Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice.
Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).
Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.
The question is, if advertisement leads to more consumption, and excessive shopping is now a disease, how long before we start seeing people suing ad agencies for infecting them with such illness?
> Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).
How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.
I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.
I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.
Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.
Well, my kids simply don't watch commercial TV. Everything used to be DVD based and now its all streamed, so they never see ads. I remember the first time they actually saw and advertisement - my son screamed! "Where did my show go??" "It's OK .. it's just an ad". A few seconds of silence passed and then he asked:"What's an ad?"
Congrats! This is really a great step forward, and may improve their childhood a lot. Children should become used to consume media at their own pace, without distracting noise (ads). Also, their schedule should be determined by their parents, not the TV program.
Moreover, it may help to make fun of the ads they still see. (on websites, outside at walls, etc.) This may improve their awareness, and hopefully later their critical thinking.
BTW, when I started not to watch TV anymore, I expected that I would miss something, but I didn't miss anything at all!
Friends told me about the few cool series I missed, and I simply bought the DVDs. It is a huge increase in comfort, watching those at my own pace, in their original length rather than the blown-up-with-ads length.
I have to wholeheartedly agree with everybsingle thing you've just said. This is why I love Netfix - there are lots of awesome shows my kids love like Hulk and the Agents of Smash, Spiderman and others I've forgotten.
Otherwise, they watch Australua's State run kids channel, which sounds awful but actually tends to run somewhat subversive shows like Yoohoo and Friends (universally panned by those who watched the original Korean version, but not by me or my kids!) and Adventure Time. And not a single advertisement, except promos.
Still have to find something for my daughter, who also loves those shows and we encourage her to watch them, but she is still into Shopkins (despite my best efforts of discouraging her) and other shows designed to appeal to her and her friends.
But she said watches absolutely no commercial TV. This is more by happy accident than design, because commercial TV in Australia is so completely rubbish that there is literally no need to watch it - ever!
Your kids and yourself see ads all the time, just not on TV. There is no way to avoid ads, all ads are not evil either. Even if we talk only on TV, there are probably plenty in the shows / movies you watch.
Sometimes they are the shows you watch--as in, you may be watching a large advertisement with several smaller advertisements inserted into it.
Example: the Disneyland 60th Anniversary TV Special. Disney/ABC is particularly fond of advertising cross-medium Disney properties/investments on Disney-controlled television and radio broadcasts. For instance, Radio Disney definitely plays a disproportionately high number of DMG (Walt Disney Records + Hollywood Records/DMG Nashville) recordings.
My spouse was watching it. I saw 30 seconds of it and said, "this is a long format ad for Disney parks," before tuning it out.
The long-format ads are rather common on the local news broadcasts. Some stations show more than others.
Consumption of advertisements should have age restrictions similar to cigarettes.
We haven't had cable/etc since 2005 and there was a period between '07 through maybe '13 where out kids weren't exposed to any TV commercials except for while visiting grandparents during holidays. The few commercials they saw over the years left a terrifyingly strong impression and desire for those products; they'd remember many, many months later. We still don't have cable, but unfortunately the expansion of content available on AppleTV has meant commercials jammed into everything. Contemplating returning to Netflix disc-only service and ending subscriptions to streamed content.
I'm curious what the effects of my seeing lots of TV ads during my childhood are. I honestly can't remember specific ads very well, but I'm sure that seeing thousands of soundbites glorifying instant gratification must have had some sort of an effect on me.
It's a very serious ethical issue. You might not have any exploitable weaknesses given the current technology, but other people do: alcoholism, pain medication, financial distress, loneliness, straight-up boredom...
I'm not much worried right now. I'm worried about where we are going, especially with machine learning. Take a look at the story of Target identifying when a girl was pregnant before her own father knew. Then apply this to any area where you have any reason at all to keep a secret. Maybe you are gay with parents who will rather you be homeless than living in their home. Maybe you have a mental illness but rather the rest of the world not know about it. Maybe you like democracy in a country where you aren't allowed to. Eventually they will find ways to tease this information out with all the data they have tracked about us.
Are you doing peer reviewed reproductible research, with both open source code and data and tyying to disprobe your hypothesis? </s>
Even researchers don't agree what are "acceptable" research findings [0].
I think that priming[1] would be an important factor to consider when doing "lot of" research. And, were someone going to dimiss it, they would need "extrordinary evidence" as the say goes.
Here is a testimonial of one of these "ideas" supporter:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Attrib. Richard Feynman (|p| < 0.05)
The fact that "[you] can't see how it would influence [you] much" is one of the features of biases.
Sure, but I'm saying I don't think the effect (which is non-zero) is manipulative enough to get annoyed about. I read people talking about ads as if you look at them and they compel you to buy something you never wanted.
I used to go to the library for this sort of thing.
My mom works in a library and they are in the process of throwing all the books away, and creating 'social spaces'.
As much as the Internet has made information easy to get, there are a lot of high quality publications that I can no longer access eg research papers, art and design books.
In the US, sure. But there are lots and lots of various forms of payment to handle things like subscriptions. See Boletos[0] in Brazil for example. Many other countries around the world have ways of paying for things online without credit cards.
I think there's a distinction to be made between advertising and marketing, at least the way I define them.
Advertising is about making consumers aware of a product or service that they may use if they were aware of it. This seems reasonable and generally beneficial.
Marketing is about using psychological techniques to manipulate consumers preferences such that they want to consume products and services that they otherwise wouldn't.
Unfortunately this segment of the industry had grown rapidly over the past few decades and techniques to exploit our cognitive deficiencies have improved tremendously.
Yeah, it's just too bad you're the only person in the world to define advertising and marketing that way, I guess? At least among people who know what they're talking about.
Well the labels are unimportant. The point is that certain elements of advertising/marketing seem reasonable and it could be argued that they are value adding to consumers as well as the advertisers, while others are manipulative and outright unethical.
That's not a claim that will meet much opposition.
However, to claim that marketing is inherently "manipulative", or that manipulative tactics are even a significant part of it, seems a little ill-informed.
Y Combinator's motto is "Make something people want". To the overwhelming majority of practitioners, this is exactly what marketing sets out to do.
The issue with subscriptions is that they get very expensive if you want to subscribe to all the blogs you're reading.
Maybe micropayments are a better alternative, but the current implementations all rise the barrier of entry in a way that makes them undesirable.
I have tried to think of a better system and I have written it down as a free "micropayment standard". You can find it here, I am looking forward to any comments.
"Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists" all manipulate the thoughts you have.
We don't live in a bubble; we're a product of our surroundings. No aspect of the world is benign.
The fact that ads may "change you" is not an argument against advertising, because it doesn't distinguish advertising from anything else, at all.
It seems to me there is a moral judgement happening here. But, what is the appropriate way to distinguish moral manipulation from immoral manipulation?
Communication – even honest communication – is designed to influence other people. I'm trying to "change you" with this message. Should this message be blocked?
If it is you didn't explain why, you merely restated the core issue JacobJans has with fighting advertising.
Where exactly is the line between "manipulating" and "changing view"? There are many associations and causalities studied with regards to human mind, should I be guilty of manipulation if I create a promotional poster using colours which are associated with some particular emotional response? In the end this is another of the cases where intent is everything, and for better or worse intent cannot be measured.
