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If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not s

If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model. Regardless of the consequences I'd rather see an ad free internet. If that means Youtube can't exist and Facebook can't exist and Google can't exist then so be it.

oh_sigh 3y ago
Except that users are willing to pay for it, since a vast majority of them look at the ads and some of them even click on the ads.
- neuralRiot 3y ago
  I wouldn’t have a problem with ads if they weren’t so intrusive and obnoxious. Imagine trying to read a magazine that would jump itself to the page with the “Axe” ad, you go back to the page you were reading and 10 seconds later it jumps to the “Chevy colorado” ad. Or asking the bookkeeper for “a book of holiday recipes” and on you way home in every corner a guy knocks your car window to sell you “holiday food”.
charcircuit 3y ago
Why not just ignore sites that use ads? If people find value in ad supported product they can use them and if they don't they can just avoid them and use an alternative without ads or nothing.
- izzydata 3y ago
  If there were no ads anywhere on the internet than everything would be on an even playing field. Currently a site that offers a paid service for something that someone else gives away for free is at a huge disadvantage.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    Even if the web was on an even playing field it has to worry about being disrupted by other platforms that allow ads. That could take the form of Web2 which is the web + ad supported sites with backwards compatibility with the original web or it could take the form of mobile apps where users can get useful ad supported apps.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    > If there were no ads anywhere on the internet than everything would be on an even playing field. In one dimension. Maybe. Influencers would still be a thing. So would SEO. The web would be like some medieval map with vast uncharted territories and "here be dragons" but also the few known sites where everyone in the known web lives. Unless we dismantle media and tech monopolies, they will still dominate that web.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  If there were a way to filter sites that serve ads out of Google searches, that would be an interesting thought. As of now, any given random website is far more likely to have ads than not, and many of the drawbacks of getting served ads (tracking, data collection, and performance issues) arise before the page is even loaded enough for you to know they exist.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    I don’t use google but surely there is an extension to allow you to block a domain?
kevindamm 3y ago
Some services would go the subscription route and survive, but then they're limited to the users that are able and willing to pay. I can't imagine offering a search product or wiki product where payment is required. Donations may be a viable option but may not provide enough starting runway. Maybe I've been drinking too much internet capitalism koolaid, but a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years.
- margalabargala 3y ago
  > Maybe I've been drinking too much internet capitalism koolaid, but a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years. I completely agree that an ad-free internet would not have seen numbers get big as quickly as what we've experienced, but it doesn't necessarily follow that an internet that makes numbers get big quickly is also the internet offering the best user experience. Usually, user experience gets sacrificed to make the numbers get bigger, faster.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years. Would that be a bad thing?
  - sethhochberg 3y ago
    I’d wager a significant number of people posting here owe their careers to that commercialization - I hate listicles, too, but not so much that I would wish them away and gamble that I ended up with the same standard of living on an Internet reserved mostly for nerds (nerds said lovingly, of course)
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > I’d wager a significant number of people posting here owe their careers to that commercialization I'm sure that's true, and it would be a bad thing for those people. But for the world at large? It's not clear to me at all that it would be bad.
paulddraper 3y ago
Or, some people are willing to pay for it, and some are willing to pay for it indirectly (via ads). Hulu I wouldn't characterize it as a "bad" business.
- neuralRiot 3y ago
  If past experience serves me right, usually it would rther be: Some people are willing to pay for it indirectly by ads and some are willing to pay and still get ads later.
- bediger4000 3y ago
  Ads are creeping in to paud-for Hulu. That's the nature of ads (or maybe advertisers): they corrupt the medium they support.
sbarre 3y ago
Yeah like I hate to say this, but do we need _that many_ sites about cameras, gadgets, games, cars, or <insert topic>? Do all those sites need to be commercial enterprises with sales teams and large editorial teams? Or could they go back to being hobby passion projects? Or maybe there's just a handful of them and they are subscription-based for people who _really_ want that kind of news, and the best writers and creators gravitate to those sites and they build a sustainable business that way? The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area to try their hand at garnering eyeball in exchange for what is ultimately the same repackaged content, because they don't need their users to pay for the content, they just need to draw them in to support the sales of ads or tracking data. This incentivizes all kinds of user-hostile behaviours in the quest for profit (or even just sustainability).
- dageshi 3y ago
