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Comment by chrisjj | Hacker News Reader

> No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content.

Ads are content too, you know?

Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.

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> Ads are content too, you know?

Yes, and I’m not against ads in general.

It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.

Sad times.

Agreed that there are many sites that seem to have no other purpose than to get ads displayed.

Unfortunately, it's also getting harder and harder to tell them apart from the sites that have legitimate content supported by ads because the quality of the latter is nosediving.

The reason you can't tell them apart is there's no meaningful distinction. Whether content is sufficiently "legitimate" to be worth the ads depends entirely on the particular user.

I don't entirely agree. Yes, there's subjectivity, but there's more to it, IMO.

There are sites (eg along the lines of legacy print or established in the "early" internet days) that still try to generate news content for reading, but are seeking more revenue.

And then there are sites that are just modern click/impression factories that never tried to actually produce real content.

I don't agree that whether the content is "real" is anything more than subjective.

If content you see laden with ads was not "real" enough to earn from sufficient readers, you would not be seeing it.

If that were really the case, then nobody would be employed to try and understand SEO, ranking algorithms, virality, etc.

Edit: what I mean by that is: I think your comment implies there's some sort of meritocracy to content people see online that isn't easily gamed. My various feeds, search results, etc, convince me otherwise.

I did not say content was never gamed. But gaming doesn't make content unreal.

From the viewpoint of Hirschman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

you don't have any "voice" about ads so your choice is to "exit" by running an ad blocker. Obnoxious advertising tactics, scam ads, and other problems in the advertising system lower people's responsiveness to advertising. We need to restore the responsiveness to weak signals (bidirectionally) that Vaughn talks about in The Challenger Launch Decision and her book about her divorce Uncoupling.

wrt GP: "generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads" is how publishing has always worked, even way back when it all came on dead trees. My library had a book in the reference section that had, for various types of demographic, the maximal percentage of ads to run (ie, how much content you needed to pay for having sold a given volume of ads), but it would probably have been almost as quick, just as cheap, and likely more accurate, to empirically determine that percentage by visiting a local newsstand and sampling the ad density from your target section of the rack.

wrt Exit vs Voice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376098

If people are willing to consume content but not willing to pay for it, then you have a very strong indicator it has no value at all and therefore no actual need to be produced in the first place.

Or at least, not enough subjective value for that person to outweigh the cost. Paywalls are a great screening filter that actually tests if people want to spend any money or time on an article, or merely clicked through from force of habit.

So? Ads are a screening filter that tests if people want to spend time consuming ads to consume content.

What's odd is when people here complain of screening by ads because they'd think screening should instead be by money. It is proper that the choce for the publisher's site is made by the publisher and for the reader's visits is made by the reader.

People willing to pay by consuming ads are indicating the content is worth that price - to them. The fact such people exist is proved by the fact such sites exist.

This is not how it works. Ad-subsidized content is functionally equivalent to price-dumping. The more ad-subsidized content is out there, the less incentive there is to focus on quality and quantity of eyeballs become the only metric that matters.

On the contrary, content quality is a major driver of ad revenue.

Then you'd have to explain why every reputable newspaper is putting up paywalls and all the quality sites that used to cover specific niches went out of business in the last 20 years.

Saying "revenue goes up with content quality" only makes sense if you compare one poor site with another, but when you put in terms of ROI, you will see it is a lot easier to set up hundreds of different content farms than to keep a sustainable source of well written, reputably sourced reports.

> Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.

I'm fine with that. An ad-laden site with ads I cannot block won't have me as a visitor anyway, so I'm not really going to notice if they are gone.

Can you really not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable to make it worth you consuming those ads?

To me this sounds like “can you not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable that you’d let someone get you addicted to their brand of cigarettes so you could get it for free”

If it’s that valuable, just let me pay a fair price to see it.

In general, I’d like to see personally targeted ads banned entirely and a legal requirement for a fairly priced (i.e. same order of magnitude as the lost ad revenue) ad free option.

Ads are addictive?? News to me.

> Can you really not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable to make it worth you consuming those ads?

Honestly, no.

Perhaps I am just lacking imagination; can you think of any content compelling enough that a) I am not prepared to pay to get it and b) I am still prepared to view ads to get it?

I can't imagine any type of content that I both don't want to pay for and feel it is worth sitting through the ads.

I expect the ratios matter as well; the average webpage/site has more ads than content that I specifically want. If I had to sit through a 10s ad to see a 90m movie, I might do it. As it stands, right now on youtube, there is a 30s-60s ad shown between 5-minute videos.

So, when I am not using Firefox, I simply don't go to youtube.

I don't know how much you can afford to pay. But I do know many users can afford to consume ads more than pay money.

> I don't know how much you can afford to pay.

I didn't say anything about content I can afford to pay for. I am talking specifically about content that I am unwilling to pay for, yet am willing to put up with ads for.

Like I said in my previous post, the ratio matters a lot, here.

Ads do not absolutely have to be delivered via pop ups or modals.

If the content is so worthless that people will not voluntarily pay for it, then this outcome would be no great tragedy.

But what would humanity do without garbage LLM content slop? How would we survive?

People voluntarily pay by consuming the ads.

I would care if they were at all capable of respecting people who allow ads.

I was fine with ads when they were a text AdSense banner.

Now a lot of sites have scammy full page js-popups of the kind that were only found on dodgy websites in the 90s.

As a life-long hater of ads (before the Internet, I would mute the TV during ad breaks), I must agree. Before AdSense, animated GIFs for advertising were obnoxious. When the “Don’t be evil” Google started doing advertising, I was so impressed with them. Even their advertising is tasteful - and relevant! They really seemed to have the Midas touch.

But I feel that their choice of advertising revenue as their predominant income stream set them on a trajectory that gradually and inexorably led them further away from their original principles.

The content was better when it was posted by hobbyists for free than it is now posted by people trying to make money off of it. So... fuck 'em.

I'd be fine with a whole web free of revenue.

There would be much less stuff around, but what would stay is the things people created for fun, not for profit. SEO spam, AI slop - these are all solved by removing money from the web.

I doubt you'd say tha same about films and music. Why should the web be different?

Web ads exist because they are one option that serves the needs of content providers and consumers alike.

> Ads are content too, you know?

I agree. Why there isn’t this technology implemented on film streaming, movie theaters, even games? I think ebooks should stop you reading every five minutes just to show ads. I’m sure it could be implemented in to PDF pretty easily.

Internet and all medias point is to make money for jesus christ, what are we, a charity? Why don’t book publishers put ads into printed books, they are goving away content for free!

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