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But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Ye

But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist. I use Firefox's built Enhanced Tracking Prevention, that some sites call "ad blocking" but in reality it is super easy to have ads that don't get blocked by it, just make them non-creepy.

andrewprock 7y ago
On the contrary, people pay for Netflix. People also pay for the ad-free upgrade to Hulu. Speaking to text websites, people are also using Brave, though I don't know how that experiment will work out in the end.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I think Brave is on the right track, but I am skeptical the kind of users that are aggressively anti-ad are going to like seeing ads straight in their notifications. I'd prefer to just pay Brave e.g. $10/month and have it give out that money to sites I visit.
- csunbird 7y ago
  When it is reasonably priced, people will pay for legal alternatives. If there was a Netflix for paid websites, which would provide subscriptions in a convenient way to all websites in bulk, people would pay for that. Current options are: > Manage subscriptions of 10 plus websites manually > Pay by your privacy It is clear that both options suck, so people opt in to ad blockers instead. Legal options are just overpriced for the demand.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    Ad blocking is not illegal.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  I think we need a solution for websites that aren't as unanimously popular as Netflix and Hulu. It's no surprise to me that the biggest entertainment services online can attract a subscription. But it would be a damn shame if those are the only services that can make much money. Just more and more centralization of content. People often respond to this with "well, hobbyists make plenty of content for free," but the thing is that we benefit when our favorite hobbyists can make money from the craft and produce more work for us to enjoy instead of waiting around for their charity. Though the growth of Patreon is a good step in the right direction, culturally. It shows a growing willingness to indeed pay content producers directly with small recurring transactions.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 7y ago
> But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist. This folk has an answer: display ads the ol' fashioned way, with a pair of <a> and <img> tags.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Ad blockers still remove them. They have tried not to and the users intentionally moved to ad blockers that still did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_ad_filtering_and_ad_whitelisting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Also, aside from the two HNers who claim they actually do, nobody is turning off their adblocker as they go to see if a given site has acceptable ads.
    - pavel_lishin 7y ago
      "Sir, I know the last seventeen hundred cups I've offered you were full of piss, but surely this time I'm being honest and genuine!"
    - pas 7y ago
      Is there a blocklist that permits acceptable ads?
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    Yes, because Adblock Plus did it in the shadiest possible way imaginable. From the Wikipedia page: > * In February 2013, an anonymous source accused Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant of offering to add his site's advertisements to the whitelist in return for one-third of the advertisement revenue.[68] In June 2013, blogger Sascha Pallenberg accused the developers of Adblock Plus of maintaining business connections to "strategic partners in the advertising industry", and called ABP a "mafia-like advertising network".[69] He alleged that Adblock Plus whitelisted all ads coming from "friendly" sites and subsidiaries, and promoted their product using fake reviews and pornography.[70] Faida responded to Pallenberg's accusations, stating that "a large part of the information concerning the collaboration with our partners is correct", but that the company did not see these industry connections as a conflict of interest.* "We'll whitelist acceptable ads. Btw, acceptable means 'willing to pay us a kickback'". The move on Adblock Plus did nothing to make me safer, so of course I ditched them for a more secure solution. Of course, it's Adblock Plus's goal and right to try to make a revenue, but I don't owe them the continued use of their product. And I absolutely reject the premise that I owe every website that's willing to send a 200 OK response the right to run arbitrary javascript in my browser. If you don't want me 'mooching' your content, fine - put up a paywall.
Waterluvian 7y ago
I think the primary argument line is something along: 1. Online ads today are so bad they must be blocked 2. But blocking ads blocks revenue for sites we like 3. So we should pay for them more directly 4. But I'm not about to set up 100 different monthly subscriptions. These corporations are not trustworthy and I cannot monitor this many bills. 5. We need a solution to simplify money -> content -> creator transfer 6. There's been many attempts at that, but there's too many players who want the power and control that comes with wedging themselves in between consumers and creators. 7. So we're stuck.
- dhimes 7y ago
  Serve content related ads and don't track. I'd be fine with that.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    Same. But I think that once you've screwed the pooch this bad, you can't just take a single step backwards and expect everyone to be fine with that. The trust is gone. You've got to reboot and rebrand somehow.
  - iscrewyou 7y ago
    Don’t track. Serve ads in a designated space across all pages (sidebar). I personally would happily uninstall adblocker if those two things came true.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    The problem is that the advertising companies wanted the offline marketing spend so much that they started selling the dream of tracking with specificity, which caused marketeers the world over to finally have an answer to the age old 'I don't know which half I spend wrong' question.
  - Xavdidtheshadow 7y ago
    Advent of Code does a great job at this. Its ads are text-based, relevant, and unintrusive. Of course, it has a pretty particular aesthetic, but plenty of sites could do a simple (non-animated) image or text to surface their sponsor without being annoying.
mattmanser 7y ago
Most of these sites offered a completely ad-free version for many years, then switched to an advertising model after they'd cornered the market. There's no ethical reason for us to "pay" these scummy actors, including Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, after they destroyed all viable alternatives by giving away their products free and THEN add advertising. As you intimate, there's also nothing intrinsically necessary to the advertising model for it to be served by different domains, with 3rd party cookies and third party javascript. Nor is it necessary to have auto-play videos, popups, etc. Even someone fairly benign like the Guardian is now infested with up-sells and adverts if you look at it without an adblocker. So the sites brought it on themselves. You want to support their ads, go ahead, but don't ask us to come up with the alternative model. You have no moral high ground to preach to us from, all these sites used a bait and switch to get on top. Right now if I look at facebook every 2 or 3 stories are adverts, where 5 years ago it was far less, and for google a huge chunk of the top of the results page, up to three results worth, are adverts. None of these are clearly marked imo, nor are they necessary, they're making billions in profit. They can do it because they monopolized the market.
gatherhunterer 7y ago
Don’t monetize your users’ data, monetize their use. When you log in with a paid account the ads should be gone. If users don’t need an account to get the content and they still get ads with the paid account, what exactly are you offering in exchange for the payment?
jacquesm 7y ago
> But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. It's not a question they need to answer, that's the problem of the companies that caused this mess. > Yet they still expect these websites to exist. Not really, they just use what exists, not what they expect to exist.
zentiggr 7y ago
> Yet they still expect these websites to exist. I for one certainly don't have that expectation. I understand sites have non-zero operating costs, and/or staffing and other expenses in order to create and serve interesting content. If someone rolls out (without using the word blockchain or any derivative) a way of doing the web equivalent of .99 per track, no middlemen/Elsevier types, just 'pay the originating site for full permanent access to this page', I'll do that in a heartbeat. I buy paper books and sit and enjoy them thoroughly... web content transparently priced with reasonable, honest rates get at least close to that style.
squidlogic 7y ago
Isn’t that what the brave browser is trying to solve?
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
The solution is to deliver safe ads from your own servers. The solution we'll get stuck with is an embedded webassembly browser rendering to canvas.
BlueTemplar 7y ago
The answers for that have been around for more than a decade. But rare are the people making the decisions that are willing to dump the current system...
dredmorbius 7y ago
Richard Stallman: The Internet Sharing Licence (2012) https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht... Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK): A Broadband Tax for the UK (2009) https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/ https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-f... Myself: Universal Payment Syndication (2014) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes... Joseph Stiglitz: "Knowledge as a Global Public Good" http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343... (PDF) (pp 308-325)

