Slashdot Mirror
Does Adblock Violate A Social Contract?
almondjoy writes "Newsforge is currently running a story on Firefox extensions where the author states the following regarding use of the AdBlock extension: 'If you use this tool ... there are those who would assert you are not holding up your end of a 'social contract' between yourself and the Web site that you are browsing' Would you be volating a social contract hitting the 30sec skip button on Tivo? Or putting a strip of paper across the bottom of our TV screen to block out those super annoying scrolling banners? I have found that using the combination of AdBlock and FlashBlock extensions in Firefox has greatly enhanced my browsing experience. Has acceptance of web sites crammed with advertising content become part of my social contract with society?"
Doesn't SPAM violate the same contract.
What gets me is that arguably, social cotract was first violated by offending websites and ad-server ppl in general, with things like popups, glaringly bad animation (ie, flashing colors, etc). Not to mention the EVIL doubleclick and their "we will track your ass... try and avoid us, punk" attitude. Which is what I believe the adblock authors were trying to control/avoid/defeat.
I won't adblock a server/ad that's generally nice or doesn't get in the way of my browsing... think google or other text-based adverts, or even non-animated, "non-epilepsy inducing" image ads. THATs a real social contract... because google/etc know that their revenue relies on their good behavior. I respect that.
Finally, on a dialup (like at my parents place), adblock SIGNIFICANTLY improves performance. I think removal of bloat is impressively important for non-broadband folks, and that's another case of advertisers "messing with social contract". I especially hated it when the page would load fast, but the ad at the top woudl sit there and hold up the entire page from rendering. WTF.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I also don't feel bad about not watching most commercials on TV or ripping the DVD's I buy and removing al the crap from them. I paid for the product, I don't want to see more ads. I pay about $140 a month to my cable company for Digital cable, Digital Broadband and a Digital phone. The least the cable company can do is get rid of ads for me, though I know that day will never come.
The only ad content I don't make an effort to block are text based ads like Google uses. I have no problem with those types of ads since they do not distract me. The day most/all web ads are text based and don't flash to "get your attention" is the day that I will stop using adblock and flashblock to block web ads. Oh, and adblock has two modes: "remove images" and "hide images". The "remove images" option doesn't download the images and the "hide images" option downloads but doesn't display them. So if you want to surf a site and still help out the web advertiser, just use "hide images", though I use "remove images" so I can get faster page load times.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
If a commercial website can't support itself via its audience, that website should die. If the users of the website are sufficiently motivated to pay for content, they will, and it will survive. Here's a hint: if you need to be paid, then be up-front and honest about it (eg: LWN). If your worth preserving, you'll be fine.
There is no such thing as an implied or "social" contract - by their very nature, contracts are not implications! The whole terminology is a marketing exercise designed to appeal to the "guilt" that just because someone is giving you something, you ought to pay for it.
Sheesh! Social contracts! What next ? Breathing contracts ?
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
could get you sued, then. I guess.
Stated that websites weren't allowed to pop-up advertisements. When they started to do so, a renegotiation of the contract became necessary, and the new contract states that while web sites may attempt to pop up windows, I am free to disallow that on my system.
If web sites have a problem with this, they need to learn to read the fine print before they sign.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Why should this be different on the internet?
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
This "social contract" BS is something marketers dreamed up to make it "bad" to block their ads. The TV people say the same thing about how you're "breaking contract" by muting commercials, getting up off your duff for a drink, or skipping past them on a recording you made.
I didn't sign any contract. I didn't agree to any ToS. I don't want to see your commercials, so poo on you.
The thing advertisers don't seem to get is that you don't sell products by annoying the hell out of people.
I would take it a step further. The thing advertisers don't get is that if someone is taking steps to ensure they don't see your ad then the chances of them actually buying anything from you had they seen your ad are absolutely miniscule.
"Yes, your honor, I was honoring my social contract by carefully reading all the roadside billboards and advertising when I accidentally drove my car into that Denny's."
You don't see people going to extreme lengths to block Google text ads. Why? Because they are fairly unobtrusive, yet still visible enough for people to see them.
Actually, most of the prepackaged adblock rules such as the one at http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock do block Google text ads.
