We’re dropping Google Ads
groundup.org.za
groundup.org.za
So to quote GroundUp: "Obviously the behemoth in Mountain View won’t miss [us], but we take some pride in saying the feeling’s mutual."
Although I don't know how much I can blame this on connection problems on my end, it looks like it takes five seconds or so to type "Test Tester", when in my opinion it should take only one.
All you need to do is delete the frames where nothing changes in the input box and it'll be a big improvement.
(Obviously, this depends on your framerate. Suck it and see.)
It's pretty well known that techies don't click on ads, but they're only a smaller segment of the internet population.
Google is no cake-walk from the other end either. As someone who has paid them for ads, over 70% of the clicks are...shall we say?... low quality. Of course if you only run Google Analytics you may never realize this, but if you cross-check with something else you will.
The idea that google can better qualify leads based on search results has basically failed. Online advertising needs to be treated the same as the other media: just a method of branding.
I much prefer to pay-per-view rather than -per-click. At least I feel like I'm getting what I pay for.
My recommendation is to sell the space directly on BuySellAds. At $1.00 CPM it would fly off the shelves, but you can get much more than that with a little patience (and provided that your visitors have at least some kind of quality).
Another point to remember is that typically publishers only sell to Google AdSense their unsold (so-called "non-guaranteed") inventory. Typically you take this money because it's better than nothing, and because you couldn't sell this inventory yourself. Usually this non-guaranteed inventory has a lower value then the stuff you'd sell yourself.
There's a lot of reference-style material on news sites, and the CTRs on that are not bad. Just look at Wirecutter and its affiliate model.
That said, industry average for news display ads is about 0.05%... 1 click per 2,000 impressions. No bueno. Say 3m impression get 1.5k clicks, that's $0.33 CPC net or about $0.49 CPC gross.
Please help: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/64wwge/ads_mak...
I'm used to seeing mainstream newspaper websites with downright toxic commenting environments, so seeing "Dear Editor" followed by a thought-out response is very refreshing. Maybe they have a "better" readership/screening process/whatever, but I think this higher quality commenting behavior is in part due to how GroundUp has simply tweaked the wording of the comment box interface - by framing the comment with "Dear Editor".
"In contrast to comments, letters are only published if approved by our editors. Views expressed in letters are not necessarily endorsed by GroundUp, but they must meet our quality requirements. Letters are given more prominence than comments on the website. "
Then at some point Google gave me the option to opt out of various objectionable topics and soon Google ads got as bad as the others. Maybe Google bought the bad ad networks, or partnered with them or something.
Quite a bit of subtext is largely unexamined. AT&T and Verizon, two of the biggest advertisers, have pulled out from YouTube. AT&T is the biggest pay TV provider in the US now (DirecTV) and Verizon wishes you would watch Go90 so they could sell ads against it. Both of them benefit if ad spend goes elsewhere than YouTube.
I think the problem with ads on the internet is that it will always be a race to the bottom. Ads on TV and in newspapers/magazines have scarcities in play to somewhat help manage them. Ad space on the internet has never been scarce.
The ad companies (Google and Facebook especially) see themselves as somehow unbiased market platforms, and I think we are coming to point where the lack of scarcities leaves "neutral" platforms vulnerable to very cheap "attacks". I worry that ad platforms need to exert a lot more editorial control in the face of that and/or start building a lot more artificial scarcity into their platforms, and I don't think any of them are appropriately incentivized to do that.
I also worry that Google and Facebook's ad spaces are content spaces: search ads at the top of search results, and sponsored "posts" that have like/share/comment abilities. I think that also requires a custodianship and a moral obligation to editorially control those spaces that neither Google nor Facebook have thus far been inclined to take enough responsibility for. Facebook especially, when liked/shared ads graduate to "real" viral content, entirely blurring the lines between ads and content and giving direct power to cheap micro-targeting attacks without having some editorial immune system to help avoid the worst memetic viruses. (Facebook claims to want to do better, but their fiduciary responsibility incentivizes them not to treat ads as user hostile infection points.)
Me too, but not so much about the content ("ads is ads", I used to think), but about privacy and the relentless tracking that DoubleClick was doing. And oooh boy, did that omen ever come true.
Another thing was the moment when I realized the implications of having a giant Internet-wide ad-network implemented in the form of injected third-party javascript. I mean, at first it seemed real clever. This wasn't a big thing back then, just yet. Originally ads were just clickable image links with an affiliate code in the GET parameter and http-referer tracking (which already provides an advertiser way more info about their audience then a printed ad in a magazine would, so yes that is more than sufficient for advertisers who honestly want to advertise instead of spying on people).
It's a miracle that over the existence of AdSense, nobody ever managed to XSS the entire Internet. Even if that can be attributed to the AdSense team awareness of their unique position of responsibility and engineering quality control or something; We still dodged a bullet with that one, because it just so happens that it was the Google that came into control of the largest XSS vector in history. But having quality control and a culture of responsibility didn't cause becoming the largest and gaining control (it just means they got to keep it, because it hasn't gone horribly wrong--for which we are lucky). A while back I read a comment on HN arguing (though I'm not sure if they realized) that whether something is a "good product" depends more on how well it is marketed (and therefore finds its way to people that can use it) than it depends on the quality of the product. That's horrible, but like too many horrible things, also true in some sense. So it just so happened that the ad-network that was marketed best and became one of the largest and most successful, also happened to be one that was of sufficient quality to not break the Internet.
It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site. When you take away the option to protect myself, you accept responsibility for attacks. After all, if it's morally/legally wrong to alter the presentation of the content they serve, then they also morally/legally responsible for incidents when they serve it improperly and cause losses/damages. Quite obviously it's not financially viable for them to pay for their negligence, and so it's also not financially viable for me to trust that a site won't host some sort of attack vector.
The pennies of advertising revenue earned from my modest browsing over the course of a year doesn't pay nearly enough to compensate for the time I lose through dealing with malicious ads. Unless online advertising cleans itself up, adblockers will be the best option. And sites that don't respect that aren't sites I'm interested in.
yep. This is an effective way to get newspapers whining about ad blockers to shut up as well.
"But then what's the point", we both said in unison.
* Everything is worse for users (tracking and malware)
* Everything is worse for advertisers (ineffective ads)
* Everything is worse for publishers (pays way too little)
* But adtech gets paid well
I thought they were, while still annoying, safe from serving such content. So much that if they detect your site has malware they prevent it from serving their ads https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1308246?hl=e...
As such I went along with allowing google ads since it seemed like a good middle ground between not wanting to have everything pay-walled off and still allowing sites to generate ad money
Yes.
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/y...
The claim is that a YouTube ad was serving malware.
However, upon reading the article, it seems that:
1. Somebody purchased legitimate YouTube ad space. 2. They then redirected that traffic twice through two other legitimate ad networks. 3. They then broke into a Polish government website, and funnelled the traffic there, to serve up malware.
That certainly doesn't seem to be a case of Google/YouTube serving up malware - if anything, these attacks went to a lot of trouble to obscure from YouTube what they were doing, precisely so they wouldn't get shut-down (presumably by either YouTube, or the two other ad networks they were piggy-backing on).
You could argue, they should have caught them earlier - but isn't that a bit like blaming your email provider that you got a spam/malware email - when the actual party to blame is the person sending you aforesaid spam/malware?
All that backend obscurantism is completely irrelevant to the hapless viewer.
Or if somebody posts a bomb in your postbox - you'd say "US Postal Service is building and sending bombs"?
There's a fairly clear distinction there...
I don't think most people would consider Google's purposeful display ads, which site owners choose to put there and customers expect to see, 'Malware.' I think Adware/Advertising Malware refers to software that shows unexpected ads, such as after you leave the site, or installing software on your computer that randomly shows ads.
... they probably even tell it to themselves to better sleep at night.
It's right there in the definition, literally.
I don't qualify any of the info that trackers get about me as "sensitive".
"Google Ads" is injected third-party code that literally does all of these things (and goes through quite some trouble to obfuscate it) (even if us techies are aware).
And they pay people to serve it to you.
I would like to consider my Android phone to be a "private computer system", yet Google has full access to it and they will disrupt its operations whenever I try to prevent them from either 1) gathering sensitive information or 2) displaying unwanted advertising.
But it came with Android when I bought it, yes? And I chose to agree to this agreement or something, right? Well first, we know by now that this "choice" is mostly illusion. I put Cyanogenmod on it to better protect myself, but the disruption persists and it merely exposes how aggressive the malware in fact is as soon as you put up any form of resistance. The mob can also be real nice people if you don't stand in their way. Also, if you buy a new laptop, the crapware it comes bundled with, is that malware? What if it would disrupt and limit the operation of this laptop if you decide not to use it (yes you must actually use it and thus provide them with sensitive private tracking data, not merely refrain from trying to uninstall it).
Of course I don't really consider my phone to be a "private computer system", not any more, but that is exactly the sad state of affairs. I can't consider it private because I am aware of the above and my lack of real choice in the matter. But this way you can argue that any computer system that malware has gained access to, is no longer private. But that is basically just giving up.
It's a very natural human instinct to legitimize something just because it's the largest, most successful player. There's an internal urge to want to side with the winner. But not all human urges are rational or even okay to give in to, without seriously considering the implications.
Almost every senior citizen I've ever had clean up malware for got it from a malicious search ad. And the tech support scams they continue to list take advantage of tons of people as well.
I've pointed out before that Google happily lists phone numbers of tech support scams on search terms for Windows tech support, but doesn't show ads at all if you look for Chromebook support, pointing you straight to their official contact.
As a note, if anyone would like to see examples of this in action, I can go get screenshots and example links and everything, it just takes a little while to put together, as I would prefer to offer evidence of what I see "today" rather than any past examples I might have.
That's quite a serious accusation :). One that is not substantiated by the facts:
https://blog.google/topics/ads/how-we-fought-bad-ads-sites-a...
It's like somebody saying "Tesla cars suck - they explode". And Elon Musk comes out and says, "No they don't, here's the testing/validation we did". And you say "Oh but...but....you work for Tesla. It must be lies!"
If there's factual inaccuracies - of course, that's a different story. But you seem to be simply saying, "They must be lying, because that suits my narrative, so I'm not going to bother trying to refute it".
But malicious content (even on the SERP) is common enough that one of the most effective steps that you can do to protect senior citizens from malware is to install a good ad blocker. The ironic thing is that the search algorithm does a decent job of filtering out malicious sites from appearing on the first page, but that does no good if there is a malicious ad right above the filtered results.
Even if Google is removing "x million bad ads", they are merely replacing bad ads with other bad ads. Removing bad ads doesn't significantly impact their revenue. I'd argue that while Google is willing to make gestures like removing some ads, they are unwilling to do what's necessary to protect users: Stop serving ads entirely where malicious ads are particularly prevalent, and clearly highlight the difference between ads and search results.
EDIT: Here's some captures I did this morning of Google results on incognito: https://oasis.sandstorm.io/shared/nTZcQOHrTgnM-90dAfmut0AX_c...
https://gimletmedia.com/episode/78-very-quickly-to-the-drill...
Yes. Very much so.
Look for "VLC download" for instance, the first ads should be adware sites that distribute a fake version of the software and they paid to get that top search position.
There is even a giant banner (looks like it's not paid for) that says "VLC" and has the VLC logo and links to Videolan.
Google removes ads that contain/link to malware/viruses as soon as they are made aware of them. What more do you want?
They are however replaced with new ones as soon as they are deleted. It is a constant war and the only salvation is adblockers.
Not doing it in the first place, of course! Because this has happened with VLC (a fact you seem to ignore), maybe they fixed it by now, or maybe it's temporary, or maybe you're just not in the "stupid people that would fall for this" filter bubble, but for quite a while Google Ads have been responsible for serving malware and damaging people's computers.
Also just because they try and fix it after the fact for VLC, doesn't mean it's not still happening for all sorts of other software. Google's approach for curation of ads is just not suitable to be able to provide a platform this large in a responsible manner (and I doubt it can ever be, but that doesn't give them a free ticket to behave irresponsibly).
Maybe you've forgotten what this thread was about in the first place, but if their policy is "we will remove ads that contain/link to malware as soon as they are (made) aware of them", then:
1) it's still a perfectly smart choice to use an adblocker because you can still get malware from ads (in addition to many of the other reasons such as opting out of clickbait timewasters, whose "innocence" evaporates as soon as you consider their scale), and a particularly important and smart choice to install it on people's computers that would actually fall for such a fake download link, which is not the HN crowd.
2) as a publisher, I would DEFINITELY want a much tighter guarantee on not serving/linking malware than "we'll remove it when we see it" because now it's not just my safety on the line (or my father trying to download VLC cause I told him over the phone, etc) but my entire audience!
I know I am careful personally, what to click and install, but I honestly wonder how long I myself could keep a fresh Windows install malware-free without running an adblocker. Some of those things are nasty clever and misleading (not thinking about Google Ads in particular, here). Ever consider the amount of good those people are doing? The ones writing the adblockers and keeping the blocklists up-to-date? They are not even getting paid to do it. It gives me such a bitter taste, every time I see a website whining about my adblocker usage. If you care so much, why are you using a third party ad network. If hosting and linking and curating your own advertisements is too much to ask, well then so is me whitelisting your site, sheesh.
1) Don't open the site to begin with.
2) Open the site and instantly get redirected.
Note how none of the options entails actually reading the content provided by the site.
So if there is no valid way to consume the content, you could ask why it is there in the first place.
