It’s reaching back a ways, but I remember when they called out a technology that swapped ads on hotel wi-fi for other content.
It’s bad when other people do it.
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So that means you’re the wrong person to ask, but I’m going to ask anyway: Can you ask the BoingBoing powers-that-abide to please add an option for a no-ads paid subscription? I’d much rather support them with a few bucks a month than to be given a page with 21 trackers and 41 third party cookies on it.
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This right here. I’d shell out a couple bucks a month for a content only, ad/tracker free experience.
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And even if you don’t, you could set up a Patreon account for now, and then I won’t feel guilty for running industrial strength ad blockers.
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I’m certainly not in a position to say if their opinion has changed given my complete lack of anything to do with the authorship / ownership side of this site, but in the past their answer to this has always been a hard “no”, it doesn’t work, and the time for the internet to be like that has passed due to user choice. Same with a paywall, I imagine.
Now, obviously, that can change and they can change their mind on it, but at least in the past they’ve made it clear that it is not an option and would not offset enough to have a “subscription side”
It’s an unfortunate truth. Off hand I can’t think of many things that have made this model work. I’m reckon adding it as an “option” for the few of us willing to support in this fashion would require enough lift/maintenance that the ROI on technical investment would never make sense.
But still, a person can dream.
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We really, really want to do this!
While the “most successful patreon in history” part is probably no longer true (uh, thanks pandemic I guess?) The issue still remains that there’s no out-of-the-box way for us to do this - most sites with subscriptions are owned by a large parent who can do this development work, or built them in the golden era of online advertising. hopefully we will get there one day.
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By the by, as long as you’re updating this, you might as well remove this section, which is completely irrelevant now:
- We Collect Information When You Suggest A Link
When you use our form to suggest a link, we request (1) a title for the item you’re suggesting; (2) an URL of the suggested website; and (3) a description of the suggested site. We use this information to assess your suggestion…
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They don’t, but these kinds of services come and go constantly. It’s hard (and usually not worthwhile) for YouTube to go after them. As others have said, the real losers are the content creators. YT’s losses from a service like Air TV are a rounding error, but it could be 20% of the revenue for us content creators.
Resharing services like this also mess up our metrics on YT, which is how the algorithm decides whether to surface our content. So using something like Air TV hurts content creators in multiple ways.
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If we believe corporate.air.tv they claim to increase revenue:
If you have your own video content, AIR.TV will distribute it to the more than 1,000 sites who rely on AIR.TV for 3rd-party video. If you have a YouTube channel, AIR.TV will automatically swap your YouTube embeds for AIR.TV embeds and deliver 10-20X higher yield than you get from YouTube.
That sounds fishy to me though.
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I think that applies to “creators” who are running embeds in their own site - someone like Verge. For a creator who has their video embedded on a site like BB, I think it works differently.
Since they claim to only link swap on content they have licensed, there must be a different revenue channel back to creators who’ve opted to license to air[,]tv
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Since air dot tv is backed by Warner Media, I’m going to assume the content licensing is legit. On that basis, one could say that BoingBoing is doing content creators a favor, letting them get increased revenues from air dot tv playing instead of YouTube’s version of their content. But there have to be consequences for that as VeronicaConnor notes, including not getting play counts, likes or the option for people to subscribe to their YouTube Channel. So the separate licensing deals may include a bit of an own goal for content creators. And I don’t see where all the magic money is coming from. Can air dot tv really pay BB and content creators and themselves so much more money than Google, up to 10-20x more? That seems a bit unbelievable, and, even if true, doesn’t seem sustainable. But I can understand why BB would want to use the service to see if it can live up to its promises.
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I wonder if it just discourages traffic to those videos in the first place? Sure, perhaps a content creator may make more per click, but they’re most likely sacrificing their audience in the process since some people don’t like being spammed. Personally I have little patience for video ads, and most of the time would rather just not watch the video at all and move on to something else, which is not hard to do online. Attention is the main commodity online and air.tv is anathema to getting such attention. I pay YouTube money for an ad-free experience, which is fair to me, and would gleefully pay boing boing as well.
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Agreed. I stop autoplay ads & skip the whole video rather than being subjected to commercial TV. Can I ask what industrial-strength ad-blockers people recommend? Also, @orenwolf, thank you for engaging with this topic, I appreciate it.
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Not mine to update, but I will suggest it to TPTB. 
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There are no demons in this straightforward thing.
We have seen many video resharing services in the past, and even tried one, but none seemed to have the rights to the content they claimed. Air.TV has given us enough reason to believe they are only swapping out videos they have the rights for, and that both the content creators and we are being paid. In this case, we are happy to give it a try.
I believe most of the videos you should see ‘the swap’ on are such things as Warner movie trailers and Warner Music videos – but if their licensing team is doing more than that they are earning their revenue share.
If we find out they aren’t meeting expectations, we will be as happy to part ways with Air.TV as we have with a myriad of other advertising partners. Much like every other decision we’ve made around this, we will not share information beyond updating the privacy policy when necessary.
The back office story of boing boing is as colorful and interesting as the rest of our work, yet not one we have any interest in making public.
I apologize for the typo in the addition to the privacy policy for this. It is fixed.
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