andrewprock 7y ago

On the contrary, people pay for Netflix. People also pay for the ad-free upgrade to Hulu. Speaking to text websites, people are also using Brave, though I don't know how that experiment will work out in the end.

Someone1234 7y ago
I think Brave is on the right track, but I am skeptical the kind of users that are aggressively anti-ad are going to like seeing ads straight in their notifications. I'd prefer to just pay Brave e.g. $10/month and have it give out that money to sites I visit.
csunbird 7y ago
When it is reasonably priced, people will pay for legal alternatives. If there was a Netflix for paid websites, which would provide subscriptions in a convenient way to all websites in bulk, people would pay for that. Current options are: > Manage subscriptions of 10 plus websites manually > Pay by your privacy It is clear that both options suck, so people opt in to ad blockers instead. Legal options are just overpriced for the demand.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Ad blocking is not illegal.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
I think we need a solution for websites that aren't as unanimously popular as Netflix and Hulu. It's no surprise to me that the biggest entertainment services online can attract a subscription. But it would be a damn shame if those are the only services that can make much money. Just more and more centralization of content. People often respond to this with "well, hobbyists make plenty of content for free," but the thing is that we benefit when our favorite hobbyists can make money from the craft and produce more work for us to enjoy instead of waiting around for their charity. Though the growth of Patreon is a good step in the right direction, culturally. It shows a growing willingness to indeed pay content producers directly with small recurring transactions.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pavel_lishin 7y ago

> But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. Yet they still expect these websites to exist. This folk has an answer: display ads the ol' fashioned way, with a pair of <a> and <img> tags.

Someone1234 7y ago
Ad blockers still remove them. They have tried not to and the users intentionally moved to ad blockers that still did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_ad_filtering_and_ad_whitelisting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Also, aside from the two HNers who claim they actually do, nobody is turning off their adblocker as they go to see if a given site has acceptable ads.
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    "Sir, I know the last seventeen hundred cups I've offered you were full of piss, but surely this time I'm being honest and genuine!"
  - pas 7y ago
    Is there a blocklist that permits acceptable ads?
- pavel_lishin 7y ago
  Yes, because Adblock Plus did it in the shadiest possible way imaginable. From the Wikipedia page: > * In February 2013, an anonymous source accused Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant of offering to add his site's advertisements to the whitelist in return for one-third of the advertisement revenue.[68] In June 2013, blogger Sascha Pallenberg accused the developers of Adblock Plus of maintaining business connections to "strategic partners in the advertising industry", and called ABP a "mafia-like advertising network".[69] He alleged that Adblock Plus whitelisted all ads coming from "friendly" sites and subsidiaries, and promoted their product using fake reviews and pornography.[70] Faida responded to Pallenberg's accusations, stating that "a large part of the information concerning the collaboration with our partners is correct", but that the company did not see these industry connections as a conflict of interest.* "We'll whitelist acceptable ads. Btw, acceptable means 'willing to pay us a kickback'". The move on Adblock Plus did nothing to make me safer, so of course I ditched them for a more secure solution. Of course, it's Adblock Plus's goal and right to try to make a revenue, but I don't owe them the continued use of their product. And I absolutely reject the premise that I owe every website that's willing to send a 200 OK response the right to run arbitrary javascript in my browser. If you don't want me 'mooching' your content, fine - put up a paywall.

