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It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I

• bpodgursky 11y ago
  "Simple" doesn't mean correct. In practice cutting out ads probably makes you a more valuable customer because you've spent 10x the time most people spend looking at ads inspecting them while cutting. (and don't give any BS about "oh I actively avoid brands that advertise" -- brand advertising works, deal with it) The better analogy is, you cut out the ads, reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers. In the real world, this is not going to be legal.
  • howeyc 11y ago
    I don't see where you're getting the "reprint the paper, and redistribute it to other customers" based on how ad blocking works. Ad block is at an individual level, there is no redistribution.
  • afandian 11y ago
    There's no redistribution. Why does your analogy include redistribution? There's no need for an analogy anyway. It's equivalent of receiving a free magazine and the user putting it through an automatic ad-censoring machine before reading it.
  • luso_brazilian 11y ago
    An even more apt analogy would be if a third party made an easy to use glass overlay that, when placed over a magazine page, obscured all the ads leaving only the content visible. Considering that is applied voluntarily and "client side" and no redistribution takes place I'm not sure that would be illegal considering current laws. Despite of that I believe publishing companies would be lobbying for laws to curb that practice as soon as it achieved critical mass and high enough adoption.
    • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      All of the analogies given miss some major issues. Visual adds aren't the problem. Audio adds, adds that consume massive bandwidth that is limited, and add that track are all the problem. Normal visual adds can sometimes be nice, letting me know about products that I didn't previous know about that I might actually want to buy. But being tracked? Nope. Blocked!
  • danr4 11y ago
    As stated in another comment, cutting them out can be an hypothetical ad cutting machine I 3D printed. The implementation detail of how i'm cutting out the ads is beside the point. The point is that I can offer my ad cutting services for free to anyone. I can tell all my friends - "Hey guys i'll come to your house and cut the ads out of the free magazines you're already receiving" Which is definitely not the same as "Hey guys I've received this magazine, and I cut the ads, here's the PDF" The reprint and redistribution parts are non-existent in ad blockers. the content is not hosted on adblockersite.com.
• CSMastermind 11y ago
  Newspapers have successfully used a combination of subscription and advertising for a century now.
  • eli 11y ago
    Maybe not the best example: http://i.imgur.com/0mgT0AR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0mgT0AR.jpg
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      Not how up to the .com bust the newspapers were actually making more money than before. The collapse of the market took a heavy toll, both on newly minted online media as well as on established media that had made the jump to online.
      • eli 11y ago
        The downturn in revenue also coincides with the rapid expansion of Craigslist, which devoured the previously pretty reliable classifieds revenue. But print readership was going down for a while before then. TV news was on the rise. I think it was a lot of factors at once.
• moron4hire 11y ago
  I would pay for the NY Times or Washington Post if I knew having a paid subscription would remove the ads and give me a reasonable reading experience.
  • eli 11y ago
    The problem with removing ads for paying subscribers is that it greatly devalues the remaining ad impressions -- who would want to reach just the people too disengaged or cheap to buy a subscription? It also incentivizes the site owner to have increasingly obtrusive and annoying ads for non-paying members.
    • moron4hire 11y ago
      So how does Reddit manage to have ad-less subscriptions and yet still restrain themselves from creating obtrusive interstitial ads? Superhuman strength? Immortality? Some other heretofore unknown super power? The truth is, there is nothing on the NY Times or WaPo that is worth paying twice for.
      • eli 11y ago
        Reddit has its users create all the content for free. And AFAIK they still aren't profitable.
        • jacquesm 11y ago
          You'd hope that the content produced by newspapers would rise above the level of reddit leading to people wanting to pay for the content directly. Of course if people are looking for entertainment then that's a different story and reddit may be serious competition.
          • TeMPOraL 11y ago
            One would hope. The problem is, content produced on Reddit (and HN) is way better than content produced by newspapers, by a very simple mechanism: someone posts an article to Reddit/HN, people start debunking all the bullshit, misinterpretations and lies journalists wrote in that article. Newspapers have a lot of trust to regain with people. But then again, I suppose the general population doesn't give a rat's ass about the truth, and want to read only something shocking to use as a "social object" (i.e. something you can start discussing with other people you meet).
