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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

#251

Post by icebraining »

13thLetter wrote: post #238
icebraining wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What you've wrote is almost a perfect example of the Nirvana fallacy.

Yes, the current ad system is inefficient, regularly disruptive and even occasionally destructive. But it's here and it's redistributing, while the proponents of alternatives don't even mention that aspect, let alone have a working solution.

And it might be a "distance third-order effect" to you, but as someone who lives in a country where credit cards are rare and the average wage is under $15k/y, it's not as abstract to me.

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

#252

Post by jordanpg »

teddyh wrote: post #39
hannob wrote: post #22

This is so common for the many anti-adblock texts you see these days - they all avoid to talk about the major issues here. (I say that with the background that a significant part of my income comes from ad-financed news pages.) That is: * Security risk through ads (malvertising, ad networks not supporting https etc.). * Ads killing performance (70% CPU for a flash ad is not uncommon). * Privacy (Ad vendors having mos…

Those are all valid reasons, but they are not the reason I first started to block ads: • They impose a surprisingly huge cognitive load. Even if you (like most people nowadays) are used to them and hence “do not notice them”, that very habit of ignoring them actually takes more brain power than you’d think.

I would take this a step further. I perceive the effects of advertising in most cases to be toxic and nefarious. Trying to convince me to buy or do something that I didn't already want or need is an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism. I avoid ads because I absolutely do not want their influence looming over me.

We -- the technologists behind it -- should be anxious to help humanity get past this embarrassing chapter in our development and find another way to make the economic wheels turn.

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

#253

Post by chongli »

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.

If paywalls actually worked then we'd already see them everywhere. Why don't we? Because people don't want to pay.

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

#254

Post by mvdanker »

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.

I use an adblocker, but only with a blacklist. So far only one site has made it on that blacklist. A certain financial blog that is just too obnoxious to read without. The whitelisting approach suggests that 'the first one is always free' for the consumer but I agree with you that the average user has no feeling for the economics underlying the websites they visit and the content they consume. Adblockers run with a whole lot of blocking by default. That gives them the most market value (remember, there is a market for adblocking).

People suggest that they would happily pay a 1st world sum of money but do they think about what that price tag looks like for people with less money to spend? My 'eyeballs' might be worth more than most, or not, to the ad networks. I'm happily trying to subsidize this whole web thing.

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

#255

Post by thesteamboat »

ac29 wrote: post #77
microtonal wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time. As far as I understand, Google is trying to do this. But it does not provide a 'no ads' guarantee and there are other ad networks with even more obnoxious ads.

> Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time. The problem with this is you must allow a third party to track every page visit and/or page view time, which is unacceptable to many people that use ad blockers. If you are OK with persistent, pervasive tracking, I think this is probably the best solution.

Ignoring the page view time bit, couldn't this (theoretically, I have a hard time imagining it practically) just be handled invisibly by the ISP that already knows every request you make?

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

#256

Post by imgabe »

icebraining wrote: post #230
imgabe wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree there is value in making useful information available to people who can't afford it. I don't think advertising is the only way or even the best way to make this happen. We used to consider this such a valuable endeavor that we had whole institutions dedicated to making information available for free, without ads. They were called "libraries".

I also agree that ads aren't the only or best way to make it happen. But they are the existing way. It's well known what tends to happen when structures are eliminated with promises of better tomorrows.

It's been "the existing way" for only 20-30 years. Before that we had newspapers, libraries, town criers, monks copying manuscripts by hand, phone trees, who knows what else. A webpage with an ad is hardly the only available means of disseminating information. There are other options even right now with donation supported sites, sites supported by sales of affiliated merchandise, manufacturer websites with product data, and so on.

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

#257

Post by DanBC »

adekok wrote: post #110
DanBC wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm very sorry for content-makers who've hitched their financial wagons to ads, I wish things were easier for you, I really do, but I'm not going to view ads, nor am I going to feel bad about. No more so than if you had made the poor choice of relying on spam for financial support. People who hated spam signed the Boulder Pledge. People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidt…

> People who hate ads tend to say fuck you, I'm blocking the ads but taking the bandwidth anyway. You ever see stats on ads taking the bandwidth? http://betanews.com/2015/08/25/ad-blocker-crystal-massively-... The ad vendors business model depends on the user paying for the ads. Why in living hell are they complaining? I am subsidizing their crappy business model. If I want to stop subsidizing them, it's my right.

Sure, block ads. But why then visit those same sites that try to serve ads? Those sites clearly don't care about you, so why do you want to give them the pageviews?

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

#258

Post by bigbugbag »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #191
Yuioup wrote: post #68

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want some of my money you need to get it from the people who charge me every month for accesing you web page: My ISP. They are the ones making money off the fact that I want to get on the internet and access content. Too bad there is no reliable, independent mechanism for taking some of that money and putting it in a large pool to be ditributed to content creators. Th…

Sounds like a good idea at first, but... Who did we pay for TV content prior to cable/satellite? No one. You bought the hardware and thereafter the content was all free, supported by ads. Cable access providers promised ad-free content, so people paid for it. Paying the access provider worked well. So well that it mostly wiped out the ad-supported over-the-air competition and left the cable cos as monopolies. Which e…

Well in TV jargon "content" refers to advertisement and "feel" refers to what you think as content.

Isn't public TV paid for by taxes?

Anyways, I second you, the ISP should not collect money for accessing content.

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

#259

Post by DanBC »

DanBC wrote: post #95
JupiterMoon wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike like spam and adverts in roughly equal measure and I've never heard of this Boulder Pledge. > But people the people who created those early spam filters - they all signed the Boulder Pledge. They all agreed that not only would they block spam, but they would also never ever buy a product promoted with spam. And people that use spam filters on a daily basis just like the fact that they don't get as much spam…

> 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?

I'd edit this if I could, but I can't because the edit / delete window has closed.

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

#260

Post by rasz_pl »

DrScump wrote: post #15

Are you sure that ad blockers are the only variable in play here? "(October 2014) we had nearly 4.5 million hits (read) on our articles. This year (October 2015) we are at 4.4 million hits... Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day." Is pageviews the actual metric, or is ads served the metric? Given the recent discoveries in how many "ad views" were actual…

nah, I and many others directly block Google Analytics = no pageviews in google dashboard. I refuse to be tracked by third parties whenever I go.
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