Slashdot Mirror
Will Ad Blockers Kill the Digital Media Industry?
HughPickens.com writes: Michael Rosenwald writes at the Columbia Journalism Review that global online ad revenue continues to rise, reaching nearly $180 billion last year. But analysts say the rise of ad blocking threatens the entire industry—the free sites that rely exclusively on ads, as well as the paywalled outlets that rely on ads to compensate for the vast majority of internet users who refuse to pay for news. A new report from Adobe and one of several startups helping publishers fight ad blocking shows that 198 million people globally are now blocking ads, up 41 percent from 2014. In the US, ad blocking grew 48 percent from last year, to 45 million users. "Taken together, ad blockers are hitting publishers in their digital guts," writes Rosenwald. "Adobe says that $21.8 billion in global ad revenue will be blocked this year."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
Publishers have been banking on the growth of mobile, where the ad blocking plugins either don't work or are cumbersome to install. A Wells Fargo analyst wrote in a report on ad blocking that "the mobile migration should thwart some of the growth" of ad blockers. But Apple recently revealed that its new operating system scheduled for release this fall will allow ad blocking on Safari. Apple is trying to pull iPhone and iPad users off the web. It wants you to read, watch, search, and listen in its Apple-certified walled gardens known as apps. It makes apps, it approves apps, and it profits from apps. But, for its plan to work, the company will need those entertainers and publishers to funnel their content to where Apple wants it to be. As the company makes strategic moves to devalue the web in favor of apps, those content creators dependent on ads to stay afloat may be forced to play along with Apple. Adblock Plus has released a browser for mobile Android devices that blocks ads, and it's planning to release a similar product for Apple devices. "The desire to figure out how to bring ad blocking to mobile consumers is a worldwide phenomenon," says Roi Carthy Ad blocking, he says, "is an inalienable right."
One can only hope so.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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
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
Yup, the internet was paid for by paying for the internet itself; subscriptions to ISPs, building out infrastructure, etc. Today coporations want you to pay for the internet AND pay for the crappy content too, and they want to have you pay in order to receive the ads since they're not reimbursing you for all those unnecessary downloads. Even worse on a mobile phone as you can incur big penalties if you use more data than your plan allows, so the ads slow the network and drain your wallet.
At which point someone on slashdot pops in and says "you're all a bunch of worthless freeloaders, if you want to look at my glorious blog about hamster farming then you have to look at these ads about Buicks so that I can buy a better microphone for my hamster podcast."
It will kill the internet as we know it.
Somewhat of an overstatement, but I suppose it will bring about changes.
Only those entities with money will be able to post any content.
Dead wrong. I pay $120 a year for my site hosting and $10 a year for the domain. You can do it for free actually, I just like having big mysql databases and cron jobs.
Smaller sites like /. may survive on subscriptions, but many will not. If you think the coroprtization of the internet is bad now...
No, sites will move toward self-hosted ads and rely less on ad networks. It will probably give rise to a new industry of ad brokering for smaller sites unable to find their own advertisers, replacing the current ad+malware delivery networks.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's more than that.
Why the fuck should we accept being constantly tracked by dozens of analytic companies as a price of using the web?
When there's 15 or 20 trackers in addition to ads in every page, the only reasonable response is to block the hell out of all of this crap.
It's none of score card research's fucking business what sites I visit. Nor it it Facebook's business. Nor is it any of the dozens of other companies I've blocked with privacy extensions.
This idea that self entitled corporations are entitled to all of this information about us is complete bullshit.
In the real world it would be like a retailer implanting a tracking chip in you when you walked in the store.
I don't care about anybody's damned analytics. And as much as I can, I'll block everything which isn't the content I'm there to see.
The revenue model isn't my damned problem. My privacy is.
And I'm not giving that away to some asshole marketer who wants to optimize his synergies.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
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.
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.
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.