I agree, but the problem for them is that’s exactly how we’ve ended up in the current situation. Read the comments on pretty much any story about adblocking on a mainstream media website (The Guardian has done some excellent stuff on it) - hundreds, often thousands of comments all saying the same thing: Don’t track us, don’t interrupt our browsing experience, and stop being a malware attack vector.
I’m torn on the issue.
On the one hand, advertising is fundamentally degrading to culture; although some in tiny quantities adverts can be cute, such as the Stella Artois French Cinema series; and I’ll give a pass for artistic value **if **they take the trouble to include a naked chick or a smiling kitten.
Yet on the internet it’s almost entirely trash: and for my own blog I adopted the ad free blog livery badge. And the Antiadvertisingagency has done good work.
On the other, in the face of Death, Destroyer of All Things, and actual life for millions on millions of creatures: as with everything to do with copyright and patents etc., I’m moving to the position that even thinking about the moral issues of such penny ante trash as advertisers and their wretched products is wholly unsuitable for Man.
I ad block and also use this when necessary. Actually not always when necessary, but just to say NER!
Thanks for that tip!
I’m literally okay with that. Just like I am by muting and 30 second skipping commericals to steal TV shows.
I don’t see any incentive for websites not to block users who block their ads. There is literally no downside for them. Sort of like a politician trying to curry the favor of non-voters.
When I share a link with, say, a message board, or Facebook or Twitter, people who are not running AdBlock will click on it and go make them money. So they may not get ad views from me if I go there, but if I can’t go there, they won’t get traffic from me sending others there, either.
It’s a tenuous downside, but it’s a downside. I share a lot of links.
Let me know when there’s widespread technology for blocking ads in newspapers. It is a false equivalence and you know it. The equivalent of ignoring an advert in a newspaper is ignoring an advert on a webpage. The equivalent is not running technology to make sure that the advert never appears.
And you say you didn’t look, but I bet you you were aware of them. That’s how advertising works.
This irritates the shit out of me. Seriously. Like everything, the overwhelming majority does nothing to harm computers. No malware is installed. But because one crappy one does now and again people blame all of them. It is the computer equivalent of blaming all Muslims for ISIS. But even then, who are these people that claim to be getting malware from ads? I know I never have despite never running an ad blocker. Perhaps it is more a reflection on the sites that these people are going to and the lack of any sort of willpower to not click “yes” when something asks to install.
If you don’t want to “risk” things then don’t use the site. But you won’t do that, will you? Your sense of entitlement demands that everyone bends round to you.
People say that bad ads in the past created the need for ad blockers. Well over-zealous use of ad blockers has created the need for the blocking of ad blockers. You reap what you sow.
But what it comes down to is simply that people need to pay the bills. But your entitlement doesn’t make allowances for that, does it?
If you knew anything about how this works on the business side you’d realise that only the highest traffic sites get the option of running ads that they have complete control over (ie. Premium Ads). Unless your daily active users is in the millions they won’t even speak to you.
So remnant advertising is basically the only choice they have. It isn’t about laziness, it is that the advertisers do not consider them to be financially worth the time to deal with.
The vast, vast majority will not pay for access. Only the biggest sites get premium ad deals. Please let me know how the smaller websites should fund themselves as you’ll be solving a problem that is plaguing the entire industry. Right now remnant advertising is pretty much the only thing that works. Some point to the begware type things like Patreon, but all too few will put their money where their mouth is (for the same reasons that they won’t pay for subscriptions) and as such you can barely get enough to fund a person, never mind a company.
Again, false equivalence. You are not blocking the ad from being shown, the advertiser is still paying. By blocking ads you are stopping them from being loaded and hence stopping the payment.
Ads are dangerous on top of being annoyances, using an ad blocker is a basic step of internet use. Any site that tries to get me to quit using them is wrong and getting dropped.
Not entirely false. Newspaper and magazine ads don’t overlay the articles and require you to do something to remove the ad to view the content. Nor do I have to pay extra for the ads in paper media. Many user’s have internet connections with data caps and the New York Times found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers. There is usually some fee required once that data cap is reached. And then half the data you are paying extra to download is still more ads and crap. If a newspaper or magazine wants to stuff another hundred pages worth of ads into an edition, they’re not going to charge you extra for it.
Well, certainly if it never happened to you it must not be real!
None of those require you to click on “Yes” or take any active role; they are injected passively via various exploits.
You don’t know when a site’s advertising will start injecting malware. I assume most people would have trusted the BBC, for example, to not infect their system with ransomware … you know, until it happened. You can either protect yourself or you can just wait for some random trusted site to infect you.
Sure. As soon as the BBC, Yahoo!, etc start cutting people $500 checks to cover the cost of getting their malware encrypted files back we can talk about the need to pay bills. Until then, I’m going to protect myself because they aren’t doing it for me.
