but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try
we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so completely lost control of their own platform that it was the only way to make the ads stop
When I ran Android Police, we were one of the largest Scroll users in the beginning and I was pretty upset when Scroll shut down.
However, it never amounted to any meaningful revenue and was just a nice way to implement ad-free subscriptions across various sites. Other big sites used it too, like The Verge and Gizmodo and I thought it had some potential.
At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription.
I got an email from the developer, which was kind enough, asking me why I was cancelling and if there was any feedback I wanted to share.
I mentioned how complicated ad inventory, ad placement, and online ordering for hands-off customer self-service was.
His question back was, "What's hard about it?"
I couldn't even muster a reply.
"At some point I just lost interest in the whole thing and cancelled my plugin subscription."
this is batshit insane, yet I believe it
Now, whose job was it to remove the previous 200 Tag Manager scripts? Obviously the last guy's, because those were his experiments and he was in charge at the time so new guy was clearly not responsible for it. And at the end of the year, 250 Tag Manager injections would now exist and we would turn the page to reveal a new CMO.
And thus ends the parable of how I put a wrapping feature flag on the code that added Google Tag Manager to the site so that I could display the effects of the insanity and demonstrate why the PageSpeed metrics were ass and why engineering couldn't fix it (in a way they would permit, anyways).
It's only when I jump back into the ads management page where I'm able to get a better idea. Even then, the specific trackers are hidden behind a variety of menu items that can change every time. This post made me realize that I need a better strategy as things are getting ridiculous with ads.
I used to be someone who didn't use ad blockers because some of them are botnets. It's just not the same anymore, as I would trust the botnets with my data over the advertisers.
I think this might be selection bias in your customer base. I've had some friends who worked at a local news outlet. The ads on their website were a big deal and they had a full-time position dedicated to managing internet advertising.
This is called "Tuesday", for me.
> How the hell did they end up not knowing how to manage the content on their site?
The knowledge atrophied. To me the harder problem is keeping knowledge off the bus… it gets on of its own accord and then boom: knowledge lost. People leave the company, and with them, lessons. People are in constant crunch time, and don't have time for the last 2% of the work that takes 98% of the time, like adequately documenting the weird bits of the system. Half the time the corp site is an afterthought to main engineering, relegated to some CMS that marketing can have, and trust me marketing is not writing docs.
Company leadership at nigh every job I have worked on encourages the company, collectively, to forget. Dev turnovers at most places I've worked average around 2y… that's knowledge, just walking out the door.
The entire industry is run by actual journalists, it's one of the few industries where people who know how to do the job still rise to the top. Unlike most other industries, where the top brass are MBAs who don't actually know how to do things like build airplanes or write software or what have you. Which is honestly great except when it's not.
The web has never found a way to make journalism as profitable as it was back in the print days, so they mostly see technologists as people who get in their way, as disposable or replaceable.
So imagine the state of their tech stack — CMS's integrated with the front end, if not Wordpress then something like that, nothing headless. “Hey you should remove this plugin" what's a plugin? "look… this Bonzai Buddy, who installed it?" Some guy who left twenty years ago. And it's not in a template, it's in the articles and executed by an eval().
They have no motivation to fix any of it, because again, web sites for newspapers aren't profitable. Subscriptions are profitable. I think the real reason why Substack is successful is not that email is a good format for journalism — in fact it’s terrible — but because you generally cannot inject javascript into it. Which comes back to Gruber’s point — javascript was a disaster for the web as a document standard.
(personally, I haven't read news on the web in something like twenty years — RSS ftw)
Often, that tag manager isn’t managed by the technology department, and well-meaning marketing people continue to sign contracts and jam JavaScript into the front end. If there’s also not a good content security policy in place, ad networks quickly become unregulated, all sorts of strange ads come in, and it’s very difficult to control them.
