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The Ad Blocking Wars

nytimes.com

141–150 of 236 posts

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#141
post #132

Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of ad content will be detected as ads.

The real sins, the true annoyances and the routes for malware, come from ads brought in from off-site. Ad copy served directly from the domain to which you've gone are rarely a problem. But when that domain sublets part of their page to an agency, which in turn sells exposures to anybody including malware vendors, then you need to block. Your innocent visit to wanteddomain.com ends up with literally hundreds of scripts and images pulled in from tens of unrelated domains. So an ad-blocker needs only to block cross-domain calls to be effective _without affecting display of ads from the source domain at all_.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm... Wikipedia doesn't show ads and never will.

Thats incorrect. Wikipedia sometimes shows ads asking for donations. Just because its a 'internal' ad means nothing.

Oh come on off it. That's a totally different thing, and it only ever happens once a year. It's perfectly reasonable, and they don't use content trackers, or anything else that's nasty. It's ridiculous to say otherwise.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#144
post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

re: content There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation. Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question. One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content". If the interne…

"Today, if an internet subscriber seeks 'content' she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone."

If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s.

Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...

That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#145

Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content. Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content. One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place. I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer. The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which st…

By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all... I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.

The New York Times exists first as a print publication. Wikipedia has never shown commercial ads. HN doesn't show normal blockable ads. Reddit is replaceable. Xkcd doesn't show ads.

Really, I think those work better as examples of how little value advertising actually brings to the Internet.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#146
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally: 1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries…

I work in tech and I am not supported by ads. If you are in tech and are supported by ads, find a different line of work in tech. If you work in tech the first thing you should do is take the moral argument and throw it out the window. Moral systems of obligation do not work well on the net. You run into one of two conditions quickly. The first is immoral operators/providers will push moral operators out of business…

If you don't mind my asking, what industry are you in? It is very hard in the modern economy to find things not supported or at least augmented by advertising (or at least marketing).

I'm a touch reminded of the Lloyd Dobbler buy/sell/process monologue from "Say Anything".

Full disclosure I we work in ads...

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#147

If all ad methods hypothetically disappeared, what would be the alternatives for businesses to promote their services and goods?

Funny you should ask.... If I'm looking for something to buy: 1. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid reviews. This quite often means not giving much credence to review mills -- CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly lesser extent. 2. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google M…

Many (maybe most?) ads are not looking for an immediate conversion. They are looking for long term impacts. Its why lifestyle programs like Top Gear are so valuable.

Half the ads I see on the internet are for pickup trucks, something I'm clearly not going to click through & buy.

Interestingly enough, I did buy a truck I don't need recently...

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#148
post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

[deleted]

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#149
post #132

Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of ad content will be detected as ads.

Even if the ad is served by the service host, ad blockers can leverage machine learning or similar techniques to distinguish ads from content. I think the next step is that ads merge with content: so-called "native ads," submarine ads, etc. that are the content.

Re: The Ad Blocking Wars

#150
post #14

Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice. Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps). Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay…

Subscriptions lock out people without credit cards (children, less affluent) from the Internet. This makes me sad.
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