5 ms·

You will never escape ads by paying for content

45 points by hliyan 11y ago

vilmosi 11y ago
Simple and to the point
Silhouette 11y ago
I run a web site that produces original content at significant cost. We charge a small monthly fee for access. We don't carry ads, and have no plans to. That being the case, how exactly is someone who values our content and pays us for it going to get more ads as a result, no matter how much any third party might want to advertise to that person through our site?
- leephillips 11y ago
  Good question. Care to share where I can find your site? There are sites like LWN that have a long record of quality content that people are willing to pay a subscription for, that either have no advertising or very limited, unobtrusive advertising that they have not increased for a long time.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    Sorry, I tend to post pseudonymously in these discussions. I see too much risk of the everything-should-be-free crowd causing trouble in the real world if I link to my actual businesses. Suffice it to say that like LWN, the site in question is in a niche area, appealing to people who enjoy a specific activity and think about it a certain way, with little relevance to anyone else. The target audience is large enough to be viable, and we make enough money on it to cover our costs, but it's a small world kind of situation so we have little interest in interfering with the site or risking reputation damage or unwanted associations by carrying advertising. I suppose I'd never say never in business unless there were significant legal and/or ethical principles involved, but right now I can't imagine any realistic offer that would change our minds.
- droopyEyelids 11y ago
  Does your website have a business development team that discusses the best way to drive revenue for the enterprise? If not, you may be comparing apples to oranges.
  - ethanbond 11y ago
    The best way to drive revenue? Go rob a couple of banks and throw them in the corporate coffers. Of course, there's a tradeoff. Just because your form of "driving revenue" includes annoying the living hell out of users while cleanly documenting all of their behavior for surveillance purposes (government or otherwise) doesn't mean someone else's does.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    No, it's not really that kind of site. But then many of the sites I value myself and the content I read also aren't that kind of site. There are plenty of people in the world willing to produce good content without trying to maximise every last drop of potential revenue, and who for whatever reason prefer not to carry ads next to that content. Some of them just blog for fun. Some, like the site I mentioned, charge to cover the costs and maybe make some modest profit, but in a niche market you're never going to become the next Google or Facebook anyway. Sometimes the whole site is run for reasons other than direct profit anyway, for example if the site itself is a promotional exercise for some brand or store or charity awareness campaign or freelancer, or if it's some sort of community or government site with its costs covered by other means. None of these sites need to carry the kind of ads I think we're talking about here. Of course there are also sites that are very commercial in nature and do want to do everything they can to maximise revenues. If that means carrying ads, they'll do it. But as long as those sites aren't the only places you can find good content, the original premise will be flawed.
- fixermark 11y ago
  The hypothesis in the original article is that advertisers will be willing to pay an unlimited price for the eyeballs of your readers, as their demonstration of the desire to pay for content implies they have money to pay for other things. For this hypothesis to succeed, there must be a price at which your readers' attention can be bought from you. This is a simple theory that falls apart on the details. Of course advertisers won't pay unlimited funds. And if the entire business model of your content product is "View it without ads," there is in fact no price at which advertisers can buy your readers' attention (short of "The cost to buy your entire publishing entity," which is up to you).
shoo 11y ago
Okay, let's try an obviously ridiculous thought experiment: Can we apply the same argument to physical books? I bought a book a few weeks ago for about $20, from a physical book shop. It is a non-fiction book. It is pretty good. I am about 2/3rds of the way through it. The book contains no advertisements. Shock! Why is this? I suspect the argument is glossing over a few details! Maybe we could get a firmer idea by trying to quantify things. E.g. estimating how much people would pay, and how much that would be worth to potential advertisers, etc.
- bnegreve 11y ago
  But that works for movies. When you go to the cinema, you pay, yet you get ads before the movie and sneaky product placements during the movie.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    There are adverts in books too. A friend told me to read a new Bond or a Bourne book (can't remember) and it was one long series of product placements.
