Ad blockers are the solution to an advertising industry that largely has zero respect for users. Ad blockers are the logical extension of pop-up blockers and spam filters.
If the Internet advertising industry could be trusted to behave itself nobody would install ad blockers. The fact that people are installing such software should be taken as an indication that today's ads are too intrusive and too disrespectful.
Not to mention occasionally malicious. Of the people I've known who have gotten viruses in the last 5 years, a majority of them were from compromised ad hosts and/or malicious ads. In fact, there was one a week or two ago from Yahoo[1], of all places.
Yeah, I held out for years, in part because I didn't want a different than "usual" experience. I figured I would deal with obnoxiously ad-infested websites by simply not visiting them. Whereas I was afraid that if I used an ad-blocker, nigh-unusable websites would actually look usable to me, and then I'd make the mistake of sharing links to them with others, not realizing how bad they were. Then I'd promote the propagation of such sites, not to mention annoy friends/family when I send them links to sites with all sorts of obnoxiousness I never saw myself. So I wanted the unvarnished "default" sites, the better to flee as quickly as possible.
But I finally gave in and installed a basic ad-blocker (though not with a default blocklist), because it's become futile to try to use the web without one. Unless I restrict myself to a tiny number of whitelisted sites (here, Wikipedia, some .edu sites, arxiv.org, etc.), the web has just become unusable without filtering. At least some very basic filtering like blocking autoplaying flash ads and blocking popups is needed to regain minimal functionality.
> Ad blockers are the logical extension of pop-up blockers and spam filters
This is a nice way to put it. My answer to the question in the actual post: "both". Ad blockers are an answer to a problem, and they are perceived as a problem in and of themselves.
Ads themselves are not the problem. Intrusiveness is. I had no problem with the original Google ads, which were always off to the side of the search results. They were text-only, they were out of the way and they did not try to coerce the user into doing anything.
In my eyes, enything more intrusive is fair game to be blocked without mercy. If your service can't support the infrastructure to serve non-intrusive ads as part of the pages themselves, then you don't deserve to be in the business of serving ads in the first place. I ignore ads in the TV, and I ALWAYS skip them when watching recordings.
Find ways to serve ads without annoying me and you will find a customer willing to spend money on quality. Try to violate or creep me out and I will actively boycott you, utilising the full power of 3/11 rule.
can't agree more. On my desktop I typically run flashblock and don't allow animated gifs etc. That's enough there to do the job.
On laptops, etc that use battery and don't have a lot of cpu and in many cases are bandwidth limited I run adblock. Some advertises have little respect for the people they are advertising to.
Seeing as how modern web browsers are basically designed to download and execute code from random third parties at a second party's prompting, wouldn't you think it reasonable that the first party want a little control over the process? After all, us infosec folks always tell people to be cautious of what they download, turn off things like autorun, etc. The web browser is autorun for the Internet!
(Never mind all of the bandwidth wasted on loading all of the third-party crap. Not all of us have high-speed/low-latency network links. Many of my users operate in very out-of-the-way places. Disabling the extra crap seems to significantly improve things like page load times.)
Some advertisers have already moved from the force-fed ads culture inherited from TV and Radio to a model that involves, cooperate with, and rely on the viewer to spread the word (viral campaigns, Facebook, Twitter, ...). But it requires a higher level of creativity, so there's still a long way to go.
> And getting into the Acceptable Ads program isn't easy. According to Adblock Plus, it rejected 50% of 777 whitelist applicants because of unacceptable ads; the overall acceptance rate stands at just 9.5%.
It is possible that Adblock Plus has other motives for rejecting ads, but at least this supplies one data point: 50-90% of ads are, by some criteria, unacceptable.
If the only value your website offers is to bring eyeballs to ad's, then it's time for you to find a new vice.
If you want to serve up ads on you site, make sure they're relevant, they're absolutely 110% malware free, and respect my privacy. And unless you're willing to take responsible for when those conditions aren't met, then don't whine when I do everything technical to block out the useless malware laden offensive ads that you do serve.
The difference between net ads and tv ads are that tv ads cost enough money that people who buy tv ads spend time and energy in being very selective about their market demographics and the type of ads they run. Plus I've never had a tv ad infect my tv and stop it from going to any other channel but CMT.
If me and my eyeballs are going to be your product, then I want a little respect for my participation.
>Plus I've never had a tv ad infect my tv and stop it from going to any other channel but CMT.
Funny story...there's a regional sports network who shows a 5-10sec image of their logo at the end of ad-blocks. When the channel was watched through the cable boxes provided by our local TV provider, the box would freeze. Either the logo image would be stuck and only audio would continue or audio would stop and video continue.
Not exactly the network's fault (we figured out that the compression they used lead to a buffer overflow in the cable box's decoding logic and figured out how to encode crash inducing video) but it was still annoying.
Their broadcast wasn't malicious, they can't exactly guarantee that the decoding logic baked into the firmware of, what I'm sure, were knockoff-brand cable boxes won't cause something silly to happen.
But if you're using AdBlock, won't you likely be blocking my malware-free, privacy-protecting ads too? You wouldn't even know they exist...
I agree with your larger point though. For all the (legitimate) hand-wringing about ad networks tracking people and building profiles... they still suck at targeting ads. A lot. I think we're still in the Stone Age of ad matching algorithms.
It depends on how ads are blocked by the user, and it also depends on how you frame it. For example: I don't block advertising on Something Awful, because the ads there are both unobtrusive and occasionally quite relevant or interesting to me, even in terms of pointing me at things I didn't realize I had an interest in. I'll also usually unblock sites that detect that I'm running an adblocker and ask me politely to stop.
I will, however, make a point of blocking ads on any site that decides to drop full-screen overlays, modal dialogs, javascript popovers, or any of that other crap that ad agencies seem to love these days. If your ad is interfering with my browsing experience, I'm not going to waste my time even considering interacting with it.
Ads done 'the best way' are unlikely to fall foul of ad blockers, no script, etc. Deliver your ads from the same ___domain, as static content, and you're likely to be fine. Bonus points for not slowing down the browsing experience, and altering the layout at random intervals for about a minute after page load (see theguardian.com)
You sure about that? EasyList, the most common block list, clearly intends to block ALL ads, even self hosted ones. it blocks by css class name, directory name, image dimension, etc. It's updated frequently as users report unblocked ads.
(Not to mention how incredibly hard it would be to sell ads set up like that.)
Doesn't that flag a lot of false positives (in fact, I have personal experience of an ad blocker that did exactly that by blocking images with numbers in the filename)? Conversely, there's no way that can block ALL ads, unless it literally blocks all ... content.
Yes, certainly. But it's still the most popular filter subscription. I think this suggests that most people using AdBlock want to block all ads, not just network ads.
Delivering ads from the same ___domain is impossible for small publishers. If you insist on using your own adserve, that means your numbers will decide the billing, whic leaves the possibility for fraud, which is unacceptable to the advertiser. Then you have the problem eith actually finding advertisers. A smal site can't dedicate resources for ad selling and relies heavily on networks for monetization.
Only if the model is payment-per-view as opposed to payment-per-click, or commission on referral sales
> then you have the problem [w]ith actually finding advertisers
Isn't there the same problem with the third-party model, unless you go for a completely automated solution like AdWords? Isn't there an opportunity for a middleman to match up publishers and advertisers? Couldn't an automated system still work on a same-___domain basis via advertiser-provided APIs?
Clicks are nice and a lot of people focus on them, but it's not a viable option for a lot of publishers/industries. Brand advertisers are about sending messages rather than driving traffic to pages and converting people there. Around 70% of display advertising is not direct response orientated.
The typical adnetworks give you ad tags which you put on your site and the ads are served from their ad servers. Then there are a few companies [1][2][3] that are marketplaces faciiliating transactions between publishers and advertisers, but they still use their own platform to serve the ads. And then larger buyers give them adtags, served by their own servers. Nobody in their right mind will just wire you money for ad inventory and just take your word for the traffic unless you are a very large name and have a proprietery self-serve platform (AOL/yahoo style). And even on these platfroms a lot of advertisers still use their own adtags (a recent java malware attack through yahoo's network comes to mind).
