Speak for yourself. I use other computers in my household that don't have AdBlock installed, and every time I do, I am reminded why I use AdBlock on my main work computer (this one).
TiVo is a set-top box that blocks advertisements. I know a lot of people who use it, and even I used to use it. I thought it was a necessary part of the watching experience.
There are two main reasons why I stopped using it:
I started to use a HD TV. This was quite a while back and TiVo didn't work on HD then. So I decided to go without it.
The second reason was when I worked at NBC and an employee noticed that TiVo started blocking NBC ads. It felt hypocritical that I blocked ads but worked at a company that relied on advertising.
At first I thought I could just whitelist shows, but then what about one time programs that have good segments? Why deny them advertising revenue. Think about how many shows rely on advertising that you watch. Lost, Fringe, Futurama, News, Seinfeld, Adult Swim (Questionable Content I've always noted specifically).
So I stopped using TiVo and honestly the experience hasn't been that bad. There are a few shows that show annoying ads like 10 minute Shake-Weight commercials. But for the most part, ads aren't that bad. The age of the really really obnoxious ones have been stopped or perhaps I watch different channels than I used to? Either way, I haven't had too much trouble or annoyance.
Time, effort, and concentration are limited resources. You only get so
much of each of them in your lifetime. If you wish to spend your limited
resources experiencing advertising, it's your choice. If you'd prefer to
spend your limited resources elsewise, again, it's your choice.
If Google and Facebook curled up and died tomorrow due to no one being
willing to spend their lives experiencing advertising, something would
take their place. Whether said "something" turns out to be better or
worse is subject to debate. There are plenty of possible business
models, yet relying on revenues from advertising has a proven track
record of profitability due to most people not being savvy enough to
make advertising ineffective.
Personally, I've got better things to do with my life.
In his piece Tim OReilly warned against people who browsed at bookstores, but only shopped online.
I suspect the same is true here.. if you use $service regularly, and $service exists through advertising, then maybe whitelisting their ads is a reasonable trade-off to make..
Fun moments in driving a demo for the engineering team at my last company, which was in the advertising space, was spending several minutes trying to debug a problem with the demo before the CTO informed me that my toolbar indicated that AdBlock was still turned on and Ghostery was probably eating my company's tracking cookies so the demo was unlikely to work...
Did I stop using those tools? Not a chance. Advertising is for suckers. If your site or service uses it then I wish you success, but I will not feel one iota of remorse for taking every opportunity to reduce the clutter and distraction of advertising from my life. If you want my money have the balls to ask me for it rather than trying to sell me as your secondary product.
My issue with this view is that the viewer makes himself seem like this victim. Let's put ourselves in this scenario again. You, the viewer, are on my website. You're using my server bandwidth while using my website functions, which probably had a lot of investment go into them whether they were services or content. Multiply you by a 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 and now we have a problem.
This you take for granted. This you don't pay for.
It's my website. I choose how to monetize it. If you like that, great; otherwise, stop using my website. Until we generate some automatic way of blocking you from ever using my website while you're on AdBlock, then what you're doing is stealing. No one forces you to use my website.
A lot of examples in the real world apply here. There are adverts on highways, buses, buildings. Removing that clutter-creating huge banner ad from the middle of the mall; how's that different from removing a leader-board from a blog?
How can removing ads completely and automatically - from websites that earn their entire existence from adverts - while still accessing the website's content and using their server bandwidth anything less than a cowardly immoral act of theft? And to hide behind that as some sort of hero for having the mental capability of installing AdBlock is just downright delusional.
Blocking advertisements from people that live off of them while still using their resources is theft. Plain and simple.
This vaguely reminds me of record labels' arguments against filesharing. The answer to impacted profits isn't to fight trends in technology (easy music copying, easy ad blocking); the answer is to find another way to monetize. People will pay for good stuff. Just look at the dozens of well written OS X apps. You pay for TextMate. You pay for Stay. You pay for Apple products in general. Why? They're good. Good things cost money, and people know that.
I will continue to use AdBlock, and I will continue to entrepreneur.
Piracy is zero-cost (other than the "lost customer" argument) to the record label. Bandwidth is something SOMEONE pays for. If you're stealing my bandwidth, either by deep-linking a photo to put into a news article or by reading my site while blocking the monetization I've put on it, that's real money you're costing me, not some theoretical "you would have bought it if you didn't pirate it" argument of loss.
