What we break when we fix ad blocking
tonyhaile.com
tonyhaile.com
It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.
More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.
"Yes, I want free content and I'll pay the ad blockers" and "No, I want free content and I'll pay the publisher through ads".
I'm with you. I didn't use an ad blocker for years. Then I installed a flash blocker because it kept my computer from trying to melt it's self and play video ads while I was trying to read.
Then we started to get so many ads that prevented me from reading content (the link-hover pop-ups, pop-ups that appear after the content has been loaded for 30s, ads that use JS to move parts of the page around) I started using one on the desktop just so I could try to read sites.
In the last year I've been using my phone/tablet a lot more. The experience has been DREADFUL because of ads. They take up most of the screen, slow loading to a crawl, kick other pages out of memory, make scrolling jittery, etc.
I don't care about ads, I just want to be able to read web articles. If the ads are relatively unobtrusive (i.e. not covering up content, not flashing, etc.) they're OK with me. I don't mind banners in between paragraphs of a story I'm reading.
But if I can't read your site because of your ads, you're not helping yourself. The creepiness of trackers only ads to all the other problems.
The ad companies need to be less abusive. In the mean time, I'll use an ad blocker.
(I also subscribe to sites I really like, which only seems fair).
FYI, I had the pleasure of installing an ad-blocker (in the spirit of no advertising, I will not mention which one) on my iPad this morning. It lets me turn off scripts and images. The device now responds like something out of Star Trek. Highly, highly recommended if you just care about reading words on the screen.
The Verge is also no doubt trying to make the poll more divisive with this phrasing, given where their revenue comes from.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351233/poll-ad-blocking-y...
People will pay (a relatively small amount I guess) to see no ads on most sites.
(disclaimer: I use a free ad blocker for firefox on android)
That's basically how I browse. The only ads I'm ever interested in turn out to be reminders of things I've looked at, due to how cookies work.
Interestingly enough, at least in my field, using these practices have actually had the effect of increasing ad revenue since I am now directly selling ads and cutting out the middleman.
I agree... a funny example: https://twitter.com/JonyIveParody/status/611482506400014336
It's not the the irrelevant parties that bother me, it's the targeted ads based on my history that do!
I don't think this is a great way to frame the debate - we've been a consumerist society full of billboards and sales people for 100s of years before the internet was even invented. There has been relatively little pushback (perhaps mild annoyance) outside advertising on websites.
Let's be honest here: this debate for most people is a fully practical one about speed, security, aesthetics, etc. Most people I know are fine with unobtrusive advertising and enjoy the benefits it's provided them up to now. But the state of the digital advertising world has been getting worse and worse for everyone (including the advertisers, btw), and ad blockers have been making that glaringly obvious. What we're seeing is the side effect of a broken industry, not a pushback against consumerism.
Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.
Such bans are completely possible and within the rights of a local jurisdiction - they're just extremely rare and not something society generally seems to care about. In actuality, branding and advertising is engrained in our culture. I hear friends talk about their favorite ads all the time - instead of the TV show the ads interrupted. I know a very large number of people who watch the Superbowl "just for the ads". I can't convince anyone who visits me in NYC to skip Times Square, because they really want to see that pit of blinking ads for themselves. Many moviegoers love how the theater wastes 15 minutes of their time playing previews (i.e. ads). I could go on and on with my biased examples :)
My point is that we are a consumerist society; anyone who has worked in advertising lives off of this fact and knows it's true. The real problem is internet advertisers took it way too far.
1. http://www.euronews.com/2014/11/26/grenoble-europe-s-first-a...
The supreme court ruled that billboard bans based on location (for city and land planning purposes) would be appropriate, but billboard bans which determined which kinds of content were appropriate for public discourse were unconstitutional. A blanket ban across the state is constitutional, but a ban which targets certain kinds of content is not.
I'm not sure where the balance is. Too many is certainly bad for a city as well. LA has seen a big increase in strip club billboards. Not sure why that popped in my head.
I actually enjoy the ads on trains in Tokyo and learn about all kinds of stuff from them from products to events at museums. I noticed the lack of ads in the Paris subway (in the cars themselves) left me kind of bored. It doesn't help there's no mobile signals in the subways.
There's been plenty of push-back against sales people: Do not call lists, blacklists on phones of late, swearing at the people down the telephone, 'no callers' signs and rather unpleasant greetings, 'No thank you' yelled at the people trying to accost you in the streets, the inability to get to a decision maker without an inside line in b2b sales.
And billboards? Well, they're more an American thing than something I see much of, there are three I can think of in a few miles of where I live, all fairly well hidden and definitely not things that you'd spend time looking at unless you were trying to.
