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I Block Ads

coryd.dev

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Re: I Block Ads

#241

Post by stevenwliao »

bee_rider wrote: post #237
stevenwliao wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose web ads were banned tomorrow. How would sites adapt? Many sites will shut down. A few sites would probably go Wikipedia style and ask for donations, run by the generosity of a few. But I think the vast majority of remaining sites will become paid walled gardens, kind of like what we have with TV these days. I don't think this is a better web.

Any dramatic change like banning ads in a day is destined to cause waves. I’m more interested in whether we’d end up in a better place a couple years out.

I can't think of a benefit that would outweigh the balkanization of the Internet.

Re: I Block Ads

#242

Post by ltbarcly3 »

Thorrez wrote: post #214
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #6

Advertising based 'free' things cost you far more than a subscription ever would. This is because Advertising Works and it works on you too . You are being manipulated into buying things you wouldn't buy, manipulated into making poor decisions you wouldn't otherwise make. Generations of people lost decades with relatives from smoking and drinking that would not have happened but for advertising. Advertising makes peo…

>Advertising based 'free' things cost you far more than a subscription ever would. Let's say someone watches 1 YouTube video per month. Is it worth it to buy YouTube premium at $12/month? What if that person makes minimum wage in the US? What if that person makes the global median wage: $227/month? Free advertising-supported things provide web resources that the poor wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. Disclosure:…

I do pay for Youtube Premium (previously Youtube Red). It comes with Youtube Music bundled and is still cheaper than spotify.

YouTube creators get maybe $0.018 per view. Lets say an average video is 15 minutes long (not a crazy thought) and I watched YouTube 5 hours a day. In a 30 day month, this would mean creators are paid 30 * 5 * 60 / 15 * .018 == $10.80. Realistically, lets say I watch for 2 hours, 5 days a week. Then it's 21 * 2 * 60 / 15 * .018 == $3.02. I suspect creators making content for an Indian or Kenyan audiences get paid much less per view, so you can charge users in countries that consume that content significantly less and still make the same payments to creators. Of course the cost would be slightly higher because Youtube wants to make a profit, but advertising doesn't pay creators very well.

Compare this to a cable TV subscription which might cost someone $80 to $200 a month and still has far more advertising than YouTube (almost 1/3 of the view time) and is quite reasonable that people might pay $6 for ad-free youtube. My original point was that even if I paid $20/month just to avoid youtube advertising, I would probably save money net because I would avoid being influenced into buying things I don't need.

Re: I Block Ads

#243

Post by seelaman »

omginternets wrote: post #69
jurassicfoxy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find highway billboards and store signage to be a particularly awful display, and I'd be overjoyed for them to be banned entirely. I have often thought about cutting down highway billboards, although I'm not quite intense enough for that.

Quite. Also, here in the US, gas stations have begun to play particularly loud/obnoxious video advertisements at the pump. I cannot stress how angry I am about this. One of the last places where I could just day-dream has now been deemed "up for grabs" by the lowest form of shit-peddler in the modern world. Pause for a second to consider the absurdity of being blasted with advertisements while paying for a product. T…

try the button one down from the top on the right side

It has worked for me.

Where I read about it: https://www.thedrive.com/guides-and-gear/how-to-mute-gas-sta...

Re: I Block Ads

#244

Post by nickwritesit »

jredwards wrote: post #169
jjbinx007 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I have ADHD but trying to read a news website without an ad blocker actually triggers me a little. The content keeps moving around as the ads are pumped in, and then a video (often unrelated to the article) begins to play, and it's often impossible to close it. I'm unable to concentrate on the article. And then the ads change and a new batch is rotated in. Some of them try their best to obscure the cont…

I do have ADHD. The idea that people are out there just raw-dogging the internet with no ad-blockers makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Do you use a reader app like Readwise Reader or Pocket? I have ADHD and they help a ton, both because saving the article strips the ads and because I can return to them later when I inevitably get distracted.

Re: I Block Ads

#245

Post by nickwritesit »

DirkH wrote: post #191
Atlas22 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I would agree the vast majority of the time, ads are also used heavily by small businesses and independent developers to gauge interest and even just to keep the lights on sometimes. Mostly referring to online ads, billboards and TV ads are much more expensive and are far more risky for small businesses.

Just want to point out I think there's a big difference between using tracking to "gauge interest" and using ads. You can do one without the other. In fact, there are even privacy-respecting alternatives for businesses to track online traffic.

