I've been on the fence about this for a while, and after reading what GroundUp wrote, I can't agree with them more. So I think it's time for me to dump Google Ads from my sites, as well. I send Big G three million ad impressions a month, and in return I get $150 and a bunch of visual dreck that makes the site look bad. $200, if I'm lucky. And this is all U.S. traffic on an award-winning news site. I only need to sell one more local ad to more than make up for the loss, and I get the extra benefit of having only quality, relevant advertising on my site.
So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."
3,000,000 for $150? That's criminal. How are you only getting 5 cents per thousand impressions? Are you getting really low quality traffic from far eastern countries or something? That's just extremely low even for Google. If your CTR is the problem, have you looked at placement optimization?
My recommendation is to sell the space directly on BuySellAds. At $1.00 CPM it would fly off the shelves, but you can get much more than that with a little patience (and provided that your visitors have at least some kind of quality).
One thing to remember is that publisher revenue is net Google's monetization cut. Publisher's see just 68% of ad revenue sold on their site. So $150 is really $220.58 in gross, which is significantly higher.
Another point to remember is that typically publishers only sell to Google AdSense their unsold (so-called "non-guaranteed") inventory. Typically you take this money because it's better than nothing, and because you couldn't sell this inventory yourself. Usually this non-guaranteed inventory has a lower value then the stuff you'd sell yourself.
There's a lot of reference-style material on news sites, and the CTRs on that are not bad. Just look at Wirecutter and its affiliate model.
That said, industry average for news display ads is about 0.05%... 1 click per 2,000 impressions. No bueno. Say 3m impression get 1.5k clicks, that's $0.33 CPC net or about $0.49 CPC gross.
Not necessarily, I have computer-related content which gets results like this (a bit better than this, but I assumed that the parent poster was exaggerating a bit about the 3x10^6 traffic). The problem is quite notorious, and AdSense now refuses new "tech" content.
I was under the impression that most modern blockers (uBlock etc) simply block that request from the site to the adserver, so no they wouldn't count as an impression.
I'm working on something that will benefit people who have high traffic sites that don't want to show their users ads. The basics are here: http://www.trussapp.com/ -- it's not quite ready for production, but if it's something you might be interested in, I'm looking for beta users. cam@trussapp.com
Small nitpick, and if you want some unsolicited feedback on that site: the GIF that shows a user using the site goes super slow and it would be a lot more engaging if the user typed faster.
Although I don't know how much I can blame this on connection problems on my end, it looks like it takes five seconds or so to type "Test Tester", when in my opinion it should take only one.
It's effectively the same thing, but it prevents users from having to leave your site to contribute. The hope is that it will increase donations because of that.
The amount of money you get from Google Adsense depends on the type of content. I looked at your profile but didn't find any information on what sites you might be running. Since this is hacker news, it might be that your site contains computer-related content. That type of content gets very low RPM. Still 3,000,000 impressions a month is quite a lot, so your site is obviously popular.
Put your site in your profile. We need to support businesses like your.
Google is no cake-walk from the other end either. As someone who has paid them for ads, over 70% of the clicks are...shall we say?... low quality. Of course if you only run Google Analytics you may never realize this, but if you cross-check with something else you will.
The idea that google can better qualify leads based on search results has basically failed. Online advertising needs to be treated the same as the other media: just a method of branding.
I much prefer to pay-per-view rather than -per-click. At least I feel like I'm getting what I pay for.
Off topic: this is the first time I've heard of GroundUp, and I really like the "Dear Editor" format of the comment page on this site.
I'm used to seeing mainstream newspaper websites with downright toxic commenting environments, so seeing "Dear Editor" followed by a thought-out response is very refreshing. Maybe they have a "better" readership/screening process/whatever, but I think this higher quality commenting behavior is in part due to how GroundUp has simply tweaked the wording of the comment box interface - by framing the comment with "Dear Editor".
"In contrast to comments, letters are only published if approved by our editors. Views expressed in letters are not necessarily endorsed by GroundUp, but they must meet our quality requirements. Letters are given more prominence than comments on the website. "
It's not just the framing. They call their comments "letters". Try clicking the "Write a letter in response to this article" button. The UI is designed to promote constructive comments.
Great observation. I think the UI wants to remember that this article was written by another human being. A simple solution to encourage civil conversation.
When I started with Google ads, Google was classier than other ad networks. Other ad networks were stuffed with free ringtones, sketchy supplements and other scams.
Then at some point Google gave me the option to opt out of various objectionable topics and soon Google ads got as bad as the others. Maybe Google bought the bad ad networks, or partnered with them or something.
Quite a bit of subtext is largely unexamined. AT&T and Verizon, two of the biggest advertisers, have pulled out from YouTube. AT&T is the biggest pay TV provider in the US now (DirecTV) and Verizon wishes you would watch Go90 so they could sell ads against it. Both of them benefit if ad spend goes elsewhere than YouTube.
I worried when Google bought DoubleClick many years back if Google would become as bad as DoubleClick. I don't think we can point fingers at any one thing precisely, but that did seem like an omen at the time.
I think the problem with ads on the internet is that it will always be a race to the bottom. Ads on TV and in newspapers/magazines have scarcities in play to somewhat help manage them. Ad space on the internet has never been scarce.
The ad companies (Google and Facebook especially) see themselves as somehow unbiased market platforms, and I think we are coming to point where the lack of scarcities leaves "neutral" platforms vulnerable to very cheap "attacks". I worry that ad platforms need to exert a lot more editorial control in the face of that and/or start building a lot more artificial scarcity into their platforms, and I don't think any of them are appropriately incentivized to do that.
I also worry that Google and Facebook's ad spaces are content spaces: search ads at the top of search results, and sponsored "posts" that have like/share/comment abilities. I think that also requires a custodianship and a moral obligation to editorially control those spaces that neither Google nor Facebook have thus far been inclined to take enough responsibility for. Facebook especially, when liked/shared ads graduate to "real" viral content, entirely blurring the lines between ads and content and giving direct power to cheap micro-targeting attacks without having some editorial immune system to help avoid the worst memetic viruses. (Facebook claims to want to do better, but their fiduciary responsibility incentivizes them not to treat ads as user hostile infection points.)
> I worried when Google bought DoubleClick many years back if Google would become as bad as DoubleClick.
Me too, but not so much about the content ("ads is ads", I used to think), but about privacy and the relentless tracking that DoubleClick was doing. And oooh boy, did that omen ever come true.
Another thing was the moment when I realized the implications of having a giant Internet-wide ad-network implemented in the form of injected third-party javascript. I mean, at first it seemed real clever. This wasn't a big thing back then, just yet. Originally ads were just clickable image links with an affiliate code in the GET parameter and http-referer tracking (which already provides an advertiser way more info about their audience then a printed ad in a magazine would, so yes that is more than sufficient for advertisers who honestly want to advertise instead of spying on people).
It's a miracle that over the existence of AdSense, nobody ever managed to XSS the entire Internet. Even if that can be attributed to the AdSense team awareness of their unique position of responsibility and engineering quality control or something; We still dodged a bullet with that one, because it just so happens that it was the Google that came into control of the largest XSS vector in history. But having quality control and a culture of responsibility didn't cause becoming the largest and gaining control (it just means they got to keep it, because it hasn't gone horribly wrong--for which we are lucky). A while back I read a comment on HN arguing (though I'm not sure if they realized) that whether something is a "good product" depends more on how well it is marketed (and therefore finds its way to people that can use it) than it depends on the quality of the product. That's horrible, but like too many horrible things, also true in some sense. So it just so happened that the ad-network that was marketed best and became one of the largest and most successful, also happened to be one that was of sufficient quality to not break the Internet.
Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's in a database somewhere, it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen and someone attempts to hijack accounts or steal an identity.
It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. When you take away the option to protect myself, you accept responsibility for attacks. After all, if it's morally/legally wrong to alter the presentation of the content they serve, then they also morally/legally responsible for incidents when they serve it improperly and cause losses/damages. Quite obviously it's not financially viable for them to pay for their negligence, and so it's also not financially viable for me to trust that a site won't host some sort of attack vector.
The pennies of advertising revenue earned from my modest browsing over the course of a year doesn't pay nearly enough to compensate for the time I lose through dealing with malicious ads. Unless online advertising cleans itself up, adblockers will be the best option. And sites that don't respect that aren't sites I'm interested in.
As such I went along with allowing google ads since it seemed like a good middle ground between not wanting to have everything pay-walled off and still allowing sites to generate ad money
The claim is that a YouTube ad was serving malware.
However, upon reading the article, it seems that:
1. Somebody purchased legitimate YouTube ad space.
2. They then redirected that traffic twice through two other legitimate ad networks.
3. They then broke into a Polish government website, and funnelled the traffic there, to serve up malware.
That certainly doesn't seem to be a case of Google/YouTube serving up malware - if anything, these attacks went to a lot of trouble to obscure from YouTube what they were doing, precisely so they wouldn't get shut-down (presumably by either YouTube, or the two other ad networks they were piggy-backing on).
You could argue, they should have caught them earlier - but isn't that a bit like blaming your email provider that you got a spam/malware email - when the actual party to blame is the person sending you aforesaid spam/malware?
I'm not sure what you expect "Google ads serving malware" to mean other than exactly this. Of course it's not as simple as going into Google ad manager and clicking "upload virus". The fact that it included partner networks and a compromised website is unsurprising. When malware makes it through ad networks, it is common for it to take that kind of approach. At the end of the day you're effectively exploiting networks of trust.
>>> has google ads been responsible for virus/malware in the past?
Yes. Very much so.
Look for "VLC download" for instance, the first ads should be adware sites that distribute a fake version of the software and they paid to get that top search position.
Not doing it in the first place, of course! Because this has happened with VLC (a fact you seem to ignore), maybe they fixed it by now, or maybe it's temporary, or maybe you're just not in the "stupid people that would fall for this" filter bubble, but for quite a while Google Ads have been responsible for serving malware and damaging people's computers.
Also just because they try and fix it after the fact for VLC, doesn't mean it's not still happening for all sorts of other software. Google's approach for curation of ads is just not suitable to be able to provide a platform this large in a responsible manner (and I doubt it can ever be, but that doesn't give them a free ticket to behave irresponsibly).
Maybe you've forgotten what this thread was about in the first place, but if their policy is "we will remove ads that contain/link to malware as soon as they are (made) aware of them", then:
1) it's still a perfectly smart choice to use an adblocker because you can still get malware from ads (in addition to many of the other reasons such as opting out of clickbait timewasters, whose "innocence" evaporates as soon as you consider their scale), and a particularly important and smart choice to install it on people's computers that would actually fall for such a fake download link, which is not the HN crowd.
2) as a publisher, I would DEFINITELY want a much tighter guarantee on not serving/linking malware than "we'll remove it when we see it" because now it's not just my safety on the line (or my father trying to download VLC cause I told him over the phone, etc) but my entire audience!
I know I am careful personally, what to click and install, but I honestly wonder how long I myself could keep a fresh Windows install malware-free without running an adblocker. Some of those things are nasty clever and misleading (not thinking about Google Ads in particular, here). Ever consider the amount of good those people are doing? The ones writing the adblockers and keeping the blocklists up-to-date? They are not even getting paid to do it. It gives me such a bitter taste, every time I see a website whining about my adblocker usage. If you care so much, why are you using a third party ad network. If hosting and linking and curating your own advertisements is too much to ask, well then so is me whitelisting your site, sheesh.
"Malware, short for malicious software, is any software used to disrupt computer or mobile operations, gather sensitive information, gain access to private computer systems, or display unwanted advertising. Before the term malware was coined by Yisrael Radai in 1990, malicious software was referred to as computer viruses." [1] [2]
I don't think most people would consider Google's purposeful display ads, which site owners choose to put there and customers expect to see, 'Malware.' I think Adware/Advertising Malware refers to software that shows unexpected ads, such as after you leave the site, or installing software on your computer that randomly shows ads.
> disrupt computer or mobile operations, gather sensitive information, gain access to private computer systems, or display unwanted advertising
"Google Ads" is injected third-party code that literally does all of these things (and goes through quite some trouble to obfuscate it) (even if us techies are aware).
And they pay people to serve it to you.
I would like to consider my Android phone to be a "private computer system", yet Google has full access to it and they will disrupt its operations whenever I try to prevent them from either 1) gathering sensitive information or 2) displaying unwanted advertising.
But it came with Android when I bought it, yes? And I chose to agree to this agreement or something, right? Well first, we know by now that this "choice" is mostly illusion. I put Cyanogenmod on it to better protect myself, but the disruption persists and it merely exposes how aggressive the malware in fact is as soon as you put up any form of resistance. The mob can also be real nice people if you don't stand in their way. Also, if you buy a new laptop, the crapware it comes bundled with, is that malware? What if it would disrupt and limit the operation of this laptop if you decide not to use it (yes you must actually use it and thus provide them with sensitive private tracking data, not merely refrain from trying to uninstall it).
Of course I don't really consider my phone to be a "private computer system", not any more, but that is exactly the sad state of affairs. I can't consider it private because I am aware of the above and my lack of real choice in the matter. But this way you can argue that any computer system that malware has gained access to, is no longer private. But that is basically just giving up.
It's a very natural human instinct to legitimize something just because it's the largest, most successful player. There's an internal urge to want to side with the winner. But not all human urges are rational or even okay to give in to, without seriously considering the implications.
Well... You do have the choice to buy a phone with an OS from a company who's business is to sell phones, rather than ads, don't you? Seems a bit absurd to claim a lack of real choice in this instance.
