Ask HN: If not ads, then how are websites supposed to monetize?

[justforreading]

We all hate ads, especially the ones that keep jumping at us while we are trying to read an article about Iron Man. The worst part: they are not even related to the article or the entire theme of the website. To counter this, we install ad blockers. Peace.

But the idea that I am probably not allowing the little money that the blog/website owner can make from those ads after putting in effort to write a good, well-researched and quality article feels bad. I disabled ads not because of that intention, I want them to make the money they can. I am not able to prevent any other tech giants from misusing my data anyway.

What is a resolution to this? I know many blogs have a donate option, but not everyone can donate. Not every website/blog can get a sponsorship. And ads are annoying, to the extent that a user might not visit again. Thus, the question: If not ads, then how are websites supposed to monetize?

[nicbou]

I provide what I believe to be rare and valuable information. My readers have confirmed it many times.

I live well from affiliate marketing. I don't need to pitch anything; I merely mention available options where relevant. I wouldn't consider these mention to be ads as they don't affect the content at all. That allows me to work on the website full time, so it works.

Donations don't work. At all. Even the people I personally assist over multiple emails, the people who tell me that the website saved their lives don't donate. Donations are around 1% of my income, if that.

I considered state funding, since I'm doing their job for them. I seriously explored that option, but my contacts who get such funding made it very clear that it would be a waste of time.

So what's left? Bringing customers to businesses, and getting a commission for it. It's the only option that leaves me fully in control.

[shanecleveland]

Perfectly said. Your readers do not have to use your website, they choose to. And they can choose to leave your website, and they can choose not to click on your affiliate links.

When and ad comes on the radio, I can change the station. When an add comes on the TV, I can change the channel. I cannot force either one to not broadcast the ad to me and go back to normal programming.

[nicbou]

That is fair. However my readers (and I) choose to keep using websites and getting things from creators, but strip them of their income. We expect everything to be free, but the quality content to keep coming. Oh and now it has to feed AI too.

In that sense they're not leaving. They're consuming my work and occasionally even creating more work, and not giving anything in return.

This is something I'm okay with. In my case it works that way by design. My website is meant to be a free resource. However in the absence of paying users, we're stuck with commercial patrons. Mine have no leverage, but that's very unusual.

[culopatin]

So… ads. Except that you write them instead of showing a gif.

[nicbou]

And that I have full control of what I promote, where I promote it, how I promote it, and whether I promote it at all.

There's a huge difference between "here are all 20 banks that exists" and "here is an ad paid for by the bank".

[jqpabc123]

Personal opinion --- a big part of the problem with ads is due to personalization.

It is fundamentally anti-consumer and is a proven, sure fire way to annoy your visitors and encourage them to use ad blocking --- which more than half now do according to some recent stats.

Personalized ads are the dumbest idea since the invention of advertising. When more than half of your target audience actively refuses to engage and cooperate, you might be doing something wrong.

[Grimblewald]

A bigger problem in my opinion is when ads become the primary focus of a site. When most sites I visit had ads that take up so much visual realestate that I cannot find the content I was actually after, then I will simply start using ad blockers. Sites which use ads appropriately are unfortunately caught in the crossfire. I suppose it would be handy to have ad-blockers not block by default, and rather users can add a domain to a 'black-list' (instead of a white-list which I won't remember to add sites to, as there is not reason to) if it uses scummy advertising practices, where this black-list could be tracked and users can, if they want, download the K-votes blacklist, which is a collection of domains which more than k users have blacklisted.

[estomagordo]

One can imagine that the ad networks has data that says otherwise though.

[jqpabc123]

One can also imagine that the ad networks really don't care as long as advertisers continue to buy into the ad auction ruse.

The ad networks are an opaque "black box". You only get to see what they allow you to see. It is essentially built around faith.

It's difficult for advertisers to compare to alternatives because they have effectively monopolized the market.

For consumers, the most sensible response is increasingly ad blocking. As this trend increases, advertisers will (hopefully) be forced to start abandoning the concept as ineffective.

In the long term, the big winner in all this is likely to Amazon --- where advertising is mostly context based.

