11 ms·

Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoyi

by Donzo 11y ago

Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.

FroshKiller 11y ago
I personally never bothered with ad blocking until every other site hit me with stupid landing pages (like on Forbes), exhortations to try their mobile app instead of their site (every Tapatalk-enabled forum ever), pleas to take a feedback survey before I've even seen anything that warrants feedback (MSDN), and modal ads that don't load until I try to scroll down to continue reading the content (soooooooooooo many blogs).
- moron4hire 11y ago
  It has really gotten bad. It's all a desperate grasp for ever shrinking ad dollars. Users get wise to the tactics and develop coping behaviors. You can track our eye movements and see we don't ever once even look at the common areas where ads lie. Popup boxes get closed in less than a second, with many people not even registering that it ever opened [0]. I've personally taken to sliding my cursor past the top edge of the page to see if the "subscribe to our mailing list" dialog appears, in some cases bailing on the article completely just because it's not valuable enough to me to bother after that affront. Major advertisers are swooning over 0.5% click through rates! That's not just random chance, that's a set of users highly-trained in the art of dodging ads, with an extremely-low-but-not-yet-zero failure rate! Advertising is dead. Good riddance. [0] Which has also killed the modal informational dialog in desktop applications. I've ran training sessions for internal enterprise software and the users literally could not remember there was a dialog mere seconds after dismissing it.
  - AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
    You seem to easily shrug off your conclusion. But it makes me shiver to think about that future. If advertising is dead, what else is Google going to do with all that data it has on us? Sell to the highest bidder?
    - moron4hire 11y ago
      They have already. That cat is long, long out of the bag. [0] I'm starting to think it makes more sense to make sure everyone has my data to make sore no one has a competitive advantage because of it. No, seriously though, I don't literally want to do that, but I'm starting to think in terms of that and what can we do about it. I don't think it's avoidable. I don't know how you would manage such a thing. But I think the only thing keeping us anywhere near safe is the basics of competition between these various companies. If one of them can succeed at creating their dream of a walled garden social network from which user activity never escapes, I think we will be far worse off. Most people don't care about privacy, they only care about getting free stuff. As long as there are almost no consequences to the lack of privacy--or consequences that our culture can easily turn around and use to shame the victim [1]--then nothing is going to change. The FOSS community isn't helping any. They turn their noses up at such prosaic projects as social media. How difficult would it be to make a decentralized twitter clone? It's apparently impossible, since it has been discussed numerous times and still hasn't happened yet. And how would it be different from RSS? Look where that went. I think the only hope we have is the complete implosion of advertising income as a business model on the internet. It is heading there, but the response has been to pour fuel on the fire. I think we're going to have to see some companies going bankrupt before we'll see major change. Otherwise, they'll just click-fraud leech money out of the system in a state of equilibrium. [0] Also, between my prior work in the defense industry and my wife's current work, the OPM hack has destroyed any semblance of privacy for my data. [1] RE: people losing jobs over things they've posted on Facebook. Millenials didn't invent being a jackass. They're just the first generation to have it broadcast live for their teachers, parents, and bosses to see.
onewaystreet 11y ago
Do you block ads on Google's products?
- anon1385 11y ago
  Google ad networks frequently display ads that are designed to trick you into installing malware. That is true for both the text only Adwords ads you get in search results [1], and the display ads Google runs on other sites[2]. For many years Adwords was probably the biggest risk to people setting up a new computer and wanting to download things like Firefox. When supposedly the best and most responsible sector of the online advertising market was prepared to profit from malware distribution for years then it's no wonder the entire industry has a reputation in the gutter. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870479
vegabook 11y ago
arguably HTML 5 is a co-culprit here - it is the new Flash and has massively worsened the situation. Try running a modern home page on anything other than a fast Intel chip or ARM chip and it's basically unusable (Rpi, low end Arm phones). Browsers are the new bloatware and make Microsoft Office look like vi.
- DSMan195276 11y ago