And there's no micropayment system that would allow a small blog to charge you the 1/100 of a cent that an ad might earn, so really there's no alternative unless you're a big enough company with a compelling enough product that you can charge a non-trivial subscription fee.
I am so saddened to see your post "grey" (downvoted below zero). There is simply NO WAY this article is not "contributing to the discussion" -- so you're getting downvotes because people don't agree with you.
Especially since you're pretty much spot-on correct. Maybe that's why the downvotes? People don't like to have their world view challenged.
You deserve to monetize your website if you convince me to pay to access it. Else, not.
If you leave 50,000 hot dogs on your porch every day, marked "Free hotdogs! Come early, come often, and tell your friends!" and each has some nasty sauce on it I dislike, I'm going to take a hotdog and make an effort to remove the sauce. If I carry a sauce-removal machine, so much the better for me.
You're claiming a right to follow me down the block screaming "STOP THIEF! I ONLY GET PAID IF YOU EAT THE SAUCE!"
See the problem? If I'm not a party to any of the agreements under which you get paid, you don't get to bitch to me if my behavior fails to generate cash for you.
So Youtube should ask you to pay, then? Same with Facebook and Google?
Advertising is what allows us to have great, free content on the Internet. Saying all sites should ask the customer to pay kills most startups and popular sites dead.
Either admit that you don't care if you're helping them succeed, or don't run adblock.
Actually, the one killer feature I could see adblock implementing is automatically adding sites to your whitelist if you clicked a link in a given domain. The articles I read on Hacker News are interesting and I'd like to support them. Therefore, automatically whitelist any domain I visit from hn. Seems like it would be both simple and solve the "I only want to support good content" issue.
I don't appreciate the assumption that my time and attention are commodities that others inherently deserve to profit from. When I want to find a product that fits a particular need, I'll go looking for it intentionally; when I have other purposes for being online, I want that to be respected. Websites aren't free to run, but depending on your actual costs you have other options that respect your readers, from making your content a paid service (for larger enterprises) to asking for donations (for small blogs).
AdBlock disrupted the advertisement-based revenue system. Are you going to defend the old ways or embrace new ideas?
Ads are one issue. Sending information about (almost) every website you visit to Google is another issue. That's my main reason for blocking pests such as AdWords, +1 buttons, and Facebook buttons.
I simply deactivated flash by default, and only activate it when I want (on both Chrome and Firefox). This way I still see ads, but not those which eat my cpu, hog all my memory, and distract me to death. I think this is a good compromise.
This is pretty much what I do, flash ads get blocked but I would imagine many ad sites will start having fallbacks for mobile browsers. No data on that though.
I refreshed his page (with Adblock on) a few extra times. Just out of spite I think.. I'm an asshole sometimes.
But in my defense: every website I've made and still have up has never had a single advertisement on it. I don't like them, so I don't push them on people. However, I do whitelist sites I use daily for free such as Reddit and Imgur.
The only possible time I'll stop using AdBlock is when these are met: ● Browsers do not allow popups or pop-under windows
● Flash is totally eliminated, and along with that, are SuperCookies, and Flash itself.
● No more noisy ads.
● No more ads that get in the way of getting things done (e.g. Ad Page is displayed for 5 seconds before it lets you read an article)
● Deceptive ads that pretend to be "Download" buttons (usually in software download websites).
● No more ads that mess up the usability of the websites, usually by emulating OS controls.
What are great example of a good ads? ● Bing and Google ads are honest, plain, and non-deceptive. ● Facebook ads are perfect. You can even report if an ad is not interesting; You can block an ad from a specific advertiser.
For the meantime, we can use AdBlock as "AdUnblock", meaning, we pick the sites who deserve ad views.
How about someone creates a new AdBlock EasyList-based filterset that doesn't blacklist sites that don't have obscene ads while blocking the major offenders?
Or does AdBlock allow for (allow,deny) type rules like httpd.conf where you can specify a whitelist? If so, a whitelist for certain sites may be the best approach.
I think maybe I'll turn my adblock off when advertisers quit blasting me with loud auto-playing video/audio ads that start automatically.
It really blows to open a dozen tabs and then suddenly have one start playing some goofy "nerd saves the day with MAGIC TECHNOLOGY" ad that I can't find and shut off. On a loop.
