Blog owner: The competition between advertising and anti-advertising

A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported a story that was quite interesting and I thought important: There was an internet writer who wrote articles in a professional field through blogs and maintained his life by advertising revenue. But one day he found that some readers read the article on his website through Anti-ad plug-in (an anti-advertising plug-in).

The author thinks that this is rather unfair, and that the reader is tantamount to a disguised account of the author's cheapness. The author, who found a reader to steal a chicken-mounted anti-advertising plug-in, also began to spend time on server-side changes: As long as the server decided that a browser had an anti advertising mechanism, he wouldn't let the browser see the article. But he also admits that some users of the program will then update the plugin to cope with the new policy; Of course, the author also has to find ways to update the background program to cope with more sophisticated plug-in. In the story of the Masters, a combat readiness competition, the two sides continue to intrigue between the advantage and achieve the expected benefits of competition. There is no such thing as a free lunch! Any author who works on the internet will have to pay a considerable cost. Readers do not need to pay for each article to read, does not mean that these articles are really "free".

There are different cost curves behind different creative types and depths. But for many reasons, online authoring should be directly based on the "marginal cost" of each article has its own place, because of high transaction costs, such as: charging mechanism, internet habits and so on. This is why it seems that the advertising revenue is the general network creators more likely to achieve the profit model (of course GOOGL e Adsense & AdWord). Simply put, web articles are not free for creators and readers; the authors pay "creative costs" (take time to think and write and endure a bunch of unexplained criticism), and the reader pays "to endure the advertising (and possibly the children who have been lured away by advertising)".

Let me first clarify some assumptions, such as: advertising to the reader is completely interfering with the net cost of inefficient (in fact, it can not be so extreme), network connection costs ignored, server costs ignored, the quality of each article, the book belongs to the characteristics of the common goods ignored ... We can draw a supply curve and a demand curve, which increments to the right, and the latter decreases to the right. Intersection points can be considered volume. When readers start to set up an anti-advertising plug-in, there is a net cost to the overall reader, and there will be a corresponding net increase in the content providers who have bothered to write the anti-advertising mechanism. And because the proportion of readers is often far more than the content provider, so let us assume that the net cost of readers is far less than the content providers, we can draw another demand curve as follows:

It's easy to see from the diagram, once the ad is opened vs. anti-advertising competition, both curves will be higher cost, the result of two curves to the left of the intersection, indicating that the author can provide and the reader can see the number of articles reduced; the worst thing is that there are more and more people installing anti-advertising mechanisms, This allows the author to supply the curve upwards to increase the cost until the intersection points into the second quadrant-that is, the author will not be willing to provide any more articles. It seems that the reader's own clever counter advertising means, the result is likely to just let everyone have no water to drink. Confusion, confusion, confusion recently many people criticize that blogs should not have advertisements, and others criticize websites that put too many ads.

I think the person who holds this argument is confusing two different things. In fact, each reader himself or unconsciously, compared to "the cost of their own bear advertising" and "works of efficiency," which is the higher the lower: if the article is of high value, then even if the ads to make reading the text affected, the reader will go. Like the Chu Madman, office Finance and AdSense Traditional Chinese Observatory ... And so on the amount of advertising is quite large, but hardly affect their site's popularity. Some people are so neat that advertising can't stand it, he can choose not to look at any ad sites or pay-only websites; some people endure the force to a pile of pop-up windows does not matter, naturally can see more things (like many underground BT station can also see). This is their own preferences and cost-benefit considerations, there is no right or wrong. We should remember and respect is: every work is cost, copyright owners usually have the right to determine how he will be in the work of recycling costs profit. You don't like advertising, it's your own "cost/benefit" consideration. The author also has his own cost-benefit considerations, and he does not necessarily devote himself to a few. In other words, the continuation of the front "endure advertising is the cost of the reader" concept, the more ads on the site for the reader is the higher the price of the site; And since the price is determined by the webmaster, it is not a great thing for readers who cannot afford to pay such a cost.

Therefore, recently criticized some web site article advertising too many netizens, and even think that blog and advertising on the top of the people with copper stink, in fact, have committed their own values and objective facts confuse both the mistake. How many commercials can you put up with? This is the reader's question; How to use copyright to profit? This is the webmaster's problem. The former is like you are going to the convenience store to buy fresh milk? Or go to the five-star hotel with room service called? The latter is the Beef noodle boss a bowl to sell 80 yuan or 500 yuan problem. They are two curves, and there are intersections. Pure value criticism doesn't mean much.

Summary

We can infer that if more and more people are engaged in advertising, it can be cheaper to get good articles will be fewer and less. The "software capitalism" that Bill Gates wrote to hackers when he was Young was right. This article hopes to create a simple concept for everyone. There are a lot of questions I'm not going to talk about further, because this article is only for a more important issue for the introduction, after the consensus with you, the next one we will talk about Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other manufacturers and even the entire industry, based on the above problems in the future may face a major challenge or worry. (Note: This article from the East coast of the network blog writer, because the next article and the mainland of the basic situation is poor, it is not reproduced.) Edit/Qiu song)