There are a lot of “MarTech” consultants out there that help clients essentially burn their tag manager to the ground, then build it from the ground up to work properly.
and the answer is: not much money at all. we ran the numbers and a typical user’s browsing was worth something like $20/month total across every site and every app combined
but no one can figure out the logistics, so we’re stuck with ads
The site does technically show ads. YCombinator companies can post job ads here. The job ads are privileged in that users are not allowed to comment on them.
Now that I think about it, I haven't seen many job postings from YCombinator companies in a long time. Though to be honest, after some of my experiences with applicants from postings I put in the "Who's hiring" threads I could see why they this site might have fallen out of favor as a hiring location.
Hiring posts (definitively) and tech posts (maybe) by YC companies. The whole product is one big ad for a venture fund. Its generally well done and unobtrusive. So kudos to them for that it goes relatively unnoticed.
Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not truly relevant to the story)
News sites are almost like lyric sites or recipe sites in this regard. The seem to presume that many visitors will not be regular visitors, and so they try to maximize value from every single visit.
This can go into "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than" https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3175629 - comments from 2011 when the Yahoo.com homepage was ~220Kb
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22843140 - comments from 2020
Free newspapers and alt-weeklies are the same. How are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
Chrome forces you to see ads and all the rest of it, Firefox is tolerable but I struggled a bit with enough settings and plugins, it's not as seamless.
>The reader is not respected enough by the software.
In case people don't remember, things were a lot better when a web page contained only information, not actual software.
They operate a bit like restaurants in tourist areas
lol. https://www.wsj.com always shows me one line of text:
Please enable JS and disable any ad blockerI watched someone getting a livestream of an important (to them) soccer game going via the sort of thing usually reserved for "adult" content - that any given click, be it "play" or "fullscreen" or whatever, has a 9/10 chance of triggering a junk popup rather than the intended action, so you play whack-a-mole until you finally get it playing, whack-a-mole again until you get fullscreen, and then for heaven's sake don't touch it any more. Whereas with the adblocker, typically it looks completely clean, with no junk popups, and every click doing exactly what it should on the first try.
Anyway so could it be that the web having turned into such ad-overloaded garbage, that even its designers have adblockers running and don't even fully realize what a mess they're publishing?
To be fair to your point though, the pirate sports streams are AWFUL in terms of link landmines.
Pornsites and pirating websites have always been amongst the most egregious UX/UI designed to make you accidentally click or open ads.
The only way I can explain your differing experience is that you only visit pornhub.com which is indeed the one well behaved beast in a pack of rabid possums.
it's alive and well
I am so convinced that this is the case. They're using their own product using some max-level sub that removes all the annoyances, and don't realise how unbearable the default experience is.
Speaking of the NYT: previously, I used to bypass the paywall, and I simply got the article with no nonsense. Now I subscribe, and every single day I get an obnoxious pop-up ad to upgrade my subscription to some higher family tier. Giving the NYT money has made my day a tiny bit more annoying than not giving them money. Lesson learnt.
Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.
At least in India, most popular newspapers actually do this nowadays. Several full page ads including on the front page have become the norm.
It is mostly a function of how little the reader is willing to pay for content. When the price point is too low (which for online content is too low), publishers make their money by other means. It is not rocket science.
Print magazines make most of their money from ad sales, not subscriptions. A typical ratio is 60:40 ads vs editorial. Magazines like Vogue go >70% ads, and I'm fairly sure old issues of Byte and other computer magazines were in that ballpark.
The difference in print is that the ads are targeted, and even welcome. Many of the ads in old computer magazines were price lists and mini-brochures, and pre-web that was the only way to get that information to customers.
I recently was in a 45 minutes Uber ride where the driver had the stereo set to the Sirius XM self-advertising channel - the one you get if you haven't subscribed. For 45 minutes, all he listened to was an ad for XM.
Most people just don't care.
> Most people just don't care.
So proceed as normal.
(I'm sure there would have also been countless ways to make the thing play actual music, but turning it off is the most obvious course of action.)
Which is very surprising to me. I only read The Guardian within the Tor browser, and when the website is loaded over their onion urls I do not see the same large obnoxious ads. A rare Tor win? Maybe adnetworks block Tor IP addresses and the reason why ads don't show up?