[1] buyads.com
[2] buysellads.com
[3] blogads.com
PS: sry for typos and formatting, on the phone atm.
Why do we put age restrictions on explicit or violent movies? Because we don't want to influence kids' brains for the worse.
This principle applies to adults as well. The purpose of ads is to influence you. That "influence" goes to the highest bidder.
At their most benign, they just want you to buy their brand of otherwise identical detergent.
The worst ads are the ones for charities where some emaciated kid is filmed (in HD) tearfully looking into the camera. Fuck. That. My emotions are not the plaything of some advertiser.
What about the "one quick tip to lose weight" scams that don't-be-evil Google insists on serving up. Is that fine?
The advertising industry is not your friend. Don't waste your life trying to help them. Block everything.
The advertising industry gets implicit carte blanche to do things to thousands or millions of complete strangers that, if I were to do to my friend, would be considered mortifyingly offensive or rude. I really don't understand it.
Each AdSense advertiser can turn off specific channels for their sites including 'health and wellness' (weight loss) and 'dating' (scam chat sites). Unfortunately, there are baddies in nearly every category. The software category, for instance, which is the majority of our income, is a hotbed of spyware/adware vendors. And blocking them is nearly impossible since Google doesn't really care to know. So you're left manually determining domains yourself and blocking them. But it's just wack-a-mole as they create new domains when enough sites block them.
This isn't too surprising considering that the top link for a Google search for Firefox is a Google ad for an advertiser that will deliver Firefox via a downloader along with 8 different spyware/adware apps. My mom made that mistake last weekend. We would up reimaging her computer.
> the top link for a Google search for Firefox is a Google ad for an advertiser that will deliver Firefox via a downloader along with 8 different spyware/adware apps
I don't "block" ads. I just opt not to download them.
I'm not being pedantic, we should really learn to stop adopting these insidious Newspeak tricks. Because it's not merely annoying propaganda, it has time and time again ended in criminalization. Some examples: equating "hackers" with criminals, equating copying with theft, labeling the recreational use of drugs as "abuse".
Time and time again we've seen repressive legislation after years of propaganda by manipulating the language in which a subject was discussed.
I don't block adds. I am totally free not to download yoursite/ad/bigassbanner.swf when all I want is to read yoursite/article.html. I'm not doing anything wrong, and if you're trying to trick me into downloading bigassbanner.swf anyway and I use tools to help me avoid that, you are the one who is using ethically dubious tactics, and I'm just responding to that.
You want me to pay for your content in any way, fucking ask me first, or don't put it on the open internet.
And it's not about whether or not the ads are "obnoxious", that's another red herring. I don't like any advertising, I don't want it, I don't need it, and I'm certainly not going to waste my time and bandwidth downloading it, nor am I going to allow it to take up space on my screen or have their tracking tactics violate my privacy.
I don't need any excuse to refuse to see ads. It's my time, my bandwidth, my screen, my privacy, my eyeballs. Fuck ads. There is no such category as "acceptable" ads.
The only "acceptable" ads are the ones I choose to accept up front. So far, only very few sites have asked me that, and they all threw tracking shit at me when I obliged, so fuck those as well.
After 15+ years of onesided unethical tactics I have no interest in being in any way nuanced about it. The online advertising business fundamentally rotten, and they can go screw themselves. And with them any publisher that tries to leverage these tactics for profit.
Thank you. If you consider intrusive ads to be malicious code that websites are attempting to run on your machine, you should be free stop them. It's your machine.
We are essentially talking about the equivalent of tv advertisers being up in arms about viewers getting up and going to the bathroom or changing the channel during commercial breaks.
> And some believe that today's ads aren't as obnoxious as yesterday's.
Today's ads are even worse than ads used to be (although the worse ads are less common now). These days, you can expect to have to see a full-screen ad or have to watch some sort of video before being allowed to view the content you requested. Then, once you finally get to view the content, you're assaulted with things like Vibrant IntelliTXT and JavaScript that injects content into your clipboard when you copy text.
I don't mind text ads. I don't mind most non-moving image ads, as long as they load fast and aren't too sizeable. Full-screen ads, video ads, flash ads, and JavaScript junk that modify the page contents are the problem here, and they're only getting worse as advertising companies figure out how to abuse our browsers more effectively.
Agree that IntelliTXT is obnoxious, but I honestly feel like things are trending better and the online ad industry is growing up. (And IntelliTXT is hardly new.) In the previous decade it seemed like auto-playing audio & video were pretty common... now they are definitely the exception (such ads violate a bunch of voluntary industry standards and are banned from many networks and publishers).
(Disclosure: I am co-founder of an ad-supported startup.)
I recognize this may be an unpopular opinion, but as companies get better at targeting ads and advertisers get better at measuring ROI, the result will be better ads that are more relevant to you.
You're right in saying that annoying ads are getting less common and that a minority of advertising networks have them now. I used to manually block such advertisers myself, but I gave up and started using a filter list after spending several hours trying (unsuccessfully) to block YouTube video ads.
I'd like to support the sites I visit, but the bottom line is that it's far easier to use a filter list than manually comb through the "blockable items" list in AdBlock when I discover yet another excessively annoying ad. I sometimes manually whitelist entire sites when I specifically want to support them, but frequently I don't even think about it (and when I do, I have to consider whether the ad network they're using is responsible enough to stop clients from posting ads containing Java exploits and whatnot). Using a filter list with AdBlock is one of the biggest improvements that an end-user can effect on their page load times and web browser responsiveness.
The problem with whitelisting is that while I might trust the site I am browsing, I cannot trust the people the site might have outsourced its advertising to. If a site owner negotiates its own ad deals and serves them from their own ___domain, I will see them as will many other people. If you don't trust your third party ad providers enough to serve their content from your own ___domain, why should I trust them? I, and many others, simply don't have the time to determine which advertisers are trustworthy and which are not, and if I did, I do not have the time to follow up with each one to make sure they haven't sold out and become untrustworthy.
If enough people start thinking like that, we'll probably see a lot more "content marketing" like what BuzzFeed does. Ads that aren't really ads, but content that somehow promotes a particular advertiser or message. That doesn't work for everyone though and it has some obvious drawbacks.
(Also, I'd argue that making Flash click-to-enable would have a bigger positive impact on load time. But unlike Adblock it might break some sites.)
So you're saying that real marketing (a.k.a. psychologists crafting subliminal messages and injecting them into your brain without you knowing it) is better than banner ads?
The open web is a miracle, it's amazing that it exists. Back when the open nets were forming corporations like AOL and Compuserve tried to bottle it up but failed. That's why the web doesn't work in the way that publishers would like for their business models. If the web had worked the way they want it to it would have never become the success that it has.
But, we have to be vigilant. From now until the end of time they will be working to lock it down for their gain and society's loss. The sad part is that they will probably win because there will be teams at many corporations working full-time on locking things down and lobbying, they won't give up. The main hope now is that so many people have tasted freedom that they will fight to keep things open.
Few have tasted this mythical freedom the web provides. What extremely tiny percentage of people own their own web site, let alone own any of their digital property (and these days even the hardware it lives on)?
I would say AOL and Compuserve won judging by the success of Facebook and other feudalistic platforms. We have exchanged freedom and rights to our property for the convenience and security of platforms ruled by feudal lords.
Most people voluntarily exchange their freedom and rights in exchange for someone else telling them what to do.
For most of our history they choose religion. These days corporations are taking that place.
What matters is being able to opt out without being effectively reduced to second class citizens. We haven't lost that option yet, but it is true that that is under threat.
Being able to consume content without advertising (which is corporate propaganda, i.e. the new "religion") is one of those things. That content is not just someone's private property (no matter what the manipulative copyright laws say), it is the end product on generations of collective knowledge and creativity.
If the minority ever gets excluded from it because they're not members of the Church of our Corporate Overlords, then our freedom would truly suffer.
The fact that the majority so easily surrenders their freedom for convenience and a false sense of security is not a measure of our freedom.
