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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."
One can only hope so.
You know what? The internet was better/more informative/easier to use/more interesting/etc. etc. etc. before all these pay by ad sites started springing up. If they all go away, I don't see the problem.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
I installed ad blocker this year, and its for mainly one reason: video ads. Since these have become popular, it eats up my bandwidth and starts playing ridiculously loud sound even when I don't click on it. If anyone is too blame for the rise of ad blocking technology its advertisers.
Ad networks profligate malware, as a result an ad blocking isn't just to block an annoyance, its to protect myself from a drive by download of a flash powered/explioted malware that takes over my system and ransoms it back to me. Ad blockers are the new anti-virus.
You'll have to get your blood from somebody else now.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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
don't show all the pages with the articles stuck to your shops window.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Being a slashdotter in good standing, I have the option to turn off ads here, but I don't, because I find Slashdot's ads harmless and unobtrusive. But lordy, some sites I go to they're insane, causing the page to constantly reload, while my CPU and hard drive churn away full-bore. How can they expect people won't want to block ads like that? Seems like it's grown worse in the last few months, these stupid advertisers are driving me to block their ads.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Betteridge says "No", but we can always hope that this one will be the exception that proves the rule. :)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
When ads stop playing sound, hijacking the page, redirecting me to app stores, acting as hovertraps ("Oh! You briefly moused over our ad! Let's take up the whole screen and play loud sounds!"), eating all my computer's resources, and distributing malware - then, and only then, I'll look into not using adblockers.
Web-ad-serving companies complaining about ad blockers are like grade-school bullies, crying to the teacher about "So-and-so punched me back!" They keep escalating their 'services', and are acting surprised that people aren't just taking it.
Current blockers are only partially domain based, though that's the larger part. AdBlock & friends can also block based on HTML DOM ID's, classes, paths, etc.
Even if the ads are served by proxy through the origin site's domain, they're going to be in a defined place in the layout. AdBlock can block things like:
div[id='ad']
div/span[class='whatever']/p/img
I haven't found an ad yet that isn't susceptible to being blocked via DOM attributes.
Next step would probably be to dynamically perturb the classes & ID's returned in the page, but then the blockers parse the returned HTML, deobfuscating it in such a way as to give you consistent tokenized identifiers which are then blocked.
Arms race yes, but already predictable domains aren't a requirement for effective blocking.
It's extremely clear that most everybody hates ads with a passion - else why would so many people install ad blockers eh?
So even if ad blockers were to disappear tomorrow, what makes advertisers feel that forcing ads down the throat of people who hate them increase sales for their customers?
To me, it seems that either people hate ads, block them and won't buy the shit being advertised, or people hate ads, can't block them and won't buy the shit being advertised regardless.
Worse, forcing people to see ads they don't want to see may very well antagonize them. Me, when I see an ad that gets through my ad blockers, I remember the product as something I'll make extra sure I'll never, ever buy.
So what's the business model here? I can't believe enough people actually like ads to make online advertising a viable business proposition...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I made the mistake of opening a link to a games website in IE not long ago and ended up having to kill it because it brought the browser to its knees. I opened it in Chrome with Disconnect and click to play Flash and it loaded pretty much instantly. You made your bed and then shit in it as well. Don't complain about having to lie in it now.
Please find a business model that does not involve annoying and exploiting the people who consume your media.
Now, it's not my job to tell you what your business model should be. Sell merchandise, provide paid services, ask for donations, or whatever else you can think of.
But if the basis of your business model is providing content for free to me while accepting money from people who solely want to annoy me or buy information about me, then I'm not going to allow that and you deserve to go out of business.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Speaking for myself: I don't want ads, I want the content I asked for. Stick your ads up your arse.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
No, but it is a lovely thought...
That is all.
Yeah have you seen yahoo news lately? its exactly like that.
However more people comment on yahoo news than anywhere else i've found.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
You're making one fundamental logical mistake.
The advertising industry exists to sell ads. It does not exist to sell the things they're advertising.
They don't care whether it works. They care that people pay them to push ads.
Ads are way more evil. Ads are irresponsible because they're not checked against viruses. Want a virus? Don't run an ad blocker.
I think someday we'll look back today like we do to 1998 webpages. We'll go,"They really tried to slap you with an ad before you read some goon's pointless article that was hyped?" I don't think ads should or will go away, but I think they should be more responsible. Commit to who you want to advertise with, don't just run an adnetwork. Do you really want to put nefarious ads on things kids might be reading? Well you might be doing that if you run a generic adnetwork. Sadly I don't think people will become more responsible with advertisements. I see them becoming more obnoxious because they're greedy for the monies.
Now this last thing is a pet random idea: Actually I think if you wanted to really get a huge ad based network, you should build a pyramid scheme where no one loses anything. Use the gameshow model so they're playing a game of any level of skill, but they share ad revenue with you. At the end of the month with a raffle where they get points by doing well in the game + 50% additional tickets from everyone they referred and 25% tickets from people they referred etc... People would get a portion of the ad revenue by playing the game. And they'd get additional tickets by just watching ads. Get people wanting to watch the ads for their own profit, and you have a gold mine. If I'm not getting anything for watching your ad, its just wasting my time at best. At worst, my computer is getting crypto locked with ransom ware.
I run adblock. And yes, I'd download a car if I could.
God spoke to me
Unlike giant, rusty conglomerates (such as members of the RIAA), small studios that rely on advertising will adapt--they'll have to, or they'll die. Many already have, using services like Kickstarter and Patreon to run campaigns for funding. Digital content sites have long had stores to purchase physical goods, using profit from that as (partial) funding.
Companies that offer subscriptions in addition to ad-supported revenue will likely lock down more of their content behind the subscription, offering scraps and glimpses to entice people to subscribe. I would also expect existing subscriptions to spread into tiers, so people can use cheaper subscriptions to get access, albeit at lower quality or content than the full subscription.
More directly to the web in general, I expect many competitors to pop up in "website funding". They could work like Patreon does, where you subscribe to a site for a small amount (likely $1 or less a month.) It could bring about the oft-spoken "micropayments", where a site using the service would charge the viewer a pittance per page or per day, depending on costs. (Users would ideally have full control on whitelisting/blacklisting.)
What will be killed off are the tons of blogs/sites that exist only to re-serve someone else's content (usually without attribution). It will be extremely refreshing, I think. There will be some unfortunate causalities during the transition, but in the end the web will be far better for it.
During all of this, giant publishers will just continue to stick their head in the sand and sue people, clutching to the "old ways" that they understood.
Here in Germany the marketers are already suing to ban adblockers.
But it doesn't seem like they'll succeed.
The only english article i could find on this subject is here ( it sadly isn't up to date ):
http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/adblocking-goes-to-court/
displaying static, unobtrusive, low bandwidth unanimated ads that do not track us, are served from the same domain as the web page it's displayed on, are presented below the fold, are not misleading, link to unobfuscated urls vetted by trusted third-parties to be safe, and are constantly monitored malicious code, content or redirection.. maybe, just maybe, people will start putting up with online ads again... until then... enjoy my adblock and noscript with a half-dozen years of tuning to their blocklists and whitelists.
"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.
A plain ad, with a link to someone's site? That's fine. I'll even read them as I scroll down the page, most times. If it's something I'm interested in, I'll even do a quick search for the product and look at the actual seller's page.
A really, REALLY annoying ad, with autoplay video and sound, popping up and getting in the way of the actual content, and often becoming home to all sorts of security issues like viruses or rogue redirects to trash pages? That's not. That's why I use adblocking software.
Here's a thought, advertisers:
Try spending as much time on creative and entertaining ads as you do in trying to come up with new and more obnoxious pop-ups. That actually works.
Good riddance. The Internet is shit because of ad-sponsored content and SEO.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
It is an arms race between ad networks and ad blockers. I don't think anyone would fault a site for trying to monetize its content (stuff consts money). Unfortunately, too many sites got lazy and handed over the handling of advertisements to these larger conglomerated ad networks. The ad networks got lazy about who they let advertise/what tech they allowed to be used in advertisements, and now internet ads are yet another vector for the spread of malware.
This is not ok.
I'm willing to chalk up my annoyance with loud flashing pseudo-videos to personal preference, but it seems like everyone else who consumes internet content is also irritated by these things.
Until the ad networks can guarantee (which they can't, now) that they won't deposit malware on my parents' computers, I will evangelize the use of adblockers until I die. Another option, as others have already mentioned, is to bring control of ad content back to the sites' actual owners.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
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.
I have no problem with ad on the margins of the page. Slashdot has three up right now and they don't block my view of the content, they aren't playing music or videos (chewing up my bandwidth), and nothing opened a popup. Those are Ads in the tradition of a news paper.
The Fucking Ads are the opposite. They block the content, force you to find that little X in some corner...if they didn't put a fake one in that's just a link to another page. Fucking Ads seem to be loaded first. So if some Ad service has shit slow servers, it takes forever for a simple Text article to appear. Fucking Ads also hijack random clicks. Ever click on a page to be sure the scroll is focused on the page and not something else so you can use the scroll wheel...and here comes a popup.
Fucking Ads are also dangerous. To get rid of them you have to interact with them. Who knows what the fuck will happen when you click that close button?
