
What the ad blocker debate reveals - eamonncarey
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/03/what-the-ad-blocker-debate-reveals/
======
danr4
It's rather simple in my mind.

Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting
for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it.

You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading
experience.

Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my
choice.

Want to make money? try a subscription model.

Why can't you have both? Welcome to the real world.

[EDIT]:

This was the previous opening sentence: _" Putting your content up for free is
the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free."_

I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would
stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it's trying to
deliver.

~~~
austenallred
This comment rubs me in the wrong way.

Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" \- they're putting it up with
ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not
injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request
them. _You_ seek the content out.

So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the
company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the
content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose
that's your prerogative, but don't pretend like you're the victim in this.

And also don't pretend like it's the company's fault for not choosing your
preferred business model. You don't get to choose other companies' business
models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason
they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't
be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _The reason they 're not on a subscription business model is probably
> because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use._

I say, let them die then. It's not that we need those sites but don't want to
pay. It's that various "enterprising" folks figure that they can make some
"content", fill them with ads and get passive income. If those 99% of sites
disappeared overnight, everyone would likely be better off. You'd have a
choice between quality paid sites which people would support, or free sites
paid by people who think their content is important enough to put their time
_and_ money to keep it accessible. Yes, the second group exists and is usually
the source of the most valuable and trustworthy content on-line.

~~~
austenallred
I think that's a false dichotomy.

Certainly, there are sites that we could do without; there's clickbait-filled
garbage that does nothing but pollute the Internet.

But there's also a lot of _really_ good stuff out there that is supported by
ads. Stuff that people put their heart and soul and a lot of effort into, and
stuff that I (and probably you) love to read, that wouldn't make it without
ads.

I can count the number of sites I've ever heard of that are paid for by their
users on one hand.

~~~
TeMPOraL
There is, but I think all they'd have to do to get money is _ask nicely_. I
have high hopes for Patreon as a platform for that. They could also ask nicely
to whitelist the site in ad blocker, promising they won't abuse it. I've seen
a site that does that and happily complied because hey, I get it, they need
the money and I do get some value from their services.

The reason people block ads is not because they don't want publishers to get
paid. It's because most ads are actively user-hostile, ranging from merely
fucking annoying to malware vectors which can cost you a lot of money. Quoting
'jacquesm from other subthread, "Browsing the web without an adblocker is like
sex with multiple partners every day without a condom.". [0].

[0] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995396)

~~~
austenallred
> I think all they'd have to do to get money is ask nicely.

Having been a part of a lot of media sites in the past, I can safely say that
wouldn't have been true for any of them.

~~~
anc84
Maybe there were not actually valuable to the visitors?

~~~
hamax
If you open the discussion section of any article on HN that is behind a
paywall you'll find a link that bypasses the paywall and a discussion about
how paywalled content shouldn't even be allowed on HN.

So even though they created something of value (otherwise it wouldn't be on
the front page) but most people still won't pay for the content.

~~~
forthefuture
Why doesn't that seem reasonable? On Twitch.tv people stream for free and ask
for donations or subscriptions. Most people just watch, and the few people
that donate or subscribe so vastly overfund the stream that they can afford to
never run ads.

Patreon works the same way. You make money when you produce content that
people want to pay for even if they don't have to. If you can't do that, ads
are a fine plan B, but you have to go into that knowing that many people will
be ad blocking (and even more if you're producing any kind of technical
content).

------
Donzo
Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow,
over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely
annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing
experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of
advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.

~~~
hibikir
It's a Tragedy of the Commons situation: When we block ads, we do it
relatively aggressively, so those that implement advertising in an acceptable
way get crushed anyway. You are either using ads people don't see, or doing
terrible things like many Minecraft mods, often downloaded by kids, and hosted
at a particularly nasty site where the obvious download link gives you
malware. To block horrible things like that, we also sink anyone trying to use
sensible advertisements. Behaving like a good citizen just gives a website
less revenue, and gains them pretty much nothing.

