As a possibility, a model whereby advertisers pay both content providers and readers for viewing ads.
I can imagine a system where before viewing expensive content (your next ultradeep NYT analysis I really want to read) I'm given a choice to view an ad (video, audio or picture) on one of the topics I'm interested in and be paid say $0.001. There are ad processors, let's say 2 or 3 major ones A, B and C, with whom I have an account. NYT hires one or two of them to give readers reasonable choices of what kind of ads to view and pay both ways. I'm registered with A and C with interests in cars, musical instruments and hiking equipment (in fact they may be priced differently), NYT supports A and B, which is fine, I'll be paid by A this time. I may of course change my preferences over time.
This will make ads even more expensive for the advertisers, but will at the same time improve relevance. In fact advertisers may compete for keywords/interests just like they do with Google Ads.
Right, that part needs some improvements. I'm thinking, advertisers might compete for viewers by paying more for a given keyword, i.e. the prices are not fixed and the highest bidder wins the viewer.
Another question is whether these ads are skippable or not. Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.
> Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.
I think the content providers would argue that you getting the content is your form of 'payment' for seeing the ad. So if you skip it, why should they give you the content anyway?
Some content providers may choose to allow that, because it's in their interest to deliver content to more readers, be more popular. Let's not forget, the whole point of journalism is to reach out to more readers. How the journalist's job is paid exactly is secondary really, as long as it's legal of course.
So let's say 1% of my readers choose to view the ad, get paid for it and get the advertiser pay me too. I might be fine with that. I'll have more readers then who'd spread the word about (and directly link to) my awesome blog/magazine.
The point is that lots of cents make up a sizeable income. The problem is that processing 'a cent' or a fraction of one costs more than you'll end up getting and nobody - to date - has been able to create a functioning micro payments system with associated wallet to gain sufficient adoption to make it work. It's a combination of a technology problem with a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Ad networks use real-time bidding to auction banner ad space as the page loads. (I imagine that's part of the reason it can take so damn long for some news sites to load.) Why can't the user (or their user agent) take part in this same auction? If I'm will to pay $0.02 per page view on nytimes.com, but advertisers are only willing to pay $0.01 then I should be able to win the auction.
That's a slick idea and one you could actually execute with some amount of success today. The basic idea would be that you could sign up for an advertiser account on a DSP (Demand Side Platform), create a retargeting audience, cookie your own web browser cache to place yourself in your retargeting audience, and then buy ads against that audience - ie yourself.
Ad companies have roundly demonstrated that I can no longer trust them to show me ads without tracking.
Sorry, but I'm not switching off that blocker. Maybe if the history of the internet had taken a different course. But now it's too late -- the well's been poisoned, and advertisers and publishers have only themselves to blame. Pointing the finger at the users doesn't do anything to repair this lost trust.
Ad-blocking, insofar as it contributes to the decimation of
advertising revenues, will hasten this exodus to the
platforms. And there is no way to block the ads shown to you
by Facebook or Google or Twitter in their own apps,
especially not on mobile.
Aside: There absolutely are ways to block ads within apps. There are already Android apps that accomplish this to various extents, and I'm sure they'll only get more sophisticated to match any migration of users to mobile.
Tracking is one thing that bothers me. The other are video ads that hijack my speakers and sap my bandwidth, pop over ads that hijack my screen focus, etc. Those are where I draw the line.
I don't use explicit ad blockers, but I do run with NoScript and Cookie Controller. Simple, well-behaved banner and sidebar ads are fine. Overly aggressive ads get killed.
I do DNS Hijacking on my own network for known trackers and ad networks. On my mobile devices i have an active connection home to filter the data. It kinda works... Im now looking at building the DNS filter into an app that i can load on a raspPI or a old laptop to handle all blocking and integration with addBlock lists.
Maybe the ad-heavy Internet was just a phase. Business models come and go. Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds as a business. Ad blockers may kill web ads as a business.
Every business will still have a web site for their own products and services. Amazon won't have a problem. Wikipedia will go on. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist are already pay sites, and they're almost the only news sites with actual reporters. Pay TV will continue to fund news networks, which will have sites with additional content to get people to watch their TV.
All we'll lose are the millions of bottom-feeder sites which take content in, hang ads on it, and hope to get paid. No big loss.
> and The Economist are already pay sites, and they're almost the only news sites with actual reporters.
The Economist doesn't actually have on-staff reporters, they rely on correspondents around the World who sell their articles either ad hoc or on a commission basis.
They do have staff who write editorials, but not the news articles.
The Economist is also happy to ( try to ) utterly bombard me with ads on their website despite being a subscriber. They even had a crawl-up SUBSCRIBE NOW! ad at one point when I was logged-in.
Given the date and the description of blocking ad banners specifically, my guess is that they were talking about an ad-blocking proxy like Internet Junkbuster.
These proxies weren't as easy to install as browser extensions, but they did a good job of blocking ads, and I remember similar conversations about The Future of Ad Blocking at the time.
I don't run ad blocker since 2009. I just got that good at ignoring ads. F12 + delete offending element works wonders for the most annoying stuff. And there are always hosts files.
Would've been nice if the article had pointed out that ad-networks have become a popular way to distribute trojans and malware using Flash exploits (though I'm sure when Flash is gone, ppl will keep finding other browser exploits ad's can exploit).
About a year or so ago, my dad called me out of the blue and told me that my mom was crying because "internet ads were following her and making her anxious".
Earlier that day, she came from a doctor and ended up searching for a medical condition on a famous search website. After that, she started seeing ads for various bullshit remedies all across the internet. Almost every website she visited, showed her same types of ads. Even when she wanted to forget and take her mind of it, she couldn't because these ads were constantly reminding her of it.
