After selling his company to Google, this man now wants to block ad-blockers
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
If you block me for using an ad-blocker I just won't use your site/share it/talk about it or anything else.
This. I'm completely at ease with this as a solution, but I think it's why most sites don't (and won't) block folks using ad-blockers.
If you think, website owner, that I am losing you money by refusing to be told to buy home insurance, then just give me a way to give you that money directly and stop nagging me about it.
I will neither make the effort to click the "Donate" link on each site I visit, but what if we could dedicate a Flattr/Patreon-like monthly amount to supporting websites? It could be:
- Slowly drained during the month, or split at the end of the month in proportion of the visits.
- Done by the ISP? It would probably be the least privacy-invasive option, since they are already being trusted with knowing what my usage is. Imagine your ISP usage dashboard greeting you with "You're on a 2MB unlimited ADSL line, for 40 $/month. You are also choosing to pay 10 $/month for proportional website remuneration, which currently will go to these sites: <pie chart showing my money split>. Websites frequently visited but not appearing here might not be part of ProportionalMonetizationPlatform, or be paid apps that you remunerate directly."
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I think I'd rather just let you visit with an ad blocker than try to convince anyone that that idea would work
You're effectively trying to take America's tipping system and apply it to your ISP and apply that to the world?
Do you know how many ISPs there are in the world? They can barely agree on where to route traffic sometimes much less a system that wouldn't benefit them in any way
I think you're proposing the impossible to put yourself in a morally good position. "I'll never view ads because <impossible request>" like the people that claim piracy is fine because they wouldn't have bought the content anyway so nobody loses out.
It's just a lie, it'd be more honest to just say "fuck content creators, I'm not watching adverts. Who cares if they can't make money" than this method of remuneration you've come up with
- Where do you see the slightest tentative to put "myself in a good position" ? I'm making a proposal and seeing what other members of this community think about it.
- Bravo for implying I'm saying "fuck to content creators" . Because, yes, I have both Patreon and Flattr accounts donating to a few of them. But like said elsewhere in this thread by another commenter, this fails to compensate "one-off websites" and am discussing what a solution could look like without the drawbacks of advertising.
- So because of some technicality (ISPs not agreeing) we are prohibited from even talking about changing anything?! Applause, nice approach to problem solving.
I'll leave the comment there for the sake of others being able to follow where this ended up but you are correct and to be frank it was a pretty terrible post on my part. The post only really needed the troubles of implementing it at the ISP level, if anything.
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Regarding the ISP part, I fully agree it would be tough to implement; I was throwing this idea because I had never seen it being expressed and wanted to see if commenters could point to related "prior art" / similar experiments in some parts of the world.
Mainly, my own starting point for the idea is France's (and maybe other countries?) interrupted path to a "Global License" for music [1]. The idea, expressed as a law proposal in 2005 at a time of majors freaking out about P2P, was to (fr.wikipedia translation mine) "Authorize non-commercial access and sharing of cultural content, in exchange for a proportional artists remuneration."
It was interrupted in 2009 in favor of a repressive fine system (HADOPI, [2]). But if such a very much pie-in-the-sky idea can make its way to a law proposal (with assorted technical analysis) somewhere in the world, maybe something similar is worth discussing for ads.
[1] (french) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_globale
[2] (english) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law
Thinking further (or.. at all) the models that flattr but more successfully patreon provide do seem to work and would appear to be the best model if the community you're providing for is willing to use such a system - and they are, in many cases. I can think of a podcast or two that rather than use sponsored messages are funded by their community through patreon. In fact I can only imagine they're earning more and in a more stable fashion for doing so
I'm not sure if an ISP-level funding source would be feasible on the global scale but that may just be my own limits talking, something that definitely works in replacement of adverts is the product (in this example a podcast) being free but with perks for those that want to support the creator directly. The easiest added extras in this example would be behind the scenes, an additional private podcast, archives of episodes long gone by.
The challenge is you the creator needs to make a service or tool that I actually want, need, or of such exemplary quality that I feel obligated to help see it continue existing. This isn't a new daring model of funding, NPR/PBS/FSF have done this for decades.
