291–300 of 355 posts
The question that I always wonder is, is it really that devastating if people who don't want ads and wouldn't click on them hide them? I can't help but think that the kind of person that uses adblock-like software is also not likely to be the target group for most ads. It's only a tiny minority those who do click on ads after all.
Could be a good idea for Windows 10 - blocking all ads by default, including those delivered through browsers. It could seriously affect and even kill many current and potential Microsoft competitors like Google and Facebook.
I think we know what a post-ad (or "blocked") landscape looks like ... just look to NPR and boingboing. At NPR: major movies, product launches, etc., are framed as stories and are given decent editorial treatment. But it's just part of the PR Blitz package that the advertiser is taking out into the marketplace. There's a TV commercial, a magazine ad, a Charlie Rose booking, a Terry Gross segment ... and a pre-written…
"But wait, what about the moral dimension? The fact that if you block the ads, the sites lose their income?" What a ridiculous point. Sure the advertisers want to make this into a moral issue, but is it? No. It's not. Advertisers just feel entitled. They are not actually entitled to display their ads or make money. Even bringing up this point like it's a valid point for debate drags the quality of the article down. A…
Forget ethical questions, then, and let's talk economics. If you're not generating revenue for them, why should anybody who hopes to make money off of content choose to show you anything? What value do you represent to them? Why should they believe you?
Nobody is forcing them to use advertizing to support their work/site. If they're not making money, they should change their business model.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll take "your broken business model is not my problem" for 200 points. There are plenty of places that I can buy content that I'm interested in. I'd far rather pay for quality content than put up with ads all over the web. As a plus side, paid for content might fix the journalism crisis. The death of content farms is not going to be a huge loss to the web ecosystem. Anything useful enough that people are willing to…
No, that's a fucking cop out. Answer the question: why do you feel entitled to view the content that others have worked to create for free? Why should we not expect the same of you? Why should we not expect you to work for free?
Completely contradicts your claim of "for free".
How do I know it's worth my money before I try it? When I'm purchasing a car, I can take it off the lot for a test drive. In the 90's, video games had demos (and now that demos are rare, I almost never buy video games I haven't played at a friends' first). When I purchase food - I know what I'm paying for. I know what I'm getting. Many purchases I make "guarantee my money back if I'm not totally satisfied with the product or service".
When I purchase a journalistic article - I have no idea if the quality would be worth my money. I have no idea if it's going to be well written.
Nowadays most articles I read contain factual errors, stretches of the truth, extreme political slants, author biases, and general muckery of something I would not pay for. But I didn't know that it was something so bad I would use to wipe my ass instead of reading it until after I had already read it.
There are websites I use that are 100% free and donation-only supported. They not only meet but exceed their monthly donation goals consistently. These are sites where the users give a damn whether the server is still online next month or not. The website has been online for the past 5 years and there has never been financial troubles.
Perhaps instead of using an "ad-based" business model websites should use a "value-based" business model. Where, if the website is valuable enough to the users, the users will choose to sustain it out of their own desire to continue to use the site.
If your journalistic site doesn't offer any additional value to users. You sink - and nobody would care.
I wouldn't bat an eyelid if the entire Gawker media conglomerate crashed and burned and had to shut down. I wouldn't care at all - and you wouldn't see me donating money to keep it online - because they provide no value to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll take "your broken business model is not my problem" for 200 points. There are plenty of places that I can buy content that I'm interested in. I'd far rather pay for quality content than put up with ads all over the web. As a plus side, paid for content might fix the journalism crisis. The death of content farms is not going to be a huge loss to the web ecosystem. Anything useful enough that people are willing to…
No, that's a fucking cop out. Answer the question: why do you feel entitled to view the content that others have worked to create for free? Why should we not expect the same of you? Why should we not expect you to work for free?
At no point did you contract with me to require me to view ads. Your terms of service (which you didn't even require me to agree to) did not require that I don't block ads.
Your business model is based on the assumption that I will gladly view ads. I won't. Hundreds of millions of others won't. Your business model is broken. The market is clearly not supporting the amount of content that is available. Don't try to play the ethics card; the advertising industry is as sleazy as they come.
If your content is valuable enough, put up a paywall and people will pay for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Doing an end-run around ads is no different that sneaking into the backdoor of a venue without buying a ticket. This is a curious statement. Tickets are sold in limited quantities Venues have limited available space Those alone make the comparison completely moot. A better comparison would be: If I video tape (download) a tv show (website), and then watch it by fast-forwarding through commercials (ad-blocking) - hav…
I find it very curious indeed. In my browser on my hardware in my home, the marketing types are insisting that I MUST watch their ads or I am cheating. This is of course a natural impulse, for them. They put a lot of effort into creating manipulative words and images, and there I go ignoring them. Must be frustrating. But to claim I'm in the wrong is a species of hubris I don't subscribe to. When I buy the sunday new…
The thing about intrusive adverts in Web pages is the visual noise and the tracking of behaviour across sites. The latter will probably become regulated in some way as the legislative systems respond to the properties of this new medium. The former will prove self defeating ultimately - the more strident the intrusion, the more people will use whatever settings/programs they can to avoid it. I recently actually used a command line Web browser to read the text of an article - a few hundred words - because I could not actually see the text in Firefox because of the huge file load contained in the page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Doing an end-run around ads is no different that sneaking into the backdoor of a venue without buying a ticket. This is a curious statement. Tickets are sold in limited quantities Venues have limited available space Those alone make the comparison completely moot. A better comparison would be: If I video tape (download) a tv show (website), and then watch it by fast-forwarding through commercials (ad-blocking) - hav…
What if the venue isn't sold out that night?
My point being the value of a concert ticket is defined by scarcity for that performance. As there is no scarcity in digital content the situation put forward by the grandparent post isn't really a good analogy.