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I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are jus

by jordigh 11y ago

I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties. More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

MBCook 11y ago
The Verge has a poll going today asking if you use an ad blocker: "Yes, I want free content and I'll pay the ad blockers" and "No, I want free content and I'll pay the publisher through ads". I'm with you. I didn't use an ad blocker for years. Then I installed a flash blocker because it kept my computer from trying to melt it's self and play video ads while I was trying to read. Then we started to get so many ads that prevented me from reading content (the link-hover pop-ups, pop-ups that appear after the content has been loaded for 30s, ads that use JS to move parts of the page around) I started using one on the desktop just so I could try to read sites. In the last year I've been using my phone/tablet a lot more. The experience has been DREADFUL because of ads. They take up most of the screen, slow loading to a crawl, kick other pages out of memory, make scrolling jittery, etc. I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. If the ads are relatively unobtrusive (i.e. not covering up content, not flashing, etc.) they're OK with me. I don't mind banners in between paragraphs of a story I'm reading. But if I can't read your site because of your ads, you're not helping yourself. The creepiness of trackers only ads to all the other problems. The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker. (I also subscribe to sites I really like, which only seems fair).
- hyperbovine 11y ago
  > I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. FYI, I had the pleasure of installing an ad-blocker (in the spirit of no advertising, I will not mention which one) on my iPad this morning. It lets me turn off scripts and images. The device now responds like something out of Star Trek. Highly, highly recommended if you just care about reading words on the screen.
- djur 11y ago
  Why does one of those responses assume that you have to pay for an ad blocker? I've never heard of such a thing.
  - mappu 11y ago
    The burgeoning category of iOS 9 ad blockers has several popular non gratis options.
  - incarnate 11y ago
    The poll is based around discussion of the new iOS 9 ad blocking browsers, the most popular of which aren't free (at the moment). The Verge is also no doubt trying to make the poll more divisive with this phrasing, given where their revenue comes from. http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351233/poll-ad-blocking-yes-or-no http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351233/poll-ad-blocking-y...
    - ploxiln 11y ago
      If the best ad blocking options for iOS continue to be non-free, and grow in popularity, well that would be pretty eloquent, wouldn't it: People will pay (a relatively small amount I guess) to see no ads on most sites. (disclaimer: I use a free ad blocker for firefox on android)
- greggman 11y ago
  I just mostly avoid sites with crappy ads. If I go to a site with a non skippable video ad I just close the tab. It wasn't that important to begin with. That includes YouTube sometimes. Same with other types of annoying ads. No need for an ad blocker for me so far.
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    My guess is many people are just like you. Basically, they've already installed ad blockers in their minds. Open article, click x, read article. Or read article, don't look to the left and right. Or see 45 sec countdown video, quit. That's basically how I browse. The only ads I'm ever interested in turn out to be reminders of things I've looked at, due to how cookies work.
    - stevesearer 11y ago
      I do the same while reading other websites, but have always designed mine with the goal of never using advertising methods I would be annoyed of. No popovers, no video ads, no full screen takeovers. I also recently removed Google Adsense because the ads it showed were not relevant to my content even though they may have technically been relevant to my readers via retargeting. Interestingly enough, at least in my field, using these practices have actually had the effect of increasing ad revenue since I am now directly selling ads and cutting out the middleman.
- DavideNL 11y ago
  > The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker. I agree... a funny example: https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/611482506400014336 https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/611482506400014336
noobie 11y ago
>I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties. It's not the the irrelevant parties that bother me, it's the targeted ads based on my history that do!
rm999 11y ago
>everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites. Let's be honest here: this debate for most people is a fully practical one about speed, security, aesthetics, etc. Most people I know are fine with unobtrusive advertising and enjoy the benefits it's provided them up to now. But the state of the digital advertising world has been getting worse and worse for everyone (including the advertisers, btw), and ad blockers have been making that glaringly obvious. What we're seeing is the side effect of a broken industry, not a pushback against consumerism.
- civilian 11y ago
  But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there. Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.
  - rm999 11y ago
    >you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property Such bans are completely possible and within the rights of a local jurisdiction - they're just extremely rare and not something society generally seems to care about. In actuality, branding and advertising is engrained in our culture. I hear friends talk about their favorite ads all the time - instead of the TV show the ads interrupted. I know a very large number of people who watch the Superbowl "just for the ads". I can't convince anyone who visits me in NYC to skip Times Square, because they really want to see that pit of blinking ads for themselves. Many moviegoers love how the theater wastes 15 minutes of their time playing previews (i.e. ads). I could go on and on with my biased examples :) My point is that we are a consumerist society; anyone who has worked in advertising lives off of this fact and knows it's true. The real problem is internet advertisers took it way too far.
bradleyjg 11y ago
If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical. I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?
- JulianMorrison 11y ago
  People are, it's called Patreon. Which would be a good model, too, for "free but we need our salary paid" content.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    There's also Google Contributor. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ I'd be fine with websites requiring a Google Contributor login for unlimited access.
    - gkop 11y ago
      Also Beacon: http://www.beaconreader.com http://www.beaconreader.com
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Can we PLEASE stop posting stuff that is US-only? Solving an issue only in the US does NOT help the world.
      - powertower 11y ago
        The "either help everyone or help no one" mentality helps --> no one. Also consider that usually a problem has to be solved in your garage before it's solved globally. Other times the situation is that there are external barriers (such massive fraud, incompatible laws, etc) and issues (such as the market not being developed enough yet, little to no demand, etc) that prevent the local solution getting scaled out to a global solution.
lazyjones 11y ago
> It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. That's probably the most common reason. I doubt people actually click on annoying ads in significant numbers these days. Perhaps publishers could settle for tracking only, preferably server-side without 3rd parties involved, thereby removing the most common motivation for ad blocking? Tracking data could then be sold to e-commerce sites for retargeting based on reading habits. Everyone wins, especially if privacy-conscious users can opt out of this kind of tracking.
- mocookie 11y ago
  Server-side tracking would be even harder to opt out of than the current setup.. the server could choose to not send you the article if you don't send it what it wants (ie proof of your identity, your age/address/name, etc)
Mz 11y ago
More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy. Yet, you are consuming someone else's writing as a minimum. I have taken ads off most of my websites and added a tipping option. I hope that turns out to be successful. I currently don't get enough traffic for it to support me outright. Most people on the web find that donate buttons do little or nothing. They turn to ads because it is a way to get paid. What are you doing to try to solve the problem of monetizing the web some way other than ads? If you aren't doing anything to try to promote another monetization strategy, then you are basically promoting slavery in that you are expecting people to make the web happen without being paid for it. You are expecting people to work for free. Currently, many people do work for free, some of them in hopes that it will lead to money at some point. Some of them are quite bitter about it. (Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287) I have been online about 17 years. I have steadily watched good, free content disappear and get replaced by something that helped pay the bills for the content providers. I also loathe consumerism. I live a spartan life and I expect to continue doing so. But the Internet is important to me and it needs to be monetized somehow. I am not trying to be disrespectful to you and I apologize if it at all sounds that way. It is easy to say what we do not like about what we currently have. It is much harder to find a viable alternative. I don't know how else to start that dialogue and I think it is extremely important that it get started.
