16 ms·

The correct amount of ads is zero

• spencerflem 2y ago
  I was hoping this would be about society at large. It's ridiculous the amount of money spent, people's time spent, all on a quest to make the world an uglier and more hostile place.
• shortformblog 2y ago
  Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the internet, the fact is this: Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. In fact, they will be happy to take money from every source they can. The fact that The Verge is doing so reflects that they understand their audience and are trying to meet them halfway. It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user. This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
  • 0x0203 2y ago
    I've said it before, but I feel like I need to keep saying it: If the people actually using/consuming a product aren't willing to pay the cost required to make/produce said product, then that's probably a good indicator that the product doesn't have enough value to justify its existence. If the Verge can't convince enough people to pay for their output, I'd argue it's not worth keeping around. Advertising ruins the producer/consumer relationship and incentivizes behaviors that disadvantage the consumer and push the producer away from their original purpose. If the Verge wants to diversify income, then they should provide a product that has value to a wider audience. That doesn't mean that every single person consuming/using the product needs to pay either. Patreon and similar services have proven that if what you make is of high enough quality and provides enough value, it's possible to convince a large enough subset of the consumers to pay enough to cover the costs of production. Especially with online services where the cost difference between producing for 1 person vs 1000 is nearly negligible. The few can, and often do, subsidize the many. And if that changes over time, then the product ceases to be valuable enough to be worth producing and should simply stop being made. And I'd say this is even true of news and things that people might argue are for the public good. In my opinion, most "news" today isn't actual informative news and doesn't really serve the public. But of the vanishing little left that does, if it informs and educates the citizenry in a way that improves the lives and stability of the country as a whole, and if its natural cost is more than can be reasonably covered by willing consumers, then there's a reasonable argument for covering the cost with taxes. Put sufficient legal barriers between the government funding and the content being produced to prevent government manipulation/propaganda and make sure the press can operate unimpeded. My best idea for such a government funded news source is to write into law that said news source's budget is dependent solely upon country population and country GDP, all staffing decisions are made internally, and leaders are decided by citizen vote, but I'm sure there are other ways people can come up with for maintaining a free but government/tax funded press agency. But ad-funded (of which I think even public radio/tv has effectively become), creates perverse incentives that drive the mission away from actually informing and educating. People can still pay for tech reviews, or travel advice, talking head current events opinion shows, or whatever news is in its current form if they want. Privately owned/operated press can still exist if it's useful enough for people to find it valuable and worth the cost. But advertising just ruins everything eventually.
    • heresie-dabord 2y ago
      > If the people actually using/consuming a product aren't willing to pay the cost required to make/produce said product, then that's probably a good indicator that the product doesn't have enough value to justify its existence. This is not true. In many cases, we can see that people value a service by their returning usage, but... they often want other people to pay for it.
    • kasey_junk 2y ago
      “Eventually” is doing a ton of heavy lifting in your argument. Ads have been a primary revenue driver for news media going back hundreds of years, including to when the US was codifying the civic value of news into its governing principles. The idea that revenue choice is binary or that if you have to use ads you shouldn’t be in business is a very modern one, and one that’s outside of historical norms.
      • 0x0203 2y ago
        The idea that it's wrong to use slavery as a cheap labor force is also modern and outside historical norms. Just because it's historically prevalent doesn't make something right or even good/acceptable. Some things based on historical norms are good. Some clearly aren't. And it seems to me a bit disingenuous to ignore the technological changes and the speed, pervasiveness, and invasiveness with which advertising is now done compared to the historical context being appealed to. Even if one grants that advertising wasn't "as bad" back then, that doesn't make what we have now acceptable.
        • kasey_junk 2y ago
          I’m more commenting on the idea that ads ruin things over time. If that’s the case then it’s a hundreds of year timescale (or news media was ruined long ago).
    • ghaff 2y ago
      There are a ton of things that many people would like but aren't willing to pay for. Would I like a personal chef and a personal driver at my beck and call? Sure. But I'm not willing to pay what that would cost for routine use. I do pay for some scheduled and infrequent personal care services. Also, government-funded comes with its own strings which may become more obvious than you like in the coming years.
  • eqvinox 2y ago
    I think you're missing the point. There's a reasonable number of people who are willing to pay for content like this, but only if they actually get an ad-free experience in exchange. The business decision The Verge needs to make is whether they want to try to reach these people or not, since these people won't pay for a model that still has ads. (There could of course be 2 subscription levels at different prices, one that still has some ads… but that's also extra work and a different consumer experience.) I don't think newspaper ads are a good analogy either since the consumption model of a dead-tree newspaper isn't such that you get the ads thrown into your face when trying to read an article. And classifieds specifically I wouldn't even call ads, more of a community note board service.
    • cons0le 2y ago
      Heck, if online ads didn't move around and pop up in front of the screen, less people would block them. But the reality is that companies are too greedy, and will never draw the line and say "this is enough" . I can't afford to subscribe to the dozens of sites I glance at everyday for 2 minutes. Quite frankly as someone that grew up with the "old" internet, I don't like the idea of paying for every single site I use. It feels like making every road a toll road.
      • madeofpalk 2y ago
        > But the reality is that companies are too greedy I don't think this is true. Ads get worse and more hostile because it so easily turns into a race to the bottom. Worse ads devalue the page and lower the CPM, which leads to websites to add more ads, which lowers everything again.
    • shortformblog 2y ago
      I am not missing the point. Rather, the point is so small as to not be financially worth it for them. I am saying that The Verge made a business decision to balance ad load and subscriber cost to potentially bring in more subscribers. They probably did the math and realized that charging people $15 a month would not bring in many subscribers, and that they could have charged $5 a month with regular ad load, but they found this $7 sweet spot where they could give people the best of both worlds. And the $50 model means people are more committed long-term making it more valuable for them. I would guess that “reduced ad load” means that they would only put premium advertisers, like the stuff you would see in glossy magazines, in front of those readers. I trust given how careful they were with rolling this out that they did the math and tried to strike a balance to please the most people.
  • passwordoops 2y ago
    True. And from what I understood, the Verge is offering two tiers - less ads and no ads. You can pay for the one you think is worthwhile. As a consumer I definitely lean on the "if I'm paying a subscription, I expect zero ads" side of the fence. It just has to be worth the additional price for me (The Verge is not)
    • eqvinox 2y ago
      https://www.theverge.com/subscribe https://www.theverge.com/subscribe only has a monthly and annual option, and it doesn't look like either of them is "no ads"? The annual one is just cheaper and has some magazine?
    • GraemeMeyer 2y ago
      There is no “no ad” tier. It’s full ads and reduced ads only
    • raverbashing 2y ago
      Yeah, the economics of it make sense. The optics of it is awful though.
    • yunwal 2y ago
      The no ad tier being use an adblocker?
  • Loic 2y ago
    > Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. At least in Germany, this has changed quite a lot. The publishers are naming the offers "Pur Abo" or similar. This is not perfect as one analysis[0] is showing, but for me, on the good way. [0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2020/nicht-ganz-ohne/ https://netzpolitik.org/2020/nicht-ganz-ohne/ (in German) Edit: Added German analysis of these offers.
    • shortformblog 2y ago
      Intriguing. I know the German media market is very different from the American one—back in my D.C. days, when I was still at the WaPo Express, I met a German journalist who was working in the U.S. and I remember her explaining to me how different the rules were for promotion and social media and such. I do think The Verge offering this could lead other U.S. publishers to follow suit, especially if it’s successful.
      • snowwrestler 2y ago
        Just wanted to say I used to love reading the Express on the Metro in the morning.
  • manuelmoreale 2y ago
    I’ll guarantee you that it doesn’t make me feel any better to write this type of posts. I’m just exhausted by the modern web. As for the other point you’re making, that’s complete nonsense. You don’t differentiate your revenue streams by serving a sub par product to your paying customers. Serve those stupid ads to free users, treat your paying customers with respect.
    • shortformblog 2y ago
      Gonna be straight up with you: I feel like you would have never thought about this had they not mentioned it, because so few media outlets are even thinking about reducing ad load for paid subscribers. As someone in media, I’m tired of well-intentioned media outlets try to strike a reasonable balance only to get yelled at for it like they aren’t already walking a tightrope. They have staffs of people to pay for, payroll. Travel budgets. Offices. Legal bills. And that they get hell for trying to give an inch, in my opinion, sucks. If you want them to offer an ad-free tier, tell them that directly! Given that they are clearly thinking about it suggests they might listen to you. But your binary way of approaching this is not helping and ultimately discourages companies who want to wean themselves off of adtech. Ripping off the band-aid is a lot harder than you’re making it out to be.