She got so disgusted that she quit using the web for the rest of the day and cried.
I guided them on how to install ad blocking addons and how to change default search engines (she now uses Startpage) But we couldn't easily block it on iPad so the solution was to switch the search engine and clear cookies.
All these companies that make money off tracking people and are selling search results really need to rethink their business models.
PS: She also wrote an email to Tim Cook complaining about this and got a reply from someone that they will "look into it". I'm glad Apple will now a provide solution to block these kinds of things on an iPad.
I'm sorry but how do you know it was the search website that sold information? It could as well be the first web site that she opened that happened to be on the same ad network as other related web sites she visited. Just guessing.
I agree with your point, but to the user it can feel like a violation of privacy, and at that point it's not particularly important who's doing it.
Whether it's the faceless search engine or the faceless retargeting company, the net result is that something you thought was personal and private feels less so.
Said search website was probably google. If that's the case they don't have to sell it, they just use it to target ads from their own network. If you search something on Google it will follow you like the plague.
That's called "retargeting" [1]. In some cases it feels harmless, in others it feels very creepy. I tend to use incognito windows when I search for things I don't want following me around everywhere, to avoid them getting stuck into tracking cookies. But I assume most people don't, so it causes them trouble.
I am constantly affected with this on mobile devices (no ad blocker). It is so intrusive. But its laughable at the same time, because those ad serving engines try to predict me, but show me utter bullshit ads for things I accidently viewed before.
So, I really look forward to iOS 9. And whoever provides a proper blocking app will get my money!
I recently switched from FF to Chrome on Android, because on Android Chrome gives me a better experience (mainly text resizing).
But this morning I was searching for adblockers on FF android, because ads.
I don't web much on my phone, but the extensions are bookmarked in my head, and probably the weekend I'm going to setup my FF with uBlockOrigin and Ghostery at least.
It'd be nice if I could run a web proxy on my phone that blocked ads regardless of browser or app.
I know that the previous post didn't mention Google, but people might leap to the wrong conclusion. I don't know what Yahoo and Microsoft's policies are.
Another possibility is that people will learn to care about what they read, and learn that it costs something. We don't have to tip, either.
Also, I'm sorry, but I'm never going to login to Facebook to read the Economist, and I stopped using Twitter's mobile app when they introduced sponsored content.
No. So long the code is executing on an uncontrolled device, then you cannot guarantee it'll execute how you intended. So if you make a device, like an iPad, seal it to prevent hardware tampering, and ensure no user-triggerable bugs exist, you're all set. There's also remote attestation, like Intel SGX might start to bring.
But on existing general-compute devices like PCs, it's a hopeless battle.
An extreme could be not loading content until the ad is loaded, and there is some type of check to verify that it did actually load (not blocked).
If someone is determined enough, they could simulate the ad being loaded (eg, maybe it actually IS even loaded, but the DOM element is hidden in one of dozen different ways which the ad-loaded-verification code doesn't check for).
Essentially the problem boils down to running code (HTML, Javascript, CSS, and even Flash) in an untrusted environment (the user's browser). The site sends the user bits of data to be displayed, but there's ultimately no way to know if the user's browser ACTUALLY displays those in the browser window, let alone to the user's eyeballs.
As a content provider, you can get very, very clever, but you can never get to 100%, and there will always be a motivated user to work on an adblocker that circumvents everything.
It's really not any different from DRM (as someone else in thread pointed out). The movie/music/TV/games industry has spent billions of dollars coming up with various schemes of DRM, yet you can still download basically anything (stripped of its DRM, of course) within days of release, if not earlier.
Additionally, anything more aggressive than DuckDuckGo's "Please turn off your ad blocker, or tell others about us, thanks!" will really upset the people who use ad blockers.
Damn, that article took a strange leap with discussing what better ads would be. Somehow it entirely skipped the possibility that more ads might resemble the ads of the most successful advertisers of the web (like google, facebook, twitter) and instead leaped on a dystopian slope where all ads are served by the content platforms of those companies.
Saying that twitter, google or facebook ads cannot be blocked is just bogus. People use them on normal web browsers that quite easily could block them. The reason they're not blocked is that it's not worth the hassle, because the ads are clean, small and polite. You know, better ads.
Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon.
Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon.
The risk is that advertising would also become a marginal phenomenon.
It's amazing to me that so many smart minds in content outlets can't figure out a way to make money other than ads, particular privacy invading ads.
It's been said often enough and long enough to sound tired, but we really are products, not customers. The entity that a content outlet cares about is the ad networks. NOT you. The content is just a bug zapper meant to attract you in.
I was always a defender of a site's right to use advertising in lieu of any better way to pay for its content. As someone who'd had stabs in the past at making content sites with useful content, I understood that it was a case of etiquette. If you want to read my content, do me the courtesy of allowing an unobtrusive text ad to exist off to the side. On that basis, I never blocked ads. Sometimes the ads were even interesting.
I use an ad blocker now. Too many abuses of my willingness to let the publishers show me ads and I eventually just got sick of it. Where the line was crossed for me included:
- Videos (or audio) autoplaying over the top of my own music; especially when they're in some other tab, halfway down the page, forcing me to go hunting to figure out where the sound was coming from
- Links commandeered by popup launchers; especially when they cancel the original click, or load my link in a new tab and override the current tab with the ad popup, which often resulted in me accidentally leaving the ad tab open while I closed the tab I actually wanted.
