Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
"Content blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising)."[1]
This is sad. Their slogan used to be "Work for mankind, not for the man". But the Mozilla Foundation is ad-funded. They currently have a deal with Yahoo to make Yahoo Search their preferred search engine. Before that, it was Google. Those deals bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. So they can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them.
This places them in conflict with Apple. Apple makes their money selling stuff to end users at a high markup. They can be very anti-advertiser if they choose. Apple could block all ads on their devices and market that as a feature.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/07/proposed-principles...
I agree with the arguments against ads, but I also remember what it was like to not have a CC or money to spend, and ads work as a redistribution mechanism; until someone can make a good argument why the poor won't be left out of the brave new world of paid-for content, I still won't use an ad-blocker.
Quite simply, produce something of value and you won't have a problem financing it. The worlds smallest violin plays for those websites producing garbage to feed the never ending stream of garbage that comes through the data pipe that I pay for. No one owes you anything.
But that's Mozilla's argument: block tracking, not ads.
Google Analytics and other services are not ads, but still track.
Project Wonderful, on the other hand, has ads but doesn't track.
Shouldn't we block the former, and not latter?
By the way, have I pointed out that I make absolutely no money on ads? I work for a B2B startup that charges for its services. No ads at all.
Mozilla is for blocking tracking, not again using advertisement to monetize content/services.
I think it's important to point out that, when you ask people they mention two other defenses of ad blocking:
1. They hate advertising in general. They would block it everywhere if they could. They know it's engineered to manipulate them, often with lifestyle advertising it's engineered to manipulate them into feeling worse and promising to sell them the cure, but it's always engineered to manipulate them in some way. The psychological techniques are very good, better to just block it than falsely assume you can be exposed and then will it into having no effect.
2. It's their computer so it will do whatever they want it to. Remove ads, remove other parts of your site, remix your site, redesign it, remove all your branding completely, etc. These are the more technical uses with a lot of plugins/userscripts but when you show it off to less technical users they want it too, although it's not available to them yet.
It has become a good litmus tests to see who mentions the problems with advertising in general and who sticks with the constructed narrative of "Is it OK to steal content to protect your private information?".
I agree, I would have expected Mozilla (even though I know they are ad supported) to not fail this particular test.
Fine, then Mozilla's argument is that we should block everyone except those. And that we also should block trackers not in ads as well (e.g. Analytics).
I'm don't see why this is so contemptible a statement, or why we should call a person a "PR drone" for writing it.
Except of course, for the vast majority of "pleb Web", the best way to address those user needs is by blocking ads.
On the web as well https://imgur.com/vU8sYyu
Now that consumers have been subjected to piles of abusive ads, they're just blocking all of the ads regardless of how bad they are.
Not really; they're blocking all ads except the ones that are unblockable: ads masquerading as content (sponsored posts, etc). It's inevitable to a degree; most people are willing to whine loudly and pretend they have the moral high ground about things that are immediately visible, but unable to think more than one step ahead about the consequences of their actions.
Paid content is, by and large, a miserable failure[1] (just look at the history of paid apps relative to ad-supported and IAP), and ad-blocking is on the rise as well. This is just pushing publishers to break one of the oldest rules (and for good reason), and break down the wall between ads and content.
[1] With minor exceptions like publications that have established a very strong brand with people of relatively high net worth. It's not a coincidence that the only publications I read regularly that moved to paywalls happen to be over a hundred years old (NYT, WSJ, Economist)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUGcjkdIfTk
There is a clear disclosure (no misleading marketing!) and he presents a new and interesting version of his usual show while incorporating the product.
It's not selling out, and it's fairly enjoyable (as evidenced by the rating counter on the video, as well as the comments).
If I must be advertised to, I prefer this method. Having watched the video, I would actually like to purchase the device mentioned. Not because it was shoved down my throat, but because it is relevant to me and I find it interesting.
The video merely brought it to my attention.
[1] I'm aware that you're explicitly providing a counter-example, so I'm not disagreeing with your comment. Just saying that it doesn't really address my point.
