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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I was pretty active on Tumblr in 2010 had thousands of followers when that was "big" back then and its sad they never asked for paid subscriptions with minor aesthetic features. I would of happily paid $5 a month to use my domain with my Tumblr blog instead they gave that away too. Charge for GIF avatar features. Charge to be able to have access to / or to post NSFW content.

This ads first mentality for profitability is stupid. Lastly throw in an ad here or there for different musicians under their respective tags if you want ads. Talk about contextual advertising that wouldnt bother me if I had seen it. Like maybe a band is doing a concert in my own bam!

The way I used Tumblr I may of paid $10 a month for a premium account if they just made it all the worthwhile. They also provide asset hosting for free. Come on!

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Unfortunately targeted advertising appears to be the best way to maximize returns for massive, VC-backed social media platforms. Charging for stuff simply isn't as profitable. The numbers have been run before multiple times.

I was talking with Twitch's Director of Engineering about a year ago and he was saying that their ad revenue dwarfs their revenue earned directly from users (subscriptions and bits) by at least 10 to 1. I was amazed as I've seen how much people are willing to give away on that site.

My guess would be only a fraction of people participate. I watch a bit of Twitch, but for me, the chat might as well not exist. (edit: that isn't to say how important participation and communication are for building a community, they are)

Second, ads don't need payment methods. Kids and teenagers may not have debit or credit cards, but are a hugely valuable demographic that advertisers want to target. So as long as Twitch stays relevant to those audiences, ads will probably be quite valuable.

Which is nuts when you think that something like ~70% of twitch users have an active ad-blocker.

Do advertisers know if their ad is getting blocked? I'd assume that they do but are being willfully ignorant about how ineffective adverts on the web really are. I mean who even clicks on an ad on the internet, Grandma?

I don't generally click the links, but if I see something I like, I'll google it or go directly to the site. As for if advertisers "see" their ad being blocked: it depends on the way the ad is being blocked / served. Most adblockers just blacklist certain web domains, so if a JS call is made to that domain it is blocked. The advertiser won't ever see it was blocked or have to pay for it being shown. The website owners are usually the ones hurt most by adblockers.

Twitch gets around this now by integrating the ads directly into the video stream before it even hits your browser, so there is no way for a simple ad-blocker that blacklists domains to tell when the stream is streaming an ad vs the actual content.

Most publishers put up with adblocking because most ad companies offer "set it and forget it" solutions. Just drop a piece of JS into their HTML and they start earning money. Eventually publishers will get their ads via a REST API or something (server side) and splice the ads directly into the HTML themselves, so that the ad-blocker won't know what is content and what is ads.

At that point, ad blockers just have to make their best guess at which HTML elements (div/span/etc.) contain ads by checking names, dimensions, and other features and deleting that element.

I think their might be laws that say you have to explicitly label ads or sponsored content as such, so that might make it easier.

A lot of people in tech don't seem to realize how big the advertising business is. It was gigantic even before we came along. The behemoth has turned its attention from TV and print to online, but it's still a behemoth. The amount spent on advertising just in the US is more than Facebook's entire market cap, each year. It should hardly be a surprise that an industry that big can have a significant effect on web-based companies' profit models.

BTW, the finance industry is even bigger, and has a correspondingly larger effect on how the tech industry really works. I've even seen it said that Silicon Valley is basically just a (not so) well disguised extension of Wall Street, and it's not wrong.

Doing neither is even less profitable.

Spotify and Pandora disagree.

> I would of > I may of

https://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/could-have-should-ha...

You comment would have been more well-received if you explained the issue, rather than just linking a page that doesn't.

Anyway, it's "could/should/would have" which in its contracted form is "could've" / "should've" / "would've".

If you were going to only include a link, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/could-of-or-could-ha... would have been a better choice, for example.

Sorry that English is my second language?

That comment trying to correct you is itself wrong.. It should be "may have" or "would have". It's a common grammar mistake that even native speakers make, I think because they learned the language "by ear".

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