Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I use ublock now too, but it's this really annoying feedback loop; people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers, and making the website worse and more likely for them to install an ad blocker etc...

I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.

View on HN

> people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers

I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few, and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.

Some sites have a message like "hey, we can't serve you ads, you must be using an ad blocker, stop that and absorb the advertising as is your duty because we need the money". But maybe that's just desperation and they aren't losing much to ad blockers anyway.

Many people believe that the loss is great, especially web site owners, which would certainly explain such messages. But lived experience shows at least me that most people don’t even know what an ad blocker is.

It's clearly enough of an impact for Google to spend effort killing uBlock on Chrome, and (attempting) to block it on Youtube. Obviously Google is huge, and even a small percentage of users is still a lot of money on the table.

We can only draw the obvious conclusion: Namely that Google plans to introduce a lot more ads once they have an iron grip on the consumer. If Google did that before Google destroyed ad blockers, regular people would indeed start to use ad blockers.

That's possible, but I think it's premature to think this is part of some grand plan. What likely happened is that Google estimated the cost to fund a team to shut down ad blockers was less then the money they were losing from ad blockers. Maybe it's part of a larger initiative, but I'd be hesitant to assume that without more evidence.

Remember that Google has established a pattern of hiding their true motivations so well that even lawyers can't find them (internal chats "off the record"), and they're in trouble with the law as a result.

Things aren’t free, but alternative business models to ad-supported have not much of an opportunity to develop. The hope is that the feedback loop you’ve identified will iterate to the point that ad supported content becomes truly unbearable, and eventually enough room will open up that some alternative can develop.

These sites aren't adding ads to punish the non-ad blocking users, they're doing it because Google Ads keeps slashing the premiums to keep more of the pie for themselves.

The feedback loop doesn't work like that. You are implying there is some target revenue that the website aims to hit, and if it fails to meet that target it adds more ads.

But that's just nonsense, if a website can get more revenue from more ads, they are gonna put more ads right away, they aren't gonna wait until their revenue drops under some magic number before they do.

That's a positive feedback loop. Ads are the root of all evil on the internet, and the end of that loop is "no more ads". And I don't want to hear shit about the internet dying without ads, in the same thread people are talking about cloudflare serving TBs of data for free or a $4 unmetered VPS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com