[HN Gopher] SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks
___________________________________________________________________
SMBC Parts Ways with Hiveworks
Author : momeara
Score : 159 points
Date : 2025-03-05 17:30 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smbc-comics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smbc-comics.com)
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| I feel like I've thought a lot about ads on the internet
| recently, and I hate the way things are, but I'm no closer to a
| realistic overall solution.
|
| I've used an ad blocker for a while because I'm tech savvy and I
| know I can easily have a better experience that way. I was too
| late installing an ad blocker on my father's computer - he was
| scammed out of some money when he mistook a scammy ad for a
| legitimate message to call his bank.
|
| Due to the experiences of countless others like my father, the
| FBI now recommends folks run an ad blocker.
|
| But if everyone did, then the whole thing falls apart right? If
| Google or Apple built a great ad blocker into their browser and
| shipped it with the next update, content creators would respond
| pretty damn quick right? Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would
| put all of their content behind a paywall, or in an app, or
| something else that's worse than the status quo right?
|
| _sigh_
| a_shovel wrote:
| I've heard legends of a time, perhaps back in the mid 2000s,
| when companies paid so much for banner ads that you didn't need
| another revenue source for your website with Flash games or
| what have you. If such a time ever existed, it ended long
| before Flash did.
| TylerE wrote:
| It ended when the vc money in the original dotcom boom dried
| up.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure it would be worse than the status quo. If
| all the free sites were the ones run for the love of it, and
| all the paid sites were commercial garbage, that might actually
| be better.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The attention economy is powered by payments from maximizing ad
| impressions but the public is increasingly recognizing that the
| attention economy is mentally and culturally toxic. To break
| free of the attention economy death spiral that we're in,
| internet advertising has to undergo a pretty drastic dieback.
| In other words, the whole thing has to fall apart and the
| sooner the better.
| lazide wrote:
| That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market cap
| $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets say
| half would die). So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US
| stock market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US
| military suddenly stopped getting funded.
|
| Not to mention the secondary effects - a LOT of businesses
| are built based on online ads. A _LOT_.
| UltraSane wrote:
| no pain no gain
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Google and Meta collectively employ how many software
| people in the United States? The jobs hit would be
| unimaginable. High octane nightmare fuel, that idea.
| michaelt wrote:
| Doesn't seem like a nightmare to me - a trillion dollars
| spent on ads that get blocked is a trillion dollars
| wasted.
|
| The real nightmare is hundreds of thousands of people on
| six figure salaries wasting their lives producing ads
| everyone hates.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| You're right. What was I thinking? Instead, they should
| be unemployed and starving, and all the services they
| bought from other Americans with their $200k/year
| salaries, those Americans should also be unemployed and
| starving too. All because you don't want to see an ad on
| whatever ridiculous social media it is that people are
| visiting now days. That will make the world right.
| relaxing wrote:
| Get a grip, mate.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| " _...total advertising has averaged about 1.3% to 2% of
| U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) over the past 20 years.
| ... In 2015, digital advertising corresponded to about
| 50% of total advertising spending and more recent
| estimates point to a share closer to 65% of total
| advertising spending. That represents about 0.6% to 1.1%
| of GDP. ..._ " from https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-
| economy/2024/oct/rise-digi...
|
| So, nah. It's significant but not "nightmare fuel" even
| if online advertising entirely went away. (Which nobody
| is proposing, by the way.)
| relaxing wrote:
| Google AI summary says:
|
| > As of December 2024, Meta Platforms had 74,067 full-
| time employees. This is down from 67,317 in 2023
|
| lol. At least Gemini doesn't make the same mistake for
| its makers:
|
| > As of 2024, Alphabet, Google's parent company, has
| 183,323 full-time employees
|
| Of course that's total headcount, I couldn't find figures
| for just US based SWEs.
|
| And in the US alone there are something like 200-400k
| SWE+IT job openings and 7M openings across all sectors.
|
| Verdict: after the dust settles, it would be a net
| benefit for everyone to get those bright minds working on
| real problems.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Both Google and Meta could just charge for using their
| services. I already pay meta to see no ads. So there is no
| reason that they would entirely die.
| ben_w wrote:
| > That would mean the death of at a minimum Meta (market
| cap $1.5 trln), most of Google (market cap $2.1 trln, lets
| say half would die).
|
| And nothing of value was lost.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrFv1O4dbqY
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSGVk2KVokQ
|
| > So what, a couple trillion haircut on the US stock
| market, and more of a GDP hit than if the entire US
| military suddenly stopped getting funded.