I think they are talking about the tracking capabilities of these ads, which are unexpected by the user and compromise their privacy. Thus, they behave as malware.
I have gone so far as to suggest a significant portion of Google's revenue is likely serving malicious content, which leaves them very little incentive to do anything about it.
Almost every senior citizen I've ever had clean up malware for got it from a malicious search ad. And the tech support scams they continue to list take advantage of tons of people as well.
I've pointed out before that Google happily lists phone numbers of tech support scams on search terms for Windows tech support, but doesn't show ads at all if you look for Chromebook support, pointing you straight to their official contact.
As a note, if anyone would like to see examples of this in action, I can go get screenshots and example links and everything, it just takes a little while to put together, as I would prefer to offer evidence of what I see "today" rather than any past examples I might have.
> I have gone so far as to suggest a significant portion of Google's revenue is likely serving malicious content, which leaves them very little incentive to do anything about it.
That's quite a serious accusation :). One that is not substantiated by the facts:
A Google blog post is not "the facts". A Google blog post is, in fact, an ad for Google. Your sources should be independent, and independently verifiable. What Google says they do is useless, because it cannot be verified.
Do you have anything specific that would refute anything in the report? Simply mounting an ad-hominem attack doesn't add anything to the discussion.
It's like somebody saying "Tesla cars suck - they explode". And Elon Musk comes out and says, "No they don't, here's the testing/validation we did". And you say "Oh but...but....you work for Tesla. It must be lies!"
If there's factual inaccuracies - of course, that's a different story. But you seem to be simply saying, "They must be lying, because that suits my narrative, so I'm not going to bother trying to refute it".
Reply All did a great episode about google assisting in scammers operations inadvertently. It primarily focuses on the barrage of cheap shady lock smith services offered as sponsored ads at the top of google results.
It is quite exaggerated to say that a significant portion of Google's revenue comes from serving malicious content.
But malicious content (even on the SERP) is common enough that one of the most effective steps that you can do to protect senior citizens from malware is to install a good ad blocker. The ironic thing is that the search algorithm does a decent job of filtering out malicious sites from appearing on the first page, but that does no good if there is a malicious ad right above the filtered results.
That's a key point. Google's primary business model relies on convincing you to not click on the "best search result". This is why they have, over time, reduced the visible difference between ads and real results. I've regularly found that lay users are not aware they are clicking on ads when they click on Google's search ads.
Even if Google is removing "x million bad ads", they are merely replacing bad ads with other bad ads. Removing bad ads doesn't significantly impact their revenue. I'd argue that while Google is willing to make gestures like removing some ads, they are unwilling to do what's necessary to protect users: Stop serving ads entirely where malicious ads are particularly prevalent, and clearly highlight the difference between ads and search results.
Wow, thanks for this. I've been using an adblocker for a while (and even before, I was "blind" to Google ads), but it's really ridiculous what comes up by searching for e.g. "windows help" or "hp support". Shame on Google!
I've known several people on the abuse teams for ad revenue at Google and I can tell you they work very hard and care deeply at preventing malware. It is, however, an extremely non-trivial task.
To be clear, I don't really fault those people specifically, I'm sure they do the absolute best at the jobs they are given. But this is a systemic issue with Google and the sort of solution that would actually fix it would cost more profits than they intend to spend on unimportant issues like protecting consumers from fraud.
A variant of this that highlights the absurdity of that very nicely are auto-redirecting mobile ads. The two valid options according to the site (and anti-ad-blocker people) would be:
1) Don't open the site to begin with.
2) Open the site and instantly get redirected.
Note how none of the options entails actually reading the content provided by the site.
So if there is no valid way to consume the content, you could ask why it is there in the first place.
I noticed this a while back, and it annoyed the hell out of me. So on my iPhone I have JavaScript permanently disabled on safari, which is my default browser and use chrome as an auxiliary for any site that I really want to access but can't do so without JavaScript enabled in safari.
> It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site.
yep. This is an effective way to get newspapers whining about ad blockers to shut up as well.
Every time I'm blocked from a news site because of my blocker, I just get context from comments and move on with my life. It's so rare that there's important information beyond what's in the headline anyways. I respect paywalls much more.
For smaller websites (also referred to the democratization of the internet), I am sure many people may (or have) feel (felt) guilty for using an ad-blocker.
Then you see all those shitty ads for:
- finding a russian bride
- getting rich through some millionaires secret
- anti-aging remedies
- adware
and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
People keep saying that "journalism is dying", but this industry and its ad-model isn't very "old" in historical terms. For every Business Insider that dies, the world will carry on. For quality journalism (an oxymoron of sorts) and news that matters to people and their circumstances, I assume people will keep forking out money (like they do for The Economist).
If someone smarter than myself can elaborate, how is Googles business-model for ads on 3rd-party websites sustainable for the long-term?
My attitude toward ad blockers was always "meh". I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish. Using an ad blocker is just modifying the rendering algorithm, much the same way as I could use a French to Russian translator, something that increases font sizes, or throwing on a custom stylesheet. I can write my own web browser, if I wish.
Some percentage of users will use ad blockers, and businesses should account for that. If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented. One thing I've been hoping for is inventing some form of advertising that was actually fun for the user -- fun enough that they would not want to block them.
Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user. That will incentivize people to unblock ads.
My eyeballs are not being loaned to you; my senses/attention is not for sale.
I'm perfectly fine with paywalls - that's the 'correct' approach as far as I'm concerned. You can decide to conceal the information you know; if it's valuable and nonexcludable (usually isn't), then hey, you have a sale. But if you don't, don't expect your deals with third parties to hold up on some promise you made to them about how I browse.
> if it's valuable and nonexcludable (usually isn't)...
That right there is the problem, though. You are right that most information is "non excludable" (if that actually is a word).
But that doesn't mean it isn't valuable. That's an illusion, conceptually very much like clean water: almost free, but vital.
The stuff the wire services collect and sell (and that everybody republishes) does cost quite a lot to produce, and it's the backbone of the news ecosystem. It's subjective value is further diminished by its anodyne voice, making it difficult to picture the actual people reporting it.
Maybe the publishers do actually have a case for a new class of intellectual property protection. I'm horrified of the prospect, but within the current market dynamics, I don't see much of a future for quality journalism. Public opinion is critical of every and all publications, indiscriminately, and quick to use that as an argument for not subscribing. Wall Street may still pay for Bloomberg and the like, but Main Street doesn't see why. Maybe the NYT spent two or three million on some investigation. Once published, the information is delayed by little else than the time it takes the guy at BillingsMorningNews.com to switch a few sentences around.
With regards to ad blockers, you are right in that there is nothing in the law that should stop anyone from using them. But that's not really the argument. Nor is anybody disagreeing that ad tech needs drastic changes.
But fundamentally, the question is if blocking ads isn't hurting your own interests. Sure, there are many sources for the same information, usually. But the one you're reading probably has some small advantage, which is why you are using it. Once that publication folds, you have already lost something. And I'm not optimistic that the process will stop before it has drastic consequences on diversity and availability.
It also sometimes needs reminding that for an individual, news often seems like a guilty pleasure. But for a society, news is vital. Without it, you can't even keep up the appearances of democracy.
It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, obviously: blocking ads is vastly advantageous for the individual, just as fishing with the really big net is for the fisherman. But, thinking a bit broader, the question becomes: What's better – reading the news with annoying ads, or not reading the news?
My view is that if the population is watching ads, and somehow that is enough to float a business, then the population is actually paying for the business already, but through an indirect middleman.
The population pays for it by buying more or paying more of some products -- in a time and manner that provides evidence to networks, content vendors, and advertisers of business justification.
If we drill down further into the population, I think we'll find that some population of people either view or don't view ads, but don't adequately change their purchasing behavior in a time and manner so as to provide signal.
In other words, some people are takers, and some people are contributors. The people who are takers -- that is, whether or not they look at ads, click through, or whatever, they don't sufficiently change their their market behavior in a time and manner that provides evidence for business justification -- possibly detract from all mentioned parties because they diminish the business justification of the whole affair.
In tension against the takers, the people who are contributors are paying more than what they need to for the service because they're subsidizing "news" for other people.
Note that I don't really consider revenue in situations where eventually advertising clients figure out that they lack the business justification to pursue some advertising venue, such as intermediate marketing metrics that payout to businesses, but then the lack of justification for an advertising decision is later discovered. People who are marked by intermediate marketing metrics but don't go on to yada yada market behavior, are still "takers" in my view.
With that said, I think the money is there, people are already paying for news, but maybe the people who are paying should have more say than those who don't pay. Otherwise, it's the advertisers who have say, and the advertisers sponsor some pathological news outlets.
So in my view, people who argue for advertising are arguing that only advertisers can do the financing of the news world, and that contributors should continue to float takers.
It is very much in the interest of these indirect middlemen, the third-party advertising networks, to obfuscate the direct connection/signal between advertising and buying products, while on the other hand trying to make this connection seem as favourable as possible, to both sides (publisher and product-advertiser). So they work to remain in full control of this evidence and which parts of it are shown to either party. I don't want to imply they are lying (not without proof, anyway) but it's a very open secret that are very selective in how and what information they reveal to which of the two sides they are middlemen between.
It kind of seems like an arbitrage situation. But if I understand correctly, those are only good as long as they naturally "deflate" and sort restore balance back. Instead, there is some information-hiding going on that artificially props up this situation at cost for everyone but the third-party ad industry and middlemen. I think that situation is not very good.
Your argument sounds either as if people are obligated not only to watch ads but to change purchasing decisions based on them or the less gullible people ought to pay more.
I'm not even sure how to effect the latter without making the current fish bowl infinitly more invasive.
Even your choice of words is revelatory of a profoundly scewed perspective full of imaginary obligations. Of course those whose livelihood depends on a particular arrangement often seem to feel that the current state of affairs is necessary to the world at large as if the current good effects are both essential and couldn't be achieved any other way.
"News" are bad for you and bad for democracy. "News" are not what we think about when we think about the word "news", ie, reporting about important issues in the world, put in perspective -- historical perspective, geographical perspective, etc.
Actual news are, in essence, gossip. They destroy people's ability to think and reason.
News agencies are the worst. They define the agenda, what is important and what isn't. They pollute the "news ecosystem" right at the source.
Adblock is one way to fight back. Not the only way but a good way.
I agree in the sense that I think "news" alone is rather worthless. You need an analysis, a context to make sense of it. Agenda and partisanship are not necessarily deal breakers IMO, as long as people are being forward and honest about it instead of faking "neutrality", whatever that is. You can be partisan while keeping your eyes open and your thinking critical instead of devolving into propaganda pamphlets. In a sense I believe that the idea of a completely fair and unbiased reporting is completely absurd.
For this reason I only subscribe to weekly or even monthly newspapers. It means those journalists are not racing to be the first ones to relay any information completely raw. Instead they can take a bit of distance, take time to analyze the situation and think of its possible consequences.
I don't know what to do when I'm told that there's been a terrorist attack in a country thousands of kilometers from me. Then we get a stream of picture, and a death count updated every femtosecond. It's sad, sure, but then what? Learning about the causes and consequences of this attack and how they fit in the history and geopolitics of our societies, now that's a lot more interesting and maybe even actionable.
It's hard to find. Even NYT does this as opinion pages. Go to their home page, it's got a significant area of opinion. It gets progressively worse the further down the line (of news companies) you go.
The problem is news agencies is the only way to get information. Spicer doesn't invite "regular dude Joe." We in an information desert.
Disclaimer: I live in the US, and run an adblock indiscriminately and urge others to do the same.
Yes, news as we generally know it contains a lot of fluff, is almost certainly biased - whether politically or racially - and misleads through omission and incredible sources, we can go on. But, who will then do the reporting if these big news sources do not? Imagine a world without CNN or NYT or whatever. All of these sources are blamed by one political party or another to be biased and left/right/radical/whatever leaning. If we got rid of them and relied only on the smaller news entities and blogs and such, who will do the reporting on wars in Syria and Ukraine? Or who will report on whistle blowers and interview them? Why would someone of Edward Snowden's level of infamy be interviewed by a no-name news paper? Actually, on the topic of infamy, would it have even been possible for Edward Snowden to stay alive so far if general opinion was not so divided? If no one knew about him, what would save him? I would credit those same big news entities with spreading his story around and making him known. I believe that credible news sources are required for a healthy democracy, and that news organizations need to make money. Last thing we need is a government-run news entity (how can we trust one to keep us informed about grievances our governments may commit. Lets not kid ourselves and declare that the government is perfect or has the citizens' best interests at heart).
> Lets not kid ourselves and declare that the government is perfect or has the citizens' best interests at heart.
Let's also not kid ourselves about the notion of the current, big, established news organizations being independent of the same conflicting interests that ensare various parts of the federal government. No, the government doesn't control the media. Rather, big corporations and rich moguls control the government, AND the media, to the same ends.
> reading the news with annoying ads, or not reading the news?
False dichotomy.
Firstly, ads don't have to be annoying.
Secondly, news doesn't have to be financed by ads.
There are lots of smaller and independent news sources that don't rely on ads for funding. The news organisation linked to in the article is a case in point. They make their money from donations. Another one is insurge intelligence (https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence) which uses crowdfunding.
> Maybe the publishers do actually have a case for a new class of intellectual property protection.
No. They gambled that they could make money giving their content away for free with ads on it. They were never guaranteed an income that way, and to legislate one for them is a terrible way to proceed. We have a name for those people in Australia: rent-seekers.
It's a good question, and I was about to mention the tragedy-of-the-commons trade-off, but you already did half of that in your final paragraph.
The other half is, that the third-party ad networks themselves are in fact already feeding a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. Somewhere in the whole maelstrom of shitty clickbait websites funded by ads for other shitty clickbait websites. I read an article recently linked here about those weird vague thumbnail image clickbait links (the ones about celebrities, diets and skin diseases, mostly) that appear below low quality articles. They followed the links, and it just led to more and more of the same, but it did so while spiraling downward into a lowest common denominator like way, way lower than I'd have imagined.
There's some really out-of-control complex systems (in the systems theory sense of the word) in the guts of the advertising industry and they are already causing tragedy-of-the-commons situations way before, and regardless of, people using ad blockers.
Disabling the ad blocker is not going to help fix those (they'll just gobble up the extra profit). And even then, to (personally) answer your question, yes I think using ad blockers is a net benefit if it keeps those systems at least somewhat in check.
Paper newspapers aren't best for society as a whole when you consider the environment impact of production and distribution. Even with recycling, newsprint causes a lot of pollution. And then the distribution vehicles have to drive around every day.
With "in paper", I mean mostly that you subscribe to a daily or weekly single release.
Be it paper or as e-paper on your tablet.
But in either case, subscription costs are a lot more reasonable than subscribing to the website, and you get high quality content with only very few, handpicked, ads. Which also can't track you on paper or in the PDF
Find journalism with taxes? Then wouldn't it follow that those journalists would have a disincentive to serve as a check to their masters that pay them?
Journalism's oldest and most important role is to serve as a watchdog over government. When they start profiting from government, they'll be less likely to be critical of it.
Journalism should be supported by the free market. If people want it, they pay. If nobody wants to pay, then you either adapt or die. The really good media outlets are doing just fine (i.e. The Economist, NY Times,) those on the margins are at risk -- but that's their own fault.
State supported media has the potential to turn into Pravda (for the political party from whom they garner the most support, usually leftists,) and it generally does, albeit with much more subtlety.
> Find journalism with taxes? Then wouldn't it follow that those journalists would have a disincentive to serve as a check to their masters that pay them?
Do you think the BBC is biased? ARD, ZDF? They are not.
Because they don't get paid by the government, but they have the right to collect their own taxes instead. That way they are independent, and still always funded.
>Find journalism with taxes? Then wouldn't it follow that those journalists would have a disincentive to serve as a check to their masters that pay them?
How is this different than your "masters" being mega-corporations?
At least in a publicly funded organization there would be transparent checks and balances in place.
> if it's valuable and nonexcludable (usually isn't), then hey, you have a sale.
Which means now we need to have some kind of legal, international safeguard to protect against content thieves, who copy paywalled content and publish it themselves. Everyone loses in that scenario.
I completely agree with the principle of being paid for my time to create content. If I choose the publish it for free, that is my choice. If I need to charge for it to feed my kids, that is my choice too.
Whether this means that everyone loses ... I'm not directly disagreeing with that either (I don't like copyright/intellectual property rights in their current form at all), but let's get the facts straight first :)
Moot argument. If everyone charged for their time creating content on the internet, you would buy the best quality content. Newspapers had this model for decades, worked for them.
Not really. It's a change in model that the internet has created, and one that's going to be nigh impossible to undo. If everyone charged for their work, you'd be right, but it's basically impossible to end up in that situation now. Because for everyone charging money there's ten who realise they can out compete them by offering it for free (either out of the 'kindness' of their heart or funded by venture capital).
It's the same situation with smartphone apps about now. Yes, it's an absolute mire of low quality, exploitative crap at the moment, but when developers try and avoid this by just charging full price (like Nintendo with Super Mario Run), they find their apps are significantly less popular/profitable than if they'd be 'freemium' all along and end up getting a virtual tongue lashing from audiences who expect 'mobile app' to equal 'free with ads/microtransactions'.
Unless everyone charges money for content (which is likely happening because of business reasons) or some service genuinely manage to repair the media's reputation enough people will pay for it and also offers a better, more usable product than everyone else, things aren't changing.
When the Washington Post offered me an online subscription (I live in Boston now but grew up and started my family in the Washington DC area) for $20 it was a no-brainer. The next year they wanted $100 and I worked them down to $50 so I took it. This year they wanted $100 so they got $0. If they charged $20 or $30 a year I bet they would get subscribers if the ad-revenue model died. But it's a winner-take-all operation. WaPo will dominate (along with the NY Times and WS Journal) because of their reputations. The El Paso whatever will be out of luck.
One way to get the charge-for-content back might be to demonstrate how much privacy people are losing and to make some noise about it.
Or news outlets could adopt the academic publishers / netflix / steam(?) model, and aggregate their subscriptions. I too would not pay $100 / year for WaPo. But I would pay $100/year for access to a quality selection of international news organizations. It is a blindingly obvious solution which I suspect is only hindered by pride and unrealistic expectations. There are a myriad of ways the profit could be split internally - it does not even require great creativity to find something that works fairly well, since it has all been done before numerous times.
Interesting isn't it. Upthread there's someone saying to just use the newspaper model as it worked for decades, and here are two people saying they won't pay a fraction of the newspaper model (~27c/day).
Instead you want an immense pool of content generation for that 27c per day. Good journalism isn't cheap - that's why paper newspapers cost what they do and are full of adverts - but you want to pay rock-bottom prices to individual sources whilst still pretending that you're paying a 'reasonable amount'.
The entire newspaper is not of value to me, and I read a newspaper worth of articles total, so I think it is fair to pay a newspaper's worth of subscription prices and have that revenue spread around to the business whose articles I read. Any subscription model can have a quantified limit to my access. Like I said, this isn't hard to think about or do.
There are movies that cost hundreds of millions to make which make up just one more item in the Netflix catalogue, and Hollywood is far from hurting. It may cost enormous amounts to produce good news, but this is true of the business model I am pointing out as well.
Almost. I should point out that I do subscribe to the Boston Globe since that's where I live. The WaPo would be in addition- for that I would only want to pay a delta. This is a new revenue channel for them, not taking away the old one.
Yeah, and that says more about the perceived value of their content more than their business model. Paying for news is something that basically every household in the US did up until recently so it's a tough argument to make that people are unwilling. But the honest truth is that their content isn't that much better than the ad supported alternatives.
Plenty of newspapers have shuttered their shops, and editing quality has gone way down. It used to be that seeing a single typo in a competitor's paper was cause for jubilation. These days mistakes are everywhere. In the past couple of years the most egregious ones I've seen were 'mruder' and 'hgihway' - these words don't even pass a spell-checker.
> Experience has proven time and time again that putting up paywalls just makes people go elsewhere.
Isn't Spotify and Netflix evidence that suggest otherwise. All the music on Spotify is available for free on the so called dodgy sites. Torrents and whatnot. Heck, you can even listen to it for free on FM radio! However, literally millions of people choose to pay for Spotify - because it's worth it.
The news is no different. If news content providers provide a useful service, millions of people WILL pay.
My analysis is that millions of people avoid paying because news content providers don't sell news, they sell people. They sell their readers as fodder to the ad men. When that business model changes, people will pay for news.
Publishers that have come to the web from old-school media are still failing to understand the medium. They take their print content, slap it up on a website (designed to replicate the look of a print newspaper!), surround it with ads, and expect it to behave in exactly the same way as hardcopy newspapers. It doesn't, for a myriad of reasons.
I have experience of this world, having worked with old-school book publishers and old-media print journalists. They are way too entrenched in their understanding of publishing/journalism to make the change. The closest I've seen anyone get to something that might work, and they're still a long, long way off, is the Guardian. At least they understand that a) they need to provide additional content, suited to the medium (e.g. quality infographics, interactive data, etc.) and b) online advertising is not enough, but current paywall implementations are a poor substitute.
Spotify is a great example to compare. If Spotify worked the same way as online news, you'd go to Spotify, browse through some skeuomorphic representation of a CD rack, get interrupted, find an album you like the look of, listen to the album with an obnoxious advert between each song, put it back in the rack, repeat. Is there a single newspaper that will allow me to even, for example, do something useful with their content by collecting it / tagging it / whatever for future reference? Will they let my contacts, or famous people, recommend content on a particular subject? Will they offer any kind of api for other publishers wishing to reference their material?
Thought this would just be a rant against old media but the last paragraph surprised me. Yes, that would be interesting. Not sure if spotify for news would work but a single db where you could read up on most major publications content around a specific subject or search term, standard interface, could be amazing.
This existed (kind of) in an App called Pulse. It was a feed reader, not a database, but it was brilliant for organizing news articles and searching by title.
Then LinkedIn bought it and promptly ruined, then shuttered it. Still waiting for someone to release a new newsreader app with the same scrolling format. I would have absolutely paid to keep and improve that app.
NYT's digital arm has a paywall and their digital revenue is something over a half-billion dollars per year. The group that WSJ is part of, NewsCorp's "news and information services" unit, has annual revenues well over a billion dollars.
I'm pretty sure that should cover their server bills.
The point is that it is winners-take-all now. There are a few winners with strong businesses, like the ones you mentioned, but it is not a broadly strong industry. That was not the case with print, where the local paper had some advantages in their home market.
This seems to be kind of just how technology industries work (at least right now): you don't have a broadly strong market for "social news feed", you have Facebook.
I don't believe that was the point of the thread I replied to.
But sure, when you reduce distribution cost to zero, you remove a lot of local advantage. And this isn't new. Improvements in music distribution, starting with the wax cylinder, have been slowly killing the local market for musicians. Why wait until the evening go a few blocks and pay to hear a so-so local band when you can play an amazing one in your house right now?
A summary of the thread, from my perspective: 1. Advertising is the wrong way to monetize, paywalls are the right way, 2. Paywalls don't work because they make people go elsewhere and sites still have expenses, 3. (you) Paywalls do work, NYT and WSJ make lots of money on digital, 4. (me) Yes but that's only because they are the winners in a winners-take-all market.
I don't really disagree with you, my point was just that the fact that paywalls can work for an extremely small set of publishers does not resolve the tension in comments #1 and #2.
> My eyeballs are not being loaned to you; my senses/attention is not for sale.
That fine-sounding in theory, but it seems to ignore the fact that your attention has been for sale for as long as billboards, or, heck, carnival barkers have been around.
It's great that we can use technology to un-render ads that have been delivered to us via the internet, so I fully support ad blockers, but let's not pretend that we have some innate, natural Right to never hear a sales-pitch.
Yeah, but those billboards and carnival barkers are standing on someone else's property. They're not taking up space on the screen in front of me, which I personally own and administer.
If someone wants to buy their own screens and show ads on them, it's fine by me. But you don't have any right to do it on my screens.
Yes, and they can kick me (or any of my code) off of their property, just as I can kick them and theirs off of mine. They can refuse to accept any part of any message I send them at their wish, just as I will refuse to accept any part of any message they send me at mine.
Unfortunately the situation has devolved into a kind of arms race where content providers need to recover costs via advertising more aggressively because more people are "skipping"/blocking the ads. Those "more people" include me because some of it has become unbearable as well as malicious.
That said, I do maintain that a site owner has the right to try to extract revenue from their enterprise and to a degree as visitors we have a right to not put up with overwhelming advertising. It's one of those things where we both have rights and we need to find an agreeable medium --not that everyone will agree but at least "the average person" will agree.
Maybe small enthusiast site will always be free and depend on the goodwill of the site maintainer (as in the "good old days" before ads) And maybe we'll have services which bundle premium content ala cable. And maybe there will be a micropayments aspect too. In the end, content does not come for free --someone or many people have to put work into bringing that content to light/publish.
I tend to think framing in terms of (legal or moral) rights isn't the best argument. The debate needs to be about utility and interests.
People seem to think they exist in a vacuum. But now everyone is using ad blockers, and the dynamics have devolved to resemble the Greek tax system: "I'm not paying those taxes, they are too high" -> "We're not getting enough revenue, need to lower costs" -> "Why should I pay for the shitty service the government provides?" -> "We need to raise taxes, or close the schools" ->...
Stuff that would help:
– Publishers need to get their act together and offer netflix/spotify-style access
– Adtech needs a quality revolution
– Ad blockers need to evolve to do "smart blocking", where the tuple of (user/publisher/article/ad network/ad client/network condition) determines if an ad should be blocked, with a build-in mechanism to reward both quality content (by being more forgiving in the other dimensions) and quality ads (in terms of technology/security/interest to the user/intrusiveness)
– Users need to welcome such experiments with a modicum of goodwill and good faith, and a renewed willingness to differentiate. Right now, journalists cry themselves to sleep because even if you're just doing the crosswords at a French magazine, someone will try to stab you with your own pencil, yelling something about "Iraq" and "WMDs".
Sure, but it has needed one for circa 20 years. And quality has continuously declined over that time. To me, that indicates that generally the next increment of profit gain is not in making things slightly better, but slightly worse.
It seems like a classic tragedy of the commons to me. But good management of a commons requires people perceiving and acting on a common interest with a long-term focus. That's an attitude so far removed from what I see of the culture of advertising and adtech that I expect we'll need a major disaster to change that.
> Users need to welcome such experiments with a modicum of goodwill and good faith
That sounds like a reach to me. In a financial sense, and I think perhaps also in the casual sense, goodwill is what you get when you've spent a long time working hard to make sure your customers like you. For the whole of the consumer internet, advertisers and adtech have been pushing the line of what people will put up with. With the possible exception of search advertising, I think internet ads have earned enormous negative goodwill.
If publishers and advertisers want new experiments to be evaluated separate from the last 20 years of history, I think they're going to have either a) spend a long time undoing the damage, or b) find some way to declare brand bankruptcy for the whole notion of advertising.
And even if they try, I'm not sure how well it will work. The point of the sort of ads that publishers run is to distract you from what you're trying to read and manipulate you into buying whatever the advertiser wants you to buy, without regard to the actual utility or quality of the thing purchased. No matter how much you experiment, there will be a moral conflict at the root of advertising. New tech won't fix that.
If we could go back to self-hosted ads without scripts, cookies and other forms of user tracking, without autoplaying videos and whole-page overlays, I'd be much more willing to turn off my adblocker.
I would totally turn off my ad blocker if ads to restricted to a set maximum size, constituted only a static JPG and contained no tracking pixels/code or cookies and we no more targeted than the site they were on: I.e. technology ads on tech sites (SO, Ars Technica, etc), ads for games on gaming sites. Basically, the ad model back in the day.
I would absolutely turn my adblocker off as well if that were the model. My problem isn't advertising, it is false, malicious, bloaty surveillanceware that most advertising is today.
You wouldn't even need to - ads like that are practically indistinguishable from locally-hosted images, I'd reckon most adblockers don't block them anyways!
>Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user. That will incentivize people to unblock ads.
microsoft tried that with bing rewards. i suspect it's not working well because i only heard of it in the context of botting it to get free money. the advertiser wants to spend as little money to gain as many sales, whereas the viewer (and blackhats) want to get as much money as possible. the two parties' objectives do not line up.
And Google tried that with Google Contributor [1], which they shut down mid-January, promising a replacement.
I was on that program, paying $10 a month. They refunded anything that was left over. IIRC think they habitually refunded $5+. They also showed stats, and IIRC the websites I frequented the most frequently (Ars Technica, multiple times a day), still received only pennies. That's how cheap ads are.
I started being a subscriber to some of those websites after.
Despite teasing a Contributor replacement "early 2017", nothing has been announced yet.
> the websites I frequented the most frequently [...] still received only pennies.
And what I don't understand is when I decide I want to subscribe to a newspaper, it's hundreds of dollars a year. They take pennies to serve me spam and malware, but if I want to pay them, it's 1000x the price.
And don't get me started on how the Washington Post gives a $70 annual discount on a digital subscription if you agree to receive a print copy of the Sunday edition. It sounds incredibly stupid and backward until you remember, advertising.
Netflix was massively popular because the price was anchored against the price of cable. Americans were used to paying $100/mo or more for a collection of channels of which the majority were never watched. (because... ESPN? I never understood that) So $10/mo looked like a bargain.
Currently, online journalism is anchored against the price of free. So if I want to sit down with my coffee and read an article from the New York Times, another from Washington Post, and a counter-point from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and follow that up with a long-form piece from the New Yorker, I can either pay $500/yr, or remember to right click each article and open in incognito mode.
Yeah but if it was like 1$ a month each or 10$ for all newspaper problem solve customers would pay.
They just haven't figured out yet that on the web no-one is ready to pay 15$ for access to a single news source given that no-one is able to actually read all available content produced in one day.
New potential news customers born in the 1990 are like bees that fly from sites to sites.
Loyals customers that relly on one newspaper and are paying high fee are elderly people and they will stop paying when they unfortunately dies.
It all about not getting the demographic of you potential customer base...
I, too, am waiting for a cross-publisher content network. I'd easily pay $30/mo, instead of the $0 I'm paying now.
But, for the individual publisher, this would mean the end of their current subscriber base and 70%+ of revenue. I'm pretty sure the NYT has a spreadsheet somewhere, and currently it's still saying that they are likely to lose out in such a model.
If they get, say, 10% of my $30, that's $3 x 12 = $36, which is about 1/10 of their current price. Could they increase their subscriber base by an order of magnitude with such a model? I'd say it's possible, but it's just too big a risk right now. And the numbers may be less favourably for smaller outfits.
I used to work on that project. I'm sad that this happened, but mostly I'm annoyed at the public -- the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount.
It's definitely coming back, though. Just not in quite the same form.
> the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount.
No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware.
My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges.
I'm desperately looking for a solution to support journalism that simply lets me pay to read articles for exactly what advertisers would pay to bombard me with crap.
Google Contributor was SO close to being a solution. All it had to do was work with ad blockers.
> No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware.
That's a big issue. Another is that I want sites without any ads to be able to get a share of the money too.
But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.
> But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.
Using the normal bidding process was a clever shortcut to get Contributor working as a 20% project, with minimal manpower. Seriously, it was just two guys at first.
It's not currently just two guys. I'll let you read that how you will.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves (Looking at you NY Times) If you allow me to subscribe to your site/service online, then you better fkn let me manage my subscription (update payment method, deactivate recurring billing, etc...) online as well. You can't even email them. You have to call them, so they can push you onto their retention specialists. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU
"My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges."
1. I haven't resorted to pre-paid Vias cards, but it's a good idea.
2. There has been so many times when I'm thinking about signing up for a website, or service, but the fear of them being "cute", like not charging the correct amount, recurrent billing, making it difficult to quit, and lousy security prevents me from giving money to anyone, except the current monopolies., and only for stuff I really need. As to really need--I don't need that much in all reality.
3. I get those Wall Street Journal offers for $1 for so many weeks. I don't care if it was .01 cents; I don't want to have another thing in the back of my mind to worry about.
It's not about the money, it's about Trust. If I feel this way about WSJ, how are the littler sites suspose to gain trust?
4. I don't have a solution as to how online companies can make money. I just know the minute you hire the MBA, or the "expert", and start underestimating your customers; you're screwed.
Every website should give the customer the option of an immediate purge of all credit card data on the servers, at the time of registration;
"We will sign you up today, charge you $10, and purge you from our database. We would not sell your information. We won't bother you ever again. You have my word--sincerely, the Founders."
You will need to re-register next month. Big deal? Most people will opt for the easy way(keep all info on the customer on the servers), but their will be people like me, that don't want you to have that information on file.
I was just about to sign up for Republic Wireless. It might me the cheapest cell phone service out there. Then I noticed their "new, and improved" billing. It's not new and improved, it's just more money per month. I didn't bite. One lost customer, at least for now.
It's about trust, at this point, for me. I don't think getting certain people to pay is an insurmountable problem, but work on trust, and make the content something they need to pay for? In my youth, I needed quality porn, and that was my last subscription. Pathetic, I know, but even then I made sure they didn't get cute with my Credit Card.
What will be the next website I really need? Yea, it's a problem, but trust should be taken for granted.
Checkout Privacy.com, I use it for exactly these kind of scenarios. You can generate card numbers that are locked to a single merchant, and you can set transaction limits and delete the card whenever you want. Or you can set it as a "burner" which will only work for a single transaction.
Some banks have a e-card option for internet payment.
The most extreme can give you a unique card number with an expiry date of your choosing, whenever you need one. That does wonder against shady practices.
people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount.
(You is to be read as Google, not you personally)
You didn't even give me a chance! I was actively looking and you denied me, I think because I was European and didn't want to lie or something.
And seriously: I only knew of it through HN. Was there ever any campaigns to inform about it? I can't remember seeing a single ad. Never heard about a single talkshow appearance from any of your bosses.
If I hadn't seen it mentioned deep in a thread here at HN, I would never have seen a single mention of it, either.
As it was, I was the only one of the dozens of other techs/devs I know who heard about it. Most were interested once I told them! There must have been zero advertising.
I was happy to pay, and starting using Contributor the moment I found out about it.
Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through.
On top of that, it showed me the absolutely paltry amount paid out to the sites running the ads.
So back came adblock, and Contributor mostly just helped on my mobile browsing. I bought Contributor to contribute to the sites, and some for Google, not majority Google, dribble for sites.
> Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through.
That was a serious problem, I agree, and not one we could do anything about at the time. The problem was, those more-obnoxious ads were mainly not served by Google in the first place.
(There may have been a period when Contributor only worked on a subset of Google's ad products, mostly for technical reasons.)
With the Tier1 ISP billing at 95th percentile, and ISP almost illimited subscription and the close to flat rate, the contribution of small internet users in volume is the biggest in proportion of revenues.
And with people like google not paying for their transit, it means someone has to pay. Who?
Every internet users.
Internet & phone are in all developed country a must have for administrative & job related tasks. In every country it is when you are poor a substantial cost, as well as computers.
For those who are growingly poor internet is expansive.
But for the happy few with latest generation computers internet is comparatively cheap.
Being rich is the art of making the poor pay for you.
It is not people don't want to pay, the poor cannot pay, and they are the biggest population.
Me I have an adblock not because I don't want advertisement, it is because my 2007 computers cannot load a modern web page under 15 seconds with ads enabled.
The modern economy is based on the redistribution of the money of the poorest to the richest achieve by (lack) of regulations where the strongest wins.
So, my point is there is no free champagne, someone has to pay, but I don't see why it should be the one not being able to buy a bier.
And call a cat a cat: commercial internet has not yet found a fair sustainable model.
Some of those whales are the folks who sit at casinos spending their social security and eating cat food for the rest of the month. They're not all rich.
Bing rewards actually got me to use Bing as my primary search engine for half a year. The rewards were enticing enough to convince me to give them a fair shot. There were some nice things in Bing, but after 6 months, I decided that the quality of their results just weren't good enough even with the rewards. Maybe if their search quality or features (ala DDG) were better, it would have worked. In the end, quality >> incentives.
I tried bing rewards, but the spamy emails of "hey get a few more points!" both were annoying and there really was no benefit to using their service. Never did redeem any points, so my mileage was varied.
20 years ago, my best friend's brother worked for a company trying this - it was called AllAdvantage. They paid you to watch ads, and paid you a bit for every person you referred who watched ads.
We of course botted immediately. I am shocked they went out of business.
All large websites switch to canvas rendering (like Netflix already does). This provides scrape, adblocker, content filter, ... protection.
And of course it makes the internet completely unusable by anyone either blind or ...
You might even create a startup that makes a javascript web browser, that allows all these companies to get consistent rendering across all web browsers, prevent ad blockers from working, while enabling them to use all their current infrastructure as-is. This would work better because it would still enable ad-network providers to send their javascript to the end-user, so they can keep doing their little custom checks to verify if they're being scammed or not.
At present, ads are easy to identify and block because advertisers don't trust the sites they advertise on - they want the impression to be recorded by a trusted (?) 3rd party ad server; this means ad data are easily identifiable at the network level, which is easy to block.
Until there's a replacement model for that lack-of-trust, ad blocking will probably be easy regardless of display technique.
> One thing I've been hoping for is inventing some form of advertising that was actually fun for the user -- fun enough that they would not want to block them.
You should take a look at the sponsored lenses on Snapchat. Nowhere else on the internet are ads so engaging and enjoyable. This is also why I think Snapchat had a chance to really take on Facebook, until FB sucked up and started copying everything from Snapchat.
When I was a kid, my dad used to rip the advertisements out of magazines as soon as they came in the mail. That's a practice I've carried on, despite getting far few magazines these days... My family also used to mute the advertisements on TV, though I don't think any of us still watch it.
So when I see people claiming that adblockers are immoral, it always gives me a good chuckle. Is ripping the ads out of a magazine immoral too? Is the mute button on my remote a ethnical crime against poor hapless television companies?
> Is the mute button on my remote a ethnical crime against poor hapless television companies?
Which reminds me, TV/cable/et al. related services already cost money, yet they still serve advertisements. Isn't this a form of double-dipping? Shouldn't they be paying (or giving a discount) to watch advertisements?
The cost of broadcast and cable networks already includes a discount that takes the advertising into account. Ad-free networks (HBO, Showtime, etc.) otherwise known as "pay television" are $15/mo each, since all revenue must come directly from subscribers.
Pay TV came to Australia in the 90s with the promise "No ads - your payment covers it". Then the ads came between shows. Then the ads came within shows, just like free-to-air TV. So... what were we paying for again?
Not really, back when I received the paper copy of the Economist it took me about a minute after receiving it on a Saturday morning to flip through and rip-out the double-sided ad pages. Also gave me an idea of the main stories in the issue.
Put a 30cm ruler on the page near the binding, grab top, pull. Well worth it for making the magazine thinner, easier to fold into my back pocket, and more readable on the bus. Just turn the page and continue reading, no interruptions.
One time there I remove so many pages ( 20? a lot anyway ) that I actually spent money on postage and sent them back to the Editor with the suggestion that he spend his time reading them for me and provide a summary.
Did you remove less than 50% of the paper? I guess the equivalent to online publishers' attempts to prevent ad-blocking would be simply to stop printing adverts on both sides of a page. Presumably, publishers had no incentive to do that because, as far as they were concerned, they still got paid for the adverts. And the number of people ripping ads out of magazines must be a tiny percentage, of course.
This I did as well when The Economist arrived. They make it easy since half of the ads are printed full-page on both sides. Took like 30 seconds to do and did make reading much more enjoyable. Now (wow, has been years now) I use the digital edition on iPad and listen to it more than I read it, but when reading I do look at the ads as there are fewer and of high quality in the app edition.
> Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user.
Brendan Eich is trying to do exactly this with the Brave browser [0]. Although it is a ways away, he wants to cut out the adware middlemen and give users a portion of the revenue for ads which they view, perhaps with some sort of opt-in "watch this video and earn $x" model in which the video content is tailored to you through (local, private) browsing history analysis.
If you are interested, Software Engineering Daily recently did an interview with him about the topic:
>One thing I've been hoping for is inventing some form of advertising that was actually fun for the user -- fun enough that they would not want to block them.
Unfortunately it seems they've taken an other route. If users try to actively disable ads, just hide the ads amongst the actual content of your website.
I will admit to have been tricked by that a couple of time already (that I know of, at least). You're on some kind of news website, you see a genuine looking link towards a potentially interesting article. You follow it, read a few paragraphs and then starts to notice that the tone appears completely off and way too enthusiastic about the device or service they're talking about.
Then you start looking around and you eventually find a small "sponsored content" disclaimer somewhere on the page. I've seen those types of ads on physical newspapers as well, mainly those given for free in the subway. Often the only thing that sets them apart from actual content is a think border around the page or something like that. That's super shady and a bit worrying honestly.
I don't think anyone is seriously doubting your legal right to block ads.
> If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented.
If the ad blocking becomes so widespread that the ad-supported model becomes unsustainable, I think a lot of people will be unhappy with what happens next. There will be a lot more paywalls and a lot more native advertising, which will be fine for entrenched players but much harder for very small publishers to pull off.
The cool thing about AdWords was you could write a little blog and actually make a few dollars running ads on it just by adding a snippet of code. Maybe micropayments can take care of that some day?
Do not underestimate the American corporation's ability to believe they have a right to a profitable business model. This is a nation where municipalities are regularly stopped from building their own broadband.
...is that a competing business down the road from mine has decided to spend $20/click for my business name, so now I have to spend much more than that in order for customers who already want to make an appointment with me to be able to call my phone number consistently. Google are complete gangster at this point... "nice business you have there."
Or you could hire an IP attorney to file a trademark infringement suit against that competing business?
How is that not intentionally causing marketplace confusion?
Also, if you roll over and pay Google, you are damaging your ability to defend your own business name as a trademark. Trademarks are lost if you don't defend them. Talk to a real lawyer, ASAP.
Do you mean to say that Chevrolet has never bought the AdWords phrase "Chevrolet"? I would be shocked to learn that.
We've considered seeking legal counsel. Part of the problem is that the two primary words of the business name are a generic service offered by this type of business (40 years ago SEO was not a big consideration). Also very few of our customers take the care to quote the two-word phrase, so their queries could plausibly be sent to the competitor which offers that service as well. This competitor has itself recently added the name of yet another lucrative related service to its name, presumably as an SEO measure.
That said, I'd be very eager to see any more advice you might have, or any links to resources you think might be helpful to us.
Ah. I was assuming that it was a situation like Ford buying AdWords for "Chevrolet". If it is more like Speedy Plumbing buying AdWords for "snake" and "plumbing" when your business is named Snake Plumbing, then I don't think you have much of a trademark case there.
In that case, businesses exist that can help your business search for and monitor more defensible trademarks. If you are truly hurt by competitors buying AdWords, you really should thrust your hand into the fire and suffer the pain of rebranding now, because it's only going to get worse the longer you wait. Switching from "Snake Plumbing" to "Jessaustin Pipewranglers" would hurt temporarily as you trained your existing customer base to use the new name, but uncommon or newly coined words are so much more defensible.
Careful what you wish for. I bet the Verizons and Comcasts of the world have some ideas for monetizing web content. Buy the "sports package" and you get ESPN on your TV and access to sports blogs on the web.
If ad-supported blogs are a viable alternative, then there were always be ad-supported blogs. If it isn't, well, some of them will probably go on with tip jars. But some won't.
People have been searching for the "iTunes of news" for over a decade. Guess it's a hard problem.
Also, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people would prefer ads over paying for content directly. What percentage of Spotify users are on the free plan dispite it's disruptive ads?
I think a 70-90% cut is probably closer the the right ballpark. I've long thought that ads cost me, the viewer, far more in lost attention and annoyance than they give a monetary benefit to the website owner. I'd like to see the ads cost their creators an order of magnitude more, and for the viewer to get the lion's share.
> I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish.
Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't. By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement
No.
By replying to my browser, they're entering into an agreement to not waste my time, and give me lots of money. Oh, not that either? Hmm. Several sites detect that I'm using a malware blocker. I make no effort to obfuscate this. Some websites will ask me to turn it off, others will block me if I do not. That's fine - I've no obligation to them, they have no obligation to me. Neither of us entered into any kind of agreement.
Keep in mind - I'm even happy to unblock and click ads relevant to my interests and follow relevant affiliate links - to stuff I'm actually interested in. Webcomics in particular are my jam.
So I would likely not even bother with ad blockers if site owners were not routinely acting as a proxy for criminals in (attempting to) serve me malware, extortion-ware, pyramid schemes, and other scams - or peddling horrifically low quality untargeted advertizing that doesn't respect my time (think "same 30 second unskippable ad plays 5 times in a row" utter and other absolute garbage.)
> Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't
If you want to talk ethics and morals, just how ethical and moral is it to leave your computer open to joining a botnet - imposing so many externalities onto other parties not privy to your "agreement" in the form of DDoS attacks and proxying to obfuscate the origins of such criminals? I think these concerns far weightier than the ethical or moral concerns of depriving a website owner a few cents for selling my time, my attention, my browsing history, etc. (even if they've outsourced that messy work to an ad company who does so on their behalf.)
You can't block ads in Facebook's native mobile app.
Their communications are probably encrypted and their ads are probably served on the same connection as everything else. Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).
The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modify its behavior, which will be copyright infringement.
So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement. After all, isn't opening a website just like installing an app? I don't see a difference really.
Don't get me wrong, I now have ad-blockers installed everywhere I can.
But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with, by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.
> The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modify its behavior, which will be copyright infringement.
It wouldn't be. You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer, you just don't have the right to redistribute all of those bits.
Copyright is about distribution, not about modification (well, it is in part, such a modified work would be classed as a 'derived work' and that is why you can't redistribute it, just like you can't redistribute the original).
> courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.
That's utterly wrong. Copyright infringement is about distributing content, not about forced consumption of content that was freely given to you by the rights holders or their agents and associates (the ad networks).
And rights holders have plenty of options here:
- sell ads directly rather than through networks
(and serve them up from the same server)
- charge for their content
- deny you access if you use an adblocker
No court will ever rule this as copyright infringement.
For using apps in general you need to agree with an EULA, which can be upheld, otherwise EULAs wouldn't exist.
Of course you can't sell your soul in an EULA and there's always this gray area where users might not be held accountable for selling their souls with a single click on "I agree".
But you're saying that copyright law refers to distribution, but well, you can't have that binary distributed legally unless you agreed to that EULA. And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
The other problem is that most users won't be able to crack their own binaries and distributing or even downloading cracked binaries from the Internet will be copyright infringement.
Even so, lets assume that an easy to use tutorial will be provided, such that somehow users aren't violating any laws. Well, this is why the industry is pushing for DRM, which ends up getting used not only for encrypting media, but also for protecting binaries. And in some parts of the world it is already illegal to crack DRM.
And if not, I see the industry winning this argument and pushing for legislation protecting them, because truthfully they can point to people that crack binaries in order to freeload and pirate stuff for free - even if such arguments will be morally and factually wrong, they'll win by those arguments with the right lobbying power being exerted. It has been happening for some time now.
> You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer
Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
You keep using the words 'copyright infringement' but you really have no idea what they mean.
> And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
No, it really isn't.
Breach of the EULA does not automatically translate into breach of terms-of-use for the service and neither of those translate into copyright infringement.
They would have a case to terminate your right to use and maybe they'd sue you for damages if you cause any but copyright has nothing to do with it (in this case, there are edge cases where copyright might be invoked but this is not one of those).
> Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
Yep.
> There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
Well, the company won't like it and may sue you but they will still have to convince a judge that you caused them damage. And suing a private individual for pennies in lost ad sales is just not going to happen.
It would only be copyright infringement if you distributed your modified version of the Facebook app, or the modified content you've caused your browser to render.
Fortunately, Facebook seems to have some standards for ads: I don't see the porn/Russian brides/make money fast ads on Facebook like I see elsewhere. (except for a few real world friends involved in some MMF scam who use their personal status to advertise - not Facebooks' fault there though)
I do judge publishers by the quality of ads they accept. You cannot advertise a borderline illegal MMF scam and be considered legit. So when I see such ads I assume the news is at best a twisting of the truth, at worst completely fake. Quality editors will take less revenue to ensure that their advertising is not a scam.
Sure, I agree about quality, but if we continue blocking ads, then how are we going to end up rewarding the good actors?
I mean, this GroundUp site decided to drop Google's ads in order to improve usability for users and because the gains aren't worth it.
But this change won't get noticed by users having ad-blockers installed.
And if they'll decide to push high-quality in-house ads in order to survive, all it takes is somebody submitting a new rule in uBlock's or AdBlock's repository and then that revenue will be lost, with no discrimination.
Again, because of the status quo I too have ad-blockers installed everywhere, phone included. But it's not a win-win situation and that bothers me.
> all it takes is somebody submitting a new rule in uBlock's or AdBlock's repository and then that revenue will be lost, with no discrimination.
Anybody is free to disable their blocker on any site. If you want a site to be funded by mean of ads and you are fine with the ads served to you, just disable your blocker on that site.
Even better. Just checkin to FB once a day on your desktop (assuming you have one of course). Then you can use FBPurity to "cleanse" your FB experience.
> You can't block ads in Facebook's native mobile app.
One of the many reasons I don't install every dick and jane's mobile app. In this context, I don't even have a Facebook account.
> Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).
It's trivial to proxy your own HTTPS traffic even on unrooted phones for e.g. debugging or corporate MITM. Short of cert pinning - which is going to block some corporate users as well - it's not going to be a problem. Facebook would be able to detect I'm not consuming their ads, of course.
> So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked
You'll want a working website if only for the search traffic. I also consume most of my content on desktops or laptops - native apps are barely a thing here (anymore.) Even for phones, Google has a powerful incentive not to let apps break the web (which would deprive Google of all that juicy search traffic) and are already penalizing e.g. "intrusive interstitals". And even for phones, I will go without sooner than I will go with people's terrible native apps.
> or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.
Has that stopped pirates? And reminding consumers that adtech can be regulated might not be the smartest move as well... that goes both ways after all.
It's also giving ad blockers powerful incentive to obfuscate their tracks. Right now, adtech has the option to detect and request you disable your ad blocker, or refuse to serve you content if you don't. They lose that option if ad blockers have to obfuscate their tracks as a matter of routine, just to continue operating.
> But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with
Agreed.
> by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.
That doesn't follow. Several blockers have e.g. "acceptable ads" policies. Those that don't can still whitelist sites (either because they asked nicely, or because the website breaks without doing so), and you will likely not remain whitelisted unless you and your advertisers are good actors. If anything, ad blockers are about only rewarding good actors.
There's also native advertising, doing a bit for one's sponsors in a podcast or video stream, etc. which tends to be of infinitely better quality, impossible to embed malware into, actually vetted by the content producers, and which generally nobody bothers to even try blocking.
And for all GroundUp's good intentions, part of the reason they seem to be ditching google ads is because they were not being good actors by running said ads. Are you sure this is an example of a darkening future instead of a brightening one?
I used to feel that way, and still have absolutely no problem with ads in and of themselves. But they are the ones who breached ethics and morals by tracking me around the web, tracking my search queries, running all sorts of terrible JavaScript, and generally being dicks. So I don't feel bad anymore.
It used to be the case that all content was Hollywood or newspaper created. But now, 99% of the content I am using is discussion threads such as this one, Wiki articles, arXiv papers and blogs.
From the people, to the people! I don't even need movies and articles - well, I still keep a 1% interest in them, but that's all. I am sorry about them but they are so derivative and dishonest at times that I can't watch them any more.
How many times did you find more value in YC comments than the linked article?
Exactly. On HN, I click to view the comments to see if it's even worth reading the linked article. It seems to be about 50/50, which is as good is it gets I think.
By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
C'mon, you know better. What agreement? If your answer contains the word "unspoken", I'll let you in on the real definition of that word in this context: "non-existent". I didn't sign anything, no notice was posted. The only agreement I have is that I ask for data, and should your server deem me worthy, it will send me some. That's what I signed up for low those many years ago. If you and advertisers would like to change the "agreement" after the fact, well, good luck with that upstream swim.
You don't like ads, I get it. You take without compensating because you want to. Don't just shrug and say, "no notice was posted." Own it. Say, "I felt like taking this so I took it."
I'm sorry but it isn't that black and white. To be honest, I wish there was a way to put in my HTTP request headers the fact that I'm going to use an ad blocker - then your server has enough knowledge what to serve me exactly - if you wish, the text without adds, if not, then a notice saying that the text if for pay.
That'd be perfectly fine. Many sites already do this - detect my adblocker in javascript and then deny me access to the content. This is also perfectly fine - I fully agree that circumventing this forcefully is immoral/unethical.
In essence - the seller (content provider) should have the option to not give me content if I have an ad-blocker. If this is possible, then I don't see anything immoral about me using an adblocker. Do you?
And in fact, it does seem to be possible - wired for example does this. And I certainly don't try to circumvent this.
Many sites manage to work around and still show me ads. I dearly wish there would be some way for me to indicate "I'd rather be denied access to the content than be shown ads." Unfortunately that doesn't technologically exist easily yet.
It's more like content-mills like adverts, so they give content for free, attach adverts and hope it sticks.
Don't just shrug and say "we have to do this". Own it. Say, "we sideloaded non-relevant content to you for profit through pipes you're paying for because we didn't want to bother building a different business model".
Society does have many unwritten agreements, but this is not one of them.
Did you ever get those "march of dimes" solicitations that include a dime? I know people who believe that there's an unspoken agreement of reciprocity - they sent you something of value (even though you did not ask for it) so you must give something back. But no such social contract, spoken or unspoken, exists.
Similarly, there is no such contract with respect to ads. Personally, I never watch TV live, even when the schedule is convenient, because I like to skip all the ads. Courts have held time shifting to be a right, so I can assure you I am in the right on this one, although there is zero practical difference between my fast-forward ad blocking (which is sometimes automated), and running uBlock Origin.
You could argue that the society has an unspoken agreement about views vs ads, but that agreement includes limitations on what kinds of ads are considered acceptable - and guess what, most of the sites are violating that unspoken agreement.
Adblockers didn't happen by magic, they are a reaction to advertising trampling all over the implicit social contract.
And this isn't an unwritten agreement that this member of society is even aware of so... so much for that aspect of society. Or as my grandfather used to say, you can wish in one hand and crap in the other, one of them will fill up faster. That unwritten agreement is worth everything its written on.
What exactly am I taking by not viewing ads? I view it the opposite, ads take away my attention and time and worst of all are generally using psychology to influence my behavior. If your site is using them to monetize, I'll be blunt, tough shit. I dislike the advertising model of shoveling malware javascript from dodgy ad companies and if blocking ads is the way to get that changed, so be it. Consider this societal protest over a business model I disagree with on its very premise. All the way back to Edward Bernays I think advertising has a rotten core by encouraging things like women to smoke, and passing off one of the most common elements off as some sort of rare thing amongst numerous other ethically questionable tactics.
But what theft has occurred when ads are blocked? What have I taken from the ad companies? From the publisher? What alternative has been given? If anything the only thing I have taken away is encouraging them to pursue better ways of monetization that doesn't treat my attention as some fungible thing for their own benefit. This company made $200 a month, donations alone could easily recoup that cost with 40 people doing $5 a month.
Also, if I go to a website and read content without viewing ads due to having an ad blocker. Well oops, but not like there is a giant banner over each hyperlink that says I can't click it without hurting someones feelings or bottom line. Block me if you want, but ironically you'd be cutting of your own nose to spite your face. I'm willing to pay for no ads, but no site is wanting to engage in what that truly means.
Point me to the ethical problem with ad blocking and maybe I'll buy your argument. But if your fundamental premise is that you need ads to publish, you're not going to convince me with $200/month arguments.
My computer is controlled by me, ads come through a programmable rendering engine, nobody owes ads the right to render unconditionally.
All that being said, the irony is I pay more out via patreon than I'm probably worth in ad revenue to all the websites I've ever visited. I do this because I hate the current model. I'm supporting the content producers that have realized this fact and are embracing it. What are you doing to change things for the better?
I hate the ad model too, but you're stealing bandwidth and hosting. Delivering those pictures and text comes from somewhere, and ads are how they're hoping to pay for it. Justify it to yourself how you want, but it's true.
It's not stealing, because you request the resource from the server and the server explicitly decides to fulfill your request. And this isn't exploiting a bug or security vulnerability. The server is deliberately programmed to fulfill requests regardless of whether the requester's client.
If running an ad blocker is stealing, then so is disabling JavaScript or using curl.
There are other comments (including one by me) discussing this. I'm totally fine with it. Others have said that most advertisers won't pay for these ads due to an inability to audit and track users.
Well, they were happy to pay for them in the past that way and likely will be happy to pay for them again if the only other option is not to be able to advertise at all.
The target of a link could still be redirected, this would not allow the ad agency to track visitors but would allow them to track the effectiveness of a campaign.
That's about as much as they should be getting anyway.
But it would kill most RTB schemes and it would get rid of the majority of the tracking, which would be a good thing.
It wouldn't even kill RTB - it's just that the RTB response would include the actual ad to be displayed, and we'd be back to Nielsen style outfits figuring out how many of those ads were actually displayed.
And the world is likely to be a better place for it.
I think the companies who rely on tracking, auditing, and preying on vulnerable users aren't typically those who would benefit from billboard or TV ads.
The companies who do advertise in more traditional forms of media tend to be larger and more brand focused. They don't rely on manipulating their customers in very short term, impulse situations. They rely on visibility and try to generate goodwill through elaborate PR campaigns.
The ethical problem isn't ethical, but existential. If everyone acted on only their immediate self-interest, ad-supported business models would fold. Then, we already have all lost out, because people currently obviously prefer ads to paywalls. Even if you decide to pay for a few sources of information, you will never again have access to the breath of journalism you have now.
If paywalls don't catch on, it's game over for he current model of societies. Because even if my contribution of a vote every four years seems quite small, it's still the currency that democracy depends on. And without an informed public, their decisions tend towards randomness, and are no longer a factor in the decision-making process.
All this isn't a new mechanism, it's basic tragedy of the commons. "It's my boat, and I'm gonna go out tonight, and fish as much as I want to. Nature belongs to me as much as to anyone else, and nobody has the right to tell me what to do, especially not in international waters".
There's nothing really wrong with that argument, except that many a fisherman has made it, and seen his haul cut to almost nothing when overfishing had decimated the population.
The public's attention span and patience is a commons, too. Advertisers have engaged in a vicious, scorched-earth campaign to target the most vulnerable (read: gullible) people out there. Needless to say, this has done catastrophic damage to the commons.
The media deserve their share of the blame. Besides participating in this unethical ad market, they've cranked up the emphasis on sensationalist, click bait garbage at the cost of real journalism.
To continue with the fishing/aquatic analogy: don't blame people for filtering their water or buying bottled water after all of the toxic waste that's been dumped into the river.
If everyone stopped watching ads, of course the ad-supported business models would fold! And what we would have lost out on is a business model that is apparently not liked by enough people anymore.
Who's to say paywalls will end up being the norm? And what happens if the paywall is abstracted away behind a Spotify-like news interface?
In the Netherlands there's an online subscription-based news and magazine service, it's doing quite well. It seems quite succesful in engaging their readers more than the traditional media.
I do also see that we live in a more chaotic time than say a 100 years ago. I think much of it can be attributed to the rise of fast information transport systems, computers and the Internet, but that does not mean I have an obligation to support a business model I find immoral, because it might in some way indirectly benefit journalism and democracy in general. Perhaps abolishing the advertising model will make space for interesting other models, like community-curated news, patronage, paying for archives/more in-depth articles, etcetera.
It's not a tragedy of the commons if the only "victims" are a few companies. Companies are not "the commons", or humans for that matter. Companies fail all the time, and that's OK. Business models are not sacred cows that can never be slaughtered. If one business model stops working, companies will adapt and find new business models.
On the other hand, it can be argued that advertisements can have a negative influence on their viewers in many ways.
> people currently obviously prefer ads to paywalls
I don't think this claim can be made on the basis of site traffic. You would have to compare how many people actively support the ad system vs actively support the paywall system.
Assuming people that use adblocking software, support the paywall system as a default alternative, ~22% of internet users use adblockers[0] and (let's say) support a paywall system.
I would guess that of the 78% of people that don't use an adblocker, the majority of them don't know about them, rather than make a conscious decision to not use them.
Ad revenue model is winning on traffic because of three reasons
* lots of people don't know about adblockers
* the default configuration for browsers is to not do adblocking
* most people don't change defaults
I couldn't find any studies that have specific estimates of how many people dont know about adblocking software or know and don't use.
>hen, we already have all lost out, because people currently obviously prefer ads to paywalls.
Fallacy of the excluded middle: among the choices you did not accept we have the option of returning the internet back to the laws that originally governed it, that is nothing commercial.
I don't personally want this across the board, but I am not convinced that the world wouldn't be better if that rule held for non fictional content.
There's an unwritten agreement that sites won't serve stuff that tries to infect me with malware, but, well, here we are.
Could you please answer the question: are you accepting actual legal liability for users' computers you infect with malware from ads? If not, you have lost any moral argument.
Does your site take responsibility for the ads it displays? Will you compensate me for the time and expense in the event one of your unvetted ads infects a user at my company with some kind of drive-by malware?
No?
Then I guess this "agreement" isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.
Give me two examples of unwritten agreements that are not laws and will get me in more trouble than "some segment of the population will think less of me".
Twist it however you like, but just saying things like they're a fact does not an argument make. Making your case without accusations would be a good place to start.
I'm definitely entitled not to let your document which you chose to send me on request cause my hardware+software to do things I don't want it to, like make any ol' network request it pleases without my say-so.
Would you say the same about changing the font size or the color contrast?
For years I had "flash click to play" for usability reasons (I always have 20-50 tabs open), before ad blocking was a thing - but as a results, ads wouldn't play or show until I clicked on them. Do you think back then I had the obligation to click-to-play the ads?
It is exceedingly simple. If you don't want me to see content without ads, don't serve it to me without ads. If you don't want me to change the font size, serve it as a png so I can't change it.
Sure, it's called "manners", or "social behaviour". Of course, as time goes on, many informal social rules have been made into law, because someone always figures he can live with the disapproving looks.
As just one example: If you've agreed to meet with a friend and they don't show, without notice, you'll probably inform them that they are in violation of your unwritten agreement.
(I'm not actually in favour of this line of argument, but I believe it's pretty obvious that unwritten social norms exist, and often serve a purpose)
If you argue with that kind of unwritten agreement, I'd argue that ad providers should also adhere to the agreement not to track me, manipulate me or to infect my machine with malware. Which they evidently don't. So I don't feel very motivate to respect theirs.
When you enter a physical store or the house of your neighbours, you are also entering into an unspoken agreement that far exceeds the minimum requirements set by law. You didn't sign anything and no notice was posted, yet you abide by the rules.
When they clearly and openly change those requirements, for instance by hanging advertisement banners from the walls, then you have the option of leaving. You are certainly not entitled to remove the banners from your view, not even using magic shades. The may ban magic shades in the stores or the house.
That technology makes certain things possible, even easily, does not make it an entitlement. That the other party is invisible, instead of mom and pop behind the counter of the store, does not mean you are entitled to ignore their wishes.
But you certainly are entitled to use magic shades, unless of course the homeowner bans them. Likewise, a server is free to deny my browser's web request for any reason. The fact that the server does not deny my browser's request makes it pretty clear that using an ad blocker is analogous to using magic shades in my neighbor's home and receiving no complaints from the neighbor.
This analogy breaks down because it's my browser and my hardware. You're essentially putting both the web site and the viewer in a room together that happens to belong to the people who own the site. Whereas the reality is that each party owns his own end of a connection. My house is connected to their house/store. Neither party's rules apply outside their own domain, no pun intended. I can't remove the banners from their store, without permission and they can't display them in my house without permission.
We're not that far from achieving that, from a tech point of view. Augmented reality with something like the Hololens could hide these things away, image recognition has become good enough to deal with most real world ads panels/posters. The main showstopper is size of equipment and battery life.
The day AR allows me to use a headset untethered to a desktop computer with enough battery life to last a day will be the last day I ever have to watch an ad in the real world.
How can you debate the finer points of whether accessing a website and rejecting ads is moral or not, when you haven't built a moral case for urging and tricking people into buying stuff that they don't need?
You say "visiting a site" should be enough to "enter into an agreement" with a site to agree to view their ads.
Surely the same should extend to the site, such that "visiting a site" is enough to "enter into an agreement" with the visitor to agree to show only ads that are relevant, non-intrusive, and do not contain malware.
The main short-term incentive for ad networks is to show more ads, make them more intrusive, and sell them to whomever pays the most. It's simply not in the long-term interests of a website, or a website visitor, to be part of an ad network.
I'm more frustrated they're wasting my bandwidth, slowing down load times. If their ads were text-only and not running trackers to follow me on the internet I wouldn't bother with ad-blockers/tracker-blockers.
Again: if they choose one you’re not happy with, you’re free to decide not to read the content. Otherwise I don’t see how the situation is different from not paying for a meal in a restaurant if you’re not happy with the payment methods offered.
Actually, if the restaurant only accepts payment by credit card, you are free to not pay. That's the concept of legal tender - if they want to demand payment of a debt (i.e. after you finish the meal) from you with backing by law, they _must_ accept legal tender. If they only accept credit card payments, they can't use the law to make you pay.
> This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services.
Emphasis added is mine. US coins and currency are valid offers of payment for debts, but for most other purposes a vendor can choose what to accept. The uniform commercial code, §3-603, then states:
> If tender of payment of an obligation to pay an instrument is made to a person entitled to enforce the instrument and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender, of the obligation of an indorser or accommodation party having a right of recourse with respect to the obligation to which the tender relates.
Unless there are other statutes that apply (I'm not any kind of expert in this area), it sure sounds like if I make a valid offer of legal tender to an authorized agent of a creditor, and they refuse, I have satisfied the terms of the debt. So, if I owe someone $10,000 I can legally offer them one million pennies, which are legal tender under the Coinage Act of 1965 (perhaps I also should provide some form of proof that there are one million pennies in the truck so there's no dispute about that). They can also legally choose to reject it, but if they do then I no longer owe them anything.
That doesn't contradict what I said. If I pay up front, the restaurant can accept/deny whatever they want. If they want to recover a debt, they have to accept legal tender.
From reading the responses and thinking further on this: is this a culture-divide issue? Do you pay for meals in advance in US restaurants? If so, I've misspoken.
It depends on the type of restaurant. Table-service restaurants generally do not require payment in advance [if you look like you can pay]. Take-out, delivery, and counter-service restaurants generally require payment in full before fulfilling your order. Buffet restaurants are split: some require payment as you walk in the door, and others require payment on your way out.
This leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation where you cannot buy a hot dog on credit, but you can get a porterhouse, lobster tail, salad, baked potato, and a beer and not be expected to pay until well after the food is already beyond recovery.
So I started looking into this, because it's interesting.
So, merchants can reject cash for purchases[1] because cash is legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues, and a purchase is not one of these.
The Wikipedia page [2] for dining and dashing states that ordering a meal is a contract debt, since you are given the food before the transaction occurs, with the understanding that you'll pay for it afterwards. Thus, if the merchant, after giving you the food, informed you that they only accept credit card, that would not be allowed.
It's completely true. If I finish my meal and don't have a credit card, the restaurant will be annoyed. I offer them cash, and they refuse the payment. I therefore leave without paying. The restaurant takes me to court for non-payment and I agree to pay. I pay in cash. From the link in your sibling comment:
"This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor"
If I sat down in a restaurant, finished my starter, and was then brought a bowl of vomit for my main course, I wouldn't expect to have to pay for the starter. I would get up and leave. If the restaurant had a big sign outside saying "vomit for main course", I wouldn't feel entitled to leave without paying.
Consider the following: If you pick up a newspaper or magazine, is it wrong to skip the ads? What about changing the TV channel or radio station while commercials play?
>Consider the following: If you pick up a newspaper or magazine, is it wrong to skip the ads? What about changing the TV channel or radio station while commercials play?
Apparently when I take a piss during a commercial break, I'm not just voiding my bladdder... I'm breaking the social contract.
Sorry, but if you put up a website, I can render it with whatever browser I please.
Or alternatively, content providers can embrace a holistic view of their site - ads and all... just don't cry when someone tries to make a case that your malvertising is a CFAA violation :)
I think it'd be wrong to hire a dude to clip out all the ads before I open the paper in the morning. I think it'd be wrong to mod my TV and car radio to change the channel when an ad starts playing.
According to your logic you are obliged to watch the ads on TV. Because by watching a film you made an agreement that watching the film is only free because you watch the ads.
The TV and Radio ad argument falls a little flat when you consider people have left radio for competitively priced streaming music that is ad-free and people have left TV for competitively priced streaming movies and TV that are ad-free.
Newspapers have just struggled to find and adopt a similar model, I hope they find it. The common thread is that we live in an advertising saturated world and a lot of people are tired of it.
Drive down a street or highway... Ads, signage, billboards, Turn on a radio... Ads, Go online... Ads, Open a newspaper or magazine... Ads, Watch a movie... Product placements. I am waiting for them to print ads on the individual sheets of toilet paper on a roll.
Some advertising is fine but when it ruins landscapes, deafens you as you watch TV or ruins a perfectly good site layout whilst tracking and eavesdropping on you then something is wrong.
>The TV and Radio ad argument falls a little flat when you consider people have left radio for competitively priced streaming music that is ad-free and people have left TV for competitively priced streaming movies and TV that are ad-free.
Not ad free - different types of ads. Services like Netflix have product placement.
(Which troubles me a bit since while traditional ads were irritating, at least there was disclosure.)
Isn't this what clippings services provide? I don't see Obama (because Trump only watches TV) wasting his precious time reading the ads. He has people literally picking the wheat from the chaff.
That has to be a first: arguing for the morality of the advertising eco system. I've seen quite a bit of it from the inside and let's just say that if there is an argument for morality it lies with the consumers, emphatically not with publishers (who have conditioned their audience first that everything should be free) or with advertisers (and that's even before we get into the content of the ads, see TFA).
> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
That sounds like a legal argument to me, about which you earlier said you have no idea. Let me summarize my answer: you're wrong. By visiting a site you do not 'enter into an agreement to exchange your adviews for content'.
> Doesn't feel right to me.
That's ok, you are entitled to your own feelings.
So you don't get to install an adblocker. Have fun with spyware, malware and being tracked from here to kingdom come.
If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine.
>If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine.
I really want this to be true but the elephant in the room is auditing. Without the ad network performing tracking, advertisers have no way to independently verify ad performance and corresponding payment to publishers for CPC ads. For CPA ads, the publisher has no way to independently verify the advertiser is paying out correctly for sales conversions.
You need a third party in the middle to arbitrate. AFAIK, the only way to do that at scale is with cookies from an ad network dropped in and tracked via a beacon.
I guess the only solution is for a new, non-commercial advertising network to spring up (sort of like an NGO) with a strong enough charter and ethical approach that end users (or browsers themselves?) trust limited tracking from ads served through that network. The problem is, who funds it? Not the advertisers or publishers as that would destroy the impartiality of the network.
Edit: and problem two is if such an ad network came in to existence and was successful, it would end up a de-facto monopoly for on-line ad distribution. Apart from the headwinds it would attract from Google, there are obvious issues around free-speech, mono-culture etc.
Edit 2: or maybe the "internet" agrees what an ethical ad network should look like and then any one is free to set one up but must submit to regular auditing by a new internet body to make sure they are sticking to the agreed "charter". That way the ad network could be operationally funded by publishers/advertisiers but still retain user's trust. A little like the CA market for SSL certs. If an ad network started misbehaving, browsers themselves could block/de-list them (like they do when they revoke root certs from rogue CAs)
They could audit the effectiveness by catching the clicks on a redirect. That way they can't track but will still know the number of visitors as a result of the campaign.
A 'sample audience' such as used in TV that would willingly be tracked could then be used to extrapolate impressions.
The sample audience might work for CPC campaigns on large sites but difficult to see how it would work reliably for the millions of smaller sites out there (or work at all for CPA campaigns where conversion % can vary wildly depending on the action being paid for and the geography of the end user market being targetted).
I'd personally have zero problem with a strongly audited third party tracking me during transition from a publisher site to arrival (or checkout in the case of CPA) on an advertiser's site.
What I do object to is that same tracking info being used across every publisher and advertiser on the ad network (and tracking info persisting for months).
If there was an ad network that enforced a strict set of simple, inert advertising formats and ensured tracking was ephemeral and unique between each publisher/advertiser pair (and not capable of being used to parallel construct my browsing across the whole network), I'd happily accept the compromise. Doubly so if I knew the browsers held a nuclear option of "de-listing" the network in the event of bad behaviour.
Well, for CPA the only thing that matters you already know, then it's up to you to decide who you want to run those ads and if they agree with you and find you trustworthy. That's a 'solved problem' in the sense that for a long time such situations were dealt with using outside auditors. It costs a bit but not so much that it would make CPA impossible, merely less convenient.
Interesting part I got from this discourse: there is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to what is acceptable and what is not. That's yet another problem to be solved.
Sometimes when I click a link I get to a site I never visited before and I don't know that before having got there. They could have ads, they could not have ad. They could use JS to display even text content, they could not use any JS at all. They could serve malware, they could fingerprint me, they could run some bitcoin miner in the JS they serve. They could be totally honest. I really don't know. In some cases they don't know too.
That's why I'm adblocking everything and I visit sites with NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies, DisableWebRTC among the others. Better safe than sorry.
And about the right to render bits and bytes however I wish, I use Stylish for those few sites that do really wierd things with their layout.
By the way, a browser renders bit and bytes as it wishes, starting from the html file and maybe stopping there or going as far as precaching linked pages.
No. You can not force "agreement" on me that easily. By visiting the site, I am visiting the site. There is no agreement between us whatsoever about anything.
The good thing about morale is that it doesn't have to be the same for different people. It's not an absolute value. You can live up to your high morale standards and watch ads (which sounds a bit odd). Other people think differently.
Other people like me think we are morally bound to ignore ads as much as possible because we think they destroy a healthy capitalism and are misused to track people and distribute malware. Therefore I use an ad-blocker.
But that's only a side note. In the internet your argument is invalid because I don't know in advance whether a website uses ads or not. To discover that I would have to visit that site without an ad-blocker and let them serve ads without warning. And that would be unacceptable.
The solution for that problem is the various websites either use paywalls or detect ad-blockers and don't provide content when one is in use. In this case we really have an agreement. If I turn off my ad-blocker I'm allowed to watch the content, otherwise I'm not.
But I never ever had the desire to see content which has been hidden behind an ad-blocker blocker.
I agree. It's just like any other kind of piracy. If the content isn't valuable enough to see with ads enabled, then the ethical answer is to not view the content at all.
It turns out to be the other way around: the site owner claims that the ads Google served up were of such low quality that they "polluted" the content of the site:
"For about R20,000 a year, it isn’t worth it to pollute our content with get-rich-quick adverts featuring Patrice Motsepe, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey (see image at top of article)."
Moreover, the author states in the comments that their non-profit is sustained by donations, not by ads. If someone had visited this site with an ad-blocker turned on before the author stopped using Google ads, it would have improved the content (by the author's own stated standards) without endangering the site's source of funding.
Granted this may be a special case. But I think special cases are often worth the read, or at least not "just like any other kind."
I read newspapers without looking at the ads. I use highways and public transportation without looking at the billboards. I don't see how it's any different.
I would say it should be arguably illegal to resell content with ads removed, but how something is rendered in my brain or inside the confines of my home is upto me to decide. There's nothing illegal about ripping out the ad pages before reading a magazine at home.
There is a big difference between print and web: by the time you rip the ads out of the newspaper you have already made it to the ad statistics (“our newspaper sells X copies daily”). On the other hand, with an ad blocker an ad load is never recorded. In the first case, the publisher still makes money, in the second he doesn’t.
Along with several other factors, this is what makes advertising online more valuable, as far as I can tell. Online ads can be far better quantified, in terms of impact, can appeal more to their target audience, can more easily provide a service alongside their advertising content, etc. Advertisers were given a magic wand, but decided to break it over their collective knee and carrying on waving their empty hands about instead.
In the first case you are also screwing the advertising entity for the gain of the publisher, in the second case you are not pretending to see ads to profit for someone in the ecosystem on the expense of someone else.
Unless your friend asks you to cut ads out of their newspaper. Ad blockers operate with explicit permission, so it's not as if anyone who wants to view ads is being deprived.
This is also why I pirate all the indie games I want. Cracks are just modifiers to bits I have on my computer. And don't get me started on movies. Some people offer me some bytes at a cheaper (free!) rate than so-called 'legitimate' sources.
Previously, lots of indie games used to have serial codes which I could just get off the Internet (just more bytes), but now they act in a user-hostile manner by using debilitating spyware like Steam. It's still crackable, and some people let me play their games for free because they don't put any DRM on it so all I need is the bits and lots of people are giving me those bits for free.
Non-subscription software is my favourite. I only need to modify the check algorithm, which are just bits and bytes that I can change however I wish, but subscription algorithm often means I have to get help from the Internet to prevent the spyware phoning home.
Some percentage of users will use ad blockers, and businesses should account for that.
How is that an argument for it? Some percentage of people steal things from stores, business do account for it, but its neither here nor there in an argument about whether people should do it.
Let's separate morality and legality. Morality is relative to your beliefs and values. Legality is common to all.
It's illegal to steal physical property (payment transfers ownership of property).
It's not illegal to not look at something.
Speaking of which, I really want to write a real life ad blocker with a HoloLens or whatever AR equipment becomes popular in the future. Replace all the billboards with cat pictures.
I disagree that adblockers are theft and that the comparison is accurate.
Stores do indeed account for a small amount of theft in their budget in the way of security and special procedures, and also for actual theft. Precautions are taken, security personnel and procedures are evaluated, and there's a cost/benefit analysis on such situations. Living abroad in certain countries, it's no unusual to see even a small corner shop have a prominently displayed security personnel standing at the front just keeping an eye on things on top of an array of security cameras across the store. It's a cost of business that physical stores take, and it has an impact on their public perception, and that's a choice the store owners have to make; public perception, or the cost of theft. If websites feel that strongly about ads, then they should make it clear - an adblocker is an indication that people don't want ads. The reason could be as simple as "they're annoying" to "they're intrusive privacy wrecking tools of the devil", but it's a response to the complaint "these ads are annoying." Advertisers have very simple and low cost solutions to this; they can ask for whitelisting, they can ask to turn off the adblocker, they can use the adspace that is blocked to offer an ad-free alternative, or they can just not serve the page, something I wish more would do. Yes, such a position may harm the websites readership, but it's better than the alternative.
As for it being theft, I disagree as ads on a website are basically a unilateral agreement that I have no agency in. Making it a condition for viewing the site, whether it's a spoken or unspoken contract, means that we are in some sort of arrangement - your content for my eyeballs and privacy. I don't know what's on your page before I load it, and titles being what they are for articles, it's even harder to know if it's something I want to see. A single paragraph summary of an AP posting isn't really worth me disabling the adblocker. A conspiracy theory style rant on such a posting isn't worth my time either, regardless of the agenda. A list that is basically just copy/pasted from wikihow with some stock photos added isn't worth it, and so on. If the requirement for your page is I must watch ads, then politely let me know before you spam me with ads so I can make the decision as to whether I want to view the content or not. I have the adblocker on because I specifically don't want ads; the risk outweighs the reward in most cases. If the site operators feel that I shouldn't see the content with an adblocker on, I'm fine with that. That's their offer, and I respect their wishes. I just want website operators and advertisers to respect my wishes instead of trying to circumvent it, or flat out lie to me about why they want me to unblock ads. I don't have an obligation to view ads because I clicked on a link that I had no idea of the contents of. The agreement between an advertiser and a site isn't any of my business, and if they want to make it my business, that's fine, but they need to be upfront about it. Removing my agency in the matter is not a way to win me over as a repeat visitor.
I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish.
No you don't. Just because something is technically possible, even easy, does not mean you are entitled to do so.
