Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhall1468 | Hacker News Reader

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And the people that use the most heavy-handed approaches with ad-blocking are going to be the same people that are screaming "NOT MY PROBLEM" while the ship goes down.

Their business model doesn't require changes to reality. Their business model requires the end-user to accept reality for what it is: you can't get a bunch of free stuff, ad infinitum, while simultaneously blocking the only feasible revenue model for said free stuff.

> It's not up to "reality", us, to change to support your business model.

Did you pat yourself on the back while you said that, or right after?

We are not reality. The reality is, ad-blocking will be the absolute death of currency-free content. This abuse of the word reality is truly odd to me.

You seem to think every choice we make as consumers is the current reality. What you call reality, I call a house of cards.

View on HN

Most content is worthless. Content that has actual monetary value to someone, market research data for instance, has no trouble finding people willing to pay for it.

The fact is most "news" and other article type sites do not serve a purpose other than satisfying some idle curiosity or passing time. Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life. The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material. When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it.

> Most content is worthless.

What nonsense. Most content's worth is variable depending on who is consuming it. The issue with ad-blockers is that it isn't killing worthless content. It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit.

> The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material.

Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal.

> When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it.

You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported.

> It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit.

What does that tell you about the value of that content that people are not even willing to be exposed to an ad in order to consume it? This is the proper application of "the customer is always right". When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault. It's the vendor's fault for failing to meet the market demands in a suitable way.

> Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal.

No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product.

> You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported.

Do most FOSS doc pages have ads on them? Not that I've seen. O'Reilly and other publishers have no trouble charging money for well-written technical documentation. People are clearly willing to pay for that. Rosetta Stone charges quite a bit for language instruction.

> When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault.

They do want it, but for free. And while they still consume it, for free, they hide behind some non-sense about tracking or privacy, even though if those two issues were resolved they would block it any way because it's not convenient to white list a site. Duckduckgo is perfect evidence of that.

> No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product.

And much of the time it isn't.

> They do want it, but for free.

Yes, this is relatively common. People will take something for free that they aren't willing to pay for. Other things they'll pay one amount for, but not a larger amount. Everybody decides for him or herself how much something is worth to them. If the majority of people decide that value is "nothing, not even looking at an ad", then that's what the value of that thing is. That's how markets work.

This is a load of BS. The reality is most people install a blocker and never think twice. Your implication that people make a value decision for every website they visit is laughable, and more importantly, exactly the opposite of what most people do.

You take another breath every few seconds but you don't do it consciously. Not everything you do is a conscious decision you actively make in the forefront of your mind.

Your comments lead me to believe you have skin in the game because you seem determined to not acknowledge that the value of something is what your customers will pay for it. If they aren't willing to pay for it then it has no value in the market, regardless of the value you've assigned to it.

> Your comments lead me to believe you have skin in the game because you seem determined to not acknowledge that the value of something is what your customers will pay for it.

None what-so-ever, other than having several websites I enjoy that use ads for revenue generation. My current work is in Business SAAS.

> If they aren't willing to pay for it then it has no value in the market, regardless of the value you've assigned to it.

You don't understand markets. If a minority of users aren't willing to "pay" for it, that doesn't make it without value. By your logic, movies are pirated by a minority and thus, they have no value. With movies it matters less because they've compensated for it by charging people that actually pay more and more.

> most people install a blocker

This is exactly the point. People have to actively seek out and find an ad blocker. They experience the Internet with ads, then decide that it is not worth it. It doesn't just happen. So what is your argument? That people are idiots and cannot correctly assess how valuable something is to them?

Personally, I've whitelisted sites that are known to have useful and unobtrusive ads. I've also supported other sites and apps that I like directly, by giving money, buying a paid version, or buying branded merchandise. There are options other than ads.

I think it's quite possible to detect when someone is using an ad blocker. If publishers really think it's a problem, they can easily disable the site for anyone with an active ad blocker. So why don't they do it? I've seen a few sites take this approach. I happily left and never went back. Like I said before, there's no real reason I need to read one particular article rather than another one in any given moment. If I need the information for something specific, I'll pay for it.

> If publishers really think it's a problem, they can easily disable the site for anyone with an active ad blocker.

