13 ms·

The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

260 points by kyleslattery 11y ago

clarky07 11y ago
I never used an ad blocker until the last month or so. Ive made money with content and ads before and I know it's hard to do. Sadly, things have gotten absurd lately. Chrome basically slowed my computer to a halt on an almost daily basis. The performance improvement from using an ad blocker has been tremendous. So much difference I have a hard time believing it. As a side bonus I also don't have to deal with auto playing video ads and popover boxes asking me to subscribe to content I haven't yet had a chance to see if I like.
- Ntrails 11y ago
  I just installed windows 10, and obviously had to quickly fire up "Edge" to get chrome/firefox etc. My mind was blown when I googled a "how to" and went to a PC help page that started auto playing a video in the sidebar completely unrelated to the topic I was interested in - simultaneously kind of clashing with the music I was already listening to. Seriously? People have been putting up with this? Some 10 minutes later I was all adblock'd/noscript'd and my internet experience had returned to normal. I literally haven't experienced that since the days of sodding myspace.
k__ 11y ago
We went from the "static" newspaper/TV ads, that didn't know about what you did with them, to "dynamic" web/mobile apps, that know exactly if you watched them, clicked on them AND eventually bought something coming from that ad. Also, which ad from the same ad-network you watched before, what apps/websites you used before etc. Advertisement got much more power on the Internet and got much more predictable for advertisers. But we also switched from turning pages or switching channels, if we don't like the ads, to blocking whole advertising companies with the help of software. We can now even prevent the ad from being "overseen" at all, because it doesn't even get shown to us in the first place. newspaper adds always hit your subconsciousness. Both sides stepped up their game. Don't see any problem with this.
seiji 11y ago
Before the web, people changed channels or got up during TV commercials, Many people still don't realize it's trivial to have a DVR automatically skip commercials, but advertising companies and TV networks sued TiVo to make sure they will never implement it. Modern web ads and trackers are far over the line for many people today, Not just "over the line," but for over 5 years now, advertising networks have allowed exploits to be delivered over their advertising networks. There's nothing like browsing a website then having a drive-by crypto locker installed on your machine. As of 2015, blocking advertising isn't a moral question, it's a question of do you value your own security. But publishers, advertisers, and browser vendors are all partly responsible for the situation we’re all in. People say "trust the wisdom of the free market," but they forget the important part: free markets always become corrupt and always accumulate power towards the top. A market without government oversight and intervention is just a way to exploit and abuse people for profit with no repercussions. It has never been easier to collect small direct payments online, That's more tricky, isn't it? We've all viewed some article at a tiny city's online newspaper then been hit with a "SUBSCRIBE TO PODUNK DAILY ONLINE TO KEEP READING, ONLY $24.99/month." It's not sustainable for every small thing to receive direct payments and we don't have a clean disaggregation of a common "subscribe to internet publicans" pool (like iTunes Match, but for writing? Still useless if you get 0.00002 cents per page view—but, that's basically online advertising again).
- k8tte 11y ago
  flattr.com
  - anc84 11y ago
    Is a centralised service. I want to pay "cash", I want my privacy. It is no one's business which things I give money to.
    - CodeCube 11y ago
      bitcoin! :)
bediger4000 11y ago
How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't. Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config. The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control away from owners. That seems like a generally bad outcome.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  The ethical issue is with regards to people reading all the content supported by advertising, but then blanking out all the ads. Marco's taking the position that, given the risk, and the general intrusiveness and privacy violations associated with advertising, that it's entirely ethical to do so.
  - WorldWideWayne 11y ago
    Don't you think the bigger ethical issue here is how content providers keep using ad networks that commonly serve as a delivery mechanism for malware? Reading someone's content without looking at their ads seems like a relatively minor infraction in comparison.
    - ghshephard 11y ago
      I agree with Marco - I think the pendulum regarding security and privacy has swung too far, and it's entirely ethical to block such code from running on your system. I think a form of ads that are entirely reasonable (though hard to scale), are the ones that Gruber sticks himself into his DF feed. and, ironically, they are extraordinarily effective - I can probably name, by heart, about 20 of his sponsors. And I've visited, and purchased products from many of them.
- minimaxir 11y ago
  > How is ad blocking an ethical issue? Many people rely on ads for a livelihood without charging for content; ad-blocking would deprive of their livelihood. This was a contentious issue for niche video content creators (e.g. the nostalgic review craze that happened a few years ago) Most of these content creators have switched to Patreon/Kickstarter.
agd 11y ago
people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price. This is the crucial point to me. How can I agree to a website's trackers before I know they exist?
- tremon 11y ago
  This is also what the much-maligned EU cookiewall was intended to address: you inform visitors about your tracking /before/ you start tracking them. Though I don't know at which stage that incentive was bungled (other than: "doomed from the start, because people").
  - redml 11y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong (because I don't live in the EU and can't verify this), but to comply with the cookie law websites started just displaying "we use cookies" in the header somewhere and didn't actually change anything. Meaning its the same as browsing the internet everywhere else you just get told that this is happening.
    - tremon 11y ago
      No correction, that is what happened. But I don't know if that's because the law was naively constructed, naively interpreted or willfully misinterpreted because it's easier to implement.
RodericDay 11y ago
What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it. If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible. Advertising isn't free. Insofar it works, for some people, it's basically coercive via psychology and simulated peer pressure.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Advertising is an arms race.
  - commentzorro 11y ago
    I thank you for your worship. --Vishvarupa
- reasonishy 11y ago
  Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services. Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts. But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying. I buy quite a few magazines, and one of the reasons I buy them is for the adverts, which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in. For example, I buy a bee-keeping magazine, which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable. I buy a pig magazine, which has adverts for pig arks, pig tags, weaners, etc etc. Good advertising is a net win for everyone. It provides us information about things we might like. Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless. What is the alternative model to advertising on the internet? The fact is, that most websites are supported by advertising, and if that goes away, so do the websites unless some other magical income model replaces it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jpmattia 11y ago
I'm beginning to find the various articles about ad-blocking fatuous, and I doubt I'm the only one. Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model. Worse, it is becoming apparent that ads increase the attack surface. Failing to clean that up will cause armies of IT folks to actively work against you. Maybe the business model is that you're serving ads in a non-centralized way, or maybe you're serving centralized ads to people with locked-down computers, but good luck serving blockable ads and relying on the good graces of the population to unblock your ads out of charity.
- 13 11y ago
  Websites offering self hosted, static advertising isn't so much of a problem as random bits of javascript and tracking cookies loaded from god knows where every time you load a page. Harder to block, the advertiser needs to pass their content through the hoster which assures some level of quality and relevance, and some level of privacy for the end viewers.
  - eli 11y ago
    And yet ad blockers generally try as hard as they can to block all types of ads.
    - TuringTest 11y ago
      Except for those that don't.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Similarly, I've wondered why advertisers don't just change how they do the ads: if the ads are non-standard size, are non animated, and link back to a legit landing page from non/shady domain, what adblocker covers that? Wouldn't that just look like ordinary site content? Or do they really update them that quickly and narrowly?
edent 11y ago
Why is this becoming an issue now? I've been blocking adverts on-and-off for 10 years or so. Back then it was manually editing a HOSTS file - is it just in the news now because it's becoming slightly easier on iPhone?
- netrus 11y ago
  It becomes mainstream. We are at a point where we get less content, because revenue for content-creators is impacted by blocking.
