Comment by chrisjj
11 hours ago
> No sane person would ever come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to make the user click away numerous popups, (cookie) banners and modals just to actually see the content.
Ads are content too, you know?
Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
> Ads are content too, you know?
Yes, and I’m not against ads in general.
It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.
Sad times.
From the viewpoint of Hirschman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
you don't have any "voice" about ads so your choice is to "exit" by running an ad blocker. Obnoxious advertising tactics, scam ads, and other problems in the advertising system lower people's responsiveness to advertising. We need to restore the responsiveness to weak signals (bidirectionally) that Vaughn talks about in The Challenger Launch Decision and her book about her divorce Uncoupling.
Agreed that there are many sites that seem to have no other purpose than to get ads displayed.
Unfortunately, it's also getting harder and harder to tell them apart from the sites that have legitimate content supported by ads because the quality of the latter is nosediving.
The reason you can't tell them apart is there's no meaningful distinction. Whether content is sufficiently "legitimate" to be worth the ads depends entirely on the particular user.
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If people are willing to consume content but not willing to pay for it, then you have a very strong indicator it has no value at all and therefore no actual need to be produced in the first place.
People willing to pay by consuming ads are indicating the content is worth that price - to them. The fact such people exist is proved by the fact such sites exist.
This is not how it works. Ad-subsidized content is functionally equivalent to price-dumping. The more ad-subsidized content is out there, the less incentive there is to focus on quality and quantity of eyeballs become the only metric that matters.
Or at least, not enough subjective value for that person to outweigh the cost. Paywalls are a great screening filter that actually tests if people want to spend any money or time on an article, or merely clicked through from force of habit.
> Without ad revenue, many sites would have no content at all.
I'm fine with that. An ad-laden site with ads I cannot block won't have me as a visitor anyway, so I'm not really going to notice if they are gone.
Can you really not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable to make it worth you consuming those ads?
> Can you really not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable to make it worth you consuming those ads?
Honestly, no.
Perhaps I am just lacking imagination; can you think of any content compelling enough that a) I am not prepared to pay to get it and b) I am still prepared to view ads to get it?
I can't imagine any type of content that I both don't want to pay for and feel it is worth sitting through the ads.
I expect the ratios matter as well; the average webpage/site has more ads than content that I specifically want. If I had to sit through a 10s ad to see a 90m movie, I might do it. As it stands, right now on youtube, there is a 30s-60s ad shown between 5-minute videos.
So, when I am not using Firefox, I simply don't go to youtube.
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To me this sounds like “can you not conceive of some content sufficiently valuable that you’d let someone get you addicted to their brand of cigarettes so you could get it for free”
If it’s that valuable, just let me pay a fair price to see it.
In general, I’d like to see personally targeted ads banned entirely and a legal requirement for a fairly priced (i.e. same order of magnitude as the lost ad revenue) ad free option.
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Ads do not absolutely have to be delivered via pop ups or modals.
If the content is so worthless that people will not voluntarily pay for it, then this outcome would be no great tragedy.
People voluntarily pay by consuming the ads.
But what would humanity do without garbage LLM content slop? How would we survive?
The content was better when it was posted by hobbyists for free than it is now posted by people trying to make money off of it. So... fuck 'em.
I was fine with ads when they were a text AdSense banner.
Now a lot of sites have scammy full page js-popups of the kind that were only found on dodgy websites in the 90s.
I would care if they were at all capable of respecting people who allow ads.
I'd be fine with a whole web free of revenue.
There would be much less stuff around, but what would stay is the things people created for fun, not for profit. SEO spam, AI slop - these are all solved by removing money from the web.
> Ads are content too, you know?
I agree. Why there isn’t this technology implemented on film streaming, movie theaters, even games? I think ebooks should stop you reading every five minutes just to show ads. I’m sure it could be implemented in to PDF pretty easily.
Internet and all medias point is to make money for jesus christ, what are we, a charity? Why don’t book publishers put ads into printed books, they are goving away content for free!