Adverts on TV? Let's not pretend they weren't annoying, or that we didn't skip over them in recordings whenever we could. They were just an unfortunate cost of doing business that there wasn't a way around bar sighing and leaving the room to do something else for a few minutes. At least for myself, they were one of the big things that finally decreased the quality of programming to a point where it wasn't worth the bother of owning a TV. 15-20 minutes between 5 minute adverts? I think I'll just buy the DVD....
Web advertising is more like the salesmen than the other things, mind. Things that attempt to force your attention to them and try to interact with your computer in various undesirable ways.... If it was just a .JPEG at the top of every page I doubt anyone would give them five minutes thought one way or the other.
I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?
Which would be a good model, too, for "free but we need our salary paid" content.
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
I'd be fine with websites requiring a Google Contributor login for unlimited access.
Also consider that usually a problem has to be solved in your garage before it's solved globally.
Other times the situation is that there are external barriers (such massive fraud, incompatible laws, etc) and issues (such as the market not being developed enough yet, little to no demand, etc) that prevent the local solution getting scaled out to a global solution.
Or, at the point where we are, just put a "US-only" banner at the top. Because that’s the case. Most solutions here could be implemented far more easy in countries across Europe than in the US, but they are implemented in the US, and only the US. Despite demand.
Like Netflix only in 2014 for most of Europe, and then complaining that europeans pirate all the movies.
Most people now pay for their music through iTunes, easily-accessible YouTube channels, Patreon, or Satellite XM radio.
So I'd say they found new models - and they're working.
The issue with music was a different one (accessibility/distribution) and not a privacy-concerned one. So it doesn't quite fit. But they were able to change their business model to accommodate.
Now it's "change your business model or die." for another industry.
What you're saying here is that, if you don't like advertising, your only ethical option is to never use the Web again. (Well, I suppose I can read the comments on Hacker News. None of the articles, though.) That is not reasonable. I have actually gone out of my way to configure my adblocker to un-block as many inoffensive ad providers as possible, because I want to support the sites I use, but when those sites are knowingly degrading not just my browsing experience but the functioning of my computer, measures need to be taken.
> I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry model was broken and they should come up with a new one. Well, if that's what they thought why weren't they out there patronizing artists using a new model?
Because there weren't any new models yet. Which is why the downloaders wanted people to come up with one.
You could tell yourself that you were perfectly justified in doing so. In fact it was Britney's fault for not coming up with easy way for you to pay her and get 128mbit mp3s from your pajamas in your room. But I didn't buy it then, and I don't buy it now.
Why is it suddenly different when its the web?
That's probably the most common reason. I doubt people actually click on annoying ads in significant numbers these days. Perhaps publishers could settle for tracking only, preferably server-side without 3rd parties involved, thereby removing the most common motivation for ad blocking? Tracking data could then be sold to e-commerce sites for retargeting based on reading habits. Everyone wins, especially if privacy-conscious users can opt out of this kind of tracking.
Yet, you are consuming someone else's writing as a minimum. I have taken ads off most of my websites and added a tipping option. I hope that turns out to be successful. I currently don't get enough traffic for it to support me outright. Most people on the web find that donate buttons do little or nothing. They turn to ads because it is a way to get paid.
What are you doing to try to solve the problem of monetizing the web some way other than ads? If you aren't doing anything to try to promote another monetization strategy, then you are basically promoting slavery in that you are expecting people to make the web happen without being paid for it. You are expecting people to work for free. Currently, many people do work for free, some of them in hopes that it will lead to money at some point. Some of them are quite bitter about it. (Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10234287)
I have been online about 17 years. I have steadily watched good, free content disappear and get replaced by something that helped pay the bills for the content providers. I also loathe consumerism. I live a spartan life and I expect to continue doing so. But the Internet is important to me and it needs to be monetized somehow.
I am not trying to be disrespectful to you and I apologize if it at all sounds that way. It is easy to say what we do not like about what we currently have. It is much harder to find a viable alternative. I don't know how else to start that dialogue and I think it is extremely important that it get started.
Will there be more and better content if people can make money by producing content? Probably. However, comparing people who voluntarily produce free content to slavery is ludicrous.
Websites are able to detect most ad-blockers these days. If they like, they're welcome to deny me access to their content if they see I've blocked the ads.
The Internet has created a situation that did not previously exist. It is natural that we don't automatically know what the solution is.
It's the same reason that thousands of naive 20-somethings move to LA every year.
Are you kidding me? It's practically heresy around here to suggest that a startup should charge money and sell a product. Try it and see yourself derided as a "lifestyle business" instead of a real startup.
HN (and VC-funded startups generally) worship at the Church of Growth above all else, and the easiest way to get that coveted "hockey stick graph" is to give everything away for free. Grow now, and worry about revenue later, so the mantra goes.
