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I posted this on an earlier thread about the morality of AdBlock, but it seem relevant to the discussion: There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's fun

I posted this on an earlier thread about the morality of AdBlock, but it seem relevant to the discussion: There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda. I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad. I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak. . TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen. [1] https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts

eeeeeeeeeeeee 11y ago
I see your point, but the the alternative is we need a better solution; blocking ads doesn't mean the writing becomes corrupt and we give up and that's it. Adblocking will lead to content creators finding a better revenue source; there are a lot of people that don't want to compromise themselves by being a paid voice for corporate interests. Buzzfeed is a poor example; it's just garbage content that is being re-circulated by many different places. There are TONS of sites that have paywalls and/or ads on their sites and their writing is still compromised. So I think paying for content and getting advertisements out of good content is the solution to restore independence, but the price point needs to be right. I hate blocking ads (I whitelist sites I visit frequently with reasonable ads) but ads have become obnoxious, so AdBlock is a natural reaction to site owners treating users like shit. Sadly, a lot of reasonable sites with unobtrusive ads have gotten caught up in blacklists. I would pay for good news content if I could pay for a bundle of good content at a fair price. Even something like the NY Times is a hard sell; it feels weird given the wealth of sources and information we have access to these days. NY Times is a great source, but I don't want to only read a single source. And it quickly becomes unaffordable if you want to pay for a lot of sources of information. Spotify and similar providers solved this with music and I still think a better solution will come out eventually for news. There are a lot of people that want to pay a fair price for good content, but the current options are not very good.
- mozumder 11y ago
  Spotify isn't profitable. I don't know any subscription-based pure-play internet media company that's profitable. (Maybe Netflix? But we'll have to see how profitable they are now that other subscription services have recently launched.) The NYTimes is probably the highest-end as far as content quality is concerned, but if you're not going to pay for that, why would you pay for anything else? Absolutely no one is paying for content online. People pay for art. They don't pay for commodity, and everything online is information commodity. There's just too much low-value competing sources that are "good enough" for consumer interests. Given that, I think ad-blocking has largely been overstated as a concern for media sites. Among my own friends, I only know one person that uses ad-blockers. Ads aren't a problem that people worry about. In fact, for a good media property, ads are a draw. People buy fashion magazines and Sunday newspapers for the ads, for example.
  - MaysonL 11y ago
    Absolutely no one is paying for content online. Techpinions, the Information, and Ben Thompson would all disagree.
    - mozumder 11y ago
      Those are industry sites, for professionals to use for their jobs. They're equivalent to academic journals. Bankers can pay Bloomberg $24,000/year for their terminal.
      - MaysonL 11y ago
        OK, how about Lynda.com? In other words, people who think the information will pay for itself, or is valuable in some other way, are willing to pay for it. That's a far cry from absolutely nobody.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - trimbo 11y ago
backtoyoujim 11y ago
So irony is responsible for "punch the monkey" ?
ksec 11y ago
I am going to guess half of the people who uses Adblock is because it brings much better experience in browsing. And that is mostly because the web loads much faster, and the browser is much more responsive. We change from 2 - 6 Mbps ADSL to 10s / 100s or even Gigabit Fibre, we moved from Single to Quad Core / Thread, 2GB to now mostly 4/8GB Memory, and order of magnitude faster with SSD. Software improvements, much better OS etc... And yet the web is still slow, very slow compared to the technological improvement we have. So how would a normal user do / think, Anything that is moving, distracting, or have a sense of constantly running, i.e Ads, they blame those. And Since there are likely many of those running, what else to blame that is slowing down the web?
- simon_vetter 11y ago
  > Anything that is moving, distracting This. It's really hard to stay focused on an article or piece of text longer than a few sentences with flickering images, autoplaying videos (with sound), and recently those pesky javascript overlay popups. Blocking ads doesn't just make for a faster web experience, it also allows you to have proper attention spans necessary to read and digest two pages of text, and that's true for any kind of audience, tech-savvy or not. Obviously, privacy invasion, constant and pervasive tracking, malware distribution, profiling and exploitation of personal data in jurisdictions with poor consumer protection laws and over which you have no control or say are all alarming and dangerous. When people started raising concerns and calling this out a few years back, ad networks (and the tech industry they are living on) came forward with DNT, "voluntary opt outs", privacy policies and "personalized contents and ads". Most people would probably agree that all these options are equally laughable as they merely try to appease concerns rather than addressing them. Regardless of my personal opinion, is it really surprising to see people of all kinds start using tools making their experience better? For most people, the web is merely a medium, just like paper books.
hyperbovine 11y ago
> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. A false dichotomy if ever there was one. "Paywals" worked in literally every single other sector of the economy for all of recorded human history (I know, I know, who can remember that brief ~6000 year interlude between the Sumerians and the Internet!) The continue to work at your local dry cleaner, grocery store, Home Depot, etc. Really everything that doesn't require a browser. There are all sorts of moral, social, economic, and environmental reasons to be opposed to advertising. I keep AdBlock on by default because I dream of a day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their service.
- cwyers 11y ago
  The issue with Home Depot is that if I buy a dishwasher from there, I get one dishwasher. If I give that dishwasher away, I have no dishwasher. With online content, that doesn't hold. If I give away a copy of an article I just read in the New York Times, I still have a copy. It goes even further than that. Content I can share with my friends is MORE valuable than content I keep all to myself, in some cases. (Paywalls are most successful where that isn't true -- where there's some advantage to having information that other people don't.)
  - gameguy43 11y ago
    Don't copy that floppy!
    - Sideloader 11y ago
      Home taping is killing music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
      - 72deluxe 11y ago
        Did it though? Is music "better" or "worse" now?
RodericDay 11y ago
the more walls are put up, the more ad consumption becomes a deliberate choice and not something that is snuck by people as they use social media. it's a good organic balance we're working towards, the optimum amount of gatekeeping and profit-sharing. as I said in an earlier post, the amount of money regular people lose bc of ads > the amount of people in the ad business pay out to "content creators" >> Those families are indirectly paying that price today, through their ad-influenced purchases. >> Not only are they paying for the end-product, but they're paying for the arms-race between advertisers as well, and that's a huge industry. >> The amount of money the ad industry deals out to "content providers" must necessarily be less than the amount they get paid by their clients, which in turn must be less than the amount people paid to those clients. >> If the distribution is not uniform, and some people benefit from the ad-influenced overspending of others, the business is then predatory.
31reasons 11y ago
I never click on Ads so from advertisers point of view I am using AdBlock. But that AdBlock is in my brain. When I use AdBlock on a browser it helps my brain. Advertisers don't care whether ad is on the side on inside the content, all they care is their ROI, so unless I start clicking on Ads I already run risk of getting ads in my content.
- impish19 11y ago
  You can easily check if a person has adblock installed or not (check https://wordpress.org/plugins/anti-adblock/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/anti-adblock/). And say, due to a prominent survey or report or other means it just becomes a widely known & accepted fact that most users are now using AdBlock, the tilt towards running ads in content will only accelerate.
  - eli 11y ago
    It's actually really hard to detect adblockers -- they go out of their way to avoid detection and are constantly updating whitelists of test scripts. I haven't tried this particular plugin, but I doubt it detects modern extensions. A big, high-profile publisher would find it nearly impossible. As soon as they roll out code to lock out adblock uesrs, it would be circumvented in a filter update.
- eli 11y ago
  That's not really true. There's a misconception that publishers only get paid for clicks, when actually many (perhaps even most for certain types) ads are sold by impression. And that's never going to fully go away; if you sell luxury cars you just want to do a branding campaign. You want to get your logo in front of NYTimes.com readers. You don't care how many click. tl;dr it's much better for publishers if you see ads but never click them vs blocking them.
- cissou 11y ago
  Actually some of the biggest spenders are content with your brain just seeing the ad. It builds awareness (as in: you know that they exist, that they are still in business, that they are relevant). It's all they need to "help you" make a decision next time you're in a store and deciding between buying something from them or from their less-known competitor.
postmeta 11y ago
Like you said, product placement is already here. As long as people broadcast content, consumers are free to modify it for personal consumption. The next level filter might filter all brand names from an article or movie.
- chaostheory 11y ago
  It hasn't just arrived. It's been here for years already. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html I think the only major recent change is what we call them. I could be wrong but today people refer to it as 'native' advertising.
brikis98 11y ago
That's a very interesting point that I never fully considered. Of course, there is no doubt that some content providers already are taking money to reflect someone else's agenda, but it's definitely worth considering what happens if advertising fails as a business model for the majority...
TTPrograms 11y ago
Well, there always the possibility of people paying for content voluntarily. Lots of niche creators seem to support themselves fairly well with non-DRM media and various forms of touring. Patreon seems to work for a fair number of creators. I'm happy to support creators that I connect to. If we can figure out how to better enable this sort of connection I think there's hope.
- vlasev 11y ago
  As of right now you are literally the only person in the thread mentioning Patreon. Yet, it seems that Patreon-like services are one way to solve a lot of the problems.
cactusface 11y ago
> If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda. That said, non-web advertising agencies exert their influence over content too, regardless of whether or not there are separate ads or product placement. Why would the internet be different? Pretty sure you can't run AdSense on a porn site.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Plenty of content makers manage to sustain themselves without annoying ads. Just because it's so common doesn't mean we need to just accept it, or that it's somehow "immoral" for content consumers to avoid ads. Imagine if all content sites funded themselves via spam. When you viewed a site for the first time you'd have to verify your email address, which would then be spammed to oblivion. Would we tolerate that? Would we think it was immoral for people to do an end run around the spam?
dzhiurgis 11y ago
I personally find plenty of great free content in StackExchange, Github, Coursera, etc. The rest is not really content, it's entertainment. The entertainers choose how will they get paid. The reality is that they work is not valuable enough to be paid directly, so they opt-in for a revenue from adverts. And I choose to opt-out from paying them, because I think that we shouldn't be paying for entertainment. What is worst is that 'news' increasingly becomes entertainment. You only need so much paid journalist to cover main events. If they choose to make farce out of events, it's up to them. But I will not pay that premium, because I do not care and because I don't even want to reach me. And you dot have to do anything for 'news' to reach you.
- mkartic 11y ago
  Netflix - Essentially a paywall for great CONTENT. You subscribe to their service with regular payments. Youtube - Ads for free content. Both seem to be working just fine as far as revenue is concerned. Can you elaborate on why you find only sites like SE or GH "content"? What's your definition? Are you suggesting entertainment doesn't have a value of its own?
  - dzhiurgis 11y ago
    > Are you suggesting entertainment doesn't have a value of its own? Yes, exactly. Netflix is paywall for entertainment. Youtube does have some educational content. Some of it generates revenue from ads. Although those who actually do create educational content, do it for self expression or as a token to return to community. Just another day there was a top ranking comment about Apple's music streaming service. The TL;DR was that there are millions of great musicians who do not care about profit, they care about music. I think art is about self expression, not means to making money. Somehow it is much more prominent in tech community with open source and bunch of free information. The information that is actually valuable. Of course we do have day jobs, but there we get paid for implementing something that people actually need. I realize this is probably a unusual worldview, but perhaps we are too much entertained and not enough educated?
