12 ms·

There are no acceptable ads

226 points by k1m 11y ago

AgentME 11y ago
You can disable the "acceptable ads" in adblock plus. This seems like... an ad for uBlock Origin.
- k1m 11y ago
  You can, but why not opt in to acceptable ads? Why do we have to opt out? uBlock Origin does the right thing - assumes you want all ads blocked. By the way, we're in no way affiliated with uBlock Origin. Just think it's currently the best ad blocker out there for users.
- mverwijs 11y ago
  It is merely a recommendation.
- tomp 11y ago
  "Adblock" that doesn't block ads is like a bank that looses your money. A fraud, pure and simple, no way around it.
lrem 11y ago
> If ad blocking continues to grow, which we hope it will, other ways of funding will be found. What ways can you imagine? Within a few minutes I came up with: 1) Someone else paying for you seeing ads. 2) You paying for using the site or an associated service. 3) Someone else paying for influencing what the site does for you. 4) Someone else paying for your data on that site. And, the one that people rely on too much: 5) Someone else paying for nothing, hoping the site can be sold later at a profit. One that can realistically cover only a small portion of sites: 6) The site being run as part of a charity. Do you find one of those generally more preferable than 1), or can see a point I'm missing?
- quakenul 11y ago
  Exactly... Brushing over the core issue as if someone else is certainly going to solve it in a timely fashion through sheer pressure in a way that is going to turn out preferable to advertisement. Is that really all you have to offer?
- fela 11y ago
  -) Other users paying for the premium version Or rephrasing it a little, in a way that explain why it makes sense to let you use the free version -) The x% probability that a free user will create a paid user (either my becoming one or by referring other free users that become one)
- blfr 11y ago
  Yes, a mix of 2) and 7) sites being run by hobbyists (like blogs) or as side-activities (like HN).
- supergreg 11y ago
  7) The site closes and we have one less click bait news blog in the world.
  - pdimitar 11y ago
    Most precise comment in the entire thread. Thank you.
- grey-area 11y ago
  Most companies charge people money for goods or services they value and gladly pay for. For them ads are an adjunct to marketing, not a business model. Some other people host stuff for free, some sell content slots (like the job ads here on HN), some give content away to attract other business. That diversity is great, and none of it is threatened by ad blockers. There's more to the world than ads, a lot more. In contrast the rise of ad companies like taboola is actively degrading content and experiences and debasing previously respected sites. If you insist on showing intrusive advertising, users will go elsewhere. The failure of that business model based on ads is simply not the reader's problem to solve.
TheLogothete 11y ago
I find discussions on HN about advertising very amusing. If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless. Something to think about.
- mverwijs 11y ago
  Let's cross that bridge when we get to it. We're innovative, imaginative folks around here. I'm sure a solution will present itself.
  - ssharp 11y ago
    There are lots of innovative and imaginative folks all over the world. ...and ads are still the best solution to certain problems.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- galfarragem 11y ago
  That's what I keep saying also (at expense of some downvotes). As most people, I don't like ads. But this is capitalism, a system fueled by consumption. Without changing the system, ads will never disapeer, they will always come back with a different form, they are a necessary 'evil'. [edit/disclaimer] I don't work on ads, I only curate a niche blog.
  - chippy 11y ago
    if this discussion makes people who work in jobs dependent on ads to reflect on their choices then so this goes the initial step towards a change, even if it's a change in career from digital marketing to a technology company.
    - TheLogothete 11y ago
      Which company is not dependent on advertising?
have_faith 11y ago
I no longer visit websites that block people who block ads. Not out of spite, but because the content they produce is of such low value that I have no incentive to pay for it if offered (either with money, or with my attention for your ad supplier). And this is my contention with 99% of content produced on the internet in general.
- supergreg 11y ago
  Could we move beyond adblocking and start blocking such sites directly? I don't want to even visit websites that only grab content from other sites. From bots making nonsense pages for getting in your search results to news sites grabbing a story from another news site and rewriting. I've seen plenty of sites that just copy Wikipedia or StackOverflow content to show it with ads and with no added value on top.
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    In theory, Google should be penalizing these sites left and right, however, since many of them appear to slip through the cracks, this would indicate that the problem is much more difficult to solve than it seems.
wimagguc 11y ago
Ads are the lazy way to monetise anything. I love Duolingo's example, where they've built out a translation service on top of their language-learning platform: while learning a new language, people contributed to the translations Duolingo could sell to their clients. I bet they make %% more than by running any amount of ads.
- eva1984 11y ago
  Talk to Google/Facebook about that. Maybe you think subscription is better way for...search?
  - aikah 11y ago
    > Talk to Google/Facebook about that. Maybe you think subscription is better way for...search? Google gets to crawl all the web for free for its search results. Maybe Google should start paying websites for crawling them hey ? Of course if you crawl google search you're now violating their TOS ... how does google make money again ? Ad networks like Google ( because that's what Google is ) can't have it both ways.
- galfarragem 11y ago
  >> Ads are a lazy way to monetise anything Ads can be also a way to monetise something that doesn't reach the value threshold where people will pay directly. E.g. Niche blogs sometimes have a lot of visitors (they are providing some value) but not enough to get paid directly. Even patreon most times doesn't work.
  - mseebach 11y ago
    Many interesting niche blogs are essentially job ads for the writers.
dibbsonline 11y ago
I disagree. The best monetized site I've seen had a direct relationship with the advertiser, no ad blocking as the banners were local content, spot on topic and tasteful.
- bostik 11y ago
  Have to concur. Some time ago I wrote down a list of ground rules that would make display ads acceptable, at least for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 When ads are served locally, avoid tracking, remain kept out of the way and are kept strictly within the topic of the content - then we are talking about a reasonable starting point. Unfortunately the current ad ecosystem seems to be diametrically opposed to this. As far as I can see, the ad vendors brought this situation upon themselves. EDIT: typofixes.
- ssharp 11y ago
  Those deals require business development / sales to happen, which requires time and/or money. Those are expenses that many sites can't afford. Slapping on SSP tags, on the other hand, is cheap and starts bringing in money right away.
mikro2nd 11y ago
Excellent work. Cloning it for my own website as soon as I can.
- k1m 11y ago
  Thanks! :)
  - mikro2nd 11y ago
    Now added (with tweaks to fit the static-site generator and templates I'm using.) I love the idea of turning the functionality of adblock-detection on its head. To my mind, ads are, in the absence of my prior informed consent, an outright theft of the computing and networking resources I pay for. (Not to mention the attention thing and the propaganda/pernicious-psychology things.) I could not agree more: There are NO acceptable ads.
bachback 11y ago
Can someone explain how Google makes so much money with their ad system and how its related to these kinds of ads? Google originally planned never to do ads. They changed course I think 2002 or so, and are now worth 500B$.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  I'd venture to guess: no looping GIF ? No video ads with auto-play ? That's why I use an ad-blocker. I didn't care about static images/text but animation prevented from reading the actual content. I am sure I am not the only one.
  - mpeg 11y ago
    Google control a huge share of the global ad market, they have every creative type you can imagine, autoplay videos included.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Even static images can be an annoyance. Just because i occasionally browse gaming news do not mean i want a face full of glowing eyes or rotting flesh wherever i go.
- grey-area 11y ago
  Through mail, search, youtube, android they control a huge amount of traffic. They also have a clever bids system for ads which encourages people to spend lots and gives them enough tracking to let them feel it's worth it. Mostly it's just the traffic though. It's at the opposite end of the spectrum from taboola say, and is probably the most acceptable form of advertising I've seen. So both customers and advertisers like it.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Google is very unique. They get half of the ad market because they power search for so many people. Advertising is about matching up your intent with what the advertiser is selling, and there's no clearer signal of this than what you type into a search bar because you're letting Google know exactly what you're looking for at that moment. While Google does have a big ad network for banners and text ads across the web, their search ads are very well targeted by your search queries in addition to all the profile information they have about you. This gives them an amazing ad platform that works very well for pretty much all of their clients. The only other company that comes close today is Facebook which works by mining all the data that is shared and estimating intent through your likes, updates and interactions.
raverbashing 11y ago
Linking to a github page is an (implicit) advertisement for github Saying "no ad is acceptable" is just so out of reality it's not even funny. I do use Ublock and I do deactivate it for sites I think are worthy.
hollander 11y ago
What about Privacy Badger? How does that compare? Is that OK to use? https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger I've used Adblock, Adblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery. Since several months I've changed to Privacy Badger. The first time I tried it, I thought it didn't work, but it seems it needs a little time to collect info and start blocking. Since then I've had no issues with it. It's easy to unblock individual sites, if something doesn't work, and then re-blocking it again. The only problem is that when I want to unblock one specific functionality on a website, it's very difficult to find out which scripts to allow. At first you see the PB has four items blocked. Easy you think, you can try four times, and then it should work. But those four items load another twenty, and then it gets complicated. This is not Privacy Badger's fault, just the complexity of websites nowadays. But if you could allow specific services, instead of specific scripts, that would be great. I can't give a useful review, nothing more than that it works for me like Adblock and Ghostery have worked.
