[jordigh]

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying.

It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.

More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

[MBCook]

The Verge has a poll going today asking if you use an ad blocker:

"Yes, I want free content and I'll pay the ad blockers" and "No, I want free content and I'll pay the publisher through ads".

I'm with you. I didn't use an ad blocker for years. Then I installed a flash blocker because it kept my computer from trying to melt it's self and play video ads while I was trying to read.

Then we started to get so many ads that prevented me from reading content (the link-hover pop-ups, pop-ups that appear after the content has been loaded for 30s, ads that use JS to move parts of the page around) I started using one on the desktop just so I could try to read sites.

In the last year I've been using my phone/tablet a lot more. The experience has been DREADFUL because of ads. They take up most of the screen, slow loading to a crawl, kick other pages out of memory, make scrolling jittery, etc.

I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. If the ads are relatively unobtrusive (i.e. not covering up content, not flashing, etc.) they're OK with me. I don't mind banners in between paragraphs of a story I'm reading.

But if I can't read your site because of your ads, you're not helping yourself. The creepiness of trackers only ads to all the other problems.

The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker.

(I also subscribe to sites I really like, which only seems fair).

[hyperbovine]

> I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles.

FYI, I had the pleasure of installing an ad-blocker (in the spirit of no advertising, I will not mention which one) on my iPad this morning. It lets me turn off scripts and images. The device now responds like something out of Star Trek. Highly, highly recommended if you just care about reading words on the screen.

[greggman]

I just mostly avoid sites with crappy ads. If I go to a site with a non skippable video ad I just close the tab. It wasn't that important to begin with. That includes YouTube sometimes. Same with other types of annoying ads. No need for an ad blocker for me so far.

[lordnacho]

My guess is many people are just like you. Basically, they've already installed ad blockers in their minds. Open article, click x, read article. Or read article, don't look to the left and right. Or see 45 sec countdown video, quit.

That's basically how I browse. The only ads I'm ever interested in turn out to be reminders of things I've looked at, due to how cookies work.

[stevesearer]

I do the same while reading other websites, but have always designed mine with the goal of never using advertising methods I would be annoyed of. No popovers, no video ads, no full screen takeovers. I also recently removed Google Adsense because the ads it showed were not relevant to my content even though they may have technically been relevant to my readers via retargeting.

Interestingly enough, at least in my field, using these practices have actually had the effect of increasing ad revenue since I am now directly selling ads and cutting out the middleman.

[DavideNL]

> The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker.

I agree... a funny example: https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/611482506400014336

[djur]

Why does one of those responses assume that you have to pay for an ad blocker? I've never heard of such a thing.

[incarnate]

The poll is based around discussion of the new iOS 9 ad blocking browsers, the most popular of which aren't free (at the moment).

The Verge is also no doubt trying to make the poll more divisive with this phrasing, given where their revenue comes from.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351233/poll-ad-blocking-y...

[ploxiln]

If the best ad blocking options for iOS continue to be non-free, and grow in popularity, well that would be pretty eloquent, wouldn't it:

People will pay (a relatively small amount I guess) to see no ads on most sites.

(disclaimer: I use a free ad blocker for firefox on android)

[mappu]

The burgeoning category of iOS 9 ad blockers has several popular non gratis options.

[freshhawk]

And when you add the spyware/malware issues along with a general stance of "I am always allowed to control what my computer does for me" it strikes me as textbook motivated reasoning to frame things as the author has.

It can get outright comical, part of this argument reads to me as a threat: "If you people don't start letting me run code that works against your interests in your browser we will start doing even more unethical stuff to get money".

I don't even disagree that the bad actors will get worse if their business model continues to fail. I just don't see that appeasement is a good solution in any way. And I just don't believe that anyone would find this convincing unless their livelihood depending on them believing it.

[rm999]

>everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible.

I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.

Let's be honest here: this debate for most people is a fully practical one about speed, security, aesthetics, etc. Most people I know are fine with unobtrusive advertising and enjoy the benefits it's provided them up to now. But the state of the digital advertising world has been getting worse and worse for everyone (including the advertisers, btw), and ad blockers have been making that glaringly obvious. What we're seeing is the side effect of a broken industry, not a pushback against consumerism.

