Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: To AdBlock Or Not To AdBlock?
Is there an acceptable compromise to behavioral targeting? On the one hand, I don't want to be profiled by unscrupulous advertisers. On the other hand, I feel that the advertiser is the middleman between the things I care about (content) and the dollars that support those things. My compromise is to take a page out of BF Skinner's book, Walden Two, and view the situation as a sort of absurd behaviorist experiment. Basically, I Adblock everything, but whitelist the sites I support. Is this too much? Not enough? What should individuals do protect themselves, if anything at all?
I AdBlock everything. One, I dislike looking at ads. Two, I dislike business models that are based on ads.
I don't care if AdBlock destroys the Internet as we know it. The Internet as we know it could use a little constructive destruction.
I fully support adblock plus - It's a fully transformative experience compared to browsing without it. Pages load quicker, load without the random long-pauses from faulty ad servers, and from not having to traverse dozens of servers just for a small amount content.
That, and your view is uncluttered with intentionally misleading images, many kinds of annoying sound and images, and countless script-based frustrations that advertisers are ever-increasingly willing to push on their prospective customers.
Simply put, AdBlockers do an amazing job at helping me retain some minimal level comfort that humanity can sometimes retain some motivations greater than misleading manipulation - even if you have to filter your view to extensively to see that sometimes.
Ryan Fenton
Simply by asking question, you are committed to doing the right thing. Follow your morals.
Also, by my reasoning you are a better person than me. I did not consider unblocking, even after reading this:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love/
... it's that so many times ad-serving networks end up being compromised and send ads that end up installing malware on your computer: if sites ran their own SIMPLE ads (plain images, served by their own website, no flash/iframe/... crap) there would be a lot less problems.
Unfortunately that kind of ad-serving costs more money to do (easier to farm this out to an ad network) and since there are no penalties for doing so (if your ad provider is compromised and thousands of your users get hit by drive-by malware you say "sorry, not responsible, it's the ad provider's fault") that's why we're in the situation we're in where most tech savy people adblock as much as possible to reduce risks, which unfortunately hurts the content providers...
I honestly wish there was some sort of scheme where you could have some sort of microtransaction way to give $$$ to websites you use. Say you like /. a lot, you could decide that every time you visit, you'd pay $0.01 with a maximum of $0.25/day, say you don't like as much another site but you don't want to completely freeload, you could decide you still give them $0.01 but only with a maximum of $0.01/day. It might seem low, but with a lot of users it could add up quite a bit for sites, and I think more than the current ad-based approach.
Yes, this could probably add up to $50-100/month, but I'd be totally willing to pay that because I'd be supporting the sites I chose to, and sites wouldn't have to deal with subscriptions, they'd just get paid by the microtransaction provider once a month (minus of course a flat fee of some sort). The microtransaction providers could compete on fees etc. as long as there was interoperability so users wouldn't have to worry...
-- the cake is a lie
You may be buying the products, but that doesn't mean the web sites are receiving any revenue. Google ads and many others often only pay when clicked.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I'm not sure advertising is "evil," but I agree that a person should do whatever they please, as they wish, just as advertisers do.
I react very negatively to adverts. The more a company puts it's message in front of me, the less likely I am to buy from them. I instinctively avoid products with heavy TV marketing campaigns, because they can't represent good value for money, given that the cost of the campaign comes out of the price I'm paying.
So I adblock everything... and by doing so, I save advertisers from getting filed under 'I hate those irritating people and won't buy anything from them'. I'm more likely to buy from a company if I don't see their ads than If I do.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
...doesn't understand how the Internet works. On a simpler level, there is no reason that just because I load file A (content I want), I also have to load file B (advertising). My downloading article.html does not make me obligated to download advertisement.png just because there's an image link to it. I will not feel guilted into using my bandwidth to download a single byte I'm not interested in downloading. If I'm stealing, am I also stealing when I use a text mode browser like lynx? Are blind people that use text browsers and a screen reader stealing? If I set Firefox to not download images or turn off JavaScript, am I stealing? If you feel passionately enough about a site that you want to support their ad business model, go ahead and whitelist that site. I feel no need to support any site by downloading things I want. If a site goes out of business because no one looked at its ads, well I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm sure I can find the content I want elsewhere.
Things of value require money, and money has to come from somewhere. Are you really saying you would prefer to pay for content directly, rather than to have an unobtrusive and moderately relevant ad that you can easily ignore?
