Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads
mattcutts.com
mattcutts.com
1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.
So here's what people need to know about Google contributor:
1. I pay for the highest level available.
2. I love not seeing ads.
3. This only works for Google-based ads, which are certainly common, but are neither the majority of advertising online, nor are they among the more annoying.
4. Contributor doesn't work like an ad blocker, which makes ads just "disappear." Instead, you see a big empty block (that is apparently customizable in some way) that says "Thank you for being a contributor. The ad space is still there, it's just blank. So if half of your page used to be covered in ads, now half your page is covered in little blocks that say, "Thank you for being a contributor."
For example, here's a screenshot of iMore (the site that was used to compare ios9's ad blockers): https://austen-screenshots.s3.amazonaws.com/iMore__The_1_sit... I'd almost prefer ads.
5. This doesn't stop most of your pages from taking forever to load because of JavaScript from other ad networks.
6. I don't care about the tracking/privacy as much as some people, but it doesn't solve that problem either.
So, do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely. I hope Google can expand it, and I will pay. I have no idea how expensive it would be to pay for the disappearance of all ads, but I'd likely do it. (I recognize I'm not the "average" Internet user as far as what I'm willing to pay).
That being said, it does not yet come close to competing with the convenience that an ad-blocker provides (which I don't use out of principle).
It's still early, so I give some leeway, and I like the idea, but as of yet this won't be a game changer. I truly hope it can become one.
There's a sliding scale that goes in $1 increments.
If I'm paying the same as the bidding cost for advertisers, then I'm all in, this is super sweet. If I'm paying some vague hand-wavy fee that reduces my ads, but doesn't correspond 1-1 to what advertisers are paying then forget it.
Edit: Apparently it is a 1:1 mapping and unused money rolls over until next month. I was wrong. Thanks cmpb for pointing that out.
The way I would be in 100% support of this would be if I could go and "top up" my ad-support-budget. Say I add $50.. and from then on every Google served ad gets swallowed up and my balance gets deducted whatever the bid price was, with the same % going to the contributor site.
When my $50 is up, ads return. I can choose to refill as I want, or set it up to auto-refill with $20 when it runs out, sending me an email or whatnot.
I really really really like this concept, but man, they need to be really honest with their implementation.
[1] https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6182619?hl=en&...
- Sites like thewirecutter.com make their money from affiliate links
- To try this experiment, I need to turn adblocking off. Which I am not willing to.
- Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads. http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-... -- people are happier since less information assaults their brains, companies are still doing what they need to do because they needed to get creative ways to convince people why their products are worthwhile.
Yes, there are multiple ways to monetize things on the Internet. Affiliate links work very well for Wirecutter, because it is based around people trying to buy things. If you're forbes.com however, affiliate links don't really work.
> Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads...
If the problem we're trying to solve is, "How can we pay content creators what they need in order to continue producing content?" then an anecdote about outdoor advertising and billboards is largely irrelevant.
Of course, your proposed solution may be, "No one gets paid for content and the content ceases to exist because I don't like ads," and that may be what happens to some degree, but I personally wouldn't like that solution very much.
I'll start unblocking ads the moment site creators start taking responsibility for what they display. My hourly rate for machine fixing is many times more than the few tenths of a penny you got for my ad impression.
To answer your question above, they gripe because they are being disrupted by technology and cannot charge what they want to charge for their product.
You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of. Otherwise if there really is no value on that page, what are you doing there? You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting.
> You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of.
Well, current model also costs me that $0.001 (likely more) in electricity costs and exposes me to at best some ugly-looking crap made with adversarial intent, that has nonzero chance of scamming me into buying something I don't need, and at worst is a vector of malware delivery. It also costs me time wasted on waiting (10x longer load times) and productivity losses due to system slowing down if for some reason I need to keep the site open and do something else.
> You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting
You prove there is potential value by visiting. You won't know if there is an actual value until you at least skim the content. If you're visiting the same site regularly you can start to predict how much value you expect to get out of a visit, but at this point the site owner can probably convince you to pay for it somehow (be it subscription, turning off the ads, selling you their book, etc.).
When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?
I also hear this "potential" value argument a lot - why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value? Just doesn't make sense. And either way, ads allow you to not lose anything monetarily if you feel that site didn't give you what you expected. It's very a fair and low-risk trade.
This is very relevant here, because a big part of issue with ads is about dumping externalities on people. When you multiply that small electricity costs by number of people exposed to a bloated, flashy ad you'll see it actually adds up to a decent amount of coal unnecessarily burned. But that's beside the point, I only brought up electricity because it's commensurable to the amount of money ad-serving site makes on me.
> When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?
I don't ask for refund, but I do tally that and include in my decision about which shop to go to.
> why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value?
As I said, if I go to a website regularly, it means that I have some concept of value I may expect to get from it. Bust most of browsing today is driven by a) search results, and b) link aggregators. Most of the websites I visit I visit only once or twice in a lifetime, because there was a link to a particular article on HackerNews, or maybe because it was the first search result for my query. In such situation I do not have concept of value I am about to receive.
> It's very a fair and low-risk trade.
It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.
Then include that in your decision in whether to go to a site with ads. You wouldn't just take things from the store either?
> It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.
Scams are a greater issue than to put on advertising. Malware is an issue and I agree with that. The industry does need to work on this and things are changing but that doesn't suddenly make it ok to take. If the risk is too much for you, dont visit the site. Same as if the risk of driving on the freeways is too much, stay off the freeway.
You seem to keep saying you take risk and externalities into account but then say that you have no control and thus rationalize taking content, however you always have the choice of just not going to that link.
Me looking at something is not a form of payment. The payment is coming from the advertiser. The advertiser is paying the content producer, THAT is the business transaction. Whether I choose to view the ad and make those advertisements have value is not my concern. Those ads are the REAL value and worthy of my payment.
Otherwise viewing the NYT is like watching sunsets, the only way to monetiZe that is by slapping a billboard in front of me, at which point, i go elsewhere
If you went elsewhere, there's no issue. But when you breakdown the billboard and still see the sunset (assuming the sunset is copyrighted and original content) then you're changing the value exchange unfairly.
Under your definition, getting up to go to the bathroom during commericials or making a conscious effort to look away from ads is ...immoral? Illegal? Fraud? There is no contract no quid pro quo.
The content providers are selling real estate. Thats it.
The obligation is to accept the ads with the content. It's actually in the terms and service of many sites and doesn't require a signature. This is completely legal and binding, just not easily enforceable.
Sure there might be natural losses due to leaving or not looking at the screen but adblockers are all about your intent to completely remove the ads from the content before you even seen it. That's the issue.
I view a website and someone says I owe them my first born, does not make it so.
Anyways, this is something that paywalls solve entirely so it's a great model, but nobody wants to pay.
I mean, they're not making me sign a contract saying I wouldn't consume their content if the ads are off, so it's up to me to choose what I see on MY computer. There are also websites which detect adblockers and don't show their content at all. I'd just close their website not caring about their content, so at least I don't find it worth paying for.
Even I have blogs, videos which earn me ad money. I know had it not been ads, no one give a dime to see them :), and it's perfectly fine for me.
Think of like a movie: you can pay $10 to see the whole thing or $0.001 per each frame. That's what the web is like with each frame possibly being from a different publisher. That kind of granular payments is very hard to pull off effectively outside of advertising.
It's possible to have a separate "content" subscription but that will mean ISPs have far more tracking and net neutrality issues than now so it's best to have another 3rd party doing this.
But that's obviously not the deal, because your traffic would plummet as many of your visitors would reject that deal. So don't pretend an agreement exists here. Visiting a website is not an obligation to view the content or the ads.
The agreement is between the website and the advertiser. They have obligations to each other, we don't have obligations to them.
Which parts of the web are those exactly?
You'd be surprised at how creative people can get when their livelihoods are threatened by changing business models. Those who come up with a better solution for monetizing good content will survive. Those who don't, or who had poor content to begin with, will be forced out of the market.
Look at the main alternatives – subscription is the usual other one. And subscription will probably be enough to keep the big sites like Google and Facebook afloat, but for smaller sites, they'd just go under. Not to mention subscription biases the wealthy – suddenly, the poor are locked out of a lot of sites.
I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.
Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is that they have to get their pagerank up and stay relevant. The reason they have to do that is because if they don't do it, there are ad revenue dependent content generators out there that will do it for them. If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.
Google is great. I think in many ways they've made the world a better place. Google is very ad revenue dependent. Ad revenue sponsored all of the great television shows and radio shows from the beginning. I don't think that advertising should go away because it makes great things by Google and media companies possible.
However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.
Much of it is, yes. Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do.
Not that I have any answers here - I think your DVR comparison is fair.
Not any more. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist are all paywalled. Those are some of the few remaining newspapers with sizable reporting staffs.
Most other US "newspapers" have a few reporters, but mostly regurgitate wire services and press releases. The "fluff" sections (cars, real estate, food and wine, sports) are outsourced, sometimes to Demand Media, the content-farm company.
Buy a newspaper and mark all the articles that didn't originate as a press release, press conference, national news service, or ad. There will not be many.
And you seem to be ignoring cause and effect here - the reasons many newspapers have much smaller staffs these days is because the bottom fell out of the ad market and left them with no money.
Ads providing revenue has not led to value, ergo I don't see much reason to protect the status quo for fear of losing it.
That's one of the best good for all, social arguments against ads/for blockers that I've seen.
The reason why people continue to visit all those sites and click all those links? - Because they like it.
And what's wrong with subjective, anyway?
There's nothing wrong with subjective - unless you're actively trying to say you know what's right for everyone else. That's not how we make progress in the best interests of everyone.
This is disingenuous; there are people who dedicate their working life to causing other people to do things they (other people) don't want to do (e.g., following a psychologically-designed bespoke(!) anchor that belongs to a class of things colloquially known as ``link bait". )
Let's say everyone falls for it once, twice or even a dozen times. Don't you think the traffic would just stop after a while. Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?
