Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not in the app market, but I run a few user-content-oriented websites which get millions of monthly hits. They're funded only by community donations. I decided to never add any ads to any of them.

I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. (In my case, my websites are aimed at adults and there are no concerns about children seeing inappropriate content.) It's not about the morality or even the tracking for me. I personally don't even mind tracking all that much (though I know I'm in a tiny minority on HN).

I just, simply, really fucking hate looking at ads. They're annoying and distracting and ugly and will make any decent-looking website look tacky and dumb. And I thought, if I would never want to browse my own website and see ads, why should I subject other users to them? Sure, I use an ad blocker, and most of my users probably do, too, but I'm sure there are many who don't. And there're also the practical concerns about ads affecting page load performance and bandwidth consumption, but that's a more minor consideration.

I also try to avoid commercials and video pre-roll ads (even those HBO ones advertising other HBO shows), and I skip past all ad/sponsor parts of podcasts and YouTube videos. I can only think of a single time in my life that an ad led to a purchase, and that was from a YouTuber I liked doing an absurd segment that unexpectedly turned the entire 10 minute video into an over-the-top ad for the sponsor, and it was funny and well-written and well-executed and was something I was already planning to get and seemed to be a good deal and a good product, so I actually did buy it a week or so later. That's one exception out of hundreds of thousands or millions, though.

I admit I do feel what might be a kind of revulsion at the thought of huge companies like Google and Facebook making advertising their primary revenue source, or the thought of some of our world's top minds being paid amazing salaries to figure out how to get more people to look at and click ads. But I think it just comes down to me not wanting to see or hear them. They waste my time and/or much of my visual field, and are an eye/ear-sore, and I'd like to do unto others as I would want them to do unto me.

> I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking.

This seems to me like one of those spots where one's approach to ethics can play a big part in the conclusions you draw.

From a sort of Kant-style, deontological perspective, where you have to be able to say with confidence that something is morally wrong in order to make much of a judgment at all about it, yeah, it seems hard to mount a strong case against ads.

From a more Bentham-style utilitarian approach, it's easier: Are ads and tracking a net benefit or detriment to people in general? AFAICT, the only people who try to mount a case that the answer is yes are people whose livelihoods depend on everyone being OK with ads.

Then there's the "do unto others" approach you get from virtue ethics. The GP's take of, "I'm not going to monetize with ads because ads annoy me" reminds me of that.

It's interesting, because, if you could paint those three approaches to ethics with a broad brush, the latter two would be, "Let's try and make things as nice for everyone as possible," while the first would be more like, "As long as it's not actually evil, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

> the only people who try to mount a case that the answer is yes are people whose livelihoods depend on everyone being OK with ads.

Playing devil's advocate... Advertising helps the world in the case where a person has a need and they see an ad that informs them of a way they hadn't considered to address that need, and that solution proves to be better than available alternatives.

... I'm sure that happens ever. I am skeptical that it's enough to net positive.

Another argument would be that advertising allowed the internet to develop as it is, to the scale it is. It's impossible to separate the accessibility, progress, UX, and information available from the core business model that enabled so much of it.

If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords? Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage? Think what you will, but Google has developed a ton of impressive technology and open sourced quite a bit of it; they have been much more open stewards than I would expect if AOL and IBM and Microsoft built out the internet.

(They have also given everyone a ton of value without asking for money from users -- it's important to not underestimate how far we've come on the backs of the ad dollar).

It might be a faustian bargain, or it might not be.

IBM and Microsoft both contribute more to open source than Google. In fact, the explosion of the internet occured during their primes moreso than Google.

What Google really pushed forward was SaaS and the free price tag was a trick to make it seem as good as open source.

But when it comes down to it, Gmail is worse than Windows 7 when it comes to user power. At least you can use windows 7 without a constant connection to Microsoft.

These are valid counter-arguments; my intention wasn't to litigate the merits of each claim, just to mention that as the parent had trouble conceiving of other options than 1.

I will say, however, that your claims would be challenging to verify or refute -- quantity of contributions may not be a good metric, and it appears your Gmail/Win7 comparison is based on a single dimension (user power) which is further limited to one dimension of that dimension (whether it requires a constant connection).

You may be correct, but your comment didn't provide much of an argument to get me to think more of the problem. It just seemed like you needed to negate my (also unsubstantiated but admittedly devil's advocate position) out of some sense of anti-google sentiment.

I think you really had a good piece of feedback going until you made it personal in the last paragraph. It does not endear you to the reader and from an intellectual perspective I don't understand why you'd finish an otherwise well-structured response like that. If it was out of anger, I would expect it in the front. Can you explain what made you write it like this?

Microsoft is in the open source game to domimate it. They want to be in a position where you can't realistically run an open source project without their involvement. Their recent moves around github all point in that direction.

IBM has more of a consultancy perspective: they want rheur business customers to pay for services provided on top of existing solutions. And open source platforms make it easier to sell custom extensions.

> Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage?

Are you sure ads are related?

