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.
Be careful with this. It can get the site accused of click fraud, based on previous things I've read on HN.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
Is one possible solution anyway.
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].
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[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.
Mobile Chrome already doesn't allow plugins, and this is definitely a huge part of the reason why.
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.
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?