I post about this in every ad-block article. The reality that nobody wants to admit is that most web content isn't worth paying for. Web publishers know it, and they're scared of a web that isn't funded by advertisements, because they'll have to find new jobs.
In my experience, the contents that really matter are written either by people who are NOT trying to make money from their writing because they wish to share experiences from their day jobs or free time, or by people who are payed for writing by someone but not by their readers.
The better option is to ask the user to turn off their adblocker and explain why (and say that the adverts are vetted for malware properly).
I don't see how I exploit them by reading their articles - more likely the opposite is true, and the authors actually hoped that many people would read their article and that their readers would get something out of it.
Maybe you are idealizing wage labour? The economy isn't fair, it's more like "winner takes all". There is a blurred line between work and joy. Some people just write for the recognition (which is not a synonym for pay), or because they really care about the topic. If only 0.01% of the internet population is motivated like that, then content will always be produced no matter what.
If they were full of existential fears, with no idea how to pay their bills, they wouldn't have the energy for writing at all. Or maybe they would be writing about their problems instead.
Imagine the following:
In a busy shopping mall, a busker starts to play music. A crowd starts to form enjoying the music.
Then, a strange thing happens - people with clipboards and cameras start to walk through the crowd taking photos of the shoppers and their children, making notes of their genders, heights and weights, clothing, and the shopping bags they are carrying, plus whether or not the women are pregnant.
A minute or two into the performance, more people walk through the crowd, holding placards with brand and product names on them. They walk up to each person, holding the placard in front of them and blocking their view, using a stopwatch to make sure they do so for at least 30 seconds.
One of the women says - 'hey, that's not cool - stop being so creepy'.
The clipboard and placard people remain silent, but the busker shouts - "hey - that's how I get paid! If you don't like it you are a criminal, stealing my performance".
No, I desire the business model to change.
> I posit that if you are using ad blockers and not also promoting another form of valid monetization, you are, in fact, taking advantage of people in a manner that is essentially slave labor.
My ancestors were literally kidnapped out of their homes and forced to do backbreaking work for little pay in intolerable conditions, often while being raped and beaten daily. You have a shitty business model and you want to compare your business failure due to incompetence to that? No, fuck that. Your comparison is outright offensive. Your failure to monetize your labor is not equivalent to slavery and it's disgusting for you to claim it is.
I am sorry you are offended. But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse. Not all slaves were also actively abused. But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.
I disagree, slavery is about force against consent. I agree that abuse isn't necessary for slavery to be bad, but force is. Nobody is forcing content creators to create content without their consent.
> But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.
I do plenty of labor for the benefit of others without recompense: I volunteer. Again, it's not about labor without recompense, it's about force. Slave labor and volunteerism are both labor without recompense: the difference is that slave labor is forced against the laborer's consent.
But let's go back to the ownership thing for a second: are you really claiming that people who use ad blockers are trying to take ownership of content creators and/or their content? Really? Even if I did agree with you that slavery is about ownership, your argument doesn't make sense.
EDIT: At a more fundamental level, it's completely arrogant and entitled to assume that just because you performed labor someone should pay for it. I've put a lot of labor into learning how to play guitar. I could probably post a bunch of recording of my guitar playing and get a bunch of people to listen to them and view ads. But I couldn't get anyone to pay for my recordings, because I still suck at guitar. Am I entitled to recompense for the many hours I've spent practicing?
As I said before: Lots of previously successful, legitimate businesses are finding their income slashed. People doing things that are actually valued by others, where the site gets substantial traffic and ads previously paid for staff. This is not an argument that anyone who slaps something on the web deserves compensation. It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online. The expectation that all web content be provided for free is not a healthy or realistic expectation. And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that, or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.
This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.
> It is an argument that THIS model is failing when it once worked, so we need a new model to pay for the things we do value online.
"Worked" is not what I would say about the current state of ads on the internet. It certainly doesn't work for me.
> And if this model fails and no other emerges, then either people work for free, whatever terminology you want to use for that,
Volunteering? Play? Definitely not slavery. If you don't want to labor for free, just don't do it. This isn't a complicated situation, you're smart enough to figure this out.
> or things we value simply disappear, something I have already seen more than enough of over the years -- and compared to many here, I got online relatively recently.
Well, I was on the internet in the 90s, and there was some great content back then. I'll actually posit that the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher then.
Also, funded content disappears all the time. If that's the effect you're concerned about, this isn't the cause you're looking for.
This is true, but I posit that those businesses can easily move to a pay model. If they can't, they aren't legitimate businesses.
One last comment: Not all businesses are conducive to a pay per use or pay per user model. For some things, that simply does not work. This is exactly why advertising has been used for decades by content providers, even before there was an Internet.
