Advertisers are welcome to treat me like a magazine from days gone by with lots of static images of their products and no code involved. If they don't like that, then I'm okay with going back to the pre-commercial web where people with passion built websites without trying to be the next big thing.
I dunno, the website chose to monetize that way. Arguably we don't need so many low quality adspam sites on the web anyway and if most of them died, the signal to noise ratio would get better. Advertising and SEO is a scourge that doesn't need to be protected, IMO. Let them die...
I would happily pay a subscription that gets divided among whatever sites I visit. In the absence of that option, I pay for a subset of sites and freeload the rest. My solution seems ethical to me since if everybody picked a random subset, most sites would get their revenue.
So I think the experience would be like you add $5 to your browser, then as you visit sites it asks you either to pay a one time access fee or subscribe for continued access.
But this would be the case for every site, right, because they all cost money. I wonder how many distinct websites the average user visits and if they're willing to pay that many parties that much money.
I guess my conclusion here is that bad ads should be punished by some mechanism. Unfortunately making the most targeted, helpful (and they are helpful, by the way, when done right they show you something you like) ads often incentivizes bad ad production practices like data farming and data marketplaces. I think that has to be attacked legislatively or, in your example, by direct payment.
But I think the reality of an internet gated by payments is a bigger deal than people appreciate.
(PS Not that this is usually my line of argument, but it also has the unfortunate effect of tying someone's economic status to what they can access, leading to greater isolated groups and class hierarchies in content)
it seems more reasonable to me to only advertise like that when a user signals they're interested in a particular type of product, not passively all the time.
Most businesses don't really get to do that. They set their price based on what customers are willing to pay. Then they try to keep their variable costs low enough to be profitable, and get enough sales to cover their fixed costs.
> tying someone's economic status to what they can access
An option there is subscriptions for those willing to pay, ads for the rest. Youtube does that, for example (and it's one of the sites I pay).
I don't really want "helpful" ads. I just want to be left alone. I don't want corporations trying to manipulate me, and I don't want distractions from whatever I'm trying to read, because I'm distractible enough as it is. If I want to buy something, I can search for it, and when I do, I don't want to see it everywhere I go for the next month.
Sure, sounds good. When you win that fight, let me know and I'll reconsider the ad blocker.
The average user doesn't even recognize that running a website literally cost electricity that must be paid for. Who pays for it? Who will carry the boats?
Now there may be some upsides to this. Shock content, designed to garner page views, may become less common. Perhaps content will get longer.
But I do not relish the annoyance of having to pay for every site. I despise that tech help on medium, for example, is often behind a paywall. I'd rather watch an ad.
Subscriptions suck because it is another thing to keep track off and many business models rely on you forgetting about them.
I think micropayments would be great but the problem is that you need to consume the content before knowing if it was really worth paying for.
My dream would be some kind of general internet subscription network set up as a non-profit public service where I pay a fixed sum every month and where all kinds of content creators, news sites, basically anyone could be in. The network would pay their members a split of my monthly fee based on the sites I visited by default but offer me up and downvote buttons on every page. Downvotes means the site is excluded from getting payments from me, upvote means double payment. (Of course I can't downvote all of them, the sum I pay is always fixed.)
So I have only one single monthly payment, I don't have to think about it much while still having a way to encourage high-quality content.
That's it. That's not entitlement. I just want to actually read the stuff on a website. If websites could do ads that weren't trying to monopolize attention and/or trick me in to downloading malware, I'd definitely think twice about my use of a blocker on that website.
Sure there are some that feel like because its on the internet that's its free and they are entitled to it. But I'd wager most ad block users fall in to a similar camp as me.
Plus most adblocking extensions these days are also tracker blockers as well, so there's some element of privacy protection in play there as well.
Also, ads got ridiculous real fast, and started doing a lot more than just show a picture. This was really the breaking point for me. I happily pay for the couple mentuomed earlier, and donate to OSS projects even but more than that is unfeasible.
