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How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

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Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#221

Post by m0nty »

mirkules wrote: post #146
monkmartinez wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is crazy what kinds of BS you find when you run something like Little Snitch for OSX. On a fresh install of Firefox before I've had a chance to download adblock, there are two dozen popups requesting outbound connections... most of the time, I have NO idea who is behind the request or what these request really want. This is just the start page... news pages are even worse. Run some apps with Little Snitch turned o…

Funny, I just bought my first RPi in order to run Pi-Hole. It works decently from my daughter's tablet. I enabled it on the router so the whole house is covered, but due to uBlock I hardly ever see ads on computers. The nice thing is having "boring text" instead of colorful ads on tablets makes them a much smaller target for kids to tap on. I will say that the installation process can be somewhat painful if you devia…

I'm using this on my Windows PC:

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Disabled all ad-blockers and still don't get ads, and the whole experience seems faster. Presumably it takes longer for JavaScript-based utilities to block ads compared to just blackholing them in the hosts file? Anyway, might get a Raspberry Pi or just use an old small form-factor PC with it's own DNS server running the same list.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#222

Post by mirimir »

bachmeier wrote: post #214
mirimir wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Companies trying to sell subscriptions have never understood how to set prices.

It's a dead-wood mindset, I think. Sure, I like to read a Wired article now and again. But I don't regularly hit their site. I go there based on search results, links, and so on. There are too many sites at that level for me to bother following. Let alone subscribing.

I get that $52 isn't very much. Not for me, that is. But it is for many readers. And so it's not a good choice for a basic subscription. If they don't want to bother with per page pricing, they could at least offer multiple subscription levels.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#223

Post by thirdsun »

chrischen wrote: post #212
thirdsun wrote: post #154

Earlier 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 they just don't want to see ads as intrusive as the ones found these days. Neither do I. While my main concerns are performance, bandwidth, security and privacy, I don't think that simple static image ads would have led to the widespread adoption of ad blockers we're currently seeing.

In my opinion it's due to the fact that ads became very intrusive lately - video, audio, flash, popups, fullscreen overlays, endless scripts, you name it.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#224

Post by Shivetya »

so the end result will be when servers get powerful enough they will simply bake the ads into the article so at least the visual representation is there and rotation continues.

As for the content charges, a micro transaction system really needs to take root for the web. I really don't want to be driven to the poor house with a dearth of monthlies. Its bad enough with cable, tv, netflix, etc/etc, and now every damn website. Worse are magazine based companies trying to charge print subscribers for web content that used to be free.

A dollar a week might not sound like much but if I am not using the site each week its too much. Set me up an article bank so that my one dollar gets me a set number of articles and it tracks which I read so I can reread content I paid for

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#225

Post by mirkules »

m0nty wrote: post #221
mirkules wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I just bought my first RPi in order to run Pi-Hole. It works decently from my daughter's tablet. I enabled it on the router so the whole house is covered, but due to uBlock I hardly ever see ads on computers. The nice thing is having "boring text" instead of colorful ads on tablets makes them a much smaller target for kids to tap on. I will say that the installation process can be somewhat painful if you devia…

I'm using this on my Windows PC: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ Disabled all ad-blockers and still don't get ads, and the whole experience seems faster. Presumably it takes longer for JavaScript-based utilities to block ads compared to just blackholing them in the hosts file? Anyway, might get a Raspberry Pi or just use an old small form-factor PC with it's own DNS server running the same list.

The Pi-Hole script uses that same list as part of a consolidated list: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/adlists.defau...

It then installs an updater via cron to check for updated lists every week.

As to your experience with speed, I'm kind of surprised. The only time I noticed a speed difference is when I blackholed domains in the hosts file that didn't resolve to a valid web server (i.e. resolving to 127.0.0.1 without having a web server running), and that's the opposite of what you describe. The pi-hole script also installs lighttpd to serve up a placeholder page, and uses some tricks like mod_expire to improve performance.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#226

Post by m0nty »

mirkules wrote: post #225
m0nty wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using this on my Windows PC: http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ Disabled all ad-blockers and still don't get ads, and the whole experience seems faster. Presumably it takes longer for JavaScript-based utilities to block ads compared to just blackholing them in the hosts file? Anyway, might get a Raspberry Pi or just use an old small form-factor PC with it's own DNS server running the same list.

The Pi-Hole script uses that same list as part of a consolidated list: https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/adlists.defau... It then installs an updater via cron to check for updated lists every week. As to your experience with speed, I'm kind of surprised. The only time I noticed a speed difference is when I blackholed domains in the hosts file that didn't resolve to a valid web server (i.e. resolving to 1…

Thanks for the link to the lists, I'll try rigging that for auto-update on my PC soon.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#227

Post by WWKong »

socket0 wrote: post #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 singl…

Are you sure Wired is not compromising? Maybe they want to charge $5 but only charging $1. Will you pay a much higher price for all the things you suggest Wired should do?

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#228

Post by simonswords82 »

Respect to Wired for attempting to find a solution to their issues but I fear like many others commenting on this thread that this isn't the solution.

I'd love to see their numbers in a few months - but I doubt that they would make them public.

Obviously making money via adverts on news websites is a shrinking business. I wonder if any companies are taking advantage of this to create a new type of revenue generation machine for publishers? I know micro-payments keep getting kicked around but they don't seem like the solution here. Any thoughts?

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#229

Post by voyou »

mattmaroon wrote: post #101
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micropayments would allow me to pay $1 for those articles viewed, or maybe even $5. The difference is that this would not require me to do anything else besides viewing the page, just like on the old prestel networks. But there the 'central authority' was the phone company and the whole tracking saga means that if you want to hit a large enough fraction of the ad blocker users that you'll have to take that scenario i…

I'm not saying it wouldn't benefit anyone. Just that the friction of paying for anything at all, assuming a reasonable level of security, is such that if I'm willing to pay $.01 I'm probably willing to pay $1. If I'm willing to pay $1 I'm more than 20% likely to be willing to pay $5. So the optimal pricing strategy would never be a micropayment. This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count f…

"there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers"

At least up until now, there have been ad sales, which you can think of as an incredibly heath-robinson micropayment system: a small amount of what I pay for every product I buy goes to their marketing department, which passes on a smaller amount to advertising firms, which give it to websites. The viability of advertising largely removed the incentive to develop micropayment systems; hopefully that's now changing.

Re: How Wired Is Going to Handle Ad Blocking

#230

Post by jarnix »

bachmeier wrote: post #214
mirimir wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

According to undisclosed sources, a user gives around $1 per year to an editor of this kind, so yes, it's a massive difference!
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