The correct amount of ads is zero
manuelmoreale.com
manuelmoreale.com
On the internet, the fact is this: Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. In fact, they will be happy to take money from every source they can. The fact that The Verge is doing so reflects that they understand their audience and are trying to meet them halfway. It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user.
This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
Why would I, as a consumer, compromise on what I want to make some MBA's life easier? That almost sounds like corporate welfare. Businesses sign up to take risks the moment they're created.
A news organization doesn't need to be in business. There is nothing unjust or morally wrong with letting a business shutdown because they couldn't figure out a sustainable way to be profitable (assuming for sake of argument that most people don't subscribe due to the ads, which idk if that would really happen).
> This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
The OP is a customer of the Verge who is rejecting their offer for a new subscription service they don't like. That's called "voting with your wallet", and its the free market working as intended.
You presumably want access to the Verge's content. This is unsustainable without some revenue. You're compromising to continue to get what you want, not to make some MBA's life easier.
The tension between those two forces will find a natural result. Maybe the company goes out of business and whatever the company did is no longer available to anyone. Maybe they lose half their customers but still make more money and buy themselves yachts, and their remaining customers are satisfied.
As is the verge’s pricing and ad strategy, you think they didn’t expect some churn by making a pricing change? The author is free to shout it from their soapbox but chances are the verge already expected some of this sentiment and is totally ok with a “ok losing these customers” approach
Ads are a scourge.
Because of things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Newsroom_cuts_...
Which is only one of many. Just came to my mind because once Pulitzer Price winning, while now nothing special.
https://www.westword.com/ is more interesting, at least for local stuff, if one considers 4 to 5hrs drive in good weather, or a short hop through the air 'local' :)
Similar stuff with https://www.aspentimes.com/ which is now more or less generic drivel,
in the same template as much other stuff around there. (See News Neighbors down there, click and compare)
Some of those migrated to https://www.aspendailynews.com/ which isn't better that much, but still a little bit.
Maybe that's just because of the location, and the economic pressures of a former mininig village,
which changed into a fully gentrified resort village, milking masses of tourists for the 'unique experience'.
Which it still has, far away from the tourist traps, if one can afford it :)
There isn't that much to report, which would be public, or the locals being interested in.
There aren't that many anyways.
The OP should indeed vote with their wallet. They will have to find some other source of news/entertainment. (I really wish that those two weren't the same thing, but that's another compromise that we haven't figured out how to avoid while still getting paid.) Maybe they'll get a deal elsewhere that is more to their liking.
I honestly wouldn't mind a subscription that reduces ads to the point of being _non-obnoxious_, but I'm in an odd position because I pay for YouTube Premium, which doesn't have ads, and costs a lot more money to distribute (video, text, and images vs text & images), but I grew up in the newspaper age which were chock full of ads free or subscription.
Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want.
I just wish it were possible to pay $1 for an article whose headline sounds interesting, or someone recommended. Subscribe, even with a free trial? Pass.
The free market is great. But we should not deny it when it leads to bad outcomes. If we do, then we're no better than those who say "real communism has never been tried".
All shadiness aside it’s an interesting model. Cuts a lot of the middlemen out.
yes. that's the cost of freedom. Stupidity is freedom as well.
>Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy?
I want good creators compensated for good stories. MBAs will get paid no matter what. that's sort of what they minmax for. And they don't care what industry they suck off of.
>I just wish it were possible to pay $1 for an article whose headline sounds interesting, or someone recommended
$1 for an article would be way overkill for 99.999% of the population. the microtransaction approach can't work because you really can't charge much more than a dollar for any digital transaction to begin with. You can always go for the "tokens" approach, but that's a much older and assumedly unpopular model.
>The free market is great. But we should not deny it when it leads to bad outcomes.
At the same time, denying the free market because it doesn't go the way we want just makes us sound hypocritcal. Fortunately, most results of this model do not give us scams and propoganda. There's enough to discuss without going into the fringes.
Most people won't do it when it's offered. The few who do aren't enough to be worth implementing it.
If they don't get that, and are too stupid to push for that, with all their journalistic force and might, maybe they aren't that important, and never were to begin with? Let them all burn in a bonfire of their very own.
But it is currently a political weapon being wielded by a political party. I don't expect that problem will be solved any time soon, but it's not fair to blame that on capitalism. Politicians ruin everything no matter what economic system they're in.
> Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want.
But I don't want ad supported journalism!
> we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media
If you think all advertising is immoral, then this probably doesn't do anything for you. However, if you have privacy and performance concerns, this is a big win I think.
Generally I like what the verge does, and I would gladly pay if it included their podcast being ad free. The Verge’s podcast is the only podcast I listen to that I don’t pay for, and it’s full of repeating programmatic ads for crypto companies, sports betting, and cars.
And the never ending struggle to increase/maintain subscriptions for some companies probably has something to do with that.
For me personally, and I expect a not insignificant portion of users, paying for a subscription is primarily to remove advertising completely. Anything else means its not worth subscribing, so not offering that level of option rules us out as customers.
I've spent a minor amount of time and energy reducing the amount of advertising I see, from (pre-streaming) downloading shows I already pay for legal access to with commercials removed with automated systems, to being an early adopter of streaming services and dropping cable, locally running pi-hole on top of ad-blockers and using VPN's, privacy focused browsers etc.
The payoff has been immense for my family, to the point watching TV in other locations and being bombarded by advertising is jarring and uncomfortable, and the manipulation tactics become more obvious and gross the less you inundate yourself with them. Obviously you can't get away from all advertising, indirect, product placement etc. is everywhere, but I found a significant improvement in quality of life.
I would also make the argument that social media engagement hacking at its root traces to advertising and we blame social media for the problems when advertising was the true problem. Advertising as a revenue stream results in trying to optimize and improve engagement, often by gamifying or moving towards sensationalism to drive up numbers to increase revenue, most of which is negative for the user and little actually positive.
I also put quite a bit of effort into removing ads from my and my family's eyeballs. I hate them. But because of that I already don't see ads on The Verge so for me a sub isn't about removing ads at all. I'll sub to support the work and whatever other perks come along with it (full-text RSS for one)
Another way to describe reality is that people can choose to subscribe to various substacks or newsletters instead. On those platforms subscribers get zero ads, they get more in depth and more thoughtful articles, and because the system has much less overhead modest subscription revenue is sufficient. Vox also does video reviews, but then again, there are also many high quality tech youtubers. Vox certainly has the right to charge for a subscription and then serve the subscribers ads. And people have a right to walk away from a bad deal. Vox could disappear tomorrow at no great loss to society. We might like some of the reporting Vox does, but we don't need it.
