The advertising industry uses the term "publisher" for anyone who operates a website. Even a website offering its text under a license for free cultural works, such as Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange network, is considered a "publisher".
It's not the amount* as much as needing to whip out the payment card in the first place. If you read three or fewer articles on a particular site per year, arriving at them from Google Search or Slashdot or whatever social network you use, how likely are you to pay $5.99 for a year's subscription and create yet another line in your password manager?
* Except that the payment method charges a transaction fee on the order of 30 cents.
It's annoying to quote you if you start a comment in the subject and finish it in the body.
In theory, many MPEG video codecs are structured like that. They have a "baseline profile", a "main profile", and a "high profile". But depending on the relationship among the patent encumbrances of the profiles, the higher profiles might not take off. Consider the example of arithmetic coding in JPEG. No popular encoder or decoder supported arithmetic coding because the expiration of its patent was so far after the release of JPEG and its JFIF container, and the bitrate saving at a given quality was not dramatic (about 5 to 10 percent over Huffman). By that time, more advanced lossy still photo codecs with royalty-free licensing, such as WebP (based on the intra coder of VP8), had become available.
And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Subscription websites, such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and closed-access academic journals, tend to rank consistently high in many of my Google Search queries. This goes double since October 2017 now that Google Search no longer imposes a cloaking penalty if a paywall is marked as such with JSON-LD.
For the most part, they become part of my "minus list". You know, the long, and growing, line of "-this -that -whatever -site:paywalled.crp" pasted onto every query.
How often do the terms in your minus list cause you to hit Google Search's limit of 32 terms per query? (Before 2005, it was 10 terms.)
Nor is my comment history the topic. So ad hominems aside:
Your comment appears to promote "regular ads that consist of text or an image" as an alternative to the script-driven ads responsible for the abuses that Google Chrome will block. For example, Daring Fireball runs "regular ads that consist of text or an image" and are hosted on Daring Fireball's server (source). But that model requires each publisher to staff an ad sales department in order to advertise the site's ad space to advertisers, and advertisers are likely to pay far less if they can verify only clicks, not views.
So let's say a publisher that doesn't get quite as many views as the Markdown documentation on Daring Fireball wants to switch from abusive ads to "regular ads that consist of text or an image." How would such a publisher go about marketing its ad space to advertisers in a cost-effective manner?
A service called Adult Check tried that business model in the late 1990s. But its "grown-ups can pay $10 per month for nice things" business model ran into two problems. The first was that the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine successfully sued Adult Check out of business when it was discovered that several publishers (website operators) accepting Adult Check had displayed infringing copies of photographs from Perfect 10. The second is that if different publishers are on different subscription aggregators, viewers are back to the same situation they're currently in.
Or buy the article piece-rate.
I fail to see how would such an "a la carte" model work. Payment processors charge on the order of 0.30 USD per transaction, which greatly exceeds the 0.01 to 0.05 USD asking price for a single article.
Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out.
The logistical difference between an advertiser and a subscription aggregator is that only the publisher, not the viewer, needs to establish a business relationship with the advertiser.
If no readers are willing to pay you for your article then maybe that says something about its market value and your business model.
If readers are willing to pay for one article but not 100, does that say the same thing?
I see at least three practical problems with Coinhive. First, if the viewer is viewing the article using a low-power ARM or Atom CPU, the viewer is unlikely to finish mining enough blocks to pay for one article view by the time the viewer finishes reading the article. Second, the Coinhive brand has been tainted by widespread installation of Coinhive on publishers' websites by intruders without the publisher's permission. Third, Coinhive relies on JavaScript, which some users (especially those who regularly read SoylentNews, Slashdot, or other more technical websites) disable by default as a means of blocking phishing, malware downloading, and other attacks on the browser.
I get paid because I am able to read documentation.
Would you still be able to do your job if you had to pay for access to said documentation? Or for help interpreting documentation, particularly to resolve discrepancies between the documentation and the behavior of the software or workarounds for functionality that the documentation acknowledges is missing?
Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.
With what source of money did the operators of said forums pay for hosting and moderation?