Why do celebrities have the most followers and gossip sites have some of the highest traffic? It's easy to argue that it's not "valuable" or "educational" content but it's still incredibly popular. Does that somehow make it "bad"? Are you the judge of that? Or is someone manipulating everyone to pay attention? Are a few people capable of controlling entire populations this easily? And why are they spending time with ads then?
OR - could it simply be that people just like what they like? At some point you just have to put aside the prejudices and look at the data and see that much of the popular stuff on the web is popular precisely because it's what users want.
http://mumbrella.com.au/mamamia-has-said-goodbye-to-clickbai...
http://digiday.com/publishers/upworthy-goes-clickbait-free-n...
http://blog.newscred.com/how-reader-demand-for-content-marke...
Are you suggesting that this was my contention?!---I fall for click bait all the time.
> Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?
No, but I don't think ``we" are actively trying to figure it out. People design these traps _for a living_; ``we" get trapped by them _in ``our" spare time_.
> ...
...
Why do people keep clicking obvious linkbait articles? Because there's certain social-inclusion triggers we're wired to respond to, logic and conditioning be damned. The content isn't popular. The forcing function used to drive that traffic is playing on social addictions.
At some point you have to put aside the "data" and think about where the cause and effect really lies.
You're talking about basing all this on some rough psychology - however plenty of people don't watch comedies with laugh tracks because they just don't like the show and it's the same with headlines.
There might be certain influences (since it is called clickbait) but in the end it's all up to the user. They choose to click.
> If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.
Sounds like a funny way to try to make the internet more "sophisticated." If you dont like the content of the regurgitation engine, then you wouldnt visit the site and so wouldnt be supporting it.
So something else is at play. I think that a huge portion of the public actually likes the regurgitated content. They come home from work and just want to chill out and be mildly entertained by buzzfeed. So addblockers dont reduce the velocity of the crap engine, they take away your patronage and therefore your vote for what content you want to see.
I think that there is so much low quality on the web because people value it very low. They only pay by viewing adds (and with privacy) so the media produced will reflect that.
Now think about what might happen with contributor. Those that hate viewing adds and some that block them will decide to pay for the add space of the pages they view. Then the value of addsense space goes up since advertisers are more confident that the people seeing the adds will not hate them and the website also gets money from those who are contributors. So the value of content goes up as well and that should bring the quality up as well.
> However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.
You're not really paying google. Google takes a commission, which they deserve, and the money goes to the content creators. Tivo and DVR are bad examples since they actually did end an era in television and were not free so not very widely used for a long time.
But there might not be enough really good stuff out there. User created content is never going to be like professional globally top notch produced content - or if it is it will take as much talent and time to make. Once I have seen the new Star Wars film, it's not like I am going to be able to see another three hours of similar quality entertainment the next night and the next and the next.
For a thousand years humans have mostly entertained themselves by talking and jossing and laughing with each other. That's likely to be the future of content - just aimed at our niches.
I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.
Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and good content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.
Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.
And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.
And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.
It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.
Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).
There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.
And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.
Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.
It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.
Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.
uMatrix is a much more effective way of using DNS to block ads than HOSTS file editing. You can select only certain items from certain domains. Sure, I block Google cookies on most sites, but those sites are dependent on scripts coming from the same domains. With uMatrix, I can permit just the scripts that the site needs.
And I can quickly and easily test different resource combinations to customize my website experience.
I can select specific subdomains; I can also use wildcards.
I doubt there is anything an ad blocker can block that I cannot block using DNS. But if you have examples, post them and let's see.
If there is some site with frames that I willingly use regularly, I just bust out of the frame and access the contents directly.
Hence what you are describing does not sound like something I desperately need to do.
The only way I can answer your question is if you give me an example: a website with ads to block. Then I'll test it.
I should note though that cookies are not ads; the original topic was blocking ads - you are shifting the goalposts.
I agree. In the sense it's usually meant, "free" just means "monetarily free", but cost can come in more forms than just monetary units. :)
What I was referring to is that Google's "product" is offered free to the user.
What you refer to highlights the importance of the question: if their "product" is not free to produce, then why don't they charge users for it?
No matter how well Google delivers your search results and email, if they cannot serve ads, they are in trouble. They have hundreds of millions of loyal users of these websites, but Google does not ask users for money.
If they did, would you pay?
The demo images/gifs make it seem like you can make the ad space disappear. Is this achieveable by replacing the placeholder with a custom 1x1px image?
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ (The 'or even this' image)
I suppose you could use a 1x1 pixel as a workaround, but that seems to be more of a hack than the way Google designed it to function.
YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to earn money. Wikipedia? Check. HN discussions? Check. Topical subreddits? Check. Tutorials, videos, articles? Check, check, check. In fact, over time I've noticed a strong negative correlation between trustworthiness of content and amount of ads around it.
Heck, myself I created lots of such content and always felt it should be distributed for free.
Sure, videogames, music, movies, etc. are a different story. They are products that usually require full-time engagement of skilled professionals and you can't really get around paying for those. But your average web page? Rule of thumb: the more ads it projects, the more likely it is that it exists only to earn money off you (quality or dependability of content be damned).
TL;DR: I don't mind if upon removing ad support half of the Internet goes to shit. It was the bad part.
Oh, and since someone will surely bring up New York Times - I say, let it burn. Let's be honest with ourselves, we all know mainstream media are 1% content, 99% combination of bullshit and malicious lies. I'm willing to support that 1% with cash, but not the 99%. It is harmful to society and it should die.
And how is reddit funded?
Yes, they use ads, and if they didn't, I probably would be happy to pay or donate (if only to keep all the topical forums in one place and not revert to dark ages of phpBB and linear discussion threads). But let's not cheat ourselves - the ads are not paying for the content, they are merely supporting an efficient platform.
I've paid for it, personally, and I know others who do.
Yes, the ads are probably a larger portion of their income right now, but there's certainly an easy way to support them directly.
And they have ads, too:
But dont impose your ideals on everyone else who is reading that content voluntarily because they clearly enjoy it.
It's not just about me not wanting to read the bad stuff. If I dislike a page, I just don't visit it, I usually don't complain. But when talking about mass media, every lie they write gets read by the general population. People still (for some reason, probably because there's no other established alternative) trust them, and most don't have time to evaluate the claims critically. They form beliefs based on lies, and then they act based on those beliefs. In democracies, they go and vote based on those beliefs.
So suddenly, that pile of bullshit I carefully avoid to read gets amplified and hits me anyway, in form of bad policy, bad social projects and, well, bad zeitgeist.
But complaining about what people should consume because you deem it unworthy seems arrogant, draconian and irrational.
I think a good example is recipes. At one point, I instructed google to ignore food.com, about.com, food-network.com and a few more. But now there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites that are simply indiscriminate collectors of (mostly) crap recipes. If I search for a recipe for ramen, I'm looking for the obsessed guy who eats ramen 3 meals a day, tweaks everything until it is just perfect, and knows all the differences between ramen in every area, and knows how to make his own noodles, etc, etc. I'm not looking for, "Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Review: "5 stars!!! My husband and I make this all the time." The rest of the page is full of ads.)
And these days you get kind of "boutique" websites where someone has decided to have a go and make it their livelihood. And as much as some of these are really good, the vast majority are just writing 2000 words of how they went to Japan and tried ramen and how they couldn't get a hotel room in Kyoto because it was golden week and they didn't know that it got so busy... followed by, "Recipe: Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Comments: "5 stars!!! My wife and I make this all the time." The right 30% of the page is filled with ads).
The thing is that in order to be really amazingly informed about something, you really need to obsess about it. So the really amazing websites seem to be run by people who are thinking "I need some place to put down my ideas", not "What can I write that will make me money". Sometimes the former also manage to make money on their writing, but by and large I think the best sites are the ones that are not motivated by profit.
I have thought for a long time that we need a different kind of search engine (which I will tentatively call "Otaku"). Instead of of ranking pages based on popularity, they would be ranked on how nerdy they were. I'd love to get my old internet back ;-)
I wonder if that also means it won't work anywhere else where an embedded web view is used.
And I tried to see if it removes Video ads on YouTube (which I find very annoying), but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I think I must have been turned away from a site once or twice, but I really can't remember specifically.
So they don't block. Which means, they get something out of the visit. Exposure, at least. The hope of an eventual subscription, as I subscribe to the NYT digital.
But if they don't block, then they either get something out of those visit, or they're foolish. Either way, I'm not worried about them.
At all.
Paywalls are the only sure fire way to keep people out.
Sites can only attempt to ask by basically rendering that message and then replacing with ads. If the ads never load, then you'll see that message. However all these tricks are incredibly easy to get around with adblocker filters and so websites do NOT have a reliable way of knowing whether you are using an adblocker or not.
They can either refuse to serve content to everyone without a login (paywall) or serve it to everyone and hope the ads are there. That's how HTML works, the content is part of it and your adblocker is filtering it after receiving the content. There is no way for sites to refuse adblock users even if they wanted to without a paywall system.
You might look at this and think they still want you to have the content for free but they'd rather not - it's just out of their control unless they implement a different access model altogether.
I think you're right.
> Sites can only attempt to ask by basically rendering that message and then replacing with ads. If the ads never load, then you'll see that message.
Yes – content creators should get paid. Also, not all ads are bad. Some campaigns even make such an impression on popular culture that they have their own place in history. But the campaigns that won't? Well, basically anything coming out of ad machines like adsense and what not.
