What the ad blocker debate reveals

http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/03/what-the-ad-blocker-debate-reveals/

by eamonncarey • 11 years ago

104 152 11 years ago

danr46• 11 years ago

It's rather simple in my mind.

Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it.

You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.

Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice.

Want to make money? try a subscription model.

Why can't you have both? Welcome to the real world.

[EDIT]:

This was the previous opening sentence: "Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free."

I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it's trying to deliver.

bpodgursky• 11 years ago

"Simple" doesn't mean correct.

In practice cutting out ads probably makes you a more valuable customer because you've spent 10x the time most people spend looking at ads inspecting them while cutting. (and don't give any BS about "oh I actively avoid brands that advertise" -- brand advertising works, deal with it)

The better analogy is, you cut out the ads, reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers. In the real world, this is not going to be legal.

howeyc• 11 years ago

I don't see where you're getting the "reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers" based on how ad blocking works. Ad block is at an individual level, there is no redistribution.

afandian• 11 years ago

There's no redistribution. Why does your analogy include redistribution?

There's no need for an analogy anyway. It's equivalent of receiving a free magazine and the user putting it through an automatic ad-censoring machine before reading it.

luso_brazilian• 11 years ago

An even more apt analogy would be if a third party made an easy to use glass overlay that, when placed over a magazine page, obscured all the ads leaving only the content visible.

Considering that is applied voluntarily and "client side" and no redistribution takes place I'm not sure that would be illegal considering current laws.

Despite of that I believe publishing companies would be lobbying for laws to curb that practice as soon as it achieved critical mass and high enough adoption.

danr46• 11 years ago

As stated in another comment, cutting them out can be an hypothetical ad cutting machine I 3D printed.

The implementation detail of how i'm cutting out the ads is beside the point. The point is that I can offer my ad cutting services for free to anyone.

I can tell all my friends - "Hey guys i'll come to your house and cut the ads out of the free magazines you're already receiving"

Which is definitely not the same as "Hey guys I've received this magazine, and I cut the ads, here's the PDF"

The reprint and redistribution parts are non-existent in ad blockers. the content is not hosted on adblockersite.com.

CSMastermind• 11 years ago

Newspapers have successfully used a combination of subscription and advertising for a century now.

eli6• 11 years ago

Maybe not the best example: http://i.imgur.com/0mgT0AR.jpg

moron4hire14• 11 years ago

I would pay for the NY Times or Washington Post if I knew having a paid subscription would remove the ads and give me a reasonable reading experience.

eli6• 11 years ago

The problem with removing ads for paying subscribers is that it greatly devalues the remaining ad impressions -- who would want to reach just the people too disengaged or cheap to buy a subscription? It also incentivizes the site owner to have increasingly obtrusive and annoying ads for non-paying members.

kawsper• 11 years ago

I tried to subscribe to a danish newspaper online (their online version), and I couldn't even pay by creditcard. These companies really live in the past.

VLM4• 11 years ago

People used to say that about cable TV about 30 years ago, that you have to pay for it but the cable channels have no ads. Ditto going to the movies, sure its not free like watching it in a couple months on TV but at least there's no ads at the theater. Look how that turned out.

Maybe the elite that pay the most money for a subset of content will be able to temporarily avoid ads, sometimes, but "the masses" will never be permitted to not be advertised to, as long as its technologically possible to spam them. They are cattle and that is their purpose.

jdeibele• 11 years ago

I pay for the NY Times and use an ad blocker. They cover a lot of subjects that wouldn't be covered any other way.

I agree it'd be nice to not have ads but there are other people who find them interesting. That's one of the reasons I don't read magazines anymore - the amount of ads is way out of proportion to the value of the content.

scott_s3• 11 years ago

I pay for the NY Times, but I don't feel like I'm a customer. I'm a supporter. I think the NY Times is an excellent newspaper, and I fear for the future of newspapers. I also think the NY Times' web presence is superb.

For example, this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act...? I think it's excellent in both content and presentation. I want to support them so they can continue doing it.

johnchristopher2• 11 years ago

Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.

Uh ? To cut the ads out you need to see them. Adblock hide them as if they never existed in the first place.

Analogies, these days...

pjc50• 11 years ago

You can (and I do) from time to time cut out ads manually from the web with the DOM inspector. It's particularly good for screen-filling modals. Of course I can then make the cutout permanent with a hosts file or user-configurable adblocker ...

danr46• 11 years ago

Alright i'll bite.

