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Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

When did advertisements become the universal currency?

If I am not mistaken, when Marc Andreessen was building the Mosaic browser (1993-ish) he and his co-founders contemplated the monetization model for the web. Since micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice was ads. In this sense, reliance on advertisement as the primary way to monetize online businesses is as old as www.

I think it goes further back than that. You can find early radio broadcasts where the story was brought to you buy some brand. They would even work the brands into the stories sometimes.

Indeed:

> The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas originally being sponsored by soap manufacturers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera

Yeah. I believe that's where the term "soapies" originated.

Shows originally brought to you by washing powder manufacturers.

G'day, mate? (I've never heard the term "soapies". Is it Australian slang? Having lived a decade in Hong Kong, I got exposure to a fair amount of Australian slang, and this fits the character.)

South African ...

Although I was under the impression that soapies was an American word.

I've only ever heard "soap operas" or "soaps" in the Upper Midwest and East Coast.

Let's blame Australia.

I've found that quite a lot of South African slang is mistaken for Australian slang, while a South African accent is often mistaken for a British one[1].

[1] I've actually been asked, once, "You're English, right?", when I was in the states.

I've never heard "soapies" in my part of the US. It's "Soaps" or "soap operas" here.

> I've never heard "soapies" in my part of the US. It's "Soaps" or "soap operas" here.

After reading the other replies, I believe that it's not just your part of the US.

I'm going to put this down in the TIL column - I always thought it was American slang, TIL I learned that it's not.

It’s pretty close even if it’s not actually an Americanism.

"ies" doesn't sound very American.

It may be. It could be a very regional item. Like soda vs pop.

I personally never heard it until this thread. I have heard 'soaps'.

> micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice was ads

this is completely specious .. source: present at the time

Please elaborate. Curious.

there are people here that can tell the stories better of course. MarcA was building the browser with other grad students and whomever, and they ultimately formed a company called Netscape. That product was called Netscape Navigator, and sold to consumers in a commercial software box, like a big book, similar to Adobe Photoshop and dozens of other huge programs in that day ("shrink wrap software").

Through the 1990s many Usenet users talked about ads on the Internet via usenet lists, everyone knew about AOL and their business model. The opinion among most coders in public was that ads on the Internet would "ruin it." Public surveillance on the scale that is common now, was a topic from comic books. etc

Micropayments, which are now possible if you accept cryptocurrency (specifically Solana) as the intermediary instead of Visa/MC, work. But how that would work is that you'd scroll past an article and pay for scrolling down. Instead of doing that, we put an ad in so when you're scrolling down, it costs the advertiser a micropayment and sends it to the ad agency (Google) at the expense of the viewer's time.

How do I convert Flooz to Solana?

Responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what you said, as per the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it looks like you'd have to use something more mainstream (BTC/ETH/USDT) as the intermediary as https://flooz.xyz/trade won't convert Flooz directly to Solana. Getting money in and out of the Solana ecosystem is part of being able to do micropayments. USD to Solana (and back) is supported by Coinbase, however. My main point is that the code to make it so that scrolling down the article you're reading sends sub-cent amounts to the author is actually possible with today's technology, whereas it wasn't back in the 90's.

Ads is theft (of our attention and of our data) and theft is committed without consent of the victim. It is for this reason ads can "pay" for things that money cannot. Similarly, if the law allowed extortion or blackmail, corporations that embrace it would outcompete those who don't.

Attention is the currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

Early newspapers, even paid ones, often had an entire front page of only ads. And then more ads within.

During the golden age of software piracy.

They aren't a universal currency, they are just something that you can always add to a product that already makes $X, to make $X + $Y, instead.

Most firms seem to prefer to make $X + $Y, over making $X.

Since 1999.

This wasn't invented by the internet either. Free newspapers or TV are examples of services funded by advertisements.

You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product. If you charge for your product you will always have people who do not value your product at the price you need to charge.

If you make it free you will always get more people to use your products. This helps a lot in getting funding in case of startups. Look at our user base if each user paid 1 dollar we would make billions. Of course you can never turn 100% of your user base into a paying customer.

If you want to keep your massive user base you have to resort to ads. If you switch to a paid plan your user numbers will decline and investors will complain. If you do not show ads you will continue to bleed money and make no return on investment.

At some point in time having a small paying customer base became unsexy to a lot of investors who wanted to chase after the next potential unicorn.

> You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product

The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself. Or... iOS?

Users pay indirectly for those, they don't see it as a standalone paid product.

Both of these get bundled with the Hardware so people do not really consciously chose them.

And for windows it seems the microsoft actually started to go the ads route by putting them in windows 10 and 11. And you do not have to pay for the OS anymore to use it as you do not have to activate the license.

>The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself. Or... iOS?

Or hardware, even. Just look at the iPhone...

Even hardware can become victim to this look at Alexa:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2023/08/20/ji...

One example surrounded by many other pieces of hardware that don't do this doesn't do much to solidify your "cannot" absolute.

Edit: Your second link makes it pretty clear that it's not Alexa's lack of profitability that seems to be the issue with regards to ads playing between songs. Apple Music has a free, ad-supported tier - meaning that on whatever device you use it on, you'll hear ads. If your Alexa is set to access your ad-supported Apple Music account, then of course you're going to hear ads.

Or coca-cola, or baby formula, or the myriad of construciton materials that we all consume but are produced by a few obscure, giant entities.

> You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product.

That really depends on how we define "gigantic user base", but I think Adobe, Valve, and Autodesk all disprove it.

> If you charge for your product you will always have people who do not value your product at the price you need to charge.

It doesn't matter how many non-customers you get, only how many customers you get.

In general, I think you do have something of a point in that it is easier to get more users with a nominal price of $0, and it might be a way to get enough users that the small $/user from ads works out. That doesn't mean that ads are always going to work or that other models can't work, though.

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