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The Morality of Web Advertisement Blocking
An anonymous reader writes "There has been some recent coverage of the over-hyped boycott of Firefox, in response to the rising popularity of the Adblock Plus Firefox extension. A recent editorial on CNET looks into the issue, and explores the moral and legal issues involved in client-side web advertisement blocking. Whereas TiVo users freeload on the relatively fixed broadcasting costs paid by TV networks, users of web ad-blocking technology are actively denying website owners revenue that would otherwise go to pay for the bandwidth costs of serving up those web pages. If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft? Is this right? "
But is there a moral difference between not downloading the ad vs. not seeing the ad? For example, I use my userContent.css file to not display advertisements in older versions of Mozilla (I like the full suite of apps darn it!). *My* bandwidth is still used to get the file, *their* webserver still logs a request for /advert.php?foo.... but I never see the ad. As long as the request for the advert is made and it is sent, does it matter if someone sees it? Of course, if they don't see it they can't click it, but still...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
If the website owner feels it is necessary to use ads to support the cost of being on the internet, then the least they can do is avoid the flash "Bonk the _____ and get a ______" ads. If they aren't willing to do that then whether they like it or not I'm blocking their ads.
I go to websites primarily for content, and if thats disrupted by advertisement then I'm not getting what I went there for.
I'm using their bits, eh? Well, they're using my CPU with all their annoying flash ads.
As soon as people learn that annoying (and often intrusive) Flash ads aren't appreciated, then there won't be a major reason for adblock.
If the website designer has to pay for bits each time you view their website without viewing their banner ads, are you engaged in theft?
In order for me to view their banner ads, my browser must actively request the data for that banner in a separate transaction from the one used to get the rest of the contents of the page. I see no reason for me, as the computer's owner and operator, not to forbid the browser from doing so.
As a good citizen of the internet, I think it a good thing that I don't clog the tubes with advertising bandwidth which I do not care to see.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
If you want me to view your advertisement it better not.
1. Have sound. If it does your so forever block from my browser and wallet its not even funny
2. Overlay what I am reading. Having to click your ad away from the article text means I know exactly who I am never buying from.
3. Pop a window, over or under, its the same, your gone.
4. Any ad which causes my HD to spin up to load the damn support required for it, aka Flash and JAVA. If it pauses my experience it ends your chances.
5. Heaven forbid you dare ask me to download something.
You want might business. Then target those pages with simple and to the point banners and block ads. Do not animate my webpage. Put in bold letters why I should even pay attention to you. If you animate, make noise, or otherwise disturb my surfing you are intruding into my life and don't have that right
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
When I transfer a + c bytes, that's OK. When I transfer only c bytes, I'm stealing. So in this case, it's stealing when I take less than normal?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
As a publisher of a variety of blogs and a hoster of dozens of forums, javascript-based advertising accounts for nearly 30% of our income. Another 30% is based on direct advertising or link-sales along with paid-for-articles (which we fully disclose), and the rest is made up by subscriptions.
We openly advertise that our ads are blockable, and that users who are not interested in ads SHOULD block them. For us, users who are not interested in the advertisers products should block the ads so that our click-through rate is actually higher. When one of our users blocks ads they won't click, our CTR goes up. When our CTR goes up, our direct customers pay MORE for the outreach than if we forced ads on everyone, even those who don't want ads.
We've been slowly updating our sites to actively disable ads for anyone who logs in and sets their ads to "none" (even if they aren't subscribers). Again, this is no concern to us.
The clicks we do provide to our advertisers are generally good clicks, with users interested in the site or product. This makes our site even more valuable, as we have had more than a few dozen advertisers submit bids for our sites specifically, rather than just random appearances because of the site being "on topic" for the ads. Directly bid ads get us a LOT more CPC or CPM (sometimes in the $1-$2+ range), so again it is good that non-interested readers would disable ads, making our click-through even higher for those direct ads.
Considering that we're making a decent 5 figures annually, more than 1/2 of that from direct advertisers rather than random AdSense ads, I think it's a win-win situation. Users who like what we write will either pay, or accept ads. Users who don't want ads don't display them, but they still give us a profit by being responsive to things written via e-mail or combox responses. I'd rather get 5 minutes of a person's time to respond than $0.15 for some random ad click.
When you run an ad-sponsored site, you have two choices: get a lot of crappy traffic and get low CPM (barely covering your hosting cost), or get GOOD limited traffic and get a high CPM from those accepting ads (or getting a profit through a subscription or an intellectual profit from a reply or an e-mail).
I wouldn't be blocking ads if:
1. The ad servers didn't overload all the time and slow the page load to a crawl. I can't count the number of times I've had to block an ad server just to get a page to LOAD.
