The Ad Blocking Wars
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).
Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.
The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?
How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.
I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.
I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
Moreover, it may help to make fun of the ads they still see. (on websites, outside at walls, etc.) This may improve their awareness, and hopefully later their critical thinking.
BTW, when I started not to watch TV anymore, I expected that I would miss something, but I didn't miss anything at all!
Friends told me about the few cool series I missed, and I simply bought the DVDs. It is a huge increase in comfort, watching those at my own pace, in their original length rather than the blown-up-with-ads length.
Otherwise, they watch Australua's State run kids channel, which sounds awful but actually tends to run somewhat subversive shows like Yoohoo and Friends (universally panned by those who watched the original Korean version, but not by me or my kids!) and Adventure Time. And not a single advertisement, except promos.
Still have to find something for my daughter, who also loves those shows and we encourage her to watch them, but she is still into Shopkins (despite my best efforts of discouraging her) and other shows designed to appeal to her and her friends.
But she said watches absolutely no commercial TV. This is more by happy accident than design, because commercial TV in Australia is so completely rubbish that there is literally no need to watch it - ever!
I can vividly picture the "Where did my show go??" moment :)
Example: the Disneyland 60th Anniversary TV Special. Disney/ABC is particularly fond of advertising cross-medium Disney properties/investments on Disney-controlled television and radio broadcasts. For instance, Radio Disney definitely plays a disproportionately high number of DMG (Walt Disney Records + Hollywood Records/DMG Nashville) recordings.
My spouse was watching it. I saw 30 seconds of it and said, "this is a long format ad for Disney parks," before tuning it out.
The long-format ads are rather common on the local news broadcasts. Some stations show more than others.
Consumption of advertisements should have age restrictions similar to cigarettes.
We haven't had cable/etc since 2005 and there was a period between '07 through maybe '13 where out kids weren't exposed to any TV commercials except for while visiting grandparents during holidays. The few commercials they saw over the years left a terrifyingly strong impression and desire for those products; they'd remember many, many months later. We still don't have cable, but unfortunately the expansion of content available on AppleTV has meant commercials jammed into everything. Contemplating returning to Netflix disc-only service and ending subscriptions to streamed content.
It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...
I'm not much worried right now. I'm worried about where we are going, especially with machine learning. Take a look at the story of Target identifying when a girl was pregnant before her own father knew. Then apply this to any area where you have any reason at all to keep a secret. Maybe you are gay with parents who will rather you be homeless than living in their home. Maybe you have a mental illness but rather the rest of the world not know about it. Maybe you like democracy in a country where you aren't allowed to. Eventually they will find ways to tease this information out with all the data they have tracked about us.
If it is unconsciously influencing you how would you know if it is only doing so "a tiny amount"?
Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0].
I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes.
Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Attrib. Richard Feynman (|p| < 0.05)
Regards
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29
My mom works in a library and they are in the process of throwing all the books away, and creating 'social spaces'.
As much as the Internet has made information easy to get, there are a lot of high quality publications that I can no longer access eg research papers, art and design books.
Advertising is about making consumers aware of a product or service that they may use if they were aware of it. This seems reasonable and generally beneficial.
Marketing is about using psychological techniques to manipulate consumers preferences such that they want to consume products and services that they otherwise wouldn't.
Unfortunately this segment of the industry had grown rapidly over the past few decades and techniques to exploit our cognitive deficiencies have improved tremendously.
However, to claim that marketing is inherently "manipulative", or that manipulative tactics are even a significant part of it, seems a little ill-informed.
Y Combinator's motto is "Make something people want". To the overwhelming majority of practitioners, this is exactly what marketing sets out to do.
Though I've never heard "advertising" and "marketing" used to describe information content vs. persuasion, it would be a great shorthand.
Maybe micropayments are a better alternative, but the current implementations all rise the barrier of entry in a way that makes them undesirable.
I have tried to think of a better system and I have written it down as a free "micropayment standard". You can find it here, I am looking forward to any comments.
https://konstantinschubert.github.io/pennytoken-spec/
I am also working on a reference implementation over here: http://micropayment-service.boosted.science/
I'd be happy about some feedback.
We don't live in a bubble; we're a product of our surroundings. No aspect of the world is benign.
The fact that ads may "change you" is not an argument against advertising, because it doesn't distinguish advertising from anything else, at all.
It seems to me there is a moral judgement happening here. But, what is the appropriate way to distinguish moral manipulation from immoral manipulation?
Communication – even honest communication – is designed to influence other people. I'm trying to "change you" with this message. Should this message be blocked?
Yes/no?
