We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.
In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted.
The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions.
For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.
The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively.
> no one actually wants to pay
Two things
1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this.
2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.
> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.
So be it.
It's like someone realizing that their crack dealer is an untrustworthy scumbag who is destroying everything the care about and they need to totally cut ties with him, and a friend objecting "Unfortunately, the 'scumbag' is your crack supplier himself."
Yeah, we know that. If starving the beast means we have to give up our unhealthy addictions, it's probably a side benefit rather than a counter argument.
The idea that the internet couldn't exist without ads is a myth that needs to die. The internet existed, thrived, and was awesome long before it became infested with ads. An ad free internet would be different in some ways, but it'd still be great and filled with endless amounts of content. Your example of youtube kind of proves the point. It was so much more fun before youtube became all about profit and people just posted videos for fun, or out of genuine passion. Not having obnoxious youtube ads doesn't even stop creators from getting paid since they can still take donations or sell merch.
What? It's 2026, not 2016? And Patreon has been running very successfully for over a decade? Huh. Whaddayaknow?
1% of people covering most the costs for the other 99% of people is. Which is what we find when looking at patreon conversions
What, you don't have a sub?
While I pay for software, music, movies, etc, I think the vast majority of people either can't or won't. The internet would be vastly different if there were no ads because the amount of content would be greatly reduced.
I still want no ads. I just don't think it'd be as small of a change as you suggest.
In terms of quantity it wouldn't be noticeable to you at all. It'd still be more than you could ever consume in your lifetime. I saw the internet before ads and it was still filled with just about everything you see today. The content itself was actually better in many cases (technical limitations being what they were). It was certainly less harmful.
The only thing I really think we'd have to worry about losing is some of the youtube content made with extremely high production costs but even some of those channels started out producing the same content with lower production values and slowly improved the presentation as their channel grew which could still happen without ads through donations and other strategies.
The vast majority of the content we'd lose on the internet without ads is the stuff companies put out there for no reason other than because they want to make money, as it turns out, that stuff is mostly trash anyway. It's what brought us click bait, entire content farms of trash, the millions of AI generated websites filled with hallucinations that drown out the actual information you're looking for, etc.
Getting rid of ads on the internet wouldn't make all the bad stuff would go away though. Companies already often have other perverse incentives for putting stuff on the internet, but at least we wouldn't be getting the obnoxious ads and surveillance capitalism on top of that.
I mean, want is a strong word, but I'm very much okay with paying creators I follow. I have a patreon account with about 22 subscriptions from 1-50 dollars, because what they create enhances my life.
> For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.
First sentence is correct, the second is patently ridiculous. I don't block ads because I think people should work for free: I block ads because every virus I've ever gotten has been delivered to me via an ad network that's not properly vetting what's being pushed to it, and to save incredible amounts of mobile data, and to prevent my phone from getting (as) hot in my hand.
The creator who's page I'm looking at is not even a factor in this calculus. I don't care. If you put up your stuff and are monetizing via ads only and I bounce off that and you earn nothing, oh well. Put it behind a proper paywall then, just, not my problem boss.
> The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
The Internet, collectively, has been in an abusive relationship with this beast since it's inception. And yeah we got a bunch of free-at-point-of-use services out of it. Okay? I didn't ask Facebook to exist. I didn't request Twitter, I wasn't simply dying of lack of Linked-In. In fact my life would be better if many of these things closed up shop tomorrow and fucked right off.
In time immemorial, it was normal to host VBulletin forums, your own static website, run a BBS, an ICQ server or TeamSpeak server, or whatever for literally nobody. We had no idea if any damn one was reading what we wrote back then, but we wrote anyway because as most people do in one way or another, we felt the drive to create and to share, and then as the internet evolved and the tools became more successful, we built communities, we built forums, we built email lists, all kinds of decentralized, albiet limited, ways to remain in contact with likeminded people.
It was the monoliths who came onto the scene, stuffed to the gills with VC money, who suddenly gave us Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, all the rest of the websites of which there are like 6 now that everything is on. They showed up, and provided free services in exchange for our data. We didn't ask for that, they gave it freely. And now a couple decades on-ish they're finding out that monetizing user data, which has been the go-to excuse for all that time, doesn't really pay the bills and most of them are either losing money or are selling their souls to anyone who will purchase ad space, which is why ads are basically all scams now.
