Adblock Plus Maker Seeks Deal With Ad Industry Players (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader writes with Yahoo's report that the makers of Adblock Plus are "looking to reach out to advertisers and identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net." That involves convincing advertisers to conform to the company's own guidelines for advertising, or an alternative path much disliked by some of the software's users — to pay the company to ignore ads that don't meet those guidelines. From the article: Big websites can pay a fee not to be blocked. And it is these proceeds that finance the Cologne-based company and its 49-strong workforce. While Google and Amazon have paid up, others refuse. Axel Springer, which publishers Germany's best-selling daily Bild, accuses [Adblock Plus maker] Eyeo of racketeering. "We believe Eyeo's business model is against the law," a spokesman for Springer told AFP. "Clearly, Eyeo's primary aim is to get its hands on a share of the advertising revenues." Ultimately, such practices posed a threat to the professional journalism on the web, he suggested, an argument Eyeo rejects.

Comments

No such thing

[nospam007]

"identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net."

That will be hard to find since such a thing does not exist.

Re:No such thing

[Teun]

For me that's similar to what a printed publication does, there it's on the same sheet of paper, on the web it's presented by the same server.
The moment an ad turns into a tracking device there are good reasons to block it.

Re:No such thing

[Anrego]

Meh, if it:

- Stays quietly off to the side somewhere
- Clearly distinguishable as an ad
- Doesn't slow down page load time
- Isn't a scam
- Preferrably doesn't do an excessive amount of tracking

It's acceptable in my books.

That said, the adblock guys are about to blow their own foot off. Nothing they do is that complicated, there are already workable alternatives.. the only reason they are so popular is that they've "just worked" for the longest, but it won't take much of this crap before they see their entire userbase migrate to something else.

Re: No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish them luck. There are no beneficial deals to be made with the likes of advertisers and marketers.

Re:No such thing

[AmiMoJo]

- No tracking
- No animation
- No sound
- No Javascript
- No plugins / Flash
- No third party hosts
- No delays >10ms to auction the ad
- Max 10Kb of data
- No adult content unless its an adult site
- No obfuscated links
- No more than 10% of the page area
- No mixing ads and content, ads must be clearly separated and identified
- No overlays
- No interstitials

In addition, AdBlock must enforce these rules in the plug-in, i.e. whitelisted ads get overriden if it detects they contain scripts or >10kb of data or make the page take >50ms extra to load.

Re:No such thing

[amiga3D]

I think most people are okay with ads. The shit that assaults your computer isn't advertising. I've been using adblock for a while now. So long that when I recently did a fresh install of Linux on an old laptop I picked up I forgot to set up adblock on Firefox. I was stunned at how aggressive ads are now. Unbelievable.

Re:No such thing

[justthinkit]

Most of what I said in another thread:

Ads are something no user wants, but every advertiser and content-hoster wants. Bottom line is ads will always be around in one form or another. And they will always be evolving and changing.

You can't get rid of them (permanently everywhere that is), and you do want some content to survive (e.g. Slashdot), so maybe an ad vetting/voting/whitelisting system has some merit.

Regarding ad voting, the potential for abuse of this is high (i.e. people hating every ad). One solution would be that your votes are always relative. In other words, do you like this ad more or less than other ads. This way some ads will always bubble to the top. And advertisers can then study/learn from those ads, and/or choose to run those ads more. And when they do that, people grow tired of those ads. So they bubble down the list and force new ads to appear.

This may not sound that great, but right now I am staring at sites that pad with screen after screen of white space, or force gigantic menus to overwrite content or display zero content when I try to ad-block them (via no JS and hosts anyway). Point is that we are already in the middle of an arms race.

People's browsers could be set for what they will allow through -- Javascript, or ad size, etc. Advertisers could pay according to how high up the ad rankings they want their ad to run -- "Top 10%", "Everyone". To reach everyone, your ad would cost more, and tend to be the best behaved.

Re:No such thing

[110010001000]

Amazingly the Internet existed before there was advertising on it. I know, right? Amazing!

Re:No such thing

[wbr1]

I have already switched and am pushing uBlock Origin as an alternative to my customers. Having a ruleset for allowing non-intrusive ads is one thing. Taking shakedown money to allow big players through is another and unacceptable.

Re:No such thing

[GuB-42]

That's with such reasoning like that things are unlikely to go forward.
One one side there are advertisers who seem to think that a good way to do business is to make sure that you only get ads and not what you initially came for, and the other side won't tolerate a single monetized pixel.
Yes, there are such things as acceptable ads, but it is not something that can be settled with brains switched off.
For example, are appeal to donation by charities acceptable? is self-promotion acceptable? is mentioning a friend's business in a blog post acceptable? is classified advertising (craigslist-style) acceptable? What is more tolerable for you : a small google text ad powered at the bottom of a page or an aggressive appeal to donation popup, Wikipedia-style, why? If both are unacceptable, how about a small text appeal to donation at the bottom of a page? And how about tracking? Is all tracking unacceptable, even if it is unrelated to ads? what about A/B testing? And opt-in tracking? Is there a difference if content, ads, tracking, whatever comes from a third party rather than a first party? What if the first party is Google?

Re:No such thing

[Xicor]

i disagree. i am totally fine with static banner ads and in page ads. the only reason i use adblock is to block all of the ads that do full screen popups, malware ads and video ads.

Re:No such thing

[Anrego]

I'm generally fine with high level tracking that can't easily be tied to an actual person.

That said, there's no way to really audit how the dots are being connected, what's being stored, and with whom, so _practically_ speaking, I agree you pretty much do have to ban tracking in general.

Re:No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

All of that sounds reasonable and feasible, except for the "No Tracking" bit. The moment a 3rd party ad is rendered they have some information about you. At the very least, this is the URL of the site you're visiting, which may sound harmless enough, but it also usually carries information about your search terms (i.e. in Google) or your shopping habits (i.e. categories you're browsing on Amazon). And in the case of large ad networks which serve ads on most sites that you visit - well, they get a pretty detailed picture of what you do online.

So I'm all for the idea of less invasive ads, but if you want to ensure privacy and security you can only really get that by blocking indiscriminately.

Re:No such thing

[danbob999]

Those who want to support these web sites are free not to block their ads.

Re:No such thing

[110010001000]

Wow. You guys are ignorant of recent history: there was an Internet even before BBS, Prodigy and AOL. They weren't the Internet. Amazingly the Internet existed before Facebook! Or Ads!

Re:No such thing

[110010001000]

Yes there was. You were just ignorant of its existence.

Re:No such thing

[swb]

Maybe a generation change will fix this.

I worked at an ad agency at the dawn of the commercial Internet. The people on the advertising side of the business had all kinds of problems adapting.

The print people wanted it to be another print medium and were frustrated by their lack of layout control and font selection. Their tool was giant images with click regions because they could basically export an Illustrator file as a graphic, so you'd end up with sites that were just a giant collection of images with click regions that led you to more images with more click regions.

The TV people treated it like another TV set, at first with just inserted videos, next with semi-interactive Flash animations that still had all the intelligence of a one-way TV commercial.

Perhaps in the not-too-distant future the people who didn't grow up on standard, commercial television or tweaking print layouts down to the pixel AND who came of age frustrated by overlays, popups, interstitials and understand ad blocking will become ascendant and stop imposing old thinking on the web.

Re:No such thing

[ceoyoyo]

Sure there is. I remember when Google entered the advertising business. Their whole schtick was that they only presented small text ads, well identified as such. They were fast, unobtrusive, and often useful.

Then Doubleclick bought Google for negative whateverbillionty dollars.

Re:No such thing

[AmiMoJo]

Advertisers are moving to product and story placement now. Whole articles that are basically ads. Fake reviews. The next level of ad-blocking is to filter that crap out too.

Re:No such thing

[ceoyoyo]

It's called the free(ish) market. Websites that have compelling content will attract viewers who are either willing to suffer ads or fork over a usage fee or donation. Sites that don't, won't. If sites people like start dying, they'll fork over some cash to save them.

Re:No such thing

[laurencetux]

okay first off i aggressively block ads (i install some sort of adblock within the first 30 seconds of setting up any browser).

okay now for an ad network to be acceptable to me (and content with embedded ads acceptable to me)

1 80 percent of the content of the page should be the requested content (90% of the above the fold content should be what was requested)

2 articles should be separated into pages if and only if the content is more than will fit on a typed (reasonable font) A4 page with half inch margins and then should be only broken down into sections of that size

3 on a video page NO VIDEOS OTHER THAN THE REQUESTED VIDEO AND NOTHING SHOULD AUTOPLAY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES (allowances should be made for pages that are video directories ie YouTube)

4 all scripts should be scanned for malware and any client that provides a malware asset package should be fined not less than 2X the cost of the campaign (or permanently banned)

5 any attempt to disguise an ad as content or a system dialog should result in a permanent ban

Re:No such thing

[Anrego]

Unfortunately there is nothing stopping the website owner from tracking this information and reporting it back to the ad provider, acting mainly as a proxy (so you access http://yourfavouritesite/somea... and they just make a request on their end to http://eviladcompany/?all_that... and serve up the results).

The one thing it would make harder is cross-site tracking, but again, nothing stopping each site from serving up their own cookie, tying it to the generic ad companies id, and forwarding it to them (although that would require significantly more energy and at least be somewhat detectable unless done really well).

Re:No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

You basically eliminated everything.
- No Tracking (Can't be done otherwise you would get the same ad repeatedly, and is necessary for context-awareness)
- No Animation (Can be done, but I think you meant "no VIDEO" ads on non-video content)
- No Sound (It violates every legitimate ad network to do this already)
- No Javascript (Impossible, otherwise you will see the ads burned into the content of the website, which is actually worse, because it's hard to be context-aware this way, do you really want to see ads for condoms on childrens comics?)
- No Plugins (Already being done)
- No third party hosts (Can't be done unless every site direct-sells the ads, which like above with the No Tracking and No Javascript, harms the user experience more than it improves it. Nobody buys directly from content publishers because campaigns have set dates to run, and it's faster for them to buy from an ad exchange and specify the conditions for the ad to be shown. Also many publishers have set it and forget it ad invocation code, so they don't want to manage the ads because it takes time away from producing content.)
- No delays (Only bad ad networks are slow, unfortunately you sometimes have to chain up to 10 ad networks to get a paying ad, and that is why some sites have slow ads, because the highest paying ad network has no inventory, so it goes to the next, with Google usually being at the end because Google adsense is not worth using if there is anything else.)
- No Adult content (You do realize that adult content ads only appear on sites that have approved it right? It's otherwise a violation of the ad networks terms and conditions to have ads on adult sites, and only adult sites run garbage ad networks that show adult ads.)
- No obfuscated links (The entire reason that happens is because of generic ad blocking.)
- No more than 10% of the page area (That is the publisher's fault, many newspaper sites dilute the value of their advertisements by having more than 3 ad units)
- No mixing ads and content (It violates ad networks rules to "not have ads clearly look like ads", and in fact the only sites that suffer from this are sites that offer downloads of something to begin with.)
- No Overlays (These are annoying and you'd think that "pop-ups" from the X-10 era would have been a lesson in not doing this)
- No interstitials (These are really only meant for linear content, eg you visit a site, and on the third page or so, you see this ad. It's not meant to be the first thing you see because it sends the user away from the publisher.)

Adblock is pretty much a garbage plugin, everyone knows how to defeat it easily and make users turn it off , and that's by using it's own ad blocking rules against it. Put the entire content in a css container called "ad" and you'll be forced to turn off ad block to view the site.

Re:No such thing

[locofungus]

The answer is for ads to be sufficiently inobtrusive that the majority of users don't bother blocking ads.

The fundamental issue is a tragedy of the commons. Advertisers are fighting each other for the same eyeballs with more and more intrusive and processor and network demanding ads. The web is becoming almost unusable - especially on older hardware - unless you block ads.

