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Ad blockers: A solution or a problem?

_cipher_ 13y ago
Definitely a solution. For many years web sucked. Still sucks (and much more). I personally, do not care for any company that stores cookies on >my< system without my permission.
- eli 13y ago
  Understanding that other people's business models aren't your problem... what would you prefer publishers do instead? Paid subscriptions? Micropayments? "Sponsored Content"? Charity work?
  - _cipher_ 13y ago
    Well, the article does not talk about publishers, does it? As my comment, it speaks about ad business. I would not have any problem with a nice banner, clickable, possibly surrounded by a color that does not make me want to pull out my eyes with a fork after having 4 seisures and 2 strokes. I do though have a problem, when a 3rd party tries to track everyone, and possibly without the publishers you're speaking of know anything about what's running on his site (they do not care, why should I?). What I would prefer publishers to do: write something useful and meaningful, and make users come back because of your content. Be it a book, a fanfic, a blog with random thoughts, poetry, etc. People seem to forget that web is about meaningful content. This is how you attract users. And some last lines while we're at it. Why is it always the question "if we [publishers] stop using ads, what'll we do"? I seriously do not care. I do not HAVE to care. Same goes for any user. It's his job to find a way (hint: meaningful content) to get revenue. He's the boss after all, right? ;)
    - eli 13y ago
      True enough, but the online ad business is inextricably tied to the online publishing business. AdBlock is a problem [1] because if you're using it then how would you even know that my banner ads are all respectful and relevant? Like I said: I understand it isn't your problem to figure out how the sites you enjoy will stay in business. But I think it's worth thinking about. > It's his job to find a way (hint: meaningful content) to get revenue You mean sites should charge to read their content? How else does one turn meaningful content into revenue without ads? ([1] I actually don't think it's much of a problem at all... yet)
      - betterunix 13y ago
        "AdBlock is a problem [1] because if you're using it then how would you even know that my banner ads are all respectful and relevant?" That is the nice part about ABP's whitelist -- respectful ads are shown, and bad actors are punished. Better still, if you disagree with ABP's judgements, you can (a) disable the whitelist or (b) use a different ad blocker. It is a great idea for what amounts to an industry-wide problem.
        eli 13y ago
        That's definitely an interesting solution: an independent authority who judges ads worthy. I question how independent ABP is, though, when their (only?) revenue comes from the fees sites pay to get on their whitelist. It gives the appearance of a shakedown. With the default set to block, it's kinda rough on the little guy, too.
  - betterunix 13y ago
    How about ads that don't do any of this: * Require me to download megabytes of Javascript and Flash, particularly when I have to pay by the megabyte for my data plan. * Consume excessive CPU time and reduce my battery life * Use CSS to hover over the actual text I was trying to read * Make noise * Pop-ups * Pop-unders * Link to malware * Link to scams * Ignore me when I say "DO NOT TRACK" In other words, show me a modicum of respect. Deliver ads that actually have value for me, rather than treating me like the product you are selling to someone else. Nobody complains about the ads they see on Amazon, largely because Amazon is doing this. The absolute worst thing you can do is try to defeat the ad blocker I installed. That means you have become my adversary -- in which case I have zero reason to care about your revenue stream.
    - eli 13y ago
      If you come up with an Ad Blocker that blocks all those things, but lets "good" ads through, I'd pay for a license! :)
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      AdSense in text mode mostly does this. Except there will be spyware/adware apps advertisied.
- mindslight 13y ago
  They're not really the best solution though. Not enough people run them, and from what I hear the majority of sites now have ads plastered all over them and are run by people who think they should have a say in how my browser behaves. Search results have also become filled with essentially spam generated by people who don't actually care about publishing useful hard-wrought information but just want to trick away your attention and sell it for pennies.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
A superfluous solution. They're easily fingerprintable, unlike blocking ad trackers from the hosts file. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
- eli 13y ago
  Purely a guess, but I think the majority of AdBlock users simply don't want ads on their screen and don't feel strongly about the privacy implications or the bandwidth savings or any other potential benefits.
  - tbirdz 13y ago
    In that case, why not have the ad blocker download the content, and execute the tracking js, but simply not display the resulting ad to the user. It would register as an impression to the ad company, so the content publisher would get paid, and at the same time the user would not have to look at the ad. If you raise the issue of the ad company paying for people who don't watch the ad, just consider the situation of the ad industry in any other media. TV ads? The viewer can easily turn off the TV during the ads, like I do, or change the channel to a channel not showing an ad. The same is true for radio ads. For ads at the start of a movie, you can come to the movie 10-15 minutes late, thus getting there right when the movie starts and skipping the ads, or just wait in the lobby until the ads are over. Magazine ads you can easily skip to the articles and never look at the ads. Even in web ads, you can take my old father's "low-tech" add blocker, a paper cutout he hangs on his monitor that physically block ads in the margin on the side of the screen.
    - eli 13y ago
      All you've done is moved the problem up the value chain. Now instead of publishers losing revenue to AdBlock, it's advertisers. That's not a good solution. Advertisers will very quickly see that their conversion rates are falling and will adjust how much they pay for an impression accordingly. (Not to mention that many ads are sold per click and not per impression.) Changing the channel during an ad is already priced in to the cost of the TV ad. The TV people do studies on how many people change the channel or hit mute. But mostly they don't care because they can see that the TV ads work by how many people call the 800 number or how in-store sales jump after an ad runs in a region. This is especially true of online ads. If you have an online store, you probably don't really care how many impressions your ads have or even how many people click -- your main metric is how much did it cost to get you a paying customer. Ad Block drives that number up whether it loads the ad or not.
TrainedMonkey 13y ago
I think there has to be a better way, but it is not here yet, or we are not ready for it. Right now using ad blocker significantly improves quality of browsing. I cringe every time I fire up a browser without adblock by how disruptive and annoying ads are.
- millstone 13y ago
  It's not just ad blocker. There's tons of nonessential distractions on most web pages. For example, I read a story on cnn.com, and even though I have Ghostery enabled, I am still swarmed by "Share This" (on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn...) and "Print" and "Email" buttons and "Search Powered By Google" (twice!) and "health resources by HealthGrades" and "CNN Trends Fueled by zite" and for some reason, the weather in Atlanta, even though I live in California. And then I click the Safari Reader button, and all I see are the text and photographs. Pure zen. My theory is that websites iterate "what can I add to make people stay here longer" and thereby accrete crap. If there is to be a better way, I hope it removes the incentive to add this junk.
  - hershel 13y ago
    You're right. I wish there was a more automated way(without pushing that button) to remove the clutter in sites that need this kind of filtering.
kbuck 13y ago
> And some believe that today's ads aren't as obnoxious as yesterday's. Today's ads are even worse than ads used to be (although the worse ads are less common now). These days, you can expect to have to see a full-screen ad or have to watch some sort of video before being allowed to view the content you requested. Then, once you finally get to view the content, you're assaulted with things like Vibrant IntelliTXT and JavaScript that injects content into your clipboard when you copy text. I don't mind text ads. I don't mind most non-moving image ads, as long as they load fast and aren't too sizeable. Full-screen ads, video ads, flash ads, and JavaScript junk that modify the page contents are the problem here, and they're only getting worse as advertising companies figure out how to abuse our browsers more effectively.
- eli 13y ago
  Agree that IntelliTXT is obnoxious, but I honestly feel like things are trending better and the online ad industry is growing up. (And IntelliTXT is hardly new.) In the previous decade it seemed like auto-playing audio & video were pretty common... now they are definitely the exception (such ads violate a bunch of voluntary industry standards and are banned from many networks and publishers). (Disclosure: I am co-founder of an ad-supported startup.) I recognize this may be an unpopular opinion, but as companies get better at targeting ads and advertisers get better at measuring ROI, the result will be better ads that are more relevant to you.
  - kbuck 13y ago
    You're right in saying that annoying ads are getting less common and that a minority of advertising networks have them now. I used to manually block such advertisers myself, but I gave up and started using a filter list after spending several hours trying (unsuccessfully) to block YouTube video ads. I'd like to support the sites I visit, but the bottom line is that it's far easier to use a filter list than manually comb through the "blockable items" list in AdBlock when I discover yet another excessively annoying ad. I sometimes manually whitelist entire sites when I specifically want to support them, but frequently I don't even think about it (and when I do, I have to consider whether the ad network they're using is responsible enough to stop clients from posting ads containing Java exploits and whatnot). Using a filter list with AdBlock is one of the biggest improvements that an end-user can effect on their page load times and web browser responsiveness.
smtddr 13y ago
Time to get downvoted into the earth's core... AdBlockers are a problem. I know "Everyone hates ADs"(TM), but really... that's how everything has worked up 'till now. ADs and/or paid. The advertisements around sports are a significant reason why that whole thing works; why those athletes get the money they get. They can get the attention of many eyes and all those eyes get exposed to ads. Take away _all_ the advertising-dollars and we'll see how long these huge pro-sports events last. The internet became a big thing and people would like to show you content for free but how will they support it? I don't want a paid-subscription for every single quality website I visit. I rather they just show me ads. If I really like the content of the website, I might even give them a few clicks on the ads. For better or for worse, advertisement-money is behind most forms of free content, especially entertainment-related. If anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears.
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  Sure advertising is the "business model of the Internet", but I have a hard time getting a hair across my ass about the fact people use blockers. Maybe because I don't work in an ad-supported industry means I don't have to rationale to myself it's not scummy. You can say ad-blockers are "the problem", but they're really a negotiating tactic. Remember the bad old days? When advertisers and those selling ad space were arrogant to think they could get away with anything? They destroyed the user experience so badly people wrote software to get rid of them. Now advertisers have to balance the intrusiveness of their ads against driving more users to install blocking or remembering to reinstall adblock on their new computer. Yes, websites depend on advertising to stay afloat, but why should I care? Nobody is entitled to a business model.
- adsunecessary 13y ago
  You're right adblockers are a problem, they're not addressing the cause but its expression. But at the same time and like the article, you also failed to frame the problem properly, see, it starts by telling us about a website serving 2 millions page views then goes about people wanting content for free. Content doesn't cost anything once put online, so it's not about content but rather that it is accessed 2 millions times a month which generates traffic, which has a cost. Now if it cost the same for the content to be accessed 10 or 10 millions times, then the justification/needs for ads would go away (except for newspapers' websites maybe). The problem is in fact dual, one is that the internet is designed to work as dumb pipes connected intelligence located in the network periphery not as centralized servers hosting content and the owner of the inner tubes ask money based on how much traffic goes through them. The obvious solution of distributing the content in a p2p model which would move the bill of traffic from the content provider to the content receivers. So yes adblockers are a problem because they're and additional layer of attempting to fix another problem ads and associated surveillance which is trying to fix the issue of relying on a centralized model on a network not thought for this usage imposed by a few giant companies exploiting their ownership of the architecture for profit, making a mess of layers attempting to fix each other but really attempting more problems requiring more fixing.
pasbesoin 13y ago
Like Usenet, too many people have started talking about them. Personally, I don't mind the idea of ad-supported content. But the malware/exploitation risk, and the utter distraction many moving, "noisy" ads cause me, continue to make it a non-starter for me, personally. Back in the "early days", I actually encountered and clicked through on a fair number of useful ads. But... as time went on, they did not remain useful, nor benign.
josephlord 13y ago
I don't block ads but I do largely block Javascript and Cookies (thank-you Noscript). It does greatly reduce the number of ads but that is a side effect (the fact that it blocks obnoxious moving content is intended). No if I could just get Noscript for mobile Safari...
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  You can use mobile Firefox on Android and use Noscript.
gathly 13y ago
The internet was designed for free information exchange. If people struggle to turn it into E-commerce, I couldn't care less.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  One bit I edited out of my longer post above referenced Tim Berner Lee's original WWW proposal documents. And how eminently readably they are today. Mostly because all they are is text and semantic markup.
betterunix 13y ago
Ad blockers are the solution to an advertising industry that largely has zero respect for users. Ad blockers are the logical extension of pop-up blockers and spam filters. If the Internet advertising industry could be trusted to behave itself nobody would install ad blockers. The fact that people are installing such software should be taken as an indication that today's ads are too intrusive and too disrespectful.
- bnolsen 13y ago
  can't agree more. On my desktop I typically run flashblock and don't allow animated gifs etc. That's enough there to do the job. On laptops, etc that use battery and don't have a lot of cpu and in many cases are bandwidth limited I run adblock. Some advertises have little respect for the people they are advertising to. And don't get me started on trackers...
  - rsync 13y ago
    Just to clarify ... You block animated gifs because you don't like the distraction, yes ? I'm trying to think of a way that animated gifs could provide attack surface, or be malicious, and I'm not coming up with anything...
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      I'd wager distraction as that's a big reason to block flash ads as well.
    - dylz 13y ago
      Animated gifs can potentially ruin battery life on some laptops, spinning up GPU unnecessarily, etc.
    - xenophonf 13y ago
      You're clearly not sufficiently paranoid. :) Here's one using the WMF image format: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms09-062 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms09-06... Seeing as how modern web browsers are basically designed to download and execute code from random third parties at a second party's prompting, wouldn't you think it reasonable that the first party want a little control over the process? After all, us infosec folks always tell people to be cautious of what they download, turn off things like autorun, etc. The web browser is autorun for the Internet! (Never mind all of the bandwidth wasted on loading all of the third-party crap. Not all of us have high-speed/low-latency network links. Many of my users operate in very out-of-the-way places. Disabling the extra crap seems to significantly improve things like page load times.)
vonskippy 13y ago
If the only value your website offers is to bring eyeballs to ad's, then it's time for you to find a new vice. If you want to serve up ads on you site, make sure they're relevant, they're absolutely 110% malware free, and respect my privacy. And unless you're willing to take responsible for when those conditions aren't met, then don't whine when I do everything technical to block out the useless malware laden offensive ads that you do serve. The difference between net ads and tv ads are that tv ads cost enough money that people who buy tv ads spend time and energy in being very selective about their market demographics and the type of ads they run. Plus I've never had a tv ad infect my tv and stop it from going to any other channel but CMT. If me and my eyeballs are going to be your product, then I want a little respect for my participation.
- eli 13y ago
  But if you're using AdBlock, won't you likely be blocking my malware-free, privacy-protecting ads too? You wouldn't even know they exist... I agree with your larger point though. For all the (legitimate) hand-wringing about ad networks tracking people and building profiles... they still suck at targeting ads. A lot. I think we're still in the Stone Age of ad matching algorithms.
  - pseudonym 13y ago
    It depends on how ads are blocked by the user, and it also depends on how you frame it. For example: I don't block advertising on Something Awful, because the ads there are both unobtrusive and occasionally quite relevant or interesting to me, even in terms of pointing me at things I didn't realize I had an interest in. I'll also usually unblock sites that detect that I'm running an adblocker and ask me politely to stop. I will, however, make a point of blocking ads on any site that decides to drop full-screen overlays, modal dialogs, javascript popovers, or any of that other crap that ad agencies seem to love these days. If your ad is interfering with my browsing experience, I'm not going to waste my time even considering interacting with it.
    - eli 13y ago
      I would think the vast majority of AdBlock users have it set to try to block all ads by default, though I admit I have no data to prove that.
