The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com | Hacker News Reader

The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

guru3d.com

121 pointsnkurz321 comments

I use uBlock Origin. I don't block ads - I block 3rd party requests. People that complain about ad blocking are indeed missing the mark. I'm fine with ads - really. But if you want them seen, you are going to have to serve them yourself. There is no going backwards - for reasons spelled out by others in this thread. So if your business depends on ads, then you are in the ad business. Web sites are going to have to become like magazines. When I look at a magazine, I don't see a page with the message "please go get this other publication and look at the ad on page 3". I see the ad - in the publication I am viewing. Really, stop wining and just create quality content and engage with advertisers and ad firms that will create quality ads FOR YOU that will be place IN YOUR web page. Nothing exists that I know of that can block such ads.

I just looked at the guru3d site. The content is the ad - there's no need to add more ads. You just need to monetize the "ads" you already have. You are promoting these products. Negotiate with the vendor or reseller directly to get your fair share.

That's not a good idea if you want people to trust that your reviews are unbiased.

That is why Consumer Reports carries no ads, and is why I am willing to pay for their content.

That would have a deleterious effect on the editorial independence of their content, I imagine.

Yes it will. But if they are ad supported in the gaming hardware niche then they probably never had independence.

That probably depends on their ad model. For example, I would imagine that Google ads would not cause them to change their editorial model, while a referral-based network or a more niche banner network might exert some influence.

Further, whether they were truly independent to begin with is beside the question of whether it would make them less independent or not.

http://thewirecutter.com is a website that does something like this. They do in-depth reviews of all kinds of things and, as far as I know, make the money for the site off affiliate retailer links for the products they recommend.

It helps, though, that their articles can have thousands or tens of thousands of words comparing and contrasting different products in the same category in depth, including clearly outlining the flaws of the products they consider the best option, while Guru3D seems to have articles that are badly rewritten press releases and/or bullet points copied from the back of a game box.

Isn't that the success recipe that turned google into a multi-billion transnational corp ?

That won't work for small sites that aren't going to have a million monthly views, which means you are effectively chocking of new websites, or forcing them to proxy the request through their own site, thus pointlessly driving up the cost.

I get that some people don't want to be tracked (I don't mind as long as I can selectively turn it of), but please at least be honest about what you don't like.

In fact it only works for small sites. Big sites will get on the default blocklist right away.

Which is why the user should be able to change it.

So, they make a CMS plugin that serves ads from same origin, instead of different origin.

How would that help your user experience? (it might.. dunno)

I think it will help in two respects. If they are serving the content, they will take more responsibility for the content's message and for its effect on the user experience.

For once, they would not (easily) be correlating my data with other sites. Also, they would have more liability for choosing their ads so they do not include malware (a liability that Yahoo and friends have somehow been able to avoid, but shouldn't have)

They could correlate with other sites with a back-end system that shares cookie data.

That's exactly the thing, they can't. If you block 3rd party requests as intrasight (and I) do, there's no way for a back-end system to know that users of one website are users of another, short of using things like panopticlick or font-signature correlation (which are much less reliable than a cookie -- and personally I take action to make them useless).

???

I know who you are based on a cookie I drop on your browser (or just from your IP address) and I can share that information from my back-end to other sites.

You can share it, of course - but, how would they correlate it with data from other websites? How can they tell that a user on your site and one on my site are one and the same? They cannot (exceptions noted above), which makes it rather useless for profiling a user

You describe patronage, sponsored content, product placement.

Hey, this gpu shootout brought to you by Nvidia, and ASUS!

Yes. Just as it is now true with other media (TV, Radio, Magazines) it is also true of the web - and largely for the same reasons.

This is so common for the many anti-adblock texts you see these days - they all avoid to talk about the major issues here. (I say that with the background that a significant part of my income comes from ad-financed news pages.)

That is:

* Security risk through ads (malvertising, ad networks not supporting https etc.).

* Ads killing performance (70% CPU for a flash ad is not uncommon).

* Privacy (Ad vendors having mostly stated that they won't accept user wishes through DNT or similar technologies).

Privacy is a tricky one, because data is in part where the income comes from. But the other two are fixable. I want to hear from everyone complaining about ad blockers what they intend to do to make ads less of a security risk and cpu cycle burner. That would be a good start of a proper conversation about the topic. Every text that ignores these issues is usually not worth recognizing.

Those are all valid reasons, but they are not the reason I first started to block ads:

• They impose a surprisingly huge cognitive load.

Even if you (like most people nowadays) are used to them and hence “do not notice them”, that very habit of ignoring them actually takes more brain power than you’d think.

I'd be okay with ads on the web if it looked like newspaper or magazine ads (and with the associated cognitive load). But not auto-play videos that pops up in the middle of the article or blinking GIFs on the side.

That's true! I stopped watching TV somewhere around the high school age, which means I react to it just like small children do: if I'm trying to have a meeting where there's a TV running I turn into almost a drooling idiot.

My brain is simply not conditioned to flashing colors and quick cuts that aren't important. It requires practice to read a text bylined with blinking animations, and I simply don't have the cognitive power to do that. Most people that cope with it probably doesn't realize how much practice they've had.

And everybody knows that if you deplete your brain power before going to sleep your brain explodes...

On a serious note, your brain will be ok, it is a fine pattern matching machines with adaptative filters to discard uninteresting data (did you notice that sound of blood heartbeating in your ears?... that's filtering doing its work).

And also visually our brain is very good at ignoring data, search for the gorilla suit experiment.

Straw man. I did not say that using brain power is inherently bad. What I maybe should have said is that I prefer to use all my brain power on reading the article and pondering its implications rather than (unconsciously) wasting much of it on ignoring distracting ads.

It doesn't explode, but it does get tired. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tough-choices-how-...

Not reading them is the same as blocking them. To gain moral high ground people who compare adblocking to theft are required to read every ad on every website they encounter. The moral distinction between "I do not read ads" and "I block ads" is an illusion.

I wish people would vote down stuff that is not relevant instead of stuff they disagree with.

This does not take into account the security aspect. With the modern world being what it is one should be careful the code running on one's systems is from trusted sources. Adverts on the modern web violate this principle.

> The moral distinction between "I do not read ads" and "I block ads" is an illusion.

Do not some ad networks pay content providers for "impressions", regardless of whether the ads are clicked? In that case, loading the ads without reading them is not the same as not loading them.

My prediction for the future: Ad blockers will load ads but not display them as more and more websites will block visitors who block them.

Right. We need a blocker that loads the ads and "sandboxes" them from the user.

Loading the ads without displaying them doesn't help with page load time.

Merely looking at ads aren't enough. Purchasing behavior must ultimately be effected somewhere down the line, to the extent that someone can determine changes in sales were due at least somewhat to ads. If someone can't find a causal or predictive relationship between ads and customer behavior, then they will lose cause to invest in some advertising venue.

If a site is consistently staying alive only through ads, it means that money is somehow flowing from some people to the ad-supported content. We are all already paying for content through some convoluted pathway.

We should just start paying with minimal middlemen, since ad companies bill our attention and build profiles about us from our behavioral data.

I would take this a step further. I perceive the effects of advertising in most cases to be toxic and nefarious. Trying to convince me to buy or do something that I didn't already want or need is an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism. I avoid ads because I absolutely do not want their influence looming over me.

We -- the technologists behind it -- should be anxious to help humanity get past this embarrassing chapter in our development and find another way to make the economic wheels turn.

I hate ads for all the reasons you cite and because some are hugely distracting.

But small websites are not in a position to change the state of affairs, and if nothing changes and people keep blocking their ads, they're going to be dying in large numbers.

As a result, everything will be locked into app stores with even less privacy and with many restrictions on the type of content that is allowed.

The sort of answers I am looking for are the ones that do not pit small websites against users.

Actually, there are many "small websites" which are completely adless and will continue to remain, because the group or individual (usually the latter) is paying for their hosting. Some are hosted on the ISPs of their owners. I've spent many hours on these sites and they also tend to have the most esoteric and interesting content. Unfortunately they do seem to be disappearing from Google's search results, which is a different but also potentially problematic issue.

Yes, there are (I run one), but how are they relevant to this discussion?

Small sites are not supported by ads — traffic is too low, so small sites will sustain.

I suspect that rather than paywalls, we'll start to see a lot more "native" advertising, where some or all of the content itself is an ad.

This strikes me as pretty similar to the usual "record labels are evil" defense for pirating music, in that it's a rationalization for something people were going to do anyway. While your points are true ones, they're not the reasons most people are using ad blockers (for instance, I am quite confident that most people have no idea about the security risks involved in simply loading an advertisement).

No. The security argument would be more analogous to a hypothetical situation whereby listening to legally purchased CDs occasionally resulted in you house keys or credit card details being distributed to criminals.

Or, you know, that time Sony installed a rootkit from music CDs.

Funny thing those were not actuals CDs, Philips asked Sony to stop using the official CD logo on those infected discs or face a lawsuit.

What do you mean they weren't CDs? They weren't "licensed" or they were something else entirely?

They did not conform to the official specification for an audio CD and therefore were not allowed to carry the logo for Compact Disc Digital Audio.

That's true in a sense for me. I originally installed an ad blocker because I'm annoyed by the ads, and by the bandwidth that they were consuming. I wasn't even aware of the security and privacy issues at first.

When I became aware of those issues, I installed additional blocking software even though I was already not seeing any ads.

In my defense, content blocking has been around since time immoral. The first browser I ever used, some Netscape, had a setting to disable the display of images. I used that setting to speed up my page loads.

* time immemorial

You caught me. ;-)

Additionally, visitors don't sign a contract to agree to view ads in exchange for content, content-makers don't own their visitors' eyes or attention and can't expect to just sell them off willy-nilly.

I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about it. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support.

Look, a lot of this ad revenue was bullshit anyway. Online ads have not been very effective historically, but people were still willing to pay for them and that pumped a lot of money into any site with a lot of traffic, regardless of whether or not the ads on that site actually worked. It turns out that visitors have started blocking ads before people started figuring out how crappy the RoI on those ads actually were, but that money was likely to dry up one way or the other eventually.

There are plenty of non-obnoxious ways to do product reviews and endorsements that can still bring in revenue (that's the laziest option) but there are also a ton of excellent options out there for content-creators to gain financial support without relying on ads. It's easier than it's ever been to earn a living without ads and it's only getting easier over time. If you're a web-focused content creator in 2015 and you don't have something for sale on your site (even just "brand" merch), don't have patreon set up, and don't have plans for crowd funded projects then you're making a huge mistake and leaving a crap-ton of money on the table.

> I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support.

People who hated spam signed the Boulder Pledge.

People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway.

You're living in a fantasy world. Nearly everyone universally hates spam, and nearly everyone uses a mail system that automatically filters it. They don't sign a pledge, they just use tools that help then avoid spam. They mark spam they get in their inbox to help others avoid it automatically. And they have no compunction about using a site that relies on spam, they merely find it annoying.

And as I mentioned there's no formal system in place where users agree to see ads in exchange for access to content. Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.

But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam.

> Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.

Don't pretend that you have unique moral authority, able to decide the rights and wrongs. If you don't want ads you should boycott ad supported sites - not giving them your traffic is at least as effective as giving them your traffic but hiding their ads. They respond to you by having advertisers paying for content. They respond to me by improving the quality of the content and charging for it.

Are we talking about spam or ads served over the web? If the latter - they are taking up my bandwidth!

If either reach your local machine then they are both taking up your bandwidth.

I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge.

> But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam.

And people that use spam filters on a daily basis just like the fact that they don't get as much spam anymore. You know like people that use adblockers and appreciate that they don't have as many adverts anymore.

You are comparing apples and cats. If you want to compare apples and apples compare the people that created spam filters with those that created blockers and compare the people that use spam filters with those that use blockers.

> I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge.

How old are you? How long have you been using the Internet? Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?

I’ve used the Internet since before the Web, and I’ve never heard of the Boulder Pledge either.

> Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?

Yes

Any thoughts on the rest of my comments?

Not really, I was just curious about the[1] change in culture from "don't support people sending you ads by giving them your custom or pageviews" to "just block the ads, and take the content."

[1] There hasn't been any change. It's just my perception, and that turns out to be wrong.

My favorite part of HN, the reason I prefer this news feed over any other, is because the comments are usually intelligent and civil.

Your comment here is neither, and it just turned a discussion about the morality of ad-blocking and the viability of ad-based revenue models into a dick measuring contest.

Not cool.

A more charitable reading of DanBC's comment is simply inquisitive. If we're going to hold civility in such high esteem, then we should also be assuming good faith, which it seems you have not done.

Honestly now. I am as enthusiastic a practitioner of the principle of charity as anyone else, but that doesn't mean you have to ignore overwhelming signs of bad faith when they're staring you in the face.

When Floegipoky decided DanBC's comment was probably not made in good faith, I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a mere assumption. More like an inference well supported by the available evidence.

Sorry. Re-reading it it does come across that way, and deserves the downvotes.

It wasn't intended that way though - I was genuinely just trying to see if people who'd used the Internet earlier were more aware of things like Boulder pledge. (Turns out several people who had significant involvement in Internet email at the time didn't know about it.)

I also have been on the internet since before the WWW (not just its commercial use) and have run mail servers for businesses since the mid-90s. Never heard of the Boulder Pledge.

I've also been using the internet since long before the WWW even existed. I was there for MAKE.MONEY.FAST. Never heard of this "Boulder Pledge."

I'd edit this if I could, but I can't because the edit / delete window has closed.

> People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway.

You ever see stats on ads taking the bandwidth?

http://betanews.com/2015/08/25/ad-blocker-crystal-massively-...

The ad vendors business model depends on the user paying for the ads. Why in living hell are they complaining? I am subsidizing their crappy business model. If I want to stop subsidizing them, it's my right.

I think this link was posted here a little while ago:

https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-fro...

The article is exactly what it says on the tin: You are charged more (roughly 16x) for the data inherent in the ad than the publisher makes for serving it.

In an ideal world with perfect coordination, we'd agree to just directly send the publisher a quarter of what the current ad data costs us, and everybody relevant wins.

Sure, block ads. But why then visit those same sites that try to serve ads? Those sites clearly don't care about you, so why do you want to give them the pageviews?

Are you going to donate to the pages you visit?

And don't forget the bandwidth and capacity usage for those on capped mobile data. I only have a 512MB/month allowance, I don't want it spent on downloading ads.

That's bullshit. If you don't want those ads, then don't consume that content.

Well, it's not as though every random link on the internet has a Surgeon's General Warning-esque disclaimer: "Clicking this link will download 23MB of Javascript frameworks, tracking coookies, advertising iframes and uncompressed, full-resolution images."

These are all issues for the users, there are other problems with the current system:

* some ad media companies scam their clients by publishing ads on sites where kickback payments are most attractive, rather than where the users are most suitable for the client

* agencies who also design campaigns for their clients tend to use more obnoxious and more commonly blocked ad formats because they're more expensive for the client, hurting both client and publisher (more ad blockers, annoyed users)

* I am also convinced that there's plenty of click fraud out there, but it's the only of these issues I don't know firsthand / as a fact

We could have an ad API where browsers could make it impossible for ads to have certain things that users don't like (for me, anything animated or which interrupts the flow) and in return ad-block software could allow ads through the new API. It could be made to work with older browsers by having a tag that ad-api browsers recognized as render this ad in this element, rather than its content and which older browsers skipped. Make the API tight enough and it won't be a CPU issue, it won't be any more a security risk than browsing any old site that is able to serve you pictures.

I doubt privacy is salvable, and I wouldn't want ads that didn't know what I was interested in to show up at all, since those universually suck.

If your business model requires changes to reality, then your business model is probably dead. [If you have lobbying power, you can extend your business model for awhile, perhaps indefinitely ala content industry and copyright.]

In other words, adapt your business model to change or die.

It's not up to "reality", us, to change to support your business model. If there is demand for whatever you produce, someone will create a "business model" to supply it. If there is not enough demand to pay for any business model then so be it, we didn't actually need/want your product after all.

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And the people that use the most heavy-handed approaches with ad-blocking are going to be the same people that are screaming "NOT MY PROBLEM" while the ship goes down.

Their business model doesn't require changes to reality. Their business model requires the end-user to accept reality for what it is: you can't get a bunch of free stuff, ad infinitum, while simultaneously blocking the only feasible revenue model for said free stuff.

> It's not up to "reality", us, to change to support your business model.

Did you pat yourself on the back while you said that, or right after?

We are not reality. The reality is, ad-blocking will be the absolute death of currency-free content. This abuse of the word reality is truly odd to me.

You seem to think every choice we make as consumers is the current reality. What you call reality, I call a house of cards.

Your post seems entirely based on the assumption that people will not create and host quality content for free.

It also assumes people will not try to extract content from walled gardens via any means and share such information for free.

It seems the assumption of "block everything" individuals is that any quality content that is not currently free somehow will magically become so when all ads are blocked.

This is what people did in the past. People are doing this now, and they will continue to do this. TBH, most of the content that will go away as a result of adblocking is garbage anyway. It's the paid bloggers and other leeches that have had easy for the last 10 years who are really complaining about this.

The world did fine prior to the advertisements and the world will be fine after the advertisements fail. Simply because somebody asks you to become a sheeple doesn't mean you are required to become one. No need to fall into lock step and comply.

Modern advertising began in 1836. Why has it become vogue to call someone "sheeple" because they think there's a happy medium between the "all ads are bad" and the "giving you a seizure with my ad is okay" approaches.

You aren't an underground revolution fighting the man. You installed a browser plugin.

There cannot be such a happy medium as long as ads are increasingly "targeted" and "third party". "Targeted ads" means surveillance, profiling, tracking, massive privacy invasion. "Third party" means poorer performance and having no control on your main source of revenue (see the stories about google censoring content on google ads based websites).

Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.

The issue here has two sides: on the practical side it is much easier to block all ads than to maintain a white list while on the attitude style a website that tells its visitors "I could not care less about your privacy and your browsing experience" by showing ads and running third partu tracking scripts should not be surprised when a growing portion of visitors return the favor "we don't care about your failed business model, we do care about our privacy and browsing experience though" by blocking said ads.

If adblocking wasn't a game changer revolution, we wouldn't be reading the IAB telling us "we messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." http://www.iab.com/news/lean/

> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while stille being profitable.

So there is a happy medium and, in your opinion, it's non-targeted ads. Yet uBlock and uBlock Origin and the millions of people that use them are blocking DuckDuckGo ads.

piwik is an open-source, locally installed, piece of analytic's software that is blocked by default in the above AND in adblock.

So you are making an argument that is presently being implemented and still being blocked.

Sorry, I may have not expressed myself in clear enough way, please allow me to try again:

IMO there is no happy medium, all ads are unwelcomed on the net.

duckduckgo debunks the myth that ads need to be targeted as is the usual investor storytime myth.

I was using phpmyvisites before it spawned piwik and have been pushing piwik as an alternative to google analytics since, still piwik is a tracking mechanism and as such is expected to be blocked, but additional tracking script vs parsing web server logs is another debate.

So you said this:

> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.

For what reason exactly? So they debunked a myth that is moot anyway because the very premise of the myth is unwelcome.

Sure, it's hard to imagine any objection to DuckDuckGo's ads that wouldn't apply to advertising in general. They're unobtrusive, clearly marked, at least somewhat relevant, supposedly non-targeted, and apparently served from the same domain without a bunch of extra JavaScript. Privacy is a big part of the DDG brand, so lying about targeting would be risky.

But most ads and most sites aren't like that. How are people supposed to know which are trustworthy?

Most content is worthless. Content that has actual monetary value to someone, market research data for instance, has no trouble finding people willing to pay for it.

The fact is most "news" and other article type sites do not serve a purpose other than satisfying some idle curiosity or passing time. Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life. The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material. When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it.

> Most content is worthless.

What nonsense. Most content's worth is variable depending on who is consuming it. The issue with ad-blockers is that it isn't killing worthless content. It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit.

> The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material.

Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal.

> When the content can be easily leveraged to some profitable goal, people are usually more than willing to pay for it.

You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported.

> It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit.

What does that tell you about the value of that content that people are not even willing to be exposed to an ad in order to consume it? This is the proper application of "the customer is always right". When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault. It's the vendor's fault for failing to meet the market demands in a suitable way.

> Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal.

No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product.

> You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported.

Do most FOSS doc pages have ads on them? Not that I've seen. O'Reilly and other publishers have no trouble charging money for well-written technical documentation. People are clearly willing to pay for that. Rosetta Stone charges quite a bit for language instruction.

> When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault.

They do want it, but for free. And while they still consume it, for free, they hide behind some non-sense about tracking or privacy, even though if those two issues were resolved they would block it any way because it's not convenient to white list a site. Duckduckgo is perfect evidence of that.

> No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product.

And much of the time it isn't.

> They do want it, but for free.

Yes, this is relatively common. People will take something for free that they aren't willing to pay for. Other things they'll pay one amount for, but not a larger amount. Everybody decides for him or herself how much something is worth to them. If the majority of people decide that value is "nothing, not even looking at an ad", then that's what the value of that thing is. That's how markets work.

This is a load of BS. The reality is most people install a blocker and never think twice. Your implication that people make a value decision for every website they visit is laughable, and more importantly, exactly the opposite of what most people do.

You take another breath every few seconds but you don't do it consciously. Not everything you do is a conscious decision you actively make in the forefront of your mind.

Your comments lead me to believe you have skin in the game because you seem determined to not acknowledge that the value of something is what your customers will pay for it. If they aren't willing to pay for it then it has no value in the market, regardless of the value you've assigned to it.

> Your comments lead me to believe you have skin in the game because you seem determined to not acknowledge that the value of something is what your customers will pay for it.

None what-so-ever, other than having several websites I enjoy that use ads for revenue generation. My current work is in Business SAAS.

> If they aren't willing to pay for it then it has no value in the market, regardless of the value you've assigned to it.

You don't understand markets. If a minority of users aren't willing to "pay" for it, that doesn't make it without value. By your logic, movies are pirated by a minority and thus, they have no value. With movies it matters less because they've compensated for it by charging people that actually pay more and more.

> most people install a blocker

This is exactly the point. People have to actively seek out and find an ad blocker. They experience the Internet with ads, then decide that it is not worth it. It doesn't just happen. So what is your argument? That people are idiots and cannot correctly assess how valuable something is to them?

Personally, I've whitelisted sites that are known to have useful and unobtrusive ads. I've also supported other sites and apps that I like directly, by giving money, buying a paid version, or buying branded merchandise. There are options other than ads.

I think it's quite possible to detect when someone is using an ad blocker. If publishers really think it's a problem, they can easily disable the site for anyone with an active ad blocker. So why don't they do it? I've seen a few sites take this approach. I happily left and never went back. Like I said before, there's no real reason I need to read one particular article rather than another one in any given moment. If I need the information for something specific, I'll pay for it.

> If publishers really think it's a problem, they can easily disable the site for anyone with an active ad blocker.

Anti-ad blocker blocker's are a thing. UBlock and Adblock both include them. At the end of the day all it takes is regex.

I use an adblocker, but only with a blacklist. So far only one site has made it on that blacklist. A certain financial blog that is just too obnoxious to read without. The whitelisting approach suggests that 'the first one is always free' for the consumer but I agree with you that the average user has no feeling for the economics underlying the websites they visit and the content they consume. Adblockers run with a whole lot of blocking by default. That gives them the most market value (remember, there is a market for adblocking).

People suggest that they would happily pay a 1st world sum of money but do they think about what that price tag looks like for people with less money to spend? My 'eyeballs' might be worth more than most, or not, to the ad networks. I'm happily trying to subsidize this whole web thing.

