Just doesn’t feel good
marco.org
marco.org
Basically, he's what many of us aspire to be.
Why bother with all of the political mess (much of it from "the internet" I'm sure) when you could just apply your effort elsewhere and avoid a ton of physical and emotional stress? Focusing on Overcast sounds just fine.
It looks like he just felt uncomfortable making money off of his friends' and colleagues' loss. Makes sense, really, even if some posters can't seem to fathom giving up money to sleep soundly at night.
This is like kicking kittens and then announcing to the world that you're going to stop kicking kittens. Then why kick kittens in the first place?
No one made Marco create an ad blocking app. No one demanded his coordination with Ghostery. No one demanded that he announce it with great fanfare on his site. Moralizing about him stopping it ignores that it was just a few short days ago that he started it.
And now he deserves accolades for stopping it? This is an incredible discussion. Countless other people with the ability and the means, who actually had convictions about this topic, didn't create ad blockers (much less for personal reward). Others still, who have convictions that favor ad blockers, did and stand by their moral compass. Either groups are in a far better position than Arment's "have it both ways" perspective.
Sure. That having been said, people do things all the time without realizing how it's going to make them feel. Marco made an ad blocker, turns out it made him feel bad, so he's going to stop doing it. Fair enough.
I'm not trying to suggest Marco is some Saint here. Like you said, he created this problem for himself in the first place. I just can't believe how unwilling HN's readership is to believe that there isn't some ulterior motivation behind him pulling the app.
Not really, because now all those who bought "Peace" in good faith feel bad. We trusted this guy to deliver a good product and then it disappears under us. Grrrrr..
Also, he himself clearly says that he doesn’t think blocking ads is somehow undoubtedly immoral (like kicking kittens) or something. He makes a much more subtle argument, basically saying it’s a complex issue and he doesn’t feel confident in his ability to make the right decisions looking forward in his stewardship of what would probably have been one of the most popular ad blockers on the platform.
He just doesn’t want to make those decisions. He feels uncomfortable making them. That’s it. I think that’s a very sensible argument for pulling the app, especially if you expected this app to be not very popular in the first place.
The anticipation about adblockers on iOS has been fervent and growing for a while now. Marco went and setup an agreement with one of the larger purveyors of block lists, then utilizing that to all advantages to corner the market. I find it highly dubious that he didn't think it would be lucrative.
The ramifications and gray area of adblocking are not new. They are not unknown. This has been a discussion for literally years. As with others, it seems obvious that there is something else that motivated this sudden change of perception, and personally I would wager that very shortly we'll see Ghostery skip the middle man and release their own blocker, probably with some financial considerations.
My post above is completely accurate. The moral grandstanding is an embarrassment, and it's worse how well this noise works on HN.
Anytime you sell a product in a competitive market, you do this. Those ad companies are happy to steal costumers' attention from other companies.
You could potentially argue that the intended viewer of those ads is now capturing that value, however real world examples of paywalls and various other business models suggest that general web users don't value not being shown ads as much as advertisers value showing them ads.
Ad-blockers don't set their users' money on fire. Of course someone will make that money.
Or maybe it creates value by allowing me to spend my money on things I care about, rather than bandwidth for video ads?
Or maybe it creates value by speeding up the web for me, giving me the one precious and non-reneable resource: Time?
Or maybe it create value for me by giving me privacy? I value that.
Ad blockers are simply moving value around. If people didn’t think it created value, they wouldn’t have paid for it.
That's basically the position a lot of us hope to see ourselves in.
So he went all in on something that was already hugely controversial (for weeks regarding iOS, and for years on other platforms). That adblockers would be controversial was blatantly obvious to any of this Earth, and should not be a surprise to anyone.
The world didn't need Marco to get in the ad blocking business. Yet he did in a big way, with a big partnership, and put a big amount of his namespace and reputation behind it.
People infer motives because the notion that this all came as some big surprise rings hollow.
This is the issue- Him having 'fuck you' money makes no difference to me. Plenty of rich people do things with a hidden agenda. Personally I feel like the reason he gave seems far fetched and much less likely then another causation point. So, with Occam's razor in mind I default to my viewpoint that this was likely a issue induced by Ghostery.
For what its worth, I also feel like the Flappy Bird guy had a alternative reason to pull his app as well. I wont get into that here though.
Perhaps an understandable (though not very charitable) reaction if you cannot see yourself having the same viewpoint. But I think the existence of other people who believe they would have the same viewpoint means you should view it as less far fetched, or not far fetched at all. You might discount some of this as people incorrectly believing they'd take a view that they presently view as "more moral" without actually understanding how they'd behave.
I've had the opportunity to work on some tech that was similar to adblocking, and, without moralizing, I found it highly stressful and quickly chose to work on something else. I encourage you to read my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240713
But his explanation makes sense to me. I would not want to work on an adblocker, even for loads of money. I don't want to spend my days working out how to undo somebody else's work, knowing they will then try to undo mine, no matter how much I dislike their work. It would be stressful and I would be miserable. Maybe someday it would pay off by helping us get toward a world I'd prefer, but if not, or until then, it would just feel like I was wasting my own energy and someone else is wasting theirs, when we could both be building cool new things instead of fighting each other.
There's nothing in the entire post to believe or not to believe, it's all extremely evasive. It pretty much screams "something happened I don't want to or can't talk about".
What I can't understand is the quite sudden change of heart 2 days after launching the product. I don't think people here are questioning whether developers are willing to forego their own financial gain for their moral ease (the very existence of the FSF makes it clear that there is a willingness). It's simply a very sudden turn for someone who previously demonstrated no such compunction.
For people who have done things the rest of the world said could not be done, this is the only feedback mechanism that makes sense. (Shrug)
This is likely why people like Steve Jobs have such negative reputations: They learned what their limits were by hitting a metaphorical wall, because it was the only realistic way to learn their actual limits. If you are very intelligent or competent, it will be your routine experience that you can do a great many things that people around you claim "cannot be done." After a while, you just stop listening to the counsel of the great masses of people who try to tell you to not try, who try to tell you that you will regret it.
