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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

I find these things interesting, but not so much I won't use an adblocker. Perhaps I can buy into this and allow google ads, and then block the resulting 'thanks' text. I don't need that either.

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.

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I'm pretty tired of one of these personalities that appear to be a loud voice in the ad blocking conversation.

"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?)

>> 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 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.

I agree with you about branding adverts, but isn't the purpose of text ads to click through?

I am +1 with Nursie.

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.

Brands are pressed into our brains by constantly pushing them in front of our eyes. And then, when you think of a need, you remember the brand.

Nobody ever went to a bank just after reading the ad in the newspaper. But they remembered the brand.

Yet I bet you know who Ford, Geicko, Chevrolet, Coca Cola and McDonalds are, regardless of how much you like their products.

I like advertisement.

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.

When you say "Ads never work for me", you're really saying "I never click on ads". Even if you never interact with ads, they still work on you, because you see them. Modern advertising is built on decades of psychology research, much of it dealing with trust and the importance of repeatedly viewing a brand to build that trust.

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.

Your argument reads to me to be a stronger reason to continue blocking ads.

For people that dislike ads the statement, "I have never ever been positively influenced in any way every by one" is literally a definition because if you purchase anything because of an ad you've been made worse off.

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.

But what if you weren't going to buy it because you were not aware it existed? When you see an ad for an interesting movie and decide to check it out, you go watch it, and love it, are you really worse off? Maybe you see an ad for a new restaurant and decide to check it out. Are you worse off? Aren't these examples of positive ads?

I like to operate by word of mouth, sometimes online searches (and I'll take reviews over ads any day, even when searching) and by stumbling across things.

What if you see the ad, and decide to check the movie out, and it's terrible - a waste of your time and money? What if you see a slick ad for a restaurant, and it turns out the restaurant spends more money on ads than on being a good restaurant, and it is a waste of money? Are you better off?

Wow. He was saying they could be positive. Of course you can come up with a counter-example...

Which is why it is ridiculous to approach the situation from a "what if..." perspective. We should approach it from net expected benefit, else everyone gets to pretend they are the one true purveyor of good and classy ads.

That's not exactly true.

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.

If I'm looking for a bluetooth speaker, or metal snips (got ones the other day), I will look for:

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.

> 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.

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.

"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."

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.

It's a hard one, but I really do hate advertising and visual clutter that much, and if I remember that I have been advertised at, particularly intrusive ads, I will try to avoid that brand.

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.

Unfortunately, most marketers that focus on brand awareness would say that eliciting any reaction to a brand is better than not eliciting the reaction at all.

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 feel the same as Nursie and can give at least one concrete example - I purposefully avoided buying any Groupon ever only because once upon a time they spammed living shit out of the Internet with pink animated ads.

Are you sure it didn't also have to do with the slew of bad press they received for a while, especially here? Do you actually have a memory of avoiding groupon and at that time remembering the ads, or are you now remembering avoiding groupon because you disliked them and now remembering the ads? (I ask because I find perceptions of past actions interesting, not because I specifically doubt you).

I am aware that memory plays tricks over time, so I am not 100% sure, but I have a distinct memory of sitting at work and getting seriously pissed off at the astounding amount of same, ugly, pink Groupon adverts I've seen in the space of few hours. I recall how ridiculous a lightweight-layout site looked when all available ad boxes got filled with variants of the same animated pink ad at the same time.

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.

It's really just perception of your brand. If you advertise to me I'll think less of you. Maybe that's enough for me to avoid you, maybe not, but it certainly didn't help your cause.

You're missing the point of some types of advertising.

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.

As I said, particularly with web advertising, if you've made me notice your brand then I will actively try to remember not to buy from you - I dislike advertising that much.

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.

Most people do not behave as you claim to. Advertising really does work. It's rational and has well-demonstrated ROI.

You're either an outlier in terms of behavior, or you're not offering an honest representation of how you react to ads.

I'm sure it does work across populations, but I'm also pretty sure I'm part of a growing demographic who are finding every way they can to opt out of it because they're sick of it.

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'm also pretty sure I'm part of a growing demographic who are finding every way they can to opt out of it because they're sick of it.

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)

I'm pretty sure it's growing, at least on the web, if it were not we wouldn't see stories about adblockers hurting revenues.

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.

Advertising only has to work on a fraction of the population for it to have a positive ROI.

Penis pill emails have a well demonstrated ROI as well.

> has well demonstrated ROI

Actually, that is not as clear cut as one might expect [1].

