> Brain-dead statistical matching of page content to ad content would do a better job of targeting than whatever systems are in place now. I want to see ads that are relevant to the content, something that doesn’t feel like a distraction.
Wasn't this the business model of Google AdWords?
> Stop loading data from third-party websites. This is a security and privacy issue. There’s no technical reason why all ads can’t be served from the site I’m visiting. It can still communicate with ad servers, just do it on the backend.
Ad networks insist on this because there's no other way to prevent massive-scale fraud by the customers - how should the ad network know that the end user is a "real" user and not a fake request the customer generated to drive up the impressions on pay-per-impression ads?
We all want things, but I sure as shit don't care what giant, rich ad corporations want from my computing equipment. Their needs aren't important to me at all, even though they currently subsidize the garbage fire that is the modern web.
> Ad networks insist on this because there's no other way to prevent massive-scale fraud by the customers - how should the ad network know that the end user is a "real" user and not a fake request the customer generated to drive up the impressions on pay-per-impression ads?
Then get rid of pay-per-impression. I'd rather have the days of affiliate links than the crap we have now. You advertise a widget on your site, I click on it and buy it. You get a (small) cut of the profit. It also tends to make ads match site content, since I won't be buying left-handed spanners advertised on a site dedicated to short-haired pomeranians, probably.
The missing part is an ad-blocker thats allowing ads by default, unless you tell him to block on the current domain.
I think the problem is in the default behaviour of being on for all domains by default. Which even when you do your job right, by not using overlay or otherwise distracting ads, blocks you by default, without giving the user a choice to decide.
Have they? A user may install an ad blocker because of some giant video obscuring content and playing music on a.com, but they may be entirely willing to continue seeing text ads on b.com. For users that want such an experience, there is definitely a lack of options.
personally i compare them with housekeeping. I don't like it, i can decide to pay someone to do it, or i've to accept them. Which could kill me by poisonous cleanser (malware).
That would mean a user who manually blacklisted 10 domains took on the added risk of letting 10 ads through that were potential malware vectors.
Another problem is that the ads the user deemed to be acceptable visually don't necessarily carry a correspondingly lower risk of malware.
Yet another problem is that the user likely thinks that by allowing ads for domain X they are allowing X to serve them ads. When in reality, they are allowing X to add a third-party service Y that sells access to Z, and that neither X nor Y currently have a way to guarantee that bad things won't happen from letting Z (or even who Z is, or that Z was a possible participant when X signed up for the service).
I think this article doesn't go far enough with its championing of blocking certain ads. All ads should be blocked and web services which rely on them should find a better way of sustaining themselves profitably.
The malicious nature of ads is not new. Ads have always been infested with malware, tracking, and hideous graphics. Taken to their logical extreme (as Facebook has done), ads can also manipulate users to a degree far more dangerous than a TV or radio ad could. Ads are just the surface of a much deeper problem with the Internet, which is that most massive web services are paid for with user data rather than a mutually agreed upon price.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service. This amounts to a donation which you are not really in control of. Just circumvent the ad and buy from the company or send them money if you value their services.
As a fellow ad-hater, I'd love to see a list of alternatives. I often hear "they should find a better way" but I don't know what that would be for the majority of "I'll use it if it's free" websites or services out there. Micropayments are a hassle most don't use, donations get forgotten about, and there's too many sites to have a subscription to each one.
We see the alternatives in the handful of cases in which spying on users isn't a viable model (or, at least, just doing that isn't viable). Typically it's directly paying money for services, maybe with a free tier (Github) or something Free with a capital F and community-driven (Wikimedia). Take away spying and serving deceptive/harmful ads as an option for e.g. search, mapping/route-finding, voice recognition, and so on, and we'd see alternatives pop up, probably under those models, or possibly under more traditional less-invasive (and less malware-spreading/scam-promoting) advertising models (like magazines, or the early ad-driven web but with way more eyeballs).
So, say goodby to google? No thanks. I don't have money to pay for every service I want. Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet, and this value is worth more to society as a whole than ads. Yes let's kill malicious ads, but throwing the baby out with the bath water isn't good sense.
That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society.
>I don't have money to pay for every service I want
So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society.
In all fairness, you didn't provide any either. Most things have a mixed outcome, some good and some bad. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
The safety counts for very little if advertising-free web browsing means you aren't truly using the internet.Sure, those services exist, but the free ones are few. HN wouldn't be very usable, for example, if I refused to click on sites that happen to have advertisements.
So yes, between being short on cash and wanting to actually get use out of the internet - including being able to easily and cheaply talk to my family overseas - I'll deal with it. Something else might be right for you, and that's fine.
> So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit?
And in way too many cases, it's more than worth it!
We could have better ads, that don't require any privacy or safety loss from our side, and blocking ads does set things the way they need to be for those ads to appear. But no, I can't agree that ads are inherently bad.
> Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet, and this value is worth more to society as a whole than ads.
