People access a webpage for content, not noise. Ads are noise. Smarter noise will still sound like noise. Perhaps, making it even more obvious, the kind that irritates people. Gradually, the noise took more and more center stage. And then, users were forced to silence the noise. Blurring the lines of content and noise is completely backwards. Be transparent, place ads aside the content (not within it), and everyone w…
> Ads are noise.
Not necessarily, maybe as a general rule
If the ads are high effort enough, people will actively seek them out, just the effort won't scale
Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month? I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5). Do companies like the Economist crunch the…
Google actually tried this... at least twice, I think? In 2011, they partnered with some publishers to offer "One Pass", a pass-through billing system that also had an option for pay-per-article: https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/google-... Then, separately in 2012 they tried to launch "Google Wallet for content", offering publishers a way to sell individual articles for less than a dollar: https:/…
I am not the mainstream user, but a solution like that would have to come from someone other that Google, because it is 100% safe to assume, that Google would be mining my choices of what I want to read or would try to profile me or would put mandatory recaptcha on the pages or similar.
I benefit from ad free internet since the first ad blocker extension was made.
Same. It's a bit weird to write a whole article on ads on the Internet and not mention ad blocking once. I don't want to see ads, any ad, ever, and so far I'm succeeding, but I wonder how long this is going to last.
As long as companies like Google, Meta won't succeed in pushing new web standards that make ads impossible to block.
But even then, the browser can prerender the page use AI to find and remove the ad and do the final render. :)
This is nothing new but the article hits hard. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is after my attention but a good chunk of the economy seems to depend on it. There has to be a better future than this?
The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody…
The challenge highlighted in the article is that adds are increasing in areas that are harder to avoid such as billboards, hotel rooms, airline seats, ride-hailing apps.
Doesn't this end up spiralling, though? As we've seen with Netflix, nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed. Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" sub…
>then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads Or rather their AI will by that time have disguised ads as to be not recognisable as ads :)
This is nothing new but the article hits hard. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is after my attention but a good chunk of the economy seems to depend on it. There has to be a better future than this?
The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody…
Eventually those places will be premium real estate for ads. Some one will find a way to bring ads to our kitchen or to mount fiji. Maybe they will fly planes overhead, or do crop circles, put put them in hiking trails.
This seems like a legal issue. There needs to be a clear definition of ads, then a requirement for companies to offer ad free options to their services with a clear, fast way to report offenders.
Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication. Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it…
I've been trying to find a bank that does consumer-level FedNow outbound transfers. So far, no joy. Many banks have receive-only FedNow - they can receive money, but not send it. The US Treasury's Fiscal Service, the part of the government that sends payments, is going to be using FedNow. So banks want to be connected enough to receive money faster. There are some online services for companies that make lots of outbo…
Singapore handles this well through their PayNow system, addressing can be handled by phone number, QR code, or entity ID. Obviously they didn’t have the same level of technical debt as the US did, but it’s possible to do this in a consumer friendly way.