Slashdot Mirror
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."
No. I will not risk the safety and security of my systems by allowing them to display potentially (frequently) harmful ads. Also I don't like being advertised to in general and fuck you anyways.
Shut the fuck up or join Adblock Plus' unobtrusive ads program.
Examples include ads that occupy the entire page, video ads that automatically play and hog mobile data, or broken/inoperable links to ad servers that prevent access to content.
Make ads unobtrusive (think about the way Google delivers ads), and customers won't block them.
In other news, a psychologist said that idblockers are amoral.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
are the reason i started using ad blockers, i will continue to do so until i'm confident the web has removed 100% of these
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.
and I'll keep blocking your ads.
Ad networks have lately been the largest vector for remote exploits. Some very ordinary and mainstream websites have been using ad networks that offer up images/flash with embedded exploits. I will block all ad networks due to this. You want to provide ads? Download the ads locally, vet and display them from your own server like we used to do in the good ol' days of the web. Then I can't block them.
Using an ad network as a webmaster is laziness and immoral.
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.
"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."
So for all their sins, which include abuses such as embedding malware, unlawful tracking and spying as well as browse hijacking, plus the sheer annoyance of embedded video and flashing content -- the users who have opted out by installing Ad Blockers are the immoral ones. Then again -- rapists often blame their victims.
Ad blockers would not have been necessary if we didn't have ad networks distributing malware.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The war began in earnest when ads became intrusive and disruptive.
I appreciate that someone has to pay for all of the sites that I visit for free. Some are payed entirely out of pocket, a labor of love by the host. And some are fueled by ad revenue. But those that utilize pop-ups, pop-unders, full screen ads, ads that autoplay voice and sound, malicious ads with fake security warnings and fake buttons... I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about denying ad revenue to those sites.
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.
He has a point. Ads are used to support many free services such as hobbyist forums which would otherwise be unable to run.
That being said, none of us here would be affected by banning of ad-blockers since we all know basic CSS and other ad-blocking techniques. We don't need it, and we can all benefit from others' lack of it.
In addition I want the concept of ad revenue generated content to die.
Slashdot is advertising-supported, and I can see that you aren't posting from a subscriber account. Would you prefer that Slashdot operated like Something Awful, requiring payment up front to see anything past the front page? If you read an article on 20 different web sites, good luck paying for 20 different $5 per month subscriptions.
For many years, I didn't block ads, viewing them as a necessary part of all the free content on the internet. But starting with pages of animated ads that really slowed down browsers of old, and progressing to ads that play audio by default, ads that play video (with audio!) on even a momentary mouseover, etc.,, not to mention ads containing or linking to malicious content, I have no choice but to block them.
Doesn't work. Most ads these days use HTML 5 (thanks Apple). And since browsers always have vulnerabilities (none has ever survived Pwn2own) you're left with blocking ads entirely if you want to remain safe.
I'm even willing to directly kick a few dollars to my favorite small-time interest-specific sites I read.
If anti-ad sentiment grows, you'll end up having to create an account and "directly kick a few dollars" for a month's subscription to read the full text of even one article whose abstract you found through a search engine. Look at newspapers' trends toward making more money from the paywall than they had from advertisers, look at major scholarly journal publishers that continue to resist open access, and look at musicians pulling their recordings off Spotify in favor of subscription-only services like Tidal.
While I find his preaching about the moral rightness of what he does, and our duty to endure whatever shit he wishes to shove in our faces to be deeply obnoxious; it would not entirely surprise me if this little experiment by the carriers ends up going...badly.
Ad-blocking at the client end('client end' includes routers, filtering appliances, etc. under user control, if the applicable network is large or geeky enough) is simply the right of the individual to run the software of their choice on their hardware, to best serve their interests, in action. Running a public HTTP server doesn't give you some special right to dictate how the output is formatted for display.
Ad-blocking at the carrier level, though, gets risky fast. Whenever an ISP starts deviating from 'dumb pipe' operation, you have to start worrying about whose interests are going to win out, and how dramatically. Especially risky if (as is the case with quite a few cellular companies and ISPs) they also have a side interest in advertising, consumer analytics, a media arm, or other properties that could benefit from a little traffic meddling. We've already seen some of the more obscure WISPs provide 'ad blocking', then inject their own ads over the originals, worst of both worlds.
Ad blocking is well and good(and, frankly, until the advertisers can clean up the ghastly security situation, they have no justification for whining. Ads are easily the most dangerous part of most parts of the web you'd admit to visiting in polite company); but anything that gives ISPs more control over traffic is to be watched with considerable concern. You don't think that a plan to stick it to google is going to stop at blocking google's ads, do you? Not when they could use their privileged position on the wire to achieve the same tracking and advertising that google actually has to offer attractive services to achieve...
