alt Hacker NewsDon't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed onto tracking for the slim improvement it provides.
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No company would treat it as either-or.
If websites could charge 5.99/month, they would.
If a website was charging 5.99/month, they would not stop spying on you.
This sounds possibly better. Aligns the interest of the website more with the users.
Ads are a weird game. People say you're ripping off the website if you adblock, but aren't you ripping off the advertiser if you don't buy the product? If I leave YouTube music playing on a muted PC, someone is losing.
>The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads.
Ads won't go away. They'll just move from infesting websites to infesting AI chatbots.
I don’t think it would necessarily have to be six bucks a month.
Something Awful is a one time fee of ten bucks (a few bucks more to get rid of ads).
I wouldn’t really mind a one-time fee for a lot of sites if it meant that they didn’t have to do a bunch of advertising bullshit,
> The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads
This is highly debateable. I wouldn't mind paying a bit for the websites I am using as there are just a few platforms and some blogs that I would be happy to pay a small amount for.
I'm happy to see that day. I'm already paying for stuff I need in life. There's no reasons to insist on not paying for the stuff I need in the web. Just kill those spywares stealing my personal actions and information.
internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads
Not sure on that. It was far, far better before what drives ads today. I've gotten more value from random people's static HTML pages in 1999, than I ever have from something in the last 25 years.
This just led me to think of news sites, and how they've turned mostly into click-bait farms in the last decade to 15.
Gives me pause. Didn't the king of "doing it online" buy a newspaper, but the end result wasn't an improvement on its fate? If there is any way to make cash from news, shouldn't Bezos have been able to do it??
yes, Google AdSense was like the cambrian explosion allowing tons of businesses to get traction in the early days.
There is a story of this PlentyOfFish founder (who exited to Match.com for 500m cash) that in the beginning he got 3-4 USD per click
I would rather pay people and websites for content. I already do this today for journalism orgs and a handful of high value substacks, I'm happy to pay for more. I'd pay for HN. Free does not scale (with the caveat being orgs like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and others who have an endowment behind them and can self fund alongside donations; this, of course, is a model others can adopt), people need to eat, pay for rent, etc, and ads are ineffective when everyone can block them.
Ads are a symptom of the problem that people want human generated content for free; they either do not value the content enough to pay for it, or cannot afford it. Ads do not solve for those problems.
> soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month
No, I won't. I'll just stop using them. So will almost everyone. I don't think there's a single ad-supported product that would survive by converting to a paid subscription, because they're all so profoundly unnecessary.
Honestly, I'd rather see the internet wither and die than live with ads. True hate and contempt for them.
I'd be very happy with an internet without ads. Not that I see any ads anyway.
But those websites would have to provide 5.99 a month of value, and many don't.
We used to have "static" banners on sites, that would just loop through a predefined list on every refresh, same for every user, and it worked. Not for millions of revenue, but enough to pay for that phpbb hosting.
The advertisers started with intrusive tracking, and the sites started with putting 50 ads around a maybe paragraph of usable text. They started with the enshittification, and now they have to deal with the consequences.
I honestly don’t think “with ads” describes what we are experiencing. We are being all but violently fracked for data (and we don’t know what all they’re taking) for them to sell to 3rd parties we don’t know who then use decades of research and tooling + your personal data to psychologically manipulate you into not just buying things, but also into feeling and acting certain ways (socially, politically, etc).
This isn’t Nielsen ratings informing cable networks where to throw up which commercials in certain regions. This is far more dangerous and intense. So the conversation needs to be framed differently than the implied bar of “intrusive/annoying/incessant ads.”
It would not be 5.99 to access a website because that's not what it costs and that's not what ads yield.
I think people think ads give way, way more money than they actually do. If you're visiting a website with mostly static ads then you're generating fractions of a cent in revenue for that website. Even on YouTube, you're generating mere cents of revenue across all your watch time for the month.
Why does YouTube premium cost, like, 19 dollars a month then? I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.
Point is, you wouldn't be paying 5.99. You could probably pay a dollar or two across ALL the websites you visit and you'd actually be giving them more money than you do today.