Community efforts would step up in a big way if there weren't free spy-vertising services making them seem pointless. Or yeah, paid options. Maybe even profitable but non-behemoth businesses built on human-vetted static ads with minimal targeting, which might be valuable again if invasive targeting weren't an option and we stopped letting companies dodge responsibility for serving malware/scam ads just because waaaaaah paying humans to look at things is expensive and we don't wanna.
Google the massive company making enormous amounts of money abusing near-monopoly status and human dignity and throwing that money chaotically into dozens of sometimes-neat-but-destined-to-be-used-to-spy-on-people side projects? Yeah, that'd be gone.
> there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service
How about when the service can not exist otherwise? Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. If the value of the service is heavily based on network effects, the result is a network too small to reach the break-even point. I'm not saying you should view ads you don't want to, but demanding that people provide a free service you find useful while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me.
>Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be.
I'm not convinced that there is a way that google maps could be as big as it is without ad revenue. Most people just wouldn't pay and the only reason that you would consider paying now is because the infrastructure that ad money has paid for has made it worthwhile.
a) Ads on google tend to be much less annoying than from other vendors because google maintains relatively high standards for how it displays ads. I consider it a reasonable trade-off and don't block ads on Google services - they are usually relevant and not overtly annoying or distracting.
b) the fastest possible growth isn't necessarily the highest good. You don't get a better plant by trying to pull it up out of the ground, and things that are grown fast don't always last that well. Wikipedia doesn't have advertising and while it's subject to many criticisms I would argue that its slower organic growth makes it more sustainable over the long term.
b) Not my area of expertise, but google doesn't fill half its website with a plea for donations once a year. As a layman it doesn't appear to be more sustainable than google. What is your argument for the sustainability of donations over ads, ignoring the obvious differences of these two companies?
And no longer... The market peaked and fell 10 years ago for both of those companies while google continues to grow. I'm not convinced that it would be a good strategy for google to follow their example.
To be clear, I agree that ads are not the ONLY way, just the most effective way for many companies. I think that there is no way that google could so easily steal market share from both Garmin and TomTom without ad revenue.
Free community and paid, privacy-respecting efforts get squashed by the very presence of the spy-vertisers in the market, usually in the idea phase. A world without those products wouldn't fail to have equivalents for most or all of them, and likely quite a few actually free ones (though probably a little less convenient).
[EDIT] I'd add that sensible governments might well consider something like mapping/route-finding to be basic infrastructure and worthy of funding, absent free commercial options. Especially now that we've seen what that's like. So the US might be screwed but much of Europe and Asia could well come out with tax-funded alternatives to nearly-universally-valuable but expensive/extensive services like that.
"...while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me..."
No realistic way that you can think of. Simply because you can't figure it out and nobody else has figured it out doesn't mean it's impossible. After all, why should anything change if there's no need to?
The ad model is broken. If you want to run ads, get on your content management system and hand-type in your own ads. Own them. Don't toss off the responsibility for what appears on your site to a bunch of third-party yahoos. If that's as much as you care about the user experience, why the hell shouldn't they block whatever tripe is coming down the line?
> Simply because you can't figure it out and nobody else has figured it out doesn't mean it's impossible
At my age I probably have even less patience with the "if I don't know how then nobody does" attitude than you do. Nonetheless, until an alternative solution to that problem is discovered, we're stuck with ads. We can make them better, but we can't realistically demand that they go away unless we also accept that everything currently funded by ads goes away too. I don't just mean Google and Facebook. I also mean the advertisers whose business models depend on those platforms and whose products would not be on the market otherwise. Ads don't just support big companies. They also support moms and pops, and BTW charities use ads too.
So you want that reality to change? Good for you. Seriously. But what are you contributing to that effort? What's your great idea for easing our dependence on ads? I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts.
>How about when the service can not exist otherwise?
Then maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing. There are plenty of web services not supported by advertisement. This is not a case where "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is acceptable. The current system of sustaining webservices is broken and outdated.
> If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing.
You are conflating specific negative aspects of the current advertising landscape with advertising in general.
"Advertising" covers a large spectrum of actions, from the sign above the corner store in a neighborhood saying its name to complex analysis of online behavior, personal traits and current disposition to influence your actions. There are both positive and negative aspects of online and offline advertising. Oversimplification of the description and overly broad statements based on that simplification aren't really useful to a beneficial change.
I'm not at all, because I'm not talking about advertising in general. I'm aware of what advertising is. I'm talking specifically about the same kind of advertising that the article posted is.
You responded to something about advertising in general ("How about when the service can not exist otherwise?") with something about specific negative advertising practices. Regardless of what the article is about, is seems the comment you replied to was talking about advertising in general (and was itself responding to a comment referring to advertising in general).
I don't think we're going to get very far if we aren't talking about the same thing.
When I see evidence of the advertising industry working hard to eliminate dark patterns and junk I'll take that argument seriously. Advertising is not a benign or neutral commercial activity, it has huge externalities which most of its proponents prefer to ignore.
> If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom...
