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Haha, precisely. On HN, a common idea is that if companies offered ad-free versions for a price, people would pay. But why would you? You can get the ad-free ve
by arjie 9y ago
Haha, precisely. On HN, a common idea is that if companies offered ad-free versions for a price, people would pay. But why would you? You can get the ad-free versions for free.
- aninhumer 9y agoWhy not? Lots of people already support creators via Patreon who give their content away for free.
- arjie 9y agoWe'll see, I suppose. But most people will just take the approach of the person I replied to. If ad-blocking takes off, we're going to come to a new content winter.
- majewsky 9y agoPrisoner's dilemma: If only one ad-supported site switches to pay-per-view or a subscription model, people will go to the other ad-supported sites instead. It would take all of them to switch. And if that happens, the experience would be strictly worse for the consumer. Every individual is going to have access to less content because they're not going to subscribe to every site that might conceivably have an insightful article at some point. What does work is patronage-supported content, but only for certain types of content. For example, if Youtube were to remove ads tomorrow, I would expect most channels with original content to survive on crowdsourced patronage (i.e. Patreon or similar), but I would definitely not expect Patreon to be able to support investigative journalism. (It would be great if it were! But I don't see it happening.)
- ionised 9y agoI do for the services that offer it. I even pay for three different e-mail services and cloud storage. If a site doesn't offer an ad-free experience? I block their ads.