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> I don't want a stupid autoplaying video following me around on the damned page. I don't want Facebook to track me endlessly and mastermind what I see. Those

> I don't want a stupid autoplaying video following me around on the damned page. I don't want Facebook to track me endlessly and mastermind what I see. Those autoplaying videos and trackers are the reason these pages are there in the first place. All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way. It's not as simple as: > Get rid of the 10+ trackers Sites like Facebook can't just do that, that's how they make money and stay in business. This is a business-model problem, not a technical problem. If anything, new technology allowed these business models to be slightly less annoying and damaging to the user experience.

drb91 8y ago
This is an easy argument to make when there's conveniently no way for consumers to decide how they want to pay. Realistically, humans are just lazy about finding decent ways of monetizing their time. I can't say I'll shed any tears if a business relying on ads goes out of business from my ad blocker: they always could have asked me for my cash.
- buboard 8y ago
  i would like to see stats on that. in my experience people are very hesitant to pay even if they recognize they derive value from your service. it's just not the "thing that everyone does"
- Izkata 8y ago
  IMO this has already been proven to work as long as it's easy to pay. Just think of all the successful phone apps where the paid version is there to remove ads.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > This is an easy argument to make For the record, I'm not making any value judgement or "argument" here. I'm pointing out that GP's complaining about issues that aren't really technical, but fundamental business practices.
- prostoalex 8y ago
  Consumers will pay for the services that consistently deliver value, but most of media out there delivers value occasionally. And that’s assuming some exclusives, where a competing publication is not a click away. When even the mighty NYT and WSJ have issues monetizing their Web presence, what hope is there for smaller fish? Do I read an occasional article from The Guardian or Venture Beat? Yeah, happens every now and then. Am I willing to pay for it? Unlikely.
  - mcbits 8y ago
    Where media struggles is in spending hundreds of dollars per page of content that has an effective lifespan of about 1 to 5 days before it goes off to the virtual landfill (formerly a real landfill), never to be seen again. Maybe they need to ditch the daily blog-feed style of journalism and direct their resources toward building a more cohesive/holistic archive of events that provides some lasting interest and value, so they won't need to desperately squeeze revenue from each article as aggressively as possible before the aggregators drop it.
    - omnimus 8y ago
      I think they try to. But it might be that it is actually much cheaper to write small daily articles that junior people can write than to write extensive high quality stuff. That puts you under constant pressure.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Which is precisely why they have a problem with monetizing. I can't really sympathise with that. Why should I care if the business model of flooding people with crap, occasionally containing some gems, is in trouble? Drop the crap, drop the frequency, send only gems when you have them.
        omnimus 8y ago
        Well that goes against attention economy we have today. Slow news are not news. I think what you want are magazines. It is precisely why they are not dead. In fact they had dip but now they are growing again.
- robryan 8y ago
  I think a bunch of smart people have spent a bunch of time on it and what we have currently simply makes the most money. Of course that may change once the majority block ads.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Consumers have basically already decided. How many people use incognito windows to get around the NYT paywall, for example?
  - skybrian 8y ago
    Still waiting for the Spotify of news sites. I guess it's harder than it is for music?
    - Schaulustiger 8y ago
      It's interesting to see how no one even seems to try. In Europe there's Blendle [1], but that's only an aggregator and you still have to pay for each article you read (with hilarious differences in pricing). I've always wondered if they'd be more successful with a flat fee for complete access to all articles for all their papers and zines. But I guess the publishing houses don't consider this viable as it would hurt their subscriptions (who's gonna subscribe to just one paper when there's access to ten more for roughly the same price?). [1] https://blendle.com https://blendle.com
