The Advertising Platform To Save Content Providers?
Okay, I’m probably missing something. But here ‘goes.
The great challenge for content-generators (writers, particularly) in an age of free digital reproduction is: how does anybody get paid?
The answer, typically, is: by attracting eyeballs that can be delivered advertising content along with the desired content.
This gives all power to the content aggregators – small fry like Andrew Sullivan, who have an audience that they feed content that is mostly produced by others (and mostly not paid for), but much more so great white sharks like Google’s search engine, which is the mother of all aggregators.
Content-generation becomes organized around feeding these aggregators, in the hopes of attracting eyeballs. But unless a regular stream of eyeballs is attracted this way, there’s still no way to generate income for the downstream content generator.
What you need is a micropayment mechanism, whereby downstream content generators get a tiny amount of money per eyeball for the eyeballs directed their way, in recognition of the fact that their content was the plankton, if you will, on which the great white sharks at the top of the food chain ultimately depend. But even if you had such a mechanism, why would the great white sharks agree? How do the downstream content generators get the leverage to force some kind of sharing agreement?
One sometimes-suggested solution would be to create an advertising platform that is content-independent. Ads would be delivered based on personal profile information that would be augmented by knowledge of browsing and search history. But there are two problems with this: first, how many people would consent to create such a profile (what’s in it for them?); second, how does this browser-based ad platform give any greater leverage to downstream content providers? Wouldn’t it, in fact, reduce their leverage?
Well, here’s one thought. Advertisers don’t like to compete with each other. A browser-based, profile-based ad platform would be more successful if it were an exclusive platform – if it made arrangements with websites to share revenue in exchange for disabling any other ad-delivery mechanisms that they had going when their “viewers” tuned in.
Instead of serving up whatever ad content Hulu or Salon or whatever want to serve up, the browser-based ad platform would take over and serve up something more tailored to your specific profile. And, in exchange for no longer competing with these other ad platforms, the browser-based ad platform would share revenue with the content site.
That creates an incentive for people to sign up with the platform – yes, you’re getting ads when sometimes in other circumstances you wouldn’t – but you’re also obliterating ads that, in other circumstances, you’d be stuck getting. And, all things being equal, you’re getting “better” ads – ads that fit your profile better.
Sure, lots of people still won’t sign up for privacy reasons. But probably most people won’t be deterred by privacy concerns. They rarely are when there is actually something in it for them. Which, in this case, there is. (You could even imagine a revenue-share of some kind for the recipient of the ads – something dependent on click-through purchases, presumably, but whatever.)
The heavy negotiation would be between content-providers with substantial ad revenue and the browser-based ad platform. But once that structure was in place, it would be logically extensible to content-providers generally. Not necessarily on identical terms, but the browser-based ad platform would have a reason to sign a contract with even marginal content-providers: they would need access to their code to assure their ads were disabled when browser-based-ad-platform-subscribers visited. Which would give even marginal content providers some marginal leverage to get the bargain-basement contract for downstreaming revenue.
The main people who would appear to be threatened, if such a mechanism really got off the ground, would be the content-aggregators themselves, particularly the search engines, who would for that reason be unlikely to sign any agreement with the browser-based ad platform. But Google ads are (a) relatively unobtrusive; (b) not designed to “distract” from content – rather, they are intended to be a form of content, to be relevant “answers” to search queries. As such, they aren’t really a competing platform. People don’t “hang out” at search engines distracted by the ads. So it’s not actually obvious that there’s any competition there. The competition would be with platforms that sell ads directly on websites. But what the existence of such a platform would do is free content-providers from their dependence on search engines for audience. They would be free to pursue an audience by more traditional means – directly, and via aggregators who are “taste-makers” (like Andrew Sullivan) rather than automated search functions – and would now have some basis for generating revenue from such activities. I suspect such revenue would continue to be very, very small for nearly all websites. But there is an enormous difference between small and zero. Add a lot of small numbers together and you just might get something. Zero never adds up to anything.
Ultimately, nobody gets paid unless somebody visits, to view or read. Content has to attract eyeballs, or there’s nothing to monetize. The question is first, how to capture whatever value is associated with that viewing/reading time, and, second, how to create a mechanism that would justify downstreaming some of that value-capture to the actual content provider. I think the mechanism I’ve outlined could do both things.
Anybody out there know if this idea is even technically feasible?
The other typical answer is that one should “generously” give your book, music, movie, whatever away for free and then sell a t-shirt or totebag with your logo emblazzened on it.
What both answers miss is that in either case, the most valuable thing isn’t the book, music, movie, whatever, it’s the ablity to sell somebody something — to sell them a t-shirt, to sell them advertising space. Compared to that, the book, music, movie, whatever is like the fizzy brown liquid inside a bottle of Coca Cola — essential to the transaction, but not the most valuable part.
— Tony Comstock · Jan 5, 05:14 AM · #
Something like what you describe appears to have been implemented recently. I’ve noticed in the last few weeks that browser ads are more closely tracking my past internet activity than before. Viz, I had been looking at sweaters at one site; subsequently, for about a week, there was about a 50% chance that any page I viewed would contain an ad from that site for those sweaters. Now, we can argue the efficiency of a system that so repeatedly offers a product I had already declined to purchase, but it does seem to be in production.
— misplaced trust co. · Jan 5, 05:31 AM · #
As far as micropayments, Clay Shirky has been arguing for years that they won’t work:
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers
— Bill Carson · Jan 5, 06:52 AM · #
This is one of the more reasonable ideas I’ve read regarding online profit generation, however it still falls into the trap of misunderstanding the medium. The Internet is a medium whose technical structure and operational philosophy simply don’t care whether someone can make money or not. It exists only to transfer information. If you can make a buck by selling coffee mugs or charging a fee for Paypal transfers, great, but trying to turn the medium into one supported completely by advertising is basically pretending that it’s TV. It isn’t and never will be.
The only “advertising” that works within this medium is giving the song away for free so the fans buy concert tickets. To the internet, EVERYTHING is information and potentially shareable. Making money is just a happy side effect for some people.
That aside, I have questions about the poster’s main proposition. First: How will this ad platform be implemented? Are Mozilla, Google and Microsoft going to include it in their browsers automatically? Not bloody likely. Google is in the business of browsers and providing information seamlessly. Mozilla insists on open and transparent web standards. There’s no way a large-scale profit generator like the one proposed would adhere to or have a bias in favor of open standards — quite the opposite.
Second: what happens when someone invents a new version of Adblock that disables it?
— Daniel Daugherty · Jan 5, 08:01 AM · #
Tony: not exactly sure what you mean by the “ability” to sell somebody something. It sounds like you’re saying that what’s most valuable is having someone’s attention for the right product at the right time. So, for example, the movie theaters basically do give away the movies they show for free – because getting people into the theaters gives them the opportunity to sell overpriced popcorn and soda. That’s what you mean, right? So the internet analogy is precisely Daniel’s “give away the song and sell the concert ticket” where you sell the concert ticket in some kind of popup that appears while the listener hears the song. Right?
Misplaced: that’s why, fundamentally, I’m skeptical that people are really going to object to some kind of identification on privacy grounds – because so many entities are already collecting so much information that, eventually, it’ll be obvious that all voluntary participation in an ad-delivery system does is improve the experience from your subjective perspective; the privacy is already gone. Mark Zuckerberg certainly seems to have bet the farm on that proposition, anyway.