Then you see all those shitty ads for:
- finding a russian bride
- getting rich through some millionaires secret
- anti-aging remedies
- adware
and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
People keep saying that "journalism is dying", but this industry and its ad-model isn't very "old" in historical terms. For every Business Insider that dies, the world will carry on. For quality journalism (an oxymoron of sorts) and news that matters to people and their circumstances, I assume people will keep forking out money (like they do for The Economist).
If someone smarter than myself can elaborate, how is Googles business-model for ads on 3rd-party websites sustainable for the long-term?
(A) The plugins do not actually have any particular philosophy. They act as facilitators for different lists which certainly have their own.
(B) The creators of the plugins' philosophies (which again, aren't actually in the plugin - usually you have to look into the creator) tend to be varied, and several of them (notably the best ones) do promote supporting content creators, either directly or via whitelist
(C) You can always control your adblocker, and many users (especially those who care about a site, are interested in related content, or so on) do disable it for their favorite sites. The extensions (that I've used, anyways) specifically account for this and remember whitelisted sites.
If your site is significantly suffering because of adblocking and you've mentioned your concerns to users, adblockers are not your problem, your users are. There's no fix for resource leeches.
My sites are not suffering significantly at all due to ad blocking, but some peers say it's a problem. It's a bummer, though, that we don't even have an opportunity to show adblock users that our ads are relevant and not too obnoxious. The filter list author has made that decision for them, and it's almost always "block every ad."
I made similar experiences in the past, to the point where our API broke because we had the audacity to call one of our API endpoints "metric" (for a metrics service), which got caught by one of the over-zealous regexes of EasyList.
[1]: https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...
There also aren't any good self hosted ad servers, among other reasons. .
Some percentage of users will use ad blockers, and businesses should account for that. If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented. One thing I've been hoping for is inventing some form of advertising that was actually fun for the user -- fun enough that they would not want to block them.
Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user. That will incentivize people to unblock ads.
microsoft tried that with bing rewards. i suspect it's not working well because i only heard of it in the context of botting it to get free money. the advertiser wants to spend as little money to gain as many sales, whereas the viewer (and blackhats) want to get as much money as possible. the two parties' objectives do not line up.
We of course botted immediately. I am shocked they went out of business.
I was on that program, paying $10 a month. They refunded anything that was left over. IIRC think they habitually refunded $5+. They also showed stats, and IIRC the websites I frequented the most frequently (Ars Technica, multiple times a day), still received only pennies. That's how cheap ads are.
I started being a subscriber to some of those websites after.
Despite teasing a Contributor replacement "early 2017", nothing has been announced yet.
It's definitely coming back, though. Just not in quite the same form.
No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware.
My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges.
I'm desperately looking for a solution to support journalism that simply lets me pay to read articles for exactly what advertisers would pay to bombard me with crap.
Google Contributor was SO close to being a solution. All it had to do was work with ad blockers.
That's a big issue. Another is that I want sites without any ads to be able to get a share of the money too.
But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.
Using the normal bidding process was a clever shortcut to get Contributor working as a 20% project, with minimal manpower. Seriously, it was just two guys at first.
It's not currently just two guys. I'll let you read that how you will.
https://blendle.com/signup/kiosk
They also have a 9.99 per month subscription, where you get 20 articles daily (I think they are selected through a recommendation system + curation).
1. I haven't resorted to pre-paid Vias cards, but it's a good idea.
2. There has been so many times when I'm thinking about signing up for a website, or service, but the fear of them being "cute", like not charging the correct amount, recurrent billing, making it difficult to quit, and lousy security prevents me from giving money to anyone, except the current monopolies., and only for stuff I really need. As to really need--I don't need that much in all reality.
3. I get those Wall Street Journal offers for $1 for so many weeks. I don't care if it was .01 cents; I don't want to have another thing in the back of my mind to worry about.
It's not about the money, it's about Trust. If I feel this way about WSJ, how are the littler sites suspose to gain trust?
4. I don't have a solution as to how online companies can make money. I just know the minute you hire the MBA, or the "expert", and start underestimating your customers; you're screwed.
Every website should give the customer the option of an immediate purge of all credit card data on the servers, at the time of registration;
"We will sign you up today, charge you $10, and purge you from our database. We would not sell your information. We won't bother you ever again. You have my word--sincerely, the Founders."
You will need to re-register next month. Big deal? Most people will opt for the easy way(keep all info on the customer on the servers), but their will be people like me, that don't want you to have that information on file.
I was just about to sign up for Republic Wireless. It might me the cheapest cell phone service out there. Then I noticed their "new, and improved" billing. It's not new and improved, it's just more money per month. I didn't bite. One lost customer, at least for now.
It's about trust, at this point, for me. I don't think getting certain people to pay is an insurmountable problem, but work on trust, and make the content something they need to pay for? In my youth, I needed quality porn, and that was my last subscription. Pathetic, I know, but even then I made sure they didn't get cute with my Credit Card.
What will be the next website I really need? Yea, it's a problem, but trust should be taken for granted.
The most extreme can give you a unique card number with an expiry date of your choosing, whenever you need one. That does wonder against shady practices.
cough
rich people don't pay, poor people pay for them.
That's the base of the free internet model.
With the Tier1 ISP billing at 95th percentile, and ISP almost illimited subscription and the close to flat rate, the contribution of small internet users in volume is the biggest in proportion of revenues.
And with people like google not paying for their transit, it means someone has to pay. Who?
Every internet users.
Internet & phone are in all developed country a must have for administrative & job related tasks. In every country it is when you are poor a substantial cost, as well as computers.
For those who are growingly poor internet is expansive.
But for the happy few with latest generation computers internet is comparatively cheap.
Being rich is the art of making the poor pay for you.
It is not people don't want to pay, the poor cannot pay, and they are the biggest population.
Me I have an adblock not because I don't want advertisement, it is because my 2007 computers cannot load a modern web page under 15 seconds with ads enabled.
The modern economy is based on the redistribution of the money of the poorest to the richest achieve by (lack) of regulations where the strongest wins.
So, my point is there is no free champagne, someone has to pay, but I don't see why it should be the one not being able to buy a bier.
And call a cat a cat: commercial internet has not yet found a fair sustainable model.
Funny, F2P gaming is all about the opposite. The whales pay for everyone.
Something like lotteries being a tax on people who don't get math.
Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through.
On top of that, it showed me the absolutely paltry amount paid out to the sites running the ads.
So back came adblock, and Contributor mostly just helped on my mobile browsing. I bought Contributor to contribute to the sites, and some for Google, not majority Google, dribble for sites.
That was a serious problem, I agree, and not one we could do anything about at the time. The problem was, those more-obnoxious ads were mainly not served by Google in the first place.
(There may have been a period when Contributor only worked on a subset of Google's ad products, mostly for technical reasons.)
(You is to be read as Google, not you personally)
You didn't even give me a chance! I was actively looking and you denied me, I think because I was European and didn't want to lie or something.
And seriously: I only knew of it through HN. Was there ever any campaigns to inform about it? I can't remember seeing a single ad. Never heard about a single talkshow appearance from any of your bosses.
As it was, I was the only one of the dozens of other techs/devs I know who heard about it. Most were interested once I told them! There must have been zero advertising.
And what I don't understand is when I decide I want to subscribe to a newspaper, it's hundreds of dollars a year. They take pennies to serve me spam and malware, but if I want to pay them, it's 1000x the price.
And don't get me started on how the Washington Post gives a $70 annual discount on a digital subscription if you agree to receive a print copy of the Sunday edition. It sounds incredibly stupid and backward until you remember, advertising.
"If you just ask for the fucking right price, people will pay and great original content can arise"
Currently, online journalism is anchored against the price of free. So if I want to sit down with my coffee and read an article from the New York Times, another from Washington Post, and a counter-point from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and follow that up with a long-form piece from the New Yorker, I can either pay $500/yr, or remember to right click each article and open in incognito mode.
They just haven't figured out yet that on the web no-one is ready to pay 15$ for access to a single news source given that no-one is able to actually read all available content produced in one day.
New potential news customers born in the 1990 are like bees that fly from sites to sites.
Loyals customers that relly on one newspaper and are paying high fee are elderly people and they will stop paying when they unfortunately dies.
It all about not getting the demographic of you potential customer base...
But, for the individual publisher, this would mean the end of their current subscriber base and 70%+ of revenue. I'm pretty sure the NYT has a spreadsheet somewhere, and currently it's still saying that they are likely to lose out in such a model.
If they get, say, 10% of my $30, that's $3 x 12 = $36, which is about 1/10 of their current price. Could they increase their subscriber base by an order of magnitude with such a model? I'd say it's possible, but it's just too big a risk right now. And the numbers may be less favourably for smaller outfits.
All large websites switch to canvas rendering (like Netflix already does). This provides scrape, adblocker, content filter, ... protection.
And of course it makes the internet completely unusable by anyone either blind or ...
You might even create a startup that makes a javascript web browser, that allows all these companies to get consistent rendering across all web browsers, prevent ad blockers from working, while enabling them to use all their current infrastructure as-is. This would work better because it would still enable ad-network providers to send their javascript to the end-user, so they can keep doing their little custom checks to verify if they're being scammed or not.
Until there's a replacement model for that lack-of-trust, ad blocking will probably be easy regardless of display technique.
> If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented.
If the ad blocking becomes so widespread that the ad-supported model becomes unsustainable, I think a lot of people will be unhappy with what happens next. There will be a lot more paywalls and a lot more native advertising, which will be fine for entrenched players but much harder for very small publishers to pull off.
The cool thing about AdWords was you could write a little blog and actually make a few dollars running ads on it just by adding a snippet of code. Maybe micropayments can take care of that some day?
Seriously, where's the Spotify of blogs?
It might be the best we can do, given that the price of information has plummeted, but I hope something better comes along.
Also, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people would prefer ads over paying for content directly. What percentage of Spotify users are on the free plan dispite it's disruptive ads?
...is that a competing business down the road from mine has decided to spend $20/click for my business name, so now I have to spend much more than that in order for customers who already want to make an appointment with me to be able to call my phone number consistently. Google are complete gangster at this point... "nice business you have there."
How is that not intentionally causing marketplace confusion?
Also, if you roll over and pay Google, you are damaging your ability to defend your own business name as a trademark. Trademarks are lost if you don't defend them. Talk to a real lawyer, ASAP.
We've considered seeking legal counsel. Part of the problem is that the two primary words of the business name are a generic service offered by this type of business (40 years ago SEO was not a big consideration). Also very few of our customers take the care to quote the two-word phrase, so their queries could plausibly be sent to the competitor which offers that service as well. This competitor has itself recently added the name of yet another lucrative related service to its name, presumably as an SEO measure.
That said, I'd be very eager to see any more advice you might have, or any links to resources you think might be helpful to us.
In that case, businesses exist that can help your business search for and monitor more defensible trademarks. If you are truly hurt by competitors buying AdWords, you really should thrust your hand into the fire and suffer the pain of rebranding now, because it's only going to get worse the longer you wait. Switching from "Snake Plumbing" to "Jessaustin Pipewranglers" would hurt temporarily as you trained your existing customer base to use the new name, but uncommon or newly coined words are so much more defensible.
How is that an argument for it? Some percentage of people steal things from stores, business do account for it, but its neither here nor there in an argument about whether people should do it.
It's illegal to steal physical property (payment transfers ownership of property). It's not illegal to not look at something.
Speaking of which, I really want to write a real life ad blocker with a HoloLens or whatever AR equipment becomes popular in the future. Replace all the billboards with cat pictures.
Coming soon to a congress/senate near you : adblockers are now illegal. Why ?
Because media appear to control a decent proportion of voters and can make or break political candidates.
Stores do indeed account for a small amount of theft in their budget in the way of security and special procedures, and also for actual theft. Precautions are taken, security personnel and procedures are evaluated, and there's a cost/benefit analysis on such situations. Living abroad in certain countries, it's no unusual to see even a small corner shop have a prominently displayed security personnel standing at the front just keeping an eye on things on top of an array of security cameras across the store. It's a cost of business that physical stores take, and it has an impact on their public perception, and that's a choice the store owners have to make; public perception, or the cost of theft. If websites feel that strongly about ads, then they should make it clear - an adblocker is an indication that people don't want ads. The reason could be as simple as "they're annoying" to "they're intrusive privacy wrecking tools of the devil", but it's a response to the complaint "these ads are annoying." Advertisers have very simple and low cost solutions to this; they can ask for whitelisting, they can ask to turn off the adblocker, they can use the adspace that is blocked to offer an ad-free alternative, or they can just not serve the page, something I wish more would do. Yes, such a position may harm the websites readership, but it's better than the alternative.
As for it being theft, I disagree as ads on a website are basically a unilateral agreement that I have no agency in. Making it a condition for viewing the site, whether it's a spoken or unspoken contract, means that we are in some sort of arrangement - your content for my eyeballs and privacy. I don't know what's on your page before I load it, and titles being what they are for articles, it's even harder to know if it's something I want to see. A single paragraph summary of an AP posting isn't really worth me disabling the adblocker. A conspiracy theory style rant on such a posting isn't worth my time either, regardless of the agenda. A list that is basically just copy/pasted from wikihow with some stock photos added isn't worth it, and so on. If the requirement for your page is I must watch ads, then politely let me know before you spam me with ads so I can make the decision as to whether I want to view the content or not. I have the adblocker on because I specifically don't want ads; the risk outweighs the reward in most cases. If the site operators feel that I shouldn't see the content with an adblocker on, I'm fine with that. That's their offer, and I respect their wishes. I just want website operators and advertisers to respect my wishes instead of trying to circumvent it, or flat out lie to me about why they want me to unblock ads. I don't have an obligation to view ads because I clicked on a link that I had no idea of the contents of. The agreement between an advertiser and a site isn't any of my business, and if they want to make it my business, that's fine, but they need to be upfront about it. Removing my agency in the matter is not a way to win me over as a repeat visitor.
