Hacker News Reader

Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

I've been a contributor member for several months now, because I firmly believe in two things:

1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.

So here's what people need to know about Google contributor:

1. I pay for the highest level available.

2. I love not seeing ads.

3. This only works for Google-based ads, which are certainly common, but are neither the majority of advertising online, nor are they among the more annoying.

4. Contributor doesn't work like an ad blocker, which makes ads just "disappear." Instead, you see a big empty block (that is apparently customizable in some way) that says "Thank you for being a contributor. The ad space is still there, it's just blank. So if half of your page used to be covered in ads, now half your page is covered in little blocks that say, "Thank you for being a contributor."

For example, here's a screenshot of iMore (the site that was used to compare ios9's ad blockers): https://austen-screenshots.s3.amazonaws.com/iMore__The_1_sit... I'd almost prefer ads.

5. This doesn't stop most of your pages from taking forever to load because of JavaScript from other ad networks.

6. I don't care about the tracking/privacy as much as some people, but it doesn't solve that problem either.

So, do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely. I hope Google can expand it, and I will pay. I have no idea how expensive it would be to pay for the disappearance of all ads, but I'd likely do it. (I recognize I'm not the "average" Internet user as far as what I'm willing to pay).

That being said, it does not yet come close to competing with the convenience that an ad-blocker provides (which I don't use out of principle).

It's still early, so I give some leeway, and I like the idea, but as of yet this won't be a game changer. I truly hope it can become one.

View on HN

> or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist

I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.

Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is that they have to get their pagerank up and stay relevant. The reason they have to do that is because if they don't do it, there are ad revenue dependent content generators out there that will do it for them. If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.

Google is great. I think in many ways they've made the world a better place. Google is very ad revenue dependent. Ad revenue sponsored all of the great television shows and radio shows from the beginning. I don't think that advertising should go away because it makes great things by Google and media companies possible.

However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.

That's a really interesting reason - now I can actually justify ad blocker and not just praise affiliate and content marketing.

> Much of the web is noise and regurgitation.

Much of it is, yes. Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do.

Not that I have any answers here - I think your DVR comparison is fair.

"Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do."

Not any more. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist are all paywalled. Those are some of the few remaining newspapers with sizable reporting staffs.

Most other US "newspapers" have a few reporters, but mostly regurgitate wire services and press releases. The "fluff" sections (cars, real estate, food and wine, sports) are outsourced, sometimes to Demand Media, the content-farm company.

Buy a newspaper and mark all the articles that didn't originate as a press release, press conference, national news service, or ad. There will not be many.

Those organisations have paywalls, yes, but they still depend overwhelmingly on ads for funding. If they lost it all tomorrow their paywall earnings would come nowhere near filling that hole.

And you seem to be ignoring cause and effect here - the reasons many newspapers have much smaller staffs these days is because the bottom fell out of the ad market and left them with no money.

...and having online ads didn't improve the reporting, so it earns me no particular allegiance to maintaining the status quo.

If they didn't have online ads they would pretty much be out of business and there would be no reporting.

I don't really understand the point you're making here. Who suggested having ads improved the reporting? It made the reporting available to you at a lower (or free) price.

The argument made slightly above was that without ads, we lose the current media environment. I'm saying (agreeing with some) that since the current media environment contains very little reporting of value, I don't see a real reason to maintain it.

Ads providing revenue has not led to value, ergo I don't see much reason to protect the status quo for fear of losing it.

NYT has tons of ads, even for paying subscribers.

> Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is ... ad revenue .... If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.

That's one of the best good for all, social arguments against ads/for blockers that I've seen.

Except it's not because it's completely subjective.

The reason why people continue to visit all those sites and click all those links? - Because they like it.

Show me an objective argument regarding ad blockers.

And what's wrong with subjective, anyway?

This entire post has plenty of objective arguments. What aspect would you like to discuss?

There's nothing wrong with subjective - unless you're actively trying to say you know what's right for everyone else. That's not how we make progress in the best interests of everyone.

> The reason why people continue to visit all those sites and click all those links?---Because they like it.

This is disingenuous; there are people who dedicate their working life to causing other people to do things they (other people) don't want to do (e.g., following a psychologically-designed bespoke(!) anchor that belongs to a class of things colloquially known as ``link bait". )

So half the planet is incapable of learning what clickbait is and only you can resist it?

Let's say everyone falls for it once, twice or even a dozen times. Don't you think the traffic would just stop after a while. Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?

