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I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want me to consume ads, give me ads I want to consume. Ultimately, ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads. T

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want me to consume ads, give me ads I want to consume. Ultimately, ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads. They're about filtering out visual noise. Stop putting crap on my screen and FFS stop being-self righteous when I block said crap. In what world is blaming your users the right move? The customer is always right. troyhunt.com is part of the problem.

CountSessine 10y ago
troyhunt.com is part of the problem For displaying a small sponsorship message?
- omginternets 10y ago
  Yes. It's not a scandalous example or anything, but it is representative of the fact that webmasters can't wrap their heads around "people will block things that degrade their experience, and if you can't make money in such an environment then it's your problem". He's part of the problem, although granted, the problem is minor on a cosmic scale.
ekidd 10y ago
> give me ads I want to consume. Going by your argument, a one-line black-on-beige text message saying "Sponsored by: $COMPANY_NAMES" is "crap". But even scientific papers often have lines saying "Sponsored by NSF grant #1234." PBS children's TV has a voice that says, "Sesame Street was sponsored by $COMPANY." And I have at least one or two GitHub repos containing a note in the README that says, "This work was sponsored by $CLIENT_NAME". To me, saying who's paying for work is as much a matter of giving proper credit and fully disclosing where the money is coming from. Personally, as an EasyList user, I'm a bit surprised that EasyList has a site-specific rule to block this particular "Sponsored by" message.
- omginternets 10y ago
  >Going by your argument, a one-line black-on-beige text message saying "Sponsored by: $COMPANY_NAMES" is "crap". Yes. At best it's tolerable crap. >To me, saying who's paying for work is as much a matter of giving proper credit and fully disclosing where the money is coming from. There's a difference between disclosure and advertisement. The latter has the notion that the information should literally be advertised, that is, thrust upon the viewer. I don't care that a paper cites collaborators or donors, I just don't want it to be done in such a way that pollutes my experience of the content. That's a crucial distinction. >Personally, as an EasyList user, I'm a bit surprised that EasyList has a site-specific rule to block this particular "Sponsored by" message. As an EasyList user, I'm considering making a donation precisely because they do this. Again: ad-blockers are about improving the signal-to-noise ratio on a site and preserving my attentional resources. Ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads, per se.
  - eponeponepon 10y ago
    What, in your opinion, would be the effect on the signal-to-noise ratio if $blogger_x were to write a lengthy article tearing down the customer service of $company_y, but your ad blocker silently removed the banner at the top saying "this article was sponsored by $company_z"?
    - omginternets 10y ago
      That would be problematic as there's an obvious value to labeling a piece of content as native advertising. That's also not what's happening in the present case.
      - eponeponepon 10y ago
        > That's also not what's happening in the present case. Really? I'll grant you my hypothetical case is very rough-hewn, but let's refine it: - currently, troyhunt.com displays the message "Sponsored by: Sucuri: Incident Response, Monitoring, DDoS mitigation and WAF for websites" to me on all page views (albeit only if I disable uBlock, of course) - the article in question has nothing to do with Sucuri, except in their capacity as a sponsor of the content - what if it did? More precisely, if (and there might well be one; I've not checked) an article somewhere on troyhunt.com, without being directly written at Sucuri's behest, concerned itself with the downsides of Sucuri's main competitor (whoever that might be), would you still be able to say that your ad blocker improved the signal-to-noise ratio?
- mnw21cam 10y ago
  > But even scientific papers often have lines saying "Sponsored by NSF grant #1234." Yeah, this brings a whole new slant onto the argument. It may be that there is some text attached to a document that must legally accompany that document. For instance, would it ever be alright for an ad-blocker to remove something like "Copyright 2018 ACME corporation"? In what way is "This work was supported by a grant from ACME corporation" different?
