[lanstin]

It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.

[yifanl]

Paradoxically, the people who pay for adfree experiences would be the most valuable targets for ads, so I suspect any pay for no ads arrangement will be temporary at best.

[FireBeyond]

Exactly. Next up, it'll be on the Plus tier to "help subsidize the low price of this tier".

[shinryuu]

Check out kagi; adfree search

[newswasboring]

> All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads

This isn't true, there were many other ideas. It's just that only KPI was how much money they can make, thus ads won. Companies don't have an axis of ethics or morality.

[lanstin]

Ideas don't count - it's persuasion and execution that matter. One of the several reasons that the rule is not ruled by smartness/rationality.

[stevage]

I refuse to pay for ad free YouTube + otherwise I'd watch even more of it. The annoyingness of ads is a pretty important brake.

[s1mplicissimus]

There's other options to break this kind of cognitive pattern, like https://unhook.app/

If I want them, I can use them. No need to justify ads for this use case.