When I visited Yahoo the other day and looked at the very long list of URLs necessary to track me and to display ads, I knew that the same system without this feature would be a lot cheaper and a lot faster (read: less servers are required).
The next thought was that a paid service with a low fee for Yahoo news, email etc. can be profitable and have happy users.
I believe that Google's cut of contributor is smaller than Google's cut of AdWords. (I did a quick search to verify and couldn't find it, so don't take my comment as gospel).
This is just you buying the ad slot instead of the advertiser. Why should it be any different for the website's income?
If anything, more entities bidding for the ad means the prices can go higher and the website gets more money (though I imagine any difference here would be undetectable).
> Why should it be any different for the website's income?
Because the point is that a lot of people who block ads, don't actually like advertising. I would hazard a guess that they want to support websites, but they don't want to support advertising companies, and validate their business.
Google's primary job is to make billions of dollars of profit. I believe an organization like that has all the more incentive to inflate the fees and pocket as much as possible.
I'm not sure I understand the question. It's up to each publisher to decide if they make enough on AdSense to justify putting its ads on their site. The success of Google's ad business suggests that even net of fees, many people still think it's worth it.
Now, personally, I don't think Google pays me enough to run AdSense on any of my sites. It's frankly not even close, so the fee isn't the issue -- it's just a bad fit for the volume and type of content I produce. I can see why it's great for many other publishers though.
Well, I understand an organization that sets up a network where content creators get paid incurs some costs. I was curious as to what people think is the appropriate amount of fees they should charge for that service.
Google's costs and fees are irrelevant to the content creator. They want the ad network that writes the biggest check each month, not the one with the lowest operating overhead.
In fact there are many niche ad networks with fees much higher than Google, but they actually pay publishers more because they also charge the advertisers much more.
Nothing destroyed the quality of web content as much as AdSense did. So many websites turned into "made for AdSense" and started doing stupid things that actually severely reduce their earning potential.
But how does it know that I'm me? My Google login? I don't think I'm logged in to Google everywhere. Just curious as to how this thing works, basically.
More importantly to me: I don't want to login to a Google account. $10 - $15 is a fair price, but I don't want to login.
I feel that if I pay for something and it now requires me to have an account I'm getting a worse experience. This is especially true in this case where a free product like uBlock will yield a better result.
If it was any cheaper then people would believe ads have very little value which leads to thinking an ad-blocker isn't really harming anyone. I wouldn't be surprised if this product is really, at least in part, a PR move to get people to think seeing adverts is the equivalent of 'saving' $20/month for web content.
And it actually is the equivalent of saving that money! If you want quality journalism, or even just an ops budget for the hosting site for your cat pictures, someone needs to pay at some point. There's a very close analogy to print publications: if magazines and newspapers didn't have ads, the newsstand price would be significantly higher due to the loss of impressions. Now, imagine if your Sunday newspaper had a magical printing press that could print, on-demand, a customized version for you without ads. If everyone switched to that option, they'd lose all their ad revenue, so they'd need to raise the newsstand price accordingly!
Which is interesting because of how many people mention that adds really only contribute a small fraction of that. From what I can find $1 per 1000 impressions seems to be about average for ad revenue.
That means that if I go to 1000 websites in a month I'd expect to pay about $1. I'd be interested to see how many impressions I make per month and find out how much money I actually generate for these websites.
I'd also be interested in a focused ad session to reduce the cost of my browsing. I.E. you show me products and I actually click on them to check them out, and you add money to my pool for browsing. It would have to be an opt-in scenario, but that would be an alternative to paying and seeing ads while you browse.
Ha good point. I'm going to circle back to the comment above mine though. I'm going to change his $20 to $15 because that is the highest amount listed on their site.
I'm also going to factor in that this only removes at most 50% of the ads. we are talking about vising something like 166 (15000/30/6 *2(for the 50%)) pages on an average day. And those are pages with google ads only.
So do I visit 166 pages with 6 google ads on it a day? I don't honestly know but I doubt it.
Now if I could pay $15 a month to remove ALL ads, I think that would be worth my money, even though I still doubt that I visit 166 pages a day.
Ad blockers are NOT harming anyone. I don't want ads.
Content providers need to decide whether they want to provide content for free or charge. If I like their content enough to pay, I might pay. If they provide free content with ads, I'll block them.
I was on board until I got down to that figure. No way am I going to whitelist google's ads, pay $15/mo just so I can see 75% more ads!
Just cut out 100% of the ads and divide the $15 among the sites a viewed. If that comes out to a couple of cents for each that's still better than nothing.
The biggest problem of this is that it only works on Google's ads, but there are far more obnoxious ads that will result in the user wanting and installing an adblocker anyway, and then why bother with Contributor?
I'm not sure if the Doubleclick AdExchange allows that but sometimes it can look like it's coming from Adsense or Doubleclick AdExchange but the ad is actually served from Doubleclick For Publishers. In that latter case the publisher decides what is acceptable.
I think the tvtropes forum used AdWords (? Not sure) and I certainly saw ads there which redirected to open the app store (on android).
I'm not certain, but I believe the ad network being used was associated with Google.
(Not that the ads were officially allowed, I think I read things on a Google support forum which indicated that they hadn't finished blocking those ads yet, or blocking them again when they were created again. Still, I think an ad agency has a responsibility to proactively(?) ensure that they do not serve any malicious (in the security sense) ads.)
I have seen several adsense ads that auto-play. But it could be that they're violating Google's policies. I tried looking for a policy document, but this is all I could find.
I saw a few that expanded to take over the screen if you hover over them for like 5 seconds but they gave you a warning. I haven't seen autoplay though. Are you certain they were adsense? Sometimes ads can appear to be adsense because they are served via DoubleClick For Publishers ( https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/solutions/revenue-manage... ). The site controls the approval of those ads. Google won't approve an as that violates the policies unless it somehow slips by.
Its not something that happens very often, but I've seen it mostly on websites that are usually low quality/aggregation websites. Here's one such instance.
Those are really the only ones I can think of that bother me but it's the sites placement that is what makes it a terrible UX. They place all those ads around the actual download button. You would think you could get banned for trying to force a click like that.
I wouldn't put the blame on the site owners exclusively. Yes, they are responsible for location on the page. But Google puts a big green button labelled "download" on the page in the first place; that button would be confusing anywhere on the page. And obviously, these ads only show up on download pages, not on other types of pages.
There's no excuse: the site operator, the ad network, and the ad buyer all collaborate to deceive the user. Google could easily stop this practice, but they don't. "Do no evil, unless it affects the bottom line".
On mobile, I get exactly these kind of ads in-app. Flashing yellow and red, "Scan your phone", "Speed your phone", "Phone virus?!" and crap like that. Always links direct to appstore for some home screen or launcher that requires every permission. I reported them for a week or so then gave up.
Unblock ads served from google, keep the rest blocked. Eventually websites will just have to use google as their ad platform if they want to receive revenue in a mostly ad-blocked world.
So with this system, the same amount of space is still taken up by ads? I don't think that's really a huge improvement.
I think my ideal system would be something where a website can offer a bitcoin* address in a header, and at the end of the month my browser randomly picks a set of addresses it's seen, and sends money to them. (In conjunction with current ad-blocking technology.)
* Bitcoin probably wouldn't work due to transaction limits, but maybe some sort of sidechain, alternative coin, or something similar.
Or, even better, gave a proportional amount based on the amount you've visited. Better yet, give a Humble-Bundle-like distribution slider to allow you to alter it by preferences ("HN already has funding, give all of my BTC to individual bloggers they've linked...").
Someone could probably build a browser plugin to at least keep track and divvy up money. The real problem is people say they want to support sites but they really don't want to see ads or support the site.
> I think my ideal system would be something where a website can offer a bitcoin* address in a header, and at the end of the month my browser randomly picks a set of addresses it's seen, and sends money to them. (In conjunction with current ad-blocking technology.)
This is so ripe for abuse it's not even funny. It would take clickjacking to a whole new level.
This is the whole problem with microtransactions: sites need them to be frictionless or else users will abandon the flow no matter how low the price is, but financial transactions need some sort of user confirmation or else they're wide open to abuse.
> This is the whole problem with microtransactions: sites need them to be frictionless or else users will abandon the flow no matter how low the price is, but financial transactions need some sort of user confirmation or else they're wide open to abuse.
I agree. I solved this problem with a 3-party protocol (user, provider, authenticator) that can't be subverted by either the user or the provider.
No user intervention is required; it works seamlessly. User identity is not revealed and the provider cannot piggyback on the shared tokens to create a persistent identifier. The same scheme can be used to provide effortless passage through paywalls, as well as enabling the same model as Contributor (and before them Kachingle, Contenture, Readability and several others who've failed).
As the authenticator would essentially need to maintain a list of verified providers, you would have to do a lot of work to figure out which providers are legit and which are fraudulent. Even distributed across a whole bunch of transactions, the cost is likely too high when each transaction is a fraction of a cent. That's just a show-stopper for microtransactions.
The technology is the easy part for microtransactions. Simplifying the business rules to the point it can cheap enough to operate financial transactions safely is the hard part.
> As the authenticator would essentially need to maintain a list of verified providers, you would have to do a lot of work to figure out which providers are legit and which are fraudulent.
If payment is proportional to usage, then a linkbait/clickbait scheme won't work. The point is to reward genuine repeat visits to a site you like.
If the profit is too low, fraudsters simply go elsewhere.
>So with this system, the same amount of space is still taken up by ads? I don't think that's really a huge improvement.
It will continue to take up space in most cases (but the system will make an ad block disappear completely if in some circumstances)
But you can go into your settings and set what you want to show up there.
It can be the default (a strange checkerboard mosaic thing), a selection of cat pictures, some abstract colors, a blank space, or you can set it to a custom URL (like a 1px by 1px gif image) which will make them collapse in a similar way to adblockers.
Yes every site should be sending a bitcoin receiving address in the headers, or embedded in the HTML for when a single page has two areas of content from different providers.
Payout could be based on a number of factors, including existing ads on the page (downvote), number of visits (upvote), seconds of streaming video watched (upvote), etc.
This is fascinating. Business model: annoy people so much that they pay you to stop annoying them.
Everybody's been talking about the death of display ads, and it looks like Google's paying attention and trying to figure out how to marginalize the ad itself, but still take money on the transaction.
Eventually, Google could probably marginalize the ad so much that there are only a rare few display ads left online, and Google has cleverly tricked us into keeping that industry aloft, essentially paying to keep something we hate alive.
We hate shitty content creators (like Buzzfeed) who replicate content from other sources or even worse disguise ads with content (i.e. native advertising) . We also hate paying for the whole site just to read a couple of articles every now and then. How about a pay-by-article model with widespread adoption from the industry? I'd gladly go for it.
Lastly, we hate tracking. I can't overstate that. They kill profiling we kill ad blocking. Simple as that.
Bingo. Most people don't even realize they are being tracked via ads. And if they did, they wouldn't care. Look at how many know about the NSA yet don't really care, and ad tracking is small potatoes compared to that.
Sure dude, I didn't proclaim my self public speaker of the HN community. It's just a way of saying. Jesus, some people in here are ready to dig up the hatchet first chance they get. Chill man, love and peace.
I mean, I think I'm pretty chill? I didn't mean to offend you if that's what happened, I was just pointing out that the distinction may be important in the context of this conversation.
If someone is proposing a solution for or discussing a problem that affects the entire Internet, it's important to realize that there are several parties who think differently, and in fact only a very small minority feel the same way you or me or the majority of HN does about things.
Well imho the context of this conversation and probably of every other conversation in HN is between technology savvy people. I think this is pretty clear, or isn’t? We talk about ourselves, not about the average user, unless otherwise stated. So in this context, with “we” I speak for those of us who understand the risks of profiling and for that reason choose to block ads.
I'm not proposing a solution, hell I wouldn't even consider that I know better than Google what should be done. I'm just stating a problem. Profiling is annoying. And as a user I don't think it works that well. When I visit a site for science fiction I'd prefer watching relative ads, not an ad about a pair of shoes I searched a week ago.