- Hover ads that activate because I was careless enough to not pay precise attention to the location of my mouse pointer
- Page content scroll positions jerking up and down as ads appear or disappear (usually just the former)
- Overlay ads appearing on top of content I'm trying to read, and in particular those which make the close button either hard to see, unresponsive when clicked, or which respond as though I've clicked the ad itself
- Content that just won't display because it's blocked by ad resources that have stalled while loading
And so forth. I'll stand up for publisher's rights, but only to a point. Eventually the noise and bad behaviour just becomes too much.
It's possible that some advertising will merge in with regular content and become covertly invasive over the long term. Publishers become credibility farms, where credibility is built using real articles and sold via "propaganda" pieces. One possible example is the Wired tennis physics link posted recently [0].
The author gets one thing massively wrong. So do the reddit commentors they quote.
The quote:
"Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data"
Oh? And how are you so sure they won't go the other direction? Because that's where I'd place my money in a heart beat.
Adblockers rely on blocking requests to known ad networks and affiliates. If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Ad blockers are 100% ineffective in those instances. A company like google or any other major ad network just needs to create some sort of back-end, plugin or server side program that serves up ads from the domain you're visiting. The ad blocker wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat or an ad for Netflix since it's all coming from randomsite.com
Several smaller companies have already started doing this and it could very well signal the end of ad blockers if it becomes widespread and adopted by the big players (specifically adsense).
The one thing I don't see is ad companies becoming more transparent & open. That's silly to even think about since it's less profitable alternative. The companies that don't do this will cannibalize the ones that do since they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. No, I see ad companies becoming more clever.
As far as content creators go, I don't even know how this is a debate. Just how entitled are people nowadays? Is this why they call millennials the entitled generation? If someone creates content, and wants people to see an ad for Pepsi before you can consume that content, that is the creators prerogative, not yours. End of story. There's no further argument here. I don't know why people think everything should be free. Nothing is free, everything is subsidized by something.
I think you missed the point, the plugin or program wouldn't have a distinct pattern or scheme since it would be coming from the website you're visiting.
How do you block that without blocking every image on the website?
Granted, what you propose would be easier to do for more advanced systems, but the key here, is that 95% of adblockers almost exclusively look for calls to ad networks. If you eliminate that, you open up that 95%.
Ad blockers already have element rules so yes, you can block ads served from the same site. As long as it's possible for an intelligence to distinguish ads from content, it'll be possible to remove ads. It might get more difficult, but you're simply wrong to say it's the end of ad blockers.
Ad blockers can do what you suggest, but it's very rudamentary. What it relies on, almost exclusively, is blocking calls to known ad networks. In my experience, about 95% of ads are blocked this way. Even if it was only 50%, that's still a gigantic number of previously unseen ads being seen.
I love the mantra of "the web is supported by advertising" that every one of these sorts of articles at least quotes. It's not. Shitty business models are supported by advertising. There are plenty of us who provide non-advertising driven services that are profitable and can afford transit costs.
As for blocking, the technology allows it so I will use it. If it doesn't allow it, I have no ethical qualms about breaking it until it does. If I'm paying for the portal device be it tablet, desktop, smartphone, TV, I will be in control of it. If it's subsidy-driven, their funeral.
The mantra? This is how the majority of the web is monetized. It's not a mantra, it's a fact. People contribute content to the web and you pay with viewing ads. I don't know how you can rationalize that as being a "shitty" business model just because you purchase a device that is capable of connecting to the internet.
If what you really mean to say is that it's a bad business model because people like yourself can install ad-blocking software and consume content without paying for it, then I see what you're saying although you come off as entitled and naive.
Thats really not how it works. Content providers like that ideal but it's incorrect. It never has operated that way.
I pay for a connection and a device. I don't pay for an advertising subsidy. If you choose to use advertising as a capital model for your business in a market so easily destroyed by technology then that by definition is a shitty business model due to the massive risk of a technological shift destroying your only income. Not only that, the consumers merely tolerate your model, not engage it. It is a plague upon them most of the time.
The only way this model works is if you provide a device which consumes advertising. That in itself is being eroded as well due to the number of services which offer utility without advertising even on the advertiser's territory.
Content isn't worth much on its own which is the problem. Authors rarely get paid anything significant from publishing; same with content driven advertising. I don't see how you're going to milk it in a decaying market.
The web will shrink, content will have to stand alone and be free of advertising ties and you'll have to put some cash down for services. Back to 1995 again.
I fully expect these dying markets to throw a few turds yet however. That will merely bury them deeper.
If ad blocking keeps growing at the rate it has been, then you're correct and the web will shrink. Maybe people will pay for services or news, and maybe they won't. I do agree that some ads are intrusive and annoying, but the model of publishers using advertising as a revenue source isn't going away any time soon.
What I think is disappointing is that the quantity and quality of original content would suffer without advertising-based business models. Individual bloggers, niche news outlets, and other small publishers will be unable to monetize their content. Even the New York Times (one of the most respected and largest news outlets in the entire world) can barely get over 800,000 paying online subscribers, and that includes subscriptions for a slimmed-down NYT Now app.
If you want a web that is rich in information, then advertising is a devil you have to accept.
1. Support model. I.e. I donate to your site and then consume your content.
2. Netflix (walled garden) model: I pay a central place, think AOL, or Facebook and they track my views and pay those producing content.
Trying to convince somebody they want to buy something by bombarding them with ads on every web page is shitty. I don't want to be exposed to it. I don't want my kids exposed to it.
Then to build your content business on top of the shitty advertising industry that seems kind of a bad idea.
I think if people want your content they will pay. Publishers just need to bundle it the right way.
And I've said it a few times here on HN, but if we as a society think news and current affairs is important, we shouldn't trust it to commercial organisations driven by profit, we need independent, publicly funded news like Australia's ABC.
