Use of Ad-Blocking Software Rises by 30% Worldwide
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I am not giving them the internet too!
They can take their unwritten pact and starve.
The worst offenders however, are the ones that require a payment to use, and still completely overwhelm you with the ads (Public transport in my case). I do subscribe to some services where the subscription removes ads, and I gladly pay for mobile applications that offer a reasonable (<10$) cost to ad-free experience. However, I have observed the overwhelming majority of content to be completely worthless, and I do not lose anything by not coming back.
I have a sister who is a successful advertising creative and executive. Our wildly differing and strong opinions on the topic makes for interesting family dinners.
I am longing for the day that AR technology gets to the stage where lightweight sun-glass frames can have the ability to overlay classical art, or any other texture, over real-world ads in real-time.
I have also been wondering lately if some sort of Adnix [0] like device could be developed using the incredible machine learning software that is becoming widely available. I know very little about such things but I have been meaning to make time to see if it is within my abilities.
I'd love to scare my sister with it.
[0] Adnix - http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=2223
It seems that you got some value from the web site. Is this consistent with "advertising ruins everything"?
Without ads, do you think the web site would exist at all?
I did, however, pay Carl Sagan for it many years ago, when he first published Contact.
Quite likely. This kind of content is something people tend to maintain out of their own interest in the subject and willingness to share. Ads are added more like as a "why not?" thing.
Anyway, there are many ways to monetize that don't involve asking third parties to shove shit at your visitors.
Also if you would like your phone to replace them with art: http://noad-app.com
Don't hold your breath. The disgusting industry of marketing/advertising will happily pay the AR companies irrefusable sums of cash to have their firmware prevent you from overlaying their ads. Or worse, the ads will be projected directly onto your lenses without even needing to look at the real world. Walled garden AR will win out over any open-source equivalent, as the money involved will monopolize the industry with patented technology. Never underestimate their scummy practices; our obsession with capitalism has made this the status quo even before television ever hit us. Hell, newspapers and public posters were already pulling this crap in the 1800's. This has been our reality since the invention of the word "corporation".
Personally, I wish that any business that must advertise to even be viable should not exist. Unfortunately, every business owner who wants a piece of the pie disagrees and will do everything possible to force themselves onto us. Yes, force - it's tantamount to rape in my opinion. Unsolicited, unwanted, unwarranted, and inescapable - were any "person" to shove themselves at you like companies do, it would be considered rape. For example, "retargeting" is literally stalking you everywhere you go. How it is considered acceptable is beyond me.
No wonder you and your sister don't get along. This is completely ridiculous.
I don't think advertising is tantamount to rape.
Rape IMO, is one of the most heinous crimes a human can perpetrate on another.
But I do think the advertising industry is already well over-the-line that I am comfortable with. The insane fact that we let advertisers track us and keep files on us should make anyone nervous.
why? FOSS seems to be doing fairly well across the Internet at the moment.
No wonder everyone went to the offworld colonies.
I bet rednecks would shoot their rifles at would be audio ad blimps passing over their property without thinking twice - like they do now with drones. And I don't blame them, because I'd do the same any day.
I suspect what stops us from seeing more blimps is cost. They're expensive to operate, and billboards are cheap.
Approximately the only people who can bash advertising without hypocrisy are subsistence farmers. The rest of us are paid to satisfy artificially inseminated needs. Perhaps our specific industries and employers use classier, higher-quality, and more subtle forms of advertisement, but in a truly ad-free world, we'd not spend money on anything but staying fed, warm, and reproductive.
Just because an item doesn't prevent one from starving or freezing to death does not mean it is an "artificially inseminated need".
Sure, GDP might drop 10% in the short-term if all advertising was banished. Who knows. What I do know is that people won't stop wanting things that make their life better, and in general will continue to buy such things.
Advertising is not what keeps us from a peasant lifestyle.
Is this what you actually mean? Because that's an absurd statement. Unless you dilute the meaning of the word "advertising" such that it covers literally every human action. But then we aren't having a useful conversation anymore.
You're aware that a small number of years ago, in the scope of human civilization, most objects were not branded, billboards didn't exist, etc?
This is nonsensical.
You can only buy something if you know that it exists for sale and where.
The process by which you acquire this information is, by definition, advertising.
In your specific case it's possible that you knew what speakers are, and you knew what Bluetooth is, and you extrapolated from there that the combination might exist and you went looking for one (carefully avoiding paid reviews in the process).
But it's also possible that you saw a post on techcrunch or HN years ago when Bluetooth speakers were first being developed that seeded the concept in your mind. Something changed between then and now such that you recently wanted to buy one, and that kicked off your ad-free research and purchasing process. Are you positive that no ads were involved in that original, long-past inception of the concept "Bluetooth speaker" in your mind? Or maybe one of those fellow consumers whose reviews you recently read originally bought their speaker because of an ad they saw.
If I make a better mousetrap, but then tell no one and never leave my farm, will the world beat a path to my door?
I think you might argue that there is a distinction between word of mouth flow of information and advertising, but the devil is in the details. Is publishing a peer-reviewed paper advertising? Is updating a blog about your project advertising? Is posting a limited number of access codes on a forum you don't own to a service you are launching advertising? Is cold calling advertising? Is sending unsolicited emails advertising?
What makes advertising advertising, and how is it different from telling people about this thing you made that they don't know about but might add value to their lives? I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with fuzzy concepts like social capital.
1) My friend has one
2) I saw one at a party or work function
3) I was at the store a while back, browsing around (of my own volition), and learned about them
I could go on, but you get the idea. There are very many ways to learn about new things other than overt advertising. If we are being lenient, it's actually not too different from asking "how does culture spread and evolve?" Humans have been doing this stuff for thousands of years.
To address the second half of your post, I do agree 100% that it's impossible and unreasonable to draw a really hard line against all advertising. But I think we can certainly do way, way better than we do now.
Having your product out in the world with a brand name on it is a form of advertising, and it works really well because people don't recognize it as such.
