Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people.
On the internet, the fact is this: Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. In fact, they will be happy to take money from every source they can. The fact that The Verge is doing so reflects that they understand their audience and are trying to meet them halfway. It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user.
This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
> miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous.
Why would I, as a consumer, compromise on what I want to make some MBA's life easier? That almost sounds like corporate welfare. Businesses sign up to take risks the moment they're created.
A news organization doesn't need to be in business. There is nothing unjust or morally wrong with letting a business shutdown because they couldn't figure out a sustainable way to be profitable (assuming for sake of argument that most people don't subscribe due to the ads, which idk if that would really happen).
> This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
The OP is a customer of the Verge who is rejecting their offer for a new subscription service they don't like. That's called "voting with your wallet", and its the free market working as intended.
> Why would I, as a consumer, compromise on what I want to make some MBA's life easier?
You presumably want access to the Verge's content. This is unsustainable without some revenue. You're compromising to continue to get what you want, not to make some MBA's life easier.
I don't think you've said anything that disagrees with GP. Of course you can vote with your wallet. And of course a company can choose to seek profit from ads.
The tension between those two forces will find a natural result. Maybe the company goes out of business and whatever the company did is no longer available to anyone. Maybe they lose half their customers but still make more money and buy themselves yachts, and their remaining customers are satisfied.
As is the verge’s pricing and ad strategy, you think they didn’t expect some churn by making a pricing change? The author is free to shout it from their soapbox but chances are the verge already expected some of this sentiment and is totally ok with a “ok losing these customers” approach
That folks think it’s an MBA that benefits from building a sustainable media business and not the people who work there, who get paychecks and better resourcing, is one of the great misunderstandings of the journalism business and the reason why I pipe up in threads like these.
Those organizations that didn't do what it took to be in business, are already out of business. You are looking at the survivors.
The OP should indeed vote with their wallet. They will have to find some other source of news/entertainment. (I really wish that those two weren't the same thing, but that's another compromise that we haven't figured out how to avoid while still getting paid.) Maybe they'll get a deal elsewhere that is more to their liking.
If they can't survive without reduced ads on subscriptions, or the price of subscriptions without ads becomes unviable for users, then they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I honestly wouldn't mind a subscription that reduces ads to the point of being _non-obnoxious_, but I'm in an odd position because I pay for YouTube Premium, which doesn't have ads, and costs a lot more money to distribute (video, text, and images vs text & images), but I grew up in the newspaper age which were chock full of ads free or subscription.
Voting with our wallets got us infowars and two major fake news groups of media (mainstream and not).
Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want.
I just wish it were possible to pay $1 for an article whose headline sounds interesting, or someone recommended. Subscribe, even with a free trial? Pass.
The free market is great. But we should not deny it when it leads to bad outcomes. If we do, then we're no better than those who say "real communism has never been tried".
"Less ads" is the easy way to describe what they're offering, but I believe what they're doing is not just 50% less ad spots, but rather paying will remove all third party ad networks from the site, leaving first party ads only.
> we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media
If you think all advertising is immoral, then this probably doesn't do anything for you. However, if you have privacy and performance concerns, this is a big win I think.
Generally I like what the verge does, and I would gladly pay if it included their podcast being ad free. The Verge’s podcast is the only podcast I listen to that I don’t pay for, and it’s full of repeating programmatic ads for crypto companies, sports betting, and cars.
In various contexts, you would draw the distinction here between `ads` (that is, marketing sold against large swaths of content) and `sponsorships` (marketing sold against a small targeted set of content) but the distinction is subtle and the terms are pretty overloaded.
>Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money.
And the never ending struggle to increase/maintain subscriptions for some companies probably has something to do with that.
For me personally, and I expect a not insignificant portion of users, paying for a subscription is primarily to remove advertising completely. Anything else means its not worth subscribing, so not offering that level of option rules us out as customers.
I've spent a minor amount of time and energy reducing the amount of advertising I see, from (pre-streaming) downloading shows I already pay for legal access to with commercials removed with automated systems, to being an early adopter of streaming services and dropping cable, locally running pi-hole on top of ad-blockers and using VPN's, privacy focused browsers etc.
The payoff has been immense for my family, to the point watching TV in other locations and being bombarded by advertising is jarring and uncomfortable, and the manipulation tactics become more obvious and gross the less you inundate yourself with them. Obviously you can't get away from all advertising, indirect, product placement etc. is everywhere, but I found a significant improvement in quality of life.
I would also make the argument that social media engagement hacking at its root traces to advertising and we blame social media for the problems when advertising was the true problem. Advertising as a revenue stream results in trying to optimize and improve engagement, often by gamifying or moving towards sensationalism to drive up numbers to increase revenue, most of which is negative for the user and little actually positive.
> For me personally, and I expect a not insignificant portion of users, paying for a subscription is primarily to remove advertising completely.
I also put quite a bit of effort into removing ads from my and my family's eyeballs. I hate them. But because of that I already don't see ads on The Verge so for me a sub isn't about removing ads at all. I'll sub to support the work and whatever other perks come along with it (full-text RSS for one)
One way to describe reality is to argue that media organizations like Vox can't survive if they don't show ads to their paid subscribers.
Another way to describe reality is that people can choose to subscribe to various substacks or newsletters instead. On those platforms subscribers get zero ads, they get more in depth and more thoughtful articles, and because the system has much less overhead modest subscription revenue is sufficient. Vox also does video reviews, but then again, there are also many high quality tech youtubers. Vox certainly has the right to charge for a subscription and then serve the subscribers ads. And people have a right to walk away from a bad deal. Vox could disappear tomorrow at no great loss to society. We might like some of the reporting Vox does, but we don't need it.
Vox media has raised about 450m (according to the first google result). Modest profitability is not enough for Vox Media because they need to secure a significant exit for their investors. This puts them at odds with their readers and subscribers. Not that laudable if you ask me. They made a bet they were going to disrupt traditional media and become a new great media platform. But now it looks like Vox itself is getting disrupted. Like newspapers of old clinging to a business model that no longer exists.
Well put. Though I couldn't care less about 'Fox noise', I'm doing that subscription of individuals, sometimes, though reluctantly because the methods of payment suck from my POV.
> It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user.
But I don't want to pay less. I want my data to not be sold to the highest bidder, that's all.
As it stands there's no option for people like me other than not subscribing.
This is very much like the situation with smartphones these days: they cost less because you get a bunch of bloatware that you can't uninstall.
I don't want that on my device, so I went with an offering deemed "overpriced" because it has less of such crap than others and thus costs about $250 more. Ideally it should be zero, but that's the best I could get.
> I want my data to not be sold to the highest bidder, that's all.
sigh I wish this was easier to achieve. But at least in the case of The Verge the sub removes third party ads so it should increase privacy even if it doesn't remove all the ads.
The fact is people like you are in the minority and there’s no reason for a company to ever even entertain modifications to their product/service to cater to your wants
This might seem common on HN but IRL people don’t give much attention to ad related privacy and are probably much more concerned with the fact they have to fork over a CC and a few bucks
I don't recall in the past a company needing my identity required or be tracked just because I bought a newspaper. I pay the $1 for the newspaper and no more interaction or relationship after that.
Ads are OK but why do all the ad companies need to track me and know my movements and just to show me an ad? It's basically malware, stalking. Ads are zero advantage to me the consumer for what I lose in privacy.
> That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe.
My assumption is that the salaries of reporters, editors was paid for by ads.
The nominal fee for the paper was to pay for the pulp, ink. I mean if you just printed up millions of papers and gave them away, people would pick them up simply as raw material for lining their bird cages, for papier-mâché, to insulate their cardboard box home on the corner of 12th and Main.....
I worked at a number of free tabloid newspapers in my day (one small-town exurban, one mid-sized car-centric metro area, one metro area where most people took public transit) and I will say that most people did not do this. Usually they just left the papers on the train or at the coffee shop.
Nonetheless, the first half of your point—the ads usually paid for all the reporting—is correct.
Quite a lot of papers were, and still are, given out for free. My city still supports 3 separate print newspapers that are free in coffee shops, libraries, corner boxes, etc.
They’re a great way to keep up with the actions and gripes of the local community. Being such small operations, there is very light editing and the reporter’s point of view often comes through pretty clearly.
All paid for via ads from local businesses. Quite a lot of the ads are from real estate agents, which I think reflects the belief that a lot of tourists are picking up the papers in addition to residents.
Right. It is/was just a big bucket of money and obviously there were free papers given away on college campuses and subway stations. But, at least back in the day, newspaper subscriptions and newsstand/put your quarter in boxes basically paid for creating and delivering the physical copies.
The generally dire journalism situation these days is there is mostly no physical distribution and physical advertising dollars have become digital dimes. And local news--which was never a really thriving business--is basically dead.
From a UX perspective, there’s really no way to measure “fewer ads”. Customers with subscriptions aren’t doing A/B tests and feeling satisfied that they’re seeing fewer ads. They’re seeing ads. Still a subpar experience. The “fewer ads” narrative exists on some MBA/bean counter’s spreadsheet.
This should be an absolute benefit, not a relative benefit. Who’s to say the number of ads won’t ratchet up in the future? Almost surely will. Let’s say a subscription customer sees 50 ads today vs 100 a non-subscription customer sees. Tomorrow, they 2x that – sub customer sees 100 ads, non-sub customer sees 200. Does a sub customer derive smug satisfaction that they’re seeing fewer ads than a non-sub customer? How would one even know? They’re just seeing ads.
The correct amount of ads for a subscription service (from a UX perspective) is zero.
Intriguing. I know the German media market is very different from the American one—back in my D.C. days, when I was still at the WaPo Express, I met a German journalist who was working in the U.S. and I remember her explaining to me how different the rules were for promotion and social media and such.
I do think The Verge offering this could lead other U.S. publishers to follow suit, especially if it’s successful.
This really doesn't add up to me. I don't have the numbers, but I would assume that:
1. A very small percentage of website visitors will end up paying for a subscription.
2. They make way less than $5 per user per month from ads.
The money they'd lose by providing an ad-free experience to paying customers should be a rounding error. Removing ads will also increase conversion, but who knows whether or not that will be enough to offset the revenue lost.
I don't particularly care about their "business reality" - if you're an online news outlet you're not paying the costs of printing and distribution - your expenses are just journalist salaries and the marginal costs of keeping a website running. If you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
2) is because of 1). They make way less than $5/user/month, but here's thousands of users to close that gap. So the paid users are a smaller slice than you'd guess at first blush.
