Ask HN: If not ads, then how are websites supposed to monetize?
We all hate ads, especially the ones that keep jumping at us while we are trying to read an article about Iron Man. The worst part: they are not even related to the article or the entire theme of the website. To counter this, we install ad blockers. Peace.
But the idea that I am probably not allowing the little money that the blog/website owner can make from those ads after putting in effort to write a good, well-researched and quality article feels bad. I disabled ads not because of that intention, I want them to make the money they can. I am not able to prevent any other tech giants from misusing my data anyway.
What is a resolution to this? I know many blogs have a donate option, but not everyone can donate. Not every website/blog can get a sponsorship. And ads are annoying, to the extent that a user might not visit again. Thus, the question: If not ads, then how are websites supposed to monetize?
49 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadThe question of whether politics can enable curiosity, and curiosity can enable politics. (Use the finite resolution, Luke!)
The answer to the modified question where "politics" is replaced by "commerce" is trivially true as evidenced by your implicitly answering your original question. The intersection of nerds and jocks is more than mythical-- it is rde of this website.
So, the three estates of ongoing human concerns, not just in the microcosm of our minds, but also as the object of martial zen, practiced by the human macroorganism on itself.
To paraphrase: can the lords spiritual (as guardians of curiosity) be Friends with the lords temporal (as the de facto guardians of humanity)
(We would also have liked French mathematicians to have been in that liminal space, but humanity tends to pay more attention to Sartres than Camuses)
*(Like a Spinoza to the Hobbesian Ellul -- or the proto-Taoist Sv Fedorov)
PS Following deserves a close-reading in light of the same question but where "curiosity" is replaced by "commerce" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cre...
Indeed, our cybernetic sojourn through the noosphere leads us to ponder: can the digital agora, that grand bazaar of bits and memes, transmute the base metal of click-commerce into the philosopher's stone of genuine epistemic enrichment? (Use the infinite scroll, Neo!)
The answer to the modified question where "commerce" is replaced by "cat GIFs" is trivially true, as evidenced by the inexorable rise of feline-based attention economies. The intersection of LOLcats and Kantian imperatives is more than mythical -- it is the very substrate of this website's collective unconscious.
So, we find ourselves navigating the three estates of ongoing human concerns, not just in the microcosm of our browser tabs, but also as the object of digital zen, practiced by the human macroorganism on its own user interface.
To paraphrase: can the lords of viral content (as guardians of engagement metrics) be Friends with the lords of ad-tech (as the de facto guardians of monetization)?
(We would also have liked French post-structuralists to have been in that liminal space, but humanity tends to pay more attention to Baudrillards than Bourdieus)
*(Like a Zuckerberg to the Jobsian Musk -- or the proto-Memetic Haraway)
PS: The following deserves a close-reading in light of the same question but where "curiosity" is replaced by "cryptocurrency" https://www.example.com/definitely-not-a-rickroll
but MST=Murderous Saint Ted (Kaczynski)
and Sv Fedorov should have been
Saint Nikolay (Feodorov)
Also that question has been asked (or rather parodied) on mass media before, I don't claim novelty
https://youtu.be/wqgkZDbe4Xk (Warning: Scottish, pace young Obiwan)
But maybe I propose to elide commerce in the wanksmith's bag of tricks
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxu7fMeS5uc
(in those days, I understand the process of selecting which branch of the military an officer candidate was best suited for consisted of asking them what "2+2" might be.
If they answer "4", artillery.
If they first count on their fingers under the table, and then answer "4", infantry.
If they yell "3" while slamming their fist on the table before one even gets to the "might be" part of the question, cavalry.)
(Suchet volunteered for the cavalry, so that takes him out of the rubric, I suppose!)
P140-->
Horst Poller: Bewältigte Vergangenheit. Das 20. Jahrhundert, erlebt, erlitten, gestaltet. Verlag Olzog, 2010
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_von_Seydlitz-Kurzbac...
>A few days later, Seydlitz fled the German lines under fire from his own side with a group of other officers
Another virtuoso in disobedience!
Non Greek viewers might mistake that for teutonic infantry but its probably actually just Ἱερὸς Λόχος reenactment outfits
Quite reasonable.
As we know, traditionally, some of the best websites were not intended to be financially viable.
It is fundamentally anti-consumer and is a proven, sure fire way to annoy your visitors and encourage them to use ad blocking --- which more than half now do according to some recent stats.
Personalized ads are the dumbest idea since the invention of advertising. When more than half of your target audience actively refuses to engage and cooperate, you might be doing something wrong.
The ad networks are an opaque "black box". You only get to see what they allow you to see. It is essentially built around faith.
It's difficult for advertisers to compare to alternatives because they have effectively monopolized the market.
For consumers, the most sensible response is increasingly ad blocking. As this trend increases, advertisers will (hopefully) be forced to start abandoning the concept as ineffective.
In the long term, the big winner in all this is likely to Amazon --- where advertising is mostly context based.
Customers obviously can see performance.
How is it that you imagine that you know this better than these people do?
Then, data transparency is a thing and advertisers can obviously also measure their performance.
For example, you and I have no idea if the ad networks are bidding against their own advertisers in order to drive revenue. They hold all the cards.
Ad fraud is a growing business and ad networks are not the ones getting hurt directly by it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/677466/digital-ad-fraud-...
