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Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. Lots of websites have marginal utility, but can be paid for with ads. And those websites will disappear

Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. Lots of websites have marginal utility, but can be paid for with ads. And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain.

buro9 3y ago
but yet, when we pay for services (Google Suite) and websites... we still get adverts we're not incentivised to pay as our data is mined and sold anyway, our attention still fought for
- thorncorona 3y ago
  For larger companies I think that’s a fair assessment, but there’s a lot of small websites that I only use one or twice a year which are very useful, like camerasize.com, which otherwise I wouldn’t pay for.
  - vextea 3y ago
    Sites like camerasize could feasibly target based on the niche they fill rather than showing generic "personalized" ads. There are ad networks out there that do this, e.g. Carbon.
goodpoint 3y ago
> And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain. Good!
Barrin92 3y ago
>Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads pretty easy if you publicly fund it. My vision of Europe is every town, every city putting some money into building out federated and decentralized systems, supported by small and middle-sized business. Effectively the same way radio or public broadcasting is already supported in say Germany or the UK. We should go all the way and just rid ourselves of Meta, Tencent et al, sadly there's probably not enough vision for something like it.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Anything is easy if you can take people's money and assign it to companies deemed worthy by a bureaucrat. But now you have a much bigger problem.
  - nerbert 3y ago
    Pretty much already how startup are funded in Europe. Size of the EU tech scene shows how efficient that is.
  - bigbillheck 3y ago
    Got some news for you about the history of currently existing society.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      ...yes?
- gatinsama 3y ago
  It's a very nice vision
vasdae 3y ago
There's a conspiracy here that people can't see. Free sites will close without targeted advertisement, obviously; they barely can afford to pay salaries now, so with untargeted ads it will be impossible. And the only media sites that will be able to afford to run are those that are subsidised by the state. This is already happening in Europe, where most of the big media are practically bankrupt and their income comes from the state in the form of subsidies, ad campaigns, internships paid by the state, etc. You already have a sibling comment in this thread precisely asking for that: the state paying for the media. How do they think this will end?
- whynotmaybe 3y ago
  It all boils down to the same problem : people want to have the cake and eat it. We all want roads to allow us to roam freely but don't want to pay the government people that manage everything around those roads. Everyone wants free content but everyone wants to be paid for their work. I have a pihole and one of the website I frequently visit has been remade and now everything is empty. I'm currently thinking about paying for this content... or just quit and live without this content.
- gpderetta 3y ago
  I don't understand. We were able to run with untargeted ads for decades. Why now, suddenly only targeted ads are viable?
  - vasdae 3y ago
    That's not true, ads have always been targeted. On the telly you don't see the same ads on all stations all the time. They are segmented depending on the average profile of the viewer. If you are watching a soap opera you will see ads for diapers for female incontinence.
    - gpderetta 3y ago
      Of course I meant targeted to the specific reader/watcher. Context targeting was not the issue.
deutschepost 3y ago
Ads are not the discussion. It’s tracking. Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop. If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show you more personal ads while you travel around town, people will be opposed to that too. You don’t need to track every user and every click to show ads and make money. But as ad companies like meta can make more money by tracking your every step they will just do that. There were ads on the internet before tracking became a thing. And people made money off of those ads.
- avarun 3y ago
  Ads are significantly more useful with tracking. Non-personalized ads are effectively spam and we would be better off without those entirely. Personalized ads can often be as good as the content you're looking for in the first place, if not even better.
  - ryanblakeley 3y ago
    I value privacy above the marginal usefulness of targeted ads. You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want. But we shouldn't all be caught in a surveillance dragnet by default.
    - avarun 3y ago
      > You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want. Agreed. So why is the EU making that illegal? I want to be able to use products for free by opting in to personalized ads so that businesses can make enough revenue to justify having an ad-supported free version of their product. The incompetent bureaucrats at the EU won't allow Meta to offer that.
      - cush 3y ago
mrweasel 3y ago
As many many others points out, it's not the ads. It is the massive surveillance and privacy invading machinery that powers it all. For me personally it's also the constant pushing pushing pushing to buy crap that you don't need or replace things you already own. I already have a washing machine, I got it last month, you don't need to sell me another (It's actually amazing that we haven't gotten to the point there advertisers can stop push products a consumer already bought). Google is actually really good as a "I need to buy X,Y,Z" in that case the ads are super helpful and often more relevant than the search results. I will absolutely click those ads, but I'm not going to order that new washing machine while I'm reading the news anyway.
rapind 3y ago
> Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. But that's not the issue here is it? *Personalized* ads is the issue. Can the free internet survive without personalized ads? Of course it can. Will a ton of companies disappear? Yes, and so what? Business fail all the time, and new businesses based on different models will fill the void. We might even see a ton of innovation beyond figuring out how to harvest and profile people's data when our biggest brains are directed towards different problems.
ndriscoll 3y ago
Lots of things like niche review sites might die, but those are impossible to find thanks to SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) anyway. Something like forums? The entire reddit database (excluding media) fits on a $150 SSD, and a used laptop can serve tens of thousands of requests/second for such a simple site. Something like a Ryzen 7950X with a few NVMe drives could probably do more than you could reasonably get a network connection for. Someone with 10 gigabit Internet could serve a forum for 10s of millions of users at least at almost no cost. The primary issue is liability. Secondary is ISPs not allowing people to use their Internet connections for server hosting (a hobbyist could do colocation, and many do already). Fix the law there and the compute cost is peanuts.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Product review sites seem like the perfect case for contextual advertising; no user tracking necessary at all.
- avarun 3y ago
  > SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) Huh? SEO exists because companies don't want to pay for ads. If advertising disappears, SEO will just become more prevalent and we'll have to suffer through more and more garbage.
Nextgrid 3y ago
This would open an opportunity for a universal micropayments system.
xxs 3y ago
>those websites will disappear nothing of value will be lost and all that meme. On a flip note: that's not reddit to preface comments w/ 'hot take'
alkonaut 3y ago
Another hot take: I honestly can't wait for that to happen.
adrr 3y ago
Another hot take, its hard to do a consumer based startup without effective and cheap advertising. Its going to hit their startups like fintech, direct to consumer, etc.
cush 3y ago
The vast majority of data gathered by Facebook isn't gathered on Facebook. The vast majority of that data isn't used by Facebook for delivering ads. The utility of Facebook is long lost. I'd gladly pay a few bucks to keep in touch with friends, maintain niche groups, have a Marketplace etc. But Facebook hasn't been that for over a decade. Its utility is all in tracking us around the internet, and selling our profile to the highest bidder. Ads are fine, but if the idea is that in order to have a free internet, Facebook needs to monopolize our online presence and shape how we receive information on other sites, then that's hardly a free internet. Facebook ruined the internet.

Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. Lots of websites have marginal utility, but can be paid for with ads. And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain.

buro9 3y ago

but yet, when we pay for services (Google Suite) and websites... we still get adverts we're not incentivised to pay as our data is mined and sold anyway, our attention still fought for

thorncorona 3y ago
For larger companies I think that’s a fair assessment, but there’s a lot of small websites that I only use one or twice a year which are very useful, like camerasize.com, which otherwise I wouldn’t pay for.
- vextea 3y ago
  Sites like camerasize could feasibly target based on the niche they fill rather than showing generic "personalized" ads. There are ad networks out there that do this, e.g. Carbon.

goodpoint 3y ago

> And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain. Good!

Barrin92 3y ago

>Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads pretty easy if you publicly fund it. My vision of Europe is every town, every city putting some money into building out federated and decentralized systems, supported by small and middle-sized business. Effectively the same way radio or public broadcasting is already supported in say Germany or the UK. We should go all the way and just rid ourselves of Meta, Tencent et al, sadly there's probably not enough vision for something like it.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Anything is easy if you can take people's money and assign it to companies deemed worthy by a bureaucrat. But now you have a much bigger problem.
- nerbert 3y ago
  Pretty much already how startup are funded in Europe. Size of the EU tech scene shows how efficient that is.
- bigbillheck 3y ago
  Got some news for you about the history of currently existing society.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    ...yes?
gatinsama 3y ago
It's a very nice vision

vasdae 3y ago

There's a conspiracy here that people can't see. Free sites will close without targeted advertisement, obviously; they barely can afford to pay salaries now, so with untargeted ads it will be impossible. And the only media sites that will be able to afford to run are those that are subsidised by the state. This is already happening in Europe, where most of the big media are practically bankrupt and their income comes from the state in the form of subsidies, ad campaigns, internships paid by the state, etc. You already have a sibling comment in this thread precisely asking for that: the state paying for the media. How do they think this will end?

whynotmaybe 3y ago
It all boils down to the same problem : people want to have the cake and eat it. We all want roads to allow us to roam freely but don't want to pay the government people that manage everything around those roads. Everyone wants free content but everyone wants to be paid for their work. I have a pihole and one of the website I frequently visit has been remade and now everything is empty. I'm currently thinking about paying for this content... or just quit and live without this content.
gpderetta 3y ago
I don't understand. We were able to run with untargeted ads for decades. Why now, suddenly only targeted ads are viable?
- vasdae 3y ago
  That's not true, ads have always been targeted. On the telly you don't see the same ads on all stations all the time. They are segmented depending on the average profile of the viewer. If you are watching a soap opera you will see ads for diapers for female incontinence.
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    Of course I meant targeted to the specific reader/watcher. Context targeting was not the issue.

