7 ms·

Ad Blockers and the Nuisance at the Heart of the Modern Web

39 points by denzil_correa 11y ago

DaveWalk 11y ago
tl;dr The NYT distills the adblocking zeitgeist into layman's terms. Standard quotes from ABP parent company CEO. And from an Irish startup called PageFair that reports on AdBlock use. Dig this quote: >In a report last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in revenue this year. I can't even wrap my mind around that $22 billion comment. What does it even mean? It seems...vacuous. It reminds me of the RIAA/MPAA propaganda of the aughts, even though movie/music pirates would never have bought at full retail price to begin with.
- oconnore 11y ago
  > I can't even wrap my mind around that $22 billion comment. What does it even mean? It means that several thousand people will have to get real jobs.
  - Eupolemos 11y ago
    Well, in the end that goes for advertisers and website makers both, I guess. I think it is a pretty difficult conundrum, with stalking and annoying ads being unethical, but easy advertising services being a good thing for website producers. I'm working on my first commercial site, but don't know how to go about funding it in a way that wouldn't bother me - not everyone is willing to pay for membership and I'd like to be able to use ads without being an douchebag. I just don't know how yet.
wanderfowl 11y ago
That was a really nicely done piece, and captures the ethos nicely with that closing line ("For better ads tomorrow, block ads today"). So much of adblocker usage is because ads are ugly, intrusive, creepy (or conversely, pointless), and great vectors for malware, and thus, are bad UX. I'm very much hoping that increased prevalence of adblocking will make the content industry either come up with a way to serve ads without wrecking UX, or monetize differently.
- psadri 11y ago
  > "For better ads tomorrow, block ads today" The problem with ads and ad blockers is that if a significantly large percentage of sites have bad ads, people will install and use ad blockers. Ad blockers will by default block ads on the well behaved sites as well as the bad sites, effectively punishing the good and bad alike. I believe there is a term for this -- the market for lemons.
  - wldcordeiro 11y ago
    Adblock Plus tried to address this but was given a ton of grief for it. I thought the idea of having an acceptable ads filter was smart.
    - fred2133 11y ago
      Maybe "display this resource text-only" rather than "hide this resource" would be a reasonable compromise. An acceptable ads standard, in other words.
    - psadri 11y ago
      Adblock could be off by default and if enough people 'vote' a site as bad by activating it for that site, then it will become 'on' by default.
      - mc808 11y ago
        And the whole thing can be funded by selling lists of users who did/didn't disable the ads in cluster X, Y, Z...
- petercooper 11y ago
  It already has to a point. Native advertising. Content marketing. Sponsorships. Crowdfunding. The problem is media businesses dealing in mass market dreck struggle to monetize those ways and instead rely on giant intrusive ad networks paying penny CPMs - but I think that's what "For better ads tomorrow, block ads today" is getting at :-)
Nadya 11y ago
People who are blocking your ads aren't people who would have purchased a product because of your ad in the first place. So I find the act of "showing non-disruptive ads to ad blockers" to be strange. >Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads. There is no reason why the implicit contract can't be changed. That's why you get contracts in writing. :) As far as any "moral" argument goes. Here's how I see it: "Your neighbor asks if they can park in your driveway. You agree to it, you had space to spare for the neighbor's car anyway. This went on fine for a few months, then your neighbor started parking two cars in your driveway. You had only agreed to having one car parked but you still had space to spare so you let them do it. A few years later - your neighbor is now parking many cars in your driveway and even blocking your garage. To drive anywhere you need to move your neighbor's car out of the way. Being the nice guy he is, he gave you a spare key to move the car when needed." Would it be "immoral" to ask your neighbor to stop parking cars in your driveway at this point? Is it immoral to ask your neighbor to stop parking cars in your driveway at any point? I've decided to no longer let ads be parked in my browser. I don't see how that is immoral. > PageFair’s canny strategy to mitigate users’ outrage is that it will only show ads that aren’t “intrusive,” Mr. Blanchfield said. Sean Blanchfield, if you ever get to read this, you can go fuck yourself. How's that for "mitigated outrage"? You don't get to decide what is and isn't "intrusive" for me.
- rhino369 11y ago
  >People who are blocking your ads aren't people who would have purchased a product because of your ad in the first place. Most advertising is just brand awareness. The days of e-advertising being about clicking the ad and buying on some webstore are long over. They are just like commercials on TV or billboards. You don't even realize the effect they have on you. >I've decided to no longer let ads be parked in my browser. I don't see how that is immoral. I totally agree. But I think it would also be fine if the content providers refused me service if I didn't let the ads through. I'm surprised more sites don't do that. I have a blocker on (and I don't even let through intrusive ads, I block it all) and I think I've only run into problems on hulu or some other video website.
Mz 11y ago
The Internet is here to stay and somehow we need to figure out how to pay for it in a way that keeps good things available to the public. This means both finding a way to pay people providing good quality stuff and doing so in a way that doesn't shut folks not paying. I have thought about this for a lot of years. When I was a homeschooling parent, there were a lot of good resources online that later disappeared for various reasons. One of those reasons was that the person publishing it took it offline to make it available to paying customers only. People have decried the deterioration of the Internt for years. I think there is a lot of validity to those complaints, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't want ads, then you need to be willing to pay people some other way. Donate buttons seem to do poorly. I was glad to see Patreon come out. I hope we can make headway on this issue. To me, there is a clear connection between everyone wanting sites to remain free while they increasingly block ads and simultaneously decry the loss of so much good stuff.
- niels_olson 11y ago
  Is there any way to impose a "progressive taxation" system? Presumably the wealthy are willing to cough up $40 per month for the New York Times. But if it's the poor and oppressed we want to take care of, how do you convince the wealthy to pitch in? Most studies I'm aware of indicate the wealthy are the least likely to be interested in progressive taxation schemes, even though they have historically created tides that lift all boats (rather than the current trend of financial schemes, which create tides that lift all yachts)
  - Mz 11y ago
    I am so tired of hearing this kind of framing. Good paradigms do not frame economic solutions in terms of rich vs poor. I am not interested in talking about how to soak the rich for the benefit of the poor. That framing only deepens the class divide. We need a different mental model for this relatively new set of problems or the horrendous crisis we currently have will only get worse. You cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. -- Albert Einstein
    - 11y ago
Fiahil 11y ago
I looked up the Interactive Advertising Bureau cited towards the ends, and ended up on a document describing guidelines to detect Click Fraud[0]. How the hell did we ended up to this level of insanity? [0]: http://www.iab.net/media/file/Click-measurement-guidelines2009.pdf http://www.iab.net/media/file/Click-measurement-guidelines20...
jordanpg 11y ago
As is typical, this doesn't address my biggest concern, which is that I absolutely don't want any ads alongside my content, ever. Now and forever, I reserve the right to read documents that I'm interested in, without any ads visible. If the web economy cannot exist without this, then I want to find another way. I don't have the answer. Yes, I'll pay for subscriptions, but this obviously doesn't solve the whole problem. Until then, I'll use adblockers until I'm forced not to or they are out-maneuvered (presumably pretty soon). We need to stop taking it for granted that the future of the internet is one in which ads are always visible.
- Natsu 11y ago
  It will be interesting to see the arms race once HTTP/2 becomes widespread. Then the server might have a better idea if you refused data it pushed, though to be fair, I suppose things like that are already detectable somehow. Part of the problem is that it's hard to secure a reasonable flow of good content. I've watched the papers race to the bottom in attention-grabbing (but wildly wrong) clickbait for some time now and it's depressing, but the web is utterly painful to use, as I've found out on occasion when starting out with a new browser that doesn't have the right extensions installed. Some of the big download sites that used to be okay bundle crapware or else make a fake download button pop and the blend the real download button with the background so you don't even download what you thought you were getting.
- WalterGR 11y ago
  Now and forever, I reserve the right to read documents that I'm interested in, without any ads visible. If the web economy cannot exist without this, then I want to find another way. Out of curiosity - and as a software engineer who makes his living partially from the intellectual property he creates - why do you feel entitled to arbitrary content on your terms? Do we all have a moral right to unencumbered and payment-less access to the new Britney Spears album? Wouldn't it make more sense to only consume media that's legitimately available in a way that you find acceptable? That's one way to steer content creators towards that world, right?
  - Retra 11y ago
niels_olson 11y ago
Wait, my use of an ad blocker costs the industry $11,000?! Maybe I should use 2... And, frankly, I have no problem paying a reasonable price for content. And the New York Times sets that bar: $40/mo is a little to high. I think they'd make 10x as much with a $5 or $10 rate.
- delecti 11y ago
  Presumably that means they've calculated that every non-adblocking person generates almost $1,000 in ad views every month. I find that number ludicrous, and I even work in advertising.
getdavidhiggins 11y ago
I'm a bit tired of the AD blocking debate. There will always be two camps in this; the tech savvy, and the web consumers who think Facebook is the Internet. Lumping people into these two categories only ever worked for computers and the web, because remember; a computer is unforgiving, the programs that execute on it are unforgiving, and a computer is only as smart as its user. With very fine grained precision I can allow what traffic I want to see on my network, and I do not apologize for that. In the end AD blocking is about control structures trickling down into the consumer web. If it is the case where I am paid better than stupid people because I know how to serve them ADs better, then I suppose I win on a hermetic level; I have recast the purpose of a computer; which is something to do my bidding, and made it a mere device and gimmick for my users. If on the other hand users are in control and I try to seize back that control, then I am in a silly game of cat and mouse, and this becomes a game of who can devise the smartest way to outsmart smart people. Not the game I want to play. Money is about keeping the channels open to receive an exchange, and if there are hangups by web publishers about whether they should disband AD networks because of AD blockers, then the game is lost. Just open up more channels. Seek out other ways to monetize: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324 https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324 Also similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647
blhack 11y ago
A thing about ads is: I actually like them. One of the reasons I used to buy magazines was to read the ads. It gave me a really good idea about the different types of tech that were available in whatever industry I was curious about at that time. My problem with most web ads is that they just feel like scams. The barrier to entry for web ads is so low, that anybody can take out any ad for any thing, and there really is no filter. Sure there were always ads for penis pills (or a speaker that makes your car sound like it has a turbo!) in the back of the magazine, but now those ads are showing up for me right in the metaphorical front. Here's what I really wish existed: an opt-in ad network. You agree to have ads shown to you, and you tell the advertisers what you are interested in, then they show you ads for things you care about. For instance: I'm leaving for burning man this weekend. I would LOVE to see ads about headlamps, or cheap EL wire, or a deal on Cliff Bars; stuff like that. Or usually: I would love to see [curated] ads for web hosting, new restaurants in Phoenix, or cheap airfair to SF. Maybe that should be my next project: a curated ad network.
- minikites 11y ago
  There's already a curated ad network in The Deck: http://decknetwork.net/ http://decknetwork.net/ Daring Fireball uses it, among others.
SCHiM 11y ago
I remember back when I was younger I used to be active on a programming website (ok it was a game hacking website, but I was active in the programming sections mostly). I wrote a number of tutorials, some of what I wrote was crap. I was 15/16 at the time, but other stuff was pretty useful. The point being that all this content was shared for free, all the code was/is in the public domain, I know that some of my code made it into, ahem, commercial products. Turns out it was pretty productive for content that was generated without any compensation at all. I wasn't the only person doing this, most content is still available from others. Naturally the internet, most companies, cannot possibly run on goodwill and motivation alone. But for me it does show that in certain niches money is not an issue. As long as there is a platform there will always be hidden gems to be found.
walterstucco 11y ago
Internet won't die without ads (or money), maybe big content providers will, and that's ok to me. The point of internet advertising is that paradoxically we have to pay to make advertisers not work. If I pay, the adv gets removed, hence the adv is not displayed, hence the advertiser real job right now is to create something that make us think that paying to not to see that shit, is actually acceptable. Ads are so terrible right now that people are gradually accepting the idea of paying for a - sometimes expensive - subscription because advertisers created the false dichotomy that the internet should be free and run by ads, or ads free but the users will have to pay for it. It is the same model of the Italian mob: if you pay, I don't burn your shop to the ground. As Italian I know this model generate lots of revenues, but it's not exactly fair. I think there is a better model, the content providers should reward with a small fee (a tiny percentage of their ads revenues) those users who are willing to watch the ads in exchange for some - small but real - money (it could even be something completely different from money, the idea is to reward who watch the ads). This way we could put things back in balance: pay advertisers to actually do their job, not to scare people into buying subscriptions to services that once were free.
brownbat 11y ago
I like the article, but I feel like there's an unquestioned premise everyone uses in these debates: > Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, Is that true? There is definitely a lot of great ad supported stuff. No question. But does that mean that all great stuff is ad supported, or ad support is necessary for the web to function? I'm not getting paid through advertising for this comment. It's still content I created that you're reading. (I know, you're probably thinking it's not that great a comment either!) A lot of webmail is ad supported, but email wasn't always that way. We had several decades with usenet, user-side email servers, dial-up BBS's, early MUDs... in the late 90s there were a lot of early online multiplayer games. Now when a single player game (with a social layer!) fails, the servers die and it's not playable.[1] Back then when a near-MMO failed, the community just took over and hosted servers for free.[2] You basically just paid for a pipe and everyone tried to pitch in, contribute something interesting, or pile in with a little of their bandwidth.[3] I don't remember society scoffing and thinking, "nah, Internet doesn't have YouTube, it's a fad." Well, except Newsweek.[4] I think that if there were no ads, we would lose a lot of the great stuff online. But we'd have different cool stuff too, because there's always been some incentive to share interesting things with other people. Even if that only motivates one in a thousand people, turns out there are a lot of people online, and it fills up pretty quick.[5,6] The different cool stuff might be "obviously worse" in your imagination, but I'm not sure. Some days I feel nostalgia for the web of decades past. Then I usually fire up an ad-supported video on YouTube to reminisce, and try to ignore the irony.[7] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires_Online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires_Online [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) [3] There's a paradoxical aside in Cryptonomicon about how the cost of bandwidth approaches zero over time, so, in theory, it can be treated as costless and abundant. Unfortunately this is a very asymptotic trend, and the needs for bandwidth increase proportionately, so in practice it's a significant and ever-present cost. [4] http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-buy-books-newspapers-straight-intenet-uh/ http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-bu... [5] http://www.geek.com/news/youtube-hits-3-billion-views-per-day-48-hours-of-video-uploaded-per-minute-1383495/ http://www.geek.com/news/youtube-hits-3-billion-views-per-da... [6] Most the people uploading videos to youtube will never get paid. Just because they theoretically could be paid doesn't mean most of them will, or that's their driving motivation. [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvch3eIoKQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvch3eIoKQQ
bigger_cheese 11y ago
I passed the threshold many years ago advertisers only have themselves to blame back in the late 90's early 00's the web used to be miserable popups everywhere ads disguised as content ads that served malware etc. Then they moved on to irritating flash ads - sometimes with sound... Nowadays it's worse because they actively mine your personal information. I see things on Facebook like "31 years old and single? Meet women now." No thanks, talk about creepy and condescending.

39 points by denzil_correa 11y ago

tl;dr The NYT distills the adblocking zeitgeist into layman's terms. Standard quotes from ABP parent company CEO. And from an Irish startup called PageFair that reports on AdBlock use. Dig this quote: >In a report last week, Adobe and PageFair, an Irish start-up that tracks ad-blocking, estimated that blockers will cost publishers nearly $22 billion in revenue this year. I can't even wrap my mind around that $22 billion comment. What does it even mean? It seems...vacuous. It reminds me of the RIAA/MPAA propaganda of the aughts, even though movie/music pirates would never have bought at full retail price to begin with.

oconnore 11y ago
> I can't even wrap my mind around that $22 billion comment. What does it even mean? It means that several thousand people will have to get real jobs.
- Eupolemos 11y ago
  Well, in the end that goes for advertisers and website makers both, I guess. I think it is a pretty difficult conundrum, with stalking and annoying ads being unethical, but easy advertising services being a good thing for website producers. I'm working on my first commercial site, but don't know how to go about funding it in a way that wouldn't bother me - not everyone is willing to pay for membership and I'd like to be able to use ads without being an douchebag. I just don't know how yet.

wanderfowl 11y ago

That was a really nicely done piece, and captures the ethos nicely with that closing line ("For better ads tomorrow, block ads today"). So much of adblocker usage is because ads are ugly, intrusive, creepy (or conversely, pointless), and great vectors for malware, and thus, are bad UX. I'm very much hoping that increased prevalence of adblocking will make the content industry either come up with a way to serve ads without wrecking UX, or monetize differently.

psadri 11y ago
> "For better ads tomorrow, block ads today" The problem with ads and ad blockers is that if a significantly large percentage of sites have bad ads, people will install and use ad blockers. Ad blockers will by default block ads on the well behaved sites as well as the bad sites, effectively punishing the good and bad alike. I believe there is a term for this -- the market for lemons.
- wldcordeiro 11y ago
  Adblock Plus tried to address this but was given a ton of grief for it. I thought the idea of having an acceptable ads filter was smart.
  - fred2133 11y ago
    Maybe "display this resource text-only" rather than "hide this resource" would be a reasonable compromise. An acceptable ads standard, in other words.
  - psadri 11y ago
    Adblock could be off by default and if enough people 'vote' a site as bad by activating it for that site, then it will become 'on' by default.
    - mc808 11y ago
      And the whole thing can be funded by selling lists of users who did/didn't disable the ads in cluster X, Y, Z...
petercooper 11y ago
It already has to a point. Native advertising. Content marketing. Sponsorships. Crowdfunding. The problem is media businesses dealing in mass market dreck struggle to monetize those ways and instead rely on giant intrusive ad networks paying penny CPMs - but I think that's what "For better ads tomorrow, block ads today" is getting at :-)

Nadya 11y ago

People who are blocking your ads aren't people who would have purchased a product because of your ad in the first place. So I find the act of "showing non-disruptive ads to ad blockers" to be strange. >Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads. There is no reason why the implicit contract can't be changed. That's why you get contracts in writing. :) As far as any "moral" argument goes. Here's how I see it: "Your neighbor asks if they can park in your driveway. You agree to it, you had space to spare for the neighbor's car anyway. This went on fine for a few months, then your neighbor started parking two cars in your driveway. You had only agreed to having one car parked but you still had space to spare so you let them do it. A few years later - your neighbor is now parking many cars in your driveway and even blocking your garage. To drive anywhere you need to move your neighbor's car out of the way. Being the nice guy he is, he gave you a spare key to move the car when needed." Would it be "immoral" to ask your neighbor to stop parking cars in your driveway at this point? Is it immoral to ask your neighbor to stop parking cars in your driveway at any point? I've decided to no longer let ads be parked in my browser. I don't see how that is immoral. > PageFair’s canny strategy to mitigate users’ outrage is that it will only show ads that aren’t “intrusive,” Mr. Blanchfield said. Sean Blanchfield, if you ever get to read this, you can go fuck yourself. How's that for "mitigated outrage"? You don't get to decide what is and isn't "intrusive" for me.

rhino369 11y ago
>People who are blocking your ads aren't people who would have purchased a product because of your ad in the first place. Most advertising is just brand awareness. The days of e-advertising being about clicking the ad and buying on some webstore are long over. They are just like commercials on TV or billboards. You don't even realize the effect they have on you. >I've decided to no longer let ads be parked in my browser. I don't see how that is immoral. I totally agree. But I think it would also be fine if the content providers refused me service if I didn't let the ads through. I'm surprised more sites don't do that. I have a blocker on (and I don't even let through intrusive ads, I block it all) and I think I've only run into problems on hulu or some other video website.

Mz 11y ago

The Internet is here to stay and somehow we need to figure out how to pay for it in a way that keeps good things available to the public. This means both finding a way to pay people providing good quality stuff and doing so in a way that doesn't shut folks not paying. I have thought about this for a lot of years. When I was a homeschooling parent, there were a lot of good resources online that later disappeared for various reasons. One of those reasons was that the person publishing it took it offline to make it available to paying customers only. People have decried the deterioration of the Internt for years. I think there is a lot of validity to those complaints, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't want ads, then you need to be willing to pay people some other way. Donate buttons seem to do poorly. I was glad to see Patreon come out. I hope we can make headway on this issue. To me, there is a clear connection between everyone wanting sites to remain free while they increasingly block ads and simultaneously decry the loss of so much good stuff.

niels_olson 11y ago
Is there any way to impose a "progressive taxation" system? Presumably the wealthy are willing to cough up $40 per month for the New York Times. But if it's the poor and oppressed we want to take care of, how do you convince the wealthy to pitch in? Most studies I'm aware of indicate the wealthy are the least likely to be interested in progressive taxation schemes, even though they have historically created tides that lift all boats (rather than the current trend of financial schemes, which create tides that lift all yachts)
- Mz 11y ago
  I am so tired of hearing this kind of framing. Good paradigms do not frame economic solutions in terms of rich vs poor. I am not interested in talking about how to soak the rich for the benefit of the poor. That framing only deepens the class divide. We need a different mental model for this relatively new set of problems or the horrendous crisis we currently have will only get worse. You cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. -- Albert Einstein
  - 11y ago

Fiahil 11y ago

I looked up the Interactive Advertising Bureau cited towards the ends, and ended up on a document describing guidelines to detect Click Fraud[0]. How the hell did we ended up to this level of insanity? [0]: http://www.iab.net/media/file/Click-measurement-guidelines2009.pdf http://www.iab.net/media/file/Click-measurement-guidelines20...

jordanpg 11y ago

As is typical, this doesn't address my biggest concern, which is that I absolutely don't want any ads alongside my content, ever. Now and forever, I reserve the right to read documents that I'm interested in, without any ads visible. If the web economy cannot exist without this, then I want to find another way. I don't have the answer. Yes, I'll pay for subscriptions, but this obviously doesn't solve the whole problem. Until then, I'll use adblockers until I'm forced not to or they are out-maneuvered (presumably pretty soon). We need to stop taking it for granted that the future of the internet is one in which ads are always visible.

Natsu 11y ago
It will be interesting to see the arms race once HTTP/2 becomes widespread. Then the server might have a better idea if you refused data it pushed, though to be fair, I suppose things like that are already detectable somehow. Part of the problem is that it's hard to secure a reasonable flow of good content. I've watched the papers race to the bottom in attention-grabbing (but wildly wrong) clickbait for some time now and it's depressing, but the web is utterly painful to use, as I've found out on occasion when starting out with a new browser that doesn't have the right extensions installed. Some of the big download sites that used to be okay bundle crapware or else make a fake download button pop and the blend the real download button with the background so you don't even download what you thought you were getting.
WalterGR 11y ago
Now and forever, I reserve the right to read documents that I'm interested in, without any ads visible. If the web economy cannot exist without this, then I want to find another way. Out of curiosity - and as a software engineer who makes his living partially from the intellectual property he creates - why do you feel entitled to arbitrary content on your terms? Do we all have a moral right to unencumbered and payment-less access to the new Britney Spears album? Wouldn't it make more sense to only consume media that's legitimately available in a way that you find acceptable? That's one way to steer content creators towards that world, right?
- Retra 11y ago

niels_olson 11y ago

Wait, my use of an ad blocker costs the industry $11,000?! Maybe I should use 2... And, frankly, I have no problem paying a reasonable price for content. And the New York Times sets that bar: $40/mo is a little to high. I think they'd make 10x as much with a $5 or $10 rate.

delecti 11y ago
Presumably that means they've calculated that every non-adblocking person generates almost $1,000 in ad views every month. I find that number ludicrous, and I even work in advertising.

getdavidhiggins 11y ago

I'm a bit tired of the AD blocking debate. There will always be two camps in this; the tech savvy, and the web consumers who think Facebook is the Internet. Lumping people into these two categories only ever worked for computers and the web, because remember; a computer is unforgiving, the programs that execute on it are unforgiving, and a computer is only as smart as its user. With very fine grained precision I can allow what traffic I want to see on my network, and I do not apologize for that. In the end AD blocking is about control structures trickling down into the consumer web. If it is the case where I am paid better than stupid people because I know how to serve them ADs better, then I suppose I win on a hermetic level; I have recast the purpose of a computer; which is something to do my bidding, and made it a mere device and gimmick for my users. If on the other hand users are in control and I try to seize back that control, then I am in a silly game of cat and mouse, and this becomes a game of who can devise the smartest way to outsmart smart people. Not the game I want to play. Money is about keeping the channels open to receive an exchange, and if there are hangups by web publishers about whether they should disband AD networks because of AD blockers, then the game is lost. Just open up more channels. Seek out other ways to monetize: https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324 https://gist.github.com/ndarville/4295324 Also similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924647

blhack 11y ago

A thing about ads is: I actually like them. One of the reasons I used to buy magazines was to read the ads. It gave me a really good idea about the different types of tech that were available in whatever industry I was curious about at that time. My problem with most web ads is that they just feel like scams. The barrier to entry for web ads is so low, that anybody can take out any ad for any thing, and there really is no filter. Sure there were always ads for penis pills (or a speaker that makes your car sound like it has a turbo!) in the back of the magazine, but now those ads are showing up for me right in the metaphorical front. Here's what I really wish existed: an opt-in ad network. You agree to have ads shown to you, and you tell the advertisers what you are interested in, then they show you ads for things you care about. For instance: I'm leaving for burning man this weekend. I would LOVE to see ads about headlamps, or cheap EL wire, or a deal on Cliff Bars; stuff like that. Or usually: I would love to see [curated] ads for web hosting, new restaurants in Phoenix, or cheap airfair to SF. Maybe that should be my next project: a curated ad network.

minikites 11y ago
There's already a curated ad network in The Deck: http://decknetwork.net/ http://decknetwork.net/ Daring Fireball uses it, among others.

