7 ms·

Internet users are increasingly blocking ads, including on their mobiles

63 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

mikhailt 11y ago
> Websites’ use of ever more in-your-face advertising formats (videos that play automatically, pop-ups that obscure the text you are trying to read) have driven ever more people to seek ways to block them. Younger consumers seem especially intolerant of intrusive ads, and as they get older, overall ad-blocking rates are bound to rise further, predicts Peter Stabler of Wells Fargo Securities, one of the authors of a recent report on the phenomenon. Yep. Stop the "in your face" ads, stop the tracking, and people are less likely to block the ads and the tracking. It is really simple as that. I despite all ads that start playing videos, gif animations, etc. It distracts me from being able to read the article. I'm okay with Google Ads, it's purely text and not annoying. But the only reason I block it is because of the tracking. It scares the shit out of me when I saw something related to what I was doing on a completely different site on a different day. Fuck that.
- swang 11y ago
  Ads that you don't pay attention to are useless to the advertisers so they won't stop doing intrusive ads
  - kentt 11y ago
    You can't seriously be saying that Google's text ads don't work? What are you getting at. I think the parent wants a reasonable balance between effective ads and ads that don't degrade the content by being obtrusive.
  - Nadya 11y ago
    Advertisements are useless to advertisers if I refuse to buy their products based entirely on the fact that I've seen an ad for their product. So the jokes on them. I keep a spreadsheet where I add products/brands that have somehow snuck past my adblocker. I avoid buying from them altogether and will look for similar or offbrands. I do have a few exceptions to this rule. If enough of my friends/coworkers can testify on the products behalf, I may purchase it because it seems to be a good product. If I already have purchased the product in the past and enjoy it and later see it in an advertisement - I already know I like and buy the stuff so it doesn't get added. Imagine how fewer advertisements you'd see if more people kept a personal blacklist? :) "But how will you hear about _____"? The same way anyone eventually hears about any great product: word of mouth.
    - manigandham 11y ago
      You are absolutely not the norm. Ads do work and the data for decades has proven it. Many people do benefit from eventually finding and buying products/services that they want/need.
      - 6d0debc071 11y ago
        > Ads do work and the data for decades has proven it. Many people do benefit from eventually finding and buying products/services that they want/need. Rather nebulous claim. And it's not clear that the second sentence is even talking about the same thing as the first.
        manigandham 11y ago
        The reason there's so much spending on digital ads is because its returns so many accurate metrics on how the ads are being seen and interacted with. If you're referring to whether people respond to ads, that's also been proven by hundreds of studies and the entire advertising industry. It's pretty easy to quantify sales before and after something as simple as a billboard to show that there's an increase. Nielsen alone has done lots of in-depth scientific analysis on this. This industry is pretty advanced and uses lots of science and data, contrary to what you might imagine. What is wrong with the 2nd sentence? Lots of people find what they're looking for through ads. They dont just have to be digital, simple things like coupons in newspapers still have massive reach and sales ROI. There's nothing wrong with it.
        Nadya 11y ago
        This is a larger issue with how easily impressionable people are. They are largely influenced by advertisements - even the people who deny that ads have any affect on them to purchase products they've seen in ads (can't remember where the study was done). It works because of all the wrong reasons, in my opinion. Which is why I go so far out of my way to avoid purchasing things from ads.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    I do pay attention to low-profile ads. And I feel well-disposed towards those advertisers, whereas intrusive advertisers go on my mental blacklist and I select against their offerings when I go shopping.
    - seanp2k2 11y ago
      Anyone know of any studies on the effects of ad overload / negative associations with brands / products which are heavily advertised? There seems to be a line beyond which advertising more heavily does more harm than good (that's my theory, anyway).
- manigandham 11y ago
  Why is it scary? People always want more relevant ads... then say they dont like it when they get them. What exactly would be the better option?
  - dec0dedab0de 11y ago
    Personally I want ads relevant to whatever content I am consuming, not relevant to my prior browsing habits.
- wlkr 11y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree and I'm sure others do, too. There are many sites which I have on my whitelist but tracking and the risk of malware causes me to maintain a whitelist as opposed to a blacklist. The reaction from many websites is often to either more aggressively target those without ad-blockers - thus leading more people to turn to ad-blocking, or to switch revenue models - a risky and IMO often necessary step. Eventually the pool of people who aren't blocking ads will be a deeply suboptimal demographic - as noted in the article the majority of people who use ad-blockers are at least somewhat tech savvy, fairly heavy internet users, one of the prime targets for advertising online. I haven't thought a great deal about this but it's very interesting to consider that through increased use of such software, perhaps end users can truly take control of how they are treated. There is absolutely no reason why advertising should cease to be a successful revenue stream but changes are undoubtedly needed to guarantee it into the future. FWIW, websites which I visit frequently that are transparent about their tailored advertising and sponsorships gain much more trust and respect from me.
- hrehhf 11y ago
  To monetize a website can anyone recommend decent advertisers that don't track viewers and aren't a nuisance? Perhaps like Google Ads but without the tracking?
- alexqgb 11y ago
