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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

I have to admit that at a deeper lever I'd love if advertisers get the fuck off of the web. I don't have a problem with advertising per se but the way it's used today hurts the medium in so many ways. Sites are bloated with ads, journalism is riffled with native advertising articles, malware is mainly spread through infected ads and on top of that we have a legion of companies out there which are collecting every kind of personal information imaginable without permission or any kind of regulation. Enough is enough.

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The good thing about Google's cost-combative platforms like Adwords and DoubleClick is it prices the lowest rung of spammers out of the market.

Multinationals leaving these platforms means the price drops down. This not only means more illegitimate entities can afford to compete, but that publishers need more of them, in more places, just to stay afloat on the same income.

You could argue that this is falling apart because Google takes a 50-68% cut of what the advertisers pay, away from publishers. I'm not sure how this competes with old world advertising, but that seems pretty severe. If they edged off on this —they'd lose a ton of money but— they'd probably make the internet better.

50-68%? You mean 32%-49%? https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en

Interesting...they specifically say that the Rev share for mobile ads and video is undisclosed.

I do. I was using very old numbers.

It's really too bad that they got away from being an equalizer in the advertising space. Pricing the spammers out of the market isn't the best way. Keeping the advertising from becoming so in-your-face is the right way to fight this. And quit trying to get ahead of my thinking in what I want to purchase. I never recall them ever getting it right. I've never searched for something, seen an ad, then purchased. EVER.

And I'm ready to make a several-hundred-dollar purchase tomorrow and I see ZERO ads around these products. I see plenty of crap.

In my view, the founding hypothesis of the company- that people will be amenable to ads connected to what they are searching for- is incorrect. So we're seeing a pretty clumsy pivot.

I keep hoping Duck Duck Go takes it elsewhere. It could be very easy, maybe as simple as a little button I click that says "I am looking to purchase" and now let the advertisers make their pitches.

The point is, I would like to see if they got better results by letting me drive.

I'm afraid that the situation is backwards. Media aren't published for an ulterior reason and propped up with ads to cut costs. Most digital media exist to show ads, and it props them with "viral content" to lure in readers.

Paper media can sell a paper copy and (theoretically) run without ads. Digital media would have to sell subscription (when they can offer high-quality content), or run entirely on ads (then the content is secondary). Guess which type is prevalent.

The big companies are working on this and this should soon be tackeled by the betterads standard: https://www.betterads.org/

The trouble is: given how much of the web relies on advertising, how would things fare once ads are gone?

All the click bait bullshit would disappear pretty fast that's for sure.

Well, the Internet existed before web ads were a thing, and it was a better place in many ways. I wouldn't mind losing a lot of the current noise (twitter, facebook...) to end up with a network of public services, subscription-supported businesses, and fan/volunteer-powered resources.

I've always loved the idea of a back-to-basics www2 project. Not enough people care about this stuff for it to ever work though. 99% of people are perfectly happy with the FB/Google/etc world.

When i use Google news , there's so much waste in web journalism: a million journalists rewriting the same article, and often a useless and low quality article, at that.

So maybe there's a better way.

I agree. It’s really old fashioned supply and demand. When the price drops below the price of providing something, you get a shortage. We need a shortage of some of the nonsense that passes for “news” these days!

In the heyday of the wires, Reuters, AP and to a lesser extent UPI and AFP were the syndicated news sources of choice – now every “digital marketing” intern from here to Jakarta suddenly is their own “wire” service. I am all for diverse reporting, but the same story written 800 different ways at a quality approaching trained monkeys on typewriters – I’m kind of over it.

So maybe there's a better way.

There's a reason those articles are so bad https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/06/robo_journalism_goo...

This isn't the reason(although it could add to it). This is for local news, not the stuff we are talking about.

The web will be for people who are willing to pay to say something, I guess.

Also it will be for people who are able to pay for everything.

If people built more things instead of sold them to people maybe there'd be less need for advertising (or politicians). When the value is actually clear there is far less need to convince people.

Make things that work, sell your vision not the product. People will buy into your vision, and accept more product shortcomings and cheer you on as you improve.

Since ads on the web are mostly produced by bots for bots, and distributed through shady borderline-criminal ad-networks I think we've already reached rock bottom years ago and it can only get better.

Wasn't that always true though? The earliest internet I knew was through AOL cd's, but it still seems like the internet as we know it was born of cancerous (mostly pornographic) ads.

The first spam campaign that looked like the spam we know and love today way a "green card lottery[1]" campaign on Usenet by a couple of lawyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

We can ask ourselves what could exist without ads.

Most newspapers could make old-style ad deals, like they do for print. A few newspapers also still finance their sites almost entirely through subscriptions, and those would continue to exist (e.g. Süddeutsche, SPIEGEL). As would obviously publicly financed sites (BBC, ARD, ZDF, NPR).

Also products financed via paying customers, such as imgur used to be, or possibly reddit if they change the way reddit gold works.

Also, most people's blogs would continue to exist, as many self-host or use services where the free users are subsidized by the paying ones. Even WhatsApp used to be profitable with that model.

We'd be going back to a 2010 era web, and I'm not so sure that's actually bad. We'd lose the corporate dominance over the web, Google, Facebook, etc.

Now, there is one part where paying user subsidizing doesn't work, but where ads are currently the only model of financing, and that's search engines.

But considering those act as a public service, maybe after advertisers leave the web and Google goes down crashing, a government could just buy Google (as the German government bought DHL, or major shares in VW, they could probably just outright buy Google).

If Google were to ask for a monthly fee for the search engine (and hopefully cut down on the data collection a not), I'd totally pay them.

You might, but not very many people would. Realistically we'd lose Google.

You are worth ~26€ to Google. On average, only ~5% of users are willing to pay, so each paying user would have to subsidize ~19 non-paying users for such a model to be profitable.

This would result in you paying around 600€ to use Google.

Alternatively, in a paid-only scenario (where you just pay the 26€), Google would become such a niche product that it'd become irrelevant.

Is that figure a monthly value or a "total customer value", e. g. One-time indulgence payment?

And would 26€ per month also remove all Google ads from the Internet?

That was a total customer value that leaked a few years ago, if I remember correctly.

26 in what period? Like over the life time, year, month?

The ad business requires Google to hire a hell of a lot of developers who are not working on the search engine. A pay service would be viable on less revenue. And nobody knows who many people are actually willing to pay for Google search because we've never had to.

The quality publications will remain, under alternative funding models.

Many sites will perish, and little of value will be lost.

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