On the internet, the fact is this: Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. In fact, they will be happy to take money from every source they can. The fact that The Verge is doing so reflects that they understand their audience and are trying to meet them halfway. It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user.
This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
Why would I, as a consumer, compromise on what I want to make some MBA's life easier? That almost sounds like corporate welfare. Businesses sign up to take risks the moment they're created.
A news organization doesn't need to be in business. There is nothing unjust or morally wrong with letting a business shutdown because they couldn't figure out a sustainable way to be profitable (assuming for sake of argument that most people don't subscribe due to the ads, which idk if that would really happen).
> This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
The OP is a customer of the Verge who is rejecting their offer for a new subscription service they don't like. That's called "voting with your wallet", and its the free market working as intended.
You presumably want access to the Verge's content. This is unsustainable without some revenue. You're compromising to continue to get what you want, not to make some MBA's life easier.
The reality is that the internet is not a good publication venue. There are lots of eyeballs and distribution is cheap, but getting people to pay is hard. That doesn't mean serving up advertisement is a moral response. Advertisement is met with ad-blockers and will continue to be. When that is too painful, people do skip the content.
people are free to ignore it as well.
Has his kind of blowhardy stance ever convinced anyone?
>When that is too painful, people do skip the content.
not enough that non-mainstream news sites haven't stopped serving ads. That's the point. You can only control you, not someone clicking a result off google or reddit, nor a million dollar website that has paid employees.
because of lack of regulations? or corrections to regulation. there's GDPR but of course there will be loopholes to make the browsing annoying. That's the cat and mouse of law.
Note that this also goes for genuinely free content - if tons of ad-supported businesses just dominate the search results because they can afford to spend time on SEO then free alternatives (individuals sharing their passions, non-profit organizations, etc.) will be discouraged.
The reality is also that we simply have much more content than needed. Having every single of currently ad supported businesses cease to exist would not be a real problem.
Uhh, what about news organizations? That would be a problem.
Is it that you are generally opposed to critical response? And if so, do you see the irony in you critically responding to another critical response?
The tension between those two forces will find a natural result. Maybe the company goes out of business and whatever the company did is no longer available to anyone. Maybe they lose half their customers but still make more money and buy themselves yachts, and their remaining customers are satisfied.
As is the verge’s pricing and ad strategy, you think they didn’t expect some churn by making a pricing change? The author is free to shout it from their soapbox but chances are the verge already expected some of this sentiment and is totally ok with a “ok losing these customers” approach
Ads are a scourge.
Because of things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denver_Post#Newsroom_cuts_...
Which is only one of many. Just came to my mind because once Pulitzer Price winning, while now nothing special.
https://www.westword.com/ is more interesting, at least for local stuff, if one considers 4 to 5hrs drive in good weather, or a short hop through the air 'local' :)
Similar stuff with https://www.aspentimes.com/ which is now more or less generic drivel,
in the same template as much other stuff around there. (See News Neighbors down there, click and compare)
Some of those migrated to https://www.aspendailynews.com/ which isn't better that much, but still a little bit.
Maybe that's just because of the location, and the economic pressures of a former mininig village,
which changed into a fully gentrified resort village, milking masses of tourists for the 'unique experience'.
Which it still has, far away from the tourist traps, if one can afford it :)
There isn't that much to report, which would be public, or the locals being interested in.
There aren't that many anyways.
The OP should indeed vote with their wallet. They will have to find some other source of news/entertainment. (I really wish that those two weren't the same thing, but that's another compromise that we haven't figured out how to avoid while still getting paid.) Maybe they'll get a deal elsewhere that is more to their liking.
I honestly wouldn't mind a subscription that reduces ads to the point of being _non-obnoxious_, but I'm in an odd position because I pay for YouTube Premium, which doesn't have ads, and costs a lot more money to distribute (video, text, and images vs text & images), but I grew up in the newspaper age which were chock full of ads free or subscription.
Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want.
I just wish it were possible to pay $1 for an article whose headline sounds interesting, or someone recommended. Subscribe, even with a free trial? Pass.
The free market is great. But we should not deny it when it leads to bad outcomes. If we do, then we're no better than those who say "real communism has never been tried".
All shadiness aside it’s an interesting model. Cuts a lot of the middlemen out.
yes. that's the cost of freedom. Stupidity is freedom as well.
>Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy?
I want good creators compensated for good stories. MBAs will get paid no matter what. that's sort of what they minmax for. And they don't care what industry they suck off of.
>I just wish it were possible to pay $1 for an article whose headline sounds interesting, or someone recommended
$1 for an article would be way overkill for 99.999% of the population. the microtransaction approach can't work because you really can't charge much more than a dollar for any digital transaction to begin with. You can always go for the "tokens" approach, but that's a much older and assumedly unpopular model.
>The free market is great. But we should not deny it when it leads to bad outcomes.
At the same time, denying the free market because it doesn't go the way we want just makes us sound hypocritcal. Fortunately, most results of this model do not give us scams and propoganda. There's enough to discuss without going into the fringes.
> I want good creators compensated for good stories.
I asked that rhetorically, and then immediately answered it.
> I want good creators compensated for good stories.
So do I. And yet they refuse to take my money.
> $1 for an article would be way overkill for 99.999% of the population.
Maybe. Maybe not. Yes, subjectively it'll feel that way to most people. But there are many out there who have a subscription for $5 a month where they consume none of the content.
But I just pulled the price $1 out of my ass. $0.20, then? The Economist seems to cost $79 per year. If you charge $0.20 per article that's order of one article per day. And most people would not even be interested in one of their articles per week.
Then tomorrow they can spend $0.20 at FT for another article, and so on. And at the end of the year, $79 has been sent to actual journalism, and the customer has received value.
Now this potential customer just consumes nothing. Or worse: Twitter.
> Stupidity is freedom as well.
Differential pricing too. It annoys me that I'm not charged $1 per Economist article, since I am willing to pay.
Okay, I can still answer a question, especially if the framing is bad.
>So do I. And yet they refuse to take my money.
We don't get to choose how we pay for stuff. That's part of the deal. Maybe I want a slice of bread but I often need to buy a loaf. Maybe I want a bottle of ketchup but Costco only sells 2 giant vats.
Again, blame Mastercard/Visa for your model not being popular. I mentioned as such in the previous response. You may have chosen a dollar arbitrarily, but you were kind of correct about that cost if we're talking per article purchases.
Most people won't do it when it's offered. The few who do aren't enough to be worth implementing it.
I hope this has actually been tested, and that this is not a (quite reasonable) assumption. (but per below, it's not easy to test)
But when you say "most won't do it when it's offered", surely it has to be a higher percentage than people who choose to sign up for a subscription when offered? (though yes, a subscription will bring more revenue)
I guess this mostly annoys me because I've personally never been offered. And I would.
> The few who do aren't enough to be worth implementing it.
Not only that, but also micro transactions are not very profitable, after CC fees. I still believe that a working standard micro transactions system would be great. It has a bootstrapping problem, though.
If they don't get that, and are too stupid to push for that, with all their journalistic force and might, maybe they aren't that important, and never were to begin with? Let them all burn in a bonfire of their very own.
Sure. But there are many good ones too. Not just random ones, but take FT or Economist. Several times a month I see a headline I'm interested in, and I do trust them to not bait-and-switch the article. Maybe I'd read it and conclude it was not worth it, but that's not the same thing.
But they both want to sign me up for a subscription. No. I'll pay $1 to read this article if and only if this is the end of the interaction.
So I end up paying them nothing, and not reading the article. (or someone with a subscription copy-pastes the content for me)
> If they don't get that, and are too stupid to push for that, with all their journalistic force and might
Maybe they're stupid. Maybe "I'm not the typical user". Maybe it's just not feasible for FT/Economist alone to implement what I'm asking for, because the micro payment infrastructure doesn't exist.
Amazon does this, Aliexpress does it, many others already do this. Why can't the effing press/media do it?
Similar applies to US-American ACH.
But no, those r-tards always want to sell their bundles and abonnements.
But it is currently a political weapon being wielded by a political party. I don't expect that problem will be solved any time soon, but it's not fair to blame that on capitalism. Politicians ruin everything no matter what economic system they're in.
> Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want.
But I don't want ad supported journalism!
It's actually a very common opinion, because it always gets weaponized.
It's not a new phenomenon. It's the reason for the whole idea of freedom of speech.
It's not just R doing this (though they are... prolific users of it). Remember covid? Lab leak was politically incorrect as a lie, and banned, but has since been downgraded to "maybe".
> But I don't want ad supported journalism!
Me neither. But the choice may be between ad supported or none at all. But I hope we can find a viable third way.
I would rather not let the goivernment decide what is the truth. A free and independent press as well as free speech in general is a very important check on government corruption that we should not get rid of even if it means tolerating some comparatively minor issues.
"Fake news" is much better solved by teaching people to think critically and ensuring that they have the ability and will to deal with being subjected to deliberately wrong information no matter who it comes from. Unfortunately most school systems do the opposite of that, teaching instead to blindly follow authority and to accept whatever information is provided as fact. Same with current progressive culture in general, if you even dare question any of its dogma you are shunned. No individual though allowed.
It's called "bait" and not "yellow journalism" for a reason. misleading is not the same as misinformation. It's a petty subsect of journalism that really isn't serious enough for any formal regulation to be made on.
> we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media
If you think all advertising is immoral, then this probably doesn't do anything for you. However, if you have privacy and performance concerns, this is a big win I think.
Generally I like what the verge does, and I would gladly pay if it included their podcast being ad free. The Verge’s podcast is the only podcast I listen to that I don’t pay for, and it’s full of repeating programmatic ads for crypto companies, sports betting, and cars.
And the never ending struggle to increase/maintain subscriptions for some companies probably has something to do with that.
For me personally, and I expect a not insignificant portion of users, paying for a subscription is primarily to remove advertising completely. Anything else means its not worth subscribing, so not offering that level of option rules us out as customers.
I've spent a minor amount of time and energy reducing the amount of advertising I see, from (pre-streaming) downloading shows I already pay for legal access to with commercials removed with automated systems, to being an early adopter of streaming services and dropping cable, locally running pi-hole on top of ad-blockers and using VPN's, privacy focused browsers etc.
The payoff has been immense for my family, to the point watching TV in other locations and being bombarded by advertising is jarring and uncomfortable, and the manipulation tactics become more obvious and gross the less you inundate yourself with them. Obviously you can't get away from all advertising, indirect, product placement etc. is everywhere, but I found a significant improvement in quality of life.
I would also make the argument that social media engagement hacking at its root traces to advertising and we blame social media for the problems when advertising was the true problem. Advertising as a revenue stream results in trying to optimize and improve engagement, often by gamifying or moving towards sensationalism to drive up numbers to increase revenue, most of which is negative for the user and little actually positive.
I also put quite a bit of effort into removing ads from my and my family's eyeballs. I hate them. But because of that I already don't see ads on The Verge so for me a sub isn't about removing ads at all. I'll sub to support the work and whatever other perks come along with it (full-text RSS for one)
Another way to describe reality is that people can choose to subscribe to various substacks or newsletters instead. On those platforms subscribers get zero ads, they get more in depth and more thoughtful articles, and because the system has much less overhead modest subscription revenue is sufficient. Vox also does video reviews, but then again, there are also many high quality tech youtubers. Vox certainly has the right to charge for a subscription and then serve the subscribers ads. And people have a right to walk away from a bad deal. Vox could disappear tomorrow at no great loss to society. We might like some of the reporting Vox does, but we don't need it.
Vox media has raised about 450m (according to the first google result). Modest profitability is not enough for Vox Media because they need to secure a significant exit for their investors. This puts them at odds with their readers and subscribers. Not that laudable if you ask me. They made a bet they were going to disrupt traditional media and become a new great media platform. But now it looks like Vox itself is getting disrupted. Like newspapers of old clinging to a business model that no longer exists.
But I don't want to pay less. I want my data to not be sold to the highest bidder, that's all.
As it stands there's no option for people like me other than not subscribing.
This is very much like the situation with smartphones these days: they cost less because you get a bunch of bloatware that you can't uninstall.
I don't want that on my device, so I went with an offering deemed "overpriced" because it has less of such crap than others and thus costs about $250 more. Ideally it should be zero, but that's the best I could get.
sigh I wish this was easier to achieve. But at least in the case of The Verge the sub removes third party ads so it should increase privacy even if it doesn't remove all the ads.
This might seem common on HN but IRL people don’t give much attention to ad related privacy and are probably much more concerned with the fact they have to fork over a CC and a few bucks
I don't recall in the past a company needing my identity required or be tracked just because I bought a newspaper. I pay the $1 for the newspaper and no more interaction or relationship after that.