Advertising could have been unobtrusive like the author claims but advertisers chose otherwise trying to one-up each other. This is why you can't have nice things.
I haven't seen such ads in 5 years or more. I use NoScript to prevent most Flash from running without my permission, and that's the primary way that such ads blast things without your permission, but the only annoying music/auto-play video I've encountered typically is just a poorly designed web site, not an ad on a site. And 99% of the time, it's a TED talk video that's auto-playing when I restore Firefox...sigh...
I agree with the article. If you don't like a site, don't go there. Don't steal their bandwidth and try to justify it.
Umm....and it's a terrible, terrible tragedy to accidentally see an awful web page once.
With something that blocks scripting, you don't need to worry about a site infecting your browser/computer. If the site is covered with ads, then close the window, and it's gone. Then downvote it on HN or Reddit or where ever you found it.
I'm a little confused on how blocking ads is stealing bandwidth, but blocking flash ads and scripts is not. Flash ads may be the most profitable for a given site, and the scripts may well affect revenue for marketing, analytics, affiliates, selling viewer personal information, etc.
It would seem to me that if you hold the belief that ad blockers are stealing bandwidth then so are flash/script blockers to a lesser extent. If you don't like a site (and their flash ads and scripts), don't go there.
Blocking scripting is (or should be) basic web-surfing hygiene. I don't disable scripts to prevent Flash ads from annoying me. I disable scripts and Flash because of the many zero-day vulnerabilities I've read about in both.
There's this great <noscript> tag that sites can use to monetize me. They won't be able to track me as well, no, but I don't think a web site should ever have the RIGHT to track someone. No simple web page should EVER need scripting to work, nor should it EVER rely on Flash (which isn't even available if I'm surfing from an iPad/iPhone!). Anyone who doesn't test a web page with scripting disabled to make sure it renders in a reasonable manner shouldn't be doing web development. And don't get me started on idiots whose pages redirect a browser with scripting disabled to a dead-end page that tells me scripting is disabled (duh!) and then doesn't give me a way to get back to the original page.
Blocking ads is stealing bandwidth because you are intentionally are blocking the (typically only) means of income of a site for aesthetic (or philosophical) reasons. You're presenting to the site as if you're a normal user, but then surgically removing the ads from each page.
Blocking scripting may have the occasional side effect of limiting income on badly implemented sites, but I take no responsibility for hurting sites that are poorly designed. Any blame there should be on whoever decided to go with a Flash-based ad solution, which won't monetize everywhere no matter what.
If a site requires that I install software on my computer to use it, then (as you say) I won't use it. If it requires me to enter an email address to use it (and I don't trust it), then I similarly won't use it. If it requires me to enable scripting and I don't trust it, then I won't use it.
But I'm not going to enable scripting globally and risk ending up with an infected computer on the off chance that, on my first visit to a new site, I might prevent them from making a small amount of income because their web developers were incompetent.
There is advertising on the Internet? I almost forgot.
Advertising got a really bad reputation with a lot of people, and they are unlikely to turn off their armor for anyone. If you are having a problem with the relatively small community who uses ad blocking software, you are paying the price for years of annoying animated gifs, flash, and ridiculous punch-the-monkey win ipod scams.
I whitelist a few sites I use regularly and that I'd like to "support", after an article on arstechnica awhile ago. But it's a short list.
"If you are a software engineer, stop fucking using AdBlock now. We ALL have at least one friend who works at Google, or Yelp, or Facebook, or somebody. Even if the company doesn't rely on advertising as a revenue source, I'm sure they use it as a source of getting new customers."
Commence fucking that static this instant, and do not stop until I put "pad Google's EBITDA" on my todo list somewhere above "have a less bullshit-laden experience on the Internet."
I mean honestly...making it convenient for marketers to monetize my web browsing is about the last thing on Earth for which I feel a shred of personal responsibility.
I recall it generated a lot of negative feedback, but at the same time, I'm surprised it hasn't been copied more widely: If you're the kind of person who's willing to use Ad Block on a site that's providing content financed solely by advertising, I would imagine you're also the kind of "customer" that at least some of those sites would prefer not to have.