It is a general observation about the behavior of very accomplished people. Presumably, someone who has fuck you money that he earned himself (as others here on HN are saying he has) falls in that category.
On Sept 16th, a few dozen beta testers may have been using Peace and giving Marco feedback. On Sept 18, Peace is the top ranked app in the app store, displacing MineCraft. MineCraft! Estimates are in the 12000-15000 downloads on the first day[1]. You look in your iTunes connect account and realize you on the path to make $100K on an app that, rightly or wrongly, could impact other people's livelihoods. I can understand how that makes you consider the morality in ways you hadn't before.
Marco isn't against ads. He's said as much, and he runs ads himself. He's against oppressive, annoying, UX destroying ads. He wants to encourage tasteful ads. But within a day he himself had to write a story about how his own app would block ads from The Deck[2], which he has said is the type of advertising he finds tasteful and acceptable. Peace wouldn't effect change if it also impacted 'good' ads, and Marco said in that post he didn't want to be the arbitrator of what is a good and bad ad. At that point it was only a question of when he would pull it.
I take him at his word.
[1] http://www.techinsider.io/marco-arment-just-pulled-peace-fro...
[2] http://www.marco.org/2015/09/17/why-peace-blocks-deck-ads
Because someone giving me 100k for an app which wrote, to use it for the exact purpose I made it for is certainly /the/ reason I would change my mind about making it...
> and subject me to a torrent of unpleasantness. But that’ll end soon enough, and that’s better than how I’d feel if I kept going.
What he doesn't say is that he is obviously already getting what amounts to a "torrent of unpleasantness", from people which are more like colleagues than customers. Of course, no one wants to admit to kowtowing, so there is no mention of it, but as we can see, he cares about this sort of thing, so it was obviously a significant factor.
Except its not the exact purpose he made it. The author believes in tasteful ads - Peace blocks everything.
Absolutely agreed. All else aside, I don't really believe someone goes through the trouble of building, launching and promoting an iOS application on the app store (with all its hurdles) with the thought, "Gee, I really hope it doesn't get too popular!"
I'm not Marco (nor have I ever talked to him) and I'm not trying to put myself into his head space. Moreover, I absolutely despise a conspiracy theory. I'm simply saying that the explanation he gave, true or not, does not make sense to me so I personally choose not to believe it. If I were Marco and reading my comment, my response would be, "Good for you; I honestly couldn't care less what you think."
The world is full of stories of people who attempt something and then get upset or disheartened or unhappy when it comes to pass. Why does everyone have to assume something nefarious here?
Publishers won’t solve this problem: they cannot consistently enforce
standards of decency and security on the ad networks that they embed in
their sites. Just as browsers added pop-up blockers to protect us from that
abusive annoyance, new browser-level countermeasures are needed to protect
us from today’s web abuses.
And we shouldn’t feel guilty about this. The “implied contract” theory that
we’ve agreed to view ads in exchange for free content is void because we
can’t review the terms first — as soon as we follow a link, our browsers
load, execute, transfer, and track everything embedded by the publisher. Our
data, battery life, time, and privacy are taken by a blank check with no
recourse. It’s like ordering from a restaurant menu with no prices, then
being forced to pay whatever the restaurant demands at the end of the meal. [1]
Continuing to visit while blocking ads is no different than downloading movies or apps for free because you can. It's fine when a handful of people do it; just like music sharing wasn't a huge problem until Napster. When every ios user starts totally blocking ads, it's not longer ignorable. There's no human right to read the nytimes.
I still believe that ad blockers are necessary today, and I still think
Ghostery is the best one, but I’ve learned over the last few crazy days that
I don’t feel good making one and being the arbiter of what’s blocked. [1]
Note ad blocking also disabled ads on marco.org and daringfireball.net, though; I'm sure that was unrelated to his decision.
ps -- he hasn't refunded his users. He's indicated how they can get a refund which isn't the same thing at all. Sincere regret might be easier to believe if he got rid of the tens of thousands of dollars he earned from this.
Let's face it, AdBlock on the Web only benefit closed network like Facebook, which also has plenty of PII. If the Web dies as as an Ad platform (because of AdBlockers), guess where the advertisers can go?
Start a trend. Start that trend. Be that person. Not just the person who had a hit iOS app. Be the person who eliminates hunger by setting a simple, obvious, example. Does that feel good? Also keep our app.
In the past, being famous usually required a lot of effort and (usually) money. Many people that could have been famous but didn't spend the time/money to make it happen were often discovered by the larger public only after their death. The end game of this property are things like the modern manufactured artist, where fame is achieved because that was the business plan.
An important consequence of this "traditional" type of fame is that someone who wants to leave and get their old life back can generally stop participating. Without the time/money investment the public moves on. "Traditional" fame is a job you can walk away from.
This changed with the internet, where people can become famous by accident. A tweet or blog post can suddenly get millions of views, or something you made can suddenly become the thing that everybody is trying to get a copy of. It's obvious that this is a well-known concept because we have entire industries working to try to make their product "go viral".
This "unexpected" type of fame has a serious problem: it's permanent. It is hard or impossible to simply "walk away' from something when that would mean walking away from your normal life.
When the tsunami of unexpected fame suddenly happens to someone, it is perfectly rational for someone to try to escape the situation before it becomes permanent. The only problem is it may be too late. Also, we're not helping: the fact that this thread on HN even exists is only making this product (and the drama surrounding it) even more famous.
For a better discussion of this problem, I highly recommend watching "This is Phil Fish" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w ).
edit: I should add a very mild language warning with that video. (a few quoted f-bombs that are understandable in context)
Of course, someone else will be there instead, but I can see the desire not to be the person who causes an abrupt shift in how content monetisation happens on mobile.
To be honest, I was surprised when he released it; from his podcast my impression was that was in the "pro Adblock, but cautious" camp. He was possibly a bit naive about how big it'd get.
