Doubtful. Many websites across the Internet are ad-free when you pay for it, such as Ars Technica [1] and Slashdot [2]. Many apps do the same thing, offering In-App Purchases of "Disable Ads, $0.99". People wouldn't offer the option unless (1) they're inept and illogical or (2) it actually makes money. I'm willing to bet it's the latter.
And even then, people love getting rid of ads. Whether you're blocking them with AdBlock Plus [3] or blocking things in a hosts file or firewall [4], or even just pirating things outright [I'm not posting a link to TPB], people hate having their minds filled with garbage.
It's a waste of time, waste of space, and honestly will just disappear asymptotically. It will probably never leave us entirely, but it will effectively be gone (as far as I know).
The fundamental disconnect is this: Advertisers are willing to pay more for a split second of my attention when I'm casually browsing than I am to pay for all of the content I come across.
Of course, not all sites are created equal. I'm willing to pay for Netflix to get rid of ads in TV, I pay for Spotify so there are no ads in my music, and I pay for Kindle books, so no ads there either. But I also make a lot more money than the average person, and am a lot more invested in the media I consume than most people. Yet, even for me, a lot of the stuff I access online I'm accessing very casually, and would never pay a significant amount for. It's not that I don't care for it to exist, but I'm not invested in its existence enough to pull out my credit card.
Basically, ads everywhere are your tax for using the Internet.
If, theoretically, some micro-tipping system worked out, where you filled up your wallet with $x/month and it was drained each time you visited a site, my guess is people would be blown away at how expensive it was to brows the Internet.
To make such an ad-removal system work at scale ( to make ads "disappear"), you would either have to 1. Have every site with an opt-out ad system, or 2. have every site do that and lock people out who don't pay.
#1 will never happen, because Facebook knows it makes more from advertisers than you will pay. #2 will never happen because most people won't pay for content - only a few sites can get away with that, and just barely.
> The fundamental disconnect is this: Advertisers are willing to pay more for a split second of my attention when I'm casually browsing than I am to pay for all of the content I come across.
It would be interesting to have a browser extension that kept a running tally of how much advertising revenue has been generated by your browsing. "You have seen $x of ads today"
> than I am [willing] to pay for all of the content I come across
There is no free lunch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237. You are paying for all of that content, one way or another. Or if you somehow avoid buying any product that has advertising costs baked into the price you pay, most other consumers are subsidizing you.
The moral and responsible thing to do is start paying straight up, and cut out the advertising middlemen and all the extra costs, both economic and social, associated with advertising.
> The moral and responsible thing to do is start paying straight up, and cut out the advertising...
That's an outrageous statement I could not disagree with more.
The internet being open and available to all is much more valuable to me (and I would contend to society) than the Internet not having any ads that can be annoying at times. I can see how you may feel differently personally, but to project what you prefer onto others by calling it the "moral" or "responsible" thing to do is absolutely farcical.
Ads are an Internet tax. One I am happy to pay if that means anybody anywhere can access the content, regardless of monetary means.
You failed to answer the points made by my comment, which includes the linked points. Did you reject my point of view without giving it an honest read?
> to project what you prefer onto others by calling it the "moral" or "responsible" thing to do is absolutely farcical.
It is not my preference, but my moral view, as I so stated. Is there nothing you disapprove of in society? Racism, sexism, police corruption, robbery, or bribery? Is it farcical projection onto others of what I prefer if I said "The moral and responsible thing to do is to refuse the bribe and report the briber"?
You can deny all my points in my comment (including in the link) and consider my reasoning farcical (I welcome rational debate), but to say that my expression of my morality as a statement of what people should do (the very definition of morality) "farcical" (You keep using that word, i do not think it means what you think it means) is nonsense.
> Ads are an Internet tax.
You are begging the question.
> if that means anybody anywhere can access the content, regardless of monetary means.