Ads can be tasteful, even enjoyable, but most of the internet ads aren't. Unlike broadcast tv, you can block internet ads; it's easy to do, and you should. Not because it'll kill content creators or indie app makers[1] or whatever, because it won't. It'll hurt the revenue streams of shitty ad mongers like adsense and doubleclick and facebook and admob and what have you. These are – in my opinion – on the same shitty level as porn peddlers. They sell crap for pennies, but they win because you just won't reach out to everyone otherwise. Google and Twitter and Facebook and all of the shitty ad platform snake-oil salesmen are the broadcasters of today – and their messages suck.
Not only do their messages suck, but people – good people – spend valuable time they'll never get back in order to produce these shitty ads. Time they could have spent doing something useful. Instead they made a shitty flash banner that won't play anyway because everyone blocks flash.
Ads of this kind need to be blocked so we can get to a point where advertising can be good. Where it requires thought, effort, research. Where it requires smart people, creative people, coming up with things that matter and are contextually relevant. The shitty ads we have today need to be blocked to preserve bandwidth, and to help make our planet perhaps die a little bit less every year. Blocking ads on the internet is easy, and doesn't require fancy heuristics or anything. It just requires black lists and hive minds. Ads that are not peddled through "platforms" or however you'd like to describe it – sponsored articles like those on Daring Fireball or increasingly in news papers these days – are less easy to block, and require more effort. But those ads aren't annoying, and they may not be entirely relevant but at least you don't want to throw up because you're fed up with their bullshit. So it becomes a cost/benefit calculation – is it worth the time and energy to block all ads, or are some ads ok?
To me the answer to that is simple: ads are ok. The ad-porn that inflicts the internet today, through adsense and the rest of the ad-platform mob, can die a painful death in fire. Fuck 'em, I'm blocking their shitty ads left-right-center.
Well, technically you're not "seeing" ads but I'm pretty sure your information is still being traded to data providers.
This actually works to google's advantage. They reduce ad blindness and when an actual ad appears it will be highly targeted and probably gives Google a lot more revenue per ad.
"Google Contributor is terrible. Not because it doesn't work, but because it still leaves big green gaps where the ads were saying, "Thank you for using contributor!" 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."
One of the nice things about ads is that it allows many users to browse content for free - subsidised by those that interact with adverts.
If advertising were to go away and micro-payments replace it - how do users get free access to content subsidised by the masses? I can freely browse the most internet today from anywhere in the world regardless of my income situation. A micro-payments barrier to entry isn't going to allow that.
Also those who are most likely to pay for a solution like this are likely the most affluent who are likely to be the ones clicking and buying products through advertising.
A few days ago I remarked on Twitter: "sad that Contributor, a great alternative to ads/tracking, is owned & marketed by Google, which has more to lose than gain from promoting it"[0]
The idea behind Contributor is a powerful one: one that if aggressively marketed and expanded, could (at least conceivably) provide a viable hybrid model for online content publishing (that could coexist with ad-tech).
But Google is a one-trick pony (with ads, obviously) and has everything at stake here. That makes Contributor feel like more of a defensive "moat" initiative -- there to passively discourage others from pursuing (or investing in) similar ideas. Maybe I'm being too cynical. I too am happily subscribed to Contributor--the most dramatic difference is The Next Web -- where the crazy canvas-flying ads are toggled off.
[0] - https://twitter.com/spencenow/status/646480765794975744
The advantages of Google Contributor are reasonably clear. There is at least:
1. Works through Google's existing advertising systems, so easier for them to implement.
2. Minimal work for websites to sign up.
3. Advertisements disappear, while supporting websites.
4. Very little work for the end user to get started.
But the disadvantages to me seem quite strong. A few:
1. Advertisers (e.g., Google), can still track you. Those with privacy concerns won't have those concerns addressed.
2. Doesn't remove all ads (even if you pay the maximal amount, it only affects Google ads, as you say).
3. Effectively creates more competition for the ad spots, driving the prices up (good for Google).
4. Does not change content layout.
5. Google still controls the space, where it would be better for the website owner to be able to use that space themselves.
6. Pricing is not clear. What exactly am I getting for what I pay? As competition increases, price goes up. As an end user, I like to know how much I need to pay to get a particular service. I don't want to have to give it much thought.
I do think it's great that you're willing to support websites in removing ads. An Adblock Plus survey suggests that there are many users who would be willing to donate, so you're not alone.
Full disclosure: I run https://webpass.io, a service to give money back to the content creators in a way that completely bypasses the advertising industry, rather than working through it (thus protecting privacy). Gives the power to the website owner to control their content, not Google.
I find the whole thing odd though.
I never click ads when I do see them, I literally have never, ever bought anything through advertising links. Even without an adblocker, the only reason the site would be getting money from my view is that the advertiser is being ripped off - I am literally a worthless view to them. In fact for any ad that's beyond static text I am more likely to remember your brand and deliberately not buy your stuff in future.
So effectively, any site that was being supported by my visits would be scamming the advertiser.
I'm kind of OK with that, but the other benefits of adblocking (no tracking, no random scripts executing, much faster page-loading etc) far outweigh any concerns.
I know, I'm accessing your content without paying at the moment. I would be happy to put a header in my http requests that says I will not render ads, and allow you to decide if you want to serve me. Until then, I'm going to carry on freeloading, but make no mistake - if I wasn't, you would be.
Well,you don't decide your own worth in this system. Your first mistake is assuming the only usefulness they get from you is when you click on an ad to buy something. That's a very naive view of advertising.
The whole advertising industry is built on a very naive view of advertising.
To the advertisers?
No I'm sure they think that 'brand awareness' is useful too, only it's not, if you annoy me into noticing your brand I will deliberately not buy it.
But that's also irrelevant. If they are paying to have pictures put in front of you for brand awareness, then that's what they are paying for,not ad-clicks. Assuming you can completely understand their business, strategies and intentions to the point that you can accurately judge what is best for them is not just naive, it's hubris.
Th world can be a quieter, calmer place when you stop letting people make sales pitches at you constantly.
Not really, I already pay for my tv, music and radio directly (tv license, streaming services etc) so I don't have to be advertised at, and I'm seriously considering signing up for these various no-ad services for the web.
It doesn't have to be more boring without advertising, in nearly all media now there are ways to enjoy great content without letting the sales pitch in. I hope we find good ways with the web too.
My point was that it's more boring if you forego the content that has ads, and I think your use of an ad-blocker to access this content supports this position.
I also hope we find good mechanisms to pay for content without advertising, but I also don't want advertising paid services to go away. It does allow a freedom of access that wasn't possible beforehand.
I dunno, I might get more done actually and have a more interesting life, but that's something of a philosophical point.
>> I think your use of an ad-blocker to access this content supports this position.
I think that if I didn't have one I would use the web much less, as I do find advertising that intrusive and awful now.
>> I also don't want advertising paid services to go away
I honestly don't care about them, I'd rather not have ads or the service and would be more than happy to see a model develop that blocks people like me from content if the advertising is that important to the site.
Happily for me I no longer have the to make the choice of either putting up with it or not funding the content when it comes to most media.
The root of this for me is that you don't reject it entirely, you just reject the portion you don't like. You (like most of us, let's be clear) reject the pitch, but take the stuff. I don't really think that's right, but many of us do it anyway. I do object to casting it as positive for the ad companies and the content producers though. I think it's very clear it's not, and making that more clear to more people would make update of alternate content payment schemes more likely.
Otherwise, if you don't owe the content producers anything after consuming the content, why bother paying for something like Google Contributor? Just to help support artists, patron style? I don't think the uptake due to that will be enough.
There are sites now that block access if you block ads. I am happy for them to do this. But to get technical - on the web I request content and it is sent to me, I make no promises about rendering anything.
>> I do object to casting it as positive for the ad companies and the content producers though.
I didn't say it was positive for the producers, it's clearly not. It's positive for the advertisers because they don't have to pay for a 'view' that is useless to them though.
>> Otherwise, if you don't owe the content producers anything after consuming the content, why bother paying for something like Google Contributor?
I don't actually owe them anything as at the moment they don't charge, except in an implied way. They can charge, either by insisting I look at their ads, in which case I won't use their service, or by insisting on something like Google contributor or Patreon before I get the content. I'll say again, if sites make it clear I'm not welcome without viewing their ads, I won't go. It's OK with me. I don't think I find any online content or service compelling enough to change my mind on that, with the possible exception of Google's stuff.
>> I don't think the uptake due to that will be enough.
To be honest I don't think the uptake will be very high anyway because people are used to the current model and most don't object as strongly as me. Just as I think the number of people who use streaming services for the convenience probably vastly outweighs the number who even care that they enable ad-free viewing.
Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable, they could be trying ten different ways to detect if you are blocking ads so they can display a note that you aren't allowed to view the content, and you would likely never know.
Or do you think they should put a banner at the top of ever page, inconveniencing every user just so the ones that don't want to view ads and are running ad-blockers have a chance to notice the content producers don't want them skipping the ads, after purposefully blocking their ability to determine if the message applies to them specifically?
Or how about we just assume that if a site attempts to display ads then they intend their users to view them? Is that too crazy to assume?
That's just not true. Lot's of sites can and do detect them just fine, and display custom messages.
That said, I don't think we're that far away from ad-blockers blocking detection. As soon as some large sites detect and bypass ad-blocks by moving to a ad source in those cases (or displaying ads in some other manner), ad-blockers will be forced to prevent detection to fulfill their purpose.
Sometimes advertising is about awareness. Sometimes that's brand awareness, but it's also issue awareness. There are ads about social issues. They are often about making sure you are aware of the organization that put the ad out in case you want to get involved/help financially, but often it's also just to raise awareness about the issue.
In what way is a site showing an ad about children going hungry in America (as Hulu used to play quite often) and him not clicking on it scamming the organization that put the ad out? In what way is his blanket rejection of the ad before actually seeing it making helping that organization?
As I said, a very naive view.
It's one 'view' (well page-load, because I'm not going to view it regardless) that's going to get them nowhere that they don't have to pay for.