[civilian]

But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there.

Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.

[rm999]

>you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property

Such bans are completely possible and within the rights of a local jurisdiction - they're just extremely rare and not something society generally seems to care about. In actuality, branding and advertising is engrained in our culture. I hear friends talk about their favorite ads all the time - instead of the TV show the ads interrupted. I know a very large number of people who watch the Superbowl "just for the ads". I can't convince anyone who visits me in NYC to skip Times Square, because they really want to see that pit of blinking ads for themselves. Many moviegoers love how the theater wastes 15 minutes of their time playing previews (i.e. ads). I could go on and on with my biased examples :)

My point is that we are a consumerist society; anyone who has worked in advertising lives off of this fact and knows it's true. The real problem is internet advertisers took it way too far.

[toothbrush]

I guess that you're right, mostly. Initiatives to pass city laws against advertising do exist, though [1]. I don't live in Grenoble so i cannot comment on how this plays out in practice, but i wish all cities would do that.

1. http://www.euronews.com/2014/11/26/grenoble-europe-s-first-a...

[toomuchtodo]

Billboards are illegal in Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine.

[jonhohle]

I wondered how they got around the first amendment - here's more info on that (not specific to those states) - http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/billboards

[Animats]

Five years ago, Sao Paulo, Brazil, banned all outdoor advertising. All. Not just billboards, large business signs had to go too. It worked out very well.[1]

[1] https://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban

[greggman]

Wow. Thanks for that link.

I'm not sure where the balance is. Too many is certainly bad for a city as well. LA has seen a big increase in strip club billboards. Not sure why that popped in my head.

I actually enjoy the ads on trains in Tokyo and learn about all kinds of stuff from them from products to events at museums. I noticed the lack of ads in the Paris subway (in the cars themselves) left me kind of bored. It doesn't help there's no mobile signals in the subways.

[kuschku]

In my city, we banned outdoors advertising that used animation, flashing lights, lights in any kind, and anything with a bounding box larger than 25 m²

[cm2187]

Billboards can't track you all over the country

[avn2109]

You might be surprised by the computerization and tracking that competently-designed out of home ad setup will run. They are surprisingly good at figuring out who drove by their billboard.

[6d0debc071]

> I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.

There's been plenty of push-back against sales people: Do not call lists, blacklists on phones of late, swearing at the people down the telephone, 'no callers' signs and rather unpleasant greetings, 'No thank you' yelled at the people trying to accost you in the streets, the inability to get to a decision maker without an inside line in b2b sales.

And billboards? Well, they're more an American thing than something I see much of, there are three I can think of in a few miles of where I live, all fairly well hidden and definitely not things that you'd spend time looking at unless you were trying to.

Adverts on TV? Let's not pretend they weren't annoying, or that we didn't skip over them in recordings whenever we could. They were just an unfortunate cost of doing business that there wasn't a way around bar sighing and leaving the room to do something else for a few minutes. At least for myself, they were one of the big things that finally decreased the quality of programming to a point where it wasn't worth the bother of owning a TV. 15-20 minutes between 5 minute adverts? I think I'll just buy the DVD....

Web advertising is more like the salesmen than the other things, mind. Things that attempt to force your attention to them and try to interact with your computer in various undesirable ways.... If it was just a .JPEG at the top of every page I doubt anyone would give them five minutes thought one way or the other.

[frik]

We need better ads, e.g. a comeback of the traditional banner ads where ads where just a single picture with a link.

If you really need a video ad, create a small size mp4 movie and add a link, e.g. 70KB for 30s video.

But nowadays ads are too overblown with huge JS code, invasive behaviors, and still a lot of flash animations and videos. Basically the current situation is the fault of many advertisement networks that produce bad ads and pay little to the website owner. And many website owners that put too many ads on their sites and have choosen the wrong ad networks.

A subscription model won't work for many sites. (there will always be another site like yours that will offer the content for free sponsored by ads, and you will loose most of your traffic) Also it would mean a come back of the dark ages before the WorldWideWeb when Bill Gates had his failed idea about "The Microsoft Network" (1995 MSN version 1) and when there were still teletext services like BTX in Germany where you had to pay premium price to view each single (text) page. The idea of paying $3/month for 100 websites won't fly, such ideas come from individuals that think Facebook is the internet and only visit Facebook and maybe two other websites.

