We’re dropping Google Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#291

Post by kome » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:03 AM UTC

chrissnell wrote: post #123

phantom_oracle wrote: post #12

For smaller websites (also referred to the democratization of the internet), I am sure many people may (or have) feel (felt) guilty for using an ad-blocker. Then you see all those shitty ads for: - finding a russian bride - getting rich through some millionaires secret - anti-aging remedies - adware and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is los…

What infuriates me is that I've paid for subscriptions to online editions of newspapers like the New York Times and still--even though I am a paid subscriber--they show me ads. It's obscene. How much do I have to pay not to get pestered? I have no idea because that's not even an option. I won't pay a cent for any site that shows me ads on a paid subscription. In fact, I'll go out of my way to cancel the subscription…

Use adblocks and stop paying until they understand.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#292

Post by dingaling » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:03 AM UTC

HillaryBriss wrote: post #151

Crito wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, my dad used to rip the advertisements out of magazines as soon as they came in the mail. That's a practice I've carried on, despite getting far few magazines these days... My family also used to mute the advertisements on TV, though I don't think any of us still watch it. So when I see people claiming that adblockers are immoral, it always gives me a good chuckle. Is ripping the ads out of a magazin…

> my dad used to rip the advertisements out of magazines sheezus. didn't that take a shitload of time and effort? i can't believe how many ads magazines have. they're all over everything.

> didn't that take a shitload of time and effort?

Not really, back when I received the paper copy of the Economist it took me about a minute after receiving it on a Saturday morning to flip through and rip-out the double-sided ad pages. Also gave me an idea of the main stories in the issue.

Put a 30cm ruler on the page near the binding, grab top, pull. Well worth it for making the magazine thinner, easier to fold into my back pocket, and more readable on the bus. Just turn the page and continue reading, no interruptions.

One time there I remove so many pages ( 20? a lot anyway ) that I actually spent money on postage and sent them back to the Editor with the suggestion that he spend his time reading them for me and provide a summary.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#293

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:04 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #227

Dylan16807 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A user with an ad blocker normally uses less bandwidth. Should they download the ad and pretend to display it? Then the site still gets the impression and everybody wins.

A user with an ad blocker normally uses less bandwidth The user uses less of her own bandwidth, but not the publisher's. Ads are served from third-party networks, not the publisher's servers.

That's easy to solve by the publisher: serve up the ads directly, ad blocking problem goes away. And that's exactly how this will end.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#294

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:05 AM UTC

zoul wrote: post #162

dheera wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read newspapers without looking at the ads. I use highways and public transportation without looking at the billboards. I don't see how it's any different. I would say it should be arguably illegal to resell content with ads removed, but how something is rendered in my brain or inside the confines of my home is upto me to decide. There's nothing illegal about ripping out the ad pages before reading a magazine at ho…

There is a big difference between print and web: by the time you rip the ads out of the newspaper you have already made it to the ad statistics (“our newspaper sells X copies daily”). On the other hand, with an ad blocker an ad load is never recorded. In the first case, the publisher still makes money, in the second he doesn’t.

Along with several other factors, this is what makes advertising online more valuable, as far as I can tell. Online ads can be far better quantified, in terms of impact, can appeal more to their target audience, can more easily provide a service alongside their advertising content, etc. Advertisers were given a magic wand, but decided to break it over their collective knee and carrying on waving their empty hands about instead.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#295

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:08 AM UTC

dingaling wrote: post #292

HillaryBriss wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my dad used to rip the advertisements out of magazines sheezus. didn't that take a shitload of time and effort? i can't believe how many ads magazines have. they're all over everything.

> didn't that take a shitload of time and effort? Not really, back when I received the paper copy of the Economist it took me about a minute after receiving it on a Saturday morning to flip through and rip-out the double-sided ad pages. Also gave me an idea of the main stories in the issue. Put a 30cm ruler on the page near the binding, grab top, pull. Well worth it for making the magazine thinner, easier to fold int…

Did you remove less than 50% of the paper? I guess the equivalent to online publishers' attempts to prevent ad-blocking would be simply to stop printing adverts on both sides of a page. Presumably, publishers had no incentive to do that because, as far as they were concerned, they still got paid for the adverts. And the number of people ripping ads out of magazines must be a tiny percentage, of course.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#296

Post by chongli » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:10 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #293

chongli wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A user with an ad blocker normally uses less bandwidth The user uses less of her own bandwidth, but not the publisher's. Ads are served from third-party networks, not the publisher's servers.

That's easy to solve by the publisher: serve up the ads directly, ad blocking problem goes away. And that's exactly how this will end.