Some people do recognize it, which is why they'll do stuff like de-badge their cars, to avoid being an agent of the "my friend has one" or "I saw one" form of advertising. My grandparents found this terrifyingly insidious and tried to be cognizant of and reject it whenever possible. Now we all wear logos without a second thought.
>3) I was at the store a while back, browsing around (of my own volition), and learned about them
Manufacturers jockey with retailers for prominent shelf space (or shelf space at all) as part of their advertising efforts.
Similarly, a storefront with signage in a heavily (foot) trafficked area is one of the most expensive (per impression) ad placements that money can buy.
I didn't say the product had a branded logo on it. Many products do these days, but not all.
It's not hard to imagine a world where logos aren't everywhere. Even today, I don't buy clothing with prominent logos.
You are completely missing my broader point here. Advertising is a small, superficial part of culture. People have participated in culture for thousands of years, acquiring items and ways of doing things. They don't need advertising to do this.
Because I want a speaker and my phone supports Bluetooth.
> you knew what speakers are, and you knew what Bluetooth is
Umm, yeah. And if I didn't know what Bluetooth was I'd still know I wanted a speaker. The fact that my phone supports it - even if I didn't know what it was - would lead me to wanting a speaker that supported it.
> If I make a better mousetrap, but then tell no one and never leave my farm, will the world beat a path to my door?
The ads proclaiming best mousetrap ever, never are. So from my PoV all I lose by you not advertising is another rip-off.
Try renting the mousetraps with a "Purchase if we catch X mice per month" agreement. Prove their efficacy instead of spewing empty words.
> but the devil is in the details. Is [...] advertising?
An argument that there are shades of gray isn't a valid answer for the complaint that people enthusiastically push the boundaries of black-hat.
> What makes advertising advertising, [...]? I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with fuzzy concepts like social capital.
The fact that someone pays to force it on you. Also, that the people writing the advertising would say anything for the sale, rather than being honest.
Yes, many people lived and died in an era when there was no time for economic activity beyond extracting dinner from local fauna or the land. The process by which they first learned about and acquired farm implements, giving them the time to do other things, is called advertising.
> If you believe the human experience before modern technology and economics was good enough
No rational person can take what I originally said and twist it to sound like this.
> Yes, many people lived and died in an era when there was no time for economic activity beyond extracting dinner from local fauna or the land.
Learn history. Art is older, if not as old as agriculture.
> The process by which they first learned about and acquired farm implements, giving them the time to do other things, is called advertising.
Farm implements first had to be invented. They first invented them.
Everyone on this thread knows what is meant when the word Advertisement is used. It is not even close to what you are proposing.
Besides, nobody is bashing advertising because it's advertising things. We're bashing that advertising activity that's based on lies and deceit -- you know, like the flashing neon signs that invite you to buy this pill that's gonna make you beautiful like the other girls and it's basically half a gram of sugar mixed with ten grams of Matcha tea, and the sort of dubious activity that it mixes up in this scheme, like user tracking and outright malware (remember Forbes' blunder?). And I'm not even going to get into the part where it advertises stuff like cigarettes (and I'm a smoker, I'd just rather not see this vice being frickin' advertised!). I have every intention to keep bashing this shitty industry until it grows a spine.
To get rid of online ads would therefore require either everyone paying something on the order of 700 usd per year, or a lot less ad-funded content.
I've never understood why this is always seen as such a bad thing. It worked well before, it works well now, and it can work well in the future. I'd even argue that most sites were better before advertisement-based funding became common.
However, it's worth bearing in mind that the end game of ad blocking isn't an Internet without adverts.
It's an Internet of product placement and "sponsored content".
I'm with you on the concept, but public transit is just about the most wrong example you can come up with.
Every system that I'm aware of either loses money directly, or would do so if they lost government subsidies. Advertising revenue isn't something that any of them can do without.
You may be able to afford to pay a rate that would obviate the need to rely on advertising, but those who most depend on it could not
...
In those regions, people’s efforts to block malware disguised as online advertising has been the main motivation for downloading ad blockers.
First, "critics say" a lot of things. And that "unwritten pact"? Yeah, you wanna know why it's unwritten? Because it doesn't exist. However, the second part that I quote undoes any kind of morality tale "critics" would like to spin. Users were apparently willing to tolerate a degree of advertising (which, BTW, is a loooong way from any kind of a pact), but after a point they'll turn the tap off if there are tools available to do so.
If they want to pretend this unwritten contract exists (I don't think it does) then they need to uphold their part of the deal: don't infect users with malware.
In regards to the "invisible pact": I believe publishers would find more success by framing it in terms of the users' self-interest: Considering everything that's going on, do you believe the world would be a better place without The Wall Street Journal, NYT, Guardian, Bloomberg, Wired etc? Or even – for people prone to sudden exclamations of "CNN IS FAKE NEWS!", without Breitbart, Drudge, and The Intercept? If you cut out every publisher currently set up as a revenue-based organisation – would you be well informed? Is there some non-professional blogger(s) who could have served as a primary source for all the news of the last week?
Congratulations; may your lucky streak continue.
> I believe publishers would find more success by framing it in terms of the users' self-interest: Considering everything that's going on, do you believe the world would be a better place without The Wall Street Journal, NYT, Guardian, Bloomberg, Wired etc?
Aren't they attempting to solve that problem by charging for access outright, instead of just begging their users to look at banner ads?
PS: You have probably been part of several botnets, modern malware does not try and break your system.
Unfortunately, malware has shifted back into breaking systems, under the form of ransomware.
>If you cut out every publisher currently set up as a revenue-based organisation – would you be well informed?
I don't believe these publishers accurately inform people most of the time (from either politically biased side). They give an illusion of "being informed" but are you really informed if you only know half the story with countless important details left out for brevity or because the situation is simply too complicated? How accurately do you think any of the places you mentioned cover what is happening in Syria? How many people do you think are actually "informed" about what is going on? Do you think most people are even capable of understanding what is going on from a few sound bytes or even segments on the news?
