What we break when we fix ad blocking

I&#x27;m going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don&#x27;t mind paying.<p>It is because when I&#x27;m in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don&#x27;t care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it&#x27;s only in the HTML comments it may be ok). There has to be a better way to finance the web, because I refuse to accept websites trying to convince me to give my money to irrelevant third parties.<p>More extremely, I flat out refuse consumerist society whenever possible. None of us needs to be manipulated into buying most of the things ads try to manipulate us to buy.

This article, like all the ones before it complaining about AdBlock, seem to conflate all kinds of contents like they&#x27;re all the same.<p>Yet, they aren&#x27;t. People gladly pay for content: books, mp3 (streamed or downloaded), going to the theater, subscribing to Netflix and&#x2F;or cable, etc. etc.<p>The article argues that with the advent of adblocking all content will hide behind a paywall; but that will not happen... or not for long.<p>Paywalls work for high quality content (eg, The Economist); but not for low quality content.<p>Low quality content cannot survive behind a paywall, because nobody will pay for it; what will happen is that low quality content made for profit will die&#x2F;disappear, and we&#x27;ll all be better for it.<p>What will survive is high quality content made for profit or for free, and low quality content made for free (which we can ignore).<p>This whole debate exists only because current producers of low quality content have somehow convinced everyone that their content is in fact worthwhile, and that it&#x27;s an accident and a crime that they&#x27;d be robbed of revenue, and that users are fools not wanting to pay for it.<p>This is rubbish. Users are not fools, and they are always right. What they will not pay for is <i>worthless</i>, literally.

Just like if 95% of my cable channels disappeared overnight, I&#x27;m actually pretty OK with a bunch of websites going out of business, and I end up paying for the few services I&#x27;m not already paying for but would wish to keep. It&#x27;s sad that people lose their jobs, especially those that can no longer make a living doing what they love, but from a product standpoint: whatever.<p>I was around before the commercialization of the web exploded, and I might miss all the light entertainment that it provides, but going back wouldn&#x27;t be the worst. The parts of the internet that are most special to me are some combination of not funded by ads in the first place, a labor of love, open source, or I already pay for anyway.<p>The increasingly desperate, increasingly gross business models that pop up as publishers go down with the ship is going to suck though.

My issue is with advertisements that break web pages, or slow them down dramatically. Or even worse, take up real estate on my phone, and just plain break my mobile experience further. Sometimes I forget to install an adblocker whenever I do a fresh OS install and forget just how bad things can be without an adblocker (well really my biggest peeve is pop ups, just why are they still around?) and they get worse when someone buys ads to distribute an exploit to Java or something (was once in my lifetime a victim to a Java 0-day through advertisements - never again will I enable Java as a browser plugin).

There is an alternative to adverts. Its real, it&#x27;s here, it works. That alternative is Patreon.<p>In the Patreon model, you can support the creator directly, and their ability to produce content scales with that support. It&#x27;s like a subscription, except you allow anyone else to free ride.<p>A Patreon supported site could run <i>no ads at all</i> and still make a stable income. It would no longer be fighting its readers to force them to view manipulative nonsense. It would no longer be answerable to pushy, content-controlling advertisers. It would have more editorial freedom, bounded only by the willingness of people to pay.<p>IMO the Patreon model answers all the problems of the advertising model and I&#x27;d like to see it becoming the norm.

This article assumes that advertisers can get more sophisticated than blockers - I don&#x27;t agree. With good enough technology, any logo can be snipped out or scribbled over. Any inline, self hosted image can be recognized and removed. Perhaps in future, adblockers will comb through the text of pages and the frames of video and your hero will be drinking &quot;soda&quot; instead of &lt;brand name&gt;.<p>Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking glasses. So I can walk down the street and NO LOGOS.<p>It would almost be like humans owned the public space, then.

Sorry content makers, you don&#x27;t have the rights to resell my eyeballs. I truly am sorry that for many of you this represents a loss of what would otherwise be an easy income stream, but I will apologize for blocking ads no more than I would for unsubscribing from spam&#x2F;newsletters or for not clicking ads or buying advertised goods, which is to say, not at all.<p>Much like newspapers, you&#x27;ve hitched your wagons to problematic revenue streams. I wish it were easier, but as content creators you are also businesses, and you need to work on better ways to support yourselves. That&#x27;s your responsibility, not mine. I do support content creators directly quite often and quite a lot in many different ways (merch, crowdfunding, direct support such as patreon, volunteer labour, etc). If you can&#x27;t survive in a world full of &quot;me&quot;s, well I suspect you weren&#x27;t trying very hard.

