Ad Blocking: The Unnecessary Internet Apocalypse
adage.com
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I second that. I couldn't agree more with this comment. I use to make a lot of searches for pharmaceutical products for one of my projects and then Google decides to show me tons of drug related ads regardless of the context of the site I'm currently visiting. It's frustrating to say the least. Like I don't have any other interests.
But I'd like to hear from people hosting AdSense on their sites. Has profiling raised CTR rates significantly?
Probably hard to tell, since there are a lot of confounding variables. Most notably, conversion across the board has plummeted in recent years (I forget the exact percent, but I think it's about one third).
So if you're a website funded by ads and your traffic has grown 10% since last year, you've actually taken a pay cut!
The advertisers need trackers, otherwise they're just yelling into the void. It never used to be like this because people were pretty homogeneous. A few decades of globalization and multiculturalism have made us much more diverse, and an impossible target for generalized advertising.
I'm not defending them, just pointing out the challenges product-makers and advertisers face.
You base your TV viewing on the advertising?
Streamed shows with no ads, ah! Wonderful, good value, even at a higher price (Netflix, IMHO, is leaving money on the table).
Use privacy badger or a tracker-blocking list for your ad blocker if you're that concerned about privacy.
On another note, as an ad person, context-aware ads are alive and well, for instance if you mention a specific thing in your Facebook updates you're more likely to see an ad for it. But the hard fact is that personalisation and retargeting works very, very well.
The real mistake ad companies do is that you should not see that ad if you didn't want to buy the jeans (or you bought them on a different device), which is hard to guess but not impossible
Maybe someone fromThe Deck could comment on why their approach is better.
Some sorts of tracking are harmful, I don't like the current state of affairs either and cookie syncing is downright evil (the practice of calling a pixel from a third party domain to "sync" your first party cookie with theirs) and abused.
I just don't think it's as black and white as some people make it sound, not all advertising is obnoxious and unwanted and as a consumer it's ultimately almost impossible to escape trackers completely (unless you expect consumers to run Tails and browse websites as static html)
Personalisation does work to some degree, I can see that on Facebook. But especially in that place it tends to creep me out and I do make an effort to never visit Sponsored Content.
Still, as much as I understand the need for Ghostery to monetise, I personally prefer to trust the EFF.
For one, while certain websites or apps show a clear signal that can be used (e.g. coding, hence the user can be shown ads on coding tools), many other websites or apps are not giving a signal on preferences or intent, this besides the ads inventory being an issue.
For example when you're reading political news, or when you're playing chess, what ad could you be shown that could be related to politics or chess? I can answer this - without a user profile, best case scenario is that you're shown something at random, with a disastrous conversion rate. And worst case scenario is ads being used for spreading pieces of propaganda on controversial issues and I remember for example how a certain gold mining company was attempting to manipulate with downright lies the viewers of certain YouTube videos that were criticizing their open-pit project. And because such ad spots are basically worthless, they can be bought for cheap.
I'm personally all about privacy and the security of my data, being downright paranoid. But privacy is one thing, blocking ads is another. If you don't like ads, then don't use those services or websites. That's how you end up rewarding alternatives and personally I rewarded many alternatives that way. Even if you want to punish bad actors, you still give them the eyeballs, you still distribute those links to your friends, etc. The concept of voting with your wallet is basically broken.
And contrary to the music and film industry that has pushed for DRM, this time people that block ads don't have the proper moral ground to stand on and also the industry is not going to go down without a fight. Consider that you can't block ads in mobile apps without having root privileges. This will turn out to be a whack-a-mole game and it won't last for long. Just wait until these websites will start to serve ads from their own domain, with ads being indistinguishable from the surrounding content ... oh wait, this is already happening ;-)
Worst of all is that you end up hurting other people - from publishers, many of whom are already on the verge of bankruptcy, to people that will suffer the consequences even if they don't use ad-blockers, as the history of video gaming can teach us. Do you enjoy the DRM laden pay-to-win gaming industry that others have created for you? As personally I'm thankful that I've outgrown video games.
