Hacker News Reader

Comment by briga | Hacker News Reader

Is it wrong that I don't particularly care about supporting the ad-based web? Ads don't interest me, and I don't particularly feel like making space for ads in my daily attention span and thereby degrading the quality of my web-viewing experience so big corporations can profit. The whole reason I switched from watching TV to using the internet as my primary source of entertainment was to escape advertising. I have a website and as long as it's up I am not going to put ads on it. I feel like information just wants to be free. I'd be interested to hear some alternate perspectives on this however.

View on HN

I've been on the web since BBS's, and continue to be well-satisfied by the web content put up by volunteers ... the voices of real people motivated by interests, hobbies, passions, fandom, technical areas. I care about a diversity of voices and strictly what people -care- enough to share.

Those with some professional or profit-driven or political/ideological motives can well afford to advertise on broadcast media. They may put up expensive websites and dream of wealth - can't stop 'em. I quit TV because of advertising, and so I really don't appreciate them following me around and whining. STFU or GTFO.

P.S. Want some money from me? Support micropayments.

You're not alone --- the sites on which I've found the most useful, informative, and detailed content have also been those with next to no ads (and that's not just because I use an adblocker). Sometimes there's a tiny and relevant banner or a text link in an unobtrusive place, but for the most part, they're text-free. They also tend to be personal sites and (unfortunately) rank very low in searches, so are rather difficult to find; but once you do find one, it's like a breath of fresh air.

Contrast with the masses of vapid ad-filled sites whose pitiful excuses for content only exist to drive traffic towards them, are also highly SEO'd and engineered to grab attention, and thus show up unwantedly in a lot of searches.

I’m with you on this, and even if I weren’t I’m so burned out by years of intrusive ads and auto play sounds, videos, and worse practices that I just don’t care. If I gave everyone competing for my attention and brainspace a slice, there would be none left for rational thought. Mostly though, the content is usually crap! Am I really supposed to care that Buzzfeed might fail?

“This town needs an enema!”

The flip side is that any reasonably popular site on the web is going to cost a not insignificant amount of money to maintain, and the hard reality is that nobody really wants to pay for it out of pocket. They want it for free, paid for with ads that other people see while they block them with their browser plugin.

I've said for a long time that I'd rather see something that functioned much like Facebook does (or did, rather, maybe 10 years ago) but was completely supported by subscription. Let me pay something like $5/month and in return no funny business, no stupid manipulation to get more page views, etc. Just a place I can interact with friends and family.

But nobody would pay for that, even if that's basically what they pay for it indirectly through the products they buy.

People pay reasonable amounts for good service. The NYT’s online subscriptions are booming, Netflix seems to be doing alright, and there are many others. What can’t survive is a model of asking for too much, or drowning out content with ads.

People are willing to pay for good content. e.g. Wikipedia receives vast amounts of donations. Not only are people willing to pay money, they are willing to do it if even if the content is otherwise free.

The problem is that most of the time, ad-supported websites become experts in creating clickbait and lose their ability to create content that worth any money. It is the ads that are killing the ad-supported web, it is a race to the bottom.

>The problem is that most of the time, ad-supported websites become experts in creating clickbait and lose their ability to create content that worth any money.

Depends. Some websites have a hybrid model where they have a free tier and a subscription tier that removes ads. I think that works well provided the free tier isn’t too invasive about the advertising.

What the internet really needs is a standardised format for “tipping” for content. I’d be happy to send a little money to a website that I visit without having to subscribe or put payment information in.

Especially true of something like the newspaper. I don’t actually like the NYT or Post as businesses enough to subscribe, but in the rare occasion they actually publish some worthwhile journalism rather than “let’s interview some idiots and see if they still like Trump” then sure I’d pay whatever an ad click is worth for that.

Part of the problem with that is finding the right mix of free content to attract users and still get them to trust that it's worth it.

It's also a challenge because with all of these modular services, it's hard not to start feeling like your bank account is getting the death by a thousand cuts routine.

Sure, it's annoying when I can't read a NYT article because I ran out of my 5 free articles. But is it enough for me to actually pay? No, I'd rather just read the HN comments as those are free and usually better than the actual content in the article.

On the contrary, it costs almost nil to handle traffic with an HTML/CSS static site, maybe 3x - 10x that with personalization, transactions, social, etc. Most info sites don’t need those.

Define popular? How about a billion hits?

Figure four servers for static HTML/CSS, maybe add CloudFront or similar if heavy on images or progressive download video, and 10 servers for dynamic personalization/transactions, for a billion personalized/e-commerce hits a month.

A billion hits averages to under 400 reqs/second, which you could handle on a single Pentium running Apache on BSD in late 90’s. Make it a bell curve, account for surges, 4 modern boxes is still comfy headroom for static stuff.

If hosting content is prohibitively expensive you could be doing it wrong. Try not firing up script interpreters and ‘frameworks’ per hit, use a static site gen CMS. If dynamic, spend time nailing caching.

Apparently it doesn't cost money to produce content?

I think you interpreted maintain too literally. For most sites you need to paid writers, designers, programmers, etc

Those all cost money.

GP had own site, said ‘information wants to be free’, I was talking about case where that gets popular.

I was not talking about media generated as placeholders for ads (sports, ‘news’, and reality television come to mind, as does click-bait).

Ah, fair enough

It's a pity you're being downvoted - but I realize it's for being off-topic. I feel you make a very important point: we became so dependent on dynamic websites that it stifles growth even if in many (not all!) cases a static version would do just fine - and these can withstand massive amounts of hits.

If you make enemies, though, you're screwed - a good protection against DDoS attacks can be terribly expensive.

Ads are not the only method for monetizing content, they are merely the laziest.

Content makers have been using the web for over two decades, and figuring out how to do it profitably as well. There are innumerable models for doing it, but it requires putting in the leg work to actually care about how your work is supported. Sure it's seductive to think that someone working in some "noble" pursuit should be able to avoid having to do that, but that's not really true of anyone anywhere, why should it be true of content makers?

So... you'd rather be the customer than the product? I agree!

Believing in something passionately doesn't make it real unfortunately.

I also want to believe in that but all the data seems to show the opposite. As a niche blogger, what I hopefully believe is that there is a reachable sweet spot with less intrusive ads and good content. Good content in the long term can't be free, it's Economy 101, nobody will spend days creating great content for half a dozen pennies no matter how passionate they are about something. People want a reward, no matter if it is more work opportunities (technical blogs) or cash. For me it was a monthly dinner paid by my content. This could keep the "troops morale" high. Does new content is lowering in quantity and quality? Unfortunately yes.

Most fellow HNers are militant against ads (even if many get a sallary from them) and I am too but as an amateur content creator I can recognise the problem. Do I use adblockers? Sure I do but only on annoying sites and not in all of them. By default it's switched off.

> I feel like information just wants to be free.

Even in today's web Information IS largely free and not ad supported. It is entertainment ("content") and communication that costs a lot of money to support and hence either paid or ad supported.

> Is it wrong that I don't particularly care about supporting the ad-based web?

Most people in the world can't pay for entertainment content or even Google search if you charge it's true cost. Most countries have per capita income in the range of a few thousand dollars a year. Even China is sub 10k dollarsa year. Hence ad supported models.

I feel the same. Maybe I'm an asshole but I feel no particular loyalty to any website. If a place I frequent shuts down I move on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com