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I agree with you that the MPAA claim is silly. But in this case, you're actually consuming the product - using their bandwidth, their servers, etc, all of which

I agree with you that the MPAA claim is silly. But in this case, you're actually consuming the product - using their bandwidth, their servers, etc, all of which costs money - and denying them the revenue they use to support that service. The argument with the MPAA concept is that you're not denying them a sale, nor are you increasing their cost of doing business, but here you're you're doing the latter. Do you really believe that advertising (which is only part of what marketing departments do) is "zero value-add"? How do you learn about new products? How do you think the press who review products learn about them? How does a product become available for your to buy at Walgreens on the corner? All of that is "marketing"...

joejohnson 14y ago
That argument is false for a few reasons. With many online services, who's to say precisely what the product is. Aren't we (the users) the real product for a lot of large, free services (gmail, Facebook, etc.)? And for the bandwidth, I'm paying for that too. I pay an ISP every month to browser the internet. Shouldn't I be able to control what I use this bandwidth for? When I click on a link, I don't truly know what resources resolving that address will require; it only seems fair that smart consumers can decide to black/whitelist content that they don't want.
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  I don't disagree that as a consumer you should have the right to choose what gets sent to you - but generally, if you're using a site, you're also consenting to its terms of service (which generally include accepting its ads.) As such, the product IS actually defined for you, and not up for you to define as you see fit. Using it outside of those terms is theft of service. If you don't want accept those ads, fine, but from an ethical and legal standpoint you shouldn't be consuming its content or using its service, either. This whole "the users are the product" thing sounds great but it's an oversimplification; ultimately, it's the user's consumption of advertising that's the product for an ad-supported site; the user itself (ex ads) is often worthless or less than worthless. You're making a deal with the provider of the site that you'll consume their product in exchange for also viewing the ads; if you don't like that bargain, don't accept it and don't consume the content. The fact that you pay for your bandwidth, btw, has nothing to do with the fact that the site also pays for its bandwidth. Your ISP is not using part of what you pay to cover the bandwidth costs of the content provider.
  - gradschool 14y ago
    To take this line of reasoning a step further, you're not really acting in good faith if you view the ads without ever buying the products or services they advertise. The advertiser pays the provider of the site in the expectation of a reasonable conversion rate. If you don't want to buy a certain reasonable percentage of products advertised to you, fine, but from an ethical and legal standpoint you shouldn't be forcing them to waste their advertising budget on you. Doing so diminishes the advertiser's incentive to support the site whose content you're consuming. Here are some terms of service for you. When you enter into any business venture, you accept the risk of it not succeeding. Wishful thinking notwithstanding, the consumer is under no obligation to indemnify you against it.
    - tomkarlo 14y ago
      Advertisers either pay for impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC) or directly for conversions. They don't pay for conversion rates - if rates are too low, they might not buy CPC or CPM campaigns any more, but you can't generally get a refund for a CPM campaign because your conversion rate was too low (barring clickfraud.)
  - jodrellblank 14y ago
    Is it legally agreed that connecting to a webserver and sending "GET /" and reading the reply is "agreeing to the terms of service"? If the terms of service included a link to an audio advert, do I have to quiet other sound sources so I can hear the advert?
