Meet the Company Hijacking New York Times Ad Revenue
theatlanticwire.com
theatlanticwire.com
However, in my opinion this would be acceptable if it were the intention of the user. I hold the point of view that it is entirely my decision how to display websites on my devices. For example, it is up to me whether I display ads, run Javascript, or Flash. Similarly it would be okay if I decided to install a program that replaced ads on popular websites by different ones.
But it seems obvious to me that the users installing this software have no clue what they are doing, and are in fact essentially installing hidden malware. And this should be the way this problem is attacked and dealt with. Not via some perceived moral rights by websites to not have their ads replaced, but simply by the fact that this company is essentially installing malware without consent. This is what should be criminally prosecuted in my opinion.
This is not a new technique, there have been adware/spyware apps for nearly a decade that do similar things. The ones that do it openly as a "legitimate business" claim the user consented, like Gator/Claria and Direct Revenue did. The netherworld ones dispense with that fantasy and just install.
Often the advertisers have no idea their ads are being served up through these shady networks. For example, in 2005 Gator was showing ads from the Yahoo network as part of the Overture keyword search. As an Overture advertiser you couldn't control whether ads appeared there.
It seems to me all the talk of laws is rather pointless. If the NY Times can detect that this is happening then they can refuse to serve pages to clients that do it, and instead give them instructions on how to remove the malware. That solves the problem for everybody. The user takes a minute to follow the instructions to clean their machine of malware, then continues on to read the article.
Why does everything need a legal solution?
(And yes, Malware Corp. can try to sue you for telling people to remove their crapware, but anybody can sue anybody for anything. Doesn't mean they'll win.)
The culprit should not be NYT; it's the company that's spreading the adware.
An interesting thought experiment might be: what if TiVo replaced TV commercials with their own ad's..?
I think you're perhaps overestimating the cost of banning such things too. For one thing, there is no reason to go it alone. Major ad networks should be providing websites with tools to identify and disinfect affected clients. Then the cost to the NY Times et al would be little more than installing the supplied tools on their servers.
In addition, there is a certain amount of "starve them and they die" that needs to happen here. If something is illegal but still profitable, it continues to happen. On the other hand, if it becomes unprofitable because no websites will service infected clients then it disappears even if it's still legal.
Aside from that websites are a terrible way to fix a problem, there's probably still a massive amount of the internet 'best viewed in X' even though standards and non-IE browsers have been popularized for years. It's taken like a decade of campaigning, education and updates to reduce IE6 to insignificance.
Browser / operating system vendors are in a good position to tackle it and there's precedence for that too, but a single website even as big as the NYTimes is in a weak position to do anything except sue.
And as for browser and OS vendors, it seems like there is a clear way for the Times to push that along: If this problem is nontrivially impacting ad revenue then Google has a clear incentive to work with them on Chrome and Android, and with that as leverage, they can go to other browser and OS vendors and say "take the same measures to keep your users from coming to our website infected with this crap or we'll be recommending that they use Google's products instead."
Better to just let the market put the bad guys out of business because the good guys all blacklist them.
When you load the NY Times website, you use up their resources (hosting, delivery, etc) and they're paying some fee to give you the privilege of viewing that page.
They pay for that using ads. Their choice.
You don't like that? Great. Stop visiting that website. That's your prerogative. But to visit the website, use their resources, AND block their way of generating revenue to pay for that...well, that's both immoral and wrong.
That's a summary opinion without the backing of law or even a thorough examination of the ethics involved. What is unethical/annoying to you may not be to someone else.
The poster is free to use AdBlock and other scripts to improve his browsing experience and the NYT is free to install ways to get around ADB (of which many exist) or make content available to those who want it for free.
Frankly, the route you propose --criminal legislation -- would not be possible without overbearing laws on the order of SOPA. How would you envision a law that banned a plugin provider from injecting "bad" content into a consenting user's browser? Defining the "bad" is what gets us into trouble here
Since malice seems obvious and the operation is clearly a commercial one, I don't see how this being anywhere in a gray area.
Rather, the plugin changed and added the ads to YouTube. It was so under-the-radar that I wouldn't have noticed unless I had decided one day to look up why YouTube was allowing allowing ads with sound to play over videos.
I'm a savvy user, but that was literally slipped under my nose. I think a lot of users that wouldn't have been nailed by such plugins in the past are starting to find them to be a huge problem.
Whatever you think about the ethics of ad blocking (not a quagmire I want to wade into), NYT ads fund one of the best regarded operations in all of journalism, while Sambreel ads fund... what, exactly? Let's not lose sight of what a scam this is.
