114 replies
5h32m
Extremely sad. There basically is nothing like Anandtech; the depth, the ability to explain, the lack of sensationalism, and the integrity in benchmarking (I still vividly remember when they noticed an issue with HPET in Windows affecting their benchmarks, and promptly pulled all of them offline until they could reassess). Chips and Cheese is great but only covers a certain segment of it.
In the end, I would assume it just boiled down to lack of money. There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage, but Anandtech said at some point they had considered it and couldn't find a good model. (As an aside, I pay for LWN, and I would pay for something that covered similar areas to Phoronix but actually was good.)
From TFA:
And your comment:
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
[0] https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/
[1] https://kagi.com/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412
[3] https://ladybird.org/
--
EDIT: fixed grammar.
I'm a bit more pessimistic I guess. Netflix at one point felt like the end of piracy, because it was becoming the portal to all great video content. Then everyone wanted a slice of the pie and started their own platform. Now, Netflix is starting to fill up with 'sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content' and they really seem to want to become ad-fuelled.
I also dislike that I have to choose between giving up all my privacy to a ton of ad providers or needing 100 different subscriptions to get some good content.
I kinda hope that Mozilla (or someone else) finds a way to become the Spotify/Netflix of the web. A place where I can pay a single fee that then gets distributed between the platforms and sites I visit. But I kinda know that that will never happen, since it gives too much power to that one platform.
For a while I thought that blockchain/crypto might be a good way to fix this. But nobody seems to be building blockchain stuff to do the right thing, they only do it to rip people off.
In other words, we got competition. If Netflix remained the sole streaming platform of significance it would be lumped in with the monopoly talk that clouds Google, Amazon, Apple and the other trillion dollar corporations.
If anything this is a good thing, competition happened before Netflix could dominate completely.
Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple, Tidal all manage to have almost comprehensive music catalogs for me to stream. It's rare that I find something on one platform that isn't on another (Some artist exceptions exist, and are rare).
Pick 10 random films off the AFI top 100 list and tell me how to stream them. How many services do I need to watch them "for free".
Consumers want a single point of access to content. If I want to listen to a song I go to my music platform, if I want to watch content I go to the web to find out who has it... That friction is what consumers dont want or need.
That's because music costs barely anything to create vs tv/movies and the digitally distributed track is basically just advertising for the music creators merch, sponsorship deals, live gigs where they make their real money.
You can tell that's the case because practically every piece of music created has been put on youtube while nobody puts tv/movies on youtube for free.
So your spotify equivalent for tv/movies is going to cost $100+ a month, perhaps more because tv/movies are that much more expensive to make and that's what you were paying for cable back in the day.
But people think everything could cost $20 at most, so that's why we're going to have 10 or so streaming services and frankly that's way better than the old cable days.
No, that's because music licensing has been collected together into one or two monopolistic licensing schemes in every country. Most countries do it via a government agency, the US does it with BMI and ASCAP. It's actually kind of surprising the US hasn't broken up BMI & ASCAP with anti-trust, but they've got special dispensation just like the NFL.
Legislatures could bring in a compulsory licensing scheme for movies similar to BMI and ASCAP.
I am no expert on licensing schemes, but I've seen major artists like Taylor Swift remove their catalogues from Spotify and the like, which tells me they're not that compulsory when it comes to online streaming?
Taylor Swift has unusual market power.
CD's used to cost 20 bucks, artists used to make money on their sales.
Now they don't.
There are movies that "don't make money" because of shady accounting practices.
And I paid 100 bucks for cable for the same reason that you pay 100 bucks for internet now, lack of competition.
There are plenty of people creating content on YouTube for what YouTube is willing to give them... and that isn't much. They have a working model because they keep creating content, not trying to squeeze every drop from the juice (over and over).
You might want to go back and look at the Paramount Decree. We would not be here if it was extended to streaming rather than allowed to expire.
