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I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I want to make sure that content crea

I agree with the points in the article. Fingerprinting of any kind is a major risk for personal freedom. At the same time I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. That said, I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read. The ad based model provides a more streamlined approach to compensation, but at the unacceptable price of privacy. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.

airstrike 11mo ago
Pay $5/month to buy credits that let you read content behind that network. Every blog you read gets $0.10. Top up with credits if you run out. Sending emails costs $0.50.
- CamperBob2 11mo ago
  Eh, that's too expensive unless the recipient can authorize refunds for non-spam emails. But yes, I always thought some form of network syndication would emerge on the Web, where creators could register for their share of aggregated periodic payments made by users. Still not sure why that's not a thing. I would pay $50/month to a syndicate in return for never having to deal with paywalls on any sites affiliated with them. But only as long as the vast majority of sites participated, and that is probably the showstopper, I guess. We'd end up paying 20 different 'syndicates' for absolutely no good reason, just as we now have to deal with 20 different streaming services.
- ako 11mo ago
  I read from too many different sources through aggregators like hackernews. With a network you'd probably still have too many subscriptions. Also wonder if it will really work out, i open too many articles that are pretty bad when you start reading them. So i quit after 1 or 2 paragraphs. Now if you get the first 2 paragraphs for free, contents writers will start to optimize for good first 2 paragraphs, and afterwards quality will drop. Also, many blog posts or news articles don't have more than 2 paragraphs of good content.
Xelbair 11mo ago
how about donating to the creator directly? not subscription, just occasional donations whenever people feel like it - content is more widely available, and people who really enjoy it or are well off can actually fund the development
- lobsterthief 11mo ago
  Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn’t pay the bills for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but nobody has made that work yet.
  - voakbasda 11mo ago
    No one has made a successful micro-tipping solution, because regulations and entrenched interests (banks, payment processors) have too much control and assess per-transaction fees that dwarf the amounts that such a system would be designed send. Aggregation of tips and payouts would help, but that requires network effects (achievable only at scale) to be viable. I believe this approach has been tried in recent years, but I am not sure where those efforts went.
  - txrx0000 11mo ago
    If someone puts a donate button beside their name or in the corner of their webpage, and that button leads to a payment page, I think that's good enough. The point of paying creators is so that they can focus on creating content instead of making other things. Giving money to a creator is basically saying "you're so good at what you do, and it has so much cultural/intellectual value, I'd rather have you make content instead of stocking shelves or making food". But this should be reserved for people that publish good content because they can and are passionate about it, not just anyone putting out slop with the instrumental goal of paying their bills. If the friction of clicking a button and filling in payment details is enough to deter people from paying them, then maybe their content isn't worth paying for and they should find some other way to make a living instead.
- temp0826 11mo ago
  I already pay my isp. Maybe they should work something out with them.
norman784 11mo ago
Ads are annoying, but they are ok, what is not ok is collecting data and then selling it, so they can profile you without your consent across different platforms.
prymitive 11mo ago
> I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read Would you pay per view? Most people (me included) would probably hesitate to say yes, because we’re used to not paying for that. But what if it meant that ad based model is gone and everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?
- morkalork 11mo ago
  Hard to say, there's no shortage of enticing looking medium articles that are superficial and worthless. I would not pay per view that trash even though there are good ones buried in the pile.
  - Terretta 11mo ago
    "If you thought click-bait was bad before..."
- echelon_musk 11mo ago
  How do you track the views?
  - imiric 11mo ago
    How do you track ad impressions?
- myaccountonhn 11mo ago
  I would. Or alternatively I'd also pay for a Spotify style model where my monthly amount get redistributed amongst the articles I read.
  - FireBeyond 11mo ago
    At the risk of pedantry, though it's still germane to this context, that's more the Tidal model than the Spotify model. Spotify's model is more that your monthly amount gets disproportionately redistributed to the artists that bring more interest and listens to Spotify, regardless of whether you were one of those listeners. Smaller and niche artists suffer under Spotify's model.
tgv 11mo ago
