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I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an aven

I definitely hate ads like anyone, but it should be acknowledged that ads serve a purpose too, of creating an economy for free content and giving people an avenue to get some income in exchange for their efforts, and possibly be able to devote their full attention to a free project and not have to support themselves with other income. Ads give creators some incentive to create stuff - although the income generally isn't great unless your audience is massive. That said, the ad networks out there seem pretty awful in terms of privacy, slow-running javascript code mess, huge images or videos adding megabytes to the size of what should be a simple text page, etc. So if it's not doing it already perhaps this project can filter and put some pressure on the ad networks to clean up their mess a bit and not harm the user experience so much, and if an ad network is playing nicely, allow it through as a way to support free projects and their creators.

zeta0134 10y ago
I've maintained for a long time that the ad networks themselves are the problem, not advertising as a whole. There is a place for video advertising (around content that is also video), there is a place for audio advertising (on the radio, around podcasts, on music services), and there is even a place for animated, interactive advertisements, on sites that are expected to dance and move anyway, like online games. The trouble is, most third party networks are so laser focused on getting people to "interact" with their advertising that they've skewed the game in favor of distracting users from the content they arrived to consume. They're so focused on targeted advertising that they regularly invade users privacy, utilize questionable data collection practices, and break down security barriers when browsers try to shut down their violations of user trust. It's no wonder ad blockers are on the rise, because the existing ad networks are all untrustworthy. There will always be a place for advertising when it's done properly. Watch an NFL broadcast and observe the product placement, the logos and sponsors everywhere. It's organic, integrated into the very fiber of the broadcast in a way that couldn't be blocked with even the most sophisticated blocking software. And it's also usually quite tasteful, there to promote the product, but not distracting enough to detract from the game the viewers came to the channel to watch. This kind of advertising, organic product placement and sponsorships, where the content creator and the advertiser have a real partnership and coordinate their efforts, this is the kind of advertising I want to see more of. For all the drama they tend to draw, I commend the Gawker sites (Gizmodo is particularly good about this) for their Sponsored posts and their frequent "Deal of the Day" posts, which are first-party advertising that my blocker regularly fails to block. And you know what? Some of the deals are genuinely interesting to me, because Gizmodo clearly knows their audience, and selects advertising partners that make sense on their blogs. More of that please!
- LordKano 10y ago
  I can't tolerate ads that mangle content. If the ad floats over the content. If the ad overlays my screen. If the ad forces me to do something to dismiss it, I don't care what the product is. I'm going to be less inclined to buy. Put a normal, rectangular ad on the screen that doesn't dynamically resize itself while I'm trying to read the content and don't spread the content across 31 different pages just to increase the number of ads you show me.
- Smudge 10y ago
  There is a much bigger barrier to entry when it comes to monetizing via product placement and sponsorships. For smaller entities, developing dedicated advertising partnerships is just not on the table. So if the the ad networks themselves truly are the problem (and as a result adblocking is ever on the rise), it sounds like there is an opportunity for a better, more "organic" solution accessible to the long tail of smaller sites looking for monetization options. Sounds like a tricky nut to crack, as I'm sure anyone who works in the industry would tell me.
  - acbabis 10y ago
    Adblock Plus has an "Acceptable Ads" program that allows non-animated, non-sound ads to remain on the page. People who think supporting the sites they visit is the right thing to do, can enable acceptable ads while blocking annoying ones.
- nugator 10y ago
  Organic like: "Vote for the Snickers Play of the Week" For me that is quite funny in a way Americans might not get since brands and commercials are more or less everywhere.
  - hire_charts 10y ago
    I wouldn'tve found that funny before I stopped watching broadcast TV. Now that I've cut cables I notice "organic" ads like that right away.
- 10y ago
noonespecial 10y ago
I agreed with you right up to the point where they decided it was acceptable to periodically jank the text I'm trying to read out from under my eyes. I switched right from "well, ads support the internet so" to "kill this s### with whatever fire I can enable my browser with". Web advertisers, we gave you a chance and the rich benefit of the doubt. You completely and totally earned every bit of this thats coming down on you now.
Nugem_ 10y ago
Let all the users in the world that are not tech savvy support the ad networks then. Ill use AdAway, Block-This.apk, pi-hole, and others.
legulere 10y ago
Generally almost everything also has positive consequences, so you have to take both the positive and the negative sides into account. Ads are not the only way to support free content, and in most cases free content is paid for with advertisement (at least not amounts you could see as a payment). On the other hand ads lead to consumerism, overconsumption, poor spending habits, waste of resources for the adverts and the products they sell, and they reduce our attention to things that actually matter (like the traffic while we're driving cars).