Yes, I agree. It is a difficult topic to reason about, but I would say that freedom can only be reasoned about relatively, and only by exercising it can its limits be discussed. And then those limits themselves must be exercised for the notion of freedom to exist in the first place.
I wonder if there is some kind of idealized equilibrium, as both freedom and control try to fully realize themselves in society.
I think there has to be a better way, but it is not here yet, or we are not ready for it.
Right now using ad blocker significantly improves quality of browsing. I cringe every time I fire up a browser without adblock by how disruptive and annoying ads are.
It's not just ad blocker. There's tons of nonessential distractions on most web pages.
For example, I read a story on cnn.com, and even though I have Ghostery enabled, I am still swarmed by "Share This" (on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn...) and "Print" and "Email" buttons and "Search Powered By Google" (twice!) and "health resources by HealthGrades" and "CNN Trends Fueled by zite" and for some reason, the weather in Atlanta, even though I live in California.
And then I click the Safari Reader button, and all I see are the text and photographs. Pure zen.
My theory is that websites iterate "what can I add to make people stay here longer" and thereby accrete crap. If there is to be a better way, I hope it removes the incentive to add this junk.
Yes, those things are BAD - for the USER. For the website, those things are quite lucrative, because users click on exactly those kinds of things.
The ad industry's bad ADs are in response to 1 thing - clicks. If they didn't work, the industry would not do it.
I run an AdBlocker myself, and do not like crazy ads, popups, etc. personally. But don't mistake OUR dislike for those things with the reason they exist, because they work.
And as someone who wants to read his content, him not making money is your problem too. Maybe the benefit of blocking adverts out-weighs the downside of denying the content creator revenue, and that's a fine choice to make. But don't pretend any of these issues are one-way only.
If publishers don't make money, they can't hire journalists, editors, designers, programmers, administrators, support and they can't produce content for you to 'consume'.
You (publishers) are the one trying to sell something, if your business plan does not work, take a look at the mirror, and you'll see who you can blame.
Not exactly. A publisher is selling something and offering it up for the price of ads. You're making the choice that you want that thing the publisher is offering but don't want to pay for it. If you went to the site, saw the ads and decided to move elsewhere, that's one choice. That's choosing that the item on offer is not worth the price. But you are choosing to visit the site without paying the price. I'm not making a moral judgement here as I use AdBlock Plus with specific whitelisting myself. Just pointing out that it would be a good idea for everyone to look in the mirror.
"Viewing ads is part of the deal if users want content to
be free, says Freitas."
I would imagine that a log of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources). Any site owners complaining about ad-blockers is missing the opportunity to detect ad-blocking and try to sell that person an ad-free version of their service. Ideally this service would be a pay per view model, where I pay a fixed amount (like 5 cents to 10 cents per article read) or where I pay a fixed subscription fee (like $1 to $2 a month for unlimited articles).
I did the math a while back with NY Times online advertising revenue and I remember the value gained from non-paying users to be around 70 cents per month per user. I don't know about you, but I would happily pay 70 cents or even a full dollar or two for access to the NY Times ad free. Unfortunately, when a site does introduce an ad-free paid version they try to extract like 5x or more of the revenue they gain from advertising. I don't know about others, but when I encounter that type of gouging, I just look elsewhere for my news.
So Mssrs. Publisher, please offer a reasonable paid ad-free alternative or quit your bitching. Every ad you serve is an annoying distraction that distracts me, irritates me and slows down my browsing experience both in terms of bytes download and lines of javascript executed.
I am completely within my right to block all outgoing requests to any host I deem negative to my web browsing experience via my /etc/hosts/ file. If you happen to serve ads from those sites and I can't view them because I block them, that isn't my problem it is yours. Want me to pay, give me the ability to do so and be fair with your prices.
So long as you don't offer a paid service that I can buy and you support yourself via ads, you are not really considering me to be your customer, but your product. You are not in a position to complain when your product doesn't consent to being sold.
>I would imagine that a [lot] of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources).
But that's just it. Even if they could make money off a dollar-per-person-per-month model --even if they could pay all their bills and then some-- they certainly wouldn't make the switch. Ad sales always have the potential for growth, even if the size of your audience is the same. Offering base subscriptions puts a hard floor (edit: ceiling, not floor) on the amount of money you can make with any set number of viewers.
While that's true, that's only the case for sites you regularly visit. If you get linked to a random site or blog post from HN, Reddit, Digg, Facebook, or what have you, your first thought is not going to be "gosh, I really want to pay for a subscription to this site". In fact, if you run into a paywall, you'll probably just bounce back to the site that linked you to the article and ask for the article text or a non-paywalled version of the same.
Maybe people would be happy (well, happier) with extreme micropayments. The use case you describe should be a rounding error as far as my bank account is concerned, but enough when multiplied by reasonable traffic to sustain online publishing.
Does anyone know the actual value of a single ad impression?
Depends on a large number of things. As an advertiser you can pay based on ___location on the site (e.g. the advertiser will pay more for a banner than a little side unit below the fold).
Some adverts are pay per view, pay per click, some are commission based (referrer gets a cut). Sometimes it'll be a few dollars for a few thousand views, other times it'll be a few hundred dollars for a week's visibility.
For click throughs, fractions of a cent to a few cents I guess. Commission is obviously worth a lot more (a few percent of the purchase price typically), but harder to convert users.
Have a look at buysellads to get an idea of how this works. Unsurprisingly Adblock has a field day if you try and view the website with it turned on ;)
> Does anyone know the actual value of a single ad impression?
This is often summarized as RPM (revenue per mille) or eRPM (effective RPM), i.e. how much income a site's ads bring in per 1000 page impressions, regardless of how it's paid out (per-click, per-view, per affiliate purchase, etc.). And that varies hugely between sites, anywhere from below $1 to above $100. A typical case is around $5-10 for many publishers, I believe. So that's about 0.5-1.0¢ per page view.
so why don't they charge me 10..20¢ per article, with an option for $x (or $xx if they publish a lot) unlimited monthly subscription, should I like them. Seems like 10-20 times more profitable, yet a rounding error.
Micropayments seem to have had trouble getting off the ground. It's not a lot of money to pay a few pennies per article, but if you put up a paywall and make people pay it, they seem to go elsewhere. Either people are too cheap to pay it, or the interfaces are too clunky, or some mixture of both.
Subscriptions do work for some sites, but from what I can tell most have trouble selling enough subscriptions to cover what advertising would pay for.
I suspect the clunky interfaces are to blame: if the paywall was only 1 click ('confirm $0.1 purchase') instead of a long long form to fill most people would just click.
Even that is too clunky, IMO. I really liked the model that Readability tried to pioneer: pay a monthly subscription, view websites, at the end of the month, all money paid is distributed amongst publishers in proportion to views. Readability's purpose meant that 'view websites' was actually a more complicated step involving explicit user choice, but I don't see why this same model couldn't be used with a set of 'certified' publishers and a central authority. The common link could be 'publishers who reject advertising'.
It's a problem of tracking the payments and keeping track of everything at that point.
If it's 2 dollars a month for 10 or so sites that isn't that much money but setting up 10 different credit card automatic payments is a pain in the ass. Then I lose a card and everything breaks.
If we had a nice model to aggregate articles on one central site with profit sharing from subscriptions then it might be better.
Time to get downvoted into the earth's core... AdBlockers are a problem.
I know "Everyone hates ADs"(TM), but really... that's how everything has worked up 'till now. ADs and/or paid. The advertisements around sports are a significant reason why that whole thing works; why those athletes get the money they get. They can get the attention of many eyes and all those eyes get exposed to ads. Take away _all_ the advertising-dollars and we'll see how long these huge pro-sports events last.
The internet became a big thing and people would like to show you content for free but how will they support it? I don't want a paid-subscription for every single quality website I visit. I rather they just show me ads. If I really like the content of the website, I might even give them a few clicks on the ads.
For better or for worse, advertisement-money is behind most forms of free content, especially entertainment-related. If anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears.
Sigh. You're serving up html on some port somewhere, probably 80. I do not have any sort of contract with you to fetch everything you link to in your initial html page.
