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Comment by convery | Hacker News Reader

As someone whoms business largely relies on ad-revenue: please don't go out of your way to ruin advertising. It's a shitty system that is sometimes abused, but it's the best system we have as very few users actually want to open their wallet for their "free" content. Seriously, we have a single unobtrusive banner yet 85% of our users are adblocking; it's not an issue of 'bad ads' as so many like to argue.

EDIT: So the general consensus seems to be that one should not mention adblocking hurting small companies because these small companies should just: a) Invent their own advertising platform that can separate users from bots without any tracking or off-site processing, b) Invent a new payment method that appeals to everyone in the world, c) Make the content so exceptionally good that the users will literally throw money at their monitor, d) Look for investors that can shoulder the costs rather than the users, e) Just create additional sources of revenue so that adblocking users can still get their free content. This may be a controversial opinion, but I'd rather people just said "I don't want to pay" rather than making up impossible criteria for why they shouldn't pay.

EDIT2: So there's a lot of replies basically saying: "just make content worth paying for". I do wonder, do you people stand around street-musicians for 45min and when they nudge their hat just say "fuck you, your content is not good enough to pay for; now shut up and continue playing"?

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As someone else, I'd gladly ruin advertising and all businesses that rely on it; it's immoral (involuntary invasion of other people's minds) and a terrible business model and should die ASAP.

Edit: most ad-blockers don't actually block ads; they just block cross-domain, spying widgets. Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted, untracked image that's actually an ad. The fact that you complain about adblockers implies that you don't do that, which implies that you're using bad practices (e.g. spying on users).

I dislike advertising too and would gladly see it and the related industry burn in a fire but it's neither immoral or a terrible business model.

Many business benefit greatly from some amount of advertisement and it's a practical way to monetise people's attention. What is immoral is the cohort of brilliant minds who've made the optimisation of advertisement the quest of the century.

So there is nothing wrong with involuntary invasion of other people's minds?

I love how you people always find new ways of wording shit to gain some moral superiority. Can't wait for the logical conclusion, "Netflix's servers are heating up the planet while processing my request; I DO NOT CONSENT TO THIS!! Thus my piracy is for the good of the land".

If sites warned that they will load trackers beforehand, your accusation would make sense: people could just not enter the site.

But as it stands, even if you're willing to forgo using such sites, you have to load trackers to know that the site uses them. So an adblocker/anti-tracker is a necessary protection.

You got me. Gaining moral superiority is what I was after.

The only thing you'll achieve with that attitude is convincing people that there's no point in slowing down or talking things over.

> wording shit

The head of the first French TV channel himself bragged that "his job was to sell available brain time".

Well so far I've lived fairly well, being "involuntarily invaded" by art for instance, so I'm not sure I see merit in the invasion argument.

On the the other hand if you're complaining about the shady manipulations going on behind the scenes to fuel the data driven marketing and advertising schemes then sure you have a point.

You consent to go to the website that has ads on it.

On the other hand, you don't consent to seeing a billboard whilst on public roads, so I don't think I'd object to people "defending themselves" (whatever that looks like) from billboards.

> Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted, untracked image that's actually an ad.

Which is largely impossible for smaller sites. If you contact companies directly and ask if they'd like to advertise (or just have a contact page) they expect you to have millions of daily users. Not to mention that you have to build systems to track how many times the banner is shown to the users and have some way to verify this (e.g. that they are not bots/crawlers).

Saying; "just host your own ads" is a lot similar to "if you don't like the software, just make your own from scratch". It's not that easy for most people.

Most sites have tracking via GA as well, why not just show advertisers that, and let them buy e.g. 1/3 of the monthly traffic? AFAIK most ad-blockers don't block GA (though other plugins do).

Edit: Ah, I just checked, uBlock apparently blocks GA whereas AdBlock doesn't.

If you add any privacy related list to any blocker, GA is blocked, thankfully.

AdBlock now allows ads and trackers from companies that satisfy their proper ad criteria. One of the criteria is also a payment that depends on the size of your company.

Right, but it won't be impossible when the alternative is not advertising at all in millions of sites.

this is the real shame. people don't block ads because they can't stand the site of them. it's because the whole ad infrastructure is so janky that it makes the browsing experience glitchy and unstable. nobody wants cookie stuffing popunder free download now buttons on their site but ad providers don't really give much in the way of being able to selectively filter those out.

> people don't block ads because they can't stand the site of them.

That's cute :-)

We're doing exactly that at my startup Confiant [1], blocking bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. High quality content websites don't want to ruin UX with bad ads.