> I think if people want your content they will pay. Publishers just need to bundle it the right way.
This is incredibly difficult to do and all the attempts I am aware of have 'failed' by varying degrees (paywalls, app.net).
If ad-blocking becomes a trend, I hope the websites as the blockers to pay instead of resorting to "native ads" or going out of business. Hopefully, the internet won't be stratified (rich vs. poor peoples versions of the web), but who am I kidding - happens in all other industries.
However, my opinion is likely coloured by my circumstances: I am a biased 3rd-worlder. I'd prefer the status-quo and have the content I consume subsidised by ads targeted at the western middle class. I would not afford to pay for all the content I find interesting on the internet, especially now with the horrendous USD exchange rate.
So Paywalls and app.net failed. I can think of heaps of better ideas for packaging news and other content.
I would like to see some of the lessons we have learnt about Freemium applied to news.
First you have a base level of great content available for free for everybody. You build a very large user base. Then for those people who want to dig deeper, you have premium content. Those users who really value your service won't mind spending a little money to engage more. Those who engage a lot - pay a lot, but it's their hobby, their past time. they don't mind.
It sound horrible when you spell it out explicitly, but like everything you need present well.
10c to read an article 1 hour earlier than everybody else. 10c to comment on an article. 5c to read the full transcripts of interviews. 10c to download full res photos. 5c to read full bio's of the people involved in the article.
You could spend $20 a day interacting / socialising / enjoying your news and entertainment.
I'm fairly certain this has all been tried. The New York Times and many other news outlets do have a freemium model of sorts. You are allowed access to 10 news articles a month, and after you reach your limit you can pay for more.
Guess how many people subscribe to the Times and are willing to actually pay to read another article? <830,000 worldwide. Paywalls have been implemented, monetization models have been tweaked - you can't change habits. People are habituated to getting their content online for free. They're not willing to pay for it in the vast majority of cases.
If we're talking online news content, there's just a ton of different outlets and I don't see people being willing to pay individually on an article-by-article basis. Maybe if you aggregated content under one subscription model (like the music industry does wit Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) and distributed revenue to publishers based on readership, it could work for a small minority of consumers. But even that seems like a stretch.
Ok, I just went and had a look at the Times website you minimum subscription is around $80USD a year but you can up to around 500USD a year. Lets round 800,000 at 100US a year is 80MM right?
Thats a shit tone of journalists employed if you ask me.
If you actually read the article, it says that the NY Times' operating costs were $1.48 Billion last year. $80 Million would cover a very minor portion of that.
> Shitty business models are supported by advertising.
Just because you do not like it doesn't make it a shitty business model: most sports are supported by advertising (e.g. NFL, UEFA). Endorsement deals, sponsoring teams/stadia/leagues and TV rights are just various forms of advertising.
TV shows are also funded by advertising, as is most journalism that is not state-funded (a.ka. propaganda).
Saw that ad for what is borderline malware on a fresh install of windows 10 while trying out Microsoft Edge to see what it's worth as a browser. It's a google ad (you can always spot them through the X button), on a popular website.
As long as google doesn't do any real policing on what is permissible in their adnetworks, it will always be a user's right to protect himself. Television and newspapers have higher standards for ads, at least in my country.
This was also a reminder that Edge will not be a real browser until Microsoft adds the possibility of using an adblocker. No extensions, no deal.
That little triangle looking logo in the to right is the AdChoices logo, Google has that on everything going through AdSense but just because AdSense -> AdChoices does not mean that AdChoices -> AdSense. That advertisement is actually an AdSense ad in this case but not everything you see with that logo is AdSense.
Microsoft announced earlier this year an IE feature called "SmartScreen Filter" that is supposed to detect and block misleading or malicious ads. I assume Edge has this feature, too, but from the blog post (and your experience) it sounds like it is disabled by default.
Content providers (from ad networks to movie studios) need to realise that you can only go so far. Ads have become more than ads. They track you wherever you go, not just online but offline too and people are starting to realise how intrusive this is. Most people are reasonable. A lot of articles have been publish about how terrible ads are but if you show them in a tasteful and a non-intrusive way (meaning that they don't track the user), they can be very successful.
Podcasts have been getting more and more popular everyday and I listen to a lot of them. I almost never skip any podcast ads even though I've heard most of them before because they feel more authentic (mostly because it's read by someone whose opinion I trust) and they're not intrusive at all. It seems like a good trade of to listen to them while getting great entertaining/informative content for free and I might get a good deal on something I might be interested in (since they mostly offer promo codes). If I'm listening to a podcast on technology, I get to hear Hover's ad spot, for example. That's interesting to me because as someone who's interested in listening to a podcast about technology, it's possible that I already manage a couple of domains and I might not be happy with my registrar (then again, who is). They're generically targeted ads. While on the websites, cookies follow me wherever I go, sometimes even when I delete them and my information is sold by companies I trust as a user because they're greedy and some other party want my information just so they can put ads in front of my face. When I try to block these, I'm called unethical because I'm taking food off the table of the writers.
There's a middle way here but I don't think ad networks ever going to realise this the same way movie studios haven't realised you can't solve piracy problem by adding more and more DRM. Don't be intrusive. Don't fuck up the UX. Don't bother me. I don't mind removing my ad blocker and see ads if that means I'll support the websites I visit. But ad networks are greedy and I fear this is only going to make them become more intrusive because of how easy (and now probably widely reached) ad blockers are going to become. And even if they do realise their mistake and make ads less intrusive both for privacy and UX reasons, no one will be there to realise that because everybody will be using ad blockers.