    - jpollock 11y ago
      That was "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", which was full of paid product placements.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Cinema attendance has been plummeting for 20 years. For, among other reasons, the value added by advertisements isn't realized by the cinema patrons who are paying their time and money to see them.
  - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    "Sneaky"... Maddox reviews "I Robot" http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=i_robot http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=i_robot
- deleted 11y ago
codeshaman 11y ago
Totally agree with the author. Obligatory quote by Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LEYG5TqaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LEYG5TqaI And a deeper analysis by George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW2JInyMoPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW2JInyMoPc
xiphias 11y ago
Ads aren't bad by themselves. Annoying ads that take my time and focus away are bad (for example video ads are mostly annoying as they always take my time away even if it's just a few seconds)
- HappyTypist 11y ago
  Collecting new private information that wouldn't be collected otherwise, for the purposes of targeting ads, is also a bad thing about ads IMO. There's nothing wrong with Gmail showing me relevant ads to my email, but there's something wrong with Google Chrome collecting my browsing history (under the guise of a "Sync" feature) for ads.
- fixermark 11y ago
  I'll add to that list "consume my device's energy to no benefit," in the days of mobile dominance. The battery and network resources wasted by ad content that doesn't result in a conversion adds up, and I don't know that price is yet reflected in the cost of the impressions.
- lanaius 11y ago
  Ads that don't take your time and focus away aren't really worth anything, are they?
- rimunroe 11y ago
  > Ads aren't bad by themselves That is not something that everyone agrees with (although neither is what constitutes an "ad"). There are obviously grey areas and arbitrary lines get drawn, but I personally feel like the whole concept of intentionally trying to influence someone to buy/consume/want something that they don't already desire is a a little ethically dubious.
  - ionised 11y ago
    Agreed. I consider it psychological manipulation. Nothing more.
aikah 11y ago
> So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in Except people are not paying to keep ads away, that's the point. Basically what happened to artists 10 years ago is happening to ad backed websites :Most People just don't want to pay for content on the web, period. Online advertising won't save the Buzzfeeds or the dying press when people use ad block massively. They'll have to find other ways to make money.
fixermark 11y ago
Interestingly, Google has just launched a project to test that theory: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ What happens when you let readers become bidders in the ad auction for their own attention?
- ethanbond 11y ago
  Ah, fantastic. You're telling me I get to pay in order to have my screen real estate chewed up by "thank you messages," get "fewer ads on some websites," and I get to have all of my browsing behavior tracked, too?! What a steal!
  - fixermark 11y ago
    You of course don't have to... In which case you get your screen real estate (and computer cycles and attention) chewed up by ads, get fewer ads on no websites, and get to have all your browsing behavior tracked too. Alternatively, you can install an ad-blocker, which will never be supported by sites that run ads (so will break them in exciting ways), can come with its own can of worms regarding tracking your browsing, and puts a publisher in a tragedy of the commons where if enough people go that road, they can't generate ad revenue and will have to seek other options (see sibling threads for side-effects). Alternatively, you can seek out media that is entirely ad-free of its own volition; you'll curtail your own consumption, but it's an option. It's a wide, free world out there.
    - ethanbond 11y ago
      Or Google can also try to put forth a serious proposal for what they're clearly acknowledging as a problem.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Quarterly Earnings Reports. You start a startup and offer subscriptions for content. You go public and everything is great. Then you have a bad quarter. Then another. Your stockholders are going to pressure you to find ways to quickly increase revenue (because thinking further into the future than a quarter is for losers, right?). You introduce ads. You have an amazing quarter. Then another. About this time your core user base is exiting for a new startup with a subscription model and no ads. You then have a string of bad quarters. You're in a downward spiral. Was, Rinse, Repeat.
- diminish 11y ago