Also, the target of the funding shouldn't enter into a discussion about legality/ethics of the method.
It is a rag.
This company is parasitic, not adding value for anyone, the publisher or user. Despite the complaints about the Chrome store becoming more of a walled garden, perhaps it would help situations like this.
Customers could install the extension/plugin and browse sites as normal. However the ads they see would be earning them cash.
In general I don't expect skimlinks' business model to work. Referral programs exist to incentivize linking to your site, not to share profit with a third party when a user of their site would have linked to you anyway.
We need to be careful here. Simply because an ad-centric revenue model grew up around web content doesn't mean it is written in stone.
You do own your browser but you don't own the sites you visit or their content. To me when someone argues for being able to replace ads on a website that's almost the equivalent of saying "I am entitled to take ownership of and alter anything I lay my eyes on". Some people counter by arguing that if it's not alright to replace ads then it's not okay to use custom CSS rules or plugins or apps designed to enhance readability. The fundamental difference between those things is that site owners want you to read their content and almost universally happily accept people using custom CSS and readability type plugins but replacing ads is different in that you are making a choice to put someone else's content on their site to the site owmer's detriment. If I were running a site that relied on ad revenue I'd almost prefer plugins that stripped out the ads altogether to one's that replace ads with one's that someone else will profit from. In the case of the former you could reasonably assume the visitor wouldn't be clicking any ads anyway but in the case of the latter that user may still click and youd get nothing.
Imagine there was an eyeglass company that sold glasses that would replace certain things you saw with other things that they decided on. I know this is far out but just follow me here. Now imagine owners of these glasses walk into a mall and the glasses replaced window signage and ads with ones from the eyeglass maker's preferred partners. The shop owners in the mall would be upset but the maker of the eyeglasses would claim they're just giving their customers the deals they want. And then a certain portion of the people who wear these glasses say "I own my eyes. I may choose to replace anything I see with whatever I want".
In 1996 I was 10 years old and grew up from that point on with the web. Ads were annoying for a time but the people posting and creating them learned really fast that their strategy wasn't working and from then on ads have been pretty polite. They mostly just sit in their grid positions. Sometimes they're animated and sometimes they have sound but it's off by default. I don't get why people hate online ads so much. They're easy to ignore and rarely if ever become intrusive these days. But that's a whole 'neither topic. My main point is that suppressing ads is one thing but to replace ads with others that deprive a site from the CPC revenue is unequivocally wrong. It may be legal but it's wrong.
I use AdBlock and selectively whitelist domains that I support.
For my own part, I don't mind text ads; but animations or movement of any kind completely kill my ability to read. It's just the way I'm wired. I can't focus with movement or animation in close peripheral vision.
I also have no time for pauses or delays. I can't watch TV or listen to the radio at all any more because of ads. I just can't do it; an ad break comes on and I just want to turn the thing off and do something different.
Eh... I certainly wouldn't mind if I could buy a pair of glasses that blanked out ads, although replacing them with alternative ads would be pretty much equally scummy.
This is exactly what I feared: a generation who grew up not knowing any better somehow deciding that simply because things were a certain way when they were 15 that it's wrong to change them. It is not.
The web is a communications protocol. It is not a way of life, the meaning of the universe, or written in stone. There are lots of communications protocols.
I can create content (interactive) or not and surface it on the web for others to consume. How, when, or why they consume it is none of my business (aside from perhaps wanting to control access to my content to certain people).
Look at it this way: who is in charge of my consuming your content? If I am blind, would you require me to listen to ads before my text reader started browsing the site? If I had difficulty seeing, would you prevent my browser from scaling the text so that I could see it better even if it ruined your layout? If I were busy, would it be a crime to have my secretary read relevant parts to me over the phone?
It's clear. I, and only I, control how I consume your content once you make it available. Now you might want me to go to some seminar where they'll hard-pressure me to buy timeshares before you turn on access. Fine and dandy. But once the port is open, I might telnet in and read the whole thing one byte at a time for all you care. Content providers are perfectly free to own and control access. They are not free to determine how I consume their content.
You know, there might be a lot more interesting and effective business models for folks interacting on the internet. Simply because we picked one back in 1995 doesn't make it the optimum for all time.
The pervasiveness of hijacking plug-ins is depressing. I lent my roommate my top-of-the-line MBP from 2008 and within a couple of months it was filled with bizarre homepage hijacking plugins. A few days ago I got a hijacked DM-tweet from a top investigative journalist. I wonder if general computer literacy and best practices will ever outpace spammers' ability to infect computers?
Whitelisting would be a more reliable solution. It has snuck into consumer computing under a different name: app stores.