Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshuat | Hacker News Reader

This would also mean a lot of currently "free" services becoming paid in some other fashion, which I think people would be equally up-in-arms about.

I'm no fan of ads and I am willing to pay for services I use to avoid seeing them - but I've learned over recent years that most people simply do not agree with that premise.

View on HN

I'm fine with that. The revenue per user per month from ads is so small that the fee to use services wouldn't have to be that large.

And overall society would get cheaper and more efficient since all that budget allocated to advertising would vanish with no consequences. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game where you have to advertise to get ahead of the other businesses advertisements. If companies stopped getting in to bidding wars for the top place on google, all of that money could be freed up for something useful.

Sounds great. Ideally things are beholden to the value the process for the customer rather than to their ability to trick people into clicking on them (SEO optimization etc) in order to get money indirectly via ads. Some form of micropayments will be necessary to support independent sites, but that sounds great also. Anything to get rid of the perverse incentivizes of advertising.

I'd also like to see astroturfing / promoting things for money without disclosing it explicitly illegal. Again, anything to stop systematic manipulation.

But it will also mean that some actually free services that weren't able to compete with ad-supported ones because they don't have the marketing budget will be able to take over. I expect that to actually be the more common outcome for services that matter.

And the paid services that at some point do show ads?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com