Vox media has raised about 450m (according to the first google result). Modest profitability is not enough for Vox Media because they need to secure a significant exit for their investors. This puts them at odds with their readers and subscribers. Not that laudable if you ask me. They made a bet they were going to disrupt traditional media and become a new great media platform. But now it looks like Vox itself is getting disrupted. Like newspapers of old clinging to a business model that no longer exists.
But I don't want to pay less. I want my data to not be sold to the highest bidder, that's all.
As it stands there's no option for people like me other than not subscribing.
This is very much like the situation with smartphones these days: they cost less because you get a bunch of bloatware that you can't uninstall.
I don't want that on my device, so I went with an offering deemed "overpriced" because it has less of such crap than others and thus costs about $250 more. Ideally it should be zero, but that's the best I could get.
sigh I wish this was easier to achieve. But at least in the case of The Verge the sub removes third party ads so it should increase privacy even if it doesn't remove all the ads.
This might seem common on HN but IRL people don’t give much attention to ad related privacy and are probably much more concerned with the fact they have to fork over a CC and a few bucks
I don't recall in the past a company needing my identity required or be tracked just because I bought a newspaper. I pay the $1 for the newspaper and no more interaction or relationship after that.
Ads are OK but why do all the ad companies need to track me and know my movements and just to show me an ad? It's basically malware, stalking. Ads are zero advantage to me the consumer for what I lose in privacy.
My assumption is that the salaries of reporters, editors was paid for by ads.
The nominal fee for the paper was to pay for the pulp, ink. I mean if you just printed up millions of papers and gave them away, people would pick them up simply as raw material for lining their bird cages, for papier-mâché, to insulate their cardboard box home on the corner of 12th and Main.....
Nonetheless, the first half of your point—the ads usually paid for all the reporting—is correct.
They’re a great way to keep up with the actions and gripes of the local community. Being such small operations, there is very light editing and the reporter’s point of view often comes through pretty clearly.
All paid for via ads from local businesses. Quite a lot of the ads are from real estate agents, which I think reflects the belief that a lot of tourists are picking up the papers in addition to residents.
The generally dire journalism situation these days is there is mostly no physical distribution and physical advertising dollars have become digital dimes. And local news--which was never a really thriving business--is basically dead.
This should be an absolute benefit, not a relative benefit. Who’s to say the number of ads won’t ratchet up in the future? Almost surely will. Let’s say a subscription customer sees 50 ads today vs 100 a non-subscription customer sees. Tomorrow, they 2x that – sub customer sees 100 ads, non-sub customer sees 200. Does a sub customer derive smug satisfaction that they’re seeing fewer ads than a non-sub customer? How would one even know? They’re just seeing ads.
The correct amount of ads for a subscription service (from a UX perspective) is zero.
2. People do notice when $7/mo is cheaper than $16/mo which is possible because there are still ads.
At least in Germany, this has changed quite a lot. The publishers are naming the offers "Pur Abo" or similar.
This is not perfect as one analysis[0] is showing, but for me, on the good way.
[0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2020/nicht-ganz-ohne/ (in German)
Edit: Added German analysis of these offers.
I do think The Verge offering this could lead other U.S. publishers to follow suit, especially if it’s successful.
1. A very small percentage of website visitors will end up paying for a subscription.
2. They make way less than $5 per user per month from ads.
The money they'd lose by providing an ad-free experience to paying customers should be a rounding error. Removing ads will also increase conversion, but who knows whether or not that will be enough to offset the revenue lost.
I don't particularly care about their "business reality" - if you're an online news outlet you're not paying the costs of printing and distribution - your expenses are just journalist salaries and the marginal costs of keeping a website running. If you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
>if you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
That's just American labor in a nutshell. if a jounralist is making full time national minimum wage ($7.25, 40 hours a week), that's very roughly $1000/month post tax. that very pooly paid jounalist needs 200 subcribers to sustain them. \
costs are going up, but readership and revenue is not. This doesn't end well for anyone. And yes, many businesses are dying right now.
>I don't particularly care about their "business reality"
if you don't care about them, I'm not sure why they'd care about your opinions on how they run.
Why not offer an ad-free tier?
There may be ad agreements that preempt their ability to offer ad-free at this time, likely in the case of ultra-premium advertisers.
It could also just be good ol’ internal bureaucracy at play. Maybe there was a turf war, and this was the best they could do while keeping everyone happy.
Edit: The point in the other comment about it affecting reader demographics is a good one too.
What narrow idea of “a media business” must have ads even when you pay, and why do they have to be different from everything else?
That’s like saying Verizon has ads because I see ads on the internet.
If YouTube would force content creators to upload sponsor-free versions for premium subscribers, the subscription might actually be worth it.
I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.
This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way. Users love it, but advertisers hate it and it craters the value of the ad space you sell to whomever doesn't think it's worth it/can't afford it.
If you set the subscription fee above this value, you as a service will be better off regardless of the advertizers.
So the subscription should be free. And with less ads.
My heart bleeds for the poor advertisers. /s
Actually, no it doesn't. Not even a little bit.
Having a company double dip and concluding that's somehow laudable is absurd.
>People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper
Because the product isn't delivering $5 worth of perceived value per day. Trying to extract $5 anyway via stuff like this is the wrong answer.
As a consumer I definitely lean on the "if I'm paying a subscription, I expect zero ads" side of the fence. It just has to be worth the additional price for me (The Verge is not)
There are few (if any) media businesses I care about enough to compromise on my requirements just to help them stay in business. Certainly not The Verge.
As for me, I’m happy to either not see the content or use workarounds that let me see it for free with no ads, i.e. ad-blockers + reader mode and services like archive.ph.
Which leads to the conclusion that the company that most disrupted the newspaper industry was not Google or Facebook but Craigslist.
Were the ads run on the web not built on a separate business that attempts to violate the reasonable sense of privacy the average person expects, and didn’t attempt to warp consumer’s expectations of privacy, I think there would be less objections.
I don't think newspaper ads are a good analogy either since the consumption model of a dead-tree newspaper isn't such that you get the ads thrown into your face when trying to read an article. And classifieds specifically I wouldn't even call ads, more of a community note board service.
If the ads stay in the boundary areas of the page or well-behaved interstitials that's one thing. In fact, ads can sometimes be interesting and entertaining and most importantly can make markets more competitive bringing you a better variety goods and services.
When they screw up the page, jump around, cover things up, don't have proper controls to "x" them out, use confusing dark patterns, generate fake clicks (ever think it's not an accident that some sites jiggle around so much?), need 50 trackers to be (kinda) sure parties aren't screwing each other, have 20x the bandwidth cost of the content that's something else.
Also there's the content of the ads. There is a subprime tranch that includes Temu but is best represented by prerolls on YouTube that are best advertising sketchy energy drinks and supplements and worse are outright crypto scams. I can see some humor in Temu but not in the scams.