|
| Not even.
|
| Market Cap is more like net worth than like GDP, GDP is
| more like annual revenue (both are still somewhat
| different, hence "more like") -- Meta's global revenue is
| $164.5 billion, Alphabet's is $350.02 billion, so even if
| that's entirely in the USA (it isn't), and the money spent
| was purely positive-sum (it isn't), even combined that's
| less than the US military budget of $849.8 billion.
| lazide wrote:
| I guarantee you if Meta all the sudden couldn't sell any
| ads tomorrow, it would be a lot more than a 1 trln GDP
| hit we'd experience.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| If we'd lose so much GDP, without losing anything of
| value, perhaps GDP is not a useful measure of the
| economy.
| lazide wrote:
| Easy to say when you don't have bills to pay.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| GDP does not pay my bills.
| lazide wrote:
| If you participate in the economy or are dependent on
| anything related to taxes, it quite literally does pay
| your bills.
| ben_w wrote:
| I beleive the argument being made here is a map-territory
| distinction -- certainly I myself see it this way.
|
| I mean, their other comment was:
|
| > If we'd lose so much GDP, without losing anything of
| value, perhaps GDP is not a useful measure of the
| economy.
|
| Meta etc., can pay taxes on the profits made from
| connecting advertisers to eyeballs, but what actual value
| do they really provide? What real value gets created due
| to this, that would otherwise not be created? If Meta is
| just moving money around, without helping more stuff get
| made, then whatever measure says "Meta is good" is a poor
| measure. Even Meta's taxable income would just become
| someone else's higher profit or cheaper goods.
|
| (But: I presume my belief that ads are zero-sum, or close
| to thst, is correct; perhaps this is untrue).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Advertisement is positive sum: it connects people who
| need goods or services with people who can provide those
| goods and services. The modern advertising industry is
| negative-sum: the sheer _cost_ to everyone far outweighs
| this theoretical benefit. (Most people I know will
| deliberately refuse to buy anything that 's advertised at
| them, unless they have no other option.)
|
| The "attention economy" is stealing people's time, then
| trying to sell it. Other people's cognitive resources are
| _not yours to sell_. (Are there really people who do not
| realise how cartoonishly evil this is?) Time was, people
| used to pay for big books full of advertisements. Would
| anyone pay to receive modern online advertising?
|
| The advertising companies are a big part of why I don't
| have the money to spare to pay for "ad-supported"
| websites: I'm too busy trying to keep my personal life
| away from their mass surveillance systems, missing or
| declining opportunities in the process. I, and those
| around me, would be _richer_ if not for this pointlessly-
| wasted effort, me establishing increasingly-impractical
| countermeasures to maintain my privacy, and them building
| increasingly-elaborate workarounds to spy on me anyway,
| all so they can try to sell me a washing machine.
|
| Banksy put it best. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy
|
| > People are taking the piss out of you every day. They
| butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then
| disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make
| you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses
| that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is
| happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your
| girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most
| sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they
| bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are
| laughing at you.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If we're talking about removing one advertising platform,
| there is plenty of other stuff to spend money on. Even if
| the totals go down, I don't expect the average bystander
| to take a notable hit.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| " _It is difficult to get a man to understand something,
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it._ "
| -Upton Sinclair
| relaxing wrote:
| I think there are other advertising channels that could
| pick up the slack.
| lproven wrote:
| "You say that like it's a bad thing."
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| CDOs, the financial instrument behind the 2008 financial
| collapse, had a tremendous amount of market value too. A
| "LOT"(sic) of businesses were built on selling tobacco
| products, lead based gasoline, and high sugar ultra-
| processed foods too. Perhaps you should rethink your
| argument?
|
| Creating economic activity doesn't justify harming people
| and it has become thunderingly obvious that titillating and
| outraging viewers constantly to maximize ad impressions is
| harming the public.
| lazide wrote:
| I'm saying it's easy to say until the consequences
| arrive. And with something this big, the consequences
| will be big.
|
| But then I've lived through 3-4 major downturns so far -
| and seen the 'oh shit's land.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I've lived through 3-4 major downturns too and, yeah,
| it's hard. Like discontinuing leaded gasoline, we either
| pay the price now or pay much worse later.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The best day to stop smoking was yesterday, but stopping
| today is the second best.
|
| The consequences of addiction are huge, and the longer
| you stay addicted the worse it gets.
| derkster wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember an internet before non-porn ads.
| Being Hacker News, does someone have any hard idea on
| infrastructure costs in the late 1990s compared to now?
