5 ms·

Would you put your money where your opinion is? You can demand your attention back, but are you willing to pay for the content you consume? I say this in earne

Would you put your money where your opinion is? You can demand your attention back, but are you willing to pay for the content you consume? I say this in earnest. We had great content in newspapers and magazines... and the world decide that cheap ( with instance access ) was better. Same has happened to many industries. You shouldn't demand, without a willingness to, well, compensate.

badsectoracula 8y ago
> We had great content in newspapers and magazines... and the world decide that cheap ( with instance access ) was better. I do not remember a time that newspapers and magazines had no ads, despite being paid. If anything many of them were almost half ads, half content. I was reading magazines since the 90s though, i do not know if things were better before.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  My memory agrees. Hell, I work with a gaming magazine preservation project and those things are 90%+ ads when you get down to it.
- keepper 8y ago
  I think my point is that the "bombardment" of ads is partly in due to the lack of monetization. There's a bit of a difference between print ads, and intrusive online ads. For example, you could turn the page... there was not redirect to "wow iphone user, you've won this prize!!!" I'm actually ok with facebook/ig/google adwords ads. I'm not ok with intrusive, redirecting, in your face, ads. I could be alone in this opinion.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Those ads are relevant, because they are context-specific and purchased directly from the publisher. If I pick up The Economist, I will expect to see ads for some luxury watch brand, as well as highly specialized job postings for executives somewhere. If I go to the Economists' website, I will see ads for: - a university website I went to that dropped a remarketing cookie into my browser - the shitty dating app full of bots and escorts, that would never have passed a QC review at a publication. Yet they are common on FB and TW (maybe Google Ads is different). - the tshirt website that displays some machine-generated text based on what it thinks my interests are. These are what I consider intrusive ads. When I see one, I don't want to have to think about what trail I left that led to these particular ads being shown to me.
  - ariwilson 8y ago
    This is not even true. I just went to the Economist website and I got exactly the same ads you claim for the print version: - Louis Vuitton watch ad - Accenture strategy ad about company purpose (served by Google DoubleClick)
    - rchaud 8y ago
      Hmm, I just checked again and you are right, I was wrong. Perhaps they changed their digital ads strategy, as the last time I visited on a non-adblocked browser, it was showing those low-grade ads that really cheapened the experience of being on the site.
- mrep 8y ago
  Maybe not all news, but you can pay for ad-free youtube, hulu, spotify, and arstechnica these days.
- tzs 8y ago
  With magazines with a narrow focus, such as magazines about a particular hobby or activity, readers usually wanted the ads. I used to regularly read "Astronomy" and "Sky & Telescope", for example, and would have been disappointed if the ads went away. Ads in those magazines were the primary way most amateur astronomers back in, say, the '70s would find good equipment. Other magazines I would have been disappointed to lose ads from were "Popular Electronics", "Chess Life" and "Byte". For more general interest magazines, like "Time" or "Newsweek", I don't recall looking forward to the ads like I did for the above mentioned magazines, so wouldn't have minded if they went away. On the other hand, print ads generally weren't intrusive, though, so if they would have had to raise the price of the magazine to get rid of them I would rather keep them. Although newspapers were general interest, their ads were often useful because they were usually for local things. Remember, back in the day we bought almost everything in person at local stores, so these ads often alerted us to sales and deals that we were interested in.