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Comment by 9o1d | Hacker News Reader

Dear friends! I am a simple programmer. I had a website in 2009, where I posted useful articles. I had a small ad block, which allowed me to pay for my expenses. When users began to install ad blockers en masse, the number of ad views dropped significantly and I had to close the site. Now I have no job and I am very poor. I want to thank those people who not only do not want to pay for good service, but also install ad blockers. Now you say that there is nothing to find on the Internet. Who will do something for you for free? Maybe a taxi driver will take you for free?

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dear friend! I am also a simple programmer. When I post simple rants like the one featured here, not only it doesn't have an ad block anywhere and so it generates no money but you're also all consuming bandwidth on a server i'm paying for with my money.

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 $.

Let me give you a piece of advice. Since you are still young and you do not have enough experience to make a lot of money. Because before it was not a few dollars that you mention, but hundreds of dollars. Advertising revenue has dropped so much. I thought the same as you. I was young and naive. Companies also have little money from advertising and therefore they simply cannot hire you and pay you a lot of money. Think about making a lot of money while you are young and full of energy. I am about 50 years old and I can not work hard anymore as in my youth. It becomes harder to make money with age. Think about the fact that none of those people who come to your site without advertising will give you a dollar in your old age. They will forget everything. Start being a serious adult. You are responsible only for yourself, but not for other people who just come to your site, and you do not have enough money to enjoy life while you are young. This time will quickly pass and in old age you will remember that you did not earn a lot of money in time.

I want to stay young and naive. I want to die poor and let people simply visit my site and hopefully earn something at a personal level. I care about human connections, I care about interacting with people via email in an honest way. If I’m not going to earn a living by doing that so be it.

I'm willing to pay for valuable content and services. I pay for online search and email, for example.

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.

Some YouTubers scream in panic that you dare to install ad blocker. Well nobody told them to build their business around such ad-driven solution.

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.

Did you know that YouTube does not make a profit, but only covers its own expenses? What if it becomes unprofitable because of ad blockers? What will remain? Paid cinemas? Do you want to pay money from your own pocket? And you will remember the times when you could pay by watching ads without money. Think about it! No one will do anything for you for free. Try to take a taxi or a train without money? Try to steal bread from a store without money? This is stealing and it is illegal. If something is free, it means that those who benefit from it have already paid for you, so that you receive the information they want. So that an independent site cannot distribute free information.

Tiktok, torrents, Flash

> Did you know that YouTube does not make a profit, but only covers its own expenses?

Yet they make no decisions to reduce those expenses. You either have to believe they are incompetent or this statement is on the spectrum of half truth to full on lie.

> What will remain? Paid cinemas?

Libraries. They used to be awesome and no corporation owned them.

> This is stealing and it is illegal

Sure, but, now you're forced to declare an actual value for the items taken. What is a fair price for most of this "content?"

> So that an independent site cannot distribute free information.

The irony is watching independent journalists take "super chat" donations on these corporate platforms. How big of a cut does the corporation get again?

Why do you stop at looking at ads? Why not compelling viewers to actually support the advertisement by buying their stuff? Letting them pay your way through life without buying their products is tantamount to stealing. All this free money from ads, do you get free money from the grocery store? From a taxi driver? No. So why do you take it from advertisers without buying whatever they offer?

Oh, yeah! I often click on a link if an ad interests me. The problem is that I'm poor. But there are rich people who buy from advertising, right? After all, it's not my business to count the advertisers' budget. They know what they're doing. Don't interfere with advertisers doing their job! I learn a lot from advertising.

Extensions for blocking are not only about ads. If you take a look at ublock site it does say it uses privacy and malware lists.

Therefore it is quite easy to understand and follow, and was suggested by FBI that we should use such extensions for our own protection.

Anyone saying, or implying that we should not use commonly named 'ad blocking' is spreading real harm to people.

When it comes to YouTube it is easy to understand the throwback. It always has been free. Now it is changing, but people are accustomed to this, and it is very bad to shame people for wanting things to keep that way. I agree, that if YouTube TOS say you should not be using them, then fine by me. YouTube goes bye bye. This is the only reason why they did not close all the loopholes, because that is how you loose your viewers, publicity, eyes, and eventually shareholders, and entire ad business. Microsoft for years tolerated piracy to keep them the most popular operating system. That still allows them to shame everybody for what they allow.

If the content is just a bunch of text, isn't that just ten dollars a month?

OP’s talking about the time taken to write the text, not the hosting costs (which would be zero on GH Pages or something like that).

Indeed, in 2009 I used free hosting. However, my articles were so interesting that in one week my site was visited by about a million people. Because of the huge traffic, I was kicked out of free hosting. Then I rented a VPS. Then I was still a big opponent of advertising, like all of you, and I was naive. I was an idealist. But when I tried to sell access to the site for sending SMS messages costing 10 cents, no one wanted to buy them, only one person out of a hundred. When I installed advertising, this ratio increased to fifty out of a hundred, that is, my income increased 50 times. Then I understood the benefit of advertising. I received about $ 100 a month from advertising. Then the income from advertising dropped significantly due to the mass installation of ad blockers. Now I use Firefox without any plugins. I honestly watch ads. This is the decision of a responsible adult. Because I understand that without advertising there will not be those wonderful sites that are still left.

If ads are first-party, non-personalized, non-tracking, and don't get in the way of the content, people are mostly fine with them. Most ads are not like this, so people use ad-blockers, and the good ads get blocked along with the bad ads. The fault lies with the advertising industry, not the consumers.

It's an old-fashioned notion, but the advertising industry has extremely bad manners: it doesn't respect civilized social norms like not exploiting personal information for private gain and not egregiously interrupting people for trivial reasons. It's nosey, untrustworthy, intrusive, manipulative, and deceptive. I wouldn't tolerate this behaviour from a friend, and I'm not going to tolerate it from a bunch of amoral strangers.

I understand you perfectly. I apologize, as a defender of advertising, for the fact that advertising often causes you inconvenience. However, I believe that advertising does less damage than cars. Okay, let's ban cars? What about alcohol and smoking? Why doesn't anyone try to throw a blanket over the shelves with alcohol?

You all have interesting arguments and valid points in this discussion, but this last message is whataboutism [1].

edit: and it doesn't help you much, you are likening ads to harmful things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

What kind of expenses are you talking about?

About $ 100 a month.

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