What we break when we fix ad blocking

http://www.tonyhaile.com/2015/09/18/what-we-break-when-we-fix-for-ad-blocking/

by arctictony • 11 years ago

114 216 11 years ago

larrik• 11 years ago

Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers/publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire.

It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through constantly.

lmm• 11 years ago

Oh but it is. The publishers went to the networks because they paid better, and never wondered where they were getting their advantages from.

click1702• 11 years ago

Couldn't agree more. The fault for the state of web advertising these days lies squarely on advertising networks that do not vet their content.

For a long time I used but did not recommend adblock to my trogladite friends and family. Sadly its gotten so bad that I've begun installing it on their machines on their behalf when they ask me for help with their computer because ad blockers are today what antivirus was 10 years ago. They're how you keep yourself safe online.

Adblock usage won't change until the networks do.

shostack• 11 years ago

Criminals? Really?

kalleboo• 11 years ago

I think he's referring to the people distributing malware though ad networks.

ISL2• 11 years ago

I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use.

If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.

TallGuyShort• 11 years ago

Being willing to pay is not a guarantee you can remain ad-free. Showing ads to paying users will still often be seen as a way to increase revenue further, unless the company has made a lifetime guarantee to the contrary. I pay for Netflix. I would even be willing to pay more for Netflix. But then they started showing ads before content they created.

bittercynic2• 11 years ago

I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) Other awesome ad-free content is created to promote retail within the same company, like sparkfun.com. It seems to me the ease of monetization with ad-networks drive ultra-low quality content like about.com, though even I must admit that there are also good sites out there that are supported by ads.

edit: I just discovered that dr-iguana.com does have ads. I stick by my assertion that there is a lot of great content out there made strictly as a hobby, though.

munificent• 11 years ago

I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.)

I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source.

I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field.

It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works.

When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how few novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book.

There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people observing the poor from a distance. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell.

You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life.

The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness.

This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story.

The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems causing increased economic disparity.

If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, we need to hear their stories. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them.

[1] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ [2]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

austenallred2• 11 years ago

Google Contributor is terrible. Not because it doesn't work, but because it still leaves big green gaps where the ads were saying, "Thank you for using contributor!"

Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were.

ISL2• 11 years ago

You can configure it to render transparent images, so you see the site's background. Hit the 'gear' in the upper right of the Contributor site, and the options are neutral-grey, transparent, cats, and 'soft focus'.

thescriptkiddie2• 11 years ago

Here's an idea: Send bitcoin addresses in the HTTP headers.

People could voluntarily install a browser plugin that watches for addresses and sends money. Perhaps the donation could vary by time spent on the page (monitoring for activity to accommodate leaving stuff open), or perhaps it could be a fixed sum per pageview (with a cooldown to discourage blogspam). In exchange, servers could withhold ads.

jacques_chester• 11 years ago

Contributor is almost the correct model, but the wrong company. It directly cannibalises the revenue stream that Google totally relies on: advertising.

That's why they made it a sliding scale, instead of a fixed no-ads-ever package.

And I expect that the more "successful" it is, the more watered down it will become. Like cable TV: the promise was "no ads". Then there were ads.

jordigh3• 11 years ago

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying.

It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.

More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

MBCook• 11 years ago

The Verge has a poll going today asking if you use an ad blocker:

"Yes, I want free content and I'll pay the ad blockers" and "No, I want free content and I'll pay the publisher through ads".

I'm with you. I didn't use an ad blocker for years. Then I installed a flash blocker because it kept my computer from trying to melt it's self and play video ads while I was trying to read.

Then we started to get so many ads that prevented me from reading content (the link-hover pop-ups, pop-ups that appear after the content has been loaded for 30s, ads that use JS to move parts of the page around) I started using one on the desktop just so I could try to read sites.

In the last year I've been using my phone/tablet a lot more. The experience has been DREADFUL because of ads. They take up most of the screen, slow loading to a crawl, kick other pages out of memory, make scrolling jittery, etc.

I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. If the ads are relatively unobtrusive (i.e. not covering up content, not flashing, etc.) they're OK with me. I don't mind banners in between paragraphs of a story I'm reading.

But if I can't read your site because of your ads, you're not helping yourself. The creepiness of trackers only ads to all the other problems.

The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker.

(I also subscribe to sites I really like, which only seems fair).

hyperbovine• 11 years ago

I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles.

FYI, I had the pleasure of installing an ad-blocker (in the spirit of no advertising, I will not mention which one) on my iPad this morning. It lets me turn off scripts and images. The device now responds like something out of Star Trek. Highly, highly recommended if you just care about reading words on the screen.

djur• 11 years ago

Why does one of those responses assume that you have to pay for an ad blocker? I've never heard of such a thing.

greggman2• 11 years ago

I just mostly avoid sites with crappy ads. If I go to a site with a non skippable video ad I just close the tab. It wasn't that important to begin with. That includes YouTube sometimes. Same with other types of annoying ads. No need for an ad blocker for me so far.

DavideNL• 11 years ago

The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker.

I agree... a funny example: https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/611482506400014336

noobie• 11 years ago

I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.

It's not the the irrelevant parties that bother me, it's the targeted ads based on my history that do!

rm9992• 11 years ago

everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible.

I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.

Let's be honest here: this debate for most people is a fully practical one about speed, security, aesthetics, etc. Most people I know are fine with unobtrusive advertising and enjoy the benefits it's provided them up to now. But the state of the digital advertising world has been getting worse and worse for everyone (including the advertisers, btw), and ad blockers have been making that glaringly obvious. What we're seeing is the side effect of a broken industry, not a pushback against consumerism.

civilian• 11 years ago

But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there.

Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.

6d0debc071• 11 years ago

I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.

There's been plenty of push-back against sales people: Do not call lists, blacklists on phones of late, swearing at the people down the telephone, 'no callers' signs and rather unpleasant greetings, 'No thank you' yelled at the people trying to accost you in the streets, the inability to get to a decision maker without an inside line in b2b sales.

