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Comment by serviceberry | Hacker News Reader

> People prefer ads to paying.

Eh. Spotify has 250 million subscribers. Netflix has 300 million. Amazon Prime has 180 million. Heck, there's something like a million people paying Twitter for a checkmark, and half a million paying Reddit for nothing at all.

People don't seem to be opposed to paying for online services. They were just never given choice. I have no doubt that publishers prefer ads because it just lets them extract value "for free" - which is probably why you're increasingly seeing ads in paid services, too (Netflix, etc).

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> They were just never given choice.

There was Google Contributor[1], which they tried three launching three different times before giving up on it. It seems like nobody was interested in paying to remove ads on the web.

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

Reading your link, it basically launched twice, with the second time you couldn't even pay to remove adverts but you could bid as your browsed to drive up the price of advertising.

So you paid, and you still saw adverts, it was never available outside of the USA, and didn't last very long for each launch.

Not that people weren't interested. However this is the first I've heard of it, so there's that too.

Fair point, although the ad supported platforms are all 10x bigger.

Meta has network effects which is a different issue. But what’re your thoughts on consumers using Google for free versus the paid search models? There, at least, there are good alternatives and people clearly prefer ads.

Counterexample: TextNow offers a "free"(ad-supported) mobile phone service, yet people overwhelmingly prefer to pay for T-Mobile.

Interesting, I’d never heard of text now. I wonder if it’s an awareness thing, or is it aligned with previous conditioning? (Eg I always paid for cell service and it’s cheaper and better now than it’s ever been… whereas Google has always been free)

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