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This has been standard practice for at least 100 years: Newspaper. Radio. Television. Magazines. Internet. All have had roughly the same model of providing free

• rosser 11y ago
  Online advertising vs. the forms that existed in "traditional" media is not at all a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind. There are fundamental differences between online advertising and every other form of the medium that has ever existed, and you deny — or are ignorant of — those at your own peril.
  • meritt 11y ago
    I disagree. Fundamentally it's no different. Content-providers create or distribute content and they need to be paid for that in order to continue operations. That's traditionally came from one of two ways: Subsidized by advertising or premiums paid directly by the consumer. Do you have a third way to facilitate this business model that's likely to succeed?
    • rosser 11y ago
      You're looking at the result, and not the mechanism. Sure, advertising pays for the content. That's no different. But how it does it? Tracking your every click across time, across the entire web? No, that's completely new, utterly unprecedented, and a thing the consequences of which we haven't even begun to unpack.
      • meritt 11y ago
        Which is why I think the long term reality of what we'll end up with is not simply ad blocking but blocking of the privacy violating tracking. There's two issues here only one of which I think is worth fighting: 1) Do companies have the right to serve advertisements in exchange for consumption of their content? I'd agree they do. 2) Do companies have the right to track your every move across the web and use that to improve the efficacy of #1? Absolutely not.
        • oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
          It sounds like everyone's more-or-less in agreement, although there remains a group of us that would, on balance, prefer to pay actual money than have to consume advertising. If companies have the right to serve advertisements, then they also have the duty to ensure those advertisements are a) not harmful to the consumer b) don't exceed a given file-size c) don't prevent the consumer from continuing whatever journey they were on. That's in rough order of importance/realism. Advertising providers are currently failing on all three of these, and it's hardly a surprise that the market is reacting by preventing all advertising, even that which might be deemed acceptable. The industry needs to fix this soon or it's going to destroy itself. As a consumer, I don't mind - alternative content will prevail - but from the companies' point of view, they need to fix this problem urgently.
        • cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
          > Do companies have the right to serve advertisements in exchange for consumption of their content? They have the right to put whatever they want into the page as the author of the content. The realities of the Web and HTML being what they are make avoiding advertising quite trivial, especially when the advertisements are large video or image files. If you want to serve advertisements that are less than trivial to block then the future of that is likely going to be either native advertisement where the entire story/content piece is the advertisement or advertisement bound directly into the final story and served as a single request. You have the right to be on the street corner yelling your paranoid conspiracy theories at people. They have the right to ignore you.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
      There's a fundamental difference in that advertisers have outsourced their operation to such an extent that they are putting their consumers at risk. Nobody even opened a magazine, saw an advert, then lost their life-savings as a result.
      • ikeboy 11y ago
        This happens all the time. See e.g. http://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2006/10/31/Scam-uses-newspaper-job-ads-to-con-victims/stories/200610310199 http://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2006/10/31...
• mirimir 11y ago
  It's not free content when you pay for the traffic.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • diskcat 11y ago
    You pay for the traffic of things like TV as well. You pay for the machine that turns radio signal into video/audio and you pay the opportunity cost of the radio bandwidth which is public property that is used for transmission of TV signal.
    • tremon 11y ago
      You pay for the traffic of things like TV as well. When was the last time you had a pay-per-use TV subscription?
  • TheLogothete 11y ago
    You pay for access to the internet, not the content.
    • mirimir 11y ago
      For mobile devices, you typically pay per Byte. And so you pay for the extra crap. Plus you have to see it. That's why users block ads. And now even some mobile providers are blocking ads. I'm guessing that's because they're concerned that they won't recover investment in additional infrastructure. That is, providers who block ads and charge less will be more competitive than providers who allow ads and charge more.
• diskcat 11y ago
  What's new is that people defend enforced advertisement. Nobody is gonna complain if you close your eyes when ads pop up on your TV.
