What the ad blocker debate reveals(mondaynote.com) |
What the ad blocker debate reveals(mondaynote.com) |
Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it.
You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.
Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice.
Want to make money? try a subscription model.
Why can't you have both? Welcome to the real world.
[EDIT]:
This was the previous opening sentence: "Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free."
I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it's trying to deliver.
I request some data, you send me some data. My computing device (yes MY computing device) then renders it in accordance with my wishes.
That's it.
(oh, and no, I have no obligation to play ball with your trackers)
Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" - they're putting it up with ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request them. You seek the content out.
So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose that's your prerogative, but don't pretend like you're the victim in this.
And also don't pretend like it's the company's fault for not choosing your preferred business model. You don't get to choose other companies' business models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.
I say, let them die then. It's not that we need those sites but don't want to pay. It's that various "enterprising" folks figure that they can make some "content", fill them with ads and get passive income. If those 99% of sites disappeared overnight, everyone would likely be better off. You'd have a choice between quality paid sites which people would support, or free sites paid by people who think their content is important enough to put their time and money to keep it accessible. Yes, the second group exists and is usually the source of the most valuable and trustworthy content on-line.
> You elect to not display that part using your client.
That's not how ad-blockers work. They prevent ads from downloading. And so sites load faster, and mobile users pay less for throughput.
It's just the forces that be, my need versus their need, the economy, human nature, technological abilities. Nothing more.
Let them choose their business model, I really don't care. But don't go out crying if your business model isn't sustainable, taking into account that ad blocking (which is a my prerogative as you say) is not going away.
Websites that distribute malware through their ads are definitely culpable. Mobile browsing without adblock is a miserable experience, with every other page opening up the app store to install whatever the malware game of the week is, or shouting audio that I didn't ask for. Plenty of non-tech-savvy people get caught by "your computer is infected!!" style ads. If website operators can't be bothered to ensure they're not distributing malware, I think we have a duty to protect ourselves.
In exchange, all you have to do is let these people (whom I don't actually know) track you and run their software on your computer, which will present a garish display of images (and maybe also sound and video, did I mention that I don't know these guys?).
All you have to do then is click and I will get paid a fraction of a cent (and you will have to deal with whatever crap comes up afterwards).
So what do you say?"
I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines.
You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader problem is that consumers have shown over time that they aren't willing to pay for content (at scale) so they are left with making money somehow.
Giving away the magazine for free was the choice of the person at the stand. If they want to profit, they have various means to do this. Ads are one way. Asking you for money when you ask for the magazine is another.
I don't think it's a problem that consumers aren't willing to pay for content. That's literally the description of consumers, to decide what to consume, how to use it, and what they are willing to give in exchange.
Uh ? To cut the ads out you need to see them. Adblock hide them as if they never existed in the first place.
Analogies, these days...
Nitpickers, these days...
"I can cut them out" can be, as stated in another comment, an ad cutting physical machine.
Your move.
I'd extend that to say "my eyes, my ears, my brain."
If I have the right to mute the volume, change the channel, or otherwise do something else when adverts appear on the TV, then I should also have the right to block them on a webpage - we're just using available technology to help us do it more effectively.
In practice cutting out ads probably makes you a more valuable customer because you've spent 10x the time most people spend looking at ads inspecting them while cutting. (and don't give any BS about "oh I actively avoid brands that advertise" -- brand advertising works, deal with it)
The better analogy is, you cut out the ads, reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers. In the real world, this is not going to be legal.
Considering that is applied voluntarily and "client side" and no redistribution takes place I'm not sure that would be illegal considering current laws.
Despite of that I believe publishing companies would be lobbying for laws to curb that practice as soon as it achieved critical mass and high enough adoption.
The implementation detail of how i'm cutting out the ads is beside the point. The point is that I can offer my ad cutting services for free to anyone.
I can tell all my friends - "Hey guys i'll come to your house and cut the ads out of the free magazines you're already receiving"
Which is definitely not the same as "Hey guys I've received this magazine, and I cut the ads, here's the PDF"
The reprint and redistribution parts are non-existent in ad blockers. the content is not hosted on adblockersite.com.
There's no need for an analogy anyway. It's equivalent of receiving a free magazine and the user putting it through an automatic ad-censoring machine before reading it.
Maybe the elite that pay the most money for a subset of content will be able to temporarily avoid ads, sometimes, but "the masses" will never be permitted to not be advertised to, as long as its technologically possible to spam them. They are cattle and that is their purpose.