To me that is the crux of it. Any other interpretation denies the physical reality of the web and its underlying infrastructure.
> The internet became a big thing and people would like to show you content for free but how will they support it?
Depends on how big the site is. I run a very successful web site off my cable modem from home. I pay for the connection anyway to browse, so my serving is effectively free.
Not every site needs 15 AWS instances and a load balancer.
But to answer your question directly—there will always be people who make sites and host them out of their own pocket for the greater good, or to establish themselves in the industry, or whatever. It's the same reason Free Software exists, even though it doesn't make financial sense at its core.
Sure advertising is the "business model of the Internet", but I have a hard time getting a hair across my ass about the fact people use blockers. Maybe because I don't work in an ad-supported industry means I don't have to rationale to myself it's not scummy.
You can say ad-blockers are "the problem", but they're really a negotiating tactic. Remember the bad old days? When advertisers and those selling ad space were arrogant to think they could get away with anything? They destroyed the user experience so badly people wrote software to get rid of them. Now advertisers have to balance the intrusiveness of their ads against driving more users to install blocking or remembering to reinstall adblock on their new computer. Yes, websites depend on advertising to stay afloat, but why should I care? Nobody is entitled to a business model.
You're right adblockers are a problem, they're not addressing the cause but its expression.
But at the same time and like the article, you also failed to frame the problem properly, see, it starts by telling us about a website serving 2 millions page views then goes about people wanting content for free.
Content doesn't cost anything once put online, so it's not about content but rather that it is accessed 2 millions times a month which generates traffic, which has a cost.
Now if it cost the same for the content to be accessed 10 or 10 millions times, then the justification/needs for ads would go away (except for newspapers' websites maybe).
The problem is in fact dual, one is that the internet is designed to work as dumb pipes connected intelligence located in the network periphery not as centralized servers hosting content and the owner of the inner tubes ask money based on how much traffic goes through them.
The obvious solution of distributing the content in a p2p model which would move the bill of traffic from the content provider to the content receivers.
So yes adblockers are a problem because they're and additional layer of attempting to fix another problem ads and associated surveillance which is trying to fix the issue of relying on a centralized model on a network not thought for this usage imposed by a few giant companies exploiting their ownership of the architecture for profit, making a mess of layers attempting to fix each other but really attempting more problems requiring more fixing.
It turns out when you have a simple and obvious business model, it's easy to pay for content - iTunes enabled us to actually buy music (kind of, we're in the middle of screwing the artists over with bulk streaming deals and what I suspect is a lot of RIAA-contact lock ins preventing direct sales).
But really, how valuable do you think your blog post about someone else's blog post is? Or a news site reporting on what happened from Twitter, or publishing articles which are taken whole-sale from bullet pointed corporate and political press releases?
Sometimes just sometimes when a site has 100-1000 times the numbers of readers compared to a mere anonymous blog, they're just far more successful at generating clickbait and have more resources to waste on elaborate HTML5. Or maybe they really generate actual useful content. If we're discussing anecdotal data points everyone has a different view on a website's utility.
Personally I believe if the reader base of a site is genuine and not heavily dependent on one-hit readers, they shouldn't rely on an ad-driven model. At least, not solely. Call it guilt-tripping, donation driving, paywalling, microtransactions, anything you will. As long as it's not the ad networks actually asking for dosh. It's merely crowdfunding on a more diffuse and intimate level, since the aim is for the site to exist down the line indefinitely.
I know nothing about the last one, but the two others I imagine lots of people can do without...
This for-profit free-content model also ruins a lot of paid business models, which might otherwise be successful. We get rid of the overhead of the advertisment industry and retain more money to pay for good journalism etc.
Actually I was thinking of most of the current newsmedia sites. You know - CNN, Fox, or locally for me - Sydney Morning Herald and others. Of course there problem has ended entirely since even the effort of reading them has lost its appeal.
I literally have never heard of the 3 things you just listed.
Advertisement has a prime target group which will never install adblockers - People who want to see ads and find convenience from having them.
It should not come as a big surprise. Mail based advertisement that is delivered by the post office has worked like that for years. Advertisement only goes to people who wants it, and those people uses the coupons and sale offerings given to them. Everyone stays happy with this model.
What you are loosing are forcing advertisement onto people who do not want it. That group is also the least profitable group to give advertisement to, and can often do more ham than good. Ad blockers help here in separating the group you do not want to give advertisement to, and the group you do.
For any company depending on advertisement, adblocking is a feature.
One bit I edited out of my longer post above referenced Tim Berner Lee's original WWW proposal documents. And how eminently readably they are today. Mostly because all they are is text and semantic markup.
I don't particularly like ads, but I don't mind if they're small, unobtrusive, and clearly marked as ads. Also, all the usual caveats about respecting privacy apply. I find there are very few of these types of ads around these days. Google text ads used to be this way, but then they started injecting them into SERPs in such a way that they looked more like results than ads. Also, popunders and popups need not apply: they make my whole browser unusable, and that's unacceptable.
In addition to individual ads needing to be unobtrusive, the totality of the ads on the page needs to not make the page unusable. This is the thing that annoys me about Youtube ads, for the most part. I visit youtube to watch videos, and if I have to sit through an ad every time before I can do that, I start to get annoyed.
This isn't the same as how TV ads work, either. Sure, each ad is 30 seconds, and together they make an hour worth of programming equal to about 42 minutes of content, but each commercial break is a few minutes long, which makes them effectively skippable. Imagine if a commercial break were 1 minute long (so there were 18 of them per hour). Wouldn't that get annoying fast?
The "clearly marked as ads" is such an important point that it bears repeating. My older brother is as luddite as they get and he has developed an extreme mistrust of the internet and technology in general to the point that he only visits 3-4 domains he knows he trusts and doesn't do anything else without asking his wife if it is safe. One of the examples he shared with me was the fact that he went for a long time without knowing the top results on Google until he found out they were ads shown before the actual results. He basically stopped using Google wholesale when that happened. He (I believe) is an extreme example of what happens when you abuse the user's trust and try to trick people.
Commerce functions best on trust and between shady advertising patterns like this and dark patterns like opting into subscriptions, a lot of bad actors are destroying trust on the web for luddite users.
There is probably a startup in here somewhere in making a Google Chrome or Safari extension that looks out for dark patterns and highlights them on the page for the user. i.e. spot ads and place a semi-transparent overlay stating "possible ad, click to reveal and interact" or looking for check boxes with whose default is being checkmarked and analyzing the text next to them to see if they match the dark patterns of opting into services you probably don't want.
Regarding micro payments to fund websites: I wouldn't pay for most sites. Not because their content is worth nothing, but because it is uncomfortable to have a counter ticking, spending more cents for each of my mouse clicks. And of course, I don't want to do through a billing UI for each new site I visit, although this could be fixed.
However, I'm willing to pay an extra $10 a month to fund content providers, up to them to share it effectively. $2e10 of advertising budget for 2e8 US internet users is about $10 / person*month, and as large proportion of it doesn't end up in the website owners' pockets, so it could even be cheaper than that.
There is a pot of gold waiting for someone who can make the idea of microtransactions palatable and transparent to the web surfer. Because it has to come, one way or the other.
In addition, all site expenditures are not equal. There are huge numbers of clickbait sites that basically spend almost nothing in content creation, and expenses are almost entirely incurred through hosting/bandwidth charges. On the other extreme are smaller sites with highly loyal reader bases who create highly useful content where the creation/research costs are substantial. It would be almost impossible for the first group to go down the nickel-and-dime/paywall route. So really, it's only when the site operators start asking for the hard coin does the real test of what the content is worth in the users' eyes start.
(Some readers actually demand a site details all their expenses exhaustively before they agree to pay for content. This may or may not be possible, or comfortable for site owners to accept as a neccessary part of the business.)
You pick a monthly budget, then you click on Flattr links when you encounter them on something you like (whether an article or a GitHub repository or whatever). Then at the end of the month your budget is split up between everyone you clicked on that month. Not sure if it'll really catch on, but I do think it's on the right track in avoiding the "ticking counter" feeling, since clicking on a Flattr link doesn't cost you anything extra, just allocates your fixed budget.
