5 ms·

Man, ads are great. They allow content to be targeted towards people that could potentially not afford the content and towards people that might not necessarily

Man, ads are great. They allow content to be targeted towards people that could potentially not afford the content and towards people that might not necessarily use the product normally. The world is already significantly divided by wealth. Assuming someone poor even has access to a service like Google, imagine if it was behind a paywall. Could they afford it? If not imagine how much of a life advantage someone wealthier has over those would can not afford it. Your idealistic 'superior' ad free world is as alienating and as segregated as Silicon Valley is...

toomuchtodo 11y ago
How much would a Google search cost me if it wasn't ad supported?
- ivank 11y ago
  Some numbers from 2009 say 1.18 cents/search: https://web.archive.org/web/20110201052634/http://billwarner.posterous.com/new-blog-post-how-much-does-a-single-search-c https://web.archive.org/web/20110201052634/http://billwarner... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110938
  - devsquid 11y ago
    Yea but the question is impossible to answer. Google would have had to balance many differ factors, both of which would have changed as they grew larger.
  - Moru 11y ago
    If google started taking money for searching they would quickly be marginalized.
    - bottled_poe 11y ago
      How exactly? I thought we are assuming that advertising would become worthless if everyone was blocking the ads...
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Consider alternatives such as DDG or YaCy and their cost structures. The alternative need not replicate all of Google's infrastructure.
tritium 11y ago
tracking != advertising
- devsquid 11y ago
  Clearly, but the Blog post is also about ads.
- the8472 11y ago
  advertising hosted on the same domain as the website might not track you beyond the domain itself. But since most websites share common ad networks those ad networks can effectively track you while showing their ads.
  - gpvos 11y ago
    How would they do that without the ability to use the same cookie? The only way I can think of is to track you by ip address.
    - jdbernard 11y ago
      Well, for one, they could fingerprint your browser: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
      - gpvos 11y ago
        Is that really done to any real extent? The majority of users will have a standard configuration anyway.
        mQu 11y ago
        Yes and no. In my tests with live traffic (fingerprint,ip) tuple was as good as standard tracking cookie. Sometimes even better because I could match "incognito" modes as well. This was however only for desktop browsers. Mobile has much higher conformity and yielded mostly false positives. YMMV of course but for my purposes it was not worth it.
comrade1 11y ago
You're trying too hard. Before Google the Internet was more useful. Smaller and more content focused. I'd gladly go back to hotbot or whatever to get away from Google and their ilk. A combination of disconnect, Adblock pro, and self destructing cookies gets me there.
- devsquid 11y ago
  I am trying to hard?
  - tentakull 11y ago
    What, no one has ever criticized you for overblown rhetoric?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - devsquid 11y ago
      I feel like I present a pretty sound argument. This is done via rhetoric of course, but what isn't. In what way is it overblown? I am not taking it to an extreme, I am actually pointing out the extreme the blog poster has taken.
- hmbg 11y ago
  "Before Google the Internet was more useful" Wow, could not disagree more. It's order of magnitudes easier for me to find a good answer for virtually any question. Not to mention how much better gmail is than mail clients of old. Or google maps, my lord how it has simplified my life. Google isn't solely responsible for this, but them and other ad-financed companies played a crucial part in building the web as we know it to day. And for me, and everyone I've ever met, the web is a lot more useful today than 15 year ago.
  - hillsarealiv3 11y ago
    I don't find Google results to be noticeably different from other search engines. For many types of questions wolframalpha is a much better option.
comrade1 11y ago
You're trying too hard. Before Google the Internet was more useful. Smaller and more content focused. I'd gladly go back to hotbot or whatever to get away from Google and their ilk.
oconnore 11y ago
The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.
- greggman 11y ago
  "If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other. The general raising of standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half-century would have been impossible without that spreading of the knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
  - mrob 11y ago
    That was a time before modern communications technology made it very easy for knowledge of higher standards to spread naturally, and a time of much less dangerous advertising. Advertisers today literally use brain scanners to design adverts that manipulate people most effectively. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing And advertisers have the ability to test and refine their ads far beyond what advertisers of Roosevelt's time could do, using tracking that would be considered stalker behaviour if an individual did it. If advertising reverted to 1930s level there'd be much less need to defend yourself from it.
  - realusername 11y ago
