6 ms·

I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical capabilit

I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them" as the ad networks are simply a platform for which there are buyers of ads/eyeballs (advertisers) and sites/apps that display said advertising. It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code snippets needed to display ads or track you (not withstanding those terrible ad injector add-ons). Without your favorite sites providing it space to advertise on, there would be no advertising network. In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content and advertising is much more lucrative for the sites you patronize. Who's paying for that "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" quiz on Buzzfeed that you gleefully wasted 5 minutes of you life on? Certainly not you; it was the advertiser who paid in exchange for an opportunity to influence you in some way (either direct action or indirect branding). When you think about the 'morality' of ad blockers, it's not about the ad networks that we're talking about, it's the publishing sites that produce the content you consume. When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that.

sohkamyung 12y ago
>In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. One way I'm trying to overcome that is to actually pay for content. I've started in a small way by supporting people who producing the content I care about at Patreon.
- s3r3nity 12y ago
  +1 to you and I agree this is a nice step - though it doesn't work at scale, nor is it 100% appropriate for the ideals of the web. If you think about the web as the penultimate democracy for content, where content of the highest quality is available to even the poorest person, then saying "pay for this or you'll remain ignorant" is just not fair. Example: I would be more ok if Coursera/Udacity and the like went with an ad-based model rather than a pay-per-view model. Why? Because the people it's meant to help - the individual who can't afford to take out massive loans to pay for school or the kid from the bad side of town - can't really benefit if it costs 100's or 1000's of $$ to study, say, computer science or the like. Retort: But there are a number of other free resources! See link here or here! Retort back: Those aren't the highest quality, and usually those are free because: a) they're supported by ad spend b) they're supported by VC funding and will eventually move behind a paywall of some sort eventually.
  - deciplex 12y ago
    That's not without cost, though. It could mean that poor become so inundated with ads that they waste their already limited budget on frivolous bullshit and junk food, and have to take out more payday loans to pay the water bill this month.
    - calbear81 12y ago
      Your point has been made several times on this topic but can someone cite some study about how poor people are more "susceptible" to the ill effects of advertising and how everything that is being advertised is obviously "bullshit"? If anything, advertising is what allows poor people to have the same access to content/information without having to pay real wages in return for access. What types of online ads that you see do you consider bullshit?
      - deciplex 12y ago
        It's not that they are necessarily more susceptible, it's that they would be exposed to more of it, under this model.
      - nitrogen 12y ago
        How do the advertisers benefit from showing ads to people who can't afford their products anyway?
  - xorcist 12y ago
    Where do you earn "1000s of $$" per visitor? Are you serious? Part of why ads are so irritating is that they shove tons of attention seekers on every page just to earn a tenth of a cent.
    - pandler 12y ago
      I think they were referring to taking a course at a university.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Patreon's model desperately needs a "one-shot" mode. Ideally there'd be two types: the one-off, and the time-limited subscription. Not only would this provide a bit more data to the content-creators, but for me the consumer it would play better with my budgeting. Having to remember I have N subscriptions going on at any time is far more tiring then knowing I have X disposable income and want to apportion it out, or that I've committed to a maximum of subscription period of X before I'll decide to renew it.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    IMO, a lot of content creators had already been providing one-shot opportunities by selling merchandise. The problem for me is that I frequently don't care for merch, so Patreon basically filled a niche for me: creators I was happy to give money to without actually asking for any more. It really discomforts me that a lot of creators seem to feel obligated to provide a higher level of service for patrons.
itistoday2 12y ago
> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. People's reluctance to pay and their aversion to advertising is, I think, understandable and reasonable. It is just a quirk of the time period that we find ourselves in that there is any "moral" dilemma attached to this situation. The reason people perceive it as a moral situation is because we've established a society in which one must extract money out of others in order to survive. Our welfare system is not yet currently capable of providing people with the basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, clean water, healthcare, education, and equal access to opportunities. If it were, you would find that the cost of content really would approach $0. If, for example, artists did not have to worry about any of the previously mentioned necessities (if it was just given to them), then most of them would probably be perfectly happy to continue to produce content for free and without advertising. I know, as a software developer and entrepreneur, that I personally would be happy to not charge anything for any software that I create (or charge very little), if these basics were taken care of. As more people continue to lose their jobs to robots and automation, we will (if we can avoid destroying ourselves), move in that direction.
- itistoday2 12y ago
  I'd be interested to know what the Internet is like for folks in countries like Sweden where welfare systems are far more capable. For example, do Swedish websites also rely heavily on advertising? How does the economy of Swedish content (in Swedish markets) compare to American content in America? BTW: I should be clear that I am not advocating any particular type of welfare system. It does not even have to be government managed. The important thing is that a system exist to free people's minds from the mundane details of basic survival.
  - nl 12y ago
    The profit motive exists just as much in Sweden as in the US. Welfare acts as a safety net for individuals, not companies.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
curiouscats 12y ago
