Given how superior the internet is in every possible way (search, ease of updating, ease of distribution, price) for content and for ads, I am amazed that the decline has taken so long.
My perspective is probably skewed by being an early adopter, though, and the fact that society always moves far slower than I hope.
Actually, the one area that I think print has an advantage over digital is tangibility. I love the web and all things digital, but there's still something special about sitting in a coffee shop and reading a newspaper or paperback novel, or leisurely paging through an art book. The Kindle is awesome and I'll give up all my physical books when I get one, but something real and meaningful will be lost in the transition, I'm afraid. Something worth losing, but something just the same.
I think the reason newspapers have declined so much, is merely the fact that they rely almost entirely on advertising to pay for the production and it's fairly inaccurate advertising. I mean your demographic targeting is exclusively to those who read, which in countries with 99% literacy rates, you're basically fucked for targeting. Where as you can pay less money to advertise online, reach less people but potentially have everyone who sees it interested.
Advertising on a bus is more demographically targeted than newspaper advertising, I mean generally lower income and likely don't own a vehicle. I don't own a drivers license, so why do I care about the new Ford Taurus, they just wasted money by advertising to me.
However, there's no advertising in book sales. Perhaps this is why for the past ten years they've had record sales. The internet has only helped book sales, and interestingly free eBook releases also boost sales.
The assumption that publishing is dead because of the internet is just stupid. We have ubiquitous clean water supplies, but people still "waste" money on bottled water. Plumbing isn't as useful to people as water in a bottle. Similarly, eBooks aren't as useful to people as books (at least so far).
Kindle and similar eBook readers offer promise to removing the paperback from its throne, but tangibility and freedom are key here. I can hand my book to anyone, I can sell it on and whatever I want, this creates the incredible ability for free advertising. Most of my books are from authors recommended to me, which usually involved the person handing me the book to me for me to read.
Also you can't advertise that you're intelligent and well read better than a bookshelf full of books. Then there's all the textile sensations that come with books.
While I don't doubt books will likely go the way of the newspaper. I highly doubt the end is nigh for bookpublishers when they have record sales. It just stinks of the BS spouted in the 50's that the end of the automobile would be soon because of how cheap air travel was becoming. I'm still not flying to work, so I'll laugh and ridicule the people who tell me book publishers are going to go out of business when they have record sales, just as everyone should have doubted we'd be flying to work when automobile manufacturers were posting record profits and more highways were being built than ever.
It just strikes me as ignorant, that so many tech news websites and the fanboys on them don't seem to grasp that newspapers and novels are far more different than Microsoft and Apple. You'd think people who can proclaim two computers so different would be capable of understanding a newspaper is not a book, alas apparently not.
Unfortunately, the internet won't always be completely superior. The advantage of newspapers is that you can always just not look at the ads, or at least not pay attention to them. Eventually everything online will be monetized, and more likely than not, the ads will be more intrusive simply because they can be more intrusive, and hence more effective.
But ads online have a limit to how intrusive they can be - if it detracts so much that it removes the value of the content, people won't consume the content at all. It's the same reason there aren't newspapers with one story per page and just ads around it.
AdBlock basically works by blocking inline ads loaded from offsite - eventually someone is going to figure out how to get around it.
And as far as "too intrusive", that will only last as long as people let it. It'll be the "slowly boiling water" technique, adding more and more intrusive ads slowly enough that there won't be an immediate backlash.
Any company wishing to create content will have to figure out how to monetize it somehow, or else they'll have no reason or ability to create/provide the content in the first place, and right now, the current ad model just isn't enough for the level of profitability that traditional media are accustomed to. If YouTube, one of the most popular sites on the planet, can't come up with enough ad revenue to be profitable, the current status quo just isn't enough. Either they will need to scale back their site, or add a massively increased volume of ads.
eventually someone is going to figure out how to get around it
It's not that hard to do, there's not much figuring out involved. It just doesn't make sense to serve ads to people who have actively taken steps to ensure that they don't see them.
As for YouTube - do you realize how much data they deal with? Their costs are ridiculous; they're hardly the example you should be trotting out to inspire incredulity about the viability of the online advertising model.
Of course their costs are ridiculous - I was trying to make the point that we are living in a "golden age" of relatively ad-free bliss on the internet. We won't have YouTube in its current, awesome-for-the-consumer implementation forever. Either they are going to have to start serving many many more ads, or they are going to have to scale back the amount of content they provide - both options are not really ideal from a user standpoint.
I don't think the online advertising model is a failure - I just think there is a lot more room for increased ad volume with it. As traditional media outlets decline, we are going to see more and more of that room exploited on our screens.
As far as AdBlock, no company wants to pay for eyes that they are never going to get on their ads. There was (and is) plenty of resistance to TiVo from the networks because they know that companies do not want to pay for commercials that consumers using TiVo can and will skip.
> Either they are going to have to start serving many many
> more ads, or they are going to have to scale back the
> amount of content they provide
I suppose another option would be that we get more effective ads. Right now I get bombarded with flashy ads about things I have no interest in, so I no longer even see them. But if, say, HN would have a "Buy now" link off to the side every time one of us mentions a book, or "Learn <programming langugage>" with a link to the O'Reilly's book for that language every time we mention a programming language, I'll bet those ads might lead to a lot of sales. Arguably, you could even call them a service to the reader.
Not that I hold out much hope for this happening at very many sites...
There's a third option: ride it out on the revenues from the other business lines until the advances in software, processing speed, power consumption, storage, and network bandwidth drop your costs to a profitable level.
That might work for YouTube, but how many companies have the deep pockets of Google to ride it out long enough for technology advances to make their product profitable?
There is no way the vast amount of free, professionally made, high-quality content we have available online now continues without some sort of tradeoff in either cost, increased ad exposure, or reduction in quality. The transition period the internet is in right now has to end sometime, and I'm pretty sure it will come down squarely on the side of the content providers/producers.
Not too many, but we were talking specifically about YouTube, not some theoretical every-company. If you'll recall, my initial point in this thread was that it was kind of dumb to point to YouTube as if it were anything like a typical internet company.
And if you look at my original point, you'll see that I was trying to point out that not everything can stay free and ad-minimal forever.
I was simply using YouTube as an example of something that, absent of Google deciding to run it at a significant loss for 5 years (far from certain), will have to change its operating methods to something less pleasant to the consumer.
Where in our thread did I dispute that 'not everything can stay free and ad-minimal forever'?
The only thing I ever said was that YouTube wasn't a good example supporting your point, because it was in a completely different situation from most of the rest of the web, and that because of its unique situation, it actually could continue on at a loss for quite a while longer than most.
In other words, you were kind of right, but for the entirely wrong reason.
My perspective is probably skewed by being an early adopter, though, and the fact that society always moves far slower than I hope.