Main reason I published on AMO is because a feature which I think is important was removed from uBlock (per-site switches). That both versions diverged significantly enough so soon is not in my control.
When ABP added "acceptable ads" in their fork, they also created a demand for a version uncompromised by the "acceptable ads" principle, hence ABE happened. When uBlock removed the
per-site switches, a demand was created for a version of uBlock with the per-site switches.
This is the reality of GPL: anybody can fork and create their own flavor if they disagree with the pre-fork version. This should not be seen as wrong when it happens, it's expected. In the big picture, users win.
As far as trust is concerned, both versions can be trusted -- that should not be an issue in either case: the development and source code is public in both cases (every single code change can be easily browsed on github).
Edit: Notice that I still contribute fixes to uBlock since the fork, and also try to deal with filed issues (those issues which are relevant to both versions), so it's not like I am ignoring uBlock to the advantage of uBlock Origin -- I also want uBlock to work fine for whoever uses it, I just strongly disagree with the removal of the per-site switches feature.
> When ABP added "acceptable ads" in their fork, they also created a demand for a version uncompromised by the "acceptable ads" principle, hence ABE happened.
I wish they'll go one step further and add the "Please remove us from your adblock" notices to default blocking list
"Edit (2015-06-15): Somewhere toward the end of May, I decided I will not contribute code anymore to https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock anymore. See top of README."
Is there a good ad blocker that can be set to NOT block by default, and that provides an easy, one button or so, interface to turn blocking on for the site currently being viewed? I want to operate under a policy of giving new sites I visit a chance to show me that they can advertise responsibly and blacklist them if they show that the cannot.
All the ones I've tried so far (AB, ABP, uBlock) are strongly oriented toward blocking everywhere by default and whitelisting sites that you do not want to block on.
I suspect that most people who use an ad blocker do so not because of some moral objection to the very concept of advertising to pay the bills so that a site can provide free content to the general public. They use an ad blocker because they got tired of sites whose ads do obnoxious things like block the content, move the content around [1], make noise, put distracting animation in your peripheral vision, and so on.
By blocking all ads by default, the current ad blockers break the feedback loop that should be pushing sites toward ads that don't have the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph.
[1] moving the content around is what got me to install an ad blocker. Gocomics.com started doing ads that slide in from the left side, pushing the comic you are reading to the right. If you have zoomed in to make the comic more readable, this could push the right panel of the comic off the screen. Since the slide in ads did not run on every page (and when they did run, it was with a delay of a few seconds), you could not anticipate them and position the zoomed comic appropriately.
This is how I use uBlock, by disabling all the built-in filter selections and blocking ad providers when I notice them doing something shady/annoying, or going down in a way that hangs site loads.
Spoiler alert: you wind up blocking all ads anyway. There aren't any ad networks that have anything approaching the standards and practices of late night cable. If you don't believe me please run this experiment yourself.
Honest question - what business model for free content do you see other than ads? I understand all the privacy and distraction issues related, but increasingly many news sites I read feature only paid content. I suppose it's connected to the rise of ad blocking.
At the moment I'm not hosting any content of such kind myself, but I wanted to publish a game and I'm facing the same question. Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids, or host ads and risk not earning a dime because every single gamer I know is tech savvy enough to have an ad blocker?
The whole point of a business is to come up with a plan to get people to give it money for a service. If your entire business plan is to get someone else to give you money because people completely unrelated to and uninterested in it happen to be using your service, it's not really a good plan.
I'm ecstatic about the seemingly new increase in paid-for content. If it means the long dark era of scatter-shot shotgun creation of incredibly lousy and shallow information in mass quantities only to garner advertising payments comes to an end (or even decreases slightly), I think the web and software in general will be a better place.
Good grief, we had an Internet full of fantastic content before the ads showed up. Universities, libraries, Governments and NGOs, donation- and government-funded organizations like many news/media agencies, stores/businesses, and just real people -- amateur and professional.
Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Stands and we work on a product that addresses this issue specifically
From a wider perspective - I believe that the ideal is a fair ad based model which funds a free web and promotes equality and democracy, but it needs to put us - the citizens of the web - on an equal playing field in the ad/data business, and respect us (our privacy and experience).
