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The correct amount of ads is zero
541–550 of 611 posts
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube and Spotify both do “subscribe to remove ads.” If they’re not big, who is?
YouTube Premium costs 90% as much as a standard Netflix subscription, but with one major difference: Netflix needs to spend ~17B on content per year to collect that $15.49/mo. Youtube gets content for free and pays out a revenue share. If they also had to spend billions on content, they would have to charge more than $13.99/mo.
And YouTube’s content is far more interesting, useful, and entertaining. Hence why I pay for YouTube and don’t even use the “free” Netflix subscription I have with my cell phone plan.
Not sure what your point is besides YouTube’s offering being far superior both in terms of content and not showing ads when you’re already paying.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube Premium costs 90% as much as a standard Netflix subscription, but with one major difference: Netflix needs to spend ~17B on content per year to collect that $15.49/mo. Youtube gets content for free and pays out a revenue share. If they also had to spend billions on content, they would have to charge more than $13.99/mo.
And YouTube’s content is far more interesting, useful, and entertaining. Hence why I pay for YouTube and don’t even use the “free” Netflix subscription I have with my cell phone plan. Not sure what your point is besides YouTube’s offering being far superior both in terms of content and not showing ads when you’re already paying.
My point was that YT already charges a lot for content they get for free, and if they had to license/create it, they would need to charge much more. Spotify is partly owned by record labels, and they have other incentives that are affect subscription pricing.
Their subscription model is not really that comparable to other services that have high acquisition costs for content.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, and probably true, but the difference with newspaper is, it would be prohibitively expensive to produce different versions of the same newspaper for different subscription options, while it's trivial to do on the web. Why not offer an ad-free tier?
The richest people, hence the most valuable for advertisers, would buy it. This significantly affects the whole ad business value. Such that the ad-free tier would have to be priced too high. It’s more profitable to “force” everyone to watch ads. I’m afraid.
Let's see how profitable it is as ad blocking gets more popular, then.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wanted to know about headphones that have high sound quality yesterday and you know what I did to find out? I googled it. I found out about ChatGPT and became a paying subscriber in january 2023, because it was all over hckrnews, youtube, twitter and tech media in general. New stuff and recommendations are everywhere. They are even a form of entertainment themselves. I watch several tech channels on youtube just to…
No ads needed for you . Just like you can visit hacker news and see all the stories right there, do they just manifest through out the day? Or is there a group of people trudging through the new stories to pick which ones to elevate? Having worked on the product side, I can tell you that when you google a product looking for organic reviews, what you are seeing is the sprouts of seeds planted by advertising. Trust me…
I am right now launching a sass product that I develop using advertisement. I have launched many products in the past. I used to be a concert organizer and band manager in my youth. All the times I have driven around town to hang up posters... I went to business school. I know advertisement.
Advertisement is 99.999% bad people doing bad things to you.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't have to be rich to afford a subscription for a dozen dollars a month. It's not about being rich. It's about having disposable income and willing to spend it. A $10+/month subscription to some entertainment magazine? That's a clear sign you're open to spending money - a sign ads could make you spend on stuff in the first place.
Somebody spent ten dollars, so they must have a ton of disposable income that they're just itching to throw around? Let's be honest what it's really about: Most hackers / computer enthusiasts are cheap skates and if there's an opportunity to get something for free instead of paying a dollar, they will spend hours or days to get it for free. They are highly insulted by the thought that anything on the internet would c…
> Somebody spent ten dollars, so they must have a ton of disposable income that they're just itching to throw around?
Very much yes.
> Most hackers / computer enthusiasts are cheap skates and if there's an opportunity to get something for free instead of paying a dollar, they will spend hours or days to get it for free.
Not really. But consider you're talking about two distinct groups here. Being a "hacker" / "computer enthusiast" is one of the cheapest hobbies possible, and while it may end up giving you a well-paid career in tech, until it does, as a "hacker" you're probably without any money of your own.
