The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

http://www.marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics

by kyleslattery • 11 years ago

260 243 11 years ago

clarky07• 11 years ago

I never used an ad blocker until the last month or so. Ive made money with content and ads before and I know it's hard to do. Sadly, things have gotten absurd lately. Chrome basically slowed my computer to a halt on an almost daily basis. The performance improvement from using an ad blocker has been tremendous. So much difference I have a hard time believing it.

As a side bonus I also don't have to deal with auto playing video ads and popover boxes asking me to subscribe to content I haven't yet had a chance to see if I like.

Ntrails• 11 years ago

I just installed windows 10, and obviously had to quickly fire up "Edge" to get chrome/firefox etc.

My mind was blown when I googled a "how to" and went to a PC help page that started auto playing a video in the sidebar completely unrelated to the topic I was interested in - simultaneously kind of clashing with the music I was already listening to.

Seriously? People have been putting up with this? Some 10 minutes later I was all adblock'd/noscript'd and my internet experience had returned to normal. I literally haven't experienced that since the days of sodding myspace.

k__• 11 years ago

We went from the "static" newspaper/TV ads, that didn't know about what you did with them, to "dynamic" web/mobile apps, that know exactly if you watched them, clicked on them AND eventually bought something coming from that ad. Also, which ad from the same ad-network you watched before, what apps/websites you used before etc.

Advertisement got much more power on the Internet and got much more predictable for advertisers.

But we also switched from turning pages or switching channels, if we don't like the ads, to blocking whole advertising companies with the help of software. We can now even prevent the ad from being "overseen" at all, because it doesn't even get shown to us in the first place. newspaper adds always hit your subconsciousness.

Both sides stepped up their game. Don't see any problem with this.

seiji• 11 years ago

Before the web, people changed channels or got up during TV commercials,

Many people still don't realize it's trivial to have a DVR automatically skip commercials, but advertising companies and TV networks sued TiVo to make sure they will never implement it.

Modern web ads and trackers are far over the line for many people today,

Not just "over the line," but for over 5 years now, advertising networks have allowed exploits to be delivered over their advertising networks. There's nothing like browsing a website then having a drive-by crypto locker installed on your machine.

As of 2015, blocking advertising isn't a moral question, it's a question of do you value your own security.

But publishers, advertisers, and browser vendors are all partly responsible for the situation we’re all in.

People say "trust the wisdom of the free market," but they forget the important part: free markets always become corrupt and always accumulate power towards the top. A market without government oversight and intervention is just a way to exploit and abuse people for profit with no repercussions.

It has never been easier to collect small direct payments online,

That's more tricky, isn't it? We've all viewed some article at a tiny city's online newspaper then been hit with a "SUBSCRIBE TO PODUNK DAILY ONLINE TO KEEP READING, ONLY $24.99/month." It's not sustainable for every small thing to receive direct payments and we don't have a clean disaggregation of a common "subscribe to internet publicans" pool (like iTunes Match, but for writing? Still useless if you get 0.00002 cents per page view—but, that's basically online advertising again).

k8tte• 11 years ago

flattr.com

anc844• 11 years ago

Is a centralised service. I want to pay "cash", I want my privacy. It is no one's business which things I give money to.

bediger40004• 11 years ago

How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't.

Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config.

The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control away from owners. That seems like a generally bad outcome.

ghshephard2• 11 years ago

The ethical issue is with regards to people reading all the content supported by advertising, but then blanking out all the ads. Marco's taking the position that, given the risk, and the general intrusiveness and privacy violations associated with advertising, that it's entirely ethical to do so.

WorldWideWayne• 11 years ago

Don't you think the bigger ethical issue here is how content providers keep using ad networks that commonly serve as a delivery mechanism for malware?

Reading someone's content without looking at their ads seems like a relatively minor infraction in comparison.

minimaxir2• 11 years ago

How is ad blocking an ethical issue?

Many people rely on ads for a livelihood without charging for content; ad-blocking would deprive of their livelihood. This was a contentious issue for niche video content creators (e.g. the nostalgic review craze that happened a few years ago)

Most of these content creators have switched to Patreon/Kickstarter.

reasonishy3• 11 years ago

OK, so the equivalent would be this:

I buy magazines from the wholesaler. I rip out all the adverts. I then sell them to the public.

I'm acting as a lovely "ad-blocker" for magazines. Is what I'm doing legal or ethical?

Another argument would be is it ethical to block people who have adblock installed. In such an arms race, who will win?

markbnj• 11 years ago

I don't think that analogy holds up, since the viewer of a web page is not reselling the content (which would be the unethical part). It would be more accurate to ask whether removing the ad pages in magazines you keep for your own use was ethical. The obvious answer would be: of course.

nightmiles2• 11 years ago

I buy magazines from the wholesaler. I rip out all the adverts. I then sell them to the public.

Why wouldn't this be legal or ethical? What you choose to do with the mass of paper you just purchased is totally fine.

jgrowl• 11 years ago

As someone who uses ad-blockers, I am totally fine with sites blocking me for it. I will disable adblock for that site if I really value the content. Otherwise it makes it really easy for me to decide to never go back to a site again.

JD557• 11 years ago

I think magazines is the wrong analogy here, as you paid for them.

A better example would be doing the same to free newspapers.

stdbrouw• 11 years ago

Do you really believe that the only reason "it's my car and I can run over whoever I like" is ethically wrong is because there's a law that says you can't run over people?

Spivak• 11 years ago

No, but it's my car so I can take off all the manufacturer and dealer badges.

eli3• 11 years ago

How is downloading cracked software or stolen movies an ethical issue?

drdaeman3• 11 years ago

Primarily, it's a legal issue.

Although I genuinely wonder what came first - the discussion of ethics of "stealing" books or discussion of ethics of passed copyright laws.

danielweber3• 11 years ago

"It can't be unethical because it's not illegal" is question-begging.

bediger40004• 11 years ago

But we see the "You have to do this (possibly) unethical thing because it's the law" (capital punishment, imprisonment for victimless crimes, etc) all the time. Why not the opposite of "it's ethical because it's the law"?

philh• 11 years ago

You get to control your computer, but there are some things which it's unethical to control your computer to do.

It would be unethical to prevent people from blocking ads, but that doesn't mean it's ethical for people to block ads.

(I'm not saying it's not ethical for people to block ads, just that I don't think your argument works.)

ksk2• 11 years ago

That is not a good argument to make. The corollary is that the telecom companies "own" their infrastructure. They can modify any packets sent from your computer to theirs, insert tracking, or peek at it or whatever. After all, YOU sent the packet to them.

codezero4• 11 years ago

They actually do this. Adding unique identifiers to headers.

The U.S. Government also use the fact that telco owns the lines to justify mass surveillance since you are communicating on lines you don't own.

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

Not to them, but through them.

I'm paying them to take that data, and deliver it verbatim to some other party.