• johnchristopher 11y ago
  > Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Uh ? To cut the ads out you need to see them. Adblock hide them as if they never existed in the first place. Analogies, these days...
  • pjc50 11y ago
    You can (and I do) from time to time cut out ads manually from the web with the DOM inspector. It's particularly good for screen-filling modals. Of course I can then make the cutout permanent with a hosts file or user-configurable adblocker ...
  • danr4 11y ago
    Alright i'll bite. "I can cut them out" can be, as stated in another comment, an ad cutting physical machine. Your move.
  • toyg 11y ago
    you could hand the magazine to a 3-year old who can't read, and he'll cut out all pictures for you. Nitpickers, these days...
    • johnchristopher 11y ago
      Are you really saying you would let a 3-year old operate that ad cutting physical machine mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995459 ? Adults, these days... :]
      • toyg 11y ago
        My 3-year-old is perfectly fine with a pair of safe scissors, as long as we keep him away from curtains and other should-not-cut materials. Luckily, we have no need for ad-cutting on kindle...
• Nursie 11y ago
  I think it's simple too, but doesn't need a meatspace analogy like that. I request some data, you send me some data. My computing device (yes MY computing device) then renders it in accordance with my wishes. That's it. (oh, and no, I have no obligation to play ball with your trackers)
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That's why in the War on General Purpose Computing, publishers and advertisers are on the side of making the computing device not yours.
  • jfoster 11y ago
    I actually think the people running sites are better off with this becoming the norm. Ads are not a great way to make money. Low friction paywalls will be great for everyone.
• AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines. You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader problem is that consumers have shown over time that they aren't willing to pay for content (at scale) so they are left with making money somehow.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    It's like going to the stand and asking for a magazine. You have it given to you for free. Now it's yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including giving it to a 3-year-old child to cut out the ads and throw them in a bin, so that you don't have to ever see them. It's yours, you have a right. Giving away the magazine for free was the choice of the person at the stand. If they want to profit, they have various means to do this. Ads are one way. Asking you for money when you ask for the magazine is another.
    • AndrewKemendo 11y ago
      Agreed. To extend the analogy though the customer sees the free one next to a quality paid one, chooses the free one and then complains about it having ads in it. At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible.
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        > Agreed. To extend the analogy though the customer sees the free one next to a quality paid one, chooses the free one and then complains about it having ads in it. To improve it even further, based on my own experience and what I see in comments here, apparently you have like 1 quality paid stuff per 10 paid scams, 10 paid pieces of crap and 100 free stands. Those who want to pay for quality content quickly discover that it's incredibly hard to find. The analogy breaks down on the nature of the ads themselves. In physical magazines, ads are static and occupy fixed space on the pages. The off-line equivalent to what we have on-line would be ads carried by bugs inside the pages - moving, making sounds, hard to get rid of and occasionally biting you so you get sick and need to seek time-consuming and/or expensive care. Ads on-line are actively hostile. > At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible. I agree.
• chmike 11y ago
  Exactly and for the subscription model to work provide quality content.
• austenallred 11y ago
  This comment rubs me in the wrong way. Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" - they're putting it up with ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request them. You seek the content out. So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose that's your prerogative, but don't pretend like you're the victim in this. And also don't pretend like it's the company's fault for not choosing your preferred business model. You don't get to choose other companies' business models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.
  • mirimir 11y ago
    > So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. > You elect to not display that part using your client. That's not how ad-blockers work. They prevent ads from downloading. And so sites load faster, and mobile users pay less for throughput.
    • javery 11y ago
      This is not completely accurate - most ad blockers include both request blocking as well as content blocking. For instance it might not be able to block a sponsored tweet since it is returned with all of the other tweets, but it can hide that div on the page. Check any block list and you will see both rules.
      • mirimir 11y ago
        OK, thanks for the clarification. Nonetheless, many sites do load dramatically faster with ad blocking. That's especially so with high-latency connections. I often use Tor through nested VPN chains, and total latency can be 1-2 seconds. Some sites are unusable without AdBlock and NoScript.
