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Comment by niccaluim | Hacker News Reader

His list of arguments for using ad blockers left out what I imagine is the #1 reason, which is "you're filling my eyeballs with garbage."

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The new thing they're trying is what you could call "gross-bait" ads, one gem that comes to mind is the girl's legs with indentations in them and white things coming out.

I'm not even sure they're selling anything anymore, most web ads seem more like psychological warfare.

How about a subscription service - and it could be a voluntary honor system thing - where you pay something each month and it gets distributed to websites you visit, and in order for a site to register with the service they have to forgo advertising. I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web ads. Somebody steal that idea.

> Somebody steal that idea.

Google already did:

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

Well, shit.

>>I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web ads.

I read somewhere that the number is close to $70/family/month, growing at %10 per year. Would you still pay ? Would this model even fit most people ?

Those families are indirectly paying that price today, through their ad-influenced purchases.

Not only are they paying for the end-product, but they're paying for the arms-race between advertisers as well, and that's a huge industry.

The amount of money the ad industry deals out to "content providers" must necessarily be less than the amount they get paid by their clients, which in turn must be less than the amount people paid to those clients.

If the distribution is not uniform, and some people benefit from the ad-influenced overspending of others, the business is then predatory.

That's an interesting way to look at it, if I understand it correctly: Advertising itself is a problematic concept. Why should we weep? Everyone would be equally affected by this, it's not like someone is getting an advantage. Maybe this hurting advertising is a net positive for all of us. It forces people to actually pay for stuff directly rather than by being subconsciously tricked into buying more of the stuff advertised, later.

The worst case scenario I have seen people come up with is more sponsored articles but I doubt that is a sustainable business model. Honestly, I never understood why I can read the New York Times online for free. I'm not feeling bad about it, but it's fucking strange. Baby steps, but I really hope something like Contributor (https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/) becomes popular. Preferably not run by google.

I agree - the direct , and especially indirect price[1] people pay for ads is huge.

[1]ads have a huge impact on society and on the psych of people.

Indeed.

When tobacco advertising was banned in the UK, tobacco profits soared because they no longer had to take part in the arms race.

I'd pay hundreds of dollars a month to be free of all the ads that bombard me from every fucking direction every fucking waking minute of my life. I'd love Apple to get so big and monopolistic they could curate the Internet, and you'd just pay them a monthly fee and they'd pass a percentage on to the sites you visited.

I will set up a proxy for you for a mere 99 dollars a month.

> I'd love Apple to get so big and monopolistic they could curate the Internet

So basically just for your own comfort you'd like a big company to become monopolistic and force its views on the web? I am not found of ads myself, but I think they are a better alternative to what you describe.

In other words, roughly AOL. That didn't end well.

Adblock?

I use it on my desktops, but feel kind of like I'm littering. I would like to pay for the content if possible. Also, where do I get ad block for IRL. Some airports have ads on their escalator handles now.

Found a link: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-much-ad-free-in...

>of the 316 million people living in the U.S. are online, according to recent estimates by Pew Research Center and Forrester Research, that would equate to roughly $159 per person per year

So yeah about $50 for a family of four per month.

I would pay for this site, reddit, google search, maps and gmail.

Why would you pay for anything from Google? They are already making loads off of you by reading/scanning your email, saving all of your search queries, and noting all of your locations via maps. They then sell all of that information. Haven't you paid them enough already to then have to fork over actual money?

> They then sell all of that information

Source? Their product is ad targeting. Selling the data itself would devalue their product.

If it ever comes to alternative non-ads form, I would consider this way.

Also, Readability tried something similar. Didn't work.

https://gigaom.com/2011/02/01/419-readability-intros-subscri...

https://gigaom.com/2012/06/13/readability-ends-publisher-pay...

Sounds like Readability was blocking all ads and then saying "come find us so we can pay you, even though we never told you we were doing this, oops too late".

Plus since then there's been the invention of these Taboola and Outbrain type ads which are like the ISIS of advertising. Because of them I'm sensing a lot more people are ready to declare war on web ads.

I didn't know what Taboola or Outbrain was so I searched and found this: https://newthealarmclock.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/screen-... and I recognized them. Very tabloid-style.

If they were always pics of nice looking girls in bikinis nobody would have a problem, usually they look like this: http://digiday.com/publishers/is-this-the-worst-page-on-the-...

Re the service: a while back I had the idea that people could add a TXT record containing their BTC/PayPal/etc address and, as long as there existed a loose formatting standard, users could install an extension that activated when it detected you were on a site that accepted donations.

For obvious reasons, it would fall apart for sites like Medium, but I was attached to the idea.

Why not just a <meta name="payment"> HTML tag?

That would certainly work, with the added benefit of value changes by page; however, I imagine it would require more work to display on every page. There are too many ways to serve web pages, and having to change your site like that seems like a potential turn-off for an already [negative adjective here] platform.

basically https://flattr.com/

Have you seen the Acceptable Advertising manifesto [1]? Sites like reddit and stack exchange have signed up. Essentially AdblockPlus one of the big two adblocking plugins has this manifesto where ads are not garbage, animated, annoying etc. won't be blocked.

My guess is that so many users installed adblockers because of obnoxious ads on a few websites they visit without realising that it removes the non-annoying 'acceptable ads' that support the sites they love. Hopefully something like the acceptable ads manifesto will help stem the tide of quite frankly shitty ads .

[1] https://acceptableads.org/

> Essentially AdblockPlus one of the big two adblocking plugins has this manifesto where ads are not garbage, animated, annoying etc. won't be blocked.

AdBlockPlus also charges a fee for whitelisting, which I oppose on principle even though I think I'd probably qualify.

I have never and will never (ever!) click on any ad. So it doesn't matter that ad-block is removing non-annoying 'acceptable ads'. I never click them, so the sites I love will never get any revenue anyway...

> "you're filling my eyeballs with garbage."

This is fundamentally a usability problem. One of the main reasons I use ad blockers is invasive web advertising often forces more mousing/tapping. Due to many many years of constant keyboard/mouse I have enough RSI discomfort these days that extra mousing/tapping is very noticeable.

A million upvotes for this.

It's mind pollution and the world would be better without it.

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