They are reasonably free to refuse to take my money (they may have traded that freedom for some other gain, but then it's a different story), what they can't do is claim they are providing that service, while adulterating my data.

njharman2• 11 years ago

You're making the wrong argument. You get to control what you are subjected to. If you don't want to be bombarded by psychologically manipulative propaganda, it is just, correct, ethical, and legal(for now) not to be.

If you produce ad burdened content hoping that I will allow myself to be advertised to. I'm glad to crush that hope. You can charge for your content, stop producing it, etc. What you can't do is demand I endure you're fucking advertising.

bediger40004• 11 years ago

Thank you. I was indeed making the wrong argument. Your argument is much better, and takes the ethical high ground.

zzalpha6• 11 years ago

How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

No one said it's a black-and-white ethical issue. It's unquestionably a dilemma. And as a user of ad blocking software, one I myself wrestle with.

hsod• 11 years ago

The ethical argument, which is briefly considered in this article, is that by blocking ads you are violating an implied agreement with the site owners.

Legality and technology are irrelevant, it's simply a question of whether or not such an implied agreement exists and whether or not it is ethical to break it.

My opinion is that such an agreement does exist, and that it is a (very minor) unethical act to break it, and that it is a much larger unethical act to brag gleefully about breaking it as many are doing in this thread.

The virtuous way to respond to an untenable agreement is to avoid it altogether, not to take the parts that benefit you and violate the parts that don't.

flavor83• 11 years ago

Are there any analagous "implied agreements" that lend weight to your opinion, or are we breaking new ground with this?

And as a counterpoint, I would suggest that the "implied agreement" respects the user to whom ads are being served. Sites like gawker, huffington, techcrunch who attempt to sell my behavior to 6-10 ad networks are stepping over that line.

agd• 11 years ago

people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price.

This is the crucial point to me. How can I agree to a website's trackers before I know they exist?

tremon3• 11 years ago

This is also what the much-maligned EU cookiewall was intended to address: you inform visitors about your tracking /before/ you start tracking them.

Though I don't know at which stage that incentive was bungled (other than: "doomed from the start, because people").

redml• 11 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong (because I don't live in the EU and can't verify this), but to comply with the cookie law websites started just displaying "we use cookies" in the header somewhere and didn't actually change anything. Meaning its the same as browsing the internet everywhere else you just get told that this is happening.

RodericDay5• 11 years ago

What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance".

It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it.

If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible.

Advertising isn't free. Insofar it works, for some people, it's basically coercive via psychology and simulated peer pressure.

jacquesm3• 11 years ago

Advertising is an arms race.

commentzorro2• 11 years ago

I thank you for your worship.

--Vishvarupa

reasonishy3• 11 years ago

Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services.

Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts.

But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying.

I buy quite a few magazines, and one of the reasons I buy them is for the adverts, which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in.

For example, I buy a bee-keeping magazine, which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable. I buy a pig magazine, which has adverts for pig arks, pig tags, weaners, etc etc.

Good advertising is a net win for everyone. It provides us information about things we might like. Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless.

What is the alternative model to advertising on the internet? The fact is, that most websites are supported by advertising, and if that goes away, so do the websites unless some other magical income model replaces it.

TheOtherHobbes• 11 years ago

That's a false comparison, because there's a huge difference between ads-as-information and ads-as-empty-noise.

If you buy a trade magazine it's a given the ads will be targeted to a specific area of interest. The bad ads are simply not very interesting, and the good ads add real value to the experience by giving you useful information and/or entertaining you.

But when you turn the page, they're gone. Print ads leave you with some agency.

Most ads on the web seem to be completely untargeted. And when they are targeted, they're not targeted very well. And even if they are targeted well, they're incredibly repetitive.

Web ads don't give you agency. They treat you as a passive consumer who needs to be forced to see the same stupid banners over and over. Most of the time the banners are simply annoying. Even when they're not, they have a much lower information content than a print ad.

So unlike a print ad, which will be some combination of irrelevant, beautiful, sparsely presented, and informative, they carpet bomb your browsing experience with noisy low-value distractions.

Instead of adding to the experience, they take away from it.

And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way.

There certainly is an arms race, but it's gone in a completely ineffective direction.

IMO there's a lot of money to be made by bringing some intelligence back into web marketing. Instead of just spurting banners everywhere or using not-so-bright algos to do poor targeting, the ad industry might want to consider going back to ads that add value, instead of treating customers like not very intelligent prey that has to be herded down a funnel.

creshal• 11 years ago

Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless.

The problem is it's not just some. At first, there was bounds of worthless advertising. Classical random banner ads have about zero revenue, and have had for over a decade. Instead of good advertisements, we got pop-up ads, pop-under ads, flashing animated gif ads, autoplay video ads, autoplay audio ads, ads that pretended to be native OS dialogs, link ads, … just to grab the users' attention anyway, and trick a few into buying absolute crap they didn't want. Ad networks getting used as vectors to infect computers (cf. latest Firefox/pdfjs exploit) are just the final nail in the coffin.

Print magazine ads work well because they don't try to infect me with viruses, don't try to trick me, don't make my fan run at 100%, don't drain my monthly data plan in a day (or battery in an hour), and don't keep me from reading the rest of the magazine. Had web advertisement stayed that same, I doubt we would ever have seen adblockers gain a substantial marketshare – nobody would use them if installing them was more of a hassle than just ignoring adverts.

RodericDay5• 11 years ago

I don't need to know there's a new Star Wars movie coming out.

Scarcity seems to breed innovation, so maybe cutting the cord and creating a financial incentive will have some brilliant people come up with better models than I can for free on my spare time.

Maybe after a period of downtime, we'll all reminisce about the good old days and vote in some kind of universal internet-real-estate tax, allowing people to pledge bandwidth to people whose content they enjoy to aid in its dissemination, on a "one-person-one-attention-unit" basis. Who even knows?

improvesnetwork2• 11 years ago

A contrary (and more accurate view) is that advertising suggests things that people don't really need.

Here's a "magical alternative": if you make something the least bit good/useful, people don'e need to be beat over the head with it - they'll find it.

Advertising is vapid, inaccurate, and a blight.

njharman2• 11 years ago

Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services.

Prove it. I can just as easily pull out my ass "Word of mouth and browsing in-store or online is the method most people use to discover new products/services."

unprepare• 11 years ago

Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services.

Do you have a source for that?

How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out?

By being interested in science fiction movies, being part of a community of people with like interests, theater showtimes, etc.

Why do i need to know 6 months beforehand that a star wars movie will eventually come out?

Why would i need to know any sooner than a week before the release date?

How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying.

By having an interest in buying them, and then doing research regarding which product will best fit my needs.

which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in

Or do the advertisements give you an itch and a tool to scratch it?

which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable

In what way?

Are you incapable of finding a new bee-keeping related product without first seeing an advertisement?

Can you not google the item you need and then compare the options amongst each other?

Can you not simply search on amazon or some bee-keeping friendly retailer?

Are you not part of a community of bee-keepers who you can ask for recommendations about products?