gordaco 13y ago
We wouldn't see ad blockers as a solution if ads hadn't become a problem. As obvious as it seems for the users, advertisers don't seem to grasp it. Anything flashy and/or moving is BAD. Anything with actual javascript code is BAD. Especially, anything that tracks you is BAD. Anything that temporarily prevents you from watching the content is BAD (I'm thinking about splash screens you have to close and unskippable videos). Anything that modifies the behaviour of the web page you're visiting is BAD. Until (at least) those are solved, ad blockers are most definitely a solution.
- rgbrgb 13y ago
  Well those are a lot of opinions stated as facts. Care to back them up?
- LocalPCGuy 13y ago
  Yes, those things are BAD - for the USER. For the website, those things are quite lucrative, because users click on exactly those kinds of things. The ad industry's bad ADs are in response to 1 thing - clicks. If they didn't work, the industry would not do it. I run an AdBlocker myself, and do not like crazy ads, popups, etc. personally. But don't mistake OUR dislike for those things with the reason they exist, because they work.
  - gress 13y ago
    They only work until people block them.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  As a publisher, you can't do an ad from any major 3rd party ad firms without Javascript. Even the text ads are all Javascript based.
  - claudius 13y ago
    As a reader/content ‘consumer’, that’s your problem, not mine.
pmiller2 13y ago
I don't particularly like ads, but I don't mind if they're small, unobtrusive, and clearly marked as ads. Also, all the usual caveats about respecting privacy apply. I find there are very few of these types of ads around these days. Google text ads used to be this way, but then they started injecting them into SERPs in such a way that they looked more like results than ads. Also, popunders and popups need not apply: they make my whole browser unusable, and that's unacceptable. In addition to individual ads needing to be unobtrusive, the totality of the ads on the page needs to not make the page unusable. This is the thing that annoys me about Youtube ads, for the most part. I visit youtube to watch videos, and if I have to sit through an ad every time before I can do that, I start to get annoyed. This isn't the same as how TV ads work, either. Sure, each ad is 30 seconds, and together they make an hour worth of programming equal to about 42 minutes of content, but each commercial break is a few minutes long, which makes them effectively skippable. Imagine if a commercial break were 1 minute long (so there were 18 of them per hour). Wouldn't that get annoying fast?
- malandrew 13y ago
  The "clearly marked as ads" is such an important point that it bears repeating. My older brother is as luddite as they get and he has developed an extreme mistrust of the internet and technology in general to the point that he only visits 3-4 domains he knows he trusts and doesn't do anything else without asking his wife if it is safe. One of the examples he shared with me was the fact that he went for a long time without knowing the top results on Google until he found out they were ads shown before the actual results. He basically stopped using Google wholesale when that happened. He (I believe) is an extreme example of what happens when you abuse the user's trust and try to trick people. Commerce functions best on trust and between shady advertising patterns like this and dark patterns like opting into subscriptions, a lot of bad actors are destroying trust on the web for luddite users. There is probably a startup in here somewhere in making a Google Chrome or Safari extension that looks out for dark patterns and highlights them on the page for the user. i.e. spot ads and place a semi-transparent overlay stating "possible ad, click to reveal and interact" or looking for check boxes with whose default is being checkmarked and analyzing the text next to them to see if they match the dark patterns of opting into services you probably don't want.
jsmith0295 13y ago
The solution is simple: websites just need to start detecting adblock and refusing let someone use the site with it enabled. If you don't like it...go pay for an ad free service. Nobody deserves to get something for nothing. Edit: Additionally, using someones server resources that they pay for without contributing anything to their revenue, if ads are in fact an important source of their revenue, is effectively stealing. Just because the ads annoy you doesn't justify screwing the people who pay to run the site you're using.
- LocalPCGuy 13y ago
  I disagree that it is stealing. That is their form of monetizing, but as you said, they can choose not to provide an AdBlock user with service if they want. It's my computer, and I choose (well, for the most part) what I download to my computer. It's on the website owner to decide not to allow that behavior. Completely different from downloading copyrighted material, for instance, or from walking into a store and walking out with something. Closest analogy I could make is maybe reading a magazine at the rack instead of buying it and taking it home.
  - jsmith0295 13y ago
    Yeah stealing was a strong word. As for downloading copyrighted material, at least that doesn't necessarily have a direct cost to the content creators/providers, where as for example streaming a video from YouTube while ignoring all of the ads is bad for both Google as well as the people who rely on ad revenue to make YouTube videos full time as it actually costs Google money in addition to not generating them any revenue. In fact I would say the example of reading the magazine in the store is more applicable to copyright violation, and that using AdBlock is more like going into a Starbucks to use the WiFi without buying anything, except worse, as with AdBlock one generally wouldn't turn it off, so every time someone with AdBlock visits the site they're basically just sucking up resources.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      Mechanically, my browser is asking for index.html. At that point, your server can decide what it's going to send, but I'm not obligated to ask for any other data from you - nor am I obligated to execute arbitrary client-side code. Web site operates make a calculated risk when they offer service the way they do, in the same way that Starbucks does in offering free wi-fi. And a lot of people don't do it that way - for instance a lot of coffee shops give you the wi-fi password with a purchase and I suspect in the future we may see a move to using enterprise WPA2 and "purchase enables x hours of access" policies. Saying things should work differently gets absurd quickly: you don't earn money just for showing ads, you need click-throughs. If no one clicks through, are they still stealing? What if my browser renders the ads and I just tape up my screen so I can't see them etc. etc.
guelo 13y ago
The open web is a miracle, it's amazing that it exists. Back when the open nets were forming corporations like AOL and Compuserve tried to bottle it up but failed. That's why the web doesn't work in the way that publishers would like for their business models. If the web had worked the way they want it to it would have never become the success that it has. But, we have to be vigilant. From now until the end of time they will be working to lock it down for their gain and society's loss. The sad part is that they will probably win because there will be teams at many corporations working full-time on locking things down and lobbying, they won't give up. The main hope now is that so many people have tasted freedom that they will fight to keep things open.
- pirateking 13y ago
  Few have tasted this mythical freedom the web provides. What extremely tiny percentage of people own their own web site, let alone own any of their digital property (and these days even the hardware it lives on)? I would say AOL and Compuserve won judging by the success of Facebook and other feudalistic platforms. We have exchanged freedom and rights to our property for the convenience and security of platforms ruled by feudal lords.
  - bowlofpetunias 13y ago
    Most people voluntarily exchange their freedom and rights in exchange for someone else telling them what to do. For most of our history they choose religion. These days corporations are taking that place. What matters is being able to opt out without being effectively reduced to second class citizens. We haven't lost that option yet, but it is true that that is under threat. Being able to consume content without advertising (which is corporate propaganda, i.e. the new "religion") is one of those things. That content is not just someone's private property (no matter what the manipulative copyright laws say), it is the end product on generations of collective knowledge and creativity. If the minority ever gets excluded from it because they're not members of the Church of our Corporate Overlords, then our freedom would truly suffer. The fact that the majority so easily surrenders their freedom for convenience and a false sense of security is not a measure of our freedom.
nathancahill 13y ago
I used an ad blocker until I started showing ads on one of my websites. Now, I click ads on blogs I read frequently and tools that I use and support. Gittip and Flattr (and Bitcoin) could replace this behavior if they had wider adoption.
- __david__ 13y ago
  Really? I didn't stop. In fact, it caused me 20 to 30 minutes of debugging over a couple of times because I couldn't figure out why my ads weren't showing up :-).
  - troels 13y ago
    I swear I did the same, only with Ghostery and Facebook.
  - nathancahill 13y ago
    Yep. Did that too. Switched it off after that and never turned it back on.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  > Now, I click ads on blogs I read frequently and tools that I use and support The rampant click fraud (abusing ads as a donation link) is another nail in the coffin for online ads, although currently Google rakes in billions from such behavior due to the advertisers' credulity. I don't believe that Gittip and Flattr could replace it because it's much more tempting to "donate" the advertisers' money than your own. But it would be much more honest on behalf of the publishers.
- brainburn 13y ago
  You mean are merely costing the publishers money
malandrew 13y ago
"Viewing ads is part of the deal if users want content to be free, says Freitas." I would imagine that a log of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources). Any site owners complaining about ad-blockers is missing the opportunity to detect ad-blocking and try to sell that person an ad-free version of their service. Ideally this service would be a pay per view model, where I pay a fixed amount (like 5 cents to 10 cents per article read) or where I pay a fixed subscription fee (like $1 to $2 a month for unlimited articles). I did the math a while back with NY Times online advertising revenue and I remember the value gained from non-paying users to be around 70 cents per month per user. I don't know about you, but I would happily pay 70 cents or even a full dollar or two for access to the NY Times ad free. Unfortunately, when a site does introduce an ad-free paid version they try to extract like 5x or more of the revenue they gain from advertising. I don't know about others, but when I encounter that type of gouging, I just look elsewhere for my news. So Mssrs. Publisher, please offer a reasonable paid ad-free alternative or quit your bitching. Every ad you serve is an annoying distraction that distracts me, irritates me and slows down my browsing experience both in terms of bytes download and lines of javascript executed. I am completely within my right to block all outgoing requests to any host I deem negative to my web browsing experience via my /etc/hosts/ file. If you happen to serve ads from those sites and I can't view them because I block them, that isn't my problem it is yours. Want me to pay, give me the ability to do so and be fair with your prices. So long as you don't offer a paid service that I can buy and you support yourself via ads, you are not really considering me to be your customer, but your product. You are not in a position to complain when your product doesn't consent to being sold.
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  >I would imagine that a [lot] of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources). But that's just it. Even if they could make money off a dollar-per-person-per-month model --even if they could pay all their bills and then some-- they certainly wouldn't make the switch. Ad sales always have the potential for growth, even if the size of your audience is the same. Offering base subscriptions puts a hard floor (edit: ceiling, not floor) on the amount of money you can make with any set number of viewers.
deleted 13y ago
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yetanotherphd 13y ago
People have a right to use ad-blockers. It's their computer after all. However, a lot of things that people like to use, and might even have been willing to watch ads in order to use, will not be viable if everyone used adblockers. It's really that simple. However, most people don't like to acknowledge that given the opportunity, the will freeload of others, or that in some contexts freeloading is natural and not immoral
- radmuzom 13y ago
  I don't think the original article or people who despise Ad blocking software (like me) question the right of people to use ad-blockers. All we are saying is that economics and free markets will eventually take care of the problem, and will result in much lesser useful content being created for people to consume. If one thinks that lesser content is better and the only ones allowed to publish content are big budget companies like Google who can afford to pay Adblock developers to be in the whitelist, then so be it.
alextgordon 13y ago
99% of advertisers give the rest a bad name... Why do we put age restrictions on explicit or violent movies? Because we don't want to influence kids' brains for the worse. This principle applies to adults as well. The purpose of ads is to influence you. That "influence" goes to the highest bidder. At their most benign, they just want you to buy their brand of otherwise identical detergent. The worst ads are the ones for charities where some emaciated kid is filmed (in HD) tearfully looking into the camera. Fuck. That. My emotions are not the plaything of some advertiser. What about the "one quick tip to lose weight" scams that don't-be-evil Google insists on serving up. Is that fine? The advertising industry is not your friend. Don't waste your life trying to help them. Block everything.
- austinz 13y ago
  The advertising industry gets implicit carte blanche to do things to thousands or millions of complete strangers that, if I were to do to my friend, would be considered mortifyingly offensive or rude. I really don't understand it.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  Each AdSense advertiser can turn off specific channels for their sites including 'health and wellness' (weight loss) and 'dating' (scam chat sites). Unfortunately, there are baddies in nearly every category. The software category, for instance, which is the majority of our income, is a hotbed of spyware/adware vendors. And blocking them is nearly impossible since Google doesn't really care to know. So you're left manually determining domains yourself and blocking them. But it's just wack-a-mole as they create new domains when enough sites block them. This isn't too surprising considering that the top link for a Google search for Firefox is a Google ad for an advertiser that will deliver Firefox via a downloader along with 8 different spyware/adware apps. My mom made that mistake last weekend. We would up reimaging her computer.
  - troels 13y ago
    Just a thought: Couldn't advertisers collaborate on maintaining a blocklist, just like users do with adblockers? Does it already exist?
linuxhansl 13y ago
People can say and do what they want... If there is a moving or worse a sounding ad, I will block it. I do not mind text or (still) image ads. Show some respect for the viewers and ad blocker will not be needed.
dredmorbius 13y ago
I turned to this page after the following experience (I make aggressive use of ad blockers and JS filtering generally). This was in an incognito Chromium session where I don't run NoScript. I was searching for some basic heat transfer references and found a page with a nice write-up on Newton's law of heat transfer. I copied the URL into the post I was composing as I was reading it. A "chat" dialog pops up asking if I need tutoring assistance. Um. No. So I ignore it. The site then navigates me away from the page and onto a registration page. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. My immediate and predictable response: I fired up 'sudo -e /etc/hosts' and added both hostnames to my blocklist. Though I took the courtesy of emailing the site's contact address and asking them what the actual fuck they thought they were doing. Apparently Pearson Education have the educational market so fully sewn up they can get away with this kind of bullshit. But seriously? What the actual fuck? Upshot: why do people block the hell out of this stuff? It's goddamned annoying as hell. I compiled a list some time ago on G+ that's worth repeating here: Forbes asks: Why do programmers hate advertising so much? First, I think it's hardly just programmers. I suspect most people find advertising to be a negative. But as to us techies? Why do we hate thee? Let me count the ways: 1. It's intrusive. Many/most of us probably have some level of ADD/OCD. Or just plain environmental sensitivity. 2. It's distracting. 3. It promotes a host of anti-usability features: content muting, multi-page click-through articles, overly formatted pages, overlays, pop-ups, persistent floating top/right/left/bottom elements, audio, video, multiple audio/video. 4. It's creepy, and you're creeping me out. Tracking through various deceptive means, even though I've made very clear that I don't wish to be tracked. Incidentally, subscription content suffers a similar issue: I don't want an audit trail of all things I've read, even on one site, let alone across sites. 5. The ads themselves frequently position themselves to price-discriminate -- though how and when I can never be certain (which undermines the efficacy of all ads). 6. The mechanisms of advertising networks pose security issues: cross-site JS, iframes, Flash, and Java. Even just the proliferation of different JS sources creates a serious management and cognitive overload for the security- and privacy-conscious reader. A single article from a news site may contain over 20 JS sources. 7. The goods and services which are most highly advertised are those which I'm least inclined to buy. Especially for (so-called) food and entertainment, but also general consumer products, electronics, and various services, especially financial services. To the point that when I see advertising my first conscious reaction is "why do they have to try so hard to convince me that that is something worth buying?" 8. It's not relevant. There are a very limited number of times when I'm in a purchase mode. The real value of the Internet would be to (correctly) identify those times, and then find me the best deals on what I want, in the way that I want to obtain it. Which, frankly, dear, isn't online most of the damned time. On that last point, I've been shopping in recent times for a number of moderately high-ticket items. Including spending a lot of time researching options on-line. My biggest take-away is that online purchase researching sucks massively. Contrast to the experience at a store with a well-trained, skilled retail staff. "Is this what you like?" "No, I'm looking for something that's more XXX". And as much as I disdain retail much of the time, the people who are good at it figure out what you want, what you can afford, and what they have that suits you, quickly, without wasting your time (and if you're lucky, making the exercise enjoyable). It's something I've also addressed recently, "Search quality vs. search personalization". The upshot: there's a lot more information in the moment that's relevant to purchase logic than in a person's profile or market demographics. Advertisers/shoppers could avoid massive amounts of creep factor by focusing on this, probably with vastly superior conversion factors. The final thought: advertising is well and good, but where the rubber hits the road is in making the sale. Which is where Amazon (and other sales-oriented sites: eBay, Craigslist, Apple's iTunes) wins all over any advertising-based site. Update: oh, and the email I sent to Pearson? It bounced. I'm shocked, shocked ....