Steam has locked up the gaming market on PCs and so far it has been all upside. The decline of Netflix and the proliferation of generally worse alternatives has not been a boon for anyone but rent-seekers. This theory of competition is not holding up here.
I think Steam is an anomaly, not the rule for monopolies. Steam is privately owned with long term stable leadership. They are generating a crazy amount of money and are able to be content with that.
If steam went public and had the usual revolving door of MBA CEOs keen to "maximize efficiencies", you can bet that Steam would turn just as malign as the adtech industry.
I concur on all points, though I think there's something else than public ownership at fault per se. Publicly traded corporations were once considered an innovation and improvement over private ownership. Something went awry over the years, and private equity is presently giving a bad name to private ownership too.
The barrier to entry to compete with steam is a newspaper ad, a CD-R writer (or usb stick) an envelope and a stamp. There are a million ways to deliver software. You can setup a website as a front to an S3 bucket and then just pay per download of the file. You have epic, origin gog, greenman gaming etc they all exist, but people choose to buy their games on steam, and publishers choose to sell their games there despite the 30% cut. I wouldn't call it "locking up", they just provide a Better Service to customers.
The last game I bought that wasn't on steam was probably Kerbal Space Program, in ~2014, and later converted my key to Steam when the option presented itself.
*Epic offers 0% cut for the first year to most indie games
GoG exists too, and just like what happened with streaming services, gaming companies have pushed out their own shitty platforms full of DRM and spying. Steam is still #1 though.
Almost all criticisms of monopolies comes from the abuse they enable. On an abstract level, a monopoly is the best option, because it removes so much extra cost, and has the ultimate scaling factor. Like early Netflix with it's seemingly infinite catalog.
In practice, of course, monopolies under capitalism exist specifically to exploit it, making things far worse for customers in the long run.
Steam is, to me, the closest we have to a benevolent monopoly. A monopoly that exists purely because it offers the best product.
Yes well the definition of "monopoly" seems to vary a bit on HN, often it means "large company I don't like".
I've heard people on this site argue that Apple has a monopoly on smartphones because they don't like Android and so their only choice is iPhone and since Apple controls iPhone 100% it's therefore a monopoly.
I suspect people make that argument because they are unaware of the word duopoly. Functionally, a duopoly isn't much different from a monopoly. The market would be far better off if there were 4 or more players.
In the context of smartphones, the vertical integrations don't help with the "monopoly" perception, either. Once you've decided to get an iPhone hardware device, your only choice is to use the Apple app store, and if you want something out of the Apple app store, your only choice is to get an iPhone. Android phones are a little more lenient in that there are at least multiple app stores, but you still have the tight coupling between the hardware and the OS despite smartphones fundamentally being ARM devices with touchscreens.
Were smartphones more like PCs, you could buy an iPhone and put Android on it, then use any of the iOS, Google Play, or Amazon stores to install apps. Or, perhaps you'd prefer to buy a Samsung Galaxy S24 and put iOS on it, and install apps from any of the many app stores just the same.
I'd be at least as irritated with the PC market if I had to buy a Dell PC to access Steam and it only allowed installing from Steam, an HP PC was linked 1:1 with the Epic store, Alienware PCs were linked 1:1 with the Origin store, etc. and building your own machine was no longer possible, though at least you'd still have more options than with phones.
It's never been like that. What you wrote is fundamentally the same idea as: "If consumer computers more like consumer computers, you could buy a MacBook Pro and run RedHat Linux on it, then run any of the macOS applications or Linux applications that exist in the world."
While the mobile computing ecosystem and details are quite different, it's mostly same cocktail of things: Commercial hardware that is either open or closed, a [maybe commercial] OS, and applications that execute under version X of the OS and version Y of a runtime.
This "competition" increased prices, which is not the desired result from competition. The problem is that copyright holders have too much power over their content, especially older content. If copyright holders were required to license content to anyone who wished to publish or redistribute it after, say, 10 years of initial publishing, that would be a form of competition that would decrease prices.
