Avoiding The Content Apocalypse? 171
ObligatoryUserName asks: "Recently, a gaggle of Amazon Honor System, and PayPal logos (or cheeky text equivalents) have been proliferating on a number of great, beloved and/or famous/infamous web sites. While still other sites are turning to membership programs. The advertising model seems to have failed (or is in the process of failing) and according to yesterday's great interview, micropayments aren't going to work out either. So, I was wondering, how can we save these sites? Is the major cost bandwidth? (Sites with bandwidth sponsors seem, so far, less likely to ask for micropayments.) Is most of the money going to the salaries of content creators? If some non-profit organization or the government (as per PBS) were to pay for bandwidth for exceptional/popular sites, how much would it help?" It's a decent question, and one that I keep bringing up because a workable solution has yet to present itself. Before, the chorus was micropayments (as the minor chord chimes in with the yet-to-be-tested Street Performer's Protocol). With micropayments in doubt, what other routes can sites follow for the funding they need to exist?
Colocation (Score:1)
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Who cares about content or bandwith? (Score:1)
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What's the issue? (Score:3)
I think it's FAR too early to say that micropayments are a failure, and that we need to Save Our Sites. Most folks run sites out of love, and will continue to do so. Micropayments are just a way that we might be able to make some cash doing what we would do anyway.
The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else. [michris.com]
Mocking other media is the key (Score:3)
what the? [mikegallay.com]
I know.. this sounds weird. (Score:1)
What about... A JOB!!!
No really, If the site cannot support itself then how about finding a job and doing what you can with a site ehh?
I mean think about it... If you simply cant make money on a site but you just want it to stay around why not get a job to pay for your habits ehh?
Some of the time you just have to sacrifice 100% of your attention for one thing in order to at least to just keep something around.
Otherwise... you will be SOL.
That is that.. the web is about information exchange not making tons of money. It provides a great convenience but how can a site that usually just provides textual content really expect to make money.
People write books and GIVE them away (Bruce Eckel) and you can go buy a book for say 40 dollars right now. So why would I pay for content on some website such as news when there is TV and Newspapers that are just as convenient. Newspapers may cost say a dollar but people totally have the mindset that they are NOT paying for a website.
It just wont happen because there is not enough mas acceptance of Micropayment etc.
Give it up! It wont work! Get a job all you hippie content providers
That is my suggestion at least..
Jeremy
funding... (Score:1)
Fund Raisers (Score:3)
I usually donate once a year. I donate based on what I can afford. The first time was only $10. The next was $100... the next, who knows.
The radio station is at www.ckua.org. Please don't slashdot it unless you plan on making a donation
Point being: Fund raising can be a good way to earn the money needed to stay in business. Ask for donations, and make it easy for people to donate as much as they can afford.
Get the ISPs to pay somehow (Score:2)
Anyway, the longer a user stays online, the more money the ISP makes. If these free ISPs could track what sites users are visiting, they could pay a small proportion (perhaps 10%) of the profit to the website owner. That's a tiny, tiny amount, but it could add up if you have a popular enough site. In this way the free ISPs might encourage sites to develop content tailored to their subscribers. (To avoid just randomly giving away money, the ISP might pay only those sites with which they have an agreement, or which belong to some 'association of penniless websites' which provides a mechanism for payment.)
I don't know whether there is a level of payment low enough to make the ISPs try it, but high enough to sustain websites. It would probably never work. But I'd like to see at least one provider give it a try.
Banner ads (Score:4)
(1) I'm bombarded with dozens of pop-up windows that won't go away, and I wind up either killing netscape, or in extreme circumstances, killing X-windows and logging back in.
(2) I get an incredibly complicated page loaded down with strange javascript and java things that crashes or hangs my browser.
Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:5)
Many excellent adult sites are bringing in VERY large amounts of purely advertising revenue. If non-adult websites would simply follow this business model (it usually takes them a few years to catch up), then we wouldn't see as many failures. Advertising works fine. There's plenty of room in the world of non-adult websites for ad-drive, content sites, if they are run with an eye on the bottom line.
Bandwidth (Score:1)
Too Many Visitors! (Score:5)
I currently work for a company that has several large websites. Our goal for last year was 300 million visitors. Unfortunately (!) we had 1.6 billion visitors. This nearly killed us. We had the bandwidth, but the *cost* of that bandwidth was huge. The ad sales just don't cover the costs.
How did we fix it? We haven't. The higher ups set the goal for this year of 300 million visitors (again). So we have to try to find a way to keep people away from the site, but not drive everyone away. It also means trying to co-brand with other companies (where they pay us), and not updating the content as much).
Oddly enough for today's climate, our eCommerce activities are actually making money, and keeping the rest of the sites afloat.
Will we be able to make it? We'll have to see...
Exactly... (Score:2)
Comercial content is overrated (Score:1)
Simple solution:
Pay for your own pipe.
Publish your own content.
Comercial content is just that: Comercial, The only comercial sites I regularly to visit are /. and my yahoo mail account. The reason for this is simple, comercial content sucks. Flash and banners take forever to load, News is spun to the advantage of the owner and real information is scarce. I have learned much more from sites put up by Universities and geeks with a personal interest in the subject then from comercial sites.
The formula is simple; If you know something share it.
100 Million webservers running in 100 Million closets will accurately represent the current state of culture and knowledge on the planet.
