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It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And the people that use the most heavy

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And the people that use the most heavy-handed approaches with ad-blocking are going to be the same people that are screaming "NOT MY PROBLEM" while the ship goes down. Their business model doesn't require changes to reality. Their business model requires the end-user to accept reality for what it is: you can't get a bunch of free stuff, ad infinitum, while simultaneously blocking the only feasible revenue model for said free stuff. > It's not up to "reality", us, to change to support your business model. Did you pat yourself on the back while you said that, or right after? We are not reality. The reality is, ad-blocking will be the absolute death of currency-free content. This abuse of the word reality is truly odd to me. You seem to think every choice we make as consumers is the current reality. What you call reality, I call a house of cards.

anonymousab 11y ago
Your post seems entirely based on the assumption that people will not create and host quality content for free.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  It also assumes people will not try to extract content from walled gardens via any means and share such information for free.
- jhall1468 11y ago
  It seems the assumption of "block everything" individuals is that any quality content that is not currently free somehow will magically become so when all ads are blocked.
- RUG3Y 11y ago
  This is what people did in the past. People are doing this now, and they will continue to do this. TBH, most of the content that will go away as a result of adblocking is garbage anyway. It's the paid bloggers and other leeches that have had easy for the last 10 years who are really complaining about this.
raddad 11y ago
The world did fine prior to the advertisements and the world will be fine after the advertisements fail. Simply because somebody asks you to become a sheeple doesn't mean you are required to become one. No need to fall into lock step and comply.
- jhall1468 11y ago
  Modern advertising began in 1836. Why has it become vogue to call someone "sheeple" because they think there's a happy medium between the "all ads are bad" and the "giving you a seizure with my ad is okay" approaches. You aren't an underground revolution fighting the man. You installed a browser plugin.
  - bigbugbag 11y ago
    There cannot be such a happy medium as long as ads are increasingly "targeted" and "third party". "Targeted ads" means surveillance, profiling, tracking, massive privacy invasion. "Third party" means poorer performance and having no control on your main source of revenue (see the stories about google censoring content on google ads based websites). Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable. The issue here has two sides: on the practical side it is much easier to block all ads than to maintain a white list while on the attitude style a website that tells its visitors "I could not care less about your privacy and your browsing experience" by showing ads and running third partu tracking scripts should not be surprised when a growing portion of visitors return the favor "we don't care about your failed business model, we do care about our privacy and browsing experience though" by blocking said ads. If adblocking wasn't a game changer revolution, we wouldn't be reading the IAB telling us "we messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." http://www.iab.com/news/lean/ http://www.iab.com/news/lean/
    - jhall1468 11y ago
      > Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while stille being profitable. So there is a happy medium and, in your opinion, it's non-targeted ads. Yet uBlock and uBlock Origin and the millions of people that use them are blocking DuckDuckGo ads. piwik is an open-source, locally installed, piece of analytic's software that is blocked by default in the above AND in adblock. So you are making an argument that is presently being implemented and still being blocked.
imgabe 11y ago
Most content is worthless. Content that has actual monetary value to someone, market research data for instance, has no trouble finding people willing to pay for it. The fact is most "news" and other article type sites do not serve a purpose other than satisfying some idle curiosity or passing time. Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life. The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material. When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it.
- jhall1468 11y ago
  > Most content is worthless. What nonsense. Most content's worth is variable depending on who is consuming it. The issue with ad-blockers is that it isn't killing worthless content. It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit. > The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material. Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal. > When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it. You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported.
  - imgabe 11y ago
    > It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit. What does that tell you about the value of that content that people are not even willing to be exposed to an ad in order to consume it? This is the proper application of "the customer is always right". When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault. It's the vendor's fault for failing to meet the market demands in a suitable way. > Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal. No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product. > You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported. Do most FOSS doc pages have ads on them? Not that I've seen. O'Reilly and other publishers have no trouble charging money for well-written technical documentation. People are clearly willing to pay for that. Rosetta Stone charges quite a bit for language instruction.
lazyjones 11y ago
> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. Why do you simultaneously try to use it as a threatening outlook? If enough people perceive it as a threat or discover later that paywalls are even less convenient to them, some other solution will have to be found.
- jhall1468 11y ago
  > If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good". > some other solution will have to be found Because we already have a solution. Unobtrusive advertising is a valid trade-off between having to pay currency for content and said content-creators generating money through their content. I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive. But now we are destined to fear-mongering nonsense about Google tracking your every move to justify blocking everything. When that wasn't far enough, we blocked locally installed software applications that track client-side behavior. Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card.
  - lazyjones 11y ago
    > What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good". It's good for the majority of publishers if they accept it as their preferred solution as you wrote. Unless you think they ought to be driven by other motives than making sound business decisions - like cruelty or whatever you were trying to insinuate with your slanted rhetoric. > I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive. Not really - fools like me already worked around ads almost 20 years ago because they wasted bandwidth (proof: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/websearch.html http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/websearch.html - no longer functional though amazingly still online). Piggyback ads are an anomaly and people will always try to avoid them, whether they're text (to be confused with valid search results) like Google's or flashy, crashy animations. > Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card. Well, go ahead and use it then. What's holding you back? Altruism and the urge to save users from the consequences of their personal choices? Oh, please...
