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The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his

by jasode 5y ago

The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer. The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... or micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" ... or Patreon donations for video content ... are all more user hostile for my use cases. I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content. I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. That said, there are also many corrosive aspects of advertising. Advertising should be open and transparent. If the business of ads are truthful, I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. The opposite and immoral idea of hidden ad tracking is Facebook trying to convince Apple not to show confirmation dialogs about ad IDFA tracking.

raspyberr 5y ago
But this model is the reason something like Trump and Russian/Chinese medelling happens. Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? Businesses aren't people. They'll just work out how to make money eventually.
- crumbshot 5y ago
  > Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.
  - raspyberr 5y ago
    I'd like for donation to be the predominant way to support digital work in the future. But paying with a card online is pretty hasslesome and micropayments will cause so many issues anyway that it kind of feels like a pipe dream. Stuff like Signal and Internet Archive are excellent tools that may not make all the money in the world do achieve their goals well whilst, at least for the time being, being financially stable.
    - sangnoir 5y ago
      Donors aren't always benevolent, especially if there are a few 'whales'.
ipaddr 5y ago
The outcry would be huge if everything went to a pay model.
- mdavis6890 5y ago
  You're right - but I find that strange. Most of us are not angry about the pay model for groceries or haircuts. A smaller - but still large - fraction of us are okay paying for other zero-marginal-cost goods like software as well. I wonder why we are so attached to free content online. Maybe because of the historical television model that's been mentally transferred to the internet?
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    Its just the fact that people are used to free content, so the idea of paying for it is foreign. If groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.
    - pydry 5y ago
      That's absurd. People need groceries. If the National Enquirer went to a paid subscription model or disappeared entirely nobody would riot.
      - inetknght 5y ago
        > That's absurd. People need groceries. Thus: if groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot. Arguably: why would people riot about not-free Youtube?
    - yissp 5y ago
      See also this Planet Money episode about formerly-free doughnuts. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost-of-free-doughnuts-70-years-of-regret https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
omginternets 5y ago
>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.
- underyx 5y ago
  > ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information) I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    The classic: "make something extremely bad, then roll back some of that, and just make it worse, and people will praise it". Same here: - Google and Facebook have turned ads into 24/7 surveillance of everything people do - Now Google roll backs some of it by saying, "with FLoC we can only surveil groups of people 24/7" - we are expected to praise them for finding a "solution"
  - michael1999 5y ago
    Unfortunately, Doubleclick/Google doesn't get the benefit of the doubt when declaring their intention to respect privacy. They burned that bridge. Many, many times.
  - kerng 5y ago
    The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript. And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about. Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC? Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
ksec 5y ago
There are plenty of good ads. And Ads is also news in a sense, it is there to solve discovery problem. Just like your $10 ticket to see all the latest wares, which are all Ads. We know what bad ads are, not in terms of ads quality but the amount of tracking and personal information gathered and sold across different companies.
jareklupinski 5y ago
I would prefer the payment model if it means I get the things I expect from other premium models: hand-on user support that is motivated to keep me paying, features that actually enrich me instead of sap me further, and an internal culture of working for the customers instead of working for the shareholders.
djdjdjdjdj 5y ago
After realizing how often I use youtube i got premium and I'm not looking back. I grew up with "free internet services" but I can't complain on one side about ads and consuming stuff and in the other side not just paying for those services directly and it's a monthly thing. Easy to cancel much better than all those 1 year contracts for stuff like paytv.
elliekelly 5y ago
I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign. The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!" The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  >The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.
  - mrblampo 5y ago
    > The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.
    - exhilaration 5y ago
      Relevant: Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-ces-launch https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
      - 5y ago
defaultname 5y ago
There are many, many cases where users choose pay options over `free'-but-ad-supported options. The pay options usually have a better/more honest financial model, and more aligned interests with their users. And there certainly is a universe where we would pay for search, in the same way that we pay for countless other things. Google's business model scorched Earth the realm, though, so there isn't a lot of potential for that now, but it's a universe I could easily imagine. "the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer." Do you use an ad blocker? I certainly do, as does most of HN. Layers of ad blockers. It works for me because I get the content for free and I don't have the scourge of ads, so sure it's a fine model. When that podcast starts with six minutes of promos I just scrub right past them. I don't believe I've clicked on a single ad online in decades, at least not intentionally. I honestly don't even understand how that industry survives. My gut instinct is that it's a giant illusion and effectively a massive fraud. A major reason many of us have such a laissez-faire attitude towards the detritus of the ad world is that it's something that other people endure.
- js8 5y ago
  Things being paid from advertising, rather than from user's pocket, is also patronizing. When things are paid from user's pockets, it's the user who controls whether the expense is made, to whom and how much. If things are paid through ads, it is companies (and their management) that make the decisions, not their customers. I argue that paying from your own pocket is a more free system. However, I understand that if this had to change, the income would have to shift, too.
- shanecleveland 5y ago