      • manuelmoreale 2y ago
        > If you want them to offer an ad-free tier, tell them that directly! Given that they are clearly thinking about it suggests they might listen to you. The first thing I did the other day was emailing Nilay Patel, editor in chief at The Verge, to share my thoughts on the subject. That’s before I posted on my site. As for “ripping off the band aid”, again, that’s nonsense. I’m not saying they should drop ads. They should figure out how much a user is worth and then price their membership accordingly. The vast, vast majority won’t switch anyway because that’s the reality of today’s web. As for your first point, I’d not have noticed that because I run multiple adblockers everywhere and I am THRILLED that I can now support in other ways.
      • romanows 2y ago
        I've asked NYT, WaPo, and the non-profit Chicago Sun Times for an ad-free tier (no ads displayed in their apps) and they've all said "we don't offer an ad-free tier".
  • bambax 2y ago
    Okay, and probably true, but the difference with newspaper is, it would be prohibitively expensive to produce different versions of the same newspaper for different subscription options, while it's trivial to do on the web. Why not offer an ad-free tier?
    • xixixao 2y ago
      The richest people, hence the most valuable for advertisers, would buy it. This significantly affects the whole ad business value. Such that the ad-free tier would have to be priced too high. It’s more profitable to “force” everyone to watch ads. I’m afraid.
      • PaulHoule 2y ago
        Yep. Elephant in the room of media economics. Look at ads on daytime broadcast TV and it is: medicare advantage, something you can get from medicare, a medicare scam, personal injury lawyer, some drug your insurance might pay for, personal injury lawyer #2. Ads for something you spend your own money on are few and far between (maybe you will get a car ad because if nobody bought a car who'd get hit by a car and call William Matar?) People in that demographic don't have money to spend so they get subprime ads. In the day newspapers and magazines thought about the balance of ad and subscription revenue a lot. On top of (1) people have money for a subscription being better qualified than people who don't, (2) people who are motivated to get a subscription are qualified because they care about the topic (you can get a free magazine about construction equipment but you'd better convince them you are really in the industry) and (3) in the current era, subscribers give up their name and other personal details and will be more definitely tracked.
        • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
          You see the same effect with twitter's advertiser exodus since it was acquired. It was not long ago you'd see everything on twitter: prominent fashion brands, car companies, big name electronics, everything you'd expect from a healthy ad ecosystem. Now it's basically nothing but crypto scams, reverse mortgages, supplements, dude wipes and pills that make your dick work. Like you can feel whatever you feel about that, but it's a clear, marked shift.
  • eterevsky 2y ago
    It is always possible to have several tiers of subscriptions, a cheap tier with some additional feature and ads, and a higher tier with no ads at all. I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.
    • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      The problem is: advertisers will argue that if you're offering a tier of service that removes ads, that's specifically going to be the most appealing to the group of your user-base that has the most money to spend and whom is most ready to spend it, evidenced by the fact that they have subscribed to your ad-free tier, and is therefore worth the most in terms of reaching with ads. Those people are self-selecting as the most responsive to being appealed to to buy things, which is what your advertisers want. This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way. Users love it, but advertisers hate it and it craters the value of the ad space you sell to whomever doesn't think it's worth it/can't afford it.
      • greenie_beans 2y ago
        yikes. that makes sense for an advertiser but also fuck that.
      • justinclift 2y ago
        > This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way [...] advertisers hate it My heart bleeds for the poor advertisers. /s Actually, no it doesn't. Not even a little bit.
        • adamc 2y ago
          Not even a smidgen. If your business plan is built around advertising, I hope your business goes broke. On this, no compromises.
      • benj111 2y ago
        Surely in this reverse Catch-22 hypothetical anyone who is willing to pay to escape ads is therefore worth more, so they would need to be served fewer ads for the same income. So the subscription should be free. And with less ads.
  • JKCalhoun 2y ago
    > That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. My assumption is that the salaries of reporters, editors was paid for by ads. The nominal fee for the paper was to pay for the pulp, ink. I mean if you just printed up millions of papers and gave them away, people would pick them up simply as raw material for lining their bird cages, for papier-mâché, to insulate their cardboard box home on the corner of 12th and Main.....
    • shortformblog 2y ago
      I worked at a number of free tabloid newspapers in my day (one small-town exurban, one mid-sized car-centric metro area, one metro area where most people took public transit) and I will say that most people did not do this. Usually they just left the papers on the train or at the coffee shop. Nonetheless, the first half of your point—the ads usually paid for all the reporting—is correct.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Right. It is/was just a big bucket of money and obviously there were free papers given away on college campuses and subway stations. But, at least back in the day, newspaper subscriptions and newsstand/put your quarter in boxes basically paid for creating and delivering the physical copies. The generally dire journalism situation these days is there is mostly no physical distribution and physical advertising dollars have become digital dimes. And local news--which was never a really thriving business--is basically dead.
    • snowwrestler 2y ago
      Quite a lot of papers were, and still are, given out for free. My city still supports 3 separate print newspapers that are free in coffee shops, libraries, corner boxes, etc. They’re a great way to keep up with the actions and gripes of the local community. Being such small operations, there is very light editing and the reporter’s point of view often comes through pretty clearly. All paid for via ads from local businesses. Quite a lot of the ads are from real estate agents, which I think reflects the belief that a lot of tourists are picking up the papers in addition to residents.
  • nubinetwork 2y ago
    Freemium gets abused, just look at YouTube... give them money and they still run ads...
    • wat10000 2y ago
      No they don’t.
      • ndriscoll 2y ago
        Apparently they were showing some users football ads and support said that's expected. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42131778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42131778
        • johnnyanmac 2y ago
          Youtube =/= Youtube Music. I can't speak to the latter ( I miss Google Play Music), but I have yet to receive a normal ad on Youtube premium.
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
    > That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. Which leads to the conclusion that the company that most disrupted the newspaper industry was not Google or Facebook but Craigslist.
  • belorn 2y ago
    It is fairly common in a large number of industries that a large part of the valuable portion of the products get subsidized by underhanded "immoral" side of the same industry. A (in)famous example is the practice of paying for expensive ink with excessive anti-customer practices in order to keep the prices of printers low. The printing manufacturers get multiple revenue streams that are more stable over time, and printers become accessible to more people. What is there to not like about it? The biggest problem is that anti-consumer behavior causes harm. With advertisement it brings disinformation, spying, abuse of the most vulnerable in society, general distrust, are often a crime (scams, fraud, targets children, and usually ignore local advertisement laws), and siphons money to a third party which usually is outside of the country and do not pay taxes. The benefits of anti-consumer behavior are generally not worth the downsides.
  • Havoc 2y ago
    Loads of companies out there rely on a single revenue stream. If you sell a single product you get a single revenue stream. Having a company double dip and concluding that's somehow laudable is absurd. >People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper Because the product isn't delivering $5 worth of perceived value per day. Trying to extract $5 anyway via stuff like this is the wrong answer.
  • madeofpalk 2y ago
    "Less ads" is the easy way to describe what they're offering, but I believe what they're doing is not just 50% less ad spots, but rather paying will remove all third party ad networks from the site, leaving first party ads only. > we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media If you think all advertising is immoral, then this probably doesn't do anything for you. However, if you have privacy and performance concerns, this is a big win I think. Generally I like what the verge does, and I would gladly pay if it included their podcast being ad free. The Verge’s podcast is the only podcast I listen to that I don’t pay for, and it’s full of repeating programmatic ads for crypto companies, sports betting, and cars.
    • shortformblog 2y ago
      This is a good way to put it. Honestly, it sounds like they have a messaging challenge that they need to solve around this.
    • chrisrhoden 2y ago
      In various contexts, you would draw the distinction here between `ads` (that is, marketing sold against large swaths of content) and `sponsorships` (marketing sold against a small targeted set of content) but the distinction is subtle and the terms are pretty overloaded.
    • nyclounge 2y ago
      That is what brave is doing. If we are going down this getting money for ads road, then let's just pick the lesser of all evils.
  • plagiarist 2y ago
    Something laudable? They're trying to sell subscriptions that people will buy. It's completely normal to criticize their offering. I agree with the criticism and you don't, that's all fine, too.
  • ChrisRR 2y ago
    Exactly. This has been the case for decades. Newspapers have had advertising despite no being free, but if they didn't they would be so much more expensive
  • kshahkshah 2y ago
    Don’t care. One or the other not those figure way a way to make it work. I’m furious when I pay for add free and I still am subject to ads.
  • ksec 2y ago
    This feels such a breath of fresh air, especially being the top comment and coming from a 2009 account. >This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it. Ads is evil has been a thing on HN for a very very long time.
    • shortformblog 2y ago
      It’s because I’m a nerd with a background in journalism, and have been around the realities of a lot of this stuff for a while.
      • ksec 2y ago
        Well at least HN is at the point where you could write it out and not get any personal attack. So things are improving. In 2016 - 2020 it wouldn't even be upvoted in the first place. I also dont think you need to be in journalism to understand the business case around it. People just need to understand business, or i.e the realities. But despite the swing back to somewhat moderate discussions, HN's pro business stance have been on the decline from the start and shows no kind of recovering. So please continue to chime in when you can. It certainly help to balance the dynamics of discussion.
