Beyond ad blocking – the biggest boycott in human history | Hacker News Reader

Beyond ad blocking – the biggest boycott in human history

blogs.law.harvard.edu

77 pointsfranze75 comments

Tracking, it's been argued, is good because it allows more relevant ads to be served. I've been giving Google huge amounts of data about me and my life for almost 20 years and the ads are still terrible. I spend thousands of dollars every year at Amazon and their recommendation engine doesn't do much better.

How much more do advertisers need to know about me before ads served online are significantly more relevant than the ads I see in People magazine at the doctor's office?

At this point, I'm super skeptical about the ad business. Advertisements don't really bother me that much, but I'm becoming less comfortable with being tracked. I would love to see a study that compares the costs of tracking with the added value of tracking and see who pays those costs and who benefits from the value.

Google benefits, the costs are negligible compared to the revenue they get. Its the entire business model.

The problem for content creators is I can't think of much written content that i'm willing to pay a subscription fee for. I doubt I am alone in this.

> the costs are negligible

The costs are not negligible. Tracking scripts use a lot of bandwidth and (on mobile) battery power.

The costs are negligible for Google. See here: https://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

The major stated revenue costs seem to be traffic acquisition costs (payouts for YouTube and the like, I imagine). Bandwidth is probably a minor issue - anyway they are making 60% profits on revenues of $66 billion a year.

Exactly, just because the cost is distributed doesn't mean it's not being paid in one form or another.

If ad networks actually had to pay the cost, say $10/GB of traffic they served to mobile devices, ads would be lighter and far less spammy.

I would pay 1c for reading Nytimes or rockpapershotgun article. There is no easy way to give 1c though.

I think Google Contributor solves the I-don't-want-to-see-ads problem, but does nothing (AFAIK) for the I-don't-want-to-be-tracked problem.

Taking money directly from end users has never been a really good strategy for individual content creators. It effectively turns each piece of content into its own little product, each requiring a marketing strategy, distribution, payment. The overhead adds up too quickly.

IMHO Patreon is probing otherwise. I now make more money per page drawing my weird comic about a robot lady with Philip K Dick problems than many people make drawing stuff for Marvel or DC. And I'm an obscure cartoonist with a tiny following.

Link? Sounds like something I'd want to purchase.

All online for free: http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/ Also there are links to the store where you can buy the first two printed volumes (kickstarter for the third and final one soon, I have two pages left to finish) and to the Patreon, which will get you PDFs.

Imagine if you didn't just have to pay UPS a small fee to deliver your package, but you also had to pay them the entire cost of the product itself, none of which went to the manufacturer. The manufacturer had to include a ton of ads in the package and hope that it would cover the cost of creating the product. That is the situation we have on the internet today, and it's not okay.

Laws should be changed so that half of the portion of your monthly ISP bill that the company used to consider profit instead becomes the money used for this compensation of content creators.

Evenly distribute the money based on the time the user spends interacting with a given site in the frontmost tab. Implement a new HTTP header the server can send to indicate where payment can be made. All major browser vendors should agree to respect this, and all ISPs should be legally required to go along with it rather than pocketing everything.

I think that's a terrible idea.

Should the people who sell trucks and airplanes to UPS also be entitled to some percentage of UPS' profit?

Thats a horrible idea. Wouldnt that require enforced tracking?

What about people who put up free blogs? I'm sprry but if your business model isnt working online, then you need a new business model. If its not working, asking for a new system wont save it.

This bothers me too. Google should be able to read my mind at this point. And yet... I can count on one hand the number of times I've bought something via a web ad. (I could probably even do it on a hand that didn't have any fingers.) Showing me an ad for something that's similar to something I bought last week is about as good as it gets, and that's not very good.

This is by design they make more money (long term) if the target thinks his privacy is save. So only a percentage is targeted at you the rest are decoys.

But the percentage of well-targeted ads is zero.