Derbasti 13y ago
I block ads. I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads. If your business needs me to see your ads, I'd rather not be your customer. If these practices will bring down the ad industry, all the better.
- johnchristopher 13y ago
  > I block ads. I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads. If your business needs me to see your ads, I'd rather not be your customer. Are you referring to the ad business in general , the advertised business or the website business ? Because blocking ads and reading the website still makes you the website's consumer, right ?
  - Derbasti 13y ago
    As noted in the preceding sentence: I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads They can choose to not show me the website since I run an ad blocker. I am completely fine with that. I don't read magazines, because they usually contain enormous amounts of ads. I don't watch television because of ads. I pay for websites if I value their content and there is an option to pay for them to remove ads.
d5ve 13y ago
I think of online advertising in the same way as I now do smoking in a workplace, pub or restaurant - I can't believe people used to live like this. Using someone else's browser and seeing the distracting and intrusive ads feels a bit like trying to eat a meal surrounded by the smell and eye irritation of second-hand smoke.
fatman 13y ago
I feel the same way about ad blockers as I do about skipping commercials with the DVR - my purchasing decisions are almost never influenced by ads, so why would I bother watching them? I'm just afraid that someday, even without DVR's and Adblockers, companies will figure out that I'm not buying their crap and stop offering me free TV shows and websites, ads or no.
Kiro 13y ago
I turned off AdBlock when I realized how many sites break with it enabled, for example all sites with GTM. I used to think the sites were just broken in general but now I know better.
ankitoberoi 13y ago
Just Blocking Ads on all websites, is not a solution. You are only trying to put publishers out of business who provide and share information. I actually wrote a post on the subject sometime ago: http://www.adpushup.com/blog/ad-blocking-bad-news-consumers/ http://www.adpushup.com/blog/ad-blocking-bad-news-consumers/ Sorry about the plug, I'm a co-founder @ AdPushup and a near future product goal is also to prevent publishers from Ad Blockers. I know I'll get downvoted here (everyone just hates ads so much), but there are networks which do serve malware-free ads. Also, you don't want to punish all the publishers just because some (or even if it's a majority) do bad.
- youWontLikeThis 13y ago
  " You are only trying to put publishers out of business " Uhm, not, we are not. That may be a consequence, but just check the comments to see what people is trying to accomplish.
- msh 13y ago
  If you don't punish the publishers how would the problem ever be solved?
  - ankitoberoi 13y ago
    You should punish publishers who serve malware, popups, JS & other bad stuff BUT you don't punish ALL the publishers - many of them don't do that and are just fine. In fact, instead of an AdBlocker, it is better off if there is a plugin which blocks such sites completely. Why use their content if you don't like them anyway.
    - strubleandecure 13y ago
      And how would ANY user know which ad network is compromised or not before it serves them a delicious helping of malware? Face it, if you're using Adblock you're on a default allow model and any previously spotless network can be compromised at any time since it only takes one malformed payload to get through the cracks to infect a user. It's the same situation the AV vendors face. The only realistic option (whether the ad vendors like it or not) for a blocklist is to craft the regex to be as sweeping as possible. On the other end of things the ad firms need to self-police themselves at a vastly increased level than what is happening now, preferrably under some sort of umbrella organization. But even if that happens I expect punishments to be mere wristslaps and non-legalistic in nature. At the end of the day, it's not MY business model that's at risk here, the stakeholders have the onus to make it work in the real world. They're not entitled to it because the base model worked on network TV and then assume it can be ported wholesale to vastly different environments without compromise and change.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
I don't "block" ads. I just opt not to download them. I'm not being pedantic, we should really learn to stop adopting these insidious Newspeak tricks. Because it's not merely annoying propaganda, it has time and time again ended in criminalization. Some examples: equating "hackers" with criminals, equating copying with theft, labeling the recreational use of drugs as "abuse". Time and time again we've seen repressive legislation after years of propaganda by manipulating the language in which a subject was discussed. I don't block adds. I am totally free not to download yoursite/ad/bigassbanner.swf when all I want is to read yoursite/article.html. I'm not doing anything wrong, and if you're trying to trick me into downloading bigassbanner.swf anyway and I use tools to help me avoid that, you are the one who is using ethically dubious tactics, and I'm just responding to that. You want me to pay for your content in any way, fucking ask me first, or don't put it on the open internet. And it's not about whether or not the ads are "obnoxious", that's another red herring. I don't like any advertising, I don't want it, I don't need it, and I'm certainly not going to waste my time and bandwidth downloading it, nor am I going to allow it to take up space on my screen or have their tracking tactics violate my privacy. I don't need any excuse to refuse to see ads. It's my time, my bandwidth, my screen, my privacy, my eyeballs. Fuck ads. There is no such category as "acceptable" ads. The only "acceptable" ads are the ones I choose to accept up front. So far, only very few sites have asked me that, and they all threw tracking shit at me when I obliged, so fuck those as well. After 15+ years of onesided unethical tactics I have no interest in being in any way nuanced about it. The online advertising business fundamentally rotten, and they can go screw themselves. And with them any publisher that tries to leverage these tactics for profit.
- waylandsmithers 13y ago
  Thank you. If you consider intrusive ads to be malicious code that websites are attempting to run on your machine, you should be free stop them. It's your machine. We are essentially talking about the equivalent of tv advertisers being up in arms about viewers getting up and going to the bathroom or changing the channel during commercial breaks.
jrabone 13y ago
Ads on desktop browsers are no longer the problem - between ABP and Ghostery one need never see another ad. The mobile device is the new battleground, but the prevalence of "dual-funded" apps (free, ad-supported and pay-for, ad-free) gives me some hope that a sane business model will emerge. Meanwhile I reconfigured bind on my LAN to DNS-spoof roughly 3500 ad-serving domains and redirect them to a logging but otherwise content-free HTTP server (hey, it's OK when my ISP or my government do it to ME, right?). Very interesting just how bad the problem is. I recommend you try it to get a real feel for just how much crap the average page requests behind your back.
tbarbugli 13y ago
A solution, assholes :)
lazyjones 13y ago
Our website has ads too, but I fully support everyone who wants to block them. They add no value to the website and I'm only interested in people using our site, not in getting them distracted or annoyed. We even have an ad-free version of our main website (but it's not indexed by search engines). I've also learned that people working at ad agencies as well as those handling ads on the publisher side tend to be extremely incompetent w.r.t. web publishing. They do not understand how usability, reputation, visitor/customer satisfaction work. They tend to believe that looking at ads is the most important thing people visit websites for (and possibly that people make road trips just in order to look at the billboards).
- erikig 13y ago
  Just a side note - I do know a lot of people that love to go to Times Square at night to be bathed in the bright but artificial light of the billboards.
erikig 13y ago
Ad blockers are going to gradually become irrelevant (like pop-up blockers) primarily because of the mobile web. I believe the adoption of the mobile web is forcing advertisers to reconsider their strategies. With the limited screen real-estate and cut-throat competition for those pixels it becomes difficult for the marketers to go overboard.
D9u 13y ago
https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck All that crap doesn't reach my browser.
kybernetyk 13y ago
Without ad blockers I would be back to using gopher and usenet.
jotm 13y ago
Heh, ad blockers are both a solution for the users and a problem for the advertisers and publishers. But they were created to deal with the insanity of the latter - with an ad blocker (and that probably includes JS blockers nowadays), you don't get all the wonderful pop-ups, pop-unders, sliding ads, floating survey invites, half a dozen text and image ads advertising often unrelated stuff, the super annoying audio coming from who knows where, unexpected redirects, the lost seconds while you wait for the page to load, and more. If advertisers used better ad targeting, fewer and less intrusive ads, that would definitely reduce the number of people who install ad blockers.
- strubleandecure 13y ago
  I also see in the wild much higher occurences of ad networks serving up survey content recently. This is really an implicit acknowledgement that widespread adblocking is taking toll on the bottom line and their proposed solution is for DEEPER mining, not less of it. They're fishing for data on a level that's impossible with a standard ad+tracker.
strubleandecure 13y ago
In this age of drive-by downloads, (100% legal) sorched-earth adblocking has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages. If the web advertising would police themselves better none of this would be neccessary. They are not held responsible in any financial and/or legal sense for any damage they incur when a malware incursion occurs, or the dire consequences for a end-user if they get botnetted into doing something dire that would bring down the wrath of law enforcement. The longer they drag their feet on reforming the Wild Wild West that is web advertising the more likely adblocking will turn into the status quo for an increasing percentage of people and they're not going back to the old ways of usage anytime soon. All the guilt-tripping advertisers are trying to pull is wasted on adblockers because they're not the ones actually producing the content people give a shit about, a subtle but important difference It's like venture capitalists trying to harangue the customer base of a startup they're involved with. I don't expect things to improve with the ad networks anytime soon. Just the mere thought of the DNT flag being default on Firefox was enough to send them into a frenzy. Most of them explicitly ignore the flag anyway.
fab13n 13y ago
Regarding micro payments to fund websites: I wouldn't pay for most sites. Not because their content is worth nothing, but because it is uncomfortable to have a counter ticking, spending more cents for each of my mouse clicks. And of course, I don't want to do through a billing UI for each new site I visit, although this could be fixed. However, I'm willing to pay an extra $10 a month to fund content providers, up to them to share it effectively. $2e10 of advertising budget for 2e8 US internet users is about $10 / person*month, and as large proportion of it doesn't end up in the website owners' pockets, so it could even be cheaper than that.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  The more I think about it, the more I think some form of universal content syndication should be the way to fly: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...
- strubleandecure 13y ago
  There is a pot of gold waiting for someone who can make the idea of microtransactions palatable and transparent to the web surfer. Because it has to come, one way or the other. In addition, all site expenditures are not equal. There are huge numbers of clickbait sites that basically spend almost nothing in content creation, and expenses are almost entirely incurred through hosting/bandwidth charges. On the other extreme are smaller sites with highly loyal reader bases who create highly useful content where the creation/research costs are substantial. It would be almost impossible for the first group to go down the nickel-and-dime/paywall route. So really, it's only when the site operators start asking for the hard coin does the real test of what the content is worth in the users' eyes start. (Some readers actually demand a site details all their expenses exhaustively before they agree to pay for content. This may or may not be possible, or comfortable for site owners to accept as a neccessary part of the business.)
- _delirium 13y ago
  Flattr is trying to do something along those lines: http://flattr.com/ http://flattr.com/ You pick a monthly budget, then you click on Flattr links when you encounter them on something you like (whether an article or a GitHub repository or whatever). Then at the end of the month your budget is split up between everyone you clicked on that month. Not sure if it'll really catch on, but I do think it's on the right track in avoiding the "ticking counter" feeling, since clicking on a Flattr link doesn't cost you anything extra, just allocates your fixed budget.
fab13n 13y ago
Regarding micro payments to fund websites: I wouldn't pay for most sites. Not because their content is worth nothing, but because it is uncomfortable to have a counter ticking, spending more cents for each of my mouse clicks. And of course, I don't want to do through a billing UI for each new site I visit, although this could be fixed. However, I'm willing to pay an extra $10 a month to fund content providers, up to them to share it effectively. $2e10 of advertising budget for 2e8 US internet users is about $10 / person*month, and as large proportion of it doesn't end up in the website owners' pockets, so it could even be cheaper than that.
Too 13y ago
> When he presented an option for an ad-free experience, > less than 1% of his 4 million unique monthly visitors > signed up for the $2.99/month subscription. Congratulations! You now make almost $120000 per month. The article make that claim sound like a bad thing.
- waylandsmithers 13y ago
  Yes, that was my first thought too. Sounds pretty good to me. I'm getting sick and tired of sites (and physical publications) crying "But how are we supposed to make money?!?" Boo fucking hoo. Just because you are running a business doesn't mean you are guaranteed riches and profits. Lots of businesses fail, and lots of seemingly good ideas turn out to not be economically viable (hence the persistent lack of jetpacks). Figure it out.
nitrogen 13y ago
Some of the less free ITU member states recently designed a bunch of nasty, restrictive protocols for turning the Internet into a complex web of pay-per-hop-per-packet price gouging. Maybe some of those concepts can be turned on their head and used to create a reliable, opt-in micropayment network using bitcoin, sort of how copyleft exploits copyright for the benefit of the many over the few.
Bartweiss 13y ago
The site owners discussing how no one took them up on their subscription services seem to miss a significant point: their sites aren't worth anything like what they're charging to most users. $25 for an annual site subscription is something I'd only pay for a handful of sites - most sites simply don't have enough unique, quality content to make me care. Replacing adblock with ad-free subscriptions isn't the way of the future. The "beauty" of advertising is that it can create revenue for a site owner in excess of the value they provide to their viewers.
deleted 13y ago
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rwl 13y ago
I have a hard time sympathizing at all with "publishers" who are hurt by ad-blockers. The vast majority of web sites, I would guess, fall into one of two categories. The first category are sites which are a labor of love: they are written and maintained because someone just wants to have a voice, or to get their information out there. These sites can often be run on nearly-free hardware from a home Internet connection that you would be paying for anyway. Hardware and bandwidth costs are near zero, or low enough that the operator is willing to cover them at a loss. The operator is not expecting to make money, so advertising is not necessary. The second category are sites operated by businesses that are expecting to make money by selling a genuine product or service. These sites have non-trivial costs to develop, operate, and maintain, but the sites lives on the cost side, not the revenue side, of the balance sheet. That's OK, because the business sells something else which (presumably) covers that cost and then some. The "publishers" expecting to make money from advertising fall into neither of these categories. They are operating sites with the expectation of making money, but they have nothing generating revenue except advertising placed in their "content". Hoping to make money by running a web site that does nothing but serve pages for free is an unsustainable business model. If you want to make money, sell something less ephemeral than a web page. I'm not saying that publishing (without the scare quotes) is an unsustainable business. If your product is your "content", put it in a form that someone will actually want to buy, like a book or a magazine. Something that your customers can hang on to, that they can reference when they're away from their browsers, that they can lend to their friends, that doesn't simply disappear at your whim. People do pay for those things, and they even tolerate ads there. If you're not willing to provide something of real and tangible value, don't expect your audience to be willing to provide you with a revenue stream. And don't complain when they evade your attempts to force that on them.
tinalumfoil 13y ago
When you get content for free, you do it under the agreement you're going to look at their ads. Decide sifting through ads isn't worth it? Close the tab. Ad blockers allow people to break this "agreement". If less people are viewing ads, the quality of the content has to drop or the advertising (what funds all that "free" content) has to increase. Just like all those "why I pirate" things, its just a long way of saying "I'm too lazy/cheap to compensate people for the content they produce"