If you calculate the cost of 10MB of hard drive space in the good old days of Yahoo mail, adjust for inflation, calculate how much hard drives you can buy now for that money, you’ll get at least 100GB. I don’t think average gmail mailbox approaches that size.

> If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords?

Not sure how that's related to ads. I've been online since 1996, and AOL wasn't available in my country, although did get those AOL trial diskettes with my copy of C&C: Red Alert.

Xcite, Yahoo, Altavista, Askjeeves and others simply had a search box and an alphabetical directory of sites. I didn't hear about Google until 1999 when I came across a Time Magazine article about it, and there were ads on the internet well before then.

I wish I saw more ads for local entertainment options. Preferably diverse. I don't need 100 ads all telling me to do the same thing at different venues. But an ad informing me that hey, this weekend there will be a model train convention or if you'd rather there is a big chess boxing game you could go see. That'd be cool.

You may very well be aware, but local newspapers (online as well as off) often have a section for events.

The problem I have with the anti-advertising crowd is that none of them take their philosophy to the required ethical conclusion: Stop using free ad-supported resources. Google and Facebook are easy examples of this. The position would be far more ethically aligned if they unplugged from all ad-supported products and services.

The alternative ethical conclusion is to pay for the services. I would if I could, but a lot of these guys don't offer this because they want a nice broad stroke of people in their data pie.

And that's just where these services are being up front. There's a lot of sneaky underhand tracking that goes on without even being aware of it.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha

Just because someone, either by choice or necessity (have you tried to stop using all ad-supported resources? You've practically gotta be a hermit) participates in something they find morally wrong, doesn't cease to make it morally wrong.

The morality, or lack thereof is your perspective and yours only, it is not an absolute fact.

What is a fact is that some are perfectly content having others pay for services they use while, at the sane time, trying to weave a fake moral framework with which to justify their actions.

Nobody is forcing anyone to use these sites, and you don’t have to.

"Pay for the ad-free version" is pretty common.

I don't see that option in these services.

https://contributor.google.com

That means signing up for a Google account, which means you're being tracked.

Brilliant. And, of course, nobody using ad blockers will sign up. They want others to pay while they use the web for free.

Then don’t use the service. Nobody is forcing you. You want to use a service for free and have other people pay fir it.

You can also start paid versions of these services and show them how it’s done. People who don’t want ads are sure to flock to your services.

Advertising is a pollution on social space. A deliberately attention-grabbing advertisement represents a very real theft from people, and a public space covered in it, even more so. Advertising is designed to exploit inherent human weaknesses and biases, to manipulate behaviour. It's abusive. Seen from this position, Google is an abuser.

The required ethical conclusion is not "inconvenience yourself so you can be more respectable", it's far more extreme than that. What about saving other people from it, or activism to ban it completely, like we restrict noise pollution and physical manipulation of strangers?

Using ad-supported services and an ad-blocker might be unethical theft, but the anti-advertising position is against-adverts not how to treat Google fairly; it's not about being "ethically aligned".

I'm not exactly presented with that option.

If, when clicking on a hyperlink, I were presented with a landing page where I'd be presented a diagram of what the page would look like, in order to inform me that 70% of the initial data mass of the page would be chumbox, and that there'd be a video that expands out of the middle of the article and starts playing automatically as I scroll past, etc etc, then I'd happily rely on that instead of an adblocker. But that's not what happens - instead, I click the link, and the page immediately starts eating up my data budget (which costs me money, yo) and attempting to track me. My best defense here is to use some sort of adblocker.

At which point, the equilibrium point seems to be, some sites I don't even necessarily know they're trying to serve ads to me. Other sites give me a little popup saying, "Disable adblock or GTFO," so I politely GTFO.

It's less possible to do anything on that front with outdoor advertising; annoying as a lot of it is, I can't very well stop consuming the world itself.

TV, radio, stuff like that, that's at least getting easy nowadays.

That's not how I think about it, though. It's not about the principles of a website using ads or issues with advertising companies. I just personally don't want to see them. If I'm using a Google service, I generally see no or almost no ads because I use uBlock Origin, so I'm not bothered at all. And I actually do subscribe to YouTube Premium because there's no decent way to block ads in the mobile apps, as far as I know.

I do like Google's services, and I do understand they couldn't exist without ads, so I know there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. But for me, if I can block the ads, then I'm not going to complain. The only time I boycott a site is if they lock you out of the site if they detect you're using an ad blocker. (I'm okay with small messages politely suggesting you turn it off if they don't otherwise restrict access to the site. I always ignore them, though.)

It isn’t cognitive dissonance. You are using something others are paying for and don’t wat to be bothered. If you don’t like the add, don’t use the service.

Originally, in the days of doubleclick, before Google cornered the internet ad marktet, I absolutely hated online ads. They were annoying, distracting and intrusive.

Then Google conquered the market with very low-key unobtrusive ads, and I was fine with them. I had no problem with tracking, because it lead to more relevant and less annoying ads.

