Advertising 'accounts for half of data used to read articles'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
They haven't done the maths, but I suspect that each ad served over mobile data earns the mobile carrier far more than the advert earns for the page that hosts it.
Mobile carriers should be banned from charging for data involved in serving ads .. and given the option of blocking them instead.
Edit: your solution is much less technically complex, and less intrusive than carriers inspecting traffic for billing purposes though
Not that this would be popular, as people would just click "no" on the "pay 1c to read this page" dialog.
If Ads were much lighter and better behaved, I there would be such a problem with advertising - Both for the publishers and the consumers.
On desktop chrome, my default profile runs uBlock origin and blocks all third party js & frames. Much faster, & you can selectively allow 3rd party content.
Three, the UK Carrier mentioned in the article has unlimited* data plans, every extra bit sent over their network costs them more, that why they're looking into ad blocking.
* Subject to rate limits for "aggressive" use.
That's why most website try to 'engage' the users with full screen nags when you arrive, they are trying desperately to know if you are a human or a bot, and that's their latest attempt at it (until the bots catch up that is)
The 'users' are rather removed from the advertiser->agencies->publishers->content providers->websites spinloop, yet all of a sudden they are being blamed from trying to shield themselves from the torrent of crap.
The true, real victims are the people who try to advertise stuff, and the users at the other end -- all the advertiser's budget is siphoned down that chain of intermediaries, and the 'return' they get is ... wind as less and less users want to see their stuff anyway given the deluge.
If you're able to do attribution at the impression level, you're far less worried about clicks. With that level of tracking, you can build out an attribution model that accurately reflects the value of an impression and not waste money.
If you want to accuse humanity of favoring corporate interests for the past century and longer, that's definitely your prerogative, but please stop acting like this is a new phenomenon.
Do you have a third way to facilitate this business model that's likely to succeed?
But how it does it? Tracking your every click across time, across the entire web? No, that's completely new, utterly unprecedented, and a thing the consequences of which we haven't even begun to unpack.
There's two issues here only one of which I think is worth fighting:
1) Do companies have the right to serve advertisements in exchange for consumption of their content? I'd agree they do.
2) Do companies have the right to track your every move across the web and use that to improve the efficacy of #1? Absolutely not.
If companies have the right to serve advertisements, then they also have the duty to ensure those advertisements are a) not harmful to the consumer b) don't exceed a given file-size c) don't prevent the consumer from continuing whatever journey they were on. That's in rough order of importance/realism.
Advertising providers are currently failing on all three of these, and it's hardly a surprise that the market is reacting by preventing all advertising, even that which might be deemed acceptable. The industry needs to fix this soon or it's going to destroy itself. As a consumer, I don't mind - alternative content will prevail - but from the companies' point of view, they need to fix this problem urgently.
They have the right to put whatever they want into the page as the author of the content. The realities of the Web and HTML being what they are make avoiding advertising quite trivial, especially when the advertisements are large video or image files. If you want to serve advertisements that are less than trivial to block then the future of that is likely going to be either native advertisement where the entire story/content piece is the advertisement or advertisement bound directly into the final story and served as a single request.
You have the right to be on the street corner yelling your paranoid conspiracy theories at people. They have the right to ignore you.
You pay for the machine that turns radio signal into video/audio and you pay the opportunity cost of the radio bandwidth which is public property that is used for transmission of TV signal.
When was the last time you had a pay-per-use TV subscription?
And now even some mobile providers are blocking ads. I'm guessing that's because they're concerned that they won't recover investment in additional infrastructure. That is, providers who block ads and charge less will be more competitive than providers who allow ads and charge more.
https://www.eff.org/cases/newmark-v-turner
I'm not really trying to defend advertising per-se but I'm trying to point out this isn't a new problem, however the level of entitlement which people feel definitely appears to have increased.
Guilty as charged.
If advertisers do find some way to prevent "active" ad blocking, the next step will be to download an entire page, ads and all, and then strip out the useless bits. This would even have the side effect of inflating download counts in comparison to actual views.
The US began with a theory that email was like mail since the recipients resource use was minimal and now treats it more like fax since the senders burden proved even more minimal.
On the web in general, the delivery costs are exceptionally low for the producer leading to the general sense that most content should be long lived and ad free. Especially on mobile, where people with ridiculous data plans have large costs.
Clearly, traditional news publishers have other production costs and a decaying product. But how do you fairly make the distinction between real ones and pseudo publishers in a way that doesn't over-reward being near the blurry lines that separate them?
Normally, search should have a mechanism to specify these kinds of qualities, hence a separate mobile mode in google's search. But Google working out penalties for use of display ad networks (which deliver different content to different users) is a conflict of interest.
The article is describing that 50% of the data is spent on ads. And many times the actual page is 90% ads (often video, audio, moving, popups) with a couple sentences of content, wrapped in a clickbait title.
