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We’re dropping Google Ads

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Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#311

Post by [deleted] »

zipwitch wrote: post #164
eli wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is seriously doubting your legal right to block ads. > If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented. If the ad blocking becomes so widespread that the ad-supported model becomes unsustainable, I think a lot of people will be unhappy with what happens next. There will be a lot more paywalls and a lot more native advertising, which will be fine for entrenched players but much hard…

Do not underestimate the American corporation's ability to believe they have a right to a profitable business model. This is a nation where municipalities are regularly stopped from building their own broadband.

[deleted]

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#312

Post by jacquesm »

corford wrote: post #305
jacquesm wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 adverti…

>If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine. I really want this to be true but the elephant in the room is auditing. Without the ad network performing tracking, advertisers have no way to independently verify ad performance and corresponding payment to publishers for CPC ads. For CPA ads, the publisher has no way to independently verify the advertiser is payin…

They could audit the effectiveness by catching the clicks on a redirect. That way they can't track but will still know the number of visitors as a result of the campaign.

A 'sample audience' such as used in TV that would willingly be tracked could then be used to extrapolate impressions.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#314

Post by flashman »

matt4077 wrote: post #157
nebabyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even about the bits/bytes/data to me. My eyeballs are not being loaned to you; my senses/attention is not for sale. I'm perfectly fine with paywalls - that's the 'correct' approach as far as I'm concerned. You can decide to conceal the information you know; if it's valuable and nonexcludable (usually isn't), then hey, you have a sale. But if you don't, don't expect your deals with third parties to hold up on some…

> if it's valuable and nonexcludable (usually isn't)... That right there is the problem, though. You are right that most information is "non excludable" (if that actually is a word). But that doesn't mean it isn't valuable. That's an illusion, conceptually very much like clean water: almost free, but vital. The stuff the wire services collect and sell (and that everybody republishes) does cost quite a lot to produce,…

> Maybe the publishers do actually have a case for a new class of intellectual property protection.

No. They gambled that they could make money giving their content away for free with ads on it. They were never guaranteed an income that way, and to legislate one for them is a terrible way to proceed. We have a name for those people in Australia: rent-seekers.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#315

Post by davidgerard »

justabystander wrote: post #242

Ad networks regularly serve various forms of malware and spyware, as well as tracking beacons that put my data at risk of being stolen or misused. And once it's in a database somewhere, it's only a matter of time until it gets stolen and someone attempts to hijack accounts or steal an identity. It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity…

> It's funny how you never see the sites that whine about adblockers offer to accept legal responsibility for their complicity in the potential theft and property destruction served from their site.

yep. This is an effective way to get newspapers whining about ad blockers to shut up as well.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#316

Post by ferbivore »

harwoodleon wrote: post #250
ori_b wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My eyeballs are not being loaned to you; my senses/attention is not for sale. The sites need to pay for servers somehow. Experience has proven time and time again that putting up paywalls just makes people go elsewhere.

Moot argument. If everyone charged for their time creating content on the internet, you would buy the best quality content. Newspapers had this model for decades, worked for them.

Moot argument. It stopped working for them.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#317

Post by davidgerard »

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.

I didn't enter into an agreement to play Russian roulette with malware.

Are you accepting actual legal liability for malware served to me via ads on your site?

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#318

Post by corford »

jacquesm wrote: post #312
corford wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine. I really want this to be true but the elephant in the room is auditing. Without the ad network performing tracking, advertisers have no way to independently verify ad performance and corresponding payment to publishers for CPC ads. For CPA ads, the publisher has no way to independently verify the advertiser is payin…

They could audit the effectiveness by catching the clicks on a redirect. That way they can't track but will still know the number of visitors as a result of the campaign. A 'sample audience' such as used in TV that would willingly be tracked could then be used to extrapolate impressions.

The sample audience might work for CPC campaigns on large sites but difficult to see how it would work reliably for the millions of smaller sites out there (or work at all for CPA campaigns where conversion % can vary wildly depending on the action being paid for and the geography of the end user market being targetted).

I'd personally have zero problem with a strongly audited third party tracking me during transition from a publisher site to arrival (or checkout in the case of CPA) on an advertiser's site.

What I do object to is that same tracking info being used across every publisher and advertiser on the ad network (and tracking info persisting for months).

If there was an ad network that enforced a strict set of simple, inert advertising formats and ensured tracking was ephemeral and unique between each publisher/advertiser pair (and not capable of being used to parallel construct my browsing across the whole network), I'd happily accept the compromise. Doubly so if I knew the browsers held a nuclear option of "de-listing" the network in the event of bad behaviour.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#319

Post by mcintyre1994 »

mevile wrote: post #6

I always imagined that some website/mobile app/service would appear that would let you buy subscriptions for access to multiple publishers at once. I think people have a hard time spending $5 here a month $10 there a month, but would spend maybe $49 for a range of access to sites. I don't know why something like that hasn't taken off yet. You could pick the sites you want access to or they could do a pay out based on…

texture.com looks quite promising, they cover well known magazines (Time/New Yorker/Forbes etc.) I don't know anything else, I just heard them advertised on a podcast - US/Canada only for some reason so I can't check it out.

Re: We’re dropping Google Ads

#320

Post by hawski »

I had a bit silly idea about financing of web services.

Create beautiful, fast and very lean web serivce - "easy" part. It should be very lean - every page at most few hundred kB.

Serve the website with useless bytes at front. Example: page weights 100kB - add 500kB of garbage to it at front. You can place them in html or js comment. You can add useless EXIF data to jpegs. You could place small number in every HTTP header. Or you could add artificial latency to every request.

Then you sell those useless bytes or milliseconds. Your bytes could really be unicode glyphs. Example: a dollar for every byte per month. When a user leases a specific byte you can send it to him by an e-mail for increased silliness factor. He leased it, so it will not be sent to anyone else as long as he pays.

That way you can specify a ceiling of profits. 500kB at one dollar per kB can bring you at most $500k per month. It seems fair, a bit like Patreon targets.

I thought about doing a service this way. And even a platform - providing web server configs and plug-ins that would do all this selling of bytes process, also payment processor for bytes that would also run on the idea.

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