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Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

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Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#141

Post by stegosaurus »

stegosaurus wrote: post #132

The producers of content that I view not being financially secure is a problem. I've read a lot of useful stuff over the years, and I really want the people who made that possible to thrive. I don't particularly care about whether they can buy flash cars, but I do care about them being able to live without stress and continue to do the things they love and are best at. As far as I'm concerned, the problem looks like…

To put it another way:

I'm not sure that the creation and dissemination of knowledge works well as a capitalistic business. I'm not sure that it leads to optimal outcomes WRT the dissemination of said material.

I don't know how we deal with the edge case of trading scarce resources like food and land for unlimited resources like data, but I don't think advertising is it.

When you think about it, it's really quite odd. The deal is that you can view this web page, if in the abstract you commit to buying some portion of a physical item or service from someone else later on.

To me, it feels a lot like an inefficient form of tax.

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#143

Post by CuriouslyC »

wiz21c wrote: post #12

I use adblocker. Now, the news sites I like say "sorry pal, adblocker means no news". I'm perfectly fine with that. It's just arms race. My freedom to remove the ads, their to put them. Everybody's free and I love it. Now I'll have to pay and that's fine : good content comes from work and work deserve money. But all of a sudden, as I'll pay, I'll become much more demanding. And so competition can work again...

Just get a browser plugin like quick javascript switcher and disable javascript for sites that try to disallow adblocker users. It has worked for me every time.

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#144

Post by tremon »

darpa_escapee wrote: post #134
tremon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are hurting a business by consuming content that costs them money to create and host without paying for it And if I chose not to consume their content, how much money would it save them?

That sounds like entitlement according to the OP's definition.

Maybe, but that wasn't my point. My point is that it's useless to have a discussion about the economic impact of individual "pirating" of website content because the discussion costs more than the piracy.

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#145

Post by pdkl95 »

rmc wrote: post #50
imgabe wrote: post #19

It would be interesting to see if someone could endow an independent publication with enough money to keep it going, then put quality ad-free journalism behind a paywall. I'm thinking it would be something like "B Corporation". Not exactly a charity, but not necessarily trying to maximize profit either. Charge a high monthly price, maybe $50/month for immediate access to new articles, but after 1 month everything bec…

The Guardian newspaper in the UK (y'know one of the newspapers Edward Snowden reached out to), are exactly that. Except you can read it for free online. You can consider signing up as a Guardian Member if you want to support them.

You should watch Jacob Appelbaum's comments[1] about The Guardian. They may not deserve your support.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJValv4YQcY#t=78

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#146

Post by bigmanwalter »

freehunter wrote: post #128
jamespo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the arguments about not letting in any refugees as some of them may commit a crime.

Once advertisements become sentient creatures and can be considered human, then they should be granted human rights. As it stands though, what you're doing is saying that refugees (who, I remind you, are humans) are basically worth as much as a banner ad on a website. It shouldn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway: blocking ads is not comparable to genocide. In any way. At all. Fucking disgusting.

The singularity is approaching! What a time to be alive :)

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#147

Post by GVIrish »

vijayr wrote: post #97
nulbyte wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you hit the nail on the head: greed. This was my tipping point. When sites got so greedy that they stopped caring if anyone read their content, I stopped caring if they got paid for obtrusive ads. Even Google has designed some horrendous ads, especially the Nexus ad that grabs swipes on mobile, keeping you from scrolling past it. If the ads stuck to the meatverse-equivalent style of static but attractive, I…

The problem with greed is that it only takes a handful of players to ruin it for everyone. There are still good sites providing quality content and monetizing it responsibly and decently with ads - they will also get hit by ad blockers, as most users would likely block all ads (and we can't blame them for it)

> The problem with greed is that it only takes a handful of players to ruin it for everyone.

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Bad actors in the advertising space rush to extract the most value out of internet ads by continually pushing the frontier of obnoxiousness. Because, 'hey if I don't do it, someone else will'. And much like the tragedy of the commons with overfishing, they have to keep increasing effort to make up for the decline in effectiveness as they 'overfish' internet users.

Even if you're an ethical advertiser you end up getting harmed by the unethical ones as wide swathes of people start using ad blockers, and the ones that don't are ad-blind anyway.

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#148

Post by lallysingh »

karterk wrote: post #5

For a very long time, I did not want to use ad blockers. I have used ads in the past to monetize some of my own projects, and I really did not want to stab the creators of quality content. However, last week I finally reversed my decision and started using ad blockers. Why? Frankly, many sites are just greedy. Banners were ugly enough (and I tolerated them) but many sites these days show ads that cover the content, a…

I don't use ad blockers, but I do just hit the 'back' button when I see a site that's ad-unreadable. I don't feel that I'm missing anything of quality this way.

I have a flash blocker on, which I think ends up doing 90% of what I would want an ad blocker for when combined with my 'back it up on bad ads' policy.

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#149

Post by FussyZeus »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #112
eli wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fair to call it "greed" if these sites aren't making much money, even with all the aggressive ad units? You need to have an extremely popular site with uncommonly low overhead to be very profitable just off of banner ads.

You do now. It was easier before the ad industry fell into the classic Tragedy of the Commons trap. "Reinvent your industry with this one weird old tip." Yes, it was greed, and yes, of course it led to a predictable outcome. The smart thing for the industry to do would be to create a code of practice and do a deal with the ad blockers to allow - not force - people to view ads that add value to their lives. Print publ…

Cannot up vote this hard enough. The attitude of ad purveyors to their consumers idles at neglect and ramps up to direct malice.

Re: Rise of Ad Blocking Is the Ad Industry's Fault, Says Outgoing FTC Commissioner

#150

Post by cpeterso »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #135

DNT was never going to work and the failure of the Do Not Call list should have made it obvious. No one ever thought people would willingly accept being tracked in the first place. I'm sure everyone who ever worked on an ad network felt a little yucky with what they were doing at some point and got over it real quick or quit, leaving an industry full of people who already rationalized that what they were doing was OK…

Perhaps DNT can be repurposed to bypass those EU cookie warnings by sending `DNT: 0` (Do Not Not Track).
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