Bill: I’m probably using micropayments incorrectly. I agree that “nickel-and-diming” users is stupid, and will never happen. But downstreaming microfractions of ad revenue to a gazillion content providers is trivial and doesn’t impinge in any way on the user experience, so none of Shirky’s objections are relevant.
— Noah Millman · Jan 5, 01:36 PM · #
Daniel: very good questions.
Re: how will it be implemented: I don’t know. But you’re really asking why it would be implemented. The answer to that is: if it provides a superior experience to the user, then some browser would incorporate it as a potential source of competitive advantage. I’m assuming that a browser that offered the deal “I’ll offer an ad experience that is more relevant to you and will kill everybody else’s annoying ads for you without crashing your computer” – assuming such a thing could be done – would have real value for the user. But let’s say it’s not enough. So you layer on more inducements. Give the user a micro-cut of the ad revenue, either directly or in the form of discounts on any click-through purchases made through the browser ads. Whatever. The point is: the whole scheme doesn’t work unless users voluntarily buy in. If they do, then it’s because it’s bringing them value. If it’s bringing them value, then, for example, Microsoft might include it in their browser as a way of successfully competing with Mozilla and Google.
Re: Adblock: well, the concept is that the browser-based ad platform incorporates the most awesome version of Adblock – one that works seamlessly because it has buy-in from the content sites that were serving up the ads you are trying to block. Sure, someone could hack the browser-based platform to disable it as well. Probably the best defense would be to develop some mechanism for the platform to realize that it’s been disabled, and therefore have it stop disabling the ads on content sites. At that point, basically, there’d be no point in signing up for the browser-based service – and, again, the whole premise is voluntary buy-in.
Re: selling concert tickets: or anything else, right? There’s no difference between an ad and a ticket window on the internet. If someone is viewing something, and that experience as such gives someone else a natural opportunity to sell something, that’s an opportunity that can be monetized, right? The idea isn’t to make the internet into television – the idea is to figure out what’s the popcorn. I think. Because the literal concert tickets model isn’t going to work very well for anything but music – people aren’t going to buy tickets to hear journalists jabber. Not normal people, anyway.
— Noah Millman · Jan 5, 01:55 PM · #
I just now read Clay Shirky’s article. One area where I, as a customer, not a publisher, would be glad to have a micropayment system is for articles in electronic journals. Right now I have access to a huge library of these journals through my employment with a major university. When I retire in a few years, I will not have such access. If I had an academic position in my university, it would be different, but I’m a member of the support staff. I’m trying to tell my supervisor that the university might induce me to retire a little earlier than I would otherwise if they’d let me have the same access as those in academic positions will get upon retirement, but given the complexities of contracts with publishers of scholarly journals, I’m not counting on it. If I could have access to articles for a couple of dollars per each, I’d easily consume a few hundred dollars worth each year.
— The Reticulator · Jan 5, 04:39 PM · #
Isn’t an equally large problem here the very real possibility that “capturing eyeballs” doesn’t work? People had to sort of assume it worked in the golden era of magazines. So you had people advetising 50-year-old scotch and expensive watches in Playboy, hoping beyond hope that the readers actually WERE middle-brow people with disposable income, hoping to spend it to become high-brow. Well, now we don’t need to hope. We can track it. We can see what people buy.
I am not an expert in the field, obviously. But it seems to me that the big problem is that people HAVE tracked it. And it doesn’t look like people are clicking through and buying stuff.
I am not arguing that advertising never works. But now we have a better idea about when it does and when it doesn’t. No more BS. And that’s a problem if you believe that a huge amount of advertising budgets were getting wasted in the past. And they probably were. I read Playboy A LOT when I was a teenager. I still haven’t bought that scotch, or the watch. Maybe that imbued a sense of longing in my heart which I will eventually unleash in the scotch/watch marketplace and those industries when I have enough money, giving a delayed reaction to all those ad dollars. But probably not. My eyeballs were captured by other things.
— Sam M · Jan 5, 07:29 PM · #
I think Sam hit the nail on the head, online advertising simply doesn’t work, it is too easy to ignore so the traditional model of advertising funded content will never work
— Eric k · Jan 5, 09:50 PM · #
Many disjoint thoughts, bear with me please.
First, I think that what Millman proposes is technically straightforward to do.
I also hear his concerns about what you might need to do to convince people to surrender some privacy, but, get with it, dude: privacy is dead. Don’t like it, don’t feel that way myself, but there it is. People don’t value it anymore — at least not that kind of privacy. So it’s a nonconcern.
Now — and Sam is here first, really — I don’t wan’t optimal ads tuned to the wonderful unique mutha that I am. I don’t want any ads, except maybe the Google ad type (and usually not even that). That’s because in the Internet era, when I want to buy a pole saw, it’s trivially easy for me to go looking for information on pole saws. Anything I’m interested in actually getting, I can get information on fast. Google figured out that when I want to see an ad is when I’m looking to go buy something and so, if I’m looking for something, could they facilitate plugging me into things I might be trying to buy? Basically all ads are going to offer no information to me (and in fact, ``tuned’‘ ads are sort of annoying: we bought a rug from an internet store and suddely that store’s ad shows up on every frickin’ website I visit. Dude, I already bought the rug, I clearly know about your store, if I needed another now I’d have included it with the order!) So your only hope isn’t to show me pole saw ads with the awareness that I’m a pole-saw kinda guy. It’s to show me ads for stuff I don’t even know I want yet, just throw random stuff at me (``Honey, check this out! It’ a USB pole dancer! Fuckin’ A!‘’). Woot has ridden this strategy to glory.
But my most important objection is the one Comstock raises. ``Content’‘? Just that crappy, anodyne marketing word — ``content’‘ — says it all. ``Content’‘ is nuthin’. I shit ``content,’‘ Millman. Check out the amazing ``content’‘ I’m contenting right now, dude. Watch me content some more ``content.’‘
That’s because the real gem isn’t producing ``content’‘ — some troglodyte will always crap you out ``content,’‘ if nothing else there’s always another twelve year old girl with an unwisely placed webcam out there — but gatekeeping and aggregating. Marketers rule, man, they’re hell of smart and the new information tools give them all kinds of ways to direct you, to make you the very best and most awesome consumer of ``content’‘ you can be. If you know exactly what you’re looking for and what it looks like, that’s one thing. But if not rest assured my marketing department can direct you straight to utter mindless crud, and will have you convinced it’s the shit. I mean, if it’s all free and stuff, I’ll direct you to the best stuff I can and compete on quality, and I can fire those marketers. But if they’re going to charge me, then the hell with it, I’ll just promote the stuff I get free. And it works! Look how hard people already work to tailor their sites so they come up on the aggregators. It’s nothing new — remember payola? The simple truth of how the world works, which Tony is trying to convey, is that ``content’‘ goes begging for the aggregator — the aggregator doesn’t go looking for ``content’‘ any harder than it has to.
