8 ms·

Maybe the ISP should start charging the ad network instead of the user for ad traffic. Then they can start blocking the ads of people who don't pay. The user,

Maybe the ISP should start charging the ad network instead of the user for ad traffic. Then they can start blocking the ads of people who don't pay. The user, who pays for the service, is getting no value out of the ads and the advertiser is freeloading the ISP's technical infrastructure and userbase.

Workaccount2 2y ago
The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.
- rlpb 2y ago
  > The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. I disagree. The value I get from the Internet is almost entirely from non-ad-driven sources. The ad-driven stuff is very low value to me.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    you never used google search? if not you should check it out - it is not bad - https://www.google.com https://www.google.com
    - xigoi 2y ago
      I prefer Kagi, which does not have ads.
      - t0bia_s 2y ago
        But you have to pay for it and link your credit card with it. Which is privacy nightmare. I have whatever search engine without ads for free. uBlock + NextDNS do the job.
    - lukan 2y ago
      Or chrome, or gmail, or firefox, or ... sadly most of the internet is financed by ads. Only some parts remain free of them. Wikipedia for example. And even HN here ... you can argue it is payed for by the occasional ads, or rather all of it is an ad for the VC ycombinator.
      - JoshuaRogers 2y ago
        Even Wikipedia feels like each page has a prominent “Plea from Jimmy Wales” ad at the top of every page (even after donating), even if it isn’t billed as such.
  - Uehreka 2y ago
    If the most of the websites you visit aren’t ad supported, then this article likely doesn’t apply to you. It does apply to most people however.
  - deadmutex 2y ago
    Sure, and someone else can say otherwise. Comparing anecdotes doesn't provide a global view, IMO, and can lead to incorrect conclusions. Maybe better to look at data instead, e.g. Netflix ad-supported plans vs ad-free plans, or YouTube Premium vs YT ad-supported, etc.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Then you aren’t visiting ads-loaded sites and they aren’t using your data. Seems fine.
  - sethops1 2y ago
    Ironic you're posting this on Hacker News, which is fundamentally an ad for YCombinator.
    - mahirsaid 2y ago
      Are you not benefiting from this site. I come here to read things and shelter with like minded peoples. I don’t see ads.
      - nickff 2y ago
        Many of the YCombinator companies advertise jobs on this forum, and some also post ‘demos’, which are often advertising to potential investors, clients, and partners.
        Vampiero 2y ago
        If only someone made a userscript to automatically filter those out..
- HWR_14 2y ago
  They could serve non-targeted text ads. Those are very cheap to deliver and seem to work fine.
  - freehorse 2y ago
    If the ads were just text-based and related to the content I visit at the time rather than "me" I would have much less hate towards them. If I visit a webpage about CPUs I am probably interested in CPUs, maybe I am building a PC, send me ads about that which I may actually find useful. Why would you send me irrelevant ads about gardening just because I am into that also? If I am looking to buy a CPU I am not gonna click on something irrelevant like that.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Speak for yourself. Some of us were on the internet before the ads.
  - kennyloginz 2y ago
    It feels like the people that push the “internet requires ads” idea never experienced the internet before ads. It really did exist, and was pretty great.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    I have been here since the mid 90's. Ads have been a plague for almost 30 years
- lolinder 2y ago
  The valuable parts of the internet are, with few exceptions, ad-free. Forums like HN, personal blogs and sites, paid services—these are the places where real value is to be found on the internet. The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enormous drain on society that the ad-funded model has been. > and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have. This is a classic market failure. Corporations have figured out how to manipulate people into pursuing the corporation's interest (scroll indefinitely through pages and pages of ads and spend money on the things so advertised) at the expense of the consumer's interest (do anything else with their time and money). Popularity is irrelevant when it's clearly achieved by exploitative design, not value delivered.
  - dgrin91 2y ago
    Is this really true? Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads). Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Virtually all news sites, regardless of what side you agree with, are composed mostly of garbage designed to draw your attention, not inform you about things that really matter. They may provide some value in addition to that, but the advertising model ensures that they must hack your attention as their primary goal. > Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Similarly, our entertainment options were better before they had to be designed to keep you on a specific streaming platform for a certain length of time. > Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads). Depends on who you're buying productivity stuff from. My Fastmail account does just fine with no ads and no data sales, and covers basically everything I need. Most other "productivity" tools I've tried have felt palpably exploitative. > More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere. Ad-funded products are a civilization-wide trap like credit card rewards. They create an illusion that things are coming for free, but companies don't do this out of charity—they pay for ads because they have good data that strongly suggests that the people who see them will, on average, pay them back and more. I'd rather make the cost of a service explicit than hide it behind hard-to-quantify behavioral hacks.
- 5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E 2y ago
