281–290 of 334 posts
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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.
If advertisers could turn the Moon into a giant Pepsi logo, they would definitely do it.
The ad-free internet has already been here for a long time if you are willing to spend 10 minutes install ublock origin. Paying is actually worse on all aspects, even if you ignore the cost, because it shows the fact that you have some amount of disposable income and are willing to pay for things, which greatly increases the value of advertising to you specifically.
I don't get this "adblocking culture". If you don't tolerate ads, you could just... not visit the site? Close the tab? I don't like paying for things, but I've never been in a transaction where I could say "you know what, I don't like the price of this, I'll just take it and give you no money. Deal?"
I am entitled to decide what runs on my computer and how. They only option another party has is whether or not they will provide service to me.
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Hard to say, nobody has managed to replicate the old IRL newspaper business model. You used to be able to get a subscription, or just buy a single paper from a store or a box. The latter is much more convenient, but the former was the only one implemented for the web. For example, I don’t care to have a subscription to the economist, so I didn’t read this article. If I could pay like $1 for it, I probably would. But…
As someone who doesn't really know because he refuses to use anything with the word "Apple" in it, doesn't Apple News kind of do this?
Apple’s podcast client has some ability to subscribe to the premium version of some podcasts. So they seem to have something vaguely like this. It still appears to be a monthly/yearly subscription thing though.
I decided to poke around the news app based on your comment, but I only see monthly subscriptions, sadly.
I get that newspapers want the reliable recurring subscription instead, but it just seems to weird to me that they were willing to concede to users and sell a single issue when the papers were, well, paper, but not digital. I mean it should be easier with digital, they don’t have to even make any projections about how many to print!
Not directly mentioned in the article (although this is essentially what the article is about), but it’s struck me lately as very dissonant that I pay for Spotify and Youtube in order to avoid the ads, and then still have to fast forward through the sponsorship and ad reads that the content creator records into their product. It’s a fair price to get someone’s content, and I know the revenue from that is much higher…
As a user, it makes sense to pay Spotify for music access, because Spotify, in turn, pays out a few fractions of a cent to the artist. But it doesn't really make sense to use Spotify premium for podcasts, when you can just download them directly or use various free RSS-based clients.
So why do so many people still consume podcasts on Spotify? 1. Because they're already on Spotify, so it's convenient, but more importantly... 2. Because Spotify realized they make more money if most of their users are paying, yet still consuming free (podcast) content. They don't pay out on podcasts per-stream like they do for a typical song. So ultimately, a premium user who consumes 100% podcast material is more profitable than a user who consumes 100% label-published music.
It's not a coincidence that Spotify has gradually taken over its homepage with podcast promotions, and promoted your "podcast library" as a first-class citizen, even placing it above your music library. It's all about profit margins, baby!
Ad free internet costs ~$40 one time fee. Raspberry Pi + pihole dns.
I tried Pihole a couple of years ago, and while it did block every god forsaken ad, I had a lot of trouble with sites not working right, and the process of turning off the Pihole for that was annoying. Has anything changed since then?
The repeating issue in these comments: very small fiat transactions are difficult. Crypto solves this. The barrier to entry is cumbersome because of KYC, but after that the whole ecosystem is ready to go. People talking 25 cents for an article. The ad revenue from viewing a single page with a few well sold ad impressions at $40 CPM is like 4 cents, and more often more like < 1 cent. I keep hoping to see Basic Attenti…
To avoid generating many transactions you could also work with a classic custodian structure, i.e. prepay into your account once or periodically and it gets redistributed periodically.
Or even better, have a ZK rollup between each client and a single intermediary, who manages ZK rollups with all publishers. Then you, as a client, don't have to worry about large amounts being trapped in escrow, and publisher payouts happen more regularly.
We could call it "Mastercard"
I treasure my attention and so I've spent some time to opt out of ads. 5 years ago I couldn't tell what DNS was, now I've got an OPNsense router at home running ZenArmor/Unbound and I can can link to it from my phone over wireguard. Using ublock I've made a point to prune the pages I visit, so classes like "header" "breadcrumbs" "recommended" "sponsor" &c. are hidden. I self-host my media collection so I avoid spotif…
There is a small cottage industry of privacy focused products that do some section of the heavy lifting (adguard comes to mind, and there is a paid DNS service that essentially does what pihole does with easier configuration as well) but no "one stop shop" as of yet, and I think in part its because - the market isn't conditioned to want these services - awareness of their benefits aren't obvious - Its still within th…
I treasure my attention and so I've spent some time to opt out of ads. 5 years ago I couldn't tell what DNS was, now I've got an OPNsense router at home running ZenArmor/Unbound and I can can link to it from my phone over wireguard. Using ublock I've made a point to prune the pages I visit, so classes like "header" "breadcrumbs" "recommended" "sponsor" &c. are hidden. I self-host my media collection so I avoid spotif…
Missing some Invidious and Yattee for youtube there friend. Adfree and crowd-sourced sponsor segment skipping is a glorious experience.
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Naive question, but when you sign up to pay for a service you are promised various functions or improvements, one of them is no-ads experience. If company then starts showing ads, isn't that breaking at least some consumer-protection laws?
Companies word it carefully, like Spotify Premium: "Enjoy ad-free music listening". They still get paid to promote particular artists/songs to you on the home page.
Songs themselves include ads too (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/) so "ad-free music listening" is no certainty, but I guess we can't blame spotify for that.
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While I use ublock and ad blocking DNS, this particular ad-free Internet isn’t sustainable. For better or worse, the business model behind many of these sites rely on the ad revenue to continue existing, and ad blocking only works as long as most people still aren’t doing it.
Don't worry about sustainability. There was life before YouTube and Facebook and there will be life after. I am not sacrificing my mental well-being for a false economy. If the internet rots out its own Ponzi Scheme, we will build something else
> Don't worry about sustainability. There was life before YouTube and Facebook and there will be life after
Which is it? The point is that this version of the ad-free doesn’t actually exist in the long run. In a discussion about a move away from the “false economy” you highlight via paid subscriptions (presumably not a false economy), it seems odd to say that this already exists while also admitting that it doesn’t/can’t.