[1] https://www.confiant.com

cool startup! do you do anything about the infrastructure though? I mean a regular old banner image is OK, but the same image delivered via the series of scripts all tracking, sniffing, and profiling with all the cookie stuffing and who knows what else black magic bullshit is in those adtech js really screws with the browsing experience. uMatrix doesn't just hide ads - it blocks the ad tech entirely which ends up improving the whole experience by making the site load faster, use less ram, not spin up my fans and heat up the battery, etc.

yup, we detect and block most sleazy ad tech schemes through the daisy-chain of third parties. Agreed on UX improvement with ad blockers, we're doing this selectively on behalf of publishers.

> people don't block ads because they can't stand the site of them.

Oh yeah? Where do you get your research from?

I guarantee people are blocking ads because they hate ads and everything else is secondary.

You want some proof? TIVO sold millions of devices because of the ability to skip ads. People hate ads.

there's a big difference between a tv commercial and a banner ad. one completely hijacks your attention for some period and the other is more like a billboard or poster - if you're not interested you don't have to pay attention to it.

I know some sites have taken to showing full screen overlays and that's a lot more like a tv commercial, which I agree people hate. but for the most part we're talking about banners and their corresponding infrastructure for tracking and targeting (which is more intrusive than the actual ad mist of the time).

This response will be lengthy, it's a complicated subject.

I disagree. Most banner ads are through some sort of service like AdSense. They don't fit the theme of the page they're on most of the time which harms the immersive experience for the end user.

People care about these details. AdBlockers are increasing in popularity every year and there are reasons for that, you can't simply disregard this fact.

There are rare sites where ads are less hated, a good example might be Penny Arcade where the ads are hand-picked by the site owners for their specific appeal to their targeted audience. Those kinds of ads are probably the least hated.

I've had this conversation dozens of times, and people are constantly insisting that advertising is going to live forever! But that's nonsense. People hate ads. Even the least intrusive ads, they hate them on principal because their lives have been ruled by ads for decades. And films like Minority Report have painted horrifying visions of the future where advertising has taken over everything. The savvy among us can see that "big data" trends are heading in that direction, and that isn't a future anyone wants. Except people who work in advertising.

What I am curious about is why people cling so desperately to this revenue model. Obviously those who rely on it for their bread and butter are going to wish it would live forever, but the other 90% of the population would realize a much better quality of life if advertisements were to die forever. Just imagine it.

The internet and digital technology is changing the world. Advertising is going to die. It's an exciting thing to bear witness to.

Each site owner need not do it on his own . Perhaps there is an opportunity for an open source ad hosting solution which has all the features and connect to one or more central marketplaces where advertisers can place bids and also each ad can have be rated basis user responses and feedback and you can configure which marketplaces to list and restrict the quality of ads and the kind of tracking

I'm hearing this moralistic (and naive IMHO) argument a lot lately. Do you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead? Please don't rant against "evil ads" like that; rather, think about an economically feasible model which allows content creation and the web to thrive.

The problem with ads, and the sole reason I'm personally using an ad blocker, is tracking. For me, mass surveillance isn't an adequate compromise to make for free content.

I don't have a problem at all with classic banner ads OTOH. By merely switching off JavaScript you used to able to switch off most tracking years ago. But today's web pretty much requires JavaScript for even the simplest interactivity. Thank you W3C and WHATWG and Google for HTML5's lameness.

Do you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead?

As if we didn't have that already?

One thing I wanted to do was to allow ads everywhere and only block ones with obtrusive ads. That is instead of whitelisting good ones, I would have to only blacklist bad ones. But could find out how to do that with uBlock. Maybe somebody here can help.

You can try uMatrix. Same author. Adjust the defaults. There is a learning curve.

Do you not count tracking as obtrusive?

Lets see if Basic-Attention-Token works

It won't. Most people don't want their attention monetized.

Most people don't know that it already is and has been for a very long time.

And as they get wise, they increasingly install ad blockers. That's going to the moon at the moment. Tools like Ad Nausium are the next logical step.

How will they tackle abuse (hackers running bots and "mining attention")?

>I'm hearing this moralistic (and naive IMHO) argument a lot lately. Do you rather want to read targetted (advertisement-in-disguise and mass-scale political campaigning aka fake news) content instead?

We already have that buddy. One problem at a time.

I think the "do you want hidden ads instead?" is a bit naive as well, to be perfectly honest.

It misunderstands the nature of advertising and advertisers.

The kind of person/organisation who will target you with fake news and paid-for or ghost-written articles or books (which incidentally, is an increasingly large number of popular publications already these days) is not the kind of entity that says "oh, well i've got banner ads, best hold-back now in the interest of good-faith relations".

