12/8/2025 at 3:27:33 PM
So many times on this website, people say, "I will pay for the service to get rid of advertising." You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper. It is naive to think any company isn't finding ways to monetize your behavior, whether you're paying them or not.by dfxm12
12/8/2025 at 3:32:20 PM
If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertising, you are exactly the market segment advertisers want to reach. They will always be willing to pay to outbid that segment’s own desire to not see ads.by teeray
12/8/2025 at 4:17:57 PM
Added to that: it's in the middleman's interest to blur this distinction. You can sell a lot more "may or may not be rich enough to buy your product" adverts than you can "definitely rich enough" adverts. Even if the rate per advert is slightly lower, it probably makes the middleman (Uber in this case) more money. (And the rate per advert probably won't be a lot lower because companies have fixed advertising budgets.)So now, to justify removing someone from your pool of advertisees, they don't just need to pay what could be made by advertising to them; they need to pay for what could be made to advertise to them and (unwittingly) several poorer people.
by quietbritishjim
12/9/2025 at 3:25:00 PM
I get a lot of private aviation ads. I certainly can’t and will not be flying private anytime soon, but I assume I get fed these expensive ad buys because I do have an ADSB radio hobby.I also click them often. $$$$
by trillic
12/8/2025 at 3:44:25 PM
Yep. People are paying for the privilege of segmenting themselves into the high disposable income categories of the market. They're paying to do the corporation's market segmentation for them.by matheusmoreira
12/8/2025 at 5:26:00 PM
So it’s not“If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product”
It’s
“If you don’t pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you’d pay for the product”
by darth_avocado
12/8/2025 at 4:09:23 PM
I don't know about "always", but the general correlation of interest in "paying to not have ads" and interest of advertising dollars in "paying to get to you" rings true and is often overlooked.by zamadatix
12/8/2025 at 4:13:05 PM
I think the general correlation is that corps will find ways to make more money than they are now while they will all eventually realize data aggregation can be monetizedby dylan604
12/8/2025 at 5:07:13 PM
I'm not sure this is true, the people who would pay to not have non-distracting ads are likely a demographic that does not convert very well.by monerozcash
12/8/2025 at 6:18:04 PM
If they're half as likely to convert but four times wealthier, does it matter?by SR2Z
12/8/2025 at 9:58:03 PM
Four times wealthier does not mean they'll spend four times more on your products.The answer here isn't really obvious, but I'd suspect that in many cases this is not a very attractive demographic to advertise to.
by monerozcash
12/9/2025 at 4:16:28 PM
Fair enough, but keep in mind that many Americans are just not wealthy enough for a lot of advertised products; a luxury car ad, for example, is mostly useless if it's shown to people making < $60k a year.This demographic is inherently attractive simply because they can spend money.
by SR2Z
12/8/2025 at 10:31:21 PM
They should have used the term more valuable not more wealthy, their point is generally cogent.On the wealthy side, you don't need to be that rich to pay not to get ads.
by neom
12/8/2025 at 5:20:26 PM
> If you have the disposable income to pay to remove advertisingSo a fancy way to say that if you have 10 dollars?
by carlosjobim
12/8/2025 at 6:22:30 PM
I’m describing the general principle. If x + x = 2x, then it already follows that 1 + 1 = 2.by teeray
12/8/2025 at 7:03:44 PM
You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.by carlosjobim
12/8/2025 at 8:55:09 PM
> You could just as logically say that if the user has spent money to remove advertising, then they now have less money and are less valuable to advertise for.Thank you for the laugh.
While this may be true on an individual level, it’s wildly not true in aggregate.
The first dollar is hardest to get. Once someone has shown a propensity to spend on pretty much anything, they become much more valuable as an advertising target.
by csa
12/9/2025 at 12:24:57 PM
I can't understand why you're so sure about that. First of all, every person in the world spends money. The first dollar identifies a customer interested in your product, absolutely. But that means your product, not any random product in the world. So it's not a signal at all for being a good advertising target.That's like thinking that a girl is likely to sleep with everybody because she has a boyfriend. "She's already sleeping with one guy, so why shouldn't she sleep with everybody?".