  The thing to remember is that the Internet was never designed as a commercial, ad-friendly place. As many of its architects have noted, it would look very different if it were. That means trying to build an ad-supported business in a place that is - if not hostile - than at least fundamentally indifferent to the needs of ad-supported content producers was always going to be a tough row to hoe. If you succeed, well good for you. If not, don't feel too bad - the cards were stacked against you from the outset. In either case, the most important thing to remember is that Internet does not owe you a living. Nor does it owe advertisers an easy and easily controlled environment in which to operate. It has purposes that are significantly higher and deeper than hustling cheap, fast content while trying to make quick buck by selling your audience's personal details to fly-by-night ad networks. Not everyone operates like this, of course. Google, Facebook, and BuzzFeed are all examples of places with far cleaner models. All they sell is access. None of them make information available to others. Indeed, they all guard what they know very jealously. And Google aside, they haven't been vectors for piracy. But on balance, the Internet has been pretty terrible for people who work in the content industries, and the new media industries - in partnership with advertisers - have been pretty terrible for the Internet. You really need to go outside of this mutually debilitating flustercluck to find the truly awesome and wonderful things that the Internet makes possible. And many of these are things around which very good businesses can be built. For genuinely daring and visionary people, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. Here's what's not visionary, or helpful, or beneficial to humanity: trying to turn the Internet into a cheaper, faster, dirtier, amalgamation of print and broadcast media, only with much crappier advertising and a large helping of surveillance and malware thrown in. You're not saving the world with that crap. Indeed, you're the bad money that drives out the good, and the sooner your business model collapses, the better off the world will be. AdBlock on.
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  > Yep. Stop the "in your face" ads, stop the tracking, and people are less likely to block the ads and the tracking. It is really simple as that. I think it's too late. Ads have an irreparable PR problem. As soon as users find out about the existence of Ad Blocking, they will simply enable it and never look back because they've been burnt by deceptive and intrusive advertising for far too long on the internet. Whitelists, exceptions, even the very act of even thinking about turning off their Ad Blockers, are things that only principled, technical users will ever bother with, and we all know they represent a mere rounding error on the total internet population. It will probably be a more fruitful effort to start exploring other alternative methods of monetization than to try to make Ads work again.
sgnelson 11y ago
Once the advertisers pay for the bandwidth they use on my mobile plan, they can send me ads.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  That's a funny thought, I wonder if in the case of mobile, the ad revenue is lower than your data cost. In which case micropayments for the content would be less aggravating and cheaper.
- citricsquid 11y ago
  Doesn't this argument work both ways: "Once the visitors pay for the bandwidth they use accessing my websites, they can visit without adverts"? And if so, isn't the solution that if you're not happy with advertisements using your bandwidth (but you don't or can't pay to opt out of advertisements) then you should just not visit websites with advertisements? Seems like a fair compromise.
  - xg15 11y ago
    Disregarding the other obvious problems with this idea, how do you get to know whether or not a site serves ads without visiting it?
wnevets 11y ago
One of the things that made google's ad network successful in my opinion was the fact they're text based and were obviously ads. I've never had a reason to block em and its the main reason I don't get upset when people complain about adblock plus's whitelist. I wish more advertisers would follow in google's footsteps, the full screen video ads are reminding me of the days leading up to the .com bubble burst.
- duskwuff 11y ago
  They were text-based, that is. AdSense seems to almost alway ends up placing graphical ads now, though...
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Absolutely. I run adblock, and HTTP Switchboard but I am absolutely OK with Google's ads (and actually, Facebook sponsored posts as well) because they're consistently framed as ads and they don't impose a big cognitive load. I even click on them sometimes, and even make purchases sometimes! If you tell me your commercial message politely, well, I may or may not be interested but I don't mind. But if You engage in the visual equivalent of shouting with eye-catching designs, animation, faux-interactivity and so on - then I will tune you out. I guess advertisers use these techniques because they work on enough people to be profitable, so they don't care about the sales they lose by irritating people like myself to the point of being blocked. But I don't think they're doing their clients any favors. The one thing from Google that I do block is advertising on YouTube. Just give it up and try something else already - why would I want to import everything that sucks about television/radio advertising?
  - diminish 11y ago
    As an advertiser and publisher I resisted ad blockers for a long time and YouTube ads drove me so crazy that I had to install them feel finally.. So the guy who converted YouTube to a TV channel coated Google and all the publishers a huge sum.
  - minthd 11y ago
    >> Just give it up and try something else already - why would I want to import everything that sucks about television/radio advertising? I think they are trying payment based schemes. But for people who prefer not to pay - what is there other than ads and freemium[1] ? [1]that's usually exchanging user advertising versus free service - but Google doesn't need advertising.
bitwize 11y ago
Well no shit, sherlock. When ad networks decide that mobiles are a fucking free-for-all and I get un-back-out-able popups like I'm on some warez or porn site, fuck yeah I'm gonna block that shit!
- ivanca 11y ago
  The worst is when they hack the browser history, so when you click back 20 times and you still see ads
reader5000 11y ago
