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I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used

I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a realistic overall solution. I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a legitimate message to call his bank. Due to the experiences of countless others like my father, the FBI now recommends folks run an ad blocker. But if everyone did, then the whole thing falls apart right? If Google or Apple built a great ad blocker into their browser and shipped it with the next update, content creators would respond pretty damn quick right? Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would put all of their content behind a paywall, or in an app, or something else that's worse than the status quo right? sigh

a_shovel 2y ago
I've heard legends of a time, perhaps back in the mid 2000s, when companies paid so much for banner ads that you didn't need another revenue source for your website with Flash games or what have you. If such a time ever existed, it ended long before Flash did.
- TylerE 2y ago
  It ended when the vc money in the original dotcom boom dried up.
amanaplanacanal 2y ago
I'm not entirely sure it would be worse than the status quo. If all the free sites were the ones run for the love of it, and all the paid sites were commercial garbage, that might actually be better.
ThrowawayR2 2y ago
The attention economy is powered by payments from maximizing ad impressions but the public is increasingly recognizing that the attention economy is mentally and culturally toxic. To break free of the attention economy death spiral that we're in, internet advertising has to undergo a pretty drastic dieback. In other words, the whole thing has to fall apart and the sooner the better.
- lazide 2y ago
  That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT.
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    no pain no gain
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    Google and Meta collectively employ how many software people in the United States? The jobs hit would be unimaginable. High octane nightmare fuel, that idea.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      Doesn’t seem like a nightmare to me - a trillion dollars spent on ads that get blocked is a trillion dollars wasted. The real nightmare is hundreds of thousands of people on six figure salaries wasting their lives producing ads everyone hates.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
        You're right. What was I thinking? Instead, they should be unemployed and starving, and all the services they bought from other Americans with their $200k/year salaries, those Americans should also be unemployed and starving too. All because you don't want to see an ad on whatever ridiculous social media it is that people are visiting now days. That will make the world right.
        relaxing 2y ago
        Get a grip, mate.
derkster 2y ago
I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now? In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can remember were serious labors of love, especially the early "hacker" communities. But, we lost that internet a long time ago. I, personally, would love for an internet that could emulate those early years of being able to log in, communicate, and make friends with random, sometimes sketchy, weirdos, all within 45 seconds of dialing up. There weren't algorithms that decided who was important and who wasn't, you just had your words and wits. That was a tangent, but my point is - would the internet improve or decline if there was a serious "adpocalypse"?
- stavros 2y ago
  I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of your own pocket, I think, so the barrier to entry is higher.
  - multjoy 2y ago
    I remember running a semi-popular phpBB back in the early 00's. There was nothing like Digital Ocean or Linode. You can run a small instance for pocket change today.
    - Kye 2y ago
      There were VPSes and managed servers back then, but most people went with shared hosts that supported PHP and MySQL. That's how WordPress got so big.
  - rat87 2y ago
trilbyglens 2y ago
Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does. If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch that at all because there would be no way to identify them separately from the content.
- stavros 2y ago
  A smaller company like Hiveworks, for example?
- JBiserkov 2y ago
  > there would be no way to identify them separately from the content We'll use AI
- ccppurcell 2y ago
  I think you're wrong about that last part. For ads to make sense as a revenue stream you have to basically auction them, for example at different times and different countries etc. So there has to be some automation, you can't just manually include each ad. This will have to be done programmatically, and there will always be traces (e.g. in div classes). You can try to randomise these or what have you, but it's basically a cat and mouse game with ad blockers.
  - TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
    Their used to be a system (which was created by a webcomic artist, though I forget which one) where ads could be sold in slots of time, completely independent of clicks. But it died a few years ago.
    - elsonrodriguez 2y ago
      Dinosaur Comics I believe.
dmurray 2y ago
> Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would put all of their content behind a paywall, or in an app, or something else that's worse than the status quo right? The NYT already puts its content behind a pay wall, and SMBC (as of this update) doesn't rely on third party ads either. So it's not clear that something else would be worse than the status quo for them. Some content creators would certainly suffer, but if online ads were not normalized, others would thrive.
seanalltogether 2y ago
The answer to no more ads is you can't be independent. You have to have service aggregation. The fundamental problem is that you can't grow an audience all your content is behind a paywall. So you have to offer some content for free, but if you're an independent comic artist like smbc, no one is going to visit your site if only 1 comic per week is free. But if a lot of creators are behind a single paywall, and that paywall was able to feature 10 random free webcomics every day, then you pull in lots of visitors and have more opportunity to convert them into paying customers. Now the harder question, how do you convince a bunch of independent content creators to band together behind a single paywall.
- throwanem 2y ago
  Nebula did it.
  - TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
    Nebula is mostly video, but also hosts a bunch of podcasts. I wonder whether they could be persuaded to expand their range of offerings to other media.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  I think in a way, we already sort of have precedent for this, in the comics sector. The Japanese-style "phone book sized" manga weeklies/monthlies are the manifestation of this idea. Technically it's not a "free" teaser, but if you buy the issue for one or two "known" series you want to try, the rest is shoveled into your hand for free. It also provides a good stickiness factor-- if you originally bought the magazine for one or two series, hopefully you've glommed onto others by the time those end or you lose interest in them.
cameronh90 2y ago
I might be unusual, but I’d be quite happy to pay more than my ad value (less than a cent per pageview in most cases) to sites, but there’s no system to do so. There’s zero chance I’m going to subscribe to every site that I might hit a few times a year.
lou1306 2y ago
a) You can set up your own advertisement/sponsorship system and, unless some bloke took the time to specifically write rules targeting your website, the ads would not be blocked. Bonus points: this prevents most malicious ads, which are another major reason people use ad blockers, from appearing on your website, simply by virtue of you not letting them in. b) You can always follow a combination of free (unpaywalled) content + premium content behind a paywall/Patreon/etc + merchandise + Kickstarter for more ambitious projects.