Ads are OK but why do all the ad companies need to track me and know my movements and just to show me an ad? It's basically malware, stalking. Ads are zero advantage to me the consumer for what I lose in privacy.
An ever increasing amount of privacy. The ad industry will never be satisfied with the amount of data they collect now. They will always want more. This insatiable appetite for tracking and data represents a slow erosion of our privacy. Building unimaginable surveillance machinery for what? So that I might buy something online once every few years? It's casting an extremely large net to catch extremely small fries. The means do not justify the ends.
I think relevant, contextual ads are the best alternative. I'm more likely to eg buy something related to what I'm reading than I am to buy a mattress advertised to me across a million websites (a mattress that I've probably already bought I should add!). That doesn't require intense tracking and surveillance across the web. It just requires understanding the context in which the ads are placed. And it's essentially how marketing worked prior to digital advertising
Maybe women want to groom their men really good? Including hairs?
My assumption is that the salaries of reporters, editors was paid for by ads.
The nominal fee for the paper was to pay for the pulp, ink. I mean if you just printed up millions of papers and gave them away, people would pick them up simply as raw material for lining their bird cages, for papier-mâché, to insulate their cardboard box home on the corner of 12th and Main.....
Nonetheless, the first half of your point—the ads usually paid for all the reporting—is correct.
They’re a great way to keep up with the actions and gripes of the local community. Being such small operations, there is very light editing and the reporter’s point of view often comes through pretty clearly.
All paid for via ads from local businesses. Quite a lot of the ads are from real estate agents, which I think reflects the belief that a lot of tourists are picking up the papers in addition to residents.
The generally dire journalism situation these days is there is mostly no physical distribution and physical advertising dollars have become digital dimes. And local news--which was never a really thriving business--is basically dead.
This should be an absolute benefit, not a relative benefit. Who’s to say the number of ads won’t ratchet up in the future? Almost surely will. Let’s say a subscription customer sees 50 ads today vs 100 a non-subscription customer sees. Tomorrow, they 2x that – sub customer sees 100 ads, non-sub customer sees 200. Does a sub customer derive smug satisfaction that they’re seeing fewer ads than a non-sub customer? How would one even know? They’re just seeing ads.
The correct amount of ads for a subscription service (from a UX perspective) is zero.
2. People do notice when $7/mo is cheaper than $16/mo which is possible because there are still ads.
At least in Germany, this has changed quite a lot. The publishers are naming the offers "Pur Abo" or similar.
This is not perfect as one analysis[0] is showing, but for me, on the good way.
[0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2020/nicht-ganz-ohne/ (in German)
Edit: Added German analysis of these offers.
I do think The Verge offering this could lead other U.S. publishers to follow suit, especially if it’s successful.
1. A very small percentage of website visitors will end up paying for a subscription.
2. They make way less than $5 per user per month from ads.
The money they'd lose by providing an ad-free experience to paying customers should be a rounding error. Removing ads will also increase conversion, but who knows whether or not that will be enough to offset the revenue lost.
I don't particularly care about their "business reality" - if you're an online news outlet you're not paying the costs of printing and distribution - your expenses are just journalist salaries and the marginal costs of keeping a website running. If you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
>if you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
That's just American labor in a nutshell. if a jounralist is making full time national minimum wage ($7.25, 40 hours a week), that's very roughly $1000/month post tax. that very pooly paid jounalist needs 200 subcribers to sustain them. \
costs are going up, but readership and revenue is not. This doesn't end well for anyone. And yes, many businesses are dying right now.
>I don't particularly care about their "business reality"
if you don't care about them, I'm not sure why they'd care about your opinions on how they run.
Why not offer an ad-free tier?
Look at ads on daytime broadcast TV and it is: medicare advantage, something you can get from medicare, a medicare scam, personal injury lawyer, some drug your insurance might pay for, personal injury lawyer #2. Ads for something you spend your own money on are few and far between (maybe you will get a car ad because if nobody bought a car who'd get hit by a car and call William Matar?)
People in that demographic don't have money to spend so they get subprime ads.
In the day newspapers and magazines thought about the balance of ad and subscription revenue a lot.
On top of (1) people have money for a subscription being better qualified than people who don't, (2) people who are motivated to get a subscription are qualified because they care about the topic (you can get a free magazine about construction equipment but you'd better convince them you are really in the industry) and (3) in the current era, subscribers give up their name and other personal details and will be more definitely tracked.
Like you can feel whatever you feel about that, but it's a clear, marked shift.
You compete with advertisers not to receive ads.
If youre wiling to spend 1 galactic credit to not see an ad, and advertiser must spend 1.01GC to show it to you.
Whether this work, only hinges on the question of whether we are already in the situation of having the maximum number of ads served to us, that it is possible to.
- Expensive cars and cruises are advertised all the time on open TV channels and other ad-supported media.
It's not about being rich. It's about having disposable income and willing to spend it. A $10+/month subscription to some entertainment magazine? That's a clear sign you're open to spending money - a sign ads could make you spend on stuff in the first place.
Let's be honest what it's really about: Most hackers / computer enthusiasts are cheap skates and if there's an opportunity to get something for free instead of paying a dollar, they will spend hours or days to get it for free. They are highly insulted by the thought that anything on the internet would cost money. Maybe because they started young without an income and when commerce was not online. Then if somebody else spends a few dollars on a subscription, they consider it so outrageous that they assume that this person must be made out of gold – thus a delicious target for advertisers.
Why wouldn't advertisers have the same attitude towards people who spend frivolously on things such as buying a bus tickets or buying a coke? They clearly also have ten dollars in disposable income.
Very much yes.
> Most hackers / computer enthusiasts are cheap skates and if there's an opportunity to get something for free instead of paying a dollar, they will spend hours or days to get it for free.
Not really. But consider you're talking about two distinct groups here. Being a "hacker" / "computer enthusiast" is one of the cheapest hobbies possible, and while it may end up giving you a well-paid career in tech, until it does, as a "hacker" you're probably without any money of your own.
Spending hours or days to get something for free? That's what people do when they can't afford what they want. Unsurprisingly, when your poor, parent-subsidized "hackers" turn into software industry professionals, they suddenly become good spenders, because they can afford to stop wasting time on bullshit.
> They are highly insulted by the thought that anything on the internet would cost money. Maybe because they started young without an income and when commerce was not online.
Not "they" the "hackers / computer enthusiasts", and not insulted. Rather, it's general population that got culturally used to things on the Internet being free. Obviously, almost everyone younger than ~50 got exposed to the Internet when they were too young to have any income, but ultimately, this is something companies inflicted on themselves. "Free" is the singularity of commerce, it breaks competition; "free but subsidized by ads" is an anti-competitive business model. It won not because people demanded it, but because no one can compete with it.
> Then if somebody else spends a few dollars on a subscription, they consider it so outrageous that they assume that this person must be made out of gold
It may have been a view people had at some point, but that's more because the Internet was new and everything on it felt frivolous to those who didn't grow up in it. That's becoming a past now.
Now, for the actual key point:
> Why wouldn't advertisers have the same attitude towards people who spend frivolously on things such as buying a bus tickets or buying a coke? They clearly also have ten dollars in disposable income.
But they have! Why do you think there are so many ads in sports events, in cinemas? Why do you think advertising metastasized to cable TV so quickly after it was created? Why do you think malls are set the way they are? Merchants and advertisers are, and have always been, hunting for those with money to spend. This was true off-line, and it is true on-line.
It's not always easy to tell who has disposable income and who counts every penny. However, one of the most reliable signals here is spending. People buying stuff have money to buy stuff. The more frivolously the buy, the more money they have that could be redirected to other frivolous purchases. And that's the whole thing advertising is after - redirecting people's purchasing decisions.
Could you explain this better? It certainly used to be one of the most expensive hobbies possible, and still today you need devices that are not free. Compared to many sports who are essentially free, as long as you have shoes.
> Not "they" the "hackers / computer enthusiasts", and not insulted. Rather, it's general population that got culturally used to things on the Internet being free.
You're making a very good point. Still, the general population will just give up or pay if they cannot get what they want for free. If they're given an option like Spotify or Netflix, they will uninstall Kazaa and DC++. Hackers will spend endless effort setting up their Plex servers, and write endless paragraphs on why they shouldn't pay for a cheap subscription.
> Obviously, almost everyone younger than ~50 got exposed to the Internet when they were too young to have any income
Hackers started living on the internet when they were young and penniless, while the general population started living on the internet since about 10 years ago. I'd argue that they don't even consider their Netflix, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok to be "the internet".
> However, one of the most reliable signals here is spending. People buying stuff have money to buy stuff. The more frivolously the buy, the more money they have that could be redirected to other frivolous purchases. And that's the whole thing advertising is after - redirecting people's purchasing decisions.
I mean, in my experience the more "premium" an environment is, the less advertising you see. Both in the physical world and the cyber world. When I go to an expensive restaurant, they don't have banners with their special deals. When I watch a National Geographic documentary on YouTube premium, there are no sponsor breaks.
> "Free" is the singularity of commerce, it breaks competition; "free but subsidized by ads" is an anti-competitive business model. It won not because people demanded it, but because no one can compete with it.
"Free" breaks the mind of most people. If people were given the option between the best beer in the world for $10 and a low quality beer for free, almost everybody would choose the free beer. If they were given the option of a great beer for a dollar or free low quality beer, they would be lining up around the block for the free beer. But there's always a segment of people who are resistant to the allure of "free" and spend a few bucks for something better. That doesn't mean they're rich. It just means they value their time and mind more.
There may be ad agreements that preempt their ability to offer ad-free at this time, likely in the case of ultra-premium advertisers.
It could also just be good ol’ internal bureaucracy at play. Maybe there was a turf war, and this was the best they could do while keeping everyone happy.
Edit: The point in the other comment about it affecting reader demographics is a good one too.
What narrow idea of “a media business” must have ads even when you pay, and why do they have to be different from everything else?
That’s like saying Verizon has ads because I see ads on the internet.
you're only pedantically correct in the sense that most videos on the internet have under 10 views.
Practically speaking, I'd be surprised if you can watch any video from a content creator with > 10k subs and not have some sort of sponsored segment.
If YouTube would force content creators to upload sponsor-free versions for premium subscribers, the subscription might actually be worth it.
I have to say I find watching videos a chore anyway, I'll always prefer written content. But often it's not available or not as well suited (eg for a review it's good to see the product).
But I would never pay for premium if it means I still get ads, it doesn't matter where they come from.
>I'll always prefer written content. But often it's not available or not as well suited
Makes sense, this whole post is because text ads is proving hard to monetize. Menawhile, video is flourishing for now.
>it doesn't matter where they come from.
Matters to me. I wanna support the little guy with my time, not the trillion dollar conglomerate.
Another fun fact, but your youtube premium sub also spreads out some extra revenue to whichever creators you watch that month.
I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.
This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way. Users love it, but advertisers hate it and it craters the value of the ad space you sell to whomever doesn't think it's worth it/can't afford it.
Youtube gets content for free and pays out a revenue share. If they also had to spend billions on content, they would have to charge more than $13.99/mo.
But yes, Youtube (to my charaign. There's loads of problems) is very much the "indie scene" in comparison, where it doesn't need highly produced million dollar sitcoms to bring in viewers.
Not sure what your point is besides YouTube’s offering being far superior both in terms of content and not showing ads when you’re already paying.
Their subscription model is not really that comparable to other services that have high acquisition costs for content.
If you set the subscription fee above this value, you as a service will be better off regardless of the advertizers.
So the subscription should be free. And with less ads.
My heart bleeds for the poor advertisers. /s
Actually, no it doesn't. Not even a little bit.
Having a company double dip and concluding that's somehow laudable is absurd.
>People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper
Because the product isn't delivering $5 worth of perceived value per day. Trying to extract $5 anyway via stuff like this is the wrong answer.
As a consumer I definitely lean on the "if I'm paying a subscription, I expect zero ads" side of the fence. It just has to be worth the additional price for me (The Verge is not)
There are few (if any) media businesses I care about enough to compromise on my requirements just to help them stay in business. Certainly not The Verge.
As for me, I’m happy to either not see the content or use workarounds that let me see it for free with no ads, i.e. ad-blockers + reader mode and services like archive.ph.
Which leads to the conclusion that the company that most disrupted the newspaper industry was not Google or Facebook but Craigslist.
Were the ads run on the web not built on a separate business that attempts to violate the reasonable sense of privacy the average person expects, and didn’t attempt to warp consumer’s expectations of privacy, I think there would be less objections.
I don't think newspaper ads are a good analogy either since the consumption model of a dead-tree newspaper isn't such that you get the ads thrown into your face when trying to read an article. And classifieds specifically I wouldn't even call ads, more of a community note board service.
