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The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

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Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#21

Post by markbnj »

reasonishy wrote: post #17
bediger4000 wrote: post #5

How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't. Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config. The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control…

OK, so the equivalent would be this: I buy magazines from the wholesaler. I rip out all the adverts. I then sell them to the public. I'm acting as a lovely "ad-blocker" for magazines. Is what I'm doing legal or ethical? Another argument would be is it ethical to block people who have adblock installed. In such an arms race, who will win?

I don't think that analogy holds up, since the viewer of a web page is not reselling the content (which would be the unethical part). It would be more accurate to ask whether removing the ad pages in magazines you keep for your own use was ethical. The obvious answer would be: of course.

Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#23

Post by logfromblammo »

I see ad revenue as someone who has an audience opening up access to that audience for a third party in exchange for a fee. It is entirely up to the third party to figure out how to get a return on that investment.

Neither the content creator nor the audience bears any responsibility to the third party to ensure that the opened channel is used effectively.

If shit comes through the channel, I'm going to route it right into the sewer. If gold comes through, I'll route it into my pocket. Either way, I still care more about my relationship with the content creators than about their sponsored side-channels.

The ads do not pay for the content. The content creators pay for their own content. Then they hold their nose and make a deal with shady web-advertisers to capitalize a bit more on what they have already done. Those advertisers aren't buying content. They are buying access to the audience.

Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#24

Post by stdbrouw »

bediger4000 wrote: post #5

How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't. Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config. The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control…

Do you really believe that the only reason "it's my car and I can run over whoever I like" is ethically wrong is because there's a law that says you can't run over people?

Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#25

Post by savanaly »

RodericDay wrote: post #7

What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to p…

>If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. We could pay X for the content, and not incur the overhead. If these costs are not borne evenly, and some people are paying for the consumption of more disciplined people, it's probably contributing to terrible cycles of poverty (ie: some kid spending money on fancy new shoes he doesn't need and can't afford is paying for a well-paid tech-users YouTube habits, because it preys on their lack of education). Either way it's terrible.

Advertising isn't a complete societal waste. If I find a way to compete with an established business by offering the same product at a lower cost, or a better product at the same cost, or a new product that is worth the money but no one had thought of before, my only hope to connect people to that product (not to mention make myself money) is through advertising. Word of mouth and objective reporting in news outlets will also do the information spreading work, but advertising does a considerable amount. In other words, it's competition increasing.

I think economists have done studies on markets with and without advertising and have found results indicating it does bring down costs in those markets by increasing competition [1]. In economic terms that would be a gain since without advertising we would consume an inefficiently low amount of said product. Note that even if there is a gain to efficiency because of lower prices, it may be completely offset by the cost of advertising itself (costs being the cost of consumers having to be irked by looking at them and the effort that went into crafting the advertisements).

[1] Could I be remembering this paper? http://www.jstor.org/stable/724797?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...

Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#26

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

reasonishy wrote: post #13
RodericDay wrote: post #7

What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to p…

Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services. Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts. But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you m…

That's a false comparison, because there's a huge difference between ads-as-information and ads-as-empty-noise.

If you buy a trade magazine it's a given the ads will be targeted to a specific area of interest. The bad ads are simply not very interesting, and the good ads add real value to the experience by giving you useful information and/or entertaining you.

But when you turn the page, they're gone. Print ads leave you with some agency.

Most ads on the web seem to be completely untargeted. And when they are targeted, they're not targeted very well. And even if they are targeted well, they're incredibly repetitive.

Web ads don't give you agency. They treat you as a passive consumer who needs to be forced to see the same stupid banners over and over. Most of the time the banners are simply annoying. Even when they're not, they have a much lower information content than a print ad.

So unlike a print ad, which will be some combination of irrelevant, beautiful, sparsely presented, and informative, they carpet bomb your browsing experience with noisy low-value distractions.

Instead of adding to the experience, they take away from it.

And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way.

There certainly is an arms race, but it's gone in a completely ineffective direction.

IMO there's a lot of money to be made by bringing some intelligence back into web marketing. Instead of just spurting banners everywhere or using not-so-bright algos to do poor targeting, the ad industry might want to consider going back to ads that add value, instead of treating customers like not very intelligent prey that has to be herded down a funnel.

Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#27

Post by nightmiles »

reasonishy wrote: post #17
bediger4000 wrote: post #5

How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't. Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config. The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control…

OK, so the equivalent would be this: I buy magazines from the wholesaler. I rip out all the adverts. I then sell them to the public. I'm acting as a lovely "ad-blocker" for magazines. Is what I'm doing legal or ethical? Another argument would be is it ethical to block people who have adblock installed. In such an arms race, who will win?

> I buy magazines from the wholesaler. I rip out all the adverts. I then sell them to the public.

Why wouldn't this be legal or ethical? What you choose to do with the mass of paper you just purchased is totally fine.

Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#28

Post by creshal »

reasonishy wrote: post #13
RodericDay wrote: post #7

What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to p…

Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services. Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts. But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you m…

> Just because there's some bad advertising on the internet, it doesn't mean all advertising is useless.

The problem is it's not just some. At first, there was bounds of worthless advertising. Classical random banner ads have about zero revenue, and have had for over a decade. Instead of good advertisements, we got pop-up ads, pop-under ads, flashing animated gif ads, autoplay video ads, autoplay audio ads, ads that pretended to be native OS dialogs, link ads, … just to grab the users' attention anyway, and trick a few into buying absolute crap they didn't want. Ad networks getting used as vectors to infect computers (cf. latest Firefox/pdfjs exploit) are just the final nail in the coffin.

Print magazine ads work well because they don't try to infect me with viruses, don't try to trick me, don't make my fan run at 100%, don't drain my monthly data plan in a day (or battery in an hour), and don't keep me from reading the rest of the magazine. Had web advertisement stayed that same, I doubt we would ever have seen adblockers gain a substantial marketshare – nobody would use them if installing them was more of a hassle than just ignoring adverts.

Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking

#29

Post by guelo »

It would be great if the ad business model on the web died. Hopefully the new business models that would popup would be more upfront. People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper or a few bucks for a magazine.
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