Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

blog.ericgoldman.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 166 posts

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#111

Post by aaronbrethorst »

etc-hosts wrote: post #84
riazrizvi wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a super-sophisticated industry where advertisers are gamed out of their advertising dollars, and we occasionally can see it leaking out. For example I was very recently relentlessly hammered by political advertising by some odious tech guy who wants to get nominated for some congressional seat in the Bay Area. This was hard programming, where they just threw out the guy's name before you could hit mu…

I think Saikat is just willing to spend more of his personal huge fortune on ads than most people usually are. https://missionlocal.org/2026/04/saikat-chakrabarti-sf-campa... I also get bombarded by anti-Saikat ads, most from "Abundant Future", which appears to be a PAC funded by Garry Tan and the Ripple guy. the ads loudly proclaim that AOC tweeted once that one of Saikat's tweets is divisive, and that Saikat is a m…

Is that the guy who kept running those quixotic campaigns against Nancy Pelosi?

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#112

Post by akoboldfrying »

kstrauser wrote: post #86
akoboldfrying wrote: post #60

> I never saw most of the offending ads because of my adblocker Using ad blockers is unethical. No one who uses one (probably 99% of people on HN) wants to hear this, but the conclusion is inescapable really. You may commence your downvoting. ETA: Why do I claim it's unethical? Every ad-supported page is an implicit contract: If you want the good stuff on this page, you need to pay for that by giving some of your att…

Because I am pro-capitalism, I utterly disagree with your premise. In a real contract, parties can negotiate and come to a meeting of the minds. Here's how it actually works: * A website serves me a page with a place to put ads on it. * I reject their offer to serve me ads. * The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup. If they continue to ser…

Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?

If not, at what point during your milk purchase does the negotiation step that you hold to be important for capitalism take place?

I put it to you that take-it-or-leave-it-ness is orthogonal to the capitalism-socialism axis, and that the take-it-or-leave-it nature of viewing an ad-supported website is no more socialist (and no more alarming) than buying milk.

Regarding "negotiation":

> * The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup.

Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol? Because if so, I would agree that this amounts to a negotiation with the website as you say.

But this would certainly be news to me. It must be a recent change, since for most of my life, ads have simply been hyperlinked images/objects/videos/IFrames, or sometimes inline text generated server-side or on the client using JS, and the only mechanisms available to implement ad blocking were implicit, and based on subterfuge: By preventing fetching of that content in the first place (in a variety of ways), or by fetching it but then hiding/obscuring the result in some way. None of which amount to "negotiation", obviously.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#113

Post by odo1242 »

addaon wrote: post #61
kdheiwns wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody does that and has for the past 10 years. People sell the scammiest stuff then completely dissociate and say "sorry guys I didn't know that was a scam haha. I won't do it again. This program brought to you by Honey. I use it and it's great." Their viewers always forgive them.

> Their viewers always forgive them. Pretty strong selection bias there. And no way to know how many potential viewers avoided them after the first ad read.

Can you name a YouTube channel that experienced a drop in viewership, subscribers, any metric whatsoever, after a sponsorship read turned out to be a scam?

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#114

Post by kstrauser »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #112
kstrauser wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I am pro-capitalism, I utterly disagree with your premise. In a real contract, parties can negotiate and come to a meeting of the minds. Here's how it actually works: * A website serves me a page with a place to put ads on it. * I reject their offer to serve me ads. * The site has the option of deciding not to serve me any more content, typically by showing me an anti-ad-blocker popup. If they continue to ser…

Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario? If not, at what point during your milk purchase does the negotiation step that you hold to be important for capitalism take place? I put it to you that take-it-or-leave-it-ness is orthogonal to the capitalism-socialism axis, and that the take-it-or-leave-it nature of viewing an ad-supported website is no more socialist (and no more…

> Is buying milk at your local supermarket a Soviet-style take-it-or-leave-it scenario?

No. You can ask. They'll say no, almost surely, unless you're talking to the manager about something that's about to expire and then anything goes. But you can ask. Your idealized scenario is where the initial, and only, offer is "see this with ads or don't see it" with no room for negotiation.

> Are you indeed claiming that today's ad blockers operate by explicitly rejecting a request sent from the main site as part of some standard ad negotiation protocol?

As far as it's possible to express this arrangement in HTML, yes, of course. The page gives your client a document describing which resources it may wish to fetch, among other things. It's not expected that you'll fetch all of them. You may already have the cached data. A resource may be of a type your client doesn't know how to render. It may be in a tag your client doesn't know how to process. It may include executable code that your client might be configured to execute or not to execute. It may have several media types for scenarios that don't apply to you, such as for printing or working with a screen reader for people with visual impairments, and those media types may refer to resources that your client won't fetch because they're not relevant to you. 100% of those decisions can be made by your client. It's not obligated to execute your JavaScript, even if it has Bitcoin mining code and you lose out on the would-be cryptocurrency that my browser chooses not to mine for you. It's not obligated to use your fonts, or figure out how to display your odd graphics format, or render your PDF, or load your Java applet, etc.

And thus with ads. Your web page says "here's an image tag for you to display an ad", or more likely, "here's a ball of malware for you to execute that also displays an ad". There's no legal or moral or technical scenario where my client is obligated to choose to display or execute it, simply because your site told me how to do it if I chose to participate.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#115

Post by akoboldfrying »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #87
akoboldfrying wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly is a contradiction, but it's so deeply ingrained that using ad blockers is OK that people can't see it even when it's right in front of their faces. If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist, and nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people.

> If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist Sounds incredible. How do we make this paradise happen?

Remember the part about all the free-as-in-beer stuff on the internet that people find really useful, and that wouldn't exist if not for ads?

That stuff doesn't depend on Alphabet and Meta specifically. It depends on ads. No ads = no that stuff. Are you happy for it to all disappear?

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#116

Post by akoboldfrying »

vkou wrote: post #83
akoboldfrying wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly is a contradiction, but it's so deeply ingrained that using ad blockers is OK that people can't see it even when it's right in front of their faces. If everyone used 100% effective ad blockers, Alphabet (minus GCP) and Meta would not exist, and nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people.

> nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people. Whatever replaced them could hardly be worse than the shit we currently have. I refuse to believe we live in a global maximum.

You could be right, but I personally am much more comfortable paying with a few milliseconds of my attention for news/email/short comedy clips/timezone conversion/etc. than even a single cent of actual money. And it has to be one or the other -- right?

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#119

Post by onion2k »

quantummagic wrote: post #109
esseph wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because of Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT People are using AI as a search engine. https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/ https://searchengineland.com/how-googles-ai-overviews-are-ac...

That is true i'm sure. But in this particular case, there is no search or AI directly involved. It's the ads that get inserted to Youtube videos, and what they pay to creators.

Creator-led channels are competing with AI-generated video channels that pump out many videos every day. The ad spend hasn't increased but now it's shared with people who have automated their channel's content production and who are likely getting the majority of what's available.

Re: After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)

#120

Post by vkou »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #116
vkou wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nor would the very large number of free-as-in-beer services that make up a large part of what makes the internet useful to people. Whatever replaced them could hardly be worse than the shit we currently have. I refuse to believe we live in a global maximum.

You could be right, but I personally am much more comfortable paying with a few milliseconds of my attention for news/email/short comedy clips/timezone conversion/etc. than even a single cent of actual money. And it has to be one or the other -- right?

Of course you are, that's why we are in this Faustian bargain. It's hard to compete with free-as-in-beer.
Post reply on HN