You're begging the question. The point of the article is saying that advertising should be fixed. You're saying advertising shouldn't be fixed because services shouldn't be using advertising because advertising is broken.
So how are you going to be able to determine when advertising is 'fixed'? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking or hoping the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.
You put a lot of words in my mouth. I'm saying Internet advertising is broken to the point where there is no reasonable hope of fixing it. I'm saying even if advertising were "fixed", simply paying for services would be a better move. I'm not saying advertisement should not be fixed- I don't care. I'm saying all of this "fixing ads" nonsense is unreasonable and backwards thinking.
I don't want to seem like an old-timer telling the young whipersnappers soda pop used to be a nickel but I was involved in the internet before there was a web. So, I've sort of seen the growth over time and believe it or not there was a time before advertising. Most websites didn't have advertising. Nowadays your strange uncle has ads on his personal blog because someone told him about AdSense. Forget that fact that he earns $0.15 a year, he's a professional blogger.
For awhile, most of the content on the internet was non-commercial. People, myself included, posted stuff online because we wanted to share information. We had no expectation of ever receiving compensation for it.
Nowadays way too many people want to thumb their nose at boring jobs and travel the world writing blog posts and getting paid for it. Or they want to become Instagram stars so they pimp products for money.
I'm not saying that as a cranky old man. What I'm getting at is everybody is trying to monetize everybody else. It's not that you get annoying ads on CNN, it's that your cousin is trying to get you to watch his YouTube channel so he can quit the rat race and live in Thailand for $500 a month.
I know this is unrealistic but I would like to see things move back more towards how they used to be. Ad platforms used to actually have standards. You had to be doing pretty decent traffic to even be considered. The bar was set high enough that it limited the number of people who created websites as commercial ventures.
People used to create websites because they were passionate about a topic, not because they figured out that there was an SEO niche where they could rank #1 for a keyword and then slap ads all over the site.
And the way this relates back to services that could not exist otherwise, if they're valuable enough people will either pay to use them or advertisers will bid up the price for the limited advertising inventory and the provider can make a decent return.
Because the real problem is that the supply of content is virtually infinite while the money going into the advertising space is finite. Thus, supply of space to advertise exceeds demand willing to pay to advertise on it.
There are exactly two possible outcomes of advertising.
1. You spend no more money on products that are advertised to you, and advertisers don't consider your view meaningful, and won't pay for it.
2. Advertisers make extra money from you, either by getting you to buy a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, or by getting you to buy a version of a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, and will pay less than that extra expected revenue for your view.
that revenue comes from your pocket. If you are in the latter category, then whether or not advertising is positive depends on whether or not you believe that advertising causes your decision making process to be more or less rational.
It's the article's raison d'être to advocate NOT blocking all ads, but to be discriminating so as to encourage better practices by the publishers/advertisers/ad networks.
As it is right now, with ad blockers usually defaulting to blocking all ads, there are no incentives for better practices: the 5MB video overlay on <whatever.com> may play a small part in convincing someone to install an ad blocker, but it plays a comparative larger part to keep <whatever.com> in business–it's the tragedy of the commons, basically.
It's somewhat irrelevant that you may be willing to pay money, because many schemes, from impermeable paywalls to voluntary micropayment have been tried, and users have generally been reluctant to adopt these.
I don't even agree with your first sentence. I don't see anything in this article about how we should collectively stop blocking ads in order to encourage better practices from publishers/advertisers/ad networks. The article is just a long rant about how bad ads are with the promise that "if they get better I will look at them".
How are you going to be able to make this judgment call? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.
Even if the article was actually encouraging people to work with the ad networks to find a reasonable common ground it would be severely misguided.
Most ads. I am OK with manufacturers, merchants and so on advertising the existence of their goods/ services/ pricing. Communicating the existence of your commercial offering to consumers is a legitimate business activity. But I agree that a great deal of advertising consists of psychological manipulation and that's bad, and the people who do it for a living should feel bad about themselves.
I was and am OK with Google's simple textual ads, although it's true that Google leverages them to push its own brand by controlling color schemes and so forth.
But any marketing that relies on interrupting people can fuck right off.
I don't enjoy ads either, but we have decades of precedent at this point where the vast majority of things and services on the Internet are free. We've come to expect it. And the arms race between users and ad revenue has been going on nearly as long.
What it comes down to is people want it all for nothing. And that shapes the world we live in. The Internet is the way it is because that's the way we want it. We as a group of consumers have proven for decades we're not willing to pay for every sort of thing.
As a result we've shown ourselves more than willing to be the product and then grumble about it. But so long as things are still free we can just imagine a utopia where everyone pays enough to or enough people pay to keep things where we want them.
However the market has already shown us who we really are, like it or not. And if you disagree, well welcome to the high minded minority or the deluded minority(probably majority).
Most of us won't think twice about dropping $5 on a shitty Starbucks coffee, but won't pay $5 for something super useful like Google search which we use every day multiple times. But on the other hand, most of these services don't even try selling a service instead of monetizing via ads, as they have trained their users to expect everything for free on the internet. So maybe people would pay, if there is a choice?