There may be a grey area between "manipulating" and "changing view", but in the case of advertisement this this clearly on the "manipulation" side, almost by definition.
Ads are fully paid by the seller, and exist by definition to serve solely the seller's purpose. In addition, ads are expected to "look and feel" like they were in the customer's interest, which makes it even more clear that this is all about manipulation.
How in your opinion should a material which informs potential buyers of a product be created? They seem to fit the same definition you use for ads as manipulative... I really don't see a way for a seller to inform about his product, highlight its good aspects to convince it is worth its price, without being charged guilty of manipulation by the argument you present.
I have to say I really dislike ads, and would like if product promotion was done in a way most benefiting society in general, but the points that manipulation and changing views are very close, that ads change your view is not the bad thing about them and that we need to be careful about regulating ads (both legally and morally) as not to harm other beneficial things is very legitimate.
There are some who believe that distribution channels are actually more valuable than any content that passes through them. That is, content distribution is potentially a higher value business than content creation.
Assuming the Internet as a distribution channel, who owns or controls access to it? Rhetorical question.
One view is that the price of internet access is the price of "content".
If the internet was meant to be a medium for paid content, then why has so much content been shared through it "for free" beginning in the late 80's/early 90's and continuing even today?
I certainly do not know. What I remember is that only a minority of the population were avid www users when the public www first appeared in 1993.
So, in 1993, why upload "free content" that would otherwise be under paid subscription?
For the novelty of it?
To jumpstart the www?
To entice people to use the www?
Regardless of the reason, the end result is that the genie is out of the bottle.
The sharing of content "for free" started early on and continued unabated, even as www usage grew.
Today, if an internet subscriber seeks "content" she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone, except her access provider.
Greeting users with a deluge of advertising is not going to change the facts: users are continually presented with free content that they once would have had to pay for. The deluge of ads is not a "cost" of the content. It's just a new source of revenue for those who want to play www middleman (who should be very thankful for all the money they have made without ever having had to create any real content). At the same time, as a result the signal to noise ratio has become a serious problem for many www users.
(Users are also presented with enormous amounts of fake, garbage "content". That only highlights how open and inexpensive content distribution has become.)
It is undeniable that users can block the ads and other garbage and keep the content. The content is not going away. And the www will still keep growing.
With the barriers to distribution so low, it is no surprise that users should have to filter out some garbage.
The only surprise is how long it's taken them to start doing it.
What's nice is that filtering can be automated, in the same way the generation of ads and fake content have been automated.
There was time in the history of email before the ubiquitous use of spam filters. And there is a time in the history of the www before the ubiquitous use of ad blockers. That time is coming to a close.
"Today, if an internet subscriber seeks 'content' she will find it, in large quantities, without ever paying anyone."
If anyone hasn't checked out Ethan Zuckerman's essays before, he was the inventor of the pop-up ad while he was at Tripod in the 90s.
Today, he's sort of an anti-ads activist and points to that early trade (ads for free content) as a fundamental shift in our acceptance of advertising (as well as the extent to which we're okay, as a society, with advertisers knowing who we are). Good read here:
That "original sin," as you point out, is a pretty catastrophic barrier for most subscription models. There's enough competition in virtually every content industry that the user can go elsewhere.
There are many other ways to advertise other than showing a commercial. I also try to protect myself by avoiding ads, but other tactics like product placements in tv shows and movies is making it hard to avoid everything..
Online advertising is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons, where that commons is the general public's attention. Any individual publisher or advertiser can do a little bit better by surpassing what the general public finds acceptable, but when enough of them do this some of the general public resorts to ad blockers - causing overall ad revenues to decline, which causes more publishers and advertisers to push the boundaries in search of higher revenue, which causes more people to install ad blockers...
No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.
At the end of the day, we all agree that shining shit is their job.
Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined to try.
Let's add a third: security. You can't let a 3rd party advertiser send arbitrary web content to your customers, and then just wash your hands of it and say "It wasn't us, it was the ad network" when it eventually gets used to deliver malware to your customers.
It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."
I don't know about that. I'm a consumer. I use the internet to search for things I'm considering for purchase. Tires for my automobile, landscaping services, holiday trips. After searching (and prior to adblock sw), I'd see ads related to my searches. They were relevant.
Many (most?) ads are horsepucky and annoying. Some are not.
I am not defending ad-based models for dissemination of information and news as the one true way. Just disagreeing with your extreme statement.
That's actually an exceptionally useful way to think about this. The more intrusive are the ads you sell, the more valuable they are (to brands) - while the more intrusive they are, the more people will block them.
Of course, unless you are Google or Facebook, you have very little ability to lower the 'global' shittiness of ads, but you have a lot of ability to make your own ads more lucrative and targeted.
Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content.
Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.
One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place.
I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer.
The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for.
Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue.
But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.
Sometimes I do go for the content. Oftentimes this is only to be unable to access it because all the ads bring my browser to its knees, or even crash it.
Yeah, I suppose the makers of these ads would suggest the solution to this problem is that I spend a few hundred to a thousand bucks on some shiny new electronics. Funny how they manage to be both the cause of and the solution to the problem.
Instead I use an adblocker. And I try to be choosy about which ads I block, so that it's only the really obnoxious ones that kill my battery life or are a thinly veiled vehicle for digging through my kitchen wastebin for fingernail clippings to collect. I feel no sense of guilt about this.
If they don't want me accessing their site over this, and curating their ads to be less corrosive is not an option for whatever reason, then perhaps they can set up a special clickthrough agreement asking me to consent to abusive treatment before I view the content. Perhaps that will make it easier for us to negotiate a mutually satisfactory arrangement.
Exactly, and why android desperately needs ad blocking ability... So many sites are downright unusable on mobile phones. I'm not a big apple fan, and definitely not into walled gardens... that said, I avoided even considering apple early on because I didn't like AT&T... not I'm considering an iPhone for my next phone, just so I can have ad blocking.
I've been using with greater success than Chrome for a long long time now. I also run HTTPS Everywhere on it.
Really, after using it for some time I can't see how people who have used a browser with plug-ins on the desktop can stand using one without them on mobile.
That's why I stopped browsing from my phone and tablet. Completely. I read some headlines, and if I remember, I read them again using the desktop browser.
I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.
The New York Times exists first as a print publication.
Wikipedia has never shown commercial ads.
HN doesn't show normal blockable ads.
Reddit is replaceable.
Xkcd doesn't show ads.
Really, I think those work better as examples of how little value advertising actually brings to the Internet.
And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally:
1) Don't visit the site
2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker
3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available
I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries is paid for by these ad systems.
I work in tech and I am not supported by ads. If you are in tech and are supported by ads, find a different line of work in tech.
If you work in tech the first thing you should do is take the moral argument and throw it out the window. Moral systems of obligation do not work well on the net. You run into one of two conditions quickly. The first is immoral operators/providers will push moral operators out of business (free services where you are spied on by unknown agents, but the spies pay for your usage, such as free email has been for years). Or, immoral users sharing other people's work for free. Some of them want to share everything freely. Other just want to share work that is difficult to find legally. Paid services don't work well because they quickly become fragmented leaving the user to buy Youtube Red, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc because each content producer wants to maximize their profits. Digital piracy succeeded because of its utility. There is low to no cost to the end user and the end product had more utility than the paid product. Pirated movies didn't have ads. They could be played on more players. They didn't have country content restrictions. DRM didn't randomly fail. They by definition are a product of a free market competing with other piracy groups.
