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Comment by speckledjim | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

Why does Opera 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 ...

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