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I own a website www.Photopea.com, visited by 3 million people a month. Once in a while, I enable adblock detector, and do not allow usrers with adblocks use th

I own a website www.Photopea.com, visited by 3 million people a month. Once in a while, I enable adblock detector, and do not allow usrers with adblocks use the service. I wish everyone was doing that. When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing). But when you see someone willing to give you an article, a poem, a song, a funny video, but they want you to watch the ad in exchange, lots of people think it is fine to break their conditions. It is extremely easy to detect ad blockers on the web. I wish website creators stopped tolerating ad blockers. People would finally learn to watch ads, or pay for stuff, and the creators would be able to create much better content.

p2detar 5y ago
I hate ads and I never understood the „watch ads to get content“ business plan. Why not just provide demo content and ask users to pay for full access? By relying on ads for revenue, you basically invite adblockers. After all, if people didn’t like them, they wouldn’t exist.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  almost nobody pays for 'ad free' experience
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    The problem is that the ad-free experience often costs orders of magnitude above what the ad view would earn them. Let's take newspapers for example, ad view on a single page load would maybe earn them 10c, but if I wanted to pay I'd need to subscribe to a monthly commitment of ~15£/month (for the WSJ) and still have no guarantee my data won't be used maliciously (there is no way to pay anonymously) nor whether cancelling the subscription will be easy (no idea for the WSJ but the New York Times is infamous for this).
    - shukantpal 5y ago
      The subscription doesn't have a limit on how many times you use the app, however. If you read 150 pages a month (~5 a day), then the math is equal.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        True, but there are hundreds of news websites out there and even if there was just one you'd still have to read it 5 times a day to make the subscription worthwhile. I don't read news near enough to make a single subscription worthwhile, and even if I did I would read multiple sources meaning I'd need multiple subscriptions - that's completely unsustainable.
interator7 5y ago
That's interesting, I use Photopea a lot. How did you start it, and what led you to going with ads/premium to unblock ads instead of charging premium for more features?
- IvanK_net 5y ago
  90% of my income is from ads. If I could not make money with my website, I would shut it down and would go get hired by some company.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
ThalesX 5y ago
I don’t understand why you can’t just load traditional ads related to your business that no ad blocker would work out of the box against. If I visit a website about cars, one could put up car ads because it’s obviously in my interests at this point. I don’t visit websites that require me to block my adblocker for the simple reason that it means they have no other monetizable content apart from me, and as I didn’t even get to their magnet content yet I have no idea how the website feels, which makes me not so open to sharing my data fingerprint.
- IvanK_net 5y ago
  My ads are traditional ads, and the ads are almost always related to the business. There are no good and bad ads. The creators of ad blockers decide, what the ad is. The code of an ad blocker literally contains a code like: if(website is Photopea.com) find a specific element and delete it. If an ad blocker tells you, that they are not blocking "good ads", they are usually blackmailing ad companies to pay them, so that they do not block their ads. The money, which could go to content creators, are going to ad block creators.
davidodio 5y ago
Maybe watching ads would be a fair exchange if there was an option to pay, often (mostly), there isn’t. Additionally to some (most), ads aren’t the problem, its tracking, creation of shadow profiles etc Never used photopea, hope it works out for you, but I wish website creators stopped thinking that invasion of my privacy is a currency
- getsiu 5y ago
  > if there was an option to pay... It doesn't work very well, unfortunately. Those willing to pay usually are the most interesting part of the audience for ad providers, so it's difficult to compensate that loss by a reasonably priced 'ad-free' option. You probably would be surprised if you knew how much your attention may cost. Targeted ads created a market where everyone pays proportionally to their spendings. I'm not saying it's a good situation, but it looks like that's a local optimum rather hard to leave. What bothers me is that huge companies are more resilient to tracking and ads restrictions, so that fight may further speed up centralisation of the internet. I would personally prefer the chaotic old-school world wide web with ugly flashing banners instead.
- IvanK_net 5y ago
  Photopea.com has an option to pay for an ad-free experience, and one in 2000 users is paying for it. I make around $.01 (one USD cent) for an hour of using Photopea with ads. If someone was willing to pay me two cents for an hour of using Photopea (with no ads), I would gladly accept it.
supermatt 5y ago
Thats a pretty disingenuous comparison. You aren't just charging your users "ad views". You are also facilitating 3rd parties tracking their online behaviour, and they certainly aren't agreeing to those terms when they first land on your site.
- IvanK_net 5y ago
  Could you be more specific? What "3rd parties" are tracking what "behaviour" of yours, and why exactly is it worth so much? And what do you mean by "you" in "tracking you"? Do they know your name?
  - timbit42 5y ago
    The behaviour is what websites you visit. It is worth money because websites have topics which hints how they can better target advertising at you. Yes, they know our names because they can track us across every website we visit.
  - supermatt 5y ago