You search google for "windows 8 wifi keeps dropping out" and you hit my site. My site tells you it's likely windows disabling the adapter to save power and how to stop it from doing that. Your issue is resolved and your life is that much easier for it. But you'll never be back to that site that fixed your wifi
You're going to pay monthly for that one time? I'll stick with ads in the hopes that not everyone uses an ad blocker.
Ads are the only viable revenue for drive-by sites like this. Ones that help a multitude of single specific issues that aren't related enough for many to subscribe for long periods of time
From here I am supposed to feel guilty for not wanting to hear about that new car model, and thus after hearing about about that new magazine I should buy, I shall be allowed to hear how to fix my computer problems.
Thus I learn how to fix things, you get some fractions of a penny off me, and hopefully I will some day go on to buy some great new self-help book.
This sucks. I don't want to be told to buy anything. If you want money, just take my money. Don't tell me to give other people money.
In the ideal world something like flattr would be the best model for current ad-based revenue sites, easily better would be selling something directly that people actually want as a service or product
Not just indexed by google. Then you'd actually be providing a service. Otherwise your just a single reference, no valuable or critical then any other. I can just grab the next result.
What you described is inherently worthless in this day and age. That one fact may exist on hundreds of different websites, yours generates no value to myself, its existence is irrelevant due to its ease of replacement. Why should I support you? What do I need you for? All you are doing is taxing my access to information, not assisting me in acquiring it.
If micropayments will never work, via bitcoin or anything else, then another alternative is Google Contributor.
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
But there has to be a better way than trying to get me to buy shit I don't need. Our web browsing experience shouldn't be powering consummerism.
Admittedly this won't block 100% of ads, closer to 50-60%, although it would most likely block all of the worst offenders. Likely net cost would be in the $1-$3/day range, distributed amongst the sites you patronize. And, again, all of the infrastructure to do this already exists. You wouldn't need to do deals with publishers or anything like that.
I've always wondered why nobody's created this yet; I've always assumed it's because people using ad blockers would not actually pay for an ad-free experience. Other ideas?
[1] https://www.projectwonderful.com/ ; they serve ads on several popular webcomics
That's a bit like saying that encrypting a DVD is going to prevent someone copying it. If you reveal something to the user you reveal it to the computer too and then it's just an arms race.It would be better to have a functioning micro-payments system.
There's some things that seem inevitable to me. True flat-rate music streaming services was one of those things and we're pretty much there. Moving away from ad-supported websites to a convenient subscription model is the other.
I don't think the war against AdBlock can be won. How do you disable a software that simply hides content? Force users to click the ads? Put them into more and more annoying places? We already know the endgame of that and it's shady pop-up orgies. I doubt the New York Times wants to be associated with that. But I also won't pay $10 for every single website I might visit a month (some, maybe, for only an article or two in a link).
What we need is a common subscription flat-rate that fairly splits revenue between websites you actually visit. Not sure about the privacy concerns but at least here, the user data wouldn't have to be used for advertising.
This entire thing where your attention is hijacked because you have a passing interest in subject X is out of date. Yes, we've had passive ad sponsorship of all kinds of events in times past, but it wasn't a situation where the advertisers monitored your every move and were aggressively interfering with your content consumption. It was a situation where they wanted to be recognized for supporting the content you were consuming. Ads have gone from being passive, supportive, widespread constructs to being aggressive, directive, in-your-business constructs. Not good.
I don't mind ads. Trackers need to be outlawed. I'll tell an ad service what kinds of ads I'd like to see if they'd like. I don't want to be tracked though.
I'd be happily spending the equivalent of a annual nyt subscription per year but I'm not willing to pay that amount to a sole news site. As it is, everybody tries to do a vendor lock-in while whining that people are not walking into or get out of that trap.
I like it. Not sure how to get enough vendor participation, though. I imagine the way to go would be to pair up with one of the large ad networks -- you could even work it where if you pay, the ads don't come. If you're not in the system, you get ad-ed like everybody else.
My prediction is, if centralized content micropayment service is ever going to happen, it won't come from the publishers, but a big player with enough leverage like Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Then the publisher will write outrage articles about how unfair and anti press freedom the cut they get is. Until they adapt silently.
