4 ms·

Sadly, this won't be the end of intrusive advertising. It will just go underground. I think as a result of wide-spread ad blocking we'll see three worrying tren

by tlack 11y ago

Sadly, this won't be the end of intrusive advertising. It will just go underground. I think as a result of wide-spread ad blocking we'll see three worrying trends develop. 1. More paid-only content More content will go behind pay gates and login gates, like the NYT site, as sites scramble to monetize. This is bad for society as a whole as we lose free access to information. 2. Advertising goes server-side Advertising will become more subtle and not understandable by the end user. The good thing about Javascript-based advertising tags is that you could kind of understand what was going on. In the future, ads will be indistinguishable from content, and already shaky wall between editorial and advertising will collapse completely. On top of that, the worst part of modern advertising - data sharing - will be completely unobservable to us. Even small publishers will maintain databases of a wealth of information about you, tied to your logged in email address. 3. The collapse of many cottage hobby websites You can forget about small blogs being a worthwhile side biz for many small groups. No more dropping in a simple JS ad tag and having some revenue to pay off your hosting bill.

slang800 11y ago
> In the future, ads will be indistinguishable from content, and [the] already shaky wall between editorial and advertising will collapse completely. If anything, that should give us even more reason to attack this new form of advertising. Ad-blockers were born out of a pretty mild inconvenience. But hidden ads are far more sinister, and thus - should result in far more people coming up with ways to remove them. > No more dropping in a simple JS ad tag and having some revenue to pay off your hosting bill. At this point, hosting is basically free. You can either pay for it with pocket-change (as is the case with S3), or you could host it on GitHub and use GH-Pages, or even host a non-static site on something like 000webhost (I'm sure that there are more free non-static hosts than just 000webhost, but I haven't looked for one in years). But yeah, it is a shame that people can't make a little cash off of a side project using something like ads. We should come up with a way to fix that... like Flattr or Gittip (Gratipay) have been trying to do.
- tlack 11y ago
  > But hidden ads are far more sinister, and thus - should result in far more people coming up with ways to remove them. But how? Give me an example on a site like my (admittedly far from perfect) startup, http://lump.co http://lump.co. How would you identify an ad which posed as a gallery, or posed as a photo in a gallery? There would be no way to identify it - at all. On a blog, an entire post could be an advertisement for a product. They wouldn't bother labeling them - to avoid the ad block. The only person that loses is the consumer who can no longer trust what they read. > At this point, hosting is basically free I envy those kinds of sites! My S3 bills were $1200 a month (switched to Incero). I am taking in 2,000 new gallery posts, each with 50 photos that I download, per day, filling 2tb of disk every month or so. Far from free for startups that are data or processing heavy! Even for a blog, WPengine, various SaaS offerings you need, and misc stuff can easily reach $100+, before you add Cloudflare.. And that's before we even consider the human time that goes into it. Running a site ain't free. > Flattr and Gittip This is the best approach. I hope the world becomes comfortable paying tiny amounts for content. Sadly I feel like that's a ways away, especially for the non-US demo. And I hope those systems support refunds because often I'm disappointed by content once I get a chance to really read it. :) p.s. I'm not trying to make this about me. I am just an example of a common case.
- dtoidniero 11y ago
  We're not talking about a little side cash. All independent (most of the web) middle-sized publishers like me would have to lay off people (who are not all college kids, some who support have families). I caution people who think ad block is "sticking it to the man" because only corporations are going to survive a sudden drought if the ad-supported model dries up. It will kill the indies almost instantly and corporate will just figure out a way around it after they're done picking up bodies at a discount.

by tlack 11y ago

slang800 11y ago

> In the future, ads will be indistinguishable from content, and [the] already shaky wall between editorial and advertising will collapse completely. If anything, that should give us even more reason to attack this new form of advertising. Ad-blockers were born out of a pretty mild inconvenience. But hidden ads are far more sinister, and thus - should result in far more people coming up with ways to remove them. > No more dropping in a simple JS ad tag and having some revenue to pay off your hosting bill. At this point, hosting is basically free. You can either pay for it with pocket-change (as is the case with S3), or you could host it on GitHub and use GH-Pages, or even host a non-static site on something like 000webhost (I'm sure that there are more free non-static hosts than just 000webhost, but I haven't looked for one in years). But yeah, it is a shame that people can't make a little cash off of a side project using something like ads. We should come up with a way to fix that... like Flattr or Gittip (Gratipay) have been trying to do.

tlack 11y ago
> But hidden ads are far more sinister, and thus - should result in far more people coming up with ways to remove them. But how? Give me an example on a site like my (admittedly far from perfect) startup, http://lump.co http://lump.co. How would you identify an ad which posed as a gallery, or posed as a photo in a gallery? There would be no way to identify it - at all. On a blog, an entire post could be an advertisement for a product. They wouldn't bother labeling them - to avoid the ad block. The only person that loses is the consumer who can no longer trust what they read. > At this point, hosting is basically free I envy those kinds of sites! My S3 bills were $1200 a month (switched to Incero). I am taking in 2,000 new gallery posts, each with 50 photos that I download, per day, filling 2tb of disk every month or so. Far from free for startups that are data or processing heavy! Even for a blog, WPengine, various SaaS offerings you need, and misc stuff can easily reach $100+, before you add Cloudflare.. And that's before we even consider the human time that goes into it. Running a site ain't free. > Flattr and Gittip This is the best approach. I hope the world becomes comfortable paying tiny amounts for content. Sadly I feel like that's a ways away, especially for the non-US demo. And I hope those systems support refunds because often I'm disappointed by content once I get a chance to really read it. :) p.s. I'm not trying to make this about me. I am just an example of a common case.
dtoidniero 11y ago
We're not talking about a little side cash. All independent (most of the web) middle-sized publishers like me would have to lay off people (who are not all college kids, some who support have families). I caution people who think ad block is "sticking it to the man" because only corporations are going to survive a sudden drought if the ad-supported model dries up. It will kill the indies almost instantly and corporate will just figure out a way around it after they're done picking up bodies at a discount.