>if you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
That's just American labor in a nutshell. if a jounralist is making full time national minimum wage ($7.25, 40 hours a week), that's very roughly $1000/month post tax. that very pooly paid jounalist needs 200 subcribers to sustain them. \
costs are going up, but readership and revenue is not. This doesn't end well for anyone. And yes, many businesses are dying right now.
>I don't particularly care about their "business reality"
if you don't care about them, I'm not sure why they'd care about your opinions on how they run.
Okay, and probably true, but the difference with newspaper is, it would be prohibitively expensive to produce different versions of the same newspaper for different subscription options, while it's trivial to do on the web.
The richest people, hence the most valuable for advertisers, would buy it. This significantly affects the whole ad business value. Such that the ad-free tier would have to be priced too high. It’s more profitable to “force” everyone to watch ads. I’m afraid.
My guess is that some of those ads bring in so much money that covering them with an ad-free model would lead to a cost that they feel is prohibitively expensive.
There may be ad agreements that preempt their ability to offer ad-free at this time, likely in the case of ultra-premium advertisers.
It could also just be good ol’ internal bureaucracy at play. Maybe there was a turf war, and this was the best they could do while keeping everyone happy.
Edit: The point in the other comment about it affecting reader demographics is a good one too.
There are plenty of subscription services out there that are ad-free. YouTube does it, I think all the various music streaming services do it, most if not all of the video streaming services have an ad-free tier. Beyond the media realm, my cell phone service doesn’t package ads with my monthly subscription, nor my home internet service. I could go on.
What narrow idea of “a media business” must have ads even when you pay, and why do they have to be different from everything else?
The problem is: advertisers will argue that if you're offering a tier of service that removes ads, that's specifically going to be the most appealing to the group of your user-base that has the most money to spend and whom is most ready to spend it, evidenced by the fact that they have subscribed to your ad-free tier, and is therefore worth the most in terms of reaching with ads. Those people are self-selecting as the most responsive to being appealed to to buy things, which is what your advertisers want.
This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way. Users love it, but advertisers hate it and it craters the value of the ad space you sell to whomever doesn't think it's worth it/can't afford it.
True. And from what I understood, the Verge is offering two tiers - less ads and no ads. You can pay for the one you think is worthwhile.
As a consumer I definitely lean on the "if I'm paying a subscription, I expect zero ads" side of the fence. It just has to be worth the additional price for me (The Verge is not)
https://www.theverge.com/subscribe only has a monthly and annual option, and it doesn't look like either of them is "no ads"? The annual one is just cheaper and has some magazine?
Something laudable? They're trying to sell subscriptions that people will buy. It's completely normal to criticize their offering. I agree with the criticism and you don't, that's all fine, too.
The only laudable move is to reject all forms of tracking and targeted ads as a matter of principle and make sure there’s at least one completely ad-free option.
There are few (if any) media businesses I care about enough to compromise on my requirements just to help them stay in business. Certainly not The Verge.
As for me, I’m happy to either not see the content or use workarounds that let me see it for free with no ads, i.e. ad-blockers + reader mode and services like archive.ph.
The realities of the news business are fine, but the realities of the adtech business are not. As a consumer I very much want profiling and targeting to die off.
Were the ads run on the web not built on a separate business that attempts to violate the reasonable sense of privacy the average person expects, and didn’t attempt to warp consumer’s expectations of privacy, I think there would be less objections.
I think you're missing the point. There's a reasonable number of people who are willing to pay for content like this, but only if they actually get an ad-free experience in exchange. The business decision The Verge needs to make is whether they want to try to reach these people or not, since these people won't pay for a model that still has ads. (There could of course be 2 subscription levels at different prices, one that still has some ads… but that's also extra work and a different consumer experience.)
I don't think newspaper ads are a good analogy either since the consumption model of a dead-tree newspaper isn't such that you get the ads thrown into your face when trying to read an article. And classifieds specifically I wouldn't even call ads, more of a community note board service.
I think it is not just "ads" but also the character of the ads.
If the ads stay in the boundary areas of the page or well-behaved interstitials that's one thing. In fact, ads can sometimes be interesting and entertaining and most importantly can make markets more competitive bringing you a better variety goods and services.
When they screw up the page, jump around, cover things up, don't have proper controls to "x" them out, use confusing dark patterns, generate fake clicks (ever think it's not an accident that some sites jiggle around so much?), need 50 trackers to be (kinda) sure parties aren't screwing each other, have 20x the bandwidth cost of the content that's something else.
Also there's the content of the ads. There is a subprime tranch that includes Temu but is best represented by prerolls on YouTube that are best advertising sketchy energy drinks and supplements and worse are outright crypto scams. I can see some humor in Temu but not in the scams.
> There's a reasonable number of people who are willing to pay for content like this, but only if they actually get an ad-free experience in exchange.
I guarantee that the majority of these zealous anti-ad people will not subscribe to an ad-free service for The Verge.
For the most part, their hobby is not subscribing to online publications, it’s complaining about the subscriptions at online publications that they would almost certainly never subscribe to.
And yes, I understand that this doesn’t apply to the ones of people who will reply here claiming that they would never do this.
Heck, if online ads didn't move around and pop up in front of the screen, less people would block them. But the reality is that companies are too greedy, and will never draw the line and say "this is enough" . I can't afford to subscribe to the dozens of sites I glance at everyday for 2 minutes. Quite frankly as someone that grew up with the "old" internet, I don't like the idea of paying for every single site I use. It feels like making every road a toll road.
I am not missing the point. Rather, the point is so small as to not be financially worth it for them.
I am saying that The Verge made a business decision to balance ad load and subscriber cost to potentially bring in more subscribers.
They probably did the math and realized that charging people $15 a month would not bring in many subscribers, and that they could have charged $5 a month with regular ad load, but they found this $7 sweet spot where they could give people the best of both worlds. And the $50 model means people are more committed long-term making it more valuable for them.
I would guess that “reduced ad load” means that they would only put premium advertisers, like the stuff you would see in glossy magazines, in front of those readers.
I trust given how careful they were with rolling this out that they did the math and tried to strike a balance to please the most people.
As I recall, newspaper subscriptions basically paid for the distribution cost of physical copies.
Someone like the New York Times still has ads for digital subscribers but they're not crazy pop-ups all over the place. I'd probably prefer they weren't there but they don't really detract from my reading experience.
I get that some people vehemently hate ads and most marketing.
It is fairly common in a large number of industries that a large part of the valuable portion of the products get subsidized by underhanded "immoral" side of the same industry. A (in)famous example is the practice of paying for expensive ink with excessive anti-customer practices in order to keep the prices of printers low. The printing manufacturers get multiple revenue streams that are more stable over time, and printers become accessible to more people. What is there to not like about it?
The biggest problem is that anti-consumer behavior causes harm. With advertisement it brings disinformation, spying, abuse of the most vulnerable in society, general distrust, are often a crime (scams, fraud, targets children, and usually ignore local advertisement laws), and siphons money to a third party which usually is outside of the country and do not pay taxes. The benefits of anti-consumer behavior are generally not worth the downsides.
I’ll guarantee you that it doesn’t make me feel any better to write this type of posts. I’m just exhausted by the modern web.
As for the other point you’re making, that’s complete nonsense. You don’t differentiate your revenue streams by serving a sub par product to your paying customers.
Serve those stupid ads to free users, treat your paying customers with respect.
Gonna be straight up with you: I feel like you would have never thought about this had they not mentioned it, because so few media outlets are even thinking about reducing ad load for paid subscribers.
As someone in media, I’m tired of well-intentioned media outlets try to strike a reasonable balance only to get yelled at for it like they aren’t already walking a tightrope. They have staffs of people to pay for, payroll. Travel budgets. Offices. Legal bills. And that they get hell for trying to give an inch, in my opinion, sucks.
If you want them to offer an ad-free tier, tell them that directly! Given that they are clearly thinking about it suggests they might listen to you.
But your binary way of approaching this is not helping and ultimately discourages companies who want to wean themselves off of adtech. Ripping off the band-aid is a lot harder than you’re making it out to be.
Reality and principles don't always align. There's a "rubber meets road" moment where you have to decide what your principles are worth. I do not believe there was any rationale behind this pricing decision. I believe it is pure greed, and you're not likely to change my mind.
I clutch my principles rather tightly, especially in cases like this. I will never pay for a streaming service whose first payment tier is "less ads", nor will I ever pay for a _newspaper_ of all things whose first premium tier is "less ads".
I don't think double-dipping is laudable, and I don't think we should encourage it. Their (in)ability to fund their business isn't my problem, frankly.
Ads is evil has been a human thing for many times longer. Everybody hates them. At best, some accept ads as a necessary evil. It’s a dire combination: tremendously irritating and adding absolutely zero value to the world.
Exactly. This has been the case for decades. Newspapers have had advertising despite no being free, but if they didn't they would be so much more expensive
The difference is that newspapers had tasteful ads. I didn't mind seeing a Rolex or an expensive perfume, exquisitely photographed, in the Financial Times.
Most of the Internet ads are medical issues, financial scams, weight loss scams etc. Most of these are accompanied by disgusting pictures. These ads combine the worst of classic Email spam and the yellow press.
Give me better ads and I might switch off the adblocker. I'd even tolerate a banner Coca Cola ad if done tastefully and if it is the only ad on the page.
There's a high likelihood that your adblocker won't be able to block those anyway.
But no, you probably won't switch it off. That's because you can only know the ad quality after you've been exposed to them, and after your computer has run their code, and after you've faced the risk of them maintaining the universal, persistent eavesdrop on your life.
I've said it before, but I feel like I need to keep saying it: If the people actually using/consuming a product aren't willing to pay the cost required to make/produce said product, then that's probably a good indicator that the product doesn't have enough value to justify its existence. If the Verge can't convince enough people to pay for their output, I'd argue it's not worth keeping around. Advertising ruins the producer/consumer relationship and incentivizes behaviors that disadvantage the consumer and push the producer away from their original purpose. If the Verge wants to diversify income, then they should provide a product that has value to a wider audience.