Kadin 10y ago
I've been on the Internet since before advertising became common, and I am not convinced that advertising is the only, or even a good, model for funding either content or infrastructure. The move to advertising as the basis for the Internet has hidden, at least from most users, the cost of running a website and putting content online, which is frankly quite low compared to what it used to be, both in terms of actual money and the time/effort/experience required. While in the mid/late 90s running a website could be a financially risky proposition (there are all sorts of semi-funny horror stories about people who ran labor of love sites that got Slashdotted and ended up with hundreds of dollars in bandwidth bills), today you can stand up a VPS on a Gigabit connection that's capable of serving orders of magnitude more users than most sites will ever see for a few bucks a month. I don't think that is necessarily a bad entry point for a communications platform that lets you talk to a significant percentage of the global population in one shot. I'm not convinced that having the dominant model be "labor of love" as opposed to "make $$ off advertising" is necessarily worse or would result in less quality content. The advertising-driven model has given us clickbait and even machine-written garbage articles, link farms, etc., none of which would really exist under a publisher-pays model. There are significant hidden costs to the ad-based model, which are externalized on all players, including hard-to-define costs of privacy in terms of the way major players are incentivized to build detailed dossiers on users in order to improve ad targeting.
- malikNF 10y ago
  So if you are not convinced the advert driven model is not "the only, or even a good, model" what is then an alternative. I think the ad model needs to improve where the major players will start enforcing strict rules on what types of adverts are allowed for example, they could reject any advert that waste CPU cycles, reject ones using too much memory, ban buggy adverts. Plus, the number one concern these days, the privacy concern, I am forced to use adblockers everywhere on the Internet except for a few sites because I do not want some company giving me product recommendations just because I had a conversation with a friend about something related.
  - foxylad 10y ago
    Subscriptions. My company only provides services via subscription, which means we can provide great support, continuous development, and no ads. Our customers love this. You could argue that this doesn't solve your problem, because we have to identify you to tell if you have paid or not. But actually paying for a service radically alters the relationship - it's suddenly in our interests to keep your information private, because if we don't you'll stop paying us and move to competitors who can provide better privacy. So we're now on the same side on this issue. The old adage that if it's free, YOU are the product is now understood by more and more people.
albertico 10y ago
no one has the right or should spam people with ads. There are lots of ways to support your projects without ads. Privacy matters!
- drdaeman 10y ago
  I think, privacy, spam and ads-in-general are related but distinct concepts that don't necessarily involve each other (although more likely to be so than not, when it comes to real-life situations). Ads are about what's being sent from publisher to consumer. It can be solicited, unsolicited or something in-between. And privacy is about what's being sent in the very opposite direction.
  - traviscj 10y ago
    I think a lot of publishers seem uninterested in untargeted advertisements though, so the distinction -- while existing in principal -- is not very relevant in practice. Certainly the untargeted adds I see (or even those I can tell are by virtue of the place I am, instead of my own customer profile, seem much lower quality.
richdougherty 10y ago
I agree, ads serve a useful purpose, but their implementation is bad. I'd like a compromise where we have ads, but they're less bad. The trouble is that incentives are misaligned so we can't get to a middle ground position. - Content owners and ad networks have little incentive to make ads that are better for users. They just want to get an ad system going that's simple to implement and allows tracking and fraud detection. - Users who dislike the privacy, security, resource use issues with ads find it easier to just block ads completely. It would be much harder to work out a solution involving proxying, sandboxing, etc. These conflicting incentives mean ad networks produce something good for them but bad for users and users (who know what to do) will do something that's good for them but bad for ad networks. There's a middle position, but neither party has a reason to attempt it.
drdaeman 10y ago
Whatever fancies publishers/distributors - as long as end-users are in charge of what their computer's doing and have the final saying. If end-user can instruct their computer "do this and don't do that" and freely share those scenarios with other end-users - I guess, everything's fine... or it isn't? (Of course there's a never-ending-until-the-singularity arms race between ever-complicating advertisement delivery code vs ever-improving advertisement blocking rules... but that's just bound to happen, so personally I'm just looking forward to whatever would speed things up to their logical conclusion, whatever it will be.)
AlexAffe 10y ago
Then they should start to respect the user in every way. For me, it is not about ads being shown (as long as no pink flashy flashy banner popup hell). It is about privacy and snooping around, creating profiles, without me knowing, selling my data behind my back. I want to control, what my device sends and to whom. That is it.

