Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

blogs.law.harvard.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 112 posts

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#11

Post by Kenji »

acdha wrote: post #10
Kenji wrote: post #7

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things…

So … in your idealized 90s web, how does a reporter pay their mortgage? Storage space was never the expensive part even back then – it's always been the skilled humans who create things.

Back then there weren't so many worthless garbage news sites. So the reporter most likely worked for a real newspaper that printed and sold the thing.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#12

Post by arbitrage »

acdha wrote: post #10
Kenji wrote: post #7

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things…

So … in your idealized 90s web, how does a reporter pay their mortgage? Storage space was never the expensive part even back then – it's always been the skilled humans who create things.

That's not our problem. It's the reporter's.

We are not responsible for helping businesses prop up their failing revenue streams.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#13

Post by staunch »

zobzu wrote: post #9
Kenji wrote: post #7

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things…

Im not sure why people defend ads. They fear the free web would be in danger? It already isn't free if it has ads. In the end if the ads is distracting you from the content its a bad ad, and given the choice you don't want to see it. Thus the only acceptable ads, are things like product placement. You know its an ad but it doesnt cut the flow.

> Im not sure why people defend ads.

Nearly all the current voices in media rely on advertising for their existence. Nearly all of the most influential organizations are extremely biased.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#14

Post by hagbardgroup »

hiphopyo wrote: post #5

> Look at New Yorker, for example. The ads are generally interesting and feature great photography. Wish Google would introduce some sort of minimum design requirements for their AdSense image ads. I also wish they'd give publishers full control over the appearance of their text ads. Right now, these ads look horrible, and only premium publishers (ie. websites with millions users) are given this sort of control.

They do. Google also produces the most widely-used ad platform for publishers, which makes it much easier for those publishers to blacklist and whitelist given ads and advertisers.

The ads suck for a lot of reasons, but lack of capacity to filter them isn't one of them.

Plenty of ad units that you see on a publisher may be filled by Adsense on one pageview and by another ad network in another one. Those networks may or may not have the same quality requirements that Adsense does.

Publishers tend to optimize for the amount of money they can make from an ad rather than how good it looks. An ad ops person will filter out offensive or porny ads while otherwise looking to top out their commission pay.

They also give some control over how the text ads appear in terms of color and font: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6002607?hl=en

It's just that a lot of publishers don't know how to handle the settings or don't care. Most publishers are not tech-first companies, and their websites don't make the bulk of their revenue anyway. For any TV channel, their website is a rounding error in terms of total revenue.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#15

Post by hughperkins »

acdha wrote: post #8
api wrote: post #2

Of course they don't. Readers don't pay.

The New York Times has a million digital-only subscribers who might disagree: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/05/business/the-n...

Yeah, I signed up for that. But they still show me ads :-P So, then I installed RequestPolicy et al, and have a guilt-free, ad-free existence :-)

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#16

Post by douche »

zobzu wrote: post #9
Kenji wrote: post #7

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things…

Im not sure why people defend ads. They fear the free web would be in danger? It already isn't free if it has ads. In the end if the ads is distracting you from the content its a bad ad, and given the choice you don't want to see it. Thus the only acceptable ads, are things like product placement. You know its an ad but it doesnt cut the flow.

You know, if all the websites that are the most flagrantly abusive and dependent on ad-support (the Buzzfeeds, Crackeds, HuffingtonPosts, etc) disappeared tomorrow, how much have we really lost?

I can survive without another shitty slide-show of the 17 Most Ridiculous Cats Twerking, or another news article that is a summary of a summary of a Reuters, machine-learned bot-written summary of a press release about an abstract of a scientific study.

Most interesting content is created for personal blogs and Wordpress and even Tumblr, by amateurs and people that are writing because they like doing it. Or it's on the pay-walled dead-tree publisher websites, like NY Times, the Atlantic, MIT Review, WSJ, etc.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#17

Post by petercooper »

Kenji wrote: post #7

I'll be honest, I hate all ads, regardless of how good they are. I think it's creepy and fills my mind with things I do not want it to be filled with. For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears. I think it barely matters how good the ads are. I've only seen one single website that did ads right (they were perfectly embedded into a mosaic pattern of site functionality, things…

"For me, the entire debate is silly because it's my screen -> my decision what appears."

My company makes most of its money off of advertising, I am broadly a fan of advertising (done well) myself, and yet.. I agree with your feeling at a core, technical level. I currently don't see how it's defensible to argue that a piece of software MUST render a certain stream of data in a certain way.

This is not about copyright, redistribution (we're not transforming then rebroadcasting), or ethics (to me). This is simply about having code on a machine transform an incoming stream to a visual representation, and while common standards and protocols (e.g. JPEG, HTML, CSS, HTTP) determine how to do that to get towards a desired result, I think any individual's code or computer should be free to render data as it sees fit even if that rendering is not what the creator intended.

Dictating how people or machines must intrepret things is a bad idea, IMHO. Provide the source data in whatever way you want, by all means, but the end user/device must interpret them as they will.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#18

Post by cbhl »

douche wrote: post #16
zobzu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not sure why people defend ads. They fear the free web would be in danger? It already isn't free if it has ads. In the end if the ads is distracting you from the content its a bad ad, and given the choice you don't want to see it. Thus the only acceptable ads, are things like product placement. You know its an ad but it doesnt cut the flow.

You know, if all the websites that are the most flagrantly abusive and dependent on ad-support (the Buzzfeeds, Crackeds, HuffingtonPosts, etc) disappeared tomorrow, how much have we really lost? I can survive without another shitty slide-show of the 17 Most Ridiculous Cats Twerking, or another news article that is a summary of a summary of a Reuters, machine-learned bot-written summary of a press release about an abs…

You would also lose Google, GMail, and YouTube.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#19

Post by pavornyoh »

sparkzilla wrote: post #4

I'm fairly sure that if publishers removed popups (ads and subscription forms), ads that move the text while you're reading it, and autoplay video or audio ads, then most people would be happy. As it stands, readers are bombarded with ads that ruin the actual reading experience.

@Sparkzilla, I agree. I don't know which I find the most annoying. The videos that play themselves or the pop-ups which when trying to close takes you to a whole new site. Damn it! I just want to read the news.

Re: Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

#20

Post by tomp »

sparkzilla wrote: post #4

I'm fairly sure that if publishers removed popups (ads and subscription forms), ads that move the text while you're reading it, and autoplay video or audio ads, then most people would be happy. As it stands, readers are bombarded with ads that ruin the actual reading experience.

> most people would be happy

Except those on slow or limited data connections that suffer because of image ads, and everyone who opposes tracking ads on principle.

Post reply on HN