11mo ago

An advertising industry worker's take on adblockers

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I agree with him entirely, but the current problem is really that content creators need to get paid, but so do the hosts.
There are places to host that are creator-paid…the creator could also self-host. But if you want your content to be seen, you need to be in the big websites that get most their revenue from ads.
Get Patreon and Nebula bigger than YouTube and maybe more creators would host there. But that’s a bit of a prisoners dilemma.
- No, they don't need to get paid. People can do things for fun and not money.
  
  Is this sarcasm? I don't understand why they don't need to get paid. I mean sure the hobbyist creator isn't thinking about getting paid. But the people with the best content aren't hobbyist, they are good because that's all they do.
  
  Those "people with the best content" getting paid through ad money had lead to lots of people optimizing their content not for quality but for ad friendliness and mass compatibility.
  
  Sure they can. But no matter how you slice it, everybody has bills to pay. Servers and bandwidth aren’t cheap. Nor are people to run them, or the massive infrastructure that makes up YouTube (for example).
  You host your videos in a computer under your desk, and it doesn’t cost much, but you are highly limited on how much you can serve and how big your audience is. You can grow either of them but that’s going to take time and money. Eventually it goes from a fun thing you do that you enjoy, to an expensive hobby, to a time-consuming money sink.
  If you’re lucky you get to stay in one of the first two. You’re not huge, but you’re having fun and you’re not a sellout. Eventually you are faced with a choice…have fun and limit your arts reach, or get bigger and become a sellout. And the move itself to a larger ad supported platform will likely result in losing some of your more virtuous fans.

126 comments