That doesn't mean that every single person consuming/using the product needs to pay either. Patreon and similar services have proven that if what you make is of high enough quality and provides enough value, it's possible to convince a large enough subset of the consumers to pay enough to cover the costs of production. Especially with online services where the cost difference between producing for 1 person vs 1000 is nearly negligible. The few can, and often do, subsidize the many. And if that changes over time, then the product ceases to be valuable enough to be worth producing and should simply stop being made.
And I'd say this is even true of news and things that people might argue are for the public good. In my opinion, most "news" today isn't actual informative news and doesn't really serve the public. But of the vanishing little left that does, if it informs and educates the citizenry in a way that improves the lives and stability of the country as a whole, and if its natural cost is more than can be reasonably covered by willing consumers, then there's a reasonable argument for covering the cost with taxes. Put sufficient legal barriers between the government funding and the content being produced to prevent government manipulation/propaganda and make sure the press can operate unimpeded. My best idea for such a government funded news source is to write into law that said news source's budget is dependent solely upon country population and country GDP, all staffing decisions are made internally, and leaders are decided by citizen vote, but I'm sure there are other ways people can come up with for maintaining a free but government/tax funded press agency. But ad-funded (of which I think even public radio/tv has effectively become), creates perverse incentives that drive the mission away from actually informing and educating.
People can still pay for tech reviews, or travel advice, talking head current events opinion shows, or whatever news is in its current form if they want. Privately owned/operated press can still exist if it's useful enough for people to find it valuable and worth the cost. But advertising just ruins everything eventually.
> If the people actually using/consuming a product aren't willing to pay the cost required to make/produce said product, then that's probably a good indicator that the product doesn't have enough value to justify its existence.
This is not true. In many cases, we can see that people value a service by their returning usage, but... they often want other people to pay for it.
There are a ton of things that many people would like but aren't willing to pay for. Would I like a personal chef and a personal driver at my beck and call? Sure. But I'm not willing to pay what that would cost for routine use. I do pay for some scheduled and infrequent personal care services.
Also, government-funded comes with its own strings which may become more obvious than you like in the coming years.
“Eventually” is doing a ton of heavy lifting in your argument.
Ads have been a primary revenue driver for news media going back hundreds of years, including to when the US was codifying the civic value of news into its governing principles.
The idea that revenue choice is binary or that if you have to use ads you shouldn’t be in business is a very modern one, and one that’s outside of historical norms.
you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side.
Print ads don't get your personal data and sell them to who knows who. Internet ads have become synonymous with this practice. Comparing them to print ads without this consideration is disingenuous.
Yeah the classifieds business was huge for local news and Craigslist murdered it. Now ad revenue is declining. The result is subscriptions and paywalls.
It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. Hence the cuts. Same on Youtube. I watch a lot of content there while maintaining zero interruptions by ads. Works great and so far I've never had to pay Youtube to not see ads. I do pay for Amazon Prime. Occasionally. I usually reactivate my subscription when I need it either because I'm ordering stuff or because they have something I want to see. I'll cancel soon again because I don't currently need them and I once again exhausted their limited offerings. Forced ad watching makes it less likely I come back.
I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. It's not sustainable for me to do pay for all the websites I visit. And me randomly paying only some tiny subset of them doesn't make any sense to me. I'd need some prioritized list. And it would have to be a very short one because I'm simply not rich enough to maintain lots of multi dollar subscriptions per month. And I also don't want to micromanage a lot of payments and subscriptions.
The Verge, which was mentioned in the article is a good example of a website that I don't value enough to get anywhere near that short list. They have a lot of competition reporting more or less similar stuff that I wouldn't miss them. In fact, I can't recall reading anything by them lately. I guess not a lot of their stuff makes it to the HN front page. Probably because it's just not that interesting.
You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.
You can use uBlock and pay your content creators via Patreon if they have one. I believe that the ad-based freemium business model is harmful to society and unfixable due to the incentives it creates to engage and enrage rather than entertain and inform. So, I use uBlock to use YouTube for free to explicitly drain it of resources without giving Google any ad income, and then I pay the creators that I like using other platforms.
- Rent seeking is not behavior I care for, and so much of the subscription service stuff is exactly that.
- I'm more than happy to pay for quite a few patreon/similar things.
- But _ultimately_ I don't just want to "consume" content, I want to share it. In fact I believe sharing the cultural artifacts I engage with is an essential part of a culture, and that getting in the way of that is morally wrong. So if your paywall gets in the way of _that_, I _will_ work around it.
Edit: also, the other side of the problem is that there are too many websites now. When it was Netflix and nearly everything there, I payed for it. I no longer pay for shows and movies, because things got _completely_ nuts. Similar thing with news. Reality is I pay _way_ more for Patreon than most people I know - not because of any moral reasons, but because I can actually afford that. And a typical news site asks as much as what I give to some of my favorite writers and painters.
Regarding The Verge, I wish something like Apple News existed in this space. I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels. I just can't justify paying $X/mo individually to 20 different sources.
Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier).
See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
(The comparison is not great because premium streaming of original content and long-form text journalism on current affairs are different things with different audiences and pricepoints and viewing patterns.
By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)
> I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels
I'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.
The fact that NYTimes never bothered with Apple News says something about this model.
Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example.
Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass).
If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.
> but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read.
I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason.
It either need to be
- (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music,
- or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.
> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.
> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.
While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.
I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.
I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
We had some text ads, maybe a banner at the top/bottom of a site, and that was it... that was "the middle ground", they got the ads, we didn't have to block them. Then they added more ads and more ads and more ads, and animated gifs and more of them, and videos, and videos with sound, and overlaid ads, and overlaid ads with unskippable video and audio, and more and more... and in the end, a lot of us blocked them.
They had their chance, they decided that the option they wanted was to abuse the viewer with a huge amount of very bad ads on every goddamn site they visited, and now (for some of us), it's over, we're blocking ads.
If they stayed at the one, two ads per site, I wouldn't even notice them,... now, when I do (because there's just too many of them), I immediately install an adblock on every machine (parents, relatives,...) that I have to use a browser on.
The problem with allowing "basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts" is that you also allow "pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …" and malware attacks since they all pull from the same pool by default.
They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you.
Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?
> While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going.
Then they should find a business model that doesn't involve psychological manipulation. Ads are predatory. I have as much compassion for those who cry about ad revenues as I do for people complaining that they worse off for not being allowed to rape and pillage.
I would pay for YouTube premium if you can afford it. The cost is pretty reasonable and 55% of the subscription goes to content creators. It's not a huge amount but probably similar to what a creator would make if ads were shown.
I subscribed until they price hiked it like 45% in one go a couple of months ago in my country. Now the price for it is equal to, or in some cases even more expensive than the services that actually produce their own high quality movies/tv shows.
But it is not possible to use it without creating a Google account. I should not need to sign in to watch videos, especially when that makes all efforts at avoiding tracking null.
Well I'm pretty much an anti-ad radical as well, but you're saying you block ads and you don't want to pay for stuff like subscriptions and similar. Well that's also not very sustainable, content creators have to eat :)
Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr
I really can't imagine someone with CTO title doesn't have $15/month to pay for YouTube when you're a regular user. People with far fewer resources pay. This goes to content creators, if you're not even seeing ads, they don't get paid.
I'm pretty sure, that by this logic, if you combine all the "$15/month" things that someone should have money for, they'll eventually be left without any of that money. Every goddamn website wants $15 per month, and even after they get it, they still show you ads. Even youtube, if nothing else, there are the in-video ads ("this video is sponsored by,...") that an adblock skips.
I stopped visiting The Verge after their last 'rebrand' which offended my eyes.
As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they?
"Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.
You should report sites that do that. We still enforce the GDPR, and it's illegal to force acceptance of cookies (excepting functional cookies) for any reason, including offering to remove them for money.
It's a funny anecdote and cool hack to be able to skip streaming video ads, but it's also kinda entitled to leech the content and shift the burden onto everyone else.
> The correct amount of ads for a publication that’s directly supported is zero.
I basically agree with this sentiment, but one place where it can be a tricky balance (not saying that's the case here!) is "native advertising".
For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Which bits of this are ads? Well the behind the scenes post and interview could theoretically have been produced anyway, they're within the scope of the site, but in this case they weren't prioritised, certainly not for launch day, it was only by the whole collaboration being paid for that they got made. Are they ads? Yes they are ads. How would a loyal subscriber feel about those parts being hidden from them though? I imagine they would be miffed about that.
Native advertising like this has a whole spectrum of quality and the worst native ads are very explicitly ads that have no value to typical readers. However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
How do you resolve this? No idea. If I were paying I'd want to see that content assuming it's good quality. Others would not on the basis of bias or a more philosophical opposition to ads.
> However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
That's akin to saying a person wants some of that "good" cancer.
If I am paying, I am supporting the editorial staff. It's their decision what to report on and how. Paid-for content, even if it's just for priority coverage, compromises the integrity of the editorial staff as well as their ability to curate (not to mention a clear disincentive to be critical of the ad buyer's claims).
It starts when TheBrink publishes a high quality behind the scenes piece about a scam mobile game instead of a truly great indie game just because the latter is not as profitable and cannot afford to buy the ad.
It ends with the entire catalogue of the publication being paid for by advertisers. Much like some influencer's instagram feed. Paying for access to an ad feed is unacceptible.
To add: "the firewall" between the editorial and business sides of a publication is the basic prerequisite for ethical journalism, even if it's an entertainment rag. Advertising that masquarades as reporting is therefore the worst and most toxic, i.e., cancerous, of the bunch.
So I do not agree that native ads are something that should be desired.
Print magazines were paid, either via subscription or purchasing at a street kiosk, and had advertising in it. A lot of it, actually.
The ads just weren't as obtrusive, privacy-invading and annoying as what we have now. A lot of them were fun to read, had amazing photography, because creativity still mattered, not just volume. Unfortunately alternatives to bring back this more harmless and tasteful form of advertising to the web (RIP The Deck) have failed.
I think this is where fine grained terminology is required. The articles/interview you describe could be described as 'paid content'.
What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
One is designed to keep you on the site (paid content) while the other is attempting to go else where.
The effect of paid content can not be discounted. It's important to recognize that a paid review or a game or movie can result in a different outcome, even subtly.
I remember in the golden days of game review sites it was clear when writers were fudging the reviews because the user experience would be starkly different. The 'we were told to ignore the bugs' excuses always followed because the gig was paid.
> What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
This here is key.
