
The Ad Blocking Wars - msoad
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/the-ad-blocking-wars.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur
======
colmvp
Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a
benign, acceptable practice.

Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can
manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So
to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal
usage of ad-supported apps).

Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free
magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's
good enough for me.

~~~
seanwilson
> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can
> manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it.
> So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock,
> minimal usage of ad-supported apps).

How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for
over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar
to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.

I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see
how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I
usually do a lot of research first.

I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny
amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.

~~~
tracker1
Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10...
but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a
little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

~~~
abrookewood
Well, my kids simply don't watch commercial TV. Everything used to be DVD
based and now its all streamed, so they never see ads. I remember the first
time they actually saw and advertisement - my son screamed! "Where did my show
go??" "It's OK .. it's just an ad". A few seconds of silence passed and then
he asked:"What's an ad?"

~~~
Mimu
Your kids and yourself see ads all the time, just not on TV. There is no way
to avoid ads, all ads are not evil either. Even if we talk only on TV, there
are probably plenty in the shows / movies you watch.

~~~
logfromblammo
Sometimes they _are_ the shows you watch--as in, you may be watching a large
advertisement with several smaller advertisements inserted into it.

Example: the Disneyland 60th Anniversary TV Special. Disney/ABC is
particularly fond of advertising cross-medium Disney properties/investments on
Disney-controlled television and radio broadcasts. For instance, Radio Disney
definitely plays a disproportionately high number of DMG (Walt Disney Records
+ Hollywood Records/DMG Nashville) recordings.

My spouse was watching it. I saw 30 seconds of it and said, "this is a long
format ad for Disney parks," before tuning it out.

The long-format ads are rather common on the local news broadcasts. Some
stations show more than others.

------
gyardley
Online advertising is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons, where
that commons is the general public's attention. Any individual publisher or
advertiser can do a little bit better by surpassing what the general public
finds acceptable, but when enough of them do this some of the general public
resorts to ad blockers - causing overall ad revenues to decline, which causes
more publishers and advertisers to push the boundaries in search of higher
revenue, which causes more people to install ad blockers...

No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is
well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's
still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything
involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.

~~~
officialchicken
At the end of the day, we all agree that shining shit is their job.

Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive
ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too
much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to
correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined
to try.

~~~
wlesieutre
Let's add a third: security. You can't let a 3rd party advertiser send
arbitrary web content to your customers, and then just wash your hands of it
and say "It wasn't us, it was the ad network" when it eventually gets used to
deliver malware to your customers.

It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops,
looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault
though. It was a subcontractor."

------
kazinator
Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so
called valuable content.

Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.

One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page
in the first place.

I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the
search engine indexer.

The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ...
and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking
for.

Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue.

But every visitor wishes for that outcome.

If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would
gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only
half the garbage.

~~~
matt4077
By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all...

I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny
that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something
valuable.

~~~
pixl97
>By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all...

That's a strange leap of logic.

>Wikipedia

Asks for donations, it doesn't show ads.

There are many other websites that are internally funded in other ways that
exclude direct ads.

~~~
deelowe
And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three
options morally:

1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay
for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available

I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking
service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a
huge percentage of our salaries is paid for by these ad systems.

~~~
pixl97
I work in tech and I am not supported by ads. If you are in tech and are
supported by ads, find a different line of work in tech.

If you work in tech the first thing you should do is take the moral argument
and throw it out the window. Moral systems of obligation do not work well on
the net. You run into one of two conditions quickly. The first is immoral
operators/providers will push moral operators out of business (free services
where you are spied on by unknown agents, but the spies pay for your usage,
such as free email has been for years). Or, immoral users sharing other
people's work for free. Some of them want to share everything freely. Other
just want to share work that is difficult to find legally. Paid services don't
work well because they quickly become fragmented leaving the user to buy
Youtube Red, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc because each content producer wants to
maximize their profits. Digital piracy succeeded because of its utility. There
is low to no cost to the end user and the end product had more utility than
the paid product. Pirated movies didn't have ads. They could be played on more
players. They didn't have country content restrictions. DRM didn't randomly
fail. They by definition are a product of a free market competing with other
piracy groups.

Of course Hollywood has a huge amount of power and has the FBI as their lapdog
to prevent their product from being infringed. The ad industry does not. You
will see more of a push for them to push ad blocking as a type of legal
infringement.

