8 ms·

The End of the Ad-Supported Web

100 points by hunglee2 8y ago

hadsed 8y ago
Well I'm not sure i believe that the web is truly moving away from ads in as big a way as being claimed here. The trends in news groups are clear, but for each of the other examples there are counterparts that do run ads, ie Netflix and Hulu, and Spotify and Pandora. Don't get me wrong, i would love to see a change just like anyone else here, but I'm not sure I'm seeing it yet. Additionally i enjoyed this other article more as it goes into their proposed solution: https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-web-b98e9b94add1 https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-we...
PlutoIsAPlanet 8y ago
Ad companies got caught putting their hand in the cookie jar and people have had enough. There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web, but it got abused, with tracking going too far and ad companies constantly trying to defeat privacy-protecting features. They have no one to blame but themselves.
- baal80spam 8y ago
  > There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web I very much disagree with this statement. I simply can't stand ads in my internet and uBlock Origin is the first thing I install in a fresh browser. I can't fathom browsing the web without it anymore.
  - geocar 8y ago
    Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news? I'd be okay with increasing taxes to cover it, or using a UK-style TV license (Internet Publishing License anyone?) and requiring people seek "Internet commissioners" like we have for Television[1], [2]. [1]: http://www.pbs.org/about/producing-pbs/proposal-process/ http://www.pbs.org/about/producing-pbs/proposal-process/ [2]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning Another option is micropayments, but I worry bugs and fraud would then steal consumers' dollars instead of Advertisers'.
    - austhrow743 8y ago
      The consumer.
    - Hoasi 8y ago
      > Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news? Direct support from the public would make sense, this is already at work, to some extent. The problem with this is that people are already so used to free that it may be difficult to implement. A license system would be a good idea. It is still far off, but authors associations are working on this in some countries.
      - goldfeld 8y ago
        Maybe we need arts and journalism to step up the game again, so good content is missed from the mainstream needing to be supported directly. Maybe most current art and journalism online won't be missed at all.
        Hoasi 8y ago
        > Maybe most current art and journalism online won't be missed at all. Likely they wouldn't be missed. Perhaps we would also realize that enabling everyone to become a publisher was a mistake.
    - the8472 8y ago
      > a UK-style TV license (Internet Publishing License anyone?) Germany sort of does that already. From 2006 to 2012 internet-connected devices were considered broadcast receivers for the purpose of the broadcast fees. Since 2012 the fee was simplified to a general per-household broadcast fee which reduced the fairly data collection the agency had to do to know who had which kind receiver. The internet presence of the public-service broadcasters is also financed through those fees.
    - lkrubner 8y ago
      "Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news?" The government is the obvious choice. The USA already has the National Endowment for the Arts, which is a good start but it needs vastly more money. The important thing is that the NEA has none of the corrupting biases that afflict companies such as Google and Facebook. Most Western countries have some equivalent for the NEA.
  - orev 8y ago
    The point is that the reason you feel the need to immediately block ads is because of how they have been abused and pushed to further and further absurdity over the years.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      That may be the point, but it's wrong. Advertising is manipulative and causes people to make bad decisions. It shouldn't be allowed at all.
      - matt4077 8y ago
        Advertisement is a required feature of a market-based economy, because it (also) informes consumers of the choices available. Without ads, the chances of breaking into an established market are extremely low.
      - H1Supreme 8y ago
        > Advertising is manipulative and causes people to make bad decisions. Not all advertising is some evil plot to brainwash the public. At it's core, it's a way to let the public know about your product. In the correct context, it's beneficial to the consumer. My Grandpa used to subscribe to Hemmings Motor News. It's a magazine that is focused on restoring vintage cars. It has regular ads, and a pretty large classified section. He used that magazine, including the ads, as a resource for vehicle restoration. Ads selling parts for 1940's Chevy pickup trucks in a section of a magazine specifically catering to that audience make sense. They're beneficial to people in the market for those products. I agree that web sites or real sites (eg. Times Square) that simply bombard you with anything and everything are awful. But, you can't put all advertising under one umbrella.
      - systematical 8y ago
        So spend tons of time and money building a startup, but don't advertise it...got it. Sound economics.
      - ElFitz 8y ago