You are probably a middle-class caucasian male from a western country. I can make that assumption because this willingness to pay that you're talking about cannot be a reality for the poor or for citizens of underdeveloped countries, or in other words ... the majority.

You're right. And addressing issues like poverty is one of the many better things we could be doing than trying to figure out how Buzzfeed can get paid to tell us about 35 Things Only Parapalegic Law School Students from Cincinatti Will Understand.

Even if the personal targeting in bad_user's post is uncalled for, the point is still valid: right now, ads serve as a redistribution mechanism, and pretending that Buzzfeed and the likes are the only sites that will be blocked to the lower classes in a paywall-laden web is just demagogy.

In fact, Buzzfeed will probably still be available to the general public, since they already engage in "native advertising", where the content is the ad. It's sites that still maintain some editorial independence that will be most affected.

I agree there is value in making useful information available to people who can't afford it. I don't think advertising is the only way or even the best way to make this happen. We used to consider this such a valuable endeavor that we had whole institutions dedicated to making information available for free, without ads. They were called "libraries".

I also agree that ads aren't the only or best way to make it happen. But they are the existing way. It's well known what tends to happen when structures are eliminated with promises of better tomorrows.

It's been "the existing way" for only 20-30 years. Before that we had newspapers, libraries, town criers, monks copying manuscripts by hand, phone trees, who knows what else. A webpage with an ad is hardly the only available means of disseminating information. There are other options even right now with donation supported sites, sites supported by sales of affiliated merchandise, manufacturer websites with product data, and so on.

"Let them eat newspapers"?

We're not talking about a return to the past; we're talking about a two tier system, where the good information will be served with all the speed and amenities of the web to those who can afford it. Having other means of disseminating the information is irrelevant, because the real money will come from the paywalled sites. It's the JSTOR model, now for all the information.

And what I'm saying is not "let's keep the current model"; all I want is to urge the anti-ad advocates to at least acknowledge the issue -which is real- instead of brushing it off as only affecting Buzzfeed and the likes, and to come up with a better answer than "manufacturers will still publish their product data", as if that covered the important information we're talking about.

> right now, ads serve as a redistribution mechanism

If you wanted to redistribute wealth to the global poor, forcing everyone (poor and not-poor alike) to download massive, useless megabytes of untargeted advertising, malware, and phishing scams is not the most efficient way to do it. This is defending the current broken and destructive ad regime on the basis of a distant third-order effect.

What you've wrote is almost a perfect example of the Nirvana fallacy.

Yes, the current ad system is inefficient, regularly disruptive and even occasionally destructive. But it's here and it's redistributing, while the proponents of alternatives don't even mention that aspect, let alone have a working solution.

And it might be a "distance third-order effect" to you, but as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.

> Yes, the current ad system is inefficient, regularly disruptive and even occasionally destructive. But it's here and it's redistributing,

Talk about fallacies! Based on that kind of argument, you can defend any awful, destructive policy if it benefits someone, somewhere.

> as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.

I'm sorry, but I can't seem to find the contract I signed where I agreed to be tracked by giant corporations and choke all my devices to the point of nonfunctionality with malware and ads just so a stranger wouldn't have to pay for content. Maybe you have a copy?

You seem to be assuming a lot from my posts; please don't. I'm not saying we should keep the existing system, and I'm not saying you should have to accept tracking. What I'm saying is that bad_user has a point regarding redistribution, and that anti-advertising advocates should deal with it instead of whistling and pretending it'll only affect Buzzfeed, like the post I originally replied to did.

> What I'm saying is that bad_user has a point regarding redistribution

Sure, and what I'm saying is that it's not a good point for the reasons I've stated already. I'll add that if you deliberately wanted to turn people against redistribution of wealth, you could hardly do better than to associate it with the intrusive web advertising that everyone hates!

...and this is the unspoken truth of advertising. There is no reason for advertisers to reach that majority who cannot or will not pay for whatever is being advertised. However the publishers resent ad blockers because they reduce the pool and that's a bad thing in a world where cost-per-impression is common, or even cost-per-click where inadvertent clicks can make money.

At the bottom of it all though, there need to be enough people who actually do follow through on the call to action in order for the ads to be profitable. In casino parlance these are the "whales" who make all the freeloaders at the buffet worthwhile. In the 1990s the "whales" of the Internet were AOL users, they had that sweet combination of impulsive action and disposable income that advertisers love. I don't know who their target market is today, but it's not me.

I know, right? I've never in my entire life intentionally clicked on an ad, much less made a purchase decision based on one.

> Most content is worthless.

Which is why ads are the only way to monetize it and be able to actually have it somewhere.

> The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material.

Except nothing is free. Someone has to pay for it. If it's not ad networks and if it's not donations (again, mostly because most content is worthless, and probably also because most people are greedy), who will pay for it?

> Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life.

How old are you? I'm 23, my youth was spent on the internet learning. I wasn't able to pay any content at the time. The website I was reading from were living out of ads, some of them made by minor, that were later able to make a decent living out of it. Yeah we have a bunch of website getting enough donations, but they need to be in the top 100 to actually survive from it.

When Youtube Red was announced, I was freaking happy (except about the fact that I'm Canadian and I won't be able to enjoy it), most arguments I've seen against ads was that there was no alternative... except now people are simply complaining that Youtube is simply being greedy and that they can already get that using adblock...

It's probably too late to make people realize that content isn't free, that offering it isn't free either. We are in a world where ads and huge investment gave us the opportunity to share and produce really cheaply and it seems like it's all free... you remove the ads, you remove any way to pay for that cheap but existing cost.

I still have a little hope on donations though, seeing the amount some live streamers are able to make on Twitch, seeing how Patreon is a way to make a living, seeing how some crowdfunding is able to produce some really decent content (Tabletop, Conman, Fallout Nuka Break and VGHS to name a few), etc... I hope it will grow and allow us to keep at least the same amount of content as before.

> Which is why ads are the only way to monetize it and be able to actually have it somewhere.

Why do we need to have it somewhere if nobody wants it enough to pay for it?

> Except nothing is free. Someone has to pay for it. If it's not ad networks and if it's not donations (again, mostly because most content is worthless, and probably also because most people are greedy), who will pay for it?

People who want to disseminate information will pay to do so. Hacker News doesn't have ads. YCombinator is paying for it because it serves their purposes to have an online community for hackers.

People write and create other content for a variety of reasons. Usually the best content is not created to maximize the amount of money it makes.

> Why do we need to have it somewhere if nobody wants it enough to pay for it?

Yes, because search engines are basically elitist.

Back in the old days, (early 1990's) when I was starting out on the internet, there was very little advertising. What advertising there was, was relatively unobtrusive. People were putting up content for personal reasons, passion or desire to share and communicate with an audience. The era of the mom making a living with a blog hadn't begun. Frankly, it was a better time. Sure the technology was limited, but things were simpler and much more exciting. There isn't a single blog on the internet that I can't do without.

> Most content is worthless.

I would suggest that quite a bit of so-called "content" is actually negative value. Consumption of this negative value is done for a variety of reasons (paying a minor cost for an indirect social benefit, for example ("I wanted to participate when people talk about #{current_pop_culture}")). These negative values are only worthwhile when the cost is small enough, and we've recently seen advertising raise those costs past important thresholds.

The initial reaction is an attempt to lower the cost by installing an ad blocker. In the long run, this will simply lead to a re-evaluation that the rising costs outweigh the benefits.

Any attempt to "monetize" something that was previous done for free is by definition imposing a cost on the people involved. This current trend of "ad supported" stuff is really just a complicated type of rent seeking. Rents are only justifiable when scarce resources are involved, so it should be obvious that most interactions on the internet cannot be monetized (anything that has effectively zero marginal cost is not scarce).

I agree with you. I refuse to view any ads whatsoever. There isn't a single website on the internet that I can't do without. As long as I can control what I view on my own device, I will. I have no problem with a business model dying, it's the way of the world. I'm a musician myself, and the business model has changed so much that music is virtual worthless in the market. That's ok with me.

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. Why do you simultaneously try to use it as a threatening outlook? If enough people perceive it as a threat or discover later that paywalls are even less convenient to them, some other solution will have to be found.

> If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution.

What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good".

> some other solution will have to be found

Because we already have a solution. Unobtrusive advertising is a valid trade-off between having to pay currency for content and said content-creators generating money through their content.

I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive.

But now we are destined to fear-mongering nonsense about Google tracking your every move to justify blocking everything. When that wasn't far enough, we blocked locally installed software applications that track client-side behavior.

Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card.

> What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good".

It's good for the majority of publishers if they accept it as their preferred solution as you wrote. Unless you think they ought to be driven by other motives than making sound business decisions - like cruelty or whatever you were trying to insinuate with your slanted rhetoric.

> I'm not defending advertising to the death here. The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive.

Not really - fools like me already worked around ads almost 20 years ago because they wasted bandwidth (proof: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/websearch.html - no longer functional though amazingly still online). Piggyback ads are an anomaly and people will always try to avoid them, whether they're text (to be confused with valid search results) like Google's or flashy, crashy animations.

> Yet, the argument from the "zero tolerance for ads" group is "come up with a better model". We have another model. You pull out your wallet, and enter your credit card.

Well, go ahead and use it then. What's holding you back? Altruism and the urge to save users from the consequences of their personal choices? Oh, please...

> It's good for the majority of publishers if they accept it as their preferred solution as you wrote. Unless you think they ought to be driven by other motives than making sound business decisions - like cruelty or whatever you were trying to insinuate with your slanted rhetoric.

Perhaps my rhetoric is slanted, but yours is fully bent. When only one solution eventually exists, it doesn't make it the preferred solution, it makes it the nuclear option. Quit spouting nonsense about cruelty. I'm suggesting that advertising-supported businesses are eventually going to have one remaining option. That isn't slanted rhetoric. That's common sense.

Unless of course we come up with a completely new way for content creators to earn a living with their content outside of charging for it, or using advertising for it. Because new forms of compensation in exchange for content are popping up all the time.

> Well, go ahead and use it then. What's holding you back? Altruism and the urge to save users from the consequences of their personal choices? Oh, please...

I'm starting to believe you are just putting words together so you sound smart. No one is going to change to paywalls until every has to. Until then the middle of the pack is going to continue fighting for scraps while the giants in the industry (Google, Facebook, Microsoft) continue to profit on the sheer mass of their user base, and hedging their bets with non-advertising products.

But you keep spouting pseudo-Socratic arguments about how "nothing is stopping us" from moving to a model nobody wants but the end-user is steadily preventing any other alternative.

> When only one solution eventually exists, it doesn't make it the preferred solution, it makes it the nuclear option. [...] I'm suggesting that advertising-supported businesses are eventually going to have one remaining option. That isn't slanted rhetoric. That's common sense. Unless of course we come up with a completely new way for content creators to earn a living with their content outside of charging for it, or using advertising for it. Because new forms of compensation in exchange for content are popping up all the time.

You don't make any sense. Why would it become the only option when other forms keep popping up? Even with very hypothetical 100% penetration of (unblockable) ad blockers, this won't be the case.

> No one is going to change to paywalls until every has to.

You must have missed the NY times, the largest german newspaper (BILD) and other large publications switching to paywalls then. Perhaps look around some more before beating dead horses here... Also, your inflammatory language hurts your cause.

> Why would it become the only option when other forms keep popping up? Even with very hypothetical 100% penetration of (unblockable) ad blockers, this won't be the case.

Name me one other form of a successful website that does not use one of the following methods of monetization:

ads, donations, currency-exchange or none (free)

Because none of those are recent.

> You must have missed the NY times, the largest german newspaper (BILD) and other large publications switching to paywalls then. Perhaps look around some more before beating dead horses here... Also, your inflammatory language hurts your cause.

Because I'm not talking about organizations that already have millions of customers as a base. They are going to survive regardless of the ad-blocking penetration. Just like Google and Facebook will. What won't survive is anything that isn't enormous.

