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Editor-in-Chief of the Next Web: Adblockers Are Immoral
lemur3 writes: Hot on the heels of the recent implementation of Canvas Ads (allowing advertisers to use the full page) Martin Bryant, the Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web, wrote a piece that, ostensibly, calls out mobile carriers in Europe for offering ad blocking as a service. He writes: "Display ads are still an important bread-and-butter income stream. Taking delight in denying publishers that revenue shows either sociopathic tendencies or ignorance of economic realities." While referring to those using ad blocking as sociopathic is likely not to win many fans, this mindset seems to be prevalent in certain circles, as discussed previously on Slashdot. Martin closes his piece with a warning: "For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online voices and publishers – and I don't think consumers really want that."
There is no right to make a profit. http protocol is displayed by a backend interpretation. I can do what I want with the data I fetch.
In addition I want the concept of ad revenue generated content to die.
Agree 100%. I installed adblock plus when slashdot started throwing URL blocks from the ad rotator. How do I know the next ad rotation won't be a driveby? The industry provides zero guarantees and relies too much on upstream ad providers to vouch for safety.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Customers hate them so much that one person started a blog called Tab Closed; Didn't Read highlighting the worst offenders. This has inspired a hashtag #tcdr in microblog posts like this.
While he has a point that ads do fuel much of the content on the Internet, where he goes horribly wrong is to think that it is advertisers RIGHT (instead of PRIVILEGE) to beam their messages into our brains. He probably also thinks you shouldn't go to the bathroom during commercials on TV.
No, where he goes horribly wrong is using a violent mental disorder as an illusion to people rejecting an ad. That makes him not just misguided but dangerous.
Yes the internet needs to be paid for. Ads were never the way. They always have been intrusive. Google has been the best of the worst.
What he's truly angry about is that we aren't forced to see them.
I will close this piece with a truth. "For all their sins, ads fuel much of the Web. Cut them out and you're strangling the diversity of online publishers – I think users really want that. Users want to restore the internet to what is was in the beginning. A resource of communication, knowledge and entertainment unencumbered by intrusive, unneeded, bandwidth eating bits of useless info."
If web sites can't find a way to pay for the content and hosting then they eventually will go away. The consensus on /. seems to be "paywalls and ads are bad and screw those that use them I have a right to ad free and free access to content..." The problem isn't so much ads as the intrusive nature of some and their increasing use as malware delivery mechanisms. pop ups, self starting, animated ads are a real nuisance and worthy of blocking, as are tracking cookies etc. The advertising industry needs to find a way around that that doesn't annoy users because, while ad blocking users are probably a small fraction of all users currently, as things get worse more and more users will block ads. Whisk they are at it, they need to fix the problem that if I do see an ad I am interested in if I leave the page and come back the ad is no longer there.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How do I know the next ad rotation won't be a driveby?
Because you've set the the Java applet and Flash Player plug-ins to "click to play" mode. It's sort of hard to catch a drive-by when you've disabled the tech through which drive-bys enter your machine. This used to be a separate extension called Flashblock, but browser publishers have recently started to incorporate this functionality directly into the browser. In Firefox, in Hamburger > Add-ons > Plugins, set "Shockwave Flash" to "Ask to Activate" instead of "Always Activate". This way, you can block Flash unless you're on Newgrounds, Kongregate, Dagobah, Albino Blacksheep, Weebl's Stuff, Homestar Runner, or one of the few other sites that legitimately need Flash functionality.
In very black-and-white terms I agree with Martin Bryant.
BUT... to give one example, a lot of web sites (including Slashdot) are unusable on my iPhone nowadays because of ads that either (1) automatically redirect me to a product on the App Store as soon as the ad loads, or (2) try to do that, but do it badly so Safari closes the web page and reloads it.