And billboards? Well, they're more an American thing than something I see much of, there are three I can think of in a few miles of where I live, all fairly well hidden and definitely not things that you'd spend time looking at unless you were trying to.

Adverts on TV? Let's not pretend they weren't annoying, or that we didn't skip over them in recordings whenever we could. They were just an unfortunate cost of doing business that there wasn't a way around bar sighing and leaving the room to do something else for a few minutes. At least for myself, they were one of the big things that finally decreased the quality of programming to a point where it wasn't worth the bother of owning a TV. 15-20 minutes between 5 minute adverts? I think I'll just buy the DVD....

Web advertising is more like the salesmen than the other things, mind. Things that attempt to force your attention to them and try to interact with your computer in various undesirable ways.... If it was just a .JPEG at the top of every page I doubt anyone would give them five minutes thought one way or the other.

bradleyjg2• 11 years ago

If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical.

I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

People are, it's called Patreon.

Which would be a good model, too, for "free but we need our salary paid" content.

tertius• 11 years ago

Point me to an AUP that would make your music to article an apples to apples comparison and I may listen.

Nadya• 11 years ago

All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one

Most people now pay for their music through iTunes, easily-accessible YouTube channels, Patreon, or Satellite XM radio.

So I'd say they found new models - and they're working.

The issue with music was a different one (accessibility/distribution) and not a privacy-concerned one. So it doesn't quite fit. But they were able to change their business model to accommodate.

Now it's "change your business model or die." for another industry.

Erik816• 11 years ago

I can't agree with you that blocking adds on a webpage is unethical. I am accessing a website through a web browser that has the ability to modify the page before it is presented to me. How I choose to view the content that is made available on the open web is my business. If content producers don't want to make their content available in a format where ads can be blocked, they can simply stop doing so.

PhasmaFelis3• 11 years ago

If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical.

What you're saying here is that, if you don't like advertising, your only ethical option is to never use the Web again. (Well, I suppose I can read the comments on Hacker News. None of the articles, though.) That is not reasonable. I have actually gone out of my way to configure my adblocker to un-block as many inoffensive ad providers as possible, because I want to support the sites I use, but when those sites are knowingly degrading not just my browsing experience but the functioning of my computer, measures need to be taken.

I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?

Because there weren't any new models yet. Which is why the downloaders wanted people to come up with one.

Khaine2• 11 years ago

Do you watch ads when they are on the TV, you know to support the content, or do you go to the bathroom, surf the web etc?

Why is it suddenly different when its the web?

lazyjones• 11 years ago

It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need.

That's probably the most common reason. I doubt people actually click on annoying ads in significant numbers these days. Perhaps publishers could settle for tracking only, preferably server-side without 3rd parties involved, thereby removing the most common motivation for ad blocking? Tracking data could then be sold to e-commerce sites for retargeting based on reading habits. Everyone wins, especially if privacy-conscious users can opt out of this kind of tracking.

mocookie• 11 years ago

Server-side tracking would be even harder to opt out of than the current setup.. the server could choose to not send you the article if you don't send it what it wants (ie proof of your identity, your age/address/name, etc)

Mz8• 11 years ago

More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

Yet, you are consuming someone else's writing as a minimum. I have taken ads off most of my websites and added a tipping option. I hope that turns out to be successful. I currently don't get enough traffic for it to support me outright. Most people on the web find that donate buttons do little or nothing. They turn to ads because it is a way to get paid.

What are you doing to try to solve the problem of monetizing the web some way other than ads? If you aren't doing anything to try to promote another monetization strategy, then you are basically promoting slavery in that you are expecting people to make the web happen without being paid for it. You are expecting people to work for free. Currently, many people do work for free, some of them in hopes that it will lead to money at some point. Some of them are quite bitter about it. (Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287)

I have been online about 17 years. I have steadily watched good, free content disappear and get replaced by something that helped pay the bills for the content providers. I also loathe consumerism. I live a spartan life and I expect to continue doing so. But the Internet is important to me and it needs to be monetized somehow.

I am not trying to be disrespectful to you and I apologize if it at all sounds that way. It is easy to say what we do not like about what we currently have. It is much harder to find a viable alternative. I don't know how else to start that dialogue and I think it is extremely important that it get started.

TheCoelacanth• 11 years ago

It's not slavery; it's volunteerism. No one is forced to produce content for the web.

Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.

gglitch• 11 years ago

How about, as a start, an ad industry that voluntarily and transparently (e.g, using open source software and business contracts) restricts itself to displaying ads that (a) do not directly impinge upon the browsing/reading experience, and (b) do not track?

JupiterMoon5• 11 years ago

Don't writers of most blogs make more money from a mixture of native advertising and affiliate links anyway?

freshhawk• 11 years ago

And when you add the spyware/malware issues along with a general stance of "I am always allowed to control what my computer does for me" it strikes me as textbook motivated reasoning to frame things as the author has.

It can get outright comical, part of this argument reads to me as a threat: "If you people don't start letting me run code that works against your interests in your browser we will start doing even more unethical stuff to get money".

I don't even disagree that the bad actors will get worse if their business model continues to fail. I just don't see that appeasement is a good solution in any way. And I just don't believe that anyone would find this convincing unless their livelihood depending on them believing it.

sambrand4• 11 years ago

I respect your ideals. And I'd love to hear about how you plan to move the Internet towards Utopia. But I'm not sure consuming without paying (attention to ads) is really the most respectful or effective way to get there.

jordigh3• 11 years ago

Google contributor seems like a good plan.

x5n1• 11 years ago

You just hate the economy and want everyone to be unemployed.

loco5niner2• 11 years ago

Why does the economy have to be based on trying to get people to buy things they don't need? I think he has a good point about consumerist society.

ThomPete• 11 years ago

The problem fundamentally really is that too many people are trying to say the same thing and so it becomes a commodity that can only be countered by attracting huge number of visitors to your specific site and bombard them with adds.

