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Comment by thedevil | Hacker News Reader

I'm ethically opposed to adblockers as they deny content creators a means of making money for their work.

Yet, ads have gotten so out of hand that I'm about to install adblockers partly for safety, partly for other issues. They track my information when I would not expect it. And I just had a simple news website suck up 2GB of memory. And on my phone, simple websites with 1K text frequently suck up 5MB for ads - and I can't easily predict and control that.

Edit: ADP now installed. And it says it doesn't block "non-intrusive" ads unless I ask it to - which sounds pretty good from my perspective.

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> I'm ethically opposed to adblockers as they deny content creators a means of making money for their work.

Quick rebuttal:

- People who use adblockers aren't likely to click ads anyway (maybe improving CTR for advertisers?).

- Server logs can still tell you how many 'hits' you've had, which were bots etc. even if various JS analytics snippets are blocked. These can be shared with ad partners, even if 100% of your visitors use adblocking.

- Advertising is not the only way to make money from writing/media and I'm becoming ever more convinced that it is even an immoral and hostile action on behalf of the advertisers and their partners (unless done in a mutually beneficial way, such as keyword bidding/ads relevant to expressed commercial needs).

Sadly the response to all this seems to be increased product placement. There are cultural divides between various countries and the web will most likely homogenise over the average at one point, but in areas of ad-desensitized culture we'll see the worst of advertising (or best, depending on your viewpoint).

EDIT(3): uMatrix + pihole user (uMatrix for me, pihole for everyone else on the network, mobile and tab included)

1: I don't judge anyone for using adblockers because there's a lot of moral grey area here.

2: "Advertising is not the only way to make money from writing/media"

-> I don't think this is a very good argument. It may be the only reasonable way for that content creator to make money.

3: "I'm becoming ever more convinced that it is even an immoral and hostile action"

-> Some of these ads are hostile, but some are attempting to make money in a very reasonable way. You're demonizing the entire group, including some who are creating value for you and me.

Edit: A little anecdote: There is a project I'd like to do that involves investing considerable time and money in creating content that will be shared with the world and would help a lot of people. I'd like to make some money back out of it for my time and costs. Free but with ads is the best way to help the most people but still make money. However, it might be difficult to make much and I would have to deal with people attacking me for trying to make money off ads. This is a factor that is actually affecting my decision as to whether or not I pursue this project (which I will decide in the next several months).

Appreciate the further consideration of those points.

As for your project; do it! If it'll help people, write it all and release it under a creative commons licence. Spread it far and wide. It could be your legacy, long after you've left the earth and stopped worrying about money.

I self-published a book in 2011. I charged for it. It ran its course, the product lifecycle played out and I'd made more than it cost to put it together. It's now free to read on my site and will soon be added to the creative commons as a PDF to be freely shared. I continue to benefit from its existence in other ways than monetary.

If you really do want money in return for the effort, charge for the publication. Get it published professionally or self-publish and promote it widely. Do you think the ad model is best because you are convinced people will only find what they're looking for through a search engine or social media?

EDIT: Would the people you help with your publication be helped even more by the ads displayed alongside it? Who would click the ads to make the project pay?

> immoral and hostile

Have these become code words for something beyond or outside of the dictionary definition? I have seen both of these words used recently in such a hyperbolic manner that defied any other explanation.

I'm using them literally. Immoral as in 'not a moral activity' and hostile as in 'attacking my freedom'. I think we probably agree that advertising can be improved, it's just likely that I'm more offended by it than you are. Maybe for cultural reasons or maybe because I'm an idealist.

Quick rebuttal to the quick rebuttal:

- Many advertisers pay by the impressions, especially "premium" ad slots. They treat ads as billboards and pay for "reach."

- (1) If you're using a CDN, hits don't got to your server (2) Advertisers trust numbers from an industry-common analytics solution, they don't trust something hand-rolled

- Agreed on your last point, I think ad-supported content is creating perverse incentives for content creators.

