[fridek]

Honest question - what business model for free content do you see other than ads? I understand all the privacy and distraction issues related, but increasingly many news sites I read feature only paid content. I suppose it's connected to the rise of ad blocking.

At the moment I'm not hosting any content of such kind myself, but I wanted to publish a game and I'm facing the same question. Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids, or host ads and risk not earning a dime because every single gamer I know is tech savvy enough to have an ad blocker?

[arbitrage]

The whole point of a business is to come up with a plan to get people to give it money for a service. If your entire business plan is to get someone else to give you money because people completely unrelated to and uninterested in it happen to be using your service, it's not really a good plan.

I'm ecstatic about the seemingly new increase in paid-for content. If it means the long dark era of scatter-shot shotgun creation of incredibly lousy and shallow information in mass quantities only to garner advertising payments comes to an end (or even decreases slightly), I think the web and software in general will be a better place.

[frik]

Would you like to go back to Internet stoneage where you had to pay per page view in Microsoft Network '95 (MSN v1) or Germany's BTX from 1980s.

Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall?

The WWW got popular because it's friction-free and many sites are paid by advertisement money. At the moment many ad networks are just stubborn (bad ads) and greedy taking big chunk of the ads money away, instead of sending it to the website owner who is doing the majority of work. So there is definitely a place for a new ad network that disrupt the Web ads that don't suck and with a smaller cut so that the website owner get again a bit more money.

[forgottenpass]

Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall?

I don't rely on hundreds of ad-supported websites now. If all the ad-supported websites I use went behind paywalls, I'd be fine with that.

I'd pay for google and one or two more news orgs in addition to the ones I'm subscribed to. The rest of the websites I depend on and don't pay for are non-profits and/or don't run ads in the first place.

The WWW got popular because it's friction-free and many sites are paid by advertisement money.

Yes, and I guess I don't care. I was online before then, we can go back to that small world again. The web's popularity is largely an explosion in the equivalent of cable TV networks. If adblockers push them out, oh well.

[pmontra]

> I don't rely on hundreds of ad-supported websites now.

I don't know if I do but I might do. The reason I don't know it is that I use AdBlock but whenever I google something I go to a few well known sites and to hundreds of random blogs. If I had to pay for each of them I'll probably use the Internet very differently.

[andybak]

I think the fairest thing is for both users to decide if they want to block ads and for site owners to decide if they want to block users who block ads.

Let's see how that pans out. I predict we'd end up mostly back where we are.

My ideal scenario would be 'informed curated blocking' where the worst offenders (ad networks that don't have sufficient safeguards against malware, genuinely abuse privacy controls or push the envelope for instrusive ads) are forced out of the market.

[Nadya]

Go ahead and try to block users who block ads. People and companies have already tried that.

In the end it's a game of cat and mouse with the AdBlockers finding a way to circumvent whatever detection the adblock-blockers are using.

[manigandham]

It's called paywalls. Adblock will not get you around that.

[chc]

Paywalls don't specifically block people who block ads. They're a completely different revenue strategy.

[mavhc]

Would you like to go back to the AOL model, where sites got a proportion of the user's AOL subscription?

[Aissen]

In fact, this exists. It's called Flattr.

[chc]

Flattr is a donation model, not a subscription model. Donation models are much less lucrative in general than nearly anything else because you can just forget to donate after reading. This is why Exhibit A for the donation revenue model is non-profits.

[frik]

I would like that the Web stays at it is.

[JadeNB]

But you seem to argue against the culture of the web the way it currently is, which, whatever the morality of it (I use blockers with abandon!), includes both pushy, aggressive ads and ad blockers.

[dhimes]

Speaking for myself, ads don't bother me so much. Tracking does. And serving me ads on content I have already paid for really fucking does.

Like purchasing a movie dvd and being coerced to watch previews for other movies before getting to the one I want. grrrrr.

