Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmortin | Hacker News Reader

Somebody has to pay for it in the end, so Facebook could simply say "agree to targeted advertising and use the site for free or do not agree and pay a monthly fee for the site".

View on HN

Sign me up!

The sad truth though is that the users who are most likely to pay to get rid of ads, are also the users that are most valuable to advertisers, because that's a signal they have more money to spend than the rest.

You can disable Google's ad targeting at any time: https://adssettings.google.com/ You don't have to pay anything. What you get instead is untargeted ads, like ads for cars, potato chips, and shampoo, just like on TV. Personally I find those to be a lot more annoying.

Facebook's ad targeting can be similarly disabled under https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_s...

So... I have to be logged in or have a Google cookie in order to not be tracked by Google. This is complete bullshit and worthless for anyone using private browsing.

> What you get instead is untargeted ads, like ads for cars, potato chips, and shampoo, just like on TV. Personally I find those to be a lot more annoying.

I'm genuinely curious: what's so much more annoying to you about untargeted ads? I've never found targeting to be effective at showing me ads that were genuinely better or less annoying.

I feel more comfortable with untargeted ads, since I can be much more confident nothing truly sneaky is going on, especially technology ever gets good enough to reliably manipulate me to buy more now.

>I've never found targeting to be effective at showing me ads that were genuinely better or less annoying.

I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I think the key difference is this statement. I had untargeted ads on for about a year and they were always irrelevant. Since returning to targeted ads, I now see things all the time that I'm at least mildly interested in (mostly startups and new services, and/or tools/software I want to try out).

I don't care if I'm being coaxed into buying more: the things they're tempting me with are legitimately interesting and I have the ultimate say on whether I buy it or not.

Untargeted ads don't give that choice: they're just always irrelevant to my interests.

I consider most advertising-delivered information to be suspect. I find about things I'm interested in organically, through interest-based websites and the like.

In any case, except for a few specific circumstances, I've rigorously used ad-blocker so I haven't had to deal with any ads at all. The last ads that I have seen were on Facebook, but even it couldn't seem do a good job, even though it's purportedly the master of targeting

"What you get instead is untargeted ads, like ads for cars, potato chips, and shampoo, just like on TV. Personally I find those to be a lot more annoying."

Really? I kind of despise the targeted Ads. They're typically poor quality, and often it's some website I visited months ago to look at one product constantly dangling that product in my face in a desperate attempt for me to come back and buy it.

Show me the cars and potato chips, please!

This is retargeting, and is pretty much the least sophisticated ad targeting out there.

For me I don't really care whether ads are targeted or untargeted. It's the data collection they use to target the ads that's the real concern. I suspect that's true for most people but for some reason these discussions are typically framed as targeted vs untargeted, which IMO misses the point.

That said, I also really don't like seeing ads at all.

Does this disable Facebook's data hoovering about you?

I wouldn't think so.

You can also disable Google's ads on some sites, https://contributor.google.com/

Sadly, Google Contributor is not available outside US. I am eagerly waiting for it.

It also puts users in the mindset of starting to consider if their time on Facebook is worth $X/mo.

What if they say it's $20 a month? And it's just facebook. Google also asks for $20, Reddit too, etc.

It won't be cheap.

Google services with guaranteed no tracking and profiling?

$20 is cheap.

Huh? A Google Suite account is 4 euros a month. No tracking and profiling.

So you are stipulating an account worth is 240USD a year at facebook? Instead of 20, why won't you say 100, make it round.

Seriously though, behemoths do fall and if facebook ceases to exist there will be no harm but good in my book.

I've seen this so many times, but if this future comes I think there will be a lot of angry ass people complaining about the $100s of dollars it costs to make the internet useful.

Every recipe site runs on ads as one example. Now five million recipes across 1,000 prominent sites are to be locked behind paywalls, and you must pay $5 per month for access to each site due to the extreme drop in traffic they suffer (nobody is signing up to pay except at the largest sites, smaller sites have to charge more to make up for that, they implode accordingly).

The result: 973 of those sites disappear. Diversity of choice just collapsed. Starting a new recipe site or blog just got 100x more difficult. But hey, in Communist Internet, who needs lots of recipe sites.

What do you think the creative work is for running a recipe site? And what about the technical work/costs?

I guess you mean the kind where either there are users providing those for free or it uses a huge number of compiled one, not some person inventing new ones.

I would wager that 970 of those sites can be run for virtually no cost, either maintained by loyal community or the wide internet.

