The Mozilla Foundation has come out against ad blocking:
"Content blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising)."[1]
This is sad. Their slogan used to be "Work for mankind, not for the man". But the Mozilla Foundation is ad-funded. They currently have a deal with Yahoo to make Yahoo Search their preferred search engine. Before that, it was Google. Those deals bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. So they can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them.
This places them in conflict with Apple. Apple makes their money selling stuff to end users at a high markup. They can be very anti-advertiser if they choose. Apple could block all ads on their devices and market that as a feature.
Well, as someone who doesn't earn money from ads, I'm on their side.
I agree with the arguments against ads, but I also remember what it was like to not have a CC or money to spend, and ads work as a redistribution mechanism; until someone can make a good argument why the poor won't be left out of the brave new world of paid-for content, I still won't use an ad-blocker.
Here's a counter argument; just because you can throw clickbait articles up onto a website doesn't give you the right to rape my personal details for your personal profit.
Quite simply, produce something of value and you won't have a problem financing it. The worlds smallest violin plays for those websites producing garbage to feed the never ending stream of garbage that comes through the data pipe that I pay for. No one owes you anything.
Here's a counter argument; just because you can throw clickbait articles up onto a website doesn't give you the right to rape my personal details for your personal profit.
But that's Mozilla's argument: block tracking, not ads.
Google Analytics and other services are not ads, but still track.
Project Wonderful, on the other hand, has ads but doesn't track.
Shouldn't we block the former, and not latter?
By the way, have I pointed out that I make absolutely no money on ads? I work for a B2B startup that charges for its services. No ads at all.
I suppose Mozilla is trying to walk a fine line, but with Tiles, it just uses a band-aid to hide a gangrenous condition. Adtech is toxic to UX and will never become less so on its own. We should have zero qualms about using ad blocking tools, because only drastic measures might force advertisers to adjust. Publishers should be rallying against adtech and not users. Mozilla is on the wrong side of this debate too. A band-aid will not fix the rotten fetid UX that adtech brings - there was plenty of time to improve. It's time for cutting as far as I'm concerned.
Everyone emphasizes the privacy/tracking reasons for ad blocking and mentions the annoyance/performance reasons in passing.
I think it's important to point out that, when you ask people they mention two other defenses of ad blocking:
1. They hate advertising in general. They would block it everywhere if they could. They know it's engineered to manipulate them, often with lifestyle advertising it's engineered to manipulate them into feeling worse and promising to sell them the cure, but it's always engineered to manipulate them in some way. The psychological techniques are very good, better to just block it than falsely assume you can be exposed and then will it into having no effect.
2. It's their computer so it will do whatever they want it to. Remove ads, remove other parts of your site, remix your site, redesign it, remove all your branding completely, etc. These are the more technical uses with a lot of plugins/userscripts but when you show it off to less technical users they want it too, although it's not available to them yet.
It has become a good litmus tests to see who mentions the problems with advertising in general and who sticks with the constructed narrative of "Is it OK to steal content to protect your private information?".
I agree, I would have expected Mozilla (even though I know they are ad supported) to not fail this particular test.
How do the PR drones who write this stuff not instantly and repeatedly punch themselves in the face? I can probably count on one hand the number of advertisers who respect "performance, security, and privacy." Text and static image ads served from a first-party domain don't bother me, but web-wide creeps following my every move to "retarget" me with invasive annoyances and act as almost-but-not-quite credit reporting agencies are the very opposite of respectful.
I can probably count on one hand the number of advertisers who respect "performance, security, and privacy."
Fine, then Mozilla's argument is that we should block everyone except those. And that we also should block trackers not in ads as well (e.g. Analytics).
I'm don't see why this is so contemptible a statement, or why we should call a person a "PR drone" for writing it.
The statement is designed to be (deniably) deceitful. Taken literally, it basically says "blow up the whole online commercial surveillance industry, and everyone who relies on it for most of their revenue." That happens to include Mozilla, formerly a subsidiary of Google, now one of Yahoo, so I doubt they mean that.
Yet Apple puts huge ads in metro stations all over the world. They pick what's interesting for them - no ads on mac and iOS, and huge ad campaigns elsewhere
It was inevitable that this would happen. I remember when Opera first added pop-up blocking and plenty of people got mad. This is the same thing: ads are burning energy, bandwidth, and our time.
Now that consumers have been subjected to piles of abusive ads, they're just blocking all of the ads regardless of how bad they are.
> Now that consumers have been subjected to piles of abusive ads, they're just blocking all of the ads regardless of how bad they are.
Not really; they're blocking all ads except the ones that are unblockable: ads masquerading as content (sponsored posts, etc). It's inevitable to a degree; most people are willing to whine loudly and pretend they have the moral high ground about things that are immediately visible, but unable to think more than one step ahead about the consequences of their actions.
Paid content is, by and large, a miserable failure[1] (just look at the history of paid apps relative to ad-supported and IAP), and ad-blocking is on the rise as well. This is just pushing publishers to break one of the oldest rules (and for good reason), and break down the wall between ads and content.
[1] With minor exceptions like publications that have established a very strong brand with people of relatively high net worth. It's not a coincidence that the only publications I read regularly that moved to paywalls happen to be over a hundred years old (NYT, WSJ, Economist)
There is a clear disclosure (no misleading marketing!) and he presents a new and interesting version of his usual show while incorporating the product.
It's not selling out, and it's fairly enjoyable (as evidenced by the rating counter on the video, as well as the comments).
If I must be advertised to, I prefer this method. Having watched the video, I would actually like to purchase the device mentioned. Not because it was shoved down my throat, but because it is relevant to me and I find it interesting.
Sure, but as usual, anecdotal evidence isn't worth much[1]. I'm sure I can point you to traditional display ads that I've seen on the Web that are tasteful, useful, and unobtrusive. Does that obviate all the complaints people have about display ads overall? Of course not. Similarly, the amount of times I've heard a podcast say "this episode sponsored by blahblah, [explanation of blahblah]" doesn't erase the amount of examples I've seen of an article with a tiny "sponsored by X" at the top. And as is inevitable when financial pressure is great enough, you end up with even well-respected publishers resorting to stuff like this: http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-shrinks-labeling-n...
[1] I'm aware that you're explicitly providing a counter-example, so I'm not disagreeing with your comment. Just saying that it doesn't really address my point.
BTW I realize that my terminology was really confusing. By "paid content", I meant "content that you pay for". You appear to have responded to the part of my post about sponsored content. Just want to make sure that you weren't also reading the part of my comment about paid content and thinking of sponsored content.
Paid content on the web has been bad because there has been a glut of free content.
But if we look at the history of print, paid content did quite well for a very long time. Books, you might recall, were pretty popular. Many magazines and newspapers used to make a great deal of their revenues from subscription fees.
Video similarly seems to have worked well when paid: movies have always been profitable. The recent "golden age of television" has been attributed to the increasing volume of paid content; the ad-supported stuff is seen as lower quality.
I use an ad blocker because I'm not interested in participating in a system that is based around manipulation of people. I pay for some media both old (e.g., Economist, NYT) and new (e.g., via Patreon). The system of ad-supported print content is certainly in trouble, and if I can help along its demise by using an ad blocker, I'm glad to do it. It'll be exciting to see what comes next.
> The recent "golden age of television" has been attributed to the increasing volume of paid content
Interesting, really? Do you have a source referring to this? The only theory I've heard is that as Hollywood studios have become financially more conservative (cf the dominance of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, etc relative to decades past), talent interested in taking risks has fled to television.
> Paid content on the web has been bad because there has been a glut of free content.
Right, and the glut of free content is facilitated by the incredibly low marginal cost of distribution. Buzzfeed has built their entire business on this: instead of "writers", they have "people with a spare ten minutes to Google a set of gifs"[1]. I don't see how this is a feature of the Internet that is going to disappear, especially since people have spoken loudly and clearly that, en masse, paid media will be ignored in favor of nominally free alternatives. Your book example is particularly useful in proving my point: those books that aren't encumbered by the monopoly power of copyright are freely available on Kindle or through Project Gutenberg. TL;DR: As long as there's a free alternative, people writ large won't pay, and as long
> I use an ad blocker because I'm not interested in participating in a system that is based around manipulation of people.
This is what bothers me about people who try to take the moral high ground about ad-blocking. How in God's name do you come to the conclusion that "not participating in a system" is anything but "not visiting those sites"? If you think Beats headphones are priced more for brand than quality[2], do you go "I refuse to participate in a system that overprices products based on fooling customers" and then merrily shoplift your way through their inventory?
[2] Note that I'm very uninterested whether people think Beats are fairly priced or not and don't have an opinion about it myself; I'm not an audiophile and was just parroting something I've heard a bunch of times for the purposes of constructing a hypothetical. Please don't respond to this comment arguing about Beats...
I can't find where I read the notion on paid content originally, but it makes sense to me. With 3 network channels and the goal of maximizing ad revenue, you need a lot of stuff that a lot of people will watch, which mean generally adequate, inoffensive, middlebrow programming. Places like HBO and Netflix, though, live and die based on whether people a) sign up to pay, and b) keep paying. That gives a strong incentive to create very compelling, high-quality shows that a narrower audience will definitely watch. (I think the invention of reality TV has also helped, in that it has drained off the fraction of the audience that is happy with low-end, cheap-to-produce programming.)
Regarding me using an ad-blocker: your use of physical theft as an analogy for viewing content is just embarrassing on Hacker News. You should know better.
The difference is that if I steal headphones, the store is deprived of the headphones. Whereas if I read an article without also paying to download and display their ads, they still have the article. If they would like to only show content and ads at the same time, there are technological fixes they could apply. If they do, I won't be working around them.
They presumably haven't because there is value to them in people reading and sharing their content whether or not ads are viewed. And also because the marginal cost of a view is so small that it's best expressed in scientific notation. Personally, I don't bother trying not to read their stuff because a) I am looking for opportunities to pay people who are willing (e.g., I pay the NYT), b) I hope it'll contribute to the signal to them that their ad-driven model is not sustainable, and c) I'm not the level of obsessive that is going to carefully decide which sites to visit because I might be costing large media companies epsilon cents until they get their acts together.
The downside is that ads are going increasingly incognito, precisely to avoid things that explicitly filter them out. The basic act of renting an audience is not going to be stopped.
But they don't cost me actual real money both in terms of bandwidth costs and psychological cost (tracking induces paranoia which curbs my thought, which adjusts my online search behaviour, for one example). Printed adverts in a newspaper do not have these costs.
This notion of "publishers" vs. "comsumers" is myopic ... we're all sitting in the same boat. Lot of benevolent and ad displaying publishers out there (f.x. stackoverflow) and same goes for lot of consumers who donate to content creators they cherish.
From a business model perspective, the reader is not the 'customer', but the advertisers. The content is just the bait to get traffic, and then a publisher has to monetize the traffic, most of the time by using ads to divert some of the traffic to an advertiser. So a publisher has to walk a very fine line between not anoying the reader too much but at the same time still have value for the advertiser. No wonder that some publishers go (way) too far and only focus on advertisers and almost forget the reader.
Doesn't help that the ads are most of the time outside the control of the publisher, but are controlled by big advertising networks of course.
> Look at New Yorker, for example. The ads are generally interesting and feature great photography.
Wish Google would introduce some sort of minimum design requirements for their AdSense image ads.
I also wish they'd give publishers full control over the appearance of their text ads. Right now, these ads look horrible, and only premium publishers (ie. websites with millions users) are given this sort of control.
They do. Google also produces the most widely-used ad platform for publishers, which makes it much easier for those publishers to blacklist and whitelist given ads and advertisers.
The ads suck for a lot of reasons, but lack of capacity to filter them isn't one of them.
Plenty of ad units that you see on a publisher may be filled by Adsense on one pageview and by another ad network in another one. Those networks may or may not have the same quality requirements that Adsense does.
Publishers tend to optimize for the amount of money they can make from an ad rather than how good it looks. An ad ops person will filter out offensive or porny ads while otherwise looking to top out their commission pay.
It's just that a lot of publishers don't know how to handle the settings or don't care. Most publishers are not tech-first companies, and their websites don't make the bulk of their revenue anyway. For any TV channel, their website is a rounding error in terms of total revenue.
Indeed. I'm not the target demographic for their ads (anorexic women and men who like expensive watches, AFAICT), but the ads on their site aren't aggressive, and they hire good writers. I'm happy to pay for a subscription, and wish there were more of them and less of buzzfeed on the Internet.
This is where stronger protections against this sort of deception would be useful. I'm (sometimes) fine with sponsored articles. I've seen some sites use it well. But it has to be honest, clearly marked.
I'm fairly sure that if publishers removed popups (ads and subscription forms), ads that move the text while you're reading it, and autoplay video or audio ads, then most people would be happy. As it stands, readers are bombarded with ads that ruin the actual reading experience.
No, that wouldn't be enough. The real problem is profiling. It's spooky and most tech-savvy people dissent it. And they (aka we) are the ones that influence the general public as to adopting ad blocking technologies.
It's one thing having Google serving me personalized ads which I know come from my search history, and a whole other having the same thing happening from various ad-serving companies with which I have no affiliation at all. Where the hell do they get my profile from? And who regulates that market?
They get that information from tracking you across the wide internet (because you see the banners which also track you) and they sell targeted advertisement to specific audiences using real time bidding systems where you can bid for advertisement space for a specific audience ('interested in cars', 'interested in electronics', 'probably male', 'age 30 to 40') etc. That profile data is gathered/derived from your browsing behavior.
I don't see it as a big issue when an ad follows me around the net. Yesterday I searched for a musical instrument on Ebay; now ads for the instrument display on Facebook. They may, in some way, invade my privacy, but they don't invade my reading experience.
Most tech-savvy users aren't the problem, ad-blockers aren't popular because some people don't want to be tracked, they are popular because most people don't like being annoyed and spammed with obnoxiously loud advertisements.
I beg to differ. Ad blocking has been around for almost a decade, AdBlock Plus was first published in 2006. But if you take a look at historical usage [1] of ad blocking technologies you’ll see that it started spiking after 2012, right when profiling was widely adopted by the digital advertising marked due to the usage of programmatic advertising. Also it’s tech related sites that are taking the biggest toll [2] (although that could also be attributed to adoption of video ads). I also don’t think it’s irrelevant that ad blocking usage in European countries is twice that in US [2]. Generally speaking I think Europeans are more concerned for their privacy.
Just to be clear, I won’t argue that ads are annoying and that makes a lot of users willing to use something to block them. I just have the impression that it was after the adoption of profiling technologies that ad blocking usage boomed.
Exactly with almost no impact, only in the past 1-2 years did it became a major issue as more and more people were installing them and now with Apple and the likes actively promoting them it became a common knowledge.
As for the European part, as a European I would not agree to that statement at all most people here do not show any more insight into technical privacy than who I know in the US.
VPN is also quite common here in Europe and not for any privacy concern but because regional blocking of content is a plague here. And it's not only to access US content Europe is a nightmare when it comes to distribution rights for IP since even tho we have a unified market every country still has it's own distributors.
So if a Belgian user wants to access French content they more often than not have to use a VPN to get a French IP because otherwise no streaming for them, same goes for an Austrian or a Swiss user who wants to consume German content. And that's before going into the insanity of regional content for the likes of Netflix.
You also forget that Europe has adopted Chrome much faster than in the US because from 2010 to 2014 they had to have the browser choice menu for all versions of windows which were shipped in the EU upon installation (You can also see a short spike in IE users once that directive expired in dec 2014, presumably just to get Chrome/FF again ;)) which meant that they had the ability to install free adblockers (adblock for IE costs money, and is a shite reverse proxy).
Add in "ads using any kind of animation", "ads that slow site loading in any way", and "ads that use up limited mobile bandwidth" and you'd get closer. When reading text, any kind of animation in view proves quite distracting, which likewise "ruins the actual reading experience". And ad scripts and ad servers use up bandwidth and slow down page loads.
Disabling Javascript and making flash click-to-play take care of most (all?) of these. Though the latter has become more difficult to do (in Chrome) on either a whitelist or blacklist basis since Chrome recently made the controls to quickly change a sites content policy more buried.
@Sparkzilla, I agree. I don't know which I find the most annoying. The videos that play themselves or the pop-ups which when trying to close takes you to a whole new site. Damn it! I just want to read the news.
I think we are missing one key thing in this debate. Ads and ad-blocking is just a symptom of the fact that you cannot make money in this industry.
The only ones making money on IT are companies who's main thing is not technology, but who can utilize technology to make there business more efficient. A good example is logistic companies who have a business that's been around for ever, but smart algorithms allows them to cut costs and work more effectively. But the money it selves comes from shipping things.
I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things like a little tile with the coca cola writing). (EDIT: Okay, news.ycombinator.com also does it well with its inline job ads. See, I didn't even think of it as an ad, that's how nicely it's embedded.) The problem is that people used to use the internet to exchange files and information that was then locally stored on each PC. Now, you go to youtube, listen to a song, and 20 minutes later you download the entire video again if you listen to it (if you closed the tab inbetween). That stuff adds up and of course everyone is reluctant to pay that bill. The solution is going back to a decentralized download-culture like it was in the 90's. Storage space is incredibly cheap. Nobody has to pay that bill of transferring the same things over and over and over again.
"For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears."
My company makes most of its money off of advertising, I am broadly a fan of advertising (done well) myself, and yet.. I agree with your feeling at a core, technical level. I currently don't see how it's defensible to argue that a piece of software MUST render a certain stream of data in a certain way.
This is not about copyright, redistribution (we're not transforming then rebroadcasting), or ethics (to me). This is simply about having code on a machine transform an incoming stream to a visual representation, and while common standards and protocols (e.g. JPEG, HTML, CSS, HTTP) determine how to do that to get towards a desired result, I think any individual's code or computer should be free to render data as it sees fit even if that rendering is not what the creator intended.
Dictating how people or machines must intrepret things is a bad idea, IMHO. Provide the source data in whatever way you want, by all means, but the end user/device must interpret them as they will.
I like choice too, but a good design can go a long way: the frontpage of a newspaper for example. It dictates that the really big headlines were the most important, the medium headlines were somewhat important and the stuff on the side was interesting but didn't warrant a full article... and people liked this.
You know, if all the websites that are the most flagrantly abusive and dependent on ad-support (the Buzzfeeds, Crackeds, HuffingtonPosts, etc) disappeared tomorrow, how much have we really lost?
I can survive without another shitty slide-show of the 17 Most Ridiculous Cats Twerking, or another news article that is a summary of a summary of a Reuters, machine-learned bot-written summary of a press release about an abstract of a scientific study.
Most interesting content is created for personal blogs and Wordpress and even Tumblr, by amateurs and people that are writing because they like doing it. Or it's on the pay-walled dead-tree publisher websites, like NY Times, the Atlantic, MIT Review, WSJ, etc.
GMail is already a product people can and do pay for. That would surely be fine.
Google is in a different category for me as far as ads go. When people are actively searching for something, offering them things they are searching for is working with their interests. Most advertising, though, is distraction from whatever the user is up to, so it's working against their interests.
YouTube might have a problem. People might, god forbid, actually have to pay to host stuff. I suspect we'd survive.
Youtube alone hosts a vast amount of content - everything from archival footage to MIT lectures to people's cat videos, and all of it more or less free. Just because you personally dislike Google doesn't mean the world is better off without the services it provides.
I’d prefer the Internet Archive and the many non-profit and/or academic sites which still exist to host that content. People’s own cat videos they should host themselves.
That's fine, but it's reasonable that not everyone who wants to put videos online necessarily also wants to pay for the space, bandwidth and maintenance of their own server. And I don't know whether or not the Internet Archive has the budget or infrastructure to really replace Youtube at scale without resorting to monetizing the videos themselves.
I agree with you in principle, because if people hosted their own content they would have more direct control over it, and decentralizing the web is usually a good thing. But in practical terms the result of that would probably be the removal of a great deal of video content from the web, or moving most of it to whatever next best option is after Youtube (probably Vimeo.)
im not sure if they rely on it i think its just part of the money that comes in. Totally weird but sometimes I wonder if enforcing by law that you can't get more than x% profit margins else you redistribute to the govt would actually fix the whole capitalism/corporate issue.
Of course this means the govt has to be controlled better - but thats an easier target than "all corporations"
So … in your idealized 90s web, how does a reporter pay their mortgage? Storage space was never the expensive part even back then – it's always been the skilled humans who create things.
Some combination of charging up front for access (with only a few samples shown to people who don't subscribe), charging for timely access (see LWN, which provides articles 1-2 weeks earlier for subscribers), and patronage (if you want to see more investigative reports like this, pay me via Patreon).
I agree, but this implies that these reporters would need to write articles that are useful or interesting enough for someone to want to pay money for. And writing like that takes real work and talent to produce, very different from churning out 50 click-bait articles per day. Lots of writers and sites that survive on the ad-based model would probably die off if they had to switch to a pay-for-service model.
That's certainly what I'm hoping happens – I think the ads / pay not to see ads model has a lot of potential since it's a short step from the current model.
That's also a much better answer than the person I replied to, who seemed to think that the problem was that we aren't using peer-to-peer file change.
Those "real" newspapers only existed due to the "creepy" ads that you hate. IIRC we're talking like a third of the revenue coming from ads a decade ago. There are few newspapers in the world that would be economically viable with just subscription revenue, now or then.
If advertising dies as business model, it won't be just the Buzzfeeds of the world that go with it. Of course nobody can force you to watch ads. But the people you're hurting by doing that are in fact the same people making the content you're actually viewing. Your glee about killing just the low quality content providers by blocking ads isn't justified.
As jsnell pointed out, newspapers sold tons of ads – and the reason we had so much more resource-intensive journalism back then was because you bought the entire newspaper and so the classified ads, car dealers, etc. were subsidizing the Podunk Herald-Clarion's international reporters.
Further, your description of the past is either limited to a few months in 1994 or needs to include the tons of small “portal” sites which were plastered with ads and ran only content from AP and Reuters or, more likely, lower-tier networks but produced no original content except for advertorial sponsored content. The click-bait headline might have taken awhile to reach its modern form but it was invented shortly after the invention of advertising.
Arguably, you are somewhat responsible if the revenue stream is failing because you want to consume content without caring whether anyone gets compensated for it.
That's approaching from the wrong angle. I am not responsible for publishers adopting a distribution format that allows me to render their content without ads (HTML). If they can't survive in an environment where people can freely (ethically, morally, and legally) block ads [1] then that really is their problem and not mine. The web has changed the face of publishing, but the world has no obligation to keep someones revenue stream going.
[1] It really shouldn't be called "blocking" ads. It's really just choosing not to render them. When I control the rendering device (my browser), I can make it do whatever I want. Good luck showing me your video ad when I'm browsing with "links".
Your point #1 is sophistry. They're making things available with the clear expectation of getting ad revenue. If you don't like ads, either don't visit the site or complain when it all goes behind a paywall.
Besides, your argument is essentially “If you want me to pay, use DRM”. I would suggest that this is not a direction we need to try going down again.
It's hardly sophistry. My point is the web as it stands has certain features. One of those features is that servers can't control how clients render content. I think it's pure hubris for content providers to move onto the web and then suddenly demand that things work the way they want ("you must render our ads or you're stealing") ignoring the way things actually work.
> Besides, your argument is essentially “If you want me to pay, use DRM”. I would suggest that this is not a direction we need to try going down again.
That sort of is my point, but not quite. Because once DRM is in the picture then I (and everyone else) won't partake of the content, which is what they want of me anyway. Until that time, I feel morally, ethically, and legally free to render their content as I see fit.
If your business model is publishing content on the Internet for free, it is not the responsibility of the readers to consume the content in a specific way to get you paid, or to come up with a way for you to get paid. You chose to publish on the Internet, without paywall. If you don’t like it, go back to not publishing.
Arguably? I don't think so. If the producer wants to protect their content, put it behind a paywall or similar. If you're sending out content to anyone for free, you can have no expectations of making money. Either guard it or don't, but don't try to put blame on others for your stupid decision to not guard it.
>For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears
What a silly statement. Does the same logic also apply to your TV and radio? You are visiting a site that gives you content for free in return for viewing their ads. If you don't like that contract then don't visit the site and limit your browsing to sites that adhere to your personal contract.
In addition, you can also mute the volume and/or walk out of the room during a TV commercial, and it's perfectly legal to record a TV show and fast-forward over the commercials.
Viewership in tv and radio isn't measured directly, but indirectly through polls and surveys. You're counted as part of the set of potential viewers based on your age, location and whether or not you have a Nielsen box (or whatever they use nowadays.) TV stations don't actually know that you decided to turn the channel, and they don't really care, since that time has already been paid for.
When you can very accurately determine how many people have seen a web ad and you know how many people haven't, that more directly affects how much value can be extracted from that advertising. In terms of the actual effect on revenue, blocking a web ad would seem to have more impact than ignoring a tv or radio ad.
I would argue that it has exactly the same impact. Your argument is a bit of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" nature.
Unless the advertisers want to publicly (!) admit that they wish they could block TV content from people muting/changing the channel/walking out to make tea during commercials.
Ad-blocking is exactly the same thing as turning the volume off during commercial breaks. Or perhaps turning the TV/radio off, and then back on again afterwards might be the better analogy, since then you are not consuming the "bandwidth".