I disabled ad blocking recently and websites that normally load lightning quick would not even load or would lag tremendously. I don't know why nobody can figure out a workable, voluntary microtransactions model. If you like a piece of content instead of (or in addition to) upvoting or "liking" or retweeting, you send a few pennies to the content creator. The model now is simply people not savvy enough to install ad blocking subsidizing content consumption of everybody else. That is probably not stable.
- RhodesianHunter 11y ago
  "people not savvy enough" Or people who are plenty savvy, but simply don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...
  - tombrossman 11y ago
    Watching ads isn't contributing to content creators. That ad money didn't materialize from nowhere, that's a percentage of revenue being diverted to the ad company. Bought Product X? See that Product X ad? You helped pay for it. You could make a strong argument that ad networks are parasitic drag on the economy, but that would probably be dismissed as crazy talk.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    "Destroy your Internet economy with this one weird old tip..." >don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume... The current ad economy favours clickbait over original content. Paradoxically, there's a lot more original content than there used to be in the days of print. But that's down to Wordpress and the low cost of entry to web publishing, and not so much because there's an infinite number of content monkeys trying to monetise an infinite number of articles of the Twenty Things About Hacker News You Just Won't Believe kind.
  - michaelchisari 11y ago
    I wouldn't mind ads so much if I had an easy way to pay $0.05 to get rid of them for a day, or $0.50 to get rid of them for a month. As far as I can tell, that's way more money on a per user basis than companies are making on selling ads.
746F7475 11y ago
I'd be more than willing to be excluded from sites that have ads on them. Give me a browser extension that completely blocks all sites that don't want me to visit since I'll be blocking their ads.
- a3n 11y ago
  Eye block, blocks user that use ad block.
axanoeychron 11y ago
I hate adverts. My problem with adverts is that they are not information, they are selective truths or downright lies. I cannot trust adverts.
- avmich 11y ago
  Indeed. Roughly, the whole idea of free market economy, a.k.a. capitalism, is based on theory of rational behavior of participants - and also on assumption of complete information about the matters which are being decided. Advertisements heavily change that last assumption (lies, selective omissions or inclusions), so much that the whole system doesn't work as expected. Game-theoretically, everybody incentivized to advertise his goods, while together we make market working worse for everyone - conflicting goals. I wonder if there are theories modelling this state of things.
  - adventured 11y ago
    Free market theory is not built on complete information, perfect behavior, strict reason, et al. Quite the opposite in fact. It allows for and can easily withstand significant irrationality among participants, while still producing vastly superior outcomes. The 19th century in the US more than proved that fact; by ~1910 the US was embarrassing every major economy of Europe in terms of median incomes, growth, wealth production, etc. The free market results in an economy with far greater flexibility across the board. It can absorb shocks from irrational behavior better than any other system. The more distance you get from the free market, the harsher the penalties for irrationality: just ask all the Socialist, Communist, and Fascist systems of the 20th century. The free market system has no opinion on the behavior of individuals, that's a relationship that exists among people and not with the system itself. In actuality there is no "free market" that you're interacting with, such that it punishes you for being irrational, there are only other people with economic interests of some sort that may take advantage of your irrationality. Reputation is the answer to your last issue with the free market, regarding both advertising and complete information. Nearly every economic structure in any market system depends on reputation, and even more so in the free market. The free market doesn't require instant or perfect information, or expect participants to possess such god-like powers - the free market runs on eventual consistency, eventual recognition of reputation. Over time customers will come to know you as either honest, or dishonest, and they will vote with their money depending on the grievance. Try running a typical business in a free market, lie to your customers non-stop, over-charge them compared to what you advertise, and see what happens to you. Your reputation will destroy you over time. This happens every day to businesses of every size in every city in America.
lorenzhs 11y ago
I think this misses an important aspect from an InfoSec perspective. Ad networks are very lucrative targets for spreading malware, and examples of malware being distributed via ad networks are abundant ("malvertising"). For companies (and individuals aware of the risk), ad blocking is an important security measure.
seba_dos1 11y ago
I think this article by Douglas Adams from 1998 is in hindsight very inspiring on this matter: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-05-a.html http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-05-a.html The industry simply disregarded the opportunity Adams recognized and just moved what we all hate from paper media to the Internet. However, in the Internet we have a tools we can use to defend ourselves. It's really no wonder that we, users, increasingly reach for them and it's only a stupidity (and/or greediness) of ad companies that prevented them from predicting that.
- icebraining 11y ago
  I don't see why we should assume they haven't predicted it. Web advertising was and continues to be a billion dollar business, and until ad blocking usage grows enough to kill it, people will continue to sell ads, even if they expect it to end eventually.
oconnore 11y ago
I mostly block for the tracking. In theory, a google text ad doesn't bother me so much. But since my profile, built up from analytics-- fonts-- jquery-- recaptcha, and so on, is being sold to the highest bidder, I block everything I can.
SwellJoe 11y ago
I only installed Adblock about a year ago, after years of resistance. I'm happy to support the sites I visit regularly...but, when the trust I put in those sites is betrayed repeatedly with intrusive, disruptive and distracting ads, I get tired of it, and lose any sense of loyalty. If your site plays an ad with sound enabled on load you're no longer worth any concern from me. I whitelist pages I trust not to be abusive (reddit mostly). But, otherwise I don't care to serve an abusers interests any longer. If a site doesn't respect basic decency with their ads, I will impose that decency on them with an ad block tool.
