Is it wrong that I don't particularly care about supporting the ad-based web? Ads don't interest me, and I don't particularly feel like making space for ads in my daily attention span and thereby degrading the quality of my web-viewing experience so big corporations can profit. The whole reason I switched from watching TV to using the internet as my primary source of entertainment was to escape advertising. I have a website and as long as it's up I am not going to put ads on it. I feel like information just wants to be free. I'd be interested to hear some alternate perspectives on this however.
If you're a user reading this kind of article or paper, you should not feel guilty for using an ad-blocker. You are simply protecting yourself. The people who should stand up and take notice are website admins and ad providers.<p>The web's ad industry is nothing short of amazing. A small number of users started using ad blocking software when ads became obnoxious and intrusive, flashing, spinning, spawning popups and obscuring the content they're supposed to accompany. Did the ad industry take a hint? No, they moved, en masse, to ads that were <i>more</i> obnoxious and intrusive. Then they started exploiting browsers to discover as much personal information as possible about users, which motivated even more people to install ad blockers. Then ads became one of the most significant vectors of malware, so people started adopting script and ad-blockers as standard safe-computing practice.<p>It's reached the point where I <i>would not allow</i> either my parents or my children to run a browser without an ad-blocker installed. That's how bad it's gotten.<p>Ad providers have had years to establish ways of delivering safe, privacy-respecting, non-intrusive, content-specific advertising. They haven't, and the rising use of ad blocking is the natural consequence. The demand from people running websites <i>should</i> be there. Maybe space devoted to an ethical ad provider would make less money in the short-term, but anyone can see that ignoring the rise of ad-blocking is going to hurt their bottom line down the road.<p>Ads <i>just work</i> in print media. They don't jump out of the corner of the page and cover up articles while flashing and making loud noises. They don't invade your privacy. They don't damage your property. Online ads need to advance to this state. The onus is on ad providers and those employing them to accomplish this, not on users to uninstall their ad blockers.
Ok, I'm not going to rent this full article or buy it just so I can comment on it. The abstract is more than enough for that purpose.<p>> "Ad blocking software allows Internet users to obtain information without generating ad revenue for site owners, potentially undermining investments in content."<p>Good that it uses the correct words, like "potentially". I wish we could have something that talks about the user experience, by saying something like, "Most of the sites that run ads are usually obnoxious, drain mobile device batteries and data quotas, track and profile users, spread malware, mine cryptocurrency using the user's resources and are potentially a threat to the entire web and humanity as a whole!"<p>> "We explore the impact of site-level ad blocker usage on website quality, as inferred from traffic. We find that each additional percentage point of site visitors blocking ads reduces its traffic by 0.67% over 35 months. Impacted sites provide less content over time, providing corroboration for the mechanism. Effects on revenue are compounded; ad blocking reduces visits, and remaining visitors blocking ads do not generate revenue."<p>I'm confident that the reduced visits are only because of ad-block killers on the websites and the generally poor quality of content on the sites (most "news" sites today regurgitate something from another site with little or no value addition to the context). Such sites don't deserve to be supported by users unless they provide a lot more value.<p>> "We conclude that ad blocking poses a threat to the ad-supported web."<p>The ad-supported web is a threat to the web itself. So this is actually good in some ways. Yes, we don't have viable, accessible and cheaper mechanisms for people to support all the sites directly (without involving crooked and malicious ad networks). But the publishers who don't care much for their users don't deserve to be supported. Period.
"There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."<p>An anonymous New York journalist, quoted in Hamilton Holt's
<i>Commercialism and Journalism</i>, 1909.<p><a href="https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...</a>
> We find that each additional percentage point of site visitors blocking ads reduces its traffic by 0.67% over 35 months. Impacted sites provide less content over time, providing corroboration for the mechanism.<p>Unless they provide some mechanism by which adblockers cause people to stop visiting, they've reversed cause and effect. Bad sites get worse and lose users.
Until people can verify that the adverts I expose my computer to do not contain cryptocoin miners, crapware, or outright malware, and until adverts become less intrusive generally and much faster at loading, I will continue to use an ad-blocker. The advertising industry created this problem, it has the choice of fixing it as well. Through regulation, whitelists, blacklists, etc.<p>I value the security of my computer and the amount of mental space I have been gifted with too much to clutter them with bit-crap and visual-crap. Besides, advertising has become an adversarial and manipulative industry. The more unwanted influence I can cut out the better.
I have been opposed to ad blocking until recently because I do want to support content creation and ads are the most passive way to do so.<p>But lately, ads and tracking have become so egregious that the content is often not worth the hassle of awkward, obstructive ads and very creepy tracking.<p>So, lately I’ve switched my browsing to a mixture of Chrome/Mobile Safari vs. mobile & desktop Brave browser depending on if the account I’m using browses political/monetizable material.<p>Next I need to investigate Basic Attention Token to see if it actually does present a reasonable alternative to ads that makes content creation viable. Don’t know yet...
The hypothesis is that ad blocking causes less traffic, but their reasoning is fairly tenuous ...<p>> First, ad blocker usage by a site’s visitors reduces the site’s revenue if at least some of those users would have visited the site in the absence of ad blocking. The relevant mechanism, as in the traditional literature on the relationship between intellectual property revenue appropriation and supply, is that reduced revenue may undermine a site’s ability to invest, which could manifest itself as a diminished site that is less appealing to potential visitors. Web users then visit the degraded site less, reducing the site’s traffic.<p>> Second, in the presence of ad blocking, a site’s remaining revenue-generating visitors are less ad-intolerant, leading the site to run more ads, increasing the nuisance cost of visiting the site.
"Copyright is brain damage."<p>"Copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge."<p>"Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good.We have also come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The international community, through institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good—knowledge for development."<p>"What the academic publishing industry calls 'theft' the world calls 'research'."<p>It's far beyond time to recognise that 1) Copyright is not the solution, copyright is the problem, and 2) that creators of valuable creative works need to get paid, somehow.<p>The intersection of these two statements gives a corollary: <i>Payment for access to knowledge is a net harm to society.</i> Which means that we must find an alternative method of finance. Salon's misguided plea here is not that solution. A general tax, proportionate to wealth and/or income, strikes me as about right.<p>The quotes above, respectively, are from:<p>Nina Paley, artist and animator
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc</a><p>Pamela Samuelson, copyright legal scholar, UC Berkeley
<a href="http://sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-" rel="nofollow">http://sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening-</a> access-to-knowledge-4224697.php,<p>Joseph Stigletz, Nobel laureate economist
<a href="http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195130529.001.0001/acprof-9780195130522-chapter-14" rel="nofollow">http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195130529.001...</a><p>Edward Morbius, Space Alien Cat
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...</a>
I think that this is more of a case where people will choose to enable ad blocker on a website that they like and choose to support through their ads. People will add exceptions to websites they trust and will leave their blockers on for those who don't. This then leads to a filtering effect where people vote with their ad blocker if they like a website or not and I think that that is fine.
The google search engine rewards click bait its not smart enough to recognize organic text and organic traffic. It only knows pure clicks and un-ironically has created the very ecosystem it was meant to destroy.
I don't get it! Why do websites think they have a right to use my CPU and bandwidth? This is like saying people locking their doors is preventing thieves from stealing their stuff. Yes, that's the intention.