Then you look at something like Maria Popovos www.brainpickings.org and you realize that there are other ways to build a business around content without it being advertizing centric.

But sure if you are in competition with 3000 other media outlets all trying to say the same about the same 5 subjects then this is the result.

PhasmaFelis3• 11 years ago

There has to be a better way to finance the web

There is not. There are, however, many even worse ways to finance the web, as the article says.

Money has to come from somewhere. Either you the reader pay for content--which users have proven overwhelmingly unwilling to do--or your advertising views pay for content. I don't like it either, but polite, non-disruptive ads are the best possible solution. We need to push content and advertising provides to insult on those and only those.

dmayle• 11 years ago

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms.

As it turns out, you're guilty of the same thing everyone else is, because you've absolutely missed the point of enabling ad blockers on iPhone

For Apple, it serves two purposes, both of which are hugely anti-competitive. They'll most likely get away with it, due to the fact that they have a minority share of the global smartphone market, but the effect on the marketplace will be drastic.

1) This is an attack on the open web. No matter what anyone says about minority report advertising, ad-supported content is a boon to the public good in that it encourages more sharing and more open sharing of information. Yes, you can go too far, but ad-blockers drastically change the market dynamic. Even the conscientious advertiser is punished by the extremes, which means that the market can not respond to user preferences for ads. In the app store, no such technology will exist, and as such it drives content creators into the walled garden of eden of monetization. There, the market will adapt, and you will be stuck with ads no matter what your preference is, and will have to support ads to the same level as the average user.

2) This is an attack on Google, in many ways. On the one hand it gives Apple an above-average position in the case of their ad network when on their platform (lock-in), on the other hand by starving the open web, they are ultimately starving the future of Google's search technology, helping to erase that advantage.

If we want to go down this route, everyone should be demanding that Apple enable content blockers in apps themselves.

Khaine2• 11 years ago

Android allows ad-blocking in its store, Chrome too. But now that apple is doing it, suddenly its anti-competitive.

Give me a break

wooster• 11 years ago

Ad blocking is not an attack on the open web. Ad blocking is the open web.

msh• 11 years ago

So desktop chrome and Firefox is also attacking the open web? They have had ad lockers in their app stores for a very long time.

frik2• 11 years ago

We need better ads, e.g. a comeback of the traditional banner ads where ads where just a single picture with a link.

If you really need a video ad, create a small size mp4 movie and add a link, e.g. 70KB for 30s video.

But nowadays ads are too overblown with huge JS code, invasive behaviors, and still a lot of flash animations and videos. Basically the current situation is the fault of many advertisement networks that produce bad ads and pay little to the website owner. And many website owners that put too many ads on their sites and have choosen the wrong ad networks.

A subscription model won't work for many sites. (there will always be another site like yours that will offer the content for free sponsored by ads, and you will loose most of your traffic) Also it would mean a come back of the dark ages before the WorldWideWeb when Bill Gates had his failed idea about "The Microsoft Network" (1995 MSN version 1) and when there were still teletext services like BTX in Germany where you had to pay premium price to view each single (text) page. The idea of paying $3/month for 100 websites won't fly, such ideas come from individuals that think Facebook is the internet and only visit Facebook and maybe two other websites.

None of the subscription and pay per view model were too successful, obviously the free WorldWideWeb with the ad model won. And if there is a need for an ad blocker, then only one that blacklists & blocks the very bad ad network players. Ads that crash the mobile browser, flash ads, video ads with enabled audio, popup ads, invasive tracking.

kuschku9• 11 years ago

And we need relevant ads.

If I’m watching a let's play on YouTube, I don't care about buying crayola crayons. If you’d present me an ad for the game the player plays, on the other hand, I’d probably buy it. Maybe even give the youtuber like a 2% cut of the sales.

stevenh• 11 years ago

ISPs should be legally required to pay a fixed percentage of their profits per subscriber to the owners of the sites that those subscribers visited. No one seems to have a problem with 70/30 these days, so how about that? The 70% of former ISP profits could instead be distributed in a fair way to site owners based on total time the user spent interacting with their site in the frontmost tab, as calculated in an agreed-upon manner by all the major browser vendors. It would also be auditable by the site owners, because they could run their own page activity analytics and see whether they match up with the level of activity claimed by the detection built into the browsers.

simoncion• 11 years ago

I assume that you're talking about residential ISPs.

1) Given that actual -non-maintenance- capex on the networks of the major ISPs appears to have been practically zero for decades, I suspect that the major ISPs will claim (and have the paperwork -however legitimate- [0] to back it up) that their per-customer profits are near-zero or negative.

2) Good ISPs are run like good utilities: any actual profits are either invested in the network, or returned to customers in one way or another. [1] This means that good ISPs actually have a near-zero per-customer profit.

So, all you're going to do with this plan is:

* Raise the -already high- barrier to entry for independent ISPs.

* Make a lot of paperwork.

* Make a lot of DPI hardware vendors very happy.

Noone will get more money, except for the DPI folks. :)

[0] Hollywood Accounting, anyone?

[1] Either through rate reductions, or one-off credits in a billing period.

JupiterMoon5• 11 years ago

What about people that use tor/VPNs? What about people using the free wifi in various cafes and restaurants? What about website that don't want to make money (this forum)? There are too many corner cases. This would result in a huge amount of regulation.

lcswi• 11 years ago

God no! That would throw altruistic websites into the same bucket as clickbait.

JupiterMoon5• 11 years ago

I disagree. I use an adblocker to take some control over what code executes on my computer. There have been numerous attacks contained in ads in recent years and I regard my blocker (and no script) as one essential part of my security process.

GnarfGnarf• 11 years ago

If you work for a living, what type of company do you work for? Do they sell something? Do they advertise? Would your salary be reduced if they stopped advertising and their sales declined?

If their sales would not be affected by cutting out advertising, march into the Marketing department right now, and tell them; they need to know this.

akshayB• 11 years ago

I use Adblock and I don't mind disabling it for sites that provide quality content or reading materials. There has to be a balance which is sometimes abused by the sites.