AFAIK abp does work by simulating a VPN on your system and therefore being able to block all resources channeled through this VPN. I don't know if that counts as system level. In comparison: Adaway (which needs root) edits the hosts file to block network requests on a system level.
The advertising market have been inflating for ten years now. Ten years ago one user would earn you an average of one usd per month, while you only get around 1 cent per user now. The same goes for advertisers, if your ad gets shown for ten thousand people, you can expect one lead. While ten years ago that would have been a hundred leads.
What bothers me the most about all these fertile sources for spam and ads to thrive (junk snail mail, telephone marketers, email spam, internet ads) is not just the malicious intent of most of it, but also the inefficiency of it all. A majority of Internet traffic is bots[1] costing electricity and time sorting through spam. Most of my snail mail by weight and size is trash every single day, waisting effort of an already underfunded and non-profitable USPS. Internet ads clutter up web interfaces and take up cycles in our browsers wasting time and making the delivery of information much less efficient. I feel as though in time, with all the physical and digital public services we have, 60% of infrastructure resources will go toward wasteful and nefarious services, 30% will go toward blocking and mitigating said services, and the remaining 10% will be human activity wondering why everything is so damn slow and expensive.
For all the people cheering on ad blockers: do you not realize that the _only_ result of wide-spread ad blocking is to drive smaller ad networks out of business and make Google into a monopoly?
This is not a win for privacy or security on the Internet. Google is an order of magnitude worse offender compared to the small-time ad networks.
And no, you cannot ad block Google. Good luck trying to block google.com cookies and access to *.google.com.
Why not? It may be difficult to stop google from tracking you, but if you don't ever see the consequences (as you're blocking their ads), it doesn't much matter does it?
Most ad blockers will block Google's ad network Doubleclick and Google search result ads, Gmail ads, by default. What do you mean when you say one cannot ad block Google?
> In other words, even the most important and widely respected newspaper in the world is nowhere close to being healthily monetized, especially not by the small number of people who pay for it.
It's not true that people won't pay for "content". People subscribe to Netflix, and still go to the theaters in droves (despite "piracy"). People buy games. And it's not even true that there's a problem with written content: people still buy books.
People won't pay for news, which isn't the same thing as "content" in general.
The reason people won't pay for news is because news have no inherent value.
Reading the news is a way of passing time; it's more like glazing at trees and leaves in the wind (but much less enjoyable).
I would tend to agree. I took a news writing course in college. We got a bullet point list about newsworthiness: 1) proximity 2) recency 3) prominence... and a few others.
They also taught us to write short paragraphs, short sentences, and use limited vocabulary. Further, you write stories in "inverted pyramid" style, where basically every sentence in an article is in decreasing order of importance, such that you can basically only read the first sentence of a story and know the whole thing.
Given that, I think much of traditional news is pretty much replaced by twitter, youtube, facebook, blogs, etc. Your friends will do a good job of surfacing newsworthy stories. And reporting the facts is pretty easily done by tweeters, bloggers, and those capturing photos/video.
Yet professional news writing about politics, weather, sports, and business will never go away because its crucial to society. Farmers need to know the weather. Vegas needs to know about sports scores. And investors need to know about business activity. All those groups will pay for that news.
But investigative journalism, interviews, in-depth stories, and the like do have inherent value. I hope there are viable business models for people producing that content.
Great read, thanks! I agree with everything in this paper (but that may be confirmation bias at work...)
So adblocking is actually going to save the world by starving all the evil news-producing entities.
However, the fact that most people won't pay for news, signals that news is less addictive than one could think (since people do pay for drugs - they're willing to pay any price for a fix).
My personal reason for using an ad blocker is the infrastructure.
There is nothing wrong with ads. But there is something deeply wrong with ad networks and automated ad placement.
Giving up a square of your website to some company to place whatever the hell they deem relevant is the reason I dislike web ads. I go to a website to read their content, not what Doubleclick thinks I should see based on my creepy user profile.
So if content creators curate and produce ads in partnership with advertisers (whose products they must actually, you know, like enough to want to promote to their readers) then maybe people will find ads less offensive. Instead of seeing ads for malware, or a private medical condition, or the towels they were just browsing on Amazon in a separate tab.
Great content creators don't use an algorithm and analytics-generated user profiles to determine what content to serve individual users, they just publish what they think their readers will like. Why not do the same for ads?
Are there any studies that show whether cross-site user tracking actually increases ad click-through rates? An advertiser can already intuit a lot about a reader from the current web site or search terms without tracking their activity on other sites. The most relevant ads I've seen were from Feedly and Twitter, who have their own profiles based on RSS feeds or Twitter accounts I follow.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadI can imagine a system where before viewing expensive content (your next ultradeep NYT analysis I really want to read) I'm given a choice to view an ad (video, audio or picture) on one of the topics I'm interested in and be paid say $0.001. There are ad processors, let's say 2 or 3 major ones A, B and C, with whom I have an account. NYT hires one or two of them to give readers reasonable choices of what kind of ads to view and pay both ways. I'm registered with A and C with interests in cars, musical instruments and hiking equipment (in fact they may be priced differently), NYT supports A and B, which is fine, I'll be paid by A this time. I may of course change my preferences over time.
This will make ads even more expensive for the advertisers, but will at the same time improve relevance. In fact advertisers may compete for keywords/interests just like they do with Google Ads.
Another question is whether these ads are skippable or not. Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.
I think the content providers would argue that you getting the content is your form of 'payment' for seeing the ad. So if you skip it, why should they give you the content anyway?
