[stvswn]

But, you like accessing content for free, correct? That content doesn't exist and then ads are layered on, the context exists BECAUSE of ads. Like, no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads.

This is how mass media has worked from the get-go. Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising. Entire genres of popular music wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Online advertising did not create the notion of advertising being the predominant media funding model.

And, just because you'd rather ads not exist, it doesn't mean there's something "evil" or whatever about a business promoting itself. I'm going to guess that if you ever find yourself needed to market a business you'll be happy if there's an option to advertise effectively.

[retzkek]

> no one would produce the content without the plan to make their money back via ads.

What is your plan? You just produced content, on a site with no ads, and no links to other ways to capitalize off it. I'd argue most content is created by people who just want to share something they are passionate about. Maybe a lot of it is low quality, and "you get what you [or someone else] pay for" can apply, but a world without ad-supported distribution models would not be without content.

> Radio stations were built by advertisers for the purpose of advertising

Radio stations and other traditional mass media also require substantial investment and resources; putting a web page on the internet does not (unless we make it, by putting all our "pages" on a couple giant sites, who then need revenue to provide those services, hence serve ads).

[shantly]

> But, you like accessing content for free, correct?

Meh. The best online content's fully paid, donationware (Wikipedia), or simply free. 100% of the ad-supported stuff could go away tomorrow and my quality of life would suffer not at all. Hell, might go up. Meanwhile spyvertising-paid "free" services & software are sucking the air out of the room for paid and open-source alternatives (and protocols—god is that ecosystem bad for protocols) alike, for a variety of things I might like to buy or use or contribute to.

I don't get the "but think of what the Web would look like without ad money!" doom & gloom. It'd be fine. Go ahead, outlaw them. I do not care even a little.

[ACow_Adonis]

Your post is literally the content I'm reading that you claim no one would produce without ads, and it's unsupported by ads.

And again (I feel like a broken record on this site), that's a totally inaccurate history of the internet.

Content arrived first, THEN the advertising companies arrived.

[cameronbrown]

Hacker News is not mass media. Plus don't forget Y Combinator funded many ad-based platforms. HN isn't free either.

[ACow_Adonis]

A fair point.

So I see two takeaway questions: would we be fine/better off without mass media funded by advertising(it's obvious what my answer to this would be since I don't generally listen to it or watch it, though I acknowledge it going away won't likely happen).

And the second, would content we like to consume/ be worthy of consumption be produced anyway, and my contention is that it would still, just like it did in the past and continues in the current (some free, some paid for), as can be seen in the history of books, early internet, street art, leisure, bloggers, hobbyists, cinema, documentaries, etc.

There might be a third point of mine, which is that we're actually suffering from a glut of content and competition for eyeballs: so to me, worrying about that content disappearing is a bit like worrying about dying of thirst while drowning in a freshwater lake.

[cameronbrown]

I don't know, really. I don't want to go back to a time where artists struggle to eat, to make a metaphor. Independent creators are using advertising revenue now too.

[etblg]

> But, you like accessing content for free, correct?

I'm really not sure about that anymore.

I pay for The Athletic, I was hesitant at first but now I really enjoy getting access to top quality sports articles with no ads and a nice clean experience.

I pay for Google Play Music (for however long that lasts) and I'm really happy I can just listen to music without needing to hear more fucking ads in my life.

I support a few Youtube channels on Patreon because the advertising money on Youtube isn't enough for them to cover their bills. At this point there's a good number of channels I would rather pitch a few dollars at each month than have to sit through ads (which are adblocked anyway, whoops) and have their content threatened by what Youtube determines advertisers care about.

I pay for Netflix and never have to watch ads (so far) while watching TV. Whenever I watch live TV it drives me crazy how many breaks they take to show me the same stupid commercials over and over again for stuff I will never buy.

You see it with online sports packages that don't have the rights to show TV feeds online -- so when it's time for commercials, it just switches over to a silent image saying "Commercial Break in Progress". I pay $20 a month for DAZN and I'm not sure how much longer I can stand watching the awful commercials that keep getting shown at every break.

I donate a small amount every once in a while to Wikimedia and in return we all get access to a free encyclopedia that stays eternally relevant without advertising.

We can live in a world where we pay for content and be happy. We can live in a world without advertising. It's really not that bad paying a little to get a much better experience.

[hyperdimension]

Actually, that's not (historically) the case. From The Attention Merchants (a great book, by the way), page 12:

>"Day's idea was to try selling a paper for a penny...he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky...was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What Day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood--more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him--was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product" (emphasis original)

His paper ended up being the New York Sun.

Just something to think about. It wasn't always like this.

[rch]

Actually, I'm aggressively looking for higher quality content that I can pay for, like (e.g.) nzz.ch for news. I was also a Google Contributor subscriber, before it required an opt-in for site operators.

What I would really like is to pay for the Google Feed (aka Google Now) on my Pixel instead of having to ignore the ads that have recently started to show up there.

[dorkinspace]

Does Google Now still not respect "I'm not interested" flagging?

I've tried to use it many times, but I'll keep seeing the same stories I've marked as not interested. One easy example is any Marvel release. I'll say not interested in "move title". Then the same story will pop up in the Marvel category. I'll repeat the process for Marvel, and the same story will show up as entertainment, repeat until I close the app.

[rch]

I've had good results from consistently tuning my feed over the last few years, particularly by excluding low quality sources altogether.

I have seen the phenomena you're talking about though. For me it might be a political scandal that I mark as uninteresting, which then shows up again under some peripherally related category.

[jerkstate]

for some reason, they think I love baseball, so I get a ton of baseball alerts. I need to accept notifications to the Google app because that's how I auth to gmail. Pretty stupid that the same app sends necessary and completely useless alerts, but I'm sure that's intentional.

[criddell]

Advertising isn't the big problem (IMHO), it's the tracking and surveillance. We give up too much for what we get back.

[perl4ever]

I literally just tried to order some pants on the internet, and I couldn't because the retailer's site broke when interacting with my ad blocker.

I don't care what conditions someone wants to put on using their website, per se, and agree they have the right. The problem is, that I can't easily selectively interact with the part of the internet that isn't polluted by unreasonable advertising.

The evil part is the mixing of the unwanted or dangerous ads with the general internet. If it was segregated so you could choose which area you wanted to be in, then it would be genuinely voluntary.

[JohnFen]

> Online advertising did not create the notion of advertising being the predominant media funding model.

True, but online ads did create the notion that spying on everyone should be part of the business model. That's what I object to. If the price to make that stop is that there is no more "free" content (scare quotes because it's not really free), I'm fine with that. I don't think that's the price, though.

[xenocyon]

This is true for newspapers, pro YouTube channels, etc. But even today, the majority of internet content is created by people for free - this includes comments on HN, Reddit discussion, original Facebook posts, amateur YouTube content, and much more.