If you've ever heard of:

Costco

Krispy Kreme

Kiehls

Spanx

Lululemon

Rolls Royce

Zara

Jiffy muffin mix

NO-AD sunscreen

Then you've disproven you're entire argument, as those are all brands that have $0 advertising budget, and do no advertising.

candu• 11 years ago

I'd...search for things I need? Or rely on word-of-mouth via people I actually care about? (Of course, you could argue that these are also forms of advertising, in which case this argument ultimately devolves to "people hear about things most often by hearing about them".)

Or: even though it might be possible to interest me in buying said products and services, maybe I don't need/want them enough to justify the purchase, and so reducing/eliminating pervasive psychological coercion is in fact helping me to act in my rational self-interest?

Also: "most businesses are supported by X, therefore X is good and/or there is no viable alternative to X" just doesn't hold water as an argument. For instance: "most businesses are supported by chattel slavery..."; "most businesses are supported by the local feudal warlord..."; "most businesses are supported by the infinite benevolence of the Church...", and so on - failure to imagine a different model is a failure of imagination and/or historical perspective, not of existence.

savanaly3• 11 years ago

If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible.

Advertising isn't a complete societal waste. If I find a way to compete with an established business by offering the same product at a lower cost, or a better product at the same cost, or a new product that is worth the money but no one had thought of before, my only hope to connect people to that product (not to mention make myself money) is through advertising. Word of mouth and objective reporting in news outlets will also do the information spreading work, but advertising does a considerable amount. In other words, it's competition increasing.

I think economists have done studies on markets with and without advertising and have found results indicating it does bring down costs in those markets by increasing competition [1]. In economic terms that would be a gain since without advertising we would consume an inefficiently low amount of said product. Note that even if there is a gain to efficiency because of lower prices, it may be completely offset by the cost of advertising itself (costs being the cost of consumers having to be irked by looking at them and the effort that went into crafting the advertisements).

[1] Could I be remembering this paper? http://www.jstor.org/stable/724797?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...

improvesnetwork2• 11 years ago

Who pays the costs in lost efficiency, lost productivity, lost time etc for readers to wade through ads to get to content?

Saying something "lowers costs" without considering ALL costs involved is lazy.

Most smart consumers are much less interested in what a company has to say about its own products (embellishment) than about what other people say.

So yeah, advertising is pretty terrible.

SapphireSun• 11 years ago

Essentially, advertising is useful when you need to tell people about a new product or service. Beyond that, it's playing a game. Once people know a service exists and have been accurately informed as to its benefits, then for the most part, people will use it if they need it and spread it by word of mouth if its useful for other people (and/or they had a good experience).

Advertising beyond that mostly serves to solidify brand integrity and trust and ways to undercut competitors and is an ever growing conflagration of an arms race. It has little to do with the interests of the public.

eevilspock4• 11 years ago

Which do you think wins, low budget factually honest advertising or high budget advertising that builds consumer loyalty or craving using whatever psychological means necessary?

I'm pretty certain the latter wins far more often than the former, in which case advertising hurts healthy competition. You may in fact have the better or cheaper product, but the establish company has the huge advertising budget by virtue of being the established company. Advertising serves as a moat far more than it serves as a bridge.

So while the naive view is that advertising communicates the existence and benefits of products so that consumers can make informed choices, in reality it is more often and more successfully used to communicate lies and manipulation, and raise insurmountable barriers to new competition.

chatmasta• 11 years ago

If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste.

That doesn't make sense.

You are saying because User reads Content, Advertiser pays Content, and User pays Advertiser, that the middle step of Advertiser paying Content is unnecessary, because User could pay Content.

Simple counterexample: I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. But I might see an ad for a new device that I like and would pay for, on techcrunch. If I click through the ad and buy it, then everyone wins. Techcrunch makes money from me, who would never pay them directly, because the advertiser pays them, and the advertiser makes money, because I buy their product.

aylons2• 11 years ago

In your example, there are two possibilities: either you did want and need to buy the product before the advertisement or you didn't.

In the first case, the advertisement was wasteful: the company that sold you the product has unnecessarily spent money, which goes to the product price. And this is not a small amount: big consumer companies spend billions on advertisement space/time alone, an amount comparable to their R&D expenses. I'm talking about ads alone, not other marketing expenses, many of which are related to advertisement. In most companies, marketing budget dwarves R&D, by the way, and in some markets, this costs could very well be the biggest chunk of the price in a product.

In the second case, you would not buy the product without the ad. That may mean that you simply didn't know the product before and finding it was good for you, but most probably you didn't need it or would not want it if not because of the ad.

In this common case, you didn't win: you just spent money because of a need/want that you didn't have before seeing the ad. You were hacked and exploited for both the publisher and advertiser benefit.

RodericDay5• 11 years ago

See, I really like markets, and I have a problem with phrases like:

I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it.

Sounds to me a lot like Mitt Romney talking about how his wife has the most important job in the world, but she's essentially his unpaid housewife. Sounds hollow.

You are paying for techcrunch, by buying products advertised on it. It would be good for the finances of everyone in society to know exactly how much. If the product company could slice prices in half because their arms-race marketing budget is soaring, maybe you'd change your mind and pay techcrunch directly, so that you, techcrunch, and the R&D department of the product benefit, while marketing stops soaking up a large chunk of the money exchanged.

jules• 11 years ago

Funding the content suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem.

VLM5• 11 years ago

Something rarely discussed is how the cost of publishing the content is imploding.

A generation ago it took a real company with full time employees to run Slashdot. In 2014 it took some volunteers and some linode instances to run SoylentNews using slashcode. In another decade you'll have people running things like /. and HN on the equivalent of a raspberry pi drawing 5 watts.

A generation ago some cool sites started as an old desktop underneath some desk, then they scaled to internet size which meant a mid size corporation. Well, for technological reasons we're scaling it back down to some legendary sites will once again run on a desktop underneath someone's desk, its just that desktop will run internet scale not mere thousands of users.

I'm not sure that society gets much value from journalists. Take corporate press release, lightly wrap in trendy breezy cliches and clickbait headline like 1000 of your closest competitors but supposedly your re-skin is better than theirs, and spam the link everywhere.

When that industry is gone, I won't miss it. Remember when the blue collars were losing their jobs and the journalists were all "ha ha not my problem go back to school"? What comes around goes around, and after the journos lose their jobs they can go back to beautician school or air conditioning repairman or whatever, "ha ha not my problem go back to school"

fweespeech2• 11 years ago

It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it.

Yes, and if you paid directly you'd have X+(B2C payment processing overhead) which is more than B2B.

We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead.

That is really not true. Have you ever tried to support N customers instead of 20 businesses?

There are some very major costs in providing any kind of support, even if its just for billing.

