6 ms·

I generally agree. However without ads, how do you expect poor people to have (free) access to radio, magazines (well, cheaper), antenna tv?

fermienrico 8y ago
At this rate, the poor are better off without tv, radio and magazines. They’re largely just an entry portal into psychological extortion by these advertising firms. I’m a huge fan of publicly funded media such as NPR and your local public radio station.
- sooheon 8y ago
  I'm also a fan of patronizing the media you enjoy. Content makers having a direct relationship with their consumers.
  - WoodenChair 8y ago
    Choosing to watch ads is a way of patronizing the media you enjoy.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  I'd rather have the poor decide what is good for them, and not you.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    That sounds like a good theory from our comfortable, affluent office chairs... until you think about it for approximately five seconds. Would you rather have the children decide what they should learn in school, or the injured decide how their wound should be dressed? A fundamental aspect of our society's advancement is that we have become specialists: we almost all wear socks but very few of us would know how to make them. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to make them quite so efficiently. The poor—or the middle class, or the rich—shouldn't have to decide how they are being informed about the world any more than they should be expected to decide which type of stitching is used to assemble their socks.
    - dymk 8y ago
      You're literally comparing the decision making skills of lesser financial means to those of child - which strikes me as extremely problematic. To claim that the "us" commenters of HN have some specialized skillset, tuned to consume better media than the rest of the world, absolutely baffles me. Can we agree that mentally stable adult humans, generally, should have some agency and responsibility to choose how they consume media?
      - sjwright 8y ago
        You're putting words in my mouth. My point has nothing to do with someone's relative affluence or poverty. All I'm saying is that in almost all domains, everyone in modern society relies upon the expertise of others. That's equally true for Bill Gates as it is for the homeless person waiting in line at the soup kitchen. I'm not even going to respond to your second paragraph because it's almost insulting that you thought it necessary to ask.
- james_pm 8y ago
  The shows and movies and articles and websites often only exist to pull in people to view the ads. There's far to much content for the sake of content where the goal is not to inform or educate, but merely to wrap around the ads (or in a lot of cases, be the ad).
illumin8 8y ago
If we truly paid what it cost for content, instead of fueling about $1 trillion in middle-men, creators could get paid (very handsomely) and we wouldn't have as many societal problems. I'm cautiously optimistic that a utility token like BAT, or some other way that people can provide micro-payments for content will win in the end. I'd gladly pay $0.25 to read a well written article on the Internet, so long as it went to the creator and didn't fund the advertising machine.
- snaky 8y ago
  Micropayments used to be great idea, but didn't get traction. By the way, for example of not-ad-driven internet you might look at China, where podcasts is $7 bln business (direct fees and subscriptions), video blogging is of course full of celebrities promoting big brands, but for the main part is still about direct "gifts" from viewers to tens of thousands of bloggers.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
carapace 8y ago
Poverty should be over soon. Twenty to thirty years max.
- inapis 8y ago
  Doesn’t mean ads will die. Even if you pull everyone out of poverty, there’d be plenty of people who might not have cash to spare or even be unwilling to pay for all the content they consume. Plus there’s the slightly increased friction to paying compared to not paying and viewing ads. You have to make an active effort to pay, especially with micro-transactions, every time.
- jfk13 8y ago
  I wish I could think of some reason to believe that.
  - carapace 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-population-in-extre... It's a straightforward extrapolation from data.
    - fghtr 8y ago
      This is not poverty. It is "extreme poverty", very different thing.
      - carapace 8y ago
        The trend is general: the tide is rising and lifting all boats. > We are living through a period of rapid global poverty reduction. According to recent estimates, high, sustained growth across most of the developing world has helped nearly half a billion people escape $1.25-a-day poverty between 2005 and 2010. Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/two-trends-in-global-poverty/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/two-trends-in-global-pove... 500,000,000 people, 5 years.
danShumway 8y ago
I have two problems here: First, from what I can find, the average click-through rate online for ads is something like 2%. I suspect it's even worse for smaller blogs and independent sources that don't advertise using Google. Let's assume you're getting a dollar every time someone clicks on an ad. I think that's high, but whatever. If we were to get everyone to start paying for content, that would translate to it costing around 2 cents for you to look at a page. If you're reading 30 articles from your favorite site every month, that's 60 cents a month. So people talk about how expensive content would be, but from what I can see it probably wouldn't take a huge amount of money to give sites the same amount of support that they're getting right now. Secondly, I think it's at least a little bit problematic to say that ads make content free. The only reason why any company would ever pay to put an ad on someone's content is if they expect to make that money back, either by encouraging consumers to buy a different product than they normally would have, or by encouraging them to buy more of a given product than they otherwise would have. Statistically speaking, you are paying for content that is ad supported. If you weren't, nobody would put ads on that content. And I realize that sounds a little bit like splitting hairs, but I get tired of this idea that ads don't have a consumer cost. If you completely get rid of ads through ad blockers, and by not listening to radio or watching live TV, and by not using any service that doesn't give you a purchase option... it will not take long until you become re-accustomed to "normal" levels of advertising. And once you are accustomed to that, you will immediately notice on venturing back into the ad-filled world just how much time and attention and mindspace that ads demand from you. Everyone believes that they're atypical, and that ads don't encourage them to spend more, or to buy branded products instead of generic ones, or to treat practical products like status symbols. Most people are wrong about their own abilities though. Most people are affected by advertising. That doesn't mean that advertising is evil, there are lots of good use-cases for advertising -- but it does mean that ads aren't free. It would be very hard to gather data on this, but I suspect that if you tracked the average spending habits of people who were inundated with ads, their monthly spending would increase more than the cost of buying a few magazine subscriptions. I suspect that's even true of most people on Hackernews. If anyone has data, they're welcome to prove me wrong though.

