Ultimately, ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads. They're about filtering out visual noise. Stop putting crap on my screen and FFS stop being-self righteous when I block said crap. In what world is blaming your users the right move?
The customer is always right. troyhunt.com is part of the problem.
No they're not. Often they're absolutely wrong.
> if you want me to consume ads, give me ads I want to consume.
The sponsorhip message on Troy's site is unobtrusive (it appears once at the top of the page, text only), and doesn't track you. It's relevant to the audience of his site (sponsors are curated by Troy). They're the best case for good ads on the web. If all sites did ads like this, I'd uninstall my adblocker immediately.
You misunderstand the expression, I think. The expression means "do you really want to get into a moral argument over trivial matters with your clientelle... really? Because that's not good for you."
>The sponsorhip message on Troy's site is unobtrusive
Indeed. However, it's still an ad. It still decreases the signal-to-noise ratio on his site, and that's why I use an ad-blocker. Ranting against this behavior is not in Troy Hunt's interest because guess what: the web is big. He's replaceable.
Again: the missing bit here is that the adverts do not add value to the site. They degrade it (if only a little). This is why his ads are being blocked. Full stop. The market has spoken.
> Ranting against this behavior is not in Troy Hunt's interest because guess what: the web is big. He's replaceable.
So he should just suck it up? Why?
> This is why his ads are being blocked. Full stop. The market has spoken.
If this is the market speaking, it's going to eat itself. On that trajectory, it's only a matter of time before everything of value is behind a paywall of some description.
He should serve ads I want to consume. This is the norm: it's called native advertising.
Exactly how he goes about doing this is frankly his problem, but the bottom line is that the advertisment should also have value for me as a consumer. It should be informative, unintrusive, well-designed and enjoyable. This can take the form of sponsored posts, for instance (with the usual caveats surrounding such things).
What I'm propsing is not rare. Pocket does this extremely well. It does imply, however, that you can't lazily slap a link somewhere on a site.
You enjoy consuming glorified PR pieces, that aren't distinguished as such? To me, that seems much more underhanded and deceitful that a simple sponsorship message, or even something like AdSense. At least they're distinguished from content. In my opinion, there are too many ethical issues surrounding native advertising, not least of which is the distortion of content.
So no, I don't enjoy consuming glorified PR pieces that aren't distinguished as such, but that's not what I'm advocating.
"Advertorial", as native advertising in print was called, was loathed and rightly so. It was viewed as a way to hoodwink the reader, suggesting to them that this advertising copy ("buy this car, it's great!") came with the impartial seal of approval of the editorial staff. There would be a little "Sponsored Content" disclaimer at the top, but it was easily missed. Every editor I knew would strongly resist the sales staff's attempt to get us to run advertorials.
By contrast, display advertising - brash, colourful, couldn't be mistaken for editorial - was understood not to be in conflict. Occasionally an advertiser would threaten to pull their ads because we'd written something they didn't like (Casio once pulled all their advertising after I reviewed a terrible digital piano of theirs and pointed out how terrible it was). Our response was generally "ta-ra then".
There's some irony that we've now come 180°, and on the web, advertorials are considered good, display advertising bad.
I don't care that a commercial site is trying to sell me stuff. I do care that journalists -- who serve a crucial political and social function -- are actually peddling widgets for the ACME corporation instead of acting in the public interest.
As such, advertorials are a problem in journalism, but not in commerce (provided they are well-labeled, etc).
Surely you have to be at least a bit aware of the fact that the only way to serve ads that you, omginternets, will find value in would be to track you and your viewing and buying habits all over the internet, right? Which is one of the things that adblockers seek to circumvent...
It should be informative, unintrusive, well-designed and enjoyable. This can take the form of sponsored posts, for instance (with the usual caveats surrounding such things).
But this was a sponsored post? And you still seem to be pretty indignant about it. In fact you called troyhunt "part of the problem".
And surely I have, despite your strangely snide tone.
This is where relevance is particularly important: the pot has to be pretty sweet for me to accept tracking.
Sorry - no snideness intended. It seemed like a bit of a contradiction to me, that's all.
I myself believe that web advertising is just completely broken; I use an ad-blocker for safety and because on mobile the browsing difference with and without an ad blocker is like night vs day. But I'm also very aware that a lot of creative people earn their livings with advertising and I'm hoping we can figure out a good technological solution to this problem of making web advertising less-awful. Maybe micro-transactions. Maybe an <advertisement> tag that lives outside the DOM and doesn't affect page loading. I don't know.
