Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking | Hacker News Reader

Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

blog.adcontrolapp.com

27 pointsarturgrigor57 comments

> no one wants to give away money from their own pockets in order to sustain their website.

Interestingly, some of the best content on the web (in my opinion) can be found on websites that do not have ads. They are maintained by people genuinely interested in a topic and have a passion for sharing knowledge.

I'm not saying that gift economy works for everyone, but there certainly are people that are willing to pay from their own pockets. It's not like the web wouldn't exist without ads.

Plus, with all the copycat sites gone, stopping ads is more likely to make the web a better place, overall.

Definitely not true, especially for web users from developing countries. Few days back there was an article on a company providing articles from various sources for around few cents (Euro) each. Given the exchange rate of the currency in which I earn my salary, it is simply too expensive for me. I would rather see ads (and occasionally click on them to support sites I love) rather than pay for each article I read.

Many of the best of those sites rely on reporting from other sites that are ad-supported. You can get excellent analysis for free, but you usually can't get wide-ranging on-the-ground reporting that way.

To be honest, I was thinking more about art, science and technology content that is primarily published on the web rather than traditional journalism like you would find in New York Times.

I can't speak for on-the-ground or wide-ranging reporting of breaking events, but for instance I know of a local investigative journalism website that does not depend on ads and is often praised for the quality of its content. (http://podcrto.si/about).

Can you share some examples where the content IS the business model?

For example, I think Joel Spolsky's articles are some of the best content on the web. He does not serve ads because he does not make money from the content, although his content did serve as a form of advertising for his company. That is not a viable option for all content producers.

I am not against ad-blocking, but do not block them myself. If the ads come in the way of obtaining content which I am interested in, I simply close the web page.

I can think of http://roadsandkingdoms.com/ , arguably the best travel site on the web.

I actually wonder how they sustain themselves.

This has been my thought on the matter too. If there's no money in journalism anymore, then the only people left doing it are the ones who love doing it. The leeches all slither off to other industries they can make a buck off of.

the leeches and the people who need to make a living

Yes, it is a curious and rather blinkered statement.

Imagine if the author had written 'no one wants to give away money from their own pockets to sustain their [photography|aircraft modelling|horse riding] hobby'. We'd all look askance. But somehow he thinks the web is different?

Plenty of hobbyists and societies run websites entirely without external funding. They will continue to do so, just like they did in the 1990s before advertising exploded onto the Web.

> We fear that in the near future many websites will start to disappear just because their maintenance will no longer be profitable, and no one wants to give away money from their own pockets in order to sustain their website.

I hear that since Webwasher. And today, with better AdBlocking tools, additional costs for hosts, the Internet is still there.

From time to time even I get weak and think about the way I block ads. Then I just launch my IE at work and there is no doubt about it: this is not the Internet I want to see.

At work I only use IE for internal sites and apps. Everything external I use Firefox with uBO, Disconnect and Ghostery.

I don't want to be responsible for bringing something heinous into my employer's network.

I don't know why adblockers aren't mandatory inside corporations.

I would love to understand that too. Especially since it seems to be a kind of UK problem. Colleagues in the US do have FF on their computers.

I'm not even allowed to run FF, Chrome, etc. We bypass this by using Waterfox because it seems to be the .exe Files that are blocked.

It's a horrible risk since people are doing research on their IE going down to private peoples pages and blogs (not all of them though since wordpress-hosted blogs are blocked...).

Will that one advertisement per website be done without giving my computer malware-like code that tracks me? Will they follow the regulation of advertisements in my country rather than where ever the ad-networks server happens to resides in? Will they respect the personal data protection laws that my government has decided on? Will the publishing website be held liable for the advertisement company complying with said laws?

Somehow I doubt all that. They want "everything to stay the same", and that means keeping the wild west as it current is. I don't.

I will shed no tears when the shitty web advertising business model dies a well-deserved death. They slow down my browser to a crawl, waste my battery life, waste my data cap, invade my privacy, and assault my eyes, all for what? An ad I'm never going to click on anyway.

We can do better.

Sounds like you could use an ad blocker, friend!

There's been no great solution on Apple mobile so far. Hoping iOS 9 changes that.

The answer is to make your adverts fast, lightweight and battery efficient. This is competition at its finest - those with the fastest and most compact adverts do not get blocked.

Claiming your business model will be harmed by progress in technology is depressing and a cop out. I would like to see resource quotas enforced by browsers. Like billboard space, you have a scarce resource to fill that is prime. How about you fit your advert resource usage into a well defined slot of time that my browser can manage for you? If you're fast and respectful, I see you. Otherwise you get torn down for vandalism like illegal posters.