Advertising does not voluntarily stop. Advertisers do not hold back in the name of decency. It generally expands until it is either stopped (through legislative and societal bans, not having the rights to advertise in a particular place, or until it is cost-prohibitive to do so) or until the eyeballs stop looking (either because it has lost power or become so obtrusive that people either block it, turn to substitutes, turn off or push back).

> Thank you W3C and WHATWG and Google for HTML5's lameness.

Is HTML5 lame, or are web developers just too lazy to learn to use it properly?

The majority of our companies income comes from Amazon affiliate sales. We have our own widget, backend pulls the information from Amazon via their API, front end shows the products (we have a lot of structured data, so we know which products are actually relevant to show and don't have to rely on Amazon). No adblocker blocks this and it pulls no external resources besides the product image from amazon.

you're doing it right. what's needed is tooling that allows other publishers to do this for basic ads.

If the current generation of ad technologies ever get completely blocked, alternate technologies will emerge for companies to recreate a dark version of ad networks, sharing web server logs, etc.

Not only that, but like the "War on Drugs" is doomed to fail, so is the "war on Ads" - or any other market in which there is significant demand.

Companies need to advertise. If they don't sell their products, they go to die.

Here's some real world impact of Adblockers: Advertorials, Fake Reviews, increasily covert forum spam and Influencer Marketing. Not to mention increasing hard work of PR agencies chiseling away at reputable sources like Wikipedia. I basically can't trust anyone on the internet anymore - and this trend will only accelerate if companies can't reach interested prospects via clearly marked ad slots anymore.

All this advertising need and money isn't going away over night if banner ads are finally gotten rid of: it will simply go somewhere else.

Companies need to advertise. If they don't sell their products, they go to die.

Nonsense. If I or anyone NEEDS a product or service, we'll happily go out and buy it. Ads exist purely to drive unnecessary consumption-for-the-sake-of-consumption. It's telling that even a generally capitalist, free-market demographic like HN's thinks they are a sleazy way to make money. It's not a "war on drugs" its more like a war on some disease - and those are very winnable.

This is naive. How will you know what product to buy? And I mean this quite seriously. Where I work, there are initiatives to internally advertise tools and libraries that exist so people don't go reinventing them. For certain niches, it's not clear that a product exists unless you've seen it before.

This is naive. How will you know what product to buy?

This is naive. Advertisers aren't in the business of educating and informing the public. If they were most of them would say don't buy our product, you don't need it, it won't make you happy, the paid celebrity/model in our ad doesn't even use it, the people who make it don't even use it, because they know what's in it.

Like, do you think the executives at McDonalds feed their kids Happy Meals every day?

> Here's some real world impact of Adblockers: Advertorials, Fake Reviews, increasily covert forum spam and Influencer Marketing.

This has existed before ad-blockers and would continue to exist even if all ad-blockers disappeared overnight.

Being immoral pays more, it has nothing to do with ad-blocking.

> All this advertising need and money isn't going away over night

They could reroute that money into the products themselves. Cheaper prices, more quality, it's their choices.

You're right in that the "War on Ads" is an unwinnable war. But I think its more analogous to cleaning your house, or good hygiene. Its true that its a just a matter of time until your house, or yourself, will become dirty again if you don't do anything. But I don't think that's really an argument against cleaning.

Rather, its just the reality that you're never going to get down to zero.

But maybe if we put up enough of our own barriers, then our families can live in an environment with 10% of advertising influence and exposure instead of 60% or 80%. And i think that's a fight worth fighting.

I might not be able to get rid of advertising, but I can block ads, I can stop billboards going up, I can stop them advertising cigarettes/alcohol or gambling in certain times and places, and I can never let the tv shows or ghost-written books into my house. And overall, I think we'll live in a better world overall if people make the effort. Its the good fight.

As for ad-blockers being responsible for advertorials, fake reviews, forum spam and influencer marketing...lets just say it takes a massive leap of logic to turn a problem solely due to the behaviours of advertisers and try to level that at the feet of people trying to stop them. Wow.

It doesn't take a leap of logic at all. All it requires is some fairly simple economics.

Someone has to pay for content. You don't view ads, and you don't buy subscriptions. You also never donate. What do you think will happen next?

Well, some businesses die, but most don't. At the Guardian, we had to rely on three things:

1. We had to make about three hundred people redundant. (This is the human cost of the problem - not that some fatcat makes marginally worse dividends, but that a print worker who's done this job since 16 is now being turned out at 42)

2. We had to diversify our revenue streams. One way became 'native advertising': content sponsored by companies, like an article on the history of whiskey with a Jack Daniels badge, etc. Editorial hated this. Oh, boy, they objected. They fought in every principle and at every point available. They relented when they realized they were next for redundancies.

