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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> What guarantee is there that this will reduce ads in any way?

None, of course. It's possible to disable ads for users with Web Monetization, but it's also possible to be greedy and use both at the same time. But remember, we're not talking about big companies or anything of the sort, it's more for small scale personal blogs, or, as i pointed out, institutions like the Internet Archive or Wikipedia, so greed is IMHO unlikely and will probably be rare.

In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you.

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> Wikipedia

If I remember, Wikipedia is rather controversial, for having a ginormous war chest, but still having PBS-style begfests all the time.

I don't think they do any ads, now, except for their begging headers.

Wikipedia asks for money once a year. They have a ginormous war chest because they do unmatched incredibly good work for the whole world and don't waste too much of the money, despite all the nitpickers.

No, they have a ginormous war chest because their increasingly intrusive advertising campaigns convince people that the operational costs of wikipedia.org are unsustainable otherwise, and this has so far kept ahead of their also massively inflating expenditure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

90 million a year is an inflated expenditure for the most productice website to ever exist? Its an absolute pittance, that the turnover of a midsized bakery chain!

Would you care to backup this outrageous claim by demonstrating similarly popular website, awash with content, that spends less?

The running costs of the site are 2.5 million/year per their own financial reports:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

Staff expenses are harder to break down, as they don't break out who's working on e.g. wikipedia development and funding and who's working on, e.g. the social movement strategy, which is allocated approximately the same budget as running wikipedia.org: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...?

But from just the information they provided us, can you give a reason why Wikipedia in 2019 would need 33% more staff expenditure than 2018 for running the site? And similar increases in the years leading up to that?

Any number of reasons, maybe to moderate massively growing number of lanuages and articles, to improve their software or working on new projects, or maybe to give existing staff a raise to match market rates.

But thats a moot point. If there is no other organisation, more efficient than wikipedia, then you have no right to call them wastefull. It shows your idea of how efficient wimipedia should be is a fantasy with no grounding in reality and would, in the long term, lead to death of wikipedia.

> Wikipedia asks for money once a year

if once == "allYearLong" { clapYourHands() }

I don't think that I've opened a Wikipedia page in months, that didn't have a beg header.

But, to be fair, I do consider it a valuable resource; especially as a way to direct people with different language requirements to a common definition, and begfests are better than ads (as long as they don't get too intrusive, as some PBS stations get).

I just went to a random Wikipedia article and the main page, and neither of them displayed a 'beg' header.

You are correct. I had 2, this morning. Now I have none.

I don't think Wikipedia does good work. It's been the bane of my existence these last seven years. Since they're not paying anyone to write my biography, the only people who edit my wikipedia page are generally those who harrass me online. I wish the top search result for my name wasn't this creepy wikipedia article that cites tabloids and focuses on my childhood and gender and medical history.

> In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you.

If everyone used an adblocker it would definitely impact you. So while I agree with the vibe and block for convenience along with security, it's an uneasy feeling knowing that such benefits for me only exist because many others aren't taking advantage of content creators like this.

> If everyone used an adblocker it would definitely impact you.

Sure, but would the impact be positive or negative? While some people rightfully ask to be compensated for high quality content, money also encourages many more people to contribute to the glut of low value, derivative, and outright plagiarized content.

yup, anytime you lookup for something on youtube, the top results are full of lame, short and sponsorship-packed animated Wikipedia summaries often with mismatching theme music because they don't want to read a book, license footage or even proper music.

web is the same. tons of lazy blogs copy pasting without any effort in understanding or explaining from a different angle.

That has not been my observation, whether it was a review for a product or when I needed help with a plumbing issue.

Maybe it's more prevalent in historical subjects than DIY tutorials and such.

> would the impact be positive or negative?

That's a fair question and not sure I have the answer to it other than stating a personal preference. Much smarter people than me have been trying to solve this content conundrum for decades now and it doesn't seem like anyone has found something workable for all parties involved.

