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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind Google or Facebook showing ads in their own products, because that's the only business model that works at their scale and for what their offer. Imagine the world, in which the access to the most advanced search engine or social network was only available to the people who can afford to pay for it.

But I don't support using ad networks in the products that are not big enough to sell them themselves. Firstly, because it makes those products completely dependent on third-parties for their own existence. And secondly, because these products often become proxies for third-party user tracking.

Just let me pay for your product, if I like it enough. Otherwise, I will just rely on Blokada[1] to protect me from your unwillingness to find a sustainable business model.

[1] https://blokada.org/

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Been using Blokada since December and it's now a must-have; battery life has improved somewhat as well.

I don't even make heavy use of my phone for social media apps, yet have close to 300K ad-related requests blocked since I installed it.

> that's the only business model that works at their scale and for what their offer.

Do you have any basis for that claim? Because my impression is that historically there have been and are plenty of other businesses at their scale that did/do not need this at all.

> historically there have been and are plenty of other businesses at their scale that did/do not need this at all.

Have we ever had an internet company with over 1 billion active users not using advertising as its main source of income?

Microsoft? Major ISPs and wireless carriers? Basically any company that has a real product that people need can succeed without advertising.

Maybe the real answer is that Shitbook is just not worth paying for?

> Microsoft? Major ISPs and wireless carriers?

These are physical businesses, not internet companies.

Bing has ads. Twitter has ads. Reddit has ads.

Yahoo! has had ads since 1990s.

How is Microsoft a physical business? They provide services delivered online, just like Facebook, Google, etc does.

> Yahoo! had ads since 1990s. Twitter has ads. Reddit has ads.

And yet seems like Reddit is the only one doing somewhat good (and even then the community is pissed off and rightfully so, and without the community they'd suffer the same fate as the two former ones).

> How is Microsoft a physical business?

A lot of its income comes from licensing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office, which are physical products.

And where Microsoft competes with Google directly, it often shows ads just like Google does[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_Ads

O365 however does not, in contrast with Google Docs.

What's the definition of a "real" product? Is Google's search engine not real?

Advertising as a business model is perfectly valid and has allowed billions of people to access things they otherwise wouldn't get.

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