  - omginternets 10y ago
    The NSF grant funds public research done (in principle) for the common interest. ACME's logo on public research has little or nothing to do with ACME's logo on a private, commercial website. In the former case, it's a certification and proof-of-work (on behalf of the NSF). In the latter case, it's literally commercial advertising. I think comparing advertising to public research is a big fat red herring. Here troyhunt.com has a business problem: environmental forces make "simple" sponsorship an unreliable source of revenue. It takes few users to get the sponsorship link blacklisted on EasyList as intrusive (read: unpalatable) advertising. Clearly, you cannot make money doing things this way. There are no easy solutions, but native advertising seems to work.
johneth 10y ago
> The customer is always right. No they're not. Often they're absolutely wrong. > if you want me to consume ads, give me ads I want to consume. The sponsorhip message on Troy's site is unobtrusive (it appears once at the top of the page, text only), and doesn't track you. It's relevant to the audience of his site (sponsors are curated by Troy). They're the best case for good ads on the web. If all sites did ads like this, I'd uninstall my adblocker immediately.
- omginternets 10y ago
  >Often they're absolutely wrong. You misunderstand the expression, I think. The expression means "do you really want to get into a moral argument over trivial matters with your clientelle... really? Because that's not good for you." >The sponsorhip message on Troy's site is unobtrusive Indeed. However, it's still an ad. It still decreases the signal-to-noise ratio on his site, and that's why I use an ad-blocker. Ranting against this behavior is not in Troy Hunt's interest because guess what: the web is big. He's replaceable. Again: the missing bit here is that the adverts do not add value to the site. They degrade it (if only a little). This is why his ads are being blocked. Full stop. The market has spoken.
  - johneth 10y ago
    So how should he fund his work? Can you offer him some sort of alternative method that's acceptable to you? Donation buttons are a sort of ad. Paywalls rarely work, especially in niche content like his. How else should he fund it? > Ranting against this behavior is not in Troy Hunt's interest because guess what: the web is big. He's replaceable. So he should just suck it up? Why? > This is why his ads are being blocked. Full stop. The market has spoken. If this is the market speaking, it's going to eat itself. On that trajectory, it's only a matter of time before everything of value is behind a paywall of some description.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      >So how should he fund his work? He should serve ads I want to consume. This is the norm: it's called native advertising. Exactly how he goes about doing this is frankly his problem, but the bottom line is that the advertisment should also have value for me as a consumer. It should be informative, unintrusive, well-designed and enjoyable. This can take the form of sponsored posts, for instance (with the usual caveats surrounding such things). What I'm propsing is not rare. Pocket does this extremely well. It does imply, however, that you can't lazily slap a link somewhere on a site.
Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
> The customer is always right. In what sense of the word are you a "customer" of Troy Hunt?
- omginternets 10y ago
  Good point. I should have said "end-user".
  - fixermark 10y ago
    And the end-user is demonstrably not always right.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      In what sense? I'm using "the customer is always right" in its idiomatic sense, not in a literal sense. The point is: arguing with your customer that what he wants is wrong is not a fruitful approach to ... well... anything.
      - fixermark 10y ago
