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Brad with the CoinTent team here.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I tend to agree with the core of what you're saying: that advertising has enabled, and should continue to be a main driver of, the creation of content on the internet. There's really no way to argue with that, and I don't think ads will ever go away entirely.

I also agree that things and content cost money to make. The truth is, in the US, the average ad block rate is currently 20%. That means a lot of content creators struggle to get enough money from ads, often leading them to create worse experiences (more ads, more aggressive ads) or more content (to get more eyeballs).

Our intention is to create an alternative to ad blockers that provides a sustainable option for websites and users. Specifically, we are trying to create a model that does not solely reward websites for attracting the most viewers or eyeballs, but rather incentivizes the creation and distribution of valuable content.

Just because advertising existed before, doesn't mean it has to continue to exist.

Advertising is not a law of nature, it is a human invention and should be replaced by a new invention.

Advertising is a very bad thing. It's a form of brainwashing in which people are manipulated or provoked to consume way beyond their needs. Its goal is to plant ideas into your head, without you even being aware of it.

Curiously, the law of supply and demand in economics doesn't even mention the concept of advertising, yet it plays a huge role in demand creation.

This 'inflated' demand provokes inflated supply, which creates even more demand (because everyone wants a popular thing), the feedback loop being limited by the speed of extraction of the natural resources and the capacity of the human body, but that can be augmented by increasing human population.

There's too much shit produced in the world, too much waste created, too much useless information on the web and too many shitty websites and ecosystems, which exist solely due to advertising.

I don't mind at all if they disappear or reduce in numbers.

Good content and good products will find ways to survive.

Bill Hicks https://vimeo.com/36651896

George Carlin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtK_YsVInw8

Honestly that sounds like a pretty terrible world to me. New products, services, and experiences would come in at a trickle. Competition would take a nosedive, and incumbents could begin to price at whatever they please as the barriers to entry grow ever taller.

Not only that, but advertising is a way for the few to subsidize the many. For every person who responds to an ad, 100 do not. That means people of little means get access to free content paid for by companies betting they can find other people to pay for it.

I grew up poor. We didn't have cable TV, or any kind of subscription service, because we couldn't afford it. My parents would never had justified micro-paying for online content. But through advertising, a world of content beyond what was available in public libraries was made available to me.

Advertising will never go away anymore than money or prices will go away, because even in post-scarcity goods world, people's attention span is still scarce, and anyone seeking to scale any business or organization in this world will need to reach people, and with so many people vying for attention, undoubtedly, differential time-preference and privacy-preferences between people will mean some people will trade one for the other, human diversity practically guarantees it.

> ad blockers is started an arms race where the ads now come in the form of sponsored content so you have no idea what's an ad and what isn't.

"Ad blockers" did not start an "arms race". There has always been people who would rather not have ads intruding on their daily life, including before "ad blockers" came into existence -- content blockers are merely the expression of this.

"Native advertising" and "product placement" were a thing before personal computer, internet and content blockers existed. The end game of an ad is to be seen, and for advertisers there is nothing off-limit to reach that goal, content blockers or not.

Funding through advertisements as business model is not a law of the universe which people must accept with a fatalist mindset.

You are a hero of mine, gorhill. Thank you for your work!

I'll reconsider when ad networks stop bloating websites, autoplaying videos and shore up their security.

Until then, you can pry my adblocker out of my cold, dead hands.

Sure that's a fair point.

Irresponsible adnetworks are fucking up the web not advertising in general. It will revolve though and brands and content providers will push those violators or. It's just a matter of time.

You say irresponsible ad networks are fucking it up for the rest of them. Name a responsible ad network? One that doesn't put me at substantial risk of malware and tracking.

I literally know of none, and having worked at some I know that you can't stay in business if you spend the kind of money necessary to solve the malware problems. And the tracking data/access is either your secondary or, sometimes, primary revenue source.

In regards to advertising, I believe they do more harm to societies than good, or will in the future. I'm not 100% set in my ways, but definitely lean the way of ads being harmful.