frik 11y ago
The problem are not ads, but certain kinds of ads. Bad ads: CPU intensive ads and privacy inversive "personalised" ads that follow you around Solution: Show us simple text or picture based banner ads with ad content related to the website topic and pay the website owner a reasonable money per 1000 views/impressions called CPM. AdBlocker should block only the bad ads, and keep the static non inversive ads. Remember as soon as browser vendors blocked the annoying popups the ads industry had to change their ads format. It's time that browser vendors initiate another such forced change. Though blocking all ads is a bad solution, as an internet without ads means probably a bad web walled garden paywall experience - a lose lose situation.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  "Personalized" ads can actually be kind of nice. I like seeing ads that are for things I care about, instead of for things that "people who visit this site" care about. There's hazards, it's true, but I feel like I have seen the future where ads are helpful and don't feel like ads as we have come to know them, and I like it.
  - frik 11y ago
    Personalised ads show what I just bought or viewed and never will buy as I bought something else. Non-personalized ads shouldn't show things what other people bought but it should show me things about the current page content or or the site topic. Show me pictures with links to amazon books about the programming language the article is about, etc. I know a lot of (startup) companies are in that market and try to be helpful by big data grinding. But neither Google ads, nor any other personalised ads were useful at all to me. Ads that follow me around just because I visited a site two times is just very creepy and "forces" users to investigate how to block ads in the first place. If you work on a ads network please pivot to a "better ads" that allow website owners to install the ads service on their website - this is the only solution that will work despite an adblocker! So write an ad network in Go/Rust, be it a single executable, and website owners can simply add it to their website. Only the information on Amazon.com below the product page that shows what other people who bought this product also bought works.
  - 11y ago
interpol_p 11y ago
> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. I love ads "inside" my content when they are done right. The most effective advertising for me is when an author I like to read recommends a product by directly writing about it because they were paid to do so and they like to use the product. Ad blockers don't block these because they aren't ads, they show up inline with the rest of the author's content (and the author acknowledges it was a sponsored posting). I am completely happy with this model. The whole reason I read an author is because I like her style and opinion. So a recommendation from her, as long as she genuinely likes the product, is actually interesting to me. The same goes for video: algorithmically determined video ads at the start or within video content are rubbish and I will block them. But the presenters themselves recommending something in-line I am totally open to watching.
- ads_are_crap 11y ago
  Goodbye ads. We won't miss you. If you have content, and it is worth it, people may pay for it. Otherwise, natural selection, survival of the fittest etc. Excellent move by Apple. They managed to kill Flash, and now Ads.. fantastic!
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    People won't pay for anything but highly specialized content. First-class integration of ad blockers will eventually just drive down the amount of actual content available; people will put fluff content that is actually an ad or they'll have to go do something else with their time. Maybe this is a good thing or maybe it's a bad thing, but one thing is for sure: people are not going to be taking special action to pay for content that isn't highly specialized. One potential non-ad route for monetization would be an extension for the browser that opens your bitcoin wallet and sends a tip to a page's creator based on how much of your time was spent on that site that day. That'd be better than ads if we could get widespread adoption, as the site's owners wouldn't feel compelled to make deals with entities that may force them to compromise their content. Maybe Firefox can integrate it to counteract Safari.
    - 11y ago
minusSeven 11y ago
Sorry but I am buying it. There certain websites that explicitly tell you to disable adblock to browse their websites. They make sure you can't get to their content without you blocking adblock. It never works. If new york times websites ask to disable adblock will I look at it. Sorry I and most people won't bother. The bigger problem here is companies haven't figured out how to monetize their content better.
- manigandham 11y ago
  What's the better way? I hear this a lot but nobody has any other solutions. The two models that work are paid access or free for ads.
- yardie 11y ago
  According to the NYT, they are monetizing pretty well from the paywall. For most of their articles they are the primary source. So, whether you buy a subscription directly or one of their affiliates pays for the content (and then tries to monetize it through ads) they are still getting paid. They don't care if you don't want to pay for it or read it you are not their intended audience.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
> "The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content." The alternative to ads is no ads. I keep various ad- and tracker- blockers on because I prefer a world that is not polluted by advertising, and in which privacy is respected. Advertising versus no content is a false dichotomy, just like advertising versus no sport, or copyright versus no music. It is this sheer propoganda the systematically prevents us from having a meaningful debate on the subject. I do see it as a moral issue: I find advertising in all its current forms unethical. If you disagree, please have the courtesy of allowing for an honest discussion instead of spreading FUD about how horrific the world would be without advertising. Also, the advertising industry is not going to draw the line at "native advertising", regardless. It won't stop until it has plastered the planet with advertising. Only the law and countermeasures have ever limited advertising. tl;dr: There is already shit all over the house, it's naive to think they will stop at the kitchen.
- realityking 11y ago
  Serious question, how do you propose creators are to be paid? Paywall? Paid for content? Internet tax?
  - makeitsuckless 11y ago
    It's not a serious question, it's cheap rhetoric. Just because I'm against the pollution caused by chemical plants dumping unprocessed waste into rivers, doesn't mean I have to come up with solutions that allows the chemical industry to retain the same profit margins. Personally, if I want to get paid for something I create, I ask for something in return, usually money. I could be wrong, but afaik that's the way we have done things for a very long time. "If you want this, you also have to swallow this pile of shit, hell, if you even so much as glance in the general direction we'll start throwing shit at you" is a relatively recent business model, and I have a problem with it. The onus is not on me to come up with alternatives for people who don't like the effort and/or profit margins involved in the way we've traded and bartered goods and services for millennia and prefer to throw shit at people.
    - 11y ago
giancarlostoro 11y ago
If ads weren't as intrusive as they can be (ie pop-ups, pop unders, auto-played video adverts with audio enable etc) I wouldn't mind them, but when you impose on my expectancy of what a website should work like or behave like then I need to block your advertisements. Otherwise, I would happily allow your ads. Some websites ruin my experience overall, not only do I now have to go out of my way to scour the screen but now I'm ignoring whatever it was I came to your website to begin with, usually at that point I close the website never to return. I'm all for non-intrusive advertisements.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  I agree. But advertisers abuse Maybe it's time for 'ad toning down' instead of blocking all of them, block animated gifs, block big images, etc (though in mobile this is not so bad)
  - hessenwolf 11y ago
    In mobile? I've shut so many sites down in the last two weeks because I couldn't read on my iphone over the ad. It happens less to me in this period on android devices I notice.
  - slavak 11y ago
    Isn't that the entire point of AdBlock's default allowing of non-intrusive ads? People like to rant about them "selling out," but IMO it's a reasonable approach to allow decent sites to make a living, is a good monetization strategy, and they seem to have reasonable and global requirements for what constitutes a "non-intrusive" ad. (i.e.: It's not just a case of "pay us enough to blast loud popup videos in the user's face.")
    - mst 11y ago
      This is precisely why I run adblock plus is non-intrusive ad only mode.
    - nathan_long 11y ago
      "Allowing non-intrusive ads" seems like a fine goal to help users and advertisers alike. If a community of users maintained the whitelist, it would be a non-issue. The fact that the list is managed privately and that whether a company pays them influences whether they're blocked does muddy the waters quite a bit. https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements#payment https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements#payment Not all ad blockers do this. Eg: https://getadblock.com/ https://getadblock.com/ doesn't (disclosure: creator is a friend of mine and I once worked a bit on the product). uBlock also doesn't do this: https://www.ublock.org/ https://www.ublock.org/ And I'm sure there are others.
sprokolopolis 11y ago
I find the current state of ad services to be morally wrong; therefore, I do not feel bad about using an adblocker. I wouldn't be opposed to tasteful, cookie-less ads that don't attempt to track people around the internet and mine their data. I realize that people need to be paid for their time and content, but maybe there is a better way to manage, serve, and present the ads. It would also be nice if people could decided on a sane and logical system of standard ad sizes, because the current standards are ridiculous and awkward.
- PhilipA 11y ago
  If they don't track you they have no way to serve you relevant ads, and I would much rather want relevant ads than ads which promote useless products to me.
  - jodrellblank 11y ago
    "Relevant ads" my arse. They don't want to show me ads for things I'm already interested in, they want to make me interested in things I didn't know about, or more interested in things I knew about but wasn't going to buy. They don't care about relevant, they want successfully manipulative ads.
  - negrit 11y ago
    That's not true. TV, radio, printed newspapers, ... has done it for decades. It's content based. They are tracking because they can make more money out of the tracked data.
    - jfoster 11y ago
      Can you explain end-to-end what you mean about advertisers making money out of the tracked data? (eg. what you think they track, what they do with the data, how they make money from the data, etc.) I think it's very easy for different people to mean different things when having conversations on this topic, so it's good to spell it all out.
      - 11y ago
ekianjo 11y ago
> I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad. And you don't care about Ad Pushers Tracking what you see and where you go ? You have no morality problem there?
dubyah 11y ago
> A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. Thankfully, the FTC is helping in that regard. http://adexchanger.com/publishers/ftc-publishers-will-be-held-responsible-for-misleading-native-ads/ http://adexchanger.com/publishers/ftc-publishers-will-be-hel...
scriptproof 11y ago
There is also the sourceforge example. Since they can not make enough money with ads on the site to survive, they put them in the archives. They will die also at the end, but a lot of projects with them.
wutbrodo 11y ago
Absolutely, I've been saying this for years. The line between advertisement and content is one that's been around for decades longer than the Web, and for good reason. And yet for some reason, those who defend ad-blockers as 'good for the web' are either too ignorant or too apathetic to understand that if increasing adblocker usage makes it intractable to provide free content when ads are easily distinguishable from content, then the majority of content that survives will break down that barrier. The collateral damage of rendering adblockers useless is skewing every webpage towards the content that the interested party with the deepest pockets wants. It's particularly ridiculous when you consider that there's easy analogies to this that even the most clueless of adblocker users should be able to understand: if Google stopped distinguishing between ads and organic results, there would (rightly) be a huge outcry. One would have to be a fool not to understand that pushing the entire Web in that direction would be correspondingly more devastating.
- adslingerssuck 11y ago
  Can you hear that? It's the sound of the ad-slingers crying into their breakfast. Can you hear that? It's the sound of users cheering for a faster, sleeker, less malware drived web experience. I would say go cry me a ad river, but it doesn't matter - my browser blocks it!
  - wutbrodo 11y ago
    I'm assuming you're a bot, or at the very least some sort of reverse-Turing test performance art in which you send generic and irrelevant replies to comments that match certain substrings. That's very cute, but adults are trying to have a conversation here, so shoo.
- orkoden 11y ago
  Magazines and newspapers have been disguising advertisements as articles for as longs as they have existed. Why is this one restaurant, album, book reviewed and not the other? How are the list of cool and hot fashion articles curated?
  - 11y ago
fijal 11y ago
Do you find it equally immoral not to pay/donate for all the open source that you use?
belorn 11y ago