a_shovel 2y ago

I've heard legends of a time, perhaps back in the mid 2000s, when companies paid so much for banner ads that you didn't need another revenue source for your website with Flash games or what have you. If such a time ever existed, it ended long before Flash did.

TylerE 2y ago
It ended when the vc money in the original dotcom boom dried up.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago

I'm not entirely sure it would be worse than the status quo. If all the free sites were the ones run for the love of it, and all the paid sites were commercial garbage, that might actually be better.

ThrowawayR2 2y ago

The attention economy is powered by payments from maximizing ad impressions but the public is increasingly recognizing that the attention economy is mentally and culturally toxic. To break free of the attention economy death spiral that we're in, internet advertising has to undergo a pretty drastic dieback. In other words, the whole thing has to fall apart and the sooner the better.

lazide 2y ago
That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US military suddenly stopped getting funded. Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses are built based on online ads. A LOT.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  no pain no gain
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  Google and Meta collectively employ how many software people in the United States? The jobs hit would be unimaginable. High octane nightmare fuel, that idea.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    Doesn’t seem like a nightmare to me - a trillion dollars spent on ads that get blocked is a trillion dollars wasted. The real nightmare is hundreds of thousands of people on six figure salaries wasting their lives producing ads everyone hates.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
      You're right. What was I thinking? Instead, they should be unemployed and starving, and all the services they bought from other Americans with their $200k/year salaries, those Americans should also be unemployed and starving too. All because you don't want to see an ad on whatever ridiculous social media it is that people are visiting now days. That will make the world right.
      - relaxing 2y ago
        Get a grip, mate.

derkster 2y ago

I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads. Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now? In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can remember were serious labors of love, especially the early "hacker" communities. But, we lost that internet a long time ago. I, personally, would love for an internet that could emulate those early years of being able to log in, communicate, and make friends with random, sometimes sketchy, weirdos, all within 45 seconds of dialing up. There weren't algorithms that decided who was important and who wasn't, you just had your words and wits. That was a tangent, but my point is - would the internet improve or decline if there was a serious "adpocalypse"?

