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I'm all fine with people creating content and then expect to make some money off ads. Just don't be an asshole about that. There are sites that have mostly unobtrusive ads, I'm fine with that. There are sites (like Episode Calendar) that politely ask you to turn AdBlock off when you're using a free account, and since I derive some value from them, I happily comply.

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.

Also, theres OkCupid who puts up a nagging image try tries to pressure/guilt trip you into turning it off for the site.

Yes, there are also sites like that, and such behaviour tends to drive me away. There's a discussion forum I visited today that had a banner saying "We see you're using an ad blocker. By doing so, you're contributing to the downfall of this community". Well, I like the site, but guess what - I keep my AdBlock active on purpose.

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.

>> "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."

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.

Adjust your expectations. As some other commenter wrote, publishing a web site is a gift you make to your viewers. By very definition. I don't really understand where did people get that expectation that you can just publish something on-line and the money will flow to you.

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.

>> "As some other commenter wrote, publishing a web site is a gift you make to your viewers. By very definition."

Unless you can show me that definition you are just stating an opinion and further proving my point.

Ok, I shouldn't have said "by definition", the phrase I'm looking for is "self-evident".

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.

It's not a gift because you only put it up there with the intention of making money. But you are right, they should probably just paywall their stuff instead of fighting adblockers. Then we'll continue to use user-agent and referer trickery to get around paying money for content.

Probably, but at this point social expectations start to shift towards legitimizing their cause. I do skip paywall from time to time - but only on articles someone shared with me, and I don't feel good about it. In other cases, I just go somewhere else (I might buy subscription if I really care about that particular publisher/content).

On one hand you are using their resources by engaging with theor community and I guess you had to agree their term of services. They aren't really binding by law, i.e. They can not force you to watch ads, but they can refuse to provide the service to you.

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.

> they can refuse to provide the service to you

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.

I'd even happily start clicking on the ads for them.

Be careful with this. It can get the site accused of click fraud, based on previous things I've read on HN.

I didn't mean that much ad clicking, only that I'd click an ad on purpose every now and then. But thanks for the reminder, I'll keep it in mind.

"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.

Exactly. People are fine with paying, as long as the distinction between an unconditional gift and a business transaction is being kept.

In downtown SF there are a couple scam monks who pull exactly this with bead bracelets. They are very aggressive even if one tries to give the bracelet back.

They do that with blank cds in chicago all the time.

> if too many people decide ads are too taxing for them to view, the content can no longer be supported.

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

> - 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.

Also, Reddit isn't shit if you abandon the front-page and stick to subreddits on topics that interest you :).

You say that like the only content worth looking at is the one you pay for, where in fact the opposite is usually true. From my observation there is an inverse relationship between quality/trustworthiness of the side and the amount/annoyingness of ads it displays.

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.

I totally agree with your second paragraph. And about your first sentence, I am talking about " bloggers who care about the topic, BUT RELY ON the revenue", I invite you to re-read my comment with that in mind. :)

There's a more likely outcome -- Chrome will simply remove plugin capability if the adblocker install base gets too large.

Mobile Chrome already doesn't allow plugins, and this is definitely a huge part of the reason why.

Google could do that, but at the same time would likely lose a lot of users to Firefox the very same day.

> 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.

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

Is one possible solution anyway.

> Is there ad blocker that only blocks the annoying ads, not the ones that we deem "OK?" Or do we just use the actions of the few to punish all ad-supported platforms?

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'm am working on a similar project. Please email me.

If people aren't willing to pay, do they really love the content?

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.

[3] https://air.mozilla.org/subscribe2web/

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9195063

Prices sometimes seem a little high which is an obstacle. For example, NYTimes alone is $15/month for their smartphone subscription.

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?"

Yes, it's called "AdBlock Plus". Read the article.

I think their definition of annoying vs acceptable is probably not the same as yours. Which is a problem with this whole approach.

> Website operators that want ads on their site added to the white list must seek permission. 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.

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

> AdBlock does not only block the ads that we deem OK. it blocks the ads that it deems OK that also pay it money. There's a big difference.

I think you mean "allow", not "block" here, both times.

Adblock Plus whitelists all sorts of malware infested and annoying ad networks (for instance, Outbrain and Taboola). All they seem to care about is who will pay them the most money. I switched to uBlock and was reminded what a real ad free experience feels like.

Is there ad blocker that only blocks the annoying ads, not the ones that we deem "OK?" Or do we just use the actions of the few to punish all ad-supported platforms?

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.