If you start a new company and have a new product, how are you going to tell people it exists?
Advertise on a website about that class of product, not on the web at large. For example, advertise a video game on a website about video games, and advertise tampons on a site about women's health.
If you're unemployed and want to find a job, how do you know there are job openings?
Look at ads posted on a job board, such as Indeed, Monster, or Stack Overflow Jobs, not on the web at large.
If you're not happy with a product and want to find some alternative, what do you do?
Subscribe to Consumer Reports, a not-for-profit publisher of less-biased product reviews. Or look for reviews on some other website specializing in that class of product.
Well, you could sell page view tokens in quantities of more than one per transaction for starters.
What good is buying single-site page view tokens in minimum quantities of 100 when a reader plans to view only one article on a site? The sunk cost of the remaining 99 page views produces almost the same filter bubble effect as the sunk cost of the remaining 29.9 days of a monthly subscription.
Porn sites had(have?) the adult verified affiliate network where for one aubacriptio you get access to a bunch of sites.
I'm aware of Adult Check, and I've suggested a similar multi-site subscription model before because adults can pay for nice things. But what appears to have brought down Adult Check was the fact that so many sites on the network were carrying infringing copies of photographs taken from Perfect 10 magazine. The publisher of Perfect 10 sued Adult Check and won. What should a multi-site subscription network do to mitigate its vicarious liability for infringing activity of its participating publishers?
Some people want to pay, but they don't want 30 cents per page view to go to the credit card companies. What method of accepting payment without 30 cents per page view going to the credit card companies would you recommend?
Would you accept not having Internet access at home? If, as you suggest, there were "no ads. For anything. Ever", there would likely not be enough economies of scale for your cable company to continue to offer affordable Internet access to your residence. Adblock Plus will not protect you from the "You are offline" notice.
I'm guessing based on your comment that your phone is POTS or VoIP, I assume, and you currently do not subscribe to mobile phone service. Am I right? If so, have you emailed Twitter about inability to receive a code at your phone number?
Alternate scenario: You walk in the mall, and each store charges $10 admission whether you buy anything in there or not. The admission is good for unlimited return visits within the next 30 days but not good at other stores.
Are you cool with that too? Because, to me, it's exactly the same as the paywall scenario that's likely to happen soon after publishers stop tracking users on the internet.
if I can't view a site through an ad blocker, I just go somewhere else.
Occasionally, I've been applying the same policy to featured articles in Slashdot stories. But when I have posted a comment to the story warning other Slashdot users that the article is behind a paywall or incompatible with tracking protection in Firefox or both, such comments have often ended up modded down as "Troll" or the like.
That kind of information belongs in trade publications and the like, the ultimate targeted advertising.
I appreciate what you're trying to say: if you want to see computer-related ads, you'd open a Computer Shopper or the like. But not everybody is already aware of the existence of relevant trade publications. And seeing as not every publication is a trade publication, how would the writing and distribution of publications that aren't trade publications be funded? Paywalls?
Even if "non-tailored ads are still worth something", they might not be worth enough to pay for a particular site's writing and hosting. Interest-based ads reportedly command three times the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to context-based ads. "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" by J. Howard Beales and Jeffrey A. Eisenach states: "the availability of cookies to capture user-specific information is found to increase the observed exchange transaction price by [...] as much as 200 percent (for users with longer-lived cookies)."
What you suggest is in fact being done. Servo is the project to rewrite Firefox's engine in Rust, a modern language focusing on provable thread safety through abstractions with zero runtime cost. Quantum is the project to replace parts of Firefox's engine written in C++ with the parts of Servo that are completed.
Who would buy a proprietary box for a single use case in this era?
I see it as no more unusual than buying an Xbox One game console just for the latest Halo game or a Nintendo Switch game console just for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Hopefully, with a relatively fine-grained exception system that allows this to be overridden explicitly when it makes sense to.
This raises two questions: First, how would a non-technical user learn to operate "a relatively fine-grained exception system" with the appropriate balance between safety and convenience? Second, how would a developer go about proving its application worthy of such an exception?
Desktops and mobile devices have very different input and output devices. You shouldn't be using the same human interface for both of them.
Good point. This raises two questions: First, which not-a-web-browser desktop app player is compatible with all major desktop and laptop platforms (X11/Linux, macOS, Windows, and Chrome OS)? Second, which not-a-web-browser mobile app player is compatible with both major touch-driven platforms (iOS and Android)?
you could easily create a lot of well designed, cross-platform libraries that did work between machine types and were far, far easier to develop with than when targeting a browser.