Anti-ad blocker blocker's are a thing. UBlock and Adblock both include them. At the end of the day all it takes is regex.

I use an adblocker, but only with a blacklist. So far only one site has made it on that blacklist. A certain financial blog that is just too obnoxious to read without. The whitelisting approach suggests that 'the first one is always free' for the consumer but I agree with you that the average user has no feeling for the economics underlying the websites they visit and the content they consume. Adblockers run with a whole lot of blocking by default. That gives them the most market value (remember, there is a market for adblocking).

People suggest that they would happily pay a 1st world sum of money but do they think about what that price tag looks like for people with less money to spend? My 'eyeballs' might be worth more than most, or not, to the ad networks. I'm happily trying to subsidize this whole web thing.

You are probably a middle-class caucasian male from a western country. I can make that assumption because this willingness to pay that you're talking about cannot be a reality for the poor or for citizens of underdeveloped countries, or in other words ... the majority.

You're right. And addressing issues like poverty is one of the many better things we could be doing than trying to figure out how Buzzfeed can get paid to tell us about 35 Things Only Parapalegic Law School Students from Cincinatti Will Understand.

Even if the personal targeting in bad_user's post is uncalled for, the point is still valid: right now, ads serve as a redistribution mechanism, and pretending that Buzzfeed and the likes are the only sites that will be blocked to the lower classes in a paywall-laden web is just demagogy.

In fact, Buzzfeed will probably still be available to the general public, since they already engage in "native advertising", where the content is the ad. It's sites that still maintain some editorial independence that will be most affected.

I agree there is value in making useful information available to people who can't afford it. I don't think advertising is the only way or even the best way to make this happen. We used to consider this such a valuable endeavor that we had whole institutions dedicated to making information available for free, without ads. They were called "libraries".

I also agree that ads aren't the only or best way to make it happen. But they are the existing way. It's well known what tends to happen when structures are eliminated with promises of better tomorrows.

It's been "the existing way" for only 20-30 years. Before that we had newspapers, libraries, town criers, monks copying manuscripts by hand, phone trees, who knows what else. A webpage with an ad is hardly the only available means of disseminating information. There are other options even right now with donation supported sites, sites supported by sales of affiliated merchandise, manufacturer websites with product data, and so on.

"Let them eat newspapers"?

We're not talking about a return to the past; we're talking about a two tier system, where the good information will be served with all the speed and amenities of the web to those who can afford it. Having other means of disseminating the information is irrelevant, because the real money will come from the paywalled sites. It's the JSTOR model, now for all the information.

And what I'm saying is not "let's keep the current model"; all I want is to urge the anti-ad advocates to at least acknowledge the issue -which is real- instead of brushing it off as only affecting Buzzfeed and the likes, and to come up with a better answer than "manufacturers will still publish their product data", as if that covered the important information we're talking about.

> right now, ads serve as a redistribution mechanism

If you wanted to redistribute wealth to the global poor, forcing everyone (poor and not-poor alike) to download massive, useless megabytes of untargeted advertising, malware, and phishing scams is not the most efficient way to do it. This is defending the current broken and destructive ad regime on the basis of a distant third-order effect.

What you've wrote is almost a perfect example of the Nirvana fallacy.

Yes, the current ad system is inefficient, regularly disruptive and even occasionally destructive. But it's here and it's redistributing, while the proponents of alternatives don't even mention that aspect, let alone have a working solution.

And it might be a "distance third-order effect" to you, but as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.

> Yes, the current ad system is inefficient, regularly disruptive and even occasionally destructive. But it's here and it's redistributing,

Talk about fallacies! Based on that kind of argument, you can defend any awful, destructive policy if it benefits someone, somewhere.

> as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.

I'm sorry, but I can't seem to find the contract I signed where I agreed to be tracked by giant corporations and choke all my devices to the point of nonfunctionality with malware and ads just so a stranger wouldn't have to pay for content. Maybe you have a copy?

You seem to be assuming a lot from my posts; please don't. I'm not saying we should keep the existing system, and I'm not saying you should have to accept tracking. What I'm saying is that bad_user has a point regarding redistribution, and that anti-advertising advocates should deal with it instead of whistling and pretending it'll only affect Buzzfeed, like the post I originally replied to did.

