I dunno - if it’s only a break-even concern, they could fix that overnight by just tweaking the revenue share percentage; at the moment, creators get 55% of ad revenue, YouTube keeps 45%. If they switched that around, or met in the middle, it wouldn’t stop people bothering to upload content. There would be a few sobs and tears from some corners, then things would carry on.
You know about 12ft.io/ right? Everyone needs to know… Works on most things I read.
We’re in the golden age of ebegging, lol. Yeah, I agree that people should get paid, but right now people are asked to subscribe to/create accounts for/continue with Google for/enjoy a trial subscription for/just go ahead and pay for a zillion things. It’s not just the money. It’s managing passwords and accounts and all that annoying 21st century stuff.
There are photos from the late 19th century from before when people knew how to manage all of the telegraph and telephone cables, and it can look more than absurd. In the future, I think people are going to look back on our time with all of our accounts and passwords and whatnot the same way.
Yeah, and I hear of people having them add up to $1,000 or more a month. 
It’s not an ecosystem that can continue as is much longer, IMHO.
I think it would be fascinating to see how that sausage is made and where all the cashflows come from. Very complicated, I’m sure, with every factor influencing everything else.
To argue against your specific point (which is not to say I think you’re wrong), if they could massage that factor and go from break-even to profitable, then they could also go from profitable to highly profitable. So why don’t they do it? It could be that they have already massaged everything to the best of their ability and come up short.
I do not, assume, however, that the management at YouTube is competent. Almost everything visible to creators and viewers is not competent: moderation, handling of copyright strikes and TOS-related complaints, the algorithm itself, war on ad blockers, etc. etc. It’s a shitshow.
Yes! And thanks for the reminder. Typically though, I find that my interest in reading a paywalled story evaporates about 5 seconds after getting blocked. It’s very rare that I really want to see whatever it was badly enough to take a step 2.
That’s what disappoints me about News+. I feel a smarter system would redirect me from a paywalled access point to one that I do have the permissions to see, but that seems to be too much to ask.
For me, I usually use 12ft when I intentionally go to sites I read regularly but have a paywall in place. I’m with you on it usually not being worth it to try to view some random link.
I don’t use News+, but, by the same token, I wish I could just block paywalled results in Google or at least be alerted that the sites are paywalled.
…and Avenue Q’s “The Internet Is for Porn” is from a musical from 2003 
And as you mention, that was itself an artifact of the time of huge venture capital inputs and the notion of just weathering years of eating the loss until you could break through or become the biggest “Last Man Standing” in your niche.
But yeah, there continues to be that sort of expectation. Part of what happened there is that high-value content providers that should have been able to “charge what it’s worth” (including combining advertising with payment) from the beginning, faced the reality that they’d be undercut by those who provided free content so they became trapped by the general expectation.
In Ye Olde Days you paid a quarter a day, when a quarter was worth something, for the newspaper (ad-subsidized) – but most people who bought a newspaper only bought the one and only expected to read the one. You were not expecting access at will to today’s copy of a score of international daily papers. The Web gave us that and more. But we still want to pay a quarter for it all.
Yep, haha. If anything, the situation is far worse today (cough onlyfans cough).
Maybe a bit more. In the 1980s, our family subscribed to the local Region paper (one of the two–there were two!–but I forget), the Chicago Tribune, and several magazines. It wasn’t that much money, and it was all subsidized by an advertising model that still worked.
I’ll also point out that everyone put their stuff online before they knew that the online advertising model would not work. By then it was too late–eff paying even a quarter–everything is freeeeee!
Couple of random points on the topic I that have come to mind:
I have to be positive about something. Google is now putting an AI summary at the top of their search results, and it’s pretty good and useful. To be taken with a grain of salt, but often it delivers the needed information succinctly.
I have Amazon Prime and therefore its streaming service, but I barely use it any more. It sucks that it has ads now, but that’s not the real reason. I’m not sure what it is exactly. I used to explore on there a lot, but now it doesn’t pull me in.
In fact, our household mostly doesn’t watch movies via streaming at all. We have a very good library system here in Vanderburgh County that has a pretty damn impressive collection of DVDs and Blurays, and we have been watching those. It’s like the old school Netflix without having to pay for it! Backward progress, lol.
