Well I'm not sure i believe that the web is truly moving away from ads in as big a way as being claimed here. The trends in news groups are clear, but for each of the other examples there are counterparts that do run ads, ie Netflix and Hulu, and Spotify and Pandora.
Don't get me wrong, i would love to see a change just like anyone else here, but I'm not sure I'm seeing it yet.
Ad companies got caught putting their hand in the cookie jar and people have had enough.
There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web, but it got abused, with tracking going too far and ad companies constantly trying to defeat privacy-protecting features. They have no one to blame but themselves.
I very much disagree with this statement. I simply can't stand ads in my internet and uBlock Origin is the first thing I install in a fresh browser. I can't fathom browsing the web without it anymore.
Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news?
I'd be okay with increasing taxes to cover it, or using a UK-style TV license (Internet Publishing License anyone?) and requiring people seek "Internet commissioners" like we have for Television[1], [2].
> a UK-style TV license (Internet Publishing License anyone?)
Germany sort of does that already. From 2006 to 2012 internet-connected devices were considered broadcast receivers for the purpose of the broadcast fees. Since 2012 the fee was simplified to a general per-household broadcast fee which reduced the fairly data collection the agency had to do to know who had which kind receiver.
The internet presence of the public-service broadcasters is also financed through those fees.
"Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news?"
The government is the obvious choice. The USA already has the National Endowment for the Arts, which is a good start but it needs vastly more money. The important thing is that the NEA has none of the corrupting biases that afflict companies such as Google and Facebook.
Most Western countries have some equivalent for the NEA.
Do you see any conflict of interest between the government appointing judges who will then, at some point during their career, probably hear civil lawsuits against the government? The independence of the judiciary developed throughout the 1500s and 1600s and then finally, in Britain, was consolidated into a formal principle with the Act Of Settlement of 1706. And since that time, the principle of independent appointees of the government carrying out government functions is an idea that has spread to other areas of government. We can certainly put in place guarantees of an independent NEA.
> Who do you think should sponsor the creation of arts and the publication of news?
Direct support from the public would make sense, this is already at work, to some extent. The problem with this is that people are already so used to free that it may be difficult to implement.
A license system would be a good idea. It is still far off, but authors associations are working on this in some countries.
Maybe we need arts and journalism to step up the game again, so good content is missed from the mainstream needing to be supported directly. Maybe most current art and journalism online won't be missed at all.
Micropayments ideally need some kind of prepay token system similar to phone credit, so you can buy a certain amount to then spend in small increments.
Why do we need a funding model for arts or news publication? For example, most of the artistic content I consume (aside from cinema) originates from people who self-publish online (blogs, articles, podcasts) and do not involve advertising nor ask for donations in the delivery of the content.
Those people like creating and delivering content to others for free. They are happy to lose their own money in exchange for the product they like (an audience consuming their content). Just like I am happy to lose money to reserve a spot in my recreational basketball league. I don’t also let tennis shoe brands bid on the logo of the t-shirt I’ll wear.
I think the problem is that we have this idea that someone should be paid for content. But I don’t agree.
If they want to be paid for it, that’s totally fine too and they can charge a paywall, ask for donations, or attach ads, etc. However, plenty of other people write better stories, give away better paintings, generate better games or videos, share better poems or summaries of world news or published research or opinion articles — all without expecting any type of payment or earnings to come from their efforts or costs to make and distribute it.
The lone aspect of this I think might not be fully sustained just as people’s voluntary recreational pursuits is the upfront capital required to fund some types of investigative journalism and provide legal protection to journalists. That part makes sense to me as a subscription cost for consuming from centralized news organizations, and if those orgs run out of money, it’s a reflection that society doesn’t value the journalism compared with recreational journalists happy to generate the content without compensation.
I personally want to pay so that journalism can be thoroughly investigative and not captured by bad state actors or bad corporate actors. But that’s just my opinion... one that most humans in my country don’t seem to share, resulting in market conditions where for-pay journalism can only be sustained by a very small number of groups.
Content creation is a passion industry so creators should be prepared for making less than people in other industries.
Maybe creators should be more valued by society. If that is the case giving up our attention and privacy for free content is not the best way for a society to support them.
The point is that the reason you feel the need to immediately block ads is because of how they have been abused and pushed to further and further absurdity over the years.
