[dan15]

The majority of internet users are either unwilling or unable to pay for content, and so far advertising has been the best business model to allow these users to access content without paying. Do you have a better suggestion?

[microtonal]

They are able, because in the end advertising is also paid by customers. The complications are:

- Paying for services is very visible, whereas the payment for advertising is so indirect that you do not feel like you are paying for it.

- The payments for advertising are not uniformly distributed, people with more disposable income most likely pay more of overall advertising. But subscriptions cannot make distinctions between income.

- People with disposable income are typically the most willing to pay for services. However, they are also the most interesting to advertisers. For this reason, payment in place of ads is often not an option at all, because it is not attractive to websites/services.

I think banning advertising would be good. But I think a first step towards that would be completely banning tracking. That would make advertisements less effective (and consequently less valuable) and would pose services to look for other streams of income. Plus it would solve the privacy issue of advertising.

[porridgeraisin]

This!

It's a game. When a merchant signs up to an ad platform (or when the platform is in need of volume), they are given good ROI, and the merchant also plays along and treats it as "marketing expenditure". Eventually, the ROI dries up i.e the marketing has saturated and the merchant starts counting it as a cost and passes it onto the customer. I don't know if this is actually done, but it's also trivial for an ad platform to force merchants to continue ads by making them feel it's important: when they reduce their ad volume, just boost the ROI and visibility for their competitors (a competitor can be detected purely by shared ad space no need to do any separate tagging). Heck, this is probably what whatever optimization algorithm they are running will end up suggesting as it's a local minima in feature space.

And yes, instead of banning ads, which would be too wide a legal net to be feasible, banning tracking is better. However, even this is complicated. For example, N websites can have legitimate uses for N browser features. But it turns out any M of the N features can be used to uniquely identify you. Oops. What can you even do about that, legally speaking? Don't say permissions most people I know just click allow on all of them.

[_Algernon_]

Internet users pay for their services by everything they buy being more expensive due to the producers having to cover the advertising expenses.

[mrguyorama]

>The majority of internet users are either unwilling or unable to pay for content

Except for Spotify, News subscriptions, videogame subscriptions, video streaming services, duolingo, donations, gofundmes, piracy services!, clothing and food subscriptions! etc etc

People pay $10 for a new fortnite skin. You really pretending they won't pay for content?

People were willing to pay for stuff on the internet even when you could only do so by calling someone up and reading off your credit card number and just trusting a stranger.

Meanwhile, the norm until cable television for "free" things like news was that you either paid, or you went to the library to read it for free.

Maybe people could visit libraries more again.

[FuckButtons]

Sure, this entire business model has been cataclysmic for traditional media organizations and news outlets and peoples trust in institutions has plummeted in correlation, so, let’s just fucking scrap it and go back to payed media.

[geoffpado]

"Traditional media organizations" have been primarily funded by advertising longer than anyone on HN has been alive.

[rhubarbtree]

I think that might be a rhetorical device bequeathed to you by the social media companies.

People of course do pay for things all the time. It’s just the social media folks found a way to make a lot more money than people would otherwise pay, through advertising. And in this situation, through illegal advertising.

The best thing we can all do is refuse to work for Meta. If good engineers did that, there would be no Meta. Problem solved. But it seems many engineers prefer it this way.

[bandrami]

I don't pay for network TV but it still gets produced

[thevinter]

And it is funded by ads, what's your point?