Seems like the time for each of us to create a policy re: websites that try to coerce us into turning off the ad blocker. Personally, I strongly dislike such attempts to manipulate me, when a site makes demands of this kind, accordingly my policy is just going elsewhere.
There's no site I have so great a need to visit that I will put up with it. I can't think of instances where the content was unavailable elsewhere, or if not available I couldn't live without it.
The sites insisting that I subject myself to their ad abuse are likely to find their viewership evaporate. I can't see how how those enterprises will survive, considering that the internet will very likely always provide alternatives that visitors find more acceptable.
I think it's totally fair game to coerce me into turning off my ad blocker. That's how they monetize. That's how I'm supposed to "pay" for the content.
I choose to use a blocker because I don't like ads. But if someone wants say "hey, the deal is ads or nothing" I think it's a pretty fair bargain.
Currently the ad blockers (my self included) are free loading off the system. The internet only works because most people are willing to suck it up and watch the ads in my stead.
Of course it's a valid choice to go along with turning off ad blockers, that's always up to the individual. It might well be better, and less hazardous, to pay for content than be subject to ads.
This issue comes up re: science journals and whether it's appropriate to keep articles behind steep paywalls. The trend increasingly favors "open access" rather than having such important content restricted and inaccessible to the community at large.
It's a different thing when talking about buying material items online, in that case it's clear what one is getting for the money. By comparison is the content of most websites really worth paying for? Mostly I'd say the answer is "no", and that's the reason I would rarely choose to pay for content.
Ads are a way sites try to extract payments from sellers or third parties, but ultimately it's paid by site visitors one way or another. Since I choose not to pay directly because the marginal entertainment value isn't worth it to me, why would I go along with paying indirectly?
I think it's perfectly legitimate to use an ad blocker. No one is obligated to put up with ads just because sites want to make money. If sites refuse to serve content because of ad blocking, the visitor's loss is negligible vs. sites taking substantial risk of losing viewers and jeopardizing site viability altogether.
Sites have choices too. They can "clean up their act", police the ads they run, demand the ad servers/agencies eliminate ad-malware and intrusive tracking, etc. Choosing to monetize subscriptions, well, good luck with that, competition is ferocious, and subscribers probably sparse. Perhaps the internet was not really built to be "monetized" by the kind of ads we're talking about.
Actually I don't. According to Firefox help, "private" browsing avoids saving history of pages visited, searches, cookies, etc. It also activates tracking protection, but otherwise doesn't stop ads which is the point of using an ad blocker.
IOW since I'm the only user of this device, there's not much reason to use private windows. I do have tracking protection set "on" and use ad blocking in order to make browsing the wide open internet tolerable and a bit safer.
Wired's final prediction is that all the ads will disappear into sponsored content within a decade.
I’m surprised that Wired made such a prediction because to me it sounds awfully wrong. For starters, whatever is going to happen it will happen much sooner than a decade. Ad blocking adoption has already reached 35% in some countries. At 50%-60% the industry is doomed. Not to mention fake ad impressions which already amount to one quarter of all traffic. I also find it odd that the only outcome they see is sponsored content. We already have that, it’s called native advertising and it sucks. If advertisers can have a saying on the content then the quality will go south pretty fast. What about micropayments? What about serving ads from the publisher’s domain? What about stopping the damn profiling which is the root of the problem? It seems that the online publishing industry is in a bit of a shock from the way things are moving and can’t think originally.
Spam blocking on email is currently close to 100%, and yet there is plenty of companies that do news letters and coupons. Stores and services send recommendation emails to customers on a rather regular basis.
I would like to see googles number on how often such services get reported as spam, but I suspect its actually quite low. It helps that you can unsubscribe if you don't want to see it.
I like this analogy. It would be interesting to see a similar mechanism to banner ads. I'd imagine part of the responsibility would be on the ad network and part of it would be on the publisher.
Showing a bunch of low-quality "1 weird trick ads?" the network gets flagged. Trying to squeeze too many ads onto a single page? Publisher gets flagged.
I doubt we'll see such a thing. On the other hand ad networks like the deck, carbon and yoggrt have done a good job filtering out bad ads. I generally whitelist sites with those networks.