Non-consented advertisement has had their click and buy rate diminish each year, and customers are only getting more dissatisfied by each attempt to squeeze more and more from them. Blocks are the natural step when you have somewhere around less than 0.1% success rate per customer. Mail Spam as advertisements can be seen as the warning sign, and spam protection is today a critical feature that all mail programs must have to be considered functional. Consented advertisement, on the other hand, is having a great time. More stores are now using club memberships for advertisements, and when Facebook started to only send out a fraction of news letters, some customers went and asked where their news letters has gone. People are actively seeking where their consented advertisement are when it is being blocked. I find taking a moral stand in the name of non-consented advertisement to be a bit sad. They had their chance with do-not-track and they collectively decided to ignore consent. Instead of taking a step back, they doubled down on being more intrusive and anti-consumer. Now they've got to live with the consequences, while companies reroute money to consented advertisements.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
oneeyedpigeon 11y ago
This is already a problem with old media; The Daily Telegraph newspaper here in the Uk recently ignored a story about fraud and corruption at HSBC because of commercial interests (although they claim otherwise). You assert that paywalls aren't working; as someone who has worked for two online publishing businesses whose models rely on a paywall, I disagree. There IS an issue with general interest content, but even that, I believe, is being resolved, albeit slowly. I think the market (or at least part of it) is slowly adjusting to the idea of paying for quality content. When micropayments eventually become a thing, this will only accelerate. There are alternatives to bot those models. Bear in mind that not every website needs to make a huge profit. Many in the early days took no income whatsoever. Donations and merchandising are popular small income streams for many blogs. Not all advertising is objectionable; The Deck ad network, for example, provides advertising that is tasteful and unobtrusive (much like a polished version of Google AdWords). Finally, content-based advertising CAN work, providing it's clearly demarcated, highly relevant, and entertaining in its own right. I must've listened to many hours of advertising via TWIT podcasts, and I don't really resent any of it.
mercer 11y ago
You might very well be right that this is what will happen. And yes, it would be bad if native advertising increases dramatically because everyone has adblockers. However, the problem I have with your argument is that it rests on preserving something bad and to keep something worse from happening. I think that's generally not the best approach, which is why I'm not 'conservative' in most of my views. Let's say web content suddenly becomes infested with native ads. Those of us who care, might actually start paying for paywalled content. Those of us who don't, happily read advertising dressed up as proper content. Or maybe the bigger publishers will not be able to exist anymore, and content becomes either really shitty, or really good with little middle ground. Perhaps we'll finally start paying those individual journalists and writers through donations and crowd funding. I think a good comparison is music. People started ripping their music, so the industry replied with DRM. People cirsumvrented this, and the DRM became increasingly intrusive. Then downloads and torrents happened. All seems lost. And what do you know? 'Paywalled' music actually starts sort-of working. This may very well happen to video and text once companies get their act together and go with the tide rather than swim against it. I've been a pretty extreme 'modern', tech-savvy consumer for most of my life. And yet, now that I reached my thirties, and now that I have disposable income: 1. I pay for The Correspondent, a Dutch, pay-walled web-only publication that has been doing well and produces great content by great authors, including some of 'celebrity' journalists here (and soon to be released in English, too). 2. I occasionally buy single articles from any of the newspapers in Holland through Blendle, at prices of around 20/30 eurocents, with the option of a refund that I rarely use. 3. I pay for Spotify, not just because it's convenient, but because it offers (or used to offer) a really nice interface for discovery and curated playlists. 4. I buy ScreenCasts and (e)books direct from programmers/writers in my communities. 5. I've donated to a number of arts/journalistic crowdfunding projects. While there are many bad things that could happen, I'd argue that the current state of production, consumption, and accompanying advertising is already pretty bad. I'm fine with either: 1) the current models crumbling, and new models coming up that might be worse, so that it might get better quicker, or 2) fighting the fundamental problems and actively working towards a better alternative, or 3) hoping that the changes will end up better altogether. But preserving a situation that is already pretty shitty just out of fear for something shittier seems like the worse possible approach. I do realize that I'm leaving out the moral arguments in favor or against bypassing DRM, pirating content, or blocking ads. That's a difficult and perhaps important issue too, but I'd say judging by current behavior it's largely irrelevant to what actually happens.
yAnonymous 11y ago
>I do see it as a moral issue. The moral issue is on the other side as well: Most malware comes from hacked ad servers and the ad industry doesn't really seem to care. Until that changes, ads stay blocked and I won't even bother evaluating the other reasons (invasiveness, bandwidth/battery usage).
- tljr 11y ago
  I'd go deeper - a lot of social issues stem from advertising. Until that stops Adblock stays on.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Malware is my #1 reason for blocking ads. Unless you as the website owner are willing to vet every single advertiser on your platform (or alternatively: commit to ads with zero active content), and compensate people if/when you let something through, the ads stay blocked. My hourly rate is many times more than the few hundredths of a cent you get for the impression.
egypturnash 11y ago
There are other alternatives to "ads alongside my content" that don't involve "more obnoxious ads". I make a webcomic. Historically, that's very much an ad-supported medium. I also block ads aggressively; it's one of the reasons I hassle with jailbreaking my iThings. I put my adblocking mouth where my money is: as long as I'm getting enough money per new page of comics on Patreon, I don't have any ads on my current project. It's been great to not have anything trying to distract people from reading my content. Sometime next year, as the Patreon income rises, I'll turn off ads on all my comics, new or old. There's no paywall; anyone who wants to read my comic can do this for free, with no ads thanks to the generosity of my supporters. Obviously it's easier for one person to make enough money via the donation box than it is for a large company; this does not necessarily scale. But it's an option worth considering. And hell, it can work on a larger scale - if you're old enough to remember a time before cable, or if you listen to the radio in the car, you may be familiar with the yearly donation drives on your local public tv/radio station; you may even be a supporter. Or hell: last year when an algorithm change at Google resulted in a lot less drive-by traffic to Metafilter, they started taking donations from their regular userbase. It has ended up being a significant portion of their income; https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-and-funding-update https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-an... (Yes, I am also aware that I am arguably stealing from all the people whose ads I block without supporting them. I've made my peace with that moral quandary. I fast-forwarded over the commercials when I used to watch stuff on TV, too.)
- WalterGR 11y ago
  I make a webcomic... I also block ads aggressively... I put my adblocking mouth where my money is: as long as I'm getting enough money per new page of comics on Patreon, I don't have any ads on my current project. It's been great to not have anything trying to distract people from reading my content. Sometime next year, as the Patreon income rises, I'll turn off ads on all my comics, new or old. Sorry to simplify, but I'm not familiar with your work: Is it safe to say that you 1. show exactly enough advertisements to earn what you subjectively feel is a salary commensurate with your investment -- time investment or otherwise 2. block all ads from other sites? (Disclaimer: I make a portion of my income from ads.)
harperlee 11y ago
> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. You are assuming an invariable quantity of ads, which it is false. This banning makes advertisement more difficult; and more difficult, or less effective, advertising would push towards giving less valuable "for free* (*advertised)". So it pushes towards having to pay for more things, which is good for Apple. It's also valuable for us, in the sense that our customers are accustomed to get huge amounts of value for free. That's good for us creators. The issue is that we are also consumers, and that's bad for us - we will need to pay more. All in all, I believe too many people in this forum are risking their professional lifes a lot, and having a somewhat safer environment can end up being good for the economy. If there is less risk in entrepreneurship, more people will jump into putting effort into creating something good, as it is easier to sell. It also works against productizing users information, which might be good for our privacy, too.
adamlett 11y ago
It will not hurt the content producers who publish their content in apps. Like the just announced Apple News or the Facebook thing I can't remember the name of.
mcmullen 11y ago
I disagree with your assertion that "paywalls don't work", which is fundamentally not true. Content produces need to raise revenue to pay for their costs and make a profit. One excellent way to raise this revenue is by raising pay walls. It works for companies like The Times (London), The FT and The Economist. Will you retract this false statement? What I think you're saying is that "worthless ramblings on the internet aren't (inherently) worth anything and thus no one wants to give them their money willingly", which of course isn't the fault of the paywall but the content. It comes down to content creation and paying for it. If nobody wants to pay for it then it doesn't get created (unless you're a blogger, or meet your costs in some other way). We shouldn't have any time for people who want to get content for free. I'm in the unusual position of actually paying for content and use AdBlockers, however I use it because I disagree with tracking on the grounds of consent and privacy. (That said, I will happily disable adblocking for websites who only want to show me banners and not track me.)
- the-dude 11y ago
  Blendle(http://blendle.com http://blendle.com) is trying to be the 'micro'-paywall for content providers. After launching in The Netherlands, they have contracts with major German publishers now as well. Micro-payment system which actually works. Disclaimer: Dutch
  - mcmullen 11y ago
    Thanks for the link. Interesting company! Nice summary here: https://medium.com/on-blendle/one-website-all-newspapers-and-magazines-3a5f6c8360d9 https://medium.com/on-blendle/one-website-all-newspapers-and.... I like the idea of micro-payments for interesting, long-form content because there are various journalists I like who work for newspapers I don't subscribe to. I would happily pay for in-depth analysis pieces. I remain hopeful about non-click-bait journalism.
BrainInAJar 11y ago
> I do see it as a moral issue. Your ability to get rich is not my moral concern.
learnstats2 11y ago
> TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen. This is a fallacy. All news agencies are already producing advertorial copy, and have been since before the web: this is nothing new. They didn't start doing it because ads stopped working. Someone who is willing to show intrusive ads is already willing to plumb any depth for an additional income stream. > A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. I would suggest that the viewer's ability to distinguish is increasing, since we are more aware of the problem, and we don't have to face the cognitive load of ad-ignoring elsewhere.
dunkelheit 11y ago
I think you raise very valid point. Historically it just made business sense for content creators to put up some ads. It works like a feedback loop: you put some ads -> you can offset your production costs and lower the price or produce more content -> you increase your audience -> you put more ads. And unfortunately for content consumers the equilibrium is near the point when they are irked by the ads but just not enough to leave in droves. So now when general dissatisfaction with ads seems to rise the choice for content creators is to install paywalls/raise prices (public won't like it either) or accept more surreptitious kinds of ads (morally dubious). Or maybe go freemium?
coldtea 11y ago
>Let's face it: paywalls don't work. Citation needed.
chrisdone 11y ago
I don't think morality has anything to do with this, unless you want to bring a marketing issue onto a high-ground that it frankly doesn't deserve. What body of ethics has anything to say about this? I think part of the issue is that most of these services that base themselves on ads are inessential. I don't care if reddit or gmail or last.fm goes down, I can always get another service that will step up and fill the niche. Grooveshark funded their service by ads, then it got taken down by a lawyer army, now I pay for a Spotify subscription. When ads are present, they're part of the experience. And that means the experience, for some people, is shitty. People will prefer not to have shitty experiences. Some people decide to start out with the premise that they will make money off of ads, good luck to them. But it's not my moral obligation to accept it.
Terretta 11y ago
Traveling in Europe on a limited and expensive 3G connection, I'm acutely aware I'm paying more for the bandwidth these ads consume than the advertiser is paying to display them. The ads consume 20x more bandwidth than the content. I'm subsidizing the ads! You say ads are moral, I say as implemented, that's immoral.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 11y ago