We wrote a post about it here: http://blog.standsapp.org/how-to-fund-a-free-web/
In short:
- It blocks obtrusive ads
- Protects your privacy by blocking tracking companies
- Shows only standard banner ads and the revenue from these ads split between the site and the charity you choose
- Provides you with the ability to control your online experience by limiting the amount of ads and other capabilities
- Ads load after content loads
We're working on a product publishers can use to convert ad block users to Stands, let me know if and when you are interested to work with us on the beta.
If you only see a choice between "Free to Play" or hosting Ads then you have a problem greater than choosing your business model. You don't value your work enough to consider it valuable enough to pay for outright. First, ponder why that is, then address that issue.
I've preached this for years, and its my ongoing pet project, but patronage really is the endgame for information content.
Pretty much any freelance animator online is already using patreon. Writers, artists, and comedians are using it. I'm surprised its taken this long for news companies to start trying it.
Fundamentally, the information created is not scarce. It is knowledge. It deserves to be free. But the work to create the information is scarce. Valuable. Some might even say worthy of compensation.
There are so many ways you can present patronage to your audience. Hell, advertising honestly is a kind of patronage - your viewership translates into third parties valuing your work enough to pay you for it, so their ads can go along for the ride. But on the other extreme, you could be a writer or animator or comic artist who says "next episode costs $XXXX, when I get that much money I'll produce it / release it". And there is an entire range of other options in between those two, and its really stifling how content creators are still so limited in their options.
Donations. You can also do freemium without doing evil stuff: it doesn't optimize your income, of course, but it's better than nothing?
I also don't really think it's that important to have free content. I'm happy to pay for entertainment, and for other stuff most content isn't really produced with income in mind - stuff like blog posts etc don't have to make money, people will write them anyway
I run a free website and every year I do a one week fund raising for the costs. I don't have customers but a more or less dedicated community (some people are around for years, others come and go). The community always exceeds the amount I ask for.
I believe short term sponsoring should be worked on. Your game needs a good mouse and Logitech wants to increase its presence on the gamer market? You feature an ad from them.
The way ads are served usually today is so terrible that it encourages the use of ad blockers. Get the control back on them. Integrate them in your contents - on your terms and transparently - and the Web will probably be better for everyone.
The problem is that it's a lot of work and you have better things to do. I've heard of proxy companies that to do the boring stuff (hunting announcers, contract negotiation, etc.) for YT streamers.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9716430, particularly Freditup, the_af & my comment discussing Emily Greer's rationale that players "pay-to-win" with large sums in physical sports games.
In terms of business models for free content: I'm a big fan of Patreon, and I use it to actively pay for a half-dozen sites and authors I enjoy. There are many more sites and authors I'd pay if they offered the option.
On the other hand, consider actually charging for your game. Or, alternatively, give the game away but charge a nominal amount for access to multiplayer servers, since that's a significant source of your costs.
How much do you think you'll make from ads? Chances are, much, much less than you expect. There are exceptions (e.g. plentyoffish.com), but people I know who run popular niche sites (in the low millions of page views per month, a few tens-of-thousands unique) are happy when they manage to make $1,000/month from ads.
I think we're ripe for some new business models becoming mainstream.
As I see it, ads just suck. I don't just mean suck as in "I just don't like them"; they're also just terrible at accomplishing what they want to accomplish, and they're getting more terrible, and because of this there's getting to be more and more of them everywhere. I get the impression (just an impression) that society is sort of 'wising up to' ads. (Admittedly, this may be because I've grown up and have personally wised up.) I personally have not clicked on an online ad in .. it's got to be at least a few years.. and I long for a day when everyone has wised up to the point where the model falls apart. (but I'm aware that ads can affect you by other means than having you click on them, such as by planting ideas in your head or making you gradually accustomed to company or product names.)
