[jonnycat]

I fully agree with the sentiment, and yet marvel at the apparent lack of alternatives for so many business models. I'm mildly surprised, for example, that micro-payments for web content are still not a (widespread) thing.

Consumers hate ads, but they hate paying for things even more apparently.

[keiferski]

It's not really clear to me that consumers hate ads. It seems like more of a tech niche opinion; most people are perfectly fine with watching TV commercials (and look forward to them at the Super Bowl) and don't mind using ad-tier streaming plans. Ad blockers are used by a tiny, tiny percentage of total browser users. And so on.

[somenameforme]

Look at literally any poll on the topic - people hate ads universally, with advertisers not far behind. And ad blocker usage has skyrocketed. It's now up to ~30% of all internet users [1] with younger people starting to approach a majority. And it should go without saying that the only reason that's not near 100% of users is because most people don't know they exist and/or don't feel comfortable installing one.

[1] - https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

[keiferski]

This link claims that 39% of people over the age of 56 use an ad blocker. Sorry, but color me skeptical. I could but wrong, but I am highly skeptical of that statistic.

This report also doesn't seem to clarify what is meant by "ad blocker," specifically, which makes the whole thing pretty suspect. Looking into the sources they provide, at least one of them doesn't mention ad blockers at all, even though the related image is about people blocking ads. So, yeah, I'm not considering this to be reliable information.

[somenameforme]

Have you noticed the growing number of sites trying to be increasingly aggressive towards ad-blockers? They're not jumping through these increasingly sophisticated (and expensive!) technical hoops to try to squeeze a few more ad views out of a "tiny, tiny percentage".

The Reg gives 52% of all Americans [1], b2.ai (who sells anti ad block services) gives 45% in North America [2], and so on. Most sources seem to fall in a 30%-50% range, with all sources agreeing that uptake on adblockers has rapidly and dramatically increased. People hate ads.

[1] - https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/america_ad_blocker/

[2] - https://www.b2.ai/ad-blocker-statistics-2024/

[keiferski]

1. The study is claiming 50% of all Americans based on a sample size of 2,000.

According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by research firm Censuswide, on behalf of Ghostery, a maker of software to block ads and online tracking, 52 percent of Americans now use an ad blocker, up from 34 percent according to 2022 Statista data.

2. Both of them, and indeed all of these studies seem to be funded by ad blocking companies. That alone makes them suspect.

I can buy the idea that the advertising industry is under pressure from built-in restrictions pushed by Apple, et al. But the idea that 52% of the American population even knows what an ad blocker is, much less has one installed, is completely absurd.

From a quick search, that percentage is comparable to the number of people that: own an iPhone, drink coffee everyday, or own a pet.

[somenameforme]

2000 is a massive sample assuming it's reasonably representative - far larger than you'd see in an average e.g. election poll. Statistics can be counter-intuitive. The surveys are also generally carried out by survey companies, not the first parties.

You can corroborate these data pretty much anywhere and everywhere. For a silly one I dug up here's [1] PewdiePie in 2016 talking about already seeing a 40% adblock rate as reflected by a non-scientific poll but also in his revenue stats, up from 10%-15% in past years. And it's certainly way higher now - obviously though that sample is going to trend young and probably technically above average.

But really, the thing about ad-blocking is that it's the ultimate in viral tech. Anytime I meet somebody who's not using ad-block I tend to introduce them to the Brave browser and the result like 99.9% of the time is 'omg I didn't even know this was possible.' Those are now people who will probably never go without ad-blocking again and some percent of whom will likely then go on to introduce others to it. There is literally no downside to using an ad-blocker and a million upsides. People just simply don't know about them and/or think they're somehow difficult to use.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304044704/https://pewdie.tu...

[danaris]

Even ignoring the sibling comment debunking your "tiny, tiny percentage"...

There's a huge difference between extremely-high-production-value Superbowl ads and regular TV ads.

There's another huge difference between regular TV ads and some of the ads you can get on YouTube (example: someone I follow decided, For Science™, to actually watch the entirety of a 5-hour ad they got on YouTube for...I think it was one of the Lego Movies? It consisted entirely of an endless repetition of the same 3-minute-ish song).

There's also a huge difference between what people are willing to tolerate in order to reduce some of the often-absurd financial burden they're being put under, and what people actually like, or are genuinely content with.

"Revealed preference" theory is a bunch of motivated reasoning.

[barrkel]

One problem is transaction costs; you need aggregators to sit in the middle, adding up the people paying and to be paid out. Structurally, aggregators are then in a position to extract rents. Which they will do, sooner or later.

There are of course other problems, fraud, money laundering and the like, which extract taxes, and and a whole patchwork quilt of national regulations, which extracts a lot more.

Things like crypto look, feel and smell like money laundering. I don't think there's a technical solution here. The problems are social and regulatory.

[nertirs1]

Yep, it is mind boggling. Most people spend more on a single meal than on web content they consume in a single year.

[zild3d]

If there was a simple way to get the food for free, a lot of people would stop paying for meals