"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
Public advertising certainly has a coercive feel to it. If ads were food then advertisers would be running around shoving food into people's mouths (mostly junk food, too). And yet we think nothing of feeding people information without their consent.
It's interesting to imagine a world where you have to explicitly agree to be exposed to information. I think I would rather like that world.
Banksy's quote is quite ironic, coming from a guy that's well known as a master of publicizing his own work... even more, doing that by creating/exposing his work in "public space", using the walls of private and public buildings as a canvas without asking anyone for authorization.
"Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours."
That's an interesting conception of one's natural rights in a public space, given that basically nothing in a public space "gives you choice whether you see it or not" by the definition of "public space." The following does not sound different in principle from the quote:
"Any member of the opposite sex (who with their looks implies you're not sexy enough and all the fun is elsewhere blah blah BLAH) who gives you no choice whether you see them or not is yours. They're yours to take, 're-arrange and re-use'."
I honestly don't see a difference except in degree (and hence in jail time I'd prefer to see resulting from actions based on each of the attitudes, roughly 15 days and 15 years, respectively.)
There's a big difference between blocking ads on my machine and spraying ads in a public space. The latter is a small-time prank of course and nothing close to a serious crime, but the philosophical basis for it cited above couldn't be more off IMO.
People are publishing content on the internet without putting it behind a login/password/restricted access.
Not only are they publishing it, they're announcing its presence on social media, performing "search engine optimizations", and cross-promoting it on other non-web technologies (radio, tv, printed media, etc.).
... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you will look at the ads being shown here".
I also haven't agreed to such things for cable tv or radio - but guess what? I don't generally consume those media products, in large part because the formats are linear and full of "unskippable" ads.
Nothing is stopping the web from moving to this format. There are many sites out there that present an interstitial of some sort before moving onto the main content. And every time I end up on one of those sites, if my ad blocker isn't dealing with it somehow, I generally remember and avoid visiting the next time.
If you want me to pay for the web content that you're publishing because that's the business model you've decided on, be up front and attempt to get a paid agreement from me. Or deal with the fact that I'm part of the audience that doesn't look at the ads in print media, mutes or skips channels on TV, and installs ad blockers for the web.
If an ad comes on the radio, I usually change the station. During TV commercials, I mute and do something else. There's nothing that compels me to sit through the ads to listen to the music or watch the television show. Similarly, I have no problem with "skipping", or blocking, ads.
>... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you will look at the ads being shown here".
Isn't it common knowledge that many sites rely on ads for their revenue? Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum wage because customers are expected to tip. Yet, it's generally considered rude to not tip even though it's even easier than installing an ad blocker and restaurants won't refuse you service, whereas some websites try to block ad blockers.
Sounds like you would not consider it unethical to exploit a flaw in a website that allowed you to order products without paying. After all, the website is public, and you weren't asked not to exploit the flaw...
I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them" as the ad networks are simply a platform for which there are buyers of ads/eyeballs (advertisers) and sites/apps that display said advertising. It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code snippets needed to display ads or track you (not withstanding those terrible ad injector add-ons). Without your favorite sites providing it space to advertise on, there would be no advertising network.
In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content and advertising is much more lucrative for the sites you patronize. Who's paying for that "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" quiz on Buzzfeed that you gleefully wasted 5 minutes of you life on? Certainly not you; it was the advertiser who paid in exchange for an opportunity to influence you in some way (either direct action or indirect branding).
When you think about the 'morality' of ad blockers, it's not about the ad networks that we're talking about, it's the publishing sites that produce the content you consume. When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that.
There is nothing ethically or morally wrong with an ad-blocker. It is no different than using any other technology to filter language or explicit content. No one is being harmed nor has property been destroyed or stolen (the owner was not deprived of their property).
Plain and simple: if you do not want to pay for the bandwidth and hosting charges, don't put material online. Just because you are trying to make a living does not mean anyone should partake in your business model. After all, should everyone that visits your site be required to click on one of the ads?
(Interestingly, in the current link to this article, http://mises.org/blog/whats-wrong-blocking-ads , the author credited is B.K. Marcus, despite there being no change in the article.)
I finally installed an ad blocker a couple of years back, after two decades of browsing without. It had become too much for me to cope with. The popups that took advantage of me clicking to focus on their page to get past my popup blocker, the ads with sound that didn't start muted, the overlay ads that blocked out the whole page until acknowledged, etc. This doesn't even begin to address the privacy concerns. I spent too much time being angry at nameless faceless advertisers and the asshole coders who serve them.