Maybe if advertisers didn't behave so aggressively, people wouldn't aggressively block them. I block ads on my Mac, and if it was possible (maybe it is?) then I'd block them on my iPhone too. Not because I object to adverts, or even because I want to avoid seeing them, but because they make browsing the web an obnoxious, frustrating and potentially dangerous experience. (The only virus I've ever had was from an advert force-loading a malformed PDF document.)
and it gets worse forcing autoplay of that dancing singing crap, much of which gags my browser. take your Flash and HTML5 and go to hell.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I smell a perverse incentive. The sender of traffic pays, but the last mile also pays for the connection. And in the case of a satellite or cellular last mile, the subscriber pays the most by far: usually $5 to $15 per gigabyte in the United States market. How many of these ad networks happen to own stock in satellite and cellular carriers or vice versa?
I'm assuming that Firefox and Chrome browsers are less likely to have vulnerabilities that are known and exploitable than those in Flash Player. And I'm also assuming that ad networks are going to continue to be as dumb as they currently are, serving up Flash as the preferred ad media type instead of HTML5 with a Flash fallback. So until some of these assumptions become no longer valid, such as if advertisers come to prefer HTML5 over Flash Player, browsers become more vulnerable than Flash Player, browser vulnerabilities become more serious, or zero-day browser vulnerabilities become more widely known to malware authors, blocking Flash will remain effective.
Do advertisements add enough value to my existence to compensate me for the time lost? Not rhetorical, I think it's a good question. Having some commercials while watching TV may be the only reason I have something to watch on TV, I can appreciate that. But in the paste decade or more, commercials have consumed such a large portion of the time of TV, that it was no longer worth the time investment to be constantly interrupted, taking 30 minutes of my time to watch a 15 minute show.
I guess I would use that as an example. Another staggering fact that I learned while in school is that about 50% of the cost of enterprise software is marketing, If you pay $10k for some software, about $5k of that cost was convincing you to purchase it in the first place. I understand that to some degree that marketing is a necessary evil, but holy crap!
Active advertising is literally coercion,
If you find advertising that does not involve a realistic threat of physical violence against your person to be coercive, then advertising isn't the problem, your broken mind is.
This is why I actually don't have a problem with Google's text ads. You do a search on some terms, and alongside your search results you also get some ads based on those terms. This can be really helpful if you're looking for a product to solve a problem you have, and the ad shows you something which is exactly what you're looking for. I guess this is called "targeted advertisement".
The mass-spam advertisement is the stuff that sucks, because I have to see it even when I'm not looking to buy something, and it can be for anything, not something that I specifically need.
I'm of the opinion that advertising is immoral.
Do you like the existence of Google? Should the Internet be purely pay-to-play like in the old AOL or GEnie days? For that instance, should Slashdot exist
Yes, by the end of your advert I might "want" your product that I'd never heard of, but as the OP says, "fuck you". You are taking money out of my pocket that I did not plan to allow its removal. In some circles, that's theft.
You know what ACTUAL theft is? Consuming someone's product (ie. visiting an ad-supported web site) and then refusing to pay (ie. allow the ads to be shown). If you want a moral and ethical ad-blocker, implement a plug-in that refuses to let you visit any site whose ads you don't want displayed, or which allows you to pay micro-payments per visit.
That might be the case but when any of those ad could be carrying a malicious payload and attack my system there is no way in hell I am going to allow any arbitrary code from a third party to execute on my system.
I trust Slashdot not to attack me. Slashdot is paid by "acme ad company" to insert their ads. Acme will pipe through whatever code crackers and malicious operators gives them as long as they get their money. I don't trust acme because of this and I certainly don't trust the person placing the ad. But here is the problem acme doesn't care as, I am a product not a customer. They only have to appease Slashdot and who ever is placing the ad. In fact their is a disincentive to scrutinize the content on the ads they are selling as they get paid either no matter the content and passing up bad operators is lost money. They can get away with it because if Slashdot viewer complain then they can say they will look into it opps one got through our system and nothing happens. So the only way to be safe is to block ads.
If Caveat lector (reader beware) is the way the internet is to be then get used to me being aware and responding appropriately.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.