Of course Hollywood has a huge amount of power and has the FBI as their lapdog to prevent their product from being infringed. The ad industry does not. You will see more of a push for them to push ad blocking as a type of legal infringement.
If you don't mind my asking, what industry are you in? It is very hard in the modern economy to find things not supported or at least augmented by advertising (or at least marketing).
I'm a touch reminded of the Lloyd Dobbler buy/sell/process monologue from "Say Anything".
I'm confused. Both I and my computer just send a request "may I have this article/video", and the server responds "yes" and sends the data. However, it also sends along a bunch of other stuff (advertising).
At no point in this did I ever agree to have anything other than the requested data sent to me. And at no point did I see a screen that said "please watch this ad to view this content." The ad was just sent anyway.
If you need me to pay money to consume some content, then why aren't you asking me for money? Or if I'm "supposed" to view an ad, why isn't that agreement formalized?
Basically, it's my computer, and I'm not restricted by any kind of agreement to watch ads. So why should I?
What possible moral grounds are there that says I have to allow you to serve me extra garbage data that I never consented to receiving, and even more extreme, that I am somehow obligated to consume the advertising that I never consented to receiving?
I say fuck the ad services... yesterday I made the mistake of researching something on my phone, half the results were content stuffed, worthless and so many ads it brought my phone to a crawl.
If websites weren't putting 6+ ads on a page, each with iframes in iframes several layers deep, it wouldn't be so bad... and you know what else... if the ads were delivered first party, then the ad blockers wouldn't be able to know the difference.
To be clear, I pay for youtube red so that I don't have to deal with ads. Same goes for netflix and several other services. My point isn't that I think ads are awesome, but that doesn't make ad blocking OK.
>You are saying it isn't my right to consume what I choose?
That's what the law says actually. Not trying to be snide here but unfortunately the law does not allow for sovereign domain over one's own body (at least in the US -- and elsewhere) in many cases. Though I realize you are asking in regards to advertisements.
But, can it go too far in the other direction? Can ads be abusive or is anything a content publisher does to monetize fair game?
For instance, apps that use dark patterns that make it difficult to dismiss an ad without "accidentally" clicking through the ad...are these cool? Or would you say that one simply should not use the app?
An app is not analogous to a junk page with no useful content. You installed and use it repeatedly in spite of the ads because it provides some sort of benefit.
Any app which contains a clickable element which leads to malware infestation, or shows children inappropriate content, is malware. Regardless of whether that button is on an ad or elsewhere, and regardless of whether it is contrived to make it easy to press by "accident" or not.
An ad that constantly interposes itself to be clicked by accident is merely annoying, and probably counterproductive (users will give the program a bad rating).
To annoyed users, I would say "don't use the app".
To malware purveyors, I'd ideally like to say, "3 to 5 years".
Junk pages with no useful content do not tend to survive, hence that is not a valid comparison. Just as you "install and use repeatedly" apps that are useful, you only revisit pages that are useful.
So, the relevant analogy is between a page of some value and an app of some value. If ads weren't a problem on pages that fit this description, then we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Annoyance is annoyance in any context, even if it stops short of outright malice.
The most of the content and value of sites like Wikipedia, Hacker News, and Reddit is generated by the users. I'd be interested to know the relationship between contributors and ad block use. If it turns out that a high percentage of contributing users make use of an ad blocker, then isn't that fair enough? Why should a contributor "pay" twice?
If the NYT online ads were as benign as their print ads with respect to tracking and profiling me, I wouldn't block them.
I also wonder why they treat the front page of their online site so different than the front page of the paper. Today I opened nytimes.com and 1/2 the window was filled with a Hilton ad. Have they ever filled have the front page (or even just the half above the fold) of the paper version with an ad?
So I'm not a fundamentalist that thinks advertising is evil. I probably am a fundamentalist when it comes to the ad-tech that watches what I do to opaquely build a profile around me.
Oh come on off it. That's a totally different thing, and it only ever happens once a year. It's perfectly reasonable, and they don't use content trackers, or anything else that's nasty. It's ridiculous to say otherwise.
> Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.
Why are you there then? The fact that you spend your time there, that you spend both your bandwidth, your cpu time, etc.. and theirs, means there's something "valuable", it's probably way less than a cent, but it's value.
That's the beauty of ads, even though the value isn't much, it's still enough. I don't want to pay 0.1 cent, but that ads does it for me.
> But every visitor wishes for that outcome.
That's freak, stop going there if you wish for their death!
If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market.
Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.
Things started to go downhill, and they consider themselves too big to die, too important for the current infrastructure. Any business will have this inertia - gripping their shaky hands on the past, and showing the fangs at the present and the grim future - it's like the will to survive of animals.
I agree. Their website is just a bitstream sent down the tube. How it's rendered is totally not their business. If I wanted to use Lynx to render everything in text or use that's my prerogative.
- 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads.
- Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords.
- Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading.
- Video ads that start playing automatically.
- The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch.
- Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it.
- Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer.
Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.
Most people probably would not install add blockers except that ad volume and lack of quality have reached the point where they make it difficult to browse the web. Installing an ad blocker is a necessary act of self defense.
In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion.
I don't see this as an issue. I've been blocking ads on the web for over a dozen years and now somehow it's an issue? No, it's not. The publishers who can't make it in a world where people increasingly use ad blockers won't and the ones who figure out how to make it will. Economics 101. I've been waiting for this play to start for awhile--it's amusing--but I'm not really interested in reading about idiots who see this as a moral issue. The advertising industry has had a good dozen years to reign unchecked. They've gotten used to having nice things that shouldn't have been theirs. Now, either adapt or die. Truthfully, no one outside of the advertising industry cares either one way or another.
It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to start ...
I agree with the parts that are visible. However, your data is being sold behind the scenes eg Verizon tracking you through a service you have paid for.
I take huge issue with that. I pay for cell phone service. I should not be used to derive additional revenue for another channel. It's single use not multi.
"It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life."
Sure, if you live in a cave. TV and movies are saturated with product placements. Grocers receive fees to give products better placement in the store. And it's amazing how many placements happen in health care--drug company sales reps are just the start of it.
Ad blockers are going to be like applying pesticides to insects. Those that don't die are just going to breed offspring that are that much harder to kill.
You can't afford to be too complacent because ad agencies know this too and will come at you sideways - 2nd hand advertising is going to become a recognised thing. Advertisers reaching you and me through celebrities we respect, through hijacking friends or just through corrupting children.
Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer"
Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials' advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)"
They pay for placement with gratis or discounted hardware, not with dimes.
A long, long time ago, I did data entry for a local newspaper of campaign contributions records. At that time, I learned what an "in-kind" contribution was. This was when someone would, for instance, provide food for a campaign event. The candidate who benefited was required to report the dollar amount of that food as an in-kind contribution.
Payment in kind is another term for barter. The reporting requirement is so that public political campaigns could not hide sources of support by failing to report barter-like transactions.
And you shouldn't mislead people by saying Apple does not pay for product placement. It does pay. It pays via barter, rather than with cash, but it pays.
There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it.
So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
> the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.
Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them.
Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.
