AdBlock Plus defeats German publishers in court
bbc.com
bbc.com
Don't forget the malware that installs over exploited ad networks every few months.
And the inevitable responses from websites: "I'm not responsible for the malware you got from my site, all I did was let an untrusted 3rd party inject arbitrary content into the page, and they did a bad thing with it! Nothing I could have done to prevent it!"
Except, you know, not letting some random jackass with an ad network distribute exploits through your website.
But seriously, the whole infrastructure of our online ad system just feels like a terrible idea to me. Advertisers want their analytics data from having all the requests hit their servers though, so it's not going anywhere unless Patreon and similar catch on in a big way.
Has Google actually served exploits, or is it just their selling ads for fake downloads of Firefox, VLC, etc with malware in the installers?
I do remember hearing about the ad for a third party Firefox download bundled with a malware toolbar. Which, while bad, is quite different.
Diminishing Adblock's business model also removes development resources from adblock which would impact negatively your ability to filter ads.
However, I found AdBlock a little too heavy or laggy and use uBlock nowadays.
I mean I get it, ads are yucky, privacy concerns, etc. But as someone who has used ad revenue as the only means to pay for content a lot of people loved, if too many people decide ads are too taxing for them to view, the content can no longer be supported.
I fear that as adblocker becomes more standard (I'm not sure it's only geeks using it; I have plenty of friends who aren't "geeks" who do), ad-supported companies will start to not allow you to see content if you have an adblocker on (like ESPN) or just make more native content.
Creating things to read or view costs money. If we say the people that create them don't deserve to make that money back through ad revenue, we also have to be aware of the consequences - that this type of content will largely cease to exist. It's your prerogative at the end of the day, but a lot of the stuff I love wouldn't exist without advertising.
But my issue, and I guess that of many other users, is that ads are mostly a scam. Products that are actually valuable to the buyers don't need aggressive advertising; just announcing that they exist (through unobtrusive ads) is usually enough for the word of mouth to bring in customers.
Advertising companies are one of the best examples of an adage I have - "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction". Ad companies are those layers of abstraction. They will lie, they will spam, they will abuse users and as a CEO who outsourced customer acquisition to them you may never have an accurate picture of just how much crap people are exposed to on your behalf.
This whole issue is about Human Decency 101. If you behave like an entitled asshole, don't be surprised people don't do what you want them to, like viewing obtrusive ads.
That could also apply to you. You want content. You don't want to pay for it - but you will view ads. But then only ads that fit your specific set of criteria.
If you want me to pay for your gift, say it up-front. Put on a paywall, ask for a donation, or if you really want to stick to ads, kindly ask me to disable blocking. I'll happily comply.
Unless you can show me that definition you are just stating an opinion and further proving my point.
I put some information on an open-access network for everyone to see. How this is not a gift? What in this process entitles you to expect people to pay you without you explicitly asking for said payment?
There are social rules and expectations around such things and they're older than Internet. Complaining about people blocking crappy ads is just being an asshole. If you want to get paid, say it up-front. If you need resources to support your work, again, say it up front. Many will happily comply. And if you don't want people accessing your work for free, introduce a paywall. Just avoid this whole "give for free and guilt-trip later" business model, because it's malicious behaviour.
On the other hand ads are a mess, between popups, popunder, autostarting video and recently the damned ad that redirect the full web page on mobile sites.
The solution here is not using ad supported services instead of acting as a self entitled asshole, but one would still need adblocks to protect themselves from when visiting random pages.
I will gladly accept that. Then I'll either pay them or not, depending on whether I find the community valuable enough. This is fair.
The only reason I didn't disable AdBlock for that site and explicitly decided to keep it is because of the way they asked for it. Had they said, "Dear visitor, we see you're using an ad blocker; please consider disabling it, because we really need the ad revenue to support the community", I'd even happily start clicking on the ads for them.
If you publish something and expect a compensation for it, say it up-front, and either restrict access to those who follow your chosen compensation route or stop whining. Publishing something on the Internet with open access is giving a gift to people. Giving something away and then guilt-tripping people into compensating you is antisocial behaviour, and if you ever tried to pull it off face to face, you'd be shunned by the community you're in.