~~~
kasey_junk
If you don't mind my asking, what industry are you in? It is very hard in the
modern economy to find things not supported or at least augmented by
advertising (or at least marketing).

I'm a touch reminded of the Lloyd Dobbler buy/sell/process monologue from "Say
Anything".

Full disclosure I we work in ads...

------
spodek
Why should others control my monitor?

If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their
prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business
model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other
entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market.

Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to
support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their
business plan on others.

~~~
timonovici
Things started to go downhill, and they consider themselves too big to die,
too important for the current infrastructure. Any business will have this
inertia - gripping their shaky hands on the past, and showing the fangs at the
present and the grim future - it's like the will to survive of animals.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Time for advertising go (mostly) go away.

\- 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button"
ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing
malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads.

\- Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when
honest businesses purchase adwords.

\- Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading.

\- Video ads that start playing automatically.

\- The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the
Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and
javascripts loading on TechCrunch.

\- Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar
ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar
ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it.

\- Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a
$1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer.

Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly
what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of
good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's
life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7
computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's
been storming for a while. Let it rain.

------
hodgesrm
Most people probably would not install add blockers except that ad volume and
lack of quality have reached the point where they make it difficult to browse
the web. Installing an ad blocker is a necessary act of self defense.

In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular
websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X.
www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers
are legion.

At some point enough is enough.

------
joesmo
I don't see this as an issue. I've been blocking ads on the web for over a
dozen years and now somehow it's an issue? No, it's not. The publishers who
can't make it in a world where people increasingly use ad blockers won't and
the ones who figure out how to make it will. Economics 101. I've been waiting
for this play to start for awhile--it's amusing--but I'm not really interested
in reading about idiots who see this as a moral issue. The advertising
industry has had a good dozen years to reign unchecked. They've gotten used to
having nice things that shouldn't have been theirs. Now, either adapt or die.
Truthfully, no one outside of the advertising industry cares either one way or
another.

It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of
live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that
choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or
simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many
worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till
the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the
roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and
thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're
in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves
with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open
web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to
start ...

~~~
caoilte
You can't afford to be too complacent because ad agencies know this too and
will come at you sideways - 2nd hand advertising is going to become a
recognised thing. Advertisers reaching you and me through celebrities we
respect, through hijacking friends or just through corrupting children.

~~~
byuu
Not to mention embedded advertising.

Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?"

Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple,
Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple.
Apple."

Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction;
Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly
Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer"

Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged
the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials'
advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell
long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was
greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)"

This is not a war I want to keep escalating.

~~~
melted
Funny thing is, Apple doesn't pay a dime for product placement.

~~~
majewsky
Source? ;)

~~~
byuu
Apple's just that kind of company. For some reason, they don't seem to need to
advertise their products. Not sure why that is ...

 _Sent from my iPhone_

------
newman314
There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers
had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little
sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it.

So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to
feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully
improve as a result of these events.

~~~
mschuster91
> the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a
> result of these events.

Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws
for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining
and analyzing the data for them.

Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary
to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.

~~~
13thLetter
Yup. And the people complaining about it will then obediently re-elect the
politicians who give in to those groups. Nothing will change.

------
anotherevan
“It’s the worst players in the web publishing world that’s driving this.”

You mean it's only the 95% that is making the rest of you look bad?

