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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that in many cases, the users go to war first. Ad blockers, paywall bypassing, incognito mode, etc. make it virtually impossible for most sites to survive on a straight ad model. The company has to find a way to survive, so it tries memberships, click-bait, nag screens, gathering user data, and in response an extension like this is built, and it keeps going back and forth with anti-ad-blocker, anti-anti-ad-blocker, etc. Medium is far from blameless here, their Twitter feed is repetitive and far too low on quality articles vs junk. And yes, their nag screen and 3-article limit suck. But they need to do something, don't you think?

If you are a user of ad blockers and additional strategies, what do you envision as the endgame? No ads, ever? What kind of content are you expecting at that point?

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> The company has to find a way to survive

No it doesn't. Closing the business when they can't turn a profit is a perfectly viable (maybe inevitable) course of action. When a local restaurant is losing money do you expect them to close or to start padding the meals with sawdust? Much of digital media has reached the point of charging you for the sauce on your sawdust.

> What kind of content are you expecting at that point?

Much better content on average, less clickbait crap. You could halve the quantity tomorrow and no one would notice.

If restaurants offered meals for free, people wouldn't complain about the ads on the menu. No restaurant offers free meals though.

Should we start charging for everything we see online?

So content providers shutting down their businesses will result in "much better content"? Are you sure you've thought this through?

Not really. AdBlockers were a reaction against the toxic ads. And even today only a minority of users (<10%) are using adblockers.

You should provide sources when you toss out statistics, PurpleRamen is not itself a source people trust. You are quoting a global number. And it's outdated.

In the US, overall ad-blocking is 30%+. https://www.statista.com/statistics/804008/ad-blocking-reach...

On laptops, US adblocking was 40% in 2017. https://marketingland.com/survey-shows-us-ad-blocking-usage-...

These number are growing every year. And surely, if you focused only on the demographic group most likely to read Medium, the percentage would be even higher.

Whomever starts it, it always turns into an arms race because the backers of the website want constant growth; they are never content with steady performance.

So be it. I have better things to do with my time than participate in 100 arms races. Such sites simply become dead to me and I move to the next one that's friendlier to its readers.

In many cases, the reason they need constant growth is because they're not profitable. They're just burning through cash in an attempt to become profitable in the future, which requires growth.

The endgame is for sites to provide content that users want to pay for.

If you would ban ads on the internet, only sites actually being useful to users would remain. The rest would die off, along with the ad industry on the internet. Sounds like a dream to me.

Nobody pays for content. Let's stop pretending it's a usable business model. Even paywalls are hated by most, and banned by some communities.

If you block ads, they'll simply make the content an ad.

A) They are going to make the content an ad anyway. It's not like they are going to turn down one advertising revenue stream just because their old one came back.

B) Tons of people pay for content. It's a perfectly viable business model. Look at Patreon, Kickstarter, etc. The uncomfortable truth for website owners is that they are likely just not putting out material that is worth paying for.

In terms of news, there likely is no such thing. The WSJ is among the most respected and high-quality newspapers on Earth. Despite that, every time a WSJ article is posted on HN, somebody posts a paywall workaround. If HN won't pay for content, you expect the average joe will? Get real.

This is just a sample from this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17510315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17490839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17479284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17480087

> In terms of news, there likely is no such thing.

Most countries have public broadcasters like the BBC that are much higher quality than most of the commercial options. We're already paying for news.

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