AdBlock Plus teams up with Flattr to help readers pay publishers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The Adblock people claim they're going to collect a half billion dollars a year in voluntary payments. Has anybody in the history of voluntary payments for software ever collected half a billion dollars? The American Red Cross collects about $700 million a year. Somehow, I expect that Adblock's system will not be "voluntary".
If/When ABP goes over to the dark side people will stop using it. There are plenty of replacements, uBlock Origin being the current winner.
Anyone who hasn't yet switched to uBlock Origin should do so ASAP. It's super fast, has a much smaller memory footprint, has a strict policy against "acceptable ads" (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/MANIFESTO.md), licensed under the GPLv3, and hosted in a very active repository on GitHub (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock).
I actually like the acceptable ads system. I don't inherently object to advertising (content has to be paid for somehow, and I'd rather pay with my attention than with my money). I just object to invasive or distracting ads, and ABP does block those.
Google Search ads, for example, are fine by me.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27j1gd/i_had_53_bt...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2pm4tx/blockchaini...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4e99po/blokchalini...
The latter supplements publishers (websites) with revenue that covers the cost of providing content to you. Search ads are typically acquisition driven, where companies are paying for new customers.
Five years ago, searching for "credit card" had top hits from credit card search spammers. Today, Google has brought that spam in-house and redirected the revenue to themselves. It's kind of depressing.
(We, of course, have Ad Limiter, to cut Google search ads down to size.)
20 years ago it would have taken scrolling through several pages of porn to get to anything resembling a card. I do not miss those days at all.
Yet, they choose to name their product in a misleading way, suggesting they do something which, by default, their product does not do.
If ABP was a drug, what would the FDA say? :)
We all know that outside tech circles most people don't even know what "acceptable ads" are, assume ABP does what it says on the label, and don't bother changing defaults. That's why ABP's business is so shady.
Pharmaceutical companies generate their revenue from selling drugs. That doesn't make selling drugs illegal.
Nobody is getting tricked by ABP. For one thing, their homepage literally says "unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites" right above the install button. [0] Moreover, even if a user were to install it and still saw ads they would realize that it's not in fact blocking all ads.
Since you apparently hate capitalism, I'm curious how you're paid.
I'd be surprised to learn most users ever even touch the homepage, rather than the plugin installation mechanism for their respective web browsers. Result #1 on Google for me goes straight to the Chrome store.
The immorality comes in when the program actively subverts its own purpose for existing... imagine an antivirus with "acceptable viruses" allowed out of the box. They don't steal your info, or ruin your computer, but its authors gave the company a backhander to leave them unblocked by default. This is directly analogous to ads.
It's also a conflict of interest, and gives the developer a perverse incentive to allow more ads, since they charge ad publishers actual money to be on the whitelist. ABP's customers are the ad companies, not its users. (Something something if you're not the customer...)
And "hating capitalism" is such a ridiculous strawman that it deserves no further comment.
Depends on what you think its purpose is -- I don't block ads because I have a moral problem with advertising revenue paying for content I view -- I block ads because I'm tired of overly disruptive ads that interfere with my web browsing experience. I really don't mind if there are some unobtrusive ads and I might even click on them if they are particularly relevant (i.e. Google ads tend to be relevant enough that I click on them).
_ It's also a conflict of interest, and gives the developer a perverse incentive to allow more ads,_
But AdBlock devs have a strong incentive to not piss off users so much that they'll stop running the software or will click the button that says "block all ads". If developers remove that button, then users will move to different software.
I don't care how much money ABP makes from publisher payouts, I just care that my browser no longer freezes while I wait for a 2MB pop-over to load as it chews up my limited bandwidth.
Worse even when I do pay, the ads don't go away. (Hulu, premium cable TV, etc.) Because, it's the people with money that subsidize the Advertising model, let them opt out and it collapses.
Since you're apparently hate reading and replying to comments as they were written, instead of as you want to read into them, I paraphrase the above poster:
"We all know that outside tech circles most people don't even know what "acceptable ads" are, assume ABP does what it says on the label, and don't bother changing defaults. That's why ABP's business is so shady."
