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Comment by cameronbrown | Hacker News Reader

Do you prefer ads or paywalls?

Nobody's ever happy..

Ads. The social contract of the web was: link aggregators bring traffic to websites which need views to ad-support themselves. WSJ doesnt need it. (This article is not available on archive.is or anywhere. You actually need to pay to see it).

There is no such social contract.

thats why RSS and those like/share buttons existed

good point

You just made me realize I'm a bit of a hypocrite. I don't want ads, but I will never pay for this either. Then again, I don't really want to read it anyway hehe

That being said, if ads actual ads and not targeted surveillance crap, I'd be ok with that. I might have to change my adblocker settings to reflect that...

You should load up the Privacy Badger extension. It lets you adjust the settings to keep trackers at bay.

Forgive me if I'm missing the point of your question, but isn't the answer obviously ads? Even if they couldn't be blocked, at least they don't prevent me from accessing the content. I guess ideally there would be ads with a pay option to remove them, but that's just from a consumer point of view.

Regardless, I realize we shouldn't be complaining about paywalls in comments. I just wanted to address your question.

When you block the ads, the publication doesn't receive revenue from them as the impression is lost.

Then, the publication suffers and the quality falls.

But this way the people who don't have a subscription (which we can safely assume to be GREATER than those who have ad blockers) don't even open the page, so they still don't get any revenue.

???

I put that on par with: because I'm not paying for an Aston Martin, I don't get to drive one to work every day. Thus, I have nothing to contribute to discussion on daily drivers of Aston Martin cars. Just because I want to join the discussion doesn't mean I'm entitled to one of their cars anyway. Aston Martin isn't weeping for me because I don't get to drive one of their cars.

Why would the publication just give away the product of their labour for free? [Especially the WSJ. That's against their cornerstone beliefs AFAIU.]

This is easy : I have an ad blocker, so I’m happy with ads.

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