The economist's big idea is that the "invisible hand" of market forces will lead us to an ideal world. In this case, someone's idea of an ideal world is one where you can drink soda in moderate amounts, but not to the extent that you ruin your health.
When letting the market decide things doesn't result in the desired effect (who's desire?), instead of saying that this isn't something markets solve, economists call it a "market failure", and suggest ways that the state could intervene to make the market work again.
This isn't always stupid. Commodity markets with healthy competition do tend towards a fair market price. Insider trading can break that system (market failure). Laws against insider trading allow the market to work properly.
But sometimes it is stupid. Sometimes if you want to control people, you just have to grit your teeth and admit that it's your aim.
Who gives a damn about "Lily Allen, George Michael, and Sandie Shaw" in the first place? Who are they?
They're well known singers from the 2000s, 1980s and 1960s respectively. The vast majority of British people would recognise their names.
I would assume the newspaper writers took a look at the list of signatures and picked out what they felt were the three most recognisable names given their intended readership.
Lets take the closest physical thing to the music industry, a book store. I can go into almost any book store and read the entire thing if I so please. Guess what? They don't come running over to you screaming "thief!" and press charges when you do that. In fact, many book stores actually -encourage- reading by providing comfortable chairs and tables for reading and having coffee shops so you can drink coffee while you read.
But they wouldn't let you walk out carrying a book without paying. I suspect you'd get booted out of the shop pretty quickly if you took a laptop and a scanner in and started scanning their books.
Bookshops encourage reading in their shops because they anticipate that having read a couple of chapters, you'll want to buy the book and take it home. Further, they've found that by providing that kind of atmosphere, they're able to sell books more effectively than a competing bookshop that doesn't.
Record shops provide listening stations for exactly the same reason.
It's entirely different from the practice of copying a piece of music then listening to it as often as you like, wherever you like, for evermore.
That's really their money machine, the marketing. It has nothing to do with the bands being good in alot of cases (Cases in point: Jonas Brothers, Britney Spears, and a million others). They can just sell the bejesus out of their product.
I happen to think that...Baby One More Time and Toxic are among the greatest pop records ever created. But our subjective views on the quality of music is not really relevant here.
Your point is well taken though. The marketing is inherent to the product, it's creative and it's expensive. To sell 1,000,000 albums, you would expect to spend $1,000,000 or more (figures gleefuly plucked from the air, but you get the idea) on image consultancy, design, photography, promotional travel, buying lunches for TV execs and showbiz columnists, etc.
When you bought an album, you weren't just buying the music. That was just the tangible part of the product that you could actually walk into a shop and acquire. But what you really got was a piece of the entire construction - dress, attitude, style, soundbites, scandal, whatever.
A big chunk of the money that faciliates all that, traditionally came from album sales. Yes, there's also broadcast royalties, concert tickets, sheet music royalties etc., but album sales is stil a big chunk.
Now, many of us may agree that the world would be no worse off if we lost the extravagant starmaking marketing machine, and therefore didn't need albums to sell millions in order to fund it. But I'd argue that in fact millions of people like to have a world with mass-market celebrities.
And at least by understanding that, we can see where the music industry is coming from. If we say "you can't sell albums any more" (since if copyright restrictions were lifted, no rational customer would pay for a copy), the way they've financed the creation of music for the past 50 years collapses.
The question is whether we should care about that or just let it go ahead and collapse. Me, I'm not sure. I'm having fun watching.
Newspapers need to realize that the readers are the product, and they're trying to sell that to the advertisers.
Newspapers know that. Newspapers also know that paying readers are worth more to advertisers than non-paying readers - because the fact that they're paying shows they're "engaged".
Perhaps online news sources need to prove to advertisers that their readership is engaged in different ways. For example, a lively commenting community would be one way.
I only really know about British papers, of which the broadsheets (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, etc.) are the ones with mature comment and analysis. Which one's best is a matter of personal preference.
The trashy papers also have opinion, commentary, and an editorial stance of course. It's just that it's all a bit more rabble rousing and shrill.
As far as I'm concerned, since all the papers get the same basic raw material (news), it's how they comment on it that gives them a competitive edge.
When journalists make insipid and banal attempts at commentary and analysis, they usually get it wrong.
But a good newspaper's best part is the "Comment and Analysis" section. Otherwise all it does is paraphrase Reuters. Obviously a paper that does a bad job of it doesn't deserve to sell.