So if they just stick to what they've been doing for the last 200 years, we're fine.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Worst part? They'll never realize they killed themselves.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Use an ad blocking and tracking hosts file instead of a plugin. A properly set up hosts file can also prevent malware.
This reads like the cliffhanger at the end of the original TV Batman. "Will Evil Mediacorp be devoured by the ungrateful, greedy, gluttonous masses bent on destroying the world?" "Tune in next week to find out" "And now a word from our sponsors" The truth is they overstepped their bounds by making the ads overt and invasive and that created a backlash. On TV the media is controlled but web sites the user can control what parts he wants and what he doesn't.If you ease up on the IN-YOUR-FACE popup, flash, loud noises ads the majority of people will never even consider an ad blocker because those unobtrusive little banners aren't bothering me at all. But media companies never take the advice and are now paying for their arrogance.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It will kill the internet as we know it. Only those entities with money will be able to post any content. Smaller sites like /. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
"Science is the power of man"
I don't think ad blockers exist because people don't want ads or "refuse to pay for news." Ad blockers exist because ads have become so ridiculously obnoxious and disruptive with animations or even sound that they make the web pages they're on pretty close to unusable. This is on top of the occasional but still-to-frequent usage of ad networks as malware distribution platforms. If the ad networks set some reasonable standards and actually enforced them, then ad blockers wouldn't be as much of an issue. As it is right now, using an ad block is a security requirement, not an option. From an aesthetic and usability standpoint it's just highly desirable.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Then they started getting invasive. Autoplaying with noise, making pages download super-slow, popping over content I'm reading, containing malware, being 4x louder than the show I'm watching, being the same ad 15 times in one show instead of a good variety. I like seeing the ads out there, getting updates on new products and services, knowing they exist, and often they are amusing. But when I'm watching a sad, quiet scene about the death of an anorexic girl and the "I'M ON THE COOKIE AIR DIET" commercial pops up, for the 53rd time this episode, I'm not fucking doing it. Make ads good or we will block them and you will fail. It is truly that simple. And the rest of us, good content producers will move to subscription services, patreon, other similar methods of providing content. I use adblock because I feel I have no choice, and I feel bad about costing legitimate pages money from using it, I've even disabled it on a few pages I really enjoy that do advertising not-horribly.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Which means that people will instead stop visiting the primary content altogether. Treat your visitors as scum and they'll treat you as scum.
I have to think it's some perverse offshoot of the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" theory. You say you mentally catalog all the bad ads, but the ire certainly fades after some time. In a few months, maybe you have a choice to make between Widget Company and Acme Corp, and even though you can no longer remember that you had been angry with Acme, you recognize the name, so you give them a shot.
It relies on invalid assumptions. People that block ads are not going to buy things from the blocked ads, ever, even if they were displayed. The industry is lying to its customers, and, as is traditional, fraud of this nature allows its perpetrators to make far more money than any type of honest work. On the other hand, the ad-industry has over-done it to an extreme degree. The success of ad-blocking software shows how intrusive and disrespectful of the user's time and attention it has become. Of course, people fight back, and the ultimate outcome can only be the demise of this cancer of the Internet. On the plus-side, this does not threaten content creators, as there are other, valid ways to finance content-creation.
Like the copyright-industry, the ad-industry cannot die fast enough.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
But it's the same thing: at some point, companies that pay to push ads are bound to notice people get pissed off, their sales aren't increasing as much as they'd like after running advertising campaigns after campaigns, and pushing ads turns out to be counterproductive. Then they'll stop paying to push ads.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The more intrusive ads get (popups, sounds, unskippable video, high bandwidth use combined with capped connections etc - i especially hate ads with sound), the more likely people are to install ad blockers.
If ads were less intrusive, people would be less inclined to block them.
I installed an ad blocker specifically because of ads which contained sound, especially annoying when you have multiple tabs open and ads rotate so all of a sudden one of your 50 tabs starts making noise and you have to hunt around to shut it off.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I have seen this argument and always found it incredible. These people who wish to place pop-up ads have neither invented the internet, nor enabled its growth, nor provided useful or beneficial content; and yet they argue that they are the true owners of the Internet who should be able to tax us for its survival, and that to install ad-blocking filters is somehow 'piracy'. There are other, nobler organisations that use advertising in moderation (Google), and others that try to do without (Wikipedia) - I would not argue that one is right and the other wholly wrong. Both of them manage to live well within the bounds of what I feel is to the general good. But the click bait links, the promises that this 'weird trick' discovered by a mum discovered will free you from ageing or snoring or male pattern baldness, the stupid, stupid stuff that I wish would burn and die, all you are a cancer on the Internet, the beautiful child of all nerds of the world, and I hope the chemotherapy of filtering may earn us a remission, if not a cure. I have not heard from Nigerian princes in a while. No-one has tried to sell me Viagra in weeks. We may win this one too, if we stay firm.
Whew. Sorry about that. But it came from the heart...
I think some sites make their articles available without charge with ads because paywalled articles are less likely to get cited in other publications.
don't think for one single fucking second that your slimy piece of shit malware infested crappy ad server or the network it resides on has any right to pass so much as a single bit past my firewall.
Don't like it? Choke on a dick and die.
BTW: I block ad's on my phone too, so don't think mobile devices will save you either.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Yeah, look at YouTube's auto-play feature. Used to be that advertisers could count on the the customer actually watching the video (and associated ad) they just clicked for, but with auto play they can get paid for ads even if nobody's watching! Google wins, but only until advertisers realize that their ads "mysteriously" don't work like they used to.
But it's the same thing: at some point, companies that pay to push ads are bound to notice people get pissed off, their sales aren't increasing as much as they'd like after running advertising campaigns after campaigns, and pushing ads turns out to be counterproductive. Then they'll stop paying to push ads.
If that was true, companies would have stopped buying ads on cable TV decades ago.
Adblock Plus is a great example of this. It blocks the flashing, buzzing, throw-themselves-in-your-face, totally obnoxious ads. But for advertisers who are willing to stick to less offensive things, they can still get through. So no, it won't kill the digital media industry. But I hope it will force them to stop torturing the internet and making their products so unpleasant to use!
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
The Web was a fine place before there were advertisements on the Web.
If you ever wanted to put a site up on the Web, then you always knew that visitors to your site could read it through a browser capable of parsing its content and displaying it however the visitor wanted to view it. The Web has been like this since the very beginning--it was designed that way.
Crying over it is like crying over gravity. This is the reality we live in. Deal with it.
Ad-supported "content" is never as good as the information disseminated by ordinary folks who are posting on the Web for personal and non-monetary edification. Anything that is worth being said without ad revenue attached is just more worth listening to. If you need the ad revenue to make your posts worth it, perhaps you are posting for the wrong reason.
Disclaimer: I use Adblock Plus and I have for nearly a decade now.
VCR will kill commercial TV broadcasting
VCR/DVD rentals will kill Hollywood
Napster/bit torrent will kill the music industry
etc...
Why are there so many monetized VEVO channels in the top 25 YouTube channels? Would they exist if you couldn't monetize YouTube videos?
If copyright owners couldn't monetize YouTube videos, then even more of them would set their Content ID policies to "block" and deploy overzealous takedown bots.
Where you do a search for "video capture cards" and stores that just happen to be local to you mysteriously show up in the first 5 results
You shared it by choosing to connect with your IP address rather than a VPN elsewhere. And because you shared it, the search engine decided to present links to stores near you rather than hundreds of miles or km away because nearby stores are more relevant to most people.
Commit to who you want to advertise with, don't just run an adnetwork.
In theory, I agree. In practice, how should a newly established web site go about finding advertisers? It's their problem to solve, so what should they do to go about solving it?
Personally, I don't use ABP/uBlock. I actually make an effort to allow ads through. However, I have rules:
1.) Thou shalt not track me. Ghostery does a sad amount of blocking from its blacklists, and I have the ad-based one disabled...
2.) Thou shalt not obfuscate what I came to see. BehindTheOverlay is invaluable; it allows me to nix whatever overlays happen to be blocking my view of the content.
3.) Thou shalt not autoplay audio. FlashBlock nixes most ads that play sound, unwarranted.
I feel that I have very reasonable expectations from advertisers. They can advertise. They can use images if they want. I don't fault the website owners from having to make a buck, and advertising firms are, in the abstract, a middleman that makes sense. They cross a line, that's when I lose respect.
In the late 1990's, pop-up ads were the intrusive, annoying ads of their day. Pop-up blockers became so widely circulated, that all of the browsers have one built in. Are we here again?
I listen to music while I am browsing. Any ad executive that thinks he/she/it has the right to start their ad and automatically start playing audio, interfering with something else I am listening to, is the equivalent of home invasion. That is the fastest way to get me to block you and I will have no sympathy whatsoever.
If you think deeply enough, you will have no single direction for your outrage.
In coming up with these numbers for lost revenue, they're assuming that every internet user click on a certain number of ads per day/month/year/whatever and so by ad-blocking, they're missing that click revenue. (Similarly, the entertainment industry assumes that if you download a movie, they've lost revenue because you watched a pirated copy of their movie instead of going to a cinema and paying to see it.)
I block ads because they are annoying, intrusive and so rarely relevant to anything I am interested in. I've probably clicked on three ads my whole life, two were by accident.
And just because I downloaded Pixels, it does NOT mean that I would've paid someone my hard earned cash for Adam Sandler to violate every one of my senses. I prefer he does that for free, in the comfort of my own home.