[notNow]

Actually, if you paid for content or made a purchase driven by an ad, this makes you a "high value" lead for advertisers based on their estimation of your disposable income and therefore you are more likely to be targeted with more ads from them to make even more big-ticket purchases.

You can't really escape those pesky advertisers.

[Zarel]

An internet full of paid content is an internet that excludes many children and people in third-world countries, and in general more hostile to the poor than the wealthy. It's also an Internet that incentivizes sticking to a few sites you're used to rather than exploration of new things.

Is that really the internet you want?

[manigandham]

That seems incredibly dismissive of all the content out there. Just because something is "shallow" to you does not mean others don't enjoy it.

There is no such thing as "quality", its all subjective and the reason why there's so much gossip news and stuff is because so many people like to read it. BuzzFeed didnt get this big because nobody comes back to read their articles. That's the simple truth.

And nobody wants to pay for content when it's so easy to get things for free. Micropayments are not some easy answer (very hard to pull off) and they are no less private, in fact they will require even more tracking and even more data, down to your real identity and billing details.

[nfoz]

Good grief, we had an Internet full of fantastic content before the ads showed up. Universities, libraries, Governments and NGOs, donation- and government-funded organizations like many news/media agencies, stores/businesses, and just real people -- amateur and professional.

[lahata]

Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Stands and we work on a product that addresses this issue specifically

From a wider perspective - I believe that the ideal is a fair ad based model which funds a free web and promotes equality and democracy, but it needs to put us - the citizens of the web - on an equal playing field in the ad/data business, and respect us (our privacy and experience). We wrote a post about it here: http://blog.standsapp.org/how-to-fund-a-free-web/

In short: - It blocks obtrusive ads - Protects your privacy by blocking tracking companies - Shows only standard banner ads and the revenue from these ads split between the site and the charity you choose - Provides you with the ability to control your online experience by limiting the amount of ads and other capabilities - Ads load after content loads

We're working on a product publishers can use to convert ad block users to Stands, let me know if and when you are interested to work with us on the beta.

[bobajeff]

If you only see a choice between "Free to Play" or hosting Ads then you have a problem greater than choosing your business model. You don't value your work enough to consider it valuable enough to pay for outright. First, ponder why that is, then address that issue.

[aravindet]

One more: because its value depends on network effects. For example, it might be a communication service, a community forum or a multiplayer game.

Free (of cost) results in more users, which makes the service more valuable for every user. Unfortunately, it also prevents the developer from capturing this value directly.

In some cases, user segmentation and price discrimination is possible (ancillary paid features) but they come with extra design and development cost.

[fridek]

Because:

* it's not what I want - I prefer to deliver it for free and do not plan for it to become any source of income, just to not have costs scaling with popularity

* I don't need to sell it - I'm reasonably wealthy, with a good 40h/week job and salary. This is a side project and will loose it's charm when I convert it to a business project.

* it's hard - I work on a browser-based game (no easy to implement payment options)

In other words, it needs to be free for users and possibly earning just enough to not cost me anything.

[Matumio]

What costs? Is hosting really so expensive, or is it something else? Obviously you have invested a lot of time. Personally, I wouldn't think twice about spending, say, $10 per month to publish something where I have invested the equivalent of $100000 in unpaid developer time (and yes, I have done that, although it's strange thinking of it in money when I did it for the challenge). Maybe it's more a psychological issue (pay for giving something away) rather than the actual cost?

[bobajeff]

Oh, I hadn't figured you were making a web game. I've thought of working on one myself (that's as far as that goes however). I would consider myself lucky to have made a web game popular enough to be concerned about the cost of running it.

[manigandham]

Please... it's so easy to just dismiss these problems as "hey you should find a better business model" when lots of very smart people have been trying for a very long time.

Free + ads vs Paid access are the only viable models today. Anything else is an offshoot of less ads with more donations or merchandise or something else but there's no real 3rd option. If there was, we would have figured it out by now dont you think?

[bobajeff]

The OP was asking for a alternative business model for his game. I suggested he had more important things to be concerned about. Did you reply to the wrong comment?

