Information wants to be free — or why problogging is a myth (3)
Tris Hussey, who profiles Canadian technology at catech, wrote a rant yesterday about Adblock plus, an extension for Firefox that strips away all advertisements in webpages. As a professionnal blogger, he writes that it would dry up one his viable source of income:
everyone wants content to be free, no subscription fees and the like, but websites cost real money to run. If you don’t charge for access to the content, you have to earn money somehow, and that would be advertising. Short of the work I do as a consultant, a lot of my income over the past three years has been derived from advertising
I understand his point, although I also think you can’t force internet users on how they should have their “surfing experience”. If you enforce ads, with javascript for instance, users are going to find an alternative way to consume your content ad-free, be it by RSS, or by using even more advanced tools like GreaseMonkey. This is just a battle you can’t win. On the other hand, if you make your content avalaible only via paid subscriptions, readership is going to decrease considerably, and it’s also against one of the Internet’s principle, which is free accessible information always wins (insert your favorite Google SEO reference here).
As for blogs, I don’t believe in advertising. Solutions like Adsense are only effective for top destinations, if you aren’t in the top 100, revenues from advertising will be marginal and completely unrelated to the efforts you invested in making your content relevant and interesting. I believe that you don’t blog to “get rich”, but to use blogs as a communication tool for your work. MontrealStartup use a blog to communicate their own ideas on how tech investors operate and how they work with startups. Sébastien Provencher tracks news about local technology and mashups at praized, and it’s obviously to promote his startup’s exhaustive expertise for local technology. Roberto Rocha blogs at TechnoCité, which he uses as a writing tool for his Gazette articles, to reach informally readers, and also build his own profile as a main ressource for Montreal Technology news. I can enumerate a whole list of bloggers, where I think the return they get thanks to their blog is well worth the time and effort they invested in it. Blogs are also a damn efficient tool for launching a product, for practically zero financial investment.
Of course, the formula is not perfect, because there should be more opportunities than communication or “pushing your agenda” for blogs and websites. My opinion on that matter is that the Internet is currently broken. I don’t think advertising is a sustainable way to build an economy with, and there should be another way to reward “information experts” for their work. But the Internet is still young, and I believe entrepreneurs are going to fill that need.
“Not that making money with blogs is a Bad Thing. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s always easier to think with than because; but that there’s often much more money to be made because of than with.”
http://doc-weblogs.com/2005/10/19#theBecauseEffectContd
fagstein: if you consider the technicalities, the crowd will always find a way to go around protection schemes. (remember DVD and CD ripping, people will go at great lenghts to get the content in the format they want)
now there is one way to make indistinguisable technically, which is produce html directly inline (instead of javascripts), which means the website owner has to manage all advertising instead of relying on a third-party ad network. and this brings more problems than it solves
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