The condescending attitude of &quot;users don&#x27;t understand the consequences of their actions&quot; -- which I&#x27;ve also seen from several other people raising red flags about the consequences of ad-blocking -- really bugs me a lot.<p>A different way of looking at it is that many users <i>do</i> understand the consequences and either disagree with the author about the likely outcomes or have a different set of priorities than the author.

There&#x27;s a great short book called &#x27;Who moved my Cheese?&#x27; which tackles the impermanence of any particular means of income stream.<p>Putting aside the morality&#x2F;ethics discussion for a moment, it seems to me that the &#x27;cheese&#x27; is moving for content publishers and so they are left with a choice, change and find new cheese - or stay and starve. Either way, the current gnashing of teeth will have little effect.

Ad blocking is interesting in that it shows what happens when something that probably should be regulated has not. And because of this the public trust has eroded and then the answer has become an arms race of ad blockers vs ads. Resulting in a downward spiral resulting in less quality content.<p>The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.

They are not ad-blockers so much as HTML firewalls.<p>I use a firewall to protect my home network from the wilds of the internet. I use an HTML firewall to protect my browser (and in turn, my home network) from the wilds of the web.<p>Incredibly slow loading, large assets that are inconsequential to the functionality I need, malware, unwanted visual clutter that creates a negative cognitive load I want to protect myself from.<p>The reality that advertisements are the main targets is indicative that they have perhaps been the worst offenders. I&#x27;m sure there are many good advertisers out there. I&#x27;m sure it is only the 99% that make the rest of them look bad.

I&#x27;ve been trying out Google Contributor of late. It&#x27;s not perfect, but it&#x27;s the first practical micropayment service I&#x27;ve been able to use.<p>If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.

&gt; <i>A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the original sin of the web was to disconnect the value of ads from the users experience on the page. The data is clear: the better the user experience =&gt; the more attention you can capture while an ad may be in view =&gt; the greater impact on recall and recognition. Ad-supported pages that prioritise user experience are more effective, but we set up our systems to care about page loads not performance.</i><p>I&#x27;m curious why, in all the outrage and handwringing about ad blockers and the future of the Web, <i>nobody</i> ever seriously suggests making ads less annoying.<p>We don&#x27;t need a new monetization model. We need content providers, and by extension advertising providers, to refuse to carry ads that are wildly intrusive, CPU-intensive, or outright fraudulent (&quot;one weird trick&quot;). Seriously, why are major national news outlets carrying advertisements that are as sketchy as those X-Ray Specs ads from old Boy&#x27;s Life magazines?

Ad blocking is really a war between regular users and criminals, with ad networks as the battlefield (and sometimes the criminals themselves) and content producers&#x2F;publishers as the civilians caught in the crossfire.<p>It&#x27;s not the users&#x27; fault that not running ad-blocking is outright dangerous and stupid, and it&#x27;s not always the website operators fault that their &quot;trusted&quot; ad networks let terrible things through constantly.

The irony is that the biggest player here, Google, was also the most aggressive in placing ads. I had the pleasure of working with various AdSense and DFP Specialists. Basically it was all about how and where to place ads in the most eye-catching ways, and as many as possible, without breaking AdSense rules. Bigger ads = usually better (in particular those large rectangles, yuck). Higher up the fold = better (funny enough the Google Search team later penalitzed you when you replaced your up-the-fold content with non-content ad stuff - which shows that there are Chinese walls separating various Google teams).

If ad blocking is a matter of right and wrong, then so is the invisible hand of <i>any</i> demand&#x2F;supply driven system.<p>Blocking web-based ads is no different from TV viewers who walk out of the room, or record shows then skip over ads on playback, or mute the TV during ads. AFAIK, no TV advertisers have bemoaned that venerable practice.<p>If web ad purveyors want folks to browse differently then they must 1) improve their spam so people choose not to block it, or 2) change the physical way it&#x27;s distributed.<p>To volubly complain is to sleight the invisible hand, which as you know, in the Land of the Free, is akin to giving olde Mr Smith the finger.

I use Adblock and I don&#x27;t mind disabling it for sites that provide quality content or reading materials. There has to be a balance which is sometimes abused by the sites.<p>For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don&#x27;t make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don&#x27;t mind watching a small commercial if it was 5-10 minutes highlight of a game. If the balance was reasonable I am sure Adblock would not have been this popular.