  I think you're about 5ish years out of date. Most of the sites on cameras, gadgets, games, cars e.t.c. are dead or dying and have been replaced by youtube channels, many of them run by hobbyists.
  - jjulius 3y ago
    The same rhetorical question still applies for hobbyist YT channels, IMO. Especially since many of them lock the more useful content behind subscription walls.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >Especially since many of them lock the more useful content behind subscription walls. useful content? which ones? average youtuber incentives (be it through YT or Patreon) tend to just be a community private server on Discord to talk to the creator with. Or cut content that they couldn't air on youtube anyway (e.g. extended commentary on a video that would be de-monitized otherwise. There's way too much competition to lock out signifigant part of a Youtube's channel's content.
  - sbarre 3y ago
dageshi 3y ago
It's a well understood part of human nature that it's very difficult to charge for something you previously gave away for free. The vast majority of the web has been given away for free by being ad supported, that's never going to roll back, the expectation has been set. Thankfully, the wider public might find ads irritating but they'd still prefer them over paying so ads aren't going away anytime soon.
- izzydata 3y ago
  I know it will never happen. At least not anytime in the near future. There is usually a group of people advocating that using an adblocker is like stealing or killing businesses. My counter argument is that I'm fine with that. Don't offer something for free when I have complete control over how it is displayed on my end if you can't stay in business if I block some part of it. Everyone on the planet should use ad blockers for their own protection and to actively change the internet to a non-ad business model. I will never stop using ad blockers and I don't feel bad about it in the slightest.
crazygringo 3y ago
> that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. No, it's just often that the logistics make it too inconvenient. For various impossible-coordination reasons, micropayments and monthly-subscription-to-all-news just haven't taken off, despite consumers being willing to pay.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  sounds like enough people weren't willing to pay. It's very easy to espouse demand, but in reality not everyone will put their money where their mouth is. Or in a worst case scenario, everyone who is willing to pay already is, and the business is indeed non-sustainable. But I doubt this.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    No, I said precisely the opposite. People can be willing to pay, but corporations are unable to coordinate amongst themselves to receive the payment or make it frictionless enough. This is not an uncommon situation in economics. It's not a fictional concept. E.g. you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination. That wasn't inevitable though. If record labels had chosen to launch fragmented independent music streaming services, that wouldn't have changed people's willingness to pay for all music for $10–12/mo., even if it weren't available.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      I imagine it comes down to costs either way. If it was quick and easy companies would have done it. And that willingless is partially based on if more buyers come in from it. They wouldn't do it for the most dedicated buyers nor for the ones who think it's too expensive. >you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination. By basically giving the record labels all the money and make the actual artists not really make money on their craft. I guess nothing can be perfect. But music is realtively cheap to produce (but not cheap at the top, of course). There is also a reason Netflix has been price hiking and still bleeding content and customers as everyone rolls their own. You simply want more control when each episode of content is 7 figures.
arp242 3y ago
Things like newspapers and comic books and whatnot have had ads for over a hundred years. These types of things partly being sponsored by ads is hardly a new concept. Ads are not going away. I would argue that the internet has gone rather overboard with it, but that's a different thing.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  For me, the problem that internet ads have that older media ads didn't is all the spying that comes with them. It's the spying that elevates them from being incredibly annoying to being just plain evil.
  - arp242 3y ago
    That's not an ad problem, that's a tracking problem. I think it's important not to conflate the two concepts. But other than that, yes, I agree.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      They are two different things, but you don't get ads without the spying. Often, you get the spying even if you block ads.
      - arp242 3y ago
        That's not true; there is nothing preventing anyone from serving ads without tracking, and I'm pretty sure there are solutions out there that do exactly that, even if they're not the most commonly used. Like I said, ads were viable in print, well before the internet. Just <img href="/ad.png"> would work, and has no tracking and is essential the same as print media ads (or those YouTube sponsors for that matter). While this would probably net in less income than e.g. the Google ad stuff, it's completely viable and I'm sure there are people and companies doing something like that. But uBlock will block that, because it's an adblocker and not a trackblocker, and that's clearly an ad. That's perfectly fine, but what I want is a trackblocker
tootie 3y ago
That would eliminate 99% of news. Including anyone on social media.
- krapp 3y ago
  Good. 99% of news and almost everything on social media is garbage. Burn it all down.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    ironically enough, it'd just mean that most news would end up being funded by the government where possible. Which is how the FSFE gets its funding.