Again, I think the best answer is simply the one he gave:
>"Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate"
He didn't anticipate it. In other words, he learned something about himself.
Hopefully that happens all the time to all of us, and hopefully we have the courage to do what we consider the most conscionable thing, even if we know it will may unpopular.
Doesn't he? He always seemed like a guy wanting to go into controversy to me.
Not of John McAffee levels of course, but still far more vocal and controversial than most tech bloggers, especially when they're not professional bloggers in the first place (this site is just his outlet, not his core business like for Gruber or others).
for example because Ghostery is owned by Evidon, a company that collects and provides data to advertising companies https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10240483&goto=item%3Fi...
that's at least suspicious...
Annoying advertisements are, in practice, the result of people failing to be creative in monetization. Ars Technica, for instance, has done a great job of integrating ads into their website in a way that doesn't bother me or detract from the experience. This is no doubt due to careful consideration of the needs of both the user and the owner.
I'd much rather pay journalists to tell me the truth than read what people with money are paying them to tell me.
No. I value UX over almost everything, but you have to realize that your values don't exist in a vacuum. Without something to keep the lights on and the AC blowing air on the servers, UX is pointless and doesn't amount to anything.
No one is going to stop changes from happening - market effects are in play here. But change always comes with pain for some, and not everyone wants to directly be involved with that pain.
No but you didn't compensate the content creator with anything to demand a superb UX. When you pay them or exchange anything of value in return of the content you consume unless they're giving it explicitly for free, you could then argue that web advertising is degrading the UX.
What's the user experience of an app that dies because it doesn't have the revenue to continue?
You could just stop visiting the site that offends you. That would be the actual principled way to treat this - the content is not worth the price of admission. Instead, ad blockers let you take the content and sidestep the price of admission.
I absolutely agree that media companies have not been creative enough in monetization, but "I'm going to take the content from you until you find a way for me to pay that I like" strikes me as a very entitled stance.
Seriously. Take my money. But you don't get to show me ads. And I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely.
This is exactly the entitled attitude I was referring to.
And I misremembered the cost; it's actually "only" $5/GB.
Not at all. This is exactly the same as broadcasters putting ads in their shows, and you muting them, fast-forwarding through them, going to the bathroom when they're on, etc.
The attitude that "if I put this out there and show ads, all viewers will need to view the ads before or while reading it so I can make money from this" is the entitled stance.
If you put it out there, I'll choose whether to download the content, the ads, both, or neither. If you don't like that, it's on you to find another way to monetize it or stop me from having access. I'm not going to pirate or try to break-in. But if it's just sitting there and I can legally download it, I will. It doesn't stop anyone else from doing it differently.
If links came with a little tag on them saying "this will take you to a site with malicious advertising" then I'd do as you'd suggest. But they don't. So it's either block ads, or only visit sites I already know about.
No, it'd be your principled way to treat this. Not everyone shares your principles.
I don't share your principle that site owners have the right to demand that you accept their unilateral rules on how I should view the content they're sending me. I never explicitly nor implicitly agreed to those conditions. They are free to refuse my request, but if they don't, I am breaking no promise.
I could see your position for sites that click-wrapped their content with that condition, getting you to accept it, but not otherwise.
(By the way, I don't use ad blockers)
The issue lies in that all the people who do it bad, The Verge, etc ruin it for Ars Technica. Why? Because the ads on The Verge are so atrocious they install adblockers. Now these adblockers are all in whitelist mode from the start. Nobody cares to turn it into blacklist mode and require users to manually enable it for the sites. They just blanket block all sites from the get go. Nobody wants to deal with configuring it and being fair. So Ars Technica is now losing out by following the books because The Verge is douche spaceships.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-tu...
A blacklist is an interesting idea. I'd like it even better if the blacklist was only active for a limited time so that I have to manually keep re-blocking it. Then if a site cleans up their ad-act and starts running ads good enough that they don't eff up the UX I'll simply forget to re-block them.
Something along those lines might be a product, especially if you sell access to a chart of how many people are blocking your site at any time. It might be a tool that publishers can use to evaluate advertisers and not accept the business of advertisers that cause their blocking numbers to spike.
I get greeted by a salvo of dozens of third part trackers from the likes of Doubleclick & co.
Ars Technica operates as maliciously as any other publisher. There's no "careful consideration here", just blatant disrespect for the privacy of their public.
I don't subscribe to Ars for a few different reasons. My visits to the site have reduced drastically in the last couple of years (just a few times a month) and it's quite expensive for me. If Ars stopped using those trackers and also dropped the subscription price even by 50%, I would consider subscribing. I don't know if buying a subscription only turns off ads while keeping the trackers on (for an overly broadly termed reason called "analytics"). That would be practically useless for a reader like me.
Frankly, I believe Ars (and other sites) could make more money than they are now by reducing the prices and letting in more people from various backgrounds and geographies (currency conversion rates and all). Being one of the better tech sites, Ars could also be a good role model if it eliminated all those third party trackers (no clue what influence its owner, Condé Naste, has over such things).
It'd be really interesting to see if someone, maybe one of the conscientious networks like The Deck, seizes the opportunity to setup something like an indie-web network where you see decent ads with a link to subscribe and not see ads on any participating site. Google Contributor could turn into something like that but it seems like they're afraid to commit to that as a serious effort.
I think subscriptions are the way to go, but these sites really need to work on their pricing.
Ars wants $5 a month for a few articles of text a day; whereas Netflix gives me millions of hours of movies for $8 a month. Frankly, I can't even imagine how Netflix pays for the bandwidth, let alone all the licenses, to allow that to be possible.
The value proposition is extremely out of balance ... as if one is selling you a bottle of soda, and the other a brand new car, and they're asking similar prices. While I spend maybe 2-3 hours a month on Ars for content that's traditionally been free, I spend probably 30-60 a month on Netflix consuming content that's traditionally charged around $10-20 an hour for their content.
