Advertising as a business model is destroying the things we love. Nobody wants addictive content. We want informative, enjoyable content, but that's not profitable. Page views are profitable, and page views require addiction.
Turn on your ad blockers. Destroy addiction as a business model. The only content that will remain will be subscription-based, commissioned by crowds or individuals, or written for free. It will be better.
Naivity. The ads will be hidden in the content and articles/videos will be paid for by advertisers to shill their products with subtle mentions. Everything will be a PR piece, and you can't block that without blocking the content.
We seem to have reached a bearable truce with spam. I think well north of 90% of email people try to send is spam nowadays, but no more than 50% of what I actually see on any given day is PR junk, unsolicited or otherwise. Granted, messages I care about sometimes get lost, but it doesn't happen often enough to make email useless. ML-based "native advertising" blockers will eventually become as common as spam filters, and the war will become a slightly unpleasant stalemate. Maybe the end-state will be something like current product placement in movies and TV, which is usually either comically heavy-handed, or completely unobtrusive and ignorable.
Actually, I was quite interested to notice recently that I don't seem to get that much spam any more. There are apparently only 16 emails in my spam folder from the last 30 days. I'm not particularly careful with my email address either.
I have fairly a boring Spamassassin configuration on my mail server, and I don't get a lot of spam reaching inbox.
What I have noticed, however, is that I am now getting more and more telemarketing phone calls (robo calls) on my cell phone than I am spam hitting my inbox. It's reached the point where I keep my phone on silent all of the time because I get 5+ robo calls each day.
You must have a good filter. I get hundreds of chinese spam emails every month (which get moved to the spam folder automatically) since I made my address public on a couple mailing lists.
You might block "27 Thoughtful Wedding Gifts" because it has product links, but there is chance some of those links would actually be useful to people looking for wedding gifts.
Such a blocker would have to block the entire Buzzfeed, for instance.
If anyone thinks that this behavior is desirable, download BuzzOff [1], it blocks BuzzFeed and other click bait on the web. It is more than a simple DNS block, it removes entire elements that contain click bait from websites like Facebook, so that they never even appear.
There is the CAN SPAM act, too, but it only works for legitimate organizations with reputations to preserve (politicians and legitimate retailers, mostly). SMTP-level blocking gets rid of most of the bottom-feeders, and ML targets the stuff in the middle. The web already has customer satisfaction and host-level blocking for the top and bottom, but ML will still be needed for the middle.
The known sites aren't the one violating CANSPAM (and its ilk). There's a huge difference between websites that people choose to visit and an open inbox that anyone can ping.
Given that even reputable/suable ad networks have been caught distributing malware, I don't see ad slots served by third parties as much better than open inboxes (though at least most mail clients don't load external resources or execute JS by default...). I think the web equivalent of CANSPAM-compliant mail is first-party advertising and third party networks who make a real effort to block malware and enforce some sort of design and privacy standards; maybe they would even obey do-not-track. The bottom-feeders are most of what currently shoves ads at people's faces.
I see an analogy with free/cheap IT conferences: you go there (naively) expecting content, but it turns out that almost every talk is an advertisement of the product or job openings.
You're right, I should modify my statement: there are free/cheap conferences that are organised by some for-profit organisations - and they're mostly pitches.
On the other hand, there are lots of meetups, confs, tech talks organised by non-profits, student groups, enthusiast, etc. which are really worth attending.
I like native advertising in general. The one thing I do not like though is the growing prevalence of "un-advertising" i.e. blurring logos of brands that appear in the image for different reasons. I have not looked into this but I presume this is done because some sponsor earned exclusivity.
Also, I absolutely hate the current trend in tv shows to put a sticker over a logo on _every single_ computer. Real world does not look like this, it is ridiculous.
Or the legal department is afraid of trademark case for showing the mark... or an advertising arrangement couldn't be reached before shooting was done.
I don't know, it seems like a quite recent trend for me. For example in France they are now blurring the national railway company logo in news and tv shows. Which is a totally pointless action since it is on a railway station and there is (basically) only one railway company. Not to mention their logo is extremely recognisable even when blurred.
More recently I saw a show about clothing where they put some duct tape over Nike logos on shoes.
Are there laws that prohibit you from showing brands in videos shot in public places now? If Nike did not want to be recognised they would not put their giant logo on everything.
I disagree (until they do it better). The Microsoft PP is especially horrible. The way they force strange MS Branding onto laptops takes away quite a bit of immersion for me.
I also hate forced dialogues that only serve PP (PlayStation in House of Cards comes to mind).