There are other comments (including one by me) discussing this. I'm totally fine with it. Others have said that most advertisers won't pay for these ads due to an inability to audit and track users.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#297

Post by wpietri » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:11 AM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #172

mc32 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the situation has devolved into a kind of arms race where content providers need to recover costs via advertising more aggressively because more people are "skipping"/blocking the ads. Those "more people" include me because some of it has become unbearable as well as malicious. That said, I do maintain that a site owner has the right to try to extract revenue from their enterprise and to a degree as vis…

I tend to think framing in terms of (legal or moral) rights isn't the best argument. The debate needs to be about utility and interests. People seem to think they exist in a vacuum. But now everyone is using ad blockers, and the dynamics have devolved to resemble the Greek tax system: "I'm not paying those taxes, they are too high" -> "We're not getting enough revenue, need to lower costs" -> "Why should I pay for th…

> Adtech needs a quality revolution

Sure, but it has needed one for circa 20 years. And quality has continuously declined over that time. To me, that indicates that generally the next increment of profit gain is not in making things slightly better, but slightly worse.

It seems like a classic tragedy of the commons to me. But good management of a commons requires people perceiving and acting on a common interest with a long-term focus. That's an attitude so far removed from what I see of the culture of advertising and adtech that I expect we'll need a major disaster to change that.

> Users need to welcome such experiments with a modicum of goodwill and good faith

That sounds like a reach to me. In a financial sense, and I think perhaps also in the casual sense, goodwill is what you get when you've spent a long time working hard to make sure your customers like you. For the whole of the consumer internet, advertisers and adtech have been pushing the line of what people will put up with. With the possible exception of search advertising, I think internet ads have earned enormous negative goodwill.

If publishers and advertisers want new experiments to be evaluated separate from the last 20 years of history, I think they're going to have either a) spend a long time undoing the damage, or b) find some way to declare brand bankruptcy for the whole notion of advertising.

And even if they try, I'm not sure how well it will work. The point of the sort of ads that publishers run is to distract you from what you're trying to read and manipulate you into buying whatever the advertiser wants you to buy, without regard to the actual utility or quality of the thing purchased. No matter how much you experiment, there will be a moral conflict at the root of advertising. New tech won't fix that.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#298

Post by eli » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:12 AM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #148

eli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the notable exception of AdBlock Plus (which has its own problems) the big ad block plugins tend to be philosophically opposed to all ads of any type, quality or quantity. This is a bummer for sites like ours where the ads are sold directly to advertisers (no network) and are relevant to the audience and subject matter.

If you are already directly selling the ads, why not host them on your own domain? Then they won't be blocked automatically. If you still see people going out of their way to add site-specific rules to their ad blocker, the ads probably weren't as relevant or unintrusive as you thought.

It wouldn't work for very long. If you're site is even moderately popular, the self hosted ads will be blocked by a specific rule.

There also aren't any good self hosted ad servers, among other reasons. .

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#299

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:13 AM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #46

dheera wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My attitude toward ad blockers was always "meh". I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish. Using an ad blocker is just modifying the rendering algorithm, much the same way as I could use a French to Russian translator, something that increases font sizes, or throwing on a custom stylesheet. I can write my own web browser, if I wish. Some percentage of users will use ad blockers, and businesses sh…

> I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish. Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't. By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement. Doesn't feel right to me.

> Legally I have no idea.

Duly noted.

> But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't.

That has to be a first: arguing for the morality of the advertising eco system. I've seen quite a bit of it from the inside and let's just say that if there is an argument for morality it lies with the consumers, emphatically not with publishers (who have conditioned their audience first that everything should be free) or with advertisers (and that's even before we get into the content of the ads, see TFA).

> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.

That sounds like a legal argument to me, about which you earlier said you have no idea. Let me summarize my answer: you're wrong. By visiting a site you do not 'enter into an agreement to exchange your adviews for content'.

> Doesn't feel right to me.

That's ok, you are entitled to your own feelings.

So you don't get to install an adblocker. Have fun with spyware, malware and being tracked from here to kingdom come.

If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#300

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 10:18 AM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #174

MaulingMonkey wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement No. By replying to my browser, they're entering into an agreement to not waste my time, and give me lots of money. Oh, not that either? Hmm. Several sites detect that I'm using a malware blocker. I make no effort to obfuscate this. Some websites will ask me to turn it off, others will block me if I do not. That's fine - I've no obligation to them, they have no…

You can't block ads in Facebook's native mobile app. Their communications are probably encrypted and their ads are probably served on the same connection as everything else. Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course). The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modif…

> The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modify its behavior, which will be copyright infringement.

It wouldn't be. You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer, you just don't have the right to redistribute all of those bits.

Copyright is about distribution, not about modification (well, it is in part, such a modified work would be classed as a 'derived work' and that is why you can't redistribute it, just like you can't redistribute the original).

> courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.

That's utterly wrong. Copyright infringement is about distributing content, not about forced consumption of content that was freely given to you by the rights holders or their agents and associates (the ad networks).

And rights holders have plenty of options here:

  - sell ads directly rather than through networks
    (and serve them up from the same server)

  - charge for their content

  - deny you access if you use an adblocker

No court will ever rule this as copyright infringement.