[estomagordo]

Not faith, data.

Customers obviously can see performance.

How is it that you imagine that you know this better than these people do?

[jqpabc123]

How is that you imagine that "these people" don't have full control over any data and the entire process?

[estomagordo]

I genuinely would like to know how it even happens that you think you know better.

Then, data transparency is a thing and advertisers can obviously also measure their performance.

[solardev]

One take: Maybe some websites don't need to exist?

If nobody wants to pay for it, and you don't want to make it for free, maybe there's a case to be made that it just doesn't have to be made at all?

Ads just force a market to optimize for clickbait and readership, not quality. Having fewer websites, each more expensive and intentional, would probably drastically increase the signal to noise ratio of the web.

We could probably lose 80 to 90 percent of the current content on the web and not miss most of it...

[Yawrehto]

Except...what if the website is primarily targeted at people in a developing country who might not be able to pay, even if they wanted to? Then useful websites, providing useful information, would vanish. Your idea is good if the people are rich and willing to donate to good websites, but it completely breaks down once you consider websites where people may adore it and desperately want to donate, but be unable to.[1] It's fair that AI-BS websites probably shouldn't survive, but using money as a proxy for how much people like it unfairly catches websites in developing countries, where people might need that information the most. [1] Some quick googling turns up - and I have no idea about the reliability of these websites, but they do seem like good candidates for 'might provide valuable information but the community might not have the means', nyasatimes.com and horseedmedia.net, from Malawi and Somalia respectively. Also, looking at w3newspapers.com, there are a lot of online newspapers in very poor countries.

[solardev]

Are the costs of hosting (aside from domain registrations) usually borne by richer countries on behalf of poorer ones?

If not, if they're staffed and hosted in-country, I'd have thought their costs and profits would scale to regional costs of living. Like it takes less money to run a paper in Somalia than in New York. Is that a wrong assumption?

[Yawrehto]

Probably it does cost less - one imagines rent in Mogadishu is cheaper than in NYC - unless you're somewhere very unstable. But, I think it doesn't cost nearly as much less as it would in other industries, e.g., manufacturing. The cost of producing a story probably stays fairly similar across countries. And people have much less money to donate or click on the products the ads are hawking, so you're still not getting enough money.

[shanecleveland]

Better yet, if you don't agree with the method of monetization of a website, don't visit it. Don't whine about it. Don't use an ad blocker. I routinely back out of websites with obtrusive advertising. I find an alternate source, and reward them with my visit.

[skydhash]

The content is for free. I just strip out what I don't like. Very much like when I was young and cutting out car pictures out of magazines. Except that the magazines did the smart thing and asked for payment first.

[shanecleveland]

So the car pictures you cut out were not free. Not a good comparison.

Unless you are saying you would be willing to pay up front for every website you want to visit. Is that right?

[skydhash]

Very much. I already pay for my self hosted software, I pay for cloud storage, I also pay for various services around the web. I used to pay for medium (when it was good), if my workflow was dependent on a piece of software and I needed to pay to have access to a good support forum, I'd do that too.

I'm grateful for the fact that so many people are open to share their knowledge for free. But even in this case, I'm paying for the internet to visit their websites. And for the amount of information I get from HN, I'd pay for a membership subscription.

One is entitled to add ads to one's webpages. But the computer is mine and I'm totally free to not display them. The same way I'm free to mute my TV and switch channels when the ads start. Or skip forward on the podcast. It's my personal computing/entertainment space, I decide what I'm exposed to.

[shanecleveland]

I agree. As I said in another comment, you have the right to not visit sites in the same way you have the right to change your TV channel. But what you cannot do on your TV is strip away ads and force a channel to only show programming.

My pie-in-the-sky theory is that if enough people avoided "abusive" ad sites, they would change their behavior. But if ad blockers are used instead, the bad sites get more abusive to circumvent them, and the responsible sites become unsustainable.

[solardev]

I'd rather just be able to pay them, like EU Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, etc.

[estomagordo]

If they can't get users to pay directly via subscriptions or donations, or indirectly via ads, then it seems reasonable to expect that they just aren't financially viable.