> Advertising is manipulative and causes people to make bad decisions.
Not all advertising is some evil plot to brainwash the public. At it's core, it's a way to let the public know about your product. In the correct context, it's beneficial to the consumer.
My Grandpa used to subscribe to Hemmings Motor News. It's a magazine that is focused on restoring vintage cars. It has regular ads, and a pretty large classified section. He used that magazine, including the ads, as a resource for vehicle restoration.
Ads selling parts for 1940's Chevy pickup trucks in a section of a magazine specifically catering to that audience make sense. They're beneficial to people in the market for those products.
I agree that web sites or real sites (eg. Times Square) that simply bombard you with anything and everything are awful. But, you can't put all advertising under one umbrella.
I don't know that is true, I spend more than half my time on resources similar to (sometimes even from) the pre-commercial Internet. The existence of the Ad driven Internet is disruptive even if it were pretty benign simply because it has money and it wants all the engagement.
This. From my user perspective, a good website is one that gives me the information that I need, when I need it, in minimum necessary time. From ad-driven websites's perspective, a good user is one that visits the website as often as possible, and stays as long as possible; also provides all kinds of personal data (in ideal case, also on other people).
Problem is, even if I turn off the ads, I cannot turn off the design decisions that were influenced by the ads. Such as, pages trying to make you click on more pages, long descriptions where a short one would do, multiple articles containing essentially the same information, articles with partial information (which don't get updated, because a new article gets written instead), etc.
Agreed 100%. I don't believe there's a good top-down solution here, though. Cultivate a few websites that don't have bad design, and otherwise spend more time reading books. (or, just using some medium that is not the internet)
I don't see how what you personally can't stand has anything to do with there being nothing wrong with it existing. It's like me saying I very much disagree with a statement saying there's nothing wrong with a beet-supported farm. Maybe there is something wrong with an ad supported web, but a better argument can be made.
I have no problem with reasonable ads as a means of compensating a website for free content, but the free market once again went too far here. There is a sense of entitlement that just gets under my skin when people think they can just have stuff for free.
Keep in mind that ads are a very limited monetization scheme. For example, you can't even increase the price of your content and set it at a desired value.
That is basically how advertising works. You set the price and people pay to be next to the content. If you don't get the price you want, don't share the content. For people blindly putting a javascript tag on their page for google ads I would agree but you can bet that places like Techmeme and DaringFireball set their price.
Yes, but it's still very limited. The price point where nobody will want to advertise is pretty low (I'm guessing). There's no way to escape that, and basically your only option is to change the entire monetization scheme.
On the content side, I wonder if the problem is deeper. People want easy money and the large IT companies are simply facilitating. After all if I create enough crap content I might eventually write a book about parrots: https://www.wisebread.com/how-a-teenager-started-a-multi-mil...
This is close to an advertisement, written by the founder of https://unlock-protocol.com , a distributed web payments scheme using some bitcoin competitor.
Yay, yet another decentralized (except not really because lolpayments) and (semi)trustless implementation of something that has no need for decentralization or trustlessness!
Before the rise of ubiquitous ads, the web was publisher-pays. If you wanted a blog, you would pay a host a few bucks a month to host it.
I wonder if that's the model that the web will move back to. There's the argument to be made that the advertising model supports 'independent' news and social media, but it sure doesn't look that way - we'd move from partisan media supported through ads to partisan media supported by parties, which seems more direct.
Some micropayment / street-performer-payment solution will emerge if ads are gone. It may take a few years, likely not have anything to do with cryptocurrency (though it may).
There are quite a few people already supporting themselves through patreon; people are willing to pay if the donation is reasonable, and friction low enough.
In many ways iTunes/Netflix/prime beat “free” pirated content - but only once friction was low enough. That can happen on the web, but right now ads are incredibly low friction - they will have to go away first.
In my country everybody was tooting that the creative industry is gonna die due to piracy (torrents). Yet once the subscription services became very easy to pay for, affordable and with high quality, people almost completely forgot about movie torrents.
Re the reference to Vectuary. Here's the decision:[1]
They sell an add-on for apps which snoops on the user's location and sends it to them for advertising purposes. The French data privacy regulator said that required Vecturary to get explicit user consent. But Vectuary has no customer interaction of their own. They claimed to rely on some chain of consent from some other party, but couldn't prove they actually had consent from every user.
