Stackoverflow, Advertising and the Ethics of a Free Lunch
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I think the typical counter-argument is that somehow I have tacitly agreed to look at ads because other people have historically looked at ads on the internet. But go further back, and there were no ads on the internet. I was there in 1994, and your ads weren't. It's your expectations or the behavior of other people that have misled you, not some activity on my part.
It's true that site developers are counting on the ads for revenue-- I understand that. But I'm just not willing to pay. If the site's free, fine. If I have to look at ads, sorry, no deal. Stop responding to my HTTP requests, and I'll be fine.
Edit: I guess I do feel a little sympathy for someone who hopes to make a living off an ad-supported site, but only because I generally like people and hope their businesses succeed. I just don't find the "tacit agreement" argument compelling. (I'd be open to other, more compelling arguments.)
Does anyone know of an adblocker that negotiates with servers? Like "TCP SYN but only if no ads", "TCP SYN ACK No, you must take the ads", "TCP FIN"?
From a practical standpoint, I don't care. Leeching can't be stopped and any web business obviously has to understand that. Clearly, businesses are able to be built despite leechers.
What I find incredible is that ads are really that much of a nuisance for people. I've never had the slightest difficulty completely tuning out any manner of ad. I sometimes get the feeling that folks who go out of their way to ad block are actually a little bit offended by banner ads in general. And that makes me think they're a little bit creepy. In real life, no one would repeatedly take favors from someone and not feel a certain obligation.
What I find even more incredible is the pure, uniform rationalization that comes from communities that otherwise pride themselves on their logic. Would you take a cookie from one of those cardboard vendors some office buildings have and not pay? "If they didn't want me to eat their cookies, they should have stopped me from taking one."
It's just that the "crime" is so trifling and anonymous. No single raindrop blames itself for the flood.
Like I said, I don't care about ad blocking per se. It's the collective and willful rationalization that irritates me.
(Incidentally, your edits imply that you would be willing to automaticaly be blocked from sites that serve ads. That's nice, and makes you consistent, but the vast, vast majority of ad blockers would not be willing to live with an Internet hamstrung to that extent.)
Your example with the cardboard vendors is an interesting one. I'm not familiar with those things-- are they like an honor-system cookie jar or something? It's an interesting comparison, because I wouldn't steal from an honor-system cookie jar. Also, I think the raindrop/flood analogy is pretty good, except I totally accept that I'm part of the flood. I just don't care at all if the content providers want me to look at ads. They didn't build the internet, they didn't buy me a computer, and they didn't pay for my connection. They're trying to leverage a public good, like putting a billboard next to a highway, and I don't owe them my attention.
Thinking about it a bit, maybe it's because I do actually remember the internet before ads. It was kind of nice. If I hadn't experienced that, maybe ads would seem more palatable.
[1] I did actually know a kid who thought granola was made of meat. He was 12.
I block ads and flash because I find ads distracting, animated ads in particular. When web sites use interstitial ads before content comes up (such as javascript popups, or delayed redirects) - I normally close the page and don't bother with the content. The fact that you don't find ads distracting is not proof that I don't find ads distracting. I have the same feelings towards TV; so I don't own one. I have similar feelings towards radio; so the ones I own are multi-purpose devices, like my phone or alarm clock, and are not used for radio listening. I have similar feelings towards magazines; I don't buy them. I have similar feelings about going to the cinema, so I always turn up late to avoid ads, especially trailers, which almost invariably ruin the film before it can be seen with fresh eyes.
Now this has nothing to do with "obligation". Me having my attention degraded by advertising, my focus and concentration broken, is harmful to my being. I resent it, and I would resent the products presented in such a manner, in just the same way as I never buy products from door to door salesmen. I actively seek to avoid those products that were presented persistently enough to lodge in my mind. If anything, I'm doing the advertiser a service by preventing it from harming me. I have a little economic suspicion in my mind: if the advertiser has sufficient margin to try to buy my attention, there's probably a better value option available somewhere else.