His point is valid. If you rely on something that causes people harm that must be factored in when they seek to minimize their risk. I don't use ad blockers because I generally support your position. I do block flash because it is so annoying and especially noisy ads and downloading video I didn't ask for on my limited bandwidth. It seems to me it isn't 100% either way. There is an issue of being a free-riding meanie when you block ads those providing content rely on for income. There is also an issue of sites being overly obnoxious in their serving of ads. The users right to control their computer makes sense. The risk of privacy violations and serving malware are real and impact the ability to claim blocking ads is fair. Those that believe in blocking ads mainly don't believe it is ok for some ISP or others to replace website ads with their own ads. This is normally based on the idea they don't have the right to change web content clients request and this argument largely relies on the same idea those that say ad blockers are wrong rely on. It is true there is space between these arguments to slip in the claim that while others don't have the right to eliminate the web content and replace it with their own the end user does. This is a reasonable argument, but it is not, IMO, without a reasonable counter-argument (that those providing the web content are doing so with the ads as part of their offer). I don't think ad blockers are immoral or unethical but I do think they are not 100% pure either. They are a reasonable thing to resort to given an understanding of the whole situation. But they do, it seems to me, take away an earned benefit from those providing content.
- xai3luGi 12y ago
  > I didn't ask for on my limited bandwidth. Your browser asked for it though. Maybe fix you browser so it isn't doing things you don't like? Of course with HTTP/2, websites will be able to send you stuff that even your browser didn't ask for.
  - Forlien 12y ago
    Isn't fixing his browser exactly what curiouscats is doing by blocking flash?
  - frankzinger 12y ago
    HTTP/2 makes provision for the rejection of pushed resources.
BrainInAJar 12y ago
So find a better business model. If it's not paywalls, and it's not ads, figure it out.
- eropple 12y ago
  If you want to smarm about a better business model, I invite you to find it yourself. It's much easier to perform that smarm than find one, but I guess if you have to rationalize free ridership it's a good line. And it means you don't have to come to grips with the idea that it's a social problem instead of a free-market-hallowed-be-thy-name problem; it does mean you can mostly wave away that the money needs to come from somewhere and every scalable option involves advertising that free-riders block, native advertising that compromises the integrity of the work (if it's applicable at all), or requiring payment that readers won't pony up for. (Yes, really, every option, you're welcome to bookmark this post and cheetodust about it if one ever comes to fruition but I am comfortable betting my side of the line.) Fixing the country, though, is ssssocialism, and we can't have that. Instead people who entertain us should beg for scraps, I suppose. That's sustainable.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - comex 12y ago
    I claim that part of it at least is a technical problem. No, really. Compare user payment habits on desktops/websites versus mobile devices. Sure, there are the issues that users have become attuned to $1 apps, that many are incredibly reluctant to pony up even that, etc. etc. But at least some users pay $1, because it only requires a few taps and the purchase is associated with their existing $devicevendor account; good luck getting that to happen on the web, where not everyone has PayPal (to which the most common alternative is pulling out a physical wallet and filling in a long list of text boxes) and you need to make your own account system. What would the web be like if micropayments had actually become a thing?
trimbo 12y ago
> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today Then how come, every time I pay for content, that content still has ads? The paywalled newspaper sites I frequent do this. Or, notice how they do this in every movie theater in America now -- you can't sit there in peace before a movie. Instead, before the trailers start, you're subjected to a barrage of loud ads. Even on the March Madness app -- I've logged in with my Comcast credentials, they are going to show me the regular TV ads, and yet they make me miss live game action to show me ads specific to the app! And they do this every time you leave the app and come back. Every place that an ad can be placed, it will eventually be placed, in every medium and whether a consumer paid for that content or not. Throwing ads in our face is so widely abused that I'm completely unsurprised that adblockers are mainstream and still growing. Our web browser is one of the few places we still have control.
- deciplex 12y ago
  It's a combination of "the ads subsidize the production of the content somewhat i.e. you aren't paying the full price" and "everyone is desensitized to ads now anyway so we might at well show them in every place we can possibly get away with it". FWIW I think it's mostly the latter (e: was thinking specifically of cinema when I wrote this - nl is right it depends on the medium).
  - nl 12y ago
    It's actually mostly the former. Not sure about movie theatres but for example printed newspaper costs are usually not even covered by the price of the newspaper. The ads is where the money is.
- Potando 12y ago
  The newspaper used to cost $1 (each! every day!) and it was full of ads. Probably about as much percentage of area as a typical news site today. There must be a balance between "no payment" and "no ads" - the optimum profit doesn't necessarily happen at one of the extremes. Do you think you'd choose a higher priced subscription if it offered no ads?
na85 12y ago
>It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code snippets needed to display ads or track you (not withstanding those terrible ad injector add-ons). Facebook tracks me and builds a shadow profile whether I use their shitty site or not. >In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. And yet if I pay for something, it invariably still shoves ads at me. Paying TV subscribers have to watch commercials. If I pay a subscription to the Economist I still see ads in print and online. >Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content Content isn't worth as much these days. >When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that. And that's why I love ad blockers. I don't want anyone to get money for forcing me to watch ads I don't want.
felipeerias 12y ago
In most cases, a website will not get paid unless the visitor actually clicks on the ad (or carries out the action that the ad points to). In those cases, using Adblock and simply ignoring the ads would produce the same amount of revenue for the site: zero. The problem here is that the trade-off is not "I tell you a story and you see this ad in return". The real trade-off is "I tell you a story and you have to allow these other shady companies to track you and run their code on your computer". Ads demand too much in terms of attention, performance, privacy and security.

