My favorite example is when you see a popular github repository with a donate button (Flattr, Bitcoin address, etc) only to realize they've made a whole $14 in the past year. Wow, thanks world!
It turns out that ads worked because the user didn't actually have to do anything. They didn't have to get their credit card out of their wallet, something they rarely do on the internet.
And when they do, it's to give money to a large corporation like Netflix or because Jimmy Wales managed to beg for donations in a more invasive annoying way than a banner ad ever was. (You know, I never once had to see the face of the founder of AdultFriendFinder in one of their ads.)
I hope we find a next-coming middleground that changes the culture of what people are willing to pay for and how they do it. But the fact that giving your credit/debit card number to someone gives them (and anyone else) unlimited charge license on your account is not helping.
You say "nobody" but I know that's not true because I am "somebody" who donates.
Ad blockers mean one isn't prepared to pay for your product. Personally when I am prevented from viewing content because my Privoxy has been detected I tend to just go elsewhere. I find ads a significant burden on my concentration and well being.
Yet in print media I don't mind. Often I read trade mags specifically for the ads, they are great market research.
I mean "nobody" in the sense that it doesn't scale and people like you, god bless, do not replace ads for the vast majority of websites.
At least not until some sort of shift happens in how we pay for content which I think is imminent.
> Ad blockers mean one isn't prepared to pay for your product.
Perhaps rather: "Your product is not worth taking out a credit card and paying for" which applies to most websites. There are massive barriers to explicitly paying for things, even just psychological.
In an abstract sense, ads are like vignette windshield stickers that let you cruise past tollway checkpoints when the alternative is to have to stop at a tollboth even if it's just to pay 10 cents.
People have tried to create services that replace ads in that abstraction, but so far nothing has stuck. I think the post-ad solution needs to be just as mindless as ads if it's going to replace them.
One does not simply "detect adblock". Browsers are user agents. They run code in an environment optimized for user safety and convenience. These environments will always be able to tell your site's server- and client-side code exactly what it wants to hear while showing something different to the user. You can't stop it. The client will always win.
We may eventually get to the point where clients use various computer vision techniques to recognize ads. If I can clearly distinguish jiggling, improbably large elf anatomy below a flashing yellow "PLAY THIS ONLINE RPG" from content I want to see, so can an algorithm, at least to within an acceptable error rate.
Advertisements that are so borderline that they can't be detected as advertisements are ones I probably don't mind seeing anyway.
Spammers have already tried all available countermeasures and they've completely lost. Spam is so completely ineffective that it's actually dipped below half of email traffic.
It's an arms race. Advertisers may be able to detect ad blockers in the short term, but eventually they will lose. That's because users control their machines and advertisers don't. Widespread use of adblock-blockers will only hasten this inevitable defeat.
The techniques used by the project to which you've linked can be trivially worked around by detecting the script itself and either not running it or telling it what it wants to hear. (Come on: an iframe? You really don't think a browser extension could lie about that? I expected at least some kind of server-client traffic correlation for a serious ad-blocker-blocker attempt.)
It'll be interesting to see how it pans out. Some sites will play nice. It's easy to imagine buzzfeed just loading their image content from adservers though.
The only reason the client can separate certain forms of advertising from content is that advertisers - by and large - don't care. The more advertising and content is intermingled the more difficult it will be to separate them. The intermingling is already happening as we see in the rise of content marketing.
I am amazed that their response to adblockers is more targetted ads. My main reason for using an adblocker isn't to block ads, which don't bother me that much. It is to block tracking accross websites. Telling me that they will do more tracking in response isn't really going to change my mind...
... but it may change most minds. What bothers me about advertising is the visual noise, which amounts to a pollution of my environment. Better advertising can help reduce the need to rely on pure attention-sucking and so reduce the urge to block ads entirely.
I don't give a damn about tracking. All the doomsday scenarios that those in the anti-tracking camp imagine have not come to pass.
Me too. And there is no point to access the last two years of someone's browsing history to know that someone visiting a video game website is interested in video games or technology.
But what kinds of science and technology? Maybe our user has a bit of disposable income and wouldn't mind ads for high-end hardware he didn't happen to know about. Maybe she's interested in DLC for games she's passionate about, as measured for frequently of forum visits. Maybe our user runs a lab and would be very interested in high-end PCR machines.
You can do much better than "interested in video games or technology" if you know a bit about your users. This tracking makes advertising much less annoying (occasionally veering into useful).
Advertisers just have to accept that when a customer walk through their door, they will not have access to his/her bank statements, sexual preferences, list of acquaintances, medical records, gps locations for the last two years, etc. What information one can get from someone's browsing history is awfully invasive.
Advertisers will adapt. What you have to accept is more annoying advertising coupled with increasingly error-prone code in both ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers. The only one that wins is Moloch; everyone else is worse off.
> What information one can get from someone's browsing history is awfully invasive.
Is it? Advertisers don't get some kind of toast on their phones saying "Joe, 34 from Topeka with a toaster fetish, has just visited your site!" along with pictures of Joe and said toasters. That's a strawman that the anti-tracking people love to hint at, but it doesn't actually work that way.
What actually happens is that advertisers target broad categories. They say, "show this ad to midwesterners who've visited sites about toasters", and that's what happens. There's no secret dossier just waiting to be sold to the highest bidder for purposes always left unspecified.
Yes, centralized trackers do end up learning a portion of your browsing history. But you don't have to accept third-party cookies. You can run with an ad blocker. And you can just reset your cookie[1] state every so often. You can do any of these things. You'll just pay for your paranoia with a shittier web.
[1] Yes, I know about non-cookie trackers. Advertisers stashing information where it's hard to clear are scum. It's up to web browsers to make it easy to flush all server-visible state.
>Advertisers don't get some kind of toast on their phones saying "Joe, 34 from Topeka with a toaster fetish, has just visited your site!"
But the likes of Google and Facebook know exactly that. They have it stored somewhere and it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen by organised criminals, religious fanatics or oppressive governments.
Yes. If you're going to be responsible for your content, be responsible for your content. Don't write up great evergreen long-form content and then auction off key areas of your page to anybody with a credit-card and ad-network approval. Instead, curate products and services I might be interested in. Vouch for those the same way you vouch for the content. If you want to track everywhere I go, say so. (I doubt I'll patronize your site, but at least you'd be honest about it.)
The problem isn't that all advertising is bad. The problem is that we visit websites expecting one entity to own and operate it. Instead we get hit by a thousand entities, each with its own privacy policies and agendas. That's unworkable from the consumer side.
I don't think that's what will happen. Ad firms will come up with a server side API you plug into your website so ads can come through your site. You've just made the security problem worse not better as coming from the same site they are allowed to read everything that site does vs coming from iframes from different domains in which case they are allowed to read nothing.
No, the tracking becomes specific to the site visited (same origin policy), not cross-websites, and I don't have a problem with that.
Now there is also the debate of whether all sites deserve to be able to run javascript. I say no. But some people here think that even rendering a blog article should require a lot of client side scripting.
They might but how would they correlate me on abc.com and me on xyz.com if they don't have some form of cookie?
Browser fingerprinting is the only way I can think of, and between the phasing out of flash, java and silverlight, and having javascript disabled by default, browser fingerprinting is pretty much toothless.
I go on site abc.com, which gives me the cookie abc:111
Then I go on xyz.com which gives me the cookie xyz:222
Because of the same origin policy, xyz.com can't access the cookies set by abc.com. Abc and xyz can communicate as much as they want on the server side, they will not be able to tell that abc:111 and xyz:222 are the same user (absent additional information: browser fingerprinting, email address if you have an account on both, etc).
