Internet writing, income and adblocking

[Erik_Twice]

I read a very interesting article today and one that is increasingly relevant.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/arti ... er-reporti

While I think there's more than selling papers behind the rampant sensationalism of Kotaku, which is obviously the example set in the article, it's true that bussiness models based on advertising are increasingly inefficient and specially so in the internet. I've done the calcs myself and getting a decent salary as an internet writer requires a ludicrous level of readership.

And, of course, having to rely on the good will of your readers for support is just dire. Writing is already a poor career choice, this only makes it worse. It's also impossible to start a subcription model without being already popular in the first place and competition from free sites makes everything more painful.


I do however understand that ads are very annoying. You may remember I asked for an adblocker because all those "shoot the iPhone" ads were driving me crazy. I don't watch anything on television because I can't stand two hours of ads for a feature film. The big losers here are users losers and creators of actual content who try to get paid for their quality instead of quantity. In a sense I fear media as a whole is moving closer to content farms which is a terrible thing.

Any thoughts on this?

EDIT: By the way why don't sites use static ads? Isn't there enough interest for them? They can't be blocked and it can't be that different from how newspapers work.

[ZeroAX]

Why didn't he mention selling out high review scores in the alternative income methods? (yes I'm just here to ruin your thread )

[Menegrothx]

In a sense I fear media as a whole is moving closer to content farms which is a terrible thing.

Any thoughts on this?

EDIT: By the way why don't sites use static ads? Isn't there enough interest for them? They can't be blocked and it can't be that different from how newspapers work.

I don't know if this has any relevance but it seems like the local newspapers here have become increasingly sensationalistic with their headlines. And the most of the time the headlines are so misleading that it borders on lying to readers, just to get them click the article.

[Erik_Twice]

I don't know if this has any relevance but it seems like the local newspapers here have become increasingly sensationalistic with their headlines.

It's probably caused by the crisis. Small newspapers seem specially prone to populism and while everything I read lately is highly sensationalistic the small papers are beyond terrible right now.

[Hatta]

Advertising is a scourge upon humanity and the sooner it is abolished the better off we will all be. The solution to ad-blocking is the same as the solution to piracy. Create content that people *want* to pay you for.

[MrPopo]

Advertising is a scourge upon humanity and the sooner it is abolished the better off we will all be. The solution to ad-blocking is the same as the solution to piracy. Create content that people *want* to pay you for.

And how exactly do people find out about your content/product?

[Snowman Death Droid]

That article is depressing. I found this thread right after making a new post on my blog too, something I thought would be cool to make money off of. Internet journalism can't be that desperate, can it?

[Raiiban]

That article is depressing. I found this thread right after making a new post on my blog too, something I thought would be cool to make money off of. Internet journalism can't be that desperate, can it?

I've seen a lot of different sources make articles similar to this, it's certainly not just limited to video games and technology, but it's probably worse there than other areas because of the more savvy reader base.

Problem is, even if you make content that people would pay for a lot of them won't put forward any money if there's just a donation button on the site. You can try to offer an incentive like memberships with ad free access to the site, but most of the time that would require logging in to remove the ads, an extra step in getting to your content when you could just leave ad-blocking on and carry on without having to log in once in a while.

Penny Arcade did a Kickstarter for their site to remove advertisements for a year, but they were kinda smart/shady about it by setting a low initial goal with the intent to only remove one banner and then have the rest be stretch goals. They have an already monetized userbase that could easily hit the first goal and then the rest is gravy from then on to remove some ads but not all of them.

I miss when Ads were limited to just TV, you can't do anything on the net without 40 different marketers trying to shove their garbage in your face. Nobody likes Ads but they're the only way for most websites to run. What a terrible situation.

[Snowman Death Droid]

Snip Snip Snip

Your avatar is very appropriate for this thread. lol

I guess it's a battle between the users who look for convenience and the content creators who need money. I always have my adblocker on, even for content creators I like. I'm certain that advertisers will find away around adblockers someday so that they can display all of their stuff to a larger group of people. I guess we'll see.

[MrPopo]

I miss when Ads were limited to just TV, you can't do anything on the net without 40 different marketers trying to shove their garbage in your face. Nobody likes Ads but they're the only way for most websites to run. What a terrible situation.

So you were on the academic-only proto-web?