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Study: Ad-Free Internet Would Cost Everyone $230-a-Year
Several readers sent word of research into the cost of internet content without ads. They looked at the amount of money spent on internet advertising last year in the U.K., and compared it to the number of U.K. internet users. On average, each user would have to pay about £140 ($230) to make up for the lost revenue of an ad-free internet. In a survey, 98% of consumers said they wouldn't be willing to pay that much for the ability to browse without advertisements.
However, while most consumers regard ads as a necessary trade-off to keep the internet free, they will go to great lengths to avoid advertising they do not wish to see. Of those surveyed, 63 per cent said they skip online video ads 'as quickly as possible' – a figure that rises to 75 per cent for 16-24 year olds. Over a quarter of all respondents said they mute their sound and one in five scroll away from the video. 16 per cent use ad blocking software and 16 per cent open a new browser window or tab.
...OK...where do I sign up?
Considering that cable modems are $50 a month for capped services. Another 30% higher is nothing.
Considering that more viruses are transmitted by ads now than on their own it gets even scarier. Adblock and no script do more to keep viruses out of your stuff than antivirus.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Not sure how the 3rd world countries would do, but I can imagine it'd be okay with free AD-based internet for them, but for the rest of us who's just FED up with endless load times on our smartphones when it comes to Flash-Ads, or YouTube Ads etc. (yeah yeah, I know about adblocker, but consider that a lot of the sites refuse to work if you have one of those).
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I'd gladly pay the extra on top to my ISP if it meant no ads ever again.
IF i see a video or something that i have to sit through before i can get to my content. I instantly close it, it couldn't be that important that i need to watch an ad.
A large portion of that ad revenue is going to sites that don't really provide any kind of value, but are spammy SEO deals. The best part of an internet with no advertising revenue (or at least a lot less of it) would be precisely that all these content farms would not be able to replace that revenue, and would hopefully go away.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Last time I seen AdBlock was free
If it's just static ads then whatever. But if it means I don't have to worry about facebook, google and a million other sites tracking me so they can sell me to advertisers, then I'd sign up for this in a heartbeat!
But it's never going to happen. It's impossible to coordinate.
A good study would provide a description of what the internet would look like without ads. My intuition is that I'd be just fine with the only content available being content that did not seek a revenue stream. I thought the internet was better back then anyway.
It's also a pointless study because it's never going to happen. I'd guess the only reason it was done is to support the idea that ad blockers and no script are "bad". Oh wait it was conducted by an ad platform.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
OK, so everyone pays $230... how do they pay the websites that you visit? What represents ads? One could argue that www.apple.com is one giant ad for Apple products, right?
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Perhaps the internet reverting to a state where there were less grumpy cat videos, or viral ice bucket challenges, wouldn't be such a terrible thing.
Use links,lynx web browsers. What ads!
Been there, done that. I doesn't work quite so simple. While Lynx doesn't show the graphical content, it many times fail to filter out the code used to display the ads, and it includes the links anyway - so you'll have to fight endless links and navigate trough lots of garbage just to read a little content.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Actually, I would be entirely happy to pay $230/year for ad-free Internet; meaning that I would continue to have access to all the sites that I want, but those sites would be directly supported by my yearly subscription, and so they wouldn't need to display ads or be otherwise beholden to advertisers. I'm sure a great many people would be willing to do so.
The problem is that such a state of affairs is impossible. If people actually started paying for subscriptions, the ads would disappear only temporarily. Eventually companies would realize "Sure, they're paying subscription fees, but if I just put a little unobtrusive link to 'related products' in the sidebar, no on will complain. And, yeah, sure, I'll get a little extra money on the side for displaying links to specific (paying) partners..." Soon enough, the ads are back (in some form or other), and we're now paying for the content twice. (We've seen this happen many times before; e.g. subscription cable-TV was supposed to be ad-free. More recently I've noticed that digital downloads from iTunes or Google Play have ads for other shows added to the beginning.) Moreover, oftentimes 'ad-free' really just means the ads are less obvious but more insidious (product placement, 'trusted' reviewers being bribed to give positive reviews, etc.).
The simple fact is that we cannot ever trust companies to actually honor the social contract of subscription models. Since they cannot stick to the rules, the only option is for end-users endure the constant ads, since at least in this case we don't have to pay subscription costs.
My biggest problem with ads is they are designed to steal your attention from the content. I've mentioned this numerous times whenever a website starts crying about Adblocking. If you want me to read your content, don't put full motion video ads on the side right next to the content I'm trying to read. Don't make 2/3rds of the page giant clickable area to redirect me to your sponsor. I'm not visiting your site to see the ads, I'm there for the content that you put so much work into. Ads are typically designed to steal your attention and be obtrusive. Slashdot's ads are pretty much safe, even though I even have the option to disable ads here.
I don't recall who it was but one big site posted a editorial on why they think Adblock is bullshit. It was the same day they had full page sponsorship and basically clicking anywhere that had empty space would direct you to that sponsor and they had every kind of obnoxious ad possible on the site at the same time. If everybody was sensible about ads then I wouldn't use an adblock, I do have the option enabled to allow unobtrusive ads so at least I'm not that big of a dirtbag.