Intra-site, they can be rather common. My Amazon and Etsy logins have long wishlists.

That's true. Amazon knows what I've bought and what I've thought about buying.

But Google knows every damn thing about me. Google ads should be slaughtering Amazon suggestions, and they aren't.

The location based stuff is creepy until you actually want to use it, then it becomes useless. E.g. they geolocate my IP so they can show me ads that "someone in <your town> makes $3000/hr working from home!!" but if I search for "pizza" it will recommend me a place in Wyoming instead of <my town>. The value add of it to me is less than zero.

Not to mention that when you buy something you only want one of, you will be bombarded by ads for the same thing...

I agree. It's been a bit of a let down for me when I disabled ad blocking when I moved from Wichita to Des Moines (and finally to Minneapolis) since nothing really gave me a good idea of what was in the area unless I used sites like Yelp or FourSquare. Google's own ads didn't give a single hint of what was local to me. It seems the whole local ad network concept may be a failure. At least for now.

If I type "weather" or "The Martian movie times" into google I get useful local results. But I see it being used for useless and creepy things also.

So who are the tracked ads aimed at? Is this a question of hunting the 1%, the "whales"?

Targeted advertising has been around for a long time without all this creepy tracking. I recently switched car insurance due to a targeted advertisement. It was a billboard on a subway platform.

Tracking has also been around for a long time without the creepy stalker stuff. Whenever you redeem a coupon, you're giving companies feedback on whether or not the ad the coupon is attached to is reaching the intended audience.

And tracking individuals to get a clearer picture has been around for a long time without the violation of consent. Nielsen families know all about that.

What I think is problematic is the individualization. Signaling is an important part of advertisements. With an oldschool advertisement I get some extra information indicating that the company is legitimate and in good shape. Oldschool ads are expensive, so companies that place them are sending a clear message that they can afford them, and that they have enough faith in their product to think it will pay off.

Individualization, by contrast, makes it impossible for me to distinguish between a big robust ad campaign and some fly-by-night company singling me out in an effort to sell the equivalent of crap from Skymall. And it does too much to enable parasitic advertising, where a company that wants to sell to people who read Harper's can avoid paying for ads on Harper's because they can instead follow those people to less-glamorous places and advertise to them there.

This feels reminiscent of the arguments over piracy and content distribution media. Back before spotify and netflix and itunes, pirating music was just the way of life. People made moral arguments one way or the other and they both had credibility. Now that we have essentially moved away from that model, I've noticed discussion about piracy drastically fall off many discussion forums.

Now the same thing is happening with advertising and ad blocking. Both sides have reasonable arguments, and the discussion really doesn't seem to be getting anywhere at all. "Ads pay for your free content!" "This content is so full of other garbage it isn't even consumable in the first place!" etc, etc. The google service to pay for ad space was interesting, I am curious if that will translate to the new "spotify" of the music industry. People might be more willing to pay monthly subscriptions for high quality, ad-free content. I most likely would be.

However, the most disappointing thing from that article is the search history for "do not track." That is why I run an ad-blocker. The amount of web tracking that happens is super creepy and ethically grey at best. I don't want to be a part of that system, and if running a script blocker does that, that supersedes any ethical qualms I have with blocking ads.

Blocking ads is no different from skipping commercials with DVR. If you answer my http request with 200 OK I am doing nothing unethical by discarding part of the response I'm disinterested in, just as I'm doing nothing unethical by pressing "fast forward" on my Tivo.

I'm generally in agreement with you. I'm just trying to present the arguments equally from both sides.

The other side has no argument. You can't give something away and then dictate how it is used.

Unfortunately, Do Not Track was dead on arrival. It was a poorly-defined voluntary practice, which the advertising industry had no reason to follow. The only effective way to avoid tracking now is to avoid all advertisements and many scripts.

It also didn't help that Internet Explorer ended up making it enabled by default.