"I can cut them out" can be, as stated in another comment, an ad cutting physical machine.

Your move.

toyg3• 11 years ago

you could hand the magazine to a 3-year old who can't read, and he'll cut out all pictures for you.

Nitpickers, these days...

Nursie• 11 years ago

I think it's simple too, but doesn't need a meatspace analogy like that.

I request some data, you send me some data. My computing device (yes MY computing device) then renders it in accordance with my wishes.

That's it.

(oh, and no, I have no obligation to play ball with your trackers)

TeMPOraL15• 11 years ago

That's why in the War on General Purpose Computing, publishers and advertisers are on the side of making the computing device not yours.

jfoster• 11 years ago

I actually think the people running sites are better off with this becoming the norm. Ads are not a great way to make money. Low friction paywalls will be great for everyone.

AndrewKemendo3• 11 years ago

Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free.

I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines.

You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader problem is that consumers have shown over time that they aren't willing to pay for content (at scale) so they are left with making money somehow.

TeMPOraL15• 11 years ago

It's like going to the stand and asking for a magazine. You have it given to you for free. Now it's yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including giving it to a 3-year-old child to cut out the ads and throw them in a bin, so that you don't have to ever see them. It's yours, you have a right.

Giving away the magazine for free was the choice of the person at the stand. If they want to profit, they have various means to do this. Ads are one way. Asking you for money when you ask for the magazine is another.

danr46• 11 years ago

I totally agree with your correction to my analogy, though I do not think it changes the conclusions.

I don't think it's a problem that consumers aren't willing to pay for content. That's literally the description of consumers, to decide what to consume, how to use it, and what they are willing to give in exchange.

chmike2• 11 years ago

Exactly and for the subscription model to work provide quality content.

austenallred4• 11 years ago

This comment rubs me in the wrong way.

Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" - they're putting it up with ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request them. You seek the content out.

So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose that's your prerogative, but don't pretend like you're the victim in this.

And also don't pretend like it's the company's fault for not choosing your preferred business model. You don't get to choose other companies' business models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.

geggam• 11 years ago

...but you are paying for the content delivery or postage. If the envelope gets too heavy and your postal budget gets used up with a couple deliveries is that right ?

TeMPOraL15• 11 years ago

The reason they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.

I say, let them die then. It's not that we need those sites but don't want to pay. It's that various "enterprising" folks figure that they can make some "content", fill them with ads and get passive income. If those 99% of sites disappeared overnight, everyone would likely be better off. You'd have a choice between quality paid sites which people would support, or free sites paid by people who think their content is important enough to put their time and money to keep it accessible. Yes, the second group exists and is usually the source of the most valuable and trustworthy content on-line.

coldpie2• 11 years ago

but don't pretend like you're the victim in this

Websites that distribute malware through their ads are definitely culpable. Mobile browsing without adblock is a miserable experience, with every other page opening up the app store to install whatever the malware game of the week is, or shouting audio that I didn't ask for. Plenty of non-tech-savvy people get caught by "your computer is infected!!" style ads. If website operators can't be bothered to ensure they're not distributing malware, I think we have a duty to protect ourselves.

danr46• 11 years ago

I don't think there's a victim here at all. not me not them.

It's just the forces that be, my need versus their need, the economy, human nature, technological abilities. Nothing more.

Let them choose their business model, I really don't care. But don't go out crying if your business model isn't sustainable, taking into account that ad blocking (which is a my prerogative as you say) is not going away.

mirimir3• 11 years ago

So, you go to a site, and download all of the content.
You elect to not display that part using your client.

That's not how ad-blockers work. They prevent ads from downloading. And so sites load faster, and mobile users pay less for throughput.

jerf2• 11 years ago

Oh, the memories. I haven't seen this metaphor fight in like 8 years now, since web annotation basically died. And here we finally are with a version of this debate that people actually care about, because there's actual money at stake. Finally my years of prep are ready to pay off!

First, I suggest everyone resist metaphors. Physical metaphors don't work here at all. For one thing, the "free content" may in the future decide that you can't load the content in the page until after the ads and trackers confirm that you have indeed loaded their content and executed it to some degree, which wrecks every physical metaphor you can come up with. Physical content is dead. Web content is code. It gets to do code-y things. No physical metaphor will keep up.