Of course your current customers are excellent targets for your own upsells and your other products. But not much else.
by carlosjobim
12/8/2025 at 3:41:15 PM
This is very insightfulby landgenoot
12/8/2025 at 4:00:29 PM
Just to give you another little titbit if you're interested. I work in go to market, and part of that is awareness, and part of that is advertising. Where people use the platform has a huge impact on the prices you pay to advertise on the platform, for example reddit is very expensive because they have a very high mobile traffic population, and the ads can't be blocked, advertising on X is hard because the people I want to reach all pay for premium, so the traffic you get from it now is basically useless, linkedin skews towards desktop, but their targeting is amazing, but because they skew towards desktop people run ad blocks, some platforms let you pick the devices you serve to, some don't, all of it impacts the price you pay to serve the ads.by neom
12/8/2025 at 4:15:20 PM
So, don't do targeted advertising then?by landgenoot
12/8/2025 at 4:27:07 PM
Well, it doesn't really matter that it's expensive or hard: that's what we have VCs for. More money you can raise, better targeting you can pay up for. You'd be amazed at how much oxygen you can suck out of a market for a million bucks.by neom
12/8/2025 at 3:59:10 PM
I started to rebut this with the expected value of the bid... but if you're advertising a sports car, it's worth paying $100/impression even if your conversion rate is 1%.by Cpoll
12/8/2025 at 4:03:03 PM
If the ad impression is worth that much (which seems extremely rare), then there's a profitable trade to be had, where I'm paid to see the ad and the platform is paid to provide the ad. Then all parties are happy.Anyway, the devil is in the implementation details here, but this doesn't strike me as a common case.
by rbalicki
12/8/2025 at 4:09:48 PM
For ads I see in places I paid not to see them, I add all the vendors to my "never buy from" list when this happens.by dmitrygr
12/8/2025 at 4:41:35 PM
Isn't it fun when monopolies show you ads.by pixl97
12/8/2025 at 3:38:46 PM
I paid quite a fee to have crave streaming service in canada. It's pretty premium with HBO and that. Yet, all the star trek shows are now behind ads.. several minutes for a 20 minute episode of lower decks. Things are getting out of hand.by goalieca
12/8/2025 at 3:46:40 PM
I was paying $24 for crave. They showed me ads.I'm not paying crave anymore.
by charles_f
12/8/2025 at 4:09:25 PM
But rest assured they'll blame piracy for their downturn in revenue.by oniony
12/8/2025 at 5:08:22 PM
Unlikely, does anyone in this sector actually bother complaining about piracy anymore? Except for sports, they've largely managed to kill it off.by monerozcash
12/9/2025 at 12:01:56 PM
I had read it was resurging since they started upping the pricing and the fragmentation that occurred since Disney split off.by oniony
12/8/2025 at 4:17:24 PM
Get a cheap VPN and then pirate.That technically is also competition. And if the market offers garbage for money, but the illegal market is free and better, go with the illegal choice.
You'll be treated like a criminal either way with DRM. So... Yeah.
by mystraline
12/9/2025 at 2:48:31 AM
For $24 a month you can even get an expensive vpnby charles_f
12/9/2025 at 9:49:09 AM
For 24$ a month you can get a good enough VPS to stream Terabytes of movies with jellyfin.Even if you take away the money a vpn costs, you still can have a decent vps with decent storage.
