An Ad Blocker Opens the Gate, Ever So Slightly
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Well, I'm okay with this.
I don't block Slashdot ads, though Slashdot gives me that option. I don't block ads at FARK because FARK enforces non-intrusive ads. There are other sites that ask me not to block their ads, and I usually white list them as long as their ads are not intrusive, and that follows what adblock plus seems to be seeking:
no pop-ups, not flashing, no marquee, no flash crap,
I don't mind websites making money, I prefer the ones I like stay in existence. I only ask that their ads let me read the damn site and not attack my senses.
a) the technology used b) how much exposure you have to technology that can capture your interests (or your socio-demographic profile etc.)
If you use Gmail you will find that their ads are usually quite a good match for your interests, because the amount of exposure with Google is huge for the average user, and because they can use semantic contextualization on your mails...
The manufacturer of my car has never displayed an ad trying to get me to take it in for a service, or sing the merits of the newest model that hits home for an existing owner. The various credit related ads seem to think I don't know money is fungible, or that I can't count. The various health and beauty products are extremely misguided. The food related ads are beyond stupid. The cell related ones assume that ETFs don't exist. I can go on, and on ....
> Mr. Faida has left open the possibility that some big Web sites will pay his start-up as part of the new service
This sounds like a shake down; pay us or your ads will be blocked.
Like all bakeries conspire to shake you down: pay us, or you don't get any bread?
ABP is not a monopolist nor do they do anything illegal. Therefore, they are not 'shaking anyone down'.
This may have been his goal, but a lot of users (myself included) obviously don't want ANY advertising. It's not that I don't want to support content creation, I would just rather pay real dollars for the services I use than be sold as a commodity to advertisers. I put my money where my mouth is, subscribing to premium ad-free versions of music sites, and paying for online subscriptions to news sites. I also donate to Wikipedia. These are all great ways to support websites that don't involve being subjected to advertising. I don't mind if website operators want to use advertising as a revenue model, but they should be offering a "pay me to opt out". When this becomes widespread, Adblock Plus will be unnecessary.
> “I just talked to a tech Web site here in Germany, they have seven employees and 40 percent of their users have ad-blockers,” he said. “There was a tech convention in America, and they couldn’t afford to send more than one journalist because so many of their ads are being blocked.”
They should charge for their site. Some nontrivial number of those 40% users would pay, and a paid user is ridiculously more profitable in most cases than the highest CPMs.
I don't think you understand why ads are the funding of choice for most of the internet.
Imagine the last time you read a random article on a tech blog. You probably were linked to it on HN, or a friend linked it on Twitter, or on Reddit, or whatever. It's likely not something that is in your news feed.
For most people, that is how they find content. There's a minority of users who will use RSS or follow specific sites on Twitter, but 99% of users will be linked to it, or maybe Google it, or otherwise stumble across it. They have no actual ties to that site, and will likely read what they are linked and then leave the site until it shows up on HN/Reddit/Twitter again.
Now, there are a few sites that have loyal followings. I'm subscribed to GiantBomb.com, for example, because I love its content. But for most sites, putting content behind a paywall would destroy them. No one will pay to read a random article they were linked - and people won't link articles that they know their friends would have to pay to read.
Instead, sites must make money from incoming traffic - and thus, ads. If you have 500 regular readers but see 10,000 coming in from a Reddit post, you'll get money from those page views.
And, of course, this is also why "pay to opt out" is flawed: you're not going to pay every site you visit over the course of the day (possibly 200+, if you're an avid news/social bookmarking reader) to remove those ads, no matter how convenient.
I know we like to pretend that web users will reward the best content by paying, but that model ignores the way the web works. It's not like there's 20 sites we all read; there's a ton we see every day.
So? The very concept of ads is flawed. There are two things consumers want: a) discovery, b) reviews. Both are best served by independent parties, filters, “editors”, gatekeepers who earn the trust of consumers by doing, guess what, good introductions and good reviews. Sometimes, consumers take it upon themselves to spread the word or write good reviews. Other times, consumers should pay for these things. And producers should concentrate on making good products. Advertising is conscious, paid-for, explicit manipulation of other people. Why is it so hard for some people to not whitewash it and see it for what it is?