For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don't make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don't mind watching a small commercial if it was 5-10 minutes highlight of a game. If the balance was reasonable I am sure Adblock would not have been this popular.

edgyswingset• 11 years ago

nfl.com was actually the site that turned me into a "default to blocking" person. The severity of ads on their site is pretty ridiculous.

giancarlostoro• 11 years ago

My issue is with advertisements that break web pages, or slow them down dramatically. Or even worse, take up real estate on my phone, and just plain break my mobile experience further. Sometimes I forget to install an adblocker whenever I do a fresh OS install and forget just how bad things can be without an adblocker (well really my biggest peeve is pop ups, just why are they still around?) and they get worse when someone buys ads to distribute an exploit to Java or something (was once in my lifetime a victim to a Java 0-day through advertisements - never again will I enable Java as a browser plugin).

briffle• 11 years ago

There is a sports related web site I often read (friends link to it from facebook, and other sites I visit).. When reading it on mobile, almost the entire page will load, then my whole phone (LG G4) freezes up completely for about 8 seconds, then a full page add appears over the screen. Sometimes the "X" is in the upper right, sometimes below, etc, and if you are off even the slightest amount, you get a new chrome tab opened, to a site that also freezes up your whole phone again for a few seconds..

If it wasn't for adds the cover the whole text, I would probably not run an ad blocker (and really need to find one for android that doesn't suck)

dublinben• 11 years ago

I highly recommend uBlock in Firefox for Android. It works pretty much the same as on desktop, which is to say excellently.

AJ0072• 11 years ago

One thing is for certain, publishers aren't using cohorts for how browser-breaking advertising is influencing their user retention and overall revenue. Fuck, some of the JS just for news site UI makes it clear no one is even testing their mobile sites on an actual mobile device.

If the ad block rate gets high enough, and if the CPMs do not increase in the face of dwindling supply, publishers will just make content available only in their own apps. Fake crises averted, things change, markets and businesses adapt.

nhebb• 11 years ago

just plain break my mobile experience

I installed Firefox on my Android recently since it allows extensions and I could install UBlock Origin. I've found it helps quite a bit.

harryf• 11 years ago

If the content that best informs our thinking is increasingly only available to those willing to pay then it has troubling impacts for those living in poverty or countries for whom a $9.95 monthly subscription is out of reach.

...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read

Boxbot• 11 years ago

You prefer targeted advertising to and data collection from children and teenagers to having them get parental approval for what they do online?

grey-area• 11 years ago

This flood of articles about blocking ads are all predicated on the assumption that making money with ads supports quality content, and that the internet as we know it would not exist without ads. Both of these assumptions are false - the internet didn't begin by being driven by ads, and it won't end that way, and ad-driven content is degraded by the ads when it starts to exist because of them.

The intrusive ads which are being blocked do not lead to quality content, on the contrary they intrude on it both in an immediate sense by distracting readers from the content, and in editorial terms, by driving a constant demand for more clicks, more views, and more unique visits, whatever the cost. The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers. The result is media sites which see the success of Buzzfeed not as a warning but as inspiration, which use services like outbrain to try to keep users clicking in a circle of despair through endless shocking headlines which promise much but offer nothing of substance.

I won't mourn that web as it passes, and I won't be starting to read the Facebook News app or other corporate feeds instead - native apps are subject to the same pressures and the same inexorable creep of advertising around and into the content. This will be a blow for Google though, and I'm quite sure behind Apple's rhetoric about user choice lies a calculation that this will limit Google's bottom line.

The Mona Lisa is an interesting example to use, as it was neither produced in order to display with advertising, nor with advertising within the picture (the two choices offered in the article). It and pictures like it were commissioned privately by a patron who valued the services of that painter but thereafter was displayed for free to the world - maybe there's a model there for online content - commissioned via something like kickstarter for its value but thereafter displayed for free to the public. It also wasn't valued as much at the time as it is now.

We should reject false dichotomies which offer the choice between one sort of advertising or another. The best places for discussion, content and news on the web are often advertising free, or have advertising which is unobtrusive and targeted and therefore not likely to be blocked by users, given the choice (as with HN for example). I honestly wouldn't mourn the loss of most of the so-called news services we currently have, and the rise of other services which request payment from a patron, subscription payments from loyal users, or find other ways of making ends meet (selling related services, bundled content, making money on related transactions like bookings etc). There are lots more ways to make money in the world than advertising, and most of them less degrading.

scrollaway• 11 years ago

The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers.

Amen. A lot of people talk about the "web we wouldn't have", yet would we really be worse off without the low quality trash from the thousands upon thousands of content farms that pollute it?

And yes I realize some would get caught in the cross fire. Ads did enable some good possibilities. Are they in the majority? Would they really have had no alternatives?

Maybe we would have had kickstarter a decade earlier. For all we know, ads set us back 10-15 years.

stock_toaster• 11 years ago

Wholeheartedly agree.

bambax2• 11 years ago

Me too! Just said much of the same thing in another comment.

All content is not created equal; content supported by ads is the worst kind, and there's a good chance it'll simply be killed by adblocking.

This is all very good news.

markyc• 11 years ago

in trying to be more private we may be more transparent

I think that's one thing people don't account for. once most content is behind paywalls you leave much more of a trace than on the ad-ridden web now

click1702• 11 years ago

I don't disagree but I think an important distinction is that when you provide your credit card there is an expectation that they will be able to track you based on that.

A big problem with ad tracking these days is that its entirely out-of-site-out-of-mind, nontechy people don't expect to be tracked across the internet as much as when they buy something online with a credit card.

XorNot• 11 years ago

No it's also just that once the user is the customer, there's a requirement to actually pay them some respect. An annoyed paying customer is directly lost revenue.

dynomight3• 11 years ago

Maybe scaling native advertising might hire more people than robotizing the whole affair the way it is now.

thescriptkiddie2• 11 years ago

Are you implying that native advertisements aren't ads, or are more acceptable kind of ad, or are impossible to block? Because none of those things are true.