    I don't know if this quote is true but advertising in Roosevelt's times was really different. It was not a creepy tracking business tracking everything you do and traditional advertising was much less present everywhere back then.
  - oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
    "By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence." - Bill Hicks
toephu2 11y ago
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." -Tyler Durden
- mikro2nd 11y ago
  Or, as I drummed into my kids heads, "If they have to advertise it, it is almost certainly not good for you."
  - devsquid 11y ago
    Why not? The world is not wholly evil. I know plenty of ads which accurately demonstrate what is good about a product. It seems like you should teach them, "Learn to think for yourself, even if someone says something or believes in something it is not inherently true." But that is a scary thing to teach a child, as an effective teaching of such would invariably lead to them thinking differently than you.
    - mikro2nd 11y ago
      Oh, we certainly tried to teach our kids to think for themselves, too. I believe we were moderately successful. They frequently disagree with me on a whole range of stuff, and nobody finds it scary or threatening. Nevertheless, I do not believe that any good whatsoever comes from advertising. It is all, without exception, an attempt to propagandize. If nothing else, the underlying agenda is, "Consume, comsume, consume! You don't live up to <impossible image>. You're inadequate and hopeless until you buy <stuff>." Not a healthy message.
  - tomblomfield 11y ago
    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/seat-belt-30th-anniversary-the-hardest-1564349 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/seat-belt-30th-annivers... http://www.sussexsaferroads.gov.uk/info/safer-for-drivers/seatbelts http://www.sussexsaferroads.gov.uk/info/safer-for-drivers/se... https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insights-team https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insi...
- 11y ago
SilkRoadie 11y ago
I agree, advertising is very important for the web. I think adblock is a step too far. If companies cannot generate revenue through advertising then they will need to start charging for their products which would be a negative for most people. I would like to see Mozilla take the lead on bad advertising. Ads which cripple browser performance and page load speeds. These ads would then be automatically blocked by the browser. It would be similar to when apple decided to disallow flash on ios. Just as apple encouraged a move away from flash, this would encourage content providers and advertising companies to create lighter, less intrusive ads. Basically it would look at blocking ads which are known to track, ads which take a long time to serve, ads which prevent the page from loading till the page loaded (this might be difficult) and full ad overlays (again, could be difficult to identify)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
belorn 11y ago
A working advertisement market doesn't require to have advertisements forced onto everyone they can. People can opt-in by members ship cards, news letters, and subscriptions, which that mean people who receive it has a positive association rather than negative one. At that point an ad blocker do not serve any purpose, as users would turn them off.
Nursie 11y ago
They demand attention I don't want to give. They track my browsing and take information about me without my consent. They try to run code on my computer without even asking permission. No thankyou.
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  They obtained your permission to run code when you directed your web browser to load the page.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sukilot 11y ago
    And they lost my permission when I blocked the ad URL.
  - Nursie 11y ago
    Of course they didn't. I requested a document from them, they obligingly sent it. It's entirely up to me how (or even if) I render I it.
placeybordeaux 11y ago
Ads allow for a form of market segmentation that no one has been able to do so far. Offering a free version with ads and a premium version without ads is just about as far as we have gone so far.
barnacs 11y ago
Who pays for the content? Noone, ads make it free! Who pays for the ads? Companies. Who pays the companies? The customers. When I check out at the grocery store, I pay for all the ads of the store, the suppliers, the factories and all the tools and services they use. If I could deduct all these fees for all my purchases, I would gladly distribute that money directly among content providers of my choice. It would likely be shocking to learn how many google searches that would pay for.
- thomaskcr 11y ago
  The point is the ads provide "liquidity". By viewing the ads on their site, you're doing basically exactly what you said except you don't need to subscribe to 40+ different sites. I get really frustrated by paywall sites, even those I have subscriptions to (journals) when I need to enter my credentials. People complain ads are disruptive while looking for information, I find the process of logging in or not being able to access something I want because I need to get a subscription a lot more disruptive. Also - a side effect of paying for every site you go to is selectivity. You'll end up locking yourself into a bubble. I'd only be willing to pay for more conservative news sources since that's the majority of what I read/enjoy. It's healthy for me to get alternative perspectives from sources like The Guardian or I'll never challenge my own opinions.