But once they do it better it becomes rather problematic ethically. What good is a "this contains PP" label if it's the standard and you can't identify it. I guess once we cross that bridge my only recourse is non consumption. I guess there might be a disruption opportunity there somewhere where you can pay for content without the PP which requires shooting TV/movies/sports broadcasts in two different modes. Doubt there would be many customers for that though...maybe the other way around, dynamic programming with custom tailored PP.
I think the PlayStation in House of Cards did serve a bit of a plot point... the shift when he was forced to switch to a secure network point and couldn't play anymore... That lack of a day to day stress relief can have a big impact. I don't play many games, but could see it as more than PP... I don't think most people who don't play would even recognize what game system it even was.
Case in point: I'm not a console gamer and didn't pay any attention to what console he was using. It only registered as "playing a military FPS on a TV screen" which to me seemed like the obvious modern equivalent of punching a punching bag in the basement to relieve stress.
What about the trend to use actual news casters in movies? Its absolutely product placement yet there would have been a generic fake newscast if not for the product placed one.
I actually amuse myself during movies / TV shows trying to pick which items are product placement and which are just necessary props.
I'm a lot more cynical of articles, though, and like you I generally treat any positive piece (even down to forum posts if they smell fishy) with a degree of suspicion.
What is Theranos could have paid WSJ not to publish the article exposing them as frauds? They might still be pushing ineffective tests on people today. They might be raising another round.
Large actors should never have too much control over the media.
Is there some truth to this episode ? An acquaintance of mine (picture a stereotypical MLM-type guy) recently added a P.S. to an e-mail suggesting I subscribe to 60 Minutes All Access. I found this bizarre since I had recently clicked on 60 Minutes All Access link. It felt like my friend was advertising to me based on my browsing history.
But this would suggest Google monitors what I do in my Chrome browser then suggests an affiliate embed a casual link in an e-mail based on the friend he is writing. That sounds kind of evil and improbable. Anyone ?
Sounds good for upper middle class population. If your wages were $50,000/yr (aka US median wage) then you would think twice or may be thrice about anything that has word "subscription" in it.
Also, consider the fact lot of subscriptions have poor overall value. Advertises allow you to try and move on without making any commitments. If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.
Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model. Subscriber churn is almost always ongoing threat putting significant pressure on aquition pipeline. If TV channels went subscription only, most would die quick horrible death. The open secret in media industry is that advertisers are forced to pay lot more money than return they would actually get which ultimately "subsidizes" the content creation.
> Sounds good for upper middle class population. If your wages were $50,000/yr (aka US median wage) then you would think twice or may be thrice about anything that has word "subscription" in it.
Garbage content is not an improvement over no content, no matter what your demographic. I'm also skeptical that there's a very large demographic for whom even $10/mo in subscription fees would break the bank.
> If all internet websites enforced subscriptions then you won't be browsing around so often.
Sounds great to me. Most of the time I spend on the internet is spent looking for decent content, and most of that time is spent sifting through garbage.
> Finally, anyone who had been in media business for long enough knows that subscription is terrible business model.
Excellent. I really hope the Buzzfeeds of the world go out of business.
Advertisers and the garbage they fund make the world a worse place. They prop up businesses that provide negative value. They drain resources from businesses that provide value but have to advertise to the level of their competition's advertising. They introduce insecurity and complexity to our infrastructures. They waste the talents of thousands of brilliant minds who could be solving real problems. They sell people things they don't need or want, for prices they can't afford. Worst of all, they poison the collective consciousness with ignorance and outright lies. They deserve to go out of business.
People are willing to pay for what they actually want, and people want good content, so creators of good content will be okay. The creators of garbage who need ads to legitimate their sorry existence, on the other hand, can burn.
> Garbage content is not an improvement over no content, no matter what your demographic. I'm also skeptical that there's a very large demographic for whom even $10/mo in subscription fees would break the bank.
I wholly disagree. You think from the perspective of an US citizen but there are other places on the map where 10$ would be a great deal. This would restrict these people's access to information that they might need just as mush as you do. The side effect would be effectively closing off parts of the internet to a great array of people. You'd eventually get at the same impasse the film industry is now. Bad distribution, unserrviced areas, article piracy would pop-up.
My father earns ~300 EUR/month. How would you convince him to pay 10$/month for a website that publishes maybe ~5 articles that seem interesting to him a month?
And your information staple is not just _one_ provider, but many providers, and you'd probably have to pay them all.