This will probably offend some startup people here (who probably rely on advertisement to run their otherwise unprofitable websites), but advertisement is evil. How can you believe in the power of capitalism and the invisible hand and still think it's ok that people are all the time being led into buying stuff they do not need because marketers study specifically how to psychologically manipulate people into associating good emotions with material crap?
I'm not saying there aren't other factors involved, but do you really think the most popular brands are so due to merit? Don't you think the world would be different if not so many people would just stop consuming products from the very corporations they are protesting against?
This could be a very long rant, I just hope you can see where I'm going with this, that the really unethical thing to do is to allow advertisement to continue to exist.
It doesn't offend me, but the concept that all advertising is evil is very, very misguided. Just because big brands often use evil techniques to advertise doesn't mean that it's all bad.
If I'm selling something used on Craigslist, that's advertising. If I'm looking for a product to fill a need, and I don't know what to buy, the paid links on Google have more than once led me to the perfect product. Every single thing on Amazon's site (fill in ANY e-commerce site online here -- even most of Craigslist, with things like apartments for rent), right down to the product page, is, fundamentally, advertising.
You'd pretty much have to restrict the web to a highly edited version of Wikipedia if you were going to outlaw advertising. And if you succeeded in banning all advertising you'd just prevent new entries into any market, or the creations of new markets, because everyone would tend to buy the products at the stores they knew about already.
What's evil is not educating people in logical thinking, and in not inoculating them at a young age against the kinds of psychological tricks you're talking about.
I'm sorry, english is not my first language, so I maybe that's why I thought the word advertising didn't include craigslist postings. In portuguese we have a very specific word to the advertising I'm referring to, "propaganda" (which also has the same meaning as in english).
Craigslist/Ebay are exactly the kind of things we need more, especially ebay, where you can see different offerings side by side and compare them on objective grounds, then decide which one better fits your needs. And that's the key, if I'm on ebay it's because I'm looking for something, people are not trying to convince me to buy groupons when I'm actually looking to read a fine article from HN.
If "I" succeeded in banning the advertisement I'm talking about (basically impossible without censorship, and that's the last thing I'd want), more sites would spring up to help people who are looking for something. You wouldn't always buy from the same brand/store because you would have these tools to help you make sure (with the least amount of effort possible) you are making the best buy you can.
Furthermore, I think it's the existence of advertisement that is reducing the incentives to create alternate business models (for content websites, for example), like micro-payments (think very small subscription fee for a site like salon.com), and basically tips, which could be considered donations but would be too small to be worth it with the current payment processors.
I read an article recently that pointed out that an episode of a TV show is effectively an advertisement for the next TV show in the series. Propaganda certainly has the connotations that you're looking for, but in English it's typically used to refer to a certain class of political ads. I get what you're saying, though, and I think the proper response is education.
Craigslist is great, and I might consider a subscription to Salon.com if it were inexpensive enough, but I think you're overestimating humanity's willingness to part with cash. All you have to do is look at just about ANY paid app on an iPhone or (especially) Android, and you'll find people complaining that it should be free.
Just a few years ago, buying a small game for your computer would cost from $7-$20. Now people complain if a game costs $1, even if the game contains dozens of hours of entertainment value. It's not like it costs less to make a polished game now than it did a few years ago.
And if a game is fun enough and has enough replay value, I can actually make more than the $0.70 I make from a $1 sale by showing the users ads (considering I get 200x as many downloads of a free version). Other models do exist -- in-app payments for buying "coins" to play a game more, for example -- but some of those end up feeling more evil than the advertising you're decrying.
What you'd need to fight is the sense of entitlement that people have around web content, which is what game developers have to fight on Android. I mean, just look at the comments on this very article! We're talking HN readers who feel entitled to get everything for free. People who have no connection with web site creation or running a business will typically have even less of a personal connection to the companies that they're hurting when disabling ads.
Micropayments for news sites could happen if you got the right sites to buy in, but it's been tried again and again, so I suspect that it's the lack of customers rather than the lack of site support that's the problem. If you got the New York Times, Salon.com, and a half dozen other high-profile sites to join a micropayment network, so I could sign up ONCE and go to a lot of different news sites ad free, I'd like that as a customer. But I suspect that you'd see the same ratio of 200x as many people sticking with the "free" ad-supported sites.