toomuchtodo 11y ago

How much would a Google search cost me if it wasn't ad supported?

ivank 11y ago
Some numbers from 2009 say 1.18 cents/search: https://web.archive.org/web/20110201052634/http://billwarner.posterous.com/new-blog-post-how-much-does-a-single-search-c https://web.archive.org/web/20110201052634/http://billwarner... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110938
- devsquid 11y ago
  Yea but the question is impossible to answer. Google would have had to balance many differ factors, both of which would have changed as they grew larger.
- Moru 11y ago
  If google started taking money for searching they would quickly be marginalized.
  - bottled_poe 11y ago
    How exactly? I thought we are assuming that advertising would become worthless if everyone was blocking the ads...
dredmorbius 11y ago
Consider alternatives such as DDG or YaCy and their cost structures. The alternative need not replicate all of Google's infrastructure.

tritium 11y ago

tracking != advertising

devsquid 11y ago
Clearly, but the Blog post is also about ads.
the8472 11y ago
advertising hosted on the same domain as the website might not track you beyond the domain itself. But since most websites share common ad networks those ad networks can effectively track you while showing their ads.
- gpvos 11y ago
  How would they do that without the ability to use the same cookie? The only way I can think of is to track you by ip address.
  - jdbernard 11y ago
    Well, for one, they could fingerprint your browser: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/
    - gpvos 11y ago
      Is that really done to any real extent? The majority of users will have a standard configuration anyway.
      - mQu 11y ago
        Yes and no. In my tests with live traffic (fingerprint,ip) tuple was as good as standard tracking cookie. Sometimes even better because I could match "incognito" modes as well. This was however only for desktop browsers. Mobile has much higher conformity and yielded mostly false positives. YMMV of course but for my purposes it was not worth it.

comrade1 11y ago

You're trying too hard. Before Google the Internet was more useful. Smaller and more content focused. I'd gladly go back to hotbot or whatever to get away from Google and their ilk. A combination of disconnect, Adblock pro, and self destructing cookies gets me there.

devsquid 11y ago
I am trying to hard?
- tentakull 11y ago
  What, no one has ever criticized you for overblown rhetoric?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - devsquid 11y ago
    I feel like I present a pretty sound argument. This is done via rhetoric of course, but what isn't. In what way is it overblown? I am not taking it to an extreme, I am actually pointing out the extreme the blog poster has taken.
hmbg 11y ago
"Before Google the Internet was more useful" Wow, could not disagree more. It's order of magnitudes easier for me to find a good answer for virtually any question. Not to mention how much better gmail is than mail clients of old. Or google maps, my lord how it has simplified my life. Google isn't solely responsible for this, but them and other ad-financed companies played a crucial part in building the web as we know it to day. And for me, and everyone I've ever met, the web is a lot more useful today than 15 year ago.
- hillsarealiv3 11y ago
  I don't find Google results to be noticeably different from other search engines. For many types of questions wolframalpha is a much better option.

comrade1 11y ago

You're trying too hard. Before Google the Internet was more useful. Smaller and more content focused. I'd gladly go back to hotbot or whatever to get away from Google and their ilk.

oconnore 11y ago

The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.

greggman 11y ago
"If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other. The general raising of standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half-century would have been impossible without that spreading of the knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
- mrob 11y ago
  That was a time before modern communications technology made it very easy for knowledge of higher standards to spread naturally, and a time of much less dangerous advertising. Advertisers today literally use brain scanners to design adverts that manipulate people most effectively. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing And advertisers have the ability to test and refine their ads far beyond what advertisers of Roosevelt's time could do, using tracking that would be considered stalker behaviour if an individual did it. If advertising reverted to 1930s level there'd be much less need to defend yourself from it.
- realusername 11y ago
  I don't know if this quote is true but advertising in Roosevelt's times was really different. It was not a creepy tracking business tracking everything you do and traditional advertising was much less present everywhere back then.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
  "By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence." - Bill Hicks

