Comment by torpfactory | Hacker News Reader

Comment by torpfactory | Hacker News Reader

Just below the title in the article: "New iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra will stop ads following Safari users, prompting open letter claiming Apple is destroying internet’s economic model"

I would love to blow up the ad-revenue economic model of the internet. Sure some of the services it funds are convenient but the cost is pretty high. Just a few of these "costs" in my mind:

- Keeping people in a constantly mentally distracted state with various app notifications in order to serve them more ads

- Degredation of political discourse in a race to the rhetorical bottom because that approach appears to generate the most views and thus ad revenue

- More efficient sorting of people into tribal camps of group think. All as a consequence of content which agrees with their worldview because this content generates more ad revenue.

- Fundamental lack of control by users of their personal information as collected by these ad services

I don't know what would replace the ad model, but I'd be happy to find out.

Also when looking for information these days I usually only find annoying "these N things are the best" sites where you have to browse through N+1 pages of ads. The ad industry has seriously damaged the information content of the web.

I've found the formula for "news" slideshows is N+int(N/5) as ads seem to be inserted in after every 5 X that are X.

Maybe the subscriber model would rear it's ugly head again and people would pay to consume content that's worth reading. Instead of being dragged into click-bait.

Works great if you have the following:

Content worth consuming.

Content worth subscribing to consume.

A production pipeline that can put out enough enjoyable premium content for users. If its good, people will subscribe just to get access to a certain feature or series ala Giantbomb.

Giantbomb has this down pat- but it's taken years of content creation, and a CBS buyout to keep the doors open.

What it can do is make you pretty damn appealing when you go up for sale, if you have the active, paying subscriber base.

That's why Giantbomb is still around and is seemingly surrounded by the of corpses of those who tried the subscription model, but simply couldnt keep subscribers subscribing.

And if you have subscription fees that are reasonable.

I do agree that "tracking" ads are undesirable. I also doubt whether they are really as effective as the ad mongers would have their customer's believe. It I search for a topic it does not necessarily mean I want to buy something related to the topic. Not every effort to acquire information is motivated by consumerism. I think in a subscription model the echo chamber / mutually reinforcing world views effects would be even stronger. It is human nature that people sort into tribal camps. In general ads are effective when they appeal to basic aspects of human nature. That does not mean that the ads themselves are responsible for those aspects of human nature we don't always agree with.

One potential model I'm mildly optimistic about is a net based on cryptocurrency microtransactions, such as the Coinhive proof of concept [1]. Who knows how (or if) it'll work out in the long term, but personally I'm definitely going to try out Coinhive or something like it.

[1] https://coin-hive.com

In the long run this probably won't work. The way most cryptocurriences work is their supply is limited and the difficulty of mining increases as the amount of computational power allocated to mining grows. In the case of unlimited supply cryptocurrencies you would have an inflationary effect where more and more people try to make money off of users' computational resources generating more and more crypto-tokens reducing the value of a given "unit of mining effort." The Internet is a hyper-competitive marketplace so "profit" trends to zero in the long run. This will also be true of Google and Facebook. In the long run search will be distributed among Internet nodes maybe like a semantic DNS not under the control of a few companies. People will be able to host their social profiles in the search records. But until the long run arrives this approach will be interesting.

> "internet’s economic model".

That's rich. Wonder which genius came up with those wordings in the complaint.

Are ads really the majority of the revenues generated on the internets?

Imagine if the purpose of highways was the billboards. The need to go somewhere is just the content to get you out and seeing the ads.

So what are you saying exactly? That the internet needs a government that taxes its users in order to build websites that do not need ads for profiting? All this circle-jerk against ads is fine if there was some viable alternative; but unfortunately not everyone can live of selling over-priced smartphones like Apple does so internet ads came to exist after internet was created just like TV ads came to exist after the TV was created.

I'm not convinced it's worth investing in a response based on the extremes you applied to your statement. It seems you see no middle ground, so this issue involves circle jerks or over-priced smartphones.

But the short answer is that I'm irritated by how ads have become the focus and content has become the excuse to get people to see the ads. Ever gone through a magazine like that? Where the articles and such are all just fluff so they can call it a magazine, but really it's just a book of ads.

Netflix, is a response to, among other things, TV commercials and 30 minutes of ads before a movie at a theatre. I think Internet ads are going the same way. Clearly people don't want them. Clearly efforts to hide ads are having a serious impact to the bottom line. So content providers need to evolve. I like the Patreon model a lot.

It's a stupid monetization model anyway. Imagine I want to increase the price of my service; how do I do that with ads? Do I increase the number of ads on my website? At what point will that break? Probably pretty soon.

You increase your prices by better targeting, either by knowing the demographic of the eyeballs (Facebook) or by intent of the action (Google).

Yes, I can increase prices by a certain factor by optimization. But then what? What if I want to increase prices further?

Then you start jamming affiliate links in places so you get a percentage. Then you target more and more keywords that are convertable. Then you have a newsletter that pushes those products. Then you take money to write articles/reviews/videos about some product.

It's not just jamming banner ads everywhere, there's a lot you can do to increase revenue with advertising and referrals.

So you are saying I can increase the price like I could by asking money? E.g., I could set the price at 10 dollars per visitor per day?

Your points 2 and 3 are actually integrated part of human nature and ending ads is not gonna help a bit; looking for a common enemy in order to start a mob by yourself (and therefore polarizing people) has always been a thing; it's just that now Internet allows absolutely anyone to do it, which includes anti-vaxxers flat earthists and millions of other intellectually decadent views.

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