<story><title>There are no acceptable ads</title><url>https://github.com/fivefilters/block-ads/wiki/There-are-no-acceptable-ads#wrapper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mahranch</author><text>&amp;gt; I want high quality content, and I&amp;#x27;m willing to pay for it.&lt;p&gt;Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why I don&amp;#x27;t like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;d pay for high quality content&amp;quot;. And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that&amp;#x27;s simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And &lt;i&gt;none&lt;/i&gt; have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000?&lt;p&gt;Subscription models just don&amp;#x27;t work. Nuff said, really. There&amp;#x27;s 10+ years of data to back it up.</text></item><item><author>ollysb</author><text>I want high quality content, and I&amp;#x27;m willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4&amp;#x2F;month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we&amp;#x27;re stuck with at the moment. Even the content  traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve got £50&amp;#x2F;month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy&amp;#x2F;able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there&amp;#x27;s a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I&amp;#x27;m hopeful that we&amp;#x27;re seeing the start of the return to journalism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dwc</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve struggled with this myself. A while back, due to linkage from here and other sites, I had used up my free allotment of free nytimes stories and thought, &amp;quot;hey, let me see if I can pay a bit to raise the limit, because I&amp;#x27;m willing to pay a bit for journalism.&amp;quot; So I checked out their subscription plans and could find nothing even remotely close to worthwhile for me.&lt;p&gt;There were disconnects between how they viewed subscriptions vs. what I wanted:&lt;p&gt;* They offered access to all of their content for a price that would have been fair if I would be reading some significant fraction of it. But I wanted to raise my cap from X stories&amp;#x2F;month to 2X stories per month and have it cost something reasonable. Or something close, like 5X stories. They need to get over the idea that the way people read news today is by going to a single site and reading through a fair amount of it, like people used to do with a physical newspaper.&lt;p&gt;* The subscriptions were for what I&amp;#x27;d call &amp;quot;odd&amp;quot; time periods like 6 weeks. WAT. Why not 5 or 7 weeks, or multiples of 10 days? What happens when my 6 weeks is up? I start getting renewal emails? Quit messing around and quote a recurring monthly rate with discount for longer commitments.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I went there intending to give them some money even though I only occasionally go over the free limit, and left without signing up, slightly bewildered.</text></comment>
<story><title>There are no acceptable ads</title><url>https://github.com/fivefilters/block-ads/wiki/There-are-no-acceptable-ads#wrapper</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mahranch</author><text>&amp;gt; I want high quality content, and I&amp;#x27;m willing to pay for it.&lt;p&gt;Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why I don&amp;#x27;t like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;d pay for high quality content&amp;quot;. And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that&amp;#x27;s simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And &lt;i&gt;none&lt;/i&gt; have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000?&lt;p&gt;Subscription models just don&amp;#x27;t work. Nuff said, really. There&amp;#x27;s 10+ years of data to back it up.</text></item><item><author>ollysb</author><text>I want high quality content, and I&amp;#x27;m willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4&amp;#x2F;month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we&amp;#x27;re stuck with at the moment. Even the content  traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve got £50&amp;#x2F;month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy&amp;#x2F;able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there&amp;#x27;s a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I&amp;#x27;m hopeful that we&amp;#x27;re seeing the start of the return to journalism.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>girvo</author><text>&amp;gt; Subscription models just don&amp;#x27;t work&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not disagreeing with you, but that still doesn&amp;#x27;t refute the argument that you&amp;#x27;re selling your audience to someone else without their consent (and before you say &amp;quot;then don&amp;#x27;t use the site&amp;quot;, you don&amp;#x27;t get to choose whether or not you&amp;#x27;re exposed to the given sites ads until you go on it, in which case it&amp;#x27;s already too late. Unless, of course, you use an ad-blocker -- which is why I&amp;#x27;m of the opinion that people should use ad-blockers, but I disagree with the article in that I feel there can be cases of responsible, acceptable advertising. Things aren&amp;#x27;t so black and white, from either side)</text></comment>