It comes close as a #2 for me (I care more for an uncompromised system than for tracking but YMMV). However, the article states that the state of affairs might be better for publishers if they didn't ignore DNT. I doubt that very much for these two reasons:
1. Malware
2. Intrusive ads, even the article site serves animated ads which distract from the content.
For me, #1 is the extra bandwidth cost (I have a crappy internet connection), #2 is malware, and #3 is tracking.
My crappy internet connection is what originally pushed me to block ads. Everything's a lot more speedy when you're not loading all those extra scripts, images, and videos.
I'm completely with you on this one. I pay the bills doing computer forensics and defensive security, and the amount of times that I've seen clients compromised due to advertising networks serving malicious content is non-trivial. I'd recommend ad-blocking purely from this perspective.
When you have a single user the attack surface isn't so bad, but across an organisation of several thousand people it quickly escalates.
For me, distraction is the #1 reason. I started blocking ads as soon as it was possible (almost 15 years ago I guess), having been fed up with animated gifs. Next on my list was Flashblock, again because of distraction first. By then I had already permanently muted my browser.
I started blocking javascript because my pc was getting old and sites just ran much smoother without it. First using the global "block javascript" flag, and when too many sites became unusable I switched to NoScript and now RequestPolicy.
The tracking and security concerns are secondary to me; usability was my motivator. But by now, I'm so used to it, I never browse without protection. I literally feel dirty when I have to use IE or any other bare browser.
If you support their message and cause, it's a reminder that they exist on donations from people like you. If you're thankful, it's a reminder to show thanks if you can/want to.
Sorry for going orthogonal, but I have been wondering about donating for quite a while. I really do like the EFF, has a good mission and most their statements are very much aligned with my pov. Except for some, like their financial statements e.g. https://www.eff.org/about/annual-reports-and-financials
Concerns like:
1. Their numbers don't add up, there is no corresponding arc to the Salaries and Benefits expense for instance (5,377 > 5,184)
2. Salaries and benefits jumped 20% past years, which might mean more employees, but also could be more benefits
3. What are Board Enrichment expenses?
4. I know nonprofit has subtle nuances in meaning, but how could they have 1M Net Investment Income?
5. Most importantly their Support and Revenue figures are double of the expenses, should I really donate them? I mean they can put it away for a rainy day, but is my money actually further any cause?
For a very long time, I did not want to use ad blockers. I have used ads in the past to monetize some of my own projects, and I really did not want to stab the creators of quality content.
However, last week I finally reversed my decision and started using ad blockers. Why? Frankly, many sites are just greedy. Banners were ugly enough (and I tolerated them) but many sites these days show ads that cover the content, and going as far as to hide the [x] button for a few seconds. And, I am not even talking about privacy and security issues.
Businesses have to come up with better monetization strategies. Shoving ads on my face and making me accidentally click them is a net loss for everyone.
I agree completely and like you for a long time I didn't use ad-blockers on morale grounds.
Personally I don't get overly excited about the tracking/re-targeting, but what did bother me was how ridiculously intrusive the ads on some sites that totally destroyed my user experience, wasted my batteries and cellular data and at times prevented me from (on mobile) from getting to the content I actually wanted.
With mobile it was also the stupid number of accidental clicks when scrolling, or pop ups with really small 'x' to close that and a non-zoomable viewport.
Wasting my time (and somebody else's money) on ads I never wanted to click does't seem like a good or sustainable economic value add.
Sometimes ads can be useful. On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top. Similarly I have discovered things of interest in Facebook & Twitter ads where they were relevant to me.
It does seem that online advertising is in need of a bit of a 'reboot'.
Same here - I'm not that concerned about targeted ads, but if it means significant consequences for my bandwidth, security, performance or simply being able to use the site as intended, well, then I don't seem to have a realistic choice.
That said, I think there's room for an adblocker that focuses on ads that are too intrusive and whitelists decent, static ads automatically. Currently I do that manually on a per site basis.
Adblock Plus does that. Ad networks can in some fashion request their ads be unblocked, and ABP does some sort of review (I'm not sure how it all works, I don't use it).
I'm not sure, but isn't that review process basically a transaction of money? As in buying your way out of being blocked? That's probably the last thing I'd want.
In fairness, they don't just whitelist any old ad, there's ostensibly a review and guidelines that must be followed, but at the end of the day, it's still a colossal conflict of interest.
> On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top.
Are they?
If you have 2 products that sell for X, one company spends Y on ads and X - Y on product, the other spends X on product. It would seem that the second one should be SEOd (by good reviews and recommendations) to the top, and that would be the more important signal.
I both make a small amount of money from ads and also use AdBlocker.
The thing is, I don't mind ads. The problem is that the people providing content should own and manage what ads they show me. This idea of allocating page space and then bidding it off? It only leads to click fraud, malware, and all sorts of other problems. Instead, write things I find useful, then provide me links -- text links -- to ways I might continue my investigation.
Ads are fine when they help people. When we start focusing on the money instead of the experience, however, it all goes to crap. I don't think ads are something you can outsource if you want to be a quality content provider. They're just as important as any other content on the page.
By the way, this also means that mostly-plain-text pages could work fine for both creators and consumers in the vast majority of cases.
This. I tend to think ads only work when people don't care or even notice them. If an ad annoys its viewers, it's already a failure of the ad and they don't deserve money, whether or not it's blocked. Many obscene ads failed silently. Ad blocking is just a visible part of their failure.
You mean like in some of those fancy fashion magazines where the ads are actually part of the content that people buy.
Yes that would be good for websites to do, but it also requires a dedicated ad department to organise it all, and consumers of that content that would want to buy the goods that are being sold.
This. It's the only website I've found that actually has ads relevant to the site, ads I want to see and am receptive for. My understanding from what I've gleaned from their blog, is that this really worked out for them (though PAX revenue now dwarfs their site revenue).
> The problem is that the people providing content should own and manage what ads they show me.
I started building something that would do this, but was never able to generate any interest and gave up eventually. Do you think there is interest outside of us and I should continue that? Where would I find interested parties? Does it already exist?
It's really easy to forget this. Ads can be a good thing! Anyone ever pick up Computer Shopper magazine in the '90s? It was a giant phonebook full of practically nothing but ads for computer hardware and software. And not only did people voluntarily read it, they paid money for the privilege, because it was useful to them.