Why do celebrities have the most followers and gossip sites have some of the highest traffic? It's easy to argue that it's not "valuable" or "educational" content but it's still incredibly popular. Does that somehow make it "bad"? Are you the judge of that? Or is someone manipulating everyone to pay attention? Are a few people capable of controlling entire populations this easily? And why are they spending time with ads then?

OR - could it simply be that people just like what they like? At some point you just have to put aside the prejudices and look at the data and see that much of the popular stuff on the web is popular precisely because it's what users want.

Or it could be that we hadn't yet learned to avoid it, and we're slowly learning:

http://mumbrella.com.au/mamamia-has-said-goodbye-to-clickbai...

http://digiday.com/publishers/upworthy-goes-clickbait-free-n...

http://blog.newscred.com/how-reader-demand-for-content-marke...

> So half the planet is incapable of learning what clickbait is and only you can resist it?

Are you suggesting that this was my contention?!---I fall for click bait all the time.

> Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?

No, but I don't think ``we" are actively trying to figure it out. People design these traps _for a living_; ``we" get trapped by them _in ``our" spare time_.

> ...

...

Why do serial primetime comedies use laugh tracks? The writing is base and the jokes often not funny, but when we hear other people laugh we're psychologically driven to feel more joy/humor/whatever and join in.

Why do people keep clicking obvious linkbait articles? Because there's certain social-inclusion triggers we're wired to respond to, logic and conditioning be damned. The content isn't popular. The forcing function used to drive that traffic is playing on social addictions.

At some point you have to put aside the "data" and think about where the cause and effect really lies.

You never put aside the "data". That's how you make smart decisions.

You're talking about basing all this on some rough psychology - however plenty of people don't watch comedies with laugh tracks because they just don't like the show and it's the same with headlines.

There might be certain influences (since it is called clickbait) but in the end it's all up to the user. They choose to click.

Upvoted because its well thought-out, but here's what I'm thinkin...

> If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.

Sounds like a funny way to try to make the internet more "sophisticated." If you dont like the content of the regurgitation engine, then you wouldnt visit the site and so wouldnt be supporting it.

So something else is at play. I think that a huge portion of the public actually likes the regurgitated content. They come home from work and just want to chill out and be mildly entertained by buzzfeed. So addblockers dont reduce the velocity of the crap engine, they take away your patronage and therefore your vote for what content you want to see.

I think that there is so much low quality on the web because people value it very low. They only pay by viewing adds (and with privacy) so the media produced will reflect that.

Now think about what might happen with contributor. Those that hate viewing adds and some that block them will decide to pay for the add space of the pages they view. Then the value of addsense space goes up since advertisers are more confident that the people seeing the adds will not hate them and the website also gets money from those who are contributors. So the value of content goes up as well and that should bring the quality up as well.

> However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.

You're not really paying google. Google takes a commission, which they deserve, and the money goes to the content creators. Tivo and DVR are bad examples since they actually did end an era in television and were not free so not very widely used for a long time.

I think the problem is more that there is not that much good stuff out there. I mean look at Netflix. I like it, but it's either films I have seen, often on tv, from maybe ten years ago, or it's really bad. Really bad.

But there might not be enough really good stuff out there. User created content is never going to be like professional globally top notch produced content - or if it is it will take as much talent and time to make. Once I have seen the new Star Wars film, it's not like I am going to be able to see another three hours of similar quality entertainment the next night and the next and the next.

For a thousand years humans have mostly entertained themselves by talking and jossing and laughing with each other. That's likely to be the future of content - just aimed at our niches.

It's a chicken and egg problem, right? If we want good quality content on the web, we have to be willing to pay people on the web. If we also don't like ads, then one way to support the content is via micropayments. Many other models have been tried to varying degrees of success but didn't encompass all of the web like Google Contributor is trying to do.

Solution: Micro-organisms.

> I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.

I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.

Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and good content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.

Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.

And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.

Many of us liked the Internet in 1996 ;) And some saw its commercialization as an affront, as a violation of fundamental principles. So anyway, I'm not at all attached to the Internet existing in it's current form.

In general I agree with you. Technically though, youtube didn't have any revenue source initially, including ads. Basically they built a giant user base, then let someone else figure out how to make money with it (unsurprisingly, with ads).

"I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate to block ads."

And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.

It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.

Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).

There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.

And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.

Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.

It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.

Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.

> And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.

uMatrix is a much more effective way of using DNS to block ads than HOSTS file editing. You can select only certain items from certain domains. Sure, I block Google cookies on most sites, but those sites are dependent on scripts coming from the same domains. With uMatrix, I can permit just the scripts that the site needs.