- TheCoelacanth 11y ago
  It's not slavery; it's volunteerism. No one is forced to produce content for the web. Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.
  - Mz 11y ago
    Let me put that another way: People currently try to monetize by putting ads on their sites. Other people use adblockers, denying them payment but benefitting from their labor. If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people. I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor. People who use ads are not wanting to do this work for free, as "volunteers." They are looking to get paid. In the past, people who labored for the benefit of others without recompense were called slaves. Perhaps you would like to provide an alternate term? Does "Victims of theft" work better for you?
freshhawk 11y ago
And when you add the spyware/malware issues along with a general stance of "I am always allowed to control what my computer does for me" it strikes me as textbook motivated reasoning to frame things as the author has. It can get outright comical, part of this argument reads to me as a threat: "If you people don't start letting me run code that works against your interests in your browser we will start doing even more unethical stuff to get money". I don't even disagree that the bad actors will get worse if their business model continues to fail. I just don't see that appeasement is a good solution in any way. And I just don't believe that anyone would find this convincing unless their livelihood depending on them believing it.
sambrand 11y ago
I respect your ideals. And I'd love to hear about how you plan to move the Internet towards Utopia. But I'm not sure consuming without paying (attention to ads) is really the most respectful or effective way to get there.
- jordigh 11y ago
  Google contributor seems like a good plan.
  - eropple 11y ago
    Opt-in solutions are not solutions, though. You say you're willing to pay--but nobody else is. The commonses are gettin' real tragic here.
  - heroh 11y ago
    being logged into Google while browsing around the web is stupid. It's a isht plan.
x5n1 11y ago
You just hate the economy and want everyone to be unemployed.
- loco5niner 11y ago
  Why does the economy have to be based on trying to get people to buy things they don't need? I think he has a good point about consumerist society.
ThomPete 11y ago
The problem fundamentally really is that too many people are trying to say the same thing and so it becomes a commodity that can only be countered by attracting huge number of visitors to your specific site and bombard them with adds. Then you look at something like Maria Popovos www.brainpickings.org and you realize that there are other ways to build a business around content without it being advertizing centric. But sure if you are in competition with 3000 other media outlets all trying to say the same about the same 5 subjects then this is the result.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
> There has to be a better way to finance the web There is not. There are, however, many even worse ways to finance the web, as the article says. Money has to come from somewhere. Either you the reader pay for content--which users have proven overwhelmingly unwilling to do--or your advertising views pay for content. I don't like it either, but polite, non-disruptive ads are the best possible solution. We need to push content and advertising provides to insult on those and only those.
dmayle 11y ago
> I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. As it turns out, you're guilty of the same thing everyone else is, because you've absolutely missed the point of enabling ad blockers on iPhone For Apple, it serves two purposes, both of which are hugely anti-competitive. They'll most likely get away with it, due to the fact that they have a minority share of the global smartphone market, but the effect on the marketplace will be drastic. 1) This is an attack on the open web. No matter what anyone says about minority report advertising, ad-supported content is a boon to the public good in that it encourages more sharing and more open sharing of information. Yes, you can go too far, but ad-blockers drastically change the market dynamic. Even the conscientious advertiser is punished by the extremes, which means that the market can not respond to user preferences for ads. In the app store, no such technology will exist, and as such it drives content creators into the walled garden of eden of monetization. There, the market will adapt, and you will be stuck with ads no matter what your preference is, and will have to support ads to the same level as the average user. 2) This is an attack on Google, in many ways. On the one hand it gives Apple an above-average position in the case of their ad network when on their platform (lock-in), on the other hand by starving the open web, they are ultimately starving the future of Google's search technology, helping to erase that advantage. If we want to go down this route, everyone should be demanding that Apple enable content blockers in apps themselves.