I see your point, but the the alternative is we need a better solution; blocking ads doesn't mean the writing becomes corrupt and we give up and that's it. Adblocking will lead to content creators finding a better revenue source; there are a lot of people that don't want to compromise themselves by being a paid voice for corporate interests. Buzzfeed is a poor example; it's just garbage content that is being re-circulated by many different places. There are TONS of sites that have paywalls and/or ads on their sites and their writing is still compromised. So I think paying for content and getting advertisements out of good content is the solution to restore independence, but the price point needs to be right. I hate blocking ads (I whitelist sites I visit frequently with reasonable ads) but ads have become obnoxious, so AdBlock is a natural reaction to site owners treating users like shit. Sadly, a lot of reasonable sites with unobtrusive ads have gotten caught up in blacklists. I would pay for good news content if I could pay for a bundle of good content at a fair price. Even something like the NY Times is a hard sell; it feels weird given the wealth of sources and information we have access to these days. NY Times is a great source, but I don't want to only read a single source. And it quickly becomes unaffordable if you want to pay for a lot of sources of information. Spotify and similar providers solved this with music and I still think a better solution will come out eventually for news. There are a lot of people that want to pay a fair price for good content, but the current options are not very good.

mozumder 11y ago
Spotify isn't profitable. I don't know any subscription-based pure-play internet media company that's profitable. (Maybe Netflix? But we'll have to see how profitable they are now that other subscription services have recently launched.) The NYTimes is probably the highest-end as far as content quality is concerned, but if you're not going to pay for that, why would you pay for anything else? Absolutely no one is paying for content online. People pay for art. They don't pay for commodity, and everything online is information commodity. There's just too much low-value competing sources that are "good enough" for consumer interests. Given that, I think ad-blocking has largely been overstated as a concern for media sites. Among my own friends, I only know one person that uses ad-blockers. Ads aren't a problem that people worry about. In fact, for a good media property, ads are a draw. People buy fashion magazines and Sunday newspapers for the ads, for example.
- MaysonL 11y ago
  Absolutely no one is paying for content online. Techpinions, the Information, and Ben Thompson would all disagree.
  - mozumder 11y ago
    Those are industry sites, for professionals to use for their jobs. They're equivalent to academic journals. Bankers can pay Bloomberg $24,000/year for their terminal.
    - MaysonL 11y ago
      OK, how about Lynda.com? In other words, people who think the information will pay for itself, or is valuable in some other way, are willing to pay for it. That's a far cry from absolutely nobody.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- trimbo 11y ago