But in the past couple of years, tracking and ads are touching on absolutely everything I do online. Google for an accountant, and for the next month all videos on Youtube have ads for accountants. Read an article on something, and suddenly all ads are about that.

And with these ad companies also controlling our social media and our online search results, suddenly my entire view of the internet, and therefore my view of the world, becomes controlled by people who want to show me ads to sell me stuff.

It's too controlling and too intrusive, and I have no control over it. Maybe if they make it more transparent and gave me more control over what they show me, I'd be fine with it, but at the moment it's too much.

Only seeing informative ads about things I'm interested in is good. Having my entire experience controlled by people who want to monetize my information is not.

I run a user-content website, and hate advertising too. But, the website costs $15,000 a year in expenses to run, and community donations bring in $3,000. Advertising generates $50,000.

I stay with safe ad categories (no drugs, alcohol, gambling, adult content, etc), and use standard display sizes. No audio ads, background ads, popups, etc. I'm sure the site could generate twice the revenue with background advertisements.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a slightly different perspective. Although I hate advertising as much as you, my site doesn't work with community donations. So, I use advertising to keep it alive, and try to draw a line somewhere I think is appropriate.

Never ran something like this, but always wondered: why not have a visible counter saying "this is what it costs to run, please donate!" and let people donate to keep it up? Some kinda big progress bar somewhere or whatever.

How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?

Or with that, a visible running revenue counter with a probability that ads will show. If the site generates $3k/year and costs $15k/year 20% of the page loads would be ad free.

I don't blame GP for wanting to make some money - they're certainly putting in some otherwise unpaid hours. But a "Target 0" system could work well for some communities.

I ran a content forum and blog that needed $6k at cost back in pre vps days and raised it several years in a row off community donations.

I refused to show ads because they were all ticket brokers / scalpers.

It is actually kind of a pain and takes work to raise money this way. For me, I had to do a personal appeal, email drips, and I even added membership status indicators to usernames and gave access to “exclusive” content.

It did work though with the thermometer thingy and some pluck.

Yeah I suspect it could work with some savvy and pluck. I have some ideas that will probably lead me to face off with this issue myself, I'm kinda looking forward to it.

If wikipedia is any indication, it doesn't work without plastering the top half of the screen begging for a donation.

Have you ever worked at a nonprofit? I have, my whole career, lots of them. Don't say this. Nonprofits use strategy after strategy, tested and untested and rational and intuitive, to increase donations in every way they can. They know what they're doing. Do they get it 100% right? No. Do they do it all day, every day, and know a ton about it? Yes.

I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me "why do you guys send out those letters? Everyone just throws them out." Do you know why? Because we see how much they cost, and how much they make, and it's worth it.

This guy is actually running a community site that's paying for itself. Do not question him, especially by proposing one tiny little strategy among the thousands that might work.

Yes, I have, but didn't deal with this issue.

I don't think this advice of "if you haven't done it you can't criticize or ask questions about it" is very good. It would bar me from commenting on and criticizing Michael Bay movies, so no thank you.

I'd also like to know if the guy shuts off the ads when he makes more than is needed for maintenance costs.

No, I don't shut off the advertising.

1. That's my bill for hosting and bandwidth expenses. I obviously need to consider the cost of my time which is not included in that figure. The more money the site generates, the more time I invest in it. So, if it were to generate $150,000 from advertising, I wouldn't shut it off, but I'd start pulling my time out of other projects, and moving it into this community site to add more of the requested features.

2. I want to save for a rainy day. Online communities don't last forever. It would be short sighted to shut off advertising simply because this years expenses are met, and then two years from now I need to close up the site because advertising is falling short. When the site hits a rough patch, I want the savings to either push it through or pivot. Coasting on maintenance costs would be a dangerous road with an abrupt end.

How much do you need to save for a rainy day?

I've heard that line from people raking in several hundred thousand a year, while they still callously heap ads on their audiences.

If you have no target, neither for your site nor for your personal ambition, it seems like the veneer of "I tried to avoid them but couldn't" is really quite thin.

Do you serve the ads yourself or do you defer to third party ad networks? I have no problem with the former, but with the latter I think it's very hard to control what gets displayed, and you're also opening your users up to various attack vectors.

There has got to be a niche available for somebody to do plain old non-evil advertising???

EDIT $15,000 a year sounds like a tremendous amount of money to run a web site in 2019 ...

He said user content so that might be users uploading images, audio, or video with the associated storage and bandwidth costs not to mention workers for generating thumbnails.

I'm the grand-parent poster and not the parent, but yeah, my user-content sites don't cost anywhere near that much. Storage is probably the biggest cost, and that still doesn't cost much. I'm not really sure how a site like that could cost that much unless you're getting absurd amounts of traffic, or are using some poorly optimized software; though I also don't know the nature of the site or the content.

If my costs were anywhere close to that I think I'd have no choice but to suck it up and place some ads as well. As it is, community donations cover our costs just fine, but pretty much 100% of that revenue - which is all of our revenue - goes to infrastructure cost. We don't make any profit, but that was never the intention when creating the sites.

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