And you started the inflammatory nonsense by putting words into my mouth.

> Name me one other form of a successful website that does not use one of the following methods of monetization:

My former company (founded in 2000; majority sold in 2014; ~2.5 million users) has 95% revenue from other sources than those you named, it's a price comparison website. Most competitors operate in a similar fashion. Ads are used only as an insignificant additional revenue source (with lots of doubt and disputes internally).

Other examples: large classified ad pages, dating websites, real estate brokers (syndicated/search websites), airbnb, hotel and flight booking sites.

> Because I'm not talking about organizations that already have millions of customers as a base.

OK, how about the newly founded austrian branch of swiss publication NZZ - it started with 0 users and paywall.

> large classified ad pages

It literally has the word "ad" in it.

> dating websites

Either ad-driven or membership based, in which case the membership is received as a currency-exchange.

> real estate brokers (syndicated/search websites)

Just because your content is an ad doesn't make it less an ad.

> airbnb

See above.

> hotel and flight booking sites.

See above.

Every one of those sites are classified ad sites, which is problematic on two fronts:

1. All the content is the ad. 2. It's not unique content, it's content created for the sole purposes of selling something.

Literally everything you listed requires that there be something to sell, whether a product or sex/dating. So the Internet should effectively be one big shopping district?

> OK, how about the newly founded austrian branch of swiss publication NZZ - it started with 0 users and paywall.

A subsidiary of a 300 year old establishment is your example of a startup making it day one with a paywall. Okay...

> 1. All the content is the ad. 2. It's not unique content, it's content created for the sole purposes of selling something.

Google Search fits the same definition. It has no unique content (CSE and booking sites do by the way, they have product information, reviews and ratings etc.) and it only points to other sites, just like their ads.

> Literally everything you listed requires that there be something to sell, whether a product or sex/dating. So the Internet should effectively be one big shopping district?

No, selling something is just one way of getting revenue without annoying the user. Perhaps more websites should try it.

> The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive.

I remember differently, when ads started to appear on the web, it was promptly followed by adblocking. Actual reason was to block ads.

Yep. I remember most of the first ads were outright scams, "You are visitor 1.000.000 of this webpage! Click here to collect your $500" [Seizure-inducing flashing to follow].

IIMNM the first ads I remember were banners, used to be banner exchange between willing webmasters turned into paid for banners (not sure if it was per impression or per click or both).

> I remember differently, when ads started to appear on the web, it was promptly followed by adblocking. Actual reason was to block ads.

Sure, but the adblocking was pretty specific. Popup blockers followed popup ads and they were far more popular than any software that blocked ads outright. Adblocking isn't new, it's that it's iron-fisted and gaining in popularity that's the problem.

I don't remember adblocking to be specific, it was about adding a bunch of ip to your hosts file to redirect them to 127.0.0.1 and was sometimes a bit too broad.

Then again this is a matter of opinion, to me it is ad supported model popularity that is the problem.

I have an even better model than that: Website erects paywall, nobody pays for content, and another irrelevant site bites the dust.

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

Except this won't free us from ads, actually the contrary as explained here: http://zen.lk/2015/07/19/Why-you-will-never-escape-ads-by-pa...

> The reality is, ad-blocking will be the absolute death of currency-free content.

The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...

> The reality is that it's not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web

The article is a 10-page document on why "surveillance" (tracking) is evil and effectively offers no solution outside of (maybe) micro-payments as a means to compensate, which directly counters the first argument you made that paying will never free us from ads.

So which is it?

Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing.

If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…

> Had you read the argument about paying for content not freeing us from being targeted by advertisers, you would have noticed it is based on showing buying power, something micro payment is not really doing.

"Not really doing" doesn't exactly encouraging. You are making assumptions based on an idea that's never been tested, let alone shown to work. I think it's an interesting idea that may work for some content, and may not work for others. But let's not pretend that the article is, in any way, based on a real working model.

> If you want solutions you can look at patreon, flattr, crowdfunded websites, wikipedia,…

Patreon, flattr and crowdfunding are all the same thing. Exchanging money for content/creation. This is not a new solution to the problem, they are all platforms for solutions that are as old as money.

Wikipedia is a non-profit that survives on donations. Pretending that every form of content should be, or could be, non-profit is as silly as saying that every form of content can happily survive on microtransactions.

Sorry I didn't understand what you wrote in the first part.

For the other part, the point was not to invent something new but to give a few examples of how to support websites financially without relying on ads.

I don't understand where you read that I said every website should/could be non-profit, everyone is welcome to try to make a profit out of a website but if this fails they should not point to their visitors exercising the ability given to them by the very nature of the web.

Neither did I say that every form of content can happily survive, actually if 9gag disappeared tomorrow this would not make me sad, but I'll take the opportunity to go deeper here. Let's focus on the need to monetize website which raises from the cost of hosting and traffic, which in turn comes from issue in how we do internet.

When we move away from the peer to peer nature of internet to centralized servers, we create the very cost I was mentioning earlier. When for some reason we went from symmetrical dialup to asymmetrical broadband it prevented us from hosting our own content at no additional cost.

So maybe we'll see something new arise where there will be no place for ads, maybe something p2p taking advantage of blockchain technology. There are already experimentation in this direction such as http://zeronet.io/

If it can't survive without abusing is readers attention, privacy, and security, then I guess the ship needs to go down like the titanic already.

And be replaced with what, exactly?

The call to arms over privacy, attention and security is getting old. Not because its wrong, but because it's never accompanied with an actual solution.

But that's moot because the ship isn't going to sink. Enough people will not use adblock to ensure that companies like Google and Facebook will always make some money off advertising.

So rest assured, the Titanic's will continue to float along. You are simply guaranteeing anything smaller won't. Including any potential competition for the Titanic's.

Maybe with nothing? There isn't some god-given requirement for there to be all these reviews about 3D cards. If readers refuse to receive ads and refuse to pay, then the site will go out of business and the content will go away. That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist.

Less content is not the end of the world. Probably some hobbyist will spend his own time and money to publish it in some form anyway. Or Guru3D will find some other way to survive? They've added a donation link - maybe people will be happy to pay after all.

> That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist.

Nonsense. That argument means all content is valued only by the numbers of ads viewed. By that logic Facebook is the best content. And they don't have to change by the sheer volume of people that visit it. Competition becomes even more unlikely because nobody wants to invest in a business that needs to millions of viewers to be profitable.

> Less content is not the end of the world.

Nor is it necessarily a good thing. Fewer options will just empower the organizations that happened to exist in the heyday of advertising. Converging power more and more while saying "it's a good thing, the market will right itself" is naive.

This is correct. I would be happy with the web I was using in 1995, to be honest. Most of the non-corporate content was produced by people who did so simply for the chance to talk about their passion and have an audience. I could care less if Sally can make a living off of her blog or not.

That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be.

I'm not a huge "free-market" proponent. But markets exist, and they aren't magic. They smove to solution(s) that the market wants / willing to "pay" for. Pay in broadest sense, money, eyeballs, time, etc. As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional.

> That's fine. If paywalls is the business model that works (I don't think it is for most content (it's really just not worth anything even ad eyeball time)) then that is how it will be.

This argument is already so tired. When you limit all options to one, that option has to be taken whether or not it is a good option. If everyone blocked every advertisement indiscriminately there would be no other option available but pay-walling. That isn't a good option because, as you said, most content will either die or be replaced by free content, which may or may not be as good.

> As a business you can fight a losing battle against the tide. Or you can ride it. Hoping the tide doesn't exist or doesn't apply to you, is delusional.

The only delusions are those held by people that think the tide is a good thing.

The reality is that ads are not going away. What's happening is ads are becoming a business that is only sustainable by enormous companies. Google and Facebook will survive and they will profit off of ads. Guru3D will not. The opportunity for competition will dry up, because you won't be able to profit with ads and you can't charge for what is already free.

I'd be fine with paying to access several latest issues of a periodical. A periodical might as well be fine with making historical issues available for free, since they'd drive more visitors to pay for new content, expectedly also high-quality.

Just because you don't like the argument doesn't mean it's "tired." It's absolutely true. I block every ad, I will continue to do so, and should content go behind a paywall, I will simply not view it. If there are enough people like me, content providers will be forced to adapt their strategies. That's the way it is.

Let me join in with a Hell Yeah. I'm exactly the same mindset; folks who imagine they can dictate my web viewing habits, are just going to lose a segment of the viewership outright. No amount of self-serving rationalization ("You owe it to us to watch our ads!") is going to change my habits one iota.

> If there are enough people like me, content providers will be forced to adapt their strategies.

For the most part the large companies will remain so because there will likely always be "enough" money in advertising to keep Google and Facebook going.

But you aren't something anyone in any industry is concerned about. You are a leech and no strategy is going to change the fact that you are a leech. You feel that all your content should come without cost and any means to monetize content you will either outright block or ignore the content entirely.

That's the way it is.

If you think the only options in the world are ads or pay wall, you are oblivious. There are currently existing, wildly popular content sites using a different model than either of those.

Whether the tide is a good thing or not. It exists. You can ignore it but you can't avoid it.

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

And...?

Industries where "person who pays for product" is separated from "person who consumes product" tend to have enormous problems because of that. They are inefficient because the consumer doesn't care about price, and they provide bad product because the person paying doesn't care about quality. Perhaps it is indeed time to consider crazy, wacky, out-there alternatives such as paying for content.

> What you call reality, I call a house of cards.

If the "house of cards" that is online journalism does finally collapse once and for all, ad blockers will have done a massive service for humanity.

Viewing a banner ad is a price I'm willing to pay. A full-screen ad designed to be hard to close, or with misleading cues to take you to another site, or with intrusive sounds? That kills my bandwidth and my battery? Not so much. Then there's all the tracking. It was the advertisers who broke the terms of the deal and now We The People are renegotiating.

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

If paywalls actually worked then we'd already see them everywhere. Why don't we? Because people don't want to pay.

The problem is people don't want to pay for anything.

Couldn't agree more. How to display content should be an absolute final decision on the part of the user. Adverts hijack hardware, bandwidth, screen space, electricity, and time, which belong to the user, not the advertiser or the site. Using adverts to make money is unethical, so I hope this site can change its business model successfully.

Are you writing about Napster or Ad Blockers? (Seriously; can you articulate a principled differentiation on which your argument legitimates ad blockers but properly censures Napster?)

I remember a time on the Internet before ads, when the only websites were made by geeks who were passionate about the topic. Then came the popup ads, followed by the popup blockers, banners never worked, then came contextual ads. Google made it quick and easy to profit from content and made content a commodity. Currently they are the #1 financier of web spam, and pay off ad-blockers to whitelist their ads.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. Ad-supported media is not free, it's costs are simply externalised. While we, the tech-savvy, may not click ads, somebody is buying those payday loans, lose 30 lbs in a month with this weird trick, get-rich-quick scams.

I'm more than happy to see ad-financed (mostly low-quality) content go the way of the popup. I have no problem paying for quality content (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Audible, etc.). The few high quality ad-supported blogs will then be able to charge for their content, since there will be no decent alternatives. As long as ad-supported content exists though, it will be a race to the bottom.

What you are describing is a world where only big, well financed, or well known entities can survive. In order to keep the amazing internet we actually have, we need to come up with a model that can be used by small upstarts to either serve smaller markets or to give them time to figure things out and become large over time. Requiring people to publish things for free will only result in the most extreme of views. Look at any Wikipedia article that remotely touches a controversial topic - it will likely present a strongly biased message towards whatever side the maintainer of that article feels strongly about.

The world where only the big players can win is the one we live in now. It's difficult for a small player to be heard when Buzzfeed-type click-bate headlines dominate the landscape. Switch it around, who would pay for access to Buzzfeed? On the other hand, I would pay for an expert's opinion on a topic I'm passionate about. You only need 1,000 people paying $10 a month to make a good living. To get $120k from ads, you'll need a whole lot of visitors.

