Well, yeah, ad-blockers are among the best antivirus-software, speed up page-load times, reduce data usage, improve privacy and require roundabout 0 effort on the user's part.
And except for ignorance of their existence or extreme benevolence, there's not a whole lot of reasons for users to not install ad-blockers.<p>That the ad-industry has been flourishing for so long is actually more surprising to me...
Greetings from Poland :)<p>Even while inconvenient for me, I've switched on my android from chrome (which I also use on desktopt) to firefox because of one reason: you can install plugins (read ublock, adblock etc) on firefox for android. Since that day, mobile browsing is a BLISS !!!<p>You can see here (and elsewhere) why: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-...</a>
> But the survey also found that very few people pay anything for online news—just 9% of people in English-speaking countries<p>That's WAY higher than I expected
To me, ad blockers are a sign the web is working.<p>Ethics comes up a bit when it comes to ad blockers. Sites make money from ads. Dont' they have a right to?.. I think if we're going to think about it in that sort of way, we need to sort out rights. The web means that servers can serve whatever they want. They have a "right" to send you pictures of clowns when you request their page, even if that page was a news site yesterday. They can also send you ads. The client has the "right" to do whatever they want with that page. They can use whichever browser they want. Display the content however they want using whatever software they want. They can read the code, execute the JS, selectively display the content....<p>That's the <i>deal</i>. Servers can send what they want. Clients can do whatever they want with whatever servers send them. Users are exercising their rights with adblockers.<p>On the more practical side, it's interesting how the economics of this has evolved. In the beginning, online ads were pretty useless and worthless. The economic model around online ads collapsed with the 99 crash.<p>Then Google (or really omniture) figured out how online ads could work. They cleverly used it to serve ads with a tiny, unobtrusive footprint and still make way more money than the dancing monkey ads from the 90s. We've been in rapid growth mode since, and the value of advertising stock is now through the roof.<p>Now that online ads are valuable again, the incentives to go overboard are overwhelming. Even Google who made small and unobtrusive ads a core idea have crossed some big lines. They look at valuable search queries like "best divorce lawyer in Toronto" where every <i>click</i> is worth $50, all the clicks going to those worthless (free) organic results and aggressively trying to increase the share of clicks going to ads.<p>Now, even if you search for a divorce lawyer by name, you will first scroll throught a page and a half (on mobile) of his competitors ads. This is unequivocally "obtrusive" in the sense that it puts less relevant content in more prominence than the relevant stuff.<p>This time it's being driven by ads being valuable rather than worthless.<p>Back to the rights thing... Ad blockers and the active right of users to reject certain content is a balancing force here. When a respectable news site, forces you through an ad before they load a page, autoplay a video and then pop up (or under) an affiliate link to aliexpress and dating for gold digger pages...
I am amazed the numbers are that low actually. Most sites become unusable without an adblocker as many mobile browsers simply crash when trying to load that many content.<p>Also, the amount of data used by ads is overwhelming, and (at least in my country) mobile data limits are still from 1999. Since setting up a squid proxy with adblocker for my mobile devices, my mobile data usage dropped significantly, allowing me to switch to a cheaper data plan.
Keep pushing. I've said this many times before, there will inevitably be some casualties in the war on intrusive ads but these might be necessary to convince advertisers to come back to us with a fair deal. Don't accept guilt-tripping, don't be pressured into allowing unlimited surveillance by private entities, traditional circulation based advertising which isn't a bare in terms of bandwidth or surveillance can and will work when users demand it.
But it is good for actual companies/people who pay for ads, right? I mean, in the first place I wouldn't want to pay for showing my ad to someone who is not genuinely interested, thus is not a potential client. And it is in my interest that such people use ad-blockers.
It's a dead end. People in Poland won't really pay subscription fees, so the only way to monetize is through ads. Ads don't pay that much though, so they are packed in amounts that are beyond annoying for users. So they block.<p>On the other hand, most people gather their daily news digest from one of the top news outlets, which in turn serve heaviest ads. So the most valuable customer is the average Joe who doesn't know ads can be blocked and doesn't really care.
This industry is ripe for disruption by micro-payment system. I want to be able to surf, and make a small payment on every website I visit ($0.001). If system detects I actually used something (copy&paste, longer visit, scroll down, print bookmark), payment should be increased significantly.<p>But it has to preserve privacy, be scam proof...
I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which harms the bottom line (ad-blockers, decreased viewership, etc).<p>The fact that these patterns are being spoken about to such a large audience - I have no link to the advertising industry and have seen loud messages from large publications outlining some issues:<p>- Relevance: showing an ad of something you just searched on eBay on your news site was novel at first but over time people have learned to tune out because seeing your search for soccer ball while reading about terrorism just taught people to blank out the irrelevant ads.<p>- Performance: tracking scripts, social sharing, multimedia ads. Refer to the series of VPAID Google+ posts outlining the detrimental effects of a single ad loaded into the user's view.<p>Companies targeting contextualisation and performance, and accepting that users are no longer willing to accept the poor quality of current popular methods may be in the minority at the moment but the niche will most likely expand. They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods, and current popular methods will slowly be overtaken by those methods that obtain a better ROI.<p>A good question is how long will the industry ignore the rising walls of ad-blocking? Walls seem a lot hard to take down than build in these types of situations. It would be wrong to expect people to turn off their ad-blockers because the industry pinky-swears not to overstep the boundaries again.
For some months I try to not use ad blockers on one laptop (Dell XPS13 2016) after years of ad blocker usage.<p>1. I still hate how sometimes ads pop up where I click, often above videos. Might be intentional or might be download times of the ads (or might intentionally use the slower download of ads by placing them there).<p>2. While traveling with a limited mobile data plan, data was sucked up by video ads, reloading ads, ... the largest strain on my data plan was ads.<p>3. Many ads get larger and have sounds, which is painfully annoying.<p>4. Not yet been infected by an ad, but the anxiety is there.<p>5. Not scientific, but my feeling is power is significantly drained faster (checking some days with ad blocker on)
I'll just keep reading public service news sites.<p>The online presence of commercial news feels mostly stressful, incendiary, and yucky to me. That publishers don't understand or ignore the way their advertisements ruin the user experience and sell out our news reading habits is just another reason to consider commercial news as basically hostile.
More and more of the large German news pages are adding auto-playing videos to their websites and you find them even on their mobile websites. Think about that for a second... auto playing videos on mobile websites in a country with very expensive mobile contracts... Who thought that this might be a good idea?
I think even browsers such as Firefox should begin to offer an easily accessible adblock button. But instead of being enabled by default, it should be off by default for all websites. If the users are annoyed with a site's ads, then they can click to block them, and the preference is saved permanently until the user unblocks that site again. I believe this is exactly what Opera does now.<p>Third-party tracking protection should be enabled by default.