bigbugbag 11y ago
> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. Except this won't free us from ads, actually the contrary as explained here: http://zen.lk/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escape-ads-by-paying-for-content/ http://zen.lk/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escape-ads-by-pa... > The reality is, ad-blocking will be the absolute death of currency-free content. The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...
- jhall1468 11y ago
  > The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web The article is a 10-page document on why "surveillance" (tracking) is evil and effectively offers no solution outside of (maybe) micro-payments as a means to compensate, which directly counters the first argument you made that paying will never free us from ads. So which is it?
  - bigbugbag 11y ago
    Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing. If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…
    - jhall1468 11y ago
      > Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing. "Not really doing" doesn't exactly encouraging. You are making assumptions based on an idea that's never been tested, let alone shown to work. I think it's an interesting idea that may work for some content, and may not work for others. But let's not pretend that the article is, in any way, based on a real working model. > If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,… Patreon, flattr and crowdfunding are all the same thing. Exchanging money for content/creation. This is not a new solution to the problem, they are all platforms for solutions that are as old as money. Wikipedia is a non-profit that survives on donations. Pretending that every form of content should be, or could be, non-profit is as silly as saying that every form of content can happily survive on microtransactions.
Karunamon 11y ago
If it can't survive without abusing is readers attention, privacy, and security, then I guess the ship needs to go down like the titanic already.
- jhall1468 11y ago
  And be replaced with what, exactly? The call to arms over privacy, attention and security is getting old. Not because its wrong, but because it's never accompanied with an actual solution. But that's moot because the ship isn't going to sink. Enough people will not use adblock to ensure that companies like Google and Facebook will always make some money off advertising. So rest assured, the Titanic's will continue to float along. You are simply guaranteeing anything smaller won't. Including any potential competition for the Titanic's.
  - RyanZAG 11y ago
    Maybe with nothing? There isn't some god-given requirement for there to be all these reviews about 3D cards. If readers refuse to receive ads and refuse to pay, then the site will go out of business and the content will go away. That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist. Less content is not the end of the world. Probably some hobbyist will spend his own time and money to publish it in some form anyway. Or Guru3D will find some other way to survive? They've added a donation link - maybe people will be happy to pay after all.
    - jhall1468 11y ago
      > That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist. Nonsense. That argument means all content is valued only by the numbers of ads viewed. By that logic Facebook is the best content. And they don't have to change by the sheer volume of people that visit it. Competition becomes even more unlikely because nobody wants to invest in a business that needs to millions of viewers to be profitable. > Less content is not the end of the world. Nor is it necessarily a good thing. Fewer options will just empower the organizations that happened to exist in the heyday of advertising. Converging power more and more while saying "it's a good thing, the market will right itself" is naive.
njharman 11y ago
That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be. I'm not a huge "free-market" proponent. But markets exist, and they aren't magic. They smove to solution(s) that the market wants / willing to "pay" for. Pay in broadest sense, money, eyeballs, time, etc. As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional.
- jhall1468 11y ago
  > That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be. This argument is already so tired. When you limit all options to one, that option has to be taken whether or not it is a good option. If everyone blocked every advertisement indiscriminately there would be no other option available but pay-walling. That isn't a good option because, as you said, most content will either die or be replaced by free content, which may or may not be as good. > As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional. The only delusions are those held by people that think the tide is a good thing. The reality is that ads are not going away. What's happening is ads are becoming a business that is only sustainable by enormous companies. Google and Facebook will survive and they will profit off of ads. Guru3D will not. The opportunity for competition will dry up, because you won't be able to profit with ads and you can't charge for what is already free.
  - nine_k 11y ago
    I'd be fine with paying to access several latest issues of a periodical. A periodical might as well be fine with making historical issues available for free, since they'd drive more visitors to pay for new content, expectedly also high-quality.
  - RUG3Y 11y ago
    Just because you don't like the argument doesn't mean it's "tired." It's absolutely true. I block every ad, I will continue to do so, and should content go behind a paywall, I will simply not view it. If there are enough people like me, content providers will be forced to adapt their strategies. That's the way it is.
13thLetter 11y ago
> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And...? Industries where "person who pays for product" is separated from "person who consumes product" tend to have enormous problems because of that. They are inefficient because the consumer doesn't care about price, and they provide bad product because the person paying doesn't care about quality. Perhaps it is indeed time to consider crazy, wacky, out-there alternatives such as paying for content. > What you call reality, I call a house of cards. If the "house of cards" that is online journalism does finally collapse once and for all, ad blockers will have done a massive service for humanity.
gaius 11y ago
Viewing a banner ad is a price I'm willing to pay. A full-screen ad designed to be hard to close, or with misleading cues to take you to another site, or with intrusive sounds? That kills my bandwidth and my battery? Not so much. Then there's all the tracking. It was the advertisers who broke the terms of the deal and now We The People are renegotiating.
chongli 11y ago
It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. If paywalls actually worked then we'd already see them everywhere. Why don't we? Because people don't want to pay.

