7 ms·

I was thinking about this further, and while it comes off as fairly irrelevant to start with, it's actually an extremely bad thing. In essence, this has set up

by RyanZAG 13y ago

I was thinking about this further, and while it comes off as fairly irrelevant to start with, it's actually an extremely bad thing. In essence, this has set up two tiers of advertising: those we have paid for white list privileges, and those who haven't. This is heavily in Google's interests as they are the only advertiser powerful enough to get by with only text adverts - nobody else has a platform like Google search where text only adverts are enough to overcome costs and provide viability. By using Adblock Plus as a weapon against non-Google adverts, Google is removing the ability for other players to compete on level footing. It's very similar to the idea of paying AT&T for prioritization for Google traffic, and it destroys a lot of the foundations that the web is built on. It definitely crosses into 'evil' territory for me, in the same way as paying AT&T to slow down access to Bing would be. While it's just an add on, it's a bad precedent to set.

md224 13y ago
It's interesting that people are upset about Google being able to pay to get their content around certain barriers, when this is essentially what Google AdWords is: a system for advertisers to pay to get their content displayed in prominent locations rather than relying on position in organic search. And yet nobody really takes it seriously as a Real Problem. Not trivializing your complaint, btw... just pointing out that using money to get your message to the forefront is kind of the point of advertising itself, so the fact that Google is paying to get their advertising displayed is kind of... meta? I'd love to have a discussion on HN about the necessity of advertising in the Information Age. I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible. Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond subsidizing information flow? If not, are there alternate viable strategies for subsidizing information flow, such as Wikipedia's donation model? Is a post-advertising world possible, or even desirable?
- sandossu 13y ago
  "I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible." Would you really like all advertising to move in that direction? You should realize it's impossible to know if a person really owns and likes a product or it's just a sponsorship. Nobody would be trusted anymore.
  - md224 13y ago
    That's a good point to raise. Two questions: Would you agree that opinion manipulation in online reviews is already taking place? If so, would reducing the presence of explicitly-labelled advertisements result in an increase in covert opinion manipulation? I'm pretty sure there are already issues with regard to the trustworthiness of online reviews. But if we define the value of testimonial by impartiality, then ads are pretty worthless by default. It could be better to rely on sources that at least have the potential of impartiality. I admit this is definitely a complex issue. I can also understand the ethical argument that it's better to allow sponsored content because otherwise companies would resort to more illegal methods. It's sort of like the drug legalization argument: companies are going to market anyway, so we might as well focus on harm reduction. But it still feels suboptimal in this case. I guess I'd prefer if we focused on preventing misinformation rather than a strategy of appeasement.
    - cLeEOGPw 13y ago
      Yes and yes. That's why I often look not at reviews themselves, but about questions that asks about problems of the product. Reading the answers you can tell if a problem is real or not, removing the possibility of fame questions about non-existing problems, in case this strategy ever would become widely used.
- bpatrianakos 13y ago
  I don't want to live in an ad-free, review-only world myself. Advertising and reviews serve two different purposes. The one gets the word out about a product or service and lets the creator point out why their audience would like it. A review's purpose is to let others know if the product or service lives up to the advertising and lets you gauge how good a fit a given product is in relation to competitors or on its own. We need both. Advertising can be unethical at times but its no reason to do away with it all together. Reviews cAn be flawed too. As far as AdBlock goes, I'm still uncertain of why people dislike advertising so much to begin with. Okay, they collect information about you. I understand the desire to not want to be tracked like that. But lets imagine for a moment that advertisers are collecting your information but they're not doing anything unethical with it. They're just trying to show you add that are relevant. In that situation I really don't care if I see advertisements online at all. I also think the definition of unethical comes into play here too though. For me, advertisers sharing my data with each other is something I don't see as unethical. Others I suspect do. Living the lifestyle I live, I can't think of anything advertisers could know about me that would be at all harmful. I suppose everyone's mileage may vary. My question is, in the end, what part of online advertising is so distasteful to everyone? Is it the data collection or is it seeing the ads?
  - md224 13y ago
    Sincere question: do you feel that you, personally, have gained useful information from advertisements? Was it about a new kind of product or service that you didn't previously know about, or just a brand that was better than the ones you currently knew about? Your point about product discovery is well-taken. In the case of discovery of new product types, it seems to be a valid issue. For product types that a person already has knowledge of, however, I would think it would be preferable to skip the ads and simply compare reviews. In other words, if I'm searching for a hammer, looking at ads for hammers will not give me the best information. I do wonder if there are other ways to enable product discovery besides paid placement, but I'm not sure.
    - bpatrianakos 13y ago