Nothing wrong with the CIS interface. Type in "go wherever", and you can read what you want. Similar with newsgroups pre-Canter/Siegel where trolls would feel the wrath of their local BOFH quite quickly.
I just think it will get worse. Windows 10, with its privacy settings that allow all your data to be slurped up, and the Edge browser which doesn't allow for extensions like AdBlock, but is happy with add-ons like Flash. DRM extensions are already in all major browsing platforms, so I wouldn't be surprised to see all content DRM-protected, just to protect the ads, similar to the all-Flash web pages back in the early 2000s to bypass hosts files and such, but were killed by devices that didn't play well with Adobe's add-ons. I also wouldn't be surprised to see more websites refuse to work on mobile sites unless via their app.
Hey Genius, the google home page doesn't have adds and adblockers don't block google's text search adds.
So many industries are this way. They assume that there is a captive audience with only a few malcontents, but over time it starts slipping away and they don't know how to cope. Like television, they decide to save money by having crappier unscripted content or hire only interns as script writers, then are baffled that people are cutting the cord.
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
Now, Apple is crowing about their new ad blocking features in the next release of iOS, but they will not be blocking iAds. This great new feature merely blocks ads for companies that have not paid Apple to advertise. Once you pay Apple for the privilege, Apple will guarantee that the user will not be able to block the ad. Since this whole advertising scheme is built into the OS and not Safari, it will be very difficult to defeat. I am growing to regret my purchase of an iPhone 6.
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
If they hadn't created an environment where 50 ads per page (with 50 trackers) was commonplace, in your face popups and interstitials, being a malware vector, and just generally abusing their own users, perhaps it wouldn't have to come to this. They have only themselves to blame.
don't raise up what you can't put down CF!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ads are getting more and more intrusive and that's likely the driving force behind people installing blockers.
The other reason for blocking advertisers that no one is talking about is for privacy. Ads are not just in your face, they're tracking you across multiple web pages and allowing others to build profiles of you and your families. The privacy features of many ad block programs along with stand alone extensions are a necessity in today's hyper-targeted world. Unfortunately, with the growing use of browser fingerprinting, even that's not enough anymore.
Currently, ads:
1) Interrupt my flow of thought.
2) Use video, which eats my limited bandwidth (Some of us use hotspots with data limits, comprende?)
3) Unexpectedly start creating sounds, interrupting my wife, the cat, myself and the children.
4) And the very worse thing, the godamm ads start JUMPING MY PAGE AROUND so the thing I was trying to click is no longer there by the time my mouse/finger manage to click the screen and I've suddenly opened the ad for hot singles in my area (The wife just loves that one).
So, clue train manifesto for online advertisers:
1) DO! NOT! INTERRUPT! ME! If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
2) Do not ever randomly resize or refresh my web page. It needs to load once AND STAY THERE. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
3) Do not include noise in your ads, if possible. If necessary, make sure I have to work to consciously turn it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
4) Do NOT use bandwidth sucking video unless I request it by consciously turning it on. If you can't do that, I'm happy to go elsewhere.
5) DO NOT ASK IF I WANT TO DOWNLOAD YOUR APP, RECEIVE YOUR NEWSLETTER, OR ALERTS BEFORE I'VE EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO SEE THE DAMN PAGE.
Seriously guys. Basic reasoning? How the hell would I know if I want anything to do with you ever again if I haven't even looked you over yet?
The more I see the results of web advertising, I wonder if they lobotomize the ad designers before, or after they are hired. Hire a UI specialist. Hire a psychologist. Most of all, pull your heads out of your own self absorbed asses and actually *talk* to a customer now and then.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
an unblockable ad delivery system. (I'm looking at you, New York Times, and I do pay you every month.)
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
The ad industry doesn't even care of advertising is effective or not. The people buying the ads are going to wake up and realize it's not worth the cost. Then the people trying to make a living with cheap ass youtube videos are going to have to update their resumes.
So much so that for me to be watching at all, the content darn well better be good. Alas, so often it isn't - so i don't watch a lot of television any more.
And now to the web. A very similar situation. If I have to wade through a few dozen or more tracking scripts, analytics and sounds, and videos, and whatever malware they feel they have to install on my computer, and steal my bandwidth, and make the pages take 5 times as long to load.
That page damn well better be worth it.
And 99 times out of a hundred, it is not even remotely worth it, as llikely as not its another advertisement.
So thte plain bald and irrefutable truth is adblockers are not killing the digital media industry. They are committing suicide. And will succeed at it.
But there is a new way, my friends. It will be difficult at first, but in the end, might just save them.
First off, responsible advertisers must band together. They need to form a Responsible Internet Transparency Advertising Limitations Inentive Nexus - or RITALIN - forgive the lame joke. Some sort of industry organization anyhow.
Then they need to voluntarily limit the asshattery that is pissing people off. Then they need a few big sites to sign on to the standards, and make a big deal out of it. That you know when you go ot their pages, you aren't getting served a steaming hot pile of webbish weaselry. I'd bet the situation will go a long way towaards resolving itself. It's a choice between innocuous advertisements that don't install mallware or track your movements - but are seen, and the ridiculous crap we are served now, which anyone who is sane will block - and never be seen.
Because when an adblocker and noscript and a hostfile has become the first line of defense for intelligent and safe web surfing, and necessary to protect yourself from people who want you to buy their products but feel they have to treat you like the enemy, well - that's just sad.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm never going to unblock ads. Ever. The web is not usable without a script blocker and an ad blocker. That's the simple fact of the matter.
If that "kicks you in the guts" then too fucking bad. Find a viable business model. But don't expect me to put up with your intrusive, bandwidth-abusing horseshit.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Newsweek uses scripts so it doesn't display if it detects AdBlock for example.
Their site loads fine for me. You're not letting sites run JavaScript without you whitelisting them first, are you? If so, why in the hell would you ever do that?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I use an element hider to fix that. It will always be an arms race.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
No, it will transform it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The problem is Yahoo jumped the shark a long time ago.
History of Google search page vs Yahoo Portal crap
http://praveenrajan.com/blog/u...
You can block Internet ads now? Why didn't anyone tell me about this sooner!? I'm installing this right now! Thanks!!
I am willing to play fair and tolerate some advertising, but it finally got too invasive and so I got adblock. I am fine with ads, but only so long as they don't disturb me using the web. No autoplay video/audio, no popups, no interstitial. When they start pulling that crap, well sorry but I'm going to have to opt out. If it kills a site off, too bad, maybe you shouldn't have been so annoying.
Advertisers are going to have to learn to keep it reasonable if they want me to stop using adblocking. As it stands now I block by default and only whitelist sites I know aren't bad about it.
What? you mean people still aren't using adblock + [or -] and/or uBlock and Firefox? Shocking! I haven't seen ads for years. Sure, the odd crass, idiotic Blogsite seduced plugin pop-up [because it's sooooo beyoooteeful] but by and large I am shocked that ads are still a problem. Still I guess it's like Land Lines, Cable TV and Alphabet - they just take a while to die after they roll over. Can't wait!
May the lies we live by make us strong, healthy, happy and wise - Kurt Vonnegut.
This is true, and using an ad blocker is no different than using the mute button when there's a TV ad that you find obnoxious or have gotten tired of listening to.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Decades ago, the ads on TV weren't nearly annoying. The ads themselves were far less obnoxious. There were also less of them. They also did not creep across the content either.
Modern TV advertising practices exist in an era where cord cutters seem to be finally impacting the bottom line of cable operators.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Let's devise an Online Advertising Code. The Code would forbid popups, autoplaying videos, slow ad servers, ads containing malware, ads that yank you to an app store, and videos with no sound controls. Ad blocker extensions would have an "Allow OAC compliant ads" checkbox. Problem solved.
The argument of ROI decrease is a sound one, eventually the promised throughput will vanish.
Having said that, I wonder if the TV ad argument could be taken to a study, where you're looking at age and income groups that still watch TV, and the targeting of ads played on TV. My money would be on the extremes: Young of lower to middle income (automatic babysitter), and approaching retirement and beyond of lower to middle income (low-energy past time reminiscent of their younger years).
There's a lot better targeting on the web via ads, but what the industry seems to be missing (either in rise of new companies or "revitilization" efforts of old ones) is the intrusiveness of ads compared to the target page is directly proportional to the malcontent of the receiver. In this way, the "new" "hip" way to play sounds and be the thing on the page that speaks to you, literally! is the ad that drives users to AdBlock Plus. Any of the other techniques mentioned here are also a problem. The trick is mental shock, and how to avoid it. but it seems that this factor is something ad producers are trying to increase, rather than decrease, and they're losing the battle of psychology.
Dear Advertisers, Figure out how to do ads in a trustworthy way (i.e. no privacy invasive behavior tracking and little or no risk of malware exposure) and I'll be happy to allow those ads. I'd prefer the ads to be static HTML hosted within the site I visit. I don't want my browser touching 15 domains that all run scripts every time I visit a page. As long as ads compromise my privacy and security I will consider advertising networks the enemy and treat them accordingly.
Bing will stay free.