For example, this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act...? I think it's excellent in both content and presentation. I want to support them so they can continue doing it.
I agree it'd be nice to not have ads but there are other people who find them interesting. That's one of the reasons I don't read magazines anymore - the amount of ads is way out of proportion to the value of the content.
For all those saying "get a subscription model!" remember this. A subscription model, by its very definition, implies that both of us expect a repeat, longer term relationship. Understand if that's the only way to monetize content on the internet it'll change the type and way content is created.
First, I suggest everyone resist metaphors. Physical metaphors don't work here at all. For one thing, the "free content" may in the future decide that you can't load the content in the page until after the ads and trackers confirm that you have indeed loaded their content and executed it to some degree, which wrecks every physical metaphor you can come up with. Physical content is dead. Web content is code. It gets to do code-y things. No physical metaphor will keep up.
Next, this obviously produces an arms race. The first iterations of this will be stupid and client-side, because it's cheap. When that doesn't work, server-side things can be done so that at the very least, you must download the ad; that can be confirmed fairly well in a non-forgeable way. The ads will also run arbitrary bits of code in an attempt to verify that they've really been shown; the client side plugins will retaliate by simulating the relevant code and not actually showing the ad. With the current state of web technology, this would stabilize in a sort of middle ground, where the client-side correctly doesn't render the ads, but the requisite requests to convince the server that you can see the content would by necessity still leak tracking information in order to convince the servers to show it at all. You could try to do things like use client-side stuff to scramble those values and share them among users or something, but that's fairly easy to detect at scale.
Where that becomes particularly relevant though is that the clients at this point are becoming increasingly outright deceptive and duplicitious. Instead of passively failing to render ads, actively deceiving the remote systems opens a new door both legally and ethically. At some point after this the publishers have both a legal and ethical case that you are not merely "experiencing the content as you wish", but actively defrauding them.
This, of course, won't stop people from arguing they have a right not to be tracked or advertised at, which means that they will essentially be arguing in favor of a right to have their programs make fradulent requests in order to get this "free" content. Which is fine and dandy locally, but consider what that means globally... and in particular, at this point how do you argue that it's ethically wrong to put trackers and ads in content, and for that matter even spyware, if the "other side" is retaliating in kind? If you're not careful with the ethics here you surprisingly find that you end up arguing in favor of the very things you thought you were arguing against, and end up making a "good for me but not for thee" argument, which even if you do end up believing that is still not a very powerful or compelling ethical/legal position.
Pardon if I'm leaping about 4 steps further down the road than most people here are at... I worked this all out about 12 years ago. (It's a bit dated now and I cringe a bit at the writing style, as befits any writer linking to something they wrote 12 years ago, but you can see what I worked out at http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics . Perhaps remarkably, it is dead on topic for this very debate... there's a lot of related issues here.)
Do you think we should still have the right to close our eyes, to look away, to refuse to watch, to put our hands over the screen? Would you consider that "defrauding" too? That's what it ultimately comes down to: the personal freedom to choose precisely the content you want to consume, vs. the desires of publishers to force-feed you what they want.
I have used blockers a lot before (If I'm not going to click I'd rather not be tracked and deal with the bloat) but recently turned them all off to see what it's like again. It's still the same shit that I don't care about and have no intention of clicking on. 9 times out of 10 its for something I ALREADY PAY FOR (Looking at you DO, AWS, etc) which is annoying because not only do I have to look at it but it just highlights the gross inefficiencies in advertisements.
I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless.
Mobile is the big sticking point. On the desktop I could use an extension that reads some meta data out of a site's head to identify that site and mark it down for receiving a portion of "subscription fee" but on mobile this becomes much more of a challenge as I'm not willing to switch to a single-purpose browser (not that iOS would make it easy even if I did) and there are no browser extensions on mobile and no, I'm not going to do some gross "share" hack to record the sites I visit.
I don't have an answer to all of this, it all sucks. I want to compensate content creators but other than pay-per-view ads (which I mentally block out if not with an ad blocker) I'm never going really help them as it stands currently.
ad blockers not only improve the web experience for users (making everything load faster, by blocking unwanted spurious crap), ad blockers are good for the cellcos as long as net neutrality holds true.
Absent net-neut cellcos could in principle charge advertisers for access, but in a net-neut environment there's no money to be gained by carrying the traffic. Traffic which impairs the UX for the paying customers (the smartphone and tablet users).