They don't get $5 per month from ads. So the true subscription price must be a lot lower. One option: a fund where you buy tokens, that you can spend reading an article. That will, however, lead to more clickbait and AI slop and snowing under serious blogs with low volume.
- Bjartr 11mo ago
  This micro payments for content idea has been tried a few times, with slight variations. No-one has cracked the problem yet. But maybe one day
  - ericd 11mo ago
    I know HN doesn’t love crypto, but this kind of thing seems promising for finally cracking micropayments: https://www.x402.org/ https://www.x402.org/
kasabali 11mo ago
> I'm not quite sure what the answer is. It's very simple, it's what they've been doing in print media for centuries: contextual advertising.
- gedy 11mo ago
  Yes seriously - I'm old enough to have enjoy reading magazines that had ads throughout them. They were fine. I'd venture to say contextual advertising would be more effective than whatever we've been trying to squeeze out of fingerprinting etc. All this supposed "data" they are gathering feels like a scam perpetuated by ad companies about how important it is to the people who buy ads. It's not. Even Facebook and Instagram, which pretty much should know you to a tee is completely ineffectual at advertising to me - like at all.
  - 8bitsrule 11mo ago
    Same here. By the time I was old enough to have an income, reading comics had already made it possible for me to -not even see any- advertising. That carried over to newspapers, magazines... all those advertisers were wasting their money. Later on in life I got pissed at cable-TV advertisers shoved into my favorite movies every 5-10 minutes ... ruining any ambience or artistic merit in them ... so I got rid of cable TV. By the time analog TV went away, I'd got rid of my television set. No return address on an envelope? junk mail, into the garbage unopened. Now the pollution's ruined the 'net ... it's YouTube (re-routed) and some websites (blocked). So long, boing-boing and wired and your 'native ads'. Sites demand subscription? blocked. How much longer before advertisers realize how much they're getting ripped off?
    - sfink 11mo ago
      > Sites demand subscription? blocked. Odd. In the midst of a (well-deserved) anti-ad rant, you throw in the primary non-ad alternative and discard it. > How much longer before advertisers realize how much they're getting ripped off? A while longer, if the same people who reject ads are also the people who reject alternatives to ads. The advertisers can safely ignore those people's opinions. (I'm not saying subscriptions are the answer. I don't have an answer. I'm just saying that companies wanting subscription money is not part of the problem where companies want to shove ads in our faces 24/7.)
yegle 11mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor was the ideal solution IMHO.
- usr1106 11mo ago
  Ideal for what problem? Certainly not for reducing Google's data collection and improving privacy. It would only work with tons of small payment providers, but then you are back at square 1 that users need to subscribe with tons of services for just pennies.
txrx0000 11mo ago
We could normalize paying content creators directly. So instead of paywalls or ads, we get "donate" buttons.
jwr 11mo ago
> content creators are compensated for their work I have a gut feeling that we've been tricked (by ad companies) into thinking that this is somehow realistic and that casual "content creators" can get meaningful money from us reading their articles. Realistically, while professional content creators can make a living, writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income. Instead of trying to "monetize" everything, we would be better off with free content like on the internet of old. There are other means of making money. It seems that the current situation means that the "content creators" earn insignificant money, while ad companies earn huge money because of scale, and we all somehow keep believing that this is necessary for content to appear.
- Buttons840 11mo ago
  You mean I shouldn't make a comfortable living off my valuable HN comments? I was about to consider this comment a good days work. Maybe if I put this comment on my own webpage it would be more valuable?
  - ykonstant 11mo ago
    Best I can do is tree fiddy. Perhaps a little ragebait could give it that extra oomph it needs.
    - Buttons840 11mo ago
      You mean tree fiddy per month, right?
  - zelphirkalt 11mo ago
    About as valuable, as many content creators' work. But it all hinges on engagement, so consider this my part in helping you to the next million.
- FireBeyond 11mo ago
  > writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income Nor, generally, should it. Sitting down one or two Saturday afternoons a month to write a blog post shouldn't be generating the income of a FTE.
beeflet 11mo ago
The Ad model is exactly the problem. If you had anonymous, cheap micropayments where you pay 1 cent per pageview it would not just solve the surveillance problem but it would solve the DDoS problem too (you set up a web server where the price increases with load and clients bid for bandwidth).
- AndrewStephens 11mo ago