Native advertising is probably the worst kind of advertising. If I see a website or magazine publish an "advertorial", I'm never going to trust anything they publish from then on. It completely undermines credibility and only makes sense as a last-ditch moneygrab. It's not even worth blocking because it's a useful red flag.

dynomight3• 11 years ago

There doesn't have to be a single way of doing things for every situation. For some things I'm interested in a native ad is just fine. For other things not.

You make interesting points even though you are unnecessarily aggressive.

dynomight3• 11 years ago

Oh my goodness you are so correct.

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

This article assumes that advertisers can get more sophisticated than blockers - I don't agree. With good enough technology, any logo can be snipped out or scribbled over. Any inline, self hosted image can be recognized and removed. Perhaps in future, adblockers will comb through the text of pages and the frames of video and your hero will be drinking "soda" instead of <brand name>.

Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking glasses. So I can walk down the street and NO LOGOS.

It would almost be like humans owned the public space, then.

octatoan• 11 years ago

AFAIK someone did make adblocking glasses with image recognition software. :)

sbov• 11 years ago

Ads tend to be in private spaces though. You can just see it from public space.

Another way to achieve your goal is for the glasses to render giant walls around all private spaces. All cities would look like Manhattan then.

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

I was thinking more like: detect an advert, draw a grey box over it. Or kittens.

kuschku9• 11 years ago

You can still ban ads in private spaces. Many cities did that. Sao Paolo is just one example

wrsh07• 11 years ago

Times Square as one great shiny ... emptiness

jamie_ca• 11 years ago

São Paulo, Brazil did just that[1] almost 10 years ago - outright banned outdoor advertising.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

henriquemaia• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w

(They Live, 1988, Sunglasses scene)

chejazi• 11 years ago

In the future everyone will be producing content - not just the people that currently do it for a living. Brand-name publishers simply will not be able to compete against the masses. It began with TypePad blogging, and now platforms like Medium are taking social publishing even more mainstream.

Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?

hiou• 11 years ago

Ad blocking is interesting in that it shows what happens when something that probably should be regulated has not. And because of this the public trust has eroded and then the answer has become an arms race of ad blockers vs ads. Resulting in a downward spiral resulting in less quality content.

The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.

thephyber2• 11 years ago

I don't think regulations are the only solution to this problem. I think content creators have been too greedy/hopeful while there is so very much competition and a _very_ low barrier to entry. They are nostalgic for the days of large newspaper advertising margins and the domination of peoples' attention by a single newspaper/magazine during a reading session that they don't understand how people use their product now.

Content creators are desperate for more revenue so they throw on another tracking pixel, another web ad placement, another sponsorship. None of this helps the fact that content on the web is a commodity and people value their time and attention span.

Large lawsuits against the ad networks for allowing malware infections and drive-by downloads would have had an effect, but unless regulation has real teeth, it's just a hindrance or a "cost of business" with no value added to the consumer.

x3n0ph3n3• 11 years ago

Is your solution to every problem that more regulation is needed?

zzalpha• 11 years ago

Well, or it's a powerful illustration of a market finding a solution to a new, novel problem.

After all, what solution would the government put in place? Ban ads? Regulate their content? How would that be more optimal than allowing people in the market to find the right solutions?

The reality is, ad supported content with lots and lots and lots of content providers may simply not be tenable, due to the fragmentation in both content and ad delivery vectors.

That requires the market to find new solutions, like paywalls, micropayments, different styles of ads, mixed pay/free models, good ol' fashioned consolidation, etc.

Now, to be clear, I'm about as far from a free market dogmatist as you can get... I'm no communist, but I'm Canadian, so...

But I honestly don't believe this is a case where regulation is appropriate. Where the market is likely to settle on a highly non-optimal solution (like, say, healthcare, due to information asymmetries, or broadband, due to enormous barriers of entry, or manufacturing pollution, thanks to negative externalities), absolutely I think the government has to get involved.

But in this case, I don't see any reason for that kind of heavy-handed intervention.

skuhn• 11 years ago

I don't think that the government should be involved in regulating advertising beyond things like banning ads for jumping off of bridges and other legitimately harmful things.

Where I think regulations do make sense is for advertising by-product: the enormous treasure trove of data about users that is collected and stored who-knows-where and has who-knows-what done to it.

jdp23• 11 years ago

The condescending attitude of "users don't understand the consequences of their actions" -- which I've also seen from several other people raising red flags about the consequences of ad-blocking -- really bugs me a lot.

A different way of looking at it is that many users do understand the consequences and either disagree with the author about the likely outcomes or have a different set of priorities than the author.

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

There is an alternative to adverts. Its real, it's here, it works. That alternative is Patreon.

In the Patreon model, you can support the creator directly, and their ability to produce content scales with that support. It's like a subscription, except you allow anyone else to free ride.

A Patreon supported site could run no ads at all and still make a stable income. It would no longer be fighting its readers to force them to view manipulative nonsense. It would no longer be answerable to pushy, content-controlling advertisers. It would have more editorial freedom, bounded only by the willingness of people to pay.

IMO the Patreon model answers all the problems of the advertising model and I'd like to see it becoming the norm.

strayptr• 11 years ago

This might be true for individual creators, but ad revenue powers companies. Can Patreon do that?

(It's still an important point for individuals though.)

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

Well, right now it's people.

But I see no reason the NYT or some such site couldn't fund itself the same way.

[Edit, posted in reply to the wrong person]

SebastianMerz• 11 years ago

Isn't that just saying "we want all content creators to become charities, and then other people can pay them". It's like saying all software should be free, but the companies should have patreons. Even the open source softwares supported by donations from big companies get their money indirectly from the actual monetization the big company does.

I just don't see a charity economy being long term sustainable on the web...