But Buzzfeed et all will survive, since their content is already ads itself (see "native advertising").

And $10/month is a tremendous amount. Follow 10 sites and you've spent 1/10 of the average wage in my European country, and more than 1/6 of the minimum wage. It'll only lead to a balkanization of the web, with good sites pricing for wealthy American and northern European visitors, and everyone else being left out.

There was a web before commercialization (and an internet before that) where people published things for free. There are still topics that people are interested in and thoughts that they want to share and discuss. You just don't notice it now because it's all drowned out by ad-financed clickbait and ads themselves being reposted, reblogged, retweeted, etc. You don't even realize that there is a free signal because of the all the commercial noise.

People still publish personal blogs, comments, threads in forums, free software, help for other people, articles and data, etc. without getting paid for it.

> I have no problem paying for quality content (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Audible, etc.)

Funny that you mention that. Netflix and Hulu are not available in my country and my country is in the EU. As an american, you may not realize it, but paywalls are going to lead to a balkanization of the Internet, a process that is well on its way to being a reality.

This reminds me of the copyright/piracy debate. The copyright industry was screaming about lost profits , but would not change it business models. Well, it turns out, all they had to do was change their business models to something people actually wanted. Now piracy rates are falling where appropriate services are available.

Patreon (and youtube community in general) have, together with projects like gog.com, humblebundle etc. proved that people actually WANT to pay for content even if they don't have to. But only in the way they want to. Especially if that means they'll get more reader centric content, not advertiser centric.

Do you have anything for me to read about falling piracy rates ? (e.g. gamasutra)

From the site: "We review the Voyager Air 2 from Corsair, this portable storage unit allows you to connect it to USB 3.0 and WIFI. It actually comes in a 1 TB HDD model as well, which we review. This great looking device might be what you're looking for to move or stream your content from and with the latest Corsair Smartphone it might just be what the doctor ordered."

"One of the CPU cooler makers we do adore, Noctua today celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Since the introduction of the first generation NH-U12 heatsink in October 2005, Noctua's products have received more than 6000 awards and recommendations from leading international hardware websites and magazines, making them a default choice for quiet cooling enthusiasts all over the world."

That's the content.

This is not someone who has a legitimate right to complain about ad blocking.

I'm sure you could find plenty of negative reviews on the site as well.

Just because someone says a product is great doesn't mean they are being paid to do so, or even that they received it for free. It could just be that the product is great for the use case they reviewed.

"Blocking" ads is loaded language, and should be recognized as such. Not viewing ads can be done in a multitude of ways, but it's not like users are patching software to get there.

The web was always built to be adaptable to the end user device. The user agent was intended to act as the decision maker how to render the markup. For many years, browsers even respected the default foreground and background colors and font choices (sadly not many respect X resources anymore). CSS was designed to include an end user defined style sheet to override tiny fonts and other things that made web pages hard to read.

Not viewing animated banners isn't at all different from changing your base font, or not loading javascript. Had we chosen to call it "disabling" instead of "blocking" it would have been much more clear that this is an action that the user is and should be empowered to take. I do recognize that we're stuck with the loaded word for now, I just feel it's important not to forget that. The public discourse is dominated by media people, and their perspective is important too, but not more so than the technical one.

You bring up a terrific point. The ads are simply not loaded. The user is accessing an external server, and it's up to them what to load.

Indeed, a user could likewise load only the HTML and ignore all images, scripts, CSS and suchlike. The user is in control, and that's how it should be. I am not obligated to view ads any more than I'm obligated to view any other part of a website.

I am amazed that their response to adblockers is more targetted ads. My main reason for using an adblocker isn't to block ads, which don't bother me that much. It is to block tracking accross websites. Telling me that they will do more tracking in response isn't really going to change my mind...

... but it may change most minds. What bothers me about advertising is the visual noise, which amounts to a pollution of my environment. Better advertising can help reduce the need to rely on pure attention-sucking and so reduce the urge to block ads entirely.

I don't give a damn about tracking. All the doomsday scenarios that those in the anti-tracking camp imagine have not come to pass.

Sites need to consider going back to the pre-Double-Click world, where they self hosted and self managed ads.

I'd accept that without issue. I don't mind ads, I just can't accept the intrusive tracking, including being retargeted.

Me too. And there is no point to access the last two years of someone's browsing history to know that someone visiting a video game website is interested in video games or technology.

But what kinds of science and technology? Maybe our user has a bit of disposable income and wouldn't mind ads for high-end hardware he didn't happen to know about. Maybe she's interested in DLC for games she's passionate about, as measured for frequently of forum visits. Maybe our user runs a lab and would be very interested in high-end PCR machines.

You can do much better than "interested in video games or technology" if you know a bit about your users. This tracking makes advertising much less annoying (occasionally veering into useful).

Advertisers just have to accept that when a customer walk through their door, they will not have access to his/her bank statements, sexual preferences, list of acquaintances, medical records, gps locations for the last two years, etc. What information one can get from someone's browsing history is awfully invasive.

> Advertisers just have to accept

Advertisers will adapt. What you have to accept is more annoying advertising coupled with increasingly error-prone code in both ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers. The only one that wins is Moloch; everyone else is worse off.

> What information one can get from someone's browsing history is awfully invasive.

Is it? Advertisers don't get some kind of toast on their phones saying "Joe, 34 from Topeka with a toaster fetish, has just visited your site!" along with pictures of Joe and said toasters. That's a strawman that the anti-tracking people love to hint at, but it doesn't actually work that way.

What actually happens is that advertisers target broad categories. They say, "show this ad to midwesterners who've visited sites about toasters", and that's what happens. There's no secret dossier just waiting to be sold to the highest bidder for purposes always left unspecified.

Yes, centralized trackers do end up learning a portion of your browsing history. But you don't have to accept third-party cookies. You can run with an ad blocker. And you can just reset your cookie[1] state every so often. You can do any of these things. You'll just pay for your paranoia with a shittier web.

[1] Yes, I know about non-cookie trackers. Advertisers stashing information where it's hard to clear are scum. It's up to web browsers to make it easy to flush all server-visible state.

>Advertisers don't get some kind of toast on their phones saying "Joe, 34 from Topeka with a toaster fetish, has just visited your site!"

But the likes of Google and Facebook know exactly that. They have it stored somewhere and it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen by organised criminals, religious fanatics or oppressive governments.

This. Facebook and Google combined have probably enough data to blackmail most people in the first world.

Yes. If you're going to be responsible for your content, be responsible for your content. Don't write up great evergreen long-form content and then auction off key areas of your page to anybody with a credit-card and ad-network approval. Instead, curate products and services I might be interested in. Vouch for those the same way you vouch for the content. If you want to track everywhere I go, say so. (I doubt I'll patronize your site, but at least you'd be honest about it.)

The problem isn't that all advertising is bad. The problem is that we visit websites expecting one entity to own and operate it. Instead we get hit by a thousand entities, each with its own privacy policies and agendas. That's unworkable from the consumer side.

I don't think that's what will happen. Ad firms will come up with a server side API you plug into your website so ads can come through your site. You've just made the security problem worse not better as coming from the same site they are allowed to read everything that site does vs coming from iframes from different domains in which case they are allowed to read nothing.

No, the tracking becomes specific to the site visited (same origin policy), not cross-websites, and I don't have a problem with that.

Now there is also the debate of whether all sites deserve to be able to run javascript. I say no. But some people here think that even rendering a blog article should require a lot of client side scripting.

> No, the tracking becomes specific to the site visited (same origin policy), not cross-websites, and I don't have a problem with that.

You're assuming the server-side scripts won't share data with a central server.

They might but how would they correlate me on abc.com and me on xyz.com if they don't have some form of cookie?

Browser fingerprinting is the only way I can think of, and between the phasing out of flash, java and silverlight, and having javascript disabled by default, browser fingerprinting is pretty much toothless.

If they're talking to a central ad server they can tell it what cookies they're seeing.

Yes but how do you correlate the two cookies?

I go on site abc.com, which gives me the cookie abc:111 Then I go on xyz.com which gives me the cookie xyz:222

Because of the same origin policy, xyz.com can't access the cookies set by abc.com. Abc and xyz can communicate as much as they want on the server side, they will not be able to tell that abc:111 and xyz:222 are the same user (absent additional information: browser fingerprinting, email address if you have an account on both, etc).

D'oh! You're right of course.

Just a thought - if the ad network uses js code (hosted on abc.com and xyz.com servers), which loads images from the same domain (but it loaded in on a server-to-server link, and cached and served from the the domain you're visiting). Can they not just set a tracking cookie for that domain that they control with a unique ID, tied to browser fingerprinting, which is transmitted to the ad network?

So you visit abc.com for the first time, get an ad image served from the same domain (but was provided from the ad network), have the cookie set, the ID is noted by the ad network.

You then visit xyz.com, a new cookie is generated, which can be tracked by the ad network as the ID is the same.

So you now get tailored/tracking adverts without any third party domains being accessed by your browser...

Do you mean: I visit abc.com, abc.com serves me an abc cookie, then I visit xyz.com, and xyz.com makes a call to abc from my browser, so that they can use the abc cookie to track me?

Well, that is effectively using abc as a tracking server, and abc.com would quickly be added to the adblockers lists. Effectively this is the current model.

The other thing is that I may visit abc.com and xyz.com but this particular combination may be unique to me, i.e. I may visit nytime.com and ford.com which may use the same ad network, but you may not visit nytime.com at all and instead wsj.com.

Browser fingerprinting is a different problem. It does defeat the same origin policy. But I suggest you look at the sources of entropy: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ With javascript off, there is virtually no entropy, just your user agent and HTTP_ACCEPT header. You can't fingerprint a browser at all.

If you enable javascript but not plugins, then the Browser Pluggin details give you some entropy, although looking at the list those a relatively generic and would likely be the same on many machines.

If you enable plugins (flash, silverlight, java) then you have a massive amount of entropy but realistically all of these plugins are almost gone from major browsers.

That's not quite what I meant - the ad network provides abc.com with a js file, hosted on the abc.com servers. That js file creates an ID from browser fingerprinting, which is saved in a separate cookie, or an additional data point within whatever abc.com sets.

The ad cookie/ID is then sent from the abc.com server to the ad network (along with whatever data they need to determine what ads were seen/clicked), who collate all the data from wherever their js file is running, thusly allowing them to track you, without any requests from your browser being sent to any other domains other than the ones you directly visit.

The main reason this has not happened is that it requires the ad networks to trust the publisher on things like visits/impressions/clicks.

If your server has the ability to say "Hey, Jane doe saw your ad just now" when she didnt, thats a recipe for massive fraud.

You might say CPC would work and then just send to unique urls the ad network can track- This too wont work, as it allows the publisher to do things like auto-pop the link, hide it in 1x1 iframes, etc.. Overall its a security and fraud nightmare that involves huge cat-and-mouse games.

Not to mention the fact that the ad networks have no incentive to change. As more inventory drys up, the spends go up with them (competition increases) - Supply and demand, mostly.

At least in this scenario sites would be able to track how much of their poor performance is caused by ad networks. (hint: a bunch!)

Data sharing agreements would make self-hosting ads irrelevant. You would have to either not support organizations that would share your data with (or without) your consent, or better/stronger laws would have to be enacted to make it a regulatory issue.

It seems like by "targeted ads" they mean ads relevant to the site, not the reader.

Well there is site-specific tracking and web tracking. I don’t mind for the former. If sites could build in-house mechanisms and work more closely with their advertisers to serve me ads specific to my interests that’s fine with me-as long as those interests correlate with the content of the site. It’s when tracking becomes pervasive to the whole damn web that becomes annoying.

Are you sure that ad blockers are the only variable in play here?

"(October 2014) we had nearly 4.5 million hits (read) on our articles. This year (October 2015) we are at 4.4 million hits... Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day."

Is pageviews the actual metric, or is ads served the metric? Given the recent discoveries in how many "ad views" were actually never presented to the reader and were just phony revenue ticks, could it not be that you are also "suffering" from an ongoing reduction in phony ad presentations as the trickery is discovered and addressed?