anonymousab 11y ago

Your post seems entirely based on the assumption that people will not create and host quality content for free.

cinquemb 11y ago
It also assumes people will not try to extract content from walled gardens via any means and share such information for free.
jhall1468 11y ago
It seems the assumption of "block everything" individuals is that any quality content that is not currently free somehow will magically become so when all ads are blocked.
RUG3Y 11y ago
This is what people did in the past. People are doing this now, and they will continue to do this. TBH, most of the content that will go away as a result of adblocking is garbage anyway. It's the paid bloggers and other leeches that have had easy for the last 10 years who are really complaining about this.

raddad 11y ago

The world did fine prior to the advertisements and the world will be fine after the advertisements fail. Simply because somebody asks you to become a sheeple doesn't mean you are required to become one. No need to fall into lock step and comply.

jhall1468 11y ago
Modern advertising began in 1836. Why has it become vogue to call someone "sheeple" because they think there's a happy medium between the "all ads are bad" and the "giving you a seizure with my ad is okay" approaches. You aren't an underground revolution fighting the man. You installed a browser plugin.
- bigbugbag 11y ago
  There cannot be such a happy medium as long as ads are increasingly "targeted" and "third party". "Targeted ads" means surveillance, profiling, tracking, massive privacy invasion. "Third party" means poorer performance and having no control on your main source of revenue (see the stories about google censoring content on google ads based websites). Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable. The issue here has two sides: on the practical side it is much easier to block all ads than to maintain a white list while on the attitude style a website that tells its visitors "I could not care less about your privacy and your browsing experience" by showing ads and running third partu tracking scripts should not be surprised when a growing portion of visitors return the favor "we don't care about your failed business model, we do care about our privacy and browsing experience though" by blocking said ads. If adblocking wasn't a game changer revolution, we wouldn't be reading the IAB telling us "we messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." http://www.iab.com/news/lean/ http://www.iab.com/news/lean/
  - jhall1468 11y ago
    > Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while stille being profitable. So there is a happy medium and, in your opinion, it's non-targeted ads. Yet uBlock and uBlock Origin and the millions of people that use them are blocking DuckDuckGo ads. piwik is an open-source, locally installed, piece of analytic's software that is blocked by default in the above AND in adblock. So you are making an argument that is presently being implemented and still being blocked.

