This one weird trick can make online publishing faster, safer, more attractive, and richer The universe ended unexpectedly on a March Monday in 2025. To the relief of many, it came back a few days later much as before, but with one very significant change. One that may herald significant changes for all of us, inside its sphere or not. This universe, in particular, is Universe Today, a space news website a good …
In this case at least, it’s not being static which makes that website fast. By modern standards, the photos are ridiculously low quality. 640x440px for main article photos…..it’s not 2005 any more. A website like that should have awe-inspiring images. I can only think that basically forever they’ve been messing around trying to “optimise” a broken website, and carefully reducing the picture size to get it to work. The kB size isn’t even that low, given how low-res the photos are. Sorry, I want to like this, but this is grim.
I love the idea that people pay for the content they want without ads and tracking, but I wonder if £3 a month is just a little steep to attract sufficient volume (and there's no micropayment option for casual visitors). Looking at Press Gazette analysis, once you get to the bottom end of the top 50 global subscription sites they're around 100,000 subscriptions - and that's for globally known publications, plus a few title aggregators like Hearst Newpapers, Ganett and Newsquest. Between these top 50, they have a paltry 45m subscribers. Which tells me most people - most of whom happily paid for hard copy magazines back in the day - still aren't comfortable paying for digital content, and in my view that's because the price/benefit balance is wildly wrong. I don't think a patron model is the way forward - it'll be like Wikipedia or the Guardian, where a tiny minority support the majority who won't pay, and then we all end up with regular begging appeals, and a precarious existence for the publication.
So, throwing the floor open, what would you pay if the Reg was ad-free behind a paywall? I'd give them a tenner a year, which I suspect is a lot more than they currently get per regular viewer*. They'd need some offer to drag in new subscribers, or a micropayment offer
* And considerably more than they get from me as I'm running ad-blockers, purely because the ad industry has got out of hand with it's tracking, privacy invasions, and the sheer intrusiveness of their garbage adverts. I know the Reg isn't as bad as say Reach, but the ad industry have thrown themselves over the edge, and I'm not going to save them.
There's only one site I visit that even offers a subscription option - RMWeb. I've been a paid up member for several years now. It helps that there's also a deal that gets you a monthly digital magazine and one free show ticket a year but the community is so good and valuable that I'd pay a couple of quid a year anyway.
They nearly aways have one N scale layout in each issue but I do agree that it's gone a bit downhill. Incorporating Traction magazine hasn't helped as far as I'm concerned because I have no actual interest in railways themselves. The railway is a just useful way to add interest to the scene and a technical challenge to construct. Also the digital reader is a bit naff making it less pleasant to read.
But in combination - magazine, forum without adverts and free ticket it works for me.
I also model in N.
How about a APT-P set for your layout?
I was at the London Festival of Railway Modelling which was held at the Alexandra Palace last weekend -
Picked up a leaflet for APT-P models from the N Gauge Society stand...
http://beeshillmodels.co.uk/apt-p-models
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSTql8QxJPk
Lol! One of my long time wants is for an APT-E (that windscreen is so cool) but that has never been done in N. RevolutioN ran a crowd fund campaign but it failed. Then there was someone trying to do it on their own via 3D printing but I've lost track of that.
Another loco I wanted was a Princess Elizabeth because my Dad had let me use his on our childhood layout. There has been a brass kit for N of that at least but it was issued a long time ago and anyway building a loco from a kit is beyond comfort zone.
Ordinary Level Physics by A.F. Abbott
The back cover had a picture of the APT-E tilting on a curve
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81OnWAq-FaL._SL1500_.jpg
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Level-Physics-F-Abbott/dp/0435670050
> what would you pay if the Reg was ad-free behind a paywall
Yeah, I'd give them probably US$3 or $4 a month. But the point of Patreon is you're not behind a paywall. You have extras like maybe early content access or a Discord server where perhaps you can have Q&A sessions. I can see The Reg shutting down the comment section and moving it to Discord as a perk.
If you're behind a paywall, you don't get new users. Simple as that.
I already pay US$35 a month on Patreon to 4 YouTube channels[1] and 2 webcomics. **Far** better investment than Amazon Prime or Netflix.
Patreon got started because YouTube started jerking people around with ad revenue and random demonetization. Now it's actually the primary income stream for many channels.
For webcomics, there's a limit to how many t-shirts with clever sayings you can sell each month, and then you're stuck with overstock, so it's a godsend there too.