[1]: http://justinmrao.com/lewis_rao_nearimpossibility.pdf

That paper talks about how advertising experiments require larger-than-expected sample sizes to calculate ROI, because the signals are more diluted.

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.

Having worked at and with small companies that rely on advertising to overcome obscurity and get business to their products - modern analytics tools have pretty much got this problem solved, the marketing people knew and actively tracked their ROI on a daily basis and were shuffling limited funding around between various forms of advertising to optimise sales.

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.

It's not rational, it's silly. It's a tragedy of commons problem coupled with a feedback loop - companies waste ever increasing amount of money, fuel, and man power, supporting a whole bullshit job industry in oder to compete with each other over a limited pool of attention and wallets AND at the same time they turn whole Internet into a cesspool. If you look at it globally, it's insanity.

It seems like you're just saying that because you don't like them.

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.

I'm not postulating a conspiracy. I'm only pointing out the resource-wasting zero-sum game which drives most of the advertising. I'm not denying that ads have effect. Of course they have. But what matters is marginal effect, which generally stays constant, because there is only so many things one can buy, and so many attention one can spare.

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.

For a good illustration of some of the points you make - when tobacco advertising was banned in the UK, profits went up markedly because demand remained the same and there was no longer the massive outlay.

The problem is that you, specifically, are only remembering the intrusive ads that have at one point negatively affected you.

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.

Well, I don't really watch ads so it's true I'm not thinking about how great an ad experience I'm having, because I'm not having them.

As a result I find nearly all advertising, when I do come across it, to be intrusive and annoying.

That's exactly my point - you're only remembering your negative experiences as advertising experiences. You're even saying "watching", which leads me to believe that most of your negative experiences have been online or on television.

What other experiences are there? I don't listen to the radio much, and when I do it's the BBC. I don't read print publications any more (I read books, these tend to be ad-free). There are billboards I suppose.

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.

I have noticed this in myself. Generally, I find ads terribly annoying and frequently offensive. And then on occasion I see or hear on ad for something that actually interests me. Maybe it is for a service I did not know existed. At that point, I don't think of it as an ad. I think of it as useful information I discovered. Only later do I realize that the "useful information I discovered the other day" was really an ad.

One thing I'd like to point out is that, display an ads usually doesn't make the situation worse. So neutral and negative are (mostly) the same for a brand because they don't convert to a sale, while positive does. For example, if you feel sick about a specific ad, you probably won't be interest in that brand anyway regardless if you see the ad or not. And this is the worst case, "they failed to give good impression to someone". The best case is, it might remind someone about the brand and lead to a sale in the future.

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 am literally a worthless view to them.

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.

Implying that someone somewhere knows the real value of his/her view.

The whole advertising industry is built on a very naive view of advertising.

>> Your first mistake is assuming the only usefulness they get from you is when you click on an ad to buy something.

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.

I think what you think you'll do, what you swear you'll do, and what you actually do aren't necessarily always aligned.

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.

The fact that advertisers will use things like 'brand awareness' and other subtle ways to try to get into my brain against my wishes is, IMHO, an excellent reason for blocking.

That's also a good argument for holing up in a cave somewhere and never coming out. The whole of human culture and communication is full of subtle cues and plays on how our mind works, and has been for millennia.

In a way, when it comes to advertisements, I do that already. I don't watch broadcast tv, I don't read newspapers or magazines on paper, I listen to BBC radio if I listen to the radio, I have adblockers for the internet.

Th world can be a quieter, calmer place when you stop letting people make sales pitches at you constantly.

That's an easy decision to make when you stop letting them make the sales pitches, but still take what they offer in exchange for those sales pitches. If you stopped the advertising and didn't view the content they offered in exchange, it would be quieter, calmer and a lot more boring.

>> If you stopped the advertising and didn't view the content they offered in exchange, it would be quieter, calmer and a lot more boring.

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.

> 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.

>> My point was that it's more boring if you forego the content that has ads,

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.

I agree it we would be better off overall with the ability to choose whether or not we wanted to see content if it requires ads, as that would make the choice clear to many people who I think it isn't clear for now. Ideally, I think we would be well served by a choice where we could choose to see an ad, or choose to pony up a small amount from a list of services that escrow these small amounts for us (Google Contributor for example) with the cost clearly defined, and the option to forego seeing the content entirely. Being able to set defaults for this on browser and per-site basis would make this really smooth.

I mean, that's kind of the root of it for me, this implied bargain - you get this stuff for free, just let us pitch our stuff to you for x% of the time - that's over, I reject it entirely.

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.

> that's over, I reject it entirely.