We just have to destroy the corporate monopoly on information.
A coupla points (Score:1)
I see a couple of possible futures for niche-based content sites. On way is conglomeration, where media companies buy up successful sites and implement their own advertising models. Such an example of this is Geeknews, which is now a subsidiary of eFront. This solution is one to be detested by
The concept of government subsidised content is interesting, and my favorite. I would elect that an entire department of the federal government be set up to manage citizen-produced content. Sites, publications, even broadcasters could receive initial funding with a grant-like application process, and receive additional funding on the basis of popularity, so that the government is assured they are providing money to the information and entertainment that interests the citizens.
The concept of government supported content borders on socialism, but appropriate checks and balances - which we all should remember about from fourth grade - would insure that content is not censored on any basis, except for popularity. And censoring isn't the right term, either. Popular content would simply be encouraged by the agency, which could perhaps be called the Department of Information and Entertainment, however Orwellian that may sound. Any other sites, ones which appeal to only a very small clientelle, would still receive funding from the DIE (hee hee, taht is a good name), but would also need to find revenue elsewhere. Wouldn't you all like it if Slashdot were funded by Uncle Sam, as long as control of the site remained in community hands?
With all respect to those whose opinion differs... (Score:1)
I am very much of the belief that it is far too early to make any statements about micropayments failing. The "free" content support network is collapsing at a staggering rate. Read the efront logs to understand fully the financial underpinnings of advertisement driven sites.
Again I, and I know there are many like me, am entirely willing to support sites (though not a voluntary "tip" jar because such concepts fade very quickly while everyone presumes everyone else tips. It's like the 15% standard tip for serving staff...most people are too much of weasles to follow it [and let's face it : If everyone DID tip that much that would be the job to have]) through a "micropayment" type system, though this is under the condition that there is almost no transaction fees, and _I_ am in control, not the content provider.
Disclaimer: Again when I say micropayments I am referring to small payments : Not necessarily per graphic or article. Could be a subscription based model.
What happens when a Zamey [zamey.com] does a yafla [yafla.com]?
Re:Colocation (Score:4)
Pipe costs less today than last year, granted, but offering up sweet MP3/Ogg Vorbis audio and glitzy, high-grade vids will still eat up bandwidth.
Sometimes, a back-to-basics approach is called for. Simplifying your index.html (getting rid of extraneous tags and fancy font calls) may be minor, but if you get a thousand.. ten thousand hits, those bits add up.
If you're in a major metro area, you could try DSLing your own personal web server.. if you're sure the provider is reliable (and you can afford the symmetric DSL rates... )
Still.. As with most things that are worth it, getting a website up, hot, and active takes money.
Right now, though, don't count on your website to be your day job (unless design, creation, and maintenance thereof IS your day job, in which case, bravo!)
Ruling The World, One Moron At A Time(tm)
"As Kosher As A Bacon-Cheeseburger"(tmp)
Ain't working too well for me... (Score:2)
I've been using an "honor system" via PayPal since October of last year, and it ain't panning out too well. I'm sure additional site traffic would help, but all in all, I've collected about $150.
Now, I can look @ site logs and compare the number of downloads of my fonts to the number of payments, and less than 1% of the people that visit my site are actually going along with the "honor system"... Depressing and demoralizing, but oh well. If worse comes to worse, I'll stop giving away my fonts entirely and just sell them outright. At least, that way, I'm guaranteed to get a bit of money for my work.
I suppose it's nice if you're a smaller site, like me, though. Every week or so, a couple people will donate a few bucks, and I've gotten a few checks in the mail, some nice cards and notes, etc., so that is kinda cool.
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Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
You have misunderstood what he said about micropay (Score:2)
What he didn't say would fail were things like tip jars or single payment system, like once a year or once whenever. He just didn't consider those to be micropayment systems, even though I see collecting even 10 cents as possibly usful in a tip jar.
As he said, finacial institutions will come around to support whatever level of payment people want them to support. If a whole bunch of places spring up that take $.10 through PayPal, then you can bet that eventually you'll be able to do the same through a bank, someday. Until then there is PayPal, whish is not perfect but is much better than anything else.
Bomis parody (Score:2)
http://www.bomis.com/tipjar/
(So now you'll know about my other life, when I'm not fighting for content freedom. :-) )
--Jimmy Wales
Compression? (Score:2)
Why hasn't anyone come up with zhtml or something similar? Wouldn't it be trivial to compress content before sending it over the internet? Obviously, somethings wouldn't compress well at all, like jpegs, but what about clear text html? xml? tables output from servlets or asp? It wouldn't make download sites any faster but I bet it would speed up sites like slashdot, amazon, or ebay. It would obviously require a compatible browser, but that's not hard.
It can work- use macropayments (Score:2)
I'm not sure if micropayments can work very well, but asking for donations can work. For a lot of smallish sites, it only takes a few decent sized donations to keep them afloat. I've donated money to one of my personal favorites [baseball-reference.com] because I want to see it stay around. It's not only a very useful site in its area of interest, but IMO also one of the best designed sites I've ever seen and one that I recommend as an example of good use of linking. If everyone would just give a $10 donation to a single site once in a while (instead of $0.10 to a bunch of sites), it would work just fine.
Confusion on Micropayments (Score:5)
Ask most any content producer what they want to get paid with, and they'll reply, "Micropayments." But it's because we use the term the wrong way.