        > Advertising is manipulative and causes people to make bad decisions. So do a lot of unasked opinions, especially on the internet (oh the irony). They're somehow still allowed to have and share them.
  - Angostura 8y ago
    And I don't like paying to watch films. Neither really address the original statement
  - kodablah 8y ago
    I don't see how what you personally can't stand has anything to do with there being nothing wrong with it existing. It's like me saying I very much disagree with a statement saying there's nothing wrong with a beet-supported farm. Maybe there is something wrong with an ad supported web, but a better argument can be made.
  - systematical 8y ago
    I have no problem with reasonable ads as a means of compensating a website for free content, but the free market once again went too far here. There is a sense of entitlement that just gets under my skin when people think they can just have stuff for free.
- amelius 8y ago
  > There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web Keep in mind that ads are a very limited monetization scheme. For example, you can't even increase the price of your content and set it at a desired value.
  - spullara 8y ago
    That is basically how advertising works. You set the price and people pay to be next to the content. If you don't get the price you want, don't share the content. For people blindly putting a javascript tag on their page for google ads I would agree but you can bet that places like Techmeme and DaringFireball set their price.
    - amelius 8y ago
      Yes, but it's still very limited. The price point where nobody will want to advertise is pretty low (I'm guessing). There's no way to escape that, and basically your only option is to change the entire monetization scheme.
FatDrunknStupid 8y ago
On the content side, I wonder if the problem is deeper. People want easy money and the large IT companies are simply facilitating. After all if I create enough crap content I might eventually write a book about parrots: https://www.wisebread.com/how-a-teenager-started-a-multi-million-dollar-online-business-with-a-parrot https://www.wisebread.com/how-a-teenager-started-a-multi-mil...
x0x0 8y ago
This is close to an advertisement, written by the founder of https://unlock-protocol.com https://unlock-protocol.com , a distributed web payments scheme using some bitcoin competitor.
- Groxx 8y ago
  And of course it's a blockchain with smart contracts. Not that it's inherently a bad approach, but it's very much a fad that's often applied without thinking.
- lagadu 8y ago
  Yay, yet another decentralized (except not really because lolpayments) and (semi)trustless implementation of something that has no need for decentralization or trustlessness!
trothamel 8y ago
Before the rise of ubiquitous ads, the web was publisher-pays. If you wanted a blog, you would pay a host a few bucks a month to host it. I wonder if that's the model that the web will move back to. There's the argument to be made that the advertising model supports 'independent' news and social media, but it sure doesn't look that way - we'd move from partisan media supported through ads to partisan media supported by parties, which seems more direct.
- beagle3 8y ago
  Some micropayment / street-performer-payment solution will emerge if ads are gone. It may take a few years, likely not have anything to do with cryptocurrency (though it may). There are quite a few people already supporting themselves through patreon; people are willing to pay if the donation is reasonable, and friction low enough. In many ways iTunes/Netflix/prime beat “free” pirated content - but only once friction was low enough. That can happen on the web, but right now ads are incredibly low friction - they will have to go away first.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    Good analysis and I agree. In my country everybody was tooting that the creative industry is gonna die due to piracy (torrents). Yet once the subscription services became very easy to pay for, affordable and with high quality, people almost completely forgot about movie torrents.
Animats 8y ago
Re the reference to Vectuary. Here's the decision:[1] They sell an add-on for apps which snoops on the user's location and sends it to them for advertising purposes. The French data privacy regulator said that required Vecturary to get explicit user consent. But Vectuary has no customer interaction of their own. They claimed to rely on some chain of consent from some other party, but couldn't prove they actually had consent from every user. This is the biggest effect of the GPDR. Ad companies which have no customer contact of their own are on shaky legal ground. Some adtech companies have shut down operations in Europe.[2] No loss there. The big winners are Google and Facebook, which both have user signups and run ads. They can ask for consent. [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&sp=nmt4&u=https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCnil.do%3FoldAction%3DrechExpCnil%26id%3DCNILTEXT000037594451%26fastReqId%3D974682228%26fastPos%3D2&xid=17259,15700023,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201 https://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=en&prev=se... [2] https://digiday.com/media/ad-tech-firms-quitting-europe-blaming-gdpr-often-scapegoat/ https://digiday.com/media/ad-tech-firms-quitting-europe-blam...
- p1necone 8y ago
