choose to work for and support is worthwhile. i choose not to be a leech, a scab.
i think that's something we should all adopt.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
since this is a marketing survey, let me tell you , I LIKE the ads on slashdot, they make sense. of course, there are programs which filter them out. any good open source ones? micheal? timothy? cdr?
Heck- I actually like the banners. I mean. They're geek stuff, I'm a geek. Why not? They let me find ThinkGeek and a few other nifty places. It's not like they're trying to get me to buy the latest and greatest shade of lipstick, or a new method of losing 20 lbs in 20 days.
That said, I completely understand why Slashdot would want to generate some sort of money to pay for the service it's offering. It has to be bogged down under a *LOT* of traffic, and it has to take up quite a bit of server space. We always talk about how a site gets "Slashdotted" and disappears. Slashdot never gets slashdotted, eh? That has to be an expensive feat to carry off.
Point me to a link where I can donate some money. =] I like Slashdot and dislike the idea that it does seem to be following the path of free-->free with banners--> free with special subscription deals --> free with special subscription deals and more banners for those who don't pay --> subscription only --> gone. Yeegh.
I say lets all give 'em a penny for every day of the year or something like that. =] Heck- we give 'em our "two cents worth" often enough.
-Sara
If we'd all just buy an X10 camera and spent some money at the online casinos, we wouldn't be having this discussion! Consume already!!! ;^)
You usually pay for a number of impressions for an ad, similar to the way you would pay more for an ad in a magazine with greater distribution.
Clickthroughs can pay more or will be the source of payment for certain types of ads, but I doubt for example that Salon.com only gets paid when someone clicks through and I know that the OSDN network sells based on impressions not clickthroughs.
IMO the *most* annoying thing about popups (aside from their very existence) is that they take focus away from the actual page. When I shop at Amazon (I know, shoot me now) I often get three or four letters in the search box before the pop-up code executes, and then that pop-up window steals the remaining keystrokes -- annoying as all hell.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Actually I kinda dig /. banners.. they are usually all stuff I would/do go look at anyhow.
Dan FitzGerald Network Analyst and Wannabe Hacker KC0CZM (2m & 440 in NJ)
I'm to busy reading the news, i hadnt even noticed that slashdot even had banner ads until the article pointed it out.
_______
Death wish, n.:
The only wish that always comes true, whether or not one wishes it t
Presumably if you're willing to pay for the site you're a semi-serious contributor and not somebody posting reams of crap. So an extra +1 posting bonus might be justified. Maybe only if your karma is above a base threshold (to avoid letting losers pay their way to higher-rated posts).
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
How many sites would I pay $5/month for? Virtually none. But if somebody like AOL Time Warner (insert obligatory "hiss, boo" here) said hey, you can get all the content and services on all our publication sites, plus some interesting new music releases at high quality, then I *might* be willing to pay $5/month for that. Then again, I might not because it could all be crap (we are talking about AOL-TW here!), but aggregating things this way is a lot more likely to convince me to ante up than asking me to pay on an individual publication basis.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
It's similar model except with online versions of the books. In short: For $9.95 a month (IIRC) you get five points (or $14.95/month = 10 points, and so on). Most books are one point, so in effect you get subscriptions to the content of five books. You can swap out any book(s) for new titles once a month. Nice way to give yourself a kind of rotating tech library. I'm not throwing away the shelf full of O'Reilly books I've got, but this lets me explore some new technologies or look at stuff that I need temporarily for a particular project.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Not yet, no. That will come.
It's tough dealing with the "creative" ways companies express data in 10-K and 10-Q filings. VA Software filed a nice, clean statement, but many others are far worse. Worst case: a money-losing company that filed a 10-Q with a line labelled "net loss", followed by a positive number, creating the illusion to the unwary that they're profitable.
The SEC used to require companies to file an SGML-encoded "financial data schedule" that was straightforward to parse. Now, that data has to be pulled out of the filings with AI programs. Three such programs now exist (ours, PriceWaterhouse Coopers', and one from the University of Kansas). S&P has an army of clerks doing it manually.
