Where do their stories come from? Aren’t they usually just reporting what one of the main news sites has reported?
I don’t understand any of this. I barely notice ads on internet news sites. They just sit at the side and I literally don’t see them. I have read pretty much all the hard news on two news sites today and could barely tell you there were ads on those sites. I know they were there, but they just don’t register. and they don’t compulsorily impede my reading of the content in any way.
Contrastingly, I don’t know what coloured glasses you are looking at TV ads through, but I want a pair. I essentially won’t watch commercial TV because of the Og damned ads interrupting the experience all the damn time. And bear in mind IIRC Australia has lower rates of ads per hour of TV time than the US. People go back and watch 50’s and 60’s ads now because they are quaint, not because they regard them as inherently entertaining. And even to the extent they are entertaining, they are entertaining once, same as some modern ads. They were no more entertaining the 50th time through than modern ads are.
I’ve never got malware off any ad ever and I think the risk of doing so is highly exaggerated, as part of a particular agenda. I started to read one of the articles on the subject but when I got to the sentence saying sites were “attempting to hold their content hostage over people’s use of adblockers” I switched off.
“hostage”? Seriously? When someone starts describing a business’s product (yanno, the stuff they sell to stay in business) as a “hostage” we are not in Kansas anymore, we are in agenda-land (or should that be “entitled-land”?).
Ads are worse on some sites than others, that’s absolutely true. But I have ad blocker on, so I wouldn’t know what’s what.
I don’t watch commercial TV either, for the same reason. I was referring to ads in 50s and 60s TV. Ads used to take up only 6 minutes of an hour-long show. Now they take up 18.
I think it’s both. You will have people going back and watching ads for fun from the 50s, 60s, a little less from the 70s, quite a bit less from the 80s but still there–but does anyone go back and look at any ads for fun from the 1990s? Maybe if it’s for a specifically nostalgic product…
But that’s all academic.
Not really disagreeing with you on this. I didn’t enjoy ads on TV in the 70s and 80s.
Maybe you could quote something specific. I don’t really know what you’re talking about.
I have an agenda, it’s true. I think the Internet is set up in a shitty way such that a large chunk of it is a fucking grift. And our economy as a whole has slid in that direction. It’s check cashing stations and vape shops in bricks and mortar land and clickbait and 3rd-party servers online. We can do better.
+1
Sorry it was a link from Lord Feldon’s post above at #34. Shoulda said.
I’m with the OP. Pervasive advertisement is one of the scourges of the modern age (yeah, yeah, #1stworldproblems). Adblocking has made the web functional again, as well as aesthetically pleasant (depending on the site, of course). And, at least for me, minimizing exposure to advertisements helps me maintain the illusion that life is more than consumption, and that in this crazy topsy-turvy world I am more than just a revenue source for businesses.
I too will normally leave a site that has a unblockable ad, though Ad block has a setting that allows it to try different things to try to disable it, I sometimes try that instead. Those 2 methods make up 99% of my options, the remaining 1% is a manual attempt, perhaps reloading it and hitting stop to view content w/o the ad. I don’t know if I ever disabled ad block or watched such a ad, such a turnoff I don’t care about their content anymore.
Those sites are just a bait and switch tactic, a hard sell and I don’t play that game as it goes into intent, and that type of intent makes the content I wanted questionable and damages the credibility of the site.
There is a very simple workaround to cope with Wired.com and a variety of other problems:
After a desired page loads, click the Stop (X) icon.
In either Chrome of Firefox, this is an X immediately to the left (Chrome) or right (Firefox) of the URL bar. (Click it before the X changes to circle-with-arrow, but after the desired content is available. … Though in many cases the content will not appear until after you click X.)
While this is very simple (just click the X), there is a much more complicated procedure I sometimes need to view content:
[SPOILER]After loading a page but before it switches to a blocking mode, press control-U on the keyboard.
If you wish, you can view the content, with a little difficulty, on the ctrl-U page. Or save it, edit it to remove the undesired Javascripts, then display it with your browser. Ctrl-S doesn’t work as well: By the time you respond to the Save menu, the desired page has been replaced with a blocking-message page. But ctrl-U is almost instantaneous.[/SPOILER]
I block ads because the advertisers fired the first shot. They have given us good reason not to trust them to act in good faith, so I don’t. I allow Adblock Plus’s “non-intrusive advertising” because I have no inherent objection to finding out what products you want to sell me, but everything else - the audio ads, the auto-playing videos, the pop-ups and the malware - means that I refuse to give the advertisers free rein to do whatever they want.
