Regardless of the consequences I'd rather see an ad free internet. If that means Youtube can't exist and Facebook can't exist and Google can't exist then so be it.
Do all those sites need to be commercial enterprises with sales teams and large editorial teams? Or could they go back to being hobby passion projects?
Or maybe there's just a handful of them and they are subscription-based for people who _really_ want that kind of news, and the best writers and creators gravitate to those sites and they build a sustainable business that way?
The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area to try their hand at garnering eyeball in exchange for what is ultimately the same repackaged content, because they don't need their users to pay for the content, they just need to draw them in to support the sales of ads or tracking data.
This incentivizes all kinds of user-hostile behaviours in the quest for profit (or even just sustainability).
So I don't begrudge people trying to build an audience by publishing online about things they know or love, but one of the downsides is that the Internet's "content is free" tradition - that comes from hobbyists working out of passion - has led to a whole industry of "how do we make money off people without taking money from them" and that's ads and tracking.
And then the game becomes "how many people can I draw in to my site by any means necessary" instead of "how can I create engaging content".
Most of the sites on cameras, gadgets, games, cars e.t.c. are dead or dying and have been replaced by youtube channels, many of them run by hobbyists.
SEO, content farms and content marketing are killing the open web and Google is enabling it, perhaps because they're ok with the web being replaced by 4 or 5 websites, Youtube being the biggest of them.
There's still plenty (too many?) commercial websites - most that include their own YouTube channel - trying to compete for eyeballs by repackaging the same preview/review/press materials that companies send out..
They're no longer the only game in town though, that's for sure. I don't disagree that many hobbyists (definition up for debate) can compete on merit for the audience, which is awesome of course.
useful content? which ones? average youtuber incentives (be it through YT or Patreon) tend to just be a community private server on Discord to talk to the creator with. Or cut content that they couldn't air on youtube anyway (e.g. extended commentary on a video that would be de-monitized otherwise. There's way too much competition to lock out signifigant part of a Youtube's channel's content.
> The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area
"Too many" according to whom? You?
If no one "needs" them, then they won't get viewers and thus eventually won't get ads, either.
Demonstrably untrue; there are plenty of spam sites that hide themselves and play the SEO game well enough to (temporarily) get my eyeballs. These sites only satisfy a "need" insofar as my grandparents have a "need" to respond to emails from Nigerian scammers.
train your eyeballs better, then. Or theirs.
Sure, yes, according to me. That was implied when I posted my opinion on here, a discussion forum where we share opinions.
My opinion is that the ad-supported model itself, which doesn't rely on having paying readers/users, but rather on attracting said users to then be paid for showing them ads or collecting their data, has perhaps unintentionally created too low of a bar for entry (in hindsight) and as a result, the fierce competition for profit has led to user-hostile incentives in order to stay alive in such a crowded landscape.
I think the low barrier to entry for putting up websites or creating content online are a net positive, for the record. I love that anyone can just put their content online and compete for an audience on merit (more or less), rather than needing some large monetary investment up front.
But I also think the ad-supported monetize-the-shit-out-of-users model is a bad thing, and benefits from the same low barrier to entry.
But you take the good with the bad I suppose.
if you make an assertion about there being "too many" of something, it begs for someone to ask how you know this. Almost anyone on HN might ask that. However, you've now added some nuance to it.
I think in general a low barrier to entry is a good thing: most of the music on Bandcamp wouldn't have even been available to the public 50 years ago.
Most of the self-published books out there now also would never make it past the Mean Girl "agents" who populate literary agencies. Most of those books are crap, but then so are the books from major publishers in airport bookstores.
Ah yes, the old "must challenge every statement" gambit. You must be fun at parties.
…and if the hobbyists know that their sites aren’t going to get any visitors, there’s little reason to make them in the first place.
For all the negatives, a consistent stream is one of the biggest benefits from professional content creators, be it traditional news, Youtubers, streamers, or even bloggers.
These are not mutually exclusive things, sorry if I implied that.
My point was more about the race to the bottom with commercial content sites/networks/publications in what seems like a borderless space, with increasingly bad incentives to draw in users.
This only holds if you agree that humans are perfectly rational economic agents. I disagree with that and think that there are lots of little interactions where just introducing a financial transaction impacts how people interact.
Maybe If I tallied all of my internet usage, figured out how much I value my internet usage, and then gave each page visit a value I could find out that I value my hackernews usage at $0.02 per link click. But if clicking links directly led to me paying more, my usage pattern would change.
You can chose to only frequent ad-free sites and services. You wouldn't even have a use for an ad blocker.
It really seems like a win-win.
Hulu
I wouldn't characterize it as a "bad" business.
No, it's just often that the logistics make it too inconvenient.
For various impossible-coordination reasons, micropayments and monthly-subscription-to-all-news just haven't taken off, despite consumers being willing to pay.
Or in a worst case scenario, everyone who is willing to pay already is, and the business is indeed non-sustainable. But I doubt this.
People can be willing to pay, but corporations are unable to coordinate amongst themselves to receive the payment or make it frictionless enough. This is not an uncommon situation in economics. It's not a fictional concept.
E.g. you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination. That wasn't inevitable though. If record labels had chosen to launch fragmented independent music streaming services, that wouldn't have changed people's willingness to pay for all music for $10–12/mo., even if it weren't available.
>you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination.
By basically giving the record labels all the money and make the actual artists not really make money on their craft. I guess nothing can be perfect.
