8 ms·

As an ad-blocker user for years, I agree. On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? May

by c16 2mo ago

As an ad-blocker user for years, I agree. On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? Maybe this is not a discussion for here right now. But it's definitely something I've thought of. Not everyone want to pay for news.

JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
> how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.
- Rebuff5007 2mo ago
  There is a third option, that the content does not need to be monetized.
  - mrngld 2mo ago
    Full time journalists do in fact enjoy eating like the rest of us.
    - Rebuff5007 2mo ago
      The parent comment mentioned "blogs" and "everyday websites." Do you want to make a case for why exactly a percentage increase calculator app needs ads?
- neodymiumphish 2mo ago
  I want to pay good sites for their content, but I don't think it's economical to expect a subscription from every semi-regular reader. I'd like for the internet to settle on some sort of micro-transaction system where your browsing history pays out a fraction of a penny each time you browse to a site, so as long as you maintain a balance in your wallet, you can browse the web ad-free across all the sites that support the transaction system.
  - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
    > micro-transaction system Doesn’t make sense commercially or socially. If you’re dabbling in specialist content, you’re fine waiting for it to filter out through ad-funded sources. The information density will be lower. And timing, too. But the whole point of the subscription is you have a stable base of financing and a committed community of knowledgeable people (likely in positions of power). And practically speaking, the archive.is workarounds sort of are the solution for dabblers. It just taxes your time instead of wallet, which seems fair.
- armadyl 2mo ago
  More like the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is or people just posting the full text in comments on this forum even. Subs only aren’t viable for publications with full staff imo
  - JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
    > the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is This is increasingly blocked by investigative outlets, particularly niche ones. It eventually filters through to folks who won’t or can’t pay. And for most people, that’s fine—they don’t need detailed and timely news.
janandonly 2mo ago
We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers. It didn’t catch on back then. But time are changing.
- Kye 2mo ago
  I don't remember that, though I only started with early Netscape. Do you have more detail?
  - ihateolives 2mo ago
    It wasn't in Mosaic either so I have no idea where they took that fact from.
  - c16 2mo ago
    pretty sure the guy from TPB had a micro-payments/donation startup around the time when everyone was using Facebook like buttons on their websites.
    - Kye 2mo ago
      That was a decade after anything I would think of as early browsers, much less very early browsers.
- LukaD 2mo ago
  > We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers. I don't think this was ever a thing. I know there's HTTP 402 and before 2000 there were some standards around payment being pursued but AFAIK nothing ever made it into browsers. Or am I missing something?
- Itoldmyselfso 2mo ago
  Paywalling with extremely easy, one-click payment of very small amount might work. Paywalling does still incentivize things like misleading, sensationalized click-bait titles, but that's pretty much the norm everywhere. Alternatively, if there was a subscription that covered a massive amount of blogs/news bundled into one low-cost subscription, that might also work. What I heavily doubt is if donation-based micropayments will ever find enough users to remain profitable.
shevy-java 2mo ago
> On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? I heard that argument many times before, and to this I can only say: if your revenue model is based on pestering real humans, you need to go extinct. So if they die that is great. The sooner we can get rid of companies that build their existence on pester-harassing people, the better. The days of infiltrating people's minds via ads are over - these companies just have not realised that yet. I live a 100% ad-free life (ok, that's not really possible, since sometimes I still see ads, but I strive towards that ideal - the sooner companies that rely on ads go extinct, the better, and the more they complain, the more convinced I am that they must go extinct today rather than tomorrow).
dzonga 2mo ago
ads are not bad. if it's publisher ads/native ads. the bad ad ecosystem is where there's whole demand, supply side platforms and ad exchanges that mine and sell your data. now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience. you're reading some article about EV's - then boom the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad - not serve you an ad about weight loss or viagra or any other shit stuff.
- II2II 2mo ago
  > now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience .... the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad This has always been possible and, from my recollections, was how some early online advertising was done. (I don't know if it was ever the dominant model, but it was certainly more common.) I suspect the difficulty connecting content providers with advertisers is the root of them problem. After that, it takes effort to maintain that relationship. Having a third party handle everything is simply easier, especially for smaller web sites and smaller companies who want to advertise.
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
  > ads are not bad Ads are noise deliberately added to the signal. They're content you did not seek out and probably don't want. All advertisements are inherently untrustworthy: they're getting paid to sell you something, naturally they will exaggerate the positives and downplay the negatives. Conflicts of interest doesn't even begin to describe it. That's the charitable interpretation. One could describe advertising as mind rape. You don't consent to it, you don't want it. They just keep trying to forcibly insert the data into your mind anyway. You block them, they bypass your blocker, which arguably makes them malware as well. They feel entitled to our cognition, memories, attention. They think it's theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. They make it even harder for people with attention deficit to concentrate by trying to forcibly grab their attention. It's not only an accessibility problem, it's also a form of aggression, which makes uBlock Origin a form of justified self-defense.
  - tensor 2mo ago
tensor 2mo ago
> Not everyone want to pay for news. People want things for free. Too bad. Nothing is really free. Either you pay for it, have ads, or have your taxes pay for it as part of public media. Personally, I'd like to see forced ads banned. Having ads that the user can come to see is fine (e.g. I'm looking for a product and I want to browse pitches, totally fine). That means that yes, we need a way where news can get paid. Most big news companies already offer paid tiers, they just continue to shove ads even then.
Gareth321 2mo ago
When I look a decade ahead, I think the advertiser internet model is going to die. People won't be using search engines anymore. They'll be using LLMs. They won't be reading blogs anymore. They'll be asking their LLMs. They won't be looking at review or recipe or travel sites anymore. They'll ask their LLMs. Of course this creates second order effects. If no one ever views the ads on the review and recipe sites, those sites will disappear. Then what do the LLMs reference? Parametric knowledge? Google is trying to get ahead of this with "Google Zero:" an internet in which one never leaves Google because they cache and serve everything a user could ever want. All stolen from other websites, of course. I hope we end up back at the internet of the 90s. Small, unmonitised hobby spaces. Unfortunately bots will be 99% of all internet traffic within a few years, so how do we protect these spaces from unsolicited spam, disinformation campaigns, trolling, etc? We might actually go and touch some grass and re-learn how to socialise in person. This is not a bad thing.
Saris 2mo ago
It's a tough question, I would be fine with ads if they were relevant to the content I'm looking at, minimal (ie; no motion, popups, covering up content), actually checked for safety so all the scam and phishing ads went away, and checked for performance so they didn't slow down a website so it's barely usable. Maybe if adblockers become more widespread that will start to happen, right now ad networks seem to just allow anything. Like if I'm reading a cooking article and there's an add to the side for some cooking gadgets or something like that, sure why not!
WillAdams 2mo ago
I would be fine with a mode where the ads were corralled at the bottom of the page, but not loaded, with a disclosure triangle which would then allow me the option of viewing them if the content was credible enough that it seemed to me that the site content creators could be trusted to have signed up for ads which might have merit.
- armadyl 2mo ago
  99.9% of people would not intentionally enable ads even if they liked the content this is an insanely unrealistic option.
lesostep 2mo ago
I know few web sites that has unblockable ads. Mostly nerdy themed websites that has relationship with small nerdy webstores. They just host the ad themselves and it's a part of the site. It's cheaper for a webstore to pay one good website personally, and people trust ads like that a lot more. It's almost like a personal recomendation from the team curating knowledge base. And no ad trackers, plus quicker website, win/win|win situation for everybody

