Blame consumers for this. If a company sells a service for $10/mo ad-free and $9/mo completely loaded with ads, most people will pick the latter plan. Why won't they offer it then?
Because if they did the 9$ ads would plummet in price paid to the platform because it implies to the advertisers the consumers have no purchasing capability and may be price sensitive or else they would shell out the extra dollar. If they don't offer it and still sell adds they can demand advertisers pay the premium as the consumer has disposable income to buy the service and is likely price insensitive since they are now paying for something that was free.
Is this actually true? It's one of those bits of "telephone wisdom" I've heard passed from commenter to commenter on Hacker News (and Slashdot before that) for as long as I can remember, but nobody ever seems to have a primary source for it, it's always been a "just trust me" bit of knowledge.
Seriously. There’s a lot of spaces where the options are pigeonholed. Where the middle option, if it exists, exists to ladder, not to provide actual value. The problem is you’re using Econ 101 but real world economics is quite a bit more complicated and nuanced
The people most likely to pay the extra $1 are the people who will watch the most, and then they'd lose more than $1/mo from them in ad impressions.
The real question is, why don't they have a completely free plan supported entirely by ads -- don't even try to get a huge premium for the ads, just sell lots of them, even if it's a 1:1 time relationship between ads and content. And then have another plan where you pay money and have zero ads.
Because the latter scheme should be the most profitable. To begin with you open up the market to people who wouldn't pay you at all but would watch ads, so you get more viewers, and on top of that it's effectively try before you buy where the trial requires watching ads, which means you can stay on it as long as you like because the service is still making money. People start watching a show and get tired of seeing ads so they subscribe, when they otherwise would never have started. Then you don't charge $10/mo for no ads, you charge $20, which is worth it to a lot of people because there are so many ads in the free version, and for the people it isn't you still make money from them by showing them lots of ads.
Completely free works sometimes (e.g. Facebook), but not always - the free plan might cannibalize lots of people who would otherwise pay significant amounts of money.
Free plans don't work when the cost of providing a service is high. Google, Facebook and the like can happily give away their products for free and lose money on the bottom N% of users, because it still amounts to pennies. Netflix has high bandwidth and content licensing costs that scale per user, so they need some barrier to entry.
Could they offset bandwidth by using torrents? I mean, it works for the pirates, even though there is no way to enforce people keep seeding (apart from private trackers maybe).
They already do something similar called open connect https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
I am pretty sure the biggest cost is licensing. Also why you see Netflix producing so much original content.
>The people most likely to pay the extra $1 are the people who will watch the most
No the people who pay the extra are the ones who are most able to afford it. The outcome is still the same though as these are the people the advertisers want to target.
The people who can't afford the extra dollar are of very little value to the advertisers.
> No the people who pay the extra are the ones who are most able to afford it. The outcome is still the same though as these are the people the advertisers want to target.
Except that you can't get those people anyway because they value time more than money so they'll just buy some other content with no ads in it from someone else. Also, that doesn't matter if you just price the paid offering at the level that it makes up the actual ad revenue from the people who would use it.
> The people who can't afford the extra dollar are of very little value to the advertisers.
Rubbish. People are often budget constrained because they have high expenses rather than low income, e.g. anyone with kids. Being able to divert that spending to your brand from a competing brand has significant value to advertisers.
No, what happens is people pick the $10 plan and then sometime later, when all the competition has disappeared, they yank on the enshittification handle, and start adding ads to the service and not reduce the price.
> The correct amount of ads for a publication that’s directly supported is zero.
I basically agree with this sentiment, but one place where it can be a tricky balance (not saying that's the case here!) is "native advertising".
For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Which bits of this are ads? Well the behind the scenes post and interview could theoretically have been produced anyway, they're within the scope of the site, but in this case they weren't prioritised, certainly not for launch day, it was only by the whole collaboration being paid for that they got made. Are they ads? Yes they are ads. How would a loyal subscriber feel about those parts being hidden from them though? I imagine they would be miffed about that.
Native advertising like this has a whole spectrum of quality and the worst native ads are very explicitly ads that have no value to typical readers. However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
How do you resolve this? No idea. If I were paying I'd want to see that content assuming it's good quality. Others would not on the basis of bias or a more philosophical opposition to ads.
I like the idea of subject or source focused ad feeds that I can choose to see, but are never thrown in face without my explicit request.
That is a win-win-win for everyone. If the ad feed has a clear focus its viewers will even be self-selected for ad relevancy without surveillance & manipulation involved.
Being able to discover what products their creators/suppliers are trying to popularize on my timing and topic terms is a worthwhile service.
I think this is where fine grained terminology is required. The articles/interview you describe could be described as 'paid content'.
What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
One is designed to keep you on the site (paid content) while the other is attempting to go else where.
The effect of paid content can not be discounted. It's important to recognize that a paid review or a game or movie can result in a different outcome, even subtly.
I remember in the golden days of game review sites it was clear when writers were fudging the reviews because the user experience would be starkly different. The 'we were told to ignore the bugs' excuses always followed because the gig was paid.
> What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
This here is key.
If I'm reading the synopsis for an anime series on a website whose main topic is anime/manga/novels/etc, and I see an ad in an unobstrusive and non-annoying location talking about this one new anime figurine or plushie or some other merch, you bet I'm going to check it out.
These ads don't require cross-site tracking or third-party resources. They can even be shown with the strictest Content-Security-Policy. Even if they send you to a different website.
If I'm logged in, and you give me a way to tell you "I don't like this shit, stop showing me stuff related to this series/artist/etc" (i.e. a clearly tagged blocklist, not a vague "I don't like this" and you guessing what I mean by "this"), I'll even help you refine your ads for me.
But that's only because I care about this content.
And because it's done in a respectful way. For example, I don't mind those classic 88x31 "affiliate links" (ads) or blog rolls (also ads, at least in my eyes), or self-promotion sections (ads) in some communities, or when someone I follow on Bluesky posts about how they're selling a thing (also ad). If one of those gets through my adblocker, I won't go out of my way to add a rule for those.
But the moment a third-party script is involved, or data selling begins, or there's annoyances like putting random shit between paragraphs I'm reading, or popups, or "subscribe to the newsletter"-style popups, I'm out. I'm either blocking your whole site on uBlock Origin, or at DNS level if it was bad enough.
TL;DR: I don't care about ads. I care about things that piss me off.
Usually you don’t publish those behind the paywall. Someone else has already paid for the entrance fee after all. But I think sponsored articles should always be marked as such, at the top
> However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
That's akin to saying a person wants some of that "good" cancer.
If I am paying, I am supporting the editorial staff. It's their decision what to report on and how. Paid-for content, even if it's just for priority coverage, compromises the integrity of the editorial staff as well as their ability to curate (not to mention a clear disincentive to be critical of the ad buyer's claims).
It starts when TheBrink publishes a high quality behind the scenes piece about a scam mobile game instead of a truly great indie game just because the latter is not as profitable and cannot afford to buy the ad.
It ends with the entire catalogue of the publication being paid for by advertisers. Much like some influencer's instagram feed. Paying for access to an ad feed is unacceptible.
To add: "the firewall" between the editorial and business sides of a publication is the basic prerequisite for ethical journalism, even if it's an entertainment rag. Advertising that masquarades as reporting is therefore the worst and most toxic, i.e., cancerous, of the bunch.
So I do not agree that native ads are something that should be desired.
Print magazines were paid, either via subscription or purchasing at a street kiosk, and had advertising in it. A lot of it, actually.
The ads just weren't as obtrusive, privacy-invading and annoying as what we have now. A lot of them were fun to read, had amazing photography, because creativity still mattered, not just volume. Unfortunately alternatives to bring back this more harmless and tasteful form of advertising to the web (RIP The Deck) have failed.
> For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Sure, but does this ever get sold on a site that _doesn't_ already have ads in the first place? You literally mention "increased placement on ad units", so I'd argue that if this site is directly supported, they've already violated the principle in a way that doesn't involve "native ads", and if they aren't directly supported, this principle doesn't apply to them. I'm skeptical that there are any non-hypothetical examples of sites that charge for access and make deals for "native ads" in the form of content but don't have any actual ad units that are displayed to users.
If I'm wrong and this is a thing, I don't think that's it's really that hard to solve. When a user signs up for a paid subscription, as part of the sign-up process, show a screen that explains that sometimes the company will partner with sponsors to produce content about their products, link/screenshot to a couple examples to make sure the user understands what you're talking about, and then give them the choice to either have content like that shown or hidden, and then put that as a toggle they can flip whenever they want in their account settings and mention that fact when you prompt them for their initial choice. If companies don't way to pay for a partnership because their metrics show that too many users turn off the publication's sponsored content from showing, that's just a sign that the system is working, since users shouldn't be paying for sponsored content that they don't actually want to see.
Although I no longer pay for a subscription and can't be certain, I used to have a paid subscription to The Pragmatic Engineer and I'm pretty sure the paragraph "brought to you by X, Y and Z" was still included in each post. I don't think there's any other advertising on the site. Might not quite meet your definition.
in some countries (France as an example), if there was payment in any form, it has to be disclosed otherwise that's an undisclosed ad and very much illegal
The US FTC also has rules requiring most (but not all) native advertising to have a disclosure (e.g. "ad”, “promoted by [X]”, “sponsored advertising content”, etc. but not terms such as “promoted” or “promoted stories")
it's a good point, and if theverge was using the weasel language to still allow paid content to be published to subscribers, that would be one thing.
but that's not it - they're still going to serve you banners, even if you pay. just, fewer of them. and they're going to gate content behind the paywall. it's the "have your cake and eat it too" of paywalls.
>we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media.
If I go to TheBrink to read about game news, and I click on a link that says the article is about that new game, then I get what I asked for. Coupled with a clear indication that it's paid-for content, it should be fine.
What's not fine is seeing an ad for the new game when I didn't go to a games news site and didn't click on such a link. I don't want to be interrupted with games news while I'm watching a video on DIY. I shouldn't be shown appraisals of the new game while shopping for a new car radio.
I dream of a world where instead of being inundated with ads, in case any of them is relevant to you, people who are shopping for something can opt to see ads while they're shopping.
Ads have to be aggressively pervasive because they're not very effective, and the attempted solution is even more invasive advertising for even more marginal gains.
Of course this will never happen because search engines are very effective forms of advertising, but ads could retreat from many mediums without significant impact to marketing.
Disagree. Would I like zero ads? Yes, do I think a company should be required to offer a zero ad service for money? No. If you don't like that they have ads even if you pay then don't use the service.
People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for them) that are full of ads. International flights have ads on their entertainment. Flights by some airlines I've been on have ads just after the safety instructions. I've been on flights where they have ads for shopping while on the plane.
What I want is incompatible with a lot of businesses sustaining themselves. That doesn't change anything in how I think regulation or technology should work here. I think we should have both technological change and regulatory change in the online ad industry that would wipe out a large chunk of the ecosystem.
> People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads.
Back in the day (yes, I'm that old) the selling point of cable was "TV without any ads". It was marketed as expensive and upscale TV, though. And people don't really want to pay for content, so this business model didn't work out in the end.
You must be really old because the selling point was always more channels/better quality picture. No ads was reserved for the premium channels (HBO and Showtime) which were an added fee. There were a small number of basic cable channels which were ad-free (AMC and TCM, if I recall correctly were originally both ad-free), but most basic cable channels had ads (and some were just re-feeds of independent broadcast “super stations” like WTBS and WOR.
That's why I keep saying[0] advertising is a cancer on society.
TV and news are one of the first media it consumed so thoroughly people don't remember there was a time where ads weren't expected, or default, or integral part of anything.
I do remember back when MTV started they showed videos on rotation without ads, along with some other content. Ads only came later. I also remember being greatly annoyed by ads appearing everywhere on a service we were paying for. I wasn't alone in this, it was a big topic at the time.