This flood of articles about blocking ads are all predicated on the assumption that making money with ads supports quality content, and that the internet as we know it would not exist without ads. Both of these assumptions are false - the internet didn&#x27;t begin by being driven by ads, and it won&#x27;t end that way, and ad-driven content is degraded by the ads when it starts to exist because of them.<p>The intrusive ads which are being blocked do not lead to quality content, on the contrary they intrude on it both in an immediate sense by distracting readers from the content, and in editorial terms, by driving a constant demand for more clicks, more views, and more unique visits, whatever the cost. The result of an ad-driven web is newspapers which have deteriorated into machines for generating a constant stream of listicles, written mostly for free or a pittance by an army of writers. The result is media sites which see the success of Buzzfeed not as a warning but as inspiration, which use services like outbrain to try to keep users clicking in a circle of despair through endless shocking headlines which promise much but offer nothing of substance.<p>I won&#x27;t mourn that web as it passes, and I won&#x27;t be starting to read the Facebook News app or other corporate feeds instead - native apps are subject to the same pressures and the same inexorable creep of advertising around and into the content. This will be a blow for Google though, and I&#x27;m quite sure behind Apple&#x27;s rhetoric about user choice lies a calculation that this will limit Google&#x27;s bottom line.<p>The Mona Lisa is an interesting example to use, as it was neither produced in order to display with advertising, nor with advertising within the picture (the two choices offered in the article). It and pictures like it were commissioned privately by a patron who valued the services of that painter but thereafter was displayed for free to the world - maybe there&#x27;s a model there for online content - commissioned via something like kickstarter for its value but thereafter displayed for free to the public. It also wasn&#x27;t valued as much at the time as it is now.<p><i>We should reject false dichotomies which offer the choice between one sort of advertising or another.</i> The best places for discussion, content and news on the web are often advertising free, or have advertising which is unobtrusive and targeted and therefore not likely to be blocked by users, given the choice (as with HN for example). I honestly wouldn&#x27;t mourn the loss of most of the so-called news services we currently have, and the rise of other services which request payment from a patron, subscription payments from loyal users, or find other ways of making ends meet (selling related services, bundled content, making money on related transactions like bookings etc). There are lots more ways to make money in the world than advertising, and most of them less degrading.

&gt; If the content that best informs our thinking is increasingly only available to those willing to pay then it has troubling impacts for those living in poverty or countries for whom a $9.95 monthly subscription is out of reach.<p>...including children and teenagers, who are unlikely to want to get approval from their parents for everything they read

Magazines &amp; newspapers shot themselves in the foot when they ran out to produce free content to &quot;stay in the game&quot; like everyone else.<p>Their original product was never free, but they didn&#x27;t think that through. They made most money through ads &amp; classified, but they still charged for the product.<p>Now they need to figure out how to make each visitor be worth 50 cents or whatever, and they are trying to do it in a way that people were already growing sick of when they started.<p>---<p>They should create a system of micropayments where people can have a instantly accessible purse &amp; a page can charge a few cents to few, ranked by content, author, whatever.<p>they need to start selling their content again.

I think a lot of the recent pushback against adverts is driven by video and specifically autoplaying video ads.<p>As an advertiser I might well be tempted to stop displaying video ads if I was convinced that a big proportion of users were blocking video but not text ads.<p>Sadly most blockers are all or nothing. Most users are not going to go to the trouble of whitelisting individual sites so a better middle ground would be global AD blocker settings:<p>Off - Block nothing Low - Block popups Medium - Block popups and video High - Block everything<p>If that was a common model it would encourage some reasonable behaviour on both sides.

Kudos to Apple for drawing the line like they did with Flash. Advertisers were degrading their product and irritating their users by going too far, so Apple did the right thing.

In the future everyone will be producing content - not just the people that currently do it for a living. Brand-name publishers simply will not be able to compete against the masses. It began with TypePad blogging, and now platforms like Medium are taking social publishing even more mainstream.<p>Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?

Web publishers should get together to make a &quot;Reader&#x27;s Charter&quot; that pledges to stop annoying ads. It&#x27;s not that complicated. Here&#x27;s mine: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;newslines.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-improved-this-website-with-one-weird-trick&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;newslines.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-i-improved-this-website-with-o...</a>

<i>in trying to be more private we may be more transparent</i><p>I think that&#x27;s one thing people don&#x27;t account for. once most content is behind paywalls you leave much more of a trace than on the ad-ridden web now

My understanding is that adblockers work by removing known third party app sites from loading items on a page.<p>If that&#x27;s true, what would stop a website from proxying ads, so they appear to come from the website rather than the third party?<p>I guess that would involve more bandwidth and so less money for the site, but high-bandwidth items are the ones people complain about anyway. I don&#x27;t see why text based ads would be impossible under that scheme, for example.

