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Adblocking: How about Nah?

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Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#221

Post by manigandham »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #148

I'm amazed that all the interested parties haven't got together to flesh out a microtransaction standard. The whole ad-blocking debate would be moot if we could pay a few cents to read an article free of distracting ads. If you choose not to pay, you get the ads and don't get to complain about ad-blocker-blockers because you were offered an alternative. I know it has been attempted in the past with little success, bu…

It's been tried countless times. We tried as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038540

The issue isn't the payment tech, it's human behavior. People don't want to or can't pay for all the content they consume.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#222

Post by Godel_unicode »

tomrod wrote: post #181
Godel_unicode wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs. It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very…

But they can afford LibreOffice, Wikipedia, and Vimeo. The current allocation of human productivity enablement is not the only one possible (and an "is" is not an "ought to be" as per Hume).

You need a computer to run LibreOffice. So no, in many cases, they can't afford it.

Vimeo requires the person creating the content to pay, yes? So if I want to do a series of videos on Kibana, or Active Directory, or astrophysics, I need to pay Vimeo in addition to the effort of creating my content.

Basically no one outside a philosophy lecture has ever suggested that the current state of anything is the only possible one, that's a meaningless strawman. Please avoid the condescending suggestion that others can't imagine things being different, it's as patronizing as it is pointless.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#223

Post by giancarlostoro »

ryacko wrote: post #202
giancarlostoro wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah not to mention malware is often fed through ad services. I want context based ads. Context being the web page I am on not my life story. All it takes is one of these tech giants pulling a Equifax and who knows how much data spills over.

Domain-specific auctions was nice when it was done by Project Wonderful, but there is too much convenience in being able to push advertisements for the entire internet. Designing secure APIs that can’t be misused by a Cambridge Analytica or similar is a hard problem. Google Plus was “breached”.

To be fair I'm not even sure which companies I trust to do ads with. I guess I'll avoid ads on any of my websites. I do agree though, security of that scale is not an easy problem to solve.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#224

Post by michaelmrose »

air7 wrote: post #163
jacobobryant wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care if ads stop being profitable. If ads stopped being a good source of revenue, the tech industry would adapt, and my guess is that the end result would be much more favorable to society. I'm working on an early-stage startup right now, and I'm certainly not going to use ads as part of my revenue model. Google might not be too happy about an outcome like that, but I'm not overly concerned about Googl…

In recent years we, conscious consumers, shot down several viable business models that could have replaced ads such as data collection for trend analysis and crypto mining in the browser. They were met with outright hostility. Perhaps justifiably so, but we have to keep in mind that any producable "value" will have to "hurt" in some way. We have to give something in exchange for "free" services. Yet the focus is only…

How about I keep leveraging the fact that I'm smarter than the average user so I can give nothing and and the losers who get their data mined or their power used to mine coins can pay you.

This mutual hostility has worked for the entire life of the internet and probably has another decade of life if not more.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#225

Post by Godel_unicode »

dkersten wrote: post #193
Godel_unicode wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the democratizing effect of services that make money through advertising is vastly underestimated. There are a lot of people on the internet who can't afford to pay for Microsoft Office, or a set of encyclopedias, or courses like those which can be found on YouTube or blogs. It's all well and good to say that you hate ads because you can afford to pay to remove them. Many can't, and we should think very…

The best content I’ve found in recent years has been either on sites that don’t contain advertisement (because they’re someone’s personal hobby blog, for example, or HN) or from videos where the person was supported directly by fans through Patreon. Anecdotally, the advertisement-supported content is mostly garbage.

You should check out Neil Degrasse Tyson on YouTube. Or virtually any podcast.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#226

Post by ilaksh »

At the end he mentions EME (encrypted media extensions) which may be the real front in the war. Actually the browser and video market consolidation with EME could really slant the odds in the advertisers favor because and Google and Netflix can make it really hard for people.