I block ads primarily to limit tracking and bogus traffic, not to dodge advertising per se. I heartily endorse jfoutz's suggestions here. If you continue to serve quality content, it's the more sustainable business model long-term anyway.

Years before the modern ad-network paradigm, many media sites were subscription from the outset (e.g. WSJ, mercurynews). Some later went free, using ad networks to pay the way. Now, the trend is moving back to a subscription model. Those sites that do the punitive block-ads-and-we-block-you (e.g. washingtonpost) will find that people just go elsewhere for those stories.

nah, I and many others directly block Google Analytics = no pageviews in google dashboard. I refuse to be tracked by third parties whenever I go.

I turned off AdBlock on their site. A clean, attractive site immediately transformed into a supermarket sales flyer, except with animated ads. No thanks.

I don't know what the answer is. Display ads are dead or dying, though. I get a lot more revenue on my websites from Amazon affiliate links than I do from AdSense. Probably it's going to look more like paid reviews and advertising masquerading as content.

Don't people go to their sites for shopping purposes anyways?

What's the point of these sites if not to tell you what to buy?

People used to pay money to buy magazines like Computer Shopper just for the ads...

Don't care. Nothing shall be changed. You're on your own, guru3d.

Why is this down voted? Its what most people who use ad-blockers think. Its probably the most honest comment in this thread. HN members might not like it, but so what?

One of these websites:

"This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website."

instead of

"This website uses cookies to track your behaviour across this and other websites to better target and retarget you with ads. Identifying and segmenting you ensures higher advertising rates. Thanks."

Still waiting for the first website with an honest cookie warning.

"Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day. That's right, nearly 50% of the readers are blocking ads."

I'm not saying ad blockers had no effect on their business, but I find it extremely hard to believe 50% of their visitors discovered and started using ad blockers in the past year.

What would happen if I lazily assumed that Guru3D will follow the advertisement laws that exist in my country, and if the ad-network which they subcontract the delivery of ads breaks the law, Guru3D will then take full responsibility?

As it stand, most web users block ads and most web publisher block legal responsibility. Neither side want to take the hit when malware is spread through ads, people personal information is being illegally stored, and when laws that govern advertisement in news papers, radio, and TV is ignored on the web. Both side want all the benefits with none of the draw backs, and advertisement through websites will run closer and closer to the fate of advertisement through email.

AdBlock is one thing. However,

> Ghostery

These guys are complaining that users don't want to be tracked. I honestly can't take a single word in the entire article seriously.

It's getting tiresome doing this.

"We understand perfectly that some of you might find ads annoying" "Our pledge: we do not serve intrusive ads like pop-downs/pop-ups and takeovers."

From one page load of www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/guru3d-rig-of-the-month-october-2015,1.html this list excludes the dozen or so trackers and adverts that I don't have record of serving malware.

googletagservices.com (Angler, Neutrino exploit kits, to mention just the most recent)

doubleclick.net (Angler, Neutrino exploit kits, to mention just the most recent)

adnxs.com (Angler exploit kit, Flash 0-days on MSN.com)

openx.net (don't get me started on the cesspit of openx)

serving-sys.com

Main reason for ad-blockers for me: They try to distract you from reading the text you came for.

While in print ads don't (can't) do this.

Online they open to the whole page after some time, they constantly animate things to draw your attention from the text, some play sound, videos, left, right, above, below and in the text between paragraphs and capturing links.

Main reason probably because they don't really work.

I am also not a fan of annoying ads and maybe I am just a crotchety old guy, but, IMO, using an Ad Blocker and viewing content is theft.

If one is concerned with privacy, there are alternative measures such as cookie blocking options, legislation, etc.

If the ad formats are annoying then the right thing to do is to let the publisher know and work out a way to pay for the content ad-free or just stop using the site.

I also feel the same way about the bit-torrents and downloading copyrighted content. But, maybe I am the only one who feels this way.

I mostly agree with you.

But on a metered Internet connection the ads can increase cost. That's pretty lousy - I pay to get this extra content that I don't want, in order to provide minimal payment to the content creator.

Some movie studios realised that one thing driving torrent downloads was the fragility of DVDs / BluRays in the hands of children, and people wanted backups. So they started offering electronic downloads for people who bought the disc, or free disc replacements.

I don't agree. If I get a magazine which is mostly not financed by my payment but the ads, and rip out all ads and throw them away, or throw the ad supplements away and not read them, is it theft?

If it is theft blocking (aka not reading) ads online, is it theft if I just don't read them? And I don't want to argue, just interested, where is the difference in not reading them and blocking them? Is it morally imperative to read all ads in a magazine?

So I came to the conclusion, because I throw away ad supplement of magazines right away and don't read ads in magazines, me ad blocking can't be theft either, or not reading ads in magazines is theft too.

PS: Because you bringing up bit torrent implying people who ad block are also downloading films, well, I'm not.

So, if it is ok for you to view content while denying the content producers the ability to monetize that content, then would you also agree it is ok to take content from behind a paywall and display it for free on your site?

If not, what is it specifically that makes the first ok but not the other?

No one is denying content providers the right to monetize by blocking ads. The onus is on them to find a business model that the market will support.

@nwhitmore: No. I'm not proposing circumventing copyright measures. But I do not read ads a website presents.

I would not steal a magazine form a news stand or break a lock to get a magazine. But I throw away ad supplements before I read anything in a magazine.

> using an Ad Blocker and viewing content is theft.

Here's a different POV. Using an ad blocker is not theft: it's a negotiation.

When I click on a link to your site from a site like HN, I have not implicitly agreed to whatever terms you would like to impose on me. I can't even really know them ahead of time.

Instead, I'm sending my User Agent to negotiate fetching some resources. If I decline to fetch your ads, you can feel free to decline to serve me your content. Or you can give the content to me anyway. Your choice.

Really? What header does your browser send to my server informing me that you are blocking ads so that I know to deny you my content?

X-Advertisements: None

Which ad blockers provide for that header being sent? I've never seen it before and I can't find any information on it. Did you just make it up?

My answer was to your question:

"What header does your browser send to my server informing me that you are blocking ads so that I know to deny you my content?"

1. "Did you just make it up?" -> No.

2. "Which ad blockers provide for that header being sent?" -> Use a plugin in Firefox to set custom headers

3. Do website honor my header? -> Not yet.

Response 1: whether this question already has a technical answer that you find satisfying does not affect whether using an ad blocker is theft.

Response 2: a few sites are already popping up messages asking you to turn off your ad blocker, which is at least a partial existence proof.

Response 3: if you want to know whether I got your ads, use cookies or make the request url unique to me, and then check that your ad servers served the appropriate requests before allowing your content servers to serve me content.

But seriously, I shouldn't be required to solve all these problems for you as a user in order to not be called a thief. If you want a more explicit contract, then require a log in. If that adds too much friction, invent a better a better solution.

*Edited to remove the inflammatory suggestion to go out of business if you refuse to negotiate.

So, your viewpoint boils down to either I allow my content to be viewed solely on your terms or I go out of business.

Sounds like the type of negotiation the mob engages in. But, hey, as long as you get what you want, I guess it is ok.

I edited my response because I realized it was inflammatory. But to be clear, my viewpoint is that the client/server and viewer/publisher relationship is a negotiation. The publisher should make content available under terms they find acceptable, and the user should be free to refuse to view things that they find unacceptable.

I don't think it's right that publishers seem to view me showing up at their front door as carte blanche to abuse my network and system resources to the full extent that JavaScript allows. And I think it's wrong to characterize user pushback as theft. Other kinds of "theft" are criminal behavior. Pick better terms.

That's actually how all businesses work. If the terms of business aren't acceptable to your users, you lose the users and your business will fail.

Adverts are non-consensual hijacking of users resources, so you could argue that advertisers are committing theft. You're welcome to use a paywall on your site, or hide content from people using adblockers if you want to negotiate from your side.

That's pretty much the sum of it. And frankly, there's nothing wrong with that. It's how markets work. You provide something of value, and someone purchases it, or you provide something of no value, and the market refuses to buy it.

You make an interesting point about visiting a site that you are unfamiliar with.

But, for that really to be an equitable negotiation, IMO, these ad-blockers should send a header that informs the content provider that they will be blocking ads and the site can choose whether or not to serve them content.

In no way is blocking ads theft. The ads are using your bandwidth.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want some of my money you need to get it from the people who charge me every month for accesing you web page: My ISP.

They are the ones making money off the fact that I want to get on the internet and access content.

Too bad there is no reliable, independent mechanism for taking some of that money and putting it in a large pool to be ditributed to content creators. The amount you get is based on how popular your site is. The ISPs know exactly how popular your site is.

(Too bad I'm late to the thread. Nobody is going to read this)

you pay your ISP for internet access, not for content.

Sounds like a good idea at first, but... Who did we pay for TV content prior to cable/satellite? No one. You bought the hardware and thereafter the content was all free, supported by ads.

Cable access providers promised ad-free content, so people paid for it. Paying the access provider worked well. So well that it mostly wiped out the ad-supported over-the-air competition and left the cable cos as monopolies. Which enabled them to raise their prices and become filled with ads. While controlling what you could see and when, charging extra for some content vs other content, etc.

Making ISPs more like cable companies doesn't seem like a good idea for the consumer. And it won't make the ads go away.

Well in TV jargon "content" refers to advertisement and "feel" refers to what you think as content.

Isn't public TV paid for by taxes?

Anyways, I second you, the ISP should not collect money for accessing content.

Dude,

Just charge money. Have we all forgotten how commerce worked for ~5000 years before the ad-supported model came along?

Websites used to ask you to click the links because they got a fraction of a penny for your clicks. I'll send them my check for $0.001 to look at their page.

If they can't survive without advertising then let them die. Personally I don't see the problem. The few sites I care about that produce quality stuff (like https://lwn.net/) I pay for and that's just fine. The rest are nice to have (without ads) but if they go away it doesn't really matter - I'll just read something else or (shock, horror) nothing at all - I'm sure my life will continue even if they go under. Can't honestly say I care a great deal.

Edit: and as I guessed they would; the downvotes now flow in. Seems like people never like to hear that one can just stop using "stuff" and do something else.

I use ad blockers because certain streaming sites I visit are the worst in terms of pop ups. I feel bad that using a blocker for these types of sites by default blocks all other sites. Publishers need to get paid and we as consumers don't want to pay for web content. Non intrusive ads and ads are needed and should be respected in terms of allowing us the opportunity to make a living creating content and or enjoying content.

If we continue down this path it's truly going to be a wall gardened app world controlled a ton by Apple.

Lost of their income due to their bad service is not a your problem. You are just helping them to understand their mistake. Feel good.

The anonymous coward, who silently downvoted me: read «Gemba Kaizen», please.

Maybe you should start building a sustainable business model, instead of whining because people who are annoyed with ads and trackers started effectively blocking them.

If your content adds value to your visitors' lives, then charge for it. If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, then probably there is a problem with the stuff you offer not being valuable enough to people.

I don't want this to sound grumpy, and I don't mean to say your content is not good or valuable. It's just that I've discussed this topic a lot of times with friends and colleagues and there seems to be a common agreement that ads and trackers have become so invasive (visually and privacy-wise) that people are not wanting to see them anymore or to be tracked.

As always, it's about survival of the fittest and those who know how to adapt quickest. Find a way to charge for your content and build a sustainable business.

    > If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, 
    > then probably there is a problem with the stuff you 
    > offer not being valuable enough to people.

Not quite.

What people are willing to pay for has a large social/cultural/conditioned element. It's a crux of the entire problem.

The vast majority of people still attribute zero cost to ads. When you start charging $1 for your offering, now you're the one site among your competitors that's charging money. Maybe some HN nerds will care. Whoopdee doo. Nobody else does. The rest of the world isn't going to take their credit card out of their wallet when they can endure a banner ad instead.