My limit was reached a while ago when intrusive ads starting becoming the norm. My personal least favorite are ones that move the content of the page so I'm bouncing around trying to read the same paragraph and ones that somehow think my cursor hovering is sufficient reason to play sound or "expand" an ad.
Monetization from advertising must be brutal if so much content is being displayed in worse and worse ways.
Monetization is not great, but I think the biggest culprit in this case is a mix of competition, ad agencies and classic greed.
The number of impressions is limited and declining (moving from the desktop where you can put 15 ads on each page to the mobile where you have max 1 or 2 ads per page) and companies are fighting for the attention of the user while content providers try to squeeze as many adspaces they can in their pages to incrase/stabilize the declining CPM (cost per thousand impression), so they ask their ad agencies to create more inventive and engaging (attention grapping/annoying) banners.
When they ask website to do their new and improved format, they usually get a no in response. Then they shove more money at the problem until some website can't say no anymore and accept the new format.
Once someone else has accepted the others can't keep saying no or the company will only do banners with the competition that actually accept the new format, so everyone does.
All new invasive formats usually start with clear and strict rules: only one each day, for a max of two per week. And we can show the ad to each users a maximum of twice a day.
But this "rules" become progressively less strict as more and more companies want to purchase the new format that has a much higher cost and some ad manager will come to you faking sadness (while actually counting his cut behind his back) and say the magic words: "I don't like it either but it's how we paid your salaries and it's too much money to pass up."
I am with you in this. I saw that people around me started to use AdBlockers and I found first that it is not really fair from them.
Until one of the news sites I regularly read was barely usable by always running on 100% CPU, which means it was not possible to open it on multiple tabs without making my computer fully unusable.
And until Google started to use video ads in my region. I figured that it would be better for the local business to block the ads as if they cluelessly start to annoy me with their video ads, they would anger and loose one of their potential and possibly already loyal customer. Beside some of the ads had very questionable moral value.
I would call this trend telefication - ad publishers want to control when people see ads and for how long. I think that this is not acceptable.
PS. Paying for content is also not an option until there is an anonymous way to make a payment and the payments are minuscule.
I actually like seeing ads (though I wish they weren't coming from omniscient ad networks and were instead coming from the sites I was visiting). Content providers get money, I get free content. Nice.
HTML5 Video Ads are what finally switched me to ad blockers.
When people served static images and Adobe Flash videos, I could just disable auto-play of Flash, and voila, I see ads, but don't get obnoxious videos on random tabs. Now I have to block it all to get any peace.
I don't know about chrome, but in firefox you can disable autoplay on HTML5 now. It's a bit annoying for watching youtube because it assumes the video is already playing (you have to go click the pause and then click play) but annoying news sites and other nonsense don't bother me anymore.
> PS. Paying for content is also not an option until there is an anonymous way to make a payment and the payments are minuscule.
This is the most important part of your post. I would be glad to find a way to pay for content that I value. I do in other realms (e.g., Netflix original programming).
But to me it comes back to a) ease-of-use and b) trust. On the former, there's a big opportunity in a way to make that seamless. One click and done. And, on the latter, trust is huge. People are using ad-blockers because publishers' sites have malicious ad networks. And now you want me to give you my credit card number!? It just doesn't work.
My local newspaper downloads >4MB on initial page load. Some of the ads will not even render correctly on my perfectly normal laptop. The ads are a mix of dodgy ad networks and well meaning local businesses. The sad thing is that they probably don't even realise how bad it is and how they are abusing their advertisers.
I think this is the wrong way to approach this. You're essentially pirating content now. If you don't like the ads, stop using the site. It's that simple. To take it a step farther, send an email to customer service explaining WHY you're no longer using the site. This sends a much stronger message to them about what makes you unhappy with the service they provide.
I actually end up doing that with websites that block browsers with ad-blockers from viewing the content. It takes a while to change my habits but when they are changed there is no coming back to these sites.
To me that comes off as "Hey, I'm angry you won't let me view your content without paying for it anymore". Obviously in this case paying for it is viewing/watching ads. Not trying to get high and mighty with anyone. The whole ad-block culture just screams entitlement to me and it bothers me a lot.
Who is entitled? People who want to view content and will make what they feel is a reasonable bargain to do so, or people who want to sell ads and will make unreasonable bargains to do so?
If the initial html that loaded on the page also had the ads in it, it'd be much harder to block them and also make the experience of seeing those ads much less unpleasant.
As it stands what people are doing is loading the initial html and saying "no thanks" to all of the follow-on stuff.
I don't disagree with the fact that ads could be better served more safely and more securely. And I agree that the experience could be better. That's where my comment about writing an email to explain ones unhappiness with the user experience comes in. I work in information security and we do see a lot of malware infections from compromised ad servers.
The idea of a website serving ads themselves, instead of relying on a call to an ad network, is good. It means big changes to how advertising works though. The advertisers would have to give customers the ads for them to embed into the page and would need some sort of guarantee that the customer wouldn't change the ads and would pull them down when it was time to do so. I can't think of a way to check this stuff automatically that doesn't involve a call to an advertisers server, which is the whole problem to begin with.
I am not angry. The authors of the website control their content. If they want to block ad blocking browsers so be it. But my reaction to it is to go somewhere else, not to embrace being tracked all over the web.
These businesses feel that they are entitled to my time, my browsing history, my CPU time, my battery life, my limited mobile data, my habits, my privacy and the security of my identity and machines.
They feel that they are entitled to not adapt their business model to change and will push anyone off the jungle gym who won't play by their archaic rules.
It's their right, but the only entitlement I feel I deserve is the right to ignore their childish behavior as well.
Well they didn't exactly say "do we have your permission to run your CPU up to 100%, hog all of your memory, and install trackers on your computer? And occasionally, can we install malware on your machine?"
Once advertisements become sentient creatures and can be considered human, then they should be granted human rights. As it stands though, what you're doing is saying that refugees (who, I remind you, are humans) are basically worth as much as a banner ad on a website. It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway: blocking ads is not comparable to genocide. In any way. At all.
Unfortunately due to the large occurrence of malware being served over ad networks I will never choose to view ads even for trusted sites.
I will and have support people in other mediums(donations, patreon, etc), but the advertising model serving bad actor's code to my browser is not going to fly.