No, we got fragmentation. If we had competition I could pay netflix to watch the same content that I could otherwise watch on hulu if I made the choice to pay hulu instead.
Since everyone has their own exclusive content paywalled off behind their own services, we're stuck with lot of tiny monopolies.
That's why prices are skyrocketing, and we have a bunch of examples of shitty/infuriating interfaces that get in the way of users and prevent them from what they want, instead of a battle between streaming services to offer the best/most features users want at the lowest prices.
Some competition, in the wrong place.
Exclusive licencing is the problem, giving a 'monopoly' of sorts on streaming particular content. If everything was available everywhere, they just paid pay per view royalties say, then we'd have proper competition on pricing models & the quality of service provided.
Cable still exists. People wanted the ability to sub to whatever they wanted (often leaving out sports for example). That's happened and now people want it all in one place. It turns out what people want is everything in one place for free, which is leading Netflix to have an ad-tier. Though, re-bundling is going to take some time as consolidation happens.
Actually for most part I don't want to subscribe.
And I don't want free ad sponsored.
I just want to pay a reasonable (I'll get back to this) price for the things I actually want.
Netflix was OK with me (and I think a number of others) despite being a subscription service not because it was a subscription.
It was OK because it was
- the only option
- reasonably priced
- and had "everything" one wanted
So what is reasonable?
I'd assume that with all the cost savings given the digitalization of the delivery at least it shouldn't be more expensive than renting a physical dvd, although I'd accept if they adjusted a little for inflation.
So use the Apple TV store (formerly iTunes Store). There you can buy nearly anything from any studio, and you pay per episode or per season. Whether the costs are reasonable or not is in the eye of the beholder but I don't feel ripped off by it.
Nothing is for sale at the Apple TV "Store". You pay for a license to stream a piece of content, that lasts until Apple or the content owner decides to revoke it.
Meh. Videotape wears out. Video discs break. Books yellow and age and rot. No content you have ever bought lasts forever.
Many libraries all over the world have books which have lasted for centuries, far longer than a single person's lifetime. The books I bought as a child can last longer than my own body. That's close enough to "lasting forever" for most practical purposes.
Centuries-old books have had special care to preserve them.
If you want your personal books to last most of your lifetime, then there needs to be a modicum of care taken, which isn't always possible, especially while you're in transit and moving from one place and into another. How many books have been lost that way?
The whole point was someone lamenting digital license may not last forever (though Apple's has, so far) and I'm just reminding everyone that physical media doesn't last forever either.
Part of the concern is "I can keep it longer if I take care of it or if I keep track of it properly", eg if it gets lost or ruined its due to some lack of care by the end user, vs "I only get to keep it until some third party decides I don't get to have it any more".
Then buy physical copies of everything. Oh sure, you lose a huge convenience factor, but at least no third party has control over it.
Has any Apple TV purchase been revoked?
Not sure…
I have a bundle of Downton Abbey that is no longer for sale on iTunes and I can play it, but (for a while, they may have fixed it) at the end of an episode you had to navigate to the next episode by selecting the show and scrolling horizontally through every single episode. Technically possible but very irritating.
(Funny thing: I was watching the show when the switch happened… I watched two or three with the obvious play next episode in series behavior and then it suddenly stopped working… apple support finally told me it seems like it was related to it being taken off in favor of a bundle with the film included.)
That is my current solution.
Still there is a number of things I cannot buy or rent.
Cable is laced with advertising and is linear, whereas much of the world has moved on to on demand. Further, what folks always wanted back in the days before streaming was the ability not to pay for genres they didn't want. Netflix had a reasonable low price for a while so it was worth it even if you only really watched one or two genres they had, and ignored the rest of the content. But with higher prices, it is ever more difficult to justify. Disney used to offer Disney, Hulu, and ESPN separately or as a bundle, so if you didn't watch sports, you could just get Disney and Hulu. Or if you just wanted Disney, you could get that. But they have raised prices and increasingly pushed bundling.
