It bothers me on a fundamental level that we’ve been conditioned to accept ads as “the price of the internet”: I want to pay $5 for an app with no ads/IAP, not be advertised to forever. I want to pay $5 a month to listen to a podcast without ads, not have my precious time taken up with podcast hosts (aka People I Trust) telling me about how much they love whichever meal box kit is paying them this year.
I put my money where my mouth is, btw: I support ad-free podcasts, or podcasts with unlockable ad-free versions, on Patreon (as ad-free is becoming a more common perk, it’s beginning to get expensive, but podcast-listening is my main hobby). I messaged one small podcaster about why she didn’t have ad-free versions of her podcast as a patreon perk and she said the reason for it was because her advertisers have a clause stating that there must be no ad-free versions, because apparently the more devoted listeners (the ones who trust the podcasters the most) are their preferred target market.
I also emailed a podcaster I listen to when her podcast ran an ad for a ‘product’ I knew she wouldn’t support if she knew some easily googleable backstory, and she emailed me back, pulled the ad, and said that she hadn’t used the product and so didn’t know that the product was counteractive to her ‘brand’. Obviously, you know a lot of these endorsements are fake, but I find podcasts especially insidious as the podcaster-listener relationship is surprisingly intimate.
So yeah, I completely agree with you. I’m voting with my dollar, to try and make the “paid” business model more sustainable for internet services. Thanks for an enlightening post!
I’m curious if there is any reason we should expect paying for ad-free media and software to ultimately go any better than cable TV did. Being ad-free was one of the original promises of paying for a TV subscription in the first place, and now we ended up with both ads and subscription fees in ever-increasing amounts. Well, up until the point that many of us are cutting cable and getting everything online. Right now there’s a lot of competition among streaming providers targeting different parts of the spectra for media access, payment, and advertising exposure, but I suspect it’s partly a matter of the Powers That Be not yet having found strategies to lock up the market in some way.
I’m curious if there is any reason we should expect paying for ad-free media and software to ultimately go any better than cable TV did.
I don’t think “ultimately” has any place in this conversation. We’re nowhere near the ultimate, and won’t be for a long time. This is likely to be a cyclic equilibrium, where it swings between more reasonable and less. It happened for TV disaggregation—the power of TiVo to skip ads varied over time as ad-injection tech changed, then paying for ad-free, then paying more for ad-free, then some services that don’t have an ad-free tier. It’s happening on the web and in apps—many have an ad-free tier if you pay, and there are ad-blockers with varying degrees of effectiveness. And counter-technology to detect the ad-blockers, in an interesting but non-static arms race.
I think it won’t be long (under a decade) before wearable ad-blockers are available for the rich. And then ads will start incorporating detection-blockers, and the ad-blockers will start selling replacement ad space, and then something else will change.
People’s attention and beliefs are far too valuable to let them keep.
To be honest, I don’t care how things will go in the future: at the moment, I’m paying, now, to not experience ads, and I’m hoping that my purchasing decisions in this vein will encourage the sort of behaviour I want. If hosts start incorporating ads into their patron podcasts they’ll lose my $5/mo and receive a polite but firm note explaining why.
It bothers me on a fundamental level that we’ve been conditioned to accept ads as “the price of the internet”: I want to pay $5 for an app with no ads/IAP, not be advertised to forever. I want to pay $5 a month to listen to a podcast without ads, not have my precious time taken up with podcast hosts (aka People I Trust) telling me about how much they love whichever meal box kit is paying them this year.
I put my money where my mouth is, btw: I support ad-free podcasts, or podcasts with unlockable ad-free versions, on Patreon (as ad-free is becoming a more common perk, it’s beginning to get expensive, but podcast-listening is my main hobby). I messaged one small podcaster about why she didn’t have ad-free versions of her podcast as a patreon perk and she said the reason for it was because her advertisers have a clause stating that there must be no ad-free versions, because apparently the more devoted listeners (the ones who trust the podcasters the most) are their preferred target market.
I also emailed a podcaster I listen to when her podcast ran an ad for a ‘product’ I knew she wouldn’t support if she knew some easily googleable backstory, and she emailed me back, pulled the ad, and said that she hadn’t used the product and so didn’t know that the product was counteractive to her ‘brand’. Obviously, you know a lot of these endorsements are fake, but I find podcasts especially insidious as the podcaster-listener relationship is surprisingly intimate.
So yeah, I completely agree with you. I’m voting with my dollar, to try and make the “paid” business model more sustainable for internet services. Thanks for an enlightening post!
I’m curious if there is any reason we should expect paying for ad-free media and software to ultimately go any better than cable TV did. Being ad-free was one of the original promises of paying for a TV subscription in the first place, and now we ended up with both ads and subscription fees in ever-increasing amounts. Well, up until the point that many of us are cutting cable and getting everything online. Right now there’s a lot of competition among streaming providers targeting different parts of the spectra for media access, payment, and advertising exposure, but I suspect it’s partly a matter of the Powers That Be not yet having found strategies to lock up the market in some way.
I don’t think “ultimately” has any place in this conversation. We’re nowhere near the ultimate, and won’t be for a long time. This is likely to be a cyclic equilibrium, where it swings between more reasonable and less. It happened for TV disaggregation—the power of TiVo to skip ads varied over time as ad-injection tech changed, then paying for ad-free, then paying more for ad-free, then some services that don’t have an ad-free tier. It’s happening on the web and in apps—many have an ad-free tier if you pay, and there are ad-blockers with varying degrees of effectiveness. And counter-technology to detect the ad-blockers, in an interesting but non-static arms race.
I think it won’t be long (under a decade) before wearable ad-blockers are available for the rich. And then ads will start incorporating detection-blockers, and the ad-blockers will start selling replacement ad space, and then something else will change.
People’s attention and beliefs are far too valuable to let them keep.
To be honest, I don’t care how things will go in the future: at the moment, I’m paying, now, to not experience ads, and I’m hoping that my purchasing decisions in this vein will encourage the sort of behaviour I want. If hosts start incorporating ads into their patron podcasts they’ll lose my $5/mo and receive a polite but firm note explaining why.