After carefully reading Clay Shirky's comments on micropayments, he makes sense: paying before you're sure about the quality of something is a bad idea. Even with a respected content producer, how are you sure that they will maintain standards?
Case in point: Tom Clancy. I haunt alt.books.tom-clancy, and much discussion has raged there about the declining quality of his novels. Some have stated that they will never again rush to their bookstore on release day and pay full price for a first-edition hardback. I am almost to that point myself--because the quality hasn't been maintained.
What most of us content producers want is to charge, but not charge highly. We can't do it with credit cards--most folks know about the charges there. [What, you think Visa stays solvent just with our high balances? =) I wish.] So "micropayments" is our answer, although the traditional micropayment method [pay $0.NN for my bit o' content] isn't really what we want.
Here's where we [totk.com] are probably going:
If anyone has comments on this system, I'd love to hear them. Since we're an ezine, we can try to adapt the magazine business model to the Internet, all the while trying to kill the notion that information and storage are combined. My rationale on charging for archive access is just like asking us to store your old copies of Sports Illustrated--as long as you don't mind if we peruse the swimsuit issue. [Carol Alt: yowza!]
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Re:Bomis parody (Score:1)
not many options (Score:2)
So, what can you do? It isn't like the site is paying my bills or anything. The banner revenue just gives me a little extra money to blow on my expensive road cycling [roadbikereview.com] hobby. My real problem is that I'm having trouble to find advertisers these days. You would think a site geared toward Solaris admins would be pretty good demographics, but I don't get that many bites even though the click through rate is over 1% for the banners I host.
The moral of the story in my opinion is that it doesn't matter what value your particular banners are, the whole notion of banner advertising is in the toilet. I need a new way of doing things, but I haven't come up with anything that doesn't involve selling out majorly. I'm lucky though. This is just my hobby and it really doesn't cost much. If push comes to shove I can remove the banners entirely, but if I do I won't get cool bike stuff. ;)
Re:I know.. this sounds weird. (Score:1)
What high-quality, frequently updated site are you paying for out-of-your-pocket to provide to the web for free? Can you write some code for me for free too? Oh yeah, I'll need that code by next Monday, maybe you can work over the weekend to do it.
Hmmm. I thought so. When you can put your money where your mouth is, I'll take you seriously.
Ralph
Comment removed (Score:5)
Pointedly providing click-throughs? (Score:1)
So what's wrong with supporting sites by providing an occasional click-through to their ad banners, that no one has brought it up? I make a point of going through my favorite content sites (shameless plug for Sluggy [sluggy.com] here, as an example), reloading the page and clicking-through on the banners a few times. It's not tons of revenue, I'm aware, but it helps - and if more fans did that on occasion, wouldn't the sites get a bit of a boost?
I'm aware that, at some point of saturation, click-throughs would be meaningless to the ad vendors and payments would decrease/cease altogether, but it's a nice intermediate way to provide a little help to artists/writers/producers-of-things-of-value-to-me in the current atmosphere.
Re:Compression? (Score:2)
Re:I know.. this sounds weird. (Score:2)
I'm happy to pay my $$$ for SDSL and host web sites that folks find useful. But it takes a day job to pay for it.
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Re:Compression? (Score:3)
mod_gzip works with most non-ancient browsers, YMMV. Check it out [remotecommunications.com]
Re:Compression? (Score:1)
Actually its been done. Apache/php can do it (using zlib), and im sure a number of other combos can too.
Zlib is exactly what I was thinking of, but how can the server compress if the client isn't able to decompress?
Also, as a tangent, we could also quickly run jpegs though a quality (and size) reduction filter when the bandwidth gets too high (or switch to less or no graphics), but turn up the quality on off-peak times. Dynamic content depending on server load!
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:3)
Growth comes from making enough money to expand, not expanding fast enough to keep up with expenses. The latter will bankrupt you anyday (even after the Shrub sticks it to the poor slob with too much debt)
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Missing the problem (Score:2)
Bandwidth isn't even a problem, the problem is wasteful spending from the inception of a site which has carried over, and or continues within the company (of the site) often leading to fund cutting by investors who've ran from NASDAQ and may not look back for now.
Think about costs some of these companies have put into their high tech sites, I've posted on this yesterday and I'll reflect more on it today with harsher numbers.
4 Sun E450's (for databases) 100,000.00
Rack space at Exodus 25,000.00 monthly (mini cage)
20 Misc Servers Apache, etc. VAR501's 3,000.00
Admins for the hardware software 6,000.00 monthly
Content, programmers, etc authors, 6,000.00 monthly
Office space 6,000 monthly
Lets just guesstimate 50,000.00 monthly with the company gaining a measly even 10,000.00 in banner revenue, its a losing battle.
These figures are minute to whats out there and its hard for a company with little to no real world experience to keep up with no revenue coming in. You can talk an investors ear off, but if the investor sees himself throwing away his money he will pull out no matter what you propose. Whats happening often is these companies haven't fully understood this, and are now trying to revamp their business models which will also scare investors away, as the company does not have a solid game plan for success.
Micropayments, banner ads are the gist of it all, these companies need to overhaul and cut spending drastically and show they can compete with close to nothing in order to get more funding.
