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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)

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.
- eitland 2y ago
  > but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment. For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read. I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason. It either need to be - (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music, - or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  > 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'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.
- n144q 2y ago
  The fact that NYTimes never bothered with Apple News says something about this model. Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example. Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass). If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.
contrast 2y ago
You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.
- ballooney 2y ago
  He does pay for prime. The fact that they have done a bait-n-switch and now _still_ show you adverts, despite you paying, is reprehensible.
  - mortehu 2y ago
    Before that, they did a bait and switch and added free videos to their package delivery service. Beyond that, there's no lock-in to a video service beyond any exclusive show you're currently watching, so your decision to continue paying is on you.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Only if they didn't issue that as new Ts & Cs. If they just changed the service he should get his money back for an unagreed change of service.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      Unilaterally written terms are morally bankrupt. We gain nothing by helping Bezos.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        It doesn't matter if they're unilaterally written as long as they're bilaterally agreed.
        HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        It actually does matter.
racecar789 2y ago
I would pay for YouTube premium if you can afford it. The cost is pretty reasonable and 55% of the subscription goes to content creators. It's not a huge amount but probably similar to what a creator would make if ads were shown.
- kivle 2y ago
  I subscribed until they price hiked it like 45% in one go a couple of months ago in my country. Now the price for it is equal to, or in some cases even more expensive than the services that actually produce their own high quality movies/tv shows.
- blibble 2y ago
  so that's a 45% cut for Google makes the widely hated app store look generous by comparison
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    The overhead for something like youtube is insane. There is good reason there is no competitor to it.
    - blibble 2y ago
      there are competitors (dailymotion, vimeo, ...) they're just not widely used because it's the usual winner take all people are also going to be queuing up to peer with Google so they don't have to pay for transit unlikely to be the case for their competitors
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  But it is not possible to use it without creating a Google account. I should not need to sign in to watch videos, especially when that makes all efforts at avoiding tracking null.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
lambdaba 2y ago
I really can't imagine someone with CTO title doesn't have $15/month to pay for YouTube when you're a regular user. People with far fewer resources pay. This goes to content creators, if you're not even seeing ads, they don't get paid.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure, that by this logic, if you combine all the "$15/month" things that someone should have money for, they'll eventually be left without any of that money. Every goddamn website wants $15 per month, and even after they get it, they still show you ads. Even youtube, if nothing else, there are the in-video ads ("this video is sponsored by,...") that an adblock skips.
  - lambdaba 2y ago
    This person likely can afford it and some others without any noticeable impact, I just don't find it appropriate in that circumstance. If you get $15 worth, and can afford it, pay $15, plain and simple.
- raincole 2y ago
  Of course they have $15/mo. Whether they want to pay is another question.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- account42 2y ago
  > This goes to content creators Part of it, the rest goes to Google to reinvest in their ads business.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Or to, you know, maintain probably the single most data intensive service in the internet. Just a thought.
carom 2y ago
I went to watch Rings of Power on Prime (I pay for Prime) and saw it had ads. I closed it so fast and went to my IPTV service. The show was awful too.
DrBazza 2y ago
I stopped visiting The Verge after their last 'rebrand' which offended my eyes. As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they? "Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.
- scaryclam 2y ago
  You should report sites that do that. We still enforce the GDPR, and it's illegal to force acceptance of cookies (excepting functional cookies) for any reason, including offering to remove them for money.
  - noprocrasted 2y ago
    > We still enforce the GDPR No we don't, and we never did. The whole "GDPR" thing is a sham - unfortunately this is the case in many countries, but especially so in the UK. The ICO is one of the most useless "regulators" I have ever dealt with, somehow even worse than telecoms regulators. This isn't some sort of subtle and concealed breach of the GDPR that everyone puts effort into keeping quiet. It's blatant, obvious, and in the face of everyone who visits major news websites. If it was enforced, the practice would've quickly stopped. It's about as subtle as committing murder on live TV. If you don't get arrested for that, it's clear that the law you've broken is not being enforced. > You should report sites that do that But let's hypothesize and see what it takes to actually do this: As per the ICO's requirements, you must first contact the organization that has wronged you and give them time to address your concern. They have 30 days to do respond, and could extend it potentially indefinitely by engaging in pointless arguments. They could also make technically flawed arguments in how they're not actually tracking you or collecting personal data, and those will successfully work because there's no technical expert on the ICO's side to review it and call bullshit. You need full-time admin staff to deal with these matters. Assuming you finally get to a stage where you have grounds to make a complaint to the ICO, what are they going to do (if anything)? Well at best they will send a letter, which is not legally binding in any way and will promptly get ignored by the recipient, which is fine because the truth is, both sides are complicit and just want the matter to go away - whether the underlying problem is solved or not is not their concern. In practice, even if the ICO wanted to act (they don't - don't bite the hand that feeds), what would they do? This isn't a single, small offender, this is the entire newspaper industry. They not only have a lot of lobbying power but outright control the narrative. They know it, and that's why they have no fear putting evidence of their GDPR breach on their homepages. Are you ready to hire a full-time admin team to do this (and end up absolutely nowhere, except maybe collecting evidence of this "regulator"'s uselessness)? -- GDPR enforcement in the UK (and sadly in a lot of other countries) is and will remain a sham until the issue becomes politically important. The regulator on its own, even with the best of skill and intentions will not succeed in this battle. The only way I can potentially see this changing is if we see continuous and recurrent data breaches of politician's personal data and dirty laundry, but even then the likeliest solution is a two-tier system where politicians are allowed to have privacy while everyone else doesn't.
andrepd 2y ago
Well I'm pretty much an anti-ad radical as well, but you're saying you block ads and you don't want to pay for stuff like subscriptions and similar. Well that's also not very sustainable, content creators have to eat :) Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr
- account42 2y ago
  > Well that's also not very sustainable, content creators have to eat :) That is a concern for the "content creator" not for anyone else. We have way more "content" than we need, especially "content" compromised by ads.
dspillett 2y ago
I'm sort of with you here, but not… > I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. > I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income. I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go. I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
- cuddlyogre 2y ago
  The problem with allowing "basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts" is that you also allow "pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …" and malware attacks since they all pull from the same pool by default. They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you. Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?
  - dspillett 2y ago
    That is pretty much what I said: > I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. The ideal is for the advert to be served from the main source, much like a sponsored segment in a cast is just in the cast, no extra external access to do any tracking from. If the site I'm actually visiting itself starts serving malware like shite, then I go from not trusting their “partners” and being wary of them by association, to really not wanting to be there at all and adding them to my DNS blocklist just-in-case.

