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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? Pinterest makes less than $9/yr off of me? I would drop $10/yr to not have to see ads again and probably use the service more.

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I'd say there's a strong correlation between willingness-to-pay for Pinterest and being a power user on Pinterest.

As such, chances are, you're a power-user, and you (or at least your power-user peers) are generating way above-average ad revenues.

Not only that, but due to your willingness-to-pay for things online, you're also a particular niche within the poweruser group. i.e., a person 1) with money 2) of age, card-holding, ability to pay 3) willing to pay for things etc... you're an ideal e-commerce customer, and thereby an ideal advertising-target that also generates more ad revenue than the average.

In short, to replace you, you'd probably have to pay substantially more than the average.

The more typical pinterest user may only scarcely visit, be quite unwilling to pay anything, and generates a lot less than $9.

It would almost certainly cost Pinterest more than that $9/user-year to build and process payments.

I would happily pay $10 per year to never see pintrest again. I would strongly suspect this rings true for the vast majority of people.

> I would strongly suspect this rings true for the vast majority of people

Could you provide your reasoning for this strong suspicion, beyond the fact that you don't like it?

(I also can't stand Pinterest and don't know why Google Images ranks it as highly as it does. That said, I'm not willing to assume my preferences are representative of the population when (a) Pinterest has hundreds of millions of MAUs, (b) Google has better data than I do and as strong or stronger incentives to deliver good results, and (c) I don't have any data about anyone else's preferences. https://equilibriabook.com/ has more on figuring out whether one's thesis that a system is broken is actually correct. https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/ section ii is a great starting point.)

I share your doubts concerning the fact that people won't pay 10 bucks for surpassing Pinterest, but it reflect a wider resentment against a company that has repeatedly punish spam. If they can't punish Pinterest the same way (because let's be honest it's f*ing SEO spam), I won't climb in a Waymo self driving car ...

It's a suspicion, not a research paper.

If I had data, I wouldn't have said I suspected it.

A suspect in a crime is what you call them before you gather the data on whether or not they did the crime.

All it is as it stands is a good basis to go and gather some data. However, it doesn't bother me quite that much, and so it's merely a passing interest for me.

So you’re willing to pay protection money?

But $10 may be your ceiling, if you were paying them directly. Whereas if they continue to build information on you and ramp up impressions they believe they'll be able to raise that $9 to $15, then $24...

But then why won't Pinterest let me match whatever the advertisers are paying for my eyeballs for this year, and continue to gather data on me, just without showing me any ads? Oh, and maybe they could throw in some little inconsequential bonuses, just like Discord Nitro, so it doesn't just feel like paying for ads to be blocked. It sounds like everyone would win.

Probably because of the development and maintenance effort. It wouldn't actually take much such effort, but it might still be more costly than any benefit they'd get from the number of users who they think are likely to take part in such a scheme.

Also, employee CPU cycle opportunity costs. These companies are interested in scale, so any employee's CPU cycles that are working on non-scalable stuff are basically wasted.

Because $100k of revenue is worthless at their scale. The feature may yield negative return after cost to build and maintain.

> why won't Pinterest let me match whatever the advertisers are paying for my eyeballs for this year

The users who would opt out are likely educated and higher income. Taking them out of the pool reduces its value by a difficult-to-estimate amount to advertisers.

Then you are a much more valuable user to target ads on.

But why? How do I effectively communicate that ads annoy me and that I actively avoid products/brands I've seen in ads because I assume that if they need to market so hard they're probably not very good.

Like if I'm looking for some inspiration on Pinterest for a dinner party how do I tell advertisers that they look stupid advertising some terrible Kraft Cheese green bean casserole next to pictures of beef bourguignon. The contrast actually makes their product look worse. I could go on a similar rant about just about everything popular on Pinterest -- fashion, beauty products, home decor.

I'm literally in a mindset where I'm looking for things to buy and they're failing so hard it has the opposite effect.

> I actively avoid products/brands I've seen in ads because I assume that if they need to market so hard they're probably not very good.

Interesting that you say this. I find that I tend to have a similar belief. According to what I know about economics, advertising is supposed to be an effective way of signaling product quality, because the return on investment is greater when new customers will be satisfied and thus purchase the good multiple times. I'd attribute this difference to the inaccuracies and simplifications of economics, but I find it fascinating that a group of scholars believe something opposite to my (and your) experience.

I feel the same way, and recently rolled my own chrome extension for adblock on pinterest. It currently removes ads in the main grid view, and the little white dots for "buy me" things that overlay images of single pins.

https://github.com/LiveMethod/pinterest-adblock

It's just some hacky JS right now, but I'd like to improve it in the future – suggestions about functionality and code quality are very welcome.

> and probably use the service more

But that would lower their margin on the $10.

And you might not agree to inflation level increases over time which will just sort of happen wrt advertisers if they are industry-wide.

If you're the average user, maybe, but I'd bet the fact you're willing to pay $10 for it makes you far from the average. It's very possible that many users make them a few tens of cents a year, which suggests that at the top end they must have users making them $100? Maybe more? Would you pay $20? $50? At what point is it too expensive?

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