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Comment by nik_0_0 | Hacker News Reader

It does make you a product. Google can take the millions of you searching for that term and say "hey you people related to that term", and sell them based on the fact that you searched for it an a small percentage of you will click that advertisments. I almost feel that we are lucky that advertisements are more profitable when they are more useful to us, god forbid if A/B testing showed that FULL PAGE FLASHING BANNERS somehow brought in more revenue.

No one is ignoring advertising revenue, harvesting millions of users in order to bring in said advertising revenue is the problem.

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> 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).

"I can just ignore them."

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.

BS. Advertising is useful and informative, and I choose which interest me and which don't. If you can't ignore things that don't interest you, then you have problems.

Walk down a city street. It's full of adverts for shops you might want to go in.

Well, yes, of course I have a problem. That's one of the reasons of why many places put regulations on what kind and amount of ads on streets is allowed. If I didn't have a problem, I wouldn't complain about ads that much.

On the other hand, while you claim my previous statement was BS, I claim your statement displays denial.

But the vast majority of people do pay for online access to ad-funded apps every time they purchase something from a company that runs an ad. I don't imagine Heinz ads make any money from click-throughs, they promote the brand - but Heinz paid for those ads with the money I spent on ketchup last week, which is the only brand in the local store, so it's not like they needed the ad to convince me.

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