Basically the internet is turning into Idiocracy more and more every day. Animated ads all around and some times with in the content you're trying to read. NOW GO AWAY IM BAITIN.
Even if you had the option to pay this, there would still be ads, because greed cannot be satisfied. See: cable TV.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Since a company wouldn't survive by spending more on advertising than they earn from advertising, This means that the average person in the UK buys significantly more than $230 a year because of those ads. That just sounds high to me, but that's just my opinion.
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2) it did not take into account the costs associated with the malware distributed by the various ad platforms.
People already pay for their internet connection, bandwith, web hosting, etc. Maybe the Telegraph could not exist on the web without ads, but that does not mean the internet could not exist. This person seems to belive that the internet exists only because of commercial content producers.
it's the surveillance I don't like. In theory this surveillance is supposed to get me relevant ads but it just creeps me out with it's persistence. I don't really need relevant ads ever. What I actually like is being exposed to lots of different ads. It gives me a sense of what the world is up to in a way. SO I don't mind the ads. It's not like TV ads that I have to wait through. they are just off to the side. What I don't want therefore is the surveillance. it has negative value to me. I don't want targeted ads.
If I could be sure I could be surveillance free I'd pay $230. But I don't see how that is possible. How would I know? where does one draw the line-- things like cookies for sessions and autologin on returning to a site and resuming my netflix movie where I left off are useful. What about amazon auto suggest? I once bought a book on amazon about sexual practices in different cultures and for months I had autosuggests for dildos and some amazingly raunchy bondage movies that I had no idea amazon carried. My sense of embarrassment prevented me from using amazon when other people were in the room. I think however this is not really the surveillance I am worried about. I can easily not use amazon and certainly in the future I always now check the "people who bought this also bought..." before I purchase some item that will trigger things I don't want it suggesting to me. SO that's containable.
But that experience makes me wonder what that little search did for my google profile. Am I now pegged as a dog fucker on google because the key terms I used for a scholarly search had other meanings? I know that google pricks up it's ears when a search leads down a path to a purchase.
You might ask why do I care. I just do, and that's normal. were trained in caring about appearances when were on the playground.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I am reluctantly tolerant of ads since I realize that they pay the people who provide the content I'm consuming without charge, but if I'm reading a text article and a video ad with sound pops up, I kill the sound by closing the tab. I won't tolerate that rudeness when there are so many other sources of news that don't expose me to such tripe.
That assumes that anyone would want to subsidize every single site that receives ad revenue. I strongly suspect that this is not the case. But even at only $230 a year, that would be a bargain. The viruses, the flash ads, the spam. God, make it all go away please.
But it will not. They want brand awareness, not just click-throughs. Paying it would be rather like paying the danegeld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
except a lot of places now won't roll the video if the ad is also blocked.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Of course in theory we should then get that back in lower prices of consumer goods, since the manufacturers will of course pass the lower marketing costs from not having to buy advertising everywhere on to us. In practice of course they will keep the money, which is why I say fuck 'em and I refuse to play their game and look at their ads.
Amen! This is one of my biggest pet peeves in modern journalism. It's so common that I actually get excited when I see someone use "percent" correctly!
I don't actually browse the entire internet and have no interest in guaranteeing equivalent revenue to everyone selling penis enlargements. My share of the burden is only a dozen or so websites visited regular. But since many of those are content aggregators let's go ahead and say I visit 100 x that many websites, and consider these casual visits as equal to supporting the website for an entire year.
This makes $230 / 1,036,878,123 websites (internetlivestats.com) * 1200 = 2.7*e-4 dollars to cover my website burden. And I feel I probably deserve some credit for subscribing to Netflix and Amazon prime. Obviously bandwidth is a better measure of the 'cost' I need to cover for these websites to remain hosted, but averaging over all websites does (in a difficult to quantify way) account for the fact that many of the websites out there even now are not profit-motivated.
I hope the authors of this study were also sure to deduct the cost users already pay due to web advertisements in the form of malware infections, including the compromise of bank accounts, identity, etc.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
I remember when Cable TV was ad free because I paid extra for it...now 25-30% of a shows time is dedicated to advertisements, and I get to pay to watch them.
Shame if someone smeared it all up with advertisements...
Tell you what - for the low low fee of 230 dollars a year, I promise Guido and Nunzio here won't fill your windows up with popups.
Yea, all of the spam would just go away. And I wouldn't have any more spam show up in my email, right?
And all of that drive-by malware installing stuff would just go away and people would start being ice to each other, right?
Of course, all of our interactivity would still be there. And we could still have e-comerce on the web, we could still use sites like Amazon rather than having to drive miles to get to a limited selection and pay higher prices at a local "friendly" bookstore. But somehow there would be no advertising. And people would just automatically know where all of the new e-comerce sites were. And there would be no one who wanted to steal your identity and your credit card info and drain your bank account. And best of all, no one would ever see a bunch of fools saying "ad free Internet for $230 a year sounds good to me, where do I sign up?" and try to take advantage of that.
We don't even have ad-free PBS television any more, but some people want to believe they could get ad-free Internet so much that they would OK an additional yearly charge?