What is happening here is the next step in Sturgeon’s Law. He said 90% of everything is crap, true for the books that were published back 70 years ago. Now anyone can publish a book without having to convince anyone it is good, 99.9% of everything is crap. And sells like 20 copies. But is publishing really dead?
Now for me the internet went to hell once they allowed the riffraff in, those who didn’t work for tech companies or universities or were hobbyists. And there were flame wars back then. If you don’t think there are flame wars today you aren’t looking hard enough.
Porn? I believe porn creators complain that they can’t make money because there is so much available for free, who would pay? I remember when the alt.sex usenet newgroup had low volume - before spammers discovered newgroups.
The same goes for any content. The number of people producing it increases, especially since it is easier to create content, but the number of hours you have to consume it does not. It means you have to have good content, where good is defined by number of views.
Some of this comes from content should be free types, who would love everyone to be a hobbyist producing content out of the good of their hearts. I know plenty of niche content creators who seem to be doing okay. Sure they sell memberships and push people to fund them on Patreon and sell merch. Who doesn’t want to make some more money. And sure they follow the YouTube guidelines to feed the algorithm. Notice how they all encourage you to leave comments these days?
Streaming services are in trouble for this very reason. We only subscribe to 3, 2 fairly obscure, but we can’t keep up even with that. While time spent watching TV has only declined a bit, the percent of available content anyone can watch has declined a lot. So no one is watching from the pov of a lot of streaming services.
So the internet isn’t dying. It just isn’t living up to the unrealistic expectations of a lot of early users.
This. It really clutters up search results. It’s an example of the enshittification of the Internet. It harms search results.
It’s not even the money, per se. News providers deserve to get paid. But every person who gets lots of news from the Internet runs into dozens of sources a year. So much that it would be time consuming to pay for them all. Even if you paid for just the top 10 sites you used every year, you’d still run into a “gotcha ya” paywalled site occasionally. And managing 10 subscriptions would still be a big pain.
Thanks for your comment! I certainly agree with most of it.
I would amend Surgeon’s law to say, “95% of everything is crap or redundant with what came before.” I’d up the percentage as you did, but I think the redundancy angle is pretty important when assessing pop culture today. We now have a frickton of legacy content–music, novels, video games, you name it–that makes the creation of new content less necessary. I mean, one could spend years reading the good to great novels of the 19th century, which if anything have improved with time.
Well… I found this pretty devastating link recently, and it’s from 2024:
Key quote:
The overall revenue for all books sold in 2004 was a robust $23.72 billion—$40 billion in 2023 dollars. In 2023, the entire industry generated just $12.6 billion. Which is to say, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the book industry has lost more than two-thirds of its value in twenty years.
Like, ouuch. And it’s really ouch for me, as I am a published writer with ambitions, but this is a terrible market in which to scream loud and try to make one’s mark.
I think moderation has improved and locked down a lot of stuff. Not saying you’re wrong, but it’s different now.
I bet it’s hard (pun intended) to make money there too, despite the size (same thing) of the industry and the eternal demand for its products. Again, there is a ton of, yes, free content, but the legacy content factor applies here too. There is now a truly massive (pun intended) amount of HD photos and videos available, which will serve the purpose long (OK, I won’t say it) into the future. Naked people tend to look the same regardless of changes in style.
Indeed. The best environment for creatives is one in which demand somewhat outstrips supply (which was true from the Roman Empire until just recently). Once supply exceeds demand, that is less desirable, of course, but when supply massively exceeds demand, as it certainly does now, one gets a “noisy system” in which the sheer volume of competitors makes it difficult for even the best to compete and gatekeepers to judge relative quality. Just look at all of the “flopbusters” of 2024. The major studios could have done anything, could have hired anyone, and yet they made a ton of dogshit movies that no one wanted to see.
I’ve got some stuff that I think is pretty good. I’ve self-pubbed one nonfiction book, had several short stories legit published with actual payment. I’ll try to sell my novel the traditional route, but I’ll self-pub as needed. There is little hope these days, however, for writers to blow up. Have there even been any big series the past ten years a la Hunger Games, Twilight, etc.?
Yes. And think about it, if you are old (53) like me, in your own lifetime we’ve gone from having a real hunger for and lack of supply of new content to having an absolute glut. That’s quite a lot of pop culture whiplash. And the situation continues to change a lot in real time, and even the corps with well-paid MBAs and whatnot can’t keep up. Not even close.