> When he presented an option for an ad-free experience,
> less than 1% of his 4 million unique monthly visitors
> signed up for the $2.99/month subscription.
Congratulations! You now make almost $120000 per month. The article make that claim sound like a bad thing.
Yes, that was my first thought too. Sounds pretty good to me.
I'm getting sick and tired of sites (and physical publications) crying "But how are we supposed to make money?!?" Boo fucking hoo. Just because you are running a business doesn't mean you are guaranteed riches and profits. Lots of businesses fail, and lots of seemingly good ideas turn out to not be economically viable (hence the persistent lack of jetpacks). Figure it out.
I turned to this page after the following experience (I make aggressive use of ad blockers and JS filtering generally).
This was in an incognito Chromium session where I don't run NoScript.
I was searching for some basic heat transfer references and found a page with a nice write-up on Newton's law of heat transfer. I copied the URL into the post I was composing as I was reading it. A "chat" dialog pops up asking if I need tutoring assistance. Um. No. So I ignore it.
The site then navigates me away from the page and onto a registration page.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
My immediate and predictable response: I fired up 'sudo -e /etc/hosts' and added both hostnames to my blocklist. Though I took the courtesy of emailing the site's contact address and asking them what the actual fuck they thought they were doing.
Apparently Pearson Education have the educational market so fully sewn up they can get away with this kind of bullshit.
But seriously? What the actual fuck?
Upshot: why do people block the hell out of this stuff? It's goddamned annoying as hell.
I compiled a list some time ago on G+ that's worth repeating here:
Forbes asks: Why do programmers hate advertising so much?
First, I think it's hardly just programmers. I suspect most people find advertising to be a negative.
But as to us techies? Why do we hate thee? Let me count the ways:
1. It's intrusive. Many/most of us probably have some level of ADD/OCD. Or just plain environmental sensitivity.
2. It's distracting.
3. It promotes a host of anti-usability features: content muting, multi-page click-through articles, overly formatted pages, overlays, pop-ups, persistent floating top/right/left/bottom elements, audio, video, multiple audio/video.
4. It's creepy, and you're creeping me out. Tracking through various deceptive means, even though I've made very clear that I don't wish to be tracked. Incidentally, subscription content suffers a similar issue: I don't want an audit trail of all things I've read, even on one site, let alone across sites.
5. The ads themselves frequently position themselves to price-discriminate -- though how and when I can never be certain (which undermines the efficacy of all ads).
6. The mechanisms of advertising networks pose security issues: cross-site JS, iframes, Flash, and Java. Even just the proliferation of different JS sources creates a serious management and cognitive overload for the security- and privacy-conscious reader. A single article from a news site may contain over 20 JS sources.
7. The goods and services which are most highly advertised are those which I'm least inclined to buy. Especially for (so-called) food and entertainment, but also general consumer products, electronics, and various services, especially financial services. To the point that when I see advertising my first conscious reaction is "why do they have to try so hard to convince me that that is something worth buying?"
8. It's not relevant. There are a very limited number of times when I'm in a purchase mode. The real value of the Internet would be to (correctly) identify those times, and then find me the best deals on what I want, in the way that I want to obtain it. Which, frankly, dear, isn't online most of the damned time.
On that last point, I've been shopping in recent times for a number of moderately high-ticket items. Including spending a lot of time researching options on-line. My biggest take-away is that online purchase researching sucks massively. Contrast to the experience at a store with a well-trained, skilled retail staff. "Is this what you like?" "No, I'm looking for something that's more XXX". And as much as I disdain retail much of the time, the people who are good at it figure out what you want, what you can afford, and what they have that suits you, quickly, without wasting your time (and if you're lucky, making the exercise enjoyable).
It's something I've also addressed recently, "Search quality vs. search personalization". The upshot: there's a lot more information in the moment that's relevant to purchase logic than in a person's profile or market demographics. Advertisers/shoppers could avoid massive amounts of creep factor by focusing on this, probably with vastly superior conversion factors.
The final thought: advertising is well and good, but where the rubber hits the road is in making the sale. Which is where Amazon (and other sales-oriented sites: eBay, Craigslist, Apple's iTunes) wins all over any advertising-based site.
Update: oh, and the email I sent to Pearson? It bounced. I'm shocked, shocked ....
"Many/most of us probably have some level of ADD/OCD."
That's a rather debatable point, I don't know anyone with any of these, frankly I think it's a U.S. thing. If it weren't for american movies I wouldn't even know it was a thing.
It's because in the US, ADD/OCD-like behaviors are seen as a problem, while in Europe they're considered "natural" up to a pretty high point.
I don't even know which is worse - making kids with slight ADHD take stimulants (US) or ignoring the symptoms unless they're truly a problem (bad grades and behavior aren't - you're just mentally stupid or a culturally uneducated prick in Europe).
People with slight ADD/OCD can get by, but they'll always feel something is wrong and that no one understands them (plus some may never reach their full potential), while those on meds will suffer later on...
That is because when a majority of people exhibit certain traits, those traits do not constitute aberrance. Marketing, Pharma influence & FUD peddling can make a majority feel singled out. Fear & consumption 101.
Assuming ADD is real (and I strongly believe it is), that doesn't imply that the only alternative to medication is denial. In the US, besides Big Phrama, I think another big reason we reach for the pillbox is because it's a simpler and cheaper "solution" than trying to teach hyperactive children to better manage themselves and having other contingencies in place for when a child is not coping well.
I believe ADD is an umbrella diagnosis for a number of related/unrelated symptoms we do not fully comprehend, or want to comprehend. I'm sure nobody's brain reacts the same as any other, so 'imbalance' can easily be misconstrued to include everyone, not just extreme cases. It is an easily marketable diagnosis requiring little effort(patient's prerogative) and profitable returns(healthcare provider's prerogative).
I strongly agree with 2nd point, personal accountability and good stewardship/parenting are lost values in the western world. Our youth are bored and brainwashed by the media...I was too. We're constantly reminded we are 'special'(individually, just like everyone else), we can buy happiness/solutions to our problems if we have the latest/greatest (*) and 'Not my kid' is almost a national anthem. Perception is everything & it too is easily manipulated by selfish and external influences. I too am impressionable and find much of marketing insulting, sometimes assaulting. That's why I do not watch commercial television and browse the Tubez w/ AdBlock & NoScript...I am startled sometimes when I browse without them, it's a completely different experience.
That's because people like to equate wanting their desk to be neat with OCD.
I do think that TV and internet have done nothing to help my attention span, but it might just be that I dismiss things I have no interest in. When I am doing something interesting I can focus easily for a long time.
I've got my doubts on a whole lot of psychiatric disorder diagnostics. That said: I really hate any sort of intrusive distractions. Nothing but nothing but nothing will convince me to kill a browser tab faster than that kind of crap.
I too question "a lot of psychiatric disorder diagnostics".
I even question if Psychiatry even deserves it's own speciality. Maybe they deserve a speciality in medicine, but their training needs a revival--a serious restructuring
of all teaching requirements in order to obtain a license to
call themselves specialists? Actually, I would like to see
all medications that don't work, or work slightly better
than placebo( in a bunch of "cherry picked" studies, by drug
companies); made illegal to sell. I still can't believe
their are Psychiatrist out their who claim to know how a particular drug works in the brain. I literally want to
throw up when I hear a Doctor who claims to be an expert
in their esoteric field of medicine. Especially, when every
other month a study comes out questioning the validity
of a medication, or the efficacy of Therapy. Yes--I will
take my expensive, addictive medications--like I do every
day. Sorry, for my rant. Oh yea, why am I still paying
for doctors, and meds? Because, insurance companies just
flat out refuse to cover certain medications, and limit
doctor visits. I don't blame Obama--the Republicans fought
his original bill at every step. I am grateful that people
won't lose their home in collections if they get serious
ill.
This subthread has nothing to do with the original article...