So let's say 1% of my readers choose to view the ad, get paid for it and get the advertiser pay me too. I might be fine with that. I'll have more readers then who'd spread the word about (and directly link to) my awesome blog/magazine.
https://contributor.google.com/u/0/
You even have control over who gets your money:
http://i.imgur.com/4Vuuefm.png
That would be essentially the same thing this guy did to his roommate: http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
Ad companies have roundly demonstrated that I can no longer trust them to show me ads without tracking.
Sorry, but I'm not switching off that blocker. Maybe if the history of the internet had taken a different course. But now it's too late -- the well's been poisoned, and advertisers and publishers have only themselves to blame. Pointing the finger at the users doesn't do anything to repair this lost trust.
Aside: There absolutely are ways to block ads within apps. There are already Android apps that accomplish this to various extents, and I'm sure they'll only get more sophisticated to match any migration of users to mobile.http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/09/08/if-marketing-lis...
I don't use explicit ad blockers, but I do run with NoScript and Cookie Controller. Simple, well-behaved banner and sidebar ads are fine. Overly aggressive ads get killed.
All we'll lose are the millions of bottom-feeder sites which take content in, hang ads on it, and hope to get paid. No big loss.
The Economist doesn't actually have on-staff reporters, they rely on correspondents around the World who sell their articles either ad hoc or on a commission basis.
They do have staff who write editorials, but not the news articles.
The Economist is also happy to ( try to ) utterly bombard me with ads on their website despite being a subscriber. They even had a crawl-up SUBSCRIBE NOW! ad at one point when I was logged-in.
These proxies weren't as easy to install as browser extensions, but they did a good job of blocking ads, and I remember similar conversations about The Future of Ad Blocking at the time.
Earlier that day, she came from a doctor and ended up searching for a medical condition on a famous search website. After that, she started seeing ads for various bullshit remedies all across the internet. Almost every website she visited, showed her same types of ads. Even when she wanted to forget and take her mind of it, she couldn't because these ads were constantly reminding her of it.
She got so disgusted that she quit using the web for the rest of the day and cried.
I guided them on how to install ad blocking addons and how to change default search engines (she now uses Startpage) But we couldn't easily block it on iPad so the solution was to switch the search engine and clear cookies.
All these companies that make money off tracking people and are selling search results really need to rethink their business models.
PS: She also wrote an email to Tim Cook complaining about this and got a reply from someone that they will "look into it". I'm glad Apple will now a provide solution to block these kinds of things on an iPad.
Whether it's the faceless search engine or the faceless retargeting company, the net result is that something you thought was personal and private feels less so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting
So, I really look forward to iOS 9. And whoever provides a proper blocking app will get my money!
thogh thats the only good thing about it... i'd much rather use opera or chrome, as both are better in almost every way
But this morning I was searching for adblockers on FF android, because ads.
I don't web much on my phone, but the extensions are bookmarked in my head, and probably the weekend I'm going to setup my FF with uBlockOrigin and Ghostery at least.
It'd be nice if I could run a web proxy on my phone that blocked ads regardless of browser or app.
As for creepy ads following you around though I haven't personally found that to be a google thing.
I know that the previous post didn't mention Google, but people might leap to the wrong conclusion. I don't know what Yahoo and Microsoft's policies are.
Also, I'm sorry, but I'm never going to login to Facebook to read the Economist, and I stopped using Twitter's mobile app when they introduced sponsored content.
And in Australia, we don't.
And then they could throw up a page that says "Sorry, AdBlock must be disabled to view this content"
But on existing general-compute devices like PCs, it's a hopeless battle.
An extreme could be not loading content until the ad is loaded, and there is some type of check to verify that it did actually load (not blocked).
If someone is determined enough, they could simulate the ad being loaded (eg, maybe it actually IS even loaded, but the DOM element is hidden in one of dozen different ways which the ad-loaded-verification code doesn't check for).
Essentially the problem boils down to running code (HTML, Javascript, CSS, and even Flash) in an untrusted environment (the user's browser). The site sends the user bits of data to be displayed, but there's ultimately no way to know if the user's browser ACTUALLY displays those in the browser window, let alone to the user's eyeballs.
As a content provider, you can get very, very clever, but you can never get to 100%, and there will always be a motivated user to work on an adblocker that circumvents everything.
It's really not any different from DRM (as someone else in thread pointed out). The movie/music/TV/games industry has spent billions of dollars coming up with various schemes of DRM, yet you can still download basically anything (stripped of its DRM, of course) within days of release, if not earlier.
see your readers as hostile and well, you get what you deserve.
daringfireball, kottke, reddit - all fine with ads. other sites are completely unusable, especially on mobile. good riddance.
Saying that twitter, google or facebook ads cannot be blocked is just bogus. People use them on normal web browsers that quite easily could block them. The reason they're not blocked is that it's not worth the hassle, because the ads are clean, small and polite. You know, better ads.
Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon.
The risk is that advertising would also become a marginal phenomenon.
It's been said often enough and long enough to sound tired, but we really are products, not customers. The entity that a content outlet cares about is the ad networks. NOT you. The content is just a bug zapper meant to attract you in.
There are many ways, but nothing that is as profitable.
I use an ad blocker now. Too many abuses of my willingness to let the publishers show me ads and I eventually just got sick of it. Where the line was crossed for me included:
- Videos (or audio) autoplaying over the top of my own music; especially when they're in some other tab, halfway down the page, forcing me to go hunting to figure out where the sound was coming from
- Links commandeered by popup launchers; especially when they cancel the original click, or load my link in a new tab and override the current tab with the ad popup, which often resulted in me accidentally leaving the ad tab open while I closed the tab I actually wanted.