  I suspect most people's attitudes towards ads are more nuanced than either "I am fine with ads" vs. "I am not fine with ads." And, frankly, most web users probably just don't understand how ad tracking works, rather than being Laissez-faire. I understand it pretty well. I pay for a variety of services for the value they provide me and to ensure they remain viable. I use a lot of free, ad-supported tools without an ad-blocker. I make a small amount of money from ad-supported sites. I make more money from user-supported sites. I tend to be more concerned with the user experience. I don't mind ads that don't get in the way of my intent for using a tool or site. I have backed out of many sites that show me more ads than content, especially if presented in a way that make them more likely to be clicked accidentally than out of actual interest. They loose me as a user. That's a choice I get to make. I enjoy physical magazines (or digital versions of physical magazines). I pay for several subscriptions, but I know they are making much more money from advertising. I wouldn't pay more for a version without ads. I like many of the ads. They are well-targeted and visually appealing. But I am free to ignore them and I am free to stop subscribing if the advertising diminishes the value I get from it. Ad-supported sites are important to the ecosystem. Can they be done better? Yes! Can we make choices as consumers as to whether or not we patronize a site based on their advertising behavior? Yes! Ad blockers may play a role in that. Perhaps both will help push the industry in a more privacy-centric direction. Privacy is more commonly seen as a feature these days. I have a few services I promote as both free and privacy-focused; no ads, no or minimal analytics, etc. And with enough interest I would hope to eventually charge for them to make them sustainable without ads.
dooglius 5y ago
> most friction-free Maybe it's personal taste, but signing into an account is much more pleasant for me than watching an ad. As for the monetary cost, it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway. > Advertising should be open and transparent. If business of ads are truthful Ads are not truthful because they are highly incentivized to lie > I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. I have to honestly ask why? What do you feel you are measuring other than the advertising budget of the sellers? Granted, such a convention would also allow you to evaluate the wares to some extent, but doing that is to ignore the ads.
- jefftk 5y ago
  > it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway Only if you regret the purchase, no? For example, I subscribed to CBS (now Paramount+) because I saw ads for a show I was interested in watching (Picard). (I realize lots of advertising does not follow this model)
  - aflag 5y ago
    In my experience, I always come to regret anything I ever bought from ads. To the point that now I use an adblocker. For people who are unaffected by ads, it's just a minor annoyance. For people who actually affected by ads, I'd say it's a net negative, not a net positive for their lives.
kristjankalm 5y ago
advertising is the primary driver for clickbait and emotion-driven content. it enables The Daily Mail, it results in youtube's algorithm hell, it's why facebook exists. 'clicks = money' is bad for mental health. as long as wikipedia et al are free, give me subscription-based web all day.
- ape4 5y ago
  Good point, but I think headline writers that don't need clicks for advertising money would still write headlines that make people click - the popularity of a writer or article is one measure of success.
  - kristjankalm 5y ago
    yes but amplification matters -- there's been at least one study which measured the clickbaity-ness of headliness of paid vs ad-based news sites and the difference was sth like an order of magnitude. i'll see if i can find the link.
  - lwhi 5y ago
    I don't think they'd face the same pressure.
wayoutthere 5y ago
As someone who has worked in ads in the past, this is exactly what it sounds like. In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking for things to consume? Great, ads are usually unobtrusive in that context. But there are only so many discovery scenarios but lots of ad money to be made. Advertising is a zero-sum game to dominate the human attention span. This has negative effects on our social lives and mental health. Is saving a few dollars a month worth the societal impact that constant advertising entails? In my opinion this constant barrage of ads is a big part of why we as a society can disagree about basic facts about the world: we’ve been conditioned to consume media that is promoted by virtue of its ability to draw eyeballs through being controversial / shocking, rather than the veracity or value of the information. Ads create a perverse incentive for publishers to operate at the edge of truth because those stories / media get more views.
fouric 5y ago
> all more user hostile for my use cases Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button. What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself. It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system. > Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product. Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.
- jefftk 5y ago
  > It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system. Oh? People have been trying since at least https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ (1995)
  - fouric 5y ago
    You seem to be implying that solutions to problems succeed on their technical merit alone. This is trivially false. I used the phrasing "from a technical perspective" very intentionally, for a reason. And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see what data you're paying for those services with. The reason why microservices have failed is largely due to the negative externalities (e.g. massive personal information harvesting and sale) being concealed from users. If you showed users how much of their data was being harvested, and who it was being sold to (transitively), how many do you think would continue to use an ad-supported product if a reasonably-priced paid alternative was available? Edit: to provide a specific example of a somewhat-low-friction microtransaction system (that could easily be scaled to "extremely low friction" with non-architectural UI tweaks) that I've had experience with, I present to you Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle These are not hard technical problems.
thunderbong 5y ago
I agree with you although I feel you might be seeing things to simplistically? Showing ads is the first level and from that perspective I suppose it's fine. At the next level is harvesting data from those ads and sharing that data with third parties. I feel that's where things get very, very messy. Because if ads can be targeted based on a person's profile, so can other manipulations. Especially if that data is available with an authoritarian government. Since most companies showing ads don't play fairly, users in turn choose to block ads completely.
lwhi 5y ago
> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. I feel the main point is, no you haven't got this for free. If you were to pay $2400 dollars, Google would also need to pay you for your attention during this time
teachingassist 5y ago
> The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." It reads a lot like that. Jeff posits that advertising is competing only with paywalls and brushes aside hobby work, people producing content for the pure benefit of it, as if that is not impacted. If I produce something creative with real value as part of a hobby, I know there is a high chance it will be copied/stolen by a slick advertiser who will then out-compete me. So, I'm net less motivated to participate in the whole system of creating content.
stevenicr 5y ago
If "The alternative of paying $9.99/year for Youtube" was really an option - I would buy it for at least 4 kids I know, and two adults that need it, to remove the horrible ads, especially on mobile. Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games". however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year. We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.
- PieUser 5y ago
  Well I wouldn't. To each their own.
- km3r 5y ago