Just because you watched the film doesn't mean you are obliged to watch the ads.
Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't. By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
Doesn't feel right to me.
I would say it should be arguably illegal to resell content with ads removed, but how something is rendered in my brain or inside the confines of my home is upto me to decide. There's nothing illegal about ripping out the ad pages before reading a magazine at home.
Nope but hanging around the printing press and cutting out the ads in all your friends' papers seems unethical.
And it sounds like he agrees with you.
I can hardly see any moral advancement there.
"For about R20,000 a year, it isn’t worth it to pollute our content with get-rich-quick adverts featuring Patrice Motsepe, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey (see image at top of article)."
Moreover, the author states in the comments that their non-profit is sustained by donations, not by ads. If someone had visited this site with an ad-blocker turned on before the author stopped using Google ads, it would have improved the content (by the author's own stated standards) without endangering the site's source of funding.
Granted this may be a special case. But I think special cases are often worth the read, or at least not "just like any other kind."
C'mon, you know better. What agreement? If your answer contains the word "unspoken", I'll let you in on the real definition of that word in this context: "non-existent". I didn't sign anything, no notice was posted. The only agreement I have is that I ask for data, and should your server deem me worthy, it will send me some. That's what I signed up for low those many years ago. If you and advertisers would like to change the "agreement" after the fact, well, good luck with that upstream swim.
You don't like ads, I get it. You take without compensating because you want to. Don't just shrug and say, "no notice was posted." Own it. Say, "I felt like taking this so I took it."
I call it as I see it and am not falling for, "I didn't sign anything. I'm just going by what I signed up for years ago."
The argument breaks down sooner than you think.
For years I had "flash click to play" for usability reasons (I always have 20-50 tabs open), before ad blocking was a thing - but as a results, ads wouldn't play or show until I clicked on them. Do you think back then I had the obligation to click-to-play the ads?
It is exceedingly simple. If you don't want me to see content without ads, don't serve it to me without ads. If you don't want me to change the font size, serve it as a png so I can't change it.
Well that's convenient. Next time someone does something I don't like, I'll be sure to tell them about the unwritten agreement they're violating.
As just one example: If you've agreed to meet with a friend and they don't show, without notice, you'll probably inform them that they are in violation of your unwritten agreement.
(I'm not actually in favour of this line of argument, but I believe it's pretty obvious that unwritten social norms exist, and often serve a purpose)
What exactly am I taking by not viewing ads? I view it the opposite, ads take away my attention and time and worst of all are generally using psychology to influence my behavior. If your site is using them to monetize, I'll be blunt, tough shit. I dislike the advertising model of shoveling malware javascript from dodgy ad companies and if blocking ads is the way to get that changed, so be it. Consider this societal protest over a business model I disagree with on its very premise. All the way back to Edward Bernays I think advertising has a rotten core by encouraging things like women to smoke, and passing off one of the most common elements off as some sort of rare thing amongst numerous other ethically questionable tactics.
But what theft has occurred when ads are blocked? What have I taken from the ad companies? From the publisher? What alternative has been given? If anything the only thing I have taken away is encouraging them to pursue better ways of monetization that doesn't treat my attention as some fungible thing for their own benefit. This company made $200 a month, donations alone could easily recoup that cost with 40 people doing $5 a month.
Also, if I go to a website and read content without viewing ads due to having an ad blocker. Well oops, but not like there is a giant banner over each hyperlink that says I can't click it without hurting someones feelings or bottom line. Block me if you want, but ironically you'd be cutting of your own nose to spite your face. I'm willing to pay for no ads, but no site is wanting to engage in what that truly means.
Point me to the ethical problem with ad blocking and maybe I'll buy your argument. But if your fundamental premise is that you need ads to publish, you're not going to convince me with $200/month arguments.
My computer is controlled by me, ads come through a programmable rendering engine, nobody owes ads the right to render unconditionally.
All that being said, the irony is I pay more out via patreon than I'm probably worth in ad revenue to all the websites I've ever visited. I do this because I hate the current model. I'm supporting the content producers that have realized this fact and are embracing it. What are you doing to change things for the better?
If running an ad blocker is stealing, then so is disabling JavaScript or using curl.
Should they download the ad and pretend to display it? Then the site still gets the impression and everybody wins.
The user uses less of her own bandwidth, but not the publisher's. Ads are served from third-party networks, not the publisher's servers.
The target of a link could still be redirected, this would not allow the ad agency to track visitors but would allow them to track the effectiveness of a campaign.
That's about as much as they should be getting anyway.
But it would kill most RTB schemes and it would get rid of the majority of the tracking, which would be a good thing.
And the world is likely to be a better place for it.
The companies who do advertise in more traditional forms of media tend to be larger and more brand focused. They don't rely on manipulating their customers in very short term, impulse situations. They rely on visibility and try to generate goodwill through elaborate PR campaigns.
If paywalls don't catch on, it's game over for he current model of societies. Because even if my contribution of a vote every four years seems quite small, it's still the currency that democracy depends on. And without an informed public, their decisions tend towards randomness, and are no longer a factor in the decision-making process.
All this isn't a new mechanism, it's basic tragedy of the commons. "It's my boat, and I'm gonna go out tonight, and fish as much as I want to. Nature belongs to me as much as to anyone else, and nobody has the right to tell me what to do, especially not in international waters".
There's nothing really wrong with that argument, except that many a fisherman has made it, and seen his haul cut to almost nothing when overfishing had decimated the population.
The media deserve their share of the blame. Besides participating in this unethical ad market, they've cranked up the emphasis on sensationalist, click bait garbage at the cost of real journalism.
To continue with the fishing/aquatic analogy: don't blame people for filtering their water or buying bottled water after all of the toxic waste that's been dumped into the river.
Who's to say paywalls will end up being the norm? And what happens if the paywall is abstracted away behind a Spotify-like news interface?
In the Netherlands there's an online subscription-based news and magazine service, it's doing quite well. It seems quite succesful in engaging their readers more than the traditional media.
I do also see that we live in a more chaotic time than say a 100 years ago. I think much of it can be attributed to the rise of fast information transport systems, computers and the Internet, but that does not mean I have an obligation to support a business model I find immoral, because it might in some way indirectly benefit journalism and democracy in general. Perhaps abolishing the advertising model will make space for interesting other models, like community-curated news, patronage, paying for archives/more in-depth articles, etcetera.
It's not a tragedy of the commons if the only "victims" are a few companies. Companies are not "the commons", or humans for that matter. Companies fail all the time, and that's OK. Business models are not sacred cows that can never be slaughtered. If one business model stops working, companies will adapt and find new business models.
On the other hand, it can be argued that advertisements can have a negative influence on their viewers in many ways.
Every year! There are elections every year! Vote every year!
Fallacy of the excluded middle: among the choices you did not accept we have the option of returning the internet back to the laws that originally governed it, that is nothing commercial.
I don't personally want this across the board, but I am not convinced that the world wouldn't be better if that rule held for non fictional content.
I don't think this claim can be made on the basis of site traffic. You would have to compare how many people actively support the ad system vs actively support the paywall system.
Assuming people that use adblocking software, support the paywall system as a default alternative, ~22% of internet users use adblockers[0] and (let's say) support a paywall system.
I would guess that of the 78% of people that don't use an adblocker, the majority of them don't know about them, rather than make a conscious decision to not use them.
Ad revenue model is winning on traffic because of three reasons
* lots of people don't know about adblockers
* the default configuration for browsers is to not do adblocking
* most people don't change defaults
I couldn't find any studies that have specific estimates of how many people dont know about adblocking software or know and don't use.
[0]https://iabuk.net/about/press/archive/iab-uk-reveals-latest-...
That'd be perfectly fine. Many sites already do this - detect my adblocker in javascript and then deny me access to the content. This is also perfectly fine - I fully agree that circumventing this forcefully is immoral/unethical.
In essence - the seller (content provider) should have the option to not give me content if I have an ad-blocker. If this is possible, then I don't see anything immoral about me using an adblocker. Do you?
And in fact, it does seem to be possible - wired for example does this. And I certainly don't try to circumvent this.
Many sites manage to work around and still show me ads. I dearly wish there would be some way for me to indicate "I'd rather be denied access to the content than be shown ads." Unfortunately that doesn't technologically exist easily yet.
Adblockers didn't happen by magic, they are a reaction to advertising trampling all over the implicit social contract.
Did you ever get those "march of dimes" solicitations that include a dime? I know people who believe that there's an unspoken agreement of reciprocity - they sent you something of value (even though you did not ask for it) so you must give something back. But no such social contract, spoken or unspoken, exists.
Similarly, there is no such contract with respect to ads. Personally, I never watch TV live, even when the schedule is convenient, because I like to skip all the ads. Courts have held time shifting to be a right, so I can assure you I am in the right on this one, although there is zero practical difference between my fast-forward ad blocking (which is sometimes automated), and running uBlock Origin.
Could you please answer the question: are you accepting actual legal liability for users' computers you infect with malware from ads? If not, you have lost any moral argument.
No?
Then I guess this "agreement" isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.
It's more like content-mills like adverts, so they give content for free, attach adverts and hope it sticks.
Don't just shrug and say "we have to do this". Own it. Say, "we sideloaded non-relevant content to you for profit through pipes you're paying for because we didn't want to bother building a different business model".
When they clearly and openly change those requirements, for instance by hanging advertisement banners from the walls, then you have the option of leaving. You are certainly not entitled to remove the banners from your view, not even using magic shades. The may ban magic shades in the stores or the house.
That technology makes certain things possible, even easily, does not make it an entitlement. That the other party is invisible, instead of mom and pop behind the counter of the store, does not mean you are entitled to ignore their wishes.
The day AR allows me to use a headset untethered to a desktop computer with enough battery life to last a day will be the last day I ever have to watch an ad in the real world.
From the people, to the people! I don't even need movies and articles - well, I still keep a 1% interest in them, but that's all. I am sorry about them but they are so derivative and dishonest at times that I can't watch them any more.
How many times did you find more value in YC comments than the linked article?
>hire
Well I'm not paying for my adblocker. What if this dude volunteers? What if I'm doing it for my family members? This isn't a hypothetical.
Newspapers have just struggled to find and adopt a similar model, I hope they find it. The common thread is that we live in an advertising saturated world and a lot of people are tired of it.
Drive down a street or highway... Ads, signage, billboards, Turn on a radio... Ads, Go online... Ads, Open a newspaper or magazine... Ads, Watch a movie... Product placements. I am waiting for them to print ads on the individual sheets of toilet paper on a roll.
Some advertising is fine but when it ruins landscapes, deafens you as you watch TV or ruins a perfectly good site layout whilst tracking and eavesdropping on you then something is wrong.
Not ad free - different types of ads. Services like Netflix have product placement.
(Which troubles me a bit since while traditional ads were irritating, at least there was disclosure.)
Apparently when I take a piss during a commercial break, I'm not just voiding my bladdder... I'm breaking the social contract.
Sorry, but if you put up a website, I can render it with whatever browser I please.
Or alternatively, content providers can embrace a holistic view of their site - ads and all... just don't cry when someone tries to make a case that your malvertising is a CFAA violation :)
How can you debate the finer points of whether accessing a website and rejecting ads is moral or not, when you haven't built a moral case for urging and tricking people into buying stuff that they don't need?
This tells me all I need to know. If this is your stance on advertising, I don't know what to tell you.
No.
By replying to my browser, they're entering into an agreement to not waste my time, and give me lots of money. Oh, not that either? Hmm. Several sites detect that I'm using a malware blocker. I make no effort to obfuscate this. Some websites will ask me to turn it off, others will block me if I do not. That's fine - I've no obligation to them, they have no obligation to me. Neither of us entered into any kind of agreement.
Keep in mind - I'm even happy to unblock and click ads relevant to my interests and follow relevant affiliate links - to stuff I'm actually interested in. Webcomics in particular are my jam.
So I would likely not even bother with ad blockers if site owners were not routinely acting as a proxy for criminals in (attempting to) serve me malware, extortion-ware, pyramid schemes, and other scams - or peddling horrifically low quality untargeted advertizing that doesn't respect my time (think "same 30 second unskippable ad plays 5 times in a row" utter and other absolute garbage.)
> Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't
If you want to talk ethics and morals, just how ethical and moral is it to leave your computer open to joining a botnet - imposing so many externalities onto other parties not privy to your "agreement" in the form of DDoS attacks and proxying to obfuscate the origins of such criminals? I think these concerns far weightier than the ethical or moral concerns of depriving a website owner a few cents for selling my time, my attention, my browsing history, etc. (even if they've outsourced that messy work to an ad company who does so on their behalf.)
Their communications are probably encrypted and their ads are probably served on the same connection as everything else. Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).
The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modify its behavior, which will be copyright infringement.
So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement. After all, isn't opening a website just like installing an app? I don't see a difference really.
Don't get me wrong, I now have ad-blockers installed everywhere I can.
But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with, by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.
It wouldn't be. You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer, you just don't have the right to redistribute all of those bits.
