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Comment by spion | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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