Money Talks [antioffline.com]
Sites; for love or money. (Score:2)
What does bandwith cost? typical ADSL w/ 384 up and some static IP's is around or less than 100/month. Thats three nice dinners out. At a meger $12CPM, you only need 10,000 page views to be self-sufficient.
Sites fall into two categories (with some obvious blurring); they are done for love or money. Sites done for money can close if they don't make it; sites done for love will stay open as long as the creator still has an interest in it and puts money into it (as they would with any other hobby).
Government sponsorship of sites that are not popular enough to pay for themselves is not the right answer. If it's so popular that I wouldn't want to visit what justifies my tax dollars going to pay for it?
-- Greg
-- Greg
Semantics. (Score:1)
I've got an idea! (Score:4)
Porn sites are the most profitable ones on the Internet right? Well what if every content web site also ran a porn web site on the side? Then the porn site could subsidize the content site.
Now I'm off to get my money's worth off http://www.slashdotporn.org... Mmm... Naked Cowboy Neal...
Re:Compression? (Score:2)
Slashdot, Ebay, Amazon all are 100% database driven sites. The entire "page" is constructed using data from a database query or two (or two dozen). If the database is being overloaded by too many requests, there's absolutely nothing that compressing the text coming out of it will achieve.
Babelfish: rationalization => truth (Score:2)
I'll be out of the best job in the world if this business model tanks.
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Re:Pointedly providing click-throughs? (Score:2)
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Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:3)
Seriously, how do people put up with that? My thinking is that a large portion of people visiting those sites must be waves of newsbies getting on for the first time. I guess some people must think the content is very good to put in credit card number and put up with all those windows of ads.
PBS-like system (Score:1)
Most importantly, notice how PBS doesn't ask you if you would like to donate money to Antiques Roadshow, or any other specific program, but they ask for money for the cause.
I, for one, would donate more easily to a Public Content Service, or some such thing, which funded many quality non-commercial web sites. I wouldn't doubt it if corporations would feel the same way.
Please stop the "well at my site" madness (Score:1)
Fuck people. Try good content that people will read or consume rather than exploiting every opportunity to get people to visit...
The sky is not falling! (Score:1)
The real thing that is causing the perception of this problem is the fact that for the longest time websites were operating on borrowed time. They had money coming in like nobody's business and they made business plans that reflected that. Now the bubble has burst and these sites are going to have to adjust by cutting back on expenses and getting thing more at the sane level. Some of these sites will not be able to make these changes and will die. That's life, sorry.
In the future small hobby sites that grow and turn into something else will be a little more careful and have a little less money, but it things are still doable. As costs rise and advertising isn't covering bandwidth they can do things like limit usage to paying customers during certain hourse, take micro payments, all sorts of things. The key thing to remember is that these sites don't have to be worried about this sudden loss of revenue becuase they never had it to begin with.
In short, even if most of the current content providers die (which I doubt), they will be replaced by better managed, cheaper alternatives.
All just imho.
I think the apocalypse will come soon. (Score:1)
Anyway anything that reduces capitalist exploitation of the once-free web can only be a good thing right ?
Bloated Sites Fail, Lean Sites Live On! (Score:1)
government help (Score:1)
If some non-profit organization or the government (as per PBS) were to pay for bandwidth for exceptional/popular sites, how much would it help?
Do I want the government deciding what is "exceptional" or "popular"?
Michael
Re:Mocking other media is the key (Score:1)
And heck, broadband content sites can use the big flash movie interstitial ads because we're going there for big flashy content anyway, right?
I'm surprised we haven't seen more interstitial ads since they seem to convert so well from all manner of conventional media. I'm glad to hear that someone may be planning to do this.
honor system payments not easy enough! (Score:1)
1.) I was taken away from the site to do it. (as opposed to having a small new window pop up.)
2.) I had several pages to click through to make the payment.
3.) I ended up at Amazon.com, and not back at the originating page.
With some work I think these honor system payments will provide an ok solution, but not for anyone providing content for a living.
For content providers who need to make money, networks might be a good idea - where a user would pay a network a set recurring fee for accessing a selected group of sites - for example I could "subscribe" to Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Everything2, Goats, and Userfriendly for $5.00/month.
The network could provide an app to generate encrypted ip + timestamp + websites allowed "network cookie" on a daily basis so sites would know who their paying customers were.
It's definitely a change in philosophy from the honor system, but it might work a little better.
One example: (Score:1)
egoboo (Score:1)
Although this kind of begs the question, the ad/micropayment shakeout might mean that hobbyist sites become more prominent. It's only a couple hundred dollars, if that, a year to grab a domain and make a site. People will do it bevause they love the subject matter or they love the attention. (Egoboo is the 'currency' of getting your egoboosted by making something popular in an online forum) Making it pay for itself will become the exception. In some ways, this is probably bad for content in general, but I think it will be an important trend to watch.
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Re:I know.. this sounds weird. (Score:1)
Everyone says "remember when... the web was free of advertising, and it was great". But people don't remember that it was *new*, not great. Yes, someone would write a great article or two and post them on their
People are used to having great content for free. When I first started my site, I used to get e-mails like "Wow! This is great stuff. I can't believe I found this. I'm going to tell all my friends". (the site is http://www.hockeydb.com)
Now I get e-mails that say "your site is good, but why don't you have the boxscore of every single NHL game ever?". Or "why don't you show the players' jerseys?". Or "so-and-so was just traded yesterday -- why don't you show that?". "Why don't you have pictures of the players?"