This actually happened where I live! We have pedestrian mall where buskers can get a permit to perform. Most of them are quite pleasant, and I've paid a few. (Some are truly awful, but that's life.)
But one time there was a guy who was "giving away" CDs of his work. If you took one, he'd harass you until you either paid him some money or gave the CD back. There was a big sign that said they were free and he would shout at people about "Hey, I've got free CDs here!" He would even chase down people who took one while walking by! I'm pretty sure he was kicked out because I haven't seen him since then. But everyone who fell into his trap agreed it was a scam and that it was a crappy thing to do.
Be careful with this. It can get the site accused of click fraud, based on previous things I've read on HN.
and to me that is ok, that's how people will learn to either:
- pay for quality content
- enable ads for quality content
- get free crowd-sourced shit ala reddit
So yeah, I'd be totally fine with "content no longer being supported", because this means most of the crap will be gone. Wikipedia will stay and keep asking for donations. Articles that are any good will live because those are published by bloggers who care about the topic, not the revenue, and they tend to bankroll their sites from their own pockets anyway. Companies will still pay for their websites. Communities will still create useful content because they never did it for the money and the first place. Gone will be all that malicious crap we're being served by advertisers. And that probably includes most of the news sites, but I will say: good riddance.
You must realize, of course, that millions of dollars are being poured into reddit every year, and that reddit makes it's money from ads. If you're "crowdsourcing" something that means a platform is being built, and platforms are expensive to build and difficult to maintain.
Mobile Chrome already doesn't allow plugins, and this is definitely a huge part of the reason why.
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
Is one possible solution anyway.
That is one of the many personal project ideas that I hope to one day have time to try implement, though from a slightly different direction: a browser ad-on that doesn't block the bad behaviour itself but instead warns me about it beforehand so I can make an informed choice between clicking that link, making a little effort to find the same information elsewhere (for some content like news this is very easy, some content is genuinely unique to a given site though), or just not bothering because it would have been a reflex click anyway and the half second thinking is enough to decide I've got better things to be getting on with.
The thought came to me in a discussion with a contact who used some iffy practices on his site. "If you don't want my adverts and pop-unders, don't come to my site" he said, and I thought that was rather a good idea!
It would warn about a range of things, configurable per-user as some are more sensitive than I and some are more easily irritated: starting with obvious malicious content (like drive-by install attempts), pop-unders, pop-ups, pop-overs, pay-walls, ... I could always still click the link of course, but it would be an informed choice.
Of course there are significant things to deal with in such a venture: to populate the database of stuff to warn about it would either have to enlist the public userbase as informers or perform some form of pro-active scanning & indexing (or both) - this would be prone to both abuse and technical difficulties - and the warning would need to be both unobtrusive (not breaking the pages containing links to thinks it want to warn about) yet still visible.
I think there are few things going on:
a) The content is not worth to people what it costs to produce and deliver, but only worth their time if otherwise free. The trick then is to make it feel like it's free, while you tax users behind their back, which is exactly what being "ad-supported" is all about[1]. Imagine if we had free ad-supported pizza[2].
b) We need a micropayment or other solution that enables people to pay for the large variety of things they consume on the web, without the time and risk costs of entering payment info on every single site they visit. Mozilla research calculates that the advertising tax per user is $12.70/month[3]. If people could pay directly, it would be even cheaper than this, since it would eliminate most of the externalities that I describe in my first link.
c) Too many people are willing to making money at the expense of doing the right thing. People who want to do the right thing can't compete with that, so we are left with an internet dominated by perverse incentives. But it is possible to turn the tide. Take GitHub for example[4].
---
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8640622. Of course "free" ad-supported pizza is unlikely to happen, lucky for us, because a $22 cost-per-impression isn't viable.
So, unless one is a heavy user of NYTimes, if the $12.70/month rate from Mozilla is applicable then it could well be "cheaper" to skip the subscription.
