Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt4077 | Hacker News Reader

I've been singing that song for a while... Overzealous adblocking may cost us dearly when it succeeds to cut off all revenue streams for quality content except subscriptions.

I know HN takes a pretty critical view of "mainstream media", but I believe a world in which NYT/Wired/WSJ and similar have been successfully run out of business will be a very different one. They are among the last to have the resources to devote teams to investigate issues. There's nobody capable of replacing them.

I with there were an Adblocker that takes this responsibility serious, blocking maybe video and ads over content, but not static images and text ads.

For the commentator saying that "most consumers don't care how carefully ads have been selected. It still is an ad and we don't like any ads :)" I can only answer that problem started when you called yourself a "consumer". We need more citizen, less consumers.

View on HN

> I've been singing that song for a while... Overzealous adblocking may cost us dearly when it succeeds to cut off all revenue streams for quality content except subscriptions.

I find it hard to believe that a personal blog by a MS MVP, who does a lot of traveling and presenting, drives so much traffic that he can't afford a mid-tier Wordpress instance out of his lunch money, so using his example as one where "the little guy" needs advertising to stay alive is dubious.

I've been saying for a long time now that the kind of clickbait-y, listicle-y, content-free "content" that is supported purely by advertising needs to go away anyhow. The entire "industry" of hiring "writers" to research trending words, and then write 100-word articles to post to aggregator sites so that they move up the search rankings -- purely to drive ad revenue -- needs to die a quick, agonizing death.

>I find it hard to believe that a personal blog by a MS MVP, who does a lot of traveling and presenting, drives so much traffic that he can't afford a mid-tier Wordpress instance out of his lunch money, so using his example as one where "the little guy" needs advertising to stay alive is dubious.

Are you judging him on his money capacity so you can justify blocking ads on his page ? I might be mistaken but it looks like it.

People seem to find themselves with moral superiority to block content on webpages for reasons they seem fit.

The thing is, if you're using an ad blocker on all the time, how can you argue that your blocking something for a reason, if you haven't seen any ads yet ?

If someone writes click bait, or you don't like the content or whatever, just close your web browser and in the future don't visit that website.

If everyone did that, we forced people to write better content because it would be quality that would drive visits. Since most people just visit the websites, they can read the articles or content but block the ads.

It seems that what is wrong is not the content but the ads, so advertisers and ad platforms make changes so they can circumvent these issues and ad blockers do the same.

It's a war and it will get us nowhere.

> Are you judging him on his money capacity so you can justify blocking ads on his page ? I might be mistaken but it looks like it.

No, that's to point out that good content doesn't NECESSARILY need an ad-revenue stream to exist. I'm old, and I still aggregate a lot of blogs via RSS. To me, that's still the best content on the internet. Reading those posts in an aggregator removes almost all of the advertising anyway, and certainly all the "bad" adverts.

That reminds me... it was a good article. I should add him to my roll, and see what else he has to say...

You can't tell me with a straight face that bloggers could ever offer the depth and width of news that a serious newspaper gets you.

Blogs are fine, especially for technical content. Political news needs people present for actual events, it needs investigation: calling around, requesting documents, FOIA requests, sometimes lawsuits with all the costs they involve. Brand names are also useful, as a quick proxy to judge reliability.

It's been a really bad day for my on HN, with people making strawmen out of my comments, and accusing me of saying things I did not say. That's not even remotely close to what I was saying, and I'm officially done with HN for awhile.

> The thing is, if you're using an ad blocker on all the time, how can you argue that your blocking something for a reason, if you haven't seen any ads yet ?

A few weeks ago, I was reading a long-form Guardian article (pretty sure it was linked from here) and it struck me that the page layout was super clean and readable. I wondered what it would look in its full ad-laden glory, so I disabled uBlock and refreshed the page. I was immediately redirected to a "Firefox needs an urgent security update!!" page that would have installed malware if I had run the script it was pushing. I hope they got paid handsomely for that first impression, because it was also the last.

If a site wants to advertise to me, they can embed a static image, hosted on their own server, and I may or may not click the link. "Ad networks" can go sit on a sharp stick. Maybe it can be leveraged to pry their head out.

For me, that's the right way to do things.

Unfortunately ad-blockers also block static images hosted on your own server.

I run the community website for our small town. We have a (free) 'For sale' page where people can sell on/give away their unwanted goods, and upload pictures of them. It's enormously popular.

Every month or two I get an email from someone saying they can't see the pictures that accompany the ads. "I can't see the ads." "Are you using an ad-blocker?" "Yes." "What do you think an ad-blocker does..."

Yes, it wasn't clear, but I don't think ad blockers should be so agressive against harmless static ads. Being able to create custom rules should be enough. That was just an example of why I don't thinking browsing "shields down" by default is a valid option. Even the most reputable sites (and regardless of one's politics, the Guardian is reputable) are a minefield.

> We need more citizen, less consumers.

Ads are not a public service. Ads are for consumers. Advertisers pay for them to be placed in the hopes that consumers will give them money as a result.

Advertisers are wasting money if they're trying to show adverts to people who are sufficiently disinterested in seeing them that they've installed an ad blocker.

Any website which knowingly wastes an advertiser's money on aggressive attempts to display adverts to those who have clearly indicated they don't want to see them is essentially engaging in fraud.

> Any website which knowingly wastes an advertiser's money on aggressive attempts to display adverts to those who have clearly indicated they don't want to see them is essentially engaging in fraud.

Eh. It's not fraud, it's just bad business practice.

I doubt that anybody likes ads. Somehow, the still work. Your willingness to view is surprisingly uncorrelated with their effectiveness on you.

I should like to see published evidence of the effectiveness of Internet ads. I'm of the firm belief that Internet advertising is virtually useless. I think it almost exclusively benefits the ad networks and a minority of high-traffic ad-carrying websites.

One paper (DOI 10.3386/w20171), relating to search ads, concluded that they saw a strong correlation between people who click on ads and people who already regularly purchase from the advertising vendor. i.e. When a vendor pays for clicks on search ads, most of the time they're paying for people who would have bought from them anyway. In that study, for campaigns where naive analysis implies there was a 4000% ROI, an analysis which takes the correlation into account indicated a negative ROI.

I know from experience that another confounding factor is that marketing departments and agencies often have perverse incentives. Campaigns are often judged by the net revenue from customers who interacted with that campaign, which incentivizes campaigning towards the people already most likely to buy whatever is being advertised.

Additionally, even if Internet ads do influence their viewers, the most likely influence it has on people who see it despite having installed an ad blocker is to make them dislike the host website and the advertiser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com