Many recipe sites are basically blogs, so yes, there is a lot of cost associated with each of them. I do not know if they tend to make money their money on ads or on books or on other methods.

First of all, ethical ads are possible, and more so on a website already very targeted like a recipes website. I can easily guess what sorts of ads would be useful.

Furthermore, I agree the sibling commenter in that these sorts of websites usually just publish what community submits anyways, so we can have a bunch of wikis instead.

P.S.: Everybody should know the difference between trying to overcome the status quo which is selling yourself to companies and hoping that they do not abuse you, and things like communism or government overreach. And if businesses will lose money or get closed if they stop bad, malevolent practices of theirs, good riddance. Let the sanity get the better of them.

The number that's been kicked around for he value of North American user is about $50/year. So $5/month will cover it.

The problem is that even if I pay Facebook this company is so utterly untrustworthy that I don't believe for one second that they wouldn't run their data sucking shenanigans on paid accounts.

And that's why you want to have regulations. In the case you suggest, you could ask e.g. EFF if you suspected that they are abusing the contract, to sue FB in behalf of the users. Or even kick-start a big court case yourself.

I agree, but at least if the ad market is much smaller, the data will have that much less value.

Various companies will probably still gather and sell data for even more nefarious purposes, like manipulating elections, but that’s a different battle.

That's not the number that is being kicked around.

Facebook will yield more than $100 per active user in the US and Canada for fiscal 2018. That's going to $200 from here over the next six or seven years (it doubled from 2015 to 2017). No meaningful number of users are paying $15 per month out of pocket for Facebook.

Google search is similarly worth a lot per user in the US. People would be irate if they had to pay $10 or $20 per month to use search engines after commonly enjoying the free utility of that for the last two decades.

Last time someone claimed they knew the numbers I asked them to explain how. They disappeared without replying. So I'll ask you the same thing.

If you divide revenue by users you get between $1-$2 USD. I need to know how NA are 50-100 times that.

Facebook publishes revenue per MAU on page 37 of their 2017 annual report:

https://investor.fb.com/financials/default.aspx

Note that it is reported quarterly (I had some numbers but took them out when I realized I was using 1 quarter instead of the year).

OK thanks. Indeed, $100 isn't a bad number to use.

Per daily active user or monthly active user?

I also think it's conceivable in a more equitable arrangement with paid subscriptions that you could easily have a sizable number of paying users not being active in a given month.

Are you saying the free market doesn't apply to pricing for these services?

I am more than willing to pay $20 a month for both Google and Facebook. Do you hear me? Take my money!

Google gsuite pricing is $5 / month for the basic version.

I would actually pay a small amount to have a read-only account for facebook that doesn't track me at all. I don't want to post anything, but I would like to view stuff more easily on the platform. Especially since so many events are organized through fb.

Have you tried the mobile site with JavaScript disabled. Or have to tried Facebook command line where you can simply query for posts in the terminal?

That model already works for streaming TV! At least it’s working pretty well for Netflix, Amazon, HBO... (It’s definitely not ideal for viewers, but at least now it’s easy to get TV without ads.)

We already donate to reddit.

I’m pretty sure Facebook can’t do that. The point of the GDPR, as I understand it, is to make control of your data a right which can’t be bargained away, much like employers can’t try to bargain away your right to sick leave.

depends really, the law says you can't deny service, but doesnt say you get to get the exact same service. I would expect the same for people who deny ad cookies - they 'll get more ads shown.

I didn't think that was possible. Otherwise it would make determination of a fair price very messy -> In the extreme facebook could set an arbitraily high price if they didn't want to change their business model.

That would be a violation of the current policy. I don't wish to be rude, but it doesn't seem that hard to understand, and i'm a little surprised by the number of people making mistakes like this.

It's important to note that the GDPR doesn't ban ads without consent. It bans tracking users without consent.

That's not possible with GDPR. You have to be able to access the same service 'without detriment' even if you do not want targeted advertising.

Yes, but when that point hits hard enough maybe people will stop saying "Why do you not use Facebook/Gmail, it is free".

Now someone can actually try and compete with a free service. It might not work but its a step closer to happening. For example we have had open source federated social networks, and non-profits that ran email services.

That other free service also encounters the same dilemma. They have to pay for the site, so either they take your data or make you pay.

You can have ads without tracking. But frankly I'm 100% happy if you actually have a choice of "give your data or pay". It's a massive improvement over "give your data or don't use the service" or "give your data and pay" which is what we have today.

If people force the issue then I expect big sites will give you this option. But it won't be necessarily cheap, so most people will opt to use the free version instead.

I’d happily pay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com