"Can It and Should It Be Done?"
I got another rude interruption to my podcast listening the other day, this time from The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, a podcast I've shoved in my ears now for over four years. The interruption came this time from two of the skeptics themselves schlepping wares for an online audio book purveyor.
The Guide has a suggestions forum, so this time my cunning letter writing campaign went direct. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the initial responses. One poster noted that there is a donate button on the website, and if I were the mensch I think myself to be I would have donated enough to prevent ads from appearing:
The option is already there and obviously people arent giving enough money to support the show without ads.
Let me run down the silliness of this observation. Okay, let's say I did donate in the past. What guarantee do I have that I've donated enough to offset ads? I know neither how much the rogues need nor how much others contribute. When you're a drop in a bucket, you know you're surrounded by wet, but not how much.
A further point, one that invokes common human behavior: what if enough later becomes not enough? What if the amount they receive from me and others does cover their fixed costs, but once the money comes rolling in they find other "fixed" costs, like new equipment, better lunches, nicer clothes, a new house? Without the quid pro quo linking donations and amounts to a promise of ad-free programming, there is nothing to prevent the 'casters from taking both donations and ad revenues.
Another inane observation:
I have no issue with the [Company name deleted] ads and I really don't see anyway that the ads taint the credibility of the show. [Company name deleted] is about as neutral a website as them come.
This responder is, sadly, clueless as well. Again, I'm not knocking this company or another. I'm against ads in general. An ad for the cure for cancer is to me just as offensive as a NAMBLA spot pushing for new members.
Another bit of snark noted, "I don't see a problem with ads for a [Company name deleted] appearing in the podcast, heck it's not a real podcast if ads for [Company name deleted] don't appear in it's back catalogue somewhere. "
A "real" podcast? You mean, in your snarky way, I suppose, that those podcasters who sit down to the computer with a dream and a few expendable hours-but who have yet to gain an audience-aren't "real." Oh, sure, they have drive, ambition, a willingness to affect change in the world for the better, to champion a cause worthy of their attention. But they aren't "real" and should therefore be discounted as insignificant. Gotcha.
You, sir or madame, are the most despicable commenter yet, though you may not realize it. You are the dream crusher. And, interestingly, history is not on your side.
For a fascinating perspective on new communications media and the patterns they historically follow as they developed, I cannot recommend Tim Wu's The Master Switch enough. He notes:
Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society, new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each new technology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers, the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and the vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry's perspective, the invention may inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology makes less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology's potential; or too much variation in standards or protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers' dissatisfactions.
When these problems reach a critical mass, and a lost potential for substantial gain is evident, the market's invisible hand waves in some great mogul . . . or band of them who promise a more orderly and efficient regime for the betterment of all users. Usually enlisting the federal government, this kind of mogul is special, for he defines a new type of industry, integrated and centralized. Delivering a better or more secure product, the mogul heralds a golden age in the life of the new technology. At its heart lies some perfected engine for providing a steady return on capital. In exchange for making the trains run on time (to hazard an extreme comparison), he gains a certain measure of control over the medium's potential for enabling individuals expression and technical innovation - control such as the inventors never dreamed of, and necessary to perpetuate itself, as well as the attendant profits of centralization. This, too, is the Cycle.
(Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Random House, 2010, p. 10, emboldening my own.)
First it was the telephone, then the radio, then television. The first two enjoyed a long period of experimental innovation, a halcyon period where garage tinkerers toyed with the technology and evolved programming based on their interests, not on their costs and revenue expectations. Early telephone companies in rural settings sometimes connected their networks by running the lines not on poles, but on fences, the wires themselves doubling as barbed wire to keep the cattle from roaming. Early radio pioneers simply upgraded their telegraph equipment to carry sound, startling those scanning the AM band on their crystal sets. At first, these broadcasters just yammered on. Later, listeners suggested playing records to fill the talk sessions. Money simply wasn't a part of the equation.
And efforts to monetize these operations were seen as antithetical to polite company. 90 years ago, in fact, we find this article, home to the above cartoon, summing up the situation nicely.