I'd agree with you if the users were choosing what to block, but they aren't.

Some developer somewhere is choosing what to block and when their app lets through 2 ads and the competition doesn't let though any people will consider the latter better and use that.

IMO Adblockers make running "nice" safe and efficient ads pointless as you'll just get lumped in with the rest of 'em.

I'm OK with sites blocking content for those using ad blockers. That seems like a fair balance, and if the content being blocked truly is that important to me, it's a one click disable to give in, or I can probably find a similar story elsewhere. (Though most of the time I don't really care that much to do either.)

I've found that using uBlock origin I don't only block ads, I virtually redesign pages. I remove share buttons, I remove elements I never use on sites I visit frequently. Maybe I'm addicted to simplifying the web in my own image.

> I've found that using uBlock origin I don't only block ads, I virtually redesign pages. I remove share buttons, I remove elements I never use on sites I visit frequently. Maybe I'm addicted to simplifying the web in my own image.

Yeah, I find sites like ebay or amazon barely usable without blocking away the fluff.

But I wonder whether that information (blocked non-ad content) is of use for these companies? I could even imagine some companies would pay for access to the (anonymized) data. Granted, that ad blocker usage pattern is probably too obscure (i.e. too few non-geeks do it) to draw reliable conclusions about the general population.

If you produce content, no one is willing to pay for it and your only source of income for it is adverts then I say your business model is flawed and good riddance to you.

I don't disagree with you, but just from a devil's advocate point of view, some would argue that by using ads to pay for the content, it allows the content to get to those people who couldn't have afforded to pay for it themselves.

Or, niche topics that can't draw enough support to stay afloat. Thus leading to an increasing sameness and banality.

Call it the tyranny of popularity.

> Or, niche topics that can't draw enough support to stay afloat

This isn't specific to adverts and applies to every industry/endeavour that depends on voluntary engagement for funding. Name one thing that does not require a minimum level of popularity to be self-sustaining

It's not flawed, it's just not simple. Or, it's a happy accident that people figured out how to be middlemen between advertisers and news consumers (the classic example).

In the paper newspaper days I didn't mind ads at all. And I probably wouldn't have paid the full cost of subscription if the advertisers weren't the real source of income.

Now, as someone in another said, advertisers are stalkers. I mind that.

In the newspaper, the ads stayed in their boxes, and you could easily ignore them - honestly, I don't ever actually seeing newspaper ads, they faded into the background so much. They weren't playing music, flashing gifs, launching fullscreen popup windows and click-through modals.

Exactly. The online ads are objectionable by design.

Have you seen a weekend local paper in the U.S. recently? There are whole ad sections that I drop straight in the trash. It's often at least 50% of the paper by weight.

There may be deals for supermarket meat etc. but in general it seems like a total waste.

That's been the case for decades. When I used to get the Sunday paper half of it would go straight to the trash before I poured my coffee.

I respectfully disagree with you.

Most larger websites produce two or three articles a month that I'm interested in. Smaller websites may only produce one or two articles a year that I'm interested in reading. There is no way I'm going to sign up for 100+ websites in order to read sporadic content. But this sporadic content is what does exist and needs to exist in order to get a well rounded web. So it's not realistic to say to a smaller niche blog to produce "better" and more frequent content that appeals to everyone. That's part of the beauty of thousands of niche web sites over, for example, dozens of niche magazines of the past.

So, there is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. There needs to be a way to aggregate all these sites into a single payment system. You pay for a year and get access to the sites you like. Then this payment processing company takes care of allocating the money based on various factors like how many people access each article.

Finally, in order to maximize revenue to content providers, this company should be setup not to take a fixed percent of each transaction but only take what it needs to sustain itself. In other words, at the end of each week/month/whatever the company totals up it's expenses and take their percentage only up sustainability (which includes growth factors). No more middle man leaches!

"I respectfully disagree with you."

And yet you do not, instead you propose a system in which people pay for content.

The part I disagree with is the "no one is willing to pay for" part. Should have made that clearer.

I contend that lots of people are willing to pay, just not by the current means. (And proposed a possible solution that would suit me, and what I naively believe to be others too.)

Such a “well rounded web” has no inherent right to exist. If it is at the cost of having ads, and that cost is too high, then we won’t get it. And that would be fine with me. I remember the Internet before the web. I can easily imagine an Internet without it.

