I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)
but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try
we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
Maybe there are some details missing here, but asking for more detailed or tailored feedback makes it seem like he cares and was willing to hear you out. Sometimes people are in their own industry for so long that they forget what their industry and tools look like to outside eyes. A simple menu to him could’ve been overwhelming for you as a quick example.
I ran into this a while back at a talk when the speaker used the phrase "perfectly ordinary sodium iodide gamma ray spectrometer". I pointed out to him afterwards that that's not something that most people would expect to follow "perfectly ordinary" in a sentence, and he explained that, yes, today you'd be using thallium-doped CsI or NaI scintillators instead.
If the response is an exact quote, the tone is "you must be stupid." It doesn't convey caring and wiling to hear things, and if they can't understand that before sending it, it makes perfect sense that the product sucks, and it will only get worse.
It’s not the tone. It’s how you perceive the tone to be. Be careful, especially in a culturally diverse and international environment. Plenty of cultures cringe when they receive overly friendly phrased words, as it will not sound honest and curious to them but condescending and fake (in this context it may be perceived as sarcasm); whereas others will experience and mean it as straightforward openness.
Communication is hard. Even harder in writing. A usually working approach is to assume friendliness.
> we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.
Which sounds insane until you realise that you’ve just described in outline something very like the iron dome missile defence system, which actually exists in reality.
(And of course you’ll get no argument from me that it’s insane that such things need to exist at all, but such is the world we live in.)
I'll bolster it. I've worked on a site-you-have-heard-of. They were struggling and as a response they would change marketing leadership basically every year to try to find a new way to reach a new or different demographic. Every year the new marketing leader would say "we're not doing any of that previous idiot's strategy, as I am the one who knows best". And as each marketer tried to make their mark, 50 new Google Tag Manager script injects would appear.
Now, whose job was it to remove the previous 200 Tag Manager scripts? Obviously the last guy's, because those were his experiments and he was in charge at the time so new guy was clearly not responsible for it. And at the end of the year, 250 Tag Manager injections would now exist and we would turn the page to reveal a new CMO.
And thus ends the parable of how I put a wrapping feature flag on the code that added Google Tag Manager to the site so that I could display the effects of the insanity and demonstrate why the PageSpeed metrics were ass and why engineering couldn't fix it (in a way they would permit, anyways).
Thank you for this insight. Even as a developer, I can easily lose track of all the trackers I've included in a webpage. Usually, if I see a tracker in the code, it's already obfuscated and I provide the benefit of the doubt to leave it in.
It's only when I jump back into the ads management page where I'm able to get a better idea. Even then, the specific trackers are hidden behind a variety of menu items that can change every time. This post made me realize that I need a better strategy as things are getting ridiculous with ads.
I used to be someone who didn't use ad blockers because some of them are botnets. It's just not the same anymore, as I would trust the botnets with my data over the advertisers.
> the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try
I think this might be selection bias in your customer base. I've had some friends who worked at a local news outlet. The ads on their website were a big deal and they had a full-time position dedicated to managing internet advertising.
Oh Lord you need to take on some non-tech companies as clients if this surprises you. I've had clients who forgot they had a website and thought that monthly hosting bill was just for something to do with the back-office Internet connection.
It was a janitorial temp company and they didn't really care about computers. Whoever had been their IT guy before me had made a pretty neat website that would let clients book cleaning staff and give them a birds-eye- view of upcoming staffing needs. It was marginally better than their existing phone and email based system but not enough to make them change it, and over years of saying "let's try it next quarter" eventually everybody forgot about it.
> How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?
The knowledge atrophied. To me the harder problem is keeping knowledge off the bus… it gets on of its own accord and then boom: knowledge lost. People leave the company, and with them, lessons. People are in constant crunch time, and don't have time for the last 2% of the work that takes 98% of the time, like adequately documenting the weird bits of the system. Half the time the corp site is an afterthought to main engineering, relegated to some CMS that marketing can have, and trust me marketing is not writing docs.
Company leadership at nigh every job I have worked on encourages the company, collectively, to forget. Dev turnovers at most places I've worked average around 2y… that's knowledge, just walking out the door.
hi, I'm a dev who was working in journalism around thirty years ago and still has some connections.
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?).
That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.
I agree that Apple News+ is bad, but I think this is an example of why these plans always fail:
Someone says "I would pay good money for a service that does..." and then the service that does the thing appears and the goalposts keep moving as people realize their threshold for wanting to pay for something is higher than they originally thought.
Popular Mechanics is so sad these days. Like the Discovery Channel, they just had to take something that was good and intentionally turn it into garbage for some coin.
"For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it" has been my take since I got it sometime last year. It's kind of remarkable -- the ads are absolute trash and the apps, while not bad, are a little weird in hard-to-define ways other than "Apple used to do better at this whole UI thing". But if you want just a handful of the paywalled publications it unlocks for you, it's a great deal.
I pay for Apple One and yet the apple news app on my phone is still riddled with ads with weird AI generated people and horrible articles from crappy publishers pushing some other sensationalist garbage.
I would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to the participating sites I browse.
My only overriding and most prominent concern is that given how every other webservice has been, that once they have sufficient ownership of the space they will increase the cost, likely significantly, and then they will likely add in their own ads on top of everything else.
It will take a literal once in a century genius to make something like this that actually works and that companies will latch onto.
There are enormous piles of money looming around every corner seeking a return on investment. If you have users that are enjoying a service, one of those piles of money can buy out the owner, double the price, implement ads, and sell all the private data. The bet they are making is it will take longer for the userbase to quit than it will take to make back their investment.
Every popular / beloved service is a target for these giant piles of cash. The fact that lots of people like it is de facto proof that it's underpriced, or over-resourced, or coddles its users with too much content. According to the finance industry, a stable business relationship should have the userbase reluctantly concluding that they have no other option, gritting their teeth and opening their wallet - and that's the sort of maximally profitable entity that a giant pile of cash will leave alone, letting it just exist, as a business.
I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top.
I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.
Good catch. I didn't even think about the fast lanes fiasco. I don't know why businesses have decided that since they have connected to the internet that the internet owes them.
It should be a public utility. It should be as ad free as reasonable. It should not track you.
The internet should be a lot of things that it currently isn't all because rent-seeking money and power grubbing bastards have too many of the strings and love pulling them like they're pulling their puds.
Then there's the TV streaming problem where the three shows (or sites) you're interested in viewing regularly belong to three different subscription services, and they're jealously set against uniting. I guess that's like the same problem as individual paywalled sites, but bigger.
Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.
I think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company anything to include, but when somebody gets greedy and starts considering adding ads it would make the idea much less attractive and could force them to look at other ways to enshitify their product.
> contract provisions that would require the company to
IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.
If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.
If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
cable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.
Others mention Apple news+ but there are actually a bunch of services that do this. Zinio is one that I've encountered, but a quick search shows that there are also Magzter, Readly, Flipboard, etc etc. I can't speak to their relative merits/range of content/user hostility. In the early 2010s I used to use one where you bought credits and paid per article (usually on the order of $1-$2 iirc, but depended on the source/length). Can't remember what it was called and I don't see it on any of these lists, so maybe it no longer exists or was bought up.
Anyway, this is something you can have if you actually want it.
What frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month.
Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NOT. It's a fucking scam to make us pay a premium.
I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...
My guess is that the $2/user/month thing is an average across all of the users, and the fact that you use YouTube enough to even consider to pay to go ad free puts you in the much higher range of dollars-per-month users such that $14/month may even lose them money.
Presumably because advertisers won't continue to pay $2/user/month for a pool of users that has been denuded of all the users with three bucks a month to rub together for ad-free YouTube.
FWIW, YouTube Premium Lite is $8/month. It removes ads from most content, just not music, and doesn’t include YouTube Music. For me it’s well worth it.
Unless you have some first hand information that I have, you are more than 10x off.
> I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...
There in lies the problem. Your eye balls (assuming well employed with $$$ disposable income) is another 10x worth to advertisers.
If I were to make a guess, Youtube for sure will lose money at $14/month on your specific browser.
You are literally subsidizing internet for, let us say for arguments sake, some zip code in rural america or <sub any rural part of the world> 's Youtube streaming needs.
At least in my case, I had Youtube Red and would watch a few hours of content per day. Then I canceled and found the ads so unreasonable that I just stopped using youtube altogether. Now they make no money from me.
There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.
Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).
The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.
-----
The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.
By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.
I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.
I think that's the angle I'm going for. If Youtube was $25 per year or even $50 per year, it would be a no-brainer for me to pay that. Even if 50 does NOT outbid the advertiser, wouldn't YT rather have guaranteed income rather than trying to constantly find high bidders.
Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"
And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.
What if they dropped the average price of YouTube Premium to $2? And charged you $20 but people in Africa $1. Then it’d be more comparable to ad revenue. Would you be happier then?
...And you'll find that when you do so magically you seem to get logged out more frequently, and because of their UI, you likely won't notice until the sneaking suspicion the quality of your recommendations has dropped catches up with you
Which is a great idea and a great site, but why is it even necessary. The sheer dumb that means there are 12312 Netflix 'class' stream services is beyond ridiculous. I used to love one-stop shopping, now it's so fragmented I just went back to piracy. I don't have time to monkey with 10 sub services.
My point? As soon as such a service existed, there'd actually be 50 of them, and the stuff you wanted would be on 8 separate services.
it was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most.
Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off
Interesting approach! I feel like this is a hard space to break into, because of the friction -- both having to convince content hosts to opt in, and consumers to subscribe.
Not OP, but I’ll throw out that many large commercial websites don’t directly integrate ads themselves. Instead, they use a tag manager.
Often, that tag manager isn’t managed by the technology department, and well-meaning marketing people continue to sign contracts and jam JavaScript into the front end. If there’s also not a good content security policy in place, ad networks quickly become unregulated, all sorts of strange ads come in, and it’s very difficult to control them.
There are a lot of “MarTech” consultants out there that help clients essentially burn their tag manager to the ground, then build it from the ground up to work properly.
one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost?
and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined
but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads
That is a really interesting idea! I immediately see some problems, and you probably already thought through these while working on it, but I'm curious to hear if there were good solutions, or if they were non-issues for some reason:
- If it's a niche product, you can just "buy out" the ad space on the website. But if the phone becomes popular enough that the majority of a website's ad revenue comes through this route, there starts to be a bit of an extortion-like opportunity for the website owners. The website has an incentive to show _even more annoying ads_, with the knowledge that most users actually won't see the ads, but they'll still get paid as if they did. They can say "oh, we're adding 5 more banners, so you'll need to pay us 5x the amount you used to"
- I also see problems from the other direction (from the companies purchasing the ad space). By paying a website _not_ to show ads, you're essentially buying ad space. But the other purchasers-of-ad-space will still exist, and will now be competing for a more limited amount of space. So prices should rise, as demand rises. And as prices rise, you'll have to pay the websites more to keep them ad free. This should converge to a new equilibrium eventually, but I wonder if you accounted for that? If you get significant market share, the new equilibrium would be really expensive, because you're essentially trying to out-purchase everyone.
I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.
YCombinator, the accelerator which invests in startups, is a money printer. Any tiny amount of money generated by ads on Hacker News would be a rounding error.
The site does technically show ads. YCombinator companies can post job ads here. The job ads are privileged in that users are not allowed to comment on them.
Now that I think about it, I haven't seen many job postings from YCombinator companies in a long time. Though to be honest, after some of my experiences with applicants from postings I put in the "Who's hiring" threads I could see why they this site might have fallen out of favor as a hiring location.
Pedantic point: YC has ads, they are just blend in much better and are delivered in the same medium.
Hiring posts (definitively) and tech posts (maybe) by YC companies. The whole product is one big ad for a venture fund. Its generally well done and unobtrusive. So kudos to them for that it goes relatively unnoticed.
Relevancy is a big point here. HN readers work in tech or are super interested in tech, YC companies do very technical things so hiring posts or launches tend to blend right in for the most part.
"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data."
Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)
News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.
This is broadcast publishing in a nutshell. Look at the early radio shows, they had names like "Alka-Seltzer Time," "The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour," "The General Motors Hour" and so on. It was explicitly "we are playing music to get you to tune into our advertisement."
Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing.
If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
The signal (fan sites) to noise (sites focusing on revenue) ratio is way off today. The issues are that ad revenue generating sites are too plentiful, in some cases they are generated by code and they are more highly placed in search engine results. SEO and procedurally created content is where we lost the way (I think the lure of getting rich as a social media influencer or streamer further moved us away).
I was looking for discussion around a brand new album last night (not King Crimson related...), like from an internet forum, reddit, even a review, but the first few pages of search results were all storefronts selling/streaming it, PR (not even reviews) or AI generated pages about the artist. The stuff I was looking for existed, but I only found it after adding "reddit" to the search terms. I was hoping to find a new forum similar to this one focused on that kind of music. Reddit is not ad free, but at least it has a raison d'etre beyond advertising...
So, it's harder to find fan sites, and I'm sure fan site maintainers are less motivated to keep up for this reason (a more popular site is probably more fun to maintain). At least compare this to FOSS projects. I think findability is easier for those, and the popular ones are reasonably well maintained.
Geocities ran ads, but the user's page was still in the spirit of OPs comment. I'd say that lasted until the late 00's. Around 2009. I partially blame the rise of Facebook for the proliferation of "social," though, people tend to get bored with _anything_ if it stagnates too long. Regardless, the internet was inherently social before that; they only changed the landscape. Not for the better in my eyes (though hindsight's 20/20).
Geocities was full of a lot of things. There were pages that were just ad farms, often with no meaningful content except a bunch of key words hidden in the background. But there were also plenty of clean and useful sites by people who wanted to share their passion with others.
The later all but ceases to exist. Even if you are sharing your passion, you are doing it on a social media platform that is using your content to drive your audience into seeing their ads. You are ad bait.
That's very different from the web of the turn of the century.
There are distinctions to be made between rotating/static display ads, spam and everything (i.e., user surveillance) that encompasses digital advertising today. Personally, ads don't bother me. Spam is annoying in terms of UX. But really, user surveillance is what we need to worry about in terms of UX, our privacy, security, etc.
I think there's a worse-step beyond passive surveillance, where ad-networks function as a channel for viruses that seek to change your computer, along with scams and phishing.
Ad-blocking--refusing to run their code--is a simply common sense when the networks are not liable for ensuring that the code they send is not malicious.