  A quick search (haha) shows that google pulls in $182/year per user and 90% of that is from advertising. So yes google makes a lot more than people think from ads. I also suspect that is heavily lopsided, with certain demographic being more sought after by advertisers. If they were to offer a flat opt out rate, would need to account for those people switching away and losing a very lucrative market. I would even imagine kids are unfortunately a target for advertisers because they can be very impressionable, and become lifelong customers if convinced early on. In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user. Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.
- anchpop 5y ago
  My family pays for youtube premium (https://www.youtube.com/premium/family https://www.youtube.com/premium/family), it's $18/month for 5 people. They also get access to "youtube music premium", which is basically a spotify clone (so unlimited music with no ads). It's quite a good deal imo
overgard 5y ago
It's funny, in the past about 99.999999 percent of the time ads never interested me. I think I might have clicked one in a decade. Recently, just from my youtube subscriptions I think, my youtube ads have been surprisingly relevant, for things like cnc routers or various embedded tools or what not -- ads that are actually for things I might be interested in buying. (Granted there's still a ton of obnoxious get rich quick schemes that I have to skip). I have to admit, seeing ads that actually are of interest to me does change my mindset on advertising a little bit. I still find it super creepy being tracked, and I'd like the ability to know what they know about me, and erase it if I don't like it (is that even possible?), but it is kind of nice to get ads that don't suck if I have to sit through ads.
- tnzm 5y ago
  Everyone ignores the elephant in the room. Just let the users set their own advertising profiles! Always relevant ads, no tracking needed.
  - stevenicr 5y ago
    two thumbs up. with our own set profiles, we could opt out of gambling, loot boxes, and alcohol ads too. I've been suggesting this for some time now.
  - overgard 5y ago
    I would like that. Or even a scheme where they can collect data, but it's stored on my local computer so I can edit it and delete it (granted I know there's a ton of issues with that, but there is w/ the current scheme also)
  - intergalplan 5y ago
    But you don't need to run a giant spying system to make that happen, so the companies whose moat is their giant spying system don't want to even try that. They also happen to have all the users/eyeballs (they need them for their spying system, in addition to serving ads to them). So it's hard for anyone else to try it to see how well it works.
anonuser123456 5y ago
Information is not passively processed by the brain! The cost of advertising is not your attention; it is your perception. Advertisements fundamentally alter your perception of the world in favor of whatever the advertiser is showing you. You are choosing to have your view of the world shaped in a way that may change your behavior. Note that this change occurs on an emotional level and cannot simply be discarded by your rational mind even if you don't believe / care about the ad at a conscious level.
- svnt 5y ago
  This is a really underrated comment. People here tend to oversubscribe to their own capacity for rational behavior. Just because you can be hyper-rational it in one context doesn’t mean you aren’t human. It does mean that as people with better understanding you have a greater responsibility to protect others still capable of believing the internet has one old weird trick.
supermatt 5y ago
I’m sorry, but the reason he is getting voted isn’t “ads vs no-ads”, it’s the inability to acknowledge that ads are not the problem. Ads are fine. Stalking people to “optimise” those ads isn’t.
noir_lord 5y ago
There is a middle ground. You advertise to me, You don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it. If we agree to that then I'll turn my adblocker/pi-hole off - otherwise enjoy the null-hole.
- kleer001 5y ago
  > don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it. Yes. However... I have found 0.001% of what I wanted because of an ad. That's something like one item in a decade. I don't think that's worth the costs of tracking to privacy and bandwidth. Certainly not worth the obtrusiveness of contemporary ad space which is the result of the inevitable runaway arms race between the flitting attention of users and the desperate need of businesses to sale their wares. I don't see any resolution to the waste other than abandoning tracking for ads. Good enough demographics can be found by the content being consumed. Please, let's leave it at that.
oulipo 5y ago
The problem is that ads are not free. It's paid. And it's paid by you. When you say "I'm using Google for free because it's supported by ads", what it means is: - some companies are buying (expensive) ads on Google - they are therefore increasing their marketing budget - which mechanically increases the price of their services and products - which you ultimately have to pay so no, the "free ads" are not free for the consumers, you pay them as a "marketing tax" on each product and service that you pay for
- fauigerzigerk 5y ago
  True, but by the same logic, how much each of us pays for ad funded services depends on how much each of us can spend. I.e. wealthy people pay more per Google search than poor people. And there's another issue. Even if all online services switched to a subscription model tomorrow, companies would not suddenly stop spending money on promoting their products. They would just do it differently and we would pay twice.
- mmmmmbop 5y ago
  Your line of argument rests on the assumption that buying ads has no positive effect on sales.
  - anoncake 5y ago
    If it does, that's even worse. We're polluting more than we can afford to, making people want more stuff is the last thing we need.
srg0 5y ago
The problem with YouTube Premium is unnecessary and anticompetitive bundling. They ask €11.99/month for Premium (no ads) + YouTube Music. Or €9.99/month just for YouTube Music. Given that I already pay for another service, I don't want either of these plans. It's not possible to get only YouTube Premium (avoid ads), even if the marginal cost of ad-free YouTube experience is only €2/month, according to Google. I think €24/year is a very reasonable price to pay for YouTube, €144 is not.
Sholmesy 5y ago
You wouldn't pay $2400 for 20 years of a user-centric search engine that is actively trying to find you the best results, rather than try to consume your attention for as long as possible so that it can show you more ad impressions? The other side of this is that someone has actively spent $2400 worth of ad-buy to show you ads for the last 20 years. I don't think the other-side of the argument has been explored well enough; I'd love to see what is possible without these ulterior motives controlling what you see and hear.
ineedasername 5y ago
are all more user hostile for my use cases Sure, your use cases. Not other people's though, and we don't get a choice.
tshaddox 5y ago
Are you saying there is something specifically about ads that make using these products friction-free or non-hostile? Or are you just saying that you like that the products are free?
echelon 5y ago
> The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... I do pay for YouTube Red, and it's worth it to not see ads. > micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" I would pay for this, too. > ... or Patreon donations for video content ... I do it for music. It feels really good to support creators directly. Ads are the worst, and I adblock everything. I'd happily pay for web content if there were microtransactions. Either that, or a content marketplace that disburses based on views or some other accounting.
ballenf 5y ago