Next, this obviously produces an arms race. The first iterations of this will be stupid and client-side, because it's cheap. When that doesn't work, server-side things can be done so that at the very least, you must download the ad; that can be confirmed fairly well in a non-forgeable way. The ads will also run arbitrary bits of code in an attempt to verify that they've really been shown; the client side plugins will retaliate by simulating the relevant code and not actually showing the ad. With the current state of web technology, this would stabilize in a sort of middle ground, where the client-side correctly doesn't render the ads, but the requisite requests to convince the server that you can see the content would by necessity still leak tracking information in order to convince the servers to show it at all. You could try to do things like use client-side stuff to scramble those values and share them among users or something, but that's fairly easy to detect at scale.

Where that becomes particularly relevant though is that the clients at this point are becoming increasingly outright deceptive and duplicitious. Instead of passively failing to render ads, actively deceiving the remote systems opens a new door both legally and ethically. At some point after this the publishers have both a legal and ethical case that you are not merely "experiencing the content as you wish", but actively defrauding them.

This, of course, won't stop people from arguing they have a right not to be tracked or advertised at, which means that they will essentially be arguing in favor of a right to have their programs make fradulent requests in order to get this "free" content. Which is fine and dandy locally, but consider what that means globally... and in particular, at this point how do you argue that it's ethically wrong to put trackers and ads in content, and for that matter even spyware, if the "other side" is retaliating in kind? If you're not careful with the ethics here you surprisingly find that you end up arguing in favor of the very things you thought you were arguing against, and end up making a "good for me but not for thee" argument, which even if you do end up believing that is still not a very powerful or compelling ethical/legal position.

Pardon if I'm leaping about 4 steps further down the road than most people here are at... I worked this all out about 12 years ago. (It's a bit dated now and I cringe a bit at the writing style, as befits any writer linking to something they wrote 12 years ago, but you can see what I worked out at http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics . Perhaps remarkably, it is dead on topic for this very debate... there's a lot of related issues here.)

userbinator2• 11 years ago

Do you think we should still have the right to close our eyes, to look away, to refuse to watch, to put our hands over the screen? Would you consider that "defrauding" too? That's what it ultimately comes down to: the personal freedom to choose precisely the content you want to consume, vs. the desires of publishers to force-feed you what they want.

gabriel342• 11 years ago

You are assuming the adblockers will enter said arms race, which they don't really have to. What is the provider to do when I refuse to render his add? Block me from content? My guess is, given the necessity of disabling the ad blocking to view content, many users will simply bounce from that content. Content is cheap compared to the scarce attention we pay to each subject when we have so much information so easily accessible.

felipeerias• 11 years ago

"Here is the deal. I will tell you a story. But not just any story: an amazing story about this one person who did something unbelievable and you can't guess what happened next and also cats.

In exchange, all you have to do is let these people (whom I don't actually know) track you and run their software on your computer, which will present a garish display of images (and maybe also sound and video, did I mention that I don't know these guys?).

All you have to do then is click and I will get paid a fraction of a cent (and you will have to deal with whatever crap comes up afterwards).

So what do you say?"

voidz• 11 years ago

Sounds like an offer I can't refuse! /i

userbinator2• 11 years ago

my reading experience, my choice

I'd extend that to say "my eyes, my ears, my brain."

If I have the right to mute the volume, change the channel, or otherwise do something else when adverts appear on the TV, then I should also have the right to block them on a webpage - we're just using available technology to help us do it more effectively.

jusben1369• 11 years ago

To keep with the neighborly analogy what's happening is your neighbor is opening up his garage and lining it with magazines and comfortable seating for you to sit for free and read. However he's also lining his driveway with folks pitching you on goods and services on your way there. You're saying to heck with that and jumping over the fence right near the garage entrance and popping straight in. Your neighbor knows that type of abuse can occur and it's really up to them to decide how they want to handle it. But to pretend that you and he and the advertisers don't understand the implied relationship is disingenuous.

For all those saying "get a subscription model!" remember this. A subscription model, by its very definition, implies that both of us expect a repeat, longer term relationship. Understand if that's the only way to monetize content on the internet it'll change the type and way content is created.

aikah• 11 years ago

We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.”

Something's fishy here. Is there any googler here that can respond to these claims ?

“Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at…Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? …[A]ny argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.”

my thoughts exactly. "People" told the same things to the music industry. "You can't adapt, you should die", well let's see how ad networks and content producers survive the adblock revolution.

Donzo• 11 years ago

Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.

FroshKiller• 11 years ago

I personally never bothered with ad blocking until every other site hit me with stupid landing pages (like on Forbes), exhortations to try their mobile app instead of their site (every Tapatalk-enabled forum ever), pleas to take a feedback survey before I've even seen anything that warrants feedback (MSDN), and modal ads that don't load until I try to scroll down to continue reading the content (soooooooooooo many blogs).

moron4hire14• 11 years ago

It has really gotten bad. It's all a desperate grasp for ever shrinking ad dollars. Users get wise to the tactics and develop coping behaviors. You can track our eye movements and see we don't ever once even look at the common areas where ads lie. Popup boxes get closed in less than a second, with many people not even registering that it ever opened [0]. I've personally taken to sliding my cursor past the top edge of the page to see if the "subscribe to our mailing list" dialog appears, in some cases bailing on the article completely just because it's not valuable enough to me to bother after that affront. Major advertisers are swooning over 0.5% click through rates! That's not just random chance, that's a set of users highly-trained in the art of dodging ads, with an extremely-low-but-not-yet-zero failure rate!

Advertising is dead. Good riddance.

[0] Which has also killed the modal informational dialog in desktop applications. I've ran training sessions for internal enterprise software and the users literally could not remember there was a dialog mere seconds after dismissing it.

onewaystreet• 11 years ago

Do you block ads on Google's products?

anon1385• 11 years ago

Google ad networks frequently display ads that are designed to trick you into installing malware. That is true for both the text only Adwords ads you get in search results [1], and the display ads Google runs on other sites[2].

For many years Adwords was probably the biggest risk to people setting up a new computer and wanting to download things like Firefox.

When supposedly the best and most responsible sector of the online advertising market was prepared to profit from malware distribution for years then it's no wonder the entire industry has a reputation in the gutter.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870479

vegabook• 11 years ago

arguably HTML 5 is a co-culprit here - it is the new Flash and has massively worsened the situation. Try running a modern home page on anything other than a fast Intel chip or ARM chip and it's basically unusable (Rpi, low end Arm phones). Browsers are the new bloatware and make Microsoft Office look like vi.

DSMan195276• 11 years ago

I would add javascript to that list - I have a cheap laptop with an Intel Atom that's my main computer at home, and the biggest thing I did to make browsing useable was install no-script, and only enable the scripted required to make a page work. It's ridiculous how badly some javascript locks pages up, on the most innocuous of pages - For example, Wikimedia pages are unusable, and lots of blogs have badly written javascript (for unknown reasons) which end-up slowing FF to a crawl. After disabling the majority of the scripts on those pages (Which aren't usually necessary to view the page anyway) things are more then usable.

hibikir• 11 years ago

It's a Tragedy of the Commons situation: When we block ads, we do it relatively aggressively, so those that implement advertising in an acceptable way get crushed anyway. You are either using ads people don't see, or doing terrible things like many Minecraft mods, often downloaded by kids, and hosted at a particularly nasty site where the obvious download link gives you malware. To block horrible things like that, we also sink anyone trying to use sensible advertisements. Behaving like a good citizen just gives a website less revenue, and gains them pretty much nothing.

At least one ad blocker tried to avoid this by marking some advertisements as legitimate/unobtrusive, and not blocking them. That didn't fly very well, as the rest of us just claimed that they were in league with advertisers, and just using this unblocking as a different source of revenue.

That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter. Sponsored stories, content modified to add a few links to advertisers and such. Pay people not to post advertisements on their page, but to actively talk about you in the same way they talk about other things on their site.

TeMPOraL15• 11 years ago

That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter.

Which in a way is even worse outcome. It creates a conflict of interests for the publisher and makes it harder for the reader to trust the article - because you often can't tell if at any given point, the author is writing sincerely, or just advertising his sponsors.

moron4hire14• 11 years ago

Except the Tragedy of the Common requires a depletable resource of some kind, and unfettered access to it for people who have a vested interest in protecting their own supply but not the supply of others.