sohkamyung 12y ago

>In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. One way I'm trying to overcome that is to actually pay for content. I've started in a small way by supporting people who producing the content I care about at Patreon.

s3r3nity 12y ago
+1 to you and I agree this is a nice step - though it doesn't work at scale, nor is it 100% appropriate for the ideals of the web. If you think about the web as the penultimate democracy for content, where content of the highest quality is available to even the poorest person, then saying "pay for this or you'll remain ignorant" is just not fair. Example: I would be more ok if Coursera/Udacity and the like went with an ad-based model rather than a pay-per-view model. Why? Because the people it's meant to help - the individual who can't afford to take out massive loans to pay for school or the kid from the bad side of town - can't really benefit if it costs 100's or 1000's of $$ to study, say, computer science or the like. Retort: But there are a number of other free resources! See link here or here! Retort back: Those aren't the highest quality, and usually those are free because: a) they're supported by ad spend b) they're supported by VC funding and will eventually move behind a paywall of some sort eventually.
- deciplex 12y ago
  That's not without cost, though. It could mean that poor become so inundated with ads that they waste their already limited budget on frivolous bullshit and junk food, and have to take out more payday loans to pay the water bill this month.
  - calbear81 12y ago
    Your point has been made several times on this topic but can someone cite some study about how poor people are more "susceptible" to the ill effects of advertising and how everything that is being advertised is obviously "bullshit"? If anything, advertising is what allows poor people to have the same access to content/information without having to pay real wages in return for access. What types of online ads that you see do you consider bullshit?
    - deciplex 12y ago
      It's not that they are necessarily more susceptible, it's that they would be exposed to more of it, under this model.
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      How do the advertisers benefit from showing ads to people who can't afford their products anyway?
- xorcist 12y ago
  Where do you earn "1000s of $$" per visitor? Are you serious? Part of why ads are so irritating is that they shove tons of attention seekers on every page just to earn a tenth of a cent.
  - pandler 12y ago
    I think they were referring to taking a course at a university.
XorNot 12y ago
Patreon's model desperately needs a "one-shot" mode. Ideally there'd be two types: the one-off, and the time-limited subscription. Not only would this provide a bit more data to the content-creators, but for me the consumer it would play better with my budgeting. Having to remember I have N subscriptions going on at any time is far more tiring then knowing I have X disposable income and want to apportion it out, or that I've committed to a maximum of subscription period of X before I'll decide to renew it.
- saraid216 12y ago
  IMO, a lot of content creators had already been providing one-shot opportunities by selling merchandise. The problem for me is that I frequently don't care for merch, so Patreon basically filled a niche for me: creators I was happy to give money to without actually asking for any more. It really discomforts me that a lot of creators seem to feel obligated to provide a higher level of service for patrons.

