Why don't people just pay for shit instead of putting up with "free" services littered with advertising? You're literally paying more money for "free" services when you consider that the entire site is funded on the basis that you'll subliminally purchase unnecessary shit you see advertised that you don't need so that the site gets a tiny cut.
Consider: >Site needs $1 a month from you to keep running >Option 1: You pay $1 a month >Option 2: The site spams you with adverts until you buy a $20 product, the company selling the product gives the site $1 for referring the purchase
Everyone is just non-directly spending multiple times more to support the sites they use than they would if they just cut out the middle man and paid them directly. If everyone stopped being so stingy and just fairly paid for services that clearly take huge amounts of bandwidth and staff to keep running, not only would we get rid of advertising cancer but everyone would end up indirectly saving hundreds.
What useful service costs $1 that has a free alternative with advertising? Most services that people don't pay for but go for free alternatives are emails and storage. Both are more than $1/mo. if you go for a paid plan.
Aaron Scott
I'm talking about sustainably supporting websites, please reread the post.
The fact that websites need money to operate is an unavoidable fact. I'm suggesting that it would be much more efficient if people just paid their fair share directly, rather than the current setup where you force feed your users advertisements until one of them is manipulated into making a large purchase which corporate company x gives you a tiny fraction of in commission.
Liam Diaz
>What useful service costs $1 Any online service costs money to run. I'm not talking about upfront cost, I'm talking about actual cost.
You have undoubtedly used far greater than $1 worth of youtube bandwidth. Now obviously you could just install an adblocker and leech, but as of now the only way to fairly pay for your use of bandwidth is to let youtube shove ads down your throat 24/7 until you snap and spend far greater than $1 on something you otherwise wouldn't have bought, so that youtube gets $1 in advertising money. I'm arguing that it would be much more efficient if we just changed funding systems and shifted our mindset so that you just pay that $1 to youtube directly rather than letting them fuck you in the ass with ads for a month straight so they can indirectly extract $1 worth of advertising money when you purchase something influenced by advertising.
With every content being """free""" in the interwebz has conditioned people into thinking that they don't need to pay for anything Also, it'd be a pain in the ass to manage every subscription and the cases where you just wanna read a single post/news/page and never comeback
William Martinez
I visit more than one website, so I'd be paying probably $10-20/mo. in $1 support fees. Also, pretty sure Google makes more than $1 per person per month. Even if you have ad blocker, there are many who don't and I bet that on average, across all youtube users and viewers, with ad block and without Google/Alphabet still makes more than $1/mo. per person.
And what do you mean 'indirectly' extract? YouTube is owned by Alphabet, formerly Google, an advertising firm. Companies pay them directly to display ads on YouTube, and other Google/Alphabet services.
Eli Young
>Also, it'd be a pain in the ass to manage every subscription and the cases where you just wanna read a single post/news/page and never comeback Yeah, I've thought about this before. I think the idea solution would be microtipping with cryptocurrency or prepaid balance, but it would involve everyone having decency rather than just the mindset of "If I can get it for free, why pay xd". Essentially I'm suggesting a system of "If you enjoyed this article, consider tipping up $0.10 for the writer's time and our bandwidth costs". This would also completely eliminate clickbait and shitty journalism because there would actually be an incentive to write good quality articles again, rather than just baiting people into opening up a page full of adverts.
>putting up with "free" services littered with advertising? I see no ads on here? Not anywhere else too for that matter.
John Myers
By 'indirectly' I mean that the money for the bandwidth you've used isn't just directly transferred to them, it's extracted as a tiny percentage when you or someone else makes an advertising-influenced purchase, which then gets put into the company's next advertising budget and then is paid back to google.
>so I'd be paying probably $10-20/mo Why is this such a bad thing? If that's the amount that you using those services cost in bandwidth / developer time then that's completely fair. But one of the other points of my post is that you are already indirectly spending fair greater than that a month due to subliminally making purchasing decisions based on adverts google has repeatedly shoved at you. Even if you as an individual don't purchase an advertised product, the system then relies on someone with less self control than you to make up double the amount of required purchases to cover both of you, which isn't any better. So if you now see my point, I'm arguing that by "paying more" but paying it directly to the sites we use, we would not only end up ad free, but also end up saving a whole bunch of money because we don't have to give 95% of it to some other big corporation in the process.
Julian Hill
See
Christopher Howard
I agree with you, but nobody will pay for visiting websites. The better solution is IPFS.
Isaac Cook
From a quick search I gather IPFS is decentralisation? That's would be a viable solution for bandwidth costs, but you still need to solve the problem of paying for developer / sysadmin time. Also it's just another example of paying by proxy, you're still paying but just not directly out of your wallet and instead out of your internet plan, which you'll probably end up needing to upgrade once you start hosting content to everyone, meaning that you just end up paying out of your wallet anyway.
Connor Nelson
name and set????
Dylan Foster
>you are already indirectly spending fair greater than that a month due to subliminally making purchasing decisions >you No. But normalfags do. This conversation is not about us, we use adblock and we know advertisements are bullshit.