I too doubt that we will see explicit mechanism for users to manager/report ads on a website, but I do predict that we will keep seeing ads on website even if adblocking reach 100%. For example, online stores normally has a "if you like this product, then you might also like this other thing", a advertisement that I doubt will be blocked any time soon. Similarly, streaming services like to recommend films and music, and that feature is something I hear some people really want to have and would be upset if it went away. Youtube dedicate a lot of page space for this, including the front page, the top of the side panel, the top of the search result, and the end of every video.
The upside of those kind of ads is that they are intended to be both a useful tool for the user and a revenue source, and they must be designed carefully to remain both.
Wired's prediction is even more annoying because they've started begging me to turn off my adblocker last time I visited them a couple of days ago (proof[0]).
If that's the future, why are they not going for it completely before their competitors? Seems like a good strategy to me if they believe in that, doesn't it?
I avoided the adblocking discussions so far, but now that I think about it, I do think that having my adblocking software on actually helps the maintainers of websites. Since I have never clicked on an ad on the Internet intentionally (I only have Internet access for about 7-8 years, Adblock was already a thing back then and I have discovered it before anyone else I know personally), I have never purchased a thing from the Internet after clicking on an ad in my life (having only a European debit card that's not supported by the US-based services kind of helps me out in this case, but it is a huge disadvantage in every other case). By not seeing them, I'm actually improving their click rate a bit, ain't I?
> Wired's prediction is even more annoying because they've started begging me to turn off my adblocker last time I visited them a couple of days ago
Forbes "30 under 30": They don't let you read articles if you adblock... "To read this, you must disable". They create an article security nerds want to read... which then serves up a pop-under adware to steal passwords.
About 50 tracking, remarketing and generally privacy invasive scripts are executed on your browser [0] when visiting Forbes via their "Ad Light" experience.
Allowing all that scripting to run still didn't let me access the article. I can live without ever going to Forbes.
I dont think they are arguing that the future is better. Also going there today may not mean more money. For example what % of online ad money is being spend today on sponsored content ? That would matter.
>What about stopping the damn profiling which is the root of the problem?
Too late for that. People know now they can avoid getting distracted by ad with a couple of clicks and so they will not go back, profiling or not.
The way forward is clear: some sites experiment with locking you out if you don't pay up or remove ad-blockers. Others will follow if that experiment goes to plan. If it fails, hello sponsored "content".
Sponsored content won't get noticed because everyone slowly migrates to HN and Reddit likes. For drive-by reading, Wired and likes either must become extremely relevant or help create some global news reading subscription service...
I have recently subscribed to some serious, paid local news, though. And I pay for LWN for several years now, of course.
Paper magazines have been full of 'ad stories' for a while now. Nowadays I just stop browsing sites that want to show me ads. Most of the articles are waste of time anyway. In the end your time is saved and you can proceed to read a book or do something worthwhile.
I think the MindGeek / Pornhub monopoly demonstrates the lengths to which content providers will go to avoid switching away from ad-based revenue, and also the extreme aversion consumers have to the entire premise of paying for creative content (whether through paid attention to ads or paid dollars to subscriptions).
Not even porn can get many people to prefer a subscription model or stop using adblockers. Good luck to everybody else ...
> Not even porn can get many people to prefer a subscription model
You say this like porn viewers don't have a huge incentive to make sure PORNHUB CO. doesn't appear on their bank statement or that some shadow profile isn't tracking their viewing habits. Hell, private browsing was practically invented for porn and [insert non-porn plausible deniability excuse].
I think the porn industry is in a unique position where if their stance was that highly regulated, completely image based, ads served securely through their domain was the means by which the site was funded while maintaining the viewer's anonymity they could find themselves on a lot of default white-lists.
>"porn viewers don't have a huge incentive to make sure PORNHUB CO. doesn't appear on their bank statement"
Do they? I mean, honestly, who isn't a porn viewer? Who on earth would you, personally, think it to be scandalous to have a porn subscription discovered on their credit card? Anybody? What is the incentive?