Let's please avoid hijacking this discussion and avoid arguing about the prevalence of things like ADD (as richly ironic as these discussions may be :-)
I understand companies need to make some money, but I never
met a website that was to special; I would sit through their
slick Ads. I don't mind a few links, but lately I won't
even bother to swipe to see an answer(usually wrong too).
As, to "Do you want it for free Dude"--Yea, at this point
I do. When websites evolve into "must have", or can teach
a complex subject fast people will sit through a lot of
bull chit ads. I feel the teaching of programming languages
in a fast, concise, manner is really in demand. I'm getting
off subject, but lately I trying to learn the basics of programming. The core concepts to all languages, then python and ruby. Zeb Shaw's website is the only teaching site I can I can stomach. Those dudes at Harvard and MIT,
who throw candy, mean well, but are painfully slow. Yea,
I'm really off subject, but there's got to be a natural
teacher out there who can spit this information out fast,
or at least offer a free way of speeding up their presentations? I'll shut up. Bye-
>4. It's creepy, and you're creeping me out. Tracking through various deceptive means, even though I've made very clear that I don't wish to be tracked. Incidentally, subscription content suffers a similar issue: I don't want an audit trail of all things I've read, even on one site, let alone across sites.
So you're entitled to that content for free? If you really hate ads that much, and you use a site with any frequency, it only seems right to buck up and pay or not visit the site.
The web browser sends a request to the server requesting something, and the server can either say "200 OK" and send you the document, or it can do something else, such as refuse.
If it does send you the document, this does not create any other obligations on your part; for example it doesn't create an obligation to issue further requests so as to download images referred to in <img> tags in the document. Even if you do so download them, there's no obligation to actually render them on any particular device.
If the server owner objects to this he needs to configure his server to do something other than reply "200 OK" to arbitrary requests.
Forced to choose between adverts or paying for content (imagine a payment scheme like spotify, fixed rate subscription, popular sites get paid more etc.) I would pay in a flash. The problem is, as has been discussed many times before, the advertisers don't want people to opt out of advertising because those that can afford to are far more valuable than the others.
They're publishing it for free. Do you really believe this? When ad networks defend their industry with a "not buying our product is a moral failing" argument I see it as silly but understandable rhetoric.
Browsers are under the users control, always have been. That's the strength of the medium. Yes, that means it's both harder to force people to read ads than with pre-dvr television and harder to hide the fact they aren't reading ads than with newspapers.
Should I also be reading all of an article that I found boring because not clicking on page 2 is cheating the site out of page views?
I get that the business model of advertiser supported content is threatened by ad blocking, but since when is it the consumers/users fault when a business model fails due to being poorly adapted to a new medium?
> 4. It's creepy, and you're creeping me out. [...] Incidentally, subscription content suffers a similar issue: [...]
This is mentioned a lot. I don't really see what's 'creepy' about ad placement algorithms? It's a mechanical process that results in a (hopefully) more relevant display of advertising to you. The word 'creepy' suggests unpleasantness or something frightening and I just don't get it.
From my perspective, hundreds of unknown parties from unknown jurisdictions (likely not my own) potential collect, store (for unknown lengths of time and with unknown security measures) and analyze unknown amounts of my internet activity for purposes that include, possibly among other purposes, advertising, through means that are largely unknown to me (cookies? Flash supercookies? my browser fingerprint (which is quite distinct)?).
This is much more intrusive and not comparable to a company ad in my local newspaper or a magazine to which I'm subscribed.
I think of online advertising in the same way as I now do smoking in a workplace, pub or restaurant - I can't believe people used to live like this. Using someone else's browser and seeing the distracting and intrusive ads feels a bit like trying to eat a meal surrounded by the smell and eye irritation of second-hand smoke.
The solution is simple: websites just need to start detecting adblock and refusing let someone use the site with it enabled. If you don't like it...go pay for an ad free service. Nobody deserves to get something for nothing.
Edit: Additionally, using someones server resources that they pay for without contributing anything to their revenue, if ads are in fact an important source of their revenue, is effectively stealing. Just because the ads annoy you doesn't justify screwing the people who pay to run the site you're using.
I disagree that it is stealing. That is their form of monetizing, but as you said, they can choose not to provide an AdBlock user with service if they want.
It's my computer, and I choose (well, for the most part) what I download to my computer. It's on the website owner to decide not to allow that behavior.
Completely different from downloading copyrighted material, for instance, or from walking into a store and walking out with something. Closest analogy I could make is maybe reading a magazine at the rack instead of buying it and taking it home.
Yeah stealing was a strong word. As for downloading copyrighted material, at least that doesn't necessarily have a direct cost to the content creators/providers, where as for example streaming a video from YouTube while ignoring all of the ads is bad for both Google as well as the people who rely on ad revenue to make YouTube videos full time as it actually costs Google money in addition to not generating them any revenue.
In fact I would say the example of reading the magazine in the store is more applicable to copyright violation, and that using AdBlock is more like going into a Starbucks to use the WiFi without buying anything, except worse, as with AdBlock one generally wouldn't turn it off, so every time someone with AdBlock visits the site they're basically just sucking up resources.
Mechanically, my browser is asking for index.html. At that point, your server can decide what it's going to send, but I'm not obligated to ask for any other data from you - nor am I obligated to execute arbitrary client-side code.
Web site operates make a calculated risk when they offer service the way they do, in the same way that Starbucks does in offering free wi-fi. And a lot of people don't do it that way - for instance a lot of coffee shops give you the wi-fi password with a purchase and I suspect in the future we may see a move to using enterprise WPA2 and "purchase enables x hours of access" policies.
Saying things should work differently gets absurd quickly: you don't earn money just for showing ads, you need click-throughs. If no one clicks through, are they still stealing? What if my browser renders the ads and I just tape up my screen so I can't see them etc. etc.
_>Additionally, using someones server resources that they pay for without contributing anything to their revenue, if ads are in fact an important source of their revenue, is effectively stealing._
Since most website ad revenue is based on cost-per-click and not cost-per-impression, am I a thief every time I view an ad without clicking on it? (And evidently clicking an ad without intending to buy anything is "click fraud", so it's damned if you do, damned if you don't)
I see that in a later comment you admit that stealing might be too strong a word; I think any word is too strong if it attributes moral failure to anyone who doesn't respond to advertising. Whoever said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half", he didn't go on to say "therefore, half the population are thieves and freeloaders."
_>If you don't like it...go pay for an ad free service. Nobody deserves to get something for nothing."_
What you call "getting something for nothing" used to be just part of what was called "the cost of doing business." But anyway, "deserving" has nothing to do with it. Publishers can decide who gets to view their content (maybe by refusing adblockers) and users can decide what content they want to view (maybe even by paying for it).
And more to the point, if a publisher decides that anyone, "freeloader" or not, can view their content, they can still use whatever tactics they want (including moral pressure with language about "stealing" and "deserving" and "something for nothing") to convince people to move from potential sources of revenue to actual sources of revenue. And users can decide whether or not to respond to those tactics.
tl;dr: if a website needs its viewers more than its viewers need its content, complaining about the mean, naughty users is not very productive.
So I'm sure you'll be reimbursing me for the bandwidth you unwanted, unasked for ads are using, right? Or are you going to insist on stealing my bandwidth?
Do note that while your attempt to imply that there was some sort of contract or implicit agreement that required viewing of ads, the idea that you're stealing my bandwidth has some precedent: fax/cellphones/SMS. So keep pushing that nonsense - I'd love to see the laws restricting ads due to costing the recipient money/resources extended into other areas.
Well, it's their right (the same way that it's my right to not download the ads). They can do that any day they want, and live with the consequences.
That said, I wouldn't visit most of them. I don't use AdBlock, and I do like (unobstrusive) ads, but I use NoScript that has the side effect of blocking most ads. I wouldn't start running code from any random 3rd party just because a site asked for that.
I wish I could upvote this a 1000 times. As most of the commentators do not care about the business model of publishers, publishers should actively fight back and prevent these people from viewing any of their content at all.
Imagine if every time someone went to buy a newspaper or magazine they had to sign a contract confirming that they will read every advert and not flip over pages containing adverts, and if they refused to sign they would not be allowed to buy the publication. Likewise with televisions - a contract confirming no channel hopping during ads or the most favourite channels will be disabled remotely.