>Is there some non-professional blogger(s) who could have served as a primary source for all the news of the last week?
Yes actually, there are. They're just much harder to find. Most news worth knowing comes from a primary source (eg: Snowden) and while media may serve as a microphone to raise awareness - they aren't inventing news. They're sourcing news and hopefully verifying those sources for authenticity. Nowadays, they seem to have a vetting problem and most of their sources are users on Twitter.
When the media covers a huge event - they have people who (should) be knowledgeable on the topic discuss the topic. From my experiences, these "professionals" are rarely well informed on the topic and just have a degree in the relevant field and happen to be a contact source for the media body. "Hey, we need a doctor. Find a doctor on our contacts who is willing to speak. I don't care if he's a surgeon and this is neuroscience! Doctor is a doctor!" sort of thing. The worst of the media bodies have their news anchors speak on the topics.
I honestly think people would be better informed on topics without mass-media. Because a lack of knowledge, at this point, is often better than pre-existing but incorrect knowledge. Because then they think they are informed when they actually aren't. I think that's more harmful.
About your lack of malware - good malware goes undetected. If you've connected to the internet at all, I can nearly guarantee you're part of a botnet at this point. I'm probably part of a botnet at this point and I take steps to protect myself.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/16/major-sit...
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/guardian-article-on-cybercrime-...
[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...
I disagree with that. The invisible pact turns media into a clickbait factory.
I don't know if I would be, heck I don't know if I am now. But if 99% of them were cut out, I would still be suffering from information overload, there's just so much of it to indulge in. Seriously: all the press you mentioned could go away and my life wouldn't suffer for it (I hardly read them anyway). Meanwhile, I'm still forced to pay a special tax to fund my state's 500-million-eur-a-year BBC-wannabe news/entertainment/propaganda machine. And I hardly ever read them.
Because I don't see how a democracy could work without the media. Even a low-information voter like you profits (in my view) from a vibrant and free press by the decisions of more informed people in the voting booth.
It's an assumption, but it is a safe assumption when they have a history of doing it constantly.
If I understand correctly, you are saying "the media" is vital for democracy, so anyone who considers "the media" useless must also consider democracy to be useless.
However, the GP does not say all media is useless. He is saying there is more information than he can possibly consume even if most media outlets go away, and that the media outlets specifically mentioned by the GGP aren't of value to him.
Democracy worked in the United States (even surviving the Civil War) without "the media". "The media" as we know it has only existed since the late 1800s and it was first used to influence the American public toward war with Spain (funny that you mentioned Cuba).
I do agree that a healthy, functioning democracy requires the free flow of information, but that's a different concept which does not, necessarily, require "the media" as it exists now.
> Even a low-information voter like you
His post suggests he receives more information than he feels he can even handle. He simply isn't reading outlets that the GGP considers vital or necessary. If he's selective about his outlets, that may even increase the amount of useful information he uses to inform his vote.
> from a vibrant and free press
I am unconvinced this describes the modern media. Many of the incentives are misaligned, profit being the largest one. It describes, perhaps, some subset of the media.
> by the decisions of more informed people in the voting booth.
Are they 'more informed' though? I know plenty of people who consume "the media" all day long, and they are very misinformed.
However, for my family, it is mostly the malware. Especially misleading download button ads. To be fair, I'm not entirely sure it's the ad blocking, but there's been a noticeable drop in tech support calls from my parents since I installed it for them.
Eugh.
I don't know what the solution here is.
How many more sites are you willing to pay at that same level?
Right now, as far as I can tell, advertising supported sites are out-competing sites that directly charge users, meaning that users prefer not to pay. That makes leaves advertising as the most sustainable model.
Simple sites designed to promote the spread of genuinely useful information can be designed to use microscopic resources and operate on little money these will be fine.
Some sites provide neat services people are willing to pay for these will be fine.
Some sites represent the online presence of organizations with significant budgets these will be fine.
Much of what remains isn't worth much and if no viable means of support can be found I guess they shouldn't exist.
Honestly 1/2 of the modern web could go away and not much would be lost.
It's only a crisis if your livelihood depends on making a bunch of crap nobody in their right mind would pay significant resources to support.
Do you believe that's realistic?
What sites are so essential that we couldn't replace them?
https://mondaynote.com/the-nytimes-could-be-worth-19bn-inste...
Cuts both ways.
I'm sure that if a large number of companies were able to cut $277 from your average aggregate monthly spending in exchange for a guarantee that you were buying their products, they'd be signing up. Perhaps some sort of subscription service that you couldn't opt out of. You can try doing that as a startup.
It is also a matter of preference I'd say (actually preference vs annoyance). I install adblock to everyone mainly for the malware+abusing; I wouldn't go to such lengths otherwise. AFAIK I did it with the default "allow non-intrusive ads" checked.
Car companies don't sue oil companies when high gas prices hurt SUV sales. It's part of the risk of doing business.
The internet was great before advertising, and it'll be great after advertising.
"essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions" - https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...
My job is to keep my systems secure. Other peoples' jobs are their business. Unless I signed a contract or gave them my word, I have no obligation towards them.
> This means there's a shift to native advertising in response, which means they're not just shitting in the water. They're shitting in everything else too, and trying to cover up the taste.
Easy solution: if they shit on everything, I avoid the entire plague-ridden, smelly, nuclear waste dump they created.
(Please understand I'm not saying this to stoke conflict. I'm just sharing how I think through the question of how advertisers survive.)
And thieves need to steal to survive.
Brutally honest here: I don't care if the advertisers survive. I do realize that at some level, a consumer has to be made aware of a product in order to purchase that product. The problem IMHO, there is too much advertising overall. I'd prefer more effort went into making quality products, than into manufacturing the need for more unnecessary products. Obviously, this is a pipe dream.
I can deal with the annoying interstitial (as much as i hate it) but when videos pop up and start playing I draw the line. Its incredibly obnoxious when you just want to read a website. Also it slows down your computer too if you're low on ram...