      I think that's a difficult question for most people but I can honestly say yes. Sometimes its hard to tell what exactly motivated you to buy a certain thing. My first car was a Volkswagen Jetta. The advertisements made me aware of the brand and its personality. That sounds superficial but its a real part of the appeal of a lot of products. It's hard to be zen and take your ego out of buying decisions. Sometimes it can be one of the few differentiating points of a product. For me, a car is made to drive from point A to point B. I don't care about performance or most tech specs. So to me, without the advertising there's no difference between a VW, Chevy, or Mercedes. They're all cars that'll get me where I want to go and all 3 have some model that looks nice to me. So I identified with the brand personality of VW and chose it. Reviews came into play in the one area where the ads were, to me, misleading: reliability. I heard great things about the reliability of VWs from reviews and that clinched it. I learned about DigitalOcean from advertisements. I saw the ad, read the site, and their advertising convinced me to try them. They were much newer at the time so I didn't have anything else to go on and never heard of them before. To me, for my preferences, DO is a strong competitor to Linode but what kept me from moving my important projects to DigitalOcean was the reputation of the Linode brand. So its hard to separate the advertising from other information from other sources. Apple's "it just works" campaign led to me getting my first Mac. I identified with the issues they brought up in the ads, switched, and found out I really did like Macs better. Now, Macs aren't without their own set of problems so when it comes to what would make me choose a Mac over a Windows PC, those intangible, marketing-speak little things is what gets me. A lot of people try to act like they're above all that but I can't believe that. I know we all hate to think we're swayed by advertising because we want to protect our individuality. I feel like I can still be an individual even if I buy into some marketing.
- belorn 13y ago
  Advertising is fine so long its an opt-in model. Advertising that goes in the physical mailbox has for quite a while become an opt-in model (Sweden), and that system is working fine. Companies with "membership" cards has been also using a opt-in model... for as long as I has lived. There people accept advertising in trade for special offers. Sending advertising to people who actually want advertising is perfectly fine way. Sending advertising to people who do not want advertising, has ended in intrusive, tracking, bandwidth wasting, and CPU hogging mess that people want to escape. If I see advertisement being thrown in my face against my will, I instantly gets a dislike for what ever company/product being displayed. I would never, EVER, click or buy it.
- ippisl 13y ago
  Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond monetizing other things? My guess is mostly, no. In a world with search engines that know everything about you and can recommended great products and services for you, there's no need for wrong incentives in the form of money to be part of this recommendation process. And regarding brand advertising : some marketing people say that advertising do offer people some psychological value that gets implanted in the product., which makes them enjoy the product more. For example the axe deodorant ads causes some people to wonder whether using axe did helps with attraction, which changed their internal experience. The problem again with such claims is the perverse incentives that money play here, which we see in the effects of advertising on female body image. Really the only case I think ads are usefull are in cases they are used by non profits or the states to achieve public goals, like anti smoking ads.
- ippisl 13y ago
  Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond monetizing other things? My guess is mostly, no. In a world with search engines that know everything about you and can recommended great products and services for you, there's no need for wrong incentives in the form of money to be part of this recommendation process. And regarding brand advertising : some marketing people say that advertising do offer people some psychological value that gets implanted in the product., which makes them enjoy the product more. For example the axe deodorant ads causes some people to wonder whether using axe did helps with attraction, which changed their internal experience. The problem again with such claims is the perverse incentives that money play here, which we see in the effects of advertising on female body image. Really the only case I think ads are usefull are in cases they are used by non profits or the states to achieve public goals, like anti smoking ads.
kbenson 13y ago
You really equate paying a third party to reduce their negative impact on your business to paying a third party to start negatively impacting a competitor? One takes advantage of market conditions their benefit, the other changes market conditions to the detriment of the competitor.
- hnnnnng 13y ago
  Well by funding, they are helping adblock. And, assuming its true that their(Google's) own ads are NOT blocked, it means adblock(and by extension Google) is negatively impacting only the competitors. So in this case, the comparison is very valid. Obviously they(Google) can't outright put out an adblocker of their own, but if someone else puts it out and they support it, and it just so happens to whitelist their ads, you must admit its definitely worth at least questioning. Plus Google is not the stellar company it pretends to be, with the recent news about its tax evasion in Europe and PRISM participation.
  - kbenson 13y ago
    > Well by funding, they are helping adblock. And, assuming its true that their(Google's) own ads are NOT blocked, it means adblock(and by extension Google) is negatively impacting only the competitors. So in this case, the comparison is very valid. If you want to go by that meaning of "funding" then any use of a service is "funding" that company that provides it. While technically true, I would argue that most people would think "funding" to mean "provide capital to an entity without expectation of a service or item which that entity sells as a normal mode of business, and to use it in a different manner without explicit note of your meaning is to invite a misinterpretation of the facts, on purpose or otherwise. I don't believe that leads to rational discourse. > Obviously they(Google) can't outright put out an adblocker of their own, but if someone else puts it out and they support it, and it just so happens to whitelist their ads, you must admit its definitely worth at least questioning. Plus Google is not the stellar company it pretends to be, with the recent news about its tax evasion in Europe and PRISM participation. Of course it's worth questioning. But if someone someone states that paying a company to get a benefit yourself is the same as paying a company to cause a detriment to another, a lot of evidence is needed to back that up, otherwise we aren't questioning anything, we are making assumptions.