What is the difference?
Where exactly is the line between "manipulating" and "changing view"? There are many associations and causalities studied with regards to human mind, should I be guilty of manipulation if I create a promotional poster using colours which are associated with some particular emotional response? In the end this is another of the cases where intent is everything, and for better or worse intent cannot be measured.
Ads are fully paid by the seller, and exist by definition to serve solely the seller's purpose. In addition, ads are expected to "look and feel" like they were in the customer's interest, which makes it even more clear that this is all about manipulation.
I have to say I really dislike ads, and would like if product promotion was done in a way most benefiting society in general, but the points that manipulation and changing views are very close, that ads change your view is not the bad thing about them and that we need to be careful about regulating ads (both legally and morally) as not to harm other beneficial things is very legitimate.
There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation.
Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question.
One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content".
If the internet was meant to be a medium for paid content, then why has so much content been shared through it "for free" beginning in the late 80's/early 90's and continuing even today?
I certainly do not know. What I remember is that only a minority of the population were avid www users when the public www first appeared in 1993.
So, in 1993, why upload "free content" that would otherwise be under paid subscription?
For the novelty of it?
To jumpstart the www?
To entice people to use the www?
Regardless of the reason, the end result is that the genie is out of the bottle.
The sharing of content "for free" started early on and continued unabated, even as www usage grew.
Today, if an internet subscriber seeks "content" she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone, except her access provider.
Greeting users with a deluge of advertising is not going to change the facts: users are continually presented with free content that they once would have had to pay for. The deluge of ads is not a "cost" of the content. It's just a new source of revenue for those who want to play www middleman (who should be very thankful for all the money they have made without ever having had to create any real content). At the same time, as a result the signal to noise ratio has become a serious problem for many www users.
(Users are also presented with enormous amounts of fake, garbage "content". That only highlights how open and inexpensive content distribution has become.)
It is undeniable that users can block the ads and other garbage and keep the content. The content is not going away. And the www will still keep growing.
With the barriers to distribution so low, it is no surprise that users should have to filter out some garbage.
The only surprise is how long it's taken them to start doing it.
What's nice is that filtering can be automated, in the same way the generation of ads and fake content have been automated.
There was time in the history of email before the ubiquitous use of spam filters. And there is a time in the history of the www before the ubiquitous use of ad blockers. That time is coming to a close.
If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s.
Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...
That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.
No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.
Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined to try.
It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."
I don't know about that. I'm a consumer. I use the internet to search for things I'm considering for purchase. Tires for my automobile, landscaping services, holiday trips. After searching (and prior to adblock sw), I'd see ads related to my searches. They were relevant.
Many (most?) ads are horsepucky and annoying. Some are not.
I am not defending ad-based models for dissemination of information and news as the one true way. Just disagreeing with your extreme statement.
Of course, unless you are Google or Facebook, you have very little ability to lower the 'global' shittiness of ads, but you have a lot of ability to make your own ads more lucrative and targeted.
Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.
One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place.
I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer.
The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for.
Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue.
But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.
Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem.
Instead I use an adblocker. And I try to be choosy about which ads I block, so that it's only the really obnoxious ones that kill my battery life or are a thinly veiled vehicle for digging through my kitchen wastebin for fingernail clippings to collect. I feel no sense of guilt about this.
If they don't want me accessing their site over this, and curating their ads to be less corrosive is not an option for whatever reason, then perhaps they can set up a special clickthrough agreement asking me to consent to abusive treatment before I view the content. Perhaps that will make it easier for us to negotiate a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
Really, after using it for some time I can't see how people who have used a browser with plug-ins on the desktop can stand using one without them on mobile.
I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.
Really, I think those work better as examples of how little value advertising actually brings to the Internet.
That's a strange leap of logic.
>Wikipedia
Asks for donations, it doesn't show ads.
There are many other websites that are internally funded in other ways that exclude direct ads.
1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available
I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries is paid for by these ad systems.
If you work in tech the first thing you should do is take the moral argument and throw it out the window. Moral systems of obligation do not work well on the net. You run into one of two conditions quickly. The first is immoral operators/providers will push moral operators out of business (free services where you are spied on by unknown agents, but the spies pay for your usage, such as free email has been for years). Or, immoral users sharing other people's work for free. Some of them want to share everything freely. Other just want to share work that is difficult to find legally. Paid services don't work well because they quickly become fragmented leaving the user to buy Youtube Red, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc because each content producer wants to maximize their profits. Digital piracy succeeded because of its utility. There is low to no cost to the end user and the end product had more utility than the paid product. Pirated movies didn't have ads. They could be played on more players. They didn't have country content restrictions. DRM didn't randomly fail. They by definition are a product of a free market competing with other piracy groups.
