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Dealing With 'Advertising Pollution'
theodp writes: "Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it," writes longtime ad guy Ken Segall in The Relentless (and annoying) Pursuit of Eyeballs. "Unfortunately, for some this is simply license to abuse. Let's call it what it is: advertising pollution." CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm. "Google," Segall adds, "is a leader in advertising pollution, with YouTube being a showcase for intrusive advertising. Many YouTube videos start with a mandatory ad, others start with an ad that can be dismissed only after the first 10 seconds. Even more annoying are the ad overlays that actually appear on top of the video you're trying to watch. It won't go away until you click the X. If you want to see the entire video unobstructed, you must drag the playhead back to start over. Annoying. And disrespectful." Google proposed using cap and trade penalties to penalize traditional polluters — how about for those who pollute the Internet?
Most of Youtube is professionally produced videos where youtube shares the ad revenue with the creator. That's how people make money to be able to produce more videos.
you either get rid of advertising and pay to watch each video, or you put up with advertising. My account is enabled for revenue sharing, but i rarely upload anything and don't rely on it. but if took and produced videos and relied on ad revenue, i would stop very fast if i didn't get paid.
I sat down to watch Paddington Bear with my 19 month old son.
The advert that I couldn't skip was for a horror movie.
Thanks, youtube. That was *fantastic*.
I never watch forced ads. I've yet to see content that's worth it. Pages get reloaded to pass the ads a couple times, failing that I'm off to something else. Oh, and adblockers and outright hostname and IP blocking still works. I'm sure they'll figure out a way to be even more abusive, they're google after all. But even they need to learn that trying too hard easily causes a loss of those precious "eyeballs".
No Advertising does not power the Internet. Bogus assertion to begin the article. The internet ran fine before the ads. It would run fine without them. Advertising is one aspect of the internet. It does not power the internet in any way, shape or form.
I installed addblock because videos and streams I watched had add volume loudness so loud that it was a real problem. I often watch videos during the night and when the loudness jumps up for the adds it becomes annoying really fast. And that was the only reason.
I don't really mind adds and I know they run the content creators, but just that one small issue was enough for me.
When people say "internet", they mean content showing their favorite celebrities, mainstream news, and the same special-interest articles that used to appear in print manages. They don't mean a bunch of bearded, pasty-faced nerds discussing filk music and making obscure UNIX jokes on Usenet like the "internet that ran fine before the ads" that you are thinking of.
No. The internet was implemented by the federal government, funded by citizen taxes, and later extended as part of the communications infrastructure. The internet was not invented to serve businesses, it was invented to serve the citizens.
For those who voluntarily go to ad laden websites, you can't regulate self harm.
This is because most or all website revenue comes from advertising. CBS has ads, but Netflix doesn't. Books don't, and newspapers and magazines have a limited amount, because part of their revenue comes from selling their publications to consumers. (Without ads, a copy of something like National Geographic or Playboy would cost $20 or more.)
The problem is that we don't have a good way of buying small amounts of content online. You can subscribe to some sites by the month or year, or perhaps buy limited access via PayPal, but the cost tends to be $ or $$ or $$$, and nobody wants to subscribe to CNN or YouTube. They want to see that video now, with no registration and commitment. The answer is the great lost Internet opportunity of 15 years ago: micropayments. If there was an easy and universal system for paying (say) a few cents to watch a video, why not? It'd be trivial for viewers, but could add up to real money for sites.
If I were a huge content provider, I'd figure out a way to make it happen, perhaps through ISPs. Subsidize them to give every user maybe $10/month credit. Offer content providers a great deal to install a one-click "Read/Watch Now for 1 cent" buttons. Get people used to paying tiny amounts of money to view content. If something like this could get going, it'd benefit content providers of all sizes. E.g. a comedian who writes one joke a day could make a living with 10,000 readers paying 1 cent per day ($100/day = $36,500/year).
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
CNN's in-your-face, your-video-will-play-in-00:25-seconds approach, once unthinkable, has become the norm.
Why unthinkable? Why should free video be so very different from free TV?
Ads are spam. Does spam power email? Do pirates power seafaring?