zeta0134 10y ago

I've maintained for a long time that the ad networks themselves are the problem, not advertising as a whole. There is a place for video advertising (around content that is also video), there is a place for audio advertising (on the radio, around podcasts, on music services), and there is even a place for animated, interactive advertisements, on sites that are expected to dance and move anyway, like online games. The trouble is, most third party networks are so laser focused on getting people to "interact" with their advertising that they've skewed the game in favor of distracting users from the content they arrived to consume. They're so focused on targeted advertising that they regularly invade users privacy, utilize questionable data collection practices, and break down security barriers when browsers try to shut down their violations of user trust. It's no wonder ad blockers are on the rise, because the existing ad networks are all untrustworthy. There will always be a place for advertising when it's done properly. Watch an NFL broadcast and observe the product placement, the logos and sponsors everywhere. It's organic, integrated into the very fiber of the broadcast in a way that couldn't be blocked with even the most sophisticated blocking software. And it's also usually quite tasteful, there to promote the product, but not distracting enough to detract from the game the viewers came to the channel to watch. This kind of advertising, organic product placement and sponsorships, where the content creator and the advertiser have a real partnership and coordinate their efforts, this is the kind of advertising I want to see more of. For all the drama they tend to draw, I commend the Gawker sites (Gizmodo is particularly good about this) for their Sponsored posts and their frequent "Deal of the Day" posts, which are first-party advertising that my blocker regularly fails to block. And you know what? Some of the deals are genuinely interesting to me, because Gizmodo clearly knows their audience, and selects advertising partners that make sense on their blogs. More of that please!

LordKano 10y ago
I can't tolerate ads that mangle content. If the ad floats over the content. If the ad overlays my screen. If the ad forces me to do something to dismiss it, I don't care what the product is. I'm going to be less inclined to buy. Put a normal, rectangular ad on the screen that doesn't dynamically resize itself while I'm trying to read the content and don't spread the content across 31 different pages just to increase the number of ads you show me.
Smudge 10y ago
There is a much bigger barrier to entry when it comes to monetizing via product placement and sponsorships. For smaller entities, developing dedicated advertising partnerships is just not on the table. So if the the ad networks themselves truly are the problem (and as a result adblocking is ever on the rise), it sounds like there is an opportunity for a better, more "organic" solution accessible to the long tail of smaller sites looking for monetization options. Sounds like a tricky nut to crack, as I'm sure anyone who works in the industry would tell me.
- acbabis 10y ago
  Adblock Plus has an "Acceptable Ads" program that allows non-animated, non-sound ads to remain on the page. People who think supporting the sites they visit is the right thing to do, can enable acceptable ads while blocking annoying ones.
nugator 10y ago
Organic like: "Vote for the Snickers Play of the Week" For me that is quite funny in a way Americans might not get since brands and commercials are more or less everywhere.
- hire_charts 10y ago
  I wouldn'tve found that funny before I stopped watching broadcast TV. Now that I've cut cables I notice "organic" ads like that right away.
10y ago

noonespecial 10y ago

I agreed with you right up to the point where they decided it was acceptable to periodically jank the text I'm trying to read out from under my eyes. I switched right from "well, ads support the internet so" to "kill this s### with whatever fire I can enable my browser with". Web advertisers, we gave you a chance and the rich benefit of the doubt. You completely and totally earned every bit of this thats coming down on you now.

Nugem_ 10y ago

Let all the users in the world that are not tech savvy support the ad networks then. Ill use AdAway, Block-This.apk, pi-hole, and others.

legulere 10y ago

Generally almost everything also has positive consequences, so you have to take both the positive and the negative sides into account. Ads are not the only way to support free content, and in most cases free content is paid for with advertisement (at least not amounts you could see as a payment). On the other hand ads lead to consumerism, overconsumption, poor spending habits, waste of resources for the adverts and the products they sell, and they reduce our attention to things that actually matter (like the traffic while we're driving cars).