There is definitely a tone shift in the e-mails. People are no longer grateful, they are demanding.
My server costs $200/month at the CPU/bandwidth level I consume. I buy some syndicated content which costs me over $1000/year. So right there, that's $3400 in costs without factoring in the 20-30 hours a week I spend maintaining and updating the site, and answering e-mail (which takes a long time when you get 30-40 e-mails a day).
I've also found that doing something that others find cool for free is fun -- but only for a few months, and when people are still appreciative. I've found that if I'm making some money to do those things, it's fun for a lot longer.
Why do you think "free" sites get abandoned after a few months? Because after a few months, you find other things to do if it's just a hobby.
Do you like free (not supported by ads) sites? Go to Geocities and browse the sites there. I just picked one on Hockey Fights. When was it last updated? 2/15. That's "last year" in internet time.
Most of the sites are "under construction". Remember that? That's code for "I'm not updating this too often".
That's the future of a web with no revenue. Which may be OK for some people, but for the most part it will change from a daily encyclopedia to a bi-yearly encyclopedia.
Ralph
What do you want from your site? (Score:2)
I considered running a gaming-oriented content site, back in late 1999. I bought a domain (the name [gamelore.com] was cool), and started looking to put up banner ads. Before lining up a staff and opening office space, I discovered (as would any chimp with half a brain) that banner ads weren't going to pay for a site -- so I never went live. I wrote the time off as a "learning experience", and went on to bigger and better things...
My other site, Coyote Gulch Productions [coyotegulch.com], operates on a totally different financial basis: I run it because I want to, not because it makes me a buck.
Oh, all right, I have made a few bucks from the site over the years... I've sold software code libraries, sold some of my books, and used it as an online resume and distribution point for applets and open source code. The "profit" has been pretty thin, though, considering the time that goes into creating those damned little ALife applets... and regardless of its money-making potential, I'll keep doing Coyote Gulch, teaching people about neato concepts and presenting my view of the universe.
I have considered going the micropayment route for some of my book projects. Can anyone explain to me if there's something wrong with PayPal or the Amazon "honor system?" Okay, so Amazon is "patent pig" scum -- and failing scum at that. But what about PayPal?
Here's the deal: I wrote (and my wife illustrated) a children's book, which I sold to a Big Name Publisher, who was then eaten by a bigger fish, who then killed the "kid's division" before the book saw print. Rather than hunt up another publisher, I've considered putting the book online, and having people "micropay" me if they like it. Hell, if I make $50, it $50 more than the book has made me before...
But back to the central point: Your average person sees the web as an interactive TV; they're already paying for the connect, just like they pay for their cable setup. So "average Joe" thinks he's already paid for access, and he expects his content for "free", just like TV. I don't see how content-based sites can expect to pay for themselves in that kind of environment...
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
DUH! (Score:2)
Content-Encoding: gzip (Score:4)
HTTP already has Content-Encoding: gzip [w3.org]. But the bulk of HTTP transfer (on a kilobyte basis) is already tightly compressed (PNG and JPEG images; MP3 audio; Flash, MNG, and MPEG animations; bzip2 tarballs) so this will help only for HTML and MIDI.
It would obviously require a compatible browser
Or a compatible proxy. But AFAIK Mozilla and IE (two biggest browsers) already support it.
All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual (Score:5)
Why does it work that way in the adult internet? Because the people involved are running actual businesses that depend on cash flow and profitability.
And because "adult entertainment" is a sure bet -- people WILL pay for it, especially if its served up in a way that maintains their privacy. They have for centuries; and they have for every new media since radio.
Nothing else available on the 'net is stuff that people, personally, absolutely will pay for. All you can do is hope. Trouble is that everything else people buy, they aren't (necessarilly) ashamed to buy in public.
You can buy CDs and VHS/DVDs in a store, with the gratification of taking it with you; the 'net can't do that. You can buy software in a store, and have the books with you right away, as opposed to having to read on the screen or waste 100s of pages of paper to print them. Books are the same way -- if there's a store that carries what you like on a regular basis, then you hit that store, and take it with you. Ditto magazines, newspapers, etc...nothing they have you couldn't get some other way.
Yes, you could get "porn" the old fashioned way, but you'd rather do it in total privacy and not deal with the anxiety of funny looks from people in or outside the "shop", or the postman delivering your "descrete plain brown wrapped package". Porn on the 'net is value added -- the value added is privacy in a form never before seen. No other market needs that particular "value added". The only anxieties 1) your sig-other looks at your visa bill, 2) your company actually looks at its web-logs, or 3) you do it so much that you exceed the download limit of your ISP, and they start charging $1/meg (back to said visa bill).
So the problem is that e-commerce will not and never will be the internet's true "killer app". Shipping costs and times are prohibitive compared to the convenience and experience of walking into a store and walking out with product, regardless of the extra availability of items online.
The "killer app" of the 'net is what it was made for -- communication mechanisms like slashdot and groups.yahoo.com and stuff like that. Only that stuff is so easy to make (relatively speaking -- especially with so much free software to build it on), nobody thinks its really worth paying for. Egroups, listbot, onelist all just finally (and cleanly) automated the process that majordomo and listservs have had (and that required a lot of "administration" for far too long) for years; my reaction was "about time".