- euroclydon 11y ago
  You should just stop visiting the site instead. Your still taking their content, but it sounds like what's really not of any concern to you, is their monetization strategy.
  - rhizome 11y ago
    Love the sinner, hate the sin.
  - weland 11y ago
    Or, you know, keep visiting the site until they switch to making money in a way that is not annoying. And it's not just the sounds and the graphics and the non-obvious placement and framing. It's the bloody tracking as well. If they want to play dirty to make money off my ass, I can play dirty, too. "Monetization strategy" makes it sound good. It's not. If it's so bloody disgusting, it's a ripoff, not a business done in good faith. It deserves about as much respect as a scam.
    - manigandham 11y ago
      You don't think paywalls are annoying? Because that's the only other model.
      - RogerL 11y ago
Animats 11y ago
The interesting item in that article is that in 2013, "Free", the French mobile service, did ad-blocking by default. Not in the article: AdBlock's company is coming out with an IOS browser with integral ad-blocking. That's something worth doing in the GNU fork of Firefox. From within the browser, you can do ad blocking and pop-up blocking more successfully. Add-ons currently do it as an after-the-fact change to the DOM. With better browser support. As ad-blocking becomes more widely used, we may see a decline in clickbait sites. No loss there.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
I wish there was something to block or at least flag all the advertisements masquerading as articles.
rhino369 11y ago
How do I block ads on ios?
nickysielicki 11y ago
I would bet that all the marketing and ad departments have seen this coming for a very long time. Considering that, it's absolutely no surprise that native advertising is becoming so popular on platforms targeting the 18-36yo demographic. This is where Snapchat hopes to start making big money. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Reddit is cashing in on this already. As much as we hate waiting 5 whole seconds before a YouTube video, I think it's much less sinister than having brands shoved into your subconscious. But this is the internet we've created. I think that we'll solve it with time. I'm still not apologizing for using my adblocker.
jtwebman 11y ago
We will just see more and more native style ads. If the ad is coming from the same location as the site, it will be really hard for ad blockers to block them.
- anonymousab 11y ago
  If it's not dynamically generated, it can be blocked.
Ameo 11y ago
I will never use adblock for the reason that I'm a content creator myself; it's so very difficult to make money off of things online and pay for things like server costs. I think ads are very important for keeping the internet free like it is now.
- dublinben 11y ago
  The internet was free for a long time before pervasive advertising.
manigandham 11y ago
This conversation keeps coming back and I'm not sure there's ever anything new to say. I'm just going to summarize this the way I see it: 1) There are only two viable business models for digital publishers - free content with ads, or paid access. Yes some can survive on donations and ecommerce, but those are exceptions. Direct paid models also only work for some very large and high quality publishers, the long-tail of great small sites only exists because of ads. 2) The main reasons of adblocking usually are performance, security and privacy. Performance is a given, loading less means loading faster. Security is definitely a problem along with privacy, but mostly because this is a global industry that has largely gone without any real regulation. Things are slowly changing but a few bad actors have ruined a lot of trust by coming up with increasingly intrusive formats and allowing malware on their networks from shady advertisers. 3) Blocking ads absolutely does hurt publishers. It's not fair nor "right". It might not be illegal but just because it's easy to do doesn't condone the usage. Lots of sites have terms of service where they explicitly state the content is available in exchange for the ads. The fair choice would be to not visit the site if you don't find the ads acceptable, a choice that has always existed. By visiting with adblock, you are showing that you find value in the content but don't want the publisher to recoup the costs of production. 4) Going forward, advertisers are getting better with less intrusive formats and better security. Regulation is also finally appearing along with things like fraud and viewability tracking. This should all help, but it's a long road. The other option is micropayments but this isnt as easy to solve (needs massive scale, partnerships with sites, perhaps ISP help, etc). Overall: ads work, it's a giant industry, adblocking does improve performance, security and privacy but costs the publisher and does endanger the wider web of original content. I don't agree with using adblock but I do consider the reasons valid and that its at least pushing for a better industry (and perhaps future model). Edit: Downvoters, what exactly is the issue? Interesting that anyone advocating that adblockers aren't an absolute good thing gets dismissed here on HN.
- dsr_ 11y ago
  I suspect you are being downvoted because you are not arguing very well. "There are only two viable business models" - and then you admit a third, and a fourth, and claim that they are exceptions. There can't possibly be a fifth? There can't be a sixth that someone will invent next year and become the dominant mode of funding digital publishing? You claim a moral right for web sites to show you ads, but no equivalent moral right for people to use programs to ignore the ads. That's inconsistent, and also morally abhorrent to many people. Finally, you say that you "don't agree with using adblock but I do consider the reasons valid" -- that appears to be another inconsistency. If ad blocking is immoral, there can't be any reasoning which will overwhelm your moral objections. Perhaps you are using the word "moral" in an unusual fashion?
b3lvedere 11y ago
I will try and block every piece of network traffic i don't want on my devices, including ads.
snake117 11y ago
I think one of the worst advertisements is the Bank of America ads played before any video on the BBC app. It's always that one German lady singing "Dankeshon"...very annoying.