That is not online content one whit. My use of the WaPo does not in any way impact another users use, certainly not to the degree that WaPo is loading down my bandwidth with extra code and content above and beyond what I'm there to read. Seriously, by the time I'm done reading this article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/03...), they've used up 5MB of my bandwidth, for 5KB of text. Literally 1/1000th. It gzips down to half of that. In the time it took me to write the last three sentences, it's now up to 25MB. I'm not the one choosing to use up their server resources. They're doing it to themselves.

My hosting fees for all the sites I run combined come up to around $50/mo. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be for 1000 times more traffic. I assume it's not linear, but lord help me if it is.

There is no end in site for online content. When I can get a perfectly good substitute to the NY Times just by scanning the plethora of free blogs and social media posts from people who are doing it because they like it, because it's important to them, because they are living it, then there is no end in site to online content.

People will pay for valuable things. The problem is that this age of "you have to play the blogging/social media game to find any relevance in the public conscience" thing has created a functionally infinite supply of articles all saying basically the same thing. But turn on the TV, flip to CNN, and what are they talking about? "What are people saying on Twitter?" Why put up with ads to pay for secondary sources when I can go to the primary, where their advertising is nowhere near as intrusive?

An artist I really like releases a new album and I buy it right away because I want to listen to it on repeat. If I really liked a movie I saw in a theater, I preorder it right away (at current theater ticket prices, plus going with my wife, plus typical Blu-ray prices, I'm spending around $60 a movie, if I really like it).

Oh jeez. The WaPo article is 35MB now, and they just played a little "dink" sound, I'm guessing to try to catch my attention and get me to come back to... what? To an article I've now long disengaged with. These tactics works? This gets people to buy? This is worth all this infrastructure to try to leech out that one converted sale out of every 10,000 people?

JoshTriplett7• 11 years ago

so those that implement advertising in an acceptable way get crushed anyway

I have yet to see any ad blocker that blocks a simple link along with text like "I used this and here's how it helped me". I don't consider any other forms of advertising "acceptable".

Pay people not to post advertisements on their page, but to actively talk about you in the same way they talk about other things on their site.

A couple of sites I read occasionally mention products they've used, and now that they're popular, they also mention whether or not they're getting any money for mentioning the product. As long as that money gets mentioned, and the actual opinion is genuine, I see nothing wrong with this.

bigbugbag3• 11 years ago

The kind of ads is one thing, but to me the underlying issue is that I don't want to be tracked and online advertising is all about tracking people.

karmakaze• 11 years ago

I too don't mind ads, even targeted ones, if it's in moderation and secondary to the content. If it intrudes on the experience, performance, or security, I will filter or avoid it. Unfortunately the prevalence makes it much easier to filter all than just the majority.

If someone knows of something like uBlock with default whitelists, I want to know and try it.

cstross• 11 years ago

A secondary effect:

ad blockers not only improve the web experience for users (making everything load faster, by blocking unwanted spurious crap), ad blockers are good for the cellcos as long as net neutrality holds true.

Absent net-neut cellcos could in principle charge advertisers for access, but in a net-neut environment there's no money to be gained by carrying the traffic. Traffic which impairs the UX for the paying customers (the smartphone and tablet users).

This is going to be an interesting dilemma for that strong proponent of network neutrality, Google, uh, DoubleClick, right? (Unless they go the third-order route and roll out their own LTE data network, where of course they'll be the advertising gatekeeper and maybe folks who DPI indicates are using ad blockers will get a reduced speed of service ...)

alkonaut• 11 years ago

I understand why it's a genius strategy from Apple to make mobile browsing free from ads (Googles lifeblood), but I don't see why it's such a huge deal to Google; they already have a mobile platform of their own where ad blocking was always possible and widespread. You could see this step from Apple as an aggressive one towards Google, or just as reaching feature parity with Android on ad-blocking. What will be interesting is whether ad blocking will be widespread on iOS or if it will be like on desktop where it is a power user thing. If it's the former then it will change the web in a big way.

If Apple really wanted to spread ad blocking and disrupt things they should make it an optional install when users first open the browser, "do you want to see ads when browsing", where answering no installs an ad-blocker which blocks all apps not on apples whitelist (which ad networks then pay a sizable sum to be on of course).

tdkl2• 11 years ago

where ad blocking was always possible and widespread.

Majority of people don't root.

coldpie2• 11 years ago

Hmm? Firefox and ublock origin don't require root. It won't block in-app ads, but that's not what is being discussed here.

JulianMorrison6• 11 years ago

I want the advertising industry to die.