Social or not, a contract represents an *agreement* among people or groups. To have a valid contract, first there must be a common agreement that the terms of that contract are actually valid. Our at-large social contract works because, on the whole, people agree that there are certain rules we must live by in order for society to work.
However, there has NEVER, implicitly or otherwise, been any sort of common agreement that society *must* endure advertising, regardless of degree of intrusion or method of delivery. When TV and radio were first brought on the air, the idea that commercial advertising would allow them to survive was not a given. The fact that it *did* allow them to survive happened to come to pass, but then again, there were no technological means for the public to manipulate the medium for their own benefit - for a while. However, there was no obligation for society to absorb content broadcast to them, and indeed when options became available, they were used.
When the first tape players became available, there *were* arguments and court cases regarding recording off the air, whether it was "legal" to listen while skipping recordings, etc. These arguments have all been had before. And consistently, it has been recognized that people hvae no inherent "obligation" to absorb content in any way other than however they see fit.
I have no obligation to read the ads in a magazine. I have no obligation not to turn down the dial on the radio when commercials come on. I have no obligation to sit by idly while pop-up windows dance across my desktop. THERE IS NO SUCH CONTRACT OR AGREEMENT, social or otherwise. If my actions, and the actions of millions of others, somehow cause those broadcasting content discomfort or loss, that's their problem, not mine.
I have no obligation to support *any* business model for anyone else. Indeed, if there were such an obligation, then society could never evolve or adapt to change, could it?
In short - that's just plain old horse manure.
Well, it's just like TV. The more they annoy me, the more effort I will make to remove the annoyance. If they don't annoy me, I won't bother, and... get this... I'm likely to actually view the ad. I do not, however, like to trade annoyance for content. Plus, it's not like annoying ads are making sales to me anyway. If anything, I will make it a point to avoid the product.
In summary: "Social contract" my ass.
I reserve the right to block ads. If they don't like it, they can charge me for the site. If it's worth it to me, I'll pay. If it's not, it's their loss.
Maybe they can follow my social contract: Don't make ads that cause epileptic seizures and bleeding ears and I won't be inclined to block them. How's that for a social contract?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I've worked on the technology side of the advertising industry (advergaming in particular), and I beleieve that this statement is actually incorrect.
Most of the advertising agencies I've worked with beleive that banner ads and intrusive advertising simply do not work. The craze over exposure (how many eyeballs can I get in front of, regardless of the experience) has been replaced with an emphasis on targetted and uesful advertising.
However, it is the companies doing the advertising themselves that are really keeping these ads going. I've heard multiple stories of product managers demanding obtrusive ads. A rather common quote is something along the lines of "If I'm paying for it, I expect people to see it". There is still a strong belief by non-experts (and a very natural one if you think about it) that advertising is all about volume (how many 'views') as opposed to the quality of the ad itself.
It's fascinating stuff really.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
Source, please.
<p>Research is pretty clear that text based ads have a much higher rate of success than any other form of internet ad.</p>
If you refuse to see the ads, you should find your content on another website.
I take it, then, that you will never:
I mean, you wouldn't want to be exploiting those providers by not viewing their advertisements, would you? Somehow, you're asserting that advertisers/providers have a right to force you to look at them.
Just like downloading music on a p2p system is a violation of copyright law.
What a broad generalization. Ever tried getting some legal tunes from indie artists? Or being in a country that allows downloading music?
You have no social right to listen to that music.
Yes, but your analogy is nothing close to that. A more appropriate analogy would be purchasing an album by $BAND and being forced to listen to $TRACK1_ADVERTISING_SPIEL_FOR_3:00 each time you attempted to play the disc.
I call it the sucker tax. The world needs suckers so that the rest of us can get breaks. Rebates are an excellent example. The suckers buy the product and don't mail in the rebate, we mail in the rebate and save money. We were able to save that money because the suckers subsidised us by paying more.
Same with ALL advertising. You get to watch TV because the suckers are buying everything Britney SPears puts out.
evil is as evil does
I will offer my experience here. using my family as guinea pigs...
I use provoxy at home on the network, we use firefox only on all pc's, I have an asterisk server that directs all telephone calls that are from outside my local dialing to voicemail and we have replay tv units at eact Television.