------
aikah
As a musician, I remember 10/15 years ago what online medias told my kind
"Adapt, go sell t-shirts". The irony.

~~~
Kalium
As someone who has been involved in media production and online publishing,
I'm wholly on board with "Adapt or die" here too.

------
Geekette
Ah, the ad war wages on. I say no to ads because they exist in opposition to
visually clean pages, no tracking, no malware.

As a lot of online content falls under entertainment, if it came down to it,
I'd be happy to unclutter my mind/reduce procrastination by restricting my
browsing to non-essential content, rather than eat ads.

Seems part of why the frenzy is heating up is that many media sites merely
regurtitate news and do not produce any unique content, but are ad and tracker
heavy. So, they stand to lose, even in better-case scenarios where some people
are willing to pay for content they value.

------
proactivesvcs
I think it's far past time to stop calling this "ad blocking". It's computer
security. When a site like MSN continues using an advertising organisation
that has _already infected its readers_ , and get stung again by the same
organisation, we should start using the correct language. It's not just a
choice a person makes to keep their web browsing distraction-free: it is a
necessary security precaution.

What used to be "ad blocking" is now part of an anti-virus solution.

------
hellbanTHIS
I don't know why they don't just show what's on sale near me geographically.
You know, two for one Kraft mac and cheese up at Publix. You'd never know that
I might buy mac and cheese by data mining me, I don't even really like mac and
cheese, but shit man two for one!

The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer
programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads showed me
that toilet paper was on sale somewhere nearby, that's something I might
whitelist.

~~~
kbart
Yes! Now I have to to actively search for grocery and various small stuff
sales on my local markets by visiting their sites one by one. The main problem
with ads that they are irrelevant. If I did a research on Google before buying
a new laptop, please, don't spam laptop ads for the next 6 months or so, I
already have one, thanks, I don't buy them daily. Especially from sellers that
don't ship to my country anyway.

------
AndrewKemendo
My thought is that we should be replicating the "pull" based commerce process
of the shopping mall but doing it electronically.

So instead of bombarding people with stuff they don't want in a context that
doesn't make sense - ads for products on the sidelines of other unrelated
content - we build a platform where people can get as close to the in person
shopping experience as possible from their home. Obviously there are
limitations to this from a tactile standpoint, but by and large consumers have
shown that they don't really need that to such high fidelity.

~~~
nitrogen
I like this idea, with the caveat that you need to ban paid placement within
the virtual mall. I'd like a list of product categories in a nice hierarchy,
and a list of products in random order. No games or manipulation.

------
cm3
Here's what the ad industry dreams of:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Blac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Black_Mirror%29)

------
noodlio
If all ad methods hypothetically disappeared, what would be the alternatives
for businesses to promote their services and goods?

~~~
dredmorbius
Funny you should ask....

If I'm looking for something to buy:

1\. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid
reviews. This quite often means _not_ giving much credence to review mills --
CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite
often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly
lesser extent.

2\. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) are often what I use when
seeking a specific option _locally_. I suspect thes are underappreciated.

3\. Classifieds systems. There's a reason Craigslist took off like it did,
though its quality/relevance have been lagging for some time. It's still
ground zero for housing ads.

 _High quality recommendations mean a lot._ I happened to be reading a blog
through one of my rare unfiltered browsers, and realised it included book
recommendations on the sidebar, for which the blog editor was highly qualified
to offer assessments and endorsements. The state of advertising is _so bad_
that I had missed these previously. The blog would be better off putting those
recommendations into posts or other content less likely to be filtered. First
time in quite literally _years_ that I'd had the least sense of missing
something.

~~~
punee
It's quite telling, but by no means surprising on Hacker News, that you
completely failed to address the question.

The question wasn't "What would you do if you were looking for something to
buy".

The question is: "What would you do if you were a business and had something
to sell?"

~~~
aninhumer
But the answer to the latter depends on the answer to the former. For example,
if people tend to rely on review sites to make their choices, you should make
sure your product compares favourably to the competition, and then solicit
reviews for it. (And if you can't do that, maybe your product isn't worth
buying.)

~~~
punee
People tend to rely on watching television commercials to learn about new
products. So you should buy more TV advertising. Correct?

~~~
aninhumer
The question was in a hypothetical context of a world without advertising. My
point is that you can't talk about what a business should do in that situation
without first clarifying what the alternative to advertising is in this world.

------
Pxtl
Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as
advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's
completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of
ad content will be detected as ads.

~~~
fernly
The real sins, the true annoyances and the routes for malware, come from ads
brought in from off-site. Ad copy served directly from the domain to which
you've gone are rarely a problem. But when that domain sublets part of their
page to an agency, which in turn sells exposures to anybody including malware
vendors, then you need to block. Your innocent visit to wanteddomain.com ends
up with literally hundreds of scripts and images pulled in from tens of
unrelated domains. So an ad-blocker needs only to block cross-domain calls to
be effective _without affecting display of ads from the source domain at all_.

------
tosseraccount
Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?

~~~
pjc50
Fraud.

The dozens of domains and tons of javascript are all there as part of an
effort to establish that the ad has been served to a human who might
concievably be a customer for the product, and not a robot or some sort of
third world ad-viewing farm.

~~~
ino
That's true for click campaigns but what about view campaigns?

Couldn't Samsung, now releasing their new phone, buy a website's entire ad
space for a month or two, let's say techcrunch, and tell them to serve their
new phone's ad themselves? Samsung is in for the eyeballs just like when they
buy those huge outdoor ads, but even better, no intermediaries.

The publisher would even optimize the HTML5 ads for loading and rendering
speed, and have a selection of them so they could rotate them. I believe it
could work well for physical items.

~~~
nitwit005
You're underestimating the general underhandedness of people. If I can sell
all my website's ads once, why not try to sell them twice? Double my income.

If Samsung's marketing people are in Korea, I'll show all Asian IP addresses
their ad, and then show some other ad (or ads) to the rest of the world.

Of course, Samsung may notice the low volume, so a better scheme is to also
load their ad elsewhere, but placed on the page so it's not visible.

If you look at the Javascript that gets served with the ads, there is
generally a hunk of logic that tries to confirm the ad is genuinely visible,
to try to deal with that last bit.

------
erikb
ad blocking is such a simple topic. I don't know why they call it a war. War
requires two nearly equal powers. Here we have the whole world who is willing
to pay NOT to get free ads served, and then there are a few people who got
free money in the past and now cry because they need to find a real job. Just
find something people are willing to pay for, or go broke. It's your decision,
the same as everybody elses.

And for us it's also quite simple in my eyes. There are ads and we block them.
There are ad-block-blockers and we just don't visit that page again. There is
enough other content to read. If you don't believe it yet, have some faith. I
avoid paywalls and ads since I was able to use a keyboard and never lacked
stuff to read. (And in fact if you look at my amazon history you'll see that I
actually pay quite a big percentage of my monthly income on written content,
it's just not blogs I'm paying for)

If you look at both paragraphs it's easy to see why there is no war. We don't
need these content providers who push ads onto us that we don't want. So there
is no way they can achieve their goal. They can fight as much as they want.
The same as the copyright industry.

------
alkonaut
> ..."the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing"

That's the most awesome billionaire name I have ever seen.

~~~
desdiv
Nominative determinism strikes again!

------
palderson
The objective of the entire ad industry is basically to determine what it is
you're in the market for. Funnily enough, I'd have no problem telling
someone/thing what I'm in the market for providing the offers received matched
my specified criteria.

On any given day of the week, we're all in the market for something, right
down to a tube of toothpaste. I've always thought that if advertisers knew,
from the source, what that item was, their focus would shift to the value of
the offer versus today's focus on identifying potential buyers.

~~~
timonovici
The problem is - every minute of every day, they'll show their wares, while
I'm interested only seldom to buy things. Most people buy their toothpaste,
brushes and toilet disinfectant at the supermarket, when they do their weekly
shopping - why would I have to be bombarded with it constantly?