I guarantee that the majority of these zealous anti-ad people will not subscribe to an ad-free service for The Verge.
For the most part, their hobby is not subscribing to online publications, it’s complaining about the subscriptions at online publications that they would almost certainly never subscribe to.
And yes, I understand that this doesn’t apply to the ones of people who will reply here claiming that they would never do this.
I am saying that The Verge made a business decision to balance ad load and subscriber cost to potentially bring in more subscribers.
They probably did the math and realized that charging people $15 a month would not bring in many subscribers, and that they could have charged $5 a month with regular ad load, but they found this $7 sweet spot where they could give people the best of both worlds. And the $50 model means people are more committed long-term making it more valuable for them.
I would guess that “reduced ad load” means that they would only put premium advertisers, like the stuff you would see in glossy magazines, in front of those readers.
I trust given how careful they were with rolling this out that they did the math and tried to strike a balance to please the most people.
Someone like the New York Times still has ads for digital subscribers but they're not crazy pop-ups all over the place. I'd probably prefer they weren't there but they don't really detract from my reading experience.
I get that some people vehemently hate ads and most marketing.
The biggest problem is that anti-consumer behavior causes harm. With advertisement it brings disinformation, spying, abuse of the most vulnerable in society, general distrust, are often a crime (scams, fraud, targets children, and usually ignore local advertisement laws), and siphons money to a third party which usually is outside of the country and do not pay taxes. The benefits of anti-consumer behavior are generally not worth the downsides.
As for the other point you’re making, that’s complete nonsense. You don’t differentiate your revenue streams by serving a sub par product to your paying customers.
Serve those stupid ads to free users, treat your paying customers with respect.
As someone in media, I’m tired of well-intentioned media outlets try to strike a reasonable balance only to get yelled at for it like they aren’t already walking a tightrope. They have staffs of people to pay for, payroll. Travel budgets. Offices. Legal bills. And that they get hell for trying to give an inch, in my opinion, sucks.
If you want them to offer an ad-free tier, tell them that directly! Given that they are clearly thinking about it suggests they might listen to you.
But your binary way of approaching this is not helping and ultimately discourages companies who want to wean themselves off of adtech. Ripping off the band-aid is a lot harder than you’re making it out to be.
I clutch my principles rather tightly, especially in cases like this. I will never pay for a streaming service whose first payment tier is "less ads", nor will I ever pay for a _newspaper_ of all things whose first premium tier is "less ads".
I don't think double-dipping is laudable, and I don't think we should encourage it. Their (in)ability to fund their business isn't my problem, frankly.
>This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
Ads is evil has been a thing on HN for a very very long time.
They can do what they want, but I don't really care if businesses that rely on ads go bankrupt.
Most of the Internet ads are medical issues, financial scams, weight loss scams etc. Most of these are accompanied by disgusting pictures. These ads combine the worst of classic Email spam and the yellow press.
Give me better ads and I might switch off the adblocker. I'd even tolerate a banner Coca Cola ad if done tastefully and if it is the only ad on the page.
There's a high likelihood that your adblocker won't be able to block those anyway.
But no, you probably won't switch it off. That's because you can only know the ad quality after you've been exposed to them, and after your computer has run their code, and after you've faced the risk of them maintaining the universal, persistent eavesdrop on your life.
That doesn't mean that every single person consuming/using the product needs to pay either. Patreon and similar services have proven that if what you make is of high enough quality and provides enough value, it's possible to convince a large enough subset of the consumers to pay enough to cover the costs of production. Especially with online services where the cost difference between producing for 1 person vs 1000 is nearly negligible. The few can, and often do, subsidize the many. And if that changes over time, then the product ceases to be valuable enough to be worth producing and should simply stop being made.
And I'd say this is even true of news and things that people might argue are for the public good. In my opinion, most "news" today isn't actual informative news and doesn't really serve the public. But of the vanishing little left that does, if it informs and educates the citizenry in a way that improves the lives and stability of the country as a whole, and if its natural cost is more than can be reasonably covered by willing consumers, then there's a reasonable argument for covering the cost with taxes. Put sufficient legal barriers between the government funding and the content being produced to prevent government manipulation/propaganda and make sure the press can operate unimpeded. My best idea for such a government funded news source is to write into law that said news source's budget is dependent solely upon country population and country GDP, all staffing decisions are made internally, and leaders are decided by citizen vote, but I'm sure there are other ways people can come up with for maintaining a free but government/tax funded press agency. But ad-funded (of which I think even public radio/tv has effectively become), creates perverse incentives that drive the mission away from actually informing and educating.
People can still pay for tech reviews, or travel advice, talking head current events opinion shows, or whatever news is in its current form if they want. Privately owned/operated press can still exist if it's useful enough for people to find it valuable and worth the cost. But advertising just ruins everything eventually.
This is not true. In many cases, we can see that people value a service by their returning usage, but... they often want other people to pay for it.
Also, government-funded comes with its own strings which may become more obvious than you like in the coming years.
Ads have been a primary revenue driver for news media going back hundreds of years, including to when the US was codifying the civic value of news into its governing principles.
The idea that revenue choice is binary or that if you have to use ads you shouldn’t be in business is a very modern one, and one that’s outside of historical norms.
Print ads don't get your personal data and sell them to who knows who. Internet ads have become synonymous with this practice. Comparing them to print ads without this consideration is disingenuous.
I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. It's not sustainable for me to do pay for all the websites I visit. And me randomly paying only some tiny subset of them doesn't make any sense to me. I'd need some prioritized list. And it would have to be a very short one because I'm simply not rich enough to maintain lots of multi dollar subscriptions per month. And I also don't want to micromanage a lot of payments and subscriptions.
The Verge, which was mentioned in the article is a good example of a website that I don't value enough to get anywhere near that short list. They have a lot of competition reporting more or less similar stuff that I wouldn't miss them. In fact, I can't recall reading anything by them lately. I guess not a lot of their stuff makes it to the HN front page. Probably because it's just not that interesting.
Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.
> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.
While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.
I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.
I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr
As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they?
"Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.
I basically agree with this sentiment, but one place where it can be a tricky balance (not saying that's the case here!) is "native advertising".
For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Which bits of this are ads? Well the behind the scenes post and interview could theoretically have been produced anyway, they're within the scope of the site, but in this case they weren't prioritised, certainly not for launch day, it was only by the whole collaboration being paid for that they got made. Are they ads? Yes they are ads. How would a loyal subscriber feel about those parts being hidden from them though? I imagine they would be miffed about that.