Of course Hollywood has a huge amount of power and has the FBI as their lapdog to prevent their product from being infringed. The ad industry does not. You will see more of a push for them to push ad blocking as a type of legal infringement.
I'm a touch reminded of the Lloyd Dobbler buy/sell/process monologue from "Say Anything".
Full disclosure I we work in ads...
At no point in this did I ever agree to have anything other than the requested data sent to me. And at no point did I see a screen that said "please watch this ad to view this content." The ad was just sent anyway.
If you need me to pay money to consume some content, then why aren't you asking me for money? Or if I'm "supposed" to view an ad, why isn't that agreement formalized?
Basically, it's my computer, and I'm not restricted by any kind of agreement to watch ads. So why should I?
What possible moral grounds are there that says I have to allow you to serve me extra garbage data that I never consented to receiving, and even more extreme, that I am somehow obligated to consume the advertising that I never consented to receiving?
If websites weren't putting 6+ ads on a page, each with iframes in iframes several layers deep, it wouldn't be so bad... and you know what else... if the ads were delivered first party, then the ad blockers wouldn't be able to know the difference.
What is the difference between lynx and an ad blocker?
That's what the law says actually. Not trying to be snide here but unfortunately the law does not allow for sovereign domain over one's own body (at least in the US -- and elsewhere) in many cases. Though I realize you are asking in regards to advertisements.
For instance, apps that use dark patterns that make it difficult to dismiss an ad without "accidentally" clicking through the ad...are these cool? Or would you say that one simply should not use the app?
An app is not analogous to a junk page with no useful content. You installed and use it repeatedly in spite of the ads because it provides some sort of benefit.
Any app which contains a clickable element which leads to malware infestation, or shows children inappropriate content, is malware. Regardless of whether that button is on an ad or elsewhere, and regardless of whether it is contrived to make it easy to press by "accident" or not.
An ad that constantly interposes itself to be clicked by accident is merely annoying, and probably counterproductive (users will give the program a bad rating).
To annoyed users, I would say "don't use the app".
To malware purveyors, I'd ideally like to say, "3 to 5 years".
So, the relevant analogy is between a page of some value and an app of some value. If ads weren't a problem on pages that fit this description, then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Annoyance is annoyance in any context, even if it stops short of outright malice.
I also wonder why they treat the front page of their online site so different than the front page of the paper. Today I opened nytimes.com and 1/2 the window was filled with a Hilton ad. Have they ever filled have the front page (or even just the half above the fold) of the paper version with an ad?
So I'm not a fundamentalist that thinks advertising is evil. I probably am a fundamentalist when it comes to the ad-tech that watches what I do to opaquely build a profile around me.
Why are you there then? The fact that you spend your time there, that you spend both your bandwidth, your cpu time, etc.. and theirs, means there's something "valuable", it's probably way less than a cent, but it's value.
That's the beauty of ads, even though the value isn't much, it's still enough. I don't want to pay 0.1 cent, but that ads does it for me.
> But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
That's freak, stop going there if you wish for their death!
If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market.
Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.
- 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads.
- Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords.
- Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading.
- Video ads that start playing automatically.
- The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch.
- Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it.
- Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer.
Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.
In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion.
At some point enough is enough.
It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to start ...
I take huge issue with that. I pay for cell phone service. I should not be used to derive additional revenue for another channel. It's single use not multi.
Sure, if you live in a cave. TV and movies are saturated with product placements. Grocers receive fees to give products better placement in the store. And it's amazing how many placements happen in health care--drug company sales reps are just the start of it.
Ad blockers are going to be like applying pesticides to insects. Those that don't die are just going to breed offspring that are that much harder to kill.
Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?"
Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple. Apple."
Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer"
Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials' advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)"
This is not a war I want to keep escalating.
A long, long time ago, I did data entry for a local newspaper of campaign contributions records. At that time, I learned what an "in-kind" contribution was. This was when someone would, for instance, provide food for a campaign event. The candidate who benefited was required to report the dollar amount of that food as an in-kind contribution.
Payment in kind is another term for barter. The reporting requirement is so that public political campaigns could not hide sources of support by failing to report barter-like transactions.
And you shouldn't mislead people by saying Apple does not pay for product placement. It does pay. It pays via barter, rather than with cash, but it pays.
Sent from my iPhone
So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them.
Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.
You mean it's only the 95% that is making the rest of you look bad?