But if we look at the history of print, paid content did quite well for a very long time. Books, you might recall, were pretty popular. Many magazines and newspapers used to make a great deal of their revenues from subscription fees.
Video similarly seems to have worked well when paid: movies have always been profitable. The recent "golden age of television" has been attributed to the increasing volume of paid content; the ad-supported stuff is seen as lower quality.
I use an ad blocker because I'm not interested in participating in a system that is based around manipulation of people. I pay for some media both old (e.g., Economist, NYT) and new (e.g., via Patreon). The system of ad-supported print content is certainly in trouble, and if I can help along its demise by using an ad blocker, I'm glad to do it. It'll be exciting to see what comes next.
Interesting, really? Do you have a source referring to this? The only theory I've heard is that as Hollywood studios have become financially more conservative (cf the dominance of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, etc relative to decades past), talent interested in taking risks has fled to television.
> Paid content on the web has been bad because there has been a glut of free content.
Right, and the glut of free content is facilitated by the incredibly low marginal cost of distribution. Buzzfeed has built their entire business on this: instead of "writers", they have "people with a spare ten minutes to Google a set of gifs"[1]. I don't see how this is a feature of the Internet that is going to disappear, especially since people have spoken loudly and clearly that, en masse, paid media will be ignored in favor of nominally free alternatives. Your book example is particularly useful in proving my point: those books that aren't encumbered by the monopoly power of copyright are freely available on Kindle or through Project Gutenberg. TL;DR: As long as there's a free alternative, people writ large won't pay, and as long
> I use an ad blocker because I'm not interested in participating in a system that is based around manipulation of people.
This is what bothers me about people who try to take the moral high ground about ad-blocking. How in God's name do you come to the conclusion that "not participating in a system" is anything but "not visiting those sites"? If you think Beats headphones are priced more for brand than quality[2], do you go "I refuse to participate in a system that overprices products based on fooling customers" and then merrily shoplift your way through their inventory?
[1] Side note: I love this site. http://buzzfeedminusgifs.tumblr.com/
[2] Note that I'm very uninterested whether people think Beats are fairly priced or not and don't have an opinion about it myself; I'm not an audiophile and was just parroting something I've heard a bunch of times for the purposes of constructing a hypothetical. Please don't respond to this comment arguing about Beats...
Regarding me using an ad-blocker: your use of physical theft as an analogy for viewing content is just embarrassing on Hacker News. You should know better.
The difference is that if I steal headphones, the store is deprived of the headphones. Whereas if I read an article without also paying to download and display their ads, they still have the article. If they would like to only show content and ads at the same time, there are technological fixes they could apply. If they do, I won't be working around them.
They presumably haven't because there is value to them in people reading and sharing their content whether or not ads are viewed. And also because the marginal cost of a view is so small that it's best expressed in scientific notation. Personally, I don't bother trying not to read their stuff because a) I am looking for opportunities to pay people who are willing (e.g., I pay the NYT), b) I hope it'll contribute to the signal to them that their ad-driven model is not sustainable, and c) I'm not the level of obsessive that is going to carefully decide which sites to visit because I might be costing large media companies epsilon cents until they get their acts together.
Because they mislead customers into thinking positive-leaning advertisements are actual reviews of products.
Further reading:
http://adexchanger.com/publishers/ftc-publishers-will-be-hel...
https://m.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/38gocf/ethics...
You are right about online tracking though.
Doesn't help that the ads are most of the time outside the control of the publisher, but are controlled by big advertising networks of course.
Wish Google would introduce some sort of minimum design requirements for their AdSense image ads.
I also wish they'd give publishers full control over the appearance of their text ads. Right now, these ads look horrible, and only premium publishers (ie. websites with millions users) are given this sort of control.
The ads suck for a lot of reasons, but lack of capacity to filter them isn't one of them.
Plenty of ad units that you see on a publisher may be filled by Adsense on one pageview and by another ad network in another one. Those networks may or may not have the same quality requirements that Adsense does.