  Right now I m staring at twitter picture content on my Android notification area. Are they gonna be ads soon? Most executives will carefully introduce ads by making A/B testing. So your scenario can only be made true by blind and dumb executives. And yes they are many.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    They are neither blind nor dumb. However, they can only see in green and have a single-minded focus on seeing more green.
delinka 11y ago
In the cases that I can't escape ads by paying, I tend to move away from the content with ads. For example, Hulu - I was a paying customer, but the relentless advertising drove me away. It's slightly different with HBO Now - I get ads, but for other entertainment on the same provider; this is much less bothersome. Ars Technica: I'm not a subscriber, I read often, but I tolerate the laser-focused advertising because the content is excellent, the ads are not obtrusive and they actually target me quite well. tl;dr- It's always more complicated than a simplistic blog post indicates.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  I also ditched Hulu over the ads. Their app kept crashing my Roku as well. Either one of those would have been enough reason. Who wants to pay someone to lob obnoxious ads at them?
- joshuapants 11y ago
  > In the cases that I can't escape ads by paying, I tend to move away from the content with ads. This is why I don't listen to the radio or watch "normal" TV anymore. I purchase music, subscribe to streaming services, and use Netflix.
striking 11y ago
Doubtful. Many websites across the Internet are ad-free when you pay for it, such as Ars Technica [1] and Slashdot [2]. Many apps do the same thing, offering In-App Purchases of "Disable Ads, $0.99". People wouldn't offer the option unless (1) they're inept and illogical or (2) it actually makes money. I'm willing to bet it's the latter. And even then, people love getting rid of ads. Whether you're blocking them with AdBlock Plus [3] or blocking things in a hosts file or firewall [4], or even just pirating things outright [I'm not posting a link to TPB], people hate having their minds filled with garbage. It's a waste of time, waste of space, and honestly will just disappear asymptotically. It will probably never leave us entirely, but it will effectively be gone (as far as I know). [1]: http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/ http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/ [2]: http://slashdot.org/faq/subscriptions.shtml http://slashdot.org/faq/subscriptions.shtml [3]: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-users-that-employ-AdBlock-Plus-or-similar-ad-blocking-plugins http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user... [4]: http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Tutorial-How-to-disable-Skype-advertisements/td-p/3316902 http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Tutoria...
- jshelly 11y ago
  Netflix can be added to that list as well
  - sethd 11y ago
    Assuming you don't consider product placement to be a form of advertising. Their original series are full of obvious product placements.
    - fixermark 11y ago
      It's definitely a different experience though. If the narrative calls for [someobject] to be in a scene and an advertiser pays to make it their object, that doesn't generally detach me from the story like an ad interstitial does.
  - mcculley 11y ago
wangii 11y ago
just like in-app-purchases.
dpatac 11y ago
If you go back in time cable used to be something you paid for not to have ads. Now look at us dumb folk, paying for cable/satellite and paying to see ads. Books are also filled with ads - if they mention a product by name - most likely it is placed there - American Psycho wow could not get past a page mentioning some list of products...
- iron_ball 11y ago
  Not arguing your larger point, but in American Psycho, the endless lists of brands and clothing labels illustrate the protagonist's obsession with surface appearance and the signals of wealth and status. It's one place where I think the brand barrage is well-placed and even subversive—because who wants to be like Patrick Bateman?
WorldWideWayne 11y ago
Cable TV was supposed to be TV without ads because you were paying for it. Look how long that lasted.
tome 11y ago
This is an ingenious observation, but why doesn't the argument work for something Netflix which[1] doesn't have ads. [1] unless I'm very much mistaken -- I'm not a Netflix subscriber
- joshuapants 11y ago
  No ads on Netflix unless you count the header on the page giving you a notification that new content is available, the carousel that rotates through new/interesting content, or the suggestion of other things you might be interested in after finishing a movie/series while the credits roll. No external ads, no commercials while you watch, just unintrusive elements that serve to help both the user and Netflix.
circlefavshape 11y ago
Not everything is commercial, and some content (wikipedia, open source software) is free and not ad-supported
a3n 11y ago