itistoday2 12y ago

> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. People's reluctance to pay and their aversion to advertising is, I think, understandable and reasonable. It is just a quirk of the time period that we find ourselves in that there is any "moral" dilemma attached to this situation. The reason people perceive it as a moral situation is because we've established a society in which one must extract money out of others in order to survive. Our welfare system is not yet currently capable of providing people with the basic necessities: food, shelter, clothing, clean water, healthcare, education, and equal access to opportunities. If it were, you would find that the cost of content really would approach $0. If, for example, artists did not have to worry about any of the previously mentioned necessities (if it was just given to them), then most of them would probably be perfectly happy to continue to produce content for free and without advertising. I know, as a software developer and entrepreneur, that I personally would be happy to not charge anything for any software that I create (or charge very little), if these basics were taken care of. As more people continue to lose their jobs to robots and automation, we will (if we can avoid destroying ourselves), move in that direction.

itistoday2 12y ago
I'd be interested to know what the Internet is like for folks in countries like Sweden where welfare systems are far more capable. For example, do Swedish websites also rely heavily on advertising? How does the economy of Swedish content (in Swedish markets) compare to American content in America? BTW: I should be clear that I am not advocating any particular type of welfare system. It does not even have to be government managed. The important thing is that a system exist to free people's minds from the mundane details of basic survival.
- nl 12y ago
  The profit motive exists just as much in Sweden as in the US. Welfare acts as a safety net for individuals, not companies.
  - digi_owl 12y ago

curiouscats 12y ago

His point is valid. If you rely on something that causes people harm that must be factored in when they seek to minimize their risk. I don't use ad blockers because I generally support your position. I do block flash because it is so annoying and especially noisy ads and downloading video I didn't ask for on my limited bandwidth. It seems to me it isn't 100% either way. There is an issue of being a free-riding meanie when you block ads those providing content rely on for income. There is also an issue of sites being overly obnoxious in their serving of ads. The users right to control their computer makes sense. The risk of privacy violations and serving malware are real and impact the ability to claim blocking ads is fair. Those that believe in blocking ads mainly don't believe it is ok for some ISP or others to replace website ads with their own ads. This is normally based on the idea they don't have the right to change web content clients request and this argument largely relies on the same idea those that say ad blockers are wrong rely on. It is true there is space between these arguments to slip in the claim that while others don't have the right to eliminate the web content and replace it with their own the end user does. This is a reasonable argument, but it is not, IMO, without a reasonable counter-argument (that those providing the web content are doing so with the ads as part of their offer). I don't think ad blockers are immoral or unethical but I do think they are not 100% pure either. They are a reasonable thing to resort to given an understanding of the whole situation. But they do, it seems to me, take away an earned benefit from those providing content.

xai3luGi 12y ago
> I didn't ask for on my limited bandwidth. Your browser asked for it though. Maybe fix you browser so it isn't doing things you don't like? Of course with HTTP/2, websites will be able to send you stuff that even your browser didn't ask for.
- Forlien 12y ago
  Isn't fixing his browser exactly what curiouscats is doing by blocking flash?
- frankzinger 12y ago
  HTTP/2 makes provision for the rejection of pushed resources.