The presence of paywalls would not necessarily exclude the existence of rubbish. Look at newspapers before internet, bad press also existed then, tabloids existed then. And people paid for them. No, the reason bad content exists is not because of the payment model, it's because people _like_ it. They enjoy shitty articles, they let themselves emotionally manipulated by factless press. We, as a collective, are pretty weak.
But open, even ad-based access to information can improve this. Open access leads to a more diverse information stable and eventually, people settle for the, it not best, at least better information alternative. Thing that would not happen if you were stuck in your information bubble, as is with a sole or few information providers.
Advertisers aren't funding content to help the middle class. They're funding content to take the middle class's money. You might think advertising doesn't make people spend more, but there's a pretty big industry that disagrees with you.
I don't care if it's hard to build a business on subscriptions. The alternative—building a business on addiction and manipulation—is immoral. I will happily watch it die.
You might think advertising doesn't make people spend more, but there's a pretty big industry that disagrees with you.
So what would people do with the money if ads didn't exist? Make quilts out of bills? People are going to spend it all, that's the whole purpose of money, ads just redirect who gets it.
So, you are agains people having some savings and less junk that does not make them happier? You do realise that much of advertising is geared towards getting you to do that impulse purchase that you later regret?
There are studies showing that people don't use their garages to park their cars, because they are full of stuff.
Ads constantly remind me that the newer model of the blender that I have will make me sooo much cooler (blender is just an example). But the last year's blender that I have works perfectly well. Why should I like the fact that the website tells me that I'm old and boring because I don't have a perfect body and I have last year's blender model?
Yes, people buy a lot of crap they don't need. It's not clear to me that they would stop doing so without advertising, or whether ads are just getting them to buy different crap. Besides, with the constant concern about "aggregate demand", it's far from clear to me that people would actually be allowed to keep those savings.
Content marketing is destroying the things we love :)
It's almost impossible to read a well written popular piece of content today that isn't selling something either directly or indirectly.
I think we will see advertising in the form of a piece of promotion attached to other content is going to disappear as we become better and better at injecting it into our normal content.
I brush my teeth because I don't want them to rot out of my face and make my life difficult. And I'm writing this comment because I think your perspective is amateurish and stupid, and maybe I'm really just a compulsive asshole.
You're pounding round pegs into square holes and just ignoring the shredded bits that went flying when you did that.
That's an extremely myopic way of looking at it. Not everything that is done is done solely for the benefit of the one doing it.
And I really don't see why you're so committed to generalizing marketing and sales terminology into a general human philosophy, save for your lack of familiarity with the existing, perfectly suitable terminology.
More importantly, human identity is complex and multi-faceted, and is not entirely defined by human individuality. I can see myself as an individual, and maybe I'm selling something there, but if I see myself as a living creature, there is nothing for me to sell myself to, since rocks and stars don't give a shit what I'm 'selling.' Humanity itself is not selling anything, and my ability to see myself as an agent of humanity precludes me from selling anything in that role. So anything I do in service of those goals isn't marketing.
Imagine you just stubbed your toe. You've just participated in life. Now what are you 'selling' by doing that? Nothing.
Nature has given us needs that needs to be full filled, like thirst and hunger. There is also higher level needs, like need to fit in and seen as a desirable mate.
What do we get in return of this pursuit? Pleasure in some cases or relief from pain, in other. In other words, it is a fair game, IF you consider that pleasure and pain are "real".
Now ads are evil because the create needs that often conflicts with our natural drives. For example, a man who loses sleep, or does not spend time with family for advancing in career, often so that he can buy more stuff. In this case, the man sees pleasure in seeing his bank balance increase and makes him afford more and more expensive stuff.
Now this pleasure, I say, is a lie. Because it is not natural, and does not serve a natural purpose. Also, this manipulation by Ads also serves to distract people from constructive thinking.
Imagine all the revolutions and all the breakthroughs of the world. They came from People who think freely. When you are distracted 24x7 by ever increasing ads, where do you have time to think for yourself? I am not saying that all the creativity from the world has disappeared. But imagine if the great artists of the past were distracted by Ads like we have today? Do you think the great works in arts and literature would have been created?
I am not even considering ads that Inject fear and insecurity into the minds of the masses to make then spend, spend, spend all day long..../rant
"Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also."
Personally I have gotten access to some legitimately good products via ads. So, I don't believe advertising is destroying things - only irresponsible, immoral advertisements of bad products is. This latter form of advertising thrives only via junk content(like daily newspapers, reality television etc.). No good company will be willing to advertise its products via junk content and no creator of good content is going to let a bad product get advertised. So I feel, speaking against junk content is the way to go. That way we will have good content making money by advertising products that actually deserve it while also getting rid of bad companies and junk content.