I never liked advertising, but I usually liked the sites I was visiting and wanted to support them, so I didn't kill the ads. Even now, I let a small number of sites serve me ads, if they have shown themselves to be responsible and respectful of my attention. reddit is one of the very few, for example, because they almost never serve a really obnoxious ad.
And, of course, I have never heeded the alligator tears of the online marketing industry (or any other marketing industry...physical junk mail producers can rot in hell). I respect the desire of websites to support their business. But, I'm not obligated to accept the method by which they want to do it, if it includes behavior that I consider unethical or just annoying.
I have run an ad blocker for at least the last 6 years, probably longer - it has been a staple in my browser setup for so long I cannot stand browsing without one.
The author linked to a tweet which I think requires further examination "ad blocking is shoplifting for the Web".
This argument fails on several fronts, the main one is consent - by loading a website, I am not required to load any or all resources that the server presents to me - certainly in many cases e.g. text-based browsers there is no point to loading these resources - they simply cannot be displayed to the user.
An adblocker is the same, it is a consent mechanism - the server presents my browser with resources that it thinks would be worth rendering with the content, I am free to allow or not allow these resources to be loaded as I choose - and this includes offloading the decision making to other code on my machine.
I don't have a solution for the content creators, I wish I did - I regularly buy books from authors I first discover online. I would be open to micro-payments - however I am skeptical surrounding current implementations as it requires me to submit my browsing history and likes to a third party which is one of the other reasons I run an adblocker in the first place.
There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.
Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.
I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.
I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak.
.
TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen.
On a broad scale, we have moved from a culture of ads as info, to ads that push you to buy whatever the factory produces. This huge supply and false demand for things we don't really need has a huge impact of consumption culture, personal distress - an ongoing feeling that you always lack something, ecological waste and people wasting their hard earned dollars on things they don't really need. God bless ad blockers.
Who gets to decide whether something is necessary or not?
Maslow understood that humans "need" pathways to self-esteem and self-expression. An extensive collection of Marvel action figures could slip through that loophole.
Francis of Assisi lived in abject poverty, and would be a much harsher judge than Maslow, and would probably criticize either of us for bothering to own any electronic devices.
I'm neither a Franciscan nor a Maslowian, but the concept of "human needs" hardly lends itself to immediate and universal agreement.
But its the content creators being punished, not the ad companies. If anything ad blockers are in their interest since the type of person who blocks ads is probably the type of person to ignore them anyway.
While I like your poetic verve, this isn't true. Ads were always garbage. Old ads lied just as much and tried to instill the same feelings. They just had less direction since they didn't know how to measure and optimize on outcomes.
Is there anyone arguing that adblockers are immoral other than somebody on Twitter? In the US, the legal issue has been settled. Fox tried suing Dish Networks over their commercial-skipping feature. Fox lost.[1]
The main problem with ad blockers is that they're not very good technically. They're usually regular expression based and need too much information about the exact format of ad code, so they need constant updating. Some have deliberate holes. AdBlock Plus sells "block bypassing" to "good" advertisers. Ghostery blocks tracking but then does tracking itself. (If you use Ghostery, go to its preferences and opt out of "Ghostrank".) BlockSite became adware.
There's no money in the ad blocking business. Last year, the AdBlock Plus guy was trying to make money by selling hoodies. An automatic ad blocker with machine learning to adapt to new ads would be a nice open source project. You won't make any money, but you'll get lots of publicity.
Unless it's changed recently, I'm pretty sure "Ghostrank" is off by default, and you have to opt-in, but yes, it will track you if you turn it on. (The ABP "allow some advertising" option is an opt-out though IIRC.)
Does anybody remember the internet in the early 90s? Before it started getting rammed full of ads and get quick rich startup schemes? It was kind of awesome, kind of a mess. People just put up whatever personal scratch they wanted to itch paid the then outrageous hosting fees ($20/mo for 1MB of space!) and the world was good.
My point is that these days, it seems like providing the same experience for most people, involves millions of dollars, thousands of dollars a month in hosting fees, forming a company and having a marketing department that buys ads on ad networks.
We can all dream of making our millions, but sometimes it's just cool to have a modern personal site and get on with life.
I think if you step back a bit from this problem, the real source of the problem is that typical capitalism -- supply and demand and all that -- fails miserably for such things as web sites and services, where there is zero marginal cost.
