Ethical Adblocking
noscope.com
noscope.com
So, now, the ad industry trying to talk to the rest of the world about the ethics of blocking ads is like the drunk uncle who puked on last year's Thanksgiving Turkey talking to the family about the "ethics" of not inviting him this year. Sure, it's a sad situation, but you probably should've thought about that before you puked on the turkey.
If the ad guys spend a few years ensuring that advertisting is safe, lightweight, unobtrusive, non-creepy, and fast, maybe we'll invite you back to the party someday, and start to consider web advertising less of a threat-to-be-blocked.
But for now, we're not taking that risk. Sorry guys, but you've earned it.
Isn't that the point Gruber was making his Deck ads? Or do you not think those qualify?
There is no monolithic "ad industry" ... it's a bunch of people and companies with different methods and objectives and values.
If there's a door open to a room that's filled with 9900 assholes and 100 decent people, even though it's not fair to the 100, it's still a good idea to shut the door. Similarly, right now, the best bet is to set your adblockers in the least permissive way possible.
EDIT: Also, with regards to the decentralized "ad industry", look at what happened in the spam/commercial email industry. The bad companies have been chased out, and the good ones are well regulated. That was many disparate groups, but along with improvements in spam blocking, they've proved themselves ready to sit at the adults table. Advertisers now have a chance to do the same, and Adblock will help us keep them honest.
I think the number of users willing to unblock ads that are already being blocked will be in the minority - and more than likely any such "ethical" advertising would be blacklisted as soon as possible. An ad blocker that does allow so-called "ethical" ads by design would probably be considered spyware.
And I think the ad industry is going to need to give up on tracking as a concept. No matter how they do it, it's basically the same concept as the massive data collection the NSA is working towards which everybody hates, except ad companies don't even have the illusion of protective and pure motives.
The people who truly want zero ads are, I think, in the minority. If I'm reading a blog about Django and it's got an ad with a discount code for DjangoCon, I actually want to see that ad -- and not just because it supports the blog.
The other day I put an item in my cart on an ecommerce site and forgot about it until I saw a "retargeted" ad reminding me to complete my purchase. I wanted to complete the purchase, I just forgot. I want that ad.
For some non-tech examples: consider how many people would opt for an ad-free Superbowl or an ad-free fashion magazine. Some would, but certainly not everyone. Many people like those ads.
I think people hate ads that are not relevant to them. Third party tracking cookies have many problems, but they're one way to help make ads more relevant.
(Disclaimer: I'm cofounder of an ad-supported B2B news organization)
"Threat to be blocked" is exactly right.
Now it's simply become a tragedy of the commons. Browsers of the web employ blockers die to the annoyance of shortsighted advertising tactics, in turn, advertisers, trying to extract more revenue from the remaining bare browsers of the web, utilize even more questionable tactics resulting in more people deciding to use ad blockers...
No one is winning this one.
* TV channels have the right to put annoying ads in, but I have the right to mute them, look away, change the channel, skip them if previously recorded, etc.
* Movies have the right to insert pre-roll ads and previews, but I have the right to skip them or come to a movie 15 minutes later than listed showtime to ensure I miss them.
* Newspapers and magazines have the right to put ads in, but I have the right to cut them out or fold the page over so I don't have to look at them while reading the article.
No amount of these shaky moral arguments are going to make me change my mind about intrusive advertising and tracking. There is no contract or promise between me and the website that I am visiting that I will be captive to their ads or behavior tracking, implied or otherwise - just like in any other other media format. People absolutely have the right to block them, and they absolutely have the right to install software that helps improve their privacy.
I have the right to call you an asshole but it wouldn't be moral. Mods have the right to ban everyone with ideas they don't like but it wouldn't be moral.
You do have the right to demand something from someone for free. You do have the right to go to every store in the city and empty every "take a penny leave a penny" tray. But having the right to do it and it being moral are very, very different things.
Are you saying it is moral for publishers to track my usage behavior, and to force me to watch any ad they want me to?
No, they are offering their content in the expectation that they will be rewarded for producing it, via ads. It isn't free.
Are you saying it's moral for you to read their content but circumvent their business model?