  Surely Vectuary just needs the apps of their clients to ask for consent from their users?
  - beagle3 8y ago
    “Just”? It must be opt-in, not opt-out. The exact use must be properly described. Consent may be revoked at any time, and all copies of data retrieved or deleted by customer request. It is more likely the apps would drop Vectuary than deal with that.
    - p1necone 8y ago
      Well yes, if informing your users about the data collection you're performing to monetize your product causes the majority of them to revoke consent for said data collection then of course your business isn't going to work. The post I was replying to seemed to imply that they were unable to ask for consent though, rather than that consent was unlikely to be provided.
jeromebaek 8y ago
Ads have been around since literally the beginning of civilization, and it is not so much a business model as it is a fundamental human need. The author comes across as naive when he says Netflix makes 5 times as much money as Facebook per user, therefore (clearly) ads don't work well. Why don't you say that healthcare makes 50x that per "user", therefore clearly the Netflix model isn't working? Point being that the ad supported model and the subscription model are fundamentally different at a psychological level. Tim Wu, the guy who coined the term "net neutrality", has written an excellent history of ads: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mania-to-capture-our-eyeballs/2016/10/27/9fbebeb0-8b41-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?noredirect=on&tid=kp_google&utm_term=.f09cfcf75f10 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mania-to-capture...
jancsika 8y ago
What about adding a "max-cycles" attribute to iframe? Ad network fills the frame with whatever it wants until it runs out of gas, after which no more computation is allowed. Content creators can choose some high limit. But users can set a global value, or install an "ad diet" plugin to pick and choose. Content creator can post a div to complain, "Aw c'mon, give my ad buddies more than 100 measly cycles. I gotta eat!" Better than being blocked outright.
wazoox 8y ago
I've been using adblockers since they existed. Previously I used filtering proxies and other more complex solutions, ever since I've seen my first banner ad sometimes around 1997. I hate ads, always did, always will. So good riddance.
Aloha 8y ago
I think any pronouncements about the death of an ad supported web are probably premature.
keithnz 8y ago
The irony of the articles website asking to turn off adblocker :) I'm not sure what a non ad supported web would look like. I'm fairly sure my local newspapers would collapse. They are drastically shrinking already. Seems hard to make a buck in journalism these days. we also hate "paywalls", we expect everything available for free and, the more tech savvy, are more than happy to block the ads with adblockers. While I agree that the web is warped by ads, and it's getting absolutely nuts what can be tracked about people.... What are viable models? Do we try and regulate this and see what happens? Nothing sounds too promising, other than trying to regulate advertising itself ( which also feels like a crappy tool for the problem )
- matt4077 8y ago
  It seems like most people are deeply cynical now, as in “all politicians are corrupt, anyway”, “journalists are corrupt/incompetent”, etc. Or, at least, that’s how they justify running every last publisher into the ground for reasons as spacious as “they are intruding on my rights by loading this unnesseray JS library”. Once all medium-sized papers are gone (i. e. soon) it will probably get worse, then downhill from there, and over the cliff beyond that. But at least we won’t have to deal with those distracting ads. Or only in the 30 minutes per day that the power is on.
  - everdrive 8y ago
    Subscribe to a real, physical paper. Use the internet less. So many easy, practical solutions here.
    - matt4077 8y ago
      I hate to break it to you, but physical magazines are somewhat linked to their internet equivalent. If your local papers’ website is offline, “I’ll just by buy the physical paper” might not actually be a workable strategy, for obvious reasons. In the best possible light, you may be saying that Peoples’ willingness to pay for content will increase as that content b comes rarer and rarer. In this scenario, you are already operating on the assumption that independent publishers will further dwindle, and I’m not convinced that whereever the swee spot will be, it will anywhere close to the vibrant media landscape a civil society needs for survival.
product50 8y ago
No ad supported web means a paid web. I am not sure if that is what the users want either. I have seen even in HN where people post alternate links of a site blocked by paywall to let users access the content for free. And this paid channel means every content site (such as Medium, NYT, WSJ, WaPo etc.) will have to institute their own paid mechanism which will cost users a lot of money. Pick your pill - you can't have it both ways.
- beagle3 8y ago
  Some of us were on the web before it became an ad infested cesspool. It wasn’t as slick, sure. But it was usable, and useful. Most of the useful things on the web that arrived since, with the notable exception of modern search engines, are independent of ads. There needs to be a solution for commons like search engines if there is no ad revenue to be made - I would gladly pay $50/year for a good search engine (which is infinitely more than google and Facebook are making on me now, as I use as blockers) and I am not alone.