>> In what way is his blanket rejection of the ad before actually seeing it making helping that organization?
Again, they don't have to pay for me to completely ignore them.
Are you trying to argue that I should watch all advertising that comes my way in case some of it is socially responsible?
I'm not sure who has the more naive view here...
No, but I think your view on advertising and the content it supports is hypocritical (because you still accept the desired content), so I thought casting it in light of a hopefully less nefarious cause might cause you to look at it more objectively.
The naivety I reference is specifically in your belief that you can correctly predict the desires of multiple large and small complex business entities in their goal to advertising in front of you, and make decisions in their best interest that are against their expressed desire.
There are many arguments for ad-blockers that can be put forth, but I don't believe taking the moral high-ground is a valid one.
Edit: s/arguments against/arguments for/
I think there is nothing to predict here - they have no goal towards 'Nursie, or any other particular viewer. Advertising on-line is done by carpet-bombing the whole Internet with cheap ads, hoping that enough people get hit.
I stand by my assertion that thinking you know exactly what the intention of an ad that was is naive. And that's before considering that you wouldn't even see it in this case, you would just block it and assume blindly.
I have said I will be happy to include a header in my http requests that says I will not render ads, and I already am happy to pay for content in other media. I will now explore that on the web.
At the moment, however, I request content from web servers and they send it to me. I make no guarantees implied or otherwise about what I will do with it or how I will render it.
>> The naivety I reference is specifically in your belief that you can correctly predict the desires of multiple large and small complex business entities in their goal to advertising in front of you,
They want my money. I'm well aware of this much.
>> and make decisions in their best interest that are against their expressed desire.
Well perhaps not, but in the simple case I will repeat - if I notice you're advertising your brand at me, I will not buy your stuff.
>> There are many arguments against ad-blockers that can be put forth, but I don't believe taking the moral high-ground is a valid one.
There are very many arguments for ad-blockers that do occupy the moral high-ground. Advertising is manipulative and it's not immoral to block these attempts at manipulation.
> Advertising is manipulative and it's not immoral to block these attempts at manipulation.
My argument has never been that you shouldn't be able to control what's presented to you, just that if it's part of an exchange, if you reject one part, you shouldn't get the other. and I think casting yourself as actually helping the advertiser in this situation is a specious argument.
And I'm sorry but I do think advertising is manipulative through and through. That's pretty much the whole point.
So is all communication. That friend you tells you about his morning, or some current event? He's expecting to elicit a particular type of response. We don't generally care too much, because we attribute good, or at least harmless intentions to their communication. We manipulate the emotions of those around us as a secondary communication channel.
Advertising is communication as well. The difference is that we often adopt an adversarial stance when dealing with it, because while most advertising is about the company selling you something and mostly harmless (if annoying) it's still informative of the product, but some advertising is outright misleading and can confuse the issue. Advertising isn't bad because it tries to manipulate you, but it can be bad when that manipulation is to get you to do something that isn't in your best interests (otherwise it ranges from helpful, through useless, and to annoying).
Advertising can be useful and helpful. It helps people determine what is available in the market and make a decision on what to buy or what to research. The name of a store on it's exterior, and the name of a site at the top are both advertising, and useful. You may have decided that you think this trade in information is not worth your time, and that's fine, but I reject any argument so simplistic as to say advertising is bad and possibly immoral because it's manipulative. It's too simplistic to have a meaningful relation to reality in this case, and thus has no place in this discussion, IMO.
There are typically 2 types of goals that an advertiser can be interested in- 1. Branding, 2. Direct Response. With "Branding" campaigns an advertiser just wants to get their name out there and very often, associated with a specific publisher (say Mercedes wants to be associated with The Economist)- the metrics that these types of campaigns are judged by are impressions (the number of people that view the ad) and are usually sold on a CPM basis (the advertiser pays $X for each 1000 views). With "Direct Response" the advertiser actually cares about people clicking on the ad and "converting" on the landing page, big advertisers rarely do that, most often these campaigns are sold on a CPC (cost per click- the advertiser pays for each click) or CPA (cost per acquisition- the advertiser pays for whatever action the user completes on the landing page) basis. So, in reality, by viewing the ad you're not actually ripping anyone off.
The only time the advertiser is ripped off, is when bad actors set up fake sites, add ad networks to the sites then drive botnet traffic that simulates a real person, then the advertiser really is getting ripped off.
By viewing the ad I'm not ripping anyone off, no, but a page taking money for me viewing an ad would be, as the outcome for the advertiser is getting a best neutral and likely actually negative.
You're either an outlier in terms of behavior, or you're not offering an honest representation of how you react to ads.
As I say, I do find this and patreon interesting, and may sign up. I already get most of my tv and movies through subscriptions to streaming services where I don't have to see any ads.
I think you're very wrong here. I suspect only a small part of the echo-chamber techies might think this way. The general public only hates ads when they're shown as those crazy multiple pop-up windows + auto-playing flash ads with audio.
Otherwise, people do click... or tune them out(but subconsciously, the ad is in their head)
The general public in the USA may be more inured to constant ads, I'm not sure that holds everywhere, and as ad-free services like netflix grow I think we'll see more people start to become more conscious of advertising.
Penis pill emails have a well demonstrated ROI as well.
Actually, that is not as clear cut as one might expect [1].
It also doesn't specify mediums of advertising, because of confidentiality agreements, but hints that it included mediums such as television and billboards which are traditionally harder to track. I don't think it's shocking that out of home media is hard to statistically track ROI on.
Every time I see somebody claiming that advertising doesn't work, I just think that there's another person who has never tried to run a small online business.
The ad industry is not full of idiots, it's got an impressive amount of technology and data behind it proving the ROI on every side.
You have not uncovered some kind of mass conspiracy. I'd strongly recommend you either talk to people in the industry or read up on the technology and results available.
Also, I worked alongside people in ad industry and I'm very happy I escaped it. I've seen how things are done and I'm not pleased. I don't think ad industry is full of idiots - it's not the smarts I am disputing, it's the morals.
Whenever there is a good branding ad, you're not thinking about or remembering how great of an ad experience you're having. There are exceptions, like Superbowl commercials, but it's still a cognitive bias.
As a result I find nearly all advertising, when I do come across it, to be intrusive and annoying.
And no, I'm not only remembering my negative experiences as advertising experiences - when one cuts advertising out of ones diet to the extent I have tried to all advertising seems incongruous and objectionable. I have successfully re-sensitised myself to it, and made my life much quieter and calmer without the constant sale-pitch.
There're several technics in ad industry to minimal the negative effect. One example is frequency cap, which is the total number of times a specific ad be shown to someone. Anyone will get sick if they saw the exact same thing 10 times a day. Another example is ad rotation, means showing slight different ads about the same thing to people. If you like cars you might remember a recent ad campaign about ford focus on youtube.
Do these technics work? Well I don't think it makes a negative experience positive, but it does make some of them neutral for me.
I believe you when you say you don't click on things, but if it were possible to somehow objectively test this particular claim, I'd bet against it.
These days as I don't read paper news and don't watch broadcast tv (I subscribe to netflix, prime and nowtv instead), I actually find ads in the cinema most offensive, because I can't escape easily.
--edit--
I'm not going to try to claim I'm totally immune to brand awareness campaigns that would be silly, but I do genuinely find it that annoying now.
I don't have any studies on hand, but it would be interesting to test whether, on average, the initial negative reaction is better for long term brand recognition than no reaction and whether the negative nature persists, or if it shifts into familiarity territory and eventually becomes more positive than negative, as something familiar usually feels safer.
If anyone has any studies to this effect, would love to read them.
I'm pretty sure (let's say ~80%) that it was before I started hearing the bad press about Groupon. I recall being initially biased against them because of ads, and then slowly learning more reasons to not participate.
Prime I use because it's free right now, though I'll probably cancel it at the end of the month because I don't like it that much. NowTv I subscribe to because it turned out to be the easiest way to get GoT when I decided I probably shouldn't pirate any more. I found out about it because I searched, not because someone intruded into my life and demanded my attention.
Maybe that's true, but I'll bet you're influenced by it more than you think. When you consciously notice an ad and get irritated by it you won't buy, but there will be times when you subconsciously notice an ad and do nothing about it. Many advertisers are smarter than people give them credit for.
And this sort of brain-hacking is precisely the reason I find advertising unacceptable and will not allow my computer to render ads.
I get being uncomfortable with trackers, but the mind of paranoia associated with the passive and active effects of ads is a joke considering this shit has been a common part of modern society for a long time.
I don't watch them, at all. I have streaming services. My tv isn't actually even attached to an aerial at the moment. And I mostly listen to BBC radio stations (I'm in the UK).
>> billboards
We don't have quite so many of those in the UK as there are in the US, but yes, they are hard to avoid.
>> ads in magazine's/newspapers
I don't really read paper ads any more
>> but the mind of paranoia associated with the passive and active effects of ads is a joke considering this shit has been a common part of modern society for a long time.
It's not really paranoia, I just prefer to avoid being manipulated.
It's genuinely possible to avoid nearly all advertising now. I like this and I find life without the constant commercial intrusion and associated information overload quite good.
The cost of non-engaged viewers is baked into the CPM of the ad already. You aren't scamming anyone, you're just fulfilling expectations. :)
Of course I block ads routinely, so that's quite unlikely anyway. I think finding new ways to pay for content is a good thing.
"Ad's don't work on me and I have never ever been positively influenced in any way every by one"
This simply makes you, at best, look naive in your believe that your conscious self is responsible for all (or even a majority) of your actions, and at worst, wrong/lying (who remembers everything they've ever purchased and how they came to know about it?)
And I'm pretty tired of advertising.
Incidentally this subconscious effect is one of the best possible reasons to block ads. I think that regardless of commercial considerations, pushing your brand that way is underhand and actually evil.