It's not that a lot of us are too cheap for $5 a month, it's that we visit a hundred or more sites, and the bottom 90% of the population cannot afford $500-$2000 a month in website subscription fees.
I know supply and demand is a balancing act, but I really believe sites would make a lot more money if we had a sort of Paypal-like subscription management site, and could easily manage lots of site subscriptions for $1 a month or so per site.
Consider that the stodgy "print media" like the New York Times had a customer base of 800,000 that were sold for $700/year (that included ads in them!) - thats half a billion dollars a year, Ars would need 100% american penetration to get that on $1/mo.
Now obviously the cost side is changing for print, but the same is true for Netflix. I think Netflix prices are currently deeply discounted by the fact that (1) Studios are realizing they can make some money having it on Netflix rather than the Pirate Bay and (2) Home Video and Syndication prices still pay well enough that studios aren't majorly concerned. I interested to see if Netflix can even think about raising their prices while more and more studios pull their content off Netflix and Netflix has to continue relying on in house programming.
Right now, how many people are going to subscribe to a site? You have to trust them with your real info and credit card details, and maintain your login and card expiration. Cancellation's probably a hassle, too. You figure, probably one in ten thousand visitors are going to subscribe.
Have some sort of service, let's call it "Subscrybe", with a fancy button that sites put on their page. You click the button, agree to pay $1/mo, and you're back on the site ... ad-free, tracking-free, and with premium features (say, extra articles, rights to post comments on stories, etc.) No account hassles, no management hassles, no personal information given out. Maybe even better, have $1/mo be the "suggested" amount, and let people specify what they want. That sort of model has worked well for indie band/game downloads before.
My guess is the 1:10,000 figure changes to 1:1,000. Now you're making at least twice as much, even though each person is paying less. I can't prove this will be the case, but I feel it's an idea at least worth trying out. Just need a really big player to handle the subscription backend, and get some major sites onboard.
Your alternative right now, is that you get absolutely nothing, and they block your ads.
And if you still can't sustain a site with a few tech articles a day, then you'll have to fold. It's probably a sign the market's too saturated. As sources for quality news drop, they'll also have an increased paid viewership, until they're once again sustainable.
> I interested to see if Netflix can even think about raising their prices while more and more studios pull their content off Netflix and Netflix has to continue relying on in house programming.
I definitely fear this as well. Already, I'm up to Netflix+Hulu+Amazon Prime+Crunchyroll. CBS, Funimation, HBO, Showtime et al also want their own money, which I'm not going to do.
Even still, with just those four at around $30 a month (and no ads!), it feels too good to be true.
But if they keep forking, well ... I didn't ditch cable so I could split my $150/mo bill into 15 x $8-20 a month bills.
I wouldn't know how to monetize HN without disturbing the savvy balance of profiles and the quality of comments, but to this day HN is the one journalism work that adds value to my life.
I found the post from here http://blog.deathtobullshit.com (http://blog.deathtobullshit.com/post/129431438739/just-doesn...)
https://air.mozilla.org/subscribe2web/
Turns out, we're worth about $6.20/mo in advertising. Lets just round this up to $10/month to not have ads but still support sites we visit.
If content providers aren't working on an alternative like the above, I'll continue to block ads. If you want to stop me from accessing the site by detecting that I will also kill that. If that stops working I won't see your content.
Forcing me to watch ads with zero alternative though, nope. Google contributor is a start, but this needs to be across all ad platforms.
I'm not against funding people, I'm against funding ad agencies and their tracking and their other maladies. Such as trojaned ad networks, silly amounts of javascript and data, etc....
What I'm saying here is content providers and ad agencies and us ALL need to fix this. In my opinion though, this is all a result of the Faustian bargain the content providers have chosen and the inevitable escalation the ad companies have taken. I value my time and attention and am willing to pay to not have that taken away from me. Just don't force me to buy into ads, do like the twit network does if you have to. I've tried out almost all of their sponsors, not because of the company advertising but because of the person and people recommending it.
If you don't like how they make money, do not patronize them.
1. Create a website with a TOS that states "all webpages are for your personal consumption only, any permanent copies which are used for business purposes (including indexing!) constitute grave harm to us, worth $100 per instance"
2. Make many, many pages on that website which all link to one another, let's have at least say 1000s of them
3. Ensure that they rank well for very obscure terms, terms which have a very short results list
4. Do not avail ourselves of robots.txt
5. Get our website linked to through means which do not make it obvious that we're trying to get it linked to
6. Wait for google to index the website
7. Gather the evidence of the indexing activity via search results
8. File a lawsuit against google for breach of contract re: TOS and collect millions
If what you're saying is true, then this is a literally foolproof plan to become millionaires (or more!).
X-You-Owe-Me-If-You-Send-Content-In-Response-To-This-Request: $1,000,000,000
I'm going to be rich, rich, rich!!!!
Here's how contracts work: A makes an offer to exchange something of value. If B accepts that offer, there's a contract.
How's that work for websites? The website publishes its TOS. You go to the website and are able to look at the TOS. If you keep using the site, you're held to the TOS. You've impliedly agreed to it. If you disagree with it, you can leave.
There is certainly some legal fiction going on here. Of course most users don't read the TOS, and even if they tried to, they wouldn't understand them. But courts have enforced them anyway. What would happen if they didn't? It would be anarchy.
There are limits to what TOSes can do, sure. But the point of what I said -- that TOS are contracts, and can bind you -- that is true. Mocking that truth is pretty silly and uninformed.
I think there's a huge difference between what's legal and moral. I think ad blocking is quite legal, and morally questionable.
If the publishers want to get together and define a new protocol where acceptance of the terms of the TOS is included in the standard and then convince everyone to switch to it, they're free to do that. I suspect that they won't have any luck, but there's nothing stopping them.
Again, I say this as a person who does not use ad blocking software.
