Opera Browser adds integrated adblocker
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Also uBlock Origin for ads and blocking images larger than 200KB.
Saves a lot of mobile data for me.
You stopped leeching their bandwidth without any opportunity for them to earn any ad revenue from them!
Allowing leeches on your website doesn't seem that beneficial.
I stopped adding comments, starting discussions, I allow some non-intrusive ads when I enable them, I have quite extensive whitelist in ublock.
The end user cannot see some content on site A because of adblock detection but he can see it on site B, he down votes the link of site A on sharing networks, he asks for a policy banning or advocates against linking to site A because content can be found on B.
I've seen this play out many times, and at that point you're not just losing traffic from ad block clients you're losing traffic overall, have people actively promote your competitors and earn a bad rep (and that rep might not even be objective - in general if people remember anything it will be "don't use A" not the "why" of it)
Is it what you call a leech ?
I'm not convinced that's the case. They're usually quite different demographics.
Likewise I have the right to reject you if you can't comply with my terms.
In this case, I see internet content divided in half -- content for those who can pay for it, and content for those who can't. Not all websites should survive. Not all users should be able to experience everything on the internet. "You get what you pay for" is not wrong. Exclusivity can lead to quality.
"This site is not supported on browsers that block ads. Please switch to a different browser or disable your adblocker to proceed"
Those are terms. You can choose to ignore or circumvent them but they're still terms.
But underlying point is that you have no moral or ethical claim to how people view your content, just as you have no moral or ethical claim that a person cannot rip ads out of a magazine. If you want them to pay for your content, the Open Internet is not the place you should be publishing.
HTTP is not a contract.
Getting past ad-blockers isn't exactly rocket science. This is an arms race which will not end well.
Either advertisers get to track people or they don't. Either people get to block things or they don't. Once upon a time there was little attention to these things, and advertisers got to slurp up data en masse. That is still the case, just an inch less so today.
Perhaps this is a bit cruel, but I believe in a divided web experience, one which is ad-supported and the masses browse and are tracked, the other which is curated, high signal, and directly paid for. Like with most things in life, you get what you have the leverage to get, and in general that means what you pay for.
Scientific literature is run through this way, and I don't think they're hurting for ad revenue. I think exclusivity can protect quality. It's okay to have a paid-for news channel, and a free news channel for the masses, a paid-for Reddit, and a free Reddit. You get what you pay for.
If the usage of ad blockers increases, you can bet that those not using ad blockers will be squeezed and exploited and have a thousand popups and intrusive ads thrown at them in order for the sites to recoup the lost money.
So those using ad blockers are making the web worse for everyone.
They are doing that already, they are maximizing the amount of ads they can shove down user's throats. This is nothing new and ad-blocking didn't change that. You'd think adverstiser would understand by now the reason why people use adblocker...
How is it making the web worse for people using adblockers? Because they are a subset of "everyone"
You're assuming that 'good behavior' of users should somehow stay the hand of marketing companies. It ought not. A good marketing company will do everything to extract full value insofar as it is harmonious to business goals -- ad blocker or not, the search for the perfect recipe of ad delivery will march on.
That's one data point that can give you an idea of what the general reaction was.
Let's find some more:
Your move.
Actually it feels like there are more people creating content than reading it these days. There is plenty of interesting content out there, so if people can't access something, they just move on to the next one and never return.
We are in an arms race between the people and the corporations.
As long as you can see content on a website, there will be corporations trying to monetize that fact. And as long as corporations have to operate within the borders of an open system there will be people trying to circumvent their methods.
The UK is already moving in that direction.
This is yet another battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing; you either have the right to run whatever software you want on your computer, or someone else is the de facto owner of your computer through their ability to control what software is allowed to run. These battles need to be fought now, because it's hard to fight over property rights once someone else has already taken possession.
Just think, how many time do you spend sharing content in social networks for free? Most of the time it's uninteresting content it's true, but some people are actually interested in sharing highly interesting content made by themselves with the world for free, both in social networks and out of them.
May it be due to personal promotion or just out of some societal need.
True that the content provider (unlike the creator) will probably always want to be paid to provide it, but in that case, the monetization comes from other products and not from advertising. Think about GitHub personal pages for instance.
Its a little sad that they changed so much that they have to reinvent the wheel now.
You're selling out your readers, who are harmed by that. The cross-site aggregation that Google does is far more harmful (see: "pattern of life" analysis) than a smaller tracker with bad security. This makes you just as responsible.
My point is its the users responsibility to protect himself, if he goes on the Internet without any idea whats going on its just naive and my ads are the smallest of his problems.
Yes, it's a good idea for people to defend themselves. That doesn't make publishers any less responsible when they betray their readers to aggregators like Google.
> As publisher
You're telling your readers they need to talk to some other host - which may be owned by Google or similar - to get part of the page. Then you claim that it's their fault for being stupid (really: ignorant) enough to listen to you?
I dont want to be tracked personally. That does not mean that other people who also use Windows, iPhones, Dropbox and whatever even care. Why would i tell them obivous things they dont even care about?
Not sure what gives you the idea that i would depend parts of my site to external services, i dont even use S3/AWS even thought thats industry standard. My sites work perfectly without ads, i even include ads in a way that they get invisible when blocked, so there are no UI (or any other) issues for people who prefer to block them.
I am not going to play the internet hero and miss out on my awesome extra income just because some people have radical thoughts about Google. It may makes you happy that i only have ads on sites which are worth it, but all the others have Adsense, so i assume you dont care.
Edit:// I also use Cloudflare if that helps ;)
If you use ad blocking, just be sure that you and no-one you are close to depends on advertising - directly or indirectly - to get their bills paid.
So damn childish to have such a sense of self righteous indignation that people turn off ads but expect the Internet to be free.
A business model is only viable if the culture in which it is operated finds value in that model. If the culture no longer values an Internet advertising based business model, then they'll have to find a new approach to get their bills paid.
This is neither good nor bad. It's just business.
Whatever money I make from ads - we don't host them, but we do buy them - I accept that it is contingent on people choosing to accept them. That doesn't produce a moral duty to do so myself, any more than selling cod means I'm morally obliged to eat it at home. If people stop buying cod, I'm not outraged, I just accept that my business model must change.
A "you get what you pay for" world is not necessarily evil, and exclusivity can protect quality.
I am not responsible for your flawed business model.