    • wat10000 2y ago
      Ads is evil has been a human thing for many times longer. Everybody hates them. At best, some accept ads as a necessary evil. It’s a dire combination: tremendously irritating and adding absolutely zero value to the world.
  • ghaff 2y ago
    As I recall, newspaper subscriptions basically paid for the distribution cost of physical copies. Someone like the New York Times still has ads for digital subscribers but they're not crazy pop-ups all over the place. I'd probably prefer they weren't there but they don't really detract from my reading experience. I get that some people vehemently hate ads and most marketing.
  • gizmo 2y ago
    One way to describe reality is to argue that media organizations like Vox can't survive if they don't show ads to their paid subscribers. Another way to describe reality is that people can choose to subscribe to various substacks or newsletters instead. On those platforms subscribers get zero ads, they get more in depth and more thoughtful articles, and because the system has much less overhead modest subscription revenue is sufficient. Vox also does video reviews, but then again, there are also many high quality tech youtubers. Vox certainly has the right to charge for a subscription and then serve the subscribers ads. And people have a right to walk away from a bad deal. Vox could disappear tomorrow at no great loss to society. We might like some of the reporting Vox does, but we don't need it. Vox media has raised about 450m (according to the first google result). Modest profitability is not enough for Vox Media because they need to secure a significant exit for their investors. This puts them at odds with their readers and subscribers. Not that laudable if you ask me. They made a bet they were going to disrupt traditional media and become a new great media platform. But now it looks like Vox itself is getting disrupted. Like newspapers of old clinging to a business model that no longer exists.
    • LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
      Well put. Though I couldn't care less about 'Fox noise', I'm doing that subscription of individuals, sometimes, though reluctantly because the methods of payment suck from my POV.
  • nltatsy 2y ago
    The difference is that newspapers had tasteful ads. I didn't mind seeing a Rolex or an expensive perfume, exquisitely photographed, in the Financial Times. Most of the Internet ads are medical issues, financial scams, weight loss scams etc. Most of these are accompanied by disgusting pictures. These ads combine the worst of classic Email spam and the yellow press. Give me better ads and I might switch off the adblocker. I'd even tolerate a banner Coca Cola ad if done tastefully and if it is the only ad on the page.
    • marcosdumay 2y ago
      > I might switch off the adblocker There's a high likelihood that your adblocker won't be able to block those anyway. But no, you probably won't switch it off. That's because you can only know the ad quality after you've been exposed to them, and after your computer has run their code, and after you've faced the risk of them maintaining the universal, persistent eavesdrop on your life.
  • Tade0 2y ago
    > It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user. But I don't want to pay less. I want my data to not be sold to the highest bidder, that's all. As it stands there's no option for people like me other than not subscribing. This is very much like the situation with smartphones these days: they cost less because you get a bunch of bloatware that you can't uninstall. I don't want that on my device, so I went with an offering deemed "overpriced" because it has less of such crap than others and thus costs about $250 more. Ideally it should be zero, but that's the best I could get.
    • conductr 2y ago
      The fact is people like you are in the minority and there’s no reason for a company to ever even entertain modifications to their product/service to cater to your wants This might seem common on HN but IRL people don’t give much attention to ad related privacy and are probably much more concerned with the fact they have to fork over a CC and a few bucks
    • grahamj 2y ago
      > I want my data to not be sold to the highest bidder, that's all. sigh I wish this was easier to achieve. But at least in the case of The Verge the sub removes third party ads so it should increase privacy even if it doesn't remove all the ads.
  • dghughes 2y ago
    > That’s why newspapers had classified ads, I don't recall in the past a company needing my identity required or be tracked just because I bought a newspaper. I pay the $1 for the newspaper and no more interaction or relationship after that. Ads are OK but why do all the ad companies need to track me and know my movements and just to show me an ad? It's basically malware, stalking. Ads are zero advantage to me the consumer for what I lose in privacy.
    • fragmede 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • WickyNilliams 2y ago
        > What am I losing..? An ever increasing amount of privacy. The ad industry will never be satisfied with the amount of data they collect now. They will always want more. This insatiable appetite for tracking and data represents a slow erosion of our privacy. Building unimaginable surveillance machinery for what? So that I might buy something online once every few years? It's casting an extremely large net to catch extremely small fries. The means do not justify the ends. I think relevant, contextual ads are the best alternative. I'm more likely to eg buy something related to what I'm reading than I am to buy a mattress advertised to me across a million websites (a mattress that I've probably already bought I should add!). That doesn't require intense tracking and surveillance across the web. It just requires understanding the context in which the ads are placed. And it's essentially how marketing worked prior to digital advertising
        • LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
          > If I'm trying to sell men's shampoo I wouldn't want to waste money putting ads for it in a women's magazine. Maybe women want to groom their men really good? Including hairs?
  • bogwog 2y ago
    > miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. Why would I, as a consumer, compromise on what I want to make some MBA's life easier? That almost sounds like corporate welfare. Businesses sign up to take risks the moment they're created. A news organization doesn't need to be in business. There is nothing unjust or morally wrong with letting a business shutdown because they couldn't figure out a sustainable way to be profitable (assuming for sake of argument that most people don't subscribe due to the ads, which idk if that would really happen). > This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it. The OP is a customer of the Verge who is rejecting their offer for a new subscription service they don't like. That's called "voting with your wallet", and its the free market working as intended.
    • knorker 2y ago
      Voting with our wallets got us infowars and two major fake news groups of media (mainstream and not). Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want. I just wish it were possible to pay $1 for an article whose headline sounds interesting, or someone recommended. Subscribe, even with a free trial? Pass. The free market is great. But we should not deny it when it leads to bad outcomes. If we do, then we're no better than those who say "real communism has never been tried".
      • bogwog 2y ago
        The fake news situation, like all (well, most at least) failures of the free market are solvable with regulations. I don't think any rational person would disagree that it should be illegal to deliberately spread misinformation and lies. We banned selling cigarettes to minors, we banned drugs, we (theoretically) banned monopolies, and we should be able to ban fake news. But it is currently a political weapon being wielded by a political party. I don't expect that problem will be solved any time soon, but it's not fair to blame that on capitalism. Politicians ruin everything no matter what economic system they're in. > Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want. But I don't want ad supported journalism!
  • dfxm12 2y ago
    you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side. Print ads don't get your personal data and sell them to who knows who. Internet ads have become synonymous with this practice. Comparing them to print ads without this consideration is disingenuous.
  • alexvitkov 2y ago
    This really doesn't add up to me. I don't have the numbers, but I would assume that: 1. A very small percentage of website visitors will end up paying for a subscription. 2. They make way less than $5 per user per month from ads. The money they'd lose by providing an ad-free experience to paying customers should be a rounding error. Removing ads will also increase conversion, but who knows whether or not that will be enough to offset the revenue lost. I don't particularly care about their "business reality" - if you're an online news outlet you're not paying the costs of printing and distribution - your expenses are just journalist salaries and the marginal costs of keeping a website running. If you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      2) is because of 1). They make way less than $5/user/month, but here's thousands of users to close that gap. So the paid users are a smaller slice than you'd guess at first blush. >if you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business. That's just American labor in a nutshell. if a jounralist is making full time national minimum wage ($7.25, 40 hours a week), that's very roughly $1000/month post tax. that very pooly paid jounalist needs 200 subcribers to sustain them. \ costs are going up, but readership and revenue is not. This doesn't end well for anyone. And yes, many businesses are dying right now. >I don't particularly care about their "business reality" if you don't care about them, I'm not sure why they'd care about your opinions on how they run.
  • adamtaylor_13 2y ago
    Reality and principles don't always align. There's a "rubber meets road" moment where you have to decide what your principles are worth. I do not believe there was any rationale behind this pricing decision. I believe it is pure greed, and you're not likely to change my mind. I clutch my principles rather tightly, especially in cases like this. I will never pay for a streaming service whose first payment tier is "less ads", nor will I ever pay for a _newspaper_ of all things whose first premium tier is "less ads". I don't think double-dipping is laudable, and I don't think we should encourage it. Their (in)ability to fund their business isn't my problem, frankly.
  • freetinker 2y ago
    From a UX perspective, there’s really no way to measure “fewer ads”. Customers with subscriptions aren’t doing A/B tests and feeling satisfied that they’re seeing fewer ads. They’re seeing ads. Still a subpar experience. The “fewer ads” narrative exists on some MBA/bean counter’s spreadsheet. This should be an absolute benefit, not a relative benefit. Who’s to say the number of ads won’t ratchet up in the future? Almost surely will. Let’s say a subscription customer sees 50 ads today vs 100 a non-subscription customer sees. Tomorrow, they 2x that – sub customer sees 100 ads, non-sub customer sees 200. Does a sub customer derive smug satisfaction that they’re seeing fewer ads than a non-sub customer? How would one even know? They’re just seeing ads. The correct amount of ads for a subscription service (from a UX perspective) is zero.