You're assuming the browser doesn't have vulnerabilities as well. Bad assumption.
I'll be honest.... I won't shed a tear if a good 50 or 60% of the existing web sites die off, due to lack of revenue generation.
Maybe then we'll get back to something more sane? Look, I get that a lot of special interest blog sites would die if they didn't receive ad revenue. I used to write for one of them myself. (And guess what? It died, because they couldn't generate enough page hits to impress enough advertisers to spend a lot of money on it.)
But ultimately, it's survival of the fittest like anything else. I think it would be in the best interest of a lot of businesses to host and pay for sites related in some way to products or services they sell, so that would theoretically keep quite a few of them afloat. (A few of the car related forums I'm on work like that.... They're partially funded by contributions by area car dealerships that want to sponsor them, and they charge annual fees for 3rd. parties to host a message base on the forum where they can advertise whatever they like with new message posts.) This model keeps out the spam/malware and ensures target marketing by default. The users LIKE the sponsors and their marketing because it typically includes discount coupon codes on various products of interest, and ensures good
customer service when a forum "regular" also happens to be the owner of the company you bought your items from!
In other cases, people should just learn to accept that hosting a web site is going to cost them something. It really shouldn't cost much, in most cases. If you're not streaming out a bunch of video content or hosting huge downloads, your blog site just isn't likely to generate massive amounts of bandwidth usage (what most hosting services really bill for, because storage space itself is dirt cheap). Every hobby I ever had cost me some money.... Deciding to run a special interest blog or message forum should be no different.
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?
Because you've set the the Java applet and Flash Player plug-ins to "click to play" mode.
As if JavaScript was inherently safe. Browsers are adding more and more "web" APIs and better optimizations, the attack surface is growing. If you want "secure" then JavaScript has to join the others in "click to play" mode. Bonus: the most annoying adds are also silenced.
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?
So the advertisers (or their mouthpieces) are calling the people that would block ads sociopathic? That's rich.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
I'm either going to [...] make note of the advertiser and NEVER patronize them simply because they forced me to sit thru an ad I had no interest in seeing.
Good luck doing this when the ad is a public service announcement brought to you by your local electric monopoly. Care to join the Amish?
Martin Bryant, the Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web clearly needs to find himself a less public position that does not entail dealing with reality and actual people. What kind of moron goes out calling people they don't know snobs. And pertains to know that everything is fine because it works for him... there is a fantastic TED talk about that. If it is broken for me it is broken for me mister, period!!! I utterly resent your rant sir and all the deapicable thoughts it represents about other people that you do not know and cearly will never know as you have alienated them not just towards you but also towards the publication that you are dragging through the mud. I truly feel sorry for the so called editor in chief it must be hard for him that people don't feel the editors intrusive ads need to splatter on screen and suck away their bandwidth and CPU power if I could I would hand him a napkin to wipe away his tears and then tell him to get a grip... that guy has no shame whatsoever! I truly hope the publication gives him a big boot in his proverbial arse and tells him to go packing for such a display of disrespect is one you as a publisher cannot afford to leave unchallenged. Dear Martin Bryant, Editor-in-Chief of The Next Web go cry somwhere else you are hurting our ears with your high pitched wimpering!
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
I feel like the overarching sentiment isn't hostile towards ads in general, but towards disruptive ad tech. Pop unders, pop ups, ads that cover the entire screen, ads that auto play videos or sounds. These ads make the 'internet experience' miserable. Ad blockers were created in response to those nuisances. This is an arms race started by advertisers. Yes, ads help keep sites running, but the internet is not just for ad distribution. When an ad seizes control of my browsing experience, or delivers malware (because the ad mechanism has facilitated exploitation), it has ceased to be 'the thing that pays for content' and become the central feature of the browsing experience. Website owners are welcome to run their websites like that, but I am also welcome to determine what data is welcome on my machine. Since we peasant consumers have no way of knowing, beforehand, what the ad delivery mechanism is going to be, the emergence and embrace of ad blockers is to be expected. These days, I will stop browsing a site immediately if the ads become annoying. I would not have clinked on the link in the first place if I knew ahead of time that I would be interrupted by a full-page antacid advert.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Jon Stewart once signed off the Daily Show with "If you used a DVR to skip our ads, you're a thief" or some such - it was a sharp way to highlight the foolishness of these guys. We skipped ads when it was only broadcast TV all the time by stepping out to make a sandwich.