    In the case of photopea - as soon as I land on the homepage and before i consent to ANYTHING: github google analytics facebook stackpath wikimedia google adwords google fonts amazon ads (a few others I dont recognise) and, of course, the companies that you use to collect "consent"... Even if i disable ALL the options on the "consent" module and reload the page, it STILL loads ALL of these. In fact, it seems to load even more! For example, I create a document, then it loads (in ADDITION to the above): criteo 33across openx adxpremium setupad 4dex adnxs casalemedia pubmatic emxdgt rubiconproject districtm lijit They are at the very least tracking that i visited your site. They are tracking the URLs that are active. As I click around and use the app, it is triggering more interaction with those services - so clearly they are monitoring actions/events too. This is just on YOUR site. These networks are able to identify me by a cookie (and other techniques), so they can compile my activity on YOUR site into a log of my activities across multiple sites which they "provide their ads" on. They can absolutely identify you as an individual - google, facebook, etc, are ones that people have INTENTIONALLY given their names too, and many of these other networks sell/lease the data to others to allow them to provide their own identity link. Furthermore, these 3rd party "scripts" have access to the entire page content too. They can read my email address should I register. They can even capture my password if they were so configured (or were in themselves hacked to do so). Bear in mind i did NOT consent to any of this when I landed on your site, and even when i specifically removed "consent" via the form on your landing page, i was STILL being tracked by ALL those I mention above. THIS is why people have blockers, etc. I dont mind if you have an image with a link to some advertisers product/service/whatever. What I care about it that my every action on your site is providing additional data for these companies to mine and build a secret profile of my browsing habits. EDIT: I browsed without an ad blocker to compile this behaviour. I feel dirty.
GlitchMr 5y ago
Out of curiosity, I decided to check your website with adblocker turned off. After rejecting (!) GDPR consent, the website decided to send my personal information to the following companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ad Lightning, Setupad, UniConsent, Adagio, ID5, Criteo, Magnite, RTB House, Casale Media, EMX Digital, Adform, Pubmatic, Between Digital, Lijit Networks, AppNexus, 33Across, Adx Premium, Sharethrough, Smart Adserver, OpenX, BRealTime, bumlam.com (couldn't find information about owner of this domain), BidSwitch, Getintent, Yahoo, and more - at some point I gave up trying to figure out who owns given domain names. The privacy policy which is quite hidden on the website (https://www.photopea.com/privacy.html https://www.photopea.com/privacy.html) says nothing about that. All it says is the following: > We use third party tracking tools to improve the performance and features of the Service (e.g. Google Analytics). Such tools are created and managed by parties outside our control. As such, we are not responsible for what information is actually captured by such third parties or how such third parties use and protect that information. This won't fly under GDPR, just saying. Not only you are responsible for third party behavior, but you didn't even mention all tracking scripts that are directly used (I see Facebook Pixel Code right in the source code for photopea.com). You are in Czech Republic, right? I think it is in European Union.
- DitheringIdiot 5y ago
  I just checked the same thing. I didn’t get a consent banner at all, not sure why. I’d just like to add that a decent chunk of the traffic to this site is from people typing “free photo editor” or things along those lines. The creator of this site is specifically targeting people who want a free photo editor… And then complaining about people wanting to use it for free.
  - GlitchMr 5y ago
    Are you in European Union? I imagine the consent banner may skipped when not in European Union.
    - DitheringIdiot 5y ago
      I’m in the UK. So not anymore. But we still apply GDPR rules as far as I’m aware
cblconfederate 5y ago
Nextgrid 5y ago
> When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing). Someone selling goods has to abide by some laws - typically, lies/false advertising is prohibited, they might have to provide a warranty, and most contracts can be cancelled within 14 days by returning the goods. This means that the car's specifications will be made available to me, the terms of the deal throughly detailed in a legal document I'd have to sign, and I might get to test drive the car before committing. Ads in contrast don't have any of this. In your example of articles/poems/songs/funny videos, I don't get to check out the content beforehand, I have no recourse if it turns out to be defective/fraudulent/etc (such as clickbait, or a video with 2 mins actual content and 8 mins filler to get to the 10 min threshold for a second ad) after I "pay" by viewing the ad (and parting with my personal data) and I don't have any recourse either if the advertised product turns out to be a scam or malware.
- IvanK_net 5y ago
  Nobody cares what your opinion about the ad is. If you do not like the "cost" of the item (watching a minute of an ad, to see a 10 second video), just go somewhere else to find an alternative. Or buy it once and never again. What you are saying is, basically, if someone is selling bread for $100, and they dont let you taste in advance, you are allowed to steal that bread, because $100 is not a right price for the bread.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Not liking the cost implies knowing the cost in advance. Does your website disclose that it's ad-supported, which data will be collected and how it will be used (which is required if your are based in the EU or offer service to EU-based customers) and whether you take responsibility for any ill effects from executing the ad code? Because otherwise it can be argued you are also "stealing" people's computing resources and personal data before they could make a conscious decision to "pay". > steal Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here, and the costs should be taken into account either way. You're comparing fractions of a cent from an ad view with $100. I'd feel much better about stealing the former than the latter even in case of actual, physical theft. > they dont let you taste in advance It doesn't have an impact on the "theft" scenario, but in case of a paid product I would still expect a refund if the bread is defective (moldy or fake) or was mis-sold with false advertising.