What do you mean? What can you do to a cable broadcast that you can't do to an internet broadcast?
The comment I responded to suggested that it's impossible to record video delivered over the internet, which is obviously insane. Were you thinking of something different?
If something appears completely insane isn’t that often a good sign that we might not have understood.
The comment you replied to was pointing out that it was possible to record from cable TV with DVRs and that they had a feature to detect commercials and either skip recording them or allow you skip them en masse during playback.
On the other hand, streaming (usually) isn't actually streaming, it's progressive download. The thing that stops you skipping the ads is just the fact that they turn off the fast-forward button and enforce that with DRM. Otherwise skipping ads would be trivial.
Cable DVRs have to actually capture and record the signal into a ring buffer, and if it isn't integrated into a cable box[0], it has to come out of one, with a complicated setup of IR blasters to have your DVR tune the cable box to a specific channel. And of course you have to actually pause the video or record it in advance in order to get commercial-skipping capability.
Cable ad skipping is entirely a technical problem, streaming ad skipping is entirely a legal one.
[0] You were supposed to be able to just get a CableCARD, but the cable companies fought tooth and nail to force you to
Definitely not "fully" as required an additional purchase and planning of what to record. Normal usage of sitting down and turning on the TV to what something being shown at the time does not have skippable advertising.
Whenever I'm in the US and turn on a TV I'm always amazed at the amount of advertising and the effect it has on the media itself. One of the effects of streaming services was that it allowed script writers and producers total freedom from having to structure a story around the ad breaks.
> having to structure a story around the ad breaks
Whenever I try to watch syndicated US tv here in the UK — e.g. The Simpsons — it's incredibly painful because the ad breaks don't line up, so you often get a 'false positive' and/or a 'false negative' that really affects the experience.
I totally agree with your statement. A company should not be required to offer it, but I am not obliged to consume/purchase/read it.
If i can legally block/skip/cirvumvent it, i still will. When reading a magazine, i will try and skip the ads. I block as much ads on my internet connection as possible, because i get to say what comes in and goes out.
And companies may complain about my totally legal actions. Not that i am going to to anything about their complaints, for i do not care and never will, but they may totally complain.
Comanies may also try and circumvent my actions to force the ads as long as their actions are legal. I also understand that people do not want to play this cat and mouse game.
However. When products tend to be a certain necessity and in reality you cannot choose but to consume or purchase a specific thing (Microsoft Office for instance. Yes i know there alternatives, but do you really have a choice?), things get a bit weird or shady.
Companies may still legally stuff ads in those 'necessary' products, but it's not something you really want.
You don't 'need' a streaming service or a Verge subscrition and can perfectly survice without having one, but when you are paying for one and you're still getting a bunch of ads, it does not feel right. It feels you're getting screwed because of that weird fine print in a contract.
Companies stopped caring about their customers need as much as possible. They only think about making money. I stopped caring about companies and their products as much as possible. I only think about spending as less as possible of my money. You reap what you sow.
I completely share your point of view. And if I may add, I think most people completely overlook the fact that AI for tech companies is the next golden age of ad.
They will have AI that can convinces you to buy a product or service over an other one on a prompt you ask. Even generating a small video clip of it tailored on the spot for you to convince you is the future of AI.
Ads made google rich, they stole content through Google and won’t make money out of it with their new superpower ?
It cost a lot of money and their goal is to be rich. There is no other way, people won’t pay the full price of what it cost for this not to happen.
Defending this practice because it's the status quo is ludicrous.
All of these things happen not because people approve of them, but because they have no choice. Every company in those industries is doing this because they want more profits. Companies do have the choice, but they would flood your eyeballs with ads 24/7 if it was socially acceptable. So they push that line as far as they can take it before people start complaining. And that's how we got to where we are now.
The thing most people don't consciously think about is that advertising is brainwashing and psychological manipulation. It's designed to embed products and ideas into your psyche to get you to do something or think a certain way. Separating me from my money is extortion, though fairly benign. What I find truly insidious is putting thoughts into my head. Political ads and propaganda are weapons of war since they manipulate how societies think and behave. They have the ability to influence how people vote, to topple governments, to cause civil unrest and deep distrust in societies. How most of the world isn't seeing the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing in the past decade as a direct consequence of ad-fueled social manipulation is beyond me.
To speak nothing of the multi-billion dark industry of data brokers, and companies hoovering up and profiting off of our data in perpetuity.
Advertising is evil to its core and is the most harmful yet normalized industry we've ever invented.
Websites that do not use ads cannot survive (on a large scale) if their competition uses ads.
Large consumer-facing websites are forced to use ads.
As long as ads are legal, consumers will not have the choice to use ad-free websites. (The only exceptions being startups operating at a loss.)
This is not even solved by websites allowing for paid, ad-free plans.
Who pays for Google? You, when you by a can of Coke. Coca Cola increases the price of the drink, then gives that extra money to Google.
If you are using a paid, ad-free plan, you are not only paying for the plan, you are also still paying the increased price of Coca Cola.
As long as ads are legal, people who use paid plans have to pay more* than twice of what the service is actually worth.
*Don't forget the effort that is being put into designing ads, building tracking technology, managing tracking data centers, which again, are paid by you, every time you buy anything.
That is indeed what I do when I see a subscription pop-up or some other annoyance my adblocker missed. Despite, by that time I've already clicked on it, and sometimes even read some of the content, before I'm rudely ejected from the experience. This is simply not pleasant and doesn't help anyone.
For companies, whose main service is not the website/app itself, no one forces them to run a website. They are doing it for publicity reasons in one way or another. Putting extra ads or tracking there is trying to make more money from something that should in itself make them money already, by making them more widely known, possibly motivating people to use their actual services.
It is unacceptable behavior. I do check how much uBlock Origin has to block for a website of a business and that does inform my opinion of them quite severely. Biggest detractor: Google analytics. It will always be blocked, and not be loaded, but if I see it on their website, expect my opinion of them to fall quite a few levels. Combine that with some JS only website, then they are already lost. I then know they neither care about user experience nor accessibility, and if that was a potential enployer, they would have dropped out of that category, because I don't want to work in a dystopia shop.
> People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads.
Those ads are far less egregious than the kinds of online ads we're discussing. If online ads were the equivalent—static, hosted on the same site, free of data collection—then not only would the experience be much more pleasant, we wouldn't even be able to block them.
Like those 88x31 ads^Waffiliate links. I have never been bothered by them. If anything, I actually stop to look at them and maybe click one or two. The funny gifs get a click just for being funny.
Nowadays they are rare outside places like Neocities, but it is true that I don't know of anyone who has gone out of their way to add an adblock rule to block those.
dude that article calendar is sick! I wish all the bloggers actually did something like that. I dont want to scroll 400 pages into the archive to find something interesting i may have missed
Is the privileged dude the one who coded the advertising system, or managed the team, or made the decision to use advertising for additional monetisation and got promoted for it?
People (at least used to) pay for magazines and newspapers, which have also been partially supported by ads forever. Perhaps a more sustainable balance would be only first-party ads (ie no individualized tracking) for paying subscribers?
newspaper and magazine ads didn't block the page for 1 minute before allowing you to read the headlines on the page, then repeat the process every time you turned the page.
Yes I enjoyed and used the ads in print computer magazines in the 90s.
I think having highly relevant, content based static inline first party ads is tolerable and occasionally useful. Especially for specialist hardware / software. 3rd party ads that track you across the Internet are just evil and I will block them forever. As others have said, I would probably pay €50 per month for news, but not to a handful of mainstream sites. I need broad diverse coverage. Some micro transaction system is needed.
People advocate for micro-transactions as an alternative to the current system of funding content with invasive, data-collecting advertising. I just don't see it working the way proponents say it would, even if micropayments were technically feasible, which they are not.
I wrote a short post on the topic[0] but to save you a click here is the main point: We all complain about advertising that tracks users now. Imagine how valuable the data would be for paying customers now consider which micropayment provider you would trust with that information.
I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.[1]
Unfortunately they still seem to be flooded with trackers, even if you’re a paying customer. Here’s what my firewall blocks when i browse the verge for a few seconds with my browser’s ad blocker disabled: https://ibb.co/0JpKkCJ
I came here to say this too. And I mean, sometimes ads are good? I have money and I like to buy things. How am I supposed to find out about something I've never heard of before?
Plain, non-animated non-creepy banner ads I've never minded. What I mind are:
1. Ads that are intrusive and distracting
2. Pages that have more ads than actual content
3. Ads that chase you around for two weeks trying to get you to buy something you just bought.
I mean yeah, if I'm paying $20/mo it had better be ad free. But if I'm paying $4/mo, having tasteful ads interspersed among the content is probably fine.
I think the important part is that you could choose to look at those or not.
For all it's faults facebook advertising is similar, you can just scroll past an advert if it's of no interest. I don't find their adverts overly annoying.
That’s why I unsubscribed to NYT. The ads weren’t just annoying, they were distracting. Shoved directly between paragraphs and impossible to hide. When I canceled, I told them why.
It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. Hence the cuts. Same on Youtube. I watch a lot of content there while maintaining zero interruptions by ads. Works great and so far I've never had to pay Youtube to not see ads. I do pay for Amazon Prime. Occasionally. I usually reactivate my subscription when I need it either because I'm ordering stuff or because they have something I want to see. I'll cancel soon again because I don't currently need them and I once again exhausted their limited offerings. Forced ad watching makes it less likely I come back.
I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. It's not sustainable for me to do pay for all the websites I visit. And me randomly paying only some tiny subset of them doesn't make any sense to me. I'd need some prioritized list. And it would have to be a very short one because I'm simply not rich enough to maintain lots of multi dollar subscriptions per month. And I also don't want to micromanage a lot of payments and subscriptions.
The Verge, which was mentioned in the article is a good example of a website that I don't value enough to get anywhere near that short list. They have a lot of competition reporting more or less similar stuff that I wouldn't miss them. In fact, I can't recall reading anything by them lately. I guess not a lot of their stuff makes it to the HN front page. Probably because it's just not that interesting.
Regarding The Verge, I wish something like Apple News existed in this space. I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels. I just can't justify paying $X/mo individually to 20 different sources.
Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier).
See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
(The comparison is not great because premium streaming of original content and long-form text journalism on current affairs are different things with different audiences and pricepoints and viewing patterns.
By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)
> By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)
Also why many services release episodes weekly instead of giving them at once.
> See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
Does it make great content? I've only watched 3 series and then cancelled because it was annoying (but all three were fairly popular), and the more they progressed, the more underwhelming they got. The premise was always good, but scenario was meh and getting meh-er by the episode, everything was kept superficial. Kind of like to tick a box "we talked about X", but without actually exploring the topic. And it was the exact same thing over and over again in 3 separate series - be it the gay footballer in Ted Lasso or the relationship with religion while in climate catastrophe in Extrapolations. No real depth, no real thought provoking discussions, no nothing. Just a quick mention, and jump on to the next topic to gloss over.
It seems to me that they spend a lot on big name actors, had some good initial ideas on what to do, but the actual execution was pretty meh.
Yep, they sit in this very, very weird spot. On one hand they (I suspect) don't want to tarnish Apple's brand, so production quality is very reasonable, which is cost. But they charge below market. Their content is above "play it in the background while scrolling" forgettables like Sex/Life, but below polished pearls like Band of Brothers.
Having watched Presumed Innocent on Apple TV, I have had very similar thoughts. <spoiler> Supposedly it is detective fiction, with some intertwined stories, so called unreliable narrator. But then instead of tying everything together they throw all those parallel stories and draw gotcha card. Cheap novel wrapped in shiny production. </spoler>
> but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read.
I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason.
It either need to be
- (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music,
- or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.
> I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels
I'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.
The fact that NYTimes never bothered with Apple News says something about this model.
Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example.
Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass).
If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.
You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.