by c16 2mo ago

JumpCrisscross 2mo ago

> how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? Same as they do now. The quality ones charge for their content. The low-quality ones survive on serving ads to the masses.

Rebuff5007 2mo ago
There is a third option, that the content does not need to be monetized.
- mrngld 2mo ago
  Full time journalists do in fact enjoy eating like the rest of us.
  - Rebuff5007 2mo ago
    The parent comment mentioned "blogs" and "everyday websites." Do you want to make a case for why exactly a percentage increase calculator app needs ads?
neodymiumphish 2mo ago
I want to pay good sites for their content, but I don't think it's economical to expect a subscription from every semi-regular reader. I'd like for the internet to settle on some sort of micro-transaction system where your browsing history pays out a fraction of a penny each time you browse to a site, so as long as you maintain a balance in your wallet, you can browse the web ad-free across all the sites that support the transaction system.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
  > micro-transaction system Doesn’t make sense commercially or socially. If you’re dabbling in specialist content, you’re fine waiting for it to filter out through ad-funded sources. The information density will be lower. And timing, too. But the whole point of the subscription is you have a stable base of financing and a committed community of knowledgeable people (likely in positions of power). And practically speaking, the archive.is workarounds sort of are the solution for dabblers. It just taxes your time instead of wallet, which seems fair.
armadyl 2mo ago
More like the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is or people just posting the full text in comments on this forum even. Subs only aren’t viable for publications with full staff imo
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago
  > the quality ones get their content ripped and viewed for free with tools like archive.is This is increasingly blocked by investigative outlets, particularly niche ones. It eventually filters through to folks who won’t or can’t pay. And for most people, that’s fine—they don’t need detailed and timely news.

janandonly 2mo ago

We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers. It didn’t catch on back then. But time are changing.

Kye 2mo ago
I don't remember that, though I only started with early Netscape. Do you have more detail?
- ihateolives 2mo ago
  It wasn't in Mosaic either so I have no idea where they took that fact from.
- c16 2mo ago
  pretty sure the guy from TPB had a micro-payments/donation startup around the time when everyone was using Facebook like buttons on their websites.
  - Kye 2mo ago
    That was a decade after anything I would think of as early browsers, much less very early browsers.
LukaD 2mo ago
> We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers. I don't think this was ever a thing. I know there's HTTP 402 and before 2000 there were some standards around payment being pursued but AFAIK nothing ever made it into browsers. Or am I missing something?
Itoldmyselfso 2mo ago
Paywalling with extremely easy, one-click payment of very small amount might work. Paywalling does still incentivize things like misleading, sensationalized click-bait titles, but that's pretty much the norm everywhere. Alternatively, if there was a subscription that covered a massive amount of blogs/news bundled into one low-cost subscription, that might also work. What I heavily doubt is if donation-based micropayments will ever find enough users to remain profitable.

