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>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not

>There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking. I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides. I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain. Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.

asaddhamani 2y ago
If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is available. Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - fmos 2y ago
    Ha, you're assuming GP visits Youtube. (I don't, rather in this camp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 )
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic. One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back. But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet. Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Also, back in the day, some of us had a fair number of magazine subscriptions. But, really, at peak it was a small percentage of the number of websites I look at at least now and then. Consumption has generally changed and most of us are skittish about subscriptions generally even if we have a few.
    - drew870mitchell 2y ago
      The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20 years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or three most eye-catching articles that twenty different publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think. I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
      - giantrobot 2y ago
        > Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think. I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles. Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation. RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
- pbronez 2y ago
  The best (and only) implementation of this I’ve seen is https://all3dp.com/ https://all3dp.com/ If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds. Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
  - inhumantsar 2y ago
    That model sounds great. Low friction and impulse-buy pricing. There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example) I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly subscription cost. Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that a non starter.
  - RealStickman_ 2y ago
    I have the next issue of always deleting cookies when the browser closes, meaning I'd get this dialog every time I visited the site. Whitelisting a site in Firefox is relatively annoying and throw in multiple devices, that dialog will always be there. I don't really have a better idea besides automated micropayments, which nobody has managed yet, crypto doesn't count,, so I guess we'll have to live with the current situation?
krapp 2y ago
I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.
- dageshi 2y ago
  Exactly, I'm sure these hobbyists will be jumping in any day now to replace what was previously done by paid professionals.
- FMecha 2y ago
  Paid hobbyists, you mean. In sense that they get paid thru a Patreon/Ko-Fi or something, because these hobbyists likely still want to be compensated.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example of an advertising supported site because, more than any other site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would shift and KA-CHING I’d click on an ad accidentally. Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
tdb7893 2y ago
I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all your time on crappy sites. I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
- kibwen 2y ago
  I don't use an adblocker out of entitlement. I use an adblocker because I don't want to be tracked, I don't want to be surveilled, I don't want my information hoarded/sold/leaked, I don't want to be influenced by legions of marketers looking to hijack my monkey brain, I don't want to be scammed by paid ads masquerading as organic content, and I don't want to expose myself to yet another vector for malware. From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
  - tdb7893 2y ago
    I mean yeah if you pay and want to use it to also block trackers then go for broke, I've never heard of anyone having a problem with that.
- jabwd 2y ago
  Problem with that approach is that an adblocker is actual critical anti malware software.
- dahart 2y ago
  I pay for the things I care the most about, but your comment is making the assumption that other people can focus on a small number of high quality sites like you do, and that seems unrealistic with today’s web. I can’t afford enough money to pay to get rid of ads from my life, and I don’t want to limit my browsing to a tiny number of sites and never find anything new. I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content. Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.
somethingreen 2y ago
The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers. The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more malicious but profitable) ads.
zchrykng 2y ago
> I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
renewiltord 2y ago
HN user offers to pay $1.99/year for many carefully done review. Amazed that no one want to take deal.

asaddhamani 2y ago

If a site offers a reasonable priced alternative to ads I'll opt for that. I've donated at other times when that option is available. Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.

zooq_ai 2y ago
[flagged]
- fmos 2y ago
  Ha, you're assuming GP visits Youtube. (I don't, rather in this camp: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41400286 )
Workaccount2 2y ago
This comment (not from you personally, Asad, but the idea of it) is the very core of the reason why I have such an axe to grind on this topic. One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back. But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet. Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Also, back in the day, some of us had a fair number of magazine subscriptions. But, really, at peak it was a small percentage of the number of websites I look at at least now and then. Consumption has generally changed and most of us are skittish about subscriptions generally even if we have a few.
  - drew870mitchell 2y ago
    The whole mode of taking in trade news has changed. 20 years ago when i bought a Maximum PC i read it cover-to-cover. Can't imagine doing that now with anything other than a book or a movie. Instead i'm reading the one or three most eye-catching articles that twenty different publications put out. Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think. I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
    - giantrobot 2y ago
      > Our much-beloved RSS (and old-school email newsletters) were the start of the slide here i think. I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles. Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation. RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
pbronez 2y ago
The best (and only) implementation of this I’ve seen is https://all3dp.com/ https://all3dp.com/ If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds. Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
- inhumantsar 2y ago
  That model sounds great. Low friction and impulse-buy pricing. There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example) I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly subscription cost. Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that a non starter.
- RealStickman_ 2y ago
  I have the next issue of always deleting cookies when the browser closes, meaning I'd get this dialog every time I visited the site. Whitelisting a site in Firefox is relatively annoying and throw in multiple devices, that dialog will always be there. I don't really have a better idea besides automated micropayments, which nobody has managed yet, crypto doesn't count,, so I guess we'll have to live with the current situation?

krapp 2y ago

I mean, HN keeps saying commercialism has destroyed the web and anyone who creates content for it should do it for free as a hobby or not at all. So I guess someone here with enough free time and enthusiasm is bound to do just that.

dageshi 2y ago
Exactly, I'm sure these hobbyists will be jumping in any day now to replace what was previously done by paid professionals.
FMecha 2y ago
Paid hobbyists, you mean. In sense that they get paid thru a Patreon/Ko-Fi or something, because these hobbyists likely still want to be compensated.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I particularly felt Anandtech was a particularly bad example of an advertising supported site because, more than any other site, when I was browsing it in my iPad I would try to click on a link and it seemed almost every time the layout would shift and KA-CHING I’d click on an ad accidentally. Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.

tdb7893 2y ago

I don't use an adblocker because I'm not entitled to the content. If seeing the ads makes the site not worth it I just don't go to that site, these sites won't learn until people stop using them. I've had a lot of people ask me how and honestly the web isn't that bad of you just don't spend all your time on crappy sites. I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.

kibwen 2y ago
I don't use an adblocker out of entitlement. I use an adblocker because I don't want to be tracked, I don't want to be surveilled, I don't want my information hoarded/sold/leaked, I don't want to be influenced by legions of marketers looking to hijack my monkey brain, I don't want to be scammed by paid ads masquerading as organic content, and I don't want to expose myself to yet another vector for malware. From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
- tdb7893 2y ago
  I mean yeah if you pay and want to use it to also block trackers then go for broke, I've never heard of anyone having a problem with that.
jabwd 2y ago
Problem with that approach is that an adblocker is actual critical anti malware software.
dahart 2y ago
I pay for the things I care the most about, but your comment is making the assumption that other people can focus on a small number of high quality sites like you do, and that seems unrealistic with today’s web. I can’t afford enough money to pay to get rid of ads from my life, and I don’t want to limit my browsing to a tiny number of sites and never find anything new. I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content. Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.

somethingreen 2y ago

The article states fairly clearly that they've lost to clickbait (and, I would guess, increasingly, to AI-slop). I.e. it was advertising that defeated them, not the ad blockers. The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.

Workaccount2 2y ago
It's because click-bait is what attracts people who don't have the mind for using ad-blockers. It also attracts advertisers that offer more diverse (and often more malicious but profitable) ads.

zchrykng 2y ago

> I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.

renewiltord 2y ago

HN user offers to pay $1.99/year for many carefully done review. Amazed that no one want to take deal.