  - damla 8y ago
    It has been a while since google launched such an engine, but doesn't seem to have gained any traction https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing
    - beagle3 8y ago
      Only a few sites support it; And it doesn’t stop google’s tracking and profiling, just the display ads. Likely also tags you “has spendable income” for ads on sites that don’t participate (and post-shutdown future)
- pcr0 8y ago
  I think paying to opt-out of ads and tracking is a reasonable solution. There will always be people who can't afford or don't want to pay for content.
_ph_ 8y ago
The problem aren't ads per se. Ads in newspapers and magazines were always fine. There, the advertisers would directly (via their agencies) close contracts with the publishers, based on the typical audience of the publication. A lot of these ads even can be considered part of the content. Most computer magazines of the past had sometimes as much value in the ads as in the articles. Because after all, ads can (and should) be the way a potential customer can find out about a product or service. The problem with web ads was and is, that the nature of the ad business was changed completely. Rather that a publisher made contracts with the advertisers themselves, ad networks acted as a middleman. Publishers would no longer run ads of their clients, but rent out part of their web space to the ad networks, who would control the content posted on their sites. While this produced a lot of easy income to the publishers (they just rented out the space, had no further work to do), it had grave consequences: - it introduced tracking of the web users to target ads, as the ad targetting was no longer done by linking it to the publication, with all the unacceptable consequences to privacy - it far too often created anoying or even offensive ads, as there was little or no curation - beyond annoying ads, far too often plain malware was distributed via the ad channel So I am glad to hear that web ads in these form are dying. I hope the web publishing industry reacts in time and goes back to a more classic advertisement model. I don't mind reasonably presented ads which don't endanger my privacy or computer security. I even would be really interested in ads that are informative again. There are some websites out still, which seem to have direct ad contracts like print magazines and just integrate them in their page layout. And of course, they are not blocked by ad blockers, so they remain effective.
buboard 8y ago
Tracking provides a way for advertisers reach their intended audience without altering the message of the publisher. Advertising won't go away even if ad blockers reach 100%. It will just transform every article to an affiliate-supported promotion.
Delameko 8y ago
The problem with ads for me (other than the bloat and the privacy invasion) is that the tracking is just shit. Whenever I'm signed in on Youtube I get non-stop ads for Squarespace (due to being a web dev I imagine). No matter how many times I mark the ads as irrelevant, they keep showing them. I've seen Squarespace ads hundreds of times, wasting my time, and Squarespace's ad spend. When I open Youtube in a private browser and go to a gaming channel, I get ads for games. The ads are actually interesting, and I discovered three games this week that I hadn't heard of. I would rather Youtube showed gaming ads on gaming channels, instead of all this tracking nonsense.
hliyan 8y ago
An unorthodox chain of thought: 1. In order to end the stronghold of advertising on the web, we need to first address advertising in the wider world 2. Advertising (amongst other things such as lobbying, flouting rules, pollution, anti-competitive practices) is driven by companies' almost desperate need for "growth" 3. Growth is driven by investor pressure 4. Investors are driven by need for ROI 5. The need for ROI is driven by inflation and its erosive effects on saved wealth 6. Inflation is driven by government spending via printing money Therefore, we should reduce inflation?
- justapassenger 8y ago
  Growth is driven by people wanting to survive, for which they need to accumulate more wealth. Maybe you already have enough wealth to support yourself for the rest of your life but most of the people in the world don’t.
spyckie2 8y ago
Going away from ads is solely a business model question. Ads (and micro payments) allow services to collect value much closer to the actual utility curve of a user. The issue with other models, (like charging a flat fee - ie, 1$ per article) is that some people will not want to pay the full amount while others are willing to pay a lot more than the listed price. You lose out on both ends - you lose money you would have earned from the people who would pay $.50 or $1000 to access it. Ads allow the company to extract value out of the content closer to actual value of the content at scale. The hard part is finding a different business model that does that task better.
expertentipp 8y ago
Internet browser is pretty well sandboxed with limited access to the IO of the hosting device. Actually, extensive tracking is the worse that can happen and luckily the awareness is high. Now, imagine what is happening in the native mobile applications:)