deutschepost 3y ago

Ads are not the discussion. It’s tracking. Some will say that ads hijack your attention and therefore should be blocked by default. This is a different question. But since ad companies wanted to track ROI it became a problem, because it’s pretty easy for them to do that on the internet. That’s why more people are opposed to ads on the internet but not on a busstop. If the busstop ads start taking retina scans to show you more personal ads while you travel around town, people will be opposed to that too. You don’t need to track every user and every click to show ads and make money. But as ad companies like meta can make more money by tracking your every step they will just do that. There were ads on the internet before tracking became a thing. And people made money off of those ads.

avarun 3y ago
Ads are significantly more useful with tracking. Non-personalized ads are effectively spam and we would be better off without those entirely. Personalized ads can often be as good as the content you're looking for in the first place, if not even better.
- ryanblakeley 3y ago
  I value privacy above the marginal usefulness of targeted ads. You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want. But we shouldn't all be caught in a surveillance dragnet by default.
  - avarun 3y ago
    > You should be free to opt-in to tracking and personalization if that's what you want. Agreed. So why is the EU making that illegal? I want to be able to use products for free by opting in to personalized ads so that businesses can make enough revenue to justify having an ad-supported free version of their product. The incompetent bureaucrats at the EU won't allow Meta to offer that.
    - cush 3y ago

mrweasel 3y ago

As many many others points out, it's not the ads. It is the massive surveillance and privacy invading machinery that powers it all. For me personally it's also the constant pushing pushing pushing to buy crap that you don't need or replace things you already own. I already have a washing machine, I got it last month, you don't need to sell me another (It's actually amazing that we haven't gotten to the point there advertisers can stop push products a consumer already bought). Google is actually really good as a "I need to buy X,Y,Z" in that case the ads are super helpful and often more relevant than the search results. I will absolutely click those ads, but I'm not going to order that new washing machine while I'm reading the news anyway.

rapind 3y ago

> Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. But that's not the issue here is it? *Personalized* ads is the issue. Can the free internet survive without personalized ads? Of course it can. Will a ton of companies disappear? Yes, and so what? Business fail all the time, and new businesses based on different models will fill the void. We might even see a ton of innovation beyond figuring out how to harvest and profile people's data when our biggest brains are directed towards different problems.

ndriscoll 3y ago

Lots of things like niche review sites might die, but those are impossible to find thanks to SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) anyway. Something like forums? The entire reddit database (excluding media) fits on a $150 SSD, and a used laptop can serve tens of thousands of requests/second for such a simple site. Something like a Ryzen 7950X with a few NVMe drives could probably do more than you could reasonably get a network connection for. Someone with 10 gigabit Internet could serve a forum for 10s of millions of users at least at almost no cost. The primary issue is liability. Secondary is ISPs not allowing people to use their Internet connections for server hosting (a hobbyist could do colocation, and many do already). Fix the law there and the compute cost is peanuts.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Product review sites seem like the perfect case for contextual advertising; no user tracking necessary at all.
avarun 3y ago
> SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) Huh? SEO exists because companies don't want to pay for ads. If advertising disappears, SEO will just become more prevalent and we'll have to suffer through more and more garbage.

Nextgrid 3y ago

This would open an opportunity for a universal micropayments system.

xxs 3y ago

>those websites will disappear nothing of value will be lost and all that meme. On a flip note: that's not reddit to preface comments w/ 'hot take'

alkonaut 3y ago

Another hot take: I honestly can't wait for that to happen.

adrr 3y ago

Another hot take, its hard to do a consumer based startup without effective and cheap advertising. Its going to hit their startups like fintech, direct to consumer, etc.

cush 3y ago

The vast majority of data gathered by Facebook isn't gathered on Facebook. The vast majority of that data isn't used by Facebook for delivering ads. The utility of Facebook is long lost. I'd gladly pay a few bucks to keep in touch with friends, maintain niche groups, have a Marketplace etc. But Facebook hasn't been that for over a decade. Its utility is all in tracking us around the internet, and selling our profile to the highest bidder. Ads are fine, but if the idea is that in order to have a free internet, Facebook needs to monopolize our online presence and shape how we receive information on other sites, then that's hardly a free internet. Facebook ruined the internet.