You can not claim any moral ground at all. Claiming that web sites will fold if you don't exist is like a drug dealer claiming that taking them off the street will make life worse for the drug addicts.
Sites funded by invasive ads need to adapt or die.
I would like to see a micropayment system where I can load up a few dozen dollars a month and pay shares through +1 or liking pages. Sure, 1/1000 of my $50/month isn't going to make much of a difference, but if you are getting paid through ad impressions you will get a similar monthly return.
Even better, you will make more money by producing content people like, with reduced incentive to split a five word article over six pages of ads.
These days the ads are to the point that if I see a site start janking around as the stylesheets load and ads start pushing content around, I just force quit Safari right there on the spot. I don't have the time or money to support a web fuelled by the advertising dollar.
> Sites funded by invasive ads need to adapt or die.
But that's the point - they won't adapt in the direction that you want and they won't die. Why? Because you're not punishing the bad actors. Expect ad-blockers to stop working in the coming months. They only worked until now because they weren't considered to be mainstream ;-)
> I would like to see a micropayment system ...
Right, because that would solve the privacy thing. Micropayment systems for rewarding websites and projects with donations have already been tried and it's not working. For one because people claiming this never put their money where their mouth is. And also because the pool of people that can afford to spend $50 a month on reading websites is not that big, as we're speaking about the middle-class living in first-world countries, many of whom as I said don't give a shit.
#firstWorldSolutions
Except that I'm the one paying for the traffic, through my ISP. If carriers complain that there's too much traffic for the money they're paid, that's an issue of not charging the user enough for the service being provided.
I can always pay more money for more quota.
I still can not understand the mentality of US mobile service providers who just give you one-price-fits-all service. They're selling a limited resource (i.e.: consumption of broadcast bandwidth), but don't charge the heavy users more than the light users.
It's foolishness like that that makes ISPs start thinking about charging high volume content originators for use of their network.
If I choose to not download certain parts of your web site (e.g.: the JavaScript and third party resources), that's my way of controlling costs. It's not up to my ISP to make that decision for me (much less start charging content providers for the privilege of transit).
Find a better way to fun the web site. We are engaged in a tech war which is going to end up with users turning off CSS and JavaScript. Then how will you feed ads to people?
UX will win.
It will end up in better quality for everyone if only those products people are willing to pay for exist.
I think this is an improvement, compared to the current situation of ads getting in the way of the content I want to read.
I understand your point and feel yr pain but:
How do you do that without some sort of tracking? Advertising as well as the 'recommendation engines" in Netflix or Amazon track your clicks to see what you are interested in.
Otherwise you get programmatic advertising. Which means you get beer ads during football games; luxury brands in the NYTimes Magazine; etc.
My company could do that because we sell our ads directly and approve each one by hand and therefore have our own sales and ad operations staff. A lot of sites don't have the resources or scale to do that though.
Google is better at it then most and, well, you've seen AdSense. It's just OK.
Both consumers and advertisers are mostly aligned in that they want relevant ads. The idea that taking away information about the user is going to somehow make the ads better seems like a stretch.
So it's annoying, but we also seem to respond to it. As long as that second part remains true, I don't think it's going away.
What bothered me most: that to threat advertising industry on the internet is to threat democratic capitalism; that advertising is the only possible imaginable way to support good content creating and that consumer paying themselves for content is necessarily a bad thing.
There are a lot of examples where the ad industry went too far and changes came for better(in form of new business models in general or government regulations). I think now of HBO, Netflix, Wikipedia, the bilboard proihibition in my city, Sรฃo Paulo.
Ultimately, the democratic capitalism is working and the "apocalypse" will only happen if people do not consider it a apocalypse at all. If people consider that adblocking is too much (the author opinion) then nothing much relevant will happen. The reason? Democratic capitalism helps us defend ourselves from guys with self-serving interests not shared by most people. He is writing this because he is being threatened by capitalism, not because something else is threating it.
An interesting issue would come up with the adopocalyse - internet content would be for those who could pay for it. What % of Brazil (or US for that matter) would lose access to free/adtracked services like gmail, twitter, etc.