If you only need storage, even better. Found an offer for a "Storage VPS" with low hardware specs and 2TB of HDDs for 10€/monthly
by Grisu_FTP
12/8/2025 at 4:15:04 PM
I was paying for Prime. They showed me ads. I'm not paying for Prime anymoreby dylan604
12/8/2025 at 3:45:31 PM
I think when you give money for a service it's a reasonable expectation that the company you're giving the money to will respect your privacy, if only because selling your data is not a great outlook and could jeopardize the main revenue stream. I'm guess I'm proven wrongby charles_f
12/8/2025 at 3:49:14 PM
Without regulation, you have no protections against these corporate actions. If you’re expecting or relying on corporations to act in good faith, you are going to be disappointed.by toomuchtodo
12/8/2025 at 3:57:18 PM
Uber, famously a company that respects existing laws and regulations.by tdeck
12/8/2025 at 4:13:39 PM
Just one more piece of regulation, that will fix it! Voting with your wallet is better. No one is forcing you to use Uber, get more creative and stop using men with guns to impose <current hot take because I'm pissed> onto everyone else.by hypeatei
12/8/2025 at 4:26:47 PM
Is there any recent example of one of these huge tech companies actually reducing advertising due to people "voting with their wallets"? Or even making any customer-favoring change whatsoever (ad-related or otherwise) as a result of voting with wallet? "Vote with your wallet" gets trotted out here all the time but it doesn't work.by ryandrake
12/8/2025 at 4:53:57 PM
Doesn't work for who? If you stop using their service then you're not subject to getting your data sold by them because that data simply won't exist. There is no inherent need to get tech companies to "stop advertising" on a societal level.It gets trotted on a lot here because the overarching narrative on HN is that regulation is an answer to everything when it's easier to just... not use the thing if you don't like it. Rather than creating a mountain of regulations that only big business can comply with, I think it's better to choose what you do with your money as a consumer.
by hypeatei
12/8/2025 at 10:37:20 PM
Doesn't work for YOU, because Uber burned many billions across 15 years making sure they killed all their competitors.In most places, your options for a taxi service are Uber or go fuck yourself. That's how they're able to get away with their price gouging, privacy recklessness, and share-cropped labor.
Free market dynamics only work if you are in a free market. We're not, there's one player, and they won the market by literally just cheating and breaking the law. Sorry, sorry, "disrupting".
by array_key_first
12/8/2025 at 4:53:51 PM
what alternatives in ride sharing / streaming / whatever are you suggesting I vote for with my money that doesn't do this? They all follow the same playbook.by skeeter2020
12/8/2025 at 5:04:34 PM
Not giving them money is a start, and for alternatives I'd recommend finding another taxi service. Either the traditional yellow cabs or another private company/single owner-operator ones (like the ones that drive black SUVs/cars)For streaming, I'm not sure since I don't watch much, and YT+adblocker is sufficient for me. Again, not giving them money is enough of a signal if you don't find the product good.
by hypeatei
12/8/2025 at 4:28:23 PM
What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay (e.g., search engines and social media)? I think it's reasonable to have advertising-supported services, it just needs to be clear up front. I don't mind dropping Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services for Blu-Ray ripping and Plex if it gets too expensive, even with ads.by godzillabrennus
12/8/2025 at 4:53:01 PM
>What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to payWhat if I don't have enough money to buy something and I want it anyway!
by pixl97
12/8/2025 at 4:40:02 PM
While totally unaware of the underlying economics, I do find it interesting how the major LLM providers found a way to get a non-trivial portion of consumers to actually pay for the consumer service. Of course, ads are still coming, but it was objectively impressive to go from 20+ years of "search is free" to "search is free, but capped, unless you pay us."by awad
12/8/2025 at 4:50:48 PM
LLM use is not a simple search. I pay for it to either aid me or autonomously do work with document authoring, software development, and market research. It's not apples-to-apples when comparing.by godzillabrennus
12/8/2025 at 4:56:09 PM
if you looked at the underlying = economics - even a quick review - you'd see that paying customers is a relatively trivial portion. This is much closer to the dotcom race to maximum eyeballs; figure out the money part later.by skeeter2020
12/8/2025 at 7:50:06 PM
FTA:> It uses LiveRamp's clean room technology, which lets companies aggregate their data in a privacy-safe environment, without sharing or seeing each other's raw or personally identifiable customer information.
