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Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

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Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#81

Post by confusedrobot »

chuckdries wrote: post #52
Rjevski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also attacking your ability to track and infect other users with malware, so I am doing a good thing. And no, I am not punishing you - I am punishing a shitty industry for wasting millions of hours of time globally and causing damage with malware. We've seen that pacific methods do not work so the only way to drive change is to actively fight back until the lowlife either adapts (by becoming better) or dies.

You are punishing me and only me. We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fake ad clicks have been actively hurting our ability to sell ads for about a year now. Our ads are pictures. Pictures are not malware. Also what ads cause damage? Like sure the ads on porn or piratebay are cancerous but no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

Forbes was running malware ads at least once in the last year iirc. Additionally, most places have ads from an ad network so it isn't like they are specifically choosing ok ads or anything. While porn and pirate sites have some of the worse ads, that doesn't make the rest of the ads much better.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#82

Post by icebraining »

donohoe wrote: post #67
wongarsu wrote: post #27

>Generating this kind of traffic does not achieve its intended goal (providing protest against ad networks or causing advertising to fail for ad networks) since the ones punished are the publishers (those who rely on this revenue) and not the ad networks. I don't think I follow? People don't like the ad networks and want them to change or fail. That's achievable by forcing change at either the advertiser, the network…

It doesn't quite work that way. Yes, it decreases the usefulness of ad networks and hurts them - hopefully inciting change eventually. But between the reader and the ad network is the website owner. They typically have no say or control over the ad network. As fake clicks are detected they are the ones that will get punished. Their CPN can drop meaning a real hit in revenue. If fake ad clicks add up they may be boote…

They typically have no say or control over the ad network.

How so? They chose the ad network, no?

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#83

Post by jszymborski »

chuckdries wrote: post #71
jszymborski wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to punish you for writing content I want to read, I'm punishing a horrible and unethical industry that you've chosen to profit from. The current state of online advertisement is an absolute blight on the internet. Online ads are the primary source of malware among anyone I've spoken to, and online advertising standards are atrocious. Just because someone uses the profits of a Ponzi scheme to support th…

How is advertising a ponzi scheme? (genuine, earnest question) We don't buy from an ad network, we have an ad sales department, the same people that used to sell print ads to local businesses now sell online ads to local businesses. There may be big systemic problems with practices of the big ad networks, frankly I haven't looked into it enough to have an opinion, but we don't use these big networks and we still have…

Apologies, I didn't mean to say that online advertising is ponzi scheme. I used ponzi scheme as an example of an illicit practice.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#84

Post by chuckdries »

na85 wrote: post #38
SSLy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that cost is subsidized by ads. Otherwise it'd cost $10.

So why can't they produce content worth 10$?

I think our content is worth $10, but of course we're a small paper, and very few people would pay $10 for it. If we paywalled our website, we'd just turn readers away and it would go counter to our mandate to inform the public.

I don't like ads, and I use an ad blocker (though with very permissive dynamic filtering rules), but we gotta pay the bills and pure subscription models rarely make sense.

Afaik, the only news agencies that work on subscriptions alone are the massive New York Times, which paywalls more than like 2 or 3 stories per user per week. Wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters make most of their money from member papers that pay into them to get access to content they otherwise couldn't afford to make. Some publications sell specifically to niches, Bloomberg has a public facing website but most of their content is only available for consumption via the infamous Bloomberg Terminal, a very expensive dedicated workstation they develop in house so people who trade, say corn futures, can access extremely realtime information and reporting on hyper specific corn stuff.

All this is to say that selling subscriptions to the general public only works if you're the New York Times, and even then they still sell ads in print.

EDIT: hey look the times does have ads. They're pretty unobtrusive but they're there.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#85

Post by icebraining »

chuckdries wrote: post #52
Rjevski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also attacking your ability to track and infect other users with malware, so I am doing a good thing. And no, I am not punishing you - I am punishing a shitty industry for wasting millions of hours of time globally and causing damage with malware. We've seen that pacific methods do not work so the only way to drive change is to actively fight back until the lowlife either adapts (by becoming better) or dies.