The programs have varying degrees of success. PWC's has been around for a while. It's in Prolog, of all things, with some C and an Oracle back-end. PWC hired a Prolog heavy, who wrote the thing, and then left. It doesn't really understand the newer HTML filings; it renders them into a monospace font, then treats them as text. Ours is in Perl (should have used Java; it doesn't really use regular expressions much, and it's very object-oriented and tree-structured.) backed by MySQL. The server is a Linux system. Ours prefers HTML filings, and hammers plain text into something that looks like an HTML table before processing. The Kansas one doesn't seem to be as far along. None of them do as good a job as Standard and Poor's army of clerks.
Dealing with the variations in format is a pain, but possible. The big problem is variations in line item names. That's where the "creative accounting" comes in. Many companies would prefer not to report things in the standard categories, because this makes direct comparisons with other companies easy.
There's some lobbying from the XBRL people for tightening up on this. They have a whole XML-based scheme for representing this stuff (and, in fact, the data from Downside's engine is automatically tagged in XML with their tags; do a View Source.) The idea is to get the SEC to mandate filing in a more rigid format. XBRL would be nice, but just insisting that the line items use names drawn from the XBRL representation of Generally Acccepted Accounting Practices for U.S. companies would be sufficient.
In the current regulatory climate (i.e. post-Enron) there's a good chance of getting some tightening up here.
The main point is the supposed disappearence of free services on the internet. There are many free services that are stable and around for the long haul. The trick is, to latch on to one that is NOT run by a for-profit corporation.
The original promise of the internet still exists ! It is possible to publish information to millions of people so cheaply that any noodle can do it ! Of course it doesn't cost exactly nothing, but it is cheap enough that it is conceivable that it will eventually be a commonly available utility like service. (It ain't there yet, but if the cost were to drop 50% every 18 months (seems plausible, especially once the recession finishes flushing out a lot of the dead weight) then in a decade we could be there.)
What this means is that a lot of companies trying to make business and justify fairly huge capital investments are just going to get blown out of the water by hobbiests doing it for fun. That's ok, in fact it's good. It's good because we need to invest a lot of money in various projects that will never be done by hobbiests -- getting into space, curing various diseases, physical infrastructure, etc. We need to chace a lot of these suits and corporate bureaucrats out of the internet feild and back into the kinds of big capital things they they necessary for -- like putting up multi-million dollar wind farms so we are not so dependant on oil.
So from the point of view of you, the little guy, the trick is to find the cheap free service that is being run by a non-profit club or other organization. One example is sdf.lonestar.org, non profit organization offering unix shells, web space, virtual hosting, and other services. It's not free, you have to give donations to get various levels of service. (The basic unix shell and email address is free.) These guys have been around since 1987, and I have a feeling that they will be around for a long time, especially as for-profit companies abandon the area and move to business pursuits that require and justify lots of capital.
Similarly, look at dyndns.org. Those guys are not free, they are running off of your donations. But Dyndns and SDF will be here when Yahoo and Geocities finally kick me off the free email and website, because while it is cheap (not free) to provide those services, there just isn't enough money in it to justify investing people's pensions in the stock to support it. And they are close enough to free that it doesn't matter if you have a job.
In summary, what I see happening here is exactly the opposite of what everyone else here seems to be observing. There is no "end of free." That's just an illusion you get by counting press announcements of bad businesses in their death throes. In reality, I believe more and more people are using non-business services on the net: the numbers of dyndns and SDF users are going up and up, and those organizations are much more permanent than the catalog of nonsense you see on that endoffree site.
The long term trend is that connection fees will come down; bandwidth fees will come down, even if more is not available, but that's ok because as people learn how to use the net they use less bandwidth; and in the end the net will be a collection of various non-profit organizations providing services, with a layer of for-profit high-end services still there, of course, but only for a pretty small percentage.
I think the major strategy on our part is to make sure the net remains a peer-to-peer and not a hierarchical structure. To do this we have two major tools: 1) bind together in organizations like dyndns and sdf to provide what services do need a centralized and large investment, and 2) make sure that cable companies, ISPs, and DSL companies are forced to keep their service symmetrical, i.e., that you can provide services for free from your own machine.
Well, all that HTML isn't there for kicks. I for one like my text formatted rather then one sentence that may or may not wrap.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Not to start a flame war here (I hate AOL as much as the next guy), but I think that AOL's old model (when they were competing with Prodigy, CompuServ and GEnie) might be on the right track. They had 'exclusive' content providers, and a portion of your hourly fee would go tho them.