|
| In 1997, when America Online went from an hourly rate to
| unlimited hours for $20/month. Besides adult ads, I remember a
| lot of "work from home/get rich quick" ads - and that's all I
| can personally remember. Almost every forum and community I can
| remember were serious labors of love, especially the early
| "hacker" communities. But, we lost that internet a long time
| ago. I, personally, would love for an internet that could
| emulate those early years of being able to log in, communicate,
| and make friends with random, sometimes sketchy, weirdos, all
| within 45 seconds of dialing up. There weren't algorithms that
| decided who was important and who wasn't, you just had your
| words and wits.
|
| That was a tangent, but my point is - would the internet
| improve or decline if there was a serious "adpocalypse"?
| stavros wrote:
| I wonder how cheap a forum is to run now. It used to be that
| you could run a janky thing on nothing hardware and people
| would still use it and find value, but now even just running
| the software is much more demanding and expensive. Never mind
| the fact that the UI has to be slick or people will be put
| off, because the bar is much higher now.
|
| These factors have made it less economical to just run a
| popular forum out of your own pocket, I think, so the barrier
| to entry is higher.
| rat87 wrote:
| > but now even just running the software is much more
| demanding and expensive. Never mind the fact that the UI
| has to be slick or people will be put off, because the bar
| is much higher now.
|
| I'm skeptical of this. There's likely some open source
| software that's good enough and considering the advances in
| hardware likely much cheaper to run then it was way back
| when.
|
| Besides the fact that many people prefer large platforms
| like reddit or Facebook or discord where they already have
| an account (don't have to make another one) I'd say the
| problem is the human one not software. Time and effort to
| popularize the forum and either paying for moderation or
| convincing people to volunteer to moderate and deal with
| inevitable shitshow that comes with moderating
| controversial topics even if forum isn't really related to
| them.
| TylerE wrote:
| Good enough isn't nearly good enough. You're competing
| against apps, offering just a much better use experience.
|
| One bit of feedback I got repeatedly from users on a
| couple communities (now dead) I helped run was how much
| harder posting image and video content in a forum is -
| true user generated content I mean, not shared from
| YouTube. Even that meant ricking around with bbcode.
| homarp wrote:
| i somehow envision a forum as text first. Image and video
| hosting is 'out of scope'.
| jrmg wrote:
| Yeah, it should not be hard! Cheap hardware is orders of
| magnitude faster than it was in the 2000s, and we could
| run dynamic forums written in janky inefficient Perl on
| it, and serve thousand's of requests a second.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Cheap isn't the relevant metric. I've run a couple of
| forums, over the years. It's entirely possible to customize
| the software, to make the user experience, for both users
| and administrators, quite good.
|
| Moderating and managing the forum is the pain.
|
| Also, it can be fairly corrosive to personal mental health.
|
| I recently had an old acquaintance reach out to me, asking
| me to revive one of my old communities, that was killed by
| Facebook. This person argued that many of the old community
| members were now thoroughly sick of Facebook, and would
| want to go back to the dedicated forum.
|
| I politely declined, and was surprised at how the idea
| really horrified me.
| multjoy wrote:
| I remember running a semi-popular phpBB back in the early
| 00's. There was nothing like Digital Ocean or Linode. You
| can run a small instance for pocket change today.
| Kye wrote:
| There were VPSes and managed servers back then, but most
| people went with shared hosts that supported PHP and
| MySQL. That's how WordPress got so big.
| superkuh wrote:
| I've been playing NationStates(.net) for 20+ years now.
| They run a php forum as part of the civic simulation php
| site. It hasn't really changed in the 20 years. Lately the
| entire site has become completely inaccessible to many of
| us because they've deployed a cloudflare block. They say
| they _had_ to do this because the increase in bot traffic
| was slowing down the site so much it was costing them
| money:
| https://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=562415
|
| I never once noticed the site was slow. But now that
| cloudflare is blocking me and my non-corporate browser
| completely, no matter how many captchas I complete, it is
| very, very slow (dead).
|
| It's shocking to me as someone that runs multiple websites
| (for the last 20+ years) that they're having so much
| trouble suddenly. I too see bot traffic on my sites
| increasing (ie, it's like 4:1 now instead of 1:1
| bots:humans) but it is not a problem.
|
| I have to wonder how much of this is a socially contagious
| hysteria. Computational resources and bandwidth have become
| massively less expensive over those 20 years. I get the
| feeling people are "having" to block bots from accessing
| their websites just because they "feel" they have to block
| them. They actually don't.