But here's the thing: the subscription is not being cancelled. Amazon tries it, gets some people grumbling, but their bottom line is not affected and in fact goes up from this move because in addition to subscribers they also get ad revenue.
A vocal minority doesn't outweigh hard numbers in this case. But that's one of the causes of enshittification, everything becoming metrics-driven.
Indeed, the market gives permission to the offense.
The funny part is we should have all learned our lesson from the cable television days. Perhaps it's been long enough that everyone forgot, or maybe most of the market is just too young now, but there was a time in the US when cable television was ad-free. Commercials started sneaking into that with some regularity even though part of the draw to paying for cable tv was that it was commercial free. My brain wants to say this happened around the late 1980's? I might be wrong on that time frame, but at some point, like a frog sitting in a pot of water, the heat slowly rose and we found ourselves boiled to death with more and more commercial interruptions in our paid cable tv channels.
Then we watched the same thing happen with the Internet in the mid-2000's. Needless to say, I am a heavy user of ad blockers and Pi Holes. I especially loath sites that want to detect my ad blocker, and throw up a message trying to to guilt me into turning it off. The thing is I am not just blocking the ads, but also trying to block all the tracking that comes with those ads.
It's not really just about being annoyed by ads this time around. It's also about the right to privacy.
From my (admittedly non-US) experience, people actually get pretty annoyed when they have to watch a long movie or TV show without commercial breaks, especially when there's no "pause" feature available.
Not so much of a problem on modern TVs / set top boxes, as they usually offer that feature (though things get complicated if you want to do some channel flipping to e.g. quickly check how a sports game is going), but it was definitely a pretty big deal back in the day.
Also non-US, but I never remember this being a problem - the immersion breaking outweighed the lack of a built-in pause every time. But VHS also launched very early in my life and completely eliminated any upsides to ads, as well as many of the downsides!
Amazon’s downstream impact calculations and Prime attribution model were notoriously bad inside the company. That’s part of what led to the massive Devices cull a few years back — and the 2018 hiring freeze was because Prime overvalued Video, inappropriately routing hundreds of millions a year away from Retail.
I believe the metrics exist; I don’t believe they tell anyone useful information.
You can use uBlock and pay your content creators via Patreon if they have one. I believe that the ad-based freemium business model is harmful to society and unfixable due to the incentives it creates to engage and enrage rather than entertain and inform. So, I use uBlock to use YouTube for free to explicitly drain it of resources without giving Google any ad income, and then I pay the creators that I like using other platforms.
Can you share how you do this? For example, you've listened to a song on YT a few times, liked it. Do you try to find the artist on Bandcamp or iTunes and buy their album? Or order their merch?
How much do you spend on this monthly on average?
I buy on average 2-3 albums on Bandcamp every month. This month I've bought 4 already. If I like an artist enough that I want to listen to the full album more than once, then I generally buy it. If it's not available on Bandcamp I use Qobuz as a backup.
For videos and podcasts I subscribe to content creators on Patreon. I currently have four subscriptions for a total of around $12, and I give roughly the same amount to each.
I also avoid services that are monetized by ads elsewhere and pay for Kagi to get ad-free search. I will avoid all services that offer free tiers with ads and paid tiers without ads as I just fundamentally do not believe that the business model can work at scale without causing harm.
I also host my own email as I do not believe that it is possible to provide free email to people without somehow also doing things with their data or attention that goes against their interests.
If you offer content for free I'm not going to pay for it. I don't tip, I don't buy micro transactions in games, I don't pay for discord nitro or buy "collector's edition" versions of games or twitch subscriptions or anything like that.
Simply, if I don't have to pay I don't. And I certainly won't waste my life watching ads just so someone can earn a fraction of a cent.
I don't feel any need to justify that, I don't feel bad about it. These tactics earn tons of money, and if that ever stops they'll stop doing it and do something else instead. Until then I'll happily take advantage of all the free stuff. Someone else wants to donate to subsidize me that's great, go right ahead. I'm gonna keep my money.
Exactly. Their business is to serve content which, if consumed using software in its default configuration, will give me a degraded experience. When the content has left their server and resides on my hardware, it is up to me - no, actually, it is my human right - to process it in the way I want. It is not my moral obligation to make sure that their messed up business model makes sense on a large scale. The alternative is Black Mirror Season 1 Episode 2.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but this way of thinking feels the most unsustainable of them all. You said it yourself; the only reason you get to watch content ad-free is because other people are either watching ads, or paying for the content.
You justify with 'if you offer content for free, I'm not going to pay for it'. Agreed with microtransactions and stuff. But with youtube videos? The content is not actually offered for free. It precisely relies on ads to exist. So the content is offered with ads/with subscription (i.e. not free), and you are using an adblocker to bypass this. So you are just leeching out of the other users, and is not sustainable.
Honestly I don't care. I wouldn't sit through a 30 second ad to earn a cent, and i definitely am not doing it so that someone else can earn a cent.
As long as I can use youtube for free with an ad blocker (and sponsorblock, amazing plugin) I will. If google doesn't like that they better figure out a solution. Not my problem.
I don't really care if their business model is sustainable. If they go under so be it, someone else will offer it. Whether it's some hobby bob or whatever. I thought the internet was a lot better when it wasn't run by mega corporations anyway.
The thing with ads is: it's not free money. We pay for it. All of us. It's part of the price when we buy goods and services.
If advertising wasn't possible, items would be cheaper and we would have more money to pay for content directly. Cutting out the whole advertising industry out of the content payment loop would save so much money.
And yeah people would still buy stuff they need because they need it. And stuff they didn't need? Well good then that they're not buying it. Saving natural resources and money.
I'm not a big believer in this. It simply doesn't scale. So I might donate chunks of income to 1, 2, maybe 5 or 10 people like this. What about everyone else? It's not a fair system. I engage with lots of youtube channels, read lots of things on dozens/hundreds of websites. Add a few podcasts to the mix and it starts adding up to quite a lot of mouths to feed with individual donations. It's not reasonable for all of them to expect something from me.
At least with Spotify and Netflix there is some kind of rev share thing in place. It's not very fair of course and a bit biased towards rewarding content creators that I don't necessarily like (or are in need of more money). But it's better than having to cherry pick creators. Somehow publishers have resisted creating such a thing for written media. We have this broken model of ad supported media and media outlets taking most of that revenue and paying really shitty wages to journalists, many of whom are working on a freelance basis and get paid pitiful amounts per word. Why do we have all these middlemen?
Spotify doesn't solve that problem at all, it just helps you avoid feeling bad about it. I know artists who sell their music on both Bandcamp and on Spotify, and they all say that their income from Spotify is utterly insignificant unless you are already a big and established name with lots and lots of streams.
You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears.
Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.
Paying 1 is better than 0. You’re assuming support has to scale perfectly to be fair, but that’s a false binary.
Creators don’t expect everyone to pay but they rely on _someone_ paying.
Refusing because it ‘doesn’t scale’ just reinforces a broken system where nobody pays, creators lose and we end up with the shit quality media and content we have now
> we end up with the shit quality media and content we have now
I'll just say that looking back on my life consuming media (that started long before the consumer Internet was around), there has never been a better selection of media that I enjoy than now.
I've never watched reality shows or sitcoms, the kind of stuff that dominated mass media for a long time... I have interests that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream, so finding interesting or quality content was hard, and shows/films/docs were few and far between..
But now? The current system, while imperfect, at least allows for every possible topic and niche to be somewhat sustainable.
The sheer quantity of media has absolutely grown exponentially so there's definitely a lot more bad media, and media that isn't for me, but in terms of choice for myself, it's incredibly good.
Obviously YMMV and this is just my anecdotal experience, but I don't consider the system to be broken (even though, again, it's certainly not perfect).
- Rent seeking is not behavior I care for, and so much of the subscription service stuff is exactly that.
- I'm more than happy to pay for quite a few patreon/similar things.
- But _ultimately_ I don't just want to "consume" content, I want to share it. In fact I believe sharing the cultural artifacts I engage with is an essential part of a culture, and that getting in the way of that is morally wrong. So if your paywall gets in the way of _that_, I _will_ work around it.
Edit: also, the other side of the problem is that there are too many websites now. When it was Netflix and nearly everything there, I payed for it. I no longer pay for shows and movies, because things got _completely_ nuts. Similar thing with news. Reality is I pay _way_ more for Patreon than most people I know - not because of any moral reasons, but because I can actually afford that. And a typical news site asks as much as what I give to some of my favorite writers and painters.
I would pay for YouTube premium if you can afford it. The cost is pretty reasonable and 55% of the subscription goes to content creators. It's not a huge amount but probably similar to what a creator would make if ads were shown.
But it is not possible to use it without creating a Google account. I should not need to sign in to watch videos, especially when that makes all efforts at avoiding tracking null.
I get why you might not want to create a Google account, but how is it even possible to operate without one? I'm genuinely astonished by people who are able to get by in 2024 without having ever created an account on Google.
the more it becomes "genuinely astonishing" that people can use the internet without $ProprietaryThing, the more important it is to resist using $ProprietaryThing wherever possible and at all costs. they have been pulling out all the stops for 10+ years to make it seem like you're required to have a google/icloud account to participate in society. it's slimy and endangers the neutrality of the internet.
I have google accounts that I created a decade ago but I can't remember the last time I logged on one, except to log on gmail and clean the box in private browsing.
I basically only keep them because I used my real name and don't want anyone to steal an account/personnal info I might have created with that gmail address and impersonate me.
I don't really see what is difficult in operating without a google account.
What do you need one for, if you're not in the Google ecosystem?
Just about the only thing I can think of is Google Docs. But if you need that for work, chances are you're using your work account for that, not your personal one.
I think the point about _having_ a Google account is one thing, but then there's the fact of having to be logged in. I use many of the Google services, but I don't have the need to be logged in while using YouTube for 99% of the time (if not 100%).
I subscribed until they price hiked it like 45% in one go a couple of months ago in my country. Now the price for it is equal to, or in some cases even more expensive than the services that actually produce their own high quality movies/tv shows.
I really can't imagine someone with CTO title doesn't have $15/month to pay for YouTube when you're a regular user. People with far fewer resources pay. This goes to content creators, if you're not even seeing ads, they don't get paid.
I'm pretty sure, that by this logic, if you combine all the "$15/month" things that someone should have money for, they'll eventually be left without any of that money. Every goddamn website wants $15 per month, and even after they get it, they still show you ads. Even youtube, if nothing else, there are the in-video ads ("this video is sponsored by,...") that an adblock skips.
This person likely can afford it and some others without any noticeable impact, I just don't find it appropriate in that circumstance. If you get $15 worth, and can afford it, pay $15, plain and simple.
I stopped visiting The Verge after their last 'rebrand' which offended my eyes.
As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they?
"Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.
You should report sites that do that. We still enforce the GDPR, and it's illegal to force acceptance of cookies (excepting functional cookies) for any reason, including offering to remove them for money.
No we don't, and we never did. The whole "GDPR" thing is a sham - unfortunately this is the case in many countries, but especially so in the UK. The ICO is one of the most useless "regulators" I have ever dealt with, somehow even worse than telecoms regulators.
This isn't some sort of subtle and concealed breach of the GDPR that everyone puts effort into keeping quiet. It's blatant, obvious, and in the face of everyone who visits major news websites. If it was enforced, the practice would've quickly stopped.
It's about as subtle as committing murder on live TV. If you don't get arrested for that, it's clear that the law you've broken is not being enforced.
> You should report sites that do that
But let's hypothesize and see what it takes to actually do this:
As per the ICO's requirements, you must first contact the organization that has wronged you and give them time to address your concern.
They have 30 days to do respond, and could extend it potentially indefinitely by engaging in pointless arguments. They could also make technically flawed arguments in how they're not actually tracking you or collecting personal data, and those will successfully work because there's no technical expert on the ICO's side to review it and call bullshit. You need full-time admin staff to deal with these matters.