Ad companies have spent the better part of my life digging their own graves and I'm very excited to watch them lay down in them. Rest in piss. The Internet lived before the Platforms, and it will survive them.
Usually a few enthusiasts can just bear the lion's share of the cost to create the infrastructure for a community, excess can go to long term contingency funding and, in the unfortunate case that a community completely runs out of funds then it'll stop existing until people care enough to create a new one.
Video hosting and the like are dramatically more expensive but they can be reasonably subscription based (see Nebula and Dropout[2] neither of which have the VC backing to light piles of money on fire just to sustain a user base) but not everything needs such a high level of technology.
Heck, back in the day the majority of traffic that a website that was ad-driven needed to host was the ads - if you were half-decent at writing asset caching rules images became a non-issue that were usually handled by proxies/other intermediaries.
Everything costs money - but it's important to remember that a lot of services charge a lot more money than they cost to run and that ad money is a lot less money than most people realize[1].
1. A big exception to this being things like newspapers which really are in a hard place. Their expense isn't in hosting or other technical doodads (e.g. the NYT Crossword puzzle) - the subscription you're paying is to afford the huge team of reporters and editors that are needed to produce the information gathering and presentation.
2. Edited to add - Dropout is probably a terrible example here since it's a lot more like a newspaper, only a sliver of the cost is technical, most of it goes to the production team and talent they're retaining. But I'll leave it in there unedited.
You mentioned the NYT in particular — they're paid a lot to shill political positions.
No. As discussed in (Epstein friend, but the research is still sound) Noam Chomsky's work, the money comes from access. The positions taken are to gain access (they don't take positions that will cause them to lose access).
Paid to report something? You sound like a conspiracist. The real conspiracy is how the system is aligned to generate the outcome. That's capitalism.
Money and power serves money and power.
Don’t threaten me with a good time. Most of what’s on the Internet should not exist and the world would be better without.
Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
They have not been very successful in their goals. I suspect, without sarcasm, that that is because compared to the absolutely routine click-fraud conducted up and down the entire ad space at every level, those plugin's effects literally didn't even register. It's an arms race and people trying to use ad blockers to not just block the ads but corrupt them are coming armed with a pea shooter to an artillery fight, not because they are not very clever themselves but just without a lot of users they can't even get the needle to twitch.
Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.
Because what matters is the total spend per resulting purchase, not spend per impression.
Because spam ad companies have a very tiny conversion rate, they can only pay a very small amount per impression before it becomes unprofitable.
Legitimate companies aren't usually trying to completely trick their customers. They are selling an actual halfway decent or good quality product. Therefore, if they are targeting well, they have a much much higher conversion rate and can therefore pay much more per impression.
Even with the most straightforward to compare products like bank accounts, the biggest household names absolutely screw their customers. e.g. Chase gives like 0.01% APY on their savings accounts, or 0.02% on their "premier savings accounts". Capital One just settled a lawsuit for having two almost completely identical "high yield" accounts where the only difference was the less informed set of customers got like 0.3% in their "high yield" account while everyone else including Capital One's other, otherwise identical account was giving over 4%. It's not quite fraud, but I'd call that a scam from a major company. Part of the lawsuit alleged that they excluded existing customers with the worse account from ad campaigns about the better one. You can't do that without profiles on everyone, and that's exactly the sort of thing where even for products from the same company, they will absolutely use information about you to advertise to you the worst deal they think you'll take.
Regardless, imagining there were a difference in the direction you believe, it would be one of degree, not kind. Scams by large companies backed by large advertising campaigns are still scams.
You seem to be trying to push some ideological idea that all ads/companies are equally scammy, but that's obviously not true.
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
> Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing
This is an assumption not backed by data. But its pretty much impossible to truly test this hypothesis at any real scale. What data we do have is if many brands stop advertising when they used to do advertising, they tend to start to lose sales. But, as you point out, their competitors didn't necessarily reduce advertising as well, its not testing "what if everyone cut advertising".
> But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already?
Its an assumption these people would have even found the product in the first place, or were willing to give it a try, or even know the product category or type exists in the first place, and that this organic growth would have happened fast enough to keep the product alive. If everyone is basing their decisions off word of mouth, are there really going to be enough people in your network to buck the trend and give a scrappy new competitor a go and have their opinion make decent enough waves?