The obvious solution as far as the ad networks are concerned is to proxy their adverts through the website that's displaying them. A website owner signs up to adnetwork.com, installs a node/PHP/whatever app on their server, and adverts are sent to that app and relayed on to the user's browser. As the ads come from the same domain as all the other content for the website they'll be virtually impossible to block. The reason this hasn't happened in the past is because shared web hosting would have made it difficult; as more and more sites move to virtual servers it'll get easier. Eventually it'll be a one-click install from a browser when you set up Wordpress or Ghost.

This means they'll load more slowly, they'll be harder to get around, and we will have absolutely no way to see who is actually tracking us any more.

Much as I dislike adverts on websites, the alternative to the way they're sent now is far worse.

I'm pretty sure I've already seen this in the wild, but there are plenty of workarounds.

1) Easiest is DOM-structure. Ads will often have a signature tell-tale placement and structure on a page, and this is enough to identify them. A naive ad implementation is trivial to detect, and even smarter ones can be worked around using crowdsourcing.

2) As a general matter, the facet of advertising we call ads are obvious to humans, and should in principle be detectable to machines. Rely on layout cues, other pages on the website, differences in content. This will ultimately push more and more advertising into the "sponsored content" category, which seems a genuinely harder problem.

The sponsored content/"native advertising" is the next logical step. It can range from "product placement" in otherwise regular articles, to full-blown advertorials disguised as regular articles. No DOM-structure to block, no layout clues and very non-obvious to humans. I consider these to be more insidious than current ads that most are eager to block

What we see here is evolution of advertisement. From low quality spam-like ads to higher quality advertorials, which must provide some usefullness to the reader in order to carmouflage as normal content and to attract attention. I work in a marketing agency and there is a big shift from Adwords + SEO to "content marketing". Big money is put into creating interesting or funny stuff to attract attention (and backlinks).

If the content is sponsored, this fact must still be disclosed according to FCC regulations. These disclosures could be detected. In fact, there is already a Firefox extension to do this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/addetector/

Suggesting that a site agree to have either one or no ads seems a bit to comand-and-control for the Internet.

I agree with the other commenter that it seems reasonable for asightto a sight to block content if their ads are blocked, but do not see this as a sustainable solution. How can one know abead of time whether a site will or will not behave this way. The only time you'd know is if re-visiting. In that case, you're not likely to revisit. Seems like a lose-lose.

To me, the obvious answer is the option to opt out and either immediately paying a metered amount cash exchange, paying an end of month pro-rata subscription amount, or paying via a block exchange.

I think the end of month subscription, divied pro-rata, is the best option (anonymized of course). Its transaction cost is the middle of the two. It requires no direct relationship with the site prior to your visit. But most importantly, it allows for Spotify style consumer pricing. The consumer pays a flat fee for opting out of adverts. Then the content creators are encouraged to produce content that you will actually spend time with, not click-bait. This leaves the option on the table for each site to sell other content and material behind pay walls.

One last comment. Advertising is designed to influence and change behavior and opinions. In my opinion it is disingenuous to insist that a site visitor agrees to third party influence brokering to keep your lights on. It is my screen, my hardware, and my mind. I have every right to run adblocker. Similarly you have every right to decide bow to keep the lights on at your business. But I think there as been enough of this argument that consumers have unwittingly entered into some sort of relationship /agreement and should somehow wake-up and see that it's our proper responsibility to be good advert targets so the servers stay on.

Instead of "one ad" I'd like to see unlimited well behaved ads. Static images served from the same domain. In fact - static images served from the same domain are probably nearly impossible to separate from content.

In a perfect world, web adverts will be back to the print media style - non-clickable non-targeted images.

Why do you want everything to stay the same?

Websites will figure out how to monetize or they will go away. This is a good thing.

I think the most worrisome, and presently most likely, outcome is an arms-race style battle of iterative workarounds that will end up producing less revenue for producers, and provide consumers with a worse experience with higher friction.

I don't necessarily disagree with that especially given that there is a current arms-race to try and maximize the number of ads on a page.

However, I also, think that once the ad bubble bursts people will start to be creative in how they monetize. Most will get it completely wrong. The few who figure it out will eventually lead the rest.

Something has to give. It cannot keep going the way it is. It's neither producer or consumer friendly.

Display ads are not the problem. The problem is with ads used to track, follow, and target users while surfing the web. Ads are becoming web stalkers that follow us around the internet. How will showing 1 ad per page prevent tracking, following, and targeting?