Assuming you finally get to a stage where you have grounds to make a complaint to the ICO, what are they going to do (if anything)? Well at best they will send a letter, which is not legally binding in any way and will promptly get ignored by the recipient, which is fine because the truth is, both sides are complicit and just want the matter to go away - whether the underlying problem is solved or not is not their concern.
In practice, even if the ICO wanted to act (they don't - don't bite the hand that feeds), what would they do? This isn't a single, small offender, this is the entire newspaper industry. They not only have a lot of lobbying power but outright control the narrative. They know it, and that's why they have no fear putting evidence of their GDPR breach on their homepages.
Are you ready to hire a full-time admin team to do this (and end up absolutely nowhere, except maybe collecting evidence of this "regulator"'s uselessness)?
--
GDPR enforcement in the UK (and sadly in a lot of other countries) is and will remain a sham until the issue becomes politically important. The regulator on its own, even with the best of skill and intentions will not succeed in this battle. The only way I can potentially see this changing is if we see continuous and recurrent data breaches of politician's personal data and dirty laundry, but even then the likeliest solution is a two-tier system where politicians are allowed to have privacy while everyone else doesn't.
Well I'm pretty much an anti-ad radical as well, but you're saying you block ads and you don't want to pay for stuff like subscriptions and similar. Well that's also not very sustainable, content creators have to eat :)
Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr
> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.
> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.
While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.
I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.
I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
The problem with allowing "basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts" is that you also allow "pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …" and malware attacks since they all pull from the same pool by default.
They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you.
Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?
> I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world.
The ideal is for the advert to be served from the main source, much like a sponsored segment in a cast is just in the cast, no extra external access to do any tracking from.
If the site I'm actually visiting itself starts serving malware like shite, then I go from not trusting their “partners” and being wary of them by association, to really not wanting to be there at all and adding them to my DNS blocklist just-in-case.
We had some text ads, maybe a banner at the top/bottom of a site, and that was it... that was "the middle ground", they got the ads, we didn't have to block them. Then they added more ads and more ads and more ads, and animated gifs and more of them, and videos, and videos with sound, and overlaid ads, and overlaid ads with unskippable video and audio, and more and more... and in the end, a lot of us blocked them.
They had their chance, they decided that the option they wanted was to abuse the viewer with a huge amount of very bad ads on every goddamn site they visited, and now (for some of us), it's over, we're blocking ads.
If they stayed at the one, two ads per site, I wouldn't even notice them,... now, when I do (because there's just too many of them), I immediately install an adblock on every machine (parents, relatives,...) that I have to use a browser on.
> While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going.
Then they should find a business model that doesn't involve psychological manipulation. Ads are predatory. I have as much compassion for those who cry about ad revenues as I do for people complaining that they worse off for not being allowed to rape and pillage.
It's a funny anecdote and cool hack to be able to skip streaming video ads, but it's also kinda entitled to leech the content and shift the burden onto everyone else.
Don't work in ads, never did, don't make money from them.
I don't mind ads one bit, except video unskipable ones. I find stuff to buy there all the time, or discover new tools, sometimes I'll buy an equivalent thing years later that I remember I found first in an ad.
If I want to research competitors to something, I just google the something and click the ads.
And I also like that I like something that makes so many people pissed off.
I needed a washing machine - so I went online and purchased one from a large retailer. For the next month all I got was ads for washing machines - many from the retailer I purchased from.
It has made me want to not reset my browser so frequently.
This is a bad take. Ads are not the problem. Behavioural ads with suriveillance and data economy is. Static ads or contextual ads are the answer. Some of the best examples I can think of on the top of my head is duckduckgo.com and https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blockers and are more aware of privacy. But now, not only don't they not provide content for free, but also make you pay and collect your data as well.
- Go to most of the major news sites in firefox.
- Install noscript extension
- See the bizillion scripts that loads.
Note: You can load all these scripts indirectly with google tag manager or platforms like cloudflare zaraz etc. So you won't even directly see the analytics script that is loaded in a website. Just google tag manager etc.
Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right. Behavioural ads makes it the worst it the problem we should be solving. It makes sense from the business POV as well. You cut the middlemen like facebook and google and get paid premium directly. You curate the ads for your product/website. People want to just plug in an api call and generate money. That won't fly anymore with users being aware.
Not when it is done right. Most or all podcasts and youtube channels are perfect examples of static ads. I have interacted and signed up with things cos I find them useful. Imagine, the entire podcast industry and youtube channels are dependent on static ads to make revenue. And people say it doesn't work.
Static / Contextual ads means:
- no data collection needed
- More money to websites/apps cos they are removing google and facebook as middlemen.
- Can be privacy friendly
- Provide free content means more reach
- Lesser scams, ad malwares and other scammy things
Behavioural ads with data economy over api's became mainstream because we had to directly make relationships with people who want to show ads in our website and apps. It's time consuming and you will need a worthwhile product to show and pitch your website/ads as an ideal place for them to show their ads to. And you cannot just create a bunch of pages and setup google ads and be done with it. Delegating this has been bad for the websites/apps and for users equally. The only winners have been google, facebook like players.
I have been writing an article on this topic for months. I will finish and hopefully I can make a more articulated case then.
How does this answer GP's claim that people who can't afford stuff are being bombarded with messages that make them feel inadequate and cause psychological damage?
Another issue is that content is now being written to accommodate the ads, it's not really value in its own right anymore. So much reporting and writing is terrible, because it's seen as a cost, while the ads are the source of revenue.
Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
I agree. The decline in writing quality is observable. There is like zero effort put into improving the writing.
> Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
Exactly. And the same like I have said above applies for data collection as well. Paywalls don't stop data collection and data surveillance.
I'll quote you "this is a bad take". What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
> Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right.
In an ideal world, yes. That ideal world is long gone.
> I'll quote you "this is a bad take". What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
> What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
OK. Let's first examine 2 complaints about ads:
1. Ads are an annoyance.
2. Ads with surveillance and data economy are bad.
If your problem is the first one, I don't have anything else to say than the fact that Ads are not going anywhere. My arguments are all against and about the 2nd point. I think ads are a good way to make revenue. And it should NOT be done with data surveillance but with curated and useful ads.
Exactly. Do you think the problem is ads here? And you still haven't answered to my POV. How is paywall stopping data surveillance? The reality is they are making you pay and serving ads. Which is the problem? How is paying solving it?
> In an ideal world, yes. That ideal world is long gone.
If we are to fix the problem, this is what we should do. Find THAT ideal world.
> I don't have anything else to say than the fact that Ads are not going anywhere.
Why? You state that as if Ads are a product of the universe we live in and we need to accept them like gravity.
> And it should NOT be done with data surveillance but with curated and useful ads.
Agree in principle. The problem is that you don't even need to do data surveilance in this case.
I pay money to the verge.
You can infer I have a) disposable income and 2) interest in tech
With those two alone you can start showing me ads. You don't even need to profile me.
And that's wrong in my book.
> Do you think the problem is ads here? And you still haven't answered to my POV. How is paywall stopping data surveillance? The reality is they are making you pay and serving ads. Which is the problem? How is paying solving it?
The problem is the ambiguity. The old mantra says "If you're not paying for the product then i'm the product"
Well i'm paying. The transaction should be clear. I give you money, you give me content. But instead that's not what you get. Because you still get profiled, you're still served ads, and sure, BETTER, ads. That's my problem.
> Why? You state that as if Ads are a product of the universe we live in and we need to accept them like gravity.
Am being realistic. The enshittification of tech companies is not to be blamed on ads. Ads have been around way way before, internet, tv or even news papers.
> Agree in principle. The problem is that you don't even need to do data surveilance in this case.
I agree with you here as well. Remove data surveillance and behavioural ads and you get contextual / static ads. That is better for users, advertisers. Ads zero is not the solution is all am saying.
The disagreement I have with this is that the other way (your way) doesn't work as well. They still track data, make you pay and it is only accessible to people with disposable income.
> The problem is the ambiguity. The old mantra says "If you're not paying for the product then i'm the product"
No. Data surveillance has nothing do with ads. DuckduckGo is a good examplle of it. It doesn't have to be like that.
> Well i'm paying. The transaction should be clear. I give you money, you give me content. But instead that's not what you get. Because you still get profiled, you're still served ads, and sure, BETTER, ads. That's my problem.
This is a very entitled view. Not all of them has the disposable income. Moreover, How many are you going to subscribe? But also, it doesn't fly with news sites. Subscription works for software etc. Anything that needs to be accessible for the broader audiences (like journalism), it fails. This is where ads come in.
Moreover, my problem with the whole statement is that ads were done in a right away in the past. We know how to do that. While it hasn't panned out very well when it comes to subscriptions for news sites etc. It is making it more difficult for journalists and others to survive with subscription. There is a reason why newspapers had ads even after you pay for subscription. Especially for news sites like services.
The problem with internet ads is that we just don't want to directly deal with advertisers. We rather make an api call and let google do the rest. AND they do surveillance. Thats on us. Not on ads.
Personally, I think the correct amount of subscription fee is zero and ads should be zero too. It’s unethical to charge for information you have that could improve someone else’s life. It’s near zero marginal cost to give it to them and you’re just going to hoard it?
We should ban paying for information at the federal level to prevent this horrific practice.
Dear friends!
I am a simple programmer. I had a website in 2009, where I posted useful articles. I had a small ad block, which allowed me to pay for my expenses. When users began to install ad blockers en masse, the number of ad views dropped significantly and I had to close the site. Now I have no job and I am very poor. I want to thank those people who not only do not want to pay for good service, but also install ad blockers. Now you say that there is nothing to find on the Internet. Who will do something for you for free? Maybe a taxi driver will take you for free?
Indeed, in 2009 I used free hosting. However, my articles were so interesting that in one week my site was visited by about a million people. Because of the huge traffic, I was kicked out of free hosting. Then I rented a VPS. Then I was still a big opponent of advertising, like all of you, and I was naive. I was an idealist. But when I tried to sell access to the site for sending SMS messages costing 10 cents, no one wanted to buy them, only one person out of a hundred. When I installed advertising, this ratio increased to fifty out of a hundred, that is, my income increased 50 times. Then I understood the benefit of advertising. I received about $ 100 a month from advertising. Then the income from advertising dropped significantly due to the mass installation of ad blockers. Now I use Firefox without any plugins. I honestly watch ads. This is the decision of a responsible adult. Because I understand that without advertising there will not be those wonderful sites that are still left.
If ads are first-party, non-personalized, non-tracking, and don't get in the way of the content, people are mostly fine with them. Most ads are not like this, so people use ad-blockers, and the good ads get blocked along with the bad ads. The fault lies with the advertising industry, not the consumers.
It's an old-fashioned notion, but the advertising industry has extremely bad manners: it doesn't respect civilized social norms like not exploiting personal information for private gain and not egregiously interrupting people for trivial reasons. It's nosey, untrustworthy, intrusive, manipulative, and deceptive. I wouldn't tolerate this behaviour from a friend, and I'm not going to tolerate it from a bunch of amoral strangers.
I understand you perfectly. I apologize, as a defender of advertising, for the fact that advertising often causes you inconvenience. However, I believe that advertising does less damage than cars. Okay, let's ban cars? What about alcohol and smoking? Why doesn't anyone try to throw a blanket over the shelves with alcohol?
Some YouTubers scream in panic that you dare to install ad blocker. Well nobody told them to build their business around such ad-driven solution.
There are thousands, and thousand of useful places, each for free. Take a look at awesome lists at github. These provide so much value to the society. It does not require any subscriptions, nor money.
There are millions of people who share education, and knowledge for free. If you build a business, you need to build it around things that are sustainable.
The old boomer internet is also over. Google will not lead anyone to any niche blog, or site. Now everything is inside big tech siloses, where "the algorithm" spoonfeds people with what zuckerberg likes. Go advertise any real http domain with any useful data. Nobody cares.