It's apparently not that they directly sell your PII at least.
by barbazoo
12/8/2025 at 5:16:16 PM
I don't think G-Suite customers are excluded from Google's ad tracking network. Microsoft enterprise? Neither. All you can ask if that they don't show you ads. And even that is temporaryby netdevphoenix
12/8/2025 at 3:38:58 PM
If you arent paying, you are the product.And if you are paying… you’re still the product as well.
by AznHisoka
12/8/2025 at 3:43:10 PM
Yeah. Only way to avoid becoming the product is to become a "pirate" instead. Pretty sad but it is what it is.by matheusmoreira
12/8/2025 at 4:00:05 PM
Thers no ads on the high seas?by thenthenthen
12/8/2025 at 4:32:22 PM
I've seen ads of several varieties:- Public websites are chock full of ads
- Downloading a file often means hopping through several redirects (each of which is an ad) and sometimes even having to "complete an offer" to get the final link
- Private websites have some affiliate deal with VPN providers. "We did the research, this one is the best, if you subscribe through this link you will get some perks on our website".
Of all the kinds of ads out there, that last one is the least objectionable to me. They don't force it on you, it doesn't clog up the important parts of the site, and they supposedly do some research to pick the best provider to affiliate with. I "never" click on ads but this one worked on me.
by qwerpy
12/8/2025 at 6:13:58 PM
Why are you doing it that way? That's the hardest way to get content and most likely to infect you along the way. Just torrent stuff.by malfist
12/8/2025 at 7:42:16 PM
Torrent is what I meant by public/private website, I didn’t want to spell it out in case someone got offended. I rarely use direct file download but for the odd mp3, console firmware/keys, etc it can be easier to grab exactly what I want.by qwerpy
12/8/2025 at 5:00:43 PM
If you can get a private tracker or sonarr running, pretty much no ads.by nemomarx
12/8/2025 at 4:18:18 PM
Not until that asshat company wanting to deploy satellite constellation that displays ads from space. It's not like there are billboards in the middle of the oceanby dylan604
12/8/2025 at 4:35:05 PM
That was a stretch, really had to jam that little dig in there, huh?Although if they did somehow deploy their constellation as a legible ad, I wouldn't even complain. "Drink Coke" spelled out with a hundred satellites would be hilarious.
by qwerpy
12/8/2025 at 5:15:41 PM
What dig?by dylan604
12/8/2025 at 5:25:02 PM
Yeah this is where I think government-regulation would actually be a solid-fit to try and govern some of this manipulative and unfair practices.There just needs to be a blanket-law where your data is considered every-bit as intellectual property as a piece of copyrighted media and for there to be consent established to sell or give your data to a third-party there needs to be an active exchange of payment, credit or services that is opt-in only, not opt-out from an intentionally obfuscated EULA update email.
Require active opt-in and consent along with a clear set of goods/services/payment, and active simple on-demand revocation with strict timelines, and you could have companies actually properly incentivizing users to sell them their own personal data instead of it just being harvested.
Unfortunately too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issues.
by gremlinunderway
12/8/2025 at 10:03:28 PM
> too many libertarian nutjobs out here think that the market here will magically fix all issuesI'll see your libertarian market nutjobs and raise you reflexive "regulation will fix it" liberals (I don't really know the right term here, but I guess it's the one that fits most closely with US politics for the last 60+ years). Neither group has much room in its worldview for the simple fact that some people are just jerks and will abuse any system.
Regulation can be done well, but doing so in a way that doesn't just hand the entire segment to the current incumbents is hard and regulatory capture isn't just something market worshipers conjured out of thin air.
by devilbunny
12/8/2025 at 3:45:08 PM
In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials. That didn't last long...by efsavage
12/8/2025 at 5:29:29 PM
> In the earliest days of getting people to pay for cable TV when OTA was free, the pitch was that you'd see fewer/no commercials.No, it was quality of reception, especially for people who were farther from (or had inconvenient terrain between them and) broadcast stations; literally the only thing on early capable was exactly the normal broadcast feed from the covered stations, which naturally included all the normal ads.