- peteretep 11y ago
  I use Privacy Badger and AdBlock and NoScript. But I feel like my secret weapon is self-destructing cookies.
ryporter 11y ago
Intrusive ads are not some new phenomenon. Print, radio, and TV ads are all definitely intrusive as well. I don't generally hear the same crowd advocating the end of all such advertising.
- craigds 11y ago
  Indeed, using an ad blocker isnt new either. Most people always channel-surfed or muted the car radio or TV when ads come on. The only difference now is that advertisers can tell you didn't see their ad.
- k1m 11y ago
  You would if it was as easy as installing an ad blocker.
  - ryporter 11y ago
    No, I wouldn't. (Do I know you?) I don't even use ad blocker.
- hartpuff 11y ago
  They're intrusive but they aren't violating your privacy, tracking you and/or being a potential security threat. That aside, there's also no way to remove those ads.
ollysb 11y ago
I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4/month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is. I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. Even the content traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it. I've got £50/month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy/able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there's a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I'm hopeful that we're seeing the start of the return to journalism.
- peteretep 11y ago
  I pay for a lot of content, but individual subscriptions doesn't scale. I have subscriptions to Stratfor, The Economist and NYT. Nothing else has enough for me to buy in bulk. I would probably pay for 538 too. There are Wired articles I would pay to read, but I don't want the whole corpus. Micro payments cannot come soon enough.
  - zyxley 11y ago
    On the topic about scaling, I'd give serious thought to a "Spotify model" for it if there was such a service that included enough sites.
  - DougBTX 11y ago
    > Micro payments cannot come soon enough. Any idea how to encourage quality content with micropayments? The naive implementation would be to charge on opening the article, but I suspect that would just encourage more click-bait headlines. Short articles can still contain good content, so just tracking reading time wouldn't be sufficient either.
    - peteretep 11y ago
      Blendle allows no-question refunds, and it seems to be working very well. I think you'd have to do it that way.
Freestyler_3 11y ago
I think with computers we can make a system that makes it easy for website to charge a small fee (per article or per website) and that notifies/promts the user in a simple way with the cost. It doesnt have to cost much, since advertisers are not paying big amounts per pageview either. You can build a strong paywall, or you make it a gate where visitors can easily go through.
- moonshinefe 11y ago
  It won't work. This is the internet, it's not some single country or smaller community you can just push a transaction system onto at this point. It really just doesn't make sense.
  - Freestyler_3 11y ago
    The internet can handle it, there are lots of services that make payments across the globe possible. This system would be rolled out per website that wants it.
qz_ 11y ago
I just made an account to say this is utter BS. If someone provides a service that costs them money to run, they have the right to make money off of it. If you don't agree don't use their service. Whatever. Or block ads and donate to the service. Just don't be a freeloader.
- joosters 11y ago
  If companies don't want to offer stuff for free, they should probably stop doing it. Put their website behind a paywall. You can't have it both ways, complaining about non-paying visitors when you didn't try to charge them.
- deprave 11y ago
  No, they don't, because they're marketing their service to users under the false pretense that it's "free" thereby explicitly associating it with "costs zero money" while in reality it does cost money that they do charge, only someone else in some other way. Consumers have the right and ability to completely destroy this business model and should exercise it, sooner the better. Most companies compete by stating prices on products, it's absurd that a select few get to state prices in long ToS and/or privacy policies that we know nobody reads. It doesn't matter one bit if it's a mom-and-pop store or a tech giant that goes out of business because people are fed up with tracking, malware, and advertising.
owenwil 11y ago
This is ridiculous. I'll be first to admit a lot of the advertising models are broken, but there are acceptable ads. Many of the advertising structures on iOS, for example, work well. There are websites that do simple advertising, without trackers, like Daring Fireball that are more than acceptable. Can we stop with the repetitive anti-advertising FUD, please?
- moonshinefe 11y ago
  There are acceptable ads. But has the internet's sites overall used best practices remotely? Nope. They've used auto-play video and audio, performance and bandwidth hogging schemes, even malware, and countless other things. The trust is lost. I agree that this _is_ ridiculous. The fact some ads are OK doesn't mean the pool isn't poisoned and users are done with it.
furyferret 11y ago
Unfortunately, this gist is based on the same fallacy that the one it opposes is based on: the idea that visiting sites and consuming their content is a primary need for visitors. The so-called "other ways of funding" are paywalls. If every blog, YouTube videos, online newspaper, start-up, etc, were behind a paywall, people would just nope out because it wouldn't not worth it, at all. Disabling ads wouldn't result in other ways of funding, it would result in people not working on creating content because they wouldn't be able to make a business out of it. On the other hand, and for the same reason, content creator shouldn't complain that people block their ads. We don't need to visit your site, we don't need your content, it's a bonus. We don't care whether you make money or not. You chose not to make a paywall (and that's probably a good idea since nobody would pay) and hand over your content for free bundled with ads. We can technically cut out the ads. If you don't want us to do so, make them so that their annoyance isn't worth the effort of cutting them out.
ssharp 11y ago
Advertisers are willing to pay more money for the right to put an ad on a webpage than website visitors are willing to pay to view the webpage. Until that math changes, ads will prevail.
Zpalmtree 11y ago
Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that, as the majority of 'content' is complete rubbish. The web used to be populated by hobbyists who made their own websites not expecting compensation, and they were generally high quality. Now it's ruled by clickbait and ad infested contentless garbage, I'm happy if it all dies.
- mahranch 11y ago
  > Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that Except it's more of a butterfly effect than people realize. Not just "article" type content, but also innovation. I doubt sites like reddit would exist (at least in their current form) without ads. Hell, they barely get by with ads. Google wouldn't exist without ads, etc etc... Sure those sites exist now, and you take ads away, they're already entrenched, but what about the future google or reddit or facebook? A lot of innovation has been spurred from people's passions and their hobbies, but much more innovation has taken place as a result of people trying to make a quick easy buck. And that's what ads promise. Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads. I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads. If you actually stop and think about it, the complexity can boggle your mind.
  - Hoasi 11y ago
    > Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads Both excellent arguments.
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      "Innovation" that harms society (such as anything dependent on advertising) isn't actually innovation we want. I'm very aware of all the supposed "innovation" that is largely greed cargo culting other successful businesses, or simply a scam. I'm perfectly fine with all of this pathological "innovation" finally going away.
epalmer 11y ago
I use uBlock origin and love it. But I have a mental conflict. I run 135+ university web sites (for one university) with no ads and no flash. But we do use google analytics and include some 3rd party fonts on specific sites. Many ad blockers block google analytics and some block the fonts. I haven't started counting how many users are blocking google analytics. I'm less worried about the fonts because the designers have accounted for that and they downgrade to something that is acceptable (at least to me). We are seeing a decline in new users to our sites but college applications are up. I'd love to know if that decline is false and is just because google analytics is blocked. I think it is time to put some code in and see what the real numbers are for ad blocking on our main site.
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  Google Analytics (and other comparable services) will often be blocked by tools such as EFF's Privacy Badger. It depends on your audience how many users do this. If you want reliable metrics, analyse your webserver's access logs instead, or implement a usage logging solution that does not depend on calls to a third party domain. Fonts hosted at a third party can be blocked, but not as often as analytics services. You could simply host the WOFF files with your website. As long as you configure the webserver to serve these fonts with the proper caching headers, users should only request them once.
- mike-cardwell 11y ago
  There are plenty of web stats/analytics packages that you can install on your own web server, which ad blockers wont block, that will stop you from continuing to hand over your users browser history to Google. And there's no reason for your fonts to be blocked by an ad blocker. Just serve them from your own web server instead of a privacy invading CDN.
- supergreg 11y ago
  Maybe move to a self-hosted analytics tool? I've seen some like piwik that use JavaScript just like Google Analytics, but I wonder if there's any that can simply be added as a plugin to Apache or nginx or as a middleware for node.js, etc.
- 11y ago
elorant 11y ago