    • hombre_fatal 2y ago
      1. The Verge's post says they are paywalling some of their content, so the offering seems more than just reduced ads. 2. People do notice when $7/mo is cheaper than $16/mo which is possible because there are still ads.
  • wat10000 2y ago
    There are plenty of subscription services out there that are ad-free. YouTube does it, I think all the various music streaming services do it, most if not all of the video streaming services have an ad-free tier. Beyond the media realm, my cell phone service doesn’t package ads with my monthly subscription, nor my home internet service. I could go on. What narrow idea of “a media business” must have ads even when you pay, and why do they have to be different from everything else?
    • adamc 2y ago
      Youtube does not do it. You stop seeing youtube's ads, which are obnoxious, but you still see the actual content author's ads.
      • wat10000 2y ago
        YouTube shows you what you ask it to show you. The vast majority of content has no ads. You can easily go forever without seeing one. That’s like saying Verizon has ads because I see ads on the internet.
        • adamc 2y ago
          Not my experience of youtube at all, but I primarily watch longer, more analytical content. It almost all has ads.
        • johnnyanmac 2y ago
          >The vast majority of content has no ads. you're only pedantically correct in the sense that most videos on the internet have under 10 views. Practically speaking, I'd be surprised if you can watch any video from a content creator with > 10k subs and not have some sort of sponsored segment.
      • wkat4242 2y ago
        Yeah this is the problem. You still need sponsorblock to make it watchable even if you subscribe. Then you might as well go the full way and adblock. If YouTube would force content creators to upload sponsor-free versions for premium subscribers, the subscription might actually be worth it.
  • hmmm-i-wonder 2y ago
    >Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. And the never ending struggle to increase/maintain subscriptions for some companies probably has something to do with that. For me personally, and I expect a not insignificant portion of users, paying for a subscription is primarily to remove advertising completely. Anything else means its not worth subscribing, so not offering that level of option rules us out as customers. I've spent a minor amount of time and energy reducing the amount of advertising I see, from (pre-streaming) downloading shows I already pay for legal access to with commercials removed with automated systems, to being an early adopter of streaming services and dropping cable, locally running pi-hole on top of ad-blockers and using VPN's, privacy focused browsers etc. The payoff has been immense for my family, to the point watching TV in other locations and being bombarded by advertising is jarring and uncomfortable, and the manipulation tactics become more obvious and gross the less you inundate yourself with them. Obviously you can't get away from all advertising, indirect, product placement etc. is everywhere, but I found a significant improvement in quality of life. I would also make the argument that social media engagement hacking at its root traces to advertising and we blame social media for the problems when advertising was the true problem. Advertising as a revenue stream results in trying to optimize and improve engagement, often by gamifying or moving towards sensationalism to drive up numbers to increase revenue, most of which is negative for the user and little actually positive.
    • grahamj 2y ago
      > For me personally, and I expect a not insignificant portion of users, paying for a subscription is primarily to remove advertising completely. I also put quite a bit of effort into removing ads from my and my family's eyeballs. I hate them. But because of that I already don't see ads on The Verge so for me a sub isn't about removing ads at all. I'll sub to support the work and whatever other perks come along with it (full-text RSS for one)
  • tootie 2y ago
    Yeah the classifieds business was huge for local news and Craigslist murdered it. Now ad revenue is declining. The result is subscriptions and paywalls.
  • adamc 2y ago
    They capture the reality (for many of us). I stopped subscribing to the NYT because they insisted on showing subscribers ads. They can do what they want, but I don't really care if businesses that rely on ads go bankrupt.
  • barnabee 2y ago
    The only laudable move is to reject all forms of tracking and targeted ads as a matter of principle and make sure there’s at least one completely ad-free option. There are few (if any) media businesses I care about enough to compromise on my requirements just to help them stay in business. Certainly not The Verge. As for me, I’m happy to either not see the content or use workarounds that let me see it for free with no ads, i.e. ad-blockers + reader mode and services like archive.ph.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • ary 2y ago
    The realities of the news business are fine, but the realities of the adtech business are not. As a consumer I very much want profiling and targeting to die off. Were the ads run on the web not built on a separate business that attempts to violate the reasonable sense of privacy the average person expects, and didn’t attempt to warp consumer’s expectations of privacy, I think there would be less objections.
• DavideNL 2y ago
  Even though i hate ads as much as most commenters… as advocate of the devil: This black-and-white thinking [1] is also bad. What’s the point if they show 0 ads, subscription price will then have to go up to cover the costs, and nobody signs up so they go bankrupt. They also have to be able to survive in the current world/reality, even if they WANT to show 0 ads. My point is: we don’t have any insight in their financial data/revenue/costs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
  • prmoustache 2y ago
    > They also have to be able to survive in the current world/reality, even if they WANT to show 0 ads. They have to? I don't think. If you can't offer a service the ethical way, maybe you shouldn't offer that service. Your kind of reasonning also is the reason these medias can't survive without ads. If we banned ads altogether, subscription prices would go higher but decent publications would be able to serve content without ads because they would not face unfair competition from unethical ones. People would still subscribe to interesting content. Maybe they would not subscribe to 10 different publications but only 2 or 3. But the quality of the content of those publications would be higher because their real customers would be the paying users, not the ad industry. Here we are in that weird state where the real customers are not the people subscribing to the service. Paying users are merely addicts that online medias sell to advertisers. So the content served is only meant to redirect users to ads through many kind of psychological manipulation.
    • DavideNL 2y ago
      > I don't think well they are free to offer it - and i can understand they do this to try to build their service/company. If people don't LIKE this, of course that's fine too, then just don't subscribe / use it. I think the criticism of OP is a little too much black/white thinking.
• whereismyacc 2y ago
  My biggest frustration right now is paying for Spotify and not getting any ads in music, but getting ads in podcasts. Not even just the ads embedded in the audio stream, which I can understand Spotify can't do much about, but Spotify actively injecting more ads into the shows.
  • deergomoo 2y ago
    Please do yourself a favour and download a proper podcast client. There are so many great ones out there, they’re often from independent developers, and podcasts are one of the last parts of the modern web that actually work how the web was supposed to work: decentralised* and open access. Don’t let media giants turn it into a closed system. * the elephant in the room being that the iTunes podcast directory is the de-facto standard index. It’s freely available, but the fact that it could be withdrawn at any time is not great. Projects like https://podcastindex.org/ https://podcastindex.org/ are trying to address that.
    • whereismyacc 2y ago
      I agree with you, I've just struggled to find one that worked well on Android but also synced to desktop. I'm on iOS now, so maybe it's time to look through the options again.
• Gehinnn 2y ago
  I'd pay a lot per month if I wouldn't have to care which subscriptions I need and could just access everything. I wouldn't pay a lot for any particular service that I'd just use only once or twice per month. I only ever read "the verge" if it is linked from HN or somewhere else. A subscription just doesn't make sense for me.
• lajosbacs 2y ago
  Agree fully. I got livid when traveling in a business class long haul flight with the Lufthansa Group, and was forced to watch ads on the screen in front of me. No option to turn the screen of (which was later enabled, during the flight). It's several years and I still remember this.
• newsclues 2y ago
  Rather than focus on zero ads, I would like to see better ads and better ad targeting. Lately many ads, are for things I HATE, and advertising them makes me not want to watch the content I really want, if there is ads I actively hate. Government ads in particular I find offensive. But it seems wild that the ad targeting is so bad. I ride a bike and am anti-car, so stop giving me ads for cars and trucks, I will never buy. I don't think Ive had a video game ad in years, but outside of food and rent, games and tech is one of my biggest budget line items. Why is advertising so bad? They spend too much money on the technology and data to target consumers.
• xfz 2y ago
  It's a great move by the Verge but I agree with the article that it doesn't go far enough. Why not offer a premium ad-free tier? For me, viewing web ads is non negotiable (print ads were much more manageable and didn't prevent me from enjoying the content). However I only view about 4-6 Verge articles per month so I'll see how it plays out. If the best stuff goes behind a paywall then I can't justify subscribing, and nor do I want to hand over personal data to every site I read occasionally (for several reasons). I've always wondered why publishers can't follow the Spotify or Netflix model for at least some of their content? This does also raise the uncomfortable question of how much the content is worth. Yes they have some exclusives and unique content but in other areas if I stopped reading it I'd have another hundred reviews of the latest Apple products to choose from, and Reddit is much more realistic (albeit noisy) about the Sonos debacle than The Verge. The article about undersea cables was good though.
• drawkward 2y ago
  Advertising is a virus that eventually consumes all ecosystems.
• paulcole 2y ago
  > The correct amount of ads for a publication that’s directly supported is zero You are not the only one directly supporting the publication > you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side Yes they do. You get the option to cancel.
