Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla and Scroll Partner To Test Alternative Funding Models for the Web (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: News subscription service Scroll, which is yet to launch to consumers but has received the backing of several top publishers, courted another major player today: Mozilla. The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web and subscription-based funding models. As part of the deal, Mozilla said it would test features and product ideas provided by Scroll, which itself has been conducting internal tests with a number of outlets. Small groups of Firefox users will be invited at random to share feedback and also respond to surveys, Mozilla said.
I am happy to pay a fair price for content, but am unwilling in any scenario to be subjected to invasive advertising. Netflix is a good example of an ad-free subscription based library of video content.
One of the early promises of the Web was micropayments, remember that? It has yet to happen because the cost of a secure financial transaction is simply too high. I think the best answer is subscription aggregators, who provide access to a libraries of content and track which customers are accessing said content. At the end of the month, the subscription aggregator sends a single payment to each content provider, which represents the sum of all accesses that month.
Various pundits in political and gaming news sphere (of those I follow) generally played around with subscription model to the point where most of the content is free with constant nods to paying patrons on youtube and such. And then they have some kind of a small paywall for extras, with various tiers of payment for more benefits.
It's a model that found its backers.
If you're not willing to pay a few cents a day for a website without remuneration, then maybe you shouldn't have a website. Here's the dirty little secret: All the newspapers exist because someone wants their voice to be heard. No, they're not in it for the profit. That's a means to an end, because newspapers aren't damn near free like servers and bandwidth. All the manufacturer web sites exist because that's the cheapest way to support their products, and you don't sell anything without support. Do you really want the blogs and vlogs that only exist because someone wants your money? People are unwilling to pay for the web because there's already more than anyone can consume in a lifetime. The web doesn't need a coin slot.
and you can advertise to me.
So I'll flog it again: "Charity Share Brokerage".
The idea is cost recovery and accountability, not massive profit. Wannabe donors would pledge shares, perhaps $10, toward the project proposal. It might be a proposal for new software, for a solution to the problem described in an article, for running a server for the next year, for another article on a related topic, or for something else. Each proposal would be vetted to make sure it's complete. That means a plausible schedule, a realistic budget, committed resources, sufficient testing, and success criteria. When the project gets sufficient donors, then it gets the funds and the CSB will make sure the results are assessed and reported to the donors and the public.
Time to go see if it's worth submitting the idea directly, but I bid Slashdot the usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
As far as I am concerned, news sites that won't let you use an adblocker but start autoplaying videos obviously don't give a shit about how much their bandwidth or content creation costs...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
... as long as they're served from the domain that I'm visiting. Just like print media up until a few years ago, there's nothing to say that websites can't sell ads to legitimate advertisers and put up advertisements. I'd have no problem with that. I won't submit any of my computers, though, to any of the garbage ad networks out there (Google, Facebook, etc.).
I don't respond to AC's.
What, like mining cryptocurrency in the browser? If done right (it probably won't), it could be an interesting alternative.
Looking at multiple descriptions of how Scroll will work, they explicitly say the Scroll subscription fee won't cover individual news site paywalls -- you'll also have to have a subscription to the underlying site to get unlimited (or, in some cases, any) articles.
So unless I'm missing something, the only apparent benefit from my $5/month to Scroll is to get ad-free content (and, I suppose, less anti-adblocker cat and mouse).
"The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web"
I can tell you this without any study at all: People like ad-free experiences, period.
"I wish I could see more ads!" said no one ever.
Various pundits in political and gaming news sphere (of those I follow) generally played around with subscription model to the point where most of the content is free with constant nods to paying patrons on youtube and such. And then they have some kind of a small paywall for extras, with various tiers of payment for more benefits.
It's a model that found its backers.
Everyone I watch: gaming, science, history, and 1 political channel, everyone is crowd funded now.
It's the proven model once your channel is a success, but ad revenue has an advantage for new/small channels. I'm not sure crowdfunding alone is enough. OTOH, does getting $100/month from YouTube really motivate people to keep building their audience? I don't know.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Everybody drink, we got a Republican crybaby liar who can't figure out that Fox News is the reason his head is stuck in Vladimir Putin's asshole. He likes the view.
I would also question how scalable relying on donations is. It doesn't feel to me like you could operate a large scale business (e.g. NY Times) when we think about how budget stations that relied upon telethons seemed to be.
That is a bit rich considering most of the web runs on free software, which is vastly more complex than your typical Youtube channel, even the ones which are not just clickbaiting, regurgitating and commenting. No, you're not special because you can talk, sing, dance, draw or write well. The web is full of people like you and they all want their works to be heard and seen. It used to be well known that artists are poor people. The notion that they should be well paid stars is an aberration that is going away. Get used to it. Digital data is infinitely reproducible. You're literally competing against the world, and not just the present, all the greats of the past too. If you don't understand what this means for the price of your work, don't become an artist.