Which is, I suppose, where a truly frictionless payment system could come in. There's no way I would subscribe to random websites I visit once or twice a month by happenstance- but if I could automatically pay them whatever the ad revenue of my one visit is worth (fractions of fractions of a penny) instead of seeing ads, I would probably do that.
Is there ad blocker that only blocks the annoying ads,
not the ones that we deem "OK?"
So let's call a spade a spade; you can pay AdBlock Plus to review you, potentially adding you to a white list.
AdBlock does not allow the ads that we deem OK. it allows the ads that it deems OK that also pay it money. There's a big difference.
Edit: thanks dragonwriter
I think you mean "allow", not "block" here, both times.
You can whitelist the domains you deem trustworthy and interesting to serve you ads. I have made one of mine as I don't have any prob with viewing silly ads while browsing as a kind gesture to content creators to support their operations and efforts but what I do have a problem with is the invasive nature of advertisers to chase me everywhere I go on the web and trying to gather info and construct a profile of me and then sell it or leak it to third parties to win favors at the cost of my privacy. Here I need to step up and protect my privacy and fend off those intruders.
Where I live, advertisement in the mail box (the one on the house) is forbidden if I have a small sign saying "no advertisement, thank you". This rule has not destroyed the advertisement industry, nor those who uses advertisements to raise sales. Instead it has created a large incentives for stores to get customers to agree with personal advertisement, with coupons, special deals, or a flat 1-5% return of anything purchased. The customer is happy, the store is happy, and those who want to be left alone is happy. Additionally, people do not hate the advertisement or those who produce it.
While I don't doubt it might initially raise your click through rates, it wasn't durable. The thing for me is that using AdBlock and Ghostery easily triples the speed at which pages load. Those advertisers are slow to respond to page requests and it just takes forever to render.
The other interesting thing to me is that price for an advertisement in a magazine that a 4 million people see generates over 10x the revenue that the same ad on web page that 4 million people see. Not sure how we're going to fix that.
One frustrating thing about Ad Blockers though is that even my "non-annoying" advertisements and up getting blocked in many cases because they fit the size profile or are wrapped in a particular class name.
Magazine readers also happily pay for access to the magazine content which also contains advertisements. For some reason the discussion regarding website ads is either 'pay for access' or 'see advertisements', but I see premium online content going the way of magazines and combining 'pay for access' and 'see advertisements'. People willing to pay for content are generally going to be the exact people worth advertising at.
I recall visiting Dr. Dobb's offices back when they were a print magazine and there were a bunch of people who were responsible for ad sales/layout/checking and AdSense out sourced all of that for web site owners. Which was cool, until it was abused. So how many web sites are willing to do ad sales? Interesting opportunity there.
One of my favorite things about selling ads myself is that I can ensure that advertisements are relevant to my readers. Relevant ads make readers happier. The results of relevant ads makes advertisers happier.
I get a good number of emails from ad networks boasting about their pool of advertisers and how I can make 1000% more money using their network. My first question is always, "What advertisers are relevant to my readers?" Crickets.
If I were making a service around direct selling ads, I would tackle a specific content vertical and play the middle man between relevant advertisers in that field and websites looking for advertisers.
As I said in my final comment, advertisers will costume themselves as the white knights protecting the businesses they deal with, but they only care about themselves - the users of said businesses are just peasants.
If these are pay-per-click ads, then there's zero difference to the publishers if I see them or not, because I will never click on one as a matter of principle.
If these are pay-per-impression ads, then an ad blocker that downloads ads without displaying them should be just fine with the publishers.
Either way I see absolutely no point in keeping ads in the content if/when they can be trimmed away.
So tell me again what's the purpose of forcing an ad down my throat, an action that is guaranteed to piss me off?
This is one of the reasons I chose another adblocker (uBlock). I have no moral qualms when it comes to blocking ads, but I don't feel too hot about this guy building a business by making other businesses pay him money to let their ads through.
I'm not one of them. I'm ready for ad-supported businesses to die.
Which one do you want?
I don't think Ad Block Plus is doing that, to be fair. It IS what I want though.
I'd love to give advertisers a way to be honest.