Native advertising like this has a whole spectrum of quality and the worst native ads are very explicitly ads that have no value to typical readers. However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
How do you resolve this? No idea. If I were paying I'd want to see that content assuming it's good quality. Others would not on the basis of bias or a more philosophical opposition to ads.
That's akin to saying a person wants some of that "good" cancer.
If I am paying, I am supporting the editorial staff. It's their decision what to report on and how. Paid-for content, even if it's just for priority coverage, compromises the integrity of the editorial staff as well as their ability to curate (not to mention a clear disincentive to be critical of the ad buyer's claims).
It starts when TheBrink publishes a high quality behind the scenes piece about a scam mobile game instead of a truly great indie game just because the latter is not as profitable and cannot afford to buy the ad.
It ends with the entire catalogue of the publication being paid for by advertisers. Much like some influencer's instagram feed. Paying for access to an ad feed is unacceptible.
To add: "the firewall" between the editorial and business sides of a publication is the basic prerequisite for ethical journalism, even if it's an entertainment rag. Advertising that masquarades as reporting is therefore the worst and most toxic, i.e., cancerous, of the bunch.
So I do not agree that native ads are something that should be desired.
The ads just weren't as obtrusive, privacy-invading and annoying as what we have now. A lot of them were fun to read, had amazing photography, because creativity still mattered, not just volume. Unfortunately alternatives to bring back this more harmless and tasteful form of advertising to the web (RIP The Deck) have failed.
What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
One is designed to keep you on the site (paid content) while the other is attempting to go else where.
The effect of paid content can not be discounted. It's important to recognize that a paid review or a game or movie can result in a different outcome, even subtly.
I remember in the golden days of game review sites it was clear when writers were fudging the reviews because the user experience would be starkly different. The 'we were told to ignore the bugs' excuses always followed because the gig was paid.
This here is key.
If I'm reading the synopsis for an anime series on a website whose main topic is anime/manga/novels/etc, and I see an ad in an unobstrusive and non-annoying location talking about this one new anime figurine or plushie or some other merch, you bet I'm going to check it out.
These ads don't require cross-site tracking or third-party resources. They can even be shown with the strictest Content-Security-Policy. Even if they send you to a different website.
If I'm logged in, and you give me a way to tell you "I don't like this shit, stop showing me stuff related to this series/artist/etc" (i.e. a clearly tagged blocklist, not a vague "I don't like this" and you guessing what I mean by "this"), I'll even help you refine your ads for me.
But that's only because I care about this content.
And because it's done in a respectful way. For example, I don't mind those classic 88x31 "affiliate links" (ads) or blog rolls (also ads, at least in my eyes), or self-promotion sections (ads) in some communities, or when someone I follow on Bluesky posts about how they're selling a thing (also ad). If one of those gets through my adblocker, I won't go out of my way to add a rule for those.
But the moment a third-party script is involved, or data selling begins, or there's annoyances like putting random shit between paragraphs I'm reading, or popups, or "subscribe to the newsletter"-style popups, I'm out. I'm either blocking your whole site on uBlock Origin, or at DNS level if it was bad enough.
TL;DR: I don't care about ads. I care about things that piss me off.
What's not fine is seeing an ad for the new game when I didn't go to a games news site and didn't click on such a link. I don't want to be interrupted with games news while I'm watching a video on DIY. I shouldn't be shown appraisals of the new game while shopping for a new car radio.
Ads should be opt-in.
Ads have to be aggressively pervasive because they're not very effective, and the attempted solution is even more invasive advertising for even more marginal gains.
Of course this will never happen because search engines are very effective forms of advertising, but ads could retreat from many mediums without significant impact to marketing.
in some countries (France as an example), if there was payment in any form, it has to be disclosed otherwise that's an undisclosed ad and very much illegal
Here's one overview: https://www.kevel.com/blog/ftc-compliant
Sure, but does this ever get sold on a site that _doesn't_ already have ads in the first place? You literally mention "increased placement on ad units", so I'd argue that if this site is directly supported, they've already violated the principle in a way that doesn't involve "native ads", and if they aren't directly supported, this principle doesn't apply to them. I'm skeptical that there are any non-hypothetical examples of sites that charge for access and make deals for "native ads" in the form of content but don't have any actual ad units that are displayed to users.
If I'm wrong and this is a thing, I don't think that's it's really that hard to solve. When a user signs up for a paid subscription, as part of the sign-up process, show a screen that explains that sometimes the company will partner with sponsors to produce content about their products, link/screenshot to a couple examples to make sure the user understands what you're talking about, and then give them the choice to either have content like that shown or hidden, and then put that as a toggle they can flip whenever they want in their account settings and mention that fact when you prompt them for their initial choice. If companies don't way to pay for a partnership because their metrics show that too many users turn off the publication's sponsored content from showing, that's just a sign that the system is working, since users shouldn't be paying for sponsored content that they don't actually want to see.
but that's not it - they're still going to serve you banners, even if you pay. just, fewer of them. and they're going to gate content behind the paywall. it's the "have your cake and eat it too" of paywalls.
>we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media.
Weird that This is not the case in the US?
Advertising is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, to an extent far beyond what you're used to from home. Posters, billboards, fliers, TV commercials, product placement, celebrity endorsements - you can barely step outside without being bombarded by yet another obnoxious advertisement. And "obnoxious" is an understatement: American adverts are noticeably more loud, garish, cheesy, repetitive and attention-grabbing.
It's really quite something. And it's exhausting.
Interesting, why?
In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.
One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.
How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?
Most customers don't know themselves that a solution to their problem (which they might not even notice) exists.
Manipulative ads are bad, yes. But ads that expand your knowledge of what's available in the world are good in my opinion.
They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.
However, I agree with the position that all ads with some small exceptions are a negative thing. I think the incentives behind advertising are inherently perverse because of what they are at their core, an attempt to manipulate (if they work then a successful attempt!). They are dishonest and inauthentic by design. It’s possible to create an ad that is like “hey this thing exists and this is strictly what it does without any exaggeration” but that basically never happens because the people who make ads have no external incentive to do that.
I think a much more ideal situation is where a user searches for something on a search engine, or an LLM or whatever, and they are shown as unbiased as possible results. This way the people making good products get their exposure and the people looking stuff get the stuff they want. Of course there’s a lot of problems in practice with that as well.
I don’t claim to have a solution, and I don’t think making an add is like super immoral, but I think ads are a scourge on our society and culture.
Back when Google was great, they kind of acted as an advertising police on the entire internet, keeping ads unobtrusive and negatively ranking sites with bad user experiences. That system worked pretty well back in the day (although definitely not perfect), and I think it gives a good model to start from if we as a society ever decide to try and fix this hellscape we're living in.