Publishers tend to optimize for the amount of money they can make from an ad rather than how good it looks. An ad ops person will filter out offensive or porny ads while otherwise looking to top out their commission pay.
They also give some control over how the text ads appear in terms of color and font: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6002607?hl=en
It's just that a lot of publishers don't know how to handle the settings or don't care. Most publishers are not tech-first companies, and their websites don't make the bulk of their revenue anyway. For any TV channel, their website is a rounding error in terms of total revenue.
Indeed. I'm not the target demographic for their ads (anorexic women and men who like expensive watches, AFAICT), but the ads on their site aren't aggressive, and they hire good writers. I'm happy to pay for a subscription, and wish there were more of them and less of buzzfeed on the Internet.
Some sites are quite good ad hiding sponsored links and there is way too much advertisement masquerading as editorials already.
It's one thing having Google serving me personalized ads which I know come from my search history, and a whole other having the same thing happening from various ad-serving companies with which I have no affiliation at all. Where the hell do they get my profile from? And who regulates that market?
Just to be clear, I won’t argue that ads are annoying and that makes a lot of users willing to use something to block them. I just have the impression that it was after the adoption of profiling technologies that ad blocking usage boomed.
[1] http://www.mondaynote.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/347_adb...
[2] http://digiday.com/publishers/global-rise-ad-blocking-4-char...
As for the European part, as a European I would not agree to that statement at all most people here do not show any more insight into technical privacy than who I know in the US.
VPN is also quite common here in Europe and not for any privacy concern but because regional blocking of content is a plague here. And it's not only to access US content Europe is a nightmare when it comes to distribution rights for IP since even tho we have a unified market every country still has it's own distributors.
So if a Belgian user wants to access French content they more often than not have to use a VPN to get a French IP because otherwise no streaming for them, same goes for an Austrian or a Swiss user who wants to consume German content. And that's before going into the insanity of regional content for the likes of Netflix.
You also forget that Europe has adopted Chrome much faster than in the US because from 2010 to 2014 they had to have the browser choice menu for all versions of windows which were shipped in the EU upon installation (You can also see a short spike in IE users once that directive expired in dec 2014, presumably just to get Chrome/FF again ;)) which meant that they had the ability to install free adblockers (adblock for IE costs money, and is a shite reverse proxy).
Except those on slow or limited data connections that suffer because of image ads, and everyone who opposes tracking ads on principle.
The only ones making money on IT are companies who's main thing is not technology, but who can utilize technology to make there business more efficient. A good example is logistic companies who have a business that's been around for ever, but smart algorithms allows them to cut costs and work more effectively. But the money it selves comes from shipping things.
My company makes most of its money off of advertising, I am broadly a fan of advertising (done well) myself, and yet.. I agree with your feeling at a core, technical level. I currently don't see how it's defensible to argue that a piece of software MUST render a certain stream of data in a certain way.
This is not about copyright, redistribution (we're not transforming then rebroadcasting), or ethics (to me). This is simply about having code on a machine transform an incoming stream to a visual representation, and while common standards and protocols (e.g. JPEG, HTML, CSS, HTTP) determine how to do that to get towards a desired result, I think any individual's code or computer should be free to render data as it sees fit even if that rendering is not what the creator intended.
Dictating how people or machines must intrepret things is a bad idea, IMHO. Provide the source data in whatever way you want, by all means, but the end user/device must interpret them as they will.
In the end if the ads is distracting you from the content its a bad ad, and given the choice you don't want to see it.
Thus the only acceptable ads, are things like product placement. You know its an ad but it doesnt cut the flow.
I can survive without another shitty slide-show of the 17 Most Ridiculous Cats Twerking, or another news article that is a summary of a summary of a Reuters, machine-learned bot-written summary of a press release about an abstract of a scientific study.
Most interesting content is created for personal blogs and Wordpress and even Tumblr, by amateurs and people that are writing because they like doing it. Or it's on the pay-walled dead-tree publisher websites, like NY Times, the Atlantic, MIT Review, WSJ, etc.