> Now that the legalities are out of the way, we want to reach out to other publishers and advertisers and content creators and encourage them to work with Adblock Plus rather than against us. Let’s develop new forms of nonintrusive ads that are actually useful and welcomed by users; let’s discover ways to make better ads; let’s push forward to create a more sustainable Internet ecosystem for everyone.
> You know where to reach us.
This is not blackmailing. At all. :-)
Strictly speaking, blackmailing involves using knowledge of someone else's transgressions against them (e.g. "Pay me $1,000 if you don't want me to show your wife these pictures of you having an affair.") I don't see anything close to that happening here. I mean, AdBlock isn't saying "Pay us to serve your shitty ad". They're saying "Pay us to ensure that your ad meets the high standards of our users, in which case we'll see that it's delivered."
Big, big difference.
Like a lot of people, I'm not adverse to ad-supoorted content in principle. And I recognize that smaller sites can't have dedicated ad-sales units, and need to rely on ad networks to connect their audiences with advertisers. Unfortunately, this means giving up a lot of quality control, and that ends up producing a crappy experience for readers - who then resort to AdBlock, which degrades the value of the Internet as an ad platform for non-horrible advertisers. This downward spiral is part of the reason that print outlets can charge so much more for the same reach online.
AdBlock Plus seems to fix all three problems at once. By applying some reasonable criteria as to what is an isn't a horrible ad (to say nothing of crap infected with malware), it makes it easy for me to filter out the worst ad networks, and only engage with the ones that enforce some basic standards. Assuming that ABP gets widely adopted, they provide a great way to drive the worst offenders out of business, leading to a world where sites and advertisers gravitate to the networks that offer the highest penetration.
In essence, ABP is a buyer's agent, with the buyer being the reader and the currency being their attention. And thanks to the efficiency of my agent, I don't have to waste my time rejecting the crappiest bids. At the same time, I can participate in the ad-supported model (which I frankly prefer to paying cash). With less crap in the mix, this model actually becomes increasingly beneficial to sites as online ad-rates increase. Far from something noxious like blackmailing, ABP seems like a fundamentally civilizing influence.
The gold standard in all of this is Vogue, and specifically, their September Issue, which would actually be worth less is the absence of all the ads. And yes, you better believe those ads are heavily vetted by the magazine. In a world with competing blockers / coaches, the agent who gets closest to this mark wins.
EDIT: I didn't know ABP is building a business out of paid whitelisting. I'll need to read more about that. I am, however, still fully supporting publishers being forced by all ad blockers to find a less malicious way of earning money.
Publishers and content creators say "If you don't like what you hear from someone on the TV or radio, change the channel." It's free speech, after all.
Maybe it's time for publishers and creators to live that credo, and not deliver to consumers that they don't like.
They could block users with adblockers or they could just circumvent the adblockers. Many sites already show alternative content where blocked ads would have been. All you cannot do is to link through central ad-markets. Thats easily blockable. But a direct link to advertisers can never be blocked. Because the adblocker cannot know if the link to some site was paid for or not.
I can understand that Google does not dare to go this way with adsense. If adblock would decide to block ads on googles own websites, billions of yearly revenue would go up in smoke.
But other publishers, who are not in bed with adblockers, should probably try linking directy to advertisers. At least as alternative content, when the ad-market ads are blocked. A startup that creates a market for direkt-linking-ads could become huge.
What could possibly go wrong? :) Let's not forget that e.g. Die Zeit actually has subscribers (i.e. my wife) who might not be amused and end their subscriptions.
Why not seek different models for non-subscribers instead. E.g. for my native language (Dutch) Blendle [1] is becoming more and more popular. They are basically a paywall, but offer many newspapers, reasonable curation, a money-back guarantee (if an article is not what you expected), and recommendations based on e.g. Twitter followers. Monthly, I am probably spending the price of a subscription, because they have made it so easy to actually purchase content without ads and other annoyances.
Exactly my point. "If you don't like what we say or do, then change the channel, end your subscription, etc."
If they want to sit comfortably in the big freedom of speech chair, they're going to have to sit in the same room with consumers sitting in the freedom of listening chair.