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

Patreon isn't charity. It's "I spend my money to hire you to do something." You pay to keep the content you care about, or to push them over a milestone goal to a feature you want.

thephyber2• 11 years ago

The author is nostalgic for the days when newspapers commanded high ad rates, something which never really existed in web-based news.

I agree with the idea that there are existing alternative business models, but I don't think a voluntary model will generate enough revenue to sustain current content standards.

amelius• 11 years ago

It seems that in the Patreon model, the creator is the central element, and not the content itself. This seems a bit weird, because it is the content I'm after, not the artist. It may be nice for fans who will buy anything from a particular artist, even if it is worthless when considering just the content.

Also, this seems a lot like "branding & marketing" version 2.0. I don't like branding. And I don't want to like what people write just because of what they have written before. I want to read or listen to work, and then decide if I pay for it.

Do you have a better way of viewing this?

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

You pay the NYT for a subscription, not tip after the fact for content.

If you don't like what they make, you stop subscribing.

GhotiFish2• 11 years ago

I'm paying for creation, that is what is valuable, not content, content is worthless. Content has infinite supply. Creation is what is limited.

This dissonance has been, and (it seems) will always be, the primary stumbling block in the discussion of the information economy.

Why are pirates immoral? Why are they not immoral? Why is DRM immoral? Why is DRM not immoral? Who owns the copyright? what is fair use?

All to do with information. All fighting this central dissonance.

This is why the Patreon model should be advocated when it comes to information. Because as a tool, the market is utterly unfit to operate in this arena.

copsarebastards8• 11 years ago

Are you really making the argument that content creators are uncorrelated with your enjoyment of the content they create? Really?

avital12• 11 years ago

From the Patreon wikipedia page:

Artists set up a page on the Patreon website, where patrons can pledge to donate a given amount of money to an artist every time they create a piece of art, optionally setting a monthly maximum. Alternatively a fixed monthly amount can be pledged

So it either turns into a monthly subscription fee, or becomes another game for the ad-tech industry to solve.

JulianMorrison9• 11 years ago

A monthly subscription to having the artist or company make content. Not to the actual content itself. The subtlety here, is that if people are paying the artist to work, the work itself can be free or sold-at-cost if physical. So basically, you get what the web used to be before the bust - free content as far as the eye can see.

burger_moon• 11 years ago

I'm curious now after reading the mobile gaming post that's also on the front page. If everyone paid for the content on the big news sites, would it even be more profitable than selling ads and mining user data?

How much would sites have to charge to make up for the loss of ads and user data?

Also what are the chances publishers to ever get rid of tracking and mining data?

forgottenpass• 11 years ago

Just like if 95% of my cable channels disappeared overnight, I'm actually pretty OK with a bunch of websites going out of business, and I end up paying for the few services I'm not already paying for but would wish to keep. It's sad that people lose their jobs, especially those that can no longer make a living doing what they love, but from a product standpoint: whatever.

I was around before the commercialization of the web exploded, and I might miss all the light entertainment that it provides, but going back wouldn't be the worst. The parts of the internet that are most special to me are some combination of not funded by ads in the first place, a labor of love, open source, or I already pay for anyway.

The increasingly desperate, increasingly gross business models that pop up as publishers go down with the ship is going to suck though.

Snhr• 11 years ago

I kinda get the feeling a lot of the content on semi-large websites is curated to bring in more views, playing on their main demographic's idea of what they find interesting instead of what the author is actually interested in. I'd rather listen to someone talk about something that they love than something they think I should love. I feel like that all got lost in the rush to bring in a profit and websites that haven't updated to that style get pushed back because they don't artificially raise interest in what they have to say.

mrsaint• 11 years ago

The irony is that the biggest player here, Google, was also the most aggressive in placing ads. I had the pleasure of working with various AdSense and DFP Specialists. Basically it was all about how and where to place ads in the most eye-catching ways, and as many as possible, without breaking AdSense rules. Bigger ads = usually better (in particular those large rectangles, yuck). Higher up the fold = better (funny enough the Google Search team later penalitzed you when you replaced your up-the-fold content with non-content ad stuff - which shows that there are Chinese walls separating various Google teams).

ss64• 11 years ago

I think a lot of the recent pushback against adverts is driven by video and specifically autoplaying video ads.

As an advertiser I might well be tempted to stop displaying video ads if I was convinced that a big proportion of users were blocking video but not text ads.

Sadly most blockers are all or nothing. Most users are not going to go to the trouble of whitelisting individual sites so a better middle ground would be global AD blocker settings:

Off - Block nothing Low - Block popups Medium - Block popups and video High - Block everything

If that was a common model it would encourage some reasonable behaviour on both sides.

randcraw2• 11 years ago

If ad blocking is a matter of right and wrong, then so is the invisible hand of any demand/supply driven system.

Blocking web-based ads is no different from TV viewers who walk out of the room, or record shows then skip over ads on playback, or mute the TV during ads. AFAIK, no TV advertisers have bemoaned that venerable practice.

If web ad purveyors want folks to browse differently then they must 1) improve their spam so people choose not to block it, or 2) change the physical way it's distributed.

To volubly complain is to sleight the invisible hand, which as you know, in the Land of the Free, is akin to giving olde Mr Smith the finger.

sambrand4• 11 years ago

The adblocking : DVR analogy is broken. TV ads are interstitial. Online ads are, for the most part, native. You can consume the content and the ad simultaneously. So online ads really are already, in some sense, product placements. Are you're arguing in favor of blocking out all product placements?

randcraw2• 11 years ago

Yes, block all product placement. All advertising is a curse not a blessing. Look at the state of its progeny: TV and radio. Hopeless.

The little bit of good content on TV is... only from sources without ads (HBO, PBS, Netflix).

The advertising model of content underwriting should be dead. Let ad blockers be the stake through its vampire heart.

sambrand4• 11 years ago

Advertising is paying for goods with attention. It's a novel type of currency. It's a wealth generator. And it's contributed to a more diverse Internet.