    - tomkarlo 14y ago
      If you're going to consume the editorial content of the site? The ethical and legal (if not practical) answer is yes. It's your obligation to understand and accept the terms of a service (not just a web site) before using it. Is that impractical? Yes. But when I rent a car, I don't read the terms either, and they still apply. It's just a result of a world in which we undertake hundreds of "transactions" a day with business entities, all of which have to be governed by legal agreements.
rglullis 14y ago
The thing is, if the product is actually valuable to me, I would spend more money on them that they could ever make from me through ads. "But wait, what about freemium? Plenty of services remove the ads for paying customers", one might ask. The problem with it is that you now a have false sense of choice: 1) Free product + ads 2) Paid product and no ads. There is a third alternative: free product, adblock, no ads. Yes, marketing is much more than advertising. But I think that the "advertising" part is what everything else is based on, when it shouldn't. To take on your example, the "press who review products" is, most of the time, dependent on eyeballs to sell ads to. This model is so broken that you either have newspapers going bankrupt or Huffington Post-style blogs, with zero actual content. If enough people started using adblock, perhaps we would get to a point where the current model would be unsustainable, which would producers to either: - Get rid of ad-based services and products, and start charging directly. - Improve their ads to make it more relevant to consumers.
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  "There is a third alternative: free product, adblock, no ads." By that logic, it's also possible to avoid high grocery bills by sticking some things in your pocket and not paying for them. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a scalable or ethical option. Google's core breakthrough in advertising was to close the loop and push advertisers towards ads that are relevant to customers, where they know exactly how much they're earning per dollar they spend on ads. Ads have, actually, improved quite a bit over the past 10 years. The famous line was "half of ad spending is wasted, we just don't know which half" (paraphrased)... now they know which half. To go back to the OP's subject - the reason why retargeting has grown so popular is that it WORKS LIKE A MOFO. Retargeted ads are usually an order of magnitude more relevant and are immensely cost effective in terms of spend versus conversions. The best indicator that someone's interested in buying a Ford? They visited the Ford site.
  - rglullis 14y ago
    If using adblock is unethical, so is torrenting TV shows; and I thought you agreed with me that the MPAA claim is bullshit. Google is better than the alternatives, sure. It doesn't mean that it is any good. The ads I get on my cell phone are still awful, to the point of discouraging me to use it more.
Peaker 14y ago
If you just mentally ad-block, are you still denying them?
- Duff 14y ago
  It's your ethical duty to click! Seriously though, my local weekly newspaper knows nothing about my habits, but offers ads 10x more relevant than Google, who has been tracking me for a decade.
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    I'm sure your local newspaper offers tons of irrelevant ads as well (mine did once-upon-a-time). I suspect you've learned to pick out the relevant ones and skip the irrelevant ones - which is arguably the dead-tree newspaper equivalent of this proposal.
  - zanny 14y ago
    But your local newspaper is not trying to provide relevant ads. They just take ads from whoever will pay them and put those in the paper. Or am I missing something, such as sarcasm. I am bad with that.
    - Duff 14y ago
      Google is great at targeting with search based ads, but the site-based ads are awful. Google thinks I'm really into gold coins based on me clicking on some story on reddit several months ago.

