Ad revenue drying up, what next for free websites?

[landscapephoto]

I find the discussion a bit strange. Everybody is talking about commercial sites and, indeed these need to be financed one way or they other.

But are all web sites necessarily commercial? The web made publishing extremely cheap, thereby empowering normal users to run their own sites out of pocket money. Forums like this one, for example, used to be non-commercial as a rule and quite a few still are.

[Rob C]

My dad was an avid BJP reader, and built his late-life Nikon F3HP system around G. Crawley's recommendations. (Accurate rangefinder focusing became harder for Dad in his 80s, so he reluctantly "went SLR.")

I have to say my SLR camera & lens choices in the '90s were very much influenced by Mike Johnston's writing, both in print and online. He's the guy who clued me in to Contax SLR gear, specifically the lenses.

In both these cases I'd say there was a form of advertising involved, but it was of the "this is what I use…if you're interested you should check it out" variety. This I have no problem with. But I find more blatant forms of advertising to be not only not persuasive but counter-persuasive. What are the metrics advertisers use to gauge the number of potential customers driven away by annoying, imbecilic marketing techniques? (TV ads for instance. So intrusive and utterly inane I DVR nearly all commercial broadcasts I watch and FF past the damn things. During the occasional live baseball or hockey game the ads get muted while I get up & stretch my legs.) I doubt there are any…

-Dave-

Nice to know somebody else appreciated Crawley's work! Actually, he was also a Leica fan - I think I remember him relating having dropped a lens for it off a small boat and getting it back. Can't remember though, if it worked again! Jeanloup Sieff had an M4 drenched in the sea; it sat 'rusting', he wrote, on his shelf as he penned his final book...

I've just been watching the Texas F1 GP and shooting the screen through a Vaselined flter; looks interersting on the back of the camera, tomorrow will show me if there's anything I can do to make a couple of pix out of it. I wonder what on Earth the © situation is there - not that I'd dream of doing anything commercially of course, strictly for fun!

Rob C

[Justinr]

I find the discussion a bit strange. Everybody is talking about commercial sites and, indeed these need to be financed one way or they other.

But are all web sites necessarily commercial? The web made publishing extremely cheap, thereby empowering normal users to run their own sites out of pocket money. Forums like this one, for example, used to be non-commercial as a rule and quite a few still are.

Good point. The history of the web is outlined here, although it is only a precis - 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

What started of as an information exchange system for those interested in computing very quickly became commercialised, as could only be expected, which has lead us to where we are today, a giant machine for selling you stuff. In fact I rather think it's now drowning in its own excesses, or is certainly moving on from a desktop based resource to a gadget/mobile focused channel with a corresponding drop in quality of content as everything has to be lighter and fluffier to fit on a smaller screen. News is now broken up into a series of single sentences, tedious white space predominates and adverts have to be squeezed in there somewhere and the only way to do that is to make them look like editorial content.

One so far unrecognised effect of this is that companies now think that all content is advertising and are getting a lot fussier about what is said about them across the whole of the media. Printed publications are not immune and the objectivity and independence of many periodicals is seriously compromised.

I blogged about it here a couple of weeks back - http://inkplusimages.com/wp/blog/2015/10/09/is-marketing-killing-the-media/

[Rob C]

I imagine that online advertising will contine, but become more sophisticticated as the people running it realise that it isn't the same thing as any other medium. In particular, I see the greatest change being to do with cellphones. These are of such small screen dimensions that they are hardly the most comfortable way of watching anything.

Sometimes I switch on to LuLa during breaks between courses at lunch, wherever I happen to be eating that day. It isn't the most pleaseant experience. I have constantly to magnify, make smaller, and muck about just to catch some form of continuity and readability in the process. Watching any commercials is not going to happen; reading what I want to read is pain enough.

(And no, it's not my eyesight. Was a time after 44 that I needed glasses for reading; now, since the advent of glaucoma, I do not, but my earlier, excellent distance vision now requires glasses - on and off, some days on and some days off.)

However, watching teenagers and younger play with their cells tells me another story: they hold them so close to their noses that what's small but legible to me at twelve inches must appear perfectly normal to them at four inches. But do they have any disposable income, so to whom does one aim the ads?