If the newspapers are raking it in on the flash ads, why aren't their stocks over $100 a share?
Because they're part of a supposedly free market, meaning they have to charge market rate for ads, or their ad customers will go to their competitors instead.
Please talk me through how, when for years the general public has shown that it's prepared to pay for sensationalism on paper, paid digital content will lead to the death of sensationalism?
The BBC is the left-wing propaganda arm of the British state;
You call that left wing? Jeez.
it doesn't drop its left-wing slant even when a right-wing government is in power
Since we haven't had a left wing government since 1983, it's pretty hard to make a judgement on that.
What is clear, though, is that the BBC is entirely separate from the government. The government authorises the BBC to collect a TV licence fee, on condition that it sticks to its charter, and there the links end. There's plenty of people who kick up a stink at the slightest hint of the BBC becoming a government mouthpiece.
But newspapers are run by ad people. They think more ads = more revenue even if you're driving your readers away. Yes, they're ALL that dumb.
So either it's not working, in which case they'll go out of business and they won't be mourned...... or it is working, and more ads = more revenue is actually true.
The more in your face they make it, the harder we readers concentrate on ignoring it, and when it gets too outrageous we put in ad blockers. ADVERTISING SHOULD NOT MOVE IN A PAGE YOU'RE TRYING TO READ. When I see a page of blinkey flashing twirley ads with two paragraphs per page, I know that the site is pure shit and is only there to garner cash for some greedhead. They're lucky if they get me to read the first page.
Market forces should solve this one. If it's not working, it'll change until it works better.
However, if it is working (that is, the publisher and the advertiser are still making profits), then your individual irritation is not relevant.
The problem with news is that it is an experiential good meaning you can't determine it's value in advance.
Indeed, and while we get over this with periodicals by using past performance as a guide, I'd say that this only works if you look at whole edition of a newspaper as a bundle, rather than looking article by article.
If I loved one Guardian article, I don't think that's a reliable indicator that I'll love some arbitrary Guardian article from today's edition.
Rather, I've found in the past that a typical copy of the Guardian (GBP 1.20) contains a a bunch of headlines I can skim through to get a general idea of what's going on in the world; three or four news articles I want to read in full; maybe one in-depth double page spread I can get my teeth into; some lightweight commentary; a letters page; reviews; a crossword and sudoku if I'm bored later on.
If you unbundled those and tried to charge for the separately, I don't think it would work. I happily pay the cover price for a newspaper knowing that I'll skip more than half of it. But I don't know which half until after I've paid, and neither does the editor.
While a free site will get a lot of visitors (most of whom are merely casual browser types) as soon as they start charging even the slightest amount you can expect their readership to fall off dramatically. Why is that?
I see you've been reading Chris Anderson:)
It's an absolutely valid point. But the other side of the coin is that when you charge even the slightest amount, and your readership drops, the readers who remain are demonstrably committed to your subject matter. Advertisers love that kind of audience. If you sell handlebars, would you rather pay $1000 to reach 100,000 web users who skim past bikemag.com for free, or $1000 to reach 10,000 web users who are so into bikes that they pay $1/month for premium access to the site?
(Yes - this means you have to define a premium service where "no ads" isn't the selling point)
People are, and always have, paid for the bandwidth associated with getting content from its producers to its consumers. Not for the content, but for the bandwidth. Simple as that.
Simple, but not true.
The numbers in what follows probably aren't accurate, but the spirit is.
If I pay $2 for a newspaper at my local shop, and the newspaper gets another $1 from advertisers based on the expectation that I may glance at their ads, that's $3 in total being paid for the newspaper.
$1.00 goes to the shop, which will cover overheads such as heat and light for the shop, staff costs, distribution, as well as some profit for the shop. $1.00 covers materials, printing, etc - manufacturing costs.
All of the above is "bandwidth" as you put it.
The remaining $1 *is* for the content. That stuff doesn't just pop into existence. People take payment for creating it, and that money comes from somewhere.
I repeat - the numbers could be wrong, but the spirit is right.
People have always paid for the combination of content and bandwidth.
Now that we pay separately for bandwidth - our ISP subs - we should expect our content to come cheaper, but not free. I don't think charging money directly for news content is practical. But as previously, is can be funded by ads, or by other models. At the end of the day, someone has to be spending money, and that money has to reach the journalists.
