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by Jormundir 4192 days ago
Maximized user experience would be no ads.
2 comments

Not if price is factored in to the user experience. Plus the small amount of value of discovering something you wouldn't have heard of otherwise.
I'm not at all convinced that's true. I pay for Ars Technica because I want them to have money but I don't want to see ads.

Edit: looks like Google might be thinking the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

That would be awesome. Google's one of the few players with enough clout and reach to make a micropayments system that might actually work, or at least get enough users to see how it would work in practice and work through some of the theoretical hurdles.
The only ads I ever notice are for things I already have. Everybody pro advertising tells me how good ads are for me. I started using the Internet in 1991 and have yet to see how advertising is good for me. Here are some ways in which ads are bad for me:

- Increased operator bandwidth charges (REAL money)

- Loss of privacy

- Page download performance

- Garish web sites

- Lost time cleaning up after sites

- Being shown ads for products I already own

I would happily give more money than I pay my operator to content providers in exchange for no ads.

There's always the freebie users for every media form - piracy, adblock, etc. As a supplier of such things I can only really hope you'll spread the word to those that do fill my pockets with delicious fractions of a penny and not let it bug me

The rest? Not really my problem - I wouldn't redesign a website to save you time when you're (objectively speaking) worth nothing to me - that's bad business

On paying more - You might (might, I don't believe you) but you'd be in the minority. Having a system that allows you to paypal the site a penny every few months would be infeasible anyway

I would be ecstatic if I could pay $8/mo. for YouTube with no ads. Instead I use AdBlock and no one gets anything.
Agreed, I would pay for an ad free version of the internet. Unfortunately, as I have to negotiate everywhere and many advertisers act badly or are misleading, I choose the scorched earth option as well.
No ads would mean no Google, which (given Google's market share) I respectfully claim would not be maximized user experience.