Rob C

[Kevin Raber]

Rob C.
Luminous-Landscape is designed to reformat for mobile devices.  If you are seeing our regular page and not the mobile version which is a lot easier to read then you may want to check the setting on your phone browser.  Most likely you have show web page version selected.  The site detects what kind of device you are on and reformats for it unless the option to show as normal web page is selected.  I hope that makes your viewing of the site easier on your phone.

[Otto Phocus]

But are all web sites necessarily commercial?

That would depend on how you would define commercial in this context. Not all websites are designed to bring in money.

[Rob C]

Rob C.
Luminous-Landscape is designed to reformat for mobile devices.  If you are seeing our regular page and not the mobile version which is a lot easier to read then you may want to check the setting on your phone browser.  Most likely you have show web page version selected.  The site detects what kind of device you are on and reformats for it unless the option to show as normal web page is selected.  I hope that makes your viewing of the site easier on your phone.

Hi Kevin,

I can't find anything on my cell that seems to indicate the settings of my browser. Or I'm incapable of recognizing them, which wouldn't surprise me at all.

The unit's a Samsung GT-55830; Android Version 2.2,1.

Perhaps it's too old for these advanced things?

But thanks, anyway.

Rob C

[Peter McLennan]

WTF happened to micropayments? Click here to read this article:  $0.01
Forget subscriptions and paywalls.  If the item is valuable to me, I'll click and pay.

[Otto Phocus]

WTF happened to micropayments? Click here to read this article:  $0.01
Forget subscriptions and paywalls.  If the item is valuable to me, I'll click and pay.

But you are not going to know the article is valuable until after you read it. 

[landscapephoto]

Good point. The history of the web is outlined here, although it is only a precis - 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web

What started of as an information exchange system for those interested in computing very quickly became commercialised, as could only be expected, which has lead us to where we are today, a giant machine for selling you stuff. In fact I rather think it's now drowning in its own excesses, or is certainly moving on from a desktop based resource to a gadget/mobile focused channel with a corresponding drop in quality of content as everything has to be lighter and fluffier to fit on a smaller screen. News is now broken up into a series of single sentences, tedious white space predominates and adverts have to be squeezed in there somewhere and the only way to do that is to make them look like editorial content.

One so far unrecognised effect of this is that companies now think that all content is advertising and are getting a lot fussier about what is said about them across the whole of the media. Printed publications are not immune and the objectivity and independence of many periodicals is seriously compromised.

I blogged about it here a couple of weeks back - http://inkplusimages.com/wp/blog/2015/10/09/is-marketing-killing-the-media/

I agree with your post and also with the blog article: if the web is nothing but advertisement and advertisement disguised as content, the readers will simply go.

I believe that this is what already happened to paper magazines before the web. We read everywhere that the web killed paper magazines, but the truth is that their circulation was already down in the late 80s, before the web gained traction. And their circulation was down because, already at the time, their "articles" were written to please advertisers and not their readers. Readers started to stop buying them, because they were little more than catalogues. I know I stopped buying them around that time.

I actually stopped at a newsstand on my way home before writing that message. There was not a single magazine that appeared to have actual content.

[Alan Klein]

I like the more personal ads.
http://www.picturesof.net/_images_300/Man_Wearing_a_Sandwich_Board_Royalty_Free_Clipart_Picture_081011-020804-887042.jpg

[Rob C]

I think that the problem for magazines is simple: cost of production. You have to sell a lot of advertising to break even, and then you also have to contend with a falling number of buyers of the product (the magazine).

But it's nothing new, and I think there's another factor has to be borne in mind: the demographics of the buying public. For example, when my wife was a teenager she used to buy perhaps two women's magazines every week. But, as she herself became wife and mother, she realised that the content of all of the magazines was much of a muchness - a cycle of seasonal fashion tips and cooking ideas, dating advice (?) and nonsense like that. She stopped buying. Now, with the dropping birth rate in some key constituencies, the natural market for this pap vanishes to the point where you need more and more prepaid ads and less dependency on kiosks and/or subscriptions, and smaller print runs mean higher unit costs, and a constant dumbing down to find more and more daft people to buy your crap...

And don't forget that paper itself now costs an arm and a leg, another factor that constantly drove my calendar market overheads the wrong way. Eventually, you find fewer and fewer clients who can dig deeply enough into their business pockets to take advantage of what you do. Was a time in the mid-70s that a small run of 3,000 units was doable; by the mid-80s that was a forgotten source of work, and you were looking for maybe 10,000 units to make it possible. So, those small clients had to resort to printers' offers of choosing from a number of standard formats and ready-made stock picture pages they held, with a cheap overprint of your company name.