Isn't Google just a loss-leader beta project from a company called Alphabet now, anyway?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
But, let's not get sidetracked, the real question is that people are voting with their browsers and pushing ads off the table as a revenue stream, I always questioned how this industry worked in the first place, do 100,000 ad impressions actually net business? (Well, other than for the person who claims business will come your way with 100k ad impressions)
It's 'complicated'. From what I've seen of the early studies, people who, for example, see only Coke ads but no Pepsi ads will tend to buy Coke instead of Pepsi.
As the relative expense increases, advertising matters less once you've at least put your name out enough that you're on the 'to be checked out' list.
For example, let's say I'm a restaurant. In the old days, once I'm in the yellow pages, a spot here and there to remind people that I exist is sufficient to keep new customers coming in to replace old ones, assuming that I'm not in a 'hot enough' location to do it all on local traffic. BTW, 'Local Traffic' is the reason why restaurants often have 'unique' appearances.
However, it's important to remember that people only have so much money, and value their time. But so doesn't Coke and Pepsi want that revenue. So they end up in a game of one-upmanship for our viewings. After a while, they lose track of how much sales they're gaining/losing due to their advertising. Still, they generally try to make their ads interesting.
The problem is, with internet ads they can actually see effectiveness rates, and had deluded themselves that response rates should be high, so when they get 1 response out of 1k impressions, they think the advertising is less effective than with television and such. When in reality it's probably the same to better.
Another problem is that the more advertising we're exposed to, the less effective it is. As a result people today, especially Americans, are incredibly resistent to the effects of ads. We're like type-2 diabetics when it comes to insulin. So the ad companies ratchet things up again.
I don't read AC A human right
I'm just going to put this right here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or for those who don't like to clicky:
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
I go with the generic brand name.
This is sort of what baffles me. The math doesn't seem to hold up. I'm just not worth that much money per view of an ad. I don't spend enough to justify it. The only reason it's working so far is that advertising is ridiculously cheap on the internet. It can be just a fraction of the total marketing costs, you can even put your marketing interns on the internet project. I think companies are either losing money on it or barely breaking even, but it's so small a cost that they either don't realize it or don't care.
Users didn't start blocking ads because of some unreasonable hatered towards good deals on stuff and services. Users started blocking ads because of bad ad practices. I don't want to search through 10 tabs looking for that one dickhead page that's playing audio half way down a mile long article. I don't want to search for an X and cross my fingers that I'm not getting hijacked, simply because my cursor ventured away from the content area of the website. I really really really don't want to take your survey about how well your website works 1½ seconds after loading the page. I don't want blinking banners telling me I've won some imaginary prize.
Bad ad practices have gotten so out of hand that I would claim it's down right a security risk for the average user not to run some sort of ad/flash blocker. My pensioned mother has installed trojans in the belief that she's actually getting a real security warning that her computer is infected, because of fraudulent ads served on regular websites. If the people that manage those ad networks don't give a damn what they're serving, I don't give a damn about what they want to sell me.
I unblock on a pr. page basis. I do believe the content creators I follow, on for example youtube, deserve some money for their efforts, so I sit through some of their video ads. Slashdot ads I've simply forgotten to unblock, because they're so unintrusive that I forget they're there (will unblock after submitting this). Random faceless media can however kiss my ass. If I don't trust them, if I can't trust them and if I don't have any emotional/personal connection to them, they don't deserve the income I can generate for them.
If it's in email then it's spam and most people agree it's spam. Spammers got such a bad reputation that even advertisers distance themselves from it. People hated them because it was lots of extra work to clean out the spam to get to the real mail But the ads on web sites are essentially the same thing. But instead of annoying people who have to slow down and clean out the inbox, it slows down the computer and internet instead and annoys people indirectly. The end user sees the page loading in ten seconds and learns to live with it without knowing the cause. Maybe they think they need a new computer instead of focusing their rage on the advertisers.
But it's all essentially spam. Like the difference between bombs and smart bombs, we have spam and smart spam.
TV is different. People accept that TV shows whatever the producer arrange for them. And if they want to see the rest of the show, they let the ad play - perhaps muted.
Just about everyone I know who still watches TV records the shows and fast-forwards through the ads. Our MythTV box does it automatically for us, though it's not perfect.
If your 'content' isn't worth people paying for it... you can't really complain that people aren't paying for it.
If your 'content' is worth paying for, then people will pay for it.
Losing ad revenue would just mean many 'content' writers would have to find a real job, not that 'content' wouldn't exist.
Question is, how much money is it worth to control the population?
The answer is, all of it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The solution is to target ads to a site's target audience. No end-user tracking cookies needed. Just what you can learn from data-mining the site itself, especially the user comments (if any). Obviously, visitors to geek sites like Slashdot would want at most ads with static graphics. Better would be Google-style text ads, prominently marked as "advertisement". (Best would be no ads, but that won't be an option unless you can cook up a really subtle slashvertisement.)
And get rid of those fucking audio ads as well. I don't need some dick yelling at me about how to get free sex whilst I'm searching for Dora the explorer for a friends kid.
One of the great things about Microsoft being in catchup mode is that you can pretty much bet that, by the time they start doing something, it will be on the way out.
Now they've pushed all the user tracking and ad-serving crap into Windows, the advertising bubble is probably about to burst.
I see ad blocking as part of a larger service problem with the content industry on the web. Many website operators have gone to war with Adblock Plus, and lose every time because Adblock Plus can adapt around whatever new safeguards they've put in against it. If people are blocking your ads, it's because you have a service problem. Allow me to give an example:
I play a game called Pathfinder fairly regularly with a group of friends online. Pathfinder is basically a clone of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5th edition, very rules-heavy and with lots of little things to look up that most people don't bother memorizing. To that end, there are two major sites that carry all of the open game content (which in Pathfinder is pretty much 100% of the content) in a searchable form which is a lot easier than figuring out which book you need and then looking through a corresponding PDF or the book itself.
One of these sites is d20pfsrd.com, which is run by a guy who ran tons of ads for a long time and then ultimately resorted to a Patreon account.. in addition to ads. Now, I understand that he needs money to keep buying the books to put the stuff on his website, but it becomes more than a little annoying when I'm trying to look something up in the middle of a game and have a third of my phone's screen taken up by the incessant pop-ups advertising sales of third-party books (from which the site owner gets a cut) that no one ever uses or linking people to his Patreon to donate money. I don't know how successful his Patreon campaign is, but I'm imagining it's not very much if he keeps begging for money.
Meanwhile, there's a second site called Archives of Nethys that is in general better organized, doesn't run intrusive ads, and has the same exact content that d20pfsrd does. I don't block ads on Archives of Nethys because like the d20pfsrd owner, I understand that they need money for books - but at the same time, they're not running intrusive ads or begging me for Patreon dollars in an overlay that blocks me from reading the actual content of their website. If I was going to donate money to one of these sites, I'd pick Archives of Nethys hands down because they have better service to their readers.
You could say that from a business perspective, d20pfsrd has a service problem: their ads are more annoying than their competitor's, and thus more likely to be blocked. The same principle can be applied to any website.
"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. "
I recently went to a page where the JS begged me to turn off AdBlock. So I did. I was rewarded with a page that was 3/5th ads, with the content squished into the center. Turning it back on produced a single column of readable text. I can't wait for AB on iOS.
When Apple refused to support Flash and told everyone it was because Flash sucked, the interwebs came alive with conspiracy theories about how Apple was trying to force people onto QT and apps. The thing is, Flash did suck, and all the other platforms turned it off too. And today, the conspiracy theory is no longer mentioned.
So here we are with plug-ins. Is Apple making a plug-in system, or trying to force everyone to use apps? I suspect the later, and have a feeling this story arc will play out the same way as Flash over the next six months.
I wouldn't even mind PAYING for access to newspapers and commentaries, but I don't live in a major metro area, and it just isn't worth it to me to pay the entire going rate for access to just ONE paper (as I recall, the NY Times is like $250/yr), the vast majority of which doesn't relate to me - but I'd jump at the chance to pay $10/mo for access to articles that interest me that I could pick and choose from 100s - 1000s of papers all over - just like the way no one wants to pay for an entire album just to hear one good song, or buy a subscription to just one record label.
I'm sorry, it appears that someone clicked "Overrated" by mistake. Surely no-one would use that moderation on a perfectly sensible (and previously unmoderated) post on purpose. I'm sure they meant to rate it "Insightful" or "Interesting".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
One hour show in the 1950's, 52 minutes of content, 8 minutes of ads.
One hour show today, 39 to 41 minutes of content, 19 to 21 minutes of ads.
Web sites at the start- a few relevant ads which were low bandwidth, didn't flash, weren't animated, and didn't interfere with your mouse and put invisible overlays over the screen to steal your mouseclick and shoot you off to some random site, combined with massive numbers of privacy invading cookies (i've stopped trying to load pages after the cookie and ad count passed 25 and the page still wasn't loading.
Web sites today- often the advertising content consumes 10x to over 500x the bandwidth of the content. Intrusive, and everything bad up above PLUS occasionally injects PUP's and virii into my computer. Dangerous and obnoxious. Often the ads have nothing to do with me OR they are creepily over relevant (having cookied me on some other site unrelated to the current one).
I wouldn't go to heroic efforts to block low bandwidth, relevant polite ads.
Now, it's reached a point, I simply don't load certain pages. If I can't get them to load within 30 seconds, I move on to some other less convoluted, less intrusive site.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I'm paying for my internet bandwidth, you are not. Are you going to pay for my internet connection that you waste with your malware filled bloat and spyware? No? Then die.