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You're not going to get ad-free Internet. But if you really care about it at all you can get greatly ad-reduced Internet. And it doesn't involve a yearly fee, just a small expenditure of effort. Block the major ad sources in your Hosts file (or, even better for the more advanced user, set up a network wide block in your router). But be aware, this has the side effect of making your browsing a lot faster, since you cut out a lot of unwanted traffic.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
BBC channels are add free in the UK with a mandatory ã145 license fee. If the Interents could work for similar cost I see a win.
While properly crafted ads are not bothersome at all (Text only, no motion pictures, video ads that don't autoplay or are at least muted, etc). I would play that $230 per month to guarantee that I wasn't being tracked. Now THAT would be a way to make the Do Not Track token work better, because then you can say there was some harm to you as a consumer if you were tracked.
If you create a pool of billions of $230 yearly "contributions" to the people who are trying to milk the Internet now, do you really think that the people looking to make easy money from the Internet that you and I already pay to gain access to will go away, or can you understand that there just might be more people attracted by all of that money and looking for ways to establish themselves as Internet Advertisers so that they can get some of that money?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What would possibly happen is that they will charge you $250 (+20 for various fees), and then still find a way to incorporate ads in the future. Remember how cable subscription you already pay for includes ads in the programming? In fact it already started, even large news outlets are including "adveterials" (sponsored stories), which are even worse than ads (it takes a second to realize they are not in fact real editorial content).
If text browsers have a problem finding the start of an article's body on a particular site, some screen readers used by blind people might have the same problem. Report this accessibility problem to the site. If the site still refuses to fix it, find a blind person in your community and a sufficiently sleazy lawyer and have them sue the site under applicable disability discrimination law. It worked against Target.com.
Advertising is pissing on your brain through your eye sockets.
Bring on the advertising-free web. The signal-to-noise ratio will improve tremendously.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the web site owners can't afford their own sites, then it is their own fault
Which raises a question: How do you expect any web site owner to afford his own site?
We already pay an ISP for having access to the web...
So from what source of revenue should a site's writers be paid?
As soon as you would try to make such a model, everyone would come, create some alibi website and tell the world, he needs one dollar of your 230 USD per year. If there is money, people get greedy.
That's fine if you access the Internet only through a desktop PC. But hosts file managers don't work on unrooted tablets and phones, and a lot of people aren't willing to sell a tablet or phone just to buy an easily rootable one.
deposit your money directly on my account. You'll then be sure never to see an ad from my webpages.
Slashdot offers the same deal.
" each user would have to pay about ã140 ($230) to make up for the lost revenue"
:)) I wouldn't mind seeing some of them disappear, they are no friends of mine, that's for sure.
This sounds crazy, I hope someone realizes that. "Lost revenue" in a businness which only has any revenue at all, because soeone somewhere thought that choking the Internet in a tide of ads must be a good businness model... "Losing" that "revenue" would be lost to those companies who built on this idiotic assumption, also this businness is one of those who drive the whole web into sh*t in the long run.The Internet would function fine, their only problem is that they've grown used to the high revenue stream and reducing or losing it would hurt them. But saying that they couldn't live with a reduced ad revenue and they'd need to push all that revenue's source onto customers to survive is also idiotic - who says they need to have the level of revenue they actually have, or that they actually need to survive at all?
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
ads make you buy products you did not intend to buy. apple.com allows you to buy products you wanted to buy before you even visited the page.
Without a TPM or asking questions about the ads that the user has seen
Solve Media ads do the latter. Please see the previous Slashdot story CAPTCHA Using Ad-Based Verification.
Video ad platform Ebuzzing calculated the average âvalueâ(TM) of each web user
in other words, advertising agency insists its products are valuable, lands spot on news site for free.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Yes, if such a system actually worked, I would gladly pay. But in fairness, I should be paying way less than the global average. I have developed pretty good skills of ignoring anything resembling an ad. Actually I make it a point to avoid buying from anyone pushing their ads too aggressively, as long as there is reasonable competition. Probably those ad pushers should be paying me money for not wasting their budgets.
Think the internet is bad try reading magazines. We already PAY for every companys advertising. that has been paid with money they get from the sale of there vastly over priced smaller product. I don't block text ads but I don't click on them either never have am I soposta feel some kinda responsibility to buy stuff I don't want or need? Nope I don't feel bad I have already paid at the pump thank you very much. Oh and the ad networds ARE unsafe so am I soposat allow my PC to be compromised so they can feed me a few malware and virus laden ads?? I say no so I block them.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I have a small photography journal, free to go to, and while I know it's hosted on Google's blogspot, I don't run any kind of revenue generating ads on it. I know Google has their own monitoring crap built in to blogspot, but I do not think there is anything I can do about that.
My main site is hosted and paid for fully by me, no ads, nothing, just content. If my hosting costs go up because of increased bandwidth, then I pay the costs. I am happy to see increased traffic, means I must be doing something right.
But ultimately I'm providing content because I want to, not because I want anything back.
This is the way it should be.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Several readers sent word of research into the cost of internet content without ads.
