AdBlock, NoScript & Ghostery – The Trifecta Of Evil [Opinion]
makeuseof.com
makeuseof.com
It depends. If your ads are pay-per-click, and if I would never click your ads anyway, did I hurt you in any way by not loading those ads in the first place? Pay-per-view is a different problem, but I have yet to see pay-per-view ads that I consider non-intrusive. After all, ads need to be intrusive in order to generate clicks. There's a conflict of interest right there.
> The modern Internet MUST have Javascript. So when you use NoScript, you’re breaking the Internet.
No, I'm not breaking the Internet. I'm only degrading (or improving, depending on who you ask) my own experience of the Internet, which I have every right to do. Just like I have every right to tell my browser to display all text in green-on-black 12pt Courier, or in any of the thousands of unexpected ways in which a computer program can consume HTML. If I broke into your server and removed a couple of script elements from your home page, that would be breaking the Internet.
> So even if a tracking script does follow some of your browsing habits, is it such a big deal? At the very worst end of the scale ... they’re being used for what’s called a behaviourally-targeted market.
I don't want behaviorally-targeted marketing, and if you'd like to convince me otherwise, you'd better give me a better argument than "I wanna make money." Plenty of honest people have made plenty of money without tracking people's behavior across websites. Just calling your opposition "conspiracy theorists" will not do.
If it is "evil" to make HTTP requests to some resources and not others, I would gladly be evil. If you don't like this, you are welcome to adjust your business strategies so that your main audience is too dumb to use AdBlock.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe we may be shifting towards this pay-per-click model. Remember GM pulling their ads from Facebook ? Views are still an important part of a marketing strategy, but it's harder to estimate the actual benefits of such a campaign (as opposed to clickthrough rate).
This is not the death of online advertising - companies are making huge profits with a cost-per-click model, eg Criteo... So yes, adblock is changing the way editors made money. But oh well, isn't the internet threatening the business model of the music/film industry ?
Just a sidenote, but if you do this, make it override author settings. I used a custom (white-on-black) default color scheme for a while a year or two ago, and was floored by how many websites set their font-color but not their background. After the sixth major website that I experienced as gray-on-black, I just gave up.
> [..] Ghostery appears to be the ultimate do-not-track plugin.
Then it's not evil, is it? If you have to manually opt-in by installing an add-on, how can it be evil?
> AdBlock silently removes all advertising and social buttons
AdBlock exists because users got fed up of massively intrusive advertising. If advertisers had thought a little more long term, AdBlock would be a dead project.
> What makes me angry about the AdBlock plugin is that the author – while happy to destroy our revenue stream – is also profiteering from the very same free content model by asking for PayPal donations when the plugin is installed. Talk about hypocrisy.
Asking for money via a different route other than advertising is not hyprocrisy.
Quite. It is ironic that the author is appealing to users to think a little more long term and tolerate all these cynical, short-termist ads to support his preferred revenue stream.
I think AdBlock, NoScript etc. are symptoms of consumers reactions to this flawed revenue model, not attacks on content creators. Content creators need to either find some other way to monetize, or else accept that this is the risk they undertake by monetizing through ads.
Maybe a better way would be to draw down revenue directly from ISPs, since people access the internet to view this content and ISPs can track which IPs a given user points at. That does put us on dangerous ground with respect to net neutrality.
I couldn't understand if the article was serious or not. The point about AdBlock seems sort of in the right direction, if a bit missing the point - but the next two just left me scratching my head.
If you don't go to McDonalds, you don't get the burger.
If you go to a site with AdBlock installed, you still get the content.
> just do not read/watch my content
I'm pretty sure I don't already, and wasn't really planning in the future either. Many content providers actually take considerable efforts to get me to read their content. I'll stay with them, I don't have too much time to waste on reading random stuff on internet anyway.
> just pay me directly the same money I would get from adverts
To get my money you first have to give me something that I value more than money. What have you got to offer?
As for feeling entitled, I just want to point out that bit torrents trackers have never had trouble supporting themselves without ads or paid content of any kind... (Despite which I'm happy to support things like my local public radio station.)
(Though I'm a big fan of Ghostery, too -- the amount of trackers sites use is ridiculous and who knows what someone is able to do with the data.)
Also, my new pet peeve: links that don't go where they say.
Google is especially bad about this -- any link in your Gmail goes to some Google URL that then sends you to where you really wanted to go -- though plenty of other site are doing it too. They could be sending you to malware-r-us and making it look like a link to happy-happy-choo-choo.com. I think browsers should refuse to display links that don't display the same location they're targeting, however it's done. I think it might be on the way out though -- it seems to have been 'undoned' from Google news.