        Arguing with your customer that what he wants is wrong at the point of sale is, in the short-term, not a revenue-optimizing strategy. 1) Commenting on one's own blog about things one has observed that could be adjusted to improve the market as a whole is perfectly fine and doesn't usually do any short-term damage to one's brand (you can touch a nerve and trigger a boycott, but that's probably unlikely given this topic). Comments on this topic are important, because people who use ad blockers may not realize that their short-term gains are pointing to a world where content creators have to bake the ads into the content itself to get paid. If they don't want that, it's good this signal is in the zeitgeist for them to consider. 2) Sometimes, even deciding a specific customer is too damaging to your ability to serve customers in general and service needs to be refused is the right choice. To pop out of the analogy and into the world of web transactions: people are very much allowed to run ad blockers. And I'm very much allowed to craft a site to detect ad blockers and begin 400'ing requests or failing to load page content if I can't verify the ads are shown. It's, ultimately, your content to display and my content to vend. It's a two-sided transaction by the very nature of the protocol.
oelmekki 10y ago
If someone is wrong here, it's neither adblock nor troyhunt, it's the person who decided to manually block the sponsor banner. I'm an happy adblock user, but this makes me wonder how blocking lists are built. Did I just give power to some people to filter out any content they don't like from my browser?
- fixermark 10y ago
  You definitely did, yes, unless you're hand-vetting the >50k ruleset. I personally tell people who deliver bug reports to me "First turn off your ad blocker then try again." It's a losing battle as a web developer or website administrator to keep up with the myriad ways these tools can manipulate the DOM in a non-standards-compliant fashion.
yladiz 10y ago
Pardon the flame, but if you seriously think this, stop being an ass and get off your high horse. Ads aren't meant for you, they are meant to help the producer of the content. How do you define an ad you want to consume? Something specifically targeted for you, or by some other definition? If it's the former, are you okay with the fine grained tracking companies like Google do to give you that targeted ad? Hunt is not blaming his users, he is blaming the specific ad blocker (and more specifically, a bad actor and the inaction of the ad blocker) for blocking a truly unobtrusive ad, and so in this case the title is warranted, maybe a little bit click bait.
- omginternets 10y ago
  Flame pardoned, but there is no high horse. Instead, there's an observation about the general trends in online marketing: go native or die by a thousand ad-blocks. >Ads aren't meant for you, they are meant to help the producer of the content. Sadly for the producer of the content, I (or others) have to consume the god-damn ads. Complaining that one's users are blocking one's ads amounts to complaining that one's marketing strategy is bad. So yes, I do have trouble taking "boo hoo people are blocking my ads" seriously.
  - yladiz 10y ago
    Go back and read the article. Hunt is not complaining about users blocking ads, he is complaining that a specific adblocker is blocking his ad even though it is unobtrusive and he sent in a specific form to allow the ad.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      With respect: go back and read the comment thread. - we agree that he's complaining about a specific list - we agree that the ad is unobtrusive - we agree that he sent in a form However: 1. it's an ad 2. "unobtrusive" is relative, and clearly people are annoyed with his ad In what world is blaming EasyList the right move? They're doing what it is they're meant to do (and that for which people donate to the service): blocking annoyances on the web.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
> if you want me to consume ads, give me ads I want to consume. I'd rather see irrelevant ads - or ads targeted at the average visitor - than be tracked and shown things an algorithm thinks I personally want to see.
- omginternets 10y ago
  Okay, but businesses don't want to spend money on irrelevant ads, so no deal. However, there are services you can pay for and enjoy without ads and tracking. You should do that.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    I'm currently helping subsidize some content creators via Patreon, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of content I consume. I wish one of those "pay $X/month into a bucket, distribute that bucket among all the content you consume proportionally" schemes would actually take off and work.
    - omginternets 10y ago
      Call my selfish (I probably am, but I think it's representative of the market), but I'd rather just block ads and consume the content for free. From a game-theoretical perspective, it's the only smart move for me. This is why ad-blockers aren't going away any time soon.

