3 ms·

Fun moments in driving a demo for the engineering team at my last company, which was in the advertising space, was spending several minutes trying to debug a pr

by evgen 15y ago

Fun moments in driving a demo for the engineering team at my last company, which was in the advertising space, was spending several minutes trying to debug a problem with the demo before the CTO informed me that my toolbar indicated that AdBlock was still turned on and Ghostery was probably eating my company's tracking cookies so the demo was unlikely to work... Did I stop using those tools? Not a chance. Advertising is for suckers. If your site or service uses it then I wish you success, but I will not feel one iota of remorse for taking every opportunity to reduce the clutter and distraction of advertising from my life. If you want my money have the balls to ask me for it rather than trying to sell me as your secondary product.

kloncks 15y ago
I get your point. But it's faulty. My issue with this view is that the viewer makes himself seem like this victim. Let's put ourselves in this scenario again. You, the viewer, are on my website. You're using my server bandwidth while using my website functions, which probably had a lot of investment go into them whether they were services or content. Multiply you by a 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 and now we have a problem. This you take for granted. This you don't pay for. It's my website. I choose how to monetize it. If you like that, great; otherwise, stop using my website. Until we generate some automatic way of blocking you from ever using my website while you're on AdBlock, then what you're doing is stealing. No one forces you to use my website. A lot of examples in the real world apply here. There are adverts on highways, buses, buildings. Removing that clutter-creating huge banner ad from the middle of the mall; how's that different from removing a leader-board from a blog? How can removing ads completely and automatically - from websites that earn their entire existence from adverts - while still accessing the website's content and using their server bandwidth anything less than a cowardly immoral act of theft? And to hide behind that as some sort of hero for having the mental capability of installing AdBlock is just downright delusional. Blocking advertisements from people that live off of them while still using their resources is theft. Plain and simple.
- ayu 15y ago
  This vaguely reminds me of record labels' arguments against filesharing. The answer to impacted profits isn't to fight trends in technology (easy music copying, easy ad blocking); the answer is to find another way to monetize. People will pay for good stuff. Just look at the dozens of well written OS X apps. You pay for TextMate. You pay for Stay. You pay for Apple products in general. Why? They're good. Good things cost money, and people know that. I will continue to use AdBlock, and I will continue to entrepreneur.
  - SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
    Sorry, but that's not a valid comparison. Piracy is zero-cost (other than the "lost customer" argument) to the record label. Bandwidth is something SOMEONE pays for. If you're stealing my bandwidth, either by deep-linking a photo to put into a news article or by reading my site while blocking the monetization I've put on it, that's real money you're costing me, not some theoretical "you would have bought it if you didn't pirate it" argument of loss. And there's no micropayment system that would allow a small blog to charge you the 1/100 of a cent that an ad might earn, so really there's no alternative unless you're a big enough company with a compelling enough product that you can charge a non-trivial subscription fee.
- SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
  I am so saddened to see your post "grey" (downvoted below zero). There is simply NO WAY this article is not "contributing to the discussion" -- so you're getting downvotes because people don't agree with you. Especially since you're pretty much spot-on correct. Maybe that's why the downvotes? People don't like to have their world view challenged.
- feralchimp 15y ago
  You deserve to monetize your website if you convince me to pay to access it. Else, not. If you leave 50,000 hot dogs on your porch every day, marked "Free hotdogs! Come early, come often, and tell your friends!" and each has some nasty sauce on it I dislike, I'm going to take a hotdog and make an effort to remove the sauce. If I carry a sauce-removal machine, so much the better for me. You're claiming a right to follow me down the block screaming "STOP THIEF! I ONLY GET PAID IF YOU EAT THE SAUCE!" See the problem? If I'm not a party to any of the agreements under which you get paid, you don't get to bitch to me if my behavior fails to generate cash for you.
  - kloncks 15y ago
    Simply by you stepping onto my ground, you're now under my house rules. With a website, it's called a Terms of Service.
    - dho 15y ago
      Then enforce those rules and block people using AdBlock. Problem solved.
- BiosElement 15y ago
  Say good bye to your users then. :) BTW, theft means something is missing. Ad money which doesn't yet exist isn't theft.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
redthrowaway 15y ago
So Youtube should ask you to pay, then? Same with Facebook and Google? Advertising is what allows us to have great, free content on the Internet. Saying all sites should ask the customer to pay kills most startups and popular sites dead. Either admit that you don't care if you're helping them succeed, or don't run adblock. Actually, the one killer feature I could see adblock implementing is automatically adding sites to your whitelist if you clicked a link in a given domain. The articles I read on Hacker News are interesting and I'd like to support them. Therefore, automatically whitelist any domain I visit from hn. Seems like it would be both simple and solve the "I only want to support good content" issue.

