Aside from many other content producer-side arguments others have presented, surely it's most obvious that so long as the consumer choice exists to block ALL adds, it's far more optimal to a user than opting into a system that presents (tracking) advertising...
Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
21–30 of 60 posts
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#22> We fear that in the near future many websites will start to disappear just because their maintenance will no longer be profitable, and no one wants to give away money from their own pockets in order to sustain their website. I hear that since Webwasher. And today, with better AdBlocking tools, additional costs for hosts, the Internet is still there. From time to time even I get weak and think about the way I block…
At work I only use IE for internal sites and apps. Everything external I use Firefox with uBO, Disconnect and Ghostery.
I don't want to be responsible for bringing something heinous into my employer's network.
I don't know why adblockers aren't mandatory inside corporations.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#23The obvious solution as far as the ad networks are concerned is to proxy their adverts through the website that's displaying them. A website owner signs up to adnetwork.com, installs a node/PHP/whatever app on their server, and adverts are sent to that app and relayed on to the user's browser. As the ads come from the same domain as all the other content for the website they'll be virtually impossible to block. The r…
I'm pretty sure I've already seen this in the wild, but there are plenty of workarounds.
1) Easiest is DOM-structure. Ads will often have a signature tell-tale placement and structure on a page, and this is enough to identify them. A naive ad implementation is trivial to detect, and even smarter ones can be worked around using crowdsourcing.
2) As a general matter, the facet of advertising we call ads are obvious to humans, and should in principle be detectable to machines. Rely on layout cues, other pages on the website, differences in content. This will ultimately push more and more advertising into the "sponsored content" category, which seems a genuinely harder problem.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#24If you produce content, no one is willing to pay for it and your only source of income for it is adverts then I say your business model is flawed and good riddance to you.
I don't disagree with you, but just from a devil's advocate point of view, some would argue that by using ads to pay for the content, it allows the content to get to those people who couldn't have afforded to pay for it themselves.
Or, niche topics that can't draw enough support to stay afloat. Thus leading to an increasing sameness and banality.
Call it the tyranny of popularity.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#25I was quite happy with ads, then our local paper www.bathchronicle.co.uk became impossible to use and I "chose" to install adblock specifically because of their 45+ ads on one page.
I noticed a similar issue with other www.localworld.co.uk paper sites. I get they need to make money but to make articles unreadable is not the way to go.
One option I'm guessing is to have a blacklist adblock approach that only kicks in when a particular site becomes abusive and is reported back to the site owners to enable them to "fix" their ad delivery.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#26If you produce content, no one is willing to pay for it and your only source of income for it is adverts then I say your business model is flawed and good riddance to you.
It's not flawed, it's just not simple. Or, it's a happy accident that people figured out how to be middlemen between advertisers and news consumers (the classic example).
In the paper newspaper days I didn't mind ads at all. And I probably wouldn't have paid the full cost of subscription if the advertisers weren't the real source of income.
Now, as someone in another said, advertisers are stalkers. I mind that.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#27If you produce content, no one is willing to pay for it and your only source of income for it is adverts then I say your business model is flawed and good riddance to you.
It's not flawed, it's just not simple. Or, it's a happy accident that people figured out how to be middlemen between advertisers and news consumers (the classic example). In the paper newspaper days I didn't mind ads at all. And I probably wouldn't have paid the full cost of subscription if the advertisers weren't the real source of income. Now, as someone in another said, advertisers are stalkers. I mind that.
In the newspaper, the ads stayed in their boxes, and you could easily ignore them - honestly, I don't ever actually seeing newspaper ads, they faded into the background so much. They weren't playing music, flashing gifs, launching fullscreen popup windows and click-through modals.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#28I was quite happy with ads, then our local paper www.bathchronicle.co.uk became impossible to use and I "chose" to install adblock specifically because of their 45+ ads on one page. I noticed a similar issue with other www.localworld.co.uk paper sites. I get they need to make money but to make articles unreadable is not the way to go. One option I'm guessing is to have a blacklist adblock approach that only kicks in…
My local paper's site, the Denver Post, started to look like a whore with all the ads, and auto-replicated stories on the same page, years ago. I stopped visiting before I ever installed my first ad blocker.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#29Ads that track users are bad. But when I think back, the first time I wanted to control ads was when ads just keep popping up or it decides to open tab/windows on its own and forward it to various sites.
As long as, they are not doing that. It should be fine.
Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking
#30> Last week Washington Post decided to block the content of the article if you’re using an ad blocking software.
I just went there and clicked around as much as I could, at least 20 articles. I saw no complaints or roadblocks. uBO, Disconnect and Ghostery all reported blocking lots of ads and trackers.