Making doughnuts and soft drinks available to everyone for free is superficially a huge win for people. They are valuable (as determined by marketplace) and lowering the cost makes them more available to everyone. But measuring the net societal impact of a cheap stopped at that point is basically worthless. There are many 2nd and 3rd order impacts that must be included. The obvious is health, but others include the marginal cost considerations of where the money will go that is "saved". Or what alternative food would be purchased (if it's deep fried Twinkies, maybe free doughnuts are a health win). Any work that makes the ad marketplace more efficient (easier for creation and deployment of effective ads or ad instrumentation) has huge effects on relative competitiveness of startups vs. conglomerates. Just as one example. And those effects directly affect consumers. I can avoid ad surveillance to some degree, but am powerless to help a business that can't survive in an ad-driven economy. I can't single-handedly keep my local hardware store in business against the threat from conglomerates capable of operating indefinitely on zero margins.
anoncake 5y ago
Where does the money you seemingly save come from? You pay for them whenever you buy something that was advertised. If Google Search was $10/month, the average Google user would save about that much spread across all the products they buy.
smsm42 5y ago
Short term yes, not paying for things feels better than paying for things. Long term, we end up in the situation when most people recognize current model leads to gross distortions, perverse initiatives, and many sites being next to unusable.
zepto 5y ago
> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No I would absolutely pay that. Search is incredibly valuable and has deteriorated as has the web as a whole largely because of ads and this terrible business model. It’s not even slightly ‘free’, your attention is being wasted on stuff that other people are paying for you to see. I value that at way more than $120 per year.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. And that is the point, where I would say: "No, you have not been using Google for free. You have paid with something. That something is your personal data and privacy of others." Why privacy of others? Well, because by using Google, you are actually supporting their business model, which is online stalking and selling info about you basically. If no one was using their search (and other services), then what would be the point for businesses to throw money at them for placing ads there? Every user counts in the end. Many people keep thinking, that they alone will not make any difference, but that is, where people go wrong in many scenarios. The typical: "But if only I do x then it wont be so bad." or "If only I stop doing x, it wont change the big picture." If everyone thinks that way, then nothing ever will change of course. It is a feedback loop, or vicious cycle, or whatever it is called. The right idea is to start doing, what one can do oneself. And that is to stop using services such as Google search. Personally, if I had the choice between paying money every year to have a non-stalker Internet search for the whole world, ensuring everyone's privacy when searching, I would rather choose that Internet. I would prefer it over an Internet, which we have today, where I need to arm up my browser to the teeth, to avoid being tracked everywhere, being unable to access a lot of content, because knowingly or unknowingly people put it behind stalker-walls and paywalls. I also think that your suggested numbers of 120 or even 2400$ are wildly exaggerated. It would probably be much more like an Internet tax, that everyone had to pay and that is lowered or increased based on your personal economical situation.
Causality1 5y ago
I think the fact people like HN's readership are living in a golden age is underappreciated. Think about it: we block ads while the people who don't subsidize our digital lifestyle. Sooner or later the providers are going to decide we're getting too much for free. Instead of an easily-blocked separate video, the YouTube ad will be part of the video stream and the server will refuse to send any part of the video until such time as the ad has had time to play. You might be able to blank the player for the ad but you'll get a fifteen second black screen instead of a fifteen second video. So I resolved to sit back and enjoy what time I have left for getting a great experience.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
A Google subscription would likely need to cost over $20/m - considering how many people wouldn't pay even one dollar for paid search. Google had $186Bn in revenue last year and ~1.8Bn monthly active users. The revenue comes almost entirely from search - with 1.2Tn searches per year - that's $0.15 per search - hardly anyone would pay that - and to get the same amount of revenue and profit with less users - they'd have to charge many many multiples of that. It's just not feasible.
- ThaDood 5y ago
  If Google had a paid, ad-free option for more then just YouTube and some drive space I would be happy to pay it. I don't know if I would shell out for paid Google searches but I would at-least like to see an alternative option.
godelski 5y ago
I don't mind ads, I mind data mining. Ads on podcasts don't bug me as much as the ads Google/Facebook does. Nor do the ads that are sponsored inside videos (see LTT). I don't mind the ads that DDG does (which just uses key words in your search). I don't like this dichotomy of ads vs no ads, I'm not sure that's really the right framework. I turn off ads everywhere I go because I can't trust ads. But I don't bother skipping through ads on my podcasts or in videos. So it isn't the ad part that's the problem.
maxclark 5y ago
"The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube..." I completely agree - until you have kids watching Youtube the Ads are much better in general. I am however extremely concerned with the amount of data being collected on my family to then aggregate and sell.
HWR_14 5y ago
> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. But that's an outrageous sum. I'm sure you also wouldn't sacrifice your first-born son on Google's altar either. Meanwhile, would you pay $5-10/year ($100-$200 total)? That would probably cut Google's revenue by two-thirds - one-third, but still they would have plenty. I believe FB averaged under $10/year/active user in all the years I looked at (which ignores the most recent years). Meanwhile, I guess I'll just leave my adblocker installed and take the subsidy.
fragile_frogs 5y ago
> I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content. That might be true in the beginning but long term ad's add a lot of friction and frustration e.g. having to wait X amount of seconds before getting access to the content. I have been a YouTube Premium user since day one and I can't imagine not using it. What I would love to see more is having a choice of having a free ad supported version and the option to upgrade and pay to remove those ads.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
If search wouldn't be free out ad-supported. Paying for it would be the biggest productivity boost for a developer. But people don't like to pay for software. So we alternatives.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
So you don't use an ad blocker?
justinboogaard 5y ago
You (me, all of us) are (indirectly) paying for Google ads in the same way that we are (indirectly) paying for merchant credit card processing fees. If you paid for search, some businesses might be able to lower the cost of their products because they don’t have to pay for advertising.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Companies wouldn't stop paying for advertisement if we banned internet advertising, they'd have to spend more in other advertisement spaces and now those spaces aren't funding the search which we'd have to pay for.
echlebek 5y ago
Your idea about paying a yearly subscription vs having advertising presents a false dichotomy. Since the internet is a public good, search functionality could be reasonably delivered for cents on the dollar by a public utility.
ketamine__ 5y ago
Jeff is defending shareholders and not ads as a revenue model. Without shareholders Google would be free to pursue alternate strategies. Not as profitable but better for the user.