And it won't be necessarily copying Netflix model, that is just a past example. It will be by inovating in ways I can't predict.
If the people start loosing access to beneficial things because of their behavior, they will change behavior.
There is a term for this fallacy I guess - when you threat with an absurd proposition "imagine what happens if all advertising is sunddenly completely banned from internet, bad things will happen", only to push forward your proposition of "hey, let's just keep everything as it is right now, it's all fine, we don't want to risk imploding capitalismo do we?"
That is what this guy is doing.
I also agree just because I cannot imagine it that there is not a better model out there.
It is not trivial though if we explode the current DoubleClick / Amazon paradigm of advertising/ recommending by tracking. Walled gardens - subscription or ad driven - are not the answer either.
"we don't want to risk imploding capitalismo do we?"
No I really don't. The stock market crashes and poor people disproportionately suffer. If the EFF were running this adpocalypse maybe but it won't be. It will be whoever can keep the lights on.
But in this narrow case here is what I worry about. The Doubleclick model emerged in a very similar climate of a scourge killing the internet. In that case SPAM in the late 90's.
Targeted ads were among other things the spam killer. So the spammeisters went to work in adtech (I've worked for a few)...plus c'est la mรชme chose .
To be fair, the author admits in the second half of the article that the industry has done things wrongly and proposes some solutions.
But we have popups, in-page popups ("sign up to our newsletter!"), blinking, flashing, audio and video. As realistic as the article is about the approach to advertising; that is never going to happen. If anything advertisers are going to be more aggressive as the market that does not run blockers diminishes.
I'm guessing that eventually the internet is going to become unusable without blocker; at that point blockers will become de-facto and universal. Advertisers simply aren't learning.
This is 100% true and something I don't understand. Marketers/Advertisers are, from who I've met, really smart people. Yet the reaction to people blocking annoying/aggressive ads is full on idiotic. Instead of toning it down, they dial things to 11, prompting more people to block their ads.
"People are blocking our ads because they are annoying and piss them off. What should we do Sam?"
"Make the ads more annoying and piss them off even more!"
Let's be real. Most people won't pay for content on the Internet because most content on the Internet is worthless. Its primary purpose is to waste time while procrastinating on doing something more important.
Content that has an actual use - market research data, a well-written book explaining how to use a new technology, etc. - has no trouble finding customers who will pay for it. The rest has to rely on advertising. Since most ads have negative value to readers by actively obstructing the content they're trying to view or in extreme cases loading malicious software onto users' computers, they get blocked.
If publishers want readers to view ads, the ads have to provide some sort of value. It's not like a billboard where you can put it somewhere that people can't help but see it.
I find this a bit of a weird premise. Advertising can pay only for so much (at most a few cents per view). What if content owners want to be paid a little more? Should they suddenly change their complete income model? The answer should be: of course not! But currently the answer is: yes. In my view we should get rid of this strange incontinuity and get rid of ads altogether. Yes, it may mean we will pay for content, but at least it will give us privacy, a healthy market, no annoying ads, customer rights, and most of all, it may improve the quality of content. Also, don't forget that free content will also happily coexist with this model.
Without ads, maybe we lose some of the purely commercial sites, but I'm completely sure that strong communities will continue to exist without ads.
I wonder if this whole "front-end" blocking will just push things to the back-end.
How long until websites start sharing back-end tracking data between themselves?
In other words "first party tracking" is OK, "third party tracking" is not.
I am sure this has been on HN - no tsure where I first saw it. But this is a very interesting critique:
http://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you....
my thoughts on your point:
If anything, the lowest-common-denominator low quality content seems to be the biggest earner as far as advertising is concerned. Whole industries are built around churning out pages full of nothing just to generate clicks!
I'm not familiar with your blog, but if it's anything like the millions of other passionate personal blogs out there the content is probably orders of magnitude more useful and interesting than the output of the likes of Gawker or Buzzfeed...
