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The Ad Blocking Wars

nytimes.com

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Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#121

Post by dredmorbius »

noodlio wrote: post #102

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

Funny you should ask....

If I'm looking for something to buy:

1. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid reviews. This quite often means not giving much credence to review mills -- CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly lesser extent.

2. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) are often what I use when seeking a specific option locally. I suspect thes are underappreciated.

3. Classifieds systems. There's a reason Craigslist took off like it did, though its quality/relevance have been lagging for some time. It's still ground zero for housing ads.

High quality recommendations mean a lot. I happened to be reading a blog through one of my rare unfiltered browsers, and realised it included book recommendations on the sidebar, for which the blog editor was highly qualified to offer assessments and endorsements. The state of advertising is so bad that I had missed these previously. The blog would be better off putting those recommendations into posts or other content less likely to be filtered. First time in quite literally years that I'd had the least sense of missing something.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#122

Post by melted »

newman314 wrote: post #112
melted wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, people skilled in their art prefer to not work for free.

Are you implying that advertising is a skilled art that we should pay for?

No, I'm implying that one way or another developers need to be paid for what they do if you want them to continue to write apps. I pay them directly because I don't like ads. Others choose free versions of apps to pay indirectly by subjecting themselves to ads. If I had a mechanism to pay publishers directly with a reasonable flat fee, I'd do that as well.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#123

Post by clouddrover »

matt4077 wrote: post #70
kazinator wrote: post #50

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.

The most of the content and value of sites like Wikipedia, Hacker News, and Reddit is generated by the users. I'd be interested to know the relationship between contributors and ad block use. If it turns out that a high percentage of contributing users make use of an ad blocker, then isn't that fair enough? Why should a contributor "pay" twice?

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#124

Post by nitwit005 »

noodlio wrote: post #102

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

Imagine two models for a moment. In one, everyone is free to advertise, and in the other, no marketing of any kind is possible (magically enforced somehow).

What's the difference between those two? Competing companies will occasionally edge ahead with clever ads, but in general they just cancel one another out. Having marketing exist isn't a "win" for companies, unless they have no serious competitors, because their competitors also have them.

One difference, perhaps, is that consumers probably get worse products due to ads existing. Ads create an additional path business success, even with lower product quality.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#125

Post by dredmorbius »

ubernostrum wrote: post #107
0942v8653 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of cross-site tracking makes the ads far less targeted, losing a good bit of the amount advertisers will pay for ads. Additionally, advertisers don't trust the logs of the site publishing the ads in the way they trust Google, further reducing the ad price. And adblockers already support hiding specific elements of the page, even if they don't involve making an HTTP request to a designated advertising domain.…

Ironically, Mozilla solved this in a privacy-respecting way, and the internet went apeshit over it and demanded its removal from the browser. That whole "sponsored tiles" thing was actually incredibly thoughtfully designed: * Third parties provide tiles to Mozilla, who gets to vet them, etc. * Tiles get put into bundles hosted by Mozilla and carrying metadata which can be used to target. * The browser periodically do…

Interesting, and thanks for posting that here.

This points to a deeper problem, one not trivially solved via technology, of credibility. There've been several instances of technical solutions to problems for which I had a great deal of initial skepticism, some warranted, some less so.

I was aware of both wireless networking and VOIP in the late 1990s, though neither broke through to mainstream for some years. Trust in the integrity of the underlying protocols being a chief concern (not entirely unwarranted).

Challenge-response email anti-spam systems have a similar problem -- your CR system may be entirely legit, but other peoples' might well be spam-harvesting engines or otherwise bogus.

Sponsored tiles requires a great deal of buy-in before it can gain mainstream acceptance.

If there's a good description of the whole thing, might make for a good HN submission.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#126

Post by tracker1 »

seanwilson wrote: post #101
colmvp wrote: post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar t…

Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#127

Post by michaelbuckbee »

melted wrote: post #37
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, one of the big moves that AdBlockers are prompting is a push to more social advertising and in app advertising as it's blocked so much less.

None of the apps I have on my phone have ads in them. And before you ask, no I don't have FB or any of the other "social" apps. I prefer to spend a buck or two to not see the ads.

I'm with you, but the general market for mobile apps has spoken and most consumers are much more willing to use a "free" app packed to the gills with interstitial advertising (aka an ad before every round) than to pay even $1.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#128

Post by WmyEE0UsWAwC2i »

seanwilson wrote: post #101
colmvp wrote: post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar t…

Are you doing peer reviewed reproductible research, with both open source code and data and tyying to disprobe your hypothesis?

Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0].

I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes.

Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter:

   "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Attrib. Richard Feynman (|p|
The fact that "[you] can't see how it would influence [you] much" is one of the features of biases.

Regards

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#129

Post by tracker1 »

bunderbunder wrote: post #68
kazinator wrote: post #50

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…

Sometimes I do go for the content. Oftentimes this is only to be unable to access it because all the ads bring my browser to its knees, or even crash it. Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem. Instead I use an adbloc…

Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#130

Post by Estragon »

seanwilson wrote: post #101
colmvp wrote: post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar t…

> How much are you really worried by this?

It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...

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