If you don't want to pay with attention that's fine. If you believe the Internet should be an ad-free Utopia, that's fine too. But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.

toothbrush2• 11 years ago

I'm really curious whenever people say such things though: what about (thought experiment) the situation where i let my computer run whatever code websites throw at me, but that come hell or high water, i'm 100% sure i would never click on any ad or be swayed in my opinions regarding what to purchase? Is that 'attention' still worth any nonzero value? Or what about the situation where some technical gizmo forces me to look and listen to the advert (see Black Mirror S01E02) before receiving the article text. Say i do all that, but still am 100% uninterested in what's being offered—wouldn't it be in everyone's best interests to not show that ad?

On a lighter note, this is how i feel about ads: https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s (Black Books – "just browsing")

sambrand4• 11 years ago

At least today even fraudulent impressions are valuable because ad buyers are willing to pay for them. They're smartening up though, as Tony Haile (author of the linked article & Chartbeat CEO) is aware. Viewability & attention metrics are the future of ad performance tracking. (and that link gave me a good laugh)

copsarebastards8• 11 years ago

But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.

Economically, how does this differ from using an ad blocker? Do you think content publishers care whether they don't get paid because I didn't visit their site or because I used an ad-blocker?

sparkzilla• 11 years ago

Web publishers should get together to make a "Reader's Charter" that pledges to stop annoying ads. It's not that complicated. Here's mine: http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-o...

anotherevan• 11 years ago

They are not ad-blockers so much as HTML firewalls.

I use a firewall to protect my home network from the wilds of the internet. I use an HTML firewall to protect my browser (and in turn, my home network) from the wilds of the web.

Incredibly slow loading, large assets that are inconsequential to the functionality I need, malware, unwanted visual clutter that creates a negative cognitive load I want to protect myself from.

The reality that advertisements are the main targets is indicative that they have perhaps been the worst offenders. I'm sure there are many good advertisers out there. I'm sure it is only the 99% that make the rest of them look bad.

georgebarnett• 11 years ago

There's a great short book called 'Who moved my Cheese?' which tackles the impermanence of any particular means of income stream.

Putting aside the morality/ethics discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the 'cheese' is moving for content publishers and so they are left with a choice, change and find new cheese - or stay and starve. Either way, the current gnashing of teeth will have little effect.

PhasmaFelis3• 11 years ago

A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the original sin of the web was to disconnect the value of ads from the users experience on the page. The data is clear: the better the user experience => the more attention you can capture while an ad may be in view => the greater impact on recall and recognition. Ad-supported pages that prioritise user experience are more effective, but we set up our systems to care about page loads not performance.

I'm curious why, in all the outrage and handwringing about ad blockers and the future of the Web, nobody ever seriously suggests making ads less annoying.

We don't need a new monetization model. We need content providers, and by extension advertising providers, to refuse to carry ads that are wildly intrusive, CPU-intensive, or outright fraudulent ("one weird trick"). Seriously, why are major national news outlets carrying advertisements that are as sketchy as those X-Ray Specs ads from old Boy's Life magazines?

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

Sorry content makers, you don't have the rights to resell my eyeballs. I truly am sorry that for many of you this represents a loss of what would otherwise be an easy income stream, but I will apologize for blocking ads no more than I would for unsubscribing from spam/newsletters or for not clicking ads or buying advertised goods, which is to say, not at all.

Much like newspapers, you've hitched your wagons to problematic revenue streams. I wish it were easier, but as content creators you are also businesses, and you need to work on better ways to support yourselves. That's your responsibility, not mine. I do support content creators directly quite often and quite a lot in many different ways (merch, crowdfunding, direct support such as patreon, volunteer labour, etc). If you can't survive in a world full of "me"s, well I suspect you weren't trying very hard.

nl2• 11 years ago

It's pretty clear to me that the endgame for this is ad-blocking-blockers: You run an ad blocker, then you either pay to visit my site or you disable your ad blocker for my site.

That's going to slow down sites even more, but that's the tragedy of the commons: some sites will be obnoxious in the ads they show it forces people to use ad-blockers. That destroys the livelihood of so many people that countermeasures will be developed.

eli2• 11 years ago

Unless the way the web works fundamentally changes, it will always be easier to block ads than to detect and block adblockers.

nl2• 11 years ago

Yes, but arguably there is more financial motivation for the publishers. You end up in an arms race.

neya• 11 years ago

I'm just going to re-quote one of my comments from a previous topic that was flagged to death:

Back in the early internet era, the best content was available for free of charge. If anything, that's still the case even today. Try to google on some technical topics like Ohm's law or something and you'll find very old websites built with good ole' HTML tables providing the information you need crisp and clear.
Actually, I disagree. This is 2015. If I want to start a website on a certain topic, say about cars or electronics, I can find some really good free hosts who will support me without any sneazy catches. As a real example, I go to blogger.com, setup a new blog with my own custom theme, (with all the attribution to blogger removed if I want to) and start producing content. Not cool with blogspot? Then, how about Github pages? Not so technical? How about using a free shared web host (there are plenty, Google them)?
If your objective is to spread information and knowledge, you will do that no matter what. It is when your objective is guised as spreading information when you really want to make money and scale up doing so, then you run into a problem. The problem with this kind of appeal against ad-blocking is the same old argument of "How much is too much?" "We need money to support our website to keep it up and running". But, never do these authors disclose how much they really need as long as they're making a killer profit. The problem with mixing ads with content is that introduces a conflict of interest - Are you writing that content because you like writing, or are you writing that content to get more eyeballs to serve your advertisers? And it's very hard to convince your readers that you don't intend to make money from them although you have ads on your site.
For your reference, I do own a blog myself without any ads whatsoever and I think this is the future we're heading towards. I am a proud user of adblock software and I refused to be shamed for that. As would any user, I am concerned about the content first, which is the logical reason why I go to a site. But, if the site tries hard to ruin my experience to make it difficult for me to consume that content, then of course, I'll find a way to circumvent it. But, that doesn't mean I don't support the authors of the site, just that as everyone else, I have my own way of supporting them. Just like how I've been donating to Wikipedia all these years. There have been too many sites abusing the slogan of "We need to place ads so we can support ads" to buy back our lost trust. Sure, there will be a lot of content weeded out because they can't support themselves, but I am confident that the ones whose objectives are to spread information will do so no matter what.
We built the internet ourselves when no one gave us ads to support our efforts back then. And we'll find a way to do it again. Just takes time and patience.