And your thesis is very heavily flawed anyways. There's nothing to suggest the npcs would reseach their purchases better nor have less of a spending urge without internet ads. People would just blow their money on other things they were influenced to get perceive as higher status anyways.
Thomas Butler
>No. But normalfags do. This conversation is not about us, we use adblock and we know advertisements are bullshit. Absolutely weightless argument, 'just block ads' isn't a valid solution to the problem of funding online services any more than 'just shoplift' is a solution to keep your local cornershop in buisness.
>There's nothing to suggest the npcs would reseach their purchases better nor have less of a spending urge without internet ads. How much of a brainlet do you need to be to think this? Do you seriously think companies would just blow millions on advertising if they didn't have decades worth of data showing them that doing so would massively increase sales?
Dylan Hughes
Hosting is incredible cheap this is not an issue. You need to pay people that's the expensive part.
Nicholas Clark
>paying for developer / sysadmin time. Why would an end user need to do this? If you're not selling a product on your website then what the fuck are you doing? Websites are a non-profitable medium, they're an investment. Not to mention that making one requires little to no education and time.
Grayson Hughes
The product is the service / content that the website provides.
Tyler Perry
id rather websites feed ads to retards than personally pay for every single fucking one i go to.
Daniel Butler
Yeah, I'd rather shoplift from every store I go to as well but that wouldn't be sustainable or ethical.
Juan Kelly
>wouldn't be sustainable
pretty sure people have been shoplifting for millennia now
Nathan Green
A website isn't supposed to be sustainable as a standalone, retard. Read If you're selling products, a percentage of profit goes to the website. If you're selling a service then the same applies. If you're not doing shit and just making an autistic blog then why the fuck do you expect to be paid for it? Again, if you just need to keep the site alive just use IPFS. Making an actual site costs between free and 500 USD. It's a non-issue.
Xavier Morris
Because I don't buy any crap I don't need. They can try to advertise all they want, I'm immune to it.
Aiden Turner
I'm convinced bandwidth fees are a scam and the lack of freedom on the internet just means we're being taken advantage of.
Hosting my websites data because storage is a physical medium that actively degrades costs money? Sure.
The more people that visit my site the more it costs? That's a fucking scam and we're being fucked.
>my website is too popular I can't afford to maintain it anymore Imagine how fundamentally fucked we are and how apathetic we are to being taken advantage of like this
Jace Turner
Congratulations on the dumbest post I've read so far today
Thomas Gonzalez
why don't they charge $1 to view instead of relying on unreliable ads?
Colton Gray
NEETs don’t understand this. Spend money or watch ads is an inversion of work for pay or jack off.
Nathan Martinez
>I'm convinced bandwidth fees are a scam Feel free to lay your own fiber around the whole fucking world and provide bandwidth for free. If you don't buy cloud BW it's cheap as fuck anyway. You can get a 1Gbit/s hetzner box for 30$.
>The more people that visit my site the more it costs? Using more resources costs money communist faggot.
Aaron Diaz
I am paying for Amazon Prime and still get advertisement before episodes and movies, same with Netflix and Spotify, they will track everything you do on their platform even though you pay them.
Gabriel Ward
It would be nice if websites offered an ad-free plan where for a fee, no ads would be shown on your account. Since people would just get an adblocker, the company would have to implement one of those scripts that remove everything from a page if ads are blocked, so the users will have their choice reduced to either pay the fee or endure the ads.
I'd rather have a good adblocker personally, but as anti-adblock tech improves, adblockers might not be able to keep up, and if I can't block ads I might consider paying to get rid of them on my most visited sites. Of course, if I visit a site just once in a while I'll just see the ads, but most of my browsing is on the same handful of sites, so it wouldn't get too expensive.
To solve the problem of the ads on sites that you visit only once, there could be an adblock browser extension that charges you $0.01 for every ad it blocks on a page (up to 5 or something), and at the end of the year the site owner can redeem the money from the ads blocked on their pages. If the money isn't redeemed within a year, it goes to the company that runs the service. Users could set whitelists, blacklists, a limit of how much they want to give (per ad, per page, per month, etc). The site admins could collaborate with the adblock company to make their ads unblockable by every other ad blocker except this one.
I don't think it would work because everyone who cares about ads will just use a free adblockerr, but if adblockers stop being effective, then this might be a viable solution.
Lincoln Williams
Fair point, but in those situations you have a right to complain and can vote with your wallet. When you're using a "free" service though you have no ground to stand on.
Charles Perez
Good post, I've had some similar ideas before. One of my ideas was that everyone could pay a yearly "internet tax" to their ISP that then got divided out to the sites that they regularly visit. Obviously this would be botnet tier but ISPs / the government are already logging all that data anyway so fuck it.
I thought about a browser extension too that sites could opt into (e.g. don't show ads to users running this extension and they will send you X amount per pageview), but I like your more anarchical ad blocking solution better. Big sites aren't going to give the slightest fuck about opting in to the scheme of some initially irrelevant extension, but they sure might start caring when they get told "Hey, a group of users who blocked your ads last year have raised $10000 to fund your site, it's yours to take".