If you are thinking of blocking ads then that will hit not only the pockets of junk content creators(which is fine) but also that of good content creators who will then eventually turn to the junk.
X10 is the brand I will forever associate with popover/under ads... The product itself and the company weren't necessarily bad. That said, I've always avoided them because they started it all in my mind.
The advertising business model is why those companies built addictive products. To make money from ads, you have to keep them coming back as often as possible, even if it isn't adding value to their lives.
The masses have been strongly motivated to prefer the easy, the immediately satisfying, the addictive, for centuries via advertising. If nobody wants addictive content then we wouldn't be where we are---domesticated, holding certain preferences that we like to believe are our own which are actually merely beneficial to certain businesses.
Turn on your ad blockers (and destroy addiction as a business model)? Yeah, right. Really, you're kidding, right?
While I understand your position, I'm not so sure that Google, Facebook, and Twitter would look the same today if they charged each user directly for access.
Right, they'd look very different. But charging money isn't necessarily the answer there. I'm betting on decentralization. Facebook and Twitter manage identities that let us interact with our friends, but we have the technology for decentralized identities that have no middlemen. We'll replace these services with clients that act on our behalf.
Who is "we" in "we'll replace these services"? Because it sure won't be me or my organization. Just like everyone who reads this comment, we will hope someone else will do it.
That's it. Everyone is too busy trying to make money, which is fair enough. Even open source to an extent. What's the first thing programmers say when someone says how do I get a programming job and earn loads of cheddar writing apps? 'Do some open source and get it on your CV'.
No one is going to build this stuff unless it has some sort of personal gain for them. There's nothing wrong with that at all, it's just the way things work.
If I had a basic income, I would spend my days working on exactly this type of thing, with a bit of consulting on the side to earn travel money or whatever.
You've proven my point. If you had money on a tree, you'd do it, but as you don't (as far as I know!) you won't.
I would love to have a basic income, or an endless supply or money and be able to work on what I want, when I want. At the moment I'm not quite there, so have to find the odd day or two per week to work on more interesting 'stuff' than paying bills.
It's interesting that there is this huge contingent of programmers who have a picture of what they would do if they had basic income, and that that picture is very different from what they do at their "day jobs."
It's part of why I think basic income experiments are so very interesting. Just this question of what would people do? What new things would happen? How would software change? How would everything else change?
Ah sorry that's the way it read, probably my comprehension!
It's a very interesting field. I'm not waiting around for it to happen though, especially in the UK which is a very conservative country in the main.
I'm actively building my business so that I can take a back seat, or sell it within 3 years and thus spend more time solving different problems (that may or may not have a monetary end-game for me).
Ads are not bad, they allow more content to be available, its one thing to see my ads on every site like a virus or spam but if you enjoy visiting my site the least you can do is allow the ads so I get a profit out of it. Also Free content is not better, and it makes easier for people with money and an agenda to fill the space of people who tries to make a living HONESTLY with ads.
Ad blockers will eventually do to the content industry what file sharing has done to the music industry: it will make it impossible to make a living at it unless you are part of a very large corporation, mostly because they have other businesses to subsidize the unprofitable content models.
Even podcasts don't do that well as a business. The longest lasting podcasts are the ones that are essentially one large advertising vehicle for products or services owned by the individual or company running the podcast.
open source, another example of this, has pushed many individuals out of business because they give away many of the same set of features for free and then charge for support. A support company doesn't scale well with a single person or even a couple. This is why pretty much all popular open source projects are funded by large corporations. I can't think of one that isn't.
The pattern has been pretty clear in the last decade: push to give something away for free, the big corps take over because the individual can't compete with free, complain that big corps are ruining everything, and the latest: we now need a basic income because there are no jobs left.
Money is a necessary evil. It can give even the individual more power over their own life. I'm just surprised that so many people here advocate the voluntary shift in power away from the individual and into the hands of big corporations.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The whole progressive movement does exactly this. In the Nordic countries for instance, it's nearly impossible to run your own company due to the crippling taxes and regulations involved. Your only choices for employment are big corporations and the government.
My ad-run business is doing pretty well and I'm the only person running it. Ad blocking doesn't seem to have affected me - yet - because my ads are relevant, nice to look at, and self-hosted. Readers and advertisers (and me) get value out of them.
I hope I'm around in the future, and I hope that other websites will see the light and follow good practices.
