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Comment by mattdotc | Hacker News Reader

It would also be nice if people would re-think their mental model about where content comes from and who pays for it. I hear about so many people blocking ads and whatnot - and I understand why - but you don't really see these same people evangelize subscriptions or otherwise supporting these places.

Of course, ad blocking is only one aspect to lower digital advertising revenues, but so many people complain about paywalls and whatnot, yet nobody seems to have any good solutions.

Until we have a good solution, and people get over their entitlement to free (as in beer) media, outlets like the NYT and others will continue to precariously wobble near the tipping point of print's demise (and the revenue with it).

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I don't see adblocks at being the problem; adblock is /mandatory/ these days on the web; for the 0.01% website that deserve the revenue, the rest is there to abuse it, put autoplay flash, full screen popups, tracking cookies and all they can possibly /can/ on you.

The other problem is the 'monetisation'; it seems everyone around wants £10 a month. Sorry, I might pay £10/m for netflix that I use often, but do I want to pay that to everyone that I use twice a month, or even sometime a lot less? Well, nope. Not only that, but registering and paying makes you even more marketable, where your viewing habits and so on can get sold on to 'partners'.

I don't /mind/ paying for content, and I don't /mind/ ads, it's just the abusive nature of how it's done these days that I mind.

Seriously, I was reading a WIRED article, and in an ad slot, there's an image asking that I disable my ad-blocker for them, so I did, and reloaded.

The two-page article was fronted by a 30-second or more preroll video and there were animations all over the page.

Re-enabled.

When ads stop being malware, I'll let them through.

> adblock is /mandatory/ these days

No, it really is not. Ad-blockers are run by a minority of users, and the vast majority simply use whatever browser camne with their PC, or maybe download Chrome. But installing ad-blockers, GreaseMonkey scripts, Firefox extensions and the like basically never crosses the mind of your average web content viewing public. [1]

I'm not sure I'd count the adverts I see as 'abusive' either. Many times I have found ads useful, interesting, curious or (on YouTube videos) worth watching without skipping. Just as with TV and newspapers, yes, there is much crass, unsubtle, and badly created advertising. However, it's all ignorable, and even if a site pops up an inter-stitial advert, I've yet to come across one that I cannot close and move on to the content. Of course, pop-ups that tell me I have read all the free content I am allowed are different, and in those cases I make a choice - do I want to read the article enough to pay for it?

As for wanting GBP 10 per month, I would spend much more than that on physical newspapers (at 50p per issue, the 'i' is one of the cheapest, so that's about GBP 15 per month) so it seems pretty reasonable. And I don't expect my copy of the Guardian to have no adverts because I paid for it, as opposed to reading it in the library. In fact, again, I find the adverts can often be useful and informative, even in such a widely targeted medium as a single newspaper.

[1] full disclosure - I have never used or installed an ad-blocker, nor wanted to in my 20+ years of web usage

How do you know that it's only a minority of users that are deploying some way of blocking advertisement in their browsers?

I'm genuinely interested and I'm raising the question as you stated it as a matter of fact.

Even if you never installed an adblocker, "Adblock Plus" has been downloaded over 19.5 million times for Firefox, "NoScript" has been downloaded over 2 million times for Firefox.

Sufficient to say, there's an increasing amount of web sites and newspapers that have "adblocking detection" and suggest/beg that you disable it these days.

[1] Full disclosure, I block ads because a lot of site owners go too far. I have no hard feelings about it. Sucks to be them, but what can I do. I whitelist sites that behave and have decent/good content.

> How do you know that it's only a minority of users

> "Adblock Plus" has been downloaded over 19.5 million times for Firefox, "NoScript" has been downloaded over 2 million times for Firefox.

Facebook has a billion users.

Ad block use is about 2%?

I mostly wanted to indicate that it's a bit unreasonable to assume that because one person (grkvlt) does not install an adblocker - it's safe to assume almost no one does, as insinuated grkvlt's comment (at least by how I interpreted it).

That said, of course the usage numbers I quickly retrieved from Mozillas Add-ons for Firefox page - are not conclusive of total adblocker installment. I took two sample add-ons. There are at least a dozen add-ons just for Firefox. Even Firefox itself has adblocking capabilities by the way.

People's "entitlement" is a complete red herring. The problem is the semantics of monetizing non-scarce, non-rivalrous goods in a digital age are open-ended. Complaining about free-riding is a distraction and demagoguery.

> non-scarce

When it comes to things like quality content, the cost of replication might be cheap, but the cost of creation is not.

> but you don't really see these same people evangelize subscriptions or otherwise supporting these places.

Wait, I totally do that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9697153). I already subscribe to NYTimes, Spotify, Netflix, etc. and I'd love to pay a reasonable monthly fee to Google, HN, whoever else if it means getting to use their product without being spied on or sold to. Due to a sort of path determinism, everyone just assumed that everything online must be free without giving the traditional model a fair shake.

Has anyone experimented with micropayments? I'd pay a dollar or two to read an article like this now and then, but I couldn't see myself paying $200 a year for a subscription.

Blendle does that I believe.

Yes, Blendle in the Netherlands (and Germany?) :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453821

I know it's not really the same, but Flattr has been around for a long time - trying to help monetizing (freely accessed mostly) web content.

The good solution is subscription fees. There is no other good solution, including advertising. A media company that can't make money on subscriptions is doomed to fail (I consider turning into a clickbait-ey shithole a failure)

I block 100% of ads on desktop and mobile. I also spend ~ $350 a year (that's $30 a month) on media subscriptions, not counting individual movies, shows, books, etc. This is a sustainable model for the companies that I subscribe to.

My local paper has a subscription website, which I've paid for at times, but the thing is, they still blast you with annoying popup and animated ads even as a paid subscriber. No thanks, you can't have it both ways.

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