Ask HN: How do you feel about ad blockers? Are they an valid form of consumer protectionism? Or are we experiencing a textbook example of the tragedy of the commons? Something in between? |
Ask HN: How do you feel about ad blockers? Are they an valid form of consumer protectionism? Or are we experiencing a textbook example of the tragedy of the commons? Something in between? |
There are real alternatives. Micropayments based on reuse (much like publishing royalties), for instance, could simultaneously produce a good income source for creatives and an incentive to invert the chilling effects on transformative reuse created by the automatic conservative enforcement of DMCA safe-harbor policies; a nuanced model for this kind of system is described in several places as 'transcopyright'. Schneier's street-artist model has been adapted into the model used by Patreon, but is remarkably rare in practice for an idea by a major thinker that was published 20 years ago. And, of course, there's stuff like crowdfunding and selling t-shirts -- both of which have issues of their own (kickstarter-style crowdfunding is more sensitive to bad actors than either the street-artist model or Patreon's hybrid version that turns crowdfunding into a subscription model; hawking merch can turn off certain communities and may not be useful outside of communities with a strong and coherent identity with symbol-sets that uniquely identify it).
Advertising was jumped on as a monetization model because it's, at small-scale, low-effort. Google makes their money by keeping the effort the same for the other two parties (the ad-seller and the ad-buyer) while improving targeting. However, the targeting hasn't really scaled well, despite the amount of tracking going up. And, we've hit the point where the tracking intended to improve the targeting has gotten so resource-heavy that end-users would rather cut it off entirely than benefit from well-targeted ads -- we've hit a scaling limit. The effort of targeting the advertising has been pushed off to Google and to the end user in terms of bandwidth. So, unless everybody gets fiber and significantly faster computers suddenly, we have time to back-track and find something that doesn't clog the pipes with surreptitiously-collected data worth on the order of one cent per megabyte.
If you see a billboard in the street or an ad in paper journal, you are exposed to the brand name for a few seconds and that's it.
If you are exposed to a web ad, you are exposed to the brand name for a few seconds AND your actions, the fact you have visited the page, from which IP at which time of the day, with which browser is recorded in a database for later use (and is certainly going to be sold or replicated by multiple entities).
So it is not so much the advertising part that his annoying but rather the "tracking". The fact that advertising network (or social buttons) are pervasive through many sites makes the matter worse.
The biggest lie is to still call that "advertising", this has nothing to do with old school advertising.
What bothers me, borrowing from your example of the billboard, is that they don't block your content and make you wait in line. Ads on a video, popups, interstitial, they all slow me down and annoy me.
You could have never have even visited facebook.com and have never had a profile, but still this company was using its cookies to build a profile of you on the internet. All of the articles you read on the internet, the sites you visit, all being collected and tallied by some faceless internet behemoth.
That sort of thing doesn't bother you?
We (the people who realize that) should therefore coin and promote a new term, which will make this more obvious. I propose "advertracking". Everyone, start using it when referring to the internet advertising/tracking business and make your readers/listeneres aware.
Even Google is out there making it worse. On mobile I get flashing yellow ads telling me I have a virus or need to clean or speed my phone.
The point is that we must stop the momentum associated with the advertising-fueled web now, because it's too late.
We -- the technologists behind it -- need to stop taking it for granted what the future of the web is going to look like, and to think of other ways to obtain that revenue.
I do and will forever use adblockers (until they are circumvented) for these reasons.
Installing an ad blocker is similar to any other vaccination - reduce the spread of intellectual disease and hopefully create a herd immunity.
They are the result of site owners trying to make their sites sustaining or profitable and we have some trying very annoying ways of monetizing, and on the other hand we have users wanting free access to everything.
The result is site operators getting more desperate using more invasive techniques driving more users to use ad blockers and siding by default with people who want everything free.
In the end, the piper needs to get paid. Will micropayments be the answer or will only businesses for whom the www is essentially branding and marketing survive? I don't know. Certainly hope it's not public radio donation style funding.
That said, paid content masquerading as journalism is the worst.
It's a catch-22. Media outlets see they can make money off ads so they use more invasive techniques, viewers leave the site because of these techniques causing a drop in revenue, the media outlet steps it up a notch to more profitable, more invasive ads because of lost viewers from the first round of ads.
The web is new and ads have been humanity's first attempt at extracting revenue from the miracle of the web.
The web of 5, 10 years from now might be unrecognizable in various ways, by current measures.
I see no reason to think that the same might not be true about internet revenue. In another comment, I said that ads were the worst of what capitalism has to offer. If that's true, and adblocker use grows without bound, a new economic equilibrium will be reached somehow. Someone will think of something -- or else the web as we know it will become dramatically different, for better or for worse.
That is the best of what capitalism has to offer: confidence that a large enough market will adapt to anything.
This is only a tragedy of the commons if we find no other means to fund things we value and expect to have access to online. The Internet is here to stay. You are only an asshole if you hate ads, use adblocker and are also unwilling to fund the sites you use via some other means. There is nothing inherently evil about hating ads and choosing to block them. But if you expect to get all online content and services for free, then you de facto desire to treat someone, somewhere as your slave in some sense.