None of the subscription and pay per view model were too successful, obviously the free WorldWideWeb with the ad model won. And if there is a need for an ad blocker, then only one that blacklists & blocks the very bad ad network players. Ads that crash the mobile browser, flash ads, video ads with enabled audio, popup ads, invasive tracking.

[kuschku]

And we need relevant ads.

If I’m watching a let's play on YouTube, I don't care about buying crayola crayons. If you’d present me an ad for the game the player plays, on the other hand, I’d probably buy it. Maybe even give the youtuber like a 2% cut of the sales.

[solistice]

The thing about that is that targeting, even with all the personal data advertisers get acess to, is still hard work and never 100% accurate. Also it assumes that most advertisers know how to work the controls, which sadly does not seem to be the case.

The best kind of advertising is invisible to those uninterested and visible to those that stand to benefit from the offer. Most good online advertising systems are incentivized towards that, but then schools incentivize towards good grades, and they don't produce one examplary student after another.

Part of the problem may be the esteem of the profession. No kid tells himself "I want to work on PPC optimization and better Ad Targeting". It's a terrible pity a profession that handles informing consumers about goods offered is so shrouded in ignorance. How many brilliant products designed by even more brilliant engineers failed in the cradle because nobody ever found out about them, or the ones that did couldn't make out their use? Because when you build a better mousetrap...you've got a better mousetrap and the world keeps using the ones they have.

Also that 2% cut of sales would be there if the youtuber were to post an affiliate link.

[kuschku]

Yes, exactly what I mean. Use more affiliate networks instead of advertising for useless products.

[solistice]

Well, that'd be an idea, but it puts the decision cost in the hand of the content creators instead of that of advertisers. They suddenly have to make decisions for what products are appropriate for their audience, or more likely, what'll result in the largest cut. They won't neccesairly be much more efficient at it either.

And it won't neccesairily lead to less obtrusive advertising.

Useless products seems a little harsh, since a truly useless product wouldn't survive for long. You might view them as useless, but then a high schooler might not know what to do with a cisco rack, and say the same thing. Which means cisco shouldn't advertise their products to highschoolers (for the most part).

[kuschku]

The way Google advertising works today is not effective at all. By the time you get an ad for a product, you always have already bought it.

The products that are advertised might not be useless, but the current advertisement bubble will hopefully fail soon.

[ifdefdebug]

Allow your browser to store cookies between sessions and keep it signed in at G, T and F and you'll get relevant ads. I personally prefer ad blockers.

[kuschku]

No, relevant ads based on the content of the page, not based on your browsing behaviour.

Google Ads based on browsing behaviour only try to sell you stuff that you already bought and no longer need. By the point the ad shows you graphics cards, like for me right now, I already bought one. When I was searching for one, the ads were showing me crayola crayons instead.

Make relevant ads based on what the person needs right now. No need for cookies or any tracking.

[frik]

Exactly, ads should be relevant to page content. Showing me afs based on my browsing history is downright wrong and feels etremly creepy, plus most items we already own by the time we see such ads anyway.

[kuschku]

As I said.

And this is why I hope the current type of tracking becomes unprofitable very soon – it would reduce creepiness, and might actually improve ads to reduce tracking.

[LeoNatan25]

No! If the OP is on a "Let's play" video, a relevant ad is about a similar video game, computer hardware, etc. The version of "relevant ads" is a tracked ads, where he would see a sex toy ad on the video because he looked for sex toys the day before. But that is not a relevant ad to the content consumed.

[ThomPete]

The problem fundamentally really is that too many people are trying to say the same thing and so it becomes a commodity that can only be countered by attracting huge number of visitors to your specific site and bombard them with adds.

Then you look at something like Maria Popovos www.brainpickings.org and you realize that there are other ways to build a business around content without it being advertizing centric.

But sure if you are in competition with 3000 other media outlets all trying to say the same about the same 5 subjects then this is the result.