BrainInAJar 12y ago

So find a better business model. If it's not paywalls, and it's not ads, figure it out.

eropple 12y ago
If you want to smarm about a better business model, I invite you to find it yourself. It's much easier to perform that smarm than find one, but I guess if you have to rationalize free ridership it's a good line. And it means you don't have to come to grips with the idea that it's a social problem instead of a free-market-hallowed-be-thy-name problem; it does mean you can mostly wave away that the money needs to come from somewhere and every scalable option involves advertising that free-riders block, native advertising that compromises the integrity of the work (if it's applicable at all), or requiring payment that readers won't pony up for. (Yes, really, every option, you're welcome to bookmark this post and cheetodust about it if one ever comes to fruition but I am comfortable betting my side of the line.) Fixing the country, though, is ssssocialism, and we can't have that. Instead people who entertain us should beg for scraps, I suppose. That's sustainable.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- comex 12y ago
  I claim that part of it at least is a technical problem. No, really. Compare user payment habits on desktops/websites versus mobile devices. Sure, there are the issues that users have become attuned to $1 apps, that many are incredibly reluctant to pony up even that, etc. etc. But at least some users pay $1, because it only requires a few taps and the purchase is associated with their existing $devicevendor account; good luck getting that to happen on the web, where not everyone has PayPal (to which the most common alternative is pulling out a physical wallet and filling in a long list of text boxes) and you need to make your own account system. What would the web be like if micropayments had actually become a thing?

trimbo 12y ago

> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today Then how come, every time I pay for content, that content still has ads? The paywalled newspaper sites I frequent do this. Or, notice how they do this in every movie theater in America now -- you can't sit there in peace before a movie. Instead, before the trailers start, you're subjected to a barrage of loud ads. Even on the March Madness app -- I've logged in with my Comcast credentials, they are going to show me the regular TV ads, and yet they make me miss live game action to show me ads specific to the app! And they do this every time you leave the app and come back. Every place that an ad can be placed, it will eventually be placed, in every medium and whether a consumer paid for that content or not. Throwing ads in our face is so widely abused that I'm completely unsurprised that adblockers are mainstream and still growing. Our web browser is one of the few places we still have control.

deciplex 12y ago
It's a combination of "the ads subsidize the production of the content somewhat i.e. you aren't paying the full price" and "everyone is desensitized to ads now anyway so we might at well show them in every place we can possibly get away with it". FWIW I think it's mostly the latter (e: was thinking specifically of cinema when I wrote this - nl is right it depends on the medium).
- nl 12y ago
  It's actually mostly the former. Not sure about movie theatres but for example printed newspaper costs are usually not even covered by the price of the newspaper. The ads is where the money is.
Potando 12y ago
The newspaper used to cost $1 (each! every day!) and it was full of ads. Probably about as much percentage of area as a typical news site today. There must be a balance between "no payment" and "no ads" - the optimum profit doesn't necessarily happen at one of the extremes. Do you think you'd choose a higher priced subscription if it offered no ads?

na85 12y ago

>It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code snippets needed to display ads or track you (not withstanding those terrible ad injector add-ons). Facebook tracks me and builds a shadow profile whether I use their shitty site or not. >In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. And yet if I pay for something, it invariably still shoves ads at me. Paying TV subscribers have to watch commercials. If I pay a subscription to the Economist I still see ads in print and online. >Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content Content isn't worth as much these days. >When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that. And that's why I love ad blockers. I don't want anyone to get money for forcing me to watch ads I don't want.

felipeerias 12y ago

In most cases, a website will not get paid unless the visitor actually clicks on the ad (or carries out the action that the ad points to). In those cases, using Adblock and simply ignoring the ads would produce the same amount of revenue for the site: zero. The problem here is that the trade-off is not "I tell you a story and you see this ad in return". The real trade-off is "I tell you a story and you have to allow these other shady companies to track you and run their code on your computer". Ads demand too much in terms of attention, performance, privacy and security.