At least one ad blocker tried to avoid this by marking some advertisements as
legitimate/unobtrusive, and not blocking them. That didn't fly very well, as
the rest of us just claimed that they were in league with advertisers, and
just using this unblocking as a different source of revenue.

That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other
content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter. Sponsored stories,
content modified to add a few links to advertisers and such. Pay people not to
post advertisements on their page, but to actively talk about you in the same
way they talk about other things on their site.

~~~
moron4hire
Except the Tragedy of the Common requires a depletable resource of some kind,
and unfettered access to it for people who have a vested interest in
protecting their own supply but not the supply of others.

That is not online content one whit. My use of the WaPo does not in any way
impact another users use, certainly not to the degree that WaPo is loading
down my bandwidth with extra code and content above and beyond what I'm there
to read. Seriously, by the time I'm done reading this article
([http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2015/08/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2015/08/03/hitchhiking-robots-cross-country-journey-comes-to-tragic-
end-in-philadelphia)), they've used up 5MB of my bandwidth, for 5KB of text.
Literally 1/1000th. It gzips down to half of that. In the time it took me to
write the last three sentences, it's now up to 25MB. I'm not the one choosing
to use up their server resources. They're doing it to themselves.

My hosting fees for all the sites I run combined come up to around $50/mo. I
can't even begin to imagine what it would be for 1000 times more traffic. I
assume it's not linear, but lord help me if it is.

There is no end in site for online content. When I can get a perfectly good
substitute to the NY Times just by scanning the plethora of free blogs and
social media posts from people who are doing it because they like it, because
it's important to them, because they are living it, then there is no end in
site to online content.

People will pay for valuable things. The problem is that this age of "you have
to play the blogging/social media game to find any relevance in the public
conscience" thing has created a functionally infinite supply of articles all
saying basically the same thing. But turn on the TV, flip to CNN, and what are
they talking about? "What are people saying on Twitter?" Why put up with ads
to pay for secondary sources when I can go to the primary, where their
advertising is nowhere near as intrusive?

An artist I really like releases a new album and I buy it right away because I
want to listen to it on repeat. If I really liked a movie I saw in a theater,
I preorder it right away (at current theater ticket prices, plus going with my
wife, plus typical Blu-ray prices, I'm spending around $60 a movie, if I
really like it).

Oh jeez. The WaPo article is 35MB now, and they just played a little "dink"
sound, I'm guessing to try to catch my attention and get me to come back to...
what? To an article I've now long disengaged with. These tactics works? This
gets people to buy? This is worth all this infrastructure to try to leech out
that one converted sale out of every 10,000 people?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Except the Tragedy of the Common requires a depletable resource of some
> kind, and unfettered access to it for people who have a vested interest in
> protecting their own supply but not the supply of others._

The depletable resource is user patience, i.e. how much shit they're willing
to take before they start blanket-blocking ads. If every publisher stuck to
simple, unobtrusive and relevant ads then readers wouldn't block them. But
some publishers/ad creators/ad networks decide that they want more money so
they make their ads more attention-grabbing, and then the others do the same,
and then users get tired and start blocking, and everyone is worse off.

------
joshstrange
Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in
my whole life. It's to the point that I have what can best be described as "Ad
Blindness", I don't even see them anymore. So much so that sometimes I think
I've reached the end of an article because my eyes have determined that below
is only ads only to find it's an ad in the middle of the content or actually
part of the article (Just to reiterate I sometimes gloss over real content
that fits my mental model of an "ad").

I have used blockers a lot before (If I'm not going to click I'd rather not be
tracked and deal with the bloat) but recently turned them all off to see what
it's like again. It's still the same shit that I don't care about and have no
intention of clicking on. 9 times out of 10 its for something I ALREADY PAY
FOR (Looking at you DO, AWS, etc) which is annoying because not only do I have
to look at it but it just highlights the gross inefficiencies in
advertisements.

I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer
subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up
between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a
number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my
head) but none have made it seamless.

Mobile is the big sticking point. On the desktop I could use an extension that
reads some meta data out of a site's head to identify that site and mark it
down for receiving a portion of "subscription fee" but on mobile this becomes
much more of a challenge as I'm not willing to switch to a single-purpose
browser (not that iOS would make it easy even if I did) and there are no
browser extensions on mobile and no, I'm not going to do some gross "share"
hack to record the sites I visit.

I don't have an answer to all of this, it all sucks. I want to compensate
content creators but other than pay-per-view ads (which I mentally block out
if not with an ad blocker) I'm never going really help them as it stands
currently.