Some bytes you are not allowed to render them at all (and BTW, how did you get them?).
Some bytes may not be transformed into other bytes so you are able to render them (and BTW, how did you obtain the key?).
Some bytes may not be rendered in front of audiences, only for personal use.
In general: those bytes come with a copyright and a license agreement. They are my arrangement of bytes. I could easily include an explicit HTTP header saying that you may only render these bytes with unmodified browser brand X version Y.Z (or brand A version B, or ...). That that is currently unwritten in the HTTP response does not make it a non-existent agreement.
If you do something else, you violate my copyright over that arrangement of bytes.
This gets onto very shaky ground. What if I'm in a console and only browse with w3m or lynx? What if I simply disable all Images and Javascript (older web browsers made disabling images really simple; back when we had very limited dial-up bandwidth).
Can websites dictate what web browsers you use? Are you violating an agreement by using a different User-Agent?
No, no and no. You are requesting data and your browser renders it. If you write your own browser to request and render the data differently, I don't see any issue with copyright.
You have given no arguments to support these claims. You are just repeating the idea that you can do with those bytes what you want, when I just gave several examples of cases in which you can not do with those bytes what you want.
I'll make it explicit. You can't show a Netflix show to an audience (let alone a paying audience). You may not render an e-book that you haven't bought. You may not even store that sequence bytes on a device you own. You may not decrypt an encrypted file not intended for you.
What you are saying does never apply when using content for personal use. When I buy a DVD I am allowed to watch it with a filter or watch only every second frame. This would never violate your copyright.
Architects are a well known example of artists that keep a say over their products after they have been produced and 'sold'. You can't just modify 'your' building: the original artist has to approve. Even if you're the only one living in it and you shield the building from public view.
When you buy a painting, the artist may forbid you from changing it.
Why do you believe that can't be the case for a movie? Just because it is technically possible to modify only copy does not make it obvious that you should be entitled to it.
Note that I'm not asserting that this actually is the case. I'm mostly asserting it's not obviously not the case.
The difference with paintings and architecture is that there is only one. That is a sufficient justification for letting the creator control the ability to modify it. On the other hand, there is nothing stopping you from taking a photo of that painting or designing a model of that building and using it in some modern art bodily fluid exhibit or whatever.
Originals will always have inherent differences from copies in people's minds.
It's a good point but I think it does not apply to my example.
Because in my example I don't even have to modify the movie. I can apply the filter while it's playing.
And besides that your examples require the presence of a contract between me and the architect/painter where I resign from my rights to change the object. Copyright has nothing to do with it.
I remembered an old maxim. Apparently, a successful copywriter was asked "How do you write a good ad?" and his answer was "Its very easy. Get the Yellow pages for this year, last year and the year before. See which ads repeat. They are repeating because they are working. Now just copy those ads for your purpose"
The point is, those shitty ads keep repeating on those websites because their ROI is positive. Google wants to help these people by providing them every imaginable and conceivable tool so they can do it better. This also answers your last question about how their business model is sustainable for the long term. It is actually really sustainable because you think Google is a search engine, and I think Google morphed long ago into an internet scale ad-ROI measurement engine which keeps improving (by violently invading privacy of course) both the measurement tools and the actual ROI itself for those who keep pouring money into these ads.
I used to feel there was something bad about using ad-blockers, then Google started paying AdBlock to allow some types of Google ads through. I learned this while working for Google in DoubleClick circa 2014. I no longer work for Google. PSA -- just so you know.
I'm sort of confused. That list of yours is a bunch of stuff that (at least not generally) Google doesn't advertise. So where does the "only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts" bit come from? Seems like you're only angry at the peddlers. What did Google do?
If they are going to spend a million man hours of effort playing wack a mole with content creators, why haven't they spent a tenth of that effort keeping the ads they get paid to run safe and clean? Easy. Poor search results reflects poorly on them, when they put a dodgy ad on a site they get paid, and the site gets blamed.
I think perhaps you're underestimating the amount of effort that they do put into keeping their ads clean. A few highlights from [their 2016 report][1]:
> we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads
> In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.
> We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.
> We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.
> In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.
> in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.
> Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.
> In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking.
> We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
> We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.'
> And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.
On mobile, the ads I see are almost exclusively fake virus warnings, "clean your phone" and other crap like that. Complete with flashing yellow and red images.
Are those Google Ads though? Google is indeed a dominant player in the advertising market, but they're not the only one. You could be seeing ads from a different ad network.
All of those things you described (fake virus warnings, "clean your phone", flashing yellow and red images) are against Google's policies for AdWords. See:
Nowadays, when a family member is asking which "antivirus should I pick?", my answer goes along the lines of "just install uBlock Origin, activate this and that filter and allow it in incognito mode. You can do it on your own, it's super easy and super effective". Even better, this also "fix" most of the "slow computer" complaints.
With the notable exception of AdBlock Plus (which has its own problems) the big ad block plugins tend to be philosophically opposed to all ads of any type, quality or quantity. This is a bummer for sites like ours where the ads are sold directly to advertisers (no network) and are relevant to the audience and subject matter.
It's actually kind of amazing how many wrong notes this 2-line comment hits
(A) The plugins do not actually have any particular philosophy. They act as facilitators for different lists which certainly have their own.
(B) The creators of the plugins' philosophies (which again, aren't actually in the plugin - usually you have to look into the creator) tend to be varied, and several of them (notably the best ones) do promote supporting content creators, either directly or via whitelist
(C) You can always control your adblocker, and many users (especially those who care about a site, are interested in related content, or so on) do disable it for their favorite sites. The extensions (that I've used, anyways) specifically account for this and remember whitelisted sites.
If your site is significantly suffering because of adblocking and you've mentioned your concerns to users, adblockers are not your problem, your users are. There's no fix for resource leeches.
You're mostly arguing semantics. I believe the default options -- that most users never adjust -- are very aggressive for nearly all major ad blockers, blocking all ads possible as well as adblock detection scripts. We can call that something other than a philosophy if you wish, but that stuff matters..
My sites are not suffering significantly at all due to ad blocking, but some peers say it's a problem. It's a bummer, though, that we don't even have an opportunity to show adblock users that our ads are relevant and not too obnoxious. The filter list author has made that decision for them, and it's almost always "block every ad."
If you are already directly selling the ads, why not host them on your own domain? Then they won't be blocked automatically. If you still see people going out of their way to add site-specific rules to their ad blocker, the ads probably weren't as relevant or unintrusive as you thought.
Troy Hunt wrote about his experience with self-hosted ads a while ago [1]. Basically, he added a as-non-intrusive-as-possible "banner" (if you can even call it that) at the top of the content. Ad blockers blocked it. He changed the markup to avoid being caught by a false positive. Ad blockers (Adblock Plus with EasyList in this case) blocked it again.
I made similar experiences in the past, to the point where our API broke because we had the audacity to call one of our API endpoints "metric" (for a metrics service), which got caught by one of the over-zealous regexes of EasyList.
> and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but check out https://hotlinkx.com if you want. What you mentioned are a few of the other things it tries to address by letting publishers manually choose what they want to advertise.
The list is compatible with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus. If you know of any other bad clickbait ad networks, please let me know! As the article describes, I now see clickbait ads from Google that are almost as bad, but I'm not quite ready to block all Google ads in what was supposed to be a minimal blocklist.
Is Yavli still a thing? I had a hell of a time blocking their ads -- they served content from custom subdomains, and used class names "borrowed" from Google to evade ad blockers.
I find it really funny when a site asks me to turn off my adblocker, and my blocked element count is displaying 60-100+. Not a chance.
Meanwhile, duckduckgo never asked. They're pretty awesome (check their wikipedia page) so I turned blocking off.
They rewarded me with a couple subtle, text-only ads that didn't disrupt my load time or experience. <3
If we want the web to be a better place, we have to use and support companies who are making it one even if it means not getting to use the 'best'. Like Firefox. Damn I miss Chrome's performance, but the alternatives won't get better and compete unless we back them.
What I fear is that smart people with money (like you and me) use ad-blockers.
So the ads that do get shown are exactly the low quality crappy ads that appeal to the great unwashed.
This is certainly evident to me on Facebook for instance. The very first ads that get shown do not have the benefit of the marketing analytics about me so they're very low quality ones like the ads in the article.
The second wave (after about 5 seconds) are vastly improved and often touch on my interests or have some connection to friends interests or real current news events.
Still somewhat better than creepy targeted advertising. I bought a new garbage can a few weeks ago now many sites are full of ads for garbage cans. Although this may be one example where the targeting is working. Most of the sites showing those ads are garbage.
This example is brought up all the time - "I just bought something which I buy every few years at most, and now I'm getting ads for it after I bought it".
Obviously it's usually completely ineffective. BUT I think it might make a purchase correlation score go up. Imagine that no human working for the company buying the ads is fully understanding what the correlation score means, and they are effectively using or subscribing to a machine learning model that is trying to increase the correlation score. And they're seeing the score go up.
I'm no expert in the ad targeting ecosystem, and I'm sure I'll be told that's not what it does. But I'm more familiar with systems software, databases, distributed services and such, and I've seen many things that didn't really do what they were supposed to do. It just takes a lot of smarts and a lot of focus, such as Aphyr does with distributed databases, to show that they don't actually do what they claim, due to some mundane bugs or subtle design flaws.
I think there's a good chance that the complex ad targeting ecosystem is just fooling advertisers into thinking it works, without actually working.
I do not understand this behavior at all. You just bought a garbage can. Why would you need another one right away? If you did you presumably would've bought multiple at the time you made the original purchase. To me thats just the marketer or advertising platform being tone deaf.
For several months, I saw no ads on AdSense except for those advertising the Vive. None whatsoever. I saw plenty of ads, they were just the exact same one with an attractive person doing some sort of dance in a headset and controllers.
So...okay, Google. I guess you've figured out that I'm interested in technology, graphics, games, that sort of thing? Is this all that you've got? It's creepy in that it makes me wonder WHEN you're listening to me, not if.
At least for me here in Australia, Google AdSense ads aren't obnoxious.
Below is the result of a quick scan of a few websites in private mode. I wonder why OP has such a different experience? Maybe the ad market in South Africa is very different? Or maybe GroundUp hasn't spent the necessary time to filter out bad ads?
As a South African, I can attest to the exact ads shown by the author on various site, both in incognito mode as well as during normal browsing. I have seen every one of them, and they are awfully persistent and incredibly annoying. Even selecting "Don't show this ad again" seems to do nothing, despite repeated efforts. Particularly frustrating is that there seems to be no way of flagging an advert as fraudulent or malicious.
I really tried to hold off on using an ad blocker as I want to support as many content creators as possible, but the minority spoil it for the majority. Websites like Mashable and Windows Central bombard you with ads to a point where it affects loading times. If it starts affecting speed, then there is definitely something wrong with how your site is designed and it should be looked at again.
Okay, question on ad blockers: So far I have not tried to use one. And my Web site for my startup, to be ad supported, has not gone live yet.
But, what if: What if my Web server sends the actual ads, as JPG, GIF, WEBM, etc. files instead of just URLs to ad servers at some ad network? Then will an ad blocker still work?
Generally the adblockers won't detect it if you host your ads like that. But if your website becomes popular, then someone will figure out whatever pattern is used to display the ads (url location, css class etc) and add it to a list that adblockers can use.
Also, it can stop rendering, so if your ad has a custom CSS class, element name, etc then it will refuse to render that element (and children) even if it downloads the image.
But it will probably not come with these rules out of the box. I don't know how it is for others, but I only ever use the curated block lists and then whitelist a few sites I want to support.
This is exactly what we did at Techcrunch. The ads sold and we went from $3k a month ad revenue from bad ads with ad sense to $30k a month (the format where it is the square ads in the sidebar - which almost every other blog adopted)
It can work if you're trusted and selling influence.
Later on when we wanted to run some of the high end campaigns and exclusives we ran OpenX
I think serving your own ads is a solution to a lot of ad and media problems that needs to be encouraged. Its strange to me that so many companies hand over so much of their webpage real estate and user trust to what are often complete strangers
What if my Web server sends the actual ads, as JPG, GIF, WEBM, etc. files instead of just URLs to ad servers at some ad network? Then will an ad blocker still work?
Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex [0] does this. I've run ad blockers for years and his ads have never shown up on the lists. I feel no urge to block them on my personal list, either, since they don't bother me. It's probably a good way to go if you've got a good sized niche audience and you don't mind negotiating directly with your sponsors.
I routinely block anything that messes up the layout, ad or not [but mostly advertising]. right-click, add a regular expression rule, never to be witnessed again.
Yet, I am the minority. If you serve your own images/iframes, they are likely going thru... but you have to be trusted not to forge impressions and the like.
What infuriates me is that I've paid for subscriptions to online editions of newspapers like the New York Times and still--even though I am a paid subscriber--they show me ads. It's obscene. How much do I have to pay not to get pestered? I have no idea because that's not even an option.
I won't pay a cent for any site that shows me ads on a paid subscription. In fact, I'll go out of my way to cancel the subscription and block the ads and do everything I can to subvert their paywalls and read the content for free.
i think, way back in the old days, some cable tv channels didn't have commercials. but they found out they could make more money with commercials and people kept subscribing anyways.
I work at my college newspaper. We get some money from the university but I can tell you without a doubt that we would be in far worse shape if we didn't have an ad sales team that sold our ad space directly.
I probably forgive those idiot bad image ads way more than i do the fact that there are still websites autoplaying video and audio in The Year of Our Lord 2017
So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."