BrainInAJar 13y ago
The bad precedent was when Adblock introduced the concept of "acceptable ads" in the first place.
- kbenson 13y ago
  I think the bad precedent is that AdBlock didn't make this distinction in the very beginning. I believe that requiring ads to be interspersed in the presentation of the information is a right of the entity presenting the information as part of an implicit contract through your request for that information. I believe requiring authentication, or requiring performing some prior action (such as watching/seeing an ad for some time period) are also examples of this. I do not believe pop-under ads are subject to this. They try to force behavior (viewing of an ad) after the implicit contract is concluded (you are done consuming the media presented) through altering the state of items outside the presentation experience. I think with the proliferation of ad blocking software, we've only allowed bad behavior to go unpunished more often by continuing to use resources that behave in irritating ways because a large portion of people get to skip the irritating behavior entirely. I think this has the dual negative consequences of not causing feedback for the behavior to reach the originator, as well as causing them to increase the behavior to capitalize more on those that are not immune to it.
  - BrainInAJar 13y ago
    I believe you're wrong. There's no implicit contract, and I'm free to view or not view anything I feel like. I'm also free to refuse to use my resources (bandwidth) in the furtherance of your flawed business strategy (ads) I'm a good citizen, in that when I'm offered the opportunity to fund resources I enjoy through means that don't involve advertising I do. Often this comes with extra benefits to entice me. That's why I pay for Reddit Gold, and Strava Premium. If you as a business owner have decided that advertising is the only way you wish to fund your business, I'm not going to feel like I'm slighting you by refusing to participate any more than I would by muting my television and getting up to grab a snack when commercials come on.
    - 13y ago
enraged_camel 13y ago
I think the damage this causes is far greater than setting up two tiers of advertising. This is a shining example of how those with money are able to influence the system by corrupting the very mechanisms that were implemented to protect the "regular people" in that system. If Google had paid a politician to exempt itself from certain laws, we would call it bribery. For the exact same reason, we should take issue with them paying Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads.
- kbenson 13y ago
  I think this is exactly reversed. Adblock Plus is helping people to be exempt from certain "laws", and Google is paying Adblock's extortion fee. Remember, people have no inherent right to the content they are consuming it, they are getting it because Google is presenting it to them with some expectation that it will benefit Google. That benefit is usually revenue through advertising, in the cases where it's present.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    The TV networks tried to make the exact same argument when they sued TiVO, but got shut down by the courts. Bottom line: nobody can be forced into seeing ads.
    - recursive 13y ago
      And no ad blocking service can be forced to block all the ads you want them to.
    - kbenson 13y ago
      I can't seem to locate this lawsuit. Do you have information on it? I'm interested in seeing exactly what the decision was.
    - mahranch 13y ago
      I can't find anything about the Tivo case being settled. On the wikipedia page for commercial skipping, the only court case is one with ReplayTV, which didn't finish due to the company going bankrupt.
cynoclast 13y ago
As long as their ads are not so obnoxious that I want to block them, I am personally ok with this. Adblock was created because advertisers got greedy and took it too far, not because advertising is bad.
anigbrowl 13y ago
nobody else has a platform like Google search where text only adverts are enough to overcome costs and provide viability Without endorsing the 'payola', something to bear in mind that Google chose to go with text-only ads instead of allowing advertisers to control the format. At the time people thought they were crazy and that text-only ads would not last very long for them. Turns out google was correct and its critics were wrong. Any of the other major search providers could have done this, but they didn't try it - and as a result their brands became hopelessly diluted by the garish advertising content, instead of the ads being part of the branding. I manually enable adwords and google tracking on things like Ghostery and other software because adwords is the only platform that I don't find obnoxious and ugly.
MXcommenter 13y ago
I see the point you are trying to make, but Google has no special privileges here. They had to submit their ads to Adblock Plus' public forum for review to determine that their ads conform to the 'Acceptable Ads' guidelines -- just like everybody else. What is encouraging to see happening is that the success of Adblock Plus is actually reforming the entire (online) advertising industry: just make your ads non-intrusive and informative and you can ask for your ads to be whitelisted. I don't quite agree that Google is the only platform where such non-intrusive ads can work. Take for example the Reddit community, where ads are also non-intrusive and therefore whitelisted by Adblock Plus. I guess you can say that Adblock Plus has effectively created a marketplace bias the favors acceptable ads. But isn't that the whole point? The economic model of the Internet is allowed to work, but you and I are not accosted by truly intrusive and annoying and unethical ads. It's a perfect balance.
noir_lord 13y ago
While I kind of agree with your point it's worth noting that Adblock Plus can still disable the non-intrusive adverts (in fact the second that you can't do that a new Adblock Plus will appear). The ethics of disabling advertising and non-intrusive advertising are another thing entirely.