The only thing we're doing is voting with our feet that content providers should find another way to fund their work. It's no more immoral than renting direct-to-video movies were immoral compared to watching broadcast TV.
So again, if we were to get rid of ads, what would we replace them with?
Frankly, I don't give a shit. I'll continue to block the ads on my browser, and the content hosting company can figure out how to get their money.
Thank you for your concern, we all had a good laugh. But still I feel you are entitled to a response. And that's all you're entitled to. A response. You're not entitled to our bandwidth, you're not entitled to us reading your spam, you're not entitled to steal our time and most of all, you're not entitled to infecting our computers with malware 'cause you can't be assed to check whether your customers are crooks.
And this is why we use ad blockers.
Advertising is something we have come to accept as the price to pay for what we want to have. We have accepted ads as part of our TV viewing experience. And you may trust us when we tell you that we're not too fond of it. It's something we accepted as a price to pay. Not as an "additional experience" or as "valuable information". It's something we put up with to get what we want. nothing more. Essentially, we see you and your product as the necessary evil we have to accept to get what we want.
Just so you know where we are standing, and where you are.
We're not your partners. I think I don't tell you anything new, since we're essentially your product. You sell us, to your customers. You sell our views, our page impressions, our viewing habits, our "eyes" so to speak.
And products are rarely fully on the side of the entity selling them.
We have come to terms with you and your customers. And we have accepted it, as stated above. And we were also willing to do the same with this new medium here. We do understand that someone has to pay money, and if we want to pay with our time, someone else has to do the money part. We do understand that. And we do actually accept that.
What we do NOT accept is when you do not check whether your customers are crooks, we have to defend ourselves against their attacks. And that means that we have to disallow you to show us ads. Out of self defense.
What we do NOT accept is when you try to get obnoxious. When you slap ads over ads over ads before, while and after we have had any chance to see a tiny bit of what we actually want to see, we will defend ourselves. We allow you to use our eyes on our terms. Overstep your boundaries and be prepared to be shown the door.
We do NOT accept hundreds of megabytes of traffic for obnoxious video/sound ads for a few lines of content that we want. If the price (ads) outweighs the product (content), we will not pay that price.
Bottom line, and tl;dr version (we know, your time is valuable, you only deem ours expendable): You're entitled to nothing. You will get what we let you have. Be thankful and you shall thrive. Try to force more out of us than your due and you shall perish.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> You're assuming the browser doesn't have vulnerabilities
> as well
I use lynx, you insensitive clod!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You were saying?
I'm trying to think of how to make advertising work, because I really like all of the free stuff, and I know eventually those media creators need to somehow get paid.
Pages
BAD: Animated, big, or pop-up ads
OK: Text ads, like on the side of Google Search Results. Maybe little bitty, icon-like logos of brands along the side or bottom (a few). Also, somehow the print advertising in paper newspapers was never that annoying. It was even interesting. It's worth studying why and implementing whatever the computer-screen equivalent is.
Video
BAD: 30-second commercials before my 2-minute Youtube video begins
OK: 5-second commercial at the end of the Youtube video
Games
BAD: Full-screen ads between levels, or partial-screen ads during levels.
OK: Little ads at the bottom of the Game Over screen.
Businesses spend millions of dollars to hire a celebrity endorsement, talented graphic designers and filmmakers, and others, to cater to touchy-feely emotional associations. They often focus on just getting people to think the brand is cool or trustworthy in a nebulous way, instead of simply outlining the cold, hard facts about their product. I'm not saying I endorse this way of advertising. I'm saying that the elephant in the room is that they are sabotaging it all by their rude interruptions. What kind of emotional aftertaste will I have for a brand in this scenario: Ah, funny cat video. Click. Hi, I'd like to sell you insurance! Meh, you ruined the moment.
Businessmen might think the limits I've outlined above will make their ads too subtle. But if you cross that threshold of subtlety, you ruin everything. Besides, people are a lot more detail-oriented than you think. In school I remember that Guess jeans were all the rage. The difference between Guess jeans and all of the others was a one-inch triangular patch sewn on the back. I'm even talking teenagers here. They may sometimes seem incapable of remembering historical dates, but man can they spot the difference between the Polo logo and a knock-off. That's why I think little logos will be noticed. They may even be more compelling because they are not chasing you. They're standing back, like they don't really need you, totally cool.
For those that are interested, be a little enticing. For those that aren't, don't be annoying. Because I don't think the tactic is working to hit everyone over the head in the hopes that they'll fall into some kind of stupor and buy.