Copyright is about distribution, not about modification (well, it is in part, such a modified work would be classed as a 'derived work' and that is why you can't redistribute it, just like you can't redistribute the original).
> courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.
That's utterly wrong. Copyright infringement is about distributing content, not about forced consumption of content that was freely given to you by the rights holders or their agents and associates (the ad networks).
And rights holders have plenty of options here:
- sell ads directly rather than through networks
(and serve them up from the same server)
- charge for their content
- deny you access if you use an adblocker
Of course you can't sell your soul in an EULA and there's always this gray area where users might not be held accountable for selling their souls with a single click on "I agree".
But you're saying that copyright law refers to distribution, but well, you can't have that binary distributed legally unless you agreed to that EULA. And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
The other problem is that most users won't be able to crack their own binaries and distributing or even downloading cracked binaries from the Internet will be copyright infringement.
Even so, lets assume that an easy to use tutorial will be provided, such that somehow users aren't violating any laws. Well, this is why the industry is pushing for DRM, which ends up getting used not only for encrypting media, but also for protecting binaries. And in some parts of the world it is already illegal to crack DRM.
And if not, I see the industry winning this argument and pushing for legislation protecting them, because truthfully they can point to people that crack binaries in order to freeload and pirate stuff for free - even if such arguments will be morally and factually wrong, they'll win by those arguments with the right lobbying power being exerted. It has been happening for some time now.
> You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer
Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
> And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.
No, it really isn't.
Breach of the EULA does not automatically translate into breach of terms-of-use for the service and neither of those translate into copyright infringement.
They would have a case to terminate your right to use and maybe they'd sue you for damages if you cause any but copyright has nothing to do with it (in this case, there are edge cases where copyright might be invoked but this is not one of those).
> Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.
Yep.
> There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.
Well, the company won't like it and may sue you but they will still have to convince a judge that you caused them damage. And suing a private individual for pennies in lost ad sales is just not going to happen.
I do judge publishers by the quality of ads they accept. You cannot advertise a borderline illegal MMF scam and be considered legit. So when I see such ads I assume the news is at best a twisting of the truth, at worst completely fake. Quality editors will take less revenue to ensure that their advertising is not a scam.
I mean, this GroundUp site decided to drop Google's ads in order to improve usability for users and because the gains aren't worth it.
But this change won't get noticed by users having ad-blockers installed.
And if they'll decide to push high-quality in-house ads in order to survive, all it takes is somebody submitting a new rule in uBlock's or AdBlock's repository and then that revenue will be lost, with no discrimination.
Again, because of the status quo I too have ad-blockers installed everywhere, phone included. But it's not a win-win situation and that bothers me.
Anybody is free to disable their blocker on any site. If you want a site to be funded by mean of ads and you are fine with the ads served to you, just disable your blocker on that site.
One of the many reasons I don't install every dick and jane's mobile app. In this context, I don't even have a Facebook account.
> Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).
It's trivial to proxy your own HTTPS traffic even on unrooted phones for e.g. debugging or corporate MITM. Short of cert pinning - which is going to block some corporate users as well - it's not going to be a problem. Facebook would be able to detect I'm not consuming their ads, of course.
> So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked
You'll want a working website if only for the search traffic. I also consume most of my content on desktops or laptops - native apps are barely a thing here (anymore.) Even for phones, Google has a powerful incentive not to let apps break the web (which would deprive Google of all that juicy search traffic) and are already penalizing e.g. "intrusive interstitals". And even for phones, I will go without sooner than I will go with people's terrible native apps.
> or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.
Has that stopped pirates? And reminding consumers that adtech can be regulated might not be the smartest move as well... that goes both ways after all.
It's also giving ad blockers powerful incentive to obfuscate their tracks. Right now, adtech has the option to detect and request you disable your ad blocker, or refuse to serve you content if you don't. They lose that option if ad blockers have to obfuscate their tracks as a matter of routine, just to continue operating.
> But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with
Agreed.
> by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.
That doesn't follow. Several blockers have e.g. "acceptable ads" policies. Those that don't can still whitelist sites (either because they asked nicely, or because the website breaks without doing so), and you will likely not remain whitelisted unless you and your advertisers are good actors. If anything, ad blockers are about only rewarding good actors.
There's also native advertising, doing a bit for one's sponsors in a podcast or video stream, etc. which tends to be of infinitely better quality, impossible to embed malware into, actually vetted by the content producers, and which generally nobody bothers to even try blocking.
And for all GroundUp's good intentions, part of the reason they seem to be ditching google ads is because they were not being good actors by running said ads. Are you sure this is an example of a darkening future instead of a brightening one?
If that were true, it'd be built into the protocol. "HTTP GET" would require an acknowledgement of the agreement you purport exists.
Instead, it just serves the page to any requestee who comes by it, even if automated. Doesn't exactly sound like an agreement to me.
Hell, a javascript popup would be a valid test for agreement compared to that.
When one chooses the cheapest to implement approach, one can't really complain that the cheapest ad blocking technique counters it.
"This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor"
So, merchants can reject cash for purchases[1] because cash is legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues, and a purchase is not one of these.
The Wikipedia page [2] for dining and dashing states that ordering a meal is a contract debt, since you are given the food before the transaction occurs, with the understanding that you'll pay for it afterwards. Thus, if the merchant, after giving you the food, informed you that they only accept credit card, that would not be allowed.
Also some good discussion on this SE post [3]
1. https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dine_and_dash 3. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7701/is-it-illeg...
That is a myth; even the US Treasury Department outright says so.
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...
Emphasis added is mine. US coins and currency are valid offers of payment for debts, but for most other purposes a vendor can choose what to accept. The uniform commercial code, §3-603, then states:
> If tender of payment of an obligation to pay an instrument is made to a person entitled to enforce the instrument and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender, of the obligation of an indorser or accommodation party having a right of recourse with respect to the obligation to which the tender relates.
Unless there are other statutes that apply (I'm not any kind of expert in this area), it sure sounds like if I make a valid offer of legal tender to an authorized agent of a creditor, and they refuse, I have satisfied the terms of the debt. So, if I owe someone $10,000 I can legally offer them one million pennies, which are legal tender under the Coinage Act of 1965 (perhaps I also should provide some form of proof that there are one million pennies in the truck so there's no dispute about that). They can also legally choose to reject it, but if they do then I no longer owe them anything.
This leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation where you cannot buy a hot dog on credit, but you can get a porterhouse, lobster tail, salad, baked potato, and a beer and not be expected to pay until well after the food is already beyond recovery.
Other people like me think we are morally bound to ignore ads as much as possible because we think they destroy a healthy capitalism and are misused to track people and distribute malware. Therefore I use an ad-blocker.
But that's only a side note. In the internet your argument is invalid because I don't know in advance whether a website uses ads or not. To discover that I would have to visit that site without an ad-blocker and let them serve ads without warning. And that would be unacceptable.
The solution for that problem is the various websites either use paywalls or detect ad-blockers and don't provide content when one is in use. In this case we really have an agreement. If I turn off my ad-blocker I'm allowed to watch the content, otherwise I'm not.
But I never ever had the desire to see content which has been hidden behind an ad-blocker blocker.
That's why I'm adblocking everything and I visit sites with NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies, DisableWebRTC among the others. Better safe than sorry.
And about the right to render bits and bytes however I wish, I use Stylish for those few sites that do really wierd things with their layout.
By the way, a browser renders bit and bytes as it wishes, starting from the html file and maybe stopping there or going as far as precaching linked pages.
If that's your attitude then you should publish PDF's or create an app. On the web it's always been up to browsers to render a site how they wish.
Surely the same should extend to the site, such that "visiting a site" is enough to "enter into an agreement" with the visitor to agree to show only ads that are relevant, non-intrusive, and do not contain malware.
The main short-term incentive for ad networks is to show more ads, make them more intrusive, and sell them to whomever pays the most. It's simply not in the long-term interests of a website, or a website visitor, to be part of an ad network.
Duly noted.
> But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't.
That has to be a first: arguing for the morality of the advertising eco system. I've seen quite a bit of it from the inside and let's just say that if there is an argument for morality it lies with the consumers, emphatically not with publishers (who have conditioned their audience first that everything should be free) or with advertisers (and that's even before we get into the content of the ads, see TFA).
> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.
That sounds like a legal argument to me, about which you earlier said you have no idea. Let me summarize my answer: you're wrong. By visiting a site you do not 'enter into an agreement to exchange your adviews for content'.
> Doesn't feel right to me.
That's ok, you are entitled to your own feelings.
So you don't get to install an adblocker. Have fun with spyware, malware and being tracked from here to kingdom come.
If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine.
I really want this to be true but the elephant in the room is auditing. Without the ad network performing tracking, advertisers have no way to independently verify ad performance and corresponding payment to publishers for CPC ads. For CPA ads, the publisher has no way to independently verify the advertiser is paying out correctly for sales conversions.
You need a third party in the middle to arbitrate. AFAIK, the only way to do that at scale is with cookies from an ad network dropped in and tracked via a beacon.
I guess the only solution is for a new, non-commercial advertising network to spring up (sort of like an NGO) with a strong enough charter and ethical approach that end users (or browsers themselves?) trust limited tracking from ads served through that network. The problem is, who funds it? Not the advertisers or publishers as that would destroy the impartiality of the network.
Edit: and problem two is if such an ad network came in to existence and was successful, it would end up a de-facto monopoly for on-line ad distribution. Apart from the headwinds it would attract from Google, there are obvious issues around free-speech, mono-culture etc.
Edit 2: or maybe the "internet" agrees what an ethical ad network should look like and then any one is free to set one up but must submit to regular auditing by a new internet body to make sure they are sticking to the agreed "charter". That way the ad network could be operationally funded by publishers/advertisiers but still retain user's trust. A little like the CA market for SSL certs. If an ad network started misbehaving, browsers themselves could block/de-list them (like they do when they revoke root certs from rogue CAs)
A 'sample audience' such as used in TV that would willingly be tracked could then be used to extrapolate impressions.
I'd personally have zero problem with a strongly audited third party tracking me during transition from a publisher site to arrival (or checkout in the case of CPA) on an advertiser's site.
What I do object to is that same tracking info being used across every publisher and advertiser on the ad network (and tracking info persisting for months).
If there was an ad network that enforced a strict set of simple, inert advertising formats and ensured tracking was ephemeral and unique between each publisher/advertiser pair (and not capable of being used to parallel construct my browsing across the whole network), I'd happily accept the compromise. Doubly so if I knew the browsers held a nuclear option of "de-listing" the network in the event of bad behaviour.
Interesting part I got from this discourse: there is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to what is acceptable and what is not. That's yet another problem to be solved.
Are you accepting actual legal liability for malware served to me via ads on your site?
Or the user-allocated payments in the Brave browser[1].
That said, I do maintain that a site owner has the right to try to extract revenue from their enterprise and to a degree as visitors we have a right to not put up with overwhelming advertising. It's one of those things where we both have rights and we need to find an agreeable medium --not that everyone will agree but at least "the average person" will agree.
Maybe small enthusiast site will always be free and depend on the goodwill of the site maintainer (as in the "good old days" before ads) And maybe we'll have services which bundle premium content ala cable. And maybe there will be a micropayments aspect too. In the end, content does not come for free --someone or many people have to put work into bringing that content to light/publish.
People seem to think they exist in a vacuum. But now everyone is using ad blockers, and the dynamics have devolved to resemble the Greek tax system: "I'm not paying those taxes, they are too high" -> "We're not getting enough revenue, need to lower costs" -> "Why should I pay for the shitty service the government provides?" -> "We need to raise taxes, or close the schools" ->...
Stuff that would help:
– Publishers need to get their act together and offer netflix/spotify-style access
– Adtech needs a quality revolution
– Ad blockers need to evolve to do "smart blocking", where the tuple of (user/publisher/article/ad network/ad client/network condition) determines if an ad should be blocked, with a build-in mechanism to reward both quality content (by being more forgiving in the other dimensions) and quality ads (in terms of technology/security/interest to the user/intrusiveness)
– Users need to welcome such experiments with a modicum of goodwill and good faith, and a renewed willingness to differentiate. Right now, journalists cry themselves to sleep because even if you're just doing the crosswords at a French magazine, someone will try to stab you with your own pencil, yelling something about "Iraq" and "WMDs".
Ads need to be curated by content providers.
Sure, but it has needed one for circa 20 years. And quality has continuously declined over that time. To me, that indicates that generally the next increment of profit gain is not in making things slightly better, but slightly worse.
It seems like a classic tragedy of the commons to me. But good management of a commons requires people perceiving and acting on a common interest with a long-term focus. That's an attitude so far removed from what I see of the culture of advertising and adtech that I expect we'll need a major disaster to change that.
> Users need to welcome such experiments with a modicum of goodwill and good faith
That sounds like a reach to me. In a financial sense, and I think perhaps also in the casual sense, goodwill is what you get when you've spent a long time working hard to make sure your customers like you. For the whole of the consumer internet, advertisers and adtech have been pushing the line of what people will put up with. With the possible exception of search advertising, I think internet ads have earned enormous negative goodwill.
If publishers and advertisers want new experiments to be evaluated separate from the last 20 years of history, I think they're going to have either a) spend a long time undoing the damage, or b) find some way to declare brand bankruptcy for the whole notion of advertising.