Eventually we may make a hard break from the old internet into a new one. I'm looking for practical and scalable cryptocurrency and smart contract solutions to become popular. After that you may see a new type of browser protocol that does not have a full operating system in it and can be implemented by mere mortals. It might depend on one or more decentralized protocols such as IPFS or dat or even one of the many less popular academic content-oriented-networking systems. There is a strong possibility it will not have any JavaScript.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#227

Post by mikeash »

Nebasuke wrote: post #188
c256 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel like advertisers know that now? I feel like I hear about clickspam/ad fraud operations getting closed down (and nigh-instantly popping up elsewhere) on a constant basis. Is this like intrusive DRM in PC games, where all the studies show that it increases producer costs and complexity, annoys consumers, and doesn’t actually improve sales revenue, but some companies do it anyway because “what about piracy?”

I think one big difference with DRM for PC games, is that piracy of PC games is normally not a money making activity for the pirates. It might prevent companies from selling a game to certain people, but there is no clear cut evidence that person would have otherwise bought it. For advertising however, you can first of all incur a cost to an advertiser (since costs are calculated per click, view, etc), but furthermor…

You don’t have to use a model which allows this. Pay-per-placement, for example. You pay a fixed amount to put your ad in a specific article (or on the entire site or in whatever rotation people like) and then there’s no way to rip off advertisers with click farms.

You still need to measure your audience to get advertisers to pay the price, but this is decoupled from the individual ad buys so it can be done differently.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#228

Post by ibudiallo »

wybiral wrote: post #67

I don't actually want to block ads. If you want to put a small text or image blurb anywhere on the page... Good for you. I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash. But these companies are intentionally blurring the lines between advertisement and digital surveillance. You don't need to collect everything about my operating system, browser, monitors, GPU, every click I ma…

The one place I thought ads were relevant was on google search. After all, I was searching for the product they are advertising.

But the line started to blur when they decided to remove that yellow background that tells me the result is an ad. Now, it's a 11px font that spells ad. That's the only indicator.

For myself, I created a single use extension that turns google ads background to yellow[1]. I'm fine with ads on Google search, as long as I know they are ads.

[1]: https://github.com/ibudiallo/gadlight

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#229

Post by Negitivefrags »

c256 wrote: post #176
jefftk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at…

Do you feel like advertisers know that now? I feel like I hear about clickspam/ad fraud operations getting closed down (and nigh-instantly popping up elsewhere) on a constant basis. Is this like intrusive DRM in PC games, where all the studies show that it increases producer costs and complexity, annoys consumers, and doesn’t actually improve sales revenue, but some companies do it anyway because “what about piracy?”

Are their studies that show that?

I have heard the opposite. Every day you can stop a game from being pirated is quite a lot of sales earned back.

Dunovo has been quite effective at this in the past.

If you can stop your game from being pirated for a week a lot of people who want the game right now will switch to buying instead.

After it’s been cracked a lot of publishers will then patch out the DRM since it doesn’t matter anymore.

Re: Adblocking: How about Nah?

#230

Post by okr »

dkersten wrote: post #183
jefftk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe a new tag which points to a resource which can only serve an image, video or text. Absolutely no scripting. Pass along only the advertiser ID and the bare minimum. How would fraud detection work in this model? How do advertisers know the requests are coming from real users and not bots? Without assurance there, advertisers would pay much less, and publishers would earn much less. (Disclosure: I work on ads at…

Honestly, I don’t care. It worked in print, it can work in digital. Adverts would bother me less if advertisers hadn’t proven again and again that they can’t be trusted and that they don’t care about my privacy. I also believe that advertisement is a cop out for a real business model and the lowest form of business. Besides, as Banksy said: “You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe t…

You say, "google makes a fortune and content creators make fuck all", then why do people still upload their content? That makes no sense to me at all.

But besides that, i am all for more competition. Better user interfaces, better conditions, less censorship, i am for all of it.

And to me it earns a lot of respect, that i can upload my 8k video to youtube, they distribute it potentially to millions of people, and i dont have to pay a dime. And that they are still able to make it a platform, where i get a lot of interesting things to see. And it is somehow sustainable.

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