Subscriptions or other kinds of paywalls are the closest to a capitalist solution, but they require artificially limiting supply. The most dramatic and poetic discussion of the evils of artificially limiting supply to increase profits would have to be chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath: http://genius.com/John-steinbeck-grapes-of-wrath-chapter-25-...
Ads produce such a tiny amount of revenue that the web ad industry is in a position of just giving up altogether, or trying to milk every penny out of the ads. And as others have noted, that's not pretty. Everything from obnoxious in-your-face-ads, to ads that don't let you leave the page, to ads that don't let you view the content for a few seconds, to video ads with audio that comes on automatically, to ads that track you all over the web.
I don't have a perfect solution, and I am not going to blame people for using ad blockers, especially if privacy and tracking are big issues for them. But I suspect that if everyone used ad blockers, a lot of web sites that we know and love would disappear. The best thing I can think of is that the big ad companies should offer a plan where you skip all ads, but pay the same amount the ad would pay to the advertiser for the privilege of viewing the page ad-free.
I don't think there is a problem to be honest. It's just the market playing itself out - if you can't provide content with ads that I'd like to see, then you should go bankrupt.
I am subscribed to some weekly email newsletters - they have a few ads, that make sense. I don't mind it, I like it when a product I may actually be interested in, is advertised to me.
Gruber has weekly sponsors - I don't mind, at all. I like it.
When google provides me with an amazon link when I search for a book, I am fine with that.
On and on. The only folks moaning at the ad-revenue being decimated are the ones who thought annoying their users with ads they don't want is ok. It's not ok.
I envision a future where the default mode is silence, and all advertising is opt-in. If I need to buy a t-shirt, I press a button that temporarily subscribes me to a "channel" of advertisements from t-shirt brands, along with whatever relevant preferences I decide to filter the ads by. In other words, I give companies explicit permission to advertise to me. Once I buy a t-shirt and fulfill the need, I unsubscribe from the channel and it's back to silence.
The benefit to users is obvious. But there's also a lot of benefits to advertisers. After all, what can be better than a prospective customer saying, "I need to buy something, show me ads"? Instead we spend untold billions developing technologies and algorithms to predict people's behavior and end up invading their privacy and pissing them off.
I'll pay for good content - and I do with WSJ, Nat Geo and more - but I'm sure as hell not going to disable my adblocker any time soon.
I'm sick of marketing and marketers. They bombard us 24/7 on every medium they can.
- Turn on the TV and you're not only swamped with blatant ads, but they've pushed subtle product placement into everything possible.
- Turn on the radio and you're blasted with ads.
- Go on Facebook and you're hammered with "tailored" ads, clickbait, autoplaying viral videos and more.
- Go on Twitter and every popular hashtag is flooded with people advertising unrelated products.
- Walk down the street and ads are everywhere.
- Open a "free" news site and you're bombarded with ads and ads disguised as articles. Look up a tutorial and you're presented with a slide-based site that loads up new ads every time you click, or throws extra ads in on every other slide.
It's a battle and I will never entertain a "morality" argument from those in charge of the above.
Completely "free" content online is total junk for the most part. I wouldn't pay to read Reddit, anything from the Gawker network, ReCode, etc. as they haven't content worth paying for, and I won't support their ad revenue either as it makes no difference to me whether they survive or disappear. I would have previously considered paying for some of the mainstream tech news sites but they've absolutely ruined their content in recent years in the name of getting easy clicks for ad revenue.
Could not agree more. And it doesn't just cover display ads, but marketing emails and social media posts too. All equally odious.
An entire industry predicated on the idea of getting me to pay for something I don't want, and using my bandwidth to do it. Every advertiser tries to justify it, too.
"We only send emails to people who want them" or other such tripe. Nobody wants to be part of a sales funnel. If the product is actually good and useful, it will sell itself by word of mouth.
What gets under my skin is the perception that they have this "right to be seen".
Where 'being seen' means robbing me of my attention for a moment to try to sell me something I likely don't want, and every company and their dog is lining up around the block to be seen.
This author has nailed it: "The ad industry has spent years cultivating a 'fuck you' attitude where they would do everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them. To now suddenly be concerned about the 'morality' of what other people do is the height of hypocrisy."
When Ad companies start respecting my wishes, I'll consider respecting theirs.
>Nobody wants to be part of a sales funnel.
