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Comment by gorgonzolachz | Hacker News Reader

This is the right answer - HN is absolutely not representative of web users at large. If we were, I'm sure there would be much stricter anti-adblock/ad protection systems on large sites.

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Twitch and other services have already started down the road of embedding ads in the video stream rather than loading separately, etc. I use an ad blocker and am torn sometimes because I know my favorite content creator isn’t getting my view and I’m contributing to the coming wave of even more invasive ad tech.

I think paying to get rid of ads is fair. I pay for YT Premium solely for that reason, it comes out to about $5/month/person if you use the family subscription.

It’s expensive but I find it’s worth it to not have my partner and our parents watching ads.

I watched the Euro 2020 games, and even the 5-second soundbite of “the games are sponsored by so-and-so” rubs me the wrong way. Why should I be told the name of some company when I’m watching football? I digress.

5he problem with pay-to-skip ads is that, as we learned with Cable and Airlines, companies don't like to keep money on the table. You'll pay, and still get ads. In fact, the fact the that you can pay to remove ads makes you even more lucrative target for ads. There is no winning against the targeted advertisement industry.

I get the hate for increasingly invasive ads (screw the little car that carries the ball), but I chuckled at the last sentence: we've had sponsors on football jersey for 50 years :)

We also had tobacco for many many decades as normal accepted part of life. It took two generations of concentrated efforts, but we're better off without it.

Just because something has been common for long time doesn't make it quite right.

My point wasn’t that it was invasive, but that even 5-second namedrops annoy me. The prominently placed logos on clothing and all over stadiums, even in stadium names lately, also annoy me. However, then I can just focus on the game and ignore the ads. With the “sponsored by” and actual ads, you just can’t ignore it. It is force fed. I think that’s an important difference, and also why forcing me to say some brand name because they renamed the stadium to “COCA COLA ARENA” or something similarly obnoxious is so grating.

It would be interesting to let consumers have access to adtech tools. Instead of a subscription, I could set bidding limits on the ads that would have been shown to me.

I appreciate there are commercial reasons why this won’t happen, but it would be interesting. I’d also personally never trust any of the ad brokers to be honest with individuals without an army of lawyers.

Google tried something along these lines with Contributor ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor), which in it's first iteration would bid on your own ad impressions. It wasn't popular, partly because it didn't cover all ads (not every ad goes through a public auction) and partly because it fundamentally cost you money. They later tried another version, which only worked with specific partners but did exclude all ads; it wasn't popular either.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

All Google ads. Not all ads.

Are you talking about the second version? That one did exclude all ads on participating publishers, because to participate you had to set it up that way

But YT Premium only blocks YT ads, it doesn't block Sponsored Content put there by the content creator. Maybe that's okay, since by definition these ads aren't of the tracking variety?

So now you don't need AdBlock, but you still need SponsorBlock. You might be able to get a sponsorless version through their Patreon, but now YT Premium is pointless.

Unfortunately the people with disposable income to pay for premium services is exactly who marketers want to advertise to.

I too think blocking ads should be worth some money. After all everyone saves a lot of time.

I suggest a small machine with pi-hole :)

If folks were using the pay version instead of the Adblock route they might spend less effort on it tbf

Also this way your favourite content creator gets paid as if you saw the ads

https://www.twitch.tv/turbo

See that’s funny, because I’m on twitch everyday and I subscribe to half a dozen streamers and always get a little annoyed when I go to other streams where I don’t subscribe and have to sit through the pre-roll ad.

I had no idea twitch turbo existed.

It's kinda weird they never really mention it. Not great for selling ads if all the people with disposable income don't see any ads I guess

Down the line it could go the way of the cable - you will see ads even if you pay.

Premium users are a perfect segment. They already shown they are willing to spend money.

Yes, I suspect the people who can afford to pay for these services are exactly the people the advertisers are targeting. Without them the free part of the model would fall apart.

Down the line unsubscribe from Turbo and go back to using Adblock then I guess

I just recently heard about ads on Twitch. Pretty sure my pi-hole is blocking it.

HN is in the vanguard, though. The crowd here is not representative of the state of the global online population at any given time, but one could say that global online sentiment tends to trail the HN sentiment by a number of years. But it's not just HN. Not by any means.

The audience for our website (gambling) tends to be both technologically sophisticated and very conscious of their privacy. Their behaviour has also been quite reliably an early indicator of a wider change. As it stands, more than 80% of page requests block analytics, trackers and other external crapware.

The players in other industries have to prepare for the coming wave, because it will hit them soon. About time, too.

I think for your site that's true but not for HN. Your users are advanced but regular users. HN, on the other hand, are not regular users but professionals.

Car enthusiasts vs mechanics in a way.

If HN was universally the vanguard, a lot more normal people would be using VS code right now.

And most of them would have transitioned from Vim or Emacs.

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