2. The ads weren't so obnoxious. Sound is an absolute no-no. Animation is almost as bad, but at least doesn't startle you half to death at 3am when you aren't expecting it. It does however tend to slow the page down, especially if there are multiple animated ads all dancing around and asking you to punch the monkey.
If they toned down the ads a couple of notches, and made sure their infrastructure could handle the number of ads they are serving I think a lot of people would be more than happy to put up with the ads in exchange for the free content. But it seems like no matter how much you say this the advertisers don't want to listen. They're stuck in the old TV mentality where they try to push as much dazzling crap at you as they can. The problem is Internet users aren't TV viewers; we don't want things shoved in our faces constantly. If we did, we'd watch TV. Instead of getting "mind share" they're just pissing everyone off.
(and speaking of TV will someone please bitchslap the people who compress the audio of TV commercials to make it sound obnoxiously loud?)
Times like these I wish I had mod points :-| well said!
/.? Maybe. Or maybe I'd just get more work done."
Although
"Would I miss a free
Maybe you'd just go somewhere else? I was more than happy with the interweb before the last dotbomb, I don't understand why people seem to think it should become another content media platform, if I wanted to watch shite I'd turn the TV on.
Actually I do... but I wont go into the American rhetoric of make a fast buck out of everything you can get your hands on and then some.
It may be your computer, but guess whose web server it is?
With that in mind, the web page is on a private server which is open to the public. However, the owner of the machine has every right to block users who do not allow for advertisements.
See, with big sites such as CNN, I feel that their service is an auxiliary mode of delivering information in addition to their other services. However, with smaller sites such as communities, etc., I allow their advertising to pass through because I realize that for most of them, the advertising is the only thing keeping their servers up.
That's my logic. Feel free to disagree, but I feel it's probably more accurate than the parent post.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
When you site warns me that it's going to resize my browser, install software and watch everything I do I'll stop blocking it.
Actually that is when I block the entire site, not just the advertisements.
It is when the advertisements covered up the site so you could not access the content (X-10 cams?) is when I got serious about blocking advertisements. Yahoo news was almost unreadable due to all the junk floating over the page. It was as welcome as reading a used newspaper after someone used it to mop up a spilled bottle of catchup. The flash floaties were so bad, I went to the extreme to fully remove flash from my machine so I could read the articles. Later other tools came out to deal with the problem, the best being flashblock. That gave me the best of both worlds. I could view flash content and control the ugly spills on the articles.
It was obtrusive advertising that started this mess.
Once flashblock was working it was a small step to find discussions regarding the problem and solutions. The solutions would not have had a market if there were not a serious problem to deal with. The advertising hasn't improved, except Google came along and showed the world that a page full of banner advertisements isn't required to have effective advertising. Search engines have for the most part have cleaned up their act, but most news sites haven't caught on and are playing games with flash advertising for those who haven't blocked it yet, article keyword advertisements, and the old standby banner advertisements.
A hint for advertisers is to be there in the search results. Provide lots of great sponsored content. When I need soething, I'll come looking for you. That is the best kind of consumer, ones that want your product. As an example I was looking for information on a failing lamp in my laptop. Do I replace the laptop? Can I replace the lamp? Is it expensive? Is it hard to replace?
A Google search gave me the answers and a vendor with reasonable prices. The vendor didn't need to buy a bunch of banner or flash advertisements to get my business. They just needed to provide the info I needed and a good catalog of the proper parts.
Here is the tutorial that got me to the vendor's site;
http://www.ccfldirect.com/lcdtutorial.html
Here is the table that told me what lamp I needed;
http://www.ccfldirect.com/lcdrepair.html
And from the table, here is the lamp I need and the price;
http://www.ccfldirect.com/2x29fuspccla.html
I found my bulk inkjet supplier and fuser supplier for my old laserjet the same way. I looked into how to refill cartridges, how to reset the ink level indicator, and such. The supplier with the info got my order. I found them from a Google search. I did not respond to a flash or banner advertisement. Those advertisements simply don't contain the info needed. Most click-through advertisements simply put you into a data mine site. They gather information on the hot new lead instead of providing the information you seek. Bad move. I'm not signing up to everyone's email list just to get questions answered. Visit the above example for the laptop lamps. Notice the total lack of data mining. They don't ask your age, income, e-mail, profession, etc. They simply provide an open door. From there I placed my order and supplied the information needed for the order. Notice who got the sale and who didn't.
Ad blocking isn't evil. It's just an efficient way to toss the electronic 3rd class mail in bulk that you never open or respond to anyway. The free samples of catchup not spilled on your web page is a bonus. You shouldn't let advertisers spill gooey messy stuff all over your pretty web page.
The truth shall set you free!