This is a really great perspective. My background is in the print publishing world...going back to the late 90s. What I realize is that we keep going back to that world for guidance on what the future of the web will hold (in terms of content publishing). The first place I saw this was in design. In the wild west of the early net (prior to about 10 years ago), there was really not much rhyme or reason to how websites were designed. Then people like Khoi Vinh started advocating for grid structure in web design...bringing a concept that was well developed in the print world.
Today, we seem to be fighting for this false binary of either a web with ads or one without. What the old world of print might teach us is the importance of quality, limited, relevant advertising. When done well, people are not only OK with advertising, they embrace and look forward to it. Magazines were best at this...but they've gone down the path of devaluing their ads by moving towards more and more paid content (advertorials) and by overwhelming the content with the quantity of ads.
I think in the end, publishers will have no choice but to see what you see or else perish.
I have the copy of Newsweek that run only Macintosh ads back in 1984. I bought it on eBay just for the ads, certainly not for the feature about Ronald Reagan!
Can you tell us a bit more please? Did you essentially roll your own internal AdWords? How do you manage customers, campaigns, tracking, payments, etc.?
Sure, it really isn't anything special. I essentially treat the site like a magazine and sell advertisements on a monthly basis because that is the easiest thing for both myself and advertisers understand.
The site runs on WordPress so I just use one of the ad rotation plugins available [adrotate pro]. Most campaigns are for some set number of weeks or months and the plugin takes care of that.
I track clicks and advertisers track referrals traffic plus whatever other metrics they want to on their own websites. Because a number of advertisers renew regularly, I trust that they are happy with the results they are seeing. For payments, it kind of depends on the customer, but basically I just invoice them.
I subscribe to four publications and fund two nonprofit publications. But let's assume I wasn't willing to pay. We should still stop supporting our own addictions. Especially since the people feeding us junk literally sell changes in our behavior to the highest bidder. This is madness, y'all. Opt out.
Yes, because it doesn't have to be a direct exchange of money.
For example I feed live data to Wunderground, Flightradar24 and several other smaller sites and in exchange they give me ongoing advertisement-free subscriptions to their services.
That costs me a few pence per day in electricity, on top of initial equipment acquisition, but neither of those costs is tied to one particular service. I could change from Flightradar to Planefinder or Flightaware, for example, and receive the same benefits.
If I were a cynic I'd say the result of such a plan would be more articles like the one we're discussing here. Thinly veiled PR pieces.
I should probably dust of my Zotero subfolder on subliminal stimuli, too.
It's not a media flatrate. It's a tax by any other name to maintain publicly funded television and radio channels while maintaining a separation of state and media (because of bad experiences with state-controlled media in the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic).
The reason many people don't like it are:
* it feels like a third-party license fee due to how it is charged (e.g. you have to pay it yourself and it is charged per household rather than per citizen)
* prior to the simplification of the rules in 2013 many people would be subjected to "inspections" by the media companies, with ethically and legally dubious behaviour like peeking into bedroom windows and rummaging through trash cans (in the days of tv magazines)
* it costs money, unlike most private channels (via satellite or antenna)
* you have to pay even if you don't use it or don't want it
* despite being something you have to pay for, there is no obvious way to influence the programming
* although they are the only channels that are required by law to feature a certain amount of educational and cultural programming, in practice a lot of it is basically "entertainment for the elderly" (like telenovelas and cheesy romance flicks) or game shows
Personally I'm also extremely annoyed that they give free airtime to the dominant religious groups (Catholic Church of Germany, Evangelical Church of Germany and sometimes Jews or Muslims) "because culture", to the point that they always invite religious ministers or monks for ethical debates and frequently give them more weight than secular arguments (though to be fair: the religious representatives usually come off as fairly progressive although their arguments are of course still entirely based on theology).
Plus, of course, the fact that while BBC subscribers get Terry Pratchett we only get Rosamunde Pilcher -- and German actors, who are mostly horrible and take themselves too serious.
This is a submarine piece for Medium, but I found this paragraph to be poignant:
“I’ve been working on publishing systems on the internet for my entire career, which is coming up on 20 years now,” says Williams. “When I stepped back from operations at Twitter, I thought, OK, what’s next? There was no longer this need to make it easy. We’d checked that box. It’s easy to create a website. It’s even easier to send a tweet. But it turns out it wasn’t the case that more information would automatically make us all smarter as individuals or as a society. There was still something missing and broken with the system we’re relying on to get our information, that told us how to understand the world.”