The higher the basics cost, the greater the number of units you have to shift to stay accessible.

How the Internet ever makes any money from selling ads I don't know: I do all that I can to avoid having them on the monitor, and see them as an invasion of privacy. But then I see a lot of things in that light, so perhaps I'm not the typical punter that they seek.

Rob C

[Alan Klein]

There's still a huge business in catalogs and junk mail.  I know.  I get the mail every day and give it to my wife.  That's also a huge reminder that there's still a very big market for pro photographers.  All those gaments and stuff have to be photographed for magazines, catalogs, the internet, TV and other media.  That's something that amateurs don't do and a reminder for those interested in getting into the photo business.    I would guess that fine art, landscapes etc are a smaller portion of the overall market.

[Rob C]

There's still a huge business in catalogs and junk mail.  I know.  I get the mail every day and give it to my wife.  That's also a huge reminder that there's still a very big market for pro photographers.  All those gaments and stuff have to be photographed for magazines, catalogs, the internet, TV and other media.  That's something that amateurs don't do and a reminder for those interested in getting into the photo business.    I would guess that fine art, landscapes etc are a smaller portion of the overall market.

https://www.shopdirect.com/home-page/company-page/about-us/history/

They used to produce millions of thick catalogues every few seasons.

Today it's all web-based.

As for photographers, there were always far too many of them for them all to make a good living. If anything, it's got worse, with only the extremes of up and downmarket existing, the middle a wasteland.

It's reflected in the life of every pro I know personally.

Rob C

[landscapephoto]

There's still a huge business in catalogs and junk mail.  I know.  I get the mail every day and give it to my wife.  That's also a huge reminder that there's still a very big market for pro photographers.

You are right. I know some pro photographers working for this market and they do quite well.

[Justinr]

There's still a huge business in catalogs and junk mail.  I know.  I get the mail every day and give it to my wife.  That's also a huge reminder that there's still a very big market for pro photographers.  All those gaments and stuff have to be photographed for magazines, catalogs, the internet, TV and other media.  That's something that amateurs don't do and a reminder for those interested in getting into the photo business.    I would guess that fine art, landscapes etc are a smaller portion of the overall market.

A lot of that can be termed production line image capture, certainly for brochures where there is no background required. The lighting, once set up, varies little and it then just becomes a question of wheeling the product on and off. At several hundred different items a day the brochure is soon filled. 

On the other hand there are companies who think that any old snap will do and you can argue 'til you are blue in the face that they need to get their photography sorted, but to no avail, the boss's wife has got a fancy camera and that's that.

[Justinr]

You are right. I know some pro photographers working for this market and they do quite well.

The trouble is that it's not as many as there used to be.

[Justinr]

I think that the problem for magazines is simple: cost of production. You have to sell a lot of advertising to break even, and then you also have to contend with a falling number of buyers of the product (the magazine).

But it's nothing new, and I think there's another factor has to be borne in mind: the demographics of the buying public. For example, when my wife was a teenager she used to buy perhaps two women's magazines every week. But, as she herself became wife and mother, she realised that the content of all of the magazines was much of a muchness - a cycle of seasonal fashion tips and cooking ideas, dating advice (?) and nonsense like that. She stopped buying. Now, with the dropping birth rate in some key constituencies, the natural market for this pap vanishes to the point where you need more and more prepaid ads and less dependency on kiosks and/or subscriptions, and smaller print runs mean higher unit costs, and a constant dumbing down to find more and more daft people to buy your crap...

And don't forget that paper itself now costs an arm and a leg, another factor that constantly drove my calendar market overheads the wrong way. Eventually, you find fewer and fewer clients who can dig deeply enough into their business pockets to take advantage of what you do. Was a time in the mid-70s that a small run of 3,000 units was doable; by the mid-80s that was a forgotten source of work, and you were looking for maybe 10,000 units to make it possible. So, those small clients had to resort to printers' offers of choosing from a number of standard formats and ready-made stock picture pages they held, with a cheap overprint of your company name.

The higher the basics cost, the greater the number of units you have to shift to stay accessible.

How the Internet ever makes any money from selling ads I don't know: I do all that I can to avoid having them on the monitor, and see them as an invasion of privacy. But then I see a lot of things in that light, so perhaps I'm not the typical punter that they seek.