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.

eitland 2y ago
> but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment. For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read. I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason. It either need to be - (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music, - or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.
madeofpalk 2y ago
> 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'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.
n144q 2y ago
The fact that NYTimes never bothered with Apple News says something about this model. Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example. Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass). If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.

contrast 2y ago

You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.

ballooney 2y ago
He does pay for prime. The fact that they have done a bait-n-switch and now _still_ show you adverts, despite you paying, is reprehensible.
- mortehu 2y ago
  Before that, they did a bait and switch and added free videos to their package delivery service. Beyond that, there's no lock-in to a video service beyond any exclusive show you're currently watching, so your decision to continue paying is on you.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Only if they didn't issue that as new Ts & Cs. If they just changed the service he should get his money back for an unagreed change of service.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Unilaterally written terms are morally bankrupt. We gain nothing by helping Bezos.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      It doesn't matter if they're unilaterally written as long as they're bilaterally agreed.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        It actually does matter.

racecar789 2y ago

I would pay for YouTube premium if you can afford it. The cost is pretty reasonable and 55% of the subscription goes to content creators. It's not a huge amount but probably similar to what a creator would make if ads were shown.

kivle 2y ago
I subscribed until they price hiked it like 45% in one go a couple of months ago in my country. Now the price for it is equal to, or in some cases even more expensive than the services that actually produce their own high quality movies/tv shows.
blibble 2y ago
so that's a 45% cut for Google makes the widely hated app store look generous by comparison
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  The overhead for something like youtube is insane. There is good reason there is no competitor to it.
  - blibble 2y ago
    there are competitors (dailymotion, vimeo, ...) they're just not widely used because it's the usual winner take all people are also going to be queuing up to peer with Google so they don't have to pay for transit unlikely to be the case for their competitors
HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
But it is not possible to use it without creating a Google account. I should not need to sign in to watch videos, especially when that makes all efforts at avoiding tracking null.
- carlosjobim 2y ago