And even if they try, I'm not sure how well it will work. The point of the sort of ads that publishers run is to distract you from what you're trying to read and manipulate you into buying whatever the advertiser wants you to buy, without regard to the actual utility or quality of the thing purchased. No matter how much you experiment, there will be a moral conflict at the root of advertising. New tech won't fix that.
My eyeballs are not being loaned to you; my senses/attention is not for sale.
I'm perfectly fine with paywalls - that's the 'correct' approach as far as I'm concerned. You can decide to conceal the information you know; if it's valuable and nonexcludable (usually isn't), then hey, you have a sale. But if you don't, don't expect your deals with third parties to hold up on some promise you made to them about how I browse.
That right there is the problem, though. You are right that most information is "non excludable" (if that actually is a word).
But that doesn't mean it isn't valuable. That's an illusion, conceptually very much like clean water: almost free, but vital.
The stuff the wire services collect and sell (and that everybody republishes) does cost quite a lot to produce, and it's the backbone of the news ecosystem. It's subjective value is further diminished by its anodyne voice, making it difficult to picture the actual people reporting it.
Maybe the publishers do actually have a case for a new class of intellectual property protection. I'm horrified of the prospect, but within the current market dynamics, I don't see much of a future for quality journalism. Public opinion is critical of every and all publications, indiscriminately, and quick to use that as an argument for not subscribing. Wall Street may still pay for Bloomberg and the like, but Main Street doesn't see why. Maybe the NYT spent two or three million on some investigation. Once published, the information is delayed by little else than the time it takes the guy at BillingsMorningNews.com to switch a few sentences around.
With regards to ad blockers, you are right in that there is nothing in the law that should stop anyone from using them. But that's not really the argument. Nor is anybody disagreeing that ad tech needs drastic changes.
But fundamentally, the question is if blocking ads isn't hurting your own interests. Sure, there are many sources for the same information, usually. But the one you're reading probably has some small advantage, which is why you are using it. Once that publication folds, you have already lost something. And I'm not optimistic that the process will stop before it has drastic consequences on diversity and availability.
It also sometimes needs reminding that for an individual, news often seems like a guilty pleasure. But for a society, news is vital. Without it, you can't even keep up the appearances of democracy.
It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, obviously: blocking ads is vastly advantageous for the individual, just as fishing with the really big net is for the fisherman. But, thinking a bit broader, the question becomes: What's better – reading the news with annoying ads, or not reading the news?
That's the best for everyone involved.
Or you need to fund journalism with tax money, directly (NPR, PBS) or indirectly (BBC, ARD, ZDF, etc).
Be it paper or as e-paper on your tablet.
But in either case, subscription costs are a lot more reasonable than subscribing to the website, and you get high quality content with only very few, handpicked, ads. Which also can't track you on paper or in the PDF
Journalism's oldest and most important role is to serve as a watchdog over government. When they start profiting from government, they'll be less likely to be critical of it.
Journalism should be supported by the free market. If people want it, they pay. If nobody wants to pay, then you either adapt or die. The really good media outlets are doing just fine (i.e. The Economist, NY Times,) those on the margins are at risk -- but that's their own fault.
State supported media has the potential to turn into Pravda (for the political party from whom they garner the most support, usually leftists,) and it generally does, albeit with much more subtlety.
Do you think the BBC is biased? ARD, ZDF? They are not.
Because they don't get paid by the government, but they have the right to collect their own taxes instead. That way they are independent, and still always funded.
this is evidenced by Trump's foolish missile strike being so thoroughly adored in mainstream press.
How is this different than your "masters" being mega-corporations?
At least in a publicly funded organization there would be transparent checks and balances in place.
Actual news are, in essence, gossip. They destroy people's ability to think and reason.
News agencies are the worst. They define the agenda, what is important and what isn't. They pollute the "news ecosystem" right at the source.
Adblock is one way to fight back. Not the only way but a good way.
The problem is news agencies is the only way to get information. Spicer doesn't invite "regular dude Joe." We in an information desert.
For this reason I only subscribe to weekly or even monthly newspapers. It means those journalists are not racing to be the first ones to relay any information completely raw. Instead they can take a bit of distance, take time to analyze the situation and think of its possible consequences.
I don't know what to do when I'm told that there's been a terrorist attack in a country thousands of kilometers from me. Then we get a stream of picture, and a death count updated every femtosecond. It's sad, sure, but then what? Learning about the causes and consequences of this attack and how they fit in the history and geopolitics of our societies, now that's a lot more interesting and maybe even actionable.
Yes, news as we generally know it contains a lot of fluff, is almost certainly biased - whether politically or racially - and misleads through omission and incredible sources, we can go on. But, who will then do the reporting if these big news sources do not? Imagine a world without CNN or NYT or whatever. All of these sources are blamed by one political party or another to be biased and left/right/radical/whatever leaning. If we got rid of them and relied only on the smaller news entities and blogs and such, who will do the reporting on wars in Syria and Ukraine? Or who will report on whistle blowers and interview them? Why would someone of Edward Snowden's level of infamy be interviewed by a no-name news paper? Actually, on the topic of infamy, would it have even been possible for Edward Snowden to stay alive so far if general opinion was not so divided? If no one knew about him, what would save him? I would credit those same big news entities with spreading his story around and making him known. I believe that credible news sources are required for a healthy democracy, and that news organizations need to make money. Last thing we need is a government-run news entity (how can we trust one to keep us informed about grievances our governments may commit. Lets not kid ourselves and declare that the government is perfect or has the citizens' best interests at heart).
Let's also not kid ourselves about the notion of the current, big, established news organizations being independent of the same conflicting interests that ensare various parts of the federal government. No, the government doesn't control the media. Rather, big corporations and rich moguls control the government, AND the media, to the same ends.
No. They gambled that they could make money giving their content away for free with ads on it. They were never guaranteed an income that way, and to legislate one for them is a terrible way to proceed. We have a name for those people in Australia: rent-seekers.
False dichotomy.
Firstly, ads don't have to be annoying. Secondly, news doesn't have to be financed by ads.
There are lots of smaller and independent news sources that don't rely on ads for funding. The news organisation linked to in the article is a case in point. They make their money from donations. Another one is insurge intelligence (https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence) which uses crowdfunding.
Then there is also citizen media and blogs.
That data will soon enough be used to determine things like interest rates and hiring (already is in China).
I can deal with stupid ads and have done for decades reading print journalism. Unless they're animated, modal or otherwise unnaturally annoying.
Can you elaborate on that, or provide a source? I'm quite curious (and somewhat not surprised).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-surveilla...
The population pays for it by buying more or paying more of some products -- in a time and manner that provides evidence to networks, content vendors, and advertisers of business justification.
If we drill down further into the population, I think we'll find that some population of people either view or don't view ads, but don't adequately change their purchasing behavior in a time and manner so as to provide signal.
In other words, some people are takers, and some people are contributors. The people who are takers -- that is, whether or not they look at ads, click through, or whatever, they don't sufficiently change their their market behavior in a time and manner that provides evidence for business justification -- possibly detract from all mentioned parties because they diminish the business justification of the whole affair.
In tension against the takers, the people who are contributors are paying more than what they need to for the service because they're subsidizing "news" for other people.
Note that I don't really consider revenue in situations where eventually advertising clients figure out that they lack the business justification to pursue some advertising venue, such as intermediate marketing metrics that payout to businesses, but then the lack of justification for an advertising decision is later discovered. People who are marked by intermediate marketing metrics but don't go on to yada yada market behavior, are still "takers" in my view.
With that said, I think the money is there, people are already paying for news, but maybe the people who are paying should have more say than those who don't pay. Otherwise, it's the advertisers who have say, and the advertisers sponsor some pathological news outlets.
So in my view, people who argue for advertising are arguing that only advertisers can do the financing of the news world, and that contributors should continue to float takers.
I'm not even sure how to effect the latter without making the current fish bowl infinitly more invasive.
Even your choice of words is revelatory of a profoundly scewed perspective full of imaginary obligations. Of course those whose livelihood depends on a particular arrangement often seem to feel that the current state of affairs is necessary to the world at large as if the current good effects are both essential and couldn't be achieved any other way.
It kind of seems like an arbitrage situation. But if I understand correctly, those are only good as long as they naturally "deflate" and sort restore balance back. Instead, there is some information-hiding going on that artificially props up this situation at cost for everyone but the third-party ad industry and middlemen. I think that situation is not very good.
It's not like they have prosthetics for blocked ads and lost revenue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability
Maybe do a quick search before implying someone is making up words.
The other half is, that the third-party ad networks themselves are in fact already feeding a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. Somewhere in the whole maelstrom of shitty clickbait websites funded by ads for other shitty clickbait websites. I read an article recently linked here about those weird vague thumbnail image clickbait links (the ones about celebrities, diets and skin diseases, mostly) that appear below low quality articles. They followed the links, and it just led to more and more of the same, but it did so while spiraling downward into a lowest common denominator like way, way lower than I'd have imagined.
There's some really out-of-control complex systems (in the systems theory sense of the word) in the guts of the advertising industry and they are already causing tragedy-of-the-commons situations way before, and regardless of, people using ad blockers.
Disabling the ad blocker is not going to help fix those (they'll just gobble up the extra profit). And even then, to (personally) answer your question, yes I think using ad blockers is a net benefit if it keeps those systems at least somewhat in check.
Which means now we need to have some kind of legal, international safeguard to protect against content thieves, who copy paywalled content and publish it themselves. Everyone loses in that scenario.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#International_copyri...
Whether this means that everyone loses ... I'm not directly disagreeing with that either (I don't like copyright/intellectual property rights in their current form at all), but let's get the facts straight first :)
The sites need to pay for servers somehow. Experience has proven time and time again that putting up paywalls just makes people go elsewhere.
It's the same situation with smartphone apps about now. Yes, it's an absolute mire of low quality, exploitative crap at the moment, but when developers try and avoid this by just charging full price (like Nintendo with Super Mario Run), they find their apps are significantly less popular/profitable than if they'd be 'freemium' all along and end up getting a virtual tongue lashing from audiences who expect 'mobile app' to equal 'free with ads/microtransactions'.
Unless everyone charges money for content (which is likely happening because of business reasons) or some service genuinely manage to repair the media's reputation enough people will pay for it and also offers a better, more usable product than everyone else, things aren't changing.
One way to get the charge-for-content back might be to demonstrate how much privacy people are losing and to make some noise about it.
Instead you want an immense pool of content generation for that 27c per day. Good journalism isn't cheap - that's why paper newspapers cost what they do and are full of adverts - but you want to pay rock-bottom prices to individual sources whilst still pretending that you're paying a 'reasonable amount'.
There are movies that cost hundreds of millions to make which make up just one more item in the Netflix catalogue, and Hollywood is far from hurting. It may cost enormous amounts to produce good news, but this is true of the business model I am pointing out as well.
Interesting, the ones who tried to charge seem to be dying.
Isn't Spotify and Netflix evidence that suggest otherwise. All the music on Spotify is available for free on the so called dodgy sites. Torrents and whatnot. Heck, you can even listen to it for free on FM radio! However, literally millions of people choose to pay for Spotify - because it's worth it.
The news is no different. If news content providers provide a useful service, millions of people WILL pay.
My analysis is that millions of people avoid paying because news content providers don't sell news, they sell people. They sell their readers as fodder to the ad men. When that business model changes, people will pay for news.
I have experience of this world, having worked with old-school book publishers and old-media print journalists. They are way too entrenched in their understanding of publishing/journalism to make the change. The closest I've seen anyone get to something that might work, and they're still a long, long way off, is the Guardian. At least they understand that a) they need to provide additional content, suited to the medium (e.g. quality infographics, interactive data, etc.) and b) online advertising is not enough, but current paywall implementations are a poor substitute.
Spotify is a great example to compare. If Spotify worked the same way as online news, you'd go to Spotify, browse through some skeuomorphic representation of a CD rack, get interrupted, find an album you like the look of, listen to the album with an obnoxious advert between each song, put it back in the rack, repeat. Is there a single newspaper that will allow me to even, for example, do something useful with their content by collecting it / tagging it / whatever for future reference? Will they let my contacts, or famous people, recommend content on a particular subject? Will they offer any kind of api for other publishers wishing to reference their material?
Then LinkedIn bought it and promptly ruined, then shuttered it. Still waiting for someone to release a new newsreader app with the same scrolling format. I would have absolutely paid to keep and improve that app.
I'm pretty sure that should cover their server bills.
This seems to be kind of just how technology industries work (at least right now): you don't have a broadly strong market for "social news feed", you have Facebook.
But sure, when you reduce distribution cost to zero, you remove a lot of local advantage. And this isn't new. Improvements in music distribution, starting with the wax cylinder, have been slowly killing the local market for musicians. Why wait until the evening go a few blocks and pay to hear a so-so local band when you can play an amazing one in your house right now?
I don't really disagree with you, my point was just that the fact that paywalls can work for an extremely small set of publishers does not resolve the tension in comments #1 and #2.
That fine-sounding in theory, but it seems to ignore the fact that your attention has been for sale for as long as billboards, or, heck, carnival barkers have been around.
It's great that we can use technology to un-render ads that have been delivered to us via the internet, so I fully support ad blockers, but let's not pretend that we have some innate, natural Right to never hear a sales-pitch.
If someone wants to buy their own screens and show ads on them, it's fine by me. But you don't have any right to do it on my screens.
You went there on your own free will and can leave when you want. No one is "forcing" anything on your screen.
(not saying I agree with this notion necessarily - just that your physical "property" analogy isn't very good).