• brap 2y ago
  Lots of ads = zero $ No ads = $$$ Does it never make sense to have something in between?
• jonplackett 2y ago
  Amazon prime video is also double dipping now. So annoying! And they have the cheek to say ‘your program will resume uninterrupted’. You literally just interrupted it! It’s like slapping someone in the face and then smugly exclaiming ‘and that’s the end of the slaps - you must be so happy, right?’
• galfarragem 2y ago
  The correct amount of ads is one. As an indie web developer, after trying many "ad policies", I believe the sweet spot (not the revenue optimal spot!) is one ad, clear, not intrusive and highly targetted to your audience. This ad will not annoy readers and will keep your motivation at a decent level (instead of a zero ads policy). My take: https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor
  • toxik 2y ago
    1. not annoy no one 2. neg (annoy no one) 3. neg (neg exist x : annoy(x)) 4. exist x : annoy(x) 5. annoy someone
    • subjectsigma 2y ago
      It’s almost like colloquial human language != math. Everyone understands what he means
    • nph278 2y ago
      Oh?
  • amelius 2y ago
    > and highly targeted to your audience Just to be clear, are you ruling out user-tracking here, and is this ad meant to be entirely context-based?
    • galfarragem 2y ago
      You're right, "highly targeted" is not the correct expression. What I mean is: know who your average reader is and give that information to your potential sponsor. No specific user-tracking at all.
  • prepend 2y ago
    Sorry, if I’m paying you for a service I want no ads. I don’t like ads. They don’t help me. They make my life harder. I’ll tolerate them in some situations, but if I pay you then I should not see an ad. If you want to show an ad, that you choice. I think it’s anti-user and I won’t buy your thing.
• deleted 2y ago
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• ksec 2y ago
  >you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side. 1. Placing an Ad on the page has absolutely nothing to do with selling your data. Just like a magazine decide to place a print ad. 2. Ad can sometimes function as news. New Product launch, marketing notes. etc. 3. Even an internet targeting Ad, which the author is likely referring to, does not necessarily sell your data to advertiser. Your data, however may likely be gathered elsewhere that the Ad company uses for targeting. 4. There is no such thing as double dip when your data isn't even involved. Which means you are only paying once. And not twice. 5. Placing an Ad, an additional revenue generation function on the site is not double dipping. Even if the ad is inside your subscription. You are free to cancel or sue if the subscription originally promised zero ads. 6. The correct amount of ads is when Ad does not feel like an ad. The answer is very likely to be non zero but minimal. Final Note: I Notice HN has swing back enough to allow decent discussions on these sort of topics. Ads were nearly forbidden to talk about from 2013 - 2023.
  • subjectsigma 2y ago
    I’m convinced you have no idea what common terms like “double dipping”, “absolutely nothing”, or “news” mean. Which honestly seems pretty on brand for someone supporting advertising
  • kmeisthax 2y ago
    1. Advertisements without data are worthless. At a minimum you need a mechanism to combat click fraud and that requires detailed profiles and tracking on users to determine the economic value of those users. 2. This is a vanishingly small subset of ads. 3. While advertisers do not directly receive your data, you do still get tracked. Furthermore, the infrastructure undergirding ad tracking is comically easy to appropriate for law enforcement and national security purposes; the CIA buys a shitton of ad tracking data from data brokers. Furthermore, targeted advertising, even if used as intended without any law enforcement spook tracking nonsense, is still a nightmare because it allows fraudsters to target ads directly to their most optimal marks. Think about how good Facebook is at showing your grandpa a bunch of fake ads for fraudulent products and scams. Scamming online got a lot more efficient with targeted advertising. 4. The double dip still exists even if data isn't tracked because I don't want to see ads. I am paying to remove them. In fact, I shouldn't even have to pay to remove the tracking; that should be free, and under EU law it is free. 5. A lot of subscriptions actually were sold as no ads, because that's the thing people want. 6. The correct amount of ads are zero. Because ads are not information, they are attacks, in the same way that social engineering is an attack.
• deleted 2y ago
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• psychoslave 2y ago
  So, like Mediapart does? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediapart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediapart
• phendrenad2 2y ago
  This is like saying "if I pay for steak, it had better be wagyu".
• efields 2y ago
  The last 100 years or so of media will tell you that you will get ads in addition to the content you’re paying for.
• Brett_Riverboat 2y ago
  There are people in here defending ads while I'm over here in the Bill Hicks camp.
• imzadi 2y ago
  I have no issue paying for the content, but I don't want to have to give over all of my personal data to do it. I want to be able to have an experience analogous to walking into 7-11 and buying a newspaper with cash. I'm tired of everyone everywhere thinking they are entitled to my personal info because I am a consumer of their product.
• deleted 2y ago
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• stuffbyspencer 2y ago
  I hate that we still are talking about this. Ads suck, and there's already a better way to do things. Micropayments are the answer. Everyone on the internet pays a small monthly fee, say $5/month (ideally this would just be integrated into your internet bill), and every piece of content you view streams tiny amounts of that fee to whatever content you are viewing. The actual amount sent is based on your monthly usage, and never goes over that $5/month cap. People who browse less send more. A webextension tested this years ago & it was sweet. Businesses could be sustainable on there own, no ads, no data selling. If you have viewers, you have currency. But, it wasn't a seamless experience so it didn't take off. Make no mistake: This is the best possible way to fund the open web, which is exactly why Google pretends it doesn't exist. If chrome had this feature built in & people never had to think about it, ads would drop to near 0 incredibly fast. Google says no. We are doomed to have an enshittified web because the powers that be won't integrate sustainable funding mechanisms.
  • homebrewer 2y ago
    It's a very "first world" problem. Maybe it would work in the few rich countries the world has, but as someone who lives in a region with the median monthly income of under $300, I can assure you it would be difficult to extract anything over $0 from most of our population because people don't have money to spend on things that can be obtained for free. Many people I know have literally zero cash by the end of the month after all necessities are taken care of. AFAIU, most of the world's population lives something like that, a bit better here, a bit worse there, but still.
    • stuffbyspencer 2y ago
      This isn't an issue. You either have the ability to pay the monthly fee (which would probably enable cheaper subscriptions, saving people money), or you can't afford it & you'll experience the same web experience you have now. For people in lower economic areas, their monthly fee would be relative to the median income (hence the "integrated into your internet bill"). What I'm saying is we have a solution that is being suppressed. It would fix the internet for 80% of people, and the other 20% would experience no downside.
• H1Supreme 2y ago
  I get the anti-advertisement sentiment, and when it comes to most every flavor of online advertising, I agree. But, once upon a time, ads blended seamlessly with the content. Or, at least had the potential to. I used to subscribe to XLR8R and Thrasher magazine. The ads were tailored to the content of the magazine (electronic music and skateboarding, respectively). Thus, completely relevant to the interest of the reader. I'm not sure how folks would emulate that online without heavy curation. But, I can't remember feeling any negativity towards ads while reading those magazines. If anything I was glad to be informed about a new skate video or music release.
• neycoda 2y ago
  I wonder how much it costs The Verge to run their platform, and how much they need subscribers to pay to stay profitable. The fence part is that when we were paying for newspaper subscriptions, they still were chock full of ads. It's just that they tended to be relegated to entire pages or sections that weren't obnoxious. Maybe there's something different about how we peruse online content vs paper that makes us annoyed at digital and not paper ads... I will say that website ads have become so obtrusive and in the way and distracting that I'm just turned off to them.
• serenawales00 2y ago
  [dead]
• ngcc_hk 2y ago
  Mix not either-or. Zero is a bad strategy even for evil.
• mikestaub 2y ago
  The problem is that eventually, AI will get so powerful that it will block all ads on the client without anyway of detecting it. Adblockers today are very basic and have no understanding of the mind that is consuming the content. We must adapt and create new business models.
• OrladoWright 2y ago
  [flagged]
• dmvjs 2y ago
  cable TV did this for a long enough time that people are used to it
• paxys 2y ago
  Blame consumers for this. If a company sells a service for $10/mo ad-free and $9/mo completely loaded with ads, most people will pick the latter plan. Why won't they offer it then?
  • cmonreally123 2y ago
    Because if they did the 9$ ads would plummet in price paid to the platform because it implies to the advertisers the consumers have no purchasing capability and may be price sensitive or else they would shell out the extra dollar. If they don't offer it and still sell adds they can demand advertisers pay the premium as the consumer has disposable income to buy the service and is likely price insensitive since they are now paying for something that was free.
    • Analemma_ 2y ago
      Is this actually true? It's one of those bits of "telephone wisdom" I've heard passed from commenter to commenter on Hacker News (and Slashdot before that) for as long as I can remember, but nobody ever seems to have a primary source for it, it's always been a "just trust me" bit of knowledge.
      • otabdeveloper4 2y ago
        It isn't true. Advertisers think in broad social groups. ("25-44 women with kids", "men with college education", etc.)