[082349872349872]

Maybe someday, when the "new shiny" finally comes along, all the financial viability will go chase that and we can get the hobbyist web back?

[vinnyvichy]

To return to our old grapplings, MST Specialized*, like an enlightened martial artist in service of Zen, in inexorably using the finger (pace Alan Watts!) to point at:

The question of whether politics can enable curiosity, and curiosity can enable politics. (Use the finite resolution, Luke!)

The answer to the modified question where "politics" is replaced by "commerce" is trivially true as evidenced by your implicitly answering your original question. The intersection of nerds and jocks is more than mythical-- it is rde of this website.

So, the three estates of ongoing human concerns, not just in the microcosm of our minds, but also as the object of martial zen, practiced by the human macroorganism on itself.

To paraphrase: can the lords spiritual (as guardians of curiosity) be Friends with the lords temporal (as the de facto guardians of humanity)

(We would also have liked French mathematicians to have been in that liminal space, but humanity tends to pay more attention to Sartres than Camuses)

*(Like a Spinoza to the Hobbesian Ellul -- or the proto-Taoist Sv Fedorov)

PS Following deserves a close-reading in light of the same question but where "curiosity" is replaced by "commerce" http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cre...

[fallinditch]

Ah, to pirouette upon the fractal edge of our collective metacognition, like a quantum jester juggling Schrödinger's punchlines!

Indeed, our cybernetic sojourn through the noosphere leads us to ponder: can the digital agora, that grand bazaar of bits and memes, transmute the base metal of click-commerce into the philosopher's stone of genuine epistemic enrichment? (Use the infinite scroll, Neo!)

The answer to the modified question where "commerce" is replaced by "cat GIFs" is trivially true, as evidenced by the inexorable rise of feline-based attention economies. The intersection of LOLcats and Kantian imperatives is more than mythical -- it is the very substrate of this website's collective unconscious.

So, we find ourselves navigating the three estates of ongoing human concerns, not just in the microcosm of our browser tabs, but also as the object of digital zen, practiced by the human macroorganism on its own user interface.

To paraphrase: can the lords of viral content (as guardians of engagement metrics) be Friends with the lords of ad-tech (as the de facto guardians of monetization)?

(We would also have liked French post-structuralists to have been in that liminal space, but humanity tends to pay more attention to Baudrillards than Bourdieus)

*(Like a Zuckerberg to the Jobsian Musk -- or the proto-Memetic Haraway)

PS: The following deserves a close-reading in light of the same question but where "curiosity" is replaced by "cryptocurrency" https://www.example.com/definitely-not-a-rickroll

[vinnyvichy]

I recognize you?!?!

but MST=Murderous Saint Ted (Kaczynski)

and Sv Fedorov should have been

Saint Nikolay (Feodorov)

Also that question has been asked (or rather parodied) on mass media before, I don't claim novelty

https://youtu.be/wqgkZDbe4Xk (Warning: Scottish, pace young Obiwan)

But maybe I propose to elide commerce in the wanksmith's bag of tricks

[vinnyvichy]

Lagniappe while we wait for somebody's wife to take a joke for the team

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxu7fMeS5uc

[fuzzfactor]

>seems reasonable to expect that they just aren't financially viable.

Quite reasonable.

As we know, traditionally, some of the best websites were not intended to be financially viable.

[VoodooJuJu]

Most creators just need to come to terms with the fact that what they're offering isn't worth a single penny to people.

The realest web creators, after accepting this fact, will continue to do what they've always done. Whether it's a recipe site, a blog, or both, they'll do it because they enjoy it. Thankfully, even if they don't earn any money through their website, websites are so cheap to operate these days that they're practically free.

[acc1009]

Micropayments

A cryptocurrency plug-in that lets visitors purchase 1 USDT on your blog and then give 1 cent to every read they enjoy. It will be quick as you don't have to invoke your bank every time you donate to a blog and it will be fast barring the initial purchase of the cryptos because the plug-in is also a wallet which you can send from. This plug-in is powered by Cryptocurrency Micropayments Company and can be installed and used on all blogs.

