Fantastic post by Vicki Boykis (“Born Jewish in Russia. Raised guilty in America.”) on the deterioration of the internet:
Tumblr, which used to be a visual playground of interesting and sometimes bizarre ideas, is being reorganized and censored to make room for ads, including deleting accounts without any warning. Chrome, once the fastest browser, is now monitoring user voice input. Reddit is no longer reddit. News sites like The Verge and New York Times are so jacked up on ads that loading them is degrading the experience of surfing the web. Google is only now starting to undo the endless problems that G+ has caused, and it’s not clear whether it will be for the better. For example, I tried to decouple the photos on my phone from the Google + Photos app, with limited success, in the same fit of frustration that this author experienced (NSFW language). Sites like Buzzfeed are being built explicitly to profit off clickbait, meaning our news content is no longer written to provide information but to get us to…click.
There’s a pivot in the middle to focus on the big change coming to SoundCloud.
SoundCloud is so good that I’m willing to pay $10 a month (much more than I’m willing to pay for Spotify, which has a good popular catalog but not the same depth of original music as SoundCloud) so I don’t have to hear ads. So, I optimistically thought they might go to a subscription model and preserve the good momentum they already had going.
As is par for the course in corporate maneuvering, nothing happened for months and months and I continued listening to SoundCloud at home, in the office, and in my car, without any interruptions. And, I continued to find joy in this random, obscure stuff that people were creating because they were on a platform where they were free to experiment with formats without record labels and ad agencies listening in.
Then, the ads started. I’ve heard an anti-smoking ad about 10 times now. Given that I’m currently not paying anything for SoundCloud, I’m ok with ads. I’m the product. But after a few weeks, they became repetitive, extremely annoying, and disruptive, and again, I wondered why SoundCloud, whose audience is made up mostly of music connoisseurs who would gladly pay for service, didn’t take into account how annoying these ads would be.
Great read. Be sure to click on the sample songs in the post.
This is the result of people insisting on wanting everything for free. It started with Napster and has continued to the present day.
Paywalls tend to bring in some money but not enough to really support the service so although she’s willing to pay it’s very likely that not enough people would ante up $10/month to work. People bitch at ads, but if a paywall goes up a lot of them go to other sites that cover similar things/provide similar services but that don’t have paywalls… and do have ads.
This is pretty basic fact of life stuff folks. The people who make services and content for us have to pay rent/a mortgage, buy food, buy gas, etc. They run businesses that have to show a profit. To do this they need revenue and for all of the pained blustering from various quarters, not enough people will pay for the services that they receive and many of those who will won’t pay enough to matter.
Some of this is millennials who’ve been raised that all of the web is free. Some of it is Gen X and older people who never really stopped to think that the newspaper and magazine subs they paid didn’t cover the cost of that magazine.
I don’t have a solution. I have thoughts – I’d like to see ad tracking consolidated when there are multiple ads on a page to lessen performance hits, but that mitigates the impact, it doesn’t solve the root cause of this. At the end of the day I can only think of 3 revenue sources for services and content companies: 1) ads, 2) subs, 3) government or foundation underwriting. People don’t like 1, don’t do 2 and 3 won’t support everything we say we want.
Perhaps it’s time for us to grow up and realize we have to pay for things we want and perhaps it’s also time to admit that there’s simply too many sites covering topics the same way and too many services that can’t survive on the common conversion rate of most paywalls.
Very good article.
On a similar note, the reason why I gave up on all things Yahoo was because their (Aussie) homepage had these massive pop up ads that took over the screen. Plus there were other ads everywhere. And then they added an ad to the top of my emails.
So in the search for money, they lost a user who could still be using their services. Some sites cut off their noses in spite of their face.
And don’t get me started on what eBay has become…