Just because you pay for content on a site, and are shown no ads on that site, doesn't mean that site can't make money from ads on your presence. Isn't the value for online ads in following you around, and showing you targeted ads all over the place? Why couldn't a site just sell the fact of your presence and use on a site to advertisers, including your habits while on the site? You could still be shown targeted ads elsewhere, and probably never connect it with your use of the original site.
Trufa 11y ago
Well the problem with this seems to be that it's sort of taking the internet as a whole, of course I wont get completely rid of advertisements but I'd like to get rid of advertisement at least in the services I care about, in this in particular I am willing to pay.
bryanlarsen 11y ago
This is exactly the reason why you pay for newspapers and magazines. Newspapers and magazines make ~90% of their revenue from advertisements. (Or at least they did before the internet killed their business model) If they made the newspaper free, it would increase their distribution by an order of magnitude or so, and since advertisers pay rates based on readership, you would think that would also increase their revenue a similar order of magnitude. But it doesn't work that way -- paying readers are worth a lot more than users who didn't pay for the newspaper / magazine.
emsy 11y ago
My main argument against paying for web content is that people who care about ads probably don't want to see them at all. What's the use to pay for a few sites but others don't offer a pay model and still molest and track you? A better model would be to pay the ad networks which in turn give money to the website operators (similar to those music flats) but I think that's unlikely to happen.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Well as most people point out, while advertisers want to get to people with "buying power" not everyone selling content to such people is willing to be a shill for them. Or put another way, there are plenty of content creators who would create entirely advertising free experiences for their content consumers if they could make a living doing that. What I find more interesting is that there is advertising that I like/seek out, for example back in the day Byte magazine had advertisers who by their nature of establishing a relationship with BYTE were much less likely to be frauds and they sold things that readers were interested in (parts, computers, boards, Etc.) But there was an interesting level of annoyingness they stayed below. I pay for the Economist and read it on my iPad. The experience is largely advertising free, and the ads it does have do not annoy me. This could change of course, but then I would probably stop subscribing. It was less clear cut with the NYTimes which I subscribed too and it still had annoying ads, I complained a couple of times, and then eventually stopped subscribing. And then there are the ads themselves. Something that is clearly a problem is ad "networks" can have a lot of crap in them, and those are both annoying and sometimes borderline fraudulent (or actually illegal in the case of the Canadian pharmacy ads). That the networks replaced a staff of sales people who were trying to sell businesses ad space on a month to month, week to week, or day to day basis makes for a very expensive proposition for a content provider. And yet it makes for a better experience for their reader if they express an editorial sentiment over the advertising content as well. (which print magazines have always done) The first startup I joined was doing a magazine about Golf on the web in 1995. That startup was very interested in ads that reflected the mission of the web site and were not "crazy". It made for a better user experience.
eevilspock 11y ago
This is the most ridiculous, hyperbolic, clickbait bullshit I've ever seen (today). First contradiction: "you will never" and "With the way the world currently works". Which is it? Second contradiction: "you will not escape ads by paying for your content" and "So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in." No. If you are paying for your content, by definition there are no ads. If advertisers outbid you and get ads into the product, then by the definition you are only partially paying for the content. To maintain your "I pay for my content" status you would demand the ads be removed or stop consuming from that publisher. And no, the solution isn't to make advertising illegal. It is to render it irrelevant, impotent, wasted money. We achieve that with: - a reliable fully crowdsourced independent recommendation system that consumers can base purchase decisions on, allowing them to reject ads as biased at best, manipulation and lies more often. - a movement where people stop using any ad-supported products[1], realizing that said products are not only not free, they are more expensive[2]. - shifting all the greatest minds of our generation from working on getting people to click ads[3] to figuring out micropayments, crowdfunding or an entirely new model to make the web accessible to all, without ads. - [1] Don't Be A Free User: https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ [2] Advertising makes nothing free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 [3] "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera

45 points by hliyan 11y ago

Simple and to the point

I run a web site that produces original content at significant cost. We charge a small monthly fee for access. We don't carry ads, and have no plans to. That being the case, how exactly is someone who values our content and pays us for it going to get more ads as a result, no matter how much any third party might want to advertise to that person through our site?

leephillips 11y ago
Good question. Care to share where I can find your site? There are sites like LWN that have a long record of quality content that people are willing to pay a subscription for, that either have no advertising or very limited, unobtrusive advertising that they have not increased for a long time.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  Sorry, I tend to post pseudonymously in these discussions. I see too much risk of the everything-should-be-free crowd causing trouble in the real world if I link to my actual businesses. Suffice it to say that like LWN, the site in question is in a niche area, appealing to people who enjoy a specific activity and think about it a certain way, with little relevance to anyone else. The target audience is large enough to be viable, and we make enough money on it to cover our costs, but it's a small world kind of situation so we have little interest in interfering with the site or risking reputation damage or unwanted associations by carrying advertising. I suppose I'd never say never in business unless there were significant legal and/or ethical principles involved, but right now I can't imagine any realistic offer that would change our minds.
droopyEyelids 11y ago
Does your website have a business development team that discusses the best way to drive revenue for the enterprise? If not, you may be comparing apples to oranges.
- ethanbond 11y ago
  The best way to drive revenue? Go rob a couple of banks and throw them in the corporate coffers. Of course, there's a tradeoff. Just because your form of "driving revenue" includes annoying the living hell out of users while cleanly documenting all of their behavior for surveillance purposes (government or otherwise) doesn't mean someone else's does.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  No, it's not really that kind of site. But then many of the sites I value myself and the content I read also aren't that kind of site. There are plenty of people in the world willing to produce good content without trying to maximise every last drop of potential revenue, and who for whatever reason prefer not to carry ads next to that content. Some of them just blog for fun. Some, like the site I mentioned, charge to cover the costs and maybe make some modest profit, but in a niche market you're never going to become the next Google or Facebook anyway. Sometimes the whole site is run for reasons other than direct profit anyway, for example if the site itself is a promotional exercise for some brand or store or charity awareness campaign or freelancer, or if it's some sort of community or government site with its costs covered by other means. None of these sites need to carry the kind of ads I think we're talking about here. Of course there are also sites that are very commercial in nature and do want to do everything they can to maximise revenues. If that means carrying ads, they'll do it. But as long as those sites aren't the only places you can find good content, the original premise will be flawed.
fixermark 11y ago
The hypothesis in the original article is that advertisers will be willing to pay an unlimited price for the eyeballs of your readers, as their demonstration of the desire to pay for content implies they have money to pay for other things. For this hypothesis to succeed, there must be a price at which your readers' attention can be bought from you. This is a simple theory that falls apart on the details. Of course advertisers won't pay unlimited funds. And if the entire business model of your content product is "View it without ads," there is in fact no price at which advertisers can buy your readers' attention (short of "The cost to buy your entire publishing entity," which is up to you).

shoo 11y ago

Okay, let's try an obviously ridiculous thought experiment: Can we apply the same argument to physical books? I bought a book a few weeks ago for about $20, from a physical book shop. It is a non-fiction book. It is pretty good. I am about 2/3rds of the way through it. The book contains no advertisements. Shock! Why is this? I suspect the argument is glossing over a few details! Maybe we could get a firmer idea by trying to quantify things. E.g. estimating how much people would pay, and how much that would be worth to potential advertisers, etc.