That's the thing -- we've NEVER paid for content, we pay for its container, whether it be a book, a newspaper, an album, or a DVD.
I kind of sympathise with your angle, but it needs firming up. A blank notepad is cheaper than a novel or a newspaper. A DVD-R is cheaper than a DVD. So we *are* paying for content.... and the content is far from being free to create.
Yet, to me at least, the content is less valuable without the packaging. A printed book is worth more to me than a PDF, simply because I can read it in more comfort. It's the combination of content and format that has value.
The problem comes as digital formats become more ubiquitous. If I owned an eBook reader - a better one than is currently available - then possibly a digital copy of a book or newspaper would be worth more to me than a printed book. This is already happening for music: lots of people actually prefer to have MP3s instead of CDs.
If digital distribution is the future, *and* we somehow believe that digital copies should not be paid for, then how does content get financed? I don't know the answer. I'm fascinated in seeing how things work out.
For news, at least, I think that competition will push consumer prices towards zero, such that pay sites won't be able to compete.
On the contrary, I want news -- instead of this ridiculous sensationalism. And I don't want it filtered through anybody in terms of opinions.
In which case you want a Reuters feed, or similar.
Analysis, opinion, these are value-adds. Many people *don't* just want to know what's happened. They want to know what other people think about it - people who are paid to be knowledgable, or merely entertainingly opinionated or outrageous.
Ridiculous sensationalism isn't to my taste -- but lots of people seem prepared to pay for it.
Re:Is this a Star Raiders clone/enhancement?
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Star Raiders was sprite based. Elite uses 3D vector graphics. Plus the space combat is not the core of the game -- it's merely an obstacle to trading.
If this is cheap and easy enough, it'd make a very handy always-on "now playing" display for Spotify/iTunes/XBMC/whatever. Most of these have hooks you could hack something onto to update a display.
Slashdot Mirror
Serious question: what if 300 pound women is your thing?
The economist's big idea is that the "invisible hand" of market forces will lead us to an ideal world. In this case, someone's idea of an ideal world is one where you can drink soda in moderate amounts, but not to the extent that you ruin your health.
When letting the market decide things doesn't result in the desired effect (who's desire?), instead of saying that this isn't something markets solve, economists call it a "market failure", and suggest ways that the state could intervene to make the market work again.
This isn't always stupid. Commodity markets with healthy competition do tend towards a fair market price. Insider trading can break that system (market failure). Laws against insider trading allow the market to work properly.
But sometimes it is stupid. Sometimes if you want to control people, you just have to grit your teeth and admit that it's your aim.
Who gives a damn about "Lily Allen, George Michael, and Sandie Shaw" in the first place? Who are they?
They're well known singers from the 2000s, 1980s and 1960s respectively. The vast majority of British people would recognise their names.
I would assume the newspaper writers took a look at the list of signatures and picked out what they felt were the three most recognisable names given their intended readership.
Lets take the closest physical thing to the music industry, a book store. I can go into almost any book store and read the entire thing if I so please. Guess what? They don't come running over to you screaming "thief!" and press charges when you do that. In fact, many book stores actually -encourage- reading by providing comfortable chairs and tables for reading and having coffee shops so you can drink coffee while you read.
But they wouldn't let you walk out carrying a book without paying. I suspect you'd get booted out of the shop pretty quickly if you took a laptop and a scanner in and started scanning their books.
Bookshops encourage reading in their shops because they anticipate that having read a couple of chapters, you'll want to buy the book and take it home. Further, they've found that by providing that kind of atmosphere, they're able to sell books more effectively than a competing bookshop that doesn't.
Record shops provide listening stations for exactly the same reason.
It's entirely different from the practice of copying a piece of music then listening to it as often as you like, wherever you like, for evermore.
That's really their money machine, the marketing. It has nothing to do with the bands being good in alot of cases (Cases in point: Jonas Brothers, Britney Spears, and a million others). They can just sell the bejesus out of their product.
I happen to think that ...Baby One More Time and Toxic are among the greatest pop records ever created. But our subjective views on the quality of music is not really relevant here.
Your point is well taken though. The marketing is inherent to the product, it's creative and it's expensive. To sell 1,000,000 albums, you would expect to spend $1,000,000 or more (figures gleefuly plucked from the air, but you get the idea) on image consultancy, design, photography, promotional travel, buying lunches for TV execs and showbiz columnists, etc.