If I wanted to hurt advertising, I'd create an extension that would fire a thousand click-throughs on their stupid ad, and vacuum up all their AdSense budget. Get a few million people world-wide doing that, and companies would quickly realize that they are spending an even more ridiculous amount of money on advertisements, and they would stop spending.
Not really as you're constantly having to turn the volume off and on when the show resumes. So you're interacting with the actual ad and subconsciously you've acknowledged what they're advertising.
As for hurting advertising by your click though scheme - do you really think you're the first one to have thought of this? They have measures in place to identify and disregard this.
The free content for ad views model is only tantalizing for web publishers because the internet, which they did not develop using their marketing budget, provides access to billions of eyeballs for very little cost. That fantastic bargain comes at the cost of playing by the internet's rules. The internet is not a broadcast medium, but a request-response medium.
There is no implied contract, only assumed/hoped for behaviour. The TV/radio/website operator emits freely accessible information to the world in the hope he will make money of it. There is no obligation on the receiver's part to behave as the operator wants.
> You are visiting a site that gives you content for free in return for viewing their ads.
No. They are giving me back some form of data than I can render however I see fit. If I want to render their HTML but skip the rendering of the ads, that's my business and not theirs.
In my opinion, a lot of the discussion about ads and ad-blocking leaves a very key factor undiscussed: that, as with US healthcare, the consumer cannot make an informed decision about whether a given piece of content justifies the loading of a given piece of 3rd party code, because the terms of use of that code are undisclosed. The whole notion of "implied consent" seems laughable to me - about as laughable as the idea of going into a car dealership and buying a car sight unseen and for an unknown price that can be redefined by the seller at any point in the future. [Edited for cell phone typos]
This site is an ad and no one is blocking it. Many Instagram feeds are ads. This ad blocking debate is taking a very dated and narrow minded view of what an advertisement is.
Ethical ad blockers should let the web page know that they are blocking ads so that the web page can chose to not display the content, or offer a paid option.
It will avoid a stupid arm race between the two parties, and it's transparent.
Ads will never go away and these ad blockers will soon become worthless if the advertising companies ever think they're a threat. There are so many easy ways to defeat ad blocking. This is why I despise Apple for trying to publicize web ad blocking while letting their ads be displayed in their little gated community. Apple is essentially ruining it for the people that do use ad blockers because we're going to reach a point where the ad blockers are unable to block ads due to the myriad of ways publishers will use to foil them. It's only a matter of time before this happens and I hope Apple is paid back for this move in spades.
I was referring to web ads. The elimination of public display ads is irrelevant in this context. I'm preventing the provider of the content I'm consuming from earning a paycheck by blocking their ads. If the city of São Paulo received a revenue share from public advertising, to put towards government funding and reduce their taxation on the public, I'm sure they would change their mind very quickly.
So your argument is that Apple is bad because they let the plebes in on this ad blocking thing? (Rather than leaving them for the techies who are a small enough slide of the population that they can slip under the radar?)
I'd also argue that the way Apple implemented things, it actually takes more savvy to block ads on iOS than on a web browser on a PC. If it were just a default setting in Safari, you'd have a stronger argument.
Party, but my main argument is that they're chronic hypocrites whose sole reason was to hurt Google rather than to protect their users privacy. If they really wanted to protect their privacy they would also block them from their targeted ads.
Please. Anything the advertisers can come up with is easily defeated on the ad-blocking side. The only way the ad companies can get in is to convince ad blockers to let them pay and not be filtered ... which isn't a very good plan when there are open source ad-blockers.
EDIT: If it was easy to bypass ad-blockers, the advertisers would already be doing it.
Oh please. There are so many ways to defeat ad blockers. All a publisher needs to do is serve their content from a single CDN. They can also use polymorphic encryption to completely render the ad blocker useless.
Ok, so when ad blocking was not possible on iOS it was bad, because walled garden, etc. Now, when iOS users finally have a choice it's bad again.
Wonderfull logic.
And nope, advertizers will not beat ad blocking.
"Content blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising)."[1]
This is sad. Their slogan used to be "Work for mankind, not for the man". But the Mozilla Foundation is ad-funded. They currently have a deal with Yahoo to make Yahoo Search their preferred search engine. Before that, it was Google. Those deals bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. So they can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them.
This places them in conflict with Apple. Apple makes their money selling stuff to end users at a high markup. They can be very anti-advertiser if they choose. Apple could block all ads on their devices and market that as a feature.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/10/07/proposed-principles...