A world without any advertising at all seems to me to be a place where entrenched names in markets end up dominating based purely on people practically never finding the competitors. They become the default, the go to. This still largely happens in this over-marketed world today though, I do agree, but I think that's more of over-consolidation of producers and distributors having an outsized say on what we see in a lot of physical stores.
That world without any advertising also leads to some things not being made that would have otherwise existed, things that people generally like. Lots of magazines and other publications practically live off some amount of marketing, and they largely exist as a format for people to go see what's happening in a given industry. Lots of things like sports leagues/teams rely on sponsorships. Would there be Formula 1 racing if they didn't have those corporate sponsors?
I do agree especially internet advertising is largely destroying the internet. I don't understand how anyone uses mobile web pages without an ad blocker these days. Its absolutely terrible looking at anyone else's phones that doesn't block the ads, every page is more ad than content. We've definitely gone too far.
Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.
But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.
Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.
All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me
> http://google.com/ads/preferences
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.
But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.
But almost everyone thinks the same as you do, and yet ads are huge business. How are you affected? I don't know, but my first guess is brand perception, regardless of your self-diagnosis. If a company is advertising a certain time-limited sale, some of their value will come from conversions taking that offer. But some, maybe most, is the brand impression that people get over time. Think "I never heard of that" vs "Oh yeah, I've seen that somewhere".
I'm not saying that I'm immune to ads. What I'm saying is that my "ad profile" probably only says what sort of content I consume, if anything at all. Ironically, since I barely consume gaming-related content these days, I assume there is no way for ad companies to figure out that's the one thing I would actually buy from an ad.
Instead they show me ads for things I would never spend a cent on, like Decentraland, just because I've watched some tech videos.
I don't know if your assumptions are right or not.
Last time I asked someone that (over a decade ago), the answer I got was that ad companies wouldn't spend millions of dollars on their ad campaigns if they didn't have proof of effectiveness. Sure, okay, that's good evidence that the ad campaigns are effective at getting some people to buy the product. But what's the evidence that I, personally, am influenced by ads? Rather than "many people are influenced by ads, don't think you're immune"?
Especially because I, personally, actively avoid advertising. I block it on the Internet, I avoid watching live TV and instead buy (or check out from the library) DVDs of shows I'm interested in... And the billboards on the highway are mostly for services I don't need (like injury lawyers) so I have almost never bought something because I saw it advertised on a billboard. The only exceptions are the ones where the billboard said "(name of restaurant) 10 miles ahead" and I thought "Oh good, I had been hoping to find exactly that restaurant, I'll pull over in 10 miles". But I was already looking for that product, the billboard ad just helped me find it.
Not to mention that if all ads were like that — "Hey, our restaurant is at exit 183, we do really good fajitas" — I would be far, FAR less annoyed by advertising. If that was the only kind of ads you saw on the Internet, I might not have sought out adblockers in the first place.
that is what ad-infested society does to everyone… everything you end up spending money on you sure think you were going to already :) you sound here exactly like my wife does when she gets pulled in bu an ad - “oh we really needed new curtains and these just came across the billboard, the ones we have are like 7 weeks old…”
Edit: I mean, yes, some people do think they came up with the idea that was just suggested to them. Stage magicians have used suggestion tricks for years. But part of my point is that billboards that simply remind you that a product exist, and your own preexisting desires then make you want to buy it, are the form of advertising I am least annoyed by. Even people susceptible to ads had some kind of preexisting desire for the product (I really don't like those curtains, I know we only bought them two months ago but I'm having buyer's remorse, I want something else, oh look, curtains on sale!) or else the ad wouldn't work. I mean, if I know I don't have psoriasis then I won't care about psoriasis medication ads in the slightest. But if I suspect I have psoriasis (maybe I do have it, or maybe I'm a hypochondriac) then the ads will actually have a chance of influencing me.
Thing is, as far as I myself am concerned, I'm a pretty content guy. What I want is more good books to read, more good open-source software to be created, and to be able to enjoy time with my wife and kids. Almost none of which are desires that will make me susceptible to most ads. (Though if the ad was "Hey, Lois Bujold has a new book series out!" then yes, I'd be susceptible to that ad. But again, pre-existing desire: Bujold has only written two books out of her entire oeuvre that I've disliked. A much higher like-to-dislike ratio than most authors).
Your followup example of this is an impulse buy that happened adjacent to ad exposure. For that particular confluence, your theory could bear out.