I don't quite know how to make this type of thing work for the web, but perhaps DoubleClick could have a deal where you don't see their ads anymore, if you pay them. This could bring more money to the web site in question, and this money could be used for priority servers for those who subscribe, and so on. Akami, and all the others could do the same, and eventually, someone would sell a 'package deal', with all the content providers included.
That I would buy.
-twb
Well when it comes down to it what would be the diffrence between slashdot and arstechnica ,if they were both subscription based?
ARS offers the following features.
- Access to the Ars OpenForum technical areas.
- Unlimited post-access to the Ars Lykaion Lounge and Velvet Room.
- Access to special deals at The Chip Merchant. - Access to the Ars Technica PDF repository.
What will slashdot offer?
Well it boils down to just one thing. Ars has real news . Which would be worth the time and money to read it.
Dr. Suess: 'Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!' 'I can not, will not hold the One.
I will be suprised if slashdot does this, and even more if it works. Why? I've been there, and the problem with this common-sense idea is two-fold:
(1) Advertising pays based on the number of people that look at the ad. You lessen the value of the banners you still sell by allowing some of your customers to avoid them.
...AND...
(2) You just selected out the people with the most disposable income! The people still looking at the ads are the people that know how to ignore them or don't have the money to get rid of them, and therefore either won't or can't buy from you, the advertiser.
-pyrrho
It is heallaciously useful, simple, stripped to the bare, with nonobtrusive, yet centered ads. Bandwidth usage has to be minimal, s/n ratio very high, the advertising non-annoying and targeted to be useful to the user. No graphics, pop-ups, or extranious html. Back to the future!
Assuming that 250,000 are the slashdot followers (Just a Random number), and 20% of them are willing to pay let's say $10 per year, that comes out to 50,000 * $10 =$500,000/year. Can the Editors say if that is enough money for slashdot to survive? I wouldn't pay $5/month but i would be willing to send a check for $10 a year. :)
Plus $10 a year is really nothing to anybody who can afford a computer and an internet connection.
Just some thoughts
The biggest problem with subscriptions is the value of the US currency. $5 US is not much for an american, but its $8 CDN, which gets high... And what about people of less developped countries like India? How can they afford US$ based subscriptions?
As more subscriptions are required, more will only US and rich countries citizens be able to access the information. Not to good for sharing information with the world...
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Started another thread here because I did not want to go off topic on the other one.
./ is what makes it great. Making people pay, even a little will seriously reduce that inflow of ideas and comment. Some here say that would be a good thing, but I do not.
./ claims all posts are the property of the owners. I would not mind extending the right to re-publish to Andover if I got back something of value in return.
The free communication aspect of
Collecting, filtering and presenting that content in different ways would be worth paying for.
Mod perks so long as they make sense would be worth it also. Might also help with the S/N ratio of the site for the paying folks.
Slashdot e-mail! Why not?
Pay for cool user names, otherwise you get semi good ones.
PDF and Cell Phone compatable digests of threads. This one gets into trouble because
Others?
This should be a front page discussion topic.
Blogging because I can...
Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times, is an (as I said) excellent book by Robert W. McChesney, is a comprehensive story of how giant corporations are taking control of the mass media. It's not quite the same as having to be to get an ad-free slashdot, but it seems quite related to me. Here's a description:
:-)
"Rich Media, Poor Democracy addresses the corporate media explosion and the corresponding implosion of public life that characterizes our times. Challenging the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information "choices" is ipso facto a democratic one, McChesney argues that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are wealthy investors, advertisers, and a handful of enormous media, computer, and telecommunications corporations. This concentrated corporate control, McChesney maintains, is disastrous for any notion of participatory democracy."
(That was from bn.com.)
It lays bare, among other things, the myth of the "free" (NOT as in beer, or speech) market, and an analysis of the Internet and its potential direction (McChesney doesn't think it will set us free). And so on. It's damn good.
Let me put it this way: I attended a workshop with McChesney and John Nichols (editor at John Nichols (The Nation, The Capital Times) at RadFest 2001. Nothing at that conference got me more riled up than listening to their discussion about media megaconglomerates. Ohhhh...