The reason the majority of people have installed adblockers is because they want to use the internet, not because they want to block ads, stop tracking or anything else like that the typical slashdotter might care about.

While people NEED adblockers, people will be using them. If there's not a need then people won't use them any more.

Re:No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Malware is 100% due to:
a) User behavior - eg visiting 4chan, torrent and porn sites because the malware pushers know these sites will accept everything, no legitimate product wants to be associated with piracy.
b) Blocking higher paying ads - eg if you block safe ad networks like google, you end up with malware being pushed on publishers who have "maximum fill" set.
c) Third party ad network has been hacked - which happens if they are still using openx and not revive ad server.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

Sure, but the vast majority of it was content linked on student homepages on University systems. Perhaps you want to go back to that - we here at Slashdot still embrace the convention. The signal to noise was damn near infinity:1 for sure. But someone was still footing the bill - in this case, tuition.

But now that anyone can get a presence online without going to a university, someone still has to pay for servers and/or bandwidth (and frankly 'time' has worth, too). Some dude blogging about cats on some $5 shared hosting can pay that out of pocket. But there's more to do on the internet than create blogs, and sometimes those websites become popular. When out-of-pocket is no longer viable, you have two options for continuing to fund the endeavor: direct payments (whether it be donations, one-time payments, or subscriptions), or ads.

I'm curious if the rise of the "App Store" might have changed some people's minds on direct-payment so that it's a little more viable, but that would only be extremely recently. I'd say at least 70% of the non-product internet survives on advertising in some form. And really, websites for products (e.g. Coke, Apple, etc) ARE advertising by nature. So I don't understand what it is you want that you think could actually be viable.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

Web hosting is a few bucks a month. If you're not willing to spend a few bucks a month on a web site, then maybe that web site isn't worth existing.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

When out-of-pocket is no longer viable, you have two options for continuing to fund the endeavor: direct payments (whether it be donations, one-time payments, or subscriptions), or ads.

You're right. Then whoever is running the web site can sell ads and put them on their web site! If a web site has more traffic than a $5/month hosting package can handle, then they can certainly afford to go out and sell advertisements. That's a fuckton of traffic.

Re:No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Interstitial webpage, a web page that is displayed before an expected content page, often to display advertisements, confirm the user's age, or promote the installation of an app on a mobile device
Other uses[edit]

Re:No such thing

[Smigh]

Revenue of any kind incentivizes content creators. Obviously the internet has grown exponentially since the time there was no advertisement, and obviously being able to make money to produce content had something to do with it. I find it hard to believe you'd disagree with this.

Re:No such thing

[Pascoea]

That Internet connection isn't going to do you any good if there is nothing useful on the other end.

Re:No such thing

[danbob999]

Well if there was no good free search engine left I may want to pay for Google. I doubt they make anything close to $5/month from me however. Probably more like a few cents.
Slashdot makes even less, even offering me to disable ads since I am a registered member.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

That's not universal. Not everyone is running a little Wordpress blog. Sometimes people have data processing requirements to provide things like stats or other experiences for a relevant audience.

I used to run a site that at its peak, was costing $1K/month to host because I was co-lo'ing a dozen servers. That's not to say it couldn't have been lower if I really needed to (I had some extra servers for testing and failover), but it still wouldn't have come close to "a few bucks a month". Cloud-based providers (at least at the time) would have been triple that, mostly because of the bandwidth requirements (which I was graciously not charged for at my host). Advertising held it up for 5 years, until the "set it and forget it" nature of AdBlock (combined with ad pullback during the last recession) caused it to be unsustainable.

Ignoring the outcome, the simple fact I'm conveying is that it's a dangerous oversimplification to say that hosting is cheap for everyone, or assuming the only content on the web is blog-based. Some sites host video. Some create pictures. Some crunch a bunch of numbers to let you play Fantasy Football or whatever folks are into now. They're all equally useful to their own audiences.

Re:No such thing

[Your.Master]

So first, malware is not 100% due to those, but a good percent.

Second...your point c is what everybody is afraid of. Enumerating it doesn't make it go away.

Re:No such thing

[swb]

There seems to be some outer limit to this, at least at more legitimate sites because I see a lot of fake articles labeled as "sponsored content". Maybe I'm dreaming this, but didn't the commerce department make some noise about needing to label sponsored content as sponsored content? Or is this something that more legitimate news sites are doing to not totally alienate their readers?

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

What do you mean "the site owner can sell ads" - you mean ad space? Because that's what we're already talking about. That's the stuff that people are blocking. I don't understand.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

No, I don't think it's an oversimplification. If you were paying $1K/month to host, then you were running a business, which is fine. Why didn't you go sell some ads? That's a ton of money in hosting, so that's a ton of traffic. It would have made financial sense to spend some resources on selling ads, instead of taking 5 seconds to plug in some HTML from some ad network, don't you think?

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

Sell it and host their own ads. Like print publications have been doing for hundreds (thousands?) of years. If you have thousands of people visiting a web site a day, it's worth it, financially, to hire a salesperson, and sell some ads, and put those ads on your web site. Instead, modern websites say, "Waaah, we don't want to spend money on ad salespeople. We'd rather spend 10 seconds to paste in some HTML from some ad network and let them pay us." I don't think that this is rocket science.

I block every ad. Any web site that can't figure this out can die, and I really don't care. Slashdot is getting sold every three weeks these days, so it's value is dwindling fast, and that's probably because 90% of it's visitors are using ad blockers. If whoever owns it today doesn't figure this out, oh, well.

Re:No such thing

[Pascoea]

How many of the websites you visit every day do you figure run on a $5 web host? The couple of sites I maintain on a $10 host are probably of exactly zero value to you, or the vast majority of the world for that matter. Those are not the kinds of sites we are talking about now, are we?

Re:No such thing

[AmiMoJo]

It depends on the legal jurisdiction. In the UK, for example, they are supposed to be labelled but it's a voluntary code and the line between "took journalist to lunch" and "paid for the article" is pretty fuzzy.

Re:No such thing

[Anrego]

I'm largely of this mindset, but as I said in an earlier comment somewhere, it's pretty hard to know what's being tracked or passed along on the server side. Server side tracking is more difficult than tracking that largely relies on client side mechanisms, but only just, and if pushback continues I think that's what we're going to see.

I for one would love to see more containerization on the browser side (prevent those facebook cookies from being sent unless you're actually on facebook) to become the norm, but unfortunately the rise of content distribution networks makes it hard to do this generically without breaking all the things, and a lot of people actually like the whole "oh, it knows my facebook, cool!" thing.

Re:No such thing

[Rob Y.]

They kind of have to do this. As mobile takes over, AdBlock is less and less prevalent - and the web is less and less usable. It's potentially interesting that Google has signed on to this. Whether you love or hate them, it'd be really nice if Chrome on Android supported AdBlock Plus. And Apple's support for ad blockers on iOS, is definitely a shot across Google's bow that they're going to have to address. Google's ads are probably as close to the 'acceptable ads' standards as any - basically because their site is funded by getting you to click ads - not simply getting you to see them. And, of course, by the very nature of the services they offer, they're 'tracking' you anyway - though not directly on behalf of their advertisers (don't get me started...).

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

I was not running a business. You're oversimplifying again. It was a hobby that happened to fill a need in the community I served.

I still don't understand what the hell you're going on about "selling ads" - You mean buying ads for traffic to my site? I did for a while, but it was expensive and didn't give me the result I wanted - I was in a community where it was all word of mouth.

If you're talking about selling ad space, then obviously I already was. That's why I had advertisements on the site. They came from an ad network because they helped me reach other advertisers that I absolutely could not on my own. I'll also note that I never had a security problem with that ad network.

Re:No such thing

[Merk42]

No, I don't think it's an oversimplification. If you were paying $1K/month to host, then you were running a business, which is fine. Why didn't you go sell some ads? That's a ton of money in hosting, so that's a ton of traffic. It would have made financial sense to spend some resources on selling ads, instead of taking 5 seconds to plug in some HTML from some ad network, don't you think?

What do you mean by "selling ads" (instead of using an ad network)?

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

Well, I am. But any site that gets more traffic than can be handled by a $10/month host can also afford to sell some of their own ads. That's my point. Web sites that are that large/popular need to call advertisers, ask them to advertise, create ads, and put them on their web sites. Same thing that's been happening in print for hundreds (thousands?) of years. Ad networks are a cheap shortcut that don't work as well as people hoped they would.

Re:No such thing

[lactose99]

It would be easier to find a unicorn in the wild

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

$1K/month to serve a community need is an outlier. If you somehow had to pay that without having tens of thousands visitors a day, then I don't know what you're talking about.

If you had tens of thousands of visitors a day, then it would have behooved you to sell your own ads. That means:
1. Call big company that may be interested in advertising on your web site.
2. Tell them that this many people will see an ad for them if they pay you $$ per month.
3. You write HTML (with your fingers) that say, "Buy something from this company", and put it on your web pages.

What you did:
1. Copy-Paste "http://someshittyadnetwork.com/;asdiofulewrn.,n321412341324oip????&&&&"

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

"Selling ads". What the print industry (and TV and radio) have been doing for centuries. Calling advertisers. Asking them for money in exchange for advertising their goods/services. Putting ads on your web site.

Re:No such thing

[Pascoea]

The entire conversation this thread is based on is: "How do you expect to run a site without ad revenue?" Your retort to "websites aren't cheap to run" is "go sell some ads"? I can't say I follow the logic.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

Ahhh, now I see the disconnect. Yeah, so online ads are nothing like print media, except the concept that you're selling 'real estate' for people to get their message out.

In the beginning, online ad tracking was to prevent fraud. This is also why they're served from the ad network and not the site itself. Otherwise, It would be trivial for me to say "Oh, man.. this month I had 4 million unique impressions!" when only four people ever visited the site. Has it gone way too far? Absolutely. The Ad industry greatly needs to change; there's no denying that. But it will always be here, as long as people are unwilling to directly pay for every single thing they consume.

"Worth it financially to hire a salesperson".. EL OH EL. I was a broke 24-year old with an unrelated full-time job that accidentally created something that blew up online. I absolutely did not have the resources to 'hire' anyone. The internet is a medium where traditional methods of business does not always apply. You cannot shoehorn your personal method of "how things should work", because it can turn on a dime.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

Right, sell ads. Dropping in an ad network blob of HTML is not selling ads. SELL ADS. I don't know how to make it any clearer in English or any other language.

Re:No such thing

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I'm fine with them delaying as long as they like to auction the ad, as long as that delay time is made before they start serving any content. Note, Google and other ranking algorithms count time to first byte in the quality of a site.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

You're right, that fraud was possible, but less so than with TV or Radio or Print. Hell, I spend $$ on radio advertising, even that I have zero way to validate how many people are hearing those radio broadcasts. Advertisers will pay for unvalidated advertising.

If you had something that accidentally blew up on line, then you could have picked up a phone, called a big company that did something related to what this site was about, and ask them to advertise. That's how business works. You can't expect to sustain something that popular with spending zero effort on bringing in some kind of revenue. By using an ad network, that's what you're doing, and that's completely unsustainable. You're producing a service that a LOT of people are consuming, but you're spending zero effort to bring in any income from your work.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

I did have tens of thousands of visitors. That's why I had ad space. I used ad networks because I did not have the resources (including time, thankyouverymuch) to track down every company, pitch them, and implement their unique tags (and they all had different ad tags to verify traffic). Because the ad network could pitch campaigns as a group (my site, plus a few other sites), we got access to companies I wouldn't have been able to approach on my own. In addition, about 35% of my traffic was outside the US. Unfortunately, advertising is regional, so an ad network helped a) fill impressions for international traffic, and b) handled the payments.

