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Comment by RhodesianHunter | Hacker News Reader

"people not savvy enough"

Or people who are plenty savvy, but simply don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...

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I wouldn't mind ads so much if I had an easy way to pay $0.05 to get rid of them for a day, or $0.50 to get rid of them for a month.

As far as I can tell, that's way more money on a per user basis than companies are making on selling ads.

For the last decade or so, I have used a cookie marked on bidmanager that buys myself at a high enough bid CPM that I basically always win.

I serve myself a blank ad.

This is brilliant. Roughly how much does it cost?

It's generally less than ten dollars a month.

While I would like something like this too, the $0.05 per day or $0.50 per month is the real problem. Would you be willing to pay $1.00-2.00 per day? $30-60 per month? These are the typical subscription prices sites need in order to stay in business.

There seems to be no midpoint where the sites get the money they want or need that is also going to be acceptable to the consumer. Advertising, for some reason, does pay enough.

"Destroy your Internet economy with this one weird old tip..."

>don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...

The current ad economy favours clickbait over original content.

Paradoxically, there's a lot more original content than there used to be in the days of print. But that's down to Wordpress and the low cost of entry to web publishing, and not so much because there's an infinite number of content monkeys trying to monetise an infinite number of articles of the Twenty Things About Hacker News You Just Won't Believe kind.

Watching ads isn't contributing to content creators. That ad money didn't materialize from nowhere, that's a percentage of revenue being diverted to the ad company. Bought Product X? See that Product X ad? You helped pay for it. You could make a strong argument that ad networks are parasitic drag on the economy, but that would probably be dismissed as crazy talk.

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