The thing about Forbes is that most of their content (maybe all of it, but certainly the stuff I’d come across) was just blogger content anyway. It’s not as though they have some sort of special read on the pulse of [whatever], it’s just some guy’s thoughts on something, maybe with some data from some other source. Nothing that I’d go out of my way to read once it comes at all inconvenient.
Another site, one I read multiple times a day, was playing around with “sponsored content” (i.e. ads posing as articles) but that must not have gone over too well. So he instead switched to offering “premium content” as well as the regular stuff and a $5/mth or $50/yr premium subscription to access it. I had no problem paying $50 since it was a site I had been reading for years and come to make part of my day. But sites like Forbes that I only hit when they pop up on a Google search or a link from somewhere else? No real draw there.
Yeah, I noticed Wired.com pulling this shit, but I understood.
“Okay, Wired,” said I. “I get it. Let’s see what the site looks like with ads.”
So I whitelisted the site to read an article, and it threw up an advertisement bar that scrolled with the motherfucking article so that the ad was in the middle of my goddamned screen at all goddamned motherfucking times.
Fuck you straight to hell, Wired.com. Die in a fire. No longer subscribed to their RSS.
I’ve gotten malware infections from ads. There’s one site that I frequent where turning off adblock would cause firefox to randomly start spinning at 100%, which renders is goddamned unusable. Another site had an ad server start using Javascript that turned random words in the actual content into links to crap, and started constantly popping up ads over top of the content, making the site unreadable. And don’t get me started on ads that play sound and/or video.
If ads were safe and unobtrusive, I’d be ok with them. They’re not, and people running the majority of websites don’t seem to care. So the adblocker stays on.
Somebody has to pay the bills, we can’t all ride for free. I’ve turned ad blocking off on sites that ask me, no regrets yet. What these sites need to do is earn and maintain our trust by vetting their ads, no “2 SECURITY THREATS FOUND, CLICK TO FIX” and “ONE WEIRD TRICK” ads.
previously.tv is always having problems with ads. I never have to worry about it because my ad blocker means I don’t have to worry about it, but those who don’t use ad blockers are always complaining.
For sites I like, I tend to turn off adblock as long as the ads never annoy me. If I ever see a popup ad that comes up in my face and makes me click to close it, adblock instantly goes up on that site.
Advertisers, honestly, have been their own worst enemies with this ad block stuff. If it wasn’t for all these popups and otherwise annoying ads, most people would never have gotten ad blockers for something as innocuous as banner ads, etc. Ads on the side/top/bottom of the page, or even interspersed with the content? Sure, that’s fine. Ads that cover up what I’m trying to read/look at, ads that delay me and force me to watch a commercial first, etc, nope, those are unacceptable.
That’s probably the case. Pop ups, caused people to started looking for a solution, moreso the ones from way back when the pop ups were explicit porn. Then there were pop unders, so you thought you were fine until you closed your browser and found a bunch of stuff under it. And of course, who can forget when you’d get so many pop ups all you could do was kill IE to get them to stop.
It eventually tapered off and most websites started just doing banner ads and ads along the left and right side and I still never bothered with an Adblocker, what made me finally get one was flashing ads. I can’t read an article with blinking crap. For a while I could get scroll it off the screen, but when there’s multiple ones, I couldn’t do it (FTR, it was HowStuffWorks . com, probably 15 years ago). That’s when I pulled the trigger and started blocking ads, never looked back.
Even now, if a site asks nicely (AND refuses to load content), I’ll whitelist it, but if the ads are obnoxious, I won’t go to the site.
And now, on my phone I’m seeing ads that scroll past the screen as I’m scroll through the article.
Another thing about online ads: Can you think of any product that people actually like, enjoy, regularly use (it doesn’t have to have social value) built on online advertising?
I’ve never heard, once in my life, “Oh yeah, that product became really big because of the online ads they were running.”
It seems like online ads boil down to pretty much the following:
• Stuff you’ve already heard about. Geico advertising on Hulu or whatever. I don’t so much mind “serious” ads like this, but seeing them also does absolutely nothing for me, just as it doesn’t on TV.
• Scammy bullshit served up in the scammy ways that everyone complains about, including in this thread.
One final point: Who back in the 1990s, before they had even gone online once, felt that they weren’t seeing enough ads already? Ads were a joke in the 70s, already considered overkill. People were burned out on them even before the Internet Era.
While he never actually used them, I’m sure my dad wasn’t the only person to buy X10 cameras. Those pop ups were everywhere. I remember there was even a website (I had the bookmark saved for years) where you could go to and it could keep them at bay for a few months.
I know they still exist, somewhere, but I think what X10 wanted to be is what Nest is working towards becoming.