No, what you're doing is reformatting content that is being openly broadcast to anyone who cares to look in its direction, to best suit your interests and device capabilities and security.
If a site literally cannot survive without ads being viewed, they should block those who use ad blockers or reconsider their business model since blocking will only become more prevalent over time.
I do, actually. I listen to commercials on the radio all the time. It's how they pay for the content I'm listening to and they are often targeted enough that I hear about a business/offer that is pertinent to me. I don't think it's "utter nonsense". I feel like I'm supporting the continued existence of something that I care enough about to listen to. If they can't monetize the service, how can it be expected to continue? Is there no cognitive dissonance for you when you consume something without paying for it? This is the entitlement I referred to in another comment. I don't have cable, so no TV ads.
There's the difference: you seem to be getting something out of the ads. For me it's 100% irrelevant. If I need something I will go look for it. If what I need is so special that it can't be found by an internet search, rest assured no-one would make an ad for it.
I am not sure why you use the term "cognitive dissonance" for referring to a situation where I consume without paying for something, and I don't feel entitled either. It feels very sonant to read clean websites.
If someone chooses to provide a resource it's their issue to figure out how to make it profitable. Trying to set up a fake moral pressure which requires me to listen to/watch mundane, uninspiring bullshit that I do not care about, that wouldn't make them any money from me anyhow, is kind of a strange way to go through life. If I went to your website for it's great content, why do you want to force me to look at something else instead? My brain resources are too valuable to be used to process to hear someone's lies about their products.
In essence you want me to pay for your things by quite literally wasting my time.
It's pretty simple. The great content is created because the site can afford to pay for it. The "something else" I'm forcing you to look at is keeping the servers on. They HAVE figured out how to make it profitable, and you've figured out how to avoid paying for it. Just because you feel that the moral obligation is manufactured doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Paywalls are not the answer in all cases, and I do think there are moral as well as technical questions here.
I call it entitlement because you want, and are getting, a free lunch. I call it cognitive dissonance because as an adult with bills to pay you must understand that you are hurting a business by consuming content that costs them money to create and host without paying for it, be it with your time or your money.
Maybe, but that wasn't my point. My point is that it's useless to have a discussion about the economic impact of individual "pirating" of website content because the discussion costs more than the piracy.
I would submit they have not figured out how to make it profitable, lest we would not be in the situation that we're in.
Clearly there is a dissonance between the product your consumers want, your content, and the product you're willing to offer them: your content mixed with advertisement. That's an unfortunate situation.
Why does the advertisement make you money in the first place though ?
Someone out there with an actual product or service, want's to sell their product.
To increase sales, they pay you an amount of money that they think represents the amount of sale they will generate from the buyers that buy based on the advertisement run on your site. Whether it's through the proxy of some ad network or not.
If I am not willing to buy any products in the first place, I don't have to be factored into the amount the company is willing to pay to advertisers, as it will not increase their sales. If, based on just viewing the advertisement, I still am, that price is slightly inflated.
All what I am doing by blocking ads is bringing that price closer to it's actual value. Now, that's not in your interest as a content producer, but you don't have to be all moralistic about it and try to make me feel bad.
You might argue that that's incorrect, and after viewing enough advertisement I might be persuaded to buy a product that I would not have wanted to by before, but I am not willing to give you that power over my mind for mundane stuff like deodorants and beverages.
That is the height of shit that is not my problem. The "moral" argument against ad blocking goes away when you consider:
- The security implications of the large ad networks (how many malware scares were the result of exploit-laden ads being served on large, popular sites?)
- The privacy implications of same (tracking all the things)
- The large ad networks attitude towards said problems. ("Meh.")
The moment the sites that show these unvetted ads take some responsibility and agree to reimburse me and my company for my time spent dealing with a security breach caused by their shitty practices is the moment I begin considering not blocking ads at the firewall, and not a second before.
They want all the benefit with none of the responsibility. And that responsibility goes well beyond "paste some javascript we gave you in your header".
As long as the transaction is that one-sided, people will continue blocking, and no amount of moralizing is going to change it. Get used to it.
A site is a site is a site. Whether it serves incomprehensible text or comprehensible 'content'. When you decided as a site owner to open up your entire content to the world for all to consume as is without authentication or some sort of DRM strategy it's available to everyone. And I mean everyone. You can freely close your site off if you want but stop lying to yourself that you're entitled to make your site profitable. It's like saying you're entitled to ROI if you make a product regardless of how people view it (as useless or bad). You're not entitled to profitability. You're only entitled to the chance to become profitable and no more. Please etch that idea into your forehead because from my POV you're the one acting as if you're entitled to free money.
"Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing programming." --Jamie Kellner, former Warner executive
I'm not saying that what Jamie Kellner said is a good thing, only that he said it -- and it broadly reflects the thinking of many decision makers in the "content industry" -- that when content is made available to the audience with support from advertisers, the audience is obligated to view the ads.
Not pirating since one has no indication if or what type of ad-tech is being used a site. It just takes one click to end up with malicious code or a UX headache. The website owner is responsible and does not even require an email from users (more wasted time) since the data will already show what's happening. If the site owner is too dense to comprehend the issue or importance of UX, then c'est la vie.
I might agree that preventing ads from displaying is immoral but tracking users across websites is even more immoral. And since I cannot rely on websites to behave, ad-blockers are actually re-introducing morality into browsing by blocking the tracking.
Don't forget Google's free hosting of Javascript libraries and webfonts. The cost of serving those is recouped by dropping a cookie on you. Also Google DNS can give them great insight into domain popularity.
IP based tracking still works most of the time. Dynamic IPs change very infrequently, and NAT combines IPs in physically (and often socially) close groups. It isn't perfect, but a lot of those requests can probably be mapped back to those cookies.
Google's entire business is based on building large database of tracking (and other) information; obviously their DNS is just another data source.
Just skip the recursive resolvers and run a local caching DNS server that starts from the root zones.
That may be, but it seems that Akamai CDN is still giving them a data feed. From that press release:
"As a result of the pixel-free technology partnership, MediaMath's clients will gain access to more data for audience segmentation, retargeting, and optimization, with quick and easy activation."
Almost 70% of the websites linked from Reddit that I click through. Many links from HN are also guilty of this.