This is unacceptable. Simply visiting a website with ads poses a threat to the security of your devices. Until ad networks and publishers fix this, they can go fk themselves. I will block ads to protect my devices.
When you view something with ads, they send you the stuff first, on the hope or assumption that you will later view the ads. No property changes hands at any time.
In the same sense as all the arguments against ads. You're not stealing anything. No you're not. But you're wasting resources that the owner has to pay for.
I didn't say "no cost", I said "marginal cost".
Installing a sink, making cups, etc. also has a relatively high upfront cost (probably more than writing a Buzzfeed article even). The point is that once the article is written and given to the first person, it costs nearly nothing to give it to next person.
They'll just put their content on Facebook -- ad blockers don't work inside the Facebook app.
Either way, it's a pretty pessimistic view of the future of the web.
"It is a movement to create an ad-free Web"
I find this view to be unlikely to materialize. We're in a consumerist-led capitalist economy and advertising is an integral part of it and the web as communications medium is one of its important assets.
This project will fail before it even starts due to the unrealistic end goal advertised - pun intended - on the page.
This is an extremely simplistic view of the world. You can go on thinking that you're really only sticking it to coca-cola or walmart, but the truth of the matter is that 50% of digital ads (At least on facebook) are SMBs. They're startups, they're mom and pop diners. As for railing against ad agencies, most of us don't work for F500s. We support entrepreneurs, and we do it at very slim margins (often times less than 15%). So, whatever, I probably won't get you to change your mind, just know you aren't sticking it to the man. You're sticking it to the little guy.
And I'll keep doing it so long the little guy thinks being the little guy entitles them to dick their users around.
Yeah, there's nuance to the debate around ad blocking, but this argument is just silly. If a mom and pop diner refused to follow basic hygiene procedures we'd shut them down, just as we would a huge restaurant chain for doing the same.
If small businesses are spreading malware by using ad networks that are regularly compromised, it's on them. If small businesses are feeding their user's private data (often via exploits) to extensive ad networks, it's on them.
Being small doesn't exempt you from being a good citizen on the internet.
Of course, the reality isn't that small businesses and publishers are somehow evil and cackling maniacally as they feed their user's private information to huge ad networks. The reality is that they needed revenue, they chose an ad vendor, and they followed some guide on throwing some JS into the page so the ads get loaded. The real shithead behavior is on the part of these adtech companies.
But ultimately the misbehavior of adtech and ad networks is still held against the websites who choose to integrate them, and rightly so. This increases every single time an ad network is compromised to distribute malware, or is actively user-hostile, but the publisher chooses not to switch networks.
But that's not what you're doing. You're going to the mom and pop diner, eating their food, then declaring that their hygiene standards mean you don't think you should have to pay for the food.
You figuratively have no way of knowing what ad networks they're integrated with until said ad networks are loaded and serving ads. Or worse, you have no idea what you're in for until the latest Flash 0-day has pwned your machine. Hell, it's impossible to even know if a website is integrated with any ad networks at all until you load them.
This makes the ethics of blocking ads markedly different from say, dining and dashing. Hell, it makes it a closer neighbor to "if you're reading this you've already agreed to our TOS" than anything else.
I think the biggest issue I have here is that internet journos are taking this out against users rather than ad networks. Effectively the entire defense so far has been:
"yeah our ad networks are shitty, they are full of malware, they are full of user-hostile abusive shit, they exploit your browser, and they are horribly engineered and slow. We sympathize, but despite the fact that we they are still our preferred vendor should in no way reflect on us and you should continue allowing the abuse, and if you have any problems take it up with our ad vendors. In no way should we be held in any way responsible for the current sorry state of affairs"
Which is a completely, absolutely, insanely bullshit stance. Publishers are the customers of ad networks, not us, and until they start pushing for better standards (like, say, The Deck) users will keep blocking them, ethically or otherwise.
And that is the exact reason I noted there needs to be an alternative to "my site is ONLY supported by ads". Right now all of this is predicated on that assumption.
I challenge that as being necessary, which is why I also noted the google effort which while great for google ads, does nothing for other ad networks.
Hopefully that clarifies things as apparently you think I'm against supporting businesses despite my efforts in making that abundantly clear that I am not trying to deprive people of money for their content. I'm unable to right now provide support outside of viewing ads, and that isn't just my problem, its the content providers as well.
Taking the easy way out and saying I am the issue with not wanting to view ads and not that all of the parties involved is not very convincing. I do not buy into it being a moral view, nor ethical for that matter.
It's the ad networks that cookie and track. It's the ad networks that load the website with horribly slow loading external JS. It's the ad networks that want to track, profile and retarget us to death. It's the ad networks that use any means possible to get that view. From animations and modals to popunders, sound and other trickery. It's the bottom feeding ad networks that accidentally end up pushing malware out. Repeatedly.
Most web sites are loading so many external scripts, ads and trackers that the experience is simply broken. Without ad, social and script blocking the web has become unusably slow.
Meanwhile, I and many others would be glad to see ads from the little guy - without all the cruft and pollution, if I could do so safe from all the above.
That little guy just wants an advert to get her new business going. The ad network sold them all the other crap.
Can anyone tell me how they would figure out that number today?
I've looked into a similar approach and would love a reliable way to answer "how much does a publisher need to charge to not have ads".
*edit- He just said he is handing the app over to Ghostery on twitter. Very interesting.
¹ http://lifehacker.com/ad-blocking-extension-ghostery-actuall...
Doubtful that's the case. If you read his post, he recommends Ghostery several times. It just sounds like he ultimately didn't feel comfortable about making money off something that takes money out of other people's pockets:
"I still believe that ad blockers are necessary today, and I still think Ghostery is the best one, but I’ve learned over the last few crazy days that I don’t feel good making one and being the arbiter of what’s blocked...I suggest you use Ghostery on the desktop"
Why not take his statement at face value? He's personally reliant on ad income from his site, as are several of his friends, so it makes sense that profiting off an ad blocker makes him uncomfortable. No conspiracy needed.