You are simply unrealistic if you believe that ad companies have higher overhead than providing large scale customer support. I know someone who runs a [small] ad network and his overhead is a fraction of what it'd cost me to run a similar subscription based model.

blacksmith_tb• 11 years ago

The micropayments could be handled via one of those 20 companies. For example, it would be fairly easy for Doubleclick to have users set up an account and fund it with a few bucks, and then they'd pay TechCrunch .01 USD when the user read an article. In effect it'd be a sort of protection racket, if you don't want see any ads, pay up.

eevilspock4• 11 years ago

Dude, I've been trying to spread this exact understanding on HN for years[1]. You would think that this crowd would get that there is no free lunch. But cognitive dissonance is powerful:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

I've been tracking this debate (or, until recently, lack thereof) for years and no one is articulating this well, myself included. Specifically, no one is articulating how this doesn't even make sense from an economics perspective.

I'm glad Marco Arment is supporting ad blocking, but he fails to see the how bad the ad-supported business model is for the web and how much it costs society. He's an intelligent guy, so I suspect it's for the reason Upton Sinclair put so well. "I make most of my living from ads," Arment writes.

Let's work on articulating this better together? Email me! Anyone else interested is welcome too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245427, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761

minimaxir2• 11 years ago

On HN, I've recently seen less "complaining about ads" and more "complaining about hostile UX modals and popovers to force ad clicking." Which is fair.

Merovius6• 11 years ago

I've been tracking this debate (or, until recently, lack thereof) for years and no one is articulating this well, myself included. Specifically, no one is articulating how this doesn't even make sense from an economics perspective.

That sounds like very bad economics. Because a) Either the spending power of the population is constant. In that case, there is no cost (for consumers), because they don't spend more, they just spend differently. b) Or, spending power increases as a function of amount of ads. In that case, there is no cost (for consumers), because their increase in spending due to ads is precisely offset by the increase in spending power.

Unless you are somehow suggesting that people would just insanely accumulate wealth, instead of spend their income, if only there where no advertising.

teaneedz• 11 years ago

Yeah it's a really simple argument that many choose not to understand. The more ad blocking the better until Advertisers and Publishers come to grasp wit UX. I'm quite tired of the tracking and bandwidth today's ads consume. Looking very forward to iOS9.

scarface74• 11 years ago

Well yes he does make most of his current income from ads - mostly from his podcast. But he made most of his wealth from his equity in Tumblr as the first developer. He also sold Instsgram to another company and makes money from the OverCast app.

pc862• 11 years ago

some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty

You are honestly suggesting that internet advertising is contributing to poverty?

petercooper2• 11 years ago

If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty

C'mon, that isn't the only alternative.

I saw an ad for some slippers on Facebook the other day. They looked nice. I remembered I wanted some slippers for the office. I bought the slippers. I'm happy, the advertiser is happy, Facebook is happy.

Advertising is not always about unhappy or annoying endings, even if sometimes it is. In many cases it works, is ethical, and can even provide a service. In these situations, it's a great way to fund things without forcing end users to pay evenly.

Merovius6• 11 years ago

Your logic is flawed. Advertisers advertise to increase their share of the whole economy. Every single person could spend exactly the same amount of money and even on exactly the same kind of things as before and advertising would still make sense. I am not denying, that due to advertising we shift our buying habbits. But advertising is born out of competition, it is to take a share of the spending power of people away from other companies. Spending power is pretty much a constant (at least in regards to advertising, it increases as a function of the strength of the economy).

Seriously, think about it for a second: If advertising stopped today, completely. Would you spend less money? I don't think so.

Merovius6• 11 years ago

And in regards to

if these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste.

that is exactly what is happening. Advertising is the classical real world example for the prisoners dilemma. It is literally the reason, why game theory exists. Every company can chose to advertise (defect) or not advertise (cooperate). If no one advertises, everyone is better off. But that is not a stable equilibrium, so instead everyone is advertising, even though it incurs some cost on social wellfare.

mollerhoj• 11 years ago

Advertising could also just make you aware of a product that you didn't know about, no? As far as I'm aware advertising can be a win for both the advertiser and the consumer.

chrismcb3• 11 years ago

You make several assumptions. "We could pay X..." but we don't. How is it a complete societal waste? When someone purchases ad time they are essentially paying for your content. They do this in hopes of selling more product. It is essentially a win/win. You get a free product, and they get more sales. From a financial perspective the marketers aren't going to sell their product for less because they don't advertise. They are spending some money to make more money. So it makes sense for them to spend the money. As far as "we could pay X for the content..." Well that is essentially what we do today, we just do it through ads. Does it contribute to a "cycle of poverty" Not really. That kid will want those fancy new shoes whether he sees it in an ad, or sees it on his friends feet. And yeah, he is helping pay for your YouTube habit. But then so are you. Even if you don't watch ads, you are still purchasing the products that generate the ads.

jpmattia2• 11 years ago

I'm beginning to find the various articles about ad-blocking fatuous, and I doubt I'm the only one.

Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model.

Worse, it is becoming apparent that ads increase the attack surface. Failing to clean that up will cause armies of IT folks to actively work against you.

Maybe the business model is that you're serving ads in a non-centralized way, or maybe you're serving centralized ads to people with locked-down computers, but good luck serving blockable ads and relying on the good graces of the population to unblock your ads out of charity.

13• 11 years ago

Websites offering self hosted, static advertising isn't so much of a problem as random bits of javascript and tracking cookies loaded from god knows where every time you load a page. Harder to block, the advertiser needs to pass their content through the hoster which assures some level of quality and relevance, and some level of privacy for the end viewers.

eli3• 11 years ago

And yet ad blockers generally try as hard as they can to block all types of ads.

SilasX3• 11 years ago

Similarly, I've wondered why advertisers don't just change how they do the ads: if the ads are non-standard size, are non animated, and link back to a legit landing page from non/shady domain, what adblocker covers that? Wouldn't that just look like ordinary site content? Or do they really update them that quickly and narrowly?

codezero4• 11 years ago

Most ads are served by an ad network which requires third party involvement. Adblockers block those. It's not manageable to post individual ads.

zokier• 11 years ago

Do you also think that selling movies is broken business model because movies can pirated trivially?

Or that free software is broken model because GPL can be violated trivially?

jpmattia2• 11 years ago

In principle: If you pirate movies or the GPL, the legal system comes after you. So no, not completely broken.

But that's my point: Those industries have taken the path of serving the subsegment of the market that won't break the law/contract. And maybe that's the answer for website advertising, but adblockers are a one-time install and look like less effort than pirating (for movies) or obfuscating (for GPL). So good luck if that's your business model.

flavor83• 11 years ago

In both of your example cases, there are actual legal protections. In the case of a content farm, they're making content available for _free_ without a terms of service in the hope that people visiting them won't be blocking the ads they're also serving. Show me the content farm that makes users agree to a terms of service requiring ad viewing, and then your examples make sense.

lucb1e• 11 years ago

Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model.

Uhm, no, you could say that about a million things to dismiss it as unimportant and "just do it".

edent• 11 years ago

Why is this becoming an issue now? I've been blocking adverts on-and-off for 10 years or so. Back then it was manually editing a HOSTS file - is it just in the news now because it's becoming slightly easier on iPhone?

netrus2• 11 years ago

It becomes mainstream. We are at a point where we get less content, because revenue for content-creators is impacted by blocking.

btbuildem• 11 years ago

Not sure how ethics play into this. If your service is of such low quality that nobody is willing to pay for it, and you resort to ads to support your business.. well, tough. Make something that sells, or try a different way of making a living.