Kadin 10y ago

I've been on the Internet since before advertising became common, and I am not convinced that advertising is the only, or even a good, model for funding either content or infrastructure. The move to advertising as the basis for the Internet has hidden, at least from most users, the cost of running a website and putting content online, which is frankly quite low compared to what it used to be, both in terms of actual money and the time/effort/experience required. While in the mid/late 90s running a website could be a financially risky proposition (there are all sorts of semi-funny horror stories about people who ran labor of love sites that got Slashdotted and ended up with hundreds of dollars in bandwidth bills), today you can stand up a VPS on a Gigabit connection that's capable of serving orders of magnitude more users than most sites will ever see for a few bucks a month. I don't think that is necessarily a bad entry point for a communications platform that lets you talk to a significant percentage of the global population in one shot. I'm not convinced that having the dominant model be "labor of love" as opposed to "make $$ off advertising" is necessarily worse or would result in less quality content. The advertising-driven model has given us clickbait and even machine-written garbage articles, link farms, etc., none of which would really exist under a publisher-pays model. There are significant hidden costs to the ad-based model, which are externalized on all players, including hard-to-define costs of privacy in terms of the way major players are incentivized to build detailed dossiers on users in order to improve ad targeting.

malikNF 10y ago
So if you are not convinced the advert driven model is not "the only, or even a good, model" what is then an alternative. I think the ad model needs to improve where the major players will start enforcing strict rules on what types of adverts are allowed for example, they could reject any advert that waste CPU cycles, reject ones using too much memory, ban buggy adverts. Plus, the number one concern these days, the privacy concern, I am forced to use adblockers everywhere on the Internet except for a few sites because I do not want some company giving me product recommendations just because I had a conversation with a friend about something related.
- foxylad 10y ago
  Subscriptions. My company only provides services via subscription, which means we can provide great support, continuous development, and no ads. Our customers love this. You could argue that this doesn't solve your problem, because we have to identify you to tell if you have paid or not. But actually paying for a service radically alters the relationship - it's suddenly in our interests to keep your information private, because if we don't you'll stop paying us and move to competitors who can provide better privacy. So we're now on the same side on this issue. The old adage that if it's free, YOU are the product is now understood by more and more people.

albertico 10y ago

no one has the right or should spam people with ads. There are lots of ways to support your projects without ads. Privacy matters!

drdaeman 10y ago
I think, privacy, spam and ads-in-general are related but distinct concepts that don't necessarily involve each other (although more likely to be so than not, when it comes to real-life situations). Ads are about what's being sent from publisher to consumer. It can be solicited, unsolicited or something in-between. And privacy is about what's being sent in the very opposite direction.
- traviscj 10y ago
  I think a lot of publishers seem uninterested in untargeted advertisements though, so the distinction -- while existing in principal -- is not very relevant in practice. Certainly the untargeted adds I see (or even those I can tell are by virtue of the place I am, instead of my own customer profile, seem much lower quality.

richdougherty 10y ago

I agree, ads serve a useful purpose, but their implementation is bad. I'd like a compromise where we have ads, but they're less bad. The trouble is that incentives are misaligned so we can't get to a middle ground position. - Content owners and ad networks have little incentive to make ads that are better for users. They just want to get an ad system going that's simple to implement and allows tracking and fraud detection. - Users who dislike the privacy, security, resource use issues with ads find it easier to just block ads completely. It would be much harder to work out a solution involving proxying, sandboxing, etc. These conflicting incentives mean ad networks produce something good for them but bad for users and users (who know what to do) will do something that's good for them but bad for ad networks. There's a middle position, but neither party has a reason to attempt it.

drdaeman 10y ago

Whatever fancies publishers/distributors - as long as end-users are in charge of what their computer's doing and have the final saying. If end-user can instruct their computer "do this and don't do that" and freely share those scenarios with other end-users - I guess, everything's fine... or it isn't? (Of course there's a never-ending-until-the-singularity arms race between ever-complicating advertisement delivery code vs ever-improving advertisement blocking rules... but that's just bound to happen, so personally I'm just looking forward to whatever would speed things up to their logical conclusion, whatever it will be.)

AlexAffe 10y ago

Then they should start to respect the user in every way. For me, it is not about ads being shown (as long as no pink flashy flashy banner popup hell). It is about privacy and snooping around, creating profiles, without me knowing, selling my data behind my back. I want to control, what my device sends and to whom. That is it.