The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads.
You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
The valuable parts of the internet are, with few exceptions, ad-free. Forums like HN, personal blogs and sites, paid services—these are the places where real value is to be found on the internet.
The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enormous drain on society that the ad-funded model has been.
> and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
This is a classic market failure. Corporations have figured out how to manipulate people into pursuing the corporation's interest (scroll indefinitely through pages and pages of ads and spend money on the things so advertised) at the expense of the consumer's interest (do anything else with their time and money). Popularity is irrelevant when it's clearly achieved by exploitative design, not value delivered.
Is this really true? Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
> Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads.
Virtually all news sites, regardless of what side you agree with, are composed mostly of garbage designed to draw your attention, not inform you about things that really matter. They may provide some value in addition to that, but the advertising model ensures that they must hack your attention as their primary goal.
> Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions).
Similarly, our entertainment options were better before they had to be designed to keep you on a specific streaming platform for a certain length of time.
> Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Depends on who you're buying productivity stuff from. My Fastmail account does just fine with no ads and no data sales, and covers basically everything I need. Most other "productivity" tools I've tried have felt palpably exploitative.
> More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Ad-funded products are a civilization-wide trap like credit card rewards. They create an illusion that things are coming for free, but companies don't do this out of charity—they pay for ads because they have good data that strongly suggests that the people who see them will, on average, pay them back and more.
I'd rather make the cost of a service explicit than hide it behind hard-to-quantify behavioral hacks.
Reminds me of the days when ads were 5 or so minutes long, not just to convince you to buy it, but inform you why you should buy it. It wasn’t a dopamine laden 30s that tells you nothing about the product.
I listened to "The Shadow" radio episodes from the 1940s, sponsored by "Blue Coal". At 0:45 of https://www.beyondthebreaker.com/the-shadow-of-blue-coal/ "All signs point to a severe winter. Be prepared! If you want to be sure of even, dependable, helpful heat in any kind of weather, insist on Blue Coal. America’s finest anthracite mined from the fields of northern Pennsylvania. The coal that is colored a harmless blue at the mine for your protection."
That's about 20 seconds, and the blue color was 'a marketing ploy to distinguish its coal from that of its competitors. But the company took it one step further by actually promoting its product as being superior, longer burning, and even more “healthful” than other coal. No wonder the PR “spin” profession was so poorly regarded in that era!'
Also, 1971's "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke", was 1 minute long, and did not inform.
Happy HN-reader here who recently discovered Brave browser on Apple devices as an alternative YT player. I removed google’s YT app and live mostly advertisement free.
News (especially national or global) is largely idle entertainment for middle class people, and comes with large servings of propaganda. Subscriptions/commerce are fine. Productivity stuff IME is almost all FOSS or paid for. Ads tend to optimize for the opposite of productivity: engagement.
Existing ad-free because the money comes from somewhere is the point. That somewhere is more ethical and prevents the conflicts of interest that make ad-based services inevitably worth their nominal price.
Some obvious very high value parts of the Internet with no monetization: government services and information, free educational materials from pre-school through graduate university and research level, basically all software I use, creative commons music, art, and CAD designs, forums and blogs where world experts like Terence Tao post, forums and blogs where hobbyists post.
If you look to the Internet for ways to improve your life, you'll find the associated resources (which I'd characterize as the high value parts of the Internet) generally have no ads. It should be obvious why.
My brother in code, Hackernews is a blatant ad for YC, look at title bar. They just decided they could afford the subsidy to run it enough to be the sole supporter.
In general, its easiest to charge the wealthiest group with the greatest motivation to spend and that combination means in almost all cases corporations are better customers than individuals. Hence, advertising replacing subscription.
Additionally this why consumer internet is so hard to standup and SaaS feels so much easier to take from 0 to 1.
The term is "content marketing", and yes, ads are ads but ultimately people trying to release quality content for free to shill their brand is not very high on the list of worst things about advertising, I'm sure you'll agree.
This comment doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying for it, and sometimes those people paying for it are making money through advertisement to pay for this site (I.e. if Google “sponsors” your site.”