> What I'm saying is that bad_user has a point regarding redistribution

Sure, and what I'm saying is that it's not a good point for the reasons I've stated already. I'll add that if you deliberately wanted to turn people against redistribution of wealth, you could hardly do better than to associate it with the intrusive web advertising that everyone hates!

...and this is the unspoken truth of advertising. There is no reason for advertisers to reach that majority who cannot or will not pay for whatever is being advertised. However the publishers resent ad blockers because they reduce the pool and that's a bad thing in a world where cost-per-impression is common, or even cost-per-click where inadvertent clicks can make money.

At the bottom of it all though, there need to be enough people who actually do follow through on the call to action in order for the ads to be profitable. In casino parlance these are the "whales" who make all the freeloaders at the buffet worthwhile. In the 1990s the "whales" of the Internet were AOL users, they had that sweet combination of impulsive action and disposable income that advertisers love. I don't know who their target market is today, but it's not me.

I know, right? I've never in my entire life intentionally clicked on an ad, much less made a purchase decision based on one.

> Most content is worthless.

Which is why ads are the only way to monetize it and be able to actually have it somewhere.

> The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material.

Except nothing is free. Someone has to pay for it. If it's not ad networks and if it's not donations (again, mostly because most content is worthless, and probably also because most people are greedy), who will pay for it?

> Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life.

How old are you? I'm 23, my youth was spent on the internet learning. I wasn't able to pay any content at the time. The website I was reading from were living out of ads, some of them made by minor, that were later able to make a decent living out of it. Yeah we have a bunch of website getting enough donations, but they need to be in the top 100 to actually survive from it.

When Youtube Red was announced, I was freaking happy (except about the fact that I'm Canadian and I won't be able to enjoy it), most arguments I've seen against ads was that there was no alternative... except now people are simply complaining that Youtube is simply being greedy and that they can already get that using adblock...

It's probably too late to make people realize that content isn't free, that offering it isn't free either. We are in a world where ads and huge investment gave us the opportunity to share and produce really cheaply and it seems like it's all free... you remove the ads, you remove any way to pay for that cheap but existing cost.

I still have a little hope on donations though, seeing the amount some live streamers are able to make on Twitch, seeing how Patreon is a way to make a living, seeing how some crowdfunding is able to produce some really decent content (Tabletop, Conman, Fallout Nuka Break and VGHS to name a few), etc... I hope it will grow and allow us to keep at least the same amount of content as before.

> Which is why ads are the only way to monetize it and be able to actually have it somewhere.

Why do we need to have it somewhere if nobody wants it enough to pay for it?

> Except nothing is free. Someone has to pay for it. If it's not ad networks and if it's not donations (again, mostly because most content is worthless, and probably also because most people are greedy), who will pay for it?

People who want to disseminate information will pay to do so. Hacker News doesn't have ads. YCombinator is paying for it because it serves their purposes to have an online community for hackers.

People write and create other content for a variety of reasons. Usually the best content is not created to maximize the amount of money it makes.

> Why do we need to have it somewhere if nobody wants it enough to pay for it?

Yes, because search engines are basically elitist.

Back in the old days, (early 1990's) when I was starting out on the internet, there was very little advertising. What advertising there was, was relatively unobtrusive. People were putting up content for personal reasons, passion or desire to share and communicate with an audience. The era of the mom making a living with a blog hadn't begun. Frankly, it was a better time. Sure the technology was limited, but things were simpler and much more exciting. There isn't a single blog on the internet that I can't do without.

> Most content is worthless.

I would suggest that quite a bit of so-called "content" is actually negative value. Consumption of this negative value is done for a variety of reasons (paying a minor cost for an indirect social benefit, for example ("I wanted to participate when people talk about #{current_pop_culture}")). These negative values are only worthwhile when the cost is small enough, and we've recently seen advertising raise those costs past important thresholds.

The initial reaction is an attempt to lower the cost by installing an ad blocker. In the long run, this will simply lead to a re-evaluation that the rising costs outweigh the benefits.

Any attempt to "monetize" something that was previous done for free is by definition imposing a cost on the people involved. This current trend of "ad supported" stuff is really just a complicated type of rent seeking. Rents are only justifiable when scarce resources are involved, so it should be obvious that most interactions on the internet cannot be monetized (anything that has effectively zero marginal cost is not scarce).