I'm not sure why anyone would care that these businesses don't work. Why are we expected to prop up businesses that don't work?
Though, to my mind, that isn't really an alternative monetization model. It is the same model, but tweaked.
It can get outright comical, part of this argument reads to me as a threat: "If you people don't start letting me run code that works against your interests in your browser we will start doing even more unethical stuff to get money".
I don't even disagree that the bad actors will get worse if their business model continues to fail. I just don't see that appeasement is a good solution in any way. And I just don't believe that anyone would find this convincing unless their livelihood depending on them believing it.
Then you look at something like Maria Popovos www.brainpickings.org and you realize that there are other ways to build a business around content without it being advertizing centric.
But sure if you are in competition with 3000 other media outlets all trying to say the same about the same 5 subjects then this is the result.
There is not. There are, however, many even worse ways to finance the web, as the article says.
Money has to come from somewhere. Either you the reader pay for content--which users have proven overwhelmingly unwilling to do--or your advertising views pay for content. I don't like it either, but polite, non-disruptive ads are the best possible solution. We need to push content and advertising provides to insult on those and only those.
As it turns out, you're guilty of the same thing everyone else is, because you've absolutely missed the point of enabling ad blockers on iPhone
For Apple, it serves two purposes, both of which are hugely anti-competitive. They'll most likely get away with it, due to the fact that they have a minority share of the global smartphone market, but the effect on the marketplace will be drastic.
1) This is an attack on the open web. No matter what anyone says about minority report advertising, ad-supported content is a boon to the public good in that it encourages more sharing and more open sharing of information. Yes, you can go too far, but ad-blockers drastically change the market dynamic. Even the conscientious advertiser is punished by the extremes, which means that the market can not respond to user preferences for ads. In the app store, no such technology will exist, and as such it drives content creators into the walled garden of eden of monetization. There, the market will adapt, and you will be stuck with ads no matter what your preference is, and will have to support ads to the same level as the average user.
2) This is an attack on Google, in many ways. On the one hand it gives Apple an above-average position in the case of their ad network when on their platform (lock-in), on the other hand by starving the open web, they are ultimately starving the future of Google's search technology, helping to erase that advantage.
If we want to go down this route, everyone should be demanding that Apple enable content blockers in apps themselves.
Give me a break
Apple is deliberately adding support for it on the web whilst pushing people to distribution channels they control that they don't allow adblocking on, and that they get a cut of the revenue from.
You're free to run 'Desktop Chrome' or Firefox on Apple's 'Deskrop' computers. Nothing anticompetitive there.
If you really need a video ad, create a small size mp4 movie and add a link, e.g. 70KB for 30s video.
But nowadays ads are too overblown with huge JS code, invasive behaviors, and still a lot of flash animations and videos. Basically the current situation is the fault of many advertisement networks that produce bad ads and pay little to the website owner. And many website owners that put too many ads on their sites and have choosen the wrong ad networks.
A subscription model won't work for many sites. (there will always be another site like yours that will offer the content for free sponsored by ads, and you will loose most of your traffic) Also it would mean a come back of the dark ages before the WorldWideWeb when Bill Gates had his failed idea about "The Microsoft Network" (1995 MSN version 1) and when there were still teletext services like BTX in Germany where you had to pay premium price to view each single (text) page. The idea of paying $3/month for 100 websites won't fly, such ideas come from individuals that think Facebook is the internet and only visit Facebook and maybe two other websites.
None of the subscription and pay per view model were too successful, obviously the free WorldWideWeb with the ad model won. And if there is a need for an ad blocker, then only one that blacklists & blocks the very bad ad network players. Ads that crash the mobile browser, flash ads, video ads with enabled audio, popup ads, invasive tracking.
If I’m watching a let's play on YouTube, I don't care about buying crayola crayons. If you’d present me an ad for the game the player plays, on the other hand, I’d probably buy it. Maybe even give the youtuber like a 2% cut of the sales.
Google Ads based on browsing behaviour only try to sell you stuff that you already bought and no longer need. By the point the ad shows you graphics cards, like for me right now, I already bought one. When I was searching for one, the ads were showing me crayola crayons instead.
Make relevant ads based on what the person needs right now. No need for cookies or any tracking.
And this is why I hope the current type of tracking becomes unprofitable very soon – it would reduce creepiness, and might actually improve ads to reduce tracking.
The best kind of advertising is invisible to those uninterested and visible to those that stand to benefit from the offer. Most good online advertising systems are incentivized towards that, but then schools incentivize towards good grades, and they don't produce one examplary student after another.