I thought OP's porn example was pretty good. The entire world crushes porn (even when it's taboo or illegal), and yet still refuses to pay for it.
I think it's very insular to assume that what you think is normal is the same as what most people think is normal, especially when it's still newspaper scandal material.
another effect of private browsing is that, by default on Chrome, extensions are disabled. Therefore it is possible they suffer less from ad blocking than the rest of the industry.
35% seems awfully high. From what I've read it's more like 15-20%, and a large portion of that is younger people, so the demographic for advertising on websites will probably start to shift towards older people if it hasn't already.
I'm another uBlock Origin user because I don't like the compromise that ABP has become.
What I'm thinking about doing is writing a bit of software external to the browser that does something akin to what alot of us *nix users did before HTML5, which was to symlink Flash, in particular .macromedia and .adobe to /dev/null. This allowed the viewing of Flash content without the site being allowed to "write" LSOs to your HDD. Worked beautifully. I'm thinking the same sort of thing can be done with ads, tracking, etc., using a subscription model similar to what most ad blockers use. To whit, you surf a given site, yet see no ads and tracking, etc, is disallowed but the site doesn't notice. What say you, HN?
You know what? I don't care. I'm going to continue to use ad blockers like uBlock and Privacy Badger that are non-corporate. I will set up any network I'm in charge of with a DNS that has doubleclick.com as 127.0.0.1, and also many others.
The web was better in the early days, when it wasn't full of corporate dreck. If all the ad-supported BS websites fail, then so be it. I'd rather have just a few websites run by people for their own motives, than have a plethora of websites run by marketeers, propagandists and corporate executives.
"I will set up any network I'm in charge of with a DNS that has doubleclick.com as 127.0.0.1, and also many others."
You mean doubleclick.net? Alas, that's a typo that would let the ads in.
Like you I redirect doubleclick and "many others". But not to localhost. I like to log all the requests either via pflog or a socket logger. Useful for examining what apps are trying to do from my device over the network. Sometimes I redirect certain domains to my own httpd and serve my own "fake" resources (placeholders for in-app ads, etc.).
You say "any network I'm in charge of".
What if there were a DNS caching server reachable from anywhere that blocked these ad servers for you? That is, what if there was a "public DNS" like 8.8.8.8 or 208.67.222.222 except not run by a company that sells ads or "security services"?
What if there was a turnkey ad-blocking DNS caching server solution that one could run on any suitable hosting provider virtual machine instance?
Would anyone be interested in such a thing? I have had this personal DNS idea for many years, ad blocking is becoming much more popular only recently.
I think users controlling their own DNS is a key step toward taking back the www from the "corporate dreck". Maybe blocking ads is the stimulus for such a change.
I've been pondering this myself recently, and decided to explore setting up my DNS-level adblocking in Bind using RPZ instead of my hosts file.
It was quite easy, and I now even use nsupdate to block new ad domains that show up so that I don't have to restart my DNS server to add new names to block.
I pondered making my server publicly available but had concerns about bandwidth, and other potential legal shenanigans. That said I couldn't put my finger on what exactly I'd get in trouble for if I made it public, so perhaps it's just FUD?
Awesome idea. Please please please if you are going to do it first look for a business model. I guess the people coming to you to avoid ads won't be too eager to pay. Myself included :)
Maybe have a data mining or statistics service to pair with it. A curious search brings up an interesting QA about OpenDNS https://www.quora.com/How-does-OpenDNS-make-money.
Wait, what? It's my responsibility to invent a new business model for someone else? Or is it my duty to watch (possibly malware-infected) ads? I'm not sure what you're saying here.
If you're advocating for imposition of a legal duty to watch ads, then I demand the legal imposition of a duty for advertisers to frequently acknowledge that there is no "free" market any more.
> The web was better in the early days, when it wasn't full of corporate dreck.
You mean it was better when it was full of corporations which weren't trying to sell things to you.
The Web, and the Internet as a whole, were founded on a cooperation between governments, non-profit or not-for-profit or not-explicitly-profit-maximizing corporations (universities and research institutions, mainly), and, yes, profit-seeking corporations (BBN being an early one, as was Symbolics) from day one.
