The whole 'concerts and t-shirts' thing is bullshit, and only someone who has never worked in the music industry would suggest it.
It only applies to a certain kind of act, but it can and does work. Other kinds of act need to find the solution that works for them. But the point is still that a musician needs to find a way to monetise their skill -- not just demand that whatever it is they happen to do currently, gets them paid.
It is about as practical as suggesting computer games companies make their money from LAN parties and selling T-shirts.
... which probably wouldn't work. But the games industry has found ways to make money while giving away content. Look at the free MMOs, or the ad-supported casual Flash games.
The music is worth whatever the programmers, session drummers and sound engineers charge for it.
Or, it's worth whatever the programmers, session drummers and sound engineers clients/employers pay them for it. One side of the relationship wants to push the price up, the other wants to push it down, and somehow they meet in the middle.
It's up to whoever hired them how (or whether) they monetise the end result. If they want to give away the music, in order to promote touring/merchandise, that's up to them.
Note, I'm not talking about piracy. I'm talking about a business model that includes giving away content.
So there are other business models for content. You can become recognized as an expert on X, and then people interested in X will read about you. However, if you try to start selling advertisements or referrals for X, you start to lose credibility.
For a sufficiently broad X, I think there's plenty of precedents that say you needn't lose credibility (at least, in the eyes of enough readers to stay popular).
'Home Cinema World' is an authority on home cinema, and carries oodles of ads for home cinema products.
'Runner's World' carries adverts for training shoes, heart monitors, dietary supplements etc., and is still considered credible enough to maintain a readership.
Now, you could argue in both cases that these magazines pander to their advertisers -- you won't get a hi-fi mag doing an expose of the bullshit fed to you by cable manufacturers, nor are you likely to see Runner's World pushing the view that highly padded shoes do more harm than good.
But the important thing is that not enough people are put off by that potential conflict, that the publications fail in the marketplace.
Except they are basing the costs on their expenses, not on the sales potential.
Do you have a source for that?
Basic guesses about how the world works, suggest that Chuck Palahniuk and JK Rowling pay an agent to negotiate as high a price as possible for publishing rights, and that that figure has pretty much nothing to do with expenses.
Well, you're off-topic, and who knows, I might get downmodded for reponding to you.
You're making a similar objection to that made by some programmers back when free software was a new idea. "How will programmers make a living?". The answer to this is that the world does not owe programmers, or session drummers, or sound engineers a living. Any more than horseshoe manufacturers were owed a living when other forms of transports overtook the horse.
As it happens, programmers found ways to get paid for writing free software. In all likelihood musicians will continue to find ways to get paid for making music - but if they don't, that's just a free market making decisions about the value of musicianship. I gather that recording studios are closing down all over the place -- that's a result of technology moving on and home studios being much more viable.
The upshot of it all is, there's some level of renumeration that a given individual will expect in exchange for a day playing drums or doing studio engineering. If what people are prepared to pay for that doesn't match, then you do something else for the money.
Judging by the typical clickthru rates for banner ads [...]
Clue: not all ads are about clickthroughs, and not all advertisers pay by the clickthrough.
For example, if you visit Eurogamer.net right now, the front page is dominated by an ad for Need for Speed: Shift. You *can* click through that, and who knows, Eurogamer might get an extra fraction of a penny if you do so. But if you don't click through, you've still seen it. You've become aware that there's a new NFS game "in stores now"; you've seen a shot of a big shiny car.
I don't know for sure, but I've a good idea that Electronic Arts aren't *primarily* paying Eurogamer per clickthrough. They may be paying a fixed fee based on the site's historic visit rates, or they may be paying per exposure.
Clickthroughs are a good model for stuff like Google ads - for small sites that don't have the resources to run an ad sales division. But the big boys sell ads directly, and focus on views rather than clickthroughs.
After all, advertisers pay for displays on billboards, buses, phone booths, sports sidelines. You can't click through any of those.
If an advertiser believes that half a site's viewers are using adblock, they'll want to pay half as much for ads. That stands to reason.
Wikinews' current top story: "Suicide bomber kills 30 in northwest Pakistan" is sourced from Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Both commercial news gathering organisations.
It's a great aggregation and distillation service, but it's not a replacement for traditional newspaper news gathering.
The internet has given every user a best research tool.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff that's not on the internet, and there will continue to be. Getting real factual content will always involve getting off your arse, and spending time, well, investigating.
