from Hacker News

Content is dead

by vkb on 4/7/16, 11:02 AM with 109 comments

• by danso on 4/8/16, 10:45 PM

  I know these anti-ad posts are a dime a dozen here, but this is one of the more self-entitled pieces of dreck in the genre. She spends the first part of her essay slagging on WIRED ("Wired has dabbled in and eventually succumbed to the technology it once skewered and analyzed. Its latest efforts inevitably include pandering to the Instagram crowd."), implying that she's too good for their lowbrow content, and then the rest of it is about how dare they have the temerity to make her resort to using cURL to read their content. Or is this post supposed to be a sly retelling of the joke in Annie Hall? [1]

  What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The WIRED thing annoys me too but when they've got a good story, I'm willing to give them the adnetwork revenue. Forbes, on the other hand...that whole thing with their infected ad network, I've just stopped going to Forbes articles, period, even when they're posted here. It's been a long time since I can remember Forbes exclusively breaking a story...most of the time, it seems their articles are from their "contributor" network just blogspamming someone else's story.

  [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?item=qt0373261

• by Animats on 4/8/16, 10:04 PM

  We'll know that ad supported content is dead when AOL, or "Aol.", or whatever, and Demand Media, go bust. They will not be missed.

  Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime.

  Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes; Wired, no. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes; pundits, no.

  The trend we're seeing in advertising is that only Google and Facebook really matter to advertisers. The third-party ad industry is mostly bottom feeders, and it's getting worse. (See earlier article today about Forbes distributing malware.)

• by kukx on 4/8/16, 10:12 PM

  Let's be honest, why they shouldn't block adblock? The ads bring them money. And they need money to survive and, if they lucky, develop. The writers have families or plan to have ones, they need to be rewarded for their work. It may be their main or only source of income. Now, if they also provide a valuable information for you, I think that trying to trick them into giving it for free (ad free) is wrong. I think and it may controversial here, but every valuable site that lives on ads should block adblock. And don't get me wrong, I actually use adblock myself, but I'm more than happy to add exceptions for the sites I need or value.

• by zem on 4/8/16, 10:17 PM

  the possibly naive pr{e,o}mise of the early web was that it would be a place for people who created content for the joy of creating it to share said content with people who would discover the delights of gatekeeper-free media consumption. "premium" content, that people were trying to make a living from selling, could go behind a paywall or into subscriber-only emails, the way books and magazines worked pre-web.

  sadly, the implicit contract was broken on both sides. people didn't want to pay for content, but they also wanted to consume (pirated) premium stuff, rather than commons material, so there was never a concerted push to have better discovery mechanisms atop the freely-provided web. likewise, producers wanted to impose user-hostile measures like drm and geographic segmentation on a medium that was not conducive to them, making piracy the more attractive option even if you didn't care about free-as-in-beer.

  professional producers had to go free because it was not a case of paid professional content competing with free amateur content; it was a case of paid professional content competing with free pirated professional content. that also sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the amateur ecosystem; who wants to dig through the virtual slushpile when you can get pre-curated professional material for free?

  i'm sad about the whole thing because i was really looking forward to seeing if the creative commons would compete on its own merits as a mass entertainment option. once the reward of putting something up is not people reading and appreciating it, but money from ad clicks, though, the producer's incentives are suddenly misaligned with the consumer's, and we end up with the web of today :(

• by takno on 4/8/16, 10:08 PM

  This +1000. The guardian, a paper I used to buy regularly, has transformed itself comprehensively into a hell of lazy ill informed clickbait, uncritically repeating unsupported conclusions from nonsense science and refusing to differentiate their serious analysis from crappy user generated content. Now I can't even bring myself to pay the 3 quid a month subscription even though the crossword alone would probably be worth that.

• by m52go on 4/8/16, 9:45 PM

  I agree with the author concerning content and ads, but find it ironic that the article's title is so click-baity and misleading (considering she never implies content is actually dying, just that its business model is).

• by pier25 on 4/8/16, 10:12 PM

  We need a Netflix for content. You pay a (reasonable) monthly subscription and they pay each content provider depending on number of views.

• by golergka on 4/8/16, 10:09 PM

  So, the author didn't even think to question her assumption that she is entitles to get the content for free, without paying dorectly or through being subjected to ads?

• by Swizec on 4/8/16, 9:59 PM

  > today can’t epxect to put out mostly junk filler

  I wonder if that's a litmus test to see if people finish reading. Great article, perfect sentiment, last paragraph has the only typo in the entire thing.

