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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

There's a tragedy of the commons effect here, no? Using Ad Block doesn't really change the landscape so long as there are a sufficient number of people without ad block out there. But if everyone acts that way, then things will change and IMHO mostly not for the better.

A lot of the alternatives to ad models aren't great (e.g. paywalls everywhere) or require a lot more resources to implement (e.g. selling sponsorship opportunities that aren't ads). For some sites, especially smaller publishers, I don't think there is a viable alternative and they will simply cease to exist.

Disclaimer: my company runs a network of ad-supported business news sites

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Something like laracasts.com for example gives you just enough free content to be useful in of itself and then there's a monthly fee for the rest. A well put together content-based business model.

Instead of thinking of it as not having a viable alternative think of it as not having a viable business model. That's on the business, not the user.

> That's on the business, not the user.

If I don't like the prices the grocery store is charging, I don't shrug and walk out with a loaf of bread.

Loaves of bread aren't ad supported.

If bread was free but you have to look at ads for Nutella (Available in aisle 4!) then you'd have a point

Yes, except you don't know the price before entering, but once you do you're immediately charged. A store that acted like that would be forcefully closed.

You could say that's not a problem if you already know the site, but most use dynamic ads, so you don't know what you're going to get - you might even get infected (another thing that would get a real store closed).

Finally, most of these stores are connected and tracking which ones you visit and which products you purchase, and you don't have the option of "paying with cash".

> Yes, except you don't know the price before entering, but once you do you're immediately charged.

Like doctors offices, no?

Maybe in weird uncivilized countries :) Where I live, the private doctors offices have clear prices for consultations, and any subsequent procedure also has a price to which you can agree before going through with it.

Emergencies are handled by the national health service, so the price is also clear: it's whatever your tax rate is :)

Personally I prefer getting all the content for free (ad supported).

Personally I think my attention is a lot more valuable than my money, so I'd prefer to waste the latter.

Businesses and bigger players keep screwing us over, and they're not charities so there really is not a lot of incentive to comply.

I mean, I hope someone finally comes up with a micropayments solution that works so you don't need 1000 paywall accounts to browse the web. But I'd still prefer ads and I'm not sure all sites I like would survive the transition to anything else.

Unlike other tragedy of the commons scenarios, we don't actually know what will happen and if it'll be positive or negative. We just know that the current state of things is not great.

The ad world has caused some really shitty optimizations to flare up among sites supported by ads. Optimize for clicks and eyeballs instead of quality.

> Optimize for clicks and eyeballs instead of quality.

If the content is so bad why is everyone defending the use of adblockers to see it. Why not just not look?

Nobody said the content is bad everywhere. I'm saying ads are causing optimizations on terrible principles, doesn't mean everyone is following them.

Furthermore your comment is akin to "if junk food is so bad for you why is everyone eating it and saying it tastes good". It doesn't take much imagination to understand that there's other factors at play.

>A lot of the alternatives to ad models aren't great (e.g. paywalls everywhere)

Crowd-funding models don't necessarily require paywalls. Many creators release their primary content for free.

>selling sponsorship opportunities that aren't ads

How can a sponsorship not be an ad?

>I don't think there is a viable alternative and they will simply cease to exist.

I think if you can't get people to pay for it, it probably wasn't that valuable anyway.

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