"Our work refutes the belief that the battle between publishers and users is leading to a permanent arms race between the two parties, and presents a much more nuanced picture."
"There is a significant need for follow-on technical work into the expansion of techniques that we have introduced as well as a debate on the ethics of ad blocking."
Is there really a need for debase on the ethics of ad blocking at all? How could you defend presenting ads as being ethical at all? Do they really provide any value to our lives? I keep seeing it just as a waste of human attention and wondering what humanity would be like if we rejected the concept of spamming us with advertisements via every possible channel. Is it just me or we should stop accepting them and start working on building society where this is not accepted or at the very least, greatly excised?
>Well, ads currently are used to monetize part of your attention to pay for providing the service you're trying to use.
If the ads all went away, so too might the service.
From the moment that some ad sets you in contact with a product/service or a brand that brings value to you, it will become valuable to your life - on that particular moment.
Else how would you reach out to your possible customers, that would find your product/service of great value to them?
Do not fool yourself by saying that advertisement doesn't work... it does, and I bet it has influenced your decision plenty of times in your life - and I mean this in a positive way, not in a "mind controlling" way.
The problem of spamming is just a matter of cheap distribution, a lot of inventory and the need to monetize free content.
Aside from a small outspoken few, I don't think that anyone is really arguing that advertising doesn't work. That's never been the contention, and the goal isn't to be completely rid of advertisements.
The argument has been the annoyingness and frustrating way in which advertisements present themselves and constantly worm their way into your private life without your permission. It's advertising rings with exceptionally poor vetting allowing malicious ads through, no scrutiny applied. It's advertisers ignoring the expressed wishes of individuals who set Do Not Track, or installing adblockers; I will concede the latter often isn't much about philosophy and choice as it is about annoyance, but the site has the ability and choice to not provide content in that case - the sites and advertisers work to circumvent it.
The problem with the idea of discussing advertisements in a sound way is that it's always been a discussion in bad faith on the side of advertisers. Think of every time there has been a major privacy breaking advertising and data collection tactic - the only reason these times stopped was because they got caught, not because someone inside thought "huh, this might not be a good idea to make an invasion of privacy." Look at the recent issues with Android based phones listening for silent beacons without user permission; a 40 page TOS on a phone does not constitute a fair warning, and courts have repeatedly upheld this position.
Yes, I'm sure there are some "good" advertisers, but it's a poisoned landscape. The advertisements you see going to the majority of the web aren't from these good advertisers, and websites aren't interested in it either. There's money and incentive in crappy advertising and invading people's privacy. It's not "bringing value to customers", it's bringing value to advertisers and data hoarders while paying out a little to services, and these services are happy enough to lie to you about adblockers. Look at this pop-up from Bloomberg of all places: [1] It's a flat-out lie as to why they want you to unblock ads; the page renders perfectly fine and is perfectly reasonable without it, they just want you to see ads. It's not about creating value, it's about getting eyes on ads. Doesn't matter how, why, or what in many cases, just eyes and ears in contact with ads.
Advertisers have dug a huge hole for themselves, and they're just digging deeper every time there is another upset over something advertisers do - they issue a stock apology, then do it all over again with a slightly different method. It's absurd, and the idea that somehow we need to meet advertisers half-way is equally absurd. There has not been a show of good faith from the advertising realm, even in the face of government regulation. It's complete disregard for everything in the name of a few bucks and more eyes and ears in contact with whoever happens to pay enough to get an ad there. Even with the hoards of data that they mine about people, you still get ridiculous advertisement patterns along the lines of "I see you just bought a washing machine. Here are washing machines you might want to buy!"
There's no sense or reason, it's not advertising as a service, it's just spewing non-sense out there, and the amount of infrastructure, time, technology, and brainpower used to spew it out there is absolutely mind-boggling.
> From the moment that some ad ... it will become valuable to your life
Ok, ads can be valuable. So can gym memberships. But we don't require that people buy gym memberships, and we shouldn't prevent them from blocking ads. In other words, I want to clarify that this argument should be "advertisements are valuable, so you should choose not to block them", rather than "advertisements are valuable, so ad-blockers are wrong".
Of course, most people would choose not to see ads, so they don't seem to think they're valuable...
To use your analogy then I should just install a gym-membership blocker, stroll in every morning, and use their workout machines without paying.
That's absurd.
My argument has always been: if you want to use an ad-blocker, be my guest, then block the damn content too. Ad-blockers seem to have this entitlement complex where they deserve the content how they want it -- others' rights be damned.
No one's forcing anyone to consume this content just like no one's forcing anyone to get a gym membership. And somehow you don't see how your own analogy proved the absurdity of the situation?
The argument made was against the statement that ads were valuable in and of themselves. If they aren't, than the whole system becomes a zero sum game: advertisers pay content creators, who show you ads, you pay money for products, and the product seller gives a portion of the money to the advertiser. Unless value is being introduced somewhere, the whole system serves only to misdirect where your money is going. You might as well give the money directly to the content creator, and skip the advertising middleman.
Only if being given the opportunity to watch ads is valuable to you can you say that the advertisers contribute to the system rather than introducing inefficiency. Someone who has chosen to block ads is clearly making the statement that the ads provide them no value. Such a person might decide to contribute in other more efficient ways, or perhaps might decide to become a leech.
Note that there is an easier way to leech from the content creator than to block the ads: view the ads, and then don't buy the product. In this way, you are decreasing the overall value of ad impressions, and thereby decreasing the money funneled to the content creator. This option is ignored by ad-blocking opponents because you so clearly have a right to ignore the advice of ads. How, though, is it so different from blocking ads?
