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It doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to decline a money-making opportunity. Can you think of any businesses near you that have blank outdoor wall space, even though they could make good money putting a billboard on it?

In the State of Hawaii the Outdoor Circle successfully made billboards illegal. Businesses can still have signs on their storefronts but that's about it. Many mural artists have filled the void and you can see some in the news story below:

https://www.civilbeat.org/2017/08/lets-preserve-and-perpetua...

That's one way to deal with it, and in my analogy that would be equivalent to Substack banning ads within newsletters. But my point is that even where billboards are legal, most property owners choose not to install one. Why? It's because people are not money robots, and factor many other things into their decisions such as ethics, morals, personal preferences, cultural norms, etc. So, "ads make economic sense and are therefore inevitable" is a bad argument.

I misunderstood your post, my apologies. I just wanted to present Hawaii's lack of billboards as an aside. It's quite nice.

Physical ad spaces are not comparable to digital. A billboard can only show one ad at a time with no real targeting. A digital ad can use your browsing history to guess your preferences and show different ads to different users.

Digital ads are also right there in front of you, and you can go from ad impression --> sale right there on the screen. If your billboard is on the side of your building, located in some remote office park, well, the reach isn't as good.

Sounds like you just compared them.

Also sounds like the differences are in degree, not in kind.

Interestingly, you make this comment on a platform entirely devoid of advertisement, because it itself is one massive advertisement for the YC accelerator program.

So it's very true, you cannot escape the advertisements.

Aren't those weird submissions with no comments that show up on here ads? Actually, the last one I saw was for "Substack is hiring talented engineers to redefine the way people read and write things on the internet"

Yes, they allow job ads for YCombinator companies.

True, but I don't think those companies pay for those posts. It's all part of the "YC Accelerator Advertising" write-off that funds this site.

Lol those companies literally gave up a part of themselves for (among others) those ads. Not saying it's not a good deal, but it's not a free lunch either.

I'm sorry if I insinuated otherwise, I totally agree.

Nothing weird about those, they’ve always been on HN. They’re also the one of the least obtrusive ads around. In return we get a moderated, fast website for free.

> "Let me pay to not see ads". But it doesn't work that way. The value of ads is quantified in aggregate, not on a per-customer basis.

The bigger issue is the people that would pay to remove ads have more expensive habits and are worth much more in ads than the average user (though maybe that is somewhat counteracted by being more savvy against scams delivered through ads).

I'm happily paying for youtube premium because it allows me to watch youtube on my iPad without ads, and to download the videos to watch offline. Totally worth it.

I don't know how many youtube users are paying for it, but youtube premium is still a thing, and I hope it continues to be. Seems like they're making it work somehow.

They had 30M paying users at end of Q3 (up from 20M 9 months earlier). That includes both Premium and Music subscribers, but given the pricing structure it is hard to imagine who would pay for just Music. In terms of all users, 1.5 years ago they said 2B monthly active users.

On one hand, that sounds miserable. Only 1% of the users are paying! On the other hand, a Premium subscriber is an order of magnitude more profitable. The ads run rate seems to be about $20B/year, and subscriptions behind at just a factor of 5 at about $4B/year.

(The $20B is a hard number from the Q3 earnings, $4B is back of the envelope. It's hard to say just how e.g. regional pricing if affecting it, or how the family plans are counted.)

I pay for this too and justify it as actually an education/learning SaaS subscription. Youtube has become the way I learn everything. I don't want ads interrupting that learning experience.

uBlock origin works great against YouTube ads. Unfortunately it is broken on Safari atm.

There is something very wrong with the idea that you can afford an Apple computer but refuse to pay for content, instead employing techniques to avoid remuneration going to the service and content provider.

There are plenty more reasons to not pay for YT Premium beyond the monetary aspect. Not trusting Google is a big one (and in fact why I personally don't pay for it despite happily paying for Spotify and donating to the YT creators I watch directly).

There is something very wrong with the web which has become a cesspool of trackers and surveillance capitalism and every waking moment is pregnant with monetization options from the powerful players in the attention economy.

I mostly prefer to watch DVDs and employ an ad blocker so that every day existence doesn't require my brain to edit ads out of reality because it's been trained by 25 years of abuse from the internet that this is necessary to just be able pretend like I exist independent of my eyeballs' worth to some goddamn shysters halfway across the world. You know, like most of 400,000 years of human existence.

Come to think of it, maybe I'll sign off now.

Note that those techniques are in the spirit of the initial vision of the internet being open and free, and you, the user, controlling what you see on the web through your 'user agent' and not the other way around.

Also remember those ads are not free, they come at great cost of bandwidth and compute, resulting in net co2 emission. If I as a user want to object to that, using an ad blocker is morally completely valid.

Invidious is a good solution and solves a lot of the other issues with YouTube's UX (the ads can actually be dealt with AdGuard for Safari): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

> But it doesn't work that way.

Since there are services that have ad-free tiers I think it can work that way.

Hulu*, for example has an ad-free tier and they don't change the price quarterly.

* Yes, I know there are something like 3 shows that still have ads, but it doesn't change my argument.

Technically you could also say "you will never escape crime" because crime always pays more than doing things legitimately (why earn your money when you can just steal it?), and yet as a society we've managed to marginalize crime and reduce instances of it to single-digit percentages in most developed countries.

Why should it be any different for ads? Advertising is a cancer on society, by itself its purpose is to waste some person's time by showing them something they haven't asked for, sometimes in hope to drive a purchase. We've basically normalized intentionally wasting people's time (in aggregate this time can be expressed in human lifetimes) for the benefit of a select few (the advertisers). Advertising also has secondary negative effects where it perverts the incentives between service providers and their users (social networks' objective is to make you look at ads, not facilitate communication with your friends/family), sometimes up to the point where said service providers promote harmful content to drive ad views ("engagement" as they call it) where said content then leads to mental health issues, broken relationships and crime (like the radicalization of the right-leaning Trump supporters that ended up storming the Capitol).

I thought street crime was a pretty terrible business for most? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UGC2nLnaes

Also, bank robbery isn't usually very lucrative, and they've made it harder and less lucrative over time. "According to the FBI a bank robbery averaged a take of $4,000 in 2009, which may not have been sufficient to yield the thieves a positive return on their enterprise. You see, at today's prices, the robbers would need to expend $4,442 for the guns, bullets, and masks used in a typical bank robbery." http://bastiat.mises.org/2014/09/the-basic-economics-of-bank...

Some crime has been made pretty unprofitable.

Street crime & bank robbery became a terrible business model because as a society we agree that this kind of crime needs to be stopped/deterred and implemented mitigations (such as making it harder to resell stolen goods, requiring extra documentation for large cash-based transactions, etc).

There's no reason the same couldn't apply to advertising. We could implement (and actually enforce - so unlike the GDPR for example) privacy regulations that would make ad tracking more transparent and give consumers a choice, or repealing Section 230 protections for platforms that take on an publisher role by prioritizing certain content to generate "engagement". These would make advertising less lucrative and let other business models take over.

It's a shame that this isn't more widespread view. I can also add that ads together with granular targeting are being used into manipulating people into buying things they wouldn't normally want or need, and that's sort of more sophisticated and legal scam.

There's no ads on patreon and it's more or less the same service as substack