63 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

> Websites’ use of ever more in-your-face advertising formats (videos that play automatically, pop-ups that obscure the text you are trying to read) have driven ever more people to seek ways to block them. Younger consumers seem especially intolerant of intrusive ads, and as they get older, overall ad-blocking rates are bound to rise further, predicts Peter Stabler of Wells Fargo Securities, one of the authors of a recent report on the phenomenon. Yep. Stop the "in your face" ads, stop the tracking, and people are less likely to block the ads and the tracking. It is really simple as that. I despite all ads that start playing videos, gif animations, etc. It distracts me from being able to read the article. I'm okay with Google Ads, it's purely text and not annoying. But the only reason I block it is because of the tracking. It scares the shit out of me when I saw something related to what I was doing on a completely different site on a different day. Fuck that.

swang 11y ago
Ads that you don't pay attention to are useless to the advertisers so they won't stop doing intrusive ads
- kentt 11y ago
  You can't seriously be saying that Google's text ads don't work? What are you getting at. I think the parent wants a reasonable balance between effective ads and ads that don't degrade the content by being obtrusive.
- Nadya 11y ago
  Advertisements are useless to advertisers if I refuse to buy their products based entirely on the fact that I've seen an ad for their product. So the jokes on them. I keep a spreadsheet where I add products/brands that have somehow snuck past my adblocker. I avoid buying from them altogether and will look for similar or offbrands. I do have a few exceptions to this rule. If enough of my friends/coworkers can testify on the products behalf, I may purchase it because it seems to be a good product. If I already have purchased the product in the past and enjoy it and later see it in an advertisement - I already know I like and buy the stuff so it doesn't get added. Imagine how fewer advertisements you'd see if more people kept a personal blacklist? :) "But how will you hear about _____"? The same way anyone eventually hears about any great product: word of mouth.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    You are absolutely not the norm. Ads do work and the data for decades has proven it. Many people do benefit from eventually finding and buying products/services that they want/need.
    - 6d0debc071 11y ago
      > Ads do work and the data for decades has proven it. Many people do benefit from eventually finding and buying products/services that they want/need. Rather nebulous claim. And it's not clear that the second sentence is even talking about the same thing as the first.
      - manigandham 11y ago
        The reason there's so much spending on digital ads is because its returns so many accurate metrics on how the ads are being seen and interacted with. If you're referring to whether people respond to ads, that's also been proven by hundreds of studies and the entire advertising industry. It's pretty easy to quantify sales before and after something as simple as a billboard to show that there's an increase. Nielsen alone has done lots of in-depth scientific analysis on this. This industry is pretty advanced and uses lots of science and data, contrary to what you might imagine. What is wrong with the 2nd sentence? Lots of people find what they're looking for through ads. They dont just have to be digital, simple things like coupons in newspapers still have massive reach and sales ROI. There's nothing wrong with it.
        Nadya 11y ago
        This is a larger issue with how easily impressionable people are. They are largely influenced by advertisements - even the people who deny that ads have any affect on them to purchase products they've seen in ads (can't remember where the study was done). It works because of all the wrong reasons, in my opinion. Which is why I go so far out of my way to avoid purchasing things from ads.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  I do pay attention to low-profile ads. And I feel well-disposed towards those advertisers, whereas intrusive advertisers go on my mental blacklist and I select against their offerings when I go shopping.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Anyone know of any studies on the effects of ad overload / negative associations with brands / products which are heavily advertised? There seems to be a line beyond which advertising more heavily does more harm than good (that's my theory, anyway).
manigandham 11y ago
Why is it scary? People always want more relevant ads... then say they dont like it when they get them. What exactly would be the better option?
- dec0dedab0de 11y ago
  Personally I want ads relevant to whatever content I am consuming, not relevant to my prior browsing habits.
wlkr 11y ago
I wholeheartedly agree and I'm sure others do, too. There are many sites which I have on my whitelist but tracking and the risk of malware causes me to maintain a whitelist as opposed to a blacklist. The reaction from many websites is often to either more aggressively target those without ad-blockers - thus leading more people to turn to ad-blocking, or to switch revenue models - a risky and IMO often necessary step. Eventually the pool of people who aren't blocking ads will be a deeply suboptimal demographic - as noted in the article the majority of people who use ad-blockers are at least somewhat tech savvy, fairly heavy internet users, one of the prime targets for advertising online. I haven't thought a great deal about this but it's very interesting to consider that through increased use of such software, perhaps end users can truly take control of how they are treated. There is absolutely no reason why advertising should cease to be a successful revenue stream but changes are undoubtedly needed to guarantee it into the future. FWIW, websites which I visit frequently that are transparent about their tailored advertising and sponsorships gain much more trust and respect from me.
hrehhf 11y ago
To monetize a website can anyone recommend decent advertisers that don't track viewers and aren't a nuisance? Perhaps like Google Ads but without the tracking?
alexqgb 11y ago
The thing to remember is that the Internet was never designed as a commercial, ad-friendly place. As many of its architects have noted, it would look very different if it were. That means trying to build an ad-supported business in a place that is - if not hostile - than at least fundamentally indifferent to the needs of ad-supported content producers was always going to be a tough row to hoe. If you succeed, well good for you. If not, don't feel too bad - the cards were stacked against you from the outset. In either case, the most important thing to remember is that Internet does not owe you a living. Nor does it owe advertisers an easy and easily controlled environment in which to operate. It has purposes that are significantly higher and deeper than hustling cheap, fast content while trying to make quick buck by selling your audience's personal details to fly-by-night ad networks. Not everyone operates like this, of course. Google, Facebook, and BuzzFeed are all examples of places with far cleaner models. All they sell is access. None of them make information available to others. Indeed, they all guard what they know very jealously. And Google aside, they haven't been vectors for piracy. But on balance, the Internet has been pretty terrible for people who work in the content industries, and the new media industries - in partnership with advertisers - have been pretty terrible for the Internet. You really need to go outside of this mutually debilitating flustercluck to find the truly awesome and wonderful things that the Internet makes possible. And many of these are things around which very good businesses can be built. For genuinely daring and visionary people, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. Here's what's not visionary, or helpful, or beneficial to humanity: trying to turn the Internet into a cheaper, faster, dirtier, amalgamation of print and broadcast media, only with much crappier advertising and a large helping of surveillance and malware thrown in. You're not saving the world with that crap. Indeed, you're the bad money that drives out the good, and the sooner your business model collapses, the better off the world will be. AdBlock on.
lewisl9029 11y ago
> Yep. Stop the "in your face" ads, stop the tracking, and people are less likely to block the ads and the tracking. It is really simple as that. I think it's too late. Ads have an irreparable PR problem. As soon as users find out about the existence of Ad Blocking, they will simply enable it and never look back because they've been burnt by deceptive and intrusive advertising for far too long on the internet. Whitelists, exceptions, even the very act of even thinking about turning off their Ad Blockers, are things that only principled, technical users will ever bother with, and we all know they represent a mere rounding error on the total internet population. It will probably be a more fruitful effort to start exploring other alternative methods of monetization than to try to make Ads work again.

