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What the ad blocker debate reveals

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Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#81

Post by austenallred »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77
austenallred wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I say, let them die then. It's not that we need those sites but don't want to pay. It's that various "enterprising" folks figure that they can make some "content", fill them with ads and get passive income. If those 99% of sites disappeared overnight, everyone would likely be better…

I think that's a false dichotomy.

Certainly, there are sites that we could do without; there's clickbait-filled garbage that does nothing but pollute the Internet.

But there's also a lot of really good stuff out there that is supported by ads. Stuff that people put their heart and soul and a lot of effort into, and stuff that I (and probably you) love to read, that wouldn't make it without ads.

I can count the number of sites I've ever heard of that are paid for by their users on one hand.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#82

Post by VLM »

rbinv wrote: post #20
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.

Although true, wouldn't an efficient advertiser try not to pay for ads that target those "cheap people" anyway? Seems like they would be a waste of ad budget in any case.

Paying subscribers have money and get complimentary copy. Non-paying subscribers get complimentary copy and garish advertisements as a punishment to encourage subscription. I'm not sure getting rid of the punishment ads is necessarily helpful to drive subscriptions. My understanding of the complimentary copy marketplace is its informal, "here's this nice news release of ours, now you wouldn't want us to pull our ad budget, would you, so you know what to do."

I'm not aware of any journalistic experiment where readers get to select between ads and complimentary copy. In theory it should be economically possible. Maybe even a slider bar where you can smoothly pick any ratio such as 20% ads and 80% complimentary copy? I'm pretty good at reading thru B.S. so I'd go complimentary copy, my elderly MiL needs help not getting ripped off so she's best pushing the slider to ads... of course putting my best interests in direct opposition to the advertisers isn't going to work well...

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#83

Post by fridek »

It's funny how people saying ads should be replaced with a subscription model in different threads are going completely bananas about paywalled articles.

Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway. Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have access to a reasonable portion of the internet.

The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press. Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#84

Post by jakobegger »

yoz-y wrote: post #53
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.

If it's a good product, it will spread by word of mouth. Advertising can help sales, but it's by no means the only way to do sales.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

moron4hire wrote: post #78
hibikir wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except the Tragedy of the Common requires a depletable resource of some kind, and unfettered access to it for people who have a vested interest in protecting their own supply but not the supply of others. That is not online content one whit. My use of the WaPo does not in any way impact another users use, certainly not to the degree that WaPo is loading down my bandwidth with extra code and content above and beyond w…

> Except the Tragedy of the Common requires a depletable resource of some kind, and unfettered access to it for people who have a vested interest in protecting their own supply but not the supply of others.

The depletable resource is user patience, i.e. how much shit they're willing to take before they start blanket-blocking ads. If every publisher stuck to simple, unobtrusive and relevant ads then readers wouldn't block them. But some publishers/ad creators/ad networks decide that they want more money so they make their ads more attention-grabbing, and then the others do the same, and then users get tired and start blocking, and everyone is worse off.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#86

Post by chair92 »

jakobegger wrote: post #84
yoz-y wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it's a good product, it will spread by word of mouth. Advertising can help sales, but it's by no means the only way to do sales.

This is incredibly naive, and it's obviously untrue for many product categories.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#87

Post by danr4 »

Killswitch wrote: post #68
danr4 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

So let them uproar! If wikipedia shuts down because they don't have money because people won't donate, it's OK, it's called reality. It would be a pity, but that's life.

I do realize the costs and I do realize they have to make money to put food in their mouth. But it's no different than any other business, it's either you have a sustainable model, or you don't. You can't have it all. The web is not a utopia.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#88

Post by VLM »

kawsper wrote: post #26
moron4hire wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tried to subscribe to a danish newspaper online (their online version), and I couldn't even pay by creditcard. These companies really live in the past.

Don't try to use credit cards with the "grew up in the great depression" generation. Pull a graph of percentage of the population participating by individual age, and the graph of newspapers looks like pro sports or nightly network news, the majority crossover age is around fifty years old. Something like 80% of people over 70 subscribe to a newspaper and watch major league baseball, and for people under 30 the percentage is about 20%. Probably varies a little by country, but culture is more uniform than most people think.

The problem isn't that a crossover age exists; look at medical ads, young people eventually get old. The real problem is the crossover age has been going up about one year per year for some decades now.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#89

Post by userbinator »

jerf wrote: post #71
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…

Oh, the memories. I haven't seen this metaphor fight in like 8 years now, since web annotation basically died. And here we finally are with a version of this debate that people actually care about, because there's actual money at stake. Finally my years of prep are ready to pay off! First, I suggest everyone resist metaphors. Physical metaphors don't work here at all . For one thing, the "free content" may in the fut…

Where that becomes particularly relevant though is that the clients at this point are becoming increasingly outright deceptive and duplicitious. Instead of passively failing to render ads, actively deceiving the remote systems opens a new door both legally and ethically. At some point after this the publishers have both a legal and ethical case that you are not merely "experiencing the content as you wish", but actively defrauding them.

Do you think we should still have the right to close our eyes, to look away, to refuse to watch, to put our hands over the screen? Would you consider that "defrauding" too? That's what it ultimately comes down to: the personal freedom to choose precisely the content you want to consume, vs. the desires of publishers to force-feed you what they want.

Re: What the ad blocker debate reveals

#90

Post by TeMPOraL »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
[deleted] wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> what is to stop the ad being switched to something else (video, pr0n eptc) on the 3rd party server? That's when you're lucky. If you're unlucky it's malware injected via ad networks. Browsing the web without an adblocker is like sex with multiple partners every day without a condom.

Exactly. People don't block ads because they don't want content providers to get compensated. They block ads because they're actively hostile.
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