by RyanZAG 13y ago

md224 13y ago

It's interesting that people are upset about Google being able to pay to get their content around certain barriers, when this is essentially what Google AdWords is: a system for advertisers to pay to get their content displayed in prominent locations rather than relying on position in organic search. And yet nobody really takes it seriously as a Real Problem. Not trivializing your complaint, btw... just pointing out that using money to get your message to the forefront is kind of the point of advertising itself, so the fact that Google is paying to get their advertising displayed is kind of... meta? I'd love to have a discussion on HN about the necessity of advertising in the Information Age. I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible. Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond subsidizing information flow? If not, are there alternate viable strategies for subsidizing information flow, such as Wikipedia's donation model? Is a post-advertising world possible, or even desirable?

sandossu 13y ago
"I think we would all like to live in a world where purchasing decisions are based on reviews from people that have actually used a good or service, and I would think that the ubiquity of the web has made this kind of crowdsourced intelligence quite feasible." Would you really like all advertising to move in that direction? You should realize it's impossible to know if a person really owns and likes a product or it's just a sponsorship. Nobody would be trusted anymore.
- md224 13y ago
  That's a good point to raise. Two questions: Would you agree that opinion manipulation in online reviews is already taking place? If so, would reducing the presence of explicitly-labelled advertisements result in an increase in covert opinion manipulation? I'm pretty sure there are already issues with regard to the trustworthiness of online reviews. But if we define the value of testimonial by impartiality, then ads are pretty worthless by default. It could be better to rely on sources that at least have the potential of impartiality. I admit this is definitely a complex issue. I can also understand the ethical argument that it's better to allow sponsored content because otherwise companies would resort to more illegal methods. It's sort of like the drug legalization argument: companies are going to market anyway, so we might as well focus on harm reduction. But it still feels suboptimal in this case. I guess I'd prefer if we focused on preventing misinformation rather than a strategy of appeasement.
  - cLeEOGPw 13y ago
    Yes and yes. That's why I often look not at reviews themselves, but about questions that asks about problems of the product. Reading the answers you can tell if a problem is real or not, removing the possibility of fame questions about non-existing problems, in case this strategy ever would become widely used.
bpatrianakos 13y ago
I don't want to live in an ad-free, review-only world myself. Advertising and reviews serve two different purposes. The one gets the word out about a product or service and lets the creator point out why their audience would like it. A review's purpose is to let others know if the product or service lives up to the advertising and lets you gauge how good a fit a given product is in relation to competitors or on its own. We need both. Advertising can be unethical at times but its no reason to do away with it all together. Reviews cAn be flawed too. As far as AdBlock goes, I'm still uncertain of why people dislike advertising so much to begin with. Okay, they collect information about you. I understand the desire to not want to be tracked like that. But lets imagine for a moment that advertisers are collecting your information but they're not doing anything unethical with it. They're just trying to show you add that are relevant. In that situation I really don't care if I see advertisements online at all. I also think the definition of unethical comes into play here too though. For me, advertisers sharing my data with each other is something I don't see as unethical. Others I suspect do. Living the lifestyle I live, I can't think of anything advertisers could know about me that would be at all harmful. I suppose everyone's mileage may vary. My question is, in the end, what part of online advertising is so distasteful to everyone? Is it the data collection or is it seeing the ads?
- md224 13y ago
  Sincere question: do you feel that you, personally, have gained useful information from advertisements? Was it about a new kind of product or service that you didn't previously know about, or just a brand that was better than the ones you currently knew about? Your point about product discovery is well-taken. In the case of discovery of new product types, it seems to be a valid issue. For product types that a person already has knowledge of, however, I would think it would be preferable to skip the ads and simply compare reviews. In other words, if I'm searching for a hammer, looking at ads for hammers will not give me the best information. I do wonder if there are other ways to enable product discovery besides paid placement, but I'm not sure.