      - mercer 8y ago
        At least for my part Blendle has been a huge win for publishers. I've probably spent more money on Blendle articles in just a year or so (even asking for my money back a number of times) than I have on regular subscriptions. Considering the fact that I'm generally not too interested in mainstream news, and somewhat frugal, I imagine there's quite a number of people who spend even more.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      Spotify to the music industry is like putting some ice on a broken neck. The music industry at least has concerts and merchandise to drive revenues up. The problem is that news is very expensive to produce; particularly investigative journalism that might or might not pay off. Local news at the town or suburb level has a similar issue, where the market is quite small to begin with. Strip away the expensive parts and you're left with cheapo aggregator papers. But what happens when there's nothing left to aggregate?
linuxftw 8y ago
Yeah, it is a business model problem. My solution is to not visit sites that have this business model for most needs. Sometimes I tolerate it for specific content, but mostly I try to stick to text-based sites.
fouc 8y ago
Perhaps governments could make ad driven revenue illegal, force the internet to drop that particular business model. Get rid of false free.
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  And eliminate access to ad-supported services that many - especially the poor - would no longer have access to. No ads is just as dumb as all ads.
  - fouc 8y ago
    Any examples? BTW, back in the 90s there were a ton of free sites, no ads. Mainly hobbyist sites etc. No reason that still can't happen.
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      These sites are still there. In fact, many more of them, since the cost of hosting has dropped to near zero, especially for static content. The new development is huge sites providing expensive content and services for free, and using ads and tracking to pay for it.
    - geitir 8y ago
      It's part of the natural move towards a centralized web. You want a website you can trust that delivers good content, as do other people, increasing the load on the host beyond minimal finance resulting in ads. That said a lot of sites aren't that trustworthy and don't deliver good content but are riddled with ads to try and make money
    - tomnipotent 8y ago
      Besides the entire news industry? YouTube? Most informational sites besides Wikipedia? How about Google Search? Believe it or not, it costs money to run a business and not everything makes sense as a subscription model or pay-as-you-go.
    - madprops 8y ago
skybrian 8y ago
Does Facebook have 10+ ad trackers? You're logged in. They have plenty of engineers optimizing performance. This seems more likely for news sites that are desperate for revenue and use multiple ad networks.
Zarath 8y ago
Does autoplaying videos make more money or just push up meaningless metrics? Personally, an autoplaying video means an instant back button press or tab close.
- tjpnz 8y ago
  It does for certain demographics especially when you take into account how little people read these days.
CaptSpify 8y ago
> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way. This is false. We had a perfectly healthy ecosystem before ads invaded the web. In most ways it was better because it was built by people who cared, rather than by companies who wanted to extract money and power from their visitors.
- refoundglory 8y ago
  Is the first ad on the web some known thing? When was it?
- phantomathkg 8y ago
  But is it sustainable that way?
  - ardy42 8y ago