Because the media industry needs to die.
Reporting by "reporters" is bullshit. Nothing but instant glossing over or regurgitation of the API feed. ZERO reporting so if "new media" writers get let go, this is a good thing. Let's look at my favorite motorcycle websites, all reviews are done for 10 minutes at a desk, some are done without opening the package. So yes I hope those writes lose their jobs as they are worthless. Car websites writing car reviews without touching the frigging car or worse, sitting in it for 10 minutes. What does the REAL car magazine Road and Track do? Subscription based and they are making money.
It's already proven you dont need ads, you need content that is worth a damn. Game of Thrones is the #1 TV show in the world for 5 years running, NO ADS. Hell, Kung Fury is a 15 minute short that made more money BEFORE IT WAS FINISHED than any other movie twice it's length.
So yes, I hope it all dies.... Dies in a Fire.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It will find a way to survive- maybe by being less obnoxious, but more likely by finding new workarounds, after a brief year or two of peace like that glorious time in the early days of popup blocking before they started using JavaScript based pop-over 'windows' instead.
I actually don't mind the tracking, or ads in general (it was not knowing about being tracked that annoyed me more). If I'm looking up something sensitive I'll use Private Browsing - the rest of the time I will get ads for things that actually do interest me, because they know e.g. I visit slashdot and enjoy geeky things. And perhaps by offering me more relevant ads, they will feel less inclined to overload me with intrusive ones to be "more effective".
Ads that pop over content, cause you to play "guess the real download link" or auto play though can die in a fire. So can most of Youtube's advertising.
Like so many other people have commented, I have earned the right to turn off advertising on ./ and decided not to check that checkbox. Instead, I use another method to block ads: /etc/hosts. Here is a small sample:
127.0.0.1 media.sonypictures.com.
127.0.0.1 images.adsyndication.msn.com.
127.0.0.1 2mdn.net.
127.0.0.1 atdmt.com.
127.0.0.1 fastclick.net.
127.0.0.1 hire.tv.
127.0.0.1 hiro.tv.
127.0.0.1 pointroll.com.
In firefix, I have also set to "ask first" for every single media player. I just wish there was a way I could do this with HTML5 video content as well.
FYI that title was meant to say "first got popup blocking" but got silently truncated.
So many industries are this way. They assume that there is a captive audience with only a few malcontents, but over time it starts slipping away and they don't know how to cope. Like television, they decide to save money by having crappier unscripted content or hire only interns as script writers, then are baffled that people are cutting the cord.
For case in point see: retail in Australia.
See also: travel agents.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
FTFY :-)
Just checking: are you aware that the way you (mis)used "exception that proves the rule" here makes absolutely no sense? It's sort of like saying "I could care less" when you mean the exact opposite ("I could not care less"), except in this case it's just incoherent. "The exception that proves the rule (in cases not excepted)" is a heuristic you apply to things that look like exceptions to an implied rule, not something you apply to rules when you want to make an exception to them. Generally speaking, rules/laws are made weaker - the opposite of "proven" - by the presence of exceptions to them. Parroting "the exception that proves the rule" (when you don't even understand what it means) doesn't change this obvious fact.
Example: suppose you're not really familiar with the local driving laws (maybe you're in a different state or country than usual), and you come to a stoplight with a sign (which most other stop lights don't have) that says "No right turn on red". That sign implies the existence of a rule - that normally right turns on red are allowed - because otherwise there'd be no need to have the sign in order to make an exception to the rule. If you later come to a red light which has no such sign and you want to make a right turn, you could reasonably assume that it's legal to do so.
On the other hand, if you claim that a feather falls takes longer to hit the ground than a brick does, even when dropped from the same height, and somebody points out that this isn't true on the moon... well, that exception doesn't actually prove your "rule" at all. It does the exact opposite, in fact, showing that your rule is flawed. Similarly, if the answer to the headline is "yes", the only thing that proves is that Betteridge's Law is wrong, false, incorrect, unreliable, etc.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Okay, everyone deserves to be paid for their work.
The main thing with ads is that they're stealing bandwidth (and time) from the END USER.
And, as users have worked to block out the most egregious, the ad networks seek more and more egregious ways to inject bigger, more-badly-behaved ads into content.
And, at the same time, the hind end of the ad beast, whats' considered LEAST egregious, eventually migrates toward more annoying, intrusive behaviors.
Worse, badly maintained ad networks can KILL the ability to access content.
And worst of all, badly SECURED ad networks leave their viewer base open to getting their computers compromised.
Again, sites deserve to be paid for their content. But the proliferation of adblockers is the public's way of saying "You're asking too much for that."
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is pure unadulterated TRUTH! When many of us got online in the late 80s/early 90s nobody was bothered by ads...why? Because they were a simple hyperlink or at most a tiny .jpg or .gif showing a product for sale...so what. in fact i bet many of us even bought products from those ads because they were 1.- Almost all first party and thus relevant to the site you were viewing and 2.- The one who wrote the site would often have a nice polite "Here is the stuff I like, they have good deals on it, if you like the site maybe you could have a look?" and many of us did that.
Then here came the third party ad companies to take a big fat Cleveland Steamer on everything! First came the obnoxious pop ups, I bet many here first started hating ads in the mid 90s when that shit started really blowing up. First came pop up, then pop under, then pop all over the fucking screen. Then came the Java ads, followed by flash. Remember when Java was the hot thing, they were even showing desktops running entirely in java and it was Java this and Java that? I personally believe all the fucking Java ads slamming the hell out of those P3s is what turned the masses off of Java...but then came Flash, and boy was that name ever apropos when it comes to ads as the first ones were an epileptic nightmare as they flashed images worse than a Japanese cartoon trying to get your attention. Was that enough for the ad corp assholes? Nope because "hey we can blow their ears off and make 'em listen to our pitches, brilliant!" until it got to the point you couldn't have speakers in an office PC because you never knew when it would blow your ears out!
But of course the rotting elephant in the room is none of these ad corps or websites take responsibility for the malware they spread thus driving the final nail in the ad driven web coffin, because now its a severe security risk to allow ads to be loaded. I can tell everybody that once I switched all my users to browsers running ABP in low rights mode? Malware just dried up, in fact I can't remember the last nasty I saw on a PC that was running adblocking. And all those that scream about ABP and "acceptable ads" really need to look at the policy to become an acceptable ad, its the best practices I've been pushing for years, NO flash or java, NO sound, NO pop up/under/over, NO hidden redirects or misleading images like faking a security dialog box, in other words it is the kind of ads we used to not have to worry about, simple hyperlinks or non moving images.
So I'm sorry websites but you brought it upon yourselves, you had a good thing going and in the name of greed you shat all over it and made ads the plague blankets of the net. Switch to the ABP acceptable ad model and most of us will happily let your ads run, but of course that means not letting third parties throw any shit on your page they want and risking your viewers PCs but instead they will just whine and moan. I'm proud to say I got banned from The Escapist for calling them out on their BS, they had Jim Sterling whine about how evil ABP was and I posted a link showing how many times The Escapist had shown malware infected ads and simply asked "So are you gonna take responsibility and pay for the damages to those you infect with your ads?". Wow you should have seen how quickly they started burying the thread and throwing the banhammer, didn't work as the whole narrative got switched to ads and malware. So if any claim its about "saving websites" simply ask that little question, are they gonna take responsibility and pay for the damages if they infect their viewers? If not they can fuck right off!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Running NoScript; it boggles my mind how many domains are required to get some sites working (particularly MSM sites). Sometimes I just give up on trying to access the content.
1. Don't be obnoxious
2. Don't lie
Point 1 has been raised in the above comments many times, and includes ads with any kind of pop-up, sound, video or other movement.
Point 2 is much more sinister, and includes ads that claim you have won a prize, have an issue detected with your computer, or fool you into thinking the ad is the Download link for the software you are trying to download.
Those ads will always be blocked, and are killing the digital media industry.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What I find pathetic is that these companies, oftentimes the source of the most abusive and invasive software on the Internet, call themselves the victims when people just block their garbage.
It has gotten so bad, that in the last 10 years, it is quite obvious that the #1 defense against malware on a computer is not a firewall, nor is it an AV program. It is an adblocking extension coupled with some form of click to play or NoScript. In fact, if a user doesn't run anything downloaded, adblock/noscript/updated browser/firewall is pretty much all they need for adequate security.
Of course, iOS/Android tend to not be that better. Half the time, you find sites trying to shunt over to the App Store for some brain-dead F2P/P2W clone of Candy Crush or junk like that. Using Dolphin Browser on Android does help with this.
The problem isn't the ads. Plain old static banner ads did work. Google text ads are useful. The actual problem is greed. The banner ads were replaced by tower ads, content was moved from one page and broken up into 5-30 pages. Hyperlinks were replaced by mouseovers. Even photos are broken up requiring 4-5 pages to see the entire pithy meme.
See any retail industry. Anywhere.
Quite frankly, if I go to a bookstore to get information about books and what I get is an employee who knows less about books than me and turns to her computer to search Amazon for recommendations... I can do that myself, thank you! I was hoping that I'd find somewhere there who, ya know, KNOWS a thing about the shit they sell?
