[notacoward]

> there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service

How about when the service can not exist otherwise? Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. If the value of the service is heavily based on network effects, the result is a network too small to reach the break-even point. I'm not saying you should view ads you don't want to, but demanding that people provide a free service you find useful while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me.

[xatan_dank]

>How about when the service can not exist otherwise?

Then maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing. There are plenty of web services not supported by advertisement. This is not a case where "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is acceptable. The current system of sustaining webservices is broken and outdated.

[kbenson]

> If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing.

You are conflating specific negative aspects of the current advertising landscape with advertising in general.

"Advertising" covers a large spectrum of actions, from the sign above the corner store in a neighborhood saying its name to complex analysis of online behavior, personal traits and current disposition to influence your actions. There are both positive and negative aspects of online and offline advertising. Oversimplification of the description and overly broad statements based on that simplification aren't really useful to a beneficial change.

[anigbrowl]

When I see evidence of the advertising industry working hard to eliminate dark patterns and junk I'll take that argument seriously. Advertising is not a benign or neutral commercial activity, it has huge externalities which most of its proponents prefer to ignore.

[xatan_dank]

I'm not at all, because I'm not talking about advertising in general. I'm aware of what advertising is. I'm talking specifically about the same kind of advertising that the article posted is.

[kbenson]

You responded to something about advertising in general ("How about when the service can not exist otherwise?") with something about specific negative advertising practices. Regardless of what the article is about, is seems the comment you replied to was talking about advertising in general (and was itself responding to a comment referring to advertising in general).

I don't think we're going to get very far if we aren't talking about the same thing.

[peeters]

> If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom...

You're begging the question. The point of the article is saying that advertising should be fixed. You're saying advertising shouldn't be fixed because services shouldn't be using advertising because advertising is broken.

[xatan_dank]

So how are you going to be able to determine when advertising is 'fixed'? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking or hoping the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.

You put a lot of words in my mouth. I'm saying Internet advertising is broken to the point where there is no reasonable hope of fixing it. I'm saying even if advertising were "fixed", simply paying for services would be a better move. I'm not saying advertisement should not be fixed- I don't care. I'm saying all of this "fixing ads" nonsense is unreasonable and backwards thinking.

[papabrown]

I don't want to seem like an old-timer telling the young whipersnappers soda pop used to be a nickel but I was involved in the internet before there was a web. So, I've sort of seen the growth over time and believe it or not there was a time before advertising. Most websites didn't have advertising. Nowadays your strange uncle has ads on his personal blog because someone told him about AdSense. Forget that fact that he earns $0.15 a year, he's a professional blogger.

For awhile, most of the content on the internet was non-commercial. People, myself included, posted stuff online because we wanted to share information. We had no expectation of ever receiving compensation for it.

Nowadays way too many people want to thumb their nose at boring jobs and travel the world writing blog posts and getting paid for it. Or they want to become Instagram stars so they pimp products for money.

I'm not saying that as a cranky old man. What I'm getting at is everybody is trying to monetize everybody else. It's not that you get annoying ads on CNN, it's that your cousin is trying to get you to watch his YouTube channel so he can quit the rat race and live in Thailand for $500 a month.

I know this is unrealistic but I would like to see things move back more towards how they used to be. Ad platforms used to actually have standards. You had to be doing pretty decent traffic to even be considered. The bar was set high enough that it limited the number of people who created websites as commercial ventures.

People used to create websites because they were passionate about a topic, not because they figured out that there was an SEO niche where they could rank #1 for a keyword and then slap ads all over the site.

And the way this relates back to services that could not exist otherwise, if they're valuable enough people will either pay to use them or advertisers will bid up the price for the limited advertising inventory and the provider can make a decent return.

Because the real problem is that the supply of content is virtually infinite while the money going into the advertising space is finite. Thus, supply of space to advertise exceeds demand willing to pay to advertise on it.

[DanielBMarkham]

"...while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me..."

