8 ms·

The argument against ad-blocking is that the content-creators don't get paid for their content. But, honest question: who cares!? If you push out content and y

The argument against ad-blocking is that the content-creators don't get paid for their content. But, honest question: who cares!? If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. The argument then devolves to "there won't be any good content" but I'll _gladly_ roll the dice on that world to see what we're left with. Ads, to me, represent a monetization strategy rooted in "I did something, and you're looking at, so I deserve to get paid" but that makes no sense. The disconnect here is the presumption that the content has any value to begin with. I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value.

Gargoyle 11y ago
>I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value. So you agree to stop consuming it?
- mikegioia 11y ago
  I have absolutely no problem not consuming it. I would bet most people consume things not because they want to, but because it's there and easy. Ask your friends this: would they still read NYT articles if they had to pay 25 cents every time they landed on a new article? Any barrier to entry for the vast majority of people would have a profound impact on what they consume. Charge people 50 cents for a plastic bag at the bodega and they'll say they don't need the bag. Give it to them for free by default and they'll take 2!
  - Gargoyle 11y ago
    There's nothing stopping you from not consuming content you feel has no value. So stop. If you truly feel it has no value, which I doubt.
- lackbeard 11y ago
  That's not how the internet works. If they make something accessible over http, I'm free to consume it however I can.
  - Gargoyle 11y ago
    Sure. But if you truly feel it has no value, why are you consuming it?
    - lackbeard 11y ago
      Either way, it's orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make.
jusben1369 11y ago
This is a challenging line of reasoning. "I provided value to you and would like to be compensated" is a pretty basic foundation of all work and providing services. There will always be people happy to write Medium posts on the weekend but that's not the same as journalism the same way me tinkering with a drone is not SpaceX. If the content has value you read it. If it doesn't you don't.
- askyourmother 11y ago
  I don't think the content providers have actually attempted to have that value conversation with their customers though. Why? Because if faced frankly, a lot of the content is crap, and their customers would flee if pushed to pay. Some sites, e.g. The Financial Times have managed to secure paying customers for their site, customers who value the content. Sites that shy away from the honest conversation, with the risk their user base will walk en masse, have themselves to blame.
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    "Flee if pushed to pay". This uses a very narrow definition of pay. The reach into your pocket to pay cash that you earned. But there are other ways to pay - ie with something else of value to you (time/attention), your vote in an election etc. Remember that Twitter competitor that was a monthly sub with no ads? It made the above mistake - that there was only one honorable way to launch and charge for a service that brings value to millions of people.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  Medium posts are no worse than institutional journalism. Journalism is also slightly less capital-intensive than spaceflight. I also don't know if content has value until after I've read it, and in the case of journalism I still don't know after I've read it, I'll just get closer to knowing if it was worth anything over time and in light of corroboration. I'd prefer that my money go to journalism based on a combination of how honest and thorough I think it is and its agreement with my own beliefs. That determination comes from a track record, and I'm not going to pay for it before I see it. That's entirely incompatible with the idea of journalism that massive conglomerates with conflicts so universal that they just have to generally support the status quo, try to propagate. I send money to journalism online that I rarely read. I read journalism online that I'd never give a penny to. I have read David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman, and George Will. I'm not paying for that. I read plenty of stuff from people I despise. I've spent hours reading white supremacist message boards. I'm supposed to send them money or else remain wilfully ignorant of their publicly expressed opinions? Not a chance. I collect John Birch material; its material that I personally think the world would be better off if it never had been written. I should feel an ethical obligation to the authors and give them money? Let them come get it. edit: What's being discovered is that "publishers" were actually sellers of decorated paper. Once we didn't need paper, we didn't need them; the only reason they were ever considered managers of truth is because they were extremely large dealers of very detailed paper.
mc32 11y ago
People who care about journalism and information dissemination care. Yeah we could go back to a time when all you had was rumor before ad supported newspapers arrived, is that the world we want to be in where only those who want to support their view and who undertake subsidizing those views get to disseminate news and engage in journalism? Citizen journalism is not the solution. First they may have bigger biases than professionals and they don't have an editorial board overseeing and critiquing their works, it may be more unbalanced and may have less access to the halls of power. So traditional journalism still appears to have a function.
- woah 11y ago