  - bpatrianakos 13y ago
    I think that's a difficult question for most people but I can honestly say yes. Sometimes its hard to tell what exactly motivated you to buy a certain thing. My first car was a Volkswagen Jetta. The advertisements made me aware of the brand and its personality. That sounds superficial but its a real part of the appeal of a lot of products. It's hard to be zen and take your ego out of buying decisions. Sometimes it can be one of the few differentiating points of a product. For me, a car is made to drive from point A to point B. I don't care about performance or most tech specs. So to me, without the advertising there's no difference between a VW, Chevy, or Mercedes. They're all cars that'll get me where I want to go and all 3 have some model that looks nice to me. So I identified with the brand personality of VW and chose it. Reviews came into play in the one area where the ads were, to me, misleading: reliability. I heard great things about the reliability of VWs from reviews and that clinched it. I learned about DigitalOcean from advertisements. I saw the ad, read the site, and their advertising convinced me to try them. They were much newer at the time so I didn't have anything else to go on and never heard of them before. To me, for my preferences, DO is a strong competitor to Linode but what kept me from moving my important projects to DigitalOcean was the reputation of the Linode brand. So its hard to separate the advertising from other information from other sources. Apple's "it just works" campaign led to me getting my first Mac. I identified with the issues they brought up in the ads, switched, and found out I really did like Macs better. Now, Macs aren't without their own set of problems so when it comes to what would make me choose a Mac over a Windows PC, those intangible, marketing-speak little things is what gets me. A lot of people try to act like they're above all that but I can't believe that. I know we all hate to think we're swayed by advertising because we want to protect our individuality. I feel like I can still be an individual even if I buy into some marketing.
belorn 13y ago
Advertising is fine so long its an opt-in model. Advertising that goes in the physical mailbox has for quite a while become an opt-in model (Sweden), and that system is working fine. Companies with "membership" cards has been also using a opt-in model... for as long as I has lived. There people accept advertising in trade for special offers. Sending advertising to people who actually want advertising is perfectly fine way. Sending advertising to people who do not want advertising, has ended in intrusive, tracking, bandwidth wasting, and CPU hogging mess that people want to escape. If I see advertisement being thrown in my face against my will, I instantly gets a dislike for what ever company/product being displayed. I would never, EVER, click or buy it.
ippisl 13y ago
Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond monetizing other things? My guess is mostly, no. In a world with search engines that know everything about you and can recommended great products and services for you, there's no need for wrong incentives in the form of money to be part of this recommendation process. And regarding brand advertising : some marketing people say that advertising do offer people some psychological value that gets implanted in the product., which makes them enjoy the product more. For example the axe deodorant ads causes some people to wonder whether using axe did helps with attraction, which changed their internal experience. The problem again with such claims is the perverse incentives that money play here, which we see in the effects of advertising on female body image. Really the only case I think ads are usefull are in cases they are used by non profits or the states to achieve public goals, like anti smoking ads.
ippisl 13y ago
Does advertising provide a valuable service beyond monetizing other things? My guess is mostly, no. In a world with search engines that know everything about you and can recommended great products and services for you, there's no need for wrong incentives in the form of money to be part of this recommendation process. And regarding brand advertising : some marketing people say that advertising do offer people some psychological value that gets implanted in the product., which makes them enjoy the product more. For example the axe deodorant ads causes some people to wonder whether using axe did helps with attraction, which changed their internal experience. The problem again with such claims is the perverse incentives that money play here, which we see in the effects of advertising on female body image. Really the only case I think ads are usefull are in cases they are used by non profits or the states to achieve public goals, like anti smoking ads.