> regular begging appeals
Not really. The YouTube channels just simply mention they have a Patreon, instead of "click & subscribe" and instead of a dozen intrusive ads, webcomics just have a Patreon image/link somewhere on the page.
[1] Including the British gaming channels OutsideXbox and OutsideXtra
Another Patreon fan here. There's an F1 podcast that I enjoy that exists purely because the income stream from Patreon pays the host to live; meaning they can actually focus on developing and growing the podcast. (Hello MissedApex!)
The host occasionally mentions how much he makes from Youtube... it's peanuts. :(
morally, how can you give them money? patreon are such pieces of shit. last time I doled out to them, was for plain text and it took a full minute to load each page. even the post listings took that kind of time! the only thing they can have from me is scorn. they took my money, and couldn't even puke up text in a timely fashion? it doesn't matter if it was 2010 or 2015, that's a complete crock of shit and they should be torn cable from cable for it. also they take like 20% of the total. for doing, well, basically nothing. even geoshitties wasn't that slow for plain text pages... even on dialup
it's amazing the kind of thing people think is worth rewarding these days
Eh?
I'm giving money to a podcast I like, via the platform they use.
They have various payment tiers, I picked one I'm happy with and pay that. I assume they've factored in the platform fee.
I'm not sure how this is imoral? Using a service you personally don't rate doesn't make it imoral?
Plus, I'm grown up enough to know things change over time, and maybe rating something on an experience from 10-15 years ago isn't the best. (The web site just loaded for me in 1.1 seconds, which seems fairly quick compared to some).
Also... other than the inital payment I don't actually _use_ patreon, it's just a monthly sub for a podcast I like.
it'll be like Wikipedia or the Guardian, where a tiny minority support the majority who won't pay, and then we all end up with regular begging appeals, and a precarious existence for the publication.
No comment on the Guardian, but Wikipedia is no where close to being in a precarious existential state.
They beg yearly, but neglect to mention their ever increasing cash pile and imply that contributions fund Wikipedia only; when they're also used for things like political lobbying. (Ever met anyone who created the content on there that got paid?)
I'm not saying Wikipedia shouldn't solicit for donations, but when their total assets increased $17M between 2023 and 2024 (see here) I'm not sure they're short of cash.
Again... none of which goes to contributors or moderators.
> No comment on the Guardian, but Wikipedia is no where close to being in a precarious existential state.
The Guardian sits atop a £1.2 billion (and growing) mountain of assets in the form of The Scott Trust. Their exhortations for donations ring hollow
My tuppence: the problem is that one has to spend *a lot* of time on any one website to add up to even a tenner a year in value. The average Netflix user spends 3hrs on a day there….for £72 a year with ads or twice that without. You’d have to spend half an hour per day on ElReg to have the same value proposition, and that’s not likely.
I would think, more like an aggregated club of websites, subscribe to one, get them all, everybody gets a fraction, makes more sense. This has been the endgame for TV. The problem is this soon becomes Nokia walled garden / Spotify / Disney+. What happens is that the owner of the umbrella brand gets all the power. However, it is a real alternative to ad-based funding of the internet.
"So, throwing the floor open, what would you pay if the Reg was ad-free behind a paywall? I'd give them a tenner a year, which I suspect is a lot more than they currently get per regular viewer*. They'd need some offer to drag in new subscribers, or a micropayment offer"
For me, it has to be a number of payment options. One off micro payments for, say 24 hours access, NOT per article, so I can decide if it's a site/service I may be interested in (or 1, 2 or so articles per day for free). A monthly sub that requires ME to renew each month and an annual sub that requires ME to renew. None of this auto-renewing shit. That would very quickly get out of hand and require me to spend a non-trivial amount of time tracking all those subscriptions. And the price point is VERY important too. There are many Youtubers pushing Patreon along the lines of "only the price of a cup of coffee per month". But that can add up to quite a number of cups of coffee per month. Just check your browser history. How many different websites did you visit in just the last month. Imagine tracking each and every one based on subscriptions and see how quickly it adds up real money. If the web goes all pay, or all the better site go pay, we'll almost certainly end up with the most profitable ones being bought up by "big media" and as with all buy-out, the new owners want a quick ROI and put the prices up. It's going to be a fun, but bumpy ride :-)
Out went WordPress. In came pure static pages. Out went all the tracking and cookies. In came ... nothing.
Reads like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, "Once upon a time, in far away land...."