I never hated ads when we had full-page ads in magazines and you had to skip multiple pages of ads to get to the actual articles. But selling my data makes them too much money, so I do my best to never have them load on the internet.
It's difficult to run a business without advertising in a world full of advertising. If others can get to your customers before they find you then yes that's a problem. But all you get from paying to advertise is to get back to where you would have been without ads (assuming your competitors spend a similar amount).
Ads should show if and only if the user asked for them. There are plenty of people who intentionally opt out of ad blockers to support their favorite websites, or who enjoy browsing ads and shopping. There's a reason ad-only TV channels (24-hour infomercial stuff) are viable despite being able to be turned off at will, and plenty of people subscribe to product-promotion magazines (catalogues). I'm sure there are websites for those interests, too.
What should be outlawed is mixing unsolicited content into solicited. If I solicit a video on black holes, or a blog article on Python, it should not be allowed to interrupt it with a dishonest, manipulative appraisal of some VPN service. That's immoral and disgusting.
If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.
I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible.
BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience.
So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making.
If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.
Then it gives more power to those who already have the most of it.
It also normalizes lying, being intrusive, and manufacturing damaging social norms.
Tracking is worse, but all ads are toxic.
just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better
People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for them) that are full of ads. International flights have ads on their entertainment. Flights by some airlines I've been on have ads just after the safety instructions. I've been on flights where they have ads for shopping while on the plane.
All of these things happen not because people approve of them, but because they have no choice. Every company in those industries is doing this because they want more profits. Companies do have the choice, but they would flood your eyeballs with ads 24/7 if it was socially acceptable. So they push that line as far as they can take it before people start complaining. And that's how we got to where we are now.
The thing most people don't consciously think about is that advertising is brainwashing and psychological manipulation. It's designed to embed products and ideas into your psyche to get you to do something or think a certain way. Separating me from my money is extortion, though fairly benign. What I find truly insidious is putting thoughts into my head. Political ads and propaganda are weapons of war since they manipulate how societies think and behave. They have the ability to influence how people vote, to topple governments, to cause civil unrest and deep distrust in societies. How most of the world isn't seeing the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing in the past decade as a direct consequence of ad-fueled social manipulation is beyond me.
To speak nothing of the multi-billion dark industry of data brokers, and companies hoovering up and profiting off of our data in perpetuity.
Advertising is evil to its core and is the most harmful yet normalized industry we've ever invented.
Back in the day (yes, I'm that old) the selling point of cable was "TV without any ads". It was marketed as expensive and upscale TV, though. And people don't really want to pay for content, so this business model didn't work out in the end.
If i can legally block/skip/cirvumvent it, i still will. When reading a magazine, i will try and skip the ads. I block as much ads on my internet connection as possible, because i get to say what comes in and goes out.
And companies may complain about my totally legal actions. Not that i am going to to anything about their complaints, for i do not care and never will, but they may totally complain.
Comanies may also try and circumvent my actions to force the ads as long as their actions are legal. I also understand that people do not want to play this cat and mouse game.
However. When products tend to be a certain necessity and in reality you cannot choose but to consume or purchase a specific thing (Microsoft Office for instance. Yes i know there alternatives, but do you really have a choice?), things get a bit weird or shady.
Companies may still legally stuff ads in those 'necessary' products, but it's not something you really want.
You don't 'need' a streaming service or a Verge subscrition and can perfectly survice without having one, but when you are paying for one and you're still getting a bunch of ads, it does not feel right. It feels you're getting screwed because of that weird fine print in a contract.
Companies stopped caring about their customers need as much as possible. They only think about making money. I stopped caring about companies and their products as much as possible. I only think about spending as less as possible of my money. You reap what you sow.
It is unacceptable behavior. I do check how much uBlock Origin has to block for a website of a business and that does inform my opinion of them quite severely. Biggest detractor: Google analytics. It will always be blocked, and not be loaded, but if I see it on their website, expect my opinion of them to fall quite a few levels. Combine that with some JS only website, then they are already lost. I then know they neither care about user experience nor accessibility, and if that was a potential enployer, they would have dropped out of that category, because I don't want to work in a dystopia shop.
Those ads are far less egregious than the kinds of online ads we're discussing. If online ads were the equivalent—static, hosted on the same site, free of data collection—then not only would the experience be much more pleasant, we wouldn't even be able to block them.
I'd prefer a world where we pay for services we are receiving.
The assumption is that you always pay. Either with your information, or with your money. But the key word there is Either.
Not the question. It was "if the company already offers a less ads for money service" then should "less" mean "zero"?
> People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads.
Is this supposed to prove anything? They don't have a choice. If they offered
a) Lots of ads for $X
b) Many ads for $Y
c) No ads for $Z
How do you see that working out? I would expect (a) and (c) to be massively more popular than (b).
It's just another case of people confusing "What I personally want" with "What actually leads to a sustainable business/ecosystem".
I honestly think people get confused about this because we are so accustomed to getting what we want.
It's ridiculous the amount of money spent, people's time spent, all on a quest to make the world an uglier and more hostile place.
I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.[1]
For all it's faults facebook advertising is similar, you can just scroll past an advert if it's of no interest. I don't find their adverts overly annoying.
Plain, non-animated non-creepy banner ads I've never minded. What I mind are:
1. Ads that are intrusive and distracting
2. Pages that have more ads than actual content
3. Ads that chase you around for two weeks trying to get you to buy something you just bought.
I mean yeah, if I'm paying $20/mo it had better be ad free. But if I'm paying $4/mo, having tasteful ads interspersed among the content is probably fine.
As an indie web developer, after trying many "ad policies", I believe the sweet spot (not the revenue optimal spot!) is one ad, clear, not intrusive and highly targetted to your audience. This ad will not annoy readers and will keep your motivation at a decent level (instead of a zero ads policy).
My take: https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor
Ads can be useful. How else am I to know of this amazing new music service or when there will be a certain show in town? But it needn't be all day long everywhere you look, and one ad on every page still has that issue
Not that I would know how to solve the problem of reconciling (1) sustainable website income, (2) annoyance factor, (3) sufficient targeting to reduce the annoyance factor, and (4) privacy issues. I just know that websites suffer from my adblocker and that I suffer from the web without adblocker. For what it's worth, I do have an online newspaper subscription and donate to nonprofit/opensource services that I use (like f-droid and openstreetmap), but it's not a full solution...
Just to be clear, are you ruling out user-tracking here, and is this ad meant to be entirely context-based?
I don’t like ads. They don’t help me. They make my life harder. I’ll tolerate them in some situations, but if I pay you then I should not see an ad.
If you want to show an ad, that you choice. I think it’s anti-user and I won’t buy your thing.