I for one would be perfectly willing to have an option where I could get Westerns for 2 or 3 bucks a month, Action/super heros for 2 or 3 bucks, SciFi for 2 or 3 bucks, Romance/RomCom for a buck. Kids/cartoons for a buck or two etc. And then choose what I want to subscribe to each month. But if you are going to charge me 20 bucks a month, you had better have 20 bucks a month worth of content that I actually want to watch. (and no ads). Oh, and stop making good shows with cliff hanger endings and then canceling them!
As a counter, there is a trend of linear streaming channels increasing in popularity. Lots of people just want to put something on for a bit of time rather than doom scrolling on-demand to find something to put on. There have been times where I've spent the majority of the time I was willing to kill watching something searching for something to watch. Curated channels with content that your interested in is very compelling.
These are definitely out there. I worked on the backed in for something that did this very thing. There was a channel for nothing but old western TV shows. Another channel that was nothing but animal related content. Another that was basically a Hallmark channel with similar content. I never did see what their pricing was though
Beyond the providers still offering linear TV (and the new ones being built in a new "trend" sometimes referred to as FAST TV [1]) You can see some of the linear background channel desires/trends in Twitch streaming numbers, too, and in some of the popularity of some Twitch streaming channels (such as MST3K's 24/7 MST3K channel). Also this is part of why several big "comfort events" on Twitch such as 24/7 streaming of Bob Ross or Mr. Roger's Neighborhood blew up virally.
[1] https://www.mni.com/blog/popular-streaming-services-what-is-...
Don't worry by the way, cable boxes, Netflix, and televisions will give away your privacy even if you pay
You don't get past the ads, but over-the-air TV still exists and is technologically impossible to track you individually.
Also, if you're connecting your TV to the internet, that's a "you" problem.
I'd say this is provably false based on the popularity of streaming services, specifically the rise of Netflix's streaming service. That is the opposite of free.
Netflix is not offering ad tiers due to a lack of subscribers; they are doing it because there were a handful of quarters where revenue stagnated. This does not mean it was a bad business model; it means they want perpetual growth to satisfy shareholders. Same old story.
The reasons cable was and is bad and was destined to be replaced:
- No ability to unbundle (as you said)
- Messy time-shifting (DVRs, PPV, all that nonsense)
- Complicated and limited setup (proprietary hardware; extra fees for multiple devices; no ability to view on a computer or mobile device)
- Tons of fun trying to cancel
Cable has two real advantages:
- Fast channel switching
- Garbage exclusivity contracts
Streaming doesn't solve exclusivity but it certainly doesn't make it worse. In fact, making it easier to subscribe and cancel makes it significantly better.
Mind this is sort of how it used to work.
Outside of broadcast TV and radio, you either subscribed to everything (newspapers, magazines, newsletters) or you bought them ad hoc one by one at the newsstand.
A problem with modern subscriptions is that they auto renew, and thus can be hard to cancel, and they tend to be quite expensive (everyone wants a “mere” $10/month).
100% This is what is missing. I don't want to subscribe to the New York Times for £90 per year because I only want to read about 5 to 10 NYT articles a year. Why can't I pay £1.50 for 15 articles? That would be about the same as buying a physical copy of a paper from a newsagent; if I buy a physical copy I probably read about that many articles from it before it gets recycled. Instead I either don't read the article I've found to or I try to find it on the internet archive which is really irritating. I would like to read articles in a range of papers; say 3-4 UK broadsheets, occasionally some international papers like the NYT, Le Monde and a couple of trade papers. If I subscribed to 4 UK broadsheet newspapers I would already be paying >£400/year in newspaper subscriptions. Who does this? I can't understand why newspapers can't see that no-one wants to be spending that sort of money and why they can't come up with a better solution. If the problem is card fees on micro transactions why don't they club together and create some kind of patreon type thing that agglomerates transactions together?