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I disagree. This is sort of like saying it’s fine to build a restaurant with two large rooms, one that has cigarette smoke piped into it, and one with fresh, clean air. You can sit in the smoke filled room for no additional charge, but you have to sign up for a subscription plan with that restaurant to be allowed in the clean air room. Now imagine that every restaurant does this. And your grocery store, doctor’s office, airplane seat and place of worship too. To escape it, you’d literally have to become an alienating, dysfunctional hermit disavowed of all kinds of modern standards of living, hypervigilant with every place you visit. So it is with ads. Nine times out of ten, there is not even any option you can pay for that is truly ad free. Even full paying subscribers are subjected to ads and have their data and consumption habits tracked to build better ad bidding techniques or demographic profiles. Ads are essentially always a toxic psychological substance, and especially so when their injection into your life is nearly impossible to fully comprehend and relies on personal data about you that is sprawling, with huge companies and teams of engineers designing ways to defeat any expected privacy you might have believed you’re entitled to. Tracking pixels, cookies, browser fingerprinting, data bartering, location tracking SDKs, etc. There’s an aspect of this where we simply need to legislate away hyper-targeted and constant, pervasive advertising, just like we would have a public health outcry if a restaurant tried to create a room artificially filled with cigarette smoke. Ads are truly not different. They are a psychological carcinogen and people should have a natural right to avoid being subjected to them while conducting everyday modern life activities. We should disallow the possibility that the only way to avoid an ad is to avoid the content / pay a rent-seeking additional fee for ad-free access, etc. It’s not acceptable to inject a harmful substance into a product and then argue customers are free to not consume it or pay extra for the harmful substance to be removed. Ads should not be viewed as a logically possible monetization instrument for reasons of sheer public health. If this means many types of businesses fold because they were only sustainable if they monetized the injection of harmful substances into their customers’ lives, then let them fold. It means they do not provide compelling enough products or services to be justified by the marketplace, and are propped up by a philistine ethical abyss in our modern economy that tries to convince people it’s above board to make money from injecting harmful substances into customers’ lives or charging a premium to avoid the harmful substance. We wouldn’t allow businesses to monetize based on injecting cigarette smoke into customers’ lives (not even if the mostly uninformed customers claimed to be OK with it). It’s frankly no different with ads.
bduerst 8y ago
Google used to allow you to pay pennies to websites to hide display ads their site, or replace them entirely with cat pictures. It wasn't complete coverage since Google doesn't own all ad networks, but it was something like 55% of the ads on sites. Then they changed the whole program to only have 100% coverage on very specific sites, which kind of makes it useless unless you frequent those specific domains: https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995 https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995
arendtio 8y ago
> You can demand your attention back, but are you willing to pay for the content you consume? Yes, I do. In fact, I want to consume a lot less than the media corporations want me to consume (especially 'news'). So paying for Netflix/Spotify/Prime/Steam is no problem for me and I probably would pay for news if I would find it of any value. Today, every news corporation seems to have its own agenda and you have to do your own research anyway. I am just wondering how much I would have to pay to get the other stuff without that DRM garbage... I mean for games we have GOG, but for movies and music, I haven't found a legal DRM-free source yet that offers the main-stream products :-/
thecatspaw 8y ago
Yes. I pay 50bucks to a youtuber per video who does not advertise, and disables them wherever possible (sometimes its forced by yt/twitch). Lots of people do not support him on patreon, but he says that the few people who pay make him more money than he would get with ads. I would rather pay those 10$ per month or so that websites get through ads (per user), rather than getting tracked and stalked everywhere I go.
aszantu 8y ago
Well, the other side would be: how about stop throwing free stuff at me that I don't need anyways? But since it's already there, sure, I'll consume it? The market tought people to be like this. I never click on adds, and I never buy what's advertized in an add, what's the market value of that? For a while, I tried what everyone else tried: "like and subscribe, like and comment!" but 1. it didn't work and 2. I felt more and more disgusted with myself. 3. I had a friend, who did this, stuck with it and became very weird, always hunting for agreement, couldn't take any feedback at all (unless it was positive and stroking her ego). All this stuff is reshaping human behaviour, and nobody knows what it's doing. 4. All adds are telling you that something is missing and that you need it. Be it software or hardware, creams and food. Essentially the message in a lot of these things is: you're inefficient, ugly, slow, unproductive, uncreative, too thick, too thin... Who wants to listen to that kind of message all the time?