  I would add javascript to that list - I have a cheap laptop with an Intel Atom that's my main computer at home, and the biggest thing I did to make browsing useable was install no-script, and only enable the scripted required to make a page work. It's ridiculous how badly some javascript locks pages up, on the most innocuous of pages - For example, Wikimedia pages are unusable, and lots of blogs have badly written javascript (for unknown reasons) which end-up slowing FF to a crawl. After disabling the majority of the scripts on those pages (Which aren't usually necessary to view the page anyway) things are more then usable.
hibikir 11y ago
It's a Tragedy of the Commons situation: When we block ads, we do it relatively aggressively, so those that implement advertising in an acceptable way get crushed anyway. You are either using ads people don't see, or doing terrible things like many Minecraft mods, often downloaded by kids, and hosted at a particularly nasty site where the obvious download link gives you malware. To block horrible things like that, we also sink anyone trying to use sensible advertisements. Behaving like a good citizen just gives a website less revenue, and gains them pretty much nothing. At least one ad blocker tried to avoid this by marking some advertisements as legitimate/unobtrusive, and not blocking them. That didn't fly very well, as the rest of us just claimed that they were in league with advertisers, and just using this unblocking as a different source of revenue. That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter. Sponsored stories, content modified to add a few links to advertisers and such. Pay people not to post advertisements on their page, but to actively talk about you in the same way they talk about other things on their site.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter. Which in a way is even worse outcome. It creates a conflict of interests for the publisher and makes it harder for the reader to trust the article - because you often can't tell if at any given point, the author is writing sincerely, or just advertising his sponsors.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Except the Tragedy of the Common requires a depletable resource of some kind, and unfettered access to it for people who have a vested interest in protecting their own supply but not the supply of others. That is not online content one whit. My use of the WaPo does not in any way impact another users use, certainly not to the degree that WaPo is loading down my bandwidth with extra code and content above and beyond what I'm there to read. Seriously, by the time I'm done reading this article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/03/hitchhiking-robots-cross-country-journey-comes-to-tragic-end-in-philadelphia http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/03...), they've used up 5MB of my bandwidth, for 5KB of text. Literally 1/1000th. It gzips down to half of that. In the time it took me to write the last three sentences, it's now up to 25MB. I'm not the one choosing to use up their server resources. They're doing it to themselves. My hosting fees for all the sites I run combined come up to around $50/mo. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be for 1000 times more traffic. I assume it's not linear, but lord help me if it is. There is no end in site for online content. When I can get a perfectly good substitute to the NY Times just by scanning the plethora of free blogs and social media posts from people who are doing it because they like it, because it's important to them, because they are living it, then there is no end in site to online content. People will pay for valuable things. The problem is that this age of "you have to play the blogging/social media game to find any relevance in the public conscience" thing has created a functionally infinite supply of articles all saying basically the same thing. But turn on the TV, flip to CNN, and what are they talking about? "What are people saying on Twitter?" Why put up with ads to pay for secondary sources when I can go to the primary, where their advertising is nowhere near as intrusive? An artist I really like releases a new album and I buy it right away because I want to listen to it on repeat. If I really liked a movie I saw in a theater, I preorder it right away (at current theater ticket prices, plus going with my wife, plus typical Blu-ray prices, I'm spending around $60 a movie, if I really like it). Oh jeez. The WaPo article is 35MB now, and they just played a little "dink" sound, I'm guessing to try to catch my attention and get me to come back to... what? To an article I've now long disengaged with. These tactics works? This gets people to buy? This is worth all this infrastructure to try to leech out that one converted sale out of every 10,000 people?
bigbugbag 11y ago
The kind of ads is one thing, but to me the underlying issue is that I don't want to be tracked and online advertising is all about tracking people.
karmakaze 11y ago
I too don't mind ads, even targeted ones, if it's in moderation and secondary to the content. If it intrudes on the experience, performance, or security, I will filter or avoid it. Unfortunately the prevalence makes it much easier to filter all than just the majority. If someone knows of something like uBlock with default whitelists, I want to know and try it.