This is going to be an interesting dilemma for that strong proponent of network neutrality, Google, uh, DoubleClick, right? (Unless they go the third-order route and roll out their own LTE data network, where of course they'll be the advertising gatekeeper and maybe folks who DPI indicates are using ad blockers will get a reduced speed of service ...)
Something's fishy here. Is there any googler here that can respond to these claims ?
> “Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at…Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? …[A]ny argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.”
my thoughts exactly. "People" told the same things to the music industry. "You can't adapt, you should die", well let's see how ad networks and content producers survive the adblock revolution.
I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad sellers and hosters (Facebook, I'm looking at you) can promote them without having to back it up with quantifiable results. And that has led to a weird "ad ecosystem" which exists for its own purpose, not for actually trying to sell products (cause it doesn't actually work for that). I think the people most worried about the ad blockers are those that make their money from that ecosystem.
And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.
If Apple really wanted to spread ad blocking and disrupt things they should make it an optional install when users first open the browser, "do you want to see ads when browsing", where answering no installs an ad-blocker which blocks all apps not on apples whitelist (which ad networks then pay a sizable sum to be on of course).
fashion print magazines. buy a vogue and look at the ads. hard to tell apart from the content, glossy, relevant, beautiful. they make up at least 70% of the whole magazine.
i like gruber's ad system on DF, one of the few sites that seem to follow a user/reader centric approach. first you ensure the eyeballs, THEN you show the ads, always paranoid to piss off your readership.
mobile safari adblock in ios9 will hopefully bring movement into this ad game.
uBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy are my tools to control the content my web browser displays. My general rule is that I'll only disable ad blocking on a few trusted sites and never on a site that uses a third-party advertising network.
Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient attention to locate and click the "X", auto-playing sounds/videos, etc. If the UX wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware.
In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support and they plead with me to disable adblocking, I'll most likely choose to stop reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them.
I really wish the ability to make micropayments to publishers was a thing.
Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway. Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have access to a reasonable portion of the internet.
The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press. Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.
|----------------------------------|
| MY AWESOME NEWSPAPER |
|----------------------------------|
| category | links | cool | topics |
|----------------------------------|
| Article Title | Ads |
| | |
| Article content arti | A bunch |
| cle content article | of static|
| content. | not |
| | annoying |
| |---------------| | ads |
| | A cat picture | | |
| |---------------| | |
| | |
| Article content arti | |
| cle content article | |
| content. | |
| | |
|----------------------------------|
| footer links & copyright notices |
|----------------------------------|
> Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.
What content quality?
Advertising is dead. Good riddance.
[0] Which has also killed the modal informational dialog in desktop applications. I've ran training sessions for internal enterprise software and the users literally could not remember there was a dialog mere seconds after dismissing it.
At least one ad blocker tried to avoid this by marking some advertisements as legitimate/unobtrusive, and not blocking them. That didn't fly very well, as the rest of us just claimed that they were in league with advertisers, and just using this unblocking as a different source of revenue.
That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter. Sponsored stories, content modified to add a few links to advertisers and such. Pay people not to post advertisements on their page, but to actively talk about you in the same way they talk about other things on their site.
Which in a way is even worse outcome. It creates a conflict of interests for the publisher and makes it harder for the reader to trust the article - because you often can't tell if at any given point, the author is writing sincerely, or just advertising his sponsors.
I have yet to see any ad blocker that blocks a simple link along with text like "I used this and here's how it helped me". I don't consider any other forms of advertising "acceptable".
> Pay people not to post advertisements on their page, but to actively talk about you in the same way they talk about other things on their site.
A couple of sites I read occasionally mention products they've used, and now that they're popular, they also mention whether or not they're getting any money for mentioning the product. As long as that money gets mentioned, and the actual opinion is genuine, I see nothing wrong with this.
That is not online content one whit. My use of the WaPo does not in any way impact another users use, certainly not to the degree that WaPo is loading down my bandwidth with extra code and content above and beyond what I'm there to read. Seriously, by the time I'm done reading this article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/03...), they've used up 5MB of my bandwidth, for 5KB of text. Literally 1/1000th. It gzips down to half of that. In the time it took me to write the last three sentences, it's now up to 25MB. I'm not the one choosing to use up their server resources. They're doing it to themselves.
My hosting fees for all the sites I run combined come up to around $50/mo. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be for 1000 times more traffic. I assume it's not linear, but lord help me if it is.