Here on Slashdot, we have the alternative option to give our own contributions + good behavior, measured in the form of karma. That doesn't work on all sites, though, and even Slashdot would be unsustainable if no one viewed the ads; the only reason their model is sustainable is because positive-karma contributions presumably increase the value of the site, thus increasing its viewership, thus increasing the total number of ad-views enough to keep the site afloat. If everyone on the Internet adblocked, Slashdot would lose that revenue stream.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't want to be profiled by having your online behavior tracked, and you don't want to pay for the product (see outrage over NYT paywall), and you don't want to view ads... what of similar value would you prefer to give?
(a) This is posted to Ask Slashdot, but it's not really a question, it's a plug for the author's answer.
(b) The slashdot summary is incoherent.
(c) TFA consists of an incoherent intro followed by a description of what the author does. To save you the trouble of wading through the incomprehensible text, here's what he does: "#1 -- Disable third-party cookies [...] #2 -- Use Ghostery to block everything indiscriminately, but whitelist the sites I support."
A typical piece of bizarre reasoning, incoherently expressed, from TFA:
This whole thing about the morally correct response to internet advertising has been rehashed over and over on slashdot. Over and over, people have made the same point: internet ads wouldn't be objectionable if they were like ads in a newspaper or magazine, but because they aren't like that, any user with enough know-how is going to block them. I'm sorry, but I just can't read an article while an animated monkey is jumping up and down next to it on the screen.
Text-oriented sites like slashdot are relatively cheap to run, on a per-user basis, so as long as some percentage of their users don't use ad blockers, these sites are viable.
I asked someone I know, who works in online advertising, whether ad blocking is an issue for her company. I told her I never saw ads on the internet and was surprised that anyone was ... well, dumb enough ... to fail to install ad blocking software. Her response: "Do you use Hulu?"
Find free books.
I'm not sure advertising is "evil,"
It doesn't have to be evil to be bad.
Instead of binary good or evil questions, we should be asking if it's in the public interest
and whether or not the benefits outweight the negatives.
Don't forget that advertising is commercial speech, which can be limited.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Advertising != forcing you to buy it.
Worse than that - Advertising motivates me to make a point of never buying it. Ads absolutely infuriate me, the less obtrusive ones, less so.
If you find a magic formula to get my attention with an ad, congratulations, you have just lost me as a customer forever.
I block ads because they waste my, and the sites, bandwidth. I have zero chance of ever clicking an ad, or buying a product based on "impressions".
Don't like it? Go bankrupt. Because realistically, those describe your two choices - Accept that some fraction of people will block your ads no matter what, or stop producing content and let someone else fill your niche.
And in case you wonder - Nope, I don't feel "bad" about this. If Slashdot vanished tomorrow, another "news for nerds" site would take its place overnight.
... is advertising that doesn't come across as advertising.
People who say they loathe advertising in any form actually just loathe the bad advertising; the advertising that detracts from what you're trying to do and immediately screams "this is an advertisement, I'm here to interrupt you in some way in the hope that somehow it will get you to buy something even though I've pissed you off."
A few years ago I received an unepxected phone call on my wife's cellphone from a company offering a CDN service. At first I was really pissed off that this company had reached me in such an inappropriate manner ... but the guy on the other end didn't try to sell me anything and the conversation was unlike any telemarketing call that I had ever received. It was personal and appealed to my geeky curiosity (CDNs were very new at the time, the only companies that were using them were heavy traffic movers like Yahoo, so I wanted to know how it worked), it was offering me a solution to a problem I had at the time and the conversation was very informal. Within a minute or two I was actually asking him questions, and that's how it works. And to top it off when I told the guy I wasn't going to buy from him he chuckled and said "I'm not trying to sign you up today, don't worry." It kept me on the phone. I didn't buy but I was impressed enough that if I had chosen to purchase a CDN service within the next little while I probably would have given them a second look.
I still don't like people phoning me, and I think there are far better ways to reach out to people, but everything that transpired within that phone call was an example of marketing done in the right direction.
I'm self-employed, running a high-traffic web-site that generates money via ad revenue for 11 years now, and the people who visit my web-site have no idea that the entire site is one giant advertisement; in fact, people have complimented and praised me for not having any ads on the site. And yet when fellow webmasters in the same industry as myself share their sales and conversion stats I always get a big smile on my face. Their sites are crawling with blatant advertisements and they need 2 to 5 times the traffic to generate the same revenue. I've never understood how pissing off your customers can be regarded as any form of business model.
I think the best well-known type of advertisement that's going in the right direction is product placement. It can be done poorly, yes and I know I am about to get a bunch of replies from people telling me that they always notice it and it ruins the program etc. But it *CAN* be done in a subtle way that blends with the program and does not detract, to the point where the viewer does not notice or care.