Just a thought - if the ad network uses js code (hosted on abc.com and xyz.com servers), which loads images from the same domain (but it loaded in on a server-to-server link, and cached and served from the the domain you're visiting). Can they not just set a tracking cookie for that domain that they control with a unique ID, tied to browser fingerprinting, which is transmitted to the ad network?
So you visit abc.com for the first time, get an ad image served from the same domain (but was provided from the ad network), have the cookie set, the ID is noted by the ad network.
You then visit xyz.com, a new cookie is generated, which can be tracked by the ad network as the ID is the same.
So you now get tailored/tracking adverts without any third party domains being accessed by your browser...
Do you mean: I visit abc.com, abc.com serves me an abc cookie, then I visit xyz.com, and xyz.com makes a call to abc from my browser, so that they can use the abc cookie to track me?
Well, that is effectively using abc as a tracking server, and abc.com would quickly be added to the adblockers lists. Effectively this is the current model.
The other thing is that I may visit abc.com and xyz.com but this particular combination may be unique to me, i.e. I may visit nytime.com and ford.com which may use the same ad network, but you may not visit nytime.com at all and instead wsj.com.
Browser fingerprinting is a different problem. It does defeat the same origin policy. But I suggest you look at the sources of entropy:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
With javascript off, there is virtually no entropy, just your user agent and HTTP_ACCEPT header. You can't fingerprint a browser at all.
If you enable javascript but not plugins, then the Browser Pluggin details give you some entropy, although looking at the list those a relatively generic and would likely be the same on many machines.
If you enable plugins (flash, silverlight, java) then you have a massive amount of entropy but realistically all of these plugins are almost gone from major browsers.
That's not quite what I meant - the ad network provides abc.com with a js file, hosted on the abc.com servers. That js file creates an ID from browser fingerprinting, which is saved in a separate cookie, or an additional data point within whatever abc.com sets.
The ad cookie/ID is then sent from the abc.com server to the ad network (along with whatever data they need to determine what ads were seen/clicked), who collate all the data from wherever their js file is running, thusly allowing them to track you, without any requests from your browser being sent to any other domains other than the ones you directly visit.
The main reason this has not happened is that it requires the ad networks to trust the publisher on things like visits/impressions/clicks.
If your server has the ability to say "Hey, Jane doe saw your ad just now" when she didnt, thats a recipe for massive fraud.
You might say CPC would work and then just send to unique urls the ad network can track- This too wont work, as it allows the publisher to do things like auto-pop the link, hide it in 1x1 iframes, etc.. Overall its a security and fraud nightmare that involves huge cat-and-mouse games.
Not to mention the fact that the ad networks have no incentive to change. As more inventory drys up, the spends go up with them (competition increases) - Supply and demand, mostly.
Data sharing agreements would make self-hosting ads irrelevant. You would have to either not support organizations that would share your data with (or without) your consent, or better/stronger laws would have to be enacted to make it a regulatory issue.
Well there is site-specific tracking and web tracking. I don’t mind for the former. If sites could build in-house mechanisms and work more closely with their advertisers to serve me ads specific to my interests that’s fine with me-as long as those interests correlate with the content of the site. It’s when tracking becomes pervasive to the whole damn web that becomes annoying.
Why is this down voted? Its what most people who use ad-blockers think. Its probably the most honest comment in this thread. HN members might not like it, but so what?
Are you sure that ad blockers are the only variable in play here?
"(October 2014) we had nearly 4.5 million hits (read) on our articles. This year (October 2015) we are at 4.4 million hits...
Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day."
Is pageviews the actual metric, or is ads served the metric? Given the recent discoveries in how many "ad views" were actually never presented to the reader and were just phony revenue ticks, could it not be that you are also "suffering" from an ongoing reduction in phony ad presentations as the trickery is discovered and addressed?
I block ads primarily to limit tracking and bogus traffic, not to dodge advertising per se. I heartily endorse jfoutz's suggestions here. If you continue to serve quality content, it's the more sustainable business model long-term anyway.
Years before the modern ad-network paradigm, many media sites were subscription from the outset (e.g. WSJ, mercurynews). Some later went free, using ad networks to pay the way. Now, the trend is moving back to a subscription model. Those sites that do the punitive block-ads-and-we-block-you (e.g. washingtonpost) will find that people just go elsewhere for those stories.
Is there a reason more sites don't do self hosted ads? Is there a general way these can be blocked as well?
If the ad is coming from their own server and displayed with their own custom HTML/CSS, I can't see an obvious way these could be detected and blocked in general.
> Is there a reason more sites don't do self hosted ads?
Google Adsense (for example) is a live auction clearing house where you paste a snippet of code into your site that resolves into the highest bidder for the keywords on each page. You're done.
Meanwhile, hosting your own ads entails finding advertisers, wooing them, developing a relationship with them, maintaining that relationship, negotiating a contract, settling that contract, building an ad-serving system somehow, automating it somehow, etc. And that's if you're even big enough to attract anyone or even warrant the work to begin with. And the second you try to generalize it (which is what ad networks do), then you're back on every adblocker's default blocklist.
Why not build a generic system where ads are served to the server serving the website (which maintains a cache of relevant ads and serves them appropriately)?
That way you can get the benefits of a network + the benefits of serving from the same server that is serving the content
Yeah, I'm sure Adsense will let you proxy requests through my server soon or release some similar offering.
It would come at the massive expense of high-quality tracking and thus incur a massive reduction in ad revenue, but it's an imminent trade-off that beats unconditional adblocking.
I think everything is just waiting for the actual tipping point that forces everyone's hand like we always do. Adblockers are still the minority.
Well, it's the model that works for almost everyone until some sort of shift happens.
For example, the ease of Adsense is the only reason why my forum is still alive. It's a medium-sized collaborative fiction writing forum with a userbase composed of mostly teens without money (I've tried scavenging for donations once).
Every year my banner ad makes me less and less money. And when it stops breaking even with its rent, I will close it down.
Now, some people in these threads, even perhaps yourself, would argue that my forum simply shouldn't exist since it's dependent on ads or because "I'm too lazy" to spend time trying to find a business model for a forum that already makes me almost no money, but it would be a loss for my users.
This is so common for the many anti-adblock texts you see these days - they all avoid to talk about the major issues here. (I say that with the background that a significant part of my income comes from ad-financed news pages.)
That is:
* Security risk through ads (malvertising, ad networks not supporting https etc.).
* Ads killing performance (70% CPU for a flash ad is not uncommon).
* Privacy (Ad vendors having mostly stated that they won't accept user wishes through DNT or similar technologies).
Privacy is a tricky one, because data is in part where the income comes from. But the other two are fixable. I want to hear from everyone complaining about ad blockers what they intend to do to make ads less of a security risk and cpu cycle burner. That would be a good start of a proper conversation about the topic. Every text that ignores these issues is usually not worth recognizing.
Those are all valid reasons, but they are not the reason I first started to block ads:
• They impose a surprisingly huge cognitive load.
Even if you (like most people nowadays) are used to them and hence “do not notice them”, that very habit of ignoring them actually takes more brain power than you’d think.
I'd be okay with ads on the web if it looked like newspaper or magazine ads (and with the associated cognitive load). But not auto-play videos that pops up in the middle of the article or blinking GIFs on the side.
That's true! I stopped watching TV somewhere around the high school age, which means I react to it just like small children do: if I'm trying to have a meeting where there's a TV running I turn into almost a drooling idiot.
My brain is simply not conditioned to flashing colors and quick cuts that aren't important. It requires practice to read a text bylined with blinking animations, and I simply don't have the cognitive power to do that. Most people that cope with it probably doesn't realize how much practice they've had.
And everybody knows that if you deplete your brain power before going to sleep your brain explodes...