Believing "acceptable ads" can thrive alongside such knowledge is naively asking to be reminded of the tragedy of the commons and the fact that such widespread coordination usually happened in either dictatorial or communist societies.
Revenue will be generated, only that it will eventually have to come from consumers directly to publishers and content creators.
No it isn't - it's market inefficiency. Ad blocking allows content consumption without contributing to costs, which publishers have budgeted for. Flattr and Google Contributor are more efficient versions of blocking ads because it still contributes to content.
ABP is in fact a capitalist solution. It gives advertisers an incentive to tone down their ads so they can be seen by more people.
Absolutist ad blockers are actually the ones exploiting the tragedy of the commons. Without advertising, the content which you're viewing without ads would not exist.
> Revenue will be generated, only that it will eventually have to come from consumers directly to publishers and content creators.
Why? That's your personal preference and political position. Reality isn't forced to adapt to your preferences and in practice advertising has existed for thousands of years—it's unlikely to go away anytime soon.
Moreover, I suspect that if you asked most people outside the HN echo chamber they'd actually rather have advertising than paying through subscriptions.
This is a very disingenuous representation of the other comments in the thread. It's a low-brow dismissal by straw man and an appeal to the sacrosanct "capitalism". You seem to be trying to manipulate others into supporting your view by labeling the other view as anti-capitalism. This is the same as accusing anyone who opposes government surveillance of "hating freedom".
ABP is problematic because of how they generate revenue. From the advertisers' side, it looks like racketeering. From the consumer side, it looks like the tobacco industry paying your doctor to get you to smoke. Accepting money to whitelist ads is the very thing an ad blocker should never do.
> Since you apparently hate capitalism, I'm curious how you're paid.
Is advertising a synonym of capitalism?
But the default should be to block ads, because that's what an ad-blocker is supposed to do.
ABP allowing ads by default is just another one of the reasons uBlock Origin is better.
A program that labels itself as an "ad blocker" yet allows, by default, ads from companies who pay money, is part of the dark side.
Simply put, many people believe there is no such thing as an acceptable ad on the web, and that any ad blocker which allows advertising to be shown is by definition malicious, broken software. No advertising, anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances, regardless of the content, or how badly a site depends on it, is acceptable to users of ad blockers. They expect it to block ads, period.
I'm a user of an ad blocker (ABP). Don't put words in my mouth.
I believe in compensating creators for their content and would rather compensate them with my time than my money.
Don't lump everyone into your political agenda.
I'm certainly in the "fuck all ads forever" camp. There are just way too many downsides to downloading/seeing/playing/executing advertisements. If all the websites that relied on ads today had to disappear or redesign to reduce their operational costs, I think the web would be a much better place.
Except it wouldnt. Only state-sponsored media and paywalls would exist, which won't be fun.
I hear this a lot but there was just a very small early period where a few enthusiasts were on bulletin boards (and definitely not "tons of sites").
As soon as the web was mainstream and had any appreciable amount of content, there were ads right alongside.
> Prior to the disestablishment 1995 commercial traffic on the Internet in the United States was limited by law, and prior to 1988 for the most part strictly forbidden, with the exception of traffic with research and defense aims.
Also the first cross-network banner ad ran in October 1994: https://hbr.org/2013/02/stop-selling-ads-and-do-someth
Nobody was getting their news from the web in that era though. People still subscribed to print newspapers and magazines.
Content has moved online. Of course revenue had to move online as well (including advertising).
ummm.... Actually a lot of people were. It just ended up being blogs, forums and other methods.
Personally, most of the news I read comes from "non-news" sources. I find the vast majority of news-sites to be terrible in quality.
The web was always presented as being free - the content was free, the browsers were free, the community that built it believed information wanted be free. Most people don't want to compensate anyone for anything on the web by viewing ads because they've been conditioned to expect that they shouldn't have to - they simply see advertising as a nuisance. Until recently when sites started detecting ad-blockers, there was no negative effect to blocking it.
I do believe advertising doesn't work on the web, but mostly because of the way the web was designed and implemented, not entirely because of politics. Content creators can't expect to be compensated through web ads as long as they can't stop users from viewing their content without the ads. At least with other forms of media, you're expected to pay before you consume, or viewership is estimated, so the effect of avoiding advertising isn't so direct, but on the web, every view counts.