The onion url https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3...
That makes it sound like no one of The Guardian has a brain, it's not the intention, it's my most trusted news source, but maybe someone on the IT department thought a little bit further.
I loaded up a Guardian article this morning on my new 14" MBP, only to find out that there was so much crap on the page I couldn't even see the full headline without using Safari's "hide shit" feature.
Is this reader mode or some sort of adblock-style list? (if it's the latter, I'm looking for one that I can easily add without it breaking too many sites - in my experience, the "annoyance" lists for uBlock cause too much breakage to have them enabled by default).
But that's never the option and apparently it never will be. Sorry, I'm just never getting yearly subscriptions to 30 different content websites. That would probably 10x my spam email intake, I'd have to worry about them jacking up prices and playing games after the initial subscription ran out, and I'd have yet another subscription floating out there in the ether for me to forget about.
On the one end we've got Google Ads, which spies on your users everywhere they go. (I think most ad networks are in the same category, unfortunately.)
On the other end, you've got "someone emailed me to negotiate a sponsorship / affiliate thing and I added the banner/link manually, with no tracking code."
I only really see those two options.
Maybe the manual one is not so bad? I mean people don't want to see an ad either way, but if there's one, and you hand-approved it, and it doesn't spy on you... then we've eliminated most of the ethical and respect issues, right?
There's a temptation to "set it and forget it", but if you have even an atom of respect for your readers or customers, it only seems right that you'd put in a few minutes of work per month instead of deploying spyware on their machines.
(Just making it <a><img> also seems to solve all 49MB of ass.)
No tracking. No cookies. No behavioral targeting (targeting based on stuff you've previously done). Every website where our ads appear AND every advertiser is hand approved. No JS from advertisers: just a plain JPG/PNG and text.
We're small but on track to pay out $500k to publishers this year.
And as a bonus (for the website owner), they're also much harder to automatically block!
Unfortunately the industry is so large with so much money now that choosing a different business model is almost always leaving money on the table. And I don't have any ideas on how to fix that.
Youtube is just about the worst that I've put up with for it. Every single second it's trying desperately to inject more ads, which the blocker swiftly removes. After watching for a few minutes the block count can be in the several hundred...
QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads.
Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."
Advertising is when you're baited into watching some fun "content" and then they interrupt it to shove ads in your face. Nobody asked for this.
They want to look good in front of their bosses. They want to bring nice charts with nice performance metrics and they want to be up to date with the latest developments in the market of marketing tools, so they use every tool that is out there.
"IT" has no choice but to do what marketing demands, because IT is a cost center, while marketing is closer to revenues.
And so, over time, you end up with 49MB web pages with hundreds of trackers.
Granted I don’t follow news, so it’s easy for me to say maybe, but same applies other websites. If I land on hostile page (despite idea blockers) I’ll just leave it, what can be so important that can justify me to suffer through it.
Just like in the example in the article, would you eat in McDonald that treated like that? Classical case of vote with your wallet, or vote with your attention.
Because you have to pay for the print version. They have plenty of ads, too, but they're not the sole revenue stream.
The vast majority of revenue comes from ads. They are just placed and handled in less obnoxious ways.
The March 2026 issue has 12 ads across 109 pages including the back cover. Ads do not appear within an article. I even sometimes read the ads, because many are about new book releases. I opened the cover story (just one article!) of this issue within the mobile app and encountered 38 advertisements. The ads take up nearly half the screen and there is almost always one visible. These 38 instances were just the same four ads repeated many, many times.
This is just one issue of one publication, but it's representative of the broader problem the author discusses. I want to support good journalism and am willing to pay for good writers and articles but strategies that are so frustrating and disrespectful to the reader make it difficult.
> Simplified versions like text.npr.org, lite.cnn.com and www.cbc.ca/lite still exist out there.
TIL, these are awesome. Not in the sense that they're a visual tour de force, obviously, but they make for an easy "hey, type this in for a second and tell me what you think" contrast, to help people realize how inconvenient the default experience has slowly become.