backtoyoujim 11y ago

So irony is responsible for "punch the monkey" ?

ksec 11y ago

I am going to guess half of the people who uses Adblock is because it brings much better experience in browsing. And that is mostly because the web loads much faster, and the browser is much more responsive. We change from 2 - 6 Mbps ADSL to 10s / 100s or even Gigabit Fibre, we moved from Single to Quad Core / Thread, 2GB to now mostly 4/8GB Memory, and order of magnitude faster with SSD. Software improvements, much better OS etc... And yet the web is still slow, very slow compared to the technological improvement we have. So how would a normal user do / think, Anything that is moving, distracting, or have a sense of constantly running, i.e Ads, they blame those. And Since there are likely many of those running, what else to blame that is slowing down the web?

simon_vetter 11y ago
> Anything that is moving, distracting This. It's really hard to stay focused on an article or piece of text longer than a few sentences with flickering images, autoplaying videos (with sound), and recently those pesky javascript overlay popups. Blocking ads doesn't just make for a faster web experience, it also allows you to have proper attention spans necessary to read and digest two pages of text, and that's true for any kind of audience, tech-savvy or not. Obviously, privacy invasion, constant and pervasive tracking, malware distribution, profiling and exploitation of personal data in jurisdictions with poor consumer protection laws and over which you have no control or say are all alarming and dangerous. When people started raising concerns and calling this out a few years back, ad networks (and the tech industry they are living on) came forward with DNT, "voluntary opt outs", privacy policies and "personalized contents and ads". Most people would probably agree that all these options are equally laughable as they merely try to appease concerns rather than addressing them. Regardless of my personal opinion, is it really surprising to see people of all kinds start using tools making their experience better? For most people, the web is merely a medium, just like paper books.

hyperbovine 11y ago

> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. A false dichotomy if ever there was one. "Paywals" worked in literally every single other sector of the economy for all of recorded human history (I know, I know, who can remember that brief ~6000 year interlude between the Sumerians and the Internet!) The continue to work at your local dry cleaner, grocery store, Home Depot, etc. Really everything that doesn't require a browser. There are all sorts of moral, social, economic, and environmental reasons to be opposed to advertising. I keep AdBlock on by default because I dream of a day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their service.

cwyers 11y ago
The issue with Home Depot is that if I buy a dishwasher from there, I get one dishwasher. If I give that dishwasher away, I have no dishwasher. With online content, that doesn't hold. If I give away a copy of an article I just read in the New York Times, I still have a copy. It goes even further than that. Content I can share with my friends is MORE valuable than content I keep all to myself, in some cases. (Paywalls are most successful where that isn't true -- where there's some advantage to having information that other people don't.)
- gameguy43 11y ago
  Don't copy that floppy!
  - Sideloader 11y ago
    Home taping is killing music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
    - 72deluxe 11y ago
      Did it though? Is music "better" or "worse" now?

RodericDay 11y ago

the more walls are put up, the more ad consumption becomes a deliberate choice and not something that is snuck by people as they use social media. it's a good organic balance we're working towards, the optimum amount of gatekeeping and profit-sharing. as I said in an earlier post, the amount of money regular people lose bc of ads > the amount of people in the ad business pay out to "content creators" >> Those families are indirectly paying that price today, through their ad-influenced purchases. >> Not only are they paying for the end-product, but they're paying for the arms-race between advertisers as well, and that's a huge industry. >> The amount of money the ad industry deals out to "content providers" must necessarily be less than the amount they get paid by their clients, which in turn must be less than the amount people paid to those clients. >> If the distribution is not uniform, and some people benefit from the ad-influenced overspending of others, the business is then predatory.

31reasons 11y ago

I never click on Ads so from advertisers point of view I am using AdBlock. But that AdBlock is in my brain. When I use AdBlock on a browser it helps my brain. Advertisers don't care whether ad is on the side on inside the content, all they care is their ROI, so unless I start clicking on Ads I already run risk of getting ads in my content.

impish19 11y ago
You can easily check if a person has adblock installed or not (check https://wordpress.org/plugins/anti-adblock/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/anti-adblock/). And say, due to a prominent survey or report or other means it just becomes a widely known & accepted fact that most users are now using AdBlock, the tilt towards running ads in content will only accelerate.
- eli 11y ago
  It's actually really hard to detect adblockers -- they go out of their way to avoid detection and are constantly updating whitelists of test scripts. I haven't tried this particular plugin, but I doubt it detects modern extensions. A big, high-profile publisher would find it nearly impossible. As soon as they roll out code to lock out adblock uesrs, it would be circumvented in a filter update.
eli 11y ago
That's not really true. There's a misconception that publishers only get paid for clicks, when actually many (perhaps even most for certain types) ads are sold by impression. And that's never going to fully go away; if you sell luxury cars you just want to do a branding campaign. You want to get your logo in front of NYTimes.com readers. You don't care how many click. tl;dr it's much better for publishers if you see ads but never click them vs blocking them.
cissou 11y ago
Actually some of the biggest spenders are content with your brain just seeing the ad. It builds awareness (as in: you know that they exist, that they are still in business, that they are relevant). It's all they need to "help you" make a decision next time you're in a store and deciding between buying something from them or from their less-known competitor.

postmeta 11y ago

Like you said, product placement is already here. As long as people broadcast content, consumers are free to modify it for personal consumption. The next level filter might filter all brand names from an article or movie.

chaostheory 11y ago
It hasn't just arrived. It's been here for years already. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html I think the only major recent change is what we call them. I could be wrong but today people refer to it as 'native' advertising.

brikis98 11y ago

That's a very interesting point that I never fully considered. Of course, there is no doubt that some content providers already are taking money to reflect someone else's agenda, but it's definitely worth considering what happens if advertising fails as a business model for the majority...