Forbes, CBS, etc. are businesses. They provide a service which costs them money to produce. They do not exist to entertain or perform you; they entertain and/or inform you in order to make money, which serves not simply to line the owners’ pockets but to pay the artists, writers, and so on who work for them. They can raise that money either by charging a subscription fee in one form or another, or by selling ads. It’s no unreasonable for them to refuse to provide that service to persons who prevent the ads from even loading.
I have a friend-in-law who has recently opened a bakery. Should she provide endless free pastry samples to people who never buy? For that matter, should Kroger?
Sure, so long as they become fully liable for the consequences of their ads. Once you can no longer load a page without the ads, the idea that they’re not liable for what a third-party company serves users breaks down.
It’s true that Forbes is not in the business of giving out its goods for free. That doesn’t mean it has any goods that the rest of us need to consume. It’s a great big web. We can go get our news and uninformed blog rantings somewhere else.
If the whole commercial web got shoved off a cliff, and we all went back to the early days when it was passionate people talking about their hobbies and special interests, we’d all get along just fine.
Also, is your friend passing out the Zika virus along with every order of baked treats? Because, Forbes sure does! I don’t care if their business model depends on me looking at their ads while they infect my computer behind the window. Fuck 'em. Hell, I’d shove them off a cliff myself, if there was one handy.
Web advertisers have abused the privilege. Unless they go back to Google Text ads (remember those? they were great), the shields stay up.
I agree there. There are plenty of sites I won’t go to because the ads are annoying and hte content isn’t worth paying for in either coin or attention. What I was decrying was the attitude that EVERYTHING on the internet should be entirely free, supported neither by fee nor by ads. That is a selfish and frankly immature policy.
Years ago, when I was single and working as a freelancer, I supported myself in part by tutoring. Occasionally people suggested that I should waive my fee a given person – non-indigent people, mind you, not poor kids – because doing so would help my reputation, would encourage people to hire me. I always countered that the only reputation this would help me build was that of a sucker – someone who thought so little of his own value that he was willing to give away his services in exchange for nothing. How was that supposed to make me any money?
Expecting CBS not to object when people refuse to watch ads is exactly like that.
Before the rise of the Internet, this issue didn’t exist. Either there was a physical object to be purchased (magazine, newspaper, record album, book, etc.) or the product was given for free with ads not all that easy to avoid (TV and radio programs). The Internet brought something very new: extreme plasticity of both the product and the user experience.
E.g., you could wake up tomorrow, and Facebook could be something slightly different or totally different. And you can choose to experience Facebook in many different ways based on your device, browsing methods, and sofware ad-ons, etc.
It’s a new situation, so all the arguments as to what is right and wrong with respect to using the service is, as the Dude said, just your opinion, man. Comparing it to concrete physical objects with limited availability like baked goods is, IMHO, a red herring.
You’re free to argue what you think is moral in such a situation. I would go deeper and say that our whole corporate structure and economic system is rotten. I don’t owe TPTB anything. Advertising had a good run from the 19th century until the 21st, but the old system of shoving ads in people’s faces is dying and nothing is going to bring it back. Respect for human autonomy and choice is where it’s at.
Oh, and I work in advertising and still think the above. The times they are a-changin’.
I think part of the problem is that the Internet and its users have failed to find the proverbial “win-win” thus far.
The ad culture on the Internet is annoying, scammy, and skeevy. No one thinks otherwise. No one thinks we’ve come up with a good system. Plus, it doesn’t work in most cases.
Compare this to TV advertising in its first couple of decades. This was a clear win-win. Ads took up a minimal fraction of the air time, and people actually enjoyed watching them. Heck, people still go back to watch 50s and 60s ads because they are charming. That advertising also unambiguously worked for companies. (I’m not saying it’s all great in retrospect; a lot of the ads were charming but also idiotic or for products that weren’t good for society, like sugary cereals, cigarettes, etc. But there was a win-win in place between the companies advertising and viewers.)
But sometimes a good deal does comes along. I pay for Amazon Prime–it’s a no brainer! I pay for all the content that comes with Amazon Prime. I don’t complain. I don’t even think about the $100/year or whatever it costs. I watch the movies. I’m not served ads. It’s awesome.
I won’t watch Hulu because it’s an effing pain in the ass to watch the ads, and there are a ton of them. So I just don’t go to Hulu. I don’t blame them for trying to make that deal work–it just doesn’t work for me.
CBS is different. They’re a news site, and I don’t know what their deal is before going there. I went to CBS via a link or something. Then they try to serve me an ad and won’t show me the content because the ad blocker is on. That’s annoying.
By the way, I would see ads on ANY of these sites if they were banner ads, graphical ads, etc., that were actually part of the SITE. But the Web has already shown that such a rational way of advertising doesn’t work. Nope, only scammy shit from 3rd-party servers works! Well fuck that, I’m not playing. It’s really sad that websites can’t own their ads, take responsibility for them. Nope, they have to serve up some random shit. It’s classless and irresponsible, quite frankly.