Maybe not, but lots and lots of people are wanting to buy things. I my case it is a car - if I go to a car dealer I become part of a sales funnel (a particular unprofitable one, but that is a side issue).
>If the product is actually good and useful, it will sell itself by word of mouth.
The cure for cancer will sell itself that way, yes. But even things that should sell, such as cheaper cellphone plans, don't.
Yes, that's why every successful company in the world spends 0 dollar on marketing and advertising. Right? They're just that dumb. If only they knew their products could sell themselves!
A lot of misplaced anger here. The most beloved services and content exist because of advertisers. Put yourself in the shoes of somebody trying to create a new Internet publication, casual video game, search engine, social network, or most any other online business. What do you imagine a successful business plan will be? Paywalls? Good luck with that :-p
The rant is written as though advertisers snuck into the media, as though they infiltrated, they used subterfuge to penetrate an otherwise non-commercial, innocent world of dollar-free self-expression.
The whole thing is backwards. Advertisers and the advertising industry were the parents and premise of this world, not its covert invaders. I find it sad to see folks forgetting which industry we have to thank for the very forums on which we (piously!) castigate it.
As somebody who would like to build a business himself on the back of the Internet, my feeling on the existence of so frictionless a currency as advertising is mostly gratitude.
Ad blocking software, until it comes default in a browser, actually helps the industry. The sort of people who run the software are also the same people that ignore ads anyway. By removing yourself from their audience profile, they are able to decrease CPMs/CPVs for their advertisers, since they aren't wasting impressions on you.
Part of web advertising for the bigger companies is brand awareness. Every ad viewed is absorbed at some level, it can't be fully ignored. Even if you don't click your awareness of the brand has increased.
I'm as scared as the next person of all the data being sucked up but if I wanted to be charitable, ... a different pov is perfect advertising which would effectively read your mind and present you info exactly when you need it. Thinking about going on vacation to Vietnam? perfect advertizing would devine that and show you ads for good hotel deals, flights, attractions, restaurants, events, markets, etc in Vietnam. Perfect advertising would also not present ads for things you'd already done there unless it knew you'd probably want to do them again. It would know if you're an adventurous eater or a conservative eater and present you with restaurants that meet your preferences. If you're a thrillseeker it would present you with thrilling activity options. If you're a clubber you'd get ads for the best clubs featuring the artists that fit your preferences best.
Perfect advertising could read your mood tonight and suggest restaurants if your mood indicated you wanted to go out. I could know which ones are already booked solid and not present them. It would would know if wanted a quiet intimate dinner or a louder venue. It would know which friends are free and suggest asking them along.
Yes I'm scared of some of the repercussion of getting to that state and all the abuse and how it will probably never get there but it's certainly a fun thought experiment to imagine what perfect advertising might be.
Look, if I don't install uBlock on my parents' (and, to be frank, every other non-technical person's I know) machine, they will be calling me next week because google.com redirects to
malwareinjector.com and facebook.com goes to fuckbook.com. On another note, the author cites some random twitter dude. Who gives a damn about what he says? He is probably just upset because he invested money in some weird ad-scheme business and it turned out bad for him.
The host files part was pretty cool. I might not add all the ad/tracking sites, but I definitely added the shock/malware because I know for a fact I won't ever want or need to visit those.
I'm so torn on Adblockers. While I agree that advertisers generally don't act in good faith, the penalty falls unfairly on content producers. Two wrongs don't make a right, but maybe the middle ground is to be a responsible website owner who uses best privacy practices around advertising while consumers un-adblock their site. Seems like it's really just an arms race not benefiting content producers, as it is now.
A couple of years back, Ars Technica started putting up banner ads targeting adblockers: "Ads pay for the lights, etc." I felt guilty enough that I unblocked ads on Ars.
Returning to the site one day, I see the technical equivalent of a "punch the monkey" flashing banner ad. Aaand, adblocking back on, plus I now block the anti-adblock ad. And I no longer feel guilty. You had your chance and you squandered it.
Ars Technica styles itself as a site for well-informed technology-oriented people. The ads should fit the site. Insulting your audience's intelligence might work on Facebook, but these days you don't deserve to make money from advertising (on what is essentially a niche site).
I disagree that the penalty falls unfairly on content producers. The content producers choose their business model. If technology makes that model untenable then the content producers must change their model.
Not really. No-one is obligated to produce content; if a business model doesn't work, then you probably shouldn't do it.
