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The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

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Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#231

Post by jjuhl »

If they can't survive without advertising then let them die. Personally I don't see the problem. The few sites I care about that produce quality stuff (like https://lwn.net/) I pay for and that's just fine. The rest are nice to have (without ads) but if they go away it doesn't really matter - I'll just read something else or (shock, horror) nothing at all - I'm sure my life will continue even if they go under. Can't honestly say I care a great deal.

Edit: and as I guessed they would; the downvotes now flow in. Seems like people never like to hear that one can just stop using "stuff" and do something else.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#232

Post by jfoutz »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #19
sputr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it can (and is routinely) done. https://github.com/brockwhittaker/Detect-Adblockers

It's an arms race. Advertisers may be able to detect ad blockers in the short term, but eventually they will lose. That's because users control their machines and advertisers don't. Widespread use of adblock-blockers will only hasten this inevitable defeat. The techniques used by the project to which you've linked can be trivially worked around by detecting the script itself and either not running it or telling it wh…

It'll be interesting to see how it pans out. Some sites will play nice. It's easy to imagine buzzfeed just loading their image content from adservers though.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#233

Post by 13thLetter »

jhall1468 wrote: post #118
njharman wrote: post #84

If your business model requires changes to reality, then your business model is probably dead. [If you have lobbying power, you can extend your business model for awhile, perhaps indefinitely ala content industry and copyright.] In other words, adapt your business model to change or die. It's not up to "reality", us, to change to support your business model. If there is demand for whatever you produce, someone will c…

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And the people that use the most heavy-handed approaches with ad-blocking are going to be the same people that are screaming "NOT MY PROBLEM" while the ship goes down. Their business model doesn't require changes to reality. Their business model requires the end-user to accept reality for what it…

> It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet.

And...?

Industries where "person who pays for product" is separated from "person who consumes product" tend to have enormous problems because of that. They are inefficient because the consumer doesn't care about price, and they provide bad product because the person paying doesn't care about quality. Perhaps it is indeed time to consider crazy, wacky, out-there alternatives such as paying for content.

> What you call reality, I call a house of cards.

If the "house of cards" that is online journalism does finally collapse once and for all, ad blockers will have done a massive service for humanity.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#234

Post by click170 »

jhall1468 wrote: post #220
imgabe wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do want it, but for free. Yes, this is relatively common. People will take something for free that they aren't willing to pay for. Other things they'll pay one amount for, but not a larger amount. Everybody decides for him or herself how much something is worth to them. If the majority of people decide that value is "nothing, not even looking at an ad", then that's what the value of that thing is. That's how m…

This is a load of BS. The reality is most people install a blocker and never think twice. Your implication that people make a value decision for every website they visit is laughable, and more importantly, exactly the opposite of what most people do.

You take another breath every few seconds but you don't do it consciously. Not everything you do is a conscious decision you actively make in the forefront of your mind.

Your comments lead me to believe you have skin in the game because you seem determined to not acknowledge that the value of something is what your customers will pay for it. If they aren't willing to pay for it then it has no value in the market, regardless of the value you've assigned to it.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#235

Post by DanBC »

Floegipoky wrote: post #109
DanBC wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge. How old are you? How long have you been using the Internet? Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?

My favorite part of HN, the reason I prefer this news feed over any other, is because the comments are usually intelligent and civil. Your comment here is neither, and it just turned a discussion about the morality of ad-blocking and the viability of ad-based revenue models into a dick measuring contest. Not cool.

Sorry. Re-reading it it does come across that way, and deserves the downvotes.

It wasn't intended that way though - I was genuinely just trying to see if people who'd used the Internet earlier were more aware of things like Boulder pledge. (Turns out several people who had significant involvement in Internet email at the time didn't know about it.)

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#236

Post by gaius »

jhall1468 wrote: post #118
njharman wrote: post #84

If your business model requires changes to reality, then your business model is probably dead. [If you have lobbying power, you can extend your business model for awhile, perhaps indefinitely ala content industry and copyright.] In other words, adapt your business model to change or die. It's not up to "reality", us, to change to support your business model. If there is demand for whatever you produce, someone will c…

It's exactly this kind of attitude that is going to lead to paywalls for virtually every type of content on the Internet. And the people that use the most heavy-handed approaches with ad-blocking are going to be the same people that are screaming "NOT MY PROBLEM" while the ship goes down. Their business model doesn't require changes to reality. Their business model requires the end-user to accept reality for what it…

Viewing a banner ad is a price I'm willing to pay. A full-screen ad designed to be hard to close, or with misleading cues to take you to another site, or with intrusive sounds? That kills my bandwidth and my battery? Not so much. Then there's all the tracking. It was the advertisers who broke the terms of the deal and now We The People are renegotiating.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#237

Post by jgoewert »

I barely remember Guru3D, but what I still remember was the full page animated ad for something that made the site completely unusable. It was a while ago, like 8+ years and I remember it being some huge green slime dripping all over and blocking the content and the whole animation ran for like 30 seconds before you could read the page.

I added a rule in my hosts file to not load that ad as it was before client based ad blockers.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#238

Post by 13thLetter »

icebraining wrote: post #216
imgabe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. And addressing issues like poverty is one of the many better things we could be doing than trying to figure out how Buzzfeed can get paid to tell us about 35 Things Only Parapalegic Law School Students from Cincinatti Will Understand.

Even if the personal targeting in bad_user's post is uncalled for, the point is still valid: right now, ads serve as a redistribution mechanism, and pretending that Buzzfeed and the likes are the only sites that will be blocked to the lower classes in a paywall-laden web is just demagogy. In fact, Buzzfeed will probably still be available to the general public, since they already engage in "native advertising", where…

> right now, ads serve as a redistribution mechanism

If you wanted to redistribute wealth to the global poor, forcing everyone (poor and not-poor alike) to download massive, useless megabytes of untargeted advertising, malware, and phishing scams is not the most efficient way to do it. This is defending the current broken and destructive ad regime on the basis of a distant third-order effect.

Re: The Devastating Effect of Ad-Blockers for Guru3D.com

#239

Post by DanBC »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #108
DanBC wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge. How old are you? How long have you been using the Internet? Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW?

> Do you remember the time before commercial use of the WWW? Yes Any thoughts on the rest of my comments?

Not really, I was just curious about the[1] change in culture from "don't support people sending you ads by giving them your custom or pageviews" to "just block the ads, and take the content."

[1] There hasn't been any change. It's just my perception, and that turns out to be wrong.

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