Privacy should be the default. But playing the long game, it might have worked better if DNT defaulted off, MS and Mozilla lobbied to give it the force of law (like "do not call" lists), and then defaulted to on.

From a users perspective Do Not Track should have been a opt-out process, as in all users are protected by default and can white list sites. In that scenario Ms and IE were right. It was the obvious reaction by the ad industry to this that showed their true colours; they predictably threw their toys out the pram and began ignoring Do Not Track requests. It was the advertising industry's response to the obvious needs of users that was the death knell for DNT.

Do you think using an ad blocker online is more unethical than using a DVR to skip television ads? Is it unethical to ride the bus and not read all the ads plastered everywhere?

I'm not arguing one way or the other as to the morality of these situations, but I don't think that they are analogous. Each of the following should be considered separately:

1. The transfer of money from the advertiser to the ad venue

2. The viewing of the ad by the consumer

3. The effectiveness of the ad campaign as perceived by the advertiser

In the case of the bus, the most important consideration for the bus company, whether it was paid for the ad, is unaffected by whether or not you choose to look. Also, the advertiser knows beforehand that it is only paying for the probability that a passenger will sit near their ad. The fact that someone did not diligently view all the ads will not change their estimation of the ad campaign's value, since it is already factored in.

In the case of online ad blocking, all three are affected to the maximum degree. You have no chance to view the ad, the effectiveness of the blocked ad is known by the advertiser to be zero and the site is not paid.

I think you have something here. Piracy was a problem due to high cost and poor availability of content. Now there are multiple paid-for content aggregators that will serve music and video on most devices at reasonable prices, worldwide.

So it sounds like what we need are text content aggregators that work. What we need is easy syndication: RSS with money. But people have been trying to build paywalled text aggregator sites since Compuserve and not really succeeded.

Maybe the people paying should be the link-discussion sites. Reddit lets you give "gold" to users, but not to the websites hosting submitted links ...

The problem is what is trying to be sold, not the medium it is distributed in. News can't be copyrighted and is willingly distributed for free. Most news is actually cheap to produce as well.

So the problem is that a previously lucrative business (news) is no longer lucrative at all, and in fact that are many people who will give it away for free just for fun.

Unfortunately for those in the business of news I don't think there's a "fix" for this, it's just the onward march of progress.

This is the real issue. It used to be hard to come by news. It is really easy to share and read news now.

During protests and riots, the best news comes from the people on the ground with smartphones. Not a news crew with cameras and lights. My coworker texted me the other evening that the train was out of service. I didn't hear about it on Twitter or on CTV. And I read a blog post about Dieselgate before I saw the headlines on CNN.

News article text absolutely can be copyrighted. It's just the parts that are pure reported speech or excerpts from someone else's press release that can't.

News is also fairly worthless without comment, analysis and context.

Those are not monetarily valuable things though; plenty of people will write about the news for free.

Investigative reporting is the exception in that it's difficult and can be expensive to produce.

I like the patreon model a lot, though it certainly doesn't scale to corporations well. Nautilus and other subscription news works out well enough. Reddit gold I think is pretty genius too.

The author says that we, as consumers, need to "engage" advertisers because they have power (to do what?), and because we all have a stake in each other's success. He offers this explanation:

The only way engagement will work is through tools that are ours, and we control: tools that give us scale — like a handshake gives us scale. What engages us with the Washington Post should also engage us with Verge and Huffpo. What engages us with Mercedes should also engage us with a Ford dealer or a shoe store.

Does anyone know what he is talking about here? I re-read the article 2 or 3 times and skimmed the linked article in an attempt to figure out what part scale plays in a handshake. If anything, a handshake is anti-scale because its a personal gesture that you can only do with one other person at a time. But the author says that engagement should scale across all verticals (automakers, shoe stores) and all brands (Huffington Post, Verge). Seems like an inherent contradiction. Am I parsing his meaning/terminology incorrectly?

Also, why do a plurality of smart people involved in the ad industry keep pushing for us, the consumers, to "help marketers think past abuse and coercion"?