This presumes that the internet would remain in its identical form without ads. It almost assuredly would not and hence this "analysis" is based upon a useless hypothetical premise.
The trouble is advertising is not a fixed number. Firms are constantly looking for ways to increase ad revenue from the same product. Let's add a couple more spots. How about some product placement. Lets sell sponsorships for these segments. It's a never ending process.
Ultimately they don't seem to care that they are devaluating the very medium used to get the message across.
To me this means that on average, companies are making about $230/person/year in ad revenue. This means the ad companies are paying out a minimum of $230, not including increased bandwidth costs, management overhead, and other costs involved with supplying ads. So as a whole, the entire economy will save money than $230/person/year, meaning more money to be used where it should be.
I was told by once of my professors that about 50% of the cost of enterprise grade software is marketing. This means the software could be 50% cheaper if they weren't trying to shove it down my throat. At the same time, without marketing, I may not have known about the software.
My intuition is that I'd be just fine with the only content available being content that did not seek a revenue stream. I thought the internet was better back then anyway.
The geek always thinks that way
Because way back then the Internet was his personal playground. He was the both content provider and consumer. I haven't forgiven him yet for the multitude of user-unfriendly clients he devised for communication over the snail slow connections of the dial-up modem days.
Well, minimal ads, anyway. So...what are the benefits of having ads, again? I use AdBlock, so I don't see them, but when I use another machine, I see loads of ads for Progressive Insurance (don't need it, have a deal through my wife's union), Ancestry.com ($20/mo...forget it), and a bunch of other stuff I'm never going to buy. Likewise, the stuff that shows up to the right of my Google searches is hilariously inappropriate. I've clicked on a few of them and they're just link aggregator sites, for the most part. There seems to be an economy in ads, but as to actual useful links that are of interest to me, there's a real shortage there.
Funny, how nobody seems to pick up this point. Indeed, we are already paying the 230 bucks.
Fix your hosts .. your internet browsing will speed up tremendously.
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...
Just sayin', an ad-free Internet is one browser extension away.
if they can detect the ad is not showing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm already paying more than four times that amount for Time Warner Cable! Where does that money go? Oh... here's where my money goes: http://www1.salary.com/Robert-... GREED.
Ads on the Internet don't just make money for the people selling the ads, they also help bring buyers and sellers together. By analogy, just because you spend $100 on toothpaste per year doesn't mean that a toothpaste-free world would cost you only $100/year; it would likely cost you (or your dental insurance) a lot more.
When pay TV was first launched, it was with the promise of commercial-free content. That didn't last long. When satellite radio was launched, it was with the promise of commercial-free content. That didn't last long. Subscription-based streaming TV shows (like Hulu Plus)? That didn't last long.
Once you're used to paying extra for the service, the money grubbers will be back. It's inevitable.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
They can embed the whole site in a DRM-ed Flash or Silverlight wrapper
Which means your favorite general-purpose web search engine can't see it to index it. Of course, a site could provide just the title, author, and abstract without digital restrictions management and get those in the index, similarly to how Elsevier journals and WSJ.com present articles to anonymous visitors and to logged-in users whose subscription has lapsed.
2) it did not take into account the costs associated with the malware distributed by the various ad platforms.
That's not covered by the fee you paid to run Windows?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Which is why we use ad-blocker blocker blockers
Ad blockers that allow the ad to render and then cover it up exist, but they eliminate the bandwidth and CPU time savings of a normal ad blocker. Like normal ad display, a cover-up ad blocker slows down rendering, drains your device's battery (as its CPU has to come out of sleep mode more often), and runs up a higher data bill with your ISP compared to a normal ad blocker. And as I mentioned above, a cover-up ad blocker fails with interactive advertisements.
You fool! What have you done?
APK will be summoned now.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
So... People wouldn't be willing to pay 11-12 pounds (19-20 USD) extra a month for an ad free Internet? Really? o.O
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
It's a complete fiction.
For ad revenue to count towards cost of internet infrastructure, it would be having to go into funding within the infrastructure, not to "outside interests" who are - in their own ways - increasing costs by pulling "eyes".
TAANSTAFL maybe, but I think a lot of these "services" are overvaluing their "product".
But I'm not concerned with advertising as much as I'm concerned with tracking. How much for a year of tracking-free internet?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
1) it was conducted by a company that is in the business of providing internet ads
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2) it did not take into account the costs associated with the malware distributed by the various ad platforms.
3) The World Wide Web is not the Internet.
All of the highly modded postings up to now have missed this crucial point entirely. The Web has nothing to do with the Internet, aside from being the mechanism by which the bytes are transferred.
The Web has very little to do with the cost of an Internet connection, except as a selling point for most people to subscribe to an ISP.
How much of the cost of the internet goes to costs of the ads?
They seem like most of the bandwidth on many sites.
Take them out and the cost would probably drop to $2.30.
(2) Ads you don't see will still count against your bandwidth cap,
Actually, given the prices practised by some ISP, if this number is correct
ads cost you, the end user, *MORE MONEY* (in terms of bandwidth, specially the "video" kind of ads) than earn money back to the ad-supported website.