It costs a lot of money to pay those "anonymous sources" that are 100% factually wrong, but hit the narrative the news outlet wants.
I do point out that legitimate news sources have a firm policy against paying sources, anonymous or otherwise. It's the National Enquirer that you're thinking of that pays for scandal, and if you read them, you do get what you pay for, but you don't get journalism.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
The world would be a better place if publicly traded corporations had no involvement with politics.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People don't want a political gatekeeper between the content they enjoy and their ability to send payments.
No CC brand connected to a political party stopping payments.
No 3rd party payment platform making political connections about who gets users funds.
No payments system that can remove the ability to move funds around.
No secretive banking system to shutdown bank accounts due to politics.
People enjoying connecting in a more direct way with the people who create the content they enjoy.
To support content with funds, long term payments, bandwidth.
Make the internet free and open again. For art, history, politics, reviews, news, projects, hobbies, comedy.
Without needing the political approval of a bank, CC company, platform, political party, government, nation, mil, think tank, NGO.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Basically, yes. You can't mindlessly run your ten layers of abstraction with server side scripting on $3/month if you count users/second. You can serve many ten thousands of users a day on cheap shared hosting if you cache properly. For less than you pay for your phone, you can serve a web site to millions of users. A dedicated web server can easily process hundreds of requests per second. Get back to me when you exhaust that capacity.
Yes.
Hosting the website is dirt cheap, yes. Significantly less than maintaining printing presses.
The problem is that the information on that site costs orders of magnitude more to to produce that it does to present. Reporters, editor, et al, need to eat. If you're consuming the material, it would be nice to get paid for it. I'm pretty sure nobody disputes this.
The problem is what is the best means of doing that? For any given website, I may read their articles daily. Or maybe once a month. Or maybe only once a year. How do you charge for something consumed so sporadically? I'm certainly not going to pay a monthly subscription for something that I rarely use.
And because the internet is so democratizing, there are a bajillion different sites available that you can read at any given moment. And because it's all an even playing field, it turns into a Hunger Games style fight for eyeballs and revenue. In addition, the current situation incentivizes organizations to produce content that their perceived audience wants to consume, rather than content that is of actual value. That is how how train wrecks like Info Wars and Brietbart have managed to get such a following despite the fact that the "content" they produce is of such shockingly low quality that their viewers are less informed than people who don't watch/read news at all.
So we have a classic economic situation where supply grossly outstrips demand. And there are no checks and balances to help narrow the available options because people arn't interested in checks and balances. There is literally no solution possible that won't have a bunch of people jumping up and down screaming "censorship!" or "bias!". There is no way to regulate the field without that regulation being perverted by some future party hell bent on autocracy.
Solution? I have no bloody idea. All I know is that the unfettered democratic approach to content creation and news in particular, just isn't working.
That's all a business with thousands/millions of users in traffic has to pay for a domain, email and web hosting? Just $3?
He was referring to having a "voice" on the web. It doesn't mean that millions of people, or anyone, will listen to it.
Your websites are a hobby. Your contribution to Linux is a hobby. Your free software is a hobby. Your free artwork is a hobby. It's fine to have hobbies, but what puts food on the table and a roof over your head to support your hobbies?
And what is it that you do that's worth being paid for, exactly? Is it being part of the Internet's mechanisms that are ultimately funded by ads?
Some time ago, I had a conversation about this topic with Slashdot user bingoUV, who recommended that people who can no longer make a living in information publication might try working in a butcher shop.
Which host are you with? I'm currently paying a lot more than that to WebFaction for shared hosting. And do these "hundreds of requests per second" include the video whose play button the user has clicked, or are you considering only text and small images?
there's nothing to say that websites can't sell ads to legitimate advertisers and put up advertisements.
This works for Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But before you recommend requiring the ad-supported web at large to adopt their business model, please consider the following nothings:
1. A publisher selling ads on its own website has to somehow convince advertisers that the publisher exists in the first place, is worth the advertisers' time, and can detect and not charge for fraudulent page views or clicks. If a web publisher hired you to market the publisher's ad space to advertisers, what steps would you recommend taking to do so?
2. Interest-based advertising pays three times the CPM compared to context-based advertising according to a study by Beales and Eisenach.
I'll gladly fork over .99-1.99
The problem here is that the banks want a flat 0.30 USD for each transaction on top of a percentage of the total. This is true of both credit card transactions and ACH (checking account debit) transactions. This encourages merchants to reduce the percentage of revenue that goes to bank fees by adopting business models that increase the average transaction total. That's why you see monthly or annual subscriptions on news sites instead of pay-per-article.