(For background, see: http://www.marco.org/2015/09/17/why-peace-blocks-deck-ads)
To those who think the pro-ad folks are right: I'd urge you to meditate on just what the #1 ranking of an ad-blocker in the app store implies about the public's appetite for advertising.
From everything I've heard on his podcast, it is strongly hinted that he really never needs to work another day in his life.
Nothing has changed, no new issues were raised. Marco has talked about and basically supported ad blocking in the past. I guess he just doesn't feel like being the focus of their ire right now.
But people do install apps; they're crazy about apps.
There are popular, good publications on the Internet that get 80+% of their revenue from ads, and those publications have a huge iOS readership, and those iOS users tend to be on later iOS versions. Publishers aren't making it up: they're going to take a pay cut because of the content blocker features on iOS.
It's a $3 app that requires configuration. It's not Angry Birds.
Also, I'm seeing a lot of claims with zero stats to back them up. The iOS top charts are extremely volatile. A few thousand nerds installing ad blockers will impact tech publications to some extent, but I'm extremely skeptical that it's the end of the world even for them. It should mean almost nothing for other sites with broader audiences.
Journalists have to eat.
The real headache with paywalls is that buying access is a pain in the arse, with price structures that make no sense from the casual browser's point of view. What we really need is a robust microbilling architecture ... but back when the web began to take its shape in 1994-96 the transaction cost was prohibitive for micro-billing (V.34bis modems rather than broadband put a floor under minimum TCP/IP connection costs that exceeded the sort of transaction size expected for micro-billing).
Really, this is pretty simple: people just want it both ways. They feel like it's their device and they're entitled to control what's displayed on it and what consumes their bandwidth --- and, fair enough, that --- but they also feel entitled to read or watch anything posted on the Internet on their terms.
People want free and no-strings-attached.
If there was a truly low friction way to get a single piece of vetted/high quality content for a marginal one time rate (the sort of thing I used to hear from a lot of the bitcoin crowd as a potential use case, but only saw materialize in partial forms via things like dogecoin) I'd be much more likely to do so. (or if you're feeling generous as a content author, a low friction way of donating post-factum; the "paypal button" (and similar) is not a great solution as is due to aformentioned high friction)
tl;dr, it's still neither common nor easy to be able to transfer small sums for specific content. This is a model I'd support over both ads and current-form paywalls.
This post had too many qualifiers, which I think indicates it's clearly not cut and dry, but I worry that to paint a broad brush of "nobody wants to pay" distracts from finding a model that will work better.
There is: ads, but people don't like them.
I do no think there's anything that matches how frictionless ads are in exchanging value, but I'm sure someone else smarter than me might work it out; hopefully before the sites I like implode.
Really? Everyone pays for services that they value.
I certainly don't hear people complaining about the 'paywall' for eating a banana.
In my view, the advertising model exists because most things posted on the internet are not worth paying for.
What I hear more often is people paying for access and then complaining that a high level of advertising is served anyway. Paywalls are not the answer to ads.
What I also hear is people paying for access and then complaining that the quality is not worth it or reduces over time. Paywalls are not transparent.
We're all getting the Buzzfeed we deserve.
Since the arrival of the internet, that business model stopped working in the interest of society in general.
We're no longer funding the wider dissemination of information, we're either funding artificially limiting access or being asked to surrender our privacy instead of just money.
This may make perfect business sense, but in my view, societies interests go before business interests.
And yes, I also fear that without an alternative model we're going to have a hard time encouraging the production of that information within the framework of the free market.
But I rather face that challenge than to accept a society where information disappears behind paywalls and our privacy is being demolished by commercial surveillance.
Just because what the public wants is selfish and generally short sighted doesn't mean they're wrong to want it.
But none of that is as intrusive as modern ad tech. Ads dug their own grave, slowly, gradually, and are now shocked to find people are shoveling dirt in on top of them.
Moreover, ad blockers are a proportionate response to Web bugs, trackers, and ad tech in general. E-mail marketing figured out how to be tolerable. Ads have not. They keep pushing the boundaries. I've seen some startup ideas around "good" ads, but eventually the people behind these ideas just can't resist the Dark Side.
But I also think it's futile to ask a mass audience that rightfully feels abused by ad tech to be ethical about what they do about ads. But even if they do consider ethics, ad blockers are a proportionate response to intrusive ad tech. A fancy way to say "trackers, Web bugs, and other icky tricks are getting what they deserve."
Lastly, it isn't up to the audience to fix this. It is entirely up to ad-funded publishers. Some will go to paywalls. I'm not that optimistic that ad tech developers can let go of their dark patterns. That's a business that might crash before it reforms, or at least retreats into balkanized walled gardens. Too many paychecks depend on not understanding that.
You mean bloggers.
I suspect that a fundamental part of the problem with web ads stems, paradoxically, from web pages having zero marginal cost. There's effectively an infinite amount of advertising space to sell, which has quickly driven the value of ads toward zero. I don't think advertising as it exists now is going to be a sustainable business model for the web; Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News may do better, because they impose a scarcity on ad space -- which will both make the UX better and make the ads more valuable. But I doubt that's a long-term solution, either.
I said this yesterday and I'm going to repeat myself in this thread: adblocking is not going to "fix" the web as people are saying, for the simple reason ad blockers block all ads, not only annoying ones. The big publishers probably are not going to even notice it, because they have other ways of making money, but the small blogger will have a hard time when the ads on his blog get blocked, probably the only source of income for his site.
And we're forgetting people that can't afford anything besides some little AdSense ad to advertise their business. How are they going to reach people if all their ads get blocked?
I find this sentiment, and the moderation supporting it, incredible and almost a demonstration of the Stockholm Syndrome.
Marco has tweeted that he's giving the Peace app code to Ghostery. [1] That can't be considered ethical. That's like being a gunmaker, not feeling comfortable being one, pulling the product from the shelves, and still giving/selling the entire design, patents, manufacturing facilities, etc., to someone else to continue making it and selling it. In this case, even though Ghostery has had its block list and desktop browser extensions for quite sometime, it surely does not need Marco to give away the app's code to it, especially if he had a moral quandary about having made such an app.