Did you know that YouTube does not make a profit, but only covers its own expenses? What if it becomes unprofitable because of ad blockers? What will remain? Paid cinemas? Do you want to pay money from your own pocket? And you will remember the times when you could pay by watching ads without money. Think about it! No one will do anything for you for free. Try to take a taxi or a train without money? Try to steal bread from a store without money? This is stealing and it is illegal. If something is free, it means that those who benefit from it have already paid for you, so that you receive the information they want. So that an independent site cannot distribute free information.
> Did you know that YouTube does not make a profit, but only covers its own expenses?
Yet they make no decisions to reduce those expenses. You either have to believe they are incompetent or this statement is on the spectrum of half truth to full on lie.
> What will remain? Paid cinemas?
Libraries. They used to be awesome and no corporation owned them.
> This is stealing and it is illegal
Sure, but, now you're forced to declare an actual value for the items taken. What is a fair price for most of this "content?"
> So that an independent site cannot distribute free information.
The irony is watching independent journalists take "super chat" donations on these corporate platforms. How big of a cut does the corporation get again?
Why do you stop at looking at ads? Why not compelling viewers to actually support the advertisement by buying their stuff? Letting them pay your way through life without buying their products is tantamount to stealing. All this free money from ads, do you get free money from the grocery store? From a taxi driver? No. So why do you take it from advertisers without buying whatever they offer?
Oh, yeah! I often click on a link if an ad interests me. The problem is that I'm poor. But there are rich people who buy from advertising, right? After all, it's not my business to count the advertisers' budget. They know what they're doing. Don't interfere with advertisers doing their job! I learn a lot from advertising.
Extensions for blocking are not only about ads. If you take a look at ublock site it does say it uses privacy and malware lists.
Therefore it is quite easy to understand and follow, and was suggested by FBI that we should use such extensions for our own protection.
Anyone saying, or implying that we should not use commonly named 'ad blocking' is spreading real harm to people.
When it comes to YouTube it is easy to understand the throwback. It always has been free. Now it is changing, but people are accustomed to this, and it is very bad to shame people for wanting things to keep that way. I agree, that if YouTube TOS say you should not be using them, then fine by me. YouTube goes bye bye. This is the only reason why they did not close all the loopholes, because that is how you loose your viewers, publicity, eyes, and eventually shareholders, and entire ad business. Microsoft for years tolerated piracy to keep them the most popular operating system. That still allows them to shame everybody for what they allow.
dear friend! I am also a simple programmer. When I post simple rants like the one featured here, not only it doesn't have an ad block anywhere and so it generates no money but you're also all consuming bandwidth on a server i'm paying for with my money.
I also have a job—as a self employed developer that earns absolutely not enough to live a decent life—and I still do what I can to respect the web and respect the people ho visit my site by not serving them ads or by tracking them.
Because I believe that respecting you and your privacy is more important than me earning a few $.
Let me give you a piece of advice. Since you are still young and you do not have enough experience to make a lot of money. Because before it was not a few dollars that you mention, but hundreds of dollars. Advertising revenue has dropped so much. I thought the same as you. I was young and naive. Companies also have little money from advertising and therefore they simply cannot hire you and pay you a lot of money. Think about making a lot of money while you are young and full of energy. I am about 50 years old and I can not work hard anymore as in my youth. It becomes harder to make money with age. Think about the fact that none of those people who come to your site without advertising will give you a dollar in your old age. They will forget everything. Start being a serious adult. You are responsible only for yourself, but not for other people who just come to your site, and you do not have enough money to enjoy life while you are young. This time will quickly pass and in old age you will remember that you did not earn a lot of money in time.
I want to stay young and naive. I want to die poor and let people simply visit my site and hopefully earn something at a personal level. I care about human connections, I care about interacting with people via email in an honest way. If I’m not going to earn a living by doing that so be it.
I'm willing to pay for valuable content and services. I pay for online search and email, for example.
I'm not willing to look at ads. If the product or service that you have to offer is not sustainable without ads, I'm perfectly fine with it not existing at all.
I don’t get why advertisers still advertise. I select brands either by nearest retail box store or by dedicated research into comparative qualities. I don’t watch or listen to any advertising-supported video or audio media. I don’t use personalized or targeted promotion codes. I don’t ever knowingly click on banner/interstitial ads of any kind.
Am I still in the minority or has my behavior become more prevalent?
(Note that I’m not talking about adblockers; I’m talking about refusing to interact with ads, whether due to no adblocker or due to not being caught for whatever reason.)
Even if you do not use the ads you see to make your decision, they influence you.
I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route.
Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.
I wish I could teach other people how to evict ads from short-term memory before they get written to long-term and how to create mental blind spots the size of billboards and banner ads. Apparently it’s an invaluable pair of skills :(
Half of what they're paying for is the analytics. Look up "cost of customer acquisition." Those numbers can get pretty high depending on the segment and showing you an ad costs fractions of a penny.
Ads work whether we want them to work or not. It's why they are so bad. They work on our subconscious. Most people do not consciously connect watching an ad to purchasing the thing advertised.
One thing to consider is why do luxury watches advertise in newspapers? It's about building the hype around a brand. The value of a watch is not in telling the time it's about (except some in build value of materials and work) the value that society gives it.
It's why they are even more problematic than it seems on the surface.
Yes, minority. Marketing works, and it works on multiple levels as well, serving multiple, synergistic purposes. An ad for a product serves to increase sales of that particular product, which is what most people think ads are for. But in the meantime, the brand also positions itself, by showing that product as their representative, with the experience that comes from its choice of colors, shapes and other presentation material, by showing their logo and other associations like a jingle, and by signaling values that the viewer is supposed to associate with the brand. All of these are happening at the same time, and with every tactic that is not directly illegal - and it works. People's lives, culture is shaped by products, it's impossible to avoid at least thinking a bit about Apple, Coca Cola, or cars for example.
So even if we are in the minority of trying to be as rational with the purchases as possible, we surely don't do this all the time with everything. And surely we can't expect others to follow suit - so, simplifications will be made in the decision process, and that is exactly where advertisers are aiming for, and successfully.
Well, advertisers advertise because money: I put $X into facebook, google, taboola, linkedin, yahoo, and so on and I get X+R% back in revenue from amazon, facebook, google, yahoo, etc.
As a result, it doesn't matter whether you are "in the minority" or not, and to show you why simply assume that your "behavior" is the majority for a moment: If I'm still buying ads, it's not because altairprime is on my marketing list, and I'm determined to show you an ad for something you don't want, but because volume of minority ad buys 'V' is high enough to support my lifestyle at an 'R' I have uncovered.
That is to say, as an online advertiser, I'm looking for my channel (with a big R% and a big enough V), and I don't really care about the absolute size (V) of not-my-channel until I have an idea of how to get that big R from them.
Because it works, and because as usual, HN users confuse their personal experience for being that of the masses when nothing could be further from the truth.
Today, we see online ads being used as a form of "nag", to borrow the term from the shareware days, to encourage computer users to "sign up" for or "subscribe" to something that is free from ads (but still a means of data collection that may support delivery of ads elsewhere). I have read that YouTube is doing this, as many HN commenters like to try to convince readers to pay.
The utility value of ads to the computer is low. But these users are not the ad buyers so that makes little difference.
The tragedy of online ads is that computers when used for search do provide utility to computer users in locating products and services. But middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, seek to intermediate the use of computers for search in order to profit from ad services. This lowers the utility value of search to the computer user.
HN commenters and other commenters across the web complain about this degradation, namely they complain about results delievered by the largest search middleman, Google, almost daily.
Online ads annoy the majority of computer users in order to be "effective", i.e., profitable for the ad buyers, with respect to only a small minority of computer users. The system is profitable for the ad buyers but extremely inefficient. Waste and fraud are common on an unprecedented scale.
Personally I have nothing against advertising. However, having used computer networks that had restrictions on advertising, I question whether computer networks are the appropriate place for advertising.
The decreasing ability of those who produce software to license it for fees, i.e., no viable business plan, has caused them to use surveillance, data collection and advertising services as a substitute means of generating income. Software is given away "for free" and functions as a Trojan Horse for surveillance, data collection and advertising services. The sustainability of such a strategy is questionable.
The correct amount of tracking ads at least. We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying. But then the transaction was between the publisher and the advertiser, and MY information wasn't sold. They were dumb ads.
If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.
I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible.
BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience.
So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making.
If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.
The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution.
Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.
I was fine with ads in newspapers, in my TV news and on the sides of buses. While it always created incentives and questionable relations (E.g. do yo report the grocery chains' salmonella disaster in your news when the same chain advertises between that segment and the weather? What if they give you an angry call after the broadcast? does your news desk ever worry about what they should publish? as soon as they worry the damge is already done). I get that. But I'm not going to even hope we'll get the web to live up to higher standards than print and broadcast did for the last centuries. After all, internet media had significantly worse standards in this regard for as long as it existed. I'd be happy for it to just have normal media standards.
X / Twitter does the same: the first paid tier only remove some ads, not all of them. And I don't think that's good.
Now there's one way to pay to get way less ads: pay for an AI model and replace a huge percentage of your searches with searches inside the model. They're not bad at that. That's why many are saying that Google is (partially) in trouble with LLMs: wife and I definitely are searching less using search engines than we used too.
Besides that I'm running a local DNS server with a brutal blocklist: nearly one million of wildcarded domains (unbound supports wildcards). I block entire TLDs too. Entire countries' IP blocks. Add uBlock origin to the mix and your life becomes pretty ad-free.
I'm glad to pay a subscription for an AI model that doesn't serve me any ad. But I won't pay for something that serves me less ads, but still some ads. As simple as that.
Look, I'm not an ad aficionado either, but if it weren't for ads, the lifestyle of a lot of people on HN would be dramatically different — particularly for those doling out unsolicited advice to publishers on running a sustainable media business in 2024.
As long as those publishers are doling out unsolicited advice on what to buy and who to trust and what to believe (while hovering up all personal information they can), they don't really get to complain.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadSeriously. There’s a lot of spaces where the options are pigeonholed. Where the middle option, if it exists, exists to ladder, not to provide actual value. The problem is you’re using Econ 101 but real world economics is quite a bit more complicated and nuanced
The real question is, why don't they have a completely free plan supported entirely by ads -- don't even try to get a huge premium for the ads, just sell lots of them, even if it's a 1:1 time relationship between ads and content. And then have another plan where you pay money and have zero ads.
Because the latter scheme should be the most profitable. To begin with you open up the market to people who wouldn't pay you at all but would watch ads, so you get more viewers, and on top of that it's effectively try before you buy where the trial requires watching ads, which means you can stay on it as long as you like because the service is still making money. People start watching a show and get tired of seeing ads so they subscribe, when they otherwise would never have started. Then you don't charge $10/mo for no ads, you charge $20, which is worth it to a lot of people because there are so many ads in the free version, and for the people it isn't you still make money from them by showing them lots of ads.
No the people who pay the extra are the ones who are most able to afford it. The outcome is still the same though as these are the people the advertisers want to target.
The people who can't afford the extra dollar are of very little value to the advertisers.
Except that you can't get those people anyway because they value time more than money so they'll just buy some other content with no ads in it from someone else. Also, that doesn't matter if you just price the paid offering at the level that it makes up the actual ad revenue from the people who would use it.
> The people who can't afford the extra dollar are of very little value to the advertisers.
Rubbish. People are often budget constrained because they have high expenses rather than low income, e.g. anyone with kids. Being able to divert that spending to your brand from a competing brand has significant value to advertisers.
I don't because in this case that's not an option. Is either free with shitty ads or paid with "better" ads.
I basically agree with this sentiment, but one place where it can be a tricky balance (not saying that's the case here!) is "native advertising".