I vastly prefer advertisement over subscription. A subscription service is an eldorado for data collectors. (I avoid add blocks because somehow, we need to pay for the content). It is today technically quite easy to fend off the data collectors on websites (if not subscribing) and avoid getting profiled and getting targeted by personized adds but in a subscription this is impossible. I personally would not like that a service keeps track of what, when and from where I read it in which order. If one wants to get away from advertisement, there should be a micro-payment mechanism which allows to do that without having your reading habits ending up in a data base and in a few years sold or worse, just made available (data breaches can happen anytime). It is a good assumption that whatever reading data I produce somewhere as a user of a subscription service will be publicly available sometimes, somewhere or sold. If some subscription service can do that and assure that no personal information is collected, we can talk. There was something nice about good old newspapers and journals as there is something nice about cash: it is not the case that a few data collectors constantly watch the reader over the shoulders or keep track about what you buy. We only start to wake up. The recent data scandals with websites or apps which have been discovered to collect personal information and sellling them without consent were just the tip of the iceberg.
People miss reality because of the bullshit, corporate marketing is end to end psychologically destructive and manipulative bullshit. The internet itself in reality is an advertising platform, people produce the content to demonstrate their skills, products and services, to attract customers. Simply psychopaths are making a mess of it, forcing the worst kind of real medicine side show advertisements, lead by the USA, the Union of Shitty Arseholes, when it comes to their cabal of corrupt corporations, running the joint into the ground.
The idea is for companies, individuals, education facilities and government to put themselves, THEMSELVES, directly forward by creating and putting content online. Selling internet content to sell advertising, is not the bright, those companies should be directly sponsoring content to demonstrate their worth, they used to do it, then psychopathic bean counter took control and said where's the profit (confusing advertising with for profit content) but then spent even more on indirect internet advertising after being scammed by the likes of Google.
If google advertising had any real worth, why are they advertising the shittiest products on the internet, in point of fact, marketing logic is totally ignored, do not advertise your quality products alongside shitty products, because they get a free ride and your products are made too look worse by association. When immediately after you high quality ad, the customer get served a snake oil add for giant erections (makes you bullshit looks as bad as their bullshit) and the is a platform wide affect.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Woosh. I meant NYT and WaPo... NE is more likely to get a story correct than NYT or WaPo. I listed 3 examples of news stories so bad that you should only expect them to happen once every 5 years or so.
But the stories you list show the opposite story from what you implied.
Story 1. Buzzfeed is some internet site. Says nothing about real sources.
Story 2. I assume you didn't actually read the New York Times story of Covington. Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... and follow-up here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
and editorials here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... and here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that the legitimate media updates their stories when new information becomes available.
story 3. The journalists reported the police report; and when the police report changed the story, the media reported that. This is what you want from journalism. This is what you don't get from internet gossip.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
>The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that the legitimate media updates their stories when new information becomes available.
This is the most warped, and frankly disgusting lie I've seen in a long time. The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that legitimate media:
1. Has more than one independent and verifiable source.
2. Will check such sources to very the story before publishing.
"Issuing corrections after publishing" and "reporting on a single anonymous source" is the realm of yellow press journalism at best, and utter BS disguising itself as journalism at worst. How do I know?
Consider the following story being published:
"Geoffrey.Iandis is a child rapist - anonymous source. Think of the children he raped. This is where he lives."
A few days and a massive scandal later. "This may have not been true according to new information [that was available at the moment of publishing of initial story that we didn't bother to look at]".
Story ends.
This is literally how WaPo handed Covington, which is why they're the main outlet being sued for that particular lie being passed as a legitimate story.
If you think aforementioned story is "responsible journalism", you're either the dumbest person I've met on slashdot in a while, and that includes the APK spamming ACs, or you're a liar with an agenda. Either way, do everyone a favour and go fuck yourself.
" I can live without any new sources that are publicly traded corporations." = retarded Fox News viewer making bullshit excuses for his treason.
Pretty sure FNC is owned by some sort of News Corporation.
Quite famously, Fox News was owned by Rupert Murdoch (part of the group owned by and under Rupert Murdoch's control, News Corp). So, no: the Fox News you love to hate was not a publicly traded corporation; it was a private corporation owned by a foreign billionaire.
As of this coming June, though, Fox Corporation will be a separate entity (as a result of the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney).
It's still pretty much owned by the Murdoch family, though, since they own 39% of the voting power in the corporation, and Murdoch is still at the head (although now sharing power with his son Lachlan).
The world would be a better place if publicly traded corporations had no involvement with politics.
You think it would be a better place if private billionaires owned all the news?
I see no remaining value to old-school news companies. They've all become propaganda outlets for one party or another, and stopped pretending otherwise a couple years ago.
With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say, And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet - there's a stubborn effect of believing broadcasts and print, no matter how often we're reminded it's all lies.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
....With the internet, you don't have to be a big publisher to have broad reach. You just need to have something interesting to say
Yep: "interesting". Crazy? Sure, that works, long as it's "interesting".
True? Unnecessary.
And I think people's BS filters work better on the internet
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa.
You make joke, yes?
All the evidence is to the contrary.
The studies showing this aren't controversial.
Yes, not only are these studies not controversial, they don't exist at all!
Try this one: http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-...