Which brushes against a digression which I I should only make quickly because it is a large large topic in itself. There is a widespread assumption that the vast proliferation of new media and its incredible bigness will somehow cause an artistic flourishing: you have so many channels, there’s going to be so man kinds of music and art and video available, the arts are just going to flourish. I see that argument and acknowledge it’s possible. But I think becuase the same digital proliferation makes it so possible to direct your consumption, and things like social media make it so easy to tell you what’s in, or to gurantee that you only get things which fit your marketing profile, that in fact the proliferation of new media is a real crusher of artistic diversity and innovation. I might be wrong, but I’ve seen some reason to believe that’s true just in how some things have played out, and it irritates me no end that people who I think are very bright don’t seem to at least acknowledge the possibility that the Internet and satellite and all this other stuff could be a grave stifler of, rather than a facilitator of, artistic growth.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 6, 02:50 AM · #
At some point, if people aren’t getting paid, they are going to stop providing “content.” It’s like blacksmithing. At a certain point, blacksmiths stopped providing content. Then there will be this awesome content delivery system with nothing to deliver, just like cable TV today. Right now we are still in the early stages of the development of the internet. people are still trying to figure out how to make money. But eventually, big entities like the NY TImes will go broke or go into some other line of work and then dudes like Andrew sullivan will be out of business. Although maybe the Times makes money, enough to pay for all thier reporting. Although I can’t see how they do on the internet. Anyway, I can’t see really talented serious adults continuing to spend years of their lives creating “content” in exchange for nothing more than fleeting viral fame.
— cw · Jan 6, 07:24 AM · #
what was it that William Carlos Williams said?
It is difficultto get videos of amusing cats from poems
yet men die miserably every dayfor lack
of what is found there.
— cw · Jan 6, 07:36 AM · #
There’s an absolutely trivial regulatory solution for news specifically of course: force the pipe owners to become publishers.
The news divisions of the broadcast networks were classically loss-making. But the networks basically had to broadcast news anyway – because they got their right to broadcast in the first place from the government, and the government wanted news to be broadcast (along with a certain amount of other “educational” programming).
It would be trivial for the government – which licenses out spectrum to wireless carriers, and which also regulates the phone and cable wires (though I’m mixing different layers of government here to some extent) – to mandate that the wireless carriers, cable companies, etc. – anyone who provides last-mile access – to spend some fixed percentage of gross revenue on news. Then Time Warner would buy the New York Times and Verizon would buy the Washington Post and so forth, and news would be saved.
That won’t save publishing, or the music industry, or the movie industry, or whatever. And it certainly doesn’t provide a mechanism for small-time content providers to potentially earn something from their work. But it is an obvious solution to the “who will do the reporting” problem, and one that is pretty closely analogous to how the government handled an earlier medium (television).
— Noah Millman · Jan 6, 01:44 PM · #
cw, i don’t get it. Millman’s up there trying to figure out how to motivate ``content’‘ providers — which is like taking up a collection to save the pigeons — and you’re telling me I’m going to run out of content, when even now another slightly different stoner is getting video of a double rainbow all the way across the sky. The mistake both of you are making is talking about ``content,’‘ which is bottomless, when you mean Quality.
But here’s the good news. Quality is like privacy: nobody wants it. Or rather, everybody does, but it’s OK, because Quality is what the Man tells you it is (“Shut up and eat yer Quality.”) [This doesn’t apply to those savvy iconoclasts who see through all this stuff but they aren’t relevant ‘cuz they’re off waiting in line in anticipation of the iPhone 4G release in 2014, but when they get it, boy oh boy, they’ll be able to collectively sync up on just the right totally individualistic ``content’‘ to, like, completely stick it to the Man.] And there is a sudden burgeoning of tools with which I can make sure that the Nan is able to lead you straight to some real quality Quality. That’s the brilliance of Millman’s “make the providers producers” concept: they’ll for sure get you some real Quality news.
Look, here’s what you do if you find yourself worried that we’re going to run out of ``content.’‘ Get some ruby red Crocs, click the heels together three times, and repeat this mantra: ``There’s no bottom bar, there’s no bottom bar.” It helps if you stare at a GIF of a kitten peering into a litter box, captioned, ``pleez sir can i haz some content?’‘ (not the original GIF, the nostalgia one). Let your mind relax unforcedly, centered on the realization that neither the GIFs creators nor 99% of the folks forwarding it have ever read ``Oliver Twist’‘ or seen ``Oliver!’‘ and soon you will be feeling teh bliss and your ``content’‘ worries will melt like old snow.
So, yeah, let’s adopt Millman’s easy obnvious solution and mandate that big providers also produce ``content.’‘ I can see no reason to question that it will be stuff we can all agree is Quality Informative Educational Shit.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 6, 02:47 PM · #
“The Internet is a medium whose technical structure and operational philosophy simply don’t care whether someone can make money or not.”
Technical structure, maybe, but mediums don’t have operational philosophies.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 6, 05:16 PM · #
Mike, of course mediums have operational philosophies, they believe that the spirits of the dead have all kinds of interest in communicating with the living and that certain persons have the ability to relay these communications and that these communications once relayed are of potential benefit to the living. Without those guiding beliefs they’d be unable to function. In this respect, mediums are unlike media, or for that matter unlike ``technical strcutures,’‘ which in and of themselves do not necessarily reflect operational philosophies (but, I would argue, certainly can, and I think the Internet does: it is undamentally structured in a way that reflects a belief about the value of a certain non-hierarchical kind of communication).
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 6, 06:15 PM · #
Kieselguhr Kid,
1. Are you a re-avatared matoko-Chan?
2. I was talking about quality. I think Noah was too. No one really cares about lol cats or double rainbows. There will always be momentary diversions like that and there will always probably be teenage bands who want the fame and will work for penuts, but there may not always be serious journalism. Print news is on the way out now along with a lot of newpaper workers. I think Noah’s idea about regulating public service content is a great one.
But as I think about it more, I wonder who really isn’t going to get paid.
DEAD MEDIUMS
-Journalism, for sure. It’s all free now.
-Porn producers. Does anyone pay for porn now? Do we have enough? Can’t we just use what we have stockpiled indefinitely? Does Noah have a plan to save porn?
THREATENED MEDIUMS
-Musicians. I thought I read somewhere that the itunes model had somewhat stemmed the tide of file sharing.
-Novelists. Seems like the Itunes model fits books too. Athough who knows if paper books will exisist in 10 years. I kind of think they will but for a much higher price than the digital. Plus novelists are used to working for free. And this is a really small class. A niche feeding off crumbs. I think they will work for free too.
-film and tv creators. I guess the threat here is file sharing. My daughter watches all kinds of anime for free. But I don’t see movies or tv shows going away. They are too popular and there is too much money to be made. And soon your are going to have the pay-per-view-streaming thing going for a big majority and this is ripe to be facilitated by distributuion entities like Netflicks. I think most people will be willing to pay a dollar for an episode of Sinefeld that they can find in 5 seconds and will arrive with good quality rather than spend an hour searching for it on the web, like my daughter does for her anime. Besides that making film and tv is enormously expensive so it’s not like some kid working for free in his basement is going to be able to replace The WIre or Avatar. Although as CGI becomes easier, who knows.
But back to file sharing. It seems to me that it is just a blip in history. The ability to share files came a the same time the intrenet was introduced (obviously) on which everything is free. So young people feel like free “content” is a right. But content has never been free in the past and hsitory shows that when there is money to be made, authorities are engaged and soloutions are found. This is a world that sold human beings for millenium. They will figure out how to sell songs again.
Serious jouralism, I don’t know. Maybe not enough demand, not enough money to be made in the first place.