Let me ask you whether the public will wish advertising to come to them through the agency of radio broadcasting. Remember that this advertising will go right into the home. It will invade the place where the family is enjoying the full benefits of privacy and detachment from business cares. The broadcasting to thousands of homes of advertising information concerning, say: "Things for women and things for men," probably the butcher with his meats; the baker with his bread; the tailor with his clothes, and the grocer with his crackers and cheese--what kind of a home will it be anyhow? You may say you can turn it on at will and turn it off when you want to, but even so, who will want it? How valuable will be the media if the public will not support it? Personally, I don't think they will support it.
Advertising must ride on some service, and in riding on that service it must not destroy the service. The editorial page of a publication pretty generally determines the quality and extent of the circulation. Therefore the value of a medium for advertising must play second fiddle to the editorial and written pages. It is, therefore, true that advertising must "stand by" until it finds a way to associate itself with radio broadcasting without, in any way, destroying the refinement and enjoyment and general satisfaction that comes from receiving news bulletins, baseball scores, lectures, sermons, bedtime stories, concerts, etc., etc.
(I again emphasized)
Again, this was in 1922, and in case you didn't notice, was written by the then Manager. Dept. of Publicity, Westinghouse Co. . . . the company who supplied most of the broadcast equipment for the country at the time. He sums up his opinion nicely: "In closing, I give as my opinion that advertising must be inoffensive to the public and any advertising that enters the home must be welcome. If it is in any sense an intruder, it will fail just as an agent at the door is turned away if his appearance or manner is objectionable."
That same year, a future president echoed these sentiments.
"It is inconceivable," said Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce, at the first national radio conference in 1922, "that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter." Hoover's remarks reflected the accepted wisdom of the times: that advertising on radio was unacceptable. That is to say, they reflected what radio broadcasting was in the early 1920s: a decentralized industry founded on a rather idealized notion of an emergent technology, the technological utopia of its time.
(Wu, ibid, p. 74.)
How times have changed. People now expect these intrusions as a matter of course and against which it would be pointless to resist. The long-term conditioning that has led to such a reversal of what constitutes common decency was, as Wu notes, both deliberate and persistent. By the time television arrived on our cultural scene, the public's aversion to intrusive advertising had if not waned then been mostly forgotten. In the 1950s, Walter Lippmann wrote an essay, "The TV Problem", where he noted:
There has been, in fact, an enormous conspiracy to deceive the public in order to sell profitable advertising to the sponsors. In involves not merely this individual or that, but the industry as a whole. . . .
The size of the fraud is a bitter reflection on the moral condition of our society. But it is also sure proof that there is something radically wrong with the fundamental national policy under which television operates. The principle of that policy is that for all practical purposes television shall be operated wholly for private profit. There is no competition in television except among competitors trying to sell the attention of the audiences for profit. As a result, while television is supposed to be "free," it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.
(Quoted in Wu, ibid, pp. 155-156, my bold emphasis.)
An ad here, an ad there, and soon the obvious negative reactions expressed by McQuiston and Hoover lessened to almost nothing. Once established, the habits become intractable.
"All knowledge and habit once acquired," wrote Joseph Schumpeter, the great innovation theorist, "becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth." Schumpeter believed that our minds were, essentially, too lazy to seek out new lines of thought when old ones could serve. "The very nature of fixed habits of thinking, their energy-saving function, is founded upon the fact that they have become subconscious, that they yield their results automatically and are proof against criticism and even against contradiction by individual facts."
(Wu, ibid, p. 21.)
". . . proof against criticism and even against contradiction by individual facts." Sounds like the reaction my suggestion got at the Skeptics Guide.
So here we are, folks, at the dawn of yet another new technology, "bright with promise and possibility." And already the success of early podcasters has prompted them to embrace the very force that, in my opinion, if not destroyed at least hobbled the creativity of the internet's predecessors. And here I am, seemingly a lone voice trying to rein in the hobblers before everyone accepts that advertising must happen before a production can be considered legitimate.
I can't help shaking the realization that I may be very, very alone in my quixotic tilt at advertisement windmills. But tilt I will, my keyboard as my lance. You, dear reader, may be my Sancho or just entertained by a very public display of amusing delusion, I don't know. Me and my pygmy pony will ride all along the borderline either way.
