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Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

imlefthanded.com

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Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#101

Post by aukhfauwhf »

Apreche wrote: post #48

To answer the question posed by the site. How can they afford 261MB page load instead of 5MB? Because the largest expense of delivering video, the bandwidth, is still very cheap. We're talking less than one cent per gigabyte. Even if ad rates are really low, they're bringing in more than 1 cent per ad play.

> the bandwidth, is still very cheap.

This is yet another example of US/BayArea Privilege blindness.

It is NOT cheap in most places to the User. Including in the unprivileged-USA.

The user pays a lot for that bandwidth. Specially now that everyone will unknowingly move to predatory 5G home services but let me try to stay on topic.

People out of the Empire Center will pay both bandwidth and processing power. Where do you think all those old phones you trade in for the latest apple/Samsung ends up? Everyone is running phones that barely gets any security update anymore and is already slowed to the maximum by the OS itself. Trying to load and then display video ads is just evil.

And that is not web only, Apps are worse. If you install Apps, all of them are following the standard set by amazon, newegg, etc... you will get video ads along your usual usage. Ads in between search listings, ads in your cart! and you have to be much more technical to block those.

There's no escape paying the BayArea-cost.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#102

Post by TheIronMark »

reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #70
TheIronMark wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Why don't I get paid for my HN posts? Do I owe you for your reply? Do you owe me for this reply? You work out how we commoditize every interaction into tiny micropayments so MBAs are happy with our time allocations and let me know. Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.

> Why don't I get paid for my HN posts?

That's between you and HN and has nothing to do with my consumption of your comment.

> Ads were tried, and it's been an absolute fucking disaster.

No one likes ads, but expecting free content is silly.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#103

Post by gigel82 »

warner25 wrote: post #53
blakesterz wrote: post #2

In FireFox I have my ad blockers disabled in Private Mode so nothing is getting in the way if I'm testing or some site is being weird. Sometimes it's SHOCKINGLY different how a page looks with the blockers in place. I really can't believe anyone would user a browser without an ad blocker if they knew how things would look while using one. The web is a much better place with a blocker in place. (Yes, I know, we get a…

I run Firefox with uBlock Origin, and spend most of my time on pages like HN and other old-school forums that are mostly just text. My wife runs Chrome with all defaults and spends a lot more time in the mainstream web. Whenever she wants to show me something on her laptop, I think to myself, "how can she subject herself to this all day?!" For me, the experience in her browser is like being assaulted. She doesn't wan…

Sounds familiar. Installed uBlock on hers and whenever a website doesn't work for any reason I get an earfull about my "damn adblocker"... :)

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#104

Post by Workaccount2 »

onemoresoop wrote: post #81
idatum wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far does YouTube Premium go as far as privacy? I never took a look at it carefully. My fear is I would pay the fee for no ads, but Google would still collect data on what I view and monetize that by selling me ads somewhere else.

I suspect that since you're a paying user, a more valuable customer, they'd want to mine your data more thoroughly to derive more profits in other ways.

I would suspect the opposite, once you start paying you go from being a product to being a customer.

If youtube was 90% premium members, it would likely be an unrecognizably better platform, since users instead of advertisers would be the core profit center.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#105

Post by tzs »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #50

I stopped watching network TV in the 1990s when it reached about 25% ads (i.e. 7.5 minutes of ads in a 30 minute window. May have been only 7 minutes, memory is fuzzy now). The web was a relief. You could actually consume content and tune out the (then primitive, usually just a banner at the top) ads. The web, specifically un-adblocked Youtube, is now at about the same point as where I quit TV. Just not worth the agg…

We had a couple effective strategies to deal with ads on network TV when I was a kid. I've found they they still work today.

1. If I was watching alone I would have a book with me. When ads came on I'd read the book until the ad break ended. Nowadays instead of a book it is usually an iPad, and instead of reading during the break I might work on a crossword puzzle in the NYT Crossword app or do some chess puzzles at lichess.com.

2. If I was watching with other kids we could talk about the show. Heck, we were kids...it was hard to get us to not take about the show during the show. This also still works as an adult, with the only change being that the conversation is more sophisticated. E.g., kids might talk about how cool it was that Kirk made an improvised canon to shoot the Gorn, but adults might discuss the feasibility of actually making such a canon. (It probably isn't feasible BTW. Mythbusters tried it and could not get it to work using the resources available to Kirk).

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#106

Post by colordrops »

bambax wrote: post #94
skummetmaelk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It corrupts and twists everything it touches into a constant hustle for eyeball-cash This cannot be overstated. Everything today is a battle for eye-balls and ad money. The corruption is insane. You can't even buy appliances designed perform their function well. Instead you can buy cheap junk for less than cogs because they make money selling your data to ad companies instead of making money by making products that…

The funny part is I remember a time when even on HN the majority defended ads for a myriad of reasons, and one of those reasons was that people actually liked ads and wanted them. This line of reasoning has completely disappeared from the mainstream. I think that's a problem for the ad companies. They have not yet lost the war, but it seems they have lost the argument.

I remember this. "People want personalized information on products they are interested in. How else would they find out about them?" As if people would be at a loss buying a car or breakfast cereal or a pair of shoes without ads.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#107

Post by TheIronMark »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #72
TheIronMark wrote: post #46

No one likes ads, but the belief that you're owed content for free is absurd.

How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from. They'd pay for that. Instead we have the majority of content creators engaged in an arms race to hijack your attention and produce the most outrageous, rather than best, content possible because more outrage = more eyeballs = more ads.

> How about making content that people actually feel like they obtain value in their lives from.

Not believing the content has value does not actually give you the right to get it for free.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#108

Post by judge2020 »

hateful wrote: post #47
zuminator wrote: post #7

I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.

I ran ad blocking on Youtube for years, and I've been a Premium member since it came out (as Red back then). I can't stand ads and avoid them like the plague. Some ads still sneak into my world though. My current peeve is when going to a restaurant and they have "the game" on full blast. I'm perfectly fine with people watching/listening to the game - and half the time the restaurant is considered a "sports bar", so I…

Regarding this, sports bars in particular pay a pretty hefty fee to have public-view television service, especially regarding access to all pro-league games. I'm sure they'd be paying more in general if they opted to mute or turn off the screen during ads (since the network expects x% of the restaurant's viewers to see and hear the ad, so they get the advertiser to pay more for access to those viewers, subsidizing the restaurant's actual monthly bill).

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#109

Post by pea »

An interesting thought experiment is how feasible and expensive would it be to run a large-scale PR and marketing campaign to get that 25% of adblockers to 50%, and how would this disrupt the current hegemony.

If you were given the task "Remove $1BN of ad revenue. Here is $100M to spend.", how would you do it? I'd imagine it could be reasonably high leverage.

Re: Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web

#110

Post by xyst »

zuminator wrote: post #7

I've had YouTube Premium since its inception. Whenever I'm around someone else who puts on a free-tier version of YouTube its rather shocking how frequent and intrusive the commercial ads are.

instead of paying for premium and all of that money going to a megacorp. I spent some money on a simple browser plugin that forces YT to use the HTML5 video player.

Although every now and then an ad happens to pre-load before the video starts but I just refresh the video page and the ad goes away.

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