It was more genteel, perhaps, and there were AUPs in the early days which cut down on some of the more blatant advertising, but it was also narrow, niche, and nonthreatening. Nobody feared that their misdeeds would be exposed by something posted on the Internet. It was a pet project to allow researchers to share mainframes with a minimum of friction.
You're idealizing precisely the kind of Internet the propagandists want, one that's too small to challenge any of the established groups.
uBlock Origin (and uMatrix) are the only ad blockers that I trust and that I advise. The developer has strong ethics and, needless to say, they are open source.
ABP made a name for themselves as one of the first and best players, but they have turned too shady.
>uBlock Origin (and uMatrix) are the only ad blockers that I trust and that I advise. The developer has strong ethics and, needless to say, they are open source.
It makes the difference. Ghostery was interesting in it's first days, , especially with the http://knowyourelements.org site (now offline) as an educationnal item about trackers, but when you learn about it's business model, it is quite scary... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery
The company that owns Ghostery, Ghostery, Inc. (previously Evidon), plays a dual role in the online advertising industry. Ghostery blocks marketing companies from gathering website user information, but it makes money from selling page visit, blocking and advertising statistics to corporations globally, including corporations that are actively engaged in collecting user information to target ads and other marketing messages to consumers.
Customers include advertising industry groups like Better Business Bureau (BBB) and the Direct Marketing Association, parts of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA).[9] These agencies then use those reports to monitor how Online Behavioral Advertisers operate and, when needed, refer them to the Federal Trade Commission.[10] Ghostery also offers data to university students, researchers and journalists to support their work.
According to some journalists, Ghostery is not transparent in how it collects data from users or what that data is used for. Other journalists have claimed that Ghostery sells user data to advertisers to better target their ads.[11] Ghostery, Inc denies this, asserting that Ghostery does not collect any information that could be used to identify users or target ads specifically at individual users. To support their assertion, the company made the source code open for review in 2010, but after 2010 further source have not been released.[12]
In February 22, 2016 Ghostery, Inc released new EULA for Ghostery browser extension, as proprietary closed-source product.[1]
Very shady indeed. Looking for alternatives now...
What about https://disconnect.me? Don't they provide an interesting "free" trackers-list, that is even integrated inside the "non-profit" uBlock Origin?
The ad-blocker-blockers are annoying, and my usual response is to just go elsewhere. I'm not turning on advertising for anyone.
That being said, I'd happily pay a small ($5-10/mo) subscription if it enabled all (or a large number of) these sites again. Alledgedly my eyeballs are work millicents to advertisers: I'd like to buy all the advertising space I'm being shown at that price.
I don't think an adblock company could do it, as it would be too much like a protection racket, but surely someone could set up a subscription-based service for "ad-free content", where sites that took part got a slice of your flat subscription fee. A bit like microtransactions, except not microtransactions.
> Adblock Plus comes off the worst of the lot. The company charges publishers fees to allow their ads through its filters, based on criteria about size and placement.
Lie. Adblock Plus is a FOSS ad-blocker.
It has a whitelist of "acceptable ads" that is enabled by default.
You can turn it off, and since the thing is open source, you can clone your own version in which that is the default.
I haven't heard that anyone has to pay ABP (or can pay) to be on this list.
I got an email from Eyeo, "the company behind Adblock Plus, the largest Adblocker". They wanted to talk about "business potential associated with our Acceptable Ads initiative". Doesn't sound like a conversation I'd have if the program was free.
I'm curious if any evidence has ever been offered that the "Acceptable Ads" program is corrupt. It seems to me that literally the moment it was announced people characterized it as an offer to be bribed, but _as described_ I don't see anything wrong with the program.
* Allowing the most invasive of all the ad trackers to be members of Acceptable ads? (Criteo: Yes, they're a member)
* Allowing the most ubiquitous ad trackers to be members of Acceptable Ads? (Google: Yes, they're a member)
* Allowing the advertisements of companies owned by their investors to be members of Acceptable Ads? (Sedo: Owned by Tim Schumacher -- Yes they're a member)
* Allowing cheesy "native ads" site-spam to be part of Acceptable Ads? (Taboola. Yes, they're a member.)