And I can quickly and easily test different resource combinations to customize my website experience.

For blocking, I use zone files, not the HOSTS file.

I can select specific subdomains; I can also use wildcards.

I doubt there is anything an ad blocker can block that I cannot block using DNS. But if you have examples, post them and let's see.

Can your method block cookies and frames from a domain, but allow Javascript and XHR?

I accept session cookies only, I keep Javascript turned off except when I am forced to turn it on (banking, etc.), and I really do not like frames.

If there is some site with frames that I willingly use regularly, I just bust out of the frame and access the contents directly.

Hence what you are describing does not sound like something I desperately need to do.

The only way I can answer your question is if you give me an example: a website with ads to block. Then I'll test it.

I should note though that cookies are not ads; the original topic was blocking ads - you are shifting the goalposts.

The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing. I am pretty sure that google's datacentre bill is not a tiny amount, and it takes lots of developers to make a gmail. And you won't be indexing the whole of the internet on an old desktop running in a closet.

> The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing.

I agree. In the sense it's usually meant, "free" just means "monetarily free", but cost can come in more forms than just monetary units. :)

But I never suggested any of those statements you are making.

What I was referring to is that Google's "product" is offered free to the user.

What you refer to highlights the importance of the question: if their "product" is not free to produce, then why don't they charge users for it?

No matter how well Google delivers your search results and email, if they cannot serve ads, they are in trouble. They have hundreds of millions of loyal users of these websites, but Google does not ask users for money.

If they did, would you pay?

> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist.

YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to earn money. Wikipedia? Check. HN discussions? Check. Topical subreddits? Check. Tutorials, videos, articles? Check, check, check. In fact, over time I've noticed a strong negative correlation between trustworthiness of content and amount of ads around it.

Heck, myself I created lots of such content and always felt it should be distributed for free.

Sure, videogames, music, movies, etc. are a different story. They are products that usually require full-time engagement of skilled professionals and you can't really get around paying for those. But your average web page? Rule of thumb: the more ads it projects, the more likely it is that it exists only to earn money off you (quality or dependability of content be damned).

TL;DR: I don't mind if upon removing ad support half of the Internet goes to shit. It was the bad part.

Oh, and since someone will surely bring up New York Times - I say, let it burn. Let's be honest with ourselves, we all know mainstream media are 1% content, 99% combination of bullshit and malicious lies. I'm willing to support that 1% with cash, but not the 99%. It is harmful to society and it should die.

> Topical subreddits

And how is reddit funded?

Imgur kickbacks, I've always assumed.

Doesn't matter. They don't create the content, but merely facilitate creation by unpaid volunteers.

Yes, they use ads, and if they didn't, I probably would be happy to pay or donate (if only to keep all the topical forums in one place and not revert to dark ages of phpBB and linear discussion threads). But let's not cheat ourselves - the ads are not paying for the content, they are merely supporting an efficient platform.

I like reddit because they encourage people to visit the websites of the content creators by way of link aggregation. You go to /r/Worldnews or something, and it's a link to the BBC or Reuters. They don't host the articles themselves. This sends much needed traffic to the people who deserve it. Whether you're a big name like cnn.com or a small publisher like StevesBlog.com, you're on an equal playing field.

https://www.reddit.com/gold

I've paid for it, personally, and I know others who do.

Yes, the ads are probably a larger portion of their income right now, but there's certainly an easy way to support them directly.

> gold

And they have ads, too:

https://www.reddit.com/advertising/

I was under the impression that their biggest source of funding was VCs, and that ads + gold aren't enough to keep them around.

It's not your call to make on what's harmful to society. So you don't want to read the "bad" stuff? Ok that's fine, just don't go to those sites.

But dont impose your ideals on everyone else who is reading that content voluntarily because they clearly enjoy it.

There are some issues which are really simple. Feeding people lies and bullshit to earn money is rather a clear-cut issue. So is encouraging dysrationalia. And yes, as a member of society it is my right to voice my opinion about whether something is endangering it.

It's not just about me not wanting to read the bad stuff. If I dislike a page, I just don't visit it, I usually don't complain. But when talking about mass media, every lie they write gets read by the general population. People still (for some reason, probably because there's no other established alternative) trust them, and most don't have time to evaluate the claims critically. They form beliefs based on lies, and then they act based on those beliefs. In democracies, they go and vote based on those beliefs.

So suddenly, that pile of bullshit I carefully avoid to read gets amplified and hits me anyway, in form of bad policy, bad social projects and, well, bad zeitgeist.

