[richardwhiuk]

In what world was either dial-up, or high-speed internet free? You have to pay for a connection.

If you don't want to pay for the content, it needs to be funded in some manner - donations or ads - we haven't found any other business models.

[moreira]

> If you don't want to pay for the content, it needs to be funded in some manner - donations or ads - we haven't found any other business models.

I'd argue that it doesn't actually need to be funded at all. The internet and plenty of content on it existed prior to any advertising. People still talked on the internet, and they still put up their own content, even when there was no money to be made. Bloggers would still blog without ads. And we're right now using HN - a free service with free content provided by users, without ads or tracking.

Funding only matters in a worldview where everything you do has to somehow turn a profit and grow to a gigantic scale to bring in even more profit. There was a time when people on the internet weren't looking at it like "how can I get rich from this".

[fecsantos]

> And we're right now using HN - a free service with free content provided by users, without ads or tracking.

It's obvious that ycombinator's business model is not based on Hacker News advertising - but hacker news is still used as platform for their portfolio companies and services. Hacker news is just a curated list, so calling it "free content" is a bit of a stretch, unless you're saying that the content provided are the comments of the user, but I'd argue that the website wouldn't be the same without the link to the content being commented on (which are in a big part, funded by ads). Y-Combinator is for profit by the way, and it invests in companies supported by advertising (e.g. Reddit).

> Funding only matters in a worldview where everything you do has to somehow turn a profit and grow to a gigantic scale to bring in even more profit.

Funding is not required only for growing into a gigantic scale. If you want to open a restaurant in your small town, you'll require some sort of funding. Even if you don't want to profit and just want to cover costs, you'll need a stream of money coming in from somewhere. I personally don't see anything wrong in people getting paid for their work - if you really want to create your own content and give it out for free, you can do so (a lot of people currently do just that).

> There was a time when people on the internet weren't looking at it like "how can I get rich from this".

I'm not sure exactly when that was. There's been people trying to get rich from the Internet for a long long time.

[BjoernKW]

You still have to invest time and money, even if you don't want your service to scale or to get rich from the information you're providing.

At the very least someone has to pay for the server and network infrastructure, maintenance and of course content creation. Some of that might be provided for by public funding while other aspects are covered by enthusiasts putting in their time.

Just because somebody else pays for it or somebody else does the work required it doesn't magically become free.

[icebraining]

HN has ads, they're just low-profile. There's one for Demodesk (YC W19) on the front page right now.

[Valmar]

Online ads are a very invasive business model that only penalizes the end-user, and rarely benefits them.

Especially when ads are often nasty vectors for malware.

[manigandham]

Rarely benefits them? What about 95% of the content on the internet that ads pay for?

Malware isn't advertising and security is an issue in any industry and sector.

[jonathanstrange]

Most people can do without those 95% percent. Never fall into the trap of believing that because you offer something for free (i.e., ad-driven) that people consume, they like your offer or couldn't live without it. That seems to be a common misconception among Internet companies that do not sell any real products.

Most stuff on the commercial Internet exists just for entertainment. If people can't get X-entertainment for some reason, it's likely that most of them won't care at all and turn to Y-entertainment instead. For example, if Youtube closed tomorrow, there would be an outcry about the lost pirated music and a few silly popular Youtubers, but after a month the site would already have been forgotten.

[vimslayer]

Eh, most people can do without 100% of the internet, but they don't want to. And why should they? It's easy to opt out of ads - just don't use sites that have them. But if person A wants to watch some ads in exchange of "just" entertainment (which is downplaying the importance of entertainment, but whatever), why should that bother me?

Assuming of course that person A is fully aware of what they are giving said ad company, which currently is often not the case.

[rusk]

> if Youtube closed tomorrow, there would be an outcry

Clever youtube though, let you become a paying customer and bypass the ads. It really is a very compelling resource once the millstone of advertising is removed.

[majidazimi]

It's just not ads. I'm willing to pay for the content but I need the guarantee that content provider or company won't sell my usage information. The problem is that ad-tech companies won't stop when we start paying. Google will still sell our usage profiles even if we buy YouTube music.

[rusk]

> I need the guarantee that content provider or company won't sell my usage information

I think GDPR provides this no? Leaving the privacy aside for a second though, there's other ways in which pervasive advertising is destructive. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to side-step even if I am still dealing with evil-global-mega-corp (but then again, what large company isn't?).

EDIT - this thought actually occurs to me, that your data is probably safer with evil-global-mega-corp than with smaller businesses even state institutions because at least evil-global-mega-corp knows better, and has a larger attack surface for scrutiny.

[manigandham]

Why not start a service that does this?

[manigandham]

Who are you to judge what other people can do without?

People can live without a lot of things, but that's not what this is about. We're in a modern society where people can fill their wants and desires, and they're perfectly able and willing to make their own choices about the content they consume and how they pay for it.

Youtube is just distribution. The content, the demand for it, and the creators who produce will still exist and still continue to be paid primarily by advertising.

[jonathanstrange]

You have misunderstood me. My statement was merely supposed to reflect an empirical fact, not some sort of personal value judgement. I could be wrong about that empirical fact, of course, but the history of the Internet has shown several times before that people cared much less about some companies than those companies had wished for. See AOL, Myspace, Yahoo, Altavista, ...

[renholder]

>What about 95% of the content on the internet that ads pay for?

This is such a pedestrian argument, as if advertising pays for the content to be made and then hosted - when the truth of the matter is that someone else pays for the content to be created (and hosted) and that cost is recouped (with additional profit added on top), after the fact by advertising.

For example, advertising companies are not paying for YouTube content creators to create their content and then for it to be hosted on YouTube. Advertising companies seek those with the largest audience (typically, that requires having made content a priori, yeah?) and then make partnerships with those people and, then, those people may make videos pushing those products.

WSJ, since this is predominantly an American board, doesn't have advertisers paying their reporters', photographers', editors', etc. salaries. Advertisers are not paying for the content to be created or to be hosted. All of that is done by WSJ, who then recoups the costs via advertising, yeah?

So, the only point at which "95% of the content on the internet that ads pay for" is true, is (predominantly) after the content has been made and hosted and is only true over time (e.g.: not with immediate effect).

>Malware isn't advertising

You have that backwards from the OC's comment: Advertising networks have been used to push malware.

>...and security is an issue in any industry and sector.

This comes across as a whataboutism, "So? Other industries have security problems, too!" and, whilst true, largely ignores the fact that those other industries (mostly at large) weren't leveraged as attack vectors to spread malware. (I'm assuming your meaning of "industry" infers the meaning of "commercial industry", that generates revenue in exchange for a product or service, which would ignore the obvious things like P2P and the like.)

[vegasdew]

Is this even an argument? We don't pay for Apple's engineers/designers, Foxconn's workers when buying an iPhone. But they won't be paid if iPhone stops selling.

[manigandham]

Ok? The point still stands that advertising ultimately pays for the content. Manufacturers buy raw parts first and then recoup the costs by selling the final product, does that mean consumers aren't actually paying for the business?

Security is an eternal problem and a completely separate topic from advertising as a business model. Do you suggest we stop using email because some people got scams and viruses? Or can we talk about communications while acknowledging that it's separate from implementation and UX issues?