Furthermore, by analysing this option, we see the core advantage - or problem, depending on your viewpoint - of an ad based model: some people (those who are more frugal) can contribute less money than others. If you consider this a problem, than you will find a clear solution: charge all viewers the same price upfront, rather than hiding it behind the advertising machine. In this way, you become more honest, while forcing the poor to contribute the same as the rich.
> If they aren't, than the whole system becomes a zero sum game
Careful. You need to be more specific. The ad industry itself is a zero-sum market for the market participants (i.e. advertising mediums), correct. However, the ad industry has caused the PPF (production possibility frontier) of the economy to move outwards by introducing allocation efficiency, thus having a non-zero-sum impact on the economy as a whole.
> Unless value is being introduced somewhere, the whole system serves only to misdirect [...] skip the advertising middleman.
I'm sure you understand the value of interfaces. You use them everyday. I go to a supermarket instead of dealing with thousands of individual grocery suppliers. I go to a clothing store instead of dealing with thousands of individual clothing suppliers. Just like people use advertising networks so that they don't have to deal with millions of content creators. So it's been with newspapers, magazines, radio, television... and so it is with the web.
> In this way, you are decreasing the overall value of ad impressions, [...] How, though, is it so different from blocking ads?
Because a decrease in the value of ad impressions doesn't necessarily decrease the total amount of money earned by the content creator. You're dealing with the price elasticity of the market here. If you want to make that argument, then show some hard figures that back up your claim that content creators would make less if ad-blockers chose to view and ignore ads instead.
> charge all viewers the same price upfront
Yeah, that price is $830/year ($69/month) for 100M American citizens to replace the digital advertising spend in the U.S. I hope we can get there with a communal revenue sharing network one day. That'd be truly amazing.
> the ad industry has caused the PPF (production possibility frontier) of the economy to move outwards by introducing allocation efficiency
Can you explain? That's a lot of jargon for a non-economist.
> > skip the advertising middleman.
> Just like people use advertising networks so that they don't have to deal with millions of content creators. So it's been with newspapers, magazines, radio, television... and so it is with the web.
You're missing grandparent's point. "Skipping the advertising middleman" in his argument refers not to advertising networks, but to advertising altogether. He refers to content creators taking money directly from their consumers, rather than going through the indirection of advertisers (whom take money from their clients, whom get their money from the consumers, thus completing the indirection chain).
(I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either side here, just attempting to clarify.)
Sure. Imagine for a second that all the copper in the world has been unearthed. There's a finite supply, i.e., it's a scare resource. So if we want to produce more iPhones with this copper, then there's less copper to produce pennies. There's a trade-off -- the copper market is zero-sum: allocating copper to one thing takes it away from another.
So, with that said, we have a maximum amount of iPhones we can produce with this copper and a maximum amount of pennies. If we use all the copper to produce iPhones, then no pennies can be made... and vice versa. That's the PPF for copper as it stands now... we can produce anywhere from 0-100 iPhones or 0-100 pennies.
How can we grow this PPF?
Two ways: (1) we could find more copper somewhere, or (2) we could increase the efficiency with which we use copper, i.e., technological progress. Say some PhD-whiz figures out how to use less copper to produce iPhones and pennies of the same quality by doping it. Well now we can make anywhere from 0-500 iPhones or 0-500 pennies with our copper.
Our PPF has grown outward. The pie has grown bigger. When you move the PPF it creates a non-zero-sum dynamic because there's more to go around for everyone.
How does this apply to the ad industry? Well, let's look at another hypothetical example.
The United Launch Alliance has been charging the government $100M per rocket launch. That's the only supplier the government knows about. A plucky young startup comes along and believes they can get the price down to $1M per launch. And they do it! But the government doesn't hear about it... so they keep paying $100M until one day they see an announcement (an ad) for this startup's rockets. Now they're only paying $1M per launch.
Thus they're able to allocate their funds more efficiently (technological progress) because they're able to hear about more opportunities.
> You're missing grandparent's point.
Thanks for clarifying. If that's indeed the point, then the argument is orthogonal to what we're discussing. Whether all content creators wake up tomorrow and decide to charge for their content instead of displaying ads or not, we'll still have advertising, and advertising will still be useful. It will just shift to different medium since the digital ad inventory has reduced.
That's what I think people aren't getting. For content creators to charge consumers directly, that means that consumers must somehow discover the content creators. And how does that discovery happen? Well, now, the content creators have become advertisers. They need to get the word out about their product (content) like everybody else somehow.
> That's what I think people aren't getting. For content creators to charge consumers directly, that means that consumers must somehow discover the content creators. And how does that discovery happen? Well, now, the content creators have become advertisers. They need to get the word out about their product (content) like everybody else somehow.
I avoid ads, because they're not a source of reliable information. I discover stuff by reading about it, either casually or in directed search. As here on HN. Whenever I'm reading about something, I'm looking for evidence of bias. If I find bias, I discount the source.
It sounds like you're saying that once you give something to someone then you have an ethical right to dictate how they use that thing. For example, if I buy a pillow for my sofa and the pillow-maker intended that I rest my head on that pillow every day, then it's unethical of me to keep the pillow in the closet because I don't really need it all the time?
Websites give people HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files for free. Once I take these files home (download them into my browser) then I'm free to do what I want with them. If that means only interacting with part of the content then I don't see anything wrong with that.
I understand the practical situation that many content providers find themselves in. They have become dependent on display ads for revenue. So I get the argument for unblocking ads on some favorite publisher's site to help them out. But I don't see anything unethical in blocking ads in general. And, if it disincentives content providers from relying on aggressive ads that create horrific user experiences then good!
You're misunderstanding what it means to own vs. to license... the latter being dictated by a contract known as ToS (terms of service) which you implicitly agree to when using a website.
Some of us remember when the very idea of commercial operations on the Internet was controversial. That debate is, obviously, long dead. But still, the concept of ToS for websites is bizarre.
