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A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

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Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#111

Post by zaroth »

My personal opinion is if the site wants to make it a requirement to view the ads, they can write the front-end and back-end code to enforce that.

Not requesting a particular asset over the network is probably not circumvention or exceeding authorized access. Accessing the APIs to retrieve content through an entirely alternate program, unfortunately, has been deemed circumvention and the site would have a case against anyone who tried it. Not that the court of public opinion would come down on their side, but the law certainly would.

I think in a world where using curl can get you charged and convicted, adblockers certainly stray dangerously close to exceeding authorized access under the CFAA. I don't think this is right, but I do think it's the reality we currently live in.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#112

Post by ender7 »

I don't think framing the issue as one of individual morals is very constructive. Here's how I tend to think about the future of web advertising:

1. The tracking data that the online advertising industry gathers is bad for users and will ultimately be bad for advertisers. It should go away. Doing so will require a combination of technical and political restrictions on the way that advertisers do business. Solely one or the other will not be sufficient.

2. Advertising is and will remain the lifeblood of the Internet. The past is littered with the calcified husks of arguments claiming that subscription plans or microtransactions are capable replacements for advertising revenue. If a majority of users install ad blockers, society as a whole will suffer as content creators are squeezed out of the market. Whether or not this is a moral behavior is not the point -- users with ad blockers are game-theoretic parasites that feed off this weakness in the system. Societies have traditionally addressed such weaknesses by classifying such behavior as undesirable, shameful, or immoral. The movement to classify ad blockers in this category has already begun: in the future, either ad blockers will attain a majority or plurality install base among users or this movement towards demonizing ad-blocking users will intensify.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#113

Post by calbear81 »

DSMan195276 wrote: post #83
jotux wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It would certainly hurt the content creator more. I think you could make the argument that you affect the content creator to a higher degree (larger percent of income) but I suspect you affect the ad company to a higher dollar amount. Nonetheless it's a negative for both.

The content creator gets paid by the ad company for showing you the ad, the ad company gets paid if you click on it. With that in mind, there is a net-positive outcome for the ad-company if users who aren't going to click on the ads use ad-block, because that means they don't have to pay the content creator for showing ads that nobody clicked on. They only miss possible profit if you're using ad-block but would have…

Not all ads are click based. You're thinking primarily of AdSense and a lot of retargeting ads but most ads are still bought on a CPM basis based on views. Yes, if a publisher consistently shows ads that have a low CTR (clickthrough rate), then the ad network should optimize out of displaying that ad on that site.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#115

Post by mirimir »

rosser wrote: post #79
vacri wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that your argument is ludicrous. "What, these people that have been promoting their stuff everywhere have advertising on their site?". It's not like it's unexpected. The idea that each website would have to get your consent to show you ads is outright silly. I don't have a problem with people using adblockers (I use NoScript myself, which has a similar effect), but let's not pretend that it's some kind of…

I'm not a party to the contract between the advertiser and the content provider. In principle, I don't necessarily even have an expectation that a given content provider uses advertising revenue to support the provision of their content — they may use a subscription-based revenue model, and offer some number of "free" page views per day/week/month/whatever, as a teaser to encourage new subscriptions. They may just ha…

As "AdblockingAndMorality" notes, ads are also potentially dangerous content. Let's say that you're a small business, and CryptoLocker nukes everything, including your backups. Would the content provider be liable? How about the ad distributor? Why shouldn't they, if you've been given no opportunity to opt out?

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#116

Post by billwilliams »

billwilliams wrote: post #85
billwilliams wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as long as we're all whining in one direction or the other, the average U.S. citizen still watches more than 25 hours of tv per week. So we're all just yelling into the ether of the tech-haves for the next 20 years while that number slowly drops.

To continue said yelling, a point that I haven't noticed mentioned on here yet - since when do consumers get to decide how much they pay for a service? Or how? If I want to sell you x for y - we don't live in a society where you get to decide what y is, or how to pay it. I think capitalism is dumb - therefore I won't pay in money but I will pay in labor I do for you. And you have no choice in the matter. I will take…

I like how much heat this topic on the hacker news. I wonder if its extra touchy given how much "hacker" culture overall developed with online advertising - the big tech successes often depending on sweet sweet ad money. Everybody likes react, hadoop, chrome, mozilla etc, but the truth is that a huge proportion of development on the web was due to ads. And this feels ugly to people. Hackers like to believe their beautiful meritocracy was independent of the advertising bureaucracy. The privileges of the tech elite were made by ads, but now that we're all here in this beautiful (and fully deserved) technological enlightenment, we think we're somehow above it.

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#117

Post by Potando »

trimbo wrote: post #98
calbear81 wrote: post #18

I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them" as the ad networks are simply a platform for which there are buyers of ads/eyeballs (advertisers) and sites/apps that display said advertising. It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code…

> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today Then how come, every time I pay for content, that content still has ads? The paywalled newspaper sites I frequent do this. Or, notice how they do this in every movie theater in America now -- you can't sit there in peace before a movie. Instead, before the trailers start, you're subjected to a barrage of loud ads. Even on th…

The newspaper used to cost $1 (each! every day!) and it was full of ads. Probably about as much percentage of area as a typical news site today.

There must be a balance between "no payment" and "no ads" - the optimum profit doesn't necessarily happen at one of the extremes. Do you think you'd choose a higher priced subscription if it offered no ads?

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#118

Post by Animats »

Is there anyone arguing that adblockers are immoral other than somebody on Twitter? In the US, the legal issue has been settled. Fox tried suing Dish Networks over their commercial-skipping feature. Fox lost.[1]

The main problem with ad blockers is that they're not very good technically. They're usually regular expression based and need too much information about the exact format of ad code, so they need constant updating. Some have deliberate holes. AdBlock Plus sells "block bypassing" to "good" advertisers. Ghostery blocks tracking but then does tracking itself. (If you use Ghostery, go to its preferences and opt out of "Ghostrank".) BlockSite became adware.

There's no money in the ad blocking business. Last year, the AdBlock Plus guy was trying to make money by selling hoodies. An automatic ad blocker with machine learning to adapt to new ads would be a nice open source project. You won't make any money, but you'll get lots of publicity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...

Re: A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

#120

Post by nl »

deciplex wrote: post #107
trimbo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today Then how come, every time I pay for content, that content still has ads? The paywalled newspaper sites I frequent do this. Or, notice how they do this in every movie theater in America now -- you can't sit there in peace before a movie. Instead, before the trailers start, you're subjected to a barrage of loud ads. Even on th…

It's a combination of "the ads subsidize the production of the content somewhat i.e. you aren't paying the full price" and "everyone is desensitized to ads now anyway so we might at well show them in every place we can possibly get away with it". FWIW I think it's mostly the latter (e: was thinking specifically of cinema when I wrote this - nl is right it depends on the medium).

It's actually mostly the former. Not sure about movie theatres but for example printed newspaper costs are usually not even covered by the price of the newspaper. The ads is where the money is.
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