[adrianmn]

As someone that has been involved in online publishing for over 10 years I have a strong opinion about ad blockers.

In my opinion using ad blockers is borderline piracy. Refusing the content creator his revenue by blocking his ads is little different than downloading music, books... without rewarding the creator. On top of that most of the quality content this days is on websites that have decent ads.

I am not trying to start a dispute if piracy is good or bad just wanted to express an opinion on ad blockers that many seem to miss.

[skue]

> In my opinion using ad blockers is borderline piracy.

Once upon a time I agreed with you... now I view all online ads as threats.

Unfortunately, marketing companies have gotten greedy and the degree to which they fingerprint and track us as we surf the web has gotten completely out of hand. This is an industry that cannot even follow their own watered-down initiatives like DoNotTrack.

And because ad networks use layers of affiliates, sites typically have no visibility nor control over what their visitors are being served. That's why you end up with a marketing company like Evidon buying Ghostery - just so they can help companies monitor the garbage on their own pages![3]

And to top it off, ads are now a common attack vector for viruses and malware that not even the big companies can control:

1. Just last week, Youtube was serving banking malware via its online ads. [1]

2. Last month Yahoo got a lot of attention serving Bitcoin malware via online ads on their site. [2]

I know that online publishing is important, and we need a strong press. But publishing desperately needs to find a new business model because online ads are a failed experiment and it's time to stick a fork in them.

[1]: http://labs.bromium.com/2014/02/21/the-wild-wild-web-youtube...

[2]: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/05/tech/yahoo-malware-attack/inde...

[3]: https://www.ghostery.com/faq#q15

[adrianb]

Also people shouldn't be allowed to change the channel on tv when the ad breaks begin or even leave to use the toilet! They should be forced to sit and watch everything or else the ratings of the ads will not match the ones for the show.

My point it: people mostly hated ads since they were invented. Be it by not looking at them on the street, changing channels on tv or installing AdBlock on your computer, they do their best to avoid them.

[adrianmn]

The TV ad example is a false analogy. If the page has ads that you don't want to see you can close it(no one forces you to watch it) or go for the toilet break.

I agree that people hate ads and people also hate paying for things that can get for free(piracy).

You guys are missing my point of ad blockers being borderline piracy and mainly try to justify your reason for using them.

[mindslight]

As someone who has used an ad blocker for over 10 years, I have a strong opinion about the ad industry.

Die out, go away, and let us get back to the point where the motivation to publish something on the 'net stems from the desire to share knowledge. To hell with the cacophonous status quo of doing the bare minimum to trick people into giving you their attention in order to fill their head with garbage for a fraction of a penny. And if hosting honest content using central servers costs too much to be sustainable, then let that dead-end approach leave us and make room for decentralized software to deliver information.

[netrus]

I dont get your comment. Not content delivery is expensive, but content creation Do you want a net without professional journalism?! Or do you prefer paywalls? Or donations?

I am in favor of a great coordinated blackout campaign by the large content providers. Dont want to see ads? Fine, pay a dollar via Paypal to see the site - or go away.

[rcfox]

Personally, I find that people who directly depend on ad revenue contribute very little to my life. In the software industry, content creators who are paid to participate in the field tend to produce much better content than those who are paid to produce content.

[mschuster91]

The problem is that without adblockers the web is basically useless due to too many publishers becoming too greedy and torturing their users with sometimes dozens of layer,banner,popup,popunder and scareware ads on one(!) page.

[recursive]

I don't use ad blockers, and I disagree with your claim that the web is useless.

[adrianmn]

Do you see how that is in perfect connection with the reason people pirate stuff?

Anti-piracy main reasoning is that if it's too expensive(too many ads in your case) just don't buy it. The 2nd main reason is lack of availability(in ad blocker case - lack of sites with less ads that give you same content).

[mason240]

I don't use adblockers and have never had any problems.

[mendelk]

ABP for Chrome has the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" flag for precisely this reason: to reward creators who use ads deemed "acceptable".

This flag is checked by default.

More Info: https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

[_pghu]

The problem is that "acceptable" in this context means "paid protection money to the ABP dev".

(see https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads-agreements)

[marcosdumay]

I'm more than happy to see your ads. I'll even click on it, and buy things from the target if I like what I see. I've done that several times in the past. In fact, when they are relevant, and in moderated amounts, I do like ads.

Now, I'm sure that you took care to guarantee that your ads won't track me, or try to invade my computer, right? Because if you didn't, it's blocked and you can whine and call me bad names the entire day, it won't change a thing.

By the way, I never saw adblockers blocking properly applied, safe to load ads. Maybe they do, I don't use them for quite a long time (I use other tech).

[DanAndersen]

I agree there are some parallels between ad-blocking and piracy (though they do tend to be in the realm of the "piracy = theft" idea rather than copyright-related parallels).

However, I think it's also important to recognize that by similarly-strong analogy, advertisements in general are inherently a sort of mental manipulation or brainwashing.

Now, I'm not saying that mental manipulation is inherently a bad or evil thing. When I'm writing this post, I hope that those reading it will become in some way more mentally accepting of my point of view. But I think we don't look enough at how susceptible we are to advertising, and how much advertising depends on exploiting cognitive biases or implying untruths that are not explicitly stated.

We (humans) are really bad at not being affected by advertising, even if we know we're being advertised to, and even if we know the ad is deceptive. When sites depend on ad revenue, they're saying "We're offering this content for free, but in exchange we want to be able to bias/prime your brain so that when you see Product X, even far in the future, you are more likely to desire it." That's a very powerful thing, and while it's certainly necessary for many business models today, I think we should think of this as a "necessary evil."

There are sites where I disable ad-blocking, often in response to a genuine plea on the part of the website. If it's a site I particularly care about and feel that I trust, then I allow ads as a way of helping them out. But if ad-blocking is piracy, then ads themselves are brainwashing -- exploiting failings in human cognition to unconsciously guide people into actions or purchases that may or may not be optimal for them -- and with the subject having limited defenses against it once infected.

[adrianmn]

Completely agree with you on the points about the risk of brainwashing and impulse buying and people not realising how powerful and dangerous ads can be.

I would not go that far and claim all ads are brainwashing and manipulative. Going this route it means all communication is manipulative as there is an intention behind every word.

[__david__]

You act like there's some sort of contract that says I have to download and display everything in your html.

There is not.

[fauigerzigerk]

I also want the ad funding model to be viable. I'm happy to consider ads on my screen as a form of payment and I would not block them out of convenience alone.

But if the advertising industry starts to act like one huge criminal enterprise without any limits to the kind of deceptive practices they use I'm forced to defend myself.

I see no reason to be fair to those who deceive me whenever they can.

[mistercow]

As someone who has paid for advertising on websites, I'm happy that some of the users who are definitely not going to click on the ad aren't served them.

But beyond that, this is pretty irrelevant to the topic at hand. However you feel about ad blockers, tricking people into turning them off is still completely unacceptable.

[r0h1n]

What if users don't block ads but never click on one either?

[adrianmn]

That is a publisher and advertiser problem as they did not create an ad relevant and/or engaging enough.

With retargeting ads this days it becomes easier to show relevant and targeted ads.

Actually most HN-ers are leaving huge money on the table right now for not using the highest ROI ad channel - retargeting.