  The internet as we know it is a dystopian hellscape. As somebody who has been around long enough to remember the internet before every interaction on it was monetised, all I want is for the ad industry to die.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  As far as I can tell, subscriptions aren't a reliable way to opt out of ads and ad tracking. Look at cars, cable, Uber, Spotify, Amazon prime, newspapers, telecoms, ISPs, etc. They all show sponsored content and upsell services to subscribers. I've tried putting my money where my mouth is by switching to subscription services for everything and I still have to go out of my way to avoid advertising with adblockers.
  - drawkward 2y ago
    Advertising is a virus. It infiltrates all ecosystems.
    - imoreno 2y ago
      I wonder if advertising really is a waste of time and money for the most part, and it's just that the advertisers are really good at convincing people otherwise.
      - drawkward 2y ago
        I worked for an ad measurement firm; we developed a causal ad measurement methodology based on a research tool used for observational data in clinical trials. Roughly 1/3 of the thousands of consumer packaged goods (toothpaste, canned soup, breakfast cereal, etc) studies we performed showed no effect of advertising. Another 1/3 didnt have enough of an impact to justify the ad spend (ROI < $1.00), and about 1/3 showed more revenue than ad spend. Obviously, different industries are likely to show different distributions of results, but CPG companies are the biggest ad spenders, I believe.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
        Of course they are! That's the core of their 'craft' ;)
- freehorse 2y ago
  I do not get this argument at all. We all eventually bear the cost of ads by them adding cost to the products being advertised that we buy. Nothing is free.
  - acchow 2y ago
    There’s value ad with ads targeting. Otherwise we go back to the Television days when everyone watched the same ads
    - freehorse 2y ago
      Value added for whom? And what’s wrong with ads depending on the content of a webpage rather than the user as profiled over other webpages?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Not to mention that treating ad-funded as equivalent to free arrogantly assumes that I, personally, am somehow immune to the manipulation inherent in advertising. Companies pay for ads because they have good reason to believe that some significant percentage of people who see them will buy something that they otherwise would not have bought. They spend enormous sums setting up the infrastructure to attribute sales to specific ads. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have no really good way to quantify how much drains from our bank accounts each year due to the ads we see. Might I be the exception to the rule and be un-manipulatable? Possibly. But I don't have a strong reason to bet on it, and I'd rather see the price of the service listed outright as a subscription than simply hope that the ad-funded version will net to a lower cost for me.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  I have zero ads on my blog and instead I ask my readers to buy my books on my e-shop. Works well, last year I sold 5000 books this way.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  You've got to say more about what you mean by that, especially how you know what everyone else finds valuable on the internet.
- icehawk 2y ago
  The internet as I know it is the value I get out of interacting with other people. I've never had a moment where I've said "Oh, I'm glad that ad was there!" If a service can't be run unless it's through ads? Then perish.
  - nickff 2y ago
    HN exists to advertise yCombinator stuff! You seem to like this forum, yet you wish for it to perish?
    - icehawk 2y ago
      That I like this forum, and just have not found a better alternative, is certainly an assumption you're making.
- swayvil 2y ago
  There is a feast. You get a crumb. The problem isn't that part of that the internet needs part of that crumb to function. The problem is that you get only a crumb. Let's not pretend otherwise.
- amluto 2y ago
  Even assuming you’re right in principle, there’s a basic problem here: ads have value (to the advertiser, to the network, to the site showing them, and potentially to the user). And ads have costs paid by the parties other than the user (lots of money changes hands and some compute may be incurred, too), and that’s fine, and the parties in control are strongly motivated to control those costs. But there are also costs that are effectively externalities as far as the companies involved are concerned, and those are bandwidth, battery usage, and degradation of the user experience. So if anyone wants to seriously call the modern ad system a benefit to the user, then those externalities should be controlled. Either the actual bandwidth costs should be accounted as losses to the user, or the advertiser should be forced to pay those costs. And I bet that ads would start using far less bandwidth with no change in appearance if the advertisers started caring.
- kleiba 2y ago
  The way I see it: if your service forces me to watch ads or pay for a subscription, then I have two choices: either I watch the ads (probably not) or pay for the subscription (slightly more likely but it really depends), or I simply don't use your service. For the most part, I have gone with option #2 in the majority of cases so far. I have no bad conscience whatsoever to use an adblocker. Heck, I get eye cancer every time I have sit in front of somebody's webbrowser who does not have an adblocker installed. Even though I use the internet quite a bit as we all do, if the free internet were to go away tomorrow, I'd probably find something else to do with my time.
- wao0uuno 2y ago
  The alternative is hobby sites, sites that make money from sales like Steam and paid content. I’m honestly fine with that. Fuck ads. If I could remove all ad and data mining supported content from the web I’d do it without hesitation.
- imoreno 2y ago
