What we break when we fix ad blocking
tonyhaile.com
What we break when we fix ad blocking
1–10 of 226 posts
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#2Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers/publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire.
It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through constantly.
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#3I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use.
If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#4I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying.
It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.
More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#5Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers/publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire. It's not the users' fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it's not always the website operators fault that their "trusted" ad networks let terrible things through const…
Oh but it is. The publishers went to the networks because they paid better, and never wondered where they were getting their advantages from.
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#6I use Adblock and I don't mind disabling it for sites that provide quality content or reading materials. There has to be a balance which is sometimes abused by the sites.
For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don't make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don't mind watching a small commercial if it was 5-10 minutes highlight of a game. If the balance was reasonable I am sure Adblock would not have been this popular.
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#7My issue is with advertisements that break web pages, or slow them down dramatically. Or even worse, take up real estate on my phone, and just plain break my mobile experience further. Sometimes I forget to install an adblocker whenever I do a fresh OS install and forget just how bad things can be without an adblocker (well really my biggest peeve is pop ups, just why are they still around?) and they get worse when someone buys ads to distribute an exploit to Java or something (was once in my lifetime a victim to a Java 0-day through advertisements - never again will I enable Java as a browser plugin).
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#8> If the content that best informs our thinking is increasingly only available to those willing to pay then it has troubling impacts for those living in poverty or countries for whom a $9.95 monthly subscription is out of reach.
...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#9This flood of articles about blocking ads are all predicated on the assumption that making money with ads supports quality content, and that the internet as we know it would not exist without ads. Both of these assumptions are false - the internet didn't begin by being driven by ads, and it won't end that way, and ad-driven content is degraded by the ads when it starts to exist because of them.
The intrusive ads which are being blocked do not lead to quality content, on the contrary they intrude on it both in an immediate sense by distracting readers from the content, and in editorial terms, by driving a constant demand for more clicks, more views, and more unique visits, whatever the cost. The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers. The result is media sites which see the success of Buzzfeed not as a warning but as inspiration, which use services like outbrain to try to keep users clicking in a circle of despair through endless shocking headlines which promise much but offer nothing of substance.
I won't mourn that web as it passes, and I won't be starting to read the Facebook News app or other corporate feeds instead - native apps are subject to the same pressures and the same inexorable creep of advertising around and into the content. This will be a blow for Google though, and I'm quite sure behind Apple's rhetoric about user choice lies a calculation that this will limit Google's bottom line.
The Mona Lisa is an interesting example to use, as it was neither produced in order to display with advertising, nor with advertising within the picture (the two choices offered in the article). It and pictures like it were commissioned privately by a patron who valued the services of that painter but thereafter was displayed for free to the world - maybe there's a model there for online content - commissioned via something like kickstarter for its value but thereafter displayed for free to the public. It also wasn't valued as much at the time as it is now.
We should reject false dichotomies which offer the choice between one sort of advertising or another. The best places for discussion, content and news on the web are often advertising free, or have advertising which is unobtrusive and targeted and therefore not likely to be blocked by users, given the choice (as with HN for example). I honestly wouldn't mourn the loss of most of the so-called news services we currently have, and the rise of other services which request payment from a patron, subscription payments from loyal users, or find other ways of making ends meet (selling related services, bundled content, making money on related transactions like bookings etc). There are lots more ways to make money in the world than advertising, and most of them less degrading.
Re: What we break when we fix ad blocking
#10I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use. If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.
Being willing to pay is not a guarantee you can remain ad-free. Showing ads to paying users will still often be seen as a way to increase revenue further, unless the company has made a lifetime guarantee to the contrary. I pay for Netflix. I would even be willing to pay more for Netflix. But then they started showing ads before content they created.