Good. I don't want to contribute to your analytics. I don't want ads. I just want to browse the web without being tracked. I don't care if that means you can't pay for your site, other sites will spring up that can without annoying users with ads and without tracking them.
Is that really what you want?
I'm perfectly willing to support business models that aren't terrible. Perhaps you might also consider users not wanting to install rootkits, spyware and adware to support content entitled? It's the same, it's a shitty experience people don't want.
I pay for a lot of Twitch subs. I am currently subbed to like 7 channels. I've also payed for the NYTimes and Washington Post through Amazon's payment system. I've paid for Ars Technica. I pay for Pandora. I pay for Reddit gold. I also buy skins and mounts in free to play games like Heroes of the Storm and TF2.
I pay lots. Do I meet your approval now?
How dare you hurt their business model by preventing the program from installing spyware!
You should be running IE with 12 different toolbars and Bonzi Buddy and the 90-day trial of McAfee.
So no, I'm not being a hypocrite in the same way as the GP is being, unless he has restricted his consumption of Internet content to Wikipedia and pastebin
Now the main difference is that users can uncheck the bundleware in most installers. Few sites offer a pay-to-opt-out option against ads. So what options do users have to disable ads? They're forced to use an Adblocker to opt themselves out.
People turn to alternatives because it provides an easy-access alternative. Netflix soared in popularity and put Blockbuster out of business because you didn't have to visit a brick & mortar store to rent movies. Many people will pay to use Netflix rather than torrent for free, because Netflix provides a no-friction way of consumption.
Provide a way that's frictionless for users to disable ads. A once-a-year payment for $10-$20 does the job fine and likely makes you more per user than ads would. Give them a little flair badge or something trivial and cosmetic and you might convince even the Adblockers to impart some of their money to you.
There are other business models other than Ad Revenue. Many of those business models have been time-tested and work. Ads are the "lazy" way out that shows a lack of care towards your audience.
That might not be your argument, but it is an argument that's in the atmosphere. This is a thorny problem, not a cut-and-dry case. The greater good is supported when artists can be fairly compensated. It is also supported when we annoy the art-consumers less. It is probably also supported when our political stances are small, simple, and ideologically pure. It is probably also supported when poor people can consume art. There are a lot of different factors that play into the "is it OK to block ads?" question, and it's not obvious that there's a simple solution which resolves all of them.
Most (but not all) users today feel entitled to content, games, music, etc for free and get mad when it isn't granted to them and turn up their noses at things like ads that support the content for the price they're willing to pay (free).
> Most (but not all) users today feel entitled to content, games, music, etc for free and get mad when it isn't granted to them and turn up their noses at things like ads that support the content for the price they're willing to pay (free).
This is an obvious generalization and an opinion you have. People who block ads do so because ads have been and continue to be annoying, exploitive, invasive and vectors for viruses. I am not sorry I block them, and you're not going to make me feel bad for making decisions about what my computer does or doesn't do.
Much of what I said was more a generalization of online users overall. And I'm lucky that many of my own users fall outside of that generalization due to the niche of what I do and the type of product I offer (free open source software, utilities, etc). Sadly, it doesn't matter how responsibly you try to show ads as adblockers don't discriminate (except for AdBlock Plus which allows some ad networks due to payola). And doing ads on your own without a 3rd party service is nearly impossible for an independent site these days due to the nature of the ad industry.
All that said, it's not like I'm giving up. I'm working with my userbase to come up with additional revenue streams to allow the site/project to continue and the millions of users to keep using the software. Including things like paid services, merchandise, sponsorships, etc. Honestly, if we can arrive at one that'll let me ditch ads entirely, I'd be happy to.
That still doesn't imply a feeling of entitlement.
This imbalance is indeed a big problem imo: essentially any scheme from the site is permitted to be circumvented without giving them knowledge: this can create an unhealthy market dynamics where ads get more aggressive (to generate more revenue per user), every user installs ad blocking software (note that once installed, most users won't ever uninstall ad blockers), and websites are eventually forced to chose from only two models: mediocre service (low operational costs) or paywall.
I personally would gladly accept targeted minimalist ads, which I would prefer to having to pay to access most sites. Nowadays I use an ad blocker though since some ads are far too intrusive for my liking.
I think the whole internet industry needs urgently to discuss mechanisms for this problem though.
You mean, like, by-law illegal? Or just something more like "an illegal state" in a program? Because if we're talking about by-law, that's an awful sentiment and you should feel awful for expressing it.
If you mean by-program-state illegal, that's not actually too complicated: add a software dependency on your ad-generation or analytics code to all of your run-time code. You'll pay the corresponding cost in performance that any such paranoid solution is going to cost you anyway, and you'll be vulnerable to highly-targeted blacklisting of your ads anyway, but you can block those general ad rules and force ad-blockers to include arbitrary executable blacklist-code in their browsers, which is sufficient.
