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Comment by Prickle | Hacker News Reader

The 5 minute airplane ad is nightmare fuel for me. How long until they kick up the brightness to wake you up. Imagine you are stuck in the window seat, forced to watch an ad you can't turn off?

I am exaggerating obviously, but I do find it egregious that they would dare show more ads when ticket prices are already extremely high.

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You joke but I’m pretty sure I experienced this recently on a flight. Being shown ads when you have the ability to opt out is one thing. Being shown ads when you’re a captive audience in an already relatively high stress environment seems outright villainous to me.

We used to have a thing called TV Mobile on the bus here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TVMobile

Anytime you wanted to get from A to B you would be subjected to noisy TV, and it was invariably something tedious like endless repeats of Ellen or Oprah with loads of adverts.

It was hell and I am so glad the service failed and was discontinued.

Question. Would you be okay with being shown an add if in turns your plane ticket price is noticeably cheaper?

That would be how it starts, but eventually the ad-free option would go away and your ticket is back to its original price + inflation

The challenge is that there won't be any transparency with this sort of thing. Prices for flights are so variable that you'll probably never know if it is cheaper due to the advertisement, or because of other variables.

My main issue with advertising driven models is that the company will respond to the needs of who pays them, advertisers, and not who actually uses the service. Want to juice profits? Just sell more advertising slots, make them more intrusive, etc. Delivering quality service to customers becomes a cost burden rather than a way to gain more customers.

Airlines have already come up with a way to make sure you understand what you're saving on. They'd sell you a ticket for some base price, and then extort you for extras upon online check-in. Seat choice, extra legroom, meals, etc.

Maybe, but that's not going to happen, they are going to have their cake and eat it too.

It won't get cheaper, the non-ad version will get more expensive.

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