When we stop doing things that don't negatively affect us much and help others, we've lost the benefits of altruism that helped our species evolve beyond the rest.
It's up to content providers to figure out how to get paid. Guilt-tripping readers into viewing ads is one approach; running skeezy ads is another; paywalls or premium content is another; merchandising yet another. Each of those affects the value your readers get from your site. Given that, how can content providers best align their interest (getting paid) with their readers' interests (getting good content cheap/free)?
I submit that, if sites ran carefully-vetted ads that were of legitimate interest to their readers, were not annoying, and did not compromise user privacy, far fewer of us would use adblock.
How do you know if the site has changed if you are using adblock? If they do decide to change ads, it won't really matter because they are already blocked.
What about people that are using a computer with adblock already installed? They never saw the ads on the blocked site.
Adblock doesn't just block one site's ads. It blocks entire networks of ads, which hurts innocent sites that may or may not have intrusive ads. This is why I can't support its usage.
Ads are blocked for me by default, and i choose to unblock them in websites that generate repeated value for me.
this includes the content of the website, but also the speed and how the ads complement the design of the website itself.
I will consider paying website to get content completely ad free.
I would like to also have the option to get a discount for just clicking on the Ad from the vendor, if you want my attention offer me an incentive.
AdSense doesn't allow sites to do this. I don't know about other services.
For an individual site to get users who are already using adblock to stop, they may have to resort to the type of pleading or content-blocking Ars Technia did.
If, for example, your site has a community and ads are indeed "of legitimate interest", your community will discuss interesting ads. I have seen this happening on MetaFilter and Reddit.
Every now and then, an advertiser will make a mistake and pay for attention he could have gotten for free. But I don't think we can expect them to do that all the time. The only way to make money from advertising is to accept money from people who can't get attention otherwise.
What if the technology wasn't visible, wasn't in browsers, but instead was in our heads? What if we had a perfect ability to selectively filter out what we see and not let it affect us consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously? What if our awarenesses were so under our control that advertising could be scientifically proven to be useless?
Would this ability to focus our minds, free ourselves from distractions and pay deliberate attention only to what we willed, be morally or ethically wrong?
[Ed. note: As expected, "red in tooth and claw" is voted up, and "people need to cooperate" is voted down. If that's karma then I'll have no part of it.]
Don't mistake culture and societal norms for the norms of natrual human behavior.
Wright's thesis for humanity is that people cooperate far more in the context of society than they did even 20,000 years ago, allowing for much larger populations. This larger population enables more diversity and further complexity.
Indeed, the notion of "private property" often comes hand in hand with authoritarian force: http://everything2.com/title/The+Enclosure+Movement
Rightful property is established by production or trade. A rough recursive definition goes: Your body and mind are your property. If you make a thing using your property, that thing is your property. If you obtain a thing by trading your property for it, that thing is your property. (I view "gift" as a special case of trade, where the price is zero.)
I would also define "trade" as a voluntary contractual interaction between two parties. The word "voluntary" precludes force, and the word "contractual" precludes fraud.
Certainly an infant produces spit, vomit, and poop. But it doesn't stop there. The infant also produces cuteness, affection, and love. In any case the parents give the infant food, shelter, education, and care for free. Those are gifts.
So the infant grows into a strong, healthy, and wise adult. He obtains that position largely through gifts from his parents, but he has also done some production and trade along the way, for example any jobs he did as a teenager.
Now he produces far more than spit, vomit, and poop. He uses his mind and body to produce all sorts of things other people value. He owns the products of his mind and body right up until the time he trades them for something else.
Simple example: he buys a set of tools using the money he earned as a teenager cutting grass and starts a small repair business. He is now using both the physical and intellectual capital he has accumulated over the years to produce even more goods and services. That capital is his property.
So my definition gets off the ground far better than you suggest. Spit and poop ... you so funny!
Humans have been doing these things for as long as there have been humans...
> then the human race would die out.
...and this hasn't happened. Ergo, your argument is wrong.
I said that if such behavior ever became the norm, the human race would die. As of now, only a small portion of humans behave this way. This happy fact enables humans to survive.
However, on the basis of your comment I will scale back my argument a bit. It might be possible for some humans to survive in a movie fantasy post-apocalyptic world of pure rampaging feral aggression. But the number would be very few. It would consist of a few people picking berries and hunting rabbits in secret, and gangs of others occasionally sniffing them out and looting them.
In reality, in order for a human being to survive, he must have things and services produced by other humans. He can't do it all himself. If he wants to ensure that other humans continue to produce the things he needs, the best way is to offer something in return.
Certainly voluntary trade is not his only option. He could plead hardship and gain some sympathy that way. He could commit fraud, deceiving others into giving him what he wants. He could use force to take what he wants.
But ultimately all of these options are limited and fraught with risks of their own. Why risk death when you can just wash a few dishes instead?
So yes, humans have been doing stupid evil things for as long as there have been humans, and they will continue to do so. My point is, stupidity and evil are not sustainable or reliable methods for achieving life, happiness, health, and wealth. That is why they are called "stupid" and "evil."