Premium add-on channels that charged on top of cable, of which I think HBO was the first, had being ad free among their selling points, but that was never part of the basic cable deal.
by dragonwriter
12/8/2025 at 6:25:00 PM
That varied by region. When cable came to my town in the early 1980s, HBO and Cinemax were part of the local cable provider's basic package. That lasted until the next provider bought them out.by flyinghamster
12/8/2025 at 8:06:19 PM
Oh, sure, definitely some providers did some things like that early on to drive growth, especially when they were trying to drive into the areas less dissatisfied with existing broadcast quality then the initial cable markets. (And even once it stopped, it was common to bundle premium channels into the basic cost for a limited time for new customer acquisition.)by dragonwriter
12/8/2025 at 4:58:57 PM
this doesn't ring true; TV has always been deeply linked with ads, it just seems that they moved to fractional ownership of a show via many advertisers vs. the (perhaps less intrusive) show sponsor where the advertising was woven into the plot.by skeeter2020
12/8/2025 at 5:23:45 PM
I think I'm older than most HN commenters. I can't Google up a citation, but "no or fewer ads" was part of the pitch in the early-mid 1970s in my recollection. You are correct about TV and ads, so maybe I'm wrong.by bediger4000
12/8/2025 at 4:02:19 PM
Not really. Cable TV started as a better way for people to get OTA channels when they were in marginal reception areas. My family had cable TV in the 1970s and it was a maybe eight or ten OTA channels and except for the PBS station they all had commercials, between shows and during shows.HBO was the first offering that didn't have ads during the show.
by SoftTalker
12/8/2025 at 4:45:01 PM
Catv originally stood for 'community antenna' and was for those who lived in a valley where tv signals couldn't reach. The community built one antenna at the top and ran a cable down to everyone. Of course it was an obvious addition after that to add extra channels.by bluGill
12/8/2025 at 6:49:46 PM
Interesting! That makes sense now. I thought it stood for CAble TV and always wondered why they used two letters instead of just CTV.by hyperdimension
12/8/2025 at 4:15:36 PM
Interesting, I grew up in an area with good reception, so the pitch was definitely fewer commercials on the cable channels (HBO, Nickelodeon, MTV), I remember standing in the living room as the salesman said this. It was true for a while, but eventually they caught up to OTA ad loads.by efsavage
12/8/2025 at 4:21:26 PM
HBO was always a premium ad free channel. MTV was never promoted as ad free.by dylan604
12/8/2025 at 4:59:44 PM
and premium channels were ridiculously expensive back then too!by skeeter2020
12/8/2025 at 4:20:53 PM
Yea, the no ads theory of the history is cable seems to be pervasive. The only ad free channels were the premium ones like HBO. It's like people think the OTA channels that were packaged together had some magic applied that eliminated ad breaks from the exact same feed as the OTA broadcast. The cable only channels like USA also had ads as well. I guess it's just another example if you tell a lie often enough people will accept it as truthby dylan604
12/8/2025 at 3:32:07 PM
People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 5:30:18 PM
People "don't care" because they do not understand the implications or the technology, not because they genuinely have no interest in privacy. Of course its easy to dupe people without technical literacy by characterizing it as some benign "targeted advertising" as if its a service being provided for you (when clearly it's not) rather than the actual answer which is "we want to follow your every movement and pattern of behaviour as if we had someone following you in an unmarked car and then sell that data to anyone willing to cough up the cash without any of your consent".This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
by gremlinunderway
12/8/2025 at 7:09:26 PM
> People "don't care" because they do not understand the implications or the technology, not because they genuinely have no interest in privacy.I don't disagree with you there.
> This narrative is incredibly toxic and honestly a very antisocial viewpoint of people as if they are all just stupid sheep who deserve to be exploited.
The people get what they vote for, whether or not its what they deserve. The only way to move the needle on this is to educate people. Telling people they're "stupid sheep" for not wanting the thing you think they should want is not typically a winning strategy, in my experience.
> There's zero reason why its unfair for a person to both object to advertising because of the annoyance (because it is annoying) AND for a person to not want to be digitally surveilled endlessly without their consent.
I'm simply saying I think most people care more about the first thing.
by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 3:36:36 PM
No, I care about that as much or more.by mitthrowaway2
12/8/2025 at 3:38:54 PM
You're an outlier. Ask ten people at your local bus stop if this is important to them, and tell me how many start laughing at you :)by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 4:40:37 PM
I specifically mentioned people on this website. Based on comments I regularly come across on this website, I don't think the person you're responding to is an outlier. I would hope we can stay on topic.by dfxm12
12/8/2025 at 4:44:55 PM
You missed the point.People on this website are too small a fraction of society to ever move the needle. My point is that it doesn't matter what people on this website want with respect to privacy, in our capitalist democratic society it will never happen unless most people want it.
