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Comment by sasaf5 | Hacker News Reader

> I’d still prefer a targeted ad over a random ad that is unrelated to me.

No, a million times no. A targeted ad requires my personal information being collected, and the resulting assumption of my needs may be offensive and even dangerous.

I prefer a random ad. Or better, a place where I can just search the product I want in detail.

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"Random ad vs targeted ad" is a false dichotomy. There are also contextual ads. For example, the audience of Linus Tech Tips regularly gets their fair share of contextual ads delivered by Linus in-band. You're not going to see an ad of a toilet paper on LTT. Instead you're going to see ads of hard drives, Squarespace, online shopping platforms, etc. The ads are the same for all viewers (i.e. definitely not targeted) and don't require any JS spyware. Moreover, LTT (and other creators) get more money from those ads than from YouTube ads. Everybody wins (except Google and Facebook).

Everyone wins except the viewer who now has to manually skip through ads because adblockers don't block those type of ads

SponsorBlock might be of interest.

> Skip sponsorships, subscription begging and more on YouTube videos. Report sponsors on videos you watch to save others' time. [0]

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...

how do you expect the producers of the content you consume to continue putting out the content you want to consume if they're unable to monetise that content?

I think the honest answer is that one expects to be in the minority that uses adblock -- and for the content to be monetized by the majority that don't.

I'm in a restrictive country that's extremely difficult to get stuff to, I don't have the standard payment methods and instead all these internal only services.

There is absolutely no point in me watching those because I couldn't buy anything even if I wanted to

Behind a privacy respecting paywall if they want. Let the market decide if their content is worth some dollar amount. Advertisement is never the answer, IMO.

Seriously. I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favorite content creators. Sure you bought an LTT water bottle, but make no mistake Google is a business, YouTube is a business and they are not providing these videos out of the goodness of their heart. If YouTube ever doesn't make sense (algorithmically, financially, or through whatever metric Google decides is important) Google will cut it.

I don't think people expect anything for free but I don't want to pay with getting bombarded with ads. If their business model is not viable then they have to find a new one. Just as we can't expect content for free they can't expect me to sit there and look at adverts out of the goodness of my heart. If at all possible, I will find a way to block ads out of my mind as much as I can.

Cable TV Promises.

Buy our service and get no ads. 5-ish years later, just like OTA.

NY Times ('81) https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...

Satellite radio, mostly no ads. Tune to the "laugh" channels ... tons of ads.

Personally I don't feel a moral dilemma about not giving revenue to YouTube.

That said, if Person A buys an LTT water bottle and block all ads and Person B watches all ads and never buys anything, then Person B needs to watch thousands of ads to make up the same revenue from that single merchandise purchase.

I agree with Linus that skipping ads is piracy, but if you finance it in better ways should you care?

For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jUxOnoWsFU

That was basically his stance. It's piracy, and I see no issues with it.

I'm not sure why people got absolutely butthurt about that.

Linus point has a slightly different nuance: adblocking is theft. Similarly to how Taylor Swift was against Spotify because (IIRC) people should buy albums.

My version was that adblocking damages revenue in very quantifiable ways* and you can work around that.

* I am almost sure that YouTube's recommendation algorithm does not counts watched ads as a metric, that is maybe watching ads increases the total watch-time of the video but otherwise an ad-full view is counted the same as a ad-free view. But this belief is not based on anything.

If this happened to be wrong then an adblocker could exponentially hurt a channel growth and that might equal quite a few water bottles.

> I don't get why people expect that they should pay nothing to watch their favourite content creators

Because they where offered up for free? And only now are charging?

People have been able to tune out of, skip or ignore advertising on every media platform since the beginning of time. There is no obligation, anywhere, on the part of the consumer to engage with advertising in exchange for content.

Oh no, YouTube shuts down and we all have to go outside and read a book. Realistically, enough people will remain ignorant of ad blocking hygiene that YT will remain relevant to the big G for the foreseeable future. "What if everyone made the same choice?" We already know they don't.

I for one could do without a large percentage of the content made for monetization.

Honestly, that's not my problem. "How do you satisfy your customer's needs while making a profit" is the same problem every other business has. It's up to the content creators to solve it. If they can't, then they go out of business. It's that simple.

If you can't make a profit from your content because you're giving it away with blockable ads then you should stop doing that and do something else.

