It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for all.
> Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for all.
Yes!! What I wouldn't give to see this entire industry banned from existence. It would solve so many problems it's ridiculous.
The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv.
[edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody has made a successful micropayments based product or platform. Further, simply paywalling software or services means 99% of people will not use it. People also are uncomfortable with a system that just withdraws money from their account to pay people - and a universal subscription model isn't particularly tenable due to the competing interests of market participants.
If you can solve this problem with something other than ads, I will be your first investor because you're going to be the richest human on earth.
It's easy to say "ads bad" - ok, but the real question is what are we going to replace them with?
Even in the 2000s I remember newspapers not costing more than a dollar or two. I would personally prefer a one-off payment of some small amount to get the website for the day or X amount of articles instead of some god-awful subscription that has to be cancelled via some shitty call center process where they try to stop you twenty times.
How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?
The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.
Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.
Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.
People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.
Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.
Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.
Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.
I don't know and at this point I don't think it even matters. Every single time I discuss ads here on HN I learn new reasons to hate it. Some days ago I read a story about a politician who deliberately slowed down traffic so people would be forced to "contemplate" this garbage. The sheer audacity of these people never fails to impress me.
It's irredeemable and the fact that there's currently no alternative is no reason not to get rid of it. We really should just do it and let the chips fall where they may. People will figure out a way to make money. They have to, because the alternative is to go bankrupt. Maybe they'll make less money and that's absolutely fine.
> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.
No, I don’t think this is true. I think this is something people in adtech tell themselves to sleep better at night. There’s lots of money in ads and free stuff, but there are many companies doing quite well by having customers pay for stuff.
Netflix is worth $200B plus, more than the ad tv networks. Those networks said for years that customers won’t pay and need ads. They were wrong. And I’d also add that they wanted more. They charged for cable channels and still sold ads.
People want choices and don’t mind paying for value.
Ads are bad for people.
music piracy is basically over thanks to spotify, apple music, youtube, bandcamp, etc
hardly anyone i know torrents movies anymore due to netflix, hbo, hulu
everyone has a phone plan instead of hopping around on free wifi constantly
people pay for lyft/uber instead of just skipping fare on the train
there exist social networks and communities that are effectively fee-supported. somethingawful and metafilter are some siloed examples, but there's the fediverse and stuff like mastodon where essentially people either join a specific community/clique that's funded by members or host their own instance.
i'm convinced what keeps most people on the main advertiser-controlled networks is they are run by huge corporations with service monopolies and network effect. remember, whatsapp got big on a dollar per year subscription
I think advertising dollars paying for services that users use is a convenient excuse that companies use to justify it, but it isn't an imperative for why it should exist.
If you can't get people to pay for your service when they know the real price maybe your service shouldn't exist, or shouldn't exist at the scale it does now.
That being said your main point that the industry grew organically based on human behavior certainly seems true. Banning advertising (like banning lobbying or corporate contributions to elected officials) is an impossible game of whack-a-mole. It can't be defined tightly enough to be outright banned (are you going to ban telling people you sell something they might like?) and the value derived from it is large enough that people will get creative when you ban the outcomes.
That being said I do think the most egregious versions should be regulated. Ads to kids, deceptive mail or email ads that look like invoices or bills, ads that are obviously lying about features or benefits, but enforcement is incredibly difficult. I'm not especially optimistic.
The GDPR, though having a massive enforcement problem, disallows targeted ads and all the privacy violations typically associated with them.
You could make websites liable for the ads they display, automatically killing the "bottom of the barrel" of advertising such as chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola/etc) and similar low-quality trash because the cost to review & audit these ads would outweigh any potential profits.
You could revoke Section 230 protection for social media companies that manipulate the reach of content to increase engagement (which is why every social platform switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic one) as to discourage the practice and prevent them from profiting off intentionally pushing harmful or even illegal content to increase engagement.
Hopefully their return on investment will approach zero and they will stop putting ads on everything.
Most people put the value of Google search on the order of thousands of dollars per year [1]. Imagine Google was a paid service: think of the academic disparity between the children of wealthy students who had access to Google and poorer students who do not.