The idea that free sites leads to pay sites in "information" sites just isn't going to work. People will too quickly content themselves with the free, because the "value added" from the pay site usually just isn't enough. As comment 19 [slashdot.org] states, most content out there isn't worth paying for.
"Net Taxes" won't work either, as it will create an entity like the ASCAP, which will unfairly redistribute its collected fees to the point that only a small portion of the sites out there will get a large portion of the cash, and most sites get nothing. ASCAP does exactly that with regards to all of its site-licensed based income like from broadcasting sites and stations, and public merchants. It goes to the top radio airplay artists, regardless of what the broadcaster is actually broadcasting.
Pay for information? What are you, nuts?!?! (Score:2)
People do not like to pay for information or content. And they generally do not unless they are absolutely forced to, and there's something really good in it for them.
Here's why:
Books: We have bookstores, yes. But we also have a very large system of free public libraries. So, everything is available for free pretty much, and people buy books for convenience only. There is no pleasure in owning a book... if I had a library around the corner that loaned me every book or magazine that I wanted when I wanted it, why would I pay a cent for books? I'm very reluctant to buy books anyway, even when I DON'T have that perfect library around...
Music: People do buy CDs and cassettes for convenience. But if there was no radio (and MTV to an extent), I seriously doubt that people would buy CDs at all. MP3's make the situation worse... they present the music more conveniently than the radio does, hence eliminating the need to buy CDs in a lot of cases.
Visual Productions: We have movie theaters and video stores, sure. We also have television. Lots of people stay home and watch TV. Lots of people get cable to really expand the selection of things to watch... as well as get stuff that isn't available on broadcast TV. Cable is more convenient than having a gigantic video store around the corner where you have to rent EVERYTHING you watch. Otherwise, people go to the movies and video stores to watch films that aren't available on TV yet and that are convenient to watch. Lots of people don't bother with that, though. And some people have descramblers to get endless movies for free, hence eliminating the need to ever leave the house.
The Internet: We know the deal. The best example I can think of... who ever paid for Infoseek searches when they cost 10 cents a piece?!?!? No one likes to pay on the Net. Even porn is available freely in massive quanitites.
Software: Shareware is hardly registered (not to the degree it SHOULD be). I bet half of Windows and MS Office installations in personal use settings are illegal to some degree (unlicensed upgrades, pirated CDs, etc.).
Now, some people DO pay for their content, but: they never pay a lot (cable TV is cheap, no one goes to the movies 3 days a week, no one buys 20 singles a week that they listened to on the radio during their commute to work, etc..), they usually pay indirectly (taxes support public libraries, they subscribe to ISPs to get Internet access, they pay the cable company for installation and convenience, they pay for the convenience of owning a good CD themselves, etc.), and they avoid buying anything that they aren't convinced that they really want or need.
I know this sounds obvious, but here's the point: Micropayments won't work because people don't like to pay for information. That is, no matter how small the payment is, it's still money out the window. And unless you're rich (the rich tend to be even more stingy), people have better priorities than dropping one tenth of a penny in the jar every time they visit CNN.com or Slashdot.
Granted, I would pay a nominal subscription fee for the websites I visit... if I were to get something good in return for it BEYOND what I'm already doing. Micropayments are essentially paying for something that has no additional value... so I won't do it.
Plus, people are more likely to pay for something they like before they see it, but they are less likely to try it out if they have to pay to look at it first.
Re:Exactly... (Score:2)
It used to be axiomatic to say that nothing is on the web except for that which somebody considered it worth the trouble to put it there.
Since a lot of very optimistic people thought they could eventually turn a site that gives content away into a for-profit site, there was a gold rush of speculators trying to get on the bandwagon.
Now that it turns out that making money via web publishing is not going to be easy, and only those who planned for the extremely long haul are ever going to see a profit, the brief and shining moment of free professionally-made content is coming to a close.
So, the day when we could take advantage of VC folly by getting lots of free stuff may be ending. A few places, like /. and imdb are still going strong, but many others are soon to drift into the ether... We all had to know that this day was coming.
Let's take this in stride. Were things really so bad in the days before Slate and Salon?
Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual (Score:2)
Pledge Breaks (Score:2)
Re:Compression? (Score:2)
Compressing on the fly will increase CPU usage to the point that it will likely slow the site down to the point of uselessness. Moving the compression to a second box will continue the slowdown, because now the second box has to re-assemble the original packets in order to get optimized compression ratios, then retransmit. Its just not a viable solution.
Re:Mocking other media is the key (Score:2)
Re:Banner ads (Score:3)
(3) Banner ad leads to TCP_error or 404 or missing page or somewhere else. [fuckedcompany.com]
Enough of these have reduced my click-throughs due to wasted time.
Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual (Score:2)
Targeted ads (Score:2)
While targeted ads are easy for a site like Slashdot, where you have a good idea of the average viewer, they are not as easy on big sites like MSN. The problem then would be getting the viewers to register their preferences. You'd almost have to track users from site to site like Double-Click already does, which brings up privacy concerns.
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:3)
Nice quote. Trouble is that the "imagination" got away with the CEOs and VCs out there. They got their initial "hits" of advertising dollars and eyeballs and "customers" in many cases, saw a growth curve, and then expanded as if that growth curve would remain constant or even exponentially explode. After all, that's what happened to Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Compaq, Dell...
