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That's a weird way to twist GP's post.

It's not GP's "scheme", it's an observable fact - ad blockers are among the most effective anti-malware and computer optimizing solutions out there. More and more it seems to be something as obvious as having a firewall on your machine.

(No! Don't install a firewall! The poor script kiddies have to make money somehow!)

> The only thing you lose is content, but the same thing is true for web sites that disappear because they have no business model other than making content and displaying it along-side clearly marked advertising - it's not like you or anyone else wants to pay for content.

I say, good riddance. The only thing you lose is shitty content. If someone has something valuable to say, people will pay, or that someone will be willing to pay themselves to keep it up (as it is with most really valuable content on-line). If the only way to support your "content" is to shove toxic waste in the faces of your visitors, then frankly, you have no business hosting that content in the first place.

Now, for your middle ground - I guess that if we get there, we'll see a rise of anonymization proxies, Tor 2.0 or something like that. RE native advertising, in your example you're literally defending evil behaviour by saying those people could be even more evil. Like a robber that attacks me regularly and says, "as long as you have cash on you, I'll keep coming for that; if you move your money to your debit card, I'm afraid I'll have to beat you up for your PIN code". Am I supposed to be thankful to the robber that they don't beat me up and settle just for taking my cash?

Fuck it, I say jail the robber, and burn down the advertising industry.

> If someone has something valuable to say, people will pay

God, I hope you're right.

What about all the content available right now for free, without ads? Will it magically disappear just because some ad-supported businesses (that provide content as a side-effect) are unable to find another way of sustaining themselves?

Your argument is based on the premise that intrusive ads and contentcalypse are the only alternatives. This is simply false.

>What about all the content available right now for free, without ads?

Sure. We're on one of these pages right now. It has a full-time paid moderator (dang), pays for its own servers, and has no content monetization of any kind.

It is subsidized by a startup incubator, not the readers. This isn't an objection on my part. But I literally can't tell if the conversation is being influenced, and neither can you. It's simply indistinguishable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494500

It could be great, it could be draconian, you never know. When I read about Wall Street in the Wall Street Journal, I'd prefer not to have to make the same guesses. I prefer to see advertising in the Wall Street Journal, with an editorial iron curtain between the advertising and content divisions, and advertising very clearly labelled. The Wall Street Journal without any clearly-labelled advertising would be a scary thing.

This ship has sailed. The WSJ has already run adverts as editorial ( http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/oct/12/wall-street-jou... ). Moreover, it's a Murdoch paper and therefore reflects the prejudices of its owner.

The idea that the old printed press is some sort of politically and financially neutral arbiter of facts is convenient but has never been entirely true.

The same has also happened to the Telegraph in the UK: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...

I got a lot of downvotes, but here is why your first link, the Guardian, works:

http://imgur.com/1ze5jZM

(I'm drawing attention to the editorially independent advertisement.) The cut-off portion reads:

>In what appears to have been a damage limitation exercise following the Guardian's inquiries, Langhoff resigned on Tuesday, citing only the complaints of unethical interference in editorial coverage.

It's literally an exact demonstration of the separation effect that I'm talking about. The Guardian is your trusted source, because it gets to display well-marked, editorially independent advertisement, instead of writing it into stories. This might be eroding - your link is from 2011 after all - but the fastest way to erode it completely is to remove advertising revenue and make newspapers more beholden to native advertising or shallow advertising-like content.

Why do you insist that the only alternative is for newspapers to be: "more beholden to native advertising or shallow advertising-like content"?

There are other ways of generating revenue while still producing high-quality content. And it's not like the whole world is going to turn adblockers on overnight, the trend is visible but it's slow, newspapers and other related businesses have plenty of time to think this through and implement other ways of getting money. Also, the trend may well die out if there is a significant change in how intrusive ads are in general.

Another thing is that, in capitalism, this kind of thing is supposed to happen all the time, isn't it? Isn't it just that "the newspaper market is ready for disruption"? Is publishing industry that dependent on this single stream of revenue? It's like Saudi Arabia and the oil, then.

I can't help but think that publishers are lamenting because "free lunch is over". There was no Internet and everything was fine. Then the WWW (and AdWords) came and suddenly it was easier than ever to show your ads to thousands and later up to millions of users. Someone discovered that such advertising actually "works" (for some definition of "works"...), people started taking it seriously and publishers naturally expanded their businesses to the Internet. Their contribution to the Internet is mainly ads and DRM. Anyway, it worked for a long time and now it may be slowly dying out, some publishers may go bankrupt, but many will find ways to replace ads revenue on the Internet with something else.

Basically, what's the big deal? What am I missing here?

There's actually an adblocker which effectively does this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-ethical-ad-blo...

"This extension provides a 100% guaranteed ethical ad blocking experience. The conundrum at hand: users don't want to see ads, but content providers can't give away content for free. The solution is simple: if a website has ads, the user simply should not be able to see it. This way, the user doesn't experience ads, but they also don't leech free content."