toephu2 11y ago

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." -Tyler Durden

mikro2nd 11y ago
Or, as I drummed into my kids heads, "If they have to advertise it, it is almost certainly not good for you."
- devsquid 11y ago
  Why not? The world is not wholly evil. I know plenty of ads which accurately demonstrate what is good about a product. It seems like you should teach them, "Learn to think for yourself, even if someone says something or believes in something it is not inherently true." But that is a scary thing to teach a child, as an effective teaching of such would invariably lead to them thinking differently than you.
  - mikro2nd 11y ago
    Oh, we certainly tried to teach our kids to think for themselves, too. I believe we were moderately successful. They frequently disagree with me on a whole range of stuff, and nobody finds it scary or threatening. Nevertheless, I do not believe that any good whatsoever comes from advertising. It is all, without exception, an attempt to propagandize. If nothing else, the underlying agenda is, "Consume, comsume, consume! You don't live up to <impossible image>. You're inadequate and hopeless until you buy <stuff>." Not a healthy message.
- tomblomfield 11y ago
  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/seat-belt-30th-anniversary-the-hardest-1564349 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/seat-belt-30th-annivers... http://www.sussexsaferroads.gov.uk/info/safer-for-drivers/seatbelts http://www.sussexsaferroads.gov.uk/info/safer-for-drivers/se... https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insights-team https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insi...
11y ago

SilkRoadie 11y ago

I agree, advertising is very important for the web. I think adblock is a step too far. If companies cannot generate revenue through advertising then they will need to start charging for their products which would be a negative for most people. I would like to see Mozilla take the lead on bad advertising. Ads which cripple browser performance and page load speeds. These ads would then be automatically blocked by the browser. It would be similar to when apple decided to disallow flash on ios. Just as apple encouraged a move away from flash, this would encourage content providers and advertising companies to create lighter, less intrusive ads. Basically it would look at blocking ads which are known to track, ads which take a long time to serve, ads which prevent the page from loading till the page loaded (this might be difficult) and full ad overlays (again, could be difficult to identify)

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

belorn 11y ago

A working advertisement market doesn't require to have advertisements forced onto everyone they can. People can opt-in by members ship cards, news letters, and subscriptions, which that mean people who receive it has a positive association rather than negative one. At that point an ad blocker do not serve any purpose, as users would turn them off.

Nursie 11y ago

They demand attention I don't want to give. They track my browsing and take information about me without my consent. They try to run code on my computer without even asking permission. No thankyou.

mike_hearn 11y ago
They obtained your permission to run code when you directed your web browser to load the page.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sukilot 11y ago
  And they lost my permission when I blocked the ad URL.
- Nursie 11y ago
  Of course they didn't. I requested a document from them, they obligingly sent it. It's entirely up to me how (or even if) I render I it.

placeybordeaux 11y ago

Ads allow for a form of market segmentation that no one has been able to do so far. Offering a free version with ads and a premium version without ads is just about as far as we have gone so far.

barnacs 11y ago

Who pays for the content? Noone, ads make it free! Who pays for the ads? Companies. Who pays the companies? The customers. When I check out at the grocery store, I pay for all the ads of the store, the suppliers, the factories and all the tools and services they use. If I could deduct all these fees for all my purchases, I would gladly distribute that money directly among content providers of my choice. It would likely be shocking to learn how many google searches that would pay for.

thomaskcr 11y ago
The point is the ads provide "liquidity". By viewing the ads on their site, you're doing basically exactly what you said except you don't need to subscribe to 40+ different sites. I get really frustrated by paywall sites, even those I have subscriptions to (journals) when I need to enter my credentials. People complain ads are disruptive while looking for information, I find the process of logging in or not being able to access something I want because I need to get a subscription a lot more disruptive. Also - a side effect of paying for every site you go to is selectivity. You'll end up locking yourself into a bubble. I'd only be willing to pay for more conservative news sources since that's the majority of what I read/enjoy. It's healthy for me to get alternative perspectives from sources like The Guardian or I'll never challenge my own opinions.