Definitely a solution. For many years web sucked. Still sucks (and much more). I personally, do not care for any company that stores cookies on >my< system without my permission.

eli 13y ago
Understanding that other people's business models aren't your problem... what would you prefer publishers do instead? Paid subscriptions? Micropayments? "Sponsored Content"? Charity work?
- _cipher_ 13y ago
  Well, the article does not talk about publishers, does it? As my comment, it speaks about ad business. I would not have any problem with a nice banner, clickable, possibly surrounded by a color that does not make me want to pull out my eyes with a fork after having 4 seisures and 2 strokes. I do though have a problem, when a 3rd party tries to track everyone, and possibly without the publishers you're speaking of know anything about what's running on his site (they do not care, why should I?). What I would prefer publishers to do: write something useful and meaningful, and make users come back because of your content. Be it a book, a fanfic, a blog with random thoughts, poetry, etc. People seem to forget that web is about meaningful content. This is how you attract users. And some last lines while we're at it. Why is it always the question "if we [publishers] stop using ads, what'll we do"? I seriously do not care. I do not HAVE to care. Same goes for any user. It's his job to find a way (hint: meaningful content) to get revenue. He's the boss after all, right? ;)
  - eli 13y ago
    True enough, but the online ad business is inextricably tied to the online publishing business. AdBlock is a problem [1] because if you're using it then how would you even know that my banner ads are all respectful and relevant? Like I said: I understand it isn't your problem to figure out how the sites you enjoy will stay in business. But I think it's worth thinking about. > It's his job to find a way (hint: meaningful content) to get revenue You mean sites should charge to read their content? How else does one turn meaningful content into revenue without ads? ([1] I actually don't think it's much of a problem at all... yet)
    - betterunix 13y ago
      "AdBlock is a problem [1] because if you're using it then how would you even know that my banner ads are all respectful and relevant?" That is the nice part about ABP's whitelist -- respectful ads are shown, and bad actors are punished. Better still, if you disagree with ABP's judgements, you can (a) disable the whitelist or (b) use a different ad blocker. It is a great idea for what amounts to an industry-wide problem.
      - eli 13y ago
        That's definitely an interesting solution: an independent authority who judges ads worthy. I question how independent ABP is, though, when their (only?) revenue comes from the fees sites pay to get on their whitelist. It gives the appearance of a shakedown. With the default set to block, it's kinda rough on the little guy, too.
- betterunix 13y ago
  How about ads that don't do any of this: * Require me to download megabytes of Javascript and Flash, particularly when I have to pay by the megabyte for my data plan. * Consume excessive CPU time and reduce my battery life * Use CSS to hover over the actual text I was trying to read * Make noise * Pop-ups * Pop-unders * Link to malware * Link to scams * Ignore me when I say "DO NOT TRACK" In other words, show me a modicum of respect. Deliver ads that actually have value for me, rather than treating me like the product you are selling to someone else. Nobody complains about the ads they see on Amazon, largely because Amazon is doing this. The absolute worst thing you can do is try to defeat the ad blocker I installed. That means you have become my adversary -- in which case I have zero reason to care about your revenue stream.
  - eli 13y ago
    If you come up with an Ad Blocker that blocks all those things, but lets "good" ads through, I'd pay for a license! :)
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    AdSense in text mode mostly does this. Except there will be spyware/adware apps advertisied.
mindslight 13y ago
They're not really the best solution though. Not enough people run them, and from what I hear the majority of sites now have ads plastered all over them and are run by people who think they should have a say in how my browser behaves. Search results have also become filled with essentially spam generated by people who don't actually care about publishing useful hard-wrought information but just want to trick away your attention and sell it for pennies.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

