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What the ad blocker debate reveals

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Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#61

Post by scott_s »

moron4hire wrote: post #34
eli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has its users create all the content for free. And AFAIK they still aren't profitable.

Alright, fine, then how does HBO do it? If I want to have the NY Times, it's $32/mo [0], plus I have to let them ride my shoulder as I go about the rest of my business online. HBO Now is $15/mo [1], the only ads I get are in between episodes and only for other shows on HBO. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp3004.htm... they charge different rates for different screen sizes, which I find highly o…

I pay $15 a month for the NY Times, and I read it on all devices (laptop, iPhone, iPad). Their webpage is the best in the business, and I find it fine for all devices.

To answer your question: I do not know. But I don't find it a useful comparison; while they both produce "content", the content itself is vastly different. Producing shows with the quality of, say, Game of Thrones, is expensive, but so is having and sending reporters all over the world.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#62

Post by jdeibele »

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.

I pay for the NY Times and use an ad blocker. They cover a lot of subjects that wouldn't be covered any other way.

I agree it'd be nice to not have ads but there are other people who find them interesting. That's one of the reasons I don't read magazines anymore - the amount of ads is way out of proportion to the value of the content.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#63

Post by TeMPOraL »

hibikir wrote: post #40
Donzo wrote: post #5

Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.

It's a Tragedy of the Commons situation: When we block ads, we do it relatively aggressively, so those that implement advertising in an acceptable way get crushed anyway. You are either using ads people don't see, or doing terrible things like many Minecraft mods, often downloaded by kids, and hosted at a particularly nasty site where the obvious download link gives you malware. To block horrible things like that, we…

> That's why the good actors are moving towards mixing advertisements and other content to be so similar as to be impossible to filter.

Which in a way is even worse outcome. It creates a conflict of interests for the publisher and makes it harder for the reader to trust the article - because you often can't tell if at any given point, the author is writing sincerely, or just advertising his sponsors.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#64

Post by DSMan195276 »

vegabook wrote: post #24
Donzo wrote: post #5

Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.

arguably HTML 5 is a co-culprit here - it is the new Flash and has massively worsened the situation. Try running a modern home page on anything other than a fast Intel chip or ARM chip and it's basically unusable (Rpi, low end Arm phones). Browsers are the new bloatware and make Microsoft Office look like vi.

I would add javascript to that list - I have a cheap laptop with an Intel Atom that's my main computer at home, and the biggest thing I did to make browsing useable was install no-script, and only enable the scripted required to make a page work. It's ridiculous how badly some javascript locks pages up, on the most innocuous of pages - For example, Wikimedia pages are unusable, and lots of blogs have badly written javascript (for unknown reasons) which end-up slowing FF to a crawl. After disabling the majority of the scripts on those pages (Which aren't usually necessary to view the page anyway) things are more then usable.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#65

Post by scott_s »

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.

I pay for the NY Times, but I don't feel like I'm a customer. I'm a supporter. I think the NY Times is an excellent newspaper, and I fear for the future of newspapers. I also think the NY Times' web presence is superb.

For example, this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/magazine/voting-rights-act...? I think it's excellent in both content and presentation. I want to support them so they can continue doing it.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#66

Post by eli »

moron4hire wrote: post #37
eli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly: most advertisers would want to reach the sort of paying subscribers who no longer see ads. By removing all ad impressions from that segment of the audience, you disproportionately decrease ad revenue. (Also, digital advertising is still very far from efficient)

Why should we bend over backwards for advertisers but not paying customers?

I don't follow the question. I'm not suggesting we bend in any direction, merely pointing out that this sort of "freemium" ad-or-paid site is much harder to pull off in practice than it might seem at first blush. At some point it resembles "nag-ware" style shareware from the 90s.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#68

Post by Killswitch »

danr4 wrote: post #57
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…

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.

Except if it came down to it, everyone would be in an uproar about having to pay monthly fee to visit every site on the net.. I'm willing to bet half the people in this thread who say if people want to be paid for their content, to charge for it, not use ads, don't donate to Wikipedia.

It absolutely flabbergasts me the amount of people in the tech world who don't realize to run a top site delivering content to you costs thousands of dollars a month in hosting, let alone to pay the bills of the people who do the work.

Pay $5/mo to all your favorite sites... I visit 10+ sites a day average, that's $50 on top of my internet bill that is already $60/mo.

I'd rather be shown an ad that I've conditioned to block out mentally than pay $50/mo extra to look at 10 sites a day only.

So yeah, you're right, you can block ads, but when ad blocking proliferates to the point that it's not feasible for any of these sites to keep running, then they go away..

Now you're left complaining because none of your favorite sites are around.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#69

Post by VLM »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #50
moron4hire wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, fine, then how does HBO do it? If I want to have the NY Times, it's $32/mo [0], plus I have to let them ride my shoulder as I go about the rest of my business online. HBO Now is $15/mo [1], the only ads I get are in between episodes and only for other shows on HBO. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp3004.htm... they charge different rates for different screen sizes, which I find highly o…

NY Times creates all their own content. HBO in comparison creates a tiny fraction of their content and licenses other companies content for rebroadcast.

How does paying middlemen save them $17/month vs the competitor that doesn't pay middlemen?

That argument would make a lot more sense, if the NYT, like my local newspaper, were merely a re-wrapped slightly localized Reuters news feed.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#70

Post by johnchristopher »

toyg wrote: post #32
johnchristopher wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free. You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience. Uh ? To cut the ads out you need to see them. Adblock hide them as if they never existed in the first place. Analogies, these days...

you could hand the magazine to a 3-year old who can't read, and he'll cut out all pictures for you. Nitpickers, these days...

Are you really saying you would let a 3-year old operate that ad cutting physical machine mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9995459 ?

Adults, these days... :]

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