* Gouging publishers for an absolutely absurd pound of flesh? (The rate is 30% of ad revenue for blocked ads. Insane!)
Criteo recently agreed to pay Eyeo 30% of revenue from ads that are allowed through. As a public company, they disclosed this to certain analysts and investors who follow them. Almost all Criteo ads are now whitelisted by ABP. >90% of ABP users keep the default settings, so that argument is a red herring in my mind. Of course, Criteo is not just showing you ads, but tracking you around the web also, in order to facilitate showing you the right ads...so the tracking domains have all been whitelisted as well.
At what point does ABP quit being an ad blocker because so many ads get through? If you don't like ads, you should switch to another adblock client. If you don't mind ads, you should just uninstall whatever you've got so that the publishers (and not yet another middleman) reap the rewards.
Are you telling me that 90% of people who actively sought out and installed an ad blocker did not take the time to click twice more and disable the whitelist?
I'd wager that most ABP users who have the whitelist enabled do so for ideological reasons, not laziness.
ABP conducted some sort of ad hoc survey about this [2011]; they write about the results at the bottom of the FAQ list: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads under the question "Do Adblock Plus users really want this feature?"
Supposedly 25% of ABP users were found to be strictly against all ads; 75% are okay with some ads to support websites.
Therefore, arguably, the whitelist feature serves the users who are in this 75% who don't want a blocker to block everything, making the browser extension useful/acceptable to more people.
> Whitelisting is free for all small- and medium websites and blogs. However, managing this list requires significant effort on our side and this task cannot be completely taken over by volunteers as it happens with common filter lists. That's why we are being paid by some larger properties that serve non-intrusive advertisements that want to participate in the Acceptable Ads initiative.
> Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Taboola are paying the owner of Adblock Plus to unblock ads on their websites at a fee of "30% of the additional ad revenues" they would have made were ads unblocked, the Financial Times reports.
I came here to raise this. On balance, I think it is reasonable if done openly, as is "turn off adblock or pay" initiatives. The fact of the matter is, we have optimized paying carriers rather than the actual item.
Essentially we pay large postage fees for a package, the package itself being what we want and mostly unaffiliated with carriers.
So while I wouldn't turn adblock off to read an article, I understand why a publisher would want payment for their services, especially if a 3rd party is being paid and not them.
Adblock tries to strike a balance by permitting "reasonable" ads. It is hard to do and I am not sure how well they succeed but they are up front about this. This is an extension of the model described above except it tries to be a reputation broker.
Tracking by most companies has made the internet much less useful in a lot of ways. I connect to google, linked in, twitter and facebook beacons so tgey can track my preferences, then i am served the huge modal asking if I want to buy x or subscribe (or just taken to appstore out of nowhere on mobile) then the content loads but the 1/3 screen banner advert is clicked accidentally on mobile because i cant scroll.
So yes, if there was a universal $20 content fee, people would pay (and there sort of is and they sort of do) but they end up being a power broker.
I tend to think of ABP a bit like the Advertising Standards Agency in the UK. They essentially enforce a minimum standard upon advertisers, whilst collecting administrative fees in exchange.
Long-term this is actually better for advertising agencies and websites supported by ads, as it'll help stop people just blocking ads completely. But people rarely think long-term anymore...
Boing Boing runs "native advertising"--ad copy barely disguised as legitimate reviews to bypass ad blocking--every day, under the byline "Boing Boing Store". It's depressing to see them pretending they still have any moral high ground here.
Comcast (a BB sponsor) is holding a contest in which you design your own virtual apartment in "Comcast Town." They invited Boing Boing to judge but, even more fun, they asked us to suggest some Boing Boing furniture that people could use to decorate their pads! Above is the living room I designed. (I'm obviously not eligible to win. Sniff, sniff.) Notice the steampunk computer, carnivorous plant, and Flying Spaghetti Monster statue. I think the illustrator did a terrific job. In fact, I wish it was my real living room! The grand prize winning design gets a real-world room remodel, 40-inch HDTV, a new laptop, and a digital phone. I'm just helping select the ten finalists -- then it's up to The People.