Given the poor reputation (entirely deserved) of web ads, the degree of control users have over their browsers, and the number of people who view piracy and ad-blocking as a moral imperative, alongside the majority who just consider ads to be annoying and useless for them, it's simply not possible for advertising as a revenue model to work on the web. The number of people who consider "ethical" or "acceptable" ads to even be a thing isn't large enough to support the web's economy.
But there is money involved, a lot of 3rd parties inserting themselves between you and the creators are getting paid real money (Eyeo, through its "acceptable ads" campaign, is such a 3rd-party).
Surely that money is not created out of thin air, hence the question: where is this money coming from ultimately?
It's coming from advertisers, obviously. Unlikely so many on Hacker News, I don't think advertisers are inherently immoral and horrible people. I'm happy for them to pay for content and the technology to deliver that content.
Ironically, in this system the advertisers are actually subsidizing the blocking of non-compliant ads. That seems ideal: advertisers are competing to provide quality ads and to block poor ones.
Well, maybe the purpose of that particular program is to block awful, obstructive, auto-playing ads, but allow sensible levels of advertising to support web sites.
I looked at it, I tried it, I love it so far. I added uMatrix(1) and uBlock Origin Websocket(2). Now I just need to read the documentation to get the full advantage(3).
(1) https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix
(2) https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-WebSocket
(3) To RTFM; https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki
Who are these people and why do they do it? The wikipedia article on uBlock Origin didn't help much.
How do you skirts ad blocking applications without triggering an inconvenience on your readers?
It's possible for a website owner to directly publish ads, and those ads would be harder to block (but still trivial). Site owners trade screen real estate in exchange for ad revenue, just like billboards of old. This used to be the model in the early 2000s and I actually OK with it... though it probably wasn't the best model, a bit like running a diner on revenue from ads in the menu.
The problem is centralized publishers. They offer higher revenue through highly targeting ads from thousands of advertisers. It's a race to the bottom where all websites are incentivized to use publishers and consumers are forced to use ad blocking tools against the publishers (hurting content creators)... undermining the long-term sustainability of the internet as a content publishing medium.
As with many things, both consumers and producers are acting justifiably. It's the man in the middle that needs to go. He's just skimming a short-term profit and hurting both sides in the long-run.
Compare [0] (with DOM-based blocking) to [1] (without).
[0]: http://i.imgur.com/5hlPhqx.jpg [1]: http://i.imgur.com/TrxMlkz.jpg
About the only time I ever actually notice advertising is when some site sets up an aggressive anti-adblock or airs 2 minutes of dead air where an ad spot would have gone.
Indeed! I got this experience every time I used Chrome (rather than Firefox) on Android. The web has become quite horrible. I am now back on iOS and the author of uBlock has made a great blocker for Safari on iOS:
Furthermore, non-solicitation of donations is a political reason to prefer uBo. I'm curious about the technical reasons. As a side note, I personally have no problem whatsoever with an extension creator soliciting donations as long as they're not doing so in a deceptive or annoying manner.
uBlock hasn't been updated in almost a year. uBlock Origin is actively developed. uBlock has effectively had no significant changes or improvements since the uBlock Origin fork happened.
There's some background here which might be relevant. Another extension, AdBlock, used to have a policy against "acceptable ads." The author sought donations to keep development going, but later sold the business (and the users!) to an entity that immediately started allowing such ads through.
Maybe the author of uBlock Origin wants to make it clear that this can't happen here.
I can say anecdotally, that I found plain uBlock more featureful for everyday usage, but I haven't done a thorough review. I currently use uBlock Origin.
[0]https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock [1]https://www.purify-app.com/
I am a very strong believer in good content being voluntarily rewarded if the business model is right (which includes strong price discrimination measures i.e. keeping the content free for a large chunk of people). It might be naive idealism (OpenBSD/OpenSSL, PGP not getting more donations has me scratching my head) but at the end of the day I think free (as in speech and beer) with optional payment to keep the excellent content creators in the business of creating content will work and should work.
But I prefer uBlock Origin to ABP for ideological and performance reasons, so I'm not sure if I'll use this yet.