You're a skipping a chapter in some author's book. If that ruins author's business model - bad for the author.
It's quite simple. If there is no way to get paid for producing quality content, no one is going to produce quality content. I don't like the ad-riddled web any more than you, but it allows billions of people access to content they would not otherwise have access to. If the online ad business goes away, what fills that gap?
Please don't suggest micropayments, people don't want to pay anything to read a website.
And if I got the book as PDF/EPUB and without paying anything (but legally)? Would it be moral for someone to force me to read because their business model says so?
Also, if we can say the comparison with software is valid, there is a lot of software (of various quality from a total trash to exceptionally good stuff) that comes gratis and doesn't try to sell you anything.
If no businesses can profit/sustain off ads and this is the only avenue to obtain any content - people will pay. Or they'll go without content. When there is no content - there will be a demand for content. And people will pay.
If there are sites that can sustain off ads and still produce content that people view - and you can't do that - you're fucked. Too bad. That's business and unfortunately your competitor is beating you at it. There is nothing wrong with that.
I don't think this statement (or the contrary) was ever proven true. I'm absolutely sure the problem is awfully complicated and we can't simplify it as "no money - no quality content", especially as some sort of universal dogma.
That said, if anyone knows of any research/experiment in this area, they're most welcome to share a link.
If you ask any website without a paywall, they will almost ALL tell you their content is free. Some even advertise and market that enthusiastically. A visit still helps them - it is still counted in server-side stats (which is used to sell ads), and I am exposed to their brand, which is a large part of what marketing is all about. There are also other forms of advertising which are not blocked - things like sponsored posts, guest posts, mailing list opt-in forms, referral links, etc.
You also conveniently ignored my question on whether or not forcing me to watch an ad or forcing me to accept behavior tracking is moral on their part. This is not a one-sided equation.
This is totally nonsensical. If they have no prospect of recouping the expense they incurred from your visit then you are not helping them, you are worse than worthless to them, you simply cost them money.
> Are you saying it is moral for publishers to track my usage behavior, and to force me to watch any ad they want me to?
You aren't being forced to watch anything. You have the option of leaving their site and living without their content.
Your attitude is the definition of entitlement.
> Your attitude is the definition of entitlement.
I also have the option of completely ignoring the ads or covering them up, which is essentially the same thing as blocking with a plugin. This is not a binary equation. This is the essence of my very first comment here.
There is nothing morally wrong about not paying attention to an ad, zooming in so you don't see it, covering it up, not watching a video, muting commercials, etc. No publisher or advertiser has the expectation that 100% of people will pay attention to their ad. The ratios are closer to 1%. Nobody has that expectation expect the people trying to make this into a moral argument.
Come on. No they don't, vlucas. They say "welcome, enjoy, support our sponsors." They do not say "it's free; do whatever you want with our content now that the packets have been transferred."
This is the best argument I've heard so far for not blocking ads. Thank you for putting it so succinctly.
An expectation on the publisher's part does not create an obligation on my part.
"If no one saw ads content would die, you want content to live, you should act in the way you want everyone to act, therefore watch ads."
It's usually straightforward and reliable moral reasoning.
But the implications of that approach have weird results here.
If we were really serious about improving how lucrative ads were, we wouldn't just have to watch them, we'd actually have to spend money on their products.
As far as the books are concerned, a lost purchase from a blocked ad counts the same as a lost purchase from a disinterested customer.
But it feels really weird to say people are morally obligated to buy something when they watch free content.
Maybe something's fishy with the categorical imperative here because marketers are specifically playing the odds. They're hoping to motivate behavior in just 1/10,000 viewers. Advertisers know it's a long shot and that people might defeat their efforts, using technology, heading to the kitchen during TV commercials, or just training themselves to recognize manipulation and sales pitches to harden themselves against sales. They'd be silly to take umbrage anytime fewer than 100% of eyeballs bought their product.
Or maybe the moral problem goes beyond ad blockers, and we're all destroying the web by being terrible consumers.
I don't actually know, but it's a weird moral problem, something feels not quite settled about the two typical responses on this topic...
I totally agree with you, this is an awkward topic because advertising itself raises moral questions.