First, appeal-to-authority doesn't make "native advertising" any less shitty or deceptive; and second, neither of those currently has a front-page article denouncing something that they themselves do every day.
This could be done in a legitimate way. Suppose there were an AdFixPlus plugin with the mission of cleaning up advertising on the Internet by making sure every website conforms to an acceptable advertising policy that forbids intrusive ads. Users install it for free and advertisers pay for it.
It seems like that should be fine so long as both the users and the advertisers know what's going on, and there are alternative plugins with different policies out there.
Websites can forbid to serve users who turn off too many ads and users can refuse to visit websites that serve too many ads. But both sides would gain if some compromise can be reached. So it seems like a competitive market should evolve towards something that looks quite like this, with a middleman of some sort setting some reasonable rules, rather than one side deciding by fiat how it's going to be.
Of course ad networks and publishers do some of this already. They have policies about not accepting all ads. The constant negotiation about which ads are okay to show is part of the reason why Internet advertising is so complicated. But they are less focused on what the user wants since the user can't choose between ad networks; only the advertiser and publisher can.
>forbids intrusive ads. Users install it for free and advertisers pay for it
This is a great idea, but eventually comes full circle. Advertisers will pay more to have more access until they push it too far. Then someone builds a meta-AdFixPlus.
I'm using Disconnect from https://disconnect.me, which is working alright for me. While not marketed as an ad-blocker (but rather as a tracker-blocker), I effectively see no ads at all. As far as I know, it doesn't track you in any way.
The shakedown model just seems so scummy to me. There has to be a better way to monetize ad blockers. I suppose it doesn't matter though, as most advertising will simply become sponsored content/native advertising anyway, which will negate the need for ad blockers.
We see it today on the web, but we have also seen it on TV for even longer as their answer to DVR-based commercial skipping. Take a show like Nightline, which is just an infomercial for every project that ABC and its parent company (Disney) want to promote, masquerading as a news broadcast. That format is likely a sign of things to come both on TV and the web.
While Ad-blockers are getting popular the tech industry could indeed innovate to become ad-blocker-blockers. I guess ad-blockers work by looking at the domain names of the content. Why not use IP address alone to serve ads ? Why use JS embeds code to serve ads and not render it through server itself?
Even JS based ads could provide challenge response based callbacks to render content only after ad is loaded.
I think this is the answer. You can imagine content plugins that inject into server side CMS (RoR, Drupal, django on top of Apache, Nginx, etc..) that add ad elements, and scramble the div / css tags such that it looks uniform, yet has a semi-random naming scheme that would be hard to defeat.
While things like security and freedom of information warrant technical innovation to ensure human rights its gonna be a hard sell to convince smart people to make more ads.
"Why don't we just innovate and make unexploitable software that does exactly what we want with no unintended consequences" : )
Sometimes.
And sometimes the product is simply free because First time entrepreneurs feel insecure and are afraid to ask users for money.
Business models are difficult. Getting free users to become paid users is a science in its own.
You might be the product. Or you might just be a free rider helping a company grow until they feel confident enough to ask you to pay, subscribe or upgrade.
Open source at least brings the prospect of free-as-in-speech applications to reality. It's not a guarantee, but the community can have a direct and active role in the direction.
There is a difference between free (gratis) and free (libre).
It is possible to make money by giving things away, but such strategies are much more fragile when the giveaway item is libre. If you piss off your "customers"--or even just fail to please them enough--someone may just fork your free item and bleed away your audience.
Facebook is gratis, and not easily replicated. Therefore it can engage in far more objectionable behavior in monetizing its user base than AdBlock Plus, which is libre. If ABP sells out its users, the users just uninstall it and put uBlock Origin in its place. Or they download the source, cut out the part that causes offense, and re-release it as AdBlock Minus.
There's no site I have so great a need to visit that I will put up with it. I can't think of instances where the content was unavailable elsewhere, or if not available I couldn't live without it.
The sites insisting that I subject myself to their ad abuse are likely to find their viewership evaporate. I can't see how how those enterprises will survive, considering that the internet will very likely always provide alternatives that visitors find more acceptable.