imgabe 11y ago

Most content is worthless. Content that has actual monetary value to someone, market research data for instance, has no trouble finding people willing to pay for it. The fact is most "news" and other article type sites do not serve a purpose other than satisfying some idle curiosity or passing time. Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life. The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material. When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it.

jhall1468 11y ago
> Most content is worthless. What nonsense. Most content's worth is variable depending on who is consuming it. The issue with ad-blockers is that it isn't killing worthless content. It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit. > The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material. Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal. > When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it. You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported.
- imgabe 11y ago
  > It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit. What does that tell you about the value of that content that people are not even willing to be exposed to an ad in order to consume it? This is the proper application of "the customer is always right". When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault. It's the vendor's fault for failing to meet the market demands in a suitable way. > Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal. No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product. > You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported. Do most FOSS doc pages have ads on them? Not that I've seen. O'Reilly and other publishers have no trouble charging money for well-written technical documentation. People are clearly willing to pay for that. Rosetta Stone charges quite a bit for language instruction.

lazyjones 11y ago

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. Why do you simultaneously try to use it as a threatening outlook? If enough people perceive it as a threat or discover later that paywalls are even less convenient to them, some other solution will have to be found.

jhall1468 11y ago
> If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good". > some other solution will have to be found Because we already have a solution. Unobtrusive advertising is a valid trade-off between having to pay currency for content and said content-creators generating money through their content. I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive. But now we are destined to fear-mongering nonsense about Google tracking your every move to justify blocking everything. When that wasn't far enough, we blocked locally installed software applications that track client-side behavior. Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card.
- lazyjones 11y ago
  > What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good". It's good for the majority of publishers if they accept it as their preferred solution as you wrote. Unless you think they ought to be driven by other motives than making sound business decisions - like cruelty or whatever you were trying to insinuate with your slanted rhetoric. > I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive. Not really - fools like me already worked around ads almost 20 years ago because they wasted bandwidth (proof: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/websearch.html http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/websearch.html - no longer functional though amazingly still online). Piggyback ads are an anomaly and people will always try to avoid them, whether they're text (to be confused with valid search results) like Google's or flashy, crashy animations. > Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card. Well, go ahead and use it then. What's holding you back? Altruism and the urge to save users from the consequences of their personal choices? Oh, please...

bigbugbag 11y ago

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. Except this won't free us from ads, actually the contrary as explained here: http://zen.lk/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escape-ads-by-paying-for-content/ http://zen.lk/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escape-ads-by-pa... > The reality is, ad-blocking will be the absolute death of currency-free content. The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/?single_page=true http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...

jhall1468 11y ago
> The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web The article is a 10-page document on why "surveillance" (tracking) is evil and effectively offers no solution outside of (maybe) micro-payments as a means to compensate, which directly counters the first argument you made that paying will never free us from ads. So which is it?
- bigbugbag 11y ago
  Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing. If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…
  - jhall1468 11y ago
    > Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing. "Not really doing" doesn't exactly encouraging. You are making assumptions based on an idea that's never been tested, let alone shown to work. I think it's an interesting idea that may work for some content, and may not work for others. But let's not pretend that the article is, in any way, based on a real working model. > If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,… Patreon, flattr and crowdfunding are all the same thing. Exchanging money for content/creation. This is not a new solution to the problem, they are all platforms for solutions that are as old as money. Wikipedia is a non-profit that survives on donations. Pretending that every form of content should be, or could be, non-profit is as silly as saying that every form of content can happily survive on microtransactions.