If the ads stay in the boundary areas of the page or well-behaved interstitials that's one thing. In fact, ads can sometimes be interesting and entertaining and most importantly can make markets more competitive bringing you a better variety goods and services.
When they screw up the page, jump around, cover things up, don't have proper controls to "x" them out, use confusing dark patterns, generate fake clicks (ever think it's not an accident that some sites jiggle around so much?), need 50 trackers to be (kinda) sure parties aren't screwing each other, have 20x the bandwidth cost of the content that's something else.
Also there's the content of the ads. There is a subprime tranch that includes Temu but is best represented by prerolls on YouTube that are best advertising sketchy energy drinks and supplements and worse are outright crypto scams. I can see some humor in Temu but not in the scams.
I guarantee that the majority of these zealous anti-ad people will not subscribe to an ad-free service for The Verge.
For the most part, their hobby is not subscribing to online publications, it’s complaining about the subscriptions at online publications that they would almost certainly never subscribe to.
And yes, I understand that this doesn’t apply to the ones of people who will reply here claiming that they would never do this.
>I understand that this doesn’t apply to the ones of people who will reply here claiming that they would never do this.
wouldn't that be a strongly overlapping sub-group to people who take the time to complain as well? Some people just want everything for free, but I imagine a lot of this audience (on a platform to fund entrepreneurs) has higher than average empathy for business realities.
Its like saying most BMW drivers won't buy the top of the line model with all the options. They won't, doesn't mean its not worth offering it.
Not $16 for the Verge. $16 that appeals to 1% of people and where, when you click the pricing page, there's this weird $7 reduced-ad second class version. Believe it or not, they probably thought about this.
Maybe it works for Netflix in a cycle where they were already doubling the ad-free price and differently for a text media company introducing a price.
You’re 100% certain of this?
I don't think this is true.
Ads get worse and more hostile because it so easily turns into a race to the bottom. Worse ads devalue the page and lower the CPM, which leads to websites to add more ads, which lowers everything again.
I am saying that The Verge made a business decision to balance ad load and subscriber cost to potentially bring in more subscribers.
They probably did the math and realized that charging people $15 a month would not bring in many subscribers, and that they could have charged $5 a month with regular ad load, but they found this $7 sweet spot where they could give people the best of both worlds. And the $50 model means people are more committed long-term making it more valuable for them.
I would guess that “reduced ad load” means that they would only put premium advertisers, like the stuff you would see in glossy magazines, in front of those readers.
I trust given how careful they were with rolling this out that they did the math and tried to strike a balance to please the most people.
From my personal bubble, I know there's a bunch of people that won't even consider a subscription that still contains ads; it's antithetical to their (and my) expectations. Whether they'd subscribe to an ad-free The Verge I don't know either; personally I don't consume The Verge aside from occasionally getting sent a link or two, so I wouldn't. I will also say that, were I interested in any Amazon Prime Video show that has ads, I'd rather torrent it.
(I do pay for Nebula and Dropout, so no, I'm not a "would never pay for any subscription anyway" person.)
Someone like the New York Times still has ads for digital subscribers but they're not crazy pop-ups all over the place. I'd probably prefer they weren't there but they don't really detract from my reading experience.
I get that some people vehemently hate ads and most marketing.
The biggest problem is that anti-consumer behavior causes harm. With advertisement it brings disinformation, spying, abuse of the most vulnerable in society, general distrust, are often a crime (scams, fraud, targets children, and usually ignore local advertisement laws), and siphons money to a third party which usually is outside of the country and do not pay taxes. The benefits of anti-consumer behavior are generally not worth the downsides.
As for the other point you’re making, that’s complete nonsense. You don’t differentiate your revenue streams by serving a sub par product to your paying customers.
Serve those stupid ads to free users, treat your paying customers with respect.
As someone in media, I’m tired of well-intentioned media outlets try to strike a reasonable balance only to get yelled at for it like they aren’t already walking a tightrope. They have staffs of people to pay for, payroll. Travel budgets. Offices. Legal bills. And that they get hell for trying to give an inch, in my opinion, sucks.
If you want them to offer an ad-free tier, tell them that directly! Given that they are clearly thinking about it suggests they might listen to you.
But your binary way of approaching this is not helping and ultimately discourages companies who want to wean themselves off of adtech. Ripping off the band-aid is a lot harder than you’re making it out to be.
The first thing I did the other day was emailing Nilay Patel, editor in chief at The Verge, to share my thoughts on the subject.
That’s before I posted on my site. As for “ripping off the band aid”, again, that’s nonsense. I’m not saying they should drop ads. They should figure out how much a user is worth and then price their membership accordingly.
The vast, vast majority won’t switch anyway because that’s the reality of today’s web.
As for your first point, I’d not have noticed that because I run multiple adblockers everywhere and I am THRILLED that I can now support in other ways.
I clutch my principles rather tightly, especially in cases like this. I will never pay for a streaming service whose first payment tier is "less ads", nor will I ever pay for a _newspaper_ of all things whose first premium tier is "less ads".
I don't think double-dipping is laudable, and I don't think we should encourage it. Their (in)ability to fund their business isn't my problem, frankly.
>This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
Ads is evil has been a thing on HN for a very very long time.
I also dont think you need to be in journalism to understand the business case around it. People just need to understand business, or i.e the realities. But despite the swing back to somewhat moderate discussions, HN's pro business stance have been on the decline from the start and shows no kind of recovering.
So please continue to chime in when you can. It certainly help to balance the dynamics of discussion.
They can do what they want, but I don't really care if businesses that rely on ads go bankrupt.
Most of the Internet ads are medical issues, financial scams, weight loss scams etc. Most of these are accompanied by disgusting pictures. These ads combine the worst of classic Email spam and the yellow press.
Give me better ads and I might switch off the adblocker. I'd even tolerate a banner Coca Cola ad if done tastefully and if it is the only ad on the page.
There's a high likelihood that your adblocker won't be able to block those anyway.
But no, you probably won't switch it off. That's because you can only know the ad quality after you've been exposed to them, and after your computer has run their code, and after you've faced the risk of them maintaining the universal, persistent eavesdrop on your life.
That doesn't mean that every single person consuming/using the product needs to pay either. Patreon and similar services have proven that if what you make is of high enough quality and provides enough value, it's possible to convince a large enough subset of the consumers to pay enough to cover the costs of production. Especially with online services where the cost difference between producing for 1 person vs 1000 is nearly negligible. The few can, and often do, subsidize the many. And if that changes over time, then the product ceases to be valuable enough to be worth producing and should simply stop being made.
And I'd say this is even true of news and things that people might argue are for the public good. In my opinion, most "news" today isn't actual informative news and doesn't really serve the public. But of the vanishing little left that does, if it informs and educates the citizenry in a way that improves the lives and stability of the country as a whole, and if its natural cost is more than can be reasonably covered by willing consumers, then there's a reasonable argument for covering the cost with taxes. Put sufficient legal barriers between the government funding and the content being produced to prevent government manipulation/propaganda and make sure the press can operate unimpeded. My best idea for such a government funded news source is to write into law that said news source's budget is dependent solely upon country population and country GDP, all staffing decisions are made internally, and leaders are decided by citizen vote, but I'm sure there are other ways people can come up with for maintaining a free but government/tax funded press agency. But ad-funded (of which I think even public radio/tv has effectively become), creates perverse incentives that drive the mission away from actually informing and educating.
People can still pay for tech reviews, or travel advice, talking head current events opinion shows, or whatever news is in its current form if they want. Privately owned/operated press can still exist if it's useful enough for people to find it valuable and worth the cost. But advertising just ruins everything eventually.
This is not true. In many cases, we can see that people value a service by their returning usage, but... they often want other people to pay for it.
Also, government-funded comes with its own strings which may become more obvious than you like in the coming years.
Ads have been a primary revenue driver for news media going back hundreds of years, including to when the US was codifying the civic value of news into its governing principles.
The idea that revenue choice is binary or that if you have to use ads you shouldn’t be in business is a very modern one, and one that’s outside of historical norms.
Print ads don't get your personal data and sell them to who knows who. Internet ads have become synonymous with this practice. Comparing them to print ads without this consideration is disingenuous.
I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. It's not sustainable for me to do pay for all the websites I visit. And me randomly paying only some tiny subset of them doesn't make any sense to me. I'd need some prioritized list. And it would have to be a very short one because I'm simply not rich enough to maintain lots of multi dollar subscriptions per month. And I also don't want to micromanage a lot of payments and subscriptions.
The Verge, which was mentioned in the article is a good example of a website that I don't value enough to get anywhere near that short list. They have a lot of competition reporting more or less similar stuff that I wouldn't miss them. In fact, I can't recall reading anything by them lately. I guess not a lot of their stuff makes it to the HN front page. Probably because it's just not that interesting.
At least with Spotify and Netflix there is some kind of rev share thing in place. It's not very fair of course and a bit biased towards rewarding content creators that I don't necessarily like (or are in need of more money). But it's better than having to cherry pick creators. Somehow publishers have resisted creating such a thing for written media. We have this broken model of ad supported media and media outlets taking most of that revenue and paying really shitty wages to journalists, many of whom are working on a freelance basis and get paid pitiful amounts per word. Why do we have all these middlemen?
You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears.
Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.
I'll just say that looking back on my life consuming media (that started long before the consumer Internet was around), there has never been a better selection of media that I enjoy than now.
I've never watched reality shows or sitcoms, the kind of stuff that dominated mass media for a long time... I have interests that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream, so finding interesting or quality content was hard, and shows/films/docs were few and far between..
But now? The current system, while imperfect, at least allows for every possible topic and niche to be somewhat sustainable.
The sheer quantity of media has absolutely grown exponentially so there's definitely a lot more bad media, and media that isn't for me, but in terms of choice for myself, it's incredibly good.
Obviously YMMV and this is just my anecdotal experience, but I don't consider the system to be broken (even though, again, it's certainly not perfect).
If you offer content for free I'm not going to pay for it. I don't tip, I don't buy micro transactions in games, I don't pay for discord nitro or buy "collector's edition" versions of games or twitch subscriptions or anything like that.
Simply, if I don't have to pay I don't. And I certainly won't waste my life watching ads just so someone can earn a fraction of a cent.
I don't feel any need to justify that, I don't feel bad about it. These tactics earn tons of money, and if that ever stops they'll stop doing it and do something else instead. Until then I'll happily take advantage of all the free stuff. Someone else wants to donate to subsidize me that's great, go right ahead. I'm gonna keep my money.
You justify with 'if you offer content for free, I'm not going to pay for it'. Agreed with microtransactions and stuff. But with youtube videos? The content is not actually offered for free. It precisely relies on ads to exist. So the content is offered with ads/with subscription (i.e. not free), and you are using an adblocker to bypass this. So you are just leeching out of the other users, and is not sustainable.
As long as I can use youtube for free with an ad blocker (and sponsorblock, amazing plugin) I will. If google doesn't like that they better figure out a solution. Not my problem.
The thing with ads is: it's not free money. We pay for it. All of us. It's part of the price when we buy goods and services.
If advertising wasn't possible, items would be cheaper and we would have more money to pay for content directly. Cutting out the whole advertising industry out of the content payment loop would save so much money.
And yeah people would still buy stuff they need because they need it. And stuff they didn't need? Well good then that they're not buying it. Saving natural resources and money.
For videos and podcasts I subscribe to content creators on Patreon. I currently have four subscriptions for a total of around $12, and I give roughly the same amount to each.
I also avoid services that are monetized by ads elsewhere and pay for Kagi to get ad-free search. I will avoid all services that offer free tiers with ads and paid tiers without ads as I just fundamentally do not believe that the business model can work at scale without causing harm.
I also host my own email as I do not believe that it is possible to provide free email to people without somehow also doing things with their data or attention that goes against their interests.
A vocal minority doesn't outweigh hard numbers in this case. But that's one of the causes of enshittification, everything becoming metrics-driven.
The funny part is we should have all learned our lesson from the cable television days. Perhaps it's been long enough that everyone forgot, or maybe most of the market is just too young now, but there was a time in the US when cable television was ad-free. Commercials started sneaking into that with some regularity even though part of the draw to paying for cable tv was that it was commercial free. My brain wants to say this happened around the late 1980's? I might be wrong on that time frame, but at some point, like a frog sitting in a pot of water, the heat slowly rose and we found ourselves boiled to death with more and more commercial interruptions in our paid cable tv channels.
Then we watched the same thing happen with the Internet in the mid-2000's. Needless to say, I am a heavy user of ad blockers and Pi Holes. I especially loath sites that want to detect my ad blocker, and throw up a message trying to to guilt me into turning it off. The thing is I am not just blocking the ads, but also trying to block all the tracking that comes with those ads.
It's not really just about being annoyed by ads this time around. It's also about the right to privacy.