So what business model should content producers use, if they can't use the "advertising can fund anything" hack? That's a broader conversation, and I think it's the right conversation for our society to have. Advertising is an expensive tax on our economy (and on human well-being) that doesn't need to exist.
[+] [-] RodericDay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenyoda|11 years ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461383-people-are-taking-th...
[+] [-] javajosh|11 years ago|reply
It's interesting to imagine a world where you have to explicitly agree to be exposed to information. I think I would rather like that world.
[+] [-] dingaling|11 years ago|reply
Correct, Banksy never asked permission before shoving his advertising in my face.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45894000/jpg/_45894102_un...
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/img/music2/BV_Screening_Invite....
Happy enough to use the system when it makes him money.
[+] [-] opinali|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _yosefk|11 years ago|reply
That's an interesting conception of one's natural rights in a public space, given that basically nothing in a public space "gives you choice whether you see it or not" by the definition of "public space." The following does not sound different in principle from the quote:
"Any member of the opposite sex (who with their looks implies you're not sexy enough and all the fun is elsewhere blah blah BLAH) who gives you no choice whether you see them or not is yours. They're yours to take, 're-arrange and re-use'."
I honestly don't see a difference except in degree (and hence in jail time I'd prefer to see resulting from actions based on each of the attitudes, roughly 15 days and 15 years, respectively.)
There's a big difference between blocking ads on my machine and spraying ads in a public space. The latter is a small-time prank of course and nothing close to a serious crime, but the philosophical basis for it cited above couldn't be more off IMO.
[+] [-] pudquick|11 years ago|reply
Not only are they publishing it, they're announcing its presence on social media, performing "search engine optimizations", and cross-promoting it on other non-web technologies (radio, tv, printed media, etc.).
... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you will look at the ads being shown here".
I also haven't agreed to such things for cable tv or radio - but guess what? I don't generally consume those media products, in large part because the formats are linear and full of "unskippable" ads.
Nothing is stopping the web from moving to this format. There are many sites out there that present an interstitial of some sort before moving onto the main content. And every time I end up on one of those sites, if my ad blocker isn't dealing with it somehow, I generally remember and avoid visiting the next time.
If you want me to pay for the web content that you're publishing because that's the business model you've decided on, be up front and attempt to get a paid agreement from me. Or deal with the fact that I'm part of the audience that doesn't look at the ads in print media, mutes or skips channels on TV, and installs ad blockers for the web.
[+] [-] matteotom|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecdbrooks|11 years ago|reply
Isn't it common knowledge that many sites rely on ads for their revenue? Sit-down restaurants in the U.S. don't tell you as you walk in that you're expected to tip, but it's common knowledge that wait staff aren't paid minimum wage because customers are expected to tip. Yet, it's generally considered rude to not tip even though it's even easier than installing an ad blocker and restaurants won't refuse you service, whereas some websites try to block ad blockers.
Edit: Added last sentence.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calbear81|11 years ago|reply
In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content and advertising is much more lucrative for the sites you patronize. Who's paying for that "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" quiz on Buzzfeed that you gleefully wasted 5 minutes of you life on? Certainly not you; it was the advertiser who paid in exchange for an opportunity to influence you in some way (either direct action or indirect branding).
When you think about the 'morality' of ad blockers, it's not about the ad networks that we're talking about, it's the publishing sites that produce the content you consume. When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that.
[+] [-] miles|11 years ago|reply
There is nothing ethically or morally wrong with an ad-blocker. It is no different than using any other technology to filter language or explicit content. No one is being harmed nor has property been destroyed or stolen (the owner was not deprived of their property).
Plain and simple: if you do not want to pay for the bandwidth and hosting charges, don't put material online. Just because you are trying to make a living does not mean anyone should partake in your business model. After all, should everyone that visits your site be required to click on one of the ads?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070422181056/http://blog.mises...
(Interestingly, in the current link to this article, http://mises.org/blog/whats-wrong-blocking-ads , the author credited is B.K. Marcus, despite there being no change in the article.)
[+] [-] SwellJoe|11 years ago|reply
I never liked advertising, but I usually liked the sites I was visiting and wanted to support them, so I didn't kill the ads. Even now, I let a small number of sites serve me ads, if they have shown themselves to be responsible and respectful of my attention. reddit is one of the very few, for example, because they almost never serve a really obnoxious ad.