A cryptocurrency plug-in that lets visitors purchase 1 USDT on your blog and then give 1 cent to every read they enjoy. It will be quick as you don't have to invoke your bank every time you donate to a blog and it will be fast barring the initial purchase of the cryptos because the plug-in is also a wallet which you can send from. This plug-in is powered by Cryptocurrency Micropayments Company and can be installed and used on all blogs.
And the sites that use it like: https://blog.codinghorror.com
Single ad per page. Let sites monetize, but 50% ad space is stupid.
And businesses are best when they do.
As long as consumers are getting their money's worth.
And the internet was better when most websites did not monetize, since there was no need.
For about the first decade, major ISPs automatically provided you with enough web space for a personal home page on their server, when you signed up to be on the internet with them.
Perfect for a text blog (nobody called them that yet) or something like that, and the normal state of affairs, as intended, was that most people with an internet account could post a web page at no additional cost, so there was no need to monetize anything. If all you wanted to do was have a website, that was expected of everybody eventually once they were on the internet to begin with. All you had to do was upload a well-formed index.html file to your personal web address space according to your ISPs generic procedure.
The main reason to monetize a website (a good one too) would be for online business use. Almost all other websites were never supposed to rely on a monetization strategy just to cover costs. That way an online outreach or business could at least be launched without the need for any further financial resources. Obviously the right thing to do. It was expensive enough just being on the internet.
And there was no need for ads or financial consideration at all on non-business websites, which made up the vast majority for a while there, and coexisted perfectly with Amazon when it came along as a purely commercial website. When ads show up on websites that otherwise have nothing unique to sell, it still instinctively feels so unnecessary. Rather than triggering positive consumer response, it feels more like you're not getting your money's worth for some reason before you even buy, reducing your inclination for spending even further below the non-motivated level you had when you first came to the non-business website.
When it comes to monetized websites worth visiting, I still enjoy the ones best that are the online part of an ambitious business, rather than having the website be the business itself.
Either way, as long as consumers are getting their money's worth, I can't complain.
But there used to be so much more refuge for non-consumers and information surfers.
And by now with the cumulative joy that has been lost on the path to a fully-monetized online experience, it's quite disgraceful by comparison.
Then that textual content would be locked behind paywalls and subscribers would pay a monthly fee to access vast quantities of high quality textual content without ads. Authors would get decently paid if they have the audience.
Cheapskates would be stuck in the swamp with ads, scammers and AI slop, until they pony up.
The realest web creators, after accepting this fact, will continue to do what they've always done. Whether it's a recipe site, a blog, or both, they'll do it because they enjoy it. Thankfully, even if they don't earn any money through their website, websites are so cheap to operate these days that they're practically free.
If nobody wants to pay for it, and you don't want to make it for free, maybe there's a case to be made that it just doesn't have to be made at all?
Ads just force a market to optimize for clickbait and readership, not quality. Having fewer websites, each more expensive and intentional, would probably drastically increase the signal to noise ratio of the web.
We could probably lose 80 to 90 percent of the current content on the web and not miss most of it...
Unless you are saying you would be willing to pay up front for every website you want to visit. Is that right?
I'm grateful for the fact that so many people are open to share their knowledge for free. But even in this case, I'm paying for the internet to visit their websites. And for the amount of information I get from HN, I'd pay for a membership subscription.
One is entitled to add ads to one's webpages. But the computer is mine and I'm totally free to not display them. The same way I'm free to mute my TV and switch channels when the ads start. Or skip forward on the podcast. It's my personal computing/entertainment space, I decide what I'm exposed to.
My pie-in-the-sky theory is that if enough people avoided "abusive" ad sites, they would change their behavior. But if ad blockers are used instead, the bad sites get more abusive to circumvent them, and the responsible sites become unsustainable.
If not, if they're staffed and hosted in-country, I'd have thought their costs and profits would scale to regional costs of living. Like it takes less money to run a paper in Somalia than in New York. Is that a wrong assumption?
If I disagreed with the customer experience of a physical store, the solution would not be to go into the store anyway and just steal the merchandise so I didn't have to communicate with customer service. I would go somewhere else. If enough people did that, the store may decide it is worth their while to change.
I live well from affiliate marketing. I don't need to pitch anything; I merely mention available options where relevant. I wouldn't consider these mention to be ads as they don't affect the content at all. That allows me to work on the website full time, so it works.
Donations don't work. At all. Even the people I personally assist over multiple emails, the people who tell me that the website saved their lives don't donate. Donations are around 1% of my income, if that.
I considered state funding, since I'm doing their job for them. I seriously explored that option, but my contacts who get such funding made it very clear that it would be a waste of time.
So what's left? Bringing customers to businesses, and getting a commission for it. It's the only option that leaves me fully in control.
When and ad comes on the radio, I can change the station. When an add comes on the TV, I can change the channel. I cannot force either one to not broadcast the ad to me and go back to normal programming.
In that sense they're not leaving. They're consuming my work and occasionally even creating more work, and not giving anything in return.
This is something I'm okay with. In my case it works that way by design. My website is meant to be a free resource. However in the absence of paying users, we're stuck with commercial patrons. Mine have no leverage, but that's very unusual.
There's a huge difference between "here are all 20 banks that exists" and "here is an ad paid for by the bank".
What we really need is a decent, ubiquitous micropayment system. I don't have any hope that it would be viable unless one of the big players (Google) got on board, and why would they when they make a killing from serving ads and hijacking people's attention? The enshittification continues.
Disagree. Users who can't tolerate ads are already using an ad blocker.