I don’t have a problem with ads per se. I have a problem with profiling. Besides been scary, I also find it annoying. If I’m visiting a site about video games I’d rather see related ads, not an ad about a product I happened to search a couple of days ago. Just because I searched for shoes doesn’t mean it’s the only product I’m interested in. I also have a problem with web pages that load half a dozen ads that eat too much space and make readability a pain in the behind. I’m not naïve to expect that a $50bn industry will just disappear. What I’d like to disappear though is the gazillion of sites that steal content from major venues and monetize through AdSense. Which begs the question why Google accepts them in the first place. In the long term I don’t think there will be tectonic changes in the adverting industry. If publishers start serving ads from their own domains the whole ad blocking thing will become obsolete, or we’ll have to think of more aggressive ways to block ads. I would though like to see some adoption of micropayments. For the time being no publisher seems to be heading that way, they all ask for ridiculous subscriptions of something like $1/week which if you read a couple of articles per month becomes too expensive. The other thing that I also don’t like and I rarely see it mentioned, is affiliate marketing. I wonder if there’s a plugin to render affiliate links obsolete by stripping away the referrer part. I don’t like when sites become salesmen because it gives me the impression that the whole purpose of the content was to promote a product.
alkonaut 11y ago
I can stretch as far as saying that if a blocker can detect it, it's too invasive. That includes, for example if it is served from an ad network. I don't mind ad pictures in magazines. The same should be ok on websites. Im not sure what fraction of the Internet is paid for by ad-network revenue, but I really don't care if half the content on the Internet suddenly dies in a fire because their measly income from ad networks dries up. I'm happy with only truly free, properly monetized (affiliate links, proper sponsoring), or paid for content.
tambourine_man 11y ago
Just because you can do something about it easily, doesn't mean you are entitled to it. It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are. Don't like the ads? Don't consume the content. Or at least treat adblocking for what it is: a hack made easily available to you by the Web. If you consider them as part of the content (which they are) you'll see that the argument for the entitlement to remove ads falls flat
- nemoniac 11y ago
  > Don't like the ads? Don't consume the content. No problem. I have stopped reading Wired, among others.
- k1m 11y ago
  > It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are. I think they do. And if it were as easy to strip ads from TV as it is for the web, you'd be hearing plenty about that too.
  - a_imho 11y ago
    "The first digital video recorder (DVR) with a built-in commercial skipping feature was ReplayTV with its "4000 Series" and "5000 Series" units. In 2002 the main television networks and movie studios sued ReplayTV, claiming that skipping advertisements during replay violates copyright." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping
- a_imho 11y ago
  >It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are. I would disagree, as many others who do not even own a TV. Or people who record broadcast and fast forward ads. Streaming is huge. I go less frequently to the cinema, because I have to watch 20 minutes of ads (+trailers) before the actual movie.
  - 11y ago
nemoniac 11y ago
The adblocker test isn't very thorough. It just checks whether an image can be downloade from gstatic.com. It told me that I don't have an adblocker installed when in fact I have ublock origin with the setting that it can download images from gstatic.com
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- k1m 11y ago
  No, it consists of 2 tests at the moment: 1. Tries to load a file called ads.css which is usually blocked in default installations of many blockers relying on Easy List. 2. It uses gstatic.com to check if acceptable ads are being allowed - gstatic.com is whitelisted by Adblock Plus, so we test for it and warn users that acceptable ads are being let through. We're going to be updating the detection to detect use of other blockers.
facepalm 11y ago
So is uBlock origin legit? I'm not that opposed to ads, but browsing without blocker frequently brings my Computer to a halt. Doesn't Google offer a way to pay instead of seeing Google ads?
ryporter 11y ago
There are no acceptable subscription fees. Why should any of us put up with paying for content when we have no interest in giving away our money?
StavrosK 11y ago
> There are no acceptable ads That is laughably and trivially false. I'm in the market for a good and affordable house cleaning service. An ad that could hook me up with exactly what I want, when I want it would not only be acceptable, it would be fantastic.
- k1m 11y ago
  Because how else would you find such a service? :)
- mikro2nd 11y ago
  > An ad that could hook me up with exactly what I want, when I want it would not only be acceptable, it would be fantastic. It's telling that you don't seem to have found one.
Aoyagi 11y ago
There are acceptable advertisements as far as I'm concerned. Ones that are static and register the user in any way (including cookies) and don't get in the way of content consumption. It's been a while since I've seen ads like that.
manigandham 11y ago
These articles are really getting tired. What people seem to continously miss is that there is no objective "quality" standard. Value to YOU is not the same as to someone else. While we can all subjectively say stuff like celebrity news isnt as important as the latest scientific breakthrough, people are free to, and will, read whatever they want to read - and it's their actions that determines what content holds value to them. Now, regardless of quality, all that content does cost money to create and advertising is a great system to subsidize those costs. It's fast, passive, egalitarian, and efficient compared to any form of direct payment (where funds are transferred directly from you to the site). Giving the reader the choice is of course the best option, but short of that, it's far better to have ads then closed access. The problem today isn't advertising the system but rather the implementation - it's the low barriers to entry, weak standards, lack of regulation or any enforcement and misaligned incentives that has caused this massive proliferation of crappy ad networks with bad code, scammy ads, malware and fraud. Acceptable ads is absolutely the right start, it just needs to be done by an industry group or even the FTC/government itself so that it holds some power. Not an adblocking company that is paid to whitelist because clearly this leads to a conflict of interest as can be seen in what is already let through. Combine real regulation with a vetted list of approved vendors who do the right thing that advertisers are only allowed to use and we can finally move on from this silly war between readers and ads.
- voidz 11y ago
  Mmmm nope. Not buying into it. Sorry.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    Not buying what? I'm not selling anything. It would help if you had some objections that you could list.
    - a_imho 11y ago
      Comparing ads to direct payments is false dichotomy, there are countless other ways to monetize content. Also, most ads as we know are not fast nor passive. Imho content blocking is just a harsh realization your content not worth as much you thought until you could force everyone to pay for it through ads, and now you have to play catch up. Let the market handle it.
a_imho 11y ago
I think arguing whether acceptable ads is an oxymoron is just about semantics. Is there a notion of acceptable spam? Selective consumption is a reaction to ubiquitous and obtrusive content. Ad companies have to come up with an adequate response, or face decreasing revenues, it is an evolutionary process and will correct itself.
pmelendez 11y ago
>"'Non-invasive advertising' is an oxymoron. Truly non-invasive advertising would be no advertising at all. Why should any of us put up with being advertised to when we have no interest in giving our attention to advertisers?" I don't find well done advertising invasive, I actually rely on them sometimes, like when Adwords started... it made sense in the context. The author say later that as ad blocking usage grow the websites owners would find other forms of funding. The thing is, we have been there already. The majority of the volume traffic don't want to pay, and the ones that do aren't enough to support a big website operation.
PaulHoule 11y ago
I map Taboolah to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file.
nla 11y ago
Meanwhile, everyone who pays for cable TV is shown ads, even on the premium channels. And, everyone who buys a magazine is buying a periodical stuffed with ads. If anyone here believes that by installing yet another ad blocker, regardless of who made it or where it's hosted, that it will somehow curtail online advertising or improve you online experience, as Mr. Rourke would say, "Welcome to Fantasy Island."
- a_imho 11y ago
  using a content blocker improved my online experience the very first time I clicked on a youtube video
decasteve 11y ago
This medium (Internet over HTTP) is built in a way that I can choose how I render that information using the programs of my choice or the code that I write. Those who wish to prevent this can create a new medium, device, protocol, file format, or program, to push their advertising so that there is no choice. The Internet is not a one-way broadcast nor is it newsprint. The browser is not a television. This medium is new and it is different and we shouldn't put up with having the old forms and methods being forced upon us.
- jfoster 11y ago
  What's your view on websites denying access if an adblocker is detected?
  - aikah 11y ago
    I'm fine with that. I don't visit them, and these websites will find out the hard way that antagonizing their audience isn't going to work. The Ad revenue mana isn't going to last, people are tired of all these ads on the internet, the security issues, the ads killing the battery issues, the webpage performance issues.
  - qb45 11y ago
    I deny them audience. There are few paywalled/anti-adblocked/etc domains I don't even bother clicking links from.
  - CuriouslyC 11y ago
    Personally, I'm fine with that. I'm also free to disable javascript for sites of that sort, though.
- frou_dh 11y ago
  This is apparent in the formal name of the browser: User Agent. The browser works on our behalf.
petercooper 11y ago
They keep changing the definition of "we" in this. Why should any of us put up with being advertised to when we have no interest in giving our attention to advertisers? But then admit that some people may indeed like and appreciate ads. Please don't speak for the universal "we" - some of us actually do enjoy (some, but not all) and appreciate (some, but not all) ads.
donatj 11y ago
If you don't like ads either don't use the site or ask them for a paid ad free version. Blocking ads is actual petty theft. The authors asking price is the ad load. If you disagree with the price, it's not ok to just to take it. Taking something for a price the provider didn't agree upon is out and out theft. You don't walk into a shop and steal a pack of gum just because you don't like the price. "He was charging too much so I stole it" is not a moral argument, and certainly would not hold up in court. Just don't buy the gum. I truly want to hear your contradicting world views. I want to hear how taking something and not paying the asking price is OK.
- mercer 11y ago