That's the whole point behind going into a specialized store instead of doing your shopping online. To talk with someone who knows MORE about the stuff than you do, or you could find out by using the internet. That is the whole point.
But of course, people who actually know what they're doing cost more money, so what you get is people who sell you mattresses today, books tomorrow and in a week you see them flipping burgers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now who would pay for that kind of law? Seriously, you don't know how politics works.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then Google will suffer the fate of many news pages that thought they should charge for their content: People will close the tab and yell NEXT.
It's not like there's a lack of search engines.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They brought it on themselves with migraine-inducing scrolling, flashing, animated, popup-on-mouse-over, beeping, clicking, sound-clip-playing and malware-inducing crap.
When they used simple static banner ads, I didn't need to ad-block. Now if I want to surf for more than five minutes without developing a raging migraine, I have no choice but to block.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The AVGN, Kotaku and the Escapist (mostly Zero Punctuation). All of these guys make money off ads. A few are big enough to survive w/o ads now, but that also means no new content creators since they won't be able to use advertising to get off the ground.
/. for years and haven't bothered. And no, I don't count the slashvertisments.
I've been offered ad free
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Because text ads are fine. Static images ads are fine.
Where I draw the line is when ads are:
- auto-play videos that annoy me, prevent me from reading whatever I'm trying to read and wasting my monthly data quota on top of it. Not everyone has a lightning-fast connection with unlimited bandwidth.
- javascript-enabled, HTML5 canvas ads that delay the whole page load and waste my CPU cycles on top of it. Not everyone has a fast CPU.
So whoever in marketing is reading this and is furious at me, don't be. Be furious at the other assholes in marketing who pushed that shit too far. We, the users, will not let you turn the Internet into "TV 2.0".
Why do people install ad blockers? It's not like they are easy to get for Joe Average Randomsurfer. It's not like they are being peddled and hawked like, well, nearly every other shit on the net. Joe just wants to surf the net. Of course, there's that "on principle" crowd. You know them. The ones that block ads "on principle", to make a point or to feel superior, not because ads are actually in any way something that bugs them. It's one of those "I want it to bug me for I have no other problem in my petty little life" thing. You find that kind everywhere. And of course on the net, and of course with ads being the pet peeve.
I'm not talking about them.
These people always existed. Even 20 years ago when "ad" on the internet meant "someone who gave you a few pages of content that took your 56k modem half a minute to load saying 'oh, and btw, the stuff I explained to you, I bought it at Johnson's Chemicals, they deliver internationally, they're cool and give good deals, you might wanna buy there'."
But those kind of "ads" never bothered anyone. Well, aside of the aforementioned "on principle" people. But they were few and far between. Yes, even back then when there were few people using the internet in the first place (well, at least compared to today).
Fast forwards through the years, more people came on the net, and it suddenly got interesting for the "professional" advertisers. Professional as in "doing it for money". Not necessarily "having a fucking clue what they're doing". And ads got more. And since they got more, they also had to compete. For our eyes. And later ears. And they got more and more, and more and more intrusive. Because, well, an ad only works if you notice it. So they started flashing and blaring at you, wanting your attention.
And more and more people started to reach for ad blockers. Because those things got fucking ANNOYING. Worse than a 3 year old who wants a lolly.
But can you imagine just HOW annoying something has to become that it actually drives people who don't want to invest time into "tweaking" their internet use into finding out how to block it? How I know that people who usually cannot be bothered with the internal workings of their computers, who want it to "just work good enough", how I know that these people are going out of their way now to block ads? Because this would not even be an issue if they were not. These people are today the majority of internet users. People who actually care about their connection and their computers, and hence block ads because they know that a plugin ain't something that connects their computer to the power socket in the wall, are the minority.
Can you even possibly imagine just how fucking ANNOYING ads have to be that people who don't WANT to deal with "this computer stuff" actually decide that it's less annoying to deal with their computers and browser setup than the ads?
Ad industry? Listen. This is your doing. You killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. And no, there's no going back. People already know how to block your ads. Backpedaling to a less obnoxious form is not going to do you any good. Because ads serve no purpose to us. They are essentially what the products that you sell us are to you: The necessary evil for the actual thing we want. For us, ads are the necessary evil to get content. For you, producing products is the necessary evil to get our money.
We don't want your ads. We don't need your ads. And once someone learned how to block them, they will not unblock them.
You poisoned your own well.
Live with it.
Or, preferably, die from it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I quit using yahoo search in 2004. I liked it better than google's search but when you are on dialup the extra crap is quite noticeable in the load times. After I got higher speeds I used google out of habit. Now its a rather moot point yahoo search is crap because there is no yahoo search anymore its just bing with a diffrent ui. And msn/live/bing is still crap.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The ad industry doesn't even care of advertising is effective or not. The people buying the ads are going to wake up and realize it's not worth the cost. Then the people trying to make a living with cheap ass youtube videos are going to have to update their resumes.
No, they won't, because they believe that the money they are shoveling out for advertising lets them keep the business they have. They are mortally terrified that if they stop advertising sales will go to zero in short order and they will never ever get new customers.
Advertisers are parasites that feed on newborn companies. They live by selling FUD to companies. Here is their life cycle:
1. Company starts, engages (gets parasitised by) advertising. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
2. Small company grows to big company. Advertisers claim it is due to their advertising, of course.
3. Company sales growth slows, advertisers suggest MOAR ADS! Company shells out accordingly.
4. Company sales flatline, advertisers suggest EVEN MOAR ADS! Company shells out accordingly, but with worried looks to their books
5. Smart company exec asks what advertising is actually doing for sales; advertisers claim they would be nowhere without advertising and to cut advertising would destroy the company.
6. Smart company exec is fired for their heresy, company continues to pay advertisers.
7. Before company tanks, advertisers point to the success of the company, suckers more new companies (hosts), starting back at 1.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
They're typically advertising elsewhere. The internet is cheap but the response tends to be low. The only ones really relying on internet advertising are internet only companies.
Dear advertisers,
I don't mind ads so much, but I definitely do not want to run your programs, hence Noscript.
Dear Advertisers, Figure out how to do ads in a trustworthy way (i.e. no privacy invasive behavior tracking and little or no risk of malware exposure) and I'll be happy to allow those ads. I'd prefer the ads to be static HTML hosted within the site I visit. I don't want my browser touching 15 domains that all run scripts every time I visit a page. As long as ads compromise my privacy and security I will consider advertising networks the enemy and treat them accordingly.
A co-worker asked which browser I used at home.
Firefox I replied.
Now many add-ons?
About 30.
Your favorite?
Ad block plus.
You know that's how the sites make money.
I know.
Why use it then?
When the sites start paying a portion of my Internet bill for them using my bandwidth I'll quit using ad block.
Nuff said.
Basically $30/month. No I do not think you would get all that many takers.
But at $10/month, yes I would think you would get quite many interested people. That guess is based on the pricing of things like Spotify and Netflix.
And what happens when they hire someone motivated (and thus expensive), and you then buy the actual book at Amazon anyway after getting the info you need?
Bookstores are simply outdated. They're going to die no matter what they do, and know that. So why spend any more fighting the inevitable rather than just extract what profit they can on their way out?
And they know that too. They're never getting out of poverty unless they get fantastically lucky, so why bother trying? People allocate their resources - including time and effort - based on expectations of results, and the expected result for a low-rank worker working hard is ending up flipping burgers.
A social system works by creating a kind of shared dream of how the world works, what kinds of positions are available, who can fill them, and what's expected of them. These dreams can take a certain amount of being contradicted by evidence, but not the kind of brutal beatdown Capitalism is currently experiencing, at least not without attaching religious feeling its dogma, which it has done. But even so, if things don't start improving fast, the disillusionment will spread until the entire machinery falls apart.
So, any guesses where the next round of Communistic revolutions (Neo-communism? Communism 2.0?) is going to start?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"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."
This was already solved via firefox mobile + uBlock origin. I'll admit firefox mobile isn't really the best browser out there in terms of performance, but the ad blocking more than makes up for it, and it is the only browser I use on my phone.
And get rid of those fucking audio ads as well. I don't need some dick yelling at me about how to get free sex whilst I'm searching for Dora the explorer for a friends kid.
Did you search for:
Dora exploring her sexuality?
Dora self exploring?
Dora does exploring?
Dora + safari suit + adventure?
Sluts gone wild?
You've got your decades confused. There were no ads online in the late 80s or early 90s, unless you're talking about Prodigy, because no one outside of academia used the internet then, and the WWW and the Mosaic browser didn't even exist until 1994. Looking at a .gif (JPEG didn't even come out until 1992, and didn't see real usage on regular people's computers until later) meant manually downloading it first (perhaps from alt.binaries.pictures.*), then opening up an image viewer to look at it. The internet didn't really get commercialized with ads until the late 90s.
When a site proves for a (long) period they are responsible with the ads they serve, (both style and scripting), then I am likely to unblock them. If not, then all defenses up.
From the summary:
A new report from Adobe and one of several startups helping publishers fight ad blocking
Well, now I really don't like Adobe anymore.
I know a lot about books. I read pretty much non stop and have for 56 years. The only job I ever got fired from was in a book store. I could not even tear the covers off returns (paperbacks) without falling into reading them. This may be why you do not find avid readers working in book stores that expect to make a profit.
*"Cogito Ergo Liberalis"*
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
You hit the nail on the head.