If I'm reading the synopsis for an anime series on a website whose main topic is anime/manga/novels/etc, and I see an ad in an unobstrusive and non-annoying location talking about this one new anime figurine or plushie or some other merch, you bet I'm going to check it out.
These ads don't require cross-site tracking or third-party resources. They can even be shown with the strictest Content-Security-Policy. Even if they send you to a different website.
If I'm logged in, and you give me a way to tell you "I don't like this shit, stop showing me stuff related to this series/artist/etc" (i.e. a clearly tagged blocklist, not a vague "I don't like this" and you guessing what I mean by "this"), I'll even help you refine your ads for me.
But that's only because I care about this content.
And because it's done in a respectful way. For example, I don't mind those classic 88x31 "affiliate links" (ads) or blog rolls (also ads, at least in my eyes), or self-promotion sections (ads) in some communities, or when someone I follow on Bluesky posts about how they're selling a thing (also ad). If one of those gets through my adblocker, I won't go out of my way to add a rule for those.
But the moment a third-party script is involved, or data selling begins, or there's annoyances like putting random shit between paragraphs I'm reading, or popups, or "subscribe to the newsletter"-style popups, I'm out. I'm either blocking your whole site on uBlock Origin, or at DNS level if it was bad enough.
TL;DR: I don't care about ads. I care about things that piss me off.
If I go to TheBrink to read about game news, and I click on a link that says the article is about that new game, then I get what I asked for. Coupled with a clear indication that it's paid-for content, it should be fine.
What's not fine is seeing an ad for the new game when I didn't go to a games news site and didn't click on such a link. I don't want to be interrupted with games news while I'm watching a video on DIY. I shouldn't be shown appraisals of the new game while shopping for a new car radio.
I dream of a world where instead of being inundated with ads, in case any of them is relevant to you, people who are shopping for something can opt to see ads while they're shopping.
Ads have to be aggressively pervasive because they're not very effective, and the attempted solution is even more invasive advertising for even more marginal gains.
Of course this will never happen because search engines are very effective forms of advertising, but ads could retreat from many mediums without significant impact to marketing.
in some countries (France as an example), if there was payment in any form, it has to be disclosed otherwise that's an undisclosed ad and very much illegal
The US FTC also has rules requiring most (but not all) native advertising to have a disclosure (e.g. "ad”, “promoted by [X]”, “sponsored advertising content”, etc. but not terms such as “promoted” or “promoted stories")
> For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Sure, but does this ever get sold on a site that _doesn't_ already have ads in the first place? You literally mention "increased placement on ad units", so I'd argue that if this site is directly supported, they've already violated the principle in a way that doesn't involve "native ads", and if they aren't directly supported, this principle doesn't apply to them. I'm skeptical that there are any non-hypothetical examples of sites that charge for access and make deals for "native ads" in the form of content but don't have any actual ad units that are displayed to users.
If I'm wrong and this is a thing, I don't think that's it's really that hard to solve. When a user signs up for a paid subscription, as part of the sign-up process, show a screen that explains that sometimes the company will partner with sponsors to produce content about their products, link/screenshot to a couple examples to make sure the user understands what you're talking about, and then give them the choice to either have content like that shown or hidden, and then put that as a toggle they can flip whenever they want in their account settings and mention that fact when you prompt them for their initial choice. If companies don't way to pay for a partnership because their metrics show that too many users turn off the publication's sponsored content from showing, that's just a sign that the system is working, since users shouldn't be paying for sponsored content that they don't actually want to see.
Although I no longer pay for a subscription and can't be certain, I used to have a paid subscription to The Pragmatic Engineer and I'm pretty sure the paragraph "brought to you by X, Y and Z" was still included in each post. I don't think there's any other advertising on the site. Might not quite meet your definition.
Usually you don’t publish those behind the paywall. Someone else has already paid for the entrance fee after all. But I think sponsored articles should always be marked as such, at the top
it's a good point, and if theverge was using the weasel language to still allow paid content to be published to subscribers, that would be one thing.
but that's not it - they're still going to serve you banners, even if you pay. just, fewer of them. and they're going to gate content behind the paywall. it's the "have your cake and eat it too" of paywalls.
>we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media.
Advertising is fundamentally corrosive to society and should be outlawed with few and carefully tailored exceptions. Any business models that consequently fail, fail because their externalities to collective society are now priced in.
You will just get other kinds of advertisement. Ads that are technically not ads. Things like product placements, free promotions, word of mouth campaigns etc.
we already have laws that make it illegal to accept money for certain circumstances, e.g. sex, bribery, extortion. Just make it illegal to accept money to promote products. I say this not because I think it's illegal but rather to challenge the status quo - i don't think there's a reason we couldn't do this other than humans being fragile and inflexible
Because they want to make you do stuff that is not in your best interest. They want to create a need that you don't actually have, and they do so by applying psychological pressure. They are a festival of fomo. They're pollution for your mind and distort your sense of reality.
In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.
One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.
They incentivize collecting sensitive data about people.
They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.
Noam Chomksy’s critique is that the advertising industry’s main goal is to ensure that uninformed consumers make irrational choices. Essentially it undermines the market, due to the fact that in theory markets are efficient when people make rational decisions. Subject to advertising, people may pay more for a lesser quality product.
For me, it's because it's carefully crafted to be as manipulative as possible. It uses modern psychological tricks to influence our thought and behavior in ways we are unaware of and largely powerless against. The intention behind an ad is not to inform but to influence, in a way that benefits somebody's wallet at the expense of societal well-being. It's a reprehensible, psychopathic motivation to be pursuing.
I hate the modern advertising ecosystem, but ads themselves are not evil. We're just in a place where there is no limit to the what/when/where/how many. Without advertising, it would be really difficult to run a business.
Back when Google was great, they kind of acted as an advertising police on the entire internet, keeping ads unobtrusive and negatively ranking sites with bad user experiences. That system worked pretty well back in the day (although definitely not perfect), and I think it gives a good model to start from if we as a society ever decide to try and fix this hellscape we're living in.
In my view, the ads themselves are only slightly evil since they are designed to influence you subtly (well, sometimes subtly) into paying for something you probably don't want. Not a big deal, I have shields in place for that mentally. I wouldn't hate them so much if they didn't try to track you around the web and didn't sell your info to anyone with some loose change in their pockets.
I never hated ads when we had full-page ads in magazines and you had to skip multiple pages of ads to get to the actual articles. But selling my data makes them too much money, so I do my best to never have them load on the internet.
> Without advertising, it would be really difficult to run a business.
It's difficult to run a business without advertising in a world full of advertising. If others can get to your customers before they find you then yes that's a problem. But all you get from paying to advertise is to get back to where you would have been without ads (assuming your competitors spend a similar amount).
There's only one “carefully tailored” exception that I approve of, and that's when it's solicited.
Ads should show if and only if the user asked for them. There are plenty of people who intentionally opt out of ad blockers to support their favorite websites, or who enjoy browsing ads and shopping. There's a reason ad-only TV channels (24-hour infomercial stuff) are viable despite being able to be turned off at will, and plenty of people subscribe to product-promotion magazines (catalogues). I'm sure there are websites for those interests, too.
What should be outlawed is mixing unsolicited content into solicited. If I solicit a video on black holes, or a blog article on Python, it should not be allowed to interrupt it with a dishonest, manipulative appraisal of some VPN service. That's immoral and disgusting.
The correct amount of tracking ads at least. We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying. But then the transaction was between the publisher and the advertiser, and MY information wasn't sold. They were dumb ads.
If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.
I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible.
BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience.
So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making.
If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.
I was fine with ads in newspapers, in my TV news and on the sides of buses. While it always created incentives and questionable relations (E.g. do yo report the grocery chains' salmonella disaster in your news when the same chain advertises between that segment and the weather? What if they give you an angry call after the broadcast? does your news desk ever worry about what they should publish? as soon as they worry the damge is already done). I get that. But I'm not going to even hope we'll get the web to live up to higher standards than print and broadcast did for the last centuries. After all, internet media had significantly worse standards in this regard for as long as it existed. I'd be happy for it to just have normal media standards.
The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution.
Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.
Disagree. Would I like zero ads? Yes, do I think a company should be required to offer a zero ad service for money? No. If you don't like that they have ads even if you pay then don't use the service.
People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for them) that are full of ads. International flights have ads on their entertainment. Flights by some airlines I've been on have ads just after the safety instructions. I've been on flights where they have ads for shopping while on the plane.
Defending this practice because it's the status quo is ludicrous.
All of these things happen not because people approve of them, but because they have no choice. Every company in those industries is doing this because they want more profits. Companies do have the choice, but they would flood your eyeballs with ads 24/7 if it was socially acceptable. So they push that line as far as they can take it before people start complaining. And that's how we got to where we are now.
The thing most people don't consciously think about is that advertising is brainwashing and psychological manipulation. It's designed to embed products and ideas into your psyche to get you to do something or think a certain way. Separating me from my money is extortion, though fairly benign. What I find truly insidious is putting thoughts into my head. Political ads and propaganda are weapons of war since they manipulate how societies think and behave. They have the ability to influence how people vote, to topple governments, to cause civil unrest and deep distrust in societies. How most of the world isn't seeing the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing in the past decade as a direct consequence of ad-fueled social manipulation is beyond me.
To speak nothing of the multi-billion dark industry of data brokers, and companies hoovering up and profiting off of our data in perpetuity.
Advertising is evil to its core and is the most harmful yet normalized industry we've ever invented.
> People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads.
Back in the day (yes, I'm that old) the selling point of cable was "TV without any ads". It was marketed as expensive and upscale TV, though. And people don't really want to pay for content, so this business model didn't work out in the end.
You must be really old because the selling point was always more channels/better quality picture. No ads was reserved for the premium channels (HBO and Showtime) which were an added fee. There were a small number of basic cable channels which were ad-free (AMC and TCM, if I recall correctly were originally both ad-free), but most basic cable channels had ads (and some were just re-feeds of independent broadcast “super stations” like WTBS and WOR.
I totally agree with your statement. A company should not be required to offer it, but I am not obliged to consume/purchase/read it.
If i can legally block/skip/cirvumvent it, i still will. When reading a magazine, i will try and skip the ads. I block as much ads on my internet connection as possible, because i get to say what comes in and goes out.
And companies may complain about my totally legal actions. Not that i am going to to anything about their complaints, for i do not care and never will, but they may totally complain.