Waterluvian 7y ago

I think the primary argument line is something along: 1. Online ads today are so bad they must be blocked 2. But blocking ads blocks revenue for sites we like 3. So we should pay for them more directly 4. But I'm not about to set up 100 different monthly subscriptions. These corporations are not trustworthy and I cannot monitor this many bills. 5. We need a solution to simplify money -> content -> creator transfer 6. There's been many attempts at that, but there's too many players who want the power and control that comes with wedging themselves in between consumers and creators. 7. So we're stuck.

dhimes 7y ago
Serve content related ads and don't track. I'd be fine with that.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Same. But I think that once you've screwed the pooch this bad, you can't just take a single step backwards and expect everyone to be fine with that. The trust is gone. You've got to reboot and rebrand somehow.
- iscrewyou 7y ago
  Don’t track. Serve ads in a designated space across all pages (sidebar). I personally would happily uninstall adblocker if those two things came true.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The problem is that the advertising companies wanted the offline marketing spend so much that they started selling the dream of tracking with specificity, which caused marketeers the world over to finally have an answer to the age old 'I don't know which half I spend wrong' question.
- Xavdidtheshadow 7y ago
  Advent of Code does a great job at this. Its ads are text-based, relevant, and unintrusive. Of course, it has a pretty particular aesthetic, but plenty of sites could do a simple (non-animated) image or text to surface their sponsor without being annoying.

mattmanser 7y ago

Most of these sites offered a completely ad-free version for many years, then switched to an advertising model after they'd cornered the market. There's no ethical reason for us to "pay" these scummy actors, including Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, after they destroyed all viable alternatives by giving away their products free and THEN add advertising. As you intimate, there's also nothing intrinsically necessary to the advertising model for it to be served by different domains, with 3rd party cookies and third party javascript. Nor is it necessary to have auto-play videos, popups, etc. Even someone fairly benign like the Guardian is now infested with up-sells and adverts if you look at it without an adblocker. So the sites brought it on themselves. You want to support their ads, go ahead, but don't ask us to come up with the alternative model. You have no moral high ground to preach to us from, all these sites used a bait and switch to get on top. Right now if I look at facebook every 2 or 3 stories are adverts, where 5 years ago it was far less, and for google a huge chunk of the top of the results page, up to three results worth, are adverts. None of these are clearly marked imo, nor are they necessary, they're making billions in profit. They can do it because they monopolized the market.

gatherhunterer 7y ago

Don’t monetize your users’ data, monetize their use. When you log in with a paid account the ads should be gone. If users don’t need an account to get the content and they still get ads with the paid account, what exactly are you offering in exchange for the payment?

jacquesm 7y ago

> But these folks still have no answer for how free websites they consume daily (e.g. news) are to be funded, they don't pay, and don't want to see ads either. It's not a question they need to answer, that's the problem of the companies that caused this mess. > Yet they still expect these websites to exist. Not really, they just use what exists, not what they expect to exist.

zentiggr 7y ago

> Yet they still expect these websites to exist. I for one certainly don't have that expectation. I understand sites have non-zero operating costs, and/or staffing and other expenses in order to create and serve interesting content. If someone rolls out (without using the word blockchain or any derivative) a way of doing the web equivalent of .99 per track, no middlemen/Elsevier types, just 'pay the originating site for full permanent access to this page', I'll do that in a heartbeat. I buy paper books and sit and enjoy them thoroughly... web content transparently priced with reasonable, honest rates get at least close to that style.

squidlogic 7y ago

Isn’t that what the brave browser is trying to solve?

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

The solution is to deliver safe ads from your own servers. The solution we'll get stuck with is an embedded webassembly browser rendering to canvas.

BlueTemplar 7y ago

The answers for that have been around for more than a decade. But rare are the people making the decisions that are willing to dump the current system...

dredmorbius 7y ago

Richard Stallman: The Internet Sharing Licence (2012) https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht... Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK): A Broadband Tax for the UK (2009) https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/ https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-f... Myself: Universal Payment Syndication (2014) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes... Joseph Stiglitz: "Knowledge as a Global Public Good" http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343... (PDF) (pp 308-325)