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Comment by zouhair | Hacker News Reader

What would happen if ads were illegal?

Here is an experiment that seems to have gone well (banning outdoor advertising)

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

Anyone that's ever been fortunate enough to visit Hawaii knows how wonderful a place with such regulations is. Even in areas far less dense than Sao Paolo, I got a sense of relaxation from simply driving on the highway that I don't get (even in lovely rural stretches) when my attention is beggared away 10 times per minute by fast food signs. I doubt that society can yet fully quantify what we are trading away to make a few billboard operators wealthy and satisfying a few advertisers.

There are relatively few billboards where I live, sometimes none.

As soon as I cross some boundaries (city? county? not sure) there are TONS. And instead of ‘traditional’ billboards they are bright LED based ones that draw your attention and switch every 5-10s. It’s horrible.

Where is that?

Assuming making ads illegal actually gets rid of them (a big assumption), content providers and search engines would have to move to a different revenue stream. They could charge users directly: (1) Micro-subscriptions over a long time span, something like $1/month (2) Micro-payments; something like $0.03 per day of use. Transaction fees hurt #1 less, so I think it's more likely. Probably bundled over a year.

The degree to which losing ads hurts content providers depends on how much ad revenue needs to be replaced by direct payments. If an average user sees ~3000 ads a month (just a guess) and the CPM is $10, sites will need to convince users to pay $30/month for what was previously "free". The lack of ads would reduce users' mobile bandwidth costs by up to 50% [1], which does free up money, but direct payments would probably weigh more heavily on the user's mind. So a lot of sites with perceived low value would lose their advertising revenue and not be able to replace it. On the other hand, if each user only generates $3 in ad revenue per month, the transition is a lot easier.

Premium content services that people already pay subscriptions for (magazines, Netflix, etc.) would do fine. Content services with insufficient quality or breadth of content to support a subscription model would either (a) give up, (b) continue as a hobby rather than a business, or (c) provide free content to build an audience with the hope of becoming a paid service in the future.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost...

What counts as an ad and what does not? There are obvious differences, but it is sometimes more subtle.

HN would have to cancel the "Who's Hiring" monthly job ad threads.

The vast majority of content providers would go out of business, and product discovery would largely disappear.

There are many channels for product discovery other than advertising. Like do you ever talk to your friends?

For the first one, that might be a net win. For the second one, it would be more inconvenient. But there has been an era before the internet and I was doing just fine then.

> For the first one, that might be a net win.

Yeah, I'm sure that reducing economic output and driving a lot of creators out of business reducing in increased unemployment and poverty will be a net win for everyone!

Wow, can't believe what I'm actually reading...

> But there has been an era before the internet and I was doing just fine then.

With ads.

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