And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.

toyg3• 11 years ago

Publicity is the lifeblood of commerce. As long as one seller exists, one or more advertisers will also exist to help him sell more. Sad but true.

JulianMorrison6• 11 years ago

If all ads get blocked, all advertisers go bust.

yoz-y3• 11 years ago

In the current world of abundance, advertising is crucial to content and product producers. Let's say you make an application, how do you sell it if nobody knows about it? You make a nifty product, how do you make people know it exists? Advertising, in principle, is good, the way it is done currently on the Web is awful.

JulianMorrison6• 11 years ago

I used to think this but I have come around to the opposite opinion. We have tools, these days, to rate and rank products. We have tools to search for them. We have tools to get nifty new ideas out to the public as quick as you can say "gone viral". Buyers don't need advertising at all.

It's purely a system to confound rational consumer choice these days, to maintain the viability of companies that shouldn't be viable, because their product is inferior.

jakobegger• 11 years ago

If it's a good product, it will spread by word of mouth. Advertising can help sales, but it's by no means the only way to do sales.

bigbugbag3• 11 years ago

1) The current world of abundance has reached its peak. 2) Advertising is not crucial to producers, though for commercial producers enough customers to make money is. 3) Advertising in principle is pure evil.

Mikushi• 11 years ago

It is human and environmental suicide to keep supporting the advertisement industry which is one of the main driving force behind our society of excess, one that is simply not sustainable.

No matter how much we like to think otherwise, advertisement is barely ethical (it's nothing less than coercion and manipulation). It's time we catch up to it and shut it down, it's a failed experiment that only resulted in bad things, enabling that world of abundance that nobody needed.

I agree with the original commenter, let the advertising sector burn.

ionised2• 11 years ago

I can't say I agree.

Advertising is psychological manipulation and in 99% of cases all it does is create a need for something where there was none and where there need not be one.

As a society the West is driven by an obscene need for perpetual and ever-increasing consumption and advertising is primarily responsible for this.

It's a psychological attack on millions, even billions of people that uses their fears, their neuroses and their insecurities against them to generate profits.

They say advertising affects everying whether they know it or not and I do agree with this. The simple act of being exposed to say a Coca-Cola advert is enough to put that brand in your mind.

Here's the kicker though; for many people this is having the opposite effect as intended. I see an advert, for pretty much anything and all it does it make me want to avoid that company's products.

Anything from obnoxious internet ads to cringe-worthy TV ads full of happy care-free dancing actors singing headache inducing jingles. I'll avoid the products they advertise out of pure annoyance and spite.

It seems like more and more people are starting to react this way to advertising and it's a good thing.

cognivore• 11 years ago

Lost in this debate, for me, is whether online ads actually work and are worth the money. My technical experience with online ads is that it's very difficult to equate the ads with increased sales unless you have a very small sample size.

I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad sellers and hosters (Facebook, I'm looking at you) can promote them without having to back it up with quantifiable results. And that has led to a weird "ad ecosystem" which exists for its own purpose, not for actually trying to sell products (cause it doesn't actually work for that). I think the people most worried about the ad blockers are those that make their money from that ecosystem.

TeMPOraL15• 11 years ago

I have a similar impression. Moreover, I think people are actually seriously fooling themselves and each other. There's lot of tracking being done, lots of people looking at "metrics", but when I think about the statistics education of majority of people (including some professional "social media marketers" I know) I come to the conclusion that they don't understand what they're doing and can prove any conclusion they want with the numbers. All those metrics only help people to bullshit themselves and each other.

pinaceae• 11 years ago

well, let's look at someplace where ads truly work well.

fashion print magazines. buy a vogue and look at the ads. hard to tell apart from the content, glossy, relevant, beautiful. they make up at least 70% of the whole magazine.

i like gruber's ad system on DF, one of the few sites that seem to follow a user/reader centric approach. first you ensure the eyeballs, THEN you show the ads, always paranoid to piss off your readership.

mobile safari adblock in ios9 will hopefully bring movement into this ad game.

gabriel342• 11 years ago

Ads can be content. The best ones usually are.

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in my whole life. It's to the point that I have what can best be described as "Ad Blindness", I don't even see them anymore. So much so that sometimes I think I've reached the end of an article because my eyes have determined that below is only ads only to find it's an ad in the middle of the content or actually part of the article (Just to reiterate I sometimes gloss over real content that fits my mental model of an "ad").