His website, is itself, one huge advert for himself, his skills, knowledge and experience as a security expert. His website, advert though it may be, is full of great content and gives him increased exposure. Through this, he generates additional revenue (i.e. his own personal income) far more than he would do if he didn't have the website and thus, the increased exposure.
Therefore, Troy Hunt is the advertiser and he should pay for his advert (his entire website) out of his own funds, since this is the very thing that generates him (additional) revenue.
I'm not sure that's what people actually want though.
If you restate your idea in less absolute terms, you'll find that you're essentially describing Pocket.
The crux of the argument is that many websites seem to have a model of partially-sponsored content (clearly-labeled, etc...) and that this economic model functions because it provides value to the consumer. Consumers are essentially paying for curated content, with the understanding that some of the information will be promotional, though relevant.
I think this is the most (and often only) viable approach to web advertising.
I'm suggesting that he could do something very similar (sponsored content that is clearly labelled and relevant to my interests) and fix his problem. These are the kinds of ads I willingly consume. I like opinion-pieces.
A corollary to this argument is that serving this kind of curated ad content is hard. Therefore: you cannot make "easy money" in web advertisement by just slapping someone's name somewhere. I suspect the mechanism behind this is that I want to know exactly what a sponsor is influencing. If a sponsor is influencing the whole site, it's a turn-off. If it's on an article-by-article basis, I'm comfortable. In economics we call this a demand.
> It still decreases the signal-to-noise ratio on his site
Customer support 101: The customer is always right. Right they (we) are!
Going by your argument, a one-line black-on-beige text message saying "Sponsored by: $COMPANY_NAMES" is "crap".
But even scientific papers often have lines saying "Sponsored by NSF grant #1234." PBS children's TV has a voice that says, "Sesame Street was sponsored by $COMPANY." And I have at least one or two GitHub repos containing a note in the README that says, "This work was sponsored by $CLIENT_NAME". To me, saying who's paying for work is as much a matter of giving proper credit and fully disclosing where the money is coming from.
Personally, as an EasyList user, I'm a bit surprised that EasyList has a site-specific rule to block this particular "Sponsored by" message.
Yes. At best it's tolerable crap.
>To me, saying who's paying for work is as much a matter of giving proper credit and fully disclosing where the money is coming from.
There's a difference between disclosure and advertisement. The latter has the notion that the information should literally be advertised, that is, thrust upon the viewer. I don't care that a paper cites collaborators or donors, I just don't want it to be done in such a way that pollutes my experience of the content. That's a crucial distinction.
>Personally, as an EasyList user, I'm a bit surprised that EasyList has a site-specific rule to block this particular "Sponsored by" message.
As an EasyList user, I'm considering making a donation precisely because they do this. Again: ad-blockers are about improving the signal-to-noise ratio on a site and preserving my attentional resources. Ad-blockers aren't about blocking ads, per se.
That's also not what's happening in the present case.
Really? I'll grant you my hypothetical case is very rough-hewn, but let's refine it: - currently, troyhunt.com displays the message "Sponsored by: Sucuri: Incident Response, Monitoring, DDoS mitigation and WAF for websites" to me on all page views (albeit only if I disable uBlock, of course) - the article in question has nothing to do with Sucuri, except in their capacity as a sponsor of the content - what if it did? More precisely, if (and there might well be one; I've not checked) an article somewhere on troyhunt.com, without being directly written at Sucuri's behest, concerned itself with the downsides of Sucuri's main competitor (whoever that might be), would you still be able to say that your ad blocker improved the signal-to-noise ratio?
My argument is rather this: troyhunt.com is in the business of attracting users. These users do not wish to see the some content troyhunt.com has selected, so they've filtered it out by means of a third party. Now troyhunt.com (the business entity, not the individual, who I'm sure is a good person) is lashing out (albeit quite politely) against the means through which its clientele has expressed their expectations/desires. This is a case of shooting the messenger. It's bad business.
For what it's worth, I'm an occasional reader of the site, and until today I'd never seen the sponsorship message, or known that it existed, primarily because I have assumed good faith on the parts of the maintainers of EasyList - which assumption, it transpires, was a little misplaced. I think, underneath the understandable annoyance, this is the issue that Troy Hunt is getting at.