We certainly are a minority but an influencing one.
Tracking is weird. One hand it's gross and I don't like it. I think because who knows who is looking at what you're looking at. On the other hand, as a consumer I actually find the ads more valuable, and I sometimes buy items advertised to me. And as a content creator, they generate much more revenue.
I think there's a line that's often crossed. If there's no (or light) personalization, the ad shown will be relevant to the content it's next to, and maybe not relevant to me. If there's too much personalization, the ad shown will be relevant to me (or my browsing history), but not really relevant to the content it's next to. I would be less creeped out by personalization if the ads fit on the page; so when I view a news article about the Pope's visit, probably don't show me retargeting ads for a service provider whose API docs I was looking at yesterday; but if it's a technology site, then go ahead. Also take a lesson from Target; just because you can figure out I'm pregnant, don't make it obvious you know, put some deliberately mistargeted things in there too, so it looks more random.
Google ads used to be valuable because they were based on the content of the site you were currently watching. Doubleclick (later bought by Google) and others already did the tracking thing and didn't get mileage out of it. Retargeting (i.e. following you around with ads for something that you may buy with a more than 3% chance because you actually searched for it) is the opposite of that, purely tracking-based and mostly annoying.
> We hate shitty content creators (like Buzzfeed) who replicate content from other sources or even worse disguise ads with content (i.e. native advertising)
So why on earth are you going to those sites?
> We also hate paying for the whole site just to read a couple of articles every now and then. How about a pay-by-article model with widespread adoption from the industry?
I'm not. But 95% of web sites out there are replicating content one way or the other.
That's literally what this is.
No it's not. That's a different model and I have no objections against it. This is a model where Google decides to give money to sites, and that is any site that's running AdSense not just the ones with original content. My argument is about why some of us like to use ad blocking mechanisms.
No, it's the model where Google is giving money to the sites you visit, in proportion to the level you visit them. Since you claim not to visit the sites that are "shitty content creators", you're not going to be supporting them in any way. So what exactly is your real objection?
Contributor might not be the answer. But if nothing else, this is a great "put your money where your mouth is" experiment. Suddenly all the talk from adblock users about how they'd just love to micropay for content directly has been replaced with all manner of excuses.
There are literally thousands of ways to trick users to visit a site, from clickbaiting to rickrolling. Suddenly these methods pay out some real money.
What do you think the possible consequences of this are? Will that be a net positive or a net negative for content quality on the web?
My real objection is profiling. I've mentioned it in a half dozen comments in this thread. Why is it so hard to understand? And why on earth are you so aggressive?
And by the way, we're paying for content. It's called books, magazines, newspapers, kindle shorts, you name it. Half of the original content out there comes from established news agencies, and most of them don't even run AdSense.
And please, spare me with this false dilemma, we're either bombarded with ads or the web will cease to exist. I've been hearing that for more than a decade. Advertising evolves. Even if 80% of users adopted ad blocking technologies advertising would find a venue to reach users. It's doing that for decades.
In the messages in this subthread (the ones that are direct ancestors of my message) you mentioned more often how much you hate Buzzfeed-style sites than how much you hate tracking. You used having to pay for Buzzfeed as your main (only?) argument against Contributor. Maybe it's not your intended objection, but it is the one you were making.
If tracking is the actual hill to die on, I don't know how we'd possibly get to your stated optimal outcome of per-article micropayments. That is something that'll by necessity make it easier for you to be tracked. There will have to be a central micropayment platform (or a few ones), since the threshold for maintaining per-site wallets is going to be too high for users. You will also need to have a single persistent profile on that central site, rather than ephemeral profiles that can be wiped away just by clearing cookies or by browsing from an incognito window. You can't even block the HTTP requests that are passing your information about the article load to the central server, since that's exactly the request that's facilitating the micropayment you want to make.
So I don't know if it's a very consistent position.
(I did not make any claims about the web ceasing to exist, nor about the necessity of advertising. No idea why you're assigning those views to me.)
> it's the model where Google is giving money to the sites you visit, in proportion to the level you visit them
Is it, though? Perhaps a closer inspection of the payment model is in order. I found this:
> You’ll pay the market price for each ad space that shows a thank you message or pixel pattern. This price can vary a lot. The exact price is determined at the time of the Google ad auction.
Essentially, you are bidding against a website's advertisers and paying the going rate for that ad slot. Not all content is equally valuable to advertisers. Consider the high cost for cancer targeted advertising compared to targeting an audience for, say, some form of generic cola beverage. The page with the cancer advertisement will receive a higher portion of your Contribute budget than the page with the cola advertisement (if it's replaced at all.. Google may decide they get more money with the cancer-related ad than with your Contribute bid).
So, it doesn't seem to distribute your money in proportion to your level of visits. If you visit a single site more frequently than others, then sure, that site may get a larger number of bites at your budget, but if the value of that space is very low then the total sum you provide to this content creator could be less than what you give to the owner of the click-bait link you followed once and forgot about.
Well, I'm just one person, but: I pay for my email on Fastmail, I buy all the games (largely indie) I play through HumbleBundles or Steam, I donate to streamers on Twitch, I buy print copies & merch direct from comic artists I found online, and I buy music from bandcamp. I'm planning on supporting a number of artists on Patreon as well. I go meet those creators at cons and form a personal connection. Those are the content creators I want to keep alive.
I run an adblocker and I do put my money where my mouth is.
If there was any news or essay site that put out consistently high-quality content, I'd pay for that too. But as it is I'm happy for mass media and sites with vacuous pseudo-intellectual articles like Quartz, Medium and Nautilus to die out.
But I'd go a step further than "BuzzFeed". Any of the "[something] via [somesite]" web sites are in the offending category. They literally make money from the content of others by (sometimes) rewording the original title and giving it a slightly more clickbait title so that their 'via' "articles" look more inviting. Often, this is a chain of evil. I do not want to support that chain, even if it is just for the one visit. I would like to support the original writer, but none of the reworders. Now, the sad part is, there is only a very small list of real content creators.
> Lastly, we hate tracking. I can't overstate that. They kill profiling we kill ad blocking. Simple as that.
As a nerdy guy, I'd much rather see video game ads than tampon ads. I get the ideological argument against targeted advertising, but the practical arguments for it are pretty compelling, too.
You don't need to be tracked for this to happen though. If ad networks placed video game-related ads on video game-related websites and tampon-related ads on tampon-related websites, then users of both sites would get ad content relevant to their interests.
Consider contexts like news websites, though, with broadly-applicable audiences. Specialty or niche sites do just fine with site-derived advertising targets. Other things do much less well.
There's also the fact that targeted ads result in better CPMs for publishers (since they'll result in better returns-per-view for advertisers), which means that they don't have to deploy as many of them to meet revenue expectations.
If I want content from content creators, I pay for it.
Ads is the old print way of getting paid.
Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.
Why are you so focused on ads when it 1. Doesn't make sense if users can just block it and 2. There are better options for me to pay content creators?
If you aren't interested in my 'preference' you lose out. The customer is just trying to have a normal relationship here... Abusive forced ads are not normal... IMHO.
> Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.
You realize that this has been tried and widely deemed a failure, right? Paywalls are a problem because they actively drive your audience away to next-best alternatives.
> Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.
Actually, subscriptions + trial periods was also a print way of getting paid. For much the same reasons as it doesn't work for most mass content on the web, it didn't work well as the primary source of income for mass print publications (though there were publications for which it replaced ads, for the most part, it just served to provide a paid circulation number which demonstrated to advertisers the size of the audience that was dedicated enough to a publication that they were willing to pay something for it, so it was a proxy measure for effective ad reach.)
The ads aren't there purely to annoy people, they're there to support the content you'd otherwise pay for. The idea of paying them instead of getting ads is also a way to support that content.
It can also be seen as acting like the mob. "It'd be a shame if your nice clean web page suddenly got ruined with ads. You know, we can keep that from happening for a price." No thanks. I'll continue to block ads and not be tracked and have my internet load faster.
Go for it, but you're only able to have your cake and eat it too because of people who view ads. If I were you, I'd keep quiet and encourage others to view ads, otherwise content creators will have to either quit or throw up paywalls.
> otherwise content creators will have to either quit or throw up paywalls
There are other categories of content creators who don't expect payment.
For example I contribute data to Flightradar24. In return they provide me with an ad-less experience because, like forum websites, their very existence depends on user contributions.
Other people just run websites for fun and education and pay for it willingly out of their pocket. I had to step-up to a 200GB package from my ISP for that reason. No-one paid towards my costs and I don't expect anyone to do so.
ads stopped being pay-per-impression around 2001 or so. For actual money to flow, people need to click on ads. For the advertisers to want to spend money, people need to not just click on the ads but also convert (aka, go to the site and order something).
Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.
What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.
A clearer way to write this would be, pay-per-impression stopped being the default (or only) way of doing business sometime between 1999-2001. After a brief period where
ads were predominantly text-based, ad inflation brought
graphical ads and CPM back and nowadays can do CPC as well
as CPM or CPA (cost per acquisition) links:
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472725?hl=en&ref_...
But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds
mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising
dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily
from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.
Practically all of the advertising on the internet is purchased on per impression basis. It falls into 2 categories:
1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.
2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.
This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.
I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...
OK, then modify the statement, but use the same mobster voice: "It would be a shame if your browser got overloaded with pop-overs, malware and javascript trackers. You know, we can keep that from happening for a price."
Pretend there is a Museum. It's free to the public with a suggested donation. You go there every weekend because of it's interesting collection of $thing. You never pay the suggested donation.
Is this ethical? It's not illegal. But that isn't the question.
Not a good analogy. If there was a donation mechanism, many people might choose to pay it. I contribute to several sites via Patreon, for instance.
But if every time you visit the museum someone follows you around talking in your ear about the products available in the gift shop, you might choose not to go, or (if the content is interesting enough) you might start wearing headphones or earplugs and go anyway.
So a paywall, except it's intentionally obnoxious/dangerous to the very people it's trying to get to pay them money? I don't think this is a realistic thing to worry about.
Now that's an interesting question. I wonder if we'll start seeing people try to use explicit copyright licenses to say that your license is revoked if you use an ad blocker. Not sure what that'd look like.
i actually view it more like the standard age old pricing model for goods with massive supply. "Content" is drastically higher in supply than demand, you are simply paying your market price for content. Ads would of course exist, but largely yahoo and early portals acted as print media companies selling advertising instead of content because 1) it was a new dist model, 2) there was nothing close to the ecomnerce and payment tools.
So basically, you are just paying for the goods you use, you set your price and this is beneficial to companies because the marginal cost of serving a webpage is almost nothing so if you opt to pay anything it is profit.
Unfortunately, taking time to pay for something has more friction than just not paying for it as well as being cheaper.
In terms of generating-revenue-without-running-ads, I do think Patreon is still a better option, as it both provides a consistent, nonseasonal revenue source for the author and content guarantees for the user; a win-win in both cases.
Google Contributor is more of a charitable option which might be too subtle.
I'm going to second Patreon as a good revenue source. Those of us that consume the web want quality content, but that content does not come cheaply (think big production, high quality videos with sets, actors, scripts, editing and visual effects). Money needs to flow somehow in some way for these things to be made, but the current model rewards lots of cheap, small effort content to make money by scaling the amount of it.
I don't want ten different ad network javascripts being loaded and running on every single page, along with whatever assets they want to load up and all the tracking they do across websites.
And tracking is a huge one. This is no longer just a question of whether I'm supporting the site I visit. Whatever your site has to offer is not worth the all-encompassing tracking that the networks are doing. If it is, you'll have a subscription fee I can pay and your service will be valuable enough that I'll pay it.
I've been using it for about 6 months. I don't use ad blocking, so it certainly helps. When it happens to replace all ads on a site it feels good, but that's unfortunately rare. :/
I like the idea, but because it's so random it falls into an unsatisfying place most of the time. Really I'd rather it work for most other ad networks instead, since AdSense is among the least offensive. If Google manages to get other networks into the system, it could be really nice.