On a serious note, your brain will be ok, it is a fine pattern matching machines with adaptative filters to discard uninteresting data (did you notice that sound of blood heartbeating in your ears?... that's filtering doing its work).
And also visually our brain is very good at ignoring data, search for the gorilla suit experiment.
Straw man. I did not say that using brain power is inherently bad. What I maybe should have said is that I prefer to use all my brain power on reading the article and pondering its implications rather than (unconsciously) wasting much of it on ignoring distracting ads.
Not reading them is the same as blocking them. To gain moral high ground people who compare adblocking to theft are required to read every ad on every website they encounter. The moral distinction between "I do not read ads" and "I block ads" is an illusion.
This does not take into account the security aspect. With the modern world being what it is one should be careful the code running on one's systems is from trusted sources. Adverts on the modern web violate this principle.
> The moral distinction between "I do not read ads" and "I block ads" is an illusion.
Do not some ad networks pay content providers for "impressions", regardless of whether the ads are clicked? In that case, loading the ads without reading them is not the same as not loading them.
Merely looking at ads aren't enough. Purchasing behavior must ultimately be effected somewhere down the line, to the extent that someone can determine changes in sales were due at least somewhat to ads. If someone can't find a causal or predictive relationship between ads and customer behavior, then they will lose cause to invest in some advertising venue.
If a site is consistently staying alive only through ads, it means that money is somehow flowing from some people to the ad-supported content. We are all already paying for content through some convoluted pathway.
We should just start paying with minimal middlemen, since ad companies bill our attention and build profiles about us from our behavioral data.
I would take this a step further. I perceive the effects of advertising in most cases to be toxic and nefarious. Trying to convince me to buy or do something that I didn't already want or need is an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism. I avoid ads because I absolutely do not want their influence looming over me.
We -- the technologists behind it -- should be anxious to help humanity get past this embarrassing chapter in our development and find another way to make the economic wheels turn.
I hate ads for all the reasons you cite and because some are hugely distracting.
But small websites are not in a position to change the state of affairs, and if nothing changes and people keep blocking their ads, they're going to be dying in large numbers.
As a result, everything will be locked into app stores with even less privacy and with many restrictions on the type of content that is allowed.
The sort of answers I am looking for are the ones that do not pit small websites against users.
Actually, there are many "small websites" which are completely adless and will continue to remain, because the group or individual (usually the latter) is paying for their hosting. Some are hosted on the ISPs of their owners. I've spent many hours on these sites and they also tend to have the most esoteric and interesting content. Unfortunately they do seem to be disappearing from Google's search results, which is a different but also potentially problematic issue.
This strikes me as pretty similar to the usual "record labels are evil" defense for pirating music, in that it's a rationalization for something people were going to do anyway. While your points are true ones, they're not the reasons most people are using ad blockers (for instance, I am quite confident that most people have no idea about the security risks involved in simply loading an advertisement).
No. The security argument would be more analogous to a hypothetical situation whereby listening to legally purchased CDs occasionally resulted in you house keys or credit card details being distributed to criminals.
That's true in a sense for me. I originally installed an ad blocker because I'm annoyed by the ads, and by the bandwidth that they were consuming. I wasn't even aware of the security and privacy issues at first.
When I became aware of those issues, I installed additional blocking software even though I was already not seeing any ads.
In my defense, content blocking has been around since time immoral. The first browser I ever used, some Netscape, had a setting to disable the display of images. I used that setting to speed up my page loads.
Additionally, visitors don't sign a contract to agree to view ads in exchange for content, content-makers don't own their visitors' eyes or attention and can't expect to just sell them off willy-nilly.
I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about it. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support.
Look, a lot of this ad revenue was bullshit anyway. Online ads have not been very effective historically, but people were still willing to pay for them and that pumped a lot of money into any site with a lot of traffic, regardless of whether or not the ads on that site actually worked. It turns out that visitors have started blocking ads before people started figuring out how crappy the RoI on those ads actually were, but that money was likely to dry up one way or the other eventually.
There are plenty of non-obnoxious ways to do product reviews and endorsements that can still bring in revenue (that's the laziest option) but there are also a ton of excellent options out there for content-creators to gain financial support without relying on ads. It's easier than it's ever been to earn a living without ads and it's only getting easier over time. If you're a web-focused content creator in 2015 and you don't have something for sale on your site (even just "brand" merch), don't have patreon set up, and don't have plans for crowd funded projects then you're making a huge mistake and leaving a crap-ton of money on the table.
>
I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support.
People who hated spam signed the Boulder Pledge.
People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway.
You're living in a fantasy world. Nearly everyone universally hates spam, and nearly everyone uses a mail system that automatically filters it. They don't sign a pledge, they just use tools that help then avoid spam. They mark spam they get in their inbox to help others avoid it automatically. And they have no compunction about using a site that relies on spam, they merely find it annoying.
And as I mentioned there's no formal system in place where users agree to see ads in exchange for access to content. Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.
But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam.
> Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.
Don't pretend that you have unique moral authority, able to decide the rights and wrongs. If you don't want ads you should boycott ad supported sites - not giving them your traffic is at least as effective as giving them your traffic but hiding their ads. They respond to you by having advertisers paying for content. They respond to me by improving the quality of the content and charging for it.
I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge.
> But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam.
And people that use spam filters on a daily basis just like the fact that they don't get as much spam anymore. You know like people that use adblockers and appreciate that they don't have as many adverts anymore.
You are comparing apples and cats. If you want to compare apples and apples compare the people that created spam filters with those that created blockers and compare the people that use spam filters with those that use blockers.
Not really, I was just curious about the[1] change in culture from "don't support people sending you ads by giving them your custom or pageviews" to "just block the ads, and take the content."
[1] There hasn't been any change. It's just my perception, and that turns out to be wrong.
My favorite part of HN, the reason I prefer this news feed over any other, is because the comments are usually intelligent and civil.
Your comment here is neither, and it just turned a discussion about the morality of ad-blocking and the viability of ad-based revenue models into a dick measuring contest.
A more charitable reading of DanBC's comment is simply inquisitive. If we're going to hold civility in such high esteem, then we should also be assuming good faith, which it seems you have not done.
Honestly now. I am as enthusiastic a practitioner of the principle of charity as anyone else, but that doesn't mean you have to ignore overwhelming signs of bad faith when they're staring you in the face.
When Floegipoky decided DanBC's comment was probably not made in good faith, I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a mere assumption. More like an inference well supported by the available evidence.
Sorry. Re-reading it it does come across that way, and deserves the downvotes.
It wasn't intended that way though - I was genuinely just trying to see if people who'd used the Internet earlier were more aware of things like Boulder pledge. (Turns out several people who had significant involvement in Internet email at the time didn't know about it.)
I also have been on the internet since before the WWW (not just its commercial use) and have run mail servers for businesses since the mid-90s. Never heard of the Boulder Pledge.
The ad vendors business model depends on the user paying for the ads. Why in living hell are they complaining? I am subsidizing their crappy business model. If I want to stop subsidizing them, it's my right.
The article is exactly what it says on the tin: You are charged more (roughly 16x) for the data inherent in the ad than the publisher makes for serving it.
In an ideal world with perfect coordination, we'd agree to just directly send the publisher a quarter of what the current ad data costs us, and everybody relevant wins.
Sure, block ads. But why then visit those same sites that try to serve ads? Those sites clearly don't care about you, so why do you want to give them the pageviews?
And don't forget the bandwidth and capacity usage for those on capped mobile data. I only have a 512MB/month allowance, I don't want it spent on downloading ads.
Well, it's not as though every random link on the internet has a Surgeon's General Warning-esque disclaimer: "Clicking this link will download 23MB of Javascript frameworks, tracking coookies, advertising iframes and uncompressed, full-resolution images."