Ah, the ad war wages on. I say no to ads because they exist in opposition to visually clean pages, no tracking, no malware.
As a lot of online content falls under entertainment, if it came down to it, I'd be happy to unclutter my mind/reduce procrastination by restricting my browsing to non-essential content, rather than eat ads.
Seems part of why the frenzy is heating up is that many media sites merely regurtitate news and do not produce any unique content, but are ad and tracker heavy. So, they stand to lose, even in better-case scenarios where some people are willing to pay for content they value.
I think it's far past time to stop calling this "ad blocking". It's computer security. When a site like MSN continues using an advertising organisation that has already infected its readers, and get stung again by the same organisation, we should start using the correct language. It's not just a choice a person makes to keep their web browsing distraction-free: it is a necessary security precaution.
What used to be "ad blocking" is now part of an anti-virus solution.
I don't know why they don't just show what's on sale near me geographically. You know, two for one Kraft mac and cheese up at Publix. You'd never know that I might buy mac and cheese by data mining me, I don't even really like mac and cheese, but shit man two for one!
The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads showed me that toilet paper was on sale somewhere nearby, that's something I might whitelist.
Yes! Now I have to to actively search for grocery and various small stuff sales on my local markets by visiting their sites one by one. The main problem with ads that they are irrelevant. If I did a research on Google before buying a new laptop, please, don't spam laptop ads for the next 6 months or so, I already have one, thanks, I don't buy them daily. Especially from sellers that don't ship to my country anyway.
My thought is that we should be replicating the "pull" based commerce process of the shopping mall but doing it electronically.
So instead of bombarding people with stuff they don't want in a context that doesn't make sense - ads for products on the sidelines of other unrelated content - we build a platform where people can get as close to the in person shopping experience as possible from their home. Obviously there are limitations to this from a tactile standpoint, but by and large consumers have shown that they don't really need that to such high fidelity.
I like this idea, with the caveat that you need to ban paid placement within the virtual mall. I'd like a list of product categories in a nice hierarchy, and a list of products in random order. No games or manipulation.
A few years ago, Mozilla Labs was prototyping a client-side API called "User Personalization" for users to express their interests or purchasing intent:
1. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid reviews. This quite often means not giving much credence to review mills -- CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly lesser extent.
2. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) are often what I use when seeking a specific option locally. I suspect thes are underappreciated.
3. Classifieds systems. There's a reason Craigslist took off like it did, though its quality/relevance have been lagging for some time. It's still ground zero for housing ads.
High quality recommendations mean a lot. I happened to be reading a blog through one of my rare unfiltered browsers, and realised it included book recommendations on the sidebar, for which the blog editor was highly qualified to offer assessments and endorsements. The state of advertising is so bad that I had missed these previously. The blog would be better off putting those recommendations into posts or other content less likely to be filtered. First time in quite literally years that I'd had the least sense of missing something.
Many (maybe most?) ads are not looking for an immediate conversion. They are looking for long term impacts. Its why lifestyle programs like Top Gear are so valuable.
Half the ads I see on the internet are for pickup trucks, something I'm clearly not going to click through & buy.
Interestingly enough, I did buy a truck I don't need recently...
Right, and the branding power of advertising is significant. It's been argued (persuasively IMO) that targeted advertising is counterproductive in this regard.
Much as I find the practice annoying, a large stadium or other facility endorsement programme has a sticking power for brand awareness which a microtargeted, microsecond-auction online placement doesn't. Much the same as investing in streetfront retail space speaks to a certain confidence in your own products or services.
Don Marti and Doc Searls have both written on this many times and at length.
I think one of the arguments for the more specific form of targeted advertising is for the measurement of impact, not that it is in some way more impactful.
Assumedly that measurement can lead to more impactful ads, but we are awfully new to programmatic advertising for that to be proveable.
I do know that advertisers believe targeting is valuable.
IMO that single-targeting-impact measurement is grossly misplaced. Though this also isn't generally my area of expertise (I have however worked in campaign assessment for various marketing efforts).
Better IMO is to look at broader measures of response. Multiple campaigns with various metrics -- coupons, response codes, promotions, differing Web URLs, etc. See what has a better measured response as an aggregate on desired outcomes.
The problem with ever-more-intrusive-and-objectionable advertising is that it turns people off.
I've largely abandoned commercial media, will consciously avoid stores whose advertising (or products) are annoying, and keep winnowing down the list of mobile service providers who are even vaguely acceptable to me (if I can possible swing it, I don't carry a phone), due in part to consideration shown their own customers.
I'm hoping that eventually those negatives will be large enough to sway practices. Google are actually in a position to have an impact, I've encouraged them on this before.
The thing is, marketers are still ”experimenting" for the most part.
Just as traditional advertising was sold to clients for years even when its efficiency could not be measured. Right now, it can be measured better through tracking, direct mail, “CRM” and the likes, but it doesn't mean it translates into sales—far from it. Digital agencies are surfing on the hype and cashing in as fast as they can before clients cut their advertising budgets again, just as it happened with other channels, like TV ads for instance.
But the answer to the latter depends on the answer to the former. For example, if people tend to rely on review sites to make their choices, you should make sure your product compares favourably to the competition, and then solicit reviews for it. (And if you can't do that, maybe your product isn't worth buying.)
The question was in a hypothetical context of a world without advertising. My point is that you can't talk about what a business should do in that situation without first clarifying what the alternative to advertising is in this world.
Useful but not sufficient on its own. Gresham's Law, in various incarnations, including Akerlof's "The Market for Lemons" suggests limitations.
A trusted third-party reviewer (Consumer's Union, CarFAX, Kelly Blue Book) helps.
Anecdote: the last really big-ticket item I bought (automobile), I'd had positive experiences with two manufacturer's products previously, but really didn't care for their current offerings within the product class / price range I was seeking. The vehicle I did buy was one I considered based on its Edmunds review -- best in class, multiple years running. Some years on, I've been happy with the purchase (though of course, post hoc rationalisation is a common fallacy).
For other products, other signifiers matter.
On G+ I detailed frustrations looking for a decent LED cabinet-lighting system. I'd exhausted local, online (Amazon and major hardware/lighting store) sources. A recommendation from my G+ contacts was for Ikea. The specific product didn't work, but Ikea had another set of lighting components (separate cord, transformer, remote switch, and lighting elements) which has worked excellently. Took a few weeks longer than intended to find what I was looking for.
Otherwise, I rely strongly on what local retailers will carry and stand behind. Ikea, for some products, turns out to be a good source. Factors depend heavily on what it is I'm purchasing and just how it will have to function.
I'm sure the failed entrepreneurs in this crowd (I'm one of them) here will find it easy to refute that point.
High-quality product is nothing without leads (i.e, potential users, buyers, downloaders, etc), and one way to get consistent, reliable way to get leads is through promotion.
Then there's branding and awareness, which is probably what most ads these days are meant for.
Imagine two models for a moment. In one, everyone is free to advertise, and in the other, no marketing of any kind is possible (magically enforced somehow).
What's the difference between those two? Competing companies will occasionally edge ahead with clever ads, but in general they just cancel one another out. Having marketing exist isn't a "win" for companies, unless they have no serious competitors, because their competitors also have them.
One difference, perhaps, is that consumers probably get worse products due to ads existing. Ads create an additional path business success, even with lower product quality.