For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Which bits of this are ads? Well the behind the scenes post and interview could theoretically have been produced anyway, they're within the scope of the site, but in this case they weren't prioritised, certainly not for launch day, it was only by the whole collaboration being paid for that they got made. Are they ads? Yes they are ads. How would a loyal subscriber feel about those parts being hidden from them though? I imagine they would be miffed about that.
Native advertising like this has a whole spectrum of quality and the worst native ads are very explicitly ads that have no value to typical readers. However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
How do you resolve this? No idea. If I were paying I'd want to see that content assuming it's good quality. Others would not on the basis of bias or a more philosophical opposition to ads.
That is a win-win-win for everyone. If the ad feed has a clear focus its viewers will even be self-selected for ad relevancy without surveillance & manipulation involved.
Being able to discover what products their creators/suppliers are trying to popularize on my timing and topic terms is a worthwhile service.
What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
One is designed to keep you on the site (paid content) while the other is attempting to go else where.
The effect of paid content can not be discounted. It's important to recognize that a paid review or a game or movie can result in a different outcome, even subtly.
I remember in the golden days of game review sites it was clear when writers were fudging the reviews because the user experience would be starkly different. The 'we were told to ignore the bugs' excuses always followed because the gig was paid.
This here is key.
If I'm reading the synopsis for an anime series on a website whose main topic is anime/manga/novels/etc, and I see an ad in an unobstrusive and non-annoying location talking about this one new anime figurine or plushie or some other merch, you bet I'm going to check it out.
These ads don't require cross-site tracking or third-party resources. They can even be shown with the strictest Content-Security-Policy. Even if they send you to a different website.
If I'm logged in, and you give me a way to tell you "I don't like this shit, stop showing me stuff related to this series/artist/etc" (i.e. a clearly tagged blocklist, not a vague "I don't like this" and you guessing what I mean by "this"), I'll even help you refine your ads for me.
But that's only because I care about this content.
And because it's done in a respectful way. For example, I don't mind those classic 88x31 "affiliate links" (ads) or blog rolls (also ads, at least in my eyes), or self-promotion sections (ads) in some communities, or when someone I follow on Bluesky posts about how they're selling a thing (also ad). If one of those gets through my adblocker, I won't go out of my way to add a rule for those.
But the moment a third-party script is involved, or data selling begins, or there's annoyances like putting random shit between paragraphs I'm reading, or popups, or "subscribe to the newsletter"-style popups, I'm out. I'm either blocking your whole site on uBlock Origin, or at DNS level if it was bad enough.
TL;DR: I don't care about ads. I care about things that piss me off.
That's akin to saying a person wants some of that "good" cancer.
If I am paying, I am supporting the editorial staff. It's their decision what to report on and how. Paid-for content, even if it's just for priority coverage, compromises the integrity of the editorial staff as well as their ability to curate (not to mention a clear disincentive to be critical of the ad buyer's claims).
It starts when TheBrink publishes a high quality behind the scenes piece about a scam mobile game instead of a truly great indie game just because the latter is not as profitable and cannot afford to buy the ad.
It ends with the entire catalogue of the publication being paid for by advertisers. Much like some influencer's instagram feed. Paying for access to an ad feed is unacceptible.
To add: "the firewall" between the editorial and business sides of a publication is the basic prerequisite for ethical journalism, even if it's an entertainment rag. Advertising that masquarades as reporting is therefore the worst and most toxic, i.e., cancerous, of the bunch.
So I do not agree that native ads are something that should be desired.
The ads just weren't as obtrusive, privacy-invading and annoying as what we have now. A lot of them were fun to read, had amazing photography, because creativity still mattered, not just volume. Unfortunately alternatives to bring back this more harmless and tasteful form of advertising to the web (RIP The Deck) have failed.
Sure, but does this ever get sold on a site that _doesn't_ already have ads in the first place? You literally mention "increased placement on ad units", so I'd argue that if this site is directly supported, they've already violated the principle in a way that doesn't involve "native ads", and if they aren't directly supported, this principle doesn't apply to them. I'm skeptical that there are any non-hypothetical examples of sites that charge for access and make deals for "native ads" in the form of content but don't have any actual ad units that are displayed to users.
If I'm wrong and this is a thing, I don't think that's it's really that hard to solve. When a user signs up for a paid subscription, as part of the sign-up process, show a screen that explains that sometimes the company will partner with sponsors to produce content about their products, link/screenshot to a couple examples to make sure the user understands what you're talking about, and then give them the choice to either have content like that shown or hidden, and then put that as a toggle they can flip whenever they want in their account settings and mention that fact when you prompt them for their initial choice. If companies don't way to pay for a partnership because their metrics show that too many users turn off the publication's sponsored content from showing, that's just a sign that the system is working, since users shouldn't be paying for sponsored content that they don't actually want to see.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
in some countries (France as an example), if there was payment in any form, it has to be disclosed otherwise that's an undisclosed ad and very much illegal
Here's one overview: https://www.kevel.com/blog/ftc-compliant
but that's not it - they're still going to serve you banners, even if you pay. just, fewer of them. and they're going to gate content behind the paywall. it's the "have your cake and eat it too" of paywalls.
>we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media.
What's not fine is seeing an ad for the new game when I didn't go to a games news site and didn't click on such a link. I don't want to be interrupted with games news while I'm watching a video on DIY. I shouldn't be shown appraisals of the new game while shopping for a new car radio.
Ads should be opt-in.
Ads have to be aggressively pervasive because they're not very effective, and the attempted solution is even more invasive advertising for even more marginal gains.
Of course this will never happen because search engines are very effective forms of advertising, but ads could retreat from many mediums without significant impact to marketing.
People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for them) that are full of ads. International flights have ads on their entertainment. Flights by some airlines I've been on have ads just after the safety instructions. I've been on flights where they have ads for shopping while on the plane.
It's just another case of people confusing "What I personally want" with "What actually leads to a sustainable business/ecosystem".
I honestly think people get confused about this because we are so accustomed to getting what we want.
Set a price to make it sustainable.
Offer a 50/year plan with limited ads and a 200/year with no ads and be upfront about why those are the costs.
It’s not rocket science.
Back in the day (yes, I'm that old) the selling point of cable was "TV without any ads". It was marketed as expensive and upscale TV, though. And people don't really want to pay for content, so this business model didn't work out in the end.
TV and news are one of the first media it consumed so thoroughly people don't remember there was a time where ads weren't expected, or default, or integral part of anything.
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[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
The comment I responded to suggested that it's impossible to record video delivered over the internet, which is obviously insane. Were you thinking of something different?
The comment you replied to was pointing out that it was possible to record from cable TV with DVRs and that they had a feature to detect commercials and either skip recording them or allow you skip them en masse during playback.
It is quite difficult to record video from many services. Harder still to do it in an automated way like a DVR.
Cable DVRs have to actually capture and record the signal into a ring buffer, and if it isn't integrated into a cable box[0], it has to come out of one, with a complicated setup of IR blasters to have your DVR tune the cable box to a specific channel. And of course you have to actually pause the video or record it in advance in order to get commercial-skipping capability.
Cable ad skipping is entirely a technical problem, streaming ad skipping is entirely a legal one.
[0] You were supposed to be able to just get a CableCARD, but the cable companies fought tooth and nail to force you to
Whenever I'm in the US and turn on a TV I'm always amazed at the amount of advertising and the effect it has on the media itself. One of the effects of streaming services was that it allowed script writers and producers total freedom from having to structure a story around the ad breaks.
Whenever I try to watch syndicated US tv here in the UK — e.g. The Simpsons — it's incredibly painful because the ad breaks don't line up, so you often get a 'false positive' and/or a 'false negative' that really affects the experience.
If i can legally block/skip/cirvumvent it, i still will. When reading a magazine, i will try and skip the ads. I block as much ads on my internet connection as possible, because i get to say what comes in and goes out.
And companies may complain about my totally legal actions. Not that i am going to to anything about their complaints, for i do not care and never will, but they may totally complain.
Comanies may also try and circumvent my actions to force the ads as long as their actions are legal. I also understand that people do not want to play this cat and mouse game.
However. When products tend to be a certain necessity and in reality you cannot choose but to consume or purchase a specific thing (Microsoft Office for instance. Yes i know there alternatives, but do you really have a choice?), things get a bit weird or shady.
Companies may still legally stuff ads in those 'necessary' products, but it's not something you really want.
You don't 'need' a streaming service or a Verge subscrition and can perfectly survice without having one, but when you are paying for one and you're still getting a bunch of ads, it does not feel right. It feels you're getting screwed because of that weird fine print in a contract.
Companies stopped caring about their customers need as much as possible. They only think about making money. I stopped caring about companies and their products as much as possible. I only think about spending as less as possible of my money. You reap what you sow.
All of these things happen not because people approve of them, but because they have no choice. Every company in those industries is doing this because they want more profits. Companies do have the choice, but they would flood your eyeballs with ads 24/7 if it was socially acceptable. So they push that line as far as they can take it before people start complaining. And that's how we got to where we are now.
The thing most people don't consciously think about is that advertising is brainwashing and psychological manipulation. It's designed to embed products and ideas into your psyche to get you to do something or think a certain way. Separating me from my money is extortion, though fairly benign. What I find truly insidious is putting thoughts into my head. Political ads and propaganda are weapons of war since they manipulate how societies think and behave. They have the ability to influence how people vote, to topple governments, to cause civil unrest and deep distrust in societies. How most of the world isn't seeing the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing in the past decade as a direct consequence of ad-fueled social manipulation is beyond me.
To speak nothing of the multi-billion dark industry of data brokers, and companies hoovering up and profiting off of our data in perpetuity.
Advertising is evil to its core and is the most harmful yet normalized industry we've ever invented.
Websites that do not use ads cannot survive (on a large scale) if their competition uses ads.
Large consumer-facing websites are forced to use ads.
As long as ads are legal, consumers will not have the choice to use ad-free websites. (The only exceptions being startups operating at a loss.)
This is not even solved by websites allowing for paid, ad-free plans.
Who pays for Google? You, when you by a can of Coke. Coca Cola increases the price of the drink, then gives that extra money to Google.
If you are using a paid, ad-free plan, you are not only paying for the plan, you are also still paying the increased price of Coca Cola.
As long as ads are legal, people who use paid plans have to pay more* than twice of what the service is actually worth.
*Don't forget the effort that is being put into designing ads, building tracking technology, managing tracking data centers, which again, are paid by you, every time you buy anything.
It is unacceptable behavior. I do check how much uBlock Origin has to block for a website of a business and that does inform my opinion of them quite severely. Biggest detractor: Google analytics. It will always be blocked, and not be loaded, but if I see it on their website, expect my opinion of them to fall quite a few levels. Combine that with some JS only website, then they are already lost. I then know they neither care about user experience nor accessibility, and if that was a potential enployer, they would have dropped out of that category, because I don't want to work in a dystopia shop.
I'd prefer a world where we pay for services we are receiving.
The assumption is that you always pay. Either with your information, or with your money. But the key word there is Either.
Not the question. It was "if the company already offers a less ads for money service" then should "less" mean "zero"?
> People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads.
Is this supposed to prove anything? They don't have a choice. If they offered
a) Lots of ads for $X
b) Many ads for $Y
c) No ads for $Z
How do you see that working out? I would expect (a) and (c) to be massively more popular than (b).
Those ads are far less egregious than the kinds of online ads we're discussing. If online ads were the equivalent—static, hosted on the same site, free of data collection—then not only would the experience be much more pleasant, we wouldn't even be able to block them.
Nowadays they are rare outside places like Neocities, but it is true that I don't know of anyone who has gone out of their way to add an adblock rule to block those.
It's ridiculous the amount of money spent, people's time spent, all on a quest to make the world an uglier and more hostile place.