[manigandham]

I dont think OP's question was serious, there really isnt any other business model. And how is saying there are more important things to be worried about giving an answer to his question? Obviously not everything is worth an upfront payment and sometimes freemium is the best way to gain users and sales. Why is that somehow an "issue"?

[zanny]

I've preached this for years, and its my ongoing pet project, but patronage really is the endgame for information content.

Pretty much any freelance animator online is already using patreon. Writers, artists, and comedians are using it. I'm surprised its taken this long for news companies to start trying it.

Fundamentally, the information created is not scarce. It is knowledge. It deserves to be free. But the work to create the information is scarce. Valuable. Some might even say worthy of compensation.

There are so many ways you can present patronage to your audience. Hell, advertising honestly is a kind of patronage - your viewership translates into third parties valuing your work enough to pay you for it, so their ads can go along for the ride. But on the other extreme, you could be a writer or animator or comic artist who says "next episode costs $XXXX, when I get that much money I'll produce it / release it". And there is an entire range of other options in between those two, and its really stifling how content creators are still so limited in their options.

[Anderkent]

Donations. You can also do freemium without doing evil stuff: it doesn't optimize your income, of course, but it's better than nothing?

I also don't really think it's that important to have free content. I'm happy to pay for entertainment, and for other stuff most content isn't really produced with income in mind - stuff like blog posts etc don't have to make money, people will write them anyway

[anc84]

I run a free website and every year I do a one week fund raising for the costs. I don't have customers but a more or less dedicated community (some people are around for years, others come and go). The community always exceeds the amount I ask for.

[omegaham]

This is a fantastic idea. "Hey, you guys obviously get a kick out of my website. Not asking for much - just enough that I can keep the site running and still awesome." I'd definitely pitch in $20 a year to a site that has entertained me for years.

The most immediate example that comes to mind is Wikipedia.

[anc84]

It works every time I see a site like mine try it. People are attached to the site over the years plus I am fully open about all the costs and expenses. The yearly amount is less than 20% of typical monthly income though, it is just hobbyists financing one part of their hobby. I don't think you could finance an actual job through this. But I think labour of love creates better websites than money-oriented endeavours anyways.

The key is making it very focused and short-time. People won't engage if you have a random donate button (I do, zero donations over 3 years). People love immediate motivation to participate in a common fundraising I guess.

[yAnonymous]

This might very well lead to better content on news sites. Content that at least some users are willing to pay for, instead of link bait bullshit.

Premium user systems that offer full HD videos and other extra content to paying users seem to work well enough if the content is good.

[astrobe_]

I believe short term sponsoring should be worked on. Your game needs a good mouse and Logitech wants to increase its presence on the gamer market? You feature an ad from them.

The way ads are served usually today is so terrible that it encourages the use of ad blockers. Get the control back on them. Integrate them in your contents - on your terms and transparently - and the Web will probably be better for everyone.

The problem is that it's a lot of work and you have better things to do. I've heard of proxy companies that to do the boring stuff (hunting announcers, contract negotiation, etc.) for YT streamers.

[hellbanner]

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9716430, particularly Freditup, the_af & my comment discussing Emily Greer's rationale that players "pay-to-win" with large sums in physical sports games.

Also, https://badgeville.com/wiki/Game_Mechanics for a list of "engagement mechanics"

[JoshTriplett]

In terms of business models for free content: I'm a big fan of Patreon, and I use it to actively pay for a half-dozen sites and authors I enjoy. There are many more sites and authors I'd pay if they offered the option.

On the other hand, consider actually charging for your game. Or, alternatively, give the game away but charge a nominal amount for access to multiplayer servers, since that's a significant source of your costs.

[beagle3]

How much do you think you'll make from ads? Chances are, much, much less than you expect. There are exceptions (e.g. plentyoffish.com), but people I know who run popular niche sites (in the low millions of page views per month, a few tens-of-thousands unique) are happy when they manage to make $1,000/month from ads.