There are lists one can use for filtering out only the "bad" ads, mostly community driven. What we really need is a standard way of doing this, one that is enforced. But no ad company wants this, at least from what I gather.
Blaming ad blockers is the same as blaming video game piracy, you aren't tackling the real issue. The issue is that ad blockers provide a better service than not having one (i.e. not filling your screen and preventing you from seeing the content, not being a security nightmare, etc...), even if you need to go through the trouble of getting one. Alas, in this case it generates a perpetual cycle, which further puts people over their breaking point.
I guess what I'm really saying is that ad companies, and websites filling their pages with them, did this to themselves. The public tolerates it to a certain point, but I wouldn't see it it's their fault if normal web usage continues to deteriorate.
Running a retail store also has costs associated with it, including, yes, electricity.
Yet if I walk into a store and leave without buying anything, do I feel like I owe the store owner anything?
No. That's not how that works, nor is that how it should work.
You can imagine why Amazon never decided to go with this business model.
Not my problem. The web existed as a medium before advertising and it will continue just fine without it.
Get a better business model and stop crying like a spoiled child.
I don’t want to dedicate 4.5 inches of screen space to ads including videos, banners, and often time inappropriate ads. If you want to do 3rd party banner ads, be my guest, but the minute there’s more of them then content I’m going to turn them off.
It blows my mind how people are so accepting of the status quo, especially on mobile, where many news sites will put a sticky ad banner on the top, throw a video ad on the corner (with a close button that's only 1/8" across, of course), and then every paragraph (which is only like 2-3 sentences) is separated by an ad. At any given moment, well over half my screen is ads, even after managing to close the video ad in the corner.
Browsing the web on a phone, I wonder how many bandwidth and battery is being used just to show ads.
That's what it is. A request to get sent some bytes. It's up to the web server whether or not to send the bytes.
Once it decides to do so, what I choose to do with those bytes is, broadly speaking, up to me. Copyright sets some legal restrictions there, but none of those restrictions apply to deleting some of the bytes.
Perhaps the webmaster had some ambition to make some money by sticking some bytes on my computer and using them to track me without my consent. That's for them to decide, me? I'm deleting those bytes. That monetization plan is not in my interest. Perhaps they can come up with something which I'm willing to play along with, perhaps they can't.
Generally I've found that the websites which place onerous limits such as paywalls on byte access, are not worth spending my time on. Yet somehow, the Internet remains full of useful bytes and I spend many an hour productively browsing them. It's a magical place.
And the idea that the alternative to ads is 40 different subscriptions is laughable to me because there are not even 4 sites on the entire internet that I'd pay (even a small) subscription fee to use regularly, let alone 40.
The vast majority of sites I use on the internet are basically distractions of one form or another and I only ever use them because I can do so for free with a limited amount of annoyance. Any cost at all to them whether that's a subscription fee or obtrusive ads means I just stop using that site.
Avoiding said tracking is not in the least bit "unethical" and digital media sources can find other ways to make money, or just disappear if they don't like being circumvented in their ad tracking efforts. Only a badly distorted SEO/ad bro mind would consider users avoiding tracking to be somehow immoral by the users. Should then it also be unethical to not view ads on video media too?
I feel for those businesses who try to build a revenue stream off of advertising, but that well has been permanently poisoned for me. If I cannot sanitize a website of its maliciously user-hostile behaviour, I will simply refuse to make use of it.
And I encourage everyone to join me. The sooner advertising of all kinds die, the better.
I've got not problem paying 1/10th of a 1 cent as a microtransaction to read the page and I'll happily do so when that sort of system is available.
> I am unwilling to have 40 different subscriptions to 40 different websites all because every user disabled targeting.
And that's a false dichotomy. The natural alternative to a system where publishers are paid per view by advertisers is a system where publishers are paid per view by users (either directly or via some intermediary), in the same amount as before.