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Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

blog.adcontrolapp.com

51–60 of 60 posts

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#51
Suggesting that a site agree to have either one or no ads seems a bit to comand-and-control for the Internet.

I agree with the other commenter that it seems reasonable for asightto a sight to block content if their ads are blocked, but do not see this as a sustainable solution. How can one know abead of time whether a site will or will not behave this way. The only time you'd know is if re-visiting. In that case, you're not likely to revisit. Seems like a lose-lose.

To me, the obvious answer is the option to opt out and either immediately paying a metered amount cash exchange, paying an end of month pro-rata subscription amount, or paying via a block exchange.

I think the end of month subscription, divied pro-rata, is the best option (anonymized of course). Its transaction cost is the middle of the two. It requires no direct relationship with the site prior to your visit. But most importantly, it allows for Spotify style consumer pricing. The consumer pays a flat fee for opting out of adverts. Then the content creators are encouraged to produce content that you will actually spend time with, not click-bait. This leaves the option on the table for each site to sell other content and material behind pay walls.

One last comment. Advertising is designed to influence and change behavior and opinions. In my opinion it is disingenuous to insist that a site visitor agrees to third party influence brokering to keep your lights on. It is my screen, my hardware, and my mind. I have every right to run adblocker. Similarly you have every right to decide bow to keep the lights on at your business. But I think there as been enough of this argument that consumers have unwittingly entered into some sort of relationship /agreement and should somehow wake-up and see that it's our proper responsibility to be good advert targets so the servers stay on.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#52

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!

There's been no great solution on Apple mobile so far. Hoping iOS 9 changes that.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#53

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.

I respectfully disagree with you. Most larger websites produce two or three articles a month that I'm interested in. Smaller websites may only produce one or two articles a year that I'm interested in reading. There is no way I'm going to sign up for 100+ websites in order to read sporadic content. But this sporadic content is what does exist and needs to exist in order to get a well rounded web. So it's not realisti…

"I respectfully disagree with you."

And yet you do not, instead you propose a system in which people pay for content.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#54
post #32

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.

I don't necessarily disagree with that especially given that there is a current arms-race to try and maximize the number of ads on a page.

However, I also, think that once the ad bubble bursts people will start to be creative in how they monetize. Most will get it completely wrong. The few who figure it out will eventually lead the rest.

Something has to give. It cannot keep going the way it is. It's neither producer or consumer friendly.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree with you. Most larger websites produce two or three articles a month that I'm interested in. Smaller websites may only produce one or two articles a year that I'm interested in reading. There is no way I'm going to sign up for 100+ websites in order to read sporadic content. But this sporadic content is what does exist and needs to exist in order to get a well rounded web. So it's not realisti…

"I respectfully disagree with you." And yet you do not, instead you propose a system in which people pay for content.

The part I disagree with is the "no one is willing to pay for" part. Should have made that clearer.

I contend that lots of people are willing to pay, just not by the current means. (And proposed a possible solution that would suit me, and what I naively believe to be others too.)

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#56
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…

Yes, it is a curious and rather blinkered statement.

Imagine if the author had written 'no one wants to give away money from their own pockets to sustain their [photography|aircraft modelling|horse riding] hobby'. We'd all look askance. But somehow he thinks the web is different?

Plenty of hobbyists and societies run websites entirely without external funding. They will continue to do so, just like they did in the 1990s before advertising exploded onto the Web.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#57
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…

This has been my thought on the matter too. If there's no money in journalism anymore, then the only people left doing it are the ones who love doing it. The leeches all slither off to other industries they can make a buck off of.

the leeches and the people who need to make a living

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#58
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What we see here is evolution of advertisement. From low quality spam-like ads to higher quality advertorials, which must provide some usefullness to the reader in order to carmouflage as normal content and to attract attention. I work in a marketing agency and there is a big shift from Adwords + SEO to "content marketing". Big money is put into creating interesting or funny stuff to attract attention (and backlinks).

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#59

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.

I respectfully disagree with you. Most larger websites produce two or three articles a month that I'm interested in. Smaller websites may only produce one or two articles a year that I'm interested in reading. There is no way I'm going to sign up for 100+ websites in order to read sporadic content. But this sporadic content is what does exist and needs to exist in order to get a well rounded web. So it's not realisti…

Such a “well rounded web” has no inherent right to exist. If it is at the cost of having ads, and that cost is too high, then we won’t get it. And that would be fine with me. I remember the Internet before the web. I can easily imagine an Internet without it.

Re: Open letter – Our concern about ad blocking

#60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What we see here is evolution of advertisement. From low quality spam-like ads to higher quality advertorials, which must provide some usefullness to the reader in order to carmouflage as normal content and to attract attention. I work in a marketing agency and there is a big shift from Adwords + SEO to "content marketing". Big money is put into creating interesting or funny stuff to attract attention (and backlinks)…

If the content is sponsored, this fact must still be disclosed according to FCC regulations. These disclosures could be detected. In fact, there is already a Firefox extension to do this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/addetector/
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