    >>> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way. >> This is false. We had a perfectly healthy ecosystem before ads invaded the web. In most ways it was better because it was built by people who cared, rather than by companies who wanted to extract money and power from their visitors. > But is it sustainable that way? Yes. It'd be different, but sustainable. Sites like Wikipedia are proof of that. It baffling that people claim that the web requires ads and trackers to survive when a counterexample is one of the top three links on nearly all of their searches.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      Doesn't Wikipedia run on donations? Or are you saying you think that works for the majority of sites?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        It does. No, that would not make sense of the majority of sites. Majority of sites have limited audience (topically, or geographically), so costs would be nowhere as high, and could be handled by personal input + donations (for private sites), or written off as marketing expense (for company sites). Yes, websites do not have to pay for themselves directly. The idea they should is underlying lots of current web problems.
dwaltrip 8y ago
> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way. This is blatantly false... Significant quantities of digital work product are produced for free with little concern for payment. Perhaps you meant "most" or "the majority of" or even "significant quantities"?
eitland 8y ago
WhatsApp showed us that running a paid, low cost, privacy oriented service can be profitable. I'd probably pay for that, again, as soon as they were completely untied from Facebook and had apologized. (Yep, they made a very public promise.) I'd probably pay similar or slightly larger amounts for a number of other things as well (actually I do, so my point is rather that I'd pay for for stuff :) Now before anyone thinks: "great, lets paywall all the things!" here's an important catch: 1. I'm happy to pay for my newspaper. I'm happy to buy the occasional newspaper on a newspaper stand. I do not want to subscribe to every newspaper that anyone shares a link to, just to read one single thing that is relevant to me. I love the idea of blendle but it seems media (and my feeling is even a lot of HNers) don't get it. 2. I'm happy to pay a certain large cloud company that I don't like as much as I used to do for an increased storage quota. I'm happy to pay reasonable amounts for apps, services etc. I'm happy to pay for usage for things I use less often. I particularly like the Jetbrains model of pay-to-own (even if I personally prefer their competitors products. ;-) I still do not want every app to pretend they are a service that I should pay a monthly fee for. Also: I don't really mind relevant ads. The other day I actually clicked on one. Because it was relevant. But there is no reason to track me around the web: most ads I ever clicked on voluntarily (that would be 5 - 10 for the last 10 years ;-) could probably be inferred from context: I was reading a blog post about something related or searching for something related. Also (and here I go against many HNers), ads should preferably be injected server side.
- Schaulustiger 8y ago
  Blendle is nice in theory but their article pricing is really off-putting. I know that it's the publisher's choice to set prices for individual articles, but I'm not going to pay half of the actual paper price to read one single article. I use it to read a select few things that I'm really interested in, but I'd love it to be more of an individual aggregation of stuff (think Flipbook) where I don't mind reading lots of articles because they're essentially cheap enough for me to not care. Not going to do that, though, when a 300 word article costs up to 1€.
  - eitland 8y ago
    That's sad to hear. (Not using Blendle on a daily basis.) I was always waiting for more articles to get available on Blendle, but if pricing is going through the roof it will be harder to recommend.
_pmf_ 8y ago
> This is a business-model problem, not a technical problem. The technical solution would be to introduce a highly optimized first-class browser API "just send everything I do to these trackers" without JS or including remote scripts. Browser vendors adding thin veneers of security (while also introducing side channels) and web developers finding ways of circumventing these mechanisms, with some of these circumvention mechanisms being standardized again is a bizarre ritual dance that benefits no one. (Add to this the fact that the biggest browser vendor is also the biggest beneficiary of the whole ad racket.)
vorpalhex 8y ago
There's another profit model on the web, and it usually involves the user just entering their credit card. Hell, it doesn't even need all of them to do that, just enough. I absolutely use services like Patreon to support artists who make all their work available for free. I tip open source projects (usually every time I install it on a new PC). I happily pay for decent email. Sites like Facebook and Twitter don't seem truly sustainable, and they aren't free.