You are punishing me and only me. We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fake ad clicks have been actively hurting our ability to sell ads for about a year now. Our ads are pictures. Pictures are not malware. Also what ads cause damage? Like sure the ads on porn or piratebay are cancerous but no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

That is, unfortunately, very incorrect: https://www.cnet.com/news/new-york-times-bbc-dangerous-ads-r...

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#87

Post by icebraining »

chuckdries wrote: post #41
googl3_angst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent push for AdNauseam seems to be from the 4chan, free speech crowd, as a reaction to Google efforts aimed at stifling politically incorrect speech on its platforms. See https://ageofshitlords.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/4chan-...

This is especially frustrating because we don't use an ad network. We have an ad sales department that sells ad space directly to local businesses. They're not hurting google, just us.

Are your ads on the Adnauseum lists?

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#88

Post by wongarsu »

donohoe wrote: post #67
wongarsu wrote: post #27

>Generating this kind of traffic does not achieve its intended goal (providing protest against ad networks or causing advertising to fail for ad networks) since the ones punished are the publishers (those who rely on this revenue) and not the ad networks. I don't think I follow? People don't like the ad networks and want them to change or fail. That's achievable by forcing change at either the advertiser, the network…

It doesn't quite work that way. Yes, it decreases the usefulness of ad networks and hurts them - hopefully inciting change eventually. But between the reader and the ad network is the website owner. They typically have no say or control over the ad network. As fake clicks are detected they are the ones that will get punished. Their CPN can drop meaning a real hit in revenue. If fake ad clicks add up they may be boote…

>They typically have no say or control over the ad network

It's a free market. They have full control over their choice of ad network.

In fact they are the ones who have the longest lever for forcing change in ad networks. If everyone goes to an ad network that serves non-tracking, non-distracting, non-scamming ads that don't deliver malware, then only ad networks that deliver that survive.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#89

Post by kilburn »

chuckdries wrote: post #52
Rjevski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also attacking your ability to track and infect other users with malware, so I am doing a good thing. And no, I am not punishing you - I am punishing a shitty industry for wasting millions of hours of time globally and causing damage with malware. We've seen that pacific methods do not work so the only way to drive change is to actively fight back until the lowlife either adapts (by becoming better) or dies.

You are punishing me and only me. We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses. Fake ad clicks have been actively hurting our ability to sell ads for about a year now. Our ads are pictures. Pictures are not malware. Also what ads cause damage? Like sure the ads on porn or piratebay are cancerous but no reputable newspaper will have anything harmful, just potentially annoying.

Your story doesn't add up to me.

> We don't use an ad network, we sell our ad space directly to local businesses.

Fine, so you either (a) tell a business that you have XXX page views per month so they'll get YYY impressions (which may be blocked, but that you can try to make non-intrusive); or (b) you let the advertiser track the value they receive from ads placed on your site.

In the (a) case, there shouldn't be any difference between adblock and a fake clicking blocker. In the (b) case, a sensible advertiser should be able to weigh the value of the add they placed on your site no matter what mix of real and fake clicks they get: I ended up selling X USD to visitors coming through that place's ads, which amounted to Y USD in profit. Y > cost of the ads? Keep the ads going. Y The only situation where fake clicks are bad is that where the advertiser suddenly realizes that "hey we sent you XXX people" is just a meaningless figure from which you just cannot infer a proper value metric to decide whether that ad is worth its cost or not. Which is another way of saying that it gives ad purchasers a reality check that can only be positive in the long run, disregarding the short-term loses of people who were selling inflated ad spaces until now.

Re: Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension

#90

Post by chuckdries »

na85 wrote: post #60
chuckdries wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just doesn't work. Most of our readers don't pay for news, and if they did, they'd probably pay for larger national papers. Back in the day of paper newspapers, our subscription fees had to be augmented with ad revenue as well.

Sounds to me like a business model failing to adapt. The same phenomenon is occurring with car dealerships facing Tesla.

Yeah if we stopped selling ad space we'd be a failing business model, but we are selling ads, we are making money. It's a working business model right now.

There's also the philosophical argument, our mandate is to inform the public, how can we do that if we paywall everything? Not everyone can afford the paywall, and even if they could there's still the UX friction of handling payment.

The bottom line is we need to pay people to keep track of local government full time. It truly is a full time job. If we don't, who else will? In order to do this and allow concerned or interested citizens to share the things we learn on Facebook, ads make a lot more sense.

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