Comment by lazaroclapp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazaroclapp | Hacker News Reader

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This is not quite as straightforward, though. One advantage of our ad supported internet is that quality of access to ad-supported services varies very little with one's wealth. A teenager in Mexico (or India, or... you get the idea) with a low end smartphone, coffee shop wi-fi and no credit card gets the exact same Google, Youtube and Facebook services than a Silicon Valley VC with a Mac Book Pro and a huge bank account.

Now, I am not saying I like the surveillance economy, and I don't, by any means, enjoy ads. I also think we are risking a lot by the erosion of privacy as a value in our societies in the name of ad targeting. But I thought I'd point out there are social ills associated with pay services as well.

Freemium is another option, but it quickly becomes about finding a balance between providing a good enough free service that people want to use and thus promote it, and yet crappy enough that enough will upgrade to the pay version.

Note: My paycheck or the future of my current workplace does not depend on ads ;)

Imagine if instead of libraries we made literature accessible to everyone by inserting ads, including "native ads" and product placements in the stories! Egads!

You know what's more important than "quality of access"? Quality content and quality services. The perverse incentives of the ad-supported model results in great quantities of poor if not negative quality crap. The kind of stuff that manipulates and exploits the very people you are speaking up for, those who can least afford it.

Clearly there are other models. It's up to us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick?

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera

We still have the free 'libraries of the internet'. Wikipedia (charity model), and state-provided news sources (like national broadcaster ABC in Aus) do exist and are fairly popular sites.

But we still need a press that's independent from the govt, and we can't expect everyone to run all websites as a charity.

As to Mexico, language barriers are still a thing.

However, the real cost is the content that's not created. If an author is paid by the book then they tend to be of reasonable length. When paid by the page, you get content that never really ends. Compare MMO's with single player games and generally MMO's last much longer, but are less fun while your playing.

Advertising driven content is similarly insidious. You don't want people to spend a lot of time reading or thinking, just click click click.

Most of the platforms that I mentioned are not language specific. It is trivial to use Google, Youtube or FB in Spanish, and the internet has ample content in Spanish, even in U.S. owned services (how could there not be, with 470 million speakers?).

Also, sure, some content works better when each copy is paid. But my point is that a lot of the software platforms themselves: a) seem to be doing quite well on ad revenue, b) wouldn't necessarily be better for most people if they charged fees instead. Again, this applies to software services (search engines, email servers, social networks), more so than produced content itself (books, movies, games). As far as I know, the only real contender for traditional sales in the content space is crowdfunding[1].

News (investigative journalism in particular) is an interesting third case, where it is not clear whether ad supported or subscription are viable at all long term.

[1] Anecdotally, some of my favorite games and comics are crowdfunded, one of my favorite "tv" shows, but none of my favorite movies or books. Even though crowdfunding a book should not be expensive at all.

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