Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coryfklein | Hacker News Reader

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> People want free stuff.

I'll also point out that it takes two to tango and most every internet content company is actively offering free stuff. I suspect one reason that ad-based revenue models are so hard to remove are because eliminating it would require coordinated effort on two separate axes:

1) Consumers would have to coordinate on, "From now on, let's pay for all our services"

AND

2) Companies would have to all agree, "Let's stop providing free product subsidized by ads"

Without some sort of drastic fundamental shift in technology or radical technological invention, I just don't see it happening. Maybe someone makes a killer OS or product that has ad-blocking built-in from the ground up and is also so amazing that everyone switches to it, and so suddenly ad revenue drops to near zero? I guess we can dream.

There's also taxes to consider.

If your site makes its money by showing ads from some third party ad network, that is just going to be ordinary corporate income which you will deal with when dealing with the corporate income tax in your country and/or state.

If your site makes its money by selling products or services to end users it will still be ordinary corporate income in your country and/or state but it will also be sales income and so may also be subject to sales taxes or VAT where your customers reside. That can easily result in you having to deal with taxes in several dozen or more jurisdictions.

If you can make enough money from ads it will almost always be a lot less hassle than making your money by charging customers.

So... lobby for a more unified tax code?

Haha good luck, both the states and Europe have moved towards more complicated vat rules in the last years

> Maybe someone makes a killer OS or product that has ad-blocking built-in from the ground up and is also so amazing that everyone switches to it, and so suddenly ad revenue drops to near zero? I guess we can dream.

I'm not even sure that's the dream I want. There has to be a middle ground with free services paid for by privacy-respecting ads, right?

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