So when I see people claiming that adblockers are immoral, it always gives me a good chuckle. Is ripping the ads out of a magazine immoral too? Is the mute button on my remote a ethnical crime against poor hapless television companies?
sheezus. didn't that take a shitload of time and effort? i can't believe how many ads magazines have. they're all over everything.
If you create great costs (like ripping 30 pages from a magazine) for a small gain is this a particularly well intended economic strategy?
Not really, back when I received the paper copy of the Economist it took me about a minute after receiving it on a Saturday morning to flip through and rip-out the double-sided ad pages. Also gave me an idea of the main stories in the issue.
Put a 30cm ruler on the page near the binding, grab top, pull. Well worth it for making the magazine thinner, easier to fold into my back pocket, and more readable on the bus. Just turn the page and continue reading, no interruptions.
One time there I remove so many pages ( 20? a lot anyway ) that I actually spent money on postage and sent them back to the Editor with the suggestion that he spend his time reading them for me and provide a summary.
Which reminds me, TV/cable/et al. related services already cost money, yet they still serve advertisements. Isn't this a form of double-dipping? Shouldn't they be paying (or giving a discount) to watch advertisements?
I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish.
Some bytes you are not allowed to render them at all (and BTW, how did you get them?).
Some bytes may not be transformed into other bytes so you are able to render them (and BTW, how did you obtain the key?).
Some bytes may not be rendered in front of audiences, only for personal use.
In general: those bytes come with a copyright and a license agreement. They are my arrangement of bytes. I could easily include an explicit HTTP header saying that you may only render these bytes with unmodified browser brand X version Y.Z (or brand A version B, or ...). That that is currently unwritten in the HTTP response does not make it a non-existent agreement.
If you do something else, you violate my copyright over that arrangement of bytes.
When you buy a painting, the artist may forbid you from changing it.
Why do you believe that can't be the case for a movie? Just because it is technically possible to modify only copy does not make it obvious that you should be entitled to it.
Note that I'm not asserting that this actually is the case. I'm mostly asserting it's not obviously not the case.
Because in my example I don't even have to modify the movie. I can apply the filter while it's playing.
And besides that your examples require the presence of a contract between me and the architect/painter where I resign from my rights to change the object. Copyright has nothing to do with it.
Originals will always have inherent differences from copies in people's minds.
Can websites dictate what web browsers you use? Are you violating an agreement by using a different User-Agent?
No, no and no. You are requesting data and your browser renders it. If you write your own browser to request and render the data differently, I don't see any issue with copyright.
No, no and no.
I'll make it explicit. You can't show a Netflix show to an audience (let alone a paying audience). You may not render an e-book that you haven't bought. You may not even store that sequence bytes on a device you own. You may not decrypt an encrypted file not intended for you.
You should take a look at the sponsored lenses on Snapchat. Nowhere else on the internet are ads so engaging and enjoyable. This is also why I think Snapchat had a chance to really take on Facebook, until FB sucked up and started copying everything from Snapchat.
That's a great idea. Is it not what the BRAVE-Browser is trying to acheive?
Previously, lots of indie games used to have serial codes which I could just get off the Internet (just more bytes), but now they act in a user-hostile manner by using debilitating spyware like Steam. It's still crackable, and some people let me play their games for free because they don't put any DRM on it so all I need is the bits and lots of people are giving me those bits for free.
Non-subscription software is my favourite. I only need to modify the check algorithm, which are just bits and bytes that I can change however I wish, but subscription algorithm often means I have to get help from the Internet to prevent the spyware phoning home.
Unfortunately it seems they've taken an other route. If users try to actively disable ads, just hide the ads amongst the actual content of your website.
I will admit to have been tricked by that a couple of time already (that I know of, at least). You're on some kind of news website, you see a genuine looking link towards a potentially interesting article. You follow it, read a few paragraphs and then starts to notice that the tone appears completely off and way too enthusiastic about the device or service they're talking about.
Then you start looking around and you eventually find a small "sponsored content" disclaimer somewhere on the page. I've seen those types of ads on physical newspapers as well, mainly those given for free in the subway. Often the only thing that sets them apart from actual content is a think border around the page or something like that. That's super shady and a bit worrying honestly.
Brendan Eich is trying to do exactly this with the Brave browser [0]. Although it is a ways away, he wants to cut out the adware middlemen and give users a portion of the revenue for ads which they view, perhaps with some sort of opt-in "watch this video and earn $x" model in which the video content is tailored to you through (local, private) browsing history analysis.
If you are interested, Software Engineering Daily recently did an interview with him about the topic:
https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/03/31/webassembly-...
But then they will likely start clicking on ads to increase their own revenue. Or just visit various websites in an automated way to make money.
I don't know if that would work.
> we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads
> In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.
> We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.
> We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.
> In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.
> in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.
> Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.
> In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking.
> We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.
> We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.'
> And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.
[1]: https://blog.google/topics/ads/how-we-fought-bad-ads-sites-a...
All of those things you described (fake virus warnings, "clean your phone", flashing yellow and red images) are against Google's policies for AdWords. See:
> - finding a russian bride
> - getting rich through some millionaires secret
> - anti-aging remedies
> - adware
> and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but check out https://hotlinkx.com if you want. What you mentioned are a few of the other things it tries to address by letting publishers manually choose what they want to advertise.
So the ads that do get shown are exactly the low quality crappy ads that appeal to the great unwashed.
This is certainly evident to me on Facebook for instance. The very first ads that get shown do not have the benefit of the marketing analytics about me so they're very low quality ones like the ads in the article.
The second wave (after about 5 seconds) are vastly improved and often touch on my interests or have some connection to friends interests or real current news events.
That aside, yep, it's hard to ignore how incredibly dumb the lowest common denominator appears to be - if viewed as a reflection of those ads.
But, what if: What if my Web server sends the actual ads, as JPG, GIF, WEBM, etc. files instead of just URLs to ad servers at some ad network? Then will an ad blocker still work?
Also, it can stop rendering, so if your ad has a custom CSS class, element name, etc then it will refuse to render that element (and children) even if it downloads the image.
It can work if you're trusted and selling influence.
Later on when we wanted to run some of the high end campaigns and exclusives we ran OpenX
I think serving your own ads is a solution to a lot of ad and media problems that needs to be encouraged. Its strange to me that so many companies hand over so much of their webpage real estate and user trust to what are often complete strangers
Yet, I am the minority. If you serve your own images/iframes, they are likely going thru... but you have to be trusted not to forge impressions and the like.
Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex [0] does this. I've run ad blockers for years and his ads have never shown up on the lists. I feel no urge to block them on my personal list, either, since they don't bother me. It's probably a good way to go if you've got a good sized niche audience and you don't mind negotiating directly with your sponsors.
Still somewhat better than creepy targeted advertising. I bought a new garbage can a few weeks ago now many sites are full of ads for garbage cans. Although this may be one example where the targeting is working. Most of the sites showing those ads are garbage.
For several months, I saw no ads on AdSense except for those advertising the Vive. None whatsoever. I saw plenty of ads, they were just the exact same one with an attractive person doing some sort of dance in a headset and controllers.
So...okay, Google. I guess you've figured out that I'm interested in technology, graphics, games, that sort of thing? Is this all that you've got? It's creepy in that it makes me wonder WHEN you're listening to me, not if.
Obviously it's usually completely ineffective. BUT I think it might make a purchase correlation score go up. Imagine that no human working for the company buying the ads is fully understanding what the correlation score means, and they are effectively using or subscribing to a machine learning model that is trying to increase the correlation score. And they're seeing the score go up.
I'm no expert in the ad targeting ecosystem, and I'm sure I'll be told that's not what it does. But I'm more familiar with systems software, databases, distributed services and such, and I've seen many things that didn't really do what they were supposed to do. It just takes a lot of smarts and a lot of focus, such as Aphyr does with distributed databases, to show that they don't actually do what they claim, due to some mundane bugs or subtle design flaws.
I think there's a good chance that the complex ad targeting ecosystem is just fooling advertisers into thinking it works, without actually working.
<plug>
So I created a minimal blocklist for the worst clickbait (mostly Outbrain and Taboola): https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/
The list is compatible with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus. If you know of any other bad clickbait ad networks, please let me know! As the article describes, I now see clickbait ads from Google that are almost as bad, but I'm not quite ready to block all Google ads in what was supposed to be a minimal blocklist.
</plug>
https://github.com/duskwuff/syndicationblock/
Is Yavli still a thing? I had a hell of a time blocking their ads -- they served content from custom subdomains, and used class names "borrowed" from Google to evade ad blockers.
I won't pay a cent for any site that shows me ads on a paid subscription. In fact, I'll go out of my way to cancel the subscription and block the ads and do everything I can to subvert their paywalls and read the content for free.
Nowadays, when a family member is asking which "antivirus should I pick?", my answer goes along the lines of "just install uBlock Origin, activate this and that filter and allow it in incognito mode. You can do it on your own, it's super easy and super effective". Even better, this also "fix" most of the "slow computer" complaints.
Below is the result of a quick scan of a few websites in private mode. I wonder why OP has such a different experience? Maybe the ad market in South Africa is very different? Or maybe GroundUp hasn't spent the necessary time to filter out bad ads?
----- New York Times:
Cycling clothing
Microsoft Enterprise
Health Insurance
Avoid overeating
Mortgage
----- Forbes:
Unfair Dismissal Lawyers
'JobActive' - Aust govt ad for employment service
Cancer council Australia - funding drive
Commonwealth bank Australia
----- Bloomberg:
Doesn't seem to use AdSense
----- Fox News:
Save the children (charity)
Find best debit card
Business Travel saver
I remembered an old maxim. Apparently, a successful copywriter was asked "How do you write a good ad?" and his answer was "Its very easy. Get the Yellow pages for this year, last year and the year before. See which ads repeat. They are repeating because they are working. Now just copy those ads for your purpose"
The point is, those shitty ads keep repeating on those websites because their ROI is positive. Google wants to help these people by providing them every imaginable and conceivable tool so they can do it better. This also answers your last question about how their business model is sustainable for the long term. It is actually really sustainable because you think Google is a search engine, and I think Google morphed long ago into an internet scale ad-ROI measurement engine which keeps improving (by violently invading privacy of course) both the measurement tools and the actual ROI itself for those who keep pouring money into these ads.
Similarly, Google Advertisers are paying exceptionally low CPM rates for inventory that would otherwise go unfilled.
Even a 1% click-through rate justifies the acquisition costs.
Meanwhile, duckduckgo never asked. They're pretty awesome (check their wikipedia page) so I turned blocking off.
They rewarded me with a couple subtle, text-only ads that didn't disrupt my load time or experience. <3
If we want the web to be a better place, we have to use and support companies who are making it one even if it means not getting to use the 'best'. Like Firefox. Damn I miss Chrome's performance, but the alternatives won't get better and compete unless we back them.
It dates back to the 1700s-era newspapers. That's... pretty old in terms of the medium.
For example, we run a website having millions of page views a month. And similarly frustrated.
If we can divide the slot between 10 advertisers directly, we might make much more. Perhaps even double than what Adsense pays. The only reason, why we don't attempt that is time and effort getting directed in an unwanted direction.
And many small businesses are always struggling for bandwidth to do the core job (and projects that enthuse them). And Google is getting full advantage of this situation.[1]
Sometime back, I even wrote to them on falling CPCs (eCPMs) but of course, Google has a culture of not replying.
Its amazing to see, Internet living with a broken Ad model, for so long. I can't wait for a browser like Brave to take off. Where we can collect an ultra small amount from users for pageview, and still make more than Adsense.
[1] I suspect, this squeeze is happening more recently, because Google itself is feeling the pinch from Facebook. As its stealing a lot of its Ad revenue.
Edit: To add, I am slightly uncomfortable with 'if your money comes for Ad, then you are an Ad business'. People will need to settle for whatever model pays them, so that they can work on better things. On a different note, Google itself is spoken of as Ad company till date. But look at what it has now, possibly a leadership position in self driving cars; Companies working on longevity; Android and several other Alphabet companies.
If you're doing something valuable, figure out a way to get paid for it. By and large the thing you get paid for is the thing people value.
> On a different note, Google itself is spoken of as Ad company till date. But look at what it has now, possibly a leadership position in self driving cars; Companies working on longevity; Android and several other Alphabet companies.
None of which is profitable. They're an ad company with PR.
But that tiniest evil is multiplied by billions, with the power of automation. It is really an epoch-making company in that it gives a new light to the definition of the word.
An ordinary person (myself included) can't sense it. Their evil only appears in statistics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/chase-ads-youtub...
Most of our traffic to the adverts was generated, purely to syphon off money from the advertisers and we established this by fingerprinting the traffic with JS tools at the client side. This was what let me to the conclusion that the business is dysfunctional, the customers at best are getting wildly ripped off, their privacy effectively sold off and they open themselves up to huge amounts of malware too.
Advertising is a horrible business model. But until a new way is found, people/businesses don't have any other choice of marketing their activities.
I totally stand by the publication. Any publication that really cares about it's readers will try to find another way.
(Edit: I am viewing this page on a Brave Browser, check it out, it has ad blocking and publisher micropayments built in https://brave.com)
So far, for me, the tip jar has been more successful than ads or Patreon (though I am new to Patreon, so, time will tell). I would be happy to get rid of ads altogether (with the exception of one site, for REASONS) if I thought that would drive up tips. But I have experimented a bit and it didn't seem to drive up tips.