  • sabbaticaldev 2y ago
    because someone will offer the same for 9usd without ads, hopefully
  • jknoepfler 2y ago
    Citation? That is absolutely not true for me, and strikes me as obviously false, but I'm willing to be wrong.
• eviks 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • khana 2y ago
    [dead]
• captn3m0 2y ago
  I now have disabled JS on Verge as a result (using uBO), because the site does a “Quick Flash of Content” that disappears immediately.
• danpalmer 2y ago
  > The correct amount of ads for a publication that’s directly supported is zero. I basically agree with this sentiment, but one place where it can be a tricky balance (not saying that's the case here!) is "native advertising". For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold. Which bits of this are ads? Well the behind the scenes post and interview could theoretically have been produced anyway, they're within the scope of the site, but in this case they weren't prioritised, certainly not for launch day, it was only by the whole collaboration being paid for that they got made. Are they ads? Yes they are ads. How would a loyal subscriber feel about those parts being hidden from them though? I imagine they would be miffed about that. Native advertising like this has a whole spectrum of quality and the worst native ads are very explicitly ads that have no value to typical readers. However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want. How do you resolve this? No idea. If I were paying I'd want to see that content assuming it's good quality. Others would not on the basis of bias or a more philosophical opposition to ads.
  • wodenokoto 2y ago
    Also fashion magazines would be boring without all the stylish fashion ads.
    • toast0 2y ago
      Computer Shopper with no ads wouldn't have been worth buying either.
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Ads in a magazine that's explicitly just an ad bundle, that you intentionally buy in order to browse those ads, are fine.
• nox101 2y ago
  Disagree. Would I like zero ads? Yes, do I think a company should be required to offer a zero ad service for money? No. If you don't like that they have ads even if you pay then don't use the service. People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for them) that are full of ads. International flights have ads on their entertainment. Flights by some airlines I've been on have ads just after the safety instructions. I've been on flights where they have ads for shopping while on the plane.
  • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    > People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. Those ads are far less egregious than the kinds of online ads we're discussing. If online ads were the equivalent—static, hosted on the same site, free of data collection—then not only would the experience be much more pleasant, we wouldn't even be able to block them.
    • quectophoton 2y ago
      Like those 88x31 ads^Waffiliate links. I have never been bothered by them. If anything, I actually stop to look at them and maybe click one or two. The funny gifs get a click just for being funny. Nowadays they are rare outside places like Neocities, but it is true that I don't know of anyone who has gone out of their way to add an adblock rule to block those.
  • akoboldfrying 2y ago
    Hard agree (with you, that is). It's just another case of people confusing "What I personally want" with "What actually leads to a sustainable business/ecosystem". I honestly think people get confused about this because we are so accustomed to getting what we want.
    • manuelmoreale 2y ago
      I honestly do not understand this point. If they offer me a 50/year sub that is not sustainable without extra ads then adjust the fucking price. Set a price to make it sustainable. Offer a 50/year plan with limited ads and a 200/year with no ads and be upfront about why those are the costs. It’s not rocket science.
• vivzkestrel 2y ago
  dude that article calendar is sick! I wish all the bloggers actually did something like that. I dont want to scroll 400 pages into the archive to find something interesting i may have missed
• meta_x_ai 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • BLKNSLVR 2y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is. Is the privileged dude the one who coded the advertising system, or managed the team, or made the decision to use advertising for additional monetisation and got promoted for it? Do they hate ads too, despite being that guy?
  • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
    >You can’t complain about anything that’s wrong with society because you aren’t desperately poor the desperately poor conveniently don’t have much time to critique society, so i guess we can’t do anything huh.
• tempestn 2y ago
  People (at least used to) pay for magazines and newspapers, which have also been partially supported by ads forever. Perhaps a more sustainable balance would be only first-party ads (ie no individualized tracking) for paying subscribers?
  • RobotToaster 2y ago
    I think the important part is that you could choose to look at those or not. For all it's faults facebook advertising is similar, you can just scroll past an advert if it's of no interest. I don't find their adverts overly annoying.
  • acosmism 2y ago
    i enjoyed full spread magazine ads no matter what the content. feels like history but you are on to something
  • eru 2y ago
    Yes. I also notice that ads in magazines and newspapers aren't nearly as annoying as ads on a screen, so I don't mind them as much.
    • blitzar 2y ago
      newspaper and magazine ads didn't block the page for 1 minute before allowing you to read the headlines on the page, then repeat the process every time you turned the page. they felt less intrusive because they were
      • eru 2y ago
        Classic web banner ads don't block the page for one minute either, but to me they are still more annoying than print ads.
  • entropyie 2y ago
    Yes I enjoyed and used the ads in print computer magazines in the 90s. I think having highly relevant, content based static inline first party ads is tolerable and occasionally useful. Especially for specialist hardware / software. 3rd party ads that track you across the Internet are just evil and I will block them forever. As others have said, I would probably pay €50 per month for news, but not to a handful of mainstream sites. I need broad diverse coverage. Some micro transaction system is needed.
• janalsncm 2y ago
  That’s why I unsubscribed to NYT. The ads weren’t just annoying, they were distracting. Shoved directly between paragraphs and impossible to hide. When I canceled, I told them why.
• raluk 2y ago
  Paying subscribers are the best customers to advertise to.
• gherkinnn 2y ago
  Yes, yes. I agree with the author. More importantly though, that is one fine website he's running.
  • manuelmoreale 2y ago
    Appreciated <3
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. Hence the cuts. Same on Youtube. I watch a lot of content there while maintaining zero interruptions by ads. Works great and so far I've never had to pay Youtube to not see ads. I do pay for Amazon Prime. Occasionally. I usually reactivate my subscription when I need it either because I'm ordering stuff or because they have something I want to see. I'll cancel soon again because I don't currently need them and I once again exhausted their limited offerings. Forced ad watching makes it less likely I come back. I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. It's not sustainable for me to do pay for all the websites I visit. And me randomly paying only some tiny subset of them doesn't make any sense to me. I'd need some prioritized list. And it would have to be a very short one because I'm simply not rich enough to maintain lots of multi dollar subscriptions per month. And I also don't want to micromanage a lot of payments and subscriptions. The Verge, which was mentioned in the article is a good example of a website that I don't value enough to get anywhere near that short list. They have a lot of competition reporting more or less similar stuff that I wouldn't miss them. In fact, I can't recall reading anything by them lately. I guess not a lot of their stuff makes it to the HN front page. Probably because it's just not that interesting.
  • the_clarence 2y ago
    Unfortunately doesn't work on iPhone
  • montroser 2y ago
    It's a funny anecdote and cool hack to be able to skip streaming video ads, but it's also kinda entitled to leech the content and shift the burden onto everyone else.
  • redserk 2y ago
    Regarding The Verge, I wish something like Apple News existed in this space. I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels. I just can't justify paying $X/mo individually to 20 different sources. Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
• vasco 2y ago
  Don't work in ads, never did, don't make money from them. I don't mind ads one bit, except video unskipable ones. I find stuff to buy there all the time, or discover new tools, sometimes I'll buy an equivalent thing years later that I remember I found first in an ad. If I want to research competitors to something, I just google the something and click the ads. And I also like that I like something that makes so many people pissed off.
  • tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    Don't feel you are unique, there are a lot of you out there and Google et all love you.
    • vasco 2y ago
      I made no claims of uniqueness!
  • blitzar 2y ago
    I personally like the remarketting ones the most. I needed a washing machine - so I went online and purchased one from a large retailer. For the next month all I got was ads for washing machines - many from the retailer I purchased from. It has made me want to not reset my browser so frequently.
• unsungNovelty 2y ago
  This is a bad take. Ads are not the problem. Behavioural ads with suriveillance and data economy is. Static ads or contextual ads are the answer. Some of the best examples I can think of on the top of my head is duckduckgo.com and https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blockers and are more aware of privacy. But now, not only don't they not provide content for free, but also make you pay and collect your data as well. - Go to most of the major news sites in firefox. - Install noscript extension - See the bizillion scripts that loads. Note: You can load all these scripts indirectly with google tag manager or platforms like cloudflare zaraz etc. So you won't even directly see the analytics script that is loaded in a website. Just google tag manager etc. Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right. Behavioural ads makes it the worst it the problem we should be solving. It makes sense from the business POV as well. You cut the middlemen like facebook and google and get paid premium directly. You curate the ads for your product/website. People want to just plug in an api call and generate money. That won't fly anymore with users being aware.
  • the_gipsy 2y ago
    Ads are always bad. Poor or unemployed people get bombarded with lifestyle messages on a daily basis. That is psychologically damaging.
