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Comment by ixtli | Hacker News Reader

I hate this supposition that everyone should bend over backwards to allow people who make money in a certain way continue making money in that way. Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else?

Annoying advertisements are, in practice, the result of people failing to be creative in monetization. Ars Technica, for instance, has done a great job of integrating ads into their website in a way that doesn't bother me or detract from the experience. This is no doubt due to careful consideration of the needs of both the user and the owner.

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Your example about Ars Technica is perfect. They do it great and in a very tasteful way. I applaud them.

The issue lies in that all the people who do it bad, The Verge, etc ruin it for Ars Technica. Why? Because the ads on The Verge are so atrocious they install adblockers. Now these adblockers are all in whitelist mode from the start. Nobody cares to turn it into blacklist mode and require users to manually enable it for the sites. They just blanket block all sites from the get go. Nobody wants to deal with configuring it and being fair. So Ars Technica is now losing out by following the books because The Verge is douche spaceships.

Yup. Very well put.

Even further, I'm not sure many adblockers even have a blacklist mode. Neither Ghostery nor uBlock Origin appear to have one, at least at first glance...

That is my experience as well. I would love to run an adblocker in blacklist mode and only punish the sites that annoy me, but I haven't found one that works that way. If anyone knows of one let me know.

uBlock origin actually does and it's what I am running right now, ofcourse in blacklist mode.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-tu...

Thanks for the link. I think there are about a dozen sites that I really loathe the advertising on. I haven't been running ad-blocking software (as I mention elsewhere in the thread) and I "punish" these websites by simply closing the tab as soon as it gets a little jerky while scrolling.

A blacklist is an interesting idea. I'd like it even better if the blacklist was only active for a limited time so that I have to manually keep re-blocking it. Then if a site cleans up their ad-act and starts running ads good enough that they don't eff up the UX I'll simply forget to re-block them.

Something along those lines might be a product, especially if you sell access to a chart of how many people are blocking your site at any time. It might be a tool that publishers can use to evaluate advertisers and not accept the business of advertisers that cause their blocking numbers to spike.

You're in luck. By putting it in blacklist mode, when you blacklist the site with uBlock Origin it's only temporary. After time it resets itself, unless after you black list it you click the lock.

I was incredibly confused by that page until I randomly discovered that you can display that red/green matrix thing by clicking the "+ requests blocked" text on the uBlock overlay. The wiki does not tell you that anywhere.

The way online monetization currently works is extremely inefficient for pretty much everyone involved, and it will change. I recently worked in the ad tech industry and I know this first hand: publishers have been feeling the heat of dropping ad prices, advertisers have been seeing terrible ROIs, and consumers have been getting fed up with a poor online experience.

No one is going to stop changes from happening - market effects are in play here. But change always comes with pain for some, and not everyone wants to directly be involved with that pain.

I think ArsTechnica is also an example of where publishing needs to go because they don't show ads to subscribers. That's a great balance for casual and regular readers: if you visit enough to find it reasonable to pay you get faster page loads, less distraction, etc. and they get far more money from a subscription than a single user's ad revenue would have generated.

It'd be really interesting to see if someone, maybe one of the conscientious networks like The Deck, seizes the opportunity to setup something like an indie-web network where you see decent ads with a link to subscribe and not see ads on any participating site. Google Contributor could turn into something like that but it seems like they're afraid to commit to that as a serious effort.

> I think ArsTechnica is also an example of where publishing needs to go because they don't show ads to subscribers.

I think subscriptions are the way to go, but these sites really need to work on their pricing.

Ars wants $5 a month for a few articles of text a day; whereas Netflix gives me millions of hours of movies for $8 a month. Frankly, I can't even imagine how Netflix pays for the bandwidth, let alone all the licenses, to allow that to be possible.

The value proposition is extremely out of balance ... as if one is selling you a bottle of soda, and the other a brand new car, and they're asking similar prices. While I spend maybe 2-3 hours a month on Ars for content that's traditionally been free, I spend probably 30-60 a month on Netflix consuming content that's traditionally charged around $10-20 an hour for their content.

It's not that a lot of us are too cheap for $5 a month, it's that we visit a hundred or more sites, and the bottom 90% of the population cannot afford $500-$2000 a month in website subscription fees.

I know supply and demand is a balancing act, but I really believe sites would make a lot more money if we had a sort of Paypal-like subscription management site, and could easily manage lots of site subscriptions for $1 a month or so per site.

Except its entirely unclear that $5/month is sustainable, much less $1/mo.

Consider that the stodgy "print media" like the New York Times had a customer base of 800,000 that were sold for $700/year (that included ads in them!) - thats half a billion dollars a year, Ars would need 100% american penetration to get that on $1/mo.