Some journalists make a full time job of it. To do it as an amateur, well, you'd have to be independently wealthy I guess. So what happens to all those people with a talent for investigation, who are not independently wealthy?
BTW I'm not just talking about uncovering scandals here. It could be something as simple as spending a few weeks observing a public school or a hospital, interviewing stakeholders, and writing an article with your findings.
TweetFreak69: RT @HeadlineBoy app. Mexico City is in quarantine with some kind of superbug
... with what (quality) newspapers sell. Detailed information, from eye witnesses, experts, and yes, biased yet entertaining opinion columnists.
Sometimes (often, even) newspapers screw it up, but when they succeed, it's better than what amateurs could achieve, and I for one want continued access to that sort of material.
OTOH I don't think charging the consumer for it at the point of access is a winning formula.
Or you could just go to the source with lots of ads and great journalism...without the ads thanks to Adblock
Hooray!
And if enough of us did it, the advertisers would give up, the business model would fail, and the pay sites would win. (Or some other business model we've not dreamed up yet).
You're suggesting that the Boston Globe sells "ISP + news" for cheaper than Comcast's "just ISP" service? How can they achieve that? If Comcast's rates are too high, why aren't rivals already undercutting them?
Would the Globe also close off access to their site from rival ISPs? Doesn't that undermine their advertising revenue from all those readers?
The price is in no way based on content, it is based the same way an OEM prices their products.
If I understand your point correctly, then the OEM's product *is* the content.
So a novelist charges $x for the text of a novel, the shelf price of the paperback reflects that. The publisher is supposed to recognise quality(*), and what the novelist gets to charge accordingly. This is exactly what Paul Graham seems to be saying doesn't happen.
(*) where "quality" actually means "consumer sales potential".
News is cheap. You don't need a whole website for 300 words of text and maybe a link to an image hosting site or youtube.
Spreading news is cheap. Gathering news is expensive.
Hypothetical example: how much might you expect to pay someone to spend 3 months undercover in North Korea, that they might write a double page spread on the subject? Remember you need to find someone with an engaging writing style, an insightful eye, the ability to go indetected, the guts to take on the danger, you need to pay their traveling expenses etc.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news
This is a false dichotomy. It's not a clear cut choice between "paying for content" versus "news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort". There are plenty of ways to turn news gathering into a profitable exercise, other than charging the consumer directly. The big question is, which method provides the sweet spot that suits consumers best, without the business going bust? It *might* turn out to be a model where the consumer pays directly. I suspect it'll be some other model - be it advertising/sponsorship, patronage, tip jars, merchandising, whatever.
In the world of print magazines and newspapers, cover price is not much of an income stream. However, charging for the paper, or even better having plenty of paying subscribers, allows you to charge more for advertisers. It allows you to say "look, our readers are not just people who pick up a free rag on the bus, glance at it then throw it away. They're motivated, engaged readers who are so committed to our publication that they spend money on it.".
But, on the web, you can keep server logs to see how engaged readers are - so I guess there are better ways to convince an advertiser that ads on a particular site are worth paying more for.
And yes, there are plenty of other ways to bring in money. AFAIK tip jars have never been that much of a success. Sponsorship can work (a special kind of advertising), as can patronage (rich philanthropists keeping a publication going for the kudos it brings them)
The way investigative journalism has been paid for in the past, must indicate that in a free market, consumers are willing to pay for it somehow. That is, (for example) the Washington Post's management believe that by spending money on investigative journalism, they can retain readership / gain new readership from the New York Times.
I *hope* that this principle continues in an online world. It might not be a matter of paying money for content. For example, however much you may hate advertising, you might be willing to go to a source with lots of ads and great journalism, rather than a site with no ads and crappy journalism.
Or, it might turn out that - however beneficial to society *I* might thing investigative journalism is - the market as a whole just doesn't think it's worth that much. That's markets.
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
Nonsense. Some paperback editions of out-of-copyright works sell for £1. A new novel by a big literary figure fill sell for £9 in paperback, £18 in hardback (with the paperback released later; the hardback price is really a 'get it first' price). A trashy mass markey novel will cost £5 in paperback. A magazine rack book of romantic short stories costs £2.50. A technical book will cost upwards of £20.
These all cost approximately the same to print and distribute - and it's a tiny proportion of the price.
What you get in the capcha is the scanned word, plus some warping and obfuscation. Therefore if OCR advances to the point where it has no trouble with the original scan, it would still have trouble with the capcha.