I believe that advertisements have been a requirement of humanities growth (related to the world's economy). I agree that at the moment we need ads. However, I believe the world needs to move to a transparent economy and ads as we know them may not have a place in that sort of economy.

Amen to that.

Adblockers reduce the amount of requests a page makes, the amount of resources dom elements use up and the amount of malware that gets served to users.

Being served static ads or sponsored content (already happening anyway) is still an improvement over that.

> I also think adblockers are a terrible idea. All we have done with ad blockers is started an arms race where the ads now come in the form of sponsored content so you have no idea what's an ad and what isn't. We need to just accept that advertising will exist and the premium for non advertising content is just too high to afford by the vast majority of users.

This is just not true. It's not like advertisers would have said "Ya know, everyone is allowing our ads. Guess that means we no longer need to try different delivery methods. All good here, lets go get a drink guys!"

We'd still have sponsored content without adblocking. Now, instead of seeing sponsored content and banner ads, I only have to filter out sponsored content.

On the contrary, this is a great idea, and one I've considered doing myself (in fact, I think godot and I ran into each other discussing this subject on HN before).

I agree that advertising is useful and important, but it's too hard to make money from, and too easy to block with ABP et al.

My biggest gripe with this setup is that it comes with a built-in adblocker. It shouldn't seen as a tit-for-tat, the publisher should decide whether the user gets pushed ads or not (the user could still block these client-side, and the publisher could still block adblockers if they wanted to). I also don't think we need Yet-Another-Ad-Blocker, probably not a good idea to undertake that.

There should also be some sort of API that allows sites to check if the user is a CoinTent subscriber or not, which would allow the site to offer exclusive content to customers who actually pay.

People should get used to paying for things again, and a "cable subscription" model is the right type of thing here. A world where everything is free is unsustainable.

Cable does not have ads?

Several European cities have already banned billboard advertising (replaced it by art). So it can happen.

A number of states in the U.S. ban them as well. Re: Vermont: "By all accounts, getting the billboard legislation passed was no easy task. It was 1968. And there was deep opposition to the proposed ban, from businesses who relied on the advertising, and from farmers, who made money by leasing their land to billboard companies." http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/78949/billboard-ban-turns-40/

The current state of online advertising still has a significant impact on loads times, battery life and bandwidth. It's getting better and, I think, will continue to get better, in part because of the huge take-up of adblockers which is, I hope, spurring the industry to improve.

Finding new revenue models is a good idea; one that deserves many attempts.

The internet gives us the ability to discover for ourselves. Broadcasting commercials to everyone is the old method being applied to the new medium.

The amount of tracking on the internet by the advertising industry is damaging to our privacy rights.

It can(does) lead to poor quality content being published on the internet in hopes of more advertising revenue.

I applaud CoinTent for testing their idea.

I agree with you about the web. For entertainment I like the model of paying Netflix and Hulu.

Do you work in advertising?

Some of biggest companies in the world are supported purely by ad revenue and adtech. Google, Facebook are just a few examples.

This is a terrible idea.

I know I will take a lot of heat for saying this here in The South.

Slavery is something that has existed for at least 2000 plus years. Agriculture is supported by it, manufacturing is supported by it and it is no coincidence that the clothes you wear are made by it. Fact is we as humans may not love slavery but it exists because plantations want to make profits, it provides cheap labor to plantations that would otherwise need to charge a ton of money for all that cotton you love. The Southern economy entirely depends on it.

As more and more production including agriculture and manufacturing move to The South do you really truly believe they will remain slave free? Who would toil out in the blazing sun picking cotton by hand, for no pay, to be housed, fed and treated like livestock? Where would the thriving plantation, factory or farm get its labor from? Purely from the free population who buy its products? Do you think we can go back to the ways of charging $90 dollars for a cotton blouse?

Fact is things require labor to make and plantations and factories need humans to labor to keep making things. Slavery whether you like it or not is here to stay.

Edit: What this guy writes is crazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047706