Historically, even the “lottery winning” successful artists got such bad deals. The Beatles (famously, I thought, but I’m having trouble finding a source today…) received one penny for every dollar earned, but a fraction of that penny was held back for marketing, and another, and another…
I’m for publishers and other representatives of the old system pulling away from the digital world close to entirely. Their whole business model requires scarcity that used to exist when creators were on the other side of the world and fans were lucky to have them come within 200 miles for a chance to enjoy them, and in the meantime, want to buy a record to experience them at home.
Now, creators can be in our hands, on our desks, and easily in our living rooms. The middlemen that brought those scarce physical objects to us (records, tapes, vhs and audio, books, etc) aren’t needed anymore, because the distribution of the art or idea is instant and on demand and already paid for by the communications package we all subscribe to.
Fans can connect directly with creators, who no longer need millions of fans to give them a huge slice of overall music (or other creative work) revenue. Just a few hundred devoted fans is enough to live comfortably, instead of being a superstar.
I’m dreaming, though…
ETA: the publishers could rethink their role and evolve to help creatives reach their audience, but, currently, they impede that. Creatives do better (per fan) when they know their fans and can connect directly with them.
After reading the adalytics report, it sounds more like ads that were meant to be viewed mid-stream and (presumably) on YouTube content, only when clicked, were instead served on auto-play, looping and muted on third-party websites that donn meet the standards of the sold product.
So like you said, but it seems more that buyers thought their ads would run on certain locations and circumstances that ensured higher viewer interest, and instead were being charged for ads played off screen, behind other ads, and some even viewed by “declared bots”.
One point I forgot to make above: I’m not sure if we can say the Q3 2023 revenue growth can be related to the new ad-blocking-blocking or not, but I suspect there’s a piece of that in there.
Having to disable protected services to stop updates from rebooting in the middle of a nine hour encode was it for me. Checking on my encode at what should have been 90% and find my PC at the login screen was it for me. Handbrake works better for me in Linux, too.
I understood you weren’t advocating for Windows (as an Arch user? The very idea!), but your mention of your friend returning to Windows got me thinking about my friends laptop and how icky it felt.
Glad there are fewer and fewer barriers to using Linux full time these days.
My GF had a Windows laptop until this week and her last straw was three reboots in a row, each with over an hour of waiting for updates on shutdown and startup. She never asked for the updates, and wasn’t asked ifbahe wanted to perform them.
Now her password is required for any updates, and she controls her computer,as it should be.