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.

>> 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.

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.

> I'll say again, if sites make it clear I'm not welcome without viewing their ads, I won't go.

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?

>> Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable

That's just not true. Lot's of sites can and do detect them just fine, and display custom messages.

You are correct, in that currently it's a feature of anti-adblock killer and some other scripts/plugins with a similar goal, and I was conflating some comments about an adblock detector[1] and it's inability to detect ublock initially (most likely because it wasn't trying). My apologies.

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.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10161427

One of the reasons technical people use ad-blockers is because they don't want to download 10 MB of crap for a 300-word page. "The customer hasn't downloaded our crap" should be trivially detectable.

The people displaying the content (the site) and the people providing the "crap" (the ad company) are often different entities, with different servers. This is why ads are often served with javascript. Since the scripts that load the ads can change, as they are deployed by the ad company, there's not always a definitive way to know what you can expect to exist. Additionally, since there are exchanges and aggregators, you can't always be sure the same ad company is providing the script. This could be normalized, but anything that makes it easy to detect that the ad has been loaded form the page is probably also easy to detect from the ad-blocker, and trace back to something that needs to be removed.

What matters here are intentions. Yes, pretty much every human interaction is a form of manipulating the emotional state of participants, often on an unconscious level. But most of the time people do that to facilitate win-win situations, to help each other. On the other hand, most of advertising and marketing is adversarial; companies and salespeople literally want to scam you. I think it is a reasonable stance to be against manipulation with malicious intent.

Yeah I think he can determine his buying habits far better than you.

My point is that it isn't always about buying habits, at least not immediately (and sometimes never).

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.

>> 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?

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...

> Are you trying to argue that I should watch all advertising that comes my way in case some of it is socially responsible?

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/

> 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.

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.

How does that affect the argument in any way? They are willing to pay to have this add viewed by a visitor on a site at a particular time, and the site is willing to display it along with the content. Their goal, in the broadest and most general sense is to have the ad displayed. You can't assume they are trying to get you to buy something by clicking on it (it may not even be available yet), you can't assume they are trying to have you buy something later (it could be a brand-awareness campaign where you may not have a need for what they are selling, but you may tell someone who does), you can't assume they are even selling a product or service (they may not be, it could be a social issue awareness ad).

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.

>> No, but I think your view on advertising and the content it supports is hypocritical (because you still accept the desired content)

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.

I do not accept that advertising is manipulative. I accept that many forms of communication, it can be.

> 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.

Well I disagree, because I take against advertising so much that by making me see it they would be doing themselves a disservice, and costing themselves money in the process.

And I'm sorry but I do think advertising is manipulative through and through. That's pretty much the whole point.

> 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.

> 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.

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. :)

Good point. Calling that a "scam" is ludicrous.

To be honest I was just kinda trying that argument on for size. It's not really a scam, but if an advertiser pays a site for my visit they are wasting their money.

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.

Even on the one or two occasions when I have seen an ad for something that I'm interested in, I never actually click the ad, but google the product specifically to avoid the whole redirect rigamarole that ensues anytime you click on a paid advertisement.

Sounds like the ad worked, then?

This is called a "view-through conversion". Just saying that it was still tracked and attributed, regardless of clicks.

So it worked super in their favor: it got you to go to the product and they didn't have to pay for your click.

I am literally a worthless view to them

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.

>> 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.

How do you avoid that brain hackery when it comes to commercials(TV, radio, etc), billboards, ads in magazine's/newspapers, and hundreds of other sources?

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.

>> commercials(TV, radio, etc),

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.

> I never click ads when I do see them, I literally have never, ever bought anything through advertising links.

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."

Beyond per-impression charges, every advertiser is paying for probabilities - that a certain percentage of their targeted users will click the ad, or that a certain percentage of their target users will convert.

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.

Then presumably it's OK to block ads?

In some way it's a brilliant move by Apple to monetize on people that strictly reject online advertising.

I remember reading somewhere that 44% people think ads don't work on them.

I doubt that I'm 100% immune, I'm sure I do absorb all sorts of brand-growing crap all the time.

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.

You sound too confident about what you think drives your purchasing behavior.

Usually it's hunger and restlessness. I'm pretty sure most of my disposable income is disposed of on food, drink and travel. I don't aspire to own vast amounts of stuff, quite the opposite.

Especially since he has almost certainly seen Netflix ads, and proclaims himself to be a customer.

I don't think I have actually. I signed up after a friend showed me the service. I also know about them from reading tech sites over the years, it was big news on places like slashdot when services like this started up.

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.

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