btbuildem 11y ago
Not sure how ethics play into this. If your service is of such low quality that nobody is willing to pay for it, and you resort to ads to support your business.. well, tough. Make something that sells, or try a different way of making a living. People are blocking ads because nobody likes a firehose of garbage pointed right at their face. To crank that tired old record, "this sector is ripe for disruption" aka somebody go already make an ad network stand-in where the user can pay the equivalent of per-impression cost and visit any participating site ad-free.
anc84 11y ago
How come everyone is using the closed-source, ad-network friendly Ghostery instead of the open-source https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/ ?
- SolarUpNote 11y ago
  Why is Ghostery ad-network friendly?
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    They sell the metrics they collect back to the advertising networks. They're public about this, it's not a secret.
    - ovulator 11y ago
      It is opt-in, but I do agree, pretty slimy.
- vetinari 11y ago
  Because actually stopping tracking requires premium (paid) version? Or because mobile version is not a browser plugin, but virtual vpn, so it doesn't work with your real vpn?
  - insertnickname 11y ago
    The Disconnect website says that the free version "[blocks] malware & tracking (Desktop only)".
    - vetinari 11y ago
      Yes, and also says: Upgrade to premium protection - Block malware & tracking (Desktop and mobile). Ghostery works fine on both, desktop and mobile. It even syncs as an addon across both instances.
  - anc84 11y ago
logfromblammo 11y ago
I see ad revenue as someone who has an audience opening up access to that audience for a third party in exchange for a fee. It is entirely up to the third party to figure out how to get a return on that investment. Neither the content creator nor the audience bears any responsibility to the third party to ensure that the opened channel is used effectively. If shit comes through the channel, I'm going to route it right into the sewer. If gold comes through, I'll route it into my pocket. Either way, I still care more about my relationship with the content creators than about their sponsored side-channels. The ads do not pay for the content. The content creators pay for their own content. Then they hold their nose and make a deal with shady web-advertisers to capitalize a bit more on what they have already done. Those advertisers aren't buying content. They are buying access to the audience.
guelo 11y ago
It would be great if the ad business model on the web died. Hopefully the new business models that would popup would be more upfront. People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper or a few bucks for a magazine.
- ianzapolsky 11y ago
  newspapers and magazines have always had advertisements
- danielweber 11y ago
  Unfortunately we have a prisoner's dilemma where people will defect from "costs a little money" to "free with ads" to "free and I block the ads" to "no content."
  - guelo 11y ago
    We'll never get to "no content" because people want quality content and are willing to pay. It's just a matter of the market figuring out how to match supply and demand. There will be a lot of failures along the way but it will happen.
    - danielweber 11y ago
      There are lots of things where "someone wants to provide X" and "someone wants to consume X" and even if they could agree on cost, they can't, because market failure. "The market will figure it out" isn't something handed down from God. I've observed industry segments get drained because someone tried to give away the product, driving all other players out of the market, and then the one remaining player was unable to support themselves because their customers had been trained to get it for free.
- VLM 11y ago
  >People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper When you didn't have a world wide internet there was a lot of friction meaning you end up with 5000 newspapers all publishing the same junk for 25 cents because on average any community only had 1 or 2 choices at most and the local oligopoly, not wanting to go out of business, agreed to charge 25 cents. You put all 5000 on the internet, you really need 4998 of them to go out of business before you can think of going oligopoly and raising prices to 25 cents again. That has to happen first. Most of the competition has to die off before prices can rise again. In the paper newspaper days, culture supported about as many journalists as police detectives, roughly, which is a lot. In the internet era you need about as many journalists as there are pro football players, roughly. A lot of journalism schools need to close, lots of people need new jobs, its not merely closing out legacy newspaper corporations. Until the "supply" of journalist humans drops by a factor of 100 to 1000, there isn't going to be much money to be made in that field. It is like being in the horse buggy business around a century ago. Another interesting analogy might be village blacksmith vs the industrial nationwide factory. When one guy at one machine can manufacture an entire nations widgets, there isn't any requirement anymore for every village blacksmith to hand make widgets.
hkon 11y ago
Nowdays content is there for the sake of the ad. Nowdays the content in many cases is an ad. Block that...
frou_dh 11y ago
The formal name for the browser is "User Agent". Your agent should act in you, the user's, interest. Decidedly partisan and so what? You shouldn't have to explicitly instruct it to defend you from surveillance and pollution - it should do that of its own accord from day zero. Or is your browser a double-agent?
- jfb 11y ago
  Think about who makes the browser, and what their interests are. Mozilla and Google both are 100% creatures of the advertising world (in the former case, indirectly through their search box deals) and have a vested interest in selling you on. I'm not saying switch to Safari or Edge, but it's important to remember the incentives that the browser vendors respond to.
splat 11y ago
I used to use ad-block and later disabled it to support websites that generate good content, but now I'm going back. What's driven me back to ad-blocking software is that ad tracking makes it nearly impossible to buy gifts for a spouse. If I want to buy my wife a pair of sunglasses and google "Ray Ban sunglasses", guess what she starts seeing ads for all over the web. We noticed this a while back and would do gift shopping in incognito mode, but I've gotten fed up enough with it that I'm just going to start blocking everything again.
- vsync 11y ago
  Do you have separate (client- and server-side) user accounts or browser profiles?
  - splat 11y ago
    We use completely different accounts on completely different computers.
Kenji 11y ago
Is it ethical to block articles about ethics of ad-blocking?
brillenfux 11y ago
Maybe if ads weren't such a malware cesspool people would have less reason to block them. The people providing ads do a dirt-poor job curating them, so blocking ads isn't about convenience but about security.
qopp 11y ago
"What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues." -- https://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics.html https://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics.... Kant 1st Imperative -- Violates -- If everyone used Adblock, many websites would shutdown. I.e. "Adblock is okay because sites can still run if just some people do it" -- cannot be universally applied, contradiction Kant 2st Imperative -- Violates -- You treat website developers as a means to an end -- to get content, instead of rational human beings who, given a sufficient outcry against their ads, could change their ad service or offer a different model. Utilitarianism -- Violates -- Ad Revenue - Well being of site owner: -Site Costs / Visitors + Ad Revenue For just you. Well being of you: Site benefit - time wasted * time value. (Blocking "Ad will play for x seconds" in this specific ethical system might not violate) Rule Utilitarianism -- Violates -- Well being of site owners: Cannot make ad supported sites, current ad supported sites -site cost. Well being of society: Less websites -- more inefficiency and less units of entertainment good. Social Contract -- Violates -- People accept ads knowing that others will do this as well and this supports the site. Another: Site owners create sites relying on users's ability to see them and thus pay for site creation. Virtue Ethics -- Violates -- You might feel more shame being in a room with someone who made a site supported by ads and showing them that you use adblock then if you were invisible to the site owner. The systems above are the ethical systems allowed in the book "Ethics for the Information Age (6th Edition)" by Michael J. Quinn (the list is his, but not the theories themselves, just mentioning my source to show I'm not cherry-picking ethical systems)
- fwn 11y ago
  But all those reflexions on the issue are completely determined by the random assumptions you use in your examples. Kant 1. Imp: One could deny the disappearance or embrace it. One could see the new forces leading the web away from ads as something beneficial for society as a whole. Utilitarianism: There are many not quantifyable variables in a possible calculation. Just add seeing ads as exceedingly costly and your utilitarian argument in favour of adblocking is secured. Same goes for rule utilitarianism. E.g. Just measure the overall good generated by websites not by quantity but by quality. Get advertising in your quality metrics as something that reduces quality. Social Contract: Spin another social contract: Page owners freely upload their pages knowing that the web is pull and users will select the resources displayed. One could argue that forcing them to download ads might violate this social contract. Virtue Ethics: Alter the individuals opinion on his adblocking behaviour for your model. One could argue that there might be shame for someone not to block ads. (Which is a plausible case for a whole variety of ads out in the web right now.)
Vintila 11y ago
Tangentially related but: I think the ethical way forward for ad-blocking extentions/software would be for it to self-identify [1]. That way if a website owner wants to block you or be more upfront about asking for donations, they don't have to resort to JS hacks to determine if you are using an adblocker. If they don't want me to see their site ad-free [2] I can either move on or decide that the content is worth a few ads. [1] I only know the basics about the http protocol but I'm guessing something in the header could be added. [2] Which is completely within their rights as virtual "land owners".
Joeboy 11y ago
Aren't we just going to start making websites that don't serve the content until they've served the ads?
- adrusi 11y ago
  Well no, because then the page would load way too slowly and users would click away and avoid the site in the future. But suppose publishers did go this route. Adblocking software would just evolve to match it. They would fetch the ads from the server, possibly via a proxy, run their scripts, feeding bogus statistics to the trackers, and then not display the ads. Users have the right to control their computers however they want. Trying to limit how the user can use their computer to have better control over your content is DRM. And, in fact, the only effective way of preventing adblockers would be to use traditional DRM software, since we have laws saying that users can't circumvent them.
  - Joeboy 11y ago
    > Well no, because then the page would load way too slowly and users would click away and avoid the site in the future. People (fairly) happily sit through 15 minutes of advertising an hour, if that's the only way to get the content they want. Maybe adblocking software will keep up. It lags behind at the moment, so I'm a bit doubtful it will keep up in a future of increasingly sneaky ad delivery.
- ovulator 11y ago
  Some do this already, you get a full page ad with a 5 second timer. Usually there is a "continue to site" in the upper right hand corner as well.
LukeB_UK 11y ago
I have a question for everyone advocating the use of ad blockers: Do you just do a blanket block for all ads, ban the big networks with the trackers along with the malware serving ones or something else? I understand wanting to block the ones with the trackers for privacy reasons and the malware ones because nobody wants malware, but blanket blocking all ads tars everyone with the same brush. Edit: Personally, I used to just blanket ban but I've recently moved towards having uBlock only block the malware ones and will manually block any spammy sites.
- mikestew 11y ago
  > Do you just do a blanket block for all ads, ban the big networks with the trackers along with the malware serving ones or something else? Just because there might be a little fresh water in the cesspool doesn't mean I'm drinking from that tap. I block all of them. I'm not the one that pooped in the drinking water, so I'm not going to spend time sorting out the good from the bad.
romaniv 11y ago
Why do ads need to track you anyway? Doesn't it make more sense to customize ads based on the specific page you're looking at? It seems like this is rarely done. At least it doesn't seem that way most of the time.
eddd 11y ago
The average cost for displaying and ad is 0.005$. I am assuming that 30% of that goes to publisher. Would you pay 0.005*0.3 = 0.0015$ per page view? I would.
- tremon 11y ago
  Not without a restitution possibility. I will not pay anything for domain parking or site rehashing (sedo, quorra, expertsexchange), but I would pay for e.g. stackexchange or eurekalert.
  - eddd 11y ago
    But still, concept of paying the same (or even higher) rate for page view is not that crazy.
serve_yay 11y ago
A good writeup, though I don't agree with the statement about web devs and browser makers -- we read the web too, perhaps more than anyone! :) It's possible to want to make the platform more powerful and not like some of the ways the power is being used.
mikestew 11y ago
In my book, it's no longer a question of ethics, at least not directly. Way back when, we all agreed that if I look at some ads, a web site will let me view some content. Fair enough, it's a proven model and though I might not particularly like advertising, I'll trade some eyeballs for some content. Way back when, maybe it _was_ a question of ethics. But not anymore. What "we" didn't agree to was being tracked all over the web, malware being shoved down the pipe via ads, ignoring "do not track", and all of the other nefarious things ad networks have been trying to get away with. Ethics have gone out the window, if ethics ever existed on the side of advertisers. So I run an ad blocker, and I make no apologies for doing so. "What about the little guy who pays for hosting with ads?" You mean the "little guy" who has to scrape couch change to pay for the site that contains his latest post about artisanal mayonnaise and her latest gadget acquisition? Yeah, that $100/year for hosting is really going to break her, might not be able to get next year's Apple Watch on release day. The big boys and girls like The Verge and what have you? Well, using The Verge as an example, they could go under tomorrow and IMO the world would be no poorer, given that they've kind of turned to poo in recent days. I blame the web advertising model for part of their deterioration, but that's a long digression. Specific examples aside, what about the sites I like? I pay money to the sites I like, specifically Ars Technica, NYT, and the Economist (and some others I'm sure I've forgotten about). Some, like Daring Fireball, use unobtrusive, single-image ads that I'll occasionally click on because they interest me, as well as a desire to reward a job well done. But at the end of the day, the whole thing isn't my problem. If a few bad actors (or, in reality, a lot of bad actors) want to crawl into my machine and have their way, I'm blocking all of them. If there's collatoral damage because of some bad actors, it's not my job to fix it. I did my part and said, "no, you don't". Don't lay the onus on me to play nice, because you're berating the wrong party.
- Balgair 11y ago
  http://www.artofmanliness.com/ http://www.artofmanliness.com/ This site is a great one to look at in terms of the ad ecosystem. The ads are (typically) not that bad and very targeted, and the content is fantastic to the sub-genre of people looking at it. The admin there uses, reviews, and runs give-aways for products he actually likes and wants to advocate for. True, the site is never going to make billions or even millioons, but it is enough for his needs. The issue is that it takes a lot of work to build that with your community and ad partners. You have to make a lot of phone calls and write a lot of emails. You have to have consistently good and timely articles. Your content and audience have to be managed. Big ad firms do not have the margins to do this and are forced into blast ads. Many other commenters here mention that the ad ecosystem is up for a change, much like pop-ups a decade ago. Perhaps a more curated environment is going to appear for a little while.
drdaeman 11y ago
I wonder, what opponents of ad-blocking think about email spam? Is it different if spam ads are injected by email client? (some email and even messaging apps do this -- not to the actual mailbox, of course, but to the displayed inbox contents)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
arenaninja 11y ago
I whitelist ads on websites now, and I wish I could do the same on my phone. I think someone here or on reddit mentioned, and I had the same experience, trying out IE Edge and it being a decent browser, but as soon as the autoplaying video ads start, I downloaded FF, added uBlock and didn't look back. I use the same browser setup on my phone, and now and then I use some apps that emulate a browser (like Reddit is Fun or HN app), and the experience is wholly broken. I was reading an article and it was miserable - the fixed header for the site plus fixed footer for the ads took up about 1/3rd of the real estate, not to mention they were jittery and I couldn't focus because I'd scroll too far, then the ads would load where I was reading. There's no ethics involved with me. Poor experience? Get blocked. Decent experience? Welcome to the whitelist
- otis_inf 11y ago
  Why whitelist ads at all? Ads are evil, the ad agencies track you, you run the risk of viruses / malware (like the recent 0-day exploit on a russian news site through ads), and there's zero gain for the person visiting the site.
  - joosters 11y ago
    I understand the idea of whitelisting sites that you want to support, but even that is tricky when their ads are provided by a myriad of ad companies, clearinghouses and ad auction sites. So even if the original website is good and trustworthy, the ad networks that you let through could still ruin you.
    - stevesearer 11y ago
      whitelist officesnapshots.com because we self-host and sell our own ads circumventing ad networks :)
bachmeier 11y ago
The current model can't work. The internet is becoming unusable due to ads. I am not sure how it will evolve, in terms of paying for content, but this is surely not the answer. I expect that we will be paying for content in some form. Perhaps a Spotify-type model where you pay a monthly fee and the fee is distributed to content providers. On the issue of ethics, I'd say it's not ethical to spread out a small amount of content across six pages just to get more page views. It's bad for advertisers and for consumers.
seanconaty 11y ago
I'm glad someone wrote this article. I used to work at an ad network and for that reason, I've ethically chosen not to use an ad blocker. But I do agree that consolidation of tracking, over-abundance of ad spots and nasty performance have reached new lows that I've considered using one. I think it would be nice if publishers just went back to <img> tags. Script tags and iframes and flash give to much power and result in lots of performance issues. You can still track and consolidate with an img tag but the tracking is limited to what's in the http headers.
VLM 11y ago
The sale of eight-track players for cars is a violation of my government given right to an eternal revenue stream as an owner of a radio station and I demand "someone" do something about those evil (evil because they cut into my constitutionally protected right to profit) evil eight-track players cutting into my ad revenue. Won't someone Please think of the children, and the top 40 music boy bands, oh and most importantly my profits? I don't care if technology has passed me by, I have a good given right to profit as my manifest destiny and I demand those meddling kids stop interfering with it. Or else I'll... well, or else, yeah that's it.
harryovers 11y ago
People who support ad-blockers and support net neutrality don't seem to see the hypocrisy in their stance. If all net traffic should be treated equal then shouldn't advertising net traffic be treated with the same equality as content net traffic and not blocked by some software running somewhere on that network (even if it is running at your end of the network).
- LesZedCB 11y ago
  I'm not saying they can't serve it up. I'm saying I don't want to see it. I don't have control over the pipes as a last-mile provider, and if I did, I would let ad traffic through without being throttled. By that logic, running a firewall that blocks incoming ssh login requests from Asia should be a cognitive dissonance for us. I promise you it isn't.
- npkarnik 11y ago
  I don't buy the hypocrisy. Net neutrality requires ISP infrastructure companies to not artificially restrict end-users choice for legal content. Especially as ISP companies become coupled with content companies (Comcast/NBC Universal) and generate anti-trust concerns regarding throttling their competitors in the content vertical. An end-user running an ad-blocker has literally nothing to do with the appropriate role of the infrastructure provider (which many argue should be an unbiased plumbing system). I do think there are some ethical concerns for running an ad-blocker, but I don't think this is one of them.
  - harryovers 11y ago
    Net neutrality is about all net traffic being treated equally. It is not just about the ISPs throttling what they want. Ad blockers do not treat all network traffic equally, they will block it if they think it is anything to do with an advertising company.
    - npkarnik 11y ago
      Every source I've read disagrees with your interpretation. Net neutrality is about common carrier rules and definitely relates to how ISPs and Governments handle traffic. Here's an article by Tim Wu, who coined the term explaining that he is specifically talking about public network neutrality and common carrier laws: http://www.timwu.org/network_neutrality.html http://www.timwu.org/network_neutrality.html Also, https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality
faragon 11y ago
In my opinion, DRM will "fix" that in the future: browser plugins could not be able to identify those ads. So we could reach "Black Mirror"-like ads sooner o later. Brave new world...
minimuffins 11y ago
"Ads help us to be more informed about what products are available to us" (paraphrasing) A kind public service! We should really be paying them, but the advertisers inform us for free! Asking about the ethics of hiding ads seems a little like asking about the ethics of taking shelter during a carpet bombing attack. I wish we would steer these discussions away from economics (Do the ads work? Are there better ways to monetize, do they stabilize or destabilize markets, etc) and toward culture. What is the cultural effect of saturating the internet (and the rest of the world for that matter) with ads? I am not the first person to ask...
Paul_S 11y ago
Ethics? You mean business. There is no ethical dilemma here, just a business model that might be not working as well as you'd like.
TheCoelacanth 11y ago
Any ethical framework in which it is unethical to take minimal steps to protect myself from psychological manipulation is an ethical framework that I have no interest in adhering to.
Animats 11y ago
The article is a promotion for the author's ad service: "For publishers who want to remain ad-supported, ethically and tastefully presented native advertising, such as sponsored posts in feeds and our community’s podcast ads, has proven to be more effective, more profitable, and less user-hostile by far compared to awful network <script> embeds." "Sponsored posts" are in some ways worse than pop-ups. We can block pop-ups. Also note that "sponsored posts" that look like regular posts violate the FTC's rule that ads must be distinguished from non-ad content. [1] [1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines/130312dotcomdisclosures.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...
- MBCook 11y ago
  To my knowledge Marco doesn't run an ad service. > Also note that "sponsored posts" that look like regular posts violate the FTC's rule that ads must be distinguished from non-ad content. I assume that's why he wrote "ethically and tastefully presented native advertising".
charles2013 11y ago
like OP, online ads (partially) put food on my table. but that's where the similarities stop: whereas OP mentions he's "never been tempted to run ad-blocking software before," i've blocked ads for years. and i don't just block ads myself, i advise my friends and family to block them, too. what most of my friends and family don't know is web ads represent, arguably, one of the most dangerous aspects of modern web UX. ad servers exploited with 0-day vulns are one thing, but what worry me (and what i despise) most are dodgy ads that try to mimic/replicate some aspect of the publisher's web UI, and ads that fraudulently misrepresent other websites (e.g. fake facebook notification ads). many of these ads run on the biggest networks. so instead of repeatedly telling my grandma that the buttons on certain sites aren't actually buttons for those sites, or that the banner with the facebook friend request isn't actually from facebook, i just install adblock on her browser. i'm well aware of the irony and the double-standard. but safety first, right?
- charles2013 11y ago
  if i've written something that's factually wrong or misleading, offensive, or otherwise violates the comment guidelines, i would appreciate the opportunity to update my comment or delete it. and for that to happen i would need some feedback.
petercooper 11y ago
The bigger issue, IMHO, is quality of advertising rather than its presence. People pay $15 for a theater ticket and sit through 10 minutes of ads, buy Vogue magazine and have 30%+ of pages be ads, buy The New York Times and be hit with ads all over the place, watch the Superbowl specifically to see the ads, and more. What people seem to really want are better ads or even ads that are entertainment or content in their own right (which is why native advertising has taken off).
- touristtam 11y ago
  Or a revamped pricing scheme for the website they might favor for their content. Seeing how the internet and computers allows for many more content to be published at a fraction of the cost of yesterday's system, there is a gap to be filled between the old pricing scheme of hard copies newspaper and all "free" content of the web. $15 per month per website (like the NYT) seems a bit excessive when 10 or 20 other websites might offer the same news and at least a dozen direct competitors have similar offers. My father and his father might have had a subscription to a couple of newspaper/magazine, but I have the news at my finger tips.
PopeOfNope 11y ago
Forget about advertisers and site runners and economics and the rest of it. I run ad blocking software because ads are too good a delivery mechanism for malware.
gambiter 11y ago
I really truly don't understand why people this this is an ethical issue at all. I personally own 12 personal domains, all for various content that I personally put up. Some blogs, some game servers, etc, etc. I don't charge for my content, and I don't advertise. I'm not in it to make money, I'm in it to share things with people, and I do it all out of my own wallet. Why is there this assumption that all content needs to be subsidized by the readers? I mean, I get it... there's certainly value in compensating content producers for their time, and even allowing them to do it full time... but there is SO much content out there that is basically put up out of the goodness of the creators' hearts. Why can't we keep it that way?
abustamam 11y ago
I think one of the big problems is that most end-users don't know everything that goes into displaying an ad (myself included). Yes, we can say, "I consent to viewing an ad in order to receive X free service" in the same way that we consent to viewing a commercial when we watch TV or listening to an ad on the radio. However, in those latter two examples, the information is one-way. Those advertisers don't collect any personal information (outside of perhaps our viewing/listening location). When it comes to website ads, most consumers do not know/realize that a) the advertisers are collecting a WEALTH of your personal information and b) that information comes at a cost of your bandwidth (which, for many mobile users, is limited). There are probably many other things that happen between the end-user and the third-party that I am not aware of. Sure, they may consent to viewing a free ad, but most of them do NOT consent to collection of information nor increased usage of bandwidth. I am happy that many websites are now (at least trying to) put a visible cookie privacy policy, but I think even those little policies are getting banner blindness.

260 points by kyleslattery 11y ago

I never used an ad blocker until the last month or so. Ive made money with content and ads before and I know it's hard to do. Sadly, things have gotten absurd lately. Chrome basically slowed my computer to a halt on an almost daily basis. The performance improvement from using an ad blocker has been tremendous. So much difference I have a hard time believing it. As a side bonus I also don't have to deal with auto playing video ads and popover boxes asking me to subscribe to content I haven't yet had a chance to see if I like.

Ntrails 11y ago
I just installed windows 10, and obviously had to quickly fire up "Edge" to get chrome/firefox etc. My mind was blown when I googled a "how to" and went to a PC help page that started auto playing a video in the sidebar completely unrelated to the topic I was interested in - simultaneously kind of clashing with the music I was already listening to. Seriously? People have been putting up with this? Some 10 minutes later I was all adblock'd/noscript'd and my internet experience had returned to normal. I literally haven't experienced that since the days of sodding myspace.

k__ 11y ago

We went from the "static" newspaper/TV ads, that didn't know about what you did with them, to "dynamic" web/mobile apps, that know exactly if you watched them, clicked on them AND eventually bought something coming from that ad. Also, which ad from the same ad-network you watched before, what apps/websites you used before etc. Advertisement got much more power on the Internet and got much more predictable for advertisers. But we also switched from turning pages or switching channels, if we don't like the ads, to blocking whole advertising companies with the help of software. We can now even prevent the ad from being "overseen" at all, because it doesn't even get shown to us in the first place. newspaper adds always hit your subconsciousness. Both sides stepped up their game. Don't see any problem with this.

seiji 11y ago

Before the web, people changed channels or got up during TV commercials, Many people still don't realize it's trivial to have a DVR automatically skip commercials, but advertising companies and TV networks sued TiVo to make sure they will never implement it. Modern web ads and trackers are far over the line for many people today, Not just "over the line," but for over 5 years now, advertising networks have allowed exploits to be delivered over their advertising networks. There's nothing like browsing a website then having a drive-by crypto locker installed on your machine. As of 2015, blocking advertising isn't a moral question, it's a question of do you value your own security. But publishers, advertisers, and browser vendors are all partly responsible for the situation we’re all in. People say "trust the wisdom of the free market," but they forget the important part: free markets always become corrupt and always accumulate power towards the top. A market without government oversight and intervention is just a way to exploit and abuse people for profit with no repercussions. It has never been easier to collect small direct payments online, That's more tricky, isn't it? We've all viewed some article at a tiny city's online newspaper then been hit with a "SUBSCRIBE TO PODUNK DAILY ONLINE TO KEEP READING, ONLY $24.99/month." It's not sustainable for every small thing to receive direct payments and we don't have a clean disaggregation of a common "subscribe to internet publicans" pool (like iTunes Match, but for writing? Still useless if you get 0.00002 cents per page view—but, that's basically online advertising again).

k8tte 11y ago
flattr.com
- anc84 11y ago
  Is a centralised service. I want to pay "cash", I want my privacy. It is no one's business which things I give money to.
  - CodeCube 11y ago
    bitcoin! :)

bediger4000 11y ago

How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't. Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config. The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control away from owners. That seems like a generally bad outcome.

ghshephard 11y ago
The ethical issue is with regards to people reading all the content supported by advertising, but then blanking out all the ads. Marco's taking the position that, given the risk, and the general intrusiveness and privacy violations associated with advertising, that it's entirely ethical to do so.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  Don't you think the bigger ethical issue here is how content providers keep using ad networks that commonly serve as a delivery mechanism for malware? Reading someone's content without looking at their ads seems like a relatively minor infraction in comparison.
  - ghshephard 11y ago
    I agree with Marco - I think the pendulum regarding security and privacy has swung too far, and it's entirely ethical to block such code from running on your system. I think a form of ads that are entirely reasonable (though hard to scale), are the ones that Gruber sticks himself into his DF feed. and, ironically, they are extraordinarily effective - I can probably name, by heart, about 20 of his sponsors. And I've visited, and purchased products from many of them.
minimaxir 11y ago
> How is ad blocking an ethical issue? Many people rely on ads for a livelihood without charging for content; ad-blocking would deprive of their livelihood. This was a contentious issue for niche video content creators (e.g. the nostalgic review craze that happened a few years ago) Most of these content creators have switched to Patreon/Kickstarter.

agd 11y ago

people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price. This is the crucial point to me. How can I agree to a website's trackers before I know they exist?

tremon 11y ago
This is also what the much-maligned EU cookiewall was intended to address: you inform visitors about your tracking /before/ you start tracking them. Though I don't know at which stage that incentive was bungled (other than: "doomed from the start, because people").
- redml 11y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong (because I don't live in the EU and can't verify this), but to comply with the cookie law websites started just displaying "we use cookies" in the header somewhere and didn't actually change anything. Meaning its the same as browsing the internet everywhere else you just get told that this is happening.
  - tremon 11y ago
    No correction, that is what happened. But I don't know if that's because the law was naively constructed, naively interpreted or willfully misinterpreted because it's easier to implement.

RodericDay 11y ago

What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to put up online (hosting, funding its creation), someone is paying X+(ad company overhead) for it. If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible. Advertising isn't free. Insofar it works, for some people, it's basically coercive via psychology and simulated peer pressure.

jacquesm 11y ago
Advertising is an arms race.
- commentzorro 11y ago
  I thank you for your worship. --Vishvarupa
reasonishy 11y ago
Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services. Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts. But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you might be interested in buying. I buy quite a few magazines, and one of the reasons I buy them is for the adverts, which tell me about companies who provide things I might be interested in. For example, I buy a bee-keeping magazine, which has many adverts related to bee-keeping. That's valuable. I buy a pig magazine, which has adverts for pig arks, pig tags, weaners, etc etc. Good advertising is a net win for everyone. It provides us information about things we might like. Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless. What is the alternative model to advertising on the internet? The fact is, that most websites are supported by advertising, and if that goes away, so do the websites unless some other magical income model replaces it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jpmattia 11y ago

I'm beginning to find the various articles about ad-blocking fatuous, and I doubt I'm the only one. Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model. Worse, it is becoming apparent that ads increase the attack surface. Failing to clean that up will cause armies of IT folks to actively work against you. Maybe the business model is that you're serving ads in a non-centralized way, or maybe you're serving centralized ads to people with locked-down computers, but good luck serving blockable ads and relying on the good graces of the population to unblock your ads out of charity.

13 11y ago
Websites offering self hosted, static advertising isn't so much of a problem as random bits of javascript and tracking cookies loaded from god knows where every time you load a page. Harder to block, the advertiser needs to pass their content through the hoster which assures some level of quality and relevance, and some level of privacy for the end viewers.
- eli 11y ago
  And yet ad blockers generally try as hard as they can to block all types of ads.
  - TuringTest 11y ago
    Except for those that don't.
SilasX 11y ago
Similarly, I've wondered why advertisers don't just change how they do the ads: if the ads are non-standard size, are non animated, and link back to a legit landing page from non/shady domain, what adblocker covers that? Wouldn't that just look like ordinary site content? Or do they really update them that quickly and narrowly?

edent 11y ago

Why is this becoming an issue now? I've been blocking adverts on-and-off for 10 years or so. Back then it was manually editing a HOSTS file - is it just in the news now because it's becoming slightly easier on iPhone?

netrus 11y ago
It becomes mainstream. We are at a point where we get less content, because revenue for content-creators is impacted by blocking.

btbuildem 11y ago

Not sure how ethics play into this. If your service is of such low quality that nobody is willing to pay for it, and you resort to ads to support your business.. well, tough. Make something that sells, or try a different way of making a living. People are blocking ads because nobody likes a firehose of garbage pointed right at their face. To crank that tired old record, "this sector is ripe for disruption" aka somebody go already make an ad network stand-in where the user can pay the equivalent of per-impression cost and visit any participating site ad-free.

anc84 11y ago

How come everyone is using the closed-source, ad-network friendly Ghostery instead of the open-source https://disconnect.me/ https://disconnect.me/ ?

SolarUpNote 11y ago
Why is Ghostery ad-network friendly?
- rockdoe 11y ago
  They sell the metrics they collect back to the advertising networks. They're public about this, it's not a secret.
  - ovulator 11y ago
    It is opt-in, but I do agree, pretty slimy.
vetinari 11y ago
Because actually stopping tracking requires premium (paid) version? Or because mobile version is not a browser plugin, but virtual vpn, so it doesn't work with your real vpn?
- insertnickname 11y ago
  The Disconnect website says that the free version "[blocks] malware & tracking (Desktop only)".
  - vetinari 11y ago
    Yes, and also says: Upgrade to premium protection - Block malware & tracking (Desktop and mobile). Ghostery works fine on both, desktop and mobile. It even syncs as an addon across both instances.
- anc84 11y ago

logfromblammo 11y ago

I see ad revenue as someone who has an audience opening up access to that audience for a third party in exchange for a fee. It is entirely up to the third party to figure out how to get a return on that investment. Neither the content creator nor the audience bears any responsibility to the third party to ensure that the opened channel is used effectively. If shit comes through the channel, I'm going to route it right into the sewer. If gold comes through, I'll route it into my pocket. Either way, I still care more about my relationship with the content creators than about their sponsored side-channels. The ads do not pay for the content. The content creators pay for their own content. Then they hold their nose and make a deal with shady web-advertisers to capitalize a bit more on what they have already done. Those advertisers aren't buying content. They are buying access to the audience.

guelo 11y ago

It would be great if the ad business model on the web died. Hopefully the new business models that would popup would be more upfront. People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper or a few bucks for a magazine.

ianzapolsky 11y ago
newspapers and magazines have always had advertisements
danielweber 11y ago
Unfortunately we have a prisoner's dilemma where people will defect from "costs a little money" to "free with ads" to "free and I block the ads" to "no content."
- guelo 11y ago
  We'll never get to "no content" because people want quality content and are willing to pay. It's just a matter of the market figuring out how to match supply and demand. There will be a lot of failures along the way but it will happen.
  - danielweber 11y ago
    There are lots of things where "someone wants to provide X" and "someone wants to consume X" and even if they could agree on cost, they can't, because market failure. "The market will figure it out" isn't something handed down from God. I've observed industry segments get drained because someone tried to give away the product, driving all other players out of the market, and then the one remaining player was unable to support themselves because their customers had been trained to get it for free.
VLM 11y ago
>People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper When you didn't have a world wide internet there was a lot of friction meaning you end up with 5000 newspapers all publishing the same junk for 25 cents because on average any community only had 1 or 2 choices at most and the local oligopoly, not wanting to go out of business, agreed to charge 25 cents. You put all 5000 on the internet, you really need 4998 of them to go out of business before you can think of going oligopoly and raising prices to 25 cents again. That has to happen first. Most of the competition has to die off before prices can rise again. In the paper newspaper days, culture supported about as many journalists as police detectives, roughly, which is a lot. In the internet era you need about as many journalists as there are pro football players, roughly. A lot of journalism schools need to close, lots of people need new jobs, its not merely closing out legacy newspaper corporations. Until the "supply" of journalist humans drops by a factor of 100 to 1000, there isn't going to be much money to be made in that field. It is like being in the horse buggy business around a century ago. Another interesting analogy might be village blacksmith vs the industrial nationwide factory. When one guy at one machine can manufacture an entire nations widgets, there isn't any requirement anymore for every village blacksmith to hand make widgets.

hkon 11y ago

Nowdays content is there for the sake of the ad. Nowdays the content in many cases is an ad. Block that...

frou_dh 11y ago

The formal name for the browser is "User Agent". Your agent should act in you, the user's, interest. Decidedly partisan and so what? You shouldn't have to explicitly instruct it to defend you from surveillance and pollution - it should do that of its own accord from day zero. Or is your browser a double-agent?

jfb 11y ago
Think about who makes the browser, and what their interests are. Mozilla and Google both are 100% creatures of the advertising world (in the former case, indirectly through their search box deals) and have a vested interest in selling you on. I'm not saying switch to Safari or Edge, but it's important to remember the incentives that the browser vendors respond to.

splat 11y ago

I used to use ad-block and later disabled it to support websites that generate good content, but now I'm going back. What's driven me back to ad-blocking software is that ad tracking makes it nearly impossible to buy gifts for a spouse. If I want to buy my wife a pair of sunglasses and google "Ray Ban sunglasses", guess what she starts seeing ads for all over the web. We noticed this a while back and would do gift shopping in incognito mode, but I've gotten fed up enough with it that I'm just going to start blocking everything again.

vsync 11y ago
Do you have separate (client- and server-side) user accounts or browser profiles?
- splat 11y ago
  We use completely different accounts on completely different computers.

Kenji 11y ago

Is it ethical to block articles about ethics of ad-blocking?

brillenfux 11y ago

Maybe if ads weren't such a malware cesspool people would have less reason to block them. The people providing ads do a dirt-poor job curating them, so blocking ads isn't about convenience but about security.

qopp 11y ago

"What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues." -- https://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics.html https://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics.... Kant 1st Imperative -- Violates -- If everyone used Adblock, many websites would shutdown. I.e. "Adblock is okay because sites can still run if just some people do it" -- cannot be universally applied, contradiction Kant 2st Imperative -- Violates -- You treat website developers as a means to an end -- to get content, instead of rational human beings who, given a sufficient outcry against their ads, could change their ad service or offer a different model. Utilitarianism -- Violates -- Ad Revenue - Well being of site owner: -Site Costs / Visitors + Ad Revenue For just you. Well being of you: Site benefit - time wasted * time value. (Blocking "Ad will play for x seconds" in this specific ethical system might not violate) Rule Utilitarianism -- Violates -- Well being of site owners: Cannot make ad supported sites, current ad supported sites -site cost. Well being of society: Less websites -- more inefficiency and less units of entertainment good. Social Contract -- Violates -- People accept ads knowing that others will do this as well and this supports the site. Another: Site owners create sites relying on users's ability to see them and thus pay for site creation. Virtue Ethics -- Violates -- You might feel more shame being in a room with someone who made a site supported by ads and showing them that you use adblock then if you were invisible to the site owner. The systems above are the ethical systems allowed in the book "Ethics for the Information Age (6th Edition)" by Michael J. Quinn (the list is his, but not the theories themselves, just mentioning my source to show I'm not cherry-picking ethical systems)

fwn 11y ago
But all those reflexions on the issue are completely determined by the random assumptions you use in your examples. Kant 1. Imp: One could deny the disappearance or embrace it. One could see the new forces leading the web away from ads as something beneficial for society as a whole. Utilitarianism: There are many not quantifyable variables in a possible calculation. Just add seeing ads as exceedingly costly and your utilitarian argument in favour of adblocking is secured. Same goes for rule utilitarianism. E.g. Just measure the overall good generated by websites not by quantity but by quality. Get advertising in your quality metrics as something that reduces quality. Social Contract: Spin another social contract: Page owners freely upload their pages knowing that the web is pull and users will select the resources displayed. One could argue that forcing them to download ads might violate this social contract. Virtue Ethics: Alter the individuals opinion on his adblocking behaviour for your model. One could argue that there might be shame for someone not to block ads. (Which is a plausible case for a whole variety of ads out in the web right now.)

Vintila 11y ago

Tangentially related but: I think the ethical way forward for ad-blocking extentions/software would be for it to self-identify [1]. That way if a website owner wants to block you or be more upfront about asking for donations, they don't have to resort to JS hacks to determine if you are using an adblocker. If they don't want me to see their site ad-free [2] I can either move on or decide that the content is worth a few ads. [1] I only know the basics about the http protocol but I'm guessing something in the header could be added. [2] Which is completely within their rights as virtual "land owners".

