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Comment by NoGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I'd much rather they show their ads to bots than to humans. Hopefully, the day will come when every human is using a competent adblocker, but the ad industries numbers don't go down thanks to the bots, and people can get paid for content that everyone enjoys for free.

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But there’s no free lunch. If businesses realize there is a 0% ROI to ad spend due to all the traffic being bots, they will stop buying ads. At which point sites will just migrate to a subscription model.

That's the endgame! Then websites will have to compete for your dollars, and the cream will rise to the top.

If businesses actually had the ability to correctly calculate ROI to ad spend, we wouldn't be talking about ad fraud.

Wouldn't the incompetent businesses keep buying ads, helping them eliminate themselves from the market?

No. Ads will be inserted server-side. Like in the old days of print magazines and TV.

It's possible to block TV ads: https://next.taiv.tv. Taiv is a startup for bars and restaurants that uses a model which basically detects when there are sudden color shifts and lets them insert their own ads or get paid to insert someone else's ads.

Although I don't know how you'd block print ads unless you had some kind of AR headset that blacked them out.

What incentive will the site authors have to produce content and design suitable for self-respecting humans?

Time and again people fail to realize that if they install an adblocker, they remove themselves from the target audience and thus from influencing the content and quality of web pages.

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