PS. Mike Bunge. Was it you I was arguing with about Cleveland being a good team over at M. Yglesias. Or was it J Mann. Whoever it was, it would like redeem my I-Told-You-So.
— cw · Jan 6, 08:03 PM · #
“I think the Internet does: it is undamentally structured in a way that reflects a belief about the value of a certain non-hierarchical kind of communication).”
I think some folks in China would like to talk to you about how much the internet is structured to promote non-heirarchical kinds of communication.
You’re taking the way the internet has developed and then projecting backwards as though such development was inevitable and, therefore, will continue in the same direction in the future.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 6, 08:45 PM · #
“PS. Mike Bunge. Was it you I was arguing with about Cleveland being a good team over at M. Yglesias. Or was it J Mann. Whoever it was, it would like redeem my I-Told-You-So.”
I can’t deny you an I-Told-You-So, though I still contend there’s enough talent on Cleveland to be better than what they are. But you are what your record says you are and Cleveland has been horrible ever since they rolled over and expected a belly rub from LeBron when he returned.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 6, 08:49 PM · #
I was surprised they did as well as they did. But they have really low talent. Verejao is the best. He could be an important roll player on a good team. The rest would struggle to get off the bench on the Grizzlies. But they played well together for awhile until Lebron destroyed their will, or whatever.
It just shows how good Lebron is and how much impact a single elite player can have in the game of basketball. It’s a structural thing. One guy commands the attention of more than one opponant and that creates open shots. Lebron could also just function as the offense by himself for long periods of time. The other guys just had to play defense, move without the ball, and make open shots. Those ar things lower talent nba players can do.
Anyway, thanks for responding graciously to my ungracious I-Told-You-So.
— cw · Jan 6, 09:33 PM · #
“The rest would struggle to get off the bench on the Grizzlies.”
No matter how much people want to fluff LeBron, that’s simply not true.
Comparing roughly similar players on each team…
O.J. Mayo – 13.2 pts, 2.7 rebs, 2 assists, 41% from the field.
Anthony Parker – 9.1 pts, 3.2 rebs, 2.7 assists, 38% from the field.
Mike Conley – 13.6 pts, 7.1 assists, 3.2 rebs, 44% from the field.
Mo Williams – 14.8 pts, 7.3 assists, 3 rebs, 40% from the field.
Darrell Arthur – 7.9 pts, 4.3 rebs, 49% from the field.
J.J. Hickson – 10.4 pts, 5.1 rebs, 45% from the field.
Zach Randolph – 19.3 pts, 12.1 rebs, 49% from the field.
Antawn Jamison – 16.1 pts, 5.5 rebs, 43% from the field.
No. The best players on the Cavs would not struggle to get off the bench for Memphis. I’m not saying they’re great and I think I really underestimated what losing both Shaq and Big Z would mean, but the Cavs were never LeBron and a bunch of guys who’d be lucky to have jobs on other teams.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 7, 12:04 AM · #
Yeah but see, you are making my argument. The cavs have the stats they have becasue someone has to play and accumulate stats. But when you compare them to those particular grizzleys, then you have to ask, who would you rather have playing.
parker vrs. mayo >>>> mayo
conley vrs williams >>>> that one is difficult. neither are very good. Conley has been a low achiever for a while but has finally been playing better. Still not great, but better. So he still has potential. Mo Williams is a finished product. Streaky shooter, below average point guard.
Auther vrs hickson >>> I don’t want either of the. Both are scrubs.
Randolph vrs. Jamison. >>>> Randolph, not even close.
I agree that the cavs miss Z though. That is another part of the puzzel. But now I’m thinking you must be from cleveland, becasue I am detecting Lebron-imus (Lebrons + animus, get it?) it was always LeBron and a bunch of scruffy role players, with the exception of Verejao.
Watch over the next few weeks as they blow up the cavs. See what detrius the starters (minus verejao) get traded for. See how many minutes they play on the teams they go to. You have made a lot of good comments over time here at TAS, but I think your emotions are blinding you to the reality of the cavs. Which is a feature of sports. Blindness due to emotions.
— cw · Jan 7, 01:03 AM · #
cw, the point I’m trying to make — evidently terribly if my coherence is at chan levels — is that it’s foolish to fret over quality, because by and large quality is incredibly redefinable — there’s no bottom bar!
I’ve recently reread Frederick Douglass’ famous speech on the meaning, to slaves, of the Fourth of July. Read that, or one of Webster’s political speeches. Then go back and read your favorite, most highly praised Obama speech — and be amazed that it sounds like it was written by a precocious six-year-old for his classmates. That’s not, I imagine, because Obama’s much much less bright than those guys, but rather because the standards across the board for that sort of speech have been massively dumbed down and that’s the context into which he writes. And yet we hear it, and marvel at the Quality! You and Millman are worried about the ability of things like TV news to continue, and looking at the mechanisms by which TV news programs came into existence, and yet I think — are you serious? Are we talking about the same TV news programs? I mean, have you watched CBS news (say) lately? And so you see — we can easily get to the point where dreck is the quality we’re trying to preserve. If we’re left with nothing but ``double rainbow all the way’‘ videos and we’re trying to decide which ones are quality and which ones aren’t, rest assured, we’ll find some way to do that, and we’ll fret endlessly as media change — please stop saying ``mediums’‘ — about the danger to ``content.’‘
But I would be misleading if I said that what I’m trying to argue is just about changing quality standards and guaranteeing that there will always be ``quality’‘ is really just a relative thing about how cultural standards change in response to the richness or poverty of offerings on tap at any given time. Rather I think the real issue is that what is Quality is essentially that which is sold as such (this being I think the Comstock point) and in fact advances in media generally increase the tools available to define and to sell Quality, so are generally accompanied by decreases in artistic (I’m going to use that word broadly so MacNeil/Lehrer is more ``artistic’‘ than the Ed show, rather than keep saying ``artistic or educational or informational or aesthetic’‘) quality.
I mean, it’s amazing that you’re up there giving me a blow by blow of where artistic quality is doomed on the basis of who’s able to make money, when there doesn’t seem to be loads of existing reason to believe art and money are much related, unless you’re living in a world where Bieber, Glenn Beck, and Deepak Chopra are somehow our great masters of craft. There is substantial ability to use media to promote worthless stuff to most people as Quality, so if you try to put into place mechanisms to protect the production of Quality, since most people can and will made to regard utter trash as the shit, you just end up protecting and promoting crud anyway.
I remember when Rush Limbaugh broke out way back when, and bars were having ``Rush Hours’‘ and the like, and I finally heard the guy when I was out drinking and thought, huh, not much going on there. I voiced that to some guys who were huge Rush fans and they rapidly conceded that Rush was none too bright but he was teh AWESOME and he said stuff they were feeling, and it seemed to me the consensus among his fans was, he’s not real bright or a deep policy guy at all, just awesome. And now I think the Rush demographic, on the other hand, thinks he knows all kinds of deep economics and shit. Anything is sellable, that’s the real tricky bit is the sale. I don’t think people watching cable news or digging on Taylor Swift think, OK, it’s not art or anything but I dig it — they think it’s the real shit.
