How Much Would You Pay to Never See an Online Ad Again? | Hacker News Reader

How Much Would You Pay to Never See an Online Ad Again?

theatlantic.com

13 pointsdsr1239 comments

A few months ago I saw my mum browsing a website with a horrendous number of adverts. I asked to borrow the computer for 30 seconds, installed AdBlock for Chrome and refreshed the page. I handed it back triumphantly only to be told that she couldn't see the difference and wasn't sure what I'd done. I suspect this will be the response of most people - either you're technical enough to install an adblocker or you don't really care.

Let her use her browser with AdBlock installed for a few months, then remove it. I'd bet she'd notice the return of all those ads.

I would pay for something that I could load a budget onto to just pay everyone for the ads they would have shown me so I can browse in peace. I like supporting content creators directly, but I don't want to be hassled making accounts and filling in my credit card info every time.

What you're describing sounds a little like Flattr[1] to me.

[1] http://flattr.com/

I think people have been working on this idea for two decades. For one reason or another it has never really come together.

Discussion from yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4767698

Novel idea for something you would see on an infomercial or skymall, but no tech savvy person would ever purchase one because

(1) Tech people already know how to block ads.

(2) The idea of having a random linux box on your network that has access to all of your internet traffic, and can be compromised as well as a general bottleneck isn't the most comfortable of thoughts.

add (3) Making exceptions or configuration changes for single sites will be more effort than changing AdBlock settings for a given website directly in your browser.

I already see virtually no ads. My setup is Firefox with AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and RequestPolicy, proxied through privoxy.

There are really only two cases where I'd regularly see ads. One was Google text ads. But now that I've quit using Google in favor of DuckDuckGo, I don't see even those (DDG lets you turn ads off).

The other case is seeing some text ads through my email provider, which serves them over SSL -- so they are not subject to being filtered out through privoxy. This is a problem, and I've considered learning javascript just so that I can feed decrypted SSL content through privoxy to filter out the few remaining ads I get through SSL. But so far it's been such a minor problem that I haven't bothered to do so.

I'm pretty sure you are not the target audience for this product :) I would guess it's mainly for iPad owners.

Wow, I did not think of that, but may buy it because of this

Hint: jailbreak and install AdBlock on your iPad

But again: the people who have the time and ability to do that are not the target market.

Sorry, I'm a developer. I don't jailbreak because I do not want to accidentally get a different experience on the device than my customers do due to jailbreak apps/the fact it's jailbroken at all.

I would be interesting in never seeing another Ad again, in my entire life.

i.e. No ads on TV, no ads on the radio, no billboards, nothing in magazines or newspapers. I think our world would be very different with no ads.

If I had my way, all unsolicited advertising would be banned.

Advertising is an attempt to manipulate people in to buying crap they mostly don't need. It uses either outright lies or lies by omission.

Worst of all, advertising is a corrupting influence on our political process, since the news media constantly caters its content to please advertisers and not to upset them with investigative stories in to the very corporations that fund its broadcasts.

In net, I think I agree with you, but advertising can also serve an informative role. There are times I've seen a well-targeted and unsolicited ad for something I didn't know existed but solved a problem or want that I had. Ads are also important for letting people know about prices, features, etc. The importance of the informative role of advertising is probably decreasing as the internet provides more and more product and price info, but I think it is still there.

Think of all the thousands if not millions of unsolicited ads you've seen in your life. What percentage of those were for "something you didn't know existed but solved a problem or want that you had"?

My guess would be less than 1%. Maybe even less than 0.1%.

Many ads don't even have anything to do with the product they're selling. They're designed to get you to get you to associate a positive emotion with the brand name, or be so surreal or catchy that they're memorable. Those ads are worse than useless. They're both useless and manipulative.

It would look like North Korea. But probably a bit nicer and wealthier.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/08/inside-north-kore...

Billboards are illegal in New Zealand too.

my mind already blocks out 90% of ads and selectively takes in 10% of useful ads. i find it amusing people would go to such great lengths to achieve what your mind can do already.

Not a penny. Adblock Plus (free!) as already mentioned.

Um, Adblock Plus is free and near perfect.

Am I missing something?

Yeah, all of your mobile devices.

AdAway works like a charm on Android. it is open source and combines multiple lists.

Opera Mobile allows you to use urlfilter.ini if you need more sophisticated blocking on websites.

Not having to install an ad blocker for every browser and every device on your network seems to be the value here.

Just installed this for the first time. How have I lived without an adblocker before?

I tried to give the internet a go without ads after an upgrade. It wasn't that bad, advertisers have improved.

Until I tried to watch a 10 second clip on youtube of Ace Ventura saying "yes Satan?". After a 20 second ad for a car, music started playing from the side ad. Clicking the mute button took me to their site. I closed it, refreshed the video and after sitting through the same car video the same side ad started playing.

So I installed adblock.

TV ads don't play same time when your show is on. You don't do the same on the internet.

I haven't used an ad-blocker in a while (I block javascript and make plugins click to play in Chrome for security, that coincidentally kills most of the stuff).

The most ads I see are on video streaming services. But what's the state of ad-blocking on Hulu? Doesn't Hulu detect if their ads aren't making it to your machine, and halt playback? Has the device addressed this? (Have leading adblockers?)

I would consider a Youtube subscription if it was 1-5 USD/mo. No idea how much they make from me in ads.

If you use Youtube enough to be wanting to pay 1-5/month then they could make more than that by displaying ads to you. Freemium+Ad models are sometimes more profitable than subscription based models and in some cases you may find a mix of both (eg: Hulu Plus).

I strongly doubt that. In 2011, Youtube had a trillion views and revenues of about 1 billion$. That's 0.001$/view. You'd have to watch 5000 videos/month to be worth 5$.

Keep in mind [one page view != one ad view]. If you refresh the same video more than once, it does not keep repeating the advert. There is also a limit to the max number of adverts shown per session to a user. Moreover not all videos have ads and not all ads are shown to all users. There is no point in showing an ad for home-depot to your European demographic, likewise there is no point in wasting ad bandwidth on a 150 view home-video.

I don't know anyone who would justify $120+ to get rid of ads. I don't think people see them as THAT huge of an inconvenience.

I personally block ads because I view them as effective. They're effective enough to pay for decades of television, they probably work.

$0, meaning I don't care that much about seeing ads. Plus I've got adblock and disable flash until clicked.

i personally would find this more interesting if it let you curate your own ads to the networked connected devices. this way, i can make money on behalf of our offices. now wouldn't that be interesting, hmm.

You mean like the hotels were doing? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804608

So...a firewall?

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