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I think this article downplays the downsides of ad blockers too much. If ad blockers become the norm, much of the current web will no longer be viable. Facebook

I think this article downplays the downsides of ad blockers too much. If ad blockers become the norm, much of the current web will no longer be viable. Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit, StackOverflow, and countless other sites are fundamentally based on advertising and can't survive without it. The article tries to address this a little bit with the "Ad blockers do not block all advertising" section, but I don't think it fully acknowledges that if everyone installs uBlock Origin as the article suggests the web as we know it will collapse.

centimeter 6y ago
There are better, more efficient ways to monetize than ads. Ads are one of the most destructive and socially wasteful ways to monetize content; it's just technically easy. If we make ads nonviable, you can expect things like micropayments to become more common (and I'm happy to make that trade).
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not in Ads) Micropayments are generally considered to be unviable for the general population (edit: business model wise, not tech). People are unwilling to pay even pennies for an article[0], because now users are facing the burden of choice, constantly thinking about how their browsing is racking up pennies. Not to mention, it boxes you into the pay-per-article model. Sites like Twitter or Facebook don't make sense in this world. I also think it adds significant barriers to entry, since micropayments aren't accessible, at all, to younger people, or the poor. Information should be as free as possible imo. If the market decides all ads should be blocked, then sure, things will change, but please don't pretend this won't have huge ramifications - things will not be remotely like they are today. For the news at least, it'll likely just be the expensive megacorp publications that survive. [0]https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reuters_digital_news_report.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reuters_digital_news_report.php
  - centimeter 6y ago
    > micropayments aren't accessible, at all, to younger people, or the poor. This is a purely technological problem, not some sort of fundamental problem with the concept of micropayments. If advertising were really the only way young or poor people could generate value (this is not actually true, but for the sake of argument I'll go along with it), there could be dedicated websites where people intentionally look at ads in exchange for credit in their micropayment accounts (whatever that looks like, be it Bitcoin Lightning or some service from Square). Of course, once you phrase it this way, it becomes more clear that using ads as an indirect monetization strategy kind of doesn't make sense. It's better to have people perform mechanical turk style tasks (the monetization strategy of Captcha clones). As a parent, I'd be happy to put a few cents in my child's micropayment account so they don't have to get their brain flooded with garbage whenever they use the internet.
    - cameronbrown 6y ago
      > People intentionally look at ads in exchange for credit in their micropayment accounts. > It's better to have people perform mechanical turk style tasks. I do like the idea, but I still think the barriers to entry are way too high. I'm worried that what will really happen is people will just download content via other means, which will start publishers off the deep end putting DRM into their webpages. Just look at Steam as an example - it very much reduced piracy rates because it lowered the barrier to entry. > As a parent, I'd be happy to put a few cents in my child's micropayment account so they don't have to get their brain flooded with garbage whenever they use the internet. Easy enough for someone living in a 1st world country. A child in Bangladesh who just wants to read about maths or video games however... Not to mention, your child is now directly linked to your bank account, whereas before you had pseudo-anonymity.
  - ViViDboarder 6y ago
    > For the news at least, it'll likely just be the expensive megacorp publications that survive. Says the guy working for one of the largest megacorps that would be most impacted...
notriddle 6y ago
> The article tries to address this a little bit with the "Ad blockers do not block all advertising" section, but I don't think it fully acknowledges that if everyone installs uBlock Origin as the article suggests the web as we know it will collapse. The web as we know it "collapses" every ten years anyway. The question is what replaces it.
jordanpg 6y ago
It's a stupid business model that involves bad UX by definition. Not ever do I want to see an unsolicited appeal to buy something. Ever, ever, ever. The sooner it goes away, the better. I do not hold to the proposition that there is no other way to pay for the internet.
alex_young 6y ago
John Gilmore famously stated that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". I believe there is a corollary: Advertising interprets attempts to avoid it as damage and locates your eyeballs anyway. It's a constant battle with an opponent with the highest order financial motivation. Let's keep our PiHole tricks a little quiet and maybe they won't catch on right away :)
wlll 6y ago
Years ago before Google got into advertising I said I would pay for Google. I would now, if it meant that I could have an ad-free (legitimately, I use an adblocker) privacy-guaranteed experience. Would I pay for YouTube? I don't know, I pay for Netflix though, so maybe? I support some YouTube channels on Patreon, so there's definitely money there. Facebook? Nope, but then I am half a beer away from deleting my Facebook account at any time anyway.