I defeat this mechanism by offering my own ToS for interactions with any website. They implicitly agree by granting access to my browser to their content.
Where are these terms of service? I don't think most websites explicitly state that looking at ads or making your browser execute all of the scripts on the page is part of a terms of service. I mean, there are plenty of disclaimers about getting revenue from ads and referrals - especially on affiliate marketing sites - but I don't think I've seen anything dictating that I must perform certain actions with the files I download. I certainly don't think I've ever seen those terms stated before I download the site files. And informing someone of the terms of what they are agreeing to after they perform the action that implies agreement is incredibly shady.
Maybe I have technically stepped into some kind of legally defensible contract by accident.
However, I don't think tricking people into signing contracts that they don't want to sign is ethically defensible.
I have, exactly once in my life, connected with an ad in this way.
I remember it vividly, because even at the time, it struck me as amazingly strange an ad would actually be anything other that pointless noise.
I'd been house sitting at a friends place for a week, and so had been to all the takeout joints in the area several times. I didn't really want any of the options again, but was kinda hungry for lunch. At that moment a subway ad came on TV, and I remembered that there was a tiny subway tucked away off the main street, so I went there for lunch.
That's it, that's my story of ads putting me in contact with a brand that brought value to me. It happened once, and only once, and it happened at Norwood, South Australia.
I feel like I could have dug deep and lived without that brand connection.
No. Even in the cases where the adword result is at the top and the exact same result is right below it, I choose to click the non-ad version.
That situation is, in fact, a classic example of why adwords results are not relevant, ever. Either the actual google search result is literally the same as the ad word result, or the google result is more on point.
Never has there been a case where the ad word result has been what I wanted, but Google couldn't find it, and that's not surprising because Google is the one assembling both the search results and the ads, so if they can't find it in the search they also can't find an ad for it.
I feel differently. [1] And that's exactly why a debate is logical.
One useful thing you can do to enter the debate... define what you believe an ad is and why. Oh and remember, when you're driving past those big ol' strip mall signs... you're looking at a physical advertisement of location.
Maybe your definition differs, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you have a sound, logical argument for why it's different, or maybe you don't.
A debate is a good faith effort in trying to understand another's viewpoint while arguing your own. And I understand your viewpoint, I hate what some ads have become, and yet I still don't use an ad-blocker because of my own personal values.
Do you feel differently because you work for an org that makes money from selling ads? Not trying to be obnoxious but wouldn't it be simple for us to understand a pro-advertising position from such a person as no more complex as 'this is how I make my living'?
How much of our society's brainpower should be allocated to gaming the internet for ad-clicks? That would be the real debate. Many brilliant technologists are being hijacked by the major ad-media corporations for what I think we can all agree is a trivial (if not pointless) task. This is what we should be debating.
That may be an ad-hominem attack, but it's a justified one for once. Affiliations are a very relevant part to a moral discussion, so much that it has become commonplace for people to disclose their affiliations when they're engaging in moral discussions. Something that I haven't you seen doing yet, by the way.
No, it's not. My argument is simple: if you're going to install an ad-blocker, then go one step further and install a content-blocker instead for any websites that serve the ads you're blocking.
I don't want people to uninstall ad-blockers. I want them to install content-blockers.
So, if my motivation were more money, then please... tell me how less money would fit into my worldview?
How is what you are arguing different from, say, a coal miner in Appalachia arguing against subsidies for solar power? At this point their argument for coal is more existential than greedy. Wouldn't their argument be biased in an understandable way? Why should we not take that into account?
I'm not trying to bust your chops but I think your arguments have a lot of jargon and unnecessarily complex twists for what is essentially a simple position: you shouldn't access internet content without paying the price of advertising. Many disagree with that position for reasons that evoke the academic and open nature of the web.
We can do whatever we want to our machines to access content how we'd like. If it's not profitable to your corporation any longer than stop producing the content. The people will adapt the internet and create content in other ways. Very probably better ways - think Wikipedia, for example.
My argument is that you shouldn't access other people's content without respecting their wishes. Simple as that.
Yes, you can do whatever you want to your property. But you can't do whatever you want to other people's property unless they explicitly consent. (That's sort of what laws are there for...) And these people aren't explicitly consenting.
Also, you didn't answer my question. Where is the bias that you're seeing? When I'm saying let the ad industry die if it need die, I fail to see this implicit bias you're speaking of.
So, which argument are you trying to make? Respect the content creator's wishes or let the ad industry die? Would it make sense to you that those are largely exclusive positions?
If you work for a company that profits from an advertising platform and you argue that the logical extension of an ad blocker is a content blocker all you are doing is strongly asserting the intellectual property rights of your employer.
What you imply when you make that argument is that users must acquiesce to your TOS as this hypothetical content blocker is, on its face, absurd.
If you wanted to clarify your position further, perhaps you could state to this community whether or not you would support the extension of the DMCA to ad-blockers? Should it be illegal to use one? This would go a long way towards clarifying your positions which, up until now, are somewhat confusing - i.e., it's much simpler for us to conclude that you argue for advertising networks simply because you work for one.
If web sites started serving an HTTP header saying "browsers with ad blockers are not welcome to view this content", I would allow my browser to honor that request. That's more convenient than solving the AI problem of identifying and filtering out all the garbage content that exists for the sole purpose of drawing eyeballs to ads. Just tell me up front that it's garbage.
I submit that the most valuable thing being sold here is my eyeballs. And the content provider is auctioning them off to the highest bidder via the ad networks.
So, if the content providers and ad networks want to work that way, they need to respect my choice to be more selective in how my eyeballs are being sold.
If they don't want to do that, then they can choose to go out of business.