Media, and media ownership, is rapidly becoming what Linux was to me two years ago. It affects more people more directly than free software does -- although I have not abandoned free software. Just wait... I've got somethin' up my sleeves for that.
-- haaz.
-- haaz.
It's not about bandwidth, it's all about making money. It's just like anything else: Some sites will remain free, others will charge. Those that charge and can't compete will disappear and life will continue.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Stop visiting and/or linking to websites that utilize popup ads. Don't give them *any* hits. I've already started to do this. This is the _war_ I spoke of; of course, writing companies alone cannot do the trick.
The method of making ads unviewable doesn't really tell these companies anything, as they won't be able to distinguish between a non-clickthru and non-view.
Only a social/political cause against this practice is viable in the long run.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
That is correct. Some are paid already. Consider... suppose you are a small telephone company. You wish to carry internet content so that you can support the ISP's that conntect through you and also you wish to deploy your own ADSL service as well as dial up network. Now - there is just no way any ISP's are going to be interested in buying those OCx services without content... right? So you organise a connection to the backbones through POP's.
Why would a backbone operator offer such a connection for free? Answer: they won't - as a small telephone company you get to pay these people for the bandwidth required to connect through those pop's. As your company grows and you start to carry more and more content you might find a smaller fish in the pond will ask to connect to you and you get to bill them.
Ok, generally speaking all the ISP's fall into the smaller fish category so they all in general pay their upstreams megabux per month for the content that comes into their systems. In order to minimise this all the ISP's will in general operating farms of caching proxies.
Now - suppose someone happens to operate a small webserver farm. Since they don't have much stroke they fall into the smaller fish category and they will be billed by whoever they connect through. Suppose this connection is through an ISP. Typically the ISP involved would not run this content through the caching proxies because doing this would reduce the traffic and thus reduce their billing to this small webserver farm... right?
Well of course other accesses outside of the local pool of websurfers that frequent this website will end up running through the caches - but that isn't the point. The point is that in this model - the ISP that provided the uplink will Bill on the basis of the bandwidth and will not run it through the cache.
Now suppose the little web server farm operator decides that a co-locate is in order. So they call some people who offer this service and who are located closer to a backbone. Well - now the feed into the ISP that was the former uplink no longer exists. Suddenly the same content that the ISP was charging for ends up comming from a source that the ISP must pay for.
So, in this one little switch from running your own servers to comming through a hosting service the identintial content ends up being distributed at a cost to the ISP instead of it being a revenue source to them. In a fair business model one would expect that if the ISP were willing to pay their uplink for content that they would be willing to pay ANY content source on a somewhat fair payscale. This is like a supermarket telling a chicken farmer that if the chicken farmer is big enough to handle all of their egg and milk supplies and of course if this same chicken farmer has managed to get a stranglehold on the distribution channels - that they will pay for the eggs. Otherwise they expect to bill the chicken farmer for the eggs because they are providing a service distributing his eggs to their customers!!! Of course the chicken farmer can attempt to set up accounts with those egg eaters if he can find them and if he can figure out how to make them pay!!!
Ok... one more step here... Suppose the web server operator calls up his local telephone company and asks them to be the uplink. In this case he will be quoted a connection rate. The telephone company - being a bigger fish wnats the smaller fish to pay. So the guy decides, Nope - We're going to use a hosting service.
Well - now the content will be comming from a channel controlled by a fish even bigger than the telephone company so AGAIN the telephone company will find itself in the situation of paying for the distribution of the content instead of being able to bill for it.
In all cases - the idea of a level playing feild and fair market practices have been abandoned in favour of the idea that big fish can force smaller fish to pay - so they do so. I would suggest that this is not within the current fair trade practices legislation of most nations but I will also suggest that it will take an organisation and a class action lawsuit to change this.
Now, suppose that the webserver's uplink remitted money to the server operator based on the amount of content these server feed into the net. Since in general all ISP's are already paying their uplinks for the delivery of content it would only seem reasonable that they should pay ANYONE who supplies content regardless how big a fish they are. In fact this is how the commodities markets work. It is a well established fact that if you sell 100 dozen eggs that you will recieve a cheque about 10 times bigger than the farmer that supplies 10 dozen eggs.
