Ad based revenue model is dying.

The market is very effective at giving the consumer what he/she wants.  When society was growing in a liberal bent, the big thing was to get something for free.  Liberals think life owes them a living and thus living for the free spirited (or in some circles, lazy and shiftless) should be free.  Of course nothing is really free.  Generally when you get something for "free" its built into the price of something else you consume.  The free item gives your liberal brain what its looking for.  If you really did receive something for free then of course that just means it was free to you.  Someone else paid for it for whatever reason.  It could be a loss leader, a charity or whatever but someone always pays.  Liberals just think it should not be them.

In order to deal with this mentality, many online services became ad based.  If you go visit those sites you can do so without cash outlay because someone else has decided that flashing their product before the eyes of enough sheeple will result in enough impulse purchases so as to cover the cost of the ad placement.  Of course, many of those web sites are like visiting a virus pit.  Your entire computer can hang and when it does you have no control and no idea what is happening behind the scenes.  How anything can hang a multitasking OS is beyond me and so when it does hang you can suspect that nothing good is happening in this mode where you can't even open task manager and see who is hogging the system.

It is because of these ads that I pledged from the inception of this blog to never have ads on it and never has this blog been enabled for ads.  I just treated the information I am giving as a charity.  But I also believed that I would at some point be able to charge for services, something which has been going on for quite some time now with the paid Elliott wave stock analysis service.  I also believed, and told many of my high powered marketing friends that the ad based revenue model was in trouble and probably would eventually die.  And I meant this not only for Internet content but for cable TV as well.  I can tell you right now that I never watch commercials on TV.  TIVO allows easy skipping of the commercials.  At some point the product sellers will figure out that advertising on the web is too annoying and advertising on TV is too easy to bypass.

Today's evidence point about this is shown below.  Financial times used to work as an ad revenue web site but now it is transitioned to a paygo site.  I personally think that their price of $6.45 per week is a bit high.  I mean, if that were the only site I needed to get news from then $26 per month would be OK.  But how many news sites will each want their $26 per month for me to get the big picture of what is going on in the world.?  How much should we have to pay for non-fake news?  I don't know but I think we are going to find out in the years ahead because the mood of the herd is moving conservative and conservatives prefer paygo over the ad model.