Comanies may also try and circumvent my actions to force the ads as long as their actions are legal. I also understand that people do not want to play this cat and mouse game.
However. When products tend to be a certain necessity and in reality you cannot choose but to consume or purchase a specific thing (Microsoft Office for instance. Yes i know there alternatives, but do you really have a choice?), things get a bit weird or shady.
Companies may still legally stuff ads in those 'necessary' products, but it's not something you really want.
You don't 'need' a streaming service or a Verge subscrition and can perfectly survice without having one, but when you are paying for one and you're still getting a bunch of ads, it does not feel right. It feels you're getting screwed because of that weird fine print in a contract.
Companies stopped caring about their customers need as much as possible. They only think about making money. I stopped caring about companies and their products as much as possible. I only think about spending as less as possible of my money. You reap what you sow.
I completely share your point of view. And if I may add, I think most people completely overlook the fact that AI for tech companies is the next golden age of ad.
They will have AI that can convinces you to buy a product or service over an other one on a prompt you ask. Even generating a small video clip of it tailored on the spot for you to convince you is the future of AI.
Ads made google rich, they stole content through Google and won’t make money out of it with their new superpower ?
It cost a lot of money and their goal is to be rich. There is no other way, people won’t pay the full price of what it cost for this not to happen.
For companies, whose main service is not the website/app itself, no one forces them to run a website. They are doing it for publicity reasons in one way or another. Putting extra ads or tracking there is trying to make more money from something that should in itself make them money already, by making them more widely known, possibly motivating people to use their actual services.
It is unacceptable behavior. I do check how much uBlock Origin has to block for a website of a business and that does inform my opinion of them quite severely. Biggest detractor: Google analytics. It will always be blocked, and not be loaded, but if I see it on their website, expect my opinion of them to fall quite a few levels. Combine that with some JS only website, then they are already lost. I then know they neither care about user experience nor accessibility, and if that was a potential enployer, they would have dropped out of that category, because I don't want to work in a dystopia shop.
> People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads.
Those ads are far less egregious than the kinds of online ads we're discussing. If online ads were the equivalent—static, hosted on the same site, free of data collection—then not only would the experience be much more pleasant, we wouldn't even be able to block them.
Like those 88x31 ads^Waffiliate links. I have never been bothered by them. If anything, I actually stop to look at them and maybe click one or two. The funny gifs get a click just for being funny.
Nowadays they are rare outside places like Neocities, but it is true that I don't know of anyone who has gone out of their way to add an adblock rule to block those.
What I want is incompatible with a lot of businesses sustaining themselves. That doesn't change anything in how I think regulation or technology should work here. I think we should have both technological change and regulatory change in the online ad industry that would wipe out a large chunk of the ecosystem.
Definitely not "fully" as required an additional purchase and planning of what to record. Normal usage of sitting down and turning on the TV to what something being shown at the time does not have skippable advertising.
Whenever I'm in the US and turn on a TV I'm always amazed at the amount of advertising and the effect it has on the media itself. One of the effects of streaming services was that it allowed script writers and producers total freedom from having to structure a story around the ad breaks.
People (at least used to) pay for magazines and newspapers, which have also been partially supported by ads forever. Perhaps a more sustainable balance would be only first-party ads (ie no individualized tracking) for paying subscribers?
I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.[1]
Unfortunately they still seem to be flooded with trackers, even if you’re a paying customer. Here’s what my firewall blocks when i browse the verge for a few seconds with my browser’s ad blocker disabled: https://ibb.co/0JpKkCJ
Yes I enjoyed and used the ads in print computer magazines in the 90s.
I think having highly relevant, content based static inline first party ads is tolerable and occasionally useful. Especially for specialist hardware / software. 3rd party ads that track you across the Internet are just evil and I will block them forever. As others have said, I would probably pay €50 per month for news, but not to a handful of mainstream sites. I need broad diverse coverage. Some micro transaction system is needed.
People advocate for micro-transactions as an alternative to the current system of funding content with invasive, data-collecting advertising. I just don't see it working the way proponents say it would, even if micropayments were technically feasible, which they are not.
I wrote a short post on the topic[0] but to save you a click here is the main point: We all complain about advertising that tracks users now. Imagine how valuable the data would be for paying customers now consider which micropayment provider you would trust with that information.
newspaper and magazine ads didn't block the page for 1 minute before allowing you to read the headlines on the page, then repeat the process every time you turned the page.
I think the important part is that you could choose to look at those or not.
For all it's faults facebook advertising is similar, you can just scroll past an advert if it's of no interest. I don't find their adverts overly annoying.
I came here to say this too. And I mean, sometimes ads are good? I have money and I like to buy things. How am I supposed to find out about something I've never heard of before?
Plain, non-animated non-creepy banner ads I've never minded. What I mind are:
1. Ads that are intrusive and distracting
2. Pages that have more ads than actual content
3. Ads that chase you around for two weeks trying to get you to buy something you just bought.
I mean yeah, if I'm paying $20/mo it had better be ad free. But if I'm paying $4/mo, having tasteful ads interspersed among the content is probably fine.
Readit News
On the internet, the fact is this: Most companies do not offer a reduced ad load in exchange for your subscription money. In fact, they will be happy to take money from every source they can. The fact that The Verge is doing so reflects that they understand their audience and are trying to meet them halfway. It also reduces the cost of the subscription for you, the end user.
This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
Why would I, as a consumer, compromise on what I want to make some MBA's life easier? That almost sounds like corporate welfare. Businesses sign up to take risks the moment they're created.
A news organization doesn't need to be in business. There is nothing unjust or morally wrong with letting a business shutdown because they couldn't figure out a sustainable way to be profitable (assuming for sake of argument that most people don't subscribe due to the ads, which idk if that would really happen).
> This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
The OP is a customer of the Verge who is rejecting their offer for a new subscription service they don't like. That's called "voting with your wallet", and its the free market working as intended.
You presumably want access to the Verge's content. This is unsustainable without some revenue. You're compromising to continue to get what you want, not to make some MBA's life easier.
The tension between those two forces will find a natural result. Maybe the company goes out of business and whatever the company did is no longer available to anyone. Maybe they lose half their customers but still make more money and buy themselves yachts, and their remaining customers are satisfied.
As is the verge’s pricing and ad strategy, you think they didn’t expect some churn by making a pricing change? The author is free to shout it from their soapbox but chances are the verge already expected some of this sentiment and is totally ok with a “ok losing these customers” approach
The OP should indeed vote with their wallet. They will have to find some other source of news/entertainment. (I really wish that those two weren't the same thing, but that's another compromise that we haven't figured out how to avoid while still getting paid.) Maybe they'll get a deal elsewhere that is more to their liking.
I honestly wouldn't mind a subscription that reduces ads to the point of being _non-obnoxious_, but I'm in an odd position because I pay for YouTube Premium, which doesn't have ads, and costs a lot more money to distribute (video, text, and images vs text & images), but I grew up in the newspaper age which were chock full of ads free or subscription.
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Why should you want some MBA's life to be easy? So that it's feasible to keep producing what you actually want.
I just wish it were possible to pay $1 for an article whose headline sounds interesting, or someone recommended. Subscribe, even with a free trial? Pass.
The free market is great. But we should not deny it when it leads to bad outcomes. If we do, then we're no better than those who say "real communism has never been tried".
> we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media
If you think all advertising is immoral, then this probably doesn't do anything for you. However, if you have privacy and performance concerns, this is a big win I think.
Generally I like what the verge does, and I would gladly pay if it included their podcast being ad free. The Verge’s podcast is the only podcast I listen to that I don’t pay for, and it’s full of repeating programmatic ads for crypto companies, sports betting, and cars.
And the never ending struggle to increase/maintain subscriptions for some companies probably has something to do with that.
For me personally, and I expect a not insignificant portion of users, paying for a subscription is primarily to remove advertising completely. Anything else means its not worth subscribing, so not offering that level of option rules us out as customers.
I've spent a minor amount of time and energy reducing the amount of advertising I see, from (pre-streaming) downloading shows I already pay for legal access to with commercials removed with automated systems, to being an early adopter of streaming services and dropping cable, locally running pi-hole on top of ad-blockers and using VPN's, privacy focused browsers etc.
The payoff has been immense for my family, to the point watching TV in other locations and being bombarded by advertising is jarring and uncomfortable, and the manipulation tactics become more obvious and gross the less you inundate yourself with them. Obviously you can't get away from all advertising, indirect, product placement etc. is everywhere, but I found a significant improvement in quality of life.
I would also make the argument that social media engagement hacking at its root traces to advertising and we blame social media for the problems when advertising was the true problem. Advertising as a revenue stream results in trying to optimize and improve engagement, often by gamifying or moving towards sensationalism to drive up numbers to increase revenue, most of which is negative for the user and little actually positive.
I also put quite a bit of effort into removing ads from my and my family's eyeballs. I hate them. But because of that I already don't see ads on The Verge so for me a sub isn't about removing ads at all. I'll sub to support the work and whatever other perks come along with it (full-text RSS for one)
Another way to describe reality is that people can choose to subscribe to various substacks or newsletters instead. On those platforms subscribers get zero ads, they get more in depth and more thoughtful articles, and because the system has much less overhead modest subscription revenue is sufficient. Vox also does video reviews, but then again, there are also many high quality tech youtubers. Vox certainly has the right to charge for a subscription and then serve the subscribers ads. And people have a right to walk away from a bad deal. Vox could disappear tomorrow at no great loss to society. We might like some of the reporting Vox does, but we don't need it.
Vox media has raised about 450m (according to the first google result). Modest profitability is not enough for Vox Media because they need to secure a significant exit for their investors. This puts them at odds with their readers and subscribers. Not that laudable if you ask me. They made a bet they were going to disrupt traditional media and become a new great media platform. But now it looks like Vox itself is getting disrupted. Like newspapers of old clinging to a business model that no longer exists.
But I don't want to pay less. I want my data to not be sold to the highest bidder, that's all.
As it stands there's no option for people like me other than not subscribing.
This is very much like the situation with smartphones these days: they cost less because you get a bunch of bloatware that you can't uninstall.
I don't want that on my device, so I went with an offering deemed "overpriced" because it has less of such crap than others and thus costs about $250 more. Ideally it should be zero, but that's the best I could get.
sigh I wish this was easier to achieve. But at least in the case of The Verge the sub removes third party ads so it should increase privacy even if it doesn't remove all the ads.