Well... if the webserver were actually receiving money for the service they provide to the telecommunications carriers - that is if they were paid for creating content for these guys to ship to their customer base, then one would expect that there might be a bit of screaming going on about whether the people (ISP's) who do NOT own any copyright to the material have a legal right to duplicate it in their caching proxies.
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I made this argument to a systems admin who runs caching proxies. His retort was that without caching proxies webservers would be hard pressed to handle the demand from the surfers in cyberspace. Well, I do agree. It isn't a question of caching - its a question of the compensation and who gets the cash so to speak.
But here is a direct analogy. Somebody makes a sitcom for prime time TV. These people are in the same situation as the websurfers. They do not own enough equipment to be able to fully distribute the signal to all the customers of the networks and cable TV operators.
Just like in the case of TV, a cable TV operator will simply connect and pick up and distribute other people's copyrighted material and they do this so that they can bill their customers for cable TV services.
But now - the customer can choose to watch a sitcom or to use his time to surf the net. In both cases copyrighted materials are being fed into this person's electronic communications equipment.
In the case of a TV signal, the cable operator pays a sum of money into a pool which is allocated back to the producers of the TV show. But if the end user decides to surf instead, then no money is paid back to the producers of the web content and furthermore the intellectual property rights of the owners of this material are totally ignored.
To conclude, I would suggest that people stand way back and think about how for instance streaming video content supplied via TCP/IP as really any different to an end user than an NTSC signal that comes over the same wire. Does anyone think the general public knows the difference or even cares? No - surfers just want good interesting content and this is why they pay for the cable TV channels and pay for the cable modems or xDSL services or dial up lines for that matter.
Furthermore, as far as they are conserned - once they have paid for the connection they expect to get a bundled service that includes both a connection as well as content on this connection.
People in general understand there are pay TV channels just as they understand there are pay websites. What they don't understand is the distinction that the producers of TV content get paid while the producers of web content do not.
Frankly, I have trouble understanding this distinction too!
There just aren't many sites I would sign up for a subscription to.
However, there are lots of sites I would pay a nickel to read if I had some reason (a link, a google reference) to think it had the information I wanted.
I used to use 555-1212.com about once every other month to do a reverse phone number lookup. I would happily pay a nickel, or a quarter, to do a lookup. Maybe even a dollar. Then they went to a subscription, and I have not used them since. There just ain't no way I am going to pay $10/month for a subscription; that's $20 per lookup! My "Reverse phone number lookup" bookmark now points to a competitor who still provides free lookups.
Speaking of Google, here's a bigger flaw in the pay-for-surf model: How do you find stuff you are looking for? Sites that require a subscription to reference obviously aren't going to be indexed, so even if the site had something I wanted and would pay for, how am I going to find it?
What's the big holdup with micropayments? It's been "Real Soon Now" for a lot of years.
I don't understand why people are so worried about /. and whatnot. Seems to me /. rocks... but I wouldn't
all of this. I mean... the people who are going
totally pay it seems are the big businesses, the
ones that are going to provide "improved" versions
are the places like
like the places that actually provide really useful
info aren't even talking about it. I could be
wrong here... maybe it's just my version of
"useful info". I mean,
and couldn't for that matter pay for it. I think
most of these places are forgetting that a lot
of their readers don't have the money to pay for
what they need, let alone what they want. So
maybe they will go pay and make millions and
it'll be the best thing they did, but I also
think they will lose a lot of their readers.
Just my opinion.
L8rs
Just do like Weather Underground did and charge $5/year. Easy to afford, cheap enough for lots of people to subscribe, and doesn't face the user with paying $60/mon just to subscribe to 4 websites.
Hey, I found this fast, free browser called 'Lynx' that somehow subverts banner ads, popups and similar annoying stuff. It's not perfect, but probably worth more than $4.95 -though of all people, /. readers shouldn't have to be told that.
Yup. That is what monopolies do. Do you think this might be hurting NZ business? If so then why don't the Keewee's do something about it?
I think a subscription service is likely to kill the net.
/., etc.
The steps I see happening are as follows:
0) sites start to switch to a subscriber model and the public shuns them and content starts to dry up to the point where people will start dropping services. ISP's and Telco's will start to panic.