Coming back to "obligation", the content producer who believes that viewing ads is payback for producing the content, is confusing their chosen payment mechanism with their self interest. The mechanics of advertising is that the advertiser pays the content producer for the number of eyeballs that the content producer can deliver. The content producer, having bought an eyeball with some content, thereby feels robbed when the eyeball exhibits free will and doesn't do as it's told.
The only advertising that I don't find offensive is that which is extremely relevant, such as affiliate links discussing the product at hand, but simultaneously don't require tracking my behaviour, but rather rely on my being interested in that niche.
In other words: advertisers, don't come to me, I'll come to you.
Advertising is a nice "turbo boost" for a trickle of revenue. It is difficult to impossible to be the sole source of revenue for a business. All the guilt in the world won't prop up a bad business model.
1. Small(ish) adds on the periphery of a web site. Some of these may be Flash, some of them may be annoying animated GIFs, but they never attempt to take over your screen, nor do they automatically try to open pop-ups. 2. Large, flashy ads, often with video and/or audio, many of which take over the screen or spawn pop-ups.
I can deal with sites that use #1. #2 is unacceptable.
When using Firefox, I have AdBlock (among other things) installed, but now that I'm using Chrome a bit more for daily browsing, I find myself avoiding sites that use method #2 for serving up ads.
I can accept that to produce and distribute that content costs someone money. The ad based revenue model aligns very nicely with the quality of the content produced (assuming greater quality == more readers).
The problem with the pay per read model is that you don't know if you want to pay before your read. Now that probably works for larger publishers of quality work (e.g. IEEE), but for those random one-hit-wonder bloggers (and there are many of them), how would you know if yesterday's highly linked post was worth the 50 cents?
Some times a three paragraph blog post is insightful enough to be worth the nickel, sometimes I wish they paid me for the 2 minutes it took to read.
With a book or a larger volume of work, it's easier to briefly browse and make a purchase decision.
For the informal survey, I don't use ad blockers, but I just don't get bothered by the ads (with the random access afforded by a visual page they are rather simple to avoid). The onerous ones click-throughs and pop-ups), yeah, those are annoying.
Market segmentation is the time-honoured technique of asking people how much money they have when they want to buy something rather than telling them what it costs, meaning what it costs is a function of how much money they have.
What you call segmentation is actually called parallel pricing. In most digital goods and services (high capital cost, low marginal cost), these can get jumbled up.
Parallel pricing pisses people off. Segmentation doesn't.
If you are not sure exactly which one you are dealing with try to figure out the goal. The goal of parallel pricing is to maximise revenue/profit from a fixed number of sales by charging closer to the maximum people are willing to pay without losing those not willing to pay that much. The goal of segmentation is usually to sell more by giving people options that are worth more to them, or at least are better price/value-wise. Segmentation doesn't require not giving high value customers access to low value goods.
People doing A will usually call it B.
If the Internet has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that: 1. Advertising pays for otherwise free services; 2. People don’t like advertising; and 3. Advertising works.
Actually, I would argue that we knew that before the internet, now we're not so sure.
It's like offering a "pay as you like" service and complain that people don't pay or not enough. Well, if you have a precise idea of how much you should charge then change the price tag my friend. Stop the hypocrisy.
2/A service will be more successful if it's "free". If you cannot manage to charge money for your service, it means the perceived value is not that much and you don't have a working business model.
Stop complaining. Rethink your business model. Adapt.
3/A site with advertisement is not free. In exchange of reading content I deem useful, I will read content that might lead to a business transaction in the future.
4/I might be willing to pay a small yearly fee for an ad-free service like Stackoverflow. The deal could be "if you pay a certain amount of money, you don't get ads".
5/AFAIK the content of Stackoverflow is written by people who don't get paid. It's a community web site. People feel that they own a part of the content and therefore shouldn't suffer advertisement (which is why, I guess, you get less aggressive advertisement as your reputation go up, unless I'm mistaken I have more than 3,000 reputation and don't see any advertisement).
6/People mentally block ads on web sites. There was a link about this on HN a while ago, can't find it though.