random9763 6y ago
"collapse" is really quite a big word. You listed five websites, which is hardly "the web as we know it", though it certainly is a sizeable portion of online traffic. Stackoverflow would easily survive since it is a tool used mostly by wealthy people, easy to monetize. Reddit may survive but is it even alive right now? Youtube would have no way of surviving as it is. But really, you are conflating "the web" with "megacorps flushed with cash able to hire (tens of) thousands engineers building unprecedented surveillance tools and networks". And the end of the latter
identity0 6y ago
Good. A web without ads and ad companies is a freer, fairer, and more decentralized web.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  How is it freer? Would you pay 10 cents every time you scrolled through your Twitter feed?
  - identity0 6y ago
    Freer as in freedom. There would be less incentive to build massive centralized surveillance networks to serve targeted ads if ads did not exist.
bit_logic 6y ago
There's an easy fix, they just need to serve ads from their own domain. Give up on the click tracking, go back to the way ads were handled in paper newspapers and magazines. They didn't have tracking and still made a lot of money. These sites need to take responsibility for the ads and treat it as part of their content. The ads in old paper magazines were curated and carefully placed. Instead these sites just whine and do nothing. When some ad is malware or very poor quality? They just offload blame to the ad networks like it's not their problem. Users don't like the tracking? They just say they must have tracking for ads to work, which is a lie since ads existed before the internet. So I will continue blocking ads. Their greed and incompetence is not my problem. If this makes lots of websites go out of business then so be it. Maybe the next generation of websites will learn and start treating ads properly as part of their website content.
deepspace 6y ago
That ship sailed when websites neglected to screen ads properly, resulting in malware being served to unsuspecting users. If the sites collapse, so be it, but it won't because the vast majority of people casually surfing the web do not know how to use ad blockers.
krapp 6y ago
>Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit, StackOverflow, and countless other sites are fundamentally based on advertising and can't survive without it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I use all of these sites and I see utility in all of them (even the much-maligned Facebook.) Youtube, for all its controversy, is arguably the modern Library of Alexandia. But with every other business in the universe, you either adapt to changing market conditions or you die. I don't see why the web should be any different.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
Web site owners brought the wrath of ad blockers upon themselves. If ads were limited to a simple image, MAYBE a non-obtrusive animated GIF, it'd be fine. Honestly, I thought Project Wonderful[0]'s ads were fine and even had an exception in my blocker for them. But no, advertising networks allow advertisements to run JavaScript, auto-playing videos with sound, and create malvertising that hijacks my browser and even attempts to install malware or exploit browser vulnerabilities. In short, fuck 'em. If your business isn't viable without being hostile to your users, then it isn't viable. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful
- missedthecue 6y ago
  So do you turn your adblocker off on legitimate sites that don't run malicious advertising? (Which, unless you have a browsing history not fit for publication on this site, is likely the majority of sites that you visit) Or do you just want to have your cake and eat it too? It's quite funny to me that the same crowd who blocks internet advertising wholesale is often times the same crowd that bemoans the fact that so many websites are going to subscription models and paywalls versus say 10 or 15 years ago. Frankly, there is little discernable difference between adblocking and theft, but I'm sure that that statement is not a popular one on a forum like this.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    > legitimate sites that don't run malicious advertising That's the problem. There are plenty of legitimate sites that have run malicious advertising because they used an ad network that ended up allowing one. Like Forbes: https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/09/malvertising_attack.html https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/09/malvert... So as a precaution, no. Today's totally safe ad is tomorrow's malvertising.
ViViDboarder 6y ago
> Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit, StackOverflow, and countless other sites are fundamentally based on advertising and can't survive without it. Can’t wait! Did you mean for this to talk me out of it? For the most part, the ad industry is toxic. If their service isn’t worth anything to it’s users, why prop it up by through ads? First party advertising is more acceptable in my mind. Eg. Facebook selling ads to other businesses to show on Facebook. Where it tends to go wrong is that they are incentivized to track everyone everywhere through pixels on other sites, in mobile apps with Facebook logins, and buying credit card data. Some companies manage to sell high quality ads on their site without resorting to this behavior. If that was the norm, I’d turn my blocker back off.
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
Any business that needs to dump pollution into our waterways should not be allowed to operate, no matter how much good its products are. Any business that needs to destroy our minds in order to be profitable should not be allowed to operate.