- Khaine 11y ago
  Android allows ad-blocking in its store, Chrome too. But now that apple is doing it, suddenly its anti-competitive. Give me a break
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- wooster 11y ago
  Ad blocking is not an attack on the open web. Ad blocking is the open web.
- msh 11y ago
frik 11y ago
We need better ads, e.g. a comeback of the traditional banner ads where ads where just a single picture with a link. If you really need a video ad, create a small size mp4 movie and add a link, e.g. 70KB for 30s video. But nowadays ads are too overblown with huge JS code, invasive behaviors, and still a lot of flash animations and videos. Basically the current situation is the fault of many advertisement networks that produce bad ads and pay little to the website owner. And many website owners that put too many ads on their sites and have choosen the wrong ad networks. A subscription model won't work for many sites. (there will always be another site like yours that will offer the content for free sponsored by ads, and you will loose most of your traffic) Also it would mean a come back of the dark ages before the WorldWideWeb when Bill Gates had his failed idea about "The Microsoft Network" (1995 MSN version 1) and when there were still teletext services like BTX in Germany where you had to pay premium price to view each single (text) page. The idea of paying $3/month for 100 websites won't fly, such ideas come from individuals that think Facebook is the internet and only visit Facebook and maybe two other websites. None of the subscription and pay per view model were too successful, obviously the free WorldWideWeb with the ad model won. And if there is a need for an ad blocker, then only one that blacklists & blocks the very bad ad network players. Ads that crash the mobile browser, flash ads, video ads with enabled audio, popup ads, invasive tracking.
- kuschku 11y ago
  And we need relevant ads. If I’m watching a let's play on YouTube, I don't care about buying crayola crayons. If you’d present me an ad for the game the player plays, on the other hand, I’d probably buy it. Maybe even give the youtuber like a 2% cut of the sales.
  - ifdefdebug 11y ago
    Allow your browser to store cookies between sessions and keep it signed in at G, T and F and you'll get relevant ads. I personally prefer ad blockers.
    - kuschku 11y ago
stevenh 11y ago
ISPs should be legally required to pay a fixed percentage of their profits per subscriber to the owners of the sites that those subscribers visited. No one seems to have a problem with 70/30 these days, so how about that? The 70% of former ISP profits could instead be distributed in a fair way to site owners based on total time the user spent interacting with their site in the frontmost tab, as calculated in an agreed-upon manner by all the major browser vendors. It would also be auditable by the site owners, because they could run their own page activity analytics and see whether they match up with the level of activity claimed by the detection built into the browsers.
- simoncion 11y ago
  I assume that you're talking about residential ISPs. 1) Given that actual -non-maintenance- capex on the networks of the major ISPs appears to have been practically zero for decades, I suspect that the major ISPs will claim (and have the paperwork -however legitimate- [0] to back it up) that their per-customer profits are near-zero or negative. 2) Good ISPs are run like good utilities: any actual profits are either invested in the network, or returned to customers in one way or another. [1] This means that good ISPs actually have a near-zero per-customer profit. So, all you're going to do with this plan is: * Raise the -already high- barrier to entry for independent ISPs. * Make a lot of paperwork. * Make a lot of DPI hardware vendors very happy. Noone will get more money, except for the DPI folks. :) [0] Hollywood Accounting, anyone? [1] Either through rate reductions, or one-off credits in a billing period.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  What about people that use tor/VPNs? What about people using the free wifi in various cafes and restaurants? What about website that don't want to make money (this forum)? There are too many corner cases. This would result in a huge amount of regulation.
- lcswi 11y ago
  God no! That would throw altruistic websites into the same bucket as clickbait.
JupiterMoon 11y ago
I disagree. I use an adblocker to take some control over what code executes on my computer. There have been numerous attacks contained in ads in recent years and I regard my blocker (and no script) as one essential part of my security process.
GnarfGnarf 11y ago
If you work for a living, what type of company do you work for? Do they sell something? Do they advertise? Would your salary be reduced if they stopped advertising and their sales declined? If their sales would not be affected by cutting out advertising, march into the Marketing department right now, and tell them; they need to know this.