Are you saying there is no other way we could do this? If you read my points, you will understand that providing internet access this way costs society more than if we, as a society, paid for the internet and the content without advertising. Perhaps you also skipped my earlier comment herein: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9937155
According to Yahoo Finance, Facebook made $13.5 B between 13 March 2014 and 31 March 2015. In December 2014, they reported 1.19 B monthly active users. That works out to about $0.95/user/month. I would love to have the option pay $25/month[1] to be able to get out of the tracking crap.
I don't even particularly mind banner ads that appear because I am viewing a page. I just don't want to be tracked. If I go to Dockside Tropical Cafe's fb page, sure show me an ad for some trop-rock artist or Caribbean vacation. But don't do it when saying happy birthday to my friends or on a site about car repair. I don't always want one to know about the other.
[1] Edit: I meant $25/year- I'm not sure I'd pay $25/month for fb. Maybe $5/month though.
But you don't just contribute to your own "user value", you interact with friends and they with you and together, they know where you all are, what you like doing, and what you like to buy.
And it's actually worse than you make out. It's not just Facebook pages. They could track you on third party sites that have "share on Facebook" code on them (lots). They have real ability to track almost everything you read online, if you have an active Facebook session (or had one on your IP recently).
They could then sell this data bank out to third parties for A/B switching based on real demographic data.
We assume Google knows everything, but Facebook probably knows more.
I understand that they rely on the network effect, but my point is that if they went to a pay version (note that I edited what I said I would be willing to pay- the first was an accident) their revenue would increase. If a significant number of us did so then perhaps they could even reduce costs by not having to meddle as much with advertisers. $25/year more than doubles their revenue from me. And they can still show me some ads.
The tracking is ridiculously comprehensive as you point out- yet they don't get the value that they could get from direct payment. So I'm suggesting that they do us all a favor and let us opt-out of privacy invasion with cash.
It's definitely a different experience though. If the narrative calls for [someobject] to be in a scene and an advertiser pays to make it their object, that doesn't generally detach me from the story like an ad interstitial does.
Okay, let's try an obviously ridiculous thought experiment:
Can we apply the same argument to physical books?
I bought a book a few weeks ago for about $20, from a physical book shop. It is a non-fiction book. It is pretty good. I am about 2/3rds of the way through it. The book contains no advertisements. Shock! Why is this?
I suspect the argument is glossing over a few details!
Maybe we could get a firmer idea by trying to quantify things. E.g. estimating how much people would pay, and how much that would be worth to potential advertisers, etc.
I think the blog post is poorly thought out and I understand your point. Nevertheless, many books have "ads" in the sense of "read more books by this author" on the inside dust jacket of a hardback, or placed in the last few pages of a paperback.
Sometimes when I buy a book directly from the publisher, they will include in the box some brochures/catalogs for similar books. The theme for all the situations is the same -- they already have your eyeballs tuned in to their wares to some extent -- so they try to take advantage of it.
It's just that the ads are not wedged in between the middle of the book to interrupt the reading experience.
> It's just that the ads are not wedged in between the middle of the book to interrupt the reading experience.
Absolutely, the annoyance-factor of some types of advertisement are within acceptable bounds. It also helps that those ads may very well be for things you're actually interested in; if you liked the book you just read, knowing what other books are available from the same author at the end actually helps you. This is in stark contrast to, for example, the ads at the end of articles on some pages that masquerade as other articles, but just take you to another page filled with more ads for things you have no interest in.
Originally part of the pitch for cable television was that it was ad free. The networks discovered they could make more money by adding the ads back in. People were already paying for cable so they continued.
There's no way to add ads to a book you physically have; you can't compare physical products to electronic products.
If you make money selling a product there is a price point where you will make more by adding ads. It really is just a matter of finding the pricing.
Cinema attendance has been plummeting for 20 years. For, among other reasons, the value added by advertisements isn't realized by the cinema patrons who are paying their time and money to see them.
There are adverts in books too. A friend told me to read a new Bond or a Bourne book (can't remember) and it was one long series of product placements.