What if there is a way to pay $5/month each for Facebook, Twitter, Google Search etc in return for no tracking, no ads, so selling of data etc. FB has one billion users, if just 50M of them pay $5 per month, that is $3B in revenue per year. This 50M people can subsidize the rest of the users, who can't/won't afford $5 and are willing to see ads.
It doesn't work like that. Companies have already tried (see: Google Contributor) with very limited success. The reality is that you're heavily in the minority of people who care about tracking and privacy and ads. There's no market for it, and the largest analogous service, YouTube Red, explicitly needs to offer exclusive content and access to streaming media just to entice people.
Because the share of people using the internet who understand the distinction is probably about 1%, and of that 1% the share that care is certainly less than half, and of that group the share that would go go to the trouble of trying to identify the sites that use serverside ads and not block them as opposed to just blocking every ad is in turn miniscule.
No need to care about it if the ads simply bypass adblockers by being served the same way as regular content. Faster-loading pages will make everyone happier anyway. This is something I'm particularly interested in building.
Advertisers wouldn't work with them. Advertisers want to stand out (and have since the beginning of time) and at this point, a simple static image or text seldom stands out. (Exceptions might be the sponsored ads that your eyes have to go past when you do a google search, I guess).
What I find most frustrating about blocking ads and such is that when I find a site I want to see content on I will start allowing more in; i use uBlock Origin. Sometimes I do this so streaming content will load and other times to benefit the site.
However almost immediately the same pattern sets in, this is particularly true with streaming content issues. More sites pop up on the blocked list. It is like one of those little Russian Dolls, you open one up and keep finding more.
This is why I keep all blocks on and it is a very very rare occasion I will remove them. When I now come across content I would like to see I move to unblock but if I run into another Russian Doll setup I just close the tab and never look back.
Simply put. I don't trust you. If your ad services are nested within each other then whom am I actually allowing entry? I said you can come in, not the people you met on the street. so stay out.
Same goes for crappy video players. I'd be glad never to use youtube-dl again if the video player of the (ad-supported) program I'm watching didn't repeatedly freeze, crash, or outright refuse to work.
Youtube, HBO, Amazon, and Netflix are usually stellar. Hulu, NBC, Comedy Central, TBS… I don't think I've ever successfully watched a video all the way through on one of those services.
I've never really had a problem with video players not working; I have had about a thousand problems with them automatically playing content, sometimes from a tab I can't identify.
Fix the ads in the ways mentioned here and they'd be damn hard to block in the first place. The only rule needed to block practically all ads is "Stop loading data from third-party websites."
The amount of crap websites load from third parties to track and analyse your every move is staggering. This is a list of tracking parties loaded on a single website:
Make micropayments a thing and I'll pay you directly. (no way I gonna unblock any ad). And with micro I mean something more like spotify: A flat- or capped-rate and automatic payment of anything I read across publishers.
This is my exact position. I don't have any existential problem with ads. The problem i have is what the websites does. It seems there is competition between websites "who can put more ads". This is ridiculous. I use adblocks only because of this. If they put ads in more rational fashion, i would be more than happy to help websites owners make money out of their websites.
The ad model is broken. I see the future of web monetisation as tiny fractions of a bit coin (or another crypto currency) being automatically deducted from a your wallet, charged per second/minute.
Wouldn't that let you perform even crazier levels of tracking, and expose my (barely anonymous) browsing to the entire world? Wallets might be just a bunch of characters, but I bet you can figure out who I am from my url trail alone, given I spend a ton of time on messenger.com/t/mywife and mywebsite.com
Also, doesn't that mean that only people with money can go on the internet? This seems like a much, much worse system than we have today (with adblockers)
I just had CNBC.com tell me that I couldn't have autoplaying video if I don't turn off my adblocker. Sounds like a win-win from my perspective. Maybe if large commercial news websites weren't so annoying and crappy to use, and the quality of the adverts so deplorably low, then I might be more open to viewing them.
If you allow flashy banners and animations etc. all over your page, then I'm gonna black them. That simple, guys. I am not going to buy anything from someone who gets up in my face in a rude way. Not only am I not going to buy anything right now, I'm going to actively avoid your products/services in the future because you annoyed me already.
I think ad blockers should be able to throttle by amount of bandwidth. If the ads are taking up more than 20% of load time or 20% of bandwidth, they start getting cut off.
Also, an ad blocker that learned your preferences would be very cool. If you could "thumbs down" ads, this information could be used to show you ads you like and are interested in. Such information would actually be very valuable to marketers.
There is a 3rd option. You dont visit the sites that have ads on them. That way, you aren't imposing your will on them, and you aren't taking their work without passively supporting them, and everyone wins.
The idea that you're entitled to everyone's content without even passively supporting them, the author, as they ask, is just a bit too much for me.
I like the 4th option. Technical staff and management of sites that serve malware through their ad services should be found guilty of gross negligence, the corporate veil broken, and should be personally financially liable for all the damage their malware caused, in addition to criminal penalties and prison time.