I currently put €10 per month on Flattr and it would be great to not have to click each time I want to help out a publisher.
I've used flattr in the past, but the main problem for me was that there was so much low-effort stuff fighting for clicks. Flattr has good reasons for their just share everything evenly default, but unfortunately it also makes low effort stuff a lot more viable relatively speaking.
Thinking about it, allowing me to configure these parameters would be good.
Sadly, subscription models are the way to mass adoption. People are lazy and want to make one explicit payment to some centralized authority that then grants them a theoretically unlimited, but practically and economically limited, selection. It's the retail store all over again, just on the web. Spotify, Netflix, Steam replaces craigslist.
I see the perfect world being a super thin middle-man client(s) that exposes a protocol that the content producer/seller implements. Want to buy a song, a game, a movie, article? Use a client to access and pay for it then receive it. Still want a middleman to handle refunds, advice, suggestions, support? Go find a car salesman, Amazon or flattr thick client that'll add their markup for added convenience. I think this would shift the current problem away from "getting into Steam for a reasonable price" to "making a good game".
There are abuse, censorship, maintainability, legal, adoption, discovery concerns, but I said perfect world. I'm just afraid for a future where DRM/EME and Webassembly obfuscation make it impossible to get quality content on the web when everyone flocks to these gatekeepers for everything. Cable companies 2.0.
> Unlike Flattr, users don’t have to click a button to “Flattr” a website — instead, it will automatically track their browsing activity and distribute the money based on their engagement.
One of my main objections to most forms of online advertising is the tracking/profiling. I don't see why there can't be a button unless they plan on selling the info; in which case it's hardly an improvement over ordinary web ads.
I glanced at the website, and they say the info is stored locally and only the final results get sent back to headquarters, but there's no privacy policy or other detailed technical explanation of what this means.
I guess that's understandable since apparently they're not sure how they can measure the worthiness of a given web page:
> Plus, the question of exactly how to calculate engagement is a tricky one. You probably don’t want to reward a worthless article with a dumb-but-effective clickbait headline. You might also leave an article open for hours without actually reading it.
Which just reinforces my notion that the user should have a button. Otherwise you're going to have situations where users are tricked into visiting worthless pages or end up paying to support website that they might not want to support. Can you honestly say that you would choose to support the people behind every website you visit?
>> "Give me relevant ads that don't spy on me and that are not benchmarking my CPU every-time they load a piece of JS and we'll be fine."
Isn't this giving you EXACTLY what you're asking for? You donate a very small amount of money nautically by reading content you block the ads on.
Since creating quality content is the part that's difficult and expensive, it stands to reason that it's the part that should be monetized. It's really an accident of history that content creation was able to be subsidized by advertising or charging for distribution.
This is the same reason Microsoft has historically been pretty lax about going after home users who pirate Windows; those users make Windows a more attractive market for software publishers, which in turn draws more users.
Aside from AdBlock's nebulous ability to block ads except for the highest bidder, they're introducing workable micropayments (yay!) but with a heavily centralized entity (boo) that ensures tracking will now not be blocked, but actually become a core feature.
Brave addresses this by citing https://anonize.org/ as the backend for their micropayments architecture to remove this tracking vector. I loved Flattr a decade ago when it was released, but any model that actively relies on user identification (intentionally or not) is a threat in 2016.
Caveat: Read about Brave, looks great, still too young as a browser to be my daily driver.
The article says ad block will tell publishers how much they COULD have made - what happens to that money?
The Ad blocking business is beginning to look awfully shady.
I'm extremely excited about it, I really hope this takes off.
Probably in the future there will also be a system that allows websites with premium content make money the same way(some sort of universal paywall with one convenient payment method). People will end up paying $10 per month for access to a network of premium websites.
I think that it is a good thing, because incentives will align in a way that encourages websites to focus on producing high quality content instead of clickbait and trying to manipulate people's attention.
It seems like they're trying to closely imitate an ad model, and consequently the commensurate micromanaged loss of privacy for the web consumer.
Strange times.
The only reason why flattr has to take such a big share is that they do not have enough users. But with such greedy charges, which are even more expensive than paypal for a lot of cases they will never get enough users.