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As the verge pointed out[1], small publishers do have a way to get paid that will work a lot better than subscriptions.

They'll just put their content on Facebook -- ad blockers don't work inside the Facebook app.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233010

Doesn't do anything for sites not considered "publishers." Popular "tools," such as calculators, forms, etc. will not have these Facebook-type options.

I over simplified the Verge story. They said that everybody that currently depends on web ad revenue would either move to Facebook and/or a native app running iAds.

Either way, it's a pretty pessimistic view of the future of the web.

Agreed.

I'm ok with this. Facebook at least operates their advertising with some minimal level of... respect is too strong a word, but facebook won't redirect you to a page that tries to get you to install viruses.

Looks like that number was from 2013?

Can anyone tell me how they would figure out that number today?

I've looked into a similar approach and would love a reliable way to answer "how much does a publisher need to charge to not have ads".

Divide Google revenues by Internet penetration to get a rough guideline, perhaps? I doubt it has changed that much.

An excerpt from the intro on that landing page of that project or intiative

"It is a movement to create an ad-free Web"

I find this view to be unlikely to materialize. We're in a consumerist-led capitalist economy and advertising is an integral part of it and the web as communications medium is one of its important assets.

This project will fail before it even starts due to the unrealistic end goal advertised - pun intended - on the page.

So I can go to a store, I don't like how they make money, I'll just take away whatever I want for free?

If you don't like how they make money, do not patronize them.

If HTTP was a contract whereby you agreed to look at everything that was sent over then your analogy would make sense. But HTTP is a protocol, not a legally binding contract. So no.

The terms of service for the site that's delivered to you over HTTP, though--that is a legally binding contract. Some have no-ad-blocking terms.

Contracts have to be agreed upon by both parties. If you want to have users agree to a ToS and protect your content, you should 401 their requests for your content until that happens. Otherwise fuck off, it's a public request.

If that were true, then we will start a company together and become rich!

1. Create a website with a TOS that states "all webpages are for your personal consumption only, any permanent copies which are used for business purposes (including indexing!) constitute grave harm to us, worth $100 per instance"

2. Make many, many pages on that website which all link to one another, let's have at least say 1000s of them

3. Ensure that they rank well for very obscure terms, terms which have a very short results list

4. Do not avail ourselves of robots.txt

5. Get our website linked to through means which do not make it obvious that we're trying to get it linked to

6. Wait for google to index the website

7. Gather the evidence of the indexing activity via search results

8. File a lawsuit against google for breach of contract re: TOS and collect millions

If what you're saying is true, then this is a literally foolproof plan to become millionaires (or more!).

95% of the websites I visit, I've never seen the terms of service. Is it still binding on me?

This is brilliant. I've added a request header to my browser:

X-You-Owe-Me-If-You-Send-Content-In-Response-To-This-Request: $1,000,000,000

I'm going to be rich, rich, rich!!!!

Downvoting reality.. nice work, HN!

Here's how contracts work: A makes an offer to exchange something of value. If B accepts that offer, there's a contract.

How's that work for websites? The website publishes its TOS. You go to the website and are able to look at the TOS. If you keep using the site, you're held to the TOS. You've impliedly agreed to it. If you disagree with it, you can leave.

There is certainly some legal fiction going on here. Of course most users don't read the TOS, and even if they tried to, they wouldn't understand them. But courts have enforced them anyway. What would happen if they didn't? It would be anarchy.

There are limits to what TOSes can do, sure. But the point of what I said -- that TOS are contracts, and can bind you -- that is true. Mocking that truth is pretty silly and uninformed.

No, that is a cop out and a rationalization for why you feel you're entitled to stuff for free.

I don't use ad blocking software! So it can't be considered that I'm using some kind of cop-out or rationalization, since I'm not doing the thing that is supposedly bad.

I think there's a huge difference between what's legal and moral. I think ad blocking is quite legal, and morally questionable.