But then again, it would be a hard sell for the New York Times, at least: They want $35/month for a full digital subscription. That's off by at least a factor of ten from what I'd be willing to pay, possibly more. I think I'd be willing to pay $8/month to a micropayment network that included unlimited access to at least a dozen or so sites ad-free, but the NYT is demanding a much higher payment for unlimited access, so it's hard to believe they'd take a much lower amount.
Finally, I wouldn't want the micropayments service to charge me every time I looked at a site. I don't want to think about using the web; I want to browse freely, without worrying that I'm spending money every time I click a link. So those micropayments would need to come out of a monthly flat rate, to be divvied up among the various sites I'd actually visited.
I hadn't installed AdBlock on my most recent laptop until I was using free wifi at a hotel that loaded an ad underneath my mouse cursor every time a webpage loaded. So if you clicked on anything within the first 10 seconds or so of loading a page, you actually clicked on the ad. It's always something egregious that pushes me over the edge, and I never uninstall it.
Here is your argument : "I used AdBlock and was happy with it. Then I worked for someone who lived from advertising, so I'm not happy with it anymore."
I call that being a slave of the one who feeds you. From a Marxist point of view, you're only becoming servant of the interests of your exploiter, and now are trying to share this point of view with the world.
Without even thinking one instant that maybe living off advertising has no moral justification. Being exposed to advertising, as you say it yourself (when acknowledging that you don't have to click on the ads), is being unconsciously manipulated by them, and that's exactly what they are trying to do.
Advertising is not work, it is not producing anything useful for the society. It is only trying to either create needs or direct customer's attention to a particular vendor without any objective comparison between products, often creating value out of thin air just by gregarious feeling (so called "brands" making people happy to buy something not for what it brings to them but because they'll be happy to show their mates how cool they are to possess something with a particular logo on it).
So well, I recently installed AdBlock because I was tired of having my speakers start to shout silly songs when browsing the web at night, surprising me and making my heart rate jump sky high. Otherwise I've trained to filter visually the ads and completely ignore them. I don't feel any guilt of having less noise in the pages I visit.
For the ones who feel like they deserve some money for the time they put into their blog, just put a donation button somewhere, be transparent with how much money you make from it, and I won't mind a popup asking to click on it.
The amount of entitlement on both sides of this debate is always pretty amazing/amusing to me.
1) Publishers (and I am a publisher with an ad-supported site): Nobody owes you an audience or a payday. If advertising is so annoying that people are going out of their way to block it, then you're in trouble.
2) Readers: Nobody owes you professional-grade writing/video/whatever. If it's impossible to make a living doing this stuff -- and in the first decade or two of the web, the way to make a living doing this stuff has been advertising -- then most people will stop doing it and your life will be worse for it.
I don't know what the solution is, but pretending that the other side of what ought to be a mutually beneficial relationship is your prisoner and that you have the right to demand they do things to meet your needs and your needs only won't get you far.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadThere are two main reasons why I stopped using it: I started to use a HD TV. This was quite a while back and TiVo didn't work on HD then. So I decided to go without it.
The second reason was when I worked at NBC and an employee noticed that TiVo started blocking NBC ads. It felt hypocritical that I blocked ads but worked at a company that relied on advertising.
At first I thought I could just whitelist shows, but then what about one time programs that have good segments? Why deny them advertising revenue. Think about how many shows rely on advertising that you watch. Lost, Fringe, Futurama, News, Seinfeld, Adult Swim (Questionable Content I've always noted specifically).
So I stopped using TiVo and honestly the experience hasn't been that bad. There are a few shows that show annoying ads like 10 minute Shake-Weight commercials. But for the most part, ads aren't that bad. The age of the really really obnoxious ones have been stopped or perhaps I watch different channels than I used to? Either way, I haven't had too much trouble or annoyance.
If Google and Facebook curled up and died tomorrow due to no one being willing to spend their lives experiencing advertising, something would take their place. Whether said "something" turns out to be better or worse is subject to debate. There are plenty of possible business models, yet relying on revenues from advertising has a proven track record of profitability due to most people not being savvy enough to make advertising ineffective.
Personally, I've got better things to do with my life.
In his piece Tim OReilly warned against people who browsed at bookstores, but only shopped online.
I suspect the same is true here.. if you use $service regularly, and $service exists through advertising, then maybe whitelisting their ads is a reasonable trade-off to make..
Did I stop using those tools? Not a chance. Advertising is for suckers. If your site or service uses it then I wish you success, but I will not feel one iota of remorse for taking every opportunity to reduce the clutter and distraction of advertising from my life. If you want my money have the balls to ask me for it rather than trying to sell me as your secondary product.
My issue with this view is that the viewer makes himself seem like this victim. Let's put ourselves in this scenario again. You, the viewer, are on my website. You're using my server bandwidth while using my website functions, which probably had a lot of investment go into them whether they were services or content. Multiply you by a 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 and now we have a problem.
This you take for granted. This you don't pay for.
It's my website. I choose how to monetize it. If you like that, great; otherwise, stop using my website. Until we generate some automatic way of blocking you from ever using my website while you're on AdBlock, then what you're doing is stealing. No one forces you to use my website.
A lot of examples in the real world apply here. There are adverts on highways, buses, buildings. Removing that clutter-creating huge banner ad from the middle of the mall; how's that different from removing a leader-board from a blog?
How can removing ads completely and automatically - from websites that earn their entire existence from adverts - while still accessing the website's content and using their server bandwidth anything less than a cowardly immoral act of theft? And to hide behind that as some sort of hero for having the mental capability of installing AdBlock is just downright delusional.
Blocking advertisements from people that live off of them while still using their resources is theft. Plain and simple.
I will continue to use AdBlock, and I will continue to entrepreneur.
Piracy is zero-cost (other than the "lost customer" argument) to the record label. Bandwidth is something SOMEONE pays for. If you're stealing my bandwidth, either by deep-linking a photo to put into a news article or by reading my site while blocking the monetization I've put on it, that's real money you're costing me, not some theoretical "you would have bought it if you didn't pirate it" argument of loss.
And there's no micropayment system that would allow a small blog to charge you the 1/100 of a cent that an ad might earn, so really there's no alternative unless you're a big enough company with a compelling enough product that you can charge a non-trivial subscription fee.
Especially since you're pretty much spot-on correct. Maybe that's why the downvotes? People don't like to have their world view challenged.
If you leave 50,000 hot dogs on your porch every day, marked "Free hotdogs! Come early, come often, and tell your friends!" and each has some nasty sauce on it I dislike, I'm going to take a hotdog and make an effort to remove the sauce. If I carry a sauce-removal machine, so much the better for me.
You're claiming a right to follow me down the block screaming "STOP THIEF! I ONLY GET PAID IF YOU EAT THE SAUCE!"
See the problem? If I'm not a party to any of the agreements under which you get paid, you don't get to bitch to me if my behavior fails to generate cash for you.
Advertising is what allows us to have great, free content on the Internet. Saying all sites should ask the customer to pay kills most startups and popular sites dead.
Either admit that you don't care if you're helping them succeed, or don't run adblock.
Actually, the one killer feature I could see adblock implementing is automatically adding sites to your whitelist if you clicked a link in a given domain. The articles I read on Hacker News are interesting and I'd like to support them. Therefore, automatically whitelist any domain I visit from hn. Seems like it would be both simple and solve the "I only want to support good content" issue.
AdBlock disrupted the advertisement-based revenue system. Are you going to defend the old ways or embrace new ideas?
Sure it is -- it's a damn good argument. it's just very selfish, and breaks the spirit of Kant's Categorical Imperative.
But in my defense: every website I've made and still have up has never had a single advertisement on it. I don't like them, so I don't push them on people. However, I do whitelist sites I use daily for free such as Reddit and Imgur.
What are great example of a good ads? ● Bing and Google ads are honest, plain, and non-deceptive. ● Facebook ads are perfect. You can even report if an ad is not interesting; You can block an ad from a specific advertiser.
For the meantime, we can use AdBlock as "AdUnblock", meaning, we pick the sites who deserve ad views.
Or does AdBlock allow for (allow,deny) type rules like httpd.conf where you can specify a whitelist? If so, a whitelist for certain sites may be the best approach.
It really blows to open a dozen tabs and then suddenly have one start playing some goofy "nerd saves the day with MAGIC TECHNOLOGY" ad that I can't find and shut off. On a loop.
Advertising could have been unobtrusive like the author claims but advertisers chose otherwise trying to one-up each other. This is why you can't have nice things.
I agree with the article. If you don't like a site, don't go there. Don't steal their bandwidth and try to justify it.
It sure would be nice to be able do decide that in advance.
