About a decade ago google trialed a program where you could pay monthly to "buy out" ad spaces. So you wouldn't get served ads, or you would get served fewer ads, and the money would be deducted from what you allotted per month.

Of course

"What kind of dumbass would pay to not see ads when uBlock Origin is free? lololol"

It didn't ever get traction or last very long before being canned. This is the mentality that money-compensation-business-plan tech companies would have to face; "What kind of dumbass would pay for your product?"

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cjbgkagh a day ago | parent | next [-]

The more you’re willing to pay to opt out of ads the more valuable the ads are. Also the ads are auctioned and in opting out you’re all ways going to be the highest bidder. Additionally how would you know the other bidders were real, it’s a massive information asymmetry that’s open to abuse. And I’m pretty sure they have abused it in the past.

I use substack and patreon and I wish we had micro transactions that’ll enable more of this model for content.

Now much of the same info is recycled via AI, instead of reading blogs / stack overflow etc I just ask AI and so far I can use AI without ads. I do pay for a subscription to Gemini.

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martin-t a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Because it's extortion just like paying the mafia for "protection" from themselves.

See, ads are not a pro-social service. Their fundamental goal is not to inform and facilitate mutually beneficial exchange of goods/services. Their goal is to allow companies who spend ad-money to gain an advantage over competitors who don't, regardless of quality of the product.

Ads are a fundamentally anti-competitive practice.

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tonyhart7 a day ago | parent [-]

while I agree that Ads is sucks as a whole but how can you generate revenue from free service ?????

I mean its not like paid service that dont have ads and giving privacy is non existent either, we have proton mail for example

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martin-t a day ago | parent [-]

You can't. So don't advertise it as free. It's just lying, simple as that. People either pay with their data, their attention or their money.

Companies should be required to be transparent about how much revenue each of these sources generates.

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tonyhart7 18 hours ago | parent [-]

"You can't. So don't advertise it as free. It's just lying"

its free as you paid zero dollar

"People either pay with their data, their attention or their money."

for some people money is more important than their data, and its vice versa with wealthy customer

I agree that in the future maybe we can control how much data/money we can paid for the service but that just not possible in current time

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martin-t 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> its free as you paid zero dollar

What about other currencies? Do you only count state-issues currencies? Have you heard about barter?

> but that just not possible in current time

Why not?

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tonyhart7 12 hours ago | parent [-]

"What about other currencies? Do you only count state-issues currencies?"

well you convert them to usd

"Have you heard about barter?"

well you are free to choose paid service that else where, I dont understand this coming from. no one force you to choose free product

	▲	martin-t 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The point is it's not free, you're exchanging time, attention and data instead of money. In fact, you're exchanging them at a rate you are not informed about which means you are disadvantaged in this exchange. It would be free if for example there were 2 tiers, free and paid and the free tier would be entirely supported by the paying customers. But it's not. This is another way companies can legally lie to customers. I honestly don't understand why you keep defending them.