I ran two websited that used contextual ads (from the likes of vibrant media and kontera) as well as banner-based stuff (google, yahoo, etc) and I can tell you that the worst person to piss off is the one that doesn't want to see the ad. They were never going to click on it anyway, so why should you care? Most of our deals were cost-per-click revenue anyway so I didn't care to serve an ad to a person who wasn't going to click it and have to deal with pissing them off. A few months before I sold both sites (and am glad to be out of that business, though I miss the revenue), I made it so that folks could disable contextual ads through a profile setting, and added the ability for them to pay a paltry sum ($10 per year) to remove all ads site-wide. Folks were thrilled to pay a cheap price, I made some good cash, and everyone was happy.
I knew of folks using ad blocking software (hell, I use adblock plus myself!) and would never have done anything to that group for the sole reason that I wasn't going to make money on them anyway and might as well make em happy instead of mad.
Oh - and I determined that most of my ad-clicks were unregistered folks who visited my site for the first time - one of those dirty little industry secrets.
The parent post ties in rather nicely with a short piece I wrote about two years ago (but never published) in defense of my work on Filterset.G. It may be a bit outdated, but I think it's finally appropriate.
The Economics of Blocking Ads
Preface:
I have nothing against advertisers or advertising. I have no interest in eliminating advertisements from the internet as a whole. Filterset.G is a tool, and is not tied to an ideology; there is no ulterior motive. Many people believe that Adblock, Filterset.G, and similar projects will be "the death of the free internet", and attack people developing tools to block ads (including myself). I have no desire to "destroy" the internet or advertising.
Reducing Costs to Suppliers and Consumers
Advertisements are unwanted distractions to many people (i.e. those who don't buy from ads), and ad-blockers provide an easy way to remove them. Transferring advertisements to people who ignore or don't buy from them is costly to both advertiser and advertisee. Bandwidth isn't free, and the bits often travel thousands of miles through dozens of machines to reach consumers. For those who have no intention of buying advertised products in response to ads, it is a waste, and can become very expensive. The host of the ad pays to transfer it, and many ISPs charge users by the amount of data transferred, so they pay to see it. Advertisers rarely pay sites for ads based on impressions (views, not clicks/sales) anymore, due to the difficulty in gauging its success, so passive ad-viewers (who look, but don't click), needn't be considered.
Increasing Profit Margins
People who don't buy from ads are negative in the expense/profit ratio for advertisers. Eliminating the cost of advertising to non-purchasers increases profits given a constant userbase. The risk, of course, is that people who buy occasionally might also block ads and thereby decrease profits. For this reason, I strongly urge people not to install ad-blocking software on other people's computers unless they express a desire for it. The greatest threat from ad-blocking is from people pushing it on those who do buy from ads.
Demand Keeps Suppliers in Business
Let's hypothetically say that all internet advertising was eliminated overnight (which is not going to happen). That would cut a major source of funding for web sites, which would force many to close, decreasing supply. Demand, however, would still exist. As supply decreases, demand would bring capital to the "best" remaining suppliers. Subscriptions, donations, grants, and sales keep many ad-free sites alive today, and can easily continue to do so in the future. Hosting a small web site is fairly cheap, and the increasing userbase that drives up costs also increases the number of potential donors, subscribers, and purchasers. A worst-case scenario would be a drastic reduction of economically unsustainable sites, which definitionally provide too little benefit to users to warrant their covering the costs of operating it. Many people would call this a "best-case" scenario, separating the wheat from the chaff, though I take no stance.
Making Ads Less Obtrusive
If public perception of ads becomes increasingly negative, they will become decreasingly effective. Advertising strategies will necessarily shift to less offensive and distracting forms. Many users vocally support the replacement of banners and other obtrusive advertising methods by text ads in areas distinct from page content. Unobtrusive, low-bandwidth ads may not be as eye-catching, but they are well tolerated by all but the most aggressive anti-ad folks.
Forcing Ads
Many advertisers and site owners are researching methods of bypassing ad-blocking software. If ad-blocking is only done by those who do not buy from ads, the outcome will become increasingly negative as their efforts increase. Many people are becoming more and more fed-up with in-your-face ads, and are starting to boycott co
G
He used it for a month. We noticed in the logs that the traffic actually dropped. Only a handful of IPs actually sent a request for anything but the main page, a couple of which were myself and the site owner.
An interesting detail about the version of apache we used at the time.. Sometimes, when a user hits stop in the browser and the connection is reset is a specific but common way, the entry goes to errorlog instead of accesslog.
The 'less page hits' was compared to html (not all hits like images etc) on the old site, to both access and error entrys together for the new.
Anyways, needless to say, afterward he replaced that mess with his old website, however a few more ads to makeup for lost visitors. The traffic level dropped due to using html instead of one jpg, then rose slowly, but never came close to what it was before all the changes.
Just thought i'd share that experence.