So yes, ABP allowing ANY kind of advertisements kind of pisses me off. It's like creating a safety switch for a gun that allows certain kinds of bullets to be fired.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
However, two issues with your logic:
1.) Users have the right to install the ad-blocking plugins available, that doesn't mean the ABP devs have an obligation to provide it. They too have rights, one of which is to change ABP in any way they like, or to kill it off alltogether.
2.) With this change, ABP users STILL have the ability to block all adverts, so this ABP change hasn't actually prevented them from doing that if they wish.
Perhaps even doing "business" at all is now a problem. Offering to allow advertisements for companies that pay enough money seems as shitty to me as when No Script coded in ways to prevent Ad Block from disabling the ads on their site. The internet flipped its shit over that, but somehow this same practice seems ok when its carried out with large sums of money? Right.
There's a trust issue with ABP that seems to have been fundamentally ruined. I wish them luck but I will personally be looking into other alternatives.
I just disagreed with your opinion that this is bad because "the end user should have ultimate say in what does and does not come across their computer" - as they still do, even now that ABP is open to taking bribes.
They still will. ABP is proposing that it be a user-configurable option.
Once the masses get used to a certain convenience, and that convenience is taken away, someone will inevitably spring up to provide it again.
So it really doesn't matter what direction ABP takes - just the fact that it set a precedent for an ad-free experience is enough to ensure someone will provide it in the future.
I think this might be the ultimate solution to the online advertising issue: the advertisers provide abstract content and the users decide if and how they want to look at it.
Not all sites enforce these limits, but major publishers are very aware of users' interests.
The problem is that if you visit an average website, there will probably be 20+ servers involved in serving the page, the javascripts, analytics, ads, etc.
One of those systems occasionally underperforms, which would not be a problem if everything but the main content was simply loaded asynchronously, possibly in the order of importance a website owner attaches to each content type.
I'm personally using adsuck: https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck
It's a caching dns server with 'sucking out' ads. It's very nice, but has some drawbacks. You have to kill SIGUSR1 the process to reread the file with blocked sites, where in adblock you just added an exception.
Just not as much.
Email would still exist, IM would still exist. Usenet would still exist. IRC would still exist.
Facebook and Twitter would probably die. RSS would still exist. Projects like Diaspora would have more chance of succeeding with no competition from privacy abusing ad reliant services like Facebook.
The Internet wouldn't die. The Internet would continue to thrive, and would probably end up providing a much nicer user experience. Most of the services which die, would be the ones that treat the user as the product for sale, and can't make money if that user is no longer a product. That would be a good thing.
I think at this point, you would probably see many more pay-only websites. I could easily see the major Internet providers getting together with website owners and charging for premium services almost like bundled cable packages.
"Projects like Diaspora would have more chance of succeeding with no competition from privacy abusing ad reliant services like Facebook."
In a world without ads, Diaspora still wouldn't succeed. Since they can't sell advertising reliably for money, they would have to either sell products or charge a monthly fee. Most people aren't going to pay a monthly fee for a facebook-like service and without the popularity, it would be just another failed startup.
I don't think it would ever get to the current levels without some sort of centralization, which costs money.
"Universities would. I'd imagine it coming as a free addon to email services and other subscription services."
Possibly, but what if you aren't part of a University?
"Universities" was an example of one type of provider. Setting up a "free to use" node would be useful even for commercial organisations. Think brand recognition. You'd also have charitable organisations doing it for the sake of it. I don't need to supply an exhaustive list to show that it's easily possible.
>While some have couched their concerns within long notes about their affection for the project, others, like “felix,” kept it short: “ ‘acceptable ads’ is an oxymoron ... i accept no ads. you fail; goodbye.” There has been a movement proposing to “fork” the project — that is, run a version of Adblock Plus before the changes, as is allowed for open-source projects.
It sounds like the defaults are being changed and it's easy to switch back to "block all". Seems like the "fork" would be a boolean value in a default config file.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/01/the-power-of-defaul...
The forum has also been inundated by complaints (I've been following this) from people who installed ABP for 4, 5, 6 of their non-tech savvy friends who don't know what's going on, why ABP stopped working, and how to change it back. Thus, Palant has unwittingly caused (perhaps) hundreds of thousands of people to be inundated with tech support requests from their friends. That's part of the backlash.
The message is much louder than the output of diff.