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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

I've got nothing to hide. This is my real name. Yes I'm in marketing, I'm known in the industry, I wrote about ad blocking [1], built an adblocker, spent 6 figures to test alternative payments [2], am part of every initiative to make ads better [3], and have spoken with senators to push for regulation. Does that work as a disclaimer?

But what does business interest have to do with discussing advertising as a concept vs implementation? We can discuss highly technical topics with nuance but when it comes to ads, why is there such a visceral and emotional reaction?

1. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/16/ad-blocking-a-primer/

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820

3. https://instinctive.io/blog/instinctive-is-a-founding-member...

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And this why ads are a problem. From your own article.

Options include continuously changing domain names and server-side ad rendering.

People clearly have expressed their intent not to want ads, yet you want to have systems to force it on them. If people have signaled that they don’t want to ads, do you really think it is your target market. Who exactly is it serving?

Ads, especially on mobile with limited real estate, slide shows, etc makes web pages unreadable. I specifically don’t use the Facebook app or any other app that doesn’t use the SafariViewController (which supports content blockers) to display external links.

Btw, no I didn’t search for your name on the internet. I just went to your HN profile. I thought anyone who so vehemently defended the adtech business must have a business interest in it.

Most content producers want nothing more than to diversify from a dependency on ads so I knew it didn’t come from anyone on the content side.

That's still mixing up concept vs implementation. I described 4 reasons why adblockers are used in the first place. You won't find anyone else in adtech who's criticized the the formats and experience becoming too intrusive but it's not something that gets solved easily, and a big part of the problem is because people outside the industry are not willing to cooperate.

As far users: It's not about wanting ads, it's about wanting content. The cost is paid for by ads. People make that choice willingly, and that choice is rarely relevant to any product's target customer profile, but the process is serving both users and advertisers by facilitating the trade in attention vs content. Sure content producers want direct payments, and the rise of patreon and subscriptions shows success, but the scale and reach of that is inherently limited. Very few people can afford to pay for all the varied content from so many different sources that they consume daily. That's the fundamental problem.

If only a company was bundling content from various publishers and showing ad free articles for $10 a month.....

Ok? That's not an argument. We're just going in circles.

Bundling is just a stage in the cycle of payments that every medium goes through every few years and doesn't change the fact that most content still is, and always has been, paid for by advertising.

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