When I'm on mobile, I frequently click on ads by mistake when I'm trying to scroll. It's unintentional on my part, but I feel the web developers and ad networks are colluding to make this happen.
The last three viral infections I've had on my PC's have come from advertisements on websites. I generally will whitelist a select few websites that I trust to not destroy my computer and to not run irritating ads, but at the end of the day this is my damn computer, not the ad companies. If I don't feel like running their code then I can make my machine not do that and there isn't jack they can do about it.
Oh no I can't read about the Model 3 on New York Times? Then I'll go read about it on LA Times, or Huffington Post, or any one of the ten thousand other news sources no doubt covering it.
How does an advert deliver a virus? Are these genuine remote native code execution vulnerabilities in browsers? Or just breaking the sandbox somehow and using internal browser APIs?
Isn't what you need a security patch for your browser rather than an advert blocker?
I don't know how it's done either, and I've heard about them a few times. It seems somewhat unlikely that there is a remote code execution vulnerability being exploited only by adverts that hasn't been urgently fixed by the browsers.
If there genuinely is an exploit, an advert blocker isn't enough as you could put it on any website as well.
Therefore I wonder if it's possible that someone has a mis-informed definition of viruses and really it's something a little different, such as a simple link to actively download malware.
> If there genuinely is an exploit, an advert blocker isn't enough as you could put it on any website as well.
Sure, but then people need to visit that website. Ad networks are a popular delivery method because it gets your code out to millions of people quickly. Putting your exploit on a new Tumblr blog doesn't get you a big botnet.
> I don't know how it's done either, and I've heard about them a few times. It seems somewhat unlikely that there is a remote code execution vulnerability being exploited only by adverts that hasn't been urgently fixed by the browsers.
Flash. And there are a lot of unpatched browsers out there. Between the two, there are lots of users vulnerable to malvertising.
An ad blocker doesn't address the whole of the vulnerability space, but it is a significant mitigation.
The ad network is a vector for malicious code transmission. To that end, an ad-blocker is exactly what you need. Your browser may be exploitable, but I wouldn't doubt that you can siphon up some very valuable personal information using the security model and API your browser implemented.
Just like UNIX-style permissions might, in theory, prevent an unprivileged user from completely hijacking the core system, the model says nothing about user-level applications manipulating user-owned data. I'd argue my data is much more important and valuable than whether or not I need to wipe and reinstall my OS.
Yes, exactly correct. If an ad blocker is the only thing between you and a compromised machine then you are not safe.
I'd be curious if anyone has data, but I would guess "hacked wordpress site" is a far more common vector for spreading this sort of malware than malicious ads.
Ads appear everywhere immediately when published, very few people are visiting some random hacked blogs. Ads are THE vector of choice for browser malware. You may not be safe from the browser exploit with an adblocker, but you will be safe from the method most exploits are delivered.
I've personally encountered multiple hacked sites and zero malicious ads (so far as I know). Like I said, I'd be really curious if anyone has actual data on different exploit vectors rather than just arguing anecdotes.
I think my point remains, however, that if your browser can be compromised by visiting a URL then you are in a bad situation ad blocker or not.
> Businesses have to come up with better monetization strategies.
I don't like Ads but possibly there is no general way to monetize content and this is the problem. With lot of freely available value on Internet it is really difficult to convert it to $$$.
Which is why sites like the Sydney Morning Herald are utterly screwing themselves over. Seriously, go to the SMH now, and check out your ad-blocker. There will be about 60 blocked ads and sites. Then check out the headlines - all click-bait.
Ironically they now have a 30 article a month limit (easily bypassed by switching to private mode in your browser) which actively reduces their ad revenue and messes up their statistics tracking when people switch to private browsing...
In the meantime, Fairfax have been progressively cutting staff. Before it was outsourcing subeditors to New Zealand (and it shows, there are an unbelievable number of unreadable sentences, along with grammar and spelling errors - even in their headlines they show on their main page!) and now they are about to shed more than 100 jobs in actual journalism.
I once subscribed to the SMH, but then the quality got so bad that I just cancelled. They can't even get their comments section right - it's barely usable, and they don't even get threading reasonably correct.
Sure there is. I have a creative skill to make information. If anyone in the world wants that information, they can pay me to make it, and then after that I've already been paid, I can release it CC0 and let the world go nuts with it.
The problems of online DRM / ad ridden websites / etc are all attempts to after the fact monetize information using obsolete IP policy while acting like there is any scarcity to it at all after its made.
A lot of people hear that first paragraph and go on a tirade about getting your brand out, but... that is the same problem, in practice, with either form of funding the creation of information, and is technically its own problem set. You need an audience whether you want people paying you up front to make it at fixed cost or try to use state granted monopolies to extort people for money after the fact.
Usually, but patronage has connotations involving having independent patrons commission you for work. There isn't really proper vocabulary for proposing ideas of things you want to make to the world, and having them fund you creating what they want back. Closest you get is corporate internal pitches.
> Sure there is. I have a creative skill to make information. If anyone in the world wants that information, they can pay me to make it, and then after that I've already been paid, I can release it CC0 and let the world go nuts with it.
You are underestimating the search cost problem there [1] I 100% know my company is in a niche market where our revenue can be > $ 50 million/year and where we have some unique offerings BUT the problem is how I can penetrate those companies or how they can found me, not if I can do the job.
So, what you are saying is true but how will the find you? If they try to find you by your skills how do you rank against others on a search engine/app store/etc? Even worst, probably they express the search query in a different domain that the one where you market yourself.
I believe you hit the nail on the head: greed. This was my tipping point. When sites got so greedy that they stopped caring if anyone read their content, I stopped caring if they got paid for obtrusive ads. Even Google has designed some horrendous ads, especially the Nexus ad that grabs swipes on mobile, keeping you from scrolling past it.
If the ads stuck to the meatverse-equivalent style of static but attractive, I would be fine. But the overwhelming majority overwhelms the reader with animation, transitions, cover-ups, pop-over, pop-up, pop-under—how many pops do we need before we have enough?! And publishers have restored to covering up their just to force interactivity, so you can click through them and see more ads. Why is there a Read More link on this recipe page? Obviously I want to read more, that's why I visited this page!