Is the privileged dude the one who coded the advertising system, or managed the team, or made the decision to use advertising for additional monetisation and got promoted for it?
Do they hate ads too, despite being that guy?
the desperately poor conveniently don’t have much time to critique society, so i guess we can’t do anything huh.
they felt less intrusive because they were
I wrote a short post on the topic[0] but to save you a click here is the main point: We all complain about advertising that tracks users now. Imagine how valuable the data would be for paying customers now consider which micropayment provider you would trust with that information.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
Plain, non-animated non-creepy banner ads I've never minded. What I mind are:
1. Ads that are intrusive and distracting
2. Pages that have more ads than actual content
3. Ads that chase you around for two weeks trying to get you to buy something you just bought.
I mean yeah, if I'm paying $20/mo it had better be ad free. But if I'm paying $4/mo, having tasteful ads interspersed among the content is probably fine.
For all it's faults facebook advertising is similar, you can just scroll past an advert if it's of no interest. I don't find their adverts overly annoying.
I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. It's not sustainable for me to do pay for all the websites I visit. And me randomly paying only some tiny subset of them doesn't make any sense to me. I'd need some prioritized list. And it would have to be a very short one because I'm simply not rich enough to maintain lots of multi dollar subscriptions per month. And I also don't want to micromanage a lot of payments and subscriptions.
The Verge, which was mentioned in the article is a good example of a website that I don't value enough to get anywhere near that short list. They have a lot of competition reporting more or less similar stuff that I wouldn't miss them. In fact, I can't recall reading anything by them lately. I guess not a lot of their stuff makes it to the HN front page. Probably because it's just not that interesting.
Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier).
See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
(The comparison is not great because premium streaming of original content and long-form text journalism on current affairs are different things with different audiences and pricepoints and viewing patterns.
By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)
Also why many services release episodes weekly instead of giving them at once.
Does it make great content? I've only watched 3 series and then cancelled because it was annoying (but all three were fairly popular), and the more they progressed, the more underwhelming they got. The premise was always good, but scenario was meh and getting meh-er by the episode, everything was kept superficial. Kind of like to tick a box "we talked about X", but without actually exploring the topic. And it was the exact same thing over and over again in 3 separate series - be it the gay footballer in Ted Lasso or the relationship with religion while in climate catastrophe in Extrapolations. No real depth, no real thought provoking discussions, no nothing. Just a quick mention, and jump on to the next topic to gloss over.
It seems to me that they spend a lot on big name actors, had some good initial ideas on what to do, but the actual execution was pretty meh.
Having watched Presumed Innocent on Apple TV, I have had very similar thoughts. <spoiler> Supposedly it is detective fiction, with some intertwined stories, so called unreliable narrator. But then instead of tying everything together they throw all those parallel stories and draw gotcha card. Cheap novel wrapped in shiny production. </spoler>
For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read.
I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason.
It either need to be
- (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music,
- or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.
I'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.
Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example.
Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass).
If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.
A vocal minority doesn't outweigh hard numbers in this case. But that's one of the causes of enshittification, everything becoming metrics-driven.
The funny part is we should have all learned our lesson from the cable television days. Perhaps it's been long enough that everyone forgot, or maybe most of the market is just too young now, but there was a time in the US when cable television was ad-free. Commercials started sneaking into that with some regularity even though part of the draw to paying for cable tv was that it was commercial free. My brain wants to say this happened around the late 1980's? I might be wrong on that time frame, but at some point, like a frog sitting in a pot of water, the heat slowly rose and we found ourselves boiled to death with more and more commercial interruptions in our paid cable tv channels.
Then we watched the same thing happen with the Internet in the mid-2000's. Needless to say, I am a heavy user of ad blockers and Pi Holes. I especially loath sites that want to detect my ad blocker, and throw up a message trying to to guilt me into turning it off. The thing is I am not just blocking the ads, but also trying to block all the tracking that comes with those ads.
It's not really just about being annoyed by ads this time around. It's also about the right to privacy.
Not so much of a problem on modern TVs / set top boxes, as they usually offer that feature (though things get complicated if you want to do some channel flipping to e.g. quickly check how a sports game is going), but it was definitely a pretty big deal back in the day.
None of this applies to on-demand, of course.
I believe the metrics exist; I don’t believe they tell anyone useful information.
Beyond that, there's no lock-in to a video service beyond any exclusive show you're currently watching, so your decision to continue paying is on you.
For videos and podcasts I subscribe to content creators on Patreon. I currently have four subscriptions for a total of around $12, and I give roughly the same amount to each.
I also avoid services that are monetized by ads elsewhere and pay for Kagi to get ad-free search. I will avoid all services that offer free tiers with ads and paid tiers without ads as I just fundamentally do not believe that the business model can work at scale without causing harm.
I also host my own email as I do not believe that it is possible to provide free email to people without somehow also doing things with their data or attention that goes against their interests.
If you offer content for free I'm not going to pay for it. I don't tip, I don't buy micro transactions in games, I don't pay for discord nitro or buy "collector's edition" versions of games or twitch subscriptions or anything like that.
Simply, if I don't have to pay I don't. And I certainly won't waste my life watching ads just so someone can earn a fraction of a cent.
I don't feel any need to justify that, I don't feel bad about it. These tactics earn tons of money, and if that ever stops they'll stop doing it and do something else instead. Until then I'll happily take advantage of all the free stuff. Someone else wants to donate to subsidize me that's great, go right ahead. I'm gonna keep my money.
You justify with 'if you offer content for free, I'm not going to pay for it'. Agreed with microtransactions and stuff. But with youtube videos? The content is not actually offered for free. It precisely relies on ads to exist. So the content is offered with ads/with subscription (i.e. not free), and you are using an adblocker to bypass this. So you are just leeching out of the other users, and is not sustainable.
As long as I can use youtube for free with an ad blocker (and sponsorblock, amazing plugin) I will. If google doesn't like that they better figure out a solution. Not my problem.
The thing with ads is: it's not free money. We pay for it. All of us. It's part of the price when we buy goods and services.
If advertising wasn't possible, items would be cheaper and we would have more money to pay for content directly. Cutting out the whole advertising industry out of the content payment loop would save so much money.
And yeah people would still buy stuff they need because they need it. And stuff they didn't need? Well good then that they're not buying it. Saving natural resources and money.
At least with Spotify and Netflix there is some kind of rev share thing in place. It's not very fair of course and a bit biased towards rewarding content creators that I don't necessarily like (or are in need of more money). But it's better than having to cherry pick creators. Somehow publishers have resisted creating such a thing for written media. We have this broken model of ad supported media and media outlets taking most of that revenue and paying really shitty wages to journalists, many of whom are working on a freelance basis and get paid pitiful amounts per word. Why do we have all these middlemen?
You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears.
Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.
I'll just say that looking back on my life consuming media (that started long before the consumer Internet was around), there has never been a better selection of media that I enjoy than now.
I've never watched reality shows or sitcoms, the kind of stuff that dominated mass media for a long time... I have interests that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream, so finding interesting or quality content was hard, and shows/films/docs were few and far between..
But now? The current system, while imperfect, at least allows for every possible topic and niche to be somewhat sustainable.
The sheer quantity of media has absolutely grown exponentially so there's definitely a lot more bad media, and media that isn't for me, but in terms of choice for myself, it's incredibly good.
Obviously YMMV and this is just my anecdotal experience, but I don't consider the system to be broken (even though, again, it's certainly not perfect).
- Rent seeking is not behavior I care for, and so much of the subscription service stuff is exactly that.
- I'm more than happy to pay for quite a few patreon/similar things.
- But _ultimately_ I don't just want to "consume" content, I want to share it. In fact I believe sharing the cultural artifacts I engage with is an essential part of a culture, and that getting in the way of that is morally wrong. So if your paywall gets in the way of _that_, I _will_ work around it.
Edit: also, the other side of the problem is that there are too many websites now. When it was Netflix and nearly everything there, I payed for it. I no longer pay for shows and movies, because things got _completely_ nuts. Similar thing with news. Reality is I pay _way_ more for Patreon than most people I know - not because of any moral reasons, but because I can actually afford that. And a typical news site asks as much as what I give to some of my favorite writers and painters.
I basically only keep them because I used my real name and don't want anyone to steal an account/personnal info I might have created with that gmail address and impersonate me.
I don't really see what is difficult in operating without a google account.
Just about the only thing I can think of is Google Docs. But if you need that for work, chances are you're using your work account for that, not your personal one.
makes the widely hated app store look generous by comparison
they're just not widely used because it's the usual winner take all
people are also going to be queuing up to peer with Google so they don't have to pay for transit
unlikely to be the case for their competitors
Part of it, the rest goes to Google to reinvest in their ads business.
As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they?
"Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.
No we don't, and we never did. The whole "GDPR" thing is a sham - unfortunately this is the case in many countries, but especially so in the UK. The ICO is one of the most useless "regulators" I have ever dealt with, somehow even worse than telecoms regulators.
This isn't some sort of subtle and concealed breach of the GDPR that everyone puts effort into keeping quiet. It's blatant, obvious, and in the face of everyone who visits major news websites. If it was enforced, the practice would've quickly stopped.
It's about as subtle as committing murder on live TV. If you don't get arrested for that, it's clear that the law you've broken is not being enforced.
> You should report sites that do that
But let's hypothesize and see what it takes to actually do this:
As per the ICO's requirements, you must first contact the organization that has wronged you and give them time to address your concern.
They have 30 days to do respond, and could extend it potentially indefinitely by engaging in pointless arguments. They could also make technically flawed arguments in how they're not actually tracking you or collecting personal data, and those will successfully work because there's no technical expert on the ICO's side to review it and call bullshit. You need full-time admin staff to deal with these matters.
Assuming you finally get to a stage where you have grounds to make a complaint to the ICO, what are they going to do (if anything)? Well at best they will send a letter, which is not legally binding in any way and will promptly get ignored by the recipient, which is fine because the truth is, both sides are complicit and just want the matter to go away - whether the underlying problem is solved or not is not their concern.
In practice, even if the ICO wanted to act (they don't - don't bite the hand that feeds), what would they do? This isn't a single, small offender, this is the entire newspaper industry. They not only have a lot of lobbying power but outright control the narrative. They know it, and that's why they have no fear putting evidence of their GDPR breach on their homepages.
Are you ready to hire a full-time admin team to do this (and end up absolutely nowhere, except maybe collecting evidence of this "regulator"'s uselessness)?
--
GDPR enforcement in the UK (and sadly in a lot of other countries) is and will remain a sham until the issue becomes politically important. The regulator on its own, even with the best of skill and intentions will not succeed in this battle. The only way I can potentially see this changing is if we see continuous and recurrent data breaches of politician's personal data and dirty laundry, but even then the likeliest solution is a two-tier system where politicians are allowed to have privacy while everyone else doesn't.
Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr
That is a concern for the "content creator" not for anyone else. We have way more "content" than we need, especially "content" compromised by ads.
> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.
> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.
While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.
I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.
I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you.
Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?
> I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world.
The ideal is for the advert to be served from the main source, much like a sponsored segment in a cast is just in the cast, no extra external access to do any tracking from.
If the site I'm actually visiting itself starts serving malware like shite, then I go from not trusting their “partners” and being wary of them by association, to really not wanting to be there at all and adding them to my DNS blocklist just-in-case.
We had some text ads, maybe a banner at the top/bottom of a site, and that was it... that was "the middle ground", they got the ads, we didn't have to block them. Then they added more ads and more ads and more ads, and animated gifs and more of them, and videos, and videos with sound, and overlaid ads, and overlaid ads with unskippable video and audio, and more and more... and in the end, a lot of us blocked them.
They had their chance, they decided that the option they wanted was to abuse the viewer with a huge amount of very bad ads on every goddamn site they visited, and now (for some of us), it's over, we're blocking ads.