Advertisers have had plenty of time to think and reflect upon their business model. They have chosen to disrespect us, violate our privacy, and chase short-term profits at the expense of long-term customer satisfaction. Now they are receiving their just desserts because people hate they way they have been treated. The sites that host these ads are also guilty by proxy because they know exactly what they are doing.

What is there to talk about/negotiate in this situation?

What is there to talk about/negotiate in this situation?

Nothing; we're being conned. They know what they want, they know nobody else wants that, so they disingenuously play to human nature. By stating that they should be engaged with directly, they attempt to make blocking seem like an unreasonable rejection of working with them. They have no interest in cooperating, so it's just manipulative.

It's the same exact hustle we've seen with whistleblowers (and protesters) time and time again for ages. Some blowhard says that they're for reform, and support the concept of whistleblowing in general. But in this one specific case, the whistle-blowing just wasn't done right, and there are certainly more-effective routes to that reform, with less collaterally damage that should have been used instead.

Nah, that's just someone that exists to make sure the status quo doesn't change. Sorta related, about the NSA/ATT relationship: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7325100

I suspect that the problem is that advertising is chasing increasingly fewer fixed dollars. Consequently, it has had to get more and more aggressive to have any impact.

Most people are spending at their limits. They have fixed budgets on which to spend things. So, to change their behavior, you have to apply a huge bat to get to even the 0.1% you can actually change.

Unfortunately, that offends the 99.9%.

There is a reason why advertisers target new mothers the most. It's the single time when people's habits get completely disrupted and can be rearranged.

I think it's kind of specious to claim that the reason ad blocking software is more common now is because websites started ignoring Do Not Track.

Most people who use the internet don't know anything about this. It probably just took a while for there to be enough 'friends good with computers' who knew about ad blocking and installed the plugins for their family and friends. That kind of knowledge takes a bit to penetrate.

Once people see it works they keep using it because a web without ads is objectively better for the individual user (ignoring what might happen if ad revenue was no longer viable to fund the free services everyone uses).

from: http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html " 12. Fix advertising. Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting. It doesn't work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising "

The problem is that advertising business started abusing users too much and we just have enough.

I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem if we did have old-style print advertising embedded in web pages, it usually followed the same visual style as the articles.

Before the web, I used to buy computer magazines as much for the ads as for the supposed "real" content.

Seth Godin said something along those lines, too:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/09/ad-blocking....

> [web advertising] might not even seem like advertising, by current standards.

I agree. This is one commercial video I enjoyed watching (Jimmy DiResta): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOawsNpTEYk

There are several aspects of this that made it a good medium:

* it was clear it was paid by DeWalt to make

* if one took away all the DeWalt tools, the video would still be fun to watch

* it was me who decided to watch it, not a random third party

There's a strange note of entitlement that seems to pop up whenever discussions about ad blocking arise.

It smacks of the piracy argument, "if producers didn't make it so difficult to consume the content, I wouldn't pirate it." The argument isn't about whether or not it's theft, so much as whether or not consumers agree with the method and constraints on the intersection between distribution and consumption.

In the case of 'free' content on the web: site 'owners' create and serve content, often via paid servers with labor overhead in the form of creation, curation, programming infrastructure/support, sysadmins, and so forth. The server sits in one or more datacenters, waiting for requests.

Let's use the house metaphor: say I create a website, www.thisismyhouse.com and you like the content, so you visit my (open) house. My house has certain conventions, social compacts, if you will. You don't enter without some sense that there are obligations on both sides: if I am an irritating host, you don't stay and eat my food, you leave. If you are an irritating guest, you are escorted out. At no time in the physical world is there a situation where you can use technology to mute the host while still eating the food (aside from <insert dated in-laws joke here> ).

"Oho!" someone exclaims, "I spent fuel and time" (internet bandwidth) "to visit your house! This cost me (unit of value) too!" So we agree that both sides have a monetary/value stake in this transaction.