I agree with you. I refuse to view any ads whatsoever. There isn't a single website on the internet that I can't do without. As long as I can control what I view on my own device, I will. I have no problem with a business model dying, it's the way of the world. I'm a musician myself, and the business model has changed so much that music is virtual worthless in the market. That's ok with me.

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

Except this won't free us from ads, actually the contrary as explained here: http://zen.lk/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escape-ads-by-pa...

> The reality is, ad-blocking will be the absolute death of currency-free content.

The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...

> The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web

The article is a 10-page document on why "surveillance" (tracking) is evil and effectively offers no solution outside of (maybe) micro-payments as a means to compensate, which directly counters the first argument you made that paying will never free us from ads.

So which is it?

Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing.

If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…

> Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing.

"Not really doing" doesn't exactly encouraging. You are making assumptions based on an idea that's never been tested, let alone shown to work. I think it's an interesting idea that may work for some content, and may not work for others. But let's not pretend that the article is, in any way, based on a real working model.

> If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…

Patreon, flattr and crowdfunding are all the same thing. Exchanging money for content/creation. This is not a new solution to the problem, they are all platforms for solutions that are as old as money.

Wikipedia is a non-profit that survives on donations. Pretending that every form of content should be, or could be, non-profit is as silly as saying that every form of content can happily survive on microtransactions.

Sorry I didn't understand what you wrote in the first part.

For the other part, the point was not to invent something new but to give a few examples of how to support websites financially without relying on ads.

I don't understand where you read that I said every website should/could be non-profit, everyone is welcome to try to make a profit out of a website but if this fails they should not point to their visitors exercising the ability given to them by the very nature of the web.

Neither did I say that every form of content can happily survive, actually if 9gag disappeared tomorrow this would not make me sad, but I'll take the opportunity to go deeper here. Let's focus on the need to monetize website which raises from the cost of hosting and traffic, which in turn comes from issue in how we do internet.

When we move away from the peer to peer nature of internet to centralized servers, we create the very cost I was mentioning earlier. When for some reason we went from symmetrical dialup to asymmetrical broadband it prevented us from hosting our own content at no additional cost.

So maybe we'll see something new arise where there will be no place for ads, maybe something p2p taking advantage of blockchain technology. There are already experimentation in this direction such as http://zeronet.io/

That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be.

I'm not a huge "free-market" proponent. But markets exist, and they aren't magic. They smove to solution(s) that the market wants / willing to "pay" for. Pay in broadest sense, money, eyeballs, time, etc. As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional.

> That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be.

This argument is already so tired. When you limit all options to one, that option has to be taken whether or not it is a good option. If everyone blocked every advertisement indiscriminately there would be no other option available but pay-walling. That isn't a good option because, as you said, most content will either die or be replaced by free content, which may or may not be as good.

> As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional.

The only delusions are those held by people that think the tide is a good thing.

The reality is that ads are not going away. What's happening is ads are becoming a business that is only sustainable by enormous companies. Google and Facebook will survive and they will profit off of ads. Guru3D will not. The opportunity for competition will dry up, because you won't be able to profit with ads and you can't charge for what is already free.

I'd be fine with paying to access several latest issues of a periodical. A periodical might as well be fine with making historical issues available for free, since they'd drive more visitors to pay for new content, expectedly also high-quality.

Just because you don't like the argument doesn't mean it's "tired." It's absolutely true. I block every ad, I will continue to do so, and should content go behind a paywall, I will simply not view it. If there are enough people like me, content providers will be forced to adapt their strategies. That's the way it is.

Let me join in with a Hell Yeah. I'm exactly the same mindset; folks who imagine they can dictate my web viewing habits, are just going to lose a segment of the viewership outright. No amount of self-serving rationalization ("You owe it to us to watch our ads!") is going to change my habits one iota.

> If there are enough people like me, content providers will be forced to adapt their strategies.

For the most part the large companies will remain so because there will likely always be "enough" money in advertising to keep Google and Facebook going.

But you aren't something anyone in any industry is concerned about. You are a leech and no strategy is going to change the fact that you are a leech. You feel that all your content should come without cost and any means to monetize content you will either outright block or ignore the content entirely.