>> wrong/lying (who remembers everything they've ever purchased and how they came to know about it?)
I'm not claiming I have always taken this view, so I'm not really required to remember everything I've ever purchased, but I do take the view that our purchases are one of the few powers we consumers have. If I don't like your actions, be those unethical actions taken by the company or intrusive advertising, I won't buy your stuff.
Ad's never work for me, I occasionally turn off ad-blocking to see how google looks like with ADs. None of those advertising will work for fit what I am really looking for.
If I want something, I probably know what, where, how, when already.
If someone need 24 4tb SSD to setup a Raid, the chance they will get it from an advertiser instead of someone who has well established a logistics channel, reputation over years, excellent return policy, is probably zero.
I would love to see Advertisement which I can say:" Wow I must have one." But sadly Google has some more works to do there.
Somehow google has solve partially of it: YouTube reviews. They are one of the only few advertisement that work, at least to me.
Nobody ever went to a bank just after reading the ad in the newspaper. But they remembered the brand.
I use Tasla before they are popular; Windows Mobile while they are not in the news steam; The first iPhone; The very first Gen Intel SSD; 64GB rams while 256 MB is the standard, and still can go on.
Advertisements in a media act as an amplifier that fit the majority in our social system.
Now go back to our topic: Can the Google Ads show me the next SSD? Will it show me the next self-drive car? No it cannot at this stage. But when it can, I will desperate or probably pay to read those advertisements.
The guys with an established logistics channel, reputation, 5 star reviews, all have that in part because they've been advertising longer than the new players. This is how all brands enter our mindspace. Even the titans of today started as unknown brands putting ads in magazines yesterday.
If you were going to buy it anyway then the ad did nothing, if you weren't then you are now worse off as you bought something you wouldn't have otherwise -- you've been manipulated.
From this there is no such thing as a positive ad.
Also, he didn't say that ads don't work on him, they certainly do but they're not having the desired effect which makes them worthless to the advertiser. Sure, they get brand recognition but if you consciously make an effort to avoid brands which advertise to you and recommend that others avoid the brand too then you've actually cost the advertiser money, making the ad worthless.
If I'm looking for, say, a bluetooth speaker, find an ad that looks interesting (of course I do a bit of product research), that may of more utility to me than the "frustrated, and did not buy anything" option.
However, things like Taboola are a cancer on the internet. Distracting and useless.
1. Specs 2. Reviews 3. Teardown 4. Product comparisons
Ads just don't give me any of that, the landing pages too often don't even have the specs, and I am never going to choose a brand name if their specs/reviews/teardown/price is worse than any other brand's or non-brand product's.
The only ads that "could", "maybe", "in theory" work on my are from Amazon, since free 1-day shipping is a cool thing... except I already search Amazon when I'm looking for a product, and by the time they get to show me ads about it, I've already made a purchase and are no longer interested.
This is exactly how I feel ads affect me. If I see an ad, I'm inclined to avoid the company advertising that product or service to me in future.
But I have managed to eliminate ads from my life to such a great extent now that they really do drive me up the wall when I get stuck seeing them. They're just not part of my daily landscape any more.
One of the issues with ads is that an ad for a particular product will follow you around, because tracking.
I wonder if the tracking goes both ways at Amazon, so that Amazon gets the tracking data, and then "people who looked at this also looked at that" is tailored to what you've been surfing. And so something you've bought at Amazon could have been influenced by "ads."
They're not interested in your specifically. Nobody is. It is well-known that something like 80% of all people that even see ads on the internet will never click on any ad in their life. But that's fine, because it's all a matter of probabilities.
Everybody's been talking about the death of display ads, and it looks like Google's paying attention and trying to figure out how to marginalize the ad itself, but still take money on the transaction.
Eventually, Google could probably marginalize the ad so much that there are only a rare few display ads left online, and Google has cleverly tricked us into keeping that industry aloft, essentially paying to keep something we hate alive.
We hate content creators?
Lastly, we hate tracking. I can't overstate that. They kill profiling we kill ad blocking. Simple as that.
If someone is proposing a solution for or discussing a problem that affects the entire Internet, it's important to realize that there are several parties who think differently, and in fact only a very small minority feel the same way you or me or the majority of HN does about things.
I'm not proposing a solution, hell I wouldn't even consider that I know better than Google what should be done. I'm just stating a problem. Profiling is annoying. And as a user I don't think it works that well. When I visit a site for science fiction I'd prefer watching relative ads, not an ad about a pair of shoes I searched a week ago.
We certainly are a minority but an influencing one.
So why on earth are you going to those sites?
> We also hate paying for the whole site just to read a couple of articles every now and then. How about a pay-by-article model with widespread adoption from the industry?
That's literally what this is.
I'm not. But 95% of web sites out there are replicating content one way or the other.
That's literally what this is.
No it's not. That's a different model and I have no objections against it. This is a model where Google decides to give money to sites, and that is any site that's running AdSense not just the ones with original content. My argument is about why some of us like to use ad blocking mechanisms.
Contributor might not be the answer. But if nothing else, this is a great "put your money where your mouth is" experiment. Suddenly all the talk from adblock users about how they'd just love to micropay for content directly has been replaced with all manner of excuses.
What do you think the possible consequences of this are? Will that be a net positive or a net negative for content quality on the web?
And by the way, we're paying for content. It's called books, magazines, newspapers, kindle shorts, you name it. Half of the original content out there comes from established news agencies, and most of them don't even run AdSense.
And please, spare me with this false dilemma, we're either bombarded with ads or the web will cease to exist. I've been hearing that for more than a decade. Advertising evolves. Even if 80% of users adopted ad blocking technologies advertising would find a venue to reach users. It's doing that for decades.
If tracking is the actual hill to die on, I don't know how we'd possibly get to your stated optimal outcome of per-article micropayments. That is something that'll by necessity make it easier for you to be tracked. There will have to be a central micropayment platform (or a few ones), since the threshold for maintaining per-site wallets is going to be too high for users. You will also need to have a single persistent profile on that central site, rather than ephemeral profiles that can be wiped away just by clearing cookies or by browsing from an incognito window. You can't even block the HTTP requests that are passing your information about the article load to the central server, since that's exactly the request that's facilitating the micropayment you want to make.
So I don't know if it's a very consistent position.
(I did not make any claims about the web ceasing to exist, nor about the necessity of advertising. No idea why you're assigning those views to me.)
Is it, though? Perhaps a closer inspection of the payment model is in order. I found this:
> You’ll pay the market price for each ad space that shows a thank you message or pixel pattern. This price can vary a lot. The exact price is determined at the time of the Google ad auction.
Further details are here:
https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6084026?vid=1-...
Essentially, you are bidding against a website's advertisers and paying the going rate for that ad slot. Not all content is equally valuable to advertisers. Consider the high cost for cancer targeted advertising compared to targeting an audience for, say, some form of generic cola beverage. The page with the cancer advertisement will receive a higher portion of your Contribute budget than the page with the cola advertisement (if it's replaced at all.. Google may decide they get more money with the cancer-related ad than with your Contribute bid).
So, it doesn't seem to distribute your money in proportion to your level of visits. If you visit a single site more frequently than others, then sure, that site may get a larger number of bites at your budget, but if the value of that space is very low then the total sum you provide to this content creator could be less than what you give to the owner of the click-bait link you followed once and forgot about.
I run an adblocker and I do put my money where my mouth is.
If there was any news or essay site that put out consistently high-quality content, I'd pay for that too. But as it is I'm happy for mass media and sites with vacuous pseudo-intellectual articles like Quartz, Medium and Nautilus to die out.
But I'd go a step further than "BuzzFeed". Any of the "[something] via [somesite]" web sites are in the offending category. They literally make money from the content of others by (sometimes) rewording the original title and giving it a slightly more clickbait title so that their 'via' "articles" look more inviting. Often, this is a chain of evil. I do not want to support that chain, even if it is just for the one visit. I would like to support the original writer, but none of the reworders. Now, the sad part is, there is only a very small list of real content creators.
So because there are bad content creators, that means the good ones should not get paid?
I'm not quite following your logic.
As a nerdy guy, I'd much rather see video game ads than tampon ads. I get the ideological argument against targeted advertising, but the practical arguments for it are pretty compelling, too.
There's also the fact that targeted ads result in better CPMs for publishers (since they'll result in better returns-per-view for advertisers), which means that they don't have to deploy as many of them to meet revenue expectations.
Ads is the old print way of getting paid.
Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.
Why are you so focused on ads when it 1. Doesn't make sense if users can just block it and 2. There are better options for me to pay content creators?
If you aren't interested in my 'preference' you lose out. The customer is just trying to have a normal relationship here... Abusive forced ads are not normal... IMHO.
You realize that this has been tried and widely deemed a failure, right? Paywalls are a problem because they actively drive your audience away to next-best alternatives.
> Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.
Actually, subscriptions + trial periods was also a print way of getting paid. For much the same reasons as it doesn't work for most mass content on the web, it didn't work well as the primary source of income for mass print publications (though there were publications for which it replaced ads, for the most part, it just served to provide a paid circulation number which demonstrated to advertisers the size of the audience that was dedicated enough to a publication that they were willing to pay something for it, so it was a proxy measure for effective ad reach.)
There are other categories of content creators who don't expect payment.
For example I contribute data to Flightradar24. In return they provide me with an ad-less experience because, like forum websites, their very existence depends on user contributions.
Other people just run websites for fun and education and pay for it willingly out of their pocket. I had to step-up to a 200GB package from my ISP for that reason. No-one paid towards my costs and I don't expect anyone to do so.
Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.
What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.
Care to back that up with some proof. Cuz I have a pretty clear picture of ad spending and this is not true at all.
But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.
1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.
2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.
This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.
I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...
This is flatly false. CPM models are alive and well. You don't need to look any further than AdSense for proof of that.