After 9 months of this, my daughter went to a friends house for a weekend. she came back horrified.. she said their internet was unuseable because of all the ad's and she could not stand watching television without having a 30 second skip, and she could not believe how many times they get interrupted with sales phonecalls.
she said and I do qoute... "having to deal with all those advertisments made me feel dirty."
and that really is what happens when you give yourself control over advertising in your home. you end up getting rid of the numbness of getting ablated with it constantly to the point that you actually notice it and become annoyed by it.
They can cry and throw hissy-fits all they want. There never EVER was a "social contract" to accept advertising, espically the crap-tasticular advertising they use today.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And, you're missing the fact that "worth paying for" currently has a literal floor value of (in American currency) $0.01 and in practical terms more like $1.00 for single transactions.
I have several content-based sites that do OK with Google Ads (covering expenses). On a typical day the amount that an average visitor "pays" $0.002 to view a bit of content by a certain percentage clicking on an ad. Through advertising, that bit of content has a value of $0.002.
Exactly which revenue collection source enables me to collect the $0.002 that the current advertising market has indicated that my content is worth (a price that is viable and workable under the current system)?
A really good content site might have 4 heavily viewed articles/tutorials and generate numbers like I mentioned above. With current ad participation, a site like that could easily have 5000 article "reads" and would make somewhere in the ballpark of $300/month. That's a clear indication that those 4 articles have actual market value. However, take away the aggregated payment via advertisement and you lose the ability to effectively collect the already determined price for the articles since even a full-pass, reading all 4 articles still falls under the $0.01 that hard currency handles and well below any practical online payment mechanism.
And, before you think that, again, this is some great conspiracy of people who just don't understand the difference between physical and electronic items, I'd like to point out that this type of aggregated payment happens all over the place for both tangible items and non-tangible items.
Lots of people (and governments) rely on this type of payment to provide entirely viable products and services. Consider city water. I pay a couple of dollars per 1000 gallons. Between my household use and my lawn, etc. I use enough to generate a bill of $60 or so every couple of months. Each gallon has an actual cost, but it's entirely unpractical to try to buy each gallon from the city individually. Remove the water meters and aggregated billing/payment and it's not like the cost of delivering clean city water went away or that the value of doing so went away, it's just the the mechanism for collecting payment per unit consumed fell apart and stopped the system from working.
Do you think your individual taxes pay for even 1 police officer to keep your neighborhood safe? Does that mean that a police officer's salary and benefit to the community isn't a "viable product"? Absolutely not. Rather, it means that the value per citizen is low enough while the cost of providing is high enough that the cost needs to be spread out across a population of people.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
A 'social contract' isn't a contract at all. You're thinking of an 'implied contract'.
A social contract is the thing everyone participates in to make society work correctly, and is not a 'contract' at all. They are simply polite behaviors.
You walk on the right, I walk on the right. Look, we no longer run into each other.
You don't be annoying with your cellphone, I don't be annoying with mine.
You tell me if you see me walk off with my headlights left on, and I do the same for you.
You refrain from killing me, and I refrain from killing you.
Etc, etc. When violation of a social contract causes serious problems, we tend to outlaw it. When it's minor, we just call those violators assholes and shot them the bird.
Now...I refrain from blocking your ad, and you...refrain from blocking mine? WTF? I have no ads.
'Social contracts' have no bearing whatsoever to ads. Ads are unidirectional, from a very small subset of people to the population at large, and hence they can't possibly be part of any social contract.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Most people don't ask for a tissue, they ask for a Kleenex. It's not just a copy, it's a Xerox. We don't search for something online, we Google it. That picture of George W. Bush being dry humped by Abe Vigoda isn't simply fake, it's Photoshopped.
See, a good advert isn't simply about clicking now or even directly influencing your buying patters. It's all about branding. While you may never buy/visit an advertised product/site, the more exposure you have to a good ad, the deeper your mental connection between the brand and the focus.
So a few months down the road, a friend asks you "Hey, do you know any good hosting services", your brain will connect the term with, say, the Rackspace advert you saw on Slashdot.
If you just ignore the ads, you're at least giving the owner of the site a chance. If you block them all together, you're just taking all the pennies from from the little tray.