sgnelson 11y ago

Once the advertisers pay for the bandwidth they use on my mobile plan, they can send me ads.

sliverstorm 11y ago
That's a funny thought, I wonder if in the case of mobile, the ad revenue is lower than your data cost. In which case micropayments for the content would be less aggravating and cheaper.
citricsquid 11y ago
Doesn't this argument work both ways: "Once the visitors pay for the bandwidth they use accessing my websites, they can visit without adverts"? And if so, isn't the solution that if you're not happy with advertisements using your bandwidth (but you don't or can't pay to opt out of advertisements) then you should just not visit websites with advertisements? Seems like a fair compromise.
- xg15 11y ago
  Disregarding the other obvious problems with this idea, how do you get to know whether or not a site serves ads without visiting it?

wnevets 11y ago

One of the things that made google's ad network successful in my opinion was the fact they're text based and were obviously ads. I've never had a reason to block em and its the main reason I don't get upset when people complain about adblock plus's whitelist. I wish more advertisers would follow in google's footsteps, the full screen video ads are reminding me of the days leading up to the .com bubble burst.

duskwuff 11y ago
They were text-based, that is. AdSense seems to almost alway ends up placing graphical ads now, though...
anigbrowl 11y ago
Absolutely. I run adblock, and HTTP Switchboard but I am absolutely OK with Google's ads (and actually, Facebook sponsored posts as well) because they're consistently framed as ads and they don't impose a big cognitive load. I even click on them sometimes, and even make purchases sometimes! If you tell me your commercial message politely, well, I may or may not be interested but I don't mind. But if You engage in the visual equivalent of shouting with eye-catching designs, animation, faux-interactivity and so on - then I will tune you out. I guess advertisers use these techniques because they work on enough people to be profitable, so they don't care about the sales they lose by irritating people like myself to the point of being blocked. But I don't think they're doing their clients any favors. The one thing from Google that I do block is advertising on YouTube. Just give it up and try something else already - why would I want to import everything that sucks about television/radio advertising?
- diminish 11y ago
  As an advertiser and publisher I resisted ad blockers for a long time and YouTube ads drove me so crazy that I had to install them feel finally.. So the guy who converted YouTube to a TV channel coated Google and all the publishers a huge sum.
- minthd 11y ago
  >> Just give it up and try something else already - why would I want to import everything that sucks about television/radio advertising? I think they are trying payment based schemes. But for people who prefer not to pay - what is there other than ads and freemium[1] ? [1]that's usually exchanging user advertising versus free service - but Google doesn't need advertising.

bitwize 11y ago

Well no shit, sherlock. When ad networks decide that mobiles are a fucking free-for-all and I get un-back-out-able popups like I'm on some warez or porn site, fuck yeah I'm gonna block that shit!

ivanca 11y ago
The worst is when they hack the browser history, so when you click back 20 times and you still see ads

reader5000 11y ago

I disabled ad blocking recently and websites that normally load lightning quick would not even load or would lag tremendously. I don't know why nobody can figure out a workable, voluntary microtransactions model. If you like a piece of content instead of (or in addition to) upvoting or "liking" or retweeting, you send a few pennies to the content creator. The model now is simply people not savvy enough to install ad blocking subsidizing content consumption of everybody else. That is probably not stable.