PSXer literally does not understand what the word “literally” means.
Another reason this won’t work is virtual hosting. A physical web server with a single IP address can serve content for many virtual hosts. So for example my webserver listening on 1.2.3.4 can serve ads for www.chevyads.com, www.fordads.com, etc. The hostname is part of the HTTP request that the server receives. Without the hostname it wouldn’t know which content to serve.
I don’t mind unobtrusive ads, and there are a few sites that come right out and say “Please view our ads, we promise they’re not annoying.” That’s fine. But nowadays most ads are incredibly obnoxious, or drastically slow down the page loading, or hijack your device completely to open the app store (how this is allowed at all is beyond me…) and that’s why I continue to use adblock 90% of the time. I, too, have stopped going to Forbes for this reason.
Not only are ads annoying but by using bandwidth that I pay for they cost ME money. If you can’t monetize your service in a way that doesn’t piss people off then that’s a you problem. If your service is something I value and am willing to pay for then I will. If not then again the problem is you and service, not the consumer.
I resent the implication that I am taking something that I’m not entitled to by blocking ads. I will never stop blocking ads. Instead, I’m constantly looking for better, more efficient ways to block them.
arrant nonsense.
I’m under no obligation to view everything put in front of me. I picked up an “Evening Standard” on the London tube the other day and read the news and skipped straight over the time-wasting and annoying full page ads and even threw away a supplement that I know to be nothing but ads.
Was I “stealing” from the content provider? Of course not.
Now if the Standard ramped up their intrusive advertising to a point where I can’t avoid it then you can be sure I won’t pick it up at all. I’ll grab a “metro” or NME or another free paper that is less obnoxious.
That can be neatly avoided by the Standard keeping their advertising at an unobtrusive level.
This really gets to the heart of the matter, online at least. I don’t mind fairly unobtrusive ads at the top, bottom or sides, or even a very short startup page I can click through. But I sure as hell can’t stand popup ads or ones that use up or block most of the page I’m trying to read.
Forbes actually runs good articles on important subjects (for instance, genetic modification and vaccination). If something is worth reading, I might go to the trouble of turning off AdBlock on the one machine where I have it installed.
This has only come up once so far and it wasn’t worth the trouble. 
Oh, look - a new malware attack this weekend, driven by malware delivering ads:
There’s some new attack going on pretty much non-stop these days. Every time this subject comes up, it’s a piece of cake to find the latest attack news.
I don’t care if the current web producers’ business model depends on advertising. That’s not my problem. If they want to make money at this website business, then *they *need to find a new method of generating income. Their current method is akin to allowing an open sewer in my computer room, and that’s not going to happen.
It’s their own damn fault that they’ve allowed their advertisers to turn their websites into plague ships. Apparently, they didn’t care when it was only costing their customers time and money to repair the damage. So now that their reputation is in the shitter and they’re the ones losing money - I’m supposed to feel bad for them? LOL. Yeah, not even close.
If they want my eyeballs - if they want my money - then they need to figure it out. No - I don’t know where the next step is for websites that currently depend on advertising. And you know what? I don’t care. Those websites need me more than I need any of them. I am not being paid to solve their revenue-generating problems. The onus is on them to figure out a way to make money that doesn’t leave their customers at risk.
Getting worthwhile services tends to cost money. If you don’t think the website is worthwhile then you aren’t going to use it - I understand that - but your post reads as if you have an entitlement to get the article without any cost to you in terms of money or any form of inconvenience. Why would that be?
The money its costing ‘me’ (in bandwidth costs, AV costs, time, etc) does nothing for that company’s bottom line directly - they usually get paid for click thrus - which no-one (as a rule) does - the days of ‘pay per view’ went away along time ago.
So - if they were to get paid by ‘sponsors’ that would have (reasonably) relevant adds gaurunteed to be malware clean, I would turn off add block - because the sponsors would see the ‘views’ of the add as positive, they would pay the content providor based on that sponsorship alone.
IOW functionally like the TV model today - just get rid of the adbot business.
No you’re not. You’d be stealing content if you broke through a paywall on a subscription site.
Choosing not to download some components of a web page that is accessible to the general public is not stealing, and certainly not literally stealing.
Lucky you. My old laptop was destroyed by some nasty adware. As a result, I don’t go online without an adblocker.