I think simple ads most people are OK with however you start to lose people when those ads track your movements like a creepy stalker, sell that data without your knowledge or consent, and tax your system with resource hungry js that adds precious seconds to your wait only to be served with a zero day or other malware.
Sites and ad networks have being engaged in a abusive relationship with users for a long time now and it's wrong to expect them to not try to protect themselves. If you want users to stop blocking your ads then stop serving them ads worth blocking.
Slightly unrelated but I don't see how people justify ad blocking on mobile YouTube, the ads these are all native (video ads) and take up at most 30 seconds. If you don't want to wait for the ads, don't watch YT and burn Google's bandwidth.
Browse those sites with js blocked. If not js blocked, then third-party cookies blocked. If not that, then ublock to block all cookies and allow only specific cookies.
This is my recipe for browsing the web.
Blocking specific cookies. Blocking all third-party cookies. A1llowing specific third-party cookies. Still, in recent months, I have noticed some have started getting smarter. So I block js there.
But every browser is different with ease of use. Love brave browser capabilities. Like Chrome ease. Hate Firefox features. So using extensions to fill in those gaps.
The answer I keep returning to: if shady ads is what keeps your business running, stop running your business. Switch off the lights and the servers and go home.
That’s too simplistic a take: they aren’t running shady ads and unlike many sites they allow you to you subscribe and not see ads at all. Unfortunately, large chunks of the public — especially tech site visitors — have been conditioned to think of content as free, and the adtech bubble hasn’t pooped yet so we can’t reverse that trend.
What people are willing to pay for content is I think almost zero.
If we get rid of these privacy invading ads and micropayments/subscriptions don’t take off in a big way (I don’t think they will) then one or two things must happen
1) advertising money remains even though ads are dumber (less narrowly targeted, more fraud etc)
2) there is a lot less money to go around so there must simply be less content.
I think the answer is somewhere in between. I don’t think it’s a pessimistic view that maybe 75% of sites not only risks disappearing but perhaps should. The abundance of “free” content is what makes people unwilling to pay for quality.
I definitely think you’re right on the conclusion: a lot of content sites are going to need to dramatically scale back their size or simply fold. It feels a lot like when VCs pile money into an area and it takes longer for viable business models to win out, only with a much longer run time since the advertising market is so much larger.
Exactly yes. I don’t care if 80% of content online would disappear, or the thousands of jobs making that content, or the billions invested in it. It seems irrelevant in comparison.
The problem is that subscription models are flawed, at least for things like Ars Technica.
In most cases, people don't want to commit a portion of their monthly budget to a specific website for the rest of their life. I don't know how often I read Ars Technica, but it's probably a couple of articles a month. That is worth maybe $0.10 to me, so they can never collect that profitably. They use ads because then I "pay" whenever I visit, without having to approve any payment. More people visit, they automatically get more money.
I wish there were some sort of globally-accepted micropayment system. With the billions of cryptocurrencies floating around, it surprises me that nobody has attempted this yet. I buy $10 of cryptocurrency. It gets loaded into my web browser. The webserver says "hey, you have to pay for this". My browser asks me if I want to do that. If I pick yes, then the server sends me the rest of the HTML after it agrees that the money was in fact transferred.
(The closest thing I've seen to this are Twitch "bits". That is a micropayment platform that seems to be working pretty well, but it's used by the same people that want to pay their favorite content creators a stipend and so real-money recurring subscriptions are just as good. For that reason, I'm not sure we can infer much from that model, except that people will buy value in bulk and then dole it out to individuals at random intervals... which is pretty interesting if you think about it.)
I think what is stopping this from being a thing is not any technical issue, but rather just greed from the content creators. I am sure that anyone that sells a subscription service is making money from people that have forgotten to cancel or don't get the maximum value out of their subscription, and it's probably a lot of money. Nobody is going to give that up.
I also think advertisers pay too much for ads. I bet the "brand awareness" ads aren't worth nearly as much money as they pay. Meanwhile, publishers are making a lot of money off of selling impressions, and are probably hesitant to turn off free money from dumb people. Remember, serving an ad requires no input or investment from the end user; the website loads, they get money. If there were "brakes" applied every so often ("are you sure you want to pay the content creator using your real-world hard-earned cash?") revenue would go down.
So I think the problems here are:
1) Advertisers want to advertise. If you remove your publication from the list of places where they can get something advertised, they'll go elsewhere. The money won't be removed from the ecosystem, and your competition will be enriched. That's not strictly a PROBLEM, but your investors will not be making happy faces at you when you leave money on the table. Only some sort of law could change that, and there will never be any such law.
2) Publishers are making a lot of money on unused subscriptions, so they continue to push subscriptions over micropayments.
A lot of people are making content worth paying for. It's just that we can't afford it, but the advertisers can.
On top of using Firefox as my default browser everywhere because I want to see it have more than the 5% user share mentioned at the end of the article, I've additionally replaced Chrome itself with Brave when I need Chromium rendering. I have no idea if BAT coins will be a thing, but the idea is neat (and relevant to your comment) and the care towards privacy plus the ability to turn all the BAT stuff off is satisfactory.
More broadly, though, I agree with your comment and think there are additional unlisted problems.
I pay for Ars Technica because they offer an amazing cross-format (HTML, RSS, PDF, etc) clean browsing experience for paying customers plus sent a branded Yubikey plus had clear online cancel buttons instead of hoops like other publishers. In my personal utopia, every news site would be served in this cross-format ad-free fashion.
I honestly wish they'd send a new branded Yubikey every year so I'd always have an important branded physical reminder of their existence as its the best and most useful tschotske I've received as a thank-you-for-subscribing gift (and probably likely so for others in the HN crowd).
Ars Technica is one of the few sites I regularly visit directly (just like I visit hckrnews.com to often and directly). Just like here on HN, I directly visit for the content curation and occasional comment (both of which is better than social media algorithms).
Which lead me to the consideration of a third problem...
3) Users try before the buy. You can only begin the process of receiving money after they've read enough content.
I'm surprised I haven't seen more cryptocurrency-based $1/week type subscriptions to unlock the content/features/etc for a week at a time (or perhaps forever, if a user sent enough cryptocurrency).
There is also Scroll, which disables ads on participating sites. They don't stop tracking, though, as far as I know. In fact, Scroll itself tracks everything you read while logged in since they use it to reimburse the content providers proportionally out of your subscription revenue.