RhodesianHunter 11y ago
"people not savvy enough" Or people who are plenty savvy, but simply don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...
- tombrossman 11y ago
  Watching ads isn't contributing to content creators. That ad money didn't materialize from nowhere, that's a percentage of revenue being diverted to the ad company. Bought Product X? See that Product X ad? You helped pay for it. You could make a strong argument that ad networks are parasitic drag on the economy, but that would probably be dismissed as crazy talk.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  "Destroy your Internet economy with this one weird old tip..." >don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume... The current ad economy favours clickbait over original content. Paradoxically, there's a lot more original content than there used to be in the days of print. But that's down to Wordpress and the low cost of entry to web publishing, and not so much because there's an infinite number of content monkeys trying to monetise an infinite number of articles of the Twenty Things About Hacker News You Just Won't Believe kind.
- michaelchisari 11y ago
  I wouldn't mind ads so much if I had an easy way to pay $0.05 to get rid of them for a day, or $0.50 to get rid of them for a month. As far as I can tell, that's way more money on a per user basis than companies are making on selling ads.

746F7475 11y ago

I'd be more than willing to be excluded from sites that have ads on them. Give me a browser extension that completely blocks all sites that don't want me to visit since I'll be blocking their ads.

a3n 11y ago
Eye block, blocks user that use ad block.

axanoeychron 11y ago

I hate adverts. My problem with adverts is that they are not information, they are selective truths or downright lies. I cannot trust adverts.

avmich 11y ago
Indeed. Roughly, the whole idea of free market economy, a.k.a. capitalism, is based on theory of rational behavior of participants - and also on assumption of complete information about the matters which are being decided. Advertisements heavily change that last assumption (lies, selective omissions or inclusions), so much that the whole system doesn't work as expected. Game-theoretically, everybody incentivized to advertise his goods, while together we make market working worse for everyone - conflicting goals. I wonder if there are theories modelling this state of things.
- adventured 11y ago
  Free market theory is not built on complete information, perfect behavior, strict reason, et al. Quite the opposite in fact. It allows for and can easily withstand significant irrationality among participants, while still producing vastly superior outcomes. The 19th century in the US more than proved that fact; by ~1910 the US was embarrassing every major economy of Europe in terms of median incomes, growth, wealth production, etc. The free market results in an economy with far greater flexibility across the board. It can absorb shocks from irrational behavior better than any other system. The more distance you get from the free market, the harsher the penalties for irrationality: just ask all the Socialist, Communist, and Fascist systems of the 20th century. The free market system has no opinion on the behavior of individuals, that's a relationship that exists among people and not with the system itself. In actuality there is no "free market" that you're interacting with, such that it punishes you for being irrational, there are only other people with economic interests of some sort that may take advantage of your irrationality. Reputation is the answer to your last issue with the free market, regarding both advertising and complete information. Nearly every economic structure in any market system depends on reputation, and even more so in the free market. The free market doesn't require instant or perfect information, or expect participants to possess such god-like powers - the free market runs on eventual consistency, eventual recognition of reputation. Over time customers will come to know you as either honest, or dishonest, and they will vote with their money depending on the grievance. Try running a typical business in a free market, lie to your customers non-stop, over-charge them compared to what you advertise, and see what happens to you. Your reputation will destroy you over time. This happens every day to businesses of every size in every city in America.

lorenzhs 11y ago

I think this misses an important aspect from an InfoSec perspective. Ad networks are very lucrative targets for spreading malware, and examples of malware being distributed via ad networks are abundant ("malvertising"). For companies (and individuals aware of the risk), ad blocking is an important security measure.

seba_dos1 11y ago

I think this article by Douglas Adams from 1998 is in hindsight very inspiring on this matter: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-05-a.html http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-05-a.html The industry simply disregarded the opportunity Adams recognized and just moved what we all hate from paper media to the Internet. However, in the Internet we have a tools we can use to defend ourselves. It's really no wonder that we, users, increasingly reach for them and it's only a stupidity (and/or greediness) of ad companies that prevented them from predicting that.

icebraining 11y ago
I don't see why we should assume they haven't predicted it. Web advertising was and continues to be a billion dollar business, and until ad blocking usage grows enough to kill it, people will continue to sell ads, even if they expect it to end eventually.

oconnore 11y ago

I mostly block for the tracking. In theory, a google text ad doesn't bother me so much. But since my profile, built up from analytics-- fonts-- jquery-- recaptcha, and so on, is being sold to the highest bidder, I block everything I can.