It was 96/97. I remember thinking "The drones are moving in on this."
Canter and Siegel had nuked Usenet in 1994, and banners were invented in 1994 by Hotwired. But it took a while for the tech to eat the web, because the web was a niche interest for the first few years.
During that time you could - and a lot of people did - put together a simple site with a text editor and free hosting supplied by your ISP.
The majority of internet users wouldn't have experienced that supposed world.
The median age in the US in 39, which means at least half of all Americans would have been in elementary school or not around during that supposed era of the internet, and the mass adoption of the internet only really began in earnest in the early 2000s.
> "that supposed world ... that supposed era of the internet"
"Supposed: Presumed to be true or real without conclusive evidence". You think there isn't conclusive evidence that the internet existed before 1995? o_O
>If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a license. The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
The legitimate ongoing licensing costs from Gracenote/Lyricfind for their catalogs of millions of song lyrics will cost significantly more than the hosting bill. The cost is beyond the resources of typical hobbyists who like to share information for free.
EDIT: I have no idea what the downvotes are about. If you think my information about lyrics licensing is incorrect, explain why. Several decades ago, volunteers were sharing guitar tabs for free on the internet and that also got shut down by the music publishers because of copyright violations. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821
> The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
Exactly. Now what if there wasn't one popular website with all the lyrics, but a million different small fanpages?
There's a tension that the fan engagement is what really makes entertainers rich. The industry has every right to crack down, but if they do say they are really cutting their own legs off.
I think if there's any negative phrasing in your first three words, those reading from the Philosophers Chair (bathroom) are primed to take what immediately follows as Bad Vibes and downvote accordingly. They're not in this for accuracy.
Well my problem isn't with the writing in its original form, it's with the downvoting in response to it. I am fine with someone bringing bad news if it's helpful info.
> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades.
But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads.
Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste.
>> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
Nobody could find it back in 1994 either! That was part of the fun. You stumbled on a webring or somebody's curated oracle and found a bunch of interesting weird tiny websites.
I was trying to use a grain/chaff analogy to respond to your post, but I think there were just less crops in the old days. For the sites (crops) that were there, you had a lot more healthy ones. As spam and low-quality sites proliferated, the signal->noise ratio of sites got completely out-of-balance.
Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.
In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there.
Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music.
Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc.
The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it.
Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is.
Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them.
Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?"
I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
> I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
by hook or crook, people have things to sell and those platforms are the place to put up shop... (my opinion) most new products/services are garbage (hello temu and friends) so its not a surprise most ads are therefore garbage/frauds as well...
I'll admit that objects you buy from Temu are often 2-3x larger or (more likely) smaller than than you expect them to be, but often they are OK. Having worked a bit in recommendation engineering I have a lot of respect for what they do.
I've built a number of nice puzzle kits with Chinese themes I bought from Temu but don't actually use any of my kemonomimi supplies I bought from Temu and instead rely on American fashion brands, Etsy or commissions.
> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them
You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time.
We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff.
And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model.
Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site.
Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads.
Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
> Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out
Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]...
I think your point about one-off visitors is key. If most traffic is coming from search/social, there's no real incentive to build a clean, loyal-reader experience
Brave + shields
With nasty popups + block scripts will sometimes work without breaking the site.
Chrome forces you to see ads and all the rest of it, Firefox is tolerable but I struggled a bit with enough settings and plugins, it's not as seamless.
I'd say that very much ties into the point of the article. The fact that turning off a major component of your browser significantly improves the experience is damning. That means they put tremendous effort (i.e. money) into deliberately making their readers' experience worse.
It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.
Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean. I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident.
I watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try.
Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?
To be fair, I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI. It's mostly Sourceforge and image hosters from the early 00's that have my votes as the worst offenders.
To be fair to your point though, the pirate sports streams are AWFUL in terms of link landmines.
> I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI
Pornsites and pirating websites have always been amongst the most egregious UX/UI designed to make you accidentally click or open ads.
The only way I can explain your differing experience is that you only visit pornhub.com which is indeed the one well behaved beast in a pack of rabid possums.
I do web development, it makes no sense for me to use a browser most of the public doesn't use. Also I have a ton of extensions that help with development. Firefox is painful.
Every time someone complains about firefox it's something trivial like this... "I don't like the default download location." / "I don't like how the dev tools opens on the bottom." / "I don't like the way the tab bar looks." Absolutely wild to me that using a browser without an adblocker, forever, is better than spending a week or whatever getting used to the different dev tools.
> Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff?
I am so convinced that this is the case. They're using their own product using some max-level sub that removes all the annoyances, and don't realise how unbearable the default experience is.
Speaking of the NYT: previously, I used to bypass the paywall, and I simply got the article with no nonsense. Now I subscribe, and every single day I get an obnoxious pop-up ad to upgrade my subscription to some higher family tier. Giving the NYT money has made my day a tiny bit more annoying than not giving them money. Lesson learnt.
It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font.
Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.
At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm.
It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.
A lot of print publications used to do it, and many still do.
Print magazines make most of their money from ad sales, not subscriptions. A typical ratio is 60:40 ads vs editorial. Magazines like Vogue go >70% ads, and I'm fairly sure old issues of Byte and other computer magazines were in that ballpark.
The difference in print is that the ads are targeted, and even welcome. Many of the ads in old computer magazines were price lists and mini-brochures, and pre-web that was the only way to get that information to customers.
You also have the paid articles where 'journalist' interview some company ceo or influencer that happened to have given them a substantial amount of money.
> the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel.
I recently was in a 45 minutes Uber ride where the driver had the stereo set to the Sirius XM self-advertising channel - the one you get if you haven't subscribed. For 45 minutes, all he listened to was an ad for XM.
I realized that we may soon live in a reality where that's not an option, but I bet the car he had still allowed him to turn off the radio with the ad.
(I'm sure there would have also been countless ways to make the thing play actual music, but turning it off is the most obvious course of action.)
ok ... but why would you listen to the ad - and nothing else, jsut the ad - for 45 minutes straight? it's not like there aren't a billion other options.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've definitely seen behind-the-front-seats screen ad placement and other weird things in ride shares in the U.S. so this doesn't seem out of the question.
I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article. Sure enough, I loaded it up in a private window with adblocks disabled and the above the fold was very obnoxious.
Which is very surprising to me. I only read The Guardian within the Tor browser, and when the website is loaded over their onion urls I do not see the same large obnoxious ads. A rare Tor win? Maybe adnetworks block Tor IP addresses and the reason why ads don't show up?
Maybe someone with some brain on The Guardian realized if you're browsing through Tor, no way you're going to create a login and link your browsing to a name/email address...
That makes it sound like no one of The Guardian has a brain, it's not the intention, it's my most trusted news source, but maybe someone on the IT department thought a little bit further.
More likely Tor was set up years ago and receives no attention unless it horribly breaks; and so nobody notices nor cares that ads aren't working there (and if they were they'd probably not get paid for them anyway).
I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article.
I loaded up a Guardian article this morning on my new 14" MBP, only to find out that there was so much crap on the page I couldn't even see the full headline without using Safari's "hide shit" feature.
Is this reader mode or some sort of adblock-style list? (if it's the latter, I'm looking for one that I can easily add without it breaking too many sites - in my experience, the "annoyance" lists for uBlock cause too much breakage to have them enabled by default).
I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need enough people to actually subscribe to these websites to make that future happen though.
Every time I load an article in archive.ph, I think "I want to support these guys. I would happily pay $.10, maybe even $.25 for this, if it was seamless and instantaneous."
But that's never the option and apparently it never will be. Sorry, I'm just never getting yearly subscriptions to 30 different content websites. That would probably 10x my spam email intake, I'd have to worry about them jacking up prices and playing games after the initial subscription ran out, and I'd have yet another subscription floating out there in the ether for me to forget about.
Are you sure they are? Loading dieline home page I get a ton of tracking blocks. Defector was better, but I still see adtech endpoints. I don't really know of any modern monetized site that isn't like this.
Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer?
On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.)
On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code."
I only really see those two options.
Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right?
There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines.
(Just making it <a><img> also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)
No tracking. No cookies. No behavioral targeting (targeting based on stuff you've previously done). Every website where our ads appear AND every advertiser is hand approved. No JS from advertisers: just a plain JPG/PNG and text.
We're small but on track to pay out $500k to publishers this year.
Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around
IIUC this is how ads on 4chan work. I learned this during my brief foray into targeted merchandising (https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE). Everyone on a given board at a given time was seeing the same ads.
I don't even mind dynamic ads if they are targeted to the page content and not on my browsing history. If I'm reading a page on how to repair my dishwasher, ads from dishwasher manufacturers or sellers make sense.
I haven't investigated to see what sort of JavaScript, etc that they are using, but as a user looking at ads by carbon[1] seem to be pretty chill. This could perhaps meet an in-between you are looking for.
I know of one but it's niche. OpenSubtitles allows people to pay for ads at the start/end of content when you download subtitles on the fly. I've seen countless NordVPN ads in subtitles.
I built my own platform for what I call ethical ads that is serving ads for my own site. No profiling of users allowed, but I allow very specific targeting for content.
Even if the ethics on the advertiser's side could be solved, advertising as the core source of income for a business has it's own unenthical incentives imo. It ultimately boils down to more attention == more ads == more money. I'd argue we got an early preview of that effect when 24 hour news channels were coming into their own in the 90s and 00s, and the detrimental effect it had on the quality of programming and frankly truthfulness. The scale of the internet has only exacerbated those issues.
Unfortunately the industry is so large with so much money now that choosing a different business model is almost always leaving money on the table. And I don't have any ideas on how to fix that.
These days, I assume every web page is actively hostile until proven otherwise. Use as many layers of protection (uBlock, PiHole, various other extensions, etc.) as possible, filter out content when possible, and bail if those don't work.
Youtube is just about the worst that I've put up with for it. Every single second it's trying desperately to inject more ads, which the blocker swiftly removes. After watching for a few minutes the block count can be in the several hundred...
"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel."
QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads.
Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."
In that case it's not really advertising, it's just information. People watch that channel when they want to see products. They're giving people exactly what they asked for.
Advertising is when you're baited into watching some fun "content" and then they interrupt it to shove ads in your face. Nobody asked for this.
Especially now that we can render TV ads in realtime on top of real-world objects, but even before, the 7 minutes of actual TV content and 53 minutes of paid commercials exists too. Better known as professional sports. Unlike QVC, a break from the ads is occasionally given when an athlete is interviewed or things like that. Although, granted, one could argue even an interview is trying to advertise the athlete's brand. Still, potentially a reprieve from having to look at advertising in the form of things like slogans and logos.
The internet equivalent of QVC would be TikTok I believe. The ads are thinly veiled, but it seems like after you go through a few chunks of content eventually it’s basically all ads disguised as content with bits of entertainment thrown in to keep you strung along. It meshes the distinction between advert and content so completely that it doesn’t really matter anymore.
I have seen from the other side how this can happen. The people making the decisions do not understand the technical costs. In fact, many of them pretend to understand the technical costs and say things like "Well, it's just a single line that we're adding to our website".
They want to look good in front of their bosses. They want to bring nice charts with nice performance metrics and they want to be up to date with the latest developments in the market of marketing tools, so they use every tool that is out there.
"IT" has no choice but to do what marketing demands, because IT is a cost center, while marketing is closer to revenues.
And so, over time, you end up with 49MB web pages with hundreds of trackers.
I literally stopped using these websites for a long time ago. And if I run into an article with this kind of hostile design I just close the tab. No article ever worth that shit.
Granted I don’t follow news, so it’s easy for me to say maybe, but same applies other websites. If I land on hostile page (despite idea blockers) I’ll just leave it, what can be so important that can justify me to suffer through it.
Just like in the example in the article, would you eat in McDonald that treated like that? Classical case of vote with your wallet, or vote with your attention.
Following the nested "go read this" links to the "The 49MB Web Page" page:
> Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there.
TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.
Unfortunately, this does not save you. The NYT has a paywall and still has this terrible experience, which caused me to unsubscribe. I remain subscribed to The Atlantic because while it still relies on advertising, the print version is at least readable.
The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times.
This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.
Engineering would make tools for the sales guys to make websites. We hated those bastards because they would litter the pates with adds.
"We need revenue" they'd protest. Engineering would respond that past two ads, the revenue was too small to be worth destroying the brand.
What I got out of that was that business folks, often, don't give a shit about the product reputation on a timescale longer then their ownership of it.
Publishers could create efficient fast-loading web pages if they prioritized it (and a rare few do) but its just not a priority for most even though its in their best interest.
You can have ads loading on a web page, even with header bidders, if you structure it correctly. In fact you can implement an ad solution that allows for fast loading pages and better optimize your ad revenue - whether you're doing pragmatic or direct.
I know this because I've done this before. At a past employer we cleaned up their mobile version (they used the "m.example.com" format, so we could push this as a separate rogue experiment) and saw ad revenue grow by over 30% while giving readers a better, faster overall UX.
I actively monitor top publisher article pages and you can see how bad (and good) it is:
It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all.
(e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you can use to log into your computer, your XBOX, and all sorts of things. The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on)
> The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on
Depends how you use it, I guess? The close and zero-effort integration and syncing with iOS is pretty key to my desktop (well, laptop) still having enough utility-to-effort to be worth having around at all. Probably still won't save it when my M1 Air gets a bit dodgy in a year or two and I start thinking about an upgrade (I'll likely upgrade my aging, last-pre-M-series-model iPad Pro instead) but if not for that it'd already have become inconvenient enough that I'd likely have forgotten about it in a storage bin somewhere.
I find a multi-layered method is best - things like NextDNS + browser based blocking (especially as I like to use it to block annoyances that aren't ads).
I'm afraid he has it actually inverted. What if the "sanctity of the prose" is just a old gloss, and the Taboola / Outbrain ads are the reality that don't hide the org's true character?
The printed version does _look_ better, but can org that serves Taboola ever be taken seriously anymore? Sanctity is miles away from "6 simple steps to $1 Million" ads. We can be sad in general about their passing. But let's not think it's isolated to issue surrounding online/ads. WaPo isn't the same either.
> As Bose notes, “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.
I would presume that this fascination with pushing viewers to the app is because they make better money off of you reading stuff in the app.
Also because they can spam you with notifications through the app and that surely makes some chart go up. As someone with meticulous notification hygiene, it's always surprising to me just how many people allow every app to send notifications when it asks, without thinking about it at all.
Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)
My version of that is to ask yourself what this app could notify you about and decide based on that.
What could a game notify you about? Nothing, probably spam. Deny.
What could a social app notify you about? Interactions with your content and profile. These are useful, allow.
What could an instant messaging app notify you about? Messages, obviously. Allow.
What could a fast food establishment app notify your about? Probably your order status if you order from the app. But it might also spam you. Allow but be prepared to turn off categories that are spammy if spam does arrive.
> The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.
Yes because they don't give the print editions away for free.
You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.
The only reason you're confronted with articles from these legacy publications in the first place is because they've lobbied governments to get google to force them into their carousels and recommendations.
You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.
Yeah? How about when I go to the site as a paid subscriber and get the exact same experience? Did the number or obnoxiousness of ads go down when I gave NYT money? Nope.
> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.
In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads
This is a fact, America is absolutely leading with this kind of capitalism but Europe is following closely, just like the rest of the world. It’s just matter of time, US just happens to be ahead of everyone else.
> I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.
I do. I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users on average.
That number isn't current, and I don't know if it was ever broadly correct, but it's obvious that an installed app provides more opportunities to try to get the user to do something profitable, and it's harder to block ads in native apps. I would be surprised if convincing a user to install a native app doesn't reliably increase profits by a large amount for most kinds of business.
Somewhat tangential... I clicked on the "Dithering" link on Gruber's website. It leads to a podcast of his. The cover image is a 6.6mb JPEG. Man, do you even know what "dithering" means?
Also, (1) the image is dithered, ha ha, and (2) The image on the page https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering is an 863K PNG. (Which I bet we could still get down to a smaller size, granted.) It took me a bit to figure out what you're looking at -- the Dithering site on passport.online, where the cover art is inexplicably 3000x3000 pixels. I'm too tired to come up with a good crack about how that explains what I don't like about Ben Thompson, but I bet it's there.
I really wish that browsers natively supported some sort of "402 Payment Required" HTTP status code (or any other well-known specified indicator) that users could pay with micropayments, so that they wouldn't have to drown us in this ad garbage. I would gladly pay small but justified sum for an article without setting up payment method on each site and be able to return to it. I would be glad even to donate some amount of money to some authority that'd pay for viewership of those less fortunate and not being able to afford reading quality news.
Some say that you should not use ad blocker, because that kills ad revenue, but I did not forced anybody to rely with their lives on ad revenue. Many of things were 'free' because we were all just using ad blocks, and then it all became commodified, simplified, so simpletons without ad blocks became a thing. Now they shame people for using ad blocks, even though it stops spreading malware and viruses.
I plan to use ad block, and use as many extensions that protect me. If there is some form of goods, be it streaming movies, audio, books I will happily pay for it. I will not accept a web with ads. I prefer touch grass. There is a clear line for me.
Also there is no line ad publisher will not cross. The goal posts are shifted, so you will never satisfy shareholder greed. The only pushback is trough ads and probably sometimes piracy. Not that I advocate it, but in reality if companies push too hard, there are consequences.
It kills programmatic advertising, not sponsorships or subscriptions. I always subscribe to the four or five sites I use most and use a blocker. If HN had a subscription tier I would pay it to support them.
HN doesn't need your money, it is run by YCombinator, a venture capital firm. As far as I can determine HN is a way to raise brand awareness for them. Sure, there are probably some people passionate about the concept at the company, but it wouldn't stick around if it they didn't also determine that it has more value to them than the operating costs of the site.
The closest thing I can see to direct monetization of HN is that YC uses it as a captive advertising platform.
They don't serve 3rd party ads, but they use it as a job board (with closed comments on those posts, LOL) for their companies, and to announce product launches and such. All that stuff gets boosted, nobody's organically up-voting a comments-disabled job post from some mediocre startup.
[EDIT] The less-direct part, yes, is stuff like brand awareness and community goodwill.
The interesting thing about this strategy is that there are many people on this very website who have no idea what YCombinator is and just call this website "Hacker News."
Most people (me included) are not really in the target audience for YC. I have no interest in starting a company, and even if I did I wouldn't want to do so in North America.
You also see some posts on here about some YC founded company or other with open positions, which is a wider audience (so that helps the equation I guess).
My guess is that these two target audiences together is enough for them. It is not like HN is a heavy site, nor does it change much over the years. So with smart coding (i.e. a compiled language) and hosting my guess is that moderation time is the bulk of the actual operating costs.
I used to deliberately not block ads on sites that worked directly with advertisers and didn't use big spying malware- and scam-filled ad networks, and only served (more or less) static, non-animated and non-pop-up ads. I also didn't block the early "see? We're doing not-evil advertising!" well-marked text-only Google ads (remember those?)
None of those are really a thing any more, but if those were the only kinds of ads around, I might not bother with an ad blocker at all.
Except Google ads or anything else from a big multi-site ad network. That's all spying crap, I'm never going back to allowing those through, no matter how unobtrusive.
No, "No print publication on the planet can do this"
But looking back on magazines, newspapers, etc; they have ALWAYS used a tremendous amount of advertisements. Newspapers sold classified space to sell stuff. It was always passive, and no way to have the newspaper or magazine to watch the user back to track eyeballs.
Now with tech, we can do precisely this, or with close proxies.
And with FB marketplace and Craigslist eating what was left of classifieds, yeah being in media is a very bad place.
And thats not even discussing using LLMs to make slop. Even Are Technica was generating hallucinated articles, and the editor accepted it for months until being called out.
(reads:) People making the decisions do not understand they want to look good in front of their sources. They want to bring something nice and they want to be up to date to do what marketing demands,
...but how are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
If everyone looks equal, sites ('to pick') are going irrelevant it seems.... but OT: about 14y ago there was a request for ads that may be liked. and yes...in the meantime, even you would've said, 'yes ther were some ads, i liked (maybe the music, the product or something other about).' But that it wasn't originally about. 10y ago the pendulum swinged to: "we lose the web", some saying that books (typewriters for example^^) were replaced by video (TV) and that the internet eaten the book- and video-stuff. so one asked: "what is next? do we become an internet of the internet (if any may use this as a description of todays so called 'AI') ?"
And i looked on the HN frontpage which shows exactly that 'exagerated' (generated support) each of you is just echoing another... but who the heck, i am even not a native english speaker, so wayne ...
Of course they do, there are ads and unrelated articles on the same page , or, for magazines, full page ads interrupting your reading experience, or flashy callouts.
Paper is just a much more constrained technology, do they can't ruin it dynamically, not that they don't want to or somehow magically respect the reader very much for free
This reminds me of Amazon Prime video advertising Molly Mae. It knows I would never ever watch that trash but it shows it to me precisely for that reason, that'll I get annoyed enough to vent about it and contribute to it going viral. It works i guess, since I am typing this garbage on hn.
I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.
"I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role."
I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.
This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
> “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.
I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements.
This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then.
This also stems from the thousands and thousands of marketing companies/"startups" that do one thing. "Put our script on your page to track and improve customer retention". Of course whatever the marketing company is selling is perfectly quantifiable inside the analytics suite, but no one gets promoted for implementing a new analytics report. You get promoted for implementing "Click Tagger" or whatever.
This mentality runs deep through modern American culture. Where it's more flashy and newsworthy to strike a deal with a sales rep of some AI startup than implement the tech yourself. Look at the US CENTCOM implementing Israeli tech or even the report yesterday about the committee approving Microslop garbage for federal use.[0] All of that comes out of some sales contract as our leadership teams only know how to copy script tags, not understand systems and flows.
> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
Amplified but redundant for HN crowd is my point. I’m not clueless as to why a person who blogs to maintain attention would amplify a topic. Your explanation was not needed.
> The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.
lol, they're doing for the money. Not because they're "held hostage". More time on site means more money. They know this. They know it's a shitty experience. Look, I get it, they have to make money somehow, but some of these sites try to squeeze every last drop of money out of users. It's a fine line to walk between "I'll stay because this content is interesting" and "F this man, I'm leaving", and some push that line hard.
Let's not forget who developed the tooling, platforms, frameworks, libraries and packages and so on that these news companies use.
Nor the development practices that are hoisted as "the way to do things now" that people frantically race to adopt so they are not pushed out of the industry and a fruitful career as "obsolete".
Nor the technology companies that thought they served as a suitable replacement for news and advertising and community boards and used their massive investments to undercut the ability of traditional news outlets to survive, nevermind upstarts to have any hope of competing.
And the haranguing continues as if it was the design of these organizations in the first place.
There's no love lost for the media companies owned by billionaires, but maybe it should be more clear in these discussions exactly who started this particular mess.
Or someone can invent an ad supported business model that isn’t abusive.
A lot of print magazines, like Vogue or even Field & Stream, are like 60% or more full page ads. But if you’re reading something like New Bride magazine you’re probably actively shopping for wedding dresses and flowers and such, so the advertising ideally works as part of what makes the magazine valuable for the reader and the advertiser.
The real problem is that the finance and business folks are addicted to performance metrics and they preferentially put their money towards things that can be represented as graphs because it’s hard to argue with a graph. Jon Gruber has a vague sense for what sort of audience he has and what they’re into, so he can pitch advertisers on the idea that by advertising with him they’re going to reach an audience of Apple enthusiast technologists who presumably care about design and UI/UX and whatever other intuitions he has about his readership. But none of that is a quantitative metric, so only a small market is open to putting money into it.
I've long thought this. Ads don't need to follow people. They don't need to track. The entire world suffers under the weight of corporate internet surveillance.
If I want to know something, I will search for it. The sites that offer the info could easily choose to show ads specifically relevant to the topic at hand instead of hiring out that task to a cyberstalker.
I don't want to see ads for pet medicines on multiple sites because some algorithm has decided that I have a pet in need of medical assistance. I don't have a pet at all.
I'm sure I only get those because I'm using apps to poison my digital footprint, but my ex-gf, who didn't and did have pets, probably got my home IP tagged as a pet owner.
He also has no shareholders except himself. So the only person he has to please is himself, and if he is wrong, the only person who suffers is himself (and, I suppose, his family).
This very direct, very personal connection to the web business doesn't exist in most other sites.
He also has no ambitions towards being a billionaire, he just wants to make enough money to sustain a mostly upper middle class lifestyle and keep his business going.
I think a lot of online publications could be modestly sized businesses with a very respectable annual revenue range in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions, but they erode their own brand value chasing tantalizingly higher numbers that SEEM in reach but actually aren’t.
"The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, "A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their `apps' these days. I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from." It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites."
It has nothing to do with "understand[ing] or enjoy[ing] the web". It comes from people at organisations running websites that know where the money is, probably because some cretinous nerds encouraged them. Generally, the amount of potential data collection, surveillance, ad serving and _money-making_ is greater with an "app" than with a website
"Ad blockers" are popular but "app blockers"^1 are not. The "smartphone" is a remotely-controlled "entire surveillance device" (recent HN title: "Your phone is an entire computer")
1. Application firewalls like Netguard. And even this does not solve the problem entirely because the design of the "entire computer" includes extensive surveillance capabilities
News sites are going irrelevant anyways. I'd imagine they are pushing hard for this because traffic has died cause AI overviews have hit direct traffic to websites and independent writing platforms like Substack / Medium mean I can read a quality opinion on a matter I care about.
I've had a thought bubbling away lately, informed by AI hype, some job market research, the "enshittification" book/topic doing the rounds, and I guess lived experience too.
Computers were invented, and initially used for calculations, punch cards, databases, spreadsheets, automating warehouses and running airlines and stuff. Computers are really good for that stuff, like many orders of magnitude better than analog alternatives.
Later, computers became a mass market consumer product, and we had the web and internet, and moving everything online became a fad, much like AI is a fad now. This pushed computers into some fairly marginal use cases, like "social media", publishing, messaging, e-commerce, and CRUD apps to manage workflows like JIRA and friends. Computers are kind of ok for this stuff... but, frankly, not that much better than the original thing. Like, a telephone, fax, etc. already allowed instant communication, email is maybe a bit better than fax, but it's not 1000x better. JIRA is a bit better than a whiteboard and post-it notes, but, also probably not 1000x better.
It's these recent, marginal-ish use cases that are getting destroyed by enshittification, AI, etc... because they were just never that good an application for computers and UIs in the first place. I think, if one wants to work on, or use an application that doesn't get filled with ads or have a copilot gratuitously inserted or whatever, it's probably more likely to happen in software for fluid dynamics or some natural fit for using a computer. Conversely, anything like facebook or jira or whatever that never really needed to be a computer app apart from because it was fashionable... is now unfashionable.
Apple News is a fantastic service for avoiding most of these problems. The BBC put up a paywall on their site for anyone in the US but I can still read every article for free on Apple News. Politico wants me to create an account on my phone to read their articles but I can read them just fine on Apple News. New York Times is one of the few major publications not on Apple News, overall there are enough national news choices that I don't care which ones aren't there.
The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.
Is the adblocking VPN doing anything some DNS block lists on your router or device wouldn’t do?
You can’t do MITM on HTTPS anyway, so I can’t imagine they would do anything more than a $20 Pi Zero and PiHole, except for the fact that somebody else is managing it.
> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.
Ehh... I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription a year ago. Since then I've received a dozen predatory phone calls and just add many letters. Plus when you do have the subscription they alter prices on you like a cable TV provider. So in some ways print is better than web but in other ways it's worse.
> I’ve been browsing the web without content-blocking extensions on the Neo. It’s been a while since I’ve done that for an extended period of time. Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody.
Surprised Gruber isn’t using network level adblocking. I can’t imagine life without it these days.
(Yes I realise you need extensions when not on your own network etc - unless you use your own DNS!)
Apart from adblock (technically ublock), I can encourage reading mode. Even F9 on Edge is pretty good at figuring out what you really want to see/read. It sometimes also bypasses paywalls by accident.
The Guardian's twitter/X "exit" must be the dumbest thing they ever did. Their site was not so aggressively pushing for donations/subscriptions/accounts before that.
> The reader is not respected enough by the software.
The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.
We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.
The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.
I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.
>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version.
? Where is this true?
I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every paragraph.
That maybe 10KB of text is surrounded by 10MB of extraneous filler downloaded for just this page (not even including the cached content).
People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.
This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).
On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.
For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.
>For an organization who get their main income from ads
The NYT makes about $2B per year from subscriber revenue. They make about $450M from digital ads over all properties. Obviously not all news orgs are the same, but the lead example of a shitty experience is the NYT, so weird that all of the rationalizations work so hard to diverge.
>tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it
"Tailoring" a digital page to not include ads for subscribers is so laughably trivial that this is a farcical claim. They aren't hand-laying out the content and removing ad upsets it or something. But they don't remove the ads because, gollum style, why shouldn't they force ads on me?
What we're talking about is classic enshittification, and every justification people make up is just cope. Indeed, the fact that I'm a subscriber makes me even more lucrative to advertisers, in a classic catch-22 that completely undoes all of the "just pay and you don't get ads in my invented scenario".
Ok, point taken. I've heard very different numbers for dutch newspapers and blindly extrapolated that to the US. And if the numbers are like that than maybe the numbers I heard about dutch newspapers are bullshit too, who knows!
I grew up in a household where several newspapers were bought daily (dad was a journalist himself). I would struggle doing the same though, even if I can very much afford it, because it is very clear to current press that even paying, I'm the product.
There's all sorts of articles that are actually ads, attempts to move me in an ideological direction, information that is in the owner's interest to spread.
Press double dips. If the interest is on distributing ideology, have the parties/lobbies pay.
What paid subscriptions respect the readers? I would love to pay for news from organizations that only get money from readers. For example, I have been paying for The Economist for decades and still see advertisements.
Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to make the leap to a potentially better one because if they get it wrong they’ll end up with less or no income.
At the dawn of the web, no industry was better positioned to take advantage of it than the news media. Instead they ignored it and were cannibalized to a greater degree than any other industry. Its hard to keep an industry afloat when it is managed so badly. Part of the reason that the news media is where it is, is that they have lost most of their income and viewers so the only people who are willing to work in it have ulterior motives. This drives a vicious cycle of continuously more partisan news coverage which drives away even more viewers. The ads are just a symptom of this, not the cause. If they were managed better, they would have a more effective ad policy but they aren't. Still though, I'm sure its a hard balance to keep but others seem to do it so...
We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay.
Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone? They've always carried ads, and I suspect that's always been a bigger income stream than the cost of buying the paper itself.
The division has been more equal in the past. When I was a kid, probably 75% of the neighborhood subscribed to the paper and others, like my parents, bought it regularly on Sunday and certain other days. Perhaps sales was 25-30% of revenue. Advertising was big but a large portion was classified ads. Wikipedia says up to 70% of some newspapers' revenue was classifieds. These ads are unlikely to have much editorial effect, but that revenue has basically gone away. What remains is more perilous to independence, and since the number of print readers has gone way down, also not as important to the advertiser.
> Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.
Some companies are like this, but they generally lose their best people to better salaried jobs elsewhere. They exist because not everything needs to be done by top people.
Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever!
No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.
Is that so hard to understand?
Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!
The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.
>The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality
This is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber.
I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for every product you use.
Because everyone wants to double (and triple- and quadruple- and...) dip. Buy a $2000 TV and you'll likely discover ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. They figured "why not?" because someone will always rationalize it.
> It's like buy a $2000 TV and discovering ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc.
Have you bought a TV recently? This is exactly what is happening already. I had to pi-hole my entire network to get rid of the ads in my "switch source" menu on my Samsung TV that did not have ads when I bought it and for the first 3 years after that.
I only hooked up my Samsung TV to the internet to install one update when I first acquired it, then kept it disconnected. Thanks for the tip--I'll make sure to keep it offline forever now!
after 30 years of waiting for standard micropayments, I have stopped wondering if it's solvable. I perfectly believe we could have had it working 20 years ago but there's a reason someone doesn't desire it to be.
i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model.
I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month
Al a carte content via a good standardized micro payment option sounds wonderful. Not sure if we as a society would pull it off well, but I can dream.
Define micropayments, but we kind of do it with television and movies if you rent from something like Apple, Sony, or Amazon. Would love if that model could apply to the written word as well.
I feel like this is relatively short-sighted. I don't enjoy reading global news articles as often times it just makes me upset. I like reading local news because I can relate to it. I pay for one, and I read the other one in a frustrated mood.
I'm sure there are people who enjoy reading global newspapers daily, and I'm sure a good quantity pays for it. That just doesn't include me.
I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.
Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.
The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.
I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously)
but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try
we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
I had a site with some traffic and a popular, class-leading ad plugin for the platform.
At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription.
I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share.
I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer self-service was.
His question back was, "What's hard about it?"
I couldn't even muster a reply.
Maybe there are some details missing here, but asking for more detailed or tailored feedback makes it seem like he cares and was willing to hear you out. Sometimes people are in their own industry for so long that they forget what their industry and tools look like to outside eyes. A simple menu to him could’ve been overwhelming for you as a quick example.
I ran into this a while back at a talk when the speaker used the phrase "perfectly ordinary sodium iodide gamma ray spectrometer". I pointed out to him afterwards that that's not something that most people would expect to follow "perfectly ordinary" in a sentence, and he explained that, yes, today you'd be using thallium-doped CsI or NaI scintillators instead.
Unsurprisingly, there's a representative XKCD. https://xkcd.com/2501/
If the response is an exact quote, the tone is "you must be stupid." It doesn't convey caring and wiling to hear things, and if they can't understand that before sending it, it makes perfect sense that the product sucks, and it will only get worse.
It’s not the tone. It’s how you perceive the tone to be. Be careful, especially in a culturally diverse and international environment. Plenty of cultures cringe when they receive overly friendly phrased words, as it will not sound honest and curious to them but condescending and fake (in this context it may be perceived as sarcasm); whereas others will experience and mean it as straightforward openness.
Communication is hard. Even harder in writing. A usually working approach is to assume friendliness.
Why didn't you tell him what you told us?
"At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription."
> we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
this is batshit insane, yet I believe it
"Parable of the broken window", except instead of preventing the kid from throwing the rocks, they hired a someone to catch the rocks midair.
though in this case it seems "the rocks were coming from inside the building"
Somewhere in the net of tubes of our AC we have a machine that produces rocks. They randomly shoot of the air vents, please install ballistic shields in front of the vents to stop them from hitting our customers.
The pelxiglas is cheaper than taking the system down…
Which sounds insane until you realise that you’ve just described in outline something very like the iron dome missile defence system, which actually exists in reality.
(And of course you’ll get no argument from me that it’s insane that such things need to exist at all, but such is the world we live in.)
I'll bolster it. I've worked on a site-you-have-heard-of. They were struggling and as a response they would change marketing leadership basically every year to try to find a new way to reach a new or different demographic. Every year the new marketing leader would say "we're not doing any of that previous idiot's strategy, as I am the one who knows best". And as each marketer tried to make their mark, 50 new Google Tag Manager script injects would appear.
Now, whose job was it to remove the previous 200 Tag Manager scripts? Obviously the last guy's, because those were his experiments and he was in charge at the time so new guy was clearly not responsible for it. And at the end of the year, 250 Tag Manager injections would now exist and we would turn the page to reveal a new CMO.
And thus ends the parable of how I put a wrapping feature flag on the code that added Google Tag Manager to the site so that I could display the effects of the insanity and demonstrate why the PageSpeed metrics were ass and why engineering couldn't fix it (in a way they would permit, anyways).
Thank you for this insight. Even as a developer, I can easily lose track of all the trackers I've included in a webpage. Usually, if I see a tracker in the code, it's already obfuscated and I provide the benefit of the doubt to leave it in.
It's only when I jump back into the ads management page where I'm able to get a better idea. Even then, the specific trackers are hidden behind a variety of menu items that can change every time. This post made me realize that I need a better strategy as things are getting ridiculous with ads.
I used to be someone who didn't use ad blockers because some of them are botnets. It's just not the same anymore, as I would trust the botnets with my data over the advertisers.
Even if its obfuscated, there should be a comment above it saying what it is. This is bad developer hygiene.
> the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try
I think this might be selection bias in your customer base. I've had some friends who worked at a local news outlet. The ads on their website were a big deal and they had a full-time position dedicated to managing internet advertising.
yes perhaps only the big players have this problem
Other way around. Only the very small players have this problem.
For big players, ad revenue is a big part of their business. Not a forgotten corner of their website.
That is just plain ridiculous. How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?
Oh Lord you need to take on some non-tech companies as clients if this surprises you. I've had clients who forgot they had a website and thought that monthly hosting bill was just for something to do with the back-office Internet connection.
That is insane.
It was a janitorial temp company and they didn't really care about computers. Whoever had been their IT guy before me had made a pretty neat website that would let clients book cleaning staff and give them a birds-eye- view of upcoming staffing needs. It was marginally better than their existing phone and email based system but not enough to make them change it, and over years of saying "let's try it next quarter" eventually everybody forgot about it.
> That is just plain ridiculous.
This is called "Tuesday", for me.
> How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?
The knowledge atrophied. To me the harder problem is keeping knowledge off the bus… it gets on of its own accord and then boom: knowledge lost. People leave the company, and with them, lessons. People are in constant crunch time, and don't have time for the last 2% of the work that takes 98% of the time, like adequately documenting the weird bits of the system. Half the time the corp site is an afterthought to main engineering, relegated to some CMS that marketing can have, and trust me marketing is not writing docs.
Company leadership at nigh every job I have worked on encourages the company, collectively, to forget. Dev turnovers at most places I've worked average around 2y… that's knowledge, just walking out the door.
hi, I'm a dev who was working in journalism around thirty years ago and still has some connections.
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
Can you suggest some websites used to read RSS?
Feedly is the obvious choice I guess: https://feedly.com/news-reader
I use the Reeder app on iPad. NetNewsWire and Feedbin are good alternatives. I’ve never had a particularly good experience on web apps.
If I may, what was your vision? What were you aiming to replace the ads with?
I have been waiting for "Netflix for news or magazines". Pay $20 a month and get access to multiple publishers.
Isn’t that Apple News+? Cheaper than $20, too.
Alternatively, Libby is free (and yes, legal, though not available everywhere).
Isn’t that Apple News+?
You would be correct, but...and I say this as a subscriber to Apple's "all-in-one" package...Apple News+ is in many ways garbage. Low-rent articles from publications whose time has long passed (looking at you, Popular Mechanics), with Taboola-grade ads interspersed (as Gruber said recently, how many 30-something blonde women need hearing aids?).
That said, stay away from the front page and go straight to your selected publications, and it's a good deal with access to WSJ, LA Times, and what have you. You still get crappy ads (which I can't seem to find a way to block with PiHole), but the content is there. For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it.
> You would be correct, but...
I agree that Apple News+ is bad, but I think this is an example of why these plans always fail:
Someone says "I would pay good money for a service that does..." and then the service that does the thing appears and the goalposts keep moving as people realize their threshold for wanting to pay for something is higher than they originally thought.
Popular Mechanics is so sad these days. Like the Discovery Channel, they just had to take something that was good and intentionally turn it into garbage for some coin.
Apple News is a weird interface it it’s great. Magazines are all garbage now with few exceptions. In my case my local paper is there as well.
I would subscribe to the paper directly, but after the 19 week trial, it renews for random intervals for increasing prices.
"For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it" has been my take since I got it sometime last year. It's kind of remarkable -- the ads are absolute trash and the apps, while not bad, are a little weird in hard-to-define ways other than "Apple used to do better at this whole UI thing". But if you want just a handful of the paywalled publications it unlocks for you, it's a great deal.
> "For all my bitching, I'd still recommend it"
Enshittificators love people like us.
Oh, it’s been this way from day one.
I pay for Apple One and yet the apple news app on my phone is still riddled with ads with weird AI generated people and horrible articles from crappy publishers pushing some other sensationalist garbage.
I would gladly pay an extra $20/m for a Disney style internet fast pass where I can browse any site that is subscribed to the service without ads, cookie preferences already set, no login or login managed by the extension for the fast pass service, and maybe a search provider that allows me to filter out SSO spam sites and adwhores like Meta and Google, and where some significant portion of my monthly pay is sent to the participating sites I browse.
My only overriding and most prominent concern is that given how every other webservice has been, that once they have sufficient ownership of the space they will increase the cost, likely significantly, and then they will likely add in their own ads on top of everything else.
It will take a literal once in a century genius to make something like this that actually works and that companies will latch onto.
There are enormous piles of money looming around every corner seeking a return on investment. If you have users that are enjoying a service, one of those piles of money can buy out the owner, double the price, implement ads, and sell all the private data. The bet they are making is it will take longer for the userbase to quit than it will take to make back their investment.
Every popular / beloved service is a target for these giant piles of cash. The fact that lots of people like it is de facto proof that it's underpriced, or over-resourced, or coddles its users with too much content. According to the finance industry, a stable business relationship should have the userbase reluctantly concluding that they have no other option, gritting their teeth and opening their wallet - and that's the sort of maximally profitable entity that a giant pile of cash will leave alone, letting it just exist, as a business.
I think Kagi is kind of making this happen currently with search. Not sure how their adoption number are going, but people are willing to pay $$ for better search with no "sponsored content" rising to the top.
I'm hesitant about a lot of this stuff because it's very easy to get to a place where we let net neutrality degrade even more than it already has. Part of the way that platforms indoctrinate us to accept that paying extra for quality of service or "fast lanes" for specific content types are "necessary" is to degrade the existing experience so much that it seems inevitable.
Good catch. I didn't even think about the fast lanes fiasco. I don't know why businesses have decided that since they have connected to the internet that the internet owes them.
It should be a public utility. It should be as ad free as reasonable. It should not track you.
The internet should be a lot of things that it currently isn't all because rent-seeking money and power grubbing bastards have too many of the strings and love pulling them like they're pulling their puds.
I swear by Kagi and will never go back (until they inevitably start including ads after a bad earnings report)
Then there's the TV streaming problem where the three shows (or sites) you're interested in viewing regularly belong to three different subscription services, and they're jealously set against uniting. I guess that's like the same problem as individual paywalled sites, but bigger.
Everyone who thinks that some kind of subscription service will replace ads, needs to take a look at history. Cable TV, satellite TV, etc., might have started ad free, but they soon adopted ads. So you ended up paying for a subscription in addition to high numbers of ads.
I think that cable represents a lot of failures that don't need to repeated. If someone were serious about starting an ad-free subscription service there are things they can do to help ensure it stays ad-free. An easy one would be contract provisions that would require the company to make massive payouts to customers if ads are ever introduced to the service. That kind of provision doesn't cost an ad-free company anything to include, but when somebody gets greedy and starts considering adding ads it would make the idea much less attractive and could force them to look at other ways to enshitify their product.