And then you wonder why I prefer using Adblock/Noscript, etc. and donating a few bucks (bitcoin,etc.) to website I like the most.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I will block ads and see no problems with it. I see it no different than taking the sales circulars out of the local paper and tossing before reading. I think more people, including me, would not block the ads if there were not so "in your face". Just keep them simple, and not so obtrusive and I would not block them. If they would stop with the data collecting, I would not block them. If some did not pass on malware, I would not block them.
AdBlock Edge + Disconnect + NoScript + RefControl. No ads and basic tracking control.
Even if we could somehow set up a system where every internet user pays $230/year to some central authority - how would it be distributed to the site owners etc.? I think this study is more indicative that perhaps internet advertisements are too inexpensive. How much per person would it take to get rid of television advertisements? My guess is a lot more.
I don't mind seeing some advertising. I would rather not block the ads so that the people who are providing me with whatever I do want to see can get something out of it. But.. then there's those damn video ads, flash monstrosities which make the browser slow to a crawl and those horrible things that 'cover up' the content you want to see until a timer goes off or you press a tiny little X or something...
Those kinds of things make me switch on the ad blocking software. Unfortunately then the 'nice advertisers' suffer too.
This is an odd way to look at who is paying for an ad-full internet. We are already paying for the ads, saying that in some way it would cost us that much to get rid of them is gibberish. The study would have been great if it weren't for the twisted logic applied to it.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
How do you propose to reimburse people who generate or curate content, such as the editors at Slashdot, or the writers at Cracked or the Onion?
With every content media you pay for the medium (paper, traditionally for magazines and newspapers) but that barely covers materials and distribution. The advertising pays for creating the content.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The self-destructing cookies plugin for Firefox has the cookie management policy that I want. Sites can leave whatever cookies they want, but they are silently removed when I navigate away from the page (there's also an undo feature, so if I realise after navigating away that I actually wanted the site to store something persistent, I can retrieve it). It also does the same for HTML5 local storage and will aggressively delete tracking cookies from ad networks. It needed basically no configuration other than to whitelist a few sites as I go.
I'd love to see Microsoft and Apple integrate this kind of functionality into IE and Safari. I doubt Google would do the same for Chrome, as they rely too heavily on aggressive tracking for making money. I don't really understand why Apple and Microsoft don't aggressively push privacy features in their browsers: they'd get good PR and hurt one of their competitors at the same time...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Fuck 'em.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
1) it was conducted by a company that is in the business of providing internet ads
After reading Slashdot for a few years now, my first reaction to any study is looking for who funded it so I can figure out how it's a blatant lie.
There are far too few false positives.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Still no answer from him in regard to my challenge put to him to this very day MONTHS later (that tell you anything?
You and Hairyfeet should get together. Not responding to your testosterone chest-beating just means he doesn't like fighting trolls. Although him contacting you in the first place, if true, would be a black mark on him.
And could you elaborate what you mean by "AdBlock is 'souled-out' to Google" please?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
The biggest positive effect of no ads would be that sites could stop with the click-baiting.
Today lots of sites write misleading sensationalist headlines or leave out important details in summaries just to maximize the click-through and the number of shown ads.
Imagine if all those writers spent their time on writing text that benefits the reader instead of the advertiser.
For that I would gladly pay $230.
* Addons slowup slower usermode browsers layering on more - & bloat RAM consumption too + hugely excessive cpu use (4++gb extra in FireFox https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth... [mozilla.org])
That this can happen, I do not dispute. But I believe the case for it is being severely overstated by people who *ahem* have a vested interest in promoting alternatives to browser add-ons.
/etc/hosts file. I believe that good security is done in overlapping, interlocking layers. "Security" does not mean just remote attackers, but also anything intrusive I don't want, like advertisers and their tracking. I use an /etc/hosts file AND Adblock Plus, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, and several others. What one of them alone does not catch, another one will.
I currently run Firefox with 24 addons installed and actively enabled. This is mostly for ad-blocking and privacy-enhancing, with a few miscellaneous add-ons like one that restores the old-style Stop button behavior (stops animated GIFs as well as page loads). Since you seem to appreciate bold: there is no slowdown or latency problem that I can subjectively notice. If my addons are "slowing down the browser" they're doing it below the threshold of what a human can detect. I consider that a good and reasonable trade-off to make on my own systems.
On memory... I have 26 tabs open with a wide variety of sites loaded, many of which are content-heavy. This browser instance has been running continuously for many days. KSysGuard gives a nice breakdown of the memory usage of my Firefox process and this is the summary:
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Summary
The process firefox (with pid 5618) is using approximately 993.9 MB of memory.
It is using 971.4 MB privately, 15.6 MB for pixmaps, and a further 26.5 MB that is, or could be, shared with other programs.
Dividing up the shared memory between all the processes sharing that memory we get a reduced shared memory usage of 7.0 MB. Adding that to the private and pixmap usage, we get the above mentioned total memory footprint of 993.9 MB.