But there are rules, folks. The content isn't free and never was. Just because you can line up at the buffet and filter out the environment until it meets your requirements through technology doesn't mean that you have an ongoing right to keep visiting (consuming).

Free content sites are like trialware: you visit, decide if you like it, then pay if you keep using it, and the price is set by the author (ads, subscriptions, you name it). If you don't like the price, you don't get to keep eating your fill.

I'm not a fan of ads, but I accept them as by and large the price of admission to the content I like. There are plenty of ways to get around tracking without fully blocking ads, so that doesn't really concern me).

If the ads are just too much, I go elsewhere. How complicated is that?

I strongly agree that adtech has overstepped bounds in a number of ways, but articles like this seem more interested in claiming the moral high ground for ad blockers, equating them with consumer activism. However, ad blockers are clearly not a boycott - websites are still being "dealt with" (i.e. content is being consumed) to use the definition language, they are just not being paid.

Disclaimer/Context: I was the Product Manager for Ad Products at Vox Media for 2+ years

I actually think ad blockers have the moral high(er) ground, but it is weird to call it a boycott.

It's the boycott of a business model, more than of the companies who use it.

I mean, I get that... but that's not what "boycott" means.

I don't know what you get for calling it a boycott or not (can I pay with my moral high ground?), it is clearly a mass rejection of targeted advertising in all its forms and that seems to be the important part.

If you put something out there for consumption on a public forum in a medium that allows me to determine how I consume it, then you are a fool if you believe you have any say in how I do consume it. You don't have any control in this matter and you have tied yourself to a business model that requires you to be able to dictate the terms of consumption.

I pay for my expensive bandwidth. If you attempt to pollute the bandwidth I pay for do not be surprised if I cut out the crap you try to force feed me.

If you can't support your business that's your problem. After all, the down side from all these businesses folding is that we go back to a web when such parasitic practacies didn't exist, well that sound like a deal to me!

If I take a free newspaper and don't bother to read the ads, the publisher has still been paid for the ad spots, so why should it be different for a Web site publisher? The advertiser should pay a negotiated, fixed amount and the consideration that site visitors may or may not use an adblocker to skip the ad should not enter the equation.

In a similar vein, if I take a free newspaper, no-one follows me round and refuses to let me turn the page unless I confirm that I have looked at all the ads on the current one.

Define boycott gets:

noun 1. a punitive ban that forbids relations with certain groups, cooperation with a policy, or the handling of goods.

In the sense of "cooperation with a policy", this certainly is in fact a boycott. Also, a bit of a stretch, but blocking adds is forbidding relation with a certain group (advertisers).

Further, a boycott may or may not include suppliers (or any other group associated with target). For instance when some restaurant chain is being boycotted, you don't often hear "also don't buy $X apples, they sell things to the evil chain".

The point being - it is consumer activism, people are saying "I like your site, but I won't be involved in the unreadable mess that it becomes with ads popping up everywhere." That's a pretty strong message, and far more pointed than just avoiding a site. In the later case, the message is unclear... is the problem the site content itself? Is it the ads? Is it something else like the layout?

To put things into perspective: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=how%20to%20b...

yes, interest in ad blocking is growing, but these search term graphs don't show that it has arrived at the scale of the general public yet.

difference: young girls / boys google %celebrity name% here again and again. you only ask %how to block ads% once.

and then again http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US#q=how%20to%20b... -> in june 2015 "adblock" was 75% as popular as "justin biber"

Your perspective is skewed. Try this https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=adblock%2C%20justin%...

"You seem to have adblocking enabled. Please deposit 0.05 mBTC to the address bellow to white-list this device."

It's not really a war, it's a negotiation.

People seem even less willing to cross paywalls than they do to accept ads.

Users realize they can fight sensory pollution - advertiser outrage ensues... The arms race rages on !

