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The "evil ads" argument doesn't even look really thought through to me. The way I look at it, there's 3 options: 1. Do everything for free. Rarely tenable. 2.

The "evil ads" argument doesn't even look really thought through to me. The way I look at it, there's 3 options: 1. Do everything for free. Rarely tenable. 2. Charge for things. This necessarily puts focus of business on monetization, or at the very least, it frequently pits providing and extracting value at odds. 3. Delegate monetization (a.k.a. ads). Then you can just focus on providing maximum value to your customers and money scales proportionally. As a builder of things who's not greedy, #3 sounds like positively best option, if it's financially viable and product type makes it possible.

liotier 5y ago
From the consumer point of view, the business model does not even enter the equation. What matters is media pollution: my display, my computing, my rules ! To hell with the publisher's expectations of a social contract binding viewership with acceptance of advertisement. That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources, but that is not enough cognitive dissonance to stop anyone from setting up ad blockers.
- synthmeat 5y ago
  From my vantage point, that's perfectly fine. Block ads, change the fonts, color the site orange if you want. As you say, your display, your rules. I communicate to my users that I myself use an ad blocker on my own property. There's no dissonance there. My mom asked me to disable ad blocking I've set up on her devices, as she finds them useful.
- account42 5y ago
  > That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources Except it's not. Most content that I consume - like your comment here - is created by individuals that do not get paid no matter how the platform that the content is shared on is monetized. It's absurd to say that there would be no content without monetization and when people have content to shere there will be ways to share that content even when ads illegal or blocked by everyone. However as long as ads are accepted by the public at large, ad-laden sites will be more profitable and thus also have more resources to crush any alternatives that provide an ad-free user experience. I'm quite fine with anything that needs ads to survive to disappear as a result of ad-blocking - there will always be something else to fill my time.
HWR_14 5y ago
False choice. I don't know people who are "all ads are bad". It's "spyware enabling ads are bad" and "ads are too large/frequent/auto playing video/in your face" with a side of "stop eating my cycles and bandwidth". If companies just put up ads relevant to article as a static image that took up a reasonable amount of space and scrolled with the rest of the content, people wouldn't complain.

liotier 5y ago

From the consumer point of view, the business model does not even enter the equation. What matters is media pollution: my display, my computing, my rules ! To hell with the publisher's expectations of a social contract binding viewership with acceptance of advertisement. That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources, but that is not enough cognitive dissonance to stop anyone from setting up ad blockers.

synthmeat 5y ago
From my vantage point, that's perfectly fine. Block ads, change the fonts, color the site orange if you want. As you say, your display, your rules. I communicate to my users that I myself use an ad blocker on my own property. There's no dissonance there. My mom asked me to disable ad blocking I've set up on her devices, as she finds them useful.
account42 5y ago
> That is of course incoherent with the taste for free resources Except it's not. Most content that I consume - like your comment here - is created by individuals that do not get paid no matter how the platform that the content is shared on is monetized. It's absurd to say that there would be no content without monetization and when people have content to shere there will be ways to share that content even when ads illegal or blocked by everyone. However as long as ads are accepted by the public at large, ad-laden sites will be more profitable and thus also have more resources to crush any alternatives that provide an ad-free user experience. I'm quite fine with anything that needs ads to survive to disappear as a result of ad-blocking - there will always be something else to fill my time.

HWR_14 5y ago

False choice. I don't know people who are "all ads are bad". It's "spyware enabling ads are bad" and "ads are too large/frequent/auto playing video/in your face" with a side of "stop eating my cycles and bandwidth". If companies just put up ads relevant to article as a static image that took up a reasonable amount of space and scrolled with the rest of the content, people wouldn't complain.