This seems neat, but can I still use noscript and my ad blocker? I feel like the ads need to be display-able for their backend to know I'm visiting a page. But I use noscript and ublock, so it would fail to pay out.
My experiments so far (with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Exploding Cookies, and Random User Agent all on) suggest no. It seems like you'd have to do some extra work to whitelist sites so that they could get paid. It isn't clear what GOOG will do with my $2 if they can't attribute my visits...
Q: Isn’t there a waitlist to join? Or I need an invite
or something?
A: Not anymore! You can sign up immediately and support
tons of websites with one monthly payment.
With the recent ad blocker threads I wanted to see how many of my users actually use an adblocker. I have a technical tutorials site that is not that active anymore. I estimate that tech sites will likely have a higher percentage of adblock users. I track this using a Google Analytics custom variable and the blockadblock script (a fork of fuckadblock with a less offensive name).
So far I detect that 15-20% of my users have an adblocker enabled. This probably misses some percentage of people since it uses GA and JS. Users with ghostery or JS disabled won't be detected but it's close enough for me. The numbers are not quite as high as I expected them to be.
I like that people are thinking in this direction, and I would in principle be happy to pay a smallish monthly fee instead of just using an ad blocker. But this system doesn't really solve the issues I have with ads.
The best part about this is that you have really fine grained control over where your money goes.
Don't like it going to a specific site? You can disable just that site in the settings.
Want to replace ads with an image of something random? You can do that as well!
Want to only have contributor run on a few hand-picked sites? Can do that too!
A friend of mine has it setup so that it's whitelist only where he disables his adblock just for those sites, and allows contributor to work only on them.
It's actually a really nice and well thought out system.
If I can do this anonymously I'm sold. I think there is a considerable overlap between the target group for this feature and the group of privacy aware people.
Let us create anonymous profiles, give us the possibility to pay via prepaid card and you will be our hero again, Google.
I've been a contributor member for several months now, because I firmly believe in two things:
1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist.
2. Life without ads is much better.
So here's what people need to know about Google contributor:
1. I pay for the highest level available.
2. I love not seeing ads.
3. This only works for Google-based ads, which are certainly common, but are neither the majority of advertising online, nor are they among the more annoying.
4. Contributor doesn't work like an ad blocker, which makes ads just "disappear." Instead, you see a big empty block (that is apparently customizable in some way) that says "Thank you for being a contributor. The ad space is still there, it's just blank. So if half of your page used to be covered in ads, now half your page is covered in little blocks that say, "Thank you for being a contributor."
5. This doesn't stop most of your pages from taking forever to load because of JavaScript from other ad networks.
6. I don't care about the tracking/privacy as much as some people, but it doesn't solve that problem either.
So, do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely. I hope Google can expand it, and I will pay. I have no idea how expensive it would be to pay for the disappearance of all ads, but I'd likely do it. (I recognize I'm not the "average" Internet user as far as what I'm willing to pay).
That being said, it does not yet come close to competing with the convenience that an ad-blocker provides (which I don't use out of principle).
It's still early, so I give some leeway, and I like the idea, but as of yet this won't be a game changer. I truly hope it can become one.
Is the $15/mo use it or lose it, or just a maximum amount? IE, do all your monthly subscriptions add up to $15?
If I'm paying the same as the bidding cost for advertisers, then I'm all in, this is super sweet. If I'm paying some vague hand-wavy fee that reduces my ads, but doesn't correspond 1-1 to what advertisers are paying then forget it.
Don't you feel a bit ripped off? Why does google get to keep the extra? How do we know they aren't still showing you SOME ads, just not all of them, and the price for that is $15?
The way I would be in 100% support of this would be if I could go and "top up" my ad-support-budget. Say I add $50.. and from then on every Google served ad gets swallowed up and my balance gets deducted whatever the bid price was, with the same % going to the contributor site.
When my $50 is up, ads return. I can choose to refill as I want, or set it up to auto-refill with $20 when it runs out, sending me an email or whatnot.
I really really really like this concept, but man, they need to be really honest with their implementation.
Any unused money rolls over to the next month, according to Google [1]. I've been using it for months at $15/month and I've never seen it not use all of the money. I do use the internet constantly at work, though, and see many websites.
- Sites like thewirecutter.com make their money from affiliate links
- To try this experiment, I need to turn adblocking off. Which I am not willing to.
- Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads. http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-... -- people are happier since less information assaults their brains, companies are still doing what they need to do because they needed to get creative ways to convince people why their products are worthwhile.
> Sites like thewirecutter.com make their money from affiliate links
Yes, there are multiple ways to monetize things on the Internet. Affiliate links work very well for Wirecutter, because it is based around people trying to buy things. If you're forbes.com however, affiliate links don't really work.
> Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads...
If the problem we're trying to solve is, "How can we pay content creators what they need in order to continue producing content?" then an anecdote about outdoor advertising and billboards is largely irrelevant.
Of course, your proposed solution may be, "No one gets paid for content and the content ceases to exist because I don't like ads," and that may be what happens to some degree, but I personally wouldn't like that solution very much.
Is there really so much content scattered across so many sites that you couldn't easily pay for the content you enjoy, if it came to that? I would pay a small Tumblr subscription. I already patronize comic artists and musicians whose work I want to continue to exist. Jenna Marbles and Medium ego-pieces I wouldn't miss.
It could be argued that affiliate links on thewirecutter.com aren't ads so much as they are content. I realize they are advertising affiliates, but since that's what I go to the site for, I'm definitely not going to want to pay to get rid of them!
And I'm going to continue using an adblocker out of principle - because to me, the principle that my computer should remain free of malware is stronger than the principle that content creators should get paid.
Sadly, this. It doesn't come down to not wanting to look at ads (though that's a big part), it comes down to exploits being served through massive ad networks that no human has the time to vet.
I'll start unblocking ads the moment site creators start taking responsibility for what they display. My hourly rate for machine fixing is many times more than the few tenths of a penny you got for my ad impression.
Or, you know, you could block ads and try not consume the content of creators who have advertising. There seems to be an underlying assumption in your statement that you deserve access to their content, and well, if the mechanisms they put in place to monetize it are too onerous, you should feel fine just taking it.
Just because we don't like those companies doesn't mean there isn't some truth to their arguments (regarding Tivo at least, I'm not sure what they bitch at Netflix about).
Just because a company has something to sell, doesn't obligate people to buy it. if you can't get someone to buy it, displaying it for free then griping because people STILL don't want to pay for it, is just frankly ridiculous to me.
To answer your question above, they gripe because they are being disrupted by technology and cannot charge what they want to charge for their product.
That's not how it works. They aren't displaying it for free, they're displaying it in exchange for your attention/time on the accompanying ads.
You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of. Otherwise if there really is no value on that page, what are you doing there? You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting.
> They aren't displaying it for free, they're displaying it in exchange for your attention/time on the accompanying ads.
> You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of.
Well, current model also costs me that $0.001 (likely more) in electricity costs and exposes me to at best some ugly-looking crap made with adversarial intent, that has nonzero chance of scamming me into buying something I don't need, and at worst is a vector of malware delivery. It also costs me time wasted on waiting (10x longer load times) and productivity losses due to system slowing down if for some reason I need to keep the site open and do something else.
> You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting
You prove there is potential value by visiting. You won't know if there is an actual value until you at least skim the content. If you're visiting the same site regularly you can start to predict how much value you expect to get out of a visit, but at this point the site owner can probably convince you to pay for it somehow (be it subscription, turning off the ads, selling you their book, etc.).
The electricity costs you mentioned are externalities and not really relevant here. Otherwise you will start blaming everything for every little action you take. If you don't want to browse that site, you can stop at any level from going to that url, starting your browser, buying your computer, living in that country, etc.
When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?
I also hear this "potential" value argument a lot - why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value? Just doesn't make sense. And either way, ads allow you to not lose anything monetarily if you feel that site didn't give you what you expected. It's very a fair and low-risk trade.
> The electricity costs you mentioned are externalities and not really relevant here.
This is very relevant here, because a big part of issue with ads is about dumping externalities on people. When you multiply that small electricity costs by number of people exposed to a bloated, flashy ad you'll see it actually adds up to a decent amount of coal unnecessarily burned. But that's beside the point, I only brought up electricity because it's commensurable to the amount of money ad-serving site makes on me.
> When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?
I don't ask for refund, but I do tally that and include in my decision about which shop to go to.
> why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value?
As I said, if I go to a website regularly, it means that I have some concept of value I may expect to get from it. Bust most of browsing today is driven by a) search results, and b) link aggregators. Most of the websites I visit I visit only once or twice in a lifetime, because there was a link to a particular article on HackerNews, or maybe because it was the first search result for my query. In such situation I do not have concept of value I am about to receive.
> It's very a fair and low-risk trade.
It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.
> I don't ask for refund, but I do tally that and include in my decision about which shop to go to.
Then include that in your decision in whether to go to a site with ads. You wouldn't just take things from the store either?
> It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.
Scams are a greater issue than to put on advertising. Malware is an issue and I agree with that. The industry does need to work on this and things are changing but that doesn't suddenly make it ok to take. If the risk is too much for you, dont visit the site. Same as if the risk of driving on the freeways is too much, stay off the freeway.
You seem to keep saying you take risk and externalities into account but then say that you have no control and thus rationalize taking content, however you always have the choice of just not going to that link.
I think you are stretching the definition of the word free.
Me looking at something is not a form of payment. The payment is coming from the advertiser. The advertiser is paying the content producer, THAT is the business transaction. Whether I choose to view the ad and make those advertisements have value is not my concern. Those ads are the REAL value and worthy of my payment.
Otherwise viewing the NYT is like watching sunsets, the only way to monetiZe that is by slapping a billboard in front of me, at which point, i go elsewhere
Your attention (via looking or interacting) is the form of payment. This attention is given to the advertisers who pay the publishers who produce the content.
If you went elsewhere, there's no issue. But when you breakdown the billboard and still see the sunset (assuming the sunset is copyrighted and original content) then you're changing the value exchange unfairly.
You can't feed a family on people viewing stuff. Money needs to change hands. The billboard operator charges the advertiser. There is no obligation on the part of the viewer to look at anything.
Under your definition, getting up to go to the bathroom during commericials or making a conscious effort to look away from ads is ...immoral? Illegal? Fraud? There is no contract no quid pro quo.
The content providers are selling real estate. Thats it.
You can because this is how many publishing companies are run today.
The obligation is to accept the ads with the content. It's actually in the terms and service of many sites and doesn't require a signature. This is completely legal and binding, just not easily enforceable.
Sure there might be natural losses due to leaving or not looking at the screen but adblockers are all about your intent to completely remove the ads from the content before you even seen it. That's the issue.
I have a hard time believing those terms of conditions meets the inquiry notice requirements and would stand up in court against anonymous internet users.
I view a website and someone says I owe them my first born, does not make it so.
It wouldnt for many sites but it just wasn't a problem before because the value exchange held. Privacy laws and adblocking are causing these to become more visible with explicit Accept buttons however there's still the obstacle of proving identity online.
Anyways, this is something that paywalls solve entirely so it's a great model, but nobody wants to pay.
I wouldn't consume their contents if they are at a subscription fee. Most of the content creators on the internet know that their content wouldn't earn them a subscription, so they choose the advertisement model. If you make something worth paying money for, people will pay.
I mean, they're not making me sign a contract saying I wouldn't consume their content if the ads are off, so it's up to me to choose what I see on MY computer. There are also websites which detect adblockers and don't show their content at all. I'd just close their website not caring about their content, so at least I don't find it worth paying for.
Even I have blogs, videos which earn me ad money. I know had it not been ads, no one give a dime to see them :), and it's perfectly fine for me.
People don't want to pay because it requires friction on every purchase and much of the content on the internet adds up to fractions of a penny per impression. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value.