My big complaint is simply that I just hate having every second of my day filled with people trying to sell me crap! And more than anything, I hate when content is also an ad, or disguised as ads. I loathe product placements in movies and 'sponsored by' sections that play the company's commercials. I especially loathe when huge boardroom corporations task a bunch of advertisers to come up with an ads that will appeal to an 18-25 audience, and they crack their heads together and come up with a cute, ukelele-filled, animated skit that (literally) begs you to hashtag it. I want people to stop taking culture and trying to figure out how to manipulate it to sell their crap.
Like, it seems obvious that the fact that, in order to watch a TV show, you have to spend a quarter of your time watching (or ignoring, or muting and browsing the internet during) ads, is a completely terrible user experience! Imagine if every fourth page of a novel was an ad. Or if a fourth of popular websites were ads - oh wait, they are.
It's all monstrously unpleasant. I sometimes torrent movies and TV not because I couldn't pay for them, but because even if I use the right channels, the experience is awful (among other reasons). It's crazy to me that there's not yet an option to just pay more to disable all ads on TV. I guess it was technically infeasible for a long time, but, still.
Netflix is an example of someone figuring out how to take ad-supported things and turn them into a new model. That's a good thing. (Though I suspect a huge portion of their profits comes from it being so easy to ignore their bill because you sign up once and never get notifications about it?)
Ultimately I'd like to just pay for what I consume. I like Netflix because I give them money and I get service. I give Spotify money and I get service. I wouldn't mind a service that (via browser extension or something) allowed me to specify donations per month to various sites on the Internet that I visit - so I insert 100$ a month and it gets divvied up, and in exchange I have no ads. (With the caveat that if a site shows ads anyway, or tries to bait me into reading it, or is bullshit in some other way, I can revoke their piece of my payment..).
For creative work I think patronage is an underrated business model, largely because there's a high barrier to actually giving money to something. I'd love to just be able to say, I have 50$ a month for bloggers whose blogs I read - I don't want to push to "donate via paypal" button on every site; I just want it to get sent out by virtue of my being there and liking it. [Note: what doesn't work is paying proportionally to time spent on a website. That's how you get mindless Buzzfeed clickbait everywhere. Gotta figure out something else.] Twitch figured out how to get its users to actual donate money with minimal friction and that seems to be working well for them (though they're hosting a lot more ads lately, which is very tedious).
I'd also love to see a return of the renaissance style patronage of "rich people funding artists". Seems like funding happens mostly through grants and scholarships these days, instead of people just funding specific people who can do things they want to see in the world.
For your game, if it's multiplayer, the "cosmetics cost real money' model seems to work pretty well, and avoids you being resented requiring money just to access the whole game. As does just having the game cost money up front, but, that tends to lower demand. If you want to add content to the game after it's released, I think "expansions" are treated much more favorably by the public than "DLC" is: we feel cheated when we pay half as much as the game itself and get a single, probably crappy level. It's a lot nicer to get a large chunk of content with new mechanics and new stories that isn't just a tacked-in moneymaker level like a lot of games are doing.
I hoped a flattr-like solution would work, but it would need to be more automatic.
How much is all the longform article content you consume in a month worth to you? $5/mo? 20? 100? Take that, and split it up between all the sites you read news from. Multiply by 100k readers, boom! viable business model. Now the question is how you split it up. It needs to be thoughtless and as fine-grained as possible: maybe number of articles read or minutes spent reading.
This keeps the open internet: sites still compete on merit not on the inertia of subscription since the money follows the user's reading habits closely.
Set up code on your site that detects that I'm using adblocker(s) and I won't visit your site.
It really is that simple. Either you bite the bullet and accept that some of us don't want random 3rd party code running on our browsers or you gate us away. We won't hold it against you.
I would prefer to have option in uBlock that notified me if I was about to enter a site that didn't want me viewing their content if I had adblock enabled, so I could avoid those sites.
As for games free with buyable skins seems to be working well with many games.
Speaking for myself, I tend to purchase games. I avoid in-game purchases like the plague. I might download an ad supported game if the ads stay out of the way. If I continue to play an ad supported game and there's an ad-free, payed for version, then I'll upgrade.