1) In a move to rejuvinate content and reverse the drop out rate the ISP's and telco's will create subscription "channels" and they will remit money to these select few content creators based on their perception of what they want to be available on the net. You might call this "icing the cake". But in this case "icing people" get paid while "cake people" do not.
2) The surfing public will be told that websites outside of these "channels" are more expensive to support and hense we'll see webmasters costs driven up while the surfing public will be asked to pay higher monthly ISP charges for access to the "non-main-stream" content. Meanwhile the "icing people" will have a secure revenue source.
3) We'll find that probably everything that programmers and geeks do will fall into the "more expensive to support" category.
4) Just like with cable TV services, the "core bundle" that I personally never even wanted will be a necessary part of the bundle before I can get access to the "geek content" that I want.
5) In spite of popularization of the web and incredible technological advances in telecommunications, we'll be left in a WORSE position because we'll find that we first need to subsidize the web content that the general public wants before we can get access to what we want... which is open source development projects, linux/*BSD technical development and administration help groups, Wonderful websites like
6) Microsoft might lend a hand in this transformation by adding new protocols into windows such that CNN, TW, MSNBC and close friends' content is carried in a somehow superior way that linux servers are not up to... Probably this will include some form of "security" and it will be claimed that any attempt to decode this content is a breach of the DMCA in just the same way that it is claimed that it is ok for WINDOZE people to watch DVD's on their computer but it is not ok for Linux people.
Is this a nightmare? Well, as vested interests seek to gain control of what the surfing public sees on the internet, what is to stop this draconian evolution?
AOL/TW makes money off the content they distribute through the net. Slashdot for instance does not because slashdot doesn't have a subscriber base of 33 million people each of whom is sending money to AOL/TW for a service which includes delivery + content.
Of course AOL/TW sees no reason to remit funds to anyone in cyberspace who's content they borrow heavily from in order to supply most of what their customer base is looking for.
If people agree with me on this then I think they should see why a CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT is required literally as fast as it can be put together to establish FAIR TRADE PRACTICES and to ensure that the intellectual property rights of all webmasters is respected. In my mind this means that for instance AOL/TW does not have the right to use other people's intellectual property for their commencial gain without any compensation to the owners of this content. It also means that certain telephone operators and ISP's do not have the right to block port 80.
IMHO it works like this. If you are in the situation of delivering content for a profit, then it makes sense to add a little icing to the cake to give yourself a competitive advantage and meanwhile claim that their _is_ no money in content so it should be ok to fill the pipes with 95% OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK with no compensation to them.
If we were to create an apache mod that created AOL FREE FRIDAYS how long do you think that this situation would continue?
Let me put it this way. As a web master if I put up MY CONTENT then this is MINE and I have the exclusive right to decide who sees it and on what terms. This means that _I_ can choose to shut AOL/TW off. Since they don't pay me why should I continure to subsidize their business? If every other webmaster (or at least a sizable percentage) were to also shut them off then I expect that AOL would come knocking on our door asking how much we want for the content (which they previously took from us for free while "we" like idiots tried to subsidize the distribution costs).
I say it would take less than 1 or 2 months. But if it took more - big deal. We'd at least save money by doing this.
Blood Sausage said it best....
This guy is exactly right! Everybody is getting all worked up over nothing. The Net is very good at routing around things. If everyone charges but nobody pays --- then all the people charging go out of business. But, free content always stays.
What's the difference between paying $30 a year for access to a site and getting a yearly magazine subscription?!
/., provide enough content per month to justify any fee based service. The majority of sites on the internet don't provide enough content or quality to justify a monthly fee.
Well, the major difference is content. Some sites, i.e.
I would like to watch slashdot on TV. Seriously. Rob -please do find out if, like CNN international is interested. (this could be $$big bucks$$!). Andover suits will jump at it. /. what topics to have on slashTV. Then slashdot website could be really free, in fact you could even PAY posters for worthwhile comments.( ahem) or exchange karma for gadgets or mugs or t-shirts or goat wallhangings. SlashTVwould be good for evangelising free software/ opensource. Good for a different-from-bigbiz perspective (like MS, SUN, IBM). You could also charge obscenely expensive ad time for .NET. You could sell video archives on cd. You can have interviews with ubergeeks, politicians, lawmakers, even bladens based on questions from members. /. would be less US centric. Even Mr. Katz can spark off new ideas and enlighten even more people round the world. And Michael can propose on TV.