  People will pay for news, as they have for the past few hundred years. All that Internet ads have gotten us is clickbait articles monetized by ads that appear to target only the very stupidest readers. One weird trick to eliminate belly fat.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Since subscription prices never made enough revenue to make news profitable advertizing always made up for the difference, but if advertizing is no longer a viable revenue model, what's the alternative? Higher subscriptions?
danmaz74 11y ago
You don't want to read ad-supported content for free? Just don't read it, nobody is forcing you. But there are lots of people who want - or can only afford - that kind of content, why do you want to remove that possibility and decide for them?
wutbrodo 11y ago
There's always someone with the tendency to skip actually trying to understand the comments they read and just pattern-match it to something else they've heard, so I'll say this up-front: In this comment, I'm not saying that ad-blocking is morally equivalent to shoplifting. You're making some pretty radical assertions without any attempt to justify them, so I'll draw a bit of an analogy to show why I feel like I'm missing something. I don't see why your comment wouldn't apply almost 100% the same to shoplifting. I know the usual distinction drawn is that the marginal costs are different, but I don't really see how that's relevant: there's a (low) marginal cost to serving each page that's being lost. And anyway, the idea that the marginal cost is all that matters is beyond bizarre to me. There's a reason you buy bubble gum for more than the retailer paid for it, and it's because you're not only defraying the cost of the bubble gum to him. > If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. "If retailers can't make money on goods without charging money for it, then those goods didn't need to be createdd in the first place". What does the mode of monetization have to do with whether the goods "needed" to be created? Isn't continual consumption of a site's content a revealed preference that pretty much by definition means that they're getting value out of it? > Ads, to me, represent a monetization strategy rooted in "I did something, and you're looking at, so I deserve to get paid" but that makes no sense. The disconnect here is the presumption that the content has any value to begin with. I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value. "Selling bubble gum, to me, represents a monetization strategy that says 'I made something, you want it, so I deserve to get paid' ". Again, I'm not seeing the difference in this case. The idea that something that many people choose to read has no value seems so obviously insanely wrong by definition that I must be misunderstanding you somehow.
- zurn 11y ago
  It's true that trade of physical items in the end is just a social convention. But the current legal status of bubblebum theft is based on depriving someone else of their physical property. It is not at all related to the shoplifter getting to unjustly enjoy the bubblegum. Re both having a nonzero marginal cost: There is no consistent criminalization of wasting other people's time or money as they're trying to engage you commercially. Of course there's a separate system under which we evaluate if something is unlawful remote access of other people's computers, and I suppose that could be perverted to criminalize ad-blocking, but the sense of justice of the average citizen does not call for it.
onion2k 11y ago
If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. The argument then devolves to "there won't be any good content" but I'll _gladly_ roll the dice on that world to see what we're left with. It'd be interesting to see if that's true for very many people. As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page. That way users who don't want to reward content creators with money from adverts would no longer see the content they're refusing to pay for. And if the content creator gives users the option to pay instead of seeing adverts then a simple direct payment would make the site work because the ad blocker would no longer block anything. I'm actually tempted to give that a try to see what impact it has on my browsing.
- azamat-bagatov 11y ago
  Check this out: http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/its-about-ethics-in-ad-blocking/406741/ http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/its-about-ethics-in...
- vr3690 11y ago
  Oh that sounds like a good idea. It's kind of like watching a movie. You don't see it unless you buy tickets or paying too see through other media. It would be helpful to see reviews of the content before you pay for it, like we have rotten tomatoes or imdb. That definitely sounds like an interesting idea
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  Forbes implemented this and so far none of their articles were worth reopening in an ad block enabled browser for me.
- mikegioia 11y ago
  > As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page That is a fantastic idea. Someone else mentioned Forbes and I just back out of their site when I see the full-page ad.
chflags 11y ago
Well said. As a result of advances in technology, news, scholarly research, books, music, film, etc. can all be created and distributed by _anyone_, because it can be done at lower cost. This is bad news for some old school money-making schemes, but good news for consumers. Perhaps consumers on the web are getting accustomed to "free" without any focus on quality. The classic arguments that lower cost means lower quality may be weakening. Poor analogy: The computers we use today are less expensive than the ones we used in the 1980's. But who argues that they are lower quality? (I am not suggesting whether they are or not, just pointing out the arguments that people make.)