I have used blockers a lot before (If I'm not going to click I'd rather not be tracked and deal with the bloat) but recently turned them all off to see what it's like again. It's still the same shit that I don't care about and have no intention of clicking on. 9 times out of 10 its for something I ALREADY PAY FOR (Looking at you DO, AWS, etc) which is annoying because not only do I have to look at it but it just highlights the gross inefficiencies in advertisements.

I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless.

Mobile is the big sticking point. On the desktop I could use an extension that reads some meta data out of a site's head to identify that site and mark it down for receiving a portion of "subscription fee" but on mobile this becomes much more of a challenge as I'm not willing to switch to a single-purpose browser (not that iOS would make it easy even if I did) and there are no browser extensions on mobile and no, I'm not going to do some gross "share" hack to record the sites I visit.

I don't have an answer to all of this, it all sucks. I want to compensate content creators but other than pay-per-view ads (which I mentally block out if not with an ad blocker) I'm never going really help them as it stands currently.

JoshTriplett7• 11 years ago

there are no browser extensions on mobile

Not on iOS. Firefox on Android has extensions.

I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless.

Lately I'm a big fan of Patreon, and an increasing number of the folks whose work I enjoy use it.

If there are sites, channels, or any regular content you enjoy, and they don't have a subscription mechanism, send them a mail and ask them about adding one.

Coincoin• 11 years ago

I find the hardest thing for me related to ad blindness is finding the download link for a software.

We get spammed with so many fake "DONWLOAD HERE!" buttons that it becomes impossible to see the real one.

onion2k• 11 years ago

Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in my whole life.

I've clicked on hundreds. Thousands probably. For me clicking an ad is a win-win - the site I want to support gets a little money, and the advertiser gets to find out that online ads don't convert to sales so eventually they'll stop buying them. You can support the things you love and drive the ad model off the internet at the same time.

I realise this isn't a workable long term strategy. :)

joshstrange2• 11 years ago

It isn't me being spiteful on purpose or anything like that I've just honestly never seen anything interests me.

gamesbrainiac• 11 years ago

There's a mistake with the bloat diagram, the 8 KB : 6 MB pie chart. Bloat and article slices should be reversed in the diagram.

fridek• 11 years ago

It's funny how people saying ads should be replaced with a subscription model in different threads are going completely bananas about paywalled articles.

Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway. Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have access to a reasonable portion of the internet.

The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press. Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.

TeMPOraL15• 11 years ago

Let me show you a model of a decent web news paper that could get by with ads and no paywall:

     |----------------------------------|
     | MY AWESOME NEWSPAPER             |
     |----------------------------------|
     | category | links | cool | topics |
     |----------------------------------|
     | Article Title         | Ads      |
     |                       |          |
     | Article content arti  | A bunch  |
     | cle content article   | of static|
     | content.              | not      |
     |                       | annoying |
     |  |---------------|    | ads      |
     |  | A cat picture |    |          |
     |  |---------------|    |          |
     |                       |          |
     | Article content arti  |          |
     | cle content article   |          |
     | content.              |          |
     |                       |          |
     |----------------------------------|
     | footer links & copyright notices |
     |----------------------------------|

Simple as that. Just don't shit on your users. If they have ad blockers, kindly ask them to whitelist your site.

Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.

What content quality?

norea-armozel• 11 years ago

This is the basic format that I wish web designers would follow. Also, I wish ad networks wouldn't be sleazy and allow anyone to use their services (scammers, malware producers, and the like should be categorically banned from an ad network). If the latter was fixed then the former would be possible.

alyandon• 11 years ago

From another thread (still relevant I think):

uBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy are my tools to control the content my web browser displays. My general rule is that I'll only disable ad blocking on a few trusted sites and never on a site that uses a third-party advertising network.

Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient attention to locate and click the "X", auto-playing sounds/videos, etc. If the UX wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware.

In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support and they plead with me to disable adblocking, I'll most likely choose to stop reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them.

I really wish the ability to make micropayments to publishers was a thing.

chmike2• 11 years ago

Could the push functionality of HTTP/2 worsen the problem ? Ad block could limit the downloaded data by selecting it. With the push capability it won't be possible anymore. Network bandwidth could be wasted with the ads. Thebrowser could still filter its display though.

What the ad blocker debate reveals

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