There is no end in site for online content. When I can get a perfectly good substitute to the NY Times just by scanning the plethora of free blogs and social media posts from people who are doing it because they like it, because it's important to them, because they are living it, then there is no end in site to online content.
People will pay for valuable things. The problem is that this age of "you have to play the blogging/social media game to find any relevance in the public conscience" thing has created a functionally infinite supply of articles all saying basically the same thing. But turn on the TV, flip to CNN, and what are they talking about? "What are people saying on Twitter?" Why put up with ads to pay for secondary sources when I can go to the primary, where their advertising is nowhere near as intrusive?
An artist I really like releases a new album and I buy it right away because I want to listen to it on repeat. If I really liked a movie I saw in a theater, I preorder it right away (at current theater ticket prices, plus going with my wife, plus typical Blu-ray prices, I'm spending around $60 a movie, if I really like it).
Oh jeez. The WaPo article is 35MB now, and they just played a little "dink" sound, I'm guessing to try to catch my attention and get me to come back to... what? To an article I've now long disengaged with. These tactics works? This gets people to buy? This is worth all this infrastructure to try to leech out that one converted sale out of every 10,000 people?
If someone knows of something like uBlock with default whitelists, I want to know and try it.
For many years Adwords was probably the biggest risk to people setting up a new computer and wanting to download things like Firefox.
When supposedly the best and most responsible sector of the online advertising market was prepared to profit from malware distribution for years then it's no wonder the entire industry has a reputation in the gutter.
Not on iOS. Firefox on Android has extensions.
> I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless.
Lately I'm a big fan of Patreon, and an increasing number of the folks whose work I enjoy use it.
If there are sites, channels, or any regular content you enjoy, and they don't have a subscription mechanism, send them a mail and ask them about adding one.
We get spammed with so many fake "DONWLOAD HERE!" buttons that it becomes impossible to see the real one.
I've clicked on hundreds. Thousands probably. For me clicking an ad is a win-win - the site I want to support gets a little money, and the advertiser gets to find out that online ads don't convert to sales so eventually they'll stop buying them. You can support the things you love and drive the ad model off the internet at the same time.
I realise this isn't a workable long term strategy. :)
No matter how much we like to think otherwise, advertisement is barely ethical (it's nothing less than coercion and manipulation). It's time we catch up to it and shut it down, it's a failed experiment that only resulted in bad things, enabling that world of abundance that nobody needed.
I agree with the original commenter, let the advertising sector burn.
It's purely a system to confound rational consumer choice these days, to maintain the viability of companies that shouldn't be viable, because their product is inferior.
Advertising is psychological manipulation and in 99% of cases all it does is create a need for something where there was none and where there need not be one.
As a society the West is driven by an obscene need for perpetual and ever-increasing consumption and advertising is primarily responsible for this.
It's a psychological attack on millions, even billions of people that uses their fears, their neuroses and their insecurities against them to generate profits.
They say advertising affects everying whether they know it or not and I do agree with this. The simple act of being exposed to say a Coca-Cola advert is enough to put that brand in your mind.
Here's the kicker though; for many people this is having the opposite effect as intended. I see an advert, for pretty much anything and all it does it make me want to avoid that company's products.
Anything from obnoxious internet ads to cringe-worthy TV ads full of happy care-free dancing actors singing headache inducing jingles. I'll avoid the products they advertise out of pure annoyance and spite.
It seems like more and more people are starting to react this way to advertising and it's a good thing.
Visual adds aren't the problem. Audio adds, adds that consume massive bandwidth that is limited, and add that track are all the problem. Normal visual adds can sometimes be nice, letting me know about products that I didn't previous know about that I might actually want to buy. But being tracked? Nope. Blocked!
If you really want to know what I think, I basically linked a book that describes it. The writing may not be my best ever but the ideas have as far as I'm concerned stood the test of 15 years of tech development, which is, if I dare say so myself, not bad. No need to make up strawmen; you've got plenty of content to criticize.
The depletable resource is user patience, i.e. how much shit they're willing to take before they start blanket-blocking ads. If every publisher stuck to simple, unobtrusive and relevant ads then readers wouldn't block them. But some publishers/ad creators/ad networks decide that they want more money so they make their ads more attention-grabbing, and then the others do the same, and then users get tired and start blocking, and everyone is worse off.
Check any block list and you will see both rules.
Nonetheless, many sites do load dramatically faster with ad blocking. That's especially so with high-latency connections. I often use Tor through nested VPN chains, and total latency can be 1-2 seconds. Some sites are unusable without AdBlock and NoScript.
