[jhaenchen]

The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. They don't want to see ads and the ads they do see they want them to be uninformed and general. They want everything free. This just encourages subscriptions. Which we're seeing become more and more common.

[skydhash]

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps

Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.

> They want everything free.

It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.

> This just encourages subscriptions.

There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.

Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.

[drdeca]

> If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.

I'd say that it is because the value is less than the transaction cost of any payment, not zero.

[badpun]

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.

It's either watch some ads, or work slightly harder to make slightly more money, to afford a subscribtion (or forgo some other pleasure, and reallocate that money to subscribtion instead). Both options are unpleasant, but of the two, majority of people seem to prefer ads.

[badpun]

To the downvoters: YouTube has been, for a couple years now, conducting a natural experiment that my confirms my claim. People can either buy a subscribtion or suffer the ads. Most prefer the ads.

[JohnFen]

I don't think that's a good experiment, though. Regardless of people's overall preference on this, I would expect the existing YouTube audience to mostly stay with the ad-supported stuff, because that's what they're used to with YouTube and people who really, really hate ads weren't using YouTube to begin with. All of that makes YouTube users a biased sample.

A more valid experiment would require all users to be new to the platform.

[ztrww]

> weren't using YouTube to begin with

Or using it with an ad blocker

[ndriscoll]

Most of the apps I use are in fact free, and do not have ads to pay for them. Someone wanted something to exist, so they made it, and then they gave it away for free to everyone because computers are magical and there's no marginal cost to do that. The ad based Internet dying would leave hobby and academic content, significantly cleaning up the signal:noise ratio on the web, which would be great. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to be Google to index it all if it weren't filled with AI generated SEOd blogspam garbage trying to make money from ads.

[MSFT_Edging]

Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.

Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where they might sell a couple products, open source resources built by a community, etc.

I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and unobtrusive.

[JohnFen]

> Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.

Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the web is this sort of site.

[machina_ex_deus]

I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites. Would probably beat Google in many things without any algorithm. Even as blockers don't solve the problem of only getting SEO ad pages, but a search engine which doesn't show any website with ads will automatically filter all the trash.

[ndriscoll]

I've thought something similar for a while now. People say that Google has a harder problem with the SEO industry being so large now and that AI will make it a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but I suspect a decent amount of the problem is just misaligned incentives; if they aggressively penalized sites for having ads, tracking, and affiliate links, they'd be striking directly at the way blogspam funds itself, and there's no need for a cat-and-mouse game.

Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.

[JohnFen]

> I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites.

YES. Not only would I find more pleasant sites, but they'd likely be of higher information quality.

[ryathal]

That search engine would return the same 10 sites for any search.

[warbeforepeace]

Reasonable ads are fine. Its when we go to websites that have ads that make the website load 100x slower, roll video content, and other shitty behaviors made people go to ad blocker. Simple ads really didn't bother anyone. Advertisers destroyed the ad economy themselves by allowing really shitty behavior. Even google search is a joke with the number of ads you get with a single search. Sometimes i see more adds than results.

[RandallFlagg]

I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face. Unfortunately many services don't even give an option to pay with money, so I've been trying to find alternatives, for example I've been starting to migrate away from Gmail to Protonmail. I understand things cost money, so let me pay you for your services. I just despise ads with a passion.

[rchaud]

> I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face.

You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when it comes to B2C pricing.

Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:

a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins

b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc) will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't part of that equation here.

This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e. ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.

[commandlinefan]

> prefer to pay for a service

There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like that).

While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane after all - small transactions on the internet are a huge hassle. There's a lot of friction around tracking down my credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is there, but the way it works now ain't it.

[code_duck]

>a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it

I wouldn’t exactly say he’s not getting anything from it. Per Wikipedia,

>Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of $500,000 a year.

[JohnFen]

> the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?"

I'd be one of those people. $1 for a single news article is outrageously overpriced, where the coffee is only moderately overpriced.

