Ethical Adblocking

http://noscope.com/2015/09/ethical-adblocking/

by westi • 11 years ago

28 91 11 years ago

I'd like to see a whitelist option happen, like AdBlock currently does - but more transparent. Ad networks/providers that have shown themselves to be trustworthy, secure, compact and not-annoying ought to be able to show me ads - plain ads that I can scroll past, nothing that pops up, or stick around while I scroll - while the egregious offenders ought to be blacklisted until they go out of business.

hullo5• 11 years ago

Well, yes, but the thing is while we care, and might want to craft a whitelist or put consideration into our choices, the majority of folks are going to search for ad blocker, choose the first one, and start enjoying the web without ads. Then they're going to wonder why they never did it on desktop? And then they're going to do it on the desktop. The genie, once out of the bottle, will not choose to return.

pavel_lishin2• 11 years ago

Oh, in my perfect world, while end-users would be able to modify the list, it would ship with one by default. 99% of users wouldn't know or care it was even there.

jbob2000• 11 years ago

Ethical Adblocking? Is adblocking a moral issue now? We're going to put it up there with assisted suicide and abortion? Is it really that life or death?

bediger4000• 11 years ago

I'm a stakeholder here, so let me just say that ad blocking is NOT an ethical issue: it's my hardware, and I get to decide what to run on it or not. End of story because property rights.

There's a collision coming between the Kopyright Krazies and the Anti-Ad-Blockers. They want two different things. Or maybe not, maybe there will be an alliance to eliminate control over the computers that you and I own. Anti-Ad-Blockers: your computer must run what I want it to run. Kopyright Krazies: your commputer must not run what I don't want it to run. That's a bullshit situation, by the way.

88e282102ae2e5b• 11 years ago

"Ethical" doesn't always imply "extremely important". It's not ethical to cheat on a test, and it too fails the "assisted suicide and abortion" test of importance.

wahsd• 11 years ago

I have a feeling we have surpassed the opportunity for the industry to appeal to ethical ad blocking. I for one even think ads can play a role in society to disperse information, but hell, every time I try to both use the unintrusive white lists or even dare to totally disable blockers it triggers massive rage.

slight• 11 years ago

This site has a problematic design.. I couldn't see anything but a logo and a searchbox on my laptop (720p-ish).

xkcd-sucks• 11 years ago

Have you tried disabling your adblocker?

anc842• 11 years ago

She meant the initial state of the site with seems to fill the whole screen with "not the article".

dublinben• 11 years ago

It's not just you, there's a massive header above the article. You'll have to scroll down to actually read anything.

Zikes• 11 years ago

I'll take Mister Gruber's dare: it's my device, it's my bandwidth, and they're my eyeballs.

eli4• 11 years ago

I can't really speak for him, but I think "by default" is an important part of that dare. That the people who are complaining about ads are mostly not bothered by Deck ads, but Deck ads are blocked by default along with far more obnoxious ads.

srdev5• 11 years ago

Once the adblocker is installed, once web-ads have been poisoned by years of bad practices, ads aren’t coming back.

That's really the crux of the matter. Advertisers and the sites using them had a chance to show us that they could do this in a responsible manner that took user experience into consideration. They demonstrated that they would engage in as much user-hostile advertising as they could get away with. So my ad-blocker went from having a carefully curated whitelist to a blanket banning with no exceptions. They had their chance and they blew it.

hollerith• 11 years ago

If I was a responsible advertiser over the last 20 years, I had absolutely no chance to prevent irresponsible people from becoming member of the group you refer to as "advertisers" -- and, at least in the US, if I tried I would probably run afoul of anti-trust or other laws -- so it does not make much sense to say that I "had my chance".

There are good arguments for ad blockers, but treating a collection of independent market participants as if they were a single person or a coherent group able to enforce norms on its members is not one.

I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.)

ADDED. Over the 20 years since the start of advertising on the internet, the actors with the best chance to have headed off the current situation were the maintainers of the popular web browsers, but saying that they had their chance does not help shift the moral high ground from responsible advertisers to users of ad blockers.

srdev5• 11 years ago

From my perspective as a user, it doesn't matter. If the ad networks and their customers are unable to enforce standards on their advertisers, then I have no choice but to block them. Making it my responsibility is not an option.

Its not possible to enforce compliance with some sort of ethical standards industry-wide, but it is possible to at least encourage it, especially if you are a large player like Facebook or Google. From my perspective, they don't even appear to be trying.

I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.)

