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".
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
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.
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)
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
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
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.
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?
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.
I'll try.
Most commercial web sites on the internet used to generate revenue by joining in partnerships with ad companies and affiliates. These companies would pay the website by giving a certain denomination of money for every click that was logged from their site. As time went one, viewers stopped noticing the ads, because they're on every page, there's no requirement to view them (unlike the case of TV, where if you want to keep watching the show, you either sit through the commercials, or change the channel and go back in 3 minutes), and people just got used to seeing a 40 pixel bar at the top of their browsing window, and started ignoring the ads. Gradually, ad companies started noticing that they weren't getting so many click-throughs, and the ones they were getting weren't resulting in a sale for whatever service was being peddled. Thusly, the ad companies decided to bring down the value of a click-through. This complicated the issue for the web sites, not only because users weren't clicking as much on the ad banners, due to their desensitization to it, but because the site now isn't making as much money from the users that do click.
Now webmasters can't pay the bills purely by traditional banner advertising anymore, ad companies aren't paying enough per click to cover the costs of content and bandwidth, and sites need to figure out new ways of generating revenue so they can keep offering the content and services that draw users to click their ads, and make them money.
In short, it's not so much that anybody's getting greedy (although I'm sure that might have motivated it to an extent), it's simply the fact that ad banners aren't the "gold mine" that everybody thought would keep the net "paying for itself".
It's an awful conundrum, isn't it?
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
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?
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.
That's why I think large web pages will turn into purely marketing vehicles. www.pepsi.com www.ford.com www.coke.com are the future. Web pages as commercials.