Hacker News Reader

Comment by aneesh | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure sympathy is an effective business model. If the ads are annoying enough to make lots of people block them, maybe there's something wrong with the ads, not the people.

View on HN

The issue is this:

If you install adblock "Fingers in ears" (ignore everything), you're not even giving websites a chance. You're not even giving them the benefit of the doubt that they could ever provide you useful advertising. You're assuming they're going to annoy you, so you're sticking your fingers in your ears.

You can sort of see why that's disheartening to people who are trying to provide useful advertising.

I personally think installing adblock is a crappy move. It's like walking into a conference with hands over your ears incase someone tries to sell you something. You just look like an idiot, and lose out.

It's sort of common courtesy to not assume someone is going to irritate you when you meet them. That's why, when we meet new people, we don't cover our ears, we extend them goodwill, and assume they're going to be nice.

Sadly, adblock users (Ones who block everything) don't seem to have any common courtesy.

It's more like trusting your secretary to do a good job of screen useless calls. You outsource the screening to an list provider rather than making a decision for every site on the internet.

You're the ones who came into my Internet and put ads on everything. I don't owe you anything.

  if (youDontLikeAdsOnWebsite()) {
      dontFlippingGoThereThen();
  }

If you went to the mall, and a shopkeeper in Macys started beating you over the head with a bat, would you come back next week to the mall and go into every shop in full body armor, or would you just not go in Macys any more?

As usual with these things, the analogies are a bit lacking. I humbly suggest that it's more like requesting a catalog from Macys and then ignoring/defacing/destroying the parts of the catalog that I am not interested in.

  if (youDontLikeMyBlcokingAds()) {
    dontFlippingServeMeAnyContentAtAllWhenIMakeAnHttpRequest();
}

That's certainly an option, and I'd expect we'd see a move to that if adblock usage ever did increase to more than 0.5% or whatever it is at the moment.

We'd just have a free internet for those not running adblock, and a paywall internet for those using adblock.

Exactly. There is a major opportunity lurking here. Online ads suck, actually ads in general suck, but how does one fix them? Sounds like a good challenge.

A small number of boutique advertising networks have successfully tackled this challenge and are making quite a lot for their trouble.

For instance, The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/): 30 ad spots per month, currently $7,900/ad, equals $237,000/mo (and they're always booked solid.) This doesn't even count their "roadblock" ads which are an additional $7,900/day. The best part about their ads are they're good. I've found quite a few excellent products through them over the years.

If only all online advertising were half as good as The Deck.

That's like wishing for all cars to be as good as Porsches. While I share your sentiment, The Deck is high-end advertising for a small batch of high-end advertisers.. people won't/can't/don't want to pay those rates everywhere.

I doubt it's possible to fix. Advertising is by its nature an attempt to manipulate people, by grabbing their attention, bombarding them with information, and eliciting emotional responses in them. Unsolicited advertisement is inherently disrespectful to the people being advertised at. There's no way to do it nicely, you can only hope people are too apathetic to complain about it.

Advertising is actually more about providing information that the viewer did not know.

It's actually a pretty useful service y'know?

Advertising is about moving product. Just a quick perusal of advertising techniques indicates that just "providing information" is a rarely used methodology. Biased information isn't very useful anyhow.

Indeed. Putting a scantily-clad lady up on the TV screen isn't giving me any information. It's treating me like an animal, hoping my sex drive overrides the part of my brain that says "You don't really need to buy this crap".

Loud noises, cute kittens, catchy songs, scary consequences, status symbols, repetition until you can't forget the company's name if you tried. That's not any information I need.

Those things get peoples attention, and make some % remember you.

Obviously not every advert works on everyone. It'd be silly if it did. But when taken as a whole, they do work. Astoundingly well.

It's about telling you about a product/service you might be interested in.

The movie trailers I watch in frontrow on OSX. They're advertising. I love them. They inform me of new movies that are coming out. Useful no?

I remember a few years back when everyone was asking this questions and then we got Adwords and Adsense. Those worked great for a while, then we ended up almost back to where we started. It'll be interesting to see how thing go this time around.

Only a tiny amount of people think ads suck. It's a very small minority.

Hmm, if you mean people opposing the very concept of advertising, then I agree, most people don't. But I hear complaints about the increasingly offensive/intrusive nature of online ads in particular from pretty much everyone I know, including elderly relatives. I think a lot more people would use AdBlock if they knew it existed / knew how to install it.

I disagree. It's a small niche thing. Like people who don't own a TV.

adBlock is fundamentally bad for the web. I think a lot less people would use it if they understood that.

If you're going to make a TV comparison, I'd say it's more like people who own a TiVO.

Well it's a big enough minority that ars technica is noticing it. And most people just tend to tolerate ads, it doesn't mean they like them.

ars technica is an extremely tech orientated website. It's going to have more than general websites.

adblock usage overall is probably 0.5% - 1% if that.

People probably don't realize how much they are blocking.

You install ABP to get rid of Flash/animated ads... and accidentally end up killing off everything including the ones that aren't objectionable.

I think people realize exactly what they're blocking.

You install something called AdBlock Plus. As suggested in its name, you probably want to block ads. Which ads? All ads. Maybe people think of "That one annoying ad" that was the last straw that made them seek out the blocker, but I don't think most people think in terms of individual ads that they find okay or not okay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com