I want to argue that this is nothing more than user-feedback. From that perspective, 'EasyList' becomes a destructive test: if my content can't pass EasyList standards, we have a catastrophic failure. This is a good thing, because we want to know which designs are incompatible with internet-business ('fail fast' as the kids say).
If you want to design the most resilient things, build them in the most dangerous environments. Your revenue stream should be very resilient. Lashing out against the environment strikes me as a poor strategic decision, especially when there's a simple way of making sponsorship more palatable for your users.
Yeah, this brings a whole new slant onto the argument. It may be that there is some text attached to a document that must legally accompany that document. For instance, would it ever be alright for an ad-blocker to remove something like "Copyright 2018 ACME corporation"?
In what way is "This work was supported by a grant from ACME corporation" different?
ACME's logo on public research has little or nothing to do with ACME's logo on a private, commercial website. In the former case, it's a certification and proof-of-work (on behalf of the NSF). In the latter case, it's literally commercial advertising. I think comparing advertising to public research is a big fat red herring.
Here troyhunt.com has a business problem: environmental forces make "simple" sponsorship an unreliable source of revenue. It takes few users to get the sponsorship link blacklisted on EasyList as intrusive (read: unpalatable) advertising. Clearly, you cannot make money doing things this way.
There are no easy solutions, but native advertising seems to work.
I'm an happy adblock user, but this makes me wonder how blocking lists are built. Did I just give power to some people to filter out any content they don't like from my browser?
I personally tell people who deliver bug reports to me "First turn off your ad blocker then try again." It's a losing battle as a web developer or website administrator to keep up with the myriad ways these tools can manipulate the DOM in a non-standards-compliant fashion.
For displaying a small sponsorship message?
It's not a scandalous example or anything, but it is representative of the fact that webmasters can't wrap their heads around "people will block things that degrade their experience, and if you can't make money in such an environment then it's your problem".
He's part of the problem, although granted, the problem is minor on a cosmic scale.
In what sense of the word are you a "customer" of Troy Hunt?
I'm using "the customer is always right" in its idiomatic sense, not in a literal sense. The point is: arguing with your customer that what he wants is wrong is not a fruitful approach to ... well... anything.
1) Commenting on one's own blog about things one has observed that could be adjusted to improve the market as a whole is perfectly fine and doesn't usually do any short-term damage to one's brand (you can touch a nerve and trigger a boycott, but that's probably unlikely given this topic). Comments on this topic are important, because people who use ad blockers may not realize that their short-term gains are pointing to a world where content creators have to bake the ads into the content itself to get paid. If they don't want that, it's good this signal is in the zeitgeist for them to consider.
2) Sometimes, even deciding a specific customer is too damaging to your ability to serve customers in general and service needs to be refused is the right choice.
To pop out of the analogy and into the world of web transactions: people are very much allowed to run ad blockers. And I'm very much allowed to craft a site to detect ad blockers and begin 400'ing requests or failing to load page content if I can't verify the ads are shown. It's, ultimately, your content to display and my content to vend. It's a two-sided transaction by the very nature of the protocol.
Or did you think bloggers blogged out of kindness?
So I consume. And pay what I am aware of (attention) and what I am not (tracking and ads).
Hunt is not blaming his users, he is blaming the specific ad blocker (and more specifically, a bad actor and the inaction of the ad blocker) for blocking a truly unobtrusive ad, and so in this case the title is warranted, maybe a little bit click bait.
>Ads aren't meant for you, they are meant to help the producer of the content.
Sadly for the producer of the content, I (or others) have to consume the god-damn ads. Complaining that one's users are blocking one's ads amounts to complaining that one's marketing strategy is bad.
So yes, I do have trouble taking "boo hoo people are blocking my ads" seriously.
- we agree that he's complaining about a specific list
- we agree that the ad is unobtrusive
- we agree that he sent in a form
However:
1. it's an ad 2. "unobtrusive" is relative, and clearly people are annoyed with his ad
In what world is blaming EasyList the right move? They're doing what it is they're meant to do (and that for which people donate to the service): blocking annoyances on the web.
I'd rather see irrelevant ads - or ads targeted at the average visitor - than be tracked and shown things an algorithm thinks I personally want to see.
I wish one of those "pay $X/month into a bucket, distribute that bucket among all the content you consume proportionally" schemes would actually take off and work.
From a game-theoretical perspective, it's the only smart move for me. This is why ad-blockers aren't going away any time soon.