The reality right now is that most people don't want it.
by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 4:46:44 PM
If that was your point, I suggest you post more clearly in the future, because your post did not suggest this.by dfxm12
12/8/2025 at 4:47:51 PM
[flagged]by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 3:43:17 PM
If I went up to random people and went like, "Do you approve of companies tracking what you buy, eat, do, where you go, and every other aspect of your life?" I promise you I would get a majority of "No"sby squigz
12/8/2025 at 3:48:51 PM
The question I'm asking is "would you pay more money if the service promised not to sell your data". That's a hard no for most people.If you frame it as a negative thing with no downsides for agreeing with you, of course people will agree. But that's not the reality.
by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 4:19:21 PM
Not because people don't value their personal data but because they, rightfully, value those promises as worth approximately nothing.by ajbourg
12/8/2025 at 5:08:32 PM
It's an interesting theory, for sure. Continuing down the rabbit hole... I guess you could ask about "company promises" versus "regulatory prohibition". But then one might argue that similarly rests on the population's perception of the efficacy of government regulation, which is certainly also somewhat low...What's the solution then?
by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 5:01:51 PM
People will also say they will pay more for a ephemeral good like privacy or patriotism, so I think you'd be surprised if you ask them your question. Where you're right is will they actually do it, and even if they will how much?by skeeter2020
12/8/2025 at 5:34:05 PM
I'd guess that if you ask people about a broad right to privacy, they will mostly express support for it. You could ask: "Would you pay extra for a guarantee your personal data is kept private?"
"Would you pay extra for a guarantee your data isn't sold for marketing purposes?"
One might argue "private" implies more than can truly be promised, for example no US company can promise to ignore subpoenas and actually follow through.
I'd say it mirrors for patriotism: "do you support $OUR_COUNTRY" will get more "yes" responses than almost any more specific question about support for anything tangible. Precisely because it's sort of meaningless and unobjectionable... (well except in the US, where I'm sure it's correlated with whether or not one's favored party is in power)
by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 5:32:31 PM
It's because acompany promise is useless without actual enforced regulation which is harsh enough to actually add trust in such a contractual agreement being honoured.This is how we have a free-market to begin with. You need enforcement and structures in place so people will actually trust any of this crap. Instead, we have the nutjob early 90's cyber libertarians thinking this will all be magically fixed with just magical freedom and the invisible hand fixing everything.
by gremlinunderway
12/8/2025 at 5:48:15 PM
Yeah, I don't disagree, another comment touched on the distrust part. But would people trust government privacy regulation more?by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 3:54:42 PM
The claim you made was that people don't care about their behavior being monetized.by squigz
12/8/2025 at 3:57:42 PM
Don't care enough to sacrifice anything tangible to avoid it, yes. I would think it's obvious the question as you framed it biases responses to the point they're meaningless...by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 4:26:05 PM
'People object to advertising because it is annoying and distracting. If the ads disappear, they got what they paid for. It's not about avoiding their "behavior being monitized", most people don't care about that at all.'That's your quote as I read it in case some editing happens. There's no caveat in your original post that you are claiming now. You've moved the goal posts. As you originally stated, I agree with all of the follow up comments to it that you are now trying to expand on your original comment. Maybe that's what you always meant but just left out of the original. It happens. But now you're being obstinate about it in a way that doesn't look good.
by dylan604
12/8/2025 at 4:39:05 PM
No, you're just nitpicking the semantics and missing the forest for the trees. Everyone except you seems to understand that that was the beginning of a discussion, not an opening statement in a fucking court.by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 5:08:57 PM
yeah, it's me with the problem, that's why i'm at least the 3rd person to take issueby dylan604
12/8/2025 at 3:37:32 PM
But are you most people?I'd wager that just by the virtue of being commenters on HN, we're already outliers.
by pavel_lishin
12/8/2025 at 4:26:00 PM
Some of us don't care that much about advertising, but we object to surveillance.by criddell
12/8/2025 at 7:29:54 PM
Your opinion is unpopular in this subset of folks here, but it's valid.It isn't out-of-keeping in this kind of company for a person to start discussions about personal data privacy. In fact: We chat about this stuff here all the time.