Part of the problem may be the esteem of the profession. No kid tells himself "I want to work on PPC optimization and better Ad Targeting". It's a terrible pity a profession that handles informing consumers about goods offered is so shrouded in ignorance. How many brilliant products designed by even more brilliant engineers failed in the cradle because nobody ever found out about them, or the ones that did couldn't make out their use? Because when you build a better mousetrap...you've got a better mousetrap and the world keeps using the ones they have.
Also that 2% cut of sales would be there if the youtuber were to post an affiliate link.
And it won't neccesairily lead to less obtrusive advertising.
Useless products seems a little harsh, since a truly useless product wouldn't survive for long. You might view them as useless, but then a high schooler might not know what to do with a cisco rack, and say the same thing. Which means cisco shouldn't advertise their products to highschoolers (for the most part).
The products that are advertised might not be useless, but the current advertisement bubble will hopefully fail soon.
1) Given that actual -non-maintenance- capex on the networks of the major ISPs appears to have been practically zero for decades, I suspect that the major ISPs will claim (and have the paperwork -however legitimate- [0] to back it up) that their per-customer profits are near-zero or negative.
2) Good ISPs are run like good utilities: any actual profits are either invested in the network, or returned to customers in one way or another. [1] This means that good ISPs actually have a near-zero per-customer profit.
So, all you're going to do with this plan is:
* Raise the -already high- barrier to entry for independent ISPs.
* Make a lot of paperwork.
* Make a lot of DPI hardware vendors very happy.
Noone will get more money, except for the DPI folks. :)
[0] Hollywood Accounting, anyone?
[1] Either through rate reductions, or one-off credits in a billing period.
If their sales would not be affected by cutting out advertising, march into the Marketing department right now, and tell them; they need to know this.
Yet, they aren't. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and/or cable, etc. etc.
The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not for long.
Paywalls work for high quality content (eg, The Economist); but not for low quality content.
Low quality content cannot survive behind a paywall, because nobody will pay for it; what will happen is that low quality content made for profit will die/disappear, and we'll all be better for it.
What will survive is high quality content made for profit or for free, and low quality content made for free (which we can ignore).
This whole debate exists only because current producers of low quality content have somehow convinced everyone that their content is in fact worthwhile, and that it's an accident and a crime that they'd be robbed of revenue, and that users are fools not wanting to pay for it.
This is rubbish. Users are not fools, and they are always right. What they will not pay for is worthless, literally.
Maybe some of these individuals forget that many of us were on the Internet well before it became as "commercial" as it is now. The bulk of the content came from users that didn't expect or receive any payment for their writing...much like many of the biggest sites today: Reddit, etc. What wasn't around was shitty, click-bait junk written for no reason other than to drive ad impressions.
If 70% of what's on the web died due to lack of ad revenue, I don't think society would suffer some huge loss. Stating that ads are required to support content is begging the question; if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with.
That isn't entirely true as the content is technically worth whatever the sponsors are willing to pay to make it happen. The university in my town puts on a summer series of movies in the park and Lynda.com has sponsored a number of the seasons. There is even a short ad played on the screen before the movie.
I wouldn't pay to go to the event, but am 100% happy letting Lynda.com pay for me.
How does your view consider high quality content which is supported by advertising?
All of the examples I can think of, like radio, YouTube and other video sites, and television, happen to make their money from high quality advertisements: ones that were curated and have higher production values, not random ads from dubious ad networks (except for the YouTube text based ads).
Content paid for with advertising is paid for by advertisers (brands). Quality brands want quality content that will be watched by as many people in their target demographic as possible so they're willing to pay for it.
I ask because I run an ad-supported site and try to use good practices and sell all of my own ads to brands that are highly relevant to my content (office furniture brand ads on an office design website).
Anyway, I have tried to keep up with what people are thinking on this topic because I want to make sure I'm staying ahead of the curve so I can stay in business :)
I was around before the commercialization of the web exploded, and I might miss all the light entertainment that it provides, but going back wouldn't be the worst. The parts of the internet that are most special to me are some combination of not funded by ads in the first place, a labor of love, open source, or I already pay for anyway.
The increasingly desperate, increasingly gross business models that pop up as publishers go down with the ship is going to suck though.
If it wasn't for adds the cover the whole text, I would probably not run an ad blocker (and really need to find one for android that doesn't suck)
If the ad block rate gets high enough, and if the CPMs do not increase in the face of dwindling supply, publishers will just make content available only in their own apps. Fake crises averted, things change, markets and businesses adapt.
Do the publishers want more clicks to ads? If they look at a short period of revenue, yes, they will see a boost in their CPMs. Over the long term, as more and more advertisers block the publishers domain due to receiving worthless clicks the publisher's advertising auction prices will begin to collapse. If all of their outgoing clicks are bad eventually they will be left with advertisers who measure nothing (or measure the wrong thing, like if a video ad plays to completion) and advertisers pushing junk like adware/spyware.