Quick rebuttal to the quick rebuttal's quick rebuttal:

- Potential improvement to adblockers: a sacrificial server needs setting up that displays these ads to nobody in a dark room somewhere when triggered by the adblock software, thereby maintaining 'reach' figures for the scattergun advertisers.

- (1) Potential improvement to CDN services: display hit counters for users. (2) Many industry-standard analytics solutions use server logs for quantification.

- Agreed on your agreement point.

> Edit: ADP now installed. And it says it doesn't block "non-intrusive" ads unless I ask it to - which sounds pretty good from my perspective.

Unfortunately, that's the worst part of ABP and many other adblockers - they allow companies to pay them off to be whitelisted. The program is meant to sound consumer-friendly, but it's just another way to get their cut of the ad spend.

I'm not going to go as far as calling this extortion, but it's definitely misleading.

A more upfront way of doing it would be to call them sponsored ads or something that implies it being paid.

>I'm ethically opposed to adblockers as they deny content creators a means of making money for their work.

Why don't advertisers make ads I want to consume?

Trick question: they actually do, and it's called native advertising. Ad-blockers block the grimy, scummy, bottom-of-the-barrel ads that are little more than an assault on the senses.

The myth that ad-blockers prevent content-creators from monetizing is just that: a myth. Ad-blockers just mean you can't be lazy about your monetization strategy.

In the days when an "ad" was just an image on a website (or newspaper) I'd agree with you.

Because I visited your site, you don't get to follow me around for the next day or year...

I don't see how it is ethical to be exposed to ads, in fact ads make my mind sick and I think we should be striving for a better revenue model.

Patron is great.

Well, concerned websites could choose static assets based only ads.

Static ads bring less revenues than dynamic ads per exposure thus less $ / kb loaded. That's all.

But does the ads industry fairly give them enough information to make a rational choice?

I think there's a place for a network to go back to those, and offer to serve ads with no user tracking.

Course the question is the would anyone trust them enough to actually white list them?

I'm ethically opposed to adblockers as they deny content creators a means of making money for their work.

This is a reasonably common argument, but I never quite understand it. Ad blockers deny content creators a (one) means of making money, but not a (any) means of making money.

One particular business model is unlikely to survive as ad blockers become ubiquitous. That business model was not good for visitors, and that's why it's becoming obsolete in the face of resistance.

However, there are plenty of other viable business models on the web. I'm not sure it's a bad thing that sites with good content will increasingly have to look to those, and that users will have to get used to providing real financial support to content creators if they want good quality material to be available. Perhaps as a result we'll even develop some new mechanisms for efficiently transferring small amounts of compensation on a large scale in return for producing worthwhile content.

This all represents a change from the status quo of the past few years, but I don't see anything inherently unethical about it, any more than it's unethical for people to only buy media in convenient formats or wheelwrights to have less business opportunity since horse-drawn carriages became obsolete. The only group I see losing out profoundly in the long term are the ad networks and related services, and to some extent I think they have brought this fate upon themselves.

If your business model is based on the presumption that your users will voluntarily download anything that you want them to download, and they don't, maybe it's just a shitty business model.

As it stands, HTTP is all about the client choosing what requests to make, what to render and how to render it. If I don't want to download and view ads, I don't request them. If there is some information on a page that I am not interested in, I don't render it. I couldn't care less if this makes someone's business unviable, because in their use of web technology they are implicitly offering me the option not to be bombarded by information that I am not interested in. User discretion is part of the protocol.

>they deny content creators a means of making money for their work

I try my best to whitelist ad content from websites that I frequent for this very reason. Ads don't inherently bother me, but the extra bandwidth can be ridiculous.

I'm ethically opposed to ads, as our attention is (becoming) a scarce resource, and ads increasingly try to disrupt consumers' control over their focus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/the-cost-of...

(edit: on-topic, I use NoScript/RequestPolicy, Disconnect and UBlock whenever I can)

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