lambdaba 2y ago

I really can't imagine someone with CTO title doesn't have $15/month to pay for YouTube when you're a regular user. People with far fewer resources pay. This goes to content creators, if you're not even seeing ads, they don't get paid.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago
I'm pretty sure, that by this logic, if you combine all the "$15/month" things that someone should have money for, they'll eventually be left without any of that money. Every goddamn website wants $15 per month, and even after they get it, they still show you ads. Even youtube, if nothing else, there are the in-video ads ("this video is sponsored by,...") that an adblock skips.
- lambdaba 2y ago
  This person likely can afford it and some others without any noticeable impact, I just don't find it appropriate in that circumstance. If you get $15 worth, and can afford it, pay $15, plain and simple.
raincole 2y ago
Of course they have $15/mo. Whether they want to pay is another question.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
account42 2y ago
> This goes to content creators Part of it, the rest goes to Google to reinvest in their ads business.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Or to, you know, maintain probably the single most data intensive service in the internet. Just a thought.

carom 2y ago

I went to watch Rings of Power on Prime (I pay for Prime) and saw it had ads. I closed it so fast and went to my IPTV service. The show was awful too.

DrBazza 2y ago

I stopped visiting The Verge after their last 'rebrand' which offended my eyes. As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they? "Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.

scaryclam 2y ago
You should report sites that do that. We still enforce the GDPR, and it's illegal to force acceptance of cookies (excepting functional cookies) for any reason, including offering to remove them for money.
- noprocrasted 2y ago
  > We still enforce the GDPR No we don't, and we never did. The whole "GDPR" thing is a sham - unfortunately this is the case in many countries, but especially so in the UK. The ICO is one of the most useless "regulators" I have ever dealt with, somehow even worse than telecoms regulators. This isn't some sort of subtle and concealed breach of the GDPR that everyone puts effort into keeping quiet. It's blatant, obvious, and in the face of everyone who visits major news websites. If it was enforced, the practice would've quickly stopped. It's about as subtle as committing murder on live TV. If you don't get arrested for that, it's clear that the law you've broken is not being enforced. > You should report sites that do that But let's hypothesize and see what it takes to actually do this: As per the ICO's requirements, you must first contact the organization that has wronged you and give them time to address your concern. They have 30 days to do respond, and could extend it potentially indefinitely by engaging in pointless arguments. They could also make technically flawed arguments in how they're not actually tracking you or collecting personal data, and those will successfully work because there's no technical expert on the ICO's side to review it and call bullshit. You need full-time admin staff to deal with these matters. Assuming you finally get to a stage where you have grounds to make a complaint to the ICO, what are they going to do (if anything)? Well at best they will send a letter, which is not legally binding in any way and will promptly get ignored by the recipient, which is fine because the truth is, both sides are complicit and just want the matter to go away - whether the underlying problem is solved or not is not their concern. In practice, even if the ICO wanted to act (they don't - don't bite the hand that feeds), what would they do? This isn't a single, small offender, this is the entire newspaper industry. They not only have a lot of lobbying power but outright control the narrative. They know it, and that's why they have no fear putting evidence of their GDPR breach on their homepages. Are you ready to hire a full-time admin team to do this (and end up absolutely nowhere, except maybe collecting evidence of this "regulator"'s uselessness)? -- GDPR enforcement in the UK (and sadly in a lot of other countries) is and will remain a sham until the issue becomes politically important. The regulator on its own, even with the best of skill and intentions will not succeed in this battle. The only way I can potentially see this changing is if we see continuous and recurrent data breaches of politician's personal data and dirty laundry, but even then the likeliest solution is a two-tier system where politicians are allowed to have privacy while everyone else doesn't.

andrepd 2y ago

Well I'm pretty much an anti-ad radical as well, but you're saying you block ads and you don't want to pay for stuff like subscriptions and similar. Well that's also not very sustainable, content creators have to eat :) Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr

account42 2y ago
> Well that's also not very sustainable, content creators have to eat :) That is a concern for the "content creator" not for anyone else. We have way more "content" than we need, especially "content" compromised by ads.

dspillett 2y ago

I'm sort of with you here, but not… > I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. > I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income. I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go. I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.

cuddlyogre 2y ago
The problem with allowing "basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts" is that you also allow "pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …" and malware attacks since they all pull from the same pool by default. They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you. Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?
- dspillett 2y ago
  That is pretty much what I said: > I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. The ideal is for the advert to be served from the main source, much like a sponsored segment in a cast is just in the cast, no extra external access to do any tracking from. If the site I'm actually visiting itself starts serving malware like shite, then I go from not trusting their “partners” and being wary of them by association, to really not wanting to be there at all and adding them to my DNS blocklist just-in-case.