These are all issues for the users, there are other problems with the current system:
* some ad media companies scam their clients by publishing ads on sites where kickback payments are most attractive, rather than where the users are most suitable for the client
* agencies who also design campaigns for their clients tend to use more obnoxious and more commonly blocked ad formats because they're more expensive for the client, hurting both client and publisher (more ad blockers, annoyed users)
* I am also convinced that there's plenty of click fraud out there, but it's the only of these issues I don't know firsthand / as a fact
We could have an ad API where browsers could make it impossible for ads to have certain things that users don't like (for me, anything animated or which interrupts the flow) and in return ad-block software could allow ads through the new API. It could be made to work with older browsers by having a tag that ad-api browsers recognized as render this ad in this element, rather than its content and which older browsers skipped. Make the API tight enough and it won't be a CPU issue, it won't be any more a security risk than browsing any old site that is able to serve you pictures.
I doubt privacy is salvable, and I wouldn't want ads that didn't know what I was interested in to show up at all, since those universually suck.
This reminds me of the copyright/piracy debate. The copyright industry was screaming about lost profits , but would not change it business models.
Well, it turns out, all they had to do was change their business models to something people actually wanted. Now piracy rates are falling where appropriate services are available.
Patreon (and youtube community in general) have, together with projects like gog.com, humblebundle etc. proved that people actually WANT to pay for content even if they don't have to. But only in the way they want to. Especially if that means they'll get more reader centric content, not advertiser centric.
I remember a time on the Internet before ads, when the only websites were made by geeks who were passionate about the topic. Then came the popup ads, followed by the popup blockers, banners never worked, then came contextual ads. Google made it quick and easy to profit from content and made content a commodity. Currently they are the #1 financier of web spam, and pay off ad-blockers to whitelist their ads.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Ad-supported media is not free, it's costs are simply externalised. While we, the tech-savvy, may not click ads, somebody is buying those payday loans, lose 30 lbs in a month with this weird trick, get-rich-quick scams.
I'm more than happy to see ad-financed (mostly low-quality) content go the way of the popup. I have no problem paying for quality content (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Audible, etc.). The few high quality ad-supported blogs will then be able to charge for their content, since there will be no decent alternatives. As long as ad-supported content exists though, it will be a race to the bottom.
What you are describing is a world where only big, well financed, or well known entities can survive. In order to keep the amazing internet we actually have, we need to come up with a model that can be used by small upstarts to either serve smaller markets or to give them time to figure things out and become large over time. Requiring people to publish things for free will only result in the most extreme of views. Look at any Wikipedia article that remotely touches a controversial topic - it will likely present a strongly biased message towards whatever side the maintainer of that article feels strongly about.
The world where only the big players can win is the one we live in now. It's difficult for a small player to be heard when Buzzfeed-type click-bate headlines dominate the landscape. Switch it around, who would pay for access to Buzzfeed? On the other hand, I would pay for an expert's opinion on a topic I'm passionate about. You only need 1,000 people paying $10 a month to make a good living. To get $120k from ads, you'll need a whole lot of visitors.
But Buzzfeed et all will survive, since their content is already ads itself (see "native advertising").
And $10/month is a tremendous amount. Follow 10 sites and you've spent 1/10 of the average wage in my European country, and more than 1/6 of the minimum wage. It'll only lead to a balkanization of the web, with good sites pricing for wealthy American and northern European visitors, and everyone else being left out.
There was a web before commercialization (and an internet before that) where people published things for free. There are still topics that people are interested in and thoughts that they want to share and discuss. You just don't notice it now because it's all drowned out by ad-financed clickbait and ads themselves being reposted, reblogged, retweeted, etc. You don't even realize that there is a free signal because of the all the commercial noise.
People still publish personal blogs, comments, threads in forums, free software, help for other people, articles and data, etc. without getting paid for it.
> I have no problem paying for quality content (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Audible, etc.)
Funny that you mention that. Netflix and Hulu are not available in my country and my country is in the EU. As an american, you may not realize it, but paywalls are going to lead to a balkanization of the Internet, a process that is well on its way to being a reality.
Maybe you should start building a sustainable business model, instead of whining because people who are annoyed with ads and trackers started effectively blocking them.
If your content adds value to your visitors' lives, then charge for it. If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, then probably there is a problem with the stuff you offer not being valuable enough to people.
I don't want this to sound grumpy, and I don't mean to say your content is not good or valuable. It's just that I've discussed this topic a lot of times with friends and colleagues and there seems to be a common agreement that ads and trackers have become so invasive (visually and privacy-wise) that people are not wanting to see them anymore or to be tracked.
As always, it's about survival of the fittest and those who know how to adapt quickest. Find a way to charge for your content and build a sustainable business.
> If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads,
> then probably there is a problem with the stuff you
> offer not being valuable enough to people.
Not quite.
What people are willing to pay for has a large social/cultural/conditioned element. It's a crux of the entire problem.
The vast majority of people still attribute zero cost to ads. When you start charging $1 for your offering, now you're the one site among your competitors that's charging money. Maybe some HN nerds will care. Whoopdee doo. Nobody else does. The rest of the world isn't going to take their credit card out of their wallet when they can endure a banner ad instead.
Oh wait, they can just install an ad blocker the day they actually do care. Or maybe when their kid or significant other or buddy installs an adblocker on their browser like I did for my parents and they won't even realize the trouble it ever saved them.
See, I think that we will be soon on the cusp of a shift that needs to happen before we can replace ads at all, and it's more than just something a website can do by themselves by adding a paywall or whatever solution that doesn't work for most websites that people seem to conjure up in response to these issues.
- when you first go to the website, you get the ad-infested website
- you can pay for the app, and now, no more ads. In Android apps, the amount tends to be crazy low, like less than a cup of coffee. Pay that and get no ads is a no-brainer really...
This assumes the app isn't ransacking your device for as much personal or saleable information it can find, in addition to the nominal purchase fee.
Information leakage between sites and apps on mobile no doubt varies wildly based on your configuration and willingness to accept apps requesting outrageous permissions, but I'd suspect web-apps to be easier to protect yourself from, as a user.
Well now how costly? Just one dedicated server? multiple? Usage of AWS? Distributed data centres?
Staff? accountants, designers, moderators? Or automated scripts and volunteers?
If an organisation appeals to me to support them, I will, if they outline where and why they need it. Like Wikipedia for example or like OpenStreetMap. To say "oh it costs too much and we have lots of hits" is not an appeal to rationality.
What would happen if I lazily assumed that Guru3D will follow the advertisement laws that exist in my country, and if the ad-network which they subcontract the delivery of ads breaks the law, Guru3D will then take full responsibility?
As it stand, most web users block ads and most web publisher block legal responsibility. Neither side want to take the hit when malware is spread through ads, people personal information is being illegally stored, and when laws that govern advertisement in news papers, radio, and TV is ignored on the web. Both side want all the benefits with none of the draw backs, and advertisement through websites will run closer and closer to the fate of advertisement through email.
"Blocking" ads is loaded language, and should be recognized as such. Not viewing ads can be done in a multitude of ways, but it's not like users are patching software to get there.
The web was always built to be adaptable to the end user device. The user agent was intended to act as the decision maker how to render the markup. For many years, browsers even respected the default foreground and background colors and font choices (sadly not many respect X resources anymore). CSS was designed to include an end user defined style sheet to override tiny fonts and other things that made web pages hard to read.
Not viewing animated banners isn't at all different from changing your base font, or not loading javascript. Had we chosen to call it "disabling" instead of "blocking" it would have been much more clear that this is an action that the user is and should be empowered to take. I do recognize that we're stuck with the loaded word for now, I just feel it's important not to forget that. The public discourse is dominated by media people, and their perspective is important too, but not more so than the technical one.
