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Comment by cdmoyer | Hacker News Reader

Unlike the author, I'm really excited by this. Paying to remove ads (which this basically is) is one of my favorite business models as a consumer. Pandora and slashdot are two examples that come to mind.

I think this is an interesting move from a more mainstream outlet. It's miles ahead of my local newspaper and their stupid 5 articles a day paywall.

Also, the argument that nobody would make a product and then make it shittier for free customers seems silly. Companies do this all the time. All those pricing grids where feature X is in a higher tier, or nag screens, or limiting usage?

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I'm with you. I'd be very curious to see what the internet would look like without large-scale advertising. I know that would kill significant chunk of "free" content, but would the world really be worse for that? As a tradeoff we wouldn't have the scary empire that is Google (and Facebook etc), we wouldn't have ubiquitous tracking, we wouldn't have artificial page view count inflation (via pagination etc), probably less ugly SEO, and much more.

But the cat is out of the bag, while ad-free internet might make fun thought experiment I don't see really the situation changing in the large anytime soon.

I simply filter them out on sites that get obnoxious about it. My filter preferences in adblock plus have fixed a great many sites. I have no problem with them using ads to pay for content, but when subscriptions or similar become required to view content not purposely made annoying to view is another thing. Either present it properly or lock me out. Don't go half way and make the experience annoying.

Annoying means I start playing with css and add ons to fix your site so I can view it if you even worth the time by then

I love the pay to remove ads business model as well. I've often wondered why the internet culturally seems so against it.

I read somewhere that the CPM for YouTube video ads is $7.60. I doubt I struggle through a couple thousand ads a year, so if they charged me a dollar a month it would be a win win: I'd get hours of my life back and they'd get more revenue and less overhead serving ads.

> I've often wondered why the internet culturally seems so against it.

Internet culturally is heavily inclined to "everything to me right now gratis" attitude. Non-commercial roots and long-lasting wide-spread piratism are probably the main contributing factors, amplified by the fact that most things have been traditionally gratis.

> It's miles ahead of my local newspaper and their stupid 5 articles a day paywall

That 'stupid' paywall is serving the same mechanism as Slate's new subcription mechanism - monetizing the site's content. Interesting how one is perceived as 'bad' (but probably offers more value for money) and the other is viewed as a 'favourite business model'. Why the difference?

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