The vast majority of games on either platform won't make enough money to matter either way at this point due to oversaturation. There's still a small chance for a moonshot with the right game and the right marketing and some luck.
>Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids,
You can do freemium without selling your soul. Look at LoL or Path of Exile for the best examples. Others would be Bloons TD 5 or Bloons City, where coins allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added. Only when you add something that basically drains the fun out of the game unless money is spent are you selling your soul.
Fairness is irrelevant - we take what we can as long as we can rationalize it.(surprisingly easy to do). Look at all the comments under you blaming you for not wanting to publish content without compensation.
Do what you must to be successful, because few will pay for things they don't have to pay for.
You should all check out umatrix if you have 15 minutes to spare.
Made by the same guy, it's adblocking and noscript done exactly how you want it done. Block pulled-in third-party sites by default, accept all on the primary domain you're looking at, and especially block from domains on a blacklist.
It breaks on a few sites, but it's not in my way as much as noscript and it's a 5 second job to get most any website to work. If you don't know how the web works, you'll be frustrated. If you understand how the modern web works, you'll wonder how you ever did without.
I've tried uBlock a few times, but it's always been inferior to Ghostery. I want to choose what I block on each page, e.g. sometimes I want to load Disqus, sometimes I don't, etc. uBlock doesn't allow me to do any of that, does anyone know a lighter alternative to Ghostery that will still have sane lists and allow me to unblock elements on a per-page basis?
Policeman was the closest thing —that I know of— to uMatrix for Firefox users, but —at least for me— Firefox is always complaining that Policeman is slowing down the browser. And also, it's nice that you can easily import your Chrome uMatrix rules to Firefox.
If people who made ad blockers were ethical, they would make their software easily detectable by the websites, so those websites could choose not to service those users.
The eff released their own ad blocker type tool available here https://www.eff.org/privacybadger and it's great. It doesn't come with a singular list of sites to block, but instead blocks domains that are seen across many domains.
I've seen comments on reddit saying that often legitimate "Pay Now" buttons etc. are blocked by this add-on. Can anyone with recent experience weigh in? I don't really feel like switching from ABP which I'm perfectly happy with unless this is 99% kink-free.
The add-on shouldn't block anything on its own, so if there's a problem it's probably on some filter list that the user enabled. There's a pretty good way to debug these situations though, the network request log ( https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/The-logger ). It will let you see the history of requests for a given page, and one of the colums in the log lets you fine tune what uBlock should do for that particular request - so, if you see that something that you don't want to be blocked is filtered out, you can reverse that and reload the page.
EDIT: in the latest release (0.9.9.0 at the time of this writing) the request log will also tell you which list provides the rule that blocks a particular request, it's pretty handy to debug this kind of issue.
All the major ad blocking extensions work by applying various filter lists, all separately maintained.
They may choose to enable different lists by default (uBlock turns on more than ABP for sure), but they can be configured in a few seconds to do the same thing.
This extension is so much more efficient than ABP or any similar extension that it's a no brainer, and I've had zero problems with it when bearing the above in mind.
1/3 the total ram usage on both FF and Chrome, it makes it possible to use Chrome on a PC with <16GB of ram again.
Another option for Firefox is the built-in "tracking protection". It is off by default, but can be enabled via about:config (set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true). Works on Android, too.
[+] [-] decasteve|10 years ago|reply
Main reason I published on AMO is because a feature which I think is important was removed from uBlock (per-site switches). That both versions diverged significantly enough so soon is not in my control.
When ABP added "acceptable ads" in their fork, they also created a demand for a version uncompromised by the "acceptable ads" principle, hence ABE happened. When uBlock removed the per-site switches, a demand was created for a version of uBlock with the per-site switches.
This is the reality of GPL: anybody can fork and create their own flavor if they disagree with the pre-fork version. This should not be seen as wrong when it happens, it's expected. In the big picture, users win.
As far as trust is concerned, both versions can be trusted -- that should not be an issue in either case: the development and source code is public in both cases (every single code change can be easily browsed on github).