> contract provisions that would require the company to
IANAL but I suspect bankruptcy law is a subtle and chronic bad influence here.
If a well-behaved company has financial trouble, formerly-binding promises around privacy or ethics may get voided in the name of somehow turning the whole mess into money for creditors. Then the new ownership may be able to do whatever they want with the data.
If the prior management deleted everything before the sale, they could get into legal trouble for destroying "valuable assets" and wrongly prioritizing customers over creditors.
cable didn't start ad free. It started because some valley communities couldn't get a signal at all so the put one community antenna on high ground and ran a cable to houses to get normal broadcast tv with ads to each house. a few ad free stations came latter.
I spent a long time thinking CATV on the back mean Cable TV, not Community Antenna TV.
Huh, and I thought it was short for "Conditional Access TV" – i.e. you needed a subscription of some sort.
TIL.
Others mention Apple news+ but there are actually a bunch of services that do this. Zinio is one that I've encountered, but a quick search shows that there are also Magzter, Readly, Flipboard, etc etc. I can't speak to their relative merits/range of content/user hostility. In the early 2010s I used to use one where you bought credits and paid per article (usually on the order of $1-$2 iirc, but depended on the source/length). Can't remember what it was called and I don't see it on any of these lists, so maybe it no longer exists or was bought up.
Anyway, this is something you can have if you actually want it.
Press reader is basically this, although it lacks some of the better titles.
What frustrates me to no end, is that Youtube makes about $2 per user per month from ads. Yet if i want to go ad free, they expect me to pay $14 per month.
Why in the hell would they not just sell it to me at cost for $2. Heck, I'll even say I'll be a customer for the REST OF TIME if they did that. I understand why Netflix and other vendors charge $12 - $20 because it has to pay for the copyright. But Youtube does NOT. It's a fucking scam to make us pay a premium.
I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...
My guess is that the $2/user/month thing is an average across all of the users, and the fact that you use YouTube enough to even consider to pay to go ad free puts you in the much higher range of dollars-per-month users such that $14/month may even lose them money.
Yes it's a very broad global average. Advertisers pay much more for North American users, then European users.
And the ones they want to reach the most are the same ones willing to pay for a subscription to remove ads.
Presumably because advertisers won't continue to pay $2/user/month for a pool of users that has been denuded of all the users with three bucks a month to rub together for ad-free YouTube.
FWIW, YouTube Premium Lite is $8/month. It removes ads from most content, just not music, and doesn’t include YouTube Music. For me it’s well worth it.
Unless you have some first hand information that I have, you are more than 10x off.
> I refuse to buy Youtube ad free until they drop the price to something $3 or below...
There in lies the problem. Your eye balls (assuming well employed with $$$ disposable income) is another 10x worth to advertisers.
If I were to make a guess, Youtube for sure will lose money at $14/month on your specific browser.
You are literally subsidizing internet for, let us say for arguments sake, some zip code in rural america or <sub any rural part of the world> 's Youtube streaming needs.
At least in my case, I had Youtube Red and would watch a few hours of content per day. Then I canceled and found the ads so unreasonable that I just stopped using youtube altogether. Now they make no money from me.
There is a comment somewhere on HN where a person described implementing ads for a small, hobby website.
Users complaied about the price to go ad-free (something like $25 per year).
The commenter revealed that the actual revenue from ads was much more than $25 per year. Every person who purchased the ad-free option actually cost them money.
----- The lesson I took away is that ads pay more than we expect, though i didn't know the specifics of YouTube.
By providing an ad-free option, they are really allowing the user to out-bid the advertiser.
I think for most people, they would not be willing to pay more to avoid the ad than the ad seller is willing to pay to show it. It's a weird conundrum--but people are very cheap.
I think that's the angle I'm going for. If Youtube was $25 per year or even $50 per year, it would be a no-brainer for me to pay that. Even if 50 does NOT outbid the advertiser, wouldn't YT rather have guaranteed income rather than trying to constantly find high bidders.
Youtube claims "we’ve reached 125 million YouTube Music and Premium subscribers globally, including trials"
And I bet most of that is trials and it's probably cumulative rather than right now. I bet that 500m people paying $50 /year would actually make them real money that is dependable - since most people would pay for it again next year to avoid ads. And the lower price would skyrocket subscriptions.
What if they dropped the average price of YouTube Premium to $2? And charged you $20 but people in Africa $1. Then it’d be more comparable to ad revenue. Would you be happier then?
What if?
That's exactly what they do. It's 80c/month in Argentina.
Indeed, so what’s OP complaining about?
...And you'll find that when you do so magically you seem to get logged out more frequently, and because of their UI, you likely won't notice until the sneaking suspicion the quality of your recommendations has dropped catches up with you
I'd love that, but then I see things like this:
https://www.justwatch.com/
Which is a great idea and a great site, but why is it even necessary. The sheer dumb that means there are 12312 Netflix 'class' stream services is beyond ridiculous. I used to love one-stop shopping, now it's so fragmented I just went back to piracy. I don't have time to monkey with 10 sub services.
My point? As soon as such a service existed, there'd actually be 50 of them, and the stuff you wanted would be on 8 separate services.
it was a single monthly subscription to a bundle, and the clever part is we would measure time spent on each site and divide up the money proportionally, so the site you spent the most time reading would get paid the most. Our founder had the idea that this would incentivize higher-quality content. We never got enough paying subscribers to really pull it off
Interesting approach! I feel like this is a hard space to break into, because of the friction -- both having to convince content hosts to opt in, and consumers to subscribe.
Micro-payments, probably
This is fascinating! Can you share more stories?
Not OP, but I’ll throw out that many large commercial websites don’t directly integrate ads themselves. Instead, they use a tag manager.
Often, that tag manager isn’t managed by the technology department, and well-meaning marketing people continue to sign contracts and jam JavaScript into the front end. If there’s also not a good content security policy in place, ad networks quickly become unregulated, all sorts of strange ads come in, and it’s very difficult to control them.
There are a lot of “MarTech” consultants out there that help clients essentially burn their tag manager to the ground, then build it from the ground up to work properly.
one of the other head-exploding experiences from that startup was when a major cell-phone company sat down with us and said, we have an idea: the ad-free cell phone. What if, every time a website would normally show an ad, we just paid them not to, at about the same rate the ads are paying. How much would that cost?
and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined
but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads
That is a really interesting idea! I immediately see some problems, and you probably already thought through these while working on it, but I'm curious to hear if there were good solutions, or if they were non-issues for some reason:
- If it's a niche product, you can just "buy out" the ad space on the website. But if the phone becomes popular enough that the majority of a website's ad revenue comes through this route, there starts to be a bit of an extortion-like opportunity for the website owners. The website has an incentive to show _even more annoying ads_, with the knowledge that most users actually won't see the ads, but they'll still get paid as if they did. They can say "oh, we're adding 5 more banners, so you'll need to pay us 5x the amount you used to"
- I also see problems from the other direction (from the companies purchasing the ad space). By paying a website _not_ to show ads, you're essentially buying ad space. But the other purchasers-of-ad-space will still exist, and will now be competing for a more limited amount of space. So prices should rise, as demand rises. And as prices rise, you'll have to pay the websites more to keep them ad free. This should converge to a new equilibrium eventually, but I wonder if you accounted for that? If you get significant market share, the new equilibrium would be really expensive, because you're essentially trying to out-purchase everyone.
Lol
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I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.
YCombinator, the accelerator which invests in startups, is a money printer. Any tiny amount of money generated by ads on Hacker News would be a rounding error.
The site does technically show ads. YCombinator companies can post job ads here. The job ads are privileged in that users are not allowed to comment on them.
Now that I think about it, I haven't seen many job postings from YCombinator companies in a long time. Though to be honest, after some of my experiences with applicants from postings I put in the "Who's hiring" threads I could see why they this site might have fallen out of favor as a hiring location.
Pedantic point: YC has ads, they are just blend in much better and are delivered in the same medium.
Hiring posts (definitively) and tech posts (maybe) by YC companies. The whole product is one big ad for a venture fund. Its generally well done and unobtrusive. So kudos to them for that it goes relatively unnoticed.
Relevancy is a big point here. HN readers work in tech or are super interested in tech, YC companies do very technical things so hiring posts or launches tend to blend right in for the most part.
In other words, we're still the product at HN: the customers are just not advertisers.
"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data."
Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)
News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.
> "and 49 megabytes of data"
This can go into "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than" https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 - comments from 2011 when the Yahoo.com homepage was ~220Kb
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 - comments from 2020
For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.
This is broadcast publishing in a nutshell. Look at the early radio shows, they had names like "Alka-Seltzer Time," "The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour," "The General Motors Hour" and so on. It was explicitly "we are playing music to get you to tune into our advertisement."
Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
At least there was some connection there - if the experience for "the General Motors Hour" was absolute shit, it would get back to them.
We have so many advertising intermediaries that it's basically impossible for anything to affect anyone, ever.
People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them, but they want someone to make the lyrics available for them, for free, on the Internet, forever. And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason. That's where we are today.
Somewhere along the way, we lost the original vibe of the Internet. There was a time when it was fundamentally a community. People hosted things for the sheer joy of doing it and for the satisfaction of contributing.
If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
I would actually flip your statement around. Today, many people feel entitled to be paid for sharing things on the Internet. In that sense, they are the newcomers. The original ethos was about sharing information simply because it mattered to someone else, and a few of us still believe that value has not gone away.
we lost the original vibe of the Internet.
The signal (fan sites) to noise (sites focusing on revenue) ratio is way off today. The issues are that ad revenue generating sites are too plentiful, in some cases they are generated by code and they are more highly placed in search engine results. SEO and procedurally created content is where we lost the way (I think the lure of getting rich as a social media influencer or streamer further moved us away).
I was looking for discussion around a brand new album last night (not King Crimson related...), like from an internet forum, reddit, even a review, but the first few pages of search results were all storefronts selling/streaming it, PR (not even reviews) or AI generated pages about the artist. The stuff I was looking for existed, but I only found it after adding "reddit" to the search terms. I was hoping to find a new forum similar to this one focused on that kind of music. Reddit is not ad free, but at least it has a raison d'etre beyond advertising...
So, it's harder to find fan sites, and I'm sure fan site maintainers are less motivated to keep up for this reason (a more popular site is probably more fun to maintain). At least compare this to FOSS projects. I think findability is easier for those, and the popular ones are reasonably well maintained.
Were you using Google to search? Those fan sites don't serve up Google ads, so Google has no incentive to surface them for you.
People keep telling me that Google lost against SEO, but in reality they just realized that SEO was good for their bottom line.
So exactly when was this? Even Geocities was full of punch the monkey ads and the web was inundated with X10 pop under ads.
Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam
Geocities ran ads, but the user's page was still in the spirit of OPs comment. I'd say that lasted until the late 00's. Around 2009. I partially blame the rise of Facebook for the proliferation of "social," though, people tend to get bored with _anything_ if it stagnates too long. Regardless, the internet was inherently social before that; they only changed the landscape. Not for the better in my eyes (though hindsight's 20/20).
Geocities was full of a lot of things. There were pages that were just ad farms, often with no meaningful content except a bunch of key words hidden in the background. But there were also plenty of clean and useful sites by people who wanted to share their passion with others.
The later all but ceases to exist. Even if you are sharing your passion, you are doing it on a social media platform that is using your content to drive your audience into seeing their ads. You are ad bait.
That's very different from the web of the turn of the century.
There are distinctions to be made between rotating/static display ads, spam and everything (i.e., user surveillance) that encompasses digital advertising today. Personally, ads don't bother me. Spam is annoying in terms of UX. But really, user surveillance is what we need to worry about in terms of UX, our privacy, security, etc.
I think there's a worse-step beyond passive surveillance, where ad-networks function as a channel for viruses that seek to change your computer, along with scams and phishing.
Ad-blocking--refusing to run their code--is a simply common sense when the networks are not liable for ensuring that the code they send is not malicious.
Pre-1995
It was 96/97. I remember thinking "The drones are moving in on this."
Canter and Siegel had nuked Usenet in 1994, and banners were invented in 1994 by Hotwired. But it took a while for the tech to eat the web, because the web was a niche interest for the first few years.
During that time you could - and a lot of people did - put together a simple site with a text editor and free hosting supplied by your ISP.
The majority of internet users wouldn't have experienced that supposed world.
The median age in the US in 39, which means at least half of all Americans would have been in elementary school or not around during that supposed era of the internet, and the mass adoption of the internet only really began in earnest in the early 2000s.
> "that supposed world ... that supposed era of the internet"
"Supposed: Presumed to be true or real without conclusive evidence". You think there isn't conclusive evidence that the internet existed before 1995? o_O
As in "rose tinted glasses".
We were all setting up Gopher servers?
>If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a license. The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
The legitimate ongoing licensing costs from Gracenote/Lyricfind for their catalogs of millions of song lyrics will cost significantly more than the hosting bill. The cost is beyond the resources of typical hobbyists who like to share information for free.
EDIT: I have no idea what the downvotes are about. If you think my information about lyrics licensing is incorrect, explain why. Several decades ago, volunteers were sharing guitar tabs for free on the internet and that also got shut down by the music publishers because of copyright violations. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821
> The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.
Exactly. Now what if there wasn't one popular website with all the lyrics, but a million different small fanpages?
That's what the internet used to be.
There's a tension that the fan engagement is what really makes entertainers rich. The industry has every right to crack down, but if they do say they are really cutting their own legs off.
I think if there's any negative phrasing in your first three words, those reading from the Philosophers Chair (bathroom) are primed to take what immediately follows as Bad Vibes and downvote accordingly. They're not in this for accuracy.
My hypothesis at least.
Interesting. How would you rewrite the first sentence to sound positive?
Well my problem isn't with the writing in its original form, it's with the downvoting in response to it. I am fine with someone bringing bad news if it's helpful info.
Me too. I meant "How could the first sentence be rewritten to sound positive/ not attract downvotes?"
> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades.
But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads.
Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people
That's why we had (and for that matter still have) webrings.
>> Anyone can still do this today
But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste.
>> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
Nobody could find it back in 1994 either! That was part of the fun. You stumbled on a webring or somebody's curated oracle and found a bunch of interesting weird tiny websites.
I was trying to use a grain/chaff analogy to respond to your post, but I think there were just less crops in the old days. For the sites (crops) that were there, you had a lot more healthy ones. As spam and low-quality sites proliferated, the signal->noise ratio of sites got completely out-of-balance.
Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.
In a proper world, searching for "band song lyrics" would take you ... to the band's website, where they'd have perhaps some ads for band-related things and the lyrics, right there.
Copyright and SEO and other stupidity prevents the obvious solution from being the enacted one.
> And they feel they are entitled to this without ads for some reason
And others feel they are entitled to passive income by hastily throwing together IP they did not create and do not own, apparently.
Everything has to be a side hustle and everyone has to take their cut as a middleman these days.
You used to get the lyrics when you bought the music. Came in a nice booklet with the tape or CD, and then you would read along while listening to the music.
Should be the same with streaming. If I can listen to the song, I should be able tho see the lyrics.
All the streaming apps have this feature, though?
You can't possibly expect people griping about services to actually use them, now can you
There's an asymmetry here. We aren't talking about ads like billboard ads or TV commercials. We're talking about creepy behavioral tracking, harvesting and selling.
... and many other sins.
I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc.
The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it.
Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is.
Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them.
Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?"
I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.
I'll admit that objects you buy from Temu are often 2-3x larger or (more likely) smaller than than you expect them to be, but often they are OK. Having worked a bit in recommendation engineering I have a lot of respect for what they do.
I've built a number of nice puzzle kits with Chinese themes I bought from Temu but don't actually use any of my kemonomimi supplies I bought from Temu and instead rely on American fashion brands, Etsy or commissions.
> People want lyrics. They don't want to pay for them
You're wrong. We pay for everything all the time.
We pay for home internet (not cheap!). We pay for various subscriptions and streaming services. We pay for online tools. We pay for a TON of stuff.
And we still get hit by tons of obnoxious, invasive ads regardless of how much we pay. And people call us pirates if we want to install and adblocker. Advertisers like to violate us; it's their business model.
Stop parroting their lines, and stop defending bullshit.
There is a huge difference between providing a service with adverts to pay for it, and what almost all lyric sites are. They don't just put up ads and the related opportunities for adtech to stalk us in order to pay for the server and bandwidth: they spend time and money (SEO, sometimes more active advertising themselves) seeking out more and more visits to extract more revenue from that stalking and advertising relationship. And the have few standards on the sort of 3rd parties they deal with: last time I found myself on such a site and some things got through my blocking, the ads shown wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn site.
Selling ad impressions and stalking opportunities is the point of those sites, offering lyrics is just a way to do that.
That's how the internet worked back when we were all excited about it. Giving things away for free is easy on the web; irritating people badly enough that you can squeeze money out of them is what takes effort.
No, its because greedy people try to make money off people. Ads are the reason the internet sucks. There could be a wikipedia like site for lyrics that would cost pennies to maintain and people who like music and contributing would add to it. But scummy sites making money will pay to be at the top of search results as an ad, so they can get people to click on their site that is full of ads, all while sucking up bandwidth and processing power. Why are their dozens of almost identicle recipes for every dish? Because each one is trying to extract money with ads. Why do they all have some long-winded story about how they grew up eating this recipe every 9/11 anniversary? So they have more space to shove ads.
Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out. Do you know how much money they could make turning every wiki reader into a product for ads?
> Wikipedia only exsists because they refuse to sell out
Technically, they already did a long time ago. Jimmy Wales spun up a for-profit arm using the wikipedia tech stack, and it's now everyone's least favourite ad-ridden pop culture wiki[1]...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)
I mean there kind of is: https://lrclib.net/
Ok but on that site you can't search by lyrics. Only by title.
Why not? People will post apologia on behalf of ad corporations on the Internet, that too for free.
> for some reason
Jeez, man. This is just sad.
I think your point about one-off visitors is key. If most traffic is coming from search/social, there's no real incentive to build a clean, loyal-reader experience
... when it comes to news, however, I am always winding up at the major newspapers (e.g. New York Times) from search and social.
I use uBlock Origin plus Firefox's Reader View. Honestly, just getting text sounds like heaven.
Brave + shields With nasty popups + block scripts will sometimes work without breaking the site.
Chrome forces you to see ads and all the rest of it, Firefox is tolerable but I struggled a bit with enough settings and plugins, it's not as seamless.
>Bose writes:
>The reader is not respected enough by the software.
In case people don't remember, things were a lot better when a web page contained only information, not actual software.
NYT usually blocks me from reading articles when I block JS
> The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.
They operate a bit like restaurants in tourist areas
They probably assume a regular would log in.
> are significantly better if you block javascript.
lol. https://www.wsj.com always shows me one line of text:
Use uBlock Origin plugin instead. It sources from various block lists to block contents. Works great on most sites, youtube among them.
I'd say that very much ties into the point of the article. The fact that turning off a major component of your browser significantly improves the experience is damning. That means they put tremendous effort (i.e. money) into deliberately making their readers' experience worse.
It depends. Some sites have a soft, client-side paywall and others have a hard, server-side paywall. NYT has the latter, so you can't get the full article text with JS blocked.
Yep, that's true, and it feels like an intentional decision on the part of companies. Wider access, or higher margins?
I made a lyrics cli. “lyrics sublime santeria” boom you get a text file with the lyrics. Couldn’t deal with the garbage anymore.
Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff? I have Ublock Origin Lite on by default (RIP full Ublock Origin) and a lot of sites look clean. I'm often not even aware that if I send a link to an article via Whatsapp or whatever, it may reflect badly on me that I send such an ad-overloaded mess to them. I just don't know the mess is there except sometimes by accident.
I watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try.
Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?
To be fair, I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI. It's mostly Sourceforge and image hosters from the early 00's that have my votes as the worst offenders.
To be fair to your point though, the pirate sports streams are AWFUL in terms of link landmines.
> I don't think the porn sites have ever had egregious UX/UI
Pornsites and pirating websites have always been amongst the most egregious UX/UI designed to make you accidentally click or open ads.
The only way I can explain your differing experience is that you only visit pornhub.com which is indeed the one well behaved beast in a pack of rabid possums.
> RIP full Ublock Origin
it's alive and well
In Chrome?
Get a better browser. If you use the browser from an ad company, that's on you.
it is 2026, you should not be using Chrome
No, but Chrome is not the only browser.
I'm using Brave and Vivaldi - still the same chromium engine as Google's Chrome but both support ublock origin for now.
I do web development, it makes no sense for me to use a browser most of the public doesn't use. Also I have a ton of extensions that help with development. Firefox is painful.
Actually, it makes a ton of sense for you to use multiple different browsers.
> Firefox is painful.
What exactly is painful about Firefox? It's so painful that you'd rather go without an adblocker?
I'm not used to its dev tools. It takes me a lot longer to find my way around.
Every time someone complains about firefox it's something trivial like this... "I don't like the default download location." / "I don't like how the dev tools opens on the bottom." / "I don't like the way the tab bar looks." Absolutely wild to me that using a browser without an adblocker, forever, is better than spending a week or whatever getting used to the different dev tools.
You can have two different browsers, one for work and one for non-work.
> Just a crazy idea, but could it be that they don't dogfood their own stuff?
I am so convinced that this is the case. They're using their own product using some max-level sub that removes all the annoyances, and don't realise how unbearable the default experience is.
Speaking of the NYT: previously, I used to bypass the paywall, and I simply got the article with no nonsense. Now I subscribe, and every single day I get an obnoxious pop-up ad to upgrade my subscription to some higher family tier. Giving the NYT money has made my day a tiny bit more annoying than not giving them money. Lesson learnt.
[dead]
It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font.
Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.
If zooming in to read content is the biggest concern, that’s a win in the modern web. I double tap on the content and it fits to screen perfectly.
Optimal line length is a thing.
That's what CTRL+MouseWheel is for
[dead]
not really "just as" at all if you think about it, though.
> No print publication on the planet does this
At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm.
It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.
A lot of print publications used to do it, and many still do.
Print magazines make most of their money from ad sales, not subscriptions. A typical ratio is 60:40 ads vs editorial. Magazines like Vogue go >70% ads, and I'm fairly sure old issues of Byte and other computer magazines were in that ballpark.
The difference in print is that the ads are targeted, and even welcome. Many of the ads in old computer magazines were price lists and mini-brochures, and pre-web that was the only way to get that information to customers.
You also have the paid articles where 'journalist' interview some company ceo or influencer that happened to have given them a substantial amount of money.
> the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel.
I recently was in a 45 minutes Uber ride where the driver had the stereo set to the Sirius XM self-advertising channel - the one you get if you haven't subscribed. For 45 minutes, all he listened to was an ad for XM.
Most people just don't care.
Tales from HN techies interacting with regular people.
> Most people just don't care.
So proceed as normal.
Or perhaps his free trial ran out and he can't justify the extra expense. Driving Uber isn't exactly a path to riches.
I realized that we may soon live in a reality where that's not an option, but I bet the car he had still allowed him to turn off the radio with the ad.
(I'm sure there would have also been countless ways to make the thing play actual music, but turning it off is the most obvious course of action.)
ok ... but why would you listen to the ad - and nothing else, jsut the ad - for 45 minutes straight? it's not like there aren't a billion other options.
Is it possible that he was paid to play such add to his passengers?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've definitely seen behind-the-front-seats screen ad placement and other weird things in ride shares in the U.S. so this doesn't seem out of the question.
I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article. Sure enough, I loaded it up in a private window with adblocks disabled and the above the fold was very obnoxious.
Which is very surprising to me. I only read The Guardian within the Tor browser, and when the website is loaded over their onion urls I do not see the same large obnoxious ads. A rare Tor win? Maybe adnetworks block Tor IP addresses and the reason why ads don't show up?
The onion url https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3...
Maybe someone with some brain on The Guardian realized if you're browsing through Tor, no way you're going to create a login and link your browsing to a name/email address...
That makes it sound like no one of The Guardian has a brain, it's not the intention, it's my most trusted news source, but maybe someone on the IT department thought a little bit further.
More likely Tor was set up years ago and receives no attention unless it horribly breaks; and so nobody notices nor cares that ads aren't working there (and if they were they'd probably not get paid for them anyway).
I was surprised at the claim that The Guardian leaves very little room for the article.
I loaded up a Guardian article this morning on my new 14" MBP, only to find out that there was so much crap on the page I couldn't even see the full headline without using Safari's "hide shit" feature.
> Safari's "hide shit" feature.
Is this reader mode or some sort of adblock-style list? (if it's the latter, I'm looking for one that I can easily add without it breaking too many sites - in my experience, the "annoyance" lists for uBlock cause too much breakage to have them enabled by default).
https://support.apple.com/en-la/120682
I'm doing my small part by paying for websites that respect me in the way TFA describes. I have annual subscriptions to Defector, Brand New, and DIELINE, and I'll add more as other websites follow their lead. Maybe it'll become too much to manage one day, but it might be for other readers too, and then maybe that will pressure our card companies and banks to start providing some more useful consumer services. We need enough people to actually subscribe to these websites to make that future happen though.
Every time I load an article in archive.ph, I think "I want to support these guys. I would happily pay $.10, maybe even $.25 for this, if it was seamless and instantaneous."
But that's never the option and apparently it never will be. Sorry, I'm just never getting yearly subscriptions to 30 different content websites. That would probably 10x my spam email intake, I'd have to worry about them jacking up prices and playing games after the initial subscription ran out, and I'd have yet another subscription floating out there in the ether for me to forget about.
Are you sure they are? Loading dieline home page I get a ton of tracking blocks. Defector was better, but I still see adtech endpoints. I don't really know of any modern monetized site that isn't like this.
Does anyone know a form of internet advertising that isn't complete cancer?
On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.)
On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code."
I only really see those two options.
Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right?
There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines.
(Just making it <a><img> also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)
I built EthicalAds (https://www.ethicalads.io/) for exactly this reason.
No tracking. No cookies. No behavioral targeting (targeting based on stuff you've previously done). Every website where our ads appear AND every advertiser is hand approved. No JS from advertisers: just a plain JPG/PNG and text.
We're small but on track to pay out $500k to publishers this year.
I really hope you succeed. If ads were a simple text/image with zero js, I wouldn't need an adblocker.
Project Wonderful took the best of both (automated auction for ads, but there's only one ad active at any given moment for any given ad slot so no targeting) but apparently it wasn't able to keep making enough money to stay around
IIUC this is how ads on 4chan work. I learned this during my brief foray into targeted merchandising (https://www.temporary-url.com/9CBFE). Everyone on a given board at a given time was seeing the same ads.
ComicAd Network exists solely to fill the gap PW left, I really need to get around to setting it up on my current comics project.
Yeah, I don't mind the static, manually selected ads too much. They tend to be much less annoying, and for better/more relevant services and products.
And as a bonus (for the website owner), they're also much harder to automatically block!
I don't even mind dynamic ads if they are targeted to the page content and not on my browsing history. If I'm reading a page on how to repair my dishwasher, ads from dishwasher manufacturers or sellers make sense.
I haven't investigated to see what sort of JavaScript, etc that they are using, but as a user looking at ads by carbon[1] seem to be pretty chill. This could perhaps meet an in-between you are looking for.
[1] https://www.carbonads.net/
I know of one but it's niche. OpenSubtitles allows people to pay for ads at the start/end of content when you download subtitles on the fly. I've seen countless NordVPN ads in subtitles.
Another niche: Software professionals
https://www.carbonads.net/
Have you used them? How was your experience? Did the ads convert effectively?
I built my own platform for what I call ethical ads that is serving ads for my own site. No profiling of users allowed, but I allow very specific targeting for content.
Even if the ethics on the advertiser's side could be solved, advertising as the core source of income for a business has it's own unenthical incentives imo. It ultimately boils down to more attention == more ads == more money. I'd argue we got an early preview of that effect when 24 hour news channels were coming into their own in the 90s and 00s, and the detrimental effect it had on the quality of programming and frankly truthfulness. The scale of the internet has only exacerbated those issues.
Unfortunately the industry is so large with so much money now that choosing a different business model is almost always leaving money on the table. And I don't have any ideas on how to fix that.
These days, I assume every web page is actively hostile until proven otherwise. Use as many layers of protection (uBlock, PiHole, various other extensions, etc.) as possible, filter out content when possible, and bail if those don't work.
Youtube is just about the worst that I've put up with for it. Every single second it's trying desperately to inject more ads, which the blocker swiftly removes. After watching for a few minutes the block count can be in the several hundred...
"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel."
QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads.
Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."
In that case it's not really advertising, it's just information. People watch that channel when they want to see products. They're giving people exactly what they asked for.
Advertising is when you're baited into watching some fun "content" and then they interrupt it to shove ads in your face. Nobody asked for this.
Especially now that we can render TV ads in realtime on top of real-world objects, but even before, the 7 minutes of actual TV content and 53 minutes of paid commercials exists too. Better known as professional sports. Unlike QVC, a break from the ads is occasionally given when an athlete is interviewed or things like that. Although, granted, one could argue even an interview is trying to advertise the athlete's brand. Still, potentially a reprieve from having to look at advertising in the form of things like slogans and logos.
The internet equivalent of QVC would be TikTok I believe. The ads are thinly veiled, but it seems like after you go through a few chunks of content eventually it’s basically all ads disguised as content with bits of entertainment thrown in to keep you strung along. It meshes the distinction between advert and content so completely that it doesn’t really matter anymore.
Teleshopping channels are a thing, and they have more of an audience than one might guess.
I have seen from the other side how this can happen. The people making the decisions do not understand the technical costs. In fact, many of them pretend to understand the technical costs and say things like "Well, it's just a single line that we're adding to our website".
They want to look good in front of their bosses. They want to bring nice charts with nice performance metrics and they want to be up to date with the latest developments in the market of marketing tools, so they use every tool that is out there.
"IT" has no choice but to do what marketing demands, because IT is a cost center, while marketing is closer to revenues.
And so, over time, you end up with 49MB web pages with hundreds of trackers.
I literally stopped using these websites for a long time ago. And if I run into an article with this kind of hostile design I just close the tab. No article ever worth that shit.
Granted I don’t follow news, so it’s easy for me to say maybe, but same applies other websites. If I land on hostile page (despite idea blockers) I’ll just leave it, what can be so important that can justify me to suffer through it.
Just like in the example in the article, would you eat in McDonald that treated like that? Classical case of vote with your wallet, or vote with your attention.
Following the nested "go read this" links to the "The 49MB Web Page" page:
> Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there.
TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.
> No print publication on the planet does this.
Because you have to pay for the print version. They have plenty of ads, too, but they're not the sole revenue stream.
The amount you pay for the print version just barely covers physical print and physical distribution costs--and that's if the publication is lucky.
The vast majority of revenue comes from ads. They are just placed and handled in less obnoxious ways.
You have to pay for the web version of the NY Times as well.
Unfortunately, this does not save you. The NYT has a paywall and still has this terrible experience, which caused me to unsubscribe. I remain subscribed to The Atlantic because while it still relies on advertising, the print version is at least readable.
The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times.
This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.
My local alternative paper has always been free.
I worked for a startup once for a brief time.
Engineering would make tools for the sales guys to make websites. We hated those bastards because they would litter the pates with adds.
"We need revenue" they'd protest. Engineering would respond that past two ads, the revenue was too small to be worth destroying the brand.
What I got out of that was that business folks, often, don't give a shit about the product reputation on a timescale longer then their ownership of it.
Here is the most frustrating part:
Publishers could create efficient fast-loading web pages if they prioritized it (and a rare few do) but its just not a priority for most even though its in their best interest.
You can have ads loading on a web page, even with header bidders, if you structure it correctly. In fact you can implement an ad solution that allows for fast loading pages and better optimize your ad revenue - whether you're doing pragmatic or direct.
I know this because I've done this before. At a past employer we cleaned up their mobile version (they used the "m.example.com" format, so we could push this as a separate rogue experiment) and saw ad revenue grow by over 30% while giving readers a better, faster overall UX.
I actively monitor top publisher article pages and you can see how bad (and good) it is:
https://webperf.xyz/
TL;DR Keep using an ad blocker
Wow, it’s really interesting to see the sudden unchanged nautil.us made around the 4th of March!
The Test URL is a 404 for me though - if that's what the data is based on, it might not be completely fair...
This is very cool, nicely done.
One note: the Property link, that links to the actual news source, is broken.
Also, the test link you're using for Nautilus (the top scoring site) is 404 (https://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-multiverse-as-muse)
Fixed the URL for Nautilus. Updates will roll in over the next 24 hours as tests happen and it averages out.
Its on my roadmap to auto-update the URL over time to avoid this very thing!
Thx to those who pointed it out.
This is pretty cool!
It was funny but when we switched from my failing Alienware laptop to a new M4 Mac Mini my wife was absolutely furious at the ad saturation until I switched her from Safari to Firefox and installed an ad blocker. I guess I could have installed one in Safari if she registered an Apple account but that's something she'd feel no need for at all.
(e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you can use to log into your computer, your XBOX, and all sorts of things. The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on)
> The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on
Depends how you use it, I guess? The close and zero-effort integration and syncing with iOS is pretty key to my desktop (well, laptop) still having enough utility-to-effort to be worth having around at all. Probably still won't save it when my M1 Air gets a bit dodgy in a year or two and I start thinking about an upgrade (I'll likely upgrade my aging, last-pre-M-series-model iPad Pro instead) but if not for that it'd already have become inconvenient enough that I'd likely have forgotten about it in a storage bin somewhere.
You can block ads on a system level with NextDNS. Much easier to use for non-tech users then any browser plugin.
I find a multi-layered method is best - things like NextDNS + browser based blocking (especially as I like to use it to block annoyances that aren't ads).
She doesn't use icloud? I'm surprised she'd get no utility...
I'm afraid he has it actually inverted. What if the "sanctity of the prose" is just a old gloss, and the Taboola / Outbrain ads are the reality that don't hide the org's true character?
The printed version does _look_ better, but can org that serves Taboola ever be taken seriously anymore? Sanctity is miles away from "6 simple steps to $1 Million" ads. We can be sad in general about their passing. But let's not think it's isolated to issue surrounding online/ads. WaPo isn't the same either.
> As Bose notes, “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.
I would presume that this fascination with pushing viewers to the app is because they make better money off of you reading stuff in the app.
Also because they can spam you with notifications through the app and that surely makes some chart go up. As someone with meticulous notification hygiene, it's always surprising to me just how many people allow every app to send notifications when it asks, without thinking about it at all.
Some advice I follow, and give to others: Refuse notifications by default. Only enable them when you're getting paid to see them. (slack and work email, for example count as getting paid to see them)
My version of that is to ask yourself what this app could notify you about and decide based on that.
What could a game notify you about? Nothing, probably spam. Deny.
What could a social app notify you about? Interactions with your content and profile. These are useful, allow.
What could an instant messaging app notify you about? Messages, obviously. Allow.
What could a fast food establishment app notify your about? Probably your order status if you order from the app. But it might also spam you. Allow but be prepared to turn off categories that are spammy if spam does arrive.
> The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.
Yes because they don't give the print editions away for free.
You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.
The only reason you're confronted with articles from these legacy publications in the first place is because they've lobbied governments to get google to force them into their carousels and recommendations.
You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.
Yeah? How about when I go to the site as a paid subscriber and get the exact same experience? Did the number or obnoxiousness of ads go down when I gave NYT money? Nope.
Paying for them absolutely does not mean you won't be treated the same way. Paying removes the paywall, not the insanity.
Some news sites do have ad-free or at least ad-lite versions if you're a subscriber.
> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.
In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads
This is a fact, America is absolutely leading with this kind of capitalism but Europe is following closely, just like the rest of the world. It’s just matter of time, US just happens to be ahead of everyone else.
I don't even try to read newspaper sites, I just look at the Archive Today version.
I'm using lite.cnn.com while it still exists
This made me create a simple reading website for myself that blunts all the models, adverts and newsletter/subscription popups.
https://readwd.vercel.app
I also built an extension to redirect the article to this website, so that before these actions annoy me, I could read the article in peace.
I wish this were available for more browsers...
Why bother with ad blockers? These organizations don't want you reading their articles, so take the hint.
> I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.
I do. I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users on average.
That number isn't current, and I don't know if it was ever broadly correct, but it's obvious that an installed app provides more opportunities to try to get the user to do something profitable, and it's harder to block ads in native apps. I would be surprised if convincing a user to install a native app doesn't reliably increase profits by a large amount for most kinds of business.
Recent and related:
The 49MB web page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 - March 2026 (371 comments)
> the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials
Yes, I tried YouTube iOS app recently, without an ad blocker. It pretty much describes the experience.
Somewhat tangential... I clicked on the "Dithering" link on Gruber's website. It leads to a podcast of his. The cover image is a 6.6mb JPEG. Man, do you even know what "dithering" means?
"Be indecisive." It means multiple things. :)
Also, (1) the image is dithered, ha ha, and (2) The image on the page https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering is an 863K PNG. (Which I bet we could still get down to a smaller size, granted.) It took me a bit to figure out what you're looking at -- the Dithering site on passport.online, where the cover art is inexplicably 3000x3000 pixels. I'm too tired to come up with a good crack about how that explains what I don't like about Ben Thompson, but I bet it's there.
I really wish that browsers natively supported some sort of "402 Payment Required" HTTP status code (or any other well-known specified indicator) that users could pay with micropayments, so that they wouldn't have to drown us in this ad garbage. I would gladly pay small but justified sum for an article without setting up payment method on each site and be able to return to it. I would be glad even to donate some amount of money to some authority that'd pay for viewership of those less fortunate and not being able to afford reading quality news.
This is doable today if there was a will. But the advertising/surveillance industry doesn't want it.
Transaction costs make it inefficient. Costs more to effect the transfer than they would be able to charge for the articles.
Reminds me of "Website obesity crisis"
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U
- https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Some say that you should not use ad blocker, because that kills ad revenue, but I did not forced anybody to rely with their lives on ad revenue. Many of things were 'free' because we were all just using ad blocks, and then it all became commodified, simplified, so simpletons without ad blocks became a thing. Now they shame people for using ad blocks, even though it stops spreading malware and viruses.
I plan to use ad block, and use as many extensions that protect me. If there is some form of goods, be it streaming movies, audio, books I will happily pay for it. I will not accept a web with ads. I prefer touch grass. There is a clear line for me.
Also there is no line ad publisher will not cross. The goal posts are shifted, so you will never satisfy shareholder greed. The only pushback is trough ads and probably sometimes piracy. Not that I advocate it, but in reality if companies push too hard, there are consequences.
It kills programmatic advertising, not sponsorships or subscriptions. I always subscribe to the four or five sites I use most and use a blocker. If HN had a subscription tier I would pay it to support them.
HN doesn't need your money, it is run by YCombinator, a venture capital firm. As far as I can determine HN is a way to raise brand awareness for them. Sure, there are probably some people passionate about the concept at the company, but it wouldn't stick around if it they didn't also determine that it has more value to them than the operating costs of the site.
The closest thing I can see to direct monetization of HN is that YC uses it as a captive advertising platform.
They don't serve 3rd party ads, but they use it as a job board (with closed comments on those posts, LOL) for their companies, and to announce product launches and such. All that stuff gets boosted, nobody's organically up-voting a comments-disabled job post from some mediocre startup.
[EDIT] The less-direct part, yes, is stuff like brand awareness and community goodwill.
The interesting thing about this strategy is that there are many people on this very website who have no idea what YCombinator is and just call this website "Hacker News."
Most people (me included) are not really in the target audience for YC. I have no interest in starting a company, and even if I did I wouldn't want to do so in North America.
You also see some posts on here about some YC founded company or other with open positions, which is a wider audience (so that helps the equation I guess).
My guess is that these two target audiences together is enough for them. It is not like HN is a heavy site, nor does it change much over the years. So with smart coding (i.e. a compiled language) and hosting my guess is that moderation time is the bulk of the actual operating costs.
I used to deliberately not block ads on sites that worked directly with advertisers and didn't use big spying malware- and scam-filled ad networks, and only served (more or less) static, non-animated and non-pop-up ads. I also didn't block the early "see? We're doing not-evil advertising!" well-marked text-only Google ads (remember those?)
None of those are really a thing any more, but if those were the only kinds of ads around, I might not bother with an ad blocker at all.
Except Google ads or anything else from a big multi-site ad network. That's all spying crap, I'm never going back to allowing those through, no matter how unobtrusive.
> No print publication on the planet does this.
No, "No print publication on the planet can do this"
But looking back on magazines, newspapers, etc; they have ALWAYS used a tremendous amount of advertisements. Newspapers sold classified space to sell stuff. It was always passive, and no way to have the newspaper or magazine to watch the user back to track eyeballs.
Now with tech, we can do precisely this, or with close proxies.
And with FB marketplace and Craigslist eating what was left of classifieds, yeah being in media is a very bad place.
And thats not even discussing using LLMs to make slop. Even Are Technica was generating hallucinated articles, and the editor accepted it for months until being called out.
(reads:) People making the decisions do not understand they want to look good in front of their sources. They want to bring something nice and they want to be up to date to do what marketing demands,
...but how are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
If everyone looks equal, sites ('to pick') are going irrelevant it seems.... but OT: about 14y ago there was a request for ads that may be liked. and yes...in the meantime, even you would've said, 'yes ther were some ads, i liked (maybe the music, the product or something other about).' But that it wasn't originally about. 10y ago the pendulum swinged to: "we lose the web", some saying that books (typewriters for example^^) were replaced by video (TV) and that the internet eaten the book- and video-stuff. so one asked: "what is next? do we become an internet of the internet (if any may use this as a description of todays so called 'AI') ?"
And i looked on the HN frontpage which shows exactly that 'exagerated' (generated support) each of you is just echoing another... but who the heck, i am even not a native english speaker, so wayne ...
Comic (in german): https://iili.io/qwVP7R9.md.png (diddn't know if the hoster likes direct linking)... regards...
Discussion on source, which this is just a comment on:
The 49MB web page
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945
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> No print publication on the planet does this.
Of course they do, there are ads and unrelated articles on the same page , or, for magazines, full page ads interrupting your reading experience, or flashy callouts.
Paper is just a much more constrained technology, do they can't ruin it dynamically, not that they don't want to or somehow magically respect the reader very much for free
This reminds me of Amazon Prime video advertising Molly Mae. It knows I would never ever watch that trash but it shows it to me precisely for that reason, that'll I get annoyed enough to vent about it and contribute to it going viral. It works i guess, since I am typing this garbage on hn.
I still in 2026 do not understand the absolute manic drive websites have to push me to the app. I've administered services that have both a web client and an app client and the metrics just really weren't better, certainly not enough to spend energy actively pushing people to the app.
so much easier to collect your data and having their app on your screen is extremely valuable
The referenced article ends like this:
"I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role."