badsectoracula 8y ago

> We had great content in newspapers and magazines... and the world decide that cheap ( with instance access ) was better. I do not remember a time that newspapers and magazines had no ads, despite being paid. If anything many of them were almost half ads, half content. I was reading magazines since the 90s though, i do not know if things were better before.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
My memory agrees. Hell, I work with a gaming magazine preservation project and those things are 90%+ ads when you get down to it.
keepper 8y ago
I think my point is that the "bombardment" of ads is partly in due to the lack of monetization. There's a bit of a difference between print ads, and intrusive online ads. For example, you could turn the page... there was not redirect to "wow iphone user, you've won this prize!!!" I'm actually ok with facebook/ig/google adwords ads. I'm not ok with intrusive, redirecting, in your face, ads. I could be alone in this opinion.
rchaud 8y ago
Those ads are relevant, because they are context-specific and purchased directly from the publisher. If I pick up The Economist, I will expect to see ads for some luxury watch brand, as well as highly specialized job postings for executives somewhere. If I go to the Economists' website, I will see ads for: - a university website I went to that dropped a remarketing cookie into my browser - the shitty dating app full of bots and escorts, that would never have passed a QC review at a publication. Yet they are common on FB and TW (maybe Google Ads is different). - the tshirt website that displays some machine-generated text based on what it thinks my interests are. These are what I consider intrusive ads. When I see one, I don't want to have to think about what trail I left that led to these particular ads being shown to me.
- ariwilson 8y ago
  This is not even true. I just went to the Economist website and I got exactly the same ads you claim for the print version: - Louis Vuitton watch ad - Accenture strategy ad about company purpose (served by Google DoubleClick)
  - rchaud 8y ago
    Hmm, I just checked again and you are right, I was wrong. Perhaps they changed their digital ads strategy, as the last time I visited on a non-adblocked browser, it was showing those low-grade ads that really cheapened the experience of being on the site.
mrep 8y ago
Maybe not all news, but you can pay for ad-free youtube, hulu, spotify, and arstechnica these days.
tzs 8y ago
With magazines with a narrow focus, such as magazines about a particular hobby or activity, readers usually wanted the ads. I used to regularly read "Astronomy" and "Sky & Telescope", for example, and would have been disappointed if the ads went away. Ads in those magazines were the primary way most amateur astronomers back in, say, the '70s would find good equipment. Other magazines I would have been disappointed to lose ads from were "Popular Electronics", "Chess Life" and "Byte". For more general interest magazines, like "Time" or "Newsweek", I don't recall looking forward to the ads like I did for the above mentioned magazines, so wouldn't have minded if they went away. On the other hand, print ads generally weren't intrusive, though, so if they would have had to raise the price of the magazine to get rid of them I would rather keep them. Although newspapers were general interest, their ads were often useful because they were usually for local things. Remember, back in the day we bought almost everything in person at local stores, so these ads often alerted us to sales and deals that we were interested in.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I disagree. This is sort of like saying it’s fine to build a restaurant with two large rooms, one that has cigarette smoke piped into it, and one with fresh, clean air. You can sit in the smoke filled room for no additional charge, but you have to sign up for a subscription plan with that restaurant to be allowed in the clean air room. Now imagine that every restaurant does this. And your grocery store, doctor’s office, airplane seat and place of worship too. To escape it, you’d literally have to become an alienating, dysfunctional hermit disavowed of all kinds of modern standards of living, hypervigilant with every place you visit. So it is with ads. Nine times out of ten, there is not even any option you can pay for that is truly ad free. Even full paying subscribers are subjected to ads and have their data and consumption habits tracked to build better ad bidding techniques or demographic profiles. Ads are essentially always a toxic psychological substance, and especially so when their injection into your life is nearly impossible to fully comprehend and relies on personal data about you that is sprawling, with huge companies and teams of engineers designing ways to defeat any expected privacy you might have believed you’re entitled to. Tracking pixels, cookies, browser fingerprinting, data bartering, location tracking SDKs, etc. There’s an aspect of this where we simply need to legislate away hyper-targeted and constant, pervasive advertising, just like we would have a public health outcry if a restaurant tried to create a room artificially filled with cigarette smoke. Ads are truly not different. They are a psychological carcinogen and people should have a natural right to avoid being subjected to them while conducting everyday modern life activities. We should disallow the possibility that the only way to avoid an ad is to avoid the content / pay a rent-seeking additional fee for ad-free access, etc. It’s not acceptable to inject a harmful substance into a product and then argue customers are free to not consume it or pay extra for the harmful substance to be removed. Ads should not be viewed as a logically possible monetization instrument for reasons of sheer public health. If this means many types of businesses fold because they were only sustainable if they monetized the injection of harmful substances into their customers’ lives, then let them fold. It means they do not provide compelling enough products or services to be justified by the marketplace, and are propped up by a philistine ethical abyss in our modern economy that tries to convince people it’s above board to make money from injecting harmful substances into customers’ lives or charging a premium to avoid the harmful substance. We wouldn’t allow businesses to monetize based on injecting cigarette smoke into customers’ lives (not even if the mostly uninformed customers claimed to be OK with it). It’s frankly no different with ads.

bduerst 8y ago

Google used to allow you to pay pennies to websites to hide display ads their site, or replace them entirely with cat pictures. It wasn't complete coverage since Google doesn't own all ad networks, but it was something like 55% of the ads on sites. Then they changed the whole program to only have 100% coverage on very specific sites, which kind of makes it useless unless you frequent those specific domains: https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995 https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995

arendtio 8y ago

> You can demand your attention back, but are you willing to pay for the content you consume? Yes, I do. In fact, I want to consume a lot less than the media corporations want me to consume (especially 'news'). So paying for Netflix/Spotify/Prime/Steam is no problem for me and I probably would pay for news if I would find it of any value. Today, every news corporation seems to have its own agenda and you have to do your own research anyway. I am just wondering how much I would have to pay to get the other stuff without that DRM garbage... I mean for games we have GOG, but for movies and music, I haven't found a legal DRM-free source yet that offers the main-stream products :-/

thecatspaw 8y ago

Yes. I pay 50bucks to a youtuber per video who does not advertise, and disables them wherever possible (sometimes its forced by yt/twitch). Lots of people do not support him on patreon, but he says that the few people who pay make him more money than he would get with ads. I would rather pay those 10$ per month or so that websites get through ads (per user), rather than getting tracked and stalked everywhere I go.

aszantu 8y ago

Well, the other side would be: how about stop throwing free stuff at me that I don't need anyways? But since it's already there, sure, I'll consume it? The market tought people to be like this. I never click on adds, and I never buy what's advertized in an add, what's the market value of that? For a while, I tried what everyone else tried: "like and subscribe, like and comment!" but 1. it didn't work and 2. I felt more and more disgusted with myself. 3. I had a friend, who did this, stuck with it and became very weird, always hunting for agreement, couldn't take any feedback at all (unless it was positive and stroking her ego). All this stuff is reshaping human behaviour, and nobody knows what it's doing. 4. All adds are telling you that something is missing and that you need it. Be it software or hardware, creams and food. Essentially the message in a lot of these things is: you're inefficient, ugly, slow, unproductive, uncreative, too thick, too thin... Who wants to listen to that kind of message all the time?