joejohnson 14y ago

That argument is false for a few reasons. With many online services, who's to say precisely what the product is. Aren't we (the users) the real product for a lot of large, free services (gmail, Facebook, etc.)? And for the bandwidth, I'm paying for that too. I pay an ISP every month to browser the internet. Shouldn't I be able to control what I use this bandwidth for? When I click on a link, I don't truly know what resources resolving that address will require; it only seems fair that smart consumers can decide to black/whitelist content that they don't want.

tomkarlo 14y ago
I don't disagree that as a consumer you should have the right to choose what gets sent to you - but generally, if you're using a site, you're also consenting to its terms of service (which generally include accepting its ads.) As such, the product IS actually defined for you, and not up for you to define as you see fit. Using it outside of those terms is theft of service. If you don't want accept those ads, fine, but from an ethical and legal standpoint you shouldn't be consuming its content or using its service, either. This whole "the users are the product" thing sounds great but it's an oversimplification; ultimately, it's the user's consumption of advertising that's the product for an ad-supported site; the user itself (ex ads) is often worthless or less than worthless. You're making a deal with the provider of the site that you'll consume their product in exchange for also viewing the ads; if you don't like that bargain, don't accept it and don't consume the content. The fact that you pay for your bandwidth, btw, has nothing to do with the fact that the site also pays for its bandwidth. Your ISP is not using part of what you pay to cover the bandwidth costs of the content provider.
- gradschool 14y ago
  To take this line of reasoning a step further, you're not really acting in good faith if you view the ads without ever buying the products or services they advertise. The advertiser pays the provider of the site in the expectation of a reasonable conversion rate. If you don't want to buy a certain reasonable percentage of products advertised to you, fine, but from an ethical and legal standpoint you shouldn't be forcing them to waste their advertising budget on you. Doing so diminishes the advertiser's incentive to support the site whose content you're consuming. Here are some terms of service for you. When you enter into any business venture, you accept the risk of it not succeeding. Wishful thinking notwithstanding, the consumer is under no obligation to indemnify you against it.
  - tomkarlo 14y ago
    Advertisers either pay for impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC) or directly for conversions. They don't pay for conversion rates - if rates are too low, they might not buy CPC or CPM campaigns any more, but you can't generally get a refund for a CPM campaign because your conversion rate was too low (barring clickfraud.)
- jodrellblank 14y ago
  Is it legally agreed that connecting to a webserver and sending "GET /" and reading the reply is "agreeing to the terms of service"? If the terms of service included a link to an audio advert, do I have to quiet other sound sources so I can hear the advert?
  - tomkarlo 14y ago
    If you're going to consume the editorial content of the site? The ethical and legal (if not practical) answer is yes. It's your obligation to understand and accept the terms of a service (not just a web site) before using it. Is that impractical? Yes. But when I rent a car, I don't read the terms either, and they still apply. It's just a result of a world in which we undertake hundreds of "transactions" a day with business entities, all of which have to be governed by legal agreements.

rglullis 14y ago

The thing is, if the product is actually valuable to me, I would spend more money on them that they could ever make from me through ads. "But wait, what about freemium? Plenty of services remove the ads for paying customers", one might ask. The problem with it is that you now a have false sense of choice: 1) Free product + ads 2) Paid product and no ads. There is a third alternative: free product, adblock, no ads. Yes, marketing is much more than advertising. But I think that the "advertising" part is what everything else is based on, when it shouldn't. To take on your example, the "press who review products" is, most of the time, dependent on eyeballs to sell ads to. This model is so broken that you either have newspapers going bankrupt or Huffington Post-style blogs, with zero actual content. If enough people started using adblock, perhaps we would get to a point where the current model would be unsustainable, which would producers to either: - Get rid of ad-based services and products, and start charging directly. - Improve their ads to make it more relevant to consumers.

tomkarlo 14y ago
"There is a third alternative: free product, adblock, no ads." By that logic, it's also possible to avoid high grocery bills by sticking some things in your pocket and not paying for them. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a scalable or ethical option. Google's core breakthrough in advertising was to close the loop and push advertisers towards ads that are relevant to customers, where they know exactly how much they're earning per dollar they spend on ads. Ads have, actually, improved quite a bit over the past 10 years. The famous line was "half of ad spending is wasted, we just don't know which half" (paraphrased)... now they know which half. To go back to the OP's subject - the reason why retargeting has grown so popular is that it WORKS LIKE A MOFO. Retargeted ads are usually an order of magnitude more relevant and are immensely cost effective in terms of spend versus conversions. The best indicator that someone's interested in buying a Ford? They visited the Ford site.
- rglullis 14y ago
  If using adblock is unethical, so is torrenting TV shows; and I thought you agreed with me that the MPAA claim is bullshit. Google is better than the alternatives, sure. It doesn't mean that it is any good. The ads I get on my cell phone are still awful, to the point of discouraging me to use it more.

Peaker 14y ago

If you just mentally ad-block, are you still denying them?

Duff 14y ago
It's your ethical duty to click! Seriously though, my local weekly newspaper knows nothing about my habits, but offers ads 10x more relevant than Google, who has been tracking me for a decade.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  I'm sure your local newspaper offers tons of irrelevant ads as well (mine did once-upon-a-time). I suspect you've learned to pick out the relevant ones and skip the irrelevant ones - which is arguably the dead-tree newspaper equivalent of this proposal.
- zanny 14y ago
  But your local newspaper is not trying to provide relevant ads. They just take ads from whoever will pay them and put those in the paper. Or am I missing something, such as sarcasm. I am bad with that.
  - Duff 14y ago
    Google is great at targeting with search based ads, but the site-based ads are awful. Google thinks I'm really into gold coins based on me clicking on some story on reddit several months ago.