  I get what you're saying, but you're disregarding the point of my (admittedly tongue in cheek) proposal. I'm not saying there shouldn't be ads. Currently, the ad industry is subsidized by consumers because they pay for the traffic. Instead, the advertiser should pay, since they get the most of it. Besides, this argument that without ads content can't exist is bogus. Firstly people have been creating art and knowledge without thought for pay since time immemorial, it's a basic human instinct. Were there ads paying for the paintings in Lascaux? In the early days of the internet there was little money to be made online, and yet the quality of the content was excellent - and yes there were banners and tracking cookies but it's interesting how the best sites had little or none of that, and when they did have ads the quality of the ads was very high too - relevant to the audience and not some worthless crap that is much worse than competitors. To this day people freely publish quality content with 0 monetization, just because they want to. That type of content gets shared on this site daily. Technology has advanced greatly and simply putting a website up is very cheap now, and people have a decent number of hours to put into their hobby.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  Bullshit. I guarantee you that if tomorrow, by some regulatory or technological magic, the vast majority of invasive ads were eliminated from online content and platforms, creators of content would still find ways to deliver the goods, simple because the interest would be there. This would happen even if people showed an enormously strong tendency of not paying for subscription offers. Before ads and ad "partners" became as pervasively parasitic as they are today, there was still plenty of fine content available online, much of it free of charge, and even now, many platforms exist that offer the same, or at least keep their ad systems unobtrusive to users. Also, as another comment below mentions, even when you do pay, many platforms still bombard you with ad garbage, or create frankly abusive bullshit like paid tiers in which you still can't opt out of ads. Looking at you and many others Netflix.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  "The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads." Perhaps this statement is meant as a figure of speech. If so, please disregard the remainder of this comment. If not, the statement makes no sense. The truth is Workaccount2 does not even know imoreno's name, let alone how imoreno uses the internet, i.e., "the internet as imoreno knows it". The alternative is not "subscriptions for everything" because that is what so-called "tech" companies are already trying. Obviously it does not work very well if the subscription seller is only an intermediary with nothing that people want to pay for. As such, these websites must rely on surveillance and/or ads. There are a number of internet users who generally do not "sign up" or "subscribe" to anything, other than internet service. Apparently this number is large enough to leave so-called "tech" companies no other option than to sell internet users out as surveillance subjects and/or ad targets. The alternative is that the number of so-called "tech" companies (unnecessary intermediaries) able to continue as a going concern would drop. Naturally anyone invested in such ventures will be very defensive about their entitlement to conduct commercial surveillance and profit from ads. We see this in HN comments along the lines of "internet ads are mandatory" all the time. The "arguments" made in these HN comments are often quite funny, like "We cannot go back to the time before the internet had ads" or "If we do not have unfettered proliferation of internet ads, then the internet will suck."
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  The something in between alternative between these two extremes is universally working hassle-free micro-, or even nano-payments, with accordingly priced articles, without any further subscription pressures.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  > The alternative is subscriptions for everything That's a false dichotomy, the website earns $0.01 from my ad view(s) on a given page, why should that be replaced with a subscription? Just let me pay $0.01 to view the content.
- jjav 2y ago
  > The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. No. I'm old enough to clearly remember the Internet without ads (commercial use was banned) and it was a far superior place. Ads only add surveillance and noise and waste, zero value.
SkiFire13 2y ago
ISPs are likely happy about it, since it means users will have to spend more. Ads can also be easily hosted on CDNs, so their cost for ISPs can be decreased significantly compared to other more dynamic content.
- imoreno 2y ago
  But it's a marketing win. Imagine an ISP that blocks most ads automatically, and what it doesn't block is excluded from your data cap. Shut up and take my money!
Tarball10 2y ago
That sets a terrible precedent. You do not want ISPs picking and choosing what content to deliver, or forcing content providers to pay extra to deliver content to their customers.
- agilob 2y ago
  precedent? This is already a common practice. Since early 2010s ISPs were doing it in USA [1] and trying to lower net neutrality standards in Europe to do it [2]. That's how the whole net neutrality debate started in US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai#Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai#Net_neutrality_in_the... [1] https://www.nexttv.com/news/netflix-ceo-some-big-isps-extracting-toll-because-they-can-355863 https://www.nexttv.com/news/netflix-ceo-some-big-isps-extrac... [2] https://epicenter.works/en/content/data-toll-deutsche-telekom-vs-meta https://epicenter.works/en/content/data-toll-deutsche-teleko...
  - Tarball10 2y ago
    OP was suggesting an outright block of traffic from ad providers. I don't believe any US ISPs have gone to that extreme, at least not yet. They allowed peering points to become congested which affected Netflix traffic, but weren't blocking it.
    - agilob 2y ago
      But we don't know if ISP aren't double charging them for the ads traffic. If they slow down traffic of some ad providers, it's end users who suffer
- mahirsaid 2y ago
  It will result in a more poor experience online. You want the people providing the service act on their own behalf. Not a more controlling entity to do so. I agree
bowsamic 2y ago
Isn’t this against net neutrality?
- agilob 2y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/technology/net-neutrality-rules-fcc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/technology/net-neutrality...
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    I’m not American so that’s irrelevant to me anyway, I just think it’s a moral good
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mannyv 2y ago
That would be against the whole idea of 'net neutrality.' Which is why I agree. The user is paying for those ads, and the infrastructure is being upgraded to serve those ads. Why do ads get subsidies?