Mute the sound and go to another tab for however many seconds. You don't have to watch it or listen to it. Use ad blocker for the rest. You don't have to be bothered with ads if you don't choose to be bothered. There are some serious annoyances in this world, but internet ads aren't a big deal.
I disagree with ads on a very fundamental level. they're manipulative and serve to change and circumvent logic and the decision making process. I don't appreciate anything or anyone that is intentionally trying to manipulate me.
I am still going to go to all the same web sites as I always have but you can bet I'm going to adblock as many ads as tectonically possible. The industry brought it upon themselves by pushing the intrusiveness way to far. I don't feel guilty in the slightest.
Do you remember the Internet before advertising? I do. It was mostly educational, and technical. It was also low bandwidth. The modern Internet is a lot of expensive to produce and deliver content. That money has to come from somewhere, and Universities are not financing it all like they used to.
I've noticed a really annoying trend, where you're on a site for a 10-20 seconds reading their content, when this (presumably JavaScript) box pops in front of the content soliciting for your email address. This is really annoying, since it totally breaks the concentration on what you're reading. Since this apparently done with JavaScript provided by the hosting site, pop-up window blockers and cross-script blockers don't prevent it.
So here's a hint for web designers: THIS IS F***KING ANNOYING! STOP IT!
Thank you.
Ads and marketing in general have evolved from simple, respectful "hey, try this! It's good" into manipulative nonsense. Few people can see through it and the result has been devastating to them. It has shaped and certainly harmed the culture of the US and even results in violence in some extreme cases where people want things so badly they hurt and kill each other to get it. Though most will disagree exactly when things have gone "too far" few will disagree that they have.
People seem to forget, the internet RUNS on advertising money. It's what pay's the "real" bills for servers, staff & redbull's.
People used to have their own web sites about their hobbies and interests.. they used to actually participate until mass media came along and turned the network into a TV set. It was standard practice to offer users personal home pages when they signed up for Internet service.
IMO, if ads stopped across all internet sites, or the online advertising industry completely collapsed. The internet as we know it, would be gone.
Good riddance.
Adblock
NoScript
CookieMonster
And Flashstop
Adblock removes most of the ads. I turn off for sites I want to support or that don't annoy me with obnoxious ads.
NoScript is on for any site I can use without javascript. Java slows a lot of sites down without providing me any useful functionality in most cases. Also most of the annoying things a site can do like throw pop ups at you is done in javascript. So I just keep it off for most things.
CookieMonster blocks cookies which I do anywhere the site I'm interacting with doesn't need me to have a cookie. If I'm not doing anything complicated on a site and there are no logins then there's no need for cookies.
Flashstop stops all those annoying flash animations and videos and audio files that otherwise would auto play when you load a site. Its even good with youtube because you can load up five or six different pages at once without them all auto playing.
This is how I interact with the web now. Come at me.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...except, of course, for the ad companies selling it to companies who try to get sales. I'm not in marketing, but I got some insider information from people who are, and they all say that about 50% of all the money put into advertisement has basically the same effect on sales as burning it would have. The only reason it is wasted this way is that a) many customers don't know it and - more importantly - b) they don't know which 50%.
But, as in so many things, when something stops being effective, the first answer to the problem is to do more of it. The enemy has built bunkers against our bombs? Drop more bombs! The virus is becoming immune to our medicine? Raise the dosage. People have begun to ignore or block advertisement? Throw more ads their way.
Yes, it is pollution, the term is spot on.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Exactly you nailed it. For those that say that the ads have become manipulative, sorry but how are they different than old TV? Sure we have Tivo like apps but the reality is that commercials have always been in your face. It is just that on the Internet we have become used to non-invasive free Internet (as in free beer). The fact that this has changed does not surprise me in the least. Don't like it, do like the parent poster said, don't vist the site. Or better yet fork over money so that sites don't need ads.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
> It was also low bandwidth. The modern Internet is a lot of expensive to produce and deliver content.
Bandwidth costs have dropped exponentially since then.
We are looking at a 2000x drop in pricing from 1998 to the end of this year.
In 1998 it was $1200.00/Mbps by 2015 it will be $0.63/Mbps
For those that say that the ads have become manipulative, sorry but how are they different than old TV?
Well for one thing on old TV ads didn't pretend to be part of the show you were watching. Viewing them didn't turn your computer into a botnet, track your every move or adorn your sets control knobs and television cabinet with vendor advertising. TV ads also lack self awareness.
