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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing. Ad blockers as they are today don't work because the "block everything" approach is not sustainable.

Advertising is a good model, it works, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Ad blockers, by being selective, can actually act as an agent of change by forcing the market to move towards the formats people actually prefer.

Ad Block Plus attempted to do this with their pay-per-play whitelist approach but that obviously has major issues since it didnt have realistic goals, wasn't transparent, and clearly let crap through anyway.

I wish the ad standards also included outstream video (the autoplaying video ads inside of an article) but this is a good start.

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Ad blockers work just fine. It's very rare for an advert to make it past the filters, and it will be quickly fixed if it does. The preferred format is "no ads". The web existed before ads and it will exist after ads. It's not my problem if you've built a business around the unethical practice of manipulating people into buying things against their own interests.

Wow.

A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads.

B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site.

C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?

> A- Ads do not manipulate people into buying things against their own interests. Businesses who sell great products that people want don't just magically find their customers. They find customers with ads.

I think that's a pretty rosy description of things. Advertisements are an effective way to influence peoples' choices. Sometimes good products get advertised, sure; and sometimes when you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you get lucky and land in a pile of snow.

> B- You're free to use an ad-blocker, and websites are free to block your use of the site. > > C- I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?

Absolutely! I don't think many reasonable people would object to anything here. I personally don't block ads on most of the sites I enjoy, and I have to problem with websites paywall-ing me if I use adblock.

A - counterpoint: Great products can succeed without ads. The customers find YOU. Crap needs to be advertised.

B - yup, and bye

C - yup

"Content" of any type is just not worth much anymore. It's plentiful and cheap. What's worth something is eyeballs.

As the price of content, of all sorts, approaches zero, the work is taken over by amateurs. Old timers have seen an amateur web and are absolutely not afraid of its coming back.

> Great products can succeed without ads.

This is exceedingly rare and anyone at a major company will tell you that marketing and sales is usually more important for success than the actual product and it's qualities.

Prime example: oracle

> I assume you enjoy the web, and that a lot of effort is put into the sites that you enjoy. Do you expect all of this for free?

But where things get murky is when the primary value of a site is the content generated by its users. Why should I look at ads when I'm going to the effort of creating the content?

Because you get the value of the content created by other users. You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit if you don't get any value from it, but someone is providing the service in the first place and there is nothing wrong with monetizing that service with advertising.

> but someone is providing the service in the first place

And I'm paying for that too with my ISP charges. Why should I pay for the data usage incurred by viewing an ad?

> nothing wrong with monetizing that service with advertising

True, except for the various ways that advertising is typically unethical in manipulative design, the unjust and problematic imbalance of power between platform owners and the communities who use the platforms, the fact that ads are usually tied to privacy-invading tracking… besides those sorts of things, nothing's wrong.

> You are absolutely free to not contribute anything or even visit

This rhetoric needs to die. You are free to not go to the grocery store and buy food, unless of course you want food besides that you can grow on your own as a subsistence farmer. I suppose the fact that grocers operate at scale with very organized corporate models in order to consolidate their economic power while consumers are divided into being individual shoppers is totally irrelevant to the market factors here‽

If the supply side were divided into individual programmers etc. while consumers were all organized into powerful consumers' unions with near-monopsony, it would then be equally ridiculous and insulting to say "hey, you individual programmer — if you don't want to make the specific product the consumers' union wants to use, you don't have to; you are free to choose what you make".

Point A is as valid as any sort of baseless religious claim. It's a delusional fantasy. Do you think people need ads to know that McDonald's sells burgers? Try talking to anyone who actually creates advertisements for a living. Try investigating even the tiniest bit to check whether your hypothetical models actually match reality.

Say I know that I want a new refrigerator. Is it in my interest to see carefully crafted ads promoting whichever products have the highest ad budget? No, I want to see objective information in order to choose the best product. And that's just one of the most benign examples, whereas ads often promote things nobody needs at all.

You think cartoon characters connected with sugary cereals are giving kids useful information about the food‽

> websites are free to block your use of the site

Well, they're free to try. It's not completely trivial. (The resulting cat-and-mouse game would probably be won by publishers in principle, but an unbeatable solution would require significant changes in ad distribution.)

In nineteen ninetyfive, I was around 20, I started using the Internet. I was amazed and started looking for ways to communicate with others. I realized everyone wanted to communicate with everyone. I started subscribing to newsletters. When I opened my inbox I thought to myself "wow, the Internet is communicating with me".

Today my stomach turns when the internet communicates with me (ads, messages, pretend news). The original idea is lost. Newbies never get a glimps of what I saw, back in the day. I wonder if it's lost forever.

I blame Google. They solved big data. Made it queryable. And then implemented a business idea very far from "not evil".

Edit: spelling

They also solved email hosting and dns and spam and the browser wars and map directions and domain hosting and reactive web guis and streetview and maybe self driving cars...