The problem is exactly what you said, we're all destroying the web by being terrible consumers. We're used to an internet where we do not generally have to pay for content, and that has led to a culture where paying for online content is almost unthinkable. This is a problem of our own making, but here we are.
People pretty much universally hate ads, but almost no one hates them enough to actually hand over money instead. We know this because of the failure of things like flattr and the experiences of developers on app stores - if you offer a free ad-supported version of an app, and a paid version which removes the ads, only a tiny, tiny percentage of users are going to choose the paid version. And this is in an ecosystem where products usually cost less than a cup of tea and you can pay with almost no effort - it's literally easier than finding the equivalent cash amount in your pocket. People just don't do it.
I don't have an answer to this. What I do know is that quality content costs money to produce and therefore we need a way for content producers to be rewarded for their work. Right now just about the only way that works on a large scale is with ads, and even that works poorly for most cases.
Some people reading this will say to themselves "well, I'd pay for content". Congratulations on being an outlier, most people are not like you.
Some people reading this will say to themselves "well, the free market will solve this problem", and that might be the case in the long term, but it will have terrible consequences for content producers in the short term and will fundamentally change the web. You might hate ads, but do we really want the series of walled gardens that an ad-less internet would necessarily devolve into?
If everyone blocked ads, things like Google would have to become paid services. What kind of social inequality would that lead to in the long term?
Obviously this is related to game theory. Blocking ads makes sense on an individual level, but if everyone does it we're all screwed. It's not a solution to the problem, it's going to cause more problems, and that's why I don't do it.
If websites had cared about "ethical advertising" in the first place we probably wouldn't have had ad blockers.
We've been dealing with "unethical advertising" since, what, 1995? I'll disable my ad blocker in 20 years.
That's really the crux of the matter. Advertisers and the sites using them had a chance to show us that they could do this in a responsible manner that took user experience into consideration. They demonstrated that they would engage in as much user-hostile advertising as they could get away with. So my ad-blocker went from having a carefully curated whitelist to a blanket banning with no exceptions. They had their chance and they blew it.
There are good arguments for ad blockers, but treating a collection of independent market participants as if they were a single person or a coherent group able to enforce norms on its members is not one.
I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.)
ADDED. Over the 20 years since the start of advertising on the internet, the actors with the best chance to have headed off the current situation were the maintainers of the popular web browsers, but saying that they had their chance does not help shift the moral high ground from responsible advertisers to users of ad blockers.
Its not possible to enforce compliance with some sort of ethical standards industry-wide, but it is possible to at least encourage it, especially if you are a large player like Facebook or Google. From my perspective, they don't even appear to be trying.
> I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.)
Its not clear to me that this is the case. Simply enforcing standards on ads is not the same as limiting competition. Its an issue of a corporation deciding to not carry your content because it does not pass some presumably published and neutral guidelines. At the very least, it is not as clear-cut as you are making it sound.
Sure, perhaps they impact your LTE connection less. (But, hey, no one needed faster than 56kbps in 1995. Mobile bandwidth will grow.)
In point of fact, I'll bet ads "disguised as legitimate content" impact you more.
Most of us are technologists of one stripe or another here. But putting on our humanities hats, isn't it actually quite a bit better/more moral/more tolerable/sustainable to have a little shiny 300px by 250px cube with a picture of the latest BMW than to have the credibility of our favorite car blog or car writer compromised?
These things have already been done for a while. Is there any evidence that banner ads were preventing this sort of advertising from being even more prevalent than it already is? I am skeptical that advertisers are holding back on these avenues -- in fact its pretty obvious that they're heavily into this space already.
I've worked on some sites that had adverts on them over the years. They were always pretty simple and respectful – generally no third-party tracking, no obnoxious flash popovers or horrible spammy 'one top tip that doctors hate' nonsense. Or sometime's Google's text ads, which has the downside of tracking but are still pretty gentle.
I fought pretty hard for this in most cases – other parties would rather have trackers from dozens of domains, third-party adservers, interstitial advertising and so on. But it's not like the majority of ad-blocking users care about allowing 'good' adverts to thrive – they'll understandably just turn it on and block everything. Before you know it, you've achieved nothing except lower revenue and a vague sense of having done the right thing. It's a race to the bottom.
