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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the answer to just buy a product explicitly marketed as ad-free? I used to watch enough YouTube that it was worth it for me to pay $10/mo to disable ads (and stream music). It never occurred to me that I was owed as a human right limitless free content with no implicit or explicit cost.

Similarly, if ads partially fund a toaster, just....pay more for the toaster without ads? The expansion of ads to every product category doesn't warrant the assumption that it will _consume_ every product category, leaving no ad-free alternatives.

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Except no ad-free service remains ad-free forever. Sooner or later, subscriber growth slows down, and the standard playbook to continue to grow revenue is:

(a) introduce new products that require additional subscriptions (but eventually the company runs out of new products to introduce),

(b) raise subscription fees a tiny little bit every year (but there's a limit to how much any company can do that without angering customers too much), and

> Except no ad-free service remains ad-free forever.

None of the examples you gave (toasters, windows, paint, and shower-heads) are services. I used YouTube (a service) as an example, because we're not in a world where products are overrun with ads the way services are, but my point was that even the service market has started to offer alternatives to ads.

The idea that the market will bear every product getting service-ized but somehow not offer any ad-free versions is nonsensical, at least in the steady state.

YouTube has tons of product placement withim videos themself so ad-free service you pais dor barely remove half od the ads.

Aside from not being true in general (none of the videos I watch have product placement/sponsorships), this is completely irrelevant. We're discussing the YouTube content delivery service, not the manner in which the content is funded, in exactly the same way that "the movies you're watching already have product placement" would be completely irrelevant to the discussion on this thread about ads in the interface through which you watch the movie.

Tangential, but you reminded me of it: it's truly fascinating how incredibly brain-damaging discussion of ads seem to be. Every single thread I've ever read on the topic is full of non sequiturs, nonsensical analogues, glaring logical inconsistencies, etc. The only other topic I can think of that makes people similarly insane is airlines (cf my "why should I pay taxes" uncle complaining about airlines no longer requiring other passengers to pay for transporting his suitcases).

That's great, until they stop making the ad free version. It's like TVs, there are no high end ad free TVs now.

Interesting, I did some quick Googling and was able to find a good handful of 2020 models with no ads, but none for 2021. I'll take your word for it that they don't exist, but the fact that this is the first year where that appears to be the case is not strong evidence to me that this is the steady-state of the TV market.

You make a good point that it might not be the steady state of the display market, but I think it is for the majority of TVs today.

As alternatives, you can buy commercial displays that are effectively TVs (with HDMI in), however they lag in specs and lack some features. You can also buy hospitality versions of TVs as 'dumb' TVs for a similar price, but these also tend to have lower specs. You can buy large format computer monitors (55" is about the highest I've seen) but they are substantially more expensive (roughly 3x more expensive) and typically use DisplayPort instead of HDMI.

I only learned about the options because I'm looking to replace my 2013 Plasma TV that has a power supply problem.

Good to know, thanks. I was actually going to buy a TV a couple of weeks ago, but ended up deciding to make my large monitor do double-duty instead of stuffing another screen into my "cozy" new place in Manhattan. It's good to know that I dodged a bullet: it's easy enough for me to avoid ads that when I do come across them, I find them pretty jarring.

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