  Sadly, I think you are wrong. Micropayments seem attractive but the idea falls apart quickly - there are just too many intractable non-technical problems. It has been tried more than once and each effort has failed. I wrote a longer post on this[0] but to save you the click I will state the biggest problem from a privacy point of view - if you think privacy is bad now with ads imagine how much worse it would be with a payment processor knowing your every click. Yes, I know about certain cryptocurrencies that maintain privacy, they are a non-starter for micropayments for different reasons. Even if a magically technical solution to privacy were to emerge there is nothing more valuable than information about paying customers and sites would use browser fingerprinting anyway. [0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
  - beeflet 11mo ago
    I think it is a technical problem. If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough. Even without the lightning network and just direct 1-to-1 payment channels, it would work. The article you lists assumes a "conventional" credit card system with chargebacks, massive fees, etc. which makes micropayments ecosystem impractical in the first place. Proposals for micro-payment systems usually describe a way top enable low-fee payments. The author doesn't take into account modern cryptocurrency tech like payment channels. I really doubt that payments have a natural fixed floor of 10s of cents - Payment providers charge these fees simply because they are in a natural monopoly position, thanks to lock-in and regulation. The need to control fraud is caused by regulatory requirements, which are in turn caused by monopolization. Despite being technologically less efficient, even traditional cryptocurrency payments are cheaper than bank transfer fees due to competition and low regulation. Secondly, you assume that no one wants to do micropayments. The infrastructure doesn't exist for it yet. If you don't build it, they will not come. As for browser fingerprinting, it can be solved on the client side with enough effort. Look at tor browser. Just have a system where cookies, WebGL, etc. are opt in on a browser level in the same way that WebUSB is. Artificially limit the performance of javascript to prevent bench-marking. I think it is possible to solve this architecturally. Check it out! https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf Also, there are GNU Taler/Chaumian cash type systems that inherit the efficiency of centralized systems with an added privacy benefit.
Neikius 11mo ago
Do you see how the discourse has been shifted here? Some of us have nothing against ads per-se. We care about tracking. How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? In my case it does not. As the tracked ads are usually worse as they will keep advertising me things I don't need anymore. Context based ads worked fine in the past and I don't really see why they cannot. Also why does every web store need to show me ads? Don't they make money out of selling things? If they really have to, do they have to invade privacy? This is like walking into a physical store and them doing facial recognition, then showing you tailored ads/inventory. That feels creepy to me.
- fragmede 11mo ago
  > How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? If you don’t want to be tracked, you shouldn’t be, but how could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards a 50 year old woman isn’t going to be the same ad to show a 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be better than ones that aren’t. You may not like the targeting and think it's invasive, because it is, but let's not pretend the tracking doesn't do something.
  - troupo 11mo ago
    A 14-year-old is unlikely to read/look at the same content as a 50-year old woman. That's how contextual advertisement works.
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      contextual advertising isn't targeted advertising, yes.
      - troupo 11mo ago
        Indeed. So no idea what your argument is about. BTW, targeted ads need to be 100% to 700% more efficient than regular ads to be as profitable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811623000502 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...
troupo 11mo ago
Showing ads doesn't require invasive and pervasive 24/7 surveilance.
nativeit 11mo ago
Give each of them $0.25/mo, and you’ll probably 10x-100x what they’re currently getting from you watching ads.
geocar 11mo ago
> I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. This is false: We're the ones who pay the creator, because: > I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read If that upsets you, please understand it upsets me to, because > but at the unacceptable price of privacy I want you to consider a different toothbrush brand, or maybe a hot location for a holiday, and the idea that I am "invading" your privacy in trying to do this is disconcerting. I understand there are actors who want to use your private personalising data to harm you. I think that is bad, but I am telling you friend, that isn't me. > I'm not quite sure what the answer is. Listen, as an insider I am not quite sure what the answer is either, but I'm telling you that content creators need to eat because you have threatened them with capitalism which murders you if you don't participate, and I am the one feeding them and not you. I think though, it probably takes the form of better laws that prevent people from using personalised data to harm you without public (judicial) review, and I think that is going to require people like you thinking of the outcome that you want, instead of foolishly trying the impossible to conserve your personal privacy.
AuthAuth 11mo ago
> I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read Why would you assume ads are worth $5 a month? Its more like paying 10cents to read the blog.