  Ads are more like one of those street scammers quickly putting a bracelet on your arm and then insisting you pay for them. Except with ads they also pick your pockets for personal details without asking first, and possibly infect you with some disease.
  - donatj 11y ago
    You requested the bracelet when you requested the URL and gave them your personal details yourself.
- aikah 11y ago
  > Blocking ads is actual petty theft Since when blocking content on the web is theft ? Providers don't own the web, don't own my browser. People don't want to see ads, it kill their phone's or laptop's battery, slow down their browser and make web experience in general poorer. Providers will have to move to a new business model because their audience are not willing to put up with ads anymore.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Since when blocking content on the web is theft ? Providers don't own the web, don't own my browser. They own their own site though, and they work and give access to it in the provision that the ads are also shown.
p4wnc6 11y ago
I dislike nearly all ads and want the ability to block any ads I dislike. But the fundamental question is: without advertising, how do you learn about products you might want to buy? Ad-funded search is not a good answer, and in the limit, proprietary search result ordering would be just another type of advertising. Word of mouth is slow and unreliable, especially if you are looking for unusual things or if your preferences are often unusual compared with the people you ask for reviews. The only thing I dislike more than ads is social media, so that's not an option. When I personally bear a higher cost conducting a product search to fit my needs than the costs of viewing ads, then ads are better and they do add value. This is not a heroic defense of the abject shit ads that litter the internet, the rampant malware or tracking, the creepy attempts at unnecessarily specific personalization, or content creators selling out. But it's also not reasonable to say the Platonic idea of an ad is intrinsically unethical or intrinsically cost-ineffective.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Advertising is a spectrum. A landing page for a product is advertising, but so are popups. The difference is that one is pull the other is push. Same with offline. Junk mail is push, billboards are push etc... those are the things that people complain about. I'm almost certain that nobody has ever complained about pull advertising - so the hyperbole of the article isn't that. What you describe with searching would come down to pull advertising, because you are asking for it, not being shown it out of context. The answer to your question though actually leads to a much less desirable future: A search engine would know you and your behaviors so well, that when you ask for something it knows exactly your preference and gives you the most relevant return. In effect you end up with the same system we have now, only much more in depth.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    > What you describe with searching would come down to pull advertising, because you are asking for it, not being shown it out of context. What determines the "context" for what you are "asking" to be advertised from? I'd argue that your choices about what to click, what content to read, etc., all also place as much context as what you explicitly type. More importantly though, as I mentioned in my other comment above about Leesa Mattresses, the specific benefit of ads is for push ads, not pull ads. The whole point is that there is something you want, but you've arrived at the conclusion that either it doesn't exist, or that you've already paid a search cost for trying to find it and you didn't find it and so you're less likely to engage in a pull search on your own. You may still want to know about the new product. Imagine it like an RSS feed. There are the "pull" subscriptions to the blogs you already know that you want. But what if you also want a certain kind of blog that you don't know about yet? If you only look at your RSS feed, it cannot ever possibly come. There has to be another feed, of sorts, that pushes content at you that you did not previously explicitly agree to. A lot of it will be noise, but sometimes it will show you something you wanted that's outside your sphere of pulls, and then you can add it to the pulls. I think this might even be the majority of things that I want. I don't usually respond to a direct need in my life and then say, "Hmm ... what are my options for solving this need?" Normally, I have vague awareness of a whole bunch of things I might want, and they are at various states of being "filed away for later" in my brain, which determines how likely or unlikely it is that I would exogenously come up with the thought to search for it. Many times I benefit from something I never asked to have hit my eyes nonetheless hitting them and making me aware of something I didn't know about, or that I had filed away and would not have actively generated the thought to find it. Whether the value-to-noise ratio is in favor of this arrangement is the big problem. The standard ads online have such a poor noise volume that it's almost never worth it. But, in principle, it could be worth it. Which is why the idea of a push ad is, potentially, a very good thing.
yuhong 11y ago
Paid "acceptable" ads lists are a joke, but ad blockers that don't allow control of which kinds of ads you want to block are also a joke too.
furyofantares 11y ago
I agree entirely that there are no acceptable ads. I have only one life and the entirety of the value I derive from it comes from that which I pay attention to. Thus I highly value the extent to which I can control my attention and the thoughts swirling around in my consciousness (and in my subconscious, since that has a significant effect on what ends up being promoted to conscious thought.) I consider advertising to be robbing me of ME. I understand that this is a cost I am incurring as payment for a service, but I consider it an extremely high cost, and exploitative of the fact that it is difficult to see how high the cost is. This view is informed largely by popular books on how the brain/humans work, like Thinking Fast and Slow and Consciousness and the Brain and podcasts like You Are Not So Smart, etc. It is also somewhat informed by meditative experience, which I think has given me at least a little insight into the workings of my mind. I'll note that I do think there is some amount of informational value in advertising. But as long as advertising is created and funded by people working hard to drive me to a specific conclusion rather than to inform me, I'm not interested. I'd rather pay services like consumer reports to deliver this information to me.
- branchless 11y ago
  Also advertising typically uses negative tactics to try to get you to buy. "Look at this guy/girl, so much better looking, so much happier with their XXXXX". It saps moral. I agree, I wouldn't have these people round my home to talk to me about this. I don't want to see them.
- Avshalom 11y ago
  >I consider advertising to be robbing me of ME Okay fine but the alternative is working longer hours to produce the money to pay for your consumption. Which is as much robbing you of you as advertising is with the disadvantage that you can't consume concurrently.
  - furyofantares 11y ago
    If that's true, I think I'm willing to accept it. I'm much more capable of evaluating how much to consume vs how much to work than I am of evaluating advertising. I'm not sure it's true, though. Advertisers are confident they make money from me by taking my attention. Like everyone else, I don't directly perceive that to be true -- but, amazingly, it is.* Advertisers split those profits with the content creators/distributors. I'd rather that money come directly from a conscious, informed choice on my part rather than by intentionally manipulated behaviors. That does mean I'll consume different things than I do when I'm advertised to, but it also frees up money. I believe this just from looking at "sinks and sources" -- removing advertiser profits is removing a big sink (and a small source of informational value, which I've mentioned I'd rather get elsewhere.) I don't know what the solution is for getting that money into the hands of content creators and distributors, but I'm sure there is one. * And this apparent contradiction, where basically nobody directly perceives the cost, but advertisers realize the value anyway, is consistent with everything psychology tells us about the myriad of systematic human bias, and is a big part of the reason I say the cost of advertising is difficult/impossible to evaluate from an experiential perspective.
noamsml 11y ago
This is like people who want to repeal Obamacare and have no alternative. If you advocate blocking all ads, you should at least have a vision for how you're gonna pay for your fucking content. I block ads too (I'm ADD and moving objects in my field of vision make it hard to enjoy content), but I'm not going to be fucking self-righteous about it.
noamsml 11y ago
This is like people who want to repeal Obamacare and have no alternative. If you advocate blocking all ads, you should at least have a vision for how you're gonna pay for your fucking content. I block ads too (I'm ADD and moving objects in my field of vision make it hard to enjoy content), but I'm not going to be fucking self-righteous about it.
simonebrunozzi 11y ago
First time I hear about uBlock Origin. Anyone has been using it?
kup0 11y ago
I understand that ads going away means loss of jobs in industries supported by advertising. It means sites may no longer have ways of supporting themselves easily. If lost jobs and less web content is the cost of having no advertising, it's a cost I am okay with. I think. It's an internal mental debate I have on this topic from time to time. The one and only case that I have a hard time with myself is for people that really can't afford to pay for content, people who barely can afford internet in general. If suddenly most content online becomes paywalled (though this isn't maybe a given in an ad-less web, hard to say), then a lot of underprivileged people will be left out of access to the general web, and if we want the web to be a place of easily accessible information for everyone, then this becomes a problem. Personally, I've had enough family members' machines affected by malware from ads, and I've been to enough intrusive ad-cluttered pages across the web that I will continue ad-blocking myself (and for my family's machines), despite any particular larger consequences for the web that my result. The performance, readability, and security differences between not-ad-blocking and ad-blocking are staggering. If all of our ad-blocking eventually kills the web... well at least short-term I didn't have to deal with ads. A selfish, short-term view. I don't deny that. Acceptable ads maybe is some kind of special middle ground we can all arrive at, but the problem is that "acceptable" is arbitrary depending on who the arbiter is... and so far ABP's ideas of "acceptable" are not acceptable to me. Ads from something like "The Deck" ad network are closer to what I consider acceptable.
benedict_kmu 11y ago
this is fantastic!! Loved it.

