Hacker News Reader

Comment by olegious | Hacker News Reader

If we kill advertisement, you can say goodbye to the vast majority of content on the internet. The better approach is to make advertising a better experience and to create incentives for advertisers to spend ad dollars on quality content.

View on HN

There will always be bottom-feeders as long as there is a market where people are not forced to choose with their wallets. Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly.

> Killing the "vast majority of content on the internet" seems like a good thing to me, honestly.

I sure hope my content of preference beats out yours for not getting killed.

I am reasonably sure that even if our preferences are complete opposite and we eliminate 99% of content in general, you would still have enough quality content for what your interests are. But just to be extra sure, please vote with your wallet and actively support the things you like and don't let advertisers do the choosing for you.

Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers. I really hope this point of view gets killed together with advertisement.

> Advertisement just should not be the central means of income of content producers.

Can you propose any viable alternative?

whatever wikimedia organisation does :)

Subscription. It is only viable for content that well off people use a lot of though, even then only when you are much better than the free competition.

Ads are placed via an automatic auction upon pageview. GM and Ford both want to show me an ad when I google "what car to buy", and have automatic systems that decide how much they'd be willing to pay to show me that ad based on my likelihood of purchase (income, sex, location, etc). Why not have a system that follows me around and outbids them using funds from my bank account, to show me an ad which is just a transparent image? That way I don't have to see ads but content creators still get what they need?

What you are describing is exactly what Google Contributor is trying to do. We'll have to see how it turns out.

https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

It says it only works with "participating sites". I wonder why

The first version worked exactly as you proposed. The UX however was meh. You'd place a monthly limit on your ad (outbidding) spend (eg. $2) and it ended up outbidding only some of the ads: those served by Google which were also outbid by your amount.

So from a user's perspective it didn't fully work. Also the ad space wasn't fully removed (perhaps due to technical reasons) but was replaced with a blank image. It also didn't catch on much.

So they tried to pivot and now the program works with certain cooperating websites to fully get rid of all ads but I'm sure bigger websites would rather be in total control of monetizing themselves and can spend on the necessary IT infra. similar to most online newspapers these days.

I think an advertiser (eg. a legal firm) might be willing to pay eg. $10 per ad impression but no user is willing to outbid it so I think the first model (outbid in the auction) is more sustainable and profitable for both parties but needs to have all ad exchanges on board.

So in short, it's been tried but wasn't an instant (or even a slow) success and idk whether Google will continue investing in it or not.

Are you actually proposing for people to gasp! pay gasp! for content?

Google makes around 30 billion/quarter on ads. Assuming most of that comes from 200 million users (they have more than that but I assume a lot are not worth very much to advertisers), and their ad revenue comes from a 50% cut of the total ad payments, that comes out to around $300/quarter or $75 a month. I'd pay it, but I think most wouldn't.

Certain % of your internet bill goes to helping pay to host the sites you are visiting every billing period. If a site is large enough hosting would be sustained by the visiting userbase rather than the site owner. If a site is too small for that, chances are hosting has been cheap anyway.

1) Not to most of the best content, 2) other business models may have an actual chance when not competing with "free", 3) actually-free, community-driven sites and services (and standards and protocols—those used to be nice) will have a larger audience and larger creator interest when not competing with "free" (and well-bankrolled).

The vast majority of content is absolute shit though, so speaking strictly for me, I'm willing to try

The question was about search engines, not about content.

But I think the combination of advertising+search engines is particularly bad, so paying for search would be a great first step.

maybe it's worth saying goodbye to "8 reasons why current internet sucks that drive spammy copywriters mad". The whole more-clicks-more-revenue based approach did not do good things to the online content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com