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Comment by dangoor | Hacker News Reader

There are some for whom the paid tier is "get rid of ads". YouTube, Spotify.

In YT videos will still have "sponsored content" regardless. If they can't make YT display their ads, they will buy off the content creators. Ad industry is just so infectious.

SponsorBlock

It's also known that the extensions are also bought and start displaying ads, or worse, double charge the ad industry to let them escape their block (like once upon a time ABP did).

That has happened before, but very rarely, and I highly doubt will ever happen to SponsorBlock.

> That has happened before, but very rarely, and I highly doubt will ever happen to SponsorBlock.

Why do you doubt it? I've read that extension creators are constantly bombarded with offers to package just a little malware in their extension; surely the same is true of ads. If you're just a hobbyist developer—and that's where the best extensions come from—surely it's too much to expect that you'll resist that pressure forever.

SponsorBlock is open source. https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

SponsorBlock is completely tied to my real identity, why would I want to destroy my reputation for relatively little gain.

It's definitely nothing against you; indeed, I thank you and everyone like you who makes these tools that make my browsing experience so much better.

I assume that everyone who makes useful extensions like this does so out of good will. But I also assume that it is possible for a good person to tire of maintaining a piece of software, and want to pass on control, and to allow themselves to see the upside of an appealing and lucrative offer and believe that the worst won't come. And I can't blame a person who does this—they certainly don't owe me anything.

Into this discussion I will drop the following points:

1. The creator of the VLC media player was apparently offered "tens of millions" of euros to insert ads. Thus, if your software is sufficiently widely used, that is the kind of temptation you may eventually face.

2. He said no. So there do exist people who will resist such temptation.

Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048 and the link chain therefrom

VLC is GPLv2, saying yes would have been a short term annoyance for the community in exchange of him cashing in.

It's about neither your extension nor your incentives, and you can be the nicest person on earth (and I have no reason to believe otherwise, great work!), but we are all mortals in the end, and with the automatically updating extensions, it's too hard to say what will happen in the long term (who takes over eventually?). Also a parallel risk which has less to do with the ad industry is the extension getting hijacked.

So there is always a significant risk even the author declines all the offers for cashing out.

But again, your awesome extension in which you poured so many hours is not the problem, it's just affected by the problem.

It's a great solution, but it has a big limitation: you can't use it with the official YouTube apps for phones and TV's. You end up having to resort to 'hacked'/third-party clients like Vanced, with all the risks to your Google account that entails.

Doesn't work on a phone or Chromecast, unfortunately.

Even the Spotify paid tier has ads in podcasts. There's no escape.

That's not Spotify's fault. The ads are added by podcast host as a part of the show itself. You will have ads regardless of where you listen to your podcasts.

Aren’t those native ads though? Or is Spotify making money off them too?

It's a mix. As a premium spotify customer, I still see spotify-injected (skippable) ads.

Never encountered these, what were you listening to?

Really? Not me.

I've seen opportunities to subscribe to podcasts for $$, which irritated me, but that's it.

This can't be right.

Same here. Spotify claims it's the podcast producers' doing when ads are inserted this way. It still miffs me. One of the conditions of being a paid content provider for Spotify should be that you provide an ad-free experience for premium subscribers.

Here's the relevant press release: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-01-08/spotifys-head-of-glo...

native ads - kind of sums up the ludicrousness of the adtech industry… “they are not real ads because they are NATIVE!”

They are, and I think that Spotify should work to ban them. If I'm listening to a podcast on Spotify, then presumably the podcast creator is already getting my money (indirectly, via Spotify) and therefore I should get an ad-free version.

This gets to a question of what’s an ad. Take EDM DJs. Could they advertise an upcoming festival they’re playing at, even though the main purpose of the podcast is playing music?

> Could they *advertise* an upcoming festival

Yeah, that's an ad. It's even in the sentence.

Spotify allows it, I've contacted their support team about it. They claim that as long as the creator is the one inserting the ads that they allow it.

YouTube as well, if you're counting creators taking money to promote things.

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

It also has constant ads for podcasts in the app, as well as modal popups for things it wants to promote, like new albums and concerts. They are definitely violating the spirit of "no ads"

I suspect that Spotify's ad strategy is to make them as obnoxious as possible, just to get you to buy the subscription. For me, the ads they played made it seem like their data science were either completely inept, or extremely evil.

Hulu has ads in the "no ads" service too.

That's obnoxious

Reply on news.ycombinator.com