Joeboy 11y ago

Aren't we just going to start making websites that don't serve the content until they've served the ads?

adrusi 11y ago
Well no, because then the page would load way too slowly and users would click away and avoid the site in the future. But suppose publishers did go this route. Adblocking software would just evolve to match it. They would fetch the ads from the server, possibly via a proxy, run their scripts, feeding bogus statistics to the trackers, and then not display the ads. Users have the right to control their computers however they want. Trying to limit how the user can use their computer to have better control over your content is DRM. And, in fact, the only effective way of preventing adblockers would be to use traditional DRM software, since we have laws saying that users can't circumvent them.
- Joeboy 11y ago
  > Well no, because then the page would load way too slowly and users would click away and avoid the site in the future. People (fairly) happily sit through 15 minutes of advertising an hour, if that's the only way to get the content they want. Maybe adblocking software will keep up. It lags behind at the moment, so I'm a bit doubtful it will keep up in a future of increasingly sneaky ad delivery.
ovulator 11y ago
Some do this already, you get a full page ad with a 5 second timer. Usually there is a "continue to site" in the upper right hand corner as well.

LukeB_UK 11y ago

I have a question for everyone advocating the use of ad blockers: Do you just do a blanket block for all ads, ban the big networks with the trackers along with the malware serving ones or something else? I understand wanting to block the ones with the trackers for privacy reasons and the malware ones because nobody wants malware, but blanket blocking all ads tars everyone with the same brush. Edit: Personally, I used to just blanket ban but I've recently moved towards having uBlock only block the malware ones and will manually block any spammy sites.

mikestew 11y ago
> Do you just do a blanket block for all ads, ban the big networks with the trackers along with the malware serving ones or something else? Just because there might be a little fresh water in the cesspool doesn't mean I'm drinking from that tap. I block all of them. I'm not the one that pooped in the drinking water, so I'm not going to spend time sorting out the good from the bad.

romaniv 11y ago

Why do ads need to track you anyway? Doesn't it make more sense to customize ads based on the specific page you're looking at? It seems like this is rarely done. At least it doesn't seem that way most of the time.

eddd 11y ago

The average cost for displaying and ad is 0.005$. I am assuming that 30% of that goes to publisher. Would you pay 0.005*0.3 = 0.0015$ per page view? I would.

tremon 11y ago
Not without a restitution possibility. I will not pay anything for domain parking or site rehashing (sedo, quorra, expertsexchange), but I would pay for e.g. stackexchange or eurekalert.
- eddd 11y ago
  But still, concept of paying the same (or even higher) rate for page view is not that crazy.

serve_yay 11y ago

A good writeup, though I don't agree with the statement about web devs and browser makers -- we read the web too, perhaps more than anyone! :) It's possible to want to make the platform more powerful and not like some of the ways the power is being used.

mikestew 11y ago

In my book, it's no longer a question of ethics, at least not directly. Way back when, we all agreed that if I look at some ads, a web site will let me view some content. Fair enough, it's a proven model and though I might not particularly like advertising, I'll trade some eyeballs for some content. Way back when, maybe it _was_ a question of ethics. But not anymore. What "we" didn't agree to was being tracked all over the web, malware being shoved down the pipe via ads, ignoring "do not track", and all of the other nefarious things ad networks have been trying to get away with. Ethics have gone out the window, if ethics ever existed on the side of advertisers. So I run an ad blocker, and I make no apologies for doing so. "What about the little guy who pays for hosting with ads?" You mean the "little guy" who has to scrape couch change to pay for the site that contains his latest post about artisanal mayonnaise and her latest gadget acquisition? Yeah, that $100/year for hosting is really going to break her, might not be able to get next year's Apple Watch on release day. The big boys and girls like The Verge and what have you? Well, using The Verge as an example, they could go under tomorrow and IMO the world would be no poorer, given that they've kind of turned to poo in recent days. I blame the web advertising model for part of their deterioration, but that's a long digression. Specific examples aside, what about the sites I like? I pay money to the sites I like, specifically Ars Technica, NYT, and the Economist (and some others I'm sure I've forgotten about). Some, like Daring Fireball, use unobtrusive, single-image ads that I'll occasionally click on because they interest me, as well as a desire to reward a job well done. But at the end of the day, the whole thing isn't my problem. If a few bad actors (or, in reality, a lot of bad actors) want to crawl into my machine and have their way, I'm blocking all of them. If there's collatoral damage because of some bad actors, it's not my job to fix it. I did my part and said, "no, you don't". Don't lay the onus on me to play nice, because you're berating the wrong party.

Balgair 11y ago
http://www.artofmanliness.com/ http://www.artofmanliness.com/ This site is a great one to look at in terms of the ad ecosystem. The ads are (typically) not that bad and very targeted, and the content is fantastic to the sub-genre of people looking at it. The admin there uses, reviews, and runs give-aways for products he actually likes and wants to advocate for. True, the site is never going to make billions or even millioons, but it is enough for his needs. The issue is that it takes a lot of work to build that with your community and ad partners. You have to make a lot of phone calls and write a lot of emails. You have to have consistently good and timely articles. Your content and audience have to be managed. Big ad firms do not have the margins to do this and are forced into blast ads. Many other commenters here mention that the ad ecosystem is up for a change, much like pop-ups a decade ago. Perhaps a more curated environment is going to appear for a little while.

drdaeman 11y ago

I wonder, what opponents of ad-blocking think about email spam? Is it different if spam ads are injected by email client? (some email and even messaging apps do this -- not to the actual mailbox, of course, but to the displayed inbox contents)

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

arenaninja 11y ago

I whitelist ads on websites now, and I wish I could do the same on my phone. I think someone here or on reddit mentioned, and I had the same experience, trying out IE Edge and it being a decent browser, but as soon as the autoplaying video ads start, I downloaded FF, added uBlock and didn't look back. I use the same browser setup on my phone, and now and then I use some apps that emulate a browser (like Reddit is Fun or HN app), and the experience is wholly broken. I was reading an article and it was miserable - the fixed header for the site plus fixed footer for the ads took up about 1/3rd of the real estate, not to mention they were jittery and I couldn't focus because I'd scroll too far, then the ads would load where I was reading. There's no ethics involved with me. Poor experience? Get blocked. Decent experience? Welcome to the whitelist

otis_inf 11y ago
Why whitelist ads at all? Ads are evil, the ad agencies track you, you run the risk of viruses / malware (like the recent 0-day exploit on a russian news site through ads), and there's zero gain for the person visiting the site.
- joosters 11y ago
  I understand the idea of whitelisting sites that you want to support, but even that is tricky when their ads are provided by a myriad of ad companies, clearinghouses and ad auction sites. So even if the original website is good and trustworthy, the ad networks that you let through could still ruin you.
  - stevesearer 11y ago
    whitelist officesnapshots.com because we self-host and sell our own ads circumventing ad networks :)

bachmeier 11y ago

The current model can't work. The internet is becoming unusable due to ads. I am not sure how it will evolve, in terms of paying for content, but this is surely not the answer. I expect that we will be paying for content in some form. Perhaps a Spotify-type model where you pay a monthly fee and the fee is distributed to content providers. On the issue of ethics, I'd say it's not ethical to spread out a small amount of content across six pages just to get more page views. It's bad for advertisers and for consumers.

seanconaty 11y ago

I'm glad someone wrote this article. I used to work at an ad network and for that reason, I've ethically chosen not to use an ad blocker. But I do agree that consolidation of tracking, over-abundance of ad spots and nasty performance have reached new lows that I've considered using one. I think it would be nice if publishers just went back to <img> tags. Script tags and iframes and flash give to much power and result in lots of performance issues. You can still track and consolidate with an img tag but the tracking is limited to what's in the http headers.