100 points by hunglee2 8y ago

Well I'm not sure i believe that the web is truly moving away from ads in as big a way as being claimed here. The trends in news groups are clear, but for each of the other examples there are counterparts that do run ads, ie Netflix and Hulu, and Spotify and Pandora. Don't get me wrong, i would love to see a change just like anyone else here, but I'm not sure I'm seeing it yet. Additionally i enjoyed this other article more as it goes into their proposed solution: https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-web-b98e9b94add1 https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-we...

PlutoIsAPlanet 8y ago

Ad companies got caught putting their hand in the cookie jar and people have had enough. There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web, but it got abused, with tracking going too far and ad companies constantly trying to defeat privacy-protecting features. They have no one to blame but themselves.

baal80spam 8y ago
> There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web I very much disagree with this statement. I simply can't stand ads in my internet and uBlock Origin is the first thing I install in a fresh browser. I can't fathom browsing the web without it anymore.
- geocar 8y ago
  Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news? I'd be okay with increasing taxes to cover it, or using a UK-style TV license (Internet Publishing License anyone?) and requiring people seek "Internet commissioners" like we have for Television[1], [2]. [1]: http://www.pbs.org/about/producing-pbs/proposal-process/ http://www.pbs.org/about/producing-pbs/proposal-process/ [2]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning Another option is micropayments, but I worry bugs and fraud would then steal consumers' dollars instead of Advertisers'.
  - austhrow743 8y ago
    The consumer.
  - Hoasi 8y ago
    > Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news? Direct support from the public would make sense, this is already at work, to some extent. The problem with this is that people are already so used to free that it may be difficult to implement. A license system would be a good idea. It is still far off, but authors associations are working on this in some countries.
    - goldfeld 8y ago
      Maybe we need arts and journalism to step up the game again, so good content is missed from the mainstream needing to be supported directly. Maybe most current art and journalism online won't be missed at all.
      - Hoasi 8y ago
        > Maybe most current art and journalism online won't be missed at all. Likely they wouldn't be missed. Perhaps we would also realize that enabling everyone to become a publisher was a mistake.
  - the8472 8y ago
    > a UK-style TV license (Internet Publishing License anyone?) Germany sort of does that already. From 2006 to 2012 internet-connected devices were considered broadcast receivers for the purpose of the broadcast fees. Since 2012 the fee was simplified to a general per-household broadcast fee which reduced the fairly data collection the agency had to do to know who had which kind receiver. The internet presence of the public-service broadcasters is also financed through those fees.
  - lkrubner 8y ago
    "Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news?" The government is the obvious choice. The USA already has the National Endowment for the Arts, which is a good start but it needs vastly more money. The important thing is that the NEA has none of the corrupting biases that afflict companies such as Google and Facebook. Most Western countries have some equivalent for the NEA.
- orev 8y ago
  The point is that the reason you feel the need to immediately block ads is because of how they have been abused and pushed to further and further absurdity over the years.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    That may be the point, but it's wrong. Advertising is manipulative and causes people to make bad decisions. It shouldn't be allowed at all.
    - matt4077 8y ago
      Advertisement is a required feature of a market-based economy, because it (also) informes consumers of the choices available. Without ads, the chances of breaking into an established market are extremely low.
    - H1Supreme 8y ago
      > Advertising is manipulative and causes people to make bad decisions. Not all advertising is some evil plot to brainwash the public. At it's core, it's a way to let the public know about your product. In the correct context, it's beneficial to the consumer. My Grandpa used to subscribe to Hemmings Motor News. It's a magazine that is focused on restoring vintage cars. It has regular ads, and a pretty large classified section. He used that magazine, including the ads, as a resource for vehicle restoration. Ads selling parts for 1940's Chevy pickup trucks in a section of a magazine specifically catering to that audience make sense. They're beneficial to people in the market for those products. I agree that web sites or real sites (eg. Times Square) that simply bombard you with anything and everything are awful. But, you can't put all advertising under one umbrella.
    - systematical 8y ago
      So spend tons of time and money building a startup, but don't advertise it...got it. Sound economics.
    - ElFitz 8y ago
      > Advertising is manipulative and causes people to make bad decisions. So do a lot of unasked opinions, especially on the internet (oh the irony). They're somehow still allowed to have and share them.
- Angostura 8y ago
  And I don't like paying to watch films. Neither really address the original statement
- kodablah 8y ago
  I don't see how what you personally can't stand has anything to do with there being nothing wrong with it existing. It's like me saying I very much disagree with a statement saying there's nothing wrong with a beet-supported farm. Maybe there is something wrong with an ad supported web, but a better argument can be made.
- systematical 8y ago
  I have no problem with reasonable ads as a means of compensating a website for free content, but the free market once again went too far here. There is a sense of entitlement that just gets under my skin when people think they can just have stuff for free.
amelius 8y ago
> There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web Keep in mind that ads are a very limited monetization scheme. For example, you can't even increase the price of your content and set it at a desired value.
- spullara 8y ago
  That is basically how advertising works. You set the price and people pay to be next to the content. If you don't get the price you want, don't share the content. For people blindly putting a javascript tag on their page for google ads I would agree but you can bet that places like Techmeme and DaringFireball set their price.
  - amelius 8y ago
    Yes, but it's still very limited. The price point where nobody will want to advertise is pretty low (I'm guessing). There's no way to escape that, and basically your only option is to change the entire monetization scheme.