Then, whenever I read these discussions, there is a great deal of vitriol about the evil of ads, yet, most people don't actually want to pay for content. They just want it free. When you suggest this is a broken model and content producers also deserve compensation, the answer is typically "not my problem," basically.
As a content producer, I find it enormously frustrating to read some of the awful things that get said. It reminds me of the line in All in the Family where Archie says men are supposed to have experience before marriage and women are not and his daughter asks "Who are they supposed to get their experience with?"
My snarky son's answer: Elderly widows should be deflowering young men. It fits all the parameters of the expectations while horrifying most people.
An awful lot of people are only thinking about "I don't want ads" and that's it. They basically want it for free, then don't think about what that means for the big picture.
/rambling vent
Not all advertising is objectionable.
http://digitalmars.com/articles/
Pretty much all programming products, even free ones, operate this way. Much of the content you see on Hacker News, and on reddit/r/programming, is of this form.
There are TV shows that do the same thing, such as "Detroit Muscle". Each show is about how to do a repair/customization job on a car, and various tools and products are used to do it (and the makers of those tools and products pay for the show).
Tupperware parties are another example of this sort of thing.
It's like having a free cooking class where you show people how to cook with butter, and you're in the butter business.
The hit TV show "This Old House" was all paid for by the products and tools used in the show. It didn't look like advertising, but that's exactly what it was. And it works, and people love the show (I loved it, too).
I.e. organic marketing.
I've contemplated this kind of thing, but it feels like panhandling, and I'm reluctant to go there. I would do it if I thought I could do so tastefully and respectfully.
I'm a (non-tech-related) "content producer," and I absolutely refuse to put up ads or be a shill or "native advertiser." Instead, I wrote a book, and if people want to support what I do, they can buy it. It's not enough to be a day job, but it probably could be with day-job levels of time and effort, and my "content consumers" appreciate my integrity.
Saying that you'd like to be able to make it your full time job is a very reasonable thing as well, and I imagine people get that you need some kind of salary to do it.
Both of these are things that I, if I were a frequent visitor to your site, would have a pretty good incentive to make happen.
I am glad your strategy is working for you. But, if you are interested:
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...
BTW, kudos for writing the "Survival Guide." I ran across it at random awhile ago, and it has some great advice.
Adverts are a pain in the back for the user, they take up bandwidth and processing time and that fucks with the experience. If you could simply charge $50 for a ticket for the whole amusement park, once you are in you don't have to worry about paying but only the experience, rather than nickel and dime them people would gladly pay that amount. It's about the convenience/experience.
"When you're young, it's all filet steak, but as the years go by, you have to move on to the cheap cuts. Which is fine with me, because I like those. More flavorful, or so they say." - M. Gustave (The Grand Budapest Hotel)
I hate ads. I hate that they track you. I hate that they waste data. But most of all I hate that they are annoying. I always use an ablocker and I don't care if you don't get paid because I didn't look at an ad.
I am still busy with my degree this year. (I am studying part time) But next year I want to start my own website. With a blog and a place to share my side projects. Will I put ads on the website? Fuck no. In fact I will put up messages begging people to install adblockers if I detect that they aren't using one.
Just because I write some interesting code or article and then share it on the public internet, doesn't mean people now owe me money. I don't deserve compensation for putting stuff on the internet, and why would anyone else? But if my employer didn't pay me I would be really pissed off. Because we have an agreement that I will write code for them and they will pay me for it. I don't remember signing a contract with the whole internet saying that I will pay everyone who publicly shares some text or other media.
If someone is butthurt that they can't make a product/service/content valuable enough to sell it for money, but instead rely on advertisers for money, then that is their problem.
Do you think we all deserve to be paid for commenting on hackernews? Lots of people here write incredibly interesting and insightful comments. We all do it for free without complaining.
Edit: formatting/spelling
Best idea today, thanks! I pirate it.
I am still wrestling with the question. I like the progress I am seeing. It is a good trend for me. But it is far from a solved problem. However, for the traffic numbers etc that I have, I seem to do better than average.
A service that allowed a person to select a day (e.g. 12th) or better yet pick a day the way a lot of people get paid (day after third Thursday of the month) would be preferred.
[edit] To give a concrete example. Suppose someone on Social Security wants to pay for their sites/shows/etc. SS pays on the third Wednesday of the month. This person, in order to avoid any bank charges or other foolishness, wants the payment to come the day after that. "Day after 3rd Wednesday of month" would be a good thing to allow.
> Patreon has a rather large problem for poorer people.
I realize SV never has to worry, but how about making it easier for janitor who cleans your building or the person making your coffee to participate in the digital economy?
I think you have a point, but perhaps you should submit it as a suggestion directly to Patreon. Second, I have tip jars so people can give once without making a monthly commitment. Monthly commitments are a serious burden for poor people.
I intentionally list dollar amounts of $1, $3 and $5 to solicit small sums so people who can't afford more than $1 feel okay about giving $1. The jar is set up so you can then enter a quantity if you want to give more, for example 2 Tips at $5 to leave a total of $10. Most people who tip leave me $5 or more. But I do sometimes get $1. (This is really about 67 cents for me, but I don't want to treat other poor people like charity cases. I think that actively creates problems.)
> Monthly commitments are a serious burden for poor people.
A lot of people don't want charity and are fine with paying their own share. What I am trying to say is simple, the timing of payment is often critical for people. $10 on day 1 of a month is not the same as $10 in the third week. Most utilities get this. It would be nice if people planning the future of paying for website, news, etc. get this through their head before they leave out part of the population.
> This is really about 67 cents for me, but I don't want to treat other poor people like charity cases. I think that actively creates problems.)
That is a good attitude because treating other poor people as charity cases often leads to contempt even if its subtle. A lot of poor people won't be that way later, but they will still have the memories.
Or in other words, if "a $1 charge at the wrong time can be seriously problematic", you shouldn't be spending on patreon, you should be instead saving up that money until a $1 charge isn't problematic. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, but this problem is solvable by waiting a month to join the service, and paying each month with last month's funds.
Also the snark isn't appreciated.
Edit: To clarify, what this really comes down to is that I don't think patreon (or any company) should be going out of its way to encourage people who may not be financially stable to subscribe to recurring charges for things. That seems abusive, not empowering.
It is inherently problematic to design a world where only The Haves can contribute. I am homeless. I have been treated vastly better by second hand stores and payday loan places than by any charity organization that has helped me because I am a customer and they need my money to pay their bills.
If you do not allow for the possibility that the 99% can help pay for it, you also inherently cut them out in other critical areas, like having a voice in design and services.
It is critical that we find ways to be less exclusive or the world will go to hell in a hand basket. Giving people a choice as to when they pay is an important detail. I agree with that point, though it isn't the only issue here. There are other issues. But their POV is inherently less problematic than yours. Treating poor people like they can't and shouldn't support the services they value is an excellent way to make sure the world continues to be designed for the comfort and convenience of the 1% and to hell with everyone else.
Agreed. Although at least for patreon, which in my experience is freemium, you aren't worrying about basic access. If we were talking about a newspaper subscription or internet access or an all access subscription to some content creator who only gave access to patrons that might be different, but "premium access to extra content a creator makes" is something that I don't spend money on. In an ad-free world that might change, but it also might not.
Now, on the other hand, there's perhaps an honor in saying that I shouldn't be taking money from people who can't afford this. I think its difficult, because you either end up inadvertently taking advantage of people or alienating people, but I don't see a way to do neither. (I'm thinking of cigarettes and lottery tickets as corollaries here).
>If you do not allow for the possibility that the 99% can help pay for it, you also inherently cut them out in other critical areas, like having a voice in design and services.
I make two comments here. The first is that (again at least with patreon), I see it as an expressly premium service. My view might be wrong, but from that perspective its worth replacing "Patreon subscription" with "concierge drycleaning subscription", and I hope you wouldn't have a problem with me saying that as a general rule people really shouldn't be using a concierge drycleaning service if they are living paycheck to paycheck.
The second is that this isn't (necessarily) a 99%/1% issue. My comment was specifically addressing people with no savings and who were living paycheck to paycheck. While that's a lot of people, its not 99% (at least in the US). That's not to say that you're overall point is wrong (classist design is bad except in specific circumstances), but if you're going to make that claim, I think its important to be clear about the classes.
But, I have other things to do and trying to bridge whatever communication gap exists here is not the best use of my time ATM.
Best.
In any case, have a nice day as well.
Sorry for the snark, but I am getting a little sick of lamenting the plight of other folks while not doing the simple things to help.
> Edit: To clarify, what this really comes down to is that I don't think patreon (or any company) should be going out of its way to encourage people who may not be financially stable to subscribe to recurring charges for things. That seems abusive, not empowering.
Think about that statement in the light of a non-ad supported web.
Perhaps, but I also don't necessarily think of Comcast as a design we should follow. If I understand
>Think about that statement in the light of a non-ad supported web.
correctly, your implication is that this will cut people who can't pay out of services (ie. things become subscription based and then non-payers are excluded). That at least can be solved by freemium models (which is what Patreon does), although Mz goes further and states that even that can be alienating to people who want to pay but can't.
FWIW, as someone who is a consumer of a lot of things that I don't subscribe or pay for (including some patreon based groups), who I probably should start supporting, because I can and I'd prefer that they continue existing, I've never felt like I don't have access to media I want (note that this is different than "do I feel like I'm unable to support something I enjoy"). I'm relying on the morality of creators to continue producing (good) free content, and only producing special content at the price, but so far at least that's been a good assumption.
I think when Comcast does it better, people should consider that the bottom level they need to achieve.
I do imply it will cut people off. People need to think about these issues as soon as "free" dies. I await the various Netflix-for-news attempts.
Just as the next level of problem is the bank-less. That is one more step down the line. A lot of the bank-less have jobs that pay above minimum wage but had a bad streak. Walmart understands this given their financial services. I'm starting to think with ads going down the tube someone dealing with web content better start walking through the implications.
I will always have ads on my homeless site so that homeless people do not feel like leeches. Traffic alone can put some money in my pocket. But, I would happily remove ads from other sites if I genuinely thought this would lead to a better outcome for me. I have done a lot of nice things for people online for a lot of years and mostly not been paid for it.
This is partly a function of the problem spaces that I am involved in. Some problems are inherently trickier than others. But it is partly a function of being a woman, which both cuts me out of the "old boy network" such that I have difficulty accessing pertinent knowledge and skills and also makes other people prone to thinking I should do it out of the goodness of my heart and my dire poverty is not their problem, which is all kinds of fucked up.
So, at this point, I am more concerned with figuring out how to line my empty pockets with money than I am with the criticisms of other people. They mostly haven't given a damn about what I need and I am at a point where I feel "Yeah, whatever. This resource can absolutely go away. You are not entitled to benefit from me while I get nothing back, assholes."
So, you know, if people want to give me solutions for how to get money in a "good" way that actually improves my bottom line, awesome. If people want to bust my chops about it, not really caring at this point. Being super giving and virtuous does not have a track record of keeping me fed.
I've been using them since they launched in the US and couldn't be happier, they even offer refunds for clickbait!
I think the reason the online music subscriptions have done so well is that their catalogs span multiple publishers, and customers really don't want to subscribe to multiple services. While there's minor differences, you pretty much can get access to any music you can think of.
Otherwise you just end up with some crummy bundling service where you pay a premium for a few things you are interested in, and waste money on the rest of the junk.
I spend a little over a dollar a week and I get to occasionally read articles from sources that are expensive to buy a full subscription for.
I wonder if publishers find Blendle's usage statistics to be useful. They certainly track users'navigation across their own web properties, but knowing which articles people are willing to pay for must be a good signal.
But in principle I'm a huge fan of micropayments for journalism, so I'm going to keep using it for a while and see how it goes!
Thats at least an order of magnitude more expensive than its worth (to me), and 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more than they would make from ads. As an ad-blocking user who reads a lot of online content, I am in favor in the pay for content model, but it has to come at an appropriate price. A couple cents per reading minute is the high end of what most news/magazine/blog type writing is worth to me.
What we need is subscription payment service network __protocol__. It should be protocol because we don't want to give monopoly for single organization.
You pay something lke $5 -$60 per month for one company of your choosing. Whenever you visit a web page and pay, consume content or tip, your browser leaves an anonymous authenticated tokens/coins/whatever behind. Services can turn these tokens into money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Reason as I understand it: downward spiral. Publishers of worthy content learn to make people pay for content, and then go off-platform once they have large enough audience to keep the whole profit.
Weaker publications stay in a bundle, but at that point not many people want to pay.
Is this a future of Spotify model as well? Taylor Swift or Adele are now powerful enough to try to break away.
(use Google translate) https://www.pianomedia.sk/122/system-piano-na-slovensku-spln...
If you think about it, $5 is probably more than they could ever hope to make serving ads to a single occasional user.
That's not really true. Advertisers can bid on how much they want to pay for each individual impression. Advertisers will likely bid more for ads on high quality websites. Advertisers will also bid more for people willing to buy stuff.
Citation needed
> Advertisers will also bid more for people willing to buy stuff.
Unfortunately, there is no correlation between people willing to buy stuff and high quality content.
> Unfortunately, there is no correlation between people willing to buy stuff and high quality content.
Citation needed :)
Seriously, the "enlargement penis" spam works because the average person is not that selective on the ads they chose nor the websites they visit.
I don't think you understand "average". It's the extreme tail of the distribution that is targeted by such ads.
Example:
> Nigerian scam emails 'deliberately implausible'
> New research from Microsoft suggests that email scammers maximise profits by entrapping only the most gullible.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/9346371/Nige...
