101–110 of 156 posts
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.
The only evidence here is correlation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you intentionally unaware that they have been doing this ( C.f. webpayments API)? Or is this work going to be a complete surprise to you? I know https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Web_Payments only mentions 2017 but this stuff has been in play since 2015.
Web Payments doesn't address micropayments or actual payment authorization. It's just a standard way to collect and submit data.
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…
Yes for the sake of independent content creators please introduce such a system, Mozilla. People might run to Firefox, the first ad-less browser. Other vendors can adopt it later.
We're working on Brave Ads too, which will be an opt-in component of the browser which leverages client-side machine-learning to match ads, reduce fraud, and pay more to content creators. Further, Brave Ads will pay the user for their attention—as much as 70% of the ad revenue.
This study is great, follows years of evidence that the web runs on advertising, and that ad-blocking is becoming the new norm. Brave is looking at the horizon, and working on the long-term sustainability problem. Brave Rewards and Brave Ads is showing promise.
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 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're worried about poor people do something to increase their standard of living. Access to cat gifs is a lot priority when your the only drinking water you have is filled with lead.
Setting the cost of using a website by traffic makes about as much sense as deciding how much things in the super market cost by weight. A liter of water being 10 times as expensive as a 100g stake.
Websites and services should have the freedom of setting their prices to whatever they want. Just like how every other market works.
> 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.
- Active hours: Total time the user spent interacting with the browser - Session length: Total browser session time - Number of subsessions: Total Telemetry reports - Total tab open events: Number of tabs opened - Total URI count: Total number of pages loaded - Unique URI count: Number of unique websites (TLD+1) visited - Address bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the address bar - Search bar searches: Number of searches initiated from the dedicated search bar - Total Yahoo searches: Number of searches made using the Yahoo search engine - Total Google searches: Number of searches made using the Google search engine - Total searches: Total number of searches overall initiated from one of the Firefox search bars - Number of bookmarks: Total bookmarks added - Length of history: Total number of pages visited
So everyone with an adblocker had normal activity levels at the start (compared to the non-adblock-user they are 'matched' with by the propensity scoring), but after installation, then the adblocker people saw large increases in activity that their non-adblock counterparts, who were web browsing just as much before hand, did not experience.
This largely rules out the reverse causation of 'browsing -> adblock installation'. It could still be driven by people forecasting that they will be doing a lot of web browsing in the future and installing adblock before they begin doing all the extra browsing, but this feels a lot less plausible to me.
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…
This should be adopted by every browser maker for this to work. If we assume it is adopted then there is the issue that somewhere it is stored what sites I visited. It has to be, because it's needed if there is a payment dispute, for example. ("I was charged for that site, but I never visited it.")
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…
You might be describing the Brave browser and BAT tokens...
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is proving just as clearly that the more you use a web browser, the more likely it is that you will block ads. The only evidence here is correlation.
No. That's the point of using propensity matching in a longitudinal dataset. What this 'proves' is that 'when two new Firefox users who use a web browser an equal amount (as defined by a number of variables like time-in-browser or total-TLDs or total-URLs) are compared, one of whom installs adblock and one who does not, afterwards, the adblock user subsequently increases their web browser use compared to the non-adblock user'. As they put it:
> Restricting to new users who installed Firefox during a specific time period, we select a test group of users who installed an ad blocker, and a control group that did not. The selection is performed using a matching technique applied to baseline user features, which allows us to infer a degree of causality from the observed effects. We then compare test group Web usage after installing the ad blocker to control group usage over a comparable period, controlling for baseline usage levels. This is sometimes referred to as analysis of covariance, and is closely related to difference-in-difference analysis...This is achieved using matching. Each test group member is paired with a similar member of the control group, where similarity is determined based on features observed during the baseline period. This ensures that the groups start off “more or less the same”, e.g. that one group is not biased towards more engaged users...Taking into account the matching and adjustments made to ensure comparability between the groups, we find that installing an ad blocker does in fact have a strong effect on average Web engagement. Users who installed an ad blocker were active in the browser for around 28% more time on average, and loaded 15% more pages (URIs), controlling for baseline activity.
(Which of course still doesn't prove causation, because there is 1 remaining possibility: some third factor caused both the adblock installation and then later in time the increased web browsing. But it doesn't prove what you say it does.)
If you accept that advertising is necessary to some business models, I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. This would make them tougher to block and hinder users ability to control privacy, but it would also restrict tracking to that specific site.
>I hope to see publishers move ads back to the server because I think eliminating all the code from the client would drastically improve user experience. How so? it still needs to be downloaded to the browser, and integrated with the content the use actually wants to see.
If it was hosted by the same server that produces the content, then it would be harder though not impossible to block. It would also be harder to just mass block like you can at the moment. You would need to block for individual sites by targeting the div class name that they use.