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Comment by theknown99 | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, the type of person who installs adblock isn't the type of person you can sell things to easily. They're decidedly anti-mainstream, anti-corporate, probably not particularly rich, etc.

So it's not just a matter of convincing their userbase to stop blocking ads, you'd need to tell their current userbase to go away, and invite a better userbase to come and click on ads.

Reddit created this problem by fostering a culture of anti advertising early on.

Reddit should probably just become some non-profit foundation like wikipedia and show begging adverts.

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> IMHO, the type of person who installs adblock isn't the type of person you can sell things to easily. They're decidedly anti-mainstream, anti-corporate, probably not particularly rich, etc.

    [citation needed]

Could just be that the people installing AdBlock don't like being distracted by multitudes of flashing popover and automatically playing videos. I doubt it's anything to do with being anti-mainstream or anti-corporate.

How on earth do you conclude that people who install adblock aren't rich? There is literally no sense behind that babble.

Advertising shows you things you might want to buy. It's useful. if you have money to buy such things.

Who wouldn't want to see adverts for cool gadgets, toys, houses, suits, holidays, etc?

They should focus their efforts on redditgifts (http://redditgifts.com/) and consider putting it on the main site instead of on a separate domain. Their users may not like to buy mainstream products but they definitely like to buy quirky, off-the-wall things as evidenced by `Shut Up And Take My Money`'s success with advertising on Reddit. They've already got the right idea with the marketplace model. They should (if they're not already) focus on trying to attract unique products through a program similar to Steam's Greenlight and stop focusing so much on advertising. Advertising and Redditors -- generally speaking -- are not a good match.

Reddit could offer Reddit platinum which would give users a simple user page / blog.

I'm rich[1], and I have Adblock.

[1] Depending on your definition of rich.

While you are responding to a poorly-defended stereotype/generalization, I actually think your anecdote is worse: the userbase of this website is, on the whole, going to be almost entirely "rich"; even if 99% of Adblock users are "poor", if you thereby polled Adblock users here you would not be able to discover this phenomenon due to the pre-selection.

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