[johnward]

Stop browsing ad supported content then. It's a simple solution that works for everyone involved. Everyone says "i'd happily pay" but few put their money where their mouth is.

For the HN downvoters why is choosing not to consume the ad supported content so bad?

[freehunter]

That's like saying "stop downloading F2P games" or "don't support the RIAA/MPAA". There are really just so few sites that aren't ad supported.

"It's a simple solution that works for everyone involved."

It's literally none of those things. It's not simple, it's not a solution, and it doesn't work for anyone involved.

[johnward]

Leaching content is not much different than the early days of MP3s. So I'm hopeful we'll find a new business model that works without me having to pay for every site on the web I want to browse. I can't remember the last time I pirated an album. The ease of streaming services has made it so convenient that I don't want to manage local files.

Still I don't buy the argument that just because you don't want to pay for the content (by viewing ads) that you should still be able to consume it without ads. From a technical perspective I guess the client can do whatever it wants with the data returned but it's still not "right".

[freehunter]

We're not talking about dodging a toll booth or throwing a hat over the security alarms while walking out of a store. I ate a sample at Costco without buying the product. I got a spray of cologne at Macy's without asking what brand it was. I went to 7/11 on "free slurpee day" and got my free slurpee and nothing else. I'm an extreme couponer who walked out the door owing nothing.

I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free. Pirating is one thing. You're getting something for free that the distributor expects you to pay for. You're going out of your way to get something for free that you know you have to pay for. My ad blocker doesn't get me into Netflix for free, nor does it get past the NYT's paywall. It doesn't do anything fundamentally different from hitting "Reading Mode" built into my iPhone. Hell, it doesn't do anything fundamentally different from the Chrome extension "Cloud to Butt". It doesn't get me for-pay content for free. It couldn't possibly be any further from pirating MP3s.

[trienthusiast]

> I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free

logical fallacy. You took it for free, but it had a price. If the ad has a $3 RPM it means you seeing the ad pays $0.003 to the content producer.

The price was just to let that ad load. not even to watch it or to read it.

It was free for you because you took it, by using a browser extension that lets you watch the site in a different way than the one that was intended.

[stevenh]

All ISPs should be required to convert to nonprofit organizations, and the portion of a user's monthly bill that used to be profit for the ISP needs to instead be evenly distributed in a fair way to the owners of all sites visited by the user.

[johnward]

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not.

[WorldWideWayne]

Sites could easily refuse to serve content to people who run adblockers or who turn off Javascript.

Instead, by serving their content upon request, the sites are implicitly agreeing to my terms. So, I'm not doing anything wrong by running an ad-blocker on my computer.

I think it would be great if someone codified this too. If servers can have Terms of Service, so can users. Wouldn't it be great if my browser could send a TOS to each site once before I accepted content from them? A simple notification of my terms, via a custom header sent from a browser extension would work today, but I don't feel that I need to do this since most servers happily give me their content.

[johnward]

Actually, ad blockers work hard to make sure this can't happen. I'd like for a site to be able to identify those users and decide not to serve content but there is a reason why adblockers don't want this. If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

There is no way to identify an ad blocker in the initial request. If there was the adblocker would just spoof those params anyway. The way most of the scripts detect ad blockers is to load some JS class in an file that is likely to be blocked by an ad blocker. If the class is loaded they assume that ads are not blocked.

[WorldWideWayne]

Actually, there are sites that already can and do detect adblock so however hard the adblockers are working to stop this, it's not working. Getting hung up on the fact that you can't do it in the initial request is introducing a strawman.

> If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

Well, then you'd be an asshole. Running an adblocker on my computer is not malicious, so some site responding with a possibly illegal action wouldn't be a good solution for anyone.

[jlarocco]

Why would I do that? Helping people monetize their website isn't my problem.