The biggest success in the world of software and entertainment as far as adoption go is Popcorn Time. If there is a subscription model attached most of the viewers will be OK to pay a few dollars a month for unfettered access. (To an extent this is what Netflix is providing.)
Popcorn Time is not possible with online versions of print media. The closest you get is Google News - except for a few websites the links do not need a subscription. But then you will quickly go over the limit of free articles with no option but to pay full price / subscribe.
Even "Google Contribute" is not addressing this issue...its only to show less advertisement.
Tat Tvam Asi
I keep hearing that if I don't want to see abusive ads I should simply not go back to those sites...
The problem is that there are (literally) thousands and thousands of them. Can't remember them all.
Perhaps what we need is a way for sites to indicate or for an ad blocking site to rate that they require "no-ad blocking" and then on pages with URL's instead of a blue underline we get a red underline. Then we can vote with our clicks without ever having to actually visit the site first. Don't want to view invasive ads then don't click on the red links.
Exactly. I don't block ads. I do block tracking JavaScript. Anything that uses Flash / HTML5 video / audio needs me to click on it before I see it. The result? I very rarely see ads. Put plain-text ads that are relevant to the content of the page, and I might click on them. I used to click on Google ads periodically back when they did this, but they gradually went down the route of trying to profile me and find things that I was interested in and replaced all of the ads that were relevant to the stuff I was looking at now with ads for things that I bought last month and won't need to buy again for a long time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
YouTube has ads? Heh... I did not know that. I was wondering what the Skip Ads thing was about in Magic Actions. I thought they were just static banners and the likes but you mention that they autoplay so I am assuming they are in the videos themselves? I use Firefox to install Opera. I then install AdBlock (and more). I do not actually see ads. I do not use other folks computers unless I am fixing them and, then, I install Opera and AdBlock (and more)...
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You sir are a legend, I read this article and felt compelled to post and then I read your reply that just about states every point I wanted to make.
Well, if we want to be factual his history of how this developed is at least 10 years off. Ads didn't start to "really blowing up" in the mid-nineties. This is when early adopters started using web browsers at all. The very first web browser came in 1993, Netscape 0.9 came in December 1994. And there were no .jpgs at this time.
Even correcting for that, Java was never used much for ads. By the time non-static banner ads started to take off Flash already had a larger installed base of users.
It's one of those things that puzzle me to no end. Maybe some politician was affected by it, anything else doesn't really make sense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My money is on between 2020 and 2025. Though I doubt it will be a communist revolution. I'd fear it will lean towards fascism rather. There's far more money backing that kind of development, and far more people willing to follow it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Have these people stopped to consider that maybe the people blocking their ads have no interest in purchasing products based on ads? Before adblock, I have never intentionally clicked on an ad I saw. So, if anything, adblock saves bandwidth costs by preventing advertisers from serving ads to an ad-adverse demographic. Let the luddites shoulder the cost of free content by clicking on ads. It's win-win!
it's certainly going in that direction now. even if it turns out to be communism, it will probably be the old communism-dictatorship type. you know, lots of media propaganda, elites living in luxury, peoply spying on each other... only worse, because the elites have become richer, the media less independent and the survilance state technically sophisticated since then... but it's more likely to become ugly ol' fascism. remember, nazi was short for "national socialists". let's hope for the machines to rise before that. you're our only hope...teminator.
i just don't like those tracking ads, bandwith/cpu hogging ads, autoplaying audio/video ads, view blocking ads, pop-ups... just embed your ads as plain text or decent sized banners or as the first two search results (but clearly marked as ads), or even as marked paid content, and i'm fine with it - but as long as you do javascript-shit, links that track me across sites, or banners that pop over buttons, i'll fight them and avoid your sites,
even slashdot often puts an ad that's hard to dismiss over the "submit" button - at least on an ipad. fortunately, ios9 and content blockers are on their way.
So far it is more effective for media companies to use ads in the form of link to a third party websites and live with adblocks. I suppose at some point media companies will start place ads hosted in the same domains as their primary services to make current generation of adblocks obsolete.
I mean, do people really click on adverts on legitimate sites? I can see people getting confused on those sketchy download sites where there are 3 download links that all point to ads instead of the expected file... but really, legitimate companies losing money from blocked ads? Seems insane. On second thought, the only possible legitimate lost revenue I can think of would be YouTube videos where the commercials are blocked out.
(off-topic) I worked at a bookstore briefly and I remember the first and only time I had to do the cover-ripping thing for inventory return. It felt awful to destroy a book like that.
The more big companies cry about the lost zillions, the closer we get to having NO control over our bandwidth use.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually went to a store to do research for an online purchase. It just doesn't happen. If I actually take the time and go to a store and they have what I need/want it is very unlikely that I'll go back home and order whatever it was to save a few bucks and spend even more time waiting for it to be delivered. I don't doubt that there are people who do that but judging by the number of people living paycheck to paycheck I doubt they are in the majority.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually went to a store to do research for an online purchase. It just doesn't happen. If I actually take the time and go to a store and they have what I need/want it is very unlikely that I'll go back home and order whatever it was to save a few bucks and spend even more time waiting for it to be delivered. I don't doubt that there are people who do that but judging by the number of people living paycheck to paycheck I doubt they are in the majority.
I agree about the research comment. I've never gone to a store for product research except for vehicles like cars, boats, etc..
There are three situations where I go to a store to buy anything but groceries:
1. When I need something right away and overnight shipping is more than 3% of the item cost. Typically in this situation, the item wouldn't get to me on time if I ordered online with 2 day shipping. I would have to pay through the nose for next day. It's usually when I'm about to go on vacation and I forgot to buy something.
2. Clothes. Yes, most online clothing stores have free return policies but its more inconvenient than running down to the nearest clothing store. Shoes and sneakers are the hardest to buy as, it seems, not one shoe manufacturer uses the same sizing chart. Kohls actually does a good job here. I can try on stuff in store, scan the bar-code with their mobile app, and order through their online store. Usually I only do this if they don't have the size/style I want in the store. That being said, I have been buying dress shirts online.
3. Same Price. If the store has the item at a similar or same price as I can find online I will buy from the store. At that point it's more convenient for me to drive to the local store and pick it up or grab it while I am already there for something else.
For the last seven years at least, maybe all the way out to ten, I have only used a firewall, ABP, and NoScript. No antivirus or malware scanners required. And I've thus far had no infections or problems at all.
... third party ads. If advertisers want to present their ads to the public, let them rent page space, like on a billboard. They can still track, though customized URLs, where the clicks came from, but will no longer be able to directly intrude on the relationship between the user and the page owner.
Are you willing to pay more for the books you get in a bookstore than the identical product you can get online? Brick and mortar stores have already found that in general the answer to that question is no. Brick and mortar stores have lots of expenses that online does not. Brick and mortar for one, sales employees for another. And the situation you're describing is having knowledge experts (read people who get paid more) working as the sales people. This works in some markets; I'm willing to pay more for wine if bought from someone who knows about what they are talking about. But typically doesn't work for the vast majority of people.
The turning point was in the early to mid 2000s, when worms, executable E-mail, and infected Word documents were dealt with by signing, spam control, and just not running code in the E-mail, period. Once that vector of infection was stopped, other than Trojan horses, it became the Web browser (and add-ons) that has become the largest vector of infections, because it constantly is in contact with untrusted, likely hostile code.
As for AV, I've yet to see a normal antivirus scanner be able to deal with an exploit crawling out of a browser or add-on. The sole exception to this is Malwarebytes because it blocks malicious sites by IP. However, that doesn't give full protection, since an ad server can be completely benign for 99.999% of the time, then when it noticed IP addresses from a certain range, serve up something malicious.
You wrote this from your Faraday cage with tinfoil on your head didn't you?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The reason people block ads is that the advertisers have gone overboard with intrusive advertising. Popup windows are annoying and malfunction on some combinations of hardware and browser. Autoplay videos make your browser crawl, suck up huge amounts of bandwidth, and if the audio also autoplays they annoy everyone around you. Ads that deliver malware to your computer clearly must be blocked. Finally, there are the privacy implications of ad tracking.
If advertising was limited to text and static banners, I wouldn't bother to block it. I don't want the online ad industry to die, I want the online ad industry to return to 1998.
In the old days, before Amazon, before the web, there were support staff, paid for by the margins on books and magazines.
Now huge numbers of scanned books are traded for free on line = zero profit on those. In addition, Amazon's buying power and pricing policies have meant that the book shops no longer have hose margins. People come and look and ask, then go home and buy on Amazon or get an online file.
Most magazines were sold far below the cost of printing, the ads paid the freight, and with paper magazines and story splitting there was enough ad readership to sustain the system.
If 100% of ads get blocked = zero to pay for the web site, the site will fold.
Solution:- Sites can now render the site as a full screen jpeg, with the ads as part of the picture, unblockable. All they need is a click detecting frame for each ad..
If the frame is blocked, the system will not render the jpeg = you can not see the site if you deny the frame.
This will be slower to render, but with wide band = doable.
The alternative = pay a fee to see a site.
There will be few altruists capable of funding a high volume site with zero revenue.
> I really can't wait until everything is a pay service and everyone is complaining.