TTPrograms 11y ago

Well, there always the possibility of people paying for content voluntarily. Lots of niche creators seem to support themselves fairly well with non-DRM media and various forms of touring. Patreon seems to work for a fair number of creators. I'm happy to support creators that I connect to. If we can figure out how to better enable this sort of connection I think there's hope.

vlasev 11y ago
As of right now you are literally the only person in the thread mentioning Patreon. Yet, it seems that Patreon-like services are one way to solve a lot of the problems.

cactusface 11y ago

> If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda. That said, non-web advertising agencies exert their influence over content too, regardless of whether or not there are separate ads or product placement. Why would the internet be different? Pretty sure you can't run AdSense on a porn site.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

Plenty of content makers manage to sustain themselves without annoying ads. Just because it's so common doesn't mean we need to just accept it, or that it's somehow "immoral" for content consumers to avoid ads. Imagine if all content sites funded themselves via spam. When you viewed a site for the first time you'd have to verify your email address, which would then be spammed to oblivion. Would we tolerate that? Would we think it was immoral for people to do an end run around the spam?

dzhiurgis 11y ago

I personally find plenty of great free content in StackExchange, Github, Coursera, etc. The rest is not really content, it's entertainment. The entertainers choose how will they get paid. The reality is that they work is not valuable enough to be paid directly, so they opt-in for a revenue from adverts. And I choose to opt-out from paying them, because I think that we shouldn't be paying for entertainment. What is worst is that 'news' increasingly becomes entertainment. You only need so much paid journalist to cover main events. If they choose to make farce out of events, it's up to them. But I will not pay that premium, because I do not care and because I don't even want to reach me. And you dot have to do anything for 'news' to reach you.

mkartic 11y ago
Netflix - Essentially a paywall for great CONTENT. You subscribe to their service with regular payments. Youtube - Ads for free content. Both seem to be working just fine as far as revenue is concerned. Can you elaborate on why you find only sites like SE or GH "content"? What's your definition? Are you suggesting entertainment doesn't have a value of its own?
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  > Are you suggesting entertainment doesn't have a value of its own? Yes, exactly. Netflix is paywall for entertainment. Youtube does have some educational content. Some of it generates revenue from ads. Although those who actually do create educational content, do it for self expression or as a token to return to community. Just another day there was a top ranking comment about Apple's music streaming service. The TL;DR was that there are millions of great musicians who do not care about profit, they care about music. I think art is about self expression, not means to making money. Somehow it is much more prominent in tech community with open source and bunch of free information. The information that is actually valuable. Of course we do have day jobs, but there we get paid for implementing something that people actually need. I realize this is probably a unusual worldview, but perhaps we are too much entertained and not enough educated?

frik 11y ago

The problem are not ads, but certain kinds of ads. Bad ads: CPU intensive ads and privacy inversive "personalised" ads that follow you around Solution: Show us simple text or picture based banner ads with ad content related to the website topic and pay the website owner a reasonable money per 1000 views/impressions called CPM. AdBlocker should block only the bad ads, and keep the static non inversive ads. Remember as soon as browser vendors blocked the annoying popups the ads industry had to change their ads format. It's time that browser vendors initiate another such forced change. Though blocking all ads is a bad solution, as an internet without ads means probably a bad web walled garden paywall experience - a lose lose situation.

sliverstorm 11y ago
"Personalized" ads can actually be kind of nice. I like seeing ads that are for things I care about, instead of for things that "people who visit this site" care about. There's hazards, it's true, but I feel like I have seen the future where ads are helpful and don't feel like ads as we have come to know them, and I like it.
- frik 11y ago
  Personalised ads show what I just bought or viewed and never will buy as I bought something else. Non-personalized ads shouldn't show things what other people bought but it should show me things about the current page content or or the site topic. Show me pictures with links to amazon books about the programming language the article is about, etc. I know a lot of (startup) companies are in that market and try to be helpful by big data grinding. But neither Google ads, nor any other personalised ads were useful at all to me. Ads that follow me around just because I visited a site two times is just very creepy and "forces" users to investigate how to block ads in the first place. If you work on a ads network please pivot to a "better ads" that allow website owners to install the ads service on their website - this is the only solution that will work despite an adblocker! So write an ad network in Go/Rust, be it a single executable, and website owners can simply add it to their website. Only the information on Amazon.com below the product page that shows what other people who bought this product also bought works.
- 11y ago

interpol_p 11y ago

> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. I love ads "inside" my content when they are done right. The most effective advertising for me is when an author I like to read recommends a product by directly writing about it because they were paid to do so and they like to use the product. Ad blockers don't block these because they aren't ads, they show up inline with the rest of the author's content (and the author acknowledges it was a sponsored posting). I am completely happy with this model. The whole reason I read an author is because I like her style and opinion. So a recommendation from her, as long as she genuinely likes the product, is actually interesting to me. The same goes for video: algorithmically determined video ads at the start or within video content are rubbish and I will block them. But the presenters themselves recommending something in-line I am totally open to watching.

ads_are_crap 11y ago
Goodbye ads. We won't miss you. If you have content, and it is worth it, people may pay for it. Otherwise, natural selection, survival of the fittest etc. Excellent move by Apple. They managed to kill Flash, and now Ads.. fantastic!
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  People won't pay for anything but highly specialized content. First-class integration of ad blockers will eventually just drive down the amount of actual content available; people will put fluff content that is actually an ad or they'll have to go do something else with their time. Maybe this is a good thing or maybe it's a bad thing, but one thing is for sure: people are not going to be taking special action to pay for content that isn't highly specialized. One potential non-ad route for monetization would be an extension for the browser that opens your bitcoin wallet and sends a tip to a page's creator based on how much of your time was spent on that site that day. That'd be better than ads if we could get widespread adoption, as the site's owners wouldn't feel compelled to make deals with entities that may force them to compromise their content. Maybe Firefox can integrate it to counteract Safari.
  - 11y ago

minusSeven 11y ago

Sorry but I am buying it. There certain websites that explicitly tell you to disable adblock to browse their websites. They make sure you can't get to their content without you blocking adblock. It never works. If new york times websites ask to disable adblock will I look at it. Sorry I and most people won't bother. The bigger problem here is companies haven't figured out how to monetize their content better.

manigandham 11y ago
What's the better way? I hear this a lot but nobody has any other solutions. The two models that work are paid access or free for ads.
yardie 11y ago
According to the NYT, they are monetizing pretty well from the paywall. For most of their articles they are the primary source. So, whether you buy a subscription directly or one of their affiliates pays for the content (and then tries to monetize it through ads) they are still getting paid. They don't care if you don't want to pay for it or read it you are not their intended audience.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

> "The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content." The alternative to ads is no ads. I keep various ad- and tracker- blockers on because I prefer a world that is not polluted by advertising, and in which privacy is respected. Advertising versus no content is a false dichotomy, just like advertising versus no sport, or copyright versus no music. It is this sheer propoganda the systematically prevents us from having a meaningful debate on the subject. I do see it as a moral issue: I find advertising in all its current forms unethical. If you disagree, please have the courtesy of allowing for an honest discussion instead of spreading FUD about how horrific the world would be without advertising. Also, the advertising industry is not going to draw the line at "native advertising", regardless. It won't stop until it has plastered the planet with advertising. Only the law and countermeasures have ever limited advertising. tl;dr: There is already shit all over the house, it's naive to think they will stop at the kitchen.

realityking 11y ago
Serious question, how do you propose creators are to be paid? Paywall? Paid for content? Internet tax?
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  It's not a serious question, it's cheap rhetoric. Just because I'm against the pollution caused by chemical plants dumping unprocessed waste into rivers, doesn't mean I have to come up with solutions that allows the chemical industry to retain the same profit margins. Personally, if I want to get paid for something I create, I ask for something in return, usually money. I could be wrong, but afaik that's the way we have done things for a very long time. "If you want this, you also have to swallow this pile of shit, hell, if you even so much as glance in the general direction we'll start throwing shit at you" is a relatively recent business model, and I have a problem with it. The onus is not on me to come up with alternatives for people who don't like the effort and/or profit margins involved in the way we've traded and bartered goods and services for millennia and prefer to throw shit at people.
  - 11y ago

giancarlostoro 11y ago

If ads weren't as intrusive as they can be (ie pop-ups, pop unders, auto-played video adverts with audio enable etc) I wouldn't mind them, but when you impose on my expectancy of what a website should work like or behave like then I need to block your advertisements. Otherwise, I would happily allow your ads. Some websites ruin my experience overall, not only do I now have to go out of my way to scour the screen but now I'm ignoring whatever it was I came to your website to begin with, usually at that point I close the website never to return. I'm all for non-intrusive advertisements.