by evgen 15y ago

kloncks 15y ago

I get your point. But it's faulty. My issue with this view is that the viewer makes himself seem like this victim. Let's put ourselves in this scenario again. You, the viewer, are on my website. You're using my server bandwidth while using my website functions, which probably had a lot of investment go into them whether they were services or content. Multiply you by a 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 and now we have a problem. This you take for granted. This you don't pay for. It's my website. I choose how to monetize it. If you like that, great; otherwise, stop using my website. Until we generate some automatic way of blocking you from ever using my website while you're on AdBlock, then what you're doing is stealing. No one forces you to use my website. A lot of examples in the real world apply here. There are adverts on highways, buses, buildings. Removing that clutter-creating huge banner ad from the middle of the mall; how's that different from removing a leader-board from a blog? How can removing ads completely and automatically - from websites that earn their entire existence from adverts - while still accessing the website's content and using their server bandwidth anything less than a cowardly immoral act of theft? And to hide behind that as some sort of hero for having the mental capability of installing AdBlock is just downright delusional. Blocking advertisements from people that live off of them while still using their resources is theft. Plain and simple.

ayu 15y ago
This vaguely reminds me of record labels' arguments against filesharing. The answer to impacted profits isn't to fight trends in technology (easy music copying, easy ad blocking); the answer is to find another way to monetize. People will pay for good stuff. Just look at the dozens of well written OS X apps. You pay for TextMate. You pay for Stay. You pay for Apple products in general. Why? They're good. Good things cost money, and people know that. I will continue to use AdBlock, and I will continue to entrepreneur.
- SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
  Sorry, but that's not a valid comparison. Piracy is zero-cost (other than the "lost customer" argument) to the record label. Bandwidth is something SOMEONE pays for. If you're stealing my bandwidth, either by deep-linking a photo to put into a news article or by reading my site while blocking the monetization I've put on it, that's real money you're costing me, not some theoretical "you would have bought it if you didn't pirate it" argument of loss. And there's no micropayment system that would allow a small blog to charge you the 1/100 of a cent that an ad might earn, so really there's no alternative unless you're a big enough company with a compelling enough product that you can charge a non-trivial subscription fee.
SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
I am so saddened to see your post "grey" (downvoted below zero). There is simply NO WAY this article is not "contributing to the discussion" -- so you're getting downvotes because people don't agree with you. Especially since you're pretty much spot-on correct. Maybe that's why the downvotes? People don't like to have their world view challenged.
feralchimp 15y ago
You deserve to monetize your website if you convince me to pay to access it. Else, not. If you leave 50,000 hot dogs on your porch every day, marked "Free hotdogs! Come early, come often, and tell your friends!" and each has some nasty sauce on it I dislike, I'm going to take a hotdog and make an effort to remove the sauce. If I carry a sauce-removal machine, so much the better for me. You're claiming a right to follow me down the block screaming "STOP THIEF! I ONLY GET PAID IF YOU EAT THE SAUCE!" See the problem? If I'm not a party to any of the agreements under which you get paid, you don't get to bitch to me if my behavior fails to generate cash for you.
- kloncks 15y ago
  Simply by you stepping onto my ground, you're now under my house rules. With a website, it's called a Terms of Service.
  - dho 15y ago
    Then enforce those rules and block people using AdBlock. Problem solved.
BiosElement 15y ago
Say good bye to your users then. :) BTW, theft means something is missing. Ad money which doesn't yet exist isn't theft.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

redthrowaway 15y ago

So Youtube should ask you to pay, then? Same with Facebook and Google? Advertising is what allows us to have great, free content on the Internet. Saying all sites should ask the customer to pay kills most startups and popular sites dead. Either admit that you don't care if you're helping them succeed, or don't run adblock. Actually, the one killer feature I could see adblock implementing is automatically adding sites to your whitelist if you clicked a link in a given domain. The articles I read on Hacker News are interesting and I'd like to support them. Therefore, automatically whitelist any domain I visit from hn. Seems like it would be both simple and solve the "I only want to support good content" issue.