centimeter 6y ago

There are better, more efficient ways to monetize than ads. Ads are one of the most destructive and socially wasteful ways to monetize content; it's just technically easy. If we make ads nonviable, you can expect things like micropayments to become more common (and I'm happy to make that trade).

cameronbrown 6y ago
(Disclosure: I work for Google, but not in Ads) Micropayments are generally considered to be unviable for the general population (edit: business model wise, not tech). People are unwilling to pay even pennies for an article[0], because now users are facing the burden of choice, constantly thinking about how their browsing is racking up pennies. Not to mention, it boxes you into the pay-per-article model. Sites like Twitter or Facebook don't make sense in this world. I also think it adds significant barriers to entry, since micropayments aren't accessible, at all, to younger people, or the poor. Information should be as free as possible imo. If the market decides all ads should be blocked, then sure, things will change, but please don't pretend this won't have huge ramifications - things will not be remotely like they are today. For the news at least, it'll likely just be the expensive megacorp publications that survive. [0]https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reuters_digital_news_report.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reuters_digital_news_report.php
- centimeter 6y ago
  > micropayments aren't accessible, at all, to younger people, or the poor. This is a purely technological problem, not some sort of fundamental problem with the concept of micropayments. If advertising were really the only way young or poor people could generate value (this is not actually true, but for the sake of argument I'll go along with it), there could be dedicated websites where people intentionally look at ads in exchange for credit in their micropayment accounts (whatever that looks like, be it Bitcoin Lightning or some service from Square). Of course, once you phrase it this way, it becomes more clear that using ads as an indirect monetization strategy kind of doesn't make sense. It's better to have people perform mechanical turk style tasks (the monetization strategy of Captcha clones). As a parent, I'd be happy to put a few cents in my child's micropayment account so they don't have to get their brain flooded with garbage whenever they use the internet.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    > People intentionally look at ads in exchange for credit in their micropayment accounts. > It's better to have people perform mechanical turk style tasks. I do like the idea, but I still think the barriers to entry are way too high. I'm worried that what will really happen is people will just download content via other means, which will start publishers off the deep end putting DRM into their webpages. Just look at Steam as an example - it very much reduced piracy rates because it lowered the barrier to entry. > As a parent, I'd be happy to put a few cents in my child's micropayment account so they don't have to get their brain flooded with garbage whenever they use the internet. Easy enough for someone living in a 1st world country. A child in Bangladesh who just wants to read about maths or video games however... Not to mention, your child is now directly linked to your bank account, whereas before you had pseudo-anonymity.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  > For the news at least, it'll likely just be the expensive megacorp publications that survive. Says the guy working for one of the largest megacorps that would be most impacted...

notriddle 6y ago

> The article tries to address this a little bit with the "Ad blockers do not block all advertising" section, but I don't think it fully acknowledges that if everyone installs uBlock Origin as the article suggests the web as we know it will collapse. The web as we know it "collapses" every ten years anyway. The question is what replaces it.

jordanpg 6y ago

It's a stupid business model that involves bad UX by definition. Not ever do I want to see an unsolicited appeal to buy something. Ever, ever, ever. The sooner it goes away, the better. I do not hold to the proposition that there is no other way to pay for the internet.

alex_young 6y ago

John Gilmore famously stated that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". I believe there is a corollary: Advertising interprets attempts to avoid it as damage and locates your eyeballs anyway. It's a constant battle with an opponent with the highest order financial motivation. Let's keep our PiHole tricks a little quiet and maybe they won't catch on right away :)

wlll 6y ago

Years ago before Google got into advertising I said I would pay for Google. I would now, if it meant that I could have an ad-free (legitimately, I use an adblocker) privacy-guaranteed experience. Would I pay for YouTube? I don't know, I pay for Netflix though, so maybe? I support some YouTube channels on Patreon, so there's definitely money there. Facebook? Nope, but then I am half a beer away from deleting my Facebook account at any time anyway.