:-(
I don't disagree that reading news articles online today is a deeply unenjoyable experience. At the same time, I think not enough people acknowledge that the decision to put so much content online for free is how we ended up in this hellscape. Even when a website has a paywall, the cost of the paywall often dwarfs what you would have paid for a print equivalent of the same paper or journal, which is what enabled the flourishing of journalism in the 20th century.
This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
> “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.
I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements.
This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then.
This also stems from the thousands and thousands of marketing companies/"startups" that do one thing. "Put our script on your page to track and improve customer retention". Of course whatever the marketing company is selling is perfectly quantifiable inside the analytics suite, but no one gets promoted for implementing a new analytics report. You get promoted for implementing "Click Tagger" or whatever.
This mentality runs deep through modern American culture. Where it's more flashy and newsworthy to strike a deal with a sales rep of some AI startup than implement the tech yourself. Look at the US CENTCOM implementing Israeli tech or even the report yesterday about the committee approving Microslop garbage for federal use.[0] All of that comes out of some sales contract as our leadership teams only know how to copy script tags, not understand systems and flows.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
It's a link blog.
okay. And?
> This is a pretty inconsequential blog post where Gruber is just echoing another article.
He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
Amplified but redundant for HN crowd is my point. I’m not clueless as to why a person who blogs to maintain attention would amplify a topic. Your explanation was not needed.
NyTimes and the Guardian have very much gone downhill unfortunately.
Thought I'm alone constantly complaining that most UX is like a labyrinth lately!
This is why I have NextDNS installed at the router level. No need for Adblocking extensions if we can't even make the requests to those ad servers.
> The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.
lol, they're doing for the money. Not because they're "held hostage". More time on site means more money. They know this. They know it's a shitty experience. Look, I get it, they have to make money somehow, but some of these sites try to squeeze every last drop of money out of users. It's a fine line to walk between "I'll stay because this content is interesting" and "F this man, I'm leaving", and some push that line hard.
Let's not forget who developed the tooling, platforms, frameworks, libraries and packages and so on that these news companies use.
Nor the development practices that are hoisted as "the way to do things now" that people frantically race to adopt so they are not pushed out of the industry and a fruitful career as "obsolete".
Nor the technology companies that thought they served as a suitable replacement for news and advertising and community boards and used their massive investments to undercut the ability of traditional news outlets to survive, nevermind upstarts to have any hope of competing.
And the haranguing continues as if it was the design of these organizations in the first place.
There's no love lost for the media companies owned by billionaires, but maybe it should be more clear in these discussions exactly who started this particular mess.
But if I used an ad blocker, I never would have found out about Github for Lesbians!!!
At some point, either subscriptions have to carry more of the load or the web experience just keeps degrading
Or someone can invent an ad supported business model that isn’t abusive.
A lot of print magazines, like Vogue or even Field & Stream, are like 60% or more full page ads. But if you’re reading something like New Bride magazine you’re probably actively shopping for wedding dresses and flowers and such, so the advertising ideally works as part of what makes the magazine valuable for the reader and the advertiser.
The real problem is that the finance and business folks are addicted to performance metrics and they preferentially put their money towards things that can be represented as graphs because it’s hard to argue with a graph. Jon Gruber has a vague sense for what sort of audience he has and what they’re into, so he can pitch advertisers on the idea that by advertising with him they’re going to reach an audience of Apple enthusiast technologists who presumably care about design and UI/UX and whatever other intuitions he has about his readership. But none of that is a quantitative metric, so only a small market is open to putting money into it.
I've long thought this. Ads don't need to follow people. They don't need to track. The entire world suffers under the weight of corporate internet surveillance.
If I want to know something, I will search for it. The sites that offer the info could easily choose to show ads specifically relevant to the topic at hand instead of hiring out that task to a cyberstalker.
I don't want to see ads for pet medicines on multiple sites because some algorithm has decided that I have a pet in need of medical assistance. I don't have a pet at all.
I'm sure I only get those because I'm using apps to poison my digital footprint, but my ex-gf, who didn't and did have pets, probably got my home IP tagged as a pet owner.
He also has no shareholders except himself. So the only person he has to please is himself, and if he is wrong, the only person who suffers is himself (and, I suppose, his family).
This very direct, very personal connection to the web business doesn't exist in most other sites.
He also has no ambitions towards being a billionaire, he just wants to make enough money to sustain a mostly upper middle class lifestyle and keep his business going.
I think a lot of online publications could be modestly sized businesses with a very respectable annual revenue range in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions, but they erode their own brand value chasing tantalizingly higher numbers that SEEM in reach but actually aren’t.
This blog not having any mobile layout is a bit funny.
"The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, "A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their `apps' these days. I don't know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from." It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites."
It has nothing to do with "understand[ing] or enjoy[ing] the web". It comes from people at organisations running websites that know where the money is, probably because some cretinous nerds encouraged them. Generally, the amount of potential data collection, surveillance, ad serving and _money-making_ is greater with an "app" than with a website
"Ad blockers" are popular but "app blockers"^1 are not. The "smartphone" is a remotely-controlled "entire surveillance device" (recent HN title: "Your phone is an entire computer")
1. Application firewalls like Netguard. And even this does not solve the problem entirely because the design of the "entire computer" includes extensive surveillance capabilities
It's crazy, sometimes I get 22 mb, sometimes 27, one time even 57.8!!!
As a subscriber to The Guardian, I have a very different experience.
News sites are going irrelevant anyways. I'd imagine they are pushing hard for this because traffic has died cause AI overviews have hit direct traffic to websites and independent writing platforms like Substack / Medium mean I can read a quality opinion on a matter I care about.
The problem is that both Medium and Substack are bloated as hell but ultimately I think it's a positive move overall.
I've had a thought bubbling away lately, informed by AI hype, some job market research, the "enshittification" book/topic doing the rounds, and I guess lived experience too.
Computers were invented, and initially used for calculations, punch cards, databases, spreadsheets, automating warehouses and running airlines and stuff. Computers are really good for that stuff, like many orders of magnitude better than analog alternatives.
Later, computers became a mass market consumer product, and we had the web and internet, and moving everything online became a fad, much like AI is a fad now. This pushed computers into some fairly marginal use cases, like "social media", publishing, messaging, e-commerce, and CRUD apps to manage workflows like JIRA and friends. Computers are kind of ok for this stuff... but, frankly, not that much better than the original thing. Like, a telephone, fax, etc. already allowed instant communication, email is maybe a bit better than fax, but it's not 1000x better. JIRA is a bit better than a whiteboard and post-it notes, but, also probably not 1000x better.
It's these recent, marginal-ish use cases that are getting destroyed by enshittification, AI, etc... because they were just never that good an application for computers and UIs in the first place. I think, if one wants to work on, or use an application that doesn't get filled with ads or have a copilot gratuitously inserted or whatever, it's probably more likely to happen in software for fluid dynamics or some natural fit for using a computer. Conversely, anything like facebook or jira or whatever that never really needed to be a computer app apart from because it was fashionable... is now unfashionable.
Related, did Spotify go from 1 ad to 4 at a time?
Apple News is a fantastic service for avoiding most of these problems. The BBC put up a paywall on their site for anyone in the US but I can still read every article for free on Apple News. Politico wants me to create an account on my phone to read their articles but I can read them just fine on Apple News. New York Times is one of the few major publications not on Apple News, overall there are enough national news choices that I don't care which ones aren't there.
The web is the enemy. I have an ad blocking VPN and I use GroundNews to filter out sites that have paywalls. Between those two things, I lead a relatively sane life. But I tried looking at some of the same places on an unflitered device and man, I can't even imagine living like that. It now costs me $100/year in ad blocking/circumvention just so I don't want to kill the browser.
Is the adblocking VPN doing anything some DNS block lists on your router or device wouldn’t do?
You can’t do MITM on HTTPS anyway, so I can’t imagine they would do anything more than a $20 Pi Zero and PiHole, except for the fact that somebody else is managing it.
I could do that, but then I'd have to maintain it. I used to hostfile hack my devices. but the vpn is just easier.
Fair enough. Sometimes a VPN is also easier than forcing each device to use a specific DNS server too. I get it.
> No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this.
Ehh... I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription a year ago. Since then I've received a dozen predatory phone calls and just add many letters. Plus when you do have the subscription they alter prices on you like a cable TV provider. So in some ways print is better than web but in other ways it's worse.
> I’ve been browsing the web without content-blocking extensions on the Neo. It’s been a while since I’ve done that for an extended period of time. Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody.
Surprised Gruber isn’t using network level adblocking. I can’t imagine life without it these days.
(Yes I realise you need extensions when not on your own network etc - unless you use your own DNS!)
Apart from adblock (technically ublock), I can encourage reading mode. Even F9 on Edge is pretty good at figuring out what you really want to see/read. It sometimes also bypasses paywalls by accident.
I've used an ad blocker for so long, I'd forgotten the web has got so terrible.
Any time I have to use the Internet without an ad blocker it's truly shocking how absolutely lousy everything is with ads
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The Guardian's twitter/X "exit" must be the dumbest thing they ever did. Their site was not so aggressively pushing for donations/subscriptions/accounts before that.
> The reader is not respected enough by the software.
The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.
We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.
The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.
I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.
>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version.
? Where is this true?
I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every paragraph.
That maybe 10KB of text is surrounded by 10MB of extraneous filler downloaded for just this page (not even including the cached content).
It is true in a historical sense.
People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.
This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).
On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.
For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.
>For an organization who get their main income from ads
The NYT makes about $2B per year from subscriber revenue. They make about $450M from digital ads over all properties. Obviously not all news orgs are the same, but the lead example of a shitty experience is the NYT, so weird that all of the rationalizations work so hard to diverge.
>tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it
"Tailoring" a digital page to not include ads for subscribers is so laughably trivial that this is a farcical claim. They aren't hand-laying out the content and removing ad upsets it or something. But they don't remove the ads because, gollum style, why shouldn't they force ads on me?
What we're talking about is classic enshittification, and every justification people make up is just cope. Indeed, the fact that I'm a subscriber makes me even more lucrative to advertisers, in a classic catch-22 that completely undoes all of the "just pay and you don't get ads in my invented scenario".
Ok, point taken. I've heard very different numbers for dutch newspapers and blindly extrapolated that to the US. And if the numbers are like that than maybe the numbers I heard about dutch newspapers are bullshit too, who knows!
The subscriptions barely paid for delivery.
Press is a difficult one.
I grew up in a household where several newspapers were bought daily (dad was a journalist himself). I would struggle doing the same though, even if I can very much afford it, because it is very clear to current press that even paying, I'm the product.
There's all sorts of articles that are actually ads, attempts to move me in an ideological direction, information that is in the owner's interest to spread.
Press double dips. If the interest is on distributing ideology, have the parties/lobbies pay.
What paid subscriptions respect the readers? I would love to pay for news from organizations that only get money from readers. For example, I have been paying for The Economist for decades and still see advertisements.
The money has to come from somewhere.
Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to make the leap to a potentially better one because if they get it wrong they’ll end up with less or no income.
At the dawn of the web, no industry was better positioned to take advantage of it than the news media. Instead they ignored it and were cannibalized to a greater degree than any other industry. Its hard to keep an industry afloat when it is managed so badly. Part of the reason that the news media is where it is, is that they have lost most of their income and viewers so the only people who are willing to work in it have ulterior motives. This drives a vicious cycle of continuously more partisan news coverage which drives away even more viewers. The ads are just a symptom of this, not the cause. If they were managed better, they would have a more effective ad policy but they aren't. Still though, I'm sure its a hard balance to keep but others seem to do it so...
We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay.
This isn’t true of the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
With fits and starts, real median wages have been on a solid upward trend since the mid-1990’s.
> We used to pay for things - including the news.
Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone? They've always carried ads, and I suspect that's always been a bigger income stream than the cost of buying the paper itself.
> Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone?
Most certainly not. The hollowing out of classifies by Craigslist in 2000s is what killed most local newspapers.
The division has been more equal in the past. When I was a kid, probably 75% of the neighborhood subscribed to the paper and others, like my parents, bought it regularly on Sunday and certain other days. Perhaps sales was 25-30% of revenue. Advertising was big but a large portion was classified ads. Wikipedia says up to 70% of some newspapers' revenue was classifieds. These ads are unlikely to have much editorial effect, but that revenue has basically gone away. What remains is more perilous to independence, and since the number of print readers has gone way down, also not as important to the advertiser.
Yep paying for content is part of the solution, but it doesn't fully explain why the experience has become so aggressively bad
> Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.
Some companies are like this, but they generally lose their best people to better salaried jobs elsewhere. They exist because not everything needs to be done by top people.
Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever!
No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.
Is that so hard to understand?
Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!
The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.
>The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality
This is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber.
I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for every product you use.
Because everyone wants to double (and triple- and quadruple- and...) dip. Buy a $2000 TV and you'll likely discover ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. They figured "why not?" because someone will always rationalize it.
> It's like buy a $2000 TV and discovering ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc.
Have you bought a TV recently? This is exactly what is happening already. I had to pi-hole my entire network to get rid of the ads in my "switch source" menu on my Samsung TV that did not have ads when I bought it and for the first 3 years after that.
I only hooked up my Samsung TV to the internet to install one update when I first acquired it, then kept it disconnected. Thanks for the tip--I'll make sure to keep it offline forever now!
Can you roll back to an older firmware?
after 30 years of waiting for standard micropayments, I have stopped wondering if it's solvable. I perfectly believe we could have had it working 20 years ago but there's a reason someone doesn't desire it to be.
i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model.
I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month
Al a carte content via a good standardized micro payment option sounds wonderful. Not sure if we as a society would pull it off well, but I can dream.
Define micropayments, but we kind of do it with television and movies if you rent from something like Apple, Sony, or Amazon. Would love if that model could apply to the written word as well.
I feel like this is relatively short-sighted. I don't enjoy reading global news articles as often times it just makes me upset. I like reading local news because I can relate to it. I pay for one, and I read the other one in a frustrated mood.
I'm sure there are people who enjoy reading global newspapers daily, and I'm sure a good quantity pays for it. That just doesn't include me.
Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.
I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.
Well, the largest ad tech company on the planet owning the largest platform to view content on (Chrome) certainly may or may not have something to do with the viability of alternative payment models.
The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.