If the publishers want to get together and define a new protocol where acceptance of the terms of the TOS is included in the standard and then convince everyone to switch to it, they're free to do that. I suspect that they won't have any luck, but there's nothing stopping them.

Again, I say this as a person who does not use ad blocking software.

Sites like eBay hosted malvertising (http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/ads-on-ebay-and-drudg...) for 3 weeks. 3 fking weeks!!

This is unacceptable. Simply visiting a website with ads poses a threat to the security of your devices. Until ad networks and publishers fix this, they can go fk themselves. I will block ads to protect my devices.

Nope, you'll just not go into the store. Let's not go through this again, it's been demonstrated over and over that the analogy you are making is flawed.

I don't see any flaw in the analogy.

Not looking at an advertisement is not the same as stealing.

Except having the ads there is the cost for the content you're looking at.

When you buy stuff in a store, the items remain the property of the store until you pay. If you take them without paying then you're stealing. This is firmly enshrined in both morality and law.

When you view something with ads, they send you the stuff first, on the hope or assumption that you will later view the ads. No property changes hands at any time.

I'm hearing a bunch of excuses which are used to rationalize your bad behavior, but nothing based in reality.

How odd, because I'm not even defending the practice here, just pointing out that it's not at all the same as stealing.

That's defending the practice.

No, it really isn't. This may surprise you, but it's possible to point out flaws in an argument without making any statement about the merits of the conclusion.

So you have a service you're offering, I sign up and pay your small fee, and then share my login details with thousands of others, making you lose money.

In the same sense as all the arguments against ads. You're not stealing anything. No you're not. But you're wasting resources that the owner has to pay for.

At that point, you have agreed to a contract - the terms of service you have to click through to get an account. The terms of service say that you agree not to do that. When you simply read a public web page you are not agreeing to anything.

We're talking about extremely low marginal cost. More like a free glass of water or free use of the restroom than a free pair of jeans.

Marginal cost? free glass of water? No. Writing articles cost time and money. They are not free.

Yes, there is a single one time cost. Redistribution is essentially free, that's the point of the comment.

Being anti-consumer seems to now be costing money as well. And that is what most if not all ad driven publishing has become. User-hostile.

> Writing articles cost time and money. They are not free.

I didn't say "no cost", I said "marginal cost".

Installing a sink, making cups, etc. also has a relatively high upfront cost (probably more than writing a Buzzfeed article even). The point is that once the article is written and given to the first person, it costs nearly nothing to give it to next person.

Marginal cost is irrelevant. Someone had to create the original thing in the first place.

If it's not harming them, they let me take it and it's not illegal then your comparison is a non-sequitur.

How is it not harming them? Sites make money thru advertising and you block those ads. Paywalls don't work for everybody.

The point being is that your comment is a non-sequitur. My comment, in the end, really doesn't even matter because your comment, to begin with, is not applicable.

That's not a good analogy. Viewing a web ad is more akin to inviting a traveling salesman into your living room, where he has the opportunity to paw through your unmentionables, steal your valuables, and even burn your house down if not closely monitored and restricted in his activities.

>I'm not against funding people, I'm against funding ad agencies and their tracking and their other maladies. Such as trojaned ad networks, silly amounts of javascript and data, etc....

This is an extremely simplistic view of the world. You can go on thinking that you're really only sticking it to coca-cola or walmart, but the truth of the matter is that 50% of digital ads (At least on facebook) are SMBs. They're startups, they're mom and pop diners. As for railing against ad agencies, most of us don't work for F500s. We support entrepreneurs, and we do it at very slim margins (often times less than 15%). So, whatever, I probably won't get you to change your mind, just know you aren't sticking it to the man. You're sticking it to the little guy.

> "You're sticking it to the little guy."

And I'll keep doing it so long the little guy thinks being the little guy entitles them to dick their users around.

Yeah, there's nuance to the debate around ad blocking, but this argument is just silly. If a mom and pop diner refused to follow basic hygiene procedures we'd shut them down, just as we would a huge restaurant chain for doing the same.

