I would like to see googles number on how often such services get reported as spam, but I suspect its actually quite low. It helps that you can unsubscribe if you don't want to see it.
Technically in the U.S., if you opt in to receive offers, newsletters, etc. from an organization at some point, this isn't considered spam.
Even if you accidentally opt in, you should have an easy way to unsubscribe. This makes reporting of these types of emails pretty low.
Showing a bunch of low-quality "1 weird trick ads?" the network gets flagged. Trying to squeeze too many ads onto a single page? Publisