3 ms·

> Once the adblocker is installed, once web-ads have been poisoned by years of bad practices, ads aren’t coming back. That's really the crux of the matter. Ad

by srdev 11y ago

> Once the adblocker is installed, once web-ads have been poisoned by years of bad practices, ads aren’t coming back. That's really the crux of the matter. Advertisers and the sites using them had a chance to show us that they could do this in a responsible manner that took user experience into consideration. They demonstrated that they would engage in as much user-hostile advertising as they could get away with. So my ad-blocker went from having a carefully curated whitelist to a blanket banning with no exceptions. They had their chance and they blew it.

hollerith 11y ago
If I was a responsible advertiser over the last 20 years, I had absolutely no chance to prevent irresponsible people from becoming member of the group you refer to as "advertisers" -- and, at least in the US, if I tried I would probably run afoul of anti-trust or other laws -- so it does not make much sense to say that I "had my chance". There are good arguments for ad blockers, but treating a collection of independent market participants as if they were a single person or a coherent group able to enforce norms on its members is not one. I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.) ADDED. Over the 20 years since the start of advertising on the internet, the actors with the best chance to have headed off the current situation were the maintainers of the popular web browsers, but saying that they had their chance does not help shift the moral high ground from responsible advertisers to users of ad blockers.
- srdev 11y ago
  From my perspective as a user, it doesn't matter. If the ad networks and their customers are unable to enforce standards on their advertisers, then I have no choice but to block them. Making it my responsibility is not an option. Its not possible to enforce compliance with some sort of ethical standards industry-wide, but it is possible to at least encourage it, especially if you are a large player like Facebook or Google. From my perspective, they don't even appear to be trying. > I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.) Its not clear to me that this is the case. Simply enforcing standards on ads is not the same as limiting competition. Its an issue of a corporation deciding to not carry your content because it does not pass some presumably published and neutral guidelines. At the very least, it is not as clear-cut as you are making it sound.
onion2k 11y ago
Except the ads will come back. There'll be an arms race between ad tech companies and ad blocking companies. The amount of money that ad delivery generates means there will always be people working on new ways to put them in websites, and ad blocking companies will only ever be able to play catch up.
- srdev 11y ago
  My experience is that the blockers have done a very good job of keeping up with these tactics, so I'm not particularly worried on this front. There is still viral marketing and paid PR pieces disguised as legitimate content, however, but not much can be done about that and it doesn't impact me as much as traditional advertising.
  - malchow 11y ago
    Wait: paid messaging, articles stealthily written by PR flacks, "native" ads, in-feed hortatory messages masquerading as intelligent editorial content ---- this stuff is better than traditional ads? Because they impact you less? Sure, perhaps they impact your LTE connection less. (But, hey, no one needed faster than 56kbps in 1995. Mobile bandwidth will grow.) In point of fact, I'll bet ads "disguised as legitimate content" impact you more. Most of us are technologists of one stripe or another here. But putting on our humanities hats, isn't it actually quite a bit better/more moral/more tolerable/sustainable to have a little shiny 300px by 250px cube with a picture of the latest BMW than to have the credibility of our favorite car blog or car writer compromised?
    - srdev 11y ago
      I take it as a point that these probably impact behavior just as much as traditional ads. Let me raise a counter-point though. These things have already been done for a while. Is there any evidence that banner ads were preventing this sort of advertising from being even more prevalent than it already is? I am skeptical that advertisers are holding back on these avenues -- in fact its pretty obvious that they're heavily into this space already.
matthewmacleod 11y ago
The problem is that the well was poisoned by bad actors, to the detriment of others. I've worked on some sites that had adverts on them over the years. They were always pretty simple and respectful – generally no third-party tracking, no obnoxious flash popovers or horrible spammy 'one top tip that doctors hate' nonsense. Or sometime's Google's text ads, which has the downside of tracking but are still pretty gentle. I fought pretty hard for this in most cases – other parties would rather have trackers from dozens of domains, third-party adservers, interstitial advertising and so on. But it's not like the majority of ad-blocking users care about allowing 'good' adverts to thrive – they'll understandably just turn it on and block everything. Before you know it, you've achieved nothing except lower revenue and a vague sense of having done the right thing. It's a race to the bottom. The thing is, I'm now a dedicated user of ad-blocking software. And I didn't realise how awful using the web has become until I turned it off for a bit – it's really very unpleasant browsing without adblocking, with slow-loading sites, and obnoxious flashing adverts, and overlays and popovers… I have nothing against advertising on the web, or even things like Google Analytics. But I hit a website a few weeks ago that had no fewer than sixty tracking and advertising scripts. It's out of control.
Reedx 11y ago
Well, I have to agree that advertisers and a lot of sites have put us in a bad spot. Sites like Wikia drive me nuts because they've gone so overboard with ads that they all but force people to find a solution. But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts? I run a fairly bandwidth heavy site (MobyGames) and really try to find a reasonable balancing point. In fact the ads don't even cover hosting costs. I decline ad networks that do real time ad bidding or videos or lots of tracking scripts. So I'm really curious if you and others would consider a site like this to still not be whitelistable? If not, at what point would you consider it to be?
- srdev 11y ago
  > But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts? To be totally honest? Probably. I'd be inclined to whitelist sites that curate their ads or ad networks such that 1) Ads are small and delivered fast 2) Ads do not track users 3) Ads never deliver malware ever. 4) Content is not split or otherwise organized to enhance ad views over readability. 5) Ads do not popup, popover, popunder. 6) No door-in-face to advertise your iOS/Android app. and so on and so forth. The issue here is that you first have to establish that you won't do these things, then I have to trust that you actually keep your word and will continue to avoid bad ads indefinitely into the future. That is, you won't change your mind when revenue decreases. Then I have to extend that same trust to your ad network. I have to trust that they won't "slip up" while you're not watching. And now I have to do that for all the sites that I visit that I may want to whitelist. Thats not really tractable. That trust requires a lot of research on my part or blind faith. And the ad network thing is also a sticking point, because ad networks that have seemingly worked in good faith in the past have become user-hostile when they became larger or had to compete (i.e. Google).

by srdev 11y ago

hollerith 11y ago

If I was a responsible advertiser over the last 20 years, I had absolutely no chance to prevent irresponsible people from becoming member of the group you refer to as "advertisers" -- and, at least in the US, if I tried I would probably run afoul of anti-trust or other laws -- so it does not make much sense to say that I "had my chance". There are good arguments for ad blockers, but treating a collection of independent market participants as if they were a single person or a coherent group able to enforce norms on its members is not one. I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.) ADDED. Over the 20 years since the start of advertising on the internet, the actors with the best chance to have headed off the current situation were the maintainers of the popular web browsers, but saying that they had their chance does not help shift the moral high ground from responsible advertisers to users of ad blockers.

srdev 11y ago
From my perspective as a user, it doesn't matter. If the ad networks and their customers are unable to enforce standards on their advertisers, then I have no choice but to block them. Making it my responsibility is not an option. Its not possible to enforce compliance with some sort of ethical standards industry-wide, but it is possible to at least encourage it, especially if you are a large player like Facebook or Google. From my perspective, they don't even appear to be trying. > I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.) Its not clear to me that this is the case. Simply enforcing standards on ads is not the same as limiting competition. Its an issue of a corporation deciding to not carry your content because it does not pass some presumably published and neutral guidelines. At the very least, it is not as clear-cut as you are making it sound.

onion2k 11y ago

Except the ads will come back. There'll be an arms race between ad tech companies and ad blocking companies. The amount of money that ad delivery generates means there will always be people working on new ways to put them in websites, and ad blocking companies will only ever be able to play catch up.

srdev 11y ago
My experience is that the blockers have done a very good job of keeping up with these tactics, so I'm not particularly worried on this front. There is still viral marketing and paid PR pieces disguised as legitimate content, however, but not much can be done about that and it doesn't impact me as much as traditional advertising.
- malchow 11y ago
  Wait: paid messaging, articles stealthily written by PR flacks, "native" ads, in-feed hortatory messages masquerading as intelligent editorial content ---- this stuff is better than traditional ads? Because they impact you less? Sure, perhaps they impact your LTE connection less. (But, hey, no one needed faster than 56kbps in 1995. Mobile bandwidth will grow.) In point of fact, I'll bet ads "disguised as legitimate content" impact you more. Most of us are technologists of one stripe or another here. But putting on our humanities hats, isn't it actually quite a bit better/more moral/more tolerable/sustainable to have a little shiny 300px by 250px cube with a picture of the latest BMW than to have the credibility of our favorite car blog or car writer compromised?
  - srdev 11y ago
    I take it as a point that these probably impact behavior just as much as traditional ads. Let me raise a counter-point though. These things have already been done for a while. Is there any evidence that banner ads were preventing this sort of advertising from being even more prevalent than it already is? I am skeptical that advertisers are holding back on these avenues -- in fact its pretty obvious that they're heavily into this space already.

matthewmacleod 11y ago

The problem is that the well was poisoned by bad actors, to the detriment of others. I've worked on some sites that had adverts on them over the years. They were always pretty simple and respectful – generally no third-party tracking, no obnoxious flash popovers or horrible spammy 'one top tip that doctors hate' nonsense. Or sometime's Google's text ads, which has the downside of tracking but are still pretty gentle. I fought pretty hard for this in most cases – other parties would rather have trackers from dozens of domains, third-party adservers, interstitial advertising and so on. But it's not like the majority of ad-blocking users care about allowing 'good' adverts to thrive – they'll understandably just turn it on and block everything. Before you know it, you've achieved nothing except lower revenue and a vague sense of having done the right thing. It's a race to the bottom. The thing is, I'm now a dedicated user of ad-blocking software. And I didn't realise how awful using the web has become until I turned it off for a bit – it's really very unpleasant browsing without adblocking, with slow-loading sites, and obnoxious flashing adverts, and overlays and popovers… I have nothing against advertising on the web, or even things like Google Analytics. But I hit a website a few weeks ago that had no fewer than sixty tracking and advertising scripts. It's out of control.

Reedx 11y ago

Well, I have to agree that advertisers and a lot of sites have put us in a bad spot. Sites like Wikia drive me nuts because they've gone so overboard with ads that they all but force people to find a solution. But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts? I run a fairly bandwidth heavy site (MobyGames) and really try to find a reasonable balancing point. In fact the ads don't even cover hosting costs. I decline ad networks that do real time ad bidding or videos or lots of tracking scripts. So I'm really curious if you and others would consider a site like this to still not be whitelistable? If not, at what point would you consider it to be?

srdev 11y ago
> But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts? To be totally honest? Probably. I'd be inclined to whitelist sites that curate their ads or ad networks such that 1) Ads are small and delivered fast 2) Ads do not track users 3) Ads never deliver malware ever. 4) Content is not split or otherwise organized to enhance ad views over readability. 5) Ads do not popup, popover, popunder. 6) No door-in-face to advertise your iOS/Android app. and so on and so forth. The issue here is that you first have to establish that you won't do these things, then I have to trust that you actually keep your word and will continue to avoid bad ads indefinitely into the future. That is, you won't change your mind when revenue decreases. Then I have to extend that same trust to your ad network. I have to trust that they won't "slip up" while you're not watching. And now I have to do that for all the sites that I visit that I may want to whitelist. Thats not really tractable. That trust requires a lot of research on my part or blind faith. And the ad network thing is also a sticking point, because ad networks that have seemingly worked in good faith in the past have become user-hostile when they became larger or had to compete (i.e. Google).