You're also assuming that I used some generic ad network. For much of the life of my site, I was using a network that specifically catered to media and gaming-related websites. This helped to get and serve relevant ads, and I had a higher degree of security because they weren't one of those mass-market networks who just serve whatever, with no oversight.

You continue with these dangerous assumptions that make me feel you're not really interested in learning how the real (virtual) world actually works. I'm really not as much of an outlier as you think.

Re: No such thing

[shitzu]

might insuggedt requestpolicy into your list of anti-tracking measures. It blocks all cross-site requests, be it css, script or image unless you explicitly allow it. It seems to get rid of most ads and tracking wihtout much effort from me.

Re:No such thing

[I'm New Around Here]

Good shooting there. He gave you plenty of targets, and you hit each one square in the center.

Someone mod this one up +4.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

The problem is that you seem to think that the "virtual" world somehow is different than the "real" world. It isn't. I know lots of people who listen to NPR and very few people who listen to "regular" radio. Why? Partially, because they don't have screaming ads about gold scams and dick hardening pills. It's the same thing.

Tens of thousands of visitors should mean "take some time to earn money from this or I'm going to run out of money really fast." You didn't, and it fell over. I'm sorry. Your'e continuing to insist that what you did was the correct answer, when it obviously didn't work. If you can't learn from your own mistakes...

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

"Selling ads" does not make logical sense. What you mean to say is selling ad space. Content owners sell ad space - whether they sell them to ad networks, or to companies direct, you're selling SPACE. Virtual (or actual, in the case of print media) Real-estate.

Re:No such thing

[Pascoea]

"identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net." That will be hard to find since such a thing does not exist

So how do you pay for nearly everything on the Internet then? There are very few websites that operate with zero ad revenue.

Maybe my English isn't very good, after all it is Monday, maybe I'm a little slow. So you are saying that "manually" generating revenue from advertising is somehow different than "automatically" generating revenue from advertising? I realize the process is different, knocking on doors and calling people vs dropping some code in your page that links to someone who is doing the door knocking and phone calling, but the end result is still the same. There is still an advertisement on your website.

The root of this conversation is "There is no acceptable form of advertising on the net". By any normal logic, the answer to "how do you fund a website when advertising is unacceptable" can't be "put ads on the site"

Re:No such thing

[AmiMoJo]

The best advertising is unbiased reviews and recommendations. Unfortunately for most advertisers you need your product to be good to get those, so to sell that piece of shit you either have to manufacture some astroturf or rely on traditional ads that everyone is trying to block.

Tesla don't seem to advertise much (maybe they do in the US, I wouldn't know) but their reputation and the quality of their product is more than enough to make up for that. Ford, on the other hand, keep producing crap so have to turn it into some kind of lifestyle bullshit to sell it.

Re:No such thing

[I'm New Around Here]

When I show people the difference between using Internet Explorer and either Firefox or Chrome, adblocking is one of the items I mention. I then go to a common webpage we visit a lot, the Internet Movie DataBase at www.imdb.com.

In IE, there is usually a full scene behind the content area, plus ads along the right side of the content area. Then I show them the same page with FF/Chrome adblocking, and there is a nice clean website.

Even people who are just online to share email and Facebook with their families/friends can see the difference in how this affects their online experience. They just have to be shown.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

I've thought of malware stipulations before and intend on testing one if/when the next time I deal with an ad network.

But good luck telling someone you're going to charge them an ad impression for an unserved ad just because it didn't load in a specific amount of time; the very nature of the internet doesn't allow for that kind of guarantee.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

You're making an awful lot of assumptions to what I did or didn't do, or how much effort I exerted.
An ad network is absolutely not inherently unsustainable.

Please know what you're talking about before making blanket statements.

Re:No such thing

[TangoMargarine]

Interstitial webpage, a web page that is displayed before an expected content page

"Inter" and "before" are fundamentally incompatible. Either what they really mean is "pre-stitial", or they're abusing the English language.

(Well, like everyone else then)

Re:No such thing

[Grishnakh]

Whether you love or hate them, it'd be really nice if Chrome on Android supported AdBlock Plus.

Why? ABP is garbage, I don't want it on my phone. We already have ad-blocking on phones anyway: install Firefox for Android, and then install uBlock Origin. Works great. No ads at all, including so-called "acceptable ads".

Re:No such thing

[Grishnakh]

No, there's no solution.

The advertisers had their chance, and they completely blew it. In fact, they've been blowing it for almost two decades now! So no, there are no "acceptable ads" as far as I'm concerned, except maybe Google's little text-only targeted ads that they used to do to the right of their search results.

These days, the only sane answer is to block ALL ads. If the advertisers don't like that, then they only have themselves to blame.

Re:No such thing

[Merk42]

So, the very thing people are blocking? You don't honestly think that just because it wouldn't come from an "ad network" that people wouldn't still block it, do you?

Re:No such thing

[Grishnakh]

I was there too, and you're full of shit. Yes, lots of stuff was on university-hosted websites, and it was just fine, even if it wasn't pretty by today's standards. The content is what's valuable anyway. Most of the ad-supported media we have now is garbage: just look at how extremely-biased "journalism" sites like Breitbart.com have polarized politics so much in the past 15 years. The things that are different now, and actually valuable, are 1) forums like this one (well, not this particular one so much any more, it's really gone down the tubes) where people can talk about things pertaining to particular topics. With today's cheap hosting and easily-available forum software, it's not that hard or expensive to set up. SoylentNews.com works just fine with donations and no ads. 2) Internet retailers like Amazon.com: these sites don't need advertising, they're selling you stuff on their own pages which you've sought out willingly, frequently using a search engine. And of course there's the search engines; Google used to support itself just fine with small, text-based ads next to the search results, which bothered only really anal people. We'd all be better off if we went back to those days.

Re:No such thing

[Grishnakh]

I'm sorry, I think you're full of it. I see very little useful content on the internet that really needs to be funded by ads.

You mention websites for products: in a completely ad-blocked, ad-free internet, these would still be around. They're "advertising" technically, but that's not what we're talking about here with ad-blocking. If I want to learn about some new car, I can go to the carmaker's website and see their glitzy pictures and specs and such. As long as they're not running tracking scripts, no sane person has a problem with that: I went there to learn about the car. That's not ad-supported content, that's paid for by people buying the car.

There's also internet sellers like Amazon. They don't need advertising either: you go to the site to buy stuff there. They have no need to advertise to you (except to get you to buy other stuff on that same site, which isn't the same; we're talking about 3rd-party ads here).

Then there's content sellers like Netflix and Amazon Video. They don't need advertising either, you happily pay a monthly fee to watch their streaming video.

Sites like SoylentNews.com prove that forums can survive on donations instead of ads. Dating sites like OKCupid have both ads and subscriptions; I don't know the actual numbers, but I imagine they do pretty well with the subscriptions.

I do a fair amount of stuff with Meetup.com groups. AFAICT, there's no ads there (of course, I use UO so I'm not sure), but they seem to make all their money by charging groups an annual fee for hosting their group page there. The group organizers either pay this personally (it's only $100-200/year), or charge membership fees (either monthly or per-event) to the group members to cover it.

Small sites can easily be self-funded or funded by donations. When it's only $5/month for a small site, it doesn't take a rich person to have their own website.

It's entirely possible to have an internet without third-party ads. The biggest casualty would be the "journalism" sites.

Re:No such thing

[clodney]

If you had tens of thousands of visitors a day, then it would have behooved you to sell your own ads. That means:

1. Call big company that may be interested in advertising on your web site.

At which point big company says that "We do all of our online advertising via -insert ad network here-. Contact them at this number..."

Re:No such thing

[Grishnakh]

Just off the top of my head, lots of Linux distributions, the BSDs, the GNU Project, the FSF, and so on have ad-free pages. If you don't consider at least some of those things useful, you might be on the wrong site.

Actually, I think you're on the wrong site, because much of the readership here does not consider those things valuable. Most of the real nerds have left this dried-up husk of a website for greener pastures, and it's full of Microsoft fans and shills now.

Re:No such thing

[ewibble]

Tell that to the people post for free on facebook, twitter, or youtube, update wikipedia (I know some get paid but most do it for free), the content creators. The ad revenue goes to funding the people who serve the content not the creators, servers are not free to maintain.

I find that the internet is now full of more irrelevant junk than it was, however might be because there is of my field of interest.

Re:No such thing

[Grishnakh]

Are you willing to fork over $5/month/site to access Slashdot?

Hell no, this site sucks. If they start charging money, I'll find something else to do with my free time. Reddit doesn't charge anything and doesn't seem to have any ads.

Re:No such thing

[tepples]

No Javascript (Impossible, otherwise you will see the ads burned into the content of the website, which is actually worse, because it's hard to be context-aware this way, do you really want to see ads for condoms on childrens comics?)

Then be aware of the context of the page on which the advertisement appears, and be unaware of the viewer's context.

Nobody buys directly from content publishers because campaigns have set dates to run

Then publishers ought to introduce tools to let an advertiser choose the start and end of each campaign, so that an advertiser can buy a particular share of a particular ad unit on a "set it and forget it" basis.

No interstitials (These are really only meant for linear content, eg you visit a site, and on the third page or so, you see this ad. It's not meant to be the first thing you see because it sends the user away from the publisher.)

The interstitial is alive and well.

Re:No such thing

[tepples]

It's an interstitial between a document A containing a hyperlink and the document B to which the hyperlink refers.

Re:No such thing

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

You know, "acceptable ads" is a gateway drug. One thing leads to the next and soon it is going to be used as groundwork for laws banning ad blocking that doesn't adhere to the "acceptable ads" policies established together with the advertisement industry.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

Well, 'useful' to you may or may not be 'useful' to others.

I agree that those who directly sell products would still be around. I said exactly as much. But it doesn't make them 'not ads'.

That's great that SoylentNews can survive on donations. It looks like they require $6K/yr? ($3K per 6 months? Although the previous 6/mo was only $2K.. so not sure what it is, long-term). Either way, I'm admittedly very impressed they can consistently make that.

But you're forgetting YouTube (pre-Google - without ads, they wouldn't have been around for Google to buy). Imgur. Reddit. Twitch (pre-whoeverthefuckownsthem now). Similarly, there are several dozen websites related to gaming (that aren't exclusively "journalism") I can rattle off that exist solely on ads. Even some of the oldschool sites I visited in my youth like Stileproject (before it jumped the shark) or SomethingAwful, which are entertainment and not "journalism", would never have lasted long without advertising revenue. Hell, even TPB has ads, because they have costs.

There are several-hundred million active domains of varying success. The internet doesn't exist solely on websites you know about.

Re:No such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the legal jurisdiction. In the UK, for example, they are supposed to be labelled but it's a voluntary code and the line between "took journalist to lunch" and "paid for the article" is pretty fuzzy.

Hahahahaha! No way is that ever implemented. With web sites being offshore, they're all skirting around this. Pick and daily rag or broadsheet on any day, it'll take you less than five minutes to find the fake story promoting a products. Anything with latest research in the heading is a massive clue.

The problem is no one cares about "news." They all way reactionary crap, celeb' cleavage and bum pics, with bickering forums/comment section. That's the business model for "news" today. Basically the same as radio and TV have been doing for decades with their "call us, tell us what you reckon," crap.

Re:No such thing

[sciengin]

They are actually required by law to do this as of recently (end of 214).
Before that 'news sites' would shove paid articles down your throat without even hinting that they were actually ads.
However the FTC updated its guidelines.

Funny enough they did so at the insistence of an email writing campaign by Gamergate who were fed up with the behaviour of Gawker and its subsites.
The FTC even confirmed this explicitly in several emails that were posted on reddits /kotakuInAction/ board.

Who knows, maybe writing to them en masse will get them to limit cross-site tracking of users next.

Re:No such thing

[nospam007]

" The next level of ad-blocking is to filter that crap out too."

I'd prefer a PeopleBlock, where I can enter names like Donald Trump, Kardashian, etc and never see anything of that.