But music is realtively cheap to produce (but not cheap at the top, of course). There is also a reason Netflix has been price hiking and still bleeding content and customers as everyone rolls their own. You simply want more control when each episode of content is 7 figures.
Ads are not going away.
I would argue that the internet has gone rather overboard with it, but that's a different thing.
Just <img href="/ad.png"> would work, and has no tracking and is essential the same as print media ads (or those YouTube sponsors for that matter). While this would probably net in less income than e.g. the Google ad stuff, it's completely viable and I'm sure there are people and companies doing something like that.
But uBlock will block that, because it's an adblocker and not a trackblocker, and that's clearly an ad. That's perfectly fine, but what I want is a trackblocker
If I tell you jefftk.com has 10k daily active users so you should pay me $500 to put a banner on the top of my site, should you believe me?
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's not done.
Come to think of it, you're on a site with track-free ads right now: the ycombinator launches/hiring posts really are just ads.
And whatever the status-quo exactly is right now, what I responded to was "if something is not sustainable without ads then it's not a good business model", and tracking really doesn't come in to play in discussing to what degree the very concept of ads is or isn't desirable, as that's just an entirely separate issue.
The vast majority of ads are supported by and come with tracking. Sure, there exist sites that do ads in a way that isn't so intrusive, but they're an extreme minority. It's also hard-to-impossible to tell if a site is tracking you or not.
So long as more than a tiny number of sites use ads that involve tracking, it's necessary to treat all sites as doing so.
Which ones? All the non-tracking, supposedly-GDPR-compliant ads/analytics out there just use a convoluted and overcomplicated interpretation of the GDPR to claim their solution complies while it ultimately doesn't, or stretch the "legitimate interest" definition quite a bit.
For example, if it's able to reidentify a user coming back to a website, then it doesn't matter if they hash the IP address 20 times which is salted with the outcome of a crystal ball and all under the supervision of a magic unicorn, it's still processing personal data for non-essential purposes and should require explicit consent.
There is one "tracker" on DF, but it doesn't affect the ad you see. And if you read the RSS feed, you get the ad without the tracking.
Advertising can be a perfectly fine business model. Look at the radio, television, and newspaper industries. These have existed for decades and have brought much good to humanity even though they need advertising support to exist.
The vast majority of the web has been given away for free by being ad supported, that's never going to roll back, the expectation has been set.
Thankfully, the wider public might find ads irritating but they'd still prefer them over paying so ads aren't going away anytime soon.
There is usually a group of people advocating that using an adblocker is like stealing or killing businesses. My counter argument is that I'm fine with that. Don't offer something for free when I have complete control over how it is displayed on my end if you can't stay in business if I block some part of it. Everyone on the planet should use ad blockers for their own protection and to actively change the internet to a non-ad business model.
I will never stop using ad blockers and I don't feel bad about it in the slightest.
But you can already do that by not using Youtube and FB. You just want to deny opportunity to use them to other people who may like to have access to "free" (ad supported) internet services.
People literally can't pay a sane price for content. A blog post or warmed over press release isn't worth a penny let alone a dollar. Ads unfortunately are the only mechanism to pay the sub-cent value for content.
Even if you could reasonably conduct a penny transaction that's still an insane price to pay for a blog post or tweet.
So it's not about people being unwilling to pay it's about being unwilling to pay transactable amounts of money for content that's nowhere near worth those amounts.
depends on the content TBH. some (relatively few in the grand scheme of things, but "some" when focusig on otherwise helpful feeds) blogs are worth their weight in gold. some feel like they should pay me to even read it. I do wish a micropayment sort of system was feasible in general so we could test such models. But I'm guessing that's a logistics issue with payment vendors; they probably don't like small, disparate transactions anymore than a GPU.
Still, I've tried the closest thing for a few comic websites back then where you buy "coins" in bulk and purchase new releases a la carte (e.g. say, 2000 coins for $10, and each new chapter is 10 coins. so roughly 5 cents). Doesn't feel too bad.
As of now, any given random website is far more likely to have ads than not, and many of the drawbacks of getting served ads (tracking, data collection, and performance issues) arise before the page is even loaded enough for you to know they exist.
In one dimension. Maybe.
Influencers would still be a thing. So would SEO. The web would be like some medieval map with vast uncharted territories and "here be dragons" but also the few known sites where everyone in the known web lives.
Unless we dismantle media and tech monopolies, they will still dominate that web.
Maybe I've been drinking too much internet capitalism koolaid, but a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years.
I completely agree that an ad-free internet would not have seen numbers get big as quickly as what we've experienced, but it doesn't necessarily follow that an internet that makes numbers get big quickly is also the internet offering the best user experience.
Usually, user experience gets sacrificed to make the numbers get bigger, faster.
Would that be a bad thing?
I'm sure that's true, and it would be a bad thing for those people. But for the world at large? It's not clear to me at all that it would be bad.
I recognize the double-edgedness of that, too, though.
I mean, we just called them Encyclopedias back in my day. They won't be as high quality, complete, nor peer reviewed, but there are plenty of fan wikis powered entirely by free labor. no money in nor out.
Search is much harder, but I've been keeing an eye on Unlimited Kagi which seems set to do this very thing. Hope it succeeds.
That said, these days more and more guides and tribal knowledge is stored in discord servers. I don't know if that's better or worse. At least there's no ads.