    - tootie 3y ago
      The only government funded news in the US is VOA. The CPB gives out grants but public media are all responsible for their own budgets and a lot of them (notably NPR and it's largest affiliates in NYC and LA) have been crushed by a drop in ad revenue and cutting back severely on content production.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  No, it would eliminate most news sites, and little value would be lost. Frankly, net value might be created that way. People will still write about things that happen, and people will still read that, and money just won't change hands. Or people will read paid news, and the quality will almost certainly improve as a result.
  - tootie 3y ago
    No, no they will not. News sites pay reporters. If news sites have no money reporters stop reporting. Journalism costs money.
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
changoplatanero 3y ago
> If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model. Advertising can be a perfectly fine business model. Look at the radio, television, and newspaper industries. These have existed for decades and have brought much good to humanity even though they need advertising support to exist.
- soraminazuki 3y ago
  The crucial difference being that traditional advertising didn't enable mass surveillance.
awiejtlaijwr 3y ago
Well, ads are the business model. Ads make it possible to sell things that people don't want to pay for. Newspapers and magazines wouldn't be possible without ads. It's been that way for literally centuries. But internet ads are definitely a new level of crazy. I'm conflicted about Youtube in particular because when you filter out all the social viral crap, Youtube is one of the greatest educational resources ever created by human beings. I can go search youtube for any subject imaginable and get broad and deep video instruction on the subject from dozens of different perspectives. In grad school when a professor did a terrible job of explaining a niche technical subject, I could go on Youtube and watch lectures from a variety of other professors. I can go to Youtube to learn how to cook, how to dance, how to build a wooden canoe with hand tools, so many amazing things. It's a shame we can't find a better way to fund and maintain the educational portions of it. I don't know of a better way.
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Some of us want an ad supported internet. And the ad / no ad Internets are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist. You can chose to only frequent ad-free sites and services. You wouldn't even have a use for an ad blocker.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  There are too many low-effort ad supported sites currently. I don’t think we should make ads illegal, but it would be preferable if all ad-supported sites would identify themselves as such and then link aggregators, search engines, or even web browsers could have an easy “don’t show links to ad supported sites” button. It really seems like a win-win.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    It would be very easy for link aggregators and search engines categorize sites as ad-supported or not: load the page in a browser (which these sites often already do) with an ad blocker extension and see if it identifies anything. But my guess is they're not interested in doing this, since it rules out a lot of valuable pages. For example, HN is ad-supported.
giantrobot 3y ago
> If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model. People literally can't pay a sane price for content. A blog post or warmed over press release isn't worth a penny let alone a dollar. Ads unfortunately are the only mechanism to pay the sub-cent value for content. Even if you could reasonably conduct a penny transaction that's still an insane price to pay for a blog post or tweet. So it's not about people being unwilling to pay it's about being unwilling to pay transactable amounts of money for content that's nowhere near worth those amounts.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Even if you could reasonably conduct a penny transaction that's still an insane price to pay for a blog post or tweet. depends on the content TBH. some (relatively few in the grand scheme of things, but "some" when focusig on otherwise helpful feeds) blogs are worth their weight in gold. some feel like they should pay me to even read it. I do wish a micropayment sort of system was feasible in general so we could test such models. But I'm guessing that's a logistics issue with payment vendors; they probably don't like small, disparate transactions anymore than a GPU. Still, I've tried the closest thing for a few comic websites back then where you buy "coins" in bulk and purchase new releases a la carte (e.g. say, 2000 coins for $10, and each new chapter is 10 coins. so roughly 5 cents). Doesn't feel too bad.
xboxnolifes 3y ago
> If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model. This only holds if you agree that humans are perfectly rational economic agents. I disagree with that and think that there are lots of little interactions where just introducing a financial transaction impacts how people interact. Maybe If I tallied all of my internet usage, figured out how much I value my internet usage, and then gave each page visit a value I could find out that I value my hackernews usage at $0.02 per link click. But if clicking links directly led to me paying more, my usage pattern would change.
caskstrength 3y ago
> Regardless of the consequences I'd rather see an ad free internet. If that means Youtube can't exist and Facebook can't exist and Google can't exist then so be it. But you can already do that by not using Youtube and FB. You just want to deny opportunity to use them to other people who may like to have access to "free" (ad supported) internet services.