I get it, I was there, I remember how it felt to see the internet in the first blush of its commercial blooming. Also, I can be pretty biased against where we are today, but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.

>but to act like it was all lollipops and gumdrops in 1995 and its terrible today ignores a bunch of the improvements.

Yes, the world was both worse and better than today. I agree. Today is different. Compared to 1995, not worse or better. That's depressing because as a planet, back in 1995, we really needed to improve, as a species.

I don't know how to make an influence in world politics other than to create a business built upon my values. That's what I'm looking for right now. A technical leader. I have given up on politics.

That technical leader is not Google. I personaly share none of the ideas behind ad networks. I like how they solved big data back in the day. And since they have great people they started to solve other problems as well, like mail. And maps. That's not evil.

Sucking the air out of the browser market the same way they did with the web search industry and then standardizing an ad-blocking mechanism is not just evil, it's vicious.

I see those as two orthogonal things: solving problems for the web is the thing Google lives to do. Monopolizing internet advertising is the thing Google does to live.

Is that reasoning a way of solving the problem of doing good for the sake of evil perhaps?

Edit: This and my previous posts are very toxic towards Google. I shall try to be more positive. Maybe they really are doing good for the world. I mean, how will we have selfdriving googlecars if we don't have ads?

The era of the (non-promotion/"lifecycle"-oriented) email newsletter is dead. But, such content is still produced! In order to avoid the devaluation of text (that is, the process where people stopped reading the good newsletters because they blended into the bad newsletters), the creators of worthwhile broadcast-style media have had to move to audio or video production. Those "newsletters" are now podcasts and Youtube channels.

There was nothing wrong with letting commerce do their thing on the internet I suppose but since there was never a non-ad driven competitor to Google non-ad driven businesses now have a hard time succeeding, which is a shame I think.

Before ad-driven internet business, remember what we had? I do very well. It was called non-profitable business. Are we that plain and narrow-minded that we therefore cannot have non-ad driven business on the web today?

The information you leak when you use ad-driven services, that's the product. I know of tons and tons of other type of products that could be driving an internet business where the product was something else entirely. But I don't see them around so much. Most buy in to the Google ad circus.

What is a "non-profitable business" and why would anyone want that? Unless you truly are talking about registered non-profits (as in charities) and are expecting a Google like organization run that way?

I was refering to the giganting corporations that were created during the dotcom era that investors threw money at but never became profitable.

> The web existed before ads and it will exist after ads.

That's only speciously correct in the sense that the technology had to be there before the economy could use it. Online advertisements and email spam predate HTML by quite a bit, and ad-funded sites (c.f. Yahoo) were some of the very first successful businesses to be built on the platform.

You know there was mass advertising before the internet right? A lot of it, on TV, radio, billboards, magazines, newspapers, door-to-door salesman, etc. The commercialized web of today is vastly different from the early beginnings and 99% of the content and services you use online are funded through advertising.

You might want to go back to plain-text message boards but the world has moved on and there is an immense amount of commerce and utility conducted over the internet. If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for is successful because of advertising in some form.

Everything is manipulation, that is the action of the world against your thoughts and wishes. Have you never recommended anything to your friends? That's advertising, whether you like it or not, so I don't see what's unethical about it specifically. There are certainly dishonest campaigns and we have some (but do need more) regulation around that, however people do have free will and the final choice, regardless of the ads they see.

> Have you never recommended anything to your friends? That's advertising

It's not advertising, because you don't profit from it. Advertising is fundamentally dishonest, because I (as the viewer) cannot know if you're recommending a product because it's good, or because you get paid for it. On the other hand, recommendations are more likely to be honest, because the person making them doesn't profit from making them (and in fact stands to loose something, if the recommendation turns out to be bad).

> The commercialized web of today is vastly different from the early beginnings and 99% of the content and services you use online are funded through advertising.

Not sure about this value. For instance, Wikipedia, the 5th website in Alexa rank, does not use advertising. Besides, there is an argument to be said that if advertising really became unsustainable, then the services who would disappear would not necessarily be the ones that we miss most.

The idea that "creating content costs money so the reader must pay for it" is simplistic. Many people put quality content on the Web because they enjoy doing so, and don't ask for payment, they even pay for hosting out of their own pockets. That's how it started, and it hasn't disappeared, just became less visible when for-profit content arrived.

> If you have a job today, it is with almost absolute certainty that the company you work for [...]

This statement is far too general to be accurate. I have a job, but I don't work for a company; I doubt that my university significantly relies on ads to be successful.

> You know there was mass advertising before the internet right? A lot of it, on TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, door-to-door salesman,

All of them manageable and skippable through various means. For instance I know/knew many people who would record TV to video, just so they could skip past the ads.

The difference is that this new medium puts the receiver in control, not the transmitter. And that means people will gravitate towards what they consider the best experience, the experience with no ads.

If that doesn't work for whatever publisher or site-owner, they'll have to ask for direct payments, and the market will get to decide which web-sites the internet eventually ends up with.

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