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.

Yet, they aren't. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and/or cable, etc. etc.

The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not for long.

Paywalls work for high quality content (eg, The Economist); but not for low quality content.

Low quality content cannot survive behind a paywall, because nobody will pay for it; what will happen is that low quality content made for profit will die/disappear, and we'll all be better for it.

What will survive is high quality content made for profit or for free, and low quality content made for free (which we can ignore).

This whole debate exists only because current producers of low quality content have somehow convinced everyone that their content is in fact worthwhile, and that it's an accident and a crime that they'd be robbed of revenue, and that users are fools not wanting to pay for it.

This is rubbish. Users are not fools, and they are always right. What they will not pay for is worthless, literally.

I was around before the commercialization of the web exploded, and I might miss all the light entertainment that it provides, but going back wouldn't be the worst. The parts of the internet that are most special to me are some combination of not funded by ads in the first place, a labor of love, open source, or I already pay for anyway.

The increasingly desperate, increasingly gross business models that pop up as publishers go down with the ship is going to suck though.

In the Patreon model, you can support the creator directly, and their ability to produce content scales with that support. It's like a subscription, except you allow anyone else to free ride.

A Patreon supported site could run no ads at all and still make a stable income. It would no longer be fighting its readers to force them to view manipulative nonsense. It would no longer be answerable to pushy, content-controlling advertisers. It would have more editorial freedom, bounded only by the willingness of people to pay.

IMO the Patreon model answers all the problems of the advertising model and I'd like to see it becoming the norm.

Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking glasses. So I can walk down the street and NO LOGOS.

It would almost be like humans owned the public space, then.

Much like newspapers, you've hitched your wagons to problematic revenue streams. I wish it were easier, but as content creators you are also businesses, and you need to work on better ways to support yourselves. That's your responsibility, not mine. I do support content creators directly quite often and quite a lot in many different ways (merch, crowdfunding, direct support such as patreon, volunteer labour, etc). If you can't survive in a world full of "me"s, well I suspect you weren't trying very hard.

A different way of looking at it is that many users do understand the consequences and either disagree with the author about the likely outcomes or have a different set of priorities than the author.

Putting aside the morality/ethics discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the 'cheese' is moving for content publishers and so they are left with a choice, change and find new cheese - or stay and starve. Either way, the current gnashing of teeth will have little effect.

The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.

I use a firewall to protect my home network from the wilds of the internet. I use an HTML firewall to protect my browser (and in turn, my home network) from the wilds of the web.

Incredibly slow loading, large assets that are inconsequential to the functionality I need, malware, unwanted visual clutter that creates a negative cognitive load I want to protect myself from.

The reality that advertisements are the main targets is indicative that they have perhaps been the worst offenders. I'm sure there are many good advertisers out there. I'm sure it is only the 99% that make the rest of them look bad.

If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.

I'm curious why, in all the outrage and handwringing about ad blockers and the future of the Web, nobody ever seriously suggests making ads less annoying.

We don't need a new monetization model. We need content providers, and by extension advertising providers, to refuse to carry ads that are wildly intrusive, CPU-intensive, or outright fraudulent ("one weird trick"). Seriously, why are major national news outlets carrying advertisements that are as sketchy as those X-Ray Specs ads from old Boy's Life magazines?

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.

Blocking web-based ads is no different from TV viewers who walk out of the room, or record shows then skip over ads on playback, or mute the TV during ads. AFAIK, no TV advertisers have bemoaned that venerable practice.

If web ad purveyors want folks to browse differently then they must 1) improve their spam so people choose not to block it, or 2) change the physical way it's distributed.

To volubly complain is to sleight the invisible hand, which as you know, in the Land of the Free, is akin to giving olde Mr Smith the finger.

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.

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.

...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read

Their original product was never free, but they didn't think that through. They made most money through ads & classified, but they still charged for the product.

Now they need to figure out how to make each visitor be worth 50 cents or whatever, and they are trying to do it in a way that people were already growing sick of when they started.

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They should create a system of micropayments where people can have a instantly accessible purse & a page can charge a few cents to few, ranked by content, author, whatever.

they need to start selling their content again.