Re:No such thing

[Smigh]

Sure, I also do some things for free, but for the most part I need some form of revenue because 1) I have bills to pay, and 2) being paid is one hell of an incentive. Before advertisement (which, btw, if you mean that literally then we'd be talking about an Internet fetus) you were much more limited in the business models you could use to justify investing in producing content on the Internet. Youtube is a good example of that; I regularly watch channels that manage to produce content full-time due to the magic of ad revenue, even with the miserable share they get. Also, without ads, good luck running millions of servers and all that bandwidth without a paywall.

Re: No such thing

[Morgon]

In theory, ads aren't necessary to survive, this is true. But money is still required to create and sustain these websites, and in practice, direct subscription payment has not always proven successful. Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.

I still maintain that it benefit Pre-Google YouTube to have ads over subscriptions. The entire idea of YouTube was to quickly get videos up and out to the world. Putting that behind a paywall, especially back before it had the clout it does now, would have been suicide at the time.

Re:No such thing

[tepples]

Who pays SlashdotMedia's ISP?

Re:No such thing

[Grishnakh]

No, Tesla doesn't advertise much here in the US either. If you sign up for their emailing list, they'll email you once in a blue moon to come in and try their newest model or something like that, but that's about it. A company with product so highly in-demand doesn't need to waste money advertising.

Re:No such thing

[justthinkit]

Sure you can.

When the viewer blocks all ads, the content provider loses 100%...and this is 100% non-viable in the long term.

BTW, when Slashdot had their subscriptions, few bought them. I investigated, and found nothing I wanted to buy. Price was not an issue. Structure of the subscription was.

Re:No such thing

[justthinkit]

As soon as you throw out "80%...90%...allscripts...any attempt", you have missed the point. You are trying to order advertisers around. This has zero chance for success -- for you, and especially for advertisers.

Like it or not, you are in a three-way, and there simply has to be something for everyone.

Re:No such thing

[justthinkit]

If you give people the ability to vote on if an comment is good or not, all it does is punish all but the most popular (and highest reward) comments (Eg a WoW comment might be favored over a comment for toothpaste, which might be favored over StartsWithABang's blog).

Welcome to Slashdot.

Clearly, the ad system should be modelled after the comment/moderation system. With subscriptions allowing a user to increase their ad karma. Enough bucks, and person #1 get no ads. Some bucks, and some ad voting, works for person #2. Person #3 pays nothing, sees the most ads, but can still vote given ads up or down. Metamoderation happens by tallying up our individual votes. "Sorry, Clearasil, but no one wants to look at your ads any more. Goodbye."

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

How does one block images from a web site that's in your address bar of your browser? You ask the web server for *some* of the images from a web site, but not others? That's my whole point. If I'm going to whatever.com, I'm fine with seeing content from whatever.com, whether it's "content" or advertisements. I'm not OK with seeing content from shittyadnetwork.com.

Re:No such thing

[St.Creed]

This may not sound that great, but right now I am staring at sites that pad with screen after screen of white space, or force gigantic menus to overwrite content or display zero content when I try to ad-block them (via no JS and hosts anyway). Point is that we are already in the middle of an arms race.

Ghostery helped a LOT with that. For example, Forbes listed 3 pages of adservers and trackers, while refusing to load due to "adblocker detected" and with Ghostery I was able to pinpoint the detector, and load just the beacon while skipping the rest of their crap.

Re:No such thing

[KGIII]

For client-side blocking (or just not loading) there's uMatrix and the guy's made a Firefox version now. It's a bit like NoScript and RequestPolicy but a bit more flexible and with a marginally higher learning curve. It's a whitelist approach and I'm pretty fond of it - once I dug into the abilities. It's really good at being what it is - simply client-side filtering by stopping requests.

I liken it to an old-school Windows software firewall, sans presets, and closer to Outpost than to ZoneAlarm. The configuration is not dissimilar to that of an older hardware firewall. The flexibility and default of no-third-party is rather nice. It's available along with his other stuff - uMatrix and HTTP Switchboard. The compute resources used are pretty minimal and I've found that just using uMatrix blocks the ads well enough that I've just used it and no ad blocking software at all.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

Ok, you're right. Your failure to break even with ad networks proves that ad networks work, and that using your own internal ads doesn't.

Re:No such thing

[Coren22]

I can agree with all of that. If they are able to serve me ads of this type, I have no problem with ABP allowing the ads through. They might even not be able to block the ads as they don't come from third parties.

Re:No such thing

[Merk42]

Some ad blocking software also looks for classes, ids, or filepaths with "ad" in the string. So whatever.com/images/ad/buynow.jpg would get blocked as would whatever.com/images/buynow.jpg if it's in an element of class="ad728x90"

Re:No such thing

[KGIII]

I am no expert but I think they call that the Slippery Slope Fallacy. Of course, it's not always a fallacy but it *might* be in this case. Note the use of the word "might" in that sentence.

That said, I've no problems with ads - at all. I block each and every one. If a site requests that I disable ads in order to aid them then I make a decision at that point. If the site's content is valuable enough, to me, then I'll disable it. If not, then I close the tab or hit the back button. To date, not one site's had content that was important enough for me to disable my ad blocker - ever.

Also, err... I used to have dial-up at home. Somewhere around 1995-1998 I used an ad blocking application on Windows. So far, we've been unable (a few of us have tried to find it again - and two other people were able to recollect the same software) remember it or find it. It ran as a proxy (no, it wasn't Proximatron) and had a yellow icon in the corner of the system tray. You could block 'em based on size, wild-card supported domains and subdomains, and I think they had a list of known ad servers that could be updated - except that updating that list (I think) meant you updated the whole application and only so many updates were included in the purchase price and your key only worked for so many new versions. At the time, an update wasn't a .dif or anything but a whole *new* 3-5 MB in size which was quite a pain in the ass.

As an aside and only tangentially related: I know that dial-up users still exist. I can't imagine browsing the web on dial-up these days. Never mind how large a browser update is, how large anti-malware updates are, and how much software has bloated - it's gotta be painfully slow, even with half the crap blocked. uBlock tells me that 24% of the web is blocked for me, as my current average. Note: It works fine. uMatrix has to block even more (it does far more) and I did a test of a few pages a while back and those tests indicated that it was blocking just a bit below 70% of the content. Also, note that too still means the web works just fine for me. Much of what the two block would overlap but not all. So, no... I don't think I'd like dial-up much at all today and certainly not without blocking all that stuff.

Re:No such thing

[Pseudonym]

That will be hard to find since such a thing does not exist.

I don't know about you, but I've gone to some trouble to see some advertisements, mostly those which are works of entertainment in their own right.

When John K or Spike Jonze makes an ad, nobody skips it.

Re:No such thing

[KGIII]

I will not use the "modern web" without an ad blocking utility, at least not for very long. I've yet to have anyone tell me that I could not enable ad-blocking on their computer and I've yet to have someone ask me how to undo it afterwards. You're very much right - you just need to let them see the difference and the difference is often profound, especially on slower connections. It's amazing how much bandwidth is consumed for needless stuff. I don't need all the libraries, scripts, frames with content from other sites, things being pulled in from other sites, images that blink with monkeys to hit, or a button (and scripts) to share on a third party site. I can cut and paste just fine.

As I mentioned above, I've been blocking ads since the mid 1990s. It's hard to imagine that it has been that long but it has. Oh, there were ads before that. I even recall seeing ads in some BBSs (Call This New BBS - lots of Warez, power-users wanted!!!) At some point, I just got frustrated with them all. They slowed things down and got in the way of letting me do what I wanted to do - namely, read. Yes, yes I still read a whole lot of content and am particularly partial to comments made by real people. It's an added bonus if they're intelligent people but that's not always easy to find.

At any rate, I've been turning people on to blocking ads for a lot of years now and it's fun to watch their face as they learn the web can be a whole new experience. It's a bit like teaching somebody that they don't actually have to pay for movies and music - if they don't want to - though that's a bit more ubiquitous today. It's kind of a bit strange to me that there are people who do not block ads by default.

Lest anyone claim that I'm killing web content, I'd like to point out that today (while a bit exceptional but not entirely unknown) I've already donated $50 (25x2) to two sites today. I may not even revisit those sites but the two of them had donation buttons and both of them had information that I was, very specifically, looking for. I was more than happy to support their efforts and to enable them to share with others who have the same needs I had. I should also point out that any site that asks me to disable my ad-blocking, if I want to access their hardware, gets listened to and I've a strict personal policy of adherence to that request.

So, you're very, very much correct - in my observation and I dare say that I've got quite a bit of observation to back that up. Literally, not one single person has ever asked me to undo the ad-blocking, ever. I've been at this for somewhere near 20 years now. I've shown (and helped) loads of people do this - often just in passing. I'm going to guess, not counting web-influence, I've done so hundreds of times in all those years. Yes, hundreds. I've even had people contact me when they got a new computer and ask me to help them block the ads again - more than once. Not one person has complained or, as far as I know, gone back to not blocking ads as the default.

It might be important to add that a good portion of the above is because I'm a complete idiot. Never position yourself as "a computer guy who'll give you a hand." Do not do it! Lesson learned.

Re:No such thing

[justthinkit]

I use Ghostery, a 16MB hosts file and no Javascript unless I feel like it. Forbes balked. I turned the JS on. Forbes balked. I went with no hosts file. Forbes balked. Forbes went in my hosts file.

Slashdot should set up an ad group, with a couple of "outside of Slashdot or the ad community" members, to try to come up with something. I'd volunteer to help out. The thing is, Slashdot has the best comment+moderation+meta moderation system on the Internet. And I'm sure they could pull off something equally impressive regarding ads. If they lead, rather than followed.

Re:No such thing

[gnupun]

I can go into a store and not buy anything (a.k.a. not giving them any revenue) if I want to.

You can do that on websites too. Just visit the homepage, but don't click on any links (that's just like not buying anything at the store).

Why should I be obligated to give websites money (in the form of ad impressions) every time I visit?

Because you are using/enjoying/consuming the website's commercial content and the ads are your payment. Your childish comment is equivalent to saying "why should I pay for merchandise at the store?"

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

Uhhh. I had a very successful 5 years on ad networks. I explained that only after the mass proliferation of adblock did it become an issue. I don't see how "selling ad space directly" would have changed that, because the ad blocking would have prevented those impressions, too.

Early adblock blindly removed everything that had the dimensions of an ad, or were served with specific hostnames or URLs. You don't actually know how any of this works, do you?

Re:No such thing

[bjwest]

You've just described about 40% of the "articles" I read on c|net, and it's only getting worse. They're pretty easy to spot, but pointing it out in the comments still brings on a multitude of readers who don't believe it's an add.

The sheeple of this world are who's ruining things for the intelligent.

Re:No such thing

[gnupun]

Every ad-supported website on the planet has ads plastered all over their home pages, including, say, this very site. So, no, I can't typically just look at the home page of any website without paying with ad impressions

Fine. A more apt analogy would be, you have to buy a ticket (view ad) before you can watch the movie (view website).

I also change the channel, or leave the room when a commercial comes on. Same with radio.

Advertisers know you do all those things. However, there's a chance that you won't leave the room or change the channel fast enough... thereby you're exposed to some ads. However, when you use adblock, it's as if the TV and radio stations don't broadcast any ads at all. So you're exposed to 0 ads and that's a problem for the advertisers... they are getting 0 ROI on their massive ad expense. Don't you think you're stealing by using adblock?

Re:No such thing

[gnupun]

Don't be so literal. Here, viewing ads is of course, optional. No one is forcing your head forwards with your eyelids taped to keep your eyes open so you view ads on your monitor.

However, stripping ads from the content before they reach you is definitely theft, since there is zero benefit to people paying for your content.

Re:No such thing

[mattventura]

Well there is a voting system in place, it's called the click rate. That being said, I don't know who actually clicks ads. I can probably count the times I've actually clicked an ad on one hand.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

The problem is that you seem to think that the "virtual" world somehow is different than the "real" world.

Except it really is.

I'm not claiming what I did was necessarily the 'correct' answer, I was just relaying what it "was". However, you continue to insist that your way is the only proper way to do things - except many of your assumptions remind me a lot of the RIAA/MPAA arguments. It's a different medium. In an age where verification of impressions and clicks is possible, that's what advertisers are going to ask for. If I went to any of the larger entities and said "Hey I want you to buy ad space for $5K and you'll get a million impressions", do you really think they're going to just take my (or anyone's) word for it?

Re:No such thing

[justthinkit]

There is a lot more than click rate behind advertising.

Click rate is coarse, binary. Advertisers would like to know how long we stared at a product. How many people typed the name/keywords of the ad into YouTube. How long after a product was advertised do we retain information about the product. And a thousand other things.

So, turning all that around, if we (slashdotters) provide some of that, we don't have to necessarily "click on a link" to give advertisers something they want.

We (/.ers) love to comment and critique and reference. I think we need to address advertising like no one else ever has. And in so doing, help change the game. Because the game is broken, like shrapnel, thanks to the ongoing arms race.

Ads delivering malware, and sites serving white space instead of content? This can't continue...

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

No, I have no idea. Thank you for educating me.

Re: No such thing

[Grishnakh]

Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.

Isn't this why Reddit has "Reddit gold"? People pay extra money for special perks. It's how a lot of things work now. OKCupid is free (but has ads, easily blocked), but then has a premium "A-list" subscription service where you get extra perks, like being able to hide your visits to people's profiles, being able to message people whose mailboxes are full, etc. Tinder is free too (with no ads), but offers "Tinder Plus" with extra perks like being able to "super-like" anyone you want instead of one person per day, being able to undo swipes, etc.

Honestly, I think this is the way a lot of places are going to go: offer free content, and then paid extras. The people who don't mind spending money will get the extras, everyone else will stick with the free version, and the service will fund itself that way. If you think about it, this isn't very different from the way a shopping mall works. Lots of people (esp. kids) go to malls and just walk around and don't buy anything, or maybe just buy some very small things, not enough for stores to keep their doors open. Other people spend a bunch of money there. So the spenders are subsidizing all the "lookey-loos". The stores don't mind as long as they get enough sales, since the lookey-loos still make the place look busy which helps sales too.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

If you're running web site that gets big traffic, then I'm guessing yes, they would.

Re: No such thing

[Morgon]

But Reddit and OkCupid still have ads to subsidize the non-subscribing visitors.

Re:No such thing

[Morgon]

'Big' is relative; but the answer is no, they wouldn't. Sorry. I even just asked someone I personally know in that industry who said that they'd find that to be sketchy and would not run a campaign on a site that made such a demand - only for Amazon do they make such an exception. Not many websites are Amazon.

Online advertising just doesn't work that way.

Re:No such thing

[antdude]

Even BBS, Prodigy, and AOL had ads. ;)

Re:No such thing

[wbr1]

I feel so special.. I triggered APK.

Re:No such thing

[DogDude]

Well, best of luck with those ad networks. I think you'll see rates continue to drop as more and more people block that junk.

Re:No such thing

[Merk42]

Well, best of luck with those ad networks. I think you'll see rates continue to drop as more and more people block that junk.

and the number of websites too, unless paywalls I suppose.

By now, you've hopefully learned that your idea of "selling ads" wouldn't work either.

Re: No such thing

[tepples]

Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.

It worked for Something Awful, and 4chan has been trying it as well.

The entire idea of YouTube was to quickly get videos up and out to the world. Putting that behind a paywall, especially back before it had the clout it does now, would have been suicide at the time.

Then make a paywall for uploading videos, not for watching them. That's how publishing in, for example, an open access scholarly journal works.

Re:No such thing

[tepples]

You mention pay sites. Almost nobody will buy a year's subscription to a site just to read one article on that site.

Re:No such thing

[tepples]

For the record, DogDude means that the line between acceptable advertising and unacceptable advertising coincides with the line between advertising hosted by a publisher and advertising hosted by an ad network. This means that once a site has too much traffic to allow running it as a hobby, its operator ought to start selling ad space direcly to advertisers without the intermediary of an ad network.

Re:No such thing

[tepples]

Web sites that are that large/popular need to call advertisers, ask them to advertise, create ads, and put them on their web sites.

Let's say a site operator wants to start selling ad space. Can you recommend a guide to finding relevant and willing advertisers and approaching them?

Re:No such thing

[hucker75]

I like to be able to sign into a page using Facebook, and for my browser to know I'm signed in and use the password it already knows. But why does that need any information transmitted to any other server? The button I click on the website to say "log in with Facebook" should link to the Facebook server directly. No browser in its right mind should ever give any information about another page to a different one.

Re:No such thing

[Rob Y.]

Except that Chrome on Android works much better than Firefox. I like and use Firefox on Windows, where it works fine - and I use Chrome on Linux where Firefox doesn't work as well. In any case, it would be a good thing if the default browser on most Android devices supported ad blocking. And 'acceptable ads' are just that - acceptable. I don't think 'no ads' is a viable model for free internet content. Do you?

Re:No such thing

[Shirley Marquez]

Adblock is pretty much a garbage plugin, everyone knows how to defeat it easily and make users turn it off , and that's by using it's own ad blocking rules against it. Put the entire content in a css container called "ad" and you'll be forced to turn off ad block to view the site.

Any site that tries to make me turn off Adblock is a site I stop visiting. Hasta la vista, Forbes.

Re:No such thing

[samwichse]

Mobile Firefox supports plugins, I have ABP on my Android that way.

Of course, it's slow as molasses and clunky to use vs mobile Chrome...

Re:No such thing

[rtb61]

Factually an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising does exist, and friend, that is for you to decide for yourself, just as it is for everyone else to decide for themselves. It is up to adblock plus to identify ads for the end user and let the end user decide which advertising companies get through, which advertising agencies are allowed through and which web sites (quite often people stumble through to them by chance) get through and which combination of the above, that you choose for yourself and everyone else chooses for themselves. Adblock should have gone to the end users and not the advertisers. A user managed database managed by individuals users or managed by groups of users ie political progressive group acceptable ads or environmentalists group acceptable ads, as examples, as each individual chooses.

Re:No such thing

[movdqa]

Google's text ads are fine - they're often relevant too. Small image ads are fine - but no animated stuff and certainly no audio or video playing. Don't make your pages 67% ads and 33% content. Don't intersperse ads and links in the text content. Ideally, make the ads relevant.

Just more reason to use ublock

[Anonymous Coward]

As if not bogging your browser down with thousands of css rules every page wasn't enough.

Re:Just more reason to use ublock

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably meant uBlock Origin, not the crappy hijacked uBlock with donation links.

Homepage

Firefox addon

Chrome addon

UBLOCK ORIGIN

PS: accept no sobstitutes!

Re:Just more reason to use ublock

[blackomegax]

ublock origin is amazing. and free. who's shilling?

Don't like Adblock's business model?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't show ads. Or don't show ads it can block. Once upon a time, people paid for services they used. Have you considered that model? No? People wouldn't pay for your service? Then it is by definition worthless.

Re:Don't like Adblock's business model?

[HalcyonTimes]

People wouldn't pay for your service? Then it is by definition worthless..

What's important to understand is exactly what service Adblock offers. It's not about blocking ads, that's actually really easy to do (a simple domain filter will do). The real service is the list of ad providing domains. Someone has to manage this list. I'm not sure how Adblock currently manages their list but I'm sure it can take quite a bit of effort. How much? I don't know, I'm sure though that the cost for each user would be almost negligable because the user base is so large. It scales extremely well.

The service is not worthless, it's just extremely cheap.

Re:Don't like Adblock's business model?

[danbob999]

So people won't mind then if they get refused access to free services on websites who sustain themselves with ads if the user has an ad-blocker installed?

They are free to block those with ad-blockers. We are free to block their ad-blocking detection algorithm and/or decide to switch another web site.

Oh and just out of curiosity, If the service is useless because you aren't prepared to pay for it why are you using it?

It may be worth 1/month (which is close to worthless). If they charge $1/month for it, I will not use it.

Re:Don't like Adblock's business model?

[UnknownSoldier]

> People wouldn't pay for your service? Then it is by definition worthless for some.

FTFY. While I don't disagree ads are of limited (zero) value, the price == value is a fallacy.

1. The *same* service/thing can and does have *different* value to many people.
2. Ergo, not *everyone* is a customer. To the people who _don't_ use it, the service is worthless. To the people who _do_ use it, it has value.

Re:Don't like Adblock's business model?

[penguinoid]

Just set your useragent to googlebot. Very few sites will block googlebot, even with adblocking or sometimes their paywall. This is perfectly legitimate -- if it's not free they shouldn't pretend it is on google to draw people in just to block them until they pay up.

Re:Don't like Adblock's business model?

[tepples]

whenever I encounter a page that doesn't work with adblock enabled I close the tab and move on.

And then get hassled in Slashdot's comment section for not having read the featured article.

Re: Money talks

[TheReaperD]

The good news is, there are many more where they came from and if they no longer provide the service their users want we can use a different service.

I think it is racketeering as well

[houghi]

It is very close to the 'insurance' that the mafia sells.The fact that they also say that it will be the downfall of online journalism is irrelevant.

German judges must decide if it is against their law or not. If it is not, then companies can decide to pay or not. If it isn't, they can not be asking money.

Next to that, users can decide if they want to use it or not.

Re:I think it is racketeering as well

[Knightman]

It is very close to the 'insurance' that the mafia sells.

I doubt that ABP threatens the ad-agencies with smashing their knees in or burning down their business, although sometimes I feel that would be an appropriate response to some of the ads I've seen.

Re:I think it is racketeering as well

[houghi]

There also is the 'insurance' that nothing will happen to your business, e.g. you income. They would do fights among themselves and that would drive customers away.
Or see that no customers would get it, thus starving the business.

Is this news?

[wonkey_monkey]

An anonymous reader writes with Yahoo's report that the makers of Adblock Plus are "looking to reach out to advertisers and identify an 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net."

Isn't this what they've been doing for months? It's how they make their money.

Re:Is this news?

[DigiShaman]

In short, you can pay Adblock not to see the ads, or pay a website micro-transaction (few cents to a dollar a year??) to the site directly not to see the ads. Things that makes you go "hmmmmm".

Re:Is this news?

[wonkey_monkey]

Or, or... you can install uBlock and (with any luck) not see any ads.

It's a tricky one...

Professional...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I see Adblock's behaviour as *very* problematic (it's in the category "deregulated regulation", where a private entity, by its position takes the job of a regulator -- sometimes even encouraged by a state entity), without the supervision by democratic entities. Slippery and that (lots of examples come to mind, like a private entity in UK deciding that the image of a record cover is too obscene for Wikipedia, remember?)...

seeing Springer talk about "professional journalism" gives me the eeries too.

I choose to not side with any of them.

Re:Professional...

[tepples]

it's in the category "deregulated regulation", where a private entity, by its position takes the job of a regulator -- sometimes even encouraged by a state entity

Other examples include the Motion Picture Production Code and the MPAA rating system that replaced it, the Nintendo censorship code and the ESRB that largely replaced it, and the console makers' organizational qualifications for development of TV-displayed video games that continue to this day.

Re:Professional...

[david_thornley]

The MPAA rating system has pretty close to government authority, because almost every theater in the US uses it. It's a monopoly. If the console makers as a group agree on something, it's effectively a monopoly.

Adblock Plus is one ad blocker. There's others out there, but ABP is the one I have installed on my laptop and desktop. If I decide I don't like how ABP is doing things, I can go somewhere else. I don't see that it's comparable.