As humanity progressed, this included various ad networks and other human beneficiary systems. Today, it's all about blocking the anti-ad blockers. :-\
I've been amazed over the years tho how some friends and colleagues let this crap through. My wife, for instance, using Yahoo mail would stupefy me on how she could concentrate on writing emails when there are banner and tower ads animating and annoyingly blinking on the periphery of their ui.
As a software developer/creator, having shit all over the screen going apeshit with animations and visually assaulting assets, was just to much for me from the beginning.
I'm much more like you in my desire for no distractions so I can focus. But I would go a little further and say that I consider ads somewhat of an affront to my personal autonomy, and avoid them whenever it isn't too difficult.
I much prefer researching all the options myself, after I've decided to buy something, instead of continually being influenced to believe x, y, or z by profit hungry companies whose incentives are often not aligned with mine.
I suggested he download uBlock to Chrome, just so the flashing would go away. I don't know how people put up with it.
But when they janked the text I was reading out from under my eyes... It was Bugs Bunny, chewing that carrot, and telling Elmer Fudd "'dis means war".
I don't care about banner ads, re-targeting, etc., etc. But if you fucking hijack my speakers/headphones to play some random shit I don't want to hear, I hope you die a painful, slow, lingering death.
There are worse things in this world.
Enable ad blocker is sooooooooo easy compare to watching even "good" ads. A well made, non-distubing, interesting ad will become boring after you see it couple more times. In addition, non of the "ad or subscription" websites ever worked to my knowledge since install ad blocker is easy and take the benefits from both side. One of my friend made an ios game that asked only $0.99 to remove all ads. Yet according to him, only 1/10000 user actually paid.
One click fixed
Most people (present company excluded of course) would not seek out an ad blocker for something so minor as PgDn.
I'm not sure how you can get more obtrusive than "entire default screen of main product replaced with ads."
I'm sure you have apologetics on the matter, carefully constructed while you were surveying "most people" on how they'd react to the Page Down key.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cats
How much of your screen is ads?
I also use a DNS based filter in addition to ad blockers. Gotta love centralised ad networks - you block some hostnames and you get rid of 80% of junk automagically. The rest is the ad blocker's business.
The only websites left in my whitelist are those that only have static image banners.
Many publishers are entirely, or mostly ad supported. Their expectation is that when you read their content you also glance at the ads. If they can't make money off the ads they can't afford to produce the content anymore. (or more likely try different monetization approaches)
This sounds like some sort of deal to me. And the impact of breaking it is apparent to anyone who thinks about it for more then a couple of seconds.
That being said I find that many sites have obnoxious ads (or other content) and I simply hit back if it is too much. (and I consider my tolerance quite low) The content simply wasn't worth that much to me, and I can likely find equal or better content without the shit surrounding it.
Ad blockers are blunt instruments. They generally affect all sites and whitelisting is rare and based on the good part of the site, not how awful the ads are. This seems like the wrong motivators for publishers. The "turn away" approach directly penalizes sites that are unpleasant.
I've realized how little value the vast majority of these sites actually offer. In fact, they actually cost me more in time and productivity than anything and I gain very little.
There are plenty of services I pay for. But it probably won't be an internet news site.
On the other hand, do an exemplary job, and I'll seriously consider donating or buying merchandise. I've chipped money to Wikipedia, Reddit, and LWN, as well as Debian, the FSF and the EFF. Not everything needs to be for profit, and not every website is entitled to making money. If the work you do is important enough, it will find a way.
Whining about how consumers don't uphold their end of a pact that advertisers willfully broke is just delusional.
The newspaper doesn't necessarily know how bad the ads get for users, the users don't know what the financial stress is on the newspaper, and the advertising network doesn't have to care about either of them beyond squeezing the most water from a stone.
I'd say it's a false expectation. Businesses only succeed within the culture that supports them. If the culture doesn't value the business model then the business will fail or, as you say, it will adopt another model.
We live, I think, in an age of advertising pollution. If the culture of web users is intolerant of advertising then advertising supported businesses will fail. I don't see this as being either good or bad. The business model either works or it doesn't, and no business should expect their particular model to work.
- Those pushing a product whom have a deal with advertisers.
- The advertisers who have a deal with both the companies selling products and web pages selling space for ads.
- Web pages which have a deal with advertisers.
- Users who have little obligations to anyone and less loyalty.
Advertisers, web pages, and sellers have confused the fact that their business model depends on someone who is not only disinterested in their arrangement but actively hostile to it with an unwritten pact. This is especially surprising when it becomes clear that their acts and ends are ultimately hostile to the user.
Its not only unwritten its wholly and entirely imaginary. Adapt or die the current state of the web and the crap on it is ultimately going to end with 70-90% of users using adblock.
The issue is that it's no longer in the hands of the users. It's in the hands of the creators of the Adblock software. They decide what is actually displayed and they even have a white list where a company can pay to get onto it.
This will backfire on the people rejoicing, however. Instead of advertisements on sites, we will see entire advertisements disguised as actual content (which can't be blocked).
Real journalism costs money. Plain and simple. When you take that out of the equation (because Adblock has destroyed many revenue streams), you get articles written on speculation that can be done from the comfort of an office chair.
Online advertisements are one of the only ways a person without a big company can actually make a living. I've never really understood this massive push against it from Hacker news, which is supposed to be about startups and the startup community.
I guess an actual path to profitability is never factored into the equation.
If everyone allowed normal ads through, advertisers wouldn't sit back and say "Well done everyone. Time for us to stop doing sponsored stories! Back to the old model!". They'd still be attacking on two fronts. Ad-blocking just prevents one avenue of attack.
> Online advertisements are one of the only ways a person without a big company can actually make a living.
So? We let people who have shitty business models fail all the time. Why don't they take one of the other methods for making a living?
We worked with a company that used various tricks to get around the adblock protection, and then serve ads. This was a great success, at first. Eventually our users started notifying adblock[1], and adblock included rules to block the new ads on our site. Then we contacted our vendor, who gave us a software update to circumvent the new adblock rules.