  • meritt 11y ago
    And you can ignore online ads too (as most of us do). However the similar analogy here is what ReplayTV and Tivo did in the early 2000s -- Provided people with the ability to completely skip those advertisements. ReplayTV went bankrupt due to lawsuits; Tivo removed the adskip feature. https://www.eff.org/cases/newmark-v-turner https://www.eff.org/cases/newmark-v-turner I'm not really trying to defend advertising per-se but I'm trying to point out this isn't a new problem, however the level of entitlement which people feel definitely appears to have increased.
    • rosser 11y ago
      Yeah, I guess I do feel entitled not to have my browsing habits tracked, dissected, and correlated by actors with demonstrably unclean hands. Guilty as charged.
      • meritt 11y ago
        We're actually on the same page here (we deserve a fundamental right to privacy) but, like most Bernie supporters, you lack the ability to discern the shades of grey between black and white.
        • anon4 11y ago
          It is 2016.
        • anon4 11y ago
          It is 2016.
        • dang 11y ago
          No personal attacks on HN, please. Nor political attacks.
• letitleak 11y ago
  I generally agree, but there is an important caveat that relates to human social thinking. It is legal to mail spam since the resource burden is on you, it is not legal to fax it since the burden is on the recipient. The US began with a theory that email was like mail since the recipients resource use was minimal and now treats it more like fax since the senders burden proved even more minimal. On the web in general, the delivery costs are exceptionally low for the producer leading to the general sense that most content should be long lived and ad free. Especially on mobile, where people with ridiculous data plans have large costs. Clearly, traditional news publishers have other production costs and a decaying product. But how do you fairly make the distinction between real ones and pseudo publishers in a way that doesn't over-reward being near the blurry lines that separate them? Normally, search should have a mechanism to specify these kinds of qualities, hence a separate mobile mode in google's search. But Google working out penalties for use of display ad networks (which deliver different content to different users) is a conflict of interest.
• wfo 11y ago
  Sure but also consider the amount of advertising: in Television it's pretty standard to have about 2/3 content 1/3 ads: half hour time slots are filled by 21 minute shows. The article is describing that 50% of the data is spent on ads. And many times the actual page is 90% ads (often video, audio, moving, popups) with a couple sentences of content, wrapped in a clickbait title. Newspaper ads don't shoot loud screaming video in your face that grinds your brain to a halt and covers the content of the paper. Advertisers in the past had to play by some rules. Imagine if a cable TV station ran an illegal ad that destroyed your cable box. That would be unspeakably unacceptable. The TV provider would be crucified, their ratings would tank and they would cease to exist (not to mention legal proceedings) -- stations are accountable for the ads they serve. Now our expectations have degraded to the point where it's somehow okay for a google search for something innocuous to return an ad which is actually a virus. I have a pretty powerful machine and often if I click on a clickbait article it grinds to a complete halt for minutes at a time and crashes the browser. The state of the art in advertising is far, far worse than it has ever been and we're seeing a fundamental shift with the Internet away from accountability in advertising. It's comforting to think that things aren't different from how they used to be, and that there isn't any fundamental difference; well here there absolutely is.
  • jmiserez 11y ago
    > In Television it's pretty standard to have about 2/3 content 1/3 ads: half hour time slots are filled by 21 minute shows. Actually I consider that much worse, and it seems crazy to me that American TV has ads 1/3 of the time! You can click away even the most annoying (non-malware) ads in less than 1/3 of the total time on a website. Data usage is often irrelevant, time OTOH is strictly limited.
• InclinedPlane 11y ago
  And? Your argument is that because we've been doing it for a long time that makes it legitimate? Or not worth replacing? Thankfully nobody thought that argument applied to, say, peonage, or leaded gasoline. Moreover, it's not actually been a dominant form for funding of content creation except for a few decades. This model is very much historically unusual, but there are many interests behind pretending that it's a natural and indeed rightful state of affairs.