>How much of our society's brainpower should be allocated to gaming the internet for ad-clicks? That would be the real debate. Many brilliant technologists are being hijacked by the major ad-media corporations for what I think we can all agree is a trivial (if not pointless) task.
I 100% agree: Quantcast processes 40 petabytes of data a month for the sole purpose of showing you some ads (which probably aren't actually any good).
I consider this a tremendous waste of resources (human, technological, energy) and I wonder what we might have achieved if that time and energy had been put towards something constructive for humanity.
Can't speak for other people, but I'd like to think I don't. I try to let them make a better decision by sharing relevant information, when I have some. My goal is to let them achieve their goal.
I know, but that's not what I meant. The idea is that if you give useful information to people, they will then do the same for you later. Of course you need to have a good crap filter or it doesn't work.
this does not last, and is unlikely to scale beyond a certain point. Look how much trouble wikipedia is having with finances - so much so that they are spamming pages with donation pleas.
I'm not saying that advertising is inevitable, but when value extraction from the consumer is low (such as a shitty site that people won't pay for, but will consume if free), advertising is the only viable way. If the argument is that such sites don't deserve to exist, then the arguments from both sides are just arguing different world views, and will not ever be resolved.
Arguably making it financially viable for the poor to use online services is a key upside to the ad industry. Probably the only one. I mean, as it is they have to figure out a way to get access but when they have it, the wealth of resources they can get without additional expense is huge.
As a middle class individual, I'd prefer to pay for privacy which is why I opted to get FastMail. But for plenty of people in the world, that simply isn't a viable option.
We need a future of advertising, a company that disrupts that sad state of ads. Leaner ads, less junk, bare pics, little JS, more trusted content, more generic content related to the page itself, less specific to the visitor and his browsing history. An ad about something I bought already last week on a completely unrelated site still freaks me out, and not only me. </r>
This already exists - our company has been doing this for years, amongst several others.
The problem is a major global 12-figure industry with little oversight or regulation combined with tons of subpar talent and overloaded with politics. Until the major advertisers learn and want to do better, the (good) vendors, websites and users will suffer.
Ads are targeted with machine learning, the only possible long term defence is fighting back with machine learning. It's already been done and both sides will still improve over the next few years. But in the end, much like spam, online ads will go away, automatically.
On the tech side, using character based convolutional networks already frees the defense from writing endless rules, image ads can be nuked with another convnet, there's no technological lock.
Eventually advertising will either
1.Merge with content: a single jpg/png render of a webpage + imagemaps for links.
2.Use canvas and emulate the browser output in it(webkit.js which creates a browser-within-browser contraption)
3.Require loading ads to function: some already merge functionality with ad javascripts.
Since there is commercial pressure to have working ads, one of the methods will become commonplace eventually and will be really hard to filter(if at all possible).
For #1 machine learning to recognize what an ad looks like and replace it with black rectangles or if imagemap block its coords, for #2/#3 there will be some sort of javascript filter/hijacker that would remove the ad code from content/emulated browser. But with WebAssembly these methods will not works, as content will become obfuscated binary stream which has to be decompiled& deobfuscated to even begin searching for offending "javascript"(essentially something like a virus pattern in binary).
It isn't a single javascript can map to many bytecodes streams.
i.e. inserting dummy instructions, alternative code paths, etc, all the tricks malware uses to escape detection.
Eventually we'll find a better way of paying for online content than with our attention or ads will become promoted content that is actually interesting to people. I don't think that advertisers can win an arms race with users. Eventually ads will be annoying enough that people look for different content, like many people do with TV today.
1. Browser window renders into a buffer instead of on screen (which it already does anyway because of how compositing window managers work).
2. Ad blocker grabs the image from the buffer, runs OCR, re-renders the useful content like in Reader Mode.
3. The final window is the browser chrome with the re-rendered content in it.
So we're back at the arms race part. I'll much rather expect more Native Advertising. This would need much more than image recognition to block. (I mean, there are plenty of actual humans that cannot distinguish native advertising from legitimate content.)
We wouldn't need any of these techniques if advertisers weren't so abusive.(i know it's been said many times over) If you ever watch really old game shows like "What's My Line?", they sometimes show the same commercials from the 1950s; it's astounding to see commercials and promotions that are relatively short, not overtly distracting, and mostly focus on the merits of the product. If commercials were still like that, I'd probably still have a cable subscription, I might even be paying for Hulu, and I would even have adblock turned off. But the nature of the advertising industry is that if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile and then some. So while there is certainly a valid ethics debate around advertising and ad blocking, until the advertising industry changes their methodology that they've had in place long before ad blocking plugins were invented, I will have next to no sympathy for them no matter how unethical a piece of adblocking software might go. Though it's been said numerous times before, turning off adblock after having it on for a significant amount of time(e.g. to denormalize the prevalence of ads) is all the evidence one needs to see how completely messed up digital advertising still is.
Fortunately, many YouTubers and a lot of podcasters have already figured out that the way to go for advertising revenue is not through AdSense or stock preroll ads, but through having hosts themselves endorse a product for a portion of the show(that they have supposedly tried themselves) and making up the rest through Patreon. This harkens back to how many radio shows used to be and, honestly, it works because it's not very repetitive and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something. The corporate world either doesn't understand or like this, and are still gung ho to ram advertising down our throats. Better than adblocking, I rather just don't pay for their overvalued media to begin with. I don't pay for cable, I rarely go to the movies or buy them, I don't pay for Hulu, and I support internet shows that don't rely on AdSense. Life is actually pretty good when you pull most of your plugs.
Ethics are largely irrelevant here. The advertising industry will simply do what they have always done, which is the things shown by their models to bring the most revenue. Asking the advertising industry to be less manipulative is like asking casinos or supermarkets to stop employing behavioral psychologists to figure out the best ways to get people to spend money.