You are viewing the abstract for free. To read the rest, log in to your account or get your first week for 99 cents*
* Subscription requires a U.S. checking account, credit card, or PayPal account. Once the trial period concludes, you will be automatically billed at $9.99 per four weeks. Other restrictions apply.
My point is that after the web advertising market collapses, more of the top 10 search results will be paywalled than not. I have already begun to see this effect for some queries on Google Search.
or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.
It's amazing how much time this would give me back in my life.
What do you do for a living, and to what sources do you refer if you have a question about something? Would you prefer that, say, Server Fault and Photography Stack Exchange and Ask Ubuntu go out of business?
And I worry about what effect a worldwide shutdown of ad-supported sites would have on subscribers to home Internet access. Without ad-supported sites, there might not be enough demand for home Internet access to allow home ISPs to continue to offer Internet access at affordable rates.
I can see two ways that the Chrome team might consider it "technically correct (the best kind of correct)" not to block preroll ads on Dailymotion and YouTube.
Ad Experience: Auto-playing Video Ads with Sound
The ad format's page states: "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before ('pre-roll') or during ('mid-roll') video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself." This alone would get sites like DM and YT off the hook until such time as CBA gets around to testing prerolls.
Ad Experience: Prestitial Ads with Countdown
The ad format's page states: "In desktop environments, prestitial ads that can be dismissed immediately did not fall beneath the initial Better Ads Standard for desktop." The illustrative animation on the page implies that this refers to a modal lightbox, not an ad confined to the video's own play area. So technically, the user can dismiss the ad by navigating to another video or by pausing it and scrolling to the comments.
Internet Explorer isn't available for any of the following operating systems:
Fedora CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux SUSE Debian GNU/Linux and Raspbian Ubuntu Linux Mint Slackware Android FreeBSD
What error message do you plan to display to users of Chrome or Chromium (which comes with an ad blocker) or Firefox (which blocks only those ads that fail to respect users' privacy) on those operating systems?
I fully agree on text articles and on the videos that some news sites have started to use to decorate their text articles. But preroll ads on sites like Dailymotion and YouTube are also "self-playing video ads". Would you prefer not to have access to Partner videos and claimed videos at all, especially outside those few countries where YouTube offers YouTube Red service?
So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.
At this point, I endorse ad blocking on subscription websites. The dynamic there differs greatly from websites offered to the public without charge, as you are the customer.
We noticed you're using an ad blocker. To continue to be able to bring you quality journalism, we kindly ask you to buy a subscription for full access to this website.
Blocking animation in ads isn't a very easy problem for two reasons. First, how would you distinguish desirable animations, such as the main video on the video's description page, from ads? Second, CSS can animate a JPEG.
People prefer ads to the other two possibilities: having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article, or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt. (I'm interested to read your fourth option.)
From the cited article: "Non-carrier sales in the US are less than 10% of the overall 170m a year total." This is, as they say on another forum, TRWTF.
My first paragraph was about Twitter, not Google. I did not intend to lump Google and Twitter into the same category. To the extent that my comment can be read as doing so, I apologize for not having made the distinction more clearly. I have no experience with SMS-based 2FA on Google to see whether or not it continues to send SMS even after TOTP has been set up, having only used the Google Play Services-based 2FA once I was made aware that it was available.
Now that I think about it, one advantage of a deal with a carrier is that it gets the handset into showrooms so that prospective customers can see and feel the product before buying it. Otherwise, a manufacturer has to fight for limited showroom space in general electronics chains, such as Walmart and Best Buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you have Uber or taxis where you live?
How much do 500 Uber or taxi rides to and from work, 5 times there and 5 times back per week for 50 weeks per year, take out of your paycheck?
I'm interested to read your proposal for a more service-like business model for journalism.
The advertising industry uses the term "publisher" for anyone who operates a website. Even a website offering its text under a license for free cultural works, such as Stack Overflow and the rest of the Stack Exchange network, is considered a "publisher".
I can get about 15 miles away where I live, and commute even further.
How long does that take you on the bus? Or how sweaty do you end up on a bicycle?
there was plenty of quality content on the Internet before ads came along
Nothing remotely like there is today. Either you didn't actually use the pre-ad Internet (meaning before about 1993), or you have forgotten.