Only it didn't. It levelled off. In order to keep "growing", the .coms took part in major acquisitions (yahoo, altavista, excite) or expanded their categories of merchandise to the point of redicule (amazon). Yet the curves continued to level off. There just weren't all THAT many buyers out there for stuff they could get even easier the old-fashioned way.
Then the dumb competitors entered (did we really need 12,15,30 different online music stores, all dealing in the same stuff? Did amazon really have to enter that market as well?). Instant saturation to the point of uselessness. The entire world turned into shoeshops.
The only successes are the ones that stayed small, in terms of content and customer base -- "The Artist Shop", e.g., a speciality music store for discerning prog-rock listeners. Other successes are those for which the online catalog was merely that -- an online mail-order storefront that was an add-on to their real storefront.
Re:Pointedly providing click-throughs? (Score:2)
Eventually, the advertiser will observe a low revenue-to-clickthrough ratio and refuse to pay the higher ad rate. They may even cancel the ad if they suspect clickbots or some other artificial clickthrough inflation.
Re:Follow the adult industry, as usual (Score:2)
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:3)
A company that's overstaffed, is prepared, prepared for rapid growth. The tech industry expected rapid growth, because everyone knows that if you are first in the game, you have a much better chance of gaining dominant marketshare, and if you gain dominant marketshare, you have a good chance of acheiving a monopoly, and then, as Microsoft has demonstrated, you can pretty much sit back and rake in the profits. Microsoft was the model everyone expected Netscape, and all the other dotcoms to follow. Sure, there was bound to be blood at some point, but the risk was worth it, if you invested in a winner, you were rich. The effect was so profound, that even before the game started to play-out, money came pouring in. Everyone wanted to get rich from this "new thing". but the game hasn't played out the way people expected - I think that the conditions that led Microsoft to it's position are no longer there, possibly because Microsoft was able to head off these other companies (except for AOL). When it started taking longer than people thought for these companies to turn a profit, the money flow slowed, and the corporate bloat caught up with them - and it started a vicious circle, or death spiral.
Unfortunately, good companies with sound business plans and plenty of profit have also been bloodied in the process. Kind of sucks there. But I liken the stock market to the study of stampeding lemmings these days.
Re:Colocation (Score:4)
As for DSLing your own personal web server, why not take it a step further--have a bunch of people DSLing your own personal web server.
Since the sentiment certainly seems to be there, and since distributed computing seems to be the order of the day, where's the Open Source version of Akamai type site load-balancing? It strikes me that there are a ton of geeks out there with relatively lightly used high-speed access lines, who totally love a lot of these sites that are going to have to fold if they can't get cheaper bandwidth. What's needed is a free software package that will allow those users to safely and easily mirror sites they support and a centralized setup to allocate requests to them based on traffic, location, and available bandwidth. Of course, the centralized server to distribute the load is still going to require a chunk of bandwidth, hardware, and support time, and probably rack-space at a co-lo, but with their own bandwidth payments reduced by load distribution, subscribing sites could afford to subsidize the solution by splitting those costs.
It could be that high-bandwidth line penetration is not yet where it needs to be to support many high-volumes sites, or maybe the owners of those lines aren't confident enough in the safety of their boxes to want to run the web services that would be necessary. And for database driven sites, it wouldn't work at all. But I think that the rapid proliferation of Napsterites, SETI@Home users and the like shows that it's at least possible to split up the work if you make it simple enough.
Re:Sites; for love or money. (Score:2)
Chicago Reader [chireader.com] $25CPM
Northwest Builders [nwbuildnet.com] $28CPM
now-see-hear [now-see-hear.com] $20CPM
If you are getting alot less than $12 CPM perhaps you should re-evaluate who you are brokering your banneradds through.
-- Greg
Re:Pledge Breaks (Score:3)
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Re:Get the ISPs to pay somehow (Score:2)
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:3)
Ahhhh, but not every content business is like the porn industry. With porn, you have to pay:
For me to be similar with our ezines [totk.com], I'd have to pay:
With porn, once the image is captured, you're done. Porn talent can, er, display their wares anywhere they choose. My talent all get exclusivity clauses in their contracts, because our writers make our ezine. Also, except for sites focused around specific talent, I don't imagine that "viewers" want to interact with the talent. With writing, it's vitally necessary to the creative process.
I never thought I'd come to comparing my writers [as Chief Editor, I think of them that way, though I'm younger than almost all of them] to porn talent. I just hope like hell they don't find this thread...=)
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Re:Compression? (Score:2)
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:2)
On the other hand, slapping up 10 pictures you got from usenet isn't the same thing as creating daily content. Don't kid yourself into thinking that the "excellent adult sites" are de facto excellent web sites. Some porn sites which are truly excellent web sites might exist, but I've never seen/heard of one.
I agree (whatever that is worth) with your premise though - there's space for judiciously-run content-oriented websites.
Don't you mean subscription model? (Score:2)
Don't most adult sites use a subscription model rather than an advertising model?
(Not that I would know, or anything.)
When was the last time you saw an ad on an adult site for anything other than another adult site? Who is paying them for these ads that you say are generating revenue?
Re:URL please (Score:2)
Re:Compression? (Score:2)
Re:What's the issue? (Score:2)
Micropayment/click-thru add schemes have to pay for the bandwidth that they use to display them. If you get a micro-payment for each click, but you only get a click after displaying some graphic 1000 times at 10k/graphic, then you're not recooping the bandwidth that your spending to send the graphic... now, if the image uses the vendors bandwidth (remote image tag), the micropayment might be more cost effective.