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Another section mentions that the 15.6MB for pixmaps may be stored on the graphics card's memory. At any rate, this is nowhere near 4+ gigs. Nor have I ever, with any version of Firefox, experienced anything remotely like 4GB of memory usage. This is a 64-bit system running a 64-bit Firefox that I compiled from source (your article mentions the memory penalty for Adblock is higher on 64-bit systems, which makes sense when you understand what that means). This system has 8GB of RAM installed, so ~994MB is negligible to me. For a little perspective, currently about 6GB is being used for buffers and disk cache, since this is what Linux does with memory that would otherwise be empty and therefore doing nothing. If I run a Windows game via WINE then that comes down to 4-5GB for buffers/cache since about another 1-2 gigs of memory becomes used.
Incidentally, I don't run Windows so I don't use your hosts file tool (and even if I ran Windows I'd probably rather roll my own, nothing personal). But I do use a comprehensive
Instead of viewing browser add-ons as an obstacle in your path to promoting your own solution, you could learn to work with them, use them effectively, and incorporate them into a multi-layered approach that includes all the work you've put into hosts files. Everyone would benefit that way, especially your users.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Back in the 1980s, many channels on Cable TV had zero ads.
By the 1990s, every channel had ads. And the cost of Cable TV continued to rise. By 2000 I pulled the plug and swore off broadcast TV. I pay for viewing privileges, not for ads.
I'm not easily convinced anymore when a sales pitch promises ad free content.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Incidentally I also use the Linux kernel feature called Transparent Hugepage Support. I set it to "Always" (as opposed to only when a program specifically wants it enabled). This is known to increase the memory footprint of applications, though by how much I couldn't tell you. The idea of this feature is: the operating system's memory allocator is gaining increased performance ("This feature can improve computing performance to certain applications by speeding up page faults during memory allocation, by reducing the number of tlb misses and by speeding up the pagetable walking") at the cost of higher memory usage.
Just thought I'd mention that since it may be relevant.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Why are all these people still looking at ads ? Ive been using firefox with adblock for I dont know how long, must been someplace like 8 or 10 years. As as bonus you don't get any virus or malware or super loud video ads popping up while your at work.
Their definition of the internet is a little off. It's not the internet, but all the services on the web that we take for granted as being free. My Comcast bill would not change for lack of ads, my ability to use the internet to access sites made freely available would not change without ads. What would change is that search engines would have to be subscription services paid either by the user or the sites indexed. Facebook, YouTube and email services would have to charge users. Companies would simply no longer be able to operate 150,000 servers to provide a service that isn't billable.
I think it's more useful to think of the number as a quantification of how much that advertising is worth: that's the amount of money operators are depending on (one way or the other) to keep providing what they're providing.
How you actually get it to them is a whole different question. They've talked about micropayments and subscription models and other things, but ads have the nice characteristic of requiring zero overhead for the viewer. There's nothing to install; you "pay" just by having it on your screen. Whether it's actually worth it to the advertiser is insanely difficult to say, but they are (at least for the moment) actually forking over the money.
Everybody would love a more precise system, where you pay for the page views that are of interest to you, but that shifts the burden from millions-of-site-operators to billions-of-viewers, and they're all incensed about having to "pay" for something they were previously getting for "free". People keep trying things, but it comes as no surprise to me that for a lot of side, throwing a few basic ads onto the page for pennies-per-thousand-impressions is the easiest way to monetize their effort, at least for the vast array of small sites.
Big sites (like Slashdot) can do better, because the economies of scale make it worth the overhead to try to get money from viewers, and maybe some day we'll get that packaged down to a point where other sites can get it. But since the total sum of money is pretty substantial, I think a lot of viewers will say, "I hate ads, but I hate paying even more."
My cable company DOES make a quarter of those shows now. ...um used to? ...I gave up trying to decipher Time-Warner.
The other cable company
I think the article made a wrong assumption. That $230 per user (assuming only first world countries??) is to make up for lost advertisement revenue. However, where is the requirement that we must make up all lost advertisement revenue? Is it our duty to ensure that Google keep making massive amounts of money, do we need to keep having rich executives? A better question is how much does it cost to pay for the internet without ads: the amount to pay for the infrastructure and upgrades and *only* the nodes we visit (I refuse to pay to support Facebook or Twitter as I never visit those sights). I suspect it's much much less than $230.
Companies need to learn how to do things the old fashioned way, earning money by selling products rather than by selling advertisements.
Please stop putting advertisements into slashdot.
i know, right?!?! why wont anyone believe me when i tell them that its my 'scientific research' and inefficient ad-targeting algorithms that are causing all the bondage-dildo popups in my browser?!?!
.. .hence, my browser history....
and everyone knows those tiny darn little X's to close the popups are nearly impossible to click on
Hehe. /oblg Fool of a Took
That's ok ... just add this entry :-)
127.0.0.1 APK
When you say $230, people are going to compare what you're offering -- ad-free browsing, in this case -- to whatever else they can buy for $230. Maybe it's a new phone, or some clothes, or whatever it is non-nerds spend money on. (Dates?) Regardless, it's probably going to be more satisfying than ad-free browsing.
If you rephrase it as $20/mo, you'll have a lot more takers. $20 falls into most people's "impulse buy" category. $20 will get you an order of pizza, or a short taxi ride, or a ballcap. They don't have to consider whether they can afford it, or what else they can do with that money.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Just $20 a month? And that's from someone biased towards it?