But I think the real way to do "advertising" is provide a value to the viewer as the advertisement itself. Imagine an hour long infomercial on television that was entertaining and/or informative enough to get you to watch it for it's own sake, with no intention of buying anything. Remember that "punch the monkey" ad that was on every single web-site a decade ago ? Imagine if that had actually been a real game that you could play. No pushy-ness what-ever. Not shoved in your face and not done as a banner / flash ad. Instead, something people genuinely wanted to play, with an entertaining sales pitch as part of it. Good advertising can be done, and occasionally is. We just don't notice because we're too distracted and pissed off at the "BOO!!! HAHAH! THIS IS ADVERTISEMENT! YOU WILL BUY NOW LOLZ!"
I've practiced "magic"/illusion-performance as a hobby for a few years and in reading/studying I've learned that corporations will often hire magicians at trade-shows to pitch new products to retailers. Some of the better magicians have crafted entire 20-minute magic routines around the product they're hired to pitch. It's entertainment and people want to watch it for that purpose alone, but it's also an advertisement.
If sites need advertising dollars, let me just run a bot that keeps clicking that ad 24/7.
Back in the day, that's how a lot of sites made money.
If you want me to read the ad -
Don't make it move
Don't make it flash
Don't make it obnoxious and obvious
Don't play a sound
Don't make it a clickthru
Don't Block Content until the ad is done
Allow a video choice
Allow a bypass choice
Do not open pop ups, Pop unders
Do not stay frozen on a page while you scroll
(list goes on for another 1000 things advertisers have done to force me to adblock)
And finally, nothing is stopping the poor sod who is upset about adblocking everything and writing a check to the web site and popping it off in the mail.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
we should be asking if it's in the public interest
This is a nitpick, but I'd rather ask if it's in any individual's interest.
I like to differentiate between "marketing" and "advertising." If you'll bare with me for one second: marketing, as I see it, is about trying to develop relationships with customers, present or potential, and provide them a solution to a problem they have. Advertising is one single tool that can be used as part of a marketing campaign.
As long as there is more than a single monopoly providing a given good or service then individuals really do need a way to become informed about alternatives and make decisions. I think that's where marketing comes in. And it doesn't have to be the company jumping in front of you, interrupting what you're trying to do in an attempt to get your attention. If you are, for example, shopping for a laptop you might ask your friends. If they have had a good experience with a given company, that's a form of marketing (marketing isn't trying to make a sale, it's trying to keep customers as well and get them to speak highly about their experiences). If you google "laptops" and read user reviews, maybe even go to a consumer review site, that's also marketing. And a good consumer review site will realize that people are there looking to buy things and instead of shoving ads in their face, will provide affiliate links in appropriate places so when someone decides to check out, say, "Dell Computers" the link they click on will provide a track-back to the consumer review site and the user will never think that they've just earned someone some ad revenue.
I think there are a lot of crappy ads out there and companies that haven't the first clue how to market properly. I also think that advertising is necessary and "good." And us having this debate right now, and using ad block software etc. is also a "good thing" because it's how our opinions get shoved in the faces of advertisers. The good marketers will take notice and respond. They'll realize that making people happy in some way is the whole point of a business and that marketing is about informing choices. Not informing people who don't care, but people who are actively seeking that information.
(For the slow: the user is the bird or bee, the flower is the content provider, the nectar is the content, and the pollen is the advertisement.)
I dont get it. Which one is the car?
1 cent per page? I would owe $10 a day with that model. $300/month and close to $4000 a year. No. I much prefer the advertising that gives me free internet (also TV and radio). The alternative would be something like the BBC, where I'd have to pay $230 a year to watch NBC. $230 a year to watch ABC. $230 a year to watch CBS. And on and on and on. Pretty soon I'd have a $2000 bill just to watch television I currently get for free. (Add another $1000 to get cable.)
No I prefer the ads. And believe it or not some of those ads are useful.... like the one that told me Dominoes has 50% off pizza. Or the one advertising the "Grimm" DVD. I discovered a new show. Or the one that informed me Volkswagen has finally released a diesel-powered Beetle. I was looking for a car and now I'll have one.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Modern advertising is verging on evil. It's using more and more sophisticated psychological tools to manipulate masses of people into doing things detrimental to themselves and their loved ones.
But it is childish and hypocritical.