The thing is, I'm now a dedicated user of ad-blocking software. And I didn't realise how awful using the web has become until I turned it off for a bit – it's really very unpleasant browsing without adblocking, with slow-loading sites, and obnoxious flashing adverts, and overlays and popovers…
I have nothing against advertising on the web, or even things like Google Analytics. But I hit a website a few weeks ago that had no fewer than sixty tracking and advertising scripts. It's out of control.
But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts?
I run a fairly bandwidth heavy site (MobyGames) and really try to find a reasonable balancing point. In fact the ads don't even cover hosting costs. I decline ad networks that do real time ad bidding or videos or lots of tracking scripts. So I'm really curious if you and others would consider a site like this to still not be whitelistable? If not, at what point would you consider it to be?
To be totally honest? Probably.
I'd be inclined to whitelist sites that curate their ads or ad networks such that
1) Ads are small and delivered fast 2) Ads do not track users 3) Ads never deliver malware ever. 4) Content is not split or otherwise organized to enhance ad views over readability. 5) Ads do not popup, popover, popunder. 6) No door-in-face to advertise your iOS/Android app.
and so on and so forth.
The issue here is that you first have to establish that you won't do these things, then I have to trust that you actually keep your word and will continue to avoid bad ads indefinitely into the future. That is, you won't change your mind when revenue decreases. Then I have to extend that same trust to your ad network. I have to trust that they won't "slip up" while you're not watching.
And now I have to do that for all the sites that I visit that I may want to whitelist.
Thats not really tractable. That trust requires a lot of research on my part or blind faith. And the ad network thing is also a sticking point, because ad networks that have seemingly worked in good faith in the past have become user-hostile when they became larger or had to compete (i.e. Google).
Hilarious. Okay:
I decide what comes up my pipe, into my house, and appears on my screen; opt-in. If you have a problem with me "free-loading", then put your content behind a paywall and I'll decide if it's worth my money.
If the site had an "opt-in to ads" modal (which set a cookie or something,) would you ever accept?
If there are completely free alternatives which are an acceptable replacement how are you going to compete in the first place?
I would never accept that opt-in for an ever growing list of reasons but I'm also the person who donates to sites I like.
No. Maybe I'm jaded from years and years of terrible, manipulative advertising on all forms of media, but no.
But that's no reason to require "opt-out".
Of course back then we called it "spyware," but apparently now it's the more consumer-friendly "interest-based acquisition and aggregation you tacitly agreed to when you decided to visit our website."
What I find laughable is the author's warning at the end that essentially boils down to: If you keep blocking ads, the alternative will be much worse, so you better not block ads...or else!
"What’s more likely is that web ads are going to get way worse, adblocking is going to go way up, and at some point in this arms race, after the death of many a media company, eventually some will indeed have adapted. The big question is whether you’ll like the alternatives. It can be apps. It can be inside Apple’s Newsstand (featuring unblockable ads). It can be inside Facebooks instant articles. It can be subversive native ads. It can be paywalls. Think in-app purchases: 'Pay $1 for this article, or pay by watching a video.'"
How long will that last before Apple is kicking the content provider's arse to kingdom come?
> whether those services are free through ads or are entirely paid.
It isn't this simple. I pay for a newspaper, I still get ads. The fact the newsstand price is too low for them to give it to me ad-free isn't really up to me; they don't offer an ad-free option, even at a higher price. Magazines are the same way. So are a lot of premium pay TV channels. So's SiriusXM.
My point is, I can't trust them to not run ads. Even if I'm paying them directly, they still have the option to shove ads down my eye-holes. I can't effectively block ads anywhere but online, so that's what I do.
Everywhere else, regardless of what I pay, I still get ads.
http://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/ad-blocking-will...
I think there is a chance to make it better, ad blocking is not yet maintsteam and I think there is a room for a blockers that will only block "bad" ads.
After you guys messed the whole thing up so badly the first time, why would we want to re-open the doors at all? "It's OK guys, this time we'll be good for realsies!" just doesn't cut it.
As much as I feel for the people involved, I just don't see a compelling reason for your industry to be given a second chance and continue existing at anywhere near its current scale.
