One last thought: ascenray, if I follow a link to your website, I won’t know until I get there and am viewing your content that you expect a price to be paid for my doing so. If you’re serious about wanting payment, you need to explain that upfront, before your content is viewed, so the viewer has a chance to accept or decline. Coming in afterwards, saying, “you looked at it! now you have to pay!” is never going to work.
This is still irrelevent to this discussion though, except perhaps as an argument that you can (and should?) avoid moral conflict by eschewing professional sites that have ads, in favor of amateur sites that don’t. Which isn’t quite a statement of whether or not if you do sample professional work, should you let the ads through or not.
They’ve completely missed the point. They’re assuming that everyone is on a high-speed internet link and has unlimited bandwidth. Many people aren’t or don’t. Downloading an advert can cost.
Their contact screen seems to just discard the text, so here’s the comment I sent them:
Sounds like the price you choose to pay to enter their site. Sure, you’d like it if they lowered that ‘cost’ - but that doesn’t answer whether you have the right to circumvent it.
This is exactly what I had in mind when I said “Make explicit how agreement on the “terms” of the “deal” is negotiated.”
This is the bizarre disconnect I find in people who argue for the supremacy of “content creators” with respect to intellectual property. To profit in any way requires an audience, which in turn requires making the content available. There’s an obvious tradeoff between potential viewership and control of content.
Right. It’s a little like the folks who say libraries are stealing while ignoring the fact that libraries are the single best way to get their work in front of potential new buyers.
When I watch commercial TV, I don’t feel obliged to watch the ads - and I don’t feel I’m cheating the broadcaster by getting up and leaving the room to make a cup of tea.
Maybe there’s some reason why that’s not an apt analogy, but I can’t think of one.
As a consumer of web content, I understand that ad revenue supports the people that make the content I enjoy, but I don’t think this translates to an obligation on my part to see the ads. In actual point of fact, there’s no guarantee that the particular ads served to me are money-making ones for the webmaster, so there’s no absolute proportional relationship between the amount of content I consume and the amount of ad revenue the content provider receives, even if I turn off AdBlock. For this reason, I don’t think that allowing the ads can really be described as paying for the content.
I don’t mind if the producers of content choose to shut me out if I block ads, if they really want to play it that way - If I like the content enough, I’ll set up an exception in my ad blocker, or otherwise, I’ll go somewhere else.
As a provider of web content (OK an amateur), I don’t see it any differently - I like the modest income that I get from my ads, but I don’t consider them a mandatory part of my website - if my visitors want to block them, they’re free to do so.
I guess it would be bad if the ad revenue was my main income and it started to dry up, but really, that kind of shift can happen in any business - today’s goldmine is tomorrow’s ghost town. Tough titty.
I may not mind being charged for the bandwidth used by their content; I certainly do mind being charged for their advertisers’ content. And then there’s the time issue. Each page typically only has a few paragraphs of text, which are quick to transmit, but also gobs of graphics, which are not.
In the statement by Ars Technica in the OP, it described how you can’t compare television commercials to their web ads. Basically, television advertisers have complicated models that calculate how many people they think might watch the ads, whereas Ars’ advertisers have hard info on how many people did view the ads. Ars doesn’t get money basic on clicks, they get money based on views. If your ad blocker is on, you don’t count as a view.
My personal take is Ars Technica is free to block their site if they wish but doing so will likely alienate half of their users who will simply leave. That will mean they will have much less content and so ever fewer people will go there. If that’s what they want then great but I don’t think it is a good way to maintain a top notch website.
This is simply nonsense. Plenty of great, valuable content comes from enthusiastic and knowledegable amateurs who don’t want or expect to get paid. Plenty of utter garbage that isn’t even factually accurate comes from ‘paid’ professionals who ought to know better. The internet has made it possible for those who want to provide content to connect with those who want to receive it. This is a wonderful thing. If this doesn’t suit your preferred career path, tough. Seen many blacksmiths around lately?
Not to mention a significant aspect of the content on Ars is the comments and forums, which is generated by users. Just for example, those system guides? Written by Ars employees, but the recommendations in them are hashed out in long threads on their forum arguing the pros and cons of different gear.
<shrug> this just means they’re argument is based on assumption of some kind of privilege - in other words, they’ve done their sums wrong and need to build some extra variables into their models.
That’s just foolishness.
Those “complicated models” that calculate how many people watch ads are based on how many people watch ads. If people didn’t get up and stop watching, then the models would reflect that, and they’d get paid more for the ads. Claiming that morality of it is different on the web because there’s one less layer of obfuscation doesn’t hold water. Unless, of course, you want to take the position that it is morally ok to not watch television ads unless you are selected as a Nielsen rater, in which case you are obligated to watch them, because otherwise the advertisers’ payment models would change.
This is not particle physics. The act of observation does not change the morality of viewing advertisements.