Possibly, just possibly when media enshittification reaches totality a reset will mean writers producing high quality, well researched relevant copy will be worth paying for. While the almost monopolistic media concentration persists there is zero likelihood of any change from that quarter. Smaller highly focused media might well emerge offering some improvement on the current shite if a viable business model existed.
AI generated content might ironically be the the straw that breaks the camel's back. Even at its least worst AI content is inaccurate and misleading.
As an example when reading English stories written in the 1920s I often encountered references to £1 (and 10/-) treasury notes with Bank of England £5 etc notes and recently my curiosity got the better of me and I searched it from my e-reader. The google AI generated summary confidently asserted the treasury notes were issued by the US Treasury. Bollocks. A short PDF The Bank of England Note: A Short History from the Bank itself clarifies.
More like the thirty tonnes of rubble that broke the camel's back..
Even behemoths like YouTube are beginning to struggle with the endless stream of generated shite.. Most of the time if I look for something on Google, after scrolling irritably past the AI summary, the first few results are usually AI-generated shitsites
I will try that!
The worst ones are recipes. Almost always some shitty aggregator site if not completely AI-generated webshites..
Interestingly "beef wellington fuck" takes me fairly directly to Gordon Ramsay, so it sort of works..
Try asking to remove copilot or Gemini and of it goes and gives the standard "application wizard" or " go into system / application and turnover from there
Anyone searching (or on here) knows that these are not how to do it
It's just give for standard app removal and replaced <app name> with copilot/Gemini
I've hated and distrusted all forms of advertising since I read The Space Merchants as a young boy back in the late 70s. I'm currently living an almost ad-free life. I was a bit concerned when I had to drop uBlock Origin (but thankfully UBLite is doing almost as well) and am a bit concerned about what is going to replace Sky Q in a few years. Sky's online service claims to allow ad-skipping for an additional fee which I'll pay but I have concerns that since they gain the power to prevent me skipping adverts they might start to slip 'special' adverts in which can't be skipped even if you've paid.
Welcome to Streaming World. I have a Amazon Prime account and the streaming is a doubtful bonus on good delivery. It used to be ad-free but now increasingly there are unskippable ads in the programmes which pisses me off mightily. I still have a Humax Freesat recorder about 15 years old. It's on its 3rd hard disk but the electrolytics in the PSU haven't gone bang yet. It is a godsend for skipping ads on commercial channels so we rarely see the complete weirdness that seems to be de rigeur in the TV ad space here in the UK.
I owned a Humax FreeSat DVR at one point. It was a good machine. I've also owned a Humax Freeview DVR but vaguely recall there were some issues with that.
Both machines seemed better designed than the equivalent Sky box. Much lower power consumption in standby and helped by a more powerful EPG. I got rid of my FreeSat box when Sky Q came out and I gained the ability to record up to six channels simultaneously. Up 'till then I'd had to juggle things around recording from Free to air channels on the Humax box.
I still have one small bit of memorabilia from the FreeSat box. There was a time several years ago when The Horror Channel I think it was broadcast Alien Cargo - possibly only the second time it'd ever been broadcast in the UK. It's a favourite of mine due to its surprising scientific accuracy in a lot of areas. Anyway as you probably know the FS box allowed you to copy recordings onto USB if they weren't encrypted and it apparently wasn't.
Consequently I have a copy of AC on USB and (say it quietly) in the cloud.
I have one of these PoS.
STB's and DVR's can serve as excellent tests of UI design. It's UI is utter s**te.
The Humanx has no picture-in-picture, so you can't watch something in an ad break (either on another channel or recorded), wipes out any your record list if you update it's EPG, and doesn't allow you to rewind the channel you were watching when you switched to watch a video.
All of which the Sagemcom I had could do. Unfortunately one mug of coffee on the vents in the top.....
Sure there are lots of choices when designing such a UI.
I just can't figure out why they chose such p**s poor ones.
May I mention MythTV ?
Record free-to-air TV - check. Record multiple things at once (limited only by your hardware) - check. Skip ads - check. Choice of EPGs - check (can use on-air EPG, or a commercial one like Schedules Direct.) Very configurable - check. Share one set of content from multiple TVs - check. Free of commercial enshittification & crippleware - check.
OK, it's not in the "unbox, plug in, use" category, but once you get used to it you never want to go back to live TV ever again.
I grew up in that wonderful timeframe when internet websites could be free and the websites not only survived but thrived off the non-intrusive ads run on their websites. But slowly, over time, ads have become more intrusive, larger, taking more screen real estate, and killing the very websites I loved. And now those ads dont even pay their bills.