I agree and I like the way this author words the "fight". It has always baffled me how an entire industry can build up around the trust system because in the end that's what the majority of online advertisement is. You send me data, my screen chooses what to display.

Reminds me of the time when everyone (myself included) felt entitled to free MP3's, and then got pissed when the record companies disagreed.

A boycott is when you abstain from transacting. Ad blockers are not a boycott, they're just a legal way of stealing someone else's work.

Interesting conclusions, but they seem to be inevitable:

One is that ad blockers will evolve to valving systems for accepting advertising’s wheat while rejecting its chaff. (I explain the difference in the first post in this series. And, sez AdExchanger, 71% of Ad-Block Users Would Consider Whitelisting Sites That Don’t Suck.)

The other is that we’ll help marketers think past abuse and coercion as ways to get what they want out of customers. After that happens, they’ll realize that —

1. Free customers are far more valuable than captive ones 2. Genuine relationships are worth far more than the kind that is coerced 3. Volunteered (and truly relevant) personal data is worth far more than the kind that is involuntarily fracked 4. Expressions of real intent by customers are worth far more than guesswork fed by fracked data

> One is that ad blockers will evolve to valving systems for accepting advertising’s wheat while rejecting its chaff.

Well, I guess that is essentially what Ad-Block Plus is doing. They whitelist ads that are not intrusive and make the web a reasonable place to browse, while making a little money in the meantime. I like that idea, of purifying the web of bad content.

It is a good idea, but I've had some annoying content slip through the whitelist, so usually I just turn it off. If you whitelist Reddit for example, it often displays these creepy "non-ad" ads [1] to "thank you" for not using an adblocker. I would rather there just be no ads versus non-ad ads + real ads. So I just keep the whitelist off and see no ads at all, ever.

[1] https://55b8aba7dfd6c1911d2f4669ef645bd07e319f75.googledrive...

> accepting advertising’s wheat while rejecting its chaff

What makes you believe that users see any value in ads ?

I see value in ads when they target me specifically and alert me to some product or product alternative that I didn't know about before the ad. But that is a very small sliver of ads. There's a blog I follow that doesn't use ads but rather product recommendations with Amazon affiliate links. This type of advertising is pretty valuable to me and when/if I want to purchase the product, I use the affiliate link to do so to "pay" the blog author for the high quality content.

> One is that ad blockers will evolve to valving systems for accepting advertising’s wheat while rejecting its chaff.

Probably so. But at the moment, all we have is some ad blockers accepting money from advertisers for whitelisting their ads. This is such an obvious conflict of interest that I'm sort of shocked it even happens. I wonder if it would be workable to have some sort of centralized, disinterested group to make those determinations of wheat/chaff... instead of leaving it to the venal whims of individual blockers.

Most of your premises in a numbered list are quite inaccurate from a business POV but this one is definitively wrong: "Free customers are far more valuable than captive ones".

Captive customers aka vendor lock-in aka high switching costs is a very significant factor of a long term company valuation/capitalization. Absolute majority of companies would prefer totally locked-in customers if such lock-in doesn't hurt customer acquisition.

Since we're running full steam ahead in correlation, I'll throw in that around 2012 was when Facebook started displaying ads.

War on Ads will end just like the War On Terror, War On Drugs, War on Cancer and all other similar wars - there will be more of X, in this case Ads. To win that war we would need to change ourselves, and that's not going to happen. When I tell people that I have no cable, and Netflix/Amazon Prime is enough for my entertainment needs they are quickly to point out that I can't see the newest shows, or movies. My answer is always the same - it's entertainment - an activity that is just a small part of my life, not something that defines it.. Yet people act like they are losing part of themselves when they can't watch their favorite shows, or sporting events. That's why online streaming has so much problem acquiring new shows - cable networks know that some people are just too attached to their mindless entertainment, and will never give it up. A similar situation can be observed with the web and ads. People just want their fix of entertainment even if it means that they are being tracked, hacked and used. And it's never going to change.

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