- Hover ads that activate because I was careless enough to not pay precise attention to the location of my mouse pointer
- Page content scroll positions jerking up and down as ads appear or disappear (usually just the former)
- Overlay ads appearing on top of content I'm trying to read, and in particular those which make the close button either hard to see, unresponsive when clicked, or which respond as though I've clicked the ad itself
- Content that just won't display because it's blocked by ad resources that have stalled while loading
And so forth. I'll stand up for publisher's rights, but only to a point. Eventually the noise and bad behaviour just becomes too much.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210808
The quote:
"Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data"
Oh? And how are you so sure they won't go the other direction? Because that's where I'd place my money in a heart beat.
Adblockers rely on blocking requests to known ad networks and affiliates. If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Ad blockers are 100% ineffective in those instances. A company like google or any other major ad network just needs to create some sort of back-end, plugin or server side program that serves up ads from the domain you're visiting. The ad blocker wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat or an ad for Netflix since it's all coming from randomsite.com
Several smaller companies have already started doing this and it could very well signal the end of ad blockers if it becomes widespread and adopted by the big players (specifically adsense).
The one thing I don't see is ad companies becoming more transparent & open. That's silly to even think about since it's less profitable alternative. The companies that don't do this will cannibalize the ones that do since they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. No, I see ad companies becoming more clever.
As far as content creators go, I don't even know how this is a debate. Just how entitled are people nowadays? Is this why they call millennials the entitled generation? If someone creates content, and wants people to see an ad for Pepsi before you can consume that content, that is the creators prerogative, not yours. End of story. There's no further argument here. I don't know why people think everything should be free. Nothing is free, everything is subsidized by something.
Also -- doesn't cross-site tracking rely on third-party cookies from a shared (separate) domain?
I think you missed the point, the plugin or program wouldn't have a distinct pattern or scheme since it would be coming from the website you're visiting.
Say, for example, I want to show an ad for denture cream. Nothing fancy, just a gif. Well, the URL would look like http://www.randomsite.com/img/filename.gif
How do you block that without blocking every image on the website?
Granted, what you propose would be easier to do for more advanced systems, but the key here, is that 95% of adblockers almost exclusively look for calls to ad networks. If you eliminate that, you open up that 95%.
By blocking that specific asset? Blocklists will be much larger and slower reactively, but still far better than nothing.
As for blocking, the technology allows it so I will use it. If it doesn't allow it, I have no ethical qualms about breaking it until it does. If I'm paying for the portal device be it tablet, desktop, smartphone, TV, I will be in control of it. If it's subsidy-driven, their funeral.
If what you really mean to say is that it's a bad business model because people like yourself can install ad-blocking software and consume content without paying for it, then I see what you're saying although you come off as entitled and naive.
I pay for a connection and a device. I don't pay for an advertising subsidy. If you choose to use advertising as a capital model for your business in a market so easily destroyed by technology then that by definition is a shitty business model due to the massive risk of a technological shift destroying your only income. Not only that, the consumers merely tolerate your model, not engage it. It is a plague upon them most of the time.
The only way this model works is if you provide a device which consumes advertising. That in itself is being eroded as well due to the number of services which offer utility without advertising even on the advertiser's territory.
Content isn't worth much on its own which is the problem. Authors rarely get paid anything significant from publishing; same with content driven advertising. I don't see how you're going to milk it in a decaying market.
The web will shrink, content will have to stand alone and be free of advertising ties and you'll have to put some cash down for services. Back to 1995 again.
I fully expect these dying markets to throw a few turds yet however. That will merely bury them deeper.
What I think is disappointing is that the quantity and quality of original content would suffer without advertising-based business models. Individual bloggers, niche news outlets, and other small publishers will be unable to monetize their content. Even the New York Times (one of the most respected and largest news outlets in the entire world) can barely get over 800,000 paying online subscribers, and that includes subscriptions for a slimmed-down NYT Now app.
If you want a web that is rich in information, then advertising is a devil you have to accept.
1. Support model. I.e. I donate to your site and then consume your content. 2. Netflix (walled garden) model: I pay a central place, think AOL, or Facebook and they track my views and pay those producing content.
Trying to convince somebody they want to buy something by bombarding them with ads on every web page is shitty. I don't want to be exposed to it. I don't want my kids exposed to it.
Then to build your content business on top of the shitty advertising industry that seems kind of a bad idea.
I think if people want your content they will pay. Publishers just need to bundle it the right way.
And I've said it a few times here on HN, but if we as a society think news and current affairs is important, we shouldn't trust it to commercial organisations driven by profit, we need independent, publicly funded news like Australia's ABC.
This is incredibly difficult to do and all the attempts I am aware of have 'failed' by varying degrees (paywalls, app.net).
If ad-blocking becomes a trend, I hope the websites as the blockers to pay instead of resorting to "native ads" or going out of business. Hopefully, the internet won't be stratified (rich vs. poor peoples versions of the web), but who am I kidding - happens in all other industries.
However, my opinion is likely coloured by my circumstances: I am a biased 3rd-worlder. I'd prefer the status-quo and have the content I consume subsidised by ads targeted at the western middle class. I would not afford to pay for all the content I find interesting on the internet, especially now with the horrendous USD exchange rate.
I would like to see some of the lessons we have learnt about Freemium applied to news.
First you have a base level of great content available for free for everybody. You build a very large user base. Then for those people who want to dig deeper, you have premium content. Those users who really value your service won't mind spending a little money to engage more. Those who engage a lot - pay a lot, but it's their hobby, their past time. they don't mind.
It sound horrible when you spell it out explicitly, but like everything you need present well.
10c to read an article 1 hour earlier than everybody else. 10c to comment on an article. 5c to read the full transcripts of interviews. 10c to download full res photos. 5c to read full bio's of the people involved in the article.