Karunamon 11y ago

If it can't survive without abusing is readers attention, privacy, and security, then I guess the ship needs to go down like the titanic already.

jhall1468 11y ago
And be replaced with what, exactly? The call to arms over privacy, attention and security is getting old. Not because its wrong, but because it's never accompanied with an actual solution. But that's moot because the ship isn't going to sink. Enough people will not use adblock to ensure that companies like Google and Facebook will always make some money off advertising. So rest assured, the Titanic's will continue to float along. You are simply guaranteeing anything smaller won't. Including any potential competition for the Titanic's.
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  Maybe with nothing? There isn't some god-given requirement for there to be all these reviews about 3D cards. If readers refuse to receive ads and refuse to pay, then the site will go out of business and the content will go away. That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist. Less content is not the end of the world. Probably some hobbyist will spend his own time and money to publish it in some form anyway. Or Guru3D will find some other way to survive? They've added a donation link - maybe people will be happy to pay after all.
  - jhall1468 11y ago
    > That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist. Nonsense. That argument means all content is valued only by the numbers of ads viewed. By that logic Facebook is the best content. And they don't have to change by the sheer volume of people that visit it. Competition becomes even more unlikely because nobody wants to invest in a business that needs to millions of viewers to be profitable. > Less content is not the end of the world. Nor is it necessarily a good thing. Fewer options will just empower the organizations that happened to exist in the heyday of advertising. Converging power more and more while saying "it's a good thing, the market will right itself" is naive.

njharman 11y ago

That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be. I'm not a huge "free-market" proponent. But markets exist, and they aren't magic. They smove to solution(s) that the market wants / willing to "pay" for. Pay in broadest sense, money, eyeballs, time, etc. As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional.

jhall1468 11y ago
> That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be. This argument is already so tired. When you limit all options to one, that option has to be taken whether or not it is a good option. If everyone blocked every advertisement indiscriminately there would be no other option available but pay-walling. That isn't a good option because, as you said, most content will either die or be replaced by free content, which may or may not be as good. > As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional. The only delusions are those held by people that think the tide is a good thing. The reality is that ads are not going away. What's happening is ads are becoming a business that is only sustainable by enormous companies. Google and Facebook will survive and they will profit off of ads. Guru3D will not. The opportunity for competition will dry up, because you won't be able to profit with ads and you can't charge for what is already free.
- nine_k 11y ago
  I'd be fine with paying to access several latest issues of a periodical. A periodical might as well be fine with making historical issues available for free, since they'd drive more visitors to pay for new content, expectedly also high-quality.
- RUG3Y 11y ago
  Just because you don't like the argument doesn't mean it's "tired." It's absolutely true. I block every ad, I will continue to do so, and should content go behind a paywall, I will simply not view it. If there are enough people like me, content providers will be forced to adapt their strategies. That's the way it is.

13thLetter 11y ago

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And...? Industries where "person who pays for product" is separated from "person who consumes product" tend to have enormous problems because of that. They are inefficient because the consumer doesn't care about price, and they provide bad product because the person paying doesn't care about quality. Perhaps it is indeed time to consider crazy, wacky, out-there alternatives such as paying for content. > What you call reality, I call a house of cards. If the "house of cards" that is online journalism does finally collapse once and for all, ad blockers will have done a massive service for humanity.

gaius 11y ago

Viewing a banner ad is a price I'm willing to pay. A full-screen ad designed to be hard to close, or with misleading cues to take you to another site, or with intrusive sounds? That kills my bandwidth and my battery? Not so much. Then there's all the tracking. It was the advertisers who broke the terms of the deal and now We The People are renegotiating.

chongli 11y ago

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. If paywalls actually worked then we'd already see them everywhere. Why don't we? Because people don't want to pay.