The Guide has a suggestions forum, so this time my cunning letter writing campaign went direct. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by the initial responses. One poster noted that there is a donate button on the website, and if I were the mensch I think myself to be I would have donated enough to prevent ads from appearing:
The option is already there and obviously people arent giving enough money to support the show without ads.
Let me run down the silliness of this observation. Okay, let's say I did donate in the past. What guarantee do I have that I've donated enough to offset ads? I know neither how much the rogues need nor how much others contribute. When you're a drop in a bucket, you know you're surrounded by wet, but not how much.
A further point, one that invokes common human behavior: what if enough later becomes not enough? What if the amount they receive from me and others does cover their fixed costs, but once the money comes rolling in they find other "fixed" costs, like new equipment, better lunches, nicer clothes, a new house? Without the quid pro quo linking donations and amounts to a promise of ad-free programming, there is nothing to prevent the 'casters from taking both donations and ad revenues.
Another inane observation:
I have no issue with the [Company name deleted] ads and I really don't see anyway that the ads taint the credibility of the show. [Company name deleted] is about as neutral a website as them come.
This responder is, sadly, clueless as well. Again, I'm not knocking this company or another. I'm against ads in general. An ad for the cure for cancer is to me just as offensive as a NAMBLA spot pushing for new members.
Another bit of snark noted, "I don't see a problem with ads for a [Company name deleted] appearing in the podcast, heck it's not a real podcast if ads for [Company name deleted] don't appear in it's back catalogue somewhere. "
A "real" podcast? You mean, in your snarky way, I suppose, that those podcasters who sit down to the computer with a dream and a few expendable hours-but who have yet to gain an audience-aren't "real." Oh, sure, they have drive, ambition, a willingness to affect change in the world for the better, to champion a cause worthy of their attention. But they aren't "real" and should therefore be discounted as insignificant. Gotcha.
You, sir or madame, are the most despicable commenter yet, though you may not realize it. You are the dream crusher. And, interestingly, history is not on your side.
For a fascinating perspective on new communications media and the patterns they historically follow as they developed, I cannot recommend Tim Wu's The Master Switch enough. He notes:
Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society, new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each new technology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers, the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and the vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry's perspective, the invention may inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology makes less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology's potential; or too much variation in standards or protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers' dissatisfactions.
When these problems reach a critical mass, and a lost potential for substantial gain is evident, the market's invisible hand waves in some great mogul . . . or band of them who promise a more orderly and efficient regime for the betterment of all users. Usually enlisting the federal government, this kind of mogul is special, for he defines a new type of industry, integrated and centralized. Delivering a better or more secure product, the mogul heralds a golden age in the life of the new technology. At its heart lies some perfected engine for providing a steady return on capital. In exchange for making the trains run on time (to hazard an extreme comparison), he gains a certain measure of control over the medium's potential for enabling individuals expression and technical innovation - control such as the inventors never dreamed of, and necessary to perpetuate itself, as well as the attendant profits of centralization. This, too, is the Cycle.
(Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Random House, 2010, p. 10, emboldening my own.)
First it was the telephone, then the radio, then television. The first two enjoyed a long period of experimental innovation, a halcyon period where garage tinkerers toyed with the technology and evolved programming based on their interests, not on their costs and revenue expectations. Early telephone companies in rural settings sometimes connected their networks by running the lines not on poles, but on fences, the wires themselves doubling as barbed wire to keep the cattle from roaming. Early radio pioneers simply upgraded their telegraph equipment to carry sound, startling those scanning the AM band on their crystal sets. At first, these broadcasters just yammered on. Later, listeners suggested playing records to fill the talk sessions. Money simply wasn't a part of the equation.
And efforts to monetize these operations were seen as antithetical to polite company. 90 years ago, in fact, we find this article, home to the above cartoon, summing up the situation nicely.
