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Comment by npc_anon | Hacker News Reader

People block ads and/or not pay for content because they can. Simply because it's possible. People have been conditioned to consider any and all digital content to be worth zero. Yet continue to consume it for hours on end every day.

When not paying at all is an option people will reliably pick that option. They'll even go into extremes to avoid paying. I know somebody that plays a particular mobile game about an hour each day. Every round (taking 90s or so) it's interrupted by 1-3 mins of ads. It's maddening. She suffers through this instead of paying a one-time $4.99. We're talking about somebody firmly upper middle class.

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As they should. Never once have I seen any good outcome of ads on the web.

On the user end:

- People click scam download buttons or fake links and are blasted with scams or malware.

- Nobody I know has ever, not once, purchased something from an ad and been happy with it. The one person I know who did purchase something from a Facebook ad got scammed.

- The actual content people want to watch is delayed or interrupted by constant nonsense that they will never engage with.

So already there is absolutely no incentive as an end user to want ads. Then over on the content creator end:

- Because they work through clicks, ads generate a ton of bad incentives to make divisive content or just otherwise harmful content. See Elsagate for one way this manifests.

- For honest creators who make genuinely good and creative works, ads harm them by consistently underpaying them. Only the very absolute peak of content creators make a livable wage from ads alone. See the rise of Patreon and other such subscription methods that they have had to rely on to get away from ad revenue dependency.

- Ads also harm honest creators by incentivizing bad actors to steal their work, either by direct reuploads on various platforms or by simple plagiarism. See any Facebook page for stolen content or the whole James Somerton expose that happened a couple years ago for the plagiarism bit.

Many things do not give you that option, and the ads are obnoxious and invasive to privacy. If that is the only option, you will get nothing from me, and your ads will be blocked.

Furthermore if there is a content subscription involved, I will only ever consider it via Apple because I refuse to risk having to telephone someone to cancel something I signed up for online.

The well has been poisoned by an obnoxious industry and that industry is unlikely to ever gain even a modicum of respectability.

You're just retrofitting reasons to justify the behavior I describe.

Forget about those reasons. They don't matter. They can have merit or not, it's irrelevant. Because the behavior takes place regardless. When people can legally avoid paying for something whilst still consuming it, they'll do that.

The idea that if only ads were more privacy-friendly people would not block them or start paying for content at any scale is laughable. They won't. When there's a free path, people take that path.

Then why do people pay for services like Spotify, Netflix, and other subscriptions when they have the ability to pirate?

Further, ads are often sold as a way to keep access "free".

"all digital content to be worth zero."

People are making millions/year just by writing articles on Substack. Just look at the "paid leaderboards", number of paid subscribers, and multiply by 70% of the annual price of the newsletter.

Our newsletter is doing mid-6-figures. You simply can't find that content anywhere else, and I am not aware of a newsletter-piracy phenomenon. Even if it existed, I think many people would pay to have guaranteed day-1 access.

When I say "all" and "zero" it's obviously tongue-in-cheek, not a scientific assessment that is to be taken literally. Of course there's exceptions.

These are not exceptions, but a whole industry built around the notion that digital content is worth "something"

I pay quite a lot for digital content. I also run an ad blocker, because advertising as a whole is malicious and I consider my financial contributions to the digital creator economy to be sufficient.

But privacy, it’s not just ads, you’re taking information from me. Also people have tried to avoid ads since forever, trying to not record ads onto VHS for instance, this isn’t new.

Facile and wrong. People don't do anything "just because they can".

And anecdotes aren't data.

I think there's a divide between how we view the people that create the digital media we consume vs. the platforms they're stuck on.

Like, I've donated to certain creators through for example patreon, but I'd never even consider paying for YouTube premium or twitch prime.

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