| kibwen wrote:
| Holy hell, I can't believe NationStates is still kicking,
| or that Firefox has managed to hold onto my login details
| for 20 years. Truly a more innocent age that we'll never
| be able to return to.
| Macha wrote:
| > Computational resources and bandwidth have become
| massively less expensive over those 20 years.
|
| Your budget tier VPS provider on the other hand has only
| really doubled what you get over the last 10 years, and
| user feature expectations and AI scrapers really have
| caused resource usage to more than double.
|
| The cost efficiency has really only benefited the middle
| end here really. HN is probably cheaper to run than it
| was 10 years ago. But the large sites are on cloud
| providers who have provided added services that you might
| not have used 10 years ago to keep up their margins, and
| the intro tier VPS that "Bob's Friendly phpBB Forum"
| might be on isn't getting you much more, which matters
| when Bob's revenue is $60/year from a handful of the most
| investigated regulars only.
| trilbyglens wrote:
| Everyone just assumes that the only way to do ads online are
| from these giant, shitty ad platforms like Facebook or Google.
| When really, you can have smaller ad networks that provide
| curated and content tailored advertising. It's just a lot more
| labor intensive and it doesn't scale to nation-state levels of
| money like Google Ads does.
|
| If sites just embedded their own ads, then no ad blocker would
| be able to catch that at all because there would be no way to
| identify them separately from the content.
| stavros wrote:
| A smaller company like Hiveworks, for example?
| JBiserkov wrote:
| > there would be no way to identify them separately from the
| content
|
| We'll use AI
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I think you're wrong about that last part. For ads to make
| sense as a revenue stream you have to basically auction them,
| for example at different times and different countries etc.
| So there has to be some automation, you can't just manually
| include each ad. This will have to be done programmatically,
| and there will always be traces (e.g. in div classes). You
| can try to randomise these or what have you, but it's
| basically a cat and mouse game with ad blockers.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Their used to be a system (which was created by a webcomic
| artist, though I forget which one) where ads could be sold
| in slots of time, completely independent of clicks. But it
| died a few years ago.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| Dinosaur Comics I believe.
| piperswe wrote:
| RIP Project Wonderful, I loved that it was an ad network
| that respected privacy
| dmurray wrote:
| > Everyone from SMBC to the NY Times would put all of their
| content behind a paywall, or in an app, or something else
| that's worse than the status quo right?
|
| The NYT already puts its content behind a pay wall, and SMBC
| (as of this update) doesn't rely on third party ads either. So
| it's not clear that something else would be worse than the
| status quo for them.
|
| Some content creators would certainly suffer, but if online ads
| were not normalized, others would thrive.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| The answer to no more ads is you can't be independent. You have
| to have service aggregation.
|
| The fundamental problem is that you can't grow an audience all
| your content is behind a paywall. So you have to offer some
| content for free, but if you're an independent comic artist
| like smbc, no one is going to visit your site if only 1 comic
| per week is free.
|
| But if a lot of creators are behind a single paywall, and that
| paywall was able to feature 10 random free webcomics every day,
| then you pull in lots of visitors and have more opportunity to
| convert them into paying customers.
|
| Now the harder question, how do you convince a bunch of
| independent content creators to band together behind a single
| paywall.
| throwanem wrote:
| Nebula did it.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Nebula is mostly video, but also hosts a bunch of podcasts.
| I wonder whether they could be persuaded to expand their
| range of offerings to other media.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| I might be unusual, but I'd be quite happy to pay more than my
| ad value (less than a cent per pageview in most cases) to
| sites, but there's no system to do so.
|
| There's zero chance I'm going to subscribe to every site that I
| might hit a few times a year.
| lou1306 wrote:
| a) You can set up your own advertisement/sponsorship system
| and, unless some bloke took the time to specifically write
| rules targeting your website, the ads would not be blocked.
| Bonus points: this prevents most malicious ads, which are
| another major reason people use ad blockers, from appearing on
| your website, simply by virtue of you not letting them in.
|
| b) You can always follow a combination of free (unpaywalled)
| content + premium content behind a paywall/Patreon/etc +
| merchandise + Kickstarter for more ambitious projects.
| windowshopping wrote:
| Hey if anyone has strong experience with ad networks and
| configuring them to websites, give me an email at the address in
| my profile, I'd love to get freelance help with this. I'm new to
| it and realized it isn't as easy as just signing up the way it is
| for mobile apps. Apparently most sites can't get approved for
| adsense at ALL, let alone have it at time of launch before they
| have traffic. So yeah if anyone has a lot of knowledge/experience
| with this please holler.