oh_sigh 3y ago

Except that users are willing to pay for it, since a vast majority of them look at the ads and some of them even click on the ads.

neuralRiot 3y ago
I wouldn’t have a problem with ads if they weren’t so intrusive and obnoxious. Imagine trying to read a magazine that would jump itself to the page with the “Axe” ad, you go back to the page you were reading and 10 seconds later it jumps to the “Chevy colorado” ad. Or asking the bookkeeper for “a book of holiday recipes” and on you way home in every corner a guy knocks your car window to sell you “holiday food”.

charcircuit 3y ago

Why not just ignore sites that use ads? If people find value in ad supported product they can use them and if they don't they can just avoid them and use an alternative without ads or nothing.

izzydata 3y ago
If there were no ads anywhere on the internet than everything would be on an even playing field. Currently a site that offers a paid service for something that someone else gives away for free is at a huge disadvantage.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Even if the web was on an even playing field it has to worry about being disrupted by other platforms that allow ads. That could take the form of Web2 which is the web + ad supported sites with backwards compatibility with the original web or it could take the form of mobile apps where users can get useful ad supported apps.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > If there were no ads anywhere on the internet than everything would be on an even playing field. In one dimension. Maybe. Influencers would still be a thing. So would SEO. The web would be like some medieval map with vast uncharted territories and "here be dragons" but also the few known sites where everyone in the known web lives. Unless we dismantle media and tech monopolies, they will still dominate that web.
BobaFloutist 3y ago
If there were a way to filter sites that serve ads out of Google searches, that would be an interesting thought. As of now, any given random website is far more likely to have ads than not, and many of the drawbacks of getting served ads (tracking, data collection, and performance issues) arise before the page is even loaded enough for you to know they exist.
- midasuni 3y ago
  I don’t use google but surely there is an extension to allow you to block a domain?

kevindamm 3y ago

Some services would go the subscription route and survive, but then they're limited to the users that are able and willing to pay. I can't imagine offering a search product or wiki product where payment is required. Donations may be a viable option but may not provide enough starting runway. Maybe I've been drinking too much internet capitalism koolaid, but a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years.

margalabargala 3y ago
> Maybe I've been drinking too much internet capitalism koolaid, but a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years. I completely agree that an ad-free internet would not have seen numbers get big as quickly as what we've experienced, but it doesn't necessarily follow that an internet that makes numbers get big quickly is also the internet offering the best user experience. Usually, user experience gets sacrificed to make the numbers get bigger, faster.
JohnFen 3y ago
> a completely ad-free internet would not have had the commercial lift we've enjoyed these past 20-plus years. Would that be a bad thing?
- sethhochberg 3y ago
  I’d wager a significant number of people posting here owe their careers to that commercialization - I hate listicles, too, but not so much that I would wish them away and gamble that I ended up with the same standard of living on an Internet reserved mostly for nerds (nerds said lovingly, of course)
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > I’d wager a significant number of people posting here owe their careers to that commercialization I'm sure that's true, and it would be a bad thing for those people. But for the world at large? It's not clear to me at all that it would be bad.

paulddraper 3y ago

Or, some people are willing to pay for it, and some are willing to pay for it indirectly (via ads). Hulu I wouldn't characterize it as a "bad" business.

neuralRiot 3y ago
If past experience serves me right, usually it would rther be: Some people are willing to pay for it indirectly by ads and some are willing to pay and still get ads later.
bediger4000 3y ago
Ads are creeping in to paud-for Hulu. That's the nature of ads (or maybe advertisers): they corrupt the medium they support.

sbarre 3y ago

Yeah like I hate to say this, but do we need _that many_ sites about cameras, gadgets, games, cars, or <insert topic>? Do all those sites need to be commercial enterprises with sales teams and large editorial teams? Or could they go back to being hobby passion projects? Or maybe there's just a handful of them and they are subscription-based for people who _really_ want that kind of news, and the best writers and creators gravitate to those sites and they build a sustainable business that way? The ad-supported business model has allowed perhaps _too many_ people per topic area to try their hand at garnering eyeball in exchange for what is ultimately the same repackaged content, because they don't need their users to pay for the content, they just need to draw them in to support the sales of ads or tracking data. This incentivizes all kinds of user-hostile behaviours in the quest for profit (or even just sustainability).