stavros 2y ago
I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people would still use it and find value, but now even just running the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar is much higher now. These factors have made it less economical to just run a popular forum out of your own pocket, I think, so the barrier to entry is higher.
- multjoy 2y ago
  I remember running a semi-popular phpBB back in the early 00's. There was nothing like Digital Ocean or Linode. You can run a small instance for pocket change today.
  - Kye 2y ago
    There were VPSes and managed servers back then, but most people went with shared hosts that supported PHP and MySQL. That's how WordPress got so big.
- rat87 2y ago

trilbyglens 2y ago

Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google. When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of money like Google Ads does. If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would be able to catch that at all because there would be no way to identify them separately from the content.

stavros 2y ago
A smaller company like Hiveworks, for example?
JBiserkov 2y ago
> there would be no way to identify them separately from the content We'll use AI
ccppurcell 2y ago
I think you're wrong about that last part. For ads to make sense as a revenue stream you have to basically auction them, for example at different times and different countries etc. So there has to be some automation, you can't just manually include each ad. This will have to be done programmatically, and there will always be traces (e.g. in div classes). You can try to randomise these or what have you, but it's basically a cat and mouse game with ad blockers.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
  Their used to be a system (which was created by a webcomic artist, though I forget which one) where ads could be sold in slots of time, completely independent of clicks. But it died a few years ago.
  - elsonrodriguez 2y ago
    Dinosaur Comics I believe.

dmurray 2y ago

> Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would put all of their content behind a paywall, or in an app, or something else that's worse than the status quo right? The NYT already puts its content behind a pay wall, and SMBC (as of this update) doesn't rely on third party ads either. So it's not clear that something else would be worse than the status quo for them. Some content creators would certainly suffer, but if online ads were not normalized, others would thrive.

seanalltogether 2y ago

The answer to no more ads is you can't be independent. You have to have service aggregation. The fundamental problem is that you can't grow an audience all your content is behind a paywall. So you have to offer some content for free, but if you're an independent comic artist like smbc, no one is going to visit your site if only 1 comic per week is free. But if a lot of creators are behind a single paywall, and that paywall was able to feature 10 random free webcomics every day, then you pull in lots of visitors and have more opportunity to convert them into paying customers. Now the harder question, how do you convince a bunch of independent content creators to band together behind a single paywall.

throwanem 2y ago
Nebula did it.
- TRiG_Ireland 2y ago
  Nebula is mostly video, but also hosts a bunch of podcasts. I wonder whether they could be persuaded to expand their range of offerings to other media.
hakfoo 2y ago
I think in a way, we already sort of have precedent for this, in the comics sector. The Japanese-style "phone book sized" manga weeklies/monthlies are the manifestation of this idea. Technically it's not a "free" teaser, but if you buy the issue for one or two "known" series you want to try, the rest is shoveled into your hand for free. It also provides a good stickiness factor-- if you originally bought the magazine for one or two series, hopefully you've glommed onto others by the time those end or you lose interest in them.

cameronh90 2y ago

I might be unusual, but I’d be quite happy to pay more than my ad value (less than a cent per pageview in most cases) to sites, but there’s no system to do so. There’s zero chance I’m going to subscribe to every site that I might hit a few times a year.

lou1306 2y ago

a) You can set up your own advertisement/sponsorship system and, unless some bloke took the time to specifically write rules targeting your website, the ads would not be blocked. Bonus points: this prevents most malicious ads, which are another major reason people use ad blockers, from appearing on your website, simply by virtue of you not letting them in. b) You can always follow a combination of free (unpaywalled) content + premium content behind a paywall/Patreon/etc + merchandise + Kickstarter for more ambitious projects.