[npc_anon]

The problem in your logic is that all points starts wit "I".

You're not the only stakeholder in any of those interactions. There's you, a mediator (search or LLM), and the website owner.

The website owner (or its users) basically do all the work and provide all the value. They produce the content and carry the costs and risks.

The pre-LLM "deal" was that at least some traffic was sent their way, which helps with reach and attempts at monetization. This too is largely a broken and asymmetrical deal where the search engine holds all the cards but it's better than nothing.

A full LLM model that no longer sends traffic to websites means there's zero incentive to have a website in the first place, or it is encouraged to put it behind a login.

I get that users prefer an uncluttered direct answer over manually scanning a puzzling web. But the entire reason that the web is so frustrating is that visitors don't want to pay for anything.

[danbruc]

But the entire reason that the web is so frustrating is that visitors don't want to pay for anything.

They are already paying, it is the way they are paying that causes the mess. When you buy a product, some fraction of the price is the ad budget that gets then distributed to websites showing ads. Therefore there is also nothing wrong with blocking ads, they have already been paid for, whether you look at them or not. The ad budget will end up somewhere as long as not everyone is blocking all ads, only the distribution will get skewed. Which admittedly might be a problem for websites that have a user base that is disproportionally likely to use ad blockers.

Paying for content directly has the problem that you can only pay for a selected few websites before the amount you have to pay becomes unreasonable. If you read one article on a hundred different websites, you can not realistically pay for a hundred subscriptions that are all priced as if you spent all your time on a single website. Nobody has yet succeeded in creating a web wide payment method that only charges you for the content that you actually consume and is frictionless enough to actually work, i.e. does not force you to make a conscious payment decisions for a few cents or maybe even only fractions of a cent for every link you click and is not a privacy nightmare collecting all the links you click for billing purposes.

Also if you directly pay for content, you will pay twice - you will pay for the subscription and you will still pay into the ad budget with all the stuff you buy.

[shortformblog]

Publishers don't get paid a dime if you block the ad unless they are doing a direct ad transaction. Adtech has largely made that transaction a rarity for like 30 years.

It's not like newspapers where advertising is paid in full before publishers put stories online. It has not been that way for a long time.

Your reasoning for not accessing advertising reminds me of that scene in Arrested Development where, to hide the money they've taken out of the till, they throw away the bananas. It doesn't hide the transaction, it compounds the problem.

If publishers were getting paid before any ads ran the publishing business would be a hell of a lot stronger.

[danbruc]

Of course, they will not get paid for me visiting the website if I block the ads, but that was not my point. People have already bought stuff and with that paid for the ad budget. And that money will be spent somewhere. Maybe someone else will see the ad that I blocked, someone who would otherwise not have seen it because the ad budget would have been exhausted. Or maybe the prices for ads go up because there are less impressions to sell. Only if companies would lower their ad budgets in response to ad blocking would there be less money to distribute. If that would be the case, then my argument would fail.

[shortformblog]

Your point is illogical. It’s like you’ve invented a theory as to how companies advertise that has zero tethering to reality.

It’s especially stupid because it doesn’t include publishers in the equation at all. It’s just you looping over yourself attempting to validate your choice for running an ad blocker.

Admit you’re doing it because you want to callously screw over publishers. You certainly haven’t put their thoughts into consideration here.

To be clear: Run an ad blocker if you want, but stop acting as if you bought those ads. The chicken dinner I ate the other night has no say how I live my life after our transaction has ended.

[danbruc]

If I buy an iPhone, does some fraction of the price contribute to Apple's ad budget? If so, where does that money end up? What would change if I did not block Apple ads?

[shortformblog]

It’s up to them how they spend their money, not you. You can complain if they somehow damaged your product, they got your money unfairly, or were somehow doing something bad with your data, but at some point it is their money to spend how they see fit. They earned it, and they might spend it on advertising.

If I buy stuff at a grocery store, I can’t get a random bagger fired just because I feel like it. At some point the transaction ends and they ultimately continue to operate with or without your input.

[hahn-kev]

I feel like this could work if the payment was handled by your ISP. Content provider tells the ISP how much their content costs that there subscribers pay, and the ISP pays them. I already pay my ISP. The real problem is that it's kinda too late for this kind of change. And also the ISP would need to prevent their users from running up a bill that the ISP would be responsible for and without tracking them that's not possible.

[ricardo81]

Agreed.

Cloudflare released these insights showing the disparity between crawling/scraping and visits referred from the AI platforms.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights#crawl-to-refer-rati...