Many paperback books contain ads at the end for other books from the same publisher in the same genre. Sometimes they include short excerpts. Occasionally there are longer excerpts from the next book by the same author.
A few publishers tried inserting actual non-book advertising in paperbacks. That died out fairly quickly.
Hardcover books are likely to contain a microbibliography of the author, in the front matter.
Paperbacks used to have order forms in the back to order other books you might like as well. They still have excerpts of the next book in the series, and the front matter usually also has other books by the author (often only the ones from the same publisher).
Ebooks are a different story. Eventually (5 years) you will see ebooks include products mentioned in the body of the text. These products will change from one reading to another depending on revenue and contract with the advertiser.
Now, obviously, this depends on the platform used to present the ebook, but I am quite sure this will find its way into Kindle and iBooks.
> So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in
Except people are not paying to keep ads away, that's the point. Basically what happened to artists 10 years ago is happening to ad backed websites :Most People just don't want to pay for content on the web, period. Online advertising won't save the Buzzfeeds or the dying press when people use ad block massively. They'll have to find other ways to make money.
This is exactly the reason why you pay for newspapers and magazines. Newspapers and magazines make ~90% of their revenue from advertisements. (Or at least they did before the internet killed their business model) If they made the newspaper free, it would increase their distribution by an order of magnitude or so, and since advertisers pay rates based on readership, you would think that would also increase their revenue a similar order of magnitude.
But it doesn't work that way -- paying readers are worth a lot more than users who didn't pay for the newspaper / magazine.
You start a startup and offer subscriptions for content. You go public and everything is great. Then you have a bad quarter. Then another. Your stockholders are going to pressure you to find ways to quickly increase revenue (because thinking further into the future than a quarter is for losers, right?). You introduce ads. You have an amazing quarter. Then another. About this time your core user base is exiting for a new startup with a subscription model and no ads. You then have a string of bad quarters. You're in a downward spiral. Was, Rinse, Repeat.
Right now I m staring at twitter picture content on my Android notification area. Are they gonna be ads soon?
Most executives will carefully introduce ads by making A/B testing. So your scenario can only be made true by blind and dumb executives. And yes they are many.
In the cases that I can't escape ads by paying, I tend to move away from the content with ads.
For example, Hulu - I was a paying customer, but the relentless advertising drove me away. It's slightly different with HBO Now - I get ads, but for other entertainment on the same provider; this is much less bothersome. Ars Technica: I'm not a subscriber, I read often, but I tolerate the laser-focused advertising because the content is excellent, the ads are not obtrusive and they actually target me quite well.
tl;dr- It's always more complicated than a simplistic blog post indicates.
I also ditched Hulu over the ads. Their app kept crashing my Roku as well. Either one of those would have been enough reason. Who wants to pay someone to lob obnoxious ads at them?
Well as most people point out, while advertisers want to get to people with "buying power" not everyone selling content to such people is willing to be a shill for them.
Or put another way, there are plenty of content creators who would create entirely advertising free experiences for their content consumers if they could make a living doing that.
What I find more interesting is that there is advertising that I like/seek out, for example back in the day Byte magazine had advertisers who by their nature of establishing a relationship with BYTE were much less likely to be frauds and they sold things that readers were interested in (parts, computers, boards, Etc.) But there was an interesting level of annoyingness they stayed below.
I pay for the Economist and read it on my iPad. The experience is largely advertising free, and the ads it does have do not annoy me. This could change of course, but then I would probably stop subscribing. It was less clear cut with the NYTimes which I subscribed too and it still had annoying ads, I complained a couple of times, and then eventually stopped subscribing.
And then there are the ads themselves. Something that is clearly a problem is ad "networks" can have a lot of crap in them, and those are both annoying and sometimes borderline fraudulent (or actually illegal in the case of the Canadian pharmacy ads). That the networks replaced a staff of sales people who were trying to sell businesses ad space on a month to month, week to week, or day to day basis makes for a very expensive proposition for a content provider. And yet it makes for a better experience for their reader if they express an editorial sentiment over the advertising content as well. (which print magazines have always done) The first startup I joined was doing a magazine about Golf on the web in 1995. That startup was very interested in ads that reflected the mission of the web site and were not "crazy". It made for a better user experience.
