Hacker News Reader

Great. So set your agent to “show me adverts” and let the rest of use set our agents to “don’t show me adverts”.

Then we come to the rub: if "don't show me adverts" suddenly made common tasks (checking email, using a search engine) cost a bit of money, how many people would go for that?

Hard to tell, as those 2 specific services are currently monopolized by a company who refuses to offer those specific services ad-free

Email certainly isn’t monopolised! I can think of at least 3 mainstream search engines - although all advert driven

Quite a few. Hence people who pay for Netflix, YouTube, etc.

Certainly I don’t have adverts when I check my email, does Hotmail etc do adverts now? I’m sure they didn’t back in the early 00s.

Netflix is not a good counter argument, since lots of that content is not (legally/easily for casual users) available anywhere else even with ads.

YouTube premium might be a better counterargument—but I’m not sure how many people are buying it just for ad removal versus buying it to get access to additional games/movies/content. Is that data available? I’d be interested in checking it out if so!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com