drb91 8y ago

This is an easy argument to make when there's conveniently no way for consumers to decide how they want to pay. Realistically, humans are just lazy about finding decent ways of monetizing their time. I can't say I'll shed any tears if a business relying on ads goes out of business from my ad blocker: they always could have asked me for my cash.

buboard 8y ago
i would like to see stats on that. in my experience people are very hesitant to pay even if they recognize they derive value from your service. it's just not the "thing that everyone does"
Izkata 8y ago
IMO this has already been proven to work as long as it's easy to pay. Just think of all the successful phone apps where the paid version is there to remove ads.
dunpeal 8y ago
> This is an easy argument to make For the record, I'm not making any value judgement or "argument" here. I'm pointing out that GP's complaining about issues that aren't really technical, but fundamental business practices.
prostoalex 8y ago
Consumers will pay for the services that consistently deliver value, but most of media out there delivers value occasionally. And that’s assuming some exclusives, where a competing publication is not a click away. When even the mighty NYT and WSJ have issues monetizing their Web presence, what hope is there for smaller fish? Do I read an occasional article from The Guardian or Venture Beat? Yeah, happens every now and then. Am I willing to pay for it? Unlikely.
- mcbits 8y ago
  Where media struggles is in spending hundreds of dollars per page of content that has an effective lifespan of about 1 to 5 days before it goes off to the virtual landfill (formerly a real landfill), never to be seen again. Maybe they need to ditch the daily blog-feed style of journalism and direct their resources toward building a more cohesive/holistic archive of events that provides some lasting interest and value, so they won't need to desperately squeeze revenue from each article as aggressively as possible before the aggregators drop it.
  - omnimus 8y ago
    I think they try to. But it might be that it is actually much cheaper to write small daily articles that junior people can write than to write extensive high quality stuff. That puts you under constant pressure.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Which is precisely why they have a problem with monetizing. I can't really sympathise with that. Why should I care if the business model of flooding people with crap, occasionally containing some gems, is in trouble? Drop the crap, drop the frequency, send only gems when you have them.
      - omnimus 8y ago
        Well that goes against attention economy we have today. Slow news are not news. I think what you want are magazines. It is precisely why they are not dead. In fact they had dip but now they are growing again.
robryan 8y ago
I think a bunch of smart people have spent a bunch of time on it and what we have currently simply makes the most money. Of course that may change once the majority block ads.
bobthepanda 8y ago
Consumers have basically already decided. How many people use incognito windows to get around the NYT paywall, for example?
- skybrian 8y ago
  Still waiting for the Spotify of news sites. I guess it's harder than it is for music?
  - Schaulustiger 8y ago
    It's interesting to see how no one even seems to try. In Europe there's Blendle [1], but that's only an aggregator and you still have to pay for each article you read (with hilarious differences in pricing). I've always wondered if they'd be more successful with a flat fee for complete access to all articles for all their papers and zines. But I guess the publishing houses don't consider this viable as it would hurt their subscriptions (who's gonna subscribe to just one paper when there's access to ten more for roughly the same price?). [1] https://blendle.com https://blendle.com
    - mercer 8y ago
      At least for my part Blendle has been a huge win for publishers. I've probably spent more money on Blendle articles in just a year or so (even asking for my money back a number of times) than I have on regular subscriptions. Considering the fact that I'm generally not too interested in mainstream news, and somewhat frugal, I imagine there's quite a number of people who spend even more.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Spotify to the music industry is like putting some ice on a broken neck. The music industry at least has concerts and merchandise to drive revenues up. The problem is that news is very expensive to produce; particularly investigative journalism that might or might not pay off. Local news at the town or suburb level has a similar issue, where the market is quite small to begin with. Strip away the expensive parts and you're left with cheapo aggregator papers. But what happens when there's nothing left to aggregate?

linuxftw 8y ago

Yeah, it is a business model problem. My solution is to not visit sites that have this business model for most needs. Sometimes I tolerate it for specific content, but mostly I try to stick to text-based sites.

fouc 8y ago

Perhaps governments could make ad driven revenue illegal, force the internet to drop that particular business model. Get rid of false free.

tomnipotent 8y ago
And eliminate access to ad-supported services that many - especially the poor - would no longer have access to. No ads is just as dumb as all ads.
- fouc 8y ago
  Any examples? BTW, back in the 90s there were a ton of free sites, no ads. Mainly hobbyist sites etc. No reason that still can't happen.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    These sites are still there. In fact, many more of them, since the cost of hosting has dropped to near zero, especially for static content. The new development is huge sites providing expensive content and services for free, and using ads and tracking to pay for it.
  - geitir 8y ago
    It's part of the natural move towards a centralized web. You want a website you can trust that delivers good content, as do other people, increasing the load on the host beyond minimal finance resulting in ads. That said a lot of sites aren't that trustworthy and don't deliver good content but are riddled with ads to try and make money
  - tomnipotent 8y ago
    Besides the entire news industry? YouTube? Most informational sites besides Wikipedia? How about Google Search? Believe it or not, it costs money to run a business and not everything makes sense as a subscription model or pay-as-you-go.
  - madprops 8y ago

skybrian 8y ago

Does Facebook have 10+ ad trackers? You're logged in. They have plenty of engineers optimizing performance. This seems more likely for news sites that are desperate for revenue and use multiple ad networks.

Zarath 8y ago

Does autoplaying videos make more money or just push up meaningless metrics? Personally, an autoplaying video means an instant back button press or tab close.

tjpnz 8y ago
It does for certain demographics especially when you take into account how little people read these days.