Like I said before, we are talking about publishers who are not even testing out their own site on a real mobile device. Why not? May be they are still drunk on the typhoon of free traffic they've been getting from Facebook for the past couple of years.
I installed Firefox on my Android recently since it allows extensions and I could install UBlock Origin. I've found it helps quite a bit.
In the Patreon model, you can support the creator directly, and their ability to produce content scales with that support. It's like a subscription, except you allow anyone else to free ride.
A Patreon supported site could run no ads at all and still make a stable income. It would no longer be fighting its readers to force them to view manipulative nonsense. It would no longer be answerable to pushy, content-controlling advertisers. It would have more editorial freedom, bounded only by the willingness of people to pay.
IMO the Patreon model answers all the problems of the advertising model and I'd like to see it becoming the norm.
(It's still an important point for individuals though.)
But I see no reason the NYT or some such site couldn't fund itself the same way.
[Edit, posted in reply to the wrong person]
I just don't see a charity economy being long term sustainable on the web...
I agree with the idea that there are existing alternative business models, but I don't think a voluntary model will generate enough revenue to sustain current content standards.
Also, this seems a lot like "branding & marketing" version 2.0. I don't like branding. And I don't want to like what people write just because of what they have written before. I want to read or listen to work, and then decide if I pay for it.
Do you have a better way of viewing this?
If you don't like what they make, you stop subscribing.
This dissonance has been, and (it seems) will always be, the primary stumbling block in the discussion of the information economy.
Why are pirates immoral? Why are they not immoral? Why is DRM immoral? Why is DRM not immoral? Who owns the copyright? what is fair use?
All to do with information. All fighting this central dissonance.
This is why the Patreon model should be advocated when it comes to information. Because as a tool, the market is utterly unfit to operate in this arena.
And it's one reason why I support Basic Income as an idea. I feel like the potential prevalence of creation is huge. But everybody is wasting away their life in "day jobs".
It's interesting to consider in fact, that Patreon is kind of like a one-person basic income.
Really I'm not sure basic income enters into this. Patreon is a pretty aggressive arena, only the people that generate public interest get funded, that's not everyone.
> Artists set up a page on the Patreon website, where patrons can pledge to donate a given amount of money to an artist every time they create a piece of art, optionally setting a monthly maximum. Alternatively a fixed monthly amount can be pledged
So it either turns into a monthly subscription fee, or becomes another game for the ad-tech industry to solve.
Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking glasses. So I can walk down the street and NO LOGOS.
It would almost be like humans owned the public space, then.
Another way to achieve your goal is for the glasses to render giant walls around all private spaces. All cities would look like Manhattan then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JI8AMRbqY6w
(They Live, 1988, Sunglasses scene)
Much like newspapers, you've hitched your wagons to problematic revenue streams. I wish it were easier, but as content creators you are also businesses, and you need to work on better ways to support yourselves. That's your responsibility, not mine. I do support content creators directly quite often and quite a lot in many different ways (merch, crowdfunding, direct support such as patreon, volunteer labour, etc). If you can't survive in a world full of "me"s, well I suspect you weren't trying very hard.
A different way of looking at it is that many users do understand the consequences and either disagree with the author about the likely outcomes or have a different set of priorities than the author.
Putting aside the morality/ethics discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the 'cheese' is moving for content publishers and so they are left with a choice, change and find new cheese - or stay and starve. Either way, the current gnashing of teeth will have little effect.
The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.
Content creators are desperate for more revenue so they throw on another tracking pixel, another web ad placement, another sponsorship. None of this helps the fact that content on the web is a commodity and people value their time and attention span.
Large lawsuits against the ad networks for allowing malware infections and drive-by downloads would have had an effect, but unless regulation has real teeth, it's just a hindrance or a "cost of business" with no value added to the consumer.
After all, what solution would the government put in place? Ban ads? Regulate their content? How would that be more optimal than allowing people in the market to find the right solutions?
The reality is, ad supported content with lots and lots and lots of content providers may simply not be tenable, due to the fragmentation in both content and ad delivery vectors.
That requires the market to find new solutions, like paywalls, micropayments, different styles of ads, mixed pay/free models, good ol' fashioned consolidation, etc.
Now, to be clear, I'm about as far from a free market dogmatist as you can get... I'm no communist, but I'm Canadian, so...
But I honestly don't believe this is a case where regulation is appropriate. Where the market is likely to settle on a highly non-optimal solution (like, say, healthcare, due to information asymmetries, or broadband, due to enormous barriers of entry, or manufacturing pollution, thanks to negative externalities), absolutely I think the government has to get involved.
But in this case, I don't see any reason for that kind of heavy-handed intervention.