Publishers should engage with their audience to find out what advertising would work and engage with the advertisers to make them comply.
Given that you have used the newspaper analogy, flipping over is not same as blocking ads - most of the time I do not even care to look at what Google shows me as ads as part of search results - that is the equivalent of flipping over. Blocking ads is akin to asking a guy to cut out the ads before the newspaper is delivered to you.
Your comments are hypocritical - you are ok to allow companies with big budgets (e.g. Google) to pay off the makers of Ad Blocking software and continue to pay for these big budgets, while you are not ready to view a couple of ads on a small publisher's page who may have put hours to create their content.
I don't block ads but I do largely block Javascript and Cookies (thank-you Noscript). It does greatly reduce the number of ads but that is a side effect (the fact that it blocks obnoxious moving content is intended). No if I could just get Noscript for mobile Safari...
Our website has ads too, but I fully support everyone who wants to block them. They add no value to the website and I'm only interested in people using our site, not in getting them distracted or annoyed. We even have an ad-free version of our main website (but it's not indexed by search engines).
I've also learned that people working at ad agencies as well as those handling ads on the publisher side tend to be extremely incompetent w.r.t. web publishing. They do not understand how usability, reputation, visitor/customer satisfaction work. They tend to believe that looking at ads is the most important thing people visit websites for (and possibly that people make road trips just in order to look at the billboards).
Just a side note - I do know a lot of people that love to go to Times Square at night to be bathed in the bright but artificial light of the billboards.
Ads on desktop browsers are no longer the problem - between ABP and Ghostery one need never see another ad. The mobile device is the new battleground, but the prevalence of "dual-funded" apps (free, ad-supported and pay-for, ad-free) gives me some hope that a sane business model will emerge.
Meanwhile I reconfigured bind on my LAN to DNS-spoof roughly 3500 ad-serving domains and redirect them to a logging but otherwise content-free HTTP server (hey, it's OK when my ISP or my government do it to ME, right?). Very interesting just how bad the problem is. I recommend you try it to get a real feel for just how much crap the average page requests behind your back.
I used an ad blocker until I started showing ads on one of my websites.
Now, I click ads on blogs I read frequently and tools that I use and support. Gittip and Flattr (and Bitcoin) could replace this behavior if they had wider adoption.
> Now, I click ads on blogs I read frequently and tools that I use and support
The rampant click fraud (abusing ads as a donation link) is another nail in the coffin for online ads, although currently Google rakes in billions from such behavior due to the advertisers' credulity.
I don't believe that Gittip and Flattr could replace it because it's much more tempting to "donate" the advertisers' money than your own. But it would be much more honest on behalf of the publishers.
Really? I didn't stop. In fact, it caused me 20 to 30 minutes of debugging over a couple of times because I couldn't figure out why my ads weren't showing up :-).
In this age of drive-by downloads, (100% legal) sorched-earth adblocking has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages. If the web advertising would police themselves better none of this would be neccessary. They are not held responsible in any financial and/or legal sense for any damage they incur when a malware incursion occurs, or the dire consequences for a end-user if they get botnetted into doing something dire that would bring down the wrath of law enforcement.
The longer they drag their feet on reforming the Wild Wild West that is web advertising the more likely adblocking will turn into the status quo for an increasing percentage of people and they're not going back to the old ways of usage anytime soon. All the guilt-tripping advertisers are trying to pull is wasted on adblockers because they're not the ones actually producing the content people give a shit about, a subtle but important difference It's like venture capitalists trying to harangue the customer base of a startup they're involved with.
I don't expect things to improve with the ad networks anytime soon. Just the mere thought of the DNT flag being default on Firefox was enough to send them into a frenzy. Most of them explicitly ignore the flag anyway.
Understanding that other people's business models aren't your problem... what would you prefer publishers do instead? Paid subscriptions? Micropayments? "Sponsored Content"? Charity work?
* Require me to download megabytes of Javascript and Flash, particularly when I have to pay by the megabyte for my data plan.
* Consume excessive CPU time and reduce my battery life
* Use CSS to hover over the actual text I was trying to read
* Make noise
* Pop-ups
* Pop-unders
* Link to malware
* Link to scams
* Ignore me when I say "DO NOT TRACK"
In other words, show me a modicum of respect. Deliver ads that actually have value for me, rather than treating me like the product you are selling to someone else. Nobody complains about the ads they see on Amazon, largely because Amazon is doing this.
The absolute worst thing you can do is try to defeat the ad blocker I installed. That means you have become my adversary -- in which case I have zero reason to care about your revenue stream.
Well, the article does not talk about publishers, does it? As my comment, it speaks about ad business.
I would not have any problem with a nice banner, clickable, possibly surrounded by a color that does not make me want to pull out my eyes with a fork after having 4 seisures and 2 strokes.
I do though have a problem, when a 3rd party tries to track everyone, and possibly without the publishers you're speaking of know anything about what's running on his site (they do not care, why should I?).
What I would prefer publishers to do: write something useful and meaningful, and make users come back because of your content. Be it a book, a fanfic, a blog with random thoughts, poetry, etc.
People seem to forget that web is about meaningful content.
This is how you attract users.
And some last lines while we're at it.
Why is it always the question "if we [publishers] stop using ads, what'll we do"? I seriously do not care. I do not HAVE to care. Same goes for any user. It's his job to find a way (hint: meaningful content) to get revenue. He's the boss after all, right? ;)
"AdBlock is a problem [1] because if you're using it then how would you even know that my banner ads are all respectful and relevant?"
That is the nice part about ABP's whitelist -- respectful ads are shown, and bad actors are punished. Better still, if you disagree with ABP's judgements, you can (a) disable the whitelist or (b) use a different ad blocker. It is a great idea for what amounts to an industry-wide problem.
That's definitely an interesting solution: an independent authority who judges ads worthy.
I question how independent ABP is, though, when their (only?) revenue comes from the fees sites pay to get on their whitelist. It gives the appearance of a shakedown.
With the default set to block, it's kinda rough on the little guy, too.
They're not really the best solution though. Not enough people run them, and from what I hear the majority of sites now have ads plastered all over them and are run by people who think they should have a say in how my browser behaves. Search results have also become filled with essentially spam generated by people who don't actually care about publishing useful hard-wrought information but just want to trick away your attention and sell it for pennies.
Like Usenet, too many people have started talking about them.
Personally, I don't mind the idea of ad-supported content. But the malware/exploitation risk, and the utter distraction many moving, "noisy" ads cause me, continue to make it a non-starter for me, personally.
Back in the "early days", I actually encountered and clicked through on a fair number of useful ads. But... as time went on, they did not remain useful, nor benign.
I feel the same way about ad blockers as I do about skipping commercials with the DVR - my purchasing decisions are almost never influenced by ads, so why would I bother watching them? I'm just afraid that someday, even without DVR's and Adblockers, companies will figure out that I'm not buying their crap and stop offering me free TV shows and websites, ads or no.
> Also, you don't want to punish all the publishers just because some (or even if it's a majority) do bad.
Yes, I don't want to punish the honest publishers. But the ugly truth is that I don't really care. My time is limited and I have 1000 other things I'd rather do than fine tuning my block-lists. So I just block them all with the list I subscribe from some guy I never met.
Because it's easy.
Offer a method to block only the bad publishers that is as comfortable (or even more comfortable) as the current ad blockers and you might change something.
You should punish publishers who serve malware, popups, JS & other bad stuff BUT you don't punish ALL the publishers - many of them don't do that and are just fine.
In fact, instead of an AdBlocker, it is better off if there is a plugin which blocks such sites completely. Why use their content if you don't like them anyway.
And how would ANY user know which ad network is compromised or not before it serves them a delicious helping of malware? Face it, if you're using Adblock you're on a default allow model and any previously spotless network can be compromised at any time since it only takes one malformed payload to get through the cracks to infect a user. It's the same situation the AV vendors face. The only realistic option (whether the ad vendors like it or not) for a blocklist is to craft the regex to be as sweeping as possible.