But print readership was going down for a while before then. TV news was on the rise. I think it was a lot of factors at once.
I'm starting to think it makes more sense to make sure everyone has my data to make sore no one has a competitive advantage because of it. No, seriously though, I don't literally want to do that, but I'm starting to think in terms of that and what can we do about it. I don't think it's avoidable. I don't know how you would manage such a thing. But I think the only thing keeping us anywhere near safe is the basics of competition between these various companies. If one of them can succeed at creating their dream of a walled garden social network from which user activity never escapes, I think we will be far worse off.
Most people don't care about privacy, they only care about getting free stuff. As long as there are almost no consequences to the lack of privacy--or consequences that our culture can easily turn around and use to shame the victim [1]--then nothing is going to change.
The FOSS community isn't helping any. They turn their noses up at such prosaic projects as social media. How difficult would it be to make a decentralized twitter clone? It's apparently impossible, since it has been discussed numerous times and still hasn't happened yet. And how would it be different from RSS? Look where that went.
I think the only hope we have is the complete implosion of advertising income as a business model on the internet. It is heading there, but the response has been to pour fuel on the fire. I think we're going to have to see some companies going bankrupt before we'll see major change. Otherwise, they'll just click-fraud leech money out of the system in a state of equilibrium.
[0] Also, between my prior work in the defense industry and my wife's current work, the OPM hack has destroyed any semblance of privacy for my data.
[1] RE: people losing jobs over things they've posted on Facebook. Millenials didn't invent being a jackass. They're just the first generation to have it broadcast live for their teachers, parents, and bosses to see.
Adults, these days... :]
Luckily, we have no need for ad-cutting on kindle...
I've come to know many of the services and apps I use through channels like podcast and blog advertising. When done right, ads can be enjoyable (for example they are the only thing worth reading in an in-flight magazine)
At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible.
To improve it even further, based on my own experience and what I see in comments here, apparently you have like 1 quality paid stuff per 10 paid scams, 10 paid pieces of crap and 100 free stands. Those who want to pay for quality content quickly discover that it's incredibly hard to find.
The analogy breaks down on the nature of the ads themselves. In physical magazines, ads are static and occupy fixed space on the pages. The off-line equivalent to what we have on-line would be ads carried by bugs inside the pages - moving, making sounds, hard to get rid of and occasionally biting you so you get sick and need to seek time-consuming and/or expensive care. Ads on-line are actively hostile.
> At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible.
I agree.
The problem isn't that a crossover age exists; look at medical ads, young people eventually get old. The real problem is the crossover age has been going up about one year per year for some decades now.
Now, that's not fair. There is no such thing as "if you build it, they will come". If you are building a thing and you want people to come and use it, you have to advertise in some form. Even if you're making a diner on the side of the highway, you have to put up a sign "Eat at Joes" so people know that you exist and will pull over to try you out.
The problem is that online advertisements these days aren't even designed to inform potential consumers, they're just a mechanism to leech money out of paying customers via selling a dream to content producers that they might be able to make a living off of their craft.
I stand by my statement: the best way to do this is to build something awesome, show it to people, and have them be so excited about how much it helped them that they jump at the chance to show others. Bonus if you build something that gets more valuable the more people use it (even if only by having more people share related tools and tips for it), so people have an active incentive to share it with others.
I'm not going to buy them either way (I don't drink soda or sugary drinks anyway), so they're not achieving anything other than my disdain.
It absolutely flabbergasts me the amount of people in the tech world who don't realize to run a top site delivering content to you costs thousands of dollars a month in hosting, let alone to pay the bills of the people who do the work.
Pay $5/mo to all your favorite sites... I visit 10+ sites a day average, that's $50 on top of my internet bill that is already $60/mo.
I'd rather be shown an ad that I've conditioned to block out mentally than pay $50/mo extra to look at 10 sites a day only.
So yeah, you're right, you can block ads, but when ad blocking proliferates to the point that it's not feasible for any of these sites to keep running, then they go away..
Now you're left complaining because none of your favorite sites are around.
I do realize the costs and I do realize they have to make money to put food in their mouth. But it's no different than any other business, it's either you have a sustainable model, or you don't. You can't have it all. The web is not a utopia.
I can't imagine that many sites are earning $5 per month in ad income for each of their regular users. But maybe someone could point to some reliable data?
There are a lot of factors that determine the value of a visit so take this info with a grain of salt.
