Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge No more tin cup?

Many web sites have been relying on the kindness of strangers.

I have been seeing sites lately that ask me to disable Ad Blocker or subscribe to their site. AllMusic, for example, which is a major source for Wikipedia entries.

Subscription fees for access to web sites was a big topic of discussion 25 or so years ago but at least in the United States the concept of advertisers paying for radio and television content was so deeply imprinted on the public that the idea was quickly pushed aside but apparently not forgotten. As the industry has matured and there is more competition, profit margins are smaller, and the advertising based financial model for content is beginning to break down.

Advertisers obviously want and need to get something for their money and it doesn't take a genius to figure out if site visitors are even seeing their ads much less clicking-through to the advertisers site. Which leads advertisers to the very rational decision not to pay for exposure they are not getting. I have not encountered requests to disable the ad blocker — yet, but I have noticed more an more sites asking for registration and/or subscriptions to get much more than headlines and the registrations almost invariably lead to more junk mail (most of which I do not see because of a junk mail blocker).

Good site content cost real money to establish, maintain, and keep current and that money has to come from somewhere. If not the advertisers then the users. I try to be a good citizen and pay for shareware, contribute annually to Wikipedia and other sites, but there are more and more of "reference" sites I choose not visit because of subscription fees.

Another pernicious scheme I have seen discussed lately is pay per click. Ie. registration is required for access and a fee is required. Every time you click on a link on the site a charge is debited from your account. that too will probably happen sooner or later. The Keynesian model of a continually growing customer base is no longer working, even in technology and the corporations are becoming more concerned with creating an unending cash flow stream. Thus the lease/rental model for software that Adobe, Microsoft, and others are adopting.

The internet golden age may have passed. 😢

By-the-way FineTunedMac is paid for by the admins and moderators and has never sought or accepted advertising and although we require registration the data is never sold or given to anyone.

So far I've run into requests from at least Bloomberg and Forbes, and I've just left the websites, because the content to which I had linked wasn't important enough to me to comply.

I suppose, though, that it's inevitable that I'll have to deal with it some day.

MacNN has a lot of advertising but they are closing shop after 20 years. There was no mention of finances but I wonder….

The issue of paying for content is going to have to get shaken out at some point if the Web is to continue.

The advertising age got people used to the idea that Web content should be free. Then people got tired of ads and began using ad-blockers so they wouldn't see any. Now what's happened is we're in a world where people think content should be free and people won't accept advertising. I have no clue how that is going to end up working; it's not sustainable in the long term. If it continues, we will see a Web that's basically nothing but the curated showpiece of for-profit companies with other revenue streams.

I currently spend about a thousand dollars a year just on my various domains and hosting, not including any of the time I spend working on my sites. I have sites that get millions of visitors a month, so clearly people find value in the sites...but don't want to pay for them!

One thing that might work, and something we might think about for FTM, is a Patreon-like model. Patreon is a site that creators can go to, and patrons can pledge to support, either per month or per new creation. I have a Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/tacit

where people can support the things I create by pledging money every month. Most people pledge a dollar a month, and right now I'm making about $118 a month from pledges, so it just about pays for hosting and domains. I wonder if people would be willing to support FTM that way.

I'm willing to pay for access to or otherwise support unique, necessary content, and in my eyes, the content at FTM meets those criteria.

I don't want to see advertising here, and I don't see any reason why the mods and admins should foot the bill for the privilege (Edit: unless FTM is a more salable product than it looks like at the moment).

Edit: Can it be done with PayPal so I wouldn't have to leave a card number lying around on line? (I doubt it. )

A recent article at the CBC's on-line site says:

"Global ad spending is expected to reach $600 billion US by the end of next year, according to eMarketer, and grow at an annual rate of about five per cent until the end of the decade. Much of that growth is being fueled by digital advertising, particularly on mobile devices."

The CBC goes on to say:

"The number of people blocking ads increased by more than 40 per cent last year, and it is estimated that blocking cost cash-starved publishers more than $22 billion last year."

With my typically simple-minded view, it seems to me that when the advertisers are scooping up $600 billion (and growing) while the publishers are "cash-starved" from a $22 billion hit, the problem isn't the fact that some people use ad blockers.

It's more likely that the advertisers are doing what big corporations do - acting like greedy pigs. They are stuffing the bulk of the profits into their own pockets without peeling off enough for the people who should get paid - the content suppliers.

If I am wrong, and advertisers are giving the largest part of the profits to the providers, then I have a hard time reconciling "600 billion (and growing)" with "cash-starved".

I also have non-advertising sites that I visit but which require funding. It's no different than public radio and TV, or shareware: if you want it, you support it. If some form of membership support is required by FTM, you can count me among the "Ayes".

The figures cannot be directly reconciled. There are two different kinds of sites involved in advertising, or marketing, spending.