[1]: https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/644939796624896000
IIRC, there was a lot of drama between tv networks and Tivo, once upon a time, over the ad-skipping issue, which netted out in a pretty lame detente (Tivo pulling the 30-second-skip button out of standard UI).
At the end of the day, the issues are similar (30-second-skip == going the bathroom during the commercial break, but someone productizing it was not). Over a longer period of time, we all started time-shifting tv content and commercials took a big hit anyway (due to Netflix and to Tivo clones and licensees).
If anyone thinks a developer like Marco is somehow complicit in the death of traditional, ad-supported media, I hope they're having similar introspection over using spotify instead of buying records.
The world doesn't owe a living to people who can steal content, write clickbait headlines, and convert paragraphs into multi-page galleries the most effectively. They will have to adapt.
And some will die.
And ad-blockers are forever a thing on mobile now.
Having said that, though, I've followed Marco's writing/podcasting long enough to generally take him at his word. He's been pretty forthright about why he makes the choices he does and acknowledging things he considers mistakes. I noticed that several fairly big names in the Mac blogging/podcasting space came across the last couple of days as very hostile to the notion of ad blockers. Imagine having people you respect, work with at times and have considered friends for years attack the essential concept underpinning your new application as an immoral action that will destroy their livelihood. Given that, I don't find the "I stopped feeling good about this" explanation at all hard to swallow.
I think Apple should be at least overly cautious any time he attempts to release another application. I know many developers that would have been effectively blocked for less, but he has the fortune of being in good with Apple so I don't see that happening.
It's a shame but he gave people notice (instead of just stopping development) and recommended people request refunds. This is nowhere close to being a scam.
Without an updated blocklist, this app will quickly become useless.
"The app is completely my code, using a copy of Ghostery’s tracker database hosted on my server that the app periodically checks for updates."
So since he's abandoned the app, and broken his agreement with Ghostery, I'd assume he'll no longer be receiving an updated database from Ghostery.
Customers who bought the app only because it was the top app in the App Store at the time have no way of knowing the developer stopped supporting the app. They're screwed in the long term because they'll think they're using an ad blocker when they don't.
I think the smart way to go about this would have been to make the app free and let users know via the interface that the app will no longer be updated and users should ask for refunds. I realize this could make the app even more popular since you make it free, but I think this is still a better way to let users know about the future development of the app.
Well, that was me. Funnily enough I haven't had a good experience with Overcast either (vs. Pocket Casts), so I think next time Marco releases a product I'll be a lot more skeptical. It's an awkward position too: I know I should request a refund since the app will become progressively less useful as its blocklist becomes out of date, but I would've liked to keep using it until then.
As for the alternatives, I chose to support Peace instead of Purify because the latter has seems to be involved with some mild controversy [1], in addition previous controversy the developer was involved with previously over uBlock [2]. I honestly have no idea if this is innocent misunderstanding or a genuine attempt to mislead on the developer's part (because wording on the uBlock website does seem to have been clarified now), but it was enough to give me pause. So I guess this just leaves Crystal as the main alternative at the moment?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3leyux/say_purify_ge... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ub...
Oops - my mistake. Pulling an app two days after a long period of development without really thinking through seemed odd to me. But that's his choice.
My choice - I won't buy anything from him again. Life goes on.
Right, absolutely it's his choice. I wouldn't even go as far as saying I'll never buy a product from him again, just that I wouldn't on day one. It's not that I necessarily disagree with what he's saying (I'm glad the conversation is being had), I'm just surprised he didn't anticipate this reaction.
On a broader note, if he is concerned about the ethics of ad blocking, perhaps it would've been better to maintain control of one of the most popular ad blockers? Then he would at least have been able to influence the outcome, e.g. encourage his users to adopt whitelists or similar.
AFAIK the app will stay on your device after getting a refund. You just stop being able to update or re-download it, which in this case are no longer on the table anyway.
By saying "But my ads are blocked, too," as he did, was not an acceptable solution. If a big chunk of people visiting his site already paid him $3 to defer his advertising, then he's already won. But nobody else with their ads blocked will see that money.
He makes good arguments about both aesthetically and privacy intrusive advertising, but A definite conflict of interest on his part.
Basically, he just never planned for success.
Instead, he likely expected it to be another Instapaper: an app existing amicably along with a few other similar offerings, one of which is an entire company (Pocket), and one of which is Apple's own service (Reading List).
> produces a podcast that profits from ad sales
There are different forms of ads. He's not saying that ads suck, and it wouldn't be a conflict of interest for him to do ad-reads on ATP while making an iOS content blocker.
Overcast also has a skip-fwd button that you can configure in sensible increments. I know I use it maybe 2-3 times per podcast episode.
Podcast ad-reads are incredibly effective, and I haven't heard one person complain about them.
There are good/better/best forms of advertising, none of which are punch the monkey, malvertising, and those that CPU hog, use your cell data, and drain your battery.
For me, I'll keep blocking on the web, going pee during a TV commerical, DVR skipping, podcast forwarding, etc.
Worth a read: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/644560336369119232
> @anildash Okay, ad blocking advocates and users (I am one, sometimes!), we're going to have a new conversation. You ready?
Is this impossible?
* I don't want ads
* I don't want native advertising or sponsored content
* I don't want to pay for content
* I don't want my tax goes to government sponsored content
* I want free independent content
All of their content is completely free and isn't supported by ads at all. They make money through live shows, merchandising, and donations, and I guess now book sales.
It's exactly the model he's describing, free content that's not sponsored, has no strings attached, and is still hugely successful.
I think that the main problem with ads are crappy, annoying, low-value ads. I'd love to see more interesting and relevant ads, I may, you know, BUY something from time to time...
Someday I'll understand why nobody has put something like this together, but I'm not there yet.