[fridek]

Actually I have no idea. Never made any money from ads, but $1k/month sounds like the kind of money I could use to improve/market the game I'm working on.

There is also another question with the same roots - how much money do the sites I read need to make in order to work and maintain the same quality. I'd be glad to pay something like an equivalent of what I'm worth as an advertisement target. There was Google Contributor (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) project but I don't know the current status.

Anyway, I have recently deleted my adblock. Not having it, ads are super annoying on some sites and I miss it, but I see no other way to discourage paywalling good, free content.

[kup0]

The reality is that a large quantity of people will continue blocking ads, so your contribution will amount to nil, unless you can get a non-blocking movement going.

The unfortunate thing is no matter how much we decide to not block ads, the ad companies will continue to take advantage of us with extremely intrusive, unvetted (for safety) ads. You give them an inch, they take a mile. I'm not willing to give them that inch. They will not reciprocate.

If all ad networks were tidy and nice, like The Deck network, I probably wouldn't block ads. But my pre-adblock experience WITH ads is what caused me to block them.

The advertisers had their chance and they blew it. I could care less if all ad-supported sites go away now. You're in bed with ad company scum, you deserve what you get.

If they want to ruin the user experience. I will force the user experience to be better with an ad-blocker.

I understand some content (especially content available for those that are underprivileged) may go away if ad-blocking continues to grow. I don't know the solution, but the solution isn't more ads or not blocking them. Maybe there's some other way... shrug

[freehunter]

How about the worst of both worlds? I subscribe to the NYT and log into their site with a paid-for account to get around the paywall and still see ads everywhere.

[quadrangle]

The incentives set up by Google Contributor are to increase ads. It's about getting a micro-donation system that excludes sites that don't use Google Ads, so the idea is to force sites to show more ads in order to participate with Google Contributor and to punish sites for not showing ads.

[h43k3r]

I support your arguments of free content, but there are some sites on the internet that will serve you spam if you don't use a ad blocking software.

I unblock ads on the free websites that I use frequently which present ads in a nice way.

Some websites do show a popup that they earn from ads and it would be great if you could turn off your ad blocker and I mostly comply with that. The reason for this is that these sites know when and where to show ads.

[beagle3]

You probably wanted to reply to GGP. I am of the opinion content should be free or paid. I let ads through only if they come from the same website.

My problem with the non-annoying ads is that they still enable tracking and lrofiling which I do not like.

I think I've had Adblock+request policy/policeman running since forever - recently switched to ublockO+umatrix

[ajkjk]

I think we're ripe for some new business models becoming mainstream.

As I see it, ads just suck. I don't just mean suck as in "I just don't like them"; they're also just terrible at accomplishing what they want to accomplish, and they're getting more terrible, and because of this there's getting to be more and more of them everywhere. I get the impression (just an impression) that society is sort of 'wising up to' ads. (Admittedly, this may be because I've grown up and have personally wised up.) I personally have not clicked on an online ad in .. it's got to be at least a few years.. and I long for a day when everyone has wised up to the point where the model falls apart. (but I'm aware that ads can affect you by other means than having you click on them, such as by planting ideas in your head or making you gradually accustomed to company or product names.)

My big complaint is simply that I just hate having every second of my day filled with people trying to sell me crap! And more than anything, I hate when content is also an ad, or disguised as ads. I loathe product placements in movies and 'sponsored by' sections that play the company's commercials. I especially loathe when huge boardroom corporations task a bunch of advertisers to come up with an ads that will appeal to an 18-25 audience, and they crack their heads together and come up with a cute, ukelele-filled, animated skit that (literally) begs you to hashtag it. I want people to stop taking culture and trying to figure out how to manipulate it to sell their crap.

Like, it seems obvious that the fact that, in order to watch a TV show, you have to spend a quarter of your time watching (or ignoring, or muting and browsing the internet during) ads, is a completely terrible user experience! Imagine if every fourth page of a novel was an ad. Or if a fourth of popular websites were ads - oh wait, they are.