People are blocking ads because nobody likes a firehose of garbage pointed right at their face.

To crank that tired old record, "this sector is ripe for disruption" aka somebody go already make an ad network stand-in where the user can pay the equivalent of per-impression cost and visit any participating site ad-free.

anc844• 11 years ago

How come everyone is using the closed-source, ad-network friendly Ghostery instead of the open-source https://disconnect.me/ ?

SolarUpNote• 11 years ago

Why is Ghostery ad-network friendly?

rockdoe• 11 years ago

They sell the metrics they collect back to the advertising networks. They're public about this, it's not a secret.

vetinari2• 11 years ago

Because actually stopping tracking requires premium (paid) version? Or because mobile version is not a browser plugin, but virtual vpn, so it doesn't work with your real vpn?

insertnickname• 11 years ago

The Disconnect website says that the free version "[blocks] malware & tracking (Desktop only)".

anc844• 11 years ago

Huh, I had no idea. What a shame!

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

I see ad revenue as someone who has an audience opening up access to that audience for a third party in exchange for a fee. It is entirely up to the third party to figure out how to get a return on that investment.

Neither the content creator nor the audience bears any responsibility to the third party to ensure that the opened channel is used effectively.

If shit comes through the channel, I'm going to route it right into the sewer. If gold comes through, I'll route it into my pocket. Either way, I still care more about my relationship with the content creators than about their sponsored side-channels.

The ads do not pay for the content. The content creators pay for their own content. Then they hold their nose and make a deal with shady web-advertisers to capitalize a bit more on what they have already done. Those advertisers aren't buying content. They are buying access to the audience.

guelo3• 11 years ago

It would be great if the ad business model on the web died. Hopefully the new business models that would popup would be more upfront. People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper or a few bucks for a magazine.

ianzapolsky• 11 years ago

newspapers and magazines have always had advertisements

danielweber3• 11 years ago

Unfortunately we have a prisoner's dilemma where people will defect from "costs a little money" to "free with ads" to "free and I block the ads" to "no content."

guelo3• 11 years ago

We'll never get to "no content" because people want quality content and are willing to pay. It's just a matter of the market figuring out how to match supply and demand. There will be a lot of failures along the way but it will happen.

VLM5• 11 years ago

People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper

When you didn't have a world wide internet there was a lot of friction meaning you end up with 5000 newspapers all publishing the same junk for 25 cents because on average any community only had 1 or 2 choices at most and the local oligopoly, not wanting to go out of business, agreed to charge 25 cents.

You put all 5000 on the internet, you really need 4998 of them to go out of business before you can think of going oligopoly and raising prices to 25 cents again. That has to happen first. Most of the competition has to die off before prices can rise again.

In the paper newspaper days, culture supported about as many journalists as police detectives, roughly, which is a lot. In the internet era you need about as many journalists as there are pro football players, roughly. A lot of journalism schools need to close, lots of people need new jobs, its not merely closing out legacy newspaper corporations. Until the "supply" of journalist humans drops by a factor of 100 to 1000, there isn't going to be much money to be made in that field.

It is like being in the horse buggy business around a century ago. Another interesting analogy might be village blacksmith vs the industrial nationwide factory. When one guy at one machine can manufacture an entire nations widgets, there isn't any requirement anymore for every village blacksmith to hand make widgets.

guelo3• 11 years ago

I don't buy it because people are more addicted to content than ever. There is a huge demand for high quality content it's just a matter of figuring the business model to meet that demand. But once it's figured out there will be more journalists than ever. I can't imagine an info-starved internet future.

hkon• 11 years ago

Nowdays content is there for the sake of the ad. Nowdays the content in many cases is an ad. Block that...

frou_dh• 11 years ago

The formal name for the browser is "User Agent".

Your agent should act in you, the user's, interest. Decidedly partisan and so what? You shouldn't have to explicitly instruct it to defend you from surveillance and pollution - it should do that of its own accord from day zero.

Or is your browser a double-agent?

jfb• 11 years ago

Think about who makes the browser, and what their interests are. Mozilla and Google both are 100% creatures of the advertising world (in the former case, indirectly through their search box deals) and have a vested interest in selling you on.

I'm not saying switch to Safari or Edge, but it's important to remember the incentives that the browser vendors respond to.

splat2• 11 years ago

I used to use ad-block and later disabled it to support websites that generate good content, but now I'm going back. What's driven me back to ad-blocking software is that ad tracking makes it nearly impossible to buy gifts for a spouse. If I want to buy my wife a pair of sunglasses and google "Ray Ban sunglasses", guess what she starts seeing ads for all over the web. We noticed this a while back and would do gift shopping in incognito mode, but I've gotten fed up enough with it that I'm just going to start blocking everything again.

vsync• 11 years ago

Do you have separate (client- and server-side) user accounts or browser profiles?

splat2• 11 years ago

We use completely different accounts on completely different computers.

Kenji• 11 years ago

Is it ethical to block articles about ethics of ad-blocking?

brillenfux• 11 years ago

Maybe if ads weren't such a malware cesspool people would have less reason to block them.

The people providing ads do a dirt-poor job curating them, so blocking ads isn't about convenience but about security.

qopp5• 11 years ago

"What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues." -- https://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics....

Kant 1st Imperative -- Violates -- If everyone used Adblock, many websites would shutdown. I.e. "Adblock is okay because sites can still run if just some people do it" -- cannot be universally applied, contradiction

Kant 2st Imperative -- Violates -- You treat website developers as a means to an end -- to get content, instead of rational human beings who, given a sufficient outcry against their ads, could change their ad service or offer a different model.

Utilitarianism -- Violates -- Ad Revenue - Well being of site owner: -Site Costs / Visitors + Ad Revenue For just you. Well being of you: Site benefit - time wasted * time value. (Blocking "Ad will play for x seconds" in this specific ethical system might not violate)

Rule Utilitarianism -- Violates -- Well being of site owners: Cannot make ad supported sites, current ad supported sites -site cost. Well being of society: Less websites -- more inefficiency and less units of entertainment good.

Social Contract -- Violates -- People accept ads knowing that others will do this as well and this supports the site. Another: Site owners create sites relying on users's ability to see them and thus pay for site creation.

Virtue Ethics -- Violates -- You might feel more shame being in a room with someone who made a site supported by ads and showing them that you use adblock then if you were invisible to the site owner.

The systems above are the ethical systems allowed in the book "Ethics for the Information Age (6th Edition)" by Michael J. Quinn (the list is his, but not the theories themselves, just mentioning my source to show I'm not cherry-picking ethical systems)

fwn5• 11 years ago

But all those reflexions on the issue are completely determined by the random assumptions you use in your examples.

Kant 1. Imp: One could deny the disappearance or embrace it. One could see the new forces leading the web away from ads as something beneficial for society as a whole.