Actually he can, and quite easily, as long as he's got the appropriate skills and the population density is low. We can survive comfortably in most environments; it's just that today our environment consists mostly of other humans.
"Design" as in the memetic evolution has an unnaturally recursive feedback system compared to our biological evolution, thus producing patterns of regularity determined by initial tiny quirks? Or what the people who downmodded you seem to think you meant?
If I block ads, the site should have a higher conversion rate, so they should be able to ask for more money for the ad impressions.
Yes. As Ars said explicitly in their post, every time you choose to block the rendering of an ad on their page, their ad provider does not count the impression, and they do not get paid anything. So yes, you're directly screwing Ars by costing them money, denying them revenue, and nullifying their business model.
> If a web site asks people who hate ads to watch ads, they are screwing the people who pay for the ads.
In the first instance, "screwing" means "putting out of business". In the second, it means "mildly inconveniencing".
> If I block ads, the site should have a higher conversion rate
Again, if you'd read Ars' post, you would know that they are paid on impressions, not conversion rate.
I read that, but as I said, if they have a higher conversion rate, they should be able to negotiate a higher fee for the ads anyway.
On the other aspects, I guess we just disagree (why is it worse to screw advertisers than ad pushing people)?
The idea one makes money from ads simply by having it displayed is copying a highly speculative advertising model of print (where the effect can hardly be measured) to the web (where you can measure it be by actual clicks) put simply its vaporware of the worst kind, and a business that hedges its revenue on this model is hedging its existence on speculation alone.
The premise of advertising on the web is highly informed by age old print models that have failed that industry and put into doubt the efficacy of anything that is uttered in them.
users have a choice. You want effective Ads on the web, offer the users something,so they wont block you. or go away. effective Ads on the web are to be about incentive.
I own the delivery device, i can manipulate it as i will. This is not a newspaper, i control it, not the vendor. i will do what i want with it. the business owner need to give me a an incentive.
It's awfully hard to measure that value in any kind of meaningful way, but brand awareness is worth spending money on in many cases.
Pay per click ads aren't generally worth enough money to sustain sites that produce content. Aggregators, search engines, social networks, etc, have a much, much lower cost per pageview, and can do pretty well. On Ars, we'd need to average about 50,000 pageviews per normal post to pay the writer for it with something like Google AdSense. And that's assuming that the campaigns AdSense picks are pretty good.
There are whitepaper links and stuff you can get much better CPC rates for, but those generally only work if you're sneaky about them and embed them in content, or make them look like site resources.
If everyone blocked ads, no one would serve them. They would charge for content. This is probably the fairest model for everyone. But content providers like Ars want to mislead their customers into thinking they are getting something for free, so they make their money from advertising: that is, they don't sell content, they use content as 'bait' to attract attention and then sell that attention to advertisers. An ad-blocker is acting perfectly ethically and rationally by refusing to give their attention---after all, Ars is pretending to be free, you can hardly blame the viewers who take them up on the offer. The only ones being screwed by this are the non-blocking viewers, who are forced to give more of their attention to compensate for the blockers.
No they're not. The point I was making is that you necessarily cost them money every time you visit a page, but by blocking the ad, you're also denying them the revenue that would balance out that cost.
> But content providers like Ars want to mislead their customers into thinking they are getting something for free
I think that even the least savvy of Internet users understand the advertising model. No one is "misled" to believe that running a site like Ars costs nothing. They're not "pretending to be free" any more than a newspaper full of ads is.
Ars wants people to think that they are in the business of reporting tech news, when in fact they are in the business of selling individuals to advertisers. I don't see any notices on Ars explicitly asking people to view ads in exchange for viewing content. The reason is that doing so would confront people with the reality of the site and turn them off, even though many of them understand the ad model in principle. And yes, a newspaper full of ads is also pretending to be free.
If Ars won't explicitly require their users to view ads, then they can hardly complain when people skip them. I have no sympathy.
(And indeed economic models which work on the basis of enlightened self interest have been the most successful and delivered the most good to their adherents).
The fact is, most advertising is not obtrusive. Despite the problems that Google Ads has, it is not visually obtrusive. Hell, half of the time I don't even notice them. Does it hurt me? No. Does it help the site sustain itself? Yes. Would I notice a pay wall or product placement? Yes. Would it obstruct my enjoyment of the website? Yes.
To directly answer your question: you should care if you hurt society. If people stop being altruistic altogether, politeness and civility go out the window. An Ayn Rand style system pops up, with people being concerned how to give themselves the most power and goods while screwing others over the most. Maybe you're fine with that; I'm not.
It would be much more practical to create things that boost advertising's strengths, but mute the weaknesses, rather than trying to convince people that current ads are good/tolerable. Like you pointed out, Google Ads are a step in the right direction, but obviously still lacking. The market always points you in the right direction, better to listen than to fight it.
* as practiced in real life not some wanker's theoretical definition.
PS it was probably selfishness and greed (combined with tribal "us vs them" so that (generally) you'll steal from the fuckers in next valley over but not your children) that helped our species destroy and/or exceed our competition.