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Comment by agopaul | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. A big part of the web is paid by ads. Lots of websites rely on (non-invasive) ads to sustain themselves and provide content to anyone for free. It's safe to say that the whole web sustains on ads (think about google, FB).

I know that sometimes there are too many ads on certain web pages, but that is no excuse to ban them all.

Yes, ads are also used to distribute malware but, come on, it's 2016 and you should have uninstalled both Flash and the Java plugin in your browser a while ago.

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Ads pay for some web sites. People pay for ads because they want the attention of the sites' readers to get them to buy their products. People buy their products, which pays for the ads, which pay the websites.

I prefer to be able to steer my own attention, and not have it be steered by those who win the bids for it. I don't like paying a surcharge on every product to enable this practice. It seems like an inefficient way to finance the web.

Are you also against relevant adverts in magazines? Some of those are pretty useful...

Nobody disputes the usefulness of some ad(vert)s. But while an ad on a website is coming with tracking, a nice advert in a magazine does exactly what is the intention: inform people of something, either a product or a service. And I can watch that ad anonymously.

While I would like to watch online ads, for the information might be useful to me, is impossible to disable the tracking, somewhere in a log file an IP will be associated with receiving and/or clicking this ad. This IP might be associated already with my identity because I did login to Gmail from the same IP, for example.

That's why I am using ad-blocker.

> a nice advert in a magazine does exactly what is the intention: inform people of something, either a product or a service. And I can watch that ad anonymously.

Even ads in magazines aren't there to "inform" people.

"Informing" would be objective. Ads are meant to show the product in the best possible light and get people to buy them.

> Nobody disputes the usefulness of some ad(vert)s.

I do. Some years ago, I've read an essay where the author, among other things, considered banning paid advertisements, i.e. getting paid to promote someone else's work.

I sadly didn't save a link at the time, and I can't find it on Google. The author argued that today's social networks are effective ways for word-of-mouth advertising, which is why classical advertising is not strictly required for a new product to take off (esp. when combined with crowdfunding).

Furthermore, advertisements regularly create requirements that are irrational and even harmful to the people involved (e.g. sodas and sweets) or the society or its natural resources. I can see how banning paid advertisement could help in transitioning to a zero-growth economy, which I consider one of the most remarkable challenges of our generation.

I would love to see these ideas explored with scientific scrutiny, because, as always with economic policies on this scale, it's near impossible to estimate their effect in advance.

But after a decade and more of attempted monetization in a plethora of different models, this is the only one that kind of works. In general, people won't pay for content and expect the web to be free, when we all know it's not even close to free to run.

Ad blockers are popular because ads got creepy. Seriously creepy. And majorly intrusive and auto-playing and so on and so forth. No one considers TV ads or print ads to be "inefficient" - yes, there are pay channels, but even the bulk of paid cable channels show ads, and pay magazines are sometimes a full 50% or more ads.

I can't expect you to suddenly cheer for ads. They're everywhere and there is definitely fatigue throughout the day. They uglify highways, they can definitely be pushy. But it's not like people haven't attempted other ways of monetizing content.

I'm not sure that I agree that it works (even kind of; but that is mostly down to "working" being ill-defined), nor am I sure that there aren't other models that have worked out (parts of the web are still ad-free).

But taken at face value, my first thought was that it's just difficult to establish an alternative model against an incumbent. Advertising was there first, but on a level playing field, maybe micropayments could have taken off?

Of course, elsewhere, incumbents fall all the time. So I guess it's just difficult to establish an alternative model against an incumbent that sells the illusion that you're getting something for free. At the same time, people routinely spend 10+ cents for every web page access through mobile access charges. I don't even think about it when I browse the web on the subway.

Let me hasten to add that not all alternatives to classic ads are an improvement. Native advertising and other forms of embedded marketing come to mind. Although I am hopeful that readers will fairly quickly come to despise it even more than the more honest and easier to ignore ads.

  >Advertising was there first, but on a level playing field, maybe micropayments could have taken off?

The biggest barrier to micropayments is the same as it's always been: no real framework for achieving it. You can't add micropayments to your website, but you can add advertising. We're closer than we've ever been, though.

Is there an ad-blocker on earth that will block static content from the same domain? That seems about the best compromise all round, so much so that I think it's inevitable.

> I prefer to be able to steer my own attention, and not have it be steered by those who win the bids for it.

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Very few people are going to create content for you for free. If you don't want your attention steered, prepare to pay the piper.