If you go back in time cable used to be something you paid for not to have ads. Now look at us dumb folk, paying for cable/satellite and paying to see ads. Books are also filled with ads - if they mention a product by name - most likely it is placed there - American Psycho wow could not get past a page mentioning some list of products...
Not arguing your larger point, but in American Psycho, the endless lists of brands and clothing labels illustrate the protagonist's obsession with surface appearance and the signals of wealth and status. It's one place where I think the brand barrage is well-placed and even subversive—because who wants to be like Patrick Bateman?
Ah, fantastic. You're telling me I get to pay in order to have my screen real estate chewed up by "thank you messages," get "fewer ads on some websites," and I get to have all of my browsing behavior tracked, too?!
You of course don't have to... In which case you get your screen real estate (and computer cycles and attention) chewed up by ads, get fewer ads on no websites, and get to have all your browsing behavior tracked too.
Alternatively, you can install an ad-blocker, which will never be supported by sites that run ads (so will break them in exciting ways), can come with its own can of worms regarding tracking your browsing, and puts a publisher in a tragedy of the commons where if enough people go that road, they can't generate ad revenue and will have to seek other options (see sibling threads for side-effects).
Alternatively, you can seek out media that is entirely ad-free of its own volition; you'll curtail your own consumption, but it's an option.
I run a web site that produces original content at significant cost. We charge a small monthly fee for access. We don't carry ads, and have no plans to.
That being the case, how exactly is someone who values our content and pays us for it going to get more ads as a result, no matter how much any third party might want to advertise to that person through our site?
The hypothesis in the original article is that advertisers will be willing to pay an unlimited price for the eyeballs of your readers, as their demonstration of the desire to pay for content implies they have money to pay for other things. For this hypothesis to succeed, there must be a price at which your readers' attention can be bought from you.
This is a simple theory that falls apart on the details. Of course advertisers won't pay unlimited funds. And if the entire business model of your content product is "View it without ads," there is in fact no price at which advertisers can buy your readers' attention (short of "The cost to buy your entire publishing entity," which is up to you).
Does your website have a business development team that discusses the best way to drive revenue for the enterprise? If not, you may be comparing apples to oranges.
No, it's not really that kind of site. But then many of the sites I value myself and the content I read also aren't that kind of site.
There are plenty of people in the world willing to produce good content without trying to maximise every last drop of potential revenue, and who for whatever reason prefer not to carry ads next to that content. Some of them just blog for fun. Some, like the site I mentioned, charge to cover the costs and maybe make some modest profit, but in a niche market you're never going to become the next Google or Facebook anyway. Sometimes the whole site is run for reasons other than direct profit anyway, for example if the site itself is a promotional exercise for some brand or store or charity awareness campaign or freelancer, or if it's some sort of community or government site with its costs covered by other means. None of these sites need to carry the kind of ads I think we're talking about here.
Of course there are also sites that are very commercial in nature and do want to do everything they can to maximise revenues. If that means carrying ads, they'll do it. But as long as those sites aren't the only places you can find good content, the original premise will be flawed.
The best way to drive revenue? Go rob a couple of banks and throw them in the corporate coffers.
Of course, there's a tradeoff. Just because your form of "driving revenue" includes annoying the living hell out of users while cleanly documenting all of their behavior for surveillance purposes (government or otherwise) doesn't mean someone else's does.
Good question. Care to share where I can find your site? There are sites like LWN that have a long record of quality content that people are willing to pay a subscription for, that either have no advertising or very limited, unobtrusive advertising that they have not increased for a long time.
Sorry, I tend to post pseudonymously in these discussions. I see too much risk of the everything-should-be-free crowd causing trouble in the real world if I link to my actual businesses.