If ad-blocking eventually forces 95% of "content providers" to shutdown, I don't really care. There's too much blogspam, too many pointless "me too" posts, and just too much crap out there for me to care. If the whole system implodes and goes away it really won't bother me much. The interesting content will be able to survive with subscriptions or pay-per-read or something.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people don't want to admit that most of the web is more a waste of time than anything, and given the option, nobody would pay for most it. Would I pay $x a month to read nautil.us or medium? Yes. Would I subscribe to some idiot who posts his two cents about an article and then links to medium? No.

I buy books and ebooks, pay for music, and pay to watch movies, I don't mind paying for interesting web content. But I'd be stupid to pay for it or not read it when I can easily, legally read it for free.

[johnward]

> I think a lot of people don't want to admit that most of the web is more a waste of time than anything, and given the option, nobody would pay for most it.

I kind of agree with this but yet so much content that I think is worthless still gets massive amounts of traffic. Like those stupid viral facebook lists that make you click through 30 pages, quizzes or whatever the linkbait flavor of the week is. Yet so many of my friends must find some value in them or they wouldn't keep sharing them.

[jlarocco]

But, like I said, most people wouldn't pay for any of those things. They're "valuable" in that they're amusing and silly and free. Charge anything for them, and they would practically disappear overnight. Even people who don't explicitly block the ads are used to ignoring them at this point.

I'd like to see the overlap between people who click through web ads with people who respond to or click through spam email.

[skaplun]

You dont know if target is ad supported when you click on a link.

[johnward]

I'll give you that argument. Even though people continue to return to those same sites. Then complain about sites that try to implement other means of monetization like paywalls.

[Retra]

That solution doesn't work at all for the massive numbers of people who want content and don't want to pay for it.

[baddox]

How does choosing to not consume ad-supported content help the situation? There is no difference between not viewing an ad-supported web page, and viewing it with an adblocker, apart from the extremely small cost of serving the page. And if the cost of serving the page to adblocking visitors is too high, then that's an extremely obvious flaw in the web site's business model, and is in no way the fault of the adblocking visitors.

[johnward]

Hosting is basically a commodity now but there is still cost involved. Especially if you are actually producing unique content. If I choose to steal a physical product is that an "obvious flaw in the business model" too?

Look, I'm not arguing that advertising is the only way to make money. In fact I think it's ultimately going to die or come to some form users and content producers can agree on. Especially with companies like Apple, and Google (who ironically makes a ton of money on ads) turning against ads. There are certain types of advertising that users do accept right now. Mostly things like "content marketing". Where a user reads some blog post or helpful tip which is really just a way to promote another service or product that the user pays for. Those even do well on HN. Then again HN is basically an advertisement in itself for Y Combinator startup news.

I do think the ability to make money helped the web grow and continue to grow. Advertising is and was a large part of that.

[baddox]

> If I choose to steal a physical product is that an "obvious flaw in the business model" too?

If you give away a physical product, with an implicit expectation that each recipient will take part in some other interaction that will give you a small amount of money, then that is an obvious flaw in the business model.

If you want to apply your analogy of theft, then you need to discuss password-protected web content where people pay for subscriptions. In that case, if someone hacks your site or steals another subscriber's password, then your analogy would hold.

[joosters]

Could you give some examples of websites where there is some form of ToS that contractually disallows access without viewing the ads?

I think you'll find that the overwhelming majority of websites have no such terms of use, so who are you to tell us how we should be accessing these sites?

[johnward]

Is updating the ToS going to actually change anything?

[joosters]

Probably not, as the people who block all ads will likely continue to do so (and who reads ToS anyway?)

But without it, how can you back up any kind of complaint about someone not displaying the ads? There never was any obligation. It's like yelling at someone who leaves their lounge to make a cup of tea during a TV ad break.

[johnward]

I guess it's similar to walking away from the TV. However, DVR providers attempted to use technology to automatically skip ads and there was a huge backlash. The advertisers seem to have won the battle with TV even though you can still fast forward on DVR. Sometimes on-demand doesn't allow it. I still think users are going to win the battle on the web.