SCHiM 11y ago

I remember back when I was younger I used to be active on a programming website (ok it was a game hacking website, but I was active in the programming sections mostly). I wrote a number of tutorials, some of what I wrote was crap. I was 15/16 at the time, but other stuff was pretty useful. The point being that all this content was shared for free, all the code was/is in the public domain, I know that some of my code made it into, ahem, commercial products. Turns out it was pretty productive for content that was generated without any compensation at all. I wasn't the only person doing this, most content is still available from others. Naturally the internet, most companies, cannot possibly run on goodwill and motivation alone. But for me it does show that in certain niches money is not an issue. As long as there is a platform there will always be hidden gems to be found.

walterstucco 11y ago

Internet won't die without ads (or money), maybe big content providers will, and that's ok to me. The point of internet advertising is that paradoxically we have to pay to make advertisers not work. If I pay, the adv gets removed, hence the adv is not displayed, hence the advertiser real job right now is to create something that make us think that paying to not to see that shit, is actually acceptable. Ads are so terrible right now that people are gradually accepting the idea of paying for a - sometimes expensive - subscription because advertisers created the false dichotomy that the internet should be free and run by ads, or ads free but the users will have to pay for it. It is the same model of the Italian mob: if you pay, I don't burn your shop to the ground. As Italian I know this model generate lots of revenues, but it's not exactly fair. I think there is a better model, the content providers should reward with a small fee (a tiny percentage of their ads revenues) those users who are willing to watch the ads in exchange for some - small but real - money (it could even be something completely different from money, the idea is to reward who watch the ads). This way we could put things back in balance: pay advertisers to actually do their job, not to scare people into buying subscriptions to services that once were free.

brownbat 11y ago

I like the article, but I feel like there's an unquestioned premise everyone uses in these debates: > Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, Is that true? There is definitely a lot of great ad supported stuff. No question. But does that mean that all great stuff is ad supported, or ad support is necessary for the web to function? I'm not getting paid through advertising for this comment. It's still content I created that you're reading. (I know, you're probably thinking it's not that great a comment either!) A lot of webmail is ad supported, but email wasn't always that way. We had several decades with usenet, user-side email servers, dial-up BBS's, early MUDs... in the late 90s there were a lot of early online multiplayer games. Now when a single player game (with a social layer!) fails, the servers die and it's not playable.[1] Back then when a near-MMO failed, the community just took over and hosted servers for free.[2] You basically just paid for a pipe and everyone tried to pitch in, contribute something interesting, or pile in with a little of their bandwidth.[3] I don't remember society scoffing and thinking, "nah, Internet doesn't have YouTube, it's a fad." Well, except Newsweek.[4] I think that if there were no ads, we would lose a lot of the great stuff online. But we'd have different cool stuff too, because there's always been some incentive to share interesting things with other people. Even if that only motivates one in a thousand people, turns out there are a lot of people online, and it fills up pretty quick.[5,6] The different cool stuff might be "obviously worse" in your imagination, but I'm not sure. Some days I feel nostalgia for the web of decades past. Then I usually fire up an ad-supported video on YouTube to reminisce, and try to ignore the irony.[7] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires_Online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires_Online [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) [3] There's a paradoxical aside in Cryptonomicon about how the cost of bandwidth approaches zero over time, so, in theory, it can be treated as costless and abundant. Unfortunately this is a very asymptotic trend, and the needs for bandwidth increase proportionately, so in practice it's a significant and ever-present cost. [4] http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-buy-books-newspapers-straight-intenet-uh/ http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-bu... [5] http://www.geek.com/news/youtube-hits-3-billion-views-per-day-48-hours-of-video-uploaded-per-minute-1383495/ http://www.geek.com/news/youtube-hits-3-billion-views-per-da... [6] Most the people uploading videos to youtube will never get paid. Just because they theoretically could be paid doesn't mean most of them will, or that's their driving motivation. [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvch3eIoKQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvch3eIoKQQ

bigger_cheese 11y ago

I passed the threshold many years ago advertisers only have themselves to blame back in the late 90's early 00's the web used to be miserable popups everywhere ads disguised as content ads that served malware etc. Then they moved on to irritating flash ads - sometimes with sound... Nowadays it's worse because they actively mine your personal information. I see things on Facebook like "31 years old and single? Meet women now." No thanks, talk about creepy and condescending.