This might seem common on HN but IRL people don’t give much attention to ad related privacy and are probably much more concerned with the fact they have to fork over a CC and a few bucks
I don't recall in the past a company needing my identity required or be tracked just because I bought a newspaper. I pay the $1 for the newspaper and no more interaction or relationship after that.
Ads are OK but why do all the ad companies need to track me and know my movements and just to show me an ad? It's basically malware, stalking. Ads are zero advantage to me the consumer for what I lose in privacy.
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My assumption is that the salaries of reporters, editors was paid for by ads.
The nominal fee for the paper was to pay for the pulp, ink. I mean if you just printed up millions of papers and gave them away, people would pick them up simply as raw material for lining their bird cages, for papier-mâché, to insulate their cardboard box home on the corner of 12th and Main.....
Nonetheless, the first half of your point—the ads usually paid for all the reporting—is correct.
They’re a great way to keep up with the actions and gripes of the local community. Being such small operations, there is very light editing and the reporter’s point of view often comes through pretty clearly.
All paid for via ads from local businesses. Quite a lot of the ads are from real estate agents, which I think reflects the belief that a lot of tourists are picking up the papers in addition to residents.
The generally dire journalism situation these days is there is mostly no physical distribution and physical advertising dollars have become digital dimes. And local news--which was never a really thriving business--is basically dead.
This should be an absolute benefit, not a relative benefit. Who’s to say the number of ads won’t ratchet up in the future? Almost surely will. Let’s say a subscription customer sees 50 ads today vs 100 a non-subscription customer sees. Tomorrow, they 2x that – sub customer sees 100 ads, non-sub customer sees 200. Does a sub customer derive smug satisfaction that they’re seeing fewer ads than a non-sub customer? How would one even know? They’re just seeing ads.
The correct amount of ads for a subscription service (from a UX perspective) is zero.
2. People do notice when $7/mo is cheaper than $16/mo which is possible because there are still ads.
At least in Germany, this has changed quite a lot. The publishers are naming the offers "Pur Abo" or similar.
This is not perfect as one analysis[0] is showing, but for me, on the good way.
[0]: https://netzpolitik.org/2020/nicht-ganz-ohne/ (in German)
Edit: Added German analysis of these offers.
I do think The Verge offering this could lead other U.S. publishers to follow suit, especially if it’s successful.
1. A very small percentage of website visitors will end up paying for a subscription.
2. They make way less than $5 per user per month from ads.
The money they'd lose by providing an ad-free experience to paying customers should be a rounding error. Removing ads will also increase conversion, but who knows whether or not that will be enough to offset the revenue lost.
I don't particularly care about their "business reality" - if you're an online news outlet you're not paying the costs of printing and distribution - your expenses are just journalist salaries and the marginal costs of keeping a website running. If you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
>if you need to charge anything close to $5 per user per day to keep such an operation running, you should be out of business.
That's just American labor in a nutshell. if a jounralist is making full time national minimum wage ($7.25, 40 hours a week), that's very roughly $1000/month post tax. that very pooly paid jounalist needs 200 subcribers to sustain them. \
costs are going up, but readership and revenue is not. This doesn't end well for anyone. And yes, many businesses are dying right now.
>I don't particularly care about their "business reality"
if you don't care about them, I'm not sure why they'd care about your opinions on how they run.
Why not offer an ad-free tier?
There may be ad agreements that preempt their ability to offer ad-free at this time, likely in the case of ultra-premium advertisers.
It could also just be good ol’ internal bureaucracy at play. Maybe there was a turf war, and this was the best they could do while keeping everyone happy.
Edit: The point in the other comment about it affecting reader demographics is a good one too.
What narrow idea of “a media business” must have ads even when you pay, and why do they have to be different from everything else?
I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.
This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way. Users love it, but advertisers hate it and it craters the value of the ad space you sell to whomever doesn't think it's worth it/can't afford it.
Having a company double dip and concluding that's somehow laudable is absurd.
>People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper
Because the product isn't delivering $5 worth of perceived value per day. Trying to extract $5 anyway via stuff like this is the wrong answer.
As a consumer I definitely lean on the "if I'm paying a subscription, I expect zero ads" side of the fence. It just has to be worth the additional price for me (The Verge is not)
There are few (if any) media businesses I care about enough to compromise on my requirements just to help them stay in business. Certainly not The Verge.
As for me, I’m happy to either not see the content or use workarounds that let me see it for free with no ads, i.e. ad-blockers + reader mode and services like archive.ph.
Which leads to the conclusion that the company that most disrupted the newspaper industry was not Google or Facebook but Craigslist.
Were the ads run on the web not built on a separate business that attempts to violate the reasonable sense of privacy the average person expects, and didn’t attempt to warp consumer’s expectations of privacy, I think there would be less objections.
I don't think newspaper ads are a good analogy either since the consumption model of a dead-tree newspaper isn't such that you get the ads thrown into your face when trying to read an article. And classifieds specifically I wouldn't even call ads, more of a community note board service.
If the ads stay in the boundary areas of the page or well-behaved interstitials that's one thing. In fact, ads can sometimes be interesting and entertaining and most importantly can make markets more competitive bringing you a better variety goods and services.
When they screw up the page, jump around, cover things up, don't have proper controls to "x" them out, use confusing dark patterns, generate fake clicks (ever think it's not an accident that some sites jiggle around so much?), need 50 trackers to be (kinda) sure parties aren't screwing each other, have 20x the bandwidth cost of the content that's something else.
Also there's the content of the ads. There is a subprime tranch that includes Temu but is best represented by prerolls on YouTube that are best advertising sketchy energy drinks and supplements and worse are outright crypto scams. I can see some humor in Temu but not in the scams.
I guarantee that the majority of these zealous anti-ad people will not subscribe to an ad-free service for The Verge.
For the most part, their hobby is not subscribing to online publications, it’s complaining about the subscriptions at online publications that they would almost certainly never subscribe to.
And yes, I understand that this doesn’t apply to the ones of people who will reply here claiming that they would never do this.
I am saying that The Verge made a business decision to balance ad load and subscriber cost to potentially bring in more subscribers.
They probably did the math and realized that charging people $15 a month would not bring in many subscribers, and that they could have charged $5 a month with regular ad load, but they found this $7 sweet spot where they could give people the best of both worlds. And the $50 model means people are more committed long-term making it more valuable for them.
I would guess that “reduced ad load” means that they would only put premium advertisers, like the stuff you would see in glossy magazines, in front of those readers.
I trust given how careful they were with rolling this out that they did the math and tried to strike a balance to please the most people.
Someone like the New York Times still has ads for digital subscribers but they're not crazy pop-ups all over the place. I'd probably prefer they weren't there but they don't really detract from my reading experience.
I get that some people vehemently hate ads and most marketing.
The biggest problem is that anti-consumer behavior causes harm. With advertisement it brings disinformation, spying, abuse of the most vulnerable in society, general distrust, are often a crime (scams, fraud, targets children, and usually ignore local advertisement laws), and siphons money to a third party which usually is outside of the country and do not pay taxes. The benefits of anti-consumer behavior are generally not worth the downsides.
As for the other point you’re making, that’s complete nonsense. You don’t differentiate your revenue streams by serving a sub par product to your paying customers.
Serve those stupid ads to free users, treat your paying customers with respect.
As someone in media, I’m tired of well-intentioned media outlets try to strike a reasonable balance only to get yelled at for it like they aren’t already walking a tightrope. They have staffs of people to pay for, payroll. Travel budgets. Offices. Legal bills. And that they get hell for trying to give an inch, in my opinion, sucks.
If you want them to offer an ad-free tier, tell them that directly! Given that they are clearly thinking about it suggests they might listen to you.
But your binary way of approaching this is not helping and ultimately discourages companies who want to wean themselves off of adtech. Ripping off the band-aid is a lot harder than you’re making it out to be.
I clutch my principles rather tightly, especially in cases like this. I will never pay for a streaming service whose first payment tier is "less ads", nor will I ever pay for a _newspaper_ of all things whose first premium tier is "less ads".
I don't think double-dipping is laudable, and I don't think we should encourage it. Their (in)ability to fund their business isn't my problem, frankly.
>This feels like a situation where an organization tries doing something laudable, but still gets criticized for it.
Ads is evil has been a thing on HN for a very very long time.
They can do what they want, but I don't really care if businesses that rely on ads go bankrupt.
Most of the Internet ads are medical issues, financial scams, weight loss scams etc. Most of these are accompanied by disgusting pictures. These ads combine the worst of classic Email spam and the yellow press.
Give me better ads and I might switch off the adblocker. I'd even tolerate a banner Coca Cola ad if done tastefully and if it is the only ad on the page.
There's a high likelihood that your adblocker won't be able to block those anyway.
But no, you probably won't switch it off. That's because you can only know the ad quality after you've been exposed to them, and after your computer has run their code, and after you've faced the risk of them maintaining the universal, persistent eavesdrop on your life.
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That doesn't mean that every single person consuming/using the product needs to pay either. Patreon and similar services have proven that if what you make is of high enough quality and provides enough value, it's possible to convince a large enough subset of the consumers to pay enough to cover the costs of production. Especially with online services where the cost difference between producing for 1 person vs 1000 is nearly negligible. The few can, and often do, subsidize the many. And if that changes over time, then the product ceases to be valuable enough to be worth producing and should simply stop being made.
And I'd say this is even true of news and things that people might argue are for the public good. In my opinion, most "news" today isn't actual informative news and doesn't really serve the public. But of the vanishing little left that does, if it informs and educates the citizenry in a way that improves the lives and stability of the country as a whole, and if its natural cost is more than can be reasonably covered by willing consumers, then there's a reasonable argument for covering the cost with taxes. Put sufficient legal barriers between the government funding and the content being produced to prevent government manipulation/propaganda and make sure the press can operate unimpeded. My best idea for such a government funded news source is to write into law that said news source's budget is dependent solely upon country population and country GDP, all staffing decisions are made internally, and leaders are decided by citizen vote, but I'm sure there are other ways people can come up with for maintaining a free but government/tax funded press agency. But ad-funded (of which I think even public radio/tv has effectively become), creates perverse incentives that drive the mission away from actually informing and educating.
