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Comment by smtddr | Hacker News Reader

Time to get downvoted into the earth's core... AdBlockers are a problem.

I know "Everyone hates ADs"(TM), but really... that's how everything has worked up 'till now. ADs and/or paid. The advertisements around sports are a significant reason why that whole thing works; why those athletes get the money they get. They can get the attention of many eyes and all those eyes get exposed to ads. Take away _all_ the advertising-dollars and we'll see how long these huge pro-sports events last.

The internet became a big thing and people would like to show you content for free but how will they support it? I don't want a paid-subscription for every single quality website I visit. I rather they just show me ads. If I really like the content of the website, I might even give them a few clicks on the ads.

For better or for worse, advertisement-money is behind most forms of free content, especially entertainment-related. If anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears.

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Sigh. You're serving up html on some port somewhere, probably 80. I do not have any sort of contract with you to fetch everything you link to in your initial html page.

To me that is the crux of it. Any other interpretation denies the physical reality of the web and its underlying infrastructure.

> The internet became a big thing and people would like to show you content for free but how will they support it?

Depends on how big the site is. I run a very successful web site off my cable modem from home. I pay for the connection anyway to browse, so my serving is effectively free.

Not every site needs 15 AWS instances and a load balancer.

But to answer your question directly—there will always be people who make sites and host them out of their own pocket for the greater good, or to establish themselves in the industry, or whatever. It's the same reason Free Software exists, even though it doesn't make financial sense at its core.

Sure advertising is the "business model of the Internet", but I have a hard time getting a hair across my ass about the fact people use blockers. Maybe because I don't work in an ad-supported industry means I don't have to rationale to myself it's not scummy.

You can say ad-blockers are "the problem", but they're really a negotiating tactic. Remember the bad old days? When advertisers and those selling ad space were arrogant to think they could get away with anything? They destroyed the user experience so badly people wrote software to get rid of them. Now advertisers have to balance the intrusiveness of their ads against driving more users to install blocking or remembering to reinstall adblock on their new computer. Yes, websites depend on advertising to stay afloat, but why should I care? Nobody is entitled to a business model.

You're right adblockers are a problem, they're not addressing the cause but its expression.

But at the same time and like the article, you also failed to frame the problem properly, see, it starts by telling us about a website serving 2 millions page views then goes about people wanting content for free.

Content doesn't cost anything once put online, so it's not about content but rather that it is accessed 2 millions times a month which generates traffic, which has a cost.

Now if it cost the same for the content to be accessed 10 or 10 millions times, then the justification/needs for ads would go away (except for newspapers' websites maybe). The problem is in fact dual, one is that the internet is designed to work as dumb pipes connected intelligence located in the network periphery not as centralized servers hosting content and the owner of the inner tubes ask money based on how much traffic goes through them.

The obvious solution of distributing the content in a p2p model which would move the bill of traffic from the content provider to the content receivers.

So yes adblockers are a problem because they're and additional layer of attempting to fix another problem ads and associated surveillance which is trying to fix the issue of relying on a centralized model on a network not thought for this usage imposed by a few giant companies exploiting their ownership of the architecture for profit, making a mess of layers attempting to fix each other but really attempting more problems requiring more fixing.

And how do you pay for the content to be created?

Most ad-laden websites severely overvalue themselves. They're distractions - highly replaceable ones.

It turns out when you have a simple and obvious business model, it's easy to pay for content - iTunes enabled us to actually buy music (kind of, we're in the middle of screwing the artists over with bulk streaming deals and what I suspect is a lot of RIAA-contact lock ins preventing direct sales).

But really, how valuable do you think your blog post about someone else's blog post is? Or a news site reporting on what happened from Twitter, or publishing articles which are taken whole-sale from bullet pointed corporate and political press releases?

The sites you describe are very small ones that don't make much money and don't really have problems with adblocking.

Why not think about pando daily, the verge, 9to5mac?

Sometimes just sometimes when a site has 100-1000 times the numbers of readers compared to a mere anonymous blog, they're just far more successful at generating clickbait and have more resources to waste on elaborate HTML5. Or maybe they really generate actual useful content. If we're discussing anecdotal data points everyone has a different view on a website's utility.

Personally I believe if the reader base of a site is genuine and not heavily dependent on one-hit readers, they shouldn't rely on an ad-driven model. At least, not solely. Call it guilt-tripping, donation driving, paywalling, microtransactions, anything you will. As long as it's not the ad networks actually asking for dosh. It's merely crowdfunding on a more diffuse and intimate level, since the aim is for the site to exist down the line indefinitely.

I know nothing about the last one, but the two others I imagine lots of people can do without...

This for-profit free-content model also ruins a lot of paid business models, which might otherwise be successful. We get rid of the overhead of the advertisment industry and retain more money to pay for good journalism etc.

Actually I was thinking of most of the current newsmedia sites. You know - CNN, Fox, or locally for me - Sydney Morning Herald and others. Of course there problem has ended entirely since even the effort of reading them has lost its appeal.

I literally have never heard of the 3 things you just listed.

Advertisement has a prime target group which will never install adblockers - People who want to see ads and find convenience from having them.

It should not come as a big surprise. Mail based advertisement that is delivered by the post office has worked like that for years. Advertisement only goes to people who wants it, and those people uses the coupons and sale offerings given to them. Everyone stays happy with this model.

What you are loosing are forcing advertisement onto people who do not want it. That group is also the least profitable group to give advertisement to, and can often do more ham than good. Ad blockers help here in separating the group you do not want to give advertisement to, and the group you do.

For any company depending on advertisement, adblocking is a feature.

They also have a nice group who just don't know about the ad blockers.

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