Won't happen. As storage, processor time, and bandwidth gets cheaper a site like ./ will cost almost nothing to run. Some business will figure they can run a social media site like this with embedded employees flogging their goods and be able to profit from it. Yea, maybe free video will die, maybe free images will, but text is so cheap to transmit and manage that what you're talking about just won't happen.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually went to a store to do research for an online purchase.
Yeah, plus funny story: Just last week, a tool I had broke, so I went online looking for a replacement. I first checked out the local hardware stores' web sites (they all have them), fully planning to drive over and pick one up so I could get to work. I found that, although they all listed of it, and could order one for me, none of them had it in stock. I even called the few remaining locally-owned hardware stores, and got the same reply. None of them could get it in less than a week. So I asked amazon, they had it "in stock" (whatever that means ;-), and said "next-day delivery" for my address. They also had the cheapest price (including tax and postage). So I ordered it from amazon, and got it the next day. The job is (almost) done now.
Occasionally this approach has worked, and I have in fact driven over and bought what I was looking for. 20 minutes is a lot less than one day, after all. But it is getting hard for local stores to have enough space to match a string of huge warehouses.
What's odd about this story is that amazon could deliver in one day, but none of the commercial hardware stores could, though they all have an online order system, including the choice of shipping to the store or to your address. You'd think that the hardware stores would be more expert than amazon on the topic of deliverable hardware. But apparently not. Even the big-box warehouse-like stores like Home Depot gave me estimates of over a week.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Ad Blockers do not block well-behaved ads. It blocks obnoxious, flashing, bouncing, ads. So, if anything is being killed here it is bad, distasteful ads. If the advertising can't curtail their misbehaving work, someone else will. If it kills the industry, is it really the ad blockers' fault? No, I do not think so!
It could be that Amazon is making a very small margin or even taking a loss on hardware shipped overnight. If they can do it long enough to drive everybody else out of the market, they'll have a monopoly and can make all that money back. Hardware is probably a sector they're keen to compete in too. Other sectors where they're already pretty established, that's where they make their money and how they can afford this kind of "marketing" if you will.
Assuming their industry (like every other) is made up of people who think the world owes them a living, you won't see them crawl off to die without a fight. Before it's through, you'll hear them claim the inalienable right to force ads on people. You'll hear them demand the government step in to force ads on people. They might even succeed with that... government is very "available" right now for the right price.
I know them feels. ;_;
You're probably right. Amazon has gotten big enough that they can probably afford to take losses in a lot of "small" markets to bankrupt most of the smaller competitors. It is sorts funny to think that what the local hardware stores sell can be called a "small" market. But I suppose even in what looks like a large market, it might not be all that difficult for a company like amazon to kill off all the smaller competitors in a list of small areas, after which a few judicious buyouts and mergers completes the job.
It is interesting to see this starting to happen to Home Depot, which only a few years ago was the giant moving in and bankrupting all the locally-owned hardware stores.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
On many sites if you want to let ALL the scripts run you have to hit "Temporarily allow all this page" six or seven times before all scripts are running. Now, let's assume that one of these scripts contains an exploit. Who is responsible for serving that script to you?
Which would actually not even be a problem for ad companies if they didn't themselves poison the well they were drinking from. They deliberately shat into it deliberately and now they wonder why people want to keep them away.
As I pointed out elsewhere, Joe Randomsurfer never bothered to block ads for the longest time. Yes, some geeks did, but they were few and far between. They're about as meaningful or "threatening" to the ad business as the people who switch channels when ads come on TV or who get something to drink or take out the bodily waste such drinks produce. Statistically insignificant.
But ads became SO painful that even ordinary people who would normally not bother to even wonder whether there was such a thing as AdBlocker actually went out of their way to block them.
And once blocked, you're right on that one, once blocked, they stay blocked. Because ads are to us what the product is to the company: The necessary evil to get what they want. For us, the ads is the evil to get content. For companies, making a product is the necessary evil to get our money.
It's not like either side really wants to provide the othe rside with anything.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Communism is out of the question. Nobody that could gather the masses would want to hand over his industrial power to the state. Not even in exchange for political power. Why bother when you can simply buy politicians anyway? And that's not even something that you'd have to install, that's already pretty much the case. Politicians are dependent, absolutely and totally dependent, on corporate money.
What this will essentially mean is that a plutocracy is the most likely end product. Money makes right. We're essentially already there. Corporations decide what candidates you may vote for. Essentially, this eventually means that you may choose which corporate ideology and which business interest you wish to support when you go vote.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am from an age when advertisement blocking wasn't dreamed of, let alone possible. I remember when sites used to run tons of animated GIF ads and could support themselves on ad revenue alone. I didn't begrudge them this; I was dirt poor, and it was the only way I could get content and services.
Two things that emerged are what are driving ad-blocking and killing ad-based revenue:
-- Bulk reselling of "anonymized" data which can accurately fingerprint a specific user and/or device simply by device configuration and browsing habits (and, if you believe the hype, by typing "fingerprints").
-- Advertisement placement auctioning: the advertising companies' system of being able to auction a specific client's advertisement space in the browser on the (supposedly) relevant page.
These wouldn't even be so bad if:
-- advertisement data collected were "opt-in" and incentivized. Instead, it isn't even opt-out, and the "incentive" given to people is to use "free" services which allow companies to collect even more targeted data from customers (effectively turning them into the product, rather than the target).
-- the advertising auctions (which are entirely automated and are supposed to occur during the short period during page load) weren't intentionally lengthened to allow for profitable bids every time, but at a cost to the user visiting the site, more often than not blocking other page elements from loading while advertising connections are "loading", but not really, just delaying the page until someone meets their price and then releasing the stranglehold on the legitimate process of loading the webpage.
Ad-blockers damage both of these tactics by not letting browsers even accept connections to known ad servers. It isn't really that people are more savvy about privacy, although a growing number are, especially with all of the data breaches happening with the various companies holding this aggregated information about a great many people. It is more that their web functions better without interference from advertising.
Anecdotal and personal experience has taught me that ad-blocking on all pages, even those to whom I would actually want to receive advertising revenue through my efforts, speeds my pageloads up. One good example of this is http://mangastream.com/ . Whitelisting their pages in my ad-blocker plug-in made reading a manga nearly impossible (pages taking 1-3 minutes to load). I had to block ads on that site again in order to read a flippin' manga!
People aren't flocking in droves to ad-blocking because they don't like the ads. Most couldn't care less about ads.
People don't want to have to wait on content they want to read or view just because ad companies hold sites by the nuts for the privilege of being able to show content to consumers without directly charging them.
Advertisement itself needs to change, or it will cease to exist specifically due to the way it affects the medium that carries it.
Here's the reason why ad-blocking software is popular: it stops most ads created with Adobe Flash, Oracle (neé Sun) Java, and Microsoft Silverlight, which means way less system resource usage and eliminating a major vector for the loading of malware.
I think the solution is simple: set a date to BAN all online ads unless the ad was specifically created completely in HTML 5.0. Just that change would eliminate the vector of loading malware via plugins and might actually speed up system performance, too.
That is certainly possible, but I suspect it isn't the case.
In order to get something to you there are a few steps:
1. They have to have it in inventory.
2. They have to package and ship the item out.
3. The courier has to deliver it.
#3 should be the same for everybody, though I'm sure Amazon can negotiate lower rates on the basis of volume and integration (it isn't like the guy at Amazon picks up the phone and calls UPS to ask for a pickup, etc). Also, Amazon can save money by keeping lots of metrics on delivery times. If the USPS gets stuff from zip code 1 to zip code 2 in 2 days 99% of the time, then they can sell that as 2-day shipping and bribe the customers with incentives anytime there is a miss, rather than paying 2x as much for guaranteed 2-day shipping from somebody else (which also has some failure rate anyway).
A large hardware chain could probably achieve #1, but whether they do is debatable. You'd be amazed at how poor big companies can be at inventory management, and historically this has caused many a company's ruin. Walmart killed KMart and everybody else largely on the basis of really well-managed inventory. Dell nearly killed just about everybody else back in the day because of just-in-time inventory management for rapidly-depreciating assets like CPUs (you can't buy a $500 CPU and then take a month to sell it when your competitor just buys it a month later for $400).
However, I think #2 is the real killer. Sears and Amazon may very well have the same product available in their warehouses. However, with Amazon after you click the button they may very well have a robot with the item heading to the packing line in 15 minutes, with the shipment data already transmitted electronically to their carrier. They are extremely efficient at getting stuff out the door. An item that somebody wants to buy and which is sitting on your shelf is just a waste of space and money, and customer satisfaction as well.
In my experience that is where most companies fail. With Amazon if I buy with 2-day shipping the thing is out the door same day before 5PM or whatever (and that cutoff is very late in the day compared to many competitors). With Amazon 2-day means that I have the item in 2-days. With most other big vendors if I buy with 2-day shipping it often means that they take 3-4 days to ship the thing out, and then it arrives 2 days later. So, I'm paying that premium on shipping just to watch the vendor fumble around with my order, and I never really am sure about when it will arrive.
Amazon is pretty ruthless on this stuff, and IMHO their practices are so ruthless they border on human-rights violations in their actual warehouses. However, even if they cleaned that stuff up they'd still be way cheaper and faster than just about anybody else. Companies that want to compete have to invest a lot more in streamlined processes, because customers aren't going to pay for mail-order that takes a week to arrive.