Utilitarianism: There are many not quantifyable variables in a possible calculation. Just add seeing ads as exceedingly costly and your utilitarian argument in favour of adblocking is secured. Same goes for rule utilitarianism. E.g. Just measure the overall good generated by websites not by quantity but by quality. Get advertising in your quality metrics as something that reduces quality.

Social Contract: Spin another social contract: Page owners freely upload their pages knowing that the web is pull and users will select the resources displayed. One could argue that forcing them to download ads might violate this social contract.

Virtue Ethics: Alter the individuals opinion on his adblocking behaviour for your model. One could argue that there might be shame for someone not to block ads. (Which is a plausible case for a whole variety of ads out in the web right now.)

qopp5• 11 years ago

Ethics is always a subjective science, but these ethical models provide a fair and structured approach to looking at it.

Kant 1. Doesn't ask "what's best for society"? It asks about the "universalizability principle" i.e. "if everyone acts like me is there a contradiction?". And in this case there is, if you browse an ad-supported site that could only exist if some people view the ads is a contradiction. You have to agree that some sites would shut down if everyone used adblock, and thus the principal stands. It's not about what's best for society if the sites shut down, just pointing out the ethical contradiction that if everyone acted like you, everyone couldn't act like you (at least not always on all sites).

Utilitarianism. You just have to measure the obvious units of good vs units of bad. Again, it's not like a math proof but you can identify the units of good vs units of bad. Can you provide an alternate counter proof that is more obviously correct than my analysis?

Social Contract: I'm talking about the implicit social contract that exist today. Page owners don't freely upload their page knowing that the web is pull and users will select the resources displayed. Many page owners aren't even aware of adblock, at least not all of them.

Basically what you've said is: Movie theater owners free open their doors knowing that the world is navigable and users will select whether they want to visit the pay booth or not. Movie theater owners do open their theaters with this in mind, but they don't intend for their users to skip the pay booth if they simply don't want to pay. That's not the social contract you take on when you visit a theater.

In this case, the social contract is stated in actually stated in words you can read. Just read the terms of service on many websites. They specifically say you can view the site if you don't block the ads: "you are not permitted to block the display of ads" -- http://www.livejournal.com/legal/tos.bml

Virtue Ethics: I think this one is pretty verifyable :) Just find someone that owns a ad supported site and tell them to their face that you use ad block and you think it would be shameful not to. See how you feel ;)

daviross2• 11 years ago

If everyone used Adblock, many websites would shutdown. - Fails to make the claim that many (but not all) websites shutting down would be bad.

Kant's 2nd Imperative - Passes. It treats them as ends in and of themselves by focusing on the content they wish to present to me rather than lies which they don't control.

Utilitarianism - Impossible to come to agreement on. We could heap on whatever costs/benefits we want on either side to make it come out in our favor. Example, you don't take into account "Cost of tracking/malware vector" for site owner (site reputation, if there's a 0.1% chance of them serving malware which causes all their traffic to disappear), and viewers (Cost of malware).

Rule Utilitarianism - Same issue as above, you can tweak the numbers/rule to make the outcome whatever you want. Serving ads violates "Don't serve malware", "Don't promulgate lies/misleading statements"

Social Contract - Malware risk, tracking risk. I directly fund sites which I use when possible.

Virtue Ethics - Being supported by ads is un-virtuous.

qopp5• 11 years ago

(Fails to make the claim that many (but not all) websites shutting ) -- Not the intended claim. Kants 1 deals with "universalizability principle" (See other comment)

Kant's 2nd Imperative -- Incorrect perspective. Analyzing whether adding ads to your site isn't the question we are analyzing here (that might also be unethical). Blocking ads is what we are looking at.

Utilitarianism -- Incorrect perspective. Analyzing whether adding ads to your site isn't the question we are analyzing here (that might also be unethical). Blocking ads is what we are looking at.

Rule -- Incorrect perspective. Analyzing whether adding ads to your site isn't the question we are analyzing here (that might also be unethical). Blocking ads is what we are looking at.

Social Contract -- -- Incorrect perspective. Analyzing whether adding ads to your site isn't the question we are analyzing here (that might also be unethical). Blocking ads is what we are looking at.

Virtue Ethics -- -- Incorrect perspective. Analyzing whether adding ads to your site isn't the question we are analyzing here (that might also be unethical). Blocking ads is what we are looking at.

Vintila• 11 years ago

Tangentially related but: I think the ethical way forward for ad-blocking extentions/software would be for it to self-identify [1]. That way if a website owner wants to block you or be more upfront about asking for donations, they don't have to resort to JS hacks to determine if you are using an adblocker. If they don't want me to see their site ad-free [2] I can either move on or decide that the content is worth a few ads.

[1] I only know the basics about the http protocol but I'm guessing something in the header could be added. [2] Which is completely within their rights as virtual "land owners".

Joeboy2• 11 years ago

Aren't we just going to start making websites that don't serve the content until they've served the ads?

adrusi• 11 years ago

Well no, because then the page would load way too slowly and users would click away and avoid the site in the future.

But suppose publishers did go this route. Adblocking software would just evolve to match it. They would fetch the ads from the server, possibly via a proxy, run their scripts, feeding bogus statistics to the trackers, and then not display the ads.

Users have the right to control their computers however they want. Trying to limit how the user can use their computer to have better control over your content is DRM. And, in fact, the only effective way of preventing adblockers would be to use traditional DRM software, since we have laws saying that users can't circumvent them.

Joeboy2• 11 years ago

Well no, because then the page would load way too slowly and users would click away and avoid the site in the future.

People (fairly) happily sit through 15 minutes of advertising an hour, if that's the only way to get the content they want.

Maybe adblocking software will keep up. It lags behind at the moment, so I'm a bit doubtful it will keep up in a future of increasingly sneaky ad delivery.

ovulator2• 11 years ago

Some do this already, you get a full page ad with a 5 second timer. Usually there is a "continue to site" in the upper right hand corner as well.

LukeB_UK• 11 years ago

I have a question for everyone advocating the use of ad blockers: Do you just do a blanket block for all ads, ban the big networks with the trackers along with the malware serving ones or something else?

I understand wanting to block the ones with the trackers for privacy reasons and the malware ones because nobody wants malware, but blanket blocking all ads tars everyone with the same brush.

Edit: Personally, I used to just blanket ban but I've recently moved towards having uBlock only block the malware ones and will manually block any spammy sites.

mikestew2• 11 years ago

Do you just do a blanket block for all ads, ban the big networks with the trackers along with the malware serving ones or something else?