Where I think regulations do make sense is for advertising by-product: the enormous treasure trove of data about users that is collected and stored who-knows-where and has who-knows-what done to it.
I use a firewall to protect my home network from the wilds of the internet. I use an HTML firewall to protect my browser (and in turn, my home network) from the wilds of the web.
Incredibly slow loading, large assets that are inconsequential to the functionality I need, malware, unwanted visual clutter that creates a negative cognitive load I want to protect myself from.
The reality that advertisements are the main targets is indicative that they have perhaps been the worst offenders. I'm sure there are many good advertisers out there. I'm sure it is only the 99% that make the rest of them look bad.
If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.
edit: I just discovered that dr-iguana.com does have ads. I stick by my assertion that there is a lot of great content out there made strictly as a hobby, though.
I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source.
I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field.
It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works.
When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how few novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book.
There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people observing the poor from a distance. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell.
You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life.
The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness.
This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story.
The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems causing increased economic disparity.
If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, we need to hear their stories. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them.
[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ [2]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
I'm about to start my own Forever Project where I'm going to write a game(with no actual game programming experience) and http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com looks like an excellent book for me to read in order to try to not make some really stupid mistakes in basic architecture when starting out. Thanks!
I haven't seen "This is 40", but I personally know many poor people who drive very fancy new cars and spend on extravagant things, while simultaneously being overwhelmed by stress from lack of money. I haven't figured out how to understand that yet, but these are intelligent, rational people, who make monetary decisions that are impossible (so far) for me to understand.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/cps/a-profile-of-the-working...
The problem is more likely the fact that their stories rarely fit your narrative, and so no one wants to hear them.
I'm not sure why you believe that a story of people living in a mansion, driving fancy cars and having money problems is unrealistic. I know a number of (upper) middle class folks with exactly that problem - solid income, spendthrift wife, and constant money problems. Consider this iconic story, originally pushed by the NYT as a story of poor middle class victims of evil banks: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/05/the-road...
Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were.
People could voluntarily install a browser plugin that watches for addresses and sends money. Perhaps the donation could vary by time spent on the page (monitoring for activity to accommodate leaving stuff open), or perhaps it could be a fixed sum per pageview (with a cooldown to discourage blogspam). In exchange, servers could withhold ads.
That's why they made it a sliding scale, instead of a fixed no-ads-ever package.
And I expect that the more "successful" it is, the more watered down it will become. Like cable TV: the promise was "no ads". Then there were ads.
I'm curious why, in all the outrage and handwringing about ad blockers and the future of the Web, nobody ever seriously suggests making ads less annoying.
We don't need a new monetization model. We need content providers, and by extension advertising providers, to refuse to carry ads that are wildly intrusive, CPU-intensive, or outright fraudulent ("one weird trick"). Seriously, why are major national news outlets carrying advertisements that are as sketchy as those X-Ray Specs ads from old Boy's Life magazines?
It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through constantly.
For a long time I used but did not recommend adblock to my trogladite friends and family. Sadly its gotten so bad that I've begun installing it on their machines on their behalf when they ask me for help with their computer because ad blockers are today what antivirus was 10 years ago. They're how you keep yourself safe online.
Adblock usage won't change until the networks do.
Blocking web-based ads is no different from TV viewers who walk out of the room, or record shows then skip over ads on playback, or mute the TV during ads. AFAIK, no TV advertisers have bemoaned that venerable practice.
If web ad purveyors want folks to browse differently then they must 1) improve their spam so people choose not to block it, or 2) change the physical way it's distributed.
To volubly complain is to sleight the invisible hand, which as you know, in the Land of the Free, is akin to giving olde Mr Smith the finger.
The little bit of good content on TV is... only from sources without ads (HBO, PBS, Netflix).
The advertising model of content underwriting should be dead. Let ad blockers be the stake through its vampire heart.
For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don't make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don't mind watching a small commercial if it was 5-10 minutes highlight of a game. If the balance was reasonable I am sure Adblock would not have been this popular.
The intrusive ads which are being blocked do not lead to quality content, on the contrary they intrude on it both in an immediate sense by distracting readers from the content, and in editorial terms, by driving a constant demand for more clicks, more views, and more unique visits, whatever the cost. The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers. The result is media sites which see the success of Buzzfeed not as a warning but as inspiration, which use services like outbrain to try to keep users clicking in a circle of despair through endless shocking headlines which promise much but offer nothing of substance.
I won't mourn that web as it passes, and I won't be starting to read the Facebook News app or other corporate feeds instead - native apps are subject to the same pressures and the same inexorable creep of advertising around and into the content. This will be a blow for Google though, and I'm quite sure behind Apple's rhetoric about user choice lies a calculation that this will limit Google's bottom line.
