> On the other hand, advertisers need to make money to survive.

My job is to keep my systems secure. Other peoples' jobs are their business. Unless I signed a contract or gave them my word, I have no obligation towards them.

> This means there's a shift to native advertising in response, which means they're not just shitting in the water. They're shitting in everything else too, and trying to cover up the taste.

Easy solution: if they shit on everything, I avoid the entire plague-ridden, smelly, nuclear waste dump they created.

(Please understand I'm not saying this to stoke conflict. I'm just sharing how I think through the question of how advertisers survive.)

> On the other hand, advertisers need to make money to survive

Brutally honest here: I don't care if the advertisers survive. I do realize that at some level, a consumer has to be made aware of a product in order to purchase that product. The problem IMHO, there is too much advertising overall. I'd prefer more effort went into making quality products, than into manufacturing the need for more unnecessary products. Obviously, this is a pipe dream.

The solution is less advertisers, less tracking and less personal data mining. The solution is blocking ads until they stop, go out of business or adapt.

> On the other hand, advertisers need to make money to survive.

And thieves need to steal to survive.

stop shitting in the well?

That means that any advertising supported sites shut down.

Good!

The internet was great before advertising, and it'll be great after advertising.

"essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions" - https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...

So, cease existing?

Maybe! It's just an option that abusive advertising should not have started, and now that there's a fight back they complain. There's also the option that abusive advertising/malware is ruining it for benign advertising (if that exists). What is certain is that we won't get anywhere unless we stop pointing fingers and start working for a solution.

It is also a matter of preference I'd say (actually preference vs annoyance). I install adblock to everyone mainly for the malware+abusing; I wouldn't go to such lengths otherwise. AFAIK I did it with the default "allow non-intrusive ads" checked.

Yes. I know that sounds harsh, and I don't expect it to reach such an extreme. But at least in principle, offending people to the point where they disrupt your entire industry and you cease to exist, is one of the many risks faced by any business -- particularly in media and communications.

Exactly. One thing we often seem to forget is that no business has a right to exist indefinitely. When market conditions change, and your competition isn't doing anything obviously illegal, any damage done to your business is your own responsibility. Just because a business is suffering doesn't mean that anyone else needs to bail them out.

Car companies don't sue oil companies when high gas prices hurt SUV sales. It's part of the risk of doing business.

No, get another business model that is sustainable.

How much are you paying sites that aren't advertising supported right now?

How many more sites are you willing to pay at that same level?

Right now, as far as I can tell, advertising supported sites are out-competing sites that directly charge users, meaning that users prefer not to pay. That makes leaves advertising as the most sustainable model.

Some sites are involved in actual transactions that don't involve eyeballs and fractions of pennies these will be fine.

Simple sites designed to promote the spread of genuinely useful information can be designed to use microscopic resources and operate on little money these will be fine.

Some sites provide neat services people are willing to pay for these will be fine.

Some sites represent the online presence of organizations with significant budgets these will be fine.

Much of what remains isn't worth much and if no viable means of support can be found I guess they shouldn't exist.

Honestly 1/2 of the modern web could go away and not much would be lost.

It's only a crisis if your livelihood depends on making a bunch of crap nobody in their right mind would pay significant resources to support.

Ok. So, now you're talking about shutting down half the web.

Do you believe that's realistic?

Not who you are replying to, but I do!

What sites are so essential that we couldn't replace them?

Google is an example of an ad-supported site that would be rather hard to replace. And, apparently, they make a ridiculous amount of money per user, so replacing advertising revenue with user payments is going to be expensive -- they'd have to charge you $277 per month, if you believe this:

https://mondaynote.com/the-nytimes-could-be-worth-19bn-inste...

That would imply that I am rendering $277 worth of value to Google each month. I would happily receive that in cash and eschew all Google services, which I mostly try and do anyway for privacy reasons. Where do I sign?

Cuts both ways.

Well, the value you give google is the average probability of purchasing products.

I'm sure that if a large number of companies were able to cut $277 from your average aggregate monthly spending in exchange for a guarantee that you were buying their products, they'd be signing up. Perhaps some sort of subscription service that you couldn't opt out of. You can try doing that as a startup.

I would agree that Google search would be hard to replace, but I think it could be done, and probably done better. But one site is not worth keeping a crappy system in place, IMO.

Ok, so stop using ad supported sites, and convince everyone else to do the same, and the problem will simply go away.

If there are alternatives, I do.

A model out-competing another doesn't make it sustainable. Overfishing an area would make it out-compete another that doesn't, but that would be the exact opposite of sustainable.

What stops them from offering both?

Yep! If they are acting that badly.