As a lot of online content falls under entertainment, if it came down to it, I'd be happy to unclutter my mind/reduce procrastination by restricting my browsing to non-essential content, rather than eat ads.
Seems part of why the frenzy is heating up is that many media sites merely regurtitate news and do not produce any unique content, but are ad and tracker heavy. So, they stand to lose, even in better-case scenarios where some people are willing to pay for content they value.
What used to be "ad blocking" is now part of an anti-virus solution.
The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads showed me that toilet paper was on sale somewhere nearby, that's something I might whitelist.
So instead of bombarding people with stuff they don't want in a context that doesn't make sense - ads for products on the sidelines of other unrelated content - we build a platform where people can get as close to the in person shopping experience as possible from their home. Obviously there are limitations to this from a tactile standpoint, but by and large consumers have shown that they don't really need that to such high fidelity.
https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2013/07/a-user-personalization...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ
It's scary just how much Minority Report has predicted has come true. It's almost like the movie gave advertisers a playbook.
If I'm looking for something to buy:
1. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid reviews. This quite often means not giving much credence to review mills -- CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly lesser extent.
2. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) are often what I use when seeking a specific option locally. I suspect thes are underappreciated.
3. Classifieds systems. There's a reason Craigslist took off like it did, though its quality/relevance have been lagging for some time. It's still ground zero for housing ads.
High quality recommendations mean a lot. I happened to be reading a blog through one of my rare unfiltered browsers, and realised it included book recommendations on the sidebar, for which the blog editor was highly qualified to offer assessments and endorsements. The state of advertising is so bad that I had missed these previously. The blog would be better off putting those recommendations into posts or other content less likely to be filtered. First time in quite literally years that I'd had the least sense of missing something.
Half the ads I see on the internet are for pickup trucks, something I'm clearly not going to click through & buy.
Interestingly enough, I did buy a truck I don't need recently...
Much as I find the practice annoying, a large stadium or other facility endorsement programme has a sticking power for brand awareness which a microtargeted, microsecond-auction online placement doesn't. Much the same as investing in streetfront retail space speaks to a certain confidence in your own products or services.
Don Marti and Doc Searls have both written on this many times and at length.
Assumedly that measurement can lead to more impactful ads, but we are awfully new to programmatic advertising for that to be proveable.
I do know that advertisers believe targeting is valuable.
Better IMO is to look at broader measures of response. Multiple campaigns with various metrics -- coupons, response codes, promotions, differing Web URLs, etc. See what has a better measured response as an aggregate on desired outcomes.
The problem with ever-more-intrusive-and-objectionable advertising is that it turns people off.
I've largely abandoned commercial media, will consciously avoid stores whose advertising (or products) are annoying, and keep winnowing down the list of mobile service providers who are even vaguely acceptable to me (if I can possible swing it, I don't carry a phone), due in part to consideration shown their own customers.
I'm hoping that eventually those negatives will be large enough to sway practices. Google are actually in a position to have an impact, I've encouraged them on this before.
The question wasn't "What would you do if you were looking for something to buy".
The question is: "What would you do if you were a business and had something to sell?"
Make a high quality product.
A trusted third-party reviewer (Consumer's Union, CarFAX, Kelly Blue Book) helps.
Anecdote: the last really big-ticket item I bought (automobile), I'd had positive experiences with two manufacturer's products previously, but really didn't care for their current offerings within the product class / price range I was seeking. The vehicle I did buy was one I considered based on its Edmunds review -- best in class, multiple years running. Some years on, I've been happy with the purchase (though of course, post hoc rationalisation is a common fallacy).
For other products, other signifiers matter.
On G+ I detailed frustrations looking for a decent LED cabinet-lighting system. I'd exhausted local, online (Amazon and major hardware/lighting store) sources. A recommendation from my G+ contacts was for Ikea. The specific product didn't work, but Ikea had another set of lighting components (separate cord, transformer, remote switch, and lighting elements) which has worked excellently. Took a few weeks longer than intended to find what I was looking for.
Otherwise, I rely strongly on what local retailers will carry and stand behind. Ikea, for some products, turns out to be a good source. Factors depend heavily on what it is I'm purchasing and just how it will have to function.
High-quality product is nothing without leads (i.e, potential users, buyers, downloaders, etc), and one way to get consistent, reliable way to get leads is through promotion.
Then there's branding and awareness, which is probably what most ads these days are meant for.
What's the difference between those two? Competing companies will occasionally edge ahead with clever ads, but in general they just cancel one another out. Having marketing exist isn't a "win" for companies, unless they have no serious competitors, because their competitors also have them.