p2detar 5y ago

I hate ads and I never understood the „watch ads to get content“ business plan. Why not just provide demo content and ask users to pay for full access? By relying on ads for revenue, you basically invite adblockers. After all, if people didn’t like them, they wouldn’t exist.

cblconfederate 5y ago
almost nobody pays for 'ad free' experience
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  The problem is that the ad-free experience often costs orders of magnitude above what the ad view would earn them. Let's take newspapers for example, ad view on a single page load would maybe earn them 10c, but if I wanted to pay I'd need to subscribe to a monthly commitment of ~15£/month (for the WSJ) and still have no guarantee my data won't be used maliciously (there is no way to pay anonymously) nor whether cancelling the subscription will be easy (no idea for the WSJ but the New York Times is infamous for this).
  - shukantpal 5y ago
    The subscription doesn't have a limit on how many times you use the app, however. If you read 150 pages a month (~5 a day), then the math is equal.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      True, but there are hundreds of news websites out there and even if there was just one you'd still have to read it 5 times a day to make the subscription worthwhile. I don't read news near enough to make a single subscription worthwhile, and even if I did I would read multiple sources meaning I'd need multiple subscriptions - that's completely unsustainable.

interator7 5y ago

That's interesting, I use Photopea a lot. How did you start it, and what led you to going with ads/premium to unblock ads instead of charging premium for more features?

IvanK_net 5y ago
90% of my income is from ads. If I could not make money with my website, I would shut it down and would go get hired by some company.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

ThalesX 5y ago

I don’t understand why you can’t just load traditional ads related to your business that no ad blocker would work out of the box against. If I visit a website about cars, one could put up car ads because it’s obviously in my interests at this point. I don’t visit websites that require me to block my adblocker for the simple reason that it means they have no other monetizable content apart from me, and as I didn’t even get to their magnet content yet I have no idea how the website feels, which makes me not so open to sharing my data fingerprint.

