The Ad Blocking Wars • Hacker News Board

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#81

Post by Geekette » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

Ah, the ad war wages on. I say no to ads because they exist in opposition to visually clean pages, no tracking, no malware.

As a lot of online content falls under entertainment, if it came down to it, I'd be happy to unclutter my mind/reduce procrastination by restricting my browsing to non-essential content, rather than eat ads.

Seems part of why the frenzy is heating up is that many media sites merely regurtitate news and do not produce any unique content, but are ad and tracker heavy. So, they stand to lose, even in better-case scenarios where some people are willing to pay for content they value.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#82

Post by 0942v8653 » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:10 PM UTC

bufordsharkley wrote: post #28

amelius wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relax. Within 10 years, we have AI that is strong enough to recognize advertisements regardless of origin, so that they can be stripped from any content, be it text, images, or video. Make sure you sell your Google and Facebook stocks before that time.

I'm more worried at the point that we have AI strong enough to pass the turing test, and then spends years befriending us... just to advertise products. Pretty far off, but this concept scares the hell out of me.

https://xkcd.com/632/

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#83

Post by pixl97 » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:11 PM UTC

LanguageGamer wrote: post #69

mschuster91 wrote: post #3

Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad. We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement. And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING. Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what adverti…

> I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now. Perhaps, but how do we measure that? I was surprised to learn recently that advertising for the past century has only grown at pace with GDP, i.e. it has continued to be about 1.29% or our economy: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings... Bu…

I don't see where that adjusts for the exceptionally low costs of digital mediums.

For example, TV ads were terribly expensive because there was only a limited number of channels and limited number of slots. A billboard required sending a team out to put up a new sign. Radio and magazines were also somewhat limited forms of mediums which allowed their price to stay high.

Now with digital mediums where ads can be changed on the fly prices have dropped dramatically. One would assume there is a supply and demand curve that directly influences the price. This shows in online advertising where there is almost unlimited supply, the cost/payoff for each ad is very low. In mediums where the amount of advertising is fixed, the SuperBowl for example, the price for ads is at an all time high.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#84

Post by chris_wot » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

adblawk wrote: post #43

mschuster91 wrote: post #3

Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad. We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement. And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING. Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what adverti…

Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and how many today... 50 years ago the average western person had access to maybe 1/50th of the information they access to now thanks to the internet and in large part thanks to advertising. Advertising allows businesses to outsource the consideration (and associated decisions) of the value of their users. A business dependent on advertising do…

You say a business now doesn't have to consider who is most dollar valuable if they rely on advertising. Maybe. But advertisers sure still do - and advertisers are then your customer and so you basically choose who is most dollar callable to the advertiser. I think the distinction is so slim that it's irrelevant.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#85

Post by hellbanTHIS » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

I don't know why they don't just show what's on sale near me geographically. You know, two for one Kraft mac and cheese up at Publix. You'd never know that I might buy mac and cheese by data mining me, I don't even really like mac and cheese, but shit man two for one!

The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads showed me that toilet paper was on sale somewhere nearby, that's something I might whitelist.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#86

Post by chris_wot » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

adblawk wrote: post #74

lorenzfx wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like your users are getting a free service. They are not. They just do not pay you directly. Why are advertisers willing to pay you $15/month per user? Because those users buy the advertisers' wares with a hefty "advertisement-tax" on top of the "real" price.

You're misunderstanding the example. Advertisers do not pay $15 per user, that's the amount we would need from 5% of our users to replace the revenue lost from no advertising. The example puts the value of each user per month at $1, which is what advertisers pay.

So advertising is inefficient. News at 11!

It would be far better for content creators to create valuable content and charge for it than to rely on the dubious ethics of most advertisers.

For a time, I paid for a SMH online subscription, but then I discovered that a. Half my comments were still not reviewed or even published, with no explanation. I was STILL tracked by up to 60 ad trackers every time I went to their website. And the content of the Herald started to degrade more and more (no, I don't care about Kim Kardashian, and I never will. And it's not acceptable to have sentences that drop whole words, often in ways that make that sentence unreadable). So I stopped reading and paying for the content.

Now if I could find a decent newspaper I could pay a reasonable subscription fee to, then I'd do so. To hell with advertising. If your business model is reliant on it to survive, then wither on the vine and die for all I care.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#87

Post by melted » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

byuu wrote: post #64

caoilte wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't afford to be too complacent because ad agencies know this too and will come at you sideways - 2nd hand advertising is going to become a recognised thing. Advertisers reaching you and me through celebrities we respect, through hijacking friends or just through corrupting children.

Not to mention embedded advertising. Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?" Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple. Apple." Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealm…

Funny thing is, Apple doesn't pay a dime for product placement.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#88

Post by chflags » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:27 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #3

Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad. We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement. And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING. Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what adverti…

The big lie: www search, sharing photos on a www page, www-based chat, www-based email, etc. would all "disappear" if Google, Facebook and others cannot act as gateways/funnels into a medium -- the www/internet -- and sell ads on that medium, a medium which of course they do not own.

This is complete nonsense. If we remove the advertising, those companies might lose money, but the functions we as users perform over the www would most certainly continue.

More importantly, there might be some decentralization and movement toward an "edge-focused" medium more resembling the Internet's end-to-end roots. This would make the internetwork much more useful than the one dominated by middlemen monopolies like the one we have now.

The money to pay for ads does not come from selling ads. Ask yourself where it comes from. Those are the businesses that must endure.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#89

Post by 13thLetter » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

jwl wrote: post #57

13thLetter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much. I will guarantee you that ninety-five…

> If the ads were not intrusive and destructive, they wouldn't take the trouble to block them. Maybe if it had been like that from the beginning, but now, I see no turning back. Adblockers started as a thing for techies and while we may care about tracking, malware and whatnot, my grandma uses Adblock because she thinks it looks nicer and loads faster. Now that she has it, I don't think she or many other ordinary Int…

Agreed. Ad-blocking is a whole level above previous methods of skipping ads -- fast-forwarding during commercials, say -- because once you're blocking, it requires no effort to keep blocking and it does require effort to stop. People who block are advertising eyeballs that are pretty much gone permanently. Overcoming that inertia is a challenge I frankly wouldn't want to have on my plate.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#90

Post by chris_wot » Sun, Feb 21, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

CrystalGamma wrote: post #60

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it realizes that it wants to be our friends and doesn't feel right about only having befriended us only to sell us a product. Then there's an awkward moment where it confesses its original intent but that it has since realized the error of its ways. It's like a SciFi Romantic Comedy.

Hmm, interesting. Once I've written my current novella, that sounds like an interesting topic for the next one

Plot twist: we reject it and like a spurned lover it lashes out at humanity.