One difference, perhaps, is that consumers probably get worse products due to ads existing. Ads create an additional path business success, even with lower product quality.
In the no advertising model things simply wither on the vine with no support to keep them going.
Smart phones are an obvious example. They existed for ages before a powerful marketing company pushed them to the mainstream (plus the usability improvements). That sparked a technical revolution...
First, I think you mean "less valued". That's generally what happens when there's little demand for something, or when there's a good substitute at a cheaper price.
Second, if all the free, evil ad-sponsored content on the internet is of such "low quality", it certainly would make such services more valuable, as it would offer something scarce. Their conspicuous absence seems to indicate something is amiss with this analysis.
As I said, these services exist, they're just not very prominent.
That doesn't mean they're not valuable, it just means people don't think they're valuable, and I'm not certain that's a rational decision.
I think if you asked people whether they'd pay say £10 extra on a £300 appliance to be reasonably sure it doesn't have a hugely annoying design flaw, a lot of people would pay.
But if you ask them to pay £10/month for access to a website that gives them that kind of information (even if they can cancel it after one month), they feel like it's a waste of money.
>if all the free, evil ad-sponsored content on the internet is of such "low quality"
I'm not saying the content is low quality, I'm saying the advertising itself is a low quality form of product information.
Good service, good products, both go a long, long way towards places I want to buy things. I mostly put items on my Amazon wish list when someone recommends them, not based on ads I see.
The dozens of domains and tons of javascript are all there as part of an effort to establish that the ad has been served to a human who might concievably be a customer for the product, and not a robot or some sort of third world ad-viewing farm.
Couldn't Samsung, now releasing their new phone, buy a website's entire ad space for a month or two, let's say techcrunch, and tell them to serve their new phone's ad themselves? Samsung is in for the eyeballs just like when they buy those huge outdoor ads, but even better, no intermediaries.
The publisher would even optimize the HTML5 ads for loading and rendering speed, and have a selection of them so they could rotate them. I believe it could work well for physical items.
If Samsung's marketing people are in Korea, I'll show all Asian IP addresses their ad, and then show some other ad (or ads) to the rest of the world.
Of course, Samsung may notice the low volume, so a better scheme is to also load their ad elsewhere, but placed on the page so it's not visible.
If you look at the Javascript that gets served with the ads, there is generally a hunk of logic that tries to confirm the ad is genuinely visible, to try to deal with that last bit.
That whole "sponsored tiles" thing was actually incredibly thoughtfully designed:
* Third parties provide tiles to Mozilla, who gets to vet them, etc.
* Tiles get put into bundles hosted by Mozilla and carrying metadata which can be used to target.
* The browser periodically downloads bundles of tiles and client-side, the browser decides based on browsing history and bundle metadata which tiles to display.
Nowhere in this process did advertisers or even Mozilla get to know the browsing history of the end user. Nowhere in this process did advertisers or Mozilla get to know which sites in the browser history caused the decision to display a particular tile. All storage of history and decision-making on what to show was done client-side-only.
The more I think about it, the more I think something like that needs to be discussed as a real alternative to how things are done now.
It's irrelevant if the ads were selected in the browser or not. You'd still have to download a lot of advertising that was irrelevant. And advertisers wouldn't have been happy with just client side choosing, it would have evolved into Firefox tracking you.
It was a very bad idea, and remains a very bad idea. I sure hope Mozilla never tries it again.
This points to a deeper problem, one not trivially solved via technology, of credibility. There've been several instances of technical solutions to problems for which I had a great deal of initial skepticism, some warranted, some less so.
I was aware of both wireless networking and VOIP in the late 1990s, though neither broke through to mainstream for some years. Trust in the integrity of the underlying protocols being a chief concern (not entirely unwarranted).
Challenge-response email anti-spam systems have a similar problem -- your CR system may be entirely legit, but other peoples' might well be spam-harvesting engines or otherwise bogus.
Sponsored tiles requires a great deal of buy-in before it can gain mainstream acceptance.
If there's a good description of the whole thing, might make for a good HN submission.
Next would probably be that the advertisers, fearing fraud, want the publishers to use a third-party ad server with reporting that they trust.
Only after that comes concerns about behavioral targeting and tracking, and the absence of that affecting ad revenue.
Finally, if they thought about it, they'd realize that ad blockers would just switch strategies and carry on blocking, so it hardly seems worth the effort.
Tracking makes advertisements much, much more expensive and thus profitable.
I don't even mind the ads so much as the delay.
If ads came from the sites own domains, this wouldn't work.
That should be enough information for cooperating servers to target an ad.
