Opening the article Incognito in Chrome and examining the network tab, over 170 requests in total weighing in at around 4MB (for me anyway). That is one reason I choose to use adblockers.
I believe it just said that ad-blockers will 'impact performance' - Which is technically correct... they didn't specify if it was negatively or positively ;)
I've seen a lot of sites recently that either work around my ad blocker to still load ads or else pop up some other annoyance (e.g. Bloomberg). I'm starting to think about going back to noscript and just selectively enabling things.
It's only recently started to become a major issue. Perhaps it has been enabled by default more recently, I'm not sure—when I first installed it some time ago, I believe I enabled it manually as part of the setup process.
Because it's not always reliable and can cause things not working properly. It's really easy to create ad block killers/popup modals etc. It's just that lately site owners have began fighting back.
It's really interesting where it leads us, site owners and more importantly ad networks have been lazy trying to defeat adblock.
It would be great to have a service that looks at a website's DOM structure, then you download some rewrite rules and you literally only download content.
Makes me wish you could go to HTTP and say: give me only the div's with the attribute "name" that equals "header" and "body" and all img tags with class "illustration".
I add the entire domain of those sites to my blacklist and never look back. I don't have the time to deal with websites where the operator considers the actual content to be secondary.
I find the mindset behind, "analysts estimated that ad blocking had cost web publishers nearly $22 billion in lost ad sales" to be both hilarious and terrifying. It's something right out of Max Headroom I watched as a kid, where having an off-switch on your TV was a crime.
> We noticed that you're using an ad blocker, which may adversely affect the performance and content on Bloomberg.com. For the best experience, please whitelist the site.
The dishonesty of it saying that the adblocker will ("may") negatively affect the performance of the site, when it's in fact blocking an absurd number of requests unnecessary to the content people actually want to see, is astounding.
Eh, plenty of sites have broken on umatrix for me, and I need to go in and whitelist certain servers. Bloomberg for instance I needed to whitelist alternate bloomberg domains and disqus for comments.
uMatrix isn't a typical consumer-friendly adblocker, it's a general purpose request blocker and explicitly warns that it will break many things. uBlock, AdBlock, etc., will generally not. Certain things do still break occasionally, but it's pretty rare and usually it's on a site that I don't actually care about. Disqus comments are blocked deliberately by most tracking blockers because Disqus tracks user behavior and discloses their data to third parties.
It just seems to generate a lot of false positives in general. I've seen it on desktop (OS X) Chrome too, with no ad blocker installed.
As far as I can tell, it fires incorrectly when the page is loading slow for whatever reason (and presumably some external JavaScript doesn't get loaded fast enough to disable it).
They tried all kinds of models. People rejected them for free stuff with ads. So, it's correct to build on the only thing that works for most content most of the time. The market is the problem.
Except that Netflix and even Apple iTunes show that if you price your content to be reasonable and allow people to actually choose what they want to watch, read or hear when they want to do so you can actually make a lot of money. And you don't have to show ads.
Exactly. Top comment is always how to bypass the paywall and the readers here are wealthy than average. Having everything behind paywall would make the content available for selected few. How would HN even work if everything is paywalled?
Netflix and iTunes are outliers. There were tons of attempts in those sectors. You haven't heard of most because they went bankrupt. The others barely make money and/or acquired little content. Try these:
- Market for paid search of general content vs Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
- Market for paid downloading of arbitrary, user-generated video vs YouTube and Vimeo.
- Market for paid blogging vs Wordpress etc.
- Number of people paying for news vs reading ad-supported news.
- Number of new companies using LAMP or cloud stacks vs Microsoft Server stacks.
And so on. Paid markets kept getting tinier and tinier with less and less money.
Let me give you an example. There's all kinds of people that were concerned about privacy when messaging. What you said made sense when people recommended PGP. Then, we had things like Threema ($2) or Signal (free) that were ultra-easy to use, cheap/free, and on their favorite devices. Still using surveillance platforms or insecure messaging. Still contributing to their proliferation and lack of alternatives.
Lock-in is another issue. People wanted alternatives to IBM mainframes, Windows desktops, and so on. Great one's were produced. They didn't run their prior software. They didn't want to port it, even gradually. So, most of those firms folded while predecessors kept making billions.
Cost-sensitivity is a big one. They'll take something that cost them nothing of immediate value over something that cost them directly. They'll also take cheap over inexpensive. So, for instance, the companies charging 50% more for software with either zero or near-zero defects in production make very little compared to those charging 50% less. Despite a demand for higher quality stuff. For content, that companies charging for it... even under a buck an article... failed in favor of free + advertising sort of speaks for itself on user preferences.
Time/convenience is another one. This market has such a small attention span that they might ignore you within seconds of not seeing what they want. The norm is an ad on the page with content appearing quickly. With that the norm, the sites doing paid articles for new members have to somehow convince them in seconds or just a few impressions to start buying articles. Atavist giving a few away for free might be an example but they're kind of unique compared to most sites. Yet, the small player faces free, instant content vs paid, go-through-some-trouble content. And many sites usually cover similar topics. Uphill battle.
So, these are just a few issues with trying to get people to pay for things instead of use ads in a market that almost always works in favor of low-cost, low-time, and preferably-free suppliers. It's a problem with or preference of the market.
With all the malwaretising going around on even "reputable" networks, using an adblocker is simply a basic step for maintaining enduser security, much like antivirus software.
"Attack of the malware blockers" would be a more accurate title.
If publishers would get together and come up with a single micropayment system, I'd gladly pay them 10 cents or so for each article -- the same revenue that they'd get from the ads I'm blocking.
But I'm not going to give out my credit card number to dozens of sites where I can "pay just a few dollars per month" to access their content.
I don't want an annual subscription that renews automatically, and I'm probably not going to look at another article on that site for weeks, months or maybe never, so I don't want to pay dollars for an article that they are willing to show me for a few pennies worth of ad revenue -- just let me give them the pennies directly.
Yes! That should be like a netflix for content websites or where you could buy credits which works on all major publications and can be spend as you like.
I think if it were a Netflix for content websites, I'd pay one low monthly fee to have unlimited views of second rate websites. If I want to read big-name articles, for a bit more money, they'll ship me paper copies of the articles I want to view, but I'd have to return them when I'm done.
Contributor works on millions of sites and on all of your browsers and devices. Some sites will show fewer ads than others, and often times, a thank you will appear instead of an ad.
I'd much rather be denied access to the content if I'm outbid. I'm bidding to view the media, not auctioning my eyeballs. My eyeballs are not for sale, at any price.
Why pay the advertisers? Why not pay publishers directly?
Why not have a single, income-prorated content fee which is then allocated as a quality-and-utilisation pro-rated compensation to information creators?
BBC license fee, but universal and income based, on steroids.
$100/year per person would cover all Internet advertising. $500/year per person would cover all advertising period.
(And that's for major industrialised nations only -- US, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, roughly).
> If publishers would get together and come up with a single micropayment system ...
I believe this wasn't in reference to advertisers and seems rather similar to your proposal in theory. I'm unsure about the prices that will actually make sense for them to drop advertising completely though...
Screw that. I'm not paying for an article before I even know whether it's hacky garbage or actual journalism.
As if the temptation for these sites to pump out clickbait isn't bad enough as it is....
Unless you mean a completely passive option to give them a "tip" so to speak.
In which case I'm not saying it's a bad idea but how is that any different than donating once a year to NPR and PBS during their "Oh-God-Kill-Me-Now-athons."
Or in the case of for-profit sites, paying for however many months of subscription fees you feel is appropriate for the value you received.
I guess it could be some honor system "pay when you leave". Or maybe let you review the article "Was this worth 8 cents to you?" and display the votes before you pay so you can decide if it's worth the money. Or maybe you can flag an article as clickbait and get your money back.
Could it be a function of time on page, maybe even with scroll distance. You generally know if the article will be garbage in the first paragraph or two and always before the fold (doubly so before the fold if there wasnt ads taking up the top 75% of the page)
Blendle's 'no questions asked' money-back guarantee works pretty well. You pay the moment you open the article, and if you don't like it you click on the link in the top left to get your money back.
It's an obvious conclusion, but I'm not sure that it's a tautology. The name of something doesn't define what it is, only tries to describe it. As others have pointed out, it is, for example, perfectly possible to be interested in an adblocker mainly from a security point of view, without taking any position on ads themselves.
The solution is so obvious, at least for big media outlets who complain the most: INSOURCE YOUR ADVERTISING.
This means: no external services to track the f..k out of your users, and you yourself provide a platform for bidders to upload banner images or plaintext ads (Google Adsense-like) to.
Benefits, aside from making it harder for people to ad-block:
1) you don't hand over a sizable chunk of your ad income to middlemen with incentives for fraud (they charge the advertiser, but claim fraud towards you and keep the change)
2) you can be (relatively) sure that your site doesn't get a nasty Google penalty for serving malware.
Is there any (F)OSS/SaaS platform available for an individual to provide such a platform for bidders?
edit: I forgot offering paid content and referral links (Amazon!), these can be worth quite a chunk of money if your site is popular enough.
Yet we see that, thanks to adblockers, 3rd party advertising, tracking and data milking won't work for much longer.
I give the ad industry, especially the fraudsters, not much longer than two years, given the rising trend of adblockers.
Native ads are the only way that's left, and turns out that the big media houses usually already have an ad acquisition and disposition department for print ads.
Oho so now they are claiming that net neutrality is being violated? So basically publishers are attempting to expand "neutrality" to not transit paths but onto end-points.
I do hope that Springer disables their firewalls, virus scanners and spam filters. Could be a boon to sci-hub once their systems are compromised and all their data leaked...
I use Ad Blockers because - for me - find something browsing the web is like run into a street artist performing while I'm walking around my city.
Often the artist didn't contribute to build the city in which he's performing (taxes, etc...). He is just using an already crowded street. I don't wont to be obligated to be distracted by commercial ads.
Off course, after seeing the performance I'll be happy to donate some money or to support the artist in some way.
interesting that the survey didn't have the option "to protect myself". malware is a thing. ad blockers wouldn't be as pervasive if the ad industry was less user-hostile and more discerning of it's clientele.
That's why HEVC screen content coding extensions are so important. They enable you to present your web content as a video of someone scrolling the article page, with no loss of advertisement quality.
68 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 46.8 ms ] threadThe pop-up is now blocked by my ad-blocker ;-)
It's really interesting where it leads us, site owners and more importantly ad networks have been lazy trying to defeat adblock.
Let the war behin I guess.
I had to update my filter lists so that it retrieves the blocklist for that feature btw.
Makes me wish you could go to HTTP and say: give me only the div's with the attribute "name" that equals "header" and "body" and all img tags with class "illustration".
The dishonesty of it saying that the adblocker will ("may") negatively affect the performance of the site, when it's in fact blocking an absurd number of requests unnecessary to the content people actually want to see, is astounding.
Many other sites have cdns with different domains.
As far as I can tell, it fires incorrectly when the page is loading slow for whatever reason (and presumably some external JavaScript doesn't get loaded fast enough to disable it).
Here's a nice write-up on the beginnings:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...
- Market for paid search of general content vs Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
- Market for paid downloading of arbitrary, user-generated video vs YouTube and Vimeo.
- Market for paid blogging vs Wordpress etc.
- Number of people paying for news vs reading ad-supported news.
- Number of new companies using LAMP or cloud stacks vs Microsoft Server stacks.
And so on. Paid markets kept getting tinier and tinier with less and less money.
That sounds like another way of saying they don't have a product that people value.
And for the record they haven't tried nearly all the models possible. This is discussed every time the subject comes up.
Lock-in is another issue. People wanted alternatives to IBM mainframes, Windows desktops, and so on. Great one's were produced. They didn't run their prior software. They didn't want to port it, even gradually. So, most of those firms folded while predecessors kept making billions.
Cost-sensitivity is a big one. They'll take something that cost them nothing of immediate value over something that cost them directly. They'll also take cheap over inexpensive. So, for instance, the companies charging 50% more for software with either zero or near-zero defects in production make very little compared to those charging 50% less. Despite a demand for higher quality stuff. For content, that companies charging for it... even under a buck an article... failed in favor of free + advertising sort of speaks for itself on user preferences.
Time/convenience is another one. This market has such a small attention span that they might ignore you within seconds of not seeing what they want. The norm is an ad on the page with content appearing quickly. With that the norm, the sites doing paid articles for new members have to somehow convince them in seconds or just a few impressions to start buying articles. Atavist giving a few away for free might be an example but they're kind of unique compared to most sites. Yet, the small player faces free, instant content vs paid, go-through-some-trouble content. And many sites usually cover similar topics. Uphill battle.
So, these are just a few issues with trying to get people to pay for things instead of use ads in a market that almost always works in favor of low-cost, low-time, and preferably-free suppliers. It's a problem with or preference of the market.
"Attack of the malware blockers" would be a more accurate title.
But I'm not going to give out my credit card number to dozens of sites where I can "pay just a few dollars per month" to access their content.
I don't want an annual subscription that renews automatically, and I'm probably not going to look at another article on that site for weeks, months or maybe never, so I don't want to pay dollars for an article that they are willing to show me for a few pennies worth of ad revenue -- just let me give them the pennies directly.
Contributor works on millions of sites and on all of your browsers and devices. Some sites will show fewer ads than others, and often times, a thank you will appear instead of an ad.
If I'm paying, I don't want any ads
Basically, it works by having you bid for that ad space. If someone else outbids you, their ad shows.
I personally would rather not pay anything and get an ad, sans tracking, which worked just fine for the content providers of yore.
Does native advertising work?
It just did.
Why not have a single, income-prorated content fee which is then allocated as a quality-and-utilisation pro-rated compensation to information creators?
BBC license fee, but universal and income based, on steroids.
$100/year per person would cover all Internet advertising. $500/year per person would cover all advertising period.
(And that's for major industrialised nations only -- US, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, roughly).
I believe this wasn't in reference to advertisers and seems rather similar to your proposal in theory. I'm unsure about the prices that will actually make sense for them to drop advertising completely though...
As if the temptation for these sites to pump out clickbait isn't bad enough as it is....
Unless you mean a completely passive option to give them a "tip" so to speak.
In which case I'm not saying it's a bad idea but how is that any different than donating once a year to NPR and PBS during their "Oh-God-Kill-Me-Now-athons." Or in the case of for-profit sites, paying for however many months of subscription fees you feel is appropriate for the value you received.
Great article, but c'mon, maybe don't offer a tautology as a survey response.
This means: no external services to track the f..k out of your users, and you yourself provide a platform for bidders to upload banner images or plaintext ads (Google Adsense-like) to.
Benefits, aside from making it harder for people to ad-block:
1) you don't hand over a sizable chunk of your ad income to middlemen with incentives for fraud (they charge the advertiser, but claim fraud towards you and keep the change)
2) you can be (relatively) sure that your site doesn't get a nasty Google penalty for serving malware.
Is there any (F)OSS/SaaS platform available for an individual to provide such a platform for bidders?
edit: I forgot offering paid content and referral links (Amazon!), these can be worth quite a chunk of money if your site is popular enough.
I give the ad industry, especially the fraudsters, not much longer than two years, given the rising trend of adblockers.
Native ads are the only way that's left, and turns out that the big media houses usually already have an ad acquisition and disposition department for print ads.
I do hope that Springer disables their firewalls, virus scanners and spam filters. Could be a boon to sci-hub once their systems are compromised and all their data leaked...
Often the artist didn't contribute to build the city in which he's performing (taxes, etc...). He is just using an already crowded street. I don't wont to be obligated to be distracted by commercial ads.
Off course, after seeing the performance I'll be happy to donate some money or to support the artist in some way.