3. Then there were us, in commercial. Firefighting bad ads coming via the network, trying to resist JS hogging full page experiences, writing ads in the highest performing fashion we could to make the best of a bad situation. No-one liked us.

I didn't stay for long. I'd like to say I left because I was disgusted with the seediness of the ad industry, but the real reason was that the job was boring and depressing. We weren't saving the newspaper and we weren't making ads better.

Personally I think the only solution is the paywall. That's how newspapers worked for 250 years: you gave your dollar and you got your daily edition. You could trust your paper because it was more beholden to you than to any other interest. Will people accept this, though?

> most ad-blockers don't actually block ads; they just block cross-domain, spying widgets. Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted, untracked image that's actually an ad.

Most ad-blockers I know of use cosmetic filters, which can hide any element from a page, including self-hosted and non-tracking ads (see https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...). Sadly, showing ads that are respectful to the user is not that easy...

one day you'll run a business and your opinion will likely shift as you'll understand it's purpose.

I'd gladly exploit existing social structures to make a profit, and still oppose them.

Many adblockers block random images with “track“ or “ad“ in their css classlist.

> As someone whoms business largely relies on ad-revenue

It does not, it relies on selling user data to ad agencies that resell them via data brokers to .. well, not even you know, do you?

> please don't go out of your way to ruin advertising

I will go out of my way to ruin any business model that relies on tracking users.

Even if it is the "best system we have" it is still abyssal. Not so much the content of the ads themselves, but the data collected by ad agencies.

> very few users actually want to open their wallet for their "free" content

Then either the content is not worth enough (and would not be consumed anyway if it was paid) or payment options are unacceptable.

I regularly read between 2 (weekdays) and 5 newspapers (sunday) but I don't have any subscription. I buy them with cash in a shop, go to a cafe and have breakfast. None of the newspaper vendors ever followed me into the cafe for some up-selling, not one tried to trick me into a subscription, not one mailed me about "special offers". None of them ever tracked how much time I spent on which article.

The controversial thing is "targeting" and it's profiling prerequisite. One may not realise the extent of this (say on FB) but have a look:

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/06/27/facebook-ad-tar...

What worries folks is the disproportionate power to influence afforded to private interests. Not just advertising or political campaigns but constant influence on daily choice.

It's an ethical question: should not the direction of society be determined through democratic means? Should we not vote, be equally informed and try to be good citizens? Does the control of information flow undermine this?

wow they really understand moms

This. There are two advertising business models:

1. Pay for ads to drive customers to your business selling widgets.

2. Sell customer data to advertising networks.

The first is sustainable and is the foundation of all advertising. The second is only sustainable if it doesn't supplant the first. If it does so, it becomes a self-licking ice cream cone and the whole enterprise falls apart. Sadly, that's where we are today.

Even at the risk of coming off as an arsehole: I'm sorry, but you are collateral damage.

Adblockers have become the norm because large enough a fraction of ad pushers have no morals. And because the ad industry tends to be concentrated, the blockers (rightly) target the observed ways used to push the ads.

So if you use any of the blacklisted firehoses or their observed methods, you can expect to be blocked.

> Seriously, we have a single unobtrusive banner yet 85% of our users are adblocking; it's not an issue of 'bad ads' as so many like to argue.

If 85% of your users have decided to use adblockers, I would take that a clear signal that the resources you use for serving ads have been deemed obnoxious in the extreme.

YOU may not be shoveling unripened-manure-quality-ads to your users, but other parties in the business who use the same services obviously do. And before we go to the concept of whitelisting certain sites, please realise that there are still two major factors working against you.

1: An ad served will mean successful tracking. Sophisticated users refuse to give in here.

2: The moment some whitelisting method becomes easy, useful and accepted, the ad networks will do everything they can to abuse that to bypass blockers. This follows from human nature and ruthless business practises.

And finally, I'm going to throw something I wrote nearly two years ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930 - that's my list of things that would qualify an ad as non-intrusive.

> Even at the risk of coming off as an arsehole: I'm sorry, but you are collateral damage.

If the small site owners are only collateral damage for you then you also welcome a internet which is dominated by big companies and people with enough money to push their agenda.

I sure as hell don't like it, but I believe that's been the case for a number of years already.

Just like the offline world.

This seems to be the current 'ad-positive' argument de jour. But I don't buy it. There is plenty and always has been plenty of free content on the web. It is very cheap to publish.

But advertising has led to the collapse of the small business or hobby website. Realistically nobody will ever see your content unless you advertise heavily, or post on a platform that uses your content to sell its ads.

