Mental model fail - paying for content on the internet
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cthulhu_dream challenging my mental model of the internet in response to this post, I have a few more thoughts.
Analogies are often drawn between the internet and other media. It's a bit like TV, a bit like print, with proper two-way communication added in. It's a whole lot of other things as well, but for most people I imagine their mental model of the internet is strongly based on its resemblance to the preceding media which we grew up with. Only now are we getting adults ... well teenagers, who have grown up with the internet and perhaps model it based on it's own merits.
As mentioned in my previous post with earlier media we pay for our newspaper/TV either directly* or by accepting intrusive advertising. If we stop and think about it we realise that some of that money trickles back to the people who made the content and thus they get paid, but mostly those links of the transaction chain are invisible to us.
So with the internet - or more accurately the World Wide Web. We pay our money to an ISP for access to the internet and lo, www content appears on our screens. Subconsciously our mental model says 'we've paid for all this'. But in reality we haven't, because there isn't a transaction chain from the ISP back to every site we visit.
We see banner ads and other ads on websites and think "this is paid for by the advertiser", when in practice the economics of advertising on the internet are dramatically different to those of advertising in print/radio/TV and most people fail to make money from the ads on their sites. (The differences are elaborated in the article at Activity Press which sparked this.)
I'm not in any way saying that we shouldn't make full (legal) use of everything available to us on the internet. But the next time you have a few spare dollars and find yourself wondering what to spend it on, take a moment to wonder if you've actually paid for everything you've used recently.
*Who remembers that we used to have a TV Licensing Fee in NZ? Now the equivalent funds just come out of the general tax take - I guess it could be considered something GST covers.
cthulhu_dream challenging my mental model of the internet in response to this post, I have a few more thoughts.Analogies are often drawn between the internet and other media. It's a bit like TV, a bit like print, with proper two-way communication added in. It's a whole lot of other things as well, but for most people I imagine their mental model of the internet is strongly based on its resemblance to the preceding media which we grew up with. Only now are we getting adults ... well teenagers, who have grown up with the internet and perhaps model it based on it's own merits.
As mentioned in my previous post with earlier media we pay for our newspaper/TV either directly* or by accepting intrusive advertising. If we stop and think about it we realise that some of that money trickles back to the people who made the content and thus they get paid, but mostly those links of the transaction chain are invisible to us.
So with the internet - or more accurately the World Wide Web. We pay our money to an ISP for access to the internet and lo, www content appears on our screens. Subconsciously our mental model says 'we've paid for all this'. But in reality we haven't, because there isn't a transaction chain from the ISP back to every site we visit.
We see banner ads and other ads on websites and think "this is paid for by the advertiser", when in practice the economics of advertising on the internet are dramatically different to those of advertising in print/radio/TV and most people fail to make money from the ads on their sites. (The differences are elaborated in the article at Activity Press which sparked this.)
I'm not in any way saying that we shouldn't make full (legal) use of everything available to us on the internet. But the next time you have a few spare dollars and find yourself wondering what to spend it on, take a moment to wonder if you've actually paid for everything you've used recently.
*Who remembers that we used to have a TV Licensing Fee in NZ? Now the equivalent funds just come out of the general tax take - I guess it could be considered something GST covers.