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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

> * Advertising / analytics companies. They deliver a boatload of code that does very little for the end-user.

That's not quite fair. They subsidize the content for the end-user. Perhaps that's a crappy status quo, but in many cases without the advertising and analytics the content wouldn't exist in the first place.

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I'm increasingly of the mind that:

1. Advertising is the problem.

It's creating technical problems. It's creating UI/UX problems. It's creating gobs of crap content. It's creating massive privacy intrusions and security risks. And for what? Buzzfeed?

2. Ultimately, the problem is the business model for compensating informational goods. Absent some alternative mechanism (broadband tax, federal income tax applied to creative works), I don't see this changing much.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=broadband+tax&...

3. Micropayments aren't the solution.

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

Is it not an option to just stop visiting these sites?

Think of the children. I mean authors.

I'd like a system under which creators of quality content would be equitably and fairly compensated. The present system fails this.

What if they already are? I can think of a handful of newsletters that command a three-figure annual subscription price. The people who buy them must regard them as useful and of sufficient quality. It could be that the rabble of news sites drowning in ads are mostly schlock, and that their business model is one of attempting to monetize some of your least-attentive moments.

Perhaps. But maybe, if you add googleads, amazon adsystem, moatads, rubicon project, taboola, scorecardresearch, krdx etc [1], then you start wondering why are users using adblockers, so you add pagefair, and at that point you want to find out what works better so you add optimizely... maybe, just maybe, at that point, you're actually losing money because your page is so damn slow, rather than getting more because of your efforts to perfectly monetise it.

[1]: Just copied them from coldpie's news site screenshot comment. That was about 1/2 of them, there were many more.

I remember when I was young, Television was sponsored by Advertisers: One of my favourite shows, was made possible because of Advertisers. To bemoan Advertisers in my mind is to say that part of my childhood should never have existed, so I think greater, more focused criticism is required.

Do you ever wonder why the landscape became the way it did?

If a TV show were five minutes of content, and 55 minutes of advertising, I would stop watching it. And yet, that's the approximate breakdown for many websites between content and advertising. And they wonder why readers complain.

They know why readers complain. They wish you understood their perspective better.

A significant problem is that content costs a certain amount of money to be produced, and web content is unable to command those prices.

Ad fraud is a big part of it, and some of the companies in the best position to solve it (like Google) are benefitting so handsomely from ad fraud that I can't imagine them stopping it.

Ad blockers will hurt legitimate content producers, but because people defrauding advertisers don't use ad blockers, they'll continue to make money.

I'm sorry, but watching an ad isn't just a payment like you do with money. It's a rape of your mind. It needs your personal data, to rape your brain deeper. So i block ads, not to see content, but because ads don't deserve to exist.

> It's a rape of your mind.

This is perhaps the most ridiculous comment I have read this afternoon.

Read more about ads, their perception by our brain, how they work and how they are designed to bypass our consciousness. Next, understand the concept of metaphor. And then, come back... or not.

A rape of your mind?

Wow. Well, I'm glad you have your feet anchored down here in reality and aren't exaggerating at all.

There's actually a lot of momentum on this from with the IAB (standards body for online advertising). The goal is to separate content from analytics. The result would enable publishers to prioritize loading the content before loading analytics.

Hmm, cool, didn't know they were working on it. That should help.