Workaccount2 2y ago

The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. You may hate ads, we all do, but at least recognize the hand that feeds you. The alternative is subscriptions for everything, and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.

rlpb 2y ago
> The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. I disagree. The value I get from the Internet is almost entirely from non-ad-driven sources. The ad-driven stuff is very low value to me.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  you never used google search? if not you should check it out - it is not bad - https://www.google.com https://www.google.com
  - xigoi 2y ago
    I prefer Kagi, which does not have ads.
    - t0bia_s 2y ago
      But you have to pay for it and link your credit card with it. Which is privacy nightmare. I have whatever search engine without ads for free. uBlock + NextDNS do the job.
  - lukan 2y ago
    Or chrome, or gmail, or firefox, or ... sadly most of the internet is financed by ads. Only some parts remain free of them. Wikipedia for example. And even HN here ... you can argue it is payed for by the occasional ads, or rather all of it is an ad for the VC ycombinator.
    - JoshuaRogers 2y ago
      Even Wikipedia feels like each page has a prominent “Plea from Jimmy Wales” ad at the top of every page (even after donating), even if it isn’t billed as such.
- Uehreka 2y ago
  If the most of the websites you visit aren’t ad supported, then this article likely doesn’t apply to you. It does apply to most people however.
- deadmutex 2y ago
  Sure, and someone else can say otherwise. Comparing anecdotes doesn't provide a global view, IMO, and can lead to incorrect conclusions. Maybe better to look at data instead, e.g. Netflix ad-supported plans vs ad-free plans, or YouTube Premium vs YT ad-supported, etc.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Then you aren’t visiting ads-loaded sites and they aren’t using your data. Seems fine.
- sethops1 2y ago
  Ironic you're posting this on Hacker News, which is fundamentally an ad for YCombinator.
  - mahirsaid 2y ago
    Are you not benefiting from this site. I come here to read things and shelter with like minded peoples. I don’t see ads.
    - nickff 2y ago
      Many of the YCombinator companies advertise jobs on this forum, and some also post ‘demos’, which are often advertising to potential investors, clients, and partners.
      - Vampiero 2y ago
        If only someone made a userscript to automatically filter those out..
HWR_14 2y ago
They could serve non-targeted text ads. Those are very cheap to deliver and seem to work fine.
- freehorse 2y ago
  If the ads were just text-based and related to the content I visit at the time rather than "me" I would have much less hate towards them. If I visit a webpage about CPUs I am probably interested in CPUs, maybe I am building a PC, send me ads about that which I may actually find useful. Why would you send me irrelevant ads about gardening just because I am into that also? If I am looking to buy a CPU I am not gonna click on something irrelevant like that.
hinkley 2y ago
Speak for yourself. Some of us were on the internet before the ads.
- kennyloginz 2y ago
  It feels like the people that push the “internet requires ads” idea never experienced the internet before ads. It really did exist, and was pretty great.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I have been here since the mid 90's. Ads have been a plague for almost 30 years
lolinder 2y ago
The valuable parts of the internet are, with few exceptions, ad-free. Forums like HN, personal blogs and sites, paid services—these are the places where real value is to be found on the internet. The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enormous drain on society that the ad-funded model has been. > and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have. This is a classic market failure. Corporations have figured out how to manipulate people into pursuing the corporation's interest (scroll indefinitely through pages and pages of ads and spend money on the things so advertised) at the expense of the consumer's interest (do anything else with their time and money). Popularity is irrelevant when it's clearly achieved by exploitative design, not value delivered.
- dgrin91 2y ago
  Is this really true? Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads). Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > Virtually all news sites, regardless what side you agree with, have ads. Virtually all news sites, regardless of what side you agree with, are composed mostly of garbage designed to draw your attention, not inform you about things that really matter. They may provide some value in addition to that, but the advertising model ensures that they must hack your attention as their primary goal. > Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions). Similarly, our entertainment options were better before they had to be designed to keep you on a specific streaming platform for a certain length of time. > Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads). Depends on who you're buying productivity stuff from. My Fastmail account does just fine with no ads and no data sales, and covers basically everything I need. Most other "productivity" tools I've tried have felt palpably exploitative. > More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere. Ad-funded products are a civilization-wide trap like credit card rewards. They create an illusion that things are coming for free, but companies don't do this out of charity—they pay for ads because they have good data that strongly suggests that the people who see them will, on average, pay them back and more. I'd rather make the cost of a service explicit than hide it behind hard-to-quantify behavioral hacks.