No, I what I mean is TV manufacturers/broadcasters, if they so chose, could make it so that if you use their TV and press the mute button, you accept the TV will inform the broadcaster -- who may deny you service in the future. They should be free to decide if the consumer who doesn't want to watch any ads can watch their content, or if he has to pay subscription.
As a consumer you're not being "forced" anything: you can always subscribe or not watch the channel. Ideally broadcasters would tolerate muting/black-screening many ads up to a point, and if they see you're automatically blocking every ad they may ask you to subscribe.
I don't think this is a necessity for TVs, I was just playing along the extreme example.
I meant you can stop your TV from phoning home, just don't complain if they stop providing you service. If you instead falsely convey you are watching their ads, that is what would be illegal. Ads are a form of payment so to speak, and by actively concealing it you are making a false payment -- I'd expect that to be illegal just like false identities are.
Also, what if people have their TV plugged into a separate sound system? They could always use the mute button on that. The only way around that would be to equip the TV with a microphone, to check if the expected sounds are in fact audibly in the room ... (I kid)
(Another thought, would they also block deaf people for using the mute button on their TVs? But maybe they could request a special permit or something ...) (again, I kid)
2) If you want to keep using the TV analogy, ad blockers are like distributing a device for automatically muting/blacking out every TV ad, for free. Do you think free over the air TV broadcasts would exist for very long if such a device were the norm?
The sad truth is that adblockers are not a good thing. The value exchange with online content is free access for ads. Adblockers are just incredibly simple to install and use which allows people to skirt this agreement without issue, however just because something is easy doesn't make it "right".
It's always interesting when people argue about privacy without really knowing what ad networks store (which is just a random ID number and some interest categories) vs what they willing give up to social networks. Not to mention that payments are not more private, in fact payments = credit cards = everything including address, birthday, purchase history etc all tied to a real identity. Browsing via ads is far more private than browsing via paid access.
However ads have become just too much annoying with all the pop left and right and other shady tactics to steal your eyeballs or get you to dow load a virus
It is time user started pushing back, since content owners are currently little to no incentive to push back to ads provider for getting high quality ads.
Adblocking puts the right incentive where its due. They should however play nice to web site owners. If the content owner wants not show content unless an ad is displayed, the ad blocker shouldn't circumvent that
They aren't gonna fixing ads provider getting too far by getting to far on the opposite direction. That will just put more content behind paywalls in the long run.
Nowadays, hosting is so cheap that independent blogging is not really at risk, everyone can publish anything anytime. The risk is really with top and mid-tier publishers who produce content for money. These guys will be squeezed and what we're headed towards is both paywalls everywhere and a walled-garden approach where Facebook or other big central apps/sites will control access to everything else. Not sure either is a great option for the future.
Note: Yes micropayments/universal "internet" subscriptions might work but this is a far greater problem than people make it out to be. Any company attempting to do this will need massive scale, perfect tracking (again privacy issues here), secure access to billing and identity and ease of use for users. They will possibly help from either ISPs or some other infrastructure layer to actually make this work and even Google is having trouble with their 2nd try at a micropayments model in their new Contributor program. It's just not an easy thing to solve, definitely not as easy as just putting up a few ads and making the content free.
We need solutions for this, not a dismissal. No large company is engaging this in the public because there will be obvious backlash from adblocker users: they are currently fine, getting free content and seeing no ads -- why would they want change? While they don't see the trend is probably unsustainable, in the sense that services will generally be worse than they could have been.
My opinion is that some unobtrusive ads is a price that is worthy of payment, but this scenario is running out if we don't change some rules of come up with solutions. I'm very open to alternatives also such as some kind of internet-wide subscription model. It needs to be discussed, not tossed aside, imo.
Performance is a given, loading less = faster. Same with security, its just a few bad actors who keep allowing 3rd party content and malware. Many networks dont allow for anything other than text + images which have no malware possibilities.
Those two issues are starting to be solved by this consumer backlash and its a good thing. However when it comes to privacy I never understand how people think paying for things with their credit card is somehow more private (especially with all these data breaches) than some random ad network tracking script. The 3rd party cookie was actually a great thing that could easily be deleted and also stored any opt-out settings for users who wanted to skip tracking. Now with random out-of-context "privacy" reasons, browsers have ruined the effectiveness of cookies which means most networks cant even store a proper opt-out preference and they're also resorting to fingerprinting and other signals (at the ISP level) to track users no matter what device/platform/browser.
What the industry needed was more regulation and better standards, not this brute force guerilla warfare which is really harming the entire industry and leading to an eventually smaller and "closed" web.