So put a button asking for Paypal donations on your blog then?
> Not only do you drag webpages 10 years into the past, but you prevent essential modern page components from loading
Actually I didn't mind the internet 10 years that much. There is quite a bit of content out there that I consume that looks pretty good as static content without js running.
> users enjoying our content, without creating revenue.
So? Stop posting content then.
This sounds a bit like appeal of the horse buggy maker when cars started to be popular. "Please keep us and our families in mind everytime you think of buying one of those new self-propelled buggies made by Ford..."
Ghostery makes it very easy to block all social buttons and analytics (like google-analytics, that fails to load 1 time out of 10), that make my browsing slow, or even stall.
Moreover, tracking on the internet and advertisement tracking is not the same as the one on TV, which is just grouping ads with shows of the relevant category. On TV, even if noone was watching it, those ads would be put together. Not on the Net.
1. They can ignore AdBlock, and spend money dealing with the support problems that the broken site causes.
2. They can block AdBlock users, and spend money dealing with the PR backlash.
3. They can take AdBlock into account designing the site, and spend money on a graceful enhancement JS system.
Option 3 is close to what Reddit do, and I think they've got the best approach: spot when people aren't using AdBlock, and thank them for it.
AdBlock, NoScript and Ghostery exist. People will use them, and you cannot stop them. This is just the cost of doing business.
If a page load hangs, most of the time it turns out to be waiting for a response from a third party web site, which has no relevance to the content I want to see.
Since I installed Ghostery I find my browsing experience is much faster.
For ads, I use Adblock but I start with an empty URL list. I add servers that host obnoxious ads (animated or over-laying content) to the list as I go about my browsing. As long as a site uses a well-behaving ad network the ads will display.
What they do do with it, how long they keep it for, whether its anonymous or not is all unknown. I'd rather use ghostery and not worry about all that.
I actually wrote how pervasive the tracking is a while back, http://steadierfooting.com/2012/03/25/how-to-minimize-tracki...
[1] I seem to recall this actually happening for a plugin, but couldn't find it.
Wow, I hope not. Ad based revenue is bad enough, but panhandling?
I subscribe to Arstechnica premiere to remove the ads, I have Adblock disabled on overclockers.com.au, The Verge. I subscribe to offtopic.com at a level that removes ads. I contributed to the Penny-Arcade ad-removing kick starter.
Everything else has its ads blocked because you need to prove your worth and trustworthiness to me after two decades of sliding in to the abyss.
If you don't want me, block me. Don't let me see your content.
I could see his point if he was just using Google Analytics to see traffic statistics for his website. You want to give free access to my personal and browsing data to all of these?! Go fuck yourself and your anti-Ghostery rant.
1. The internet was already a pretty neat place before online advertising became ubiquitous. There was lots of good content online, lots of curated databases of information, lots of good reference sites. If a bunch of blogs gradually dry up and blow away because they can't be profitable enough through advertising anymore, fine. They'll be replaced.
2. AdBlock is not destroying the internet. The internet was destroyed by advertising. AdBlock became popular as a direct result of the proliferation of websites that were 20% content and 80% advertising, fluff, and nonsense. It became popular as a direct result of blinking, jumping, moving, popping-under advertising elements. It became popular as a direct result of users having their browsers (and machines) compromised and infected by ad networks that did not vet their advertisers correctly. Content owners were perfectly willing to let the administration of advertising be somebody else's problem, and when that somebody else decided not to do their job either, users got screwed and they turned to AdBlock.
3. AdBlock does not, to my knowledge, block most donation requests, so I don't get where he thinks it's hypocritical that AdBlock is donation-supported.
4. AdBlock also recently rolled out a by-default "non-intrusive ads are OK" setting for all Firefox users. This led to quite a bit of controversy, which I think mostly illustrates just how sick of advertising a lot of people are. But, it stuck. So, now you can't even argue anymore that AdBlock is terrible because it's blocking all of your revenue.
5. Users may not be entitled to your content, but you aren't entitled to your users' attention, either. For instance: more and more sites lately seem to be using a Lightbox on page load to ask you to sign up for their stupid newsletter, or follow them on Twitter, or like them on Facebook. As a content owner, you're certainly allowed to do that. And, users are certainly allowed to install an extension that will block that, too.
6. I happen to agree that NoScript does more harm than good, as a practical matter, given current standards of web development. However, again, I fully understand why it exists: a huge number of attempts to compromise web browsers, track users against their will, or otherwise abuse their trust, is done through Javascript. Back when compromised Wordpress websites were a serious problem, every single one I saw -- not a small number, cleaning them up was something we did at the time -- used Javascript in the footer of one or more files to attempt to hit the browser. NoScript protected against that.