by jasode 5y ago

raspyberr 5y ago

But this model is the reason something like Trump and Russian/Chinese medelling happens. Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? Businesses aren't people. They'll just work out how to make money eventually.

crumbshot 5y ago
> Why not reject the advertising model and the payment model until something better comes along? The Internet Archive is a great example of this. A non-profit that relies neither on advertising revenue nor subscription revenue from individual users, and instead thrives on income for providing archival services and grants from organisations that recognise the public good it is providing.
- raspyberr 5y ago
  I'd like for donation to be the predominant way to support digital work in the future. But paying with a card online is pretty hasslesome and micropayments will cause so many issues anyway that it kind of feels like a pipe dream. Stuff like Signal and Internet Archive are excellent tools that may not make all the money in the world do achieve their goals well whilst, at least for the time being, being financially stable.
  - sangnoir 5y ago
    Donors aren't always benevolent, especially if there are a few 'whales'.

ipaddr 5y ago

The outcry would be huge if everything went to a pay model.

mdavis6890 5y ago
You're right - but I find that strange. Most of us are not angry about the pay model for groceries or haircuts. A smaller - but still large - fraction of us are okay paying for other zero-marginal-cost goods like software as well. I wonder why we are so attached to free content online. Maybe because of the historical television model that's been mentally transferred to the internet?
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Its just the fact that people are used to free content, so the idea of paying for it is foreign. If groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.
  - pydry 5y ago
    That's absurd. People need groceries. If the National Enquirer went to a paid subscription model or disappeared entirely nobody would riot.
    - inetknght 5y ago
      > That's absurd. People need groceries. Thus: if groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot. Arguably: why would people riot about not-free Youtube?
  - yissp 5y ago
    See also this Planet Money episode about formerly-free doughnuts. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost-of-free-doughnuts-70-years-of-regret https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago

omginternets 5y ago

>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.

underyx 5y ago
> ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information) I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  The classic: "make something extremely bad, then roll back some of that, and just make it worse, and people will praise it". Same here: - Google and Facebook have turned ads into 24/7 surveillance of everything people do - Now Google roll backs some of it by saying, "with FLoC we can only surveil groups of people 24/7" - we are expected to praise them for finding a "solution"
- michael1999 5y ago
  Unfortunately, Doubleclick/Google doesn't get the benefit of the doubt when declaring their intention to respect privacy. They burned that bridge. Many, many times.
- kerng 5y ago
  The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript. And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about. Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC? Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.

ksec 5y ago

There are plenty of good ads. And Ads is also news in a sense, it is there to solve discovery problem. Just like your $10 ticket to see all the latest wares, which are all Ads. We know what bad ads are, not in terms of ads quality but the amount of tracking and personal information gathered and sold across different companies.

jareklupinski 5y ago

I would prefer the payment model if it means I get the things I expect from other premium models: hand-on user support that is motivated to keep me paying, features that actually enrich me instead of sap me further, and an internal culture of working for the customers instead of working for the shareholders.

djdjdjdjdj 5y ago

After realizing how often I use youtube i got premium and I'm not looking back. I grew up with "free internet services" but I can't complain on one side about ads and consuming stuff and in the other side not just paying for those services directly and it's a monthly thing. Easy to cancel much better than all those 1 year contracts for stuff like paytv.

elliekelly 5y ago

I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign. The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!" The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.

the_snooze 5y ago
>The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.
- mrblampo 5y ago
  > The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.
  - exhilaration 5y ago
    Relevant: Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-ces-launch https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
    - 5y ago

defaultname 5y ago

There are many, many cases where users choose pay options over `free'-but-ad-supported options. The pay options usually have a better/more honest financial model, and more aligned interests with their users. And there certainly is a universe where we would pay for search, in the same way that we pay for countless other things. Google's business model scorched Earth the realm, though, so there isn't a lot of potential for that now, but it's a universe I could easily imagine. "the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer." Do you use an ad blocker? I certainly do, as does most of HN. Layers of ad blockers. It works for me because I get the content for free and I don't have the scourge of ads, so sure it's a fine model. When that podcast starts with six minutes of promos I just scrub right past them. I don't believe I've clicked on a single ad online in decades, at least not intentionally. I honestly don't even understand how that industry survives. My gut instinct is that it's a giant illusion and effectively a massive fraud. A major reason many of us have such a laissez-faire attitude towards the detritus of the ad world is that it's something that other people endure.

js8 5y ago
Things being paid from advertising, rather than from user's pocket, is also patronizing. When things are paid from user's pockets, it's the user who controls whether the expense is made, to whom and how much. If things are paid through ads, it is companies (and their management) that make the decisions, not their customers. I argue that paying from your own pocket is a more free system. However, I understand that if this had to change, the income would have to shift, too.
shanecleveland 5y ago
I suspect most people's attitudes towards ads are more nuanced than either "I am fine with ads" vs. "I am not fine with ads." And, frankly, most web users probably just don't understand how ad tracking works, rather than being Laissez-faire. I understand it pretty well. I pay for a variety of services for the value they provide me and to ensure they remain viable. I use a lot of free, ad-supported tools without an ad-blocker. I make a small amount of money from ad-supported sites. I make more money from user-supported sites. I tend to be more concerned with the user experience. I don't mind ads that don't get in the way of my intent for using a tool or site. I have backed out of many sites that show me more ads than content, especially if presented in a way that make them more likely to be clicked accidentally than out of actual interest. They loose me as a user. That's a choice I get to make. I enjoy physical magazines (or digital versions of physical magazines). I pay for several subscriptions, but I know they are making much more money from advertising. I wouldn't pay more for a version without ads. I like many of the ads. They are well-targeted and visually appealing. But I am free to ignore them and I am free to stop subscribing if the advertising diminishes the value I get from it. Ad-supported sites are important to the ecosystem. Can they be done better? Yes! Can we make choices as consumers as to whether or not we patronize a site based on their advertising behavior? Yes! Ad blockers may play a role in that. Perhaps both will help push the industry in a more privacy-centric direction. Privacy is more commonly seen as a feature these days. I have a few services I promote as both free and privacy-focused; no ads, no or minimal analytics, etc. And with enough interest I would hope to eventually charge for them to make them sustainable without ads.

dooglius 5y ago

> most friction-free Maybe it's personal taste, but signing into an account is much more pleasant for me than watching an ad. As for the monetary cost, it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway. > Advertising should be open and transparent. If business of ads are truthful Ads are not truthful because they are highly incentivized to lie > I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me. I have to honestly ask why? What do you feel you are measuring other than the advertising budget of the sellers? Granted, such a convention would also allow you to evaluate the wares to some extent, but doing that is to ignore the ads.

jefftk 5y ago
> it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway Only if you regret the purchase, no? For example, I subscribed to CBS (now Paramount+) because I saw ads for a show I was interested in watching (Picard). (I realize lots of advertising does not follow this model)
- aflag 5y ago
  In my experience, I always come to regret anything I ever bought from ads. To the point that now I use an adblocker. For people who are unaffected by ads, it's just a minor annoyance. For people who actually affected by ads, I'd say it's a net negative, not a net positive for their lives.