This is the biggest effect of the GPDR. Ad companies which have no customer contact of their own are on shaky legal ground.
Some adtech companies have shut down operations in Europe.[2]
No loss there.
The big winners are Google and Facebook, which both have user signups and run ads. They can ask for consent.
It must be opt-in, not opt-out. The exact use must be properly described. Consent may be revoked at any time, and all copies of data retrieved or deleted by customer request.
It is more likely the apps would drop Vectuary than deal with that.
Well yes, if informing your users about the data collection you're performing to monetize your product causes the majority of them to revoke consent for said data collection then of course your business isn't going to work.
The post I was replying to seemed to imply that they were unable to ask for consent though, rather than that consent was unlikely to be provided.
Pardon my ignorance, I didn't read the ruling or look into it deeply. Why would the tool, used by other apps, require consent itself? Why not punish the apps using the tool without the required user consent? So if I have a tool that helps with analytics, I can't sell in Europe? Because I can't prove that my customers used it properly?
I wonder where the line is. My helper Android library that obtains an IP? What determines proof of consent by your downstream customers? I'd say there is loss when a company that is legitimately using data, with user's consent, has to in-house all the work because the middleman software industry was chilled (not saying that is the case here). Can't the same effect be gained by enforcing the laws on the ones breaking them against their direct users?
Some may cheer this specific ruling because they don't like that company, and again this is a knee-jerk comment before I've studied, but shouldn't we in general be cautious of this type of upstream liability? I didn't give Android explicit informed consent to send this data, can Samsung be liable? Obviously a stretched analogy, but it's important to review general b2b implications of such approaches. I know, I know, don't break the law (however defined) and you don't have anything to worry about is the micro-level view. At a macro level, stifling kinds of business and funding you never intended to does happen.
> I wonder where the line is. My helper Android library that obtains an IP?
GDPR only applies to parties who store and process user data. If your library doesn't talk to your own servers when embedded in someone else's app, you've got nothing to worry about.
My library processes it. Or does it have to both store and process? So my SaaS analytics service that only stores and gives it back out unprocessed is ok? It's less about specific hypotheticals and more about the general ambiguity around the risks.
Ads have been around since literally the beginning of civilization, and it is not so much a business model as it is a fundamental human need. The author comes across as naive when he says Netflix makes 5 times as much money as Facebook per user, therefore (clearly) ads don't work well. Why don't you say that healthcare makes 50x that per "user", therefore clearly the Netflix model isn't working? Point being that the ad supported model and the subscription model are fundamentally different at a psychological level.
What about adding a "max-cycles" attribute to iframe? Ad network fills the frame with whatever it wants until it runs out of gas, after which no more computation is allowed.
Content creators can choose some high limit. But users can set a global value, or install an "ad diet" plugin to pick and choose.
Content creator can post a div to complain, "Aw c'mon, give my ad buddies more than 100 measly cycles. I gotta eat!"
I've been using adblockers since they existed. Previously I used filtering proxies and other more complex solutions, ever since I've seen my first banner ad sometimes around 1997. I hate ads, always did, always will. So good riddance.
The irony of the articles website asking to turn off adblocker :)
I'm not sure what a non ad supported web would look like.
I'm fairly sure my local newspapers would collapse. They are drastically shrinking already. Seems hard to make a buck in journalism these days.
we also hate "paywalls", we expect everything available for free and, the more tech savvy, are more than happy to block the ads with adblockers.
While I agree that the web is warped by ads, and it's getting absolutely nuts what can be tracked about people.... What are viable models? Do we try and regulate this and see what happens? Nothing sounds too promising, other than trying to regulate advertising itself ( which also feels like a crappy tool for the problem )
It seems like most people are deeply cynical now, as in “all politicians are corrupt, anyway”, “journalists are corrupt/incompetent”, etc.
Or, at least, that’s how they justify running every last publisher into the ground for reasons as spacious as “they are intruding on my rights by loading this unnesseray JS library”.
Once all medium-sized papers are gone (i. e. soon) it will probably get worse, then downhill from there, and over the cliff beyond that.