Is this ethical? It's not illegal. But that isn't the question.
But if every time you visit the museum someone follows you around talking in your ear about the products available in the gift shop, you might choose not to go, or (if the content is interesting enough) you might start wearing headphones or earplugs and go anyway.
Certainly.
> and how you use it
Now that's an interesting question. I wonder if we'll start seeing people try to use explicit copyright licenses to say that your license is revoked if you use an ad blocker. Not sure what that'd look like.
Recall back in the early 80s - the idea was to pay for TV so you wouldnt have ads...
So basically, you are just paying for the goods you use, you set your price and this is beneficial to companies because the marginal cost of serving a webpage is almost nothing so if you opt to pay anything it is profit.
Unfortunately, taking time to pay for something has more friction than just not paying for it as well as being cheaper.
1) One needn't turn on all third-party cookies to make it work. Enabling a subset of
[*.]doubleclick.com, [*.]doubleclick.net, and [*.]google.com
2) Contributor is the best existing solution to the third-party micropayment problem I've yet encountered. Direct contributions to sites are surely preferable, but not yet practical. Contributor would appear to have the following structural shortcomings:
- It only applies to Google's ad network. Mass adoption of Contributor would have the knock-on effect of strengthening Google's advertising position. Whether Google will remain a benevolent ad-network for life is uncertain.
- It installs a third party as a middleman, when only agreed-upon social and networking protocols are truly requisite. If Contributor were to take off, we run the risk of paying rent to Google for web-view transactions, just as we do with credit-card firms for financial transactions today.
That said, Contributor is a practical step forward in allowing us to underwrite sites we like and to raise the minimum bid that advertisers must pay to get our attention.
Thanks, Contributor team, for making this possible.
The privacy argument, I can easier get on board with. Why does Google need to still track you if you're not seeing ads? Wasn't the point of ad tracking to get you more relevant ads, help advertisers with remarketing, etc. ?
1) contributor doesn't always replace /all/ ads,
2) if you were ever to say, stop paying for Contributor...
3) in order to see what sites ad spots paid for with contributor?
Edit: "We use machine learning to pace how much of your plan is spent each day."
If it fails then we're back to square one where most large websites get most of their revenue from ads.
A trend toward mass adoption of Contributor would pressure competing ad networks to develop similar systems with better UX (competing contributor-like systems might encourage ad networks other than the strongest one to work out exchange agreements to improve the UX and reach.)
> It installs a third party as a middleman, when only agreed-upon social and networking protocols are truly requisite. If Contributor were to take off, we run the risk of paying rent to Google for web-view transactions
You're already paying rent to advertising networks who pass on a portion to the content sites, its just that that rent is in the form of compromises to the format, delivery, and presentation of the content in order to fit ads in, rather than direct cash payments. Contributor (and any similar schemes) seek to transition that to direct cash payments, reducing the number of extraneous players involved (with ads, you have ad network + actual advertisers, with Contributor you just have the "ad" network.)
I'm not sure that it is rent in the economic sense. They're providing one place to sign up and pay, and then distributing the money in a reasonably fair way. That's actually a valuable service.
I find that there are a lot of sites that I visit infrequently enough that I don't want/need to sign up for their service, but I still like to see the occasional article. For example, I read Economist articles when I see them linked. I don't want a full-on subscription, or even go through the hassle of creating an account, but if Google can throw them some cash on my behalf I'd be happy about that.
IIRC, the problem with a lot of micropayment schemes was that they never got big enough for critical mass. Perhaps Google has managed to do that by way of ads, and maybe they'll develop into what those schemes always wanted to be.
First, if this were to take off it would move the industry to impression based pricing wholesale. Reprinted content is already on of the biggest problems today, and with this model there is obvious risk that original creators get nothing as reprinters take everything.
Second, given that we can't have a monopoly on this business, a webmaster is incentivized to join every Contributor-like program there is. We would end up with every website loading hundreds of javascripts for tracking visits from every provider there is, which would massively increase load times on the web.
Third, there are also incentives to game the system by splitting your content over many web sites, using iframes or javascript, each making a call to every possible provider. Similar ad fraud schemes are already a problem today and this will only make them easier.
One easy fix would be to make a system opt-in for the end user on a site-by-site basis. This is similar to how Flattr and Patreon works. I pay to both of them, and will probably not join Contributor, but it will be very exciting to see where Google is taking this.
As the article states, all Google Contributor does is buy the ad impression on the page you're visiting. One way or the other, there will be an ad impression on that page. This doesn't incentivize webmasters to put any more ads on than they already do, as far as I can tell. From their perspective, ads are working normally.
1. Google is already able to guage 'low quality' pages, co temt farms and pirates. This doesn't change
2. This happenens with ads, Google can add a rule saying you "can't have x amount of ads of you want to be on our network "
3.Likely to stay the same: I don't see how contributor makes fraud easier
Google lost the fight on content farms several years ago. You are more likely to find reprints than original material if you google a breaking story or meme for example, even if there are exceptions.
It feels it doesn't address the other reasons people use ad blocking:
- Fewer HTTP requests (Still have to do all the ad network requests)
- Less tracking
- Less CPU/RAM usage (Even if there is no render of ads, still have to process the JS from ad networks)
I don't want ten different ad network javascripts being loaded and running on every single page, along with whatever assets they want to load up and all the tracking they do across websites.
And tracking is a huge one. This is no longer just a question of whether I'm supporting the site I visit. Whatever your site has to offer is not worth the all-encompassing tracking that the networks are doing. If it is, you'll have a subscription fee I can pay and your service will be valuable enough that I'll pay it.
I like the idea, but because it's so random it falls into an unsatisfying place most of the time. Really I'd rather it work for most other ad networks instead, since AdSense is among the least offensive. If Google manages to get other networks into the system, it could be really nice.
Either they do or they don't. A quick google didn't turn anything up, but does someone have a reputable source?
As far as I'm concerned, no need to be polite with Doubleclick. If they're serving malware, they can fuck right off.
I'm not certain, but I believe the ad network being used was associated with Google.
(Not that the ads were officially allowed, I think I read things on a Google support forum which indicated that they hadn't finished blocking those ads yet, or blocking them again when they were created again. Still, I think an ad agency has a responsibility to proactively(?) ensure that they do not serve any malicious (in the security sense) ads.)
I have seen several adsense ads that auto-play. But it could be that they're violating Google's policies. I tried looking for a policy document, but this is all I could find.
https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/176108?hl=en
There's no excuse: the site operator, the ad network, and the ad buyer all collaborate to deceive the user. Google could easily stop this practice, but they don't. "Do no evil, unless it affects the bottom line".
It's pretty brilliant really.
Google Contributor is more of a charitable option which might be too subtle.
The outcome of this is going to be "publishers run extra ads, you pay to make the extra ads go away".
The problem with this approach is this -- you're still bidding on the ad spot. While this is cool, here are ignored issues:
1. It removes Google ads, which are arguably the least annoying ads.
2. Since it is still ad-spot based revenues, it gives a publisher no real business model switch to stop using ads in the long run. It is pretty agnostic that way, publisher does not care who bid on the ad spot.
3. No way for publisher to go ad-free.
4. Still got all the nasty ad networks, other benefits of ad-blocking like tracking, speed are not gained.
I think this is cool to remove Google's ads, but I would yearn the day where there is a Spotify-like way of opting out of ads altogether for millions of websites. I mean this from publisher side of things. Someone should give them an option to get paid for hits without putting up ads.
But then again, I don't mind ads that much.
Don't like it going to a specific site? You can disable just that site in the settings.
Want to replace ads with an image of something random? You can do that as well!
Want to only have contributor run on a few hand-picked sites? Can do that too!
A friend of mine has it setup so that it's whitelist only where he disables his adblock just for those sites, and allows contributor to work only on them.
It's actually a really nice and well thought out system.
It would be nice if I wasn't also being tracked though since I'm paying for the content myself.
* Advertisers must start paying visitors to view their ads *
Not just for clicking on ads, but simply for loading them into your browser and looking at them or listening to them.
I read somewhere yesterday that the ad business is $40 billion/year. None of that money goes to the people who are being abused daily by the onslaught of mental pollution that this "industry" produces.
What should be troubling to all advertisers, is that almost all of this stuff is displayed to people who will never buy their products.
Luckily, we have the mechanisms now to efficiently do this: Bitcoin etc. I foresee a payment system, probably mostly run by Google since they are the most connected to the current system, to mediate between ad-viewers and ad-producers.
There's the problem of detecting bots vs. people, but that already exists.
This system would also be good for website owners (content creators). A website owner would benefit by providing a reason for people to visit, thereby also gaining a percentage of the ad revenue. People visiting a website would be, in a sense, qualified-buyers of the products that could be advertised there, resulting in more targeted ads, perhaps by using the bitcoin addresses and the associated browsing history (something that's also already tracked but without consent).
I think it's the only way out of this mess. I don't have all the details worked out, I'm sure someone out there knows how to make it work.
Why should it? They're the ones consuming the free content. They get to view whatever content they're looking at, for free. You watch a funny cat video on youtube, that's your "reward". That's the product you're buying with your time.
I don't know why people feel so entitled to free stuff. They forget that the content they're viewing is subsidized by ads. It's only free because of ads.
Here's a question; Would you sit through a 60 second commercial to watch a completely brand new episode of Game of Thrones that no one has seen yet? If not, then switch Game of Thrones to whatever your favorite TV show is. Is the answer now yes? Ok, good. Now why should the advertiser also pay you to view the ad? Your "payment" is getting to watch game of thrones. The people who created game of thrones should the one's getting paid by the advertiser, not you.
Now I know not all content is "good" and worth your time viewing ads, but that's a matter of subjectivity and not really worth discussing. Everyone has different tastes when it comes to content. What matters is the fact that content is subsidized ads. For whatever reason, this is an extremely hard concept for many people to grasp. As a content creator myself, it's extremely frustrating.