Indeed, a user could likewise load only the HTML and ignore all images, scripts, CSS and suchlike. The user is in control, and that's how it should be. I am not obligated to view ads any more than I'm obligated to view any other part of a website.
I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Buying access to stuff online with a credit card is totally inconvenient, and even worse, you have no privacy then. I guess this is part of the reason why sites financed by advertising have become so prevalent.
Personally, if there was an easy and private way to do so, I'd much rather pay for content than getting "free" stuff financed by ads. Inevitably, sites will be extremely reluctant to write anything negative about products from companies that buy lots of ads. For this reason, I consider many of the reviews on tech sites, for example, kinda worthless.
So, I'm glad to see this ad financed business model break down. Buying access to content with a cryptocurrency could be real easy (and relatively private). But it does not help that many governments want you to calculate capital gain/loss everytime you make such a purchase.
I think governments ought to make an exception in the capital gains tax for small personal purchases. Maybe promoters who loudly proclaim that cryptocurrencies will soon replace "legacy" government fiat currencies are part of the problem. No wonder governments are so negative. But I don't think cryptocurrencies necessarily will replace fiat currencies anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies work great for small purchases online, but I wouldn't want to put my lifesavings into one - oh no! My computer got hacked - my life savings are gone!
Edit: replacing the entire capital gains tax with a wealth tax would probably be even better.
I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.
Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time.
As far as I understand, Google is trying to do this. But it does not provide a 'no ads' guarantee and there are other ad networks with even more obnoxious ads.
> Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time.
The problem with this is you must allow a third party to track every page visit and/or page view time, which is unacceptable to many people that use ad blockers.
If you are OK with persistent, pervasive tracking, I think this is probably the best solution.
Ignoring the page view time bit, couldn't this (theoretically, I have a hard time imagining it practically) just be handled invisibly by the ISP that already knows every request you make?
You've described the situation pretty accurately here I think. I wonder, though. What if a browser extension generated tokens and stuck them in headers, and then sites sent those tokens on to the central authority after some appropriate transformation? It seems possible to set it up so the central authority would have enough information to remunerate sites without having enough information to know what users are doing.
Yes. It's unrelated to how you acquire the Bitcoin, there's a soft limit of something like seven transactions per second across the entire ledger (it's not exactly that because the difficulty of mining a block is set based on the current hash rate, but it's set so that on average a block is mined every ten minutes; in practice, it will usually be much lower, since that figure assumes only minimum-sized transactions are used and the block is full, which is rarely the case).
Yes, because in the best case you're still creating a single pseudononymous profile and one identity-tied transaction will deanonymize the whole thing.
Even without that, enough usage activity means a shadow profile can be inferred that is effectively tracking you, just without a specific name. FINCEN has been developing this type of technology for decades.
And this is magnified when you're talking about essentially penny transactions - unless your cash bitcoin dealer is willing to see you every week for another $2.
"Anonymity" means little in the context of ecash. The property we're really looking for is untraceability, which bitcoin does not have.
Interesting. Apparently, there is much I don't know. I wasn't necessarily thinking about micro transactions, though. It would be nice to for example buy a 1 year full access to a site like Guru3D easily and anonomously. But yeah, I guess the profiling you mention is still a problem.
You're being downvoted and I think that's unfair. My reading of this article produced the same notion. My willingness to pay (in the form of being the recipient of advertising, and the associated loss of privacy) is lower than the value I receive from most content. Therefore I block the ads except on the tiny fraction of sites for which I make exceptions. Similarly I rarely cross a paywall.
Ergo, my willingness to pay is non-zero, but current fiat-currency payment services are inadequate to represent the negotiation.
I would be willing to buy (e.g. with fiat cash or another cryptocurrency) a block of quota, denominated in a well-constructed unit, for access to content. This quota could be automatically decremented within a framework of personally definable rules. It is analogous to the GB blocks I buy from my ISP, but the unit might instead represent the market value of information.
Bitcoin itself is not answer - there are limitations that preclude microtransactions at scale, and traceability issues - but some distributed cryptocurrency will be the solution. It will take luck and genius to design & establish. The Ethereum project gives me hope that a solution will be found within a couple of decades.
"Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day. That's right, nearly 50% of the readers are blocking ads."
I'm not saying ad blockers had no effect on their business, but I find it extremely hard to believe 50% of their visitors discovered and started using ad blockers in the past year.
"Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day. That's right, nearly 50% of the readers are blocking ads."
I'm not saying ad blockers had no effect on their business, but I find it extremely hard to believe 50% of their visitors discovered and started using ad blockers in the past year.
Websites used to ask you to click the links because they got a fraction of a penny for your clicks. I'll send them my check for $0.001 to look at their page.
Whenever I read something like this I feel really bad and turn off my ad blocker, as soon as I do that I'm usually greeted with 2 minute long unskippable ads, sites re-skinned with ads, targeted ads, ads that are just straight up spam, ads that play in the background and ads that require me to fill out a survey. I want to support these websites but online ads don't pay nearly as much as TV, radio or print ads but that are 10 times more annoy, detrimental to my privacy and if I ever click on them I know their almost certainly going to be some sort of phishing scam or virus from eastern Europe. You know it sucks that people are blocking ads but online ads are the absolute worst, if online ads functioned and payed as much as print advertisements than I don't think anyone would have a problem with seeing ads but we all know they don't. Only thing I can recommend is that these sites change their business model or at least augment it with a mixture of merch, internet begging (patreon), premium memberships and being more choosy with what ad networks they choose to partner with.
When running a business, you need to spend 50% of your time on the business-part and the other 50% on providing content, serving your customers, etc.
With ads, you let the ad-network do the business-part, while only taking 10%-50% of your turn-over. You can spend 100% of your time making content, etc. Especially small businesses are happy with that model.
The ads where good for content, as more content was created.
But it's now leaving a huge gap of opportunity!
Then there's also product discovery. We need new ways for people to discover more content that they are interested in.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want some of my money you need to get it from the people who charge me every month for accesing you web page: My ISP.
They are the ones making money off the fact that I want to get on the internet and access content.
Too bad there is no reliable, independent mechanism for taking some of that money and putting it in a large pool to be ditributed to content creators. The amount you get is based on how popular your site is. The ISPs know exactly how popular your site is.
(Too bad I'm late to the thread. Nobody is going to read this)
Sounds like a good idea at first, but... Who did we pay for TV content prior to cable/satellite? No one. You bought the hardware and thereafter the content was all free, supported by ads.
Cable access providers promised ad-free content, so people paid for it. Paying the access provider worked well. So well that it mostly wiped out the ad-supported over-the-air competition and left the cable cos as monopolies. Which enabled them to raise their prices and become filled with ads. While controlling what you could see and when, charging extra for some content vs other content, etc.
Making ISPs more like cable companies doesn't seem like a good idea for the consumer. And it won't make the ads go away.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadWork it out and send guru3d a payment
My favorite example is when you see a popular github repository with a donate button (Flattr, Bitcoin address, etc) only to realize they've made a whole $14 in the past year. Wow, thanks world!
It turns out that ads worked because the user didn't actually have to do anything. They didn't have to get their credit card out of their wallet, something they rarely do on the internet.
And when they do, it's to give money to a large corporation like Netflix or because Jimmy Wales managed to beg for donations in a more invasive annoying way than a banner ad ever was. (You know, I never once had to see the face of the founder of AdultFriendFinder in one of their ads.)
I hope we find a next-coming middleground that changes the culture of what people are willing to pay for and how they do it. But the fact that giving your credit/debit card number to someone gives them (and anyone else) unlimited charge license on your account is not helping.