Could be weekly 30 min program, a capsule covering maybe five topics of broader interest, along with editorially selected user comments. Since you dont have many original news/features you could commission paid professionals, or at least style slashTV as a "review" site. Have a poll on
-ram
you read this psot here frist bzchx !
you forgot to add cookies, I love this site cause it sends none!
I think its obvious that people will try to be charged by a site to view its content, which seems fair to me except for a couple of points
1) Alot of web articles are either badly written, a copy of another article, or not what the link/headline say they are.
2) I shouldn't have to pay for the whole site, I doubt anyones read every page a site offers.
3) Some sites/pages don't even load
Take slashdot, I get the daily email. I click on some of the links and of those I click a few I click through to the article, some I just read the comments, and alot I just read the blurb and realize its not what I thought it was.
So I wouldn't pay for the entire site, cause I don't use the entire site.
The only solution that gets round these problems, that I can think of, is pay once a page is loaded, or more likely once you link off or close the page. You get a request for an amount, using something like paypal, which must be simple, as simple as giving cash for a chocolate bar. Then 'you' can give what you think the article is worth, and gets around the problems I mentioned.
Google, which I consider more of a service, I would consider paying a monthly fee for and I don't think the idea above could be used...as you've no idea how good google was until you've clicked on the results.
The problems with this idea is sites would have to be willing to be judged/valued on their content, and accept that some of the content is just not worth paying for, however garish the colours are:)
People would have to accept that sites aren't electronic magazines and cannot be treated in the same way.
Browser technology, I'm guessing, would be the area that needs changing to implement this.
Has this idea been considered by anyone?
Any alternatives?
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
Guidescope is a great, free (beer) service that allows you to get rid of advertisements. It has some problems -- it gets rid of any image with the word 'banner' or 'advertisement' (possibly even 'ad' but I'm not sure) in it -- but 98.62973% of the time it hits the ads and leaves everything else intact. You download a small program (Linux and Mac users, you may be SOL with this one) that acts as a local proxy running on port 8000. Tell Mozilla (if you use anything else, you're an idiot *flame,flame*) to route through it and ta'da! No more ads. It can also kill cookies. From what the press says, it interacts with a central database to check whether or not something should be classified as an 'ad', but while I haven't checked to see what it converses with, I don't think it really does. You can however block specific images, which is kinda nifty.
I've said nifty twice in this post, which is a bad thing, so I'm going to stop talking at the end of this sentence. (period.)
[insert witty comment here]
Follow W3C specs and get programmers that aren't complete morons. Don't use WYSIWYG editors. Use tab characters instead of three spaces. Use more CSS.
Almost every design I've made runs under 10KB, images and all. And, dammit, *sniff* they aren't crappy designs!
[insert witty comment here]
"but even with peer to peer mirroring of content you still have the reliability and convenience that being an aggregator of that content provides... i would rather go to slashdot where i dont have to hunt down the content i want than go searching for it."
,In that world I would say that you would be more likely to see p2p networks or freenet sites specificaly devoted and properly geared up for mirroring web pages perfectly ,you do not see this sort of thing now as there is not much demand for it .
,it would not be that hard for me to write a script which would download a complete web page strip out the adds and mirror it on
/pic /txt/ whatever),which the majority of people want and not the web desighn, also there is a large community of people at the moment who share and trade passwords to these sites.
I agree with you're point , it would be easier,(less hassel and inconvenience), for a person,(who has paid), to go to slashdot than to go out and try and find that content on a present day model p2p network,But imagine a future enviroment where a large amount of sites are subscription based
For example
some sort of p2p network or for example freenet,( although I am not to sure about the freenet example due to freenets current state of development).Opera allows you to save an entire webpage it even gives you an option to do it with or without images and to set the link depth and There are quite alot of free programs which can save a page perfectly links and all.
My point is that we do not see alot of this now because there really is not alot of sites which are subscription based , bar porn sites and with them it is the pure content(video
Also privacy programs such as peek a booty which use routing to hide a persons identity show another way which subscription sites could be viewed.If the ip is the same and if the pwd is the same how would the website know that the user was not the same? (i.e)A friend or multiple friends could go through one person to view the content on a site.
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