Slashdot Mirror
Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industry?
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Rosenwald writes at the Columbia Journalism Review that global online ad revenue continues to rise, reaching nearly $180 billion last year. But analysts say the rise of ad blocking threatens the entire industry—the free sites that rely exclusively on ads, as well as the paywalled outlets that rely on ads to compensate for the vast majority of internet users who refuse to pay for news. A new report from Adobe and one of several startups helping publishers fight ad blocking shows that 198 million people globally are now blocking ads, up 41 percent from 2014. In the US, ad blocking grew 48 percent from last year, to 45 million users. "Taken together, ad blockers are hitting publishers in their digital guts," writes Rosenwald. "Adobe says that $21.8 billion in global ad revenue will be blocked this year."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
The ad industry is killing the ad industry. When I reinstall my OS and start a browser before installing an ad blocker the web looks and sounds like complete shit.
auto start video ads and popup ads that popup about on web pages 30 seconds after you start reading an article are my 2 least favorite ad types.
Fuck em
Last time I used a VM without ad-blocking, it seemed almost every page I visited had ads that started talking or playing music. About ten minutes into browsing on a popular social network site, the VM got nailed by scareware, apparently through a hole in a browser add-on.
The real life example is people offering you newspapers for free if you open the door and listen to a sales pitch... but then some newspaper companies started having a percentage of their salesperson hold the people at gunpoint and do a home invasion, so the smarter people just don't open the door.
"When in the course of human events...." ads become too onerous, rebellions break out. The "consumers" of news (as if news can be "used up" somehow) are rebelling against too many and too invasive ads.
It was easier to find the information I wanted on the internet before the media companies filled all google's top spots with commercial products instead of the student/hobbyist stuff that was there before.
I could live with ads if they were just annoying, but ad blocking is just commonsense self-defense. Browsing just one site exposes you ads from potentially hundreds of sources, each of which potentially carries as much or more risk of attack as the site you're browsing! It just doesn't make sense to voluntarily expose yourself to that magnitude of increased risk.
Seems like a week doesn't go by without seeing a zero-day advisory along the lines of "observed in the wild being served from XYZ ad network." A lot of attackers no longer bother compromising servers, etc when they can just spend a few $ to almost instantly serve up the targets.
First order of business for advertising networks: fix the security, bandwidth and response times issues. Until then, I won't feel any guilt whatsoever about protecting myself from you.
Yup, the internet was paid for by paying for the internet itself; subscriptions to ISPs, building out infrastructure, etc. Today coporations want you to pay for the internet AND pay for the crappy content too, and they want to have you pay in order to receive the ads since they're not reimbursing you for all those unnecessary downloads. Even worse on a mobile phone as you can incur big penalties if you use more data than your plan allows, so the ads slow the network and drain your wallet.
At which point someone on slashdot pops in and says "you're all a bunch of worthless freeloaders, if you want to look at my glorious blog about hamster farming then you have to look at these ads about Buicks so that I can buy a better microphone for my hamster podcast."
Fucking Ads pop up over my content and, on my tablet, display a close button just off screen, so I can go no further.
It will kill the internet as we know it.
Somewhat of an overstatement, but I suppose it will bring about changes.
Only those entities with money will be able to post any content.
Dead wrong. I pay $120 a year for my site hosting and $10 a year for the domain. You can do it for free actually, I just like having big mysql databases and cron jobs.
Smaller sites like /. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
No, sites will move toward self-hosted ads and rely less on ad networks. It will probably give rise to a new industry of ad brokering for smaller sites unable to find their own advertisers, replacing the current ad+malware delivery networks.
In a recent story, a university installed ad blocking at their edge router. They saw their total Internet usage drop by 30%. Since, they were probably also doing non-web traffic (e.g. software updates, dropbox, etc.), this means that the actual percentage of website content that is ads is probably higher.
Are companies who inject ads going to compensate the recipient for the bandwidth usage? Will such usage push the subscriber over their datacap?
I installed ad blocking early, because, back then, the flash video ad was more likely to hang the flash player.
And, I used to have a datacap [Note: I'm in California, and I switched to sonic.net, one of the few ISPs that have no datacap], but now the load time with the ads would still be too great.
And, I'm not against ads in general, but, the privilege [of sending me an ad] has been abused. Obnoxiousness, malware vector, delaying page load until the ad is dynamically selected in a back haul bidding network. The list just keeps going.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
I DO mind ads. Noifs and buts. I understand why they exist, yet I do not want to see them. A bit like syphilis. So I try to avoid them as much as possible with any means possible.
I did not ask for them. I do not like them. I do not want them.
I do not want the video ads. I do not want the GIF ads. I do not want the static ads. I do not want the text ads. And as always here a quote from Banksy who says it way much better than I can:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youâ(TM)re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itâ(TM)s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donâ(TM)t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donâ(TM)t even start asking for theirs.
â" Banksy
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I dislike the intrusive ads, but someone has to pay for good, insightful comment and reporting. I am willing to pay about $365 p.a. for unencumbered access to newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. I am not willing to pay $10 p.m. for every single one of these; especially to only read any article very occasionally or only once (I can't afford multiple thousand $s per year!).
Should the biggies (Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Nature, The Economist, etc.) get together and set up such a system, I'm sure most of the rest would follow.
But: would anyone else pay?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
What's even worse is ad content in the main body of the document that spends about five to ten seconds after a page load changing its size, so that the text of the document is bouncing all over the place as AJAX-loaded images size themselves to whatever is viewed as the correct size. If you don't basically walk away for about thirty seconds, you'll end up trying to click on a link, click on the wrong link and end up in some other page than you wanted.
The sheer incompetence of web design, even on major sites like the Guardian's website, just amazes me. We literally have taken the latest web tools, and found a way to make the web experience even worse than it was during those purgatorial days of Internet Explorer 6.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
One of my biggest peeves these days is the imposition of artificial pagination upon the reader as though the web were some nasty old newspaper or an elementary-school slideshow... just to artificially jack up the fucking ad impressions that much more. Combine that with the stupid javascript and HTML5 tricks that are en vogue these days and many sites are all but unusable on mobile browsers.
I too actually never minded banner ads at the top or bottom of the page. I do understand that content has to be paid for. Hell, I don't even mind targeted advertising, so long as it's well-targetd, not insulting (Looking at you, Facebook, on this one for continuing to suggest that I should like things like bill gates, samsung, and walmart.), and not obnoxious... so basically... Google AdSense.
I even whitelist some sites I do want to support. But the first time I see shenanigans... flash, java, pop-ups, pop-unders, overlays, interstitials, sounds, auto-playing video, or the aforementioned stupid javascript or HTML5 tricks... I have zero qualms whatsoever about immediately going back to blocking everything.
Imagine all the people...
This. Very this.
One of the chess sites detects if the ads don't load, and sends nasty emails threatening to delete your account if you block ads. That is their right, just as blocking ads until they ban me is my right. That is just the give-and-take of Freedom.
I didn't wait to get banned, or unblock the ads, I just switched to a different site. The best chess site doesn't have ads and is membership only; none of the free-to-access ones are worth paying for, or worth crying over if they fail to make money off of a "free" service.
I spend lots of money at the stores I shop at, but they aren't ones that have large advertising budgets. And if blogs-for-profit all go bust... honestly the content quality will skyrocket. Way less noise, even if the signal appears smaller in the short term.