Not at all. I pay my ISP to get internet access. If that internet access gave me equal bandwidth both in upload and download capacity, and adhered to network neutrality, there would be no need to pay for anything else other than internet access. The internet didn't come about because of advertising, or commercial interests. It doesn't need either to sustain itself. Protocols could easily be designed to share content, just like bittorrent does now. Bittorrent doesn't need advertising, and it can move a lot of data. More than anything a typical webpage costs in bandwidth. If the concept was extended so that websites I access frequently I could sign up to cache their content and redistribute it on a network model like bittorrent, which was what the web was designed to do, albeit less efficiently, being a "version 1.0" -- then there would be little need for servers, data centers, advertising, etc.
This isn't a "something for nothing" argument, this is a "cooperation costs less than competition" argument. The internet was not designed as a client/server model: TCP/IP is a peer to peer protocol. It's the ultimate in electronic democracy... and corporations and commercial interests have been fighting it, beating on it, manipulating it, and fucking it up as much as possible to shoehorn their own outdated business models on it.
The internet not only doesn't need advertisements: It doesn't need advertising companies, servers, data centers, clouds, businesses, corporations, governments... it doesn't need any of that. We could, in fact, create a wireless global network based on internet protocols and do away with ISPs entirely, if we were so motivated.
So don't give me that "something for nothing" argument, because that's what they're doing. They're allowed to freeload on my internet connection to support their broken business model. If enough people block advertising, move away from ISPs that don't enforce network neutrality, and demand the government do something about it... we might actually get the network back that we originally designed, the network that is full of possibilities, open protocols, and universal access to all of humanities collective knowledge and experience.
Or... you can be a consumer and eat whatever they feed you.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So you're subscribing to /. then?
I'm not, but Slashdot gave me a little checkbox to hide the ads anyway :)
I don't know what all the fuss is about. Advertising is a perfectly legitimate way to fund a site if there is no other way. People will grumble about having to view ads, but most will flatly refuse to pay even a few dollars to fund the site.
It does go too far sometimes though. I've had friends complain that they mentioned the word "diet" on a (seemingly) unrelated forum and then suddenly facebook is bombarding them with weight loss products. Targeted advertising should at least have the decency to be sneaky, not obvious. I use adblock though and have never, ever, seen an ad on Facebook. I started using adblock when all the ads made my dialup connection too slow, and have never bothered turning it off even though i'm on a much faster connection now.
The advantage you have with something like BBC, which might not be so obvious, is that when it doesn't rely on ads, you, not the advertisers become the customer. That allows for the possibility of a much broader appeal in programs and importantly (if done right) and independent media that does not have to worry about advertisers opinions, or what market segments a particular program should fit into to maximize profit.
My guess: such a system would gravitate toward the cable television model in North America. You pay for the cable, *and* you get to watch commercials. Never underestimate their desire for more money.
If you'll bare with me for one second
I'll keep my trousers on for now, if you don't mind.
I was going to say I shouldn't have to point out how stupid your argument is, but considering how stupid it is I guess I must. Point it out. The stupidity, that is. What you suggest is stealing. What I am doing is merely averting my eyes. I don't have to look at the goddamn ads. Fuck 'em if they can't come up with some other way to make money. To belabor the point, what am I stealing by not looking at ads? Should the police come to my house and arrest me if I throw the ads from the newspaper away without reading them all first? Fuck that.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
I agree with you about the ads. I hesitated for the longest time putting in ad-blocking technology, as I felt the same issue as the orange vendor mentioned in the parent. If the webmaster supported his page with ads, by golly I wasn't going out of my way to block them.
Then I started paying in ways I had not imagined. I was complaining on Slashdot on the Firefox memory leak topic, about catching viruses and forced reboots because of memory leaks. A generous fellow slashdotter offered his advice to install NoScript. Frustrated at all the problems "thinking outside the box" script programmers were causing for me, I went ahead and installed NoScript. Its made a big difference. It wasn't the ads I was trying to block, rather it was the scripts they were launching doing only God-knows-what. If a webmaster wants me to see an ad, I have no problem at all with that. Running an unknown script with unknown intentions is a horse of a different color. Especially when they misbehave, cause me problems, and force me to reboot to clean up the mess so the system runs again.
It was not the ad which caused me to install blocking technology, rather it was the abuse of the scripting system by unscrupulous scriptwriters.
Back to the orange vendor analogy, people might be highly motivated to steal the oranges rather than pay for them if attempting to pay for one resulted in the vendor spraying them with tar at the cash register. The honest guy who paid finds himself having to go clean himself off, while the thief got off scot-free.
The abuse of payment systems is the main reason I am extremely leery of paying for anything on the web. I have a few trusted sites I will deal with, as I feel I go at substantial risk to reveal bank codes and payment authorizations to a vendor. Knowing the abuse rampant on the net, I am even leery of revealing my name or email address, much less payment credentials.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The alternative would be something like the BBC, where I'd have to pay $230 a year to watch NBC. $230 a year to watch ABC. $230 a year to watch CBS. And on and on and on.