A superfluous solution. They're easily fingerprintable, unlike blocking ad trackers from the hosts file. http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

eli 13y ago
Purely a guess, but I think the majority of AdBlock users simply don't want ads on their screen and don't feel strongly about the privacy implications or the bandwidth savings or any other potential benefits.
- tbirdz 13y ago
  In that case, why not have the ad blocker download the content, and execute the tracking js, but simply not display the resulting ad to the user. It would register as an impression to the ad company, so the content publisher would get paid, and at the same time the user would not have to look at the ad. If you raise the issue of the ad company paying for people who don't watch the ad, just consider the situation of the ad industry in any other media. TV ads? The viewer can easily turn off the TV during the ads, like I do, or change the channel to a channel not showing an ad. The same is true for radio ads. For ads at the start of a movie, you can come to the movie 10-15 minutes late, thus getting there right when the movie starts and skipping the ads, or just wait in the lobby until the ads are over. Magazine ads you can easily skip to the articles and never look at the ads. Even in web ads, you can take my old father's "low-tech" add blocker, a paper cutout he hangs on his monitor that physically block ads in the margin on the side of the screen.
  - eli 13y ago
    All you've done is moved the problem up the value chain. Now instead of publishers losing revenue to AdBlock, it's advertisers. That's not a good solution. Advertisers will very quickly see that their conversion rates are falling and will adjust how much they pay for an impression accordingly. (Not to mention that many ads are sold per click and not per impression.) Changing the channel during an ad is already priced in to the cost of the TV ad. The TV people do studies on how many people change the channel or hit mute. But mostly they don't care because they can see that the TV ads work by how many people call the 800 number or how in-store sales jump after an ad runs in a region. This is especially true of online ads. If you have an online store, you probably don't really care how many impressions your ads have or even how many people click -- your main metric is how much did it cost to get you a paying customer. Ad Block drives that number up whether it loads the ad or not.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago

I think there has to be a better way, but it is not here yet, or we are not ready for it. Right now using ad blocker significantly improves quality of browsing. I cringe every time I fire up a browser without adblock by how disruptive and annoying ads are.

millstone 13y ago
It's not just ad blocker. There's tons of nonessential distractions on most web pages. For example, I read a story on cnn.com, and even though I have Ghostery enabled, I am still swarmed by "Share This" (on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ or LinkedIn...) and "Print" and "Email" buttons and "Search Powered By Google" (twice!) and "health resources by HealthGrades" and "CNN Trends Fueled by zite" and for some reason, the weather in Atlanta, even though I live in California. And then I click the Safari Reader button, and all I see are the text and photographs. Pure zen. My theory is that websites iterate "what can I add to make people stay here longer" and thereby accrete crap. If there is to be a better way, I hope it removes the incentive to add this junk.
- hershel 13y ago
  You're right. I wish there was a more automated way(without pushing that button) to remove the clutter in sites that need this kind of filtering.

kbuck 13y ago

> And some believe that today's ads aren't as obnoxious as yesterday's. Today's ads are even worse than ads used to be (although the worse ads are less common now). These days, you can expect to have to see a full-screen ad or have to watch some sort of video before being allowed to view the content you requested. Then, once you finally get to view the content, you're assaulted with things like Vibrant IntelliTXT and JavaScript that injects content into your clipboard when you copy text. I don't mind text ads. I don't mind most non-moving image ads, as long as they load fast and aren't too sizeable. Full-screen ads, video ads, flash ads, and JavaScript junk that modify the page contents are the problem here, and they're only getting worse as advertising companies figure out how to abuse our browsers more effectively.

eli 13y ago
Agree that IntelliTXT is obnoxious, but I honestly feel like things are trending better and the online ad industry is growing up. (And IntelliTXT is hardly new.) In the previous decade it seemed like auto-playing audio & video were pretty common... now they are definitely the exception (such ads violate a bunch of voluntary industry standards and are banned from many networks and publishers). (Disclosure: I am co-founder of an ad-supported startup.) I recognize this may be an unpopular opinion, but as companies get better at targeting ads and advertisers get better at measuring ROI, the result will be better ads that are more relevant to you.
- kbuck 13y ago
  You're right in saying that annoying ads are getting less common and that a minority of advertising networks have them now. I used to manually block such advertisers myself, but I gave up and started using a filter list after spending several hours trying (unsuccessfully) to block YouTube video ads. I'd like to support the sites I visit, but the bottom line is that it's far easier to use a filter list than manually comb through the "blockable items" list in AdBlock when I discover yet another excessively annoying ad. I sometimes manually whitelist entire sites when I specifically want to support them, but frequently I don't even think about it (and when I do, I have to consider whether the ad network they're using is responsible enough to stop clients from posting ads containing Java exploits and whatnot). Using a filter list with AdBlock is one of the biggest improvements that an end-user can effect on their page load times and web browser responsiveness.

smtddr 13y ago

Time to get downvoted into the earth's core... AdBlockers are a problem. I know "Everyone hates ADs"(TM), but really... that's how everything has worked up 'till now. ADs and/or paid. The advertisements around sports are a significant reason why that whole thing works; why those athletes get the money they get. They can get the attention of many eyes and all those eyes get exposed to ads. Take away _all_ the advertising-dollars and we'll see how long these huge pro-sports events last. The internet became a big thing and people would like to show you content for free but how will they support it? I don't want a paid-subscription for every single quality website I visit. I rather they just show me ads. If I really like the content of the website, I might even give them a few clicks on the ads. For better or for worse, advertisement-money is behind most forms of free content, especially entertainment-related. If anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears.

forgottenpass 13y ago
Sure advertising is the "business model of the Internet", but I have a hard time getting a hair across my ass about the fact people use blockers. Maybe because I don't work in an ad-supported industry means I don't have to rationale to myself it's not scummy. You can say ad-blockers are "the problem", but they're really a negotiating tactic. Remember the bad old days? When advertisers and those selling ad space were arrogant to think they could get away with anything? They destroyed the user experience so badly people wrote software to get rid of them. Now advertisers have to balance the intrusiveness of their ads against driving more users to install blocking or remembering to reinstall adblock on their new computer. Yes, websites depend on advertising to stay afloat, but why should I care? Nobody is entitled to a business model.
adsunecessary 13y ago
You're right adblockers are a problem, they're not addressing the cause but its expression. But at the same time and like the article, you also failed to frame the problem properly, see, it starts by telling us about a website serving 2 millions page views then goes about people wanting content for free. Content doesn't cost anything once put online, so it's not about content but rather that it is accessed 2 millions times a month which generates traffic, which has a cost. Now if it cost the same for the content to be accessed 10 or 10 millions times, then the justification/needs for ads would go away (except for newspapers' websites maybe). The problem is in fact dual, one is that the internet is designed to work as dumb pipes connected intelligence located in the network periphery not as centralized servers hosting content and the owner of the inner tubes ask money based on how much traffic goes through them. The obvious solution of distributing the content in a p2p model which would move the bill of traffic from the content provider to the content receivers. So yes adblockers are a problem because they're and additional layer of attempting to fix another problem ads and associated surveillance which is trying to fix the issue of relying on a centralized model on a network not thought for this usage imposed by a few giant companies exploiting their ownership of the architecture for profit, making a mess of layers attempting to fix each other but really attempting more problems requiring more fixing.

pasbesoin 13y ago

Like Usenet, too many people have started talking about them. Personally, I don't mind the idea of ad-supported content. But the malware/exploitation risk, and the utter distraction many moving, "noisy" ads cause me, continue to make it a non-starter for me, personally. Back in the "early days", I actually encountered and clicked through on a fair number of useful ads. But... as time went on, they did not remain useful, nor benign.

josephlord 13y ago

I don't block ads but I do largely block Javascript and Cookies (thank-you Noscript). It does greatly reduce the number of ads but that is a side effect (the fact that it blocks obnoxious moving content is intended). No if I could just get Noscript for mobile Safari...