What I’m not trying to say is that the sheeple are by and large dumb as paste and leadable by their noses — after all, if they are, then where’s the problem? I mean, pearls before swine, screw it. What I’m saying is the marketers, the sellers, the ``content’‘ aggregators, are that good. It even works on ``smart’‘ people. I sort of unseriously gave an example here but there’s easy pickings for better examples. Next time you’re at the house of a smart friend, go over to her CD collection and pull out Kind of Blue, which it seems like everyone has because they’ve been assured it’s Quality. Go, ``Wow, Kind of Blue!’‘ and people will confirm that it is in fact Quality. Ask, “What’s your favorite song on it?” Most of the time when I do this experiment (which I do a lot because I’m a dick, and I really don’t mean to judge my friends that way anyway so much as I’m interested in art), the host can’t answer, because she can’t name one. But if she can — some of the songs have famous names after all! — say, “I forget that one, how does it go?” Relatively few people can then hum you the head. It’s been masterfully sold — you’re both supposed to have it, because it’s supposed to be As Good As Art Gets, and not to much like it, because it’s not tied into all the other shit out there from which I can keep producing stuff I can sell. It is specifically sold into a particular place in our lives, which — I don’t mean this ironically — is brilliant, a remarkable sort of achievement.
It’s not a smart/dumb thing, it’s that we are who we are and signalling is very very important. It may even be more important to us than art. As a result, we are very very manipulable, and Quality is, and will always be, what we are told it is. And we’re always going to be told something is Quality, because, how else am I going to get you to buy it? So whatever system you try to put in place to protect Quality, and whatever predictions you try to make about its decline, future cws and Kids will be damn sure they’re getting it just fine, thanks. ``Quality’‘ is a nonissue. It will always be present because we will always need to signal that we’re educated or refined or hip or informed or what-have-you: to argue that we will not is weirdly ahistorical and even I think unbiological. There is no problem here, where you and Millman are fretting, you’re just not grasping what the good shit is mostly for.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 02:25 AM · #
Mike, that’s a great example — the Internet is designed according to a certain philosophy of what communication is and how it works, so it obeys that philosophy as well in China as in America. It’s not heirarchical — it’s really not a great tool for broadcasting out announcements to everyone everywhere like a TV or radio. And it’s not really one-to-one: you can’t quite trace a message from point to point well like you could on the old phone networks. It’s big and amorphous — even in China. Now, if there’s bits of it that bug you, you can censor and mask it all kinds of ways — you can hide parts, or functionality. But it works the way it works in Beijing just like in Washington DC, or at least it has for me in both places, with the same effects on how I can and do use it and the same implications (or lack thereof) for art.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 02:48 AM · #
I think you are saying quality is reletive and that…. and that what? It will be ok that the internet killed the NY times and all the local papers. Noah used the example of network news because that is how the law was applied but I was talking about serious adult journalisim, which I think he was too. he was saying “let time warner buy the NYTs and the washington post.”
I think you are making a mistake that I see made all over the place. I don’t know what you call this mistake but an example is where people point out, correctly, that quality is reletive. But then they use that fact as an absolute to make the point that, therefor, “quality” doesn’t exisit. The fact is that quality is relatively relative. While standards of quality change over time it is still possible to make value judgements about the quality of something, both in the instance and over time. Shakespere is of higher quality than your average Richie Rich comic. The new york times is more valuable in most ways than rush limbaugh. And while Obama’s speech written in 6th grade english, it is still of a higher quality than one by Glenn Beck.
(If you want to get into a discussion of what quality is, I am prepared to do that. I have the answers. I have the answers to everything today.)
And so what I’m saying is that there are things that are realtivly more valuable to EVERYONE (more people benefit form the NYTs than do Rush Limbaugh, regardless of thier preferences) that are threatened becasue of the way the internet has evolved. And this is not a good thing. Reliable accurate, sophisticated information about our community and our politicians is a requirement for a functioning democracy. If the interenet kills this, then it is a bad thing that we need to try and do something about. Pointing out how quality is reletive does not do anything to solve the harm our country would suffer if serious large-scale journalism dissapeared. Lolcats can not replace good reporting on the ground from iraq becasue quality is relatively relative.
And this gets to your point about the “nature“of the interent and what it wants. I agree that form influences function, and that the form of the interent has vastly influenced the function of various types of media in many ways. But we have control over the internet. We actually have abolute control over the internet. We could destroy all the telecommunication choke points, turn off all the satelites, detonate nuclear bombs and fry all electronics with EMP. That might be an extreme response to kids downloading free music, but it is undeniable that we have at least some cotrol. That means that we don’t have to just accept the internets “nature.” You say, “I think the Internet does: it is fundamentally structured in a way that reflects a belief about the value of a certain non-hierarchical kind of communication).” But we can change the way it is structured if we want to, if it will make certain people more money, or serve our interests. Very few people with power actually beleve in the value of “a certain non-hierachical kind of comunication.” The interenet as we really are talking about it is about 10 years old. Give the greed heads a chance to get their mitts on it.
— cw · Jan 7, 03:56 AM · #
Saying we can change the nature of the Internet isn’t helpful — yeah, we can uproot it and replace it with another technology which isn’t the internet. It’s a tool, it works according to a fundamental idea about an application. Old nerds like me often do text processing with TeX instead of say Microsoft Word. They both can be used to produce similar documents but because they have different philosophies about what I want to do when I produce a document, you have to use them very very differently and you tend to produce different kinds of output — you can use them in similar ways but it’s very hard because it’s contrary to their natures. Similarly Chinese and Americans basically use the Internet the same way for the same purposes, and use other communications tools ( the phone, texting, etc.) for other purposes as appropriate, even though parts are excised in one setting. That tool works well one way and it’s hard — not impossible but hard — to use it differently. Sure, we might replace it with some other as yet unknown tool. And?
No, I’m not saying quality is relative. Or rather, I did say that in the second paragraph up there but rapidly pointed out in the third that I think that the relative-ness of quality is besides the point. What I’m saying is that quality as a defining measure is sold. [And because it’s sold, life is easier for the sellers if the stuff gains its worth mostly from what they do, so there’s a bit of a ratcheting mechanism for overall craft at the source to decline, and then you have to work among poorly crafted works for relatively more or less quality, which you can do because quality is relative — but that’s, as I say, besides the point.]
That sold nature of quality is what guarantees you’ll always have it. Because the real function of that art (again, broadly used) is not to inform/educate/ennoble, at least out in the space where measures of ``quality’‘ are relevant. It is to signal that one is informed, refined, what-have you: tribal status as it were. That need persists: it has nothing to do with the Internet. So therefore will ``quality’‘ persist. A mechanism for rewarding its generation will always be in place, and it’ll be controlled at the level of the aggregator, the salesperson.
Therein by the way is the answer to Sam when he suggests that advertising may not work. I mean, seriously, does he think branding doesn’t work? Do you seriously think people don’t buy a thing because it signals? Becuase from Craftsman to the iPhone that appears not to be true.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 12:41 PM · #
I might be clearer if I try to force that all into a bullet list: this isn’t meant to add anything at all to anything I’ve said so if you think you got that, then this is a useless comment. Here goes:
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 01:57 PM · #
1) I say this with love, but as the kids say today, I cast wall of text!
2) It would be interesting to see whether micropayment upstream suppliers could outcompete free content providers. It would also be interesting to see whether people would start tailing coverage to stuff that might get linked by Sullivan or Instapundit.