"Also, you don't have to go to the CNN site if you don't like their ads. No one actually forced you to read CNN. It is their media property, they can do what they wish."
Sure, just as it's our right to render on our screens only what we wish.
And we do that.
Really, I don't know what I'd do without them. Probably stop using the Internet as much as I do now, find some alternatives, or do a hell of a lot more bitching.
When running a fresh new installation of a web browser, the first ad I see immediately causes me to halt everything I'm doing and install those three plugins. Annoyingly, I usually don't even hit two consecutive websites before that happens--the wretched fucking things are literally everywhere. Video ads really fucking piss me off, and even more on Android, because the god damn things are *designed* to reduce your access to the system, which effectively prevents installing ad blocking software without gaining root.
I have actually in the past, when confronted with an ad while trying to watch a video, cranked the volume all the way down and turned the phone upside down. If I did happen to see what brand was advertising, I add them to my mental blacklist of products and services to AVOID. Yes, I am so against advertising, it has the exact *opposite* effect on me when it comes to buying things. I'm sorry, but I can think for myself, I can do my own research and come up with an educated conclusion as to what I want or need. I don't fucking need someone spewing bullshit, trying to force me to buy their junk.
These days? When I even come across ONE ad when attempting to watch YouTube, I have zero tolerance. I close it. It is not worth the hassle. If I want to watch something bad enough, it will be on a proper computer with the necessary extensions. Android is one of the worst platforms to visit web pages or watch videos on.
Advertising is also why the Internet has evolved far past Usenet discussions. Ads bring us current TV episodes and today's news. I'll take that over alt.whine.virginity any time.
Youtube Center. I run that with Adblock and it automatically makes videos play in the larger window and always sets the volume to 10%. That is just a few things you can fix. The addon has tons of tweaks.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Notice that the guy who said it is an advertising guy. That's his whole worldview. That's the way he thinks it is and the way he thinks it should be. Meanwhile for the rest of us, we have lots of alternatives. Paid sites, community-supported sites, ad-blocked sites, sites run by people who love what they are running a site about.
Basically this is a little advertiser wanting us to support clubbing a big advertiser, Google. He'd like us to get mad at his competition. What he wouldn't like is for us to start noticing just how much what he is advocating is in his self-interest.
I recommend we all switch to ad-block and screw them all. If some sites die or have to switch funding models, works great for me.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
You don't get to decide things you don't pay for. The people that pay for things gets to decide them.
If you ever feel the need to install an ad blocker, you're doing it wrong.
Hence why CNN doesn't get to decide whether their ads display on the computer I paid for or not.
There were many people producing their own content on the Internet before big business saw a profit in it. To frame them all as pasty-faced nerds is disingenuous and obviously false. These were ordinary people exchanging ideas and sharing whatever they felt was worth sharing. This was, and still is, the crux of the Internet's greatness.
The kind of content you mention is the kind of content that does not utilize the unique interpersonal capabilities of the Internet. That stuff is ordinary mass media content that has moved to the Internet only because the corporations producing it were losing their readership and revenue to the Internet (see previous paragraph.) They came here to fight for our eyeballs and our opinions because we chose to ignore them in favor of communicating with each other.
Advertising, as irritating as it can be, can help us to distinguish between content motivated by money (probably distributed by a giant corporation with an ulterior motive of keeping you suckling at their teat while feeding you politically slanted pseudo-news) and content motivated by some other impetus. For me, content that is laden with irritating advertisements practically screams "don't listen to me! I'm a scumbag!"
I'd much rather hear from ordinary people who have enough respect for me to tell their story without trying to monetize me. Lucky for us, plenty of those people still exist on the Internet.
(properly formatted this time)
Correction: The Internet as you know it would be gone. The actual Internet would be just fine. Universities, stores, hobby sites, government, and people generally interested in communicating with each other would pay their ISP bills and continue without interruption.
Did you just suggest I pay for something online? Damn, I've never been more offended in my entire life. I use Facebook for my corporate website, Gmail for my inbox, and YouTube to distribute my advertising. Why the hell would I pay for anything?!?
Sincerely,
(The reason we're here today)