Post News tried this and failed. Not sure why.
There was also Blendle which I thought was a great idea, but it flopped: https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...
Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.
Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.
FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
I'd also like to subscribe to some rate-limited plan for newspapers, magazines, and newsletters. I can usually find some workaround but it's too much hassle to do that for all the sites I'd like to read (and where I would be willing to give some limited amount of money).
After being away from it for a couple of years, I checked out Apple News+ again, and it's added a lot of newspapers and magazines in the time I was away.
The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines.
It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests.
Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
Didn't Apple just layoff a ton of people in this group?
I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings. Mine offers 3 day access to the NYTimes web site for free. There is a bit of a friction as I must first log into my library account and click a link. Then I have to log into my NYTimes account if I'm not already. Bam! Full access to everything for 72 hours. It can be endlessly renewed if that's your thing. I tend to use it about once a month.
I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings.
Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.
I used to buy magazines in the 90s that cost upwards of $6-8 a magazine each, that's $18 in today's dollars.
You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'
Exactly!
The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.
Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.
Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.
Internet Archive is irritating. Just archive.is it and 9/10 times it's already archived. Especially with articles here on HN. And if it's not archived it will be archived on the spot.
You mean you want... the cable TV bundle again? Literally the thing that the article rails against, because cable TV inherently produces "sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting."
Amazing.
It was totally predictable that many of the same people who hated on the cable bundle also hate on a fragmented streaming landscape even though they probably pay significantly less than they did for cable TV unless they also pay for live TV anyway. (And they'd also hate on an all-inclusive integrated streaming service for the hundreds of dollars a month it would cost.)
Might be a bit of a cultural difference though. I'm in the Netherlands. TV was never as expensive over here as in the US. We also got spoiled, I guess, because the hits from the US were also on TV over here but the smaller shows weren't, so we'd get the biggest shows from Fox, CBS and Comedy Central on the same channel in some cases. And from what I remember this was <$20 a month.
I paid about $100/month for cable TV in the US and that wasn't with a bunch of premium content. (Maybe just HBO.) That was Comcast so I assume that was pretty typical. And then any streaming channels, movie rentals (which were mostly not on standard cable), etc. were on top of that.
And when I canceled cable TV I decided to just go cold turkey and do without the occasional sporting event on live TV. So depending upon how you count I'm probably paying less than $50/month for all my video entertainment these days.
It is more of content owner trying to get what they can from different part of the world. There are places in third world where HBO would be $1 / month , same thing in US is like 15-20 dollars. Buyers/local networks can always say this is price local market can pay else they will pirate.
No, that's why I didn't write that. Spotify allows nearly everyone to put their music on the platform. Just this week I listened to some music with <1000 plays that I found in a random video somewhere. I choose what I want to listen to and a part of the fee I pay gets transferred to the creator. I don't need to buy 100 different subscriptions to labels and musicians, it's centralized.
(Yes, I know Spotify isn't perfect and that there are valid criticisms of the platform. I'm not using it as an example of a perfect end goal, I'm using it as an example of the only thing right now that gets somewhat in the neighborhood. And in the industry there are multiple platforms who distribute mostly the same content with only some 'exclusive' releases. Which is what I'd like to see for the web.)
Brave is building something that sounds like it might be right up your alley, but adoption of their payment system has been rather low, and I doubt Mozilla has enough street cred to be more successful after the last ten years of their mismanagement and the market share hovering just above 0%.
If Mozilla's market share is an impediment to the adoption, then have I got some bad news for you about Brave....
(I say this as a happy user of Brave on Android)
"> we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content"
I am also a bit pessimistic about this, but rather think the danger comes from LLMs making even more convincing clickbait and "facts". Cheap, easy to consume, if there are enough clicks, there is enough ad money.
Something real was misrepresented, so there was a lot of outcry? Awesome, lots of clicks. Lots of money. We can later apoligize, that the LLM summarizing made a misstake there.
