This is the main reason why I use an Ad blocker (and tracker blocker, etc.)
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-b...
These arguments are not even acknowledged by Wired (or any other service that relies on ads)
How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
211–220 of 390 posts
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#212I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads today is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering. After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains a…
Agreed. I think Wired, as well as other publishers, are missing the point here. I don't have any issue with ads in general - but if we're talking about ads that Wired has no control over and just fetches from a network, it's a whole different story. The same applies to ads that significantly increase page load times, bandwidth usage (I'm forced to use a metered LTE connection) or privacy concerns. Simple static ads w…
But most people who block ads just don't want to see ads. Your technical concerns are in the minority.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
21.co is targeting micropayments [1] (and many other things) in a novel way. You will have a low powered bitcoin mining chip built into your device. This chip basically turns electricity into very small amounts of bitcoin (you'll be able to specify to do this only when your device is plugged into the wall, so as to not drain the battery). The chip's mining efficiency is less than state of the art bitcoin mining farms…
That seems like the worst of all worlds. Mining on a desktop computer just barely works, but I'll be damned if I want my laptop's fan to spin up all the time just so I can tip some web site. And I absolutely don't want my mobile to die on me daily because the bitcoin mining drains the battery. And considering the current BTC price, I'd burn like $3 for every $1 gained. Someone come up with a service where you push mo…
I was once attempting to write something like this and had a test version up.
Here is the repo: https://github.com/KonstantinSchubert/bitcoupon-public/
Somehow I got bored with debugging all the different components, but I still think it has a lot of potential.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
$52 is way too much for a medium that occasionally publishes something good. OK, that’s just my opinion and it’s highly subjective. But I used to love Wired back in the days when Internet was booming. Nowadays they’re just too irrelevant. All that aside, I’d love a pay-per-article scheme. Give me a summary of the article and if I like it I can pay for it. Sounds much more reasonable than asking me to pay for everythi…
Right. I don't read $1 worth of Wired per week. That page I just read was worth maybe $0.001 (and that's being generous). Generally, I'd be happy to match forgone ad income. I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1. Edit: Make that $0.01 for the page.
> I wonder how many page views it takes for Wired to earn $1.
When I read the price, I immediately wondered "what are they doing to my computer with those ads that they're making $52 a year when I read maybe four stories a year?"
Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices. One thing they're not taking into consideration is that you're a lot more likely to click on an article if it costs you nothing but time. For many readers, even $1 a year isn't a good value.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I think Wired, as well as other publishers, are missing the point here. I don't have any issue with ads in general - but if we're talking about ads that Wired has no control over and just fetches from a network, it's a whole different story. The same applies to ads that significantly increase page load times, bandwidth usage (I'm forced to use a metered LTE connection) or privacy concerns. Simple static ads w…
But most people who block ads just don't want to see ads. Your technical concerns are in the minority.
I think adblockers block content which usually is offsite, so it's not a matter of "technical concern".
EDIT: rephrase
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#216"Trust us, and everyone connected to us, and everyone connected to them.""
Wired is asking its readership to compromise, without being willing to make any compromises themselves. They're asking us to trust them on a one-to-one basis, but that's now how trust works in a network. We have to trust Wired, and trust every single one of the companies or servers they include content and scripting from, and trust every single one of the companies or servers that these companies or servers include content from. We're looking at trusting at least a hundred actors here, quite likely more.
"Trust us, and only us."
A much better compromise would be to ask us to turn off ad blocking on their site, while in turn guaranteeing that every single script and asset served on their domain will also be served from their own servers, after having undergone at least some type of inspection. Then we at least have a reasonable basis for trust.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#217Nope. If I can't load your article WITHOUT ADVERTS then I simply will move along. I don't care enough about any one news source to subject myself to hostile brain hacking attempts.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#218How are they going to detect ad blocking? They're going to have to spend a long time fighting anti-ad block detection. You can't trust the client. Ads are displayed in the client. It would take hardware level ad serving to make ad serving and anti-ad blocking feasible.
Trivial answer: the webpage is a monolithic PNG. Good luck building a general-purpose image parser & modifier, especially on a webpage with embedded animations. There are ways to make it very difficult to distinguish between content and ads, that's all you need to do. At the highest level, the content is the ads, which is usually what ends up happening to trade publications anyway.
I always wondered why didn't youtube concatenate the ad content directly to the main content stream. It should be possible without reencoding and maybe a minimal muxing overhead (hell DASH is not even multiplexed). It would be quite hard to block that.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#219In France we had something called the Minitel, it was basically internet but the wrong way and centralized, you had to pay more or less depending on which website you would visit (you'd dial 36 14 for free content , 36 15 for paid one ... ), it failed because it was obviously the wrong model but it was quite lucrative for "content providers". The phone company directly handled payement so there was no friction or pay…
> basically internet but the wrong way and centralized
Actually, Teletel/Minitel wasn't completely centralised. A lot of services ran from their own servers on an X.25 network....
The UK's inferior Prestel service was completely centralised (well, there was more than one server, but the servers were identical).
However....
> The phone company directly handled payment so there was no friction or paywall.
That idea certainly worked well at the time. Today, you might want to subscribe to a "content server" accessed via a VPN.
Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking
#220I'm generally not inclined to fully whitelist anyplace because even if everything it loads today is safe, who's to say what's going to be loaded after the site gets hacked. That said, I tried to go through and do some allowing of requests and scripts for places I recognized, including whitelisting the site in Ghostery to keep it from interfering. After adding 19 separate exceptions in uMatrix for both whole domains a…
They're not talking to you or me. If they were, this article would have been "How Wired Is Going to Handle Tracking and Web Cruft" and address the underlying problem causing people to install ad blockers.
I want people to get paid--really I do--but I'm not stepping barefoot into a cesspool of web cruft to do it. Blockers are like putting boots on so you can wade through it safely. Clean up your mess and I don't mind going barefoot.