Just because there might be a little fresh water in the cesspool doesn't mean I'm drinking from that tap. I block all of them. I'm not the one that pooped in the drinking water, so I'm not going to spend time sorting out the good from the bad.

romaniv• 11 years ago

Why do ads need to track you anyway? Doesn't it make more sense to customize ads based on the specific page you're looking at? It seems like this is rarely done. At least it doesn't seem that way most of the time.

eddd2• 11 years ago

The average cost for displaying and ad is 0.005$. I am assuming that 30% of that goes to publisher. Would you pay 0.005*0.3 = 0.0015$ per page view? I would.

tremon3• 11 years ago

Not without a restitution possibility. I will not pay anything for domain parking or site rehashing (sedo, quorra, expertsexchange), but I would pay for e.g. stackexchange or eurekalert.

eddd2• 11 years ago

But still, concept of paying the same (or even higher) rate for page view is not that crazy.

serve_yay• 11 years ago

A good writeup, though I don't agree with the statement about web devs and browser makers -- we read the web too, perhaps more than anyone! :)

It's possible to want to make the platform more powerful and not like some of the ways the power is being used.

mikestew2• 11 years ago

In my book, it's no longer a question of ethics, at least not directly. Way back when, we all agreed that if I look at some ads, a web site will let me view some content. Fair enough, it's a proven model and though I might not particularly like advertising, I'll trade some eyeballs for some content. Way back when, maybe it _was_ a question of ethics. But not anymore.

What "we" didn't agree to was being tracked all over the web, malware being shoved down the pipe via ads, ignoring "do not track", and all of the other nefarious things ad networks have been trying to get away with. Ethics have gone out the window, if ethics ever existed on the side of advertisers. So I run an ad blocker, and I make no apologies for doing so.

"What about the little guy who pays for hosting with ads?" You mean the "little guy" who has to scrape couch change to pay for the site that contains his latest post about artisanal mayonnaise and her latest gadget acquisition? Yeah, that $100/year for hosting is really going to break her, might not be able to get next year's Apple Watch on release day.

The big boys and girls like The Verge and what have you? Well, using The Verge as an example, they could go under tomorrow and IMO the world would be no poorer, given that they've kind of turned to poo in recent days. I blame the web advertising model for part of their deterioration, but that's a long digression. Specific examples aside, what about the sites I like? I pay money to the sites I like, specifically Ars Technica, NYT, and the Economist (and some others I'm sure I've forgotten about). Some, like Daring Fireball, use unobtrusive, single-image ads that I'll occasionally click on because they interest me, as well as a desire to reward a job well done.

But at the end of the day, the whole thing isn't my problem. If a few bad actors (or, in reality, a lot of bad actors) want to crawl into my machine and have their way, I'm blocking all of them. If there's collatoral damage because of some bad actors, it's not my job to fix it. I did my part and said, "no, you don't". Don't lay the onus on me to play nice, because you're berating the wrong party.

Balgair2• 11 years ago

http://www.artofmanliness.com/

This site is a great one to look at in terms of the ad ecosystem. The ads are (typically) not that bad and very targeted, and the content is fantastic to the sub-genre of people looking at it. The admin there uses, reviews, and runs give-aways for products he actually likes and wants to advocate for. True, the site is never going to make billions or even millioons, but it is enough for his needs.

The issue is that it takes a lot of work to build that with your community and ad partners. You have to make a lot of phone calls and write a lot of emails. You have to have consistently good and timely articles. Your content and audience have to be managed. Big ad firms do not have the margins to do this and are forced into blast ads.

Many other commenters here mention that the ad ecosystem is up for a change, much like pop-ups a decade ago. Perhaps a more curated environment is going to appear for a little while.

JackC• 11 years ago

So, just for example, loading artofmanliness.com allows 14 different third-party companies to track your browsing history. There's more to fixing this than just putting in work to manage ad inventory -- we need a system that doesn't depend on broadcasting private information to dozens of anonymous companies.

flavor83• 11 years ago

People subscribe to podcasts. Why couldn't people subscribe to his site (for a trivially small payment) and get access to one new article per week? (Or access to 50 articles for a set period of time.)

If the content is good, then people will be willing to pay for it. That's how books work. That's how, for example, wikipedia works. That's how newspapers work (although of course many have been failing).

drdaeman3• 11 years ago

I wonder, what opponents of ad-blocking think about email spam? Is it different if spam ads are injected by email client? (some email and even messaging apps do this -- not to the actual mailbox, of course, but to the displayed inbox contents)

arenaninja• 11 years ago

I whitelist ads on websites now, and I wish I could do the same on my phone. I think someone here or on reddit mentioned, and I had the same experience, trying out IE Edge and it being a decent browser, but as soon as the autoplaying video ads start, I downloaded FF, added uBlock and didn't look back. I use the same browser setup on my phone, and now and then I use some apps that emulate a browser (like Reddit is Fun or HN app), and the experience is wholly broken. I was reading an article and it was miserable - the fixed header for the site plus fixed footer for the ads took up about 1/3rd of the real estate, not to mention they were jittery and I couldn't focus because I'd scroll too far, then the ads would load where I was reading.

There's no ethics involved with me. Poor experience? Get blocked. Decent experience? Welcome to the whitelist

otis_inf• 11 years ago

Why whitelist ads at all? Ads are evil, the ad agencies track you, you run the risk of viruses / malware (like the recent 0-day exploit on a russian news site through ads), and there's zero gain for the person visiting the site.

joosters• 11 years ago

I understand the idea of whitelisting sites that you want to support, but even that is tricky when their ads are provided by a myriad of ad companies, clearinghouses and ad auction sites. So even if the original website is good and trustworthy, the ad networks that you let through could still ruin you.

bachmeier• 11 years ago

The current model can't work. The internet is becoming unusable due to ads. I am not sure how it will evolve, in terms of paying for content, but this is surely not the answer. I expect that we will be paying for content in some form. Perhaps a Spotify-type model where you pay a monthly fee and the fee is distributed to content providers.

On the issue of ethics, I'd say it's not ethical to spread out a small amount of content across six pages just to get more page views. It's bad for advertisers and for consumers.

seanconaty• 11 years ago

I'm glad someone wrote this article. I used to work at an ad network and for that reason, I've ethically chosen not to use an ad blocker. But I do agree that consolidation of tracking, over-abundance of ad spots and nasty performance have reached new lows that I've considered using one.

I think it would be nice if publishers just went back to <img> tags. Script tags and iframes and flash give to much power and result in lots of performance issues.

You can still track and consolidate with an img tag but the tracking is limited to what's in the http headers.

VLM5• 11 years ago

The sale of eight-track players for cars is a violation of my government given right to an eternal revenue stream as an owner of a radio station and I demand "someone" do something about those evil (evil because they cut into my constitutionally protected right to profit) evil eight-track players cutting into my ad revenue. Won't someone Please think of the children, and the top 40 music boy bands, oh and most importantly my profits? I don't care if technology has passed me by, I have a good given right to profit as my manifest destiny and I demand those meddling kids stop interfering with it. Or else I'll... well, or else, yeah that's it.

harryovers2• 11 years ago

People who support ad-blockers and support net neutrality don't seem to see the hypocrisy in their stance. If all net traffic should be treated equal then shouldn't advertising net traffic be treated with the same equality as content net traffic and not blocked by some software running somewhere on that network (even if it is running at your end of the network).