2. neg (annoy no one)
3. neg (neg exist x : annoy(x))
4. exist x : annoy(x)
5. annoy someone
Sorry, that's not how 90% of digital advertising works. The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen based on some specific profiling.
But these ads companies don't receive a file called "Manuel Moreale personal data and shopping history"
True, but the result is the same. I would have nothing against _some_ static ads (like in newspapers) even if I'm paying to read articles, but they should be served directly by the website, not by an external ad aggregator. Just check with how many companies data is shared on the cookie banner details: on the newspaper I'm paying for, it's "us and our 105 partners". So I feel totally justified to run an adblocker here. It's not ok that other companies should know which articles I'm reading, for how long, or things like that, so they can better target me with ads, especially that it's not limited to the website of the newspaper. In addition, you often get very annoying ads, with fast animations that are very distracting if you are reading text nearby.
The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor, and I think that's a very good thing, and many people underappreciate the extend to which it happens.
On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit and don't buy tickets, even though it's basically the same thing and a very similar business model.
Gambling ads, exploitative financial services, unhealthy "cheap" foods etc.
Also, why don't we just support the poor directly instead of requiring the construction of a consumer sentiment shaping global surveillance network?
Resolving that the poor must endure advertising to be subsidised by the wealthy is anti-poor and anti-person.
A more reasonable take is that all humans should have reasonable access to services through the fruits of their labour, and a situation where wealth inequality makes this infeasible should be rectified.
The poor also does not have the money to buy expensive books, but that is why we have libraries funded by tax money - placing banner ads in the middle of textbooks would be a dystopia, but somehow we are more okay with it if the content is digital.
That's silly.
> The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor,
[Citation needed].
> On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit
Actually I know exactly zero people who are not ok with either. The only reason I pay for public transport is that I'm afraid of being caught, but just like the correct amount of ads is zero, the correct public transport fare is also zero.
> a very similar business model.
Public transport is not a business, and it's not my concern that your business model sucks.
Poor people should have the option to go to the public library and read things for free. In the public transportation metaphor, poor people should get fair public transportation at an affordable price, and not need to ride without tickets.
Saying ads sustain poor people is, in my view, saying there is no expectation that the State/society will give a decent base level of service to anyone, and we're left to what private companies are willing to do and the mercy of the ones who can pay - coupled with their willingness to go along with whatever conditions the companies enforce for their "benevolence" (i.e., making you and your data the product).
So, what's wrong is that there's a gap here, and the poor people are not getting any support to bridge that gap and eventually get better off and add more value to society. Private philanthropy is not a valid welfare policy.
We need a new model like we had with libraries, one that handles the fact that most new content is now online. Unfortunately, most discussions I've seen around that were more about IP rights and protecting paywalls than enabling a 21st century lending model. And the traditional libraries are dying. Solving that would do more for the poor than subjecting yourself to intrusive ads ever will.
The ad industry needs users so ad-free content is unlikely to happen even if you pay.
This is technically true, but it leaves out the entire flipside of the coin. The rich wouldn't do that at the scale that they do if it didn't benefit them more than it does the poor. The services you speak of are offered at a high, but invisible, price (in the form of lost privacy, hijacked attention, manipulated will, etc.).
If you really want to help the poor, UBI does it better. It doesn't require charity from self-centered rich psychopaths. We should tax them whether they want to or not.
> The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor, and I think that's a very good thing, and many people underappreciate the extend to which it happens.
Ads are an aggression on the mind of the people with real psychological consequences. Imagine a public libraries where you should either pay a ticket or be targeted every few minutes by an advertizing team to interrupt your lecture, slap a flyer on top of your book, holding your arm to prevent your from removing it all this while shouting at you offers for a service. And that would be the rich subsidizing the service for the poor and would be a good thing. This is bonkers.
> On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit and don't buy tickets, even though it's basically the same thing and a very similar business model.
Not really. Paywall is similar business model, You pay the price, you get the service. Ads are just Ads.
I am perfectly free to decide to use whatever technology exist to remove ads from my sights when walking in the streets, or close my eyes. Same has to be for the internet.
Also, online medias lost any right to pretend we should see ads when they decided to go the unethical way and act like criminals that redirect our traffic to external parties without our consent. I was perfectly fine when ads were few and far between, not covering half the screen, served locally and only a click on the ad would send me to the advertiser.
I don't accept that it's an analogous situation, but many people have no problem with fare dodging. Public transport is for the public good and if someone can't afford the fare, dodging it the moral option.
That's clearly wrong. The equivalent of not buying a ticket would be to use a paywall bypass service to read content that's not free.
Using an ad blocker is instead equivalent to reading a book on the subway instead of looking at the ad posters. Which I hope you will agree is entirely acceptable.
I don't mind ads one bit, except video unskipable ones. I find stuff to buy there all the time, or discover new tools, sometimes I'll buy an equivalent thing years later that I remember I found first in an ad.
If I want to research competitors to something, I just google the something and click the ads.
And I also like that I like something that makes so many people pissed off.
I needed a washing machine - so I went online and purchased one from a large retailer. For the next month all I got was ads for washing machines - many from the retailer I purchased from.
It has made me want to not reset my browser so frequently.
And they have the cheek to say ‘your program will resume uninterrupted’. You literally just interrupted it!
It’s like slapping someone in the face and then smugly exclaiming ‘and that’s the end of the slaps - you must be so happy, right?’
1. Placing an Ad on the page has absolutely nothing to do with selling your data. Just like a magazine decide to place a print ad.
2. Ad can sometimes function as news. New Product launch, marketing notes. etc.
3. Even an internet targeting Ad, which the author is likely referring to, does not necessarily sell your data to advertiser. Your data, however may likely be gathered elsewhere that the Ad company uses for targeting.
4. There is no such thing as double dip when your data isn't even involved. Which means you are only paying once. And not twice.
5. Placing an Ad, an additional revenue generation function on the site is not double dipping. Even if the ad is inside your subscription. You are free to cancel or sue if the subscription originally promised zero ads.
6. The correct amount of ads is when Ad does not feel like an ad. The answer is very likely to be non zero but minimal.
Final Note: I Notice HN has swing back enough to allow decent discussions on these sort of topics. Ads were nearly forbidden to talk about from 2013 - 2023.
2. Only if your idea of news is the propaganda and corporate press releases pushed these days. I prefer my news to come from impartial sources, not those extracting enough profits that they can throw it on ads.
3. It may not sell the data directly to the advertise but it must by design be able to leak some information about you. And that's before getting to full on malware shipped with ads. It also doesn't matter who my data is leaked to, I don't want it collected in the first place.
4. If ads weren't profitable no one would run them. Your paying for them by being manipulated into doing or thinking what the advertiser wants. Thinking ads are free for the users is beyond naive.