kristjankalm 5y ago

advertising is the primary driver for clickbait and emotion-driven content. it enables The Daily Mail, it results in youtube's algorithm hell, it's why facebook exists. 'clicks = money' is bad for mental health. as long as wikipedia et al are free, give me subscription-based web all day.

ape4 5y ago
Good point, but I think headline writers that don't need clicks for advertising money would still write headlines that make people click - the popularity of a writer or article is one measure of success.
- kristjankalm 5y ago
  yes but amplification matters -- there's been at least one study which measured the clickbaity-ness of headliness of paid vs ad-based news sites and the difference was sth like an order of magnitude. i'll see if i can find the link.
- lwhi 5y ago
  I don't think they'd face the same pressure.

wayoutthere 5y ago

As someone who has worked in ads in the past, this is exactly what it sounds like. In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking for things to consume? Great, ads are usually unobtrusive in that context. But there are only so many discovery scenarios but lots of ad money to be made. Advertising is a zero-sum game to dominate the human attention span. This has negative effects on our social lives and mental health. Is saving a few dollars a month worth the societal impact that constant advertising entails? In my opinion this constant barrage of ads is a big part of why we as a society can disagree about basic facts about the world: we’ve been conditioned to consume media that is promoted by virtue of its ability to draw eyeballs through being controversial / shocking, rather than the veracity or value of the information. Ads create a perverse incentive for publishers to operate at the edge of truth because those stories / media get more views.

fouric 5y ago

> all more user hostile for my use cases Why are these user-hostile? I see very little friction to any of them - $10/year YT subscription disappears into the background (that's, what, two moderately expensive coffee drinks? if you spend just a single day watching educational content, the obtained value will easily exceed $10), per-search microtransactions would be so cheap that you could just turn on the "always transparently pay for this" feature, and any YouTube video of reasonable size that is worth watching is definitely worth spending the few seconds of time to assess and then click the "donate to get access" button. What, you're saying that these things don't exist? Then that's a problem with currently available implementations of microtransactions, not the concept of microtransactions itself. It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system. > Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? That's a price problem, not a pricing model problem. Microtransactions/subscriptions are irrelevant - that price is so far above the actual cost of your Google searches that the equivalent in terms of the current model (you pay with your data) is that Google demands your SSN in order for you to search - and the results in both cases will be the same: users will use a different product. Edit: Because this comment has gotten strawmanned in the same way repeatedly: I did not say that the ad-funded model should go away, nor do I believe that - my comment was purely a response to the idea that microtransactions are infeasible, and nobody carefully reading it would think otherwise.

jefftk 5y ago
> It's easy, from a technical perspective, to design a low-friction microtransaction system. Oh? People have been trying since at least https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ https://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/246/ (1995)
- fouric 5y ago
  You seem to be implying that solutions to problems succeed on their technical merit alone. This is trivially false. I used the phrasing "from a technical perspective" very intentionally, for a reason. And, in the specific case of microtransactions, it's well-known that consumers like cheap and free things - which causes them to flock to ad-funded services because said services make it as difficult as possible to see what data you're paying for those services with. The reason why microservices have failed is largely due to the negative externalities (e.g. massive personal information harvesting and sale) being concealed from users. If you showed users how much of their data was being harvested, and who it was being sold to (transitively), how many do you think would continue to use an ad-supported product if a reasonably-priced paid alternative was available? Edit: to provide a specific example of a somewhat-low-friction microtransaction system (that could easily be scaled to "extremely low friction" with non-architectural UI tweaks) that I've had experience with, I present to you Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle These are not hard technical problems.

thunderbong 5y ago

I agree with you although I feel you might be seeing things to simplistically? Showing ads is the first level and from that perspective I suppose it's fine. At the next level is harvesting data from those ads and sharing that data with third parties. I feel that's where things get very, very messy. Because if ads can be targeted based on a person's profile, so can other manipulations. Especially if that data is available with an authoritarian government. Since most companies showing ads don't play fairly, users in turn choose to block ads completely.

lwhi 5y ago

> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. I feel the main point is, no you haven't got this for free. If you were to pay $2400 dollars, Google would also need to pay you for your attention during this time

teachingassist 5y ago

> The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." It reads a lot like that. Jeff posits that advertising is competing only with paywalls and brushes aside hobby work, people producing content for the pure benefit of it, as if that is not impacted. If I produce something creative with real value as part of a hobby, I know there is a high chance it will be copied/stolen by a slick advertiser who will then out-compete me. So, I'm net less motivated to participate in the whole system of creating content.

stevenicr 5y ago

If "The alternative of paying $9.99/year for Youtube" was really an option - I would buy it for at least 4 kids I know, and two adults that need it, to remove the horrible ads, especially on mobile. Get me started on the ads that come with play store apps and "free games". however at $12/month that would be $864 per year to help them. I would jump at $60 / year for 6 people.. heck that would save me on comcast overages several months of the year. We still pay for some searches by paying the ad costs of the places we spend money, but that's another thing to figure.. $120 / year for search? I doubt my clicks amount to that for any advertiser. I'd pay 20 for ad free, zero tracking searches, but not 100.

PieUser 5y ago
Well I wouldn't. To each their own.
km3r 5y ago
A quick search (haha) shows that google pulls in $182/year per user and 90% of that is from advertising. So yes google makes a lot more than people think from ads. I also suspect that is heavily lopsided, with certain demographic being more sought after by advertisers. If they were to offer a flat opt out rate, would need to account for those people switching away and losing a very lucrative market. I would even imagine kids are unfortunately a target for advertisers because they can be very impressionable, and become lifelong customers if convinced early on. In addition, a flat fee could lead to a slow on googles growth, as once a users pays, they can not find new ways to monetize that user. Don't get me wrong, I love the option to pay a fee to opt out of certain ads. It really helps align the incentives of the user with the company, but unfortunately it would have to be expensive to average out the more lucrative ads.
anchpop 5y ago
My family pays for youtube premium (https://www.youtube.com/premium/family https://www.youtube.com/premium/family), it's $18/month for 5 people. They also get access to "youtube music premium", which is basically a spotify clone (so unlimited music with no ads). It's quite a good deal imo

overgard 5y ago

It's funny, in the past about 99.999999 percent of the time ads never interested me. I think I might have clicked one in a decade. Recently, just from my youtube subscriptions I think, my youtube ads have been surprisingly relevant, for things like cnc routers or various embedded tools or what not -- ads that are actually for things I might be interested in buying. (Granted there's still a ton of obnoxious get rich quick schemes that I have to skip). I have to admit, seeing ads that actually are of interest to me does change my mindset on advertising a little bit. I still find it super creepy being tracked, and I'd like the ability to know what they know about me, and erase it if I don't like it (is that even possible?), but it is kind of nice to get ads that don't suck if I have to sit through ads.