But we can't escape the reality that the world is being changed dramatically by technology and that the concept of "cost gravity" is unstoppable. Pieter Hintjens has a very good essay on this at http://cultureandempire.com
This is what we're seeing with adblocking - the technology to control which information is allowed to enter our brains is now available to everyone. Your brain is your most valuable organ, and it is highly susceptible to persuasion and influence through positive and negative images, greed, fear and jealousy. All of these can be, and are, manipulated by advertisers for their benefit.
It has always been an arms race. In the "good old days", when everyone watched TV in the evening with their family, advertising was probably necessary to support the content. Then after a few years the ads got louder (the volume was actually increased) so that people would pay attention during the commercial breaks. People discovered that their remote controls had a mute button, and then they had some welcome silence between movie episodes. Commercial breaks started to get longer and people discovered that they could record everything and fast-forward through the commercial breaks, saving much valuable time. A president of the MPAA (Jack Valenti I think) actually said that it should be illegal to skip through the advertising when viewing time-shifted video because that deprived the broadcaster of the revenue to which they were entitled.
Even movie theaters, where the assumption was that you could watch the movie since you paid for admission, started to show advertising at the beginning. At first it was just a couple of quick minutes before the feature, but that soon became many more minutes and now is at about 30 minutes (advertising thinly disguised as games and quizzes).
My simple proposal is that this downward spiral can be stopped, if advertisers accept that people want to control what they see and hear in an increasingly noisy world, and that this is both legitimate and necessary.
Regarding your question about why an advertiser should also pay me to watch an ad in addition to a Game of Thrones episode: Because, if they paid me, I would listen to their pitch. That's much more valuable than blindly displaying ads with the hope that 0.1% or less of the ad recipients would pay any attention.
That means that if I go to 1000 websites in a month I'd expect to pay about $1. I'd be interested to see how many impressions I make per month and find out how much money I actually generate for these websites.
I'd also be interested in a focused ad session to reduce the cost of my browsing. I.E. you show me products and I actually click on them to check them out, and you add money to my pool for browsing. It would have to be an opt-in scenario, but that would be an alternative to paying and seeing ads while you browse.
I'm also going to factor in that this only removes at most 50% of the ads. we are talking about vising something like 166 (15000/30/6 *2(for the 50%)) pages on an average day. And those are pages with google ads only.
So do I visit 166 pages with 6 google ads on it a day? I don't honestly know but I doubt it.
Now if I could pay $15 a month to remove ALL ads, I think that would be worth my money, even though I still doubt that I visit 166 pages a day.
Just cut out 100% of the ads and divide the $15 among the sites a viewed. If that comes out to a couple of cents for each that's still better than nothing.
Q: Isn’t there a waitlist to join? Or I need an invite
or something?
A: Not anymore! You can sign up immediately and support
tons of websites with one monthly payment.
Join the waitlist
Contributor is not yet available in your country.
:(
4. Google gets paid, rather than all the money going to the actual website.
If anything, more entities bidding for the ad means the prices can go higher and the website gets more money (though I imagine any difference here would be undetectable).
Because the point is that a lot of people who block ads, don't actually like advertising. I would hazard a guess that they want to support websites, but they don't want to support advertising companies, and validate their business.
Google's primary job is to make billions of dollars of profit. I believe an organization like that has all the more incentive to inflate the fees and pocket as much as possible.
Now, personally, I don't think Google pays me enough to run AdSense on any of my sites. It's frankly not even close, so the fee isn't the issue -- it's just a bad fit for the volume and type of content I produce. I can see why it's great for many other publishers though.
In fact there are many niche ad networks with fees much higher than Google, but they actually pay publishers more because they also charge the advertisers much more.
The next thought was that a paid service with a low fee for Yahoo news, email etc. can be profitable and have happy users.
1) Content costs money. Only way to pay is directly or indirectly (via ads). Ads are the only micropayment system that works at scale so far because it has no overhead of decisions or funds transfer and is monetarily "free". It's also more anonymous than direct payments.
2) Ads do work. Very well. Billions of dollars, millions of work-hours and petabytes of data prove this daily.
3) Ads aren't going anywhere and the industry will not disappear. It's bigger and stronger than ever with billions of clicks, pageviews, video views, tweets, likes, posts, snapchats, etc being sent every day. The technology for delivering ads will change along with more embedded/sponsored content but this model will always be valid.
4) What we're seeing is a reset in the industry to finally care more about the user experience (because they have more control now). Best case scenario - we have better ads, revenue and consumer experiences. Worse case - we're right back where we started or even a whole lot worse with more data tracking. Either scenarios are equally possible.
I signed up yesterday after a friend mentioned it, and it's near. It's definitely a minority of ads, but it's still nicer to see cat pics than other shit.
Most of those properties, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, Business Insider are currently making a profit, so why is there this moral outrage that they are not getting paid? These businesses are not charities, they are not owed your money when they choose to display free content with easily blocked ads, they are businesses.
You can either get a closed market where every piece of content is paid for like Netflix and you start to see all kinds of lock-in effects that drive monopolies (if I switch from this vendor to a slightly better one I can't transfer my music/files/videos/articles etc, so I'd rather stay with what I have), as well as putting a price floor on information that used to be free with inconvenience for potentially hundreds of millions who can't afford the digital subscription, which radically changes the internet. Or you can get a different compensation model for content, like paying not to see ads without having to subscribe to a particular business's content, or buy their content pieces on their platform. This is what that is.
Or you simply believe that the rapid growth of ad blockers will taper off fairly quickly and never constitute a significant threat. Possible but I think pretty naive.
A third option that I think is the most likely (because it's already begun to happen): Programs & plugins for websites that serve ads up natively from the local website. This means there's no call to a third party. It means there would be nothing to block and the ad gets through.
If the ad is a simple image or gif file, an ad blocker would have no way to tell what it is. It wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat with a piece of bread on its head or an ad for denture cream. This is because the picture is coming from the website you're visiting and could have a name like cute-cat.jpg. It basically nullifies the host file for ad blockers.
That's what I think is going to happen. All the big ad companies (cough, google) need to do is revamp their ad network slightly and ad blockers become significantly less useful overnight.
I'm not saying it would make ad blockers 100% obsolete, far from it. They'd still be useful. But a lot, and I mean a lot more ads would get through that wouldn't have before. If even 40% more get through, that's still a huge number.
In The Ideal World ad blockers wouldn't exist because we'd all be happy paying our fair share to content creators. This seems pretty far off from the current status quo, but running an ad blocker today is only adding fuel to the fire. If advertisers step up their game and ads become unblockable, we might be closing the door to a better solution and be stuck with ads forever.
A very good thing, actually. For starters, nobody minds ads. They subsidize content. Without ads, the internet wouldn't exist in its current iteration.
What people are against are malicious ads and the like. If an ad is a simple gif or jpg (picture), there can be no maliciousness. It makes ads relatively safe again. And content creators actually make money, incentivizing better and more content. Everyone wins.
Big-name websites will show more native adds. Companies will be desperate after losing digital adds, especially with the move to on-demand TV - they'll look to spend more on these.
Other sites will look to survive by direct payment. We'll see more (and possibly higher) paywalls. Donations will become necessary for those who can't get away with paywalls. It will be harder to keep a small operation self-sufficient.
Basically, adds will either still be there (just less obvious) or you'll be paying the difference. This will come at the expense of many small sites.
Well, I guess my Euros aren't good enough for content creators. Unfortunately for them, my privacy is not a currency I will use to pay for content.
I think my ideal system would be something where a website can offer a bitcoin* address in a header, and at the end of the month my browser randomly picks a set of addresses it's seen, and sends money to them. (In conjunction with current ad-blocking technology.)
* Bitcoin probably wouldn't work due to transaction limits, but maybe some sort of sidechain, alternative coin, or something similar.
This is so ripe for abuse it's not even funny. It would take clickjacking to a whole new level.
This is the whole problem with microtransactions: sites need them to be frictionless or else users will abandon the flow no matter how low the price is, but financial transactions need some sort of user confirmation or else they're wide open to abuse.
I agree. I solved this problem with a 3-party protocol (user, provider, authenticator) that can't be subverted by either the user or the provider.
No user intervention is required; it works seamlessly. User identity is not revealed and the provider cannot piggyback on the shared tokens to create a persistent identifier. The same scheme can be used to provide effortless passage through paywalls, as well as enabling the same model as Contributor (and before them Kachingle, Contenture, Readability and several others who've failed).
The technology is the easy part for microtransactions. Simplifying the business rules to the point it can cheap enough to operate financial transactions safely is the hard part.
If payment is proportional to usage, then a linkbait/clickbait scheme won't work. The point is to reward genuine repeat visits to a site you like.
If the profit is too low, fraudsters simply go elsewhere.
It will continue to take up space in most cases (but the system will make an ad block disappear completely if in some circumstances)
But you can go into your settings and set what you want to show up there.
It can be the default (a strange checkerboard mosaic thing), a selection of cat pictures, some abstract colors, a blank space, or you can set it to a custom URL (like a 1px by 1px gif image) which will make them collapse in a similar way to adblockers.
Payout could be based on a number of factors, including existing ads on the page (downvote), number of visits (upvote), seconds of streaming video watched (upvote), etc.
Yes. I want Dave and Leela, bloggers of great human interest, or my favourite journos and comic strip artists to all get paid handsomely for their contributions to mankind. But I don't want a third party sat in the middle of that transaction. Particularly not that one.
Work needs doing on both sides of the deal. More donation culture, easier methods, and more motivation to write content that contributes something new for the good of society, however that may be, for the commons. Less rehashed tripe split ten ways, more genuinely deeply considered works that can be easily rewarded. That's what the script blocking movement is really about.