Not so much of a problem on modern TVs / set top boxes, as they usually offer that feature (though things get complicated if you want to do some channel flipping to e.g. quickly check how a sports game is going), but it was definitely a pretty big deal back in the day.
None of this applies to on-demand, of course.
I believe the metrics exist; I don’t believe they tell anyone useful information.
Beyond that, there's no lock-in to a video service beyond any exclusive show you're currently watching, so your decision to continue paying is on you.
- Rent seeking is not behavior I care for, and so much of the subscription service stuff is exactly that.
- I'm more than happy to pay for quite a few patreon/similar things.
- But _ultimately_ I don't just want to "consume" content, I want to share it. In fact I believe sharing the cultural artifacts I engage with is an essential part of a culture, and that getting in the way of that is morally wrong. So if your paywall gets in the way of _that_, I _will_ work around it.
Edit: also, the other side of the problem is that there are too many websites now. When it was Netflix and nearly everything there, I payed for it. I no longer pay for shows and movies, because things got _completely_ nuts. Similar thing with news. Reality is I pay _way_ more for Patreon than most people I know - not because of any moral reasons, but because I can actually afford that. And a typical news site asks as much as what I give to some of my favorite writers and painters.
Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier).
See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
(The comparison is not great because premium streaming of original content and long-form text journalism on current affairs are different things with different audiences and pricepoints and viewing patterns.
By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)
Also why many services release episodes weekly instead of giving them at once.
Does it make great content? I've only watched 3 series and then cancelled because it was annoying (but all three were fairly popular), and the more they progressed, the more underwhelming they got. The premise was always good, but scenario was meh and getting meh-er by the episode, everything was kept superficial. Kind of like to tick a box "we talked about X", but without actually exploring the topic. And it was the exact same thing over and over again in 3 separate series - be it the gay footballer in Ted Lasso or the relationship with religion while in climate catastrophe in Extrapolations. No real depth, no real thought provoking discussions, no nothing. Just a quick mention, and jump on to the next topic to gloss over.
It seems to me that they spend a lot on big name actors, had some good initial ideas on what to do, but the actual execution was pretty meh.
Having watched Presumed Innocent on Apple TV, I have had very similar thoughts. <spoiler> Supposedly it is detective fiction, with some intertwined stories, so called unreliable narrator. But then instead of tying everything together they throw all those parallel stories and draw gotcha card. Cheap novel wrapped in shiny production. </spoler>
I'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.
Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example.
Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass).
If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.
For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read.
I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason.
It either need to be
- (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music,
- or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.
> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.
> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.
While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.
I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.
I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
We had some text ads, maybe a banner at the top/bottom of a site, and that was it... that was "the middle ground", they got the ads, we didn't have to block them. Then they added more ads and more ads and more ads, and animated gifs and more of them, and videos, and videos with sound, and overlaid ads, and overlaid ads with unskippable video and audio, and more and more... and in the end, a lot of us blocked them.
They had their chance, they decided that the option they wanted was to abuse the viewer with a huge amount of very bad ads on every goddamn site they visited, and now (for some of us), it's over, we're blocking ads.
If they stayed at the one, two ads per site, I wouldn't even notice them,... now, when I do (because there's just too many of them), I immediately install an adblock on every machine (parents, relatives,...) that I have to use a browser on.
They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you.
Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?
> I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world.
The ideal is for the advert to be served from the main source, much like a sponsored segment in a cast is just in the cast, no extra external access to do any tracking from.
If the site I'm actually visiting itself starts serving malware like shite, then I go from not trusting their “partners” and being wary of them by association, to really not wanting to be there at all and adding them to my DNS blocklist just-in-case.
Then they should find a business model that doesn't involve psychological manipulation. Ads are predatory. I have as much compassion for those who cry about ad revenues as I do for people complaining that they worse off for not being allowed to rape and pillage.
makes the widely hated app store look generous by comparison
they're just not widely used because it's the usual winner take all
people are also going to be queuing up to peer with Google so they don't have to pay for transit
unlikely to be the case for their competitors
I basically only keep them because I used my real name and don't want anyone to steal an account/personnal info I might have created with that gmail address and impersonate me.
I don't really see what is difficult in operating without a google account.
Just about the only thing I can think of is Google Docs. But if you need that for work, chances are you're using your work account for that, not your personal one.
Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr
That is a concern for the "content creator" not for anyone else. We have way more "content" than we need, especially "content" compromised by ads.
Part of it, the rest goes to Google to reinvest in their ads business.
As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they?
"Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.
No we don't, and we never did. The whole "GDPR" thing is a sham - unfortunately this is the case in many countries, but especially so in the UK. The ICO is one of the most useless "regulators" I have ever dealt with, somehow even worse than telecoms regulators.
This isn't some sort of subtle and concealed breach of the GDPR that everyone puts effort into keeping quiet. It's blatant, obvious, and in the face of everyone who visits major news websites. If it was enforced, the practice would've quickly stopped.
It's about as subtle as committing murder on live TV. If you don't get arrested for that, it's clear that the law you've broken is not being enforced.
> You should report sites that do that
But let's hypothesize and see what it takes to actually do this:
As per the ICO's requirements, you must first contact the organization that has wronged you and give them time to address your concern.
They have 30 days to do respond, and could extend it potentially indefinitely by engaging in pointless arguments. They could also make technically flawed arguments in how they're not actually tracking you or collecting personal data, and those will successfully work because there's no technical expert on the ICO's side to review it and call bullshit. You need full-time admin staff to deal with these matters.
Assuming you finally get to a stage where you have grounds to make a complaint to the ICO, what are they going to do (if anything)? Well at best they will send a letter, which is not legally binding in any way and will promptly get ignored by the recipient, which is fine because the truth is, both sides are complicit and just want the matter to go away - whether the underlying problem is solved or not is not their concern.
In practice, even if the ICO wanted to act (they don't - don't bite the hand that feeds), what would they do? This isn't a single, small offender, this is the entire newspaper industry. They not only have a lot of lobbying power but outright control the narrative. They know it, and that's why they have no fear putting evidence of their GDPR breach on their homepages.
Are you ready to hire a full-time admin team to do this (and end up absolutely nowhere, except maybe collecting evidence of this "regulator"'s uselessness)?
--
GDPR enforcement in the UK (and sadly in a lot of other countries) is and will remain a sham until the issue becomes politically important. The regulator on its own, even with the best of skill and intentions will not succeed in this battle. The only way I can potentially see this changing is if we see continuous and recurrent data breaches of politician's personal data and dirty laundry, but even then the likeliest solution is a two-tier system where politicians are allowed to have privacy while everyone else doesn't.
I basically agree with this sentiment, but one place where it can be a tricky balance (not saying that's the case here!) is "native advertising".
For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Which bits of this are ads? Well the behind the scenes post and interview could theoretically have been produced anyway, they're within the scope of the site, but in this case they weren't prioritised, certainly not for launch day, it was only by the whole collaboration being paid for that they got made. Are they ads? Yes they are ads. How would a loyal subscriber feel about those parts being hidden from them though? I imagine they would be miffed about that.
Native advertising like this has a whole spectrum of quality and the worst native ads are very explicitly ads that have no value to typical readers. However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
How do you resolve this? No idea. If I were paying I'd want to see that content assuming it's good quality. Others would not on the basis of bias or a more philosophical opposition to ads.
That's akin to saying a person wants some of that "good" cancer.
If I am paying, I am supporting the editorial staff. It's their decision what to report on and how. Paid-for content, even if it's just for priority coverage, compromises the integrity of the editorial staff as well as their ability to curate (not to mention a clear disincentive to be critical of the ad buyer's claims).
It starts when TheBrink publishes a high quality behind the scenes piece about a scam mobile game instead of a truly great indie game just because the latter is not as profitable and cannot afford to buy the ad.
It ends with the entire catalogue of the publication being paid for by advertisers. Much like some influencer's instagram feed. Paying for access to an ad feed is unacceptible.
To add: "the firewall" between the editorial and business sides of a publication is the basic prerequisite for ethical journalism, even if it's an entertainment rag. Advertising that masquarades as reporting is therefore the worst and most toxic, i.e., cancerous, of the bunch.
So I do not agree that native ads are something that should be desired.
The ads just weren't as obtrusive, privacy-invading and annoying as what we have now. A lot of them were fun to read, had amazing photography, because creativity still mattered, not just volume. Unfortunately alternatives to bring back this more harmless and tasteful form of advertising to the web (RIP The Deck) have failed.
What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
One is designed to keep you on the site (paid content) while the other is attempting to go else where.
The effect of paid content can not be discounted. It's important to recognize that a paid review or a game or movie can result in a different outcome, even subtly.
I remember in the golden days of game review sites it was clear when writers were fudging the reviews because the user experience would be starkly different. The 'we were told to ignore the bugs' excuses always followed because the gig was paid.
This here is key.
If I'm reading the synopsis for an anime series on a website whose main topic is anime/manga/novels/etc, and I see an ad in an unobstrusive and non-annoying location talking about this one new anime figurine or plushie or some other merch, you bet I'm going to check it out.
These ads don't require cross-site tracking or third-party resources. They can even be shown with the strictest Content-Security-Policy. Even if they send you to a different website.
If I'm logged in, and you give me a way to tell you "I don't like this shit, stop showing me stuff related to this series/artist/etc" (i.e. a clearly tagged blocklist, not a vague "I don't like this" and you guessing what I mean by "this"), I'll even help you refine your ads for me.
But that's only because I care about this content.
And because it's done in a respectful way. For example, I don't mind those classic 88x31 "affiliate links" (ads) or blog rolls (also ads, at least in my eyes), or self-promotion sections (ads) in some communities, or when someone I follow on Bluesky posts about how they're selling a thing (also ad). If one of those gets through my adblocker, I won't go out of my way to add a rule for those.
But the moment a third-party script is involved, or data selling begins, or there's annoyances like putting random shit between paragraphs I'm reading, or popups, or "subscribe to the newsletter"-style popups, I'm out. I'm either blocking your whole site on uBlock Origin, or at DNS level if it was bad enough.
TL;DR: I don't care about ads. I care about things that piss me off.
What's not fine is seeing an ad for the new game when I didn't go to a games news site and didn't click on such a link. I don't want to be interrupted with games news while I'm watching a video on DIY. I shouldn't be shown appraisals of the new game while shopping for a new car radio.
Ads should be opt-in.
Ads have to be aggressively pervasive because they're not very effective, and the attempted solution is even more invasive advertising for even more marginal gains.
Of course this will never happen because search engines are very effective forms of advertising, but ads could retreat from many mediums without significant impact to marketing.
in some countries (France as an example), if there was payment in any form, it has to be disclosed otherwise that's an undisclosed ad and very much illegal
Here's one overview: https://www.kevel.com/blog/ftc-compliant
Sure, but does this ever get sold on a site that _doesn't_ already have ads in the first place? You literally mention "increased placement on ad units", so I'd argue that if this site is directly supported, they've already violated the principle in a way that doesn't involve "native ads", and if they aren't directly supported, this principle doesn't apply to them. I'm skeptical that there are any non-hypothetical examples of sites that charge for access and make deals for "native ads" in the form of content but don't have any actual ad units that are displayed to users.
If I'm wrong and this is a thing, I don't think that's it's really that hard to solve. When a user signs up for a paid subscription, as part of the sign-up process, show a screen that explains that sometimes the company will partner with sponsors to produce content about their products, link/screenshot to a couple examples to make sure the user understands what you're talking about, and then give them the choice to either have content like that shown or hidden, and then put that as a toggle they can flip whenever they want in their account settings and mention that fact when you prompt them for their initial choice. If companies don't way to pay for a partnership because their metrics show that too many users turn off the publication's sponsored content from showing, that's just a sign that the system is working, since users shouldn't be paying for sponsored content that they don't actually want to see.
That is a win-win-win for everyone. If the ad feed has a clear focus its viewers will even be self-selected for ad relevancy without surveillance & manipulation involved.
Being able to discover what products their creators/suppliers are trying to popularize on my timing and topic terms is a worthwhile service.
but that's not it - they're still going to serve you banners, even if you pay. just, fewer of them. and they're going to gate content behind the paywall. it's the "have your cake and eat it too" of paywalls.
>we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media.
Weird that This is not the case in the US?
Advertising is everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, to an extent far beyond what you're used to from home. Posters, billboards, fliers, TV commercials, product placement, celebrity endorsements - you can barely step outside without being bombarded by yet another obnoxious advertisement. And "obnoxious" is an understatement: American adverts are noticeably more loud, garish, cheesy, repetitive and attention-grabbing.
It's really quite something. And it's exhausting.
The idea that prescription medication is marketed to the general public on TV is entirely foreign to me, the descriptions of conditions that 99% of people wouldn't have heard of make me wonder just who they are connecting with.
