Hacker News Reader

Comment by infamouscow | Hacker News Reader

That is a weak argument. You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable. People will compensate you for it because they know it will go away if they don't. Take the No Agenda Show[1] for example, they have no advertising. Two podcasters make a living creating six hours of original content every week and are solely supported by their listeners.

[1] http://www.noagendashow.com/

View on HN

That sounds nice in theory but in actuality is complete BS. On a site like Teamliquid.net, a video game/eSports forum and team, over 50% of visitors have ad blocked enabled and they in no way make of this missed revenue from donations or TL Plus ($5/mo for ad free).

Everyone always says they only have ad block on for obnoxious sites, but that's such a load of shit. The free internet is run by ads, like it or not, and as someone who uses ad block I accept that I actively hinder it.

I don't mind if people use ad block, it's just the moral high ground people take that annoys me.

I'm responding to this post because it's a good segue (esports). I'm an esports fan myself and count as one of that 50% on the few times I visit that site. It is, unfortunately, not their fault. I have on several occasions uninstalled my ad blocker for a time -- one time it was a few months, one time it was a couple years. Both times it was ended by a single website that was a bad actor. Once it was autoplaying audio ads, which frustrated me enough that I nope'd right into installing AdBlock Plus. The second time it was a flash ad that, after about 30 seconds on the page, began consuming about half of my CPU. After I figured out why I immediately nope'd on over to AdBlock Plus once again.

For me, at least, it's a tragedy of the commons out there. All it takes is one bad actor to spoil it all.

This isn't theory, it is a concrete example of content creators who make content and make a living with absolutely zero advertisement. If you need yet another example, LWN ( http://lwn.net ) runs mostly on subscriptions, instead of ads (90% of their revenue is subscriptions).

People won't pay for bad/terrible content, that is the hard truth.

> You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable.

Not necessarily. There is a threshold of value that must be met to make people pay directly for it. For example I run a niche site that gets 5K uniques each month - clearly I'm providing some value - but I doubt that what I provide is enough to make people pay me directly. Ads are the most effective way of solve that problem: reward content producers that can't meet that threshold but still add some value.

There is a legitimate place for marketing. If I cure cancer in my garage but never tell anybody, what I've done can't become valuable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com