airstrike 11mo ago

Pay $5/month to buy credits that let you read content behind that network. Every blog you read gets $0.10. Top up with credits if you run out. Sending emails costs $0.50.

CamperBob2 11mo ago
Eh, that's too expensive unless the recipient can authorize refunds for non-spam emails. But yes, I always thought some form of network syndication would emerge on the Web, where creators could register for their share of aggregated periodic payments made by users. Still not sure why that's not a thing. I would pay $50/month to a syndicate in return for never having to deal with paywalls on any sites affiliated with them. But only as long as the vast majority of sites participated, and that is probably the showstopper, I guess. We'd end up paying 20 different 'syndicates' for absolutely no good reason, just as we now have to deal with 20 different streaming services.
ako 11mo ago
I read from too many different sources through aggregators like hackernews. With a network you'd probably still have too many subscriptions. Also wonder if it will really work out, i open too many articles that are pretty bad when you start reading them. So i quit after 1 or 2 paragraphs. Now if you get the first 2 paragraphs for free, contents writers will start to optimize for good first 2 paragraphs, and afterwards quality will drop. Also, many blog posts or news articles don't have more than 2 paragraphs of good content.

Xelbair 11mo ago

how about donating to the creator directly? not subscription, just occasional donations whenever people feel like it - content is more widely available, and people who really enjoy it or are well off can actually fund the development

lobsterthief 11mo ago
Yes, but you need a scalable and low-friction donation solution. Patreon is the closest but it doesn’t pay the bills for most creators. Maybe some micro-tipping solution, but nobody has made that work yet.
- voakbasda 11mo ago
  No one has made a successful micro-tipping solution, because regulations and entrenched interests (banks, payment processors) have too much control and assess per-transaction fees that dwarf the amounts that such a system would be designed send. Aggregation of tips and payouts would help, but that requires network effects (achievable only at scale) to be viable. I believe this approach has been tried in recent years, but I am not sure where those efforts went.
- txrx0000 11mo ago
  If someone puts a donate button beside their name or in the corner of their webpage, and that button leads to a payment page, I think that's good enough. The point of paying creators is so that they can focus on creating content instead of making other things. Giving money to a creator is basically saying "you're so good at what you do, and it has so much cultural/intellectual value, I'd rather have you make content instead of stocking shelves or making food". But this should be reserved for people that publish good content because they can and are passionate about it, not just anyone putting out slop with the instrumental goal of paying their bills. If the friction of clicking a button and filling in payment details is enough to deter people from paying them, then maybe their content isn't worth paying for and they should find some other way to make a living instead.
temp0826 11mo ago
I already pay my isp. Maybe they should work something out with them.

norman784 11mo ago

Ads are annoying, but they are ok, what is not ok is collecting data and then selling it, so they can profile you without your consent across different platforms.

prymitive 11mo ago

> I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read Would you pay per view? Most people (me included) would probably hesitate to say yes, because we’re used to not paying for that. But what if it meant that ad based model is gone and everything you buy is cheaper because the price does not include the cost of running ads?

morkalork 11mo ago
Hard to say, there's no shortage of enticing looking medium articles that are superficial and worthless. I would not pay per view that trash even though there are good ones buried in the pile.
- Terretta 11mo ago
  "If you thought click-bait was bad before..."
echelon_musk 11mo ago
How do you track the views?
- imiric 11mo ago
  How do you track ad impressions?
myaccountonhn 11mo ago
I would. Or alternatively I'd also pay for a Spotify style model where my monthly amount get redistributed amongst the articles I read.
- FireBeyond 11mo ago
  At the risk of pedantry, though it's still germane to this context, that's more the Tidal model than the Spotify model. Spotify's model is more that your monthly amount gets disproportionately redistributed to the artists that bring more interest and listens to Spotify, regardless of whether you were one of those listeners. Smaller and niche artists suffer under Spotify's model.

tgv 11mo ago

They don't get $5 per month from ads. So the true subscription price must be a lot lower. One option: a fund where you buy tokens, that you can spend reading an article. That will, however, lead to more clickbait and AI slop and snowing under serious blogs with low volume.