I've never had any problems with amazon ads, have you? You should document it if you have. When I go to amazon I am there to buy things. Being shown products is very helpful then, and never a problem with malware. I am sorry that you have had those problems. If you would document them and blog your findings it would be helpful because this is the first I have heard anyone say amazon serves malware.
No, everyone does not win. I lose, because I've had to process a bunch of junk commercial messages that substantially distracted from the task I was trying to achieve while falsely claiming to be helping me. The value of the content ads are underwriting is frequently lower than the cost of the distractions created by the adverts themselves.
I like good advertising. If an ad is well-designed I'll look at it for its own sake. If I'm interested in a product or service I will scrutinize an informative ad in detail and read every commercial appeal therein.I am open to polite commercial pitches.
What I'm not open to is bullshit. If an advertiser leveraes distraction, misrepresentation, or other popular tactics to promote a commercial message, I become hostile to them because I do not care to be communicated with that way. Annoy me enough and not only will I block an ad, I'll undermine it by turning it into a meme or somesuch. Advertisers do not have a right to annoy people in order to get their message across.
That's interesting. I find their aggressive use of my bandwidth, disk caching, and CPU resources to be rude. Since I'm in control of those things, I don't feel bad about restricting them access to them. Not to mention their utter disrespect for me by enabling the tracking of me by the ad companies across the web.
I'm amazed whenever I watch someone else connect to the ad-infested web on their wide-open systems. I keep hoping that the ad companies will learn restraint, but they don't. As far as I can see, they just double down. I remember the internet before advertising got such a foothold, and I miss it (warts and all).
A few content-related, static linked images that match the look-and-feel of the rest of the page would actually encourage me to click on them. The over-complicated mess they have in place now is ridiculous.
How do you implement your policy of not visiting sites with ads?
How do you block a site prior to visiting it? Are you using a custom hosts file to block all sites that are known offenders?
Many of us are blocking ads for security and privacy concerns. How do you confirm that a site is safe prior to visiting it so that you can allow ads if it is a safe site?
Unfortunately, the only tools I have found block the good with the bad.
It's actually not that hard to eliminate the worst of it. You just leave the ad-blocker on, full-time until you visit a site. If the site isn't an abhorrent "content farm" with link-baity headlines and vague, poorly worded nonsense, then "So far so good..." you whitelist them and hit the reload button. Thanks to the race to the bottom that advertising has become, >90% of the bad sites won't make it past this first stage.
If after disabling the ad blocker the content becomes buried in interstitials, auto-playing videos, and is so crowded with ads that the actual content turns into snaketext that looks like someone tried to outdo The Odyssey in haiku form, you turn the ad blocker back on.
I agree, to an extent. Those sites should not be allowed to be indexed by search engines if they want it that way. If an article is indexed by a search engine and they clearly benefit from that traffic, the page should be open to the public, even if they have ad blockers.
Like most people in these threads, I want to support websites but I'm not going to give up my 1) privacy 2) bandwidth 3) battery life and 4) security just so these sites can shove annoying ads in my face.
For example, The Atlantic, which I subscribe to, continues to give me nags about my adblocker usage. I specifically block them because they are the annoying ads that animate and flash and make it impossible for me to actually focus on the text/content that I'm paying them for. It's obnoxious.
Ad blockers would not be so prevalent today if companies had not completely given up control of their advertisements to third party ad companies, who don't have the best interests of the viewer or even the site owner in mind.
Na I kind of disagree with the author, ads do work, and they work quite well, otherwise the whole internet wouldn't rely on them.
But also ads are always bad, because the only reason they exist is to get my to buy something I don't want. Because everything I want to buy I can (and do) research and find out where to buy without them.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadWasn't this the business model of Google AdWords?
> Stop loading data from third-party websites. This is a security and privacy issue. There’s no technical reason why all ads can’t be served from the site I’m visiting. It can still communicate with ad servers, just do it on the backend.
Ad networks insist on this because there's no other way to prevent massive-scale fraud by the customers - how should the ad network know that the end user is a "real" user and not a fake request the customer generated to drive up the impressions on pay-per-impression ads?
Ad networks can't swing the sword of justice at me while themselves standing on a platform of shaded pragmatism.
Then the ad networks business model is jacked and they should change it. If they can't find a better one, they should go out of business.
Then get rid of pay-per-impression. I'd rather have the days of affiliate links than the crap we have now. You advertise a widget on your site, I click on it and buy it. You get a (small) cut of the profit. It also tends to make ads match site content, since I won't be buying left-handed spanners advertised on a site dedicated to short-haired pomeranians, probably.
I think the problem is in the default behaviour of being on for all domains by default. Which even when you do your job right, by not using overlay or otherwise distracting ads, blocks you by default, without giving the user a choice to decide.
Lets compare it to cancer. Maybe the users don't want brain cancer, but they should have the option for skin cancer.
Nobody wants cancer. Users who install adblockers don't want ads.
personally i compare them with housekeeping. I don't like it, i can decide to pay someone to do it, or i've to accept them. Which could kill me by poisonous cleanser (malware).
Another problem is that the ads the user deemed to be acceptable visually don't necessarily carry a correspondingly lower risk of malware.
Yet another problem is that the user likely thinks that by allowing ads for domain X they are allowing X to serve them ads. When in reality, they are allowing X to add a third-party service Y that sells access to Z, and that neither X nor Y currently have a way to guarantee that bad things won't happen from letting Z (or even who Z is, or that Z was a possible participant when X signed up for the service).
The malicious nature of ads is not new. Ads have always been infested with malware, tracking, and hideous graphics. Taken to their logical extreme (as Facebook has done), ads can also manipulate users to a degree far more dangerous than a TV or radio ad could. Ads are just the surface of a much deeper problem with the Internet, which is that most massive web services are paid for with user data rather than a mutually agreed upon price.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no reason to willingly view an advertisement to support a useful service. This amounts to a donation which you are not really in control of. Just circumvent the ad and buy from the company or send them money if you value their services.
That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever. I think current technology has been wholly negative on society.
>I don't have money to pay for every service I want
So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever.
We could go on and on, no? Also, he did say "Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet", so there was an accompanying argument.
That's a bit of a lofty statement with no accompanying argument whatsoever.
In all fairness, you didn't provide any either. Most things have a mixed outcome, some good and some bad. It can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So you've decided to exchange your personal data and (in some cases) your computers safety to use them on credit? Maybe you should rethink that. Also, there are services you can use which exist which do not sustain themselves with advertisements.
The safety counts for very little if advertising-free web browsing means you aren't truly using the internet.Sure, those services exist, but the free ones are few. HN wouldn't be very usable, for example, if I refused to click on sites that happen to have advertisements.
So yes, between being short on cash and wanting to actually get use out of the internet - including being able to easily and cheaply talk to my family overseas - I'll deal with it. Something else might be right for you, and that's fine.
And in way too many cases, it's more than worth it!
We could have better ads, that don't require any privacy or safety loss from our side, and blocking ads does set things the way they need to be for those ads to appear. But no, I can't agree that ads are inherently bad.
> Advertising allows people with no means to use the internet, and this value is worth more to society as a whole than ads.
Community efforts would step up in a big way if there weren't free spy-vertising services making them seem pointless. Or yeah, paid options. Maybe even profitable but non-behemoth businesses built on human-vetted static ads with minimal targeting, which might be valuable again if invasive targeting weren't an option and we stopped letting companies dodge responsibility for serving malware/scam ads just because waaaaaah paying humans to look at things is expensive and we don't wanna.
Google the massive company making enormous amounts of money abusing near-monopoly status and human dignity and throwing that money chaotically into dozens of sometimes-neat-but-destined-to-be-used-to-spy-on-people side projects? Yeah, that'd be gone.
How about when the service can not exist otherwise? Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be. If the value of the service is heavily based on network effects, the result is a network too small to reach the break-even point. I'm not saying you should view ads you don't want to, but demanding that people provide a free service you find useful while denying them any realistic way to pay for that service seems bit too entitled for me.
No ads = no Android, no Google Maps, no Gmail, etc...
I do pay for email.
Apple has iOS and that is not ad-supported.
Ads are not the only way.
>Even if you were willing to pay for it, many others might not be.
I'm not convinced that there is a way that google maps could be as big as it is without ad revenue. Most people just wouldn't pay and the only reason that you would consider paying now is because the infrastructure that ad money has paid for has made it worthwhile.
a) Ads on google tend to be much less annoying than from other vendors because google maintains relatively high standards for how it displays ads. I consider it a reasonable trade-off and don't block ads on Google services - they are usually relevant and not overtly annoying or distracting.
b) the fastest possible growth isn't necessarily the highest good. You don't get a better plant by trying to pull it up out of the ground, and things that are grown fast don't always last that well. Wikipedia doesn't have advertising and while it's subject to many criticisms I would argue that its slower organic growth makes it more sustainable over the long term.
b) Not my area of expertise, but google doesn't fill half its website with a plea for donations once a year. As a layman it doesn't appear to be more sustainable than google. What is your argument for the sustainability of donations over ads, ignoring the obvious differences of these two companies?
To be clear, I agree that ads are not the ONLY way, just the most effective way for many companies. I think that there is no way that google could so easily steal market share from both Garmin and TomTom without ad revenue.
[EDIT] I'd add that sensible governments might well consider something like mapping/route-finding to be basic infrastructure and worthy of funding, absent free commercial options. Especially now that we've seen what that's like. So the US might be screwed but much of Europe and Asia could well come out with tax-funded alternatives to nearly-universally-valuable but expensive/extensive services like that.
No realistic way that you can think of. Simply because you can't figure it out and nobody else has figured it out doesn't mean it's impossible. After all, why should anything change if there's no need to?
