Was trying to read a news story and… What fresh shitfuckery is this? Why do I now have to pay money to a company just for the privilege of not being spied upon and not getting your cookies that I don’t want or need? How is this even legal?
RE: “Why are you even reading that shitrag?” – I clicked on a link someone posted in another sublemmit, didn’t realise it was the Sun till after. I do not read the Sun on the regular, chill. My point stands regardless that this is extremely shitty and should probably not be allowed.
It’s legal because the Sun is a private company and they have the right to charge you to not datamine you. It’s not a public service and they’re not the only source of news out there, so you have a choice: if you don’t like it, get your news elsewhere.
What’s the problem exactly?
I’m no fan of ads, but you’re right. Expecting everything for free with no ads is just greedy.
I don’t mind ads, but I don’t expect to be tracked around the internet. It’s like every website you visit being able to view your browser history. That’s private information.
Technically, whatever the Sun prints is private information available for purchase. You can either pay cash or trade their information for yours.
I still get frustrated by it, so I understand where you’re coming from. My local paper is ONLY viewable with a subscription. There are ways around it, like turning off JavaScript, but if we don’t count cheating the system, you gotta pay. They have to make money to pay their employees somehow, at least the Sun gives you an alternate option.
Give me all the ads you want but at least give me the option whether they’re personalised or not… Why is this now a paid choice? The companies get paid by the advertisers either way, right? I’m not expecting it for free but I don’t like thousands of unknown companies tracking me thank you very much.
They get paid more by the advertisers for delivering personalized ads.
Of course they do :/… Surely though, even with the previous free choice of general or personalised ads, I bet a decent few people still habitually clicked ‘accept all’, so I can’t imagine this making that much of a difference financially… And this way they’ll probably drive away some more privacy-savvy readers as well. Oh well, guess they wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t pay off for them.
In this case you’re not paying to not have ads. You’ll still get ads; they just won’t be personalized.
Personalized ads are more valuable to advertisers, so it still makes sense for them to charge a bit for it, but it’s not something I’ve seen before.
I’m guessing they charge a decent amount more than the difference, though - and probably even more than they make from personalized ads per person. On that note, I really wish ad free subscriptions were closer to the revenue providers get from serving ads - if they were, I’d be more willing to pay for them than just running an adblocker all the time. YouTube Premium, for example, costs 14 USD monthly, but annual ad revenue per non premium user was 1.21 USD.