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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

Advertising makes things shitter. The Louvre could probably replace the frame of the Mona Lisa with some rotating ads, but it would detract from the content. It cheapens it. PPK has spent years building his reputation through Quirksmode - heck, he's one of my most respected sources because I know he has a great sense of pride in his work.

HN people rely for a lot of their income through ads I know, but it doesn't change the feeling (I changed that work from "fact"!) that it detracts from the content. Thanks for your awesome work PPK, I'm donating now!

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"Advertising makes things shitter."

In your opinion, which is a minority viewpoint.

This is an opinion too. What's your source?

The majority of people find advertising useful. They buy stuff based on advertising. If they didn't advertisers wouldn't spend advertising money.

Advertising works, providing a service both to the advertiser and the consumer.

I know that's an incredibly unpopular viewpoint within this bubble, but there you go.

If it was the case that most people found advertising 'shit', then you'd see more and more people installing adblock etc. But that hasn't happened. It's still used by a very small minority of users as it has always been. It's sort of like the Opera web browser in that respect.

The conversion rate on advertising is incredibly low: often less than 1%. The remaining 99% see the ads and either ignore them (best case) or get annoyed by them (worst case). Either way, it's content on the page that those 99% don't want to see, and it dilutes the value of the page as a whole.

Most people can tune out adverts they're not interested in extremely well.

When you buy a photography magazine, it might have 20% of the pages covered by advertising. I'd say most people buying the magazine find them useful. Maybe only 1% convert to a sale, but I'd say the majority of people find the adverts useful.

Also, it's not a black and white thing between "content" and "advertising". For example, quite often adverts in digital camera magazines are handy for me because they show me new products or lenses I didn't know about - Those adverts are 'content'.

I'm not going to convince anyone who hates advertising to open their mind a little though, so I'll retire happily to my ad-supported magazines, and ad-supported websites.

Its a necessary evil if you want free content. Btw, click rates are much lower, about 0.05% for a content site.

People also come across thousands of ads that they ignore every day in billboards, shopping windows etc. That's not a legitimate reason to rule out advertising as a revenue option. (On the other hand, claiming that the majority of people find them useful is a bit of a stretch)

I've run AdSense on hundreds of websites and I get click rates between 0.5% and 10%.

Not 0.05% that's insanely low.

Mind you, a lot of those sites (the high end, anyway) are optimized strongly for clicks. The ads show up in the middle of content (as an "interlude") or prominently above the fold.

So why does Adblock exist?

I used to have this awesome FF addon called Add-Art that overlayed curated visual art in the shapes and sizes of the ads Adblock removed. It was pretty cool. Occasionally it messed up the site's layout but I thought it was worth it. Sadly they didn't update it to FF4 (or now 5). http://add-art.org/

For fun, i made a chrome extension to replace ads with foreign language flashcards, so that i would be learning a language instead of reading ads. Can't say i succeeded ...

Why does Opera exist? :/

Sorry, but I think your opinion is the minority.

Definitely the minority here on HN, on Reddit, and other similar websites, but exit the bubble, and there's a whole world of other people! Some of them even own TVs and buy newspapers :o

Would you be willing to pay an annual subscription for his online "museum" then? Donations are fine, but, to me it is a method that also cheapens the said content. It's a way to say "i believe in my content, but not enough to set a price for it, and asking for donations makes me look like a nice guy (and are untaxable)". </rant>

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