JohnTHaller 13y ago
You can use mobile Firefox on Android and use Noscript.

gathly 13y ago

The internet was designed for free information exchange. If people struggle to turn it into E-commerce, I couldn't care less.

dredmorbius 13y ago
One bit I edited out of my longer post above referenced Tim Berner Lee's original WWW proposal documents. And how eminently readably they are today. Mostly because all they are is text and semantic markup.

betterunix 13y ago

Ad blockers are the solution to an advertising industry that largely has zero respect for users. Ad blockers are the logical extension of pop-up blockers and spam filters. If the Internet advertising industry could be trusted to behave itself nobody would install ad blockers. The fact that people are installing such software should be taken as an indication that today's ads are too intrusive and too disrespectful.

bnolsen 13y ago
can't agree more. On my desktop I typically run flashblock and don't allow animated gifs etc. That's enough there to do the job. On laptops, etc that use battery and don't have a lot of cpu and in many cases are bandwidth limited I run adblock. Some advertises have little respect for the people they are advertising to. And don't get me started on trackers...
- rsync 13y ago
  Just to clarify ... You block animated gifs because you don't like the distraction, yes ? I'm trying to think of a way that animated gifs could provide attack surface, or be malicious, and I'm not coming up with anything...
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    I'd wager distraction as that's a big reason to block flash ads as well.
  - dylz 13y ago
    Animated gifs can potentially ruin battery life on some laptops, spinning up GPU unnecessarily, etc.
  - xenophonf 13y ago
    You're clearly not sufficiently paranoid. :) Here's one using the WMF image format: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms09-062 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms09-06... Seeing as how modern web browsers are basically designed to download and execute code from random third parties at a second party's prompting, wouldn't you think it reasonable that the first party want a little control over the process? After all, us infosec folks always tell people to be cautious of what they download, turn off things like autorun, etc. The web browser is autorun for the Internet! (Never mind all of the bandwidth wasted on loading all of the third-party crap. Not all of us have high-speed/low-latency network links. Many of my users operate in very out-of-the-way places. Disabling the extra crap seems to significantly improve things like page load times.)

vonskippy 13y ago

If the only value your website offers is to bring eyeballs to ad's, then it's time for you to find a new vice. If you want to serve up ads on you site, make sure they're relevant, they're absolutely 110% malware free, and respect my privacy. And unless you're willing to take responsible for when those conditions aren't met, then don't whine when I do everything technical to block out the useless malware laden offensive ads that you do serve. The difference between net ads and tv ads are that tv ads cost enough money that people who buy tv ads spend time and energy in being very selective about their market demographics and the type of ads they run. Plus I've never had a tv ad infect my tv and stop it from going to any other channel but CMT. If me and my eyeballs are going to be your product, then I want a little respect for my participation.

eli 13y ago
But if you're using AdBlock, won't you likely be blocking my malware-free, privacy-protecting ads too? You wouldn't even know they exist... I agree with your larger point though. For all the (legitimate) hand-wringing about ad networks tracking people and building profiles... they still suck at targeting ads. A lot. I think we're still in the Stone Age of ad matching algorithms.
- pseudonym 13y ago
  It depends on how ads are blocked by the user, and it also depends on how you frame it. For example: I don't block advertising on Something Awful, because the ads there are both unobtrusive and occasionally quite relevant or interesting to me, even in terms of pointing me at things I didn't realize I had an interest in. I'll also usually unblock sites that detect that I'm running an adblocker and ask me politely to stop. I will, however, make a point of blocking ads on any site that decides to drop full-screen overlays, modal dialogs, javascript popovers, or any of that other crap that ad agencies seem to love these days. If your ad is interfering with my browsing experience, I'm not going to waste my time even considering interacting with it.
  - eli 13y ago
    I would think the vast majority of AdBlock users have it set to try to block all ads by default, though I admit I have no data to prove that.

gordaco 13y ago

We wouldn't see ad blockers as a solution if ads hadn't become a problem. As obvious as it seems for the users, advertisers don't seem to grasp it. Anything flashy and/or moving is BAD. Anything with actual javascript code is BAD. Especially, anything that tracks you is BAD. Anything that temporarily prevents you from watching the content is BAD (I'm thinking about splash screens you have to close and unskippable videos). Anything that modifies the behaviour of the web page you're visiting is BAD. Until (at least) those are solved, ad blockers are most definitely a solution.

rgbrgb 13y ago
Well those are a lot of opinions stated as facts. Care to back them up?
LocalPCGuy 13y ago
Yes, those things are BAD - for the USER. For the website, those things are quite lucrative, because users click on exactly those kinds of things. The ad industry's bad ADs are in response to 1 thing - clicks. If they didn't work, the industry would not do it. I run an AdBlocker myself, and do not like crazy ads, popups, etc. personally. But don't mistake OUR dislike for those things with the reason they exist, because they work.
- gress 13y ago
  They only work until people block them.
JohnTHaller 13y ago
As a publisher, you can't do an ad from any major 3rd party ad firms without Javascript. Even the text ads are all Javascript based.
- claudius 13y ago
  As a reader/content ‘consumer’, that’s your problem, not mine.

pmiller2 13y ago

I don't particularly like ads, but I don't mind if they're small, unobtrusive, and clearly marked as ads. Also, all the usual caveats about respecting privacy apply. I find there are very few of these types of ads around these days. Google text ads used to be this way, but then they started injecting them into SERPs in such a way that they looked more like results than ads. Also, popunders and popups need not apply: they make my whole browser unusable, and that's unacceptable. In addition to individual ads needing to be unobtrusive, the totality of the ads on the page needs to not make the page unusable. This is the thing that annoys me about Youtube ads, for the most part. I visit youtube to watch videos, and if I have to sit through an ad every time before I can do that, I start to get annoyed. This isn't the same as how TV ads work, either. Sure, each ad is 30 seconds, and together they make an hour worth of programming equal to about 42 minutes of content, but each commercial break is a few minutes long, which makes them effectively skippable. Imagine if a commercial break were 1 minute long (so there were 18 of them per hour). Wouldn't that get annoying fast?

malandrew 13y ago
The "clearly marked as ads" is such an important point that it bears repeating. My older brother is as luddite as they get and he has developed an extreme mistrust of the internet and technology in general to the point that he only visits 3-4 domains he knows he trusts and doesn't do anything else without asking his wife if it is safe. One of the examples he shared with me was the fact that he went for a long time without knowing the top results on Google until he found out they were ads shown before the actual results. He basically stopped using Google wholesale when that happened. He (I believe) is an extreme example of what happens when you abuse the user's trust and try to trick people. Commerce functions best on trust and between shady advertising patterns like this and dark patterns like opting into subscriptions, a lot of bad actors are destroying trust on the web for luddite users. There is probably a startup in here somewhere in making a Google Chrome or Safari extension that looks out for dark patterns and highlights them on the page for the user. i.e. spot ads and place a semi-transparent overlay stating "possible ad, click to reveal and interact" or looking for check boxes with whose default is being checkmarked and analyzing the text next to them to see if they match the dark patterns of opting into services you probably don't want.

jsmith0295 13y ago

The solution is simple: websites just need to start detecting adblock and refusing let someone use the site with it enabled. If you don't like it...go pay for an ad free service. Nobody deserves to get something for nothing. Edit: Additionally, using someones server resources that they pay for without contributing anything to their revenue, if ads are in fact an important source of their revenue, is effectively stealing. Just because the ads annoy you doesn't justify screwing the people who pay to run the site you're using.

LocalPCGuy 13y ago
I disagree that it is stealing. That is their form of monetizing, but as you said, they can choose not to provide an AdBlock user with service if they want. It's my computer, and I choose (well, for the most part) what I download to my computer. It's on the website owner to decide not to allow that behavior. Completely different from downloading copyrighted material, for instance, or from walking into a store and walking out with something. Closest analogy I could make is maybe reading a magazine at the rack instead of buying it and taking it home.
- jsmith0295 13y ago
  Yeah stealing was a strong word. As for downloading copyrighted material, at least that doesn't necessarily have a direct cost to the content creators/providers, where as for example streaming a video from YouTube while ignoring all of the ads is bad for both Google as well as the people who rely on ad revenue to make YouTube videos full time as it actually costs Google money in addition to not generating them any revenue. In fact I would say the example of reading the magazine in the store is more applicable to copyright violation, and that using AdBlock is more like going into a Starbucks to use the WiFi without buying anything, except worse, as with AdBlock one generally wouldn't turn it off, so every time someone with AdBlock visits the site they're basically just sucking up resources.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    Mechanically, my browser is asking for index.html. At that point, your server can decide what it's going to send, but I'm not obligated to ask for any other data from you - nor am I obligated to execute arbitrary client-side code. Web site operates make a calculated risk when they offer service the way they do, in the same way that Starbucks does in offering free wi-fi. And a lot of people don't do it that way - for instance a lot of coffee shops give you the wi-fi password with a purchase and I suspect in the future we may see a move to using enterprise WPA2 and "purchase enables x hours of access" policies. Saying things should work differently gets absurd quickly: you don't earn money just for showing ads, you need click-throughs. If no one clicks through, are they still stealing? What if my browser renders the ads and I just tape up my screen so I can't see them etc. etc.

guelo 13y ago

The open web is a miracle, it's amazing that it exists. Back when the open nets were forming corporations like AOL and Compuserve tried to bottle it up but failed. That's why the web doesn't work in the way that publishers would like for their business models. If the web had worked the way they want it to it would have never become the success that it has. But, we have to be vigilant. From now until the end of time they will be working to lock it down for their gain and society's loss. The sad part is that they will probably win because there will be teams at many corporations working full-time on locking things down and lobbying, they won't give up. The main hope now is that so many people have tasted freedom that they will fight to keep things open.

pirateking 13y ago
Few have tasted this mythical freedom the web provides. What extremely tiny percentage of people own their own web site, let alone own any of their digital property (and these days even the hardware it lives on)? I would say AOL and Compuserve won judging by the success of Facebook and other feudalistic platforms. We have exchanged freedom and rights to our property for the convenience and security of platforms ruled by feudal lords.
- bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  Most people voluntarily exchange their freedom and rights in exchange for someone else telling them what to do. For most of our history they choose religion. These days corporations are taking that place. What matters is being able to opt out without being effectively reduced to second class citizens. We haven't lost that option yet, but it is true that that is under threat. Being able to consume content without advertising (which is corporate propaganda, i.e. the new "religion") is one of those things. That content is not just someone's private property (no matter what the manipulative copyright laws say), it is the end product on generations of collective knowledge and creativity. If the minority ever gets excluded from it because they're not members of the Church of our Corporate Overlords, then our freedom would truly suffer. The fact that the majority so easily surrenders their freedom for convenience and a false sense of security is not a measure of our freedom.

nathancahill 13y ago

I used an ad blocker until I started showing ads on one of my websites. Now, I click ads on blogs I read frequently and tools that I use and support. Gittip and Flattr (and Bitcoin) could replace this behavior if they had wider adoption.