If small businesses are spreading malware by using ad networks that are regularly compromised, it's on them. If small businesses are feeding their user's private data (often via exploits) to extensive ad networks, it's on them.

Being small doesn't exempt you from being a good citizen on the internet.

Of course, the reality isn't that small businesses and publishers are somehow evil and cackling maniacally as they feed their user's private information to huge ad networks. The reality is that they needed revenue, they chose an ad vendor, and they followed some guide on throwing some JS into the page so the ads get loaded. The real shithead behavior is on the part of these adtech companies.

But ultimately the misbehavior of adtech and ad networks is still held against the websites who choose to integrate them, and rightly so. This increases every single time an ad network is compromised to distribute malware, or is actively user-hostile, but the publisher chooses not to switch networks.

If a mom and pop diner refused to follow basic hygiene procedures we'd shut them down

But that's not what you're doing. You're going to the mom and pop diner, eating their food, then declaring that their hygiene standards mean you don't think you should have to pay for the food.

Well, this is where the analogy breaks down right? You can easily avoid going to a diner with an infamous reputation, but you can't go to websites the same way.

You figuratively have no way of knowing what ad networks they're integrated with until said ad networks are loaded and serving ads. Or worse, you have no idea what you're in for until the latest Flash 0-day has pwned your machine. Hell, it's impossible to even know if a website is integrated with any ad networks at all until you load them.

This makes the ethics of blocking ads markedly different from say, dining and dashing. Hell, it makes it a closer neighbor to "if you're reading this you've already agreed to our TOS" than anything else.

I think the biggest issue I have here is that internet journos are taking this out against users rather than ad networks. Effectively the entire defense so far has been:

"yeah our ad networks are shitty, they are full of malware, they are full of user-hostile abusive shit, they exploit your browser, and they are horribly engineered and slow. We sympathize, but despite the fact that we they are still our preferred vendor should in no way reflect on us and you should continue allowing the abuse, and if you have any problems take it up with our ad vendors. In no way should we be held in any way responsible for the current sorry state of affairs"

Which is a completely, absolutely, insanely bullshit stance. Publishers are the customers of ad networks, not us, and until they start pushing for better standards (like, say, The Deck) users will keep blocking them, ethically or otherwise.

> I probably won't get you to change your mind, just know you aren't sticking it to the man. You're sticking it to the little guy.

And that is the exact reason I noted there needs to be an alternative to "my site is ONLY supported by ads". Right now all of this is predicated on that assumption.

I challenge that as being necessary, which is why I also noted the google effort which while great for google ads, does nothing for other ad networks.

Hopefully that clarifies things as apparently you think I'm against supporting businesses despite my efforts in making that abundantly clear that I am not trying to deprive people of money for their content. I'm unable to right now provide support outside of viewing ads, and that isn't just my problem, its the content providers as well.

Taking the easy way out and saying I am the issue with not wanting to view ads and not that all of the parties involved is not very convincing. I do not buy into it being a moral view, nor ethical for that matter.

Well there's a simplistic view of the world if I ever saw one. It is not, for many people, the advertisers that are the problem, but the ad networks.

It's the ad networks that cookie and track. It's the ad networks that load the website with horribly slow loading external JS. It's the ad networks that want to track, profile and retarget us to death. It's the ad networks that use any means possible to get that view. From animations and modals to popunders, sound and other trickery. It's the bottom feeding ad networks that accidentally end up pushing malware out. Repeatedly.

Most web sites are loading so many external scripts, ads and trackers that the experience is simply broken. Without ad, social and script blocking the web has become unusably slow.

Meanwhile, I and many others would be glad to see ads from the little guy - without all the cruft and pollution, if I could do so safe from all the above.

That little guy just wants an advert to get her new business going. The ad network sold them all the other crap.

That's a fair view. The ad tech space can be pretty crappy sometimes. I won't disagree that the display universe is broken, or that current tracking methods are excessive. My hope, is that this current pushback helps us come to some sort of reasonable equilibrium between publishers, advertisers, and consumers.