Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't Launches Anti-Adblocking Initiative, Compares It To Piracy (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: UK culture secretary John Whittingdale has announced that the British government will set up a 'round-table' between online publishers and adblocking companies to discuss the 'problem' of adblocking. He described the practice of charging companies to be whitelisted as a 'modern day protection racket', and said: "Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist And that's as true for the latest piece of journalism as it is for the new album from Muse." The issue has largely been left to the market to self-regulate until now, although Germany's courts ruled adblocking legal in 2015.
People who abuse free samples are equivalent to thieves, people who test drive cars excessively are car jackers, and those taking more pennies than they leave are bank robbers!
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
If your product has adverts then adverts are part of your product. That makes YOU responsible for them. So if they annoy the ever living crap out of your users then it is YOUR fault.
So if you need adverts then take some responsibility. That means making sure you don't have adverts so obnoxious or malware ridden that your users want to block them. If the users want to block your adverts it is your fault and you have failed.
If you just want to "maximize your monetization" or simply can't be arsed to do a decent job, then you have no sympathy from me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Just because I make a request to a server for content doesn't mean that I have to make additional requests to other servers to get ads. What if I use a browser like lynx or links, which is incapable of displaying most ads? Is that also piracy? Also, I'd really like to see some lawsuits against advertising providers and websites displaying ads when those ads contain malware. Someone needs to be liable for not properly vetting ads.
I'll support anti-blocking initiative, if and only if these websites and ad providers are held criminally and financially liable for any damage caused by malicious ads.
I've never heard of a TV ad locking up someone's TV and ask for ransom. Hold online ads to the same standard.
He described the practice of charging companies to be whitelisted as a 'modern day protection racket', and said: "Quite simply – if people don't pay in some way for content, then that content will eventually no longer exist
That's EXACTLY the point. I didn't agree to view advertising in exchange for the content. Nobody contacted me about the arrangement to find out how I felt about it. If their business model depends on annoying me in a way that I have the power to stop then it should surprise no one when I go ahead and stop them from bothering me. Their stupid business model is not my problem.
To meaningfully understand consumer backlash to advertising means we need to go back all the way to 1986. It was here, when advertisers switched from building a product to building a brand and decoupling their reliance on a product entirely. Its also worth noting many scholars reference the 80s to a period of peak consumption. we had more choices than ever, and could no longer reliably rely on quality as a metric for purchases. by the 90s manufacturers through NAFTA and CAFTA had cemented this concept of american "brand" consumption entirely. Advertising, arguably, now had to become entirely predatory.
luxury cars were no longer sold on quality and luxury, but on a brand of cultivated superiority and projection of affluence. Athletic shoes, appliances, food, you name it, suddenly became a feature of a culture you could define yourself by and not a product you were actually seeking. "what does it do, how well does it do it" was no longer offered to be considered. And as brands forced more and more lifestyle and experience into their products they began to run out of understanding of culture, or the entropy by which their brand-centric consumerism thrived.
fast forward to this foul year 2016. ads now track you, sites track you, and campaigns overtly demand your input. there are entire analytic suites and social science departments that study you like a petri dish for any semblance of clue as to what defines your wants, and how to exploit your desires. they do this because without information about who you are and what you do, the product cant be targeted to appeal to what lifestyle you can be made to desire. Be it astronaut, playboy, or racecar driver. unless the idea of brand-as-culture is dialed back, this is only going to get worse.
what we're seeing online is a revolt against the intrusiveness of ads from bandwidth to page view and browser experience, but its also a revolt against the idea of a consumer as a lab-rat
Good people go to bed earlier.
This reminds me of that ass-clown Jamie Kellner (chairman and CEO of Turner Broadcasting) who claimed that using your DVR to skip commercials was like stealing:
"Because of the ad skips, It’s theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming."
That's odd, because I don't remember signing any contract that says I have to watch commercials.
Apparently this also applies to going to the bathroom during commercial breaks. If you do that, you're stealing!
So in response to John Whittingdale, I'll give him the exact same response I gave to Jamie Kellner, and that was, "Fuck you."
I run some ad-supported sites, and if they die off because the visitors use ad-blockers, so be it. "Them's the breaks." In short, no one owes me anything, and if my site visitors decide to use an ad-blocker, that's fine with me.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
That nice BBC system you have over there has worked quite well for some time and should be emulated elsewhere.