Ad blockers mean one isn't prepared to pay for your product. Personally when I am prevented from viewing content because my Privoxy has been detected I tend to just go elsewhere. I find ads a significant burden on my concentration and well being.
Yet in print media I don't mind. Often I read trade mags specifically for the ads, they are great market research.
At least not until some sort of shift happens in how we pay for content which I think is imminent.
> Ad blockers mean one isn't prepared to pay for your product.
Perhaps rather: "Your product is not worth taking out a credit card and paying for" which applies to most websites. There are massive barriers to explicitly paying for things, even just psychological.
In an abstract sense, ads are like vignette windshield stickers that let you cruise past tollway checkpoints when the alternative is to have to stop at a tollboth even if it's just to pay 10 cents.
People have tried to create services that replace ads in that abstraction, but so far nothing has stuck. I think the post-ad solution needs to be just as mindless as ads if it's going to replace them.
Fewer and fewer, but they still do and with enough volume to prop up entire businesses, small and multinational.
Maybe lightbox you from time to time asking for the same.
One does not simply "detect adblock". Browsers are user agents. They run code in an environment optimized for user safety and convenience. These environments will always be able to tell your site's server- and client-side code exactly what it wants to hear while showing something different to the user. You can't stop it. The client will always win.
We may eventually get to the point where clients use various computer vision techniques to recognize ads. If I can clearly distinguish jiggling, improbably large elf anatomy below a flashing yellow "PLAY THIS ONLINE RPG" from content I want to see, so can an algorithm, at least to within an acceptable error rate.
Advertisements that are so borderline that they can't be detected as advertisements are ones I probably don't mind seeing anyway.
Spammers have already tried all available countermeasures and they've completely lost. Spam is so completely ineffective that it's actually dipped below half of email traffic.
No, the client will always win in the end.
The techniques used by the project to which you've linked can be trivially worked around by detecting the script itself and either not running it or telling it what it wants to hear. (Come on: an iframe? You really don't think a browser extension could lie about that? I expected at least some kind of server-client traffic correlation for a serious ad-blocker-blocker attempt.)
That is unfortunately not the case in all situations now (e.g. mobile devices).
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/23/civilwar.html
Now guess if I block ads?
The only reason the client can separate certain forms of advertising from content is that advertisers - by and large - don't care. The more advertising and content is intermingled the more difficult it will be to separate them. The intermingling is already happening as we see in the rise of content marketing.
I don't give a damn about tracking. All the doomsday scenarios that those in the anti-tracking camp imagine have not come to pass.
I'd accept that without issue. I don't mind ads, I just can't accept the intrusive tracking, including being retargeted.
You can do much better than "interested in video games or technology" if you know a bit about your users. This tracking makes advertising much less annoying (occasionally veering into useful).
Advertisers will adapt. What you have to accept is more annoying advertising coupled with increasingly error-prone code in both ad-blockers and ad-blocker-blockers. The only one that wins is Moloch; everyone else is worse off.
> What information one can get from someone's browsing history is awfully invasive.
Is it? Advertisers don't get some kind of toast on their phones saying "Joe, 34 from Topeka with a toaster fetish, has just visited your site!" along with pictures of Joe and said toasters. That's a strawman that the anti-tracking people love to hint at, but it doesn't actually work that way.
What actually happens is that advertisers target broad categories. They say, "show this ad to midwesterners who've visited sites about toasters", and that's what happens. There's no secret dossier just waiting to be sold to the highest bidder for purposes always left unspecified.
Yes, centralized trackers do end up learning a portion of your browsing history. But you don't have to accept third-party cookies. You can run with an ad blocker. And you can just reset your cookie[1] state every so often. You can do any of these things. You'll just pay for your paranoia with a shittier web.
[1] Yes, I know about non-cookie trackers. Advertisers stashing information where it's hard to clear are scum. It's up to web browsers to make it easy to flush all server-visible state.
But the likes of Google and Facebook know exactly that. They have it stored somewhere and it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen by organised criminals, religious fanatics or oppressive governments.
The problem isn't that all advertising is bad. The problem is that we visit websites expecting one entity to own and operate it. Instead we get hit by a thousand entities, each with its own privacy policies and agendas. That's unworkable from the consumer side.
Now there is also the debate of whether all sites deserve to be able to run javascript. I say no. But some people here think that even rendering a blog article should require a lot of client side scripting.
You're assuming the server-side scripts won't share data with a central server.
Browser fingerprinting is the only way I can think of, and between the phasing out of flash, java and silverlight, and having javascript disabled by default, browser fingerprinting is pretty much toothless.
I go on site abc.com, which gives me the cookie abc:111 Then I go on xyz.com which gives me the cookie xyz:222
Because of the same origin policy, xyz.com can't access the cookies set by abc.com. Abc and xyz can communicate as much as they want on the server side, they will not be able to tell that abc:111 and xyz:222 are the same user (absent additional information: browser fingerprinting, email address if you have an account on both, etc).
So you visit abc.com for the first time, get an ad image served from the same domain (but was provided from the ad network), have the cookie set, the ID is noted by the ad network.
You then visit xyz.com, a new cookie is generated, which can be tracked by the ad network as the ID is the same.
So you now get tailored/tracking adverts without any third party domains being accessed by your browser...
Well, that is effectively using abc as a tracking server, and abc.com would quickly be added to the adblockers lists. Effectively this is the current model.
The other thing is that I may visit abc.com and xyz.com but this particular combination may be unique to me, i.e. I may visit nytime.com and ford.com which may use the same ad network, but you may not visit nytime.com at all and instead wsj.com.
Browser fingerprinting is a different problem. It does defeat the same origin policy. But I suggest you look at the sources of entropy: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ With javascript off, there is virtually no entropy, just your user agent and HTTP_ACCEPT header. You can't fingerprint a browser at all.
If you enable javascript but not plugins, then the Browser Pluggin details give you some entropy, although looking at the list those a relatively generic and would likely be the same on many machines.
If you enable plugins (flash, silverlight, java) then you have a massive amount of entropy but realistically all of these plugins are almost gone from major browsers.
The ad cookie/ID is then sent from the abc.com server to the ad network (along with whatever data they need to determine what ads were seen/clicked), who collate all the data from wherever their js file is running, thusly allowing them to track you, without any requests from your browser being sent to any other domains other than the ones you directly visit.
If your server has the ability to say "Hey, Jane doe saw your ad just now" when she didnt, thats a recipe for massive fraud.
You might say CPC would work and then just send to unique urls the ad network can track- This too wont work, as it allows the publisher to do things like auto-pop the link, hide it in 1x1 iframes, etc.. Overall its a security and fraud nightmare that involves huge cat-and-mouse games.
Not to mention the fact that the ad networks have no incentive to change. As more inventory drys up, the spends go up with them (competition increases) - Supply and demand, mostly.
"(October 2014) we had nearly 4.5 million hits (read) on our articles. This year (October 2015) we are at 4.4 million hits... Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day."
Is pageviews the actual metric, or is ads served the metric? Given the recent discoveries in how many "ad views" were actually never presented to the reader and were just phony revenue ticks, could it not be that you are also "suffering" from an ongoing reduction in phony ad presentations as the trickery is discovered and addressed?
I block ads primarily to limit tracking and bogus traffic, not to dodge advertising per se. I heartily endorse jfoutz's suggestions here. If you continue to serve quality content, it's the more sustainable business model long-term anyway.
Years before the modern ad-network paradigm, many media sites were subscription from the outset (e.g. WSJ, mercurynews). Some later went free, using ad networks to pay the way. Now, the trend is moving back to a subscription model. Those sites that do the punitive block-ads-and-we-block-you (e.g. washingtonpost) will find that people just go elsewhere for those stories.