Of course that's not what they want. What they want is to have fine control on their end, but not on yours.
I'm not worried about them. Someone else will figure out how to thrive in every new world that comes our way.
EDIT: BTW I'm not opposed to your suggestion. Lots of ways to coexist in this new world of fine control. Forcing unwanted content down my throat, as publishers appear to currently prefer, will be resisted by me and others.
I can understand the need to show ads to people viewing content for free I just don't understand why charge an access fee and show ads. This is why people use ad blockers.
But your subscription isn't necessarily paying the amount of money that the publisher has decided it wants. In that case, it's divided its revenue between your subscription and selling ads. It's hoping that the ads won't annoy you enough to block them or leave. For most people that's probably true.
But then again: any magazine, cable channel, etc "old media" still follows that. If it existed before the Internet, you're likely paying for it and viewing its advertisements.
But then many publishers and creators care about products and content their make, and not about the additional crap that is added to bring it revenue. So I expect many publishers willing to help finding a way to make both consumers and creators happy.
How so? Just because an article is published by the press, does not mean I am obligated to view it. The users who install AdBlock are doing so on their free will, not being forced by governmental or other propaganda groups.
> Their publishers had sought damages, but said their motivation
> was to challenge the software provider's wider business model.
> While AdBlock Plus offers its web browser add-on to the public
> for free, it makes money by operating a "white list" of adverts that
> it allows to get through its filters.
> In February, the Financial Times reported that one unnamed
> media company had said it had been asked to pass on the
> equivalent of 30% of the extra revenues it would have made
> by having ads on its platform unblocked.Besides reducing press to current publishers, this view is confusing a negative right (to publish anything) with a positive one (to make a living with ads).
e.g., https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt
I was pretty appalled by this statement from the publishers. As if my ability to control what I want to see and be exposed to is somehow compromising your ability to get your message out. The last time I checked, the internet is merely one part of an advertising platform.
Maybe these publishers should try another avenue to get your message out instead of annoying people with its invasive pop-up ads.
Bold statement for a company selling its own ads: http://www.ghacks.net/2011/12/12/adblock-plus-to-allow-accep...
Also, you can turn it off.
Although AdBlock Plus states that "no one can buy their way onto the white list", it does charge fees for what it terms "support services", the details of which are not made public.
In February, the Financial Times reported that one unnamed media company had said it had been asked to pass on the equivalent of 30% of the extra revenues it would have made by having ads on its platform unblocked.
That has led some critics to claim that the Eyeo is engaged in a "racket".
Clearly, the argument for more control over what to download isn't connected to selling (or not selling) ads.
(the rest of the arguments they make, sure, moronic, but ...)
AdBlock Edge, on the other hand, is on far firmer ground, IMHO.
I guess it is only a matter of time before ad blocking becomes the norm for users, and site owners will forced to bake ads into their pages. Lets hope that when they take back control, they also try push up the quality of the ads they take.
Shrink-wrapped agreements are legally tenuous at best. [1]
In the context of making money, a website is something which provides an enhanced service front end for an existing business which makes money in some other way. We expect every business we interact with to have some kind of web presence, even if minimally functional. (If nothing more, than at least a static page with the address and opening hours). Maintaining the site is a business expense.
Sites which don't have a business attached, are just someone's hobby. Complaining about AdBlock is just "Waaah, you're not paying for me for viewing the results of my hobby."
(What's worse; most of the content is self-promotional, so it's more like, "Waah, you're not paying for reading my opinions and my self-promotion.")
I don't care if some website perishes because it couldn't make money. The web would be better off if all such sites went away, leaving only the sites that provide a "web presence" for a real business, and the sites of those people who have something to present and the money to put it out there.
If you can't fund a web site entirely out of your own pocket, you basically don't belong on the web. You're not able to put "your money where your mouth is", literally.
There is commercially valuable content out there that people will pay for. That content proves itself to be that way because it can be put behind a "pay wall", and still sustain the site. People do pay for content; look at the growing subscribership of Netflix, for instance.