• The advertiser's store site and
• Third party content web sites

The great bulk of the spending goes to creating and maintaining the marketer's store web site which is charged against advertising or marketing in the budget. The content provider sites in turn are paid to carry the ads linking to the store generally on a pay-per-click basis. In other words they only get compensated when a visitor to the content provider's site clicks through an ad to get to the advertiser's store site, it is even possible to determine how many people actually have the opportunity to view the ad. If the ads are blocked and unseen by visitors to the content provider's site then there are no click throughs and the content provider gets zip for carrying the ad. This is not new. Advertisers have been tracking marketing dollar return long before there was an internet using coded postcard stuffers in magazines; special phone numbers published only in the ads in a specific magazine, newspaper, issue, what have you; and special discount "codes" (mention "Blue Moon" for free shipping.). The only difference online is the tracking data is much more accurate and easier to collect. Advertisers look, with justifiable concern, even alarm, at the rising cost of marketing and they want to be sure they are getting bang for their buck. With ad blockers inn play they are getting zero bang for their buck.

So while the advertiser/marketer is spending more and more money making their online store bigger, faster, more attractive, etc. less and less of that spending trickles down to the content provider. Leaving the content provider with the same or even more expenses to cover and less income to cover it with. That leaves the content provider with few options

1. Request site visitors to turn off ad blockers, which seems of dubious value to me
2. Requiring registration for access to the site and
   1. selling the user information to whoever is willing to pay and/or
   2. Requiring a subscription fee for site access
3. The Wikipedia solution of begging for donations (which works only because the content is donated by users)
4. Going dark

Following up on this topic CBC radio broadcast on The Sunday Edition a 37-minute documentary by Ira Basen about same this morning which one can find streaming or as a podcast at If you use an ad blocker, you're killing the Internet .

In case the advertisers are not listening to the complaints about their intrusive internet ads Mark Zuckerberg just announced Facebook is adjusting their priorities to put more weight on new posts by friends and less weight on commercial pages and ads.

How long before forward thinking content sites start offering ad free viewing for a modest annual subscription fee like many computer games are already doing?

As respects Wikipedia, their most recent financial statements show that they had $64 million in cash and investments on 6-30-2015 compared to $51 million on 6-30-2014, and that number has been steadily growing - It's up from around $30 million. - in the 3-5 years since tacit pointed out their accumulation of cash with no apparent intent to spend it.

I haven't given them a penny since tacit posted.

I think you're correct about the dubious value of asking people to turn off their ad blockers, and I think that pay-for-content is the only viable direction for the Internet to take, but I suspect that it will, in and of itself, result in many sites going dark because their content is great for free but not worth paying for.

The future of much of the Internet may depend on vanity driving people to spend their own money to perpetuate websites that are not commercially viable.

In case there are any doubts about the undeclared three way battle (war?) between advertisers, content providers, and consumers I just discovered 1Blocker (available from the App store for both MacOS and iOS) has a option to block anti-Adblock and lists some 35 different anti-adblockers which can be activated or deactivated individually. IMO this conflict is going to go back and forth until some sort of a compromise agreement is achieved on financing web content sites. Given the grievous lack of editorial oversight and fact checking on so many of today's content sites, the end result might, just might, result in better and more accurate content. At least I hope that ensues and yes I would be willing to pay for that outcome.

Perhaps as an indication of the developer's (and other's ) attitude toward advertisers, 1Blocker's icon for anti-Adblock is a single digit salute.

I see this as a combination of greed and poor business. Advertisement is sometimes the price we have to pay for the content. When done in a reasonable manner, it's relatively unobtrusive, does not interfere with consumption of the content, and has no direct cost to the consumer, so it works out well for everyone. A problem arises when the providers try to "charge too much" for their content, in the form of excessive advertisement or interference with content. This can be a result of greed, or of an unprofitable business model. Either way, some consumers will be unwilling to pay the price.

If a store is charging too much for that candy bar, you don't pay for it and you don't get it. It's not so simple with publicly offered content. It's a bit more like a street entertainer with his hat out on the sidewalk. Passers by can enjoy the music while walking by, and either toss in some change or not. The entertainer would love to have a way to force you to pay for the service, but doesn't have any practical way to enforce it. Good entertainers usually have no problem with getting payment for their services. An entertainer that demands you toss in some money before he will start playing will probably do a lot worse for the day. Sites that "paywall" themselves have to deal with this problem. By building a wall around your content, you have to have a much more enticing product. A bit like throwing up a fence around your baseball field. You have to advertise more and build a good reputation for your product before people are willing to throw down payment in advance of receiving it. That reduces your customer base, but increases your per-customer revenue. How well you balance all of those factors determines how well you do, that is the tradeoff.

I don't mind a few ads on web pages, just the same as I don't mind a few commercials on TV. But both have gotten out of hand. I no longer watch tv simply because the advertisement has become so over-the-top that I'd rather purchase content online. I do this in part because I have confidence that my up-front payment will be worth it, and in part because I feel the overbearing advertisements on TV greatly diminish the quality of the product. My options for news content online are a bit more limited, because the pay-up-front options are very limited and poor quality, and the ad blockers don't usually support a "tiered" blocking. They're usually all-or-nothing. I would just turn most of them down a bit, and some not at all if it was an option, but for now I have ADS ON and ADS OFF. Considering many sites on the computer are intolerable with ads on, and that MOST of my sites on my iPhone are intolerable with ads on, I turn them off.

