I stopped using at least 4 websites which I followed for years just because they tried to enforce on me turning off PrivacyBadger and uBlock. It will hurt only you in long term. It's more important for me to use my browser then you website that doesn't respect my choices.
A site which eventually has no visitors will become irrelevant. Those with ad blockers will also often share links to said site which others without ad blockers will click on. If you block me on your website there are many others who will no longer be clicking through via the links I would otherwise have shared.
Let's say two sites, A and B host similar content.
The end user cannot see some content on site A because of adblock detection but he can see it on site B, he down votes the link of site A on sharing networks, he asks for a policy banning or advocates against linking to site A because content can be found on B.
I've seen this play out many times, and at that point you're not just losing traffic from ad block clients you're losing traffic overall, have people actively promote your competitors and earn a bad rep (and that rep might not even be objective - in general if people remember anything it will be "don't use A" not the "why" of it)
Cartel members always have incentives to cheat - if one site can become popular by not ad-walling like 90% of them do and regurgitate the content of 90% they will do it and disregard "the big picture" especially considering the low barriers to entry. They have no enforcement mechanism to keep everyone honest - the only way this sort of thing works is if you "outlaw" non-ad-walled sites - something like google not listing those sites - otherwise not happening.
Someone needs to pay in a society where a restaurant owner needs money to eat. But that someone doesn't have to be the customer, doesn't have to be every customer - and the economy might not be structured to require anyone to pay for things, in which case both the restaurant and the customers get everything without money. (Why would people work there? Maybe vocation or hospitality, maybe they wouldn't and robots would instead.)
Well as a user I might share a link to a site that will be seen by 100 or 1000's of others, on Facebook, Reddit or whatever social network. If that website blocks me from visiting them at first place, they will also loose all the potential revenue from the viral effect.
But your friends have larger chance also being ad blocker users, right? In the end, the website just get more requests and a bigger bill from ISP without getting a cent from those.
My father doesn't even know what web browser is he using. He doesn't know how to install different one. He doesn't have permission do it anyway. You will ban him, he will stop coming there and start going to competitors. Who is lost is such situation?
Of course, and I believe that the sum of actors exercising fair play in a generally free space will result in interesting market and social configurations.
In this case, I see internet content divided in half -- content for those who can pay for it, and content for those who can't. Not all websites should survive. Not all users should be able to experience everything on the internet. "You get what you pay for" is not wrong. Exclusivity can lead to quality.
What terms? They send you a GET and you responded with 200 OK. What they do with the response once it reaches their property is up to them, you have no claim to how they view it.
FWIW I have no problem with sites doing this. You can participate in ad-blocking arms race if you so desire. I have no obligation to run your JavaScript just because you sent it to me. You can try to make it a requirement and I'll probably just use software to circumvent it.
But underlying point is that you have no moral or ethical claim to how people view your content, just as you have no moral or ethical claim that a person cannot rip ads out of a magazine. If you want them to pay for your content, the Open Internet is not the place you should be publishing.
Whatever end is reached, there's no intuitive or trending reason why it won't be any better or worse than not using ad + tracking blockers. The end result of any side winning is simply that they get what they want; it's not going to lead to some tragedy of the commons.
Either advertisers get to track people or they don't. Either people get to block things or they don't. Once upon a time there was little attention to these things, and advertisers got to slurp up data en masse. That is still the case, just an inch less so today.
Perhaps this is a bit cruel, but I believe in a divided web experience, one which is ad-supported and the masses browse and are tracked, the other which is curated, high signal, and directly paid for. Like with most things in life, you get what you have the leverage to get, and in general that means what you pay for.
Scientific literature is run through this way, and I don't think they're hurting for ad revenue. I think exclusivity can protect quality. It's okay to have a paid-for news channel, and a free news channel for the masses, a paid-for Reddit, and a free Reddit. You get what you pay for.
Well clearly the experience for people not using ad blockers is substantially worse than it was 10 years ago.
If the usage of ad blockers increases, you can bet that those not using ad blockers will be squeezed and exploited and have a thousand popups and intrusive ads thrown at them in order for the sites to recoup the lost money.
So those using ad blockers are making the web worse for everyone.
> I you can bet that those not using ad blockers will be squeezed and exploited and have a thousand popups and intrusive ads thrown at them in order for the sites to recoup the lost money.
They are doing that already, they are maximizing the amount of ads they can shove down user's throats. This is nothing new and ad-blocking didn't change that. You'd think adverstiser would understand by now the reason why people use adblocker...
Actually, it is the responsibility of any behavioral researcher, marketer, or designer, to extract full value from users as is sound to business short/middle/long term goals. If there are still ads to be placed, still users to be tracked, metrics to be studied, then let it be so.
You're assuming that 'good behavior' of users should somehow stay the hand of marketing companies. It ought not. A good marketing company will do everything to extract full value insofar as it is harmonious to business goals -- ad blocker or not, the search for the perfect recipe of ad delivery will march on.
Scientific literature is still working out how to deal with "open access": there's a big demand to make papers free-to-access. Which results in the cost being borne by the author paying the publisher instead .. or the disappearance of the publisher intermediary altogether.
People just stop using those sites, easy peasy. I've stopped browsing a few, and just close out sites that block me because I use ublock origin. No real loss to the consumer when almost every news story is syndicated and found elsewhere just as easily.
Websites can try to block users with certain browsers or ad-blockers, but that's not going to work. With a very few exceptions, content is a commodity and portals are easily replaceable.
Actually it feels like there are more people creating content than reading it these days. There is plenty of interesting content out there, so if people can't access something, they just move on to the next one and never return.
To protect yourself from tracking and malware. Being able to inform and educate yourself without several third-parties profiling you should be a cornerstone of our society.
In case you missed an episode, ads are not only used for revenues but also for user tracking. If you want to increase your privacy one bit turning ads off is an obvious first step.
I earn good money with Ads, but i am very well aware how the Internet works. Block ads myself and would never be stupid enough to depend on ads for a income. Its extra more, and you should be handling it like that, else you will be fucked within no time.
> depends on advertising - directly or indirectly - to get their bills paid
A business model is only viable if the culture in which it is operated finds value in that model. If the culture no longer values an Internet advertising based business model, then they'll have to find a new approach to get their bills paid.
It's only hypocritical if you block ads but complain that others block yours, or if you think there's some sort of moral duty to watch them.
Whatever money I make from ads - we don't host them, but we do buy them - I accept that it is contingent on people choosing to accept them. That doesn't produce a moral duty to do so myself, any more than selling cod means I'm morally obliged to eat it at home. If people stop buying cod, I'm not outraged, I just accept that my business model must change.
I don't expect the web to be free. I have faith in a process in which generally free actors, within some guidelines, act within a generally free space, and I am eager to see the outcomes of such a struggle. In this case, I see a future where the internet is divided roughly in two -- content for those who can pay, and content for those who can't.
A "you get what you pay for" world is not necessarily evil, and exclusivity can protect quality.
The internet IS free. You want to charge me for something else entirely - reading your web page. And how I render the content on MY computer using MY bandwidth is none of your concern.
I am not responsible for your flawed business model.
How true you are, Opera was in fact the first browser forcing users to block Ads back in 2003 when it integrated the Ads right into the GUI. I had to create IPFW rules to block them back then, at least now that process is easier. :)
Firefox already has tracking protection, which also blocks ads (because they almost universally track you). It's Opera that is following suit, probably as a reaction to the publicity Brave is getting.
Opera actually had an integrated blocker years ago in their previous engine. However, they scrapped most of the functionalities when they switched to Blink in 2013.
As publisher, fuck you. As consumer, that was the original reason i used Opera years ago, the natively implemented blocklist was just amazingly fast, especially compared to the extension on the other platforms.
Its a little sad that they changed so much that they have to reinvent the wheel now.
I dont. Its the decision of my readers if they want that. I dont care about adsense tracking at all, its not harming me, i am more afraid of other companies tracking which are not as secure and somehow privacy respecting as google.
You're selling out your readers, who are harmed by that. The cross-site aggregation that Google does is far more harmful (see: "pattern of life" analysis) than a smaller tracker with bad security. This makes you just as responsible.
Its how the internet works, i am not happy with it ether and tell anyone to use a AdBlocker plus something like PrivacyBatcher. Hence i am in the progress to block all this directly on my Firewall.
My point is its the users responsibility to protect himself, if he goes on the Internet without any idea whats going on its just naive and my ads are the smallest of his problems.
Yes, it's a good idea for people to defend themselves. That doesn't make publishers any less responsible when they betray their readers to aggregators like Google.
> As publisher
You're telling your readers they need to talk to some other host - which may be owned by Google or similar - to get part of the page. Then you claim that it's their fault for being stupid (really: ignorant) enough to listen to you?
I dont think Google is particularly bad and that its a bad thing they are analyzing their traffic to deliver custom tailored ads.
Yeah i actually prefer them by far over the classic ad approach, i rather see things i am probably interested in.
I dont want to be tracked personally. That does not mean that other people who also use Windows, iPhones, Dropbox and whatever even care.
Why would i tell them obivous things they dont even care about?
Not sure what gives you the idea that i would depend parts of my site to external services, i dont even use S3/AWS even thought thats industry standard.
My sites work perfectly without ads, i even include ads in a way that they get invisible when blocked,
so there are no UI (or any other) issues for people who prefer to block them.
I am not going to play the internet hero and miss out on my awesome extra income just because some people have radical thoughts about Google.
It may makes you happy that i only have ads on sites which are worth it, but all the others have Adsense, so i assume you dont care.
We are in an arms race between the people and the corporations.
As long as you can see content on a website, there will be corporations trying to monetize that fact. And as long as corporations have to operate within the borders of an open system there will be people trying to circumvent their methods.
An arms race like that will end with the richest corporations lobbying for an end to an open system. I'm sure we'll soon start seeing legislation attempting to criminalize ad-blocking.
This is yet another battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing; you either have the right to run whatever software you want on your computer, or someone else is the de facto owner of your computer through their ability to control what software is allowed to run. These battles need to be fought now, because it's hard to fight over property rights once someone else has already taken possession.
I used Opera (v5 to 7) for a long time and it always had an internal URL filter I used to block ads. I guess they just reimplemented it with a different focus.
I understand that to some ads are an important revenue, but this idea that interesting content will stop existing if we greatly reduce advertising seems false.
Just think, how many time do you spend sharing content in social networks for free? Most of the time it's uninteresting content it's true, but some people are actually interested in sharing highly interesting content made by themselves with the world for free, both in social networks and out of them.
May it be due to personal promotion or just out of some societal need.
True that the content provider (unlike the creator) will probably always want to be paid to provide it, but in that case, the monetization comes from other products and not from advertising. Think about GitHub personal pages for instance.
89 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadYou stopped leeching their bandwidth without any opportunity for them to earn any ad revenue from them!
Allowing leeches on your website doesn't seem that beneficial.
I stopped adding comments, starting discussions, I allow some non-intrusive ads when I enable them, I have quite extensive whitelist in ublock.
The end user cannot see some content on site A because of adblock detection but he can see it on site B, he down votes the link of site A on sharing networks, he asks for a policy banning or advocates against linking to site A because content can be found on B.
I've seen this play out many times, and at that point you're not just losing traffic from ad block clients you're losing traffic overall, have people actively promote your competitors and earn a bad rep (and that rep might not even be objective - in general if people remember anything it will be "don't use A" not the "why" of it)
Is it what you call a leech ?
I'm not convinced that's the case. They're usually quite different demographics.
Likewise I have the right to reject you if you can't comply with my terms.
In this case, I see internet content divided in half -- content for those who can pay for it, and content for those who can't. Not all websites should survive. Not all users should be able to experience everything on the internet. "You get what you pay for" is not wrong. Exclusivity can lead to quality.
"This site is not supported on browsers that block ads. Please switch to a different browser or disable your adblocker to proceed"
Those are terms. You can choose to ignore or circumvent them but they're still terms.
But underlying point is that you have no moral or ethical claim to how people view your content, just as you have no moral or ethical claim that a person cannot rip ads out of a magazine. If you want them to pay for your content, the Open Internet is not the place you should be publishing.
HTTP is not a contract.
Getting past ad-blockers isn't exactly rocket science. This is an arms race which will not end well.
Either advertisers get to track people or they don't. Either people get to block things or they don't. Once upon a time there was little attention to these things, and advertisers got to slurp up data en masse. That is still the case, just an inch less so today.
Perhaps this is a bit cruel, but I believe in a divided web experience, one which is ad-supported and the masses browse and are tracked, the other which is curated, high signal, and directly paid for. Like with most things in life, you get what you have the leverage to get, and in general that means what you pay for.
Scientific literature is run through this way, and I don't think they're hurting for ad revenue. I think exclusivity can protect quality. It's okay to have a paid-for news channel, and a free news channel for the masses, a paid-for Reddit, and a free Reddit. You get what you pay for.
If the usage of ad blockers increases, you can bet that those not using ad blockers will be squeezed and exploited and have a thousand popups and intrusive ads thrown at them in order for the sites to recoup the lost money.
So those using ad blockers are making the web worse for everyone.
They are doing that already, they are maximizing the amount of ads they can shove down user's throats. This is nothing new and ad-blocking didn't change that. You'd think adverstiser would understand by now the reason why people use adblocker...
How is it making the web worse for people using adblockers? Because they are a subset of "everyone"
You're assuming that 'good behavior' of users should somehow stay the hand of marketing companies. It ought not. A good marketing company will do everything to extract full value insofar as it is harmonious to business goals -- ad blocker or not, the search for the perfect recipe of ad delivery will march on.
That's one data point that can give you an idea of what the general reaction was.
Let's find some more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11258424
Your move.
Actually it feels like there are more people creating content than reading it these days. There is plenty of interesting content out there, so if people can't access something, they just move on to the next one and never return.
Also uBlock Origin for ads and blocking images larger than 200KB.
Saves a lot of mobile data for me.
[1] https://www.techinasia.com/360-safe-browser-malware
If you use ad blocking, just be sure that you and no-one you are close to depends on advertising - directly or indirectly - to get their bills paid.
So damn childish to have such a sense of self righteous indignation that people turn off ads but expect the Internet to be free.
A business model is only viable if the culture in which it is operated finds value in that model. If the culture no longer values an Internet advertising based business model, then they'll have to find a new approach to get their bills paid.
This is neither good nor bad. It's just business.
Whatever money I make from ads - we don't host them, but we do buy them - I accept that it is contingent on people choosing to accept them. That doesn't produce a moral duty to do so myself, any more than selling cod means I'm morally obliged to eat it at home. If people stop buying cod, I'm not outraged, I just accept that my business model must change.
A "you get what you pay for" world is not necessarily evil, and exclusivity can protect quality.
I am not responsible for your flawed business model.
Its a little sad that they changed so much that they have to reinvent the wheel now.
You're selling out your readers, who are harmed by that. The cross-site aggregation that Google does is far more harmful (see: "pattern of life" analysis) than a smaller tracker with bad security. This makes you just as responsible.
My point is its the users responsibility to protect himself, if he goes on the Internet without any idea whats going on its just naive and my ads are the smallest of his problems.
Yes, it's a good idea for people to defend themselves. That doesn't make publishers any less responsible when they betray their readers to aggregators like Google.
> As publisher
You're telling your readers they need to talk to some other host - which may be owned by Google or similar - to get part of the page. Then you claim that it's their fault for being stupid (really: ignorant) enough to listen to you?
I dont want to be tracked personally. That does not mean that other people who also use Windows, iPhones, Dropbox and whatever even care. Why would i tell them obivous things they dont even care about?
Not sure what gives you the idea that i would depend parts of my site to external services, i dont even use S3/AWS even thought thats industry standard. My sites work perfectly without ads, i even include ads in a way that they get invisible when blocked, so there are no UI (or any other) issues for people who prefer to block them.
I am not going to play the internet hero and miss out on my awesome extra income just because some people have radical thoughts about Google. It may makes you happy that i only have ads on sites which are worth it, but all the others have Adsense, so i assume you dont care.
Edit:// I also use Cloudflare if that helps ;)
We are in an arms race between the people and the corporations.
As long as you can see content on a website, there will be corporations trying to monetize that fact. And as long as corporations have to operate within the borders of an open system there will be people trying to circumvent their methods.
The UK is already moving in that direction.
This is yet another battlefield in the War On General Purpose Computing; you either have the right to run whatever software you want on your computer, or someone else is the de facto owner of your computer through their ability to control what software is allowed to run. These battles need to be fought now, because it's hard to fight over property rights once someone else has already taken possession.
Just think, how many time do you spend sharing content in social networks for free? Most of the time it's uninteresting content it's true, but some people are actually interested in sharing highly interesting content made by themselves with the world for free, both in social networks and out of them.
May it be due to personal promotion or just out of some societal need.
True that the content provider (unlike the creator) will probably always want to be paid to provide it, but in that case, the monetization comes from other products and not from advertising. Think about GitHub personal pages for instance.