People can still pay for tech reviews, or travel advice, talking head current events opinion shows, or whatever news is in its current form if they want. Privately owned/operated press can still exist if it's useful enough for people to find it valuable and worth the cost. But advertising just ruins everything eventually.
This is not true. In many cases, we can see that people value a service by their returning usage, but... they often want other people to pay for it.
Also, government-funded comes with its own strings which may become more obvious than you like in the coming years.
Ads have been a primary revenue driver for news media going back hundreds of years, including to when the US was codifying the civic value of news into its governing principles.
The idea that revenue choice is binary or that if you have to use ads you shouldn’t be in business is a very modern one, and one that’s outside of historical norms.
Print ads don't get your personal data and sell them to who knows who. Internet ads have become synonymous with this practice. Comparing them to print ads without this consideration is disingenuous.
I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either. It's not sustainable for me to do pay for all the websites I visit. And me randomly paying only some tiny subset of them doesn't make any sense to me. I'd need some prioritized list. And it would have to be a very short one because I'm simply not rich enough to maintain lots of multi dollar subscriptions per month. And I also don't want to micromanage a lot of payments and subscriptions.
The Verge, which was mentioned in the article is a good example of a website that I don't value enough to get anywhere near that short list. They have a lot of competition reporting more or less similar stuff that I wouldn't miss them. In fact, I can't recall reading anything by them lately. I guess not a lot of their stuff makes it to the HN front page. Probably because it's just not that interesting.
- Rent seeking is not behavior I care for, and so much of the subscription service stuff is exactly that.
- I'm more than happy to pay for quite a few patreon/similar things.
- But _ultimately_ I don't just want to "consume" content, I want to share it. In fact I believe sharing the cultural artifacts I engage with is an essential part of a culture, and that getting in the way of that is morally wrong. So if your paywall gets in the way of _that_, I _will_ work around it.
Edit: also, the other side of the problem is that there are too many websites now. When it was Netflix and nearly everything there, I payed for it. I no longer pay for shows and movies, because things got _completely_ nuts. Similar thing with news. Reality is I pay _way_ more for Patreon than most people I know - not because of any moral reasons, but because I can actually afford that. And a typical news site asks as much as what I give to some of my favorite writers and painters.
Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, but I like the idea that I get access to a number of sources for one payment.
But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier).
See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
(The comparison is not great because premium streaming of original content and long-form text journalism on current affairs are different things with different audiences and pricepoints and viewing patterns.
By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)
I'm almost certain this exact thing used to exist, and The Verge was a part of it, and then it all fell apart. I can't find it now - it's impossible to search for.
Apple News (or the original Newsstand) might work well for traditional, smaller publishers who are almost struggling in the digital age (most magazines in Apple News would quality), because Apple News brings them traffic and revenue that they may have lost or never get in the first place. Bigger publishers have enough influence to just build their own platform and avoid paying Apple rent. Verge is another such example.
Same reason for Xbox Game Pass, Kindle unlimited, etc. You gets lots of fun games from independent publishers, but never expect something like Hogwarts Legacy to launch on Game Pass on day 1 unless it is a first-party studio (and you have the most expensive version of Game Pass).
If I want to stretch this a bit more, same thing with app stores. Spotify and Netflix are big enough to say "if you want to use our app, go through the pain and pay on the web. We are not offering IAP". Most app developers can't do that. Meanwhile, Epic is big enough that it can pick a fight with Apple.
For me it wouldn't even need to be all-I-can-read.
I'd be very happy to pay a reasonable fee pr thing I read, and I'd frankly be excited about it. I was a vocal supporter of the original Blendle for this exact reason.
It either need to be
- (almost) everything at one price like Spotify or Apple Music,
- or it needs to be a reasonable price with reasonable terms, say about the same price, (adjusted for inflation) as what it used to cost back when we bought it on DVDs or CDs.
> I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads.
> I don't pay any websites/blogs for subscriptions for articles either.
While some content creators do it for love, art, whatever, others do need an income stream to keep going. I'm fine with blocking annoying ads (pop-ups, forced interstitials, autoplaying audio, …) but basic image-and-some-text-on-the-page adverts are fine, as are sponsored sections (if correctly identified as such) in content (if I've heard it before I can just skip manually). There must be a middle ground somewhere that doesn't irritate most viewers but nets the content makers some income.
I'm not against advertising as such, where it is relevant to what I am looking at (or even when it is arbitrary/random), what I object to is the stalking that is inherent in the current adtech world. I wouldn't want Amazon following me into the pub to say “I saw you looking at poo bags the other day, take a look at these beauties” in real life and I don't want it online. Over the top advertising is annoying too, but not nearly as disquieting as the feeling of being followed by hundreds of little corporate drones everywhere I go.
I don't mind paying a small amount for things either, like a couple of the podcasts I regularly listen to (though some of those are somewhat unrealistic, I'm not going to pay to a TV subscription or two worth for an ad-free slightly-longer version of a weekly podcast!), but like the point of the article I disagree with paying and still getting adverts probably with the tracking that this implies.
We had some text ads, maybe a banner at the top/bottom of a site, and that was it... that was "the middle ground", they got the ads, we didn't have to block them. Then they added more ads and more ads and more ads, and animated gifs and more of them, and videos, and videos with sound, and overlaid ads, and overlaid ads with unskippable video and audio, and more and more... and in the end, a lot of us blocked them.
They had their chance, they decided that the option they wanted was to abuse the viewer with a huge amount of very bad ads on every goddamn site they visited, and now (for some of us), it's over, we're blocking ads.
If they stayed at the one, two ads per site, I wouldn't even notice them,... now, when I do (because there's just too many of them), I immediately install an adblock on every machine (parents, relatives,...) that I have to use a browser on.
They track you like an animal across the entire web to learn your conscious and unconscious desires and insecurities and weaknesses so they can most effectively take your time and money and attention from you.
Why should I be expected to tolerate that even for a moment?
Then they should find a business model that doesn't involve psychological manipulation. Ads are predatory. I have as much compassion for those who cry about ad revenues as I do for people complaining that they worse off for not being allowed to rape and pillage.
makes the widely hated app store look generous by comparison
Fortunately there's many ways to financially support the workers whose content you appreciate: patreon, ko-fi, etc. I still wished there was something much more friction-free, something like flattr
That is a concern for the "content creator" not for anyone else. We have way more "content" than we need, especially "content" compromised by ads.
Part of it, the rest goes to Google to reinvest in their ads business.
As for the article, well, ads are everywhere now aren't they?
"Accept all cookies or pay £3 a month for ad-free" is what we're getting on most media sites in the UK. I'm guessing there's some company I've yet to discover that's selling this platform ("tech") to all the newspaper/magazine sites.
I basically agree with this sentiment, but one place where it can be a tricky balance (not saying that's the case here!) is "native advertising".
For example, a new game is being released, the publisher collaborates with TheBrink, a hypothetical popular game news site, and for this they get a huge takeover banner advert for the week, increased placement on ad units around the site, a "behind the scenes" post written about the game, and an interview with the developers published to TheBrink's YouTube channel. This type of package is absolutely a thing that gets sold.
Which bits of this are ads? Well the behind the scenes post and interview could theoretically have been produced anyway, they're within the scope of the site, but in this case they weren't prioritised, certainly not for launch day, it was only by the whole collaboration being paid for that they got made. Are they ads? Yes they are ads. How would a loyal subscriber feel about those parts being hidden from them though? I imagine they would be miffed about that.
Native advertising like this has a whole spectrum of quality and the worst native ads are very explicitly ads that have no value to typical readers. However "good" native ads are really just a company paying for priority reporting in the style that would otherwise be done anyway, and are probably content that readers/viewers want.
How do you resolve this? No idea. If I were paying I'd want to see that content assuming it's good quality. Others would not on the basis of bias or a more philosophical opposition to ads.
That's akin to saying a person wants some of that "good" cancer.
If I am paying, I am supporting the editorial staff. It's their decision what to report on and how. Paid-for content, even if it's just for priority coverage, compromises the integrity of the editorial staff as well as their ability to curate (not to mention a clear disincentive to be critical of the ad buyer's claims).
It starts when TheBrink publishes a high quality behind the scenes piece about a scam mobile game instead of a truly great indie game just because the latter is not as profitable and cannot afford to buy the ad.
It ends with the entire catalogue of the publication being paid for by advertisers. Much like some influencer's instagram feed. Paying for access to an ad feed is unacceptible.
To add: "the firewall" between the editorial and business sides of a publication is the basic prerequisite for ethical journalism, even if it's an entertainment rag. Advertising that masquarades as reporting is therefore the worst and most toxic, i.e., cancerous, of the bunch.
So I do not agree that native ads are something that should be desired.
The ads just weren't as obtrusive, privacy-invading and annoying as what we have now. A lot of them were fun to read, had amazing photography, because creativity still mattered, not just volume. Unfortunately alternatives to bring back this more harmless and tasteful form of advertising to the web (RIP The Deck) have failed.
What the article is discussing is most likely banner ads for what will usually be non related products.
One is designed to keep you on the site (paid content) while the other is attempting to go else where.
The effect of paid content can not be discounted. It's important to recognize that a paid review or a game or movie can result in a different outcome, even subtly.
I remember in the golden days of game review sites it was clear when writers were fudging the reviews because the user experience would be starkly different. The 'we were told to ignore the bugs' excuses always followed because the gig was paid.
This here is key.
If I'm reading the synopsis for an anime series on a website whose main topic is anime/manga/novels/etc, and I see an ad in an unobstrusive and non-annoying location talking about this one new anime figurine or plushie or some other merch, you bet I'm going to check it out.
These ads don't require cross-site tracking or third-party resources. They can even be shown with the strictest Content-Security-Policy. Even if they send you to a different website.
If I'm logged in, and you give me a way to tell you "I don't like this shit, stop showing me stuff related to this series/artist/etc" (i.e. a clearly tagged blocklist, not a vague "I don't like this" and you guessing what I mean by "this"), I'll even help you refine your ads for me.
But that's only because I care about this content.
And because it's done in a respectful way. For example, I don't mind those classic 88x31 "affiliate links" (ads) or blog rolls (also ads, at least in my eyes), or self-promotion sections (ads) in some communities, or when someone I follow on Bluesky posts about how they're selling a thing (also ad). If one of those gets through my adblocker, I won't go out of my way to add a rule for those.