Advertising, as far as I can see, has had a negative impact on the democracy of the web. And lead to an increase in the domination of big platform holders and brands.

> Realistically nobody will ever see your content unless you advertise heavily, or post on a platform that uses your content to sell its ads.

Care to elaborate why this should happen? Do you believe the "Google will rank you bad if you don't use Adsense" conspiracy theorie?

For example, posts on Facebook and Twitter get buried on purpose until you “promote” them.

>please allow the user to search for ads that have been displayed to them

This is a good point, and the fact that advertisers don't allow it is evidence that they're doing something immoral. If adverts were really about informing people to help them make their own reasoned choices, advert search would be very useful. But if adverts are an attempt to emotionally manipulate people, then allowing search would be counterproductive. It would give the audience time to think, which makes psychological trickery less effective. Advertisers choosing to make adverts appear and disappear unpredictably is telling.

Surely that's more a question about storage, as in saving the page:ad-link history of a billion IPs, rather than maliciousness?

Do you really believe they don't store that already?

You could probably get that information only with a few really expensive joins taking hours of datacenter time.

> This is a good point, and the fact that advertisers don't allow it is evidence that they're doing something immoral.

I don't think it's that deep. The advertiser, the ad buyer (some digital agency), the ad deliverer (some exchange or third-party network) and the publisher (the site where the ad was displayed) are all distinct entities with budgets fired up and ready to go at that specific moment.

The advertiser would surely love for you to search for their ad again (and again, and again). The buyer wouldn't mind, if only to show that their placement has increased reach. But the deliverer or the publisher won't see any additional revenues off of this, therefore there's zero incentive for them to support it.

That list is pretty good, even if a little extreme, so I'll see about implementing one or two of them.

People are not prepared to pay for your content, so you bemoan that when you give it to them for free (but in so doing destroy their privacy), they attempt to block that revenue stream.

I'd like to suggest advertising has become a crutch, preventing you from innovating: why not try and find a way to produce product content that people wish to pay for?

If you can't do that, you have two choices: continue as you are, but see it as a voluntary hobbyist project in which the content is given to the public domain and you do not monetise it; or, give up and let others decide.

The best thing that could happen to the Internet today is the destruction of the advertising industry.

Yes, it will change how Google and Facebook will need to make money. Some of these unicorns might struggle to survive and will die. It will cause a revolution down through the millions of smaller publishers as they have to think about how to make money without advertising: many will not be able to survive and will become nothing but memories on archive.org.

So be it. This, in the opinion of many people including myself, will be for the betterment of us all as a society.

So, respectively, I'm going to have to decline your request.

I'm installing AdNauseum and I sincerely hope that advertising industry is destroyed to the point that you have to find a new - better - revenue model.

Good luck.

> This, in the opinion of many people including myself, will be for the betterment of us all as a society.

If you achieve this, the result will be that the only people who can publish on the net are those with deep pockets and other interests. They may be companies (who write content as marketing), plutocrats (who will publish pro-business propaganda) or the state.

This is where we are heading: where the average citizen learns about their country from a Facebook feed, written by the Koch brothers.

This is going to have incredibly harmful effects on our society, and - I will not mince words - it seems to me the blame will rest with _people like you_.

That means YOU will be responsible for fake news and newspapers competing with the worst of the internet. That YOU will be responsible for advertisement disguised as news. All because you were too outraged to accept ads and too apathetic to pay a few dollars for paper news.

>only people who can publish on the net are those with deep pockets and other interests

Here's a beautiful and informative website: https://bestmotherfucking.website/

According to Firefox's Network Monitor, that's 2.47kB of data transfer. It's static HTML, so server load is minimal. One small donation could cover the costs for years.

It is not the server costs that are expensive; it's producing the content.

This. I feel like a lot of the responses are along the lines of; "you can get a VPS for 2€ so your site will still be profitable if 99% of users adblock; stop whining".

I think what people are saying is nobody owes you a living (this isn't meant to sound rude, I mean you don't owe anyone else one either, do you).

If something isn't working the way you want, that's a sign to do something else.

So if my side project is not working out, I will work for google or facebook. I don't think that's better.

Your claim was about the cost to "publish on the net", not the cost of production.

>If you achieve this, the result will be that the only people who can publish on the net are those with deep pockets and other interests.

The web was specifically designed for that to not be the case. Despite all the garbage we've loaded on it since then, ultimately it's still an act of mere minutes for anyone with an internet connection to start a website and serve it to all comers.

Tools like IPFS and Bittorrent only enhance that ability. The future is rosy, and it does not need advertisers.