Its not clear to me that this is the case. Simply enforcing standards on ads is not the same as limiting competition. Its an issue of a corporation deciding to not carry your content because it does not pass some presumably published and neutral guidelines. At the very least, it is not as clear-cut as you are making it sound.

onion2k• 11 years ago

Except the ads will come back. There'll be an arms race between ad tech companies and ad blocking companies. The amount of money that ad delivery generates means there will always be people working on new ways to put them in websites, and ad blocking companies will only ever be able to play catch up.

srdev5• 11 years ago

My experience is that the blockers have done a very good job of keeping up with these tactics, so I'm not particularly worried on this front. There is still viral marketing and paid PR pieces disguised as legitimate content, however, but not much can be done about that and it doesn't impact me as much as traditional advertising.

matthewmacleod• 11 years ago

The problem is that the well was poisoned by bad actors, to the detriment of others.

I've worked on some sites that had adverts on them over the years. They were always pretty simple and respectful – generally no third-party tracking, no obnoxious flash popovers or horrible spammy 'one top tip that doctors hate' nonsense. Or sometime's Google's text ads, which has the downside of tracking but are still pretty gentle.

I fought pretty hard for this in most cases – other parties would rather have trackers from dozens of domains, third-party adservers, interstitial advertising and so on. But it's not like the majority of ad-blocking users care about allowing 'good' adverts to thrive – they'll understandably just turn it on and block everything. Before you know it, you've achieved nothing except lower revenue and a vague sense of having done the right thing. It's a race to the bottom.

The thing is, I'm now a dedicated user of ad-blocking software. And I didn't realise how awful using the web has become until I turned it off for a bit – it's really very unpleasant browsing without adblocking, with slow-loading sites, and obnoxious flashing adverts, and overlays and popovers…

I have nothing against advertising on the web, or even things like Google Analytics. But I hit a website a few weeks ago that had no fewer than sixty tracking and advertising scripts. It's out of control.

Reedx• 11 years ago

Well, I have to agree that advertisers and a lot of sites have put us in a bad spot. Sites like Wikia drive me nuts because they've gone so overboard with ads that they all but force people to find a solution.

But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts?

I run a fairly bandwidth heavy site (MobyGames) and really try to find a reasonable balancing point. In fact the ads don't even cover hosting costs. I decline ad networks that do real time ad bidding or videos or lots of tracking scripts. So I'm really curious if you and others would consider a site like this to still not be whitelistable? If not, at what point would you consider it to be?

srdev5• 11 years ago

But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts?

To be totally honest? Probably.

I'd be inclined to whitelist sites that curate their ads or ad networks such that

1) Ads are small and delivered fast 2) Ads do not track users 3) Ads never deliver malware ever. 4) Content is not split or otherwise organized to enhance ad views over readability. 5) Ads do not popup, popover, popunder. 6) No door-in-face to advertise your iOS/Android app.

and so on and so forth.

The issue here is that you first have to establish that you won't do these things, then I have to trust that you actually keep your word and will continue to avoid bad ads indefinitely into the future. That is, you won't change your mind when revenue decreases. Then I have to extend that same trust to your ad network. I have to trust that they won't "slip up" while you're not watching.

And now I have to do that for all the sites that I visit that I may want to whitelist.

Thats not really tractable. That trust requires a lot of research on my part or blind faith. And the ad network thing is also a sticking point, because ad networks that have seemingly worked in good faith in the past have become user-hostile when they became larger or had to compete (i.e. Google).

wanderfowl6• 11 years ago

There was a time when the industry could have prevented the rise of widespread adblocking with "ethical advertising", which wasn't user-hostile, risky, creepy, intrusive, tracking, bandwidth and power heavy and didn't trash the UX of the sites. But, they didn't.

So, now, the ad industry trying to talk to the rest of the world about the ethics of blocking ads is like the drunk uncle who puked on last year's Thanksgiving Turkey talking to the family about the "ethics" of not inviting him this year. Sure, it's a sad situation, but you probably should've thought about that before you puked on the turkey.

If the ad guys spend a few years ensuring that advertisting is safe, lightweight, unobtrusive, non-creepy, and fast, maybe we'll invite you back to the party someday, and start to consider web advertising less of a threat-to-be-blocked.

But for now, we're not taking that risk. Sorry guys, but you've earned it.

eli4• 11 years ago

If the ad guys spend a few years ensuring that advertisting is safe, lightweight, unobtrusive, non-creepy, and fast,...

Isn't that the point Gruber was making his Deck ads? Or do you not think those qualify?