Newspaper ads don't shoot loud screaming video in your face that grinds your brain to a halt and covers the content of the paper.
Advertisers in the past had to play by some rules. Imagine if a cable TV station ran an illegal ad that destroyed your cable box. That would be unspeakably unacceptable. The TV provider would be crucified, their ratings would tank and they would cease to exist (not to mention legal proceedings) -- stations are accountable for the ads they serve. Now our expectations have degraded to the point where it's somehow okay for a google search for something innocuous to return an ad which is actually a virus. I have a pretty powerful machine and often if I click on a clickbait article it grinds to a complete halt for minutes at a time and crashes the browser.
The state of the art in advertising is far, far worse than it has ever been and we're seeing a fundamental shift with the Internet away from accountability in advertising.
It's comforting to think that things aren't different from how they used to be, and that there isn't any fundamental difference; well here there absolutely is.
Actually I consider that much worse, and it seems crazy to me that American TV has ads 1/3 of the time! You can click away even the most annoying (non-malware) ads in less than 1/3 of the total time on a website.
Data usage is often irrelevant, time OTOH is strictly limited.
Moreover, it's not actually been a dominant form for funding of content creation except for a few decades. This model is very much historically unusual, but there are many interests behind pretending that it's a natural and indeed rightful state of affairs.
I never ever want to see ads for alcohol or gambling[1].
The fact I can't opt out of that advertising means I installed an ad-blocker. I turn it off for everything, and turn it on if a site shows me an ad for alcohol or gambling. (I also try to tell the site).
[1] I either never want to see them, or I want to see as many as possible and click all of them to increase click-fraud rates and discourage their use.
Google at least gives some user control via http://www.google.com/settings/ads/ and Google Contributor in the US, but nowhere near enough to block specific advertisers.
But here I'm saying I'm happy to view ads, even with all the tracking. The two things that made me install an ad blocker are
i: alcohol and gambling ads
ii: ads that ignore English regulation
It's gotten bad enough that I'm using my hosts file to block all this garbage, so requests to any of these sleazeball advertisers and trackers just 404. I'm amazed at how awful the internet is when I have to see all the sludge that advertising sprays all over it.
Well we can debate the "morality" of ad blocking but not the justification :
- faster browsing (less javascript)
- safer browsing (it has been shown time and time again than ad networks were used to push malware ).
- saves phone/laptop battery since most ad-networks use/abuse javascript,
- better privacy (no tracking)
- more focus on the actual content, when there is one.
I personally disable javasript BY default because for me it's not the web. Is it immoral to do so ? I think not. I only enable it when it is justified ( a rich application like an online regex tool or a game ). If a website forces me to have javascript on just to read an article or block me then I don't feel bad about it. It is especially true on mobile where disabling javascript has a huge impact on battery life. Me saving some CPU cycles, some Mo on my data plan doesn't feel immoral at all. Maybe websites should think about it and the useless crap they send across the wire. Strangely today it doesn't seem to be a concern for most websites, the loading speed or the size of content. A responsive website is not enough to make it mobile friendly. I don't feel bad about punishing bad technical choices. Ads served on a different domain is also one of these bad choices.
If he consumes your bandwidth, he is the devil. But when you consume his bandwidth without offering anything in return, it is justified?
That's the foundation of the web and with his javascript on a webpage the producer is certainly consuming unnecessary CPU cycles on my computer and I have the right not to allow that. The problem definitely doesn't lie with me. If he doesn't agree he has the right to block me no question. But as long as I can access the content legally I will never feel bad about that and there is nothing to feel bad about.
There are also people producing quality content who need to make money from the content in order to continue producing it. That group of people are more likely to realize that obnoxious and overly intrusive ad placements are not a good thing, so they avoid them. The point being that good publishers strike a balance.
Placing a single banner ad on a long-form article is certainly more defensible than 35 ads on a "awkward celebrity high school photos" slideshow article. Things aren't black and white.
I really like going overboard with ads making it swinging that way. When content blocking users were a very small minority, it was very easy to brand them akin to pirates doing something shady. Sure, we will have sponsored content or whatever form ads come next, but I see people are more concerned about their privacy as ever before, which I feel is a good thing.
You can see that the commercials, per second, cost orders of magnitude more to make.
"Content" == "Bait". The amount of data used by the advertisers will continue to rise.
If www search engines and "journalists" are being paid primarily by advertisers, and not readers, then we have the best system for "news" that has ever been created. And we can be proud of their achievement, and how they are using the latest communications technology and the public resource of internet bandwidth for its highest and best purpose. Everyone in the ad sales industry should pat each other on the back. You have provided readers with so much greatness. You have earned your success.
As readers, we should be thankful for these heros for making the internet and mobile carrier networks work so smoothly and keeping us so well informed, at such low cost to readers. Everbody wins. Brilliant.