bnegreve 11y ago
But that works for movies. When you go to the cinema, you pay, yet you get ads before the movie and sneaky product placements during the movie.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  There are adverts in books too. A friend told me to read a new Bond or a Bourne book (can't remember) and it was one long series of product placements.
  - jpollock 11y ago
    That was "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", which was full of paid product placements.
- Retra 11y ago
  Cinema attendance has been plummeting for 20 years. For, among other reasons, the value added by advertisements isn't realized by the cinema patrons who are paying their time and money to see them.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  "Sneaky"... Maddox reviews "I Robot" http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=i_robot http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=i_robot
deleted 11y ago

codeshaman 11y ago

Totally agree with the author. Obligatory quote by Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LEYG5TqaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LEYG5TqaI And a deeper analysis by George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW2JInyMoPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW2JInyMoPc

xiphias 11y ago

Ads aren't bad by themselves. Annoying ads that take my time and focus away are bad (for example video ads are mostly annoying as they always take my time away even if it's just a few seconds)

HappyTypist 11y ago
Collecting new private information that wouldn't be collected otherwise, for the purposes of targeting ads, is also a bad thing about ads IMO. There's nothing wrong with Gmail showing me relevant ads to my email, but there's something wrong with Google Chrome collecting my browsing history (under the guise of a "Sync" feature) for ads.
fixermark 11y ago
I'll add to that list "consume my device's energy to no benefit," in the days of mobile dominance. The battery and network resources wasted by ad content that doesn't result in a conversion adds up, and I don't know that price is yet reflected in the cost of the impressions.
lanaius 11y ago
Ads that don't take your time and focus away aren't really worth anything, are they?
rimunroe 11y ago
> Ads aren't bad by themselves That is not something that everyone agrees with (although neither is what constitutes an "ad"). There are obviously grey areas and arbitrary lines get drawn, but I personally feel like the whole concept of intentionally trying to influence someone to buy/consume/want something that they don't already desire is a a little ethically dubious.
- ionised 11y ago
  Agreed. I consider it psychological manipulation. Nothing more.

aikah 11y ago

> So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in Except people are not paying to keep ads away, that's the point. Basically what happened to artists 10 years ago is happening to ad backed websites :Most People just don't want to pay for content on the web, period. Online advertising won't save the Buzzfeeds or the dying press when people use ad block massively. They'll have to find other ways to make money.

fixermark 11y ago

Interestingly, Google has just launched a project to test that theory: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ What happens when you let readers become bidders in the ad auction for their own attention?

ethanbond 11y ago
Ah, fantastic. You're telling me I get to pay in order to have my screen real estate chewed up by "thank you messages," get "fewer ads on some websites," and I get to have all of my browsing behavior tracked, too?! What a steal!
- fixermark 11y ago
  You of course don't have to... In which case you get your screen real estate (and computer cycles and attention) chewed up by ads, get fewer ads on no websites, and get to have all your browsing behavior tracked too. Alternatively, you can install an ad-blocker, which will never be supported by sites that run ads (so will break them in exciting ways), can come with its own can of worms regarding tracking your browsing, and puts a publisher in a tragedy of the commons where if enough people go that road, they can't generate ad revenue and will have to seek other options (see sibling threads for side-effects). Alternatively, you can seek out media that is entirely ad-free of its own volition; you'll curtail your own consumption, but it's an option. It's a wide, free world out there.
  - ethanbond 11y ago
    Or Google can also try to put forth a serious proposal for what they're clearly acknowledging as a problem.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

Quarterly Earnings Reports. You start a startup and offer subscriptions for content. You go public and everything is great. Then you have a bad quarter. Then another. Your stockholders are going to pressure you to find ways to quickly increase revenue (because thinking further into the future than a quarter is for losers, right?). You introduce ads. You have an amazing quarter. Then another. About this time your core user base is exiting for a new startup with a subscription model and no ads. You then have a string of bad quarters. You're in a downward spiral. Was, Rinse, Repeat.

diminish 11y ago
Right now I m staring at twitter picture content on my Android notification area. Are they gonna be ads soon? Most executives will carefully introduce ads by making A/B testing. So your scenario can only be made true by blind and dumb executives. And yes they are many.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  They are neither blind nor dumb. However, they can only see in green and have a single-minded focus on seeing more green.

