Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking • Hacker News Board

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#31

Post by a3n » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:26 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #27

a3n wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not flawed, it's just not simple. Or, it's a happy accident that people figured out how to be middlemen between advertisers and news consumers (the classic example). In the paper newspaper days I didn't mind ads at all. And I probably wouldn't have paid the full cost of subscription if the advertisers weren't the real source of income. Now, as someone in another said, advertisers are stalkers. I mind that.

In the newspaper, the ads stayed in their boxes, and you could easily ignore them - honestly, I don't ever actually seeing newspaper ads, they faded into the background so much. They weren't playing music, flashing gifs, launching fullscreen popup windows and click-through modals.

Exactly. The online ads are objectionable by design.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#32

Post by sarreph » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:26 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #8

Why do you want everything to stay the same? Websites will figure out how to monetize or they will go away. This is a good thing.

I think the most worrisome, and presently most likely, outcome is an arms-race style battle of iterative workarounds that will end up producing less revenue for producers, and provide consumers with a worse experience with higher friction.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#33

Post by radmuzom » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:28 PM UTC

avian wrote: post #10

> no one wants to give away money from their own pockets in order to sustain their website. Interestingly, some of the best content on the web (in my opinion) can be found on websites that do not have ads. They are maintained by people genuinely interested in a topic and have a passion for sharing knowledge. I'm not saying that gift economy works for everyone, but there certainly are people that are willing to pay fr…

Can you share some examples where the content IS the business model?

For example, I think Joel Spolsky's articles are some of the best content on the web. He does not serve ads because he does not make money from the content, although his content did serve as a form of advertising for his company. That is not a viable option for all content producers.

I am not against ad-blocking, but do not block them myself. If the ads come in the way of obtaining content which I am interested in, I simply close the web page.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#34

Post by sangnoir » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:29 PM UTC

scarmig wrote: post #23

onion2k wrote: post #17

The obvious solution as far as the ad networks are concerned is to proxy their adverts through the website that's displaying them. A website owner signs up to adnetwork.com, installs a node/PHP/whatever app on their server, and adverts are sent to that app and relayed on to the user's browser. As the ads come from the same domain as all the other content for the website they'll be virtually impossible to block. The r…

I'm pretty sure I've already seen this in the wild, but there are plenty of workarounds. 1) Easiest is DOM-structure. Ads will often have a signature tell-tale placement and structure on a page, and this is enough to identify them. A naive ad implementation is trivial to detect, and even smarter ones can be worked around using crowdsourcing. 2) As a general matter, the facet of advertising we call ads are obvious to…

The sponsored content/"native advertising" is the next logical step. It can range from "product placement" in otherwise regular articles, to full-blown advertorials disguised as regular articles. No DOM-structure to block, no layout clues and very non-obvious to humans. I consider these to be more insidious than current ads that most are eager to block

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#35

Post by avian » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:30 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #14

avian wrote: post #10

> no one wants to give away money from their own pockets in order to sustain their website. Interestingly, some of the best content on the web (in my opinion) can be found on websites that do not have ads. They are maintained by people genuinely interested in a topic and have a passion for sharing knowledge. I'm not saying that gift economy works for everyone, but there certainly are people that are willing to pay fr…

Many of the best of those sites rely on reporting from other sites that are ad-supported. You can get excellent analysis for free, but you usually can't get wide-ranging on-the-ground reporting that way.

To be honest, I was thinking more about art, science and technology content that is primarily published on the web rather than traditional journalism like you would find in New York Times.

I can't speak for on-the-ground or wide-ranging reporting of breaking events, but for instance I know of a local investigative journalism website that does not depend on ads and is often praised for the quality of its content. (http://podcrto.si/about).

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#36

Post by andygates » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:30 PM UTC

monochromatic wrote: post #7

I will shed no tears when the shitty web advertising business model dies a well-deserved death. They slow down my browser to a crawl, waste my battery life, waste my data cap, invade my privacy, and assault my eyes, all for what? An ad I'm never going to click on anyway. We can do better.

Sounds like you could use an ad blocker, friend!

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#37

Post by radmuzom » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:31 PM UTC

z92 wrote: post #12

avian wrote: post #10

> no one wants to give away money from their own pockets in order to sustain their website. Interestingly, some of the best content on the web (in my opinion) can be found on websites that do not have ads. They are maintained by people genuinely interested in a topic and have a passion for sharing knowledge. I'm not saying that gift economy works for everyone, but there certainly are people that are willing to pay fr…

Plus, with all the copycat sites gone, stopping ads is more likely to make the web a better place, overall.

Definitely not true, especially for web users from developing countries. Few days back there was an article on a company providing articles from various sources for around few cents (Euro) each. Given the exchange rate of the currency in which I earn my salary, it is simply too expensive for me. I would rather see ads (and occasionally click on them to support sites I love) rather than pay for each article I read.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#38

Post by mmf » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:32 PM UTC

IMO once all barriers (psychological and not) to quick and easy small online payments are gone, ads will not be useful anymore to content providers. A click through rate of 1/1000 will be easily compensated by a rate of donation of 1/10000.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#39

Post by CaptainZapp » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:32 PM UTC

radmuzom wrote: post #33

avian wrote: post #10

> no one wants to give away money from their own pockets in order to sustain their website. Interestingly, some of the best content on the web (in my opinion) can be found on websites that do not have ads. They are maintained by people genuinely interested in a topic and have a passion for sharing knowledge. I'm not saying that gift economy works for everyone, but there certainly are people that are willing to pay fr…

Can you share some examples where the content IS the business model? For example, I think Joel Spolsky's articles are some of the best content on the web. He does not serve ads because he does not make money from the content, although his content did serve as a form of advertising for his company. That is not a viable option for all content producers. I am not against ad-blocking, but do not block them myself. If the…

I can think of http://roadsandkingdoms.com/ , arguably the best travel site on the web.

I actually wonder how they sustain themselves.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#40

Post by subpixel » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:32 PM UTC

a3n wrote: post #26

aDevilInMe wrote: post #9

If you produce content, no one is willing to pay for it and your only source of income for it is adverts then I say your business model is flawed and good riddance to you.

It's not flawed, it's just not simple. Or, it's a happy accident that people figured out how to be middlemen between advertisers and news consumers (the classic example). In the paper newspaper days I didn't mind ads at all. And I probably wouldn't have paid the full cost of subscription if the advertisers weren't the real source of income. Now, as someone in another said, advertisers are stalkers. I mind that.

Have you seen a weekend local paper in the U.S. recently? There are whole ad sections that I drop straight in the trash. It's often at least 50% of the paper by weight.

There may be deals for supermarket meat etc. but in general it seems like a total waste.