[JupiterMoon]

I disagree. I use an adblocker to take some control over what code executes on my computer. There have been numerous attacks contained in ads in recent years and I regard my blocker (and no script) as one essential part of my security process.

[noobie]

>I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.

It's not the the irrelevant parties that bother me, it's the targeted ads based on my history that do!

[lazyjones]

> It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need.

That's probably the most common reason. I doubt people actually click on annoying ads in significant numbers these days. Perhaps publishers could settle for tracking only, preferably server-side without 3rd parties involved, thereby removing the most common motivation for ad blocking? Tracking data could then be sold to e-commerce sites for retargeting based on reading habits. Everyone wins, especially if privacy-conscious users can opt out of this kind of tracking.

[mocookie]

Server-side tracking would be even harder to opt out of than the current setup.. the server could choose to not send you the article if you don't send it what it wants (ie proof of your identity, your age/address/name, etc)

[Mz]

More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

Yet, you are consuming someone else's writing as a minimum. I have taken ads off most of my websites and added a tipping option. I hope that turns out to be successful. I currently don't get enough traffic for it to support me outright. Most people on the web find that donate buttons do little or nothing. They turn to ads because it is a way to get paid.

What are you doing to try to solve the problem of monetizing the web some way other than ads? If you aren't doing anything to try to promote another monetization strategy, then you are basically promoting slavery in that you are expecting people to make the web happen without being paid for it. You are expecting people to work for free. Currently, many people do work for free, some of them in hopes that it will lead to money at some point. Some of them are quite bitter about it. (Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287)

I have been online about 17 years. I have steadily watched good, free content disappear and get replaced by something that helped pay the bills for the content providers. I also loathe consumerism. I live a spartan life and I expect to continue doing so. But the Internet is important to me and it needs to be monetized somehow.

I am not trying to be disrespectful to you and I apologize if it at all sounds that way. It is easy to say what we do not like about what we currently have. It is much harder to find a viable alternative. I don't know how else to start that dialogue and I think it is extremely important that it get started.

[TheCoelacanth]

It's not slavery; it's volunteerism. No one is forced to produce content for the web.

Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.

[Mz]

Let me put that another way: People currently try to monetize by putting ads on their sites. Other people use adblockers, denying them payment but benefitting from their labor. If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people. I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor. People who use ads are not wanting to do this work for free, as "volunteers." They are looking to get paid. In the past, people who labored for the benefit of others without recompense were called slaves. Perhaps you would like to provide an alternate term? Does "Victims of theft" work better for you?

[itsybitsycoder]

But websites don't ask for my consent before they show me ads, and I have no idea what they expect the "price" of an article to be before I click on it, nor what I'll be getting in return. Why does the author of an article have a unilateral right to decide the terms of exchange?

Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've blocked the ads.

[Mz]

I am not suggesting they should have a unilateral right. I am asking for suggestions on how to solve this so that content producers can get paid without posting ads, something no one has yet to really respond to.

The Internet has created a situation that did not previously exist. It is natural that we don't automatically know what the solution is.

[jlarocco]

They can charge money, like people have been doing for thousands of years...

I post about this in every ad-block article. The reality that nobody wants to admit is that most web content isn't worth paying for. Web publishers know it, and they're scared of a web that isn't funded by advertisements, because they'll have to find new jobs.

[toomuchtodo]

A basic income is probably the only way writers survive writing; there just aren't enough people willing to pay enough for content for a majority of writers to survive off of it.

[ifdefdebug]

The internet has created a situation of millions of people writing text that nobody wants to read, yet you frequently stumble upon it when searching for real content.

In my experience, the contents that really matter are written either by people who are NOT trying to make money from their writing because they wish to share experiences from their day jobs or free time, or by people who are payed for writing by someone but not by their readers.

[JupiterMoon]

> Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've blocked the ads.

The better option is to ask the user to turn off their adblocker and explain why (and say that the adverts are vetted for malware properly).

[gress]

What has malware got to do with anything?

[Matumio]

Wikipedia wasn't written by "victims of theft".

I don't see how I exploit them by reading their articles - more likely the opposite is true, and the authors actually hoped that many people would read their article and that their readers would get something out of it.