    • unsungNovelty 2y ago
      Not when it is done right. Most or all podcasts and youtube channels are perfect examples of static ads. I have interacted and signed up with things cos I find them useful. Imagine, the entire podcast industry and youtube channels are dependent on static ads to make revenue. And people say it doesn't work. Static / Contextual ads means: - no data collection needed - More money to websites/apps cos they are removing google and facebook as middlemen. - Can be privacy friendly - Provide free content means more reach - Lesser scams, ad malwares and other scammy things Behavioural ads with data economy over api's became mainstream because we had to directly make relationships with people who want to show ads in our website and apps. It's time consuming and you will need a worthwhile product to show and pitch your website/ads as an ideal place for them to show their ads to. And you cannot just create a bunch of pages and setup google ads and be done with it. Delegating this has been bad for the websites/apps and for users equally. The only winners have been google, facebook like players. I have been writing an article on this topic for months. I will finish and hopefully I can make a more articulated case then.
• achempion 2y ago
  The Economist has the same problem, they sell you a subscription and then embed animated ads into the content
  • mrweasel 2y ago
    See, that is why I get the paper version. It still has ads, but they are easily skipped and I can't afford anything they advertise anyway.
• renewiltord 2y ago
  Personally, I think the correct amount of subscription fee is zero and ads should be zero too. It’s unethical to charge for information you have that could improve someone else’s life. It’s near zero marginal cost to give it to them and you’re just going to hoard it? We should ban paying for information at the federal level to prevent this horrific practice.
  • manuelmoreale 2y ago
    And journalists and the people running the news sites are going to be paid with what? With thoughts and prayers?
    • renewiltord 2y ago
      Maybe it’s not a business that needs to exist. Not every business has to be viable. Society existed before widespread news orgs.
• alexalx666 2y ago
  The Verge staff might have an inflated idea of how many people are truly interested in what they have to say, its no ft.com
  • blitzar 2y ago
    Alternative theory; they know nobody is going to pay them but without a premium tier you cant go all in on monetising the free tier.
• teekert 2y ago
  It’s not though. Any party is free to shape their offering the way they want. And any other party is free to accept the deal, or not. That said, paying AND >0 ads (or tracking) is also a no no for me.
• asimpletune 2y ago
  One big issue is that even if they take ads out they make whole articles ads. I would pay a fair amount for an ad free news source that has a first rate editorial staff that simply prints the news.
• 9o1d 2y ago
  Dear friends! I am a simple programmer. I had a website in 2009, where I posted useful articles. I had a small ad block, which allowed me to pay for my expenses. When users began to install ad blockers en masse, the number of ad views dropped significantly and I had to close the site. Now I have no job and I am very poor. I want to thank those people who not only do not want to pay for good service, but also install ad blockers. Now you say that there is nothing to find on the Internet. Who will do something for you for free? Maybe a taxi driver will take you for free?
  • int_19h 2y ago
    I'm willing to pay for valuable content and services. I pay for online search and email, for example. I'm not willing to look at ads. If the product or service that you have to offer is not sustainable without ads, I'm perfectly fine with it not existing at all.
  • kiba 2y ago
    If the content is just a bunch of text, isn't that just ten dollars a month?
    • robin_reala 2y ago
      OP’s talking about the time taken to write the text, not the hosting costs (which would be zero on GH Pages or something like that).
      • 9o1d 2y ago
        Indeed, in 2009 I used free hosting. However, my articles were so interesting that in one week my site was visited by about a million people. Because of the huge traffic, I was kicked out of free hosting. Then I rented a VPS. Then I was still a big opponent of advertising, like all of you, and I was naive. I was an idealist. But when I tried to sell access to the site for sending SMS messages costing 10 cents, no one wanted to buy them, only one person out of a hundred. When I installed advertising, this ratio increased to fifty out of a hundred, that is, my income increased 50 times. Then I understood the benefit of advertising. I received about $ 100 a month from advertising. Then the income from advertising dropped significantly due to the mass installation of ad blockers. Now I use Firefox without any plugins. I honestly watch ads. This is the decision of a responsible adult. Because I understand that without advertising there will not be those wonderful sites that are still left.
• altairprime 2y ago
  I don’t get why advertisers still advertise. I select brands either by nearest retail box store or by dedicated research into comparative qualities. I don’t watch or listen to any advertising-supported video or audio media. I don’t use personalized or targeted promotion codes. I don’t ever knowingly click on banner/interstitial ads of any kind. Am I still in the minority or has my behavior become more prevalent? (Note that I’m not talking about adblockers; I’m talking about refusing to interact with ads, whether due to no adblocker or due to not being caught for whatever reason.)
  • theshackleford 2y ago
    > I don’t get why advertisers still advertise. Because it works, and because as usual, HN users confuse their personal experience for being that of the masses when nothing could be further from the truth.
  • 0wis 2y ago
    Even if you do not use the ads you see to make your decision, they influence you. I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route. Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.
  • Mindwipe 2y ago
    You are not even in a 0.00001% group, never mind approaching "prevalent".
    • altairprime 2y ago
      Damn. Well, thanks for the confirmation. I wish I could teach other people how to evict ads from short-term memory before they get written to long-term and how to create mental blind spots the size of billboards and banner ads. Apparently it’s an invaluable pair of skills :(
  • BiteCode_dev 2y ago
    Because it works. Even on you.
• alkonaut 2y ago
  The correct amount of tracking ads at least. We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying. But then the transaction was between the publisher and the advertiser, and MY information wasn't sold. They were dumb ads. If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.
  • allan_s 2y ago
    This. I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible. BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience. So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making. If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.
  • Raed667 2y ago
    > We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better
    • alkonaut 2y ago
      Ads in a paid product might be annoying, but it's not secretly charging the customer and then also selling their information. Paying customers are also identified (logged in). So in theory you could pinpoint me even more with ads after I decided to be a paying customer.
    • akira2501 2y ago
      > do better Which is what? > just because that happened The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution. Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.
• TacticalCoder 2y ago
  X / Twitter does the same: the first paid tier only remove some ads, not all of them. And I don't think that's good. Now there's one way to pay to get way less ads: pay for an AI model and replace a huge percentage of your searches with searches inside the model. They're not bad at that. That's why many are saying that Google is (partially) in trouble with LLMs: wife and I definitely are searching less using search engines than we used too. Besides that I'm running a local DNS server with a brutal blocklist: nearly one million of wildcarded domains (unbound supports wildcards). I block entire TLDs too. Entire countries' IP blocks. Add uBlock origin to the mix and your life becomes pretty ad-free. I'm glad to pay a subscription for an AI model that doesn't serve me any ad. But I won't pay for something that serves me less ads, but still some ads. As simple as that. You want me to pay: serve me zero ad.
• marban 2y ago
  Look, I'm not an ad aficionado either, but if it weren't for ads, the lifestyle of a lot of people on HN would be dramatically different — particularly for those doling out unsolicited advice to publishers on running a sustainable media business in 2024.
  • account42 2y ago
    As long as those publishers are doling out unsolicited advice on what to buy and who to trust and what to believe (while hovering up all personal information they can), they don't really get to complain.
  • wiseowise 2y ago
    > but if it weren't for ads, the lifestyle of a lot of people on HN would be dramatically different I agree. My browsing experience would be much faster and less annoying.
  • manuelmoreale 2y ago
    > but if it weren't for ads, the lifestyle of a lot of people on HN would be dramatically different You say that as if that's a bad thing
• HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Advertising is fundamentally corrosive to society and should be outlawed with few and carefully tailored exceptions. Any business models that consequently fail, fail because their externalities to collective society are now priced in.
  • bogwog 2y ago
    I hate the modern advertising ecosystem, but ads themselves are not evil. We're just in a place where there is no limit to the what/when/where/how many. Without advertising, it would be really difficult to run a business. Back when Google was great, they kind of acted as an advertising police on the entire internet, keeping ads unobtrusive and negatively ranking sites with bad user experiences. That system worked pretty well back in the day (although definitely not perfect), and I think it gives a good model to start from if we as a society ever decide to try and fix this hellscape we're living in.
    • godshatter 2y ago
      In my view, the ads themselves are only slightly evil since they are designed to influence you subtly (well, sometimes subtly) into paying for something you probably don't want. Not a big deal, I have shields in place for that mentally. I wouldn't hate them so much if they didn't try to track you around the web and didn't sell your info to anyone with some loose change in their pockets. I never hated ads when we had full-page ads in magazines and you had to skip multiple pages of ads to get to the actual articles. But selling my data makes them too much money, so I do my best to never have them load on the internet.
    • account42 2y ago
      > Without advertising, it would be really difficult to run a business. It's difficult to run a business without advertising in a world full of advertising. If others can get to your customers before they find you then yes that's a problem. But all you get from paying to advertise is to get back to where you would have been without ads (assuming your competitors spend a similar amount).