__david__ 13y ago
Really? I didn't stop. In fact, it caused me 20 to 30 minutes of debugging over a couple of times because I couldn't figure out why my ads weren't showing up :-).
- troels 13y ago
  I swear I did the same, only with Ghostery and Facebook.
- nathancahill 13y ago
  Yep. Did that too. Switched it off after that and never turned it back on.
lazyjones 13y ago
> Now, I click ads on blogs I read frequently and tools that I use and support The rampant click fraud (abusing ads as a donation link) is another nail in the coffin for online ads, although currently Google rakes in billions from such behavior due to the advertisers' credulity. I don't believe that Gittip and Flattr could replace it because it's much more tempting to "donate" the advertisers' money than your own. But it would be much more honest on behalf of the publishers.
brainburn 13y ago
You mean are merely costing the publishers money

malandrew 13y ago

"Viewing ads is part of the deal if users want content to be free, says Freitas." I would imagine that a log of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources). Any site owners complaining about ad-blockers is missing the opportunity to detect ad-blocking and try to sell that person an ad-free version of their service. Ideally this service would be a pay per view model, where I pay a fixed amount (like 5 cents to 10 cents per article read) or where I pay a fixed subscription fee (like $1 to $2 a month for unlimited articles). I did the math a while back with NY Times online advertising revenue and I remember the value gained from non-paying users to be around 70 cents per month per user. I don't know about you, but I would happily pay 70 cents or even a full dollar or two for access to the NY Times ad free. Unfortunately, when a site does introduce an ad-free paid version they try to extract like 5x or more of the revenue they gain from advertising. I don't know about others, but when I encounter that type of gouging, I just look elsewhere for my news. So Mssrs. Publisher, please offer a reasonable paid ad-free alternative or quit your bitching. Every ad you serve is an annoying distraction that distracts me, irritates me and slows down my browsing experience both in terms of bytes download and lines of javascript executed. I am completely within my right to block all outgoing requests to any host I deem negative to my web browsing experience via my /etc/hosts/ file. If you happen to serve ads from those sites and I can't view them because I block them, that isn't my problem it is yours. Want me to pay, give me the ability to do so and be fair with your prices. So long as you don't offer a paid service that I can buy and you support yourself via ads, you are not really considering me to be your customer, but your product. You are not in a position to complain when your product doesn't consent to being sold.

aspensmonster 13y ago
>I would imagine that a [lot] of ad-blocking users are fine with paying for content if the price is reasonable (i.e. equivalent to the revenue a site gains from it's advertising sources). But that's just it. Even if they could make money off a dollar-per-person-per-month model --even if they could pay all their bills and then some-- they certainly wouldn't make the switch. Ad sales always have the potential for growth, even if the size of your audience is the same. Offering base subscriptions puts a hard floor (edit: ceiling, not floor) on the amount of money you can make with any set number of viewers.

deleted 13y ago

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yetanotherphd 13y ago

People have a right to use ad-blockers. It's their computer after all. However, a lot of things that people like to use, and might even have been willing to watch ads in order to use, will not be viable if everyone used adblockers. It's really that simple. However, most people don't like to acknowledge that given the opportunity, the will freeload of others, or that in some contexts freeloading is natural and not immoral

radmuzom 13y ago
I don't think the original article or people who despise Ad blocking software (like me) question the right of people to use ad-blockers. All we are saying is that economics and free markets will eventually take care of the problem, and will result in much lesser useful content being created for people to consume. If one thinks that lesser content is better and the only ones allowed to publish content are big budget companies like Google who can afford to pay Adblock developers to be in the whitelist, then so be it.

alextgordon 13y ago

99% of advertisers give the rest a bad name... Why do we put age restrictions on explicit or violent movies? Because we don't want to influence kids' brains for the worse. This principle applies to adults as well. The purpose of ads is to influence you. That "influence" goes to the highest bidder. At their most benign, they just want you to buy their brand of otherwise identical detergent. The worst ads are the ones for charities where some emaciated kid is filmed (in HD) tearfully looking into the camera. Fuck. That. My emotions are not the plaything of some advertiser. What about the "one quick tip to lose weight" scams that don't-be-evil Google insists on serving up. Is that fine? The advertising industry is not your friend. Don't waste your life trying to help them. Block everything.

austinz 13y ago
The advertising industry gets implicit carte blanche to do things to thousands or millions of complete strangers that, if I were to do to my friend, would be considered mortifyingly offensive or rude. I really don't understand it.
JohnTHaller 13y ago
Each AdSense advertiser can turn off specific channels for their sites including 'health and wellness' (weight loss) and 'dating' (scam chat sites). Unfortunately, there are baddies in nearly every category. The software category, for instance, which is the majority of our income, is a hotbed of spyware/adware vendors. And blocking them is nearly impossible since Google doesn't really care to know. So you're left manually determining domains yourself and blocking them. But it's just wack-a-mole as they create new domains when enough sites block them. This isn't too surprising considering that the top link for a Google search for Firefox is a Google ad for an advertiser that will deliver Firefox via a downloader along with 8 different spyware/adware apps. My mom made that mistake last weekend. We would up reimaging her computer.
- troels 13y ago
  Just a thought: Couldn't advertisers collaborate on maintaining a blocklist, just like users do with adblockers? Does it already exist?

linuxhansl 13y ago

People can say and do what they want... If there is a moving or worse a sounding ad, I will block it. I do not mind text or (still) image ads. Show some respect for the viewers and ad blocker will not be needed.

dredmorbius 13y ago

I turned to this page after the following experience (I make aggressive use of ad blockers and JS filtering generally). This was in an incognito Chromium session where I don't run NoScript. I was searching for some basic heat transfer references and found a page with a nice write-up on Newton's law of heat transfer. I copied the URL into the post I was composing as I was reading it. A "chat" dialog pops up asking if I need tutoring assistance. Um. No. So I ignore it. The site then navigates me away from the page and onto a registration page. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. My immediate and predictable response: I fired up 'sudo -e /etc/hosts' and added both hostnames to my blocklist. Though I took the courtesy of emailing the site's contact address and asking them what the actual fuck they thought they were doing. Apparently Pearson Education have the educational market so fully sewn up they can get away with this kind of bullshit. But seriously? What the actual fuck? Upshot: why do people block the hell out of this stuff? It's goddamned annoying as hell. I compiled a list some time ago on G+ that's worth repeating here: Forbes asks: Why do programmers hate advertising so much? First, I think it's hardly just programmers. I suspect most people find advertising to be a negative. But as to us techies? Why do we hate thee? Let me count the ways: 1. It's intrusive. Many/most of us probably have some level of ADD/OCD. Or just plain environmental sensitivity. 2. It's distracting. 3. It promotes a host of anti-usability features: content muting, multi-page click-through articles, overly formatted pages, overlays, pop-ups, persistent floating top/right/left/bottom elements, audio, video, multiple audio/video. 4. It's creepy, and you're creeping me out. Tracking through various deceptive means, even though I've made very clear that I don't wish to be tracked. Incidentally, subscription content suffers a similar issue: I don't want an audit trail of all things I've read, even on one site, let alone across sites. 5. The ads themselves frequently position themselves to price-discriminate -- though how and when I can never be certain (which undermines the efficacy of all ads). 6. The mechanisms of advertising networks pose security issues: cross-site JS, iframes, Flash, and Java. Even just the proliferation of different JS sources creates a serious management and cognitive overload for the security- and privacy-conscious reader. A single article from a news site may contain over 20 JS sources. 7. The goods and services which are most highly advertised are those which I'm least inclined to buy. Especially for (so-called) food and entertainment, but also general consumer products, electronics, and various services, especially financial services. To the point that when I see advertising my first conscious reaction is "why do they have to try so hard to convince me that that is something worth buying?" 8. It's not relevant. There are a very limited number of times when I'm in a purchase mode. The real value of the Internet would be to (correctly) identify those times, and then find me the best deals on what I want, in the way that I want to obtain it. Which, frankly, dear, isn't online most of the damned time. On that last point, I've been shopping in recent times for a number of moderately high-ticket items. Including spending a lot of time researching options on-line. My biggest take-away is that online purchase researching sucks massively. Contrast to the experience at a store with a well-trained, skilled retail staff. "Is this what you like?" "No, I'm looking for something that's more XXX". And as much as I disdain retail much of the time, the people who are good at it figure out what you want, what you can afford, and what they have that suits you, quickly, without wasting your time (and if you're lucky, making the exercise enjoyable). It's something I've also addressed recently, "Search quality vs. search personalization". The upshot: there's a lot more information in the moment that's relevant to purchase logic than in a person's profile or market demographics. Advertisers/shoppers could avoid massive amounts of creep factor by focusing on this, probably with vastly superior conversion factors. The final thought: advertising is well and good, but where the rubber hits the road is in making the sale. Which is where Amazon (and other sales-oriented sites: eBay, Craigslist, Apple's iTunes) wins all over any advertising-based site. Update: oh, and the email I sent to Pearson? It bounced. I'm shocked, shocked ....

Derbasti 13y ago

I block ads. I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads. If your business needs me to see your ads, I'd rather not be your customer. If these practices will bring down the ad industry, all the better.

johnchristopher 13y ago
> I block ads. I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads. If your business needs me to see your ads, I'd rather not be your customer. Are you referring to the ad business in general , the advertised business or the website business ? Because blocking ads and reading the website still makes you the website's consumer, right ?
- Derbasti 13y ago
  As noted in the preceding sentence: I'd rather not read a website than read it with ads They can choose to not show me the website since I run an ad blocker. I am completely fine with that. I don't read magazines, because they usually contain enormous amounts of ads. I don't watch television because of ads. I pay for websites if I value their content and there is an option to pay for them to remove ads.

d5ve 13y ago

I think of online advertising in the same way as I now do smoking in a workplace, pub or restaurant - I can't believe people used to live like this. Using someone else's browser and seeing the distracting and intrusive ads feels a bit like trying to eat a meal surrounded by the smell and eye irritation of second-hand smoke.

fatman 13y ago

I feel the same way about ad blockers as I do about skipping commercials with the DVR - my purchasing decisions are almost never influenced by ads, so why would I bother watching them? I'm just afraid that someday, even without DVR's and Adblockers, companies will figure out that I'm not buying their crap and stop offering me free TV shows and websites, ads or no.