But at least we won’t have to deal with those distracting ads. Or only in the 30 minutes per day that the power is on.
I hate to break it to you, but physical magazines are somewhat linked to their internet equivalent. If your local papers’ website is offline, “I’ll just by buy the physical paper” might not actually be a workable strategy, for obvious reasons.
In the best possible light, you may be saying that Peoples’ willingness to pay for content will increase as that content b comes rarer and rarer. In this scenario, you are already operating on the assumption that independent publishers will further dwindle, and I’m not convinced that whereever the swee spot will be, it will anywhere close to the vibrant media landscape a civil society needs for survival.
No ad supported web means a paid web. I am not sure if that is what the users want either. I have seen even in HN where people post alternate links of a site blocked by paywall to let users access the content for free. And this paid channel means every content site (such as Medium, NYT, WSJ, WaPo etc.) will have to institute their own paid mechanism which will cost users a lot of money. Pick your pill - you can't have it both ways.
Some of us were on the web before it became an ad infested cesspool.
It wasn’t as slick, sure. But it was usable, and useful. Most of the useful things on the web that arrived since, with the notable exception of modern search engines, are independent of ads.
There needs to be a solution for commons like search engines if there is no ad revenue to be made - I would gladly pay $50/year for a good search engine (which is infinitely more than google and Facebook are making on me now, as I use as blockers) and I am not alone.
And it doesn’t stop google’s tracking and profiling, just the display ads. Likely also tags you “has spendable income” for ads on sites that don’t participate (and post-shutdown future)
The problem aren't ads per se. Ads in newspapers and magazines were always fine. There, the advertisers would directly (via their agencies) close contracts with the publishers, based on the typical audience of the publication. A lot of these ads even can be considered part of the content. Most computer magazines of the past had sometimes as much value in the ads as in the articles. Because after all, ads can (and should) be the way a potential customer can find out about a product or service.
The problem with web ads was and is, that the nature of the ad business was changed completely. Rather that a publisher made contracts with the advertisers themselves, ad networks acted as a middleman. Publishers would no longer run ads of their clients, but rent out part of their web space to the ad networks, who would control the content posted on their sites. While this produced a lot of easy income to the publishers (they just rented out the space, had no further work to do), it had grave consequences:
- it introduced tracking of the web users to target ads, as the ad targetting was no longer done by linking it to the publication, with all the unacceptable consequences to privacy
- it far too often created anoying or even offensive ads, as there was little or no curation
- beyond annoying ads, far too often plain malware was distributed via the ad channel
So I am glad to hear that web ads in these form are dying. I hope the web publishing industry reacts in time and goes back to a more classic advertisement model. I don't mind reasonably presented ads which don't endanger my privacy or computer security. I even would be really interested in ads that are informative again. There are some websites out still, which seem to have direct ad contracts like print magazines and just integrate them in their page layout. And of course, they are not blocked by ad blockers, so they remain effective.
Tracking provides a way for advertisers reach their intended audience without altering the message of the publisher. Advertising won't go away even if ad blockers reach 100%. It will just transform every article to an affiliate-supported promotion.
The problem with ads for me (other than the bloat and the privacy invasion) is that the tracking is just shit.
Whenever I'm signed in on Youtube I get non-stop ads for Squarespace (due to being a web dev I imagine). No matter how many times I mark the ads as irrelevant, they keep showing them. I've seen Squarespace ads hundreds of times, wasting my time, and Squarespace's ad spend.
When I open Youtube in a private browser and go to a gaming channel, I get ads for games. The ads are actually interesting, and I discovered three games this week that I hadn't heard of.
I would rather Youtube showed gaming ads on gaming channels, instead of all this tracking nonsense.
1. In order to end the stronghold of advertising on the web, we need to first address advertising in the wider world
2. Advertising (amongst other things such as lobbying, flouting rules, pollution, anti-competitive practices) is driven by companies' almost desperate need for "growth"
3. Growth is driven by investor pressure
4. Investors are driven by need for ROI
5. The need for ROI is driven by inflation and its erosive effects on saved wealth
6. Inflation is driven by government spending via printing money
Growth is driven by people wanting to survive, for which they need to accumulate more wealth. Maybe you already have enough wealth to support yourself for the rest of your life but most of the people in the world don’t.