Oh, no-one needs ad revenue to serve content.

What they need is money to produce content worth reading.

Just like people need money to write songs or play sports. No money, no sports... oh, wait, that’s not how it works.

People with something to say will find a way to say it, money or no.

The way this works for sports and music is you produce for free because you love it and are good at it, until you are scouted or discovered or get an agent, and ‘go pro’.

Used to work the same for writing. Can’t see why it shouldn’t just because a few written word performers prefer busking.

And how are they to 'go pro' if there is no business model to be a professional journalist / researcher / reporter / documentarian?

I think you believe we can get all our content from local, interested bloggers. We can't. There is no filtering and no curation. There are no stakes in telling the truth because no one has a business to defend. Pulling information together and filtering out the rubbish is long and arduous and it's work. That's what journalism actually entails, not the writing part, which is fairly trivial.

But yours seems to be a typical HN response. "People feel this is important to do without being paid, therefore we should not support them as a society". It is an attitude I cannot comprehend. Something is important to our civil society - why not make doing it a viable living?

You're assuming the only way to make it a viable living is via advertising.

I pay for the Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic and others. I would pay more for them, sans adverts.

If you can't produce content that people want to pay for, what are you actually doing?

From the creator side, the internet sidesteps the need for the huge investments needed by all other content-delivery systems. No need to print thousands or millions of books. No need to set up a TV or radio station, or a movie or recording studio, or convince someone who owns that infrastructure to publish your stuff.

From the consumer side, the only investment is an Internet connection and the equipment needed to access it. More expensive than a single book or a movie ticket, but practically limitless once you have it.

So yeah, no one wants to pay. I'm surprised that anyone pretends to be surprised by that.

Advertisers are parasites. They need a host to survive. Almost no one cares if they don't survive, including the content creators and the companies with products to be advertised, if they can figure out how to make money without them. There's the rub.

Your busker analogy is actually perfect, by the way. The content is freely available because the busker chose to make it so in an effort to get an audience. Then the busker is outraged when someone doesn't pay? Under what theory of justice is the busker outraged when people take him up on his offer of free content?

I'm a business owner and I rely on advertising, and I would still ruin advertising.

1. Advertising gives advantages to the largest richest corporations and stifles competition from superior small businesses.

2. It makes people stupid, they don't take the time to investigate products before buying, because they are literally brainwashed from hearing the same bullshit every day from advertisers.

3. It wastes our time. It is 2017, it is the information era, if you want a product you open a web search and look for it. Advertising is no longer necessary or relevant, and it is stealing moments from people.

There are more reasons.

Advertising is already dead, and if your business operates solely on advertising then your business is in real trouble. I started telling people this a year ago and they laughed at me. Get off that flaming wreck now while you still can, or sink and burn with the rest of them. The smart people are already looking for new revenue models. Adapting to new conditions is a critical part of survival skills, and if you can't do it you won't survive.

> I do wonder, do you people stand around street-musicians for 45min and when they nudge their hat just say "fuck you, your content is not good enough to pay for; now shut up and continue playing"?

No, but if they follow me around, keep track of what I do, sell this information, or hand it over to a/the government, and occasionally accidentally sneeze in my face as they follow me, causing me to fall ill... well, I'd find it hard to resist kicking their hat as far as I could.

I think the privacy issues kind of render all arguments in favor of (current-day) advertisements moot. I suspect many of us would happily have a few ads on a page if they weren't so obnoxious, privacy-invading, and occasionally downright dangerous.

Furthermore, while I do sympathize with your situation, assuming that your ad is both unobtrusive and non-privacy-invading, surely you can see how guilt-by-association is not entirely unjustified in this case? How can we tell that your ads are the good kind?

(FWIW I try turn off uMatrix/uBlock on sites that I like, but unfortunately it's just not worth the trouble unless I'm a repeat visitor. And even then I often turn it right back on when I see how much the experience degrades as a result!)

I run a side project that entirely relies on ad revenue, and I run AdNauseum. Online advertising has become a horrible horrible thing and I want to see it die.

That won't stop me from milking the cash cow while I can, but I'm not going to moralise to others about how they should help me keep the cow alive.

I feel for you, I really do. Unfortunately, I can't risk the integrity of my privacy or machines by allowing all ads and taking the bad with the good.

People have replied (not very politely, unfortunately) with some suggestions though. Self-hosting ads, using a banner asking people whitelist you, or just straight up using Patron might help.

Again, I'm sorry you're in a situation like this, it really sucks :/

It's unlikely that your users made an atomic decision to block ads on your site. They probably just block all ads (I certainly do) and don't know if your site has obtrusive blocks or how many you run.