| x0x0 wrote:
| fwiw, you likely can't make real money with this.
|
| The big drivers are (1) ever more increasing inventory (ie page
| loads/refreshes/whatever with ad slots). Relatively fixed
| demand plus increasing supply gives you a price fall that has
| been going on for 10+ years with no end in sight, combined
| with:
|
| (2) retargeting has gotten endlessly more sophisticated
| allowing people whom advertisers wish to target to be found on
| places with cheap inventory.
|
| You need immense numbers of pageviews or to be very high value
| to some specific audience. As an example of the latter,
| somewhat generically: imagine people really into high end
| watches. There are buyers for that. Or your site is valuable to
| eg vacation intenders.
|
| It's why more and more sites (Defector, Talking Points Memo,
| 404, all major newspapers) that wish to, you know, not die are
| charging subscription revenue.
| jrmg wrote:
| It does feel like a rubicon has been crossed recently, where
| most things I like are going behind paywalls, and many
| smaller outfits are heavily pushing Patreon or the like.
|
| Anecdotally, I'm paying subscriptions for news sites
| (mainstream and niche) and podcasts I would not have had a
| few years ago. I subscribed to YouTube, which I thought I'd
| never do!
|
| I'm not sure what to make of this. Microtransactions and
| subscriptions powering creators has been a dream of many
| people for a long, long time - at least since the 90s. So
| maybe this is great? But even if it is, something has been
| lost too.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for a more general way to replace ads
| with micropayments. YouTube premium works well but only for
| video. Subscribing to a dozen small websites/teams is not
| it; too much money per payment and 98% of sites get nothing
| from me.
| amluto wrote:
| I wonder whether a high-quality site could gain value for its
| own ad inventory by trying to minimize the extent to which it
| leaks retargeting information.
| relaxing wrote:
| Hold up, that "wishing death upon others" revenue stream
| sounds like an interesting business model...
| ccppurcell wrote:
| I've been a fan of smbc for a long time and I've been meaning to
| buy his case for open borders book...
| jisnsm wrote:
| Good luck but I never saw any ads on your website and I will
| never see any ads on your website.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| From a comment on the announcement page:
|
| > This is the third webcomic, among the ones I read, that has
| quit Hiveworks in the past month. Anyone know what's up with
| that?
|
| What were the other ones? Any material changes from the Hiveworks
| folks that prompted this?
| ifthenelseor wrote:
| Other comics that have left hiveworks that I know of: Daughter
| of the Lilies (weird christian fantasy, currently on hiatus) In
| Blood We Rise (idk, I don't read it, looks like gay vampires)
|
| There was a rumor going around that Hiveworks is having
| financial issues, linked to a post that was then taken down and
| vagueposting from the DotL person. When I saw DotL move, I
| figured it was personal drama, and when I saw the one rumor
| post get taken down, I figured it was inaccurate to the point
| of being lawsuit material, but SMBC is kind of a big deal. If
| the rumor is anything, I wouldn't be surprised if SMBC is
| causation instead of response though and the SMBC move is
| driven entirely by the annoying ads / shop issues mentioned in
| their post. Most webcomics do not make a profit.
| rincebrain wrote:
| It's also quite possible Hiveworks is getting bought by
| someone that the creators in question don't want to touch
| with a long, long pole.
|
| My personal guess, though, would be that Hiveworks wanted
| creators to sign an updated contract that had some terms
| around feeding their stuff into genAI and creators who could
| are NOPEing out of that.
|
| I cannot overstate how much comic creators don't want to
| touch managing any of this, so n=2 or more of them leaving in
| a short window is a really, really bad smell.
| superkuh wrote:
| I thought the same thing and I doubt we're talking about the
| same comics. The one I noticed dropping hiveworks ads was "The
| Devil's Panties" (not actually porn, just wholesome slice of
| life).
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| I know of an artist who left Hiveworks years ago for various
| reasons, among them being controlling about what artists
| could/couldn't say on social media and trying to choke out the
| competition in arguably shady ways.
| starkparker wrote:
| There are rumors suggesting financial and legal issues:
| https://www.tumblr.com/shinesurge/777346311384072192?source=...
| skizm wrote:
| I sympathize, I really do. But I was a daily reader for a while
| and the ads on their mobile site were particularly brutal so I
| stopped visiting a while ago. I've since setup pi-hole and the
| site was probably viewable at that point, but I never ended up
| going back to reading daily. I'd probably have paid a monthly or
| annual subscription for an ad-free experience, but I also know
| that's not as profitable.
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