raverbashing 11y ago
I agree. But advertisers abuse Maybe it's time for 'ad toning down' instead of blocking all of them, block animated gifs, block big images, etc (though in mobile this is not so bad)
- hessenwolf 11y ago
  In mobile? I've shut so many sites down in the last two weeks because I couldn't read on my iphone over the ad. It happens less to me in this period on android devices I notice.
- slavak 11y ago
  Isn't that the entire point of AdBlock's default allowing of non-intrusive ads? People like to rant about them "selling out," but IMO it's a reasonable approach to allow decent sites to make a living, is a good monetization strategy, and they seem to have reasonable and global requirements for what constitutes a "non-intrusive" ad. (i.e.: It's not just a case of "pay us enough to blast loud popup videos in the user's face.")
  - mst 11y ago
    This is precisely why I run adblock plus is non-intrusive ad only mode.
  - nathan_long 11y ago
    "Allowing non-intrusive ads" seems like a fine goal to help users and advertisers alike. If a community of users maintained the whitelist, it would be a non-issue. The fact that the list is managed privately and that whether a company pays them influences whether they're blocked does muddy the waters quite a bit. https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements#payment https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads-agreements#payment Not all ad blockers do this. Eg: https://getadblock.com/ https://getadblock.com/ doesn't (disclosure: creator is a friend of mine and I once worked a bit on the product). uBlock also doesn't do this: https://www.ublock.org/ https://www.ublock.org/ And I'm sure there are others.

sprokolopolis 11y ago

I find the current state of ad services to be morally wrong; therefore, I do not feel bad about using an adblocker. I wouldn't be opposed to tasteful, cookie-less ads that don't attempt to track people around the internet and mine their data. I realize that people need to be paid for their time and content, but maybe there is a better way to manage, serve, and present the ads. It would also be nice if people could decided on a sane and logical system of standard ad sizes, because the current standards are ridiculous and awkward.

PhilipA 11y ago
If they don't track you they have no way to serve you relevant ads, and I would much rather want relevant ads than ads which promote useless products to me.
- jodrellblank 11y ago
  "Relevant ads" my arse. They don't want to show me ads for things I'm already interested in, they want to make me interested in things I didn't know about, or more interested in things I knew about but wasn't going to buy. They don't care about relevant, they want successfully manipulative ads.
- negrit 11y ago
  That's not true. TV, radio, printed newspapers, ... has done it for decades. It's content based. They are tracking because they can make more money out of the tracked data.
  - jfoster 11y ago
    Can you explain end-to-end what you mean about advertisers making money out of the tracked data? (eg. what you think they track, what they do with the data, how they make money from the data, etc.) I think it's very easy for different people to mean different things when having conversations on this topic, so it's good to spell it all out.
    - 11y ago

ekianjo 11y ago

> I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad. And you don't care about Ad Pushers Tracking what you see and where you go ? You have no morality problem there?

dubyah 11y ago

> A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. Thankfully, the FTC is helping in that regard. http://adexchanger.com/publishers/ftc-publishers-will-be-held-responsible-for-misleading-native-ads/ http://adexchanger.com/publishers/ftc-publishers-will-be-hel...

scriptproof 11y ago

There is also the sourceforge example. Since they can not make enough money with ads on the site to survive, they put them in the archives. They will die also at the end, but a lot of projects with them.

wutbrodo 11y ago

Absolutely, I've been saying this for years. The line between advertisement and content is one that's been around for decades longer than the Web, and for good reason. And yet for some reason, those who defend ad-blockers as 'good for the web' are either too ignorant or too apathetic to understand that if increasing adblocker usage makes it intractable to provide free content when ads are easily distinguishable from content, then the majority of content that survives will break down that barrier. The collateral damage of rendering adblockers useless is skewing every webpage towards the content that the interested party with the deepest pockets wants. It's particularly ridiculous when you consider that there's easy analogies to this that even the most clueless of adblocker users should be able to understand: if Google stopped distinguishing between ads and organic results, there would (rightly) be a huge outcry. One would have to be a fool not to understand that pushing the entire Web in that direction would be correspondingly more devastating.

adslingerssuck 11y ago
Can you hear that? It's the sound of the ad-slingers crying into their breakfast. Can you hear that? It's the sound of users cheering for a faster, sleeker, less malware drived web experience. I would say go cry me a ad river, but it doesn't matter - my browser blocks it!
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  I'm assuming you're a bot, or at the very least some sort of reverse-Turing test performance art in which you send generic and irrelevant replies to comments that match certain substrings. That's very cute, but adults are trying to have a conversation here, so shoo.
orkoden 11y ago
Magazines and newspapers have been disguising advertisements as articles for as longs as they have existed. Why is this one restaurant, album, book reviewed and not the other? How are the list of cool and hot fashion articles curated?
- 11y ago

fijal 11y ago

Do you find it equally immoral not to pay/donate for all the open source that you use?

belorn 11y ago

Non-consented advertisement has had their click and buy rate diminish each year, and customers are only getting more dissatisfied by each attempt to squeeze more and more from them. Blocks are the natural step when you have somewhere around less than 0.1% success rate per customer. Mail Spam as advertisements can be seen as the warning sign, and spam protection is today a critical feature that all mail programs must have to be considered functional. Consented advertisement, on the other hand, is having a great time. More stores are now using club memberships for advertisements, and when Facebook started to only send out a fraction of news letters, some customers went and asked where their news letters has gone. People are actively seeking where their consented advertisement are when it is being blocked. I find taking a moral stand in the name of non-consented advertisement to be a bit sad. They had their chance with do-not-track and they collectively decided to ignore consent. Instead of taking a step back, they doubled down on being more intrusive and anti-consumer. Now they've got to live with the consequences, while companies reroute money to consented advertisements.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

oneeyedpigeon 11y ago

This is already a problem with old media; The Daily Telegraph newspaper here in the Uk recently ignored a story about fraud and corruption at HSBC because of commercial interests (although they claim otherwise). You assert that paywalls aren't working; as someone who has worked for two online publishing businesses whose models rely on a paywall, I disagree. There IS an issue with general interest content, but even that, I believe, is being resolved, albeit slowly. I think the market (or at least part of it) is slowly adjusting to the idea of paying for quality content. When micropayments eventually become a thing, this will only accelerate. There are alternatives to bot those models. Bear in mind that not every website needs to make a huge profit. Many in the early days took no income whatsoever. Donations and merchandising are popular small income streams for many blogs. Not all advertising is objectionable; The Deck ad network, for example, provides advertising that is tasteful and unobtrusive (much like a polished version of Google AdWords). Finally, content-based advertising CAN work, providing it's clearly demarcated, highly relevant, and entertaining in its own right. I must've listened to many hours of advertising via TWIT podcasts, and I don't really resent any of it.