As long as ads dominate where the money comes from for newspapers, not much will change.
I think another alternative here, is the existence of broad spectrum “summary as a service” is that “content for content’s sake” and blog spam and SEO become less relevant.
Maybe not, but I hope so.
Our economic model encourages this kind of race to the bottom enshitification of everything. Unfortunately there are no high-tech solutions to this problem. The technology we need to improve is our political/economic system.
Perhaps with wealthy country populations projected to fall dramatically we will finally be forced to find a way other than "growth" to value human endeavour. That would be the most likely path to a solution, I fear it will be rather painful.
Our economic model (is supposed to) boil down to producing our goods and services using the least amount of resources. Sure, that yields planned obsolescence and enshittification, but also cheap multi-GHz laptops and widespread Internet availability.
I think we're past a low point of ad-fueled low-value content. Better alternatives will arise, grow, and become ubiquitous - but then they too will grow more expensive, become corrupted, and be circumvented in turn.
Media, art, and info distribution are never static targets, and even if a stable equilibrium exists and can be reached that does not mean that society will not oscillate around it.
I've wondered if things might get bad enough to enable a fork of the web. It could happen 2 ways:
1) A truly user focused browser is created, the fabled "user agent". The ad-focused web doesn't support that browser, but websites that care about users do support it. Thus, people who want more than ad-drivel use the niche browser and have access to a web full of weird and non-profit-focused content.
2) Possibly a fork of the underlying technologies. Maybe the browser mentioned uses incompatible technologies or protocols. Maybe this new web is based on something other than HTML and JavaScript.
Probably not. It's a wild idea. It's probably too hard to do better than the existing technologies, and the effort required for such a fork seems ever less likely in this time of dissipating focus and hobbies.
web3 is that. Pay for content / services you use through micro transactions.
If by web3 you mean crypto currencies then I ask you nicely to stop using web3 for that.
Web3 is things like json-ld and the like and it is tragic that scammers have been able to abuse the term for so long.
I’m not familiar with json-ld, other than a quick skim of a Google search that I just did. What is so revolutionary about it (and other technologies in the space, such as…?) that it represents a whole new revision of the web paradigm, comparable from the shift from static pages in web1 to interactive sites in web2?
It is not revolutionary. It is evolutionary just like web2.0 was. That is kind of the point.
But together with other, similar technologies it extends the current with metadata etc web just like web2 extended the existing web with things like ajax interactions, drag and drop and folksonomies ("tags") and other forms of user generated content.
The (IMO) fake crypto peddler "web3" is (again IMO) "revolutionary" unlike web2 and the real web3: it is a complete break from many of the things that made the web great. I'd even hesitate to describe much of it as web at all.
"web3" is nothing but another crypto-scam.
Arbitrary server-chosen microtransactions make things worse in many ways even if the payment process is simple, fast, and free.
Please stop.
It already exists, it's called Geminispace: https://geminiprotocol.net/
I never believed that internet advertising was worth what it supposedly is. Stuff like this seems to confirm it for me: https://www.adexchanger.com/on-tv-and-video/googles-second-w...
I think internet advertising is massively overvalued, the initial bubble happened when the click fraud detection tools were nonexistent, and because Google hasn't been changed, everyone assumes their valuation is right and correct.
internet advertising as a means to sell garbage is overvalued, but it enables a system of pervasive surveillance that allows governments and companies to exploit your data offline too. As long as the tracking continued, the buying and selling of the most intimate details of your life would still be a massive and growing industry even if no one ever put an ad on a webpage again. Advertising is also effective at manipulating public perception/opinion though so it's not going anywhere either way.
++++++ to Kagi.
I kind of like the OutsideOnline model where I pay for the apps (trailforks gaiagps) but also get access to decent content. Though I guess that is close to the old cable TV bundle model that sucked.
