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

The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

guru3d.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 334 posts

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#191

Post by Falkon1313 »

Yuioup wrote: post #68

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want some of my money you need to get it from the people who charge me every month for accesing you web page: My ISP. They are the ones making money off the fact that I want to get on the internet and access content. Too bad there is no reliable, independent mechanism for taking some of that money and putting it in a large pool to be ditributed to content creators. Th…

Sounds like a good idea at first, but... Who did we pay for TV content prior to cable/satellite? No one. You bought the hardware and thereafter the content was all free, supported by ads.

Cable access providers promised ad-free content, so people paid for it. Paying the access provider worked well. So well that it mostly wiped out the ad-supported over-the-air competition and left the cable cos as monopolies. Which enabled them to raise their prices and become filled with ads. While controlling what you could see and when, charging extra for some content vs other content, etc.

Making ISPs more like cable companies doesn't seem like a good idea for the consumer. And it won't make the ads go away.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#192

Post by JorgeGT »

bigbugbag wrote: post #179
jhall1468 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good". > some other solution will have to be found Because we already have a solution. Uno…

> The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive. I remember differently, when ads started to appear on the web, it was promptly followed by adblocking. Actual reason was to block ads.

Yep. I remember most of the first ads were outright scams, "You are visitor 1.000.000 of this webpage! Click here to collect your $500" [Seizure-inducing flashing to follow].

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#193

Post by Animats »

From the site: "We review the Voyager Air 2 from Corsair, this portable storage unit allows you to connect it to USB 3.0 and WIFI. It actually comes in a 1 TB HDD model as well, which we review. This great looking device might be what you're looking for to move or stream your content from and with the latest Corsair Smartphone it might just be what the doctor ordered."

"One of the CPU cooler makers we do adore, Noctua today celebrated its 10-year anniversary. Since the introduction of the first generation NH-U12 heatsink in October 2005, Noctua's products have received more than 6000 awards and recommendations from leading international hardware websites and magazines, making them a default choice for quiet cooling enthusiasts all over the world."

That's the content.

This is not someone who has a legitimate right to complain about ad blocking.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#194

Post by jhall1468 »

RyanZAG wrote: post #170
jhall1468 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And be replaced with what, exactly? The call to arms over privacy, attention and security is getting old. Not because its wrong, but because it's never accompanied with an actual solution. But that's moot because the ship isn't going to sink. Enough people will not use adblock to ensure that companies like Google and Facebook will always make some money off advertising. So rest assured, the Titanic's will continue to…

Maybe with nothing? There isn't some god-given requirement for there to be all these reviews about 3D cards. If readers refuse to receive ads and refuse to pay, then the site will go out of business and the content will go away. That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist. Less content is not the end of the world. Pro…

> That's honestly fine - if people won't pay in time or by viewing ads, the content is simply not valuable enough to enough people for it to exist.

Nonsense. That argument means all content is valued only by the numbers of ads viewed. By that logic Facebook is the best content. And they don't have to change by the sheer volume of people that visit it. Competition becomes even more unlikely because nobody wants to invest in a business that needs to millions of viewers to be profitable.

> Less content is not the end of the world.

Nor is it necessarily a good thing. Fewer options will just empower the organizations that happened to exist in the heyday of advertising. Converging power more and more while saying "it's a good thing, the market will right itself" is naive.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#196

Post by imgabe »

jhall1468 wrote: post #145
imgabe wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most content is worthless. Content that has actual monetary value to someone, market research data for instance, has no trouble finding people willing to pay for it. The fact is most "news" and other article type sites do not serve a purpose other than satisfying some idle curiosity or passing time. Very little of it has a material impact on anyone's day to day life. The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate…

> Most content is worthless. What nonsense. Most content's worth is variable depending on who is consuming it. The issue with ad-blockers is that it isn't killing worthless content. It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit. > The purpose can easily be filled by some alternate, free material. Yes, because the quali…

> It's killing content that survives between the insane traffic of Facebook and the complete lack of traffic in personal blogs that 12 people visit.