Think of like a movie: you can pay $10 to see the whole thing or $0.001 per each frame. That's what the web is like with each frame possibly being from a different publisher. That kind of granular payments is very hard to pull off effectively outside of advertising.
You're paying the ISP for infrastructure access. Not for content.
It's possible to have a separate "content" subscription but that will mean ISPs have far more tracking and net neutrality issues than now so it's best to have another 3rd party doing this.
If they put their content up without charging me for it, then why wouldn't I deserve to see it? If the deal is "look at this ad in exchange for viewing the article", then they could key on the ad as a password for the article.
But that's obviously not the deal, because your traffic would plummet as many of your visitors would reject that deal. So don't pretend an agreement exists here. Visiting a website is not an obligation to view the content or the ads.
The agreement is between the website and the advertiser. They have obligations to each other, we don't have obligations to them.
> much of the web I know and love will cease to exist
Which parts of the web are those exactly?
You'd be surprised at how creative people can get when their livelihoods are threatened by changing business models. Those who come up with a better solution for monetizing good content will survive. Those who don't, or who had poor content to begin with, will be forced out of the market.
The problem is, the changed business model will often be worse, because if it were better, we'd already have switched to it by now.
Look at the main alternatives – subscription is the usual other one. And subscription will probably be enough to keep the big sites like Google and Facebook afloat, but for smaller sites, they'd just go under. Not to mention subscription biases the wealthy – suddenly, the poor are locked out of a lot of sites.
> or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist
I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.
Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is that they have to get their pagerank up and stay relevant. The reason they have to do that is because if they don't do it, there are ad revenue dependent content generators out there that will do it for them. If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.
Google is great. I think in many ways they've made the world a better place. Google is very ad revenue dependent. Ad revenue sponsored all of the great television shows and radio shows from the beginning. I don't think that advertising should go away because it makes great things by Google and media companies possible.
However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.
"Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do."
Not any more. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist are all paywalled. Those are some of the few remaining newspapers with sizable reporting staffs.
Most other US "newspapers" have a few reporters, but mostly regurgitate wire services and press releases. The "fluff" sections (cars, real estate, food and wine, sports) are outsourced, sometimes to Demand Media, the content-farm company.
Buy a newspaper and mark all the articles that didn't originate as a press release, press conference, national news service, or ad. There will not be many.
Those organisations have paywalls, yes, but they still depend overwhelmingly on ads for funding. If they lost it all tomorrow their paywall earnings would come nowhere near filling that hole.
And you seem to be ignoring cause and effect here - the reasons many newspapers have much smaller staffs these days is because the bottom fell out of the ad market and left them with no money.
I don't really understand the point you're making here. Who suggested having ads improved the reporting? It made the reporting available to you at a lower (or free) price.
The argument made slightly above was that without ads, we lose the current media environment. I'm saying (agreeing with some) that since the current media environment contains very little reporting of value, I don't see a real reason to maintain it.
Ads providing revenue has not led to value, ergo I don't see much reason to protect the status quo for fear of losing it.
> Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is ... ad revenue .... If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.
That's one of the best good for all, social arguments against ads/for blockers that I've seen.
This entire post has plenty of objective arguments. What aspect would you like to discuss?
There's nothing wrong with subjective - unless you're actively trying to say you know what's right for everyone else. That's not how we make progress in the best interests of everyone.
> The reason why people continue to visit all those sites and click all those links?---Because they like it.
This is disingenuous; there are people who dedicate their working life to causing other people to do things they (other people) don't want to do (e.g., following a psychologically-designed bespoke(!) anchor that belongs to a class of things colloquially known as ``link bait". )
So half the planet is incapable of learning what clickbait is and only you can resist it?
Let's say everyone falls for it once, twice or even a dozen times. Don't you think the traffic would just stop after a while. Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?
Why do celebrities have the most followers and gossip sites have some of the highest traffic? It's easy to argue that it's not "valuable" or "educational" content but it's still incredibly popular. Does that somehow make it "bad"? Are you the judge of that? Or is someone manipulating everyone to pay attention? Are a few people capable of controlling entire populations this easily? And why are they spending time with ads then?
OR - could it simply be that people just like what they like? At some point you just have to put aside the prejudices and look at the data and see that much of the popular stuff on the web is popular precisely because it's what users want.
> So half the planet is incapable of learning what clickbait is and only you can resist it?
Are you suggesting that this was my contention?!---I fall for click bait all the time.
> Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?
No, but I don't think ``we" are actively trying to figure it out. People design these traps _for a living_; ``we" get trapped by them _in ``our" spare time_.
Why do serial primetime comedies use laugh tracks? The writing is base and the jokes often not funny, but when we hear other people laugh we're psychologically driven to feel more joy/humor/whatever and join in.
Why do people keep clicking obvious linkbait articles? Because there's certain social-inclusion triggers we're wired to respond to, logic and conditioning be damned. The content isn't popular. The forcing function used to drive that traffic is playing on social addictions.
At some point you have to put aside the "data" and think about where the cause and effect really lies.
You never put aside the "data". That's how you make smart decisions.
You're talking about basing all this on some rough psychology - however plenty of people don't watch comedies with laugh tracks because they just don't like the show and it's the same with headlines.
There might be certain influences (since it is called clickbait) but in the end it's all up to the user. They choose to click.
Upvoted because its well thought-out, but here's what I'm thinkin...
> If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.
Sounds like a funny way to try to make the internet more "sophisticated." If you dont like the content of the regurgitation engine, then you wouldnt visit the site and so wouldnt be supporting it.
So something else is at play. I think that a huge portion of the public actually likes the regurgitated content. They come home from work and just want to chill out and be mildly entertained by buzzfeed. So addblockers dont reduce the velocity of the crap engine, they take away your patronage and therefore your vote for what content you want to see.
I think that there is so much low quality on the web because people value it very low. They only pay by viewing adds (and with privacy) so the media produced will reflect that.
Now think about what might happen with contributor. Those that hate viewing adds and some that block them will decide to pay for the add space of the pages they view. Then the value of addsense space goes up since advertisers are more confident that the people seeing the adds will not hate them and the website also gets money from those who are contributors. So the value of content goes up as well and that should bring the quality up as well.
> However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.
You're not really paying google. Google takes a commission, which they deserve, and the money goes to the content creators. Tivo and DVR are bad examples since they actually did end an era in television and were not free so not very widely used for a long time.
I think the problem is more that there is not that much good stuff out there. I mean look at Netflix. I like it, but it's either films I have seen, often on tv, from maybe ten years ago, or it's really bad. Really bad.
But there might not be enough really good stuff out there. User created content is never going to be like professional globally top notch produced content - or if it is it will take as much talent and time to make. Once I have seen the new Star Wars film, it's not like I am going to be able to see another three hours of similar quality entertainment the next night and the next and the next.
For a thousand years humans have mostly entertained themselves by talking and jossing and laughing with each other. That's likely to be the future of content - just aimed at our niches.
It's a chicken and egg problem, right? If we want good quality content on the web, we have to be willing to pay people on the web. If we also don't like ads, then one way to support the content is via micropayments. Many other models have been tried to varying degrees of success but didn't encompass all of the web like Google Contributor is trying to do.
I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.
Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and good content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.
Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.
And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.
Many of us liked the Internet in 1996 ;) And some saw its commercialization as an affront, as a violation of fundamental principles. So anyway, I'm not at all attached to the Internet existing in it's current form.
In general I agree with you. Technically though, youtube didn't have any revenue source initially, including ads. Basically they built a giant user base, then let someone else figure out how to make money with it (unsurprisingly, with ads).
"I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate to block ads."
And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.
It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.
Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).
There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.
And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.
Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.
It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.
Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.
> And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.
uMatrix is a much more effective way of using DNS to block ads than HOSTS file editing. You can select only certain items from certain domains. Sure, I block Google cookies on most sites, but those sites are dependent on scripts coming from the same domains. With uMatrix, I can permit just the scripts that the site needs.
And I can quickly and easily test different resource combinations to customize my website experience.
The fact that it is free doesn't mean it costs nothing. I am pretty sure that google's datacentre bill is not a tiny amount, and it takes lots of developers to make a gmail. And you won't be indexing the whole of the internet on an old desktop running in a closet.
But I never suggested any of those statements you are making.
What I was referring to is that Google's "product" is offered free to the user.
What you refer to highlights the importance of the question: if their "product" is not free to produce, then why don't they charge users for it?
No matter how well Google delivers your search results and email, if they cannot serve ads, they are in trouble. They have hundreds of millions of loyal users of these websites, but Google does not ask users for money.
> Contributor doesn't work like an ad blocker, which makes ads just "disappear." Instead, you see a big empty block (that is apparently customizable in some way) that says "Thank you for being a contributor. The ad space is still there, it's just blank. So if half of your page used to be covered in ads, now half your page is covered in little blocks that say, "Thank you for being a contributor."
The demo images/gifs make it seem like you can make the ad space disappear. Is this achieveable by replacing the placeholder with a custom 1x1px image?
There is a checkbox that says "Use custom URL" - it's even in your screenshot. It is obviously designed to insert something else - a 1x1 pixel for example. That is not a "hack" and as it is there for everyone, it clearly IS the way Google designed it to function.
> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist.
YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to earn money. Wikipedia? Check. HN discussions? Check. Topical subreddits? Check. Tutorials, videos, articles? Check, check, check. In fact, over time I've noticed a strong negative correlation between trustworthiness of content and amount of ads around it.
Heck, myself I created lots of such content and always felt it should be distributed for free.
Sure, videogames, music, movies, etc. are a different story. They are products that usually require full-time engagement of skilled professionals and you can't really get around paying for those. But your average web page? Rule of thumb: the more ads it projects, the more likely it is that it exists only to earn money off you (quality or dependability of content be damned).
TL;DR: I don't mind if upon removing ad support half of the Internet goes to shit. It was the bad part.
Oh, and since someone will surely bring up New York Times - I say, let it burn. Let's be honest with ourselves, we all know mainstream media are 1% content, 99% combination of bullshit and malicious lies. I'm willing to support that 1% with cash, but not the 99%. It is harmful to society and it should die.
Doesn't matter. They don't create the content, but merely facilitate creation by unpaid volunteers.
Yes, they use ads, and if they didn't, I probably would be happy to pay or donate (if only to keep all the topical forums in one place and not revert to dark ages of phpBB and linear discussion threads). But let's not cheat ourselves - the ads are not paying for the content, they are merely supporting an efficient platform.
I like reddit because they encourage people to visit the websites of the content creators by way of link aggregation. You go to /r/Worldnews or something, and it's a link to the BBC or Reuters. They don't host the articles themselves. This sends much needed traffic to the people who deserve it. Whether you're a big name like cnn.com or a small publisher like StevesBlog.com, you're on an equal playing field.
There are some issues which are really simple. Feeding people lies and bullshit to earn money is rather a clear-cut issue. So is encouraging dysrationalia. And yes, as a member of society it is my right to voice my opinion about whether something is endangering it.
It's not just about me not wanting to read the bad stuff. If I dislike a page, I just don't visit it, I usually don't complain. But when talking about mass media, every lie they write gets read by the general population. People still (for some reason, probably because there's no other established alternative) trust them, and most don't have time to evaluate the claims critically. They form beliefs based on lies, and then they act based on those beliefs. In democracies, they go and vote based on those beliefs.
So suddenly, that pile of bullshit I carefully avoid to read gets amplified and hits me anyway, in form of bad policy, bad social projects and, well, bad zeitgeist.
Then educate people. Educate the people who are writing the "bad" stuff in the first place. Educate the people who are making the policies. Become the educator and the policy maker and be the change you want in the population. That's how you fix things.
But complaining about what people should consume because you deem it unworthy seems arrogant, draconian and irrational.
I tend to agree with you. Of course I started using the internet in the late 80s. At that time, the absolute best things on the internet were Usenet FAQs. These days it is really hard to find things of that quality because you are overrun with people trying to make a buck.