I pay for Kagi, NextDNS, Youtube to keep ads at bay. If there was a bundled content network beyond just Youtube infomercials posing as content it would be even more appealing.
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.
If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is available.
Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic.
One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back.
But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet.
Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
Also, back in the day, some of us had a fair number of magazine subscriptions. But, really, at peak it was a small percentage of the number of websites I look at at least now and then. Consumption has generally changed and most of us are skittish about subscriptions generally even if we have a few.
The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20 years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or three most eye-catching articles that twenty different publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think.
I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.
Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.
RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
I'm not sure what skeletons you think are being pulled out of the closet. I do the same as the OP, if there is an option to pay I do that, but I will always ad block. I feel for you if you can't make money without ads, but I'd rather see the world burn than be ad driven.
I pay for many many subscriptions for content I like. Also, I don't see any "virtue signalling" anywhere. I don't want ads because they are hostile and not in my best interest. They significantly lower the quality of my life. It's as simple as that.
You cannot see the virtue signalling unless you see the traffic metrics and revenue sheets.
Everyone says they pay to support, very few people actually do.
Just look at how it is a matter of course to post an archive.is link anytime a pay walled article is posted. It's so pervasive and wide spread that people don't even think about it.
That's why the saying "actions speak louder than words" exists...
In any marketing research it is well-known that what people say they would pay for and what they actually pay for are two different things. Hence also the mantra about MVPs and going to market as soon as possible.
But specifically on AnandTech and "written journalism", I think they are right about the "written" part. These days the topic and hardware reviews are all over Youtube.
It's not your customers' fault that your business model is not viable, and guilting people into turning off AdBlock is manipulative and detrimental to overall human productivity. Asking people to watch ads is simply a bad trade off, in the same way that burning trash to save on fuel is bad -- to save 1$ in fuel costs, environmental damage in the thousands is caused. To make 1$ from ads, many multiples of damage in lost productivity and bad product proliferation are caused.
Ad based businesses are as bad as door to door life insurance scammers, multi level scammers, etc.
In short, find a job that doesn't require damaging other people.
/Forgot to mention, watching ads without buying the advertised product simply decreases ad yield over time and therefore it even wastes productivity for 0 return in the long run./
The virtue signaling part of online tech discourse is probably my biggest dissatisfaction with it these days. I hope you're using Kagi because Google is unethical oh and using Matrix because Discord is evil oh but you're using Gemini because the web is all cursed and sorry you're using Signal for your private communications right? Twitter is evil now Mastodon right? Hope you aren't using Reddit but Lemmy. "Enshittification!!"
Meanwhile the numbers show where the users actually are.
What numbers?
Where can I pay to replace ads with something that isn't orders of magnitude more expensive? Basically any single-site subscription I've seen fails that test. If you're citing that kind of subscription, then that evidence doesn't work here.
The best (and only) implementation of this I’ve seen is https://all3dp.com/
If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds.
Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
That model sounds great. Low friction and impulse-buy pricing.
There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example) I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly subscription cost.
Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that a non starter.
I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all your time on crappy sites.
I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
I don't use an adblocker out of entitlement. I use an adblocker because I don't want to be tracked, I don't want to be surveilled, I don't want my information hoarded/sold/leaked, I don't want to be influenced by legions of marketers looking to hijack my monkey brain, I don't want to be scammed by paid ads masquerading as organic content, and I don't want to expose myself to yet another vector for malware.
From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
Problem with that approach is that an adblocker is actual critical anti malware software.
The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers.
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more malicious but profitable) ads.
I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.
Exactly, I'm sure these hobbyists will be jumping in any day now to replace what was previously done by paid professionals.
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
HN user offers to pay $1.99/year for many carefully done review. Amazed that no one want to take deal.
I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example of an advertising supported site because, more than any other site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would shift and KA-CHING I’d click on an ad accidentally.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
Same. Paying for LWN but I get a bit annoyed when there's the lone Phoronix-tier clickbait about diversity amongst all the high quality kernel reports.
