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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.