The Hidden Price of Free Content

We’ve been told, repeatedly, that the arrival of the 21st century has brought a new age of information. That the world is at our fingertips when the breadth and depth of content is so vast, and more importantly, free.

So it’s no wonder that the idea of paying for online content is so unappealing. Technology has brought us access to millions of web pages, news sources, educational sites and cat videos. The less content is monetized, the less incentive there is for any content creator to put a price tag on their work; after all, who wants would pay for content that could be accessed freely with a simple google search?

Yet this mentality reveals something troubling about our generation; the demand that content creators keep generating quality content without receiving any money to support the quality of the content. Most of us, myself included, don’t like to think about how the creators make a living if they produce their work for free. We like to think that everything just comes from the magical sparkling realm of the internet, that anything from five minute skits to entire encyclopedias are spontaneously generated every few seconds.

But content creators, whether they’re journalists working on an online newspaper or filmmakers uploading free movies on Youtube, don’t have that luxury. So in the face of demands for free and quality content, they turn to another way of making money; advertising.

It seems like a foolproof model. Thousands congregate on quality sites, paying for the content with their views. Advertisers notice the popularity of the content and offer the creators lucrative deals to host adverts. Everyone is happy.

But the problem occurs when you consider the ineffectiveness of online advertising in terms of generating revenue for advertisers. A recent study estimated that for every 1,000 daily users an app gets, the creator generates only $1 USD, (smallbusiness.chron.com, n.d). When factoring in the difficulty of getting noticed by people in a field so crowded by content, it’s nearly impossible to sustain a living or a business purely on advertising alone.

This is terrible for the creators concerned. But if the high rates of online piracy are any indication, most members of our generation aren’t concerned about the moral implications of not paying for content. In Singapore, for instance, 7 out of 10 teenagers admitted to downloading content illegally.

So creators have no choice but to compromise their own content in exchange for revenue generation.

The New York Times recently ran an article on female incarceration in American prisons. The caption read “as the number of women inmates soars, so does the need for policies and programs that meet their needs”. It’s an article that I might have used as a reference for a history assignment, or an editorial for our newspaper. It’s a source that I trust.

The article was sponsored by Netflix in an effort to promote their television show “Orange Is The New Black”.

This phenomenon is known as Native Advertising, a type of online advertising that “matches the form and function of the platform on which it appears”. And it’s becoming increasingly common. These advertisements do not appear as ads. Rather, they are embedded into news stories, opinion pieces, films or even blogs with barely intelligible warnings to disguise product promotion. A blogger, for instance, might choose to mention that they use a certain phone, without disclosing that it’s an advertisement.

Students at RCHK are all required to do OPVL (analyzing the benefits of using particular sources from a historian’s perspective) tasks. We understand the trouble with huge media sources like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal choosing to undermine their integrity by integrating advertisements into genuine articles. This gives out the perception of representativeness and independence even though they are manipulating narratives to meet the needs of their clients. In an information-based society, it’s crucial that we can ensure that our sources convey information because it’s topical and important, and not because an advertiser paid them to.

But the effects extend far beyond compromising our news sources. There is an increasingly prominent trend of Instagram and Youtube subtly integrating sponsored products into their content. Instagram star Essina O’Neil details the stringent requirements corporate advertisers placed on the personal photos that she posted, trying to disguise ‘‘contrived product placement” with authenticity. It makes it all the more difficult to tell if the people we idolize genuinely believe in the brand, or if it is a consequence of corporate endorsement and the need to make a living through advertisements.

We can lament about the diminishing trust in the news and our media. But it’s important to acknowledge the true culprits here. When we refuse to pay for media by pirating content, or denounce youtubers who start fundraising campaigns online, we increase the necessity for creators to compromise their content to make a living. We all love free Youtube videos, free news sources and free streamed videos. But herein lies our own hypocrisy: we cannot continue to demand free and independent content while refusing to pay the price for it.