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Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

christianheilmann.com

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Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#31

Post by TillE »

nitrogen wrote: post #12
ankitoberoi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and a lot of very talented people would not be able to focus on doing what they currently do full time (and love to do) as they'll have to worry about making money. OR As a content consumer, you'll have to pay for the content directly which is currently available for free. Yes, I know everyone hates ads and I'll probably get downvoted here too but - You should punish publishers who serve malware, popups, JS & oth…

The web was great back when people wrote and published for the love. The web would undoubtedly survive a transition back to such a state.

And that's when hosting was much more expensive.

Patreon is another good example of how to survive if there are a decent number of people who genuinely like what you do. See Cara Ellison and Zoe Quinn, for example. It won't make you rich, but that's very much the point.

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#32

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Killswitch wrote: post #21
spindritf wrote: post #14

There are so many problems with ads that I cannot in good conscience offer any other advice than "block 'em all." • Ad networks can be, and are, used as a malware distribution vector. No one is vetting all the ads. Not the publishers, not the networks. • They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn'…

> They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it. Understandable, but um, if you didn't have those ads, you wouldn't have YouTube. Oh pay for it? Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody. Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to eve…

This is not true, sites did just fine before the advent of ads, and were actually useful. Some kinds of advertising online aren't even obnoxious, and that's fine too. For the obnoxious stuff? We can mostly do without. If we drive them to bankruptcy even faster with adblocking, all the better! ;-)

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#33

Post by csmithuk »

Can block, will block. I will advise people to block where possible as well. Why?

The Internet experience is universally shit when there are adverts. The 2% exception to the rule isn't a valid discussion point. Neither is the people delivering content and surrounding it with shit.

My children battling through adverts galore and pushing apps on them using dirty ad network tricks on their iPads is a fine example. Browsing on the devices is fucking horrible to the point they only want to use a desktop with an adblocker. Their school has adblockers. The local library has adblockers. Everyone I know has adblockers.

The model is over. No turd polish or new strategy will help. Advertisers ruined it.

I'd rather go back to gopher and dialups than saw a new paradigm appear.

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#34

Post by musicalentropy »

Is there seriously a business right here which works thanks to ads ? I mean, do you really know people clicking on these ads ? For me, everything here is just working because people want to pay you so you put ads on your website... But this money, at the end, does not come from money generated from ads, but from... business angels and VCs money !

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#35

Post by mariusz79 »

Killswitch wrote: post #21
spindritf wrote: post #14

There are so many problems with ads that I cannot in good conscience offer any other advice than "block 'em all." • Ad networks can be, and are, used as a malware distribution vector. No one is vetting all the ads. Not the publishers, not the networks. • They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn'…

> They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it. Understandable, but um, if you didn't have those ads, you wouldn't have YouTube. Oh pay for it? Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody. Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to eve…

>Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody.

what a great way to get rid of all that junk!

>Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.

And that's bad because?

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#36

Post by falcolas »

weland wrote: post #30
Killswitch wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it. Understandable, but um, if you didn't have those ads, you wouldn't have YouTube. Oh pay for it? Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody. Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to eve…

> Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly. I, for one, would be happy to. I'd honestly pay a monthly fee to watch Youtube. I don't use it only for cat videos, I also use it to find new music from artists I've never heard of, watch recordings of concerts I've been to just to relive the moments and so on. If Youtube would let me pay to make those ads go away, I'd do so without…

Agreed. Since I'm given the option, I pay $5 a month to support a caster on Twitch sans ads, and I can certainly see paying some amount up to $10 a month to watch YouTube without ads.

However, I'm not given the choice, which just seems silly to me.

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#37

Post by chaz »

austenallred wrote: post #24

So many comments on this thread parrot the notion that people will just pay for the things that they love, but the math there rarely, if ever, ads up. The fact of the matter is that outside a few exceptions advertising makes more money than charging to use a product or relying on donations. And revenue is necessary not only for servers, but for man hours and ability of the creators to concentrate. No one can pretend…

> It's also easy to say that "No one clicks on ads" or "I never click on ads."

I would add that the majority of ads in the world are brand advertising -- driving awareness and consideration and not targeting a direct response. If you're planning to watch the Super Bowl today, the Olympics later today, or just about any pro/college sport, it's been largely paid for by ads. Not to mention just about any TV show, news program, newspaper, or magazine. No one immediately runs out to Target when they see a detergent ad, but next time they're in Target or shopping at Amazon (and after receiving many more impressions), the familiarity grants it extra consideration.

Most people are familiar with keyword ads, but not as much with brand ads. There's no need to click -- advertisers pay for impressions, and sites get paid for impressions. A little less than half of Internet ads is from brand/display advertising -- about $22bn in the US alone. But globally there are hundreds of billions more from TV, radio, print, and outdoor that could potentially shift online.

http://www.itamarnovick.com/why-facebook-would-be-worth-200b...

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#38

Post by bliker »

Killswitch wrote: post #21
spindritf wrote: post #14

There are so many problems with ads that I cannot in good conscience offer any other advice than "block 'em all." • Ad networks can be, and are, used as a malware distribution vector. No one is vetting all the ads. Not the publishers, not the networks. • They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn'…

> They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it. Understandable, but um, if you didn't have those ads, you wouldn't have YouTube. Oh pay for it? Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody. Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to eve…

> Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.

Hacker News, Github, Dribbble ... I disagree

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#39

Post by polemic »

I don't agree with the conclusion that adblocking is leading to Upworthy style pap articles... Those are engineered for a social media world, to cut through short timelines and attention spans. The ad content is largely unchanged from any other low quality media source. Just like all the low quality how-to pages that were/are churned out to catch long-tail searches when that was the easier meat.

In a few years trends will change, habits will change, and a new paradigm will emerge to attract eyeballs. But here's the thing: the content stratification feared in this post has long since happened. It's the reality of the web, has been for some time, and it's certainly not killing anything that hasn't had the bejeezes kicked out of it by other forces already.

Re: Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer

#40

Post by fotbr »

randomflavor wrote: post #7

So you adblockers who think the internet should go back to 1994, never use Google? I think the article is spot on. Advertising does and has always supported media distribution technologies since we had media distribution. Today that technology is the web and mobile web, and it is a distributed technology. Either micropaymetns with a bitcoin like tech will be embedded in the browser for you to be ad free, or view ads…

With the way Google has been acting over the last, oh, 5 years or so? Yeah, I try to avoid google for the most part.

I'm firmly in the camp of "You (the server) provide the content. I (my computer) decide which pieces of that content to display. You get no say in what my computer does or does not do." So yes, I block ads. I block javascript. I block flash. I override your CSS. I pick and choose which elements to display. I'm perfectly fine with doing without your content if you make it too inconvenient, because 99% of the time, I don't really need that content anyway, and the other 1%, well, the same content can be found elsewhere.

The the thing that younger people do not understand: I've lived in a pre-internet, pre-cellphone, and for the most part, a pre-personal-computer, world. I know what it's like. I know it's not the end of the world to go back to that. As a result, there's a lot of stuff I'm not willing to put up with.

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