Advertising revenue does not guarantee quality content. Far from it. A huge portion of the internet seems to have already devolved into click-bait with ads. If the choice is between that and nothing, I'll take nothing, There is still life beyond the browser.
...will set up a 'round-table' between online publishers and adblocking companies...
Someone needs be in attendance at that round-table event to advocate for the users who employ the ad blockers, so that the users can explain why they are used.
.
It is the users who are CHOOSING to use the ad blockers. The users should be represented in that government-sponsored round-table event.
It's nothing to do with the politicians. It's the advertisers and their under-table back-handers. A lowly oik is promised a non-executive board position at £300k/yr 4ish years down the road. She raises the issue with civil servants (job for life in the public sector, never lose their jobs when govts change) until it makes it to a committee. At this point more money comes in via promises of further non-exec income for the senior people on said committee; these people will be associated with a given party, even if they're don't hold a senior seat.
Sooner or later the corps get to buy legislation at the expense of the people. This is obviously the status quo in the US, but no Europe (yet). The retards in the UK always gripe about the House of Lords, but it's these very people that are the last bastion of sanity to tell the lower House to fuck off with this shit. Unfortunately the UK has followed the US model and set things up to reduce the peers (who have zero worries about income, wealth, education et al, for them and their family), and load up with career politicians to outvote those that see through the obvious corporate buy-the-law bullshit.
I sort of understand their point in this matter, at least partially. When money comes into play regarding whitelisting, that's where I'm having a hard time accepting ad blocking companies' actions. It's like being forced to claim a Yelp business profile so you can respond to critical comments.
What I don't have any objections against are non-profit adblocking software that let the user fully control what they see or don't see while respecting their privacy. No hidden URL tracking policies, data collection, ad whitelisting schemes or any similar nonsense. There are already a metric shitton of means to get around ad blocking software and improving user privacy at the same time.
-SR
Okay.. and after reading that article, the conclusion I come to, is that adblockers have nothing to do with the problem in the first place, the entire premise of online advertising is wrong and broken to start with, coupled with one simple and immutable fact about human beings: There are people who look at ads, and there are people who don't look at ads, and you can't get one to be the other regardless of how much you try. I'm a non-ad-viewer; online, if an adblocker doesn't block something, my brain is disciplined to just plain not register them anymore; even if I see it with my eyes, it doesn't make it into long-term memory. I have a TiVo DVR, and the undocumented 30-second skip function is turned on; I expertly click through commericals, and what little I see of them, 99% of the time, doesn't stick either. If, online, they started requiring a site I use to view a video advertisement all the way through before continuing on to the site? I'd either leave the room, change to a different tab, or if they were too obnoxious about it (say, for instance, they required you to interact with the ad, or it goes on playing forever) I'd just stop using the site out of frustration and disgust. Nothing is going to change my sentiments towards such things; I feel they are an abomination and I simply won't tolerate them. I know I'm far from alone in feeling that way about advertisements, too. Then there are the people who view commercials on TV as part of the entertainment. I'd imagine many of them think online ads are just fine, and actually pay attention to them. They're not going to get me, and I sure don't get them, either. However the ad-viewing types must also have a breaking point where you'd alienate them enough that they'd look elsewhere instead of enduring an overbearing ad; making ads more in-your-face than they already are isn't going to change the mind or habits of someone in my column, but it sure might drive the people in the other column away, making their 'ad revenue' problem even worse. Seems that they have limited choices in what they can do about this: They can accept the legitimate ad revenue they can get, and try to detect and exclude the fraudulent traffic, or they can risk getting more obnoxious with the ads and potentially lose their willing audience, or perhaps everything goes pay-only if you want access to a site, or they just take the loss (if they can bear it) and let people have content for free, and find some other way to get paid. Guess advertisers choices aren't really that great, but you'll excuse me for not having much sympathy for them, being one in the 'non-ad-viewing' column, who despises having anyone try to sell me anything at all, even if I might be interested.
:-(
Of course the problem goes well beyond TV and the Internet if you ask me. I can't easily estimate the amount of waste paper in my physical mailbox that goes straight into the recycle bin every month, and how offensive it is to me that money and resources are being wasted on that, and I have no way of stopping it being delivered to me; there is no 'adblocker' of any kind for your snailmailbox.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Adblocking really is just like piracy. A better product at a better price.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
And if AdBlocking software is banned, then people will just figure out other ways to keep the web clean.
As much as I hate to say this, and I really hate to say this: ad-blocking through host file changes will be resilient.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.