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Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

OP’s talking about the time taken to write the text, not the hosting costs (which would be zero on GH Pages or something like that).

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Indeed, in 2009 I used free hosting. However, my articles were so interesting that in one week my site was visited by about a million people. Because of the huge traffic, I was kicked out of free hosting. Then I rented a VPS. Then I was still a big opponent of advertising, like all of you, and I was naive. I was an idealist. But when I tried to sell access to the site for sending SMS messages costing 10 cents, no one wanted to buy them, only one person out of a hundred. When I installed advertising, this ratio increased to fifty out of a hundred, that is, my income increased 50 times. Then I understood the benefit of advertising. I received about $ 100 a month from advertising. Then the income from advertising dropped significantly due to the mass installation of ad blockers. Now I use Firefox without any plugins. I honestly watch ads. This is the decision of a responsible adult. Because I understand that without advertising there will not be those wonderful sites that are still left.

If ads are first-party, non-personalized, non-tracking, and don't get in the way of the content, people are mostly fine with them. Most ads are not like this, so people use ad-blockers, and the good ads get blocked along with the bad ads. The fault lies with the advertising industry, not the consumers.

It's an old-fashioned notion, but the advertising industry has extremely bad manners: it doesn't respect civilized social norms like not exploiting personal information for private gain and not egregiously interrupting people for trivial reasons. It's nosey, untrustworthy, intrusive, manipulative, and deceptive. I wouldn't tolerate this behaviour from a friend, and I'm not going to tolerate it from a bunch of amoral strangers.

I understand you perfectly. I apologize, as a defender of advertising, for the fact that advertising often causes you inconvenience. However, I believe that advertising does less damage than cars. Okay, let's ban cars? What about alcohol and smoking? Why doesn't anyone try to throw a blanket over the shelves with alcohol?

You all have interesting arguments and valid points in this discussion, but this last message is whataboutism [1].

edit: and it doesn't help you much, you are likening ads to harmful things.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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