On the other end of things the ad firms need to self-police themselves at a vastly increased level than what is happening now, preferrably under some sort of umbrella organization. But even if that happens I expect punishments to be mere wristslaps and non-legalistic in nature. At the end of the day, it's not MY business model that's at risk here, the stakeholders have the onus to make it work in the real world. They're not entitled to it because the base model worked on network TV and then assume it can be ported wholesale to vastly different environments without compromise and change.
Why doesn't it work? If people decide to boycott a company or industry for unetical acts have worked in the past, not always but you cant say it dont have the possibility of a positive effect.
By the way, collective punishment is not a war crime. It can be in certain circumstances but so can a lot of other things.
We are not talking about boycotting a company or industry here. That's boycotting the Internet because Publishers who provide free information here make a large part of the Internet.
In the end, you won't find so much content freely available and would have to pay for it directly - most likely.
Heh, ad blockers are both a solution for the users and a problem for the advertisers and publishers.
But they were created to deal with the insanity of the latter - with an ad blocker (and that probably includes JS blockers nowadays), you don't get all the wonderful pop-ups, pop-unders, sliding ads, floating survey invites, half a dozen text and image ads advertising often unrelated stuff, the super annoying audio coming from who knows where, unexpected redirects, the lost seconds while you wait for the page to load, and more.
If advertisers used better ad targeting, fewer and less intrusive ads, that would definitely reduce the number of people who install ad blockers.
I also see in the wild much higher occurences of ad networks serving up survey content recently. This is really an implicit acknowledgement that widespread adblocking is taking toll on the bottom line and their proposed solution is for DEEPER mining, not less of it. They're fishing for data on a level that's impossible with a standard ad+tracker.
I have a hard time sympathizing at all with "publishers" who are hurt by ad-blockers.
The vast majority of web sites, I would guess, fall into one of two categories. The first category are sites which are a labor of love: they are written and maintained because someone just wants to have a voice, or to get their information out there. These sites can often be run on nearly-free hardware from a home Internet connection that you would be paying for anyway. Hardware and bandwidth costs are near zero, or low enough that the operator is willing to cover them at a loss. The operator is not expecting to make money, so advertising is not necessary.
The second category are sites operated by businesses that are expecting to make money by selling a genuine product or service. These sites have non-trivial costs to develop, operate, and maintain, but the sites lives on the cost side, not the revenue side, of the balance sheet. That's OK, because the business sells something else which (presumably) covers that cost and then some.
The "publishers" expecting to make money from advertising fall into neither of these categories. They are operating sites with the expectation of making money, but they have nothing generating revenue except advertising placed in their "content".
Hoping to make money by running a web site that does nothing but serve pages for free is an unsustainable business model. If you want to make money, sell something less ephemeral than a web page.
I'm not saying that publishing (without the scare quotes) is an unsustainable business. If your product is your "content", put it in a form that someone will actually want to buy, like a book or a magazine. Something that your customers can hang on to, that they can reference when they're away from their browsers, that they can lend to their friends, that doesn't simply disappear at your whim. People do pay for those things, and they even tolerate ads there. If you're not willing to provide something of real and tangible value, don't expect your audience to be willing to provide you with a revenue stream. And don't complain when they evade your attempts to force that on them.
I block ads. I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads. If your business needs me to see your ads, I'd rather not be your customer. If these practices will bring down the ad industry, all the better.
> I block ads. I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads. If your business needs me to see your ads, I'd rather not be your customer.
Are you referring to the ad business in general , the advertised business or the website business ? Because blocking ads and reading the website still makes you the website's consumer, right ?
The site owners discussing how no one took them up on their subscription services seem to miss a significant point: their sites aren't worth anything like what they're charging to most users. $25 for an annual site subscription is something I'd only pay for a handful of sites - most sites simply don't have enough unique, quality content to make me care.
Replacing adblock with ad-free subscriptions isn't the way of the future. The "beauty" of advertising is that it can create revenue for a site owner in excess of the value they provide to their viewers.
When you get content for free, you do it under the agreement you're going to look at their ads. Decide sifting through ads isn't worth it? Close the tab.
Ad blockers allow people to break this "agreement". If less people are viewing ads, the quality of the content has to drop or the advertising (what funds all that "free" content) has to increase.
Just like all those "why I pirate" things, its just a long way of saying "I'm too lazy/cheap to compensate people for the content they produce"
People have a right to use ad-blockers. It's their computer after all.
However, a lot of things that people like to use, and might even have been willing to watch ads in order to use, will not be viable if everyone used adblockers.
It's really that simple. However, most people don't like to acknowledge that given the opportunity, the will freeload of others, or that in some contexts freeloading is natural and not immoral
I don't think the original article or people who despise Ad blocking software (like me) question the right of people to use ad-blockers. All we are saying is that economics and free markets will eventually take care of the problem, and will result in much lesser useful content being created for people to consume. If one thinks that lesser content is better and the only ones allowed to publish content are big budget companies like Google who can afford to pay Adblock developers to be in the whitelist, then so be it.
Some of the less free ITU member states recently designed a bunch of nasty, restrictive protocols for turning the Internet into a complex web of pay-per-hop-per-packet price gouging. Maybe some of those concepts can be turned on their head and used to create a reliable, opt-in micropayment network using bitcoin, sort of how copyleft exploits copyright for the benefit of the many over the few.
Ad blockers are going to gradually become irrelevant (like pop-up blockers) primarily because of the mobile web.
I believe the adoption of the mobile web is forcing advertisers to reconsider their strategies. With the limited screen real-estate and cut-throat competition for those pixels it becomes difficult for the marketers to go overboard.
Purely a guess, but I think the majority of AdBlock users simply don't want ads on their screen and don't feel strongly about the privacy implications or the bandwidth savings or any other potential benefits.
In that case, why not have the ad blocker download the content, and execute the tracking js, but simply not display the resulting ad to the user. It would register as an impression to the ad company, so the content publisher would get paid, and at the same time the user would not have to look at the ad.
If you raise the issue of the ad company paying for people who don't watch the ad, just consider the situation of the ad industry in any other media. TV ads? The viewer can easily turn off the TV during the ads, like I do, or change the channel to a channel not showing an ad. The same is true for radio ads. For ads at the start of a movie, you can come to the movie 10-15 minutes late, thus getting there right when the movie starts and skipping the ads, or just wait in the lobby until the ads are over. Magazine ads you can easily skip to the articles and never look at the ads.
Even in web ads, you can take my old father's "low-tech" add blocker, a paper cutout he hangs on his monitor that physically block ads in the margin on the side of the screen.
All you've done is moved the problem up the value chain. Now instead of publishers losing revenue to AdBlock, it's advertisers. That's not a good solution. Advertisers will very quickly see that their conversion rates are falling and will adjust how much they pay for an impression accordingly. (Not to mention that many ads are sold per click and not per impression.)
Changing the channel during an ad is already priced in to the cost of the TV ad. The TV people do studies on how many people change the channel or hit mute. But mostly they don't care because they can see that the TV ads work by how many people call the 800 number or how in-store sales jump after an ad runs in a region.
This is especially true of online ads. If you have an online store, you probably don't really care how many impressions your ads have or even how many people click -- your main metric is how much did it cost to get you a paying customer. Ad Block drives that number up whether it loads the ad or not.
> Now instead of publishers losing revenue to AdBlock, it's advertisers.
But if one simple trick thinks that I'm going to click on their ad, they're simply making a bad bet on me.
The problem is striking a balance between ads that are appropriate to a site (based more on site demographics) versus ads that spy on your browsing habits whilst within their ad network fence.
I don't mind an ad for adafruit on a diy electronic site. I do mind a dvor knife ad following me around to every. goddamned. site. I. visit.
I turned off AdBlock when I realized how many sites break with it enabled, for example all sites with GTM. I used to think the sites were just broken in general but now I know better.
If the Internet advertising industry could be trusted to behave itself nobody would install ad blockers. The fact that people are installing such software should be taken as an indication that today's ads are too intrusive and too disrespectful.