This is not the first wesbite that I frequent, that has decided to ditch the ads and return to a simpler time. They've mostly turned to subscription style models, or patreons, or just selling physical merch to try and pay the bills. I dont doubt it's stressful as hell to make that leap, but i sincerely hope it works out, as the more that do it, the better for everyone.
I've slowly come around to the Patreon style model, and started funding a few sites that I visit regularly. I still wish I didnt have to, but if I can splash a few dollars a month to slow the Entshitification of my little corner of the web, then I've got to do it.
I do wonder about the economics of not serving ads. It probably reduces the delivered website by 90%, thus reducing the server bills massively, so whilst you get less cash per view, it also costs significantly less cash per view. I'd be really interested in an article from El Reg on the various costs/balances. Probably if more data on actual cost/reward there, more websites might give it a try...
People will even pay for ads, if they find them useful. Back in the days before Ebay, people would go out and buy copies of Exchange and Mart - a publication that consisted entirely of advertising. People bought local newspapers not just for the journalism, but to check through the classifieds for the obituaries and see what was on at the cinema. Hobby magazines were bought not solely for the projects, but for the advertisers who supplied the materials.
The real problem, I think, is not advertising itself, but that advertisers and publishers are now almost entirely decoupled and the symbiotic relationship between them and their readers has been disrupted: advertising has become almost entirely parasitic.
Of course the nature of advertising has changed: you don't need to advertise an ECC85 for 5/6 in Practical Wireless in a world where suppliers have their own websites. However, you'd think that "community of interest" sites would still offer a useful target audience. Unfortunately, rather than brokering productive relationships between advertisers and publishers, adtech seems simply to be spraying slurry indiscriminately across the media. Perhaps it's time to remove the middleman.
> Back in the days before Ebay, people would go out and buy copies of Exchange and Mart - a publication that consisted entirely of advertising
In the US there was Computer Shopper, that was an inch thick monthly of just ads, which is still fondly remembered despite going away in 2009.
In the late 1980s and earlyish 1990s we had a freebie weekly publication in San Diego I think called Byte Buyer that was chock full of ads with a bit of mostly useful editorial content. Useful for checking memory prices, etc.
I'm old enough to remember those things called newspapers that were also chock full of ads and they never bothered me. I'd even read the ones that were of interest like Samy's Camera (a chain of camera shops).
The difference between ads in a newspaper and on the Internet is that the newspaper ads didn't track you. They also didn't try to jump out of the page and throttle your brain with distracting animation1.
I'd be more inclined to accept online ads if they were simple static images that I could look at or ignore as I wished and otherwise left me to read in relative peace.
________________
1 That's also why I've gotten rid of our television -- I can't stand the yelling, flashing, and jiggling, not to mention the machinegunned recitation of the lists of side effects in the prescription pharmaceutical ads (yes, we have those here in the States).
"In the US there was Computer Shopper, that was an inch thick monthly of just ads, which is still fondly remembered despite going away in 2009."
It was also published in the UK from 1988. It probably had as much journalism and reviews as normal magazines, but as you say, way, way more advertising. And back then, that was a useful thing as the adverts were 99% targetted at the correct audience. No random ads for 1st class train tickets or Viagra :-)
"Hobby magazines were bought not solely for the projects, but for the advertisers who supplied the materials."
Yep. Those magazines even had an advertiser index somewhere near the back so you could easily find the ads from whatever company you were interested in.
I've run a local history website for some time. Originally we used the BT community obligation service and since that ended a friend of the group who has budget has hosted it for us on WordPress along with his own huge site. We don't need advertising and probably wouldn't if that help discontinued.
The other day I got a message through the contact page offering some service to use adsense. I was most upset when my snottygram reply bounced because his email address didn't exist - either that or Gmail closed it for spamming. Interestingly he gave one name as contact name on the website and another as a sig, neither Indian which I suspect is his real name. It looks as if the leads generation lark has extended as far as selling ads these days.
Depends. Who owns it now and are they likely to cash out to YouTube or Facebook if the money is right? We can have nice things or we can have successful things. We rarely get both because some billionaire comes along and wants even more $billions and enshitifies everything s/he touches.
So successful websites might become *binary* websites?
The actual website, delivering the actual content, without a paywall.
And a subscription collection/donation website that delivers the funds.
Intriguing idea for a possible future.
Too bad the future Bill Gates suggested in "Hard Drive," never happened. People trading controlled amounts of their time and private data for micro-payments which could be used to fund other subscription sites.
