The Dish and My Non-Love of Ads
So Andrew Sullivan of The Dish is taking his blog independent, and using a no-ad pay model. This has been getting a lot of buzz on the internet.
After taking a look at his existing blog and finding it interesting, I paid my $19.99 for a year. Hopefully I’ll enjoy the blog!
Why did I take this rather impulsive leap and support a blog I haven’t ever really read?
Simple – I hate the ad model. Repeat after me “If you don’t pay for it, you’re not the customer, you are the product.”
I’m putting my money where my mouth is by supporting blogs like this, iTunes, Netflix etc.
(This is also why Hulu can go pound sand – I’ll only watch ads in TV shows – especially ones I pay for – only if there is no alternative. Long live Netflix & iTunes!)
Once you start to get your entertainment without ads, it’s hard to go back.
It really bugs me that even though the New York Times has a pay model, you still get ads on the web. Why not have an option to eliminate them for a higher cost? I don’t get it. I understand that printing and selectively delivering two versions of a printed newspaper isn’t practical. But online? It’s a Simple Matter of Software. Could be done easily.
My time has value. I’ll gladly pay what something is worth to watch, listen, or read it.
Blu-Ray
About a year ago I broke down, violated my pledge to stay out of the HD format wars, and bought an HD-DVD player (the competitor to Blu-Ray) at Costco.
A month or two later the HD-DVD consortium admitted defeat and bowed out.
So now I have a bunch of HD-DVD movies and a player. Yet another obsolete media format to add to the shelf next to my Laserdisc collection. 🙂
At that point I pledged to ignore Blu-Ray, and do what I should have done from the start – just wait for network distribution. I’m sticking to that so far.
Now – here comes the crazy – I pre-ordered Firefly on Blu-Ray from Amazon when it was announced months ago. I’m planning to buy it even if I never own a Blu-Ray player.
Why you ask? Because any chance I get to make the folks that cancelled Firefly look bad I will take.