Yes, they can try to "fingerprint" your browser into a unique hash but that method is more reliable for desktops than mobile phones.
Imagine a dozens of customers with identical iPhones sharing the wifi at Starbucks or the airport. (Everybody has the same ip address.) Sniffing for unique markers such as counting installed fonts and/or plugins isn't going to work on smartphones like it does on deskttops. Therefore, generating a cookie with an id is more reliable. Of course, people can negate that by configuring their phones to block cookies but it appears that most consumers don't do it (probably because it breaks other things such as banking, sports, etc websites.)
Since advertising revenue from mobiles is growing faster than desktops, and in some cases exceeds it (Twitter mobile ads), it doesn't look like ad networks will favor fingerprinting over cookies. (That's not to say some sophisticated ad networks don't blend both techniques.)
Say you have two users on Macbook Airs using auto-updating Chrome (which has bundled Flash) in the same office or university, and both came in through Google.
Is this an unlikely scenario? Not really.
spins up new server
setups ad service
spend couple days fidgeting with open source ad software
ads deploy to subdomain ads.domain.com
people start blocking ads.domain.com, assuming ads.<>.com wasn't already in your blocklist
redeploys ads into domain.com/DEFINITELY_NOT_ADS
people start blocking that URL
its basically a cat and mouse game. most people don't have time for that.
if you have a small client base though you can probably get away with selling a promo on a per month basis.
That part can be entirely generated on the fly. Even more so you could put important content in random generation parts to foil the people using blockers on occasion.
From the user privacy side it's also mixed as there are still large scale efforts to link up users across sites and devices.
I'm fully aware though that I'm not the mean audience for adblocking.
Dedicated ad-blockers, such as uBlock Origin, apply heuristics which are specifically tuned to advertising signals -- hosts, domains, and, as noted in parent to your post, various HTML and other entity clues to advertising content.
And for us it's also quite simple in my eyes. There are ads and we block them. There are ad-block-blockers and we just don't visit that page again. There is enough other content to read. If you don't believe it yet, have some faith. I avoid paywalls and ads since I was able to use a keyboard and never lacked stuff to read. (And in fact if you look at my amazon history you'll see that I actually pay quite a big percentage of my monthly income on written content, it's just not blogs I'm paying for)
If you look at both paragraphs it's easy to see why there is no war. We don't need these content providers who push ads onto us that we don't want. So there is no way they can achieve their goal. They can fight as much as they want. The same as the copyright industry.
That's the most awesome billionaire name I have ever seen.
On any given day of the week, we're all in the market for something, right down to a tube of toothpaste. I've always thought that if advertisers knew, from the source, what that item was, their focus would shift to the value of the offer versus today's focus on identifying potential buyers.
It's like in those movies when they tie you down to a chair, forcibly open your eyes, and blast you with tormenting images.
I never even once bought something I saw advertised online (in sidebars, for example), because I mostly think they are scams - my parents are more gullible though, and I feel bad for them, so I block their ads to protect them.
Video reviews from some people I trust are other story.
And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(
1) I have money. I got the money specifically so that I could use it to buy things.
2) Give me options of things to buy, and I will buy them.
3) Show me things that are relevant to my interests, and I will probably buy those things.
Advertisers seem to be failing (badly) at 3. Ads that I see are not only intrusive (full page CSS popovers have gotten to the point where I just disable javascript), but they're also irrelevant to me.
WHy?
Newspapers and magazines were the "tablets", the "browser" already in front of us.
Ads on those didn't move and shout at us (well, not aurally). And they gave us at least some idea of what was out there. And yes, they did "plant" impressions in our minds.
TV and radio made (from my perspective) the ads more obnoxious. Something they continued to ramp up in an escalating war for attention.
These were still one-way communications: Broadcast. Although, a "primitive" ad-blocking did arise there. Push-button presets on radios. And then, that device dreaded by advertisers: The TV remote control.
And, ads started appearing across channels in the same timeslots. They became harder to escape, en masse if not in the individual. Except for "saturation" scheduling. And, suspected at least per some of my viewing and listening, synchronized slots across channels.
These ads were seemingly more intrusive. LOOK at me! LISTEN to me! I will own your children's will -- and yours, despite your disclaiming, subliminally.
And technology brought the next form of blocking: In addition to time-shifting, home recording devices allowed us to fast-forward, eventually to click past ads. Notice, here, the influence of advertisers. Ad-sensing software in VCR's (remember that?) was challenged and, where possible, crippled. The elusive "skip ahead" button was contested and crippled. I seem to remember that it worked somewhat well on my parents' Tivo. But, Comcast put the kibasch on that, and with their Comcast box they are back to fast-forwarding.