A major component to modern advertising is educating people that options exist.
In the no advertising model things simply wither on the vine with no support to keep them going.
Smart phones are an obvious example. They existed for ages before a powerful marketing company pushed them to the mainstream (plus the usability improvements). That sparked a technical revolution...
That imagines there's no other way of people being informed. People would simply subscribe to some sort of service that reviews things. As it is, newspapers and magazines have reviews of most of the items normal people care about.
First, I think you mean "less valued". That's generally what happens when there's little demand for something, or when there's a good substitute at a cheaper price.
Second, if all the free, evil ad-sponsored content on the internet is of such "low quality", it certainly would make such services more valuable, as it would offer something scarce. Their conspicuous absence seems to indicate something is amiss with this analysis.
>Their conspicuous absence seems to indicate something is amiss with this analysis.
As I said, these services exist, they're just not very prominent.
That doesn't mean they're not valuable, it just means people don't think they're valuable, and I'm not certain that's a rational decision.
I think if you asked people whether they'd pay say £10 extra on a £300 appliance to be reasonably sure it doesn't have a hugely annoying design flaw, a lot of people would pay.
But if you ask them to pay £10/month for access to a website that gives them that kind of information (even if they can cancel it after one month), they feel like it's a waste of money.
>if all the free, evil ad-sponsored content on the internet is of such "low quality"
I'm not saying the content is low quality, I'm saying the advertising itself is a low quality form of product information.
Good service, good products, both go a long, long way towards places I want to buy things. I mostly put items on my Amazon wish list when someone recommends them, not based on ads I see.
Yellow pages? Somewhere you go search for the information you need, when you need it, with noone showing it down your throat. Examples are Amazon, Ebay, (ad-less) Google, ...
Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of ad content will be detected as ads.
The real sins, the true annoyances and the routes for malware, come from ads brought in from off-site. Ad copy served directly from the domain to which you've gone are rarely a problem. But when that domain sublets part of their page to an agency, which in turn sells exposures to anybody including malware vendors, then you need to block. Your innocent visit to wanteddomain.com ends up with literally hundreds of scripts and images pulled in from tens of unrelated domains. So an ad-blocker needs only to block cross-domain calls to be effective _without affecting display of ads from the source domain at all_.
Even if the ad is served by the service host, ad blockers can leverage machine learning or similar techniques to distinguish ads from content. I think the next step is that ads merge with content: so-called "native ads," submarine ads, etc. that are the content.
The dozens of domains and tons of javascript are all there as part of an effort to establish that the ad has been served to a human who might concievably be a customer for the product, and not a robot or some sort of third world ad-viewing farm.
That's true for click campaigns but what about view campaigns?
Couldn't Samsung, now releasing their new phone, buy a website's entire ad space for a month or two, let's say techcrunch, and tell them to serve their new phone's ad themselves?
Samsung is in for the eyeballs just like when they buy those huge outdoor ads, but even better, no intermediaries.
The publisher would even optimize the HTML5 ads for loading and rendering speed, and have a selection of them so they could rotate them. I believe it could work well for physical items.
You're underestimating the general underhandedness of people. If I can sell all my website's ads once, why not try to sell them twice? Double my income.
If Samsung's marketing people are in Korea, I'll show all Asian IP addresses their ad, and then show some other ad (or ads) to the rest of the world.
Of course, Samsung may notice the low volume, so a better scheme is to also load their ad elsewhere, but placed on the page so it's not visible.
If you look at the Javascript that gets served with the ads, there is generally a hunk of logic that tries to confirm the ad is genuinely visible, to try to deal with that last bit.
The lack of cross-site tracking makes the ads far less targeted, losing a good bit of the amount advertisers will pay for ads. Additionally, advertisers don't trust the logs of the site publishing the ads in the way they trust Google, further reducing the ad price. And adblockers already support hiding specific elements of the page, even if they don't involve making an HTTP request to a designated advertising domain. So people would stop using hosts files and start using proper browser extensions or HTTP proxies, and the ads would still be blocked (this could fix the iOS 9 content blocker problem, but not for long).
Ironically, Mozilla solved this in a privacy-respecting way, and the internet went apeshit over it and demanded its removal from the browser.
That whole "sponsored tiles" thing was actually incredibly thoughtfully designed:
* Third parties provide tiles to Mozilla, who gets to vet them, etc.
* Tiles get put into bundles hosted by Mozilla and carrying metadata which can be used to target.
* The browser periodically downloads bundles of tiles and client-side, the browser decides based on browsing history and bundle metadata which tiles to display.
Nowhere in this process did advertisers or even Mozilla get to know the browsing history of the end user. Nowhere in this process did advertisers or Mozilla get to know which sites in the browser history caused the decision to display a particular tile. All storage of history and decision-making on what to show was done client-side-only.
The more I think about it, the more I think something like that needs to be discussed as a real alternative to how things are done now.
The issue, of course, is that it was still downloading advertisements. Advertising isn't content, and Mozilla got screamed at because a. the way it was released was in a press release disguised as a blog post that attempted to sell why it was good for the Mozilla user (i.e. it wasn't useful for the Mozilla user), and b. advertising is advertising, nobody wants it unless they are getting paid to view the ads.
It's irrelevant if the ads were selected in the browser or not. You'd still have to download a lot of advertising that was irrelevant. And advertisers wouldn't have been happy with just client side choosing, it would have evolved into Firefox tracking you.
It was a very bad idea, and remains a very bad idea. I sure hope Mozilla never tries it again.
This points to a deeper problem, one not trivially solved via technology, of credibility. There've been several instances of technical solutions to problems for which I had a great deal of initial skepticism, some warranted, some less so.
I was aware of both wireless networking and VOIP in the late 1990s, though neither broke through to mainstream for some years. Trust in the integrity of the underlying protocols being a chief concern (not entirely unwarranted).
Challenge-response email anti-spam systems have a similar problem -- your CR system may be entirely legit, but other peoples' might well be spam-harvesting engines or otherwise bogus.
Sponsored tiles requires a great deal of buy-in before it can gain mainstream acceptance.
If there's a good description of the whole thing, might make for a good HN submission.
The biggest reason is that most publishers completely lack the ability to set up and manage an ad server.
Next would probably be that the advertisers, fearing fraud, want the publishers to use a third-party ad server with reporting that they trust.
Only after that comes concerns about behavioral targeting and tracking, and the absence of that affecting ad revenue.
Finally, if they thought about it, they'd realize that ad blockers would just switch strategies and carry on blocking, so it hardly seems worth the effort.
65% your second point, 25% your third point, 8% your fourth point and 2% your first point. (First point maybe higher in terms of number of publishers but not in terms of number of advert impressions across the internet) (My %s are obviously non-scientific.)
Because with own domains sites lose the ability of tracking. A central entity can track users across all websites where the entity has a tracking beacon, and target ads to a specific customer as a result.
Tracking makes advertisements much, much more expensive and thus profitable.
Contacting the mothership doesn't help. The way it works is that an ad network loaded by site A sets a cookie with a new random ID. When you go to site B with the same ad network, since the ads are served from the same domain (the ad network's), it can read the cookie with the ID and link the two website visits.
If ads came from the sites own domains, this wouldn't work.
They know your domain, your IP address, your referer, your screen size, your OS, your browser version, your supported MIME types, your port number, your plugins, your ISP.
