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WarmWashtoday at 3:15 PM1 replyview on HN

The conversion from viewer to donator is around 1%. This is true from wikipedia, to twitch, to podcasts.

The number of people who will not ever load your ads is around 30%.

I can tell you that creators talk about this a lot in private, but will not publicly because the internet has a mass delusion on how creation and compensation works. It's like trying to convince christians that jesus obviously didn't come back from the dead days later, depsite there being no logical system available that would explain it.

If we were to try and map out a functional internet where everyone wins, users and creators, there is no example where ad blocking is anything other net harmful. You either get volunteer net where 0.01% share hobby posts on their own dime for the other 99.9% or you get IRC where 99% of the population doesn't really benefit (ala 1993).


Replies

20ktoday at 5:53 PM

The problem is that the ad vendors couldn't keep it in their pants. The ads you're talking about are a common vector for delivering malware onto people's PCs, and absolutely destroy the usability of sites. Between tracking cookies, popups, full screen banners, autoplaying video, flashing ads, and their unbelievably high weight in bandwidth - the internet is fairly unusable if you don't block any ads

Bear in mind that many basic privacy features destroy ads by breaking tracking and fingerprinting. Its impossible to get a browser in that doesn't filter out behaviours that have been used to deliver ads

Creatives can and have adapted their strategies away from what is a very specific form of ads: the disruptive full screen ads, or banner ads. That's only one form of advertising that everyone utterly detests. Sponsored content is much more popular with the end users, and much more effective as well because its way less disruptive. Some people hate that, but overall the tradeoff is significantly better

We shouldn't confuse a single type of widely blocked advert with all advertising being blocked. Banner ads have very poor efficacy at delivering sales anyway