Engineering would make tools for the sales guys to make websites. We hated those bastards because they would litter the pates with adds.
"We need revenue" they'd protest. Engineering would respond that past two ads, the revenue was too small to be worth destroying the brand.
What I got out of that was that business folks, often, don't give a shit about the product reputation on a timescale longer then their ownership of it.
Publishers could create efficient fast-loading web pages if they prioritized it (and a rare few do) but its just not a priority for most even though its in their best interest.
You can have ads loading on a web page, even with header bidders, if you structure it correctly. In fact you can implement an ad solution that allows for fast loading pages and better optimize your ad revenue - whether you're doing pragmatic or direct.
I know this because I've done this before. At a past employer we cleaned up their mobile version (they used the "m.example.com" format, so we could push this as a separate rogue experiment) and saw ad revenue grow by over 30% while giving readers a better, faster overall UX.
I actively monitor top publisher article pages and you can see how bad (and good) it is:
TL;DR Keep using an ad blocker
One note: the Property link, that links to the actual news source, is broken.
Also, the test link you're using for Nautilus (the top scoring site) is 404 (https://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/the-multiverse-as-muse)
Its on my roadmap to auto-update the URL over time to avoid this very thing!
Thx to those who pointed it out.
(e.g. as maligned as it is, the Microsoft account really is one account you can use to log into your computer, your XBOX, and all sorts of things. The Apple account is the center of your digital life on iOS but on MacOS it's kinda... tacked on)
Depends how you use it, I guess? The close and zero-effort integration and syncing with iOS is pretty key to my desktop (well, laptop) still having enough utility-to-effort to be worth having around at all. Probably still won't save it when my M1 Air gets a bit dodgy in a year or two and I start thinking about an upgrade (I'll likely upgrade my aging, last-pre-M-series-model iPad Pro instead) but if not for that it'd already have become inconvenient enough that I'd likely have forgotten about it in a storage bin somewhere.
The printed version does _look_ better, but can org that serves Taboola ever be taken seriously anymore? Sanctity is miles away from "6 simple steps to $1 Million" ads. We can be sad in general about their passing. But let's not think it's isolated to issue surrounding online/ads. WaPo isn't the same either.
I would presume that this fascination with pushing viewers to the app is because they make better money off of you reading stuff in the app.
Yes because they don't give the print editions away for free.
You go to these sites as a free user, you get exactly what you paid for.
The only reason you're confronted with articles from these legacy publications in the first place is because they've lobbied governments to get google to force them into their carousels and recommendations.
Yeah? How about when I go to the site as a paid subscriber and get the exact same experience? Did the number or obnoxiousness of ads go down when I gave NYT money? Nope.
In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville noted that American publications (unlike those from Europe) packed their pages with ads
I also built an extension to redirect the article to this website, so that before these actions annoy me, I could read the article in peace.
I do. I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users on average.
That number isn't current, and I don't know if it was ever broadly correct, but it's obvious that an installed app provides more opportunities to try to get the user to do something profitable, and it's harder to block ads in native apps. I would be surprised if convincing a user to install a native app doesn't reliably increase profits by a large amount for most kinds of business.
Yes, I tried YouTube iOS app recently, without an ad blocker. It pretty much describes the experience.
Also, (1) the image is dithered, ha ha, and (2) The image on the page https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/dithering is an 863K PNG. (Which I bet we could still get down to a smaller size, granted.) It took me a bit to figure out what you're looking at -- the Dithering site on passport.online, where the cover art is inexplicably 3000x3000 pixels. I'm too tired to come up with a good crack about how that explains what I don't like about Ben Thompson, but I bet it's there.
The 49MB web page - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 - March 2026 (371 comments)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U
- https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
Some say that you should not use ad blocker, because that kills ad revenue, but I did not forced anybody to rely with their lives on ad revenue. Many of things were 'free' because we were all just using ad blocks, and then it all became commodified, simplified, so simpletons without ad blocks became a thing. Now they shame people for using ad blocks, even though it stops spreading malware and viruses.
