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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

Yes. My guess is you're leaving that statement hanging to make a larger point?

If so I'd love to add that I'm annoyed by some of the tactics and lengths that publishers go to to monetize content ad the expense of user-experience and other costs.

The only path right now are ads, 'sponsored content', 'native units'.

I would much rather we have a subscription-based model that generated enough revenue to ween them off awful ad experiences.

Thats very much an aspirational goal.

My larger point is that having readers circumvent that, as opposed to supporting that, is disheartening to many of us who are working on the inside to push change.

BTW: And that extension was a redesign, of which ads were removed or moved. The NYT legal dept had Google remove it.

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> I'm annoyed by some of the tactics and lengths that publishers go to to monetize content

> having readers circumvent that, as opposed to supporting that, is disheartening to many of us who are working on the inside to push change.

So what you're saying is that it's OK to circumvent the methods of monetization you don't support?

He doesn't like paywalls, so he circumvents them. You don't like ads, so you circumvent them. And then you say shame on you? This is absolutely the pot calling the kettle black.

I support subscription content. But you can't have your cake and eat it too -- in other words, you can't put content behind a paywall and also have it publicly indexed by search engines.

Remove the trick where it's okay for Google searches to circumvent the paywall and this extension becomes useless.

Why not? So paywall content is not good enough? It's just a different business model by publishers: free access with ads or pay for access.

Why does that penalize the content itself and the discovery of it?

What's happening here is that it's not just "free access with ads or pay for access." It's "free access if you came from google, so that google can index our pages, but otherwise pay for access so that we can put the same content behind a paywall." It's less a business model and more an SEO trick that Google puts up with under certain conditions.

I agree with most of your other posts on this thread but why is it ok to just remove ads from other competing publishers?

It's their choice to choose a business model, whether ads or subscriptions. If they serve ads and it's not the experience you want, shouldn't you just move on and not go back to that site?

The ad model actually works well for lots of sites and is the sole reason we have the long-tail of the internet. Someone working at an ad-based publisher would have the exact same comments about your ad disabling extension, why circumvent if they're trying to make it work?

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