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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

You don't need AMP, you just need PM's with the ability to grasp the tradeoff between more ads and less users as a result of that.

Obviously it's not an easy thing to decide, but they should be trying to measure that because I can't handle this crap either.

TV is dying because it's jammed full of annoying commercials. And it's getting worse as they are dying.

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No, TV is dying not because of commercials, but because other formats of access to the content are easily accessible. There's simply no point in checking if there's anything interesting on TV now, when you can just pick a movie from a streaming service or read news on the website. After all, free online services also show a lot of ads, but this doesn't prevent us, say, from watching a music video on YouTube (one of those things that made MTV irrelevant).

There are many ways of watching TV; a lot of people I know want to have something, not necessarily a particular thing, running "in the background", as they do their chores. TV would be absolutely fine for this use if not for the ads.

Also, free on-line services "show" a lot of ads, but everyone I know deals with it using ad blockers.

Indeed, that's why TV still exists as a niche product, one among others. I'll tell you more: some people are actually watching ads or not annoyed with them enough to do something. I haven't even seen people who would bother to find an ad blocker for YouTube - they just wait those 5 secs and click "Skip" (or actually watch the ad, if it's good enough).

You do need AMP though because you don't get a little lightning bolt and special placement in results if your site is just fast but non-AMP. That is probably one of the scummier things Google does at the moment. I'm surprised they haven't been sued over it yet.

The problem is that they did see it clearly in the short term, and more ads and tracking always provided considerably more revenue. If Outbrain offers you $1M to be put on your site but it slows page load by 500ms on average, you put Outbrain on your site because there's no easy way to quantify how bad 500ms is to a userbase of 100M.

It sucks, and is part of the reason I changed industries.

"e there's no easy way to quantify how bad 500ms is to a userbase of 100M"

No easy way, but it's not that-that hard, and ultimately they have to grasp there is some kind of tradeoff or it would all be ads.

I wonder if there's a business model there.

How certain are you that this analysis would come out in opposition to pretty much whatever advertisers want?

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