  And I totally agree. There are shitloads of people on the internet making money from content. Hell, I make some sometimes. If you build a real audience, listen to them, then solve their problems. Then content isn't dead.

  If you're trying to be mass media that appeals to everybody and nobody at the same time. Then content is dead.

  I mean, shit, look at someone like GaryVee or Casey Neistat, or even Kim Kardashian. They all make shitloads of money from content.

  And if you're looking for examples closer to HN home. Look at Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, or even Ramit Sethi. They might not make tens of millions, but they def print millions of dollars with their content businesses.

• by klint on 4/8/16, 11:19 PM

  (Disclosure: I write full-time for Wired, but I'll try to leave my feeling about our content aside here)

  Even if you pay for a subscription to The Economist, you're still going to see ads, both on their website and in their apps. Even though I'm a subscriber and logged in, Ublock Origin is showing over 100 blocked requests on an article I just pulled up there, some of them coming from the same third party ad networks everyone else uses. And my $1 a week subscription only buys me access to three articles a week.

  So while, as the OP points out, The Economist's Tom Standage [1] believes that ad revenue isn't a futureproof business model, they still appear to be heavily reliant on it.

  I don't know anything about the Economist's overhead, but the reason subscribers are still subjected to ads is very likely that subscription fees come nowhere near covering their costs. The truism in newspaper publishing is that subscriptions don't even cover the cost of printing and delivering the paper to a subscriber.

  Subscription-only business models have historically been tough.

  A lot of people ask "why can't all advertising be like The Deck," but the trouble there is that The Deck probably doesn't bring in enough revenue for publishers to operate a large newsroom [2]

  Personally (not speaking for my employers) I like Brave browser's idea, but they're already facing legal threats. And while they're promising publishers 70 percent of their ad revenue, but even if that's a larger percentage I don't know if that will work out to more than publishers get through the third party networks they use now.

  [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage...

  [2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-...

• by misterbwong on 4/8/16, 11:14 PM

  I've said it before and I'll say it again. Adblock is going to cause ads to become MORE invasive, not less. Native ads, native content, and other "partnerships" are going to drive revenue-all of which are much worse that what we have now, privacy-wise. Adblock is only fueling an arms race between consumer and publisher.

  In the future, we might see a viable micropayment solution but there are some fundamental problems with this approach.

• by darpa_escapee on 4/8/16, 11:04 PM

  I can't remember the last time I read an article and thought it was worth paying for.

  Even a fraction of a penny. That's the sad truth.

• by Cozumel on 4/8/16, 10:50 PM

  Why not just open firebug and delete the ad overlay? The author is either trying to 'show off' or is just genuinely oblivious that there's a much easier way.

  I'm not against ads per se, I have quite a few sites 'white listed' but when they beg for ads like Wired, then it's an automatic nope!

• by ebbv on 4/8/16, 10:38 PM

  Wired has always been garbage. You're just getting old enough to realize it.

  There's always going to be garbage content sources that are more popular than the quality content sources. If you appreciate quality content, your duty is not to bitch about the garbage content but to support quality content.

• by kirykl on 4/8/16, 10:02 PM

  Comparing the Economist to an iPhone to Android switch article is not a fair comparison.

  The Wired iPhone2Android article is and was never designed to be content. You shouldn't expect it to be either honestly.

  Apple has great content on the subject for free https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201196

  The 3rd party link bloat however is spot on

• by foltz on 4/8/16, 10:47 PM

  A couple days ago I ran into Wired's ad-blocker blocker so I just clicked my Instapaper toolbar button. Worked like a charm. I wonder if or how often Wired makes an effort to block Instapaper.

• by wmccullough on 4/8/16, 10:35 PM

  Content is not dead. Our current content delivery mechanisms have failed.

• by skybrian on 4/8/16, 10:50 PM

  The trick is to open the link in incognito mode.

• by karatekidd32v on 4/8/16, 10:50 PM

  Long live content.

• by draw_down on 4/8/16, 9:39 PM

  There are a number of tools built to extract the content from those kinds of pages, did the author try any or just start YOLOing Python scripts?

• by beeboop on 4/9/16, 1:19 AM

  I look forward to the day when media outlets start dying due to lack of ad revenue. 99% of news content is rehashing of existing content done by someone else. Remove the noise and the few real contributors will be easily recognized and supported. Also helps lessen organizational bias when content creators are less beholden to the whims of their billionaire employers.