shevy-java 2mo ago

> On the flip side, how do blogs, news, and every day ad-serving websites survive without them? If it dies, it dies? I heard that argument many times before, and to this I can only say: if your revenue model is based on pestering real humans, you need to go extinct. So if they die that is great. The sooner we can get rid of companies that build their existence on pester-harassing people, the better. The days of infiltrating people's minds via ads are over - these companies just have not realised that yet. I live a 100% ad-free life (ok, that's not really possible, since sometimes I still see ads, but I strive towards that ideal - the sooner companies that rely on ads go extinct, the better, and the more they complain, the more convinced I am that they must go extinct today rather than tomorrow).

dzonga 2mo ago

ads are not bad. if it's publisher ads/native ads. the bad ad ecosystem is where there's whole demand, supply side platforms and ad exchanges that mine and sell your data. now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience. you're reading some article about EV's - then boom the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad - not serve you an ad about weight loss or viagra or any other shit stuff.

II2II 2mo ago
> now there's better tech to do native ads without the intrusion and massive bad experience .... the publisher themselves can serve you a small ad This has always been possible and, from my recollections, was how some early online advertising was done. (I don't know if it was ever the dominant model, but it was certainly more common.) I suspect the difficulty connecting content providers with advertisers is the root of them problem. After that, it takes effort to maintain that relationship. Having a third party handle everything is simply easier, especially for smaller web sites and smaller companies who want to advertise.
matheusmoreira 2mo ago
> ads are not bad Ads are noise deliberately added to the signal. They're content you did not seek out and probably don't want. All advertisements are inherently untrustworthy: they're getting paid to sell you something, naturally they will exaggerate the positives and downplay the negatives. Conflicts of interest doesn't even begin to describe it. That's the charitable interpretation. One could describe advertising as mind rape. You don't consent to it, you don't want it. They just keep trying to forcibly insert the data into your mind anyway. You block them, they bypass your blocker, which arguably makes them malware as well. They feel entitled to our cognition, memories, attention. They think it's theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. They make it even harder for people with attention deficit to concentrate by trying to forcibly grab their attention. It's not only an accessibility problem, it's also a form of aggression, which makes uBlock Origin a form of justified self-defense.
- tensor 2mo ago

tensor 2mo ago

> Not everyone want to pay for news. People want things for free. Too bad. Nothing is really free. Either you pay for it, have ads, or have your taxes pay for it as part of public media. Personally, I'd like to see forced ads banned. Having ads that the user can come to see is fine (e.g. I'm looking for a product and I want to browse pitches, totally fine). That means that yes, we need a way where news can get paid. Most big news companies already offer paid tiers, they just continue to shove ads even then.

Gareth321 2mo ago

When I look a decade ahead, I think the advertiser internet model is going to die. People won't be using search engines anymore. They'll be using LLMs. They won't be reading blogs anymore. They'll be asking their LLMs. They won't be looking at review or recipe or travel sites anymore. They'll ask their LLMs. Of course this creates second order effects. If no one ever views the ads on the review and recipe sites, those sites will disappear. Then what do the LLMs reference? Parametric knowledge? Google is trying to get ahead of this with "Google Zero:" an internet in which one never leaves Google because they cache and serve everything a user could ever want. All stolen from other websites, of course. I hope we end up back at the internet of the 90s. Small, unmonitised hobby spaces. Unfortunately bots will be 99% of all internet traffic within a few years, so how do we protect these spaces from unsolicited spam, disinformation campaigns, trolling, etc? We might actually go and touch some grass and re-learn how to socialise in person. This is not a bad thing.

Saris 2mo ago

It's a tough question, I would be fine with ads if they were relevant to the content I'm looking at, minimal (ie; no motion, popups, covering up content), actually checked for safety so all the scam and phishing ads went away, and checked for performance so they didn't slow down a website so it's barely usable. Maybe if adblockers become more widespread that will start to happen, right now ad networks seem to just allow anything. Like if I'm reading a cooking article and there's an add to the side for some cooking gadgets or something like that, sure why not!

WillAdams 2mo ago

I would be fine with a mode where the ads were corralled at the bottom of the page, but not loaded, with a disclosure triangle which would then allow me the option of viewing them if the content was credible enough that it seemed to me that the site content creators could be trusted to have signed up for ads which might have merit.

armadyl 2mo ago
99.9% of people would not intentionally enable ads even if they liked the content this is an insanely unrealistic option.

lesostep 2mo ago

I know few web sites that has unblockable ads. Mostly nerdy themed websites that has relationship with small nerdy webstores. They just host the ad themselves and it's a part of the site. It's cheaper for a webstore to pay one good website personally, and people trust ads like that a lot more. It's almost like a personal recomendation from the team curating knowledge base. And no ad trackers, plus quicker website, win/win|win situation for everybody