When you bought an album, you weren't just buying the music. That was just the tangible part of the product that you could actually walk into a shop and acquire. But what you really got was a piece of the entire construction - dress, attitude, style, soundbites, scandal, whatever.
A big chunk of the money that faciliates all that, traditionally came from album sales. Yes, there's also broadcast royalties, concert tickets, sheet music royalties etc., but album sales is stil a big chunk.
Now, many of us may agree that the world would be no worse off if we lost the extravagant starmaking marketing machine, and therefore didn't need albums to sell millions in order to fund it. But I'd argue that in fact millions of people like to have a world with mass-market celebrities.
And at least by understanding that, we can see where the music industry is coming from. If we say "you can't sell albums any more" (since if copyright restrictions were lifted, no rational customer would pay for a copy), the way they've financed the creation of music for the past 50 years collapses.
The question is whether we should care about that or just let it go ahead and collapse. Me, I'm not sure. I'm having fun watching.
How exactly are BT's "legal" customers penalized by downloaders?
<devil's advocate>
Bandwidth on contentious ADSL connections, used up by the neighbour's Bittorrent.
</devil's advocate>
Anybody else here grow up during the 70s? 80s? 90s? Anybody else find the idea of Apple being any kind of force in gaming utterly bizarre?
What about Apple being a force in the portable music player market (from an 80s perpective, that's "competing with the Walkman")?
What about Apple making telephone handsets?
Newspapers need to realize that the readers are the product, and they're trying to sell that to the advertisers.
Newspapers know that. Newspapers also know that paying readers are worth more to advertisers than non-paying readers - because the fact that they're paying shows they're "engaged".
Perhaps online news sources need to prove to advertisers that their readership is engaged in different ways. For example, a lively commenting community would be one way.
I only really know about British papers, of which the broadsheets (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, etc.) are the ones with mature comment and analysis. Which one's best is a matter of personal preference.
The trashy papers also have opinion, commentary, and an editorial stance of course. It's just that it's all a bit more rabble rousing and shrill.
As far as I'm concerned, since all the papers get the same basic raw material (news), it's how they comment on it that gives them a competitive edge.
When journalists make insipid and banal attempts at commentary and analysis, they usually get it wrong.
But a good newspaper's best part is the "Comment and Analysis" section. Otherwise all it does is paraphrase Reuters. Obviously a paper that does a bad job of it doesn't deserve to sell.
If the newspapers are raking it in on the flash ads, why aren't their stocks over $100 a share?
Because they're part of a supposedly free market, meaning they have to charge market rate for ads, or their ad customers will go to their competitors instead.
Is that meant to contradict what I said?
Publishers going under was the first block of my if/then/else.
Please talk me through how, when for years the general public has shown that it's prepared to pay for sensationalism on paper, paid digital content will lead to the death of sensationalism?
The BBC is the left-wing propaganda arm of the British state;
You call that left wing? Jeez.
it doesn't drop its left-wing slant even when a right-wing government is in power
Since we haven't had a left wing government since 1983, it's pretty hard to make a judgement on that.
What is clear, though, is that the BBC is entirely separate from the government. The government authorises the BBC to collect a TV licence fee, on condition that it sticks to its charter, and there the links end. There's plenty of people who kick up a stink at the slightest hint of the BBC becoming a government mouthpiece.
But newspapers are run by ad people. They think more ads = more revenue even if you're driving your readers away. Yes, they're ALL that dumb.
So either it's not working, in which case they'll go out of business and they won't be mourned... ... or it is working, and more ads = more revenue is actually true.
The more in your face they make it, the harder we readers concentrate on ignoring it, and when it gets too outrageous we put in ad blockers. ADVERTISING SHOULD NOT MOVE IN A PAGE YOU'RE TRYING TO READ. When I see a page of blinkey flashing twirley ads with two paragraphs per page, I know that the site is pure shit and is only there to garner cash for some greedhead. They're lucky if they get me to read the first page.
Market forces should solve this one. If it's not working, it'll change until it works better.
However, if it is working (that is, the publisher and the advertiser are still making profits), then your individual irritation is not relevant.
The problem with news is that it is an experiential good meaning you can't determine it's value in advance.
Indeed, and while we get over this with periodicals by using past performance as a guide, I'd say that this only works if you look at whole edition of a newspaper as a bundle, rather than looking article by article.
