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Comment by whamlastxmas | Hacker News Reader

By this logic, every TV station and website whose main revenue is ads are also ad companies, which I don’t think is accurate.

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Google income aside, Mozilla literally owns an ad company: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

I agree that TV stations and websites don't have to be purely vessels for advertising, but in today's climate of slim margins – due to an expectation that everything is 'free' – and sliding ethics, advertising lends more and more bias to operations. And that bias has been there as long as there has been advertiser funded operations.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/news_hole

We could just return to a culture of paying for things (that are conspicuously not tracked) and this whole imposition of advertising in our daily consumption can go away. But the vast majority of people simply don't care.

I think ads should not be allowed for anything at all in the digital world, including TV. In a world without ads, products would be known due to reputation. Ads are an assault on the limited resource of attention.

People say how can new products reach people, but the solution to that problem isn't ads but platforms/websites that catalog new products and allow for easy discovery.

Ads actually make the problem of finding new products worse because you only see a fraction of new products if you consume ads, primarily those from companies that already have lots of money to invest into ads.

It’s a nice dream, but enough people have to be willing to pay for things in preference to tolerating ads to not pay. Streaming services and some online news services provide this option, so it’s available. But asking for everything to be free and ad free is wishful thinking, at least outside government funded media (which is still paid by taxes)

> Streaming services and some online news services provide this option

Temporarily, before they inevitably add the ads back in even for paying users.

Public service broadcasting is pretty nice too. (Of course it shouldn't be the only model, but I think it's often overlooked.)

The CEO of the biggest French TV channel once said "We’re selling eyeballs to advertisers," so yes, it’s accurate.

If their revenue is from advertising, they’re in the advertising business.

There are other business models out there.

They are ad delivery vehicles (think: sports) and often structure programming around ad slots, so in some senses, they kind-of are.

Why not? What else would you call them?

We'd call them TV stations.

I mean, we call social media companies social media companies despite them being ad funded.

We call newspapers newspapers despite them being ad funded.

We call sports teams sports teams despite them being ad funded.

And we have also learned to use taxonomies and hierarchies and sets. Therefore the intersection between the set tv stations and the set ad companies is the set ad-funded tv stations. Ad-funded tv stations are a subcategory of the larger ad companies category.

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