Adblock buying ads to advertise Adblock
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
I don't really have a problem with ads on websites, experienced users can easily block them, but I see no problem with providing ads for a free service.
Many organizations only have three methods to generate revenue, either show advertisements, have paid memberships, or take donations. Google shows advertisements, Apple has paid memberships, Wikipedia and Apache Foundation take donations. All three are great companies, they just have different ways to generate revenue. Many websites have no choice but to move towards an advertisements method to remain operational,
Adblock is trying to destroy that method of revenue and the online advertising market, it could destroy many great websites and companies that currently make money from advertising. While I'm not a huge fan of ads, they do serve a purpose, and destroying a harmless market such as online advertising without replacing it or supplementing it somehow isn't good. Plus if Adblock is actually successful and the online advertising industry collapses, then they will be putting themselves out of business.
Even worse. Some of these companies (not adblock) are asking protection money from big advertisers to be whitelisted. Mafia style.
Maybe this is well-known, but my google-fu only turned up this news about Adblock Plus. Are you sure Adblock does it as well?
When I used adblock as the search criteria, I got a bunch of hits on it. But when I did adblock -plus, I got nothing primary that could pin this activity to AdBlock.
Can someone explain to me how that works?
Are you suggesting a free service can't make enough money to operate a business? Man, how am I getting away with not paying for that Wikipedia subscription.
Adblock operates on donations and if it were to eliminate advertising, its current product would become useless.
Because other people pay for you.
This is why native advertising is doing so well lately. Instead of having blockable ads surrounding your content, you subtly twist the content into being an ad of sorts. Ad blocking has helped fuel this and while it can be done well, it can also be done in a shady payola-esque way.. while being far harder to detect or block than regular ads.
Blocking ads is about as effective as banning abortions long-term. There's a non-shifting demand and it'll always find a way to express itself, whether in entirely legal ways or not.
For extra points, they should flaunt their privacy invading features, e.g. follow you around on all the sites you visit, cheerfully reminding you about the places you've been and how all the other advertisers are recording this too.
Either way, I'm baffled by the whole exercise, and I have Adblock installed on my primary browser.
Still, the Kickstarter campaign is a great guerilla ad for the Scouter app...
Or is their rationale that advertising serves the legitimate purpose of informing users about choices they may not realize they have?
Exactly. Believe or not, most people on HN are computer savvy. There are some users who are not aware of AdBlock. Personally I have installed it on a number of friends and family computers, and guess what, it has reduced the amount of adware and malware they install.
Actually, AdBlock is making the new ad appear to those who have AdBlock installed -- I just saw my AdBlock icon light up and, when clicked, display this ad:
http://i.imgur.com/Kwi9qmD.png
I don't think we're in Kansas any more, Dorothy.
I saw the same thing, but that's not exactly the same thing as seeing ads, they're not (AFAIK) only showing AdBlock ads... they're informing you of something they are implementing in a hidden way.
If you really take offence to what they are doing then you (and not directed at you per se) - Uninstall AdBlock - View ads on websites, maybe click on them occasionally so click-through rates increase - Install Adblock Plus, because it's not the ad blocking that you are specifically against, just the fact they are advertising
The point is, you have options, and they are presenting options to potential users. This is how things work in a free-market economy. We're not living under a totally facist regime just yet...
I think it counts as an advertisement, and I'm not complaining, only observing. I just thought there was more than a touch of irony in AdBlock showing an ad within the AdBlock app.
> We're not living under a totally facist regime just yet...
Interesting comparison. A regime that forced us to watch ads could be described as Fascist, as could one that blocked all ads regardless of people's tastes. Anything that prevented free choice.
I couldn't agree more. I was posting on Usenet before there was a Web, so I've seen the entire sequence of events. Rather depressing overall. But it could be worse -- we could be hunted down and killed for expressing dissent, for protesting, for supporting unpopular causes. When I say this, I'm thinking of this man:
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/narendra-dabholkar-shot-d...
This man, this doctor, was an activist against unscientific quackery. He became too well-known and too effective, so his enemies hired a hit squad. And this was in India, a country and people that revere democracy and free speech.
Take away quotes -- "Seems to me like this is nothing more than a half-thought idea because they have nothing better to do and are jealous of AdBlock Plus taking bribes from ad companies to "white-list" them from being blocked."
"Want to have a real impact on advertising AdBlock? Do something that puts money in publisher bank accounts and gets advertisers results that's less obtrusive than the current state of affairs. Be creative.
An ad-free internet is a desert."
(full disclosure I work at buysellads)
But more seriously, I don't care about their bills. They're delivering HTML over an open network connection - what I do with that HTML is entirely up to me. If they don't like that there's nothing they can do about it.