by jordigh 11y ago

MBCook 11y ago

The Verge has a poll going today asking if you use an ad blocker: "Yes, I want free content and I'll pay the ad blockers" and "No, I want free content and I'll pay the publisher through ads". I'm with you. I didn't use an ad blocker for years. Then I installed a flash blocker because it kept my computer from trying to melt it's self and play video ads while I was trying to read. Then we started to get so many ads that prevented me from reading content (the link-hover pop-ups, pop-ups that appear after the content has been loaded for 30s, ads that use JS to move parts of the page around) I started using one on the desktop just so I could try to read sites. In the last year I've been using my phone/tablet a lot more. The experience has been DREADFUL because of ads. They take up most of the screen, slow loading to a crawl, kick other pages out of memory, make scrolling jittery, etc. I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. If the ads are relatively unobtrusive (i.e. not covering up content, not flashing, etc.) they're OK with me. I don't mind banners in between paragraphs of a story I'm reading. But if I can't read your site because of your ads, you're not helping yourself. The creepiness of trackers only ads to all the other problems. The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker. (I also subscribe to sites I really like, which only seems fair).

hyperbovine 11y ago
> I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. FYI, I had the pleasure of installing an ad-blocker (in the spirit of no advertising, I will not mention which one) on my iPad this morning. It lets me turn off scripts and images. The device now responds like something out of Star Trek. Highly, highly recommended if you just care about reading words on the screen.
djur 11y ago
Why does one of those responses assume that you have to pay for an ad blocker? I've never heard of such a thing.
- mappu 11y ago
  The burgeoning category of iOS 9 ad blockers has several popular non gratis options.
- incarnate 11y ago
  The poll is based around discussion of the new iOS 9 ad blocking browsers, the most popular of which aren't free (at the moment). The Verge is also no doubt trying to make the poll more divisive with this phrasing, given where their revenue comes from. http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351233/poll-ad-blocking-yes-or-no http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351233/poll-ad-blocking-y...
  - ploxiln 11y ago
    If the best ad blocking options for iOS continue to be non-free, and grow in popularity, well that would be pretty eloquent, wouldn't it: People will pay (a relatively small amount I guess) to see no ads on most sites. (disclaimer: I use a free ad blocker for firefox on android)
greggman 11y ago
I just mostly avoid sites with crappy ads. If I go to a site with a non skippable video ad I just close the tab. It wasn't that important to begin with. That includes YouTube sometimes. Same with other types of annoying ads. No need for an ad blocker for me so far.
- lordnacho 11y ago
  My guess is many people are just like you. Basically, they've already installed ad blockers in their minds. Open article, click x, read article. Or read article, don't look to the left and right. Or see 45 sec countdown video, quit. That's basically how I browse. The only ads I'm ever interested in turn out to be reminders of things I've looked at, due to how cookies work.
  - stevesearer 11y ago
    I do the same while reading other websites, but have always designed mine with the goal of never using advertising methods I would be annoyed of. No popovers, no video ads, no full screen takeovers. I also recently removed Google Adsense because the ads it showed were not relevant to my content even though they may have technically been relevant to my readers via retargeting. Interestingly enough, at least in my field, using these practices have actually had the effect of increasing ad revenue since I am now directly selling ads and cutting out the middleman.
DavideNL 11y ago
> The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker. I agree... a funny example: https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/611482506400014336 https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/611482506400014336

noobie 11y ago

>I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties. It's not the the irrelevant parties that bother me, it's the targeted ads based on my history that do!

rm999 11y ago

>everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms ... when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need ... I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites. Let's be honest here: this debate for most people is a fully practical one about speed, security, aesthetics, etc. Most people I know are fine with unobtrusive advertising and enjoy the benefits it's provided them up to now. But the state of the digital advertising world has been getting worse and worse for everyone (including the advertisers, btw), and ad blockers have been making that glaringly obvious. What we're seeing is the side effect of a broken industry, not a pushback against consumerism.

civilian 11y ago
But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there. Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.
- rm999 11y ago
  >you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property Such bans are completely possible and within the rights of a local jurisdiction - they're just extremely rare and not something society generally seems to care about. In actuality, branding and advertising is engrained in our culture. I hear friends talk about their favorite ads all the time - instead of the TV show the ads interrupted. I know a very large number of people who watch the Superbowl "just for the ads". I can't convince anyone who visits me in NYC to skip Times Square, because they really want to see that pit of blinking ads for themselves. Many moviegoers love how the theater wastes 15 minutes of their time playing previews (i.e. ads). I could go on and on with my biased examples :) My point is that we are a consumerist society; anyone who has worked in advertising lives off of this fact and knows it's true. The real problem is internet advertisers took it way too far.

bradleyjg 11y ago

If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical. I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?

JulianMorrison 11y ago
People are, it's called Patreon. Which would be a good model, too, for "free but we need our salary paid" content.
- jordigh 11y ago
  There's also Google Contributor. https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ I'd be fine with websites requiring a Google Contributor login for unlimited access.
  - gkop 11y ago
    Also Beacon: http://www.beaconreader.com http://www.beaconreader.com
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Can we PLEASE stop posting stuff that is US-only? Solving an issue only in the US does NOT help the world.
    - powertower 11y ago
      The "either help everyone or help no one" mentality helps --> no one. Also consider that usually a problem has to be solved in your garage before it's solved globally. Other times the situation is that there are external barriers (such massive fraud, incompatible laws, etc) and issues (such as the market not being developed enough yet, little to no demand, etc) that prevent the local solution getting scaled out to a global solution.

lazyjones 11y ago

> It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. That's probably the most common reason. I doubt people actually click on annoying ads in significant numbers these days. Perhaps publishers could settle for tracking only, preferably server-side without 3rd parties involved, thereby removing the most common motivation for ad blocking? Tracking data could then be sold to e-commerce sites for retargeting based on reading habits. Everyone wins, especially if privacy-conscious users can opt out of this kind of tracking.

mocookie 11y ago
Server-side tracking would be even harder to opt out of than the current setup.. the server could choose to not send you the article if you don't send it what it wants (ie proof of your identity, your age/address/name, etc)