Technically, MAKE.MONEY.FAST began to circulate in 1988. But let's explore the middle of the range for a moment. When did the pre-animated ad Web end?
There are very few cases I want a video on my webpage and none of them call for auto-play
Say I were to link to some cartoon on YouTube. What benefit is there of requiring an extra click to start it playing?
It's not the amount* as much as needing to whip out the payment card in the first place. If you read three or fewer articles on a particular site per year, arriving at them from Google Search or Slashdot or whatever social network you use, how likely are you to pay $5.99 for a year's subscription and create yet another line in your password manager?
* Except that the payment method charges a transaction fee on the order of 30 cents.
It's annoying to quote you if you start a comment in the subject and finish it in the body.
In theory, many MPEG video codecs are structured like that. They have a "baseline profile", a "main profile", and a "high profile". But depending on the relationship among the patent encumbrances of the profiles, the higher profiles might not take off. Consider the example of arithmetic coding in JPEG. No popular encoder or decoder supported arithmetic coding because the expiration of its patent was so far after the release of JPEG and its JFIF container, and the bitrate saving at a given quality was not dramatic (about 5 to 10 percent over Huffman). By that time, more advanced lossy still photo codecs with royalty-free licensing, such as WebP (based on the intra coder of VP8), had become available.
And you will notice that those paywalled results don't stay in the top 10 google results for long.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Subscription websites, such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and closed-access academic journals, tend to rank consistently high in many of my Google Search queries. This goes double since October 2017 now that Google Search no longer imposes a cloaking penalty if a paywall is marked as such with JSON-LD.
For the most part, they become part of my "minus list". You know, the long, and growing, line of "-this -that -whatever -site:paywalled.crp" pasted onto every query.
How often do the terms in your minus list cause you to hit Google Search's limit of 32 terms per query? (Before 2005, it was 10 terms.)
Nor is my comment history the topic. So ad hominems aside:
Your comment appears to promote "regular ads that consist of text or an image" as an alternative to the script-driven ads responsible for the abuses that Google Chrome will block. For example, Daring Fireball runs "regular ads that consist of text or an image" and are hosted on Daring Fireball's server (source). But that model requires each publisher to staff an ad sales department in order to advertise the site's ad space to advertisers, and advertisers are likely to pay far less if they can verify only clicks, not views.
So let's say a publisher that doesn't get quite as many views as the Markdown documentation on Daring Fireball wants to switch from abusive ads to "regular ads that consist of text or an image." How would such a publisher go about marketing its ad space to advertisers in a cost-effective manner?
So buy one subscription that aggregates articles.
A service called Adult Check tried that business model in the late 1990s. But its "grown-ups can pay $10 per month for nice things" business model ran into two problems. The first was that the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine successfully sued Adult Check out of business when it was discovered that several publishers (website operators) accepting Adult Check had displayed infringing copies of photographs from Perfect 10. The second is that if different publishers are on different subscription aggregators, viewers are back to the same situation they're currently in.
Or buy the article piece-rate.
I fail to see how would such an "a la carte" model work. Payment processors charge on the order of 0.30 USD per transaction, which greatly exceeds the 0.01 to 0.05 USD asking price for a single article.
Advertisers have to guess how much it will cost to get someone's attention so I see no reason why content providers should be unable to figure it out.
The logistical difference between an advertiser and a subscription aggregator is that only the publisher, not the viewer, needs to establish a business relationship with the advertiser.
If no readers are willing to pay you for your article then maybe that says something about its market value and your business model.
If readers are willing to pay for one article but not 100, does that say the same thing?
I see at least three practical problems with Coinhive. First, if the viewer is viewing the article using a low-power ARM or Atom CPU, the viewer is unlikely to finish mining enough blocks to pay for one article view by the time the viewer finishes reading the article. Second, the Coinhive brand has been tainted by widespread installation of Coinhive on publishers' websites by intruders without the publisher's permission. Third, Coinhive relies on JavaScript, which some users (especially those who regularly read SoylentNews, Slashdot, or other more technical websites) disable by default as a means of blocking phishing, malware downloading, and other attacks on the browser.