Spammers already have a neat way around capchas -- they proxy them to people on porn and warez sites. If you ever fill in a capcha on such a site, you're probably helping a spambot out.
I think the problem is that I demand bright light.
I wouldn't choose to have a 60W bulb anywhere a 100W would be allowed. Hence, following your rule, I'd be looking for a "125W replacement", which I've not seen anywhere.
That's great, except that the conversation drifted to energy efficient lights you can buy today.
If there are LED based solutions intended to replace conventional 100W bulbs, I've not seen them.
I've used the most powerful LED GU10 downlighter replacements available, and they are significantly dimmer than 50W halogen, with visibly less spread. They made my kitchen gloomy.
Well, if you EVER need to use an AC, the LEDs are better.
I think the GP is British. Note that domestic AC is a very rare thing to have in the UK. You might wish you had one maybe 5 days of the year, if there's a heatwave.
OTOH, it's not unusual to have an electric fan, and they cost money to run too.
Unfortunately you are talking about the sort of bulbs designed to run in the warm south of China on 240V and instead to be a cheapskate they are being used at 110V where it is cold.
Actually I'm talking about brand name bulbs (probably Panasonic?) bought in a British supermarket which should therefore be expected to work in British conditions. Which is 230V, at temperatures somewhere around 20 degrees C (indoors).
I'd LOVE to use CFLs and LEDs exclusively. Every single one I've bought has significant drawbacks over a traditional bulb.
Tell me how to source a CFL that gets bright immediately, I'll do it (I'll be cross if I spend the money and you're wrong).
Show me an LED GU10 that's has the same brightness and spread as a halogen GU10, and I'll switch to those.
I want to be green. But I also want my lightbulbs to actually, you know, provide light.
Slashdot Mirror
we the little guys get shat upon all the time by marketers, advertisers, and corporations
Have you stopped to consider that some of the sites you're creaming content off by blocking their ads might belong to a "little guy"?
The whole 'concerts and t-shirts' thing is bullshit, and only someone who has never worked in the music industry would suggest it.
It only applies to a certain kind of act, but it can and does work. Other kinds of act need to find the solution that works for them. But the point is still that a musician needs to find a way to monetise their skill -- not just demand that whatever it is they happen to do currently, gets them paid.
It is about as practical as suggesting computer games companies make their money from LAN parties and selling T-shirts.
... which probably wouldn't work. But the games industry has found ways to make money while giving away content. Look at the free MMOs, or the ad-supported casual Flash games.
The music is worth whatever the programmers, session drummers and sound engineers charge for it.
Or, it's worth whatever the programmers, session drummers and sound engineers clients/employers pay them for it. One side of the relationship wants to push the price up, the other wants to push it down, and somehow they meet in the middle.
It's up to whoever hired them how (or whether) they monetise the end result. If they want to give away the music, in order to promote touring/merchandise, that's up to them.
Note, I'm not talking about piracy. I'm talking about a business model that includes giving away content.
So there are other business models for content. You can become recognized as an expert on X, and then people interested in X will read about you. However, if you try to start selling advertisements or referrals for X, you start to lose credibility.
For a sufficiently broad X, I think there's plenty of precedents that say you needn't lose credibility (at least, in the eyes of enough readers to stay popular).
'Home Cinema World' is an authority on home cinema, and carries oodles of ads for home cinema products.
'Runner's World' carries adverts for training shoes, heart monitors, dietary supplements etc., and is still considered credible enough to maintain a readership.
Now, you could argue in both cases that these magazines pander to their advertisers -- you won't get a hi-fi mag doing an expose of the bullshit fed to you by cable manufacturers, nor are you likely to see Runner's World pushing the view that highly padded shoes do more harm than good.
But the important thing is that not enough people are put off by that potential conflict, that the publications fail in the marketplace.
Except they are basing the costs on their expenses, not on the sales potential.
Do you have a source for that?
Basic guesses about how the world works, suggest that Chuck Palahniuk and JK Rowling pay an agent to negotiate as high a price as possible for publishing rights, and that that figure has pretty much nothing to do with expenses.
Well, you're off-topic, and who knows, I might get downmodded for reponding to you.
You're making a similar objection to that made by some programmers back when free software was a new idea. "How will programmers make a living?". The answer to this is that the world does not owe programmers, or session drummers, or sound engineers a living. Any more than horseshoe manufacturers were owed a living when other forms of transports overtook the horse.