dageshi 3y ago
I think you're about 5ish years out of date. Most of the sites on cameras, gadgets, games, cars e.t.c. are dead or dying and have been replaced by youtube channels, many of them run by hobbyists.
- jjulius 3y ago
  The same rhetorical question still applies for hobbyist YT channels, IMO. Especially since many of them lock the more useful content behind subscription walls.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >Especially since many of them lock the more useful content behind subscription walls. useful content? which ones? average youtuber incentives (be it through YT or Patreon) tend to just be a community private server on Discord to talk to the creator with. Or cut content that they couldn't air on youtube anyway (e.g. extended commentary on a video that would be de-monitized otherwise. There's way too much competition to lock out signifigant part of a Youtube's channel's content.
- sbarre 3y ago

dageshi 3y ago

It's a well understood part of human nature that it's very difficult to charge for something you previously gave away for free. The vast majority of the web has been given away for free by being ad supported, that's never going to roll back, the expectation has been set. Thankfully, the wider public might find ads irritating but they'd still prefer them over paying so ads aren't going away anytime soon.

izzydata 3y ago
I know it will never happen. At least not anytime in the near future. There is usually a group of people advocating that using an adblocker is like stealing or killing businesses. My counter argument is that I'm fine with that. Don't offer something for free when I have complete control over how it is displayed on my end if you can't stay in business if I block some part of it. Everyone on the planet should use ad blockers for their own protection and to actively change the internet to a non-ad business model. I will never stop using ad blockers and I don't feel bad about it in the slightest.

crazygringo 3y ago

> that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. No, it's just often that the logistics make it too inconvenient. For various impossible-coordination reasons, micropayments and monthly-subscription-to-all-news just haven't taken off, despite consumers being willing to pay.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
sounds like enough people weren't willing to pay. It's very easy to espouse demand, but in reality not everyone will put their money where their mouth is. Or in a worst case scenario, everyone who is willing to pay already is, and the business is indeed non-sustainable. But I doubt this.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  No, I said precisely the opposite. People can be willing to pay, but corporations are unable to coordinate amongst themselves to receive the payment or make it frictionless enough. This is not an uncommon situation in economics. It's not a fictional concept. E.g. you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination. That wasn't inevitable though. If record labels had chosen to launch fragmented independent music streaming services, that wouldn't have changed people's willingness to pay for all music for $10–12/mo., even if it weren't available.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I imagine it comes down to costs either way. If it was quick and easy companies would have done it. And that willingless is partially based on if more buyers come in from it. They wouldn't do it for the most dedicated buyers nor for the ones who think it's too expensive. >you can look at Spotify as a success story of coordination. By basically giving the record labels all the money and make the actual artists not really make money on their craft. I guess nothing can be perfect. But music is realtively cheap to produce (but not cheap at the top, of course). There is also a reason Netflix has been price hiking and still bleeding content and customers as everyone rolls their own. You simply want more control when each episode of content is 7 figures.

arp242 3y ago

Things like newspapers and comic books and whatnot have had ads for over a hundred years. These types of things partly being sponsored by ads is hardly a new concept. Ads are not going away. I would argue that the internet has gone rather overboard with it, but that's a different thing.

JohnFen 3y ago
For me, the problem that internet ads have that older media ads didn't is all the spying that comes with them. It's the spying that elevates them from being incredibly annoying to being just plain evil.
- arp242 3y ago
  That's not an ad problem, that's a tracking problem. I think it's important not to conflate the two concepts. But other than that, yes, I agree.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    They are two different things, but you don't get ads without the spying. Often, you get the spying even if you block ads.
    - arp242 3y ago
      That's not true; there is nothing preventing anyone from serving ads without tracking, and I'm pretty sure there are solutions out there that do exactly that, even if they're not the most commonly used. Like I said, ads were viable in print, well before the internet. Just <img href="/ad.png"> would work, and has no tracking and is essential the same as print media ads (or those YouTube sponsors for that matter). While this would probably net in less income than e.g. the Google ad stuff, it's completely viable and I'm sure there are people and companies doing something like that. But uBlock will block that, because it's an adblocker and not a trackblocker, and that's clearly an ad. That's perfectly fine, but what I want is a trackblocker

tootie 3y ago

That would eliminate 99% of news. Including anyone on social media.