5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E 2y ago
The internet as we know it is a dystopian hellscape. As somebody who has been around long enough to remember the internet before every interaction on it was monetised, all I want is for the ad industry to die.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
As far as I can tell, subscriptions aren't a reliable way to opt out of ads and ad tracking. Look at cars, cable, Uber, Spotify, Amazon prime, newspapers, telecoms, ISPs, etc. They all show sponsored content and upsell services to subscribers. I've tried putting my money where my mouth is by switching to subscription services for everything and I still have to go out of my way to avoid advertising with adblockers.
- drawkward 2y ago
  Advertising is a virus. It infiltrates all ecosystems.
  - imoreno 2y ago
    I wonder if advertising really is a waste of time and money for the most part, and it's just that the advertisers are really good at convincing people otherwise.
    - drawkward 2y ago
      I worked for an ad measurement firm; we developed a causal ad measurement methodology based on a research tool used for observational data in clinical trials. Roughly 1/3 of the thousands of consumer packaged goods (toothpaste, canned soup, breakfast cereal, etc) studies we performed showed no effect of advertising. Another 1/3 didnt have enough of an impact to justify the ad spend (ROI < $1.00), and about 1/3 showed more revenue than ad spend. Obviously, different industries are likely to show different distributions of results, but CPG companies are the biggest ad spenders, I believe.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
      Of course they are! That's the core of their 'craft' ;)
freehorse 2y ago
I do not get this argument at all. We all eventually bear the cost of ads by them adding cost to the products being advertised that we buy. Nothing is free.
- acchow 2y ago
  There’s value ad with ads targeting. Otherwise we go back to the Television days when everyone watched the same ads
  - freehorse 2y ago
    Value added for whom? And what’s wrong with ads depending on the content of a webpage rather than the user as profiled over other webpages?
- lolinder 2y ago
  Not to mention that treating ad-funded as equivalent to free arrogantly assumes that I, personally, am somehow immune to the manipulation inherent in advertising. Companies pay for ads because they have good reason to believe that some significant percentage of people who see them will buy something that they otherwise would not have bought. They spend enormous sums setting up the infrastructure to attribute sales to specific ads. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have no really good way to quantify how much drains from our bank accounts each year due to the ads we see. Might I be the exception to the rule and be un-manipulatable? Possibly. But I don't have a strong reason to bet on it, and I'd rather see the price of the service listed outright as a subscription than simply hope that the ad-funded version will net to a lower cost for me.
inglor_cz 2y ago
I have zero ads on my blog and instead I ask my readers to buy my books on my e-shop. Works well, last year I sold 5000 books this way.
karaterobot 2y ago
You've got to say more about what you mean by that, especially how you know what everyone else finds valuable on the internet.
icehawk 2y ago
The internet as I know it is the value I get out of interacting with other people. I've never had a moment where I've said "Oh, I'm glad that ad was there!" If a service can't be run unless it's through ads? Then perish.
- nickff 2y ago
  HN exists to advertise yCombinator stuff! You seem to like this forum, yet you wish for it to perish?
  - icehawk 2y ago
    That I like this forum, and just have not found a better alternative, is certainly an assumption you're making.
swayvil 2y ago
There is a feast. You get a crumb. The problem isn't that part of that the internet needs part of that crumb to function. The problem is that you get only a crumb. Let's not pretend otherwise.
amluto 2y ago
Even assuming you’re right in principle, there’s a basic problem here: ads have value (to the advertiser, to the network, to the site showing them, and potentially to the user). And ads have costs paid by the parties other than the user (lots of money changes hands and some compute may be incurred, too), and that’s fine, and the parties in control are strongly motivated to control those costs. But there are also costs that are effectively externalities as far as the companies involved are concerned, and those are bandwidth, battery usage, and degradation of the user experience. So if anyone wants to seriously call the modern ad system a benefit to the user, then those externalities should be controlled. Either the actual bandwidth costs should be accounted as losses to the user, or the advertiser should be forced to pay those costs. And I bet that ads would start using far less bandwidth with no change in appearance if the advertisers started caring.
kleiba 2y ago