Gargoyle 11y ago

>I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value. So you agree to stop consuming it?

mikegioia 11y ago
I have absolutely no problem not consuming it. I would bet most people consume things not because they want to, but because it's there and easy. Ask your friends this: would they still read NYT articles if they had to pay 25 cents every time they landed on a new article? Any barrier to entry for the vast majority of people would have a profound impact on what they consume. Charge people 50 cents for a plastic bag at the bodega and they'll say they don't need the bag. Give it to them for free by default and they'll take 2!
- Gargoyle 11y ago
  There's nothing stopping you from not consuming content you feel has no value. So stop. If you truly feel it has no value, which I doubt.
lackbeard 11y ago
That's not how the internet works. If they make something accessible over http, I'm free to consume it however I can.
- Gargoyle 11y ago
  Sure. But if you truly feel it has no value, why are you consuming it?
  - lackbeard 11y ago
    Either way, it's orthogonal to the point I'm trying to make.

jusben1369 11y ago

This is a challenging line of reasoning. "I provided value to you and would like to be compensated" is a pretty basic foundation of all work and providing services. There will always be people happy to write Medium posts on the weekend but that's not the same as journalism the same way me tinkering with a drone is not SpaceX. If the content has value you read it. If it doesn't you don't.

askyourmother 11y ago
I don't think the content providers have actually attempted to have that value conversation with their customers though. Why? Because if faced frankly, a lot of the content is crap, and their customers would flee if pushed to pay. Some sites, e.g. The Financial Times have managed to secure paying customers for their site, customers who value the content. Sites that shy away from the honest conversation, with the risk their user base will walk en masse, have themselves to blame.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  "Flee if pushed to pay". This uses a very narrow definition of pay. The reach into your pocket to pay cash that you earned. But there are other ways to pay - ie with something else of value to you (time/attention), your vote in an election etc. Remember that Twitter competitor that was a monthly sub with no ads? It made the above mistake - that there was only one honorable way to launch and charge for a service that brings value to millions of people.
pessimizer 11y ago
Medium posts are no worse than institutional journalism. Journalism is also slightly less capital-intensive than spaceflight. I also don't know if content has value until after I've read it, and in the case of journalism I still don't know after I've read it, I'll just get closer to knowing if it was worth anything over time and in light of corroboration. I'd prefer that my money go to journalism based on a combination of how honest and thorough I think it is and its agreement with my own beliefs. That determination comes from a track record, and I'm not going to pay for it before I see it. That's entirely incompatible with the idea of journalism that massive conglomerates with conflicts so universal that they just have to generally support the status quo, try to propagate. I send money to journalism online that I rarely read. I read journalism online that I'd never give a penny to. I have read David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman, and George Will. I'm not paying for that. I read plenty of stuff from people I despise. I've spent hours reading white supremacist message boards. I'm supposed to send them money or else remain wilfully ignorant of their publicly expressed opinions? Not a chance. I collect John Birch material; its material that I personally think the world would be better off if it never had been written. I should feel an ethical obligation to the authors and give them money? Let them come get it. edit: What's being discovered is that "publishers" were actually sellers of decorated paper. Once we didn't need paper, we didn't need them; the only reason they were ever considered managers of truth is because they were extremely large dealers of very detailed paper.

mc32 11y ago

People who care about journalism and information dissemination care. Yeah we could go back to a time when all you had was rumor before ad supported newspapers arrived, is that the world we want to be in where only those who want to support their view and who undertake subsidizing those views get to disseminate news and engage in journalism? Citizen journalism is not the solution. First they may have bigger biases than professionals and they don't have an editorial board overseeing and critiquing their works, it may be more unbalanced and may have less access to the halls of power. So traditional journalism still appears to have a function.

woah 11y ago
People will pay for news, as they have for the past few hundred years. All that Internet ads have gotten us is clickbait articles monetized by ads that appear to target only the very stupidest readers. One weird trick to eliminate belly fat.
- mc32 11y ago
  Since subscription prices never made enough revenue to make news profitable advertizing always made up for the difference, but if advertizing is no longer a viable revenue model, what's the alternative? Higher subscriptions?