If websites were forced to embed their own advertising, obtained directly from their own sponsors, those ads would reflect the amount of effort and cost involved, and more people would pay attention to them. Far from an apocalypse, there would be an enlightenment.
Give me ads like I see in a national glossy magazine, give me ads like I see on network television, and I won't block them, maybe I'll even watch / read them. Give me junk ads and I will block them. It's really not a hard concept to understand.
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There are trackers on every site, dozens of them. And they are all totally useless for advertising. If I watch a let's play on some game, ads for the game or similar games will half of the time lead to me buying it. Current tracking ads will show me an ad for something I bought a week ago next to the video, and one week later, after I have the game, I'll see ads for the game everywhere.
๐ช๐ฒ ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ป-๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐
If I load a website, I don't want to get a metaphorical โ or for some people, quite realistic โ epileptic shock. I want to be able to enjoy the content. The ads should be visible (not just plain text), but they should not be annoying or misleading. Don't put 20 ads looking like download buttons on a download page, or I'll stop recommending your page โ or, worse, recommend people to install an AdBlock extension.
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Obviously, this all only helps for affiliate-type ads, not for Brand Awareness. But for those, there is a far better solution, that is far more successful: Viral Marketing. Often, Brand Awareness works best through marketing that is fun to watch, fun to interact with. In that case, a minigame as ad in your Facebook stream, or a fun video on YouTube can be far more effective.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal opinion.
It's a very funny book. He's an old-style TV/print ad guy who has been ranting about the stupidity of the online ad market for decades.
He makes the point that the reason trad-ad gets so much money, is because everyone knows that ads are annoying.
They're annoying on TV, they're annoying on radio and streaming services, they're annoying in cinemas, they're often annoying in print, and they're especially annoying online.
In fact they're more annoying online than anywhere else, and less effective at selling stuff than ads in other media - because online ads are poorly targeted, poorly designed, poorly distributed, lacking in context, and generally nearly useless.
All of which could have been changed - and it may or may not be too late now.
I think it's worth reading the blog:
http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/
(And no - I don't get affiliate income from that link.)
So, for example, when I dead reviews about a product, the reviewer could use an affiliate link. Because at that time I'll probably buy it anyway.
Today's ads just hurt everyone.
A much better model that I would agree with, would be a well-annotated "Promotional Post" with an ending that says "Here is what we thought about it: <Link to Review>."
I do not want you to build a dossier of everywhere I go on the web. I don't want to be tracked by dozens of shady javascript includes on each page, the way it is now. I don't want to be tracked by a nice efficient consortium either. Do not want.
If the ad industry isn't ready to give up pervasive tracking, they're not facing up to the hard choices yet. And if they think the only way to support the modern web is with a massive database of everything everyone reads, then yeah, their apocalypse is coming.
So no - I don't think the ad industry is capable of going away from pervasive tracking. I do not know how else they would do it.
If you went to a website about exotic locations and asked for information - you would then get an avalanche of spam. Targetting started out as an (initially) less intrusive method.
My stand on this:
1) I have an ad blocker in place 2) Sites can detect my ad blocker and ask me to disable it before they show me content - I know it's feasible because I already saw that happening several times. 3) Then I can decide if I want to disable the blocker and see the content, or not.
So if a site does not block it's content in response to me blocking their ads, I will assume they are fine with it. For sure I am not steeling the content because they basically provide it for free - as in free beer.
It's actually pretty difficult to detect ad blocking. The ad blockers actively try to evade detection and have special filters to interfere with detection code.
It's true that some sites detect ad blocking with some success and there are commercial solutions being pitched to publishers for blocking the ad blockers, but it's a constant arms race where the publishers are at a technical disadvantage. (Consider that there's only so much they can do if they want their pages to be accessible on the web and crawled by google.)
There should be an ad blocker that is as easy to detect on the server as it is to install for the user.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenu...
...which from wikipedia says is: "an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry."
His fear mongering at the end is a powerless cry into the wind.
Wow. That's really much higher than I would have expected.
7.93% Adblock Plus
0.84% NoScript
0.55% Ghostery
0.20% uBlock or uBlock Origin