With something that blocks scripting, you don't need to worry about a site infecting your browser/computer. If the site is covered with ads, then close the window, and it's gone. Then downvote it on HN or Reddit or where ever you found it.
It would seem to me that if you hold the belief that ad blockers are stealing bandwidth then so are flash/script blockers to a lesser extent. If you don't like a site (and their flash ads and scripts), don't go there.
There's this great <noscript> tag that sites can use to monetize me. They won't be able to track me as well, no, but I don't think a web site should ever have the RIGHT to track someone. No simple web page should EVER need scripting to work, nor should it EVER rely on Flash (which isn't even available if I'm surfing from an iPad/iPhone!). Anyone who doesn't test a web page with scripting disabled to make sure it renders in a reasonable manner shouldn't be doing web development. And don't get me started on idiots whose pages redirect a browser with scripting disabled to a dead-end page that tells me scripting is disabled (duh!) and then doesn't give me a way to get back to the original page.
Blocking ads is stealing bandwidth because you are intentionally are blocking the (typically only) means of income of a site for aesthetic (or philosophical) reasons. You're presenting to the site as if you're a normal user, but then surgically removing the ads from each page.
Blocking scripting may have the occasional side effect of limiting income on badly implemented sites, but I take no responsibility for hurting sites that are poorly designed. Any blame there should be on whoever decided to go with a Flash-based ad solution, which won't monetize everywhere no matter what.
If a site requires that I install software on my computer to use it, then (as you say) I won't use it. If it requires me to enter an email address to use it (and I don't trust it), then I similarly won't use it. If it requires me to enable scripting and I don't trust it, then I won't use it.
But I'm not going to enable scripting globally and risk ending up with an infected computer on the off chance that, on my first visit to a new site, I might prevent them from making a small amount of income because their web developers were incompetent.
Advertising got a really bad reputation with a lot of people, and they are unlikely to turn off their armor for anyone. If you are having a problem with the relatively small community who uses ad blocking software, you are paying the price for years of annoying animated gifs, flash, and ridiculous punch-the-monkey win ipod scams.
I whitelist a few sites I use regularly and that I'd like to "support", after an article on arstechnica awhile ago. But it's a short list.
Commence fucking that static this instant, and do not stop until I put "pad Google's EBITDA" on my todo list somewhere above "have a less bullshit-laden experience on the Internet."
I mean honestly...making it convenient for marketers to monetize my web browsing is about the last thing on Earth for which I feel a shred of personal responsibility.
I recall it generated a lot of negative feedback, but at the same time, I'm surprised it hasn't been copied more widely: If you're the kind of person who's willing to use Ad Block on a site that's providing content financed solely by advertising, I would imagine you're also the kind of "customer" that at least some of those sites would prefer not to have.
I can't control highway advertising but boy would I love an ad free city.
I search for what I want, let the mindless sheep get 'served'
I'm not saying there aren't other factors involved, but do you really think the most popular brands are so due to merit? Don't you think the world would be different if not so many people would just stop consuming products from the very corporations they are protesting against?
This could be a very long rant, I just hope you can see where I'm going with this, that the really unethical thing to do is to allow advertisement to continue to exist.
If I'm selling something used on Craigslist, that's advertising. If I'm looking for a product to fill a need, and I don't know what to buy, the paid links on Google have more than once led me to the perfect product. Every single thing on Amazon's site (fill in ANY e-commerce site online here -- even most of Craigslist, with things like apartments for rent), right down to the product page, is, fundamentally, advertising.
You'd pretty much have to restrict the web to a highly edited version of Wikipedia if you were going to outlaw advertising. And if you succeeded in banning all advertising you'd just prevent new entries into any market, or the creations of new markets, because everyone would tend to buy the products at the stores they knew about already.
What's evil is not educating people in logical thinking, and in not inoculating them at a young age against the kinds of psychological tricks you're talking about.
Craigslist/Ebay are exactly the kind of things we need more, especially ebay, where you can see different offerings side by side and compare them on objective grounds, then decide which one better fits your needs. And that's the key, if I'm on ebay it's because I'm looking for something, people are not trying to convince me to buy groupons when I'm actually looking to read a fine article from HN.
