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A comment on Reddit to Give 10% of Its 2014 Ad Revenue to Non-Profits Picked by Its Users. Parent comment

Re:Reddit to Give 10% of Its 2014 Ad Revenue to Non-Profits ... by hotpockets on Friday February 28, 2014 @06:32PM (#7322270)
Sorry I don't understand. They pay for bandwidth, servers, etc. You are consuming their capacity without paying.
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Re:Reddit to Give 10% of Its 2014 Ad Revenue to Non-Profits ... by shitlord on Friday February 28, 2014 @06:42PM (#7322303)
Your web server is simply providing data (a bunch of HTML) to anyone who sends an HTTP request for your web page. That's all your server is doing.

It's not telling the client (the browser) "here's a bunch of HTML, but you can only use it if you show ads". There is no contract or agreement to display ads, implied or otherwise.

In the end, all you can do is simply ask the user to display ads. If you want to enforce that the user views ads, the web probably isn't the right medium for your product.

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Re:Reddit to Give 10% of Its 2014 Ad Revenue to Non-Profits ... by kevincrane on Friday February 28, 2014 @07:58PM (#7322582)
> Your web server is simply providing data (a bunch of HTML) to anyone who sends an HTTP request for your web page. That's all your server is doing.

Exactly, and that costs money. Electricity costs money, servers cost money, webdev costs money. That data that is being sent to you wasn't magically discovered and offered up for free.

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Re:Reddit to Give 10% of Its 2014 Ad Revenue to Non-Profits ... by jrockway on Friday February 28, 2014 @08:49PM (#7322724)
Exactly, and that costs money. Electricity costs money, servers cost money, webdev costs money. That data that is being sent to you wasn't magically discovered and offered up for free.

I dunno, jrock.us is free. I subsidize those costs for the readers.

It's not as good as the New York Times, though.

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Re:Reddit to Give 10% of Its 2014 Ad Revenue to Non-Profits ... by theknown99 on Saturday March 01, 2014 @02:48AM (#7323559)
FWIW, It's trivial to detect adblock and degrade the users experience. It's also trivial to get around adblock and show the user adverts.

If adblock usage ever became mainstream, it'd become an arms war which advertisers would win.

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