I think a good example is recipes. At one point, I instructed google to ignore food.com, about.com, food-network.com and a few more. But now there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites that are simply indiscriminate collectors of (mostly) crap recipes. If I search for a recipe for ramen, I'm looking for the obsessed guy who eats ramen 3 meals a day, tweaks everything until it is just perfect, and knows all the differences between ramen in every area, and knows how to make his own noodles, etc, etc. I'm not looking for, "Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Review: "5 stars!!! My husband and I make this all the time." The rest of the page is full of ads.)
And these days you get kind of "boutique" websites where someone has decided to have a go and make it their livelihood. And as much as some of these are really good, the vast majority are just writing 2000 words of how they went to Japan and tried ramen and how they couldn't get a hotel room in Kyoto because it was golden week and they didn't know that it got so busy... followed by, "Recipe: Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Comments: "5 stars!!! My wife and I make this all the time." The right 30% of the page is filled with ads).
The thing is that in order to be really amazingly informed about something, you really need to obsess about it. So the really amazing websites seem to be run by people who are thinking "I need some place to put down my ideas", not "What can I write that will make me money". Sometimes the former also manage to make money on their writing, but by and large I think the best sites are the ones that are not motivated by profit.
I have thought for a long time that we need a different kind of search engine (which I will tentatively call "Otaku"). Instead of of ranking pages based on popularity, they would be ranked on how nerdy they were. I'd love to get my old internet back ;-)
I thought I was clever and tried to enable it from the Apple News web browser so I wouldn't get ads there even when I follow links. But it doesn't seem to work due to third party cookies being blocked.
I wonder if that also means it won't work anywhere else where an embedded web view is used.
And I tried to see if it removes Video ads on YouTube (which I find very annoying), but that doesn't seem to be the case.
If viewing contents without viewing ads is damaging to a site, they can block. Or they can provide N free views per X days, and then block. And provide a subscription mechanism.
I think I must have been turned away from a site once or twice, but I really can't remember specifically.
So they don't block. Which means, they get something out of the visit. Exposure, at least. The hope of an eventual subscription, as I subscribe to the NYT digital.
But if they don't block, then they either get something out of those visit, or they're foolish. Either way, I'm not worried about them.
Most adblockers these days get rid of those messages as well. And asking you to unblock is not the same as stopping you completely - the only way to do that is paywalls.
Yes, but the point is, if they have the ability to ask, whether my blocker blocks the ask message or not, then they know I'm using an ad blocker, and they can refuse to serve me content, or redirect me to a subscription/registration page. But they keep on letting me view their content. It's their problem.
I don't think you understand the technicality behind it or didn't read the details above.
Sites can only attempt to ask by basically rendering that message and then replacing with ads. If the ads never load, then you'll see that message. However all these tricks are incredibly easy to get around with adblocker filters and so websites do NOT have a reliable way of knowing whether you are using an adblocker or not.
They can either refuse to serve content to everyone without a login (paywall) or serve it to everyone and hope the ads are there. That's how HTML works, the content is part of it and your adblocker is filtering it after receiving the content. There is no way for sites to refuse adblock users even if they wanted to without a paywall system.
You might look at this and think they still want you to have the content for free but they'd rather not - it's just out of their control unless they implement a different access model altogether.
> 1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.
Yes – content creators should get paid. Also, not all ads are bad. Some campaigns even make such an impression on popular culture that they have their own place in history. But the campaigns that won't? Well, basically anything coming out of ad machines like adsense and what not.
Ads can be tasteful, even enjoyable, but most of the internet ads aren't. Unlike broadcast tv, you can block internet ads; it's easy to do, and you should. Not because it'll kill content creators or indie app makers[1] or whatever, because it won't. It'll hurt the revenue streams of shitty ad mongers like adsense and doubleclick and facebook and admob and what have you. These are – in my opinion – on the same shitty level as porn peddlers. They sell crap for pennies, but they win because you just won't reach out to everyone otherwise. Google and Twitter and Facebook and all of the shitty ad platform snake-oil salesmen are the broadcasters of today – and their messages suck.
Not only do their messages suck, but people – good people – spend valuable time they'll never get back in order to produce these shitty ads. Time they could have spent doing something useful. Instead they made a shitty flash banner that won't play anyway because everyone blocks flash.
Ads of this kind need to be blocked so we can get to a point where advertising can be good. Where it requires thought, effort, research. Where it requires smart people, creative people, coming up with things that matter and are contextually relevant. The shitty ads we have today need to be blocked to preserve bandwidth, and to help make our planet perhaps die a little bit less every year. Blocking ads on the internet is easy, and doesn't require fancy heuristics or anything. It just requires black lists and hive minds. Ads that are not peddled through "platforms" or however you'd like to describe it – sponsored articles like those on Daring Fireball or increasingly in news papers these days – are less easy to block, and require more effort. But those ads aren't annoying, and they may not be entirely relevant but at least you don't want to throw up because you're fed up with their bullshit. So it becomes a cost/benefit calculation – is it worth the time and energy to block all ads, or are some ads ok?
To me the answer to that is simple: ads are ok. The ad-porn that inflicts the internet today, through adsense and the rest of the ad-platform mob, can die a painful death in fire. Fuck 'em, I'm blocking their shitty ads left-right-center.
Also, fuck Google Contribute. It's just an ad platform's way of realizing their shitty business is threatened by the pervasiveness of blockers, and so they find a way to make people pay for "their" space which wasn't their space to begin with. The internet isn't a walled Google garden, where they can come in and dictate rev-share terms. I'd rather give a site owner 100% of my money, than 30% to Google.
Well, technically you're not "seeing" ads but I'm pretty sure your information is still being traded to data providers.
This actually works to google's advantage. They reduce ad blindness and when an actual ad appears it will be highly targeted and probably gives Google a lot more revenue per ad.
So you pay the highest level for it, and think it is a good idea... yet a few days ago, you said:
"Google Contributor is terrible. Not because it doesn't work, but because it still leaves big green gaps where the ads were saying, "Thank you for using contributor!" Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were."
|1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.
One of the nice things about ads is that it allows many users to browse content for free - subsidised by those that interact with adverts.
If advertising were to go away and micro-payments replace it - how do users get free access to content subsidised by the masses? I can freely browse the most internet today from anywhere in the world regardless of my income situation. A micro-payments barrier to entry isn't going to allow that.
Also those who are most likely to pay for a solution like this are likely the most affluent who are likely to be the ones clicking and buying products through advertising.
A few days ago I remarked on Twitter: "sad that Contributor, a great alternative to ads/tracking, is owned & marketed by Google, which has more to lose than gain from promoting it"[0]
The idea behind Contributor is a powerful one: one that if aggressively marketed and expanded, could (at least conceivably) provide a viable hybrid model for online content publishing (that could coexist with ad-tech).
But Google is a one-trick pony (with ads, obviously) and has everything at stake here. That makes Contributor feel like more of a defensive "moat" initiative -- there to passively discourage others from pursuing (or investing in) similar ideas. Maybe I'm being too cynical. I too am happily subscribed to Contributor--the most dramatic difference is The Next Web -- where the crazy canvas-flying ads are toggled off.
Yeah. This seems like a typical Google half-measure with little thought put into it. It's a shame because there is so much that could be done, but companies like google just don't care enough, yet, to actually put in the work.
You have some good thoughts here. I do not think that Google Contributor is the answer, though it's in the right ballpark.
The advantages of Google Contributor are reasonably clear. There is at least:
1. Works through Google's existing advertising systems, so easier for them to implement.
2. Minimal work for websites to sign up.
3. Advertisements disappear, while supporting websites.
4. Very little work for the end user to get started.
But the disadvantages to me seem quite strong. A few:
1. Advertisers (e.g., Google), can still track you. Those with privacy concerns won't have those concerns addressed.
2. Doesn't remove all ads (even if you pay the maximal amount, it only affects Google ads, as you say).
3. Effectively creates more competition for the ad spots, driving the prices up (good for Google).
4. Does not change content layout.
5. Google still controls the space, where it would be better for the website owner to be able to use that space themselves.
6. Pricing is not clear. What exactly am I getting for what I pay? As competition increases, price goes up. As an end user, I like to know how much I need to pay to get a particular service. I don't want to have to give it much thought.
I do think it's great that you're willing to support websites in removing ads. An Adblock Plus survey suggests that there are many users who would be willing to donate, so you're not alone.
Full disclosure: I run https://webpass.io, a service to give money back to the content creators in a way that completely bypasses the advertising industry, rather than working through it (thus protecting privacy). Gives the power to the website owner to control their content, not Google.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadThe next thought was that a paid service with a low fee for Yahoo news, email etc. can be profitable and have happy users.
4. Google gets paid, rather than all the money going to the actual website.
If anything, more entities bidding for the ad means the prices can go higher and the website gets more money (though I imagine any difference here would be undetectable).
Because the point is that a lot of people who block ads, don't actually like advertising. I would hazard a guess that they want to support websites, but they don't want to support advertising companies, and validate their business.
Google's primary job is to make billions of dollars of profit. I believe an organization like that has all the more incentive to inflate the fees and pocket as much as possible.
Now, personally, I don't think Google pays me enough to run AdSense on any of my sites. It's frankly not even close, so the fee isn't the issue -- it's just a bad fit for the volume and type of content I produce. I can see why it's great for many other publishers though.
In fact there are many niche ad networks with fees much higher than Google, but they actually pay publishers more because they also charge the advertisers much more.
I feel that if I pay for something and it now requires me to have an account I'm getting a worse experience. This is especially true in this case where a free product like uBlock will yield a better result.
That means that if I go to 1000 websites in a month I'd expect to pay about $1. I'd be interested to see how many impressions I make per month and find out how much money I actually generate for these websites.
I'd also be interested in a focused ad session to reduce the cost of my browsing. I.E. you show me products and I actually click on them to check them out, and you add money to my pool for browsing. It would have to be an opt-in scenario, but that would be an alternative to paying and seeing ads while you browse.
I'm also going to factor in that this only removes at most 50% of the ads. we are talking about vising something like 166 (15000/30/6 *2(for the 50%)) pages on an average day. And those are pages with google ads only.
So do I visit 166 pages with 6 google ads on it a day? I don't honestly know but I doubt it.
Now if I could pay $15 a month to remove ALL ads, I think that would be worth my money, even though I still doubt that I visit 166 pages a day.
Just cut out 100% of the ads and divide the $15 among the sites a viewed. If that comes out to a couple of cents for each that's still better than nothing.
On the other hand, looks like a nice social engineering experiment in figuring out how to convince users to be tracked better.
Either they do or they don't. A quick google didn't turn anything up, but does someone have a reputable source?
https://blog.malwarebytes.org/malvertising-2/2014/09/googles...
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/247982/google-...
http://www.csoonline.com/article/2924309/malware-cybercrime/...
http://readwrite.com/2014/05/15/app-redirects-mobile-spam-ad...
As far as I'm concerned, no need to be polite with Doubleclick. If they're serving malware, they can fuck right off.
I'm not certain, but I believe the ad network being used was associated with Google.
(Not that the ads were officially allowed, I think I read things on a Google support forum which indicated that they hadn't finished blocking those ads yet, or blocking them again when they were created again. Still, I think an ad agency has a responsibility to proactively(?) ensure that they do not serve any malicious (in the security sense) ads.)
I have seen several adsense ads that auto-play. But it could be that they're violating Google's policies. I tried looking for a policy document, but this is all I could find.
https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/176108?hl=en
http://sendvid.com/lhstkqtl
There's no excuse: the site operator, the ad network, and the ad buyer all collaborate to deceive the user. Google could easily stop this practice, but they don't. "Do no evil, unless it affects the bottom line".
It's pretty brilliant really.
I think my ideal system would be something where a website can offer a bitcoin* address in a header, and at the end of the month my browser randomly picks a set of addresses it's seen, and sends money to them. (In conjunction with current ad-blocking technology.)
* Bitcoin probably wouldn't work due to transaction limits, but maybe some sort of sidechain, alternative coin, or something similar.
