] HipMojo.com » Rotten, Spoiled Children, We are!

Rotten, Spoiled Children, We are!

We’re horrible. We really are. My generation (I’m 29) has all but given up on print, radio and TV, we live for the Web. The next generation does not even know what those three media are. But we all share one very, very bad trait:

We want everything for free. And we’re becoming less and less tolerant:

- Newsletter subscribers of the Freakonomics blog are p’d-off (the Update in this post off PaidContent), get this, because now you can only read an excerpt in the newsletter feed and must actually, sit down folks, click through and go to the NYTimes (who partners with the blog) to read the whole article… for free! In other words, it’s not enough for the article to be free in the newsletter, it must be complete. Right…

The horror! The horror!

- And what to say about ad-blocking software that robs publishers of ad revenue (disclaimer: I’m naturally biased as a publisher myself). Some people have gone as far as blocking Mozilla users (since a Mozilla plug-in allows users to block ads). Mind you, I agree with Michael Arrington that this makes the bloke’s blog dead on arrival because there is plenty-o-content elsewhere.

And of course, this a few days after Google had the audacity (the balls they have, you know?) to - da-da-da - serve ads in YouTube videos.

Sarcasm aside, I think we all need to calm the you-know-what down. We’re getting so much free content, did I mention, for free, that living with ads is a necessary evil. Publishers shouldn’t sugarcoat the fact that ads are a necessarily evil, they should find creative ways to introduce them in the publisher-consumer ecosystem, recognizing that no sane user welcomes ads.  Nick Carr had some comments on this earlier this week.

It’s a balancing act folks: if as a publisher you rape your users, they’ll go elsewhere.  But, indeed getting all fired up because publishers need to offset the costs of producing free content is plain wrong, and bad for the Web.

Tags: , , |
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Aug 24th

Subscribe:


Leave a Reply

*
To prove that you're not a bot, enter this code
Anti-Spam Image

Subscribe:


« « previous post | next post » »
Admin

Shortcut:
HipMojo.com

Subscribe:

Search Site:

Categories:

Archives:

Blogroll: