This article concludes that adblockers are "losing"... But do you know what happens when I see a modal asking me to whitelist the site? See ya! This isn't some critical thing I rely on to survive. It's Forbes. I don't need any of their content, and I'm totally fine walking away until my particular blend of adblockers can block the garbage on their site again.
Agreed, although maybe this is what they want to happen. If you use their bandwidth and they don't make any money off your visit, then they probably don't care if you never come back.
I'm like you though; I actively avoid reading sites that do this. I also block JavaScript by default, which helps to mitigate a lot of other annoyances and privacy invasions.
The don't realize the relationship is symbiotic though. Part of the value of big news sites like forbes is their influence. To an extent they are widely read because they are widely read, people read it to see what others are reading.
I work for a midlevel publisher. Nearly of our content is syndicated, with very nearly none if it being unique. Our value -add is our selectivity, and great on-site user experience when it comes to filtering and subscriptions.
20% of our readers use adblock. For video content which is a mere fraction of our site, that comes out to $700 a day in bandwidth costs going to adblock users, or $21,000 in the average month. That's a lot.
What publisher wouldn't fall over themselves to get 20% more profits in a given year?
In the last year, we grew approximately 20% but our % of adblock users soared so while costs are up, revenue is flat. This isn't a sustainable situation. I have a lot of sympathy for people who do not want to see intrsuive advertisement, and I myself feel the same way sometimes, but when it comes down to sheer costs---we can't afford to subsidize adblock users.
I'm unconviced that adblock users add more value that they take away. Since we know how many of them they are, and how much they cost, we can ask is $21,000 better spent subsizing adblock user who may tell their friends about our site, or is it better spent on traditional advertising? I think that people do follow word-of-mouth better than traditional ads, but that also means the friends of adblock users are more likely to be adblock users themselves---thus just an additional cost ontop of one we can't handle already.
Shortsighted, wouldn't you say? Eventually this will choke out all competition except for companies with the smartest people/deepest pockets. We'll end up creating monopolies around content by refusing to pay for it when there was healthy competition.
I for one am willing to pay for content as long as it's large enough to o cover most of the sites I frequent, fixed rate subscription, no extea fees for content (pay per comment/timed exclusivity for paid members to drive membership fine by me), and most importantly, a way to personally choose who gets a portion (at least 25%) of the subscription fees.
Short of that I really don't give a damn. It's not my problem.
You're supposing that there aren't people out there willing to make and distribute content without demanding some kind of payment in return. Content doesn't only come from people that put tons of crappy ads on their sites. And I can't say I'll find it tragic when Buzzfeed and Upworthy go bankrupt.
Yeah sorry, it's not totally clear but what we were trying to convey in the conclusion is in the back and forth between ad blockers and ad block detectors the detectors seem to be winning, especially if you're using AdBlock Plus or AdBlock.
...until you visit a site that gives you a blank page without javascript. speaking of which, i wouldn't be surprised if more and more sites start to require mandatory js to view their content.
Happens frequently to me with uMatrix. Then you look at the list. You know the usual suspects like jQuery, google ajax, bootstrap, Akamai etc. fairly fast.
On other sites you look at what they want to include and you just think "yeah, no, let's not do that" and just close the page.
Just curious - how much of the web are you actually able to browse? It seems the majority of sites I run into have some sort of dynamic interactivity done via JS.
How often do you actually interact with those sites? If it's almost never, I suggest giving NoScript a try, most sites are readable with it on. Obviously, you'd need to whitelist any utility sites you use, like email, but that list is likely small and doesn't change very often.
Not only publishers it would seem: This weekend I tried visiting the website of a streaming video provider I was interested in subscribing to only to be informed that, roughly, "there was a problem completing my request. If you have an ad-blocker, please disable it and refresh this page.
<company in question> uses certain tools for marketing purposes that can be blocked by ad-blockers"
... ironically for their marketing department, I decided not become a customer then and there.
They wanted to see information about how you use something they offer. You wanted something they offer. You declined, which is your choice, of course. I think you both lost that battle.
I think the company insisting they know better than myself what I need to see and how I need to see it is not going to be good to do business with. If you know your tech doesn't work well with adblockers, you have two choices: a) accept that some part of the audience doesn't want ads and work so that your tech supports them and b) tell them "screw you" and refuse to take them as the clients. The company chose the latter. Why anybody would insist on being a client of somebody that doesn't want you as a client, given the choice?
The bit about them insisting they know better than you what you need to see and how you need to see it, coupled with the bit about ads, is a non sequitur. We're talking about tracking usage stats.
Some people simply can't be bothered to disable an ad blocker for non-ad related things. Others take a more extreme stance and consider analysis itself to be an affront. Everyone loses. Producers don't know what works or doesn't and consumers don't get the content they desire.
One thing I've noticed is that these comments tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and consume. It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.
> One thing I've noticed is that these comments tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and consume. It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.
Also from people that feel entitled just to get services for free.
I'm positive I've said exactly the same thing in the past. Over time, I realized that the issue is more nuanced. I don't think most people actually feel entitled to free content, but rather that the non-monetary "fee" is not acceptable. There is no known simple solution to this issue that I'm aware of.
> So if it isn't with money or advertising, it has to be whatever else they can extract from the users.
So let's imagine someone serves supper on the street (i.e. street food), with the setup that it's take it yourself service. The incentive is that people would line up and pay, but some people don't - so would such company owners have the right to collect saliva and extract DNA to sell such personal information to some other companies thereby extracting value?
Not sure, but if tomorrow the street supper van is no longer there, because the paying customers cannot any more pay for those that take it for free, people should not complain that no one gets food.
We're talking about refusing clients who use adblockers. There are many ways to track usage that doesn't require that. I've implemented some myself. If the reason for refusal is because their tracking can't work with it it's doing it wrong.
> tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and consume
Produce what? And why does it matter? Imagine coming to a grocery store and being asked to change into store uniform, before you are allowed in, because it's easier for them to do business that way, marketing and stuff, and when you ask "WTF?" - they'd say "well, you don't know how it is to farm, do you? Did you ever milk a cow or harvested rye? You only consume, not produce, you lazy slacker, right? So either strip and wear the uniform or shut the heck up!". No thanks. I wouldn't visit such store. Would you?
> It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.
I am not obliged to serve everybody's perspective. I have no obligation to make life easy for somebody's marketing department or support somebody's business model. It's their business to convince me to support it with my money, and, frankly, telling me I'm too ignorant to appreciate how wonderful they are is not going to work well. Telling me "we're too lazy/cheap to do it any other way, so please disable all security features in your browser, disregard your privacy and risk your safety because our marketing needs some nice graphs in their next monthly presentation" won't work either.
Your point of view is beyond what I accounted for. I guess there is an extreme-extreme that literally wants something for nothing. I was charitable. I told my sibling poster such a desire was too extreme and statistically nonexistent. Maybe I was wrong? Your stance is hostile only to things not connected to the Internet.
In my opinion, get over yourself and shell up for what you enjoy.
Worry you're blinded by capitalism's propaganda that everything nice must be paid for, in this case through attention to corporate messaging (ads), ceding control of personal info (social sign ups), and personal tracking (trackers).
That's a terrible price.
The web I grew up on was more akin to non-profit pamphleteering. If you wanted to say something, you hosted it on your home page and paid for it. You did this out of support for spread of knowledge like the .edus, or out of just wanting to have a voice. And it was fine!
I hear the same "pay up if you want music" nonsense from record labels. I'm sorry, but if they all went out of business and nobody ever spent a dime on music again, you think kids with guitars would stop songwriting? No, they'd all still self-publish. Even when the 80's equivalent of uploading was copying tapes, good bands still 'went viral'.
As long as you were hosting text, pamphleteering cost essentially nothing no matter what volume. Even in late 90's, a billion hits of pure text cost less than $100.
It's how Wikipedia still works today. Just a small donation from a tiny fraction of visitors, and the whole thing is covered. No rights were lost or PII given up in the sharing of those ideas.
None were lost in the conversation on this page, either.
But I do get the content I desire. I'm quite capable of choosing by myself. And what's worse is that the opposite also happens -- I may get content that I actively resent.
You see, I bought an Amazon Fire TV stick the other day. I was dismayed to realise that it plays a (short) ad before showing me the content I asked for.
I pay for Amazon Prime. I resent them still forcing me to watch ads. I'm seriously considering whether the downside of enduring a 5s ad outweighs he convenience of the device (which is quite nice TBH). Because you're right, I do consider it an affront.
> Others take a more extreme stance and consider analysis itself to be an affront.
Indeed. Süddeutsche Zeitung, a newspaper which my family has been subscribed to since about the 1960s, now rejects me if I use an adblocker, and am not logged in.
I've actually left their site because I resent being tracked and subjected to ads, after paying them a good chunk of money already.
I'd just like to point out that the "war" developing is not so much between advertising and ad-blockers. I think most of us would be fine with advertising on some page you are visiting. The real problem comes from trackers and other tactics that don't try to show a product TO you, but try to show YOU to a company. The problem is not that I don't want to see advertising, I just don't want to share my information with someone I don't even know. Maybe there is a way in between.
Personally, I wouldn't mind SOME ads feeding companies... Hell, I'll watch short videos to get ahead in some games I play...
the problem is massive ads, 3 line stories turning into multi page ad fests, "Around the Web" type crap, security risks injected via ad networks, etc...
It's not the ads per-se: it's the MASSIVE abuse of ads. it's why we can't have nice things.
Same can be said of TV shows and how it went from a minute of ads... t0o 10 minutes out of a 30 minute slot being ads.
I just DVR everything and then skip ads. I can't watch non-recorded TV anymore - not only ads are extremely long and mind-numbingly boring, they insist on showing the same ads several times during the same show! I don't know how people tolerate it.
I recently had to add special rules to ublock because cnet.com and cnn.com were auto playing videos that were completely unrelated to the story, and there were huge blocks of ads on the left, right, and in the middle of the story.
I'm also fine with some advertising, but auto-playing video with sound is where I draw the line (especially when bandwidth sensitive).
I've started building a document with my uBlock filters to sync between browsers because of auto-playing videos and static divs covering a third of my screen in web apps. I am now actively involved in enhancing my web experience rather than just setting a broad/loose filter to get rid of most of the junk... that can't be good for content creators going forward.
I suspect this is the popular reason. Unfortunately, I think it forces ad blockers (which I use only for tracker blocking) towards heavy features. Eventually the choice will be between running a bloated plug-in or being tracked. I hope uBlock Origin will keep in mind that some people only care about the tracking.
It appears to have a very relaxed definition of tracker. For example, it let doubleclick.net through. All drop-in ad network scripts are trackers, regardless of what they might promise. I'm fine with people adding ads natively to their content so what I'm saying is I don't want my ad blocker trying to do something like analyses video on the fly to strip out native ads or examining text to find disguised advertising. What ad blockers do now is good enough for me and if a content creator gets too annoying with in-line ads, I'll just stop consuming it.
> I hope uBlock Origin will keep in mind that some people only care about the tracking.
Efficiency is a primary feature of uBlock Origin, it's not going anywhere, regardless of whether it blocks tracking or ads, or whatever else.
Just pick your filter lists according to what you want to achieve.
In any case, I fail to see the difference between ads and tracking, as I have often mentioned, ads are just the visible tip of the tracking/profiling iceberg.
"In any case, I fail to see the difference between ads and tracking"
I agree for most ads as they are implemented now but things like the common audible.com mentions in YouTube videos I'm totally fine with, that's how advertising was done for decades before the internet and there's no reason it can't still be done. Web page standards give too much power to the page author by default, if the things they use to track people had never been allowed by default, we never would have had this problem because no sane person would agree to them if asked.
I have much more problems with ads than with trackers. Sure, trackers are... well, tracking, but at least they don't ruin my experience. Ads do. Not only they occupy a lot of visual space, they jump they blink, they slow down the browser, and they try their best to prevent me from getting the information I want to get. Some even freaking auto-play sound! A mere thought of it makes my heart rate jump and my vision shift to red.
If those guys could stay in the sane bounds, the problem would be much less. But right now it's completely out of hand, browsing without adblocker became a nightmare.
Won't happen. The point of CSS is that all selectors and properties only ever trickle downwards. If they could propagate upwards (from `.adindicatorclass` to its parent, in this case), the cost of evaluating them would become prohibitively expensive. (And even worse, you could probably construct self-contradicting stylesheets.)
My eighty year old grandparents can't [be trusted to] browse web pages with internet ads. If internet ads were billboards in the same way we see highway advertising, I wouldn't mind. Today a significant percentage of them are scams, with victims.
My largest annoyance after ads is autoplay html5 videos from news sites. CNN is especially bad. I wish Ublock could have an option to stop all html5 autoplay.
(yes, I've got the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" in chrome, and no, it mostly doesn't work)
When so much is controlled by JS these days, is it reasonable to expect they can block it all the time? With flash, at least it is one element that the browser can lock until you click it. With JS, who knows what/where the developer will inject and start playing audio / video.
Omg, yeah, autoplay is annoying in itself, but then add on top of that autoplay which runs on a loop, where even if you pause the video, the video begins playing again after a certain while.
I've even had some sites do this where during the autoplay the site would autoscroll back to the location of the video and then not let you scroll away from the video until it was done playing. You'd be somewhat interested in the article, so you say "Fine, I'll watch the whole fucking ad" and then go back to reading only to have your fucking reading inter-fucking-rupted 15 fucking seconds later. FUCK!!! Seriously, fuck these web developers who do this absolute bullshit.
I particularly dislike the small sidebar videos that autoplay after a minute, and have absolutely nothing to do with the subject the page is ostensibly covering.
Open an article on protectionism, head off to Wikipedia to look up some unfamiliar terms, suddenly, "COMPANIES AROUND THE WORLD ARE DEVELOPING SEXBOTS. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS?"
Now my wife wants to know why I was researching sex bots, and the more I try to explain the situation the deeper I dig myself thanks to the Othello Effect.
See: the Content Blocer system on iOS. The interface is a rules specification, and the implementation is delegated to the OS/hardware manufacturer to save power and performance.
I never used an adblocker until recently when Youtube started showing those fucking World of Tanks ads and ads for similar games from the same fucking company.
Many of you don't understand how that could be a huge nuissance, because your systems are powerful enough to shrug it off, but for my old system, those fucking ads would freeze up the UI of the page.
Even with my new system, many of the ads offered enough of a slowdown to the experience of using many sites on top of sometimes causing the system to crash completely that an adblocker became necessary.
If your company is really that slow because of adds you might want to think about blocking some ad providers with your host file. I tested it with a verge page and it went from about ~50mb down to ~10mb. (Disclaimer it was 50mb because of an auto playing ad video)
Or a custom DNS cache if you want to block on all of your network. There is a Perl script on github that generates a local rule set for unbound using Dan Pollock's list. There are other services as well.
Interesting to see how others are doing this. I recently was tasked with adding some logic to determine the number of ad-blocking users across the network of sites I help maintain.
I added my own custom script into Appnexus (ad provider) and attempted to load it. Ad-blockers, I discovered do one of two things in this case. The first is to just block the loading of the content, in which case it was easy to detect. Others would inject their own custom content, hence adding a custom script and then checking the contents for a special string.
Dear publishers: you're fighting the wrong battle, and the wrong people.
You look at people who visit your site without seeing the ads as "stealing" your content without paying the price (suffering, apparently I guess) of viewing the ads. Forcing them to view ads is a dumb move that you've been forced into because of the bizarre incentives in the business, but it's not a sustainable strategy.
Forcing people to view ads won't make those ads effective, and it'll make your viewers hate you more. Ads are likely not a long-term stable source of income either. Precisely because people are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to figuring out what to buy and less and less tolerant of being told what to buy.
I know that advertising is one of the easiest ways to make money, especially with a content site on the internet. But you need to put serious effort into finding a better way. If you don't then you'll be caught flat footed when both your ad revenue and your viewers gone. Foster stronger bonds with your viewers, figure out how to monetize them without ads (there are a zillion ways without paywalls), keep innovating, laziness is how you die.
There are two important things to understand when it comes to monetizing content production effectively. One, when you have a strong, unique brand that produces content that people love and identify with people want to give you money. Two, the concept of consumer surplus, market segmentation, etc. (see here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...).
At the simplest level if you offer a quality product and you let people pay whatever they want for it, even nothing, you will still make money. That alone may not be enough to cover your costs, but it's an important realization. The difference between the "you need to control your customers, sell them to advertisers, and force ads down their throats" mindset versus the "you need to engage with your users and they will support you no matter what" mindset is like night and day, being so diametrically opposite can make it difficult to make the transition.
The easy level of monetization is to let people give you money in exchange for "nothing". Offer donations, or patronage support with token rewards (such as being thanked, put in the credits, etc.), and merch that allows people to show off their support or that allows people to express their identity through a connection to you or your content (this works for everything not just rock bands or web comics).
Up from there you can offer more substantive rewards. You can offer subscriptions that gain people access to extra content, to content earlier than it will be publicly available, to higher levels of credit, or to higher levels of engagement and connection with creators.
You can package your content in different forms and release it as a compilation, charging money for it or offering it to subscribers. Say you're a web comic, you can print books containing your comics by year or by story line or whatever. If you're a musical artist you might release all of the tracks you're working on at any given time freely (through youtube or mp3 downloads) but then cut an album of the tracks (perhaps after re-recording them and having them professionally mixed/mastered) and sell that (either digitally, in physical form, or likely both). If you write you can compile stuff into books focusing on certain themes. And so on.
You can break your work up into specific projects and crowd fund each project. This also gives you the advantage that you'll typically end up having to figure out how to produce various products out of that project to use as rewards, which you can also sell afterwards.
And that's just a start, there are tons of other options.
These things aren't viable for "content" creators who don't produce a lot of original content or that don't produce content of high enough quality to engage strongly with their fans, and I'm mostly ok with that. There are tons of clickbait and tabloid content creators out there who survive not because they produce anything of value but because today eyes can be monetized through ads. The main problem here is that income inequality is at such an extreme level that a lot of people have hardly any disposable income to support anything, no matter how much they value it, but the effects of that are even more wide ranging.
To be honest, most publishers just follow industry trends. Many didn't join this industry to find new and inovative ways to make money. Rather they joined because they love the content---people who love sports, want to be sports journalists. People who find politics important want to be political bloggers.
So, whatever 90% of publishers do... we follow along and do the same. If most publishers are use advertisements, we do that because it's proven to work at least marginally. If most publishers user subscriptions services as they did in the 90s/2000s, then we follow along and do the same.
It reminds me of the music/movie industry in terms of how these adblock detectors mimic something like DRM. Anyway the problem is with the business model. People are installing adblockers in response to more aggressive advertising, and then the ad companies get more aggressive because of it. It's a never ending cycle.
Does anyone know of a blacklisting plugin that will, for example, let me add wsj.com and then remove all links to that domain from any page I'm on? Ideally it would have a community driven list of known bad players. If something like that became very popular, I think companies would start to fear "disappearing" from the internet and start behaving a little more sanely.
Why can I not pay a reasonable amount of money to get past advertisments? Usually I do not need the subscription for 300$ a year but I want to read one article in a adfree way and pay for the advertisments they are losing. Unlike in apps, I haven't seen a website where I can give them money for no-ads. So for me their business model is broken.
I'm curious as to the actual breakdown, but I know that most subscription-based journalism still receives the majority of its revenue from ads. I suspect that ad-free experiences would be prohibitively expensive for most if not all subscribers. This is largely speculation though. Anyone in the industry have some harder numbers?
One example I know of that I believe is ad-free is theinformation.com which has a yearly subscription of $399. https://www.theinformation.com/payment-policy Running an institution like the NYT or the WSJ must be much more expensive.
So, this has nothing to do with the article itself and is instead about the HN post.
This is a dupe of the exact same article posted 2 hours earlier. The URL is only different because this one, the dupe, had a # at the end of the URL and bypassed dupe detection. Why isn't that something that is identified and fixed automatically? Even better, if HN detects that someone is purposefully trying to bypass dupe detection, does HN punish that user? This case looks like it could have been a simple mistake, but there's zero reason that HN shouldn't be stripping a trailing # and in general having the dupe detection flag URLs that only differ in fragment ids.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadI'm like you though; I actively avoid reading sites that do this. I also block JavaScript by default, which helps to mitigate a lot of other annoyances and privacy invasions.
I work for a midlevel publisher. Nearly of our content is syndicated, with very nearly none if it being unique. Our value -add is our selectivity, and great on-site user experience when it comes to filtering and subscriptions.
20% of our readers use adblock. For video content which is a mere fraction of our site, that comes out to $700 a day in bandwidth costs going to adblock users, or $21,000 in the average month. That's a lot.
What publisher wouldn't fall over themselves to get 20% more profits in a given year?
In the last year, we grew approximately 20% but our % of adblock users soared so while costs are up, revenue is flat. This isn't a sustainable situation. I have a lot of sympathy for people who do not want to see intrsuive advertisement, and I myself feel the same way sometimes, but when it comes down to sheer costs---we can't afford to subsidize adblock users.
I'm unconviced that adblock users add more value that they take away. Since we know how many of them they are, and how much they cost, we can ask is $21,000 better spent subsizing adblock user who may tell their friends about our site, or is it better spent on traditional advertising? I think that people do follow word-of-mouth better than traditional ads, but that also means the friends of adblock users are more likely to be adblock users themselves---thus just an additional cost ontop of one we can't handle already.
These aren't ads. They have to click play for anything to happen.
It's sad really
Short of that I really don't give a damn. It's not my problem.
On other sites you look at what they want to include and you just think "yeah, no, let's not do that" and just close the page.
Which is all the justification you need to block it.
... ironically for their marketing department, I decided not become a customer then and there.
Some people simply can't be bothered to disable an ad blocker for non-ad related things. Others take a more extreme stance and consider analysis itself to be an affront. Everyone loses. Producers don't know what works or doesn't and consumers don't get the content they desire.
One thing I've noticed is that these comments tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and consume. It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.
Also from people that feel entitled just to get services for free.
So if it isn't with money or advertising, it has to be whatever else they can extract from the users.
So let's imagine someone serves supper on the street (i.e. street food), with the setup that it's take it yourself service. The incentive is that people would line up and pay, but some people don't - so would such company owners have the right to collect saliva and extract DNA to sell such personal information to some other companies thereby extracting value?
I'm asking because paid services are treating me this way, and honestly I resent it.
We're talking about refusing clients who use adblockers. There are many ways to track usage that doesn't require that. I've implemented some myself. If the reason for refusal is because their tracking can't work with it it's doing it wrong.
> tend to come from pure consumers but rarely from those who both produce and consume
Produce what? And why does it matter? Imagine coming to a grocery store and being asked to change into store uniform, before you are allowed in, because it's easier for them to do business that way, marketing and stuff, and when you ask "WTF?" - they'd say "well, you don't know how it is to farm, do you? Did you ever milk a cow or harvested rye? You only consume, not produce, you lazy slacker, right? So either strip and wear the uniform or shut the heck up!". No thanks. I wouldn't visit such store. Would you?
> It's partially an issue of having a lack of perspective of the other part of the equation.
I am not obliged to serve everybody's perspective. I have no obligation to make life easy for somebody's marketing department or support somebody's business model. It's their business to convince me to support it with my money, and, frankly, telling me I'm too ignorant to appreciate how wonderful they are is not going to work well. Telling me "we're too lazy/cheap to do it any other way, so please disable all security features in your browser, disregard your privacy and risk your safety because our marketing needs some nice graphs in their next monthly presentation" won't work either.
In my opinion, get over yourself and shell up for what you enjoy.
That's a terrible price.
The web I grew up on was more akin to non-profit pamphleteering. If you wanted to say something, you hosted it on your home page and paid for it. You did this out of support for spread of knowledge like the .edus, or out of just wanting to have a voice. And it was fine!
I hear the same "pay up if you want music" nonsense from record labels. I'm sorry, but if they all went out of business and nobody ever spent a dime on music again, you think kids with guitars would stop songwriting? No, they'd all still self-publish. Even when the 80's equivalent of uploading was copying tapes, good bands still 'went viral'.
As long as you were hosting text, pamphleteering cost essentially nothing no matter what volume. Even in late 90's, a billion hits of pure text cost less than $100.
It's how Wikipedia still works today. Just a small donation from a tiny fraction of visitors, and the whole thing is covered. No rights were lost or PII given up in the sharing of those ideas.
None were lost in the conversation on this page, either.
But I do get the content I desire. I'm quite capable of choosing by myself. And what's worse is that the opposite also happens -- I may get content that I actively resent.
You see, I bought an Amazon Fire TV stick the other day. I was dismayed to realise that it plays a (short) ad before showing me the content I asked for.
I pay for Amazon Prime. I resent them still forcing me to watch ads. I'm seriously considering whether the downside of enduring a 5s ad outweighs he convenience of the device (which is quite nice TBH). Because you're right, I do consider it an affront.
> Others take a more extreme stance and consider analysis itself to be an affront.
Indeed. Süddeutsche Zeitung, a newspaper which my family has been subscribed to since about the 1960s, now rejects me if I use an adblocker, and am not logged in. I've actually left their site because I resent being tracked and subjected to ads, after paying them a good chunk of money already.
the problem is massive ads, 3 line stories turning into multi page ad fests, "Around the Web" type crap, security risks injected via ad networks, etc...
It's not the ads per-se: it's the MASSIVE abuse of ads. it's why we can't have nice things.
Same can be said of TV shows and how it went from a minute of ads... t0o 10 minutes out of a 30 minute slot being ads.
I'm also fine with some advertising, but auto-playing video with sound is where I draw the line (especially when bandwidth sensitive).
Efficiency is a primary feature of uBlock Origin, it's not going anywhere, regardless of whether it blocks tracking or ads, or whatever else.
Just pick your filter lists according to what you want to achieve.
In any case, I fail to see the difference between ads and tracking, as I have often mentioned, ads are just the visible tip of the tracking/profiling iceberg.
I agree for most ads as they are implemented now but things like the common audible.com mentions in YouTube videos I'm totally fine with, that's how advertising was done for decades before the internet and there's no reason it can't still be done. Web page standards give too much power to the page author by default, if the things they use to track people had never been allowed by default, we never would have had this problem because no sane person would agree to them if asked.
If those guys could stay in the sane bounds, the problem would be much less. But right now it's completely out of hand, browsing without adblocker became a nightmare.
The p element would be blocked. This will also be great for getting rid of non ad content that you just don't want to see.
(yes, I've got the "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" in chrome, and no, it mostly doesn't work)
I've even had some sites do this where during the autoplay the site would autoscroll back to the location of the video and then not let you scroll away from the video until it was done playing. You'd be somewhat interested in the article, so you say "Fine, I'll watch the whole fucking ad" and then go back to reading only to have your fucking reading inter-fucking-rupted 15 fucking seconds later. FUCK!!! Seriously, fuck these web developers who do this absolute bullshit.
Open an article on protectionism, head off to Wikipedia to look up some unfamiliar terms, suddenly, "COMPANIES AROUND THE WORLD ARE DEVELOPING SEXBOTS. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS?"
Now my wife wants to know why I was researching sex bots, and the more I try to explain the situation the deeper I dig myself thanks to the Othello Effect.
It can even block external fonts (bandwidth's not cheap for me)
I would have given you a step by step tutorial but my PC is down ATM.
Many of you don't understand how that could be a huge nuissance, because your systems are powerful enough to shrug it off, but for my old system, those fucking ads would freeze up the UI of the page.
Even with my new system, many of the ads offered enough of a slowdown to the experience of using many sites on top of sometimes causing the system to crash completely that an adblocker became necessary.
Maybe one that limits cross-domain traffic, so requests for more than, say, a megabyte get nixed?
I added my own custom script into Appnexus (ad provider) and attempted to load it. Ad-blockers, I discovered do one of two things in this case. The first is to just block the loading of the content, in which case it was easy to detect. Others would inject their own custom content, hence adding a custom script and then checking the contents for a special string.
A fun task for sure though.
You look at people who visit your site without seeing the ads as "stealing" your content without paying the price (suffering, apparently I guess) of viewing the ads. Forcing them to view ads is a dumb move that you've been forced into because of the bizarre incentives in the business, but it's not a sustainable strategy.
Forcing people to view ads won't make those ads effective, and it'll make your viewers hate you more. Ads are likely not a long-term stable source of income either. Precisely because people are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to figuring out what to buy and less and less tolerant of being told what to buy.
I know that advertising is one of the easiest ways to make money, especially with a content site on the internet. But you need to put serious effort into finding a better way. If you don't then you'll be caught flat footed when both your ad revenue and your viewers gone. Foster stronger bonds with your viewers, figure out how to monetize them without ads (there are a zillion ways without paywalls), keep innovating, laziness is how you die.
At the simplest level if you offer a quality product and you let people pay whatever they want for it, even nothing, you will still make money. That alone may not be enough to cover your costs, but it's an important realization. The difference between the "you need to control your customers, sell them to advertisers, and force ads down their throats" mindset versus the "you need to engage with your users and they will support you no matter what" mindset is like night and day, being so diametrically opposite can make it difficult to make the transition.
The easy level of monetization is to let people give you money in exchange for "nothing". Offer donations, or patronage support with token rewards (such as being thanked, put in the credits, etc.), and merch that allows people to show off their support or that allows people to express their identity through a connection to you or your content (this works for everything not just rock bands or web comics).
Up from there you can offer more substantive rewards. You can offer subscriptions that gain people access to extra content, to content earlier than it will be publicly available, to higher levels of credit, or to higher levels of engagement and connection with creators.
You can package your content in different forms and release it as a compilation, charging money for it or offering it to subscribers. Say you're a web comic, you can print books containing your comics by year or by story line or whatever. If you're a musical artist you might release all of the tracks you're working on at any given time freely (through youtube or mp3 downloads) but then cut an album of the tracks (perhaps after re-recording them and having them professionally mixed/mastered) and sell that (either digitally, in physical form, or likely both). If you write you can compile stuff into books focusing on certain themes. And so on.
You can break your work up into specific projects and crowd fund each project. This also gives you the advantage that you'll typically end up having to figure out how to produce various products out of that project to use as rewards, which you can also sell afterwards.
And that's just a start, there are tons of other options.
These things aren't viable for "content" creators who don't produce a lot of original content or that don't produce content of high enough quality to engage strongly with their fans, and I'm mostly ok with that. There are tons of clickbait and tabloid content creators out there who survive not because they produce anything of value but because today eyes can be monetized through ads. The main problem here is that income inequality is at such an extreme level that a lot of people have hardly any disposable income to support anything, no matter how much they value it, but the effects of that are even more wide ranging.
So, whatever 90% of publishers do... we follow along and do the same. If most publishers are use advertisements, we do that because it's proven to work at least marginally. If most publishers user subscriptions services as they did in the 90s/2000s, then we follow along and do the same.
Apple's new hooks for blockers only allow regex filters, so the blockers can never win without being able to add code.
There are other browsers besides Safari but then you have other problems:
1). Do they have daily updates to their ad blockers to keep up the arms race?
2). How do you use important Safari plugins like LastPass?
One example I know of that I believe is ad-free is theinformation.com which has a yearly subscription of $399. https://www.theinformation.com/payment-policy Running an institution like the NYT or the WSJ must be much more expensive.
This is a dupe of the exact same article posted 2 hours earlier. The URL is only different because this one, the dupe, had a # at the end of the URL and bypassed dupe detection. Why isn't that something that is identified and fixed automatically? Even better, if HN detects that someone is purposefully trying to bypass dupe detection, does HN punish that user? This case looks like it could have been a simple mistake, but there's zero reason that HN shouldn't be stripping a trailing # and in general having the dupe detection flag URLs that only differ in fragment ids.