If I went to a Ferrari showroom and they said "Here's a free Ferrari, but you have to keep that advert we've put on the windscreen. If you take it off we'll have to stop giving Ferraris away.", then I am driving a beautiful ad-free Ferrari around now and the showroom can't do anything about it.

> It's up to the content creators to solve it. If they can't, then they go out of business. It's that simple.

They are solving it, over and over, for the past 20 years. The way so far is to find new ways to shove ads down enough peoples throats. And the internet can't stop complaining about them doing so, understandably.

> Honestly, that's not my problem.

So, yeah, maybe it kinda is. A state of war is mostly a lose-lose situation.

A state of war is mostly a lose-lose situation.

It's not lose-lose though. The creator loses, but I don't. If I don't care about a specific creator (and I obviously don't if I don't pay them and I block their ads) then I'm only losing access to the content they produce, which I value at essentially zero. So, really, I'm not losing anything. I just move on to the next YouTube video/podcast/whatever.

That's a misrepresentation of what's happening. They've largely not tried to solve the adblock 'problem' because users are in the minority. And yet, despite that, they've still ramped up adverts. They're always going to advertise the maximum account they can before it hinders returns - that's economics.

So I could argue that by using blockers I'm reducing the amount of advertising the populace will take and increasing the value of a given, lower level of advertising.

Why would consumers consume content if 50%+ of the content is ads? Adblocks make content consumable, without them, i'd stop watching 80% of the stuff I watch now. If ads (the amount and the type) were sensible, then sure, most of us wouldn't really care that much about them, but if a 35second "#shorts" video has a 20s ad at the begining, a "this is sponsored by..." by the author, and a 15s ad at the end, then we get pissed. Also, every fucking video has the same ad... raid shadow legends, nordvpn, raid, vpn, raid, vpn... same thing in every video. It really became so bad (for me personally), I'd rather not watch the video at all, if I can't avoid the ads, because it's just too much.

I don't mind sponsor slots - they directly pay the content creators and don't involved me to be stalked as I go about my life.

If the sponsored segments get irritating, and in some cases they have, I just go elsewhere. If I don't want the content enough to put of with the sponsor segment then I simply don't want the content enough.

It depends how you define targetted. An advert for Intel while I'm looking at a technical site is targetted in the traditional sense, like advertising sports equipment and beer in TV broadcasts of football (where the audience is likely to be interested in one, the other, or both), and I'm fine with that.

Like you I object to adverts that are targetted by stalking me as I go about my daily life, or buying & selling information gleaned about me by an entity performing such stalking. Targetting based on what I'm actively doing right now seems fine.

(and away from the targetting question, I also object to other dark patterns like pop-ups/-unders, auto-playing audio & video, etc.)

Yeah totally, that statement is actually absurd to me. Because ANY ad is equally off putting. But a targeted ad is based on personal information.

Regardless of how the ad was made, I will do anything to avoid it, just as I would any other ad.

A targeted ad can be a contextual ad, with no personal information involved.

Ads are not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is tracking.

The internet has not been broken by ads. It’s been broken by data harvesting and monopolies. Contextual ads are no problem IMO, and can sometimes be a helpful (economic) signal. Without ads how can challengers get some awareness?

So yes for targeted ads, but only if it does not require personal data. Contextual ads can be targeted without engaging in use of personal data.

I hope you realize this is just your perspective.

To offer the alternative, to me ads are the fundamental problem. As much as I don't want to be tracked and avoid providing my information in any way possible, I just assume I am being tracked. It does not "annoy me" while consuming some content.

On the other hand, any random ad / paid promotion that gets through the blocking does annoy me immensely and I do consider nearly any form of advertisement harmful.

Sure I realize. I'm not alone in this thinking but reaslize I am out-on-a-limb. I totally understand your point-of-view; it was how I thought for most of my life. Perhaps it was my shift from being mostly developer and one-company focussed to later helping and/or working with or alongside hundreds of startups, including YC S12. Without ads to gain awareness and gow many now great companies would not have crossed the chasm. And we all benefit from those companies, from innovations that flourished, and use them in our toolset. Sadly a few of them acheived their own, or backers, goal of being a monopoly, leading to the annoyance, damage and extraction we all experience.

Personalizing ads per se does not need tracking or profiling. Doing it server-side and checking if the targeting works does.

the Mr Robot scandal for better or worse, was implemented almost like this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15941302

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