That provides us with a good litmus test: can your content be pay walled such that your site at least breaks even financially? If not, then it has insufficient commercial value. If you still want people to view it, that means you have an agenda. Your agenda is a promotional one, and it goes something like this: "this content is somehow valuable to me, and I want others to know it and like it." If you have such an agenda, it falls upon you to fund it. Ironically, just like those business whose ads you serve through your site are paying to promote their agenda!
Also, there is an irony in web advertizing is that it only generates revenue when people click on the ads. But when people click on ads, what are they doing? They are navigating away from the content to look at something more interesting. The theory is that the original site's content "brought" people to the advertizement. But in fact that is not true. What actually happened is more like this: someone was searching for content, and landed on the site. The site turned out to be garbage, filled with stuff not relevant to the search. But, oh, an interesting ad caught the visitor's eye; and so off that visitor went.
Hypothesis: When people actually click on ads, it's because your content is worse than garbage, so that going to the ads is a more attractive alternative. The content is just search engine bait to get people to the ad, nothing more.
> I don't care if some website perishes because it couldn't make money. The web would be better off if all such sites went away, leaving only the sites that provide a "web presence" for a real business, and the sites of those people who have something to present and the money to put it out there.
You're missing the probably most valuable kind of sites - those that are there to provide information. Not everything on this planet runs around making money - most of the time, whatever runs around it is probably shit.
The things that are actually valuable for people - like Wikipedia, like articles from domain specialists, are usually free and supported by either donations, said specialist's own pockets or by some other mechanism that doesn't include authors profiting from the information they publish.
That's why when you want to learn something about, well, anything, you go to subreddits or to Hacker News, and view the comments and not the articles. Or you visit bloggers that don't run said blogs as their primary occupation. Because all that content is created for free, out of people's spare time, in order to help one another. People running business charging you for their articles? It's them who have an agenda, and you can easily see it reflected in the low quality and trustworthiness of said articles.
I suspect that people are willing to pay to do that. In other words, that Wikipedia would still work if it charged people to create editor accounts (but viewing the content remained free).
Basically, it's a form of web hosting (but with rules governing content).
It's the fact that anyone can create an account for free and start editing that ruins the Wikipedia; that the one single thing that is responsible for the vandalism, and poor quality of some of the material, as well as its banality.
If Wikipedia charged for editing, people would think twice about writing a 40 page treatise on some pop song du jour or Pokemon character.
What actually surprised me about your comments is that you seem to show a money-centric view, i.e. the only things that are worth something are those someone paid for. I happen to hold exactly the opposite worldview. Correct me if I'm wrong about the view you're trying to present here.
While I understand the obvious intuition behind your suspicion, consider that people pay money to participate in running races (which also feature volunteers who donate their time, and spectators who don't pay anything).
If there was no such thing in the world as a runner-funded running race, you might think, "come on, who would pay to run in such a thing, when you can just put on your shoes and run for free?" Yet it turns out that people do!
There are incentives: competition, having your time publicly noted. There is also the intangible benefit of just being part of the event. The entry fees are justified as paying for the expenses, and charities. (Some races have cash prizes for the winners, though obviously that's not an incentive for anyone who has no such hope.)
It's also a matter of how much. If the site asked people to pay $100 a year for accounts, then that would likely be dead in the water. At $5 per year: definite maybe! There could be built-in incentives. The best editors could get cash rewards, so end up in the green.
> What actually surprised me about your comments is that you seem to show a money-centric view, i.e. the only things that are worth something are those someone paid for.
My view isn't that extreme, but I believe that connecting some systems with money in the right way can fix some of their problems.
$5 per year could definitely work, though I believe it would still drastically reduce the amount of content Wikipedia has. A lot of really good stuff (and a lot of really bad stuff, too) is created by teenagers - the only large group that is both smart enough to meaningfully contribute and has free time to do it. And the one thing they don't have is money.
Absolutely! For instance paying cash for blood donations is an obviously bad idea. You don't want blood from the kinds of people who would donate for money. Moreover, some people would donating excessively, thereby harming their health or even losing their lives.