If they stayed at the one, two ads per site, I wouldn't even notice them,... now, when I do (because there's just too many of them), I immediately install an adblock on every machine (parents, relatives,...) that I have to use a browser on.
Then they should find a business model that doesn't involve psychological manipulation. Ads are predatory. I have as much compassion for those who cry about ad revenues as I do for people complaining that they worse off for not being allowed to rape and pillage.
I don't mind ads one bit, except video unskipable ones. I find stuff to buy there all the time, or discover new tools, sometimes I'll buy an equivalent thing years later that I remember I found first in an ad.
If I want to research competitors to something, I just google the something and click the ads.
And I also like that I like something that makes so many people pissed off.
I needed a washing machine - so I went online and purchased one from a large retailer. For the next month all I got was ads for washing machines - many from the retailer I purchased from.
It has made me want to not reset my browser so frequently.
Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blockers and are more aware of privacy. But now, not only don't they not provide content for free, but also make you pay and collect your data as well.
- Go to most of the major news sites in firefox.
- Install noscript extension
- See the bizillion scripts that loads.
Note: You can load all these scripts indirectly with google tag manager or platforms like cloudflare zaraz etc. So you won't even directly see the analytics script that is loaded in a website. Just google tag manager etc.
Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right. Behavioural ads makes it the worst it the problem we should be solving. It makes sense from the business POV as well. You cut the middlemen like facebook and google and get paid premium directly. You curate the ads for your product/website. People want to just plug in an api call and generate money. That won't fly anymore with users being aware.
Static / Contextual ads means:
- no data collection needed
- More money to websites/apps cos they are removing google and facebook as middlemen.
- Can be privacy friendly
- Provide free content means more reach
- Lesser scams, ad malwares and other scammy things
Behavioural ads with data economy over api's became mainstream because we had to directly make relationships with people who want to show ads in our website and apps. It's time consuming and you will need a worthwhile product to show and pitch your website/ads as an ideal place for them to show their ads to. And you cannot just create a bunch of pages and setup google ads and be done with it. Delegating this has been bad for the websites/apps and for users equally. The only winners have been google, facebook like players.
I have been writing an article on this topic for months. I will finish and hopefully I can make a more articulated case then.
Stop NGOs and USAID from being able to buy ads on any issue.
Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
> Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
Exactly. And the same like I have said above applies for data collection as well. Paywalls don't stop data collection and data surveillance.
I'll quote you "this is a bad take". What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
> Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right.
In an ideal world, yes. That ideal world is long gone.
> What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
OK. Let's first examine 2 complaints about ads:
1. Ads are an annoyance.
2. Ads with surveillance and data economy are bad.
If your problem is the first one, I don't have anything else to say than the fact that Ads are not going anywhere. My arguments are all against and about the 2nd point. I think ads are a good way to make revenue. And it should NOT be done with data surveillance but with curated and useful ads.
Exactly. Do you think the problem is ads here? And you still haven't answered to my POV. How is paywall stopping data surveillance? The reality is they are making you pay and serving ads. Which is the problem? How is paying solving it?
> In an ideal world, yes. That ideal world is long gone. If we are to fix the problem, this is what we should do. Find THAT ideal world.
Why? You state that as if Ads are a product of the universe we live in and we need to accept them like gravity.
> And it should NOT be done with data surveillance but with curated and useful ads.
Agree in principle. The problem is that you don't even need to do data surveilance in this case.
I pay money to the verge. You can infer I have a) disposable income and 2) interest in tech With those two alone you can start showing me ads. You don't even need to profile me.
And that's wrong in my book.
> Do you think the problem is ads here? And you still haven't answered to my POV. How is paywall stopping data surveillance? The reality is they are making you pay and serving ads. Which is the problem? How is paying solving it?
The problem is the ambiguity. The old mantra says "If you're not paying for the product then i'm the product"
Well i'm paying. The transaction should be clear. I give you money, you give me content. But instead that's not what you get. Because you still get profiled, you're still served ads, and sure, BETTER, ads. That's my problem.
Am being realistic. The enshittification of tech companies is not to be blamed on ads. Ads have been around way way before, internet, tv or even news papers.
> Agree in principle. The problem is that you don't even need to do data surveilance in this case.
I agree with you here as well. Remove data surveillance and behavioural ads and you get contextual / static ads. That is better for users, advertisers. Ads zero is not the solution is all am saying.
The disagreement I have with this is that the other way (your way) doesn't work as well. They still track data, make you pay and it is only accessible to people with disposable income.
> The problem is the ambiguity. The old mantra says "If you're not paying for the product then i'm the product"
No. Data surveillance has nothing do with ads. DuckduckGo is a good examplle of it. It doesn't have to be like that.
> Well i'm paying. The transaction should be clear. I give you money, you give me content. But instead that's not what you get. Because you still get profiled, you're still served ads, and sure, BETTER, ads. That's my problem.
This is a very entitled view. Not all of them has the disposable income. Moreover, How many are you going to subscribe? But also, it doesn't fly with news sites. Subscription works for software etc. Anything that needs to be accessible for the broader audiences (like journalism), it fails. This is where ads come in.
Moreover, my problem with the whole statement is that ads were done in a right away in the past. We know how to do that. While it hasn't panned out very well when it comes to subscriptions for news sites etc. It is making it more difficult for journalists and others to survive with subscription. There is a reason why newspapers had ads even after you pay for subscription. Especially for news sites like services.
The problem with internet ads is that we just don't want to directly deal with advertisers. We rather make an api call and let google do the rest. AND they do surveillance. Thats on us. Not on ads.
Russian roulette is an exhilarating and entertaining game to play when it is done right.
We should ban paying for information at the federal level to prevent this horrific practice.
That said, paying AND >0 ads (or tracking) is also a no no for me.
I would pay a fair amount for an ad free news source that has a first rate editorial staff that simply prints the news.
It's an old-fashioned notion, but the advertising industry has extremely bad manners: it doesn't respect civilized social norms like not exploiting personal information for private gain and not egregiously interrupting people for trivial reasons. It's nosey, untrustworthy, intrusive, manipulative, and deceptive. I wouldn't tolerate this behaviour from a friend, and I'm not going to tolerate it from a bunch of amoral strangers.
edit: and it doesn't help you much, you are likening ads to harmful things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
There are thousands, and thousand of useful places, each for free. Take a look at awesome lists at github. These provide so much value to the society. It does not require any subscriptions, nor money.
There are millions of people who share education, and knowledge for free. If you build a business, you need to build it around things that are sustainable.
The old boomer internet is also over. Google will not lead anyone to any niche blog, or site. Now everything is inside big tech siloses, where "the algorithm" spoonfeds people with what zuckerberg likes. Go advertise any real http domain with any useful data. Nobody cares.
Yet they make no decisions to reduce those expenses. You either have to believe they are incompetent or this statement is on the spectrum of half truth to full on lie.
> What will remain? Paid cinemas?
Libraries. They used to be awesome and no corporation owned them.
> This is stealing and it is illegal
Sure, but, now you're forced to declare an actual value for the items taken. What is a fair price for most of this "content?"
> So that an independent site cannot distribute free information.
The irony is watching independent journalists take "super chat" donations on these corporate platforms. How big of a cut does the corporation get again?
Therefore it is quite easy to understand and follow, and was suggested by FBI that we should use such extensions for our own protection.
Anyone saying, or implying that we should not use commonly named 'ad blocking' is spreading real harm to people.
When it comes to YouTube it is easy to understand the throwback. It always has been free. Now it is changing, but people are accustomed to this, and it is very bad to shame people for wanting things to keep that way. I agree, that if YouTube TOS say you should not be using them, then fine by me. YouTube goes bye bye. This is the only reason why they did not close all the loopholes, because that is how you loose your viewers, publicity, eyes, and eventually shareholders, and entire ad business. Microsoft for years tolerated piracy to keep them the most popular operating system. That still allows them to shame everybody for what they allow.
I also have a job—as a self employed developer that earns absolutely not enough to live a decent life—and I still do what I can to respect the web and respect the people ho visit my site by not serving them ads or by tracking them.
Because I believe that respecting you and your privacy is more important than me earning a few $.
I'm not willing to look at ads. If the product or service that you have to offer is not sustainable without ads, I'm perfectly fine with it not existing at all.
Am I still in the minority or has my behavior become more prevalent?
(Note that I’m not talking about adblockers; I’m talking about refusing to interact with ads, whether due to no adblocker or due to not being caught for whatever reason.)
I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route.
Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.
I wish I could teach other people how to evict ads from short-term memory before they get written to long-term and how to create mental blind spots the size of billboards and banner ads. Apparently it’s an invaluable pair of skills :(
One thing to consider is why do luxury watches advertise in newspapers? It's about building the hype around a brand. The value of a watch is not in telling the time it's about (except some in build value of materials and work) the value that society gives it.
It's why they are even more problematic than it seems on the surface.
So even if we are in the minority of trying to be as rational with the purchases as possible, we surely don't do this all the time with everything. And surely we can't expect others to follow suit - so, simplifications will be made in the decision process, and that is exactly where advertisers are aiming for, and successfully.
As a result, it doesn't matter whether you are "in the minority" or not, and to show you why simply assume that your "behavior" is the majority for a moment: If I'm still buying ads, it's not because altairprime is on my marketing list, and I'm determined to show you an ad for something you don't want, but because volume of minority ad buys 'V' is high enough to support my lifestyle at an 'R' I have uncovered.
That is to say, as an online advertiser, I'm looking for my channel (with a big R% and a big enough V), and I don't really care about the absolute size (V) of not-my-channel until I have an idea of how to get that big R from them.
Because it works, and because as usual, HN users confuse their personal experience for being that of the masses when nothing could be further from the truth.
The utility value of ads to the computer is low. But these users are not the ad buyers so that makes little difference.
The tragedy of online ads is that computers when used for search do provide utility to computer users in locating products and services. But middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, seek to intermediate the use of computers for search in order to profit from ad services. This lowers the utility value of search to the computer user.
HN commenters and other commenters across the web complain about this degradation, namely they complain about results delievered by the largest search middleman, Google, almost daily.
Online ads annoy the majority of computer users in order to be "effective", i.e., profitable for the ad buyers, with respect to only a small minority of computer users. The system is profitable for the ad buyers but extremely inefficient. Waste and fraud are common on an unprecedented scale.
Personally I have nothing against advertising. However, having used computer networks that had restrictions on advertising, I question whether computer networks are the appropriate place for advertising.
The decreasing ability of those who produce software to license it for fees, i.e., no viable business plan, has caused them to use surveillance, data collection and advertising services as a substitute means of generating income. Software is given away "for free" and functions as a Trojan Horse for surveillance, data collection and advertising services. The sustainability of such a strategy is questionable.
If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.
I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible.
BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience.
So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making.
If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.
just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better
Paying customers are also identified (logged in). So in theory you could pinpoint me even more with ads after I decided to be a paying customer.
Which is what?
> just because that happened
The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution.
Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.
> Which is what?
UBI.
Then it gives more power to those who already have the most of it.
It also normalizes lying, being intrusive, and manufacturing damaging social norms.
Tracking is worse, but all ads are toxic.
Now there's one way to pay to get way less ads: pay for an AI model and replace a huge percentage of your searches with searches inside the model. They're not bad at that. That's why many are saying that Google is (partially) in trouble with LLMs: wife and I definitely are searching less using search engines than we used too.
Besides that I'm running a local DNS server with a brutal blocklist: nearly one million of wildcarded domains (unbound supports wildcards). I block entire TLDs too. Entire countries' IP blocks. Add uBlock origin to the mix and your life becomes pretty ad-free.
I'm glad to pay a subscription for an AI model that doesn't serve me any ad. But I won't pay for something that serves me less ads, but still some ads. As simple as that.
You want me to pay: serve me zero ad.
I agree. My browsing experience would be much faster and less annoying.
You say that as if that's a bad thing