The ad model is broken. If you want to run ads, get on your content management system and hand-type in your own ads. Own them. Don't toss off the responsibility for what appears on your site to a bunch of third-party yahoos. If that's as much as you care about the user experience, why the hell shouldn't they block whatever tripe is coming down the line?
At my age I probably have even less patience with the "if I don't know how then nobody does" attitude than you do. Nonetheless, until an alternative solution to that problem is discovered, we're stuck with ads. We can make them better, but we can't realistically demand that they go away unless we also accept that everything currently funded by ads goes away too. I don't just mean Google and Facebook. I also mean the advertisers whose business models depend on those platforms and whose products would not be on the market otherwise. Ads don't just support big companies. They also support moms and pops, and BTW charities use ads too.
So you want that reality to change? Good for you. Seriously. But what are you contributing to that effort? What's your great idea for easing our dependence on ads? I would absolutely love to hear your thoughts.
Then maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place. If your business model relies on feeding users ad technology known to be unsafe, undesirable, and disrespectful to users' freedom, it's not worth patronizing. There are plenty of web services not supported by advertisement. This is not a case where "if it ain't broke don't fix it" is acceptable. The current system of sustaining webservices is broken and outdated.
You are conflating specific negative aspects of the current advertising landscape with advertising in general.
"Advertising" covers a large spectrum of actions, from the sign above the corner store in a neighborhood saying its name to complex analysis of online behavior, personal traits and current disposition to influence your actions. There are both positive and negative aspects of online and offline advertising. Oversimplification of the description and overly broad statements based on that simplification aren't really useful to a beneficial change.
I don't think we're going to get very far if we aren't talking about the same thing.
You're begging the question. The point of the article is saying that advertising should be fixed. You're saying advertising shouldn't be fixed because services shouldn't be using advertising because advertising is broken.
You put a lot of words in my mouth. I'm saying Internet advertising is broken to the point where there is no reasonable hope of fixing it. I'm saying even if advertising were "fixed", simply paying for services would be a better move. I'm not saying advertisement should not be fixed- I don't care. I'm saying all of this "fixing ads" nonsense is unreasonable and backwards thinking.
For awhile, most of the content on the internet was non-commercial. People, myself included, posted stuff online because we wanted to share information. We had no expectation of ever receiving compensation for it.
Nowadays way too many people want to thumb their nose at boring jobs and travel the world writing blog posts and getting paid for it. Or they want to become Instagram stars so they pimp products for money.
I'm not saying that as a cranky old man. What I'm getting at is everybody is trying to monetize everybody else. It's not that you get annoying ads on CNN, it's that your cousin is trying to get you to watch his YouTube channel so he can quit the rat race and live in Thailand for $500 a month.
I know this is unrealistic but I would like to see things move back more towards how they used to be. Ad platforms used to actually have standards. You had to be doing pretty decent traffic to even be considered. The bar was set high enough that it limited the number of people who created websites as commercial ventures.
People used to create websites because they were passionate about a topic, not because they figured out that there was an SEO niche where they could rank #1 for a keyword and then slap ads all over the site.
And the way this relates back to services that could not exist otherwise, if they're valuable enough people will either pay to use them or advertisers will bid up the price for the limited advertising inventory and the provider can make a decent return.
Because the real problem is that the supply of content is virtually infinite while the money going into the advertising space is finite. Thus, supply of space to advertise exceeds demand willing to pay to advertise on it.
1. You spend no more money on products that are advertised to you, and advertisers don't consider your view meaningful, and won't pay for it.
2. Advertisers make extra money from you, either by getting you to buy a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, or by getting you to buy a version of a thing that you would not have otherwise bought, and will pay less than that extra expected revenue for your view.
that revenue comes from your pocket. If you are in the latter category, then whether or not advertising is positive depends on whether or not you believe that advertising causes your decision making process to be more or less rational.
As it is right now, with ad blockers usually defaulting to blocking all ads, there are no incentives for better practices: the 5MB video overlay on <whatever.com> may play a small part in convincing someone to install an ad blocker, but it plays a comparative larger part to keep <whatever.com> in business–it's the tragedy of the commons, basically.
It's somewhat irrelevant that you may be willing to pay money, because many schemes, from impermeable paywalls to voluntary micropayment have been tried, and users have generally been reluctant to adopt these.
How are you going to be able to make this judgment call? It's already known that ad services track users and occasionally install malware on their machines. Will the ads simply become more pleasant-looking while becoming more nefarious, or will they actually be more respectful of users' freedoms? How will you know which is occurring? Also, are you seriously going to stop blocking ads periodically to see if you should keep blocking ads? I think asking the ad networks to be more polite is more than a little naive.
Even if the article was actually encouraging people to work with the ad networks to find a reasonable common ground it would be severely misguided.
Not to mention that ads are a form of psychological warfare
But any marketing that relies on interrupting people can fuck right off.
What it comes down to is people want it all for nothing. And that shapes the world we live in. The Internet is the way it is because that's the way we want it. We as a group of consumers have proven for decades we're not willing to pay for every sort of thing.
As a result we've shown ourselves more than willing to be the product and then grumble about it. But so long as things are still free we can just imagine a utopia where everyone pays enough to or enough people pay to keep things where we want them.
However the market has already shown us who we really are, like it or not. And if you disagree, well welcome to the high minded minority or the deluded minority(probably majority).
What if there is a way to pay $5/month each for Facebook, Twitter, Google Search etc in return for no tracking, no ads, so selling of data etc. FB has one billion users, if just 50M of them pay $5 per month, that is $3B in revenue per year. This 50M people can subsidize the rest of the users, who can't/won't afford $5 and are willing to see ads.
However almost immediately the same pattern sets in, this is particularly true with streaming content issues. More sites pop up on the blocked list. It is like one of those little Russian Dolls, you open one up and keep finding more.
This is why I keep all blocks on and it is a very very rare occasion I will remove them. When I now come across content I would like to see I move to unblock but if I run into another Russian Doll setup I just close the tab and never look back.
Simply put. I don't trust you. If your ad services are nested within each other then whom am I actually allowing entry? I said you can come in, not the people you met on the street. so stay out.
Youtube, HBO, Amazon, and Netflix are usually stellar. Hulu, NBC, Comedy Central, TBS… I don't think I've ever successfully watched a video all the way through on one of those services.
I'll always block them, just in case they decide to track me.
Patreon however no flat-rate and not much in use for articles and flattr not widely supported and recently aquired by a dubious company...
For flattr I never understood why you can't hit the button multiple times to give double or trippe to a single author.
Also, doesn't that mean that only people with money can go on the internet? This seems like a much, much worse system than we have today (with adblockers)
Screw ads.
I have absolutely zero interest in seeing anything you are trying to sell me. Intrusive, spying, or just a linked JPG.
I will not whitelist ads for any site for whatever reasons.
If that means the site cannot continue to, well so be it.
If you allow flashy banners and animations etc. all over your page, then I'm gonna black them. That simple, guys. I am not going to buy anything from someone who gets up in my face in a rude way. Not only am I not going to buy anything right now, I'm going to actively avoid your products/services in the future because you annoyed me already.
Also, an ad blocker that learned your preferences would be very cool. If you could "thumbs down" ads, this information could be used to show you ads you like and are interested in. Such information would actually be very valuable to marketers.
I never want to see alcohol ads, nor gambling ads.
For everyone else's sake I hope you follow the author's suggestions.
The idea that you're entitled to everyone's content without even passively supporting them, the author, as they ask, is just a bit too much for me.
It blocks ads, but lets you fill up a 'wallet' that pays publishers based on your visits.
I like good advertising. If an ad is well-designed I'll look at it for its own sake. If I'm interested in a product or service I will scrutinize an informative ad in detail and read every commercial appeal therein.I am open to polite commercial pitches.
What I'm not open to is bullshit. If an advertiser leveraes distraction, misrepresentation, or other popular tactics to promote a commercial message, I become hostile to them because I do not care to be communicated with that way. Annoy me enough and not only will I block an ad, I'll undermine it by turning it into a meme or somesuch. Advertisers do not have a right to annoy people in order to get their message across.
I'm amazed whenever I watch someone else connect to the ad-infested web on their wide-open systems. I keep hoping that the ad companies will learn restraint, but they don't. As far as I can see, they just double down. I remember the internet before advertising got such a foothold, and I miss it (warts and all).
A few content-related, static linked images that match the look-and-feel of the rest of the page would actually encourage me to click on them. The over-complicated mess they have in place now is ridiculous.
How do you block a site prior to visiting it? Are you using a custom hosts file to block all sites that are known offenders?
Many of us are blocking ads for security and privacy concerns. How do you confirm that a site is safe prior to visiting it so that you can allow ads if it is a safe site?
Unfortunately, the only tools I have found block the good with the bad.
If after disabling the ad blocker the content becomes buried in interstitials, auto-playing videos, and is so crowded with ads that the actual content turns into snaketext that looks like someone tried to outdo The Odyssey in haiku form, you turn the ad blocker back on.
Like most people in these threads, I want to support websites but I'm not going to give up my 1) privacy 2) bandwidth 3) battery life and 4) security just so these sites can shove annoying ads in my face.
For example, The Atlantic, which I subscribe to, continues to give me nags about my adblocker usage. I specifically block them because they are the annoying ads that animate and flash and make it impossible for me to actually focus on the text/content that I'm paying them for. It's obnoxious.
Ad blockers would not be so prevalent today if companies had not completely given up control of their advertisements to third party ad companies, who don't have the best interests of the viewer or even the site owner in mind.
But also ads are always bad, because the only reason they exist is to get my to buy something I don't want. Because everything I want to buy I can (and do) research and find out where to buy without them.
Doesn't need to be. Ads can also be used to tell you that something you may want exists, and how to get it.
And that's still simplistic. I do agree that ads are dangerous things, but they have many uses, some good.