I don't use an adblocker but I am real close to doing so. Why? Because of the jerks who think it is okay to run a bunch of animated graphics, moving images, or videos. I am also not happy about the pervasive tracking of users.
Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#42The argument is pretty simple: if you destroy the advertising revenue that content depends on, we’ll end up in a cultural wasteland, or, worse, a culture plagued by advertising that masquerades as content. Isn't this true for things that are already paid for anyways? The car from Transformers seems to ring a bell. The argument that advertising kills content doesn't really hold its salt for me, if people are not willi…
Its not whether people are willing to pay for content, its can people really afford premium content? Ad-less content isn't very attractive when you have pay $99 per episode. Essentially advertisers have been subsidizing content for years and the question is can people really afford premium TV content and in what capacity? I'm not sure what the exact numbers are but its something to consider when thinking about the "…
I think that perhaps excessive salaries of some actors/actresses might die out. Digital distribution should be making things cheaper. Entertainment is already very expensive because people are willing to pay for it. It is made more expensive because of cable companies forcing you to bundle and pay for content you will not watch. It is not necessarily just ads that are subsidizing the content, but also other people who are paying for this content they are not viewing. I don't think ads are going to disappear any time soon, but I think that a lot of shows in the TV industry wouldn't make it without ads (and probably shouldn't make it anyways with so few people watching them).
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#43What is the point of advertisement? Capitalism is an interesting trick. It is an artificial game, which exploits people's selfishness to benefit the world. But selfishness doesn't usually work like that, so humans naturally try to find loopholes which would make them rich. Instead of spending money on improving their services & products, corporations find it more profitable to spend huge amounts of resources on paten…
What if you've built an amazing, revolutionary product but no one knows about it? You make it seem like the concept of advertising at it's core is inherently bad; it isn't.
If it were truly amazing, people would hear about it. Journalists would write about it, existing customers would tell all their friends, and you would notice more and more people using it.
With advertising, a revolutionary new product from a creator without an advertising budget can't compete with the established companies that have hundreds of millions to spend and drown out awareness of others. Think about political reality: It costs millions to hundreds of millions of advertising to run for office. What kind of politicians does that give us? And what chance does a fresh, clean and honest upstart have?
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#44I use ad-block. Ads are polluting my brain. I'm thinking of something while traveling on the bus and suddenly I catch myself reading some silly slogan on a board. Now it's stored somewhere and I might think about it later again. I never wanted to read that thing and feel like it has been forced upon me. How many hours of collective thinking power have been lost to ads processing ? Ads publishers treat us like a free…
I am torn how I feel about ads.
It seems that they work for web and app publishers, because it's a way to collect micropayments, while making people feel like they are not really paying anything. Instead of asking someone to micropay you $0.001, you ask them to waste brain cycles to tune out the ad + cause some increased chance that they'll overpay for a brand name later. This might end up being more expensive than the payment would have been.
I must admit I would behave the same way. If you gave me a way to pay $5 / month that would be split among the sites I visit based on the pageviews I generate, I probably would not do it. I wonder if there would a way for such a system to be set up, so that it could offer something more than just installing AdBlock would. I doubt it, but would be happy to be wrong.
It seems that ads are the only realistic way for this to work for publishers, while adding an unfortunate mental tax for everyone not savvy enough to install AdBlock. I hope one day we will come up with a solution.
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#45Talk about moving the measurement to create concession. Ads are a problem. Never have there been more advertisements. Not only do people have Billboards, TV ads, Radio Ads, and Newspaper ads like we've had in the 20th century (all of which are still pervasive and virtually unavoidable), But we're not talking about a problem in avoiding all of the new types of advertising only really initiated in this century. Perhaps…
I've always found it interesting that prior to us paying for services with our private data, we paid for it with our attention. All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space.
> All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space
Well I see harmful effects now. The word "consumers" for one. Children being manipulated for profits. Over-sexualization. Creating the idea that things will make you happy, and make this one of the most popular concepts in society. Dividing people through the message of "Individuality", even though that only really means buying things your neighbor wants.
> I've always found it interesting that prior to us paying for services with our private data, we paid for it with our attention.
And now we pay with both our private data, and our attention, as both are extremely related when you want to either control, convince, or confuse someone.
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always found it interesting that prior to us paying for services with our private data, we paid for it with our attention. All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space.
> All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space Well I see harmful effects now. The word "consumers" for one. Children being manipulated for profits. Over-sexualization. Creating the idea that things will make you happy, and make this one of the most popular concepts in society. Dividing people through the message of "Individuality", even thoug…
I agree that they're visible—I spoke too soon. I mean more psychologically that they have distance which means that we apply a lot of value discounting. Even if I know that funding all the things I enjoy via advertisement will eventually dehumanize me, I still get to enjoy them today.
Disincentivizing local consumer gain is, if I were to wage a wide bet, something society will need to figure out. Our current values are clearly aiming at it.
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#47Underlying the issue of attention and ethics is the fact that most ads are not benign static elements. They are accompanied by increasingly complex, increasingly opaque, increasingly ubiquitous, and increasingly intrusive forms of commercial (and therefore also government) surveillance.
Not to mention overt manipulation.
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#48I use an ad blocker. I used to use it without a filter list and would manually block any ad I found intrusive (e.g. Flash ads, ads that pick words out of the page content and highlight them, animated image ads), but then it simply became too much work. The tipping point for switching to filter list was spending two hours trying to figure out how to block YouTube video ads.
I want to support the sites I browse, but ad networks that host intrusive ads give all ads a bad name. Even worse are the irresponsible ad networks that allow advertisers to execute JavaScript, embed PDFs, embed Java applets, or even embed an entire iframe with a URL of the advertiser's choosing.
Re: Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
#49The author reflects how much we've all bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes things free. There is no free lunch, and there is no free web. In truth ads actually make things much more expensive, as I'll explain below. In addition most ads are fundamentally manipulative if not dishonest, and thereby undermine democracy and rational free markets. Advertising simply shifts the cost of the "fee lunch" to…
First, it's scaremongering to claim that ads may be regressive. Yes, maybe they are, or maybe the inverse is true, since plenty of advertising targets more affluent demographics while lowering the costs of the services displaying it.
Without more data, we can't know.
As for being more expensive, that's based on the idea that higher costs necessarily lead to higher prices, which is far from a constant truth outside of the world of spherical cows and perfect competition. In some sectors, it could make it harder for startups to compete, raising the rent that an incumbent may be able to extract from consumers as profits.
Besides, removing advertising would remove a vehicle but not the motivation, so it's to be expected that firms would continue to invest in ways of capturing customers, which may or may not be cheaper that advertising.
Empirically, the results seem mixed, with the removal of advertising both lowering as well as raising prices in different sectors of the economy, so the conclusions aren't obvious.
I dislike advertising and I work for a company that charges for its products, by the way.