The Mona Lisa is an interesting example to use, as it was neither produced in order to display with advertising, nor with advertising within the picture (the two choices offered in the article). It and pictures like it were commissioned privately by a patron who valued the services of that painter but thereafter was displayed for free to the world - maybe there's a model there for online content - commissioned via something like kickstarter for its value but thereafter displayed for free to the public. It also wasn't valued as much at the time as it is now.
We should reject false dichotomies which offer the choice between one sort of advertising or another. The best places for discussion, content and news on the web are often advertising free, or have advertising which is unobtrusive and targeted and therefore not likely to be blocked by users, given the choice (as with HN for example). I honestly wouldn't mourn the loss of most of the so-called news services we currently have, and the rise of other services which request payment from a patron, subscription payments from loyal users, or find other ways of making ends meet (selling related services, bundled content, making money on related transactions like bookings etc). There are lots more ways to make money in the world than advertising, and most of them less degrading.
Amen. A lot of people talk about the "web we wouldn't have", yet would we really be worse off without the low quality trash from the thousands upon thousands of content farms that pollute it?
And yes I realize some would get caught in the cross fire. Ads did enable some good possibilities. Are they in the majority? Would they really have had no alternatives?
Maybe we would have had kickstarter a decade earlier. For all we know, ads set us back 10-15 years.
All content is not created equal; content supported by ads is the worst kind, and there's a good chance it'll simply be killed by adblocking.
This is all very good news.
...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read
Their original product was never free, but they didn't think that through. They made most money through ads & classified, but they still charged for the product.
Now they need to figure out how to make each visitor be worth 50 cents or whatever, and they are trying to do it in a way that people were already growing sick of when they started.
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They should create a system of micropayments where people can have a instantly accessible purse & a page can charge a few cents to few, ranked by content, author, whatever.
they need to start selling their content again.
As an advertiser I might well be tempted to stop displaying video ads if I was convinced that a big proportion of users were blocking video but not text ads.
Sadly most blockers are all or nothing. Most users are not going to go to the trouble of whitelisting individual sites so a better middle ground would be global AD blocker settings:
Off - Block nothing Low - Block popups Medium - Block popups and video High - Block everything
If that was a common model it would encourage some reasonable behaviour on both sides.
Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?
I think that's one thing people don't account for. once most content is behind paywalls you leave much more of a trace than on the ad-ridden web now
A big problem with ad tracking these days is that its entirely out-of-site-out-of-mind, nontechy people don't expect to be tracked across the internet as much as when they buy something online with a credit card.
If that's true, what would stop a website from proxying ads, so they appear to come from the website rather than the third party?
I guess that would involve more bandwidth and so less money for the site, but high-bandwidth items are the ones people complain about anyway. I don't see why text based ads would be impossible under that scheme, for example.
How much would sites have to charge to make up for the loss of ads and user data?
Also what are the chances publishers to ever get rid of tracking and mining data?
>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.
Native advertising is probably the worst kind of advertising. If I see a website or magazine publish an "advertorial", I'm never going to trust anything they publish from then on. It completely undermines credibility and only makes sense as a last-ditch moneygrab. It's not even worth blocking because it's a useful red flag.
You make interesting points even though you are unnecessarily aggressive.
I understand that content providers are frustrated. But lashing out and calling names is pointless and silly.
It boggles my mind that people cannot understand this. Of course time is your to do with as you see fit. If you want to download the ads and bypass them after the content is presented, in the spirit of TiVo, by all means do, but don't selectively choose to download what you want. Instead you should just not visit the site.
Alternatively if you'd like to install an extension (if one were to exist) that warns you that ads are attempting to load before you are given a chance to consume the content and then gives you an option to return to where you came from, that is fine too.
But to deliberately reject the advertising adjacent to content is an act of thievery.
I buy the sunday paper at the local mart, I dump the ads in the trash before I go out the door. Nobody jumps out and tries to arrest me for that - its my paper, I'll do as I please.
And yes its simple name-calling to say 'thievery' without proving the case, or even attempting to justify it. That word has meaning, and it isn't what's happening. Not going to just take anybody's word for that.
That's going to slow down sites even more, but that's the tragedy of the commons: some sites will be obnoxious in the ads they show it forces people to use ad-blockers. That destroys the livelihood of so many people that countermeasures will be developed.
If you don't want to pay with attention that's fine. If you believe the Internet should be an ad-free Utopia, that's fine too. But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.
On a lighter note, this is how i feel about ads: https://youtu.be/JiHjzGKc8tA?t=0m58s (Black Books – "just browsing")
Economically, how does this differ from using an ad blocker? Do you think content publishers care whether they don't get paid because I didn't visit their site or because I used an ad-blocker?