This went on, until adblock enabled the nuclear option and blocked all ajax requests on our site. This effectively broke our site for anyone using adblock. So we caved in, took out the software, and begged for mercy from adblock. The rule was taken out, and we are back to losing 30% of our ad revenue.
I should mention that we've tried the usual stuff -- subscription service to remove ads. Asking our users nicely to add our site to their whitelist, etc. Both of these have had minuscule impact.
[1] When I say "adblock did X", I really mean the caretakers of the "rule lists", which the various adblocking engines use in their browser extensions.
Note here that I'm not against certain kinds of advertising, and I'm all for subscription models and donation incentives and a great many other ways to fund sites. But third party advertising networks have forever lost my trust, and I simply won't tolerate the security risk nor the annoyance any longer. Your site is welcome to require me to disable AdBlock, and that's fine. I don't need to read your posts that badly anyway.
The "something shady" is AdBlock muscling their way into the ad revenue game using you as a way to bludgeon the sites serving the ads. Under no circumstance should an ad blocker prevent the site from working as expected; that's the purview of the site itself.
Have you thought about handling the advertising yourself and hand picking products and services that are directly applicable to your users and displaying them in an unobtrusive manner?
And as a side note: I consider ads from any ad network to be a security risk and while I respect sites for "politely" asking me to whitelist them I feel it's a misguided approach.
The other reason is it's a community, and the more people we have on the site, the better it is for the site as a whole; more people communicating and interacting with each other, which ideally brings more people and keeps the ones that currently visit.
There was a time that might have worked. It would have worked with me, anyway. A time when others were using ad blockers, but I had an attitude of "meh, they gotta pay the bills". I might pay a little money to turn off the ads, and were I to use an ad blocker I might whitelist a site or two.
But a threshold was crossed. I can't tell you what that threshold looks like, or name any particular event that set me off. Maybe it's the malware, maybe it's the jiggling belly fat ads, auto-play videos, I dunno. But at some point I said "enough", and I quit giving a shit about anything to do with that industry. The well has been so poisoned that I don't care about finding an antidote anymore. In general, I don't care if websites go under. The poisoned well metaphor breaks down in that I can't do without water, but I can sure as hell do without most of the ad-laden websites out there. I'll miss them, but not enough to be bothered to expend even the minimal effort to whitelist as site.
I don't want to be that person. I want to be empathetic to at least the small content producers just trying to scrape a few bucks. But I've been worn down, and not in the way the advertising industry wished I had been worn down. No, I'm worn down such that it's just easier to run an ad blocker and quit caring. And it's unfortunate that companies like yours get caught in all of it.
Until advertisers understand and embrace this, the people that use adblockers will never relent. There is one, let me repeat, one website that I disable adblocking on: reddit.com. I've never been abused by them, and I don't regret that choice. Every other time I've temporarily relented, I immediately regretted it and blocked them again.
I blocked ads on mobile devices when they started buzzing my phone, sending me the the play store, giving me popups, etc.
now I block everything on all my devices using pi-hole
The site gets a chance to impress me with its "engaging marketing experiences" but when I want to read a longer piece I switch to Reader View and all the CPU hogging madness stops.
Obviously, that doesn't protect me against malware, but I have never suffered a successful malware attack so far in spite of using the web basically 16 hours a day.
I also sometimes get email spam ads from a forum I use. But the advertisers buy access to the mailout directly from the forum owners and the forum owners personally screen them to make sure they're relevant to their audience.
There are cases that still exist which sound like your former experience. They're not horrible, just inconvenient.
When I go to a website, I don't want 6 separate companies doing their best to identify me, tracking my activity, and doing their best to predict what I might actually spend money on so they can get a piece of it.
When I build a website - if I put ads up, I'm handing data about my work product off to people I don't know for what use I have no idea. Is someone going to use that data to build a competitive product? Is someone going to abuse the goodwill I build to my end users? Is the ad platform safe or am I putting my end users at risk? These shouldn't be questions. These should be answered by default by every company that would want to spend money advertising to my end users.
The ads are ineffective, the revenue is terrible unless you are a very popular site, and the questions about the data we are exposing are plentiful.
And yet everyone with a blog about Wednesday night prime time TV is clamoring to put ads up in hopes that it might generate them $100 over the course of a year.
We can do better.
The solution isn't stopping ad-blockers or getting around ad-blockers. The solution is to come up with better ways to generate the same revenue.
Google innovated and now look at them. Where would they be without AdWords? Why isn't anyone else truly innovating? Why do all of the ad tech companies look like clones of one another?
Because simply (simplistically?) speaking, a lot of people out there want to make a lot of money, but do not have enough smarts to "truly innovate". So they end up "hustling" - cloning whatever is working, Facebook for X, Groupon for Y, Uber for Z... and there is a reasonable chance that such a strategy pays off with decent enough success rate, so I don't see this trend stopping anytime soon.
This is most obvious in music. Pre-recording, a career as a musician was a viable but humble one. Your art had a range of perhaps 250km max, and you'd entertain at pubs, gigs and events in that area. You didn't make a lot of money.
Recording replaced a lot of that. Instead of hiring live musicians for their weddings, people chose recordings known to be good. Pubs installed juke boxes with more choice than one musician could ever hope to offer.
However, the carrying capacity of the recording industry was finite. There were only so many recording studios, and they were really expensive to set up and use. On top of that, the pressing factories could only replicate so many albums, even running full tilt. I'm sure if the recording industry could have let everyone record an album, they would have, but they couldn't. They had to pick who got albums and who didn't.
The result was whole nations worth of wealth being centralized into the few hundred people that a given recording industry chose, and all other musicians being left out in the cold. To this day, most municipal orchestra performers have side jobs (often as music teachers but sometimes random other stuff) because if the orchestra does pay a stipend, it's rarely a living wage. Orchestras aren't profitable any more.
But now the recording equipment for a small group goes for the range of ~$10,000, within the savings capacity of a 4 man band, and the internet will let you record and publish for free. The centralization is breaking down, and that's great for the humble garage band that wants to try to make their hobby their job. They might be able to, if they spend some time marketing themselves, and are willing to accept their income will probably be below average. They don't need the recording industry to do it.