It's easy to agree with this based on the media we encounter today, but this state is not an obvious result of the introduction of the internet. The network has changed our culture, and continues to change our culture, in ways that we don't yet fully understand.
Someone should make a plugin that counts the number of times a brand is mentioned in an "article" and uses ML/crowdsources votes to show a "sponsored content" or "submarine" score. Even if there is some interesting point to be made, I hate being manipulated into reading longform ads.
It's just content that exists at the prodding of a PR company on behalf of their client. Once you've worked with and around PR people, you start to recognise it in the wild even when it's subtle. It's not always a direct angle but could be things to build the brand of key personalities like "Running a business with small children" where the business owner is profiled, or "Staying healthy at the office" where the business owner talks about what they eat and drink.
A significant portion of print (and now online) pieces would be as a result of professional PR efforts.
(My wife works in PR and I used to share an office with another PR company.)
The internet is still new and so businesses remain committed to pre-internet business models. Modal popups, interstitials, encroachment on real content...all of this stuff comes from broadcast and print advertising models that a majority of the players in this world were trained on, either through degree programs or experience at agencies themselves wedded to the status quo.
Information goods and markets are a poor match for numerous reasons. Paradoxically, it also seems to be the direction much of the advanced world is headed, in the sense both of goods which are nothing but information (data, print, audio, images, video), and those for which information content is a large component: high-tech manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and processes.
One of the problems is fairly well understood: the tendency for marginal costs to approach zero, or at least a small fraction of the fixed costs of production (look at the story over how Boeing accounts for the R&D of its 787 Dreamliner).
Another is more insidious: information isn't readily assimilarted. If you look at the advertiser's toolkit for message dissemination, what you see are all kinds of ways to drape the intended message over an assimilable one: sex, youth, beauty, fame, fear, greed, jealousy, envy, loss. Or repetition, music, disorientation, flashy elements.
Junk food (of the dietary or infotainment variety) has cognizability, a word I first ran across in William Stanley Jevons description of characteristics of money. You instantly recognise what these are. Complex truths are, well, more complicated. The geniuses who discover or explain them come up with useful metaphors or analogies: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Feynman. Much of that is mapping a novel thought onto a familiar one.
We're not going to take that out of information, it's part and parcel of the bargain (a metaphor, incidentally, arguably a cliche). But we can try engineering systems for compensating and promoting information which don't flagrantly flog and feed junk. That's the feedback and control loops Williams talks of.
One approach is to treat information as a public good. It's what the UK does with the BBC, and it's the philosophy of a number of institutions, including CUNY's Graduate Center (who've adopted this as their motto), and Robert McChesney and John Nichols:
We can also look at the daily habits of the ordinary people who create non-junk content every day.
De Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is all about this: the fertile creativity of people going about their lives, which is overpowered by the glitz of mass media and the seriousness of corporate activity.
That's where my love is, and it's the base for my anti-commercial sentiment. Power to the people.
Corporations didn't invent food, literature, math, love, cleverness, music, fishing, gardening, dancing... they are sponsors at best, tyrants at worst.
So when they try to convince me that, say, music is doomed because of "pirate copying," it really makes me laugh. I have a guitar right here, and two friends who are into folk song...
And all this goddamn stuff they think it's important to consume, including all the goddamn news. To hell with it.
In advertising there is a concept called effective frequency which is, essentially, how many times someone needs to be exposed to your ad before they make a purchase. This is tied pretty directly to the complexity of your message. The more complex your message, the higher the effective frequency and the more times people need to be exposed to your ad before they buy your product. Hence the tendency towards easily assimilated ideas like you mention.
I'm starting to think I need to look at advertising theory some more. Ugh.
Thanks for the comment though, pretty much as I'd suspected.
Another note: if the frequency is too high in any one period of time, I suspect there's burnout. Political advertising seems to hit this point -- a friend in a heavily campaigned state a few years back used to respond to candidate spots with "F--- you <name>" when yet another of the multiple-times-an-hour ads would sound.
You need repetitions, but also spacing.
There's also ... I forget the name, but "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy", a 1930s / 1940s Texas politician. Ended up governor, before getting caught up in a corruption scandal. Early name recognition came from his fame as a bluegrass / popular music performer.
You are bordering on some basic advertising theory! Seeing an ad too often has a negative effect. So depending on your industry, you advertise with different strategies. My favorite example is beer. They advertise year round, but pretty low key. You'll see maybe one or two beer ads a week. But when certain events occur (superbowl, spring break, holidays, etc) they ramp up advertising and you'll see two to three a day.
