On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:29:56 UTC, Bubbasaur wrote:
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:01:17 UTC, Joakim wrote:
The problem is ads make no money for the vast majority of
writers, so they have to write a book and sell it to make
writing worth their time. This is why you have to pay for
almost all the D books, with free online books like Ali's the
rare exception to the rule.
I see, but I thought the money was for the D
Consortium/Organization.
If there's almost no money coming in, does it matter where that
pittance goes? ;) I wasn't talking about the D foundation, but a
paid blog that would get writers to produce good articles online.
Anyway it's really a big problem, if you see, currently sites
like: vice, verge, medium etc. They all work with ads, every
time you see a "click bait" title.
The dirty little secret is that those sites make little to no
money, relying on funding from dumb VCs before they go out of
business, like the Gigaom tech blog. Vice has done well, and
looking up why now, I see it's because they mostly focus on video
and made deals with TV channels and cable companies, not exactly
replicable for most writers.
The best way to illustrate how inadequate ads are is this chart,
that shows what happened to US newspaper ad revenue over the last
15 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naa_newspaper_ad_revenue.svg
That little blue squib at the bottom, that's online ads.
Newspaper revenue used to be 80% from ads, now they're all
putting up paid subscription banners, because ads just don't work
for most sites online.
I remember paying $50 ~ $80 for Programming books, but that
were the old times, today with ebooks and piracy things are bad.
Ebooks definitely lower costs, so they _should_ be cheaper. As
for piracy, that genie is out of the bottle, all you can do is
mitigate it. But paid books still sell well, and that's only
because of the complete lack of imagination of people to try paid
online models, such as paid blogs.
On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:55:16 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated
ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine
anything else.
I agree 100%. I published 4 books for Amazon Kindle, then
stopped for exactly this reason. You can do so much more
advanced stuff on the web than in an ebook.
I run http://tutorials.jenkov.com which has a good bit above 1
million page views a month. I do a few videos too. I just
publish as I write. I earn a bit of money from the ads, but
it's not that much money. The % of people browsing with ad
blockers is rising.
Wow, that's pretty good traffic. I've been reading your IAP/ION
spec and was surprised how clearly it's written, guess that's why.
How would a paid blog work? Subscription? Texts hidden behind a
pay wall? Hard to get it into the search engines then...
Paywall for 80% of the posts, with the remaining free to sample,
and the reader puts in $5-10 and gets charged 5-25 cents from
that balance per post clicked on. That metered model is much
better than subscriptions. If I don't read any posts for two
months, I don't get charged any money from my balance. There are
ways to get content behind a paywall indexed, paid sites like the
WSJ do it.