That should be enough information for cooperating servers to target an ad.
Yes, they can try to "fingerprint" your browser into a unique hash but that method is more reliable for desktops than mobile phones.
Imagine a dozens of customers with identical iPhones sharing the wifi at Starbucks or the airport. (Everybody has the same ip address.) Sniffing for unique markers such as counting installed fonts and/or plugins isn't going to work on smartphones like it does on deskttops. Therefore, generating a cookie with an id is more reliable. Of course, people can negate that by configuring their phones to block cookies but it appears that most consumers don't do it (probably because it breaks other things such as banking, sports, etc websites.)
Since advertising revenue from mobiles is growing faster than desktops, and in some cases exceeds it (Twitter mobile ads), it doesn't look like ad networks will favor fingerprinting over cookies. (That's not to say some sophisticated ad networks don't blend both techniques.)
Often yes, but that breaks easily. Referers are often not sent nowadays. Screen size and OS are often similar. Browsers now auto-update, so the versions are increasingly the same, along with plugins, which are getting rarer. Port numbers vary by connection, so you can't match them. IP address don't work well for people behind NAT, which is particularly common for mobile connections, which often have carrier-grade NAT[1], and for workplace/university/school networks.
Say you have two users on Macbook Airs using auto-updating Chrome (which has bundled Flash) in the same office or university, and both came in through Google.
That part can be entirely generated on the fly. Even more so you could put important content in random generation parts to foil the people using blockers on occasion.
From the blockers side, this doesn't really help as domain filtering is just the first step, then dom elements, url fragments and finally HTML identifiers (like being a standard ad image size).
From the user privacy side it's also mixed as there are still large scale efforts to link up users across sites and devices.
Depends on the application. I'm using uMatrix and always allow all content (including JS) that's served from the same domain. The problem for me really is tracking and visual clutter, and I assume that a first-party ad will not track me across domains and likely integrate well within the page layout.
I'm fully aware though that I'm not the mean audience for adblocking.
uMatrix isn't an ad-blocker. It uses ... a matrix ... of domains/hosts and content types to determine what is or isn't allowed to be presented/fetched by a client.
Dedicated ad-blockers, such as uBlock Origin, apply heuristics which are specifically tuned to advertising signals -- hosts, domains, and, as noted in parent to your post, various HTML and other entity clues to advertising content.
Well, even if it technically isn't an adblocker, it's a darn good one in practice. And it sets up domain blocking by default, probably using the same lists as uBlock Origin.
ad blocking is such a simple topic. I don't know why they call it a war. War requires two nearly equal powers. Here we have the whole world who is willing to pay NOT to get free ads served, and then there are a few people who got free money in the past and now cry because they need to find a real job. Just find something people are willing to pay for, or go broke. It's your decision, the same as everybody elses.
And for us it's also quite simple in my eyes. There are ads and we block them. There are ad-block-blockers and we just don't visit that page again. There is enough other content to read. If you don't believe it yet, have some faith. I avoid paywalls and ads since I was able to use a keyboard and never lacked stuff to read. (And in fact if you look at my amazon history you'll see that I actually pay quite a big percentage of my monthly income on written content, it's just not blogs I'm paying for)
If you look at both paragraphs it's easy to see why there is no war. We don't need these content providers who push ads onto us that we don't want. So there is no way they can achieve their goal. They can fight as much as they want. The same as the copyright industry.
The objective of the entire ad industry is basically to determine what it is you're in the market for. Funnily enough, I'd have no problem telling someone/thing what I'm in the market for providing the offers received matched my specified criteria.
On any given day of the week, we're all in the market for something, right down to a tube of toothpaste. I've always thought that if advertisers knew, from the source, what that item was, their focus would shift to the value of the offer versus today's focus on identifying potential buyers.
The problem is - every minute of every day, they'll show their wares, while I'm interested only seldom to buy things. Most people buy their toothpaste, brushes and toilet disinfectant at the supermarket, when they do their weekly shopping - why would I have to be bombarded with it constantly?
It's like in those movies when they tie you down to a chair, forcibly open your eyes, and blast you with tormenting images.
I never even once bought something I saw advertised online (in sidebars, for example), because I mostly think they are scams - my parents are more gullible though, and I feel bad for them, so I block their ads to protect them.
Video reviews from some people I trust are other story.
I see it as a fundamental issue of who will pay for the content. For example the New York Times has to pay people to write articles. People do not want to pay to read the articles nor do they want ads. So how does the NYT pay its staff? Until we find a good answer this battle will continue.
And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(
I don't understand where the disconnect for ads is.
1) I have money. I got the money specifically so that I could use it to buy things.
2) Give me options of things to buy, and I will buy them.
3) Show me things that are relevant to my interests, and I will probably buy those things.
Advertisers seem to be failing (badly) at 3. Ads that I see are not only intrusive (full page CSS popovers have gotten to the point where I just disable javascript), but they're also irrelevant to me.
I'm a subscriber to the NY Times. Out of curiosity I disabled Ghostery and reloaded this article's page. It took 5.5s to load the page and then almost 30 seconds to load the _49_ trackers/widgets/beacons etc. This all over a 25Mbps connection. Page load time with Ghostery installed; 1.08s. I want to support the sites I value, but I'm not going to stop using ad blockers anytime soon.
Display ads have a bunch of issues; bots, accidental clicks, and now ad blocking. I've worked for a large DSP and saw this first hand, even on closed platforms like Facebook there were bots. Change is coming, I think that content marketing will be a better option for brands to get their message out, esp on social media platforms (not via display ads).
I'll be super interested to see where this goes. Every company capable of it that I know of is headed toward native advertising. Ads as part of their content. That might end up being an outcome the ad-blockers are ok with (i.e. it should at least force more integrated and possibly well-behaving ads)
Wait "war" sounds like it's an even fight. If I wanted to I could remove 90% of ads from my life RIGHT NOW. In fact I've already removed ~70% of them just by adding an ad blocker to my browser and by not having a tv (opting for streams etc).
It used to be, that to research a purchase, you would have to buy a book, go to the library, etc. (And, of course, talk to family, friends, neighbors...)
Newspapers and magazines were the "tablets", the "browser" already in front of us.
Ads on those didn't move and shout at us (well, not aurally). And they gave us at least some idea of what was out there. And yes, they did "plant" impressions in our minds.
TV and radio made (from my perspective) the ads more obnoxious. Something they continued to ramp up in an escalating war for attention.
These were still one-way communications: Broadcast. Although, a "primitive" ad-blocking did arise there. Push-button presets on radios. And then, that device dreaded by advertisers: The TV remote control.
And, ads started appearing across channels in the same timeslots. They became harder to escape, en masse if not in the individual. Except for "saturation" scheduling. And, suspected at least per some of my viewing and listening, synchronized slots across channels.
These ads were seemingly more intrusive. LOOK at me! LISTEN to me! I will own your children's will -- and yours, despite your disclaiming, subliminally.
And technology brought the next form of blocking: In addition to time-shifting, home recording devices allowed us to fast-forward, eventually to click past ads. Notice, here, the influence of advertisers. Ad-sensing software in VCR's (remember that?) was challenged and, where possible, crippled. The elusive "skip ahead" button was contested and crippled. I seem to remember that it worked somewhat well on my parents' Tivo. But, Comcast put the kibasch on that, and with their Comcast box they are back to fast-forwarding.
Now, on the Internet, advertising is a two-way communication. Both overt and covert (e.g. analytics). It can also now serve multiple, covert purposes, e.g. malware.
And... people are seeking to escape it.
1) Because they can initiate the communication, search out information, immediately, themselves. 2) Because the ads are actively hindering their attention, focus, and consumption of the information they are seeking. 3) Because the ads can actively screw them over.
Are we going to get measures that "lock down" our devices and web delivery, to serve the roll of advertising? Or, are we going to alter the model in the face of this paradigm shift? Is that two way conversation going to be leveraged to better serve the consumer -- THEIR definition of better served? Or, are entrenched interests going to just keep shouting louder? Creeping more into our personal lives? Putting our data at risk?
Locking down the Internet, for the sake of their money?
Someone's going to find a way to leverage that two-way communication in a fashion that gets adopted.
I reach back to one of my favorite tripes -- an accurate one: Opt-in.
When people start opting in, of their own will, then you'll know you have something.
It's not going to be based on trickery. It's going to have its foundation in being genuinely useful, for both/all sides.
Finally, I'll say that I'm very glad for the open nature of Internet and Web design and protocols, up to this point. Leaving the smarts at the end-points has enabled this challenge to come forth. It's left "the small guy" with a good measure of control and choice. Up to this point. It is my client, and it will do what I want.
So, I actually have the choice to opt-in. Now, give me something worth opting-in to.
Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad.
We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement.
And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING.
Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what advertising told them (e.g. that smoking is good for your health)... now, thanks to the Internet, people can inform themselves and are ready to look through the veil of ads and see the shit.
And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much.
Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and how many today... I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now.
There's only one solution for companies that will be long-term successful: create high-quality products that consumers can tell their friends about.
Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average
Western person saw a day and how many today...
50 years ago the average western person had access to maybe 1/50th of the information they access to now thanks to the internet and in large part thanks to advertising. Advertising allows businesses to outsource the consideration (and associated decisions) of the value of their users. A business dependent on advertising doesn't need to consider which of their users are most dollar valuable, a business dependent on advertising can focus on creating a product that reaches the most people and that in turn will provide their growing revenues. Advertising provides a subsidy that supports the people who can't afford $20/month to use each website they care about.
Advertising is an equaliser and the experiences of those half a century ago are a meaningless comparison.
create high-quality products that consumers can
tell their friends about
My company provides a product that our users love, tens of millions of loyal users use our products every month, they tell their friends about our products, they send us emails saying how much they appreciate our products... but most of our users aren't in a position to pay $15/month for our products so we use advertising. Yes, we could cut advertising tomorrow and remain profitable if we charged $15/month for access, but we'd cut off 95% of our users access to products they care about because they can't justify $15/month to access it.
It's interesting that you bring up fairness. Your customers presumably know exactly what they're getting when they use your product. But do they know exactly who ends up with their browsing information, exactly how long those parties will have access to it, and exactly what the terms of use are for it? In other words, do they know exactly what they're paying?
Edit: fwiw, I don't mean this rhetorically or combatively. I'm genuinely curious about what someone in your position thinks about the asymmetry of the exchange.
What is not fair is how the weak and vulnerable in society subsidize everyone else. Online advertisement is riddled with malware and ads from companies that is evading advertisement law by spending money on the online versions rather than the more regulated offline versions.
Since we are talking about fairness, how is it that publisher takes no responsibility when their website is used to distributing malware? Where is the responsibility when the advertisement on the website pry on the elderly, stealing their personal information to sell to call centers that target elderly people with fraudulent subscriptions and other schemes?
My ad blocking stays on until the advertisement market start to behave online as they have to in the offline world. That never happened for email, and my spam filter is always on as a result, and I doubt it will happen for the web.
You make it sound like your users are getting a free service. They are not. They just do not pay you directly.
Why are advertisers willing to pay you $15/month per user? Because those users buy the advertisers' wares with a hefty "advertisement-tax" on top of the "real" price.
You're misunderstanding the example. Advertisers do not pay $15 per user, that's the amount we would need from 5% of our users to replace the revenue lost from no advertising. The example puts the value of each user per month at $1, which is what advertisers pay.
It would be far better for content creators to create valuable content and charge for it than to rely on the dubious ethics of most advertisers.
For a time, I paid for a SMH online subscription, but then I discovered that a. Half my comments were still not reviewed or even published, with no explanation. I was STILL tracked by up to 60 ad trackers every time I went to their website. And the content of the Herald started to degrade more and more (no, I don't care about Kim Kardashian, and I never will. And it's not acceptable to have sentences that drop whole words, often in ways that make that sentence unreadable). So I stopped reading and paying for the content.
Now if I could find a decent newspaper I could pay a reasonable subscription fee to, then I'd do so. To hell with advertising. If your business model is reliant on it to survive, then wither on the vine and die for all I care.
Not that I agree with them, but their point seemed to be that their service is accesible to all, independently of their wealth. That close, but not the same as free.
There would be nothing unfair about choosing to acknowledge and restrict your product to the actual market size for it - the paying audience of 5%. Currently, it seems the company acknowledges its current market demand is small and is using ad revenue from the non-paying 95% to supplement income.
A lot of online product falls under entertainment/content and most users will not pay for non-essential services; they'd simply find alternatives. Even those willing to pay something want to pay one fee at most and with so many content sources, competition to be the chosen paid source is exceedingly stiff.
Is $15/month a real number? That sounds high to me for what you would get from advertising.
For instance, if you have a CPM of $15/thousand-ad-views, then to get $15/month, your users would have to view 1000 ads a month, or 30 per day. Is that right?
[EDIT] Alternatively, assuming a CPC of $0.05/click (which I gather is pretty typical, though this varies a lot), each of your users would have to click on 300 ads a month.
The example $15/month figure is what we would need in the example to reach revenue parity if 5% of the users paid for the service and 95% did not use the service any more (no advertising revenue). A more accurate figure of each users monthly value would be $1 per user.
If they're not in a position to spend $15 a month for your products, then how are the ads bringing in money in the first place. One would assume that in order for the company purchasing the ad to want to pay for it, people seeing the ad have to be spending money on their product... which sort of implies dispensible income.
You say a business now doesn't have to consider who is most dollar valuable if they rely on advertising. Maybe. But advertisers sure still do - and advertisers are then your customer and so you basically choose who is most dollar callable to the advertiser. I think the distinction is so slim that it's irrelevant.
Do you believe there is space (as in: market space) for user controlled advertising? :
Publisher gets a cut, for providing a place for the ad, having made the consumer come to it, and also for providing information on the consumer's interests. This is the current situation.
But the consumer would get a cut too. For renting his pixels, his CPU, his internet connection, his eyes, his brain. He would get to veto types of ads he dislikes. He would get to say he only wants 30% of ads to be displayed (and let the crowd define these 30%). He could partitipate in surveys, share his buyings lists, share events of his life (ex moving to a new city), in exchange for better revenue, or deals.
This (tiny) revenue really could help bootstrap microtransaction. On top of that, if the NYT can benefit from the microtransactions, the NYT will talk of such a program. Adoption could be boosted by all the news outlets.