What does that tell you about the value of that content that people are not even willing to be exposed to an ad in order to consume it? This is the proper application of "the customer is always right". When the customer doesn't want what you're selling, it's not the customer's fault. It's the vendor's fault for failing to meet the market demands in a suitable way.

> Yes, because the quality of content supported by ads and the quality of content done by some ad-free blog in someone's free time is always equal.

No, it's not. Sometimes the unbiased opinion of someone who doesn't have to please advertisers results in a much higher quality product.

> You mean like instructional YouTube videos, free web-based resources for learning new things (programming, languages, etc). Oh wait, all of that is ad-supported.

Do most FOSS doc pages have ads on them? Not that I've seen. O'Reilly and other publishers have no trouble charging money for well-written technical documentation. People are clearly willing to pay for that. Rosetta Stone charges quite a bit for language instruction.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#197

Post by jhall1468 »

bigbugbag wrote: post #190
jhall1468 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while stille being profitable. So there is a happy medium and, in your opinion, it's non-targeted ads. Yet uBlock and uBlock Origin and the millions of people that use them are blocking DuckDuckGo ads. piwik is an open-source, locally installed, piece of analytic's software that is blocked by default in the above AND in adblock. So you are making an argument that is…

Sorry, I may have not expressed myself in clear enough way, please allow me to try again: IMO there is no happy medium, all ads are unwelcomed on the net. duckduckgo debunks the myth that ads need to be targeted as is the usual investor storytime myth. I was using phpmyvisites before it spawned piwik and have been pushing piwik as an alternative to google analytics since, still piwik is a tracking mechanism and as su…

So you said this:

> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.

For what reason exactly? So they debunked a myth that is moot anyway because the very premise of the myth is unwelcome.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#198

Post by ChrisGranger »

adminprof wrote: post #90
xorcist wrote: post #40

"Blocking" ads is loaded language, and should be recognized as such. Not viewing ads can be done in a multitude of ways, but it's not like users are patching software to get there. The web was always built to be adaptable to the end user device. The user agent was intended to act as the decision maker how to render the markup. For many years, browsers even respected the default foreground and background colors and fo…

You bring up a terrific point. The ads are simply not loaded. The user is accessing an external server, and it's up to them what to load.

Indeed, a user could likewise load only the HTML and ignore all images, scripts, CSS and suchlike. The user is in control, and that's how it should be. I am not obligated to view ads any more than I'm obligated to view any other part of a website.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#199

Post by cpeterso »

BogusIKnow wrote: post #122
teddyh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all valid reasons, but they are not the reason I first started to block ads: • They impose a surprisingly huge cognitive load. Even if you (like most people nowadays) are used to them and hence “do not notice them”, that very habit of ignoring them actually takes more brain power than you’d think.

Not reading them is the same as blocking them. To gain moral high ground people who compare adblocking to theft are required to read every ad on every website they encounter. The moral distinction between "I do not read ads" and "I block ads" is an illusion.

> The moral distinction between "I do not read ads" and "I block ads" is an illusion.

Do not some ad networks pay content providers for "impressions", regardless of whether the ads are clicked? In that case, loading the ads without reading them is not the same as not loading them.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#200

Post by jhall1468 »

bigbugbag wrote: post #179
jhall1468 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think this is going to happen as a result, you must presume that it would be a good - i.e. acceptable and viable - solution. What kind of logic are you following? I think dropping a bomb on Paris is going to kill a whole lot of people. How does it follow that because I think that, it stands to reason that I think it's "good". > some other solution will have to be found Because we already have a solution. Uno…

> The main reason ad-blockers exist is because fools with decision-making powers and no critical-thinking skills decided to make ads obtrusive. I remember differently, when ads started to appear on the web, it was promptly followed by adblocking. Actual reason was to block ads.

> I remember differently, when ads started to appear on the web, it was promptly followed by adblocking. Actual reason was to block ads.

Sure, but the adblocking was pretty specific. Popup blockers followed popup ads and they were far more popular than any software that blocked ads outright. Adblocking isn't new, it's that it's iron-fisted and gaining in popularity that's the problem.

Post reply on HN