Anyway, now let's see a study of how much advertising has cost each of us from:
- clicking, scrolling, and squinting for the actual content
- giving up, quitting, clicking back, and missing something
- buying, setting up, and using antivirus and adblocking software
- buying some of the frivolous things advertised, after at last being worn down by it, even a bit
- waiting for the page to load
- waiting for computer to run at all, given the heavy load some of our protective software puts on our computers
Don't confuse revenue with cost. By the author's calculations, the internet in the UK generates £140 revenue on average per user. That's not what it costs to run the internet, which is substantially lower or else the companies selling services and ads wouldn't make any profit. What proportion of that £140 goes to Google as pure profit, tax free? And how much money are addThis.com et al making by selling your details and metadata on to loan sharks, online gambling, aggressive opportunistic sales agencies (AKA con men), etc.? Should we include that in the price it costs to "run the internet"?
The article is conflating the web and the Internet, as usual.. sigh..
So what do they actually mean? I presume they really just mean web sites (articles).. Not something like Hulu Plus. I hate regular ads(*) with a passion. I love Tivo, but if there were something like an ad free Hulu Plus, or Netflix with current shows _AND_ past shows, I'd pay a lot for it, instead of regular cable. (I'd expect/want to watch it on TV, not just a computer/phone/tablet.)
Though, even if JUST for web sites, that's freaking cheap. I'd pay it in a minute... and I'm VERY frugal.
(*) Though it bugs some people, product placement very very rarely bugs me, even really blatant ones like on Survivor.
Anytime some corporate shill complains about "lost revenue" I feel the urge to strangle them for all that lost oxygen.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I know you're trying to push an eco friendly agenda there but let me ask you a question. Is it better for the environment to waste $10 of electricity a month to keep a system on but idling or is it more eco friendly to throw my blown up system in the trash and have a factory construct me a new one? Remember constructing circuit boards and semiconductors is a nasty business. I am an electrical engineer. I know from years of experience that pretty much any time a system I was responsible for failed, it was due to the initial power-on inrush current. Usually exploding power supplies, regulators, or capacitors. On systems that are left on for years at a time, about the only failure experienced is a dead hard drive or an overheat due to a dead fan, which are mechanical failures normally. Power cycling a PC daily just seems to up the chances of the PSU blowing up. I have no citations other than my own observations, but any system I have that will be used with any amount of frequency will be on 24/7/365.
I worked for a good education so I could make a good wage which allows me the ability to pay for increased electricity and bandwidth needed. It's a cost of doing business. It speaks volumes about your character that you believe that Rick and I deserve "harm" because we don't live the way you'd like us to. I don't know about Rick there, but I earn my own way and what I do "deserve" is to reap the benefits of it. If you want to sip electrons then you do it. If you want to guzzle them, then you do it. Either way, I'm not wishing ill will on you for your decision.
My problems with ads are, in order of priority, 1) Security, 2) Privacy and 3) Intrusiveness. Ads have long been a major source of drive by downloads for malicious software but the ad companies refuse to take responsibility and prevent this happening, proving that they cannot be trusted. Ad companies steal personal information and do not respect our privacy; it is a core part of their business to profile everyone for their advertising and they have become so bad that they are no better than hackers. Ads that flash, show popups, or other intrusive nonsense piss me off.
We should not be expected to comprise our online safety for ads. Fix those problems and I'll stop blocking them. Firewalls, URL/keyword filtering on routers, security software (including AdBlock and NoScript) and avoiding heavy advertising sites means that I rarely see an Ad. There are several ad supported sites that I have whitelisted because they never show intrusive ads and their ads are relevant to the site content, although the worst ad networks still don't get onto my networks.
Because they aren't attempting to crush their competition by innovating or being a better product. They've all seen how much money the Goog makes from ads and they've decided the best way to get theirs is to emulate the methods of success that have been "proven" a net positive. This mentality is part of the meaning of Extend, Embrace, Extinguish at least to me.
Interestingly the cost is very similar to the UK TV licence cost, which funds the ad-free (in the UK) BBC.
Perhaps without that money we would see less crappy content promoted by SEO. SEO has its price too...
I suspect that if most people were faced with the choice of paying for all ad-driven sites would simply not go to most sites. I could live with a only a few sites, StackOverflow being a huge one, a mapping web site, a classified ads site, etc. Do I really need to watch russian drivers crash into each other?
I pay >$500/yr today. For slow internet with ads.
Where do I sign up?
Why, yes! I AM new here.
I wonder if this will change, given all of the reports about web advertising being a bubble. Advertisers are starting to notice that, for most of them, the ROI is tiny and that's eventually going to trickle up the supply chain. If Microsoft were smart, they'd sell off their ad business while it's still at an overinflated price and then work to kill the market.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If I could be sure I could be surveillance free I'd pay $230. But I don't see how that is possible. How would I know?
Simple; every site you visit can use cookies, Flash supercookies, third-party Javascript, user-agent sniffing and mouse-movement tracking to identify and monitor everything you do, in order to make sure it's not being surveilled.