Bjartr 11mo ago
This micro payments for content idea has been tried a few times, with slight variations. No-one has cracked the problem yet. But maybe one day
- ericd 11mo ago
  I know HN doesn’t love crypto, but this kind of thing seems promising for finally cracking micropayments: https://www.x402.org/ https://www.x402.org/

kasabali 11mo ago

> I'm not quite sure what the answer is. It's very simple, it's what they've been doing in print media for centuries: contextual advertising.

gedy 11mo ago
Yes seriously - I'm old enough to have enjoy reading magazines that had ads throughout them. They were fine. I'd venture to say contextual advertising would be more effective than whatever we've been trying to squeeze out of fingerprinting etc. All this supposed "data" they are gathering feels like a scam perpetuated by ad companies about how important it is to the people who buy ads. It's not. Even Facebook and Instagram, which pretty much should know you to a tee is completely ineffectual at advertising to me - like at all.
- 8bitsrule 11mo ago
  Same here. By the time I was old enough to have an income, reading comics had already made it possible for me to -not even see any- advertising. That carried over to newspapers, magazines... all those advertisers were wasting their money. Later on in life I got pissed at cable-TV advertisers shoved into my favorite movies every 5-10 minutes ... ruining any ambience or artistic merit in them ... so I got rid of cable TV. By the time analog TV went away, I'd got rid of my television set. No return address on an envelope? junk mail, into the garbage unopened. Now the pollution's ruined the 'net ... it's YouTube (re-routed) and some websites (blocked). So long, boing-boing and wired and your 'native ads'. Sites demand subscription? blocked. How much longer before advertisers realize how much they're getting ripped off?
  - sfink 11mo ago
    > Sites demand subscription? blocked. Odd. In the midst of a (well-deserved) anti-ad rant, you throw in the primary non-ad alternative and discard it. > How much longer before advertisers realize how much they're getting ripped off? A while longer, if the same people who reject ads are also the people who reject alternatives to ads. The advertisers can safely ignore those people's opinions. (I'm not saying subscriptions are the answer. I don't have an answer. I'm just saying that companies wanting subscription money is not part of the problem where companies want to shove ads in our faces 24/7.)

yegle 11mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor was the ideal solution IMHO.

usr1106 11mo ago
Ideal for what problem? Certainly not for reducing Google's data collection and improving privacy. It would only work with tons of small payment providers, but then you are back at square 1 that users need to subscribe with tons of services for just pennies.

txrx0000 11mo ago

We could normalize paying content creators directly. So instead of paywalls or ads, we get "donate" buttons.

jwr 11mo ago

> content creators are compensated for their work I have a gut feeling that we've been tricked (by ad companies) into thinking that this is somehow realistic and that casual "content creators" can get meaningful money from us reading their articles. Realistically, while professional content creators can make a living, writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income. Instead of trying to "monetize" everything, we would be better off with free content like on the internet of old. There are other means of making money. It seems that the current situation means that the "content creators" earn insignificant money, while ad companies earn huge money because of scale, and we all somehow keep believing that this is necessary for content to appear.

Buttons840 11mo ago
You mean I shouldn't make a comfortable living off my valuable HN comments? I was about to consider this comment a good days work. Maybe if I put this comment on my own webpage it would be more valuable?
- ykonstant 11mo ago
  Best I can do is tree fiddy. Perhaps a little ragebait could give it that extra oomph it needs.
  - Buttons840 11mo ago
    You mean tree fiddy per month, right?
- zelphirkalt 11mo ago
  About as valuable, as many content creators' work. But it all hinges on engagement, so consider this my part in helping you to the next million.
FireBeyond 11mo ago
> writing a blog post every once in a while will not provide meaningful income Nor, generally, should it. Sitting down one or two Saturday afternoons a month to write a blog post shouldn't be generating the income of a FTE.

beeflet 11mo ago

The Ad model is exactly the problem. If you had anonymous, cheap micropayments where you pay 1 cent per pageview it would not just solve the surveillance problem but it would solve the DDoS problem too (you set up a web server where the price increases with load and clients bid for bandwidth).

