
Advertising 'accounts for half of data used to read articles' - denzil_correa
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/16/ad-blocking-advertising-half-of-data-used-articles
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pjc50
Only half?

They haven't done the maths, but I suspect that each ad served over mobile
data earns the mobile carrier far more than the advert earns for the page that
hosts it.

Mobile carriers should be banned from charging for data involved in serving
ads .. and given the option of blocking them instead.

~~~
rsfern
Another potential solution is for the mobile carriers to charge the ad
networks for the bandwidth they use. That's more aligned with the incentives
the mobile carriers have, more fair to users, but it might be detrimental to
the earnings of the sites hosting ads....

Edit: your solution is much less technically complex, and less intrusive than
carriers inspecting traffic for billing purposes though

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MichaelGG
Ad networks already pay or peer for the network they use. There's absolutely
zero reason they should pay any more. The mobile customer is purchasing
Internet access and should get all the data they request, ads included. Though
the end-user should probably block ads themselves, this is not a place where
ISPs should get involved.

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InclinedPlane
The fact that people consider forced advertising defensible at all shows you
just how far skewed toward corporate interests the zeitgeist is in general.
Imagine if most content sites got most of their revenue from sms spam. Would
that be defensible? Would we dare to say that using tools to avoid that spam
is tantamount to theft? It's a very comparable situation. It's sad that so
many sites have hitched their fortunes to bad business models, but that's
their responsibility to fix.

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meritt
This has been standard practice for at least 100 years: Newspaper. Radio.
Television. Magazines. Internet. All have had roughly the same model of
providing free or nearly-free content in exchange for periodically injecting
the flow of that content with advertising.

If you want to accuse humanity of favoring corporate interests for the past
century and longer, that's definitely your prerogative, but please stop acting
like this is a new phenomenon.

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mirimir
It's not free content when you pay for the traffic.

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diskcat
You pay for the traffic of things like TV as well.

You pay for the machine that turns radio signal into video/audio and you pay
the opportunity cost of the radio bandwidth which is public property that is
used for transmission of TV signal.

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tremon
_You pay for the traffic of things like TV as well._

When was the last time you had a pay-per-use TV subscription?

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spriggan3
Is it just me or all these media sites are in panic mode ? the narrative a few
months ago was like "ad-blockers have no effect on ad-driven revenue". Now it
feels like something is about to collapse and everybody working in online
advertising(thus these online news media) is panicking.

~~~
pjc50
I think this is in response to malvertising; once "use an adblocker" becomes
as standard a piece of advice as "use an antivirus", the industry is doomed.
Of course, the response is to blame the users rather than attempt to take
responsibility for the quality of ads.

~~~
a_imho
>"use an adblocker" becomes as standard a piece of advice as "use an
antivirus"

I really like going overboard with ads making it swinging that way. When
content blocking users were a very small minority, it was very easy to brand
them akin to pirates doing something shady. Sure, we will have sponsored
content or whatever form ads come next, but I see people are more concerned
about their privacy as ever before, which I feel is a good thing.

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alrs
Turn on US network television one night, and watch a three-camera sitcom. Note
the production value of the show against the production value of the ads.

You can see that the commercials, per second, cost orders of magnitude more to
make.

"Content" == "Bait". The amount of data used by the advertisers will continue
to rise.

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reitzensteinm
Orders of magnitude more to make? So a 20 second commercial costs more to
produce than a 30 minute sitcom?

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jbmorgado
Per second probably yes.

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reitzensteinm
Not per second - I think you misread my post.

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chflags
Do you think there could be any bias when the newspapers, or for-profit search
engine projects, who rely on selling advertising "space" as their "business",
report on the practice of filtering out advertising? Not me. These folks
epitomize the highest standards of integrity.

If www search engines and "journalists" are being paid primarily by
advertisers, and not readers, then we have the best system for "news" that has
ever been created. And we can be proud of their achievement, and how they are
using the latest communications technology and the public resource of internet
bandwidth for its highest and best purpose. Everyone in the ad sales industry
should pat each other on the back. You have provided readers with so much
greatness. You have earned your success.

As readers, we should be thankful for these heros for making the internet and
mobile carrier networks work so smoothly and keeping us so well informed, at
such low cost to readers. Everbody wins. Brilliant.

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codeulike
With paper newspapers, if you look at the space given to adverts you'd
probably get a similar if not worse ratio.

~~~
huskyr
Yeah, but they don't take over the whole page when you hover over them, send
all your personal details to a third party and make everything slow.