Mz 11y ago

More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy. Yet, you are consuming someone else's writing as a minimum. I have taken ads off most of my websites and added a tipping option. I hope that turns out to be successful. I currently don't get enough traffic for it to support me outright. Most people on the web find that donate buttons do little or nothing. They turn to ads because it is a way to get paid. What are you doing to try to solve the problem of monetizing the web some way other than ads? If you aren't doing anything to try to promote another monetization strategy, then you are basically promoting slavery in that you are expecting people to make the web happen without being paid for it. You are expecting people to work for free. Currently, many people do work for free, some of them in hopes that it will lead to money at some point. Some of them are quite bitter about it. (Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287) I have been online about 17 years. I have steadily watched good, free content disappear and get replaced by something that helped pay the bills for the content providers. I also loathe consumerism. I live a spartan life and I expect to continue doing so. But the Internet is important to me and it needs to be monetized somehow. I am not trying to be disrespectful to you and I apologize if it at all sounds that way. It is easy to say what we do not like about what we currently have. It is much harder to find a viable alternative. I don't know how else to start that dialogue and I think it is extremely important that it get started.

TheCoelacanth 11y ago
It's not slavery; it's volunteerism. No one is forced to produce content for the web. Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.
- Mz 11y ago
  Let me put that another way: People currently try to monetize by putting ads on their sites. Other people use adblockers, denying them payment but benefitting from their labor. If you want the ads to stop but the labor to continue, you basically desire slave labor from people. I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor. People who use ads are not wanting to do this work for free, as "volunteers." They are looking to get paid. In the past, people who labored for the benefit of others without recompense were called slaves. Perhaps you would like to provide an alternate term? Does "Victims of theft" work better for you?

freshhawk 11y ago

And when you add the spyware/malware issues along with a general stance of "I am always allowed to control what my computer does for me" it strikes me as textbook motivated reasoning to frame things as the author has. It can get outright comical, part of this argument reads to me as a threat: "If you people don't start letting me run code that works against your interests in your browser we will start doing even more unethical stuff to get money". I don't even disagree that the bad actors will get worse if their business model continues to fail. I just don't see that appeasement is a good solution in any way. And I just don't believe that anyone would find this convincing unless their livelihood depending on them believing it.

sambrand 11y ago

I respect your ideals. And I'd love to hear about how you plan to move the Internet towards Utopia. But I'm not sure consuming without paying (attention to ads) is really the most respectful or effective way to get there.

jordigh 11y ago
Google contributor seems like a good plan.
- eropple 11y ago
  Opt-in solutions are not solutions, though. You say you're willing to pay--but nobody else is. The commonses are gettin' real tragic here.
- heroh 11y ago
  being logged into Google while browsing around the web is stupid. It's a isht plan.

x5n1 11y ago

You just hate the economy and want everyone to be unemployed.

loco5niner 11y ago
Why does the economy have to be based on trying to get people to buy things they don't need? I think he has a good point about consumerist society.

ThomPete 11y ago

The problem fundamentally really is that too many people are trying to say the same thing and so it becomes a commodity that can only be countered by attracting huge number of visitors to your specific site and bombard them with adds. Then you look at something like Maria Popovos www.brainpickings.org and you realize that there are other ways to build a business around content without it being advertizing centric. But sure if you are in competition with 3000 other media outlets all trying to say the same about the same 5 subjects then this is the result.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

> There has to be a better way to finance the web There is not. There are, however, many even worse ways to finance the web, as the article says. Money has to come from somewhere. Either you the reader pay for content--which users have proven overwhelmingly unwilling to do--or your advertising views pay for content. I don't like it either, but polite, non-disruptive ads are the best possible solution. We need to push content and advertising provides to insult on those and only those.

dmayle 11y ago

> I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. As it turns out, you're guilty of the same thing everyone else is, because you've absolutely missed the point of enabling ad blockers on iPhone For Apple, it serves two purposes, both of which are hugely anti-competitive. They'll most likely get away with it, due to the fact that they have a minority share of the global smartphone market, but the effect on the marketplace will be drastic. 1) This is an attack on the open web. No matter what anyone says about minority report advertising, ad-supported content is a boon to the public good in that it encourages more sharing and more open sharing of information. Yes, you can go too far, but ad-blockers drastically change the market dynamic. Even the conscientious advertiser is punished by the extremes, which means that the market can not respond to user preferences for ads. In the app store, no such technology will exist, and as such it drives content creators into the walled garden of eden of monetization. There, the market will adapt, and you will be stuck with ads no matter what your preference is, and will have to support ads to the same level as the average user. 2) This is an attack on Google, in many ways. On the one hand it gives Apple an above-average position in the case of their ad network when on their platform (lock-in), on the other hand by starving the open web, they are ultimately starving the future of Google's search technology, helping to erase that advantage. If we want to go down this route, everyone should be demanding that Apple enable content blockers in apps themselves.