wodenokoto• 11 years ago

This reminds me of a concert experience back in the days. The venue had curtain in front of the stage where they shot a projector and somebody had forgot to full-screen the slide show and the entire audience could see napster running in the task bar.

michaelwww• 11 years ago

Kudos to Apple for drawing the line like they did with Flash. Advertisers were degrading their product and irritating their users by going too far, so Apple did the right thing.

mkhpalm• 11 years ago

I almost don't understand why people are still paying the prices they pay to put ads out on the internet. There are some exceptions but name the last "ad" you clicked on? It probably resembles the last spam you followed.

jmadsen• 11 years ago

Magazines & newspapers shot themselves in the foot when they ran out to produce free content to "stay in the game" like everyone else.

Their original product was never free, but they didn't think that through. They made most money through ads & classified, but they still charged for the product.

Now they need to figure out how to make each visitor be worth 50 cents or whatever, and they are trying to do it in a way that people were already growing sick of when they started.

---

They should create a system of micropayments where people can have a instantly accessible purse & a page can charge a few cents to few, ranked by content, author, whatever.

they need to start selling their content again.

bambax2• 11 years ago

This article, like all the ones before it complaining about AdBlock, seem to conflate all kinds of contents like they're all the same.

Yet, they aren't. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and/or cable, etc. etc.

The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not for long.

Paywalls work for high quality content (eg, The Economist); but not for low quality content.

Low quality content cannot survive behind a paywall, because nobody will pay for it; what will happen is that low quality content made for profit will die/disappear, and we'll all be better for it.

What will survive is high quality content made for profit or for free, and low quality content made for free (which we can ignore).

This whole debate exists only because current producers of low quality content have somehow convinced everyone that their content is in fact worthwhile, and that it's an accident and a crime that they'd be robbed of revenue, and that users are fools not wanting to pay for it.

This is rubbish. Users are not fools, and they are always right. What they will not pay for is worthless, literally.

briHass• 11 years ago

Well said.

Maybe some of these individuals forget that many of us were on the Internet well before it became as "commercial" as it is now. The bulk of the content came from users that didn't expect or receive any payment for their writing...much like many of the biggest sites today: Reddit, etc. What wasn't around was shitty, click-bait junk written for no reason other than to drive ad impressions.

If 70% of what's on the web died due to lack of ad revenue, I don't think society would suffer some huge loss. Stating that ads are required to support content is begging the question; if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with.

stevesearer4• 11 years ago

if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with

That isn't entirely true as the content is technically worth whatever the sponsors are willing to pay to make it happen. The university in my town puts on a summer series of movies in the park and Lynda.com has sponsored a number of the seasons. There is even a short ad played on the screen before the movie.

I wouldn't pay to go to the event, but am 100% happy letting Lynda.com pay for me.

stevesearer4• 11 years ago

There are a few podcasts I enjoy which are supported by companies like Mailchimp or even shows on NPR which are supported by non-profits and foundations. Even high quality shows on PBS have sponsors supporting them.

How does your view consider high quality content which is supported by advertising?

akiselev• 11 years ago

What are examples of high quality content that is supported by advertising?

All of the examples I can think of, like radio, YouTube and other video sites, and television, happen to make their money from high quality advertisements: ones that were curated and have higher production values, not random ads from dubious ad networks (except for the YouTube text based ads).

Content paid for with advertising is paid for by advertisers (brands). Quality brands want quality content that will be watched by as many people in their target demographic as possible so they're willing to pay for it.

look_lookatme2• 11 years ago

If you use an ad blocker and consume content supported by ads, you are a thief. It may be the best case scenario for your security, time, etc and there are cases where thievery is justified, but you are a thief nonetheless.

JoeAltmaier2• 11 years ago

That's foolishness. There's nothing in the world that compels me to use your content the way you intended. I can read it or not, store it on my backup drive, print it out and use it for the bottom of my birdcage.

I understand that content providers are frustrated. But lashing out and calling names is pointless and silly.

look_lookatme2• 11 years ago

I'm not calling names. I'm classifying the act of deliberately circumventing the method of revenue generation baked into the presentation of content by publishers.

It boggles my mind that people cannot understand this. Of course time is your to do with as you see fit. If you want to download the ads and bypass them after the content is presented, in the spirit of TiVo, by all means do, but don't selectively choose to download what you want. Instead you should just not visit the site.

Alternatively if you'd like to install an extension (if one were to exist) that warns you that ads are attempting to load before you are given a chance to consume the content and then gives you an option to return to where you came from, that is fine too.

But to deliberately reject the advertising adjacent to content is an act of thievery.

stonogo• 11 years ago

By that 'logic', if you place ads on content that is not worth my time, you are the thief. Since you are not capable of judging what content is worth to me, the only safe route for you is to remove all advertising.

cbd1984• 11 years ago

Then the mute button on my TV's remote is a more effective tool of theft than a Colt .45.

summerdown2• 11 years ago

My understanding is that adblockers work by removing known third party app sites from loading items on a page.

If that's true, what would stop a website from proxying ads, so they appear to come from the website rather than the third party?

I guess that would involve more bandwidth and so less money for the site, but high-bandwidth items are the ones people complain about anyway. I don't see why text based ads would be impossible under that scheme, for example.

gpsx• 11 years ago

Just to throw an idea out, surely not original...Http has a payment/advertising system added to the headers. Users decide if they will make a micropayment, view advertising or do a subscription to view a page/site if the site requests payment. The user can have a default setting and also settings for specific sites. Along with this there is some management that limits information the site can get about the user.

What we break when we fix ad blocking

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