[ckluis]

I personally love: https://www.carbonads.net

And the sites that use it like: https://blog.codinghorror.com

Single ad per page. Let sites monetize, but 50% ad space is stupid.

[shanecleveland]

I routinely back out of websites with ads that degrade the user experience. Not all ad-supported sites are bad. I do not use an ad blocker. That does not constructively help the situation.

If I disagreed with the customer experience of a physical store, the solution would not be to go into the store anyway and just steal the merchandise so I didn't have to communicate with customer service. I would go somewhere else. If enough people did that, the store may decide it is worth their while to change.

[Ukv]

A lot of well-researched deep technical dives I read are from non-commercial hobbyist sites, academic papers/reports, or blogs ran off the back of a company with some product/service to sell (like Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing, or malware investigations from antivirus vendors). Would even say that ad-supported articles commonly link back to one of these as their source.

[fuzzfactor]

IIRC websites are best when they don't monetize.

And businesses are best when they do.

As long as consumers are getting their money's worth.

And the internet was better when most websites did not monetize, since there was no need.

For about the first decade, major ISPs automatically provided you with enough web space for a personal home page on their server, when you signed up to be on the internet with them.

Perfect for a text blog (nobody called them that yet) or something like that, and the normal state of affairs, as intended, was that most people with an internet account could post a web page at no additional cost, so there was no need to monetize anything. If all you wanted to do was have a website, that was expected of everybody eventually once they were on the internet to begin with. All you had to do was upload a well-formed index.html file to your personal web address space according to your ISPs generic procedure.

The main reason to monetize a website (a good one too) would be for online business use. Almost all other websites were never supposed to rely on a monetization strategy just to cover costs. That way an online outreach or business could at least be launched without the need for any further financial resources. Obviously the right thing to do. It was expensive enough just being on the internet.

And there was no need for ads or financial consideration at all on non-business websites, which made up the vast majority for a while there, and coexisted perfectly with Amazon when it came along as a purely commercial website. When ads show up on websites that otherwise have nothing unique to sell, it still instinctively feels so unnecessary. Rather than triggering positive consumer response, it feels more like you're not getting your money's worth for some reason before you even buy, reducing your inclination for spending even further below the non-motivated level you had when you first came to the non-business website.

When it comes to monetized websites worth visiting, I still enjoy the ones best that are the online part of an ambitious business, rather than having the website be the business itself.

Either way, as long as consumers are getting their money's worth, I can't complain.

But there used to be so much more refuge for non-consumers and information surfers.

And by now with the cumulative joy that has been lost on the path to a fully-monetized online experience, it's quite disgraceful by comparison.

[jfoster]

> And ads are annoying, to the extent that a user might not visit again.

Disagree. Users who can't tolerate ads are already using an ad blocker.

[brokenmachine]

I feel like with the technology we have already, it should be essentially free to publish a blog.

[fragmede]

it is. it's called substack or medium or GitHub pages or any number of other platforms

[Am4TIfIsER0ppos]

They're not. You put something online because you want it to be there.

[carlosjobim]

The ideal solution would be broad syndication for textual content. Just as YouTube is a broad syndication of video content.

Then that textual content would be locked behind paywalls and subscribers would pay a monthly fee to access vast quantities of high quality textual content without ads. Authors would get decently paid if they have the audience.

Cheapskates would be stuck in the swamp with ads, scammers and AI slop, until they pony up.

[skydhash]

Medium?

[carlosjobim]

Yes, but much broader. Subscribing to a textual content syndicate should be as obvious as subscribing to Spotify or Netflix. Meaning, you should be able to find high quality stuff to read within your subscription, no matter what you're looking for: news, message boards, instructions, articles, etc.

[perilunar]

I get a little bit of money from Buy Me a Coffee, and I love the feedback I get there also, but donations don't work very well. Ads are ugly and I really don't want them on my sites.

What we really need is a decent, ubiquitous micropayment system. I don't have any hope that it would be viable unless one of the big players (Google) got on board, and why would they when they make a killing from serving ads and hijacking people's attention? The enshittification continues.