It's like in those movies when they tie you down to a chair, forcibly open
your eyes, and blast you with tormenting images.

I never even once bought something I saw advertised online (in sidebars, for
example), because I mostly think they are scams - my parents are more gullible
though, and I feel bad for them, so I block their ads to protect them.

Video reviews from some people I trust are other story.

------
FollowSteph3
I see it as a fundamental issue of who will pay for the content. For example
the New York Times has to pay people to write articles. People do not want to
pay to read the articles nor do they want ads. So how does the NYT pay its
staff? Until we find a good answer this battle will continue.

And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you
currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for
content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(

------
blhack
I don't understand where the disconnect for ads is.

1) I have money. I got the money _specifically_ so that I could use it to buy
things.

2) Give me options of things to buy, and I will buy them.

3) Show me things that are relevant to my interests, and I will probably buy
_those_ things.

Advertisers seem to be failing (badly) at 3. Ads that I see are not only
intrusive (full page CSS popovers have gotten to the point where I just
disable javascript), but they're also _irrelevant_ to me.

WHy?

~~~
brathouz
To help with #3, Google lets you help them fine-tune the ads they show you:

[https://www.google.com/settings/ads](https://www.google.com/settings/ads)

------
dnlbyl
I'm a subscriber to the NY Times. Out of curiosity I disabled Ghostery and
reloaded this article's page. It took 5.5s to load the page and then almost 30
seconds to load the _49_ trackers/widgets/beacons etc. This all over a 25Mbps
connection. Page load time with Ghostery installed; 1.08s. I want to support
the sites I value, but I'm not going to stop using ad blockers anytime soon.

------
dk8996
Display ads have a bunch of issues; bots, accidental clicks, and now ad
blocking. I've worked for a large DSP and saw this first hand, even on closed
platforms like Facebook there were bots. Change is coming, I think that
content marketing will be a better option for brands to get their message out,
esp on social media platforms (not via display ads).

------
blubb-fish
Most people wouldn't mind ads if they weren't animated and moving or popping
up and down - that's simply distractive.

------
joolze
What ad blocker leaves that message? "This ad has been removed." ? Mine just
give connection errors in cute little boxes.

------
samlinkl
I'll be super interested to see where this goes. Every company capable of it
that I know of is headed toward native advertising. Ads as part of their
content. That might end up being an outcome the ad-blockers are ok with (i.e.
it should at least force more integrated and possibly well-behaving ads)

------
jonesb6
Wait "war" sounds like it's an even fight. If I wanted to I could remove 90%
of ads from my life RIGHT NOW. In fact I've already removed ~70% of them just
by adding an ad blocker to my browser and by not having a tv (opting for
streams etc).

------
pasbesoin
It used to be, that to research a purchase, you would have to buy a book, go
to the library, etc. (And, of course, talk to family, friends, neighbors...)

Newspapers and magazines were the "tablets", the "browser" already in front of
us.

Ads on those didn't move and shout at us (well, not aurally). And they gave us
at least some idea of what was out there. And yes, they did "plant"
impressions in our minds.

TV and radio made (from my perspective) the ads more obnoxious. Something they
continued to ramp up in an escalating war for attention.

These were still one-way communications: Broadcast. Although, a "primitive"
ad-blocking did arise there. Push-button presets on radios. And then, that
device dreaded by advertisers: The TV remote control.

And, ads started appearing across channels in the same timeslots. They became
harder to escape, en masse if not in the individual. Except for "saturation"
scheduling. And, suspected at least per some of my viewing and listening,
synchronized slots across channels.

These ads were seemingly more intrusive. LOOK at me! LISTEN to me! I will own
your children's will -- and yours, despite your disclaiming, subliminally.

And technology brought the next form of blocking: In addition to time-
shifting, home recording devices allowed us to fast-forward, eventually to
click past ads. Notice, here, the influence of advertisers. Ad-sensing
software in VCR's (remember that?) was challenged and, where possible,
crippled. The elusive "skip ahead" button was contested and crippled. I seem
to remember that it worked somewhat well on my parents' Tivo. But, Comcast put
the kibasch on that, and with their Comcast box they are back to fast-
forwarding.

Now, on the Internet, advertising is a two-way communication. Both overt and
covert (e.g. analytics). It can also now serve multiple, covert purposes, e.g.
malware.

And... people are seeking to escape it.

1) Because they can initiate the communication, search out information,
immediately, themselves. 2) Because the ads are actively hindering their
attention, focus, and consumption of the information they are seeking. 3)
Because the ads can actively screw them over.

Are we going to get measures that "lock down" our devices and web delivery, to
serve the roll of advertising? Or, are we going to alter the model in the face
of this paradigm shift? Is that two way conversation going to be leveraged to
better serve the consumer -- THEIR definition of better served? Or, are
entrenched interests going to just keep shouting louder? Creeping more into
our personal lives? Putting our data at risk?

Locking down the Internet, for the sake of their money?

Someone's going to find a way to leverage that two-way communication in a
fashion that gets adopted.

I reach back to one of my favorite tripes -- an accurate one: Opt-in.

When people start opting in, of their own will, then you'll know you have
something.

It's not going to be based on trickery. It's going to have its foundation in
being genuinely useful, for both/all sides.

Finally, I'll say that I'm very glad for the open nature of Internet and Web
design and protocols, up to this point. Leaving the smarts at the end-points
has enabled this challenge to come forth. It's left "the small guy" with a
good measure of control and choice. Up to this point. It is _my_ client, and
it will do what _I_ want.

So, I actually have the choice to opt-in. Now, give me something worth opting-
in to.

------
mschuster91
Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad.

We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck
off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every
time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement.

And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING.

Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what advertising told
them (e.g. that smoking is good for your health)... now, thanks to the
Internet, people can inform themselves and are ready to look through the veil
of ads and see the shit.

And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them
on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having
proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live
_in peace_ of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at
us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much.

Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and
how many today... I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to
spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste
(!) with ads now.

There's only one solution for companies that will be long-term successful:
create high-quality products that consumers can tell their friends about.