  • 11y ago
• jerf 11y ago
  Oh, the memories. I haven't seen this metaphor fight in like 8 years now, since web annotation basically died. And here we finally are with a version of this debate that people actually care about, because there's actual money at stake. Finally my years of prep are ready to pay off! First, I suggest everyone resist metaphors. Physical metaphors don't work here at all. For one thing, the "free content" may in the future decide that you can't load the content in the page until after the ads and trackers confirm that you have indeed loaded their content and executed it to some degree, which wrecks every physical metaphor you can come up with. Physical content is dead. Web content is code. It gets to do code-y things. No physical metaphor will keep up. Next, this obviously produces an arms race. The first iterations of this will be stupid and client-side, because it's cheap. When that doesn't work, server-side things can be done so that at the very least, you must download the ad; that can be confirmed fairly well in a non-forgeable way. The ads will also run arbitrary bits of code in an attempt to verify that they've really been shown; the client side plugins will retaliate by simulating the relevant code and not actually showing the ad. With the current state of web technology, this would stabilize in a sort of middle ground, where the client-side correctly doesn't render the ads, but the requisite requests to convince the server that you can see the content would by necessity still leak tracking information in order to convince the servers to show it at all. You could try to do things like use client-side stuff to scramble those values and share them among users or something, but that's fairly easy to detect at scale. Where that becomes particularly relevant though is that the clients at this point are becoming increasingly outright deceptive and duplicitious. Instead of passively failing to render ads, actively deceiving the remote systems opens a new door both legally and ethically. At some point after this the publishers have both a legal and ethical case that you are not merely "experiencing the content as you wish", but actively defrauding them. This, of course, won't stop people from arguing they have a right not to be tracked or advertised at, which means that they will essentially be arguing in favor of a right to have their programs make fradulent requests in order to get this "free" content. Which is fine and dandy locally, but consider what that means globally... and in particular, at this point how do you argue that it's ethically wrong to put trackers and ads in content, and for that matter even spyware, if the "other side" is retaliating in kind? If you're not careful with the ethics here you surprisingly find that you end up arguing in favor of the very things you thought you were arguing against, and end up making a "good for me but not for thee" argument, which even if you do end up believing that is still not a very powerful or compelling ethical/legal position. Pardon if I'm leaping about 4 steps further down the road than most people here are at... I worked this all out about 12 years ago. (It's a bit dated now and I cringe a bit at the writing style, as befits any writer linking to something they wrote 12 years ago, but you can see what I worked out at http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics http://www.jerf.org/iri/blogbook/communication_ethics . Perhaps remarkably, it is dead on topic for this very debate... there's a lot of related issues here.)
• felipeerias 11y ago
  "Here is the deal. I will tell you a story. But not just any story: an amazing story about this one person who did something unbelievable and you can't guess what happened next and also cats. In exchange, all you have to do is let these people (whom I don't actually know) track you and run their software on your computer, which will present a garish display of images (and maybe also sound and video, did I mention that I don't know these guys?). All you have to do then is click and I will get paid a fraction of a cent (and you will have to deal with whatever crap comes up afterwards). So what do you say?"
  • voidz 11y ago
    Sounds like an offer I can't refuse! /i
• userbinator 11y ago
  my reading experience, my choice I'd extend that to say "my eyes, my ears, my brain." If I have the right to mute the volume, change the channel, or otherwise do something else when adverts appear on the TV, then I should also have the right to block them on a webpage - we're just using available technology to help us do it more effectively.
• jusben1369 11y ago
  To keep with the neighborly analogy what's happening is your neighbor is opening up his garage and lining it with magazines and comfortable seating for you to sit for free and read. However he's also lining his driveway with folks pitching you on goods and services on your way there. You're saying to heck with that and jumping over the fence right near the garage entrance and popping straight in. Your neighbor knows that type of abuse can occur and it's really up to them to decide how they want to handle it. But to pretend that you and he and the advertisers don't understand the implied relationship is disingenuous. For all those saying "get a subscription model!" remember this. A subscription model, by its very definition, implies that both of us expect a repeat, longer term relationship. Understand if that's the only way to monetize content on the internet it'll change the type and way content is created.