Now obviously the cost side is changing for print, but the same is true for Netflix. I think Netflix prices are currently deeply discounted by the fact that (1) Studios are realizing they can make some money having it on Netflix rather than the Pirate Bay and (2) Home Video and Syndication prices still pay well enough that studios aren't majorly concerned. I interested to see if Netflix can even think about raising their prices while more and more studios pull their content off Netflix and Netflix has to continue relying on in house programming.

> Except its entirely unclear that $5/month is sustainable, much less $1/mo.

Right now, how many people are going to subscribe to a site? You have to trust them with your real info and credit card details, and maintain your login and card expiration. Cancellation's probably a hassle, too. You figure, probably one in ten thousand visitors are going to subscribe.

Have some sort of service, let's call it "Subscrybe", with a fancy button that sites put on their page. You click the button, agree to pay $1/mo, and you're back on the site ... ad-free, tracking-free, and with premium features (say, extra articles, rights to post comments on stories, etc.) No account hassles, no management hassles, no personal information given out. Maybe even better, have $1/mo be the "suggested" amount, and let people specify what they want. That sort of model has worked well for indie band/game downloads before.

My guess is the 1:10,000 figure changes to 1:1,000. Now you're making at least twice as much, even though each person is paying less. I can't prove this will be the case, but I feel it's an idea at least worth trying out. Just need a really big player to handle the subscription backend, and get some major sites onboard.

Your alternative right now, is that you get absolutely nothing, and they block your ads.

And if you still can't sustain a site with a few tech articles a day, then you'll have to fold. It's probably a sign the market's too saturated. As sources for quality news drop, they'll also have an increased paid viewership, until they're once again sustainable.

> I interested to see if Netflix can even think about raising their prices while more and more studios pull their content off Netflix and Netflix has to continue relying on in house programming.

I definitely fear this as well. Already, I'm up to Netflix+Hulu+Amazon Prime+Crunchyroll. CBS, Funimation, HBO, Showtime et al also want their own money, which I'm not going to do.

Even still, with just those four at around $30 a month (and no ads!), it feels too good to be true.

But if they keep forking, well ... I didn't ditch cable so I could split my $150/mo bill into 15 x $8-20 a month bills.

I would pay for ... Hacker News. The value of journalism is so often negative (with writers removing facts from the original scientific paper and adding a deceptive title), the only real value in my online parkour is a hundred comments from Hackers News. Ten of them will add facts, dozens will bring various point of views for/against the essay, one will really put the story into perspective.

I wouldn't know how to monetize HN without disturbing the savvy balance of profiles and the quality of comments, but to this day HN is the one journalism work that adds value to my life.

In a sense, HN is already "monetized." It is part of the business model for YC. They are hardly paupers.

I hate this supposition that everyone should bend over backwards to allow people who make money in a certain way continue making money in that way.

You could just stop visiting the site that offends you. That would be the actual principled way to treat this - the content is not worth the price of admission. Instead, ad blockers let you take the content and sidestep the price of admission.

I absolutely agree that media companies have not been creative enough in monetization, but "I'm going to take the content from you until you find a way for me to pay that I like" strikes me as a very entitled stance.

I'm signed up for Contributor. I blacklist ads on every site where I see them, which is most of them; as far as I can tell, this also stops Contributor from working on those sites.

Seriously. Take my money. But you don't get to show me ads. And I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely.

I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely.

This is exactly the entitled attitude I was referring to.

Is it entitled to want to keep up with society, when I pay $10/GB for bandwidth?

Why on earth are you paying $10/GB for bandwidth?

Mobile data plans can be very expensive, especially if they're sold by a provider with a lock on a particular user's region.

Presumably because that is the price that their provider sells it for. Most people do not have a choice of ISP, and cannot negotiate the terms of their service.

...which is why I'm curious to know who they are getting their service from. A price point like that ought to be named and shamed if users have no other option.

Ice.net.

And I misremembered the cost; it's actually "only" $5/GB.

"strikes me as a very entitled stance"

Not at all. This is exactly the same as broadcasters putting ads in their shows, and you muting them, fast-forwarding through them, going to the bathroom when they're on, etc.

The attitude that "if I put this out there and show ads, all viewers will need to view the ads before or while reading it so I can make money from this" is the entitled stance.

If you put it out there, I'll choose whether to download the content, the ads, both, or neither. If you don't like that, it's on you to find another way to monetize it or stop me from having access. I'm not going to pirate or try to break-in. But if it's just sitting there and I can legally download it, I will. It doesn't stop anyone else from doing it differently.

By the time I've clicked the link I've already seen the ad. Or more likely been redirected to a malware site.

If links came with a little tag on them saying "this will take you to a site with malicious advertising" then I'd do as you'd suggest. But they don't. So it's either block ads, or only visit sites I already know about.