I was quite happy with ads, then our local paper www.bathchronicle.co.uk became impossible to use and I "chose" to install adblock specifically because of their 45+ ads on one page.

I noticed a similar issue with other www.localworld.co.uk paper sites. I get they need to make money but to make articles unreadable is not the way to go.

One option I'm guessing is to have a blacklist adblock approach that only kicks in when a particular site becomes abusive and is reported back to the site owners to enable them to "fix" their ad delivery.

My local paper's site, the Denver Post, started to look like a whore with all the ads, and auto-replicated stories on the same page, years ago. I stopped visiting before I ever installed my first ad blocker.

I think the problem is that there is local buy-in. People want to engage locally and the paper sites offer them a medium to do it. So people struggle with the site even though it's a horrendous experience.

People using ad blockers are a small proportion of the market. Shitty click-through rates are just inevitable as consumers learn new ad behavior and grow a blindness to it. Do a focus group study and I bet most people won't even be able to recall that they even saw an ad, let alone what it was for.

In other words, if you choose a business model that requires placement ads, you're doomed. You made a bad decision. Sorry.

Up to 25% of the population in some countries: http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adblocking-report/

Their 2015 report is up: http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/ad-blocking-report/

IMO once all barriers (psychological and not) to quick and easy small online payments are gone, ads will not be useful anymore to content providers. A click through rate of 1/1000 will be easily compensated by a rate of donation of 1/10000.

> Last week Washington Post decided to block the content of the article if you’re using an ad blocking software.

I just went there and clicked around as much as I could, at least 20 articles. I saw no complaints or roadblocks. uBO, Disconnect and Ghostery all reported blocking lots of ads and trackers.

Aside from many other content producer-side arguments others have presented, surely it's most obvious that so long as the consumer choice exists to block ALL adds, it's far more optimal to a user than opting into a system that presents (tracking) advertising...

Ads that track users are bad. But when I think back, the first time I wanted to control ads was when ads just keep popping up or it decides to open tab/windows on its own and forward it to various sites. As long as, they are not doing that. It should be fine.

One benefit of ad blocking is that ads do not need to be downloaded.

Once websites start blocking ad blockers the other option is to download the ads but not display them.

That of course will lead to ads getting "smarter" (well, more annoying; they will have to figure out whether they're being watched).

Fast forward into the future and we'll have eye tracking software that will make sure you see the ad :)

It's going to be an arms race.

Back in the early internet era, the best content was available for free of charge. If anything, that's still the case even today. Try to google on some technical topics like Ohm's law or something and you'll find very old websites built with good ole' HTML tables providing the information you need crisp and clear.

Actually, I disagree. This is 2015. If I want to start a website on a certain topic, say about cars or electronics, I can find some really good free hosts who will support me without any sneazy catches. As a real example, I go to blogger.com, setup a new blog with my own custom theme, (with all the attribution to blogger removed if I want to) and start producing content. Not cool with blogspot? Then, how about Github pages? Not so technical? How about using a free shared web host (there are plenty, Google them)?

If your objective is to spread information and knowledge, you will do that no matter what. It is when your objective is guised as spreading information when you really want to make money and scale up doing so, then you run into a problem. The problem with this kind of appeal against ad-blocking is the same old argument of "How much is too much?"

"We need money to support our website to keep it up and running". But, never do these authors disclose how much they really need as long as they're making a killer profit.

The problem with mixing ads with content is that introduces a conflict of interest - Are you writing that content because you like writing, or are you writing that content to get more eyeballs to serve your advertisers? And it's very hard to convince your readers that you don't intend to make money from them although you have ads on your site.

For your reference, I do own a blog myself without any ads whatsoever and I think this is the future we're heading towards. I am a proud user of adblock software and I refused to be shamed for that. As would any user, I am concerned about the content first, which is the logical reason why I go to a site. But, if the site tries hard to ruin my experience to make it difficult for me to consume that content, then of course, I'll find a way to circumvent it. But, that doesn't mean I don't support the authors of the site, just that as everyone else, I have my own way of supporting them. Just like how I've been donating to Wikipedia all these years.

There have been too many sites abusing the slogan of "We need to place ads so we can support ads" to buy back our lost trust. Sure, there will be a lot of content weeded out because they can't support themselves, but I am confident that the ones whose objectives are to spread information will do so no matter what.

We built the internet ourselves when no one gave us ads to support our efforts back then. And we'll find a way to do it again. Just takes time and patience.

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