"Today, if an internet subscriber seeks 'content' she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone."
If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s.
Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here:
That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.
If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s.
Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...
That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.