I plan to use ad block, and use as many extensions that protect me. If there is some form of goods, be it streaming movies, audio, books I will happily pay for it. I will not accept a web with ads. I prefer touch grass. There is a clear line for me.
Also there is no line ad publisher will not cross. The goal posts are shifted, so you will never satisfy shareholder greed. The only pushback is trough ads and probably sometimes piracy. Not that I advocate it, but in reality if companies push too hard, there are consequences.
None of those are really a thing any more, but if those were the only kinds of ads around, I might not bother with an ad blocker at all.
Except Google ads or anything else from a big multi-site ad network. That's all spying crap, I'm never going back to allowing those through, no matter how unobtrusive.
No, "No print publication on the planet can do this"
But looking back on magazines, newspapers, etc; they have ALWAYS used a tremendous amount of advertisements. Newspapers sold classified space to sell stuff. It was always passive, and no way to have the newspaper or magazine to watch the user back to track eyeballs.
Now with tech, we can do precisely this, or with close proxies.
And with FB marketplace and Craigslist eating what was left of classifieds, yeah being in media is a very bad place.
And thats not even discussing using LLMs to make slop. Even Are Technica was generating hallucinated articles, and the editor accepted it for months until being called out.
...but how are they supposed to function if people don't pay for them?
If everyone looks equal, sites ('to pick') are going irrelevant it seems.... but OT: about 14y ago there was a request for ads that may be liked. and yes...in the meantime, even you would've said, 'yes ther were some ads, i liked (maybe the music, the product or something other about).' But that it wasn't originally about. 10y ago the pendulum swinged to: "we lose the web", some saying that books (typewriters for example^^) were replaced by video (TV) and that the internet eaten the book- and video-stuff. so one asked: "what is next? do we become an internet of the internet (if any may use this as a description of todays so called 'AI') ?"
And i looked on the HN frontpage which shows exactly that 'exagerated' (generated support) each of you is just echoing another... but who the heck, i am even not a native english speaker, so wayne ...
Comic (in german): https://iili.io/qwVP7R9.md.png (diddn't know if the hoster likes direct linking)... regards...
The 49MB web page
Of course they do, there are ads and unrelated articles on the same page , or, for magazines, full page ads interrupting your reading experience, or flashy callouts.
Paper is just a much more constrained technology, do they can't ruin it dynamically, not that they don't want to or somehow magically respect the reader very much for free
"I'm Shubham, a full-stack product engineer passionate about fixing hostile UI, building privacy-first tools (like my YouTube extension with 51k+ DAU), and making the web usable again. I am currently looking for my next role."
:-(
> “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.
I don't entirely agree. I think these people entirely understand the web. This comes from publications trying to steer you towards their app so you can't block their tracking/profiling requests. The screens are cluttered because we've defined acceptable metrics as more clicks and views. The easiest way to generate more clicks to put a few popups on your site. Who cares what the clicks are actually for, no one is tracking user flows and user retention anymore, it's all "get them caught in the swamp" and maybe the slow page loading, janky ui, and increased clicks will land them on one of the advertisements.
This stuff comes from "here is the latest pattern people are using to get people to click on stuff" then the team implements the pattern 100 more times as a bandaid/movement of the way to get people to click on things. Those people rotate out and it's only another 5 years before some dev says "hey can you clean up your Google Tag Manager script tags?" to whoever is in charge then.
This also stems from the thousands and thousands of marketing companies/"startups" that do one thing. "Put our script on your page to track and improve customer retention". Of course whatever the marketing company is selling is perfectly quantifiable inside the analytics suite, but no one gets promoted for implementing a new analytics report. You get promoted for implementing "Click Tagger" or whatever.
This mentality runs deep through modern American culture. Where it's more flashy and newsworthy to strike a deal with a sales rep of some AI startup than implement the tech yourself. Look at the US CENTCOM implementing Israeli tech or even the report yesterday about the committee approving Microslop garbage for federal use.[0] All of that comes out of some sales contract as our leadership teams only know how to copy script tags, not understand systems and flows.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
It's a link blog.
