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Comment by jonathanstrange | Hacker News Reader

Most people can do without those 95% percent. Never fall into the trap of believing that because you offer something for free (i.e., ad-driven) that people consume, they like your offer or couldn't live without it. That seems to be a common misconception among Internet companies that do not sell any real products.

Most stuff on the commercial Internet exists just for entertainment. If people can't get X-entertainment for some reason, it's likely that most of them won't care at all and turn to Y-entertainment instead. For example, if Youtube closed tomorrow, there would be an outcry about the lost pirated music and a few silly popular Youtubers, but after a month the site would already have been forgotten.

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Eh, most people can do without 100% of the internet, but they don't want to. And why should they? It's easy to opt out of ads - just don't use sites that have them. But if person A wants to watch some ads in exchange of "just" entertainment (which is downplaying the importance of entertainment, but whatever), why should that bother me?

Assuming of course that person A is fully aware of what they are giving said ad company, which currently is often not the case.

> if Youtube closed tomorrow, there would be an outcry

Clever youtube though, let you become a paying customer and bypass the ads. It really is a very compelling resource once the millstone of advertising is removed.

It's just not ads. I'm willing to pay for the content but I need the guarantee that content provider or company won't sell my usage information. The problem is that ad-tech companies won't stop when we start paying. Google will still sell our usage profiles even if we buy YouTube music.

> I need the guarantee that content provider or company won't sell my usage information

I think GDPR provides this no? Leaving the privacy aside for a second though, there's other ways in which pervasive advertising is destructive. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to side-step even if I am still dealing with evil-global-mega-corp (but then again, what large company isn't?).

EDIT - this thought actually occurs to me, that your data is probably safer with evil-global-mega-corp than with smaller businesses even state institutions because at least evil-global-mega-corp knows better, and has a larger attack surface for scrutiny.

Why not start a service that does this?

Ad revenue is so attractive that no one is willing to just provide a simple fucking paid service.

Hey, I mean build it and I'd buy it

So why don't you do it? That's what I was asking. If there's such a big demand for it then it would be a easy business.

He never claimed that there is such a demand.

Who are you to judge what other people can do without?

People can live without a lot of things, but that's not what this is about. We're in a modern society where people can fill their wants and desires, and they're perfectly able and willing to make their own choices about the content they consume and how they pay for it.

Youtube is just distribution. The content, the demand for it, and the creators who produce will still exist and still continue to be paid primarily by advertising.

You have misunderstood me. My statement was merely supposed to reflect an empirical fact, not some sort of personal value judgement. I could be wrong about that empirical fact, of course, but the history of the Internet has shown several times before that people cared much less about some companies than those companies had wished for. See AOL, Myspace, Yahoo, Altavista, ...

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