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Comment by s8s8discourse | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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