There is no monolithic "ad industry" ... it's a bunch of people and companies with different methods and objectives and values.

wanderfowl6• 11 years ago

This is a perfect case for disruption. Make a company whose ads are so unobtrusive, so free of tracking, so non-creepy, and so fast that I would actually want to unblock them specifically. Gruber's on that, which is great, but 99% of the rest of the ad industry is full of everything wrong with it, and there's no guarantees Gruber's service won't start running malware tomorrow.

If there's a door open to a room that's filled with 9900 assholes and 100 decent people, even though it's not fair to the 100, it's still a good idea to shut the door. Similarly, right now, the best bet is to set your adblockers in the least permissive way possible.

EDIT: Also, with regards to the decentralized "ad industry", look at what happened in the spam/commercial email industry. The bad companies have been chased out, and the good ones are well regulated. That was many disparate groups, but along with improvements in spam blocking, they've proved themselves ready to sit at the adults table. Advertisers now have a chance to do the same, and Adblock will help us keep them honest.

lotharbot• 11 years ago

I resisted using an adblocker for years. Finally installed ABP about 6 months ago, when a handful of sites I was reading started in with the double-underline-word ads and some of them would trigger malware warnings on mouseover.

"Threat to be blocked" is exactly right.

mc32• 11 years ago

It all went downhill starting with the X10 camera pop up campaign. People noticed the success and since, underhandedness has prevailed.

Now it's simply become a tragedy of the commons. Browsers of the web employ blockers die to the annoyance of shortsighted advertising tactics, in turn, advertisers, trying to extract more revenue from the remaining bare browsers of the web, utilize even more questionable tactics resulting in more people deciding to use ad blockers...

No one is winning this one.

javery3• 11 years ago

There are many sites who have taken this approach. The Deck is a great example. Also StackOverflow, reddit, etc.

vinceguidry• 11 years ago

The frontier is run by strongmen, as it gets settled, you need stronger rulers. But because there's not enough there to interest the big players back home to bring in infrastructure and big-city politics, these services wind up being provided by the mob, autonomous players far enough away from civilization to avoid the law, strong enough to enforce their vision, even on the strongmen.

As the frontier gets more and more settled, the big players gradually make their way in. Civilization is huge and it takes time to build. The big players have to work with the old strongmen because they don't have enough boots on the ground yet to enforce order.

That's the position Apple is in right now with their content-blocking API. Ad blocking companies are the mob running the web content frontier towns, the ad companies are all the ruffians trying to make a quick buck. Apple is starting to build railroads and bank branches and hotels and courthouses and cultivate property developers, but the mob is still there and they have to be dealt with, otherwise the problem the mob solved is going to bite them in the ass.

anc842• 11 years ago

There is no mention of third-party tracking in this which to me is an instant criteria for unethical treatment of your users.

javery3• 11 years ago

Here are my thoughts from the ad industry side:

http://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/ad-blocking-will...

I think there is a chance to make it better, ad blocking is not yet maintsteam and I think there is a room for a blockers that will only block "bad" ads.

wanderfowl6• 11 years ago

This is well and good, but there's a trust issue. Last time we let you guys have free reign, you created a user-hostile hellscape of tracking and intrusive ads, and sold ads to the highest malware-pushingest bidder.

After you guys messed the whole thing up so badly the first time, why would we want to re-open the doors at all? "It's OK guys, this time we'll be good for realsies!" just doesn't cut it.

As much as I feel for the people involved, I just don't see a compelling reason for your industry to be given a second chance and continue existing at anywhere near its current scale.

An evolution of business models away from web advertising is what we need to bet on, rather than a pinky-swear from the people who got us into this mess in the first place.

javery3• 11 years ago

I definitely understand that perspective - and to be clear there are good ad providers out there, we just haven't been winning the war in our own industry.

I don't think a pinky swear would work either, but I think if the browsers can enforce better standards we would be able to move forward. Of course the problem there is that the largest advertising company in the world owns the most popular browser in the world.

An ad blocker that only blocks bad advertising would be a good way to encourage this.

I wish a form of micro-payments or subscription would work, but most publishers have found little luck with this. (look at all the people here who complain about a paywalled link, or find a way around it)

dil8• 11 years ago

Ethical adblocking = Blocking all ads

vlucas7• 11 years ago

I really don't get this moral argument at all. Websites don't have the right to use 5x my already severely limited mobile bandwidth on pure crap that I don't need. They have the right to put trackers and crap ads on their page, sure - but I also have the right to block them.

* TV channels have the right to put annoying ads in, but I have the right to mute them, look away, change the channel, skip them if previously recorded, etc.

* Movies have the right to insert pre-roll ads and previews, but I have the right to skip them or come to a movie 15 minutes later than listed showtime to ensure I miss them.