Edit: Notice that I still contribute fixes to uBlock since the fork, and also try to deal with filed issues (those issues which are relevant to both versions), so it's not like I am ignoring uBlock to the advantage of uBlock Origin -- I also want uBlock to work fine for whoever uses it, I just strongly disagree with the removal of the per-site switches feature.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/38#issuecomment-966...
[+] [-] currysausage|10 years ago|reply
Fun fact: ABE is now discontinued "in favor of uBlock" because the latter is just so much more efficient. [1]
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/
[+] [-] lentil_soup|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pen2l|10 years ago|reply
I wish they'll go one step further and add the "Please remove us from your adblock" notices to default blocking list
[+] [-] karlzt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|10 years ago|reply
All the ones I've tried so far (AB, ABP, uBlock) are strongly oriented toward blocking everywhere by default and whitelisting sites that you do not want to block on.
I suspect that most people who use an ad blocker do so not because of some moral objection to the very concept of advertising to pay the bills so that a site can provide free content to the general public. They use an ad blocker because they got tired of sites whose ads do obnoxious things like block the content, move the content around [1], make noise, put distracting animation in your peripheral vision, and so on.
By blocking all ads by default, the current ad blockers break the feedback loop that should be pushing sites toward ads that don't have the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph.
[1] moving the content around is what got me to install an ad blocker. Gocomics.com started doing ads that slide in from the left side, pushing the comic you are reading to the right. If you have zoomed in to make the comic more readable, this could push the right panel of the comic off the screen. Since the slide in ads did not run on every page (and when they did run, it was with a delay of a few seconds), you could not anticipate them and position the zoomed comic appropriately.
[+] [-] bcoates|10 years ago|reply
Spoiler alert: you wind up blocking all ads anyway. There aren't any ad networks that have anything approaching the standards and practices of late night cable. If you don't believe me please run this experiment yourself.
[+] [-] erikcw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Menerve|10 years ago|reply
It's not as easy as AdBlock but that's not too complicated when you understand how it works.
It seems that they changed the ordering of columns in the last versions (the global column is the second, not the first).
[+] [-] guelo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fridek|10 years ago|reply
At the moment I'm not hosting any content of such kind myself, but I wanted to publish a game and I'm facing the same question. Should I sell my soul to the devil and work on freemium, coins, exploit OCD and rich-parents kids, or host ads and risk not earning a dime because every single gamer I know is tech savvy enough to have an ad blocker?
[+] [-] arbitrage|10 years ago|reply
I'm ecstatic about the seemingly new increase in paid-for content. If it means the long dark era of scatter-shot shotgun creation of incredibly lousy and shallow information in mass quantities only to garner advertising payments comes to an end (or even decreases slightly), I think the web and software in general will be a better place.
[+] [-] nfoz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lahata|10 years ago|reply
From a wider perspective - I believe that the ideal is a fair ad based model which funds a free web and promotes equality and democracy, but it needs to put us - the citizens of the web - on an equal playing field in the ad/data business, and respect us (our privacy and experience). We wrote a post about it here: http://blog.standsapp.org/how-to-fund-a-free-web/
In short: - It blocks obtrusive ads - Protects your privacy by blocking tracking companies - Shows only standard banner ads and the revenue from these ads split between the site and the charity you choose - Provides you with the ability to control your online experience by limiting the amount of ads and other capabilities - Ads load after content loads
We're working on a product publishers can use to convert ad block users to Stands, let me know if and when you are interested to work with us on the beta.
[+] [-] bobajeff|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|10 years ago|reply
Pretty much any freelance animator online is already using patreon. Writers, artists, and comedians are using it. I'm surprised its taken this long for news companies to start trying it.
Fundamentally, the information created is not scarce. It is knowledge. It deserves to be free. But the work to create the information is scarce. Valuable. Some might even say worthy of compensation.
There are so many ways you can present patronage to your audience. Hell, advertising honestly is a kind of patronage - your viewership translates into third parties valuing your work enough to pay you for it, so their ads can go along for the ride. But on the other extreme, you could be a writer or animator or comic artist who says "next episode costs $XXXX, when I get that much money I'll produce it / release it". And there is an entire range of other options in between those two, and its really stifling how content creators are still so limited in their options.