As it happens, programmers found ways to get paid for writing free software. In all likelihood musicians will continue to find ways to get paid for making music - but if they don't, that's just a free market making decisions about the value of musicianship. I gather that recording studios are closing down all over the place -- that's a result of technology moving on and home studios being much more viable.
The upshot of it all is, there's some level of renumeration that a given individual will expect in exchange for a day playing drums or doing studio engineering. If what people are prepared to pay for that doesn't match, then you do something else for the money.
Judging by the typical clickthru rates for banner ads [...]
Clue: not all ads are about clickthroughs, and not all advertisers pay by the clickthrough.
For example, if you visit Eurogamer.net right now, the front page is dominated by an ad for Need for Speed: Shift. You *can* click through that, and who knows, Eurogamer might get an extra fraction of a penny if you do so. But if you don't click through, you've still seen it. You've become aware that there's a new NFS game "in stores now"; you've seen a shot of a big shiny car.
I don't know for sure, but I've a good idea that Electronic Arts aren't *primarily* paying Eurogamer per clickthrough. They may be paying a fixed fee based on the site's historic visit rates, or they may be paying per exposure.
Clickthroughs are a good model for stuff like Google ads - for small sites that don't have the resources to run an ad sales division. But the big boys sell ads directly, and focus on views rather than clickthroughs.
After all, advertisers pay for displays on billboards, buses, phone booths, sports sidelines. You can't click through any of those.
If an advertiser believes that half a site's viewers are using adblock, they'll want to pay half as much for ads. That stands to reason.
Wikinews' current top story: "Suicide bomber kills 30 in northwest Pakistan" is sourced from Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Both commercial news gathering organisations.
It's a great aggregation and distillation service, but it's not a replacement for traditional newspaper news gathering.
The internet has given every user a best research tool.
There's a lot of fascinating stuff that's not on the internet, and there will continue to be. Getting real factual content will always involve getting off your arse, and spending time, well, investigating.
Some journalists make a full time job of it. To do it as an amateur, well, you'd have to be independently wealthy I guess. So what happens to all those people with a talent for investigation, who are not independently wealthy?
BTW I'm not just talking about uncovering scandals here. It could be something as simple as spending a few weeks observing a public school or a hospital, interviewing stakeholders, and writing an article with your findings.
You wouldn't have found out about Watergate or similar cases by Twitter.
You probably would. But crucially, that tweet would contain a URL pointing to a mainstream news site.
Journalist gathers news. Newspaper distributes news. Word of mouth (or tweet of Twitter) spreads awareness of news.
I think you're confusing "news":
TweetFreak69: RT @HeadlineBoy app. Mexico City is in quarantine with some kind of superbug
... with what (quality) newspapers sell. Detailed information, from eye witnesses, experts, and yes, biased yet entertaining opinion columnists.
Sometimes (often, even) newspapers screw it up, but when they succeed, it's better than what amateurs could achieve, and I for one want continued access to that sort of material.
OTOH I don't think charging the consumer for it at the point of access is a winning formula.
Or you could just go to the source with lots of ads and great journalism...without the ads thanks to Adblock
Hooray!
And if enough of us did it, the advertisers would give up, the business model would fail, and the pay sites would win. (Or some other business model we've not dreamed up yet).
It doesn't make sense.
You're suggesting that the Boston Globe sells "ISP + news" for cheaper than Comcast's "just ISP" service? How can they achieve that? If Comcast's rates are too high, why aren't rivals already undercutting them?
Would the Globe also close off access to their site from rival ISPs? Doesn't that undermine their advertising revenue from all those readers?
The price is in no way based on content, it is based the same way an OEM prices their products.
If I understand your point correctly, then the OEM's product *is* the content.
So a novelist charges $x for the text of a novel, the shelf price of the paperback reflects that. The publisher is supposed to recognise quality(*), and what the novelist gets to charge accordingly. This is exactly what Paul Graham seems to be saying doesn't happen.
(*) where "quality" actually means "consumer sales potential".
News is cheap. You don't need a whole website for 300 words of text and maybe a link to an image hosting site or youtube.
Spreading news is cheap. Gathering news is expensive.
