My understanding of the plugin is that it views advertising as universally bad, and that if a site cannot survive without ads, it must not be worth much at all, and deserves to die.
I wholeheartedly agree with this view.
these are companies which actively take advantage of the worst in all of us to deliver products that monopolize our time at the cost of calm, concentration, and patience.
I would be completely fine if Facebook and Google and whoever else ceased to exist.
No, not value-less, but I didn't agree to pay for their services with the total loss of my privacy on-line. (and one doesn't have to use any of those services in order to be spied upon by them)
And no free rider argument please, I am perfectly willing to pay for Google's service. If Google wants to get paid, they can make Google Contributor available in my country. I already pay for YouTube Red.
I am just objecting to your statement that when one uses Google's service, one is making any sort of agreement that one wouldn't block ads or produce invalid clicks. There is no such agreement.
Years ago, I had a small site that ran banner ads. A couple of users found the site really useful so they clicked on lots of ads thinking that it would help the site. Unsurprisingly, I got banned, even though my visitors had the best intentions.
The agreement may not be written down, but I think it's covered in the 'don't be an ass' part of the social contract.
And no, I don't have anything that is ad supported. I dislike the tracking and security implications, but not enough to alter my morality. This is morally similar to vandalism, in my opinion.
If your okay with that, don't let me tell you how to live. I just can't justify harming people for something I can just block or ignore.
I don't see anything wrong with this statement.
Most newspapers are like this, are you saying we should not exist?
Still costs me around $2.50 for a Sunday issue locally.
- track my reading habits - were blinking trying to catch my attention - started played videos I didn't want to see
If a news website wants to make money off advertising, just host simple images on your own sever. No need to load stuff from shady companies which try to grab as much information as possible.
(And why the second category might die anyway, and ads just prolong their suffering)
I don't like ads, and I use an ad blocker (though with very permissive dynamic filtering rules), but we gotta pay the bills and pure subscription models rarely make sense.
Afaik, the only news agencies that work on subscriptions alone are the massive New York Times, which paywalls more than like 2 or 3 stories per user per week. Wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters make most of their money from member papers that pay into them to get access to content they otherwise couldn't afford to make. Some publications sell specifically to niches, Bloomberg has a public facing website but most of their content is only available for consumption via the infamous Bloomberg Terminal, a very expensive dedicated workstation they develop in house so people who trade, say corn futures, can access extremely realtime information and reporting on hyper specific corn stuff.
All this is to say that selling subscriptions to the general public only works if you're the New York Times, and even then they still sell ads in print.
EDIT: hey look the times does have ads. They're pretty unobtrusive but they're there.
There isn't a way I can see around this problem short of abolishing the requirement to fund journalistic investigation and reporting and hosting.
Back in the day of paper newspapers, our subscription fees had to be augmented with ad revenue as well.
The same phenomenon is occurring with car dealerships facing Tesla.
There's also the philosophical argument, our mandate is to inform the public, how can we do that if we paywall everything? Not everyone can afford the paywall, and even if they could there's still the UX friction of handling payment.
The bottom line is we need to pay people to keep track of local government full time. It truly is a full time job. If we don't, who else will? In order to do this and allow concerned or interested citizens to share the things we learn on Facebook, ads make a lot more sense.
I think it's needlessly dismissive to say that a website deserves to die just because it can't survive without ads. Many very niche but high quality websites can't make enough money to support curation and hosting fees, and as such turn to advertisements.