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Comment by czx4f4bd | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel guilty about using an ad blocker on sites I like. A few times, I've felt guilty enough to turn it off for a site I use a lot and trust, only to find the page completely clogged with ads that block the UI and generally make an awful experience. At this point, I've learned my lesson.

Not to mention that malvertising is still an issue that affects even major sites. In my view, browsing the web without an ad blocker is like hooking up with strangers without using PrEP - it's just not a good idea.

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I'm willing to unblock ads for a site if all the following are true:

* I like the site.

* The ads are static images or text.

* The ads are hosted locally.

* The ads are not malicious.

If any of the above is not true, the blocking stays.

The main problem with static ads is that the advertiser can't obtain any analytics as to whether their ads are effective, or whether the publisher is outright defrauding them by claiming to show ads but not actually displaying them to real users, faking the number of clicks, etc.

With newspapers and magazines, picking up a copy and estimating the distribution of the paper via a 3rd party (such as Nielsen) answers all these questions.

I'd like to hear about a solution that addresses that. It seems fundamentally incompatible with the conditions of "hosted locally" and "static images or text" (which means you can't run JS to verify whether the ad was actually displayed).

It depends on the ad and what you're measuring. If it's eyeballs then yeah, you can be lied to. If it's a conversion happening on your own site then no, you can't fake that.

> If it's a conversion happening on your own site then no, you can't fake that.

The problem with this approach is that it's a "he said, she said" situation where both parties can claim that the other is producing fraudulent numbers. It can only be resolved with litigation, which is not what anyone wants when all they wanted to do is get some sales numbers up.

Also, if you're familiar with the state of advertising fraud, faking conversions with botnets and residential proxies are an absolutely real thing.

What would you do if all of your favorite sites switched to subscription models? Would that be a win in your book? Always honestly intrigued by such world views.

> What would you do if all of your favorite sites switched to subscription models?

I have very few truly "favorite sites". Most of them are completely disposable. Eg, I don't see myself ever paying for a website that provides song lyrics -- it's a fully optional service, and entirely fungible.

I think it's possible a limited return to an "old internet" model to some extent, where some random person might just posts lyrics of their favorite band just because they like it.

For the very few actual favorites, probably.

> Would that be a win in your book? Always honestly intrigued by such world views.

Extremely so. First, no ads. Second, a site that must please its users or go bankrupt. That's a win/win in my book.

Such a change likely comes along with improvements in the site's quality. Eg, paid Youtube competitors don't want to feed me hogwash all day in hopes I watch more ads. Bandwidth is expensive, they're not getting any more money from me, and there are no ads to pay for increased consumption. So their priority becomes a smaller amount of high quality content.

In theory that’s how it could work.

In practice it seems be go subscription, and then make things that used to be free to everyone require not just the basic subscription but a premium one.

If the site is worth the asking price I certainly wouldn't mind.

There aren't a lot such sites, though.

Not parent, but I would just find different favorite sites.

I'll give you credit for being honest about being cheap, instead of advancing some bad faith "muh information wants to be fr33" argument.

I always took "information wants to be free" as a "water flows downhill" kind of statement -- it describes the natural tendency and that you need to do a lot of work against it to contain it, and even then it's probably not going to be fully successful.

It's not about what "ought" or any sort of morality, more of a factual statement of how the world works.

If I like the site, I will consider paying for it. I already do pay for online services.

I am glad the ad model is dying. What a waste of resources that was!

I've had the same experience. When I turn off ad-blocking tech on the sites I like, I don't like them anymore.

>Sometimes I feel guilty about using an ad blocker on sites I like

Put it differently, sometimes you feel guilty about not allowing the sites you like to abuse your computer.

That feeling doesn’t seem healthy to me, tbh.

> Sometimes I feel guilty about using an ad blocker on sites I like. A few times, I've felt guilty enough to turn it off for a site I use a lot and trust, only to find the page completely clogged with ads that block the UI and generally make an awful experience. At this point, I've learned my lesson.

I don't get it. The sites that you like will go bankrupt, and you won't be able to read them anymore. Or do you have an agenda, and you are okay to sacrifice the sites that you like?

If I like a site, and I want it to exist* I disable my ad blocker, and bear with the ads. But probably we visit different sites, or I have a higher tolerance against ads.

* my morals have gotten so low I would happily steal from the people that provide me value, but I won't do that because I am afraid they will close their businesses

> I don't get it. The sites that you like will go bankrupt, and you won't be able to read them anymore.

Well, if I turn off the adblocker, the resulting deluge of ads makes that site a site I that I don't like, so it doesn't really matter to me whether I can read them anymore because it won't be in the set of "Sites I Like To Read".

There are many more people who want their content be read, even for free, than there are people available to read that content.

Because we have have oversupply of content, a significant quantity being good, is there any reason to expect that the price for that content will not be driven downwards?

It's why the majority of competent artists don't make much money from their art and have a job in addition to their art: there's an oversupply of guitarists, painters, sculptors, poets, authors, singers, dancers, songwriters.

Currently there's also an oversupply of blog sites, news sites, news aggregators, learning resources (How to code sites, recipe sites, etc), with the most popular ones being the ones which had the most capital (for SEO, blog-spamming, etc) to get the most visitors, and that capital is grown by degrading the quality of the site with ads.

I imagine a net where the amount of capital you have means nothing because ads don't make a difference to the bottom line, and every site is a net expense. This would result in only very cheap sites, which means mostly static hosting (because it's cheap).

If the people who care to make money of the site but don't care about the content can't make any money, the only ones who are left are those who care enough about the content to take a small hit to publish that content.

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