Aren't we just going to start making websites that don't serve the content until they've served the ads?
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
61–70 of 249 posts
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#62How is ad blocking an ethical issue? I get to control my computer, at least until some legislation passes that says I don't. Even if I don't control my computer entirely, how about my DNS? I have a lot of the more intrusive domains (tynt, doubleclick, etc) set up as 127.0.0.1 in my dnsmasq config. The "whose computer is it anyway" question seems key here. In order to make advertising possible, we have to take control…
That is not a good argument to make. The corollary is that the telecom companies "own" their infrastructure. They can modify any packets sent from your computer to theirs, insert tracking, or peek at it or whatever. After all, YOU sent the packet to them.
They actually do this. Adding unique identifiers to headers.
The U.S. Government also use the fact that telco owns the lines to justify mass surveillance since you are communicating on lines you don't own.
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#63What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to p…
Funding the content suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem.
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#64I'm beginning to find the various articles about ad-blocking fatuous, and I doubt I'm the only one. Ads served via a centralized vendor can be blocked trivially, and people are choosing to block them. You can make a whole lot of arguments about ethics, or you can just admit that it's a broken business model. Worse, it is becoming apparent that ads increase the attack surface. Failing to clean that up will cause armie…
Similarly, I've wondered why advertisers don't just change how they do the ads: if the ads are non-standard size, are non animated, and link back to a legit landing page from non/shady domain, what adblocker covers that? Wouldn't that just look like ordinary site content? Or do they really update them that quickly and narrowly?
Most ads are served by an ad network which requires third party involvement. Adblockers block those. It's not manageable to post individual ads.
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#65It would be great if the ad business model on the web died. Hopefully the new business models that would popup would be more upfront. People used to pay 25 cents to read a newspaper or a few bucks for a magazine.
Unfortunately we have a prisoner's dilemma where people will defect from "costs a little money" to "free with ads" to "free and I block the ads" to "no content."
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Primarily, it's a legal issue. Although I genuinely wonder what came first - the discussion of ethics of "stealing" books or discussion of ethics of passed copyright laws.
So blocking ads is ethical because it's legal? That doesn't sound right.
As for ads - I suppose if there is an ongoing ethics discussion already (and I believe there is), then it's ethical issue. Not sure, though.
It's comparison that's didn't sound right to me. I'm just not sure it's well-comparable, because I suppose the major ethical debate about copyright infringement came from the existence of copyright laws. Which is not the case for ad-blocking.
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Advertising is the method most people use to discover new products/services. Of course these days the line is often blurred. So half the posts on HN could be adverts, and you wouldn't really know about it. In fact lots of them are adverts. But just think about how the world would work without advertising. How would you know there's a star wars movie coming out? How would you know about new products and services you m…
That's a false comparison, because there's a huge difference between ads-as-information and ads-as-empty-noise. If you buy a trade magazine it's a given the ads will be targeted to a specific area of interest. The bad ads are simply not very interesting, and the good ads add real value to the experience by giving you useful information and/or entertaining you. But when you turn the page, they're gone. Print ads leave…
They are supposed to be programmatically targeted, but programmatic is not as accurate as it's billed as. They do get targeted, but a lot of the traffic that they go after is spoofed somehow or otherwise inaccurate. Models of web traffic are much less accurate than unmodeled subscriber rolls.
Lots of high end people pay out the nose for information collection and shaping. They're called assistants. Others pay for specialized newspapers and magazines for their profession. There is no such thing as 'free' media because time and attention have value. If the information is more important than the entertainment value, then you can pay someone $10-15 an hour part time to read everything that you need read and give you a digest.
You can also have an ad-free life by paying someone else to read the news for you and moving to a rural area, where there are few billboards.
Print ads tend to have better targeting because the subscriber rolls get backed up with credit card numbers in most cases. This is a case in which early 20th century technology is a lot more reliable than 21st century programmatic advertising.
>And from the seller's point of view, it's damn near impossible to work out the ROI. You can't assume that view-click-sale works, because often people will research a product before buying. So you don't know if they've seen the ad once, or fifty times, or been persuaded to buy in some other way.
Actually, you can, at a certain level of scale and spending on many platforms. That requires the user fingerprinting that bugs privacy advocates so much. It's called 'cross-channel attribution,' and there's a lot of material out there about it.
Also, it's not that users aren't intelligent. Most people are pretty dumb, but few of the people with disposable income are dumb. You use repetition because you're only getting a fragment of someone's attention, and a fragment of someone's cognition is pretty 'stupid.'
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#68I have a question for everyone advocating the use of ad blockers: Do you just do a blanket block for all ads, ban the big networks with the trackers along with the malware serving ones or something else?
I understand wanting to block the ones with the trackers for privacy reasons and the malware ones because nobody wants malware, but blanket blocking all ads tars everyone with the same brush.
Edit: Personally, I used to just blanket ban but I've recently moved towards having uBlock only block the malware ones and will manually block any spammy sites.
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#69What I really can't understand, that permeates this whole discussion, is plenty of people that try to sell the idea that ads let us have content "for free", and that all we have to tolerate is "a little annoyance". It's insane. If companies are buying ad-space, it's because they expect to get more business in return. This means that someone out there is being influenced by said ads, so that if the content cost X to p…
> If these costs are being borne evenly, then it's complete societal waste. That doesn't make sense. You are saying because User reads Content, Advertiser pays Content, and User pays Advertiser, that the middle step of Advertiser paying Content is unnecessary, because User could pay Content. Simple counterexample: I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. But I might see an ad for a new device that I lik…
In your example, there are two possibilities: either you did want and need to buy the product before the advertisement or you didn't.
In the first case, the advertisement was wasteful: the company that sold you the product has unnecessarily spent money, which goes to the product price. And this is not a small amount: big consumer companies spend billions on advertisement space/time alone, an amount comparable to their R&D expenses. I'm talking about ads alone, not other marketing expenses, many of which are related to advertisement. In most companies, marketing budget dwarves R&D, by the way, and in some markets, this costs could very well be the biggest chunk of the price in a product.
In the second case, you would not buy the product without the ad. That may mean that you simply didn't know the product before and finding it was good for you, but most probably you didn't need it or would not want it if not because of the ad.
In this common case, you didn't win: you just spent money because of a need/want that you didn't have before seeing the ad. You were hacked and exploited for both the publisher and advertiser benefit.
Re: The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
#70Why do ads need to track you anyway? Doesn't it make more sense to customize ads based on the specific page you're looking at? It seems like this is rarely done. At least it doesn't seem that way most of the time.