IvanK_net 5y ago
My ads are traditional ads, and the ads are almost always related to the business. There are no good and bad ads. The creators of ad blockers decide, what the ad is. The code of an ad blocker literally contains a code like: if(website is Photopea.com) find a specific element and delete it. If an ad blocker tells you, that they are not blocking "good ads", they are usually blackmailing ad companies to pay them, so that they do not block their ads. The money, which could go to content creators, are going to ad block creators.

davidodio 5y ago

Maybe watching ads would be a fair exchange if there was an option to pay, often (mostly), there isn’t. Additionally to some (most), ads aren’t the problem, its tracking, creation of shadow profiles etc Never used photopea, hope it works out for you, but I wish website creators stopped thinking that invasion of my privacy is a currency

getsiu 5y ago
> if there was an option to pay... It doesn't work very well, unfortunately. Those willing to pay usually are the most interesting part of the audience for ad providers, so it's difficult to compensate that loss by a reasonably priced 'ad-free' option. You probably would be surprised if you knew how much your attention may cost. Targeted ads created a market where everyone pays proportionally to their spendings. I'm not saying it's a good situation, but it looks like that's a local optimum rather hard to leave. What bothers me is that huge companies are more resilient to tracking and ads restrictions, so that fight may further speed up centralisation of the internet. I would personally prefer the chaotic old-school world wide web with ugly flashing banners instead.
IvanK_net 5y ago
Photopea.com has an option to pay for an ad-free experience, and one in 2000 users is paying for it. I make around $.01 (one USD cent) for an hour of using Photopea with ads. If someone was willing to pay me two cents for an hour of using Photopea (with no ads), I would gladly accept it.

supermatt 5y ago

Thats a pretty disingenuous comparison. You aren't just charging your users "ad views". You are also facilitating 3rd parties tracking their online behaviour, and they certainly aren't agreeing to those terms when they first land on your site.

IvanK_net 5y ago
Could you be more specific? What "3rd parties" are tracking what "behaviour" of yours, and why exactly is it worth so much? And what do you mean by "you" in "tracking you"? Do they know your name?
- timbit42 5y ago
  The behaviour is what websites you visit. It is worth money because websites have topics which hints how they can better target advertising at you. Yes, they know our names because they can track us across every website we visit.
- supermatt 5y ago
  In the case of photopea - as soon as I land on the homepage and before i consent to ANYTHING: github google analytics facebook stackpath wikimedia google adwords google fonts amazon ads (a few others I dont recognise) and, of course, the companies that you use to collect "consent"... Even if i disable ALL the options on the "consent" module and reload the page, it STILL loads ALL of these. In fact, it seems to load even more! For example, I create a document, then it loads (in ADDITION to the above): criteo 33across openx adxpremium setupad 4dex adnxs casalemedia pubmatic emxdgt rubiconproject districtm lijit They are at the very least tracking that i visited your site. They are tracking the URLs that are active. As I click around and use the app, it is triggering more interaction with those services - so clearly they are monitoring actions/events too. This is just on YOUR site. These networks are able to identify me by a cookie (and other techniques), so they can compile my activity on YOUR site into a log of my activities across multiple sites which they "provide their ads" on. They can absolutely identify you as an individual - google, facebook, etc, are ones that people have INTENTIONALLY given their names too, and many of these other networks sell/lease the data to others to allow them to provide their own identity link. Furthermore, these 3rd party "scripts" have access to the entire page content too. They can read my email address should I register. They can even capture my password if they were so configured (or were in themselves hacked to do so). Bear in mind i did NOT consent to any of this when I landed on your site, and even when i specifically removed "consent" via the form on your landing page, i was STILL being tracked by ALL those I mention above. THIS is why people have blockers, etc. I dont mind if you have an image with a link to some advertisers product/service/whatever. What I care about it that my every action on your site is providing additional data for these companies to mine and build a secret profile of my browsing habits. EDIT: I browsed without an ad blocker to compile this behaviour. I feel dirty.