226 points by k1m 11y ago

AgentME 11y ago

You can disable the "acceptable ads" in adblock plus. This seems like... an ad for uBlock Origin.

k1m 11y ago
You can, but why not opt in to acceptable ads? Why do we have to opt out? uBlock Origin does the right thing - assumes you want all ads blocked. By the way, we're in no way affiliated with uBlock Origin. Just think it's currently the best ad blocker out there for users.
mverwijs 11y ago
It is merely a recommendation.
tomp 11y ago
"Adblock" that doesn't block ads is like a bank that looses your money. A fraud, pure and simple, no way around it.

lrem 11y ago

> If ad blocking continues to grow, which we hope it will, other ways of funding will be found. What ways can you imagine? Within a few minutes I came up with: 1) Someone else paying for you seeing ads. 2) You paying for using the site or an associated service. 3) Someone else paying for influencing what the site does for you. 4) Someone else paying for your data on that site. And, the one that people rely on too much: 5) Someone else paying for nothing, hoping the site can be sold later at a profit. One that can realistically cover only a small portion of sites: 6) The site being run as part of a charity. Do you find one of those generally more preferable than 1), or can see a point I'm missing?

quakenul 11y ago
Exactly... Brushing over the core issue as if someone else is certainly going to solve it in a timely fashion through sheer pressure in a way that is going to turn out preferable to advertisement. Is that really all you have to offer?
fela 11y ago
-) Other users paying for the premium version Or rephrasing it a little, in a way that explain why it makes sense to let you use the free version -) The x% probability that a free user will create a paid user (either my becoming one or by referring other free users that become one)
blfr 11y ago
Yes, a mix of 2) and 7) sites being run by hobbyists (like blogs) or as side-activities (like HN).
supergreg 11y ago
7) The site closes and we have one less click bait news blog in the world.
- pdimitar 11y ago
  Most precise comment in the entire thread. Thank you.
grey-area 11y ago
Most companies charge people money for goods or services they value and gladly pay for. For them ads are an adjunct to marketing, not a business model. Some other people host stuff for free, some sell content slots (like the job ads here on HN), some give content away to attract other business. That diversity is great, and none of it is threatened by ad blockers. There's more to the world than ads, a lot more. In contrast the rise of ad companies like taboola is actively degrading content and experiences and debasing previously respected sites. If you insist on showing intrusive advertising, users will go elsewhere. The failure of that business model based on ads is simply not the reader's problem to solve.

TheLogothete 11y ago

I find discussions on HN about advertising very amusing. If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless. Something to think about.

mverwijs 11y ago
Let's cross that bridge when we get to it. We're innovative, imaginative folks around here. I'm sure a solution will present itself.
- ssharp 11y ago
  There are lots of innovative and imaginative folks all over the world. ...and ads are still the best solution to certain problems.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
galfarragem 11y ago
That's what I keep saying also (at expense of some downvotes). As most people, I don't like ads. But this is capitalism, a system fueled by consumption. Without changing the system, ads will never disapeer, they will always come back with a different form, they are a necessary 'evil'. [edit/disclaimer] I don't work on ads, I only curate a niche blog.
- chippy 11y ago
  if this discussion makes people who work in jobs dependent on ads to reflect on their choices then so this goes the initial step towards a change, even if it's a change in career from digital marketing to a technology company.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    Which company is not dependent on advertising?

have_faith 11y ago

I no longer visit websites that block people who block ads. Not out of spite, but because the content they produce is of such low value that I have no incentive to pay for it if offered (either with money, or with my attention for your ad supplier). And this is my contention with 99% of content produced on the internet in general.

supergreg 11y ago
Could we move beyond adblocking and start blocking such sites directly? I don't want to even visit websites that only grab content from other sites. From bots making nonsense pages for getting in your search results to news sites grabbing a story from another news site and rewriting. I've seen plenty of sites that just copy Wikipedia or StackOverflow content to show it with ads and with no added value on top.
- mtbcoder 11y ago
  In theory, Google should be penalizing these sites left and right, however, since many of them appear to slip through the cracks, this would indicate that the problem is much more difficult to solve than it seems.

wimagguc 11y ago

Ads are the lazy way to monetise anything. I love Duolingo's example, where they've built out a translation service on top of their language-learning platform: while learning a new language, people contributed to the translations Duolingo could sell to their clients. I bet they make %% more than by running any amount of ads.

eva1984 11y ago
Talk to Google/Facebook about that. Maybe you think subscription is better way for...search?
- aikah 11y ago
  > Talk to Google/Facebook about that. Maybe you think subscription is better way for...search? Google gets to crawl all the web for free for its search results. Maybe Google should start paying websites for crawling them hey ? Of course if you crawl google search you're now violating their TOS ... how does google make money again ? Ad networks like Google ( because that's what Google is ) can't have it both ways.
galfarragem 11y ago
>> Ads are a lazy way to monetise anything Ads can be also a way to monetise something that doesn't reach the value threshold where people will pay directly. E.g. Niche blogs sometimes have a lot of visitors (they are providing some value) but not enough to get paid directly. Even patreon most times doesn't work.
- mseebach 11y ago
  Many interesting niche blogs are essentially job ads for the writers.

dibbsonline 11y ago

I disagree. The best monetized site I've seen had a direct relationship with the advertiser, no ad blocking as the banners were local content, spot on topic and tasteful.

bostik 11y ago
Have to concur. Some time ago I wrote down a list of ground rules that would make display ads acceptable, at least for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 When ads are served locally, avoid tracking, remain kept out of the way and are kept strictly within the topic of the content - then we are talking about a reasonable starting point. Unfortunately the current ad ecosystem seems to be diametrically opposed to this. As far as I can see, the ad vendors brought this situation upon themselves. EDIT: typofixes.
ssharp 11y ago
Those deals require business development / sales to happen, which requires time and/or money. Those are expenses that many sites can't afford. Slapping on SSP tags, on the other hand, is cheap and starts bringing in money right away.

mikro2nd 11y ago

Excellent work. Cloning it for my own website as soon as I can.

k1m 11y ago
Thanks! :)
- mikro2nd 11y ago
  Now added (with tweaks to fit the static-site generator and templates I'm using.) I love the idea of turning the functionality of adblock-detection on its head. To my mind, ads are, in the absence of my prior informed consent, an outright theft of the computing and networking resources I pay for. (Not to mention the attention thing and the propaganda/pernicious-psychology things.) I could not agree more: There are NO acceptable ads.

bachback 11y ago

Can someone explain how Google makes so much money with their ad system and how its related to these kinds of ads? Google originally planned never to do ads. They changed course I think 2002 or so, and are now worth 500B$.

johnchristopher 11y ago
I'd venture to guess: no looping GIF ? No video ads with auto-play ? That's why I use an ad-blocker. I didn't care about static images/text but animation prevented from reading the actual content. I am sure I am not the only one.
- mpeg 11y ago
  Google control a huge share of the global ad market, they have every creative type you can imagine, autoplay videos included.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Even static images can be an annoyance. Just because i occasionally browse gaming news do not mean i want a face full of glowing eyes or rotting flesh wherever i go.
grey-area 11y ago
Through mail, search, youtube, android they control a huge amount of traffic. They also have a clever bids system for ads which encourages people to spend lots and gives them enough tracking to let them feel it's worth it. Mostly it's just the traffic though. It's at the opposite end of the spectrum from taboola say, and is probably the most acceptable form of advertising I've seen. So both customers and advertisers like it.
manigandham 11y ago
Google is very unique. They get half of the ad market because they power search for so many people. Advertising is about matching up your intent with what the advertiser is selling, and there's no clearer signal of this than what you type into a search bar because you're letting Google know exactly what you're looking for at that moment. While Google does have a big ad network for banners and text ads across the web, their search ads are very well targeted by your search queries in addition to all the profile information they have about you. This gives them an amazing ad platform that works very well for pretty much all of their clients. The only other company that comes close today is Facebook which works by mining all the data that is shared and estimating intent through your likes, updates and interactions.

raverbashing 11y ago

Linking to a github page is an (implicit) advertisement for github Saying "no ad is acceptable" is just so out of reality it's not even funny. I do use Ublock and I do deactivate it for sites I think are worthy.

