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What the ad blocker debate reveals

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Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#51

Post by austenallred »

danr4 wrote: post #2

It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to…

This comment rubs me in the wrong way.

Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" - they're putting it up with ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request them. You seek the content out.

So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allowed the company to create the content. You elect to not display that part using your client. I suppose that's your prerogative, but don't pretend like you're the victim in this.

And also don't pretend like it's the company's fault for not choosing your preferred business model. You don't get to choose other companies' business models for them - you can either accept or reject what they offer. The reason they're not on a subscription business model is probably because that wouldn't be sustainable for 99% of the sites you use.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#52

Post by rmc »

moron4hire wrote: post #19
eli wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with removing ads for paying subscribers is that it greatly devalues the remaining ad impressions -- who would want to reach just the people too disengaged or cheap to buy a subscription? It also incentivizes the site owner to have increasingly obtrusive and annoying ads for non-paying members.

So how does Reddit manage to have ad-less subscriptions and yet still restrain themselves from creating obtrusive interstitial ads? Superhuman strength? Immortality? Some other heretofore unknown super power? The truth is, there is nothing on the NY Times or WaPo that is worth paying twice for.

Reddit is still losing money.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#53

Post by yoz-y »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #30

I want the advertising industry to die. And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.

In the current world of abundance, advertising is crucial to content and product producers. Let's say you make an application, how do you sell it if nobody knows about it? You make a nifty product, how do you make people know it exists? Advertising, in principle, is good, the way it is done currently on the Web is awful.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#54

Post by TeMPOraL »

cognivore wrote: post #48

Lost in this debate, for me, is whether online ads actually work and are worth the money. My technical experience with online ads is that it's very difficult to equate the ads with increased sales unless you have a very small sample size. I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad sellers and hosters (Facebook,…

I have a similar impression. Moreover, I think people are actually seriously fooling themselves and each other. There's lot of tracking being done, lots of people looking at "metrics", but when I think about the statistics education of majority of people (including some professional "social media marketers" I know) I come to the conclusion that they don't understand what they're doing and can prove any conclusion they want with the numbers. All those metrics only help people to bullshit themselves and each other.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#55

Post by AndrewKemendo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #49
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines. You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader proble…

It's like going to the stand and asking for a magazine. You have it given to you for free. Now it's yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, including giving it to a 3-year-old child to cut out the ads and throw them in a bin, so that you don't have to ever see them. It's yours, you have a right. Giving away the magazine for free was the choice of the person at the stand. If they want to profit, they have var…

Agreed. To extend the analogy though the customer sees the free one next to a quality paid one, chooses the free one and then complains about it having ads in it.

At the end of the day, everyone wants a great experience for nothing. It's not possible.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#56

Post by pinaceae »

well, let's look at someplace where ads truly work well.

fashion print magazines. buy a vogue and look at the ads. hard to tell apart from the content, glossy, relevant, beautiful. they make up at least 70% of the whole magazine.

i like gruber's ad system on DF, one of the few sites that seem to follow a user/reader centric approach. first you ensure the eyeballs, THEN you show the ads, always paranoid to piss off your readership.

mobile safari adblock in ios9 will hopefully bring movement into this ad game.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#57

Post by danr4 »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #42
danr4 wrote: post #2

It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to…

Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. I think you have the chain of events backwards. You are describing spam. A better analogy is that there are a hundred magazine providers waiting by your fence and then you ask them to throw you their magazines. You are right though that the consumer is empowered with technology to block or not block - but the broader proble…

I totally agree with your correction to my analogy, though I do not think it changes the conclusions.

I don't think it's a problem that consumers aren't willing to pay for content. That's literally the description of consumers, to decide what to consume, how to use it, and what they are willing to give in exchange.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#58

Post by VLM »

moron4hire wrote: post #10
danr4 wrote: post #2

It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to…

I would pay for the NY Times or Washington Post if I knew having a paid subscription would remove the ads and give me a reasonable reading experience.

People used to say that about cable TV about 30 years ago, that you have to pay for it but the cable channels have no ads. Ditto going to the movies, sure its not free like watching it in a couple months on TV but at least there's no ads at the theater. Look how that turned out.

Maybe the elite that pay the most money for a subset of content will be able to temporarily avoid ads, sometimes, but "the masses" will never be permitted to not be advertised to, as long as its technologically possible to spam them. They are cattle and that is their purpose.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#59

Post by geggam »

austenallred wrote: post #51
danr4 wrote: post #2

It's rather simple in my mind. Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice. Want to make money? try a subscription model. Why can't you have both? Welcome to…

This comment rubs me in the wrong way. Content creators aren't "putting it up for free" - they're putting it up with ads attached. They're certainly not "throwing it over your fence." They're not injecting their articles into your browser, you're going to a URL to request them. You seek the content out. So, you go to a site, and download all of the content. That is what the company offered. Some of that is what allow…

...but you are paying for the content delivery or postage. If the envelope gets too heavy and your postal budget gets used up with a couple deliveries is that right ?

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#60

Post by joshstrange »

Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in my whole life. It's to the point that I have what can best be described as "Ad Blindness", I don't even see them anymore. So much so that sometimes I think I've reached the end of an article because my eyes have determined that below is only ads only to find it's an ad in the middle of the content or actually part of the article (Just to reiterate I sometimes gloss over real content that fits my mental model of an "ad").

I have used blockers a lot before (If I'm not going to click I'd rather not be tracked and deal with the bloat) but recently turned them all off to see what it's like again. It's still the same shit that I don't care about and have no intention of clicking on. 9 times out of 10 its for something I ALREADY PAY FOR (Looking at you DO, AWS, etc) which is annoying because not only do I have to look at it but it just highlights the gross inefficiencies in advertisements.

I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless.

Mobile is the big sticking point. On the desktop I could use an extension that reads some meta data out of a site's head to identify that site and mark it down for receiving a portion of "subscription fee" but on mobile this becomes much more of a challenge as I'm not willing to switch to a single-purpose browser (not that iOS would make it easy even if I did) and there are no browser extensions on mobile and no, I'm not going to do some gross "share" hack to record the sites I visit.

I don't have an answer to all of this, it all sucks. I want to compensate content creators but other than pay-per-view ads (which I mentally block out if not with an ad blocker) I'm never going really help them as it stands currently.

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