You could spend $20 a day interacting / socialising / enjoying your news and entertainment.
Guess how many people subscribe to the Times and are willing to actually pay to read another article? <830,000 worldwide. Paywalls have been implemented, monetization models have been tweaked - you can't change habits. People are habituated to getting their content online for free. They're not willing to pay for it in the vast majority of cases.
If we're talking online news content, there's just a ton of different outlets and I don't see people being willing to pay individually on an article-by-article basis. Maybe if you aggregated content under one subscription model (like the music industry does wit Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) and distributed revenue to publishers based on readership, it could work for a small minority of consumers. But even that seems like a stretch.
Thats a shit tone of journalists employed if you ask me.
Just because you do not like it doesn't make it a shitty business model: most sports are supported by advertising (e.g. NFL, UEFA). Endorsement deals, sponsoring teams/stadia/leagues and TV rights are just various forms of advertising.
TV shows are also funded by advertising, as is most journalism that is not state-funded (a.ka. propaganda).
http://i.imgur.com/dzwaKhI.png
Saw that ad for what is borderline malware on a fresh install of windows 10 while trying out Microsoft Edge to see what it's worth as a browser. It's a google ad (you can always spot them through the X button), on a popular website.
As long as google doesn't do any real policing on what is permissible in their adnetworks, it will always be a user's right to protect himself. Television and newspapers have higher standards for ads, at least in my country.
This was also a reminder that Edge will not be a real browser until Microsoft adds the possibility of using an adblocker. No extensions, no deal.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2015/04/28/cleaning-...
Podcasts have been getting more and more popular everyday and I listen to a lot of them. I almost never skip any podcast ads even though I've heard most of them before because they feel more authentic (mostly because it's read by someone whose opinion I trust) and they're not intrusive at all. It seems like a good trade of to listen to them while getting great entertaining/informative content for free and I might get a good deal on something I might be interested in (since they mostly offer promo codes). If I'm listening to a podcast on technology, I get to hear Hover's ad spot, for example. That's interesting to me because as someone who's interested in listening to a podcast about technology, it's possible that I already manage a couple of domains and I might not be happy with my registrar (then again, who is). They're generically targeted ads. While on the websites, cookies follow me wherever I go, sometimes even when I delete them and my information is sold by companies I trust as a user because they're greedy and some other party want my information just so they can put ads in front of my face. When I try to block these, I'm called unethical because I'm taking food off the table of the writers.
There's a middle way here but I don't think ad networks ever going to realise this the same way movie studios haven't realised you can't solve piracy problem by adding more and more DRM. Don't be intrusive. Don't fuck up the UX. Don't bother me. I don't mind removing my ad blocker and see ads if that means I'll support the websites I visit. But ad networks are greedy and I fear this is only going to make them become more intrusive because of how easy (and now probably widely reached) ad blockers are going to become. And even if they do realise their mistake and make ads less intrusive both for privacy and UX reasons, no one will be there to realise that because everybody will be using ad blockers.
[1]: http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf
This is not entirely true. AdBlock Plus for Android works at the system level.
[1]http://theweek.com/articles/454320/62-percent-all-web-traffi...
This is not a win for privacy or security on the Internet. Google is an order of magnitude worse offender compared to the small-time ad networks.
And no, you cannot ad block Google. Good luck trying to block google.com cookies and access to *.google.com.
Why not? It may be difficult to stop google from tracking you, but if you don't ever see the consequences (as you're blocking their ads), it doesn't much matter does it?
It's not true that people won't pay for "content". People subscribe to Netflix, and still go to the theaters in droves (despite "piracy"). People buy games. And it's not even true that there's a problem with written content: people still buy books.
People won't pay for news, which isn't the same thing as "content" in general.
The reason people won't pay for news is because news have no inherent value.
Reading the news is a way of passing time; it's more like glazing at trees and leaves in the wind (but much less enjoyable).
They also taught us to write short paragraphs, short sentences, and use limited vocabulary. Further, you write stories in "inverted pyramid" style, where basically every sentence in an article is in decreasing order of importance, such that you can basically only read the first sentence of a story and know the whole thing.
Given that, I think much of traditional news is pretty much replaced by twitter, youtube, facebook, blogs, etc. Your friends will do a good job of surfacing newsworthy stories. And reporting the facts is pretty easily done by tweeters, bloggers, and those capturing photos/video.
Yet professional news writing about politics, weather, sports, and business will never go away because its crucial to society. Farmers need to know the weather. Vegas needs to know about sports scores. And investors need to know about business activity. All those groups will pay for that news.
But investigative journalism, interviews, in-depth stories, and the like do have inherent value. I hope there are viable business models for people producing that content.
So adblocking is actually going to save the world by starving all the evil news-producing entities.
However, the fact that most people won't pay for news, signals that news is less addictive than one could think (since people do pay for drugs - they're willing to pay any price for a fix).
There is nothing wrong with ads. But there is something deeply wrong with ad networks and automated ad placement.
Giving up a square of your website to some company to place whatever the hell they deem relevant is the reason I dislike web ads. I go to a website to read their content, not what Doubleclick thinks I should see based on my creepy user profile.
So if content creators curate and produce ads in partnership with advertisers (whose products they must actually, you know, like enough to want to promote to their readers) then maybe people will find ads less offensive. Instead of seeing ads for malware, or a private medical condition, or the towels they were just browsing on Amazon in a separate tab.
Great content creators don't use an algorithm and analytics-generated user profiles to determine what content to serve individual users, they just publish what they think their readers will like. Why not do the same for ads?