Maybe you are idealizing wage labour? The economy isn't fair, it's more like "winner takes all". There is a blurred line between work and joy. Some people just write for the recognition (which is not a synonym for pay), or because they really care about the topic. If only 0.01% of the internet population is motivated like that, then content will always be produced no matter what.

If they were full of existential fears, with no idea how to pay their bills, they wouldn't have the energy for writing at all. Or maybe they would be writing about their problems instead.

[copsarebastards]

> If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people.

No, I desire the business model to change.

> I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor.

My ancestors were literally kidnapped out of their homes and forced to do backbreaking work for little pay in intolerable conditions, often while being raped and beaten daily. You have a shitty business model and you want to compare your business failure due to incompetence to that? No, fuck that. Your comparison is outright offensive. Your failure to monetize your labor is not equivalent to slavery and it's disgusting for you to claim it is.

[Mz]

There is current!y a running battle between people using ads to try to monetize their work and people using ad blockers. Lots of formerly well monetized businesses are being hit hard by this. This is not one individual's personal incompetence. It is a widespread trend that is de facto denying people a "living wage" who previously had a very successful business model.

I am sorry you are offended. But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse. Not all slaves were also actively abused. But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.

[copsarebastards]

> But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse.

I disagree, slavery is about force against consent. I agree that abuse isn't necessary for slavery to be bad, but force is. Nobody is forcing content creators to create content without their consent.

> But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.

I do plenty of labor for the benefit of others without recompense: I volunteer. Again, it's not about labor without recompense, it's about force. Slave labor and volunteerism are both labor without recompense: the difference is that slave labor is forced against the laborer's consent.

But let's go back to the ownership thing for a second: are you really claiming that people who use ad blockers are trying to take ownership of content creators and/or their content? Really? Even if I did agree with you that slavery is about ownership, your argument doesn't make sense.

EDIT: At a more fundamental level, it's completely arrogant and entitled to assume that just because you performed labor someone should pay for it. I've put a lot of labor into learning how to play guitar. I could probably post a bunch of recording of my guitar playing and get a bunch of people to listen to them and view ads. But I couldn't get anyone to pay for my recordings, because I still suck at guitar. Am I entitled to recompense for the many hours I've spent practicing?

[gress]

This is not accurate. Using an ad blocker makes no demand whatsoever of people producing content, who are completely free to stop displaying it in public.

Imagine the following:

In a busy shopping mall, a busker starts to play music. A crowd starts to form enjoying the music.

Then, a strange thing happens - people with clipboards and cameras start to walk through the crowd taking photos of the shoppers and their children, making notes of their genders, heights and weights, clothing, and the shopping bags they are carrying, plus whether or not the women are pregnant.

A minute or two into the performance, more people walk through the crowd, holding placards with brand and product names on them. They walk up to each person, holding the placard in front of them and blocking their view, using a stopwatch to make sure they do so for at least 30 seconds.

One of the women says - 'hey, that's not cool - stop being so creepy'.

The clipboard and placard people remain silent, but the busker shouts - "hey - that's how I get paid! If you don't like it you are a criminal, stealing my performance".

[gglitch]

How about, as a start, an ad industry that voluntarily and transparently (e.g, using open source software and business contracts) restricts itself to displaying ads that (a) do not directly impinge upon the browsing/reading experience, and (b) do not track?

[Mz]

Thanks.

Though, to my mind, that isn't really an alternative monetization model. It is the same model, but tweaked.

[x0x0]

and discover those ads pay virtually nothing, which is why we are where we are. It's not like publishers want to spend their waking hours integrating with adtech vendors.

[JupiterMoon]

Don't writers of most blogs make more money from a mixture of native advertising and affiliate links anyway?

[bradleyjg]

If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical.

I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?

[Erik816]

I can't agree with you that blocking adds on a webpage is unethical. I am accessing a website through a web browser that has the ability to modify the page before it is presented to me. How I choose to view the content that is made available on the open web is my business. If content producers don't want to make their content available in a format where ads can be blocked, they can simply stop doing so.

[PhasmaFelis]

> If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical.