Final word, I'm sick of this pervasive attitude that people think they're doing the creator a favour if they pay them. I'm paying you, you get my endorsement, do you have any idea how special that makes you, makes us? We're friends now and everything! Get real. It's ego-mania of the highest form. There are no strings attached to any purchase and the seller owes you nothing beyond what you agreed to buy. Support them without any expectation of even the slightest of ego kickbacks and you'll have your integrity. This Contributor service has an issue with a lack of integrity at its very core. Perverted altruism. A wolf in sheep's clothing.
Let us create anonymous profiles, give us the possibility to pay via prepaid card and you will be our hero again, Google.
Unfortunately, its a non-starter because it requires browsing while logged into a Google account. I refuse to do that. Not that I believe this will actually prevent Google from tracking me, but because I don't want to make it any easier than it already is.
Why are you defending people who clearly do not respect you?
Why are you paying a tax ($15/mo for Google Contributor) to make it so that these people can continue to operate on a broken business model?
Why are you so scared of the internet changing? It's nonsensical.
On the other hand, looks like a nice social engineering experiment in figuring out how to convince users to be tracked better.
What's needed is for ad blockers to have a setting that lets these Contributor "ads" through and blocks the rest, with the setting preferably on by default. My opinion is that use of an ad blocker, while refusing to pay for something like this (especially if it is priced such that Google and the web site make the same amount of money as if you saw the ads), is not ethical, as you are being a freeloader.
All the arguments made by those defending ad blockers tend to fall away when something like this is available. If you don't like ads, and don't want to pay directly, you probably shouldn't be consuming the content.
Ad blockers remove that trust. The industry has shown they are untrustworthy, overall (i.e. there are some that are trustworthy, but you have no way of identifying if a particular site will have only them showing, or even if it will be the same next time you visit).
I adblock. I also back a range of Patreons, and regularly support some other sites. For example, I support BoardGameGeek. I'd support more content creators if that were a possibility. But I'm not going to do it via the proxy of the advertising platforms.
I adblock not to block ads, but for privacy. I don't like being tracked, and using contributor won't fix that
The concept that as a user, I don't know the ultimate bribe cost. Plus constant worry that it may go up or worse, the rules have changed and prices( read bribes ) went up. What a backwards way of shimmying your way into what should be : consumer + producer relationship.
I want to live in a reality where I know your costs and you tell me how much divided amongst your users is my share to pay. Let's get Google out of the equation.
What if we had mandatory HTTP headers: "Content-Cost: 0.02" and my browser had a credit card linked against it and I will decide if your content is good enough to buy.
Ads are evil. The industry is evil. And I don't mean it in a bible-churchy-preachy way. These are not people I will ever support with my coin.
That said, I do think that solutions like Google Contributor are the way forward if it can become an open standard that supports anonymization. I'm willing to trust my browser and a local, open-source wallet to watch the sites that I visit and authorize micro-payments via an anonymous currency. Those payments could be delivered to websites via middlemen that include ad vendors like Google or other processors.
It would require careful design and numerous security considerations, but it seems possible to use this model to support publishers while maintaining privacy.
I will continue to use an ad blocker and not pay Google, thank you very much.
If you want me to consume ads, make ads I want to consume.
Paying for seeing less ads does not change the incentives for tracking and targeting, and may even worsen them: surely Google will start by cutting the less targeted ads and will keep the most targeted ones. The more I cut the ads, the more targeted the remaining ads will be, and stronger will be their incentive to track and analyze my behavior.
Only by a policy of no ads and no other revenue stream besides my money would avoid some of these perverse incentives.
Of course, Google Contributor would still have to track the sites I visit, so I wouldn't be able to prevent tracking with a technical tool if I signed for it. This adds even more to the argument that Contributor is only an option if no ads are allowed, so that he incentives for targeting and analysis are now removed.
My reaction was a "wow, does it have stock now??? let me hurry!!! what? no stock? why do you advertise a product without stock???"
After that moment, the ad kept following me during several days...
I know that at least in terms of what makes it out to RTB across most of the exchanges, a person like me will account for about 1000 bid requests in a month. Even if we pad that significantly, there's a good chance I'd be paying paying a pretty rich CPM rate.
Given that folks who would likely sign up for this are probably not heavy clickers, my strong hunch is that Google is raking in a pretty fat margin. If an advertiser really wants you, they pay up and you see the ad. In other words, you're probably competing with advertisers to drive up the price of the impression.
I would previously have assumed that this was the same motivation most technically proficient adblocker users, but the comments here on HN seem to bely that assumption completely.
Are people really that bothered by ads that they would pay Google to continue to track their every move on the web silently???
Edit: Can't shake the thought that this is the mafia offering protection from the bad guys.
I know, I know, this isn't reddit. But it's just an odd thought that I had.
Another thing - if you're actually taking part in the bidding process this is a trojan horse to jack up the bid prices (they work in an auction format roughly) for everyone else.
Well played, evil Google.
The problem is, if you go to Engadget with ghostery, leave it disabled. It shows 27 additional items loaded in the page. For WHAT?
That's insane. Even imgur has too many external resources for ads and tracking.
If ads were not blocking, intrusive, and there wasn't so many of them and not so much tracking. People probably wouldn't care about ads. But websites like Engadget have ruined it for everyone.
However, I do have one thought. Google ads initially were incredibly popular because they weren't in your face asking for the monkey to be punched. Which is still pretty much the case.
The worst ads aren't being served by Google, they're being served by Tabooleh and the other bad-content farms.
I still don't get why anyone who puts an html file on a webserver is entitled to earn any money from this. Maybe the constant manipulation from all over the media has something to to with it.
IMO, micro-transactions which are used to pay by views are much better option, and google is the company who can implement this.
I wonder how willing people would be to pay (for example) $100 a month for this. Chances are that's more representative of the ad revenue you're generating if you're a heavy reader.
1. Get a lot of web pages to show your ads
2. Charge advertisers for showing their ads
3. Charge users for not seeing ads
4. Let the bidding wars begin!
I feel that if I pay for something and it now requires me to have an account I'm getting a worse experience. This is especially true in this case where a free product like uBlock will yield a better result.
1. Read article, sounds like a good idea, maybe I can throw $10 in a month + white-list Google ads in my ad blocker 2. Go to Contributor website, read through all information aaannnddd "Contributor is not yet available in your country." 3. Close tabs and move on
It feels way more human than a big corporation's effort, and way more direct.
If Google could get a % of the cut, it could help with lost revenue from the many ad blockers.
So far I detect that 15-20% of my users have an adblocker enabled. This probably misses some percentage of people since it uses GA and JS. Users with ghostery or JS disabled won't be detected but it's close enough for me. The numbers are not quite as high as I expected them to be.
1. It works anywhere I can log into Google, which means I see less ads on my mobile device or in browsers where I might not have been able to install an ad blocking extension.
2. You can configure what you see in place of most ads. Thus my browsing now has more cats: http://imgur.com/fqF0YJb
The only reason I'm thinking about ditching Contributor at this point is because I'm more of a dog lover.
All these making money companies, pay this pay that
Donate directly, your favorite sites, and then block their ads yourself.
Do not pay this "opt-out ransom".
Heck, it's better to send a donation to someone who makes free ad-blocking software.
1. As soon as it becomes too widespread, Google will nerf it. They rely almost entirely on advertising for their revenues. There's just too much money for them to not water the scheme down in future.
Remember when cable TV was going to be ad-free?
2. It only works inside Google's semi-walled garden. This is true of every microsubscription scheme so far built (Spotify, Amazon Underground, Apple Music). They have all required a walled garden in order to avoid massive fraud and money laundering.
I'm biased, because it so happens that I solved the second problem. I have a patented protocol which is opt-in, can reliably track users on the web without identifying them and which is resistant to fraudulent visits.
I'm building the first release. Contact me if you're interested: jacques@robojar.com.
1. A user request comes with an added header with the user's version of events.
2. The provider adds their version of events and forwards it to an authenticator.
3. The authenticator cross checks the details and signatures and logs the transaction, optionally telling the provider "yes, this person is a paying participant".
I have a more detailed protocol writeup, which is easier to follow than the patent (which was lovingly converted to patentese by a lawyer). I'm at work, happy to email to interested parties. Best address to reach me is jacques@robojar.com
Contributor directly replaces advertising revenue; if it provides a better UX for end-users, sites that use exclusively traditional advertising rather than Google's model with Contributor will suffer reduced traffic (and thus, won't get money from advertising.)
If Contributor gets widespread, its good for Google, increases costs for advertisers to reach eyeballs (whether they use Google's ad network or not), and bad for ad networks other than Google's that don't do something like what Google is doing with Contributor.
> It only works inside Google's semi-walled garden.
It certainly only works on sites that actively choose to use Google's advertising network. I'm not sure that's a "walled garden" in any meaningful sense.
> I'm not sure that's a "walled garden" in any meaningful sense.
Hence "semi-walled". It's walled in the sense that only Google's ads are affected. They can somewhat reliably track users on sites that belong to Google's network. They can't do so otherwise. I imagine they solve fraud with their existing tools.
The Contributor model, as I understand it, intrinsically scales costs (or effects) to the cost of advertising, with participants effectively bidding against advertisers for their own views. So, no, they wouldn't be incentivized to water it down if the price of advertising goes up, rather, the fact of Contributors success would drive the market-clearing price of advertising up while driving up Google's revenues from its ad networks, simply by increasing the market for its ad networks from "advertisers" to "advertisers + contributors".
> An equilibrium might form, but in the long run it probably won't be "ad free".
It will probably be ad free for the users willing to pay the most money to avoid ads, and less so for those willing to pay less.
Which, ultimately, is a pretty reasonable market-based solution. You choose the content you wish to consume, and you choose the degree to which you'd prefer to pay money vs. viewing ads.
Fuck you.