Re: Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

ABP jumped the shark a long time ago. The plugin to use now is uBlock origin. It's lighter than ABP, blocks ads and analytics and so on and it has a lot of other nice features. One of my favorites is the way that it not only blocks things like GoogleTags and Google Analytics, it also inserts a javascript shim that replicates their API with noops. This way, poorly written sites that rely on javascript won't break when the expected object/method isn't there. It also fools a lot of Adblock detectors.

Links:
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en
FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
Source: https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock

Web is Dying

[hinesbrad]

I'm amazed at each passing year how bad advertising gets on the internet. I doubt I click on more than 3 ads a year with content or a service that actually interests me. With the array of annoyances advertisers put into their arsenal over the last few years it's no wonder users are rejecting this experience. People on the internet come here for information and the exchange of ideas. We're accustomed to rapid fire, text based experiences. Content that produces annoying animations, loud sounds, or obfuscates content with a forced click to close something is not just annoying, it reduces the usability of the internet. I can remember when a website with a banner was considered to be a sellout. Just off the top of my head I can think of the vast array of websites I visit that are no longer usable without adblock: cnn.com (background), potterybarn.com (annoying hover ads), pier1.com (also annoying hover ads), youtube.com (every other video is now a 2 minute ad) ..... Is it any wonder with experiences like these we want to use this?

If Eyeo wants money...

[fabioalcor]

... just do some advert... oh wait...

Well, yeah it's worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, content that nobody is willing to pay for is worthless. That's the way a market economy works. You can argue for or against market economies, but without a market economy there is no advertising so the point would be moot.

This is similar to having a 'better' no-no sticker

[HalcyonTimes]

I have a no-no sticker on my letterbox that prevents unadressed paper advertisments. Running adblock is like having a no-no sticker.

Adblock is now looking for a middle ground. Instead of having a no-no sticker you can have an adblock-sticker that says: some unaddressed advertisment is allowed (ie. the ones allowed by adblock). If you translate this to the paper world it could mean only ads printed on recycled paper, only single page ads; not a whole booklet, ads that are clear and concise etc.

I don't mind supporting websites I like, but I absolutely hate advertisments that take over the page, 'steal' my attention or look like content. It's a fine line and as it stands the consumer is pretty powerless to find a good middle ground. Website owners are also pretty powerless because they don't have enough control over the ads that appear on their site. It's also difficult for ad makers because there are no guidelines. Only an entity like adblock has the power to force advertisers to behave: ie. behave or be blocked.

I don't quite understand the argument of people who don't want adblock to move in this direction. If you don't like it, switch to one of the many other adblocking plugins. Im sure there will always be one adblocker-like plugin that will aim to block all ads.

I see this as a healthy development, one that could finally rid us of annoying ads while making sure content providers get compensated.

I could also see a system where adblock works with ad providers to distribute revenue. For instance, you could chose to pay adblock (or some other entity) a monthly fee that gets distributed over the content providers that you consume. Kind like Flattr or YoutubeRed, but a system that could work on any platform, from any vendor.

Will be like old times...

[Timex]

Looks like I'll have to get into the habit again of finding the FQDN of the sources of advertising, and setting the IP in my hosts file to 127.0.0.1, like I used to do back in the '90s.

It was a pain in the butt then, and I imagine it will be far worse now.

Re:Will be like old times...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean something like this : http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

Re:Will be like old times...

[nctritech]

Don't use 127.0.0.1, use 0.0.0.0 instead. 127.0.0.1 directs the requests to localhost while 0.0.0.0 drops them immediately due to being invalid. Sometimes it matters, especially if you run an HTTP[S] server on the computer for whatever reason.

professional journalism on the web?

[dltaylor]

Seriously, can someone name three locations, paid, or ad-supported, that offer first-hand research (not just reposts of someone else's work), unbiased/uncensored by political interest or advertiser dollars, that don't have the articles presented paragraph by paragraph, each on its own page, and that do NOT present a danger to the security of platforms?

AdBlockerBlocker

[Tomahawk]

I guess there's a new niche in the market now - the AdBlocker Blocker...

Re: Money talks

[raynet]

I wonder how much they pay for hosting? You can get 4-8 core servers with 16GB RAM and 1-2TB storage with 100Mbps unlimited traffic from OVH for under 30euro/month. And often their Atom servers are just fine and are under 10euro/month with same 100Mbps unlimited traffic.

Adblock Minus

[GeekWithAKnife]

Once upon a time ads annoyed me, I chose Adblock PLus because it got rid of the annoying ads.

Adblock Plus stopped doing a great job at blocking annoying ads and has then been uninstalled and everyone moved on...

Adblock Plus now wants to make it's inferior product worse to make a buck.

*looks at Ublock Origin icon and laughs*

Stinks like a protection scam...

[verbatim]

That's some nice advertising you've got there... It'd be a shame if someone decided to block it...

But seriously, okay... you pay off ABP. A large group of users migrate to another ad-block tool... that tool's creator demands protection money... and so on. That, to me, is why it sounds so scummy -- because ABP can only promise not to block for it's own user-base. It's literally, "hey, give us a cut of your ad-revenue or we'll give a free app to people to prevent you from serving ads."

Does this policy undermine their "acceptable ads" option? i.e. ads are now acceptable if they meet a certain technical criteria or the provider has paid protection money?

Hahaha.

Re:Stinks like a protection scam...

[sciengin]

This is exactly the reason I ditched ABP as soon as I learned about their acceptable ads and moved to Adblock Edge.
And when development on that stopped, I ditched that and moved to uBlock origin.

After 14 years on the web and 14 years of suffering from ads that only get worse as time goes by, there is exactly one number of ads that are acceptable to me: 0.

Re: Money talks

[raynet]

They really be more open on how much donations they are getting and how much the hosting actually costs. I really cannot support such projects that have vague donation'o'meter and I really can't judge if my money is spent running the infrastucture or to buy beers for the developers (which is just fine as long as I am told that part of my money is used this way).

Re: Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be confusing uBlock with uBlock origin.
The correct git link is https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Acceptable advertising is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Just have plain pictures - no JavaScript that gets forced upon website hosts, making every single website out there a potential malware vector, when dodgy ads inevitably appear on an ad network (the bane of website hosts and users everywhere).

That's it - that's all it takes to create ads that are acceptable - it's so simple to do this, why hasn't it been done already?

Re: Money talks

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to. Quote from: github.com/gorhill/uBlock
BEWARE! uBlock Origin is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the web site ublock.org

The donations sought by the individual behind ublock.org are not benefiting any of those who contributed most to create uBlock Origin (developers, translators, and all those who put efforts in opening detailed issues). For the differences in features between uBlock Origin and uBlock, you are more likely than anywhere else to find an unbiased explanation in this Wikipedia article.

Barriers to entry?

[Lawrence_Bird]

I have used uBlock and find slightly better results than with adblock but certainly the barriers to entry for adblockers can't be very high. Completey stupid if adblock sells out.

Semantics

[cloud.pt]

Racketeering is good semantics for their current business model indeed, as there is no supervision whatsoever right now. Like Bild (end everybody else) I also don't think Eyeo is doing this in a "transparent enough" way that there's no doubt they aren't enforcing an "advertising fee" in their "controlled space of the web" (i.e. everyone who uses their adblock, their only de facto product). It should be clear enough for users of adblock, and for "payers" of whitelisting what this money is for, and a clear description of what "work" it entails to whitelist some ad (and/or an entire website/domain).

If it is to be done right, Eyeo needs to disclose publicly it offers two products: AdBlock - a free piece of software that has no direct form of revenue; and "Verified Whitelisting", a service that consists solely on periodic validation of conformity (with their "sensible ads" paradigm) for each company that so requests.

Eyeo then needs to bill each company transparently for the actual work hours taken to verify the requested pages (including hours wasted in scenarios that involve telling the company some site does not conform due to reason XYZ). But most importantly, these billed hours need to be made public. Only through transparency can companies AND users be assured that Eyeo is doing what it publicizes it does (only validate "sensible ads", and not any ads by highly-profitable payers). This way, the practice starts entering legal ground. It's pretty much a process like legalizing weed - the state can be sure there's no trafficking because all business go through their supervision, but mostly just the fact it is due to go through state supervision is enough to stop abuse. Give supervision power to every user of adblock, and Eyeo is sure to do most of its business in the way they publicize, without actually making more money than they should be doing for such an easy job.

And most important of all - AdBlock development costs cannot overlap with the whitelisting paradigm costs. This final detail is what separates racketeering from the legal practice of creating this "sensible ads" paradigm and its validation process.

Disclaimer: this is my opinion. I am no Law expert, but to me - as a citizen and user of adblock - this is what makes me comfortable. I will stop using adblock as soon as I see abuse in this whitelisting process in clear form. But I am not a company paying for whitelisting, so I don't get their side of the picture as well as I should.

Another one bites the dust

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet another great resource sells out.

Provide value or go away

[sjbe]

I don't mind supporting websites I like

I pay cash to websites which actually provide useful content to me. If you aren't willing to pay cash money to the website then it probably isn't worth much to you.

I don't quite understand the argument of people who don't want adblock to move in this direction. If you don't like it, switch to one of the many other adblocking plugins. Im sure there will always be one adblocker-like plugin that will aim to block all ads.

To me it is adblock selling out. They're basically offering advertisers a protection racket. I want no part of that. I don't need an ad blocker whose interests are not clearly aligned with my own. Obviously others feel the same way.

I see this as a healthy development, one that could finally rid us of annoying ads while making sure content providers get compensated.

Who says they deserve compensation? Their bad business model is not my problem. Provide value or go away.

Re:Provide value or go away

[Your.Master]

I pay cash to websites which actually provide useful content to me. If you aren't willing to pay cash money to the website then it probably isn't worth much to you.

If those websites are so valueless, then why bother installing AdBlock in the first place? There's three obvious possibilities:

1. You're going there on purpose, so they *do* add value to you.
2. You're going there accidentally and AdBlock protects against that. In that case, would you use a service that instead replaces sites that contain ads with a single error page, stating that the site is ad-supported, and gives you the option of paying the site, accepting the ads anyway?
3. You're evaluating whether this site is of value to you so you can choose whether to pay them money. In which case, a non-obnoxious ad seems kind of like a reasonable compromise.

I am not so inflexible in how I'm willing to pay, and that includes receiving ads that aren't obnoxious, but it doesn't include every ad that I experience in practice (even with AdBlock). I do pay money to sites like Hulu that give me the option & I use frequently.

Generally, I don't mind ads so long as:

1. They don't engage me in ways that I wouldn't otherwise use on a page/app/whatever. For instance, an audio ad when I'm reading a written article is trying to engage me through sound; that's completely unacceptable.
2. Doesn't consume an inordinate amount of space/time compared to the media I'm consuming. Youtube frequently fails this.
3. Doesn't try to deceive me into thinking it's not an ad. "One weird trick" is like that.

To me it is adblock selling out. They're basically offering advertisers a protection racket. I want no part of that. I don't need an ad blocker whose interests are not clearly aligned with my own.

That's certainly a valid fear. My counter is that AdBlock doing this doesn't imply that it's impossible to block ads with a different service. If AdBlock starts letting shit through I don't like, I switch to another ad blocking method.

Who says they deserve compensation? Their bad business model is not my problem. Provide value or go away.

I do, as the person consuming that content. I want services like Google to exist. I want Slashdot to exist without requiring paid subscriptions -- you *can* subscribe to them but I think most don't.

Re:Provide value or go away

[david_thornley]

I pay real money to certain websites I value highly. There are other websites I frequent which I just buy a lot from. Then there's a ton of websites that I might go to once a year or month or something like that for stuff I can probably get elsewhere. I have no way of paying all these sites, since the amount that I'd want to pay and/or the amount the site would theoretically get from my ad viewing would be dwarfed by the transaction cost of the payment.

