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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

We really need to figure out a way to fund online journalism that doesn't rely on the diminishing returns of digital ads.

It's really getting extreme

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Sometimes I wish newspaper subscriptions had simply evolved into “here’s an E-reader. All it will ever do is show you this week’s worth of newspapers we’ve delivered to you. When you unsubscribe we’ll want it back. Again, it will never do anything but show you the newspaper.”

That would take a decade to turn a profit on each device. It is a cool idea, though - a glimpse of a world of friendly technology that will never happen

But even the newspaper itself was chock full of ads. Sometimes it was a full page ad. We seem to forget this in these discussions.

I have no issues with ad supported anything. I do have issues with the ad tech being used to have ads on a website. The actors running them have been shown to do very bad things at various levels from running malicious code, to running video underneath an image just to juice their numbers for charging their customers more. Because of their historical behavior, I will do everything in my powers to block them.

Create an ad system that is not evil, and I'll allow ads. Until then...

Those seem particular instances of adtech. Any service than runs malicious code in your browser is bad. I don't think websites are bad because some of them have malicious code.

I never claimed the sites are bad. I specifically said ad tech is bad. I block ads, not web sites. You're trying to make my comment into something it is not.

No, you've missed the point. You're saying all ad tech is bad because some has before served malware. I'm saying this isn't consistent - you don't avoid all websites because some of them serve malware.

No I block all ad ware so I can visit what ever website I want precisely because ad tech has shown itself to be malicious. Really not sure of your confusion on the point.

My point is: why do you visit websites when they've also been "shown to be malicious"?

Yeah, but newspaper ads weren't specifically targeted at you, and they were mostly full of the information you'd get directly from the source today - what movies are showing, at what time, or what hours that restaurant is open, or where the nearest "massage" place is. On that last one, the newspapers even did ads disguised as news stories. "Oh, good citizens, run far away from this desperate house of ill repute located at 123 Main Street, where just this past weekend the police found evidence of crimes against morality being committed. That's 123 Main Street, the green house with a blue door, not to be confused with 125 Main Street, the blue house with a green door. Yes, stay far away."

Back in the early Pocket PC days, I think it was called Microsoft Today would sync daily news stories to read offline (this was long before WiFi was affordable and ubiquitous).

I remember waiting for class in college and browsing stories and thinking that this was what the fire urn was going to be like for everyone. In some ways yes, but in most ways no.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

PBS needs a streaming platform more like YouTube and less like Prime. We’ve needed this for at least a decade.

PBS streams on YouTube, unfortunately.

They also stream on their PBS app, and if you donate to your local affiliate you can unlock access to most (all?) of their content.

https://www.pbs.org/explore/passport/

Could you relate this assertion back to your experience with the article at hand?

If you read the article on a phone, there are at least 2 pop over ads that take half the screen, with a full screen pop over at the end. And all throughout the article there are flashy video ads that take the entire screen as you scroll.

This constant attention grabbing destroys whatever narrative is being crafted.

May I ask why you’re not running an ad blocker?

By running an ad blocker you are forcing them to create more ads, to make up their losses.

Hardly, if done correctly, you're probably improving the CTR by reducing the number of ad impressions that would never result in a click.

The goal is to eventually make ads completely unbearable for the handful of people that allow them, eventually destroying that whole toxic sector.

Imagine you're a mother, with a baby. Full of motherly love. High on bonding hormones and such.

Breastfeeding. So nice.

Now give that baby a chihuahua's head. Grotesque. And those teeth are sharp. But still, it's your baby. So you go with it.

Now give the baby spider claws. Then 20 eyeballs.

At what point do you reject your child?

I don’t understand the analogy really, are ads the baby? I don’t think ads are anybody’s baby, ads are the monetization strategy of last resort.

I'm not the person you're asking to, but in case you're interested in another opinion, I also no longer use ad blockers. I think it's fair to consume content in the way the author intended, especially because it seems that ads often give the author or the platform some revenue. That said, I do refuse to browse sites where the ads get too annoying. So I just close the tab and go on with my life without it. It turns out I rarely need most of the stuff that I come across randomly.

Even USA gov recommends running an ad blocker for safety reasons.

This is what I do as well. I don't like the price of entry, so I don't partake. Not my stuff to take outside of the price of entry.

I started using an ad blocker, oddly enough, because a web comic I read had a shitty habit forever of having ads above the comic that would load in and shift the page down. That shift would be late enough that it would happen just as I was clicking on the comic to make it full screen. Now I get a popup saying “please support us” and I think I’ve supported you enough, sir, with unplanned clicks on ads and whatever tracking bullshit they’re doing.

And how exactly is using an adblocker depriving the website owner of revenue if you simply close the tab instead? And 'annoying ads' are the precise reason I use an adblocker; if they were as intrusive as google's ads from the early 2000's I would hardly care, but we've long careened past that. I'm unsure the premise of your argument makes much economic sense.

Before trying to answer you, let me just reassure that I am not, by any means, preaching that people should stop using ad blockers. I was just sharing how I manage to not bother using one anymore.

You're right that using an ad blocker isn't worse than closing the tab when it comes to revenue that comes from actually clicking on the ads. And I can only assume that's how it works, I don't know.

What I was trying to say is that authors intend to share their content with ads. It's like having the ads there is what they're charging me for their otherwise free content. Not that I click on the ads. Not that I even read the ads. Just to have the ads there.

Half the time, it doesn't bother me too much, and I consume their content to their terms.

However, many sites are unreadable with so many ads. So, using an ad blocker would help me consume their content, yes. And since it's very rare for me to actually click on an ad, it wouldn't make much economic difference to them anyway.

The central point of my comment wasn't about this, though. It was that most of the internet isn't worth reading. So when I'm faced with content I'm not willing to "pay" for by having all the ads on my screen, it's okay to just let them go. It doesn't really matter. They won't be missed.

So I prefer to see the ads from those I keep reading, just because it's what they've implicitly asked to do by sharing their content.

Then again, this is not an advice. I'm not defending a point. That's just what I've been doing.

While I run an ad blocker, I think it is something everybody ought to do, and I can’t think of many reasons not to do it, IMO we should still consider the blocker-less experience to be the default one. For better or worse, (almost certainly the latter) it is what you get out of the box.

There’s something very odd going on with this site, on iOS I get no ads. Maybe Safari is blocking them or something.

Do you have an ad blocker? Or just the built in user tracking controls?

I wonder if it’s confusing their ad network.

Sites need to charge for subscriptions, then, and write content worth paying for. Maybe give us a headline and charge access per story. But charge up front.

That means losing 90% of "journalism" on the web at least, but that's fine. Most of it is filler for ads anyway.

There are probably a lot of independent online journals I'd gladly support with money even though I don't read them and don't even know they exist.

A curated independent journalism fund could do wonders. I donate to my local NPR station because it's good and I want to ensure something widely accessible still exists, but they also need my money less than smaller outfits. Even if I don't read those smaller journals, I think it's quite important for them to exist as an option and for those who do read them.

This doesn't work because the ad farms will just copy the content and make the profit on it. We need to kill advertising as a viable business model, because it consumes all other forms of business.

Ad blockers are ethical.

> the ad farms will just copy the content

How would that be legal?

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