But in reality: The number of discussions I've had about personal data privacy and monetization face-to-face with people that I did not meet through a computer network, or bring up myself is exactly 1.
It's thus my observation that most people in the world care about this issue approximately...never.
(The reason they don't care may be that they don't know enough to even begin to question whether the people behind their air fryer, genealogical DNA service, garage door opener, and food delivery system may have ulterior motives.
But guesses about root causation are, at best, both tangential and broadly inconsequential. We can guess and figure and re-figure and even prove theories until the cows come home.
And it doesn't matter.
They didn't care yesterday, they still don't care today while I write this, and they will continue to not care tomorrow.)
by ssl-3
12/8/2025 at 3:44:36 PM
Delivery in particular remains underpriced at even the high prices we see. The way the platforms are set up, you're basically paying to chauffeur a single order straight to your house, on-demand. Mobile tech and "own car" efficiencies don't begin to cover those costs. The problem was that this is the kind of service that they had to offer in order to supersede existing delivery.In an ideal world, you'd instead have drivers assigned to either particular neighborhoods or particular restaurants, allowing for order-stacking and predictable routes. Bonus for set-time daily deliveries (get your order in before 6 or have to wait until 9). Bigger bonus for set neighborhood drop-off points (like those consolidated mailboxes, but warming compartments). Anything more bespoke would cost extra.
Unfortunately, the balance of inefficient operations, decreasing competition, and "line go up" is that prices have to increase.
by underlipton
12/8/2025 at 4:18:32 PM
Delivery was financially viable for decades before delivery apps. That's why restaurants did it on their own. What's not financially viable is VCs investing billions to create global oligopolies, and and then expecting outsized returns on that investment.At the same time you have processes like increasing suburbanization and development of even more car-centric infrastructure, which makes houses and restaurants even further from each other, and makes cheaper delivery vehicles like motorbikes infeasible.
by abdullahkhalids
12/8/2025 at 8:06:32 PM
All of that is true. However, I think you don't account enough for the differences in the current and previous delivery models in delivery's viability. The old model was "drivers employed or contracted to individual restaurants, with fairly strict distance limits." Today's apps let you order from arbitrary restaurants to arbitrary delivery addresses. The other factors make the situation worse, but just this one is enough to turn a viable model into one that can't be profitable without someone involved getting scammed.by underlipton
12/8/2025 at 5:05:35 PM
"You pay for this service and rides aren't getting any cheaper" - you can't just say things. You could very well be right but you need to actually look at their margin profile over time to know if this is true.To give an industry that's a counterexample to the "they add ads and don't make things cheaper", look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.
by benced
12/8/2025 at 7:17:08 PM
> look at groceries. It's a terrible, single-digit percentage margin business but they sell everything from placement in catalogue to whether the product is in a convenient spot on the shelf. That's a clear case where ads make it _cheaper_ for consumers.I don't follow... it certainly improves the grocer's margins, but how does that do anything at all for the consumer?
by jcalvinowens
12/9/2025 at 2:08:12 AM
I should have been clearer: it's a terrible single-digit percentage business, including the ads. The ads are cross-subsidizing the food.by benced
12/9/2025 at 2:58:43 AM
> The ads are cross-subsidizing the food.I don't think you were unclear, that's what I understood you to be saying.
Surely, the grocer just pockets the extra ad money? Never in my life have I seen a for-profit corporation voluntarily charge a lower price than the market will bear because they increased their margin by other means.