If I loved one Guardian article, I don't think that's a reliable indicator that I'll love some arbitrary Guardian article from today's edition.
Rather, I've found in the past that a typical copy of the Guardian (GBP 1.20) contains a a bunch of headlines I can skim through to get a general idea of what's going on in the world; three or four news articles I want to read in full; maybe one in-depth double page spread I can get my teeth into; some lightweight commentary; a letters page; reviews; a crossword and sudoku if I'm bored later on.
If you unbundled those and tried to charge for the separately, I don't think it would work. I happily pay the cover price for a newspaper knowing that I'll skip more than half of it. But I don't know which half until after I've paid, and neither does the editor.
While a free site will get a lot of visitors (most of whom are merely casual browser types) as soon as they start charging even the slightest amount you can expect their readership to fall off dramatically. Why is that?
I see you've been reading Chris Anderson :)
It's an absolutely valid point. But the other side of the coin is that when you charge even the slightest amount, and your readership drops, the readers who remain are demonstrably committed to your subject matter. Advertisers love that kind of audience. If you sell handlebars, would you rather pay $1000 to reach 100,000 web users who skim past bikemag.com for free, or $1000 to reach 10,000 web users who are so into bikes that they pay $1/month for premium access to the site?
(Yes - this means you have to define a premium service where "no ads" isn't the selling point)
People are, and always have, paid for the bandwidth associated with getting content from its producers to its consumers. Not for the content, but for the bandwidth. Simple as that.
Simple, but not true.
The numbers in what follows probably aren't accurate, but the spirit is.
If I pay $2 for a newspaper at my local shop, and the newspaper gets another $1 from advertisers based on the expectation that I may glance at their ads, that's $3 in total being paid for the newspaper.
$1.00 goes to the shop, which will cover overheads such as heat and light for the shop, staff costs, distribution, as well as some profit for the shop.
$1.00 covers materials, printing, etc - manufacturing costs.
All of the above is "bandwidth" as you put it.
The remaining $1 *is* for the content. That stuff doesn't just pop into existence. People take payment for creating it, and that money comes from somewhere.
I repeat - the numbers could be wrong, but the spirit is right.
People have always paid for the combination of content and bandwidth.
Now that we pay separately for bandwidth - our ISP subs - we should expect our content to come cheaper, but not free. I don't think charging money directly for news content is practical. But as previously, is can be funded by ads, or by other models. At the end of the day, someone has to be spending money, and that money has to reach the journalists.
Advertising on the internet simply does not work
Got a source for that?
An awful lot of people seem to be (spending|earning) money on it.
That's the thing -- we've NEVER paid for content, we pay for its container, whether it be a book, a newspaper, an album, or a DVD.
I kind of sympathise with your angle, but it needs firming up. A blank notepad is cheaper than a novel or a newspaper. A DVD-R is cheaper than a DVD. So we *are* paying for content. ... and the content is far from being free to create.
Yet, to me at least, the content is less valuable without the packaging. A printed book is worth more to me than a PDF, simply because I can read it in more comfort. It's the combination of content and format that has value.
The problem comes as digital formats become more ubiquitous. If I owned an eBook reader - a better one than is currently available - then possibly a digital copy of a book or newspaper would be worth more to me than a printed book. This is already happening for music: lots of people actually prefer to have MP3s instead of CDs.
If digital distribution is the future, *and* we somehow believe that digital copies should not be paid for, then how does content get financed? I don't know the answer. I'm fascinated in seeing how things work out.
For news, at least, I think that competition will push consumer prices towards zero, such that pay sites won't be able to compete.
On the contrary, I want news -- instead of this ridiculous sensationalism. And I don't want it filtered through anybody in terms of opinions.
In which case you want a Reuters feed, or similar.
Analysis, opinion, these are value-adds. Many people *don't* just want to know what's happened. They want to know what other people think about it - people who are paid to be knowledgable, or merely entertainingly opinionated or outrageous.
Ridiculous sensationalism isn't to my taste -- but lots of people seem prepared to pay for it.
Star Raiders was sprite based. Elite uses 3D vector graphics. Plus the space combat is not the core of the game -- it's merely an obstacle to trading.
If this is cheap and easy enough, it'd make a very handy always-on "now playing" display for Spotify/iTunes/XBMC/whatever. Most of these have hooks you could hack something onto to update a display.
P.S. I don't think you really got the point of Fight Club.