AndrewStephens 11mo ago
Sadly, I think you are wrong. Micropayments seem attractive but the idea falls apart quickly - there are just too many intractable non-technical problems. It has been tried more than once and each effort has failed. I wrote a longer post on this[0] but to save you the click I will state the biggest problem from a privacy point of view - if you think privacy is bad now with ads imagine how much worse it would be with a payment processor knowing your every click. Yes, I know about certain cryptocurrencies that maintain privacy, they are a non-starter for micropayments for different reasons. Even if a magically technical solution to privacy were to emerge there is nothing more valuable than information about paying customers and sites would use browser fingerprinting anyway. [0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
- beeflet 11mo ago
  I think it is a technical problem. If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough. Even without the lightning network and just direct 1-to-1 payment channels, it would work. The article you lists assumes a "conventional" credit card system with chargebacks, massive fees, etc. which makes micropayments ecosystem impractical in the first place. Proposals for micro-payment systems usually describe a way top enable low-fee payments. The author doesn't take into account modern cryptocurrency tech like payment channels. I really doubt that payments have a natural fixed floor of 10s of cents - Payment providers charge these fees simply because they are in a natural monopoly position, thanks to lock-in and regulation. The need to control fraud is caused by regulatory requirements, which are in turn caused by monopolization. Despite being technologically less efficient, even traditional cryptocurrency payments are cheaper than bank transfer fees due to competition and low regulation. Secondly, you assume that no one wants to do micropayments. The infrastructure doesn't exist for it yet. If you don't build it, they will not come. As for browser fingerprinting, it can be solved on the client side with enough effort. Look at tor browser. Just have a system where cookies, WebGL, etc. are opt in on a browser level in the same way that WebUSB is. Artificially limit the performance of javascript to prevent bench-marking. I think it is possible to solve this architecturally. Check it out! https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf Also, there are GNU Taler/Chaumian cash type systems that inherit the efficiency of centralized systems with an added privacy benefit.

Neikius 11mo ago

Do you see how the discourse has been shifted here? Some of us have nothing against ads per-se. We care about tracking. How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? In my case it does not. As the tracked ads are usually worse as they will keep advertising me things I don't need anymore. Context based ads worked fine in the past and I don't really see why they cannot. Also why does every web store need to show me ads? Don't they make money out of selling things? If they really have to, do they have to invade privacy? This is like walking into a physical store and them doing facial recognition, then showing you tailored ads/inventory. That feels creepy to me.

fragmede 11mo ago
> How does tracking me and invading my privacy make ads perform better? If you don’t want to be tracked, you shouldn’t be, but how could it not? At a very simple level, an ad targeted towards a 50 year old woman isn’t going to be the same ad to show a 14 year old boy. Different people like different things and ads targeting you as an advertising profile are going to be better than ones that aren’t. You may not like the targeting and think it's invasive, because it is, but let's not pretend the tracking doesn't do something.
- troupo 11mo ago
  A 14-year-old is unlikely to read/look at the same content as a 50-year old woman. That's how contextual advertisement works.
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    contextual advertising isn't targeted advertising, yes.
    - troupo 11mo ago
      Indeed. So no idea what your argument is about. BTW, targeted ads need to be 100% to 700% more efficient than regular ads to be as profitable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811623000502 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016781162...

troupo 11mo ago

Showing ads doesn't require invasive and pervasive 24/7 surveilance.

nativeit 11mo ago

Give each of them $0.25/mo, and you’ll probably 10x-100x what they’re currently getting from you watching ads.

geocar 11mo ago

> I want to make sure that content creators are compensated for their work. Ad firms that employ fingerprinting stand between me and the content creator. This is false: We're the ones who pay the creator, because: > I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read If that upsets you, please understand it upsets me to, because > but at the unacceptable price of privacy I want you to consider a different toothbrush brand, or maybe a hot location for a holiday, and the idea that I am "invading" your privacy in trying to do this is disconcerting. I understand there are actors who want to use your private personalising data to harm you. I think that is bad, but I am telling you friend, that isn't me. > I'm not quite sure what the answer is. Listen, as an insider I am not quite sure what the answer is either, but I'm telling you that content creators need to eat because you have threatened them with capitalism which murders you if you don't participate, and I am the one feeding them and not you. I think though, it probably takes the form of better laws that prevent people from using personalised data to harm you without public (judicial) review, and I think that is going to require people like you thinking of the outcome that you want, instead of foolishly trying the impossible to conserve your personal privacy.

AuthAuth 11mo ago

> I'm not going to pay $5/month for every blog that I occasionally read Why would you assume ads are worth $5 a month? Its more like paying 10cents to read the blog.