He does this to amplify things, and look: it worked! The original post made the HN homepage a couple days ago, and now Gruber’s post about it has made the HN homepage again.
Nor the development practices that are hoisted as "the way to do things now" that people frantically race to adopt so they are not pushed out of the industry and a fruitful career as "obsolete".
Nor the technology companies that thought they served as a suitable replacement for news and advertising and community boards and used their massive investments to undercut the ability of traditional news outlets to survive, nevermind upstarts to have any hope of competing.
And the haranguing continues as if it was the design of these organizations in the first place.
There's no love lost for the media companies owned by billionaires, but maybe it should be more clear in these discussions exactly who started this particular mess.
A lot of print magazines, like Vogue or even Field & Stream, are like 60% or more full page ads. But if you’re reading something like New Bride magazine you’re probably actively shopping for wedding dresses and flowers and such, so the advertising ideally works as part of what makes the magazine valuable for the reader and the advertiser.
The real problem is that the finance and business folks are addicted to performance metrics and they preferentially put their money towards things that can be represented as graphs because it’s hard to argue with a graph. Jon Gruber has a vague sense for what sort of audience he has and what they’re into, so he can pitch advertisers on the idea that by advertising with him they’re going to reach an audience of Apple enthusiast technologists who presumably care about design and UI/UX and whatever other intuitions he has about his readership. But none of that is a quantitative metric, so only a small market is open to putting money into it.
If I want to know something, I will search for it. The sites that offer the info could easily choose to show ads specifically relevant to the topic at hand instead of hiring out that task to a cyberstalker.
I don't want to see ads for pet medicines on multiple sites because some algorithm has decided that I have a pet in need of medical assistance. I don't have a pet at all.
I'm sure I only get those because I'm using apps to poison my digital footprint, but my ex-gf, who didn't and did have pets, probably got my home IP tagged as a pet owner.
This very direct, very personal connection to the web business doesn't exist in most other sites.
lol, they're doing for the money. Not because they're "held hostage". More time on site means more money. They know this. They know it's a shitty experience. Look, I get it, they have to make money somehow, but some of these sites try to squeeze every last drop of money out of users. It's a fine line to walk between "I'll stay because this content is interesting" and "F this man, I'm leaving", and some push that line hard.
It has nothing to do with "understand[ing] or enjoy[ing] the web". It comes from people at organisations running websites that know where the money is, probably because some cretinous nerds encouraged them. Generally, the amount of potential data collection, surveillance, ad serving and _money-making_ is greater with an "app" than with a website
"Ad blockers" are popular but "app blockers"^1 are not. The "smartphone" is a remotely-controlled "entire surveillance device" (recent HN title: "Your phone is an entire computer")
1. Application firewalls like Netguard. And even this does not solve the problem entirely because the design of the "entire computer" includes extensive surveillance capabilities
Computers were invented, and initially used for calculations, punch cards, databases, spreadsheets, automating warehouses and running airlines and stuff. Computers are really good for that stuff, like many orders of magnitude better than analog alternatives.
Later, computers became a mass market consumer product, and we had the web and internet, and moving everything online became a fad, much like AI is a fad now. This pushed computers into some fairly marginal use cases, like "social media", publishing, messaging, e-commerce, and CRUD apps to manage workflows like JIRA and friends. Computers are kind of ok for this stuff... but, frankly, not that much better than the original thing. Like, a telephone, fax, etc. already allowed instant communication, email is maybe a bit better than fax, but it's not 1000x better. JIRA is a bit better than a whiteboard and post-it notes, but, also probably not 1000x better.
It's these recent, marginal-ish use cases that are getting destroyed by enshittification, AI, etc... because they were just never that good an application for computers and UIs in the first place. I think, if one wants to work on, or use an application that doesn't get filled with ads or have a copilot gratuitously inserted or whatever, it's probably more likely to happen in software for fluid dynamics or some natural fit for using a computer. Conversely, anything like facebook or jira or whatever that never really needed to be a computer app apart from because it was fashionable... is now unfashionable.