Stopping this because it "feels wrong" is odd. Donate the profits to a charity. At the absurd extreme, If you honestly feel adblocking is a moral problem, donate the profits to an anti-adblocking lobby. Throwing away your money is throwing away your leverage.
No, its not. Its quite easy to do so, and people do it all the time without any particular effort.
Its impossible, not merely hard, to argue that someone else should value one over the other, without first choosing some from of one or the other as the basis for the argument, since you can't get a value conclusion without a value premise.
"It's wrong, but it's for the greater good, so it's OK!" should be a major red flag. It says that what you're doing is wrong, you know it's wrong, and you're rationalizing. What lies down that road is the destruction of such morals as you currently have. Don't go there.
I see things as he does, the ads are terrible, but it's silly to try to pretend like ad-blockers are an unalloyed good. This situation will continue to worsen, and as I see it, will hasten the popularity of Facebook's new instant-article feature and similar.
It's one thing to know you're hurting somebody's livelihood in the abstract, it's another to have them specifically call you out over it.
Seems like the type of extension that is in fact very popular, rather than some niche one that only a few thousand out of millions of people would use.
But from all my experience in AdTech I don't think there's a single ads provider that "does not track", as it's basically the same as having a store that does not have a cashier's desk. "We don't track" is simply a big lie.
But tracking isn't black and white. At least, networks will track impressions and clicks, otherwise publishers won't get paid. But then there's Cookies. Advertising IDs. Audiences. You can even break it down on the individual user level. The biggest problem is simply responsibility and where to stop. Most large ad networks enforce responsibility by mandating minimum sized audiences by now, but with RTB it's possible to break down the last barriers.
The ecosystem is mostly based on trust in the advertisers right now and only the worst offenders get pulled, but mostly after the fact.
Marco made a good choice by not even trying to be judge, police and policymaker in the same person. It's an impossible task to begin with.
The developer says, "It’ll keep working for a long time if you already have it, but with no updates."... but this is what I am not so sure about.
I looked at my iTunes backups and didn't see Peace. It's also not in the list of my updated apps in iTunes, presumably because it got pulled from the store. Suggestion to the developer: how about a heads up next time you're planning something like this? It wouldn't have hurt anyone.
Do you know of any way how I can backup Peace that is currently sitting in my phone, in case I need to do a full iPhone restore?
Start a trend. Start that trend. Be that person. Not just the person who had a hit iOS app. Be the person who eliminates hunger by setting a simple, obvious, example. Does that feel good?
Now to be clear, I use ad blockers on the web myself, and intend to install the Android ones once I root my phone. But it's getting tiring reading people standing on some moral high ground to justify their use of ad blockers. There is no scenario where this leads to better-behaving ad networks, or to better monetization models for the web. The final winner of this ad blocker war is a no-frills ad blocker that blocks as much ads as possible, regardless of the quality of the ad network and its ads. The majority won't go and fiddle with the settings to approve ads on sites they like, or from ad networks that are cool. Give people a chance to block all ads and they will, even if some "innocent bystanders" get hurt. And I think Marco saw that scenario unfolding in real life with Peace's success.
One example, Daring Fireball is proud of how his monetization strategy is working out for him, and justly so, he hand picks his promotions and packages them into little promotional posts. But that's basically a native ad. So let's say the next big idea from everyone hurt by blocking is that native ads are the big thing now (not that it isn't already being used heavily), and everyone should hide them among the real content, undetectable to current ad blockers. So ad blockers will evolve, and people will build filters that hide the content of these native ads in smart ways. And they might build a filter that hides posts on Daring Fireball that contain the words "my thanks" or "sponsoring this week". Will Gruber still be so supportive of content blockers then? And where's the line? Who decides what the right types of ads are?
It's not that I have any smart answers about this, but I think it's disingenuous to pretend this "culling" of the shitty ads will lead into a brave new world with fair ad networks where everyone decides to turn off ad blocking on The Verge, because gosh, they've really improved, or into some kind of fairytale where people pay for The Verge's content through subscriptions. But they will keep visiting The Verge en masse, and expecting fresh content served in miliseconds. Who will pay for it and who will write it, I sincerely don't know.
From your linked article, it appears that Gruber's already not supportive of content blockers that block the Deck by default:
"I think if your Safari Content Blocker blocks The Deck by default, it’s wrong. I dare you to defend it." https://twitter.com/gruber/status/644409410048106496
I get that there are bad ads and good ads, but in the grand scheme of things, they're all still ads. Do people who skip through commercials on a PVR'ed TV show care if one or two of the ads are worth watching? I'd argue that in most cases, the answer is "no". So this all reminds me of the famous line from Animal Farm - "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
If advertisements are always a chore that people don't want to see but have to put up with, then you're always going to have an arms race between advertisers and users. But if you can make advertisements something people actually want to see, then you won't have to worry about people blocking them.
This sounds pretty hard, and maybe it's totally impractical. On the other hand, there are forms of advertisement (like movie trailers) which are almost universally appreciated.
If you suddenly sell 20k copies at $3 each, and make enough in a day to buy a BMW, then maybe you think a bit more.
I must admit if that is the fundamental belief, how one can prefer to side with the people who manipulate other people.
I am not against ads myself, I just don't understand the rationale.
That the move adds a martyrdom flavor to an already-rich personal brand is a bankable asset beyond the $100K (or whatever) that would be made in the App Store. This is a 60 Minutes or GMA-level story now.
I suggest "Making an ad blocker myself just doesn't feel good".
These are all questions I wish marco would have answered for the developers reading his piece.
It's an ad blocking app. ad blocking is a new feature for iOS 9
Ad rates are on the order of $5 per 1000 views, ie, 0.5 cents, so a 2 cent buyout is entirely feasible.
Reminds me of what happened with Flappy Bird
Without any reason other than vague hints, this sounds like someone got to him.
I'm not buying any of this. He suggest he feels bad about his product, but at no point explains why.