However, this raises two issues. First, let's assume for a moment that a developer doesn't own a Mac yet. Even assuming such a developer can figure out how to cross-compile a macOS application on GNU/Linux, how would such a developer cross-test the macOS build to make sure that the application has no macOS-only bugs? Second, Apple has reserved the right to block an application from being made available for iOS devices through its App Store. It'd face a lot more uproar if it tried to block a web application from being made compatible with the Safari browser.
Until it becomes common for ad-supported websites to offer use in app mode without charge or use in reading mode for a monthly subscription. Anti-tracking-blocking measures on The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and other websites already do just this.
Assuming that applications belong in an environment that is not-a-web-browser: Which not-a-web-browser application environment is compatible with all major desktop and mobile platforms?
So where would that leave web applications that have a legitimate use for "all this HTML5 crap"? As I understand your suggestion, they'd have to become native applications, which means they might not be made available at all for minority operating systems or CPU architectures.
Do many sites actually use the hard to block techniques in your test suite though?
I'm not aware that they do. But if use of video blocking functionality in browsers or browser extensions becomes more common, I imagine that they are likely to.
Seems like a lot of effort and bandwidth just to play back something that they know the user doesn't want to see.
The ad server uses cheap wired bandwidth, and its operator doesn't care that viewers are behind a more expensive cellular connection. Its operator cares only about impressions and how well those impressions are matched to interests inferred from surveiling each viewer's browsing history. Besides, the pure CSS JPEG filmstrip is 0.59 MB, or less than one part per million of the 1 TB/mo cap imposed by Xfinity Internet.
Even if you might not consider GIF or motion JPEG to be video, an ad network might. If an ad serving script detects that the browser is blocking MPEG-4 or WebM playback, it could seamlessly fall back to GIF or motion JPEG.
Video ads are the only way that a lot of sites can keep from going behind a paywall.
As long as the user can choose to play them or not.
Consider a website that displays the headline and the first sentence, and the rest of the article loads once the user has made a gesture to activate a button labeled "Play Videos and Continue Reading". Would you accept a flow like that?
Slashdot Mirror
If you start a new company and have a new product, how are you going to tell people it exists?
Advertise on a website about that class of product, not on the web at large. For example, advertise a video game on a website about video games, and advertise tampons on a site about women's health.
If you're unemployed and want to find a job, how do you know there are job openings?
Look at ads posted on a job board, such as Indeed, Monster, or Stack Overflow Jobs, not on the web at large.
If you're not happy with a product and want to find some alternative, what do you do?
Subscribe to Consumer Reports, a not-for-profit publisher of less-biased product reviews. Or look for reviews on some other website specializing in that class of product.
Well, you could sell page view tokens in quantities of more than one per transaction for starters.
What good is buying single-site page view tokens in minimum quantities of 100 when a reader plans to view only one article on a site? The sunk cost of the remaining 99 page views produces almost the same filter bubble effect as the sunk cost of the remaining 29.9 days of a monthly subscription.
Porn sites had(have?) the adult verified affiliate network where for one aubacriptio you get access to a bunch of sites.
I'm aware of Adult Check, and I've suggested a similar multi-site subscription model before because adults can pay for nice things. But what appears to have brought down Adult Check was the fact that so many sites on the network were carrying infringing copies of photographs taken from Perfect 10 magazine. The publisher of Perfect 10 sued Adult Check and won. What should a multi-site subscription network do to mitigate its vicarious liability for infringing activity of its participating publishers?
Such old-fashioned ads can be seen on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But their cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is one-third of what interest-based advertising can produce according to a 2014 study by Beales and Eisenach.
The web would be a lot better if you removed all the stuff that has to "get paid for" by advertising.
But would there still be enough "stuff" left to make wide use of home Internet access worth what the ISPs charge?
Some people want to pay, but they don't want 30 cents per page view to go to the credit card companies. What method of accepting payment without 30 cents per page view going to the credit card companies would you recommend?
clicking on links scrolls you "down" to a different background
Links to a fragment of the same document (e.g. <a href="#section name">link text</a> ) have been around since the 1990s.
Would you accept not having Internet access at home? If, as you suggest, there were "no ads. For anything. Ever", there would likely not be enough economies of scale for your cable company to continue to offer affordable Internet access to your residence. Adblock Plus will not protect you from the "You are offline" notice.
Chrome's engine is called Blink, yet it doesn't support the blink element. #FalseAdvertising
So anyway, how closely could CSS animation polyfill the blink element?
I'm guessing based on your comment that your phone is POTS or VoIP, I assume, and you currently do not subscribe to mobile phone service. Am I right? If so, have you emailed Twitter about inability to receive a code at your phone number?
Alternate scenario: You walk in the mall, and each store charges $10 admission whether you buy anything in there or not. The admission is good for unlimited return visits within the next 30 days but not good at other stores.
