> It's easy to say "ads bad" - ok, but the real question is what are we going to replace them with?

I don't know and at this point I don't think it even matters. Every single time I discuss ads here on HN I learn new reasons to hate it. Some days ago I read a story about a politician who deliberately slowed down traffic so people would be forced to "contemplate" this garbage. The sheer audacity of these people never fails to impress me.

It's irredeemable and the fact that there's currently no alternative is no reason not to get rid of it. We really should just do it and let the chips fall where they may. People will figure out a way to make money. They have to, because the alternative is to go bankrupt. Maybe they'll make less money and that's absolutely fine.

> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.

How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

> How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?

The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are worth $... today and Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting that monthly payment for producing volumes of written content on websites. Some blog network would have actually succeeded and become a global content juggernaut.

Most of the content online is not of high quality and people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for it as to be a sad joke.

Which website compares to the joy and value people extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a select few and they're billion dollar services like Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do millions of people still talk lovingly about some websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of people does that.

People go back and watch movies over and over again for decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums regularly for decades.

Does the average person go back and dig up long dead websites and go through them start to finish on Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would do such a thing.

Most online text content is not very entertaining, even in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between the concepts.

Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value compared to high quality, higher production value entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.

I don’t necessarily disagree, but substack would seem to be an example of quite a bit of success for writers.

Easy - they paid for cable because it was an orange to OTA's apples. You'd only get a few OTA channels, and even then, not all of them would come in clearly. People paid for cable because it offered more channels. Most channels would still show commercials. Relatively few paid for premium channels, but it wasn't because they were commercial free (they were), it was because they offered better content (newest movies), in a time when piracy wasn't nearly as accessible.

Cable channels were also subsidized by advertising. You pay a decent amount of money per month to get access to exclusive content, but that cost still doesn't cover the costs of producing the media. If cable bills were double or triple the price, even without ads, many people probably would have been pushed to "free" TV.

Exclusive content. That's why I pay for HBO anyways.

While I agree that killing advertising is effectively impossible I'm not sure I agree that the problem is that people aren't willing to pay for things.

I think advertising dollars paying for services that users use is a convenient excuse that companies use to justify it, but it isn't an imperative for why it should exist.

If you can't get people to pay for your service when they know the real price maybe your service shouldn't exist, or shouldn't exist at the scale it does now.

That being said your main point that the industry grew organically based on human behavior certainly seems true. Banning advertising (like banning lobbying or corporate contributions to elected officials) is an impossible game of whack-a-mole. It can't be defined tightly enough to be outright banned (are you going to ban telling people you sell something they might like?) and the value derived from it is large enough that people will get creative when you ban the outcomes.

That being said I do think the most egregious versions should be regulated. Ads to kids, deceptive mail or email ads that look like invoices or bills, ads that are obviously lying about features or benefits, but enforcement is incredibly difficult. I'm not especially optimistic.

You can effectively kill it or curtail its noxious effects by banning common negative externalities of it.

The GDPR, though having a massive enforcement problem, disallows targeted ads and all the privacy violations typically associated with them.

You could make websites liable for the ads they display, automatically killing the "bottom of the barrel" of advertising such as chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola/etc) and similar low-quality trash because the cost to review & audit these ads would outweigh any potential profits.

You could revoke Section 230 protection for social media companies that manipulate the reach of content to increase engagement (which is why every social platform switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic one) as to discourage the practice and prevent them from profiting off intentionally pushing harmful or even illegal content to increase engagement.

> Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use

> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.

No, I don’t think this is true. I think this is something people in adtech tell themselves to sleep better at night. There’s lots of money in ads and free stuff, but there are many companies doing quite well by having customers pay for stuff.

Netflix is worth $200B plus, more than the ad tv networks. Those networks said for years that customers won’t pay and need ads. They were wrong. And I’d also add that they wanted more. They charged for cable channels and still sold ads.

People want choices and don’t mind paying for value.

Ads are bad for people.

I will say, I find it interesting that newspapers never developed an equivalent to "the daily paper."

Even in the 2000s I remember newspapers not costing more than a dollar or two. I would personally prefer a one-off payment of some small amount to get the website for the day or X amount of articles instead of some god-awful subscription that has to be cancelled via some shitty call center process where they try to stop you twenty times.

Nah, the video game industry has micro-transactions down to a science.

I guess it depends on your definition of micro, I meant sub-$1.

But what happens when nobody sees the ads anymore? I run enough ad blockers that I never see ads on the Internet. I don’t watch broadcast/commercial TV. I don’t listen to broadcast radio. In my area, public advertising like billboards are very rare. It really isn’t difficult to live a life with very little ads.

> But what happens when nobody sees the ads anymore? I run enough ad blockers that I never see ads on the Internet.

Hopefully their return on investment will approach zero and they will stop putting ads on everything.

people keep saying things like this but really it's a question of what's available

music piracy is basically over thanks to spotify, apple music, youtube, bandcamp, etc

hardly anyone i know torrents movies anymore due to netflix, hbo, hulu

everyone has a phone plan instead of hopping around on free wifi constantly

people pay for lyft/uber instead of just skipping fare on the train

there exist social networks and communities that are effectively fee-supported. somethingawful and metafilter are some siloed examples, but there's the fediverse and stuff like mastodon where essentially people either join a specific community/clique that's funded by members or host their own instance.

i'm convinced what keeps most people on the main advertiser-controlled networks is they are run by huge corporations with service monopolies and network effect. remember, whatsapp got big on a dollar per year subscription