Then educate people. Educate the people who are writing the "bad" stuff in the first place. Educate the people who are making the policies. Become the educator and the policy maker and be the change you want in the population. That's how you fix things.

But complaining about what people should consume because you deem it unworthy seems arrogant, draconian and irrational.

I tend to agree with you. Of course I started using the internet in the late 80s. At that time, the absolute best things on the internet were Usenet FAQs. These days it is really hard to find things of that quality because you are overrun with people trying to make a buck.

I think a good example is recipes. At one point, I instructed google to ignore food.com, about.com, food-network.com and a few more. But now there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites that are simply indiscriminate collectors of (mostly) crap recipes. If I search for a recipe for ramen, I'm looking for the obsessed guy who eats ramen 3 meals a day, tweaks everything until it is just perfect, and knows all the differences between ramen in every area, and knows how to make his own noodles, etc, etc. I'm not looking for, "Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Review: "5 stars!!! My husband and I make this all the time." The rest of the page is full of ads.)

And these days you get kind of "boutique" websites where someone has decided to have a go and make it their livelihood. And as much as some of these are really good, the vast majority are just writing 2000 words of how they went to Japan and tried ramen and how they couldn't get a hotel room in Kyoto because it was golden week and they didn't know that it got so busy... followed by, "Recipe: Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Comments: "5 stars!!! My wife and I make this all the time." The right 30% of the page is filled with ads).

The thing is that in order to be really amazingly informed about something, you really need to obsess about it. So the really amazing websites seem to be run by people who are thinking "I need some place to put down my ideas", not "What can I write that will make me money". Sometimes the former also manage to make money on their writing, but by and large I think the best sites are the ones that are not motivated by profit.

I have thought for a long time that we need a different kind of search engine (which I will tentatively call "Otaku"). Instead of of ranking pages based on popularity, they would be ranked on how nerdy they were. I'd love to get my old internet back ;-)

I like the way amazingribs.com does it, a bunch of bbq geeks who mostly only show adverts for products they have reviewed and liked.

Went there to check out the ads, stayed for days looking at the food. Help! I'm buying new barbecue gear in late September!

Discovered it a year ago, I bought a weber and a thermapop a week after, the reviews are great!

I must argue a few points.

- Sites like thewirecutter.com make their money from affiliate links

- To try this experiment, I need to turn adblocking off. Which I am not willing to.

- Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads. http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-... -- people are happier since less information assaults their brains, companies are still doing what they need to do because they needed to get creative ways to convince people why their products are worthwhile.

> Sites like thewirecutter.com make their money from affiliate links

Yes, there are multiple ways to monetize things on the Internet. Affiliate links work very well for Wirecutter, because it is based around people trying to buy things. If you're forbes.com however, affiliate links don't really work.

> Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads...

If the problem we're trying to solve is, "How can we pay content creators what they need in order to continue producing content?" then an anecdote about outdoor advertising and billboards is largely irrelevant.

Of course, your proposed solution may be, "No one gets paid for content and the content ceases to exist because I don't like ads," and that may be what happens to some degree, but I personally wouldn't like that solution very much.

Is there really so much content scattered across so many sites that you couldn't easily pay for the content you enjoy, if it came to that? I would pay a small Tumblr subscription. I already patronize comic artists and musicians whose work I want to continue to exist. Jenna Marbles and Medium ego-pieces I wouldn't miss.

It could be argued that affiliate links on thewirecutter.com aren't ads so much as they are content. I realize they are advertising affiliates, but since that's what I go to the site for, I'm definitely not going to want to pay to get rid of them!

thewirecutter.com also has ads

> much of the web I know and love will cease to exist

Which parts of the web are those exactly?

You'd be surprised at how creative people can get when their livelihoods are threatened by changing business models. Those who come up with a better solution for monetizing good content will survive. Those who don't, or who had poor content to begin with, will be forced out of the market.

The problem is, the changed business model will often be worse, because if it were better, we'd already have switched to it by now.

Look at the main alternatives – subscription is the usual other one. And subscription will probably be enough to keep the big sites like Google and Facebook afloat, but for smaller sites, they'd just go under. Not to mention subscription biases the wealthy – suddenly, the poor are locked out of a lot of sites.

If viewing contents without viewing ads is damaging to a site, they can block. Or they can provide N free views per X days, and then block. And provide a subscription mechanism.

I think I must have been turned away from a site once or twice, but I really can't remember specifically.

So they don't block. Which means, they get something out of the visit. Exposure, at least. The hope of an eventual subscription, as I subscribe to the NYT digital.