Yeah, there are ways to make users pay instead of ads, but the core issue is convincing them to pay instead of using free ad blockers. I don't think that convincing them that's the right thing to do will ever work. People don't even separate their trash, which is free and only slightly inconvenient. I don't think they'll decide to start funding the sites they visit in any significant capacity. Small sites could use something like Patreon to get money from their loyal users, but I don't think people would be willing to give money to every random site that they visit once or twice. Unless they're forced to.
Also, isn't there a browser that does something similar but with some crypto? IIRC the browser pays you some cryptocurrency to use it, and you can choose to keep it or give it to the websites you visit or something like that. An alternative would be to implement this but pay them with the crypto mined by the browser, and you get to keep the difference. This way it will be easier to convince people to use it, since it's not their actual money they're paying, but still not as convincing as free ad blockers, so these would have to go first.
Jaxon Watson
IPFS is designed so that the costs do not scale with the number of users: the more users, the LESS the cost to you because the likelihood that a request is routed to you goes down to zero. You will never need to upgrade your plan to use IPFS effectively and you pay ISPs upfront instead of on a per-use basis. As a result, you're full of shit you disgusting shill.
Jonathan Taylor
Not really. Modern services are all identical and all at the same pricepoint because it's a perpetual race to the bottom. Someone does something just a tiny bit worse but not worse enough that already-hooked customers leave in any significant amount. This cuts their operation costs a lot. Everyone starts to copy them. This gets a snowball effect and within 5 years services are 1% the quality they used to be, and twice the price. But there is 0 alternative. If you have a critical need for a service (think a bank, or video chat services which are required to get any job nowadays), you're fucked no matter what.
John Morgan
>until you buy a That's not what happens. What happens is that on a large scale you shift the users towards favoring the advertised product for their next purchase. Very few people are actually sold directly on advertisements. Those are the people who get suckered hard by those crappy long form ads on TV. Don't even know what they're called. They sell junk.
The general populace just shifts. Word of mouth recommendations are far more effective in spontaneously making people buy something.
But I'm with you op. I hate ads too and don't think the weaker among us should suffer like that.
Charles Ross
>the LESS the cost to you because the likelihood that a request is routed to you goes down to zero No, it should remain constant. You're increasing the number of nodes but you're also increasing the amount of people making requests at the same rate.
Liam Cooper
Also you completely ignored half of my post, how does decentralisation solve the problem of paying for developer / sysadmin time?
Aiden Ross
Stop being clinically retarded and then maybe a discussion can take place.
Xavier Jackson
yea let'\s play $5 to every website just to access 1 article.
I pay $10 a month for youtube premium. my friends look at me weird when I tell them this, but I haven't seen an ad in years. It takes me half an hour to earn $10, so that is 20 unskippable ads. I've pretty much made up that time in the first 3 days of watching videos.
Kayden Green
because I don't want to pay for it
Andrew Rivera
Either one of two things will happen with this mindset: 1. The place you visit will eventually go bankrupt 2. The place you visit will adapt and find another means to pull the money from you. If the new method is agreeable to you or not is another story.
Adrian Brown
I wish they had a lower priced tier that was just ad free, without all the originals and music streaming that I couldn't care less about. Not that $12 a month is a whole lot, but considering that the majority of that price is for music + originals I'd just be throwing money down the drain.
Justin Price
And neither can you. You're probably one of those people who thinks "I've never clicked on an ad, so advertising doesn't work on me!!!!". The main purpose of advertising is to build brand awareness and trust, which has 100% affected a large number of purchasing decisions in your life.
bandwidth is free tho. its the hardware that costs
Josiah Garcia
i use adblock faggot
Jaxon Foster
Adblock skips the ad for free. Checkmate cuck.
Cameron Morales
na my dude, bandwidth costs as well
Cooper Turner
>You're literally paying more money for "free" services when you consider that the entire site is funded on the basis that you'll subliminally purchase unnecessary shit you see advertised that you don't need so that the site gets a tiny cut. You seem to be under the silly idea that constantly exposing me to an advertisement will get me to buy the product. The only thing I spend any money at all on is groceries and bills. I save everything else. Despite the fact that I see a Dr. Pepper ad every time I watch football, I still only buy orange juice and La Croix. A company can dump hundreds of dollars into advertisements on every website I visit, and it will result in zero earnings for them.
You should stop projecting your compulsive need to spend money on things other people tell you to buy, on other people.
Dylan King
The only valid reason to use YouTube Red is the exclusive videos. Advertisements on the site simply do not exist if you use uBlock Origin.
Caleb Reyes
why separate trash for free when the company profits from it? its their problem if they dont want to spend money on making something that can separate that shit for them.
Jace Diaz
why would it cost? transferring 100mb does not cost any more than transferring 1kb
Robert Sanchez
I worked in advertising and I'm jaded miserable asshole because of that, I don't think I'm anything, but one thing I know is that I can spot bullshit a mile away.
Brayden Ross
Because it pollutes the environment.
Ethan Gutierrez
I suppose the people who'd care about doing "the right thing" and support the websites they visit, are also the ind of people to separate trash for the same reason.