Let me ask you whether the public will wish advertising to come to them through the agency of radio broadcasting. Remember that this advertising will go right into the home. It will invade the place where the family is enjoying the full benefits of privacy and detachment from business cares. The broadcasting to thousands of homes of advertising information concerning, say: "Things for women and things for men," probably the butcher with his meats; the baker with his bread; the tailor with his clothes, and the grocer with his crackers and cheese--what kind of a home will it be anyhow? You may say you can turn it on at will and turn it off when you want to, but even so, who will want it? How valuable will be the media if the public will not support it? Personally, I don't think they will support it.
Advertising must ride on some service, and in riding on that service it must not destroy the service. The editorial page of a publication pretty generally determines the quality and extent of the circulation. Therefore the value of a medium for advertising must play second fiddle to the editorial and written pages. It is, therefore, true that advertising must "stand by" until it finds a way to associate itself with radio broadcasting without, in any way, destroying the refinement and enjoyment and general satisfaction that comes from receiving news bulletins, baseball scores, lectures, sermons, bedtime stories, concerts, etc., etc.
(I again emphasized)
Again, this was in 1922, and in case you didn't notice, was written by the then Manager. Dept. of Publicity, Westinghouse Co. . . . the company who supplied most of the broadcast equipment for the country at the time. He sums up his opinion nicely: "In closing, I give as my opinion that advertising must be inoffensive to the public and any advertising that enters the home must be welcome. If it is in any sense an intruder, it will fail just as an agent at the door is turned away if his appearance or manner is objectionable."
That same year, a future president echoed these sentiments.
"It is inconceivable," said Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce, at the first national radio conference in 1922, "that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter." Hoover's remarks reflected the accepted wisdom of the times: that advertising on radio was unacceptable. That is to say, they reflected what radio broadcasting was in the early 1920s: a decentralized industry founded on a rather idealized notion of an emergent technology, the technological utopia of its time.
(Wu, ibid, p. 74.)
How times have changed. People now expect these intrusions as a matter of course and against which it would be pointless to resist. The long-term conditioning that has led to such a reversal of what constitutes common decency was, as Wu notes, both deliberate and persistent. By the time television arrived on our cultural scene, the public's aversion to intrusive advertising had if not waned then been mostly forgotten. In the 1950s, Walter Lippmann wrote an essay, "The TV Problem", where he noted:
There has been, in fact, an enormous conspiracy to deceive the public in order to sell profitable advertising to the sponsors. In involves not merely this individual or that, but the industry as a whole. . . .
The size of the fraud is a bitter reflection on the moral condition of our society. But it is also sure proof that there is something radically wrong with the fundamental national policy under which television operates. The principle of that policy is that for all practical purposes television shall be operated wholly for private profit. There is no competition in television except among competitors trying to sell the attention of the audiences for profit. As a result, while television is supposed to be "free," it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.
(Quoted in Wu, ibid, pp. 155-156, my bold emphasis.)
An ad here, an ad there, and soon the obvious negative reactions expressed by McQuiston and Hoover lessened to almost nothing. Once established, the habits become intractable.
"All knowledge and habit once acquired," wrote Joseph Schumpeter, the great innovation theorist, "becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth." Schumpeter believed that our minds were, essentially, too lazy to seek out new lines of thought when old ones could serve. "The very nature of fixed habits of thinking, their energy-saving function, is founded upon the fact that they have become subconscious, that they yield their results automatically and are proof against criticism and even against contradiction by individual facts."
(Wu, ibid, p. 21.)
". . . proof against criticism and even against contradiction by individual facts." Sounds like the reaction my suggestion got at the Skeptics Guide.
So here we are, folks, at the dawn of yet another new technology, "bright with promise and possibility." And already the success of early podcasters has prompted them to embrace the very force that, in my opinion, if not destroyed at least hobbled the creativity of the internet's predecessors. And here I am, seemingly a lone voice trying to rein in the hobblers before everyone accepts that advertising must happen before a production can be considered legitimate.
I can't help shaking the realization that I may be very, very alone in my quixotic tilt at advertisement windmills. But tilt I will, my keyboard as my lance. You, dear reader, may be my Sancho or just entertained by a very public display of amusing delusion, I don't know. Me and my pygmy pony will ride all along the borderline either way.