It's a bitter pill to swallow that maybe what exists now is the best system we have and it will be around for a long time going forward.

There might be parties involved who should not be. RIAA types come to mind.

In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should, the ads don't impact you

That is already the status quo. The entire premise of this article is that web monetization will reduce the actual ads. It changes nothing if I still have to use my ad blocker. I don't think and but avery small minority of content creators will actually reduce their ads, and these might in any case be the people who are already very conscious of and respectfully of their consumers' privacy.

Small scale personal blogs cost next to nothing (as in: reasonable web hosting packets for $2/year exist), why would they need ads?

Wikipedia on the other hand makes lots of money with one of the most obtrusive ads on the internet (giant banner that slowly rolls down stating some variant of "if everyone donates just $5 we can stop annoying you right now"). But despite getting more and more donations every year they don't make the ad less annoying or run it shorter. So I have zero confidence that giving them another revenue stream will help

Hosting doesn't cost much. Content production isn't free.

It is free for wikipedia.

Twitter is worth and spends billions but wikipedia should run on fumes? Are people here collectively insane?

People here hold multiple opinions because there are multiple people here, not because the single mind they share is insane.

The content production still isn't free; other people just bear the costs.

Yes, that's why I said it's free for wikipedia. The editors are not wikipedia, as much as the site would like us to feel. I left editing a decade ago, but spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia during university. It was not worth the time, and I regret not chasing skirts instead.

For a personal blog? Its free.

Only if the time required to research and write has no value.

That is why personal blogs do not create content on the scale and depth required to be sufficiently high-profile and monetizable. If your blog can't be found on the first page of Google for questions people are asking, it may as well not exist to anyone but yourself.

I am thinking of things like Slate Star Codex. Scott would have continued to write even if he hadn't been able to run ads, because he can't not write. That is the kind of thing I want to see more of, instead of people creating content to get famous.

Siskind is a guy who reportedly said, "Blog followers are useful to me because they expand important ideas and network with important people." Which sounds exactly like a person creating content to get famous.

Exactly. I write to be read. Putting up a personal blog post is, regrettably, one of the lowest-ROI ways to spend my time. And that's true even if I don't care about revenue, but just want to create value. A solid blog post will take me a couple days of research, writing, and polishing.

Wikipedia doesn't show you ads from Burg3rking. And am also sure they'll do just fine with/out your donation.

Calling that request for donations an annoying ad is extremist.

When personal blogs flourished in the early millennium, keeping the owner somehow compensated made it more likely that good blogs would keep going, because no one’s time to research, write, and then copyedit intellectual content is utterly free. That doesn’t necessarily require an abusive ecosystem of ads that track people personally, but e.g. an affiliate link whenever a book was cited brought in a few hundred euro a year and made maintaining the blog feel worthwhile for some authors.

Bingo. This is insanely important.

Even if someone is comfortable, $100 a month can make it worthwhile to them to spend time considering and writing.

Sometimes that money just proves someone's finding big value in your continued efforts.

> In any case, if you use an ad blocker, which you absolutely should...

Why should everyone block the lowest friction way to pay creators? Besides the security argument which speaks more to JS, IMO.

Because ads are obnoxious and privacy nightmares, and also security risks. You can just disable JS and third-party cookies, but that might break some websites ( and that number will only increase due to the proliferation of SPAs and fancy frontend frameworks).

IMHO setting up ads on your website is higher friction that web monetization is.

I've actually noticed a bit of a reversal in JS requiring trends over the last year or two.

Of course there are still plenty of lazy product landing pages and wordpress blogs that don't work without JS and any time I see a hamburger menu I know I'll be navigating the site 'manually'. But many of the bigger news and information sites that used to deliver a blank page at least now deliver some bastardized version of their text content (though usually not their images).

The friction of ads is huge, and you pay it when you see them (interupton, distraction, stress, page experience, malware risk), and when you buy things there's a cut that goes to the value-destroying ad/adtech industry.

Web monetization is lower friction.

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