hollander 11y ago

What about Privacy Badger? How does that compare? Is that OK to use? https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger I've used Adblock, Adblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery. Since several months I've changed to Privacy Badger. The first time I tried it, I thought it didn't work, but it seems it needs a little time to collect info and start blocking. Since then I've had no issues with it. It's easy to unblock individual sites, if something doesn't work, and then re-blocking it again. The only problem is that when I want to unblock one specific functionality on a website, it's very difficult to find out which scripts to allow. At first you see the PB has four items blocked. Easy you think, you can try four times, and then it should work. But those four items load another twenty, and then it gets complicated. This is not Privacy Badger's fault, just the complexity of websites nowadays. But if you could allow specific services, instead of specific scripts, that would be great. I can't give a useful review, nothing more than that it works for me like Adblock and Ghostery have worked.

peteretep 11y ago
I use Privacy Badger and AdBlock and NoScript. But I feel like my secret weapon is self-destructing cookies.

ryporter 11y ago

Intrusive ads are not some new phenomenon. Print, radio, and TV ads are all definitely intrusive as well. I don't generally hear the same crowd advocating the end of all such advertising.

craigds 11y ago
Indeed, using an ad blocker isnt new either. Most people always channel-surfed or muted the car radio or TV when ads come on. The only difference now is that advertisers can tell you didn't see their ad.
k1m 11y ago
You would if it was as easy as installing an ad blocker.
- ryporter 11y ago
  No, I wouldn't. (Do I know you?) I don't even use ad blocker.
hartpuff 11y ago
They're intrusive but they aren't violating your privacy, tracking you and/or being a potential security threat. That aside, there's also no way to remove those ads.

ollysb 11y ago

I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4/month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is. I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. Even the content traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it. I've got £50/month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy/able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there's a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I'm hopeful that we're seeing the start of the return to journalism.

peteretep 11y ago
I pay for a lot of content, but individual subscriptions doesn't scale. I have subscriptions to Stratfor, The Economist and NYT. Nothing else has enough for me to buy in bulk. I would probably pay for 538 too. There are Wired articles I would pay to read, but I don't want the whole corpus. Micro payments cannot come soon enough.
- zyxley 11y ago
  On the topic about scaling, I'd give serious thought to a "Spotify model" for it if there was such a service that included enough sites.
- DougBTX 11y ago
  > Micro payments cannot come soon enough. Any idea how to encourage quality content with micropayments? The naive implementation would be to charge on opening the article, but I suspect that would just encourage more click-bait headlines. Short articles can still contain good content, so just tracking reading time wouldn't be sufficient either.
  - peteretep 11y ago
    Blendle allows no-question refunds, and it seems to be working very well. I think you'd have to do it that way.

Freestyler_3 11y ago

I think with computers we can make a system that makes it easy for website to charge a small fee (per article or per website) and that notifies/promts the user in a simple way with the cost. It doesnt have to cost much, since advertisers are not paying big amounts per pageview either. You can build a strong paywall, or you make it a gate where visitors can easily go through.

moonshinefe 11y ago
It won't work. This is the internet, it's not some single country or smaller community you can just push a transaction system onto at this point. It really just doesn't make sense.
- Freestyler_3 11y ago
  The internet can handle it, there are lots of services that make payments across the globe possible. This system would be rolled out per website that wants it.

qz_ 11y ago

I just made an account to say this is utter BS. If someone provides a service that costs them money to run, they have the right to make money off of it. If you don't agree don't use their service. Whatever. Or block ads and donate to the service. Just don't be a freeloader.

joosters 11y ago
If companies don't want to offer stuff for free, they should probably stop doing it. Put their website behind a paywall. You can't have it both ways, complaining about non-paying visitors when you didn't try to charge them.
deprave 11y ago
No, they don't, because they're marketing their service to users under the false pretense that it's "free" thereby explicitly associating it with "costs zero money" while in reality it does cost money that they do charge, only someone else in some other way. Consumers have the right and ability to completely destroy this business model and should exercise it, sooner the better. Most companies compete by stating prices on products, it's absurd that a select few get to state prices in long ToS and/or privacy policies that we know nobody reads. It doesn't matter one bit if it's a mom-and-pop store or a tech giant that goes out of business because people are fed up with tracking, malware, and advertising.

owenwil 11y ago

This is ridiculous. I'll be first to admit a lot of the advertising models are broken, but there are acceptable ads. Many of the advertising structures on iOS, for example, work well. There are websites that do simple advertising, without trackers, like Daring Fireball that are more than acceptable. Can we stop with the repetitive anti-advertising FUD, please?

moonshinefe 11y ago
There are acceptable ads. But has the internet's sites overall used best practices remotely? Nope. They've used auto-play video and audio, performance and bandwidth hogging schemes, even malware, and countless other things. The trust is lost. I agree that this _is_ ridiculous. The fact some ads are OK doesn't mean the pool isn't poisoned and users are done with it.

furyferret 11y ago

Unfortunately, this gist is based on the same fallacy that the one it opposes is based on: the idea that visiting sites and consuming their content is a primary need for visitors. The so-called "other ways of funding" are paywalls. If every blog, YouTube videos, online newspaper, start-up, etc, were behind a paywall, people would just nope out because it wouldn't not worth it, at all. Disabling ads wouldn't result in other ways of funding, it would result in people not working on creating content because they wouldn't be able to make a business out of it. On the other hand, and for the same reason, content creator shouldn't complain that people block their ads. We don't need to visit your site, we don't need your content, it's a bonus. We don't care whether you make money or not. You chose not to make a paywall (and that's probably a good idea since nobody would pay) and hand over your content for free bundled with ads. We can technically cut out the ads. If you don't want us to do so, make them so that their annoyance isn't worth the effort of cutting them out.

ssharp 11y ago

Advertisers are willing to pay more money for the right to put an ad on a webpage than website visitors are willing to pay to view the webpage. Until that math changes, ads will prevail.

Zpalmtree 11y ago

Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that, as the majority of 'content' is complete rubbish. The web used to be populated by hobbyists who made their own websites not expecting compensation, and they were generally high quality. Now it's ruled by clickbait and ad infested contentless garbage, I'm happy if it all dies.

mahranch 11y ago
> Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that Except it's more of a butterfly effect than people realize. Not just "article" type content, but also innovation. I doubt sites like reddit would exist (at least in their current form) without ads. Hell, they barely get by with ads. Google wouldn't exist without ads, etc etc... Sure those sites exist now, and you take ads away, they're already entrenched, but what about the future google or reddit or facebook? A lot of innovation has been spurred from people's passions and their hobbies, but much more innovation has taken place as a result of people trying to make a quick easy buck. And that's what ads promise. Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads. I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads. If you actually stop and think about it, the complexity can boggle your mind.
- Hoasi 11y ago
  > Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads Both excellent arguments.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    "Innovation" that harms society (such as anything dependent on advertising) isn't actually innovation we want. I'm very aware of all the supposed "innovation" that is largely greed cargo culting other successful businesses, or simply a scam. I'm perfectly fine with all of this pathological "innovation" finally going away.

epalmer 11y ago

I use uBlock origin and love it. But I have a mental conflict. I run 135+ university web sites (for one university) with no ads and no flash. But we do use google analytics and include some 3rd party fonts on specific sites. Many ad blockers block google analytics and some block the fonts. I haven't started counting how many users are blocking google analytics. I'm less worried about the fonts because the designers have accounted for that and they downgrade to something that is acceptable (at least to me). We are seeing a decline in new users to our sites but college applications are up. I'd love to know if that decline is false and is just because google analytics is blocked. I think it is time to put some code in and see what the real numbers are for ad blocking on our main site.

