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The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting worse in the process [video]

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Re: The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting worse in the process [video]

#341

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That video makes no sense. If renewables are cheaper, then fossil fuels have even worse margins. The video claims for some reason that fossil fuels are "more exploitable" and more profitable, but assuming you're baking storage into cost, a lot of energy is fungible. Furthermore, solar can easily be installed on prem and many energy users have plenty of unused roof space, so even if all energy providers conspired to k…

It's worth noting that a decent portion of the value/products generated by by the fossil fuels industry isn't gasoline or diesel. Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process, much of the research done by these companies over the last century was focused on inventing new products and creating markets to sell them to. Replacing transportation use of fossil fuels with renewables doesn't actually…

> Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process

Fun fact: Gasoline only became the fuel for cars because it was a refinery byproduct that had no real economic value, and so was very cheap. Before that, cars ran on alcohol or electricity, but oil refining was still a pretty large business anyway.

If we stopped fueling cars with gas, refineries would still operate to provide all of the other products we need, just as they did before gas was a thing.

Re: The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting worse in the process [video]

#342
post #269

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What examples of ad based rising companies do you see ? My first thought was Google, and it's started to plateau in the recent years: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/rev... . Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.

Google and Meta each have something like half the world as users in any given month? And most of the people who aren't using them are not on the internet? At some point, you literally have no more people you can get in your service.

Most of them overlap pretty heavily though. Assuming 2B people, minus the 1.3B that China has (rough calculations), there's still room for them to grow user-wise. The issue is revenue though - having 1.5 B Indian users is not the same as having 330 million American users.

Re: The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting worse in the process [video]

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the apps I use are in fact free, and do not have ads to pay for them. Someone wanted something to exist, so they made it, and then they gave it away for free to everyone because computers are magical and there's no marginal cost to do that. The ad based Internet dying would leave hobby and academic content, significantly cleaning up the signal:noise ratio on the web, which would be great. As a bonus, you woul…

I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites. Would probably beat Google in many things without any algorithm. Even as blockers don't solve the problem of only getting SEO ad pages, but a search engine which doesn't show any website with ads will automatically filter all the trash.

I've thought something similar for a while now. People say that Google has a harder problem with the SEO industry being so large now and that AI will make it a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but I suspect a decent amount of the problem is just misaligned incentives; if they aggressively penalized sites for having ads, tracking, and affiliate links, they'd be striking directly at the way blogspam funds itself, and there's no need for a cat-and-mouse game.

Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.

Re: The ad-based internet is dying, and it's getting worse in the process [video]

#344

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I think this is really what we're seeing now. One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.

There were many obviously lucrative paths Reddit could have taken. They have incredible amounts of data on users who self-select their own interests. They were making money selling subscriptions even. They could have monetized all sorts of things in non-annoying ways, like secret santa (pay to verify users or have direct anonymous shipping?), subreddit sponsorships (want to own /r/steam, Valve pays for it), etc. Inst…

Reddit made a lot of people rich and never promised to make more people rich indefinitely, it is spent.
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