This is so ripe for abuse it's not even funny. It would take clickjacking to a whole new level.
This is the whole problem with microtransactions: sites need them to be frictionless or else users will abandon the flow no matter how low the price is, but financial transactions need some sort of user confirmation or else they're wide open to abuse.
I agree. I solved this problem with a 3-party protocol (user, provider, authenticator) that can't be subverted by either the user or the provider.
No user intervention is required; it works seamlessly. User identity is not revealed and the provider cannot piggyback on the shared tokens to create a persistent identifier. The same scheme can be used to provide effortless passage through paywalls, as well as enabling the same model as Contributor (and before them Kachingle, Contenture, Readability and several others who've failed).
The technology is the easy part for microtransactions. Simplifying the business rules to the point it can cheap enough to operate financial transactions safely is the hard part.
If payment is proportional to usage, then a linkbait/clickbait scheme won't work. The point is to reward genuine repeat visits to a site you like.
If the profit is too low, fraudsters simply go elsewhere.
It will continue to take up space in most cases (but the system will make an ad block disappear completely if in some circumstances)
But you can go into your settings and set what you want to show up there.
It can be the default (a strange checkerboard mosaic thing), a selection of cat pictures, some abstract colors, a blank space, or you can set it to a custom URL (like a 1px by 1px gif image) which will make them collapse in a similar way to adblockers.
Payout could be based on a number of factors, including existing ads on the page (downvote), number of visits (upvote), seconds of streaming video watched (upvote), etc.
Everybody's been talking about the death of display ads, and it looks like Google's paying attention and trying to figure out how to marginalize the ad itself, but still take money on the transaction.
Eventually, Google could probably marginalize the ad so much that there are only a rare few display ads left online, and Google has cleverly tricked us into keeping that industry aloft, essentially paying to keep something we hate alive.
We hate content creators?
Lastly, we hate tracking. I can't overstate that. They kill profiling we kill ad blocking. Simple as that.
If someone is proposing a solution for or discussing a problem that affects the entire Internet, it's important to realize that there are several parties who think differently, and in fact only a very small minority feel the same way you or me or the majority of HN does about things.
I'm not proposing a solution, hell I wouldn't even consider that I know better than Google what should be done. I'm just stating a problem. Profiling is annoying. And as a user I don't think it works that well. When I visit a site for science fiction I'd prefer watching relative ads, not an ad about a pair of shoes I searched a week ago.
We certainly are a minority but an influencing one.
So why on earth are you going to those sites?
> We also hate paying for the whole site just to read a couple of articles every now and then. How about a pay-by-article model with widespread adoption from the industry?
That's literally what this is.
I'm not. But 95% of web sites out there are replicating content one way or the other.
That's literally what this is.
No it's not. That's a different model and I have no objections against it. This is a model where Google decides to give money to sites, and that is any site that's running AdSense not just the ones with original content. My argument is about why some of us like to use ad blocking mechanisms.
Contributor might not be the answer. But if nothing else, this is a great "put your money where your mouth is" experiment. Suddenly all the talk from adblock users about how they'd just love to micropay for content directly has been replaced with all manner of excuses.
What do you think the possible consequences of this are? Will that be a net positive or a net negative for content quality on the web?
And by the way, we're paying for content. It's called books, magazines, newspapers, kindle shorts, you name it. Half of the original content out there comes from established news agencies, and most of them don't even run AdSense.
And please, spare me with this false dilemma, we're either bombarded with ads or the web will cease to exist. I've been hearing that for more than a decade. Advertising evolves. Even if 80% of users adopted ad blocking technologies advertising would find a venue to reach users. It's doing that for decades.
If tracking is the actual hill to die on, I don't know how we'd possibly get to your stated optimal outcome of per-article micropayments. That is something that'll by necessity make it easier for you to be tracked. There will have to be a central micropayment platform (or a few ones), since the threshold for maintaining per-site wallets is going to be too high for users. You will also need to have a single persistent profile on that central site, rather than ephemeral profiles that can be wiped away just by clearing cookies or by browsing from an incognito window. You can't even block the HTTP requests that are passing your information about the article load to the central server, since that's exactly the request that's facilitating the micropayment you want to make.
So I don't know if it's a very consistent position.
(I did not make any claims about the web ceasing to exist, nor about the necessity of advertising. No idea why you're assigning those views to me.)
Is it, though? Perhaps a closer inspection of the payment model is in order. I found this:
> You’ll pay the market price for each ad space that shows a thank you message or pixel pattern. This price can vary a lot. The exact price is determined at the time of the Google ad auction.
Further details are here:
https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6084026?vid=1-...
Essentially, you are bidding against a website's advertisers and paying the going rate for that ad slot. Not all content is equally valuable to advertisers. Consider the high cost for cancer targeted advertising compared to targeting an audience for, say, some form of generic cola beverage. The page with the cancer advertisement will receive a higher portion of your Contribute budget than the page with the cola advertisement (if it's replaced at all.. Google may decide they get more money with the cancer-related ad than with your Contribute bid).
So, it doesn't seem to distribute your money in proportion to your level of visits. If you visit a single site more frequently than others, then sure, that site may get a larger number of bites at your budget, but if the value of that space is very low then the total sum you provide to this content creator could be less than what you give to the owner of the click-bait link you followed once and forgot about.
I run an adblocker and I do put my money where my mouth is.
If there was any news or essay site that put out consistently high-quality content, I'd pay for that too. But as it is I'm happy for mass media and sites with vacuous pseudo-intellectual articles like Quartz, Medium and Nautilus to die out.
But I'd go a step further than "BuzzFeed". Any of the "[something] via [somesite]" web sites are in the offending category. They literally make money from the content of others by (sometimes) rewording the original title and giving it a slightly more clickbait title so that their 'via' "articles" look more inviting. Often, this is a chain of evil. I do not want to support that chain, even if it is just for the one visit. I would like to support the original writer, but none of the reworders. Now, the sad part is, there is only a very small list of real content creators.
So because there are bad content creators, that means the good ones should not get paid?
I'm not quite following your logic.
As a nerdy guy, I'd much rather see video game ads than tampon ads. I get the ideological argument against targeted advertising, but the practical arguments for it are pretty compelling, too.
There's also the fact that targeted ads result in better CPMs for publishers (since they'll result in better returns-per-view for advertisers), which means that they don't have to deploy as many of them to meet revenue expectations.
Ads is the old print way of getting paid.
Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.
Why are you so focused on ads when it 1. Doesn't make sense if users can just block it and 2. There are better options for me to pay content creators?
If you aren't interested in my 'preference' you lose out. The customer is just trying to have a normal relationship here... Abusive forced ads are not normal... IMHO.
You realize that this has been tried and widely deemed a failure, right? Paywalls are a problem because they actively drive your audience away to next-best alternatives.
> Now, just restrict access and require a subscription. Have trial periods.
Actually, subscriptions + trial periods was also a print way of getting paid. For much the same reasons as it doesn't work for most mass content on the web, it didn't work well as the primary source of income for mass print publications (though there were publications for which it replaced ads, for the most part, it just served to provide a paid circulation number which demonstrated to advertisers the size of the audience that was dedicated enough to a publication that they were willing to pay something for it, so it was a proxy measure for effective ad reach.)
There are other categories of content creators who don't expect payment.
For example I contribute data to Flightradar24. In return they provide me with an ad-less experience because, like forum websites, their very existence depends on user contributions.
Other people just run websites for fun and education and pay for it willingly out of their pocket. I had to step-up to a 200GB package from my ISP for that reason. No-one paid towards my costs and I don't expect anyone to do so.
Why does this matter? If the total ad space expands, and therefore the number of ad views increases, people will still buy about the same amount of products they bought before, which means the total advertising revenue of all the sites will also still be the same.
What we'd need would be an ad blocker that allows us, at regular times, to go to a special page, get a list of all the ads, and click on some of them in a quiet moment where they don't interfere with site content. And of course all of these clicks would have to count as "organic" non-fraudulent clicks.
Care to back that up with some proof. Cuz I have a pretty clear picture of ad spending and this is not true at all.
But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.
1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.
2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.
This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.
I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...
This is flatly false. CPM models are alive and well. You don't need to look any further than AdSense for proof of that.
Is this ethical? It's not illegal. But that isn't the question.
But if every time you visit the museum someone follows you around talking in your ear about the products available in the gift shop, you might choose not to go, or (if the content is interesting enough) you might start wearing headphones or earplugs and go anyway.
Certainly.
> and how you use it
Now that's an interesting question. I wonder if we'll start seeing people try to use explicit copyright licenses to say that your license is revoked if you use an ad blocker. Not sure what that'd look like.
Recall back in the early 80s - the idea was to pay for TV so you wouldnt have ads...
So basically, you are just paying for the goods you use, you set your price and this is beneficial to companies because the marginal cost of serving a webpage is almost nothing so if you opt to pay anything it is profit.
Unfortunately, taking time to pay for something has more friction than just not paying for it as well as being cheaper.
Google Contributor is more of a charitable option which might be too subtle.
It feels it doesn't address the other reasons people use ad blocking:
- Fewer HTTP requests (Still have to do all the ad network requests)
- Less tracking
- Less CPU/RAM usage (Even if there is no render of ads, still have to process the JS from ad networks)
I don't want ten different ad network javascripts being loaded and running on every single page, along with whatever assets they want to load up and all the tracking they do across websites.
And tracking is a huge one. This is no longer just a question of whether I'm supporting the site I visit. Whatever your site has to offer is not worth the all-encompassing tracking that the networks are doing. If it is, you'll have a subscription fee I can pay and your service will be valuable enough that I'll pay it.
I like the idea, but because it's so random it falls into an unsatisfying place most of the time. Really I'd rather it work for most other ad networks instead, since AdSense is among the least offensive. If Google manages to get other networks into the system, it could be really nice.
Join the waitlist
Contributor is not yet available in your country.
:(
So far I detect that 15-20% of my users have an adblocker enabled. This probably misses some percentage of people since it uses GA and JS. Users with ghostery or JS disabled won't be detected but it's close enough for me. The numbers are not quite as high as I expected them to be.
Don't like it going to a specific site? You can disable just that site in the settings.
Want to replace ads with an image of something random? You can do that as well!
Want to only have contributor run on a few hand-picked sites? Can do that too!
A friend of mine has it setup so that it's whitelist only where he disables his adblock just for those sites, and allows contributor to work only on them.
It's actually a really nice and well thought out system.
It would be nice if I wasn't also being tracked though since I'm paying for the content myself.
Let us create anonymous profiles, give us the possibility to pay via prepaid card and you will be our hero again, Google.
I adblock not to block ads, but for privacy. I don't like being tracked, and using contributor won't fix that
1. Content creators have to be paid, or much of the web I know and love will cease to exist. 2. Life without ads is much better.
So here's what people need to know about Google contributor:
1. I pay for the highest level available.
2. I love not seeing ads.
3. This only works for Google-based ads, which are certainly common, but are neither the majority of advertising online, nor are they among the more annoying.
4. Contributor doesn't work like an ad blocker, which makes ads just "disappear." Instead, you see a big empty block (that is apparently customizable in some way) that says "Thank you for being a contributor. The ad space is still there, it's just blank. So if half of your page used to be covered in ads, now half your page is covered in little blocks that say, "Thank you for being a contributor."
For example, here's a screenshot of iMore (the site that was used to compare ios9's ad blockers): https://austen-screenshots.s3.amazonaws.com/iMore__The_1_sit... I'd almost prefer ads.
5. This doesn't stop most of your pages from taking forever to load because of JavaScript from other ad networks.
6. I don't care about the tracking/privacy as much as some people, but it doesn't solve that problem either.
So, do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely. I hope Google can expand it, and I will pay. I have no idea how expensive it would be to pay for the disappearance of all ads, but I'd likely do it. (I recognize I'm not the "average" Internet user as far as what I'm willing to pay).
That being said, it does not yet come close to competing with the convenience that an ad-blocker provides (which I don't use out of principle).