> I don't like paying a surcharge on every product to enable this practice.

The theory that advertising is a "surcharge on every product" assumes that the dynamics of sales and competition wouldn't be hurt in the absence of ads, that honest, unbiased, uncommercial content would pick up the information slack from ads. These assumptions does not stand up to basic scrutiny:

a: Ads support the entrance of new products into the market. For new products to be successful, they need to drive either new value, higher efficiency, better status-signalling or lower prices.

b: There is nothing to keep uncommercial content from recommending alternative equal-quality non-advertising products, which we would then expect to be cheaper, as they don't incur the surcharge. Certainly, there are examples of such products (eg. consumables that have a store-brand alternative), but if the theory were true, those alternatives would be widely available throughout the market. Consumer Reports routinely recommend products from brands with expensive ad campaigns.

c: Status-signalling is a thing, it really is, and while certainly exploited and supported by the ad industry, it wasn't invented by it, and won't go away if the ad industry does.

> It seems like an inefficient way to finance the web.

Perhaps so, but in a century and a half(?) of ad-supported mass media, not a lot of viable alternatives have appeared. Subscriptions (newspapers, magazines, still contains ads), donations (NPR), tax support (BBC and the like). It's not obvious to me either model would support the almost absurdly rich pluralism of content the web has with ad-finance.

EDIT: spelling, cleaned up ambiguous language.

People block ads because they can. It's that simple. Morals and philosophy have little room when all it takes is a few mouse clicks to disable virtually all ads. The barrier of entry (or de-entry, if you will) is incredibly low.

> Ads support the entrance of new products into the market.

It's going to be difficult for this trend to stop until there are some technical hurdles built. Until then, I think it's unrealistic to say we should subject ourselves to ads because "historically the market has worked that way". It may have worked that way in the past, but times are changing.

No, the the fact that ads entail a surcharge on most products is fairly self-evident (companies pay for it, and price it in), and does not rely on those assumptions.

My take on your argument is that despite the fact that products get cheaper when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the price would increase (or products would be worse, which is basically the same thing). Which is a fair point. But if that were true, it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact.

However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency. You don't even have to be very creative about it, since they already exist (e.g. consumer reports are a thing, and vaguely 10% of the Internet seems to be dedicated to discuss the dos and don'ts of buying shit). Ads are already one of the worst ways to get information about products, particularly in non-niche markets.

> (companies pay for it, and price it in) ... when you remove the "ad portion" of the price, the consumer markets would get more inefficient, and hence the price would increase

Yes, that is what I meant. I guess "net surcharge" is a better term.

> it's still not clear which of the two would have a greater impact

I believe it is, which is essentially what my argument is about. If the net surcharge is non-trivial and positive, then where are the people (trying to) capture it for profit? They can even piggy-back for free on certain kinds of competitors advertising (your competitors spend on ads explaining why everybody must have a dishwasher, you can just show up a sell a dishwasher).

> However, I don't think it's very hard to come up with mechanisms that serve the same function as ads in terms of market transparency

In theory correct, but in empirical practice this doesn't happen. Where is the car/dishwasher/whatever brand that is cheaper because it doesn't advertise, but consistently come out top in Consumer Reports? Even store brand consumables doesn't consistently test as better or equally good, just as good enough, and cheaper.

This is not one of those things where an obvious inefficiency shows up and everybody is falling over themselves because the market takes a few years or ten to smooth things out -- ads have been a fixture of the market, well, since the 60s, going by Mad Men.

This is the bit where I speculate wildly, but I think some of the fallacy is thinking about product, ad and consumer in an abstract isolation. Effects are probably much more diffused and harder to quantify. Broader status-confirmation than that of being seen carrying a can of Coke rather than Walmart Quality Cola is probably one: it feels good to be buying Tide, even is nobody ever sees the bottle, it's a confirmation to yourself that you've made it, and when you and I can shrug that off and get the cheap alternative, it partly because we can derive status confirmation from our work in a way that frankly isn't available to everybody. Also, positive branding (as supported by ads) is pretty important for employee morale which rubs off on product quality. This is way out in the margins, but an employee at the white-label detergent factory probably isn't going to feel the same pride the Tide employee is, and even a little compounds over time.

Very few people are going to create content for you for free.

The very popular site you yourself are posting on for free demonstrates the opposite. Millions provide valuable content for free every day in twitter, medium, HN, Reddit, blogs, Wikipedia etc etc.