Hypothetical example: how much might you expect to pay someone to spend 3 months undercover in North Korea, that they might write a double page spread on the subject? Remember you need to find someone with an engaging writing style, an insightful eye, the ability to go indetected, the guts to take on the danger, you need to pay their traveling expenses etc.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news
This is a false dichotomy. It's not a clear cut choice between "paying for content" versus "news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort". There are plenty of ways to turn news gathering into a profitable exercise, other than charging the consumer directly. The big question is, which method provides the sweet spot that suits consumers best, without the business going bust? It *might* turn out to be a model where the consumer pays directly. I suspect it'll be some other model - be it advertising/sponsorship, patronage, tip jars, merchandising, whatever.
In the world of print magazines and newspapers, cover price is not much of an income stream. However, charging for the paper, or even better having plenty of paying subscribers, allows you to charge more for advertisers. It allows you to say "look, our readers are not just people who pick up a free rag on the bus, glance at it then throw it away. They're motivated, engaged readers who are so committed to our publication that they spend money on it.".
But, on the web, you can keep server logs to see how engaged readers are - so I guess there are better ways to convince an advertiser that ads on a particular site are worth paying more for.
And yes, there are plenty of other ways to bring in money. AFAIK tip jars have never been that much of a success. Sponsorship can work (a special kind of advertising), as can patronage (rich philanthropists keeping a publication going for the kudos it brings them)
The way investigative journalism has been paid for in the past, must indicate that in a free market, consumers are willing to pay for it somehow. That is, (for example) the Washington Post's management believe that by spending money on investigative journalism, they can retain readership / gain new readership from the New York Times.
I *hope* that this principle continues in an online world. It might not be a matter of paying money for content. For example, however much you may hate advertising, you might be willing to go to a source with lots of ads and great journalism, rather than a site with no ads and crappy journalism.
Or, it might turn out that - however beneficial to society *I* might thing investigative journalism is - the market as a whole just doesn't think it's worth that much. That's markets.
Paul Graham's essay:
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.
Nonsense. Some paperback editions of out-of-copyright works sell for £1. A new novel by a big literary figure fill sell for £9 in paperback, £18 in hardback (with the paperback released later; the hardback price is really a 'get it first' price). A trashy mass markey novel will cost £5 in paperback. A magazine rack book of romantic short stories costs £2.50. A technical book will cost upwards of £20.
These all cost approximately the same to print and distribute - and it's a tiny proportion of the price.
What you get in the capcha is the scanned word, plus some warping and obfuscation. Therefore if OCR advances to the point where it has no trouble with the original scan, it would still have trouble with the capcha.
Spammers already have a neat way around capchas -- they proxy them to people on porn and warez sites. If you ever fill in a capcha on such a site, you're probably helping a spambot out.
I think the problem is that I demand bright light.
I wouldn't choose to have a 60W bulb anywhere a 100W would be allowed. Hence, following your rule, I'd be looking for a "125W replacement", which I've not seen anywhere.
That's great, except that the conversation drifted to energy efficient lights you can buy today.
If there are LED based solutions intended to replace conventional 100W bulbs, I've not seen them.
I've used the most powerful LED GU10 downlighter replacements available, and they are significantly dimmer than 50W halogen, with visibly less spread. They made my kitchen gloomy.
Well, if you EVER need to use an AC, the LEDs are better.
I think the GP is British. Note that domestic AC is a very rare thing to have in the UK. You might wish you had one maybe 5 days of the year, if there's a heatwave.
OTOH, it's not unusual to have an electric fan, and they cost money to run too.
Not in the last 10 years though, and not even with the £1 Asda bulbs in the last 5 years.
Either you're not as sensitive to dim light as I am, or you're deluding yourself, or I've been really unlucky with my choices.
I've bought what seemed to be the best in Tesco, in the last few months, and found them to be dim for a significant period after switching on.
Unfortunately you are talking about the sort of bulbs designed to run in the warm south of China on 240V and instead to be a cheapskate they are being used at 110V where it is cold.
Actually I'm talking about brand name bulbs (probably Panasonic?) bought in a British supermarket which should therefore be expected to work in British conditions. Which is 230V, at temperatures somewhere around 20 degrees C (indoors).
I'd LOVE to use CFLs and LEDs exclusively. Every single one I've bought has significant drawbacks over a traditional bulb.
Tell me how to source a CFL that gets bright immediately, I'll do it (I'll be cross if I spend the money and you're wrong).
Show me an LED GU10 that's has the same brightness and spread as a halogen GU10, and I'll switch to those.
I want to be green. But I also want my lightbulbs to actually, you know, provide light.