3) One problem is that discussion has traditionally depended on being free. If Brad DeLong wants to quote something I wrote and call me an idiot, does it make sense for him to have to pay me 2 cents? Does it even do me any good?
— J Mann · Jan 7, 04:02 PM · #
“Yeah but see, you are making my argument. The cavs have the stats they have becasue someone has to play and accumulate stats. But when you compare them to those particular grizzleys”
Not to belabor the point, but those Cavs players’ stats are all fairly close to their career averages, except for Jamison, so it’s not the case that their production is somehow being inflated by playing on a bad team.
And the point wasn’t that those Cavs players are better than the the guys in Memphis, but that they would “struggle to get off the bench” in Memphis. That’s clearly not the case, even with Jamison’s problems this year.
But I did forget that it’s not just about talent, but also chemistry and commitment, things this season’s Cavs wouldn’t even recognize.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 7, 05:00 PM · #
“Quality is therefore defined by the consumer.”
No, it isn’t. At least not if the word “quality” has any meaning beyond “stuff that I like”.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 7, 05:03 PM · #
Mike: “Stuff that I like, or stuff that I think is good for me like broccoli, or stuff that I want others to see that I consume, or stuff that I want to have present for others to consume.” Your interpretation is too truncated; do I need to put ``signalling’‘ in all caps or something?
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 05:46 PM · #
KK. I think your quality argument is is right in some cases. Wine. Chocolate. Luxury automobiles. jewlery. Restaurants…. You are saying (I think) becasue people buy and sell the appearance of quality, actual quality doesn’t matter.
But these are things where the effect the quality of something has on the world is minimal. If really good champagne dissappears, then it has minimal effect on the world. It doesn’t matter. If really good airplanes or surgery or journalism organizations dissapear from the world, it has a big effect. It maters geratly.
Don’t extrapolate one factor—that people sometimes buy and sell the appearence of quality, and so quality doesn’t matter—onto the whole universe.
“Quality” is the degree to which something fulfills it’s function (as determined by it’s creator).
The Cavs are a low quality basketball team becasue they do not fulfill the function of a basketball team very well. The NYT is of higher quality than FOX news because it fullfills the function of a news organization better than FOX does. Of course, FOX only pretends to be a news organization and it’s real function is different, but people regard it as a news organization and use it in place of the NYTs, so it is fair to comapre them.
— cw · Jan 7, 06:23 PM · #
Mike,
The “get off the bench” statement was to some degree hyperbole, but really, if you could only play one, who would you play, parker or mayo, conely or williams, randolph or jameson?
— cw · Jan 7, 06:28 PM · #
cw, your example doesn’t support your definition — if quality measures how well a product fulfills the purposes of its creators, then, given what’s been documented of what the creators of FOX news intend as the purposes of their vehicle — the New York Times fulfilles those purposes rather badly, no? I mean, I can’t square it up — FOX News looks like a higher quality product that way.
You want FOX to be lower quality, because it doesn’t fulfill the purpose you the consumer think news should fill. Exactly right, exactly what I said. Quality is determined by how well the product fills the needs of the customer: it’s wacky to say it comes from how well the product fulfills the desires of the producer! And there’s a whole business out there, of telling you what your needs are — and there always will be.
Now, before Mike gets confused, my needs don’t just mean, this leaf blower’s got quality because it’s exactly suited to the task. Because very, very significant needs involve signalling (you see this in particular in gadgetry — seriously, what fraction of that technology does its purchaser ever use?) So my neighbor (fer real) has an awesome backpack-mounted gas powered leaf blower that puts out 500 mph (!), which he uses to clear his deck and about 1/4 acre of property: on any fair afternoon — even with snow on the ground — he’ll be out there blowing.
It’s a pretty quality leaf blower.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 07:02 PM · #
KK, you’re stuck in a temporal fuge with your signalling insight. It applies on some layers but not all. You can’t extrapolate it over the whole universe of layers. It reminds me of these stupid english professors I had who used to try to apply the vaugeries of quantum physiscs to the entirety of exisistance, as was the fashion. They’d tell me, “quantum physiscs proves to us that there is no such thing as as an independant observer, the observer always affects the observed, blah, blah, blah.” They had what they thought was this cool insight and wanted to apply it to everything.
Quality exisits both in actuality as something measurable and in people’s minds, as an desirable concept.
— cw · Jan 7, 07:52 PM · #
I don’t disagree. You can measure quality (say, poll people on how well a product satisfies their needs, or use J.D. Power-style metrics, or whatever. So? It’s still determined by its ability to fulfill a want of the consumer. Counterexample?
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 08:12 PM · #
OK, one more try.
I believe you are saying that “quality” doesn’t matter becasue it only exisists as an arbitrary distinction in peoples minds. It can always be redefined by the sellers so that we will always have an item that is “top quality.”
For example, for years craftsman Bob made his X with certain ingrediants and his X was recognized and sold as top quality, the best. But then salespeople found another X that looked a lot like Bob’s X and which was cheaper to produce becasue it didn’t have the same ingredients. And to make more money, they started selling this alternative X as top quality, and becuase all people really cared about was that an item was LABLED top qulity, the buyers bought it, becasue they wanted to have “the best” and the alternative X became recognixed as top quality.
So the actual function of X didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that one was recognized as top quality over the other.
This, as far as I can tell, sums up your argument.
But now replace X with steel bolts. Craftsman Bob made the steel bolts with certain ingredients and his bolts were recognized and sold as top qulity and in addition to this recognition, THEY FULLFILLED THIER FUNCTION BY REMAINING INTACT AT X POUNDS OF STRESS. But then salesmen realized they could sell steel bolts with cheaper ingredients becasue they looked just like Bob’s bolts and becasue they were such good salesmen that they could create the impression in buyers minds that these alternative bolts were top quality. People bought the alternative bolts becasue they wanted the best bolts becasue they were building airplanes. But then airplanes started crashing, becasue the alternative bolts did not fullfill thier function as well as Bob’s bolts. They were not of the same quality as bob’s bolts.
So actual quality does matter in many many cases, becasue it has effects in the real world as well as in arbitrary distictions in people’s minds. You signalling insight only applies in cases where the actual qulaity of an item has no real world effects. Like wine. Or jewlery.
Thus, to cirlce back to what I think I rememebr the original argument to be, it is important for journalists to get paid so that they do quality work becasue quality jounalism has important real world effects.
— cw · Jan 7, 08:39 PM · #
Thanks, that clarifies the issue. No, i haven’t intended to make that argument. Obviously my neighbor’s leaf blower has to actually blow leaves — it has to fill a need of the customer (but note — the space we’re in is very different from your initial bizarre contention that quality comes from satisfying a function determined by the producer.) But even in that physical space of course, what we need is subject to some constraints (which change over time). But I haven’t at any time thought we’re dealing with that kind of quality since it’s one of those things that the system is going to try to meet regardless, and it’s not a ``content’‘ thing.
Here’s the thing: the quality of ``content’‘ is actually much much more amporphous and falls into the category of stuff where marketers actually do matter more than substance. On my desk is a Washington Post. There are five stories on the front page. All of them interest me and I like having ‘em there.