You can’t do MITM on HTTPS anyway, so I can’t imagine they would do anything more than a $20 Pi Zero and PiHole, except for the fact that somebody else is managing it.
Ehh... I cancelled my SF Chronicle subscription a year ago. Since then I've received a dozen predatory phone calls and just add many letters. Plus when you do have the subscription they alter prices on you like a cable TV provider. So in some ways print is better than web but in other ways it's worse.
Surprised Gruber isn’t using network level adblocking. I can’t imagine life without it these days.
(Yes I realise you need extensions when not on your own network etc - unless you use your own DNS!)
The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a product is digital then it should be free which is maybe fine if we are going to live in a world with Universal Basic Income but in our existing system is absolutely ludicrous.
We used to pay for things - including the news. The clear issue is that the working class have (since 1970s but especially since the financial crisis) tolerated having their inflation adjusted incomes degraded so there is no longer the money to pay. Outside of governments who have failed to take the necessary action against corporations and promote a power balance between investors, business and workers, the main cause of this is the lack of courage in middle management.
The executive suite have not tolerated this degradation and their salaries have risen accordingly. In contrast, middle management attain a level of safety/comfort and then coast - they don't want the hassle of looking for another job so they don't risk pushing for a pay rise. They just accept whatever meagre rise is offered because they think "well at least I'm still better off than the guys lower down the chain". This then filters down as the ceiling for the lower ranks can never be higher than the management. Over time this becomes a gigantic issue, particularly in countries with a strong minimum wage that rises every year as the gap between the worker and management closes every year. Management then start blaming the government rather than actually looking at themselves and the fact that they are not pushing for bigger wages out of fear of rocking the boat.
I literally saw this play out at a billion dollar revenue international non-tech company where I used to work a few years back. Directors were on £125k. Department heads on £75k. Tech leads on £55-65k. Seniors on £40-50k. Intermediates £27-35k. Juniors £25k. Devs who had developed features worth millions to the company would get offered pathetic pay rises of £2-5k because offering any more would then mean they'd be treading on the next rung.
? Where is this true?
I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every paragraph.
That maybe 10KB of text is surrounded by 10MB of extraneous filler downloaded for just this page (not even including the cached content).
People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.
This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).
On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.
For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.
I grew up in a household where several newspapers were bought daily (dad was a journalist himself). I would struggle doing the same though, even if I can very much afford it, because it is very clear to current press that even paying, I'm the product.
There's all sorts of articles that are actually ads, attempts to move me in an ideological direction, information that is in the owner's interest to spread.
Press double dips. If the interest is on distributing ideology, have the parties/lobbies pay.
Agree - and I pay for news - but I also find it hard to imagine that the current morass of low quality, usually scammy, ads is the most lucrative way to monetize a news web site. It’s literally driving away views while attracting advertisers that are willing to pay less and less. We’ve hill-climbed onto a plateaux (hill-descended into a crevasse?) and everyone is too afraid to make the leap to a potentially better one because if they get it wrong they’ll end up with less or no income.
This isn’t true of the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
With fits and starts, real median wages have been on a solid upward trend since the mid-1990’s.
Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone? They've always carried ads, and I suspect that's always been a bigger income stream than the cost of buying the paper itself.
Most certainly not. The hollowing out of classifies by Craigslist in 2000s is what killed most local newspapers.
Some companies are like this, but they generally lose their best people to better salaried jobs elsewhere. They exist because not everything needs to be done by top people.
No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech.
Is that so hard to understand?
Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the comments to a paywall-evading site!
The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality, highly focused on costs and with no attention at all paid to benefits.
This is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber.
I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for every product you use.
Because everyone wants to double (and triple- and quadruple- and...) dip. Buy a $2000 TV and you'll likely discover ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc. They figured "why not?" because someone will always rationalize it.
i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model.
I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month
I'm sure there are people who enjoy reading global newspapers daily, and I'm sure a good quantity pays for it. That just doesn't include me.