But if they don't block, then they either get something out of those visit, or they're foolish. Either way, I'm not worried about them.

At all.

Blocking adblock users is not as easy as it sounds. Many of the adblockers also maintain rules and filters to actively get around this.

Paywalls are the only sure fire way to keep people out.

It may not be easy. Wired seems to know how, they ask me to unblock when I visit. Same with Reddit (years ago) and duckduckgo.

Most adblockers these days get rid of those messages as well. And asking you to unblock is not the same as stopping you completely - the only way to do that is paywalls.

Yes, but the point is, if they have the ability to ask, whether my blocker blocks the ask message or not, then they know I'm using an ad blocker, and they can refuse to serve me content, or redirect me to a subscription/registration page. But they keep on letting me view their content. It's their problem.

I don't think you understand the technicality behind it or didn't read the details above.

Sites can only attempt to ask by basically rendering that message and then replacing with ads. If the ads never load, then you'll see that message. However all these tricks are incredibly easy to get around with adblocker filters and so websites do NOT have a reliable way of knowing whether you are using an adblocker or not.

They can either refuse to serve content to everyone without a login (paywall) or serve it to everyone and hope the ads are there. That's how HTML works, the content is part of it and your adblocker is filtering it after receiving the content. There is no way for sites to refuse adblock users even if they wanted to without a paywall system.

You might look at this and think they still want you to have the content for free but they'd rather not - it's just out of their control unless they implement a different access model altogether.

> I don't think you understand the technicality behind it

I think you're right.

> Sites can only attempt to ask by basically rendering that message and then replacing with ads. If the ads never load, then you'll see that message.

I'm not sure on your point with the 2nd quote...

Context

Sean Forman indicates that their suggestion to Adblock users to whitelist was explicitly blocked: https://twitter.com/sean_forman/status/644580617208864768

> Contributor doesn't work like an ad blocker, which makes ads just "disappear." Instead, you see a big empty block (that is apparently customizable in some way) that says "Thank you for being a contributor. The ad space is still there, it's just blank. So if half of your page used to be covered in ads, now half your page is covered in little blocks that say, "Thank you for being a contributor."

The demo images/gifs make it seem like you can make the ad space disappear. Is this achieveable by replacing the placeholder with a custom 1x1px image?

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ (The 'or even this' image)

These are the options you're given in the settings: https://austen-screenshots.s3.amazonaws.com/Contributor_Pref...

I suppose you could use a 1x1 pixel as a workaround, but that seems to be more of a hack than the way Google designed it to function.

There is a checkbox that says "Use custom URL" - it's even in your screenshot. It is obviously designed to insert something else - a 1x1 pixel for example. That is not a "hack" and as it is there for everyone, it clearly IS the way Google designed it to function.

I think depending on how the site has their ad slots configured with their layout, they can disappear or not.

|1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.

One of the nice things about ads is that it allows many users to browse content for free - subsidised by those that interact with adverts.

If advertising were to go away and micro-payments replace it - how do users get free access to content subsidised by the masses? I can freely browse the most internet today from anywhere in the world regardless of my income situation. A micro-payments barrier to entry isn't going to allow that.

Also those who are most likely to pay for a solution like this are likely the most affluent who are likely to be the ones clicking and buying products through advertising.

> I hope Google can expand it

A few days ago I remarked on Twitter: "sad that Contributor, a great alternative to ads/tracking, is owned & marketed by Google, which has more to lose than gain from promoting it"[0]

The idea behind Contributor is a powerful one: one that if aggressively marketed and expanded, could (at least conceivably) provide a viable hybrid model for online content publishing (that could coexist with ad-tech).

But Google is a one-trick pony (with ads, obviously) and has everything at stake here. That makes Contributor feel like more of a defensive "moat" initiative -- there to passively discourage others from pursuing (or investing in) similar ideas. Maybe I'm being too cynical. I too am happily subscribed to Contributor--the most dramatic difference is The Next Web -- where the crazy canvas-flying ads are toggled off.

[0] - https://twitter.com/spencenow/status/646480765794975744

You have some good thoughts here. I do not think that Google Contributor is the answer, though it's in the right ballpark.

The advantages of Google Contributor are reasonably clear. There is at least:

1. Works through Google's existing advertising systems, so easier for them to implement.

2. Minimal work for websites to sign up.

3. Advertisements disappear, while supporting websites.

4. Very little work for the end user to get started.

But the disadvantages to me seem quite strong. A few:

1. Advertisers (e.g., Google), can still track you. Those with privacy concerns won't have those concerns addressed.

2. Doesn't remove all ads (even if you pay the maximal amount, it only affects Google ads, as you say).

3. Effectively creates more competition for the ad spots, driving the prices up (good for Google).

4. Does not change content layout.

5. Google still controls the space, where it would be better for the website owner to be able to use that space themselves.