CountSessine 10y ago

troyhunt.com is part of the problem For displaying a small sponsorship message?

omginternets 10y ago
Yes. It's not a scandalous example or anything, but it is representative of the fact that webmasters can't wrap their heads around "people will block things that degrade their experience, and if you can't make money in such an environment then it's your problem". He's part of the problem, although granted, the problem is minor on a cosmic scale.

ekidd 10y ago

> give me ads I want to consume. Going by your argument, a one-line black-on-beige text message saying "Sponsored by: $COMPANY_NAMES" is "crap". But even scientific papers often have lines saying "Sponsored by NSF grant #1234." PBS children's TV has a voice that says, "Sesame Street was sponsored by $COMPANY." And I have at least one or two GitHub repos containing a note in the README that says, "This work was sponsored by $CLIENT_NAME". To me, saying who's paying for work is as much a matter of giving proper credit and fully disclosing where the money is coming from. Personally, as an EasyList user, I'm a bit surprised that EasyList has a site-specific rule to block this particular "Sponsored by" message.

omginternets 10y ago
>Going by your argument, a one-line black-on-beige text message saying "Sponsored by: $COMPANY_NAMES" is "crap". Yes. At best it's tolerable crap. >To me, saying who's paying for work is as much a matter of giving proper credit and fully disclosing where the money is coming from. There's a difference between disclosure and advertisement. The latter has the notion that the information should literally be advertised, that is, thrust upon the viewer. I don't care that a paper cites collaborators or donors, I just don't want it to be done in such a way that pollutes my experience of the content. That's a crucial distinction. >Personally, as an EasyList user, I'm a bit surprised that EasyList has a site-specific rule to block this particular "Sponsored by" message. As an EasyList user, I'm considering making a donation precisely because they do this. Again: ad-blockers are about improving the signal-to-noise ratio on a site and preserving my attentional resources. Ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads, per se.
- eponeponepon 10y ago
  What, in your opinion, would be the effect on the signal-to-noise ratio if $blogger_x were to write a lengthy article tearing down the customer service of $company_y, but your ad blocker silently removed the banner at the top saying "this article was sponsored by $company_z"?
  - omginternets 10y ago
    That would be problematic as there's an obvious value to labeling a piece of content as native advertising. That's also not what's happening in the present case.
    - eponeponepon 10y ago
      > That's also not what's happening in the present case. Really? I'll grant you my hypothetical case is very rough-hewn, but let's refine it: - currently, troyhunt.com displays the message "Sponsored by: Sucuri: Incident Response, Monitoring, DDoS mitigation and WAF for websites" to me on all page views (albeit only if I disable uBlock, of course) - the article in question has nothing to do with Sucuri, except in their capacity as a sponsor of the content - what if it did? More precisely, if (and there might well be one; I've not checked) an article somewhere on troyhunt.com, without being directly written at Sucuri's behest, concerned itself with the downsides of Sucuri's main competitor (whoever that might be), would you still be able to say that your ad blocker improved the signal-to-noise ratio?
mnw21cam 10y ago
> But even scientific papers often have lines saying "Sponsored by NSF grant #1234." Yeah, this brings a whole new slant onto the argument. It may be that there is some text attached to a document that must legally accompany that document. For instance, would it ever be alright for an ad-blocker to remove something like "Copyright 2018 ACME corporation"? In what way is "This work was supported by a grant from ACME corporation" different?
- omginternets 10y ago
  The NSF grant funds public research done (in principle) for the common interest. ACME's logo on public research has little or nothing to do with ACME's logo on a private, commercial website. In the former case, it's a certification and proof-of-work (on behalf of the NSF). In the latter case, it's literally commercial advertising. I think comparing advertising to public research is a big fat red herring. Here troyhunt.com has a business problem: environmental forces make "simple" sponsorship an unreliable source of revenue. It takes few users to get the sponsorship link blacklisted on EasyList as intrusive (read: unpalatable) advertising. Clearly, you cannot make money doing things this way. There are no easy solutions, but native advertising seems to work.

johneth 10y ago

> The customer is always right. No they're not. Often they're absolutely wrong. > if you want me to consume ads, give me ads I want to consume. The sponsorhip message on Troy's site is unobtrusive (it appears once at the top of the page, text only), and doesn't track you. It's relevant to the audience of his site (sponsors are curated by Troy). They're the best case for good ads on the web. If all sites did ads like this, I'd uninstall my adblocker immediately.

omginternets 10y ago
>Often they're absolutely wrong. You misunderstand the expression, I think. The expression means "do you really want to get into a moral argument over trivial matters with your clientelle... really? Because that's not good for you." >The sponsorhip message on Troy's site is unobtrusive Indeed. However, it's still an ad. It still decreases the signal-to-noise ratio on his site, and that's why I use an ad-blocker. Ranting against this behavior is not in Troy Hunt's interest because guess what: the web is big. He's replaceable. Again: the missing bit here is that the adverts do not add value to the site. They degrade it (if only a little). This is why his ads are being blocked. Full stop. The market has spoken.
- johneth 10y ago
  So how should he fund his work? Can you offer him some sort of alternative method that's acceptable to you? Donation buttons are a sort of ad. Paywalls rarely work, especially in niche content like his. How else should he fund it? > Ranting against this behavior is not in Troy Hunt's interest because guess what: the web is big. He's replaceable. So he should just suck it up? Why? > This is why his ads are being blocked. Full stop. The market has spoken. If this is the market speaking, it's going to eat itself. On that trajectory, it's only a matter of time before everything of value is behind a paywall of some description.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    >So how should he fund his work? He should serve ads I want to consume. This is the norm: it's called native advertising. Exactly how he goes about doing this is frankly his problem, but the bottom line is that the advertisment should also have value for me as a consumer. It should be informative, unintrusive, well-designed and enjoyable. This can take the form of sponsored posts, for instance (with the usual caveats surrounding such things). What I'm propsing is not rare. Pocket does this extremely well. It does imply, however, that you can't lazily slap a link somewhere on a site.