Our platform Snapzu (similar to Reddit) allows tribe leaders to earn a 55% revenue split when their referred members buy premium (our version of Reddit gold.)
This was recently added with the launch of our "blog enhancement suite" as explained in this explainer video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTvWM-kjXSQ
TLDR: You can start/run a community (like a sub-reddit), embed it on your blog/website, and earn money from your referrals (your members.)
It does not even make sense because it means there was basically zero mis-clicks. I don't know how they count a click-through but it seems to be more than just someone clicking on the ad.
Also I'm pretty tired of hearing how Google are the good guys and 'do no evil'. It's obvious through their latest YouTube scandals and AdSense they are literally stealing billions of dollars from individuals around the world.
People very rarely click ads.
The earnings per click will vary wildly depending on your content "quality"(whatever Google's algorithms decide is quality) and category(content about insurance will probably bring better paying insurance ads and content about 9/11 conspiracies will probably bring less paying ads).
AdSense has many problems but it's not a scam.
It seems to me that Google is a kind of corporate "Rain Man" - they have amazing abilities, and yet there are also these astonishing failures to deal with problems which could easily be resolved by a normal corporation.
My solution is to basically build features around the content of sites that enhance the areas of the site that already attract the users. More importantly, it simplifies the revenue model that the article talks about -- people click on your links and make purchases, and you get a share of every single purchase (CPA). The important thing is that it's compatible with any other revenue models a site might use. If, like GroundUp, they take donations, then it's just an extra revenue source on top of that.
I looked on GroundUp.org for building an example video of how that would work so I could show the community, but it doesn't really fit the model of PLEENQ. Regardless, there are a vast number of niches that this new form of native advertising would drastically improve the revenue for. Imagine an auto blog showing a picture of an engine, and you being able to hover over any part within the picture and purchase it from Auto Zone.
Another thing is that it can be used to split between revenue generating links, and informational links. Perhaps you have a news site, and a lot of your articles have pictures of politicians that your users might not be familiar with -- how about hovering over that person and being able to click on them to go to their Wikipedia page? I think that would greatly benefit a user browsing the site, and wouldn't cheapen in any way the experience of the site itself (in fact would greatly improve it).
Maybe it is cool for pink bloggers ( https://goo.gl/OFWwmp ), but I don't see the use case for the masses like you do with adsense.
Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB.
Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP header. Or you could add artificial latency to every request.
Then you sell those useless bytes or milliseconds. Your bytes could really be unicode glyphs. Example: a dollar for every byte per month. When a user leases a specific byte you can send it to him by an e-mail for increased silliness factor. He leased it, so it will not be sent to anyone else as long as he pays.
That way you can specify a ceiling of profits. 500kB at one dollar per kB can bring you at most $500k per month. It seems fair, a bit like Patreon targets.
I thought about doing a service this way. And even a platform - providing web server configs and plug-ins that would do all this selling of bytes process, also payment processor for bytes that would also run on the idea.
If you would sell all the useless bytes you would serve the clean version of your website.
Ads are useless bytes. But a bit dishonestly useless. You can block them to some extent. Some will not get served to you. However there are still some ad divs or native ads that are uselessly sent to you in case of ad blocking.
I propose sending honestly useless bytes, but give people ability to strip them out for money.
Then everyone can be happy. People can support a creator. People can get a better product by paying. A creator can eat.
I mean it makes sense, all content is still available to every user but when you pay you get instant or higher speeds.
Useless bytes have a few properties however. You can do more silly things with them. People like to do something unreasonably silly from time to time.
You can treat useless bytes as virtual goods. You could serve: unicode code points, animal names, or even sentences from public domain books. Then people can explore the catalog and have a tiny bit more personalized experience, than just buying 40ms.
They can also serve as a manifest against ads, because they are honestly useless bytes with a safety hatch.
Can you let me know which sites you own so I know not to visit them...
You're safe. I don't own any site you would want to visit.
The internet already has enough useless cruft. CNN loads 4.9 mB of data with no adblockers. Fox News loads 2.6 mB. MSNBC loads 4.2 mB. The Guardian (US Edition) loads 4.3 mB. Padding a site with 500 kB (or really any amount of bytes) is unfair to mobile users without unlimited data plans.
A user who visits your site twice per week and navigates to 5 different pages on your site each visit receives about 12 mB of garbage bytes per month.This isn't that big a deal if only one site is doing it, but imagine if that's how all sites did it?
It would be an alternative to ads. Ads are a padding plus unfairness and dishonesty. They also track you and run code on your machine. This would be just a padding.
A creator has to eat and people don't have to use his site. Those that like it and would want to make it even better can pay.
And don't forget that a first step was to create a _lean_ website. 200kB + 500kB padding would still be more than 2 times less then any website you mentioned. For this to work the website would have to prove from time to time how it would work without useless bytes. You could also serve less useless bytes.
However it could still work with added latency instead of bytes. Example: 50ms every 100kB.
1) Low quality, high volume, low overhead: google ads.
2) High quality/high value, low volume, niche: subscription/services
3) Medium quality, low volume, niche: donation
The only form of advertising I'd ever want on my site, unless it is a very low quality, is direct sold by my own staff (i.e. me). I'd probably optimize for effort and just do a single "sponsor" for each month, or maybe ongoing. The low-touch way is probably to pick a relevant CPA program (say, Audible) and pitch that to your own audience.
When you first go to the site, a Credit Karma ad or Rite Aid ad popup appears (promoted by Kixer).
Close that and you see a site just overwhelmed by ads, some local. Then they have the "Sponsored Links" by Content.ad saying:
- "Cheaper and Stronger than Adderral"
- "Don't watch this video around you wife <insert photo of model>"
- "Fruits that fight diabetes"
- "Biblical solutions to weight loss"
The local owners of the newspaper, sold their cable company for $350 million which they had owned for 45 years (Cablevision->Suddenlink).
If an exceptionally wealthy local newspaper owner can't offer content in a reasonable way without egregious deceptive links, who can?
This type of behavior should be heavily criticized, especially by those who can afford to avoid it. Instead, it's considered business as usual.
I mean ads which are simply an image inside an <a> tag. Presumably this is how everyone was doing it before the ad networks existed? (I was around in the 90s but never really thought about it.)
I guess it would take a lot of extra work and expense to approach potential advertisers and make deals. But on the upside you could host only well-curated ads that are relevant to your audience. Presumably they would also be difficult to block (although I suppose ad blockers could start recognising images, maybe they do this already?)
Has anyone had any success doing this? Is it likely to become more common as ad blocking increases?
I feel like I'm missing something incredibly obvious!
It is probably very effective if you have an audience with well targeted interests. For example a site about espresso coffee may partner with a shop that sells high end espresso machines and specialty coffee.
However, it is much harder if a website has a broader audience. A news network probably has no clue about what visitors want to spend their money on, so either they use an ad network that does the targeting for them, or they are limited to less beneficial generic partnerships.
I'll put up with ads that don't move or make noise at me. And that don't/can't try to infect me.
But, no one wants to do that.
Stalemate.
My fear is that, in addition to increasingly locking down the web, the new DRM extensions will be used to force (crap-laden) ads upon us. Content and crap will all get packaged up together, as an encrypted binary. Et voilà, no more open Web.
P.S. Yeah, I don't want to look at gross medical ads, either. So, I guess I have a few more qualifications, personally.
Um, so, shouldn't you be charging a syndication fee, probably a percentage of their ads displayed on your articles?
The real question at this point is, how are you going to pay for your site? I realize AdSense payments are tiny, but they are at least something. How do you plan on replacing those payments? Our site wouldn't be able to pay our writers without that tiny bit of revenue.
In any case, I applaud your efforts and wish you the best.
Content ads, more or less, offer a fixed amount per impression. Sure, you might get a higher ad price for certain audiences than others, but this is related to topic, not the quality or cost of content.
If you only make a fixed amount per impression, the only business model low-cost content targeting a large audience. High quality (aka high cost) content, with a narrow interest audience needs a different model.
That different model is probably charging your reader. However, the moment you set up a paywall, the content disappears. Search engines will not suggest the content, feed readers can't access it, suggestion interfaces won't suggest it, etc. The content might as well not exist.
We don't need micropayments. We need a model where paywall content can be discovered. Systems whereby paywall content can be accessed by aggregators who then can suggest/search/deliver the content, but will not give the content to users without payment.
I do not think so. Gaming and 4chan have been around a while, but this development is, as you say, relatively recent. I think there is some force that is new that promotes this curve.
One explanation is the widespread adoption and acceptance of the internet. Not so long ago, much fewer people had easy access to the web. Those that did often treated it with disdain, being mostly uninterested in it. At some point, people realized that the internet enabled them to freely speak their mind and associate with whomever they like to an unprecedented degree. Whereas before, people were limited by not wanting to distance themselves from friends and family, the internet enables them to lead a double life, with one part being a normal family man, the other being an internet pundit, freely spreading whichever vitriol they choose.
For these same reasons, I don't think this facet of internet culture will be so easily put away. To do so requires breaking some of the principles that make the internet what it is, primarily the ability to post whatever you want, even illegal content (copyright, cp). There is also the ability to join comunities from anywhere in the world, not just those local to you, that have some extension in real life. These functions are part of what people dreamed about when they fostered the internet and the web.
I think removing someone's advertising harms them to a point, but for many, it is a labor of love. They talk about the things they do because they truly enjoy those topics, and want to deseminate their views on it. If you cut off a revenue stream, they will continue posting, but perhaps scaled back due to needing a real job. Further, if their audience truly and unabashedly enjoys the content, they might be willing to fund the content maker through other channels, such as patreon or a similar websites. Cut off one revenue stream and two more pop up.
I don't know what the solution is. Cutting off advertising won't be enough. Destroying the internet as we know it might be needed, but I worry that this is going too far.
For what it's worth, some of us just never stopped putting cool and interesting content online, for free, without monetizing it with ads (except perhaps as a short-duration experiment in the early 2000s when this madness started taking off).
If I wanted to get paid to let someone shit all over and between that content/media, I'd be writing/designing very different content. ... unless maybe it was an art project to explicitly demonstrate the fragility of excellence (okay maybe that's a cool idea actually--this besides the point :p)
But still, you're not going to make a lot of money from a few hundred thousand impressions. In my experience, a YouTube video with 1,000,000 views will give you around $1,000. That's nowhere near enough to sustain a company or pay any employees.
Right now I'm working on a game (which I hope to launch soon and show on HN!). While I dislike ads, I'm still going to put them in my game, because I enjoy making money more than I hate ads. I think Google and AdMob will mostly serve ads for other games, so they're not so bad.
pics of the details can be found here: http://i.imgur.com/NDubFOO.png
Please help: https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/64wwge/ads_mak...
This would allow good advertisers to pay once or twice a month for reviews on new ad campaigns and the spammy throw it all at the wall campaigns less likely. But google isn't interested in quality... but quantity, so they can charge higher rates per view/click.
Right now I only use Amazon Affiliate and I guess only because it's (a) easy to get a link to the books I review (b) they are actually controlled by me, at least in theory. No flipping products Amazon is randomly sending me.
How is that working so far? For all the tracking Google does through Google analytics, Google search, and the Play Android framework, you'd think ads would be a lot better by now.
What's funny is that Google seems quick to fire publishers but it's never so quick to fire advertisers.
After a few dozen bucks, the ads turned into virus scams, +18 hotlines, which I am pretty sure I unchecked the last time I logged into admob's web interface, so I removed it. Good riddance.
Now thanks to google (ironically) I sell in-app purchases to enable features.
Someone get on this.
In the near future, it will be total war between amoral lowlife hucksters, and cheapskate users.
I think the real argument should be about how we pay for content on a site and how to solve that problem instead of arguing about the adverts.
Why didn't HTTP 402 ever take off?
I'd pay a lot of websites a buck a month for access. Multiply this by millions and you see. It's only when you introduce advertisements that the craziness begins.
I would be curious to know how many websites have millions of paying subscribers.
"Google pays a tiny amount each time an ad appears, and a somewhat larger amount if readers click on an ad. To understand exactly how the payment system works requires several PhDs, a four-digit IQ and stay-awake drugs."
That's enough for GroundUp to make these decision.
1. Create a new browser where the concept of a URL is missing.
2a. Make terms, keywords, concepts first-class citizens. Ban URLs alltogether. Search using keywords to get to the places you want to go, not by typing URLs.
2b. Make it so that the browser gets smarter as you go and accustomed to your prose (the way you formulate your queries).
3. Make it so that the internet index is centralized so that all your browsers use the same "lookup URLS through keywords" service. Also let people use a local index version.
4. Create a buzz around this new browser. Start in the tech community of your choice. They will love using something that has a fair chance of becoming a Google-killer.
5. Your mom and dad already want to use this new browser. URLs are not important to them. Today, they google for "www.facebook.com" before starting their internet session.
6. We are done here. Internet has re-booted. We all profit.
Point 2b makes this perfect for the [random tech incubator], wouldn't you agree?
Advertising is not an easy job: and it takes more than a few lazy banner to do it right. The current model, the one pushed by Google, has no future. Using adblocks is a duty we have to change the system.
By which I don't mean how they provide a service, in exchange for monetary compensation, in exchange for goods (bread).
I mean I wonder how they earn it.
Just curious but is there any way to know for sure whether those images are licensed or not?
Theoutline.com is an example of how the new relationship between brands<>publishers<>audience will evolve.