Maybe I'm a bit pessimistic, but I doubt that the proud traditional companies have learnt much from what happened in the music industry. Which on the bright side might be good for new media startups and different approaches to journalism.
There are clear laws against copying content without permission, not so with adverts. I am not obliged to sit in front of TV and watch ads during the break, nor when visiting a website unless there is some contractual obligation for me to do so. I have yet to come across a site that tells me I must agree to view the adverts to access the content.
What's the closest to this at the moment ?
That way, you know how much you're spending every month, avoiding the tip jar situation where you might wind up donating more than you'd reckoned, and you're able to contribute, even if modestly, to that many more sites than with, say, Patreon.
This uninvited use of your resources is stealing. I think you could make the case that all of the resources wasted by visitors is more valuable than the website is generating via ads (or losing from being blocked).
There would be many hurdles to cover especially due to all of the technical details (you requested a resource, they just served it) but I think you can argue that when you click a link to an article the user intends to request the article not the junk they're forcing you to have with it.
It actually would be nice if Google ranked pages by page size or had some way to tell you what you were in for by clicking on a link in your search results...
> you requested a resource, they just served it
Again: If you tell me a link will take me to very specific content (eg, a news article) I expect to receive only that content. Surprising me with other content is not welcome. Maybe it would be easier for you to relate to if the unwelcome material I'm forcing you to download is porn, gore, or malicious? Ads are equally unwelcome and you shouldn't be allowed to force someone to receive them.
This is why it would be great for search engines to analyze all of the elements on a page and rank those with less javascript and smaller page load higher than those with tons of junk...And if a website is entirely javascript it should go at the bottom of the bin, because so much can be hidden and we don't need to play cat and mouse games with search engines...
When you have a 500MB data plan and a single news page loads 50MB of junk, that's 1/10th your allotted transfer for a few KB of text! THIS IS CRIMINAL.
I'm getting the feeling nobody here has ever read RFC 1855? I think it's just as relevant now as back then when tailored towards mobile users and the current way we consume content.
> Don't send large amounts of unsolicited information to people.
The law should/could be interpreted in a way so that a website belongs only on a certain domain. Then access outside of it would be uninvited?
Cookies were banned in European Union, e.i. only made available if the user agrees. Then it is up to the user to white/black list sites. The same could be made for external domains.
Most blockers already support that. It is already happening. What we need is merely making it mandatory by law.
All the best with that. The number of sites on which I will have to disable ad-blocker because you won't show the content otherwise is in single digits.
It really is the fault of publishers that people hate internet ads.
The issue is more difficult with ad networks, since they always point to specific domains and run specific bits of javascript. But it seems to me that ad networks could simply offer a PHP et al script that publishers could locally host and include in their content that would basically proxy the connection between the user and the ad network. Clickthrough URL's would appear to be on the originating site, like any other content on the site, and the script would forward them to the appropriate site.
I have given this all of ten minutes of thought, and I'm on my way to a solution. I don't buy that companies with real money on the line can't solve this issue.
Quite often there's more than one level of resale; I've seen five and a friend who works in the business told me he's seen even more.
(Digression: I have also heard that Ghostery (.com) makes most of its money by telling companies what ads are on their web pages.)
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the recent squealing is really a sanitised form of "the loss from the adblockers has grown bigger than the gains from the increased ad prices, but noone understands our webapp tomcat CRM monster well enough to adapt."
When the administrator has no clue whats being shown on their webpage. That in and of itself is a huge issue that ad companies are non-to-eager to address.
Adverts for those not signed into the scheme, a blissful ad-free existence for those who do.
What would rock is if uBlock or Adblock had a subscription service for exactly this.
Thanks
And current ad-blockers are not effectively blocking Adwords, Facebook and other major players. We need something to level the field, to bring smaller players and more innovation.
"I want to browse every website for free, I don't want to pay for any of the sites that inform me, entertain me, help me to better do my job.
But god forbids if someone touches a cent from my salary..."
In the end it's just a question of entitlement and don't wanting to pay for things.
If you are annoyed for seeing some ads think about the anoyment of the people generating value for you without seeing a fucking cent.
Don't be so selfish, please.