You could just stop visiting the site that offends you. That would be the actual principled way to treat this - the content is not worth the price of admission.

No, it'd be your principled way to treat this. Not everyone shares your principles.

I don't share your principle that site owners have the right to demand that you accept their unilateral rules on how I should view the content they're sending me. I never explicitly nor implicitly agreed to those conditions. They are free to refuse my request, but if they don't, I am breaking no promise.

I could see your position for sites that click-wrapped their content with that condition, getting you to accept it, but not otherwise.

(By the way, I don't use ad blockers)

I just visited Ars Technica without the usual self-protection.

I get greeted by a salvo of dozens of third part trackers from the likes of Doubleclick & co.

Ars Technica operates as maliciously as any other publisher. There's no "careful consideration here", just blatant disrespect for the privacy of their public.

Yes but that's not what's being discussed in this thread. However, I did mention it in another comment because I think it's terribly disingenuous of people to post in here saying "BUT HOW ELSE WILL THESE POOR POOR BLOGGERS SURVIVE" while we give them huge amounts of behavioral data, often unwillingly. Just because they're not clever enough to monetize their content doesn't mean I should have to suffer. But the reality is that I wont. Before you could ad block on iOS I just stopped going to bad websites. So clearly they prefer this to me even seeing their content at all.

I had tried Ars without ad blocking quite a while ago when it had a banner that detected ad blockers and displayed a message. I found lots of third party trackers and decided to turn ad blocking on again. Even if the UI has improved with the ads in the recent times, the UX and privacy concerns are quite bad.

I don't subscribe to Ars for a few different reasons. My visits to the site have reduced drastically in the last couple of years (just a few times a month) and it's quite expensive for me. If Ars stopped using those trackers and also dropped the subscription price even by 50%, I would consider subscribing. I don't know if buying a subscription only turns off ads while keeping the trackers on (for an overly broadly termed reason called "analytics"). That would be practically useless for a reader like me.

Frankly, I believe Ars (and other sites) could make more money than they are now by reducing the prices and letting in more people from various backgrounds and geographies (currency conversion rates and all). Being one of the better tech sites, Ars could also be a good role model if it eliminated all those third party trackers (no clue what influence its owner, Condé Naste, has over such things).

When advertisers have the ability to masquerade their for-hire opinion manipulation as journalism, the public can no longer be in any meaningful way begin to hold government and corporate interests accountable. Native advertising is an existential threat to democracy and its profiteers belong in prison.

I'd much rather pay journalists to tell me the truth than read what people with money are paying them to tell me.

While I agree with you in principle, I don't think that people not wanting intrusive advertising in their blogs and acting to avoid it is going to effect this problem one way or another. What you're asking for is a BBC-style news service in America which is something I would love. If you had that, every few links on hackernews would still try to autoplay some sort of sound in a flash ad.

When I write software I try to think with the mentality of a user as much as possible. And my conclusion is that most users don't even see app functionality, they just see the goal in their mind. People use Excel to get calculations, not to put things in cells. People play game to have fun, hence the rise of casual gaming. I've never put advertising in my apps because that seems to me that when the user clicks the advertisement it will take them out of the app and away from their goal.

You're definitely not the only one.

I found the post from here http://blog.deathtobullshit.com (http://blog.deathtobullshit.com/post/129431438739/just-doesn...)

Ad blocking as a general thing is coming, there's no doubt, and I believe that it being possible on iOS will accelerate that coming; there's something about an app in the App Store that's more acceptable to an average user than a browser extension. I can understand not wanting being the person who brings the abrupt revolution, though.

>Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else?

No. I value UX over almost everything, but you have to realize that your values don't exist in a vacuum. Without something to keep the lights on and the AC blowing air on the servers, UX is pointless and doesn't amount to anything.

But what you're supposing is that there is _no way_ for people to profit off of their content except to bother me with invasive advertising. I simply can't accept this: the history of our industry and capitalism as a whole is a case study in how clever people are at monetization.

Then come up with something better.

Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else?

No but you didn't compensate the content creator with anything to demand a superb UX. When you pay them or exchange anything of value in return of the content you consume unless they're giving it explicitly for free, you could then argue that web advertising is degrading the UX.

If I could compensate them for the content that I like, I would 100% without a doubt. But that's not an option in 99.999% of all places, the only option is to pay for a subscription to a site that I'll visit one time.

"I hate this supposition that everyone should bend over backwards to allow people who make money in a certain way continue making money in that way. Am I the only one thinks that the user's experience should be more important than everything else?"

What's the user experience of an app that dies because it doesn't have the revenue to continue?

Why is that my problem? There are a hundred thousand shitty games on the App Store that all have in app purchases. Should I go and pay for them because I don't want them to die? It's the job of someone who wants money to convince me to part with it. To this end, they probably shouldn't slap me after asking for it.

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