by Donzo 11y ago

FroshKiller 11y ago

I personally never bothered with ad blocking until every other site hit me with stupid landing pages (like on Forbes), exhortations to try their mobile app instead of their site (every Tapatalk-enabled forum ever), pleas to take a feedback survey before I've even seen anything that warrants feedback (MSDN), and modal ads that don't load until I try to scroll down to continue reading the content (soooooooooooo many blogs).

moron4hire 11y ago
It has really gotten bad. It's all a desperate grasp for ever shrinking ad dollars. Users get wise to the tactics and develop coping behaviors. You can track our eye movements and see we don't ever once even look at the common areas where ads lie. Popup boxes get closed in less than a second, with many people not even registering that it ever opened [0]. I've personally taken to sliding my cursor past the top edge of the page to see if the "subscribe to our mailing list" dialog appears, in some cases bailing on the article completely just because it's not valuable enough to me to bother after that affront. Major advertisers are swooning over 0.5% click through rates! That's not just random chance, that's a set of users highly-trained in the art of dodging ads, with an extremely-low-but-not-yet-zero failure rate! Advertising is dead. Good riddance. [0] Which has also killed the modal informational dialog in desktop applications. I've ran training sessions for internal enterprise software and the users literally could not remember there was a dialog mere seconds after dismissing it.
- AnonymousPlanet 11y ago
  You seem to easily shrug off your conclusion. But it makes me shiver to think about that future. If advertising is dead, what else is Google going to do with all that data it has on us? Sell to the highest bidder?
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    They have already. That cat is long, long out of the bag. [0] I'm starting to think it makes more sense to make sure everyone has my data to make sore no one has a competitive advantage because of it. No, seriously though, I don't literally want to do that, but I'm starting to think in terms of that and what can we do about it. I don't think it's avoidable. I don't know how you would manage such a thing. But I think the only thing keeping us anywhere near safe is the basics of competition between these various companies. If one of them can succeed at creating their dream of a walled garden social network from which user activity never escapes, I think we will be far worse off. Most people don't care about privacy, they only care about getting free stuff. As long as there are almost no consequences to the lack of privacy--or consequences that our culture can easily turn around and use to shame the victim [1]--then nothing is going to change. The FOSS community isn't helping any. They turn their noses up at such prosaic projects as social media. How difficult would it be to make a decentralized twitter clone? It's apparently impossible, since it has been discussed numerous times and still hasn't happened yet. And how would it be different from RSS? Look where that went. I think the only hope we have is the complete implosion of advertising income as a business model on the internet. It is heading there, but the response has been to pour fuel on the fire. I think we're going to have to see some companies going bankrupt before we'll see major change. Otherwise, they'll just click-fraud leech money out of the system in a state of equilibrium. [0] Also, between my prior work in the defense industry and my wife's current work, the OPM hack has destroyed any semblance of privacy for my data. [1] RE: people losing jobs over things they've posted on Facebook. Millenials didn't invent being a jackass. They're just the first generation to have it broadcast live for their teachers, parents, and bosses to see.

onewaystreet 11y ago

Do you block ads on Google's products?

anon1385 11y ago
Google ad networks frequently display ads that are designed to trick you into installing malware. That is true for both the text only Adwords ads you get in search results [1], and the display ads Google runs on other sites[2]. For many years Adwords was probably the biggest risk to people setting up a new computer and wanting to download things like Firefox. When supposedly the best and most responsible sector of the online advertising market was prepared to profit from malware distribution for years then it's no wonder the entire industry has a reputation in the gutter. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879229 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870479

vegabook 11y ago

arguably HTML 5 is a co-culprit here - it is the new Flash and has massively worsened the situation. Try running a modern home page on anything other than a fast Intel chip or ARM chip and it's basically unusable (Rpi, low end Arm phones). Browsers are the new bloatware and make Microsoft Office look like vi.

