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The correct amount of ads is zero

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#91

Post by limbero »

tempestn wrote: post #29

People (at least used to) pay for magazines and newspapers, which have also been partially supported by ads forever. Perhaps a more sustainable balance would be only first-party ads (ie no individualized tracking) for paying subscribers?

That is exactly what they are offering:

  I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.[1]
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscripti...

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#92

Post by unsungNovelty »

mrweasel wrote: post #79
unsungNovelty wrote: post #60

This is a bad take. Ads are not the problem. Behavioural ads with suriveillance and data economy is. Static ads or contextual ads are the answer. Some of the best examples I can think of on the top of my head is duckduckgo.com and https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blocker…

Another issue is that content is now being written to accommodate the ads, it's not really value in its own right anymore. So much reporting and writing is terrible, because it's seen as a cost, while the ads are the source of revenue. Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other sid…

I agree. The decline in writing quality is observable. There is like zero effort put into improving the writing.

> Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.

Exactly. And the same like I have said above applies for data collection as well. Paywalls don't stop data collection and data surveillance.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#93

Post by Raed667 »

alkonaut wrote: post #84

The correct amount of tracking ads at least. We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying. But then the transaction was between the publisher and the advertiser, and MY information wasn't sold. They were dumb ads. If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay w…

> We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying

just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#94

Post by alkonaut »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #12
nox101 wrote: post #11

Disagree. Would I like zero ads? Yes, do I think a company should be required to offer a zero ad service for money? No. If you don't like that they have ads even if you pay then don't use the service. People still subscribe to newspaper even though they are full of ads. They paid money, they got an ad full paper. People still subscribe to cable TV even though it's full of ads. People still buy magazines (paid for the…

Hard agree (with you, that is). It's just another case of people confusing "What I personally want" with "What actually leads to a sustainable business/ecosystem". I honestly think people get confused about this because we are so accustomed to getting what we want.

What I want is incompatible with a lot of businesses sustaining themselves. That doesn't change anything in how I think regulation or technology should work here. I think we should have both technological change and regulatory change in the online ad industry that would wipe out a large chunk of the ecosystem.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#95

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ballooney wrote: post #72
contrast wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.

He does pay for prime. The fact that they have done a bait-n-switch and now _still_ show you adverts, despite you paying, is reprehensible.

But here's the thing: the subscription is not being cancelled. Amazon tries it, gets some people grumbling, but their bottom line is not affected and in fact goes up from this move because in addition to subscribers they also get ad revenue.

A vocal minority doesn't outweigh hard numbers in this case. But that's one of the causes of enshittification, everything becoming metrics-driven.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#96

Post by alkonaut »

Raed667 wrote: post #93
alkonaut wrote: post #84

The correct amount of tracking ads at least. We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying. But then the transaction was between the publisher and the advertiser, and MY information wasn't sold. They were dumb ads. If I pay for online content it's NOT for the content itself (obviously not, in the case of freemium), it's in order to not have to pay with my personal information. I want to pay w…

> We always paid for magazines and newspapers and saw ads despite paying just because that happened doesn't mean it has to keep happening, we can do better

Ads in a paid product might be annoying, but it's not secretly charging the customer and then also selling their information.

Paying customers are also identified (logged in). So in theory you could pinpoint me even more with ads after I decided to be a paying customer.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#97

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

contrast wrote: post #68
jillesvangurp wrote: post #44

It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. H…

You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.

You can use uBlock and pay your content creators via Patreon if they have one. I believe that the ad-based freemium business model is harmful to society and unfixable due to the incentives it creates to engage and enrage rather than entertain and inform. So, I use uBlock to use YouTube for free to explicitly drain it of resources without giving Google any ad income, and then I pay the creators that I like using other platforms.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#98

Post by TacticalCoder »

X / Twitter does the same: the first paid tier only remove some ads, not all of them. And I don't think that's good.

Now there's one way to pay to get way less ads: pay for an AI model and replace a huge percentage of your searches with searches inside the model. They're not bad at that. That's why many are saying that Google is (partially) in trouble with LLMs: wife and I definitely are searching less using search engines than we used too.

Besides that I'm running a local DNS server with a brutal blocklist: nearly one million of wildcarded domains (unbound supports wildcards). I block entire TLDs too. Entire countries' IP blocks. Add uBlock origin to the mix and your life becomes pretty ad-free.

I'm glad to pay a subscription for an AI model that doesn't serve me any ad. But I won't pay for something that serves me less ads, but still some ads. As simple as that.

You want me to pay: serve me zero ad.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#99

Post by racecar789 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #44

It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. H…

I would pay for YouTube premium if you can afford it. The cost is pretty reasonable and 55% of the subscription goes to content creators. It's not a huge amount but probably similar to what a creator would make if ads were shown.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#100

Post by arsenico »

9o1d wrote: post #80

Dear friends! I am a simple programmer. I had a website in 2009, where I posted useful articles. I had a small ad block, which allowed me to pay for my expenses. When users began to install ad blockers en masse, the number of ad views dropped significantly and I had to close the site. Now I have no job and I am very poor. I want to thank those people who not only do not want to pay for good service, but also install…

What kind of expenses are you talking about?
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