It boils down to greed. The bar has been set so low to attract more and more advertisers to make more money. Frankly, if someone were ingenious enough to inflate the price for plain publisher-hosted ads, one to a page, that didn't overwhelm the reader, I'm pretty sure that person would soon be rich.
Is it fair to call it "greed" if these sites aren't making much money, even with all the aggressive ad units? You need to have an extremely popular site with uncommonly low overhead to be very profitable just off of banner ads.
Yea, I'm ready for websites who can't find a viable monetization strategy to just go bankrupt already and stop blaming me for their shitty business plan.
You won't miss them? Quite a few of the sites I enjoy are struggling to remain ad supported and I would be sad if they can't find a way to make it work.
Well, first off: full disclosure that my startup is ad-supported business news sites. So feel free to consider me biased, but the reason I started the company with this model is because I really believe news websites work best when anyone can read the articles without paying a fee or signing up for an account.
Off the top of my head maybe a good example is http://popville.com/ which is a local DC blog. The guy who runs it is a little controversial, but the site is extremely well-read and useful and 100% ad supported. http://arstechnica.com/ is great too. And then, ya know, stuff like Twitter wouldn't really work if you had to pay to use it. Or do Twitter ads not count?
I have no real issue with people who want to put ads on sites. My tolerance ends, however, when they try to moralize to me about how I render hypertext on my own machine. My attention and mental health are worth more to me than the ad impression ever could ever be to the marketer. Occasionally a site will refuse to serve articles unless I turn off my adblocker, and every time I just close the tab with no regrets.
Sure, sometimes. But it's not easy or possible to pay directly. Paywalls are very tricky to get right and IMHO make the whole site less valuable -- just look at how many complaints there are on HN when someone posts a WSJ.com link. And frankly, I'd rather look at contextually relevant ads than pay money for most sites.
> Sure, sometimes. But it's not easy or possible to pay directly.
Patreon seems to be having a positive effect here, at least with some sites. Webcomics, personal blogs, and other small sites can really thrive on donations alone, and it's heartening that systems are finally arriving to facilitate that specific business model.
I don't think so, but to be honest I'm not 100% sure because I've been using an adblocker and noscript so long and so consistently that I haven't the slightest idea what (if any) ads show up on my favorite sites.
I do know that I've been quite happy to stop visiting any site that refuses to show content to browsers that adblock. Such sites are almost always low value, and their refusal to serve webpages is a good reminder that the content isn't really a good use of my time, anyways.
If more websites I value more highly start doing this, I'll probably just end up buying subscriptions to turn off ads.
You do now. It was easier before the ad industry fell into the classic Tragedy of the Commons trap.
"Reinvent your industry with this one weird old tip."
Yes, it was greed, and yes, of course it led to a predictable outcome.
The smart thing for the industry to do would be to create a code of practice and do a deal with the ad blockers to allow - not force - people to view ads that add value to their lives. Print publishing used to make this work fairly well.
But the industry seems incapable of acting with anything that passes for strategic intelligence. If it didn't treat customers like exploitable prey, it wouldn't be in the situation it's in now.
The problem with greed is that it only takes a handful of players to ruin it for everyone. There are still good sites providing quality content and monetizing it responsibly and decently with ads - they will also get hit by ad blockers, as most users would likely block all ads (and we can't blame them for it)
> The problem with greed is that it only takes a handful of players to ruin it for everyone.
This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Bad actors in the advertising space rush to extract the most value out of internet ads by continually pushing the frontier of obnoxiousness. Because, 'hey if I don't do it, someone else will'. And much like the tragedy of the commons with overfishing, they have to keep increasing effort to make up for the decline in effectiveness as they 'overfish' internet users.
Even if you're an ethical advertiser you end up getting harmed by the unethical ones as wide swathes of people start using ad blockers, and the ones that don't are ad-blind anyway.
I've been sticking to blocking all ads everywhere for a long time. It feels like every time I start thinking I ought to whitelist a few of the sites with better content, a story comes out about a fresh set of malware via ads attacks on very respectable sites. Another example of advertiser's greed and sloppiness spoiling the pot.
There's an interesting short story I am unable to find online at the moment, which describes a near-future in which people have figured out how to have similarly invasive effects on the viewers with print ads - leading to infectious graffiti, for example.
I don't understand the "greed" part. I worked for a publisher which eventually had to put 8 ad units per page and still could not break even and went out of business soon. I don't think trying to pay salaries of employees is greed and if it is then all of us are greedy.
But your solution is right and that is why native ads like Taboola, Outbrain and Revcontent are winning. As times goes by having ads that are not distinguishable from content is what might help these publishers.
PS. There is one more serious side effect of small publishers dieing out. It means Facebook and Twitter might have much more influence public opinion and they may not support diversity of opinion the way an open internet did. Facebook is already taking a pro-migrants stand or Twitter is also helping censor criticism of religion. Survival of small publishers is important.
The idea of ads indistinguishable from content is troubling. I agree this is a probable outcome. It sounds like food for conspiracy theories. I see two paths. First, ads so good you seek them out knowing they are advertising. This would be similar to a good catalog. Second, you are looking for content and find something produced by a company without your knowledge. It would be easy to produce "Top 10" lists or other style of content that favors your products. In that scenario, trust becomes the valuable commodity.
Ads as content isn't that bad of a problem. Consider a review or a show that uses a product for legitimate reasons.
The (far) bigger problem will be using your friends against you[1]. Advertising by making various "credit scores" dependent on your friends using the "right" products will be very hard to counter. I suggest fighting it now.
Maybe the alternative is "desperation". In your publisher example, lets say they needed 12 ad units per page to break even. At that point, you might start losing people to a bad signal-to-noise ratio.
At the end of the day, it's a viable business model. It's not about the money in of itself. But if you can't support yourself and your business with the "right level" of advertising and you can't persuade people to give you their money any other way, your business model is failing, not advertising in of itself.
> native ads like Taboola, Outbrain and Revcontent are winning
Ah yes, Taboola, that was it. About a year ago, Taboola was specifically what caused me to install ad block.
I generally didn't find ads too horrible. My browsing habits just never sent me to sites that had really obnoxious ads, and in certain cases, I specifically would avoid sites like Sourceforge, Softpedia or Download.com, because of their fake download link ads. For the most part, I tolerated (and largely ignored) the existence of ads. I've actually even legitimately clicked on ads before (fewer than 10 in my life, and only for something work-related), though I'm not sure it's ever caused a purchase.