FatDrunknStupid 8y ago

On the content side, I wonder if the problem is deeper. People want easy money and the large IT companies are simply facilitating. After all if I create enough crap content I might eventually write a book about parrots: https://www.wisebread.com/how-a-teenager-started-a-multi-million-dollar-online-business-with-a-parrot https://www.wisebread.com/how-a-teenager-started-a-multi-mil...

x0x0 8y ago

This is close to an advertisement, written by the founder of https://unlock-protocol.com https://unlock-protocol.com , a distributed web payments scheme using some bitcoin competitor.

Groxx 8y ago
And of course it's a blockchain with smart contracts. Not that it's inherently a bad approach, but it's very much a fad that's often applied without thinking.
lagadu 8y ago
Yay, yet another decentralized (except not really because lolpayments) and (semi)trustless implementation of something that has no need for decentralization or trustlessness!

trothamel 8y ago

Before the rise of ubiquitous ads, the web was publisher-pays. If you wanted a blog, you would pay a host a few bucks a month to host it. I wonder if that's the model that the web will move back to. There's the argument to be made that the advertising model supports 'independent' news and social media, but it sure doesn't look that way - we'd move from partisan media supported through ads to partisan media supported by parties, which seems more direct.

beagle3 8y ago
Some micropayment / street-performer-payment solution will emerge if ads are gone. It may take a few years, likely not have anything to do with cryptocurrency (though it may). There are quite a few people already supporting themselves through patreon; people are willing to pay if the donation is reasonable, and friction low enough. In many ways iTunes/Netflix/prime beat “free” pirated content - but only once friction was low enough. That can happen on the web, but right now ads are incredibly low friction - they will have to go away first.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Good analysis and I agree. In my country everybody was tooting that the creative industry is gonna die due to piracy (torrents). Yet once the subscription services became very easy to pay for, affordable and with high quality, people almost completely forgot about movie torrents.

Animats 8y ago

Re the reference to Vectuary. Here's the decision:[1] They sell an add-on for apps which snoops on the user's location and sends it to them for advertising purposes. The French data privacy regulator said that required Vecturary to get explicit user consent. But Vectuary has no customer interaction of their own. They claimed to rely on some chain of consent from some other party, but couldn't prove they actually had consent from every user. This is the biggest effect of the GPDR. Ad companies which have no customer contact of their own are on shaky legal ground. Some adtech companies have shut down operations in Europe.[2] No loss there. The big winners are Google and Facebook, which both have user signups and run ads. They can ask for consent. [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=fr&sp=nmt4&u=https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCnil.do%3FoldAction%3DrechExpCnil%26id%3DCNILTEXT000037594451%26fastReqId%3D974682228%26fastPos%3D2&xid=17259,15700023,15700124,15700149,15700186,15700190,15700201 https://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=en&prev=se... [2] https://digiday.com/media/ad-tech-firms-quitting-europe-blaming-gdpr-often-scapegoat/ https://digiday.com/media/ad-tech-firms-quitting-europe-blam...

