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Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

research.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#71
post #42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, but some users would be happy to buy their way out of the "advertising experience" for a few cents.

What is people's data worth? 50 dollars per year? I guess most people would be willing to pay that amount in exchange for privacy.

People willing (and able) to pay $50/y for this have the unfortunate correlating characteristic of being far more valuable as advertising targets than the average person.

In other words: If you are willing to give me $50 for ad-free internet, that's going to cost you $100. And so on...

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#72
post #52
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This comes up regularly. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect micropayments. Not from the users who would pay them. All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them. I think it's still a worthwhile discussion. Presumably the micropayments have fewer (or at least different) unintended cons…

>All the enthusiasm for ads only comes from the people who want to show/sell them. Not from the users who would be subjected to viewing them. Yes, it does seem that way because nobody actually says, "Please please give ads because I love them!" Instead, the correct way to frame what users really want is to separate "stated preferences" from revealed preferences .[1] The stated preference, of course, is for users to c…

close - 'and' .. new user-interface and/or genuinely popular marketing campaign and/or new social drivers can change the dry desert of no-pay to the flowing streams of pay .. ads without consent are somewhat a mimic of broadcast tv/radio .. the future is evolving

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#73
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is people's data worth? 50 dollars per year? I guess most people would be willing to pay that amount in exchange for privacy.

People willing (and able) to pay $50/y for this have the unfortunate correlating characteristic of being far more valuable as advertising targets than the average person. In other words: If you are willing to give me $50 for ad-free internet, that's going to cost you $100. And so on...

The point is that these people will not be paying the ad networks; they will be paying the content creators ...

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#74

Companies like WP, NYT, and Ars should conduct similar analyses focused on their own sites to see if reducing the number of ads (or their size in pixels or bytes) results in more engagement, and ultimately a larger number of ad views.

There is absolutely no doubt that all those sites, and many others, are continuously running such experiments.

There are also new financing methods, paywall implementations, prices, cooperations, etc. being tested all the time, with some successes and many failures.

While people here and in general often seem to consider publishers to be rather stupid, I think there's enough evidence at this point to conclude that it has become a particularly difficult business, what with almost half of revenue almost instantly disappearing when classifieds move to the net, and people generally considering to appear out of thin air because the costs of copying are zero.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#75
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People willing (and able) to pay $50/y for this have the unfortunate correlating characteristic of being far more valuable as advertising targets than the average person. In other words: If you are willing to give me $50 for ad-free internet, that's going to cost you $100. And so on...

The point is that these people will not be paying the ad networks; they will be paying the content creators ...

And my point is that content creators will prefer to be paid more by advertisers, one you've proven you have money to spare.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#76
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that these people will not be paying the ad networks; they will be paying the content creators ...

And my point is that content creators will prefer to be paid more by advertisers, one you've proven you have money to spare.

Once you start paying content creators directly (with the condition that there are no ads and no tracking), then ad networks have nothing to do with the whole situation.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#77

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…

I've commented a similar question elsewhere, but what is a page view?

Is it an HTML request? It would need to be, otherwise sites will just spam AJAX requests in the background. But if we make it an HTML request, will that work with SPA architectures? If you paginate an article between 5 pages, is each of those a separate view? What if the page itself triggers a redirect or a refresh? Does that count?

Will this work for video/audio content? If I have two videos on the same page, will they get charged separately, or do I need another HTML request between them? Does the length of the video matter? What if I have auto-play on a playlist? Then as a site operator, I'm triggering the refresh and play myself, same as above, so does that count? If not, how do we allow users to autoplay a playlist of songs/videos while still paying the site?

How does this work for games? If someone leaves Cookie Clicker open for 15 hours, should that count as a single page view?

You can build different systems that tackle these problems differently. But that's exactly the problem. The problem with standardization is that you need a solution that works for everyone. Micropayments are interesting. I have my doubts about them, but they might be worth experimenting with. Building them directly into a browser is a bad idea.

If we're going to standardize anything, we should standardize the payments themselves. The biggest barrier to sites setting up their own micropayment systems is that web payments are still a horrible pain for both site operators and users. Web payments are insecure, come with prohibitive fees that make it difficult to collect that problem, and then allow the community to try out different payment models on its own until we understand the problem better.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#78
> adblocker | either AdBlock Plus (ABP) or uBlock Origin, the two most popular ad-blocking Firefox add-ons

Adblock Plus ("ABP") does not block a lot of ads by default, as ABP's "Acceptable ads" is opt-out -- i.e. it is enabled by default.

I wonder if this was taken into account, and if not surely this affected the result of measuring "the effect of ad blocking on user engagement with the web", as you can't categorize ABP's "acceptable ads" as "ad blocking".

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#79
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And my point is that content creators will prefer to be paid more by advertisers, one you've proven you have money to spare.

Once you start paying content creators directly (with the condition that there are no ads and no tracking), then ad networks have nothing to do with the whole situation.

matt4077 might be right actually; those who choose to pay to avoid ads are probably not broke and thus more valuable ad targets, so (some?) content creators will get greedy and double-dip by producing content steeped in product placements or equivalent. That, in turn, would undermine the idea and adoption by the willing-to-buy-out-ads segment would be low.

Re: Firefox: The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web [pdf]

#80

Mozilla should work on a micro-payment system that is inbuilt into the browser. Ultimately that is the only solution to a web that values user privacy and prevents the psychological toll of ads. 1. Obviously, the micro-payment system should not be selling my usage data to anyone. Perhaps some cryptographic techniques can be used to increase trust in the service. 2. The price for each page should be low - a cent or le…

People will just “pirate” the web. As for no ads, people who want that experience already get it for free. Given the incredibly low quality of most ad supported content, maybe the real solution is for much of it to die.
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