What you're saying here is that, if you don't like advertising, your only ethical option is to never use the Web again. (Well, I suppose I can read the comments on Hacker News. None of the articles, though.) That is not reasonable. I have actually gone out of my way to configure my adblocker to un-block as many inoffensive ad providers as possible, because I want to support the sites I use, but when those sites are knowingly degrading not just my browsing experience but the functioning of my computer, measures need to be taken.

> I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?

Because there weren't any new models yet. Which is why the downloaders wanted people to come up with one.

[bradleyjg]

There were options. You could go to concerts, you could listen to the radio. You could go to free concerts in the park. What you couldn't do was listen to the latest Britney album when and wherever you wanted without going and buying the CD or unethically downloading it off of Napster.

You could tell yourself that you were perfectly justified in doing so. In fact it was Britney's fault for not coming up with easy way for you to pay her and get 128mbit mp3s from your pajamas in your room. But I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.

[emp_zealoth]

But now there is Spotify, and it's getting more money than I'd spend on buying CD's I haven't downloaded any music in years

[ianlevesque]

Yeah I mean, iTunes Music Store never came into existence to fill the demand. You must be right.

[loco5niner]

You're getting shot down here. Perhaps if you found an argument NOT based on the music model...

[Khaine]

Do you watch ads when they are on the TV, you know to support the content, or do you go to the bathroom, surf the web etc?

Why is it suddenly different when its the web?

[Nadya]

>All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one

Most people now pay for their music through iTunes, easily-accessible YouTube channels, Patreon, or Satellite XM radio.

So I'd say they found new models - and they're working.

The issue with music was a different one (accessibility/distribution) and not a privacy-concerned one. So it doesn't quite fit. But they were able to change their business model to accommodate.

Now it's "change your business model or die." for another industry.

[JulianMorrison]

People are, it's called Patreon.

Which would be a good model, too, for "free but we need our salary paid" content.

[jordigh]

There's also Google Contributor.

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

I'd be fine with websites requiring a Google Contributor login for unlimited access.

[gkop]

Also Beacon: http://www.beaconreader.com

[kuschku]

Can we PLEASE stop posting stuff that is US-only? Solving an issue only in the US does NOT help the world.

[powertower]

The "either help everyone or help no one" mentality helps --> no one.

Also consider that usually a problem has to be solved in your garage before it's solved globally.

Other times the situation is that there are external barriers (such massive fraud, incompatible laws, etc) and issues (such as the market not being developed enough yet, little to no demand, etc) that prevent the local solution getting scaled out to a global solution.

[kuschku]

It's annoying when there are countries that have the ability to use it – like NFC is everywhere accepted, but no one has a system that uses it yet – but the US-only solution on HN is presented as "solves all issues, everywhere".

Or, at the point where we are, just put a "US-only" banner at the top. Because that’s the case. Most solutions here could be implemented far more easy in countries across Europe than in the US, but they are implemented in the US, and only the US. Despite demand.

Like Netflix only in 2014 for most of Europe, and then complaining that europeans pirate all the movies.

[tertius]

Point me to an AUP that would make your music to article an apples to apples comparison and I may listen.

[GnarfGnarf]

If you work for a living, what type of company do you work for? Do they sell something? Do they advertise? Would your salary be reduced if they stopped advertising and their sales declined?

If their sales would not be affected by cutting out advertising, march into the Marketing department right now, and tell them; they need to know this.

[sambrand]

I respect your ideals. And I'd love to hear about how you plan to move the Internet towards Utopia. But I'm not sure consuming without paying (attention to ads) is really the most respectful or effective way to get there.

[jordigh]

Google contributor seems like a good plan.

[eropple]

Opt-in solutions are not solutions, though. You say you're willing to pay--but nobody else is. The commonses are gettin' real tragic here.

[heroh]

being logged into Google while browsing around the web is stupid. It's a isht plan.

[stevenh]

ISPs should be legally required to pay a fixed percentage of their profits per subscriber to the owners of the sites that those subscribers visited. No one seems to have a problem with 70/30 these days, so how about that? The 70% of former ISP profits could instead be distributed in a fair way to site owners based on total time the user spent interacting with their site in the frontmost tab, as calculated in an agreed-upon manner by all the major browser vendors. It would also be auditable by the site owners, because they could run their own page activity analytics and see whether they match up with the level of activity claimed by the detection built into the browsers.