Basically agree. I think the vision of a world in which everyone and everything, small or big, individual or corporate, could get its message out and attract a following and/or customers, was a noble and hopeful one. It’s too bad it hasn’t worked out that well.
Yeah. I mean, I’m not a cheap guy, and I have money. It’s more the bother factor than anything else.
All that you say is true with the exception of the word “occasionally.” I mean, on Google you might run into an Iowa Times article, or whatever, and that’s paywalled. It’s absurd and untenable for the long run (the “long run” meaning, the next few years).
4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Sodokufan’s other posts
Can’t say you’re wrong, in essence.
Before the rise of the WWW, probably very few people outside Iowa and neighboring states subscribed to this paper.
Now, however, probably a substantial amount of people occasionally try to access a link from this paper. As I did, sometime this year (not sure what paper it was exactly, but it was Iowa). I hit a paywall, but I know that I have only stumbled upon this paper maybe once in my entire time online. What to do?
I’m not going to pay to see one link in one paper one time. That’s the conundrum.
In the days when print papers reigned, every community had a stringer for the Associated Press or United Press. He - almost always he - was usually a reporter on the local paper, but sometimes on the college paper or even a freelancer. He would put the story on the “wire,” and the editors at the AP or UP head office would decide what to put on the teletype that would print it out for all the subscribers to the service. (I was news editor and co-anchor on the nightly news for my campus radio station, so my job was to read the printouts and sort out the ones that seemed of interest. What got heard therefore was curated - or was the word “censored” - by levels of editors.)
News from Iowa therefore could be read or heard at no extra cost in every newspaper and radio station in America - should the news editors decide to run it.
Today you can probably tweak something like Google News to send you stories from Iowa every day. Theoretically you should therefore be able to access all those stories. Paywalls prevent that. As said above, there should be a one-stop service that makes all the stories available, even if the full site requires payment. How much that would cost to make it profitable I can’t imagine. Maybe the AP could do it. Right now apnews.com is a great site that mirrors the teletype of old. Having that at your fingertips was once a privilege I and only a couple of others had on my whole campus. Today it’s so small and expected a given that people don’t understand how miraculous it is.
It’s not a library anymore, it’s a fcking TV station.
The AP says:
AP, which is a not-for-profit cooperative, invests hundreds of millions of dollars every year in newsgathering and distribution. Revenue from licensing this content, across formats (including digital), is our main source of funding.
That’s why I consider them a model for a future cooperative.
Newspapers, radio and television stations, websites, and anybody who needs the content.
Bold type was in the original.
They don’t if their business models aren’t changed to maintain themselves in the modern world. That’s the problem we’ve been examining.
Doing some Googling, I see that the AP is down to 1400 newspapers from 6500 in the 1980s. I don’t see any numbers for non-newspaper clients, but there are many. Certainly the AP is struggling, maybe dying, as newspapers are. They’re laying off 8% of staff, as of last month. Two big newspaper chains dropped the AP earlier this year, claiming they’ll save millions. They no doubt will, but Gannett and McClatchy are vipers who have destroyed their newspapers and gutted their reporting staffs. I dropped my subscription to the local Gannett newspaper because it was thinner than what gets wrapped around fish. The chains exist primarily to pay their executives.
But I’m not suggesting that the AP or anyone else itself creates the news. I’m suggesting that the cooperative non-profit aspect of collecting news from all over and making it available to clients at a price might be scaled up for the internet. If 1400 newspapers pay a million dollars a year for the news, then it might be possible to get 14,000,000 people to pay $100 for paywall-less access to whatever small bits of news reporting that will still exist in our dystopian future.
[quote=“Tusculan, post:24, topic:1011882”]
For me the interesting question is how the Internet is going to develop under those circumstances. Will it become basically a bookshop where you can mostly only access content if you pay, or a combination of walled gardens and in between open access areas? [/quote] *
The latter, I expect.
Will there be room for voluntary projects and/or small commercial websites, or will the large platforms crush all competition?
I foresee the large platforms all but crushing out all competition—and yet—let Alice B. Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) have the last word, from “The Women Men Don’t See”:
“What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”
There’ll always be chinks in the massif, however massive.
*(ETA: I don’t know how I goofed up the formatting of your quote, nor how to ungoof it.)