ABP's policies are fine with me. I don't object to ads. I object to ads that make the content nearly unusable, try to do things with my computer I don't want done, or might carry malware. I have no objection to well-behaved ads, and am happy that the site owners can make a little money off me (I don't cost them much anyway).

The bad business model you mention is the best we've got, unfortunately. We don't have any sort of functioning micropayment system. This means that sites that provide value and need to not lose too much money need to host ads. It may or may not be feasible for the owner to sell his or her own ad space and vet the ads, and this may or may not cut into the time the owner spends doing something actually useful. We can argue whether they deserve compensation, but websites often provide value.

If ads can't support websites, we'll have a few categories left. There will be the storefronts, the paywalled sites, and the personal and academic sites of people who are willing to pay for the sites themselves, and are sufficiently unpopular that they can afford to do that. We'd lose a lot of valuable content that way.

Re: Money talks

[slaker]

One reason I still recommend Adblock Plus for non-technical users is that it is branded consistently and works across all major web browsers. It's much easier to train users that they should have a little red Stop Sign with an ABP in it regardless of their web browser than it is to explain that they need multiple products across IE, Chrome, Firefox and their mobile devices.

Also, while in my view there are no acceptable ads and I preach zero tolerance for advertising, some of my customers are more sensitive about the idea of blocking Google Ads, and are more comfortable with the idea of supporting services that do allow static, text-only advertisements than a blanket ban on everything.

Not a problem

[Meneth]

All you have to do is uncheck the "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" checkbox in Adblock Plus settings.

Re:Not a problem

[Khyber]

Or just use uBlock Origin, which doesn't play this bullshit game.

Compromise

[frovingslosh]

When someone wants you to drink a glass of poison and you don'r want to drink it, the compromise is to only drink half a glass.

On what is acceptable

[simplypeachy]

"An 'acceptable' level and form of advertising on the net"

When we are forced to start this conversation by pleading "Would you stop allowing my computers to be infected with viruses, with ransomware and trojans and stuff? Please, please, would you stop subjecting my computer to severe risk of infection? Please don't subject me to this." then it's very telling. IYAM it says that the Internet advertising industry cannot regain any sort of trust with us for a very long time. That they have to completely scrap every method they're using, every business practice and start again, from the ground up. They have lost their way so very badly that there *are* no directions back to the path. Their only choice can be to abandon their journey. Go home, and start again. Back from square one.

Only then can we even discuss other, very important facts, like stealing the bandwidth and CPU we pay for, tracking our every online habit without our permission and intruding on our private life.

Re:This is similar to having a 'better' no-no stic

[Celarnor]

Wow, that sticker thing is a great idea. I wish we had something like that here. In my city in the states, we don't get paper recycling (we can only do cardboard and bottles free), and our trash costs $5 a bag. So not only do I not have a choice about getting unsolicited bulk paper advertisements, I have to pay the city a premium to get rid of them. It blows.

Are you in Europe?

The #1 that makes ads "unacceptable" in my book...

[jonwil]

No ad that is capable of infecting my system with malware or otherwise installing any software on my computer without my permission can ever be considered acceptable.

If the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook etc etc can 100% gaurantee that their advertising will NEVER install something malicious (or contribute in some way to the installation of something malicious) even if their ad networks are hacked by rogue hackers or otherwise compromised, I will consider unblocking those networks.

Christmas in July

[ThomasBHardy]

How to both have a little fun and show how over-inundated the ads are:

Go to your spouse's computer in say, July. Do a google search on Christmas decorations and click on 10 ads for Christmas stuff. Log off and walk away.

Your spouse will be flooded with Christmas ads for the rest of the month, on most sites that they visit.

I did this to my wife once as a joke and it was a good time. But it does show how deeply the tracking is inserted into everything.

I don't mind some tracking. I do mind others. I do not think that the answer is for everyone to refuse all ads entirely. We all consume too much content that is ad-supported to switch to "every site has a fee".

What we really need a an Adblock type package that had a dial on it.
Ranging from "No ads, ever" to "let it all through" with settings for allowing tracking cookies or not, which ad networks to allow or not, etc, And let the populace have a say in what level of ad-abuse they are willing to accept to access their favorite sites.

However Adblock allowing some ads just because the vendor paid them.. yeah, I'll uninstall adblock before i see that become the norm. The market will supply a competing product when it is needed.

Well Fuck Me Running.

[zenlessyank]

AIDS medicine manufacturers decide to let a little AIDS through so The AIDS virus can be happy too. Ad Agencies are worse than infected people running around infecting others. I DON"T WANT TO BUY ANY OF YOUR GOLD CHAINS.

Whatever happened to the micropayment idea?

[swb]

Why didn't this concept take off?

Did it just get co-opted by Google making it relatively easy to collect micropayments for your site with mostly non-intrusive advertising?

Lack of a centralized micropayment infrastructure and some method of subscribing and collecting payments that couldn't be trivially gamed? Lack of any agreeable billing model -- ie, unlimited use subscription vs. per visit/content, inability to calculate pricing model due to volatile perception of value?

Perhaps a general user objection on sites dominated by user-created content (eg, forums) where, in theory, adding content adds value to the site?

It seems like a reasonable idea, especially if it can be combine a lack of advertising with financial support.

Re:Whatever happened to the micropayment idea?

[DogDude]

Micropayments will never work because the overhead of transacting payments is too high.

Re:Whatever happened to the micropayment idea?

[swb]

Computationally, the overhead is kind of trivial.

If you're relying on the traditional credit card payment network then the cost overhead is high along with all the attendant accept credit card payment overhead.

But if you had a centralized micropayment service, the overhead gets down to a much lower level.

In an ideal world, such a service would be run as a non-profit (whatever skim would just go to running the service). Users would add funds to their micropayment account via normal methods to consolidate the usual banking transaction costs. The micropayment system could have some built-in checks, ie, users could set a maximum micropayment per site, or per time period, etc.

All of this sounds suspiciously like a clone of paypal with some added features for a micropayment system.

I think the bigger issue is establishing pricing and its attendant value. What's an article or web site visit *worth*? How much are you willing to spend per month and what kinds of quality expectations do you have over free, and how much quality can a site expect to deliver for some kind of micropayment? Is it just ad-free content, or is there some expectation of more quality by consumers to make it even worth 10 cents per site visit?

Re:Whatever happened to the micropayment idea?

[david_thornley]

Micropayments have problems.

They work reasonably well in cases where the user has some idea what the cost could be and what the user is getting. The example I kept seeing was electricity and light bulbs: instead of calculating the value of light vs. the cost of electricity, we just flip the light switch. In this case, the user can at least find out how much it costs to run the light, and can be confident that running it for an hour won't be expensive, and the user knows the benefits.

When I am doing something on the Web, I can hit quite a few pages in the course of an hour, and, depending on what I'm doing, many of those web pages may be not what I wanted. I can't always tell from the Google listing. I know that running a 100-watt bulb for an hour will cost me one-tenth of what a kilowatt-hour costs, which is a very small amount of money. If the sites I visit charge me one cent for each hit, I can run up a bill of a few dollars in an evening, and resent some of that. If the per-hit price varies from site to site, I have to take that into account in my surfing decisions.

There's other considerations. If I have a small amount of money in escrow at any given time, I'm likely to be hit with lots of notifications. If I have a continuous bill arrangement, someone can max my credit card if said person can impersonate me. Unless there's only one micropayment provider, either I have to have accounts with all of them or each website operator does.

I'm assuming here that micropayments are a matter of putting a certain amount of money in escrow, do be dribbled out to website accounts, or perhaps to be billed at the end of the month, since individual payments are relatively expensive. I don't know another way to do it.

Neville Chamberlain

[PPH]

Negotiating "peace for our time."

Charge them in the USA with RICO violations

[Khyber]

"Big websites can pay a fee not to be blocked. And it is these proceeds that finance the Cologne-based company and its 49-strong workforce."

Pay up or be blocked - sounds like a RICO violation right there. I bet some legal fuckery could be twisted out of one of our treaties to make it happen.

You CAN'T have ads without tracking.

[Sloppy]

That's never going to happen, so people who think that a compromise might some day be reached, need to let go of that.

Some of the things on the list are extremely easy because the browser itself is ultimately in control. If you don't want animation, for example, then your browser can elect to not animate things. Same for playing sound, executing Javascript, 10kb limit, etc. You're going to get your wish on all of that stuff, assuming you haven't already gotten it already.

But tracking isn't going to go away. Your computer is initiating a conversation with someone else's computer, and there's only one thing you can do to prevent someone else's computer from remembering that it happened: have there be nothing to remember, because nothing happened. i.e. don't request the ad.

If you get the ad, then you get tracking, period. There is no possible compromise between the two sides on this, and everyone who thinks they can have ads but no tracking, is kidding themselves.

Either the ad industry is going to persuade us that tracking isn't all that bad, or the users are going to persuade the media that ads aren't all that necessary. No middle ground exists on this.

Re:You CAN'T have ads without tracking.

[ewibble]

It is possible, you could set up some sort of proxy network, (this maybe how TOR works not sure) each intermediary does not tell where the packet came from. All you would need one good proxy on your path and the site would not know where the request came from.

Re:You CAN'T have ads without tracking.

[slinches]

But tracking isn't going to go away. Your computer is initiating a conversation with someone else's computer, and there's only one thing you can do to prevent someone else's computer from remembering that it happened: have there be nothing to remember, because nothing happened. i.e. don't request the ad.

My computer initiated a conversation with Site A. This does not mean that Site A should conference in Ad Network B to advertise at me without even notifying me of what they're doing. If Site A wants to get ad revenue, they can tell me directly about the advertised product, but clearly state that it's a paid ad and don't sell my personal information to third parties.

What would you think of someone who sold your contact info to telemarketers as soon as you called him or gave him your number?

Re:You CAN'T have ads without tracking.

[Sloppy]

It could very easily happen, by enforcing blocking rules that restrict or eliminate third party content.

That won't work. Even if you don't communicate directly with the third party, you don't have any way to prevent the content provider (who is also the ad provider from your point of view) from passing the information along.

We seem to have latched onto this "third party content" as The Problem, where it's really just a hack du jour for easily spotting a problem. But the only reason a content provider is putting <script src="somewhere else"> into their pages is because it still gets them paid by the "somewhere else." If you hit their own server instead of the third party, they can still forward any requests behind the scenes to anyone, and you won't even know it's happening, but all the same information will be there.

If you eliminate "third party content" you're just going to turn second parties into proxies. And they'll really do it, too. Why wouldn't they?

Looks just like Extortion

[Sarpent]

How is this any different than extortion? Just because they backed into this business model, it's still extortion -- with a little customer betrayal thrown into the mix.

Re:This is similar to having a 'better' no-no stic

[HalcyonTimes]

Yes I live in Europe. The no-no sticker is (perhaps surprisingly) mostly upheld. Sometimes I'll get a menu from a local eatery or something, but it's never big brands, they stick to the rules. I believe the system is legally backed. There is also a "don't send me shit" registry you can sign up for that will put your adres on a blacklist for advertisers, this list is also legally backed. We have a similar registry for phonenumbers. I get very little unwanted paper mail, not even one piece per month.

There is also a no-yes sticker. It blocks ads but allows things like the local newspaper and other non-ad unadressed mail. And there is also a yes-yes sticker, if you're so inclined.

The stickers are quite common here, I think 1/3 of apartmentbuilding has one.

What you describe seems like a serious problem. I reminds me of those robo-caller horror stories from the US.

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Re: Money talks

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Not actually shilling. Sorry.

Forget about adblock plus

[allo]

Do you know this sedo parking sites? This phishing sites, which try to put many keywords from the legitimate domain on a typo domain? These sites were the first on the whitelist for acceptable ads. Since then ABP is dead for me.