Freak_NL 11y ago
Google Analytics (and other comparable services) will often be blocked by tools such as EFF's Privacy Badger. It depends on your audience how many users do this. If you want reliable metrics, analyse your webserver's access logs instead, or implement a usage logging solution that does not depend on calls to a third party domain. Fonts hosted at a third party can be blocked, but not as often as analytics services. You could simply host the WOFF files with your website. As long as you configure the webserver to serve these fonts with the proper caching headers, users should only request them once.
mike-cardwell 11y ago
There are plenty of web stats/analytics packages that you can install on your own web server, which ad blockers wont block, that will stop you from continuing to hand over your users browser history to Google. And there's no reason for your fonts to be blocked by an ad blocker. Just serve them from your own web server instead of a privacy invading CDN.
supergreg 11y ago
Maybe move to a self-hosted analytics tool? I've seen some like piwik that use JavaScript just like Google Analytics, but I wonder if there's any that can simply be added as a plugin to Apache or nginx or as a middleware for node.js, etc.
11y ago

elorant 11y ago

I don’t have a problem with ads per se. I have a problem with profiling. Besides been scary, I also find it annoying. If I’m visiting a site about video games I’d rather see related ads, not an ad about a product I happened to search a couple of days ago. Just because I searched for shoes doesn’t mean it’s the only product I’m interested in. I also have a problem with web pages that load half a dozen ads that eat too much space and make readability a pain in the behind. I’m not naïve to expect that a $50bn industry will just disappear. What I’d like to disappear though is the gazillion of sites that steal content from major venues and monetize through AdSense. Which begs the question why Google accepts them in the first place. In the long term I don’t think there will be tectonic changes in the adverting industry. If publishers start serving ads from their own domains the whole ad blocking thing will become obsolete, or we’ll have to think of more aggressive ways to block ads. I would though like to see some adoption of micropayments. For the time being no publisher seems to be heading that way, they all ask for ridiculous subscriptions of something like $1/week which if you read a couple of articles per month becomes too expensive. The other thing that I also don’t like and I rarely see it mentioned, is affiliate marketing. I wonder if there’s a plugin to render affiliate links obsolete by stripping away the referrer part. I don’t like when sites become salesmen because it gives me the impression that the whole purpose of the content was to promote a product.

alkonaut 11y ago

I can stretch as far as saying that if a blocker can detect it, it's too invasive. That includes, for example if it is served from an ad network. I don't mind ad pictures in magazines. The same should be ok on websites. Im not sure what fraction of the Internet is paid for by ad-network revenue, but I really don't care if half the content on the Internet suddenly dies in a fire because their measly income from ad networks dries up. I'm happy with only truly free, properly monetized (affiliate links, proper sponsoring), or paid for content.

tambourine_man 11y ago

Just because you can do something about it easily, doesn't mean you are entitled to it. It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are. Don't like the ads? Don't consume the content. Or at least treat adblocking for what it is: a hack made easily available to you by the Web. If you consider them as part of the content (which they are) you'll see that the argument for the entitlement to remove ads falls flat

nemoniac 11y ago
> Don't like the ads? Don't consume the content. No problem. I have stopped reading Wired, among others.
k1m 11y ago
> It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are. I think they do. And if it were as easy to strip ads from TV as it is for the web, you'd be hearing plenty about that too.
- a_imho 11y ago
  "The first digital video recorder (DVR) with a built-in commercial skipping feature was ReplayTV with its "4000 Series" and "5000 Series" units. In 2002 the main television networks and movie studios sued ReplayTV, claiming that skipping advertisements during replay violates copyright." [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping
a_imho 11y ago
>It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are. I would disagree, as many others who do not even own a TV. Or people who record broadcast and fast forward ads. Streaming is huge. I go less frequently to the cinema, because I have to watch 20 minutes of ads (+trailers) before the actual movie.
- 11y ago

nemoniac 11y ago

The adblocker test isn't very thorough. It just checks whether an image can be downloade from gstatic.com. It told me that I don't have an adblocker installed when in fact I have ublock origin with the setting that it can download images from gstatic.com

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
k1m 11y ago
No, it consists of 2 tests at the moment: 1. Tries to load a file called ads.css which is usually blocked in default installations of many blockers relying on Easy List. 2. It uses gstatic.com to check if acceptable ads are being allowed - gstatic.com is whitelisted by Adblock Plus, so we test for it and warn users that acceptable ads are being let through. We're going to be updating the detection to detect use of other blockers.

facepalm 11y ago

So is uBlock origin legit? I'm not that opposed to ads, but browsing without blocker frequently brings my Computer to a halt. Doesn't Google offer a way to pay instead of seeing Google ads?

ryporter 11y ago

There are no acceptable subscription fees. Why should any of us put up with paying for content when we have no interest in giving away our money?

StavrosK 11y ago

> There are no acceptable ads That is laughably and trivially false. I'm in the market for a good and affordable house cleaning service. An ad that could hook me up with exactly what I want, when I want it would not only be acceptable, it would be fantastic.

k1m 11y ago
Because how else would you find such a service? :)
mikro2nd 11y ago
> An ad that could hook me up with exactly what I want, when I want it would not only be acceptable, it would be fantastic. It's telling that you don't seem to have found one.

Aoyagi 11y ago

There are acceptable advertisements as far as I'm concerned. Ones that are static and register the user in any way (including cookies) and don't get in the way of content consumption. It's been a while since I've seen ads like that.

manigandham 11y ago

These articles are really getting tired. What people seem to continously miss is that there is no objective "quality" standard. Value to YOU is not the same as to someone else. While we can all subjectively say stuff like celebrity news isnt as important as the latest scientific breakthrough, people are free to, and will, read whatever they want to read - and it's their actions that determines what content holds value to them. Now, regardless of quality, all that content does cost money to create and advertising is a great system to subsidize those costs. It's fast, passive, egalitarian, and efficient compared to any form of direct payment (where funds are transferred directly from you to the site). Giving the reader the choice is of course the best option, but short of that, it's far better to have ads then closed access. The problem today isn't advertising the system but rather the implementation - it's the low barriers to entry, weak standards, lack of regulation or any enforcement and misaligned incentives that has caused this massive proliferation of crappy ad networks with bad code, scammy ads, malware and fraud. Acceptable ads is absolutely the right start, it just needs to be done by an industry group or even the FTC/government itself so that it holds some power. Not an adblocking company that is paid to whitelist because clearly this leads to a conflict of interest as can be seen in what is already let through. Combine real regulation with a vetted list of approved vendors who do the right thing that advertisers are only allowed to use and we can finally move on from this silly war between readers and ads.

voidz 11y ago
Mmmm nope. Not buying into it. Sorry.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Not buying what? I'm not selling anything. It would help if you had some objections that you could list.
  - a_imho 11y ago
    Comparing ads to direct payments is false dichotomy, there are countless other ways to monetize content. Also, most ads as we know are not fast nor passive. Imho content blocking is just a harsh realization your content not worth as much you thought until you could force everyone to pay for it through ads, and now you have to play catch up. Let the market handle it.

a_imho 11y ago

I think arguing whether acceptable ads is an oxymoron is just about semantics. Is there a notion of acceptable spam? Selective consumption is a reaction to ubiquitous and obtrusive content. Ad companies have to come up with an adequate response, or face decreasing revenues, it is an evolutionary process and will correct itself.

pmelendez 11y ago

>"'Non-invasive advertising' is an oxymoron. Truly non-invasive advertising would be no advertising at all. Why should any of us put up with being advertised to when we have no interest in giving our attention to advertisers?" I don't find well done advertising invasive, I actually rely on them sometimes, like when Adwords started... it made sense in the context. The author say later that as ad blocking usage grow the websites owners would find other forms of funding. The thing is, we have been there already. The majority of the volume traffic don't want to pay, and the ones that do aren't enough to support a big website operation.

PaulHoule 11y ago

I map Taboolah to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file.

nla 11y ago

Meanwhile, everyone who pays for cable TV is shown ads, even on the premium channels. And, everyone who buys a magazine is buying a periodical stuffed with ads. If anyone here believes that by installing yet another ad blocker, regardless of who made it or where it's hosted, that it will somehow curtail online advertising or improve you online experience, as Mr. Rourke would say, "Welcome to Fantasy Island."

a_imho 11y ago
using a content blocker improved my online experience the very first time I clicked on a youtube video

decasteve 11y ago

This medium (Internet over HTTP) is built in a way that I can choose how I render that information using the programs of my choice or the code that I write. Those who wish to prevent this can create a new medium, device, protocol, file format, or program, to push their advertising so that there is no choice. The Internet is not a one-way broadcast nor is it newsprint. The browser is not a television. This medium is new and it is different and we shouldn't put up with having the old forms and methods being forced upon us.

jfoster 11y ago
What's your view on websites denying access if an adblocker is detected?
- aikah 11y ago
  I'm fine with that. I don't visit them, and these websites will find out the hard way that antagonizing their audience isn't going to work. The Ad revenue mana isn't going to last, people are tired of all these ads on the internet, the security issues, the ads killing the battery issues, the webpage performance issues.
- qb45 11y ago
  I deny them audience. There are few paywalled/anti-adblocked/etc domains I don't even bother clicking links from.
- CuriouslyC 11y ago
  Personally, I'm fine with that. I'm also free to disable javascript for sites of that sort, though.
frou_dh 11y ago
This is apparent in the formal name of the browser: User Agent. The browser works on our behalf.

petercooper 11y ago

They keep changing the definition of "we" in this. Why should any of us put up with being advertised to when we have no interest in giving our attention to advertisers? But then admit that some people may indeed like and appreciate ads. Please don't speak for the universal "we" - some of us actually do enjoy (some, but not all) and appreciate (some, but not all) ads.