And, of course, I have never heeded the alligator tears of the online marketing industry (or any other marketing industry...physical junk mail producers can rot in hell). I respect the desire of websites to support their business. But, I'm not obligated to accept the method by which they want to do it, if it includes behavior that I consider unethical or just annoying.
[+] [-] sarahj|11 years ago|reply
The author linked to a tweet which I think requires further examination "ad blocking is shoplifting for the Web".
This argument fails on several fronts, the main one is consent - by loading a website, I am not required to load any or all resources that the server presents to me - certainly in many cases e.g. text-based browsers there is no point to loading these resources - they simply cannot be displayed to the user.
An adblocker is the same, it is a consent mechanism - the server presents my browser with resources that it thinks would be worth rendering with the content, I am free to allow or not allow these resources to be loaded as I choose - and this includes offloading the decision making to other code on my machine.
I don't have a solution for the content creators, I wish I did - I regularly buy books from authors I first discover online. I would be open to micro-payments - however I am skeptical surrounding current implementations as it requires me to submit my browsing history and likes to a third party which is one of the other reasons I run an adblocker in the first place.
[+] [-] unholiness|11 years ago|reply
Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.
I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.
I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak.
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TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen.
[1] https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts
[+] [-] DodgyEggplant|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brownbat|11 years ago|reply
Who gets to decide whether something is necessary or not?
Maslow understood that humans "need" pathways to self-esteem and self-expression. An extensive collection of Marvel action figures could slip through that loophole.
Francis of Assisi lived in abject poverty, and would be a much harsher judge than Maslow, and would probably criticize either of us for bothering to own any electronic devices.
I'm neither a Franciscan nor a Maslowian, but the concept of "human needs" hardly lends itself to immediate and universal agreement.
[+] [-] edias|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billwilliams|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Animats|11 years ago|reply
The main problem with ad blockers is that they're not very good technically. They're usually regular expression based and need too much information about the exact format of ad code, so they need constant updating. Some have deliberate holes. AdBlock Plus sells "block bypassing" to "good" advertisers. Ghostery blocks tracking but then does tracking itself. (If you use Ghostery, go to its preferences and opt out of "Ghostrank".) BlockSite became adware.
There's no money in the ad blocking business. Last year, the AdBlock Plus guy was trying to make money by selling hoodies. An automatic ad blocker with machine learning to adapt to new ads would be a nice open source project. You won't make any money, but you'll get lots of publicity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
[+] [-] acheron|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|11 years ago|reply
My point is that these days, it seems like providing the same experience for most people, involves millions of dollars, thousands of dollars a month in hosting fees, forming a company and having a marketing department that buys ads on ad networks.
We can all dream of making our millions, but sometimes it's just cool to have a modern personal site and get on with life.
[+] [-] robbrown451|11 years ago|reply
Subscriptions or other kinds of paywalls are the closest to a capitalist solution, but they require artificially limiting supply. The most dramatic and poetic discussion of the evils of artificially limiting supply to increase profits would have to be chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath: http://genius.com/John-steinbeck-grapes-of-wrath-chapter-25-...
Ads produce such a tiny amount of revenue that the web ad industry is in a position of just giving up altogether, or trying to milk every penny out of the ads. And as others have noted, that's not pretty. Everything from obnoxious in-your-face-ads, to ads that don't let you leave the page, to ads that don't let you view the content for a few seconds, to video ads with audio that comes on automatically, to ads that track you all over the web.
I don't have a perfect solution, and I am not going to blame people for using ad blockers, especially if privacy and tracking are big issues for them. But I suspect that if everyone used ad blockers, a lot of web sites that we know and love would disappear. The best thing I can think of is that the big ad companies should offer a plan where you skip all ads, but pay the same amount the ad would pay to the advertiser for the privilege of viewing the page ad-free.
[+] [-] alexashka|11 years ago|reply
I am subscribed to some weekly email newsletters - they have a few ads, that make sense. I don't mind it, I like it when a product I may actually be interested in, is advertised to me.
Gruber has weekly sponsors - I don't mind, at all. I like it.
When google provides me with an amazon link when I search for a book, I am fine with that.
On and on. The only folks moaning at the ad-revenue being decimated are the ones who thought annoying their users with ads they don't want is ok. It's not ok.
[+] [-] enraged_camel|11 years ago|reply
The benefit to users is obvious. But there's also a lot of benefits to advertisers. After all, what can be better than a prospective customer saying, "I need to buy something, show me ads"? Instead we spend untold billions developing technologies and algorithms to predict people's behavior and end up invading their privacy and pissing them off.
