An ironic point is that blocking ads actually raises the probability that I will buy the advertisers' product. Example: whenever I see the word "Netflix" now I am conditioned to want to punch a hole through the nearest computer screen. Had I blocked all their ads I may have eventually considered using them. Now I just think of them as the giant annoying red box that inserts itself between me and content I'm interested in.
It's not ironic. It's statistics. Advertising works on a percentage basis across a population. Over all, it sells more products. If it didn't, people would stop doing it.
You may happen to fit within a percentage of the population that will not buy the product after seeing an ad, but that segment is far, far smaller than the percentage of the population that will go out and buy a product after seeing an ad.
I recall being bombarded by their ads via snailmail about 5 years ago, and developing the perception that Netflix was some money-hungry scamming company.
It is for that reason so uncanny now to hear my trusted circle of peers recommend Netflix to me sometimes.
Sort of off topic, but Netflix sends my house snail mail ads, even thought we're already subscribers. I have no idea why, since it seems like it would be easy to fix.
> There is nothing ethically or morally wrong with an ad-blocker.
Haha, that is a huge, unbacked assertion in this article.
Maybe under some ethical systems it's not wrong. However, some of us recognize the concept of a social contract where there is an implicit agreement that if you want to use someone else's resources and they ask payment for it, you are obligated to either
1. Pay them the way they ask (including by viewing the ads they ask you to).
or
2. Not use their resources.
Option three, which is to circumvent paying them by some means, does not become ethical merely because it's easy.
You could also look at this through the lens of the categorical imperative. We haven't yet devised a means through which people can pay for things efficiently over the internet. Ads are the only current viable way to conduct business in situations that call for many small payments for small pieces of content. If everyone blocks ads, this business model becomes impossible, creating a detrimental reality. Thus, according to the categorical imperative, ad blocking is immoral.
> It is no different than using any other technology to filter language or explicit content.
This is incorrect. On typical webpages the author of the content is not being compensated for your hearing curse words or the possibility of your hearing them.
> No one is being harmed.
Not in a direct sense, but in a statistical and economic sense they are.
Basically, this entire article-let is a big instance of begging the question. It reduces to "nothing is wrong with blocking ads because there's nothing unethical about blocking ads," with no correct support. Or, to put it even more ridiculously (but, I think, still being fair to the actual logical content of the article): "nothing is wrong with blocking ads because nothing is wrong with blocking ads."
It's the internet, though. Am I not free to maybe even switch off JavaScript as a whole, or use a browser that can only display text? I thought the general understanding is that you may watch internet sites with whatever browser you like. Unless the site specifically implements restrictions (IE only, for example).
But in general, sorry, but it can't be unethical to switch off JavaScript. And the ethics of pushing ads into people's faces are also debatable.
If your browser lacks a certain capability for reasons other than avoiding paying content providers for their content you consume, it's their responsibility to work around that weakness, or else forbid you from using the site. If they do neither, then it's a tacit agreement that in your special case they are willing to provide the content for free.
Ok, so lets assume that there is an implied agreement upon visiting a website and ad-blocking is therefore closer to "bad" than "good" on the ethical spectrum. Now lets consider that all advertising is intentionally manipulative and deceptive. Where does advertising fall on the ethical spectrum? My point isn't that you shouldn't use advertisements to fund your site. I'm just saying that this 'ethical' argument doesn't matter.
You see, even if you believe that advertising is perfectly ethical and that filtering is unquestionably unethical, I'm still OK with that situation. And I would still block ads. Because in terms of ethics, adblocking is so insignificant it doesn't even register.
To further illustrate: taking more than a living wage while people are starving all over the world and directly causing pollution are both unethical (to me) and I do both every day. I do my best to minimize the damage but I'm not willing to completely give up my lifestyle. And in my mind, these are things that matter way more than implied agreements concerning filtering on websites.
So concerning advertising, I'm not willing to experience everyones obnoxious ads if I can help it. The ethical concerns are a joke. I'd consider becoming a vegan before turning off my adblocker. That is more important to me yet still not important enough that I've changed my behavior. (Steak is too yummy. Sorry Mr. Cow.)
I also use readability and a text summarizer tool, too. Computers and the net are convenient that way: I can take what I want, mix it how I want, and leave the rest.
P.S. Companies like Vibrant Media have ruined the internet.
"Circumventing payment" really is not in this case. It's the other half of the price-finding mechanism in the marketplace for content, which is suspiciously missing from option 1 above. Every price is negotiable, and in this case some small segment of the target audience is offering $0 for the content.
By your logic, it's immoral to mute the TV, go to the kitchen, and make a sandwich during the commercial break. In reality, some percentage of the population makes sandwiches instead of watching ads, and this behavior is priced into the advertising contracts.
> and in this case some small segment of the target audience is offering $0 for the content.
There is a segment like this in every market. It doesn't follow that that segment may ethically consume the content at the price they find acceptable. To be morally right, they must negotiate to a price that the provider also finds agreeable. If they cannot reach agreement on a price, the only morally correct thing is to refrain from consuming the content, _not_ to just consume it anyway.
Perhaps you are overlooking the actual problem: they are asking to be paid $0. There is no price for using the service. They hope to make their buck from a commission on third-party auxiliary content.
If they ask to be paid something, i.e. institute a micropayment- or subscription system, circumventing that is unethical, I agree.
Mind, also, that if we are talking about ethics: is downloading and displaying the ads enough? Am I ethically obligated to actually view or read the ads? If not, is the website acting ethically accepting money for something it cannot guarantee to the advertiser its users will do? What if you are paying for a subscription of some kind? Is it ethical to block ads then? Or is it even ethical for the site to try to show ads if you are already paying them?
If the advertiser told you you had to read them thoroughly, then you might be obligated. However, when content owners put up ads normally all they ask you (/your browser) to do is display them.
> What if you are paying for a subscription of some kind? Is it ethical to block ads then? Or is it even ethical for the site to try to show ads if you are already paying them?
I am not sure. If the advertiser says in your agreement that your subscription fee is the sole payment you need to give them, then blocking ads would surely be fine if they display them. If not, probably still not ethical, though I'm a little more gray on it. It is certainly ethical for content providers to ask payment in composite form from you, but they should be straightforward with you about whether or not you will be expected to display ads even after you pay for their service.
For those who ignore all ads anyways though, using an ad-block simply takes away some distractions and let's both you and the ad-server use less bandwidth. For people who are immune to advertising anyways, I see no harm to the content producers and advertisers.
You don't actually know yourself to be immune to advertising, though, nor can you. If it were possible for someone to know themselves to be perfectly immune to advertising, you might be right. But that, like knowledge of your courage in the face of death or your absolute quality as a lover, is beyond your ken.
Your argument is like the defense of a man who steals an unpopular toy from the shelf, reasoning from his knowledge of the sales of previous unpopular toys that some will surely be returned to the manufacturer and eventually discarded. Yet his action is still unethical because he doesn't truly know to the degree of certainty the moral test demands.
E.g., a McDonald's ad just wants to make you aware of a new thing on the menu.
I just want publishers that publish this kind of ad to be aware that this is evil. So I block the ads, and they get less money as a result. If the advertisers are allowed to exploit negative externalities, I should be too.
Also, it's not my position that you are obligated to click on ads. Trying to make it seem like I claimed that is uncharitable and I'd appreciate it if you stopped.
He used an analogy that involved theft to illustrate a moral point about the potential versus actual results of actions and the conclusions we can draw from them.
Apparently this was too subtle - and I'll admit I had to stop and think for a moment, so perhaps the analogy was confusing/unclear - but I'm fairly sure that the intent was the moral point, not comparing loss-of-revenue-via-non-shown-page-views directly to loss-of-revenue-due-to-theft-of-physical-product.
If they are making money based on views and you're using an ad blocker, then you're essentially taking away their revenue while giving yourself added convenience and/or less annoyance in the process. You're not directly taking the money (i.e. putting it in your own pocket), but you're transferring the value from one form to another, and it's going from them to you. If it's not the definition of stealing, it's pretty close.
>> "Except I haven't clicked on an ad in 9 years anyways."
This is the thing I find funny in these sorts of debates. Of course you've clicked on ads. You click on them every day. You just don't realize they're ads. Sure, they might not be big flashy image 468x60 banner ads, but you click on links every day. Some of those are paid. They're ads.
If you think you don't click on any paid advertising, you're extremely naive.
However, by selling views to a person like me who doesn't help advertisers at all, CPM eventually goes down. So that argument doesn't really hold water. You want views to go to people who are influenced by the ads, otherwise it's just a waste.
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue.
That quote seems to amount to "download the damn ads anyway, even though it'll be a cold day in hell that you find one useful, so we can get paid." Am I the only person to whom that seems arbitrarily close to coercing users into participating in a scheme to intentionally mis-price advertising rates?
Also, "hurt a site financially" seems a bit hyperbolic; ad-blocking users are priced in to CPM. If a content site's audience intersects largely with adblock users, and they don't like the revenue picture, they are more likely to succeed by exploring alternate revenue models or move to serving different audiences, than by convincing their users to change.
[edit] I'm not trying to make a judgment on adblockers being right or wrong, just pointing out what I see as inconsistencies in the argument against them.
To Quote Wladimir Palant, developer of Adblock Plus
"There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren't blocked - make sure the users don't want to block them. Don't forget about the users, use ads in a way that doesn't degrade their experience."
Sounds like a very small phase in a cat-and-mouse chase. The people who use AdBlock are pretty technically savvy, they'll jump on another plug-in that bypasses the hack you've just mentioned in no time. And the hack doesn't work anyway for some existing popular adblock extensions.
Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to move to a different model altogether.
Many technical minded people tend to think that if something will eventually fail, it's not worth doing.
There's an old joke about a horse trainer who was ordered by his king, under penalty of death, to teach his horse to speak. So he very methodically starts to do just that. When asked why he's trying to do the impossible, he answers: "Teaching takes a long time. Maybe the king dies. Maybe the horse dies. Or maybe the horse learns to talk."
afaik, modifying css or not loading the advert is the most common adblock approach. To do anything lower level would be far harder.
One of the whole points of adblock is also to reduce bandwidth usage on the client side, increase load speed etc. So if you're using adblock and not loading ads from the server, that behavior is obvious and easily detected.
Advertising works extremely well. A very small minority of users decide to block all advertising without even giving websites the chance to show value in it.
I disagree about adBlock being tech savvy. Most of the time it's just doing regexps on iframe/image sources. Which is ridiculously naive.
Is this an ad? <a href=/foo.html>beds</a>. Definitely could be, yes. Can adblock block it? Nope.
If adblock did become more widespread (I doubt it will), then the advertising would just move server side, and become more hidden so that it can't be detected.
What's this alternate model you've devised for the web? Say we removed all advertising from the web, how much money would we each have to pay a day to replace that revenue? How many of us would be willing to pay to use the web like that? I know I wouldn't.
Some sites do this. In that case, you can guess that something is an ad based on the size of the image -- advertisers like to buy ads in standard-sized chunks, and you can just block all images that are that size.
Adblock also uses filters available from the Internet that automatically update at a certain interval. So if foo.com is even moderately popular, the filterset will be updated to block your site's ads reasonably quickly.
Finally, NoScript solves the problem of your adblock detector. If I don't run your detection code, the callback will not be called.
The number of people browsing with js disabled is pretty moot these days.
The number of people using Javascript to deny access to their site is pretty low these days. If that increases, the number of people blocking Javascript will increase.
I guarantee you that if someone wants to see the content on your site without ads, they will see the content on your site without ads. For example, you could just draw a white square over the ads instead of blocking them completely. You could make the DOM API return "uh sure, the ad is there", but not actually display it on the screen.
You're fighting a losing battle, and because adblockers are auto-updateable, even small victories won't last long. It's probably a better use of your time to do something, anything, else. It's like DRM -- a lot of development time sunk, just to hurt legitimate users. It doesn't make sense.
As I said, adblocking is extremely naive. <a href=http://www.foo.com>foo.com</a>; could be a paid advert for all you know, and the fact it is or isn't is hidden from you, and your adblocker. So I'm afraid the adblockers are firmly at the ultimate losing side. Sure, you can block intrusive flashing in your face advertising, but that's only one small segment of online advertising. (And nowhere near as effective as text links).
Well, the good news, is that you're an extremely tiny minority.
Most people like ads. Many even click on them! Loads even go on to buy products! Using money!!!!
I wouldn't go so far as to say people like ads. They tolerate them and are influenced by them, yes, but like? That's taking it to a bit of an extreme.
For my case, even though I'm defending these advertisements, I think they are poison. When possible, I pay to get service that lacks ads. If I could pay Google $100 per year to not show me any Adsense or Adwords ads, for example, I probably would.
That's quite a threat. If you make me actually pay for what I consume in your store, I'll take my business elsewhere! You better watch it. I'm not kidding about this. You just lost a non-paying customer, you SOB!
Most sites don't get their views from people typing the URL into the URL bar. Maybe it's the "non-paying customer" that posts your site to HN and Reddit every day. By banning that one user who doesn't like ads, you lose the opportunity to serve thousands of ads.
Also, if you don't like people stealing your content, you'd better block Google. They display their own ads next to your content!
Finally, ads are not just on content sites. Amazon.com has ads, which I block. I spent like $3000 at Amazon last year. If they block me because I'm not viewing their ads, that's $3000 in tangible revenue down the toilet, all so they could make 30 cents on some ad views. Needless to say, I doubt Amazon will be banning me for not viewing ads any time soon.
You're coming out with some crazy strawman arguments. obviously amazon wouldn't block you. They don't make all their money from advertising. They're primarily a retailer :/
I at least somewhat believe that ad-blocking is a symptom rather than a problem. Some advertising legitimately alerts me to things I find interesting, and I avoid blocking ads in general for this reason. Most, however, are repulsive and inconveniencing - I rarely watch enough of an advertisement to see what it actually sells. I generally like ad-supported content models, however, and usually am willing to let the banners ads have their place if it keeps a valuable site in business.
What offends me is the new class of ad that comes with built-in audio. I may add your site to my blocklist/spamlist for doing this. This kind of ad causes awkward social situations and trouble in the office - someone's computer randomly starts blaring out noise in what should be a quiet and focused environment. This is not a social contract - this is a trap.
I think this debate exists for stupid reasons. Advertisers and webmasters have apparently forgotten that ads are supposed to sell something to a customer. If potential customers run away from your ad, then it's time to fire the ad agency and question product-market fit.
Frankly I think what all sites should do is offer ad-free option.
And I'm not talking about the greedy...let's charge $4.99 a month for ad-free service. No, I mean charge users what you are likely to see from them over a year $1-2 one-time micropayment.
This way you still get to make money off ads, you show the passers by...but your core users, can opt out for a small fee. You win, by earning the $$$ you'd ever see from them in a single period. And they win, by not having ads on a site they use all the time.
I was thinking about this recently. My idea was to integrate advertisers as regular users into my web app.
Advantages: Ads are ordinary pictures hosted from my site\domain without javascript so not blockable. No annoying animations for my visitors. Manually targetted ads with a much higher click through rate. No middle man. Could maybe come up with some sort of market algorithm to change price to advertise based on demand rather than negotiating every deal.
Disadvantage: Would probably have to roll my own tracking system? Wouldn't be able to implement as many statistics for advertisers. Increased liability. Harder for small sites.
Does anyone know what the state of "off-the-shelf" advertising systems is for big sites that want to sell ads directly rather than rely on adsense/3rd parties? If anyone wants to hash out some ideas\code for a plug-n-play ad system that sites can drop on there server, gives advertisers dynamic quotes, handles payments/uploads hit me up at dhllndr at gmail, or aim redfoxbeatbox. Could be a good seperate product to monetize.
I take it this is somehow related to the other post about blocking ads.
This post is from 2007, and this quote...
>>And in short, due to the fact that tools like this exist, several webmasters are now refusing to allow netizens to access their respective websites via a Firefox browser.
... seems incredibly off base.
I'm hoping there's something I'm missing that made this post interesting.
For myself, i user adblock and it is very hard for me to imagine my internet experience without it, i eagerly await Fennec on the android platform so i can block ads on my cell browser, it is especially painful there
I think dubbing ad-blockers as stealing is, clearly, idiotic.
But I think it's a fair assertion that your depriving the displaying site of revenue for their content. If everyone used ad blockers would big news agencies offer free services like they currently do?
But then adverts can be a big annoyance.
Both sides have a clear point here. The problem is that the ad blockers hold all the cards - if sites put up a paywall for ad blockers they lose custom. If they circumvent the blockers they just draw fire. If they denounce the blockers they get berated.
Lets at least be a bit ethical: ad blockers are cool. But if you like a site and it's contents and your a regular visitor consider unblocking their ads :) this is what I do and I dont begrudge them it (I will still block some of the more "in your face" ads on a case by case basis)
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with blocking ads, especially if you find them offensive. Some of the worst examples feature rapidly flashing animations. To someone like me they're just an irritant to be eliminated as quickly as possible. To someone with epilepsy the situation could be more serious. This sort of disrespectful advertising is what we don't want to see on the web. I'm not against advertising online, but I think there need to be changes in the way ads are served/approved/regulated - perhaps with an industry-wide code of conduct being adopted. Ads are subject to regulation when they're shown on television, and maybe there needs to be some similar process for the internet.
And in short, due to the fact that tools like this exist, several webmasters are now refusing to allow netizens to access their respective websites via a Firefox browser.
LOL, using user-supplied data as an access control method? Sure, keep doing that, it works great!
I also recommend replacing the locks on your house with a sign that says, "Authorized personnel only."