No the BBC model is far better than that: you pay £145.50 each year to watch the BBC. This consists of multiple channels of high quality HD content plus an online service that lets you download content to watch offline later. You then get ITV, Channel 4 etc. thrown in for free with ads.
If they would let me do that from Canada I'd take them up in a flash. As it is my only option for anything close is to pay $880 (~£550) per year for cable to get the same amount of quality content split over 100 channels and interspersed with ads and low quality rubbish. The only channel that comes close in terms of quality is the CBC but it only provides one english-speaking channel and is severely hampered by lack of funding.
The BBC is by no means perfect and the funding model certainly has its flaws but the end result is something with a higher quality and lower cost than anything I have yet seen in any of the countries I've lived in.
You can't know to buy a product without some advertising to tell you it exists.
That's not a claim that can withstand much scrutiny. It's simply, comprehensively, untrue.
People can, and routinely do, live perfectly well without any advertizing at all. They buy things they need, having noticed a need for something. It's rarely in their interest to buy something merely because some stranger happens to tell them that they need it.
If I need groceries, I know how to visit a grocery store. If I need a box of M10x40 socket head cap screws in type 316 stainless steel, I'll go to a fastener store. From the mundane to the exotic, it's simply not a problem. No advertizing is required.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
There's the obvious point to make here that advertising doesn't make things free. It just hides the cost from you. Chances are you're paying well over $4000 a year in increased costs of everything from Coca-Cola to cars to support advertising.
Saying that it's ok to use the government to limit speech is evil, whether it's commercial speech or not. Using technology to block annoying people from speaking to you is just fine, even if that technology is a third-party service. Using technology to block technically bad advertising systems is not just fine, it's really nice!
I started running ad-blockers because too many ads were [BLINK]annoying animated gifs[/BLINK], which have since mutated into resource-burning browser-crashing Flash and Javascript ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, float-around-thingies, and other annoyances YELLING FOR MY ATTENTION. I'm not very bothered by Google text ads or even low volumes of non-singing non-dancing static image ads, but there's no obvious convenient way to block the annoying ones without blocking the well-behaved ones. (Sorry, Google, but I'm not going to bother using non-obvious non-convenient tools just to enable ads, even for sites I like.)
I also run ad-blockers and Ghostery because there's too much tracking going on. I don't want lots of random measurement systems watching everything I could do and deciding how they can monetize my user experience by selling tracking data to people who want to show me ads. If your web page wants to run trackers in your domain, fine, but leave the third-party stuff out of it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
1. users brought their bandwidth. you brought yours. the users are not required to pay for yours too. they are not required to ensure you make money either.
2. because when you put content up on a publicly accessible server, by default you've given permission for people to pull data from it.. Once that data enters their computers, you have no say in what happens. The internet is not cable television no matter how hard marketing droids try to make it that way. It's a good thing, really.
Well, there's a marketing aspect that's definitely not in my best interest, and that is google analytics and other trackers. Combined with data from shopping.com, or any participating merchant site, It can tell a marketer not only what I bought and how much I paid for it, but more importantly which sites I went to before I pulled the trigger. It can tell them exactly what searches and browsing patterns led me to this decision. If I searched for "water heater 50 gallon warranty sucks forum", attempting to find out what people think when they have warranty troubles, then read waterHeaterReviews.com they'll happily sell that data to an SEO marketer who then salts the top listed forums with shills posting useless crap like "My 50 gallon WetWillie 2000 water heater has a great warranty, and it doesn't suck." It poisons my ability to do a search I can trust to be somewhat independent of the planted lies.
So I use NoScript, Ghostery, and AdBlock Plus to block scripts, trackers, social networking links, flash, and ads which all serve the same purpose of assisting marketers to anticipate my moves. I won't even consider IE or Chrome, as neither offers effective privacy extensions. And I've even stopped using Google as my primary search engine, instead preferring duckduckgo.com. As far as I can tell they're trying to be honest, which sadly isn't saying much. But at least they're not Google.
I used to care more about denying ad revenue to sites, but I got over it once crap like XSS and CSRF attacks started trickling through advertisers on otherwise respectable sites. Do I feel guilty? Well, I still tithe Slashdot a few times a year. I'll click on Amazon referrer links to buy books from authors I like. And I do not install ad blockers for anyone else, nor do I tell non-technical people how to do it. They can do all the monkey punching they want, go support the ad bandits, do whatever. I'll happily let them foot the bills I am no longer willing to pay.
John