CaptSpify 8y ago

> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way. This is false. We had a perfectly healthy ecosystem before ads invaded the web. In most ways it was better because it was built by people who cared, rather than by companies who wanted to extract money and power from their visitors.

refoundglory 8y ago
Is the first ad on the web some known thing? When was it?
phantomathkg 8y ago
But is it sustainable that way?
- ardy42 8y ago
  >>> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way. >> This is false. We had a perfectly healthy ecosystem before ads invaded the web. In most ways it was better because it was built by people who cared, rather than by companies who wanted to extract money and power from their visitors. > But is it sustainable that way? Yes. It'd be different, but sustainable. Sites like Wikipedia are proof of that. It baffling that people claim that the web requires ads and trackers to survive when a counterexample is one of the top three links on nearly all of their searches.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Doesn't Wikipedia run on donations? Or are you saying you think that works for the majority of sites?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      It does. No, that would not make sense of the majority of sites. Majority of sites have limited audience (topically, or geographically), so costs would be nowhere as high, and could be handled by personal input + donations (for private sites), or written off as marketing expense (for company sites). Yes, websites do not have to pay for themselves directly. The idea they should is underlying lots of current web problems.

dwaltrip 8y ago

> All the free content and services on the web has to be paid for somehow, and that is the way. This is blatantly false... Significant quantities of digital work product are produced for free with little concern for payment. Perhaps you meant "most" or "the majority of" or even "significant quantities"?

eitland 8y ago

WhatsApp showed us that running a paid, low cost, privacy oriented service can be profitable. I'd probably pay for that, again, as soon as they were completely untied from Facebook and had apologized. (Yep, they made a very public promise.) I'd probably pay similar or slightly larger amounts for a number of other things as well (actually I do, so my point is rather that I'd pay for for stuff :) Now before anyone thinks: "great, lets paywall all the things!" here's an important catch: 1. I'm happy to pay for my newspaper. I'm happy to buy the occasional newspaper on a newspaper stand. I do not want to subscribe to every newspaper that anyone shares a link to, just to read one single thing that is relevant to me. I love the idea of blendle but it seems media (and my feeling is even a lot of HNers) don't get it. 2. I'm happy to pay a certain large cloud company that I don't like as much as I used to do for an increased storage quota. I'm happy to pay reasonable amounts for apps, services etc. I'm happy to pay for usage for things I use less often. I particularly like the Jetbrains model of pay-to-own (even if I personally prefer their competitors products. ;-) I still do not want every app to pretend they are a service that I should pay a monthly fee for. Also: I don't really mind relevant ads. The other day I actually clicked on one. Because it was relevant. But there is no reason to track me around the web: most ads I ever clicked on voluntarily (that would be 5 - 10 for the last 10 years ;-) could probably be inferred from context: I was reading a blog post about something related or searching for something related. Also (and here I go against many HNers), ads should preferably be injected server side.

Schaulustiger 8y ago
Blendle is nice in theory but their article pricing is really off-putting. I know that it's the publisher's choice to set prices for individual articles, but I'm not going to pay half of the actual paper price to read one single article. I use it to read a select few things that I'm really interested in, but I'd love it to be more of an individual aggregation of stuff (think Flipbook) where I don't mind reading lots of articles because they're essentially cheap enough for me to not care. Not going to do that, though, when a 300 word article costs up to 1€.
- eitland 8y ago
  That's sad to hear. (Not using Blendle on a daily basis.) I was always waiting for more articles to get available on Blendle, but if pricing is going through the roof it will be harder to recommend.

_pmf_ 8y ago

> This is a business-model problem, not a technical problem. The technical solution would be to introduce a highly optimized first-class browser API "just send everything I do to these trackers" without JS or including remote scripts. Browser vendors adding thin veneers of security (while also introducing side channels) and web developers finding ways of circumventing these mechanisms, with some of these circumvention mechanisms being standardized again is a bizarre ritual dance that benefits no one. (Add to this the fact that the biggest browser vendor is also the biggest beneficiary of the whole ad racket.)

vorpalhex 8y ago

There's another profit model on the web, and it usually involves the user just entering their credit card. Hell, it doesn't even need all of them to do that, just enough. I absolutely use services like Patreon to support artists who make all their work available for free. I tip open source projects (usually every time I install it on a new PC). I happily pay for decent email. Sites like Facebook and Twitter don't seem truly sustainable, and they aren't free.