That said, I’m okay with sites blocking me if I’m using a blocker. I think it’s a losing proposition for the company over the long term because more people will just go elsewhere than start allowing ads but I’m not sitting around raging at Forbes or trying to find ways to defeat them. I just go to one of the other ninety-kajillion places on the internet.
Less people, less traffic (which is the currency for determining what the major sites are). For sites that rely on any sort of community, you have less of one. If I get sent to a site that blocks me at the door, I’m just going to leave. I have paid premium/subscription memberships for sites but only after I’ve established some sort of relationship with them which isn’t going to happen if I’m barred from entering.
There’s very little really unique content on the net that you can’t find an adequate replacement for somewhere else. Losing traffic to those other sites isn’t a great long-term solution for your money flow issues.
The mechanisms that block users who block ads are an additional layer of complexity and risk for a site - a potential point of failure that could cause all traffic to be blocked from viewing the site.
True. As obnoxious as newspaper ads could be, they never laced the ink with viruses.
I have used adblocker for many, many years, and I guess that if there were no such thing as adblocker it would cut my internet browsing with at least 50%, perhaps even 75%. I kid you not. I cannot stand all these ads, sometimes it is like reading a piece of text lying on a pinball machine someone is playing. I am more or less unable to focus on the content. I’m not writing a manifest, it is just me.
But speaking of me, I think that advertisers are killing themselves. Adblockers are a direct result of their strategy to cram as much shit in your face as possible. – I would not mind, at all, if there was a sign on my favorite site that said: “Drink Coca-Cola”. I would not mind at all, and it would never occur to me to block that out. But if the site is a pinball machine of ads where I try to dig out the content I came for, I need to block it out or I will not visit it.
Now the industry is trying to stop adblockers, and some people is claiming that using them is “literally stealing”. But the race is already run. Like telesales, there is no turning back. You annoyed the hell out of your would-be customers with that strategy and there is no turning back now. You fucked it up and need a new strategy, a totally different strategy, that does not annoy your customers.
Until then, settle for non-moving, non-sounding signs on your site that is not some hurdle I need to get past to read the text, and does not take time to load, and does not affect my computer, that says: “Buy our car, it is great,” and I may very well turn off my adblocker.
But the truth is, 2016, that TV commercials, telesales and internet ads, as we learned to know them for the past ten years, are dead. Dead ends. Anyone who says that browsing with an adblocker is “stealing” is just digging deeper. You gotta find a new way of getting through.
I know sites can’t operate for free. Not a penny of what you pay to your ISP goes to your favorite websites. And we don’t want to pay a subscription fee to every site, especially for the prices that sites like wired.com think they deserve. So it’s down to ads. The sites that block adblock users need to earn our ad trust and carefully curate every ad they display. No fake buttons, no scams, no malware, no “ONE WEIRD TRICK”, no flashy garish stuff. Ensure the ads fit the tone of the site and everyone will benefit.
Advertisers, content-providers, etc. always want to tip the balance as far as they can towards revenue generation.
I used to subscribe to magazines until the amount of blow cards inserted between pages became so ridiculous, so goodbye magazines.
The Sunday newspaper in most areas has become a 10 slab. 99% of which are ads.
DVD’s are bloated with non-skippable previews and advertising.
Cable TV runs ads every 5-6 minutes on many channels, despite the fact that you pay an outrageous monthly fee to the cable company.
ISP’s redirect your searches to pages of their choice if you inadvertently mistype. They also ‘shape’ your data traffic to discourage using anything other than their services.
Sports arenas are ‘sponsored’ by advertising despite the outrageously high cost of tickets.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, et al compete to track and monitor your every mouse-click and keystroke in order to sell you to their advertisers. Even when you’re not actively using your android or Apple phone, they track where you are and where you have been.
And you have ‘voice-activated’ devices and TV’s that listen to everything. Amazon has pioneered the method of recording all of your spoken commands and is turning them into yet another method of selling.
Web sites insist that you turn off their invasive ads in order to view their content, and then infect your computer with virus’ when you do. I have elderly relatives who had every one of their files encrypted by this ‘cryptowall’ crap and told to use the TOR browser and send the assholes ‘bitcoins’. All because they innocently believed that advertising was ok and didn’t want to run ad-blocking software.
Is it really any wonder that consumers are burnt out on advertising? Everywhere you turn, everything you purchase, watch, read, listen to, every trip you plan or take, even eat, has been turned into a marketing opportunity. Our kids are bombarded with unhealthy choices and obesity is rampant.
And many people seem to think that advertisers have a ‘right’ to do this???
I think people (not ‘consumers’ as we’re referred to) have just as much right to utilize every available tool at our disposal to block this invasion and I use every one that I can. Ublock for Internet ads. ComSkip for TV commercials, Ghostery & Disconnect to prevent tracking, and fake email accounts to stop spamming. Advertisers don’t like that? Too damn bad for them.