Someone is paying for it, there is no “failure” here. This is just classic leftist talk - you are welcome to create a new model and show everyone how it’s done. But then you will need money to host, code, etc. I’m happy to take something free if you want to pay for it.
A) I know I'm doing something right when I'm alternatingly accused of being a leftist and a right-winger. Thanks for providing the regular counter to the usual accusations I get of shilling right-wing politics! Can I quote you on that next time I get one of those?
B) If there's an argument against my stance in your comment here I'm missing it. I'd love to have a dialog if you have a counterargument!
As far as I can tell, subscriptions aren't a reliable way to opt out of ads and ad tracking. Look at cars, cable, Uber, Spotify, Amazon prime, newspapers, telecoms, ISPs, etc. They all show sponsored content and upsell services to subscribers.
I've tried putting my money where my mouth is by switching to subscription services for everything and I still have to go out of my way to avoid advertising with adblockers.
I wonder if advertising really is a waste of time and money for the most part, and it's just that the advertisers are really good at convincing people otherwise.
I worked for an ad measurement firm; we developed a causal ad measurement methodology based on a research tool used for observational data in clinical trials. Roughly 1/3 of the thousands of consumer packaged goods (toothpaste, canned soup, breakfast cereal, etc) studies we performed showed no effect of advertising. Another 1/3 didnt have enough of an impact to justify the ad spend (ROI < $1.00), and about 1/3 showed more revenue than ad spend.
Obviously, different industries are likely to show different distributions of results, but CPG companies are the biggest ad spenders, I believe.
The internet as we know it is a dystopian hellscape. As somebody who has been around long enough to remember the internet before every interaction on it was monetised, all I want is for the ad industry to die.
Or chrome, or gmail, or firefox, or ... sadly most of the internet is financed by ads. Only some parts remain free of them. Wikipedia for example. And even HN here ... you can argue it is payed for by the occasional ads, or rather all of it is an ad for the VC ycombinator.
Even Wikipedia feels like each page has a prominent “Plea from Jimmy Wales” ad at the top of every page (even after donating), even if it isn’t billed as such.
Many of the YCombinator companies advertise jobs on this forum, and some also post ‘demos’, which are often advertising to potential investors, clients, and partners.
I do not get this argument at all. We all eventually bear the cost of ads by them adding cost to the products being advertised that we buy. Nothing is free.
Not to mention that treating ad-funded as equivalent to free arrogantly assumes that I, personally, am somehow immune to the manipulation inherent in advertising.
Companies pay for ads because they have good reason to believe that some significant percentage of people who see them will buy something that they otherwise would not have bought. They spend enormous sums setting up the infrastructure to attribute sales to specific ads. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have no really good way to quantify how much drains from our bank accounts each year due to the ads we see.
Might I be the exception to the rule and be un-manipulatable? Possibly. But I don't have a strong reason to bet on it, and I'd rather see the price of the service listed outright as a subscription than simply hope that the ad-funded version will net to a lower cost for me.
I get what you're saying, but you're disregarding the point of my (admittedly tongue in cheek) proposal. I'm not saying there shouldn't be ads. Currently, the ad industry is subsidized by consumers because they pay for the traffic. Instead, the advertiser should pay, since they get the most of it.
Besides, this argument that without ads content can't exist is bogus. Firstly people have been creating art and knowledge without thought for pay since time immemorial, it's a basic human instinct. Were there ads paying for the paintings in Lascaux? In the early days of the internet there was little money to be made online, and yet the quality of the content was excellent - and yes there were banners and tracking cookies but it's interesting how the best sites had little or none of that, and when they did have ads the quality of the ads was very high too - relevant to the audience and not some worthless crap that is much worse than competitors.
To this day people freely publish quality content with 0 monetization, just because they want to. That type of content gets shared on this site daily. Technology has advanced greatly and simply putting a website up is very cheap now, and people have a decent number of hours to put into their hobby.
"The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads."
Perhaps this statement is meant as a figure of speech. If so, please disregard the remainder of this comment.