The way I see it: if your service forces me to watch ads or pay for a subscription, then I have two choices: either I watch the ads (probably not) or pay for the subscription (slightly more likely but it really depends), or I simply don't use your service. For the most part, I have gone with option #2 in the majority of cases so far. I have no bad conscience whatsoever to use an adblocker. Heck, I get eye cancer every time I have sit in front of somebody's webbrowser who does not have an adblocker installed. Even though I use the internet quite a bit as we all do, if the free internet were to go away tomorrow, I'd probably find something else to do with my time.
wao0uuno 2y ago
The alternative is hobby sites, sites that make money from sales like Steam and paid content. I’m honestly fine with that. Fuck ads. If I could remove all ad and data mining supported content from the web I’d do it without hesitation.
imoreno 2y ago
I get what you're saying, but you're disregarding the point of my (admittedly tongue in cheek) proposal. I'm not saying there shouldn't be ads. Currently, the ad industry is subsidized by consumers because they pay for the traffic. Instead, the advertiser should pay, since they get the most of it. Besides, this argument that without ads content can't exist is bogus. Firstly people have been creating art and knowledge without thought for pay since time immemorial, it's a basic human instinct. Were there ads paying for the paintings in Lascaux? In the early days of the internet there was little money to be made online, and yet the quality of the content was excellent - and yes there were banners and tracking cookies but it's interesting how the best sites had little or none of that, and when they did have ads the quality of the ads was very high too - relevant to the audience and not some worthless crap that is much worse than competitors. To this day people freely publish quality content with 0 monetization, just because they want to. That type of content gets shared on this site daily. Technology has advanced greatly and simply putting a website up is very cheap now, and people have a decent number of hours to put into their hobby.
southernplaces7 2y ago
Bullshit. I guarantee you that if tomorrow, by some regulatory or technological magic, the vast majority of invasive ads were eliminated from online content and platforms, creators of content would still find ways to deliver the goods, simple because the interest would be there. This would happen even if people showed an enormously strong tendency of not paying for subscription offers. Before ads and ad "partners" became as pervasively parasitic as they are today, there was still plenty of fine content available online, much of it free of charge, and even now, many platforms exist that offer the same, or at least keep their ad systems unobtrusive to users. Also, as another comment below mentions, even when you do pay, many platforms still bombard you with ad garbage, or create frankly abusive bullshit like paid tiers in which you still can't opt out of ads. Looking at you and many others Netflix.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
"The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads." Perhaps this statement is meant as a figure of speech. If so, please disregard the remainder of this comment. If not, the statement makes no sense. The truth is Workaccount2 does not even know imoreno's name, let alone how imoreno uses the internet, i.e., "the internet as imoreno knows it". The alternative is not "subscriptions for everything" because that is what so-called "tech" companies are already trying. Obviously it does not work very well if the subscription seller is only an intermediary with nothing that people want to pay for. As such, these websites must rely on surveillance and/or ads. There are a number of internet users who generally do not "sign up" or "subscribe" to anything, other than internet service. Apparently this number is large enough to leave so-called "tech" companies no other option than to sell internet users out as surveillance subjects and/or ad targets. The alternative is that the number of so-called "tech" companies (unnecessary intermediaries) able to continue as a going concern would drop. Naturally anyone invested in such ventures will be very defensive about their entitlement to conduct commercial surveillance and profit from ads. We see this in HN comments along the lines of "internet ads are mandatory" all the time. The "arguments" made in these HN comments are often quite funny, like "We cannot go back to the time before the internet had ads" or "If we do not have unfettered proliferation of internet ads, then the internet will suck."
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
The something in between alternative between these two extremes is universally working hassle-free micro-, or even nano-payments, with accordingly priced articles, without any further subscription pressures.
dns_snek 2y ago
> The alternative is subscriptions for everything That's a false dichotomy, the website earns $0.01 from my ad view(s) on a given page, why should that be replaced with a subscription? Just let me pay $0.01 to view the content.
jjav 2y ago
> The internet as you know it is the value you get out of ads. No. I'm old enough to clearly remember the Internet without ads (commercial use was banned) and it was a far superior place. Ads only add surveillance and noise and waste, zero value.