donatj 11y ago

If you don't like ads either don't use the site or ask them for a paid ad free version. Blocking ads is actual petty theft. The authors asking price is the ad load. If you disagree with the price, it's not ok to just to take it. Taking something for a price the provider didn't agree upon is out and out theft. You don't walk into a shop and steal a pack of gum just because you don't like the price. "He was charging too much so I stole it" is not a moral argument, and certainly would not hold up in court. Just don't buy the gum. I truly want to hear your contradicting world views. I want to hear how taking something and not paying the asking price is OK.

mercer 11y ago
Ads are more like one of those street scammers quickly putting a bracelet on your arm and then insisting you pay for them. Except with ads they also pick your pockets for personal details without asking first, and possibly infect you with some disease.
- donatj 11y ago
  You requested the bracelet when you requested the URL and gave them your personal details yourself.
aikah 11y ago
> Blocking ads is actual petty theft Since when blocking content on the web is theft ? Providers don't own the web, don't own my browser. People don't want to see ads, it kill their phone's or laptop's battery, slow down their browser and make web experience in general poorer. Providers will have to move to a new business model because their audience are not willing to put up with ads anymore.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >Since when blocking content on the web is theft ? Providers don't own the web, don't own my browser. They own their own site though, and they work and give access to it in the provision that the ads are also shown.

p4wnc6 11y ago

I dislike nearly all ads and want the ability to block any ads I dislike. But the fundamental question is: without advertising, how do you learn about products you might want to buy? Ad-funded search is not a good answer, and in the limit, proprietary search result ordering would be just another type of advertising. Word of mouth is slow and unreliable, especially if you are looking for unusual things or if your preferences are often unusual compared with the people you ask for reviews. The only thing I dislike more than ads is social media, so that's not an option. When I personally bear a higher cost conducting a product search to fit my needs than the costs of viewing ads, then ads are better and they do add value. This is not a heroic defense of the abject shit ads that litter the internet, the rampant malware or tracking, the creepy attempts at unnecessarily specific personalization, or content creators selling out. But it's also not reasonable to say the Platonic idea of an ad is intrinsically unethical or intrinsically cost-ineffective.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago
Advertising is a spectrum. A landing page for a product is advertising, but so are popups. The difference is that one is pull the other is push. Same with offline. Junk mail is push, billboards are push etc... those are the things that people complain about. I'm almost certain that nobody has ever complained about pull advertising - so the hyperbole of the article isn't that. What you describe with searching would come down to pull advertising, because you are asking for it, not being shown it out of context. The answer to your question though actually leads to a much less desirable future: A search engine would know you and your behaviors so well, that when you ask for something it knows exactly your preference and gives you the most relevant return. In effect you end up with the same system we have now, only much more in depth.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  > What you describe with searching would come down to pull advertising, because you are asking for it, not being shown it out of context. What determines the "context" for what you are "asking" to be advertised from? I'd argue that your choices about what to click, what content to read, etc., all also place as much context as what you explicitly type. More importantly though, as I mentioned in my other comment above about Leesa Mattresses, the specific benefit of ads is for push ads, not pull ads. The whole point is that there is something you want, but you've arrived at the conclusion that either it doesn't exist, or that you've already paid a search cost for trying to find it and you didn't find it and so you're less likely to engage in a pull search on your own. You may still want to know about the new product. Imagine it like an RSS feed. There are the "pull" subscriptions to the blogs you already know that you want. But what if you also want a certain kind of blog that you don't know about yet? If you only look at your RSS feed, it cannot ever possibly come. There has to be another feed, of sorts, that pushes content at you that you did not previously explicitly agree to. A lot of it will be noise, but sometimes it will show you something you wanted that's outside your sphere of pulls, and then you can add it to the pulls. I think this might even be the majority of things that I want. I don't usually respond to a direct need in my life and then say, "Hmm ... what are my options for solving this need?" Normally, I have vague awareness of a whole bunch of things I might want, and they are at various states of being "filed away for later" in my brain, which determines how likely or unlikely it is that I would exogenously come up with the thought to search for it. Many times I benefit from something I never asked to have hit my eyes nonetheless hitting them and making me aware of something I didn't know about, or that I had filed away and would not have actively generated the thought to find it. Whether the value-to-noise ratio is in favor of this arrangement is the big problem. The standard ads online have such a poor noise volume that it's almost never worth it. But, in principle, it could be worth it. Which is why the idea of a push ad is, potentially, a very good thing.

yuhong 11y ago

Paid "acceptable" ads lists are a joke, but ad blockers that don't allow control of which kinds of ads you want to block are also a joke too.

furyofantares 11y ago

I agree entirely that there are no acceptable ads. I have only one life and the entirety of the value I derive from it comes from that which I pay attention to. Thus I highly value the extent to which I can control my attention and the thoughts swirling around in my consciousness (and in my subconscious, since that has a significant effect on what ends up being promoted to conscious thought.) I consider advertising to be robbing me of ME. I understand that this is a cost I am incurring as payment for a service, but I consider it an extremely high cost, and exploitative of the fact that it is difficult to see how high the cost is. This view is informed largely by popular books on how the brain/humans work, like Thinking Fast and Slow and Consciousness and the Brain and podcasts like You Are Not So Smart, etc. It is also somewhat informed by meditative experience, which I think has given me at least a little insight into the workings of my mind. I'll note that I do think there is some amount of informational value in advertising. But as long as advertising is created and funded by people working hard to drive me to a specific conclusion rather than to inform me, I'm not interested. I'd rather pay services like consumer reports to deliver this information to me.

branchless 11y ago
Also advertising typically uses negative tactics to try to get you to buy. "Look at this guy/girl, so much better looking, so much happier with their XXXXX". It saps moral. I agree, I wouldn't have these people round my home to talk to me about this. I don't want to see them.
Avshalom 11y ago
>I consider advertising to be robbing me of ME Okay fine but the alternative is working longer hours to produce the money to pay for your consumption. Which is as much robbing you of you as advertising is with the disadvantage that you can't consume concurrently.
- furyofantares 11y ago
  If that's true, I think I'm willing to accept it. I'm much more capable of evaluating how much to consume vs how much to work than I am of evaluating advertising. I'm not sure it's true, though. Advertisers are confident they make money from me by taking my attention. Like everyone else, I don't directly perceive that to be true -- but, amazingly, it is.* Advertisers split those profits with the content creators/distributors. I'd rather that money come directly from a conscious, informed choice on my part rather than by intentionally manipulated behaviors. That does mean I'll consume different things than I do when I'm advertised to, but it also frees up money. I believe this just from looking at "sinks and sources" -- removing advertiser profits is removing a big sink (and a small source of informational value, which I've mentioned I'd rather get elsewhere.) I don't know what the solution is for getting that money into the hands of content creators and distributors, but I'm sure there is one. * And this apparent contradiction, where basically nobody directly perceives the cost, but advertisers realize the value anyway, is consistent with everything psychology tells us about the myriad of systematic human bias, and is a big part of the reason I say the cost of advertising is difficult/impossible to evaluate from an experiential perspective.

noamsml 11y ago

This is like people who want to repeal Obamacare and have no alternative. If you advocate blocking all ads, you should at least have a vision for how you're gonna pay for your fucking content. I block ads too (I'm ADD and moving objects in my field of vision make it hard to enjoy content), but I'm not going to be fucking self-righteous about it.

noamsml 11y ago

simonebrunozzi 11y ago

First time I hear about uBlock Origin. Anyone has been using it?

kup0 11y ago

I understand that ads going away means loss of jobs in industries supported by advertising. It means sites may no longer have ways of supporting themselves easily. If lost jobs and less web content is the cost of having no advertising, it's a cost I am okay with. I think. It's an internal mental debate I have on this topic from time to time. The one and only case that I have a hard time with myself is for people that really can't afford to pay for content, people who barely can afford internet in general. If suddenly most content online becomes paywalled (though this isn't maybe a given in an ad-less web, hard to say), then a lot of underprivileged people will be left out of access to the general web, and if we want the web to be a place of easily accessible information for everyone, then this becomes a problem. Personally, I've had enough family members' machines affected by malware from ads, and I've been to enough intrusive ad-cluttered pages across the web that I will continue ad-blocking myself (and for my family's machines), despite any particular larger consequences for the web that my result. The performance, readability, and security differences between not-ad-blocking and ad-blocking are staggering. If all of our ad-blocking eventually kills the web... well at least short-term I didn't have to deal with ads. A selfish, short-term view. I don't deny that. Acceptable ads maybe is some kind of special middle ground we can all arrive at, but the problem is that "acceptable" is arbitrary depending on who the arbiter is... and so far ABP's ideas of "acceptable" are not acceptable to me. Ads from something like "The Deck" ad network are closer to what I consider acceptable.

benedict_kmu 11y ago

this is fantastic!! Loved it.