Ad-blocking: a sign that web publishers don’t care about readers

Everyone emphasizes the privacy/tracking reasons for ad blocking and mentions the annoyance/performance reasons in passing.

I think it's important to point out that, when you ask people they mention two other defenses of ad blocking:

1. They hate advertising in general. They would block it everywhere if they could. They know it's engineered to manipulate them, often with lifestyle advertising it's engineered to manipulate them into feeling worse and promising to sell them the cure, but it's always engineered to manipulate them in some way. The psychological techniques are very good, better to just block it than falsely assume you can be exposed and then will it into having no effect.

2. It's their computer so it will do whatever they want it to. Remove ads, remove other parts of your site, remix your site, redesign it, remove all your branding completely, etc. These are the more technical uses with a lot of plugins/userscripts but when you show it off to less technical users they want it too, although it's not available to them yet.

It has become a good litmus tests to see who mentions the problems with advertising in general and who sticks with the constructed narrative of "Is it OK to steal content to protect your private information?".

I agree, I would have expected Mozilla (even though I know they are ad supported) to not fail this particular test.

Sure, but as usual, anecdotal evidence isn't worth much[1]. I'm sure I can point you to traditional display ads that I've seen on the Web that are tasteful, useful, and unobtrusive. Does that obviate all the complaints people have about display ads overall? Of course not. Similarly, the amount of times I've heard a podcast say "this episode sponsored by blahblah, [explanation of blahblah]" doesn't erase the amount of examples I've seen of an article with a tiny "sponsored by X" at the top. And as is inevitable when financial pressure is great enough, you end up with even well-respected publishers resorting to stuff like this: http://adage.com/article/media/york-times-shrinks-labeling-n...

[1] I'm aware that you're explicitly providing a counter-example, so I'm not disagreeing with your comment. Just saying that it doesn't really address my point.

> The recent "golden age of television" has been attributed to the increasing volume of paid content

Interesting, really? Do you have a source referring to this? The only theory I've heard is that as Hollywood studios have become financially more conservative (cf the dominance of remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, etc relative to decades past), talent interested in taking risks has fled to television.

> Paid content on the web has been bad because there has been a glut of free content.

Right, and the glut of free content is facilitated by the incredibly low marginal cost of distribution. Buzzfeed has built their entire business on this: instead of "writers", they have "people with a spare ten minutes to Google a set of gifs"[1]. I don't see how this is a feature of the Internet that is going to disappear, especially since people have spoken loudly and clearly that, en masse, paid media will be ignored in favor of nominally free alternatives. Your book example is particularly useful in proving my point: those books that aren't encumbered by the monopoly power of copyright are freely available on Kindle or through Project Gutenberg. TL;DR: As long as there's a free alternative, people writ large won't pay, and as long

> I use an ad blocker because I'm not interested in participating in a system that is based around manipulation of people.

This is what bothers me about people who try to take the moral high ground about ad-blocking. How in God's name do you come to the conclusion that "not participating in a system" is anything but "not visiting those sites"? If you think Beats headphones are priced more for brand than quality[2], do you go "I refuse to participate in a system that overprices products based on fooling customers" and then merrily shoplift your way through their inventory?

[1] Side note: I love this site. http://buzzfeedminusgifs.tumblr.com/

[2] Note that I'm very uninterested whether people think Beats are fairly priced or not and don't have an opinion about it myself; I'm not an audiophile and was just parroting something I've heard a bunch of times for the purposes of constructing a hypothetical. Please don't respond to this comment arguing about Beats...

yes. it's all over the place.

On the web as well https://imgur.com/vU8sYyu

I can't find where I read the notion on paid content originally, but it makes sense to me. With 3 network channels and the goal of maximizing ad revenue, you need a lot of stuff that a lot of people will watch, which mean generally adequate, inoffensive, middlebrow programming. Places like HBO and Netflix, though, live and die based on whether people a) sign up to pay, and b) keep paying. That gives a strong incentive to create very compelling, high-quality shows that a narrower audience will definitely watch. (I think the invention of reality TV has also helped, in that it has drained off the fraction of the audience that is happy with low-end, cheap-to-produce programming.)

Regarding me using an ad-blocker: your use of physical theft as an analogy for viewing content is just embarrassing on Hacker News. You should know better.

The difference is that if I steal headphones, the store is deprived of the headphones. Whereas if I read an article without also paying to download and display their ads, they still have the article. If they would like to only show content and ads at the same time, there are technological fixes they could apply. If they do, I won't be working around them.

They presumably haven't because there is value to them in people reading and sharing their content whether or not ads are viewed. And also because the marginal cost of a view is so small that it's best expressed in scientific notation. Personally, I don't bother trying not to read their stuff because a) I am looking for opportunities to pay people who are willing (e.g., I pay the NYT), b) I hope it'll contribute to the signal to them that their ad-driven model is not sustainable, and c) I'm not the level of obsessive that is going to carefully decide which sites to visit because I might be costing large media companies epsilon cents until they get their acts together.