An ad-driven web should not be the only future we can envisage, and ads and the search for clicks are what is actively damaging our news media at present IMO. We can do better than ads.

To be the most efficient way, it has to work.

As far as I know, this is the most efficient way to finance a website. What's your most efficient way?

A less mentioned problem is the fact that, as far as our industry is concerned, ads corrupt.

They corrupt the developers, because the purpose is no longer to create a great product. You now have to think on how to:

* tweak your product to accommodate ads

* trick the user to comeback even when he shouldn't have to

* collect as much data about the user as you can

And they corrupt content creators, because it makes them focus on volume (views) instead of quality.

And yes, we painted ourselves into this corner, where is really tough to make it without using ads. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't explore other options. And without ad blockers, the industry will have no motivation to search for alternatives.

Hey, if a website uses ads that it hosts on their own server and if the ads are relevant to the content of the page and not my browsing history, I'm more then happy to see them.

Since in 2016 this is mostly not the case, I have to go with whitelisting the sites instead of the other way around.

If your business model can be defeated by a browser extension, then it wasn't a business to begin with.

The internet is in need of a unified subscription service. One that you can pay a monthly fee and see as many ad supported websites as you want, without ads.

There would already be a unified subscription service if there would be a real demand for it.

As ad-blocking becomes more common, demand for a unified subscription service grows. Hopefully, it's feasible, because I think it would be a wonderful thing. Some subscription services, which remove ads, are doing pretty well as far as I can tell; Twitch is the obvious one that springs to mind.

And after a few years it would end up being similar to cable tv. It started offering «more and better content» without ads, because you already paid a subscription. And once they had enough users and content, they added ads. Whats stopping those websites from doing the same?

I tried to contact some media sites a month ago because I was creating that service. No one even replied my email. I do not think they are even interested in it.

It's a lost cause unless if you can get someone like Murdoch in as an investor.

Flash is a red herring here. Yes, we argue about the too many. And for lots of people that is 1. I pretty much feel this movement is just a reaction to a very nasty practice, and every advertising company deserves what it gets. Ad supported != free, sorry and Google and FB != the whole web.

I'll admit that "the whole web" was an exaggeration, but I'm trying to make a point. Nearly every website that I browse is sustained by ads.

Yeah, the adv industry is a nasty one, but still this movement is not providing a viable (any?) alternative option to finance the web.

I don't think the ball is in the customers court hereto come up with solutions, but some alternatives might be 1. donations like patreon, flattr, paypal etc. 2. pushed down on people throat a different way e.g. build into your monthly internet bill (the same way as piracy 'damages' were included in CD and DVD prices) 3. maybe just let those parts die

edit: 4. I really did enjoy South Park sponsored content

Patreon is working reasonably well, and other sites are using a similar model even if they don't use Patreon specifically. Flattr is still around even though it isn't very popular. Readability tried this and distributed some money to site owners, but they didn't have a good reputation with site owners and eventually folded. Looks like the Brave browser is trying a similar thing now.

Should ISPs be required to share their profits with the owners of the sites their users visit?

Never mind the technical hurdles; from a strictly ethical standpoint, would it make sense? The industry seems to have settled on 70/30 being a fair split. Why shouldn't sites be able to opt in to receiving a portion of 30% of the profits coming from a particular ISP subscriber, proportional to how many times that user visited their site compared to other sites?

ISPs profit by transferring other people's copyrighted content but sharing none of that money with the content creators. Wasn't MegaUpload raided and destroyed for doing essentially the same thing?

BBS and similar services offered content for free before the advent of www and Web as we know it today. I think most of the Internet would survive without ads, it'd just have a bigger split between free and premium content, and p2p for distribution would be more common place to share the load.

A BBS had a more static infrastructure cost though, because the resource use was gated by fixed limitations like the number of incoming lines. Traffic cost requirements can be much harder to predict and while you can emulate the fixed maximums of older technology this is going to put your users off because people these days do not expect that sort of limitation.

All the ads you see track you.

I would be OK with watching ads instead of paying a website, I'm not OK to be tracked in doing so.

Security, performance, aesthetics help in strengthening my resolve.

If I really want to help a website I'll value whether to disable the adblocker (ublock origin) or not, or perhaps pay for an ad-less service.

So what? The web worked just fine before ads came along, and I'm not convinced that the deluge of ad money has actually improved it much. If the ad money dries up, we'll get by and the web will still be full of interesting things people have created in order to give them away for free.

It's mostly about tracking for me.

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