>and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something
In most cases (e.g. all except the ones where the host would mention the product even without any incentives), it just says that they value the money they get more than their viewers' attention.
> Asking the advertising industry to be less manipulative is like asking casinos or supermarkets to stop employing behavioral psychologists to figure out the best ways to get people to spend money.
Interesting parallel. I'd be in favour of regulation of adtech. Probably the gambling industry could do with a little more, too.
Those ads form the 1950s would be inneffective for most advertisers right now. Only "mcdonalds size" companies can afford generic advertising like that. With online ads anyone can spend $100 and it can still be very effective.
Your problems with repetitive and irrelevant ads isn't because the marketing industry is bad, its because some advertisers don't know what they're doing and run bad campaigns.
I agree that the industry will change - but only when the consumers force it to. Adblockers will eventually be widespread, and marketers will adapt to it with something else. The ads you mentioned you like aren't scalable - you can't spend $1000 in the next 20 minutes with those ads like you could with display ads right now.
> turning off adblock after having it on for a significant amount of time(e.g. to denormalize the prevalence of ads) is all the evidence one needs to see how completely messed up digital advertising still is.
I have this experience every time I visit friends who don't have an adblocker. When we watch some videos or stuff, I'm like "Holy shit, this is what your internet looks like!?"
You are focusing on the symptom not the root cause...
Honestly, the blame here lies with the publishers, not the advertisers. The way they try to maximize revenue forces out the legit advertisers and only leaves room for bad actors...If advertisers truly controlled how they paid for media, we wouldnt have these bad actors...
Case in point, when was the last time you felt an Ad on Google was disruptive or predatory or spammy? They forced quality score to determine the cost to advertise...Adwords is one of the most effective ad channels out there and one of the most expensive and its all because they aligned their offering with what was best for advertisers.
As long as publishers sell ad space in a way that doesnt align with driving profitable ads for advertisers, youll get stuck with bad actors and deeply disruptive ads...
As long as publishers sell eyeballs, we all lose...once they start selling context and results, and truly care about driving value for advertisers, we are doomed to this ad blocking world...
The problem is not advertisers its publishers not aligning their offering with whats best for their users and advertisers long term
I think adblockers will lead to something worse: extremely in-depth data harvesting. When publishers can no longer make money on ads, they will turn to companies offering them similar amounts of income ($1 per 1000 pageviews) for just placing a tracking pixel on the page. The pixel will just track absurd amounts of data, enough to justify the cost.
My example is Ibotta [1]. You can your entire shopping receipt and they give you cash back for buying certain products. While these 'coupons' prompt you to buy a product, Ibotta's real profit comes from data harvesting. They create a profile that knows where you shop, what you buy, how often, how much you spend, where you live, etc. etc. This data can be sold to companies like P+G for marketing intelligence ('Who is actually buying our products, for how much, how often? etc')
ad-blockers can block tracking pixels just as easily. If they want to move it server side, well the same could be done with ads too, the problem is that website owners can then manipulate and defraud extremely easily.
Ads can't be moved served nearly as easily as a single tracking pixel. Fraud on server side code is a good point, but that seems like a technical hurdle that could be solved.
> But the model makes clear that no further escalation is possible. That is because active ad blocking runs at a higher privilege level than publisher code, so it cannot in turn be disabled — at best it can be evaded.
This is arguable. HTML5 EME can be used to mix ads into video in realtime. EME must run in isolation, so even browser vendor can't implement neither active blocking, nor ad detection. Still banners also can be implemented as video elements.
DRM is basically in the same boat as ads, the user / operating system has all the power. The code is running in a sandbox; it can do integrity/sanity checks of the sandbox, but if the emulation is good it can't look outside the sandbox to discourage "bad behavior" like blocking ads or recording the stream for later.
> Nobody cares about cracking Widevine to extract 4 Mbps Netflix streams when Blu-ray rips are already available on the Pirate Bay. But Netflix's content, which people do care about, is being shared on torrent sites. DRM is effectively useless.
If ads were served from the same domain the page came and integrated into the page so it didn't affect the navigation of the website or grab the navigation from you if you're trying to read the page, far fewer people would object. It would be like the way ads used to be in newspapers or magazines. You look at it, and if you're not interested, you turn the page.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 91.2 ms ] thread"There is a significant need for follow-on technical work into the expansion of techniques that we have introduced as well as a debate on the ethics of ad blocking."
Is there really a need for debase on the ethics of ad blocking at all? How could you defend presenting ads as being ethical at all? Do they really provide any value to our lives? I keep seeing it just as a waste of human attention and wondering what humanity would be like if we rejected the concept of spamming us with advertisements via every possible channel. Is it just me or we should stop accepting them and start working on building society where this is not accepted or at the very least, greatly excised?
If the ads all went away, so too might the service.
So there is a debate if there's another viable economy (or even a better economy) than the ad-attention one.
I personally am against ads because the way they operate now fundamentally damages the workings of capitalism as a resource allocation tool.
There's a debate about the economics of ads, which sometimes takes on ethical dimensions.
Yes. What's the issue?
Else how would you reach out to your possible customers, that would find your product/service of great value to them?
Do not fool yourself by saying that advertisement doesn't work... it does, and I bet it has influenced your decision plenty of times in your life - and I mean this in a positive way, not in a "mind controlling" way.
The problem of spamming is just a matter of cheap distribution, a lot of inventory and the need to monetize free content.
The argument has been the annoyingness and frustrating way in which advertisements present themselves and constantly worm their way into your private life without your permission. It's advertising rings with exceptionally poor vetting allowing malicious ads through, no scrutiny applied. It's advertisers ignoring the expressed wishes of individuals who set Do Not Track, or installing adblockers; I will concede the latter often isn't much about philosophy and choice as it is about annoyance, but the site has the ability and choice to not provide content in that case - the sites and advertisers work to circumvent it.