Phoronix could get a lot better if it stopped clickbaiting (which attracts the most feebleminded parts of the peanuts nogrammer gallery in the comments) and labelled -> aggregated its benchmarks according to SIMD support/enablement, threading and type (CPU, GPGPU, 3D, etc...). And investigated strange issues in results instead of drowning readers in data.
Basically, we need something in-between Phoronix and ChipsAndCheese for benchmarks.
Also reading Igor's Lab and GamerNexus when I want some data about hardware, but it's Windows focused, sadly.
Diversity as a topic and problem space has became undeniably important though.
Of course it's not an easy topic, does not really lend itself to the usual reporting methodology of LWN. I wholeheartedly agree that many times it is completely counterproductive to post/host content that tries and fails to engage with diversity, because - as you pointed out - even the mention of it gives that ugly sour taste when browsing a site.
Yet the topic won't really lose its salience as long as the problems themselves are either "solved" or something crowds them out.
I trust that the LWN editors are aware of this, and are not doing it for the clicks. So I think it's completely fair (more so necessary for progress) to critique bad takes on diversity, but I think it just leads to frustration to try to "wish it away".
Diversity of opinion and experience is extremely important. Not diversity of your bedroom preferences or any other superficial characteristics that have no relation to technical qualities. Saying otherwise is racist and *ist by definition.
Comments on those articles always go down the shitter. I petitioned the editors to disable commenting on them, and you can do the same -- politely and humbly, of course.
The contact information is on the website, whoever wants to, will find it easily.
If a place somehow ends up only employing people wearing brown shirts, isn't that a bit odd?
I've been reading Phoronix for years and I don't recall seeing clickbait. Most of the time the titles are just quotes from the sourced article he links to.
Even skimming https://www.phoronix.com/news I see no clickbait?
Was it something they did in the past? Or is the clickbait specific to benchmarks, which I have no ability to interpret?
At this point I suspect if Phoronix suddenly takes a turn and stops being clickbait blogspam, it would be alienating its core audience... People that love to read ragebait and argue aimlessly in the comments.
The basic problem of Phoronix is that it doesn't have the capacity nor competence to do this. Journalism is expensive and takes time, and Phoronix is a single person. If they were to actually go in and investigate every strange issue they had in their benchmarks (assuming they even notice them!), or add reasonable commentary beyond the seemingly autogenerated “in benchmark X, device Y seems go be ahead”, they would have to cut the number of articles and benchmarks drastically. Kind of like Anandtech, really; one of my main gripes with it is that there just wasn't _enough_ of it per unit of time.
I feel like something is very wrong when a publication the quality of AnandTech can't figure out a viable business model.
I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. They could have diversified in terms of revenue if they were independent.
I blame this on Future PLC. Not only their Ad model is worst of all the tech site, the tech layout and software for the site and posting articles were bad and I remember Ian complained about it multiple times. They could have at least focus on their core competency which is in-depth articles and explanations.
Instead we now live in the world of rumours site like WCCftech, and Apple dominance in Tech circle since the iPhone means a lot of new ( relatively speaking ) tech readers are reading Macrumors and 9to5Mac as their tech new sources. Reporting things that those reporter dont understand and keep making fake rumours that makes absolutely no sense.
Very true. As much as we try to hope organizations might reinvent themselves or disrupt themselves for the future before something else does, they just provide a good service.
I can't wonder if AnandTech had a substack angle it might have provided an option?
Good, useful writing that teaches you how to look at, understand, use, or do something is invaluable. Creating beginners is everything in this world so they can progress.
but how do you explain AnandTech lasting so so long if the business model didn't work?
I remember reading AnandTech >20 years ago. I think it failed now because they slowed down on releasing content. Over the last 2 years they've hardly published anything. They didn't even cover the latest iPhones (and when they did, it was months after release when no one cared anymore).