If the ad is coming from their own server and displayed with their own custom HTML/CSS, I can't see an obvious way these could be detected and blocked in general.
Meanwhile, hosting your own ads entails finding advertisers, wooing them, developing a relationship with them, maintaining that relationship, negotiating a contract, settling that contract, building an ad-serving system somehow, automating it somehow, etc. And that's if you're even big enough to attract anyone or even warrant the work to begin with. And the second you try to generalize it (which is what ad networks do), then you're back on every adblocker's default blocklist.
That way you can get the benefits of a network + the benefits of serving from the same server that is serving the content
It would come at the massive expense of high-quality tracking and thus incur a massive reduction in ad revenue, but it's an imminent trade-off that beats unconditional adblocking.
I think everything is just waiting for the actual tipping point that forces everyone's hand like we always do. Adblockers are still the minority.
For example, the ease of Adsense is the only reason why my forum is still alive. It's a medium-sized collaborative fiction writing forum with a userbase composed of mostly teens without money (I've tried scavenging for donations once).
Every year my banner ad makes me less and less money. And when it stops breaking even with its rent, I will close it down.
Now, some people in these threads, even perhaps yourself, would argue that my forum simply shouldn't exist since it's dependent on ads or because "I'm too lazy" to spend time trying to find a business model for a forum that already makes me almost no money, but it would be a loss for my users.
That is:
* Security risk through ads (malvertising, ad networks not supporting https etc.).
* Ads killing performance (70% CPU for a flash ad is not uncommon).
* Privacy (Ad vendors having mostly stated that they won't accept user wishes through DNT or similar technologies).
Privacy is a tricky one, because data is in part where the income comes from. But the other two are fixable. I want to hear from everyone complaining about ad blockers what they intend to do to make ads less of a security risk and cpu cycle burner. That would be a good start of a proper conversation about the topic. Every text that ignores these issues is usually not worth recognizing.
• They impose a surprisingly huge cognitive load.
Even if you (like most people nowadays) are used to them and hence “do not notice them”, that very habit of ignoring them actually takes more brain power than you’d think.
My brain is simply not conditioned to flashing colors and quick cuts that aren't important. It requires practice to read a text bylined with blinking animations, and I simply don't have the cognitive power to do that. Most people that cope with it probably doesn't realize how much practice they've had.
On a serious note, your brain will be ok, it is a fine pattern matching machines with adaptative filters to discard uninteresting data (did you notice that sound of blood heartbeating in your ears?... that's filtering doing its work).
And also visually our brain is very good at ignoring data, search for the gorilla suit experiment.
Do not some ad networks pay content providers for "impressions", regardless of whether the ads are clicked? In that case, loading the ads without reading them is not the same as not loading them.
If a site is consistently staying alive only through ads, it means that money is somehow flowing from some people to the ad-supported content. We are all already paying for content through some convoluted pathway.
We should just start paying with minimal middlemen, since ad companies bill our attention and build profiles about us from our behavioral data.
We -- the technologists behind it -- should be anxious to help humanity get past this embarrassing chapter in our development and find another way to make the economic wheels turn.
But small websites are not in a position to change the state of affairs, and if nothing changes and people keep blocking their ads, they're going to be dying in large numbers.
As a result, everything will be locked into app stores with even less privacy and with many restrictions on the type of content that is allowed.
The sort of answers I am looking for are the ones that do not pit small websites against users.
When I became aware of those issues, I installed additional blocking software even though I was already not seeing any ads.
In my defense, content blocking has been around since time immoral. The first browser I ever used, some Netscape, had a setting to disable the display of images. I used that setting to speed up my page loads.
I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about it. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support.
Look, a lot of this ad revenue was bullshit anyway. Online ads have not been very effective historically, but people were still willing to pay for them and that pumped a lot of money into any site with a lot of traffic, regardless of whether or not the ads on that site actually worked. It turns out that visitors have started blocking ads before people started figuring out how crappy the RoI on those ads actually were, but that money was likely to dry up one way or the other eventually.
There are plenty of non-obnoxious ways to do product reviews and endorsements that can still bring in revenue (that's the laziest option) but there are also a ton of excellent options out there for content-creators to gain financial support without relying on ads. It's easier than it's ever been to earn a living without ads and it's only getting easier over time. If you're a web-focused content creator in 2015 and you don't have something for sale on your site (even just "brand" merch), don't have patreon set up, and don't have plans for crowd funded projects then you're making a huge mistake and leaving a crap-ton of money on the table.
People who hated spam signed the Boulder Pledge.
People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway.
And as I mentioned there's no formal system in place where users agree to see ads in exchange for access to content. Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.
> Nor is there a moral obligation to do so.
Don't pretend that you have unique moral authority, able to decide the rights and wrongs. If you don't want ads you should boycott ad supported sites - not giving them your traffic is at least as effective as giving them your traffic but hiding their ads. They respond to you by having advertisers paying for content. They respond to me by improving the quality of the content and charging for it.
> But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam.
And people that use spam filters on a daily basis just like the fact that they don't get as much spam anymore. You know like people that use adblockers and appreciate that they don't have as many adverts anymore.
You are comparing apples and cats. If you want to compare apples and apples compare the people that created spam filters with those that created blockers and compare the people that use spam filters with those that use blockers.
How old are you? How long have you been using the Internet? Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?
Yes
Any thoughts on the rest of my comments?
[1] There hasn't been any change. It's just my perception, and that turns out to be wrong.
Your comment here is neither, and it just turned a discussion about the morality of ad-blocking and the viability of ad-based revenue models into a dick measuring contest.
Not cool.
When Floegipoky decided DanBC's comment was probably not made in good faith, I don't think it's fair to characterize this as a mere assumption. More like an inference well supported by the available evidence.
It wasn't intended that way though - I was genuinely just trying to see if people who'd used the Internet earlier were more aware of things like Boulder pledge. (Turns out several people who had significant involvement in Internet email at the time didn't know about it.)
You ever see stats on ads taking the bandwidth?
http://betanews.com/2015/08/25/ad-blocker-crystal-massively-...
The ad vendors business model depends on the user paying for the ads. Why in living hell are they complaining? I am subsidizing their crappy business model. If I want to stop subsidizing them, it's my right.
https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-fro...
The article is exactly what it says on the tin: You are charged more (roughly 16x) for the data inherent in the ad than the publisher makes for serving it.
In an ideal world with perfect coordination, we'd agree to just directly send the publisher a quarter of what the current ad data costs us, and everybody relevant wins.
* some ad media companies scam their clients by publishing ads on sites where kickback payments are most attractive, rather than where the users are most suitable for the client
* agencies who also design campaigns for their clients tend to use more obnoxious and more commonly blocked ad formats because they're more expensive for the client, hurting both client and publisher (more ad blockers, annoyed users)
* I am also convinced that there's plenty of click fraud out there, but it's the only of these issues I don't know firsthand / as a fact
I doubt privacy is salvable, and I wouldn't want ads that didn't know what I was interested in to show up at all, since those universually suck.
Patreon (and youtube community in general) have, together with projects like gog.com, humblebundle etc. proved that people actually WANT to pay for content even if they don't have to. But only in the way they want to. Especially if that means they'll get more reader centric content, not advertiser centric.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Ad-supported media is not free, it's costs are simply externalised. While we, the tech-savvy, may not click ads, somebody is buying those payday loans, lose 30 lbs in a month with this weird trick, get-rich-quick scams.
I'm more than happy to see ad-financed (mostly low-quality) content go the way of the popup. I have no problem paying for quality content (Netflix, Hulu Plus, Audible, etc.). The few high quality ad-supported blogs will then be able to charge for their content, since there will be no decent alternatives. As long as ad-supported content exists though, it will be a race to the bottom.