Kiro 13y ago

I turned off AdBlock when I realized how many sites break with it enabled, for example all sites with GTM. I used to think the sites were just broken in general but now I know better.

ankitoberoi 13y ago

Just Blocking Ads on all websites, is not a solution. You are only trying to put publishers out of business who provide and share information. I actually wrote a post on the subject sometime ago: http://www.adpushup.com/blog/ad-blocking-bad-news-consumers/ http://www.adpushup.com/blog/ad-blocking-bad-news-consumers/ Sorry about the plug, I'm a co-founder @ AdPushup and a near future product goal is also to prevent publishers from Ad Blockers. I know I'll get downvoted here (everyone just hates ads so much), but there are networks which do serve malware-free ads. Also, you don't want to punish all the publishers just because some (or even if it's a majority) do bad.

youWontLikeThis 13y ago
" You are only trying to put publishers out of business " Uhm, not, we are not. That may be a consequence, but just check the comments to see what people is trying to accomplish.
msh 13y ago
If you don't punish the publishers how would the problem ever be solved?
- ankitoberoi 13y ago
  You should punish publishers who serve malware, popups, JS & other bad stuff BUT you don't punish ALL the publishers - many of them don't do that and are just fine. In fact, instead of an AdBlocker, it is better off if there is a plugin which blocks such sites completely. Why use their content if you don't like them anyway.
  - strubleandecure 13y ago
    And how would ANY user know which ad network is compromised or not before it serves them a delicious helping of malware? Face it, if you're using Adblock you're on a default allow model and any previously spotless network can be compromised at any time since it only takes one malformed payload to get through the cracks to infect a user. It's the same situation the AV vendors face. The only realistic option (whether the ad vendors like it or not) for a blocklist is to craft the regex to be as sweeping as possible. On the other end of things the ad firms need to self-police themselves at a vastly increased level than what is happening now, preferrably under some sort of umbrella organization. But even if that happens I expect punishments to be mere wristslaps and non-legalistic in nature. At the end of the day, it's not MY business model that's at risk here, the stakeholders have the onus to make it work in the real world. They're not entitled to it because the base model worked on network TV and then assume it can be ported wholesale to vastly different environments without compromise and change.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

I don't "block" ads. I just opt not to download them. I'm not being pedantic, we should really learn to stop adopting these insidious Newspeak tricks. Because it's not merely annoying propaganda, it has time and time again ended in criminalization. Some examples: equating "hackers" with criminals, equating copying with theft, labeling the recreational use of drugs as "abuse". Time and time again we've seen repressive legislation after years of propaganda by manipulating the language in which a subject was discussed. I don't block adds. I am totally free not to download yoursite/ad/bigassbanner.swf when all I want is to read yoursite/article.html. I'm not doing anything wrong, and if you're trying to trick me into downloading bigassbanner.swf anyway and I use tools to help me avoid that, you are the one who is using ethically dubious tactics, and I'm just responding to that. You want me to pay for your content in any way, fucking ask me first, or don't put it on the open internet. And it's not about whether or not the ads are "obnoxious", that's another red herring. I don't like any advertising, I don't want it, I don't need it, and I'm certainly not going to waste my time and bandwidth downloading it, nor am I going to allow it to take up space on my screen or have their tracking tactics violate my privacy. I don't need any excuse to refuse to see ads. It's my time, my bandwidth, my screen, my privacy, my eyeballs. Fuck ads. There is no such category as "acceptable" ads. The only "acceptable" ads are the ones I choose to accept up front. So far, only very few sites have asked me that, and they all threw tracking shit at me when I obliged, so fuck those as well. After 15+ years of onesided unethical tactics I have no interest in being in any way nuanced about it. The online advertising business fundamentally rotten, and they can go screw themselves. And with them any publisher that tries to leverage these tactics for profit.

waylandsmithers 13y ago
Thank you. If you consider intrusive ads to be malicious code that websites are attempting to run on your machine, you should be free stop them. It's your machine. We are essentially talking about the equivalent of tv advertisers being up in arms about viewers getting up and going to the bathroom or changing the channel during commercial breaks.

jrabone 13y ago

Ads on desktop browsers are no longer the problem - between ABP and Ghostery one need never see another ad. The mobile device is the new battleground, but the prevalence of "dual-funded" apps (free, ad-supported and pay-for, ad-free) gives me some hope that a sane business model will emerge. Meanwhile I reconfigured bind on my LAN to DNS-spoof roughly 3500 ad-serving domains and redirect them to a logging but otherwise content-free HTTP server (hey, it's OK when my ISP or my government do it to ME, right?). Very interesting just how bad the problem is. I recommend you try it to get a real feel for just how much crap the average page requests behind your back.

tbarbugli 13y ago

A solution, assholes :)

lazyjones 13y ago

Our website has ads too, but I fully support everyone who wants to block them. They add no value to the website and I'm only interested in people using our site, not in getting them distracted or annoyed. We even have an ad-free version of our main website (but it's not indexed by search engines). I've also learned that people working at ad agencies as well as those handling ads on the publisher side tend to be extremely incompetent w.r.t. web publishing. They do not understand how usability, reputation, visitor/customer satisfaction work. They tend to believe that looking at ads is the most important thing people visit websites for (and possibly that people make road trips just in order to look at the billboards).

erikig 13y ago
Just a side note - I do know a lot of people that love to go to Times Square at night to be bathed in the bright but artificial light of the billboards.

erikig 13y ago

Ad blockers are going to gradually become irrelevant (like pop-up blockers) primarily because of the mobile web. I believe the adoption of the mobile web is forcing advertisers to reconsider their strategies. With the limited screen real-estate and cut-throat competition for those pixels it becomes difficult for the marketers to go overboard.

D9u 13y ago

https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck All that crap doesn't reach my browser.

kybernetyk 13y ago

Without ad blockers I would be back to using gopher and usenet.

jotm 13y ago

Heh, ad blockers are both a solution for the users and a problem for the advertisers and publishers. But they were created to deal with the insanity of the latter - with an ad blocker (and that probably includes JS blockers nowadays), you don't get all the wonderful pop-ups, pop-unders, sliding ads, floating survey invites, half a dozen text and image ads advertising often unrelated stuff, the super annoying audio coming from who knows where, unexpected redirects, the lost seconds while you wait for the page to load, and more. If advertisers used better ad targeting, fewer and less intrusive ads, that would definitely reduce the number of people who install ad blockers.

strubleandecure 13y ago
I also see in the wild much higher occurences of ad networks serving up survey content recently. This is really an implicit acknowledgement that widespread adblocking is taking toll on the bottom line and their proposed solution is for DEEPER mining, not less of it. They're fishing for data on a level that's impossible with a standard ad+tracker.

strubleandecure 13y ago

In this age of drive-by downloads, (100% legal) sorched-earth adblocking has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages. If the web advertising would police themselves better none of this would be neccessary. They are not held responsible in any financial and/or legal sense for any damage they incur when a malware incursion occurs, or the dire consequences for a end-user if they get botnetted into doing something dire that would bring down the wrath of law enforcement. The longer they drag their feet on reforming the Wild Wild West that is web advertising the more likely adblocking will turn into the status quo for an increasing percentage of people and they're not going back to the old ways of usage anytime soon. All the guilt-tripping advertisers are trying to pull is wasted on adblockers because they're not the ones actually producing the content people give a shit about, a subtle but important difference It's like venture capitalists trying to harangue the customer base of a startup they're involved with. I don't expect things to improve with the ad networks anytime soon. Just the mere thought of the DNT flag being default on Firefox was enough to send them into a frenzy. Most of them explicitly ignore the flag anyway.

fab13n 13y ago

Regarding micro payments to fund websites: I wouldn't pay for most sites. Not because their content is worth nothing, but because it is uncomfortable to have a counter ticking, spending more cents for each of my mouse clicks. And of course, I don't want to do through a billing UI for each new site I visit, although this could be fixed. However, I'm willing to pay an extra $10 a month to fund content providers, up to them to share it effectively. $2e10 of advertising budget for 2e8 US internet users is about $10 / person*month, and as large proportion of it doesn't end up in the website owners' pockets, so it could even be cheaper than that.

dredmorbius 13y ago
The more I think about it, the more I think some form of universal content syndication should be the way to fly: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...
strubleandecure 13y ago
There is a pot of gold waiting for someone who can make the idea of microtransactions palatable and transparent to the web surfer. Because it has to come, one way or the other. In addition, all site expenditures are not equal. There are huge numbers of clickbait sites that basically spend almost nothing in content creation, and expenses are almost entirely incurred through hosting/bandwidth charges. On the other extreme are smaller sites with highly loyal reader bases who create highly useful content where the creation/research costs are substantial. It would be almost impossible for the first group to go down the nickel-and-dime/paywall route. So really, it's only when the site operators start asking for the hard coin does the real test of what the content is worth in the users' eyes start. (Some readers actually demand a site details all their expenses exhaustively before they agree to pay for content. This may or may not be possible, or comfortable for site owners to accept as a neccessary part of the business.)
_delirium 13y ago
Flattr is trying to do something along those lines: http://flattr.com/ http://flattr.com/ You pick a monthly budget, then you click on Flattr links when you encounter them on something you like (whether an article or a GitHub repository or whatever). Then at the end of the month your budget is split up between everyone you clicked on that month. Not sure if it'll really catch on, but I do think it's on the right track in avoiding the "ticking counter" feeling, since clicking on a Flattr link doesn't cost you anything extra, just allocates your fixed budget.

fab13n 13y ago

Too 13y ago

> When he presented an option for an ad-free experience, > less than 1% of his 4 million unique monthly visitors > signed up for the $2.99/month subscription. Congratulations! You now make almost $120000 per month. The article make that claim sound like a bad thing.

waylandsmithers 13y ago
Yes, that was my first thought too. Sounds pretty good to me. I'm getting sick and tired of sites (and physical publications) crying "But how are we supposed to make money?!?" Boo fucking hoo. Just because you are running a business doesn't mean you are guaranteed riches and profits. Lots of businesses fail, and lots of seemingly good ideas turn out to not be economically viable (hence the persistent lack of jetpacks). Figure it out.

nitrogen 13y ago

Some of the less free ITU member states recently designed a bunch of nasty, restrictive protocols for turning the Internet into a complex web of pay-per-hop-per-packet price gouging. Maybe some of those concepts can be turned on their head and used to create a reliable, opt-in micropayment network using bitcoin, sort of how copyleft exploits copyright for the benefit of the many over the few.

Bartweiss 13y ago

The site owners discussing how no one took them up on their subscription services seem to miss a significant point: their sites aren't worth anything like what they're charging to most users. $25 for an annual site subscription is something I'd only pay for a handful of sites - most sites simply don't have enough unique, quality content to make me care. Replacing adblock with ad-free subscriptions isn't the way of the future. The "beauty" of advertising is that it can create revenue for a site owner in excess of the value they provide to their viewers.

deleted 13y ago

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rwl 13y ago

I have a hard time sympathizing at all with "publishers" who are hurt by ad-blockers. The vast majority of web sites, I would guess, fall into one of two categories. The first category are sites which are a labor of love: they are written and maintained because someone just wants to have a voice, or to get their information out there. These sites can often be run on nearly-free hardware from a home Internet connection that you would be paying for anyway. Hardware and bandwidth costs are near zero, or low enough that the operator is willing to cover them at a loss. The operator is not expecting to make money, so advertising is not necessary. The second category are sites operated by businesses that are expecting to make money by selling a genuine product or service. These sites have non-trivial costs to develop, operate, and maintain, but the sites lives on the cost side, not the revenue side, of the balance sheet. That's OK, because the business sells something else which (presumably) covers that cost and then some. The "publishers" expecting to make money from advertising fall into neither of these categories. They are operating sites with the expectation of making money, but they have nothing generating revenue except advertising placed in their "content". Hoping to make money by running a web site that does nothing but serve pages for free is an unsustainable business model. If you want to make money, sell something less ephemeral than a web page. I'm not saying that publishing (without the scare quotes) is an unsustainable business. If your product is your "content", put it in a form that someone will actually want to buy, like a book or a magazine. Something that your customers can hang on to, that they can reference when they're away from their browsers, that they can lend to their friends, that doesn't simply disappear at your whim. People do pay for those things, and they even tolerate ads there. If you're not willing to provide something of real and tangible value, don't expect your audience to be willing to provide you with a revenue stream. And don't complain when they evade your attempts to force that on them.

tinalumfoil 13y ago

When you get content for free, you do it under the agreement you're going to look at their ads. Decide sifting through ads isn't worth it? Close the tab. Ad blockers allow people to break this "agreement". If less people are viewing ads, the quality of the content has to drop or the advertising (what funds all that "free" content) has to increase. Just like all those "why I pirate" things, its just a long way of saying "I'm too lazy/cheap to compensate people for the content they produce"