6. Pricing is not clear. What exactly am I getting for what I pay? As competition increases, price goes up. As an end user, I like to know how much I need to pay to get a particular service. I don't want to have to give it much thought.

I do think it's great that you're willing to support websites in removing ads. An Adblock Plus survey suggests that there are many users who would be willing to donate, so you're not alone.

Full disclosure: I run https://webpass.io, a service to give money back to the content creators in a way that completely bypasses the advertising industry, rather than working through it (thus protecting privacy). Gives the power to the website owner to control their content, not Google.

So you pay the highest level for it, and think it is a good idea... yet a few days ago, you said:

"Google Contributor is terrible. Not because it doesn't work, but because it still leaves big green gaps where the ads were saying, "Thank you for using contributor!" Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were."

I thought I was clever and tried to enable it from the Apple News web browser so I wouldn't get ads there even when I follow links. But it doesn't seem to work due to third party cookies being blocked.

I wonder if that also means it won't work anywhere else where an embedded web view is used.

And I tried to see if it removes Video ads on YouTube (which I find very annoying), but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Just out of curiosity, how much are you paying per month?

$15/month.

There's a sliding scale that goes in $1 increments.

Is the $15/mo use it or lose it, or just a maximum amount? IE, do all your monthly subscriptions add up to $15?

If I'm paying the same as the bidding cost for advertisers, then I'm all in, this is super sweet. If I'm paying some vague hand-wavy fee that reduces my ads, but doesn't correspond 1-1 to what advertisers are paying then forget it.

The $15/month is a flat fee. I'm not aware of how the math works behind the scenes, but it does not appear to be a 1:1 mapping.

Edit: Apparently it is a 1:1 mapping and unused money rolls over until next month. I was wrong. Thanks cmpb for pointing that out.

Don't you feel a bit ripped off? Why does google get to keep the extra? How do we know they aren't still showing you SOME ads, just not all of them, and the price for that is $15?

The way I would be in 100% support of this would be if I could go and "top up" my ad-support-budget. Say I add $50.. and from then on every Google served ad gets swallowed up and my balance gets deducted whatever the bid price was, with the same % going to the contributor site.

When my $50 is up, ads return. I can choose to refill as I want, or set it up to auto-refill with $20 when it runs out, sending me an email or whatnot.

I really really really like this concept, but man, they need to be really honest with their implementation.

Edit: Apparently it is a 1:1 mapping and unused money rolls over until next month. I was wrong. Thanks cmpb for pointing that out. reply

That's not correct. Unused money rolls over. See https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6182619?hl=en&...

I stand corrected, thank you for pointing that out.

Any unused money rolls over to the next month, according to Google [1]. I've been using it for months at $15/month and I've never seen it not use all of the money. I do use the internet constantly at work, though, and see many websites.

[1] https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6182619?hl=en&...

Oh nice! Ok, well that might be enough to push me over to give it a try. Thanks.

Yeah. This seems like a typical Google half-measure with little thought put into it. It's a shame because there is so much that could be done, but companies like google just don't care enough, yet, to actually put in the work.

> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.

Yes – content creators should get paid. Also, not all ads are bad. Some campaigns even make such an impression on popular culture that they have their own place in history. But the campaigns that won't? Well, basically anything coming out of ad machines like adsense and what not.

Ads can be tasteful, even enjoyable, but most of the internet ads aren't. Unlike broadcast tv, you can block internet ads; it's easy to do, and you should. Not because it'll kill content creators or indie app makers[1] or whatever, because it won't. It'll hurt the revenue streams of shitty ad mongers like adsense and doubleclick and facebook and admob and what have you. These are – in my opinion – on the same shitty level as porn peddlers. They sell crap for pennies, but they win because you just won't reach out to everyone otherwise. Google and Twitter and Facebook and all of the shitty ad platform snake-oil salesmen are the broadcasters of today – and their messages suck.

Not only do their messages suck, but people – good people – spend valuable time they'll never get back in order to produce these shitty ads. Time they could have spent doing something useful. Instead they made a shitty flash banner that won't play anyway because everyone blocks flash.