[+] [-] Anderkent|10 years ago|reply
I also don't really think it's that important to have free content. I'm happy to pay for entertainment, and for other stuff most content isn't really produced with income in mind - stuff like blog posts etc don't have to make money, people will write them anyway
[+] [-] anc84|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yAnonymous|10 years ago|reply
Premium user systems that offer full HD videos and other extra content to paying users seem to work well enough if the content is good.
[+] [-] astrobe_|10 years ago|reply
The way ads are served usually today is so terrible that it encourages the use of ad blockers. Get the control back on them. Integrate them in your contents - on your terms and transparently - and the Web will probably be better for everyone.
The problem is that it's a lot of work and you have better things to do. I've heard of proxy companies that to do the boring stuff (hunting announcers, contract negotiation, etc.) for YT streamers.
[+] [-] hellbanner|10 years ago|reply
Also, https://badgeville.com/wiki/Game_Mechanics for a list of "engagement mechanics"
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, consider actually charging for your game. Or, alternatively, give the game away but charge a nominal amount for access to multiplayer servers, since that's a significant source of your costs.
[+] [-] beagle3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajkjk|10 years ago|reply
As I see it, ads just suck. I don't just mean suck as in "I just don't like them"; they're also just terrible at accomplishing what they want to accomplish, and they're getting more terrible, and because of this there's getting to be more and more of them everywhere. I get the impression (just an impression) that society is sort of 'wising up to' ads. (Admittedly, this may be because I've grown up and have personally wised up.) I personally have not clicked on an online ad in .. it's got to be at least a few years.. and I long for a day when everyone has wised up to the point where the model falls apart. (but I'm aware that ads can affect you by other means than having you click on them, such as by planting ideas in your head or making you gradually accustomed to company or product names.)
My big complaint is simply that I just hate having every second of my day filled with people trying to sell me crap! And more than anything, I hate when content is also an ad, or disguised as ads. I loathe product placements in movies and 'sponsored by' sections that play the company's commercials. I especially loathe when huge boardroom corporations task a bunch of advertisers to come up with an ads that will appeal to an 18-25 audience, and they crack their heads together and come up with a cute, ukelele-filled, animated skit that (literally) begs you to hashtag it. I want people to stop taking culture and trying to figure out how to manipulate it to sell their crap.
Like, it seems obvious that the fact that, in order to watch a TV show, you have to spend a quarter of your time watching (or ignoring, or muting and browsing the internet during) ads, is a completely terrible user experience! Imagine if every fourth page of a novel was an ad. Or if a fourth of popular websites were ads - oh wait, they are.
It's all monstrously unpleasant. I sometimes torrent movies and TV not because I couldn't pay for them, but because even if I use the right channels, the experience is awful (among other reasons). It's crazy to me that there's not yet an option to just pay more to disable all ads on TV. I guess it was technically infeasible for a long time, but, still.
Netflix is an example of someone figuring out how to take ad-supported things and turn them into a new model. That's a good thing. (Though I suspect a huge portion of their profits comes from it being so easy to ignore their bill because you sign up once and never get notifications about it?)
Ultimately I'd like to just pay for what I consume. I like Netflix because I give them money and I get service. I give Spotify money and I get service. I wouldn't mind a service that (via browser extension or something) allowed me to specify donations per month to various sites on the Internet that I visit - so I insert 100$ a month and it gets divvied up, and in exchange I have no ads. (With the caveat that if a site shows ads anyway, or tries to bait me into reading it, or is bullshit in some other way, I can revoke their piece of my payment..).
For creative work I think patronage is an underrated business model, largely because there's a high barrier to actually giving money to something. I'd love to just be able to say, I have 50$ a month for bloggers whose blogs I read - I don't want to push to "donate via paypal" button on every site; I just want it to get sent out by virtue of my being there and liking it. [Note: what doesn't work is paying proportionally to time spent on a website. That's how you get mindless Buzzfeed clickbait everywhere. Gotta figure out something else.] Twitch figured out how to get its users to actual donate money with minimal friction and that seems to be working well for them (though they're hosting a lot more ads lately, which is very tedious).