delinka 11y ago

In the cases that I can't escape ads by paying, I tend to move away from the content with ads. For example, Hulu - I was a paying customer, but the relentless advertising drove me away. It's slightly different with HBO Now - I get ads, but for other entertainment on the same provider; this is much less bothersome. Ars Technica: I'm not a subscriber, I read often, but I tolerate the laser-focused advertising because the content is excellent, the ads are not obtrusive and they actually target me quite well. tl;dr- It's always more complicated than a simplistic blog post indicates.

fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
I also ditched Hulu over the ads. Their app kept crashing my Roku as well. Either one of those would have been enough reason. Who wants to pay someone to lob obnoxious ads at them?
joshuapants 11y ago
> In the cases that I can't escape ads by paying, I tend to move away from the content with ads. This is why I don't listen to the radio or watch "normal" TV anymore. I purchase music, subscribe to streaming services, and use Netflix.

striking 11y ago

Doubtful. Many websites across the Internet are ad-free when you pay for it, such as Ars Technica [1] and Slashdot [2]. Many apps do the same thing, offering In-App Purchases of "Disable Ads, $0.99". People wouldn't offer the option unless (1) they're inept and illogical or (2) it actually makes money. I'm willing to bet it's the latter. And even then, people love getting rid of ads. Whether you're blocking them with AdBlock Plus [3] or blocking things in a hosts file or firewall [4], or even just pirating things outright [I'm not posting a link to TPB], people hate having their minds filled with garbage. It's a waste of time, waste of space, and honestly will just disappear asymptotically. It will probably never leave us entirely, but it will effectively be gone (as far as I know). [1]: http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/ http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/ [2]: http://slashdot.org/faq/subscriptions.shtml http://slashdot.org/faq/subscriptions.shtml [3]: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-users-that-employ-AdBlock-Plus-or-similar-ad-blocking-plugins http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user... [4]: http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Tutorial-How-to-disable-Skype-advertisements/td-p/3316902 http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Tutoria...

jshelly 11y ago
Netflix can be added to that list as well
- sethd 11y ago
  Assuming you don't consider product placement to be a form of advertising. Their original series are full of obvious product placements.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    It's definitely a different experience though. If the narrative calls for [someobject] to be in a scene and an advertiser pays to make it their object, that doesn't generally detach me from the story like an ad interstitial does.
- mcculley 11y ago

wangii 11y ago

just like in-app-purchases.

dpatac 11y ago

If you go back in time cable used to be something you paid for not to have ads. Now look at us dumb folk, paying for cable/satellite and paying to see ads. Books are also filled with ads - if they mention a product by name - most likely it is placed there - American Psycho wow could not get past a page mentioning some list of products...

iron_ball 11y ago
Not arguing your larger point, but in American Psycho, the endless lists of brands and clothing labels illustrate the protagonist's obsession with surface appearance and the signals of wealth and status. It's one place where I think the brand barrage is well-placed and even subversive—because who wants to be like Patrick Bateman?

WorldWideWayne 11y ago

Cable TV was supposed to be TV without ads because you were paying for it. Look how long that lasted.

tome 11y ago

This is an ingenious observation, but why doesn't the argument work for something Netflix which[1] doesn't have ads. [1] unless I'm very much mistaken -- I'm not a Netflix subscriber

joshuapants 11y ago
No ads on Netflix unless you count the header on the page giving you a notification that new content is available, the carousel that rotates through new/interesting content, or the suggestion of other things you might be interested in after finishing a movie/series while the credits roll. No external ads, no commercials while you watch, just unintrusive elements that serve to help both the user and Netflix.

circlefavshape 11y ago

Not everything is commercial, and some content (wikipedia, open source software) is free and not ad-supported

a3n 11y ago

Just because you pay for content on a site, and are shown no ads on that site, doesn't mean that site can't make money from ads on your presence. Isn't the value for online ads in following you around, and showing you targeted ads all over the place? Why couldn't a site just sell the fact of your presence and use on a site to advertisers, including your habits while on the site? You could still be shown targeted ads elsewhere, and probably never connect it with your use of the original site.