DSMan195276 11y ago
I would add javascript to that list - I have a cheap laptop with an Intel Atom that's my main computer at home, and the biggest thing I did to make browsing useable was install no-script, and only enable the scripted required to make a page work. It's ridiculous how badly some javascript locks pages up, on the most innocuous of pages - For example, Wikimedia pages are unusable, and lots of blogs have badly written javascript (for unknown reasons) which end-up slowing FF to a crawl. After disabling the majority of the scripts on those pages (Which aren't usually necessary to view the page anyway) things are more then usable.

hibikir 11y ago

It's a Tragedy of the Commons situation: When we block ads, we do it relatively aggressively, so those that implement advertising in an acceptable way get crushed anyway. You are either using ads people don't see, or doing terrible things like many Minecraft mods, often downloaded by kids, and hosted at a particularly nasty site where the obvious download link gives you malware. To block horrible things like that, we also sink anyone trying to use sensible advertisements. Behaving like a good citizen just gives a website less revenue, and gains them pretty much nothing. At least one ad blocker tried to avoid this by marking some advertisements as legitimate/unobtrusive, and not blocking them. That didn't fly very well, as the rest of us just claimed that they were in league with advertisers, and just using this unblocking as a different source of revenue. That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter. Sponsored stories, content modified to add a few links to advertisers and such. Pay people not to post advertisements on their page, but to actively talk about you in the same way they talk about other things on their site.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter. Which in a way is even worse outcome. It creates a conflict of interests for the publisher and makes it harder for the reader to trust the article - because you often can't tell if at any given point, the author is writing sincerely, or just advertising his sponsors.
moron4hire 11y ago
Except the Tragedy of the Common requires a depletable resource of some kind, and unfettered access to it for people who have a vested interest in protecting their own supply but not the supply of others. That is not online content one whit. My use of the WaPo does not in any way impact another users use, certainly not to the degree that WaPo is loading down my bandwidth with extra code and content above and beyond what I'm there to read. Seriously, by the time I'm done reading this article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/03/hitchhiking-robots-cross-country-journey-comes-to-tragic-end-in-philadelphia http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/03...), they've used up 5MB of my bandwidth, for 5KB of text. Literally 1/1000th. It gzips down to half of that. In the time it took me to write the last three sentences, it's now up to 25MB. I'm not the one choosing to use up their server resources. They're doing it to themselves. My hosting fees for all the sites I run combined come up to around $50/mo. I can't even begin to imagine what it would be for 1000 times more traffic. I assume it's not linear, but lord help me if it is. There is no end in site for online content. When I can get a perfectly good substitute to the NY Times just by scanning the plethora of free blogs and social media posts from people who are doing it because they like it, because it's important to them, because they are living it, then there is no end in site to online content. People will pay for valuable things. The problem is that this age of "you have to play the blogging/social media game to find any relevance in the public conscience" thing has created a functionally infinite supply of articles all saying basically the same thing. But turn on the TV, flip to CNN, and what are they talking about? "What are people saying on Twitter?" Why put up with ads to pay for secondary sources when I can go to the primary, where their advertising is nowhere near as intrusive? An artist I really like releases a new album and I buy it right away because I want to listen to it on repeat. If I really liked a movie I saw in a theater, I preorder it right away (at current theater ticket prices, plus going with my wife, plus typical Blu-ray prices, I'm spending around $60 a movie, if I really like it). Oh jeez. The WaPo article is 35MB now, and they just played a little "dink" sound, I'm guessing to try to catch my attention and get me to come back to... what? To an article I've now long disengaged with. These tactics works? This gets people to buy? This is worth all this infrastructure to try to leech out that one converted sale out of every 10,000 people?

bigbugbag 11y ago

The kind of ads is one thing, but to me the underlying issue is that I don't want to be tracked and online advertising is all about tracking people.

karmakaze 11y ago

I too don't mind ads, even targeted ones, if it's in moderation and secondary to the content. If it intrudes on the experience, performance, or security, I will filter or avoid it. Unfortunately the prevalence makes it much easier to filter all than just the majority. If someone knows of something like uBlock with default whitelists, I want to know and try it.