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:2)
The pay for talent gets the latter. I should have mentioned site costs on the former, but I was focusing primarily on staffing. We've actually joked about running our own porn site, but my morals keep me from it. =)
We don't have 'em yet. I hope we never do. Personally, I find talking with people invigorating, so I have no problem being a PR contact. [It just cuts into my sleep time, that's all.]
But marketing and PR is a little more necessary for ezines than porn. Porn is something people want and crave. Sportswriting...they can take it or leave it. We have to do a little offline promotion, but I seriously doubt you'll be shilling ninenine.com on your local talk radio station. I have done that with TOTK.com on our local sports talk station. Granted, it was the cost of my time, but someday, the opportunities might get to the point where someone else has to do it...
You're right: they shouldn't be. I'd argue that perhaps the talent costs of writers are higher than porn, but then 1) I'm not paying my guys right now [hell, I don't get paid to edit their stuff OR write] and 2) I'm not going to look into the costs of porn talent. =)
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Re:Banner ads (Score:2)
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:2)
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:2)
My former company was the poster child for this business model, but since the acquisition (we were bought!), things have improved GREATLY. Seems the new parent company is full of people who can spot phonies, and fire them, a mile off.
Re:Colocation ... and other thoughts DSLing (Score:2)
Everyone has some sort of bandwidth cap, even if it's just the amount of bits they're physically able of pushing down the line in a second. My point is that if you distribute this around, then no one needs to hit or exceed their cap. And you could certainly design your system so that individual hosters could limit the amount of their own bandwidth that was consumed by the shared site, as well as the times it was consumed. Hell, even when I'm putting up a professional site with big pipes and heavy duty servers on the back end, I always assign some sort of upper limit, just to keep performance from slowing to a crawl if for some reason it gets hammered.
Re:Confusion on Micropayments (Score:2)
While you have an interesting hypothesis there, I doubt that it's exactly true. There are many different (free even) ways of getting the news and have been for a long time. What is difficult is finding what was news a while ago when you're doing research. People are not ever going to be willing to pay very much for the convenience of getting today's news, that's what TV and the paper are for. The only people who are going to pay for news are the people digging through the archives to write reports.
If you take a look at most news sites you'll see that this model is how they actually charge. The New York times is a good example. Somehow, they manage to sell what they give away for free (today's news, free online you can buy it on dead trees) and then sell what other people throw away (charge for news from the online archive while others charge to haul away yesterday's paper).
The future of all things dealing with the internet is going to be giving away content and selling some additional service. This service may be advertising or the convenience of searching the archive or something else or a combination of these things. This is how Ameritrade et. al. make money too. They give away content (stock quotes, research etc.) and charge for the service (dumping tech stocks).
The web has changed things, content has a marginal cost of zero on the web therefore the price that is charged for it is going to tend towards zero. The only way to get income in that environment is to charge for a service that would be more difficult to obtain elsewhere.
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Re:Compression? (optimised images) (Score:2)
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Yes it is. (Score:3)
The advertising model is NOT failing.
A friend of mine who runs a fairly large website with advertising income showed me some numbers the other day. Between January and September of last year, page views did not change significantly, but advertising income dropped 70%.
How is this "not failing?"
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
Re:Banner ads (Score:2)
Privacy issues aside for the moment, the problem with URLs like that is they are so long I can't even see the end of them and know where they are going to take me. If I could just hover over the banner ad and see something simple like "www.mycompany.com", I'd know where it was going to take me, thus I'd be a lot more likely to click it.
Re:Yes it is. (Score:2)
If you want to argue that the current advertising model was a bad idea to start with and should fail, then go for it, but don't confuse the issues.
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BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
bomis.com (Score:2)
I mean, it just looks like a port of the DMOZ open directory with some paid links, and annoying popups. Why the hell would anyone want to use that page?
Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
10k? (Score:2)
Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
1% is *really* good (Score:2)
Rate me on Picture-rate.com [picture-rate.com]
Sam, stop making damage control ! (Score:2)
Hey, sam we recognized you. You are talking about efront, and you are making numbers.
> So we have to try to find a way to keep people away from the site, but not drive everyone away
And you released those IRC logs ? Smart move...
Cheers,
--fred
Re:Colocation (Score:2)
It's not a horrible solution for information distribution (especially in contexts where anonymity is important), but neither is it a good replacement for a website, methinks.
Re:Advertising model is NOT failing (Score:2)
Also, provide some links to these advertising sponsored adult websites. It seems they all require a membership.
Re:Confusion on Micropayments (Score:2)
That's not what I said at all. I just said that they had the business model I thought was most likely to be successful. If you think that your content is time critical, unavaliable from other sources and your customers are not likely to be concerned about price then the subscription plan may be useful. To have people be really unconcerned about price your content needs to serve a direct business need and provide the opportunity for financial gain. The Gartner group and WSJ are good examples of this. If you have news and opinions about fairly general topics there are a lot of free options and you're going to have a hard time getting people to pay (reference slate and salon).
I certianly don't advocate that anyone try to compete with the New York Times in the area of respected worldwide journalism centered in New York City. That would be a futile endevor. What I do suggest is looking at how they have a working business plan for providing content.
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Re: (Score:2)