Ads of this kind need to be blocked so we can get to a point where advertising can be good. Where it requires thought, effort, research. Where it requires smart people, creative people, coming up with things that matter and are contextually relevant. The shitty ads we have today need to be blocked to preserve bandwidth, and to help make our planet perhaps die a little bit less every year. Blocking ads on the internet is easy, and doesn't require fancy heuristics or anything. It just requires black lists and hive minds. Ads that are not peddled through "platforms" or however you'd like to describe it – sponsored articles like those on Daring Fireball or increasingly in news papers these days – are less easy to block, and require more effort. But those ads aren't annoying, and they may not be entirely relevant but at least you don't want to throw up because you're fed up with their bullshit. So it becomes a cost/benefit calculation – is it worth the time and energy to block all ads, or are some ads ok?

To me the answer to that is simple: ads are ok. The ad-porn that inflicts the internet today, through adsense and the rest of the ad-platform mob, can die a painful death in fire. Fuck 'em, I'm blocking their shitty ads left-right-center.

[1]: http://blog.desk.pm/df/

Also, fuck Google Contribute. It's just an ad platform's way of realizing their shitty business is threatened by the pervasiveness of blockers, and so they find a way to make people pay for "their" space which wasn't their space to begin with. The internet isn't a walled Google garden, where they can come in and dictate rev-share terms. I'd rather give a site owner 100% of my money, than 30% to Google.

And I'm going to continue using an adblocker out of principle - because to me, the principle that my computer should remain free of malware is stronger than the principle that content creators should get paid.

Sadly, this. It doesn't come down to not wanting to look at ads (though that's a big part), it comes down to exploits being served through massive ad networks that no human has the time to vet.

I'll start unblocking ads the moment site creators start taking responsibility for what they display. My hourly rate for machine fixing is many times more than the few tenths of a penny you got for my ad impression.

Or, you know, you could block ads and try not consume the content of creators who have advertising. There seems to be an underlying assumption in your statement that you deserve access to their content, and well, if the mechanisms they put in place to monetize it are too onerous, you should feel fine just taking it.

You sound like a cable company bitching about netflix or Tivo.

Just because we don't like those companies doesn't mean there isn't some truth to their arguments (regarding Tivo at least, I'm not sure what they bitch at Netflix about).

Just because a company has something to sell, doesn't obligate people to buy it. if you can't get someone to buy it, displaying it for free then griping because people STILL don't want to pay for it, is just frankly ridiculous to me.

To answer your question above, they gripe because they are being disrupted by technology and cannot charge what they want to charge for their product.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion so far.

That's not how it works. They aren't displaying it for free, they're displaying it in exchange for your attention/time on the accompanying ads.

You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of. Otherwise if there really is no value on that page, what are you doing there? You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting.

> They aren't displaying it for free, they're displaying it in exchange for your attention/time on the accompanying ads.

> You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of.

Well, current model also costs me that $0.001 (likely more) in electricity costs and exposes me to at best some ugly-looking crap made with adversarial intent, that has nonzero chance of scamming me into buying something I don't need, and at worst is a vector of malware delivery. It also costs me time wasted on waiting (10x longer load times) and productivity losses due to system slowing down if for some reason I need to keep the site open and do something else.

> You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting

You prove there is potential value by visiting. You won't know if there is an actual value until you at least skim the content. If you're visiting the same site regularly you can start to predict how much value you expect to get out of a visit, but at this point the site owner can probably convince you to pay for it somehow (be it subscription, turning off the ads, selling you their book, etc.).

The electricity costs you mentioned are externalities and not really relevant here. Otherwise you will start blaming everything for every little action you take. If you don't want to browse that site, you can stop at any level from going to that url, starting your browser, buying your computer, living in that country, etc.

When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?

I also hear this "potential" value argument a lot - why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value? Just doesn't make sense. And either way, ads allow you to not lose anything monetarily if you feel that site didn't give you what you expected. It's very a fair and low-risk trade.

> The electricity costs you mentioned are externalities and not really relevant here.

This is very relevant here, because a big part of issue with ads is about dumping externalities on people. When you multiply that small electricity costs by number of people exposed to a bloated, flashy ad you'll see it actually adds up to a decent amount of coal unnecessarily burned. But that's beside the point, I only brought up electricity because it's commensurable to the amount of money ad-serving site makes on me.

> When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?

I don't ask for refund, but I do tally that and include in my decision about which shop to go to.

> why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value?

As I said, if I go to a website regularly, it means that I have some concept of value I may expect to get from it. Bust most of browsing today is driven by a) search results, and b) link aggregators. Most of the websites I visit I visit only once or twice in a lifetime, because there was a link to a particular article on HackerNews, or maybe because it was the first search result for my query. In such situation I do not have concept of value I am about to receive.