Are you cool with that too? Because, to me, it's exactly the same as the paywall scenario that's likely to happen soon after publishers stop tracking users on the internet.
if I can't view a site through an ad blocker, I just go somewhere else.
Occasionally, I've been applying the same policy to featured articles in Slashdot stories. But when I have posted a comment to the story warning other Slashdot users that the article is behind a paywall or incompatible with tracking protection in Firefox or both, such comments have often ended up modded down as "Troll" or the like.
That kind of information belongs in trade publications and the like, the ultimate targeted advertising.
I appreciate what you're trying to say: if you want to see computer-related ads, you'd open a Computer Shopper or the like. But not everybody is already aware of the existence of relevant trade publications. And seeing as not every publication is a trade publication, how would the writing and distribution of publications that aren't trade publications be funded? Paywalls?
Even if "non-tailored ads are still worth something", they might not be worth enough to pay for a particular site's writing and hosting. Interest-based ads reportedly command three times the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to context-based ads. "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" by J. Howard Beales and Jeffrey A. Eisenach states: "the availability of cookies to capture user-specific information is found to increase the observed exchange transaction price by [...] as much as 200 percent (for users with longer-lived cookies)."
You don't know what you want already?
Correct. Not everybody is already aware of the existence of all products and services that might interest them.
What you suggest is in fact being done. Servo is the project to rewrite Firefox's engine in Rust, a modern language focusing on provable thread safety through abstractions with zero runtime cost. Quantum is the project to replace parts of Firefox's engine written in C++ with the parts of Servo that are completed.
Who would buy a proprietary box for a single use case in this era?
I see it as no more unusual than buying an Xbox One game console just for the latest Halo game or a Nintendo Switch game console just for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Hopefully, with a relatively fine-grained exception system that allows this to be overridden explicitly when it makes sense to.
This raises two questions: First, how would a non-technical user learn to operate "a relatively fine-grained exception system" with the appropriate balance between safety and convenience? Second, how would a developer go about proving its application worthy of such an exception?
Desktops and mobile devices have very different input and output devices. You shouldn't be using the same human interface for both of them.
Good point. This raises two questions: First, which not-a-web-browser desktop app player is compatible with all major desktop and laptop platforms (X11/Linux, macOS, Windows, and Chrome OS)? Second, which not-a-web-browser mobile app player is compatible with both major touch-driven platforms (iOS and Android)?
you could easily create a lot of well designed, cross-platform libraries that did work between machine types and were far, far easier to develop with than when targeting a browser.
However, this raises two issues. First, let's assume for a moment that a developer doesn't own a Mac yet. Even assuming such a developer can figure out how to cross-compile a macOS application on GNU/Linux, how would such a developer cross-test the macOS build to make sure that the application has no macOS-only bugs? Second, Apple has reserved the right to block an application from being made available for iOS devices through its App Store. It'd face a lot more uproar if it tried to block a web application from being made compatible with the Safari browser.
Until it becomes common for ad-supported websites to offer use in app mode without charge or use in reading mode for a monthly subscription. Anti-tracking-blocking measures on The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and other websites already do just this.
Assuming that applications belong in an environment that is not-a-web-browser: Which not-a-web-browser application environment is compatible with all major desktop and mobile platforms?
So where would that leave web applications that have a legitimate use for "all this HTML5 crap"? As I understand your suggestion, they'd have to become native applications, which means they might not be made available at all for minority operating systems or CPU architectures.
Slashdot is the first site I know of that ran Flash ads, namely for Splunk services. Yet people still visit Slashdot.
Do many sites actually use the hard to block techniques in your test suite though?
I'm not aware that they do. But if use of video blocking functionality in browsers or browser extensions becomes more common, I imagine that they are likely to.
Seems like a lot of effort and bandwidth just to play back something that they know the user doesn't want to see.
The ad server uses cheap wired bandwidth, and its operator doesn't care that viewers are behind a more expensive cellular connection. Its operator cares only about impressions and how well those impressions are matched to interests inferred from surveiling each viewer's browsing history. Besides, the pure CSS JPEG filmstrip is 0.59 MB, or less than one part per million of the 1 TB/mo cap imposed by Xfinity Internet.
Even if you might not consider GIF or motion JPEG to be video, an ad network might. If an ad serving script detects that the browser is blocking MPEG-4 or WebM playback, it could seamlessly fall back to GIF or motion JPEG.
Video ads are the only way that a lot of sites can keep from going behind a paywall.
As long as the user can choose to play them or not.
Consider a website that displays the headline and the first sentence, and the rest of the article loads once the user has made a gesture to activate a button labeled "Play Videos and Continue Reading". Would you accept a flow like that?