I have an idea: how about advertisers pay for ads placed on the websites of news outlets that have quality reporting? And furthermore, how about those ads dont pop up unexpectedly, don't auto play movies, dont have gruesome, edgy, salacious, or insulting graphics or images? Just make an offer and if I'm interested, I'll click.
Any time I hear the debate about paywall vs content provider, they've never disambiguated whether it's greed for more money they are after (by participating in the ads arms-race) or whether they simply cannot be profitable by showing "normal" (aka late 1990's web) ads. I think that's telling.
There are ad networks that serve simple, lightweight ads, and yet when people install an ad blocker their revealed preference equates to refusing all ads, even when they do not have any of the negative characteristics you mention.
I was there in the late 90s to early 2000s, when the ad wars created auto-launching pop-overs and pop-unders. Where closing an ad would spawn 10 more, and where hitting any site on the wrong day could initiate a blizzard of browser windows that would bring even the most powerful PC of the era to its knees such that your only possible solution would be a hard shutdown and restart, your current active and unsaved data in any other program be damned.
Sorry, but that particular well for revenue generation has been permanently poisoned for me. I will never suffer another online ad if I can possibly help it.
It sucks for any legitimate website looking to support its operations, but those horses have long since fled the barn.
A VERY high percentage of ads are obnoxious. And a high enough percentage of ads are outright dangerous. Given that, using an ad blocker to keep yourself safe is a pretty sane choice. Even for sites that _try_ to have safe, sane ads; they're all using an ad network, and _that_ could get compromised, resulting in a dangerous payload (it's certain not an unknown occurrence).
There was a great HN post a few years back about "chum", the taboola-style garbage ads and a breakdown on each one's tactic. For instance, one was talking about why they show close-ups that you can't quite tell what they are, or show a picture of swiss cheese so that the holes trigger our instinct of Trycolophobia (I think thats what it was called). It's not honest communication when they resort to those scummy tactics to steal our attention.
so when grandma's windows box is rooted by a 0-day 'sploit from javascript served by visiting Gardening Today's website (grandma lives in Phoenix, GT is based in (let's say) New Hampshire), she can file a small claims case against Gardening Today to get her computer repaired? $125 initial estimate fee, $200 in "labor" to scan and remove the malware, treble damages, so $1000 sounds about right. I'm sure "quality journalists" would be happy to right these wrongs, wouldn't they?
What about the negative characteristics they didn't yet mention? Do those also track us across all the websites and share all their information with Meta and Google?
Any time I hear the debate about paywall vs content provider, they've never disambiguated whether it's greed for more money they are after (by participating in the ads arms-race) or whether they simply cannot be profitable by showing "normal" (aka late 1990's web) ads. I think that's telling.