Comment by aduty
12 hours ago
You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.
12 hours ago
You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.
Paying to get rid of ads is paying for the privilege of doing their market segmentation for them. It's paying to segment oneself into the upper echelons of the market. People who pay to avoid ads have a lot of disposable income, the value of their attention increases.
I wish uBlock Origin would incorporate AI features too. It could automatically detect brand names and product placement and blank it all out. Works on images and video. Augmented reality glasses with uBlock Origin would be life changing.
I wish we could use AI to solve captchas for us. Perhaps I should "vibe-code" such a browser plugin.
It’s funny because captchas are meant to be hard for bots but easy for people and it might be the opposite now.
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> I wish uBlock Origin would incorporate AI features too. It could automatically detect brand names and product placement and blank it all out.
that is a pretty good idea
back in the day I had an adblocker which replaced the banners with your own pictures.
> Paying to get rid of ads is paying for the privilege of doing their market segmentation for them.
My local newspaper used to be wide-open. I happily subscribed but never logged in.
Then they launched a paywall, so I unsubscribed. I didn't want to be a part of their logged-in paid premium user dragnet.
The phone-call to cancel was a bit confusing for the CSR.
"May I ask why are you cancelling?"
Me: "Oh, because of the paywall"
CSR: "Oh, that's just a technical issue, we can help you with that"
Me: "Nono, you don't understand, I'm cancelling because there is _a_ paywall"
I doubt my "reason for cancelling" got coded correctly.
YouTube Premium Lite!
You know, with ads. That you pay to watch.
Amazon prime! A paid service with advertisements for the original content no one wants to watch.
You know something went wrong when I've got an Amazon Prime account, but I still pirate any of their video content that I want to watch.
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Yeah, I basically never watch it anymore on account of the ads. Perhaps that was their goal: to reduce content licensing costs.
I never understood this with cable TV either. You could use an antenna and watch TV over the air (with ads) or you could pay for cable and still watch ads!
Before streaming, if you didn't live in a large metro area, cable got you a good clear picture and more than one or two channels. That was the selling point for it when I was a kid. With OTA reception we would have had two channels with a clear picture and maybe two or three more with a lot of static/snow.
Cable just carried regular broadcast channels back then. The value you paid for was more channels and better picture, not avoiding ads. HBO was the first premium add-on, and it didn't have ads.
Some people set up a big dish antenna in their yard so they could get content directly off the satellite backhaul. This might not have had ads but it was a fairly big investment and you had to be sort of an AV geek to use it.
Cable at least made sense on paper (if not obvious to the consumer). The channels were independent companies, they pay for the rights to content and get paid by ads. But they had the problem of how to actually get their feed into your home (over the air broadcast was the only D2C option).
The cable provider was just a delivery mechanism. So you pay them to deliver the feeds. But they didn’t get any revenue from the content providers (or their ads).
In other words, two different companies, two different services (content vs delivery), and two different revenue models.
No Lite! about it. I've twice unsubbed from YTP because they started showing me ads. Never again.
I've never seen an ad logged in to Premium. Content creators do sometimes insert sponsor segments directly into the video, but YTP offers a skip feature that works fairly well.
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This will happen! (difficult to show in a quick demo that you view for like 10 seconds)
Also forgot the part where they start to disguise that an ad is really an ad. The ad is just melted in the content.
I cancel when things do this.
Paid, or ads. Paid with ads -> cancel immediately.
Yes, this is the silicon valley special. They get us to pay for a sub. Then they get us to pay for an ad free sub. Then the ads come anywho lol.
This take is prevalent but not really true.
You can subsidize the cost of a full subscription by having ads.
I know that society at large is mostly hopeless, but here on HN we generally have the mental firepower to comprehend "It's a sliding payment scale from no ads to all ads"
Edit: You guys are welcome to be upset by this, but if you think it's wrong, please correct me. Ideally without using the one counter example of cable TV in the 90's. Monopolies bring bad behaviors.
No, if a company gets enough leverage the top plan will demand both payment and ads. We've seen it before and we'll see it again.
Examples would be the best way to prove me wrong.
Most (all?) streaming services offer an ad-free plan, and those are the most popular hybrid payment services by far.
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