No realistic way that you can think of. Simply because you can't figure it out and nobody else has figured it out doesn't mean it's impossible. After all, why should anything change if there's no need to?

The ad model is broken. If you want to run ads, get on your content management system and hand-type in your own ads. Own them. Don't toss off the responsibility for what appears on your site to a bunch of third-party yahoos. If that's as much as you care about the user experience, why the hell shouldn't they block whatever tripe is coming down the line?

[notacoward]

> Simply because you can't figure it out and nobody else has figured it out doesn't mean it's impossible

At my age I probably have even less patience with the "if I don't know how then nobody does" attitude than you do. Nonetheless, until an alternative solution to that problem is discovered, we're stuck with ads. We can make them better, but we can't realistically demand that they go away unless we also accept that everything currently funded by ads goes away too. I don't just mean Google and Facebook. I also mean the advertisers whose business models depend on those platforms and whose products would not be on the market otherwise. Ads don't just support big companies. They also support moms and pops, and BTW charities use ads too.

So you want that reality to change? Good for you. Seriously. But what are you contributing to that effort? What's your great idea for easing our dependence on ads? I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts.

[ouid]

There are exactly two possible outcomes of advertising.

1. You spend no more money on products that are advertised to you, and advertisers don't consider your view meaningful, and won't pay for it.

2. Advertisers make extra money from you, either by getting you to buy a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, or by getting you to buy a version of a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, and will pay less than that extra expected revenue for your view.

that revenue comes from your pocket. If you are in the latter category, then whether or not advertising is positive depends on whether or not you believe that advertising causes your decision making process to be more or less rational.

[mynewtb]

Name one.

[wmeredith]

All Google services

No ads = no Android, no Google Maps, no Gmail, etc...

[ams6110]

Those things are useful. I would pay for Google Maps. Lots of people bought Garmins and TomToms for their cars.

I do pay for email.

Apple has iOS and that is not ad-supported.

Ads are not the only way.

[ashark]

Free community and paid, privacy-respecting efforts get squashed by the very presence of the spy-vertisers in the market, usually in the idea phase. A world without those products wouldn't fail to have equivalents for most or all of them, and likely quite a few actually free ones (though probably a little less convenient).

[EDIT] I'd add that sensible governments might well consider something like mapping/route-finding to be basic infrastructure and worthy of funding, absent free commercial options. Especially now that we've seen what that's like. So the US might be screwed but much of Europe and Asia could well come out with tax-funded alternatives to nearly-universally-valuable but expensive/extensive services like that.

[bradjohnson]

From the above poster:

>Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be.

I'm not convinced that there is a way that google maps could be as big as it is without ad revenue. Most people just wouldn't pay and the only reason that you would consider paying now is because the infrastructure that ad money has paid for has made it worthwhile.

[anigbrowl]

You're probably right, but:

a) Ads on google tend to be much less annoying than from other vendors because google maintains relatively high standards for how it displays ads. I consider it a reasonable trade-off and don't block ads on Google services - they are usually relevant and not overtly annoying or distracting.

b) the fastest possible growth isn't necessarily the highest good. You don't get a better plant by trying to pull it up out of the ground, and things that are grown fast don't always last that well. Wikipedia doesn't have advertising and while it's subject to many criticisms I would argue that its slower organic growth makes it more sustainable over the long term.

[bradjohnson]

a) Yes, I agree.

b) Not my area of expertise, but google doesn't fill half its website with a plea for donations once a year. As a layman it doesn't appear to be more sustainable than google. What is your argument for the sustainability of donations over ads, ignoring the obvious differences of these two companies?

[ams6110]

Again, people paid for Garmin and TomTom devices and data plans long before Google Maps.

[bradjohnson]

And no longer... The market peaked and fell 10 years ago for both of those companies while google continues to grow. I'm not convinced that it would be a good strategy for google to follow their example.

To be clear, I agree that ads are not the ONLY way, just the most effective way for many companies. I think that there is no way that google could so easily steal market share from both Garmin and TomTom without ad revenue.