Then you get to the "side affects may include headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea, haemorrhaging, spontaneous combustion, exploding eyeballs, bubonic plague and instant death - do not take this drug if you are a living breathing human being" bit and you can't help but laugh. Who goes to their doctor after watching one of these?
And "Dude Wipes" - I mean is that a spoof?
That CNN clip is basically South Park in real life.
I take it that you have not been to Tokyo or Seoul, then?
Most foreign people would just gloss over them but even most temples (say in Kyoto) have the names of companies which donated money plastered all over the place.
Even the famous tori gates at inari have cool looking Japanese text which basically says "Applebees", "Yamato Metal Industries", and so on.
Some of my faves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRLe826lyao
My main curiosity was about the legal classification of product placement etc.
For example I buy SaaS, and the way I hear about most tools are ads. I choose what to buy via references and evaluation, but ads are often how to get things on my radar. Without Ads, I would have bought worse software in the past
I don't even know how to reply to that, but I feel the need to call it out as, potentially, the most creepy-as-fuck quote-unquote justification of literally anything.
If you have a specific problem you're trying to solve, then you will find out about the relevant categories.
You remarked to a coworker that it would be a great justice if a Porta Potty truck overturned onto a spammer, and you respond to your coworker —good, hit them with another. Alas that karma does not work that way.
You forgot when the modern web got so bad—indeed, has only continued to, well, you have a term for it now, "enshittification"—as you do not recall the moment of souring. Was it a decade ago, or more like two?
You is here used in the Hindu sense of you being divided from you, as that is a good way to explain you being both a great fan of ads and you holding them in extremely low regard. You may also recall that you sometimes make "you're either with us, or against us" pronouncements.
It's an issue but I'd be happy with a 90% solution over a 0% solution.
In the end, on paper, the studio has no editorial oversight, but in practice you need to give them good reviews (essentially, adverts) if your business is to survive.
This is exactly how it works, by the way.
This doesn't mean the movie article (or indeed the hardware comparison) can't be sponsored. It just means the ad shouldn't be able to be shoved in your face unsolicited.
So, is another page, that links to that page also an ad? Because maybe the homepage that runs Cisco-sponsored reviews might also have a cisco-sponsored banner. And even if not, maybe over time they become associated as "the thing that reviews things were cisco always wins"...
Oh, and what if it wasn't a sponsorship. What if instead Cisco just gave them the hardware to test at a discount? Or for free? Would you not write a slightly more favourable review for nvidia if they gifted you their top-tier GPU? What if instead of gifting you the GPU, they just give it to you at a discount? Or earlier than normal customers? Or they just have nvidia-stickers for your kids in the box?
Ads are an extremly slipperly slope, they're part of human nature; everyone I ever met is trying to tell me about (=market) themselves, their beliefs, their current hobbies, that new burger place down the road, ....
Interesting, why?
In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.
One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.
How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?
Most customers don't know themselves that a solution to their problem (which they might not even notice) exists.
Manipulative ads are bad, yes. But ads that expand your knowledge of what's available in the world are good in my opinion.
Personally, I chat with friends over a beer and talk about new things. More often than not, my friends have great recommendations on things to try — both old and new.
> How do you find out about new movies, concerts, etc.?
I go check the movie listings / concert venues’ schedules. Or look up the schedule for a band I like. I don’t constantly browse the lineup; only when I get the itch to go to a show.
Normally I’m the one engaging research into new experiences, and it seems to be going fine. The other month I was reading Troy by Stephen Fry. When I finished, I thought it would be nice if he covered the Odyssey, so I looked it up and saw he is releasing an ebook for it in the Spring. In the meantime, I decided to read the Iliad. I wasn’t sure which translation would be good, so I searched online and found that Emily Wilson has a great translation. And now hopefully a reader has benefited from m y suggestion here.
Most ads related to these fields seem to me that they are designed to sell me something I don’t necessarily want or need. I feel capable of taking action and looking up things that do interest me. It may be different for areas outside of entertainment, but I’d have to think on that more.
I found out about ChatGPT and became a paying subscriber in january 2023, because it was all over hckrnews, youtube, twitter and tech media in general.
New stuff and recommendations are everywhere. They are even a form of entertainment themselves. I watch several tech channels on youtube just to see what cool new stuff there is. There are channels and websites for movies, books, home renovation, hobbies and anything really if you want to know more.
No ads needed.
One issue now, on a world without ads, is what incentive would also those actors have to provide you with that information? Search engine, review websites, YouTube channels, etc. Of course, we could pay them for this information. They could also have affiliate links, but doesn't then it become an ad?
I think we hate ads now simply because they are implemented poorly and there's a lot of low quality, deceiving ads for useless products.
I play table-tennis a lot, and my shoes are always wet after a session, I usually left them outside to dry, but it doesn't work in bad weather (which is common here). I then saw an ad for shoe-fresh (a dry rack/sanitizer for your shoes), I got one, and it has completely solved this problem. Maybe I could have found about it in a different way, but this is how I found it.
If you want to buy some random games because they are discounted, you can just go to the corresponding section in the Steam store.
The point of the popup is to distract you from whatever you're doing right now to get you to make an impulse purchase, as opposed to a well-researched one. That's exactly how people end up with Steam accounts that have literally hundreds of never-played games in them.
Just like you can visit hacker news and see all the stories right there, do they just manifest through out the day? Or is there a group of people trudging through the new stories to pick which ones to elevate?
Having worked on the product side, I can tell you that when you google a product looking for organic reviews, what you are seeing is the sprouts of seeds planted by advertising.
Trust me, try and launch an amazing product with no advertising.
Then do it with a standard set of web ads, wait a few months, and go see the people on reddit talking about your product despite you never doing more than buying standard website/social media ads (not sponsored posts, just regular ads)
Advertisement is 99.999% bad people doing bad things to you.
Viewing a review on a site where the reviewer got sent a set of headphones to review is also advertisement. It's just not a placed ad.
They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.
Unsolicited advertisement tries to induce a sense of demand in consumers which they didn't have to begin with. This is done using many different tactics, e.g. by disguising the true cost, exaggerating the benefits or simply misinforming. This tips the utility in favor of the supplier while making it harder for the consumer to navigate the market.
However, I agree with the position that all ads with some small exceptions are a negative thing. I think the incentives behind advertising are inherently perverse because of what they are at their core, an attempt to manipulate (if they work then a successful attempt!). They are dishonest and inauthentic by design. It’s possible to create an ad that is like “hey this thing exists and this is strictly what it does without any exaggeration” but that basically never happens because the people who make ads have no external incentive to do that.
I think a much more ideal situation is where a user searches for something on a search engine, or an LLM or whatever, and they are shown as unbiased as possible results. This way the people making good products get their exposure and the people looking stuff get the stuff they want. Of course there’s a lot of problems in practice with that as well.
I don’t claim to have a solution, and I don’t think making an add is like super immoral, but I think ads are a scourge on our society and culture.
If I were to propose a general law to regulate advertisements, then it would be that if you serve content that qualifies as being an advertisement to a user, then the choice of advertisement must be independent of any data about that user. This includes the username and any details the user has entered or which has been collected as the user has been using the service, and also any ephemeral data associated with the session such as IP address. That is, the choice of ad is completely parametric in the user; if two users request the content from different locations, then they should in principle be served the same ad (ignoring other state such as ad impression counters which would still be allowed).
This would probably not be good for the ad-tech industry but I think it could remove many of the perverse incentives leading to excessive data collection.
Back when Google was great, they kind of acted as an advertising police on the entire internet, keeping ads unobtrusive and negatively ranking sites with bad user experiences. That system worked pretty well back in the day (although definitely not perfect), and I think it gives a good model to start from if we as a society ever decide to try and fix this hellscape we're living in.
I never hated ads when we had full-page ads in magazines and you had to skip multiple pages of ads to get to the actual articles. But selling my data makes them too much money, so I do my best to never have them load on the internet.
It's difficult to run a business without advertising in a world full of advertising. If others can get to your customers before they find you then yes that's a problem. But all you get from paying to advertise is to get back to where you would have been without ads (assuming your competitors spend a similar amount).
Ads should show if and only if the user asked for them. There are plenty of people who intentionally opt out of ad blockers to support their favorite websites, or who enjoy browsing ads and shopping. There's a reason ad-only TV channels (24-hour infomercial stuff) are viable despite being able to be turned off at will, and plenty of people subscribe to product-promotion magazines (catalogues). I'm sure there are websites for those interests, too.
What should be outlawed is mixing unsolicited content into solicited. If I solicit a video on black holes, or a blog article on Python, it should not be allowed to interrupt it with a dishonest, manipulative appraisal of some VPN service. That's immoral and disgusting.
If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.
I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible.
BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience.
So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making.
If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.
Then it gives more power to those who already have the most of it.
It also normalizes lying, being intrusive, and manufacturing damaging social norms.
Tracking is worse, but all ads are toxic.
just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better
Paying customers are also identified (logged in). So in theory you could pinpoint me even more with ads after I decided to be a paying customer.
Which is what?
> just because that happened
The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution.
Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.
People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for them) that are full of ads. International flights have ads on their entertainment. Flights by some airlines I've been on have ads just after the safety instructions. I've been on flights where they have ads for shopping while on the plane.
All of these things happen not because people approve of them, but because they have no choice. Every company in those industries is doing this because they want more profits. Companies do have the choice, but they would flood your eyeballs with ads 24/7 if it was socially acceptable. So they push that line as far as they can take it before people start complaining. And that's how we got to where we are now.
The thing most people don't consciously think about is that advertising is brainwashing and psychological manipulation. It's designed to embed products and ideas into your psyche to get you to do something or think a certain way. Separating me from my money is extortion, though fairly benign. What I find truly insidious is putting thoughts into my head. Political ads and propaganda are weapons of war since they manipulate how societies think and behave. They have the ability to influence how people vote, to topple governments, to cause civil unrest and deep distrust in societies. How most of the world isn't seeing the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing in the past decade as a direct consequence of ad-fueled social manipulation is beyond me.
To speak nothing of the multi-billion dark industry of data brokers, and companies hoovering up and profiting off of our data in perpetuity.
Advertising is evil to its core and is the most harmful yet normalized industry we've ever invented.
Websites that do not use ads cannot survive (on a large scale) if their competition uses ads.
Large consumer-facing websites are forced to use ads.
As long as ads are legal, consumers will not have the choice to use ad-free websites. (The only exceptions being startups operating at a loss.)
This is not even solved by websites allowing for paid, ad-free plans.
Who pays for Google? You, when you by a can of Coke. Coca Cola increases the price of the drink, then gives that extra money to Google.
If you are using a paid, ad-free plan, you are not only paying for the plan, you are also still paying the increased price of Coca Cola.
As long as ads are legal, people who use paid plans have to pay more* than twice of what the service is actually worth.
*Don't forget the effort that is being put into designing ads, building tracking technology, managing tracking data centers, which again, are paid by you, every time you buy anything.
Back in the day (yes, I'm that old) the selling point of cable was "TV without any ads". It was marketed as expensive and upscale TV, though. And people don't really want to pay for content, so this business model didn't work out in the end.
TV and news are one of the first media it consumed so thoroughly people don't remember there was a time where ads weren't expected, or default, or integral part of anything.
--
[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
If i can legally block/skip/cirvumvent it, i still will. When reading a magazine, i will try and skip the ads. I block as much ads on my internet connection as possible, because i get to say what comes in and goes out.
And companies may complain about my totally legal actions. Not that i am going to to anything about their complaints, for i do not care and never will, but they may totally complain.
Comanies may also try and circumvent my actions to force the ads as long as their actions are legal. I also understand that people do not want to play this cat and mouse game.
However. When products tend to be a certain necessity and in reality you cannot choose but to consume or purchase a specific thing (Microsoft Office for instance. Yes i know there alternatives, but do you really have a choice?), things get a bit weird or shady.
Companies may still legally stuff ads in those 'necessary' products, but it's not something you really want.
You don't 'need' a streaming service or a Verge subscrition and can perfectly survice without having one, but when you are paying for one and you're still getting a bunch of ads, it does not feel right. It feels you're getting screwed because of that weird fine print in a contract.
Companies stopped caring about their customers need as much as possible. They only think about making money. I stopped caring about companies and their products as much as possible. I only think about spending as less as possible of my money. You reap what you sow.
It is unacceptable behavior. I do check how much uBlock Origin has to block for a website of a business and that does inform my opinion of them quite severely. Biggest detractor: Google analytics. It will always be blocked, and not be loaded, but if I see it on their website, expect my opinion of them to fall quite a few levels. Combine that with some JS only website, then they are already lost. I then know they neither care about user experience nor accessibility, and if that was a potential enployer, they would have dropped out of that category, because I don't want to work in a dystopia shop.