Then these stupid "You may also like" things started appearing everywhere, very similar in style to actual real "related articles on this site" content. That's so misleadingly close to the fake download button ads that it was really getting on my nerves. Then the content quickly got obnoxious, with celebrity gossip, and the one that totally put me over the edge was some gross picture of some type of medical problem which I was seeing multiple times a day.
Honestly I even initially started out with just the intent of blocking Taboola only, but they do things to presumably make it harder to block, and so it was easier just to leave on the default blocklists (which had already done the work to block Taboola everywhere) and everything else was just a casualty of that working.
So are "native ads" like Taboola the answer? I sure hope not, because I am willing to spend a lot of energy to never see that nonsense again.
Next up will be getting rid of "sponsored content". At least they dont eat bandwidth or server you malware. I mean they should just be images wrapped in a href to link to a "sponsored" article, instead of some javascript ad network that can serve malware
I support makers and creators and artists. I back kickstarters. I have patreon subscriptions. I buy music and books and swag from artists I like a lot, especially those that I think need the most support. And sometimes I volunteer my time and skills. All in all I've spent or donated tens of thousands of dollars either in cash or time throughout the years to the arts.
Meanwhile, I spent 20 years browsing the web without an ad blocker. Since I've started using one last year, it's led to a much better experience.
Yet still, there are people who think that I should be burdened with some moral obligation to suffer advertising, for things that I will never buy, being shoved in my face in order to consume content. As though the business models of every single content creator on the planet were my personal problem. No, I do my part, and more. I've paid my advertising dues as well, and I'm done. If you don't like that you can go fuck yourself. You should be spending your time urging content creators to fix their broken business models, or helping them to do so, not moralizing about fucking advertising.
I don't use ad blockers, but I do just hit the 'back' button when I see a site that's ad-unreadable. I don't feel that I'm missing anything of quality this way.
I have a flash blocker on, which I think ends up doing 90% of what I would want an ad blocker for when combined with my 'back it up on bad ads' policy.
Sounds like the internet is going back to the early 2000s with mass popups? and auto playing sounds?. I recall the banner ad that made me learn how to edit my host files. It'd play a sound of a bee buzzing away on loop. I learnt how to edit host files pretty quickly, never looked back. Threw TV out soon over a decade ago too. Native ads are on the rise, that's the next wave.
I think it's unfair to call it greed. It feels like a strawman dismissal. It's actually hard to make money from content, and the best content creators almost certainly aren't also the best monetizers.
So people do the default thing. The default thing is ads.
And the problem is that ads don't work very well, and they are working less and less well as time goes on because people are acclimating to them like a war of escalation.
To squeeze small a bit of money out of content, you run ads that are increasingly obtrusive.
If they aren't, they don't make any money at all.
There's a huge market opportunity here. It's not greed, it's an obvious outcome of incentives.
It's amazing to me that I still actively seek out some legacy ads (flyers in the Sunday paper, Thursday car ads, Wednesday butcher ads) in the local paper. But except for the occasional Google organic result, I never, ever get any utility from online advertising.
The closest thing is the ads in podcasts, which tend to be built around a story and are more compelling. I've looked at several of those advertisers and bought a couple.
> It's amazing to me that I still actively seek out some legacy ads (flyers in the Sunday paper, Thursday car ads, Wednesday butcher ads) in the local paper
Those are not ads. It's legitimate information that helps you, so you seek it out. The vast majority of ads are not informative, but rather use emotional manipulation to get you to buy stuff you don't need, or that you wouldn't buy otherwise.
The biggest difference, in my view, is that ads are forced upon you, whereas you seek out information yourself. E.g. if you browse a clothing magazine and you see a H&M or Zara branded page, that's an ad. But if you're looking through a catalogue of clothes, and there's a section with H&M clothing and a section with Zara clothing, that's information that you explicitly sought out.
Another example are billboards and information boards. If it's in large print, so that you see it passing by, it's an ad. But if it's in small print, so you only see it if you intentionally approach the board to see what's new locally, that's information.
> The closest thing is the ads in podcasts, which tend to be built around a story and are more compelling. I've looked at several of those advertisers and bought a couple.
This is a really good point. The only worthwhile ads I've seen on the Internet have been from podcasts.
I use adblocker. Now, the news sites I like say "sorry pal, adblocker means no news". I'm perfectly fine with that. It's just arms race. My freedom to remove the ads, their to put them. Everybody's free and I love it. Now I'll have to pay and that's fine : good content comes from work and work deserve money. But all of a sudden, as I'll pay, I'll become much more demanding. And so competition can work again...
Just get a browser plugin like quick javascript switcher and disable javascript for sites that try to disallow adblocker users. It has worked for me every time.
Interestingly enough, the page itself is an example of the very thing it criticizes: http://imgur.com/aQJvlG3. Almost half the screen is an ad when you load the page.
Black and white thinking. Content creators still need to get paid. I'd be quite upset if my favorite sites had to shut down due to the rise of ad blocking and non-viable alternatives to ads (like "subscriptions", etc...)
Content creator business models are not my problem. If they want to get paid, they need to figure that out.
By globalizing their reach, most content shops entered into a race to the bottom where they cannot win. That's why you have these tiers of auctions for inventory that slide down the food chain in terms of quality as the price falls.
Traditionally, successful media has been local, local, local in scope. That remains true, although everything is being reshuffled.
Media outlets that remain alive have some sort of scope limitation that makes their ad inventory more valuable and reduces their exposure/dependency to Facebook.
Black and white thinking. Content creators can still get paid. They just need to figure out a business model that doesn't hijack my browsing session, use the limited mobile data I'm allotted and pay for each month to serve unwanted content, drain my battery, eat my CPU, track my reading/surfing/porn habits and potentially run malicious code on my machines.
You seem to think content creators sit in some evil dungeon, plotting out ways to screw their readers with ads.
That's not really it at all. There are a limited number of ad networks out there and publishers attach themselves to one or more of them. At that point, the publisher is largely clear of the process, unless they're negotiating custom deals of some sort, which happens with larger sites but is far less common than small sites.
The people doing the tracking aren't the content sites -- it's the ad networks. As a publisher, I'm not privy to your personal details.
I'm under no such impression. Thanks for the image, though.
I am under the impression that they are okay with or ambivalent towards tactics used by the ad-networks, because they'll block you for using an adblocker.
Besides profiling I also use ad blocking because I hate the usability of most pages which are cramped with ads. It didn’t use to be like that a few years ago. From the moment advertisers decided that their ads should mainly appear above the fold, web page usability went downwards very fast. There are quite a few sites where you can’t see a single thing without scrolling down. I don’t ever recall advertising being so annoying online.
It would be interesting to see if someone could endow an independent publication with enough money to keep it going, then put quality ad-free journalism behind a paywall.
I'm thinking it would be something like "B Corporation". Not exactly a charity, but not necessarily trying to maximize profit either. Charge a high monthly price, maybe $50/month for immediate access to new articles, but after 1 month everything becomes freely available.
Information will undoubtedly be copied and posted elsewhere anyway, the only thing you can realistically control is who gets access to it first. People who value up-to-date news that's guaranteed to be impartial would pay for early access to it, I think. Everyone else would still get to benefit from it as well, just slightly delayed.
The Scott Trust isn't exactly a large endowment that can provide the news using the returns from investments. It's an independent ownership model which has enough cash reserves to cushion the Guardian for a while why they get back into profit. If they don't crack the problem of how to make money from the internet they are gone just the same as everybody else.
While I love The Intercept, and First Look Media, its parent company, it is important to understand that this is not a typical scenario. The Intercept runs at a loss, which it is allowed to do because First Look Media's founder and president is Pierre Omidyar (eBay). He cuts checks for The Intercept when they need funding. They don't have an economically-sustainable journalism operation, which is why they are currently working on new for-profit initiatives.
If third party cookies were allowed, then sites like Business Insider would not be tempted to fire 50 (or more) resource hogging tracking pixels and scripts.
The law of unintended consequences in full effect here.
I recently ran into a cooking site that wouldn't serve up any actual recipes if the javascript of their ad generator wasn't found. Pretty clever... I'm surprised more sites don't do it.
I started blocking ads when adblock plus was not even a thing. Not sure when that was exactly, 10 years ago or more?
However, I did it when they started to add moving ads. There was a site that I regularly consumed (multiple times a day) and that I wanted to support. But, I was not able to focus on the content, everytime that blinking ad just distracted me.
So I had the choice, stop using that site or blocking the ads. I started using adblock back then and everytime I have to use a computer without a blocker I thank myself for the wise decision back then.
That said I would rather not consume anything anymore than allowing ads again.
The things that I was and am really interested in, will be saturated by buying books and the people that put up stuff for free, like I do for certain things.
Also I would pay for services I like. Byte.fm did it the right way I think. It's online radio, from the beginning on they never streamed ads and still do not do so today. Not long after I started to consume them I paid them and still do so today because I support services that explicitly do not use ads.
I am of the same mind. I make payments/donations to sites I enjoy regularly and block ads wholesale. If Forbes will not let me read their content w/ an AdBlocker, then I will just not read, nor cite, their content. Simple as that. I have weened myself off of much infotainment over the years and as sites bork/discontinue their RSS feeds I will read even less web content. My life is more enjoyable with less noise on the ine, anyway.
People question how we'll support content without ads, but I have to take a step back and wonder - is content that needs to be supported really that valuable? Might the world be a better place without it?
People who are passionate about the subject they are writing on are going to publish regardless of ad revenue, assuming they get hits (writing stuff nobody reads is a fast track to burnout). Right now, in many cases these people are being crowded out by well SEO'd content mills. If the advertising dollars dry up, the content mills will die off, and that ecological niche will be freed up to be filled by people with passion.
I for one welcome the idea of a return to a genuine internet, where everything isn't about monetization. The amount of content may go down, but the quality will almost certainly go way up, and there will be that much less garbage to wade through.
No. You are basically saying that people should work for free if they are passionate about it. Professional writers cannot pay their bills with passion. Same with artists, musicians etc, and every other underpaid profession. Just because they (hopefully) like what they do, does not mean it is not work or does not have value.
> Professional writers cannot pay their bills with passion
Professional writers aren’t ad-financed.
Look at Panama Papers.
Not a single of the involved newspapers and broadcasters is ad financed: All are either tax or subscription financed.
Btw, for just 19.99€ you can get full access to all articles about Panama Papers in the Süddeutsche if you don’t want to enter a 12-month subscription for the whole newspaper.
While some outlets enjoy full state support or sufficient subscription revenue to not need advertisements, the VAST majority of publications get a significant portion of their revenue (which is the used to pay their staff writers and freelance contributors) from ads. Better known examples of such publications include: The New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic.
In Norway, where I live, Aftenposten was given access to the Panama Papers for analysis and publication. Aftenposten is partially subsidized by the Norwegian government, but also dependent on ad revenue to survive.
An artist/writer/musician isn't entitled to make a living at their passion. The ones that do make a living with their work are the ones that produce things that many people find valuable; society has deemed their work good enough that it wants to support them doing it full time.
Of course, there are rare cases of great artists/etc who can't make a living because they haven't been "discovered" yet, or because their work runs against the current trends (despite being brilliant). I would argue these are the minority, and for the most part the system is functioning properly.
> Just because they (hopefully) like what they do, does not mean it is not work or does not have value.
Nothing has value. Value is assigned to something by people who are willing to pay. I wouldn't say that people should work for free; I would say that people shouldn't do something if they don't want to.
No, it will not be filled by people with "passion", it will be filled by people with free time and economic security. We don't yet live in a world where passion is enough to motivate free content.
Nobody is going to go through the trouble of writing content they aren't passionate about if there isn't a financial incentive.
As for the free time argument, people who are passionate about a subject make time for it. These people you claim are too busy just surviving to write content still find time for several hours of television/video games/other worthless use of time a day.
No, those two categories are basically the same. Middle class people with solid 9-5 jobs and not many other commitments. Some portion of these people create stuff in their free time.
The people I'm talking about are either too poor to follow their passions and work for free, or have the time but have decided to channel their passion into something that might make them money.
Basically, I have a problem with this quote: "Is content that needs to be supported really that valuable? Might the world be a better place without it?" The idea that anybody who publishes anything of value would be willing and able to do it for free is just obviously wrong. The world would not be a better place if independent content were only created by a tiny portion of humanity.
Just because you publish content for free doesn't mean that you don't derive value from it. By establishing yourself as an expert you can (just off the top of my head):
- create a market for yourself as a consultant/instructor/offer seminars in that area
- charge businesses to feature reviews of their goods and services
- sell books/prints/tshirts/(insert relevant merch for type of content here)
None of these avenues are viable for content mills. I stand by my original point that if content was free and everyone monetized their expertise this way we'd have a much better internet.
That's a great list of things that poor people, people with families, people with busy lives for any reason can't do. You need to first establish yourself as an expert, for free, with all of your free time.
Regardless, this is all possible right now. "if content was free"? Content can be free, there's lots of it. Removing every way for non-experts to make money would only hurt people, it wouldn't help anyone. It wouldn't make it any easier to publish stuff for free.
What's the benefit for society that poor people have the ability to marginally add to their income by writing words that they don't care if anybody reads?
Generally, the reason I say things to people is that I want them to hear what I'm saying, not because every time I can sneak in an endorsement of a product (that I haven't even selected), I get a nickel. I can want them to hear because I want to improve their lives, because I want to appeal to their consciences, because I'm an exhibitionist, because I want to coordinate activities with them, or even because I want them to give me money (not for a long time, and I'm sure my parents are happy about that.)
How did the last become the only one that is legitimate, and the only one that it considered a realistic source of motivation for providing the public with a range of things that they want to see or hear?
It's weird that the preservation of purposeless words is a concern of people. I would expect the people who think that we need a financial motivation to express themselves would largely conduct themselves through life silently.
You are just an old fuddy duddy. If I was reading this as prose, maybe I'd agree that an author could have been more creative with word choice. But in this kind of post, the message is vastly more important than the medium, and the use of the word 'shit' doesn't obscure the message.
The content that accompanies the worst kind of advertising tends to be the worst kind of content. If adblocking kills that kind of content I'm all for it. For example the number of sites that scrap stackoverflow and cram 30 different ads onto the page.
Even legit sites serve malware. It's beyond their control. Ghostery makes money by telling sites what shit they're serving. Because they don't know. It's too many layers of dependency.
There I block all ads all the time. No exceptions. Not even for "good" sites.
The sooner everyone blocks ads the better. If sites go out of business then so be it. They'll evolve once forced; but not a moment sooner.
The producers of content that I view not being financially secure is a problem. I've read a lot of useful stuff over the years, and I really want the people who made that possible to thrive.
I don't particularly care about whether they can buy flash cars, but I do care about them being able to live without stress and continue to do the things they love and are best at.
As far as I'm concerned, the problem looks like this:
1. Society isn't providing them with a way to live, so it's down to me (and others like me) to help out.
Which leads to:
2. I'm not wealthy enough to feel like I can give back to them, or there's no reasonable interface to do so
Which leads to:
3. Out of desperation, they try to force my hand by employing advertising (so that indirectly there's a cashflow).
I'd rather work on #1 and #2 directly than look at #3. I'm not that interested in short term solutions, and advertising is a particularly ugly one.
I'm not sure that the creation and dissemination of knowledge works well as a capitalistic business. I'm not sure that it leads to optimal outcomes WRT the dissemination of said material.
I don't know how we deal with the edge case of trading scarce resources like food and land for unlimited resources like data, but I don't think advertising is it.
When you think about it, it's really quite odd. The deal is that you can view this web page, if in the abstract you commit to buying some portion of a physical item or service from someone else later on.
To me, it feels a lot like an inefficient form of tax.
DNT was never going to work and the failure of the Do Not Call list should have made it obvious. No one ever thought people would willingly accept being tracked in the first place. I'm sure everyone who ever worked on an ad network felt a little yucky with what they were doing at some point and got over it real quick or quit, leaving an industry full of people who already rationalized that what they were doing was OK. Seeing the DNT options in browsers bugs me almost as much as seeing those cookie warnings. Government is making this stuff even more annoying, just let the people figure it out.
Side note, I'd love to see ad blockers add something to block those cookie warnings. Since literally no one on either side wants them, I'm sure website authors would be willing to agree on a de facto standard css class or something that would make them real easy to hide. Maybe it should be opt-in in case someone tries to go after the ad blockers for interfering with the cookie law.
You can use a hosts file that redirects all the domains that serve garbage to 127.0.0.1. If you have rooted your phone, at least. There are plenty of good lists available in forums. Like this, you remove ads system-wide, even in apps.
Firefox still has a few rough edges on Android, and some small number of sites exhibit pathological performance characteristics in Mobile FF, but it's certainly good enough to be your primary solution. I keep Chrome around for when sites have problems with Mobile FF, but I find myself reaching for it less and less over time.
Take a look at Netguard on Github. It emulates the hostfile via local loopback vpn and is able to fully adblock your android device without rooting it. It's also available on the playstore, but that functionality is disabled.
While the discussion here on HN is good about this topic, I think the actual article missed the point completely.
Sure, tracking is an important issue with ads but I really don't think Do Not Track made any sense nor would have made any difference. It's the continued, forceful intrusion into our minds that these ads make.
Without ad blockers: I go to a page and, the first thing I see, is an overlay with a Ford Truck on it. Then I click the x that appeared after 25 seconds on that and I continue down the page. I manage to read half of the article in spite of the "Social Bar" that is blocking some of the text and then I see a "article continued after the jump" and an ad served right below it. I scroll past that to the rest of the content. I continue to lose track of the article that I'm reading because there's a giant flashy banner to the right side of my screen replaying some video with crazy motion and is following me as I scroll. THEN, I finally get to the bottom and I'm like "I liked that article. I should read more by these people!" and, instead of their content, there's a bunch of click bait bullcrap that leads to poorly written articles about topics that I don't care about at the bottom. I then proceed to leave the page in anger.
With ad blockers: I go to a page and read an article. I get it done quickly and efficiently and am able to concentrate and take in all of the information. I get to the bottom and want to read more but I don't see any more from that site because it's all served through some scammy ad network and is blocked. I leave the site but I will return when I see another link from said site, for sure!
None of that would have been changed by Do Not Track and THAT is the problem with ads today. (IMO at least..)
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