  • Aerroon 2y ago
• portaouflop 2y ago
  That the precise reason I won’t even get the paid subscription of any service that also exists with ads - they will still get as much data as possible and sell it even if you pay the subscription. If there is no way to hide ads completely I won’t use your service full stop
• amelius 2y ago
  We live in democracies. Some of us don't want ads. So can we have X% of time when there are no ads? We can start with 1 month, e.g. ad-free February.
• Closi 2y ago
  Historically there have always been ads in paid news media (look at the newspapers, they have had ads in print since almost their inception) so I don’t think there is anything out of the ordinary here… I.e. for paid print media the ‘correct’ amount of ads is almost definitely non-zero from the publishers perspective. (Personally I’m not too bothered about ads in a paid online website as long as they aren’t excessive or intrusive but people may disagree and can vote with their wallets)
  • sangeeth96 2y ago
    Paid print media != digital/web. In latter, you can extract endless amount of data about your customers in realtime and ship it off wherever.
• solatic 2y ago
  How does a paywalled full-text RSS feed even work? Yeah, I get it, RSS itself can work with auth tokens. But I use a service like Feedly to maintain my RSS subscriptions, and managed RSS services will cache the response to a single RSS feed for multiple subscribers. The Verge trusts Feedly to not abuse the paywall mechanism? I mean, I definitely like full-text RSS when it's available, but even summary-only RSS is good enough for me. 99% of the value is in not needing to go to a bajillion sites manually to see what's new, and avoiding the eye-grabbing behavior of these sites when doing so.
  • account42 2y ago
    > The Verge trusts Feedly to not abuse the paywall mechanism? Yes, just like they trust your browser not to share the paid content with others.
  • eviks 2y ago
    You'll likely have unique feeds, so your cache won't be shared with others
• mgraczyk 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • amelius 2y ago
    Following this argument all political propaganda is OK too? And I can distract you when you are working? And I can pollute your view? Or track you around the internet?
    • mgraczyk 2y ago
      No, those are different things. Tracking me around the Internet is fine though, I don't mind and it has never harmed anyone. If you show me an office full of distractions and say, "would you like to work here? It comes with distractions" then of course that's fine (I would say no). But in fact most people prefer the tradeoffs that come with the distractions
      • gambiting 2y ago
        >> Tracking me around the Internet is fine though, I don't mind and it has never harmed anyone So if you had someone follow you around in your day to day life writing down your every activity, then sold the log of your comings and goings to hundreds of companies for cash - that wouldn't be a "harm" by your definition then, would it? Because that's effectively what's happening on the internet, but because people don't see immediate negative impact on their lives they don't see it as "harm".
        • mgraczyk 2y ago
          No it's not what's happening. The sites I visit and the sort of information that is used for ads isn't sensitive. I'd happily share it Also, most people wouldn't actually be harmed by what you're describing. It just wouldn't be super valuable data (we already know where you shop because the store and credit card will sell that information)
          • 2y ago
• elcapithanos 2y ago
  Paying to reduce the number of ads is like going to the hospital to get only part of a tumor removed
• bhargav 2y ago
  This is one of those things where interests of the consumer are at odds with that of the business. Businesses need money, customers have money. Customers do not always want to pay the businesses directly. This issue is more obvious when it comes to news media. We don't have a good solution to pay $0.01 - $0.10 or whatever small denomination. The other question is would we even want to? I don’t think Freemium or whatever subscription model solves these problems beyond the scope of a single website. I am interested to hear how this can be solved for consumers for whole swaths of websites that have ads. It’s pretty easy to say ads are evi, but I personally don’t know a good solution.
  • immibis 2y ago
    I subscribe to YouTube Premium (from back when it was called YouTube Red). I pay a fixed amount each month, and that gets given to people who made videos I watch. Why can't we have more things like this?
    • bhargav 2y ago
      Because you are an active consumer of YouTube to the point where you think it’s worth it to pay the monthly fee; as do I. However, I seldom read any news articles maybe 1-2 here and there only. In that case I wouldn’t want to pay for a susscriotion. I likely also don’t wanna pay like five bucks to read an article.
    • eqmvii 2y ago
      ostensibly because after years of experiments, ads get more revenue in most circumstances.
• beeforpork 2y ago
  Ads make people desire stuff that they don't need. The goal is to make you unhappy. It is the opposite of help, the opposite of happiness. Ads are also a great enforcer of gender and sexual identification by stereotyping and categorizing in order to target audiences. Hairstyle, toys, tools, colour, food, behaviour, everything. I blame ads for identification crises of countless souls, and for toxic human environments and for hate as people internalize stereotypes and categories. We need less enforcement to identify. We need more 'it does not matter'. Yes, the correct amount of ads is zero.
• miki123211 2y ago
  To me, being anti-ads is being anti-poor, plain and simple. The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor, and I think that's a very good thing, and many people underappreciate the extend to which it happens. On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit and don't buy tickets, even though it's basically the same thing and a very similar business model.
  • prmoustache 2y ago
    First: you are totally out of topic because the article mentionned tackle the practice of serving ads to paying users accessing a paywall. > The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor, and I think that's a very good thing, and many people underappreciate the extend to which it happens. Ads are an aggression on the mind of the people with real psychological consequences. Imagine a public libraries where you should either pay a ticket or be targeted every few minutes by an advertizing team to interrupt your lecture, slap a flyer on top of your book, holding your arm to prevent your from removing it all this while shouting at you offers for a service. And that would be the rich subsidizing the service for the poor and would be a good thing. This is bonkers. > On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit and don't buy tickets, even though it's basically the same thing and a very similar business model. Not really. Paywall is similar business model, You pay the price, you get the service. Ads are just Ads. I am perfectly free to decide to use whatever technology exist to remove ads from my sights when walking in the streets, or close my eyes. Same has to be for the internet. Also, online medias lost any right to pretend we should see ads when they decided to go the unethical way and act like criminals that redirect our traffic to external parties without our consent. I was perfectly fine when ads were few and far between, not covering half the screen, served locally and only a click on the ad would send me to the advertiser.
  • account42 2y ago
    You make it sound like poor people wouldn't have those services without those oh so generous ad-supported businesses. It's all about extracting money from those communities rather than helping them.
• justlikereddit 2y ago
  I'm still waiting for an AI-driven ad-removal software or even hardware layer. I'm willing to pay
• Varqu 2y ago
  While I agree with the post author on the "if I pay the subscription then there should be no ads" part, there is a bit that comes fairly often in such posts which I find rather funny: "sell my data to your advertisers" Sorry, that's not how 90% of digital advertising works. The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen based on some specific profiling. But these ads companies don't receive a file called "Manuel Moreale personal data and shopping history"
  • ale42 2y ago
    > The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen True, but the result is the same. I would have nothing against _some_ static ads (like in newspapers) even if I'm paying to read articles, but they should be served directly by the website, not by an external ad aggregator. Just check with how many companies data is shared on the cookie banner details: on the newspaper I'm paying for, it's "us and our 105 partners". So I feel totally justified to run an adblocker here. It's not ok that other companies should know which articles I'm reading, for how long, or things like that, so they can better target me with ads, especially that it's not limited to the website of the newspaper. In addition, you often get very annoying ads, with fast animations that are very distracting if you are reading text nearby.
    • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      This is absolutely the most reasonable compromise. I don't really understand how advertising survives as it is, but static ads feel like a win-win.
      • stkdump 2y ago
        It isn't. Targeted ads are much more valuable, to the point that fully random ads have almost no value at all. Btw. you can tell. If you regularly delete cookies you get much fewer ads. They like to say that if you don't allow/keep cookies, you get the same amount of ads, just less relevant. But that just isn't the case. If browsers had the functionality to only preserve cookies that are needed to stay logged in across sessions, that would be quite powerful. That is all the cookies I need.
• lousken 2y ago
  15 years ago regular site used to have a nice banner ad that was related to the topic of the site, maybe some small logo here and there on the right side and that was about it I did not think about blocking it, did not mind, did not care. That's how ads should have stayed instead of this giant annoying/spyware/loud/popup/... mess. Nowadays I would not use anything without ublock and i am considering storing everything locally so I dont have to visit most websites and only scrape the news. It's especially sad since back in the day making a website, having a webserver etc. was vastly more expensive and difficult while these days it costs literally less than 10$ / month for something that can handle millions of views. How is it possible that something was sustainable 20 years ago is not sustainable now?
  • freeAgent 2y ago
    There were absolutely obnoxious ads, including pop-ups and pop-unders 15 years ago, but at least they were generally contextual rather than targeted to your ad profile.
    • izacus 2y ago
      I'm not sure if "Punch the Monkey" was ever really contextual tbh :)
      • freeAgent 2y ago
        But it also certainly wasn’t targeted!
    • lousken 2y ago
      maybe something existed in the US already, but internet in Czech republic used to be pretty good with no popups and just a few ads e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20090302032443/http://web.volny.cz/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090302032443/http://web.volny....
  • account42 2y ago
    15 years ago the battle against popup ads was already fought and won and the ad industry was trying out all kinds of other crap.