TeMPOraL in your sibling comment says "I say, good riddance". That poster should run this adblocker.

I'm close to that with uMatrix and myself being too lazy to set up rules for the ad-laden sites to even render properly. My Internet browsing experience is definitely much better without visiting those sites though :P.

Wow. The mental gymnastics here are astounding. Every time the ad blocker argument comes up, in pop you affiliate defenders, crying "If you block our ads, we will all disappear!". No, buddy- crummy sites that make bad decisions with regards to advertising and/or content (or lack thereof), would disappear, as very much needs to happen. People don't just not want to pay for content, we are just tired of we, ourselves, being the commodity with which it's paid for. Charge a subscription, start a patreon or what have you. If your business (make no mistake, if you make money off your website, that's very much what it is), survives or thrives, kudos. If not, it wasn't feasible and you need to rework your business plan or start a new one altogether. Ads are the laziest, most anti-consumer way you can possibly make money. Many of us have been around since the internet began, and we remember the years of wonderful, continuing content that existed before advertising (and even after the pop ups and banners, it was a long while before the site operators made any real money), and will continue to do so after ads as we know them have shifted yet again.

I'm not going to pay you anything, but would you mind expanding on your comment by interviewing some reporters, editors, ad executives, and reading trade journals from the advertising and media industries? Would you also prepare some charts showing revenue, the number of editorially independent news sources, and the monetary effects of paywalls and related content, and how it's changed over the past few years?

I know I'm asking you to do all this for free, but if you want you can put a line at the end of your post "-------Sponsor message follows-------" and regardless of what goes below it (which you don't have to look at) you'll get $1000. You'll stay editorially independent and can write whatever you want, just make sure it is honest, thorough, and well-researched.

On second thought let's nix that $1000 - could you just do it for free, maybe throw up a PayPal link and see if someone wants to send you money.

I'd like you to do this research, I'd be interested in reading it. I think about 2 days is enough for you to write this article, you shouldn't have to talk to more than about a dozen people and read maybe 2-3 trade journals, which you could find in any large library.

I look forward to reading your comments. (Forget I mentioned anything about the ad payment, that's now off the table - that was some stupid mental gymnastics on my part, my apologies.)

please don't post like this

In case it wasn't clear, the fact that ad networks are separate is a historical relic. Technically, there is next to no impediment to the servers that serve content serving advertising content at the same time.

So Sylos's point "ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part. And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers" actually is only a historical fluke, present in the short term only.

Web sites themselves are technically able to do all of the things that Sylos mentions, without involving any off-server advertising. But web sites today have advertising that is clearly displayed.

By aggressively blocking them, while saying that web sites' broken business model isn't the users' fault, you are encouraging two things:

1) Encouraging the ecosystem to make web sites serve advertising utilizing their own stack

2) Encouraging web sites to collect deep analytics from their visitors and share them directly. This is much worse than colecting advertising view information.

3) Paid shilling. This exists today and is called "native advertising."

It is often indistinguishable from genuine content. As in, I don't know if I am consuming genuine content, or fake content. But the latter answers people's misguided calls for web sites to come up with an alternative model.

It is very simple: today, web sites that are in the business of creating content and monetizing it using advertising networks are NOT in the business of personally collecting and selling deep analytics on their customers. They are also NOT in the business of creating shill content.

This can change in the future. I wouldn't like it to.

You dig your hole deeper with every reply. Your fearmongering won't work here. Yes, they track and sell our data. Yes, many of them are ripoffs and "shill" sites. Your stating they aren't doesn't change facts at all

"It is very simple: today, web sites that are in the business of creating content and monetizing it using advertising networks are NOT in the business of personally collecting and selling deep analytics on their customers. They are also NOT in the business of creating shill content." - wrong. They get their money from the adv networks who do EXACTLY THAT, which in turn pays the site owner. They are quite literally doing exactly what you claim they don't.

Here is the core of the argument. You aren't listening to the public. You know, the people you want to visit your site. You don't create content for the joy. You do it for the MONEY. Therefore it would behoove you to listen to your customers, ie US, and give us an experience we will want to pay for. Disregarding us will cause us to disregard YOU. We lose nothing. You lose potential customers. Quit trying to bail out a sinking ship with a bucket, and build a raft that could one day become its own, better ship.

I have no idea why you think I work in the ad or newspaper industry. (To be clear: I don't and never have.)

But anyway I look forward to reading your research here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11916756 - I'd just like you to collect some facts and conduct some interviews, it shouldn't take you more than half a week tops, and I'm sure you're more than happy to do it for free. I encourage you to also throw up a paypal link in case someone feels like paying (I mean, I personally won't, but still). I realize I might be proposing a bit of a broken business model for you, but I'd still like you to do it.

Please just take a few days and do this work - I'd like to read the results! Thanks.