Doctor_Fegg 10y ago

> The customer is always right. In what sense of the word are you a "customer" of Troy Hunt?

omginternets 10y ago
Good point. I should have said "end-user".
- fixermark 10y ago
  And the end-user is demonstrably not always right.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    In what sense? I'm using "the customer is always right" in its idiomatic sense, not in a literal sense. The point is: arguing with your customer that what he wants is wrong is not a fruitful approach to ... well... anything.
    - fixermark 10y ago
      Arguing with your customer that what he wants is wrong at the point of sale is, in the short-term, not a revenue-optimizing strategy. 1) Commenting on one's own blog about things one has observed that could be adjusted to improve the market as a whole is perfectly fine and doesn't usually do any short-term damage to one's brand (you can touch a nerve and trigger a boycott, but that's probably unlikely given this topic). Comments on this topic are important, because people who use ad blockers may not realize that their short-term gains are pointing to a world where content creators have to bake the ads into the content itself to get paid. If they don't want that, it's good this signal is in the zeitgeist for them to consider. 2) Sometimes, even deciding a specific customer is too damaging to your ability to serve customers in general and service needs to be refused is the right choice. To pop out of the analogy and into the world of web transactions: people are very much allowed to run ad blockers. And I'm very much allowed to craft a site to detect ad blockers and begin 400'ing requests or failing to load page content if I can't verify the ads are shown. It's, ultimately, your content to display and my content to vend. It's a two-sided transaction by the very nature of the protocol.

oelmekki 10y ago

If someone is wrong here, it's neither adblock nor troyhunt, it's the person who decided to manually block the sponsor banner. I'm an happy adblock user, but this makes me wonder how blocking lists are built. Did I just give power to some people to filter out any content they don't like from my browser?

fixermark 10y ago
You definitely did, yes, unless you're hand-vetting the >50k ruleset. I personally tell people who deliver bug reports to me "First turn off your ad blocker then try again." It's a losing battle as a web developer or website administrator to keep up with the myriad ways these tools can manipulate the DOM in a non-standards-compliant fashion.

yladiz 10y ago

Pardon the flame, but if you seriously think this, stop being an ass and get off your high horse. Ads aren't meant for you, they are meant to help the producer of the content. How do you define an ad you want to consume? Something specifically targeted for you, or by some other definition? If it's the former, are you okay with the fine grained tracking companies like Google do to give you that targeted ad? Hunt is not blaming his users, he is blaming the specific ad blocker (and more specifically, a bad actor and the inaction of the ad blocker) for blocking a truly unobtrusive ad, and so in this case the title is warranted, maybe a little bit click bait.

omginternets 10y ago
Flame pardoned, but there is no high horse. Instead, there's an observation about the general trends in online marketing: go native or die by a thousand ad-blocks. >Ads aren't meant for you, they are meant to help the producer of the content. Sadly for the producer of the content, I (or others) have to consume the god-damn ads. Complaining that one's users are blocking one's ads amounts to complaining that one's marketing strategy is bad. So yes, I do have trouble taking "boo hoo people are blocking my ads" seriously.
- yladiz 10y ago
  Go back and read the article. Hunt is not complaining about users blocking ads, he is complaining that a specific adblocker is blocking his ad even though it is unobtrusive and he sent in a specific form to allow the ad.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    With respect: go back and read the comment thread. - we agree that he's complaining about a specific list - we agree that the ad is unobtrusive - we agree that he sent in a form However: 1. it's an ad 2. "unobtrusive" is relative, and clearly people are annoyed with his ad In what world is blaming EasyList the right move? They're doing what it is they're meant to do (and that for which people donate to the service): blocking annoyances on the web.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

> if you want me to consume ads, give me ads I want to consume. I'd rather see irrelevant ads - or ads targeted at the average visitor - than be tracked and shown things an algorithm thinks I personally want to see.

omginternets 10y ago
Okay, but businesses don't want to spend money on irrelevant ads, so no deal. However, there are services you can pay for and enjoy without ads and tracking. You should do that.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  I'm currently helping subsidize some content creators via Patreon, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of content I consume. I wish one of those "pay $X/month into a bucket, distribute that bucket among all the content you consume proportionally" schemes would actually take off and work.
  - omginternets 10y ago
    Call my selfish (I probably am, but I think it's representative of the market), but I'd rather just block ads and consume the content for free. From a game-theoretical perspective, it's the only smart move for me. This is why ad-blockers aren't going away any time soon.