Oh wait, they can just install an ad blocker the day they actually do care. Or maybe when their kid or significant other or buddy installs an adblocker on their browser like I did for my parents and they won't even realize the trouble it ever saved them.

See, I think that we will be soon on the cusp of a shift that needs to happen before we can replace ads at all, and it's more than just something a website can do by themselves by adding a paywall or whatever solution that doesn't work for most websites that people seem to conjure up in response to these issues.

So what they should do is, what Android apps do:

- when you first go to the website, you get the ad-infested website

- you can pay for the app, and now, no more ads. In Android apps, the amount tends to be crazy low, like less than a cup of coffee. Pay that and get no ads is a no-brainer really...

This assumes the app isn't ransacking your device for as much personal or saleable information it can find, in addition to the nominal purchase fee.

Information leakage between sites and apps on mobile no doubt varies wildly based on your configuration and willingness to accept apps requesting outrageous permissions, but I'd suspect web-apps to be easier to protect yourself from, as a user.

I'm in favor of a move from ad-based to paywalled content. It just feels more honest to sell your content than your readers (or viewers, visitors, etc).

There's also a mental hygeine aspect: I've noticed a pretty distinct correlation between my total exposure to online advertising and my ability to reach states of deep focus. For example, I've been finding it extremely difficult to finish books for the past few years. But since February or so, as my exposure to online ads has dropped to nearly zero, I've knocked half a dozen challenging non-fiction works off my hit list, and a few novels to boot. And it's not just mental stamina -- my moment to moment engagement and comprehension is also much higher.

This observation is anecdotal, and furthermore, poorly controlled, so establishing causality is pretty difficult. But I have noticed that when I DO browse facebook or other ad-heavy sites, I experience a significant drop in my level of mental energy, often for hours after I'm off the internet. It's as if viewing ads, which are designed to grab one's attention, forks a process in my brain whose task is to react to the ad content, thus depleting my brain-hardware resources. The social hooks make facebook a particularly bad culprit.

BUT, there's a big caveat. I don't want subscriptions -- at least, not on every site that sometimes puts out content that I like. That would cost me hundreds of buxx a month that I simply can't afford. There needs to be a decent micropayment solution so that people can buy the content that they actually want without the overhead of paying for a bunch of stuff they don't care about. I speculate that this would be a pure win for content companies. Right now, paywalls are more like "go-away-walls." If there were buttons on paywalls that said "Read this article for 50 cents," I would personally be paying for a lot more articles. There's probably even a good business opportunity in mediating these transactions to centralize signups and aggregate purchased content.

Note to website operators: Ad blockers are not just a way of disabling annoying content. They prevent intrusive tracking and spying. If you can find a way to monetize my views without tracking my habits and sharing them with third parties, I'll happily disable my extensions.

I have no idea what the practical ramifications of this complaint means...

What exactly is the fear of "intrusive tracking and spying"? What does it mean?

Are you scared that you're now going to get ads that target your demographic, such as motherboards, instead of ads that don't target your demographic, such as Alzheimers drugs?

I don't understand the problem with this.

If that's not the fear, then state the ultimate practical effect of what you fear, because right now it sounds a lot like a "made-up-in-your-mind problem that will never, ever affect you negatively".

I don't need to justify my right to privacy. All you need to know is that I don't want my browsing habits tracked and correlated across virtually every site I visit, by a small handful of companies that have nothing to do with the content I am seeking. The burden is not on me to justify why I disagree with these practices.

The burden is on you to justify your right to privacy. Otherwise it just makes you look bad, as if you're trying to defend indefensible actions. Remember, you're visiting THEIR sites. They aren't visiting your sites. They have something you want when you visit their sites, and you have to offer something in return.

If you're unable to justify yourself, then companies (both advertisers and media publishers) will proceed as they wish. Your privacy is not their concern. You need to make it their concern.

Right now ad blockers are just a mere stepping stone for these companies to track you. When they proceed with native ads (among many other options), it's going to be really difficult for you to block them.

Do you want these companies to move forward to their next step in tracking you?

With all due respect, advertising networks have been tracking people for far longer than there have been ad blockers and privacy guards. This category of programs was literally created in response to the existence of such networks. Tracking companies will do as they please, regardless of any steps I take to defend my data and my privacy.

The burden is on the shoulders of website operators to present meaningful alternatives to intrusive tracking as their core monetization strategy. It is obvious that those who do not will wither and die. Such is the way of capitalism.

The onus is not mine to explain myself for using privacy protection programs. It is theirs to recognize this reality and to pivot, or die.

Or they could just block you and others that use ad blocking, and work on the audiences that don't block them.

That would certainly be one way to pivot, and kudos to those that do. However, I suspect that the percentage of adblocking users will only continue to grow, giving this particular solution fairly diminishing returns.

>The burden is on you to justify your right to privacy.

Privacy is a human right. I am the only one who gets to decide what information I divulge about myself, except in the very small set of circumstances where my right to privacy has to be balanced against the human rights of others.

Nobody should ever have to justify one's right to privacy.

> Nobody should ever have to justify one's right to privacy.

You always need to justify you rights, since you should never assume those with power over you - the ones that grant you your rights - are willing to do that.

There is no such thing as natural rights.

Wrong.

> The burden is on you to justify your right to privacy.

That's absurd. The right to privacy is codified in many developed nation's laws and constitutions as well as the UN and EU charters.

That's like saying the burden is on you to justify your right to free speech.

> ads that target your demographic, such as motherboards, instead of ads that don't target your demographic, such as Alzheimers drugs

Surely this can be done based on the page the advert loads on, rather than the user? It would give a pretty reasonable approximation of "stuff the user is interested in" (I mean, they're reading this page) without the ick-factor of knowing they were 25-35, Male, located in Zanzibar, etc.

The meta-keywords used by Google could easily be utilised for this.

Is there a reason more sites don't do self hosted ads? Is there a general way these can be blocked as well?

If the ad is coming from their own server and displayed with their own custom HTML/CSS, I can't see an obvious way these could be detected and blocked in general.

    > Is there a reason more sites don't do self hosted ads?

Google Adsense (for example) is a live auction clearing house where you paste a snippet of code into your site that resolves into the highest bidder for the keywords on each page. You're done.

Meanwhile, hosting your own ads entails finding advertisers, wooing them, developing a relationship with them, maintaining that relationship, negotiating a contract, settling that contract, building an ad-serving system somehow, automating it somehow, etc. And that's if you're even big enough to attract anyone or even warrant the work to begin with. And the second you try to generalize it (which is what ad networks do), then you're back on every adblocker's default blocklist.

Why not build a generic system where ads are served to the server serving the website (which maintains a cache of relevant ads and serves them appropriately)?

That way you can get the benefits of a network + the benefits of serving from the same server that is serving the content

Yeah, I'm sure Adsense will let you proxy requests through my server soon or release some similar offering.

It would come at the massive expense of high-quality tracking and thus incur a massive reduction in ad revenue, but it's an imminent trade-off that beats unconditional adblocking.

I think everything is just waiting for the actual tipping point that forces everyone's hand like we always do. Adblockers are still the minority.

In other words, lazy content providers are complaining because user's are unwilling to conform to the model that they want us to.

Well, it's the model that works for almost everyone until some sort of shift happens.

For example, the ease of Adsense is the only reason why my forum is still alive. It's a medium-sized collaborative fiction writing forum with a userbase composed of mostly teens without money (I've tried scavenging for donations once).

Every year my banner ad makes me less and less money. And when it stops breaking even with its rent, I will close it down.

Now, some people in these threads, even perhaps yourself, would argue that my forum simply shouldn't exist since it's dependent on ads or because "I'm too lazy" to spend time trying to find a business model for a forum that already makes me almost no money, but it would be a loss for my users.

Self-hosted ads are at a competitive disadvantage, because they are not as targeted as ads that can track you over several websites.

I'm curious where we reach the point where ad blockers tip the scales here.

A certain ad blocking list contains /ads /advertisers etc. in its default patterns

I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Buying access to stuff online with a credit card is totally inconvenient, and even worse, you have no privacy then. I guess this is part of the reason why sites financed by advertising have become so prevalent.

Personally, if there was an easy and private way to do so, I'd much rather pay for content than getting "free" stuff financed by ads. Inevitably, sites will be extremely reluctant to write anything negative about products from companies that buy lots of ads. For this reason, I consider many of the reviews on tech sites, for example, kinda worthless.

So, I'm glad to see this ad financed business model break down. Buying access to content with a cryptocurrency could be real easy (and relatively private). But it does not help that many governments want you to calculate capital gain/loss everytime you make such a purchase.

I think governments ought to make an exception in the capital gains tax for small personal purchases. Maybe promoters who loudly proclaim that cryptocurrencies will soon replace "legacy" government fiat currencies are part of the problem. No wonder governments are so negative. But I don't think cryptocurrencies necessarily will replace fiat currencies anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies work great for small purchases online, but I wouldn't want to put my lifesavings into one - oh no! My computer got hacked - my life savings are gone!

Edit: replacing the entire capital gains tax with a wealth tax would probably be even better.

I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.

Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time.

As far as I understand, Google is trying to do this. But it does not provide a 'no ads' guarantee and there are other ad networks with even more obnoxious ads.

You mean something like Flattr?

> Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time.

The problem with this is you must allow a third party to track every page visit and/or page view time, which is unacceptable to many people that use ad blockers.

If you are OK with persistent, pervasive tracking, I think this is probably the best solution.

Ignoring the page view time bit, couldn't this (theoretically, I have a hard time imagining it practically) just be handled invisibly by the ISP that already knows every request you make?

You've described the situation pretty accurately here I think. I wonder, though. What if a browser extension generated tokens and stuck them in headers, and then sites sent those tokens on to the central authority after some appropriate transformation? It seems possible to set it up so the central authority would have enough information to remunerate sites without having enough information to know what users are doing.

Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger.

Not only is it not private but it also will not scale for microtransactions on a massive scale.

> Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger.

Ok, I admit I'm not a Bitcoin expert. But if I buy Bitcoin with cash, or mine some myself, is this really a problem?

Yes. It's unrelated to how you acquire the Bitcoin, there's a soft limit of something like seven transactions per second across the entire ledger (it's not exactly that because the difficulty of mining a block is set based on the current hash rate, but it's set so that on average a block is mined every ten minutes; in practice, it will usually be much lower, since that figure assumes only minimum-sized transactions are used and the block is full, which is rarely the case).

Yes, because in the best case you're still creating a single pseudononymous profile and one identity-tied transaction will deanonymize the whole thing.

Even without that, enough usage activity means a shadow profile can be inferred that is effectively tracking you, just without a specific name. FINCEN has been developing this type of technology for decades.

And this is magnified when you're talking about essentially penny transactions - unless your cash bitcoin dealer is willing to see you every week for another $2.

"Anonymity" means little in the context of ecash. The property we're really looking for is untraceability, which bitcoin does not have.

Interesting. Apparently, there is much I don't know. I wasn't necessarily thinking about micro transactions, though. It would be nice to for example buy a 1 year full access to a site like Guru3D easily and anonomously. But yeah, I guess the profiling you mention is still a problem.

You're being downvoted and I think that's unfair. My reading of this article produced the same notion. My willingness to pay (in the form of being the recipient of advertising, and the associated loss of privacy) is lower than the value I receive from most content. Therefore I block the ads except on the tiny fraction of sites for which I make exceptions. Similarly I rarely cross a paywall.

Ergo, my willingness to pay is non-zero, but current fiat-currency payment services are inadequate to represent the negotiation.

I would be willing to buy (e.g. with fiat cash or another cryptocurrency) a block of quota, denominated in a well-constructed unit, for access to content. This quota could be automatically decremented within a framework of personally definable rules. It is analogous to the GB blocks I buy from my ISP, but the unit might instead represent the market value of information.

Bitcoin itself is not answer - there are limitations that preclude microtransactions at scale, and traceability issues - but some distributed cryptocurrency will be the solution. It will take luck and genius to design & establish. The Ethereum project gives me hope that a solution will be found within a couple of decades.