SwellJoe 11y ago

I only installed Adblock about a year ago, after years of resistance. I'm happy to support the sites I visit regularly...but, when the trust I put in those sites is betrayed repeatedly with intrusive, disruptive and distracting ads, I get tired of it, and lose any sense of loyalty. If your site plays an ad with sound enabled on load you're no longer worth any concern from me. I whitelist pages I trust not to be abusive (reddit mostly). But, otherwise I don't care to serve an abusers interests any longer. If a site doesn't respect basic decency with their ads, I will impose that decency on them with an ad block tool.

euroclydon 11y ago
You should just stop visiting the site instead. Your still taking their content, but it sounds like what's really not of any concern to you, is their monetization strategy.
- rhizome 11y ago
  Love the sinner, hate the sin.
- weland 11y ago
  Or, you know, keep visiting the site until they switch to making money in a way that is not annoying. And it's not just the sounds and the graphics and the non-obvious placement and framing. It's the bloody tracking as well. If they want to play dirty to make money off my ass, I can play dirty, too. "Monetization strategy" makes it sound good. It's not. If it's so bloody disgusting, it's a ripoff, not a business done in good faith. It deserves about as much respect as a scam.
  - manigandham 11y ago
    You don't think paywalls are annoying? Because that's the only other model.
    - RogerL 11y ago

Animats 11y ago

The interesting item in that article is that in 2013, "Free", the French mobile service, did ad-blocking by default. Not in the article: AdBlock's company is coming out with an IOS browser with integral ad-blocking. That's something worth doing in the GNU fork of Firefox. From within the browser, you can do ad blocking and pop-up blocking more successfully. Add-ons currently do it as an after-the-fact change to the DOM. With better browser support. As ad-blocking becomes more widely used, we may see a decline in clickbait sites. No loss there.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

I wish there was something to block or at least flag all the advertisements masquerading as articles.

rhino369 11y ago

How do I block ads on ios?

nickysielicki 11y ago

I would bet that all the marketing and ad departments have seen this coming for a very long time. Considering that, it's absolutely no surprise that native advertising is becoming so popular on platforms targeting the 18-36yo demographic. This is where Snapchat hopes to start making big money. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Reddit is cashing in on this already. As much as we hate waiting 5 whole seconds before a YouTube video, I think it's much less sinister than having brands shoved into your subconscious. But this is the internet we've created. I think that we'll solve it with time. I'm still not apologizing for using my adblocker.

jtwebman 11y ago

We will just see more and more native style ads. If the ad is coming from the same location as the site, it will be really hard for ad blockers to block them.

anonymousab 11y ago
If it's not dynamically generated, it can be blocked.

Ameo 11y ago

I will never use adblock for the reason that I'm a content creator myself; it's so very difficult to make money off of things online and pay for things like server costs. I think ads are very important for keeping the internet free like it is now.

dublinben 11y ago
The internet was free for a long time before pervasive advertising.

manigandham 11y ago

This conversation keeps coming back and I'm not sure there's ever anything new to say. I'm just going to summarize this the way I see it: 1) There are only two viable business models for digital publishers - free content with ads, or paid access. Yes some can survive on donations and ecommerce, but those are exceptions. Direct paid models also only work for some very large and high quality publishers, the long-tail of great small sites only exists because of ads. 2) The main reasons of adblocking usually are performance, security and privacy. Performance is a given, loading less means loading faster. Security is definitely a problem along with privacy, but mostly because this is a global industry that has largely gone without any real regulation. Things are slowly changing but a few bad actors have ruined a lot of trust by coming up with increasingly intrusive formats and allowing malware on their networks from shady advertisers. 3) Blocking ads absolutely does hurt publishers. It's not fair nor "right". It might not be illegal but just because it's easy to do doesn't condone the usage. Lots of sites have terms of service where they explicitly state the content is available in exchange for the ads. The fair choice would be to not visit the site if you don't find the ads acceptable, a choice that has always existed. By visiting with adblock, you are showing that you find value in the content but don't want the publisher to recoup the costs of production. 4) Going forward, advertisers are getting better with less intrusive formats and better security. Regulation is also finally appearing along with things like fraud and viewability tracking. This should all help, but it's a long road. The other option is micropayments but this isnt as easy to solve (needs massive scale, partnerships with sites, perhaps ISP help, etc). Overall: ads work, it's a giant industry, adblocking does improve performance, security and privacy but costs the publisher and does endanger the wider web of original content. I don't agree with using adblock but I do consider the reasons valid and that its at least pushing for a better industry (and perhaps future model). Edit: Downvoters, what exactly is the issue? Interesting that anyone advocating that adblockers aren't an absolute good thing gets dismissed here on HN.

dsr_ 11y ago
I suspect you are being downvoted because you are not arguing very well. "There are only two viable business models" - and then you admit a third, and a fourth, and claim that they are exceptions. There can't possibly be a fifth? There can't be a sixth that someone will invent next year and become the dominant mode of funding digital publishing? You claim a moral right for web sites to show you ads, but no equivalent moral right for people to use programs to ignore the ads. That's inconsistent, and also morally abhorrent to many people. Finally, you say that you "don't agree with using adblock but I do consider the reasons valid" -- that appears to be another inconsistency. If ad blocking is immoral, there can't be any reasoning which will overwhelm your moral objections. Perhaps you are using the word "moral" in an unusual fashion?

b3lvedere 11y ago

I will try and block every piece of network traffic i don't want on my devices, including ads.

snake117 11y ago

I think one of the worst advertisements is the Bank of America ads played before any video on the BBC app. It's always that one German lady singing "Dankeshon"...very annoying.