6 ms·
Billboards dont pay for roads. Ads pay for websites.
by bwb 4y ago
Billboards dont pay for roads.
Ads pay for websites.
- hobs 4y agoBillboard companies pay taxes, rent land, and pay special fees to the state for their use... so, they sort of do.
- bwb 4y agoBut not really :)
- tomrod 4y agoYes, taxes pay for most roads.
- bwb 4y agoyes they do. Bill board ads do not.
- tomrod 4y agoBillboard companies receive revenue. They pay employees and shareholders or holdover cash, all of which is taxed. So yes, your misunderstanding aside, billboard ads do pay for roads in a clearly understood way.
- bwb 4y agoSigh... not in any meaningful way. The point is this, ads directly fund websites. Without ads those websites do not exist. Bill boards do not directly fund highways, our taxes do, and those are collected 99.9999999999% from not bill boards.
- amelius 4y agoOk, let me choose a different payment method. Anyway the entire idea is flawed. If ads pay for websites, then how is that so? Ah, by manipulating the user into buying stuff they don't need.
- bwb 4y agoI run a website, most people do not want to pay directly. Ads allow it to grow and help more people. Ads are showing relevant items people want/need. Who are you to tell others what they need? There is no manipulation, that is such a weird POV. It is awareness, are you so easily convinced you buy everything from every ad you see? I dont love ads but they pay for a lot of sites i love.
- amelius 4y ago> It is awareness, are you so easily convinced you buy everything from every ad you see? I don't want to be aware of which company has the biggest advertising budget. If I want to be aware of products, it is because of their quality. Anyway, I don't want to be distracted while working, so implement a different payment method for your website or accept that adblockers exist.
- bwb 4y agoNaive. I have no problem with ad blockers. Distracted while working? What work do you do that requires reading websites with ads?
- ptero 4y agoAds pay for hosting websites in the current model that got to the point of being the only option. Thank you, but I will do all I can to upset this particular apple cart.
- bwb 4y agoEasy to throw over a cart when you have no stake. Why dont you build a better model then replace it? A lot of jobs depend on ads, dont shit all over people :)
- ptero 4y ago> Why dont you build a better model then replace it? I do not know if you are serious or sarcastic. Assuming serious, that was feasible 30 years ago. Now trying to build anything competitively different gets you bought out or deplatformed. Neither Brin nor Zuckerberg would stand a chance if they started today. > A lot of jobs depend on ads, dont shit all over people A lot of jobs depend on mass calling people at dinnertime with spam donation requests. That is not the reason not to challenge this business model.
- bwb 4y agoOne fb and google were startups, startups will one day beat them. It is the nature of the marketplace. There is so much room to play in areas they can not. I dont hear you challenging a business model. I hear you calling to tear down a system that you do not understand with naive statements.
- cwkoss 4y agoDestroying immoral jobs is a societal good.
- bwb 4y agoAh so you are an extremist with no understanding of the real world, thank you, I will exit this conversation before you start telling me about the lizard people who really control our leaders living in the underground.
- concordDance 4y agoI, for one, would be perfectly happy for every ad funded website to die
- bwb 4y ago
- anthk 4y agoI see no ads under Lynx/Links.
- bwb 4y agoI am clapping for you one handed :), thank you for your service!
- ASalazarMX 4y agoAnd waste thousands of man hours for few measly pennies for the webmaster. They don't care about us or websites, they don't care if they wasted 30s from thousands of people in exchange from one more sale. Excessive advertising is a modern plague because it has become too cheap.
- bwb 4y agoI make around 20 per thousand visitors, it helps pay for a pt dev, pt designer, and small team. Where is wasted time? Do you find yourself mesmerized by ads and find yourself staring at them for hours :)?
- ASalazarMX 4y agoMy estimation is likely exaggerated, I was thinking of YouTube and websites with sticky video ads. Since 20,000 people seeing a 30s unskippable ad in Youtube amounts to 167 man hours used, maybe I should have said "hundreds of man hours wasted for a few measly dollars?".
- bwb 4y agoDo not use youtube then. And, life is not a quest toward perfect efficiency. Are you a human or machine? Having fun and enjoying life are not something to be scared of. You sound like you have your day scheduled down to the minute?
- ndriscoll 4y agoMost websites are completely trivial to host. e.g. from what I can find, Reddit only gets ~8k page views/second, and only has 13B posts/comments total? An old archive of the site had ~1.7B posts/comments at ~1TB uncompressed, meaning you could fit every text post today on a few SSDs and host the whole site for the price of a high end gaming computer (or a couple of them for redundancy) and an unmetered connection. In our modern world of user generated content and incredible hardware, any nerd could host even the most popular sites as a relatively cheap hobby. The only thing making them non-trivial is... all of the infrastructure for the ads, spying, and control. That and image/video hosting, which could be done through something like ipfs if it were integrated into browsers.
- bwb 4y agoSpoken like an engineer with no real understanding of what it takes to host Reddit let alone an understand of the business side of things. You have zero idea what you are talking about.
- ndriscoll 4y agoLike I said in my comment, the "business side of things" (i.e. the infrastructure to support ads, spying, control) are what makes it non-trivial. You can't use "making money is hard" as an argument against me saying that it's so cheap a hobbyist could do it for fun. Hosting a forum that gets the traffic Reddit does at higher availability than Reddit does (Reddit returns error pages all the time) is absolutely trivial on modern hardware (except for images/videos, as I said). I've known several people that have unmetered connections/servers in datacenters as a hobby. The entire history of every text post/comment ever on that site could fit on 2-3 SSDs now. The traffic is nothing. It doesn't take a lot to host a site that can fit on one computer with plenty of room to spare.
- bwb 4y agoLol :)
- account42 4y ago