Great post, and glad to see a lot of other Hacker Newser following suit.
With many magazines, the only reason they even bother to charge is to prove to advertisers that you're a "serious" reader: they don't care about your subscription fee, but about what it says about your value as a product. This has even led to a weird cat-and-mouse game where magazines try to give away free promotional subscriptions while pretending they charged you, and advertisers respond by demanding that subscription numbers be audited by third parties so magazines have to prove that you "really" paid (and this produces complex legalistic rules about things like whether paying with frequent-flyer miles counts as paying). That's because they really want the "paid subscriber" bit to sell to their advertisers, but don't particularly care about your measly $20.
And yet every month, I get another issue, and another notice. I've longed chalked it up to trying to count me as a subscriber, and it must be working.
The kicker is, I've never once paid for this magazine.
Using google to search doesn't make me a "product". They just happen to be able to make a ton of money showing adverts, which are useful for me also.
Ignore advertising revenue at your own cost.
But OTOH, this is hackernews, so continue hating advertising lead business models as usual...
No one is ignoring advertising revenue, harvesting millions of users in order to bring in said advertising revenue is the problem.
Why is it a problem? So they show me a few adverts... big whoop. I can just ignore them.
The issue is, the vast majority of people will never pay for access to online websites/apps (Me included). If you restrict yourself to the business model "charge users", then you've just got rid of 99% of the online population.
Advertising means that everyone gets what they want (Apart from the very very small but overly vocal minority that don't like adverts or have privacy concerns).
Only if you block them. Advertising is not informative, it's coaxing you, and just because you don't consciously decide you're going to read an ad now doesn't mean you get to ignore it.
Walk down a city street. It's full of adverts for shops you might want to go in.
On the other hand, while you claim my previous statement was BS, I claim your statement displays denial.