7. I didn't think Ghostery would be a very big deal, but I installed it a while back and have been completely flummoxed at the sheer amount of stuff blocked by it on websites. Loading a site and seeing a 20-deep list of social network buttons is merely visually annoying; having them all load their own little scripts and other bullshit is enough to incentivize me to block them.
AdBlock, Ghostery, and NoScript aren't ruining the internet; uninhibited commercialism and a complete lack of respect for users is.
It's not necessarily targeted advertising that people should be concerned about; it's gradual profiling by companies that have the potential to affect insurance premiums, mortgage applications, and a whole host of other real-world interactions with corporations who profile using data sourced online.
This article from 2010 in the WSJ is revealing; it hints at how companies have long been itching to use online data -- such as which articles you read -- to categorise populations into neat pigeonholes: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870464860457562...
I feel the same about Ghostery. There are a lot of Facebook/G+/whatever buttons on websites and I don't particularly want them to be collecting data points for every page I see.
Blocking ads does suck for websites that are being respectful about it; but surprise, there's a whitelist for that.
I checked MakeUseOf with adBlock off and there are ads in the middle of the article, which I think is disrespectful to the readers. Maybe respect is a two-way street?
It was already a very neat place when it tolerated almost no advertising at all.
Under the restrictions on "commercial use" that were in place until 1993 or so, although it was allowed for a job hunter to post his resume (to a newsgroup like ba.jobs whose purpose was to connect job hunters and employers), looking for contract work rather than permanent employment was not allowed because it was considered advertising of consulting services and consequently a commercial use.
I liked the internet of 1992 a great deal. I couldn't use it to buy nutritional supplements or shoes, and I couldn't use it to reconnect with old friends from high school (since those old friends were not on the internet) but it was a better tool for learning than the community college I was attending at the time.
The context of my comment was advertising. In particular I was presenting evidence against the OP's assertion that things like Adblock Plus might ruin the internet.
In an alternate universe in which advertising had never been introduced on the internet, someone would probably have made maps available through the internet by now (Nokia had online maps for their phones that were probably (I am actually not entirely sure) not supported by ads), Microsoft and Apple would have download pages (why would they depend on ads?), and all the wikis I care about (the original wiki, namely http://c2.com/cgi/wiki, Wikipedia and various small or smallish wikis created by specialized communities) would have developed more or less like they actually did.
What an idiotic comparison. The adblock author is directly asking money (voluntary donations actually) for something useful he made for your use. Straightforward quid-pro-quo. You know... commerce. What the hell is wrong with that ?Instead of dying the television and cable networks accepted the future, accepted technology, evolved and now provide time-shifted content viewing themselves.
And tracking may be useful, but it doesn't mean that users shouldn't have the option to opt-out.
"With hindsight, we didn't need this giant network of unofficial collaborators," he adds. "We were too worried about what might happen. We should have trusted people more."
But they did not trust the people when they were in power.
And thousands of fragmented lives, and fragmented documents, still bear powerful witness to how a secret police force spread throughout a society.
PS: But annoying ads on the other hand are a completely different issue and needs to addressed.
All the Javascript, Flash, Webfonts, etc are breaking MY Internet. Why should I let everyone send executable code to my browser?
I agree with the author that nothing on the Internet is 'free', its just not necessarily paid for by the person kicking off the transaction. As advertising evolves you'll find that a whole bunch of sites will go away because they aren't worth advertising on (user's don't engage) and the owners can't afford to pay the costs. I saw an article in an advertising trade magazine that suggested nearly 25% of the current ad supported sites would go off the air if there was no click fraud. I've done a bit of research but not enough to confirm or deny how close that number is to reality. There was a pretty good sized group of smart people inside Google dedicated to ferreting out stuff like that.
Of course, it's possible that you just don't care, but fundamentally what you're proposing is a technical solution to a human problem, and we all know how well they end up working.
https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/exceptionrules.tx...
We have a clothing recommendation engine that helps people discover clothes and we wanted to provide the service ad free. We chose a platform called viglink which affiliates the existing outbound links to the clothing vendors and if the user ends up purchasing something we are given a commission.
I think this is a fair model where we are compensated for our service and the user is 100% unaware and not bothered.
However, in the past month adblock has decided to block this despite the fact it provided zero nuisance to the end user. We managed to create work arounds but it's a frustrating issue.
How would you like to be asked the same question twice?
On a related note ...
How would you like to be asked the same question twice?
See, I managed to annoy you just by being mildly repetitive.
If an ad is only shown to me once and then never again, I'm more willing to look at it / click through.