mercer 11y ago

You might very well be right that this is what will happen. And yes, it would be bad if native advertising increases dramatically because everyone has adblockers. However, the problem I have with your argument is that it rests on preserving something bad and to keep something worse from happening. I think that's generally not the best approach, which is why I'm not 'conservative' in most of my views. Let's say web content suddenly becomes infested with native ads. Those of us who care, might actually start paying for paywalled content. Those of us who don't, happily read advertising dressed up as proper content. Or maybe the bigger publishers will not be able to exist anymore, and content becomes either really shitty, or really good with little middle ground. Perhaps we'll finally start paying those individual journalists and writers through donations and crowd funding. I think a good comparison is music. People started ripping their music, so the industry replied with DRM. People cirsumvrented this, and the DRM became increasingly intrusive. Then downloads and torrents happened. All seems lost. And what do you know? 'Paywalled' music actually starts sort-of working. This may very well happen to video and text once companies get their act together and go with the tide rather than swim against it. I've been a pretty extreme 'modern', tech-savvy consumer for most of my life. And yet, now that I reached my thirties, and now that I have disposable income: 1. I pay for The Correspondent, a Dutch, pay-walled web-only publication that has been doing well and produces great content by great authors, including some of 'celebrity' journalists here (and soon to be released in English, too). 2. I occasionally buy single articles from any of the newspapers in Holland through Blendle, at prices of around 20/30 eurocents, with the option of a refund that I rarely use. 3. I pay for Spotify, not just because it's convenient, but because it offers (or used to offer) a really nice interface for discovery and curated playlists. 4. I buy ScreenCasts and (e)books direct from programmers/writers in my communities. 5. I've donated to a number of arts/journalistic crowdfunding projects. While there are many bad things that could happen, I'd argue that the current state of production, consumption, and accompanying advertising is already pretty bad. I'm fine with either: 1) the current models crumbling, and new models coming up that might be worse, so that it might get better quicker, or 2) fighting the fundamental problems and actively working towards a better alternative, or 3) hoping that the changes will end up better altogether. But preserving a situation that is already pretty shitty just out of fear for something shittier seems like the worse possible approach. I do realize that I'm leaving out the moral arguments in favor or against bypassing DRM, pirating content, or blocking ads. That's a difficult and perhaps important issue too, but I'd say judging by current behavior it's largely irrelevant to what actually happens.

yAnonymous 11y ago

>I do see it as a moral issue. The moral issue is on the other side as well: Most malware comes from hacked ad servers and the ad industry doesn't really seem to care. Until that changes, ads stay blocked and I won't even bother evaluating the other reasons (invasiveness, bandwidth/battery usage).

tljr 11y ago
I'd go deeper - a lot of social issues stem from advertising. Until that stops Adblock stays on.
Karunamon 11y ago
Malware is my #1 reason for blocking ads. Unless you as the website owner are willing to vet every single advertiser on your platform (or alternatively: commit to ads with zero active content), and compensate people if/when you let something through, the ads stay blocked. My hourly rate is many times more than the few hundredths of a cent you get for the impression.

egypturnash 11y ago

There are other alternatives to "ads alongside my content" that don't involve "more obnoxious ads". I make a webcomic. Historically, that's very much an ad-supported medium. I also block ads aggressively; it's one of the reasons I hassle with jailbreaking my iThings. I put my adblocking mouth where my money is: as long as I'm getting enough money per new page of comics on Patreon, I don't have any ads on my current project. It's been great to not have anything trying to distract people from reading my content. Sometime next year, as the Patreon income rises, I'll turn off ads on all my comics, new or old. There's no paywall; anyone who wants to read my comic can do this for free, with no ads thanks to the generosity of my supporters. Obviously it's easier for one person to make enough money via the donation box than it is for a large company; this does not necessarily scale. But it's an option worth considering. And hell, it can work on a larger scale - if you're old enough to remember a time before cable, or if you listen to the radio in the car, you may be familiar with the yearly donation drives on your local public tv/radio station; you may even be a supporter. Or hell: last year when an algorithm change at Google resulted in a lot less drive-by traffic to Metafilter, they started taking donations from their regular userbase. It has ended up being a significant portion of their income; https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-and-funding-update https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-an... (Yes, I am also aware that I am arguably stealing from all the people whose ads I block without supporting them. I've made my peace with that moral quandary. I fast-forwarded over the commercials when I used to watch stuff on TV, too.)

WalterGR 11y ago
I make a webcomic... I also block ads aggressively... I put my adblocking mouth where my money is: as long as I'm getting enough money per new page of comics on Patreon, I don't have any ads on my current project. It's been great to not have anything trying to distract people from reading my content. Sometime next year, as the Patreon income rises, I'll turn off ads on all my comics, new or old. Sorry to simplify, but I'm not familiar with your work: Is it safe to say that you 1. show exactly enough advertisements to earn what you subjectively feel is a salary commensurate with your investment -- time investment or otherwise 2. block all ads from other sites? (Disclaimer: I make a portion of my income from ads.)

harperlee 11y ago

> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content. You are assuming an invariable quantity of ads, which it is false. This banning makes advertisement more difficult; and more difficult, or less effective, advertising would push towards giving less valuable "for free* (*advertised)". So it pushes towards having to pay for more things, which is good for Apple. It's also valuable for us, in the sense that our customers are accustomed to get huge amounts of value for free. That's good for us creators. The issue is that we are also consumers, and that's bad for us - we will need to pay more. All in all, I believe too many people in this forum are risking their professional lifes a lot, and having a somewhat safer environment can end up being good for the economy. If there is less risk in entrepreneurship, more people will jump into putting effort into creating something good, as it is easier to sell. It also works against productizing users information, which might be good for our privacy, too.

adamlett 11y ago

It will not hurt the content producers who publish their content in apps. Like the just announced Apple News or the Facebook thing I can't remember the name of.

mcmullen 11y ago

I disagree with your assertion that "paywalls don't work", which is fundamentally not true. Content produces need to raise revenue to pay for their costs and make a profit. One excellent way to raise this revenue is by raising pay walls. It works for companies like The Times (London), The FT and The Economist. Will you retract this false statement? What I think you're saying is that "worthless ramblings on the internet aren't (inherently) worth anything and thus no one wants to give them their money willingly", which of course isn't the fault of the paywall but the content. It comes down to content creation and paying for it. If nobody wants to pay for it then it doesn't get created (unless you're a blogger, or meet your costs in some other way). We shouldn't have any time for people who want to get content for free. I'm in the unusual position of actually paying for content and use AdBlockers, however I use it because I disagree with tracking on the grounds of consent and privacy. (That said, I will happily disable adblocking for websites who only want to show me banners and not track me.)

the-dude 11y ago
Blendle(http://blendle.com http://blendle.com) is trying to be the 'micro'-paywall for content providers. After launching in The Netherlands, they have contracts with major German publishers now as well. Micro-payment system which actually works. Disclaimer: Dutch
- mcmullen 11y ago
  Thanks for the link. Interesting company! Nice summary here: https://medium.com/on-blendle/one-website-all-newspapers-and-magazines-3a5f6c8360d9 https://medium.com/on-blendle/one-website-all-newspapers-and.... I like the idea of micro-payments for interesting, long-form content because there are various journalists I like who work for newspapers I don't subscribe to. I would happily pay for in-depth analysis pieces. I remain hopeful about non-click-bait journalism.

BrainInAJar 11y ago

> I do see it as a moral issue. Your ability to get rich is not my moral concern.

learnstats2 11y ago

> TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen. This is a fallacy. All news agencies are already producing advertorial copy, and have been since before the web: this is nothing new. They didn't start doing it because ads stopped working. Someone who is willing to show intrusive ads is already willing to plumb any depth for an additional income stream. > A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. I would suggest that the viewer's ability to distinguish is increasing, since we are more aware of the problem, and we don't have to face the cognitive load of ad-ignoring elsewhere.

dunkelheit 11y ago

I think you raise very valid point. Historically it just made business sense for content creators to put up some ads. It works like a feedback loop: you put some ads -> you can offset your production costs and lower the price or produce more content -> you increase your audience -> you put more ads. And unfortunately for content consumers the equilibrium is near the point when they are irked by the ads but just not enough to leave in droves. So now when general dissatisfaction with ads seems to rise the choice for content creators is to install paywalls/raise prices (public won't like it either) or accept more surreptitious kinds of ads (morally dubious). Or maybe go freemium?

coldtea 11y ago

>Let's face it: paywalls don't work. Citation needed.

chrisdone 11y ago

I don't think morality has anything to do with this, unless you want to bring a marketing issue onto a high-ground that it frankly doesn't deserve. What body of ethics has anything to say about this? I think part of the issue is that most of these services that base themselves on ads are inessential. I don't care if reddit or gmail or last.fm goes down, I can always get another service that will step up and fill the niche. Grooveshark funded their service by ads, then it got taken down by a lawyer army, now I pay for a Spotify subscription. When ads are present, they're part of the experience. And that means the experience, for some people, is shitty. People will prefer not to have shitty experiences. Some people decide to start out with the premise that they will make money off of ads, good luck to them. But it's not my moral obligation to accept it.

Terretta 11y ago

Traveling in Europe on a limited and expensive 3G connection, I'm acutely aware I'm paying more for the bandwidth these ads consume than the advertiser is paying to display them. The ads consume 20x more bandwidth than the content. I'm subsidizing the ads! You say ads are moral, I say as implemented, that's immoral.