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A new kind of adblocker

[kheldan]

Why can't someone create an adblocker that pulls the content from the Internet but just doesn't display it, or in the case of something Flash or Javascript based, runs it in a sandbox that likewise doesn't actually render it to your screen? Sites and advertisers wouldn't know the difference, they'd get paid, and if you didn't want to see any ads, you wouldn't see them. Give it an option to be point-and-right-click configurable to block specific elements of a page you find unacceptable, for those things that manage to worm their way past the adblocker. Is such a thing possible?

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Re:This is similar to having a 'better' no-no stic

[kheldan]

no-no sticker

Would you please describe this more for me? Something tells me it's a British or Australian/New Zealander thing, never heard of it here in the U.S.; would love to prevent all the waste-of-paper (i.e. advertisements) to 'Resident' from ever entering my mailbox in the first place.

They deserve what they earn

[sjbe]

If those websites are so valueless, then why bother installing AdBlock in the first place?

If someone is going to offer something for free I'd be an idiot to not take advantage of it. However if it isn't something I'm willing to actually pay for then it obviously wasn't very important to me and I shouldn't mourn it disappearing. If a company wants to base their business model on ad revenue then I'm not going to cry for them if that doesn't work out well. Their bad business model is not my problem. If your customers are actively seeking to block your revenue source then you might consider the sustainability of your business.

You're evaluating whether this site is of value to you so you can choose whether to pay them money. In which case, a non-obnoxious ad seems kind of like a reasonable compromise.

Ads are not required for me to evaluate a product. If anything they detract from the product. I'm certainly not willing to allow an ad network to track me under any circumstances aside from them contacting me directly and paying me what I consider a reasonable (read very large) sum in cash to follow my activities across the web.

I do, as the person consuming that content.

What is valuable to you does not mean it is valuable to me. They don't deserve compensation unless they are providing me actual value. The mere fact that they put it out there doesn't mean they deserve a single penny from me unless *I* find it valuable. There are some content makers that provide content I find worth paying.

I want services like Google to exist.

There are versions of most things Google offers that are available without ad support. My consumption of ads is not required for the continued existence of these services.

AdBlock+ There is NO ACCEPTABLE LEVEL of ADS

[SenseiTim]

There is, as I wrote above, no acceptable level of advertising on the Web. If the developers of AdBlock+ allow any advertising past their blocker, I will be forced to find another solution for my browsers. I have been a TV viewer for 60 plus years. Now, the LA Times states that, "In 2009, the broadcast networks averaged 13 minutes and 25 seconds of commercial time per hour. In 2013, that figure grew to 14 minutes and 15 seconds. The growth has been even more significant on cable television. In 2009, cable networks averaged 14 minutes and 27 seconds per hour" Using these statistics, I have been force-fed more than 8.6 MILLION minutes of commercial advertising. Now the AdBlock+ developers want to weaken their addon by allowing some ads through? I will have to find another solution if they do!

Inflated view and click counts

[tepples]

Unfortunately there is nothing stopping the website owner from tracking this information and reporting it back to the ad provider, acting mainly as a proxy

But there is something stopping the advertisers from believing the website owner. The website owner has an incentive to inflate view and click counts.

Re: Inflated view and click counts

[tepples]

What's wrong with reporting incorrect numbers?

It makes advertisers less willing to advertise on a particular site.

The sooner those advertising fools are parted with their money the sooner we can all go back to a cleaner, less corrupt internet.

And have to buy a year's subscription to five different sites in order to view one page on each site. Would you be willing to subscribe to Slashdot and to each site hosting at least one article currently on its front page?

Re:Inflated view and click counts

[Anrego]

Hmm, that's a good point. I suppose the solution from the advertisers perspective is to switch back to flat rates / advertising based on anticipated traffic (though then you're back into the problem of what's to stop a site owner from lying through their teeth. I can't wait till we get the equivalent to Nielsen ratings for the internet driving ad rates.

Re:This is similar to having a 'better' no-no stic

[myowntrueself]

Wow, that sticker thing is a great idea. I wish we had something like that here. In my city in the states, we don't get paper recycling (we can only do cardboard and bottles free), and our trash costs $5 a bag. So not only do I not have a choice about getting unsolicited bulk paper advertisements, I have to pay the city a premium to get rid of them. It blows.

Write 'Moved' on the "unsolicited bulk paper advertisements" then take it to the mailbox and throw it in there. Now its the post offices problem.

After all, it wasn't addressed to you, so you aren't the lawful recipient so its your duty to write 'moved' on it and put it back in the mail system. I'm sure it'll go to the right place.

Paywall for all sites for children?

[tepples]

No Sound

What, even for auto-playing videos?

No auto-playing videos.

It is never appropriate to advertise to children.

Ought all sites targeted at children to be instead paywalled?

no more than 10% of the browser view area, per page.

Good luck getting any advertiser to pay for a fraction of a percent of a page if the viewer's device has a 4" screen, such as a phone. And how would the site know that the viewer's device has a 4" screen in the first place without JavaScript?

Re:Paywall for all sites for children?

[tepples]

how would the site know that the viewer's device has a 4" screen in the first place without JavaScript?

CSS media queries are the preferred tool for this

CSS media queries can't change what content loads in the first place. For example, advertiser A may have a mobile ad but no desktop ad, and advertiser B may have a desktop ad but no mobile ad. The site would want to show advertiser A's ad to mobile users and advertiser B's ad to desktop users. And if the user agent is configured not to execute JavaScript, the server has to know what to send before the CSS loads, let alone before the media queries are evaluated.

unless you're in the unfortunate position of supporting IE8.

Internet Explorer 8 is no longer supported. Microsoft has shifted to a policy of supporting only the newest IE on a particular operating system. For Windows 10, 8.1, and 7, this is IE 11. For Windows Vista, this is IE 9. For Windows XP, this is IE 8, but Windows XP itself is no longer supported. And if a browser is no longer supported, it is likely to have security vulnerabilities that its publisher will never fix, such as vulnerabilities that allow the drive-by installation of a keylogger. A reasonable person would never enter personally identifying information into an application, or into any application running on an operating system, that is so likely to be insecure.

And you didn't address the other point I raised:

Good luck getting any advertiser to pay for a fraction of a percent of a page if the viewer's device has a 4" screen, such as a phone.

Let me give a more concrete example: If all advertisers that a site operator has contacted are willing to buy full-mobile-screen ads but unwilling to buy tenth-of-a-mobile-screen ads, should the site operator just add a paywall on mobile?

A year's subscription to read one page

[tepples]

subscriptions

Say you use a search engine to navigate to five different pages on five different sites, but each requires a separate subscription in order to read past the first paragraph of an article once it has detected your preference for no advertising. Only a negligible number of people are willing to pay $20 for a year's subscription to one site (or for a block of 1,000 article views on one site) to read one article; the vast majority bounce. The only way I can see around users' preference against site-scoped paywalls is to go back to federated subscription networks. Remember Adult Check?

Hosting economies of scale

[tepples]

Yes, lots of stuff was on university-hosted websites

And what happened to it once the students producing the stuff graduated?

With today's cheap hosting

Would hosting have become so cheap without the economies of scale that come with demand for hosting by ad-supported publishers?

And of course there's the search engines; Google used to support itself just fine with small, text-based ads next to the search results

The web was also much smaller back then; I remember the "Giga Google" doodle for the milestone of one billion pages in its index.

Prepare to pay multiple subscriptions to RTFA

[tepples]

Amazon is funded by the sellers who advertise products through its Selling on Amazon platform, and eBay likewise.

Most video games with AAA production values are paywalled, either just to start (traditional distribution model) or to be able to play longer than five minutes in a stretch (free-to-play with energy mechanic). It's a consequence of needing to pay artists.

Ad-free sites hosting how-to articles would be paywalled. If you want to read five how-to articles, each on one of five different sites, prepare to pay five $20 per year subscriptions. If you think people don't read the featured article on today's Slashdot, just wait until site-scoped paywalls become more popular.

Likewise, ad-free messaging platforms would be paywalled. If one of your contacts is on of LOA, another on NSM, and yet another on QCI, prepare to pay three different annual subscriptions.

Most ad providers don't want "reasonable"

[Chas]

Because they can't monetize it enough to make it worthwhile.

This is why online advertising will be a dirty, dangerous place that makes the Wild West and Mad Max look like a Sunday church service.

And, consequently, this is why end users who have a clue and actually give a shit, will opt for the most draconian forms of ad blocking possible.

Policeman

[xarragon]

I prefer Policeman over RequestPolicy. It has better ruleset creation and can be temporarily disabled on a per-tab basis: https://github.com/futpib/poli...

Re:Policeman

[shitzu]

Haven't seen it, will check out.

Showrooming

[tepples]

So the spenders are subsidizing all the "lookey-loos".

Where that breaks is when lookey-loos come in and visit the showroom and then go out and buy the same thing on Amazon or somewhere else that has no brick and mortar showroom overhead.

Re:Showrooming

[Grishnakh]

Maybe, but there are B&M stores that are doing just fine despite Amazon. Home Depot and Lowe's come to mind: no one buys lumber, drywall, etc. on Amazon. A lot of stuff is just as cheap, if not cheaper, at local stores like this, because the local store doesn't have to pay for shipping (or charge the customer extra for it; Amazon builds it into their prices usually).

Electronics has been a big loser for a while for local stores, because electronic items are usually have a very high value-per-weight ratio, but this isn't true of a lot of other things, such as food and Home Depot stuff. I can go to HD and buy some electrical outlets and boxes for dirt cheap; I'm not going to get it cheaper at Amazon. Appliances is probably another thing that makes no sense to buy on the internet: they're somewhat expensive, but they're also bulky and hard to ship (Fedex doesn't deliver refrigerators). You can get that stuff pretty cheap if you buy it locally and ship it yourself.

Clothing is the other thing that doesn't seem to be dying out in B&M stores. People like being able to try things on, feel them, browse through racks, etc. Buying clothes online just sucks IMO. Some people like it, but not that many, and whenever I've looked, the prices are always higher online. It's easy to get clearance deals and coupons in regular stores.

I think there's a good reason that malls are still full of clothing stores like H&M, crappy fast-food restaurants, and cellphone repair shops, while Sears and Radio Shack are going out of business.

Adult Check

[tepples]

Lack of a centralized micropayment infrastructure

That's probably it. Credit cards have swipe fees per transaction. Bitcoin isn't the answer either because the Chinese miners that dominate it have expressed an interest in keeping block sizes small, which increases the fee to get your transaction into a block. This leaves you with having to buy a year's subscription to a site to read one article.

and some method of subscribing and collecting payments that couldn't be trivially gamed

The closest thing I can remember was Adult Check, a subscription network where viewers paid per month and participating site operators got paid per page view. "You're a grown-up; you can pay for things now." It was popular in the late 1990s, but as far as I can tell, what killed Adult Check was a successful lawsuit from the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine, whose photography was plagiarized across many participating sites. I hear Webpass.io is trying to revive this.

Perhaps a general user objection on sites dominated by user-created content (eg, forums)

The WELL and Something Awful are successful subscription forums. But subscriptions scoped to a single site wouldn't work so well for less sticky sites, such as sites offering self-contained news or opinion pieces, because almost nobody wants to subscribe for a year to read one article.

Re:The #1 that makes ads "unacceptable" in my book

[david_thornley]

I think you're being a little demanding here. There's lots of sites that could send me something malicious if compromised, not just ad sites. If an ad supplier will guarantee that they will never allow malware, and will back that up with some sort of verifiable and actionable promise, I'd be happy with that. (As long as the ad didn't try to use sound, or interfere with my use of the page, or create its own windows, or....)

Re:The #1 that makes ads "unacceptable" in my book

[jonwil]

Yeah that's what I want. I want a gaurantee that the ad supplier will inspect every ad they allow over their network for malware or anything malicious and act swiftly against anything bad (either something that slips past their checks or something inserted maliciously by hackers)