5. Being able to choose not do do business with double dippers doens't make it not double dipping.
6. No, hiding the psychological manipulation more effectively does not make it any less wrong.
There is nothing to discuss. I do not give consent. You don't get to ignore that.
2. This is a vanishingly small subset of ads.
3. While advertisers do not directly receive your data, you do still get tracked. Furthermore, the infrastructure undergirding ad tracking is comically easy to appropriate for law enforcement and national security purposes; the CIA buys a shitton of ad tracking data from data brokers.
Furthermore, targeted advertising, even if used as intended without any law enforcement spook tracking nonsense, is still a nightmare because it allows fraudsters to target ads directly to their most optimal marks. Think about how good Facebook is at showing your grandpa a bunch of fake ads for fraudulent products and scams. Scamming online got a lot more efficient with targeted advertising.
4. The double dip still exists even if data isn't tracked because I don't want to see ads. I am paying to remove them. In fact, I shouldn't even have to pay to remove the tracking; that should be free, and under EU law it is free.
5. A lot of subscriptions actually were sold as no ads, because that's the thing people want.
6. The correct amount of ads are zero. Because ads are not information, they are attacks, in the same way that social engineering is an attack.
* the elephant in the room being that the iTunes podcast directory is the de-facto standard index. It’s freely available, but the fact that it could be withdrawn at any time is not great. Projects like https://podcastindex.org/ are trying to address that.
I used to subscribe to XLR8R and Thrasher magazine. The ads were tailored to the content of the magazine (electronic music and skateboarding, respectively). Thus, completely relevant to the interest of the reader.
I'm not sure how folks would emulate that online without heavy curation. But, I can't remember feeling any negativity towards ads while reading those magazines. If anything I was glad to be informed about a new skate video or music release.
That said, paying AND >0 ads (or tracking) is also a no no for me.
I did not think about blocking it, did not mind, did not care. That's how ads should have stayed instead of this giant annoying/spyware/loud/popup/... mess. Nowadays I would not use anything without ublock and i am considering storing everything locally so I dont have to visit most websites and only scrape the news.
It's especially sad since back in the day making a website, having a webserver etc. was vastly more expensive and difficult while these days it costs literally less than 10$ / month for something that can handle millions of views.
How is it possible that something was sustainable 20 years ago is not sustainable now?
It's amusing to hear this phrase, but I totally agree with you! Probably the best ads I've ever come across are on Daring Fireball [0]. They're so unobtrusive and privacy-respecting, they're in the source of the page!
If there is no way to hide ads completely I won’t use your service full stop
I don’t think Freemium or whatever subscription model solves these problems beyond the scope of a single website. I am interested to hear how this can be solved for consumers for whole swaths of websites that have ads.
It’s pretty easy to say ads are evi, but I personally don’t know a good solution.
You are not the only one directly supporting the publication
> you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side
Yes they do. You get the option to cancel.
Lately many ads, are for things I HATE, and advertising them makes me not want to watch the content I really want, if there is ads I actively hate. Government ads in particular I find offensive.
But it seems wild that the ad targeting is so bad.
I ride a bike and am anti-car, so stop giving me ads for cars and trucks, I will never buy.
I don't think Ive had a video game ad in years, but outside of food and rent, games and tech is one of my biggest budget line items.
Why is advertising so bad? They spend too much money on the technology and data to target consumers.
The fence part is that when we were paying for newspaper subscriptions, they still were chock full of ads. It's just that they tended to be relegated to entire pages or sections that weren't obnoxious.
Maybe there's something different about how we peruse online content vs paper that makes us annoyed at digital and not paper ads... I will say that website ads have become so obtrusive and in the way and distracting that I'm just turned off to them.
Am I still in the minority or has my behavior become more prevalent?
(Note that I’m not talking about adblockers; I’m talking about refusing to interact with ads, whether due to no adblocker or due to not being caught for whatever reason.)
I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route.
Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.
So even if we are in the minority of trying to be as rational with the purchases as possible, we surely don't do this all the time with everything. And surely we can't expect others to follow suit - so, simplifications will be made in the decision process, and that is exactly where advertisers are aiming for, and successfully.
As a result, it doesn't matter whether you are "in the minority" or not, and to show you why simply assume that your "behavior" is the majority for a moment: If I'm still buying ads, it's not because altairprime is on my marketing list, and I'm determined to show you an ad for something you don't want, but because volume of minority ad buys 'V' is high enough to support my lifestyle at an 'R' I have uncovered.
That is to say, as an online advertiser, I'm looking for my channel (with a big R% and a big enough V), and I don't really care about the absolute size (V) of not-my-channel until I have an idea of how to get that big R from them.
One thing to consider is why do luxury watches advertise in newspapers? It's about building the hype around a brand. The value of a watch is not in telling the time it's about (except some in build value of materials and work) the value that society gives it.
It's why they are even more problematic than it seems on the surface.
Because it works, and because as usual, HN users confuse their personal experience for being that of the masses when nothing could be further from the truth.
The utility value of ads to the computer is low. But these users are not the ad buyers so that makes little difference.
The tragedy of online ads is that computers when used for search do provide utility to computer users in locating products and services. But middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, seek to intermediate the use of computers for search in order to profit from ad services. This lowers the utility value of search to the computer user.
HN commenters and other commenters across the web complain about this degradation, namely they complain about results delievered by the largest search middleman, Google, almost daily.
Online ads annoy the majority of computer users in order to be "effective", i.e., profitable for the ad buyers, with respect to only a small minority of computer users. The system is profitable for the ad buyers but extremely inefficient. Waste and fraud are common on an unprecedented scale.
Personally I have nothing against advertising. However, having used computer networks that had restrictions on advertising, I question whether computer networks are the appropriate place for advertising.
The decreasing ability of those who produce software to license it for fees, i.e., no viable business plan, has caused them to use surveillance, data collection and advertising services as a substitute means of generating income. Software is given away "for free" and functions as a Trojan Horse for surveillance, data collection and advertising services. The sustainability of such a strategy is questionable.
I would pay a fair amount for an ad free news source that has a first rate editorial staff that simply prints the news.
Ads are also a great enforcer of gender and sexual identification by stereotyping and categorizing in order to target audiences. Hairstyle, toys, tools, colour, food, behaviour, everything. I blame ads for identification crises of countless souls, and for toxic human environments and for hate as people internalize stereotypes and categories. We need less enforcement to identify. We need more 'it does not matter'.
Yes, the correct amount of ads is zero.
No ads = $$$
Does it never make sense to have something in between?
I wouldn't pay a lot for any particular service that I'd just use only once or twice per month. I only ever read "the verge" if it is linked from HN or somewhere else. A subscription just doesn't make sense for me.