Google is in a different category for me as far as ads go. When people are actively searching for something, offering them things they are searching for is working with their interests. Most advertising, though, is distraction from whatever the user is up to, so it's working against their interests.
YouTube might have a problem. People might, god forbid, actually have to pay to host stuff. I suspect we'd survive.
I agree with you in principle, because if people hosted their own content they would have more direct control over it, and decentralizing the web is usually a good thing. But in practical terms the result of that would probably be the removal of a great deal of video content from the web, or moving most of it to whatever next best option is after Youtube (probably Vimeo.)
Nearly all the current voices in media rely on advertising for their existence. Nearly all of the most influential organizations are extremely biased.
Of course this means the govt has to be controlled better - but thats an easier target than "all corporations"
Some combination of charging up front for access (with only a few samples shown to people who don't subscribe), charging for timely access (see LWN, which provides articles 1-2 weeks earlier for subscribers), and patronage (if you want to see more investigative reports like this, pay me via Patreon).
That's also a much better answer than the person I replied to, who seemed to think that the problem was that we aren't using peer-to-peer file change.
If advertising dies as business model, it won't be just the Buzzfeeds of the world that go with it. Of course nobody can force you to watch ads. But the people you're hurting by doing that are in fact the same people making the content you're actually viewing. Your glee about killing just the low quality content providers by blocking ads isn't justified.
Further, your description of the past is either limited to a few months in 1994 or needs to include the tons of small “portal” sites which were plastered with ads and ran only content from AP and Reuters or, more likely, lower-tier networks but produced no original content except for advertorial sponsored content. The click-bait headline might have taken awhile to reach its modern form but it was invented shortly after the invention of advertising.
We are not responsible for helping businesses prop up their failing revenue streams.
[1] It really shouldn't be called "blocking" ads. It's really just choosing not to render them. When I control the rendering device (my browser), I can make it do whatever I want. Good luck showing me your video ad when I'm browsing with "links".
Besides, your argument is essentially “If you want me to pay, use DRM”. I would suggest that this is not a direction we need to try going down again.
> Besides, your argument is essentially “If you want me to pay, use DRM”. I would suggest that this is not a direction we need to try going down again.
That sort of is my point, but not quite. Because once DRM is in the picture then I (and everyone else) won't partake of the content, which is what they want of me anyway. Until that time, I feel morally, ethically, and legally free to render their content as I see fit.
What a silly statement. Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio? You are visiting a site that gives you content for free in return for viewing their ads. If you don't like that contract then don't visit the site and limit your browsing to sites that adhere to your personal contract.
Yes? Or are you saying I shouldn't be allowed to change the station during a commercial?
When you can very accurately determine how many people have seen a web ad and you know how many people haven't, that more directly affects how much value can be extracted from that advertising. In terms of the actual effect on revenue, blocking a web ad would seem to have more impact than ignoring a tv or radio ad.
Unless the advertisers want to publicly (!) admit that they wish they could block TV content from people muting/changing the channel/walking out to make tea during commercials.
If I wanted to hurt advertising, I'd create an extension that would fire a thousand click-throughs on their stupid ad, and vacuum up all their AdSense budget. Get a few million people world-wide doing that, and companies would quickly realize that they are spending an even more ridiculous amount of money on advertisements, and they would stop spending.
As for hurting advertising by your click though scheme - do you really think you're the first one to have thought of this? They have measures in place to identify and disregard this.
No. They are giving me back some form of data than I can render however I see fit. If I want to render their HTML but skip the rendering of the ads, that's my business and not theirs.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/05/business/the-n...
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=requestpolicy...
Sure they could. Look at São Paulo, for instance.
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/11/can-cities-kic...
I'd also argue that the way Apple implemented things, it actually takes more savvy to block ads on iOS than on a web browser on a PC. If it were just a default setting in Safari, you'd have a stronger argument.
EDIT: If it was easy to bypass ad-blockers, the advertisers would already be doing it.