Now, on the Internet, advertising is a two-way communication. Both overt and covert (e.g. analytics). It can also now serve multiple, covert purposes, e.g. malware.
And... people are seeking to escape it.
1) Because they can initiate the communication, search out information, immediately, themselves. 2) Because the ads are actively hindering their attention, focus, and consumption of the information they are seeking. 3) Because the ads can actively screw them over.
Are we going to get measures that "lock down" our devices and web delivery, to serve the roll of advertising? Or, are we going to alter the model in the face of this paradigm shift? Is that two way conversation going to be leveraged to better serve the consumer -- THEIR definition of better served? Or, are entrenched interests going to just keep shouting louder? Creeping more into our personal lives? Putting our data at risk?
Locking down the Internet, for the sake of their money?
Someone's going to find a way to leverage that two-way communication in a fashion that gets adopted.
I reach back to one of my favorite tripes -- an accurate one: Opt-in.
When people start opting in, of their own will, then you'll know you have something.
It's not going to be based on trickery. It's going to have its foundation in being genuinely useful, for both/all sides.
Finally, I'll say that I'm very glad for the open nature of Internet and Web design and protocols, up to this point. Leaving the smarts at the end-points has enabled this challenge to come forth. It's left "the small guy" with a good measure of control and choice. Up to this point. It is my client, and it will do what I want.
So, I actually have the choice to opt-in. Now, give me something worth opting-in to.
We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement.
And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING.
Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what advertising told them (e.g. that smoking is good for your health)... now, thanks to the Internet, people can inform themselves and are ready to look through the veil of ads and see the shit.
And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much.
Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and how many today... I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now.
There's only one solution for companies that will be long-term successful: create high-quality products that consumers can tell their friends about.
Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average
Western person saw a day and how many today...
Advertising is an equaliser and the experiences of those half a century ago are a meaningless comparison.
create high-quality products that consumers can
tell their friends about
That's not fair.
Edit: fwiw, I don't mean this rhetorically or combatively. I'm genuinely curious about what someone in your position thinks about the asymmetry of the exchange.
Since we are talking about fairness, how is it that publisher takes no responsibility when their website is used to distributing malware? Where is the responsibility when the advertisement on the website pry on the elderly, stealing their personal information to sell to call centers that target elderly people with fraudulent subscriptions and other schemes?
My ad blocking stays on until the advertisement market start to behave online as they have to in the offline world. That never happened for email, and my spam filter is always on as a result, and I doubt it will happen for the web.
Why are advertisers willing to pay you $15/month per user? Because those users buy the advertisers' wares with a hefty "advertisement-tax" on top of the "real" price.
It would be far better for content creators to create valuable content and charge for it than to rely on the dubious ethics of most advertisers.
For a time, I paid for a SMH online subscription, but then I discovered that a. Half my comments were still not reviewed or even published, with no explanation. I was STILL tracked by up to 60 ad trackers every time I went to their website. And the content of the Herald started to degrade more and more (no, I don't care about Kim Kardashian, and I never will. And it's not acceptable to have sentences that drop whole words, often in ways that make that sentence unreadable). So I stopped reading and paying for the content.
Now if I could find a decent newspaper I could pay a reasonable subscription fee to, then I'd do so. To hell with advertising. If your business model is reliant on it to survive, then wither on the vine and die for all I care.
A lot of online product falls under entertainment/content and most users will not pay for non-essential services; they'd simply find alternatives. Even those willing to pay something want to pay one fee at most and with so many content sources, competition to be the chosen paid source is exceedingly stiff.
A business dependent on advertising, is a business about to fail.
For instance, if you have a CPM of $15/thousand-ad-views, then to get $15/month, your users would have to view 1000 ads a month, or 30 per day. Is that right?
[EDIT] Alternatively, assuming a CPC of $0.05/click (which I gather is pretty typical, though this varies a lot), each of your users would have to click on 300 ads a month.
Publisher gets a cut, for providing a place for the ad, having made the consumer come to it, and also for providing information on the consumer's interests. This is the current situation.
But the consumer would get a cut too. For renting his pixels, his CPU, his internet connection, his eyes, his brain. He would get to veto types of ads he dislikes. He would get to say he only wants 30% of ads to be displayed (and let the crowd define these 30%). He could partitipate in surveys, share his buyings lists, share events of his life (ex moving to a new city), in exchange for better revenue, or deals.
This (tiny) revenue really could help bootstrap microtransaction. On top of that, if the NYT can benefit from the microtransactions, the NYT will talk of such a program. Adoption could be boosted by all the news outlets.