If not, the statement makes no sense. The truth is Workaccount2 does not even know imoreno's name, let alone how imoreno uses the internet, i.e., "the internet as imoreno knows it".
The alternative is not "subscriptions for everything" because that is what so-called "tech" companies are already trying. Obviously it does not work very well if the subscription seller is only an intermediary with nothing that people want to pay for. As such, these websites must rely on surveillance and/or ads.
There are a number of internet users who generally do not "sign up" or "subscribe" to anything, other than internet service. Apparently this number is large enough to leave so-called "tech" companies no other option than to sell internet users out as surveillance subjects and/or ad targets.
The alternative is that the number of so-called "tech" companies (unnecessary intermediaries) able to continue as a going concern would drop. Naturally anyone invested in such ventures will be very defensive about their entitlement to conduct commercial surveillance and profit from ads. We see this in HN comments along the lines of "internet ads are mandatory" all the time. The "arguments" made in these HN comments are often quite funny, like "We cannot go back to the time before the internet had ads" or "If we do not have unfettered proliferation of internet ads, then the internet will suck."
Even assuming you’re right in principle, there’s a basic problem here: ads have value (to the advertiser, to the network, to the site showing them, and potentially to the user). And ads have costs paid by the parties other than the user (lots of money changes hands and some compute may be incurred, too), and that’s fine, and the parties in control are strongly motivated to control those costs. But there are also costs that are effectively externalities as far as the companies involved are concerned, and those are bandwidth, battery usage, and degradation of the user experience.
So if anyone wants to seriously call the modern ad system a benefit to the user, then those externalities should be controlled. Either the actual bandwidth costs should be accounted as losses to the user, or the advertiser should be forced to pay those costs. And I bet that ads would start using far less bandwidth with no change in appearance if the advertisers started caring.
The way I see it: if your service forces me to watch ads or pay for a subscription, then I have two choices: either I watch the ads (probably not) or pay for the subscription (slightly more likely but it really depends), or I simply don't use your service. For the most part, I have gone with option #2 in the majority of cases so far.
I have no bad conscience whatsoever to use an adblocker. Heck, I get eye cancer every time I have sit in front of somebody's webbrowser who does not have an adblocker installed.
Even though I use the internet quite a bit as we all do, if the free internet were to go away tomorrow, I'd probably find something else to do with my time.
The alternative is hobby sites, sites that make money from sales like Steam and paid content. I’m honestly fine with that. Fuck ads. If I could remove all ad and data mining supported content from the web I’d do it without hesitation.
That's a false dichotomy, the website earns $0.01 from my ad view(s) on a given page, why should that be replaced with a subscription? Just let me pay $0.01 to view the content.
If the ads were just text-based and related to the content I visit at the time rather than "me" I would have much less hate towards them.
If I visit a webpage about CPUs I am probably interested in CPUs, maybe I am building a PC, send me ads about that which I may actually find useful. Why would you send me irrelevant ads about gardening just because I am into that also? If I am looking to buy a CPU I am not gonna click on something irrelevant like that.
The something in between alternative between these two extremes is universally working hassle-free micro-, or even nano-payments, with accordingly priced articles, without any further subscription pressures.
There is a feast. You get a crumb. The problem isn't that part of that the internet needs part of that crumb to function. The problem is that you get only a crumb. Let's not pretend otherwise.
Bullshit. I guarantee you that if tomorrow, by some regulatory or technological magic, the vast majority of invasive ads were eliminated from online content and platforms, creators of content would still find ways to deliver the goods, simple because the interest would be there. This would happen even if people showed an enormously strong tendency of not paying for subscription offers.
Before ads and ad "partners" became as pervasively parasitic as they are today, there was still plenty of fine content available online, much of it free of charge, and even now, many platforms exist that offer the same, or at least keep their ad systems unobtrusive to users.
Also, as another comment below mentions, even when you do pay, many platforms still bombard you with ad garbage, or create frankly abusive bullshit like paid tiers in which you still can't opt out of ads. Looking at you and many others Netflix.
You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.