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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
I DO mind ads. Noifs and buts. I understand why they exist, yet I do not want to see them. A bit like syphilis. So I try to avoid them as much as possible with any means possible.
I did not ask for them. I do not like them. I do not want them.
I do not want the video ads. I do not want the GIF ads. I do not want the static ads. I do not want the text ads. And as always here a quote from Banksy who says it way much better than I can:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply youâ(TM)re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. Itâ(TM)s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially donâ(TM)t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, donâ(TM)t even start asking for theirs.
â" Banksy
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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.
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.