5 ms·
The thing that ad-hating people (me included) sometimes gloss over is that ads actually work. They work in the sense that enough people willingly actually click
by air7 7y ago
The thing that ad-hating people (me included) sometimes gloss over is that ads actually work. They work in the sense that enough people willingly actually click them and then actually willingly give money to the advertiser in exchange for something they offer. While it is annoying, and in a sense the 99.9% of us that don't click/buy any specific ad are paying the price (by wasting our attention for no personal gain), we all get tons of cool stuff for that price. Is it worth it? That's a different question, but it's not evil per se imo.
- Nullabillity 7y ago> ads actually work. Yes. That's the (biggest) problem.
- summerlight 7y agoNo. The real problem is that no business model other than ads actually works for small to medium sized web sites at scale.
- j88439h84 7y agoSubscriptions might work.
- summerlight 7y agoExcept there hasn't been any successful go-to services for web subscription model. Google Contributor program is exactly the one, but it gets no traction from either users or publishers. https://contributor.google.com/ https://contributor.google.com/
- j88439h84 7y agoNetflix and The New Yorker, for example.
- summerlight 7y agoNeither of them are small to medium sized web sites, unfortunately.
- j88439h84 7y agoThe thing about being a small website is I probably haven't heard of it. https://lwn.net/ https://lwn.net/ comes to mind, I'm sure there are many others.
- whateveracct 7y agoYou could argue the influence ads have on people is now at a level of power (thanks in part to advancements by Google) that no one should have over others.
- jdbernard 7y agoThis is the same reason spammer keep spamming too: it works. The pursuit of profit by means that work regardless of the external costs seems evil.