Trufa 11y ago

Well the problem with this seems to be that it's sort of taking the internet as a whole, of course I wont get completely rid of advertisements but I'd like to get rid of advertisement at least in the services I care about, in this in particular I am willing to pay.

bryanlarsen 11y ago

This is exactly the reason why you pay for newspapers and magazines. Newspapers and magazines make ~90% of their revenue from advertisements. (Or at least they did before the internet killed their business model) If they made the newspaper free, it would increase their distribution by an order of magnitude or so, and since advertisers pay rates based on readership, you would think that would also increase their revenue a similar order of magnitude. But it doesn't work that way -- paying readers are worth a lot more than users who didn't pay for the newspaper / magazine.

emsy 11y ago

My main argument against paying for web content is that people who care about ads probably don't want to see them at all. What's the use to pay for a few sites but others don't offer a pay model and still molest and track you? A better model would be to pay the ad networks which in turn give money to the website operators (similar to those music flats) but I think that's unlikely to happen.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Well as most people point out, while advertisers want to get to people with "buying power" not everyone selling content to such people is willing to be a shill for them. Or put another way, there are plenty of content creators who would create entirely advertising free experiences for their content consumers if they could make a living doing that. What I find more interesting is that there is advertising that I like/seek out, for example back in the day Byte magazine had advertisers who by their nature of establishing a relationship with BYTE were much less likely to be frauds and they sold things that readers were interested in (parts, computers, boards, Etc.) But there was an interesting level of annoyingness they stayed below. I pay for the Economist and read it on my iPad. The experience is largely advertising free, and the ads it does have do not annoy me. This could change of course, but then I would probably stop subscribing. It was less clear cut with the NYTimes which I subscribed too and it still had annoying ads, I complained a couple of times, and then eventually stopped subscribing. And then there are the ads themselves. Something that is clearly a problem is ad "networks" can have a lot of crap in them, and those are both annoying and sometimes borderline fraudulent (or actually illegal in the case of the Canadian pharmacy ads). That the networks replaced a staff of sales people who were trying to sell businesses ad space on a month to month, week to week, or day to day basis makes for a very expensive proposition for a content provider. And yet it makes for a better experience for their reader if they express an editorial sentiment over the advertising content as well. (which print magazines have always done) The first startup I joined was doing a magazine about Golf on the web in 1995. That startup was very interested in ads that reflected the mission of the web site and were not "crazy". It made for a better user experience.

eevilspock 11y ago

This is the most ridiculous, hyperbolic, clickbait bullshit I've ever seen (today). First contradiction: "you will never" and "With the way the world currently works". Which is it? Second contradiction: "you will not escape ads by paying for your content" and "So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in." No. If you are paying for your content, by definition there are no ads. If advertisers outbid you and get ads into the product, then by the definition you are only partially paying for the content. To maintain your "I pay for my content" status you would demand the ads be removed or stop consuming from that publisher. And no, the solution isn't to make advertising illegal. It is to render it irrelevant, impotent, wasted money. We achieve that with: - a reliable fully crowdsourced independent recommendation system that consumers can base purchase decisions on, allowing them to reject ads as biased at best, manipulation and lies more often. - a movement where people stop using any ad-supported products[1], realizing that said products are not only not free, they are more expensive[2]. - shifting all the greatest minds of our generation from working on getting people to click ads[3] to figuring out micropayments, crowdfunding or an entirely new model to make the web accessible to all, without ads. - [1] Don't Be A Free User: https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ [2] Advertising makes nothing free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237 [3] "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera