8 ms·

What we break when we fix ad blocking

114 points by arctictony 11y ago

larrik 11y ago
Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers/publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire. It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through constantly.
- lmm 11y ago
  Oh but it is. The publishers went to the networks because they paid better, and never wondered where they were getting their advantages from.
  - click170 11y ago
    Couldn't agree more. The fault for the state of web advertising these days lies squarely on advertising networks that do not vet their content. For a long time I used but did not recommend adblock to my trogladite friends and family. Sadly its gotten so bad that I've begun installing it on their machines on their behalf when they ask me for help with their computer because ad blockers are today what antivirus was 10 years ago. They're how you keep yourself safe online. Adblock usage won't change until the networks do.
- ad-hominem 11y ago
  > Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals Oh, not wanting advertising networks all over the world sharing data about my internet usage makes me a criminal eh? Hyperbole much? It's free content, there's no assumption I am going to actually look at advertisements (or watch a commercial on TV, or listen to one on the radio). If somebody gets up during commercials to use the bathroom while watching Cheers reruns, are they also a criminal?
- shostack 11y ago
  Criminals? Really?
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    I think he's referring to the people distributing malware though ad networks.
ISL 11y ago
I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use. If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.
- TallGuyShort 11y ago
  Being willing to pay is not a guarantee you can remain ad-free. Showing ads to paying users will still often be seen as a way to increase revenue further, unless the company has made a lifetime guarantee to the contrary. I pay for Netflix. I would even be willing to pay more for Netflix. But then they started showing ads before content they created.
- bittercynic 11y ago
  I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) Other awesome ad-free content is created to promote retail within the same company, like sparkfun.com. It seems to me the ease of monetization with ad-networks drive ultra-low quality content like about.com, though even I must admit that there are also good sites out there that are supported by ads. edit: I just discovered that dr-iguana.com does have ads. I stick by my assertion that there is a lot of great content out there made strictly as a hobby, though.
  - munificent 11y ago
    > I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source. I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field. It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works. When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how few novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book. There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people observing the poor from a distance. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell. You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life. The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness. This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story. The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems causing increased economic disparity. If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, we need to hear their stories. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them. [1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ [2]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
jordigh 11y ago
I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties. More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.
- MBCook 11y ago
  The Verge has a poll going today asking if you use an ad blocker: "Yes, I want free content and I'll pay the ad blockers" and "No, I want free content and I'll pay the publisher through ads". I'm with you. I didn't use an ad blocker for years. Then I installed a flash blocker because it kept my computer from trying to melt it's self and play video ads while I was trying to read. Then we started to get so many ads that prevented me from reading content (the link-hover pop-ups, pop-ups that appear after the content has been loaded for 30s, ads that use JS to move parts of the page around) I started using one on the desktop just so I could try to read sites. In the last year I've been using my phone/tablet a lot more. The experience has been DREADFUL because of ads. They take up most of the screen, slow loading to a crawl, kick other pages out of memory, make scrolling jittery, etc. I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. If the ads are relatively unobtrusive (i.e. not covering up content, not flashing, etc.) they're OK with me. I don't mind banners in between paragraphs of a story I'm reading. But if I can't read your site because of your ads, you're not helping yourself. The creepiness of trackers only ads to all the other problems. The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker. (I also subscribe to sites I really like, which only seems fair).
  - hyperbovine 11y ago
    > I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. FYI, I had the pleasure of installing an ad-blocker (in the spirit of no advertising, I will not mention which one) on my iPad this morning. It lets me turn off scripts and images. The device now responds like something out of Star Trek. Highly, highly recommended if you just care about reading words on the screen.
akshayB 11y ago
I use Adblock and I don't mind disabling it for sites that provide quality content or reading materials. There has to be a balance which is sometimes abused by the sites. For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don't make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don't mind watching a small commercial if it was 5-10 minutes highlight of a game. If the balance was reasonable I am sure Adblock would not have been this popular.
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  nfl.com was actually the site that turned me into a "default to blocking" person. The severity of ads on their site is pretty ridiculous.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
My issue is with advertisements that break web pages, or slow them down dramatically. Or even worse, take up real estate on my phone, and just plain break my mobile experience further. Sometimes I forget to install an adblocker whenever I do a fresh OS install and forget just how bad things can be without an adblocker (well really my biggest peeve is pop ups, just why are they still around?) and they get worse when someone buys ads to distribute an exploit to Java or something (was once in my lifetime a victim to a Java 0-day through advertisements - never again will I enable Java as a browser plugin).
- briffle 11y ago
  There is a sports related web site I often read (friends link to it from facebook, and other sites I visit).. When reading it on mobile, almost the entire page will load, then my whole phone (LG G4) freezes up completely for about 8 seconds, then a full page add appears over the screen. Sometimes the "X" is in the upper right, sometimes below, etc, and if you are off even the slightest amount, you get a new chrome tab opened, to a site that also freezes up your whole phone again for a few seconds.. If it wasn't for adds the cover the whole text, I would probably not run an ad blocker (and really need to find one for android that doesn't suck)
  - dublinben 11y ago
    I highly recommend uBlock in Firefox for Android. It works pretty much the same as on desktop, which is to say excellently.
  - AJ007 11y ago
    One thing is for certain, publishers aren't using cohorts for how browser-breaking advertising is influencing their user retention and overall revenue. Fuck, some of the JS just for news site UI makes it clear no one is even testing their mobile sites on an actual mobile device. If the ad block rate gets high enough, and if the CPMs do not increase in the face of dwindling supply, publishers will just make content available only in their own apps. Fake crises averted, things change, markets and businesses adapt.
harryf 11y ago
> If the content that best informs our thinking is increasingly only available to those willing to pay then it has troubling impacts for those living in poverty or countries for whom a $9.95 monthly subscription is out of reach. ...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read
- Boxbot 11y ago
  You prefer targeted advertising to and data collection from children and teenagers to having them get parental approval for what they do online?
grey-area 11y ago
This flood of articles about blocking ads are all predicated on the assumption that making money with ads supports quality content, and that the internet as we know it would not exist without ads. Both of these assumptions are false - the internet didn't begin by being driven by ads, and it won't end that way, and ad-driven content is degraded by the ads when it starts to exist because of them. The intrusive ads which are being blocked do not lead to quality content, on the contrary they intrude on it both in an immediate sense by distracting readers from the content, and in editorial terms, by driving a constant demand for more clicks, more views, and more unique visits, whatever the cost. The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers. The result is media sites which see the success of Buzzfeed not as a warning but as inspiration, which use services like outbrain to try to keep users clicking in a circle of despair through endless shocking headlines which promise much but offer nothing of substance. I won't mourn that web as it passes, and I won't be starting to read the Facebook News app or other corporate feeds instead - native apps are subject to the same pressures and the same inexorable creep of advertising around and into the content. This will be a blow for Google though, and I'm quite sure behind Apple's rhetoric about user choice lies a calculation that this will limit Google's bottom line. The Mona Lisa is an interesting example to use, as it was neither produced in order to display with advertising, nor with advertising within the picture (the two choices offered in the article). It and pictures like it were commissioned privately by a patron who valued the services of that painter but thereafter was displayed for free to the world - maybe there's a model there for online content - commissioned via something like kickstarter for its value but thereafter displayed for free to the public. It also wasn't valued as much at the time as it is now. We should reject false dichotomies which offer the choice between one sort of advertising or another. The best places for discussion, content and news on the web are often advertising free, or have advertising which is unobtrusive and targeted and therefore not likely to be blocked by users, given the choice (as with HN for example). I honestly wouldn't mourn the loss of most of the so-called news services we currently have, and the rise of other services which request payment from a patron, subscription payments from loyal users, or find other ways of making ends meet (selling related services, bundled content, making money on related transactions like bookings etc). There are lots more ways to make money in the world than advertising, and most of them less degrading.
markyc 11y ago
in trying to be more private we may be more transparent I think that's one thing people don't account for. once most content is behind paywalls you leave much more of a trace than on the ad-ridden web now
- click170 11y ago
  I don't disagree but I think an important distinction is that when you provide your credit card there is an expectation that they will be able to track you based on that. A big problem with ad tracking these days is that its entirely out-of-site-out-of-mind, nontechy people don't expect to be tracked across the internet as much as when they buy something online with a credit card.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    No it's also just that once the user is the customer, there's a requirement to actually pay them some respect. An annoyed paying customer is directly lost revenue.
dynomight 11y ago
Maybe scaling native advertising might hire more people than robotizing the whole affair the way it is now.
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  Are you implying that native advertisements aren't ads, or are more acceptable kind of ad, or are impossible to block? Because none of those things are true. Native advertising is probably the worst kind of advertising. If I see a website or magazine publish an "advertorial", I'm never going to trust anything they publish from then on. It completely undermines credibility and only makes sense as a last-ditch moneygrab. It's not even worth blocking because it's a useful red flag.
  - dynomight 11y ago
    There doesn't have to be a single way of doing things for every situation. For some things I'm interested in a native ad is just fine. For other things not. You make interesting points even though you are unnecessarily aggressive.
  - dynomight 11y ago
    Oh my goodness you are so correct.
JulianMorrison 11y ago
This article assumes that advertisers can get more sophisticated than blockers - I don't agree. With good enough technology, any logo can be snipped out or scribbled over. Any inline, self hosted image can be recognized and removed. Perhaps in future, adblockers will comb through the text of pages and the frames of video and your hero will be drinking "soda" instead of <brand name>. Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking glasses. So I can walk down the street and NO LOGOS. It would almost be like humans owned the public space, then.
- octatoan 11y ago
  AFAIK someone did make adblocking glasses with image recognition software. :)
- sbov 11y ago
  Ads tend to be in private spaces though. You can just see it from public space. Another way to achieve your goal is for the glasses to render giant walls around all private spaces. All cities would look like Manhattan then.
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    I was thinking more like: detect an advert, draw a grey box over it. Or kittens.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    You can still ban ads in private spaces. Many cities did that. Sao Paolo is just one example
- wrsh07 11y ago
  Times Square as one great shiny ... emptiness
- jamie_ca 11y ago
  São Paulo, Brazil did just that[1] almost 10 years ago - outright banned outdoor advertising. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
chejazi 11y ago
In the future everyone will be producing content - not just the people that currently do it for a living. Brand-name publishers simply will not be able to compete against the masses. It began with TypePad blogging, and now platforms like Medium are taking social publishing even more mainstream. Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?
hiou 11y ago
Ad blocking is interesting in that it shows what happens when something that probably should be regulated has not. And because of this the public trust has eroded and then the answer has become an arms race of ad blockers vs ads. Resulting in a downward spiral resulting in less quality content. The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.
- thephyber 11y ago
  I don't think regulations are the only solution to this problem. I think content creators have been too greedy/hopeful while there is so very much competition and a _very_ low barrier to entry. They are nostalgic for the days of large newspaper advertising margins and the domination of peoples' attention by a single newspaper/magazine during a reading session that they don't understand how people use their product now. Content creators are desperate for more revenue so they throw on another tracking pixel, another web ad placement, another sponsorship. None of this helps the fact that content on the web is a commodity and people value their time and attention span. Large lawsuits against the ad networks for allowing malware infections and drive-by downloads would have had an effect, but unless regulation has real teeth, it's just a hindrance or a "cost of business" with no value added to the consumer.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  Is your solution to every problem that more regulation is needed?
- zzalpha 11y ago
  Well, or it's a powerful illustration of a market finding a solution to a new, novel problem. After all, what solution would the government put in place? Ban ads? Regulate their content? How would that be more optimal than allowing people in the market to find the right solutions? The reality is, ad supported content with lots and lots and lots of content providers may simply not be tenable, due to the fragmentation in both content and ad delivery vectors. That requires the market to find new solutions, like paywalls, micropayments, different styles of ads, mixed pay/free models, good ol' fashioned consolidation, etc. Now, to be clear, I'm about as far from a free market dogmatist as you can get... I'm no communist, but I'm Canadian, so... But I honestly don't believe this is a case where regulation is appropriate. Where the market is likely to settle on a highly non-optimal solution (like, say, healthcare, due to information asymmetries, or broadband, due to enormous barriers of entry, or manufacturing pollution, thanks to negative externalities), absolutely I think the government has to get involved. But in this case, I don't see any reason for that kind of heavy-handed intervention.
jdp23 11y ago
The condescending attitude of "users don't understand the consequences of their actions" -- which I've also seen from several other people raising red flags about the consequences of ad-blocking -- really bugs me a lot. A different way of looking at it is that many users do understand the consequences and either disagree with the author about the likely outcomes or have a different set of priorities than the author.
JulianMorrison 11y ago
There is an alternative to adverts. Its real, it's here, it works. That alternative is Patreon. In the Patreon model, you can support the creator directly, and their ability to produce content scales with that support. It's like a subscription, except you allow anyone else to free ride. A Patreon supported site could run no ads at all and still make a stable income. It would no longer be fighting its readers to force them to view manipulative nonsense. It would no longer be answerable to pushy, content-controlling advertisers. It would have more editorial freedom, bounded only by the willingness of people to pay. IMO the Patreon model answers all the problems of the advertising model and I'd like to see it becoming the norm.
- strayptr 11y ago
  This might be true for individual creators, but ad revenue powers companies. Can Patreon do that? (It's still an important point for individuals though.)
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    Well, right now it's people. But I see no reason the NYT or some such site couldn't fund itself the same way. [Edit, posted in reply to the wrong person]
- SebastianMerz 11y ago
  Isn't that just saying "we want all content creators to become charities, and then other people can pay them". It's like saying all software should be free, but the companies should have patreons. Even the open source softwares supported by donations from big companies get their money indirectly from the actual monetization the big company does. I just don't see a charity economy being long term sustainable on the web...
  - JulianMorrison 11y ago
    Patreon isn't charity. It's "I spend my money to hire you to do something." You pay to keep the content you care about, or to push them over a milestone goal to a feature you want.
burger_moon 11y ago
I'm curious now after reading the mobile gaming post that's also on the front page. If everyone paid for the content on the big news sites, would it even be more profitable than selling ads and mining user data? How much would sites have to charge to make up for the loss of ads and user data? Also what are the chances publishers to ever get rid of tracking and mining data?
forgottenpass 11y ago
Just like if 95% of my cable channels disappeared overnight, I'm actually pretty OK with a bunch of websites going out of business, and I end up paying for the few services I'm not already paying for but would wish to keep. It's sad that people lose their jobs, especially those that can no longer make a living doing what they love, but from a product standpoint: whatever. I was around before the commercialization of the web exploded, and I might miss all the light entertainment that it provides, but going back wouldn't be the worst. The parts of the internet that are most special to me are some combination of not funded by ads in the first place, a labor of love, open source, or I already pay for anyway. The increasingly desperate, increasingly gross business models that pop up as publishers go down with the ship is going to suck though.
- Snhr 11y ago
  I kinda get the feeling a lot of the content on semi-large websites is curated to bring in more views, playing on their main demographic's idea of what they find interesting instead of what the author is actually interested in. I'd rather listen to someone talk about something that they love than something they think I should love. I feel like that all got lost in the rush to bring in a profit and websites that haven't updated to that style get pushed back because they don't artificially raise interest in what they have to say.
mrsaint 11y ago
The irony is that the biggest player here, Google, was also the most aggressive in placing ads. I had the pleasure of working with various AdSense and DFP Specialists. Basically it was all about how and where to place ads in the most eye-catching ways, and as many as possible, without breaking AdSense rules. Bigger ads = usually better (in particular those large rectangles, yuck). Higher up the fold = better (funny enough the Google Search team later penalitzed you when you replaced your up-the-fold content with non-content ad stuff - which shows that there are Chinese walls separating various Google teams).
ss64 11y ago
I think a lot of the recent pushback against adverts is driven by video and specifically autoplaying video ads. As an advertiser I might well be tempted to stop displaying video ads if I was convinced that a big proportion of users were blocking video but not text ads. Sadly most blockers are all or nothing. Most users are not going to go to the trouble of whitelisting individual sites so a better middle ground would be global AD blocker settings: Off - Block nothing Low - Block popups Medium - Block popups and video High - Block everything If that was a common model it would encourage some reasonable behaviour on both sides.
randcraw 11y ago
If ad blocking is a matter of right and wrong, then so is the invisible hand of any demand/supply driven system. Blocking web-based ads is no different from TV viewers who walk out of the room, or record shows then skip over ads on playback, or mute the TV during ads. AFAIK, no TV advertisers have bemoaned that venerable practice. If web ad purveyors want folks to browse differently then they must 1) improve their spam so people choose not to block it, or 2) change the physical way it's distributed. To volubly complain is to sleight the invisible hand, which as you know, in the Land of the Free, is akin to giving olde Mr Smith the finger.
- sambrand 11y ago
  The adblocking : DVR analogy is broken. TV ads are interstitial. Online ads are, for the most part, native. You can consume the content and the ad simultaneously. So online ads really are already, in some sense, product placements. Are you're arguing in favor of blocking out all product placements?
  - randcraw 11y ago
    Yes, block all product placement. All advertising is a curse not a blessing. Look at the state of its progeny: TV and radio. Hopeless. The little bit of good content on TV is... only from sources without ads (HBO, PBS, Netflix). The advertising model of content underwriting should be dead. Let ad blockers be the stake through its vampire heart.
sambrand 11y ago
Advertising is paying for goods with attention. It's a novel type of currency. It's a wealth generator. And it's contributed to a more diverse Internet. If you don't want to pay with attention that's fine. If you believe the Internet should be an ad-free Utopia, that's fine too. But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.
- toothbrush 11y ago
  I'm really curious whenever people say such things though: what about (thought experiment) the situation where i let my computer run whatever code websites throw at me, but that come hell or high water, i'm 100% sure i would never click on any ad or be swayed in my opinions regarding what to purchase? Is that 'attention' still worth any nonzero value? Or what about the situation where some technical gizmo forces me to look and listen to the advert (see Black Mirror S01E02) before receiving the article text. Say i do all that, but still am 100% uninterested in what's being offered—wouldn't it be in everyone's best interests to not show that ad? On a lighter note, this is how i feel about ads: https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s (Black Books – "just browsing")
  - sambrand 11y ago
    At least today even fraudulent impressions are valuable because ad buyers are willing to pay for them. They're smartening up though, as Tony Haile (author of the linked article & Chartbeat CEO) is aware. Viewability & attention metrics are the future of ad performance tracking. (and that link gave me a good laugh)
- copsarebastards 11y ago
  > But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off. Economically, how does this differ from using an ad blocker? Do you think content publishers care whether they don't get paid because I didn't visit their site or because I used an ad-blocker?
sparkzilla 11y ago
Web publishers should get together to make a "Reader's Charter" that pledges to stop annoying ads. It's not that complicated. Here's mine: http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-one-weird-trick/ http://newslines.org/blog/how-i-improved-this-website-with-o...
anotherevan 11y ago
They are not ad-blockers so much as HTML firewalls. I use a firewall to protect my home network from the wilds of the internet. I use an HTML firewall to protect my browser (and in turn, my home network) from the wilds of the web. Incredibly slow loading, large assets that are inconsequential to the functionality I need, malware, unwanted visual clutter that creates a negative cognitive load I want to protect myself from. The reality that advertisements are the main targets is indicative that they have perhaps been the worst offenders. I'm sure there are many good advertisers out there. I'm sure it is only the 99% that make the rest of them look bad.
georgebarnett 11y ago
There's a great short book called 'Who moved my Cheese?' which tackles the impermanence of any particular means of income stream. Putting aside the morality/ethics discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the 'cheese' is moving for content publishers and so they are left with a choice, change and find new cheese - or stay and starve. Either way, the current gnashing of teeth will have little effect.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the original sin of the web was to disconnect the value of ads from the users experience on the page. The data is clear: the better the user experience => the more attention you can capture while an ad may be in view => the greater impact on recall and recognition. Ad-supported pages that prioritise user experience are more effective, but we set up our systems to care about page loads not performance. I'm curious why, in all the outrage and handwringing about ad blockers and the future of the Web, nobody ever seriously suggests making ads less annoying. We don't need a new monetization model. We need content providers, and by extension advertising providers, to refuse to carry ads that are wildly intrusive, CPU-intensive, or outright fraudulent ("one weird trick"). Seriously, why are major national news outlets carrying advertisements that are as sketchy as those X-Ray Specs ads from old Boy's Life magazines?
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Sorry content makers, you don't have the rights to resell my eyeballs. I truly am sorry that for many of you this represents a loss of what would otherwise be an easy income stream, but I will apologize for blocking ads no more than I would for unsubscribing from spam/newsletters or for not clicking ads or buying advertised goods, which is to say, not at all. Much like newspapers, you've hitched your wagons to problematic revenue streams. I wish it were easier, but as content creators you are also businesses, and you need to work on better ways to support yourselves. That's your responsibility, not mine. I do support content creators directly quite often and quite a lot in many different ways (merch, crowdfunding, direct support such as patreon, volunteer labour, etc). If you can't survive in a world full of "me"s, well I suspect you weren't trying very hard.
nl 11y ago
It's pretty clear to me that the endgame for this is ad-blocking-blockers: You run an ad blocker, then you either pay to visit my site or you disable your ad blocker for my site. That's going to slow down sites even more, but that's the tragedy of the commons: some sites will be obnoxious in the ads they show it forces people to use ad-blockers. That destroys the livelihood of so many people that countermeasures will be developed.
- eli 11y ago
  Unless the way the web works fundamentally changes, it will always be easier to block ads than to detect and block adblockers.
  - nl 11y ago
    Yes, but arguably there is more financial motivation for the publishers. You end up in an arms race.
    - eli 11y ago
      More like cat and mouse. The publishers are at an extreme technical disadvantage.
      - anonred 11y ago
        How so? It's extremely trivial to make an inline script that detects if the client is blocking ad network requests, then act accordingly. Possible actions range from blowing up the page to redirecting the user away.
neya 11y ago
I'm just going to re-quote one of my comments from a previous topic that was flagged to death: >Back in the early internet era, the best content was available for free of charge. If anything, that's still the case even today. Try to google on some technical topics like Ohm's law or something and you'll find very old websites built with good ole' HTML tables providing the information you need crisp and clear. >Actually, I disagree. This is 2015. If I want to start a website on a certain topic, say about cars or electronics, I can find some really good free hosts who will support me without any sneazy catches. As a real example, I go to blogger.com, setup a new blog with my own custom theme, (with all the attribution to blogger removed if I want to) and start producing content. Not cool with blogspot? Then, how about Github pages? Not so technical? How about using a free shared web host (there are plenty, Google them)? >If your objective is to spread information and knowledge, you will do that no matter what. It is when your objective is guised as spreading information when you really want to make money and scale up doing so, then you run into a problem. The problem with this kind of appeal against ad-blocking is the same old argument of "How much is too much?" "We need money to support our website to keep it up and running". But, never do these authors disclose how much they really need as long as they're making a killer profit. The problem with mixing ads with content is that introduces a conflict of interest - Are you writing that content because you like writing, or are you writing that content to get more eyeballs to serve your advertisers? And it's very hard to convince your readers that you don't intend to make money from them although you have ads on your site. >For your reference, I do own a blog myself without any ads whatsoever and I think this is the future we're heading towards. I am a proud user of adblock software and I refused to be shamed for that. As would any user, I am concerned about the content first, which is the logical reason why I go to a site. But, if the site tries hard to ruin my experience to make it difficult for me to consume that content, then of course, I'll find a way to circumvent it. But, that doesn't mean I don't support the authors of the site, just that as everyone else, I have my own way of supporting them. Just like how I've been donating to Wikipedia all these years. There have been too many sites abusing the slogan of "We need to place ads so we can support ads" to buy back our lost trust. Sure, there will be a lot of content weeded out because they can't support themselves, but I am confident that the ones whose objectives are to spread information will do so no matter what. >We built the internet ourselves when no one gave us ads to support our efforts back then. And we'll find a way to do it again. Just takes time and patience.
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- wodenokoto 11y ago
  Except for the html page you didn't specifically request anything. javascript, images, Css, cookies keeping you logged in, favicon, video, music, game assets. None of that is explicitly requested by the user. More over, there is no technical reason why ads needs to be loaded from a third party by the browser. You could easily include them server side.
  - deleted 11y ago
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wodenokoto 11y ago
This reminds me of a concert experience back in the days. The venue had curtain in front of the stage where they shot a projector and somebody had forgot to full-screen the slide show and the entire audience could see napster running in the task bar.
michaelwww 11y ago
Kudos to Apple for drawing the line like they did with Flash. Advertisers were degrading their product and irritating their users by going too far, so Apple did the right thing.
mkhpalm 11y ago
I almost don't understand why people are still paying the prices they pay to put ads out on the internet. There are some exceptions but name the last "ad" you clicked on? It probably resembles the last spam you followed.
jmadsen 11y ago
Magazines & newspapers shot themselves in the foot when they ran out to produce free content to "stay in the game" like everyone else. Their original product was never free, but they didn't think that through. They made most money through ads & classified, but they still charged for the product. Now they need to figure out how to make each visitor be worth 50 cents or whatever, and they are trying to do it in a way that people were already growing sick of when they started. --- They should create a system of micropayments where people can have a instantly accessible purse & a page can charge a few cents to few, ranked by content, author, whatever. they need to start selling their content again.
bambax 11y ago
This article, like all the ones before it complaining about AdBlock, seem to conflate all kinds of contents like they're all the same. Yet, they aren't. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and/or cable, etc. etc. The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not for long. Paywalls work for high quality content (eg, The Economist); but not for low quality content. Low quality content cannot survive behind a paywall, because nobody will pay for it; what will happen is that low quality content made for profit will die/disappear, and we'll all be better for it. What will survive is high quality content made for profit or for free, and low quality content made for free (which we can ignore). This whole debate exists only because current producers of low quality content have somehow convinced everyone that their content is in fact worthwhile, and that it's an accident and a crime that they'd be robbed of revenue, and that users are fools not wanting to pay for it. This is rubbish. Users are not fools, and they are always right. What they will not pay for is worthless, literally.
- briHass 11y ago
  Well said. Maybe some of these individuals forget that many of us were on the Internet well before it became as "commercial" as it is now. The bulk of the content came from users that didn't expect or receive any payment for their writing...much like many of the biggest sites today: Reddit, etc. What wasn't around was shitty, click-bait junk written for no reason other than to drive ad impressions. If 70% of what's on the web died due to lack of ad revenue, I don't think society would suffer some huge loss. Stating that ads are required to support content is begging the question; if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with.
  - stevesearer 11y ago
    > if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with That isn't entirely true as the content is technically worth whatever the sponsors are willing to pay to make it happen. The university in my town puts on a summer series of movies in the park and Lynda.com has sponsored a number of the seasons. There is even a short ad played on the screen before the movie. I wouldn't pay to go to the event, but am 100% happy letting Lynda.com pay for me.
look_lookatme 11y ago
If you use an ad blocker and consume content supported by ads, you are a thief. It may be the best case scenario for your security, time, etc and there are cases where thievery is justified, but you are a thief nonetheless.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  That's foolishness. There's nothing in the world that compels me to use your content the way you intended. I can read it or not, store it on my backup drive, print it out and use it for the bottom of my birdcage. I understand that content providers are frustrated. But lashing out and calling names is pointless and silly.
  - look_lookatme 11y ago
    I'm not calling names. I'm classifying the act of deliberately circumventing the method of revenue generation baked into the presentation of content by publishers. It boggles my mind that people cannot understand this. Of course time is your to do with as you see fit. If you want to download the ads and bypass them after the content is presented, in the spirit of TiVo, by all means do, but don't selectively choose to download what you want. Instead you should just not visit the site. Alternatively if you'd like to install an extension (if one were to exist) that warns you that ads are attempting to load before you are given a chance to consume the content and then gives you an option to return to where you came from, that is fine too. But to deliberately reject the advertising adjacent to content is an act of thievery.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      On my machine, in my home, with my electricity and bandwidth, I'll do anything I like with the bytes that are delivered to me. Don't pretend to tell me what I must do or not do. That's like the salesman with his foot in the door as I try to close it. I have a shotgun at home for that particular problem. I have ad-blockers for the other one. I buy the sunday paper at the local mart, I dump the ads in the trash before I go out the door. Nobody jumps out and tries to arrest me for that - its my paper, I'll do as I please. And yes its simple name-calling to say 'thievery' without proving the case, or even attempting to justify it. That word has meaning, and it isn't what's happening. Not going to just take anybody's word for that.
summerdown2 11y ago
My understanding is that adblockers work by removing known third party app sites from loading items on a page. If that's true, what would stop a website from proxying ads, so they appear to come from the website rather than the third party? I guess that would involve more bandwidth and so less money for the site, but high-bandwidth items are the ones people complain about anyway. I don't see why text based ads would be impossible under that scheme, for example.
gpsx 11y ago
Just to throw an idea out, surely not original...Http has a payment/advertising system added to the headers. Users decide if they will make a micropayment, view advertising or do a subscription to view a page/site if the site requests payment. The user can have a default setting and also settings for specific sites. Along with this there is some management that limits information the site can get about the user.

114 points by arctictony 11y ago

Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers/publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire. It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through constantly.

lmm 11y ago
Oh but it is. The publishers went to the networks because they paid better, and never wondered where they were getting their advantages from.
- click170 11y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The fault for the state of web advertising these days lies squarely on advertising networks that do not vet their content. For a long time I used but did not recommend adblock to my trogladite friends and family. Sadly its gotten so bad that I've begun installing it on their machines on their behalf when they ask me for help with their computer because ad blockers are today what antivirus was 10 years ago. They're how you keep yourself safe online. Adblock usage won't change until the networks do.
ad-hominem 11y ago
> Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals Oh, not wanting advertising networks all over the world sharing data about my internet usage makes me a criminal eh? Hyperbole much? It's free content, there's no assumption I am going to actually look at advertisements (or watch a commercial on TV, or listen to one on the radio). If somebody gets up during commercials to use the bathroom while watching Cheers reruns, are they also a criminal?
shostack 11y ago
Criminals? Really?
- kalleboo 11y ago
  I think he's referring to the people distributing malware though ad networks.

ISL 11y ago

I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use. If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.

TallGuyShort 11y ago
Being willing to pay is not a guarantee you can remain ad-free. Showing ads to paying users will still often be seen as a way to increase revenue further, unless the company has made a lifetime guarantee to the contrary. I pay for Netflix. I would even be willing to pay more for Netflix. But then they started showing ads before content they created.
bittercynic 11y ago
I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) Other awesome ad-free content is created to promote retail within the same company, like sparkfun.com. It seems to me the ease of monetization with ad-networks drive ultra-low quality content like about.com, though even I must admit that there are also good sites out there that are supported by ads. edit: I just discovered that dr-iguana.com does have ads. I stick by my assertion that there is a lot of great content out there made strictly as a hobby, though.
- munificent 11y ago
  > I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source. I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field. It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works. When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how few novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book. There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people observing the poor from a distance. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell. You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life. The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness. This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story. The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems causing increased economic disparity. If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, we need to hear their stories. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them. [1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ [2]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

jordigh 11y ago

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties. More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

MBCook 11y ago
The Verge has a poll going today asking if you use an ad blocker: "Yes, I want free content and I'll pay the ad blockers" and "No, I want free content and I'll pay the publisher through ads". I'm with you. I didn't use an ad blocker for years. Then I installed a flash blocker because it kept my computer from trying to melt it's self and play video ads while I was trying to read. Then we started to get so many ads that prevented me from reading content (the link-hover pop-ups, pop-ups that appear after the content has been loaded for 30s, ads that use JS to move parts of the page around) I started using one on the desktop just so I could try to read sites. In the last year I've been using my phone/tablet a lot more. The experience has been DREADFUL because of ads. They take up most of the screen, slow loading to a crawl, kick other pages out of memory, make scrolling jittery, etc. I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. If the ads are relatively unobtrusive (i.e. not covering up content, not flashing, etc.) they're OK with me. I don't mind banners in between paragraphs of a story I'm reading. But if I can't read your site because of your ads, you're not helping yourself. The creepiness of trackers only ads to all the other problems. The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker. (I also subscribe to sites I really like, which only seems fair).
- hyperbovine 11y ago
  > I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. FYI, I had the pleasure of installing an ad-blocker (in the spirit of no advertising, I will not mention which one) on my iPad this morning. It lets me turn off scripts and images. The device now responds like something out of Star Trek. Highly, highly recommended if you just care about reading words on the screen.

akshayB 11y ago

I use Adblock and I don't mind disabling it for sites that provide quality content or reading materials. There has to be a balance which is sometimes abused by the sites. For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don't make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don't mind watching a small commercial if it was 5-10 minutes highlight of a game. If the balance was reasonable I am sure Adblock would not have been this popular.

edgyswingset 11y ago
nfl.com was actually the site that turned me into a "default to blocking" person. The severity of ads on their site is pretty ridiculous.

giancarlostoro 11y ago

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

briffle 11y ago
There is a sports related web site I often read (friends link to it from facebook, and other sites I visit).. When reading it on mobile, almost the entire page will load, then my whole phone (LG G4) freezes up completely for about 8 seconds, then a full page add appears over the screen. Sometimes the "X" is in the upper right, sometimes below, etc, and if you are off even the slightest amount, you get a new chrome tab opened, to a site that also freezes up your whole phone again for a few seconds.. If it wasn't for adds the cover the whole text, I would probably not run an ad blocker (and really need to find one for android that doesn't suck)
- dublinben 11y ago
  I highly recommend uBlock in Firefox for Android. It works pretty much the same as on desktop, which is to say excellently.
- AJ007 11y ago
  One thing is for certain, publishers aren't using cohorts for how browser-breaking advertising is influencing their user retention and overall revenue. Fuck, some of the JS just for news site UI makes it clear no one is even testing their mobile sites on an actual mobile device. If the ad block rate gets high enough, and if the CPMs do not increase in the face of dwindling supply, publishers will just make content available only in their own apps. Fake crises averted, things change, markets and businesses adapt.

harryf 11y ago

> If the content that best informs our thinking is increasingly only available to those willing to pay then it has troubling impacts for those living in poverty or countries for whom a $9.95 monthly subscription is out of reach. ...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read

Boxbot 11y ago
You prefer targeted advertising to and data collection from children and teenagers to having them get parental approval for what they do online?

grey-area 11y ago

This flood of articles about blocking ads are all predicated on the assumption that making money with ads supports quality content, and that the internet as we know it would not exist without ads. Both of these assumptions are false - the internet didn't begin by being driven by ads, and it won't end that way, and ad-driven content is degraded by the ads when it starts to exist because of them. The intrusive ads which are being blocked do not lead to quality content, on the contrary they intrude on it both in an immediate sense by distracting readers from the content, and in editorial terms, by driving a constant demand for more clicks, more views, and more unique visits, whatever the cost. The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers. The result is media sites which see the success of Buzzfeed not as a warning but as inspiration, which use services like outbrain to try to keep users clicking in a circle of despair through endless shocking headlines which promise much but offer nothing of substance. I won't mourn that web as it passes, and I won't be starting to read the Facebook News app or other corporate feeds instead - native apps are subject to the same pressures and the same inexorable creep of advertising around and into the content. This will be a blow for Google though, and I'm quite sure behind Apple's rhetoric about user choice lies a calculation that this will limit Google's bottom line. The Mona Lisa is an interesting example to use, as it was neither produced in order to display with advertising, nor with advertising within the picture (the two choices offered in the article). It and pictures like it were commissioned privately by a patron who valued the services of that painter but thereafter was displayed for free to the world - maybe there's a model there for online content - commissioned via something like kickstarter for its value but thereafter displayed for free to the public. It also wasn't valued as much at the time as it is now. We should reject false dichotomies which offer the choice between one sort of advertising or another. The best places for discussion, content and news on the web are often advertising free, or have advertising which is unobtrusive and targeted and therefore not likely to be blocked by users, given the choice (as with HN for example). I honestly wouldn't mourn the loss of most of the so-called news services we currently have, and the rise of other services which request payment from a patron, subscription payments from loyal users, or find other ways of making ends meet (selling related services, bundled content, making money on related transactions like bookings etc). There are lots more ways to make money in the world than advertising, and most of them less degrading.

markyc 11y ago

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

click170 11y ago
I don't disagree but I think an important distinction is that when you provide your credit card there is an expectation that they will be able to track you based on that. A big problem with ad tracking these days is that its entirely out-of-site-out-of-mind, nontechy people don't expect to be tracked across the internet as much as when they buy something online with a credit card.
- XorNot 11y ago
  No it's also just that once the user is the customer, there's a requirement to actually pay them some respect. An annoyed paying customer is directly lost revenue.

dynomight 11y ago

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

thescriptkiddie 11y ago
Are you implying that native advertisements aren't ads, or are more acceptable kind of ad, or are impossible to block? Because none of those things are true. Native advertising is probably the worst kind of advertising. If I see a website or magazine publish an "advertorial", I'm never going to trust anything they publish from then on. It completely undermines credibility and only makes sense as a last-ditch moneygrab. It's not even worth blocking because it's a useful red flag.
- dynomight 11y ago
  There doesn't have to be a single way of doing things for every situation. For some things I'm interested in a native ad is just fine. For other things not. You make interesting points even though you are unnecessarily aggressive.
- dynomight 11y ago
  Oh my goodness you are so correct.

JulianMorrison 11y ago

This article assumes that advertisers can get more sophisticated than blockers - I don't agree. With good enough technology, any logo can be snipped out or scribbled over. Any inline, self hosted image can be recognized and removed. Perhaps in future, adblockers will comb through the text of pages and the frames of video and your hero will be drinking "soda" instead of <brand name>. Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking glasses. So I can walk down the street and NO LOGOS. It would almost be like humans owned the public space, then.

octatoan 11y ago
AFAIK someone did make adblocking glasses with image recognition software. :)
sbov 11y ago
Ads tend to be in private spaces though. You can just see it from public space. Another way to achieve your goal is for the glasses to render giant walls around all private spaces. All cities would look like Manhattan then.
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  I was thinking more like: detect an advert, draw a grey box over it. Or kittens.
- kuschku 11y ago
  You can still ban ads in private spaces. Many cities did that. Sao Paolo is just one example
wrsh07 11y ago
Times Square as one great shiny ... emptiness
jamie_ca 11y ago
São Paulo, Brazil did just that[1] almost 10 years ago - outright banned outdoor advertising. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

chejazi 11y ago

In the future everyone will be producing content - not just the people that currently do it for a living. Brand-name publishers simply will not be able to compete against the masses. It began with TypePad blogging, and now platforms like Medium are taking social publishing even more mainstream. Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?

hiou 11y ago

Ad blocking is interesting in that it shows what happens when something that probably should be regulated has not. And because of this the public trust has eroded and then the answer has become an arms race of ad blockers vs ads. Resulting in a downward spiral resulting in less quality content. The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.

thephyber 11y ago
I don't think regulations are the only solution to this problem. I think content creators have been too greedy/hopeful while there is so very much competition and a _very_ low barrier to entry. They are nostalgic for the days of large newspaper advertising margins and the domination of peoples' attention by a single newspaper/magazine during a reading session that they don't understand how people use their product now. Content creators are desperate for more revenue so they throw on another tracking pixel, another web ad placement, another sponsorship. None of this helps the fact that content on the web is a commodity and people value their time and attention span. Large lawsuits against the ad networks for allowing malware infections and drive-by downloads would have had an effect, but unless regulation has real teeth, it's just a hindrance or a "cost of business" with no value added to the consumer.
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
Is your solution to every problem that more regulation is needed?
zzalpha 11y ago
Well, or it's a powerful illustration of a market finding a solution to a new, novel problem. After all, what solution would the government put in place? Ban ads? Regulate their content? How would that be more optimal than allowing people in the market to find the right solutions? The reality is, ad supported content with lots and lots and lots of content providers may simply not be tenable, due to the fragmentation in both content and ad delivery vectors. That requires the market to find new solutions, like paywalls, micropayments, different styles of ads, mixed pay/free models, good ol' fashioned consolidation, etc. Now, to be clear, I'm about as far from a free market dogmatist as you can get... I'm no communist, but I'm Canadian, so... But I honestly don't believe this is a case where regulation is appropriate. Where the market is likely to settle on a highly non-optimal solution (like, say, healthcare, due to information asymmetries, or broadband, due to enormous barriers of entry, or manufacturing pollution, thanks to negative externalities), absolutely I think the government has to get involved. But in this case, I don't see any reason for that kind of heavy-handed intervention.

jdp23 11y ago

The condescending attitude of "users don't understand the consequences of their actions" -- which I've also seen from several other people raising red flags about the consequences of ad-blocking -- really bugs me a lot. A different way of looking at it is that many users do understand the consequences and either disagree with the author about the likely outcomes or have a different set of priorities than the author.

JulianMorrison 11y ago

There is an alternative to adverts. Its real, it's here, it works. That alternative is Patreon. In the Patreon model, you can support the creator directly, and their ability to produce content scales with that support. It's like a subscription, except you allow anyone else to free ride. A Patreon supported site could run no ads at all and still make a stable income. It would no longer be fighting its readers to force them to view manipulative nonsense. It would no longer be answerable to pushy, content-controlling advertisers. It would have more editorial freedom, bounded only by the willingness of people to pay. IMO the Patreon model answers all the problems of the advertising model and I'd like to see it becoming the norm.

strayptr 11y ago
This might be true for individual creators, but ad revenue powers companies. Can Patreon do that? (It's still an important point for individuals though.)
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  Well, right now it's people. But I see no reason the NYT or some such site couldn't fund itself the same way. [Edit, posted in reply to the wrong person]
SebastianMerz 11y ago
Isn't that just saying "we want all content creators to become charities, and then other people can pay them". It's like saying all software should be free, but the companies should have patreons. Even the open source softwares supported by donations from big companies get their money indirectly from the actual monetization the big company does. I just don't see a charity economy being long term sustainable on the web...
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  Patreon isn't charity. It's "I spend my money to hire you to do something." You pay to keep the content you care about, or to push them over a milestone goal to a feature you want.

burger_moon 11y ago

I'm curious now after reading the mobile gaming post that's also on the front page. If everyone paid for the content on the big news sites, would it even be more profitable than selling ads and mining user data? How much would sites have to charge to make up for the loss of ads and user data? Also what are the chances publishers to ever get rid of tracking and mining data?

forgottenpass 11y ago

Just like if 95% of my cable channels disappeared overnight, I'm actually pretty OK with a bunch of websites going out of business, and I end up paying for the few services I'm not already paying for but would wish to keep. It's sad that people lose their jobs, especially those that can no longer make a living doing what they love, but from a product standpoint: whatever. I was around before the commercialization of the web exploded, and I might miss all the light entertainment that it provides, but going back wouldn't be the worst. The parts of the internet that are most special to me are some combination of not funded by ads in the first place, a labor of love, open source, or I already pay for anyway. The increasingly desperate, increasingly gross business models that pop up as publishers go down with the ship is going to suck though.

Snhr 11y ago
I kinda get the feeling a lot of the content on semi-large websites is curated to bring in more views, playing on their main demographic's idea of what they find interesting instead of what the author is actually interested in. I'd rather listen to someone talk about something that they love than something they think I should love. I feel like that all got lost in the rush to bring in a profit and websites that haven't updated to that style get pushed back because they don't artificially raise interest in what they have to say.

mrsaint 11y ago

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

ss64 11y ago

I think a lot of the recent pushback against adverts is driven by video and specifically autoplaying video ads. As an advertiser I might well be tempted to stop displaying video ads if I was convinced that a big proportion of users were blocking video but not text ads. Sadly most blockers are all or nothing. Most users are not going to go to the trouble of whitelisting individual sites so a better middle ground would be global AD blocker settings: Off - Block nothing Low - Block popups Medium - Block popups and video High - Block everything If that was a common model it would encourage some reasonable behaviour on both sides.

randcraw 11y ago

If ad blocking is a matter of right and wrong, then so is the invisible hand of any demand/supply driven system. Blocking web-based ads is no different from TV viewers who walk out of the room, or record shows then skip over ads on playback, or mute the TV during ads. AFAIK, no TV advertisers have bemoaned that venerable practice. If web ad purveyors want folks to browse differently then they must 1) improve their spam so people choose not to block it, or 2) change the physical way it's distributed. To volubly complain is to sleight the invisible hand, which as you know, in the Land of the Free, is akin to giving olde Mr Smith the finger.

sambrand 11y ago
The adblocking : DVR analogy is broken. TV ads are interstitial. Online ads are, for the most part, native. You can consume the content and the ad simultaneously. So online ads really are already, in some sense, product placements. Are you're arguing in favor of blocking out all product placements?
- randcraw 11y ago
  Yes, block all product placement. All advertising is a curse not a blessing. Look at the state of its progeny: TV and radio. Hopeless. The little bit of good content on TV is... only from sources without ads (HBO, PBS, Netflix). The advertising model of content underwriting should be dead. Let ad blockers be the stake through its vampire heart.

sambrand 11y ago

Advertising is paying for goods with attention. It's a novel type of currency. It's a wealth generator. And it's contributed to a more diverse Internet. If you don't want to pay with attention that's fine. If you believe the Internet should be an ad-free Utopia, that's fine too. But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.

toothbrush 11y ago
I'm really curious whenever people say such things though: what about (thought experiment) the situation where i let my computer run whatever code websites throw at me, but that come hell or high water, i'm 100% sure i would never click on any ad or be swayed in my opinions regarding what to purchase? Is that 'attention' still worth any nonzero value? Or what about the situation where some technical gizmo forces me to look and listen to the advert (see Black Mirror S01E02) before receiving the article text. Say i do all that, but still am 100% uninterested in what's being offered—wouldn't it be in everyone's best interests to not show that ad? On a lighter note, this is how i feel about ads: https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s (Black Books – "just browsing")
- sambrand 11y ago
  At least today even fraudulent impressions are valuable because ad buyers are willing to pay for them. They're smartening up though, as Tony Haile (author of the linked article & Chartbeat CEO) is aware. Viewability & attention metrics are the future of ad performance tracking. (and that link gave me a good laugh)
copsarebastards 11y ago
> But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off. Economically, how does this differ from using an ad blocker? Do you think content publishers care whether they don't get paid because I didn't visit their site or because I used an ad-blocker?

sparkzilla 11y ago

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

anotherevan 11y ago

They are not ad-blockers so much as HTML firewalls. I use a firewall to protect my home network from the wilds of the internet. I use an HTML firewall to protect my browser (and in turn, my home network) from the wilds of the web. Incredibly slow loading, large assets that are inconsequential to the functionality I need, malware, unwanted visual clutter that creates a negative cognitive load I want to protect myself from. The reality that advertisements are the main targets is indicative that they have perhaps been the worst offenders. I'm sure there are many good advertisers out there. I'm sure it is only the 99% that make the rest of them look bad.

georgebarnett 11y ago

There's a great short book called 'Who moved my Cheese?' which tackles the impermanence of any particular means of income stream. Putting aside the morality/ethics discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the 'cheese' is moving for content publishers and so they are left with a choice, change and find new cheese - or stay and starve. Either way, the current gnashing of teeth will have little effect.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

> A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the original sin of the web was to disconnect the value of ads from the users experience on the page. The data is clear: the better the user experience => the more attention you can capture while an ad may be in view => the greater impact on recall and recognition. Ad-supported pages that prioritise user experience are more effective, but we set up our systems to care about page loads not performance. I'm curious why, in all the outrage and handwringing about ad blockers and the future of the Web, nobody ever seriously suggests making ads less annoying. We don't need a new monetization model. We need content providers, and by extension advertising providers, to refuse to carry ads that are wildly intrusive, CPU-intensive, or outright fraudulent ("one weird trick"). Seriously, why are major national news outlets carrying advertisements that are as sketchy as those X-Ray Specs ads from old Boy's Life magazines?

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Sorry content makers, you don't have the rights to resell my eyeballs. I truly am sorry that for many of you this represents a loss of what would otherwise be an easy income stream, but I will apologize for blocking ads no more than I would for unsubscribing from spam/newsletters or for not clicking ads or buying advertised goods, which is to say, not at all. Much like newspapers, you've hitched your wagons to problematic revenue streams. I wish it were easier, but as content creators you are also businesses, and you need to work on better ways to support yourselves. That's your responsibility, not mine. I do support content creators directly quite often and quite a lot in many different ways (merch, crowdfunding, direct support such as patreon, volunteer labour, etc). If you can't survive in a world full of "me"s, well I suspect you weren't trying very hard.

nl 11y ago

It's pretty clear to me that the endgame for this is ad-blocking-blockers: You run an ad blocker, then you either pay to visit my site or you disable your ad blocker for my site. That's going to slow down sites even more, but that's the tragedy of the commons: some sites will be obnoxious in the ads they show it forces people to use ad-blockers. That destroys the livelihood of so many people that countermeasures will be developed.

eli 11y ago
Unless the way the web works fundamentally changes, it will always be easier to block ads than to detect and block adblockers.
- nl 11y ago
  Yes, but arguably there is more financial motivation for the publishers. You end up in an arms race.
  - eli 11y ago
    More like cat and mouse. The publishers are at an extreme technical disadvantage.
    - anonred 11y ago
      How so? It's extremely trivial to make an inline script that detects if the client is blocking ad network requests, then act accordingly. Possible actions range from blowing up the page to redirecting the user away.

neya 11y ago

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

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wodenokoto 11y ago
Except for the html page you didn't specifically request anything. javascript, images, Css, cookies keeping you logged in, favicon, video, music, game assets. None of that is explicitly requested by the user. More over, there is no technical reason why ads needs to be loaded from a third party by the browser. You could easily include them server side.
- deleted 11y ago
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wodenokoto 11y ago

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

michaelwww 11y ago

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

mkhpalm 11y ago

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

jmadsen 11y ago

Magazines & newspapers shot themselves in the foot when they ran out to produce free content to "stay in the game" like everyone else. Their original product was never free, but they didn't think that through. They made most money through ads & classified, but they still charged for the product. Now they need to figure out how to make each visitor be worth 50 cents or whatever, and they are trying to do it in a way that people were already growing sick of when they started. --- They should create a system of micropayments where people can have a instantly accessible purse & a page can charge a few cents to few, ranked by content, author, whatever. they need to start selling their content again.

bambax 11y ago

This article, like all the ones before it complaining about AdBlock, seem to conflate all kinds of contents like they're all the same. Yet, they aren't. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and/or cable, etc. etc. The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not for long. Paywalls work for high quality content (eg, The Economist); but not for low quality content. Low quality content cannot survive behind a paywall, because nobody will pay for it; what will happen is that low quality content made for profit will die/disappear, and we'll all be better for it. What will survive is high quality content made for profit or for free, and low quality content made for free (which we can ignore). This whole debate exists only because current producers of low quality content have somehow convinced everyone that their content is in fact worthwhile, and that it's an accident and a crime that they'd be robbed of revenue, and that users are fools not wanting to pay for it. This is rubbish. Users are not fools, and they are always right. What they will not pay for is worthless, literally.

briHass 11y ago
Well said. Maybe some of these individuals forget that many of us were on the Internet well before it became as "commercial" as it is now. The bulk of the content came from users that didn't expect or receive any payment for their writing...much like many of the biggest sites today: Reddit, etc. What wasn't around was shitty, click-bait junk written for no reason other than to drive ad impressions. If 70% of what's on the web died due to lack of ad revenue, I don't think society would suffer some huge loss. Stating that ads are required to support content is begging the question; if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with.
- stevesearer 11y ago
  > if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with That isn't entirely true as the content is technically worth whatever the sponsors are willing to pay to make it happen. The university in my town puts on a summer series of movies in the park and Lynda.com has sponsored a number of the seasons. There is even a short ad played on the screen before the movie. I wouldn't pay to go to the event, but am 100% happy letting Lynda.com pay for me.

look_lookatme 11y ago

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

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
That's foolishness. There's nothing in the world that compels me to use your content the way you intended. I can read it or not, store it on my backup drive, print it out and use it for the bottom of my birdcage. I understand that content providers are frustrated. But lashing out and calling names is pointless and silly.
- look_lookatme 11y ago
  I'm not calling names. I'm classifying the act of deliberately circumventing the method of revenue generation baked into the presentation of content by publishers. It boggles my mind that people cannot understand this. Of course time is your to do with as you see fit. If you want to download the ads and bypass them after the content is presented, in the spirit of TiVo, by all means do, but don't selectively choose to download what you want. Instead you should just not visit the site. Alternatively if you'd like to install an extension (if one were to exist) that warns you that ads are attempting to load before you are given a chance to consume the content and then gives you an option to return to where you came from, that is fine too. But to deliberately reject the advertising adjacent to content is an act of thievery.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    On my machine, in my home, with my electricity and bandwidth, I'll do anything I like with the bytes that are delivered to me. Don't pretend to tell me what I must do or not do. That's like the salesman with his foot in the door as I try to close it. I have a shotgun at home for that particular problem. I have ad-blockers for the other one. I buy the sunday paper at the local mart, I dump the ads in the trash before I go out the door. Nobody jumps out and tries to arrest me for that - its my paper, I'll do as I please. And yes its simple name-calling to say 'thievery' without proving the case, or even attempting to justify it. That word has meaning, and it isn't what's happening. Not going to just take anybody's word for that.

summerdown2 11y ago

My understanding is that adblockers work by removing known third party app sites from loading items on a page. If that's true, what would stop a website from proxying ads, so they appear to come from the website rather than the third party? I guess that would involve more bandwidth and so less money for the site, but high-bandwidth items are the ones people complain about anyway. I don't see why text based ads would be impossible under that scheme, for example.

gpsx 11y ago

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