> I don't care about their bills
[sarcasm] How farsighted. Oh how very farsighted. [sarcasm off]
So you really do not care about their service being shut down, because it could not pay for itself? I mean, people working there to produce content, hardware to run the service, bandwidth, and so on...
Apparently, many people are not comfortable with that kind of exchange. However, people being people, they still want to see the interesting stuff. So what do they do, they install this (free!) ad blocker that gets rid of all the things that are not immediately useful to them. Unethical? Possibly. But not illegal, and not even widely frowned upon.
So at this point, as a businessperson, I must ask myself whether my business model is still viable. If not, I must change it. That's what it means to be an entrepreneur: find ways to turn labour into money. Under Western democracies, I have that right, subject to laws and regulations. What I do not have is the right to having my particular business model be forever profitable.
This is a concept that the music, movie and game industries refused to wrap their head around. Their model was (and largely still is) "I give you these plastic things with bits on them and you give me money". This was acceptable to consumers as long as the plastic was required in order to be able to distribute bits. When this ceased to be the case, the business model started to fail. Rather than move to a different model (which, I realise, I make sound much easier than it is), they held onto the failing one, introducing complicated and fail-prone systems to prevent people from separating the bits from the plastic, in the process alienating their customers by making it harder and hard to actually use their products.
So, no, I don't feel bad when your business fails because of ad blocking. Being a selfish jerk, I'm upset you no longer send me interesting stuff. Being a compassionate human being, I'm sad a bunch of people lose their source of income. But this is the free market. If your business fails, you did something wrong. Someone else will come along and do it right.
It's like receiving free news every morning, but you have ordered a kid who delivers them to cut out ads.
What's wrong with that? What laws is that breaking? I'm not even sure that's breaking any social contract.
Personally I use the free newspapers they unwarrantedly deliver to my house as a firestarter.
As for your analogy...again, you're allowed to do that.
Is there any evidence of this happening?
Obfuscating would complicate things, but at least it'd be a workaround.
It's crazy that buySellAds hasn't taken advantage of this.
(The other front page article today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274914)
""" People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck That.
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Banksy """
Source: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/01/banksy-manifesto/
Good thing I have control of my software and can opt out.
I'm already assaulted at the senses all day long in different forms. The whole concept of advertising I find abhorrent. A service should only offer itself to me when I want it, otherwise they are just imposing themselves and I will dislike them for that.
Any way that I can opt-out of ads I will make use of.
Services that rely on just this business model should adapt or fail, simply. If the service is relevant it will come again from a different source with a more acceptable model.
They have been and will continue to be the targets for malicious hackers who use them to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors.
Until those ad networks are properly secured and monitored I will treat them as a security liability.
In many cases site admins go completely overboard with advertising creating a broken user experience. They choice you have then is to vote with your clicks and go elsewhere or attempt to use the site with an ad-blocker.
If any site admin wishes me to go elsewhere they can block users with ad blockers installed. If the site has value then they an ask POLITELY to whitelist their site; which for many sites I do add then to a site wide whitelist.
Assuming your site visitors of being thieves is not only stupid but illogical. If I walk past a billboard with my eyes close should I have them surgically removed because their are an adblocker? If I use a PVR to skip ads on TV am I stealing content? No; I am exercising a choice not to look at your pointless adverts.
The adverts add nothing to my experience of your site; I don't click on them so you won't be making any money from me for displaying them anyway.
Either find some other way to monetize your site (subs, sell merchandise, ask for donations etc) or find something else to do.
Example: I only bother to block them on my main computer, but don't on my phone, desktop, etc. Your average Joe is unlikely to start doing so soon.
They don't give a shit. To them the ads are just annoying and they're getting rid of them. They don't even read TOS agreements, let alone agree to some implicit contract where advertisements are required.
Also: nitpick. The people who created adblock aren't thieves in the same way the founders of the Pirate Bay aren't necessarily pirates. They themselves aren't stealing anything, just mass-producing a method whereby it's possible (in your opinion). I'm not trying to argue semantics, but if they were charged for something, it wouldn't be thievery.
Believe it or not, not everybody in the world gets to enjoy super fast internet connection speeds, cos they live in countries that are not so well developed or they are in very rural places. Why should they have to sit through waiting for irrelevant content to load? And the adverts are not relevant to them cos Google has no advertisers in their region? And they are on bandwidth capped plan so they are paying to see these adverts?
Blocking ads has deprived nobody of their property unless you believe that a site is owed the revenue from ad impressions from its visitors (it's not). This is the same line of thinking of the MPAA with regard to how it approaches licensing.