* Newspapers and magazines have the right to put ads in, but I have the right to cut them out or fold the page over so I don't have to look at them while reading the article.

No amount of these shaky moral arguments are going to make me change my mind about intrusive advertising and tracking. There is no contract or promise between me and the website that I am visiting that I will be captive to their ads or behavior tracking, implied or otherwise - just like in any other other media format. People absolutely have the right to block them, and they absolutely have the right to install software that helps improve their privacy.

kllrnohj• 11 years ago

That's because you're talking about "rights" not "morals".

I have the right to call you an asshole but it wouldn't be moral. Mods have the right to ban everyone with ideas they don't like but it wouldn't be moral.

You do have the right to demand something from someone for free. You do have the right to go to every store in the city and empty every "take a penny leave a penny" tray. But having the right to do it and it being moral are very, very different things.

vlucas7• 11 years ago

But I am not making any demands at all. Publishers are offering their content for free, and I sometimes take them up on their offer and read it. It's an offer that started with the publisher, not a demand that came from me.

Are you saying it is moral for publishers to track my usage behavior, and to force me to watch any ad they want me to?

zamalek• 11 years ago

The moral issue is that the websites need to pay their bills. However, I'm in agreement with you for a far simpler reason:

If websites had cared about "ethical advertising" in the first place we probably wouldn't have had ad blockers.

We've been dealing with "unethical advertising" since, what, 1995? I'll disable my ad blocker in 20 years.

hullo5• 11 years ago

The moral argument isn't presented in the piece, so it's not really fair to ascribe it to the author. He's saying it doesn't matter. They're making a "poisoned well" argument that there will be no functional divide between "good" and "bad" ads.

vlucas7• 11 years ago

The moral argument is indeed presented in this piece with the quote and inclusion of John Gruber's tweet.

Guthur• 11 years ago

Caveat Emptor: I run adblocking.

Ad blocking is not unethical; in most cases there is no agreement from the provider of the website and the consumer to say that the consumer must watch the adverts, it's just not there.

It is not the adblockers fault that the websites business model is dependent on ad revenue that's the provider's decision. If the lose of web content happens because of adblocking it's still not the adblockers responsibility, there was no agreement.

logfromblammo• 11 years ago

Ethical ad-blocking is to block any and all ads that you don't want to receive.

Shouldn't we be discussing the limits of ethical advertising?

mrob• 11 years ago

The only ethical advertising is a factual text description and a price. Computer Shopper magazine used to be full of this.

Any more advanced advertising is specifically designed to undermine human rationality. It's an act of aggression similar to forcibly drugging people.

rip747• 11 years ago

I block ads for one reason only: I don't want malware.. period.. the end.

The day ad companies actually have a conscience and won't sell to malware authors, is the day i'll stop blocking their ads.

forgetsusername2• 11 years ago

"I think if your Safari Content Blocker blocks The Deck by default, it’s wrong. I dare you to defend it."

Hilarious. Okay:

I decide what comes up my pipe, into my house, and appears on my screen; opt-in. If you have a problem with me "free-loading", then put your content behind a paywall and I'll decide if it's worth my money.

hullo5• 11 years ago

Gruber isn't presenting his argument (such as a tweet so simple could be considered an argument) to end consumers - he's attempting to use his influence on (iOS) mobile developers who are creating content blockers - and this is an audience he does have a fair amount of influence on. But again, the genie once escaping the bottle will have chosen to smash it, not to return.

nattaylor• 11 years ago

Let's assume the market isn't in a place where most sites can put up paywalls, since users will just turn to free alternatives. This is debatable, but not my point.

If the site had an "opt-in to ads" modal (which set a cookie or something,) would you ever accept?

Spivak• 11 years ago

since users will just turn to free alternatives

If there are completely free alternatives which are an acceptable replacement how are you going to compete in the first place?

I would never accept that opt-in for an ever growing list of reasons but I'm also the person who donates to sites I like.

forgetsusername2• 11 years ago

If the site had an "opt-in to ads" modal (which set a cookie or something,) would you ever accept?

No. Maybe I'm jaded from years and years of terrible, manipulative advertising on all forms of media, but no.

But that's no reason to require "opt-out".

AdmiralAsshat• 11 years ago

A webcomic from twelve years ago summarized my feeling on ad tracking: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/19

Of course back then we called it "spyware," but apparently now it's the more consumer-friendly "interest-based acquisition and aggregation you tacitly agreed to when you decided to visit our website."

s_kilk• 11 years ago

Nope, it's all going in a black hole, no exceptions.