Of course, there's always the chance that such power will be abused. To prevent this, we can have an alliance of government spy agencies keep a look out by tapping undersea cables, collating the data in vast stores for data mining, purchase known security vulnerabilities, employ legions of crackers to find more, deliberately weaken security standards, disseminate malware and intercept datacentre traffic.
Of course, there's always the chance that such power will be abused. To prevent this, we can have secret courts hold secret sessions to make secret rulings based on secret interpretations of the law.
Of course, there's always the chance that such power will be abused. To prevent this, we can have oversight committees which publically state that none of this is going on, then when the details emerge they have the choice of either admitting that they completely failed in their job, or that they were lying.
Of course, there's always the chance that such power will be abused. To prevent this, we can hold democratic elections to choose which one of the two available crooks should get that power.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd sell off their ad business while it's still at an overinflated price and then work to kill the market.
Isn't it illegal to even make a plan like that? You'd have to disclose to future buyers that you planned to fucking kill them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
God, you can stop posting the same stuff 12 times per article, dude. I got the information.
And I can also do without the chest-beating and calling me feeble. Grow up.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Not quite sure how that's a challenge...it's an infodump of declarative statements saying his program is good.
And as stated previously, I have no desire to compare penis sizes. Presumably he/you'd reject any arguments I made anyway. Posting the same thing 12 times an article for years is a fairly good indication he's not open to having his mind changed :)
AdBlock works well, and you don't have to manually tinker with much of anything. Throw in Element Hiding Helper for click-based blocking for the edge cases. If you *enjoy* messing with fiddly bits, good on you--I can understand that as I rather enjoy setting up a new Linux install myself. But at a certain point I just become tired of all the fiddly bits and want something to Just Work(tm).
P.S: I'm sure you'll ignore all these points and just keep ranting about HOSTS so good day, sir.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I'm talking from an end user perspective. Maybe it's not as efficient with clock cycles but who cares because it's good enough. I'm sure there's a few fiddly technical reasons for HOSTS but AdBlock + NoScript does everything *I* care about.
No, I haven't done benchmarks. And I'm not going to commission an interface usability team to compare them either, because as we've learned on /. they're generally idiots (the ones we hear about, anyway). AdBlock is virtually the definition of a set-and-forget, zero-effort-required product. NoScript isn't so much, but I really doubt ApkTool9000 is any better.
I can't help but notice the conspicuous absence of NoScript on his list of poo-poo'd extensions. Not like it's one of the top 2 names in Firefox security plugins or anything...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
It's called a joke, dude.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
My Adblocking plugin doesnt let me see them :)
and it blocks all ads unlike adblock,
I assume what you mean is "it has a better blacklist." Because that's what we're talking about, right? Not heuristics to determine whether something's an ad? If so, then no, it does NOT "block all ads."
and it operates in kernelmode).
Okay, fine. Apart from any potential security concerns, it'll be faster.
There also isn't a host file on the planet that tears up that much CPU and in excess of 4gb of RAM and there probably never will be.
I keep hearing these "OMG Firefox is eating up all my available memory" responses and I just don't buy it. I'm a tab whore, and I only have 2GB of RAM even in my machine and neither AdBlock nor Firefox (well, technically I'm on Palemoon now) chokes.
Especially since adblock doesn't do a fraction of what hosts can for added speed, security, reliability, and even anonymity.
Why you insist on using a needlessly redundant and massively inferior product that doesn't even do its job right anymore being crippled and paid off by advertisers to NOT do its job
...Aaaaaand we're back to the APK rhetoric. At least this post was almost entirely free of bizarro punctuation, bolding, italics, etc. You missed a + and &.
As a final thought, all this whining about "AdBlock doesn't even do it's job anymore! It's sold out!" can be solved by merely going into preferences and unchecking the "Allow some non-intrustive advertising" box. At least, I have no reason to suspect it doesn't.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Now look who "can't prove wrong" all his points :)
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Well, mostly because I was at lunch, but hey :)
I haven't been arguing this whole time that Hosts is less featureful than AdBlock, just harder to use.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Other people maintain AdBlock block lists for me. Pretty sure they update automatically, too.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
If Ted Nelson's Xanadu we could have had an ad-free net (or nearly so). In his Xanadu you would be paying out small fractions of cents for every word you read to the original authors. If you were an author you would get paid for all your work but not those you quote. This would have made the Internet more democratic and egalitarian. Also instead of traffic being highly concentrated among a small number of websites, it would be spread out more.
This system would have greatly reduced the need for advertising because it would provide another way to make money off the Internet. It would help us wean ourselves of the corruption of advertising and the rampant consumerism it causes. Perhaps Xanadu could have made us stand up to the religion of continuous economic growth before we completely trash our planet.
You really seem to have difficulty comprehending two concepts: 1) the efficiency of doing both is more than good enough for my setup; 2) I am in fact doing both addons and a good /etc/hosts file.
br You remind me of a religious zealot.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So if everyone would have the NSA stop its surveillance of US citizens, each tax payer saves $168 or more per year.
Unless they help people with data recovery or getting back their data, something to ponder what value if anything happens.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future