If "I" succeeded in banning the advertisement I'm talking about (basically impossible without censorship, and that's the last thing I'd want), more sites would spring up to help people who are looking for something. You wouldn't always buy from the same brand/store because you would have these tools to help you make sure (with the least amount of effort possible) you are making the best buy you can.
Furthermore, I think it's the existence of advertisement that is reducing the incentives to create alternate business models (for content websites, for example), like micro-payments (think very small subscription fee for a site like salon.com), and basically tips, which could be considered donations but would be too small to be worth it with the current payment processors.
Craigslist is great, and I might consider a subscription to Salon.com if it were inexpensive enough, but I think you're overestimating humanity's willingness to part with cash. All you have to do is look at just about ANY paid app on an iPhone or (especially) Android, and you'll find people complaining that it should be free.
Just a few years ago, buying a small game for your computer would cost from $7-$20. Now people complain if a game costs $1, even if the game contains dozens of hours of entertainment value. It's not like it costs less to make a polished game now than it did a few years ago.
And if a game is fun enough and has enough replay value, I can actually make more than the $0.70 I make from a $1 sale by showing the users ads (considering I get 200x as many downloads of a free version). Other models do exist -- in-app payments for buying "coins" to play a game more, for example -- but some of those end up feeling more evil than the advertising you're decrying.
What you'd need to fight is the sense of entitlement that people have around web content, which is what game developers have to fight on Android. I mean, just look at the comments on this very article! We're talking HN readers who feel entitled to get everything for free. People who have no connection with web site creation or running a business will typically have even less of a personal connection to the companies that they're hurting when disabling ads.
Micropayments for news sites could happen if you got the right sites to buy in, but it's been tried again and again, so I suspect that it's the lack of customers rather than the lack of site support that's the problem. If you got the New York Times, Salon.com, and a half dozen other high-profile sites to join a micropayment network, so I could sign up ONCE and go to a lot of different news sites ad free, I'd like that as a customer. But I suspect that you'd see the same ratio of 200x as many people sticking with the "free" ad-supported sites.
But then again, it would be a hard sell for the New York Times, at least: They want $35/month for a full digital subscription. That's off by at least a factor of ten from what I'd be willing to pay, possibly more. I think I'd be willing to pay $8/month to a micropayment network that included unlimited access to at least a dozen or so sites ad-free, but the NYT is demanding a much higher payment for unlimited access, so it's hard to believe they'd take a much lower amount.
Finally, I wouldn't want the micropayments service to charge me every time I looked at a site. I don't want to think about using the web; I want to browse freely, without worrying that I'm spending money every time I click a link. So those micropayments would need to come out of a monthly flat rate, to be divvied up among the various sites I'd actually visited.
I call that being a slave of the one who feeds you. From a Marxist point of view, you're only becoming servant of the interests of your exploiter, and now are trying to share this point of view with the world.
Without even thinking one instant that maybe living off advertising has no moral justification. Being exposed to advertising, as you say it yourself (when acknowledging that you don't have to click on the ads), is being unconsciously manipulated by them, and that's exactly what they are trying to do.
Advertising is not work, it is not producing anything useful for the society. It is only trying to either create needs or direct customer's attention to a particular vendor without any objective comparison between products, often creating value out of thin air just by gregarious feeling (so called "brands" making people happy to buy something not for what it brings to them but because they'll be happy to show their mates how cool they are to possess something with a particular logo on it).
So well, I recently installed AdBlock because I was tired of having my speakers start to shout silly songs when browsing the web at night, surprising me and making my heart rate jump sky high. Otherwise I've trained to filter visually the ads and completely ignore them. I don't feel any guilt of having less noise in the pages I visit.
For the ones who feel like they deserve some money for the time they put into their blog, just put a donation button somewhere, be transparent with how much money you make from it, and I won't mind a popup asking to click on it.
1) Publishers (and I am a publisher with an ad-supported site): Nobody owes you an audience or a payday. If advertising is so annoying that people are going out of their way to block it, then you're in trouble.
2) Readers: Nobody owes you professional-grade writing/video/whatever. If it's impossible to make a living doing this stuff -- and in the first decade or two of the web, the way to make a living doing this stuff has been advertising -- then most people will stop doing it and your life will be worse for it.
I don't know what the solution is, but pretending that the other side of what ought to be a mutually beneficial relationship is your prisoner and that you have the right to demand they do things to meet your needs and your needs only won't get you far.