GlitchMr 5y ago

Out of curiosity, I decided to check your website with adblocker turned off. After rejecting (!) GDPR consent, the website decided to send my personal information to the following companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ad Lightning, Setupad, UniConsent, Adagio, ID5, Criteo, Magnite, RTB House, Casale Media, EMX Digital, Adform, Pubmatic, Between Digital, Lijit Networks, AppNexus, 33Across, Adx Premium, Sharethrough, Smart Adserver, OpenX, BRealTime, bumlam.com (couldn't find information about owner of this domain), BidSwitch, Getintent, Yahoo, and more - at some point I gave up trying to figure out who owns given domain names. The privacy policy which is quite hidden on the website (https://www.photopea.com/privacy.html https://www.photopea.com/privacy.html) says nothing about that. All it says is the following: > We use third party tracking tools to improve the performance and features of the Service (e.g. Google Analytics). Such tools are created and managed by parties outside our control. As such, we are not responsible for what information is actually captured by such third parties or how such third parties use and protect that information. This won't fly under GDPR, just saying. Not only you are responsible for third party behavior, but you didn't even mention all tracking scripts that are directly used (I see Facebook Pixel Code right in the source code for photopea.com). You are in Czech Republic, right? I think it is in European Union.

DitheringIdiot 5y ago
I just checked the same thing. I didn’t get a consent banner at all, not sure why. I’d just like to add that a decent chunk of the traffic to this site is from people typing “free photo editor” or things along those lines. The creator of this site is specifically targeting people who want a free photo editor… And then complaining about people wanting to use it for free.
- GlitchMr 5y ago
  Are you in European Union? I imagine the consent banner may skipped when not in European Union.
  - DitheringIdiot 5y ago
    I’m in the UK. So not anymore. But we still apply GDPR rules as far as I’m aware

cblconfederate 5y ago

Nextgrid 5y ago

> When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing). Someone selling goods has to abide by some laws - typically, lies/false advertising is prohibited, they might have to provide a warranty, and most contracts can be cancelled within 14 days by returning the goods. This means that the car's specifications will be made available to me, the terms of the deal throughly detailed in a legal document I'd have to sign, and I might get to test drive the car before committing. Ads in contrast don't have any of this. In your example of articles/poems/songs/funny videos, I don't get to check out the content beforehand, I have no recourse if it turns out to be defective/fraudulent/etc (such as clickbait, or a video with 2 mins actual content and 8 mins filler to get to the 10 min threshold for a second ad) after I "pay" by viewing the ad (and parting with my personal data) and I don't have any recourse either if the advertised product turns out to be a scam or malware.

IvanK_net 5y ago
Nobody cares what your opinion about the ad is. If you do not like the "cost" of the item (watching a minute of an ad, to see a 10 second video), just go somewhere else to find an alternative. Or buy it once and never again. What you are saying is, basically, if someone is selling bread for $100, and they dont let you taste in advance, you are allowed to steal that bread, because $100 is not a right price for the bread.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Not liking the cost implies knowing the cost in advance. Does your website disclose that it's ad-supported, which data will be collected and how it will be used (which is required if your are based in the EU or offer service to EU-based customers) and whether you take responsibility for any ill effects from executing the ad code? Because otherwise it can be argued you are also "stealing" people's computing resources and personal data before they could make a conscious decision to "pay". > steal Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here, and the costs should be taken into account either way. You're comparing fractions of a cent from an ad view with $100. I'd feel much better about stealing the former than the latter even in case of actual, physical theft. > they dont let you taste in advance It doesn't have an impact on the "theft" scenario, but in case of a paid product I would still expect a refund if the bread is defective (moldy or fake) or was mis-sold with false advertising.