Going away from ads is solely a business model question. Ads (and micro payments) allow services to collect value much closer to the actual utility curve of a user.
The issue with other models, (like charging a flat fee - ie, 1$ per article) is that some people will not want to pay the full amount while others are willing to pay a lot more than the listed price. You lose out on both ends - you lose money you would have earned from the people who would pay $.50 or $1000 to access it.
Ads allow the company to extract value out of the content closer to actual value of the content at scale. The hard part is finding a different business model that does that task better.
Internet browser is pretty well sandboxed with limited access to the IO of the hosting device. Actually, extensive tracking is the worse that can happen and luckily the awareness is high. Now, imagine what is happening in the native mobile applications:)
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadDon't get me wrong, i would love to see a change just like anyone else here, but I'm not sure I'm seeing it yet.
Additionally i enjoyed this other article more as it goes into their proposed solution: https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-we...
There's nothing wrong with an ad supported web, but it got abused, with tracking going too far and ad companies constantly trying to defeat privacy-protecting features. They have no one to blame but themselves.
I very much disagree with this statement. I simply can't stand ads in my internet and uBlock Origin is the first thing I install in a fresh browser. I can't fathom browsing the web without it anymore.
I'd be okay with increasing taxes to cover it, or using a UK-style TV license (Internet Publishing License anyone?) and requiring people seek "Internet commissioners" like we have for Television[1], [2].
[1]: http://www.pbs.org/about/producing-pbs/proposal-process/
[2]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning
Another option is micropayments, but I worry bugs and fraud would then steal consumers' dollars instead of Advertisers'.
Germany sort of does that already. From 2006 to 2012 internet-connected devices were considered broadcast receivers for the purpose of the broadcast fees. Since 2012 the fee was simplified to a general per-household broadcast fee which reduced the fairly data collection the agency had to do to know who had which kind receiver.
The internet presence of the public-service broadcasters is also financed through those fees.
The government is the obvious choice. The USA already has the National Endowment for the Arts, which is a good start but it needs vastly more money. The important thing is that the NEA has none of the corrupting biases that afflict companies such as Google and Facebook.
Most Western countries have some equivalent for the NEA.
And yes, I would see that being an issue.
Direct support from the public would make sense, this is already at work, to some extent. The problem with this is that people are already so used to free that it may be difficult to implement.
A license system would be a good idea. It is still far off, but authors associations are working on this in some countries.
Likely they wouldn't be missed. Perhaps we would also realize that enabling everyone to become a publisher was a mistake.
Those people like creating and delivering content to others for free. They are happy to lose their own money in exchange for the product they like (an audience consuming their content). Just like I am happy to lose money to reserve a spot in my recreational basketball league. I don’t also let tennis shoe brands bid on the logo of the t-shirt I’ll wear.
I think the problem is that we have this idea that someone should be paid for content. But I don’t agree.
If they want to be paid for it, that’s totally fine too and they can charge a paywall, ask for donations, or attach ads, etc. However, plenty of other people write better stories, give away better paintings, generate better games or videos, share better poems or summaries of world news or published research or opinion articles — all without expecting any type of payment or earnings to come from their efforts or costs to make and distribute it.
The lone aspect of this I think might not be fully sustained just as people’s voluntary recreational pursuits is the upfront capital required to fund some types of investigative journalism and provide legal protection to journalists. That part makes sense to me as a subscription cost for consuming from centralized news organizations, and if those orgs run out of money, it’s a reflection that society doesn’t value the journalism compared with recreational journalists happy to generate the content without compensation.
I personally want to pay so that journalism can be thoroughly investigative and not captured by bad state actors or bad corporate actors. But that’s just my opinion... one that most humans in my country don’t seem to share, resulting in market conditions where for-pay journalism can only be sustained by a very small number of groups.
Content creation is a passion industry so creators should be prepared for making less than people in other industries.
Maybe creators should be more valued by society. If that is the case giving up our attention and privacy for free content is not the best way for a society to support them.
Without ads, the chances of breaking into an established market are extremely low.
Not all advertising is some evil plot to brainwash the public. At it's core, it's a way to let the public know about your product. In the correct context, it's beneficial to the consumer.
My Grandpa used to subscribe to Hemmings Motor News. It's a magazine that is focused on restoring vintage cars. It has regular ads, and a pretty large classified section. He used that magazine, including the ads, as a resource for vehicle restoration.
Ads selling parts for 1940's Chevy pickup trucks in a section of a magazine specifically catering to that audience make sense. They're beneficial to people in the market for those products.
I agree that web sites or real sites (eg. Times Square) that simply bombard you with anything and everything are awful. But, you can't put all advertising under one umbrella.
So do a lot of unasked opinions, especially on the internet (oh the irony). They're somehow still allowed to have and share them.
This. From my user perspective, a good website is one that gives me the information that I need, when I need it, in minimum necessary time. From ad-driven websites's perspective, a good user is one that visits the website as often as possible, and stays as long as possible; also provides all kinds of personal data (in ideal case, also on other people).
Problem is, even if I turn off the ads, I cannot turn off the design decisions that were influenced by the ads. Such as, pages trying to make you click on more pages, long descriptions where a short one would do, multiple articles containing essentially the same information, articles with partial information (which don't get updated, because a new article gets written instead), etc.
Keep in mind that ads are a very limited monetization scheme. For example, you can't even increase the price of your content and set it at a desired value.
Not that it's inherently a bad approach, but it's very much a fad that's often applied without thinking.
I wonder if that's the model that the web will move back to. There's the argument to be made that the advertising model supports 'independent' news and social media, but it sure doesn't look that way - we'd move from partisan media supported through ads to partisan media supported by parties, which seems more direct.
There are quite a few people already supporting themselves through patreon; people are willing to pay if the donation is reasonable, and friction low enough.
In many ways iTunes/Netflix/prime beat “free” pirated content - but only once friction was low enough. That can happen on the web, but right now ads are incredibly low friction - they will have to go away first.
In my country everybody was tooting that the creative industry is gonna die due to piracy (torrents). Yet once the subscription services became very easy to pay for, affordable and with high quality, people almost completely forgot about movie torrents.
They sell an add-on for apps which snoops on the user's location and sends it to them for advertising purposes. The French data privacy regulator said that required Vecturary to get explicit user consent. But Vectuary has no customer interaction of their own. They claimed to rely on some chain of consent from some other party, but couldn't prove they actually had consent from every user.
This is the biggest effect of the GPDR. Ad companies which have no customer contact of their own are on shaky legal ground. Some adtech companies have shut down operations in Europe.[2] No loss there.
The big winners are Google and Facebook, which both have user signups and run ads. They can ask for consent.
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=en&prev=se...
[2] https://digiday.com/media/ad-tech-firms-quitting-europe-blam...
It must be opt-in, not opt-out. The exact use must be properly described. Consent may be revoked at any time, and all copies of data retrieved or deleted by customer request.
It is more likely the apps would drop Vectuary than deal with that.
The post I was replying to seemed to imply that they were unable to ask for consent though, rather than that consent was unlikely to be provided.
I wonder where the line is. My helper Android library that obtains an IP? What determines proof of consent by your downstream customers? I'd say there is loss when a company that is legitimately using data, with user's consent, has to in-house all the work because the middleman software industry was chilled (not saying that is the case here). Can't the same effect be gained by enforcing the laws on the ones breaking them against their direct users?
Some may cheer this specific ruling because they don't like that company, and again this is a knee-jerk comment before I've studied, but shouldn't we in general be cautious of this type of upstream liability? I didn't give Android explicit informed consent to send this data, can Samsung be liable? Obviously a stretched analogy, but it's important to review general b2b implications of such approaches. I know, I know, don't break the law (however defined) and you don't have anything to worry about is the micro-level view. At a macro level, stifling kinds of business and funding you never intended to does happen.
GDPR only applies to parties who store and process user data. If your library doesn't talk to your own servers when embedded in someone else's app, you've got nothing to worry about.
Tim Wu, the guy who coined the term "net neutrality", has written an excellent history of ads: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-mania-to-capture...
Content creators can choose some high limit. But users can set a global value, or install an "ad diet" plugin to pick and choose.
Content creator can post a div to complain, "Aw c'mon, give my ad buddies more than 100 measly cycles. I gotta eat!"
Better than being blocked outright.
I'm not sure what a non ad supported web would look like.