danmaz74 11y ago

You don't want to read ad-supported content for free? Just don't read it, nobody is forcing you. But there are lots of people who want - or can only afford - that kind of content, why do you want to remove that possibility and decide for them?

wutbrodo 11y ago

There's always someone with the tendency to skip actually trying to understand the comments they read and just pattern-match it to something else they've heard, so I'll say this up-front: In this comment, I'm not saying that ad-blocking is morally equivalent to shoplifting. You're making some pretty radical assertions without any attempt to justify them, so I'll draw a bit of an analogy to show why I feel like I'm missing something. I don't see why your comment wouldn't apply almost 100% the same to shoplifting. I know the usual distinction drawn is that the marginal costs are different, but I don't really see how that's relevant: there's a (low) marginal cost to serving each page that's being lost. And anyway, the idea that the marginal cost is all that matters is beyond bizarre to me. There's a reason you buy bubble gum for more than the retailer paid for it, and it's because you're not only defraying the cost of the bubble gum to him. > If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. "If retailers can't make money on goods without charging money for it, then those goods didn't need to be createdd in the first place". What does the mode of monetization have to do with whether the goods "needed" to be created? Isn't continual consumption of a site's content a revealed preference that pretty much by definition means that they're getting value out of it? > Ads, to me, represent a monetization strategy rooted in "I did something, and you're looking at, so I deserve to get paid" but that makes no sense. The disconnect here is the presumption that the content has any value to begin with. I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value. "Selling bubble gum, to me, represents a monetization strategy that says 'I made something, you want it, so I deserve to get paid' ". Again, I'm not seeing the difference in this case. The idea that something that many people choose to read has no value seems so obviously insanely wrong by definition that I must be misunderstanding you somehow.

zurn 11y ago
It's true that trade of physical items in the end is just a social convention. But the current legal status of bubblebum theft is based on depriving someone else of their physical property. It is not at all related to the shoplifter getting to unjustly enjoy the bubblegum. Re both having a nonzero marginal cost: There is no consistent criminalization of wasting other people's time or money as they're trying to engage you commercially. Of course there's a separate system under which we evaluate if something is unlawful remote access of other people's computers, and I suppose that could be perverted to criminalize ad-blocking, but the sense of justice of the average citizen does not call for it.

onion2k 11y ago

If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. The argument then devolves to "there won't be any good content" but I'll _gladly_ roll the dice on that world to see what we're left with. It'd be interesting to see if that's true for very many people. As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page. That way users who don't want to reward content creators with money from adverts would no longer see the content they're refusing to pay for. And if the content creator gives users the option to pay instead of seeing adverts then a simple direct payment would make the site work because the ad blocker would no longer block anything. I'm actually tempted to give that a try to see what impact it has on my browsing.

azamat-bagatov 11y ago
Check this out: http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/its-about-ethics-in-ad-blocking/406741/ http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/its-about-ethics-in...
vr3690 11y ago
Oh that sounds like a good idea. It's kind of like watching a movie. You don't see it unless you buy tickets or paying too see through other media. It would be helpful to see reviews of the content before you pay for it, like we have rotten tomatoes or imdb. That definitely sounds like an interesting idea
hkmurakami 11y ago
Forbes implemented this and so far none of their articles were worth reopening in an ad block enabled browser for me.
mikegioia 11y ago
> As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page That is a fantastic idea. Someone else mentioned Forbes and I just back out of their site when I see the full-page ad.

chflags 11y ago

Well said. As a result of advances in technology, news, scholarly research, books, music, film, etc. can all be created and distributed by _anyone_, because it can be done at lower cost. This is bad news for some old school money-making schemes, but good news for consumers. Perhaps consumers on the web are getting accustomed to "free" without any focus on quality. The classic arguments that lower cost means lower quality may be weakening. Poor analogy: The computers we use today are less expensive than the ones we used in the 1980's. But who argues that they are lower quality? (I am not suggesting whether they are or not, just pointing out the arguments that people make.)