random9763 6y ago

"collapse" is really quite a big word. You listed five websites, which is hardly "the web as we know it", though it certainly is a sizeable portion of online traffic. Stackoverflow would easily survive since it is a tool used mostly by wealthy people, easy to monetize. Reddit may survive but is it even alive right now? Youtube would have no way of surviving as it is. But really, you are conflating "the web" with "megacorps flushed with cash able to hire (tens of) thousands engineers building unprecedented surveillance tools and networks". And the end of the latter

identity0 6y ago

Good. A web without ads and ad companies is a freer, fairer, and more decentralized web.

missedthecue 6y ago
How is it freer? Would you pay 10 cents every time you scrolled through your Twitter feed?
- identity0 6y ago
  Freer as in freedom. There would be less incentive to build massive centralized surveillance networks to serve targeted ads if ads did not exist.

bit_logic 6y ago

There's an easy fix, they just need to serve ads from their own domain. Give up on the click tracking, go back to the way ads were handled in paper newspapers and magazines. They didn't have tracking and still made a lot of money. These sites need to take responsibility for the ads and treat it as part of their content. The ads in old paper magazines were curated and carefully placed. Instead these sites just whine and do nothing. When some ad is malware or very poor quality? They just offload blame to the ad networks like it's not their problem. Users don't like the tracking? They just say they must have tracking for ads to work, which is a lie since ads existed before the internet. So I will continue blocking ads. Their greed and incompetence is not my problem. If this makes lots of websites go out of business then so be it. Maybe the next generation of websites will learn and start treating ads properly as part of their website content.

deepspace 6y ago

That ship sailed when websites neglected to screen ads properly, resulting in malware being served to unsuspecting users. If the sites collapse, so be it, but it won't because the vast majority of people casually surfing the web do not know how to use ad blockers.

krapp 6y ago

>Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit, StackOverflow, and countless other sites are fundamentally based on advertising and can't survive without it. I mean, don't get me wrong, I use all of these sites and I see utility in all of them (even the much-maligned Facebook.) Youtube, for all its controversy, is arguably the modern Library of Alexandia. But with every other business in the universe, you either adapt to changing market conditions or you die. I don't see why the web should be any different.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

Web site owners brought the wrath of ad blockers upon themselves. If ads were limited to a simple image, MAYBE a non-obtrusive animated GIF, it'd be fine. Honestly, I thought Project Wonderful[0]'s ads were fine and even had an exception in my blocker for them. But no, advertising networks allow advertisements to run JavaScript, auto-playing videos with sound, and create malvertising that hijacks my browser and even attempts to install malware or exploit browser vulnerabilities. In short, fuck 'em. If your business isn't viable without being hostile to your users, then it isn't viable. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful

missedthecue 6y ago
So do you turn your adblocker off on legitimate sites that don't run malicious advertising? (Which, unless you have a browsing history not fit for publication on this site, is likely the majority of sites that you visit) Or do you just want to have your cake and eat it too? It's quite funny to me that the same crowd who blocks internet advertising wholesale is often times the same crowd that bemoans the fact that so many websites are going to subscription models and paywalls versus say 10 or 15 years ago. Frankly, there is little discernable difference between adblocking and theft, but I'm sure that that statement is not a popular one on a forum like this.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  > legitimate sites that don't run malicious advertising That's the problem. There are plenty of legitimate sites that have run malicious advertising because they used an ad network that ended up allowing one. Like Forbes: https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/09/malvertising_attack.html https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/09/malvert... So as a precaution, no. Today's totally safe ad is tomorrow's malvertising.

ViViDboarder 6y ago

> Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit, StackOverflow, and countless other sites are fundamentally based on advertising and can't survive without it. Can’t wait! Did you mean for this to talk me out of it? For the most part, the ad industry is toxic. If their service isn’t worth anything to it’s users, why prop it up by through ads? First party advertising is more acceptable in my mind. Eg. Facebook selling ads to other businesses to show on Facebook. Where it tends to go wrong is that they are incentivized to track everyone everywhere through pixels on other sites, in mobile apps with Facebook logins, and buying credit card data. Some companies manage to sell high quality ads on their site without resorting to this behavior. If that was the norm, I’d turn my blocker back off.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

Any business that needs to dump pollution into our waterways should not be allowed to operate, no matter how much good its products are. Any business that needs to destroy our minds in order to be profitable should not be allowed to operate.