> we have a single unobtrusive banner yet 85% of our users are adblocking; it's not an issue of 'bad ads' as so many like to argue.

Well. I had an idea to fork µblock and add a function to white-list sites that are OK, not flooding me with ads and popups, don't have 4 trackers and have max. 3 social buttons. Whitelist would be made by a community, so you could add your domain, people would visit it and vote to whitelist or not.

Maybe ask gorhill if he would like to have this feature in the actual uBlock Origin? Users could be asked to installation if they want to block all ads, or use the community-maintained whitelist.

Hate to say i but that ship sailed a long time ago. A couple of years back I tried being nice to sites that asked me to unblock them and found pretty much all of them running tracking, malware and worse yet enough javascript to make the sites totally unusable with the small n2806 celeron/2gb system I use. Not any better on the other 2955u 2gb system either. With adblockers these 2 systems work just fine on the internet.

Call me idealistic, but I would rather pay for content whenever I decide to, rather than being spied in order to pay for my “free” content.

Most sites offer some form of subscription service. Ours is currently 3$ a month and less than 5% seems to be using it. Most of our users seems to view it as a donation service though, might be something for any psych-major to do a study on.

What's your website?

This works great until the owner decides to take money to do things like "sponsored content", or advertorials. Does this get shown to the people who payed to have ads removed?

Ars Technica recently ran into this, with a major backlash against a Chevy advertorial which wasn't explicitly marked as such. Read the pages and pages of angry subscribers: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/07/why-did-chevy-bring-its...

You've posted a smart post, but it goes against tech religion which (contrary to science) holds that advertising is inherently evil because it is "brain hacking" or some such.

I'd agree, but luckely it's not the consumers responsibility for a company to turn in a profit - and I see no reason whatsoever to care about other companies by helping them invade the privacy of so many people. After all, they wouldn't care about me (or anyone else for that matter) either.

I can see your side, but unfortunately the vast majority of these ads are tracking my webpages visits and selling them to third party for top dollars. So no, not going to happen.

Ruin advertising? The companies are doing that by ignoring the do-not-track thing-of-a-bob-which-caches-that-pidgeon-or-they-loose-their-jobs

I consider all forms of advertising that distract me from the content I'm looking for bad for me. I don't want flashy colored banners telling me what I should buy. There's already plenty, plenty of distractions already, and advertising is one of the poorest forms of it. I don't think I'd mind if advertising, in its current form, died.

With 85% of your userbase using adblockers, have you had to implement popups pleading users to unblock your ads or ask for donations?

What initiatives have you implemented and how effective have they been in combatting what I presume to be a large decrease in revenue?

Just as a quick response to your EDIT2, Twitch runs such a model where gamers and creative people have lots of people paying for otherwise free content. And it works really well.

I think it'd be really cool if you dropped some of the defensiveness and used your position to help offer some suggestions to the problem. I know it's hard to see it from other angles that may not directly benefit you, but it'll help extend a resource that might disappear if people disagree with it hard enough en masse.

I sympathise with your need to earn a living, and struggling to do that without advertising revenue, but asking people not to block advertising on the web is asking them to run their systems without a crucial component of their malware protection.

However eloquent your case, I will not disable my anti-virus for your sake. If your site makes an effort to prevent my visit as a result of my security choices, I will respect it, otherwise I am ignorant of who runs third-party code on their site that has proven time and time again to be unsafe.

Some people do try to come up with alternatives.

https://flattr.com/ has been around for a while, but they're doing an overhaul of their model now, together with the company behind Adblock Plus. Here's the latest related post:

https://adblockplus.org/blog/the-story-about-the-new-flattr-...

It's too late. This advertisement terror has gone too long. Now we have a quite good infrastructure to block ads and the advertisement industry will have to come up with something really fantastic to get us back.

The methods people who rely on ads put up to counter that, will just hurt them because pointing the finger at the user of ad-blocking software is the wrong direction entirely.

Can't you make content worth seeing ads for? Direct payment from readers is not required (as demonstrated by MailOnline https://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/the-biggest-newspa...)

As a person who does stuff I wholeheartedly support doing whatever I want to stuff you put on my computer screen.

Look into better ad performs like The Deck, or self-host the ads and sell ad space by how long the ad is there for (that way you don't need to track clicks, etc). Try and find local/small businesses, they're the most likely to accept such a deal and then it's a win-win for everyone.