Would participate as a consumer? Do you think publisher, advertisers, announcers would participate too?
What is really needed is a concept for micro-transactions - transactions that may even go down to fractions of a cent!
If you're a newspaper and you're trying to sell an article (e.g.) for 20 cents, it's not possible unless you use Bitcoin, and even then it's a hassle.
Adblock Plus might actually be in the position to introduce a platform for this - in contrast to Flattr, they have a huge userbase, a massive number of clients for their opt-out scheme... I'd gladly put, say, 10-20€ a month on my Adblock account, and enjoy a web free of paywalls, advertising, malvertising, video eating off my mobile data...
https://medium.com/@rayalez/somebody-should-create-a-youtube...
tl;dr - I think that youtube red model would work really well for this.
Aka permission-based marketing. Most common examples being email and SMS subscriptions. Most studies of marketers actually conclude that email marketing is their most effective tactic.
Don't overthink it.
Advertisers will pay users directly - through some kind of micro-payment process.
Users will choose which sites they use to view the ads and obtain their revenue through.
Websites will compete for users by providing services or content, that users may decide to pay for from the revenue they receive from advertisers.
The advertising abuses and the tracking will stop when users reward only the advertisers and websites that behave ethically.
The above is a simplification of course, there's a long way to go before it happens, but I think the advertising world will grudgingly accept it eventually.
This is complete nonsense. If we remove the advertising, those companies might lose money, but the functions we as users perform over the www would most certainly continue.
More importantly, there might be some decentralization and movement toward an "edge-focused" medium more resembling the Internet's end-to-end roots. This would make the internetwork much more useful than the one dominated by middlemen monopolies like the one we have now.
The money to pay for ads does not come from selling ads. Ask yourself where it comes from. Those are the businesses that must endure.
Perhaps, but how do we measure that?
I was surprised to learn recently that advertising for the past century has only grown at pace with GDP, i.e. it has continued to be about 1.29% or our economy: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...
But it's still possible that advertisers are buying an increasing percentage of our time and attention. I would love to see a study that attempts to measure that, though it sounds like a tricky task.
For example, TV ads were terribly expensive because there was only a limited number of channels and limited number of slots. A billboard required sending a team out to put up a new sign. Radio and magazines were also somewhat limited forms of mediums which allowed their price to stay high.
Now with digital mediums where ads can be changed on the fly prices have dropped dramatically. One would assume there is a supply and demand curve that directly influences the price. This shows in online advertising where there is almost unlimited supply, the cost/payoff for each ad is very low. In mediums where the amount of advertising is fixed, the SuperBowl for example, the price for ads is at an all time high.
Make sure you sell your Google and Facebook stocks before that time.
Pretty far off, but this concept scares the hell out of me.
It's like a SciFi Romantic Comedy.
Also, I don't believe that ads will ever be merged with the content in an indistinguishable way. Authors (at least ones that take themselves seriously) would never allow that.
All that powerful adblocking tools will do is force native advertising to become dominant.
Kind of ironic seeing those are the two posterboys for companies going balls deep into AI.
Cool. Actually, right now, I have NI* that does that.
*Natural intelligence.
Yes, and it takes an enormous toll on your brain. Seriously, I really feel tired after having to use a non-adblocking computer...
I will guarantee you that ninety-five percent of the population would just stare at you in bafflement if you hit them with this Adbusters-style rhetoric. You want those things, which is fine: more power you! But most people don't care. They are using adblockers because the ads are intrusive and slow down their devices or burn up the battery. If the ads were not intrusive and destructive, they wouldn't take the trouble to block them.
That "we want to be free of proxy wars" comment is especially wrong. People love proxy wars! It's no different from rooting for your local sports team. You have a thing you like for whatever trivial reason, it's entertaining to watch that thing fight with another thing. It's a standard element of human behavior.
Maybe if it had been like that from the beginning, but now, I see no turning back.
Adblockers started as a thing for techies and while we may care about tracking, malware and whatnot, my grandma uses Adblock because she thinks it looks nicer and loads faster. Now that she has it, I don't think she or many other ordinary Internet users outside techies, would willingly go back to see ads on websites again, even if the websites promised that their ads are less intrusive than before. No ads at all is still better.
It's just that people want the things behind ads more than they don't want the ads. In a way it's an example of capitalism doing well.
If consumers really don't want to see ads, they won't.
An example of advertising working well, I see the Massdrop mailouts periodically. These emails come in a predictable and respectful format which tells no lies about the product. Attractive products clearly win on Massdrop.