Why is the mental friction of a micropayment so much worse than having to ignore (or block) ads? It's all in our heads. I think people fear micro-payments because it's something they don't know and because there is no cap. A rectangle on their web pages with obnoxious stuff they didn't want -- this they understand, so they live with it or block it.
Unfortunately, this results in the ad market being able to deliver the sub-population of users too lazy or not savvy enough to block ads, and this is not the most lucrative subset!
Micropayments as Ads are very indirect and fraught with problems and ambiguities. I wish irrational emotional factors weren't blocking a well needed Refactoring!
More important, when I pull out my credit card, this is exactly the same action than when I buy for 300 € worth of stuff on a web site.
Seems to me rather the opposite: since I hate ads enough to bother installing an ad blocker, seeing an ad might actually induce negative feelings towards that company in me (perhaps psychology can prove me wrong, but my feeling is that ads can affect me in a negative way). Also, since I sure as hell will never click on those ads, showing them to me anyway will bring the clickthrough rate of the site down. So it might also be a net loss for the site owner, who has to sell the ads for less.
Looking at an ad is not the same as paying for something. It is not a productive action. By giving somebody money, something productive has taken place (I produced something to earn that money, receiver can pay somebody else to produce something). Looking at an ad on the other hand is purely destructive - my time was simply wasted, I did not produce anything in the time I wasted with the ad.
The market doesn't perfectly distinguish this. If someone if willing to pay for your looking at an ad, then it is productive according to the market. Hence, someone is paid. Does this reflect reality? Nothing is perfect, even markets.
Micro-payments could work like this. If user expectations could be aligned that way, "free" could mean only for the cost of the download. (If you dig enough, for most people "free" just means: please don't make me pay more than $35 a month for doing everything I do on the Internet.)
In other words, it's all in our minds. It's all just how we think of it. Markets are a great way to regulate something ubiquitous. We'd probably benefit from market forces being brought to bear on the Internet in a more direct way.
For one thing, it would make the ad-blocking debate moot. Ads are just a very indirect form of micropayment.
1. People who block/remove ads are a tiny, tiny minority (right now)
2. If you're that opposed to ads, I'd just as soon not show you one. It costs money to show it -- something like $0.00003-9/impression. That adds up.
3. A site which doesn't perform at all -- e.g., no one clicks, all ads are blocked, etc -- will eventually cease to make money from ads and will be forced to seek another revenue model.
Missed the obvious of replicating the service for foo (verticals) & charge for the codebase: cf http://moms4mom.com/about
Yes, they have a lot of work to do to make it truly vertical, and not disrupt anyone in the process, but I think thats where their real $ is going to come from.
I've sent stackexhange several emails, trying to get into the beta program early, even trying to pay an extra fee for premiere service...I am more than willing to pay the ~$1000 per month fee so I can get up and running now....but no dice it seems.
Anyways, back to the article.....really, anyone that is technical (geeky) enough that can and would block ads using a script....those people wouldn't be the types to buy software from the advertisers on SO anyways (and I'm sure the advertisers know this),,,so really, I think its just a bunch of hullaboo about nothing consequential.
You had to get in pretty early to get the beta badge ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2781240756/in/set-7215...
"... I am more than willing to pay the ~$1000 per month fee so I can get up and running now....but no dice it seems. ..."
Having said that why not build an alternative?
Seriously though, three people was working on that site almost full time for more than a year now. That's about 600-650 workdays. A decent junior developer (the cheapest programmer who could possibly do it) earns at least $200 a day. That's $120000 worth of wages. Which means, you will have to use this software for more than 10 years to justify writing an alternative, and we haven't even considered any additional future development.
But of course those contingencies can change, such as with use of ad-blockers. Anyone who uses ad-blockers is perfectly free to do so. And the advertisers have no 'right' whatsoever to complain.
For a commercial organisation to feel affronted that its customers don't do what it wants is, at the very least, complacency.
If a community wants to agree to fund something, let it do so clearly.
It does not make for a very pleasant browsing experience in my opinion.
Consider it a Darwinian selection pressure.