Spending hours or days to get something for free? That's what people do when they can't afford what they want. Unsurprisingly, when your poor, parent-subsidized "hackers" turn into software industry professionals, they suddenly become good spenders, because they can afford to stop wasting time on bullshit.
> They are highly insulted by the thought that anything on the internet would cost money. Maybe because they started young without an income and when commerce was not online.
Not "they" the "hackers / computer enthusiasts", and not insulted. Rather, it's general population that got culturally used to things on the Internet being free. Obviously, almost everyone younger than ~50 got exposed to the Internet when they were too young to have any income, but ultimately, this is something companies inflicted on themselves. "Free" is the singularity of commerce, it breaks competition; "free but subsidized by ads" is an anti-competitive business model. It won not because people demanded it, but because no one can compete with it.
> Then if somebody else spends a few dollars on a subscription, they consider it so outrageous that they assume that this person must be made out of gold
It may have been a view people had at some point, but that's more because the Internet was new and everything on it felt frivolous to those who didn't grow up in it. That's becoming a past now.
Now, for the actual key point:
> Why wouldn't advertisers have the same attitude towards people who spend frivolously on things such as buying a bus tickets or buying a coke? They clearly also have ten dollars in disposable income.
But they have! Why do you think there are so many ads in sports events, in cinemas? Why do you think advertising metastasized to cable TV so quickly after it was created? Why do you think malls are set the way they are? Merchants and advertisers are, and have always been, hunting for those with money to spend. This was true off-line, and it is true on-line.
It's not always easy to tell who has disposable income and who counts every penny. However, one of the most reliable signals here is spending. People buying stuff have money to buy stuff. The more frivolously the buy, the more money they have that could be redirected to other frivolous purchases. And that's the whole thing advertising is after - redirecting people's purchasing decisions.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I also notice that ads in magazines and newspapers aren't nearly as annoying as ads on a screen, so I don't mind them as much.
newspaper and magazine ads didn't block the page for 1 minute before allowing you to read the headlines on the page, then repeat the process every time you turned the page. they felt less intrusive because they were
Classic web banner ads don't block the page for one minute either, but to me they are still more annoying than print ads.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#548Mix not either-or. Zero is a bad strategy even for evil.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#549Even though i hate ads as much as most commenters… as advocate of the devil: This black-and-white thinking [1] is also bad. What’s the point if they show 0 ads, subscription price will then have to go up to cover the costs, and nobody signs up so they go bankrupt. They also have to be able to survive in the current world/reality, even if they WANT to show 0 ads. My point is: we don’t have any insight in their financi…
> They also have to be able to survive in the current world/reality, even if they WANT to show 0 ads. They have to? I don't think. If you can't offer a service the ethical way, maybe you shouldn't offer that service. Your kind of reasonning also is the reason these medias can't survive without ads. If we banned ads altogether, subscription prices would go higher but decent publications would be able to serve content…
> I don't think
well they are free to offer it - and i can understand they do this to try to build their service/company. If people don't LIKE this, of course that's fine too, then just don't subscribe / use it.
I think the criticism of OP is a little too much black/white thinking.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#550I hate that we still are talking about this. Ads suck, and there's already a better way to do things. Micropayments are the answer. Everyone on the internet pays a small monthly fee, say $5/month (ideally this would just be integrated into your internet bill), and every piece of content you view streams tiny amounts of that fee to whatever content you are viewing. The actual amount sent is based on your monthly usage…
It's a very "first world" problem. Maybe it would work in the few rich countries the world has, but as someone who lives in a region with the median monthly income of under $300, I can assure you it would be difficult to extract anything over $0 from most of our population because people don't have money to spend on things that can be obtained for free. Many people I know have literally zero cash by the end of the mo…
This isn't an issue. You either have the ability to pay the monthly fee (which would probably enable cheaper subscriptions, saving people money), or you can't afford it & you'll experience the same web experience you have now.
For people in lower economic areas, their monthly fee would be relative to the median income (hence the "integrated into your internet bill").
What I'm saying is we have a solution that is being suppressed. It would fix the internet for 80% of people, and the other 20% would experience no downside.