But I don’t think I can justify their quality by those ``real world effects’‘ of which you speak. The only one which I think might significantly impact most readers measurably on a mid-term timescale, is Gates’ budget revisions. And frankly in some ways it’s a useless story to put there — there are very, very few readers who are competent to really evaluate that news in any way, and the number of readers who will say that find that story interesting, or useful, or of much quality, includes only a tiny portion who really know much about defense budgeting. People who’ve never seen a general staff, will have deep impassioned opinions about Gates’ plans to have fewer of them. I think it’s very very hard — maybe impossible — to really say how valuable that news is, and it’s certainly impossible to say that your knowing it (not the event itself, but your knowing of it) has a significant real world effect. I think it rarely does.
I don’t think you can meaningfully say that there’s an objective obvious standard that says, you need to know what’s going on in, say, Haiti. Or Shanghai. And history backs me up, because news and newspapers have served different functions at different times: in fact if pressed I’d guess that the large function of political news for the vast majority of consumers is a sort of ``back your team’‘ thing, and research bears that idea out, so from what I hear (I have negligible direct experience) FOX news better suits what Americans want news for, than the Post. As far as I can tell from studies and anyone I meet, if you give the Post news to the FOX readership they still basically extract the information from it which they need to serve that reinforcement goal. Guaranteeing that I continue to get the Post, designed more or less as it’s designed — which itself is a weird thing to want to do — does me personally a favor but I suspect has no real effect other than to make me happy.
What you need to do is change what people want. [Which is equivalent to, change their sense of quality.] Do that, and you have no content problem, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Fail to do that, and you’re fucked anyway, so you still have no problem. Resolving it at the level of, how do I incentivize the content producer? — which was exactly Millman’s conundrum — is nuts, which is what I’ve been saying constantly: that’s not where your problem is.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 7, 09:36 PM · #
“if you could only play one, who would you play, parker or mayo, conely or williams, randolph or jameson?”
Williams is an easy pick over Conley and Randolph is an easy pick over Jamison. I don’t have any idea how good or bad a defensive player Mayo is, so I can’t really make that call.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 7, 09:45 PM · #
“Now, before Mike gets confused”
I love how the internet has removed the “not being a dick” aspect arguing. There’s a casual snideness and arrogance that just slips in now, and I’ve certainly been as guilty of it as anyone, which in meatworld results in raised voices and the end of the discussion via either a slammed phone or a thrown punch.
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 7, 09:48 PM · #
“What you need to do is change what people want.”
So, Frederick Douglass’ speeches were written at a higher level than Barack Obama’s because his audience WANTED them that way?
Mike
— MBunge · Jan 7, 09:54 PM · #
Kieselguhr Kid:
Let’s assume you are right, that operas and novels and other kinds of “content” are ultimately like wine and leaf-blowers. If demand from the customer dries up, producers stop producing it, and that demand is driven by all kinds of factors that can’t be objectively measured, some of which amount to pure signaling. So if we want more of these things, we have to convince people to want them. We could have a debate another time about how much is signaling and how much is some readily-measurable utility function and how much is something else that is an independent quality of “quality.” I don’t generally find that kind of debate very interesting, but I just want to separate it out as not my main public-interest concern here.
I assume you would nonetheless agree that our court system, or our education system, is not precisely the same as a leaf-blower or a bottle of wine. That is to say: if our court system became manifestly less-impartial, or a greater percentage of our children finished their school years functionally illiterate, these would be objective declines irrespective of whether the signaling function of “quality” in these institutions continued to operate, and irrespective of whether the “customer” – the citizenry – was satisfied. That, I think, is what cw is getting at when he talks about real-world effects. The steel bolt example isn’t a great one, because we find out really easily whether the new steel bolts are of similar or inferior quality, whereas with courts or the school system it’s much harder to measure their performance objectively. But that doesn’t mean that there is no performance, or that there are not real consequences to massive institutional failure.
Assuming you agree with the above – and please tell me if you don’t – is journalism more like opera and novels, or more like a court system and an education system? That’s really the question.
Criticism is clearly more like the sort of “content” you are talking about. People will always do it, for free – I’m doing it right now – and there’s no need to worry about organizing to promote “good” criticism because if it’s “good” in any meaningful sense it will – ultimately – drive out bad criticism, and ultimately is really all that matters in this case. But journalism – like opera, and unlike criticism – costs real money to produce. And it is not at all clear that people really want it, in the way that they want that amazing leaf-blower.
The opera survives on the patronage of the rich. That is one possible solution for “who will pay the journalists” comes from: rich people with an interest in public affairs who want to promote a perspective that they agree with. That will give us one kind of politics. Other solutions to this very real problem will give us other kinds of politics. And what path we take will, indeed, have real world consequences.
— Noah Millman · Jan 7, 10:58 PM · #
The NYT is of higher quality than FOX news becasue more of the information it presents is correct or “true” than FOX news, correctness being one of the functions of news, at least in the present day. And while I may not really need to know what is going on in Haiti, I definitely need to know about the health care bill or global warming or the cost effectiveness of high speed rail in Wisconsin. I need to know the truth of these things whether I want to or not, becasue I need to vote for people who will do the right things re health care and global warming. ANd even if I am a doofus and believe that cutting taxes will reduce the deficit, I need someplace where the correct information is put forth, and hopefully enough people will read it and vote accordingly, saving me from my own dumb ass.
I don’t think I really need to say this to you. I think you are just riding out your argument becasue that is what we do.
PS. A really lame move here would be to question the concept of “truth.”
— cw · Jan 8, 12:17 AM · #
Yeah, Millman’s bringing it back home. cw, the problem you’re having reading this, which surely stems from a problem I’m having typing it, is you keep making my argument more metaphysical and shit than it is. No, I got no interest in arguing the meaning of truth. Nor am I making a wacky libertarian argument. I’m making a solid practical one, or I think I am. I mean, I love certain kinds of content that are dying. Love love love. I just think what you want to do is fucking nuts. My argument isn’t you shouldn’t, it’s you can’t, and it’s not worth doing.
First as an aside the minor issue of the material benefits — well, maybe (actually I honestly doubt it. I think a lot of ignorance sort of washes out in wild unpredictable ways and it’s almost impossible to tell how that ends up. If you have any evidence that informed voters are somehow more content with the government’s performance I’d like to see that.) (I think stupid is either neutral or a force for good in politics; I’m not being facetious. Some of my thinking was shaped by a Post pre-election 2008 article where they went to houses asking people’s voting plans: a woman answers the door, and when asked, she yells back, ``Honey, who are we voting for?” and a man’s voice in the house yells back, “We’re voting for the n——r,” and she brightly turns to the reporter and says, “We’re voting for the n——r!” Stupid has no bias except when there’s a sales interest and I’m not being goofy when I say, the marketers are hell of smart. So I’m OK with a lot of stupid.) But the material benefits are surely not quantifiable: this is policy you want to implement based on some kind of religion. I’m not even sure that the declines you mention are objectively declines: basically where there might — might! — be a long term impact in how I’m informed, is what kind of society I live in, so what matters is what kind of society I want to live in. And that — that is where the information broker rules my world, man, that’s what I have TV to tell me. Which is the point I made to cw before — yeah, news is different from ``hard’‘ goods in terms of how much the seller defines ``good’‘: the seller pretty much totally defines it. I’m really, really, really reluctant to concede that those are objective declines (partly because you are kind of begging the question: we need news so we can make decisions to educate children so they can read news! Screw that, we can’t all win the Booker prize), because I am honestly pretty sure of sweeping changes I would very much like to make in how people choose to live, which they could make with little sacrifice (and in fact substantial gain), that I know they’d hate. But fine, let’s concede that these are declines.
Where I began thinking you were nuts is that you wanted a means to compensate producers, but of course the problem isn’t producers, it’s sellers. You’d argue that, well, no, news is different because it takes moola, but if people could sell it that wouldn’t be a problem. Can people sell it?
No, no, no. Yeah, they mandated news on TV. And over the decades TV news has dropped like a stone in quality, and even with all the loud sportscasters, large-breasted weathermen and Madonna news, viewership has declined. Which is amazing, because way more people are watching way more TV! Man, they just don’t want it. You’re like a stalker or something.
So you are trying to say, yeah, but it’s good for them. And this is why I think you’re nuts. I’m no libetrarian: you want to tell me, kids should eat healthfully so I’m only offering healthful school lunches and allowing no other food in the school cafeteria, I say, God bless. The parents no like, I say, fuck ‘em. The kids are going to eat the shit, what choice do they have?
But what I’ve been arguing all along is that the news/culture case [aside: and I’m sort of hating on you guys for even talking about this as say a New York Times problem; I do not accept that accurate news is more vital to the kind of society I want to live in than are symphony orchestras or good novels or ballet — quite the opposite actually] is not even slightly a content problem, it’s a sales problem. If you mandate its presence, you’re back in the ``mandate TV news’‘ world: you can’t make me consume it, and the evidence that I don’t want to consume it is so overwhelmingly strong that I can’t figure out what the hell you guys are smoking. Are you figuring like a Clockwork Orange-type setup with toothpicks on the eyelids? Yeah, cw, there’s such a thing as objective truth. The truth is almost nobody gives a shit about news. Why are you totally blowing it off? It’s mathematically loopy to think the news-loving voters hold the balance — and they’re shrinking.
That’s why this argument I’m hearing everywhere about, the Internet is killing journalism, there’s too much free content, nobody can figure out how to make money, makes me tear my hair out. It’s just a flat-out lie. Miley Cyrus and the Twilight dude have way more competitors than the New York Times and they’re making a killing. Journalism isn’t dying because of the new media, journalism is dying because people can better express that they don’t want it.
It gets worse. You can’t mandate support for The New York Times — I’m not that illibertarian. and the consequences are probably the worst of the lot. You have to support a mess of news outlets. They compete. They start with the ``Britney went out pantiless again’‘ stuff and then as they need to dig deeper — well, let’s suppose I’m right about what the real function of news is for most viewers, because, I am (and I actually can produce a little quantitative data to back me up). Congrats, cw, you’re subsidizing a hundred Glenn Becks.
Now, just to pile on. If you go ahead and do this profoundly illiberal thing of making everybody pay for something nearly nobody uses because, shut up and eat yer Quality, you have to decide as I said what new to pay for. Now I agree the Times is a better news source than — well, I don’t have a lot of experience with FOX news so I won’t ``agree,’‘ I don’t really watch the fucker, but let’s say that from what I’ve heard it’s a better news source, by far, then FOX news, and henceforth I won’t put in that disclaimer. If polled I guess I’d say that the Times or PBS is more or less trustworthy, and FOX (national. Some of the local affiliates, which I’ve watched to get like weather, are quite good in the relative world of local TV news, but it’s hard to characterize local news with a broad brush; again, last time w/ disclaimer) is terrible and not trustworthy. But I’m not sure that, if polled, more people would say that FOX is untrustworthy than would say the New York Times is — certainly some of my coworkers would be in that camp — and I’m pretty sure that the plurality would say that they don’t trust either source and both make things up (I think many of my coworkers would be in that camp). I shouldn’t have to say I don’t agree, by the way.
So that’s the lay of the land. Given that lay, you want them to subsidize what they by and large feel is the promotion of lies, that few of them will use at all. I don’t see that as good or moral policy; that’s not the world I want to live in.
So you’re fucked. You got three choices: (1) figure out how to sell them your value system: good luck! (2) figure my outlook is right and it doesn’t matter in the end so it’s OK, or (3) continue to believe it does matter but accept you can’t get there from here and go the ``bitter old fuck’‘ misanthropy route, which I concede has attractions also.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 8, 02:28 AM · #
I believe accurate sources of information about current events and the actions of government are extremely valuable. The NYT is the 27th most visited website in the us and the 12th most linked to, so other people agree with me. They want information about the world.
— cw · Jan 8, 03:27 AM · #
You know as well as I do that’s just clicks. Or else why is it even meaningful to talk about the news as endangered? Saying, people will take it for free, is not saying, it has any worth to them: remember the disaster that was TimeSelect.
And, sure, I’m sure you believe it’s valuable. But you can’t produce data. I don’t see a lot of reason to legislate on your religion.
— Kieselguhr Kid · Jan 8, 05:40 AM · #
“You know as well as I do that’s just clicks”
Sure, people just click to the site and then click away, just becasue it fun.
“Or else why is it even meaningful to talk about the news as endangered?”
Because the current status quo on the internet it that everything is free. That’s what this whole stupid post is about, remember? Can the NYT sustain it’s operations under these conditions? I don’t know. Pleanty of other smaller local news organizations couldn’t, although they were in decline already.
“But you can’t produce data.”
I just gave you data. Here’s more. Just the other day there was a study that showed fox news viewers were considerably more likely to have eronious views about basic facts than people who got there news elswhere. Those people vote.There’s plenty of other data. The fact that free-speech is guarenteed in the constitution, the amounts of money authoritarian countries spend to propogandize and/or supress news orginizations….
“I don’t see a lot of reason to legislate on your religion.”
You won’t even know it happened, because it’s not that certain kind of non-hierarchical information that you value.
— cw · Jan 8, 07:58 PM · #
Interesting discussion so far.
1) It might be worth discussing whether we think that content is a “public good” — i.e., something that people don’t actually want enough to pay for, but that we as a society want them to consume, or whether it’s something that people actually do want, but that there is no current market mechanism that permits payment. Presumably, all content doesn’t qualify if we are using the public good. CW wants to draw the point finely enough to argue that FOX news is affirmatively harmful to its listeners and to society as a whole, while the NYT is salutory. (This displays CW’s lack of scientific literacy, so I would argue that CW’s content suppliers should be docked, but life is short, so let’s move on.)
2. So one question is: are you asking for a mechanism to allow content providers to charge for what people would pay for (like a revision to copyright law to allow content suppliers to charge micropayments for what otherwise might qualify as “fair use”), or are you asking for a revision to force taxpayers or consumer to pay for the good kinds of content?
— J Mann · Jan 10, 05:37 PM · #
I’m late to this, but I’m not sure I understand the original proposal. I guess the idea is that by cooperating with content creators to run ads to show their content, you would fund the development and updating of an ad blocker that’s more usable and effective than current ad blocking browser plugins.
I don’t understand what would stop this service from being undercut by another one that simply blocked or replaced all ads and kept all the ad revenue for themselves.
I’m also afraid that content aggregators that didn’t want their ads to disappear would stop linking to content creators who were known to be cooperating with this service. So I may have misunderstood, but I don’t see how it could work.
— Consumatopia · Jan 12, 08:42 PM · #