There's an awful lot of "free" content on the internet, from social networking sites like facebook and myspace, to microblogging via twitter and yammer, to news magazine equivalents like slate and newspaper sites like nytimes.com, to free videos like YouTube and Hulu, not to mention wikipedia and search sites like google, yahoo, and bing and so on.
Of course nothing is free exactly, since the providers of these services have to figure out how to pay for the network access, storage, and overhead needed to provide these services. So how do you give away your services, yet still bring in enough revenue to make some money? The most common solution by far is advertising.
Most of the free sites mentioned above use advertising one way or another to pay for themselves. The model is similar in some ways to TV - we get free broadcasts over the air, paid for by the advertisers who get to insert their content into pauses in the shows. So when I go to google and search I get a list of paid links - a form of advertising. The more common model is to include advertisements on the same page as the content, or (more annoying to me) running an advertisement first before the site comes up.
This has led to sites becoming less useful, with more time wasted waiting for advertisement content to come up, annoying sound and video embedding, flashy advertisements that make it hard to see the useful content, ads for outright scams, and I haven't even mentioned mal-ware yet.
There's a technical fix available to some degree - ad blocking software. I haven't used any myself so I can't talk about what the experience is like in any detail, but apparently ad blocker software can be used to stop the advertisements from being displayed. I figure I'll use a site if the ads aren't too disruptive, otherwise I'll just quit using sites that annoy me, rather than try to engage in a game of technical one-ups-manship to see if I can get the content I want without having to view the ads the authors need me to see in order to pay for their service.
Apparently many people are using ad blockers, though, and ars technica published a blog trying to explain why you shouldn't use ad blockers. They equate it to eating at a restaurant without paying, and while I can understand why they don't like it, the metaphor is not very accurate. When I fetch their HTML content over HTTP I have no obligation to handle, process, and render it the way they want. Clearly when I enter a restaurant I have an obligation to pay for what I consume. I sympathize with the content authors, and I suspect that the more technical sites have a larger proportion of ad blocking users, so content I care about may get harder to come by. I have to applaud ars technica for trying to make the case, but I doubt they will convince all that many users of their content to remove ad blocking.
Many and perhaps most sites contract with ad distribution firms to provide the ads for their site, and that makes sense on some level: the authors of a technical site want to focus on technical research and good presentation of technical information, not finding advertisers and billing them. By contracting with an ad placement firm that specializes in finding advertisers willing to pay for placement and handle the billing they can get some revenue and keep their operation going. This does lead to problems, though.
I've noticed that many of the sites I read, including what would appear to be reliable above board sites like slate.com and newspaper sites, are riddled with "One secret" ads for losing weight and whitening teeth. I've also read that these "One secret" sites are basically big scams that offer a free sample (for example: get a free sample of acai berries!) and try to get your credit card information so that they can charge you a monthly fee for doing nothing that you need. Since they make lots of money with very low costs they pay more for ad placements than most, so they dominate these on-web-page ads. As if that wasn't bad enough, more recently there have been reports of ad services serving up ads with embedded malware, or offer downloadable products that are malware. Ads for scams annoy me and make me think less of the site that hosts them, but I can just ignore those. Malware on the other hand actively messes up my system and costs me time and energy. Nothing will make me decide to use ad blockers faster than getting infections from ads, so the advertising distributors really should pay a lot of attention to avoiding distributing malware.
Figuring out how to pay for "free" content is one of the on-going challenges of the internet age, and I'm sure we'll continue seeing issues come and go, I just hope it doesn't get so bad as to make a technical fix like ad blocking an absolute requirement, or lots of free sites will probably end up going away.
This is one of those areas where it's much easier to see the existing problems, and much harder to see any good potential solutions. I suppose that's also a good sign that an innovative solution could be very valuable, but no good solution for the situation has occurred to me.
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