~~~
onion2k
_Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in
my whole life._

I've clicked on hundreds. Thousands probably. For me clicking an ad is a win-
win - the site I want to support gets a little money, and the advertiser gets
to find out that online ads don't convert to sales so eventually they'll stop
buying them. You can support the things you love _and_ drive the ad model off
the internet at the same time.

I realise this isn't a workable long term strategy. :)

~~~
joshstrange
It isn't me being spiteful on purpose or anything like that I've just honestly
never seen anything interests me.

------
cstross
A secondary effect:

ad blockers not only improve the web experience for users (making everything
load faster, by blocking unwanted spurious crap), _ad blockers are good for
the cellcos as long as net neutrality holds true_.

Absent net-neut cellcos could in principle charge advertisers for access, but
in a net-neut environment there's no money to be gained by carrying the
traffic. Traffic which impairs the UX for the paying customers (the smartphone
and tablet users).

This is going to be an interesting dilemma for that strong proponent of
network neutrality, Google, uh, DoubleClick, right? (Unless they go the third-
order route and roll out their own LTE data network, where of course they'll
be the advertising gatekeeper and maybe folks who DPI indicates are using ad
blockers will get a reduced speed of service ...)

------
aikah
> We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what
> they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow
> autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google.
> Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions
> and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.”

Something's fishy here. Is there any googler here that can respond to these
claims ?

> “Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being
> such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at…Why should web
> advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user
> habits? …[A]ny argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a
> technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.”

my thoughts exactly. "People" told the same things to the music industry. "You
can't adapt, you should die", well let's see how ad networks and content
producers survive the adblock revolution.

------
cognivore
Lost in this debate, for me, is whether online ads actually work and are worth
the money. My technical experience with online ads is that it's very difficult
to equate the ads with increased sales unless you have a very small sample
size.

I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything
else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad
sellers and hosters (Facebook, I'm looking at you) can promote them without
having to back it up with quantifiable results. And that has led to a weird
"ad ecosystem" which exists for its own purpose, not for actually trying to
sell products (cause it doesn't actually work for that). I think the people
most worried about the ad blockers are those that make their money from that
ecosystem.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I have a similar impression. Moreover, I think people are actually seriously
fooling themselves and each other. There's lot of tracking being done, lots of
people looking at "metrics", but when I think about the statistics education
of majority of people (including some professional "social media marketers" I
know) I come to the conclusion that they don't understand what they're doing
and can prove any conclusion they want with the numbers. All those metrics
only help people to bullshit themselves and each other.

------
JulianMorrison
I want the advertising industry to die.

And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find
ways around it, Patreon being a good example.

~~~
yoz-y
In the current world of abundance, advertising is crucial to content and
product producers. Let's say you make an application, how do you sell it if
nobody knows about it? You make a nifty product, how do you make people know
it exists? Advertising, in principle, is good, the way it is done currently on
the Web is awful.

~~~
jakobegger
If it's a good product, it will spread by word of mouth. Advertising can help
sales, but it's by no means the only way to do sales.

~~~
JulianMorrison
It will also spread by Amazon reviews, Google search rank, positive press, and
a great many other means of communication. This is not the 20th century when
it was voice, TV, print, or nothing.