The problem with the idea of discussing advertisements in a sound way is that it's always been a discussion in bad faith on the side of advertisers. Think of every time there has been a major privacy breaking advertising and data collection tactic - the only reason these times stopped was because they got caught, not because someone inside thought "huh, this might not be a good idea to make an invasion of privacy." Look at the recent issues with Android based phones listening for silent beacons without user permission; a 40 page TOS on a phone does not constitute a fair warning, and courts have repeatedly upheld this position.
Yes, I'm sure there are some "good" advertisers, but it's a poisoned landscape. The advertisements you see going to the majority of the web aren't from these good advertisers, and websites aren't interested in it either. There's money and incentive in crappy advertising and invading people's privacy. It's not "bringing value to customers", it's bringing value to advertisers and data hoarders while paying out a little to services, and these services are happy enough to lie to you about adblockers. Look at this pop-up from Bloomberg of all places: [1] It's a flat-out lie as to why they want you to unblock ads; the page renders perfectly fine and is perfectly reasonable without it, they just want you to see ads. It's not about creating value, it's about getting eyes on ads. Doesn't matter how, why, or what in many cases, just eyes and ears in contact with ads.
Advertisers have dug a huge hole for themselves, and they're just digging deeper every time there is another upset over something advertisers do - they issue a stock apology, then do it all over again with a slightly different method. It's absurd, and the idea that somehow we need to meet advertisers half-way is equally absurd. There has not been a show of good faith from the advertising realm, even in the face of government regulation. It's complete disregard for everything in the name of a few bucks and more eyes and ears in contact with whoever happens to pay enough to get an ad there. Even with the hoards of data that they mine about people, you still get ridiculous advertisement patterns along the lines of "I see you just bought a washing machine. Here are washing machines you might want to buy!"
There's no sense or reason, it's not advertising as a service, it's just spewing non-sense out there, and the amount of infrastructure, time, technology, and brainpower used to spew it out there is absolutely mind-boggling.
[1] https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*nk9KdK0VXmLi3R2JWT...
Edit: Fixed a sentence where I forgot words: "huh, this might not be a good idea to make an invasion of privacy."
Ok, ads can be valuable. So can gym memberships. But we don't require that people buy gym memberships, and we shouldn't prevent them from blocking ads. In other words, I want to clarify that this argument should be "advertisements are valuable, so you should choose not to block them", rather than "advertisements are valuable, so ad-blockers are wrong".
Of course, most people would choose not to see ads, so they don't seem to think they're valuable...
That's absurd.
My argument has always been: if you want to use an ad-blocker, be my guest, then block the damn content too. Ad-blockers seem to have this entitlement complex where they deserve the content how they want it -- others' rights be damned.
No one's forcing anyone to consume this content just like no one's forcing anyone to get a gym membership. And somehow you don't see how your own analogy proved the absurdity of the situation?
Only if being given the opportunity to watch ads is valuable to you can you say that the advertisers contribute to the system rather than introducing inefficiency. Someone who has chosen to block ads is clearly making the statement that the ads provide them no value. Such a person might decide to contribute in other more efficient ways, or perhaps might decide to become a leech.
Note that there is an easier way to leech from the content creator than to block the ads: view the ads, and then don't buy the product. In this way, you are decreasing the overall value of ad impressions, and thereby decreasing the money funneled to the content creator. This option is ignored by ad-blocking opponents because you so clearly have a right to ignore the advice of ads. How, though, is it so different from blocking ads?
Furthermore, by analysing this option, we see the core advantage - or problem, depending on your viewpoint - of an ad based model: some people (those who are more frugal) can contribute less money than others. If you consider this a problem, than you will find a clear solution: charge all viewers the same price upfront, rather than hiding it behind the advertising machine. In this way, you become more honest, while forcing the poor to contribute the same as the rich.
Careful. You need to be more specific. The ad industry itself is a zero-sum market for the market participants (i.e. advertising mediums), correct. However, the ad industry has caused the PPF (production possibility frontier) of the economy to move outwards by introducing allocation efficiency, thus having a non-zero-sum impact on the economy as a whole.
> Unless value is being introduced somewhere, the whole system serves only to misdirect [...] skip the advertising middleman.
I'm sure you understand the value of interfaces. You use them everyday. I go to a supermarket instead of dealing with thousands of individual grocery suppliers. I go to a clothing store instead of dealing with thousands of individual clothing suppliers. Just like people use advertising networks so that they don't have to deal with millions of content creators. So it's been with newspapers, magazines, radio, television... and so it is with the web.
> In this way, you are decreasing the overall value of ad impressions, [...] How, though, is it so different from blocking ads?
Because a decrease in the value of ad impressions doesn't necessarily decrease the total amount of money earned by the content creator. You're dealing with the price elasticity of the market here. If you want to make that argument, then show some hard figures that back up your claim that content creators would make less if ad-blockers chose to view and ignore ads instead.
> charge all viewers the same price upfront
Yeah, that price is $830/year ($69/month) for 100M American citizens to replace the digital advertising spend in the U.S. I hope we can get there with a communal revenue sharing network one day. That'd be truly amazing.
Can you explain? That's a lot of jargon for a non-economist.
> > skip the advertising middleman.
> Just like people use advertising networks so that they don't have to deal with millions of content creators. So it's been with newspapers, magazines, radio, television... and so it is with the web.
You're missing grandparent's point. "Skipping the advertising middleman" in his argument refers not to advertising networks, but to advertising altogether. He refers to content creators taking money directly from their consumers, rather than going through the indirection of advertisers (whom take money from their clients, whom get their money from the consumers, thus completing the indirection chain).