That's the way it is.

If you think the only options in the world are ads or pay wall, you are oblivious. There are currently existing, wildly popular content sites using a different model than either of those.

Whether the tide is a good thing or not. It exists. You can ignore it but you can't avoid it.

The world did fine prior to the advertisements and the world will be fine after the advertisements fail. Simply because somebody asks you to become a sheeple doesn't mean you are required to become one. No need to fall into lock step and comply.

Modern advertising began in 1836. Why has it become vogue to call someone "sheeple" because they think there's a happy medium between the "all ads are bad" and the "giving you a seizure with my ad is okay" approaches.

You aren't an underground revolution fighting the man. You installed a browser plugin.

There cannot be such a happy medium as long as ads are increasingly "targeted" and "third party". "Targeted ads" means surveillance, profiling, tracking, massive privacy invasion. "Third party" means poorer performance and having no control on your main source of revenue (see the stories about google censoring content on google ads based websites).

Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.

The issue here has two sides: on the practical side it is much easier to block all ads than to maintain a white list while on the attitude style a website that tells its visitors "I could not care less about your privacy and your browsing experience" by showing ads and running third partu tracking scripts should not be surprised when a growing portion of visitors return the favor "we don't care about your failed business model, we do care about our privacy and browsing experience though" by blocking said ads.

If adblocking wasn't a game changer revolution, we wouldn't be reading the IAB telling us "we messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." http://www.iab.com/news/lean/

> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while stille being profitable.

So there is a happy medium and, in your opinion, it's non-targeted ads. Yet uBlock and uBlock Origin and the millions of people that use them are blocking DuckDuckGo ads.

piwik is an open-source, locally installed, piece of analytic's software that is blocked by default in the above AND in adblock.

So you are making an argument that is presently being implemented and still being blocked.

Sorry, I may have not expressed myself in clear enough way, please allow me to try again:

IMO there is no happy medium, all ads are unwelcomed on the net.

duckduckgo debunks the myth that ads need to be targeted as is the usual investor storytime myth.

I was using phpmyvisites before it spawned piwik and have been pushing piwik as an alternative to google analytics since, still piwik is a tracking mechanism and as such is expected to be blocked, but additional tracking script vs parsing web server logs is another debate.

So you said this:

> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.

For what reason exactly? So they debunked a myth that is moot anyway because the very premise of the myth is unwelcome.

Sure, it's hard to imagine any objection to DuckDuckGo's ads that wouldn't apply to advertising in general. They're unobtrusive, clearly marked, at least somewhat relevant, supposedly non-targeted, and apparently served from the same domain without a bunch of extra JavaScript. Privacy is a big part of the DDG brand, so lying about targeting would be risky.

But most ads and most sites aren't like that. How are people supposed to know which are trustworthy?

If it can't survive without abusing is readers attention, privacy, and security, then I guess the ship needs to go down like the titanic already.

And be replaced with what, exactly?

The call to arms over privacy, attention and security is getting old. Not because its wrong, but because it's never accompanied with an actual solution.

But that's moot because the ship isn't going to sink. Enough people will not use adblock to ensure that companies like Google and Facebook will always make some money off advertising.

So rest assured, the Titanic's will continue to float along. You are simply guaranteeing anything smaller won't. Including any potential competition for the Titanic's.

Maybe with nothing? There isn't some god-given requirement for there to be all these reviews about 3D cards. If readers refuse to receive ads and refuse to pay, then the site will go out of business and the content will go away. That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist.

Less content is not the end of the world. Probably some hobbyist will spend his own time and money to publish it in some form anyway. Or Guru3D will find some other way to survive? They've added a donation link - maybe people will be happy to pay after all.

> That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist.

Nonsense. That argument means all content is valued only by the numbers of ads viewed. By that logic Facebook is the best content. And they don't have to change by the sheer volume of people that visit it. Competition becomes even more unlikely because nobody wants to invest in a business that needs to millions of viewers to be profitable.

> Less content is not the end of the world.

Nor is it necessarily a good thing. Fewer options will just empower the organizations that happened to exist in the heyday of advertising. Converging power more and more while saying "it's a good thing, the market will right itself" is naive.