Just to throw an idea out, surely not original...Http has a payment&#x2F;advertising system added to the headers. Users decide if they will make a micropayment, view advertising or do a subscription to view a page&#x2F;site if the site requests payment. The user can have a default setting and also settings for specific sites. Along with this there is some management that limits information the site can get about the user.

I&#x27;m curious now after reading the mobile gaming post that&#x27;s also on the front page. If everyone paid for the content on the big news sites, would it even be more profitable than selling ads and mining user data?<p>How much would sites have to charge to make up for the loss of ads and user data?<p>Also what are the chances publishers to ever get rid of tracking and mining data?

This reminds me of a concert experience back in the days. The venue had curtain in front of the stage where they shot a projector and somebody had forgot to full-screen the slide show and the entire audience could see napster running in the task bar.

I almost don&#x27;t understand why people are still paying the prices they pay to put ads out on the internet. There are some exceptions but name the last &quot;ad&quot; you clicked on? It probably resembles the last spam you followed.

I&#x27;m just going to re-quote one of my comments from a previous topic that was flagged to death:<p>&gt;Back in the early internet era, the best content was available for free of charge. If anything, that&#x27;s still the case even today. Try to google on some technical topics like Ohm&#x27;s law or something and you&#x27;ll find very old websites built with good ole&#x27; HTML tables providing the information you need crisp and clear.<p>&gt;Actually, I disagree. This is 2015. If I want to start a website on a certain topic, say about cars or electronics, I can find some really good free hosts who will support me without any sneazy catches. As a real example, I go to blogger.com, setup a new blog with my own custom theme, (with all the attribution to blogger removed if I want to) and start producing content. Not cool with blogspot? Then, how about Github pages? Not so technical? How about using a free shared web host (there are plenty, Google them)?<p>&gt;If your objective is to spread information and knowledge, you will do that no matter what. It is when your objective is guised as spreading information when you really want to make money and scale up doing so, then you run into a problem. The problem with this kind of appeal against ad-blocking is the same old argument of &quot;How much is too much?&quot; &quot;We need money to support our website to keep it up and running&quot;. But, never do these authors disclose how much they really need as long as they&#x27;re making a killer profit. The problem with mixing ads with content is that introduces a conflict of interest - Are you writing that content because you like writing, or are you writing that content to get more eyeballs to serve your advertisers? And it&#x27;s very hard to convince your readers that you don&#x27;t intend to make money from them although you have ads on your site.<p>&gt;For your reference, I do own a blog myself without any ads whatsoever and I think this is the future we&#x27;re heading towards. I am a proud user of adblock software and I refused to be shamed for that. As would any user, I am concerned about the content first, which is the logical reason why I go to a site. But, if the site tries hard to ruin my experience to make it difficult for me to consume that content, then of course, I&#x27;ll find a way to circumvent it. But, that doesn&#x27;t mean I don&#x27;t support the authors of the site, just that as everyone else, I have my own way of supporting them. Just like how I&#x27;ve been donating to Wikipedia all these years. There have been too many sites abusing the slogan of &quot;We need to place ads so we can support ads&quot; to buy back our lost trust. Sure, there will be a lot of content weeded out because they can&#x27;t support themselves, but I am confident that the ones whose objectives are to spread information will do so no matter what.<p>&gt;We built the internet ourselves when no one gave us ads to support our efforts back then. And we&#x27;ll find a way to do it again. Just takes time and patience.

Maybe scaling native advertising might hire more people than robotizing the whole affair the way it is now.

If you use an ad blocker and consume content supported by ads, you are a thief. It may be the best case scenario for your security, time, etc and there are cases where thievery is justified, but you are a thief nonetheless.

It&#x27;s pretty clear to me that the endgame for this is ad-blocking-blockers: You run an ad blocker, then you either pay to visit my site or you disable your ad blocker for my site.<p>That&#x27;s going to slow down sites even more, but that&#x27;s the tragedy of the commons: some sites will be obnoxious in the ads they show it forces people to use ad-blockers. That destroys the livelihood of so many people that countermeasures will be developed.

Advertising is paying for goods with attention. It&#x27;s a novel type of currency. It&#x27;s a wealth generator. And it&#x27;s contributed to a more diverse Internet.<p>If you don&#x27;t want to pay with attention that&#x27;s fine. If you believe the Internet should be an ad-free Utopia, that&#x27;s fine too. But rather than take content without paying attention, practice some civil disobedience: embargo publishers who piss you off.