[+] [-] borgia|11 years ago|reply
I'm sick of marketing and marketers. They bombard us 24/7 on every medium they can.
- Turn on the TV and you're not only swamped with blatant ads, but they've pushed subtle product placement into everything possible.
- Turn on the radio and you're blasted with ads.
- Go on Facebook and you're hammered with "tailored" ads, clickbait, autoplaying viral videos and more.
- Go on Twitter and every popular hashtag is flooded with people advertising unrelated products.
- Walk down the street and ads are everywhere.
- Open a "free" news site and you're bombarded with ads and ads disguised as articles. Look up a tutorial and you're presented with a slide-based site that loads up new ads every time you click, or throws extra ads in on every other slide.
It's a battle and I will never entertain a "morality" argument from those in charge of the above.
Completely "free" content online is total junk for the most part. I wouldn't pay to read Reddit, anything from the Gawker network, ReCode, etc. as they haven't content worth paying for, and I won't support their ad revenue either as it makes no difference to me whether they survive or disappear. I would have previously considered paying for some of the mainstream tech news sites but they've absolutely ruined their content in recent years in the name of getting easy clicks for ad revenue.
[+] [-] na85|11 years ago|reply
An entire industry predicated on the idea of getting me to pay for something I don't want, and using my bandwidth to do it. Every advertiser tries to justify it, too.
"We only send emails to people who want them" or other such tripe. Nobody wants to be part of a sales funnel. If the product is actually good and useful, it will sell itself by word of mouth.
[+] [-] click170|11 years ago|reply
Where 'being seen' means robbing me of my attention for a moment to try to sell me something I likely don't want, and every company and their dog is lining up around the block to be seen.
This author has nailed it: "The ad industry has spent years cultivating a 'fuck you' attitude where they would do everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them. To now suddenly be concerned about the 'morality' of what other people do is the height of hypocrisy."
When Ad companies start respecting my wishes, I'll consider respecting theirs.
[+] [-] tomjen3|11 years ago|reply
>If the product is actually good and useful, it will sell itself by word of mouth.
The cure for cancer will sell itself that way, yes. But even things that should sell, such as cheaper cellphone plans, don't.
[+] [-] punee|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzzworth|11 years ago|reply
The rant is written as though advertisers snuck into the media, as though they infiltrated, they used subterfuge to penetrate an otherwise non-commercial, innocent world of dollar-free self-expression.
The whole thing is backwards. Advertisers and the advertising industry were the parents and premise of this world, not its covert invaders. I find it sad to see folks forgetting which industry we have to thank for the very forums on which we (piously!) castigate it.
As somebody who would like to build a business himself on the back of the Internet, my feeling on the existence of so frictionless a currency as advertising is mostly gratitude.
[+] [-] meritt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cube00|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman|11 years ago|reply
Perfect advertising could read your mood tonight and suggest restaurants if your mood indicated you wanted to go out. I could know which ones are already booked solid and not present them. It would would know if wanted a quiet intimate dinner or a louder venue. It would know which friends are free and suggest asking them along.
Yes I'm scared of some of the repercussion of getting to that state and all the abuse and how it will probably never get there but it's certainly a fun thought experiment to imagine what perfect advertising might be.
[+] [-] dotdi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|11 years ago|reply
Using a Hosts File To Make The Internet Not Suck (as much) || http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
For backup blocking...
Adblock Plus - Surf the web without annoying ads! || https://adblockplus.org/
[+] [-] barsonme|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djKianoosh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crandycodes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isomorphic|11 years ago|reply
Returning to the site one day, I see the technical equivalent of a "punch the monkey" flashing banner ad. Aaand, adblocking back on, plus I now block the anti-adblock ad. And I no longer feel guilty. You had your chance and you squandered it.
Ars Technica styles itself as a site for well-informed technology-oriented people. The ads should fit the site. Insulting your audience's intelligence might work on Facebook, but these days you don't deserve to make money from advertising (on what is essentially a niche site).
[+] [-] cfeduke|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nfoz|11 years ago|reply
Not really. No-one is obligated to produce content; if a business model doesn't work, then you probably shouldn't do it.
So what business model should content producers use, if they can't use the "advertising can fund anything" hack? That's a broader conversation, and I think it's the right conversation for our society to have. Advertising is an expensive tax on our economy (and on human well-being) that doesn't need to exist.