Those ads are far less egregious than the kinds of online ads we're discussing. If online ads were the equivalent—static, hosted on the same site, free of data collection—then not only would the experience be much more pleasant, we wouldn't even be able to block them.
Nowadays they are rare outside places like Neocities, but it is true that I don't know of anyone who has gone out of their way to add an adblock rule to block those.
I'd prefer a world where we pay for services we are receiving.
The assumption is that you always pay. Either with your information, or with your money. But the key word there is Either.
Not the question. It was "if the company already offers a less ads for money service" then should "less" mean "zero"?
> People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads.
Is this supposed to prove anything? They don't have a choice. If they offered
a) Lots of ads for $X
b) Many ads for $Y
c) No ads for $Z
How do you see that working out? I would expect (a) and (c) to be massively more popular than (b).
It's just another case of people confusing "What I personally want" with "What actually leads to a sustainable business/ecosystem".
I honestly think people get confused about this because we are so accustomed to getting what we want.
Set a price to make it sustainable.
Offer a 50/year plan with limited ads and a 200/year with no ads and be upfront about why those are the costs.
It’s not rocket science.
Whenever I'm in the US and turn on a TV I'm always amazed at the amount of advertising and the effect it has on the media itself. One of the effects of streaming services was that it allowed script writers and producers total freedom from having to structure a story around the ad breaks.
Whenever I try to watch syndicated US tv here in the UK — e.g. The Simpsons — it's incredibly painful because the ad breaks don't line up, so you often get a 'false positive' and/or a 'false negative' that really affects the experience.
Cable DVRs have to actually capture and record the signal into a ring buffer, and if it isn't integrated into a cable box[0], it has to come out of one, with a complicated setup of IR blasters to have your DVR tune the cable box to a specific channel. And of course you have to actually pause the video or record it in advance in order to get commercial-skipping capability.
Cable ad skipping is entirely a technical problem, streaming ad skipping is entirely a legal one.
[0] You were supposed to be able to just get a CableCARD, but the cable companies fought tooth and nail to force you to
The comment I responded to suggested that it's impossible to record video delivered over the internet, which is obviously insane. Were you thinking of something different?
The comment you replied to was pointing out that it was possible to record from cable TV with DVRs and that they had a feature to detect commercials and either skip recording them or allow you skip them en masse during playback.
It is quite difficult to record video from many services. Harder still to do it in an automated way like a DVR.
It's ridiculous the amount of money spent, people's time spent, all on a quest to make the world an uglier and more hostile place.
I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.[1]
I wrote a short post on the topic[0] but to save you a click here is the main point: We all complain about advertising that tracks users now. Imagine how valuable the data would be for paying customers now consider which micropayment provider you would trust with that information.
they felt less intrusive because they were
For all it's faults facebook advertising is similar, you can just scroll past an advert if it's of no interest. I don't find their adverts overly annoying.
Plain, non-animated non-creepy banner ads I've never minded. What I mind are:
1. Ads that are intrusive and distracting
2. Pages that have more ads than actual content
3. Ads that chase you around for two weeks trying to get you to buy something you just bought.
I mean yeah, if I'm paying $20/mo it had better be ad free. But if I'm paying $4/mo, having tasteful ads interspersed among the content is probably fine.
As an indie web developer, after trying many "ad policies", I believe the sweet spot (not the revenue optimal spot!) is one ad, clear, not intrusive and highly targetted to your audience. This ad will not annoy readers and will keep your motivation at a decent level (instead of a zero ads policy).
My take: https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor
Ads can be useful. How else am I to know of this amazing new music service or when there will be a certain show in town? But it needn't be all day long everywhere you look, and one ad on every page still has that issue
Not that I would know how to solve the problem of reconciling (1) sustainable website income, (2) annoyance factor, (3) sufficient targeting to reduce the annoyance factor, and (4) privacy issues. I just know that websites suffer from my adblocker and that I suffer from the web without adblocker. For what it's worth, I do have an online newspaper subscription and donate to nonprofit/opensource services that I use (like f-droid and openstreetmap), but it's not a full solution...
Just to be clear, are you ruling out user-tracking here, and is this ad meant to be entirely context-based?
I don’t like ads. They don’t help me. They make my life harder. I’ll tolerate them in some situations, but if I pay you then I should not see an ad.
If you want to show an ad, that you choice. I think it’s anti-user and I won’t buy your thing.
2. neg (annoy no one)
3. neg (neg exist x : annoy(x))
4. exist x : annoy(x)
5. annoy someone
Sorry, that's not how 90% of digital advertising works. The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen based on some specific profiling.
But these ads companies don't receive a file called "Manuel Moreale personal data and shopping history"
True, but the result is the same. I would have nothing against _some_ static ads (like in newspapers) even if I'm paying to read articles, but they should be served directly by the website, not by an external ad aggregator. Just check with how many companies data is shared on the cookie banner details: on the newspaper I'm paying for, it's "us and our 105 partners". So I feel totally justified to run an adblocker here. It's not ok that other companies should know which articles I'm reading, for how long, or things like that, so they can better target me with ads, especially that it's not limited to the website of the newspaper. In addition, you often get very annoying ads, with fast animations that are very distracting if you are reading text nearby.
If browsers had the functionality to only preserve cookies that are needed to stay logged in across sessions, that would be quite powerful. That is all the cookies I need.
The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor, and I think that's a very good thing, and many people underappreciate the extend to which it happens.
On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit and don't buy tickets, even though it's basically the same thing and a very similar business model.
Gambling ads, exploitative financial services, unhealthy "cheap" foods etc.
Also, why don't we just support the poor directly instead of requiring the construction of a consumer sentiment shaping global surveillance network?
Resolving that the poor must endure advertising to be subsidised by the wealthy is anti-poor and anti-person.
A more reasonable take is that all humans should have reasonable access to services through the fruits of their labour, and a situation where wealth inequality makes this infeasible should be rectified.
Anything else is anti-poor.
If it was clear cool water, I'd be much more OK with it. But it's a steaming, bubbling, toxic, green/brown lumpy sludge that I refuse to let near my network.
I also don't think the green/brown lumpy sludge should be foisted upon the poor, but there are some rich folk that seem to have decided that it's OK to do so, and, confusingly-but-maybe-obviously, there ain't no government that's even tried to say that maybe that's not OK.
The FBI has even recommended the use of ad blockers to improve online safety.
https://www.securityweek.com/fbi-recommends-ad-blockers-cybe...
And the NSA and CIA seem to agree
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-nsa-and-cia-use-ad-block...
Not using an ad-blocker is no longer an option for me. After experiencing the web with one, browsing without one makes me want to never browse again.
Paying is not always an option and, when it is, it's often ridiculously overpriced. Websites send me their ads, I choose not to look at them. Should I somehow be forced to consume adverts on television, prevented from leaving the room or muting the sound?
I would have more sympathy if there were no alternative, but there's a very easy one where everyone wins: static ads. I won't block those and I can't block them!
I define what's OK to me. I am able (and legally allowed) to choose what my browser displays to me, so I use browser extensions to control my (and only my) experience of the web. I do not hurt anybody and I do not impinge on anyone's rights. I resent attempts at moral preaching aimed to make me feel guilty, especially when it's in defense of powerful entities that I find reprehensible and who do impinge on my life in ways that I object to.
My local bus company does not do that.
Hiring a bodyguard seems like the right solution if you are regularly at risk of aggression.
If ad blocker use is widespread and most people don't see a problem with it even if they don't use one themselves, it is culturally okay.
The poor also does not have the money to buy expensive books, but that is why we have libraries funded by tax money - placing banner ads in the middle of textbooks would be a dystopia, but somehow we are more okay with it if the content is digital.
The far-less capitalist, far more revered society that is Germany actually did this, far before the age of surveillance capitalism.
Not sure about textbooks speficically, but it was definitely a thing with fiction, to the point of editing foreign books so that the ad would form part of the plot.
See e.g. https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and...
That's silly.
> The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor,
[Citation needed].
> On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit
Actually I know exactly zero people who are not ok with either. The only reason I pay for public transport is that I'm afraid of being caught, but just like the correct amount of ads is zero, the correct public transport fare is also zero.
> a very similar business model.
Public transport is not a business, and it's not my concern that your business model sucks.
Poor people should have the option to go to the public library and read things for free. In the public transportation metaphor, poor people should get fair public transportation at an affordable price, and not need to ride without tickets.
Saying ads sustain poor people is, in my view, saying there is no expectation that the State/society will give a decent base level of service to anyone, and we're left to what private companies are willing to do and the mercy of the ones who can pay - coupled with their willingness to go along with whatever conditions the companies enforce for their "benevolence" (i.e., making you and your data the product).
So, what's wrong is that there's a gap here, and the poor people are not getting any support to bridge that gap and eventually get better off and add more value to society. Private philanthropy is not a valid welfare policy.
We need a new model like we had with libraries, one that handles the fact that most new content is now online. Unfortunately, most discussions I've seen around that were more about IP rights and protecting paywalls than enabling a 21st century lending model. And the traditional libraries are dying. Solving that would do more for the poor than subjecting yourself to intrusive ads ever will.
The ad industry needs users so ad-free content is unlikely to happen even if you pay.
This is technically true, but it leaves out the entire flipside of the coin. The rich wouldn't do that at the scale that they do if it didn't benefit them more than it does the poor. The services you speak of are offered at a high, but invisible, price (in the form of lost privacy, hijacked attention, manipulated will, etc.).
If you really want to help the poor, UBI does it better. It doesn't require charity from self-centered rich psychopaths. We should tax them whether they want to or not.
> The advertising model makes the rich subsidize services for the poor, and I think that's a very good thing, and many people underappreciate the extend to which it happens.
Ads are an aggression on the mind of the people with real psychological consequences. Imagine a public libraries where you should either pay a ticket or be targeted every few minutes by an advertizing team to interrupt your lecture, slap a flyer on top of your book, holding your arm to prevent your from removing it all this while shouting at you offers for a service. And that would be the rich subsidizing the service for the poor and would be a good thing. This is bonkers.
> On that note, I'm somewhat annoyed that we're culturally ok with people who use online services and block ads, and yet we're not ok with people who ride on public transit and don't buy tickets, even though it's basically the same thing and a very similar business model.
Not really. Paywall is similar business model, You pay the price, you get the service. Ads are just Ads.
I am perfectly free to decide to use whatever technology exist to remove ads from my sights when walking in the streets, or close my eyes. Same has to be for the internet.
Also, online medias lost any right to pretend we should see ads when they decided to go the unethical way and act like criminals that redirect our traffic to external parties without our consent. I was perfectly fine when ads were few and far between, not covering half the screen, served locally and only a click on the ad would send me to the advertiser.
I don't accept that it's an analogous situation, but many people have no problem with fare dodging. Public transport is for the public good and if someone can't afford the fare, dodging it the moral option.
That's clearly wrong. The equivalent of not buying a ticket would be to use a paywall bypass service to read content that's not free.
Using an ad blocker is instead equivalent to reading a book on the subway instead of looking at the ad posters. Which I hope you will agree is entirely acceptable.
I don't mind ads one bit, except video unskipable ones. I find stuff to buy there all the time, or discover new tools, sometimes I'll buy an equivalent thing years later that I remember I found first in an ad.
If I want to research competitors to something, I just google the something and click the ads.
And I also like that I like something that makes so many people pissed off.
I needed a washing machine - so I went online and purchased one from a large retailer. For the next month all I got was ads for washing machines - many from the retailer I purchased from.
It has made me want to not reset my browser so frequently.
And they have the cheek to say ‘your program will resume uninterrupted’. You literally just interrupted it!
It’s like slapping someone in the face and then smugly exclaiming ‘and that’s the end of the slaps - you must be so happy, right?’
1. Placing an Ad on the page has absolutely nothing to do with selling your data. Just like a magazine decide to place a print ad.
2. Ad can sometimes function as news. New Product launch, marketing notes. etc.
3. Even an internet targeting Ad, which the author is likely referring to, does not necessarily sell your data to advertiser. Your data, however may likely be gathered elsewhere that the Ad company uses for targeting.
4. There is no such thing as double dip when your data isn't even involved. Which means you are only paying once. And not twice.
5. Placing an Ad, an additional revenue generation function on the site is not double dipping. Even if the ad is inside your subscription. You are free to cancel or sue if the subscription originally promised zero ads.
6. The correct amount of ads is when Ad does not feel like an ad. The answer is very likely to be non zero but minimal.
Final Note: I Notice HN has swing back enough to allow decent discussions on these sort of topics. Ads were nearly forbidden to talk about from 2013 - 2023.
2. Only if your idea of news is the propaganda and corporate press releases pushed these days. I prefer my news to come from impartial sources, not those extracting enough profits that they can throw it on ads.
