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Comment by justinph | Hacker News Reader

If you're a subscriber, you're the most valuable advertising target. You've shown a willingness to pay for stuff on the internet. Furthermore, advertisers are targeting people who read those publications regularly. Subscribers are those people.

If you wanted an ad-free subscription, it would cost substantially more than you currently pay to made up for the lost advertising revenue.

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Even if, let's say, you WERE to pay substantially more than what you currently pay, the vendor might see fit to extract the maximum amount of value from you, so serve you adds they will. The only way I think they would not serve you adds is if they would lose more money (customers) if they were to serve adds.

But people have proven they are mostly OK with ads, they don't mind them (since so many services online are fueled by them and people use them).

> But people have proven they are mostly OK with ads, they don't mind them (since so many services online are fueled by them and people use them).

Let's remember that people generally have zero choice in the matter.

They would have the exact same choices with a paid provider as they do with the fee ones. Put up with it or leave.

There's no choice wrt. ads because everyone is doing them. It's rare to find an ethical business to patronize.

That's absolutely not true. You could just not use the service. I think what you mean is that you have no way to get the service without the ads, so you're willing to put up with the ads to get the service. Which is the whole point.

> I think what you mean is that you have no way to get the service without the ads, so you're willing to put up with the ads to get the service. Which is the whole point.

Well, that's what I mean. You often can't get the service without ads, as competitors show the same amount of ads.

Hell, these days you can't do anything, be it on-line or in meatspace, without being exposed to a steady stream of ads. There is no choice for ad-free life, unless you take the word "choice" so literally you accept moving to some remote location and living off land as a viable option for regular people.

Laffer curve of online ads.

>If you're a subscriber, you're the most valuable advertising target

Back in the 90s my dad used to buy shit from mail order catalogs. The volume and variety of catalogs he got in return was obscene. Seemingly every day he'd get a new catalog for something.

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