People on HN forget that ads fund lots of things. Ads are why Google is free, Gmail is free, docs are free, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are free.
You are all free to pay for search and subscriptions to websites you follow. (Today paid search is even reportedly better.)
Personally I'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets me pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article instead, but most people are happy with this tradeoff.
I hear what you're saying and somewhat agree, but as with everything, I really don't think "it's that simple".
First, that you're even using Google search or Gmail is providing Google with data they use for marketing. On top of the data those services take in (what you search for, what you click on in the results, how much time you spend watching one video compared to another, what mailing lists you're subscribed to, etc. etc.) they are provided tracking information from the majority of sites you visit (either directly or aggregated from other services). That allows them to let their customers market directly to you or even provide data to other companies (for a fee) so they can market to you more successfully (than not having that data).
Even when paying for a service, the next step is to add ads back into it.
For example, as a paying customer Amazon Video used to let you just watch the movies/shows they had available. Then they started advertising movies that they didn't have available to stream, but you could purchase or rent them. Then they started adding in ads for content that was available on 3rd party services. Now they have in-content ads that you can pay extra to remove.
They're not the only company doing this, but it was just the first/easiest example I could call up that shows a progression of what a company does when they already have your attention/money.
You can see that Google has become progressively more aggressive in pushing ads in their search over the years. They didn't have ads at first, worked their way up to being the "standard" search engine, then started putting ads between results, eventually getting to where we are today. I can do a search today and the entire first screen of results (1080p, zoom level 100%) is just sponsored results. One usually has to scroll a full page to get to any "real" results, assuming that the top non-sponsored results aren't skewed by "the algorithm", which might include things like whether or not the target page uses GA, has ads that benefit Google, conform to what Google thinks is "relevant" (very loose term) basically.
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find an excessive amount of examples where services that started making money with a simple product you could pay for, then turned to subscriptions, then turned to add-ons for the subscription, then just started pushing ads into their service regardless if you're already paying or not.
Strongly agree that it's not simple. I just like to take the contrarian view here, with everyone in this thread dunking on ads.
It's a very complicated trade off, and I'm not sure humanity understands it well enough to act optimally. But the ad based model sure as hell isn't all bad, like people in this thread make it out to be.
It's a valid argument on the internet where we use "free" services that are costly to run, like you described. There is no need for ads in public spaces though. Banning them is fair, it doesn't make good corporations less competitive, they just have to rely more on other methods like product quality and word of mouth, instead of corporate propaganda.
What the fans of advertisment forget how much funds are channeled artificially from the end user into things they absolutely do not need or want, they even loath! It is hugely distorting the economy this way! (money is spent of unwanted)
People gladly pay for things they really need. And people do not need all the things they use but do not pay directly for, but covertly and cowardly is drawn from them under the hood! Lied to and cheated the people are!
People not happy, people are forced to use this way! As there are no micropayment solution built instead of the hugely harmful ad practices.
There's a number of alternative business models that have been employed by organizations large and small for decades. More information can be readily found online which will be better than I could provide.
And I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that alternatives are superior, nor that Google, et al, are obligated to use them. Just that they exist and have been widely and long used. So just to counter the idea that the advertising-supporting model is the only route.
'Free' is relative. Those services are still making money - just with you as the product.
IMO that's even more ammunition as to why this is a problem. This system has enabled a vast amount of personal data collection and erosion of privacy for the sake of the product being 'free'.
It is "worth it for some people" because those people don't understand how they're the product, how it influences what they see if they go on some homepage where their data is being used to manipulate their behaviour, how they lose money because of that manipulation, etc.
It will become worse now with LLMs feeding on their data. Soon it will be cheap to gather this data and use it for all kinds of scoring processes. All those things aim for gaining as much money as possible from those people who use services which seem _free_ to them but actually aren't.
Maybe at that point people will realise that they'd up paying less if they pay for those services....at which point they'll learn about the other cancer: which is companies which need to generate more profit every quarter and who make their services more and more expensive...and so on. #capitalism
> I'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets me pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article instead
I hope for this too. The free internet has grown wildly but now that it’s infested with bots that fundamentally cannot be stopped (without onerous Real ID controls at least) I want an alternative ad-free web that charges micropennies per post.
You are all free to pay for search and subscriptions to websites you follow. (Today paid search is even reportedly better.)
Personally I'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets me pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article instead, but most people are happy with this tradeoff.