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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :)

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