Welcome to the Block Party: The internet after ad blocking

Trying to convince somebody they want to buy something by bombarding them with ads on every web page is shitty. I don't want to be exposed to it. I don't want my kids exposed to it.

Then to build your content business on top of the shitty advertising industry that seems kind of a bad idea.

I think if people want your content they will pay. Publishers just need to bundle it the right way.

And I've said it a few times here on HN, but if we as a society think news and current affairs is important, we shouldn't trust it to commercial organisations driven by profit, we need independent, publicly funded news like Australia's ABC.

This is not a win for privacy or security on the Internet. Google is an order of magnitude worse offender compared to the small-time ad networks.

And no, you cannot ad block Google. Good luck trying to block google.com cookies and access to *.google.com.

It's not true that people won't pay for "content". People subscribe to Netflix, and still go to the theaters in droves (despite "piracy"). People buy games. And it's not even true that there's a problem with written content: people still buy books.

People won't pay for news, which isn't the same thing as "content" in general.

The reason people won't pay for news is because news have no inherent value.

Reading the news is a way of passing time; it's more like glazing at trees and leaves in the wind (but much less enjoyable).

They also taught us to write short paragraphs, short sentences, and use limited vocabulary. Further, you write stories in "inverted pyramid" style, where basically every sentence in an article is in decreasing order of importance, such that you can basically only read the first sentence of a story and know the whole thing.

Given that, I think much of traditional news is pretty much replaced by twitter, youtube, facebook, blogs, etc. Your friends will do a good job of surfacing newsworthy stories. And reporting the facts is pretty easily done by tweeters, bloggers, and those capturing photos/video.

Yet professional news writing about politics, weather, sports, and business will never go away because its crucial to society. Farmers need to know the weather. Vegas needs to know about sports scores. And investors need to know about business activity. All those groups will pay for that news.

But investigative journalism, interviews, in-depth stories, and the like do have inherent value. I hope there are viable business models for people producing that content.

There is nothing wrong with ads. But there is something deeply wrong with ad networks and automated ad placement.

Giving up a square of your website to some company to place whatever the hell they deem relevant is the reason I dislike web ads. I go to a website to read their content, not what Doubleclick thinks I should see based on my creepy user profile.

So if content creators curate and produce ads in partnership with advertisers (whose products they must actually, you know, like enough to want to promote to their readers) then maybe people will find ads less offensive. Instead of seeing ads for malware, or a private medical condition, or the towels they were just browsing on Amazon in a separate tab.

Great content creators don't use an algorithm and analytics-generated user profiles to determine what content to serve individual users, they just publish what they think their readers will like. Why not do the same for ads?