I'd also love to see a return of the renaissance style patronage of "rich people funding artists". Seems like funding happens mostly through grants and scholarships these days, instead of people just funding specific people who can do things they want to see in the world.
For your game, if it's multiplayer, the "cosmetics cost real money' model seems to work pretty well, and avoids you being resented requiring money just to access the whole game. As does just having the game cost money up front, but, that tends to lower demand. If you want to add content to the game after it's released, I think "expansions" are treated much more favorably by the public than "DLC" is: we feel cheated when we pay half as much as the game itself and get a single, probably crappy level. It's a lot nicer to get a large chunk of content with new mechanics and new stories that isn't just a tacked-in moneymaker level like a lot of games are doing.
[+] [-] infogulch|10 years ago|reply
How much is all the longform article content you consume in a month worth to you? $5/mo? 20? 100? Take that, and split it up between all the sites you read news from. Multiply by 100k readers, boom! viable business model. Now the question is how you split it up. It needs to be thoughtless and as fine-grained as possible: maybe number of articles read or minutes spent reading.
This keeps the open internet: sites still compete on merit not on the inertia of subscription since the money follows the user's reading habits closely.
[+] [-] 746F7475|10 years ago|reply
It really is that simple. Either you bite the bullet and accept that some of us don't want random 3rd party code running on our browsers or you gate us away. We won't hold it against you.
I would prefer to have option in uBlock that notified me if I was about to enter a site that didn't want me viewing their content if I had adblock enabled, so I could avoid those sites.
As for games free with buyable skins seems to be working well with many games.
[+] [-] marrs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
You can do freemium without selling your soul. Look at LoL or Path of Exile for the best examples. Others would be Bloons TD 5 or Bloons City, where coins allow you to skip ahead, but slow downs are not purposefully added. Only when you add something that basically drains the fun out of the game unless money is spent are you selling your soul.
[+] [-] navait|10 years ago|reply
Do what you must to be successful, because few will pay for things they don't have to pay for.
[+] [-] nickysielicki|10 years ago|reply
Made by the same guy, it's adblocking and noscript done exactly how you want it done. Block pulled-in third-party sites by default, accept all on the primary domain you're looking at, and especially block from domains on a blacklist.
It breaks on a few sites, but it's not in my way as much as noscript and it's a 5 second job to get most any website to work. If you don't know how the web works, you'll be frustrated. If you understand how the modern web works, you'll wonder how you ever did without.
[+] [-] mrmondo|10 years ago|reply
https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock/releases
[+] [-] StavrosK|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kurtz79|10 years ago|reply
It would be helpful if the submitter also wrote a comment about the reasons of the submission, when they are not immediately apparent.
[+] [-] skrowl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gluegadget|10 years ago|reply
Policeman was the closest thing —that I know of— to uMatrix for Firefox users, but —at least for me— Firefox is always complaining that Policeman is slowing down the browser. And also, it's nice that you can easily import your Chrome uMatrix rules to Firefox.
[+] [-] jedberg|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fapjacks|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] of|10 years ago|reply
> Due to Mozilla's review process, the version of uBlock available from the Add-ons homepage is currently often outdated. This isn't in our control.
[+] [-] snissn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamcreasy|10 years ago|reply
How do I let the extension know that some adds are part of the page?
[+] [-] hnama|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kissickas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mziulu|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: in the latest release (0.9.9.0 at the time of this writing) the request log will also tell you which list provides the rule that blocks a particular request, it's pretty handy to debug this kind of issue.
[+] [-] wooger|10 years ago|reply
They may choose to enable different lists by default (uBlock turns on more than ABP for sure), but they can be configured in a few seconds to do the same thing.
This extension is so much more efficient than ABP or any similar extension that it's a no brainer, and I've had zero problems with it when bearing the above in mind.
1/3 the total ram usage on both FF and Chrome, it makes it possible to use Chrome on a PC with <16GB of ram again.
[+] [-] abrowne|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaFranker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kiro|10 years ago|reply