kbenson 13y ago

You really equate paying a third party to reduce their negative impact on your business to paying a third party to start negatively impacting a competitor? One takes advantage of market conditions their benefit, the other changes market conditions to the detriment of the competitor.

hnnnnng 13y ago
Well by funding, they are helping adblock. And, assuming its true that their(Google's) own ads are NOT blocked, it means adblock(and by extension Google) is negatively impacting only the competitors. So in this case, the comparison is very valid. Obviously they(Google) can't outright put out an adblocker of their own, but if someone else puts it out and they support it, and it just so happens to whitelist their ads, you must admit its definitely worth at least questioning. Plus Google is not the stellar company it pretends to be, with the recent news about its tax evasion in Europe and PRISM participation.
- kbenson 13y ago
  > Well by funding, they are helping adblock. And, assuming its true that their(Google's) own ads are NOT blocked, it means adblock(and by extension Google) is negatively impacting only the competitors. So in this case, the comparison is very valid. If you want to go by that meaning of "funding" then any use of a service is "funding" that company that provides it. While technically true, I would argue that most people would think "funding" to mean "provide capital to an entity without expectation of a service or item which that entity sells as a normal mode of business, and to use it in a different manner without explicit note of your meaning is to invite a misinterpretation of the facts, on purpose or otherwise. I don't believe that leads to rational discourse. > Obviously they(Google) can't outright put out an adblocker of their own, but if someone else puts it out and they support it, and it just so happens to whitelist their ads, you must admit its definitely worth at least questioning. Plus Google is not the stellar company it pretends to be, with the recent news about its tax evasion in Europe and PRISM participation. Of course it's worth questioning. But if someone someone states that paying a company to get a benefit yourself is the same as paying a company to cause a detriment to another, a lot of evidence is needed to back that up, otherwise we aren't questioning anything, we are making assumptions.

BrainInAJar 13y ago

The bad precedent was when Adblock introduced the concept of "acceptable ads" in the first place.

