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Relevant ads might offer a better user experience than irrelevant ads. You know what offers an even better experience? No ads. I'm in favor of anything that

Relevant ads might offer a better user experience than irrelevant ads. You know what offers an even better experience? No ads. I'm in favor of anything that makes an free-with-advertising business model less practical. Make me pay five bucks a month, if that's what the service costs; there's no technical reason why it shouldn't be easy to set that up. Don't slyly take the five bucks from me piecemeal, immeasurably, by replacing the things I care about with distracting ads. I fucking hate it.

yanw 16y ago
An advertising model isn't interchangeable with a subscription one, besides the fact that people won't pay for everything because not everything is worth paying for. Ads help a thousand flowers bloom, startups can experiment and throw ideas out there to see what sticks without requiring the user to pay to discover and interact with their creations, the ad model is very much an innovation model. Many of the services available today won’t exist unless they are free, and are used by many users which and the usage patterns are collected as feedback to improve and evolve said services.
jbooth 16y ago
Tell you what, you start cutting checks for 5 bucks whenever you visit a new blog, and I bet they'll start switching to that business model immediately :)
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Effectively ads are a bad substitute for a micro payment system. If there were such a thing I think that ad free content would rule. Imagine paying $20 on top of your current internet bill to never ever see another ad on all the sites you visit and have that $20 distributed to those sites proportional to how much time you spend there. The reason that such schemes have not found much in terms of adoption are chicken-and-the-egg related. People that would not want to get on board with this could stick to the current ad based solutions.
  - icey 16y ago
    What do you think about micropayment systems like Flattr? http://flattr.com/ http://flattr.com/
  - jbooth 16y ago
    100% agreed, with the caveat that they're way more workable than any micropayment system. Who's the broker? How do we decide how much "traffic" your site got and how much revenue it's entitled to? How do you join? Do you need to join to make money off of eyeballs? Plus, the chicken egg issues, as you cite.
sjs382 16y ago
"Relevant ads might offer a better user experience than irrelevant ads. You know what offers an even better experience? No ads." Know what? I get a lot of discounts from ads. Just a thought.

yanw 16y ago

An advertising model isn't interchangeable with a subscription one, besides the fact that people won't pay for everything because not everything is worth paying for. Ads help a thousand flowers bloom, startups can experiment and throw ideas out there to see what sticks without requiring the user to pay to discover and interact with their creations, the ad model is very much an innovation model. Many of the services available today won’t exist unless they are free, and are used by many users which and the usage patterns are collected as feedback to improve and evolve said services.

jbooth 16y ago

Tell you what, you start cutting checks for 5 bucks whenever you visit a new blog, and I bet they'll start switching to that business model immediately :)

jacquesm 16y ago
Effectively ads are a bad substitute for a micro payment system. If there were such a thing I think that ad free content would rule. Imagine paying $20 on top of your current internet bill to never ever see another ad on all the sites you visit and have that $20 distributed to those sites proportional to how much time you spend there. The reason that such schemes have not found much in terms of adoption are chicken-and-the-egg related. People that would not want to get on board with this could stick to the current ad based solutions.
- icey 16y ago
  What do you think about micropayment systems like Flattr? http://flattr.com/ http://flattr.com/
- jbooth 16y ago
  100% agreed, with the caveat that they're way more workable than any micropayment system. Who's the broker? How do we decide how much "traffic" your site got and how much revenue it's entitled to? How do you join? Do you need to join to make money off of eyeballs? Plus, the chicken egg issues, as you cite.

sjs382 16y ago

"Relevant ads might offer a better user experience than irrelevant ads. You know what offers an even better experience? No ads." Know what? I get a lot of discounts from ads. Just a thought.