However, it's the stuff of nightmares for super-star performers, because as money re-normalizes back to small time musicians across the globe, it'll inevitably drain out from under them.
I agree it's a huge feature for me, and I wish someone would let me pay for it.
That sentence shows a worrying level of entitlement. If you feel your website represents a simple content-for-ads purchase, and you feel that people are stealing from you, if the ad revenue is something you /deserve/, and you feel that 100% of visitors should see ads 100% of the time, then block everyone running an ad blocker from seeing anything[e1]. That's easy to do.
If you're not willing to lock "non payers" out, then you're offering a free service with a donation policy, and complaining that not enough people donate. Well I'm sorry, but they aren't required to. If you don't wanna be a donation based company, then don't be.
I grant you that looking at the before and after on your balance sheet may hurt, but that's not "losing 30% of your ad revenue" because that revenue is not owed to you, due to the nature of the business model that you chose. What it really represents is a potential 30% growth area, made up of people who's requirements have recently changed, and who now need a different strategy to capture. I don't know what to tell you man, markets change all the time. This is business.
[e1] or, as someone else pointed out, just leave the website broken for the "freeloaders" and don't worry about it
If not, why would you expect people to stop blocking it?
I feel for sites that show messages like this in an unintrusive yet prominent manner. But I don't remove the ad blocker because I look at what's getting blocked and notice many trackers. If it were only simple ads (preferably plain text), I wouldn't mind and would turn off the ad blocker. But I don't want to be tracked and won't add an exception for any site, cruel though it may seem from the publishers' point of view. For me, what's really cruel is the assumption on the publishers' part that tracking visitors is acceptable and even something visitors shouldn't mind just to keep the site going.
Yes, and the entire advertising ecosystem is a detriment to the internet. Crafting more "compelling" advertisements won't solve the key problem: online advertisement has become an abuse of our attention spans.
We need to stop talking about pragmatism and start considering advertising from an ethical and moral perspective.
The problem is that the entire field is driven by sales people with very few exceptions. The only objective is to make more money tomorrow, so they only think about how they can squeeze the market just a bit more... Like "Oh there's an empty spot on that page, put an ad there now!", or "Hey did you see those ads that cover the entire page? Advertisers love those... I want you to implement it on all sites asap!".
Ethics, morality, user experience, security and privacy concerns are simply not a part of the equation.
Make sure you have an exit plan.
Too bad so sad. I actually would have liked advertising to help support good websites, but we gave them a good, long chance, and the industry blew it. Articles like this don't make me shed a single tear. I wish it was different, but that industry brought it on themselves.
Ever heard of native advertising? Basicly just a catch-all name given to ads that look like content. You might think that advertisers are playing nice and that they stick a "sponsored" tag on ads that look like content (as the law requires most places), but in fact they "forget" quite often.
That's the root of your problem.
The delivery of the content has to be paid for by someone. Usually the consumer balks at that. People expect things on the internet to simply be free. But they aren't free, and ads are a way of signaling that.
That doesn't mean the current situation where ads are intrusive and irritating and a source of malware is good, and that's on the content providers and ad networks to address.
They have an active interest in (over)estimating very agressively about the growth of adblockers -- it's their business model.
Interestingly, I think this is why Google is now cracking down hard on bad websites. They're trying to justify people not using adblockers. It's a losing game.
I suspect the remaining cases mostly come from email and social engineering, where most antivirus aren't likely to be meaningfully better than MSE/Defender/whatever the OS has built in.
I hesitate to install ad-blockers for non-technical users who would need support every time a website doesn't work. Many wouldn't be able to pin down the problem to the ad-blocker; they'd just think something was broken (seemingly randomly attributed to web browser, website, Internet connection, computer, something they clicked, etc.).
How do people here deal with that? I don't want support calls daily, and even if I did it wouldn't be a good experience for the users.
Clearly, this is not the case. One can't adblock printed media, but can certainly adblock websites.
The solution? Find a better business model. For example, stack overflow uses non-intrusive, pertinent ads to entice people to white list the site, and separate revenue streams like a job board to keep the site running.
I understand that this might sound simplistic. I am perfectly aware of how hard this problem is to fix -- however the world moves in the direction dictated by the big economic trends. Websites have almost zero variable cost -- most cost is fixed and does not scale as pageviews increase -- so economics tells us that competition will drive the value of a pageview to zero.
The viable model is paywalls and that's where quality content will go. I don't see a big deal with that as I will gladly pay for content that I value.
Interesting, how so? I find it difficult to imagine any media site that, once they produced a piece of content, has to pay any other substantial cost as they get more views.
In other words: doubling up page views for the Guardian does not mean doubling up the costs of producing the articles. That's what I mean by "substantially zero variable cost".
These ads would be harder to block, mainly because of the CDN thing, but maybe not as many people would want to go out of their way to block them. readthedocs.io sometimes runs ads that fit this criteria and, at least on my machine, uBlock doesn't block them yet.
No. The unwritten pact is "you can show ads, as long as they're not intrusive (layer ads, popup ads), don't distribute malware and don't unneccessarily invade the privacy of the users".
Just go back to hosting and managing your own ads - print media most certainly can do this, given their print ad sales teams, and I believe there's a market for advertising brokers which allow a 1:1 connection between advertiser and the content platform.
Edit: And for heavens sake, do not roll out fucking video ads, especially not on mobile pages. Not everyone has 50GB+ data volume like in Finland...
The advertising industry as a whole could have taken a different, better path. But they're just as lazy as I am, and they took the easy way out. In the long-term, though, they're going to have a tough time of it as a result of short-term thinking.
And white-listing? Didn't I just say I'm lazy?
I can't look at someone without an ad blocker's browser without going "uh, here, install this".
I just don't see them anymore, since I don't pay for TV and block ads online, ads are almost entirely outside my daily experience. So when I encounter them now it triggers a burn-it-with-fire response.
