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

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

#91

Post by NeedMoreTea » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #71

amelius wrote: 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...

That may be so in a world without ad blocking.

In the world we have, even with money to spare people will stop visiting a site in preference to enabling ads. Especially as ads get ever more intrusive and destructive of the experience while use of ad blocking continues to rise. It's not solely to get content for free, it's mostly because the ads got so damn irritating and so high a percentage of screen space and page weight. To that they ad a triple shot of tracking so they can trace you all over the web.

Too many intrusive adverts is why many get rid of cable and terrestrial TV, or only listen to BBC radio.

So do content creators prefer some money from those people, or none at all?

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

#92

Post by jonathansampson » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

TekMol wrote: post #69

I smell a Correlation-Is-not-Causation fallacy here.

Could you elaborate as to why you believe there is no causation here? Those who use ad-blockers do so for the explicit reason of making the web more tolerable; a more tolerable web is therefore more desirable to browse.

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

#93

Post by jonathansampson » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

downrightmike wrote: post #65

More people are voting with their wallets that online advertising is executed poorly and an annoyance to a threat vector for malware. More people need to stop the advertising from even coming down their wire. I'm happy with Pi-hole: https://pi-hole.net/

This is what we do with Brave (https://brave.com). We stop it from even touching the network; after all, much of the ads and trackers we download aren't benign. Many are aggressively trying to monitor our online activity at best, or infect us with malware at worst. Brave blocks these requests from taking place.

We offer the user an option instead to support online properties (websites, YouTube channels, Twitch streams, etc.) with pro-rata contributions of Attention Token (BAT). Brave stakes users with free BAT grants each month to prime the system.

Understanding that the web runs on advertisements, we're also working on an alternative advertising model wherein the user gives explicit consent to participate, matching happens on-device via machine learning, and revenues are shared with the end-user (as much as 70%).

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

#94

Post by amelius » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

kardos wrote: post #79

amelius wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In-content ads are regulated in many places. You can't do it unless you explicitly mention that it is an ad.

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

#95

Post by jonathansampson » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:16 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #46

Interesting, but I do want to know if a randomized study produces the same results. Users who use adblockers are much more likely to be power users. Mozilla does control for that by separating any add-on from adblockers, however. So maybe the finding is generally true. This is not very surprising if true, given the difference in experience across most websites when adblocking is on.

Brave is extending ad-blocking beyond the power-user domain, and into the general user base. We recently passed 4 million monthly active users, and 10 million Android downloads. With our built-in ad-blocking, the practice is becoming more ubiquitous among non-technical users. In fact, prior to Brave, ad-blockers had appeared on more than 600M devices. There's a clear and strong trend towards more and more blocking/privacy-by-default on the web.

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

#96

Post by jonathansampson » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

zzzcpan wrote: post #87

RestlessMind wrote: post #82

> We find that installing ad blocking extensions substantially increases both active time spent in the browser and the number of pages viewed. This empirical evidence supports the position of ad blocking supporters and refutes the claim that ad blocking will diminish user engagement with the Web. This gives me echos of "thrift paradox" - kind of behavior which is great for you as long as most of the other folks behav…

Small independent creators cannot rely on ads for income already and fund some other way. And so almost all of the websites, except for some thousands of top ones. But those can probably find a way to survive another way. Blocking ads may not actually affect anyone beyond online advertising corporations.

Content creators have been hurting for some time, and it doesn't just impact those who have seen diminished returns. Many have been unable to monetize their content at all (which we see quite often on YouTube, etc).

We built Brave Payments (now Brave Rewards) into the Brave browser to _re-monetize_ the web. Each month we give out BAT grants to our desktop users, which fund their favorite online properties (sites, streams, channels, etc).

Brave is also standing up an alternative ad-model which requires explicit user consent. If a user participates, ad-matching happens locally, on the user's device. This protects privacy, cuts out middle-men, reduces fraud, and more. Furthermore, the users are compensated for their attention (up to 70% of ad revenue), which adds to the sustainability of the web.

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

#97

Post by jonathansampson » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

jamesb93 wrote: post #83

I think I would just rather have advertisers barrage me and I'll continue to block them.

Something has to be done about the sustainability problem though, otherwise you'll have fewer and fewer sites to visit in the future.

Brave is working on an alternative digital advertising platform based on explicit user buy-in. If the user does not consent, the user does not see these third party ads and trackers.

As part of an incentive to get user consent, Brave's model pays the user for their attention (as much as 70% of ad revenue). After all, attention is a limited commodity, and you should get paid for yours.

In the Brave model, ads are matched locally, on the user's device via machine learning. This reduces complexity, thus reducing opportunity for fraud and abuse. As such, we expect to see more revenue for the content creators themselves (in addition to the users).

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

#98

Post by ppseafield » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #52

privong wrote: 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…

As for Spotify and Kindles, the service is not that different ad supported or not. That means any savings is a much better trade-off. Youtube used to be 100% free, and $9.99 doesn't get you too much more than what you get for free + ads. In fact you can install uBlock and never see adds on Youtube for free.

Most people don't actively want ads. Ads are just too big of a revenue stream for most for-profit companies to ignore. A benefit of the original TV cable subscription was not having ads (which drove initial adoption!), but then networks saw they could charge people for cable AND show them ads with little recourse for the customer, so they did.

Also the Spotify and Youtube examples you presented are strictly subscription vs. no subscription. There can be no consumer enthusiasm for an option on the web that doesn't exist! Micropayments would add a different option with different trade-offs.

These are older examples, but they still exist. When you buy a newspaper for example, your options are not only free vs. monthly/yearly subscription, as is currently the case in your examples. They can pay a small amount for a single issue. When you buy a phone card, you can pay a small(?) amount for single calls vs. having a dedicated phone line subscription.

More recently, when you have a Starbucks card, you can use it for small purchases instead of "subscribing" to Starbucks. It's easy to use and works with the apps and online ordering. It also avoids the massive fees that payment processors collect which usually make Currently the most similar system to a "micropayment support infrastructure" I can think of is Patreon, which some people do actually use to work on projects full time.

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

#99

Post by thomastjeffery » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

gwern wrote: post #68

> In the group that installed an ad blocker, we find significant increases in both active time spent in the browser (+28% over control) and the number of pages viewed (+15% over control), while seeing no change in the number of searches. I'm struck by the almost numerical identity of their adblock correlate on page views with the long-term causaleffect on total site traffic I estimated in my banner ad A/B test ( http…

It seems to me like this study is looking at the correlation of heavy usage and ad blocker usage, and jumping to the conclusion that blocking ads is a cause for using the web more, and not the other way around.

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

#100

Post by antt » Sun, Sep 30, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #70

camgunz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have serious reservations about making the web pay-to-play. Low-income people would suffer from this, here in the US but definitely elsewhere in poorer countries. It's essentially a regressive tax on the web. Furthermore, low-income people often run into barriers securing access to the kinds of payment systems micropayments would use (credit cards, etc.). It's also completely unregulated -- if you thought micropaym…

If you think clickbait is bad now, think about how bad it'll be when aggregate traffic percentages across the entire ISP are used to determine site revenue. And you'd need to do it that way, because mandating that an ISP must track every single website someone visits is a huge privacy problem that people like me would never support. But once you start doing aggregate stats instead of individual stats, you start to ru…

Or you just let websites price their content as they please. Like every other business does.

Your though experiment makes about as much sense as pricing groceries by weight. Buying 10L of water and one 100g stake. With your method pay the water company x100 as much because reasons.