> It's very a fair and low-risk trade.

It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.

> I don't ask for refund, but I do tally that and include in my decision about which shop to go to.

Then include that in your decision in whether to go to a site with ads. You wouldn't just take things from the store either?

> It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.

Scams are a greater issue than to put on advertising. Malware is an issue and I agree with that. The industry does need to work on this and things are changing but that doesn't suddenly make it ok to take. If the risk is too much for you, dont visit the site. Same as if the risk of driving on the freeways is too much, stay off the freeway.

You seem to keep saying you take risk and externalities into account but then say that you have no control and thus rationalize taking content, however you always have the choice of just not going to that link.

I think you are stretching the definition of the word free.

Me looking at something is not a form of payment. The payment is coming from the advertiser. The advertiser is paying the content producer, THAT is the business transaction. Whether I choose to view the ad and make those advertisements have value is not my concern. Those ads are the REAL value and worthy of my payment.

Otherwise viewing the NYT is like watching sunsets, the only way to monetiZe that is by slapping a billboard in front of me, at which point, i go elsewhere

Your attention (via looking or interacting) is the form of payment. This attention is given to the advertisers who pay the publishers who produce the content.

If you went elsewhere, there's no issue. But when you breakdown the billboard and still see the sunset (assuming the sunset is copyrighted and original content) then you're changing the value exchange unfairly.

You can't feed a family on people viewing stuff. Money needs to change hands. The billboard operator charges the advertiser. There is no obligation on the part of the viewer to look at anything.

Under your definition, getting up to go to the bathroom during commericials or making a conscious effort to look away from ads is ...immoral? Illegal? Fraud? There is no contract no quid pro quo.

The content providers are selling real estate. Thats it.

You can because this is how many publishing companies are run today.

The obligation is to accept the ads with the content. It's actually in the terms and service of many sites and doesn't require a signature. This is completely legal and binding, just not easily enforceable.

Sure there might be natural losses due to leaving or not looking at the screen but adblockers are all about your intent to completely remove the ads from the content before you even seen it. That's the issue.

I have a hard time believing those terms of conditions meets the inquiry notice requirements and would stand up in court against anonymous internet users.

I view a website and someone says I owe them my first born, does not make it so.

It wouldnt for many sites but it just wasn't a problem before because the value exchange held. Privacy laws and adblocking are causing these to become more visible with explicit Accept buttons however there's still the obstacle of proving identity online.

Anyways, this is something that paywalls solve entirely so it's a great model, but nobody wants to pay.

I wouldn't consume their contents if they are at a subscription fee. Most of the content creators on the internet know that their content wouldn't earn them a subscription, so they choose the advertisement model. If you make something worth paying money for, people will pay.

I mean, they're not making me sign a contract saying I wouldn't consume their content if the ads are off, so it's up to me to choose what I see on MY computer. There are also websites which detect adblockers and don't show their content at all. I'd just close their website not caring about their content, so at least I don't find it worth paying for.

Even I have blogs, videos which earn me ad money. I know had it not been ads, no one give a dime to see them :), and it's perfectly fine for me.

People don't want to pay because it requires friction on every purchase and much of the content on the internet adds up to fractions of a penny per impression. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

Think of like a movie: you can pay $10 to see the whole thing or $0.001 per each frame. That's what the web is like with each frame possibly being from a different publisher. That kind of granular payments is very hard to pull off effectively outside of advertising.

It's not hard at all to get those kind of payments. You already pay your ISP a connection fee. Thats the payment we make to see the content.

You're paying the ISP for infrastructure access. Not for content.

It's possible to have a separate "content" subscription but that will mean ISPs have far more tracking and net neutrality issues than now so it's best to have another 3rd party doing this.

If they put their content up without charging me for it, then why wouldn't I deserve to see it? If the deal is "look at this ad in exchange for viewing the article", then they could key on the ad as a password for the article.

But that's obviously not the deal, because your traffic would plummet as many of your visitors would reject that deal. So don't pretend an agreement exists here. Visiting a website is not an obligation to view the content or the ads.

The agreement is between the website and the advertiser. They have obligations to each other, we don't have obligations to them.

I love not seeing ads.

Well, technically you're not "seeing" ads but I'm pretty sure your information is still being traded to data providers.

This actually works to google's advantage. They reduce ad blindness and when an actual ad appears it will be highly targeted and probably gives Google a lot more revenue per ad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com