------
alkonaut
I understand why it's a genius strategy from Apple to make mobile browsing
free from ads (Googles lifeblood), but I don't see why it's such a huge deal
to Google; they already have a mobile platform of their own where ad blocking
was always possible and widespread. You could see this step from Apple as an
aggressive one towards Google, or just as reaching feature parity with Android
on ad-blocking. What will be interesting is whether ad blocking will be
widespread on iOS or if it will be like on desktop where it is a power user
thing. If it's the former then it will change the web in a big way.

If Apple _really_ wanted to spread ad blocking and disrupt things they should
make it an optional install when users first open the browser, "do you want to
see ads when browsing", where answering no installs an ad-blocker which blocks
all apps not on apples whitelist (which ad networks then pay a sizable sum to
be on of course).

~~~
tdkl
> where ad blocking was always possible and widespread.

Majority of people don't root.

~~~
coldpie
Hmm? Firefox and ublock origin don't require root. It won't block in-app ads,
but that's not what is being discussed here.

~~~
tdkl
What if I want to use Chrome or default Browser ?

------
pinaceae
well, let's look at someplace where ads truly work well.

fashion print magazines. buy a vogue and look at the ads. hard to tell apart
from the content, glossy, relevant, beautiful. they make up at least 70% of
the whole magazine.

i like gruber's ad system on DF, one of the few sites that seem to follow a
user/reader centric approach. first you ensure the eyeballs, THEN you show the
ads, always paranoid to piss off your readership.

mobile safari adblock in ios9 will hopefully bring movement into this ad game.

~~~
gabriel34
Ads can be content. The best ones usually are.

------
alyandon
From another thread (still relevant I think):

uBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy are my tools to control the content my web
browser displays. My general rule is that I'll only disable ad blocking on a
few trusted sites and never on a site that uses a third-party advertising
network.

Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block
my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally
touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient
attention to locate and click the "X", auto-playing sounds/videos, etc. If the
UX wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk
and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware.

In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support
and they plead with me to disable adblocking, I'll most likely choose to stop
reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them.

I really wish the ability to make micropayments to publishers was a thing.

------
gamesbrainiac
There's a mistake with the bloat diagram, the 8 KB : 6 MB pie chart. Bloat and
article slices should be reversed in the diagram.

------
fridek
It's funny how people saying ads should be replaced with a subscription model
in different threads are going completely bananas about paywalled articles.

Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a
month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me
read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway.
Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I
also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have
access to a reasonable portion of the internet.

The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press.
Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Let me show you a model of a decent web news paper that could get by with ads
and no paywall:

    
    
         |----------------------------------|
         | MY AWESOME NEWSPAPER             |
         |----------------------------------|
         | category | links | cool | topics |
         |----------------------------------|
         | Article Title         | Ads      |
         |                       |          |
         | Article content arti  | A bunch  |
         | cle content article   | of static|
         | content.              | not      |
         |                       | annoying |
         |  |---------------|    | ads      |
         |  | A cat picture |    |          |
         |  |---------------|    |          |
         |                       |          |
         | Article content arti  |          |
         | cle content article   |          |
         | content.              |          |
         |                       |          |
         |----------------------------------|
         | footer links & copyright notices |
         |----------------------------------|
    

Simple as that. Just don't shit on your users. If they have ad blockers,
kindly ask them to whitelist your site.

> _Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it._

What content quality?

~~~
norea-armozel
This is the basic format that I wish web designers would follow. Also, I wish
ad networks wouldn't be sleazy and allow anyone to use their services
(scammers, malware producers, and the like should be categorically banned from
an ad network). If the latter was fixed then the former would be possible.

------
chmike
Could the push functionality of HTTP/2 worsen the problem ? Ad block could
limit the downloaded data by selecting it. With the push capability it won't
be possible anymore. Network bandwidth could be wasted with the ads.
Thebrowser could still filter its display though.