tnzm 5y ago
Everyone ignores the elephant in the room. Just let the users set their own advertising profiles! Always relevant ads, no tracking needed.
- stevenicr 5y ago
  two thumbs up. with our own set profiles, we could opt out of gambling, loot boxes, and alcohol ads too. I've been suggesting this for some time now.
- overgard 5y ago
  I would like that. Or even a scheme where they can collect data, but it's stored on my local computer so I can edit it and delete it (granted I know there's a ton of issues with that, but there is w/ the current scheme also)
- intergalplan 5y ago
  But you don't need to run a giant spying system to make that happen, so the companies whose moat is their giant spying system don't want to even try that. They also happen to have all the users/eyeballs (they need them for their spying system, in addition to serving ads to them). So it's hard for anyone else to try it to see how well it works.

anonuser123456 5y ago

Information is not passively processed by the brain! The cost of advertising is not your attention; it is your perception. Advertisements fundamentally alter your perception of the world in favor of whatever the advertiser is showing you. You are choosing to have your view of the world shaped in a way that may change your behavior. Note that this change occurs on an emotional level and cannot simply be discarded by your rational mind even if you don't believe / care about the ad at a conscious level.

svnt 5y ago
This is a really underrated comment. People here tend to oversubscribe to their own capacity for rational behavior. Just because you can be hyper-rational it in one context doesn’t mean you aren’t human. It does mean that as people with better understanding you have a greater responsibility to protect others still capable of believing the internet has one old weird trick.

supermatt 5y ago

I’m sorry, but the reason he is getting voted isn’t “ads vs no-ads”, it’s the inability to acknowledge that ads are not the problem. Ads are fine. Stalking people to “optimise” those ads isn’t.

noir_lord 5y ago

There is a middle ground. You advertise to me, You don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it. If we agree to that then I'll turn my adblocker/pi-hole off - otherwise enjoy the null-hole.

kleer001 5y ago
> don't track every single fucking thing I do online to do it. Yes. However... I have found 0.001% of what I wanted because of an ad. That's something like one item in a decade. I don't think that's worth the costs of tracking to privacy and bandwidth. Certainly not worth the obtrusiveness of contemporary ad space which is the result of the inevitable runaway arms race between the flitting attention of users and the desperate need of businesses to sale their wares. I don't see any resolution to the waste other than abandoning tracking for ads. Good enough demographics can be found by the content being consumed. Please, let's leave it at that.

oulipo 5y ago

The problem is that ads are not free. It's paid. And it's paid by you. When you say "I'm using Google for free because it's supported by ads", what it means is: - some companies are buying (expensive) ads on Google - they are therefore increasing their marketing budget - which mechanically increases the price of their services and products - which you ultimately have to pay so no, the "free ads" are not free for the consumers, you pay them as a "marketing tax" on each product and service that you pay for

fauigerzigerk 5y ago
True, but by the same logic, how much each of us pays for ad funded services depends on how much each of us can spend. I.e. wealthy people pay more per Google search than poor people. And there's another issue. Even if all online services switched to a subscription model tomorrow, companies would not suddenly stop spending money on promoting their products. They would just do it differently and we would pay twice.
mmmmmbop 5y ago
Your line of argument rests on the assumption that buying ads has no positive effect on sales.
- anoncake 5y ago
  If it does, that's even worse. We're polluting more than we can afford to, making people want more stuff is the last thing we need.

srg0 5y ago

The problem with YouTube Premium is unnecessary and anticompetitive bundling. They ask €11.99/month for Premium (no ads) + YouTube Music. Or €9.99/month just for YouTube Music. Given that I already pay for another service, I don't want either of these plans. It's not possible to get only YouTube Premium (avoid ads), even if the marginal cost of ad-free YouTube experience is only €2/month, according to Google. I think €24/year is a very reasonable price to pay for YouTube, €144 is not.

Sholmesy 5y ago

You wouldn't pay $2400 for 20 years of a user-centric search engine that is actively trying to find you the best results, rather than try to consume your attention for as long as possible so that it can show you more ad impressions? The other side of this is that someone has actively spent $2400 worth of ad-buy to show you ads for the last 20 years. I don't think the other-side of the argument has been explored well enough; I'd love to see what is possible without these ulterior motives controlling what you see and hear.

ineedasername 5y ago

are all more user hostile for my use cases Sure, your use cases. Not other people's though, and we don't get a choice.

tshaddox 5y ago

Are you saying there is something specifically about ads that make using these products friction-free or non-hostile? Or are you just saying that you like that the products are free?

echelon 5y ago

> The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube... I do pay for YouTube Red, and it's worth it to not see ads. > micropayments for each search query or a "Google Search Engine yearly subscription" I would pay for this, too. > ... or Patreon donations for video content ... I do it for music. It feels really good to support creators directly. Ads are the worst, and I adblock everything. I'd happily pay for web content if there were microtransactions. Either that, or a content marketplace that disburses based on views or some other accounting.

ballenf 5y ago

Making doughnuts and soft drinks available to everyone for free is superficially a huge win for people. They are valuable (as determined by marketplace) and lowering the cost makes them more available to everyone. But measuring the net societal impact of a cheap stopped at that point is basically worthless. There are many 2nd and 3rd order impacts that must be included. The obvious is health, but others include the marginal cost considerations of where the money will go that is "saved". Or what alternative food would be purchased (if it's deep fried Twinkies, maybe free doughnuts are a health win). Any work that makes the ad marketplace more efficient (easier for creation and deployment of effective ads or ad instrumentation) has huge effects on relative competitiveness of startups vs. conglomerates. Just as one example. And those effects directly affect consumers. I can avoid ad surveillance to some degree, but am powerless to help a business that can't survive in an ad-driven economy. I can't single-handedly keep my local hardware store in business against the threat from conglomerates capable of operating indefinitely on zero margins.