And $10/month is a tremendous amount. Follow 10 sites and you've spent 1/10 of the average wage in my European country, and more than 1/6 of the minimum wage. It'll only lead to a balkanization of the web, with good sites pricing for wealthy American and northern European visitors, and everyone else being left out.
People still publish personal blogs, comments, threads in forums, free software, help for other people, articles and data, etc. without getting paid for it.
Funny that you mention that. Netflix and Hulu are not available in my country and my country is in the EU. As an american, you may not realize it, but paywalls are going to lead to a balkanization of the Internet, a process that is well on its way to being a reality.
If your content adds value to your visitors' lives, then charge for it. If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads, then probably there is a problem with the stuff you offer not being valuable enough to people.
I don't want this to sound grumpy, and I don't mean to say your content is not good or valuable. It's just that I've discussed this topic a lot of times with friends and colleagues and there seems to be a common agreement that ads and trackers have become so invasive (visually and privacy-wise) that people are not wanting to see them anymore or to be tracked.
As always, it's about survival of the fittest and those who know how to adapt quickest. Find a way to charge for your content and build a sustainable business.
What people are willing to pay for has a large social/cultural/conditioned element. It's a crux of the entire problem.
The vast majority of people still attribute zero cost to ads. When you start charging $1 for your offering, now you're the one site among your competitors that's charging money. Maybe some HN nerds will care. Whoopdee doo. Nobody else does. The rest of the world isn't going to take their credit card out of their wallet when they can endure a banner ad instead.
Oh wait, they can just install an ad blocker the day they actually do care. Or maybe when their kid or significant other or buddy installs an adblocker on their browser like I did for my parents and they won't even realize the trouble it ever saved them.
See, I think that we will be soon on the cusp of a shift that needs to happen before we can replace ads at all, and it's more than just something a website can do by themselves by adding a paywall or whatever solution that doesn't work for most websites that people seem to conjure up in response to these issues.
- when you first go to the website, you get the ad-infested website
- you can pay for the app, and now, no more ads. In Android apps, the amount tends to be crazy low, like less than a cup of coffee. Pay that and get no ads is a no-brainer really...
Information leakage between sites and apps on mobile no doubt varies wildly based on your configuration and willingness to accept apps requesting outrageous permissions, but I'd suspect web-apps to be easier to protect yourself from, as a user.
Well now how costly? Just one dedicated server? multiple? Usage of AWS? Distributed data centres?
Staff? accountants, designers, moderators? Or automated scripts and volunteers?
If an organisation appeals to me to support them, I will, if they outline where and why they need it. Like Wikipedia for example or like OpenStreetMap. To say "oh it costs too much and we have lots of hits" is not an appeal to rationality.
As it stand, most web users block ads and most web publisher block legal responsibility. Neither side want to take the hit when malware is spread through ads, people personal information is being illegally stored, and when laws that govern advertisement in news papers, radio, and TV is ignored on the web. Both side want all the benefits with none of the draw backs, and advertisement through websites will run closer and closer to the fate of advertisement through email.
> Ghostery
These guys are complaining that users don't want to be tracked. I honestly can't take a single word in the entire article seriously.
The web was always built to be adaptable to the end user device. The user agent was intended to act as the decision maker how to render the markup. For many years, browsers even respected the default foreground and background colors and font choices (sadly not many respect X resources anymore). CSS was designed to include an end user defined style sheet to override tiny fonts and other things that made web pages hard to read.
Not viewing animated banners isn't at all different from changing your base font, or not loading javascript. Had we chosen to call it "disabling" instead of "blocking" it would have been much more clear that this is an action that the user is and should be empowered to take. I do recognize that we're stuck with the loaded word for now, I just feel it's important not to forget that. The public discourse is dominated by media people, and their perspective is important too, but not more so than the technical one.
Personally, if there was an easy and private way to do so, I'd much rather pay for content than getting "free" stuff financed by ads. Inevitably, sites will be extremely reluctant to write anything negative about products from companies that buy lots of ads. For this reason, I consider many of the reviews on tech sites, for example, kinda worthless.
So, I'm glad to see this ad financed business model break down. Buying access to content with a cryptocurrency could be real easy (and relatively private). But it does not help that many governments want you to calculate capital gain/loss everytime you make such a purchase.
I think governments ought to make an exception in the capital gains tax for small personal purchases. Maybe promoters who loudly proclaim that cryptocurrencies will soon replace "legacy" government fiat currencies are part of the problem. No wonder governments are so negative. But I don't think cryptocurrencies necessarily will replace fiat currencies anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies work great for small purchases online, but I wouldn't want to put my lifesavings into one - oh no! My computer got hacked - my life savings are gone!
Edit: replacing the entire capital gains tax with a wealth tax would probably be even better.
Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time.
As far as I understand, Google is trying to do this. But it does not provide a 'no ads' guarantee and there are other ad networks with even more obnoxious ads.
The problem with this is you must allow a third party to track every page visit and/or page view time, which is unacceptable to many people that use ad blockers.
If you are OK with persistent, pervasive tracking, I think this is probably the best solution.
Not only is it not private but it also will not scale for microtransactions on a massive scale.
Ok, I admit I'm not a Bitcoin expert. But if I buy Bitcoin with cash, or mine some myself, is this really a problem?
Even without that, enough usage activity means a shadow profile can be inferred that is effectively tracking you, just without a specific name. FINCEN has been developing this type of technology for decades.
And this is magnified when you're talking about essentially penny transactions - unless your cash bitcoin dealer is willing to see you every week for another $2.
"Anonymity" means little in the context of ecash. The property we're really looking for is untraceability, which bitcoin does not have.
Ergo, my willingness to pay is non-zero, but current fiat-currency payment services are inadequate to represent the negotiation.
I would be willing to buy (e.g. with fiat cash or another cryptocurrency) a block of quota, denominated in a well-constructed unit, for access to content. This quota could be automatically decremented within a framework of personally definable rules. It is analogous to the GB blocks I buy from my ISP, but the unit might instead represent the market value of information.
Bitcoin itself is not answer - there are limitations that preclude microtransactions at scale, and traceability issues - but some distributed cryptocurrency will be the solution. It will take luck and genius to design & establish. The Ethereum project gives me hope that a solution will be found within a couple of decades.
I'm not saying ad blockers had no effect on their business, but I find it extremely hard to believe 50% of their visitors discovered and started using ad blockers in the past year.
I'm not saying ad blockers had no effect on their business, but I find it extremely hard to believe 50% of their visitors discovered and started using ad blockers in the past year.
Just charge money. Have we all forgotten how commerce worked for ~5000 years before the ad-supported model came along?
With ads, you let the ad-network do the business-part, while only taking 10%-50% of your turn-over. You can spend 100% of your time making content, etc. Especially small businesses are happy with that model.
The ads where good for content, as more content was created. But it's now leaving a huge gap of opportunity!
Then there's also product discovery. We need new ways for people to discover more content that they are interested in.
They are the ones making money off the fact that I want to get on the internet and access content.
Too bad there is no reliable, independent mechanism for taking some of that money and putting it in a large pool to be ditributed to content creators. The amount you get is based on how popular your site is. The ISPs know exactly how popular your site is.
(Too bad I'm late to the thread. Nobody is going to read this)
Cable access providers promised ad-free content, so people paid for it. Paying the access provider worked well. So well that it mostly wiped out the ad-supported over-the-air competition and left the cable cos as monopolies. Which enabled them to raise their prices and become filled with ads. While controlling what you could see and when, charging extra for some content vs other content, etc.
Making ISPs more like cable companies doesn't seem like a good idea for the consumer. And it won't make the ads go away.
Isn't public TV paid for by taxes?
Anyways, I second you, the ISP should not collect money for accessing content.