An evolution of business models away from web advertising is what we need to bet on, rather than a pinky-swear from the people who got us into this mess in the first place.
I don't think a pinky swear would work either, but I think if the browsers can enforce better standards we would be able to move forward. Of course the problem there is that the largest advertising company in the world owns the most popular browser in the world.
An ad blocker that only blocks bad advertising would be a good way to encourage this.
I wish a form of micro-payments or subscription would work, but most publishers have found little luck with this. (look at all the people here who complain about a paywalled link, or find a way around it)
I'd also love to see laws passed which make websites legally liable for malware served on them by ad networks, which would incentivize sites to use only good companies.
That is, allow an opt in to use a socially decided upon whitelist, along with your personal whitelist. As users allow ads on certain sites, let them also indicate "this ad should be shown to everyone; it's not annoying/it's acceptable enough to allow". If enough users do that, allow it to be shown. If that triggers a large enough backlash amongst users, remove it from the whitelist, and prevent it from being re-added to the whitelist (though individuals can still whitelist it individually).
That way, non-obtrusive, background ads can be slowly turned on for those who opt in to allow it. If someone tries to engineer the whitelisting of an ad that people find objectionable, it will be removed by all the people re-blocking it. If a user finds the ads being allowed, in total, are too irritating, they can remove the social whitelist entirely. And those who simply want no ads need not opt in to the whitelist.
The day ad companies actually have a conscience and won't sell to malware authors, is the day i'll stop blocking their ads.
I want advertising to cease to exist.
It's one way to monetize the world, but not the only way, I hope desperately that I see a day when ad companies are remembered like telegraph companies.
Ad blocking is not unethical; in most cases there is no agreement from the provider of the website and the consumer to say that the consumer must watch the adverts, it's just not there.
It is not the adblockers fault that the websites business model is dependent on ad revenue that's the provider's decision. If the lose of web content happens because of adblocking it's still not the adblockers responsibility, there was no agreement.
Shouldn't we be discussing the limits of ethical advertising?
Any more advanced advertising is specifically designed to undermine human rationality. It's an act of aggression similar to forcibly drugging people.
If you want revenue for my view, ask me for some money. I'm happy to pay for content that is useful or entertaining, so give me the chance. But name your price in terms of some currency. My eyes, my choices, and my browsing habits are not for sale, and that's not negotiable.
If publishers want people to look at ads, then provide useful, non-obnoxious ads. I have precisely two sites whitelisted in adblock, Penny Arcade and Reddit. Both are known for screening their ads to be unobtrusive and relevant to their audience.
As the frontier gets more and more settled, the big players gradually make their way in. Civilization is huge and it takes time to build. The big players have to work with the old strongmen because they don't have enough boots on the ground yet to enforce order.
That's the position Apple is in right now with their content-blocking API. Ad blocking companies are the mob running the web content frontier towns, the ad companies are all the ruffians trying to make a quick buck. Apple is starting to build railroads and bank branches and hotels and courthouses and cultivate property developers, but the mob is still there and they have to be dealt with, otherwise the problem the mob solved is going to bite them in the ass.
When you load(possibly -ed not sure if this is still the case) a page Google says to it's advertisers "Ok, how much will you pay for an advert to be served to this id" and they had some tiny number of ms to respond based on the data they'd collected about that user.
The article author rejects that mass adoption of adblocking will cause the advertising industry to come back with a better deal that doesn't include egregious privacy invasion and that it will in fact just kill small media companies relying on advertising revenue. The two are not mutually exclusive, it's a shame that some companies will inevitably fall through the gap but as others have pointed out this doesn't create a moral obligation to you to accept the current 'deal' ad companies are offering. Don't fall for this crap, mass surveillance by advertisers must die.
It's one thing to say "Your ad was viewed 10,000 times" and another to say "Your ad got 100 clicks".
There's a collision coming between the Kopyright Krazies and the Anti-Ad-Blockers. They want two different things. Or maybe not, maybe there will be an alliance to eliminate control over the computers that you and I own. Anti-Ad-Blockers: your computer must run what I want it to run. Kopyright Krazies: your commputer must not run what I don't want it to run. That's a bullshit situation, by the way.