I'm fairly sure my local newspapers would collapse. They are drastically shrinking already. Seems hard to make a buck in journalism these days.
we also hate "paywalls", we expect everything available for free and, the more tech savvy, are more than happy to block the ads with adblockers.
While I agree that the web is warped by ads, and it's getting absolutely nuts what can be tracked about people.... What are viable models? Do we try and regulate this and see what happens? Nothing sounds too promising, other than trying to regulate advertising itself ( which also feels like a crappy tool for the problem )
Or, at least, that’s how they justify running every last publisher into the ground for reasons as spacious as “they are intruding on my rights by loading this unnesseray JS library”.
Once all medium-sized papers are gone (i. e. soon) it will probably get worse, then downhill from there, and over the cliff beyond that.
But at least we won’t have to deal with those distracting ads. Or only in the 30 minutes per day that the power is on.
In the best possible light, you may be saying that Peoples’ willingness to pay for content will increase as that content b comes rarer and rarer. In this scenario, you are already operating on the assumption that independent publishers will further dwindle, and I’m not convinced that whereever the swee spot will be, it will anywhere close to the vibrant media landscape a civil society needs for survival.
Are you sure? For me it looks like the message is just an example picture.
At least the button "How to whitelist" isn't real for me...
Lol, this is a picture from the message that NYTimes shows when you have an ad-blocker!
It wasn’t as slick, sure. But it was usable, and useful. Most of the useful things on the web that arrived since, with the notable exception of modern search engines, are independent of ads.
There needs to be a solution for commons like search engines if there is no ad revenue to be made - I would gladly pay $50/year for a good search engine (which is infinitely more than google and Facebook are making on me now, as I use as blockers) and I am not alone.
And it doesn’t stop google’s tracking and profiling, just the display ads. Likely also tags you “has spendable income” for ads on sites that don’t participate (and post-shutdown future)
There will always be people who can't afford or don't want to pay for content.
The problem with web ads was and is, that the nature of the ad business was changed completely. Rather that a publisher made contracts with the advertisers themselves, ad networks acted as a middleman. Publishers would no longer run ads of their clients, but rent out part of their web space to the ad networks, who would control the content posted on their sites. While this produced a lot of easy income to the publishers (they just rented out the space, had no further work to do), it had grave consequences:
- it introduced tracking of the web users to target ads, as the ad targetting was no longer done by linking it to the publication, with all the unacceptable consequences to privacy
- it far too often created anoying or even offensive ads, as there was little or no curation
- beyond annoying ads, far too often plain malware was distributed via the ad channel
So I am glad to hear that web ads in these form are dying. I hope the web publishing industry reacts in time and goes back to a more classic advertisement model. I don't mind reasonably presented ads which don't endanger my privacy or computer security. I even would be really interested in ads that are informative again. There are some websites out still, which seem to have direct ad contracts like print magazines and just integrate them in their page layout. And of course, they are not blocked by ad blockers, so they remain effective.
Whenever I'm signed in on Youtube I get non-stop ads for Squarespace (due to being a web dev I imagine). No matter how many times I mark the ads as irrelevant, they keep showing them. I've seen Squarespace ads hundreds of times, wasting my time, and Squarespace's ad spend.
When I open Youtube in a private browser and go to a gaming channel, I get ads for games. The ads are actually interesting, and I discovered three games this week that I hadn't heard of.
I would rather Youtube showed gaming ads on gaming channels, instead of all this tracking nonsense.
1. In order to end the stronghold of advertising on the web, we need to first address advertising in the wider world
2. Advertising (amongst other things such as lobbying, flouting rules, pollution, anti-competitive practices) is driven by companies' almost desperate need for "growth"
3. Growth is driven by investor pressure
4. Investors are driven by need for ROI
5. The need for ROI is driven by inflation and its erosive effects on saved wealth
6. Inflation is driven by government spending via printing money
Therefore, we should reduce inflation?
The issue with other models, (like charging a flat fee - ie, 1$ per article) is that some people will not want to pay the full amount while others are willing to pay a lot more than the listed price. You lose out on both ends - you lose money you would have earned from the people who would pay $.50 or $1000 to access it.
Ads allow the company to extract value out of the content closer to actual value of the content at scale. The hard part is finding a different business model that does that task better.