[OkayPhysicist]

I think another, bigger, piece is that people have more issue paying for upfront costs than marginal costs. Most people will have some sort of outrage that their medication costs the manufacturer 30c to produce when they're told it'll cost $30 to buy. Sure, there was the whole discovery process that had an upfront cost, but to most people's intuition, the cost of goods should be "cost to make + some small markup".

For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero. Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the server to my phone looks like rounding error.

[vel0city]

Google absolutely wouldn't mind if you paid in money for your mail. They sell it to lots of paying subscribers.

https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/

No ads in workspace, they don't mine your data for advertising.

[soundnote]

One reason I like Brave having a subscription for ad-free search.

[rchaud]

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps.

Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.

It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.

Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.

[FreshStart]

They want a tax funded internet and shareholder companies gone after the worst bath in history. All it takes is one state to start and give it's citizens the chance to distribute the tax anonymously and the whole advertising industry dies.

[JohnFen]

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps.

Why do you think that people don't understand this?

> This just encourages subscriptions.

Which is the lesser of the two evils.

[Gigachad]

Everyone understands that ads pay for sites. You can want something for free while still understanding how adverts work.

[timmg]

Honest question: how can you expect stuff for free without ads?

[epidemian]

Depends on the definition of "for free".

Depending on where one lives, but many people have access to "free" government services, ranging from roads, education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more. The costs of these services are payed by taxes.

Some "free" services are sustained via donations. Wikipedia is a good example of this.

Some people might say that those are not examples of "for free", because someone is paying for those things, either via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society. Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free either: the advertisers are putting the money to run those services, and the society is also paying a huge cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.

[jacobsenscott]

Linux, github, open source games/office suites/tools/etc, fediverse, irc, free cloud compute... You can live comfortably online for free without adds if you stick to the free/os world.

[washadjeffmad]

Flip side: Why doesn't YouTube pay users for the work they perform on their platform, re- impressions, interactions, training? The more often and "better" someone interacts with their services, the more "free minutes" without ads they earn. If someone is a big producer of value, they earn access to tiered UHD/4K/8K or "premium" content, or they're cut a check / given credits.

YoutTube is making money, somehow, off of us. Is it not our right to reclaim the excess value we are creating for them? Why is only okay for trillion dollar companies to have free lunch?

[Nasrudith]

Good lord, no. "Excess value" is a frankly pants-on-head stupid notion that should have died in the 19th century. It assumes businesses should operate with not only zero profit but zero margin for expenses or growth. It is beyond stupid and I find it unbelievable that there are so many followers who really should know better on several level.

[MSFT_Edging]

Conversely, profit now is less used for expenses or growth, and redirected to stock buy-backs and shareholders.

Excess value is real, measured not from the margin, or even money that goes back into the org, but value that is 100% extracted from the organization, often at the detriment of the org for the sake of shareholders. Its very often just parasitic.

People are so entitled now, "nooo i need my investments doubled at all costs". I have little sympathy for professional investors that have tied the global economy to short term private gain over long term sustainable growth. Its a rich child's game.

[flagrant_taco]

There are all kinds of reasons for professional investors to be in a position when they need an investment to double in the short term. Sometimes thats greed, other times it's to cover existing bets that are losing and could cause their entire fund to collapse.

Say, for example, a certain bank where to listen to the Fed and invest massive piles of cash deposited after currency debasement into federal notes and bonds. If those notes where purchased when the story was interest would remain zero only to face 4-6% interest months later, the investor could well need a quick win to dig out from those now toxic assets that can't be sold at face value.

[YetAnotherNick]

Using VC money? It's not even people's fault as well. For more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect internet to just work for free.

[noizejoy]

> For more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect internet to just work for free.

For more than a decade the fed has spoiled VC to expect that money could just be borrowed for nearly free.

[Gigachad]

As a user that isn’t my problem. If a service is being given away for free, I will take advantage of that for as long as its available.

[dingaling]

> Honest question: how can you expect stuff for free without ads?

Require something in return.

Flightradar24 gives ad-free subscriptions to users who pay $20 or so for an RTL dongle and feed it data.

[Euphorbium]

I am totally fine with subscription only. Ads should be banned.