[simoncion]

I assume that you're talking about residential ISPs.

1) Given that actual -non-maintenance- capex on the networks of the major ISPs appears to have been practically zero for decades, I suspect that the major ISPs will claim (and have the paperwork -however legitimate- [0] to back it up) that their per-customer profits are near-zero or negative.

2) Good ISPs are run like good utilities: any actual profits are either invested in the network, or returned to customers in one way or another. [1] This means that good ISPs actually have a near-zero per-customer profit.

So, all you're going to do with this plan is:

* Raise the -already high- barrier to entry for independent ISPs.

* Make a lot of paperwork.

* Make a lot of DPI hardware vendors very happy.

Noone will get more money, except for the DPI folks. :)

[0] Hollywood Accounting, anyone?

[1] Either through rate reductions, or one-off credits in a billing period.

[JupiterMoon]

What about people that use tor/VPNs? What about people using the free wifi in various cafes and restaurants? What about website that don't want to make money (this forum)? There are too many corner cases. This would result in a huge amount of regulation.

[lcswi]

God no! That would throw altruistic websites into the same bucket as clickbait.

[PhasmaFelis]

> There has to be a better way to finance the web

There is not. There are, however, many even worse ways to finance the web, as the article says.

Money has to come from somewhere. Either you the reader pay for content--which users have proven overwhelmingly unwilling to do--or your advertising views pay for content. I don't like it either, but polite, non-disruptive ads are the best possible solution. We need to push content and advertising provides to insult on those and only those.

[x5n1]

You just hate the economy and want everyone to be unemployed.

[loco5niner]

Why does the economy have to be based on trying to get people to buy things they don't need? I think he has a good point about consumerist society.

[dmayle]

> I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms.

As it turns out, you're guilty of the same thing everyone else is, because you've absolutely missed the point of enabling ad blockers on iPhone

For Apple, it serves two purposes, both of which are hugely anti-competitive. They'll most likely get away with it, due to the fact that they have a minority share of the global smartphone market, but the effect on the marketplace will be drastic.

1) This is an attack on the open web. No matter what anyone says about minority report advertising, ad-supported content is a boon to the public good in that it encourages more sharing and more open sharing of information. Yes, you can go too far, but ad-blockers drastically change the market dynamic. Even the conscientious advertiser is punished by the extremes, which means that the market can not respond to user preferences for ads. In the app store, no such technology will exist, and as such it drives content creators into the walled garden of eden of monetization. There, the market will adapt, and you will be stuck with ads no matter what your preference is, and will have to support ads to the same level as the average user.

2) This is an attack on Google, in many ways. On the one hand it gives Apple an above-average position in the case of their ad network when on their platform (lock-in), on the other hand by starving the open web, they are ultimately starving the future of Google's search technology, helping to erase that advantage.

If we want to go down this route, everyone should be demanding that Apple enable content blockers in apps themselves.

[Khaine]

Android allows ad-blocking in its store, Chrome too. But now that apple is doing it, suddenly its anti-competitive.

Give me a break

[wooster]

Ad blocking is not an attack on the open web. Ad blocking is the open web.

[msh]

So desktop chrome and Firefox is also attacking the open web? They have had ad lockers in their app stores for a very long time.

[makomk]

Neither desktop Chrome nor desktop Firefox are pushing their own, competing method of distributing content that can't be adblocked and that they take a 30% cut on. Also, Firefox at least didn't intentionally add support for adblocking, they just had a powerful add-on system and didn't deliberately stop it.

Apple is deliberately adding support for it on the web whilst pushing people to distribution channels they control that they don't allow adblocking on, and that they get a cut of the revenue from.

[gress]

Separating out 'Desktop Chrome' from Android makes this a deliberate Apple's to Oranges comparison. They are both Google products.

You're free to run 'Desktop Chrome' or Firefox on Apple's 'Deskrop' computers. Nothing anticompetitive there.

[makomk]

Desktop Chrome is the only version of Chrome that actually supports adblocking. The Android version doesn't have any add-on support at all.

[gress]

So Apple is putting user freedom ahead of advertiser freedom in this case, whereas Google is siding with the advertisers for obvious reasons.