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Comment by ajoy39 | Hacker News Reader

and those people keep things free for the rest of us, so I'm fine with it. Everybody likes to complain about advertising but no one has come up with a way to eliminate it without a large portion of the sites we use everyday shutting down.

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That is the core of the issue that people keep missing in these discussions. Web advertising in its current state didn't form in a vacuum, it's a byproduct of our expectation that content on the Internet is mostly free.

We aren't missing the point of web advertising. The problems being described, especially with traffic laundering - illegitimate sites are making money from ads, but aren't giving a return to the company buying the ad. When you have a low ROI on making an ad, you stop buying them. At that point, we don't have enough legitimate ads to support the web content we actually want to see survive.

The solution isn't to get rid of the Ads, it is to get rid of the perversion of the system (easier said than done). An efficient ad system is better for everybody.

This is true. The problem is stupid buyers. Many people here would be shocked at the lack of sophistication (or 'sophisticated buying theater') some marketers use to deploy 8 figure annual marketing budgets. It's getting better slowly and as it does we'll see less of this kind of crap.

To their credit, many of the DSPs (at least AppNexus) are trying to clean up their own systems as well and automatically block this type of traffic from being purchased. The trend in ad-tech right now around viewability and viewable eCPM metrics is also a step in the right direction.

So let's change the expectation. There is a real cost to these "free" services (as has been discussed at length on hn and elsewhere) and this cost is only rising as more and more people block ads. I am looking forward to businesses failing on the ad supported model so that jew approaches are tried instead.

For example, I would pay 99 cents for a full story after reading a teaser if this was easy to do. I'd even buy a membership if I could trust that a news org isn't pushing an agenda (looking at you, NYT, WaPo and many others). Heck, maybe crowdfunding select journalists is the key. I know organizations are trying to think out of the box, but because ads are still giving them a cushion I charge that they are not trying hard enough.

The sites that abuse clickbait generally post a lot of it. It's not like, say, PBS posts articles ending in "..you won't believe what happens next".

Wouldn't it be a net benefit if those sites closed down? It's not like there's much value being lost.

You'd think so, but BuzzFeed publishes some really good original content, including investigative reporting, which is bankrolled by the truckloads of clickbait they shovel out.

Interesting. That sounds similar to how movie studios maximize profits on blockbusters in order to fund actually good movies (which often lose money).

>> and those people keep things free for the rest of us, so I'm fine with it.

Huh. Such an obvious thing I've never even considered.

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