Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero
136 Responses
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Sacha, in reply to
the site owners carefully choosing which ads they run
sponsorship
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Richard Aston, in reply to
sponsorship
Yeah I guess, but depends which way the power goes. Trad sponsorship deals give a lot of power and control to the sponsors but what if this was reversed and the content creator had all the power?
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Sacha, in reply to
what if this was reversed and the content creator had all the power?
please go on..
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Anthony Behrens Esq, in reply to
I do understand that people would want to use ad-blockers – although it sometimes seems a bit precious to me – but the level of arrogance you display about it is remarkable.
It's a pity that IS comes across as arrogant...I think he/she really is just saying the "system" is buggered...and he/she's right...it is. AdBlockers have simply destroyed it. A system that relies on unquantifiable numbers is not in any way viable.
Kim.Com's hack is just confirming it by playing with the possibilities its weaknesses present...an un-constructive waste of time and talent perhaps...but his super-ego seems to enjoy it...and it may provoke something good.
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Your rights as a creator do not extend to parasitizing my brain space, or to dictating how I experience and interact with your product
I can see two sides to this - in a sense AdBlocking is just a modern version of getting up to make a cuppa when the ads come on the TV. MySky's 30x FF is another.
But at the same time I/S you seem to be claiming that you have a right to experience and interact the content, which you yourself refer to as product. Would that right extend to hacking or in some way defrauding a paywall? Or photocopying a book?
To my mind, if someone spends time and effort to create something, and says "okay, I'm making it available on this site, the deal is, if you want to read it you have to read it here with these ads - feel free to ignore them", then that's the implicit contract. If you don't want to see the ads, don't read the content; if you take the content and actively engage software to remove the ads, then that breaches that contract, and (at least in principle, if not in law) is a breach of copyright, just as it would be if someone simply copied the material wholesale to an ad-free site, or a site with their own ads on.
I'm not saying I wouldn't do it - just as I admit to downloading pirated material from time to time - but I wouldn't claim that Hollywood was "dictating" to me by asking me to rent the film I'd just stolen.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Putting aside the question of whether one has a moral duty to watch ads, or at least to be polite enough not to mention when they don't, it's pretty clear it's not a particularly successful business model. So what is actually better? Why do people make sites with useful content in them when the returns via advertising are so pitiful?
I think this one already answered itself. The site, if it is done with an intention of profiting the organizer in any way, does it mostly by being a marketing exercise, and it is marketing itself, rather than advertising on behalf. It raises the profile, if successful, of the owners and major contributors. This can and certainly does spin off into other areas. Would David Farrar's statistics firm have anywhere near the success without him having tirelessly blogged for years? Would Russell have been such an obvious choice for a general news show if he hadn't been a general news blogger of high profile for almost as long as blogging existed? Would anyone in their right mind employ WhaleOil, but for the number of hits he attracts?
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Damian Christie, in reply to
It raises the profile, if successful, of the owners and major contributors.
This assumes that the model works better wherever it is the now-high-profile person moves to, and will continue to do so - especially when you're talking about moving into newspapers, TV, or other traditional forms of media. Better to try and get the model right where we are, rather than assume the main 'profitable' purpose is some form of CV-padding. Not that I disagree with your analysis in that regard.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Better to try and get the model right where we are, rather than assume the main 'profitable' purpose is some form of CV-padding.
Sure, if there is a way, which there might not be. Maybe there's just not much oil in this well. I thought that it was worth noting that there are some other spin-offs from getting the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people, even if you can't get them to click on ads. Being able to get a good day job out of it is worth having, even if it's not a path to riches.
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Just on cultural content and consumption and business models, a major new survey on media trends by the U.S. bureau of labour statistics. Atlantic article
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tussock, in reply to
And so my right to decide what’s displayed on my site, next to my work, is unimportant? Good to know.
I can see the pictures, for .gif and .jpg and .png and even .bmp, which lets you track traffic and everything just fine at the server level, as does a simple count of page views by IP. What people block with so-called "ad blockers" is programs that try and run on users' computers.
You, Russel, have no right whatsoever to run programs on my computer. None. Zero. Ziltch. Things want to run on my computer, they need to ask my permission, and the default answer is "hell, no". If your business model demands otherwise, you need to rethink it.
Yes, Dotcom's getting people to install a parasite, but at least he's offering people a choice and some clear incentive. You get a stealth one through an ad network and you get nothing.
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tussock, in reply to
But at the same time I/S you seem to be claiming that you have a right to experience and interact the content, which you yourself refer to as product.
You mean like radio, and tv, and libraries, which also contain newspapers and magazines, and the internet (you might have heard of it, it also duplicates all of the above)? Yes, people do have a great many rights to experience and interact with content.
For the most part, people are dead keen to get you to experience their content. They actually pay people to deliver more users to get that experience, with ads. Radio is mad-keen to get you to hear songs for free, and Russel would love a million extra kiwis to read his blog every day.
The one thing the law explicitly forbids those content providers from doing is running programs on my computer without my consent. That's the illegal thing here. Trying to get around my "ad blockers".
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