While there's obviously nothing wrong with directly asking users to not adblock guru3d, the long-term solution is definitely to find another business model.

I'm not a regular reader of Guru3D, but would it be a stretch to imagine that the community would willingly pay $1 a month to see the content you put on the site? Maybe you can shuffle only people with adblockers to the paid version of the site, and allow people with ads to view for free.

I pay to use the Consumer Reports content. I think if Guru3D became the 'Consumer Reports' of gaming hardware, then they could probably get paying viewers. Here's some other ideas. As long as they are doing test builds, how about selling detailed instructions for those builds. And if they get all this hardware donated by vendors, how about selling the rigs they build. Perhaps they can get a "brand" markup - sort of like selling NASCAR pace cars.

"Guru3D.com is a costly operation."

Well now how costly? Just one dedicated server? multiple? Usage of AWS? Distributed data centres?

Staff? accountants, designers, moderators? Or automated scripts and volunteers?

If an organisation appeals to me to support them, I will, if they outline where and why they need it. Like Wikipedia for example or like OpenStreetMap. To say "oh it costs too much and we have lots of hits" is not an appeal to rationality.

For the record, I don't want to hear or see any ads, ever.

The internet is great because it provides a channel for information to cheaply get from creators to consumers at global scale.

Sadly, all of that infrastructure and creation takes time, energy, money, etc. It's not free.

I don't take it for granted that advertising is the only way there can be an internet. I'm pretty confident that if everyone starts using adblockers, the internet will continue to exist. But will it be the internet I want?

The internet that gives me Netflix and Amazon Prime I can take or leave. The internet that gives me endless blog posts, reviews, and Q&A sites I can take or leave.

The internet that gives me API documentation, etc., chat, email, and Wikipedia I will fight for. I will pay for it. I will pay higher taxes for it. The rest I just don't care that much about, and I really doubt that many other people do either.

I disabled uBlock Origin and decided to see what ads they have on their site. Pretty much all of them were retargeting sites or products I'd looked at before, but had no intention of buying.

Only one was really relevant to their site, which was a gaming keyboard. The same screen real estate could be used to to link to their articles and reviews of products from their sponsors, which would be a lot more relevant and actually provide value to the reader.

Oh and whatever uBlock Origin blocks, made scrolling really laggy when it was enabled. I think I'll stick to using it thanks.

When running a business, you need to spend 50% of your time on the business-part and the other 50% on providing content, serving your customers, etc.

With ads, you let the ad-network do the business-part, while only taking 10%-50% of your turn-over. You can spend 100% of your time making content, etc. Especially small businesses are happy with that model.

The ads where good for content, as more content was created. But it's now leaving a huge gap of opportunity!

Then there's also product discovery. We need new ways for people to discover more content that they are interested in.

Potential buyers want sources to learn about products, compared them, have uninfluenced and honest reviews to help them make decisions.

Vendors want their products reviewed. And I think they understand that reviewers need to be financially independent to be believable, so directly paying reviewers does not work.

Both sides will find a way to get what they want, there is clear financial motivation to keep the review business alive. Money is not the problem here, only how to distribute it. I do not worry about this kind of content.

Until security experts stop recommending ad blockers as a first line of defense against malware, I consider it the obligation of content providers to fix the system.

I barely remember Guru3D, but what I still remember was the full page animated ad for something that made the site completely unusable. It was a while ago, like 8+ years and I remember it being some huge green slime dripping all over and blocking the content and the whole animation ran for like 30 seconds before you could read the page.

I added a rule in my hosts file to not load that ad as it was before client based ad blockers.

Can anyone here tell me how much a site like Guru3D makes if I visit and read one article?

Is it like a fraction of a cent?

RPM (revenue per 1000 pageviews) varies wildly by site, geo and platform (desktop/mobile). If you're a site with cat photos it's about $1. If you're about mortgage refinancing or roofing, it could be $15. The first pageview in a user's session is more valuable than subsequent pageviews on the same site. So if your 1000 pageviews are from 900 users, your RPM will be $4 but if they are from 200 users (5 PVs per user), then it'll be $.90.

RPMs on desktop/tablet are much higher (about 2x) compared with mobile. RPMs for U.S. traffic are also much higher (4x) compared with say traffic from India.

Interstitial ads pay much higher (about 3x) compared with standard banner ads.

Over the past 2 years, RPMs from Adsense have fallen about 40%.

EDIT: All of the above applies to 3rd party ads sold on exchanges via ad networks like Adsense. Direct-sold ads have much higher RPMs, usually in double digits. But small publishers either don't have the traffic volume or the sales staff to sell ads directly.

This is a good point and destroys any kind of discussion about micro transactions for me. Micro transactions are NEVER micro. You dont see free games asking you to buy $0.1 worth of gold, they want $10. The same would happen if guru3D wanted to charge individual users. NYTimes made maybe 0.1 out of every user visiting them, but switching to subscription model they milk ~$12 per month minimum.

I have hated ads from the time of dialup Internet when I was paying by the minute for access, ads increased my bills - I was paying for them.

The same now where o pay based on my internet usage, on mobile it is not cheap, and the cost of ad's is again on my shoulders.

So, I don't want ads. Simple.

It would be a little bit more convincing if they had actually tried alternative revenue sources (paid subscription, associate links to Amazon, donations with a variety of providers like Flattr or using Bitcoin) and found no other viable solution.

I tried what they're asking - the linked article is noticeably less responsive than the same one without ads. Especially scrolling - it skitters visibly. It's definitely less pleasant to use the site this way.

This is the Internet, whose users tend to be highly innovative. If your business model is built on serving (good) content with ads and people don't like ads, then you will have a problem. It is a pity for some, but inherent to the Internet.

I have seen many web sites turn from a hobby into a small business funded by ads, who are now feeling the pinch. They either need to find a new way to monetize what they offer, or turn into a hobby project again. (Which often saves a lot of money on horrible UX. Generally after 2007 / the uptake of smartphones a lot of good features were eliminated and sucked into the black hole of UX and dumb simplifications to accommodate the average Internet user. Everything is tailored now for the average user, and the power user is left out.)

Related post, inspired by this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10488967

How much benefit does tracking and personalization actually provide in clickthrough percentages? Is it very large or is this companies grasping at threads to stay alive?

Times are changing, again. I block any and every ad.

or you know, change your business model to suit your market.

what would that business model be if their primary goal is to write interesting tech articles? Is producing this sort of content sustainable at all?

Ask LWN, they seem to be doing fine.

Ad blockers block Google Analytics? Why?

User tracking

the real issue is the pages are getting slower when ads are served. it is really annoying.

Whenever I read something like this I feel really bad and turn off my ad blocker, as soon as I do that I'm usually greeted with 2 minute long unskippable ads, sites re-skinned with ads, targeted ads, ads that are just straight up spam, ads that play in the background and ads that require me to fill out a survey. I want to support these websites but online ads don't pay nearly as much as TV, radio or print ads but that are 10 times more annoy, detrimental to my privacy and if I ever click on them I know their almost certainly going to be some sort of phishing scam or virus from eastern Europe. You know it sucks that people are blocking ads but online ads are the absolute worst, if online ads functioned and payed as much as print advertisements than I don't think anyone would have a problem with seeing ads but we all know they don't. Only thing I can recommend is that these sites change their business model or at least augment it with a mixture of merch, internet begging (patreon), premium memberships and being more choosy with what ad networks they choose to partner with.

well nkurz pull the plug before it is too late. ads suck, no one ever wants to look at them.

But we want to read their reviews and participate in their forums.

How much in $ terms is that worth to you?

Work it out and send guru3d a payment

Obviously nobody does that.

My favorite example is when you see a popular github repository with a donate button (Flattr, Bitcoin address, etc) only to realize they've made a whole $14 in the past year. Wow, thanks world!

It turns out that ads worked because the user didn't actually have to do anything. They didn't have to get their credit card out of their wallet, something they rarely do on the internet.

And when they do, it's to give money to a large corporation like Netflix or because Jimmy Wales managed to beg for donations in a more invasive annoying way than a banner ad ever was. (You know, I never once had to see the face of the founder of AdultFriendFinder in one of their ads.)

I hope we find a next-coming middleground that changes the culture of what people are willing to pay for and how they do it. But the fact that giving your credit/debit card number to someone gives them (and anyone else) unlimited charge license on your account is not helping.

You say "nobody" but I know that's not true because I am "somebody" who donates.

Ad blockers mean one isn't prepared to pay for your product. Personally when I am prevented from viewing content because my Privoxy has been detected I tend to just go elsewhere. I find ads a significant burden on my concentration and well being.

Yet in print media I don't mind. Often I read trade mags specifically for the ads, they are great market research.

I mean "nobody" in the sense that it doesn't scale and people like you, god bless, do not replace ads for the vast majority of websites.

At least not until some sort of shift happens in how we pay for content which I think is imminent.

> Ad blockers mean one isn't prepared to pay for your product.

Perhaps rather: "Your product is not worth taking out a credit card and paying for" which applies to most websites. There are massive barriers to explicitly paying for things, even just psychological.

In an abstract sense, ads are like vignette windshield stickers that let you cruise past tollway checkpoints when the alternative is to have to stop at a tollboth even if it's just to pay 10 cents.

People have tried to create services that replace ads in that abstraction, but so far nothing has stuck. I think the post-ad solution needs to be just as mindless as ads if it's going to replace them.

Yeah, ads work because users don't do anything. That includes actually clicking on the ads themselves.

Ever use Adwords or Adsense? People click on ads.

Fewer and fewer, but they still do and with enough volume to prop up entire businesses, small and multinational.

And you trust advertiser-funded reviews?

Eh, a better approach is probably to just detect adblock and put up a "please don't use adblock/donate here button".

Maybe lightbox you from time to time asking for the same.

> detect adblock

One does not simply "detect adblock". Browsers are user agents. They run code in an environment optimized for user safety and convenience. These environments will always be able to tell your site's server- and client-side code exactly what it wants to hear while showing something different to the user. You can't stop it. The client will always win.

We may eventually get to the point where clients use various computer vision techniques to recognize ads. If I can clearly distinguish jiggling, improbably large elf anatomy below a flashing yellow "PLAY THIS ONLINE RPG" from content I want to see, so can an algorithm, at least to within an acceptable error rate.

Advertisements that are so borderline that they can't be detected as advertisements are ones I probably don't mind seeing anyway.

Spammers have already tried all available countermeasures and they've completely lost. Spam is so completely ineffective that it's actually dipped below half of email traffic.

No, the client will always win in the end.

Actually, it can (and is routinely) done. https://github.com/brockwhittaker/Detect-Adblockers

It's an arms race. Advertisers may be able to detect ad blockers in the short term, but eventually they will lose. That's because users control their machines and advertisers don't. Widespread use of adblock-blockers will only hasten this inevitable defeat.

The techniques used by the project to which you've linked can be trivially worked around by detecting the script itself and either not running it or telling it what it wants to hear. (Come on: an iframe? You really don't think a browser extension could lie about that? I expected at least some kind of server-client traffic correlation for a serious ad-blocker-blocker attempt.)

That's because users control their machines

That is unfortunately not the case in all situations now (e.g. mobile devices).

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html

It'll be interesting to see how it pans out. Some sites will play nice. It's easy to imagine buzzfeed just loading their image content from adservers though.

Except this will be blocked by script blockers such as noscript which used to #1 most downloaded extension for firefox.

Just clicked the demo http://www.lavancier.com/adblock/ and: "Ads are enabled in this browser. :)"

Now guess if I block ads?

In the end the client is bound to lose.

The only reason the client can separate certain forms of advertising from content is that advertisers - by and large - don't care. The more advertising and content is intermingled the more difficult it will be to separate them. The intermingling is already happening as we see in the rise of content marketing.

Don't we already have adblock detector detector technology that remove those banners ?

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