Suffice it to say that like LWN, the site in question is in a niche area, appealing to people who enjoy a specific activity and think about it a certain way, with little relevance to anyone else. The target audience is large enough to be viable, and we make enough money on it to cover our costs, but it's a small world kind of situation so we have little interest in interfering with the site or risking reputation damage or unwanted associations by carrying advertising.
I suppose I'd never say never in business unless there were significant legal and/or ethical principles involved, but right now I can't imagine any realistic offer that would change our minds.
Ads aren't bad by themselves. Annoying ads that take my time and focus away are bad (for example video ads are mostly annoying as they always take my time away even if it's just a few seconds)
Collecting new private information that wouldn't be collected otherwise, for the purposes of targeting ads, is also a bad thing about ads IMO. There's nothing wrong with Gmail showing me relevant ads to my email, but there's something wrong with Google Chrome collecting my browsing history (under the guise of a "Sync" feature) for ads.
That is not something that everyone agrees with (although neither is what constitutes an "ad"). There are obviously grey areas and arbitrary lines get drawn, but I personally feel like the whole concept of intentionally trying to influence someone to buy/consume/want something that they don't already desire is a a little ethically dubious.
I'll add to that list "consume my device's energy to no benefit," in the days of mobile dominance. The battery and network resources wasted by ad content that doesn't result in a conversion adds up, and I don't know that price is yet reflected in the cost of the impressions.
This is the most ridiculous, hyperbolic, clickbait bullshit I've ever seen (today).
First contradiction: "you will never" and "With the way the world currently works". Which is it?
Second contradiction: "you will not escape ads by paying for your content" and "So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in." No. If you are paying for your content, by definition there are no ads. If advertisers outbid you and get ads into the product, then by the definition you are only partially paying for the content. To maintain your "I pay for my content" status you would demand the ads be removed or stop consuming from that publisher.
And no, the solution isn't to make advertising illegal. It is to render it irrelevant, impotent, wasted money. We achieve that with:
- a reliable fully crowdsourced independent recommendation system that consumers can base purchase decisions on, allowing them to reject ads as biased at best, manipulation and lies more often.
- a movement where people stop using any ad-supported products[1], realizing that said products are not only not free, they are more expensive[2].
- shifting all the greatest minds of our generation from working on getting people to click ads[3] to figuring out micropayments, crowdfunding or an entirely new model to make the web accessible to all, without ads.
[3] "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
No ads on Netflix unless you count the header on the page giving you a notification that new content is available, the carousel that rotates through new/interesting content, or the suggestion of other things you might be interested in after finishing a movie/series while the credits roll. No external ads, no commercials while you watch, just unintrusive elements that serve to help both the user and Netflix.
Just because you pay for content on a site, and are shown no ads on that site, doesn't mean that site can't make money from ads on your presence.
Isn't the value for online ads in following you around, and showing you targeted ads all over the place?
Why couldn't a site just sell the fact of your presence and use on a site to advertisers, including your habits while on the site? You could still be shown targeted ads elsewhere, and probably never connect it with your use of the original site.
My main argument against paying for web content is that people who care about ads probably don't want to see them at all. What's the use to pay for a few sites but others don't offer a pay model and still molest and track you? A better model would be to pay the ad networks which in turn give money to the website operators (similar to those music flats) but I think that's unlikely to happen.
Well the problem with this seems to be that it's sort of taking the internet as a whole, of course I wont get completely rid of advertisements but I'd like to get rid of advertisement at least in the services I care about, in this in particular I am willing to pay.
And even then, people love getting rid of ads. Whether you're blocking them with AdBlock Plus [3] or blocking things in a hosts file or firewall [4], or even just pirating things outright [I'm not posting a link to TPB], people hate having their minds filled with garbage.
It's a waste of time, waste of space, and honestly will just disappear asymptotically. It will probably never leave us entirely, but it will effectively be gone (as far as I know).
[1]: http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/
[2]: http://slashdot.org/faq/subscriptions.shtml
[3]: http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-user...
[4]: http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Tutoria...