We're going to need browsers which render original pages on a non-visible page, ads and all, then extract the good stuff from the DOM and put it on a visible page. Then the site can't tell if you're blocking ads.
You can enable it within uBlock Origin.
Firefox does that, it's called the "Reader Mode".
Thats why as the article said ad block became really popular in indonesia, because it costed users too much of their data plan compared to the value they got. And the reason why is because rich media ads became more frequent compared to a few years ago.
To avoid becoming an autoimmune response victim, you have to do things like google AMP where 'ad-enhanced' becomes a benefit.
It's scary. I have a million users, run the business extremely lean with just myself, and I'm barely scrapping by at the moment. If I can't survive, how is everyone else going to survive? Don't get me wrong, I use ad block too for obvious reasons, but we're going to see more and more businesses closing up shop unless there is a better way to monetize content online in the near future.
I tried having someone well connected in my industry directly sell advertising campaigns. They were able to increase ad revenue by about 30k per year. However, I needed to pay them, so at the end of the day it didn't have any benefit, and I went back to using ad networks.
Edit:
I run another site as well that has 5,000 daily unique users and 70,000 daily page views. It has two advertisements, one above the fold on the homepage, and one closer to the footer. It earns about $5 per day. That's it. I don't think many people understand how low earnings are for most sites.
Lots of publishers have been adding more advertisements, and trying to block users with ad block enabled, and it's not because they're greedy, money grabbers, trying to steal all of your information. Most of them are just trying to stay afloat as the ship sinks.
There is not enough money going to content online. How much do you donate to HN, Reddit, StackOverflow, and hundreds of other sites and services you use on a regular basis? I donate $0, and the majority of other people do the same. That's a problem, and we need a solution.
If your traffic is mostly US/UK/EU, then you are doing something very very wrong to be only earning $5 per day.
My best example of this is a very nice painted webcomic that updated once a month, and viewers reached his 4.5k goal so he could hire an additional person to help make it two comics a month. It makes the implicit contract between viewer and creator explicit, and readers would instantly know why and who to blame if the comic went back to only update once a month again.
I recommend implementing a friction-free way for people to support your site, at whatever level they may feel comfortable with. Then you can occasionally remind readers that the continued quality of the site depends on you being able to pay for both it and your rent/mortgage.
Make a page that allows people to give you money via Patreon, Amazon Payments, PayPal, Bitcoin, Rixty, Venmo, and whatever else may be convenient for you. As the revenue from those sources allow, gradually remove the ads, and try to make it obvious that some ads went away because of increased direct patronage.
If you still want some ad revenue, you will probably need some way to do direct ad sales, and embed your paid endorsement into your content somehow, in a manner that is not off-putting to your audience, while also publicly disclosing that you were paid to promote something.
Here's a site using it for their lifestyle blog -- hover over the first image (desktop only): https://www.theskinnyconfidential.com/2016/11/04/bridal-show...
Email me at justin@pleenq.com if you have any questions!
Does it need to be mapped to each product or can it do that itself?
You might also want to look into cutting out the middle man and doing sponsored posts, or display ads directly from the providers - or if not make sure that any books mentioned has Amazon referal links.
I think a majority of the sites that are ad-funded today will have to find a new working business model or go under.
I hope there will be a renaissance in online advertising where decent advertising lets content be "free" in the sense that I'm not paying with my integrity and information.
Micropayments are another option; Brave has implemented them.
A better system for micropayments would certainly help here though - most people who won't pay likely don't want to register an account at a third party service just to pay a dime to a web site.
I think this problem will be solved simply by the fact that traditional ad (network) revenue will dry up.
Will users be compensated and get repairs paid? Since its very costly and likely company threatening, would you pay a insurance which would cut into profits even more. What kind of risk mitigation do you employ to lower users risk and your own liability when deciding which ads runs on your site?
Brave browser is also a good idea but I doubt it will gain traction. It should have been a plugin.
After being frustrated with the lack of "decent" blockers for my other devices (android, iphone, tablets, etc) I started blocking network wide now. It will be difficult to go back.
Your $5 per 70k views would be $0.07 per 1000 views. Are those 70k views the number that adsense shows you or the number that Analytics shows you? Because that is a huge difference. Adsense views do not include users with ad blockers. On my sites, 66% of the users use ad blockers.
From what I read, you run something like a forum? Is the traffic is mostly returning visitors?
Most of the media industry's problems with malvertising would disappear if they only served up <img> tags. They could also one-up the ad blockers by serving images from within their own domain. Why the media industry hasn't united to clean up their act is baffling. Google certainly isn't going to take leadership on this issue since any solution cuts into their revenue.
That would work for me. I don't block ads, I simply block JavaScript from most sites. The paucity of ads served to me is a happy side effect.
Why the media industry hasn't united to clean up their act is baffling.
The media industry is constantly doubling down, trying to be more and more obnoxious. The exact opposite of cleaning up their act.
It's marginally slower than chrome but otherwise I couldn't be happier.
It's also worth mentioning that Firefox has built-in tracking protection that can be enabled in all tabs through about:config.
There's also a built-in option to block downloading webfonts.
Overall, Firefox on Android seems to be a lot more privacy focussed than Chrome.
So now ads are blocked on my browser. All of them. The advertising industry and the people who use it to monetize are at fault. They did nothing to prevent the awful privacy mess that was made of the web without ad-blocking.
Check this out: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...
Adblockers are in a very literal sense antivirus.
The article seems to trust PageFair's assessment but only mentions in passing that they make money helping companies recoup lost ad revenue, and spreading fear over higher ad-blocker usage probably helps them gain clients.
Compelling? I'd settle for "non-instrusive" and "won't force my computer to run potentially malicious code".
I also think it'd be an interesting startup idea. I get that there would be some technical hurdles to overcome, especially with all the real-time bidding that goes on now. But I'm sure a couple smart people could come up with something. Could start with something as simple as a cron job, a WordPress plugin, or an nginx proxy.
