5 ms·
If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?
by btbuildem 7mo ago
If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?
- giovannibonetti 7mo agoMicro-payments, probably
- MyHonestOpinon 7mo agoI have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.
- latexr 7mo agoIsn’t that Apple News+? Cheaper than $20, too. Alternatively, Libby is free (and yes, legal, though not available everywhere).
- mikestew 7mo agoIsn’t that Apple News+? You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?). That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.
- svachalek 7mo agoPopular Mechanics is so sad these days. Like the Discovery Channel, they just had to take something that was good and intentionally turn it into garbage for some coin.
- chipotle_coyote 7mo ago"For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it" has been my take since I got it sometime last year. It's kind of remarkable -- the ads are absolute trash and the apps, while not bad, are a little weird in hard-to-define ways other than "Apple used to do better at this whole UI thing". But if you want just a handful of the paywalled publications it unlocks for you, it's a great deal.
- Spooky23 7mo agoApple News is a weird interface it it’s great. Magazines are all garbage now with few exceptions. In my case my local paper is there as well. I would subscribe to the paper directly, but after the 19 week trial, it renews for random intervals for increasing prices.
- Aurornis 7mo ago> You would be correct, but... I agree that Apple News+ is bad, but I think this is an example of why these plans always fail: Someone says "I would pay good money for a service that does..." and then the service that does the thing appears and the goalposts keep moving as people realize their threshold for wanting to pay for something is higher than they originally thought.
- girvo 7mo agoI pay for Apple One and yet the apple news app on my phone is still riddled with ads with weird AI generated people and horrible articles from crappy publishers pushing some other sensationalist garbage.
- saltyoldman 7mo agoWhat frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month. Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NOT. It's a fucking scam to make us pay a premium. I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...
- neutronicus 7mo agoPresumably because advertisers won't continue to pay $2/user/month for a pool of users that has been denuded of all the users with three bucks a month to rub together for ad-free YouTube.
- simonw 7mo agoMy guess is that the $2/user/month thing is an average across all of the users, and the fact that you use YouTube enough to even consider to pay to go ad free puts you in the much higher range of dollars-per-month users such that $14/month may even lose them money.
- smcin 7mo agoYes it's a very broad global average. Advertisers pay much more for North American users, then European users.
- tonyedgecombe 7mo agoAnd the ones they want to reach the most are the same ones willing to pay for a subscription to remove ads.
- harikb 7mo agoUnless you have some first hand information that I have, you are more than 10x off. > I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below... There in lies the problem. Your eye balls (assuming well employed with $$$ disposable income) is another 10x worth to advertisers. If I were to make a guess, Youtube for sure will lose money at $14/month on your specific browser. You are literally subsidizing internet for, let us say for arguments sake, some zip code in rural america or <sub any rural part of the world> 's Youtube streaming needs.
- BizarroLand 7mo agoI would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to the participating sites I browse. My only overriding and most prominent concern is that given how every other webservice has been, that once they have sufficient ownership of the space they will increase the cost, likely significantly, and then they will likely add in their own ads on top of everything else. It will take a literal once in a century genius to make something like this that actually works and that companies will latch onto.
- porkloin 7mo agoI think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top. I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.
- BizarroLand 7mo agoGood catch. I didn't even think about the fast lanes fiasco. I don't know why businesses have decided that since they have connected to the internet that the internet owes them. It should be a public utility. It should be as ad free as reasonable. It should not track you. The internet should be a lot of things that it currently isn't all because rent-seeking money and power grubbing bastards have too many of the strings and love pulling them like they're pulling their puds.
- bandrami 7mo agoI swear by Kagi and will never go back (until they inevitably start including ads after a bad earnings report)
- hkt 7mo agoPress reader is basically this, although it lacks some of the better titles.
- didgetmaster 7mo agoEveryone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.
- autoexec 7mo agoI think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company anything to include, but when somebody gets greedy and starts considering adding ads it would make the idea much less attractive and could force them to look at other ways to enshitify their product.
- Terr_ 7mo ago> contract provisions that would require the company to IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here. If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data. If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
- bluGill 7mo agocable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.
- Kye 7mo agoI spent a long time thinking CATV on the back mean Cable TV, not Community Antenna TV.
- b112 7mo agoI'd love that, but then I see things like this: https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/ Which is a great idea and a great site, but why is it even necessary. The sheer dumb that means there are 12312 Netflix 'class' stream services is beyond ridiculous. I used to love one-stop shopping, now it's so fragmented I just went back to piracy. I don't have time to monkey with 10 sub services. My point? As soon as such a service existed, there'd actually be 50 of them, and the stuff you wanted would be on 8 separate services.
- topaz0 7mo agoOthers mention Apple news+ but there are actually a bunch of services that do this. Zinio is one that I've encountered, but a quick search shows that there are also Magzter, Readly, Flipboard, etc etc. I can't speak to their relative merits/range of content/user hostility. In the early 2010s I used to use one where you bought credits and paid per article (usually on the order of $1-$2 iirc, but depended on the source/length). Can't remember what it was called and I don't see it on any of these lists, so maybe it no longer exists or was bought up. Anyway, this is something you can have if you actually want it.
- jes5199 7mo agoit was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most. Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off
- btbuildem 7mo agoInteresting approach! I feel like this is a hard space to break into, because of the friction -- both having to convince content hosts to opt in, and consumers to subscribe.