As an advertiser I might well be tempted to stop displaying video ads if I was convinced that a big proportion of users were blocking video but not text ads.

Sadly most blockers are all or nothing. Most users are not going to go to the trouble of whitelisting individual sites so a better middle ground would be global AD blocker settings:

Off - Block nothing Low - Block popups Medium - Block popups and video High - Block everything

If that was a common model it would encourage some reasonable behaviour on both sides.

Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?

I think that's one thing people don't account for. once most content is behind paywalls you leave much more of a trace than on the ad-ridden web now

Maybe some of these individuals forget that many of us were on the Internet well before it became as "commercial" as it is now. The bulk of the content came from users that didn't expect or receive any payment for their writing...much like many of the biggest sites today: Reddit, etc. What wasn't around was shitty, click-bait junk written for no reason other than to drive ad impressions.

If 70% of what's on the web died due to lack of ad revenue, I don't think society would suffer some huge loss. Stating that ads are required to support content is begging the question; if people don't want to pay for it, the content isn't worth anything to begin with.

How does your view consider high quality content which is supported by advertising?

I just don't see a charity economy being long term sustainable on the web...

I agree with the idea that there are existing alternative business models, but I don't think a voluntary model will generate enough revenue to sustain current content standards.

Also, this seems a lot like "branding & marketing" version 2.0. I don't like branding. And I don't want to like what people write just because of what they have written before. I want to read or listen to work, and then decide if I pay for it.

Do you have a better way of viewing this?

> Artists set up a page on the Patreon website, where patrons can pledge to donate a given amount of money to an artist every time they create a piece of art, optionally setting a monthly maximum. Alternatively a fixed monthly amount can be pledged

So it either turns into a monthly subscription fee, or becomes another game for the ad-tech industry to solve.

(It's still an important point for individuals though.)

Content creators are desperate for more revenue so they throw on another tracking pixel, another web ad placement, another sponsorship. None of this helps the fact that content on the web is a commodity and people value their time and attention span.

Large lawsuits against the ad networks for allowing malware infections and drive-by downloads would have had an effect, but unless regulation has real teeth, it's just a hindrance or a "cost of business" with no value added to the consumer.

After all, what solution would the government put in place? Ban ads? Regulate their content? How would that be more optimal than allowing people in the market to find the right solutions?

The reality is, ad supported content with lots and lots and lots of content providers may simply not be tenable, due to the fragmentation in both content and ad delivery vectors.

That requires the market to find new solutions, like paywalls, micropayments, different styles of ads, mixed pay/free models, good ol' fashioned consolidation, etc.

Now, to be clear, I'm about as far from a free market dogmatist as you can get... I'm no communist, but I'm Canadian, so...

But I honestly don't believe this is a case where regulation is appropriate. Where the market is likely to settle on a highly non-optimal solution (like, say, healthcare, due to information asymmetries, or broadband, due to enormous barriers of entry, or manufacturing pollution, thanks to negative externalities), absolutely I think the government has to get involved.

But in this case, I don't see any reason for that kind of heavy-handed intervention.

edit: I just discovered that dr-iguana.com does have ads. I stick by my assertion that there is a lot of great content out there made strictly as a hobby, though.

People could voluntarily install a browser plugin that watches for addresses and sends money. Perhaps the donation could vary by time spent on the page (monitoring for activity to accommodate leaving stuff open), or perhaps it could be a fixed sum per pageview (with a cooldown to discourage blogspam). In exchange, servers could withhold ads.

Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were.

That's why they made it a sliding scale, instead of a fixed no-ads-ever package.

And I expect that the more "successful" it is, the more watered down it will become. Like cable TV: the promise was "no ads". Then there were ads.

Amen. A lot of people talk about the "web we wouldn't have", yet would we really be worse off without the low quality trash from the thousands upon thousands of content farms that pollute it?

And yes I realize some would get caught in the cross fire. Ads did enable some good possibilities. Are they in the majority? Would they really have had no alternatives?

Maybe we would have had kickstarter a decade earlier. For all we know, ads set us back 10-15 years.