It would also radically increase my bandwidth bills if the ads were anything but text or a small amount of (hopefully sanitised) HTML.
Both of these could be mitigated by adding an enormous amount of due diligence in terms of what ads I was willing to serve, but that would add a lot of extra cost to running the site.
There's no real technical barrier to doing it but I suspect the legal and operational barriers are more significant.
And yes, the DOM is involved too - ad blockers block URL patterns but also allow users to block DOM elements based on a selector-type syntax. The hardest ads to remove are ones where the DOM selectors are dynamic - i.e. server-side rendering producing divs with random CSS classes.
> It would also radically increase my bandwidth bills if the ads were anything but text or a small amount of (hopefully sanitised) HTML.
To an end user these sounds like features, not problems.
> Both of these could be mitigated by adding an enormous amount of due diligence in terms of what ads I was willing to serve
The lack of any vetting whatsoever is a big reason why adblock is so widespread. If you don't trust it enough to transmit it through your servers, why should I trust it to run on my computer?
Most seem to be complaining about malware.
> is there a space for good ads, which benefit both the user and the advertiser?
Probably, but how are you going to convince me that your special snowflake ad network is the one that's guaranteed to be malware free?
A good example is subreddit-specific ads. For example, say that you have a woodworking subreddit. The ads would then sell wood, tools, maybe some instructional books, and so on. I don't have a problem with that. Another example is Amazon's "Buyers of this product also bought..." section. Oh hey, I need one of those as well.
What's frustrating are the general-audience advertisements that spam every medium. Coca-Cola, car ads, movie promotions, etc.
Of course, depending on the sector, even the niche ads can be just as shitty. I post a lot in /r/learnprogramming, and most of the ads on that subreddit are for get-rich-quick coding seminars that charge an enormous amount of money, promise the moon, and teach nothing that you can't learn from CS161 at your local community college.
When I finally got a car I got an ad for the local bus company - I know they exists, I have hated them for years. Now if there had been an add for a good way to find a parking space.
When I moved apartment I got ads for 3 months for a site that allows you to search available apartments (for a fee, of course) even long after I had moved.
Facebook also gave me an add for the exact degree I told them I had, at the university I already had it from. I only need one masters, thank you very much.
So I guess there is space for good interesting ads, at least in theory, but I don't think they exist in reality, at least not in great quantity; I also don't think they ever existed of line either.
From my perspective, advertising is not terrible in itself. Advertising that punishes the user is terrible. Make the user experience of an advertisement good and useful, and get rid of the nasty malware stuff, and I suspect there will be a lot less motivation for ad blockers.
I'd be okay with paying some sort of nominal fee to support a site that reliably has content that I like and is appropriately valued, but those opportunities are very rare. I've occasionally donated $5 or $10 to sites that I use that, when you are using an ad blocker, replace an ad with a message that says something to the extend to "hey, since we're not getting ad revenue from you, would you mind chipping in?". I've never subscribed or disabled my ad blocker for a site that tries to hold it's content hostage, and I can't imagine paying for sights that want $20+/month for a subscription.
Ads are from my perspective a disaster from too many angles to list here.
In short we don't have the right funding model available yet. Ads just prop up a poor one, making it possible to appear vaguely viable. So I think the more ad blockers spread, undermining the online ad industry, the better.
I'd be more convincing no doubt if I had the right alternative model at my fingers, but if I did I would probably be working on it not writing it up in HN. Micropayments of some sort seems to be the last man standing, but which and how and by who?
If they don't violate my confidentiality and track me.
The algorithmic "stick in whatever ad in this box" network system sounds good on paper ("tailored to JUST YOU!"). But I've never seen it actually deliver on the promise. At the very best I get stalked around the web by ads for the thing I just bought last week.
I use an ad blocker now less to prevent ads appearing (which unless they pop over or flash or animate I would barely notice), than to keep data usage down (I'm in a rural area with extremely expensive data).
‘Malvertising’ Increased By 132% In 2016 According To New Report:
On one hand, advertising on the internet makes it possibile to have free services and websites, so that even people who can't afford a subscription can see the content and IMO is better than data mining as a source of revenue for content providers.
On the other hand, it's super-annoying.
The rise of ad blockers will make content providers introduce the possibility of paying to access the service with no ads, so that those who can afford it or care can pay to get it with no ads, and everyone else can still get it with ads.
It's not really realistic to pretend that some services don't make any money, because after a while there would be no good quality content to go to. Ad blockers are perhaps finally changing the idea that everything on the internet MUST be free, and getting people used to paying for what they want to use.
I was positively surprised to see the New York Times and other newspapers have started offering relatively cheap online subscriptions (still too expensive [1]). I'm waiting for Youtube Red to become available in my country and have Netflix and Spotify. Patreon provides to be a great platform for niche content and I support several creators that cater to my interests.
Subscription and pay-what-you-want seems like much more sustainable business model than ads, or at least has good synergy.
[1] For ads a CPM (cost per mille) of $1.00 is common, meaning one ad view from me is worth $0.001. If I pay a site $1.00/month I'm paying them much more than I'm "paying" them with ads.
If you like popular creator, but see that they're already getting quite a bit of money on Patreon, you're less likely to support them than another creator that you only kind of like, but who is currently getting less than you think they deserve. Unless the popular creator can convince you that they can spend the extra money to make their content better, and thus be worth it.
So I think with Patreon, creators' revenues will tend to converge on what people think they're actually worth.
It was 90% the viruses for me.
Once I installed an adblocker, I can't believe how much faster/less frustrating using my phone to find something on the web has been.
1) After the content has loaded it's broken into pieces by blank spots which slowly fill up with ads
2) Loading the page maxes out a recent CPU
3) Page with ads does 3x the number of network requests as the adblocked versionI'm guessing it will take at least a decade before Firefox or some alternative browser gains any traction on mobile.
The ad industry had a second chance with mobile, and they showed they couldn't control themselves.
I'm guessing it's small but significant and will grow.
I use Brave myself but not exclusively.
AdAway for rooted devices https://github.com/AdAway/AdAway