1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-much...
Mix the ads inside the content so that the ad delivery mechanisms don't get in the way.
They are very much part of the problem. Google search? It's bad and gets worse every day because of advertising -- Google has stopped trying to fight SEO spammers.
Advertising is mind hacking. Mind malware. It's about infecting people's minds with ideas nobody asked for. Why is it bad when some spammer does it but fine when advertisers turn our societies into a literal cyberpunk hell? Why does their "commercial interests" somehow legitimitize their industry? Nobody consented to it. Why do they think they can violate our minds without our consent?
Democracy be damned, there’s money to be made on dietary supplements!
So yea, I have the next billion dollar idea. The gas gauge app. $3.99 a month to know how much farther you can travel. Also, we remove the gauge from inside the car.
But yet even in 2022 the best we can do is "service engine soon" and getting more information than that requires an expensive visit to the dealership.
Do you mean we should build a starship, Ark B, put all marketers into it, and send them all to a very distant planet?
HBO was a great example of this in the pre-streaming days.
"Want to see great shows and movies with no commercials, pay the extra for cable + HBO and you won't have to seem them again.!"
This default, "it's all free BUT you have to see ads and there are no alternatives" seems to be the problem. The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing this consumer surplus/need and acting on it.
So the service needs to charge even more, which makes paying customers even more valuable in a feedback loop. The usual result is that eventually the service can’t help themselves and starts showing paying customers “a few” ads. Then the definition of a few gets larger and larger.
I can see this being true, but I'm curious why. Is this because the advertisers know the paying customers have the cash to pay for the service?
The more you pay in general, the more they want you to pay them specifically.
The only way would be if regulation either mandates a reasonably-priced ad-free tier (priced at the average revenue from an ad-viewing user) or other restrictions (GDPR but actually enforced, the website being liable for the ads it shows, etc) that would make advertising completely unprofitable.
> The apps described in the article are effectively recognizing this consumer surplus/need and acting on it.
Presumably, AA is pissed off because the people that value their time enough and have the skills to set up and use an alternative are people they'd very much want looking at their ads, much more so than the plebs who already use the website and see the ads.
"Industry could not benefit from its increased productivity without a substantial increase in consumer spending. This contributed to the development of mass marketing designed to influence the population's economic behavior on a larger scale.[24] "
Also, banning silicon-based eyes should be declared a massive, massive ADA violation.
We don't need to anthropomorphize HTML/JSON parsing as equivalent to human vision, and then declare any efforts to restrict that vision to be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Lol.
The airlines are already legally required to make their websites accessible in the United States, including to screen readers, by virtue of the Air Carrier Access Act. They already all comply with this.
Unrelated to screen readers, American Airlines and Red Ventures are involved in a dispute about the _legality_ of screen scraping. The dispute involves lawsuits, but does not involve technological measures to obfuscate or otherwise obstruct screen readers, or even screen scraping.
Your comment seemed to suggest that we should make _screen scraping_ legal by considering it the same as vision, and that any efforts -- including legal efforts -- to prevent screen scraping should run afoul of the ADA.
That was my understanding, and that's indeed a bizarre view.
If your point was limited simply to making screen readers accessible, then I think your point is perfectly fine, but kind of a non sequitur, because this dispute is not about technological measures to control screen scraping, it's about legal measures.
This seems to fit the definition of an unconscionable contract pretty well.
They have exactly zero right to dictate what I do on my computer. Their HTML is being rendered on my computer and I absolutely reserve the right to delete or modify elements in any way and for any reason. Their javascript is executing on my computer and I absolutely reserve the right to delete and modify functions if I deem necessary.
Complete bullshit but it's totally something these judges would understand. One would think these people would actually protect consumers from corporation abuse...
Edit: Wow, re-listening to the bit, my memory definitely failed me. Basically a rant on how we should be grateful that airline companies are even able to get a plane in the air. I think we can do better, personally.
people dont like paying and they dont mind ads. they enable a lot of products and services that would otherwise not exist. ads might be a net negative, but they certainly have at least some positives.
Edit to add: Do you really have to downvote, don't you have something better to do with your click?