p1necone 8y ago
Surely Vectuary just needs the apps of their clients to ask for consent from their users?
- beagle3 8y ago
  “Just”? It must be opt-in, not opt-out. The exact use must be properly described. Consent may be revoked at any time, and all copies of data retrieved or deleted by customer request. It is more likely the apps would drop Vectuary than deal with that.
  - p1necone 8y ago
    Well yes, if informing your users about the data collection you're performing to monetize your product causes the majority of them to revoke consent for said data collection then of course your business isn't going to work. The post I was replying to seemed to imply that they were unable to ask for consent though, rather than that consent was unlikely to be provided.

jeromebaek 8y ago

Ads have been around since literally the beginning of civilization, and it is not so much a business model as it is a fundamental human need. The author comes across as naive when he says Netflix makes 5 times as much money as Facebook per user, therefore (clearly) ads don't work well. Why don't you say that healthcare makes 50x that per "user", therefore clearly the Netflix model isn't working? Point being that the ad supported model and the subscription model are fundamentally different at a psychological level. Tim Wu, the guy who coined the term "net neutrality", has written an excellent history of ads: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mania-to-capture-our-eyeballs/2016/10/27/9fbebeb0-8b41-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?noredirect=on&tid=kp_google&utm_term=.f09cfcf75f10 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mania-to-capture...

jancsika 8y ago

What about adding a "max-cycles" attribute to iframe? Ad network fills the frame with whatever it wants until it runs out of gas, after which no more computation is allowed. Content creators can choose some high limit. But users can set a global value, or install an "ad diet" plugin to pick and choose. Content creator can post a div to complain, "Aw c'mon, give my ad buddies more than 100 measly cycles. I gotta eat!" Better than being blocked outright.

wazoox 8y ago

I've been using adblockers since they existed. Previously I used filtering proxies and other more complex solutions, ever since I've seen my first banner ad sometimes around 1997. I hate ads, always did, always will. So good riddance.

Aloha 8y ago

I think any pronouncements about the death of an ad supported web are probably premature.

keithnz 8y ago

The irony of the articles website asking to turn off adblocker :) I'm not sure what a non ad supported web would look like. I'm fairly sure my local newspapers would collapse. They are drastically shrinking already. Seems hard to make a buck in journalism these days. we also hate "paywalls", we expect everything available for free and, the more tech savvy, are more than happy to block the ads with adblockers. While I agree that the web is warped by ads, and it's getting absolutely nuts what can be tracked about people.... What are viable models? Do we try and regulate this and see what happens? Nothing sounds too promising, other than trying to regulate advertising itself ( which also feels like a crappy tool for the problem )

matt4077 8y ago
It seems like most people are deeply cynical now, as in “all politicians are corrupt, anyway”, “journalists are corrupt/incompetent”, etc. Or, at least, that’s how they justify running every last publisher into the ground for reasons as spacious as “they are intruding on my rights by loading this unnesseray JS library”. Once all medium-sized papers are gone (i. e. soon) it will probably get worse, then downhill from there, and over the cliff beyond that. But at least we won’t have to deal with those distracting ads. Or only in the 30 minutes per day that the power is on.
- everdrive 8y ago
  Subscribe to a real, physical paper. Use the internet less. So many easy, practical solutions here.
  - matt4077 8y ago
    I hate to break it to you, but physical magazines are somewhat linked to their internet equivalent. If your local papers’ website is offline, “I’ll just by buy the physical paper” might not actually be a workable strategy, for obvious reasons. In the best possible light, you may be saying that Peoples’ willingness to pay for content will increase as that content b comes rarer and rarer. In this scenario, you are already operating on the assumption that independent publishers will further dwindle, and I’m not convinced that whereever the swee spot will be, it will anywhere close to the vibrant media landscape a civil society needs for survival.

product50 8y ago

No ad supported web means a paid web. I am not sure if that is what the users want either. I have seen even in HN where people post alternate links of a site blocked by paywall to let users access the content for free. And this paid channel means every content site (such as Medium, NYT, WSJ, WaPo etc.) will have to institute their own paid mechanism which will cost users a lot of money. Pick your pill - you can't have it both ways.

beagle3 8y ago
Some of us were on the web before it became an ad infested cesspool. It wasn’t as slick, sure. But it was usable, and useful. Most of the useful things on the web that arrived since, with the notable exception of modern search engines, are independent of ads. There needs to be a solution for commons like search engines if there is no ad revenue to be made - I would gladly pay $50/year for a good search engine (which is infinitely more than google and Facebook are making on me now, as I use as blockers) and I am not alone.
- damla 8y ago
  It has been a while since google launched such an engine, but doesn't seem to have gained any traction https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing
  - beagle3 8y ago
    Only a few sites support it; And it doesn’t stop google’s tracking and profiling, just the display ads. Likely also tags you “has spendable income” for ads on sites that don’t participate (and post-shutdown future)
pcr0 8y ago
I think paying to opt-out of ads and tracking is a reasonable solution. There will always be people who can't afford or don't want to pay for content.

