alt Hacker NewsI use ublock now too, but it's this really annoying feedback loop; people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers, and making the website worse and more likely for them to install an ad blocker etc...
I know that running a website isn't free, so I understand the need for ads. Fandom is just a terrible version of it.
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Things aren’t free, but alternative business models to ad-supported have not much of an opportunity to develop. The hope is that the feedback loop you’ve identified will iterate to the point that ad supported content becomes truly unbearable, and eventually enough room will open up that some alternative can develop.
These sites aren't adding ads to punish the non-ad blocking users, they're doing it because Google Ads keeps slashing the premiums to keep more of the pie for themselves.
The feedback loop doesn't work like that. You are implying there is some target revenue that the website aims to hit, and if it fails to meet that target it adds more ads.
But that's just nonsense, if a website can get more revenue from more ads, they are gonna put more ads right away, they aren't gonna wait until their revenue drops under some magic number before they do.
That's a positive feedback loop. Ads are the root of all evil on the internet, and the end of that loop is "no more ads". And I don't want to hear shit about the internet dying without ads, in the same thread people are talking about cloudflare serving TBs of data for free or a $4 unmetered VPS.
> people use ad blockers, making the websites less money, so they add more advertisements for the people who don't have ad blockers
I have serious doubts about this step in the spiral. IIUC, people who use ad blockers are still vanishingly few, and therefore the loss of ad impressions should not be that large.