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
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
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
/. 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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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)
Is somebody testing the audience to see how would we react to a change of policy from slashdot?
It's just a BloJJ
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 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?
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.
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
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)
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.
Or one other alternative is to actually have some other thing support your site. An example is that Think Geek can help support Slashdot by selling Slashdot T-shirts and stuff. Think geek is owned by VA also. Let's face it, this is a goood way to do it. Most web content, while nice, people can do without it. Most web server's don't need to be expensive. Most webserver's don't do as much traffic as Slashdot either. For a great majority of the web, well other things or having other non web stuff supporting the web presence will help.
:)
But another thing that some companies have done is pay too much for a site or right's to do a site in the first place. One example is NASCAR.com. Turner Interactive bought the rights to do the site for 100 million dollars. Everyone scratched their heads....why would anyone do this and last year as well (the contract is 5 years). This was too much money, but yet it's a drop in the bucket for both NASCAR and Turner. But this year, they decided to go subscription for racecast and almost all of the crappy realvideo you want to see. They used to charge nothing for this and the delays and stuff was just taken (heck we get it for free who the heck cared if it was 2 laps behind). This year they started to charge for what was esentially the same thign they used to offer for free but now at 4.95 per month. Now people were pissed. Now I don;t see them doing it much longer without a class action suit (they advertised real time....2 laps bhind is not real time!). Anyway, websites should be careful. If you are going to offer something sub standard then charge for it, well you better raise it's standard...
Gorkman
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!
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'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
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.
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?
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.
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..."
Why go to a website if you're only reading their content and using up their bandwidth and server if you are not willing to pay for it even indirectly? This is quite like going into a magazine store to read the magazines but not buying it. It is not illegal per se. But it is also hurting the service that you use.
Once these companies go bankrupt, AOL/TW will buy up all content services and put it only accessible within their framework. What would your WebWasher do for you then? Would you be more willing to pay a couple dollars a month for the service now or 21.95 for an AOL/TW account?
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"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
more insulting than that is ads at the cinema peddling cinema advertising itself
"over 4 bazillion stupid eyeballs per month! advertise here!"
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...
Universities are going to become the only organizations interested in providing high bandwidth without any interest in a return on investment.
Until all the tax revenue dries up because the businesses that rely on content subscriptions go out of business and stop paying taxes and employing people who pay taxes.
I would say that if a website moved to an exclusive pay for content model and if it were shown that a signifigant amount of people were willing to pay for this model then it would become more likely for the content site to be bought up by a big isp like aol /time warner, much like a popular tv show would have its rights bought up and offered exclusively to aol/time warner's customers as a draw.
I wonder if this sort of thing happens with porn website's ?They have been offering paid subscription services for years. Do small porn sites that are successfull get bought out and merged into the big central porn networks ?Or do they stay independent?
When media content becomes pay for use it begins to fall under the same economic rules as tv and magazines, i.e it tend's to be bought up by a couple of big players and thoese players useually have there own agenda and this agenda more often than not when it comes to journalism can influences the tone and way news is presented.
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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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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
Maybe because we are not just readers. We are also the writers and the editors (watch out, I got moderator points and I know how to use them!)
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
Actually, I'd have to say you do pay to walk to the store. Taxes paid for the roads and sidewalks you walk on, plus the maintenence of them.
Having said that, maybe you are on to something. If the government provided universal bandwidth, then the notion of paying for content would be more palatable.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
You're half right. But it's /.s hypocrasy that WILL make them pay! Just whitness TIVO and their complete and total monitoring of everything you do with the device. No one cares here about that at all because it running our baby Linux! YAY! We pay for the service and they collect our info and NO ONE cares. Oh but WMP, real, CDDB and others do the same and its EVIL!
/. hypocrasy would be such that they WOULD pay. And then still shovel manure on the very next service that switched to subscription.
So yes actually as much as everyone here hates any idea of a subscription anything, I'd bet that the
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
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
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."
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.
Also, what is an acceptable profit? Are the ads sufficient to pay for the bandwidth? How much of MY ISP fee is already paying for that? How much do they need?
I would also like to ask: how much time does running the place take? I've tried before, but can't get an answer. There are a few features added periodically, but that certainly can't take a half dozen people 40+ hours per week. Going through the submission queue can't take too long, considering how many screwups come through it.
So, they need to pay for bandwidth, a few servers and routers, and what else?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Basically, you have to buy something before they let you see the catalog.
/., you pay $10 per quarter to access it. However, that $10 is 100% refundable towards the purchase of something at the /. store. Mugs, caps, other neat little toys - /. could make their money from selling these items. Kind of a "We'll let you use the site, but you have to buy $10 worth of stuff from our store a few times a year." I for one would never pay to use /., but if I could buy a toy and get preferred access to boot - you bet!
Well that's just fscking stupid. Who would pay for that? How do you know if you even want to buy something from them if you can't see the catalog until after you've sent your $10?
If this were changed a little, you could be onto something. To apply this to
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
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.
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 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 !