SkiFire13 2y ago

ISPs are likely happy about it, since it means users will have to spend more. Ads can also be easily hosted on CDNs, so their cost for ISPs can be decreased significantly compared to other more dynamic content.

imoreno 2y ago
But it's a marketing win. Imagine an ISP that blocks most ads automatically, and what it doesn't block is excluded from your data cap. Shut up and take my money!

Tarball10 2y ago

That sets a terrible precedent. You do not want ISPs picking and choosing what content to deliver, or forcing content providers to pay extra to deliver content to their customers.

agilob 2y ago
precedent? This is already a common practice. Since early 2010s ISPs were doing it in USA [1] and trying to lower net neutrality standards in Europe to do it [2]. That's how the whole net neutrality debate started in US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai#Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai#Net_neutrality_in_the... [1] https://www.nexttv.com/news/netflix-ceo-some-big-isps-extracting-toll-because-they-can-355863 https://www.nexttv.com/news/netflix-ceo-some-big-isps-extrac... [2] https://epicenter.works/en/content/data-toll-deutsche-telekom-vs-meta https://epicenter.works/en/content/data-toll-deutsche-teleko...
- Tarball10 2y ago
  OP was suggesting an outright block of traffic from ad providers. I don't believe any US ISPs have gone to that extreme, at least not yet. They allowed peering points to become congested which affected Netflix traffic, but weren't blocking it.
  - agilob 2y ago
    But we don't know if ISP aren't double charging them for the ads traffic. If they slow down traffic of some ad providers, it's end users who suffer
mahirsaid 2y ago
It will result in a more poor experience online. You want the people providing the service act on their own behalf. Not a more controlling entity to do so. I agree

bowsamic 2y ago

Isn’t this against net neutrality?

agilob 2y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/technology/net-neutrality-rules-fcc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/technology/net-neutrality...
- bowsamic 2y ago
  I’m not American so that’s irrelevant to me anyway, I just think it’s a moral good

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mannyv 2y ago

That would be against the whole idea of 'net neutrality.' Which is why I agree. The user is paying for those ads, and the infrastructure is being upgraded to serve those ads. Why do ads get subsidies?