Its different for each industry though, some do 90% of spend for the holidays.
Even before you get to burnout you get saturation where more advertising yields lower returns. There is a whole industry around advertising analytics and helping advertisers figure out how to allocate their budgets for maximum penetration without wasting money on saturated audiences.
If you're interested in some advertising theory, give Media Planning: A Practical Guide by Jim Surmanek[0] a shot. It's short and pretty accessible.
> “Medium doesn’t need to be the thing you check all day, every day. We’re not looking for addiction,” says Williams. “We’re just looking to give people one or two of what they think are the most important things on a daily basis. Things that they care about, things that change how they think about the world.”
With a business model exactly like BuzzFeed's, which is built on optimizing for content and titles that can be turned in native advertising. It's not changing the way how we think about the world...it's the changing the way we think about how advertisers want the world to look like.
It doesn't take a PhD in data analytics to figure out that profit-motive will create a ceaseless pressure for page views, which means Medium will inevitably try to get people to spend all day everyday on Medium. Which means their unavoidable path is to become BuzzFeed.
The problem is that most of news in itself is and always will be junk. Profound messages do not owe their value to novelty. If you take the time to read the newspaper and instead read a book about, I don't know, calculus, every day, you will lean much, much more.
This is spot on. I don't believe the hype with Medium. The news will always be junk. You can centralize it and make it prettier on medium - but it's still centralized pretty junk.
I wouldn't even really say 'most' of the news. Unless you're in high finance or a journalist, it really is just trivia.
Weather forecasts and crosswords are probably the best bits. For the rest, you're better off reading classic novels, all scandals are history playing itself.
It feels a bit 'tragedy of the commons' to me. It's important that someone is reading the news (because otherwise democracy falls apart). But my personal utility is maximised by reading a book about tax law rather than an article about the Panama Papers.
News are, however, the source from which most 'profound messages' are distilled. While it doesn't really hurt a single individual to stop reading the news, if large parts of society do so, democracy no longer has the substance it needs to operate.
Also: judging by the amount self-righteousness in this thread, HN readers would never consume 'fast-food-content', read 'a calculus book per day' and see through all the marketing spin. All while compulsively reloading HN, probably.
Hah, my bad, I worded that poorly. I didn't mean an entire calculus book per day. That would be absolute madness (well, at least if you calculate along with all the proofs). I mean a few pages of a calculus book every day instead of a few pages of newspaper ;)
And I read hackernews not because of the news articles but because of the value of the hackernews comments, though I agree, it is somewhat hypocritical, I also read the news sometimes.
I know – sorry for making fun of that wording. Comment threads like this just get the worst of me. Having worked in journalism, I don't quite understand the disregard (hate?) for the profession, esp. considering how reasonable HN usually seems to be.
No problem. I don't hate journalism. Contrary to the second part of my original comment, I actually worded the first part quite carefully, take note of the word 'most' and that I do not say that news cannot be profound.
I don't disregard journalism, there are some journalists who I hold in very high esteem. The problem is a classic one: Journalists have a job to write up things. They seek out information and make an article out of it. This is very difficult to do right since most interesting articles emerge from an inverse process: That the writer learned or acquired valuable information first and later feels the need to share it. This kind of writing has a higher probability to contain anything of value.
I agree, for your personal development news is not important. However, this is how the big entities (countries, enterprises, etc) move. For example, watch the Panama Papers effect in Iceland and England.
Social networks are ok to move news around, but centralized media is more efficient to reach the masses.
We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”
But, sadly, the Guardian's business model is based around advertising and so they need the eyeballs... so to get the eyeballs on quick approach is to write the click-bait headlines. :-(
Kind of funny how he talks about content in terms of calories and junk food (and he's absolutely spot on, of course), and how Medium.com is one of the leaders in website obesity, which is "fat" on the technical layer:
"We’re still stuck in some very naive thinking, with the idea that people consuming media means that’s what they want – it’s like, well, we put junk food in front of them and they ate that, so that must be what they want.”
I don't quite understand the reasoning in the start which seems to boil down to;
Content/Media on the web is bad and people are dissatisfied.
How exactly do you reach this conclusion? I mean we can all make huge assumptions about the opinions the average human have on the quality of media, but I don't think that qualifies as any form of factual commentary.
Ev was the founder of Blogger, co-founder of Twitter and now is the founder of Medium. If he's reached the conclusion that people are dissatisfied with content/media on the web it's probably because a lot of them have told him so (it's still just his opinion though, doesn't mean he's right).
Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook have been shown to be addictive.
Junk food like McDonald's and Snickers bars have been shown to be addictive.
They are all the same type of product. It's amazing to see those involved in tech attempt over and over again to rationalize themselves out of that obvious connection.
I had a thought the other day while driving through Seattle... seemed to get stuck in traffic flows more than I'm used to in other places.
The though occurred to me, that those highway signs with the mini ads for the gas stations and restaurants coming up could include products you'd be able to get at said gas stations and restaurants... Snickers could be on the sign, right next to Chevron or ARCO. That would be relatively cheap for some larger brands (Coca-Cola comes to mind), but potentially huge in terms of placement.
Gah, I hate that I come up with ways in the back of my mind on ideas like this... still it's better than the over-the-top ads in the clickbait sites.
its funny reading him moan about it. the internet was already a difficult place for written word as the attention spans necessary for more than a page/screen are just not there. Then came twitter. Will it be long now before tweets come with tl;dr ?
One of the major reasons so much online content is junk is advertisements. When journalists make money based on clicks, they have very strong incentives to produce a lot low quality, easy to consume content. When you profit from manipulating attention, it's hard to resist generating clickbait. It is much easier to manufacture outrage(that spreads very well) than to educate or enlighten.
I think that the best way to fix this is to change monetization strategy from ads to premium content or paid subscriptions. When that happens, the main incentive turns from "quickly produce a lot of viral content" to "create high quality content that is worth buying". It is the easiest, the most straightforward way to properly align incentives.
I was so excited about Medium because it's a platform that had a chance to do that, and I hoped they would. Unfortunately, they have introduced ads as a monetization strategy. Too bad.
First every new social and/or blogging platform is praised as some deity that will unlock the path to fame, fortune and a life time supply of cheese puffs, and so the hype should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
That said Medium is a solid platform that has a few advantages:
1) It's got a great asethic both for readers and writers. It's clean, flows nicely and that holds true cross device.
2) It's managed by someone else. As a writer you don't need to worry about plugins, updates, themes, etc. You just write.
3) It's managed by someone else. As a reader you don't need to worry about malicious code, horrible pop-unders or aggressive ads.
4) The fact that it is a joint marketplace for publishers and supports curration supports sharing quality pieces regardless of the publisher and so for someone who otherwise would spend a lot of time trying to seed and promote their own blog content, they can focus on writing. While there still needs to be some promotion, a really well written piece on Medium can carry further.
That said it has it's downsides. While the piece may carry further, the impact may be less than your own blog where you may amass a following. You as an author can't really monetize the content on that platform as easily nor does it have flexibility if you want to show case something in a particular style, or with plugins/features not natively supported by Medium.
Medium is like any other well-designed platform. It has it's specific use-cases which it does a great job at. But it will not give you unlimited cheese puffs.
Can you monetise the content at all? I assumed Medium was the ultimate "Do it for exposure!" content factory - with the difference that unlike most, you can get some useful exposure from it, maybe.
Update: so there's a monetisation API on the way. So - we'll see how those cheese puffs work out.
Yeah - they've experimented with multiple monetization models over the past year or so. Now there is a beta for a select group of users. I for one really hope they nail it, but I'm not sure it's on the right path yet.
The challenge is that the platform of curation of interesting content for the sake of interesting content, stops working when it becomes the curation of interesting content for profit. As unless you do it based on customer satisfaction in microtransactions (oh I like your content have a cheese puff), then it's based on views or clicks.
Thus begins their decent into clickbait land where everyone gets cheesits (the crunchier, lamer and more disappointing brother of the cheese puff).
You earn low volumes of cash as you don't have a loyal readership. I earn disappointment as your title was misleading, and we both go home and cry in the fetal position at what the internet has become.
So, once again, hopefully they nail it - because right now they're pretty dandy.
> [Medium is] the ultimate "Do it for exposure!" content factory
That's pretty much how all businesses try to get artists/creators to work for free ("it'll look great in your portfolio"). Medium has just found another way of doing that, it seems. Well played, Ev, well played.
As a reader, it's a much nicer place to read articles than... literally anywhere else on the web. Just a really nice consistent UI that puts the content front and center and lets me get on with reading your actual words.
Not meant as an ad since I am fighting alone for a non-profit but checkout something that is meant as a free no-bs replacement of Twitter (maybe Medium too) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11456660
Turn on your ad blockers. Destroy addiction as a business model. The only content that will remain will be subscription-based, commissioned by crowds or individuals, or written for free. It will be better.