3. It may not sell the data directly to the advertise but it must by design be able to leak some information about you. And that's before getting to full on malware shipped with ads. It also doesn't matter who my data is leaked to, I don't want it collected in the first place.
4. If ads weren't profitable no one would run them. Your paying for them by being manipulated into doing or thinking what the advertiser wants. Thinking ads are free for the users is beyond naive.
5. Being able to choose not do do business with double dippers doens't make it not double dipping.
6. No, hiding the psychological manipulation more effectively does not make it any less wrong.
There is nothing to discuss. I do not give consent. You don't get to ignore that.
2. This is a vanishingly small subset of ads.
3. While advertisers do not directly receive your data, you do still get tracked. Furthermore, the infrastructure undergirding ad tracking is comically easy to appropriate for law enforcement and national security purposes; the CIA buys a shitton of ad tracking data from data brokers.
Furthermore, targeted advertising, even if used as intended without any law enforcement spook tracking nonsense, is still a nightmare because it allows fraudsters to target ads directly to their most optimal marks. Think about how good Facebook is at showing your grandpa a bunch of fake ads for fraudulent products and scams. Scamming online got a lot more efficient with targeted advertising.
4. The double dip still exists even if data isn't tracked because I don't want to see ads. I am paying to remove them. In fact, I shouldn't even have to pay to remove the tracking; that should be free, and under EU law it is free.
5. A lot of subscriptions actually were sold as no ads, because that's the thing people want.
6. The correct amount of ads are zero. Because ads are not information, they are attacks, in the same way that social engineering is an attack.
2. This happen a lot more in publishing industry than people would like to admit.
3. I dont disagree here. But most site still dont sell your data. Which is my point about double dipping. Tracking, however is another issue and I dont support it.
4, 5. I think there is where the top / my comment and the opinion of others on HN differs. No one, and even in this case the Verge ever said there will be zero ads.
6. Ads are everywhere. Newsletters, communication from Visa, Master, AMEX, App Store, Promotional material on discount, etc All have Ads. To suggest they have zero information or value to users is simply ignoring how large part of the world works.
* the elephant in the room being that the iTunes podcast directory is the de-facto standard index. It’s freely available, but the fact that it could be withdrawn at any time is not great. Projects like https://podcastindex.org/ are trying to address that.
I used to subscribe to XLR8R and Thrasher magazine. The ads were tailored to the content of the magazine (electronic music and skateboarding, respectively). Thus, completely relevant to the interest of the reader.
I'm not sure how folks would emulate that online without heavy curation. But, I can't remember feeling any negativity towards ads while reading those magazines. If anything I was glad to be informed about a new skate video or music release.
That said, paying AND >0 ads (or tracking) is also a no no for me.
I did not think about blocking it, did not mind, did not care. That's how ads should have stayed instead of this giant annoying/spyware/loud/popup/... mess. Nowadays I would not use anything without ublock and i am considering storing everything locally so I dont have to visit most websites and only scrape the news.
It's especially sad since back in the day making a website, having a webserver etc. was vastly more expensive and difficult while these days it costs literally less than 10$ / month for something that can handle millions of views.
How is it possible that something was sustainable 20 years ago is not sustainable now?
It's amusing to hear this phrase, but I totally agree with you! Probably the best ads I've ever come across are on Daring Fireball [0]. They're so unobtrusive and privacy-respecting, they're in the source of the page!
If there is no way to hide ads completely I won’t use your service full stop
I don’t think Freemium or whatever subscription model solves these problems beyond the scope of a single website. I am interested to hear how this can be solved for consumers for whole swaths of websites that have ads.
It’s pretty easy to say ads are evi, but I personally don’t know a good solution.
However, I seldom read any news articles maybe 1-2 here and there only. In that case I wouldn’t want to pay for a susscriotion. I likely also don’t wanna pay like five bucks to read an article.
You are not the only one directly supporting the publication
> you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side
Yes they do. You get the option to cancel.
Lately many ads, are for things I HATE, and advertising them makes me not want to watch the content I really want, if there is ads I actively hate. Government ads in particular I find offensive.
But it seems wild that the ad targeting is so bad.
I ride a bike and am anti-car, so stop giving me ads for cars and trucks, I will never buy.
I don't think Ive had a video game ad in years, but outside of food and rent, games and tech is one of my biggest budget line items.
Why is advertising so bad? They spend too much money on the technology and data to target consumers.
The fence part is that when we were paying for newspaper subscriptions, they still were chock full of ads. It's just that they tended to be relegated to entire pages or sections that weren't obnoxious.
Maybe there's something different about how we peruse online content vs paper that makes us annoyed at digital and not paper ads... I will say that website ads have become so obtrusive and in the way and distracting that I'm just turned off to them.
Am I still in the minority or has my behavior become more prevalent?
(Note that I’m not talking about adblockers; I’m talking about refusing to interact with ads, whether due to no adblocker or due to not being caught for whatever reason.)
I already knew this but got very conscious of it when I was surprised to go to McDonalds and then discovered that they had new ads on my full commute route.
Even without influencing you, brands may just make you aware of their products, which is already a big 0 to 1.
So even if we are in the minority of trying to be as rational with the purchases as possible, we surely don't do this all the time with everything. And surely we can't expect others to follow suit - so, simplifications will be made in the decision process, and that is exactly where advertisers are aiming for, and successfully.
As a result, it doesn't matter whether you are "in the minority" or not, and to show you why simply assume that your "behavior" is the majority for a moment: If I'm still buying ads, it's not because altairprime is on my marketing list, and I'm determined to show you an ad for something you don't want, but because volume of minority ad buys 'V' is high enough to support my lifestyle at an 'R' I have uncovered.
That is to say, as an online advertiser, I'm looking for my channel (with a big R% and a big enough V), and I don't really care about the absolute size (V) of not-my-channel until I have an idea of how to get that big R from them.
One thing to consider is why do luxury watches advertise in newspapers? It's about building the hype around a brand. The value of a watch is not in telling the time it's about (except some in build value of materials and work) the value that society gives it.
It's why they are even more problematic than it seems on the surface.
Because it works, and because as usual, HN users confuse their personal experience for being that of the masses when nothing could be further from the truth.
The utility value of ads to the computer is low. But these users are not the ad buyers so that makes little difference.
The tragedy of online ads is that computers when used for search do provide utility to computer users in locating products and services. But middlemen, so-called "tech" companies, seek to intermediate the use of computers for search in order to profit from ad services. This lowers the utility value of search to the computer user.
HN commenters and other commenters across the web complain about this degradation, namely they complain about results delievered by the largest search middleman, Google, almost daily.
Online ads annoy the majority of computer users in order to be "effective", i.e., profitable for the ad buyers, with respect to only a small minority of computer users. The system is profitable for the ad buyers but extremely inefficient. Waste and fraud are common on an unprecedented scale.
Personally I have nothing against advertising. However, having used computer networks that had restrictions on advertising, I question whether computer networks are the appropriate place for advertising.
The decreasing ability of those who produce software to license it for fees, i.e., no viable business plan, has caused them to use surveillance, data collection and advertising services as a substitute means of generating income. Software is given away "for free" and functions as a Trojan Horse for surveillance, data collection and advertising services. The sustainability of such a strategy is questionable.
I wish I could teach other people how to evict ads from short-term memory before they get written to long-term and how to create mental blind spots the size of billboards and banner ads. Apparently it’s an invaluable pair of skills :(
I would pay a fair amount for an ad free news source that has a first rate editorial staff that simply prints the news.
Ads are also a great enforcer of gender and sexual identification by stereotyping and categorizing in order to target audiences. Hairstyle, toys, tools, colour, food, behaviour, everything. I blame ads for identification crises of countless souls, and for toxic human environments and for hate as people internalize stereotypes and categories. We need less enforcement to identify. We need more 'it does not matter'.
Yes, the correct amount of ads is zero.
No ads = $$$
Does it never make sense to have something in between?
I wouldn't pay a lot for any particular service that I'd just use only once or twice per month. I only ever read "the verge" if it is linked from HN or somewhere else. A subscription just doesn't make sense for me.
Now there's one way to pay to get way less ads: pay for an AI model and replace a huge percentage of your searches with searches inside the model. They're not bad at that. That's why many are saying that Google is (partially) in trouble with LLMs: wife and I definitely are searching less using search engines than we used too.
Besides that I'm running a local DNS server with a brutal blocklist: nearly one million of wildcarded domains (unbound supports wildcards). I block entire TLDs too. Entire countries' IP blocks. Add uBlock origin to the mix and your life becomes pretty ad-free.
I'm glad to pay a subscription for an AI model that doesn't serve me any ad. But I won't pay for something that serves me less ads, but still some ads. As simple as that.
You want me to pay: serve me zero ad.
It's several years and I still remember this.
The real question is, why don't they have a completely free plan supported entirely by ads -- don't even try to get a huge premium for the ads, just sell lots of them, even if it's a 1:1 time relationship between ads and content. And then have another plan where you pay money and have zero ads.
Because the latter scheme should be the most profitable. To begin with you open up the market to people who wouldn't pay you at all but would watch ads, so you get more viewers, and on top of that it's effectively try before you buy where the trial requires watching ads, which means you can stay on it as long as you like because the service is still making money. People start watching a show and get tired of seeing ads so they subscribe, when they otherwise would never have started. Then you don't charge $10/mo for no ads, you charge $20, which is worth it to a lot of people because there are so many ads in the free version, and for the people it isn't you still make money from them by showing them lots of ads.
No the people who pay the extra are the ones who are most able to afford it. The outcome is still the same though as these are the people the advertisers want to target.
The people who can't afford the extra dollar are of very little value to the advertisers.
Except that you can't get those people anyway because they value time more than money so they'll just buy some other content with no ads in it from someone else. Also, that doesn't matter if you just price the paid offering at the level that it makes up the actual ad revenue from the people who would use it.
> The people who can't afford the extra dollar are of very little value to the advertisers.
Rubbish. People are often budget constrained because they have high expenses rather than low income, e.g. anyone with kids. Being able to divert that spending to your brand from a competing brand has significant value to advertisers.
Seriously. There’s a lot of spaces where the options are pigeonholed. Where the middle option, if it exists, exists to ladder, not to provide actual value. The problem is you’re using Econ 101 but real world economics is quite a bit more complicated and nuanced
I don't because in this case that's not an option. Is either free with shitty ads or paid with "better" ads.
This black-and-white thinking [1] is also bad. What’s the point if they show 0 ads, subscription price will then have to go up to cover the costs, and nobody signs up so they go bankrupt. They also have to be able to survive in the current world/reality, even if they WANT to show 0 ads.
My point is: we don’t have any insight in their financial data/revenue/costs.
They have to?
I don't think. If you can't offer a service the ethical way, maybe you shouldn't offer that service.
Your kind of reasonning also is the reason these medias can't survive without ads. If we banned ads altogether, subscription prices would go higher but decent publications would be able to serve content without ads because they would not face unfair competition from unethical ones. People would still subscribe to interesting content. Maybe they would not subscribe to 10 different publications but only 2 or 3. But the quality of the content of those publications would be higher because their real customers would be the paying users, not the ad industry. Here we are in that weird state where the real customers are not the people subscribing to the service. Paying users are merely addicts that online medias sell to advertisers. So the content served is only meant to redirect users to ads through many kind of psychological manipulation.
well they are free to offer it - and i can understand they do this to try to build their service/company. If people don't LIKE this, of course that's fine too, then just don't subscribe / use it.
I think the criticism of OP is a little too much black/white thinking.
I.e. for paid print media the ‘correct’ amount of ads is almost definitely non-zero from the publishers perspective.
(Personally I’m not too bothered about ads in a paid online website as long as they aren’t excessive or intrusive but people may disagree and can vote with their wallets)
In latter, you can extract endless amount of data about your customers in realtime and ship it off wherever.
We should ban paying for information at the federal level to prevent this horrific practice.
You say that as if that's a bad thing
I agree. My browsing experience would be much faster and less annoying.
Micropayments are the answer. Everyone on the internet pays a small monthly fee, say $5/month (ideally this would just be integrated into your internet bill), and every piece of content you view streams tiny amounts of that fee to whatever content you are viewing. The actual amount sent is based on your monthly usage, and never goes over that $5/month cap. People who browse less send more.
A webextension tested this years ago & it was sweet. Businesses could be sustainable on there own, no ads, no data selling. If you have viewers, you have currency. But, it wasn't a seamless experience so it didn't take off.
Make no mistake: This is the best possible way to fund the open web, which is exactly why Google pretends it doesn't exist. If chrome had this feature built in & people never had to think about it, ads would drop to near 0 incredibly fast. Google says no.
We are doomed to have an enshittified web because the powers that be won't integrate sustainable funding mechanisms.
