Poll of the Day > I kinda dislike how internet content is monetized.

(+) Yeah! (+)

It was nice when things were free and done for fun and justification of personality and connection than monetization. It feels like everyone is just advertising to me now.

YouTube, Only Fans, Patreon, online courses, general ads on blogs and community forums.

Idk, its nice that people are paid for what they create, but the culture seems different.

I find internet ads a lot more tolerable than commercials. You can block the worst of them via adblocker/ublock, and skip or turn off the video when they start talking about raid shadow legends or skill share or whatever. The like/subscribe/patreon plug takes like a few seconds at most.

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people need to eat

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blu posted...

It was nice when things were free and done for fun and justification of personality and connection than monetization.

This was almost never an actual thing. There were always costs involved with producing and posting content online (server costs and bandwidth aren't free and never were, no matter what you thought when you were a kid and the Internet was a strange and wonderful place to you), and there were always ways to monetize views to pay those costs. Even "free" sites like GeoCities were built on an ad model.

It's just gotten more blatant these days because people have realized that most forms of Internet advertising (like pop-up ads and banner ads) don't actually convert to business for the advertisers (especially when most of the tech savvy users just block them in some way), so the methods of monetization have had to become more blatant to cope. Especially as people demand more and more content hours, with better and better production values, which in turn dramatically increases the cost to produce any meaningful content on a regular basis.

Unless you're willing to outright pay content producers to produce their content for you directly, you're implicitly accepting the idea that they need to advertise, sell merch, or generate revenue in some way because they're also human beings who need to eat and pay rent.

There are certainly still people out there who shoot a video on their phone with friends and just throw it up on the Internet with no real expectation of making money off it, and only doing it for fun. There's also a reason why you almost never find those videos.
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As soon as people realize that they can make a living doing something relatively easy, they're going to start trying to do that >_> And most people are going to try follow what works.

It's also the natural evolution of any system. As soon as something starts to get popular, people try to figure out how to monetize it.

Otherwise if you have a lot of attention anyway, it kinda makes sense to also promote a product you have. For instance, I don't necessarily fault authors for talking about their books or including links to them because that's part of their normal work.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This was almost never an actual thing. There were always costs involved with producing and posting content online (server costs and bandwidth aren't free and never were, no matter what you thought when you were a kid and the Internet was a strange and wonderful place to you), and there were always ways to monetize views to pay those costs. Even "free" sites like GeoCities were built on an ad model.

I think his complaint is more about the users monetizing their own content, not the hosting services monetizing the content posted on their platforms. There's a natural expectation that hosting services have bills. However, it can be jarring to have content creators break into messages from their sponsors which so many do nowadays, in *addition* to their Patreon, other donation sources, and then, on top of all that, other advertisements.

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Zeus posted...

I think his complaint is more about the users monetizing their own content, not the hosting services monetizing the content posted on their platforms. There's a natural expectation that hosting services have bills. However, it can be jarring to have content creators break into messages from their sponsors which so many do nowadays, in *addition* to their Patreon, other donation sources, and then, on top of all that, other advertisements.

Yes, but like I also pointed out, modern content tends to be produced on a much more regular/active schedule, and with much greater overhead.

25 years ago someone blogging or updating their Geocities page just needed any old keyboard to type whatever they were posting, and could even do it dialing in to their free AOL account. Now people who stream need to invest in fairly high-end cameras, lighting gear, and audio equipment (or their fans will literally never shut the fuck up about it), while more elaborate productions will be paying for multiple performers and at least one editor who will spend a fair amount of time working on the video.

Worse, if you actually want to get noticed, you basically have to produce content on a VERY regular basis, to the point of conflicting with an actual regular job. So the content producers are generally trying to generate income to offset the loss of income from normal work (and have tons of fans who whine if they "underperform"). Years ago you could get away with posting a single blog-post or video every few weeks - now no one gives a shit about you unless you're releasing multiple videos a week or streaming for 4+ hours a day every day (and god help you if you take a day off). Entitlement mentality has created an audience that is so jaded they DEMAND their trained monkeys perform at all times (preferably for free), and fuck them if that means they don't get to eat or have social lives.
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ParanoidObsessive posted...

25 years ago someone blogging or updating their Geocities page just needed any old keyboard to type whatever they were posting, and could even do it dialing in to their free AOL account. Now people who stream need to invest in fairly high-end cameras, lighting gear, and audio equipment (or their fans will literally never shut the fuck up about it), while more elaborate productions will be paying for multiple performers and at least one editor who will spend a fair amount of time working on the video.

Overlooking that most of that is a one-time cost, you can still do that today. There are smaller blogs with low traffic, as well as popular blogs with minimal investmentb. Which kinda brings me to your second point:

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Worse, if you actually want to get noticed, you basically have to produce content on a VERY regular basis, to the point of conflicting with an actual regular job.

Ultimately it's not so much that things have changed, it's that peoples' mindsets have changed. Years ago people did it as a hobby, nowadays people are trying to do it for a living. And this also comes back to the root of Blu's complaint --- years ago people were doing this for fun, now everybody wants to make money off it. You don't have as many hobbyists as you used to (or, at least, not on a percentage basis).

Even the channels I know and love -- guys who ostentatiously hadn't been doing it for the money -- (like Buckley from ADoseOfBuckley) are pushing Patreon and exclusive videos. And a lot of people trying to get into these things are sometimes setting up their monetization before they really have a product people care about.

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ParanoidObsessive posted...

Worse, if you actually want to get noticed, you basically have to produce content on a VERY regular basis, to the point of conflicting with an actual regular job.

I have a few favorites regarding archery, home repairs, woodworking, fixing cars, farm life, cooking, etc. Some have been creating YouTube content long enough that there is a good chance they already created a video addressing a question I have.

I would imagine they can create only so much new content regarding said hobby before they have to start expanding and losing focus on what originally drew me to their channel. That or I severely underestimate how much someone can talk about a certain hobby without repeating the same topic.


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