LesZedCB• 11 years ago

I'm not saying they can't serve it up. I'm saying I don't want to see it. I don't have control over the pipes as a last-mile provider, and if I did, I would let ad traffic through without being throttled. By that logic, running a firewall that blocks incoming ssh login requests from Asia should be a cognitive dissonance for us. I promise you it isn't.

npkarnik2• 11 years ago

I don't buy the hypocrisy. Net neutrality requires ISP infrastructure companies to not artificially restrict end-users choice for legal content. Especially as ISP companies become coupled with content companies (Comcast/NBC Universal) and generate anti-trust concerns regarding throttling their competitors in the content vertical.

An end-user running an ad-blocker has literally nothing to do with the appropriate role of the infrastructure provider (which many argue should be an unbiased plumbing system).

I do think there are some ethical concerns for running an ad-blocker, but I don't think this is one of them.

harryovers2• 11 years ago

Net neutrality is about all net traffic being treated equally. It is not just about the ISPs throttling what they want. Ad blockers do not treat all network traffic equally, they will block it if they think it is anything to do with an advertising company.

kstrauser• 11 years ago

It's hard to reply without sarcasm, but I'll try.

I 100% support the right of advertisers' content to be handled with the same diligence and priority as any other source on the Internet, without blocking or throttling at the ISP layer.

I 100% support my right to choose, filter, and select what legally-entitled content I download from the Internet, using whatever mechanism I see fit. If a page redirects me to a freely distributable copy of "Pixels", I'm not going to use my network resources to fetch it just because I can. That content doesn't interest me and I don't want it. Well, same with invasive advertising: I wish not to use my paid network resources to download it.

Your statement is the equivalent of "how can you support telephone companies acting as common carriers, but still think it's OK to hang up on telemarketers?" It's a non-sequitur.

faragon• 11 years ago

In my opinion, DRM will "fix" that in the future: browser plugins could not be able to identify those ads. So we could reach "Black Mirror"-like ads sooner o later. Brave new world...

minimuffins• 11 years ago

"Ads help us to be more informed about what products are available to us" (paraphrasing)

A kind public service! We should really be paying them, but the advertisers inform us for free!

Asking about the ethics of hiding ads seems a little like asking about the ethics of taking shelter during a carpet bombing attack.

I wish we would steer these discussions away from economics (Do the ads work? Are there better ways to monetize, do they stabilize or destabilize markets, etc) and toward culture. What is the cultural effect of saturating the internet (and the rest of the world for that matter) with ads? I am not the first person to ask...

Paul_S• 11 years ago

Ethics? You mean business. There is no ethical dilemma here, just a business model that might be not working as well as you'd like.

TheCoelacanth• 11 years ago

Any ethical framework in which it is unethical to take minimal steps to protect myself from psychological manipulation is an ethical framework that I have no interest in adhering to.

Animats• 11 years ago

The article is a promotion for the author's ad service: "For publishers who want to remain ad-supported, ethically and tastefully presented native advertising, such as sponsored posts in feeds and our community’s podcast ads, has proven to be more effective, more profitable, and less user-hostile by far compared to awful network <script> embeds."

"Sponsored posts" are in some ways worse than pop-ups. We can block pop-ups. Also note that "sponsored posts" that look like regular posts violate the FTC's rule that ads must be distinguished from non-ad content. [1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...

MBCook• 11 years ago

To my knowledge Marco doesn't run an ad service.

Also note that "sponsored posts" that look like regular posts violate the FTC's rule that ads must be distinguished from non-ad content.

I assume that's why he wrote "ethically and tastefully presented native advertising".

charles20132• 11 years ago

like OP, online ads (partially) put food on my table. but that's where the similarities stop: whereas OP mentions he's "never been tempted to run ad-blocking software before," i've blocked ads for years. and i don't just block ads myself, i advise my friends and family to block them, too.

what most of my friends and family don't know is web ads represent, arguably, one of the most dangerous aspects of modern web UX. ad servers exploited with 0-day vulns are one thing, but what worry me (and what i despise) most are dodgy ads that try to mimic/replicate some aspect of the publisher's web UI, and ads that fraudulently misrepresent other websites (e.g. fake facebook notification ads). many of these ads run on the biggest networks.

so instead of repeatedly telling my grandma that the buttons on certain sites aren't actually buttons for those sites, or that the banner with the facebook friend request isn't actually from facebook, i just install adblock on her browser.

i'm well aware of the irony and the double-standard. but safety first, right?

charles20132• 11 years ago

if i've written something that's factually wrong or misleading, offensive, or otherwise violates the comment guidelines, i would appreciate the opportunity to update my comment or delete it. and for that to happen i would need some feedback.

petercooper2• 11 years ago

The bigger issue, IMHO, is quality of advertising rather than its presence. People pay $15 for a theater ticket and sit through 10 minutes of ads, buy Vogue magazine and have 30%+ of pages be ads, buy The New York Times and be hit with ads all over the place, watch the Superbowl specifically to see the ads, and more. What people seem to really want are better ads or even ads that are entertainment or content in their own right (which is why native advertising has taken off).

touristtam• 11 years ago

Or a revamped pricing scheme for the website they might favor for their content. Seeing how the internet and computers allows for many more content to be published at a fraction of the cost of yesterday's system, there is a gap to be filled between the old pricing scheme of hard copies newspaper and all "free" content of the web.

$15 per month per website (like the NYT) seems a bit excessive when 10 or 20 other websites might offer the same news and at least a dozen direct competitors have similar offers. My father and his father might have had a subscription to a couple of newspaper/magazine, but I have the news at my finger tips.

PopeOfNope• 11 years ago

Forget about advertisers and site runners and economics and the rest of it. I run ad blocking software because ads are too good a delivery mechanism for malware.

gambiter• 11 years ago

I really truly don't understand why people this this is an ethical issue at all.

I personally own 12 personal domains, all for various content that I personally put up. Some blogs, some game servers, etc, etc. I don't charge for my content, and I don't advertise. I'm not in it to make money, I'm in it to share things with people, and I do it all out of my own wallet.

Why is there this assumption that all content needs to be subsidized by the readers? I mean, I get it... there's certainly value in compensating content producers for their time, and even allowing them to do it full time... but there is SO much content out there that is basically put up out of the goodness of the creators' hearts. Why can't we keep it that way?

abustamam• 11 years ago

I think one of the big problems is that most end-users don't know everything that goes into displaying an ad (myself included).

Yes, we can say, "I consent to viewing an ad in order to receive X free service" in the same way that we consent to viewing a commercial when we watch TV or listening to an ad on the radio.

However, in those latter two examples, the information is one-way. Those advertisers don't collect any personal information (outside of perhaps our viewing/listening location).

When it comes to website ads, most consumers do not know/realize that a) the advertisers are collecting a WEALTH of your personal information and b) that information comes at a cost of your bandwidth (which, for many mobile users, is limited). There are probably many other things that happen between the end-user and the third-party that I am not aware of.

Sure, they may consent to viewing a free ad, but most of them do NOT consent to collection of information nor increased usage of bandwidth.

I am happy that many websites are now (at least trying to) put a visible cookie privacy policy, but I think even those little policies are getting banner blindness.

The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

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