For people in lower economic areas, their monthly fee would be relative to the median income (hence the "integrated into your internet bill").
What I'm saying is we have a solution that is being suppressed. It would fix the internet for 80% of people, and the other 20% would experience no downside.
Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blockers and are more aware of privacy. But now, not only don't they not provide content for free, but also make you pay and collect your data as well.
- Go to most of the major news sites in firefox.
- Install noscript extension
- See the bizillion scripts that loads.
Note: You can load all these scripts indirectly with google tag manager or platforms like cloudflare zaraz etc. So you won't even directly see the analytics script that is loaded in a website. Just google tag manager etc.
Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right. Behavioural ads makes it the worst it the problem we should be solving. It makes sense from the business POV as well. You cut the middlemen like facebook and google and get paid premium directly. You curate the ads for your product/website. People want to just plug in an api call and generate money. That won't fly anymore with users being aware.
Static / Contextual ads means:
- no data collection needed
- More money to websites/apps cos they are removing google and facebook as middlemen.
- Can be privacy friendly
- Provide free content means more reach
- Lesser scams, ad malwares and other scammy things
Behavioural ads with data economy over api's became mainstream because we had to directly make relationships with people who want to show ads in our website and apps. It's time consuming and you will need a worthwhile product to show and pitch your website/ads as an ideal place for them to show their ads to. And you cannot just create a bunch of pages and setup google ads and be done with it. Delegating this has been bad for the websites/apps and for users equally. The only winners have been google, facebook like players.
I have been writing an article on this topic for months. I will finish and hopefully I can make a more articulated case then.
Stop NGOs and USAID from being able to buy ads on any issue.
Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
> Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
Exactly. And the same like I have said above applies for data collection as well. Paywalls don't stop data collection and data surveillance.
Russian roulette is an exhilarating and entertaining game to play when it is done right.
I'll quote you "this is a bad take". What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
> Ads are a good way to make revenue when it is done right.
In an ideal world, yes. That ideal world is long gone.
> What's bad is asking me to pay money and then serving me premium ads because you now know i'm someone with disposable income and i'm willing to give it to a premium publication.
OK. Let's first examine 2 complaints about ads:
1. Ads are an annoyance.
2. Ads with surveillance and data economy are bad.
If your problem is the first one, I don't have anything else to say than the fact that Ads are not going anywhere. My arguments are all against and about the 2nd point. I think ads are a good way to make revenue. And it should NOT be done with data surveillance but with curated and useful ads.
Exactly. Do you think the problem is ads here? And you still haven't answered to my POV. How is paywall stopping data surveillance? The reality is they are making you pay and serving ads. Which is the problem? How is paying solving it?
> In an ideal world, yes. That ideal world is long gone. If we are to fix the problem, this is what we should do. Find THAT ideal world.
Why? You state that as if Ads are a product of the universe we live in and we need to accept them like gravity.
> And it should NOT be done with data surveillance but with curated and useful ads.
Agree in principle. The problem is that you don't even need to do data surveilance in this case.
I pay money to the verge. You can infer I have a) disposable income and 2) interest in tech With those two alone you can start showing me ads. You don't even need to profile me.
And that's wrong in my book.
> Do you think the problem is ads here? And you still haven't answered to my POV. How is paywall stopping data surveillance? The reality is they are making you pay and serving ads. Which is the problem? How is paying solving it?
The problem is the ambiguity. The old mantra says "If you're not paying for the product then i'm the product"
Well i'm paying. The transaction should be clear. I give you money, you give me content. But instead that's not what you get. Because you still get profiled, you're still served ads, and sure, BETTER, ads. That's my problem.
Am being realistic. The enshittification of tech companies is not to be blamed on ads. Ads have been around way way before, internet, tv or even news papers.
> Agree in principle. The problem is that you don't even need to do data surveilance in this case.
I agree with you here as well. Remove data surveillance and behavioural ads and you get contextual / static ads. That is better for users, advertisers. Ads zero is not the solution is all am saying.
The disagreement I have with this is that the other way (your way) doesn't work as well. They still track data, make you pay and it is only accessible to people with disposable income.
> The problem is the ambiguity. The old mantra says "If you're not paying for the product then i'm the product"
No. Data surveillance has nothing do with ads. DuckduckGo is a good examplle of it. It doesn't have to be like that.
> Well i'm paying. The transaction should be clear. I give you money, you give me content. But instead that's not what you get. Because you still get profiled, you're still served ads, and sure, BETTER, ads. That's my problem.
This is a very entitled view. Not all of them has the disposable income. Moreover, How many are you going to subscribe? But also, it doesn't fly with news sites. Subscription works for software etc. Anything that needs to be accessible for the broader audiences (like journalism), it fails. This is where ads come in.
Moreover, my problem with the whole statement is that ads were done in a right away in the past. We know how to do that. While it hasn't panned out very well when it comes to subscriptions for news sites etc. It is making it more difficult for journalists and others to survive with subscription. There is a reason why newspapers had ads even after you pay for subscription. Especially for news sites like services.
The problem with internet ads is that we just don't want to directly deal with advertisers. We rather make an api call and let google do the rest. AND they do surveillance. Thats on us. Not on ads.
Why not offer a premium ad-free tier?
For me, viewing web ads is non negotiable (print ads were much more manageable and didn't prevent me from enjoying the content).
However I only view about 4-6 Verge articles per month so I'll see how it plays out. If the best stuff goes behind a paywall then I can't justify subscribing, and nor do I want to hand over personal data to every site I read occasionally (for several reasons).
I've always wondered why publishers can't follow the Spotify or Netflix model for at least some of their content?
This does also raise the uncomfortable question of how much the content is worth. Yes they have some exclusives and unique content but in other areas if I stopped reading it I'd have another hundred reviews of the latest Apple products to choose from, and Reddit is much more realistic (albeit noisy) about the Sonos debacle than The Verge. The article about undersea cables was good though.
I mean, I definitely like full-text RSS when it's available, but even summary-only RSS is good enough for me. 99% of the value is in not needing to go to a bajillion sites manually to see what's new, and avoiding the eye-grabbing behavior of these sites when doing so.
Yes, just like they trust your browser not to share the paid content with others.
They absolutely don't though. They skew the playing field to whoever has the most access to ad publishing (most money usually). I'd bet that a significant proportion of all the VC money raised over the last 25 years was funneled straight to Google AdSense.
What you're describing is leveling the playing field. Without Ads you'd have 10 entrepreneurs. With it you have 10000
Before the internet was fuelled by ads there were some ad-free directories and human-curated lists of websites that people seemed to like quite a lot. That could have been a viable alternative.
I'm not suggesting the proliferation of ads has been bad for the web. Far from it. It means anyone with an ad budget can compete, which is a valid point. The problem that brings is that so much of the success of a product comes from the marketing budget now. In a market where the worst product can win if it has a bigger ad spend, it's hard to believe ads are a net benefit.
And almost no startups extract or exploit. The reason Europe is so poor and not growing is because of this dark turn toward zero sum thinking. Startups literally create new wealth, it's not taken from somewhere (except rare cases of fraud or scams)
Yes, please!
Once a while I turn off ad-blocker to remind myself how bad it got. And OMG! It is bad, Bad, BAD! Unusable. Sometimes is less more.
It's pretty obvious that this is not what the person you're replying to's talking about
No, the complaint is about the "offering" in the first place. People don't want your shit forced in front of them. The fact that you are incapable of realizing this on your own is hilarious.
Person drives on road, billboards blast ads in face. (Just don't drive on this road, nothing is forced on you!)
Oh, and if you are going to argue that a website is not a public space like a road, then why the hell are you making it publicly accessible? Just lock that shit down behind a login if you are so private about it.
And I can distract you when you are working?
And I can pollute your view?
Or track you around the internet?
If you show me an office full of distractions and say, "would you like to work here? It comes with distractions" then of course that's fine (I would say no). But in fact most people prefer the tradeoffs that come with the distractions
So if you had someone follow you around in your day to day life writing down your every activity, then sold the log of your comings and goings to hundreds of companies for cash - that wouldn't be a "harm" by your definition then, would it? Because that's effectively what's happening on the internet, but because people don't see immediate negative impact on their lives they don't see it as "harm".
Also, most people wouldn't actually be harmed by what you're describing. It just wouldn't be super valuable data (we already know where you shop because the store and credit card will sell that information)
Internet ads can in theory be turned on or off per user, it's no rocket science, so you could opt-in and everybody could be happy.
Well I mean that's pretty straightforward, is it not? Someone who is in a coma is not aware of what's happening to them = ergo, no harm is being done, no?
>>I'm claiming that nothing bad happens to you from information being traded about you
Ok let me follow this for couple more seconds then - any information? Or only specific kinds? Like if I take explicit pictures of my partner and put them on the internet(or sell them, to tick the "trading" box), but she _never_ finds out and it has zero impact on her life - was there harm being done?
>>"bad" you prefer
It's not a definiton of bad but a definition of harm we're differing on. You said no one was ever harmed by online tracking - I disagree on that point.
Perhaps the Internet would be smaller without ads but it would surely not be darker - all the darkness can be traced back to bad incentives from ad-based business models. Most likely it would be about the same size because the vast majority of content is created by users who never receive a single cent.
Adtech is parasitic. It provides zero value to society. All it does is force businesses to pay to get back the same visibility they'd receive if ads didn't exist.
You don't know how good we have it
Microwaves were also for the few, and now they are cheap and most people have them.
And microwaves got cheaper without having to resort to displaying ads while the user cooks food.
What a stupid argument.
UBI does that better. Not only does it mean we can build the businesses we actually care about and believe in, as opposed to having to defile our own purpose with ads to stay afloat; it also improves societal well-being by allowing people to focus on the content they want/need and not be distracted and annoyed by unsolicited ads literally every day.
If this doesn't resonate with you, you should reevaluate your reasons for making a business. Are you making it so that you can spend your time doing what you enjoy, or are you making it to exploit other people for your gain?
UBI won't work in the US, we have enough data now that I've moved on
But with zero ads the internet would be a smaller, exceedingly beautiful place.
the desperately poor conveniently don’t have much time to critique society, so i guess we can’t do anything huh.
Is the privileged dude the one who coded the advertising system, or managed the team, or made the decision to use advertising for additional monetisation and got promoted for it?
Do they hate ads too, despite being that guy?
I'm willing to pay
I also have a job—as a self employed developer that earns absolutely not enough to live a decent life—and I still do what I can to respect the web and respect the people ho visit my site by not serving them ads or by tracking them.
Because I believe that respecting you and your privacy is more important than me earning a few $.
I'm not willing to look at ads. If the product or service that you have to offer is not sustainable without ads, I'm perfectly fine with it not existing at all.
There are thousands, and thousand of useful places, each for free. Take a look at awesome lists at github. These provide so much value to the society. It does not require any subscriptions, nor money.
There are millions of people who share education, and knowledge for free. If you build a business, you need to build it around things that are sustainable.
The old boomer internet is also over. Google will not lead anyone to any niche blog, or site. Now everything is inside big tech siloses, where "the algorithm" spoonfeds people with what zuckerberg likes. Go advertise any real http domain with any useful data. Nobody cares.
Yet they make no decisions to reduce those expenses. You either have to believe they are incompetent or this statement is on the spectrum of half truth to full on lie.
> What will remain? Paid cinemas?
Libraries. They used to be awesome and no corporation owned them.
> This is stealing and it is illegal
Sure, but, now you're forced to declare an actual value for the items taken. What is a fair price for most of this "content?"
> So that an independent site cannot distribute free information.
The irony is watching independent journalists take "super chat" donations on these corporate platforms. How big of a cut does the corporation get again?
Therefore it is quite easy to understand and follow, and was suggested by FBI that we should use such extensions for our own protection.
Anyone saying, or implying that we should not use commonly named 'ad blocking' is spreading real harm to people.
When it comes to YouTube it is easy to understand the throwback. It always has been free. Now it is changing, but people are accustomed to this, and it is very bad to shame people for wanting things to keep that way. I agree, that if YouTube TOS say you should not be using them, then fine by me. YouTube goes bye bye. This is the only reason why they did not close all the loopholes, because that is how you loose your viewers, publicity, eyes, and eventually shareholders, and entire ad business. Microsoft for years tolerated piracy to keep them the most popular operating system. That still allows them to shame everybody for what they allow.
It's an old-fashioned notion, but the advertising industry has extremely bad manners: it doesn't respect civilized social norms like not exploiting personal information for private gain and not egregiously interrupting people for trivial reasons. It's nosey, untrustworthy, intrusive, manipulative, and deceptive. I wouldn't tolerate this behaviour from a friend, and I'm not going to tolerate it from a bunch of amoral strangers.
edit: and it doesn't help you much, you are likening ads to harmful things.