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The Ad Blocking Wars

nytimes.com

111–120 of 236 posts

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#113
post #10

Why should others control my monitor? If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market. Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making th…

I agree. Their website is just a bitstream sent down the tube. How it's rendered is totally not their business. If I wanted to use Lynx to render everything in text or use that's my prerogative.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#115

My thought is that we should be replicating the "pull" based commerce process of the shopping mall but doing it electronically. So instead of bombarding people with stuff they don't want in a context that doesn't make sense - ads for products on the sidelines of other unrelated content - we build a platform where people can get as close to the in person shopping experience as possible from their home. Obviously there…

So... something like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ

It's scary just how much Minority Report has predicted has come true. It's almost like the movie gave advertisers a playbook.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#116
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all... That's a strange leap of logic. >Wikipedia Asks for donations, it doesn't show ads. There are many other websites that are internally funded in other ways that exclude direct ads.

And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally: 1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries…

I work in tech and I am not supported by ads. If you are in tech and are supported by ads, find a different line of work in tech.

If you work in tech the first thing you should do is take the moral argument and throw it out the window. Moral systems of obligation do not work well on the net. You run into one of two conditions quickly. The first is immoral operators/providers will push moral operators out of business (free services where you are spied on by unknown agents, but the spies pay for your usage, such as free email has been for years). Or, immoral users sharing other people's work for free. Some of them want to share everything freely. Other just want to share work that is difficult to find legally. Paid services don't work well because they quickly become fragmented leaving the user to buy Youtube Red, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc because each content producer wants to maximize their profits. Digital piracy succeeded because of its utility. There is low to no cost to the end user and the end product had more utility than the paid product. Pirated movies didn't have ads. They could be played on more players. They didn't have country content restrictions. DRM didn't randomly fail. They by definition are a product of a free market competing with other piracy groups.

Of course Hollywood has a huge amount of power and has the FBI as their lapdog to prevent their product from being infringed. The ad industry does not. You will see more of a push for them to push ad blocking as a type of legal infringement.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#117

If all ad methods hypothetically disappeared, what would be the alternatives for businesses to promote their services and goods?

Yellow pages? Somewhere you go search for the information you need, when you need it, with noone showing it down your throat. Examples are Amazon, Ebay, (ad-less) Google, ...

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#118
Most people probably would not install add blockers except that ad volume and lack of quality have reached the point where they make it difficult to browse the web. Installing an ad blocker is a necessary act of self defense.

In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion.

At some point enough is enough.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#119

Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content. Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content. One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place. I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer. The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which st…

By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all... I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.

Ummm... Wikipedia doesn't show ads and never will.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#120
post #30

I don't see this as an issue. I've been blocking ads on the web for over a dozen years and now somehow it's an issue? No, it's not. The publishers who can't make it in a world where people increasingly use ad blockers won't and the ones who figure out how to make it will. Economics 101. I've been waiting for this play to start for awhile--it's amusing--but I'm not really interested in reading about idiots who see thi…

"It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life."

Sure, if you live in a cave. TV and movies are saturated with product placements. Grocers receive fees to give products better placement in the store. And it's amazing how many placements happen in health care--drug company sales reps are just the start of it.

Ad blockers are going to be like applying pesticides to insects. Those that don't die are just going to breed offspring that are that much harder to kill.

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