> Make the content so exceptionally good that the users will literally throw money at their monitor

And what’s wrong with that? If more entities focused on "exceptionally good” content and services, a lot more people would be willing to pay.

it's literally the only vector left for viruses to enter home systems, so no, not gonna unblock even once. sorry for your loss, some shit player are ruining it for everyone else, but it's not the blockers. it's those that sell prime space to questionable publishers, they had a chance to clean themselves from within, but failed.

every now and then a new effort comes up with 'clean ads' or 'micro tips' but it's too late, you need to wait the next generation of techies to start not recommending adblockers in ten-twenty years, and it'll only happen if the industry as whole cleans

So would you support (ie not block) an advertising company that followed some set of ethics? What would they be?

I genuinely think that ship has sailed past practicality.

The concepts of "ethics" and "advertising" cannot be reconciled.

wouldn't say "support" but would say I wouldn't mind ads that are a passive image link; you could still track the source by referrals/url without an active payload using less intrusive standards.

the problem is twofold however:

1) I'm not managing my ad blocking list, that's too much of a task so I delegate it to list maintainers. list maintainers don't really want to have acceptable ads policies because at the first mishap they'd lose the hard earned trust completely. there was an attempt but they were white listing not just basic banners but active components, so thanks but no thanks.

2) as soon as you create a set of marchers/rules/something to allow certain ads trough, bad actors will try to exploit it, especially if the while policy does something like allowing scripts with the graphical payload. (also css can include fonts and fonts have been exploited multiple times, so there's also that - an acceptable ad is not something advertiser really like)

should we also keep using COBOL such that those poor COBOL programmers aren't ending up unemployed?

I know this is a contrived illustration ... but you get my point.

it's good if bad bad bad infrastructure is teared down mercilessly. especially if the worst case consequences are first world problems. you're not going to die or starve.

i work in ad industry and it's utterly mesmerising how zombiesque many people do their job ... best thing that could happen to poor schmucks making money by configuring ad network setups is to lose their job and be forced to think about the life and if there is maybe something more worthwhile.

but I'd rather people just said "I don't want to pay" rather than making up impossible criteria for why they shouldn't pay

But there is a market for content. E.g., a relatively small German newspaper (Taz) has a 'voluntary paywall' (which you can basically click through without paying) [1] and still they earned approximately 0.5 million Euro so far this year:

https://www.taz.de/Archiv-Suche/!5436670/

This is besides regular subscriptions and a system where you can buy shares in a 'cooperative'.

Another, more well-known example in these confines is Linux Weekly News, which besides relatively non-obtrusive ads, offers subscriptions [2] to see new content immediately (rather than after a week).

[1] http://www.taz.de/!153704/

[2] https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#subs

I adblock all sites by default, and I think that is how most people use it.

Exactly, and that's sort of the issue with the system right now. People like to argue that they are whitelisting the sites that they use regularly; e.g. Reddit and newssites. But in practice it seems like that's a minority going through with it. I've always likened it to how pirates used there being no good services around to justify their actions; yet after Steam and Netflix became popular the majority just found some new justification.

To be fair, I pirate video despite Netflix and other services because of the poor catalog or bullshit like region blocking.

I've stopped pirating music though - Spotify became good enough for me to be worth it.

So no, I bet a majority of your "pirates" will stop pirating if there was a decent legal alternative.

Meh, video streaming services are still pretty terrible.

Just let me download a DRM-free file. That way I can play it offline on my preferred media device. If I decide to rewatch it a few days later, I don't have to worry about wasting extra bandwidth.

I don't mind paying for content and services. I'm fully cognizant of the reality that things cost money. But when the content isn't being provided through a fair medium, or the service sucks... People will go through other means.

Since I enjoy anime, I have paid subscriptions for both Crunchyroll and Funimation. Despite paying for their services, I always find it more convenient to download and play regular files. It's still worth maintaining a subscription, since it funnels some of that money to the studios.

Surprisingly enough, this is something the porn industry gets right. AFAIK, most paid/premium porn websites let you download any movie. No bullshit.

If there is a need for small businesses, and advertising dies, small businesses will survive because someone will come along to solve the problem of income for small businesses.

The demise of online advertising will force the emergence of micropayments. Bitcoin is the our best bet at getting there. But low or near-zero fees are needed for that.

Ads spam your attention and makes you lose time and energy. It's a big cost for humanity.

What did you expect, really? Most people are assholes online, and HN is no exception.

Nobody owes you a living. You are free to think up a better business model.

"As someone whoms (sic) business largely relies on cigarettes, please don't go out of your way to stop smoking."

How about you make something worth paying for instead?

>do you people stand around street-musicians for 45min and when they nudge their hat just say "fuck you, your content is not good enough to pay for; now shut up and continue playing"?

I ignore that guy and move along hoping that he would fuck off and that I won't see him again tomorrow.

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