So if you use ad blockers and want services you value to stick around, please, out of enlightened self interest, support and promote alternate funding models that you find more palatable. And if your answer really boils down to "I expect everything for free!" then, yeah, go die in a fire.
That being said, I understand why others do. Adverts remain a source of privacy violations, legitimate security issues, and slow down a lot of websites.
I do run Flash click-to-play, and have EFF's HTTPS Everywhere installed. Those both negatively impact ads, but it is inadvertent and unavoidable. Both are set to improve security, if ads require an insecure connection or flash then more fool them.
I love YouTube for catching up on the late night talk shows, checking out the latest Cyanide and Happiness shorts, or watching cool documentary; I used to spend hours watching content. Lately, however, I can't stand to stay for one or two videos, because the ads are so offensive. I'll close the app/website and find something else to do.
A few years ago I cut my satellite service, and now I refuse to subscribe to cable/satellite again. I have local, over-the-air channels, but I don't watch them anymore either. After being a few years without that kind of TV advertising, I realise how obnoxious advertising really is. It's a total assault on the senses! Advertising on the Internet is heading this way, and I'm equally disgusted.
Anyway... You asked how I feel. Yay ad-blockers!
In my opinion, a billboard does not make my car move slower, and I don't have to pay to pay to see it.
Now I think those are really dumb ideas, plus I don't work for a company that makes money from ads. It's basically an arms race now, websites do insane things because their stupid fucking A/B tests ticked up .001 percent. Then the rest of them throw up modals (and whatever other garbage) because everyone else is doing it.
The real, actual web, as it really is, it's a disaster now. Sometimes I open a web page and forget about it, then minutes later it just begins blaring audio for some video ad that I can't even see because it's been scrolled offscreen. Toilet world.
If I would run for a mayor's position, I would do similar as they did in Sao Paulo and clean up the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
I find it troubling that companies get to tell me how incomplete I am on the streets every day and try to sell me workout pants and whatnot. It is utterly unethical, and we should rally to remove demeaning advertisement such as half-naked women on trucks selling refrigerators.
Have forums for these kind of things, much alike porn magazines and porn sites.
It'll be interesting to see how the internet evolves. If ad blockers are used by a lot of people, but not all, I expect to see the quality of content continue to fall lower and lower. The Buzzfeed crowd will be the last to adopt ad blockers.
I think it would be better if browsers just turned on ad blocking as a default. Force the web to find a new model sooner rather than later.
I wonder if Google and facebook have contingency plans for such an event.
If Microsoft wasn't so afraid of antitrust laws, I'd suggest they just introduce an adblocker built into windows and turned on as default. They could KO google in a quarter or two.
I currently do webcomics, an area whose most effective business model has historically been founded on ads.
I don't run ads on my comic. I used to but I decided to make 'no ads' as a goal on Patreon; I reached it and now my stuff is ad-free. A prominent cartoonist offered to sponsor my entry into a profitable collective and its ad network, and I'm not entirely sure I want to take this offer. Because then I'd be going back to ads.
On the other hand, part of how I grew the audience that lets me make enough money off of my comic to turn off ads is by running ads elsewhere. Not having them on my comic feels kind of hypocritical. I dunno.
We sure are. But advertising, not ad-blocking, is precipitating this tragedy:
1. The commons in this case is a healthy marketplace where the users are the customers and thus vote with their dollars. The invisible hand depends on this.
2. But then a competitor comes in and offers something for "free". This is a trick, a lie. The other important principle of the free market is that there is no free lunch.[1] The advertisers pay the website with money that is added to the cost of the products they are selling. Guess who buys those?
3. Here's where the tragedy comes in: Consumers are fooled by this. You've undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? The straight-up businesses that want to compete the honest way can't. They either have to cave and switch to ads, or die.
4. The tragedy continues: Since we are now the products not the customers, businesses don't compete for a dollars by producing a product we are willing to pay for. Instead, they compete for our clicks (what they're selling to the advertisers). Competing for clicks, as most of us see every day, yields horrible products for us.[2] But of course, we are not the customer.
5. And like every tragedy of the commons, what we are left with is a misused and polluted[3] precious resource, the web.
I haven't even got into the harm advertising itself cause to society, nor how it distorts the free market, suppressing innovation and true competition.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237
We now need a guilt-trip blocker. If you need money from your visitors, charge them.
Other than that, I've turned my ad blockers off since quite a while.
I would prefer some inline ad served by the site that is part of the page and has some sponsored by type feel to it.
Your contention is that if companies did not have to buy advertising to sell their products, they would subtract the advertising cost from their sales price?
You have a very unusual definition of being "fooled". Paying for something you can get for free is what most people would recognize as being a fool.
That companies decide to choose a different business model to offer for free what their competitors make you pay for is just innovation. It has zilch to do with being "honest" or "straight up".
Here's an interesting question: how come people buy bottled water when they could just drink tap water? I mean, shouldn't people be "fooled" by all the "free" water? How come the "straight up", "honest" water bottle company that sells its product at a price manages not to die? (Hint: it's not because they're not advertising).
The systematic tacking and profiling of all users of the web is disturbing and I am against it, but honestly, I still prefer Google at the commands rather that any government I can think of. Not that it justify in any way the tracking. It's a dangerous weapon.