Granted, some blogs (stratechery comes into mind) can go behind a paywall but that is because their articles have high value. Personally I like strategies like sponsored posts and similar, however these are not scalable for small producers thus available only for high-traffic websites. I wonder how would sites like Facebook, Blogger, Disqus work if there was no advertising. Also, people clearly want these sites to exist and clearly do not want to pay to use them, what other option there might be?
Potentially, that sort of funding of creators or institutions could permit them to be truly free to create as they please - with no need to answer to corporate advertisers, or anybody else except their most dedicated fan base.
Certainly, there are sites that we could do without; there's clickbait-filled garbage that does nothing but pollute the Internet.
But there's also a lot of really good stuff out there that is supported by ads. Stuff that people put their heart and soul and a lot of effort into, and stuff that I (and probably you) love to read, that wouldn't make it without ads.
I can count the number of sites I've ever heard of that are paid for by their users on one hand.
The reason people block ads is not because they don't want publishers to get paid. It's because most ads are actively user-hostile, ranging from merely fucking annoying to malware vectors which can cost you a lot of money. Quoting 'jacquesm from other subthread, "Browsing the web without an adblocker is like sex with multiple partners every day without a condom.". [0].
Having been a part of a lot of media sites in the past, I can safely say that wouldn't have been true for any of them.
The truth is, there is nothing on the NY Times or WaPo that is worth paying twice for.
If I want to have the NY Times, it's $32/mo [0], plus I have to let them ride my shoulder as I go about the rest of my business online. HBO Now is $15/mo [1], the only ads I get are in between episodes and only for other shows on HBO.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp3004.htm... they charge different rates for different screen sizes, which I find highly objectionable. If I want it on all of my devices, it's $8/wk
[1] https://order.hbonow.com/ Oh, look, an https site. NY Times redirects from https to http.
Of course if people are looking for entertainment then that's a different story and reddit may be serious competition.
I'm not aware of any journalistic experiment where readers get to select between ads and complimentary copy. In theory it should be economically possible. Maybe even a slider bar where you can smoothly pick any ratio such as 20% ads and 80% complimentary copy? I'm pretty good at reading thru B.S. so I'd go complimentary copy, my elderly MiL needs help not getting ripped off so she's best pushing the slider to ads... of course putting my best interests in direct opposition to the advertisers isn't going to work well...
(Also, digital advertising is still very far from efficient)
So even though they created something of value (otherwise it wouldn't be on the front page) but most people still won't pay for the content.
Patreon works the same way. You make money when you produce content that people want to pay for even if they don't have to. If you can't do that, ads are a fine plan B, but you have to go into that knowing that many people will be ad blocking (and even more if you're producing any kind of technical content).
Go to a gaming conference and show it to people there.
Talk to some of the well-respected (note: that's not the same thing as popular) gaming folks on YouTube or Twitch, and let them try it.
Find well-respected gaming bloggers/reviewers and show it to them.
If what you're building is VR but not exclusive to gaming, talk to people in the field it applies to.
Go to a technology conference and talk about how you built the software or how you solved some particularly interesting challenge.
If you're building on some other projects, talk to the authors of those projects, and show them what you've built (along with giving them credit in your own project).
Make a video yourself and post it to YouTube, in concert with any of the above.
Start building a network of people who are interested in what you do, so the next time you can just post interesting things to that network.
Also, out of curiosity, which of the items on that list aren't you already doing?
Word of mouth and genuine self-promotion of a useful product is indeed the best form of advertising, and of course Show HN would be a good example of that. You could certainly call that a form of advertising or marketing, but I can't imagine someone finding it objectionable. Not least of which because you can't game it with money; it'll succeed or fail based on how much people like what you built.
Newspapers have a lot of trust to regain with people. But then again, I suppose the general population doesn't give a rat's ass about the truth, and want to read only something shocking to use as a "social object" (i.e. something you can start discussing with other people you meet).
To answer your question: I do not know. But I don't find it a useful comparison; while they both produce "content", the content itself is vastly different. Producing shows with the quality of, say, Game of Thrones, is expensive, but so is having and sending reporters all over the world.
HBO also just recently changed its entire business model. It used to not be purchased directly by consumers. The old model was they sold themselves to the cable companies, and the cable companies sold HBO to consumers. HBO Now changes that, and it's possible it will also change the nature of HBO.
That argument would make a lot more sense, if the NYT, like my local newspaper, were merely a re-wrapped slightly localized Reuters news feed.