(I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with either side here, just attempting to clarify.)
Sure. Imagine for a second that all the copper in the world has been unearthed. There's a finite supply, i.e., it's a scare resource. So if we want to produce more iPhones with this copper, then there's less copper to produce pennies. There's a trade-off -- the copper market is zero-sum: allocating copper to one thing takes it away from another.
So, with that said, we have a maximum amount of iPhones we can produce with this copper and a maximum amount of pennies. If we use all the copper to produce iPhones, then no pennies can be made... and vice versa. That's the PPF for copper as it stands now... we can produce anywhere from 0-100 iPhones or 0-100 pennies.
How can we grow this PPF?
Two ways: (1) we could find more copper somewhere, or (2) we could increase the efficiency with which we use copper, i.e., technological progress. Say some PhD-whiz figures out how to use less copper to produce iPhones and pennies of the same quality by doping it. Well now we can make anywhere from 0-500 iPhones or 0-500 pennies with our copper.
Our PPF has grown outward. The pie has grown bigger. When you move the PPF it creates a non-zero-sum dynamic because there's more to go around for everyone.
How does this apply to the ad industry? Well, let's look at another hypothetical example.
The United Launch Alliance has been charging the government $100M per rocket launch. That's the only supplier the government knows about. A plucky young startup comes along and believes they can get the price down to $1M per launch. And they do it! But the government doesn't hear about it... so they keep paying $100M until one day they see an announcement (an ad) for this startup's rockets. Now they're only paying $1M per launch.
Thus they're able to allocate their funds more efficiently (technological progress) because they're able to hear about more opportunities.
> You're missing grandparent's point.
Thanks for clarifying. If that's indeed the point, then the argument is orthogonal to what we're discussing. Whether all content creators wake up tomorrow and decide to charge for their content instead of displaying ads or not, we'll still have advertising, and advertising will still be useful. It will just shift to different medium since the digital ad inventory has reduced.
That's what I think people aren't getting. For content creators to charge consumers directly, that means that consumers must somehow discover the content creators. And how does that discovery happen? Well, now, the content creators have become advertisers. They need to get the word out about their product (content) like everybody else somehow.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production%E2%80%93possibility...
I avoid ads, because they're not a source of reliable information. I discover stuff by reading about it, either casually or in directed search. As here on HN. Whenever I'm reading about something, I'm looking for evidence of bias. If I find bias, I discount the source.
Websites give people HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files for free. Once I take these files home (download them into my browser) then I'm free to do what I want with them. If that means only interacting with part of the content then I don't see anything wrong with that.
I understand the practical situation that many content providers find themselves in. They have become dependent on display ads for revenue. So I get the argument for unblocking ads on some favorite publisher's site to help them out. But I don't see anything unethical in blocking ads in general. And, if it disincentives content providers from relying on aggressive ads that create horrific user experiences then good!
Maybe I have technically stepped into some kind of legally defensible contract by accident.
However, I don't think tricking people into signing contracts that they don't want to sign is ethically defensible.
I have, exactly once in my life, connected with an ad in this way.
I remember it vividly, because even at the time, it struck me as amazingly strange an ad would actually be anything other that pointless noise.
I'd been house sitting at a friends place for a week, and so had been to all the takeout joints in the area several times. I didn't really want any of the options again, but was kinda hungry for lunch. At that moment a subway ad came on TV, and I remembered that there was a tiny subway tucked away off the main street, so I went there for lunch.
That's it, that's my story of ads putting me in contact with a brand that brought value to me. It happened once, and only once, and it happened at Norwood, South Australia.
I feel like I could have dug deep and lived without that brand connection.
"Grandpa, can you tell us again of the time when you saw a useful ad?" - "Ah yes, those were the times. But first, some messages from our sponsors!"
That situation is, in fact, a classic example of why adwords results are not relevant, ever. Either the actual google search result is literally the same as the ad word result, or the google result is more on point.
Never has there been a case where the ad word result has been what I wanted, but Google couldn't find it, and that's not surprising because Google is the one assembling both the search results and the ads, so if they can't find it in the search they also can't find an ad for it.
One useful thing you can do to enter the debate... define what you believe an ad is and why. Oh and remember, when you're driving past those big ol' strip mall signs... you're looking at a physical advertisement of location.
Maybe your definition differs, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you have a sound, logical argument for why it's different, or maybe you don't.
A debate is a good faith effort in trying to understand another's viewpoint while arguing your own. And I understand your viewpoint, I hate what some ads have become, and yet I still don't use an ad-blocker because of my own personal values.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13964498
How much of our society's brainpower should be allocated to gaming the internet for ad-clicks? That would be the real debate. Many brilliant technologists are being hijacked by the major ad-media corporations for what I think we can all agree is a trivial (if not pointless) task. This is what we should be debating.
I don't want people to uninstall ad-blockers. I want them to install content-blockers.
So, if my motivation were more money, then please... tell me how less money would fit into my worldview?
I'm not trying to bust your chops but I think your arguments have a lot of jargon and unnecessarily complex twists for what is essentially a simple position: you shouldn't access internet content without paying the price of advertising. Many disagree with that position for reasons that evoke the academic and open nature of the web.
We can do whatever we want to our machines to access content how we'd like. If it's not profitable to your corporation any longer than stop producing the content. The people will adapt the internet and create content in other ways. Very probably better ways - think Wikipedia, for example.
Yes, you can do whatever you want to your property. But you can't do whatever you want to other people's property unless they explicitly consent. (That's sort of what laws are there for...) And these people aren't explicitly consenting.
Also, you didn't answer my question. Where is the bias that you're seeing? When I'm saying let the ad industry die if it need die, I fail to see this implicit bias you're speaking of.
If you work for a company that profits from an advertising platform and you argue that the logical extension of an ad blocker is a content blocker all you are doing is strongly asserting the intellectual property rights of your employer.
What you imply when you make that argument is that users must acquiesce to your TOS as this hypothetical content blocker is, on its face, absurd.
If you wanted to clarify your position further, perhaps you could state to this community whether or not you would support the extension of the DMCA to ad-blockers? Should it be illegal to use one? This would go a long way towards clarifying your positions which, up until now, are somewhat confusing - i.e., it's much simpler for us to conclude that you argue for advertising networks simply because you work for one.
So, if the content providers and ad networks want to work that way, they need to respect my choice to be more selective in how my eyeballs are being sold.
If they don't want to do that, then they can choose to go out of business.
I 100% agree: Quantcast processes 40 petabytes of data a month for the sole purpose of showing you some ads (which probably aren't actually any good).
I consider this a tremendous waste of resources (human, technological, energy) and I wonder what we might have achieved if that time and energy had been put towards something constructive for humanity.
Aren't you concerned about ads influencing your decisions?
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/thorium-toothpaste-also...
this does not last, and is unlikely to scale beyond a certain point. Look how much trouble wikipedia is having with finances - so much so that they are spamming pages with donation pleas.
I'm not saying that advertising is inevitable, but when value extraction from the consumer is low (such as a shitty site that people won't pay for, but will consume if free), advertising is the only viable way. If the argument is that such sites don't deserve to exist, then the arguments from both sides are just arguing different world views, and will not ever be resolved.
As a middle class individual, I'd prefer to pay for privacy which is why I opted to get FastMail. But for plenty of people in the world, that simply isn't a viable option.
The problem is a major global 12-figure industry with little oversight or regulation combined with tons of subpar talent and overloaded with politics. Until the major advertisers learn and want to do better, the (good) vendors, websites and users will suffer.
For #1 machine learning to recognize what an ad looks like and replace it with black rectangles or if imagemap block its coords, for #2/#3 there will be some sort of javascript filter/hijacker that would remove the ad code from content/emulated browser. But with WebAssembly these methods will not works, as content will become obfuscated binary stream which has to be decompiled& deobfuscated to even begin searching for offending "javascript"(essentially something like a virus pattern in binary).
1. Browser window renders into a buffer instead of on screen (which it already does anyway because of how compositing window managers work). 2. Ad blocker grabs the image from the buffer, runs OCR, re-renders the useful content like in Reader Mode. 3. The final window is the browser chrome with the re-rendered content in it.
So we're back at the arms race part. I'll much rather expect more Native Advertising. This would need much more than image recognition to block. (I mean, there are plenty of actual humans that cannot distinguish native advertising from legitimate content.)
Fortunately, many YouTubers and a lot of podcasters have already figured out that the way to go for advertising revenue is not through AdSense or stock preroll ads, but through having hosts themselves endorse a product for a portion of the show(that they have supposedly tried themselves) and making up the rest through Patreon. This harkens back to how many radio shows used to be and, honestly, it works because it's not very repetitive and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something. The corporate world either doesn't understand or like this, and are still gung ho to ram advertising down our throats. Better than adblocking, I rather just don't pay for their overvalued media to begin with. I don't pay for cable, I rarely go to the movies or buy them, I don't pay for Hulu, and I support internet shows that don't rely on AdSense. Life is actually pretty good when you pull most of your plugs.
>and the fact that the host is speaking for it says something
In most cases (e.g. all except the ones where the host would mention the product even without any incentives), it just says that they value the money they get more than their viewers' attention.
Interesting parallel. I'd be in favour of regulation of adtech. Probably the gambling industry could do with a little more, too.
But then again, i'm a dirty socialist.
Your problems with repetitive and irrelevant ads isn't because the marketing industry is bad, its because some advertisers don't know what they're doing and run bad campaigns.
I agree that the industry will change - but only when the consumers force it to. Adblockers will eventually be widespread, and marketers will adapt to it with something else. The ads you mentioned you like aren't scalable - you can't spend $1000 in the next 20 minutes with those ads like you could with display ads right now.
I have this experience every time I visit friends who don't have an adblocker. When we watch some videos or stuff, I'm like "Holy shit, this is what your internet looks like!?"
Case in point, when was the last time you felt an Ad on Google was disruptive or predatory or spammy? They forced quality score to determine the cost to advertise...Adwords is one of the most effective ad channels out there and one of the most expensive and its all because they aligned their offering with what was best for advertisers.
As long as publishers sell ad space in a way that doesnt align with driving profitable ads for advertisers, youll get stuck with bad actors and deeply disruptive ads...
As long as publishers sell eyeballs, we all lose...once they start selling context and results, and truly care about driving value for advertisers, we are doomed to this ad blocking world...
The problem is not advertisers its publishers not aligning their offering with whats best for their users and advertisers long term
My example is Ibotta [1]. You can your entire shopping receipt and they give you cash back for buying certain products. While these 'coupons' prompt you to buy a product, Ibotta's real profit comes from data harvesting. They create a profile that knows where you shop, what you buy, how often, how much you spend, where you live, etc. etc. This data can be sold to companies like P+G for marketing intelligence ('Who is actually buying our products, for how much, how often? etc')
[1] https://ibotta.com/
This is arguable. HTML5 EME can be used to mix ads into video in realtime. EME must run in isolation, so even browser vendor can't implement neither active blocking, nor ad detection. Still banners also can be implemented as video elements.
To paraphrase an old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8439165
> Nobody cares about cracking Widevine to extract 4 Mbps Netflix streams when Blu-ray rips are already available on the Pirate Bay. But Netflix's content, which people do care about, is being shared on torrent sites. DRM is effectively useless.