It's all monstrously unpleasant. I sometimes torrent movies and TV not because I couldn't pay for them, but because even if I use the right channels, the experience is awful (among other reasons). It's crazy to me that there's not yet an option to just pay more to disable all ads on TV. I guess it was technically infeasible for a long time, but, still.

Netflix is an example of someone figuring out how to take ad-supported things and turn them into a new model. That's a good thing. (Though I suspect a huge portion of their profits comes from it being so easy to ignore their bill because you sign up once and never get notifications about it?)

Ultimately I'd like to just pay for what I consume. I like Netflix because I give them money and I get service. I give Spotify money and I get service. I wouldn't mind a service that (via browser extension or something) allowed me to specify donations per month to various sites on the Internet that I visit - so I insert 100$ a month and it gets divvied up, and in exchange I have no ads. (With the caveat that if a site shows ads anyway, or tries to bait me into reading it, or is bullshit in some other way, I can revoke their piece of my payment..).

For creative work I think patronage is an underrated business model, largely because there's a high barrier to actually giving money to something. I'd love to just be able to say, I have 50$ a month for bloggers whose blogs I read - I don't want to push to "donate via paypal" button on every site; I just want it to get sent out by virtue of my being there and liking it. [Note: what doesn't work is paying proportionally to time spent on a website. That's how you get mindless Buzzfeed clickbait everywhere. Gotta figure out something else.] Twitch figured out how to get its users to actual donate money with minimal friction and that seems to be working well for them (though they're hosting a lot more ads lately, which is very tedious).

I'd also love to see a return of the renaissance style patronage of "rich people funding artists". Seems like funding happens mostly through grants and scholarships these days, instead of people just funding specific people who can do things they want to see in the world.

For your game, if it's multiplayer, the "cosmetics cost real money' model seems to work pretty well, and avoids you being resented requiring money just to access the whole game. As does just having the game cost money up front, but, that tends to lower demand. If you want to add content to the game after it's released, I think "expansions" are treated much more favorably by the public than "DLC" is: we feel cheated when we pay half as much as the game itself and get a single, probably crappy level. It's a lot nicer to get a large chunk of content with new mechanics and new stories that isn't just a tacked-in moneymaker level like a lot of games are doing.

[michaelaiello]

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

[ajkjk]

That's neat. I think I'd seen that but forgotten about it since it has remained mostly irrelevant.

I'm excited about the idea, but I'm also pretty skeptical of this infrastructure even being run by Google. I'd rather it be open source. The project could fund itself through the same donations it enables for others, which is more concrete of a fundamental than a lot of other projects.

[ajkjk]

s/fundamental/funding model

[quadrangle]

is a way to promote more ads by excluding sites that respect their audience and don't show ads. You have to be already showing Google ads in order to have Contributor as a way to turn them off. So, the incentive pushes toward net increase in ads.

[infogulch]

I hoped a flattr-like solution would work, but it would need to be more automatic.

How much is all the longform article content you consume in a month worth to you? $5/mo? 20? 100? Take that, and split it up between all the sites you read news from. Multiply by 100k readers, boom! viable business model. Now the question is how you split it up. It needs to be thoughtless and as fine-grained as possible: maybe number of articles read or minutes spent reading.

This keeps the open internet: sites still compete on merit not on the inertia of subscription since the money follows the user's reading habits closely.

[746F7475]

Set up code on your site that detects that I'm using adblocker(s) and I won't visit your site.

It really is that simple. Either you bite the bullet and accept that some of us don't want random 3rd party code running on our browsers or you gate us away. We won't hold it against you.

I would prefer to have option in uBlock that notified me if I was about to enter a site that didn't want me viewing their content if I had adblock enabled, so I could avoid those sites.

As for games free with buyable skins seems to be working well with many games.

[malchow]

"I would prefer to have option in uBlock that notified me if I was about to enter a site that didn't want me viewing their content if I had adblock enabled, so I could avoid those sites."