Rob C

Simply put the internet doesn't make the money for advertisers that its supporters claim. I have asked many times elsewhere, of all sorts of business types, just what sort of return can be expected from online advertising or spending hours on social media and the silence has always been deafening.

When the web started getting all sophisticated with grand ideas about taking over the world you could earn a few cents per click on an advert on your site, now I believe its a cent per x thousand number of clicks before the site owner gets anything. I set up a bikers site three or four years ago with banners, side ads etc, all via Google, and never made a cent (cue those telling me I did it all wrong or whatever). I have also seen many others with the same idea come and go.

As far as I can see, and generally speaking, if you want a web based business then that has to be your main focus, you have to spend an enormous amount of time, money and energy on getting it running and keeping it going, the web is by no means an easy fix for firms that are either struggling or wishing to expand, some will make it but the majority won't. The web can be an important part of your marketing strategy but it must never be the only string to your bow. It's easy to look back now and remember the innocence of so many photographers as they rushed into digital and websites thinking that they were all going to make a fortune, but how many actually did?

As to your point about magazines they do tend to come and go, but it's interesting to note that they are still out there despite the dire warnings of their imminent demise that we have been regaled with over the years. Not all magazines are alike, up market lifestyle mags will spend the money on photographers, penny dreadfuls delight in using any old tat because it lends them an air of authenticity. Somewhere in between there is a small reward for folk who can handle a camera, but there's no point in thinking that the majority will employ a photographer to take some pictures and then go home, it doesn't work like that anymore, you've got to write the article as well.

[Alan Klein]

https://www.shopdirect.com/home-page/company-page/about-us/history/

They used to produce millions of thick catalogues every few seasons.

Today it's all web-based.

As for photographers, there were always far too many of them for them all to make a good living. If anything, it's got worse, with only the extremes of up and downmarket existing, the middle a wasteland.

It's reflected in the life of every pro I know personally.

Rob C

Rob  You're closer to this than I.  So I respect your knowledge.  But don't web sites require photographers too?  And many companies do both web sales and brochures.  Macy's, LL Bean etc plus all the Christmas sites that sell everything from chocolates to cheeses.  Someone is taking the photos and I doubt if they're from amateurs.   I assume that many photographers are employed by ad agencies who provide ad services including photos.  So the pros aren't working their own business in these cases.

[Rob C]

Rob  You're closer to this than I.  So I respect your knowledge.  But don't web sites require photographers too?  And many companies do both web sales and brochures.  Macy's, LL Bean etc plus all the Christmas sites that sell everything from chocolates to cheeses.  Someone is taking the photos and I doubt if they're from amateurs.   I assume that many photographers are employed by ad agencies who provide ad services including photos.  So the pros aren't working their own business in these cases.

Yes, of course pictures are still being shot; however, I think that the polarization already happened a long time ago, with the really big guys still getting the cream today, with the other cats licking the sides of the sticky bowls. A few top NY, London, Paris or Milan stores don't need many shooters to get their pix shot; much photographic stuff, other than for local sales, comes direct from the fashion houses anyway, with the same few stars getting the work in both cases. I used to get manufacturers' seasonal fashion shoots to do, twice a year, and then that over, it was dead as a dodo the rest of the year, with only last-minute fashion photography for city stores to promote items they hoped would be hot for a week or two. That was mainly why I moved to calendars: I didn't need to wait for some ad agency or mega store manager to be kind to me; I created my own direct clients and productions. Paid a helluva lot better and, best of all, I tended to have a tiny bit more control over what happened to my stuff.

I didn't know any ad agency that employed is own snappers; why pay somebody yourself, when you can make an independent pro wait the three months until you get paid before you pay him? You make money on his money, as well as on that of all the others you use, lying in your account... at least, you did when banks paid interest! Anyway, no guy worth his salt wants to work for anyone else; you never earn anything as an employed photographer - at least, not when I was one trying to learn the ropes!

No, I agree, amateurs won't be getting much glamorous work, and the pros who do what the others don't want, may or may not manage to find enough volume to pay the rent that way. Survival's a tough deal - always was in this business, possibly because few of us saw it as one, which is one trap into which most of the surviving stars never fell, often because they were grabbed by good agents or business partners. But good agents can pick 'n' choose...

Rob C