I get paid because I am able to read documentation.
Would you still be able to do your job if you had to pay for access to said documentation? Or for help interpreting documentation, particularly to resolve discrepancies between the documentation and the behavior of the software or workarounds for functionality that the documentation acknowledges is missing?
Also I want to point out there were forums and such, without ads, before Stack Overflow.
With what source of money did the operators of said forums pay for hosting and moderation?
Next search result states something similar:
My point is that after the web advertising market collapses, more of the top 10 search results will be paywalled than not. I have already begun to see this effect for some queries on Google Search.
no CSS.
Now you appear to want to take us back to the days of <table> layout and <font> tags. I don't see anybody being impressed by that.
or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt.
It's amazing how much time this would give me back in my life.
What do you do for a living, and to what sources do you refer if you have a question about something? Would you prefer that, say, Server Fault and Photography Stack Exchange and Ask Ubuntu go out of business?
And I worry about what effect a worldwide shutdown of ad-supported sites would have on subscribers to home Internet access. Without ad-supported sites, there might not be enough demand for home Internet access to allow home ISPs to continue to offer Internet access at affordable rates.
I can see two ways that the Chrome team might consider it "technically correct (the best kind of correct)" not to block preroll ads on Dailymotion and YouTube.
Ad Experience: Auto-playing Video Ads with Sound The ad format's page states: "The Better Ads Methodology has not yet tested video ads that appear before ('pre-roll') or during ('mid-roll') video content that is relevant to the content of the page itself." This alone would get sites like DM and YT off the hook until such time as CBA gets around to testing prerolls. Ad Experience: Prestitial Ads with Countdown The ad format's page states: "In desktop environments, prestitial ads that can be dismissed immediately did not fall beneath the initial Better Ads Standard for desktop." The illustrative animation on the page implies that this refers to a modal lightbox, not an ad confined to the video's own play area. So technically, the user can dismiss the ad by navigating to another video or by pausing it and scrolling to the comments.Internet Explorer isn't available for any of the following operating systems:
Fedora
CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE
Debian GNU/Linux and Raspbian
Ubuntu
Linux Mint
Slackware
Android
FreeBSD
What error message do you plan to display to users of Chrome or Chromium (which comes with an ad blocker) or Firefox (which blocks only those ads that fail to respect users' privacy) on those operating systems?
All self-playing video ads need to be blocked.
I fully agree on text articles and on the videos that some news sites have started to use to decorate their text articles. But preroll ads on sites like Dailymotion and YouTube are also "self-playing video ads". Would you prefer not to have access to Partner videos and claimed videos at all, especially outside those few countries where YouTube offers YouTube Red service?
So many sites, including New York Times (which I pay for!) are practically unreadable without a blocker, due to animated ads.
At this point, I endorse ad blocking on subscription websites. The dynamic there differs greatly from websites offered to the public without charge, as you are the customer.
We noticed you're using an ad blocker. To continue to be able to bring you quality journalism, we kindly ask you to buy a subscription for full access to this website.
Blocking animation in ads isn't a very easy problem for two reasons. First, how would you distinguish desirable animations, such as the main video on the video's description page, from ads? Second, CSS can animate a JPEG.
People prefer ads to the other two possibilities: having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article, or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt. (I'm interested to read your fourth option.)
From the cited article: "Non-carrier sales in the US are less than 10% of the overall 170m a year total." This is, as they say on another forum, TRWTF.
My first paragraph was about Twitter, not Google. I did not intend to lump Google and Twitter into the same category. To the extent that my comment can be read as doing so, I apologize for not having made the distinction more clearly. I have no experience with SMS-based 2FA on Google to see whether or not it continues to send SMS even after TOTP has been set up, having only used the Google Play Services-based 2FA once I was made aware that it was available.
Now that I think about it, one advantage of a deal with a carrier is that it gets the handset into showrooms so that prospective customers can see and feel the product before buying it. Otherwise, a manufacturer has to fight for limited showroom space in general electronics chains, such as Walmart and Best Buy.