I suspect such a feature would do serious harm to the adblocking business. They do not want to surface the latent discontent that writers and publishers feel.

If it were as simple as the publisher pushing a button and blocking adblockers, and for adblock users it was as simple as pushing a button to notify you that you are heading to a site that had such anti-adblock penalites, the result across the web would be pretty uniform: you wouldn't get to go to any high quality websites.

They'd flip the switch, and 90% of adblock users will whitelist what they really do want to see --- whether it's The Economist, The New York Times, or whatever. Surfacing the idea of publishers implementing anti-adblock measures could actually reduce the adblocking footprint.

[manigandham]

Since any code that sites install will just get circumvented by these adblockers (as they already do if you check the filters) what we're headed towards are hard paywalls where you have to login to access any content.

[marrs]

Speaking for myself, I tend to purchase games. I avoid in-game purchases like the plague. I might download an ad supported game if the ads stay out of the way. If I continue to play an ad supported game and there's an ad-free, payed for version, then I'll upgrade.

[JohnTHaller]

The vast majority of games on either platform won't make enough money to matter either way at this point due to oversaturation. There's still a small chance for a moonshot with the right game and the right marketing and some luck.

[sergiotapia]

I feel like I'm not missing out on anything from those news sites. I just don't visit them after I hit my 5/month limit. No big deal.

[Lawtonfogle]

>Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids,

You can do freemium without selling your soul. Look at LoL or Path of Exile for the best examples. Others would be Bloons TD 5 or Bloons City, where coins allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added. Only when you add something that basically drains the fun out of the game unless money is spent are you selling your soul.

[talles]

I never played those games you mentioned but I don't get "allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added".

If you can skip ahead by putting money on it you have slowed down who didn't (right?)

[Lawtonfogle]

It is an issue of a fun gameplay mechanic. Slowing it down destroys the fun. Allowing it to be skipped doesn't destroy the fun, but does allow those not interested in it to skip it.

Consider a Mario game. Speeding up would be selling gems that let you skip a level. Slowing it down is saying you only get 3 lives ever 30 minutes unless you spend gems.

Or think of WoW. The leveling up is a fun part of the game, but after the second or third character, it gets far more boring and people are willing to pay to skip it. As more expansions came out, WoW actually made leveling easier. Then recently they added an option to skip the majority of the leveling and get straight to the end game. That is paying to speed it up.

Now consider Candy Crush. A fun game at the core, with levels that get harder and introduce new game play. All well and good. But then they added extreme cooldowns on everything. 1 life every 30 minutes with a max of 5 at a time. Periods where you have to wait 24 hours to go to the next section. Other powerups limited to once a day. That is purposefully slowing it down.

[chc]

League of Legends is not a great example IMO. That game has a huge grindwall. Gaining access to just the gameplay-affecting elements of the game — not even looking at the cosmetic items — would cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars and take huge amounts of play time on top of that.

[Lawtonfogle]

Unless it has drastically changed, I was able to boot it up and play for fun right off the bat. There were no slowdowns in any matches. While some abilities were off limit to me, these were off limit to the people I was paired with as well. The only issue I've ever noticed is that heroes aren't perfectly balanced and as such it may be possible for someone to buy access to a stronger one that the rest have, but that has not ever been a noticeable problem.

That it takes 1000 hours to unlock X does not count against it when the game is quite fun without X and where X has minimal impact on the game even when someone else has X but I do not.

Think of single player RPGs where unlocking the ultimate weapons/secret characters take dozens of hours of grinding outside of the main gameplay. That does not make the RPG a grindfest. Compare this to an RPG where 2 hours have to be spent grinding for every 45 minutes of progress through the main game. That is a grindfest.

[navait]

Fairness is irrelevant - we take what we can as long as we can rationalize it.(surprisingly easy to do). Look at all the comments under you blaming you for not wanting to publish content without compensation.

Do what you must to be successful, because few will pay for things they don't have to pay for.