krapp 3y ago
Good. 99% of news and almost everything on social media is garbage. Burn it all down.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  ironically enough, it'd just mean that most news would end up being funded by the government where possible. Which is how the FSFE gets its funding.
  - tootie 3y ago
    The only government funded news in the US is VOA. The CPB gives out grants but public media are all responsible for their own budgets and a lot of them (notably NPR and it's largest affiliates in NYC and LA) have been crushed by a drop in ad revenue and cutting back severely on content production.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
No, it would eliminate most news sites, and little value would be lost. Frankly, net value might be created that way. People will still write about things that happen, and people will still read that, and money just won't change hands. Or people will read paid news, and the quality will almost certainly improve as a result.
- tootie 3y ago
  No, no they will not. News sites pay reporters. If news sites have no money reporters stop reporting. Journalism costs money.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago

changoplatanero 3y ago

> If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model. Advertising can be a perfectly fine business model. Look at the radio, television, and newspaper industries. These have existed for decades and have brought much good to humanity even though they need advertising support to exist.

soraminazuki 3y ago
The crucial difference being that traditional advertising didn't enable mass surveillance.

awiejtlaijwr 3y ago

Well, ads are the business model. Ads make it possible to sell things that people don't want to pay for. Newspapers and magazines wouldn't be possible without ads. It's been that way for literally centuries. But internet ads are definitely a new level of crazy. I'm conflicted about Youtube in particular because when you filter out all the social viral crap, Youtube is one of the greatest educational resources ever created by human beings. I can go search youtube for any subject imaginable and get broad and deep video instruction on the subject from dozens of different perspectives. In grad school when a professor did a terrible job of explaining a niche technical subject, I could go on Youtube and watch lectures from a variety of other professors. I can go to Youtube to learn how to cook, how to dance, how to build a wooden canoe with hand tools, so many amazing things. It's a shame we can't find a better way to fund and maintain the educational portions of it. I don't know of a better way.

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Some of us want an ad supported internet. And the ad / no ad Internets are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist. You can chose to only frequent ad-free sites and services. You wouldn't even have a use for an ad blocker.

bee_rider 3y ago
There are too many low-effort ad supported sites currently. I don’t think we should make ads illegal, but it would be preferable if all ad-supported sites would identify themselves as such and then link aggregators, search engines, or even web browsers could have an easy “don’t show links to ad supported sites” button. It really seems like a win-win.
- jefftk 3y ago
  It would be very easy for link aggregators and search engines categorize sites as ad-supported or not: load the page in a browser (which these sites often already do) with an ad blocker extension and see if it identifies anything. But my guess is they're not interested in doing this, since it rules out a lot of valuable pages. For example, HN is ad-supported.

giantrobot 3y ago

> If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model. People literally can't pay a sane price for content. A blog post or warmed over press release isn't worth a penny let alone a dollar. Ads unfortunately are the only mechanism to pay the sub-cent value for content. Even if you could reasonably conduct a penny transaction that's still an insane price to pay for a blog post or tweet. So it's not about people being unwilling to pay it's about being unwilling to pay transactable amounts of money for content that's nowhere near worth those amounts.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Even if you could reasonably conduct a penny transaction that's still an insane price to pay for a blog post or tweet. depends on the content TBH. some (relatively few in the grand scheme of things, but "some" when focusig on otherwise helpful feeds) blogs are worth their weight in gold. some feel like they should pay me to even read it. I do wish a micropayment sort of system was feasible in general so we could test such models. But I'm guessing that's a logistics issue with payment vendors; they probably don't like small, disparate transactions anymore than a GPU. Still, I've tried the closest thing for a few comic websites back then where you buy "coins" in bulk and purchase new releases a la carte (e.g. say, 2000 coins for $10, and each new chapter is 10 coins. so roughly 5 cents). Doesn't feel too bad.

xboxnolifes 3y ago

> If something is not sustainable without ads that seems to imply that people are not willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it then I'm not sure it is a good business model. This only holds if you agree that humans are perfectly rational economic agents. I disagree with that and think that there are lots of little interactions where just introducing a financial transaction impacts how people interact. Maybe If I tallied all of my internet usage, figured out how much I value my internet usage, and then gave each page visit a value I could find out that I value my hackernews usage at $0.02 per link click. But if clicking links directly led to me paying more, my usage pattern would change.

caskstrength 3y ago

> Regardless of the consequences I'd rather see an ad free internet. If that means Youtube can't exist and Facebook can't exist and Google can't exist then so be it. But you can already do that by not using Youtube and FB. You just want to deny opportunity to use them to other people who may like to have access to "free" (ad supported) internet services.