<sigh>
I can't remember how long ago it was I first heard the term "micro-payments" being mooted as way of paying for stuff on t'internet. I don't think it's happened anywhere yet. I guess no one is interested in the 1p/1¢ per page/article. They never saw Richard Prior in Superman and/or don't understand the phrase "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves" :-)
No, we don't need that.
The Internet was not created and released to the public with any guarantee that money could be made. No one has any god given right to income or profit. It must be earned and the public is fickle and the lords of the manor are not fair.
A hard lesson that will obviously have to learned again... the hard way.
That is why we live in the soviet utopia of free books. And authors only do their work in addition to their job as a factory worker, eh ?
JK Rowling became a billionaire with books and tales !
Others make more moderate amounts, yet still live nicely from bookwriting.
In the teal world, only few people want to play GNUJesus and live off social security.
Not so much. JK is an extreme outlier. Few actually make a living from writing, even at a minimum wage level.
Most write because they can't not write.
Currently Monopolists like Google, Amazon and Facebook feast on "free" content created by millions of authors. They make phantastic profits off this. Also, they play tyrannic censor on behalf of shady elitist groups such as the financiers behind them.
During the Covid Vacinne Selling Scam they coordinated with CISA to censor the h3ll out of any opposite voice.
Only on Russian-Dubaian Telegram we had uncensored information flow !
All the folks who yearn for the freebies from these Giga-Corporations should realize that they are enslaved to their tyrannic whims.
Freedom comes from small, independent and competitive suppliers. Not from behemoths who rival GOSPLAN in size and structure!
Freedom has very serious economic aspects.
This shows how rotte3n the FAANG is.
For some sites that are good I'll pay. The amount of magazines I used to buy each week/month was worth it, even at the end with magazines like micromart where you got it, you already knew most of the "new" articles and news. The sales section was always a laugh, but editorial or writers articled were worth the money - good on a Friday evening with a quiet coffee or by the bank on a day's fishing
Surprised nobody has come up with a community-based news system, where you just add your favourites sites, a yearly payment based on some sort of metric and the user feasts on all they can handle, sites all share a % of the revenue. Yes, you'll get some big winners but no adverts or fussing with Patreon etc.
Depends on the site. Any reason for not upgrading your fFrefox version?
My ancient 32-bit netbook used solely for web browsing had Firefox whinging about the upcoming certocalypse and the fairly old 32-bit Ubuntu on it was also unable to be updated any further. It took a while, but I found AntiX 32-bit Linux[*] is still current and likely to be for a while yet and now has the latest Firefox running on it. It staves off the landfilling of that netbook for a at least a few more years :-)
The "big boys" in Linux-land have abandoned 32-bit now. I find AntiX nicer to look at, and more memory/cpu efficient than that old Ubuntu was. The Asus EeePC netbook is hobbled by only 1G RAM and none upgradable without surgery involving solder, but now has yet another new lease of life after originating with Windows XP, then Win 7 before going Linux :-)
"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's one gigantic sales brochure."
--Douglas Adams (paraphrased}
It's pretty impressive in terms of response
"Static" web sites can be pretty impressive.
I first saw this in (of all things) space launch guidance systems.
You can do launch with either a lookup table of angles, altitudes and thrust levels or a fully closed-loop system.
The former is pre-verified and built offline before being loaded. The latter uses onboard sensors and is (in principle) difficult to test (or was with the slow hardware of the 60's and 70's)
But the later Shuttle flights used a sort of hybrid approach to implement what they called "DayOfLaunchI-Load*Update. This took weather readings and built the tilt-table within less than 2 hrs of launch, then "flew" a simulated flight of the Shuttle.
In the same way offline tools can be built to maintain a complex website without inserting shedloads of cruft. As UT shows, the results can be remarkably effective.
*Information-Load, to the onboard data table that ran the launch.
Remember the days when websites used server-side scripting to assemble what they wanted to serve you. Nowadays, it all seems to be client-side scripting requiring 100's if 1000's of time the power of the Houston Apollo Mission Control just to render a fucking web page that's not just pulling in content from multiple sites, but even the scripts creating the page are pulling in libraries from multiple sites all over the world. And lets not even go NEAR the "newspaper" sites with their 300-400 "ad partners" tracking you with cookies, sessions and pixels, all snatching a bit of your CPU power and data bandwidth at your expense so they can make a tiny bit more money.
And just to cap it off, many of those sites are not interactive and don't need all that tech to update you second by second because the content might not change even year to year on many pages.
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