kbenson 13y ago
I think the bad precedent is that AdBlock didn't make this distinction in the very beginning. I believe that requiring ads to be interspersed in the presentation of the information is a right of the entity presenting the information as part of an implicit contract through your request for that information. I believe requiring authentication, or requiring performing some prior action (such as watching/seeing an ad for some time period) are also examples of this. I do not believe pop-under ads are subject to this. They try to force behavior (viewing of an ad) after the implicit contract is concluded (you are done consuming the media presented) through altering the state of items outside the presentation experience. I think with the proliferation of ad blocking software, we've only allowed bad behavior to go unpunished more often by continuing to use resources that behave in irritating ways because a large portion of people get to skip the irritating behavior entirely. I think this has the dual negative consequences of not causing feedback for the behavior to reach the originator, as well as causing them to increase the behavior to capitalize more on those that are not immune to it.
- BrainInAJar 13y ago
  I believe you're wrong. There's no implicit contract, and I'm free to view or not view anything I feel like. I'm also free to refuse to use my resources (bandwidth) in the furtherance of your flawed business strategy (ads) I'm a good citizen, in that when I'm offered the opportunity to fund resources I enjoy through means that don't involve advertising I do. Often this comes with extra benefits to entice me. That's why I pay for Reddit Gold, and Strava Premium. If you as a business owner have decided that advertising is the only way you wish to fund your business, I'm not going to feel like I'm slighting you by refusing to participate any more than I would by muting my television and getting up to grab a snack when commercials come on.
  - 13y ago

enraged_camel 13y ago

I think the damage this causes is far greater than setting up two tiers of advertising. This is a shining example of how those with money are able to influence the system by corrupting the very mechanisms that were implemented to protect the "regular people" in that system. If Google had paid a politician to exempt itself from certain laws, we would call it bribery. For the exact same reason, we should take issue with them paying Adblock Plus to whitelist their ads.

kbenson 13y ago
I think this is exactly reversed. Adblock Plus is helping people to be exempt from certain "laws", and Google is paying Adblock's extortion fee. Remember, people have no inherent right to the content they are consuming it, they are getting it because Google is presenting it to them with some expectation that it will benefit Google. That benefit is usually revenue through advertising, in the cases where it's present.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  The TV networks tried to make the exact same argument when they sued TiVO, but got shut down by the courts. Bottom line: nobody can be forced into seeing ads.
  - recursive 13y ago
    And no ad blocking service can be forced to block all the ads you want them to.
  - kbenson 13y ago
    I can't seem to locate this lawsuit. Do you have information on it? I'm interested in seeing exactly what the decision was.
  - mahranch 13y ago
    I can't find anything about the Tivo case being settled. On the wikipedia page for commercial skipping, the only court case is one with ReplayTV, which didn't finish due to the company going bankrupt.

cynoclast 13y ago

As long as their ads are not so obnoxious that I want to block them, I am personally ok with this. Adblock was created because advertisers got greedy and took it too far, not because advertising is bad.

anigbrowl 13y ago

nobody else has a platform like Google search where text only adverts are enough to overcome costs and provide viability Without endorsing the 'payola', something to bear in mind that Google chose to go with text-only ads instead of allowing advertisers to control the format. At the time people thought they were crazy and that text-only ads would not last very long for them. Turns out google was correct and its critics were wrong. Any of the other major search providers could have done this, but they didn't try it - and as a result their brands became hopelessly diluted by the garish advertising content, instead of the ads being part of the branding. I manually enable adwords and google tracking on things like Ghostery and other software because adwords is the only platform that I don't find obnoxious and ugly.

MXcommenter 13y ago

I see the point you are trying to make, but Google has no special privileges here. They had to submit their ads to Adblock Plus' public forum for review to determine that their ads conform to the 'Acceptable Ads' guidelines -- just like everybody else. What is encouraging to see happening is that the success of Adblock Plus is actually reforming the entire (online) advertising industry: just make your ads non-intrusive and informative and you can ask for your ads to be whitelisted. I don't quite agree that Google is the only platform where such non-intrusive ads can work. Take for example the Reddit community, where ads are also non-intrusive and therefore whitelisted by Adblock Plus. I guess you can say that Adblock Plus has effectively created a marketplace bias the favors acceptable ads. But isn't that the whole point? The economic model of the Internet is allowed to work, but you and I are not accosted by truly intrusive and annoying and unethical ads. It's a perfect balance.

noir_lord 13y ago

While I kind of agree with your point it's worth noting that Adblock Plus can still disable the non-intrusive adverts (in fact the second that you can't do that a new Adblock Plus will appear). The ethics of disabling advertising and non-intrusive advertising are another thing entirely.