Normally vendor greed has a smooth transition point. As prices slowly go up, purchases slowly go down, in pretty smooth proportions. The same doesn't happen with ad blocking, because it's usually an all-or-nothing affair. This doesn't allow the providers the fine-grained control over their market, where they can adjust their price for optimal return. As they dial up the ads, there's a sudden dropoff in advertising revenue, as people can no longer tolerate the ads and they get shut off completely. The vendors blame the drop in revenue on the customers, despite themselves having been the catalyst.

This tends to be a downward spiral though, market-wide, since most blockers don't support site-specific blocking, and the ones that do haven't set it up to try to keep sites in the allow list. This means that as more vendors get greedy with advertising (or try to make up for falling revenue by displaying more ads, which accelerates the downward spiral of more people blocking ads) then ALL vendors are getting affected by the greed of the few. And as mentioned before, it's not just greed. Some vendors just have a struggling or unviable business model. These are vendors that should have just quietly gone out of business, but instead are cracking up the ads and screaming that it's all somebody else's fault that their business is struggling. Either way I have great difficulty in finding sympathy for them.

I support someone on Patreon. That's an interesting service. Makes me feel like a Renaissance patron of the arts.

I don't expect people to give away their work. I don't know much about economics, but I know that one person has to produce and another has to buy. I agree with the comments made here and elsewhere about people expecting a free lunch. Go back to Napster, for example. A terrible precedent. Practically wrecked the music business. Many people today have no qualms about stealing music, video, or software from the web.

I don't mind ads except for the intrusive pop ups, esp. the ones that pop up right in my face as soon as I enter the site. When I see that, I leave. I first started using ad blockers many years ago because my internet access has always been the cheapest and slowest, so I did anything I could to speed it up. I also didn't like being distracted by video, animation, or flashing graphics. I still can't turn off those videos that begin automatically. On the computer mostly I read and write. I don't want noise or any other distraction. The idea of whitelisting isn't bad, but I don't want ads in my face.

Possibly web sites are becoming like magazines used to be. You subscribe per month. The web put a real dent into magazines and newspapers. Too bad. I enjoyed reading magazines. I would much rather read on paper than on the screen. Occasionally I will email someone on a site, as I have this site, and said that I would pay for their work if they published a book. The usual reason is that it's not profitable for them to do it. One person blamed the cost of paper.

There are a lot of well-intentioned people who want to give their money to charity, to Africa or something like that. I say if you want to do something for your fellow men, pay for his work.

Is ad-blocking on the web different from being able to block TV commercials with VCRs, DVRs, and so on?

When I subscribed to magazines, I liked reading the ads, between stories and at the back pages. All those Mac magazines over all those years I read from cover to cover. I enjoyed the ads very much, dreaming about what I might buy, when or if I could afford it.

In the early days, Mac games were so primitive that they had to rely on artistic ads. I was never much of a gamer, but there's some great artwork and creativity in computer game ads.

I used to get those great MacMall catalogs in the mail, colorful, seductive, and free. I bought stuff through those catalogs. There was no place around here, or hardly anywhere, to purchase Mac stuff or even learn about what existed. I didn't know any Mac users. I had no other place to buy a computer.

I first started using the internet because of those CDs AOL kept sending me through the mail. It worked. That was a good place to begin.

I agree with most of what deniro says. I contribute to the arts, charities, my church, etc.. I have always paid for shareware and any other copyrighted intellectual property. I even cite original sources in quoted material. But the situation with advertising on content sites is different from the print media days. In a magazine the publisher and/or editors could control and limit the advertising content. In today's internet world the content providers (the magazine) often have little or no control over advertising content or quantity. They are paid by an intermediary advertising broker who have virtual total control over what ads appear, how often and when. The content provider,s sole contribution is an automatic link to the brokers site and all the junk mail comes from there. In a way the content providers are as victimized by the advertisers and advertising brokers as the users of the site.

MacMall and similar sites are marketing sites and their content IS advertising. They are compensated when a visitor their site purchases merchandise from them not by an advertiser. So they should not be conflated into a content provider role. It is a totally different and still very viable financial model. Perhaps even more viable than many brick and mortar stores. For example there are two different stores catering to woodworkers not far from where I live, but I buy the bulk of my woodworking tools and supplies from internet sites because they offer more selection and often better products at competitive prices, even including the shipping and handling charges.

FWIW I am now seeing sites than claim their site will not work or will not work properly if you are running and ad blocker. How long before having an ad-blocker will be used to deny site access altogether? At that point I am very likely to decide I don't need the content and if enough other users make that same decision the content site could die and the advertisers lose yet another outlet. It all reminds me of the story about the goose that laid golden eggs.