It's still early, so I give some leeway, and I like the idea, but as of yet this won't be a game changer. I truly hope it can become one.
There's a sliding scale that goes in $1 increments.
If I'm paying the same as the bidding cost for advertisers, then I'm all in, this is super sweet. If I'm paying some vague hand-wavy fee that reduces my ads, but doesn't correspond 1-1 to what advertisers are paying then forget it.
Edit: Apparently it is a 1:1 mapping and unused money rolls over until next month. I was wrong. Thanks cmpb for pointing that out.
The way I would be in 100% support of this would be if I could go and "top up" my ad-support-budget. Say I add $50.. and from then on every Google served ad gets swallowed up and my balance gets deducted whatever the bid price was, with the same % going to the contributor site.
When my $50 is up, ads return. I can choose to refill as I want, or set it up to auto-refill with $20 when it runs out, sending me an email or whatnot.
I really really really like this concept, but man, they need to be really honest with their implementation.
[1] https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6182619?hl=en&...
- Sites like thewirecutter.com make their money from affiliate links
- To try this experiment, I need to turn adblocking off. Which I am not willing to.
- Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads. http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/07/sao-paulo-city-with-no-... -- people are happier since less information assaults their brains, companies are still doing what they need to do because they needed to get creative ways to convince people why their products are worthwhile.
Yes, there are multiple ways to monetize things on the Internet. Affiliate links work very well for Wirecutter, because it is based around people trying to buy things. If you're forbes.com however, affiliate links don't really work.
> Ads are not the answer. In fact, an interesting thing happened when a city banned the use of outdoor ads...
If the problem we're trying to solve is, "How can we pay content creators what they need in order to continue producing content?" then an anecdote about outdoor advertising and billboards is largely irrelevant.
Of course, your proposed solution may be, "No one gets paid for content and the content ceases to exist because I don't like ads," and that may be what happens to some degree, but I personally wouldn't like that solution very much.
I'll start unblocking ads the moment site creators start taking responsibility for what they display. My hourly rate for machine fixing is many times more than the few tenths of a penny you got for my ad impression.
To answer your question above, they gripe because they are being disrupted by technology and cannot charge what they want to charge for their product.
You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of. Otherwise if there really is no value on that page, what are you doing there? You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting.
> You don't want to buy it because it causes friction to pay the $0.001 it costs to view the page that the ads take care of.
Well, current model also costs me that $0.001 (likely more) in electricity costs and exposes me to at best some ugly-looking crap made with adversarial intent, that has nonzero chance of scamming me into buying something I don't need, and at worst is a vector of malware delivery. It also costs me time wasted on waiting (10x longer load times) and productivity losses due to system slowing down if for some reason I need to keep the site open and do something else.
> You prove there is value to you by the act of visiting
You prove there is potential value by visiting. You won't know if there is an actual value until you at least skim the content. If you're visiting the same site regularly you can start to predict how much value you expect to get out of a visit, but at this point the site owner can probably convince you to pay for it somehow (be it subscription, turning off the ads, selling you their book, etc.).
When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?
I also hear this "potential" value argument a lot - why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value? Just doesn't make sense. And either way, ads allow you to not lose anything monetarily if you feel that site didn't give you what you expected. It's very a fair and low-risk trade.
This is very relevant here, because a big part of issue with ads is about dumping externalities on people. When you multiply that small electricity costs by number of people exposed to a bloated, flashy ad you'll see it actually adds up to a decent amount of coal unnecessarily burned. But that's beside the point, I only brought up electricity because it's commensurable to the amount of money ad-serving site makes on me.
> When you go shopping, it will likely cost you gas, time, wear/tear, etc just like anything else but do you tally that and ask for a refund on the purchase price?
I don't ask for refund, but I do tally that and include in my decision about which shop to go to.
> why are you continually going to sites that you consider to have no value?
As I said, if I go to a website regularly, it means that I have some concept of value I may expect to get from it. Bust most of browsing today is driven by a) search results, and b) link aggregators. Most of the websites I visit I visit only once or twice in a lifetime, because there was a link to a particular article on HackerNews, or maybe because it was the first search result for my query. In such situation I do not have concept of value I am about to receive.
> It's very a fair and low-risk trade.
It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.
Then include that in your decision in whether to go to a site with ads. You wouldn't just take things from the store either?
> It could be, in principle. It probably would be if the only ads displayed were AdSense ones. But as it is now, getting scammed or catching a drive-by malware is not low-risk trade.
Scams are a greater issue than to put on advertising. Malware is an issue and I agree with that. The industry does need to work on this and things are changing but that doesn't suddenly make it ok to take. If the risk is too much for you, dont visit the site. Same as if the risk of driving on the freeways is too much, stay off the freeway.
You seem to keep saying you take risk and externalities into account but then say that you have no control and thus rationalize taking content, however you always have the choice of just not going to that link.
Me looking at something is not a form of payment. The payment is coming from the advertiser. The advertiser is paying the content producer, THAT is the business transaction. Whether I choose to view the ad and make those advertisements have value is not my concern. Those ads are the REAL value and worthy of my payment.
Otherwise viewing the NYT is like watching sunsets, the only way to monetiZe that is by slapping a billboard in front of me, at which point, i go elsewhere
If you went elsewhere, there's no issue. But when you breakdown the billboard and still see the sunset (assuming the sunset is copyrighted and original content) then you're changing the value exchange unfairly.
Under your definition, getting up to go to the bathroom during commericials or making a conscious effort to look away from ads is ...immoral? Illegal? Fraud? There is no contract no quid pro quo.
The content providers are selling real estate. Thats it.
The obligation is to accept the ads with the content. It's actually in the terms and service of many sites and doesn't require a signature. This is completely legal and binding, just not easily enforceable.
Sure there might be natural losses due to leaving or not looking at the screen but adblockers are all about your intent to completely remove the ads from the content before you even seen it. That's the issue.
I view a website and someone says I owe them my first born, does not make it so.
Anyways, this is something that paywalls solve entirely so it's a great model, but nobody wants to pay.
I mean, they're not making me sign a contract saying I wouldn't consume their content if the ads are off, so it's up to me to choose what I see on MY computer. There are also websites which detect adblockers and don't show their content at all. I'd just close their website not caring about their content, so at least I don't find it worth paying for.
Even I have blogs, videos which earn me ad money. I know had it not been ads, no one give a dime to see them :), and it's perfectly fine for me.
Think of like a movie: you can pay $10 to see the whole thing or $0.001 per each frame. That's what the web is like with each frame possibly being from a different publisher. That kind of granular payments is very hard to pull off effectively outside of advertising.
It's possible to have a separate "content" subscription but that will mean ISPs have far more tracking and net neutrality issues than now so it's best to have another 3rd party doing this.
But that's obviously not the deal, because your traffic would plummet as many of your visitors would reject that deal. So don't pretend an agreement exists here. Visiting a website is not an obligation to view the content or the ads.
The agreement is between the website and the advertiser. They have obligations to each other, we don't have obligations to them.
Which parts of the web are those exactly?
You'd be surprised at how creative people can get when their livelihoods are threatened by changing business models. Those who come up with a better solution for monetizing good content will survive. Those who don't, or who had poor content to begin with, will be forced out of the market.
Look at the main alternatives – subscription is the usual other one. And subscription will probably be enough to keep the big sites like Google and Facebook afloat, but for smaller sites, they'd just go under. Not to mention subscription biases the wealthy – suddenly, the poor are locked out of a lot of sites.
I get what you are saying, but I don't buy it.
Much of the web is noise and regurgitation. The reason that publications have started to churn out poorly thought out crap is that they have to get their pagerank up and stay relevant. The reason they have to do that is because if they don't do it, there are ad revenue dependent content generators out there that will do it for them. If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.
Google is great. I think in many ways they've made the world a better place. Google is very ad revenue dependent. Ad revenue sponsored all of the great television shows and radio shows from the beginning. I don't think that advertising should go away because it makes great things by Google and media companies possible.
However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.
Much of it is, yes. Meanwhile, publications like the New York Times still depend on online advertising to continue to exist in the way they do.
Not that I have any answers here - I think your DVR comparison is fair.
Not any more. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist are all paywalled. Those are some of the few remaining newspapers with sizable reporting staffs.
Most other US "newspapers" have a few reporters, but mostly regurgitate wire services and press releases. The "fluff" sections (cars, real estate, food and wine, sports) are outsourced, sometimes to Demand Media, the content-farm company.
Buy a newspaper and mark all the articles that didn't originate as a press release, press conference, national news service, or ad. There will not be many.
And you seem to be ignoring cause and effect here - the reasons many newspapers have much smaller staffs these days is because the bottom fell out of the ad market and left them with no money.
Ads providing revenue has not led to value, ergo I don't see much reason to protect the status quo for fear of losing it.
That's one of the best good for all, social arguments against ads/for blockers that I've seen.
The reason why people continue to visit all those sites and click all those links? - Because they like it.
And what's wrong with subjective, anyway?
There's nothing wrong with subjective - unless you're actively trying to say you know what's right for everyone else. That's not how we make progress in the best interests of everyone.
This is disingenuous; there are people who dedicate their working life to causing other people to do things they (other people) don't want to do (e.g., following a psychologically-designed bespoke(!) anchor that belongs to a class of things colloquially known as ``link bait". )
Let's say everyone falls for it once, twice or even a dozen times. Don't you think the traffic would just stop after a while. Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?
Why do celebrities have the most followers and gossip sites have some of the highest traffic? It's easy to argue that it's not "valuable" or "educational" content but it's still incredibly popular. Does that somehow make it "bad"? Are you the judge of that? Or is someone manipulating everyone to pay attention? Are a few people capable of controlling entire populations this easily? And why are they spending time with ads then?
OR - could it simply be that people just like what they like? At some point you just have to put aside the prejudices and look at the data and see that much of the popular stuff on the web is popular precisely because it's what users want.
http://mumbrella.com.au/mamamia-has-said-goodbye-to-clickbai...
http://digiday.com/publishers/upworthy-goes-clickbait-free-n...
http://blog.newscred.com/how-reader-demand-for-content-marke...
Are you suggesting that this was my contention?!---I fall for click bait all the time.
> Are we all so psychologically weak that we cant figure it out?
No, but I don't think ``we" are actively trying to figure it out. People design these traps _for a living_; ``we" get trapped by them _in ``our" spare time_.
> ...
...
Why do people keep clicking obvious linkbait articles? Because there's certain social-inclusion triggers we're wired to respond to, logic and conditioning be damned. The content isn't popular. The forcing function used to drive that traffic is playing on social addictions.
At some point you have to put aside the "data" and think about where the cause and effect really lies.
You're talking about basing all this on some rough psychology - however plenty of people don't watch comedies with laugh tracks because they just don't like the show and it's the same with headlines.
There might be certain influences (since it is called clickbait) but in the end it's all up to the user. They choose to click.
> If you get rid of the ad revenue, you reduce the velocity of the crap engine, and then good content can again be successful on a subscription model.
Sounds like a funny way to try to make the internet more "sophisticated." If you dont like the content of the regurgitation engine, then you wouldnt visit the site and so wouldnt be supporting it.
So something else is at play. I think that a huge portion of the public actually likes the regurgitated content. They come home from work and just want to chill out and be mildly entertained by buzzfeed. So addblockers dont reduce the velocity of the crap engine, they take away your patronage and therefore your vote for what content you want to see.
I think that there is so much low quality on the web because people value it very low. They only pay by viewing adds (and with privacy) so the media produced will reflect that.
Now think about what might happen with contributor. Those that hate viewing adds and some that block them will decide to pay for the add space of the pages they view. Then the value of addsense space goes up since advertisers are more confident that the people seeing the adds will not hate them and the website also gets money from those who are contributors. So the value of content goes up as well and that should bring the quality up as well.
> However, I see absolutely no problem whatsoever in blocking ads on my own without paying Google. Tivo allows ad blocking. DVRs allow ad blocking. I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate just to block ads.
You're not really paying google. Google takes a commission, which they deserve, and the money goes to the content creators. Tivo and DVR are bad examples since they actually did end an era in television and were not free so not very widely used for a long time.
But there might not be enough really good stuff out there. User created content is never going to be like professional globally top notch produced content - or if it is it will take as much talent and time to make. Once I have seen the new Star Wars film, it's not like I am going to be able to see another three hours of similar quality entertainment the next night and the next and the next.
For a thousand years humans have mostly entertained themselves by talking and jossing and laughing with each other. That's likely to be the future of content - just aimed at our niches.
I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.
Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and good content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.
Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.
And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.
And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.
It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.
Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).
There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.
And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.
Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.
It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.
Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.
uMatrix is a much more effective way of using DNS to block ads than HOSTS file editing. You can select only certain items from certain domains. Sure, I block Google cookies on most sites, but those sites are dependent on scripts coming from the same domains. With uMatrix, I can permit just the scripts that the site needs.
And I can quickly and easily test different resource combinations to customize my website experience.
I can select specific subdomains; I can also use wildcards.
I doubt there is anything an ad blocker can block that I cannot block using DNS. But if you have examples, post them and let's see.
If there is some site with frames that I willingly use regularly, I just bust out of the frame and access the contents directly.
Hence what you are describing does not sound like something I desperately need to do.
The only way I can answer your question is if you give me an example: a website with ads to block. Then I'll test it.
I should note though that cookies are not ads; the original topic was blocking ads - you are shifting the goalposts.
I agree. In the sense it's usually meant, "free" just means "monetarily free", but cost can come in more forms than just monetary units. :)
What I was referring to is that Google's "product" is offered free to the user.
What you refer to highlights the importance of the question: if their "product" is not free to produce, then why don't they charge users for it?
No matter how well Google delivers your search results and email, if they cannot serve ads, they are in trouble. They have hundreds of millions of loyal users of these websites, but Google does not ask users for money.
If they did, would you pay?
The demo images/gifs make it seem like you can make the ad space disappear. Is this achieveable by replacing the placeholder with a custom 1x1px image?
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ (The 'or even this' image)
I suppose you could use a 1x1 pixel as a workaround, but that seems to be more of a hack than the way Google designed it to function.
YMMV, I suppose we may be browsing different parts of the Internet, but I know content I love would mostly stay intact. From my personal and subjective experience, nearly everything that is actually worth anything on the Internet is made by unpaid volunteers for whom creating content is an end in itself, and not a way to earn money. Wikipedia? Check. HN discussions? Check. Topical subreddits? Check. Tutorials, videos, articles? Check, check, check. In fact, over time I've noticed a strong negative correlation between trustworthiness of content and amount of ads around it.
Heck, myself I created lots of such content and always felt it should be distributed for free.
Sure, videogames, music, movies, etc. are a different story. They are products that usually require full-time engagement of skilled professionals and you can't really get around paying for those. But your average web page? Rule of thumb: the more ads it projects, the more likely it is that it exists only to earn money off you (quality or dependability of content be damned).
TL;DR: I don't mind if upon removing ad support half of the Internet goes to shit. It was the bad part.
Oh, and since someone will surely bring up New York Times - I say, let it burn. Let's be honest with ourselves, we all know mainstream media are 1% content, 99% combination of bullshit and malicious lies. I'm willing to support that 1% with cash, but not the 99%. It is harmful to society and it should die.
And how is reddit funded?
Yes, they use ads, and if they didn't, I probably would be happy to pay or donate (if only to keep all the topical forums in one place and not revert to dark ages of phpBB and linear discussion threads). But let's not cheat ourselves - the ads are not paying for the content, they are merely supporting an efficient platform.
I've paid for it, personally, and I know others who do.
Yes, the ads are probably a larger portion of their income right now, but there's certainly an easy way to support them directly.
And they have ads, too:
https://www.reddit.com/advertising/
But dont impose your ideals on everyone else who is reading that content voluntarily because they clearly enjoy it.
It's not just about me not wanting to read the bad stuff. If I dislike a page, I just don't visit it, I usually don't complain. But when talking about mass media, every lie they write gets read by the general population. People still (for some reason, probably because there's no other established alternative) trust them, and most don't have time to evaluate the claims critically. They form beliefs based on lies, and then they act based on those beliefs. In democracies, they go and vote based on those beliefs.
So suddenly, that pile of bullshit I carefully avoid to read gets amplified and hits me anyway, in form of bad policy, bad social projects and, well, bad zeitgeist.
But complaining about what people should consume because you deem it unworthy seems arrogant, draconian and irrational.
I think a good example is recipes. At one point, I instructed google to ignore food.com, about.com, food-network.com and a few more. But now there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of sites that are simply indiscriminate collectors of (mostly) crap recipes. If I search for a recipe for ramen, I'm looking for the obsessed guy who eats ramen 3 meals a day, tweaks everything until it is just perfect, and knows all the differences between ramen in every area, and knows how to make his own noodles, etc, etc. I'm not looking for, "Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Review: "5 stars!!! My husband and I make this all the time." The rest of the page is full of ads.)
And these days you get kind of "boutique" websites where someone has decided to have a go and make it their livelihood. And as much as some of these are really good, the vast majority are just writing 2000 words of how they went to Japan and tried ramen and how they couldn't get a hotel room in Kyoto because it was golden week and they didn't know that it got so busy... followed by, "Recipe: Buy some instant noodles and use canned consume instead of the crap soup in the package" (Comments: "5 stars!!! My wife and I make this all the time." The right 30% of the page is filled with ads).
The thing is that in order to be really amazingly informed about something, you really need to obsess about it. So the really amazing websites seem to be run by people who are thinking "I need some place to put down my ideas", not "What can I write that will make me money". Sometimes the former also manage to make money on their writing, but by and large I think the best sites are the ones that are not motivated by profit.
I have thought for a long time that we need a different kind of search engine (which I will tentatively call "Otaku"). Instead of of ranking pages based on popularity, they would be ranked on how nerdy they were. I'd love to get my old internet back ;-)
I wonder if that also means it won't work anywhere else where an embedded web view is used.
And I tried to see if it removes Video ads on YouTube (which I find very annoying), but that doesn't seem to be the case.
I think I must have been turned away from a site once or twice, but I really can't remember specifically.
So they don't block. Which means, they get something out of the visit. Exposure, at least. The hope of an eventual subscription, as I subscribe to the NYT digital.
But if they don't block, then they either get something out of those visit, or they're foolish. Either way, I'm not worried about them.
At all.
Paywalls are the only sure fire way to keep people out.
Sites can only attempt to ask by basically rendering that message and then replacing with ads. If the ads never load, then you'll see that message. However all these tricks are incredibly easy to get around with adblocker filters and so websites do NOT have a reliable way of knowing whether you are using an adblocker or not.
They can either refuse to serve content to everyone without a login (paywall) or serve it to everyone and hope the ads are there. That's how HTML works, the content is part of it and your adblocker is filtering it after receiving the content. There is no way for sites to refuse adblock users even if they wanted to without a paywall system.
You might look at this and think they still want you to have the content for free but they'd rather not - it's just out of their control unless they implement a different access model altogether.
I think you're right.
> Sites can only attempt to ask by basically rendering that message and then replacing with ads. If the ads never load, then you'll see that message.
Yes – content creators should get paid. Also, not all ads are bad. Some campaigns even make such an impression on popular culture that they have their own place in history. But the campaigns that won't? Well, basically anything coming out of ad machines like adsense and what not.
Ads can be tasteful, even enjoyable, but most of the internet ads aren't. Unlike broadcast tv, you can block internet ads; it's easy to do, and you should. Not because it'll kill content creators or indie app makers[1] or whatever, because it won't. It'll hurt the revenue streams of shitty ad mongers like adsense and doubleclick and facebook and admob and what have you. These are – in my opinion – on the same shitty level as porn peddlers. They sell crap for pennies, but they win because you just won't reach out to everyone otherwise. Google and Twitter and Facebook and all of the shitty ad platform snake-oil salesmen are the broadcasters of today – and their messages suck.
Not only do their messages suck, but people – good people – spend valuable time they'll never get back in order to produce these shitty ads. Time they could have spent doing something useful. Instead they made a shitty flash banner that won't play anyway because everyone blocks flash.
Ads of this kind need to be blocked so we can get to a point where advertising can be good. Where it requires thought, effort, research. Where it requires smart people, creative people, coming up with things that matter and are contextually relevant. The shitty ads we have today need to be blocked to preserve bandwidth, and to help make our planet perhaps die a little bit less every year. Blocking ads on the internet is easy, and doesn't require fancy heuristics or anything. It just requires black lists and hive minds. Ads that are not peddled through "platforms" or however you'd like to describe it – sponsored articles like those on Daring Fireball or increasingly in news papers these days – are less easy to block, and require more effort. But those ads aren't annoying, and they may not be entirely relevant but at least you don't want to throw up because you're fed up with their bullshit. So it becomes a cost/benefit calculation – is it worth the time and energy to block all ads, or are some ads ok?
To me the answer to that is simple: ads are ok. The ad-porn that inflicts the internet today, through adsense and the rest of the ad-platform mob, can die a painful death in fire. Fuck 'em, I'm blocking their shitty ads left-right-center.
[1]: http://blog.desk.pm/df/
Well, technically you're not "seeing" ads but I'm pretty sure your information is still being traded to data providers.
This actually works to google's advantage. They reduce ad blindness and when an actual ad appears it will be highly targeted and probably gives Google a lot more revenue per ad.
"Google Contributor is terrible. Not because it doesn't work, but because it still leaves big green gaps where the ads were saying, "Thank you for using contributor!" Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were."
One of the nice things about ads is that it allows many users to browse content for free - subsidised by those that interact with adverts.
If advertising were to go away and micro-payments replace it - how do users get free access to content subsidised by the masses? I can freely browse the most internet today from anywhere in the world regardless of my income situation. A micro-payments barrier to entry isn't going to allow that.
Also those who are most likely to pay for a solution like this are likely the most affluent who are likely to be the ones clicking and buying products through advertising.
A few days ago I remarked on Twitter: "sad that Contributor, a great alternative to ads/tracking, is owned & marketed by Google, which has more to lose than gain from promoting it"[0]
The idea behind Contributor is a powerful one: one that if aggressively marketed and expanded, could (at least conceivably) provide a viable hybrid model for online content publishing (that could coexist with ad-tech).
But Google is a one-trick pony (with ads, obviously) and has everything at stake here. That makes Contributor feel like more of a defensive "moat" initiative -- there to passively discourage others from pursuing (or investing in) similar ideas. Maybe I'm being too cynical. I too am happily subscribed to Contributor--the most dramatic difference is The Next Web -- where the crazy canvas-flying ads are toggled off.
[0] - https://twitter.com/spencenow/status/646480765794975744
The advantages of Google Contributor are reasonably clear. There is at least:
1. Works through Google's existing advertising systems, so easier for them to implement.
2. Minimal work for websites to sign up.
3. Advertisements disappear, while supporting websites.
4. Very little work for the end user to get started.
But the disadvantages to me seem quite strong. A few:
1. Advertisers (e.g., Google), can still track you. Those with privacy concerns won't have those concerns addressed.
2. Doesn't remove all ads (even if you pay the maximal amount, it only affects Google ads, as you say).
3. Effectively creates more competition for the ad spots, driving the prices up (good for Google).
4. Does not change content layout.
5. Google still controls the space, where it would be better for the website owner to be able to use that space themselves.
6. Pricing is not clear. What exactly am I getting for what I pay? As competition increases, price goes up. As an end user, I like to know how much I need to pay to get a particular service. I don't want to have to give it much thought.
I do think it's great that you're willing to support websites in removing ads. An Adblock Plus survey suggests that there are many users who would be willing to donate, so you're not alone.
Full disclosure: I run https://webpass.io, a service to give money back to the content creators in a way that completely bypasses the advertising industry, rather than working through it (thus protecting privacy). Gives the power to the website owner to control their content, not Google.