[Tzk]

> Ads are content too, you know?

Yes, and I’m not against ads in general.

It’s about the balance of actual content (the user wants to read and cares about) and ads/popups the site owner needs to run the site or generate some kind of income. If the user has to click away numerous things to be able to see any “real” content, then something’s clearly wrong. We’ve gone from showing ads to support the site to generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads.

Sad times.

[rkomorn]

Agreed that there are many sites that seem to have no other purpose than to get ads displayed.

Unfortunately, it's also getting harder and harder to tell them apart from the sites that have legitimate content supported by ads because the quality of the latter is nosediving.

[chrisjj]

The reason you can't tell them apart is there's no meaningful distinction. Whether content is sufficiently "legitimate" to be worth the ads depends entirely on the particular user.

[rkomorn]

I don't entirely agree. Yes, there's subjectivity, but there's more to it, IMO.

There are sites (eg along the lines of legacy print or established in the "early" internet days) that still try to generate news content for reading, but are seeking more revenue.

And then there are sites that are just modern click/impression factories that never tried to actually produce real content.

[chrisjj]

I don't agree that whether the content is "real" is anything more than subjective.

If content you see laden with ads was not "real" enough to earn from sufficient readers, you would not be seeing it.

[rkomorn]

If that were really the case, then nobody would be employed to try and understand SEO, ranking algorithms, virality, etc.

Edit: what I mean by that is: I think your comment implies there's some sort of meritocracy to content people see online that isn't easily gamed. My various feeds, search results, etc, convince me otherwise.

[chrisjj]

I did not say content was never gamed. But gaming doesn't make content unreal.

[PaulHoule]

From the viewpoint of Hirschman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

you don't have any "voice" about ads so your choice is to "exit" by running an ad blocker. Obnoxious advertising tactics, scam ads, and other problems in the advertising system lower people's responsiveness to advertising. We need to restore the responsiveness to weak signals (bidirectionally) that Vaughn talks about in The Challenger Launch Decision and her book about her divorce Uncoupling.

[aebtebeten]

wrt GP: "generating just enough content for the site to make the user visit and show them ads" is how publishing has always worked, even way back when it all came on dead trees. My library had a book in the reference section that had, for various types of demographic, the maximal percentage of ads to run (ie, how much content you needed to pay for having sold a given volume of ads), but it would probably have been almost as quick, just as cheap, and likely more accurate, to empirically determine that percentage by visiting a local newsstand and sampling the ad density from your target section of the rack.

wrt Exit vs Voice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46376098