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Comment by ratsmack | Hacker News Reader

There is only so much people will put up with, and it seems that we're inundated with advertising from all sides. When most ads were in print, it was easy to avoid them, but now they are forced into every electronic media stream available.

On the web, I have never used an ad blocker and have just closed the page if the advertising gets to be too much in my face. It seems that it is getting worse all the time, because it is a war between the advertisers and ad blockers and people like me are stuck in the middle.

And then YouTube is showing longer ads every day, with many in the 5 minute range. And when you're trying to watch a video that is only 3 minutes long, why would you watch a 5 minute advertisement?... it doesn't make any sense.

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>On the web, I have never used an ad blocker

Why? My recommendation to every single person is to install an adblocker right now and never ever turn it off again. It's such an easy thing to do which immediately significantly improves your quality of life.

Personally? I'm willing to watch or see an advert for a newspaper, YouTuber (especially this!) or small blogger. Usually I use my adblocker's counter as a measure of how awful a page is and if it's reasonable I'll turn it off.

Malware is frequently delivered by advertising, so there's good reason to keep your ad blocker on even on sites that you want to support.

Tracking is yet another thing you can avoid to some degree by using an ad blocker (and, better yet, by disabling javascript).

Finally, the best reason to use an ad blocker is to opt-out of the advertising ecosystem to make it less viable. We have to find a more ethical way to fund media than supporting this manipulative, privacy-invading industry.

> Why? My recommendation to every single person is to install an adblocker right now and never ever turn it off again. It's such an easy thing to do which immediately significantly improves your quality of life.

The same reason that if I go into a cafe to sit down for a while, I'll buy a drink even if I'm not particularly thirsty. The cost of having a table in a downtown location for you to sit at is far higher than the cost of the beans and water; a drink for a place to sit is part of the "implicit deal".

Websites cost money to run, so I think it's only fair to accept a reasonable amount of advertising. But I don't think being silently tracked for just happening upon your website is fair, so I block trackers. If your advertising works without trackers, I'll see it just fine.

You paying for a service, and you letting them attempt to manipulate you into making a purchase decision for something else are severly different things. If the only value of something is that it was capable of making you look in its direction for long enough to show you something you might actually be interested in spending money on, it actually has no value, I argue.

In my experience the best information is always in websites with no ads. Like personal blogs, old pages, you name it. Seeing ads in a newspaper website? Why would I want to watch ads in exchange for being fed manipulating, half-true information?

> In my experience the best information is always in websites with no ads. Like personal blogs, old pages, you name it. Seeing ads in a newspaper website? Why would I want to watch ads in exchange for being fed manipulating, half-true information?

To extend the metaphor: Malls often have common areas where you can sit and just hang out. They also often have cafes with tables. The common areas are often nicer than the cafes -- less loud and less cramped. If you like common areas better than cafes, by all means, sit in the common areas. But if you do sit in a cafe for some reason, you should buy something, even if it's just a bottle of water.

By a similar reasoning -- if you prefer websites with no ads, then by all means only go to websites with no ads. But if you do go to a website supported by ads, I think it's part of the implicit bargain that you be willing to view ads that are presented in a reasonable manner (where "tracking you across the internet" is not reasonable).

I don't like the concept of tipping -- I think people's salaries and/or bonuses should be determined by their managers, not random people who wander in. But if I go to a restaurant where tipping is expected, I tip, because that's the implicit agreement I made when I sat down.

I did not make any implicit agreements by clicking on a link to see what is behind it.

"Malls often have common areas where you can sit and just hang out."

I've always found it super depressing that in so many towns and cities virtually the only places where people can just hang out are commercial in nature.

It would be so much nicer if the towns and cities invested more in to providing such places themselves (beyond merely having a park here and there), where you didn't have to be a walking dollar sign to someone in order to participate.

"Websites cost money to run, so I think it's only fair to accept a reasonable amount of advertising."

Do you also make a point of buying some percentage of the products advertised to you? After all, isn't it ethical to support the advertisers that are supporting the websites that you read? It costs money to run those ads, after all, and without the ads the websites wouldn't run, according to your reasoning. Or would you rather externalize the cost of supporting those advertisers to others while you get a free ride?

Attribution is the problem. Lots of ad spend is a waste of money and, despite the advent of various tracking technologies, advertisers still don't seem to know which ads are actually bringing in the sales.

This, of course, isn't a problem for the third-parties providing all this tracking because they get their slice regardless.

This is the gist of the issue. Ad companies sell advertisers tracking and reporting, not real return of investment. I bet an ad agency could beat google by throwing up vast dashboards with tons of nonsense graphs.

The easiest and arguably best way to do that is coupon or promo codes per advertiser but that involves taking a haircut to the profit per item on top of the nominal ad expenses.

...and a fee for the 99% of sales you already had in the bag before your customer launched his search for a coupon code.

For Youtube it makes sense to pay. I did the jump and it was worth it - no ads, play music with locked screen on the phone.

Firefox on Android + "Video Background Play Fix" addon already bypass the locked screen/app not in focus "feature".

Or NewPipe (https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/), but it does require you to have FDroid (which is not a bad thing in itself, just adds a bit more friction)

It almost looks like Youtube intentionally raised the number and length of ads before and after videos while heavily pushing Youtube premium alerts to make people sign up for their subscription. No matter what you do, they win.

> "No matter what you do, they win."

What if what you do is use youtube-dl?

They can just suspend your account. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759

They theoretically could, but there is no real reason to think it actually happened to that guy. His story is full of holes, and furthermore tons of people use youtube-dl daily while only this single guy claims to have been banned.

I don't mind if they win as long as I do as well.

Relationship between consumers and business don't have to be adversarial : I'm glad to pay for a product that I consider worth it, and having the choice to pay with money instead of brain time with ads is a clear positive to me.

For me a much better solution would be to get content out of the hands of profit-seeking companies.

Unlikely. YouTube premium seems like an afterthought at best. Just a few months ago they finally rolled out the program in a bunch of rich EU countries. If it was important for them then I really don't see why it would take them years to offer the subscription service for rich countries.

> If it was important for them then I really don't see why it would take them years to offer the subscription service for rich countries.

When you pay for something, you expect service and support. Google is not known for support, especially if providing support requires staffing of actual breathing humans, so the rollout was delayed until at least a minimum of support standard could be met.

I signed up for youtube premium as soon as it as available here. Same with a lot of other sites.

Definitively worth the money and I won't have to have a bad consciousness for running ublock.

Even the print ads seem to have gotten way more intrusive over the past few years. Amazon puts ads on their shipping boxes. I got a fortune cookie in a restaurant the other day with an ad printed on the back of the fortune!

>And then YouTube is showing longer ads every day, with many in the 5 minute range.

Uhhh, can't you can press 'skip' after 5 seconds? I've never seen an unskippable YouTube ad longer than 30 seconds.

Although yes, they are upping amount of ads: a couple months ago they started doing two back to back pre-roll ads every once in a while.

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