It's rather simple in my mind.<p>Putting your content up for free is the same as standing by my fence, waiting for me to ask you to throw your magazine over so I could read it.<p>You can put ads, but I can cut them out if I want for a better reading experience.<p>Don't want me to cut out the ads? tough luck, my reading experience, my choice.<p>Want to make money? try a subscription model.<p>Why can't you have both? Welcome to the real world.<p>[EDIT]:<p>This was the previous opening sentence:
<i>"Putting your content up for free is the same as throwing your magazine over my fence for free."</i><p>I changed it to a better analogy offered by AndrewKemendo in hope people would stop picking the analogy apart and focus on the message it's trying to deliver.
Publishers have done this to themselves with obstrusive intersitals; slow, over-the-content pop-ups; autoplaying video and audio ads; and other extremely annoying and degrading ad implementations. They have destroyed the browsing experience. If publishers were more ethical with their implementations of advertising technologies, fewer people would be driven to use ad-blocking.
Let me start off by saying I have clicked (on purpose) on less than 10 ads in my whole life. It's to the point that I have what can best be described as "Ad Blindness", I don't even see them anymore. So much so that sometimes I think I've reached the end of an article because my eyes have determined that below is only ads only to find it's an ad in the middle of the content or actually part of the article (Just to reiterate I sometimes gloss over real content that fits my mental model of an "ad").<p>I have used blockers a lot before (If I'm not going to click I'd rather not be tracked and deal with the bloat) but recently turned them all off to see what it's like again. It's still the same shit that I don't care about and have no intention of clicking on. 9 times out of 10 its for something I ALREADY PAY FOR (Looking at you DO, AWS, etc) which is annoying because not only do I have to look at it but it just highlights the gross inefficiencies in advertisements.<p>I do not religiously ready many sites and the ones I do don't offer subscription models. I'd much rather PAY some monthly fee that is divvied up between the sites I actually visit over the course of a month. There are a number of service that have attempted this (Flattr being on the top of my head) but none have made it seamless.<p>Mobile is the big sticking point. On the desktop I could use an extension that reads some meta data out of a site's head to identify that site and mark it down for receiving a portion of "subscription fee" but on mobile this becomes much more of a challenge as I'm not willing to switch to a single-purpose browser (not that iOS would make it easy even if I did) and there are no browser extensions on mobile and no, I'm not going to do some gross "share" hack to record the sites I visit.<p>I don't have an answer to all of this, it all sucks. I want to compensate content creators but other than pay-per-view ads (which I mentally block out if not with an ad blocker) I'm never going really help them as it stands currently.
A secondary effect:<p>ad blockers not only improve the web experience for users (making everything load faster, by blocking unwanted spurious crap), <i>ad blockers are good for the cellcos as long as net neutrality holds true</i>.<p>Absent net-neut cellcos could in principle charge advertisers for access, but in a net-neut environment there's no money to be gained by carrying the traffic. Traffic which impairs the UX for the paying customers (the smartphone and tablet users).<p>This is going to be an interesting dilemma for that strong proponent of network neutrality, Google, uh, DoubleClick, right? (Unless they go the third-order route and roll out their own LTE data network, where of course they'll be the advertising gatekeeper and maybe folks who DPI indicates are using ad blockers will get a reduced speed of service ...)
> We also have no ability to screen ad exchange ads ahead of time; we get what they give us. We can and have set policies, for example, to disallow autoplay video or audio ads. But we get them anyway, even from Google. Whether advertisers make mistakes or try to sneak around the restrictions and don’t get caught, we can’t tell. It happens, though, all the time.”<p>Something's fishy here. Is there any googler here that can respond to these claims ?<p>> “Print-based organisations were told they needed to evolve, and stop being such dinosaurs, because the web was where it was at…Why should web advertisers be immune from evolutionary or revolutionary change in user habits? …[A]ny argument that tries to put a moral dam in front of a technological river is doomed. Napster; Bittorrent; now adblocking.”<p>my thoughts exactly. "People" told the same things to the music industry. "You can't adapt, you should die", well let's see how ad networks and content producers survive the adblock revolution.
Lost in this debate, for me, is whether online ads actually work and are worth the money. My technical experience with online ads is that it's very difficult to equate the ads with increased sales unless you have a very small sample size.<p>I've long suspected that online ads are actually more of a scam than anything else. Because you can't easily tie the expenditure to a benefit that ad sellers and hosters (Facebook, I'm looking at you) can promote them without having to back it up with quantifiable results. And that has led to a weird "ad ecosystem" which exists for its own purpose, not for actually trying to sell products (cause it doesn't actually work for that). I think the people most worried about the ad blockers are those that make their money from that ecosystem.
I want the advertising industry to die.<p>And I honestly don't care what it takes down with it. If it hurts, we'll find ways around it, Patreon being a good example.
I understand why it's a genius strategy from Apple to make
mobile browsing free from ads (Googles lifeblood), but I don't see why it's such a huge deal to Google; they already have a mobile platform of their own where ad blocking was always possible and widespread. You could see this step from Apple as an aggressive one towards Google, or just as reaching feature parity with Android on ad-blocking.
What will be interesting is whether ad blocking will be widespread on iOS or if it will be like on desktop where it is a power user thing. If it's the former then it will change the web in a big way.<p>If Apple <i>really</i> wanted to spread ad blocking and disrupt things they should make it an optional install when users first open the browser, "do you want to see ads when browsing", where answering no installs an ad-blocker which blocks all apps not on apples whitelist (which ad networks then pay a sizable sum to be on of course).
well, let's look at someplace where ads truly work well.<p>fashion print magazines. buy a vogue and look at the ads. hard to tell apart from the content, glossy, relevant, beautiful. they make up at least 70% of the whole magazine.<p>i like gruber's ad system on DF, one of the few sites that seem to follow a user/reader centric approach. first you ensure the eyeballs, THEN you show the ads, always paranoid to piss off your readership.<p>mobile safari adblock in ios9 will hopefully bring movement into this ad game.
From another thread (still relevant I think):<p>uBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy are my tools to control the content my web browser displays. My general rule is that I'll only disable ad blocking on a few trusted sites and never on a site that uses a third-party advertising network.<p>Most advertising networks have intrusive or annoying ads that actually block my ability to read a site by using pop-overs if my mouse cursor accidentally touches a keyword, divs that obscure content until I've paid sufficient attention to locate and click the "X", auto-playing sounds/videos, etc. If the UX wasn't bad enough, these third-party networks also present a security risk and have been used in the past as delivery vehicles for malware.<p>In the end if a web site relies solely on intrusive advertising for support and they plead with me to disable adblocking, I'll most likely choose to stop reading/participating on the website rather than make an exception for them.<p>I really wish the ability to make micropayments to publishers was a thing.
It's funny how people saying ads should be replaced with a subscription model in different threads are going completely bananas about paywalled articles.<p>Couple of web newspapers in my country switched recently to 10 articles a month for free and then asking for a subscription. It's awful, it makes me read less and I would prefer to see some ads I'm used to ignoring anyway. Usually I don't know if I like the content before I'm half-way through it. I also don't want to have 20 subscriptions pending every month just to have access to a reasonable portion of the internet.<p>The web has already killed most of review and proofreading process in press. Lets not kill content quality by taking even more money out of it.
Could the push functionality of HTTP/2 worsen the problem ? Ad block could limit the downloaded data by selecting it. With the push capability it won't be possible anymore. Network bandwidth could be wasted with the ads. Thebrowser could still filter its display though.