Now there's one way to pay to get way less ads: pay for an AI model and replace a huge percentage of your searches with searches inside the model. They're not bad at that. That's why many are saying that Google is (partially) in trouble with LLMs: wife and I definitely are searching less using search engines than we used too.
Besides that I'm running a local DNS server with a brutal blocklist: nearly one million of wildcarded domains (unbound supports wildcards). I block entire TLDs too. Entire countries' IP blocks. Add uBlock origin to the mix and your life becomes pretty ad-free.
I'm glad to pay a subscription for an AI model that doesn't serve me any ad. But I won't pay for something that serves me less ads, but still some ads. As simple as that.
You want me to pay: serve me zero ad.
It's several years and I still remember this.
The real question is, why don't they have a completely free plan supported entirely by ads -- don't even try to get a huge premium for the ads, just sell lots of them, even if it's a 1:1 time relationship between ads and content. And then have another plan where you pay money and have zero ads.
Because the latter scheme should be the most profitable. To begin with you open up the market to people who wouldn't pay you at all but would watch ads, so you get more viewers, and on top of that it's effectively try before you buy where the trial requires watching ads, which means you can stay on it as long as you like because the service is still making money. People start watching a show and get tired of seeing ads so they subscribe, when they otherwise would never have started. Then you don't charge $10/mo for no ads, you charge $20, which is worth it to a lot of people because there are so many ads in the free version, and for the people it isn't you still make money from them by showing them lots of ads.
Seriously. There’s a lot of spaces where the options are pigeonholed. Where the middle option, if it exists, exists to ladder, not to provide actual value. The problem is you’re using Econ 101 but real world economics is quite a bit more complicated and nuanced
I don't because in this case that's not an option. Is either free with shitty ads or paid with "better" ads.
This black-and-white thinking [1] is also bad. What’s the point if they show 0 ads, subscription price will then have to go up to cover the costs, and nobody signs up so they go bankrupt. They also have to be able to survive in the current world/reality, even if they WANT to show 0 ads.
My point is: we don’t have any insight in their financial data/revenue/costs.
They have to?
I don't think. If you can't offer a service the ethical way, maybe you shouldn't offer that service.
Your kind of reasonning also is the reason these medias can't survive without ads. If we banned ads altogether, subscription prices would go higher but decent publications would be able to serve content without ads because they would not face unfair competition from unethical ones. People would still subscribe to interesting content. Maybe they would not subscribe to 10 different publications but only 2 or 3. But the quality of the content of those publications would be higher because their real customers would be the paying users, not the ad industry. Here we are in that weird state where the real customers are not the people subscribing to the service. Paying users are merely addicts that online medias sell to advertisers. So the content served is only meant to redirect users to ads through many kind of psychological manipulation.
I.e. for paid print media the ‘correct’ amount of ads is almost definitely non-zero from the publishers perspective.
(Personally I’m not too bothered about ads in a paid online website as long as they aren’t excessive or intrusive but people may disagree and can vote with their wallets)
In latter, you can extract endless amount of data about your customers in realtime and ship it off wherever.
We should ban paying for information at the federal level to prevent this horrific practice.
You say that as if that's a bad thing
I agree. My browsing experience would be much faster and less annoying.
Micropayments are the answer. Everyone on the internet pays a small monthly fee, say $5/month (ideally this would just be integrated into your internet bill), and every piece of content you view streams tiny amounts of that fee to whatever content you are viewing. The actual amount sent is based on your monthly usage, and never goes over that $5/month cap. People who browse less send more.
A webextension tested this years ago & it was sweet. Businesses could be sustainable on there own, no ads, no data selling. If you have viewers, you have currency. But, it wasn't a seamless experience so it didn't take off.
Make no mistake: This is the best possible way to fund the open web, which is exactly why Google pretends it doesn't exist. If chrome had this feature built in & people never had to think about it, ads would drop to near 0 incredibly fast. Google says no.
We are doomed to have an enshittified web because the powers that be won't integrate sustainable funding mechanisms.
Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blockers and are more aware of privacy. But now, not only don't they not provide content for free, but also make you pay and collect your data as well.
- Go to most of the major news sites in firefox.
- Install noscript extension
- See the bizillion scripts that loads.
Note: You can load all these scripts indirectly with google tag manager or platforms like cloudflare zaraz etc. So you won't even directly see the analytics script that is loaded in a website. Just google tag manager etc.
Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right. Behavioural ads makes it the worst it the problem we should be solving. It makes sense from the business POV as well. You cut the middlemen like facebook and google and get paid premium directly. You curate the ads for your product/website. People want to just plug in an api call and generate money. That won't fly anymore with users being aware.
Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
Russian roulette is an exhilarating and entertaining game to play when it is done right.
I'll quote you "this is a bad take". What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
> Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right.
In an ideal world, yes. That ideal world is long gone.
Why not offer a premium ad-free tier?
For me, viewing web ads is non negotiable (print ads were much more manageable and didn't prevent me from enjoying the content).
However I only view about 4-6 Verge articles per month so I'll see how it plays out. If the best stuff goes behind a paywall then I can't justify subscribing, and nor do I want to hand over personal data to every site I read occasionally (for several reasons).
I've always wondered why publishers can't follow the Spotify or Netflix model for at least some of their content?
This does also raise the uncomfortable question of how much the content is worth. Yes they have some exclusives and unique content but in other areas if I stopped reading it I'd have another hundred reviews of the latest Apple products to choose from, and Reddit is much more realistic (albeit noisy) about the Sonos debacle than The Verge. The article about undersea cables was good though.
I mean, I definitely like full-text RSS when it's available, but even summary-only RSS is good enough for me. 99% of the value is in not needing to go to a bajillion sites manually to see what's new, and avoiding the eye-grabbing behavior of these sites when doing so.
Yes, just like they trust your browser not to share the paid content with others.
I'm willing to pay
I also have a job—as a self employed developer that earns absolutely not enough to live a decent life—and I still do what I can to respect the web and respect the people ho visit my site by not serving them ads or by tracking them.
Because I believe that respecting you and your privacy is more important than me earning a few $.
I'm not willing to look at ads. If the product or service that you have to offer is not sustainable without ads, I'm perfectly fine with it not existing at all.
There are thousands, and thousand of useful places, each for free. Take a look at awesome lists at github. These provide so much value to the society. It does not require any subscriptions, nor money.
There are millions of people who share education, and knowledge for free. If you build a business, you need to build it around things that are sustainable.
The old boomer internet is also over. Google will not lead anyone to any niche blog, or site. Now everything is inside big tech siloses, where "the algorithm" spoonfeds people with what zuckerberg likes. Go advertise any real http domain with any useful data. Nobody cares.