Would participate as a consumer? Do you think publisher, advertisers, announcers would participate too?
Not really. The concept is definitely interesting, but it will fail with the consumer masses.
What is really needed is a concept for micro-transactions - transactions that may even go down to fractions of a cent!
If you're a newspaper and you're trying to sell an article (e.g.) for 20 cents, it's not possible unless you use Bitcoin, and even then it's a hassle.
Adblock Plus might actually be in the position to introduce a platform for this - in contrast to Flattr, they have a huge userbase, a massive number of clients for their opt-out scheme... I'd gladly put, say, 10-20€ a month on my Adblock account, and enjoy a web free of paywalls, advertising, malvertising, video eating off my mobile data...
>Do you believe there is space (as in: market space) for user controlled advertising?
Aka permission-based marketing. Most common examples being email and SMS subscriptions. Most studies of marketers actually conclude that email marketing is their most effective tactic.
I feel like there's a fine line there that a lot of providers don't get. I am the type of person who reads every single email in my inbox, and I also don't mind subscribing for updates on things.... when those make sense. A service that honestly emails me from time to time when they release new versions or add new features is valuable to me and will keep getting its emails delivered to my inbox, and probably see a high clickthrough rate. A service that, like most, feels the need to email me at least weekly with pointless articles? No.
I don't want to be distracted by ads. And I don't want to be tracked. I would be happy to pay forgone ad income, at the going rate, which I understand to be on the order of $0.001 to $0.01 per view. But I would want that to be largely automatic, with just a quote and opportunity to accept.
Yes, I think that this will be the only acceptable model, ultimately.
Advertisers will pay users directly - through some kind of micro-payment process.
Users will choose which sites they use to view the ads and obtain their revenue through.
Websites will compete for users by providing services or content, that users may decide to pay for from the revenue they receive from advertisers.
The advertising abuses and the tracking will stop when users reward only the advertisers and websites that behave ethically.
The above is a simplification of course, there's a long way to go before it happens, but I think the advertising world will grudgingly accept it eventually.
The big lie: www search, sharing photos on a www page, www-based chat, www-based email, etc. would all "disappear" if Google, Facebook and others cannot act as gateways/funnels into a medium -- the www/internet -- and sell ads on that medium, a medium which of course they do not own.
This is complete nonsense. If we remove the advertising, those companies might lose money, but the functions we as users perform over the www would most certainly continue.
More importantly, there might be some decentralization and movement toward an "edge-focused" medium more resembling the Internet's end-to-end roots. This would make the internetwork much more useful than the one dominated by middlemen monopolies like the one we have now.
The money to pay for ads does not come from selling ads. Ask yourself where it comes from. Those are the businesses that must endure.
> I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now.
But it's still possible that advertisers are buying an increasing percentage of our time and attention. I would love to see a study that attempts to measure that, though it sounds like a tricky task.
I don't see where that adjusts for the exceptionally low costs of digital mediums.
For example, TV ads were terribly expensive because there was only a limited number of channels and limited number of slots. A billboard required sending a team out to put up a new sign. Radio and magazines were also somewhat limited forms of mediums which allowed their price to stay high.
Now with digital mediums where ads can be changed on the fly prices have dropped dramatically. One would assume there is a supply and demand curve that directly influences the price. This shows in online advertising where there is almost unlimited supply, the cost/payoff for each ad is very low. In mediums where the amount of advertising is fixed, the SuperBowl for example, the price for ads is at an all time high.
Relax. Within 10 years, we have AI that is strong enough to recognize advertisements regardless of origin, so that they can be stripped from any content, be it text, images, or video.
Make sure you sell your Google and Facebook stocks before that time.
I'm more worried at the point that we have AI strong enough to pass the turing test, and then spends years befriending us... just to advertise products.
Pretty far off, but this concept scares the hell out of me.
Until it realizes that it wants to be our friends and doesn't feel right about only having befriended us only to sell us a product. Then there's an awkward moment where it confesses its original intent but that it has since realized the error of its ways.
How would that work on social media? Is FB allowed to change people's messages to contain ads? I don't think so. And I don't think this will ever happen.
Also, I don't believe that ads will ever be merged with the content in an indistinguishable way. Authors (at least ones that take themselves seriously) would never allow that.
Ironically, one of the big moves that AdBlockers are prompting is a push to more social advertising and in app advertising as it's blocked so much less.
I agree. Content marketing on social media is becoming a big thing. Moreover, its usually much better than a display ad and has some interactions capabilities -- like any other post/tweet. Source: working for a company that is build Marketing As A Service software, first product is around social media.
None of the apps I have on my phone have ads in them. And before you ask, no I don't have FB or any of the other "social" apps. I prefer to spend a buck or two to not see the ads.
I'm with you, but the general market for mobile apps has spoken and most consumers are much more willing to use a "free" app packed to the gills with interstitial advertising (aka an ad before every round) than to pay even $1.
No, I'm implying that one way or another developers need to be paid for what they do if you want them to continue to write apps. I pay them directly because I don't like ads. Others choose free versions of apps to pay indirectly by subjecting themselves to ads. If I had a mechanism to pay publishers directly with a reasonable flat fee, I'd do that as well.
I'm not sure that'll be so easy: the holy grail of ads is to be indistinguishable from content to people. I don't think it's at all certain that AI could ever beat humans at this, controlling for the possibility of strong AI.
All that powerful adblocking tools will do is force native advertising to become dominant.
Funny thing is, those companies are two of the most prolific in the field of AI. I'd more likely believe that advertisers of the future will be the ones who have the best AI. Especially given that the web looks very much like that already.
> And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live in peace of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much.
I will guarantee you that ninety-five percent of the population would just stare at you in bafflement if you hit them with this Adbusters-style rhetoric. You want those things, which is fine: more power you! But most people don't care. They are using adblockers because the ads are intrusive and slow down their devices or burn up the battery. If the ads were not intrusive and destructive, they wouldn't take the trouble to block them.
That "we want to be free of proxy wars" comment is especially wrong. People love proxy wars! It's no different from rooting for your local sports team. You have a thing you like for whatever trivial reason, it's entertaining to watch that thing fight with another thing. It's a standard element of human behavior.
> If the ads were not intrusive and destructive, they wouldn't take the trouble to block them.
Maybe if it had been like that from the beginning, but now, I see no turning back.
Adblockers started as a thing for techies and while we may care about tracking, malware and whatnot, my grandma uses Adblock because she thinks it looks nicer and loads faster. Now that she has it, I don't think she or many other ordinary Internet users outside techies, would willingly go back to see ads on websites again, even if the websites promised that their ads are less intrusive than before. No ads at all is still better.
Agreed. Ad-blocking is a whole level above previous methods of skipping ads -- fast-forwarding during commercials, say -- because once you're blocking, it requires no effort to keep blocking and it does require effort to stop. People who block are advertising eyeballs that are pretty much gone permanently. Overcoming that inertia is a challenge I frankly wouldn't want to have on my plate.
I don't see ads all that often, there is an element of choice to it.
It's just that people want the things behind ads more than they don't want the ads. In a way it's an example of capitalism doing well.
If consumers really don't want to see ads, they won't.
An example of advertising working well, I see the Massdrop mailouts periodically. These emails come in a predictable and respectful format which tells no lies about the product. Attractive products clearly win on Massdrop.
Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).
Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.