VLM 11y ago

The sale of eight-track players for cars is a violation of my government given right to an eternal revenue stream as an owner of a radio station and I demand "someone" do something about those evil (evil because they cut into my constitutionally protected right to profit) evil eight-track players cutting into my ad revenue. Won't someone Please think of the children, and the top 40 music boy bands, oh and most importantly my profits? I don't care if technology has passed me by, I have a good given right to profit as my manifest destiny and I demand those meddling kids stop interfering with it. Or else I'll... well, or else, yeah that's it.

harryovers 11y ago

People who support ad-blockers and support net neutrality don't seem to see the hypocrisy in their stance. If all net traffic should be treated equal then shouldn't advertising net traffic be treated with the same equality as content net traffic and not blocked by some software running somewhere on that network (even if it is running at your end of the network).

LesZedCB 11y ago
I'm not saying they can't serve it up. I'm saying I don't want to see it. I don't have control over the pipes as a last-mile provider, and if I did, I would let ad traffic through without being throttled. By that logic, running a firewall that blocks incoming ssh login requests from Asia should be a cognitive dissonance for us. I promise you it isn't.
npkarnik 11y ago
I don't buy the hypocrisy. Net neutrality requires ISP infrastructure companies to not artificially restrict end-users choice for legal content. Especially as ISP companies become coupled with content companies (Comcast/NBC Universal) and generate anti-trust concerns regarding throttling their competitors in the content vertical. An end-user running an ad-blocker has literally nothing to do with the appropriate role of the infrastructure provider (which many argue should be an unbiased plumbing system). I do think there are some ethical concerns for running an ad-blocker, but I don't think this is one of them.
- harryovers 11y ago
  Net neutrality is about all net traffic being treated equally. It is not just about the ISPs throttling what they want. Ad blockers do not treat all network traffic equally, they will block it if they think it is anything to do with an advertising company.
  - npkarnik 11y ago
    Every source I've read disagrees with your interpretation. Net neutrality is about common carrier rules and definitely relates to how ISPs and Governments handle traffic. Here's an article by Tim Wu, who coined the term explaining that he is specifically talking about public network neutrality and common carrier laws: http://www.timwu.org/network_neutrality.html http://www.timwu.org/network_neutrality.html Also, https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality

faragon 11y ago

In my opinion, DRM will "fix" that in the future: browser plugins could not be able to identify those ads. So we could reach "Black Mirror"-like ads sooner o later. Brave new world...

minimuffins 11y ago

"Ads help us to be more informed about what products are available to us" (paraphrasing) A kind public service! We should really be paying them, but the advertisers inform us for free! Asking about the ethics of hiding ads seems a little like asking about the ethics of taking shelter during a carpet bombing attack. I wish we would steer these discussions away from economics (Do the ads work? Are there better ways to monetize, do they stabilize or destabilize markets, etc) and toward culture. What is the cultural effect of saturating the internet (and the rest of the world for that matter) with ads? I am not the first person to ask...

Paul_S 11y ago

Ethics? You mean business. There is no ethical dilemma here, just a business model that might be not working as well as you'd like.

TheCoelacanth 11y ago

Any ethical framework in which it is unethical to take minimal steps to protect myself from psychological manipulation is an ethical framework that I have no interest in adhering to.

Animats 11y ago

The article is a promotion for the author's ad service: "For publishers who want to remain ad-supported, ethically and tastefully presented native advertising, such as sponsored posts in feeds and our community’s podcast ads, has proven to be more effective, more profitable, and less user-hostile by far compared to awful network <script> embeds." "Sponsored posts" are in some ways worse than pop-ups. We can block pop-ups. Also note that "sponsored posts" that look like regular posts violate the FTC's rule that ads must be distinguished from non-ad content. [1] [1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-releases/ftc-staff-revises-online-advertising-disclosure-guidelines/130312dotcomdisclosures.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/press-re...

MBCook 11y ago
To my knowledge Marco doesn't run an ad service. > Also note that "sponsored posts" that look like regular posts violate the FTC's rule that ads must be distinguished from non-ad content. I assume that's why he wrote "ethically and tastefully presented native advertising".

charles2013 11y ago

like OP, online ads (partially) put food on my table. but that's where the similarities stop: whereas OP mentions he's "never been tempted to run ad-blocking software before," i've blocked ads for years. and i don't just block ads myself, i advise my friends and family to block them, too. what most of my friends and family don't know is web ads represent, arguably, one of the most dangerous aspects of modern web UX. ad servers exploited with 0-day vulns are one thing, but what worry me (and what i despise) most are dodgy ads that try to mimic/replicate some aspect of the publisher's web UI, and ads that fraudulently misrepresent other websites (e.g. fake facebook notification ads). many of these ads run on the biggest networks. so instead of repeatedly telling my grandma that the buttons on certain sites aren't actually buttons for those sites, or that the banner with the facebook friend request isn't actually from facebook, i just install adblock on her browser. i'm well aware of the irony and the double-standard. but safety first, right?

charles2013 11y ago
if i've written something that's factually wrong or misleading, offensive, or otherwise violates the comment guidelines, i would appreciate the opportunity to update my comment or delete it. and for that to happen i would need some feedback.

petercooper 11y ago

The bigger issue, IMHO, is quality of advertising rather than its presence. People pay $15 for a theater ticket and sit through 10 minutes of ads, buy Vogue magazine and have 30%+ of pages be ads, buy The New York Times and be hit with ads all over the place, watch the Superbowl specifically to see the ads, and more. What people seem to really want are better ads or even ads that are entertainment or content in their own right (which is why native advertising has taken off).

touristtam 11y ago
Or a revamped pricing scheme for the website they might favor for their content. Seeing how the internet and computers allows for many more content to be published at a fraction of the cost of yesterday's system, there is a gap to be filled between the old pricing scheme of hard copies newspaper and all "free" content of the web. $15 per month per website (like the NYT) seems a bit excessive when 10 or 20 other websites might offer the same news and at least a dozen direct competitors have similar offers. My father and his father might have had a subscription to a couple of newspaper/magazine, but I have the news at my finger tips.

PopeOfNope 11y ago

Forget about advertisers and site runners and economics and the rest of it. I run ad blocking software because ads are too good a delivery mechanism for malware.

gambiter 11y ago

I really truly don't understand why people this this is an ethical issue at all. I personally own 12 personal domains, all for various content that I personally put up. Some blogs, some game servers, etc, etc. I don't charge for my content, and I don't advertise. I'm not in it to make money, I'm in it to share things with people, and I do it all out of my own wallet. Why is there this assumption that all content needs to be subsidized by the readers? I mean, I get it... there's certainly value in compensating content producers for their time, and even allowing them to do it full time... but there is SO much content out there that is basically put up out of the goodness of the creators' hearts. Why can't we keep it that way?

abustamam 11y ago

I think one of the big problems is that most end-users don't know everything that goes into displaying an ad (myself included). Yes, we can say, "I consent to viewing an ad in order to receive X free service" in the same way that we consent to viewing a commercial when we watch TV or listening to an ad on the radio. However, in those latter two examples, the information is one-way. Those advertisers don't collect any personal information (outside of perhaps our viewing/listening location). When it comes to website ads, most consumers do not know/realize that a) the advertisers are collecting a WEALTH of your personal information and b) that information comes at a cost of your bandwidth (which, for many mobile users, is limited). There are probably many other things that happen between the end-user and the third-party that I am not aware of. Sure, they may consent to viewing a free ad, but most of them do NOT consent to collection of information nor increased usage of bandwidth. I am happy that many websites are now (at least trying to) put a visible cookie privacy policy, but I think even those little policies are getting banner blindness.