fermienrico 8y ago

At this rate, the poor are better off without tv, radio and magazines. They’re largely just an entry portal into psychological extortion by these advertising firms. I’m a huge fan of publicly funded media such as NPR and your local public radio station.

sooheon 8y ago
I'm also a fan of patronizing the media you enjoy. Content makers having a direct relationship with their consumers.
- WoodenChair 8y ago
  Choosing to watch ads is a way of patronizing the media you enjoy.
throwaway8879 8y ago
I'd rather have the poor decide what is good for them, and not you.
- sjwright 8y ago
  That sounds like a good theory from our comfortable, affluent office chairs... until you think about it for approximately five seconds. Would you rather have the children decide what they should learn in school, or the injured decide how their wound should be dressed? A fundamental aspect of our society's advancement is that we have become specialists: we almost all wear socks but very few of us would know how to make them. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to make them quite so efficiently. The poor—or the middle class, or the rich—shouldn't have to decide how they are being informed about the world any more than they should be expected to decide which type of stitching is used to assemble their socks.
  - dymk 8y ago
    You're literally comparing the decision making skills of lesser financial means to those of child - which strikes me as extremely problematic. To claim that the "us" commenters of HN have some specialized skillset, tuned to consume better media than the rest of the world, absolutely baffles me. Can we agree that mentally stable adult humans, generally, should have some agency and responsibility to choose how they consume media?
    - sjwright 8y ago
      You're putting words in my mouth. My point has nothing to do with someone's relative affluence or poverty. All I'm saying is that in almost all domains, everyone in modern society relies upon the expertise of others. That's equally true for Bill Gates as it is for the homeless person waiting in line at the soup kitchen. I'm not even going to respond to your second paragraph because it's almost insulting that you thought it necessary to ask.
james_pm 8y ago
The shows and movies and articles and websites often only exist to pull in people to view the ads. There's far to much content for the sake of content where the goal is not to inform or educate, but merely to wrap around the ads (or in a lot of cases, be the ad).

illumin8 8y ago

If we truly paid what it cost for content, instead of fueling about $1 trillion in middle-men, creators could get paid (very handsomely) and we wouldn't have as many societal problems. I'm cautiously optimistic that a utility token like BAT, or some other way that people can provide micro-payments for content will win in the end. I'd gladly pay $0.25 to read a well written article on the Internet, so long as it went to the creator and didn't fund the advertising machine.

snaky 8y ago
Micropayments used to be great idea, but didn't get traction. By the way, for example of not-ad-driven internet you might look at China, where podcasts is $7 bln business (direct fees and subscriptions), video blogging is of course full of celebrities promoting big brands, but for the main part is still about direct "gifts" from viewers to tens of thousands of bloggers.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

carapace 8y ago

Poverty should be over soon. Twenty to thirty years max.

inapis 8y ago
Doesn’t mean ads will die. Even if you pull everyone out of poverty, there’d be plenty of people who might not have cash to spare or even be unwilling to pay for all the content they consume. Plus there’s the slightly increased friction to paying compared to not paying and viewing ads. You have to make an active effort to pay, especially with micro-transactions, every time.
jfk13 8y ago
I wish I could think of some reason to believe that.
- carapace 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-population-in-extreme-poverty-absolute.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-population-in-extre... It's a straightforward extrapolation from data.
  - fghtr 8y ago
    This is not poverty. It is "extreme poverty", very different thing.
    - carapace 8y ago
      The trend is general: the tide is rising and lifting all boats. > We are living through a period of rapid global poverty reduction. According to recent estimates, high, sustained growth across most of the developing world has helped nearly half a billion people escape $1.25-a-day poverty between 2005 and 2010. Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/two-trends-in-global-poverty/ https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/two-trends-in-global-pove... 500,000,000 people, 5 years.

danShumway 8y ago

I have two problems here: First, from what I can find, the average click-through rate online for ads is something like 2%. I suspect it's even worse for smaller blogs and independent sources that don't advertise using Google. Let's assume you're getting a dollar every time someone clicks on an ad. I think that's high, but whatever. If we were to get everyone to start paying for content, that would translate to it costing around 2 cents for you to look at a page. If you're reading 30 articles from your favorite site every month, that's 60 cents a month. So people talk about how expensive content would be, but from what I can see it probably wouldn't take a huge amount of money to give sites the same amount of support that they're getting right now. Secondly, I think it's at least a little bit problematic to say that ads make content free. The only reason why any company would ever pay to put an ad on someone's content is if they expect to make that money back, either by encouraging consumers to buy a different product than they normally would have, or by encouraging them to buy more of a given product than they otherwise would have. Statistically speaking, you are paying for content that is ad supported. If you weren't, nobody would put ads on that content. And I realize that sounds a little bit like splitting hairs, but I get tired of this idea that ads don't have a consumer cost. If you completely get rid of ads through ad blockers, and by not listening to radio or watching live TV, and by not using any service that doesn't give you a purchase option... it will not take long until you become re-accustomed to "normal" levels of advertising. And once you are accustomed to that, you will immediately notice on venturing back into the ad-filled world just how much time and attention and mindspace that ads demand from you. Everyone believes that they're atypical, and that ads don't encourage them to spend more, or to buy branded products instead of generic ones, or to treat practical products like status symbols. Most people are wrong about their own abilities though. Most people are affected by advertising. That doesn't mean that advertising is evil, there are lots of good use-cases for advertising -- but it does mean that ads aren't free. It would be very hard to gather data on this, but I suspect that if you tracked the average spending habits of people who were inundated with ads, their monthly spending would increase more than the cost of buying a few magazine subscriptions. I suspect that's even true of most people on Hackernews. If anyone has data, they're welcome to prove me wrong though.