anoncake 5y ago

Where does the money you seemingly save come from? You pay for them whenever you buy something that was advertised. If Google Search was $10/month, the average Google user would save about that much spread across all the products they buy.

smsm42 5y ago

Short term yes, not paying for things feels better than paying for things. Long term, we end up in the situation when most people recognize current model leads to gross distortions, perverse initiatives, and many sites being next to unusable.

zepto 5y ago

> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No I would absolutely pay that. Search is incredibly valuable and has deteriorated as has the web as a whole largely because of ads and this terrible business model. It’s not even slightly ‘free’, your attention is being wasted on stuff that other people are paying for you to see. I value that at way more than $120 per year.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

> I've been using Google Search for over 20 years for free which is pretty amazing. Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. And that is the point, where I would say: "No, you have not been using Google for free. You have paid with something. That something is your personal data and privacy of others." Why privacy of others? Well, because by using Google, you are actually supporting their business model, which is online stalking and selling info about you basically. If no one was using their search (and other services), then what would be the point for businesses to throw money at them for placing ads there? Every user counts in the end. Many people keep thinking, that they alone will not make any difference, but that is, where people go wrong in many scenarios. The typical: "But if only I do x then it wont be so bad." or "If only I stop doing x, it wont change the big picture." If everyone thinks that way, then nothing ever will change of course. It is a feedback loop, or vicious cycle, or whatever it is called. The right idea is to start doing, what one can do oneself. And that is to stop using services such as Google search. Personally, if I had the choice between paying money every year to have a non-stalker Internet search for the whole world, ensuring everyone's privacy when searching, I would rather choose that Internet. I would prefer it over an Internet, which we have today, where I need to arm up my browser to the teeth, to avoid being tracked everywhere, being unable to access a lot of content, because knowingly or unknowingly people put it behind stalker-walls and paywalls. I also think that your suggested numbers of 120 or even 2400$ are wildly exaggerated. It would probably be much more like an Internet tax, that everyone had to pay and that is lowered or increased based on your personal economical situation.

Causality1 5y ago

I think the fact people like HN's readership are living in a golden age is underappreciated. Think about it: we block ads while the people who don't subsidize our digital lifestyle. Sooner or later the providers are going to decide we're getting too much for free. Instead of an easily-blocked separate video, the YouTube ad will be part of the video stream and the server will refuse to send any part of the video until such time as the ad has had time to play. You might be able to blank the player for the ad but you'll get a fifteen second black screen instead of a fifteen second video. So I resolved to sit back and enjoy what time I have left for getting a great experience.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

A Google subscription would likely need to cost over $20/m - considering how many people wouldn't pay even one dollar for paid search. Google had $186Bn in revenue last year and ~1.8Bn monthly active users. The revenue comes almost entirely from search - with 1.2Tn searches per year - that's $0.15 per search - hardly anyone would pay that - and to get the same amount of revenue and profit with less users - they'd have to charge many many multiples of that. It's just not feasible.

ThaDood 5y ago
If Google had a paid, ad-free option for more then just YouTube and some drive space I would be happy to pay it. I don't know if I would shell out for paid Google searches but I would at-least like to see an alternative option.

godelski 5y ago

I don't mind ads, I mind data mining. Ads on podcasts don't bug me as much as the ads Google/Facebook does. Nor do the ads that are sponsored inside videos (see LTT). I don't mind the ads that DDG does (which just uses key words in your search). I don't like this dichotomy of ads vs no ads, I'm not sure that's really the right framework. I turn off ads everywhere I go because I can't trust ads. But I don't bother skipping through ads on my podcasts or in videos. So it isn't the ad part that's the problem.

maxclark 5y ago

"The alternative of paying $9.99/month for Youtube..." I completely agree - until you have kids watching Youtube the Ads are much better in general. I am however extremely concerned with the amount of data being collected on my family to then aggregate and sell.

HWR_14 5y ago

> Would I rather replay history and pay ~$120 every year (~$2400 ?) to search for web articles? No. But that's an outrageous sum. I'm sure you also wouldn't sacrifice your first-born son on Google's altar either. Meanwhile, would you pay $5-10/year ($100-$200 total)? That would probably cut Google's revenue by two-thirds - one-third, but still they would have plenty. I believe FB averaged under $10/year/active user in all the years I looked at (which ignores the most recent years). Meanwhile, I guess I'll just leave my adblocker installed and take the subsidy.

fragile_frogs 5y ago

> I don't like ads but they are the most friction-free way to consume a wide variety of content. That might be true in the beginning but long term ad's add a lot of friction and frustration e.g. having to wait X amount of seconds before getting access to the content. I have been a YouTube Premium user since day one and I can't imagine not using it. What I would love to see more is having a choice of having a free ad supported version and the option to upgrade and pay to remove those ads.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

If search wouldn't be free out ad-supported. Paying for it would be the biggest productivity boost for a developer. But people don't like to pay for software. So we alternatives.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

So you don't use an ad blocker?

justinboogaard 5y ago

You (me, all of us) are (indirectly) paying for Google ads in the same way that we are (indirectly) paying for merchant credit card processing fees. If you paid for search, some businesses might be able to lower the cost of their products because they don’t have to pay for advertising.

TchoBeer 5y ago
Companies wouldn't stop paying for advertisement if we banned internet advertising, they'd have to spend more in other advertisement spaces and now those spaces aren't funding the search which we'd have to pay for.

echlebek 5y ago

Your idea about paying a yearly subscription vs having advertising presents a false dichotomy. Since the internet is a public good, search functionality could be reasonably delivered for cents on the dollar by a public utility.

ketamine__ 5y ago

Jeff is defending shareholders and not ads as a revenue model. Without shareholders Google would be free to pursue alternate strategies. Not as profitable but better for the user.