Khaine 11y ago
Android allows ad-blocking in its store, Chrome too. But now that apple is doing it, suddenly its anti-competitive. Give me a break
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
wooster 11y ago
Ad blocking is not an attack on the open web. Ad blocking is the open web.
msh 11y ago

frik 11y ago

We need better ads, e.g. a comeback of the traditional banner ads where ads where just a single picture with a link. If you really need a video ad, create a small size mp4 movie and add a link, e.g. 70KB for 30s video. But nowadays ads are too overblown with huge JS code, invasive behaviors, and still a lot of flash animations and videos. Basically the current situation is the fault of many advertisement networks that produce bad ads and pay little to the website owner. And many website owners that put too many ads on their sites and have choosen the wrong ad networks. A subscription model won't work for many sites. (there will always be another site like yours that will offer the content for free sponsored by ads, and you will loose most of your traffic) Also it would mean a come back of the dark ages before the WorldWideWeb when Bill Gates had his failed idea about "The Microsoft Network" (1995 MSN version 1) and when there were still teletext services like BTX in Germany where you had to pay premium price to view each single (text) page. The idea of paying $3/month for 100 websites won't fly, such ideas come from individuals that think Facebook is the internet and only visit Facebook and maybe two other websites. None of the subscription and pay per view model were too successful, obviously the free WorldWideWeb with the ad model won. And if there is a need for an ad blocker, then only one that blacklists & blocks the very bad ad network players. Ads that crash the mobile browser, flash ads, video ads with enabled audio, popup ads, invasive tracking.

kuschku 11y ago
And we need relevant ads. If I’m watching a let's play on YouTube, I don't care about buying crayola crayons. If you’d present me an ad for the game the player plays, on the other hand, I’d probably buy it. Maybe even give the youtuber like a 2% cut of the sales.
- ifdefdebug 11y ago
  Allow your browser to store cookies between sessions and keep it signed in at G, T and F and you'll get relevant ads. I personally prefer ad blockers.
  - kuschku 11y ago

stevenh 11y ago

ISPs should be legally required to pay a fixed percentage of their profits per subscriber to the owners of the sites that those subscribers visited. No one seems to have a problem with 70/30 these days, so how about that? The 70% of former ISP profits could instead be distributed in a fair way to site owners based on total time the user spent interacting with their site in the frontmost tab, as calculated in an agreed-upon manner by all the major browser vendors. It would also be auditable by the site owners, because they could run their own page activity analytics and see whether they match up with the level of activity claimed by the detection built into the browsers.

simoncion 11y ago
I assume that you're talking about residential ISPs. 1) Given that actual -non-maintenance- capex on the networks of the major ISPs appears to have been practically zero for decades, I suspect that the major ISPs will claim (and have the paperwork -however legitimate- [0] to back it up) that their per-customer profits are near-zero or negative. 2) Good ISPs are run like good utilities: any actual profits are either invested in the network, or returned to customers in one way or another. [1] This means that good ISPs actually have a near-zero per-customer profit. So, all you're going to do with this plan is: * Raise the -already high- barrier to entry for independent ISPs. * Make a lot of paperwork. * Make a lot of DPI hardware vendors very happy. Noone will get more money, except for the DPI folks. :) [0] Hollywood Accounting, anyone? [1] Either through rate reductions, or one-off credits in a billing period.
JupiterMoon 11y ago
What about people that use tor/VPNs? What about people using the free wifi in various cafes and restaurants? What about website that don't want to make money (this forum)? There are too many corner cases. This would result in a huge amount of regulation.
lcswi 11y ago
God no! That would throw altruistic websites into the same bucket as clickbait.

JupiterMoon 11y ago

I disagree. I use an adblocker to take some control over what code executes on my computer. There have been numerous attacks contained in ads in recent years and I regard my blocker (and no script) as one essential part of my security process.

GnarfGnarf 11y ago

If you work for a living, what type of company do you work for? Do they sell something? Do they advertise? Would your salary be reduced if they stopped advertising and their sales declined? If their sales would not be affected by cutting out advertising, march into the Marketing department right now, and tell them; they need to know this.