Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how to donate to DDG? It doesn't say on their site, but I want to contribute to their success.

Just disable your ad blocker for their site. They're not a philanthropy, they have a profitable ad-based business model.

They use Bing ads. It’s really unfortunate - I’d love to help them and advertise with them, but 99% of my ads will show on Bing and its other properties, which is not what I want to support.

Won't try to justify that Microsoft is no longer as bad as it was in 90s, but IMO Google needs competition.

TBH I miss 90s and early 00s when we had many search engines to choose from. They were only helping using the Internet instead changing it to make it more profitable for themselves.

Plenty of people (particularly here on HN) consider many or even all forms of advertising to be unethical. I don't think it's fair to ask someone to disable their ad blocker. For someone who never clicks on ads, the revenue generated by disabling is negligible anyway.

Even if they added a Patreon button (or whatever the "ethical" provider is this month), 99.99% of their revenue would still come from ads. Seems like some weird mental gymnastics to pretend their business model wouldn't be what it is.

Like it or not, it's fantasy to pretend that donationware scales beyond individual devs. It's rarely even enough to support individual dev stuff.

I don't think the point is to change their business model. The point is to include an alternative way to support them other than ads. Augment, not replace.

E.g. I remove ads (both in their settings and with an ad blocker). However, I would love to support them. I'd probably pay them more than they'd make off of me in ads, as well.

I'm happy to pay. I'm not happy to see ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com