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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

There are so many problems with ads that I cannot in good conscience offer any other advice than "block 'em all."

• Ad networks can be, and are, used as a malware distribution vector. No one is vetting all the ads. Not the publishers, not the networks.

• They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it.

• Ads are cognitive pollution. It's possible that mass marketing largely doesn't work, but I'm wary of assuming that "ads don't work on me." What if they do? As a matter of hygiene, it's better to avoid them. No, I don't avert my eyes away from billboards (ironic next gen Google Glass application) but I do skip TV commercials.

• Even if they don't work, they're at least distracting from stuff viewers actually care about.

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> They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it.

Understandable, but um, if you didn't have those ads, you wouldn't have YouTube. Oh pay for it? Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody.

Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.

Youtube ads have gotten more and more obnoxious and intrusive as time has gone on. I remember even before adblock was a thing using Youtube and not having to wait 30+ seconds to decide if I want to watch the video or not.

This is not necessarily a reason to block all ads. But if they would make the ads less obnoxious I'd be much more likely to not worry about blocking them.

I haven't seen a youtube ad in years. And I only use Noscript which is partially disabled on youtube, because you need scripts for flash. So I should see ads.

If you could link me a video with an ad it would be awesome, I want to determine the cause.

Oh, yeah. I realize I'm freeloading here and it may not be sustainable.

Although, maybe if it wasn't for centralized video repos, we could host them in some p2p fashion? Torrent has certainly become less popular since the advent of streaming. As an added benefit, such networks would be more resistant to censorship.

> Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.

I, for one, would be happy to. I'd honestly pay a monthly fee to watch Youtube. I don't use it only for cat videos, I also use it to find new music from artists I've never heard of, watch recordings of concerts I've been to just to relive the moments and so on.

If Youtube would let me pay to make those ads go away, I'd do so without thinking twice. In the absence of the said option, though, yes, I block their ads.

Agreed. Since I'm given the option, I pay $5 a month to support a caster on Twitch sans ads, and I can certainly see paying some amount up to $10 a month to watch YouTube without ads.

However, I'm not given the choice, which just seems silly to me.

Judging by the huge bitchfest by users complaining because they have to pay $5 a month for Xbox Live Gold just to pay $9 a month to watch Netflix on it, people won't want to pay for their internet connection, and membership fee to the hundreds of sites on line.

Yeah the internet would be better, because nobody but the people who can afford to pay for it would be on... You'd have to have a full time job just to pay the fees to your handful of favorite sites you visit.

You'd not be paying for every site you want to watch. Only those that are most important to you. Also, not everybody using the site would be paying.

If content is supposed to be available to paying and non-paying users, then maybe (in the case of youtube)the payout to content creators would be determined by the upvotes of the paying customers only.

This is not true, sites did just fine before the advent of ads, and were actually useful. Some kinds of advertising online aren't even obnoxious, and that's fine too. For the obnoxious stuff? We can mostly do without. If we drive them to bankruptcy even faster with adblocking, all the better! ;-)

Have you ever wondered what YouTube's bill is monthly just to give you that content for free?

I come from a group of people who run some of the biggest video based sites online, yes people want to watch these stupid videos for free, hundreds of thousands of daily visitors... One guy I know pays $1500/mo just to give stupid 30 second clips to his visitors with nothing but a few ads on the site to support it. No ads? Say bye to these sites, because nobody is gonna work a full time job to give you 30 second cat videos with no compensation at all.

If all the cat videos were to disappear tomorrow, I suspect that most of the 7 billion inhabitants of this planet would somehow manage to fill the gaping voids in their lives with other stupid things.

>Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody.

what a great way to get rid of all that junk!

>Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.

And that's bad because?

> Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.

Hacker News, Github, Dribbble ... I disagree

If we go by some guesstimates and youtube's numbers[1], if youtube were to target 6 billion in gross revenue (slightly up from 2013 gross ad revenue) each of it's one billion monthly unique visitors would have to pay 50 cents a month for youtube access. That's not accounting for the simplification of the hosting platform sans ads (but that might even out, or be eclipsed by taking payment).

So, if 1 in 100 signed up for 5 USD/month access, youtube would still make more (gross) than on ads. 1 in 100 might of course be a far too optimistic conversion rate.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/12/googles-y...

http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

Maybe they should also make micro-donations to the authors of videos possible?

They'd get a cut of the payment as profit and it would also "incentivize the content creators" (I feel dirty now.).

I take a carrot and stick approach to encouraging online and mobile business to stop displaying ads in favor of charging viewers. I take the paid, ad-free option, if one is available (carrot). If not, then I'm running Adblock, so I use the site anyway (stick).

The maleware distribution crap is definitely one of the biggest reasons for it. In the past, arbitrary JS could just be executed.

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