The ads are also inherently shitty to the producers: they all have to spend money on the grocer's ads now, because if they don't, their competitors will. If you look at it that way, the ads are almost extortion.
by jcalvinowens
12/8/2025 at 6:35:31 PM
Yeah, in competitive markets this would inherently cause some downward pressure on prices.by monerozcash
12/8/2025 at 4:04:33 PM
Which is why I don't pay to remove ads on YouTube, nor I give Amazon the pleasure to see more from my money than what I need to pay for prime deliveries.by pjmlp
12/8/2025 at 4:27:04 PM
Are you saying you are purchasing a minimum of $25 to get those prime deliveries, or are you some how thinking you can pay for Prime deliveries while not also paying for Prive Video??by dylan604
12/8/2025 at 5:28:04 PM
I am paying for the deliveries, the fact that Prime Video is part of the deal is something nice, but not what I care about, even less so after Amazon decided to force ads to people that were already paying in first place.by pjmlp
12/8/2025 at 3:54:56 PM
Uber ride app has ads in it now on top of data collection, service fees, etc, uber eats also sells sponsored placement, and then the fees and prices now... like what the actual fuck is this? https://s.h4x.club/9Zun85Lj - these people have lost their minds, y'all really gonna drive the business down to 10 loyal customers who you milk to hell and high water? Weird strategy.by neom
12/8/2025 at 3:57:49 PM
Target just started hitting me with completely third party ads right after you press pay in their app.They have also advertised for the Starbucks in thr Target stores long before when you go to pickup something.
by lotsofpulp
12/8/2025 at 4:04:56 PM
As someone who has spent their whole career in growth and awareness for business building, I see why people hate ads so much now - personally I love running ads, trying to place a good ad in a good spot for someone who will genuinely appreciate it, it can be very rewarding... but late stage capitalism, aka fervent consumerism, has driven business into a real bad place, it's a shame because business and commerce is pretty fun, better than conquering via killing anyways.by neom
12/8/2025 at 4:57:48 PM
Yup. The most surprising thing about this announcement is that they haven't been doing it, already...by FireBeyond
12/8/2025 at 8:52:25 PM
Sometimes I believe they aren't monetizing me. With Kagi I feel quite confident, for example. It depends how prominently they put 'no monetization/ads' as part of their marketing. Uber doesn't do that, to be fair, and never have done.by alpineman
12/8/2025 at 4:55:30 PM
The key concept is that maximising the monetisation of each user is the ultimate goal. Once that is understood, Uber's behaviour makes sense as a subgoal of that bigger goalby netdevphoenix
12/8/2025 at 4:16:08 PM
We have to be real, there's no way anyone is currently paying the real cost of having McDonalds delivered right now...by micromacrofoot
12/8/2025 at 4:21:59 PM
They just need a subscription model at Mickey Dee's. They can make up for the inefficiency with volume </sarc>.by tanseydavid
12/8/2025 at 5:18:37 PM
that and a shitty little delivery robotby micromacrofoot
12/9/2025 at 12:34:23 AM
Have we tried AI drive through kiosks yet??Surely that is the answer.
by Esophagus4
12/8/2025 at 5:00:44 PM
The prevailing implementation of capitalism compels all companies to continue developing revenue streams to increase their overall “worth.”Any company that has unique or rare data is compelled to do things with it. Those that don’t either can’t figure out how or explicitly reject the reward function of contemporary capitalism. We should really expect those deviations to be the exception.
by mattlutze
12/8/2025 at 4:32:27 PM
Okay.They’re going to sell to marketers for ads I don’t watch?
by paulddraper
12/8/2025 at 4:01:42 PM
[flagged]by gunt_crusher
12/8/2025 at 4:22:35 PM
When people say they are going to pay for an ad free product they very often underestimate how much the service would cost them. This is often a price higher than what they would be willing to pay.by dewey
12/8/2025 at 4:40:04 PM
I respectfully disagree my friend. When Investors , board, wall street is chasing second order and third order delta increase in a stock enshitification is bound to happen. If there is a board that wants return higher than previous year and when you can't optimize costs by improving tech, You find new avenues like showing 2 ads, showing 3 ads. Increasing subscription price or cheekly modifing terms of service and selling your data to 3rd party data brokers. it has nothing to do with subscription cost.by scbzzzzz