JulianMorrison2• 11 years ago

Ethical adblocking is all of them gone forever.

I want advertising to cease to exist.

wanderfowl6• 11 years ago

That's one of the problems I have in this debate. "How can we have the best advertising possible?" includes the premise "We should have advertising", which is probably not true, for the very best values of society.

It's one way to monetize the world, but not the only way, I hope desperately that I see a day when ad companies are remembered like telegraph companies.

cbd1984• 11 years ago

Here's an interesting part I'm going to use to illustrate a larger point:

whether those services are free through ads or are entirely paid.

It isn't this simple. I pay for a newspaper, I still get ads. The fact the newsstand price is too low for them to give it to me ad-free isn't really up to me; they don't offer an ad-free option, even at a higher price. Magazines are the same way. So are a lot of premium pay TV channels. So's SiriusXM.

My point is, I can't trust them to not run ads. Even if I'm paying them directly, they still have the option to shove ads down my eye-holes. I can't effectively block ads anywhere but online, so that's what I do.

Everywhere else, regardless of what I pay, I still get ads.

irl_zebra• 11 years ago

I should be able to choose what I see on my computer, especially when I'm paying for bandwidth. But this has already been said.

What I find laughable is the author's warning at the end that essentially boils down to: If you keep blocking ads, the alternative will be much worse, so you better not block ads...or else!

"What’s more likely is that web ads are going to get way worse, adblocking is going to go way up, and at some point in this arms race, after the death of many a media company, eventually some will indeed have adapted. The big question is whether you’ll like the alternatives. It can be apps. It can be inside Apple’s Newsstand (featuring unblockable ads). It can be inside Facebooks instant articles. It can be subversive native ads. It can be paywalls. Think in-app purchases: 'Pay $1 for this article, or pay by watching a video.'"

manicdee• 11 years ago

Unblockable ads, using Apple's Newsstand delivery vehicle?

How long will that last before Apple is kicking the content provider's arse to kingdom come?

lostcolony• 11 years ago

What ads blockers and ad companies should do is work to create an opt in whitelist, that is socially decided upon by the blockers' users.

That is, allow an opt in to use a socially decided upon whitelist, along with your personal whitelist. As users allow ads on certain sites, let them also indicate "this ad should be shown to everyone; it's not annoying/it's acceptable enough to allow". If enough users do that, allow it to be shown. If that triggers a large enough backlash amongst users, remove it from the whitelist, and prevent it from being re-added to the whitelist (though individuals can still whitelist it individually).

That way, non-obtrusive, background ads can be slowly turned on for those who opt in to allow it. If someone tries to engineer the whitelisting of an ad that people find objectionable, it will be removed by all the people re-blocking it. If a user finds the ads being allowed, in total, are too irritating, they can remove the social whitelist entirely. And those who simply want no ads need not opt in to the whitelist.

sleepychu• 11 years ago

I'll never forget a conversation I had with one of Amazon's devs about real-time ad bidding.

When you load(possibly -ed not sure if this is still the case) a page Google says to it's advertisers "Ok, how much will you pay for an advert to be served to this id" and they had some tiny number of ms to respond based on the data they'd collected about that user.

The article author rejects that mass adoption of adblocking will cause the advertising industry to come back with a better deal that doesn't include egregious privacy invasion and that it will in fact just kill small media companies relying on advertising revenue. The two are not mutually exclusive, it's a shame that some companies will inevitably fall through the gap but as others have pointed out this doesn't create a moral obligation to you to accept the current 'deal' ad companies are offering. Don't fall for this crap, mass surveillance by advertisers must die.

imgabe2• 11 years ago

This is not an ethical issue. You don't get to just send whatever information you want to my computer because you paid some underemployed 20-something 50 bucks to slap together a listicle.

If publishers want people to look at ads, then provide useful, non-obnoxious ads. I have precisely two sites whitelisted in adblock, Penny Arcade and Reddit. Both are known for screening their ads to be unobtrusive and relevant to their audience.

josefresco• 11 years ago

Charging for ads based on impressions or views keeps the costs high, the industry inflated and ad people safe in their jobs. If the ads were tied to actions (clicks, sales etc.) the costs would plummet and many ad people would lose their jobs.

It's one thing to say "Your ad was viewed 10,000 times" and another to say "Your ad got 100 clicks".

mariusz79• 11 years ago

There is too much crappy content (including this comment) on the web anyway. If the websites can't find another revenue stream .... too bad. I won't miss them.

markyc• 11 years ago

you can watch street performers for an hour and then leave without leaving a cent. it's perfectly legal, but not cool

Ethical Adblocking

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