_ph_ 8y ago

The problem aren't ads per se. Ads in newspapers and magazines were always fine. There, the advertisers would directly (via their agencies) close contracts with the publishers, based on the typical audience of the publication. A lot of these ads even can be considered part of the content. Most computer magazines of the past had sometimes as much value in the ads as in the articles. Because after all, ads can (and should) be the way a potential customer can find out about a product or service. The problem with web ads was and is, that the nature of the ad business was changed completely. Rather that a publisher made contracts with the advertisers themselves, ad networks acted as a middleman. Publishers would no longer run ads of their clients, but rent out part of their web space to the ad networks, who would control the content posted on their sites. While this produced a lot of easy income to the publishers (they just rented out the space, had no further work to do), it had grave consequences: - it introduced tracking of the web users to target ads, as the ad targetting was no longer done by linking it to the publication, with all the unacceptable consequences to privacy - it far too often created anoying or even offensive ads, as there was little or no curation - beyond annoying ads, far too often plain malware was distributed via the ad channel So I am glad to hear that web ads in these form are dying. I hope the web publishing industry reacts in time and goes back to a more classic advertisement model. I don't mind reasonably presented ads which don't endanger my privacy or computer security. I even would be really interested in ads that are informative again. There are some websites out still, which seem to have direct ad contracts like print magazines and just integrate them in their page layout. And of course, they are not blocked by ad blockers, so they remain effective.

buboard 8y ago

Tracking provides a way for advertisers reach their intended audience without altering the message of the publisher. Advertising won't go away even if ad blockers reach 100%. It will just transform every article to an affiliate-supported promotion.

Delameko 8y ago

The problem with ads for me (other than the bloat and the privacy invasion) is that the tracking is just shit. Whenever I'm signed in on Youtube I get non-stop ads for Squarespace (due to being a web dev I imagine). No matter how many times I mark the ads as irrelevant, they keep showing them. I've seen Squarespace ads hundreds of times, wasting my time, and Squarespace's ad spend. When I open Youtube in a private browser and go to a gaming channel, I get ads for games. The ads are actually interesting, and I discovered three games this week that I hadn't heard of. I would rather Youtube showed gaming ads on gaming channels, instead of all this tracking nonsense.

hliyan 8y ago

An unorthodox chain of thought: 1. In order to end the stronghold of advertising on the web, we need to first address advertising in the wider world 2. Advertising (amongst other things such as lobbying, flouting rules, pollution, anti-competitive practices) is driven by companies' almost desperate need for "growth" 3. Growth is driven by investor pressure 4. Investors are driven by need for ROI 5. The need for ROI is driven by inflation and its erosive effects on saved wealth 6. Inflation is driven by government spending via printing money Therefore, we should reduce inflation?

justapassenger 8y ago
Growth is driven by people wanting to survive, for which they need to accumulate more wealth. Maybe you already have enough wealth to support yourself for the rest of your life but most of the people in the world don’t.

spyckie2 8y ago

Going away from ads is solely a business model question. Ads (and micro payments) allow services to collect value much closer to the actual utility curve of a user. The issue with other models, (like charging a flat fee - ie, 1$ per article) is that some people will not want to pay the full amount while others are willing to pay a lot more than the listed price. You lose out on both ends - you lose money you would have earned from the people who would pay $.50 or $1000 to access it. Ads allow the company to extract value out of the content closer to actual value of the content at scale. The hard part is finding a different business model that does that task better.

expertentipp 8y ago

Internet browser is pretty well sandboxed with limited access to the IO of the hosting device. Actually, extensive tracking is the worse that can happen and luckily the awareness is high. Now, imagine what is happening in the native mobile applications:)