~~~
adblawk

        Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average 
        Western person saw a day and how many today...
    

50 years ago the average western person had access to maybe 1/50th of the
information they access to now thanks to the internet and in large part thanks
to advertising. Advertising allows businesses to outsource the consideration
(and associated decisions) of the value of their users. A business dependent
on advertising doesn't need to consider which of their users are most dollar
valuable, a business dependent on advertising can focus on creating a product
that reaches the most people and that in turn will provide their growing
revenues. Advertising provides a subsidy that supports the people who can't
afford $20/month to use each website they care about.

Advertising is an equaliser and the experiences of those half a century ago
are a meaningless comparison.

    
    
        create high-quality products that consumers can 
        tell their friends about
    

My company provides a product that our users _love_ , tens of millions of
loyal users use our products every month, they tell their friends about our
products, they send us emails saying how much they appreciate our products...
but most of our users aren't in a position to pay $15/month for our products
so we use advertising. Yes, we could cut advertising tomorrow and remain
profitable if we charged $15/month for access, but we'd cut off 95% of our
users access to products they care about because they can't justify $15/month
to access it.

That's not fair.

~~~
lorenzfx
You make it sound like your users are getting a free service. They are not.
They just do not pay you directly.

Why are advertisers willing to pay you $15/month per user? Because those users
buy the advertisers' wares with a hefty "advertisement-tax" on top of the
"real" price.

~~~
adblawk
You're misunderstanding the example. Advertisers do not pay $15 per user,
that's the amount we would need from 5% of our users to replace the revenue
lost from no advertising. The example puts the value of each user per month at
$1, which is what advertisers pay.

~~~
manicdee
Are you assuming that the majority of your users don't consider your content
to be worth $1/month?

~~~
jamiequint
Penny Gap:
[http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html](http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html)