I tend to agree, even though the line can be blurry. I was more anti this kind of stuff until I used Google Analytics for the first time and saw how you could fiddle with just a few things on a page and decrease bounce rate or increase how long people stayed on page (reading the article, one hopes). I always assumed it'd involve more quality compromise or something but it's often just changing a headline and showing more before the fold. Seems like it benefits everyone to enable those kinds of iterations.

Re: I Block Ads

#246

Post by jredwards »

nickwritesit wrote: post #244
jredwards wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have ADHD. The idea that people are out there just raw-dogging the internet with no ad-blockers makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Do you use a reader app like Readwise Reader or Pocket? I have ADHD and they help a ton, both because saving the article strips the ads and because I can return to them later when I inevitably get distracted.

I use pocket but I've been starting to use Omnivore and considering a switch.

Re: I Block Ads

#247

Post by bit-101 »

temp2022account wrote: post #238
V1ndaar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might you explain /why/?

Not OP but I do something similar, because I know each ad I see costs someone $$$. This leads to odd behavior like making sure I let youtube ads play for their full duration and I'll usually click on sponsor links + their pages enough to trigger the first flag of a sales pipeline, ensuring the company responsible for the ad pays as much as possible for it.

And therefore you are rewarding and validating this behavior, so that content authors continue to pile on more and worse ads.

Re: I Block Ads

#248

Post by abustamam »

ollien wrote: post #63
submeta wrote: post #43

Whenever I'm sitting in front of a computer that isn't using ad blockers, I'm shocked to see how polluted websites are, practically yelling at me, vying for my attention. How can folks concentrate on an article without ad blockers? Then there are those ads in YouTube videos and blog articles purporting to offer the reader something valuable when, in fact, they're packed with falsehoods ("xyz changed my life, and if y…

I haven't used an ad blocker in years. The short answer: you get used to it. Banner blindness is a real thing

I sometimes browse my Google Discover feed on my phone, which I've set up to open articles in Firefox (on which I have an adblocker installed), and sometimes I browse my Google News Feed, which opens articles in its internal Chrome browser.

The difference in experience is striking. Random auto-playing videos that are stuck in the corner of your browser. Horizontally it takes up like half of my screen. It has an X button that either doesn't work, OR its hit box is just so tiny that you have to tap it multiple times to get it to actually close. Not to mention cookie banners that take up 20% of my vertical real estate.

Maybe you can get used to that shitty experience, but I certainly can't. I almost always just immediately open Google News articles in Firefox now.

Re: I Block Ads

#249

Post by PeterisP »

rexreed wrote: post #12

Good list. Is there anything not included on this list that should be?

The adblocker settings can also be used to block various distracting content recommendation sections of sites you frequently use, if you want to just see the content you explicitly wanted without having your attention hijacked/tempted with clickbait from the same site. On some sites you can configure it in some options, but for others a simple filter can do it.

For example, for me the youtube shorts section, or the stackoverflow 'hot network questions' section are things like that; they are "almost ads" in some sense.

Re: I Block Ads

#250

Post by PeterisP »

jader201 wrote: post #144

There’s a lot of ad hate in this thread — and on HN in general — that sometimes feels a bit naive. In 2004, I started a small website on the side that had no business value at all. It was just a small community of video game fans (specifically Animal Crossing), and pretty quickly, the costs outgrew what I was willing to afford on my own. So I opened up donations. Unfortunately that didn’t get me very far, so I eventu…

I think that the balance has swung so far due to how obnoxious and callous the adtech industry has become, that right now many people (including me) would consider it acceptable "collateral damage" if a bunch of decent sites would become unviable and shut down. In many areas is an over-abundandance of content with scarce attention, so even if majority of the providers shut down, there would still be "enough".

And also IMHO the business has changed over the 20 years you mention - back then, sufficient compute power and bandwidth to run a site were meaningful and more users directly required more expenses; but right now the hosting costs are trivial (e.g. I'm involved in a non-monetized project with a few million views/month / 100k MAU running off of a single small VM that can get hosted for free) and the primary expense is your time - so if you want to make some content and spend time on that, you don't need to monetize it; if you're willing to spend an evening or two, then paying a few dollars for a domain name won't be an obstacle; and if in some community there is no one who wants to put in their time if there's no money in it, well, then there's no big loss if that community doesn't have that site, as apparently no one cares.

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