But the moment a third-party script is involved, or data selling begins, or there's annoyances like putting random shit between paragraphs I'm reading, or popups, or "subscribe to the newsletter"-style popups, I'm out. I'm either blocking your whole site on uBlock Origin, or at DNS level if it was bad enough.
TL;DR: I don't care about ads. I care about things that piss me off.
What's not fine is seeing an ad for the new game when I didn't go to a games news site and didn't click on such a link. I don't want to be interrupted with games news while I'm watching a video on DIY. I shouldn't be shown appraisals of the new game while shopping for a new car radio.
Ads should be opt-in.
Ads have to be aggressively pervasive because they're not very effective, and the attempted solution is even more invasive advertising for even more marginal gains.
Of course this will never happen because search engines are very effective forms of advertising, but ads could retreat from many mediums without significant impact to marketing.
in some countries (France as an example), if there was payment in any form, it has to be disclosed otherwise that's an undisclosed ad and very much illegal
Here's one overview: https://www.kevel.com/blog/ftc-compliant
Sure, but does this ever get sold on a site that _doesn't_ already have ads in the first place? You literally mention "increased placement on ad units", so I'd argue that if this site is directly supported, they've already violated the principle in a way that doesn't involve "native ads", and if they aren't directly supported, this principle doesn't apply to them. I'm skeptical that there are any non-hypothetical examples of sites that charge for access and make deals for "native ads" in the form of content but don't have any actual ad units that are displayed to users.
If I'm wrong and this is a thing, I don't think that's it's really that hard to solve. When a user signs up for a paid subscription, as part of the sign-up process, show a screen that explains that sometimes the company will partner with sponsors to produce content about their products, link/screenshot to a couple examples to make sure the user understands what you're talking about, and then give them the choice to either have content like that shown or hidden, and then put that as a toggle they can flip whenever they want in their account settings and mention that fact when you prompt them for their initial choice. If companies don't way to pay for a partnership because their metrics show that too many users turn off the publication's sponsored content from showing, that's just a sign that the system is working, since users shouldn't be paying for sponsored content that they don't actually want to see.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/
but that's not it - they're still going to serve you banners, even if you pay. just, fewer of them. and they're going to gate content behind the paywall. it's the "have your cake and eat it too" of paywalls.
>we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media.
Weird that This is not the case in the US?
Interesting, why?
In a knowledge economy your attention is your highest commodity, and ads want to take all of it.
One of the strongest rules I have for my household is that my children don't see any ads. I pay for Netflix, Youtube, and Spotify and use adblockers on all devices. And my tv is not connected to anything that can deliver flow tv - the biggest mindrot of all.
They incentivize businesses to maximize for engagement which generally promotes harmful content over informational content. Empty informational calories.
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Back when Google was great, they kind of acted as an advertising police on the entire internet, keeping ads unobtrusive and negatively ranking sites with bad user experiences. That system worked pretty well back in the day (although definitely not perfect), and I think it gives a good model to start from if we as a society ever decide to try and fix this hellscape we're living in.
I never hated ads when we had full-page ads in magazines and you had to skip multiple pages of ads to get to the actual articles. But selling my data makes them too much money, so I do my best to never have them load on the internet.
It's difficult to run a business without advertising in a world full of advertising. If others can get to your customers before they find you then yes that's a problem. But all you get from paying to advertise is to get back to where you would have been without ads (assuming your competitors spend a similar amount).
Ads should show if and only if the user asked for them. There are plenty of people who intentionally opt out of ad blockers to support their favorite websites, or who enjoy browsing ads and shopping. There's a reason ad-only TV channels (24-hour infomercial stuff) are viable despite being able to be turned off at will, and plenty of people subscribe to product-promotion magazines (catalogues). I'm sure there are websites for those interests, too.
What should be outlawed is mixing unsolicited content into solicited. If I solicit a video on black holes, or a blog article on Python, it should not be allowed to interrupt it with a dishonest, manipulative appraisal of some VPN service. That's immoral and disgusting.
If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay with money. But if I'm shown tracking and precisely targeted ads despite paying, that feels like I'm being charged twice. So the article is right: the amount of ads, at least if you consider tracking, must be zero.
I understand ads are a necessary evil for some kind of product, and it allows some content to be freely accessible.
BUT no the step from "ads" to "personalized ads" is not worth the loss of privacy, All the CPU times, all the Brain times, all the money wasted in creating always more complex infrastructure to provide a "better" ads experience.
So I'm genuinely interested to know the other side of the tradeoff, as content creator, what is the difference between "classic ads" (i.e I'm a tech blog I have ads about tech products) and "heavily personalized ads" in term of money making.
If someone also has the number as well in term of click rate etc.
Then it gives more power to those who already have the most of it.
It also normalizes lying, being intrusive, and manufacturing damaging social norms.
Tracking is worse, but all ads are toxic.
just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better
Paying customers are also identified (logged in). So in theory you could pinpoint me even more with ads after I decided to be a paying customer.
Which is what?
> just because that happened
The subtleties matter. The ads were purchased per issue or over several issues. The publication solicited the advertisers business and not the other way around. The rates were set per publication and were equal for all potential buyers. The ads were static and approved by the publisher before being included for distribution.
Then you get doubleclick now swallowed up by google. Which reversed all of this and reversed all of the incentives as well. So now people publish crap to create automatically filled ad inventory instead of having a more or less fixed inventory which required real work to get contracted buyers for.
People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for them) that are full of ads. International flights have ads on their entertainment. Flights by some airlines I've been on have ads just after the safety instructions. I've been on flights where they have ads for shopping while on the plane.
All of these things happen not because people approve of them, but because they have no choice. Every company in those industries is doing this because they want more profits. Companies do have the choice, but they would flood your eyeballs with ads 24/7 if it was socially acceptable. So they push that line as far as they can take it before people start complaining. And that's how we got to where we are now.
The thing most people don't consciously think about is that advertising is brainwashing and psychological manipulation. It's designed to embed products and ideas into your psyche to get you to do something or think a certain way. Separating me from my money is extortion, though fairly benign. What I find truly insidious is putting thoughts into my head. Political ads and propaganda are weapons of war since they manipulate how societies think and behave. They have the ability to influence how people vote, to topple governments, to cause civil unrest and deep distrust in societies. How most of the world isn't seeing the sociopolitical instability we've been seeing in the past decade as a direct consequence of ad-fueled social manipulation is beyond me.
To speak nothing of the multi-billion dark industry of data brokers, and companies hoovering up and profiting off of our data in perpetuity.
Advertising is evil to its core and is the most harmful yet normalized industry we've ever invented.
Back in the day (yes, I'm that old) the selling point of cable was "TV without any ads". It was marketed as expensive and upscale TV, though. And people don't really want to pay for content, so this business model didn't work out in the end.
If i can legally block/skip/cirvumvent it, i still will. When reading a magazine, i will try and skip the ads. I block as much ads on my internet connection as possible, because i get to say what comes in and goes out.
And companies may complain about my totally legal actions. Not that i am going to to anything about their complaints, for i do not care and never will, but they may totally complain.
Comanies may also try and circumvent my actions to force the ads as long as their actions are legal. I also understand that people do not want to play this cat and mouse game.
However. When products tend to be a certain necessity and in reality you cannot choose but to consume or purchase a specific thing (Microsoft Office for instance. Yes i know there alternatives, but do you really have a choice?), things get a bit weird or shady.
Companies may still legally stuff ads in those 'necessary' products, but it's not something you really want.
You don't 'need' a streaming service or a Verge subscrition and can perfectly survice without having one, but when you are paying for one and you're still getting a bunch of ads, it does not feel right. It feels you're getting screwed because of that weird fine print in a contract.
Companies stopped caring about their customers need as much as possible. They only think about making money. I stopped caring about companies and their products as much as possible. I only think about spending as less as possible of my money. You reap what you sow.
It is unacceptable behavior. I do check how much uBlock Origin has to block for a website of a business and that does inform my opinion of them quite severely. Biggest detractor: Google analytics. It will always be blocked, and not be loaded, but if I see it on their website, expect my opinion of them to fall quite a few levels. Combine that with some JS only website, then they are already lost. I then know they neither care about user experience nor accessibility, and if that was a potential enployer, they would have dropped out of that category, because I don't want to work in a dystopia shop.
Those ads are far less egregious than the kinds of online ads we're discussing. If online ads were the equivalent—static, hosted on the same site, free of data collection—then not only would the experience be much more pleasant, we wouldn't even be able to block them.
Nowadays they are rare outside places like Neocities, but it is true that I don't know of anyone who has gone out of their way to add an adblock rule to block those.
I'd prefer a world where we pay for services we are receiving.
The assumption is that you always pay. Either with your information, or with your money. But the key word there is Either.
Not the question. It was "if the company already offers a less ads for money service" then should "less" mean "zero"?
> People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads.
Is this supposed to prove anything? They don't have a choice. If they offered
a) Lots of ads for $X
b) Many ads for $Y
c) No ads for $Z
How do you see that working out? I would expect (a) and (c) to be massively more popular than (b).
It's just another case of people confusing "What I personally want" with "What actually leads to a sustainable business/ecosystem".
I honestly think people get confused about this because we are so accustomed to getting what we want.
Set a price to make it sustainable.
Offer a 50/year plan with limited ads and a 200/year with no ads and be upfront about why those are the costs.
It’s not rocket science.
Whenever I'm in the US and turn on a TV I'm always amazed at the amount of advertising and the effect it has on the media itself. One of the effects of streaming services was that it allowed script writers and producers total freedom from having to structure a story around the ad breaks.
It's ridiculous the amount of money spent, people's time spent, all on a quest to make the world an uglier and more hostile place.
I wrote a short post on the topic[0] but to save you a click here is the main point: We all complain about advertising that tracks users now. Imagine how valuable the data would be for paying customers now consider which micropayment provider you would trust with that information.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
they felt less intrusive because they were
For all it's faults facebook advertising is similar, you can just scroll past an advert if it's of no interest. I don't find their adverts overly annoying.
Plain, non-animated non-creepy banner ads I've never minded. What I mind are:
1. Ads that are intrusive and distracting
2. Pages that have more ads than actual content
3. Ads that chase you around for two weeks trying to get you to buy something you just bought.
I mean yeah, if I'm paying $20/mo it had better be ad free. But if I'm paying $4/mo, having tasteful ads interspersed among the content is probably fine.