But I'm not sure folks do that with any regularity. And for folks who rarely impulse buy or don't see/hear ads in spaces they control - I don't think they run into it.
Since then I gave up. I tried everything which was reasonable, even some unreasonable. Yet, I couldn’t stop them not knowing. Maybe if I had blocked JavaScript completely, maybe, but I’m not sure at all anymore.
Don't give up! Even if failure to prevent some data collection is inevitable, we can all help reduce the aggregate value of shadow profiles assembled by advertisers:
Block all ads. The bits that cross the threshold onto your networks and devices are yours to display or not. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a petty tyrant.
Help friends and family to block all ads. React to ads in their homes and on their devices the way you would to nonconsensual, graphic, violent pornography.
Keep blocking ads and tracking even though you know shadow profiles built about you continue to exist. It's only partially about confounding surveillance. It's also, and equally, about changing culture.
I recently learned that if you turn on ad targeting you can block certain ads and never see them again. So I’ve turned it on just to block the worst of the ads. But googles ad targeting still can’t target ads to me. It’s maybe only 70% scams now. But their targeting still sucks and I still get ads in foreign languages that I do not speak.
On my desktop I just use Adblock. I really try to avoid YouTube on mobile at all costs because the ads make it completely unusable.
Let’s also not pretend that personalised advertising is that great. Our Tizen runs the crappiest ads (can’t opt out in some cases). And I just have to take a look at my partner’s phone to see what personalised means, and which advertisers can _afford_ to get placement. (No, she doesn’t need another of the last 10 things we’ve purchased.)
All the fine print, exceptions, limited dates, etc. often hidden from you as best they can makes it scam-like.
Part of the problem as far as I can see is that there is no way to mark an add as insultingly matched.
Is there a link that confirms what you said here? There were "click the monkey to win an ipod" scam ads before we had ad-blockers. I think scams have always been around. I do want to update my mental model if I'm out of touch from what people actually see.
But no. I could argue that hypothetically scammers would know exactly what I would fall for, but I have real evidence: Facebook knows everything about me and serves me mostly scams, since ever. My Google ads (mostly in Youtube) actually became less scammy when I opted out of all targeting that I could find (went from crypto scams and 5G protection to car commercials and big brands reminding me they exist).
Completely agree.
> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.
Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.
If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.
And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.
You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can...
This ought to be a signal that the market is already being served, that it is unlikely to be a big opportunity to make more money.
Even with advertising, what you have in such a market is an all-pay auction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-pay_auction
The end point is nobody makes any profit on apps, because all the money that ought to be profit goes to paying for a bidding war on ad slots.
In fact, more than know, I assumed the only category under discussion were at a minimum nation-scale, what with local knowledge not requiring online advertising as a sign on a building is enough for local neighbourhoods.
Re: being careful
Any system created by humans will be abused unless regulated. And even then, there will always be loopholes which will be abused until punished (and even punishment might not be a proper deterrent if it can be calculated as a cost of business. (Yes I'm arguing for and against you, just thinking out loud basically ;)
edit: grammar
You can just get away with fraud:
Former CEO of Volkswagen AG Charged with Conspiracy and Wire Fraud in Diesel Emissions Scandal
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/former-ceo-volkswage...
> He remains a fugitive in the United States and is wanted by the Environmental Protection Agency on charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to violate the Clean Air Act, and multiple counts of wire fraud.
Even if the ads are heavily personalized, the advertiser is still the one who is trying to push an idea onto you. Similarly, even if your social media account has a lot of personal information on you, the provider is still the one who is selecting which content will appear in you "feed".
I believe that these practices make people less self-aware of what they actually want. Because they mostly respond to suggestions. They do much less research into what is possible. They just say yes or no to the things they see in their ads or in their "feed". While becoming more and more distant from the reality that is happening outside the provider-managed ads or "feeds".
I think that a safe way out of this is to ignore ads and "feeds" completely. And actively search for the things or content you want. Curate your interests in a way you like. Not in a way advertisers or providers want.
I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about.
I Adblock the web aggressively.
Maybe they would have done that anyway though.
Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all.
My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.
Any sufficiently trusted (online) community will find many attempts to exploit its trust for profit.
// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
Please don’t. I’ve been here for a years under different usernames. I feel more and more bots or other actors are starting to infiltrate.
The guidelines ask that you don't do this. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Things break or transfer ownership. HN accounts are quick to make, and I’m not one to collect internet points.