This is correct. I would be happy with the web I was using in 1995, to be honest. Most of the non-corporate content was produced by people who did so simply for the chance to talk about their passion and have an audience. I could care less if Sally can make a living off of her blog or not.

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

And...?

Industries where "person who pays for product" is separated from "person who consumes product" tend to have enormous problems because of that. They are inefficient because the consumer doesn't care about price, and they provide bad product because the person paying doesn't care about quality. Perhaps it is indeed time to consider crazy, wacky, out-there alternatives such as paying for content.

> What you call reality, I call a house of cards.

If the "house of cards" that is online journalism does finally collapse once and for all, ad blockers will have done a massive service for humanity.

Viewing a banner ad is a price I'm willing to pay. A full-screen ad designed to be hard to close, or with misleading cues to take you to another site, or with intrusive sounds? That kills my bandwidth and my battery? Not so much. Then there's all the tracking. It was the advertisers who broke the terms of the deal and now We The People are renegotiating.

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. Why do you simultaneously try to use it as a threatening outlook? If enough people perceive it as a threat or discover later that paywalls are even less convenient to them, some other solution will have to be found.

> If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution.

What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good".

> some other solution will have to be found

Because we already have a solution. Unobtrusive advertising is a valid trade-off between having to pay currency for content and said content-creators generating money through their content.

I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive.

But now we are destined to fear-mongering nonsense about Google tracking your every move to justify blocking everything. When that wasn't far enough, we blocked locally installed software applications that track client-side behavior.

Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card.

> What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good".

It's good for the majority of publishers if they accept it as their preferred solution as you wrote. Unless you think they ought to be driven by other motives than making sound business decisions - like cruelty or whatever you were trying to insinuate with your slanted rhetoric.

> I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive.

Not really - fools like me already worked around ads almost 20 years ago because they wasted bandwidth (proof: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/websearch.html - no longer functional though amazingly still online). Piggyback ads are an anomaly and people will always try to avoid them, whether they're text (to be confused with valid search results) like Google's or flashy, crashy animations.

> Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card.

Well, go ahead and use it then. What's holding you back? Altruism and the urge to save users from the consequences of their personal choices? Oh, please...

> It's good for the majority of publishers if they accept it as their preferred solution as you wrote. Unless you think they ought to be driven by other motives than making sound business decisions - like cruelty or whatever you were trying to insinuate with your slanted rhetoric.

Perhaps my rhetoric is slanted, but yours is fully bent. When only one solution eventually exists, it doesn't make it the preferred solution, it makes it the nuclear option. Quit spouting nonsense about cruelty. I'm suggesting that advertising-supported businesses are eventually going to have one remaining option. That isn't slanted rhetoric. That's common sense.

Unless of course we come up with a completely new way for content creators to earn a living with their content outside of charging for it, or using advertising for it. Because new forms of compensation in exchange for content are popping up all the time.

> Well, go ahead and use it then. What's holding you back? Altruism and the urge to save users from the consequences of their personal choices? Oh, please...

I'm starting to believe you are just putting words together so you sound smart. No one is going to change to paywalls until every has to. Until then the middle of the pack is going to continue fighting for scraps while the giants in the industry (Google, Facebook, Microsoft) continue to profit on the sheer mass of their user base, and hedging their bets with non-advertising products.

But you keep spouting pseudo-Socratic arguments about how "nothing is stopping us" from moving to a model nobody wants but the end-user is steadily preventing any other alternative.

> When only one solution eventually exists, it doesn't make it the preferred solution, it makes it the nuclear option. [...] I'm suggesting that advertising-supported businesses are eventually going to have one remaining option. That isn't slanted rhetoric. That's common sense. Unless of course we come up with a completely new way for content creators to earn a living with their content outside of charging for it, or using advertising for it. Because new forms of compensation in exchange for content are popping up all the time.

You don't make any sense. Why would it become the only option when other forms keep popping up? Even with very hypothetical 100% penetration of (unblockable) ad blockers, this won't be the case.

> No one is going to change to paywalls until every has to.

You must have missed the NY times, the largest german newspaper (BILD) and other large publications switching to paywalls then. Perhaps look around some more before beating dead horses here... Also, your inflammatory language hurts your cause.

> Why would it become the only option when other forms keep popping up? Even with very hypothetical 100% penetration of (unblockable) ad blockers, this won't be the case.

Name me one other form of a successful website that does not use one of the following methods of monetization:

ads, donations, currency-exchange or none (free)

Because none of those are recent.

> You must have missed the NY times, the largest german newspaper (BILD) and other large publications switching to paywalls then. Perhaps look around some more before beating dead horses here... Also, your inflammatory language hurts your cause.

Because I'm not talking about organizations that already have millions of customers as a base. They are going to survive regardless of the ad-blocking penetration. Just like Google and Facebook will. What won't survive is anything that isn't enormous.

And you started the inflammatory nonsense by putting words into my mouth.

> Name me one other form of a successful website that does not use one of the following methods of monetization:

My former company (founded in 2000; majority sold in 2014; ~2.5 million users) has 95% revenue from other sources than those you named, it's a price comparison website. Most competitors operate in a similar fashion. Ads are used only as an insignificant additional revenue source (with lots of doubt and disputes internally).

Other examples: large classified ad pages, dating websites, real estate brokers (syndicated/search websites), airbnb, hotel and flight booking sites.

> Because I'm not talking about organizations that already have millions of customers as a base.

OK, how about the newly founded austrian branch of swiss publication NZZ - it started with 0 users and paywall.

> large classified ad pages

It literally has the word "ad" in it.

> dating websites

Either ad-driven or membership based, in which case the membership is received as a currency-exchange.

> real estate brokers (syndicated/search websites)

Just because your content is an ad doesn't make it less an ad.

> airbnb

See above.

> hotel and flight booking sites.

See above.

Every one of those sites are classified ad sites, which is problematic on two fronts:

1. All the content is the ad. 2. It's not unique content, it's content created for the sole purposes of selling something.

Literally everything you listed requires that there be something to sell, whether a product or sex/dating. So the Internet should effectively be one big shopping district?

> OK, how about the newly founded austrian branch of swiss publication NZZ - it started with 0 users and paywall.

A subsidiary of a 300 year old establishment is your example of a startup making it day one with a paywall. Okay...

> 1. All the content is the ad. 2. It's not unique content, it's content created for the sole purposes of selling something.

Google Search fits the same definition. It has no unique content (CSE and booking sites do by the way, they have product information, reviews and ratings etc.) and it only points to other sites, just like their ads.

> Literally everything you listed requires that there be something to sell, whether a product or sex/dating. So the Internet should effectively be one big shopping district?

No, selling something is just one way of getting revenue without annoying the user. Perhaps more websites should try it.

> The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive.

I remember differently, when ads started to appear on the web, it was promptly followed by adblocking. Actual reason was to block ads.

Yep. I remember most of the first ads were outright scams, "You are visitor 1.000.000 of this webpage! Click here to collect your $500" [Seizure-inducing flashing to follow].

IIMNM the first ads I remember were banners, used to be banner exchange between willing webmasters turned into paid for banners (not sure if it was per impression or per click or both).

> I remember differently, when ads started to appear on the web, it was promptly followed by adblocking. Actual reason was to block ads.

Sure, but the adblocking was pretty specific. Popup blockers followed popup ads and they were far more popular than any software that blocked ads outright. Adblocking isn't new, it's that it's iron-fisted and gaining in popularity that's the problem.

I don't remember adblocking to be specific, it was about adding a bunch of ip to your hosts file to redirect them to 127.0.0.1 and was sometimes a bit too broad.

Then again this is a matter of opinion, to me it is ad supported model popularity that is the problem.

I have an even better model than that: Website erects paywall, nobody pays for content, and another irrelevant site bites the dust.

Your post seems entirely based on the assumption that people will not create and host quality content for free.

It also assumes people will not try to extract content from walled gardens via any means and share such information for free.

It seems the assumption of "block everything" individuals is that any quality content that is not currently free somehow will magically become so when all ads are blocked.

This is what people did in the past. People are doing this now, and they will continue to do this. TBH, most of the content that will go away as a result of adblocking is garbage anyway. It's the paid bloggers and other leeches that have had easy for the last 10 years who are really complaining about this.

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

If paywalls actually worked then we'd already see them everywhere. Why don't we? Because people don't want to pay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com