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by oliveremberton 5030 days ago
If we subscribed to this logic:

"Either put the banner up or get rid of all the junk that you've plugged into your web site."

then we'd still be setting cookies, but we'd be telling users about it after we did so. This is exactly what most sites are doing right now, and it's clearly farcical.

When you start attacking anyone who depends on advertising on the Internet - by which I guess you mean Google, Facebook, Twitter and every commercial news site in existence - then I start to lose you. Those services cost billions, and somebody has to pay for it.
1 comments
eckyptang 5030 days ago
Nope - it's fine.

Google and commercial news is fine - advertising is a big chunk but Google have other products and commercial news still sells paper and has television slots. Legislation will not kill them.

Neither Facebook or Twitter have a sustainable model and will fall in time. They don't actually do much of value really apart from enslave people into walled gardens full of noise and bombard them with advertising.

If you put all your eggs in the advertising basket, get pumped on VC cash and act like a dick, yes you will lose billions.

I quote: You have no right to make money shoveling magic unicorn shit.

Those of us who have a real product and earn from that, it's not a problem. We'll be here in 10 years. We were 10 years ago (in fact we started in '92). Empires have risen and fallen in our time. We have never advertised at all.

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oliveremberton 5030 days ago
"advertising is a big chunk but Google have other products"

96% of Google's 2011 revenue came from ads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Advertising

"commercial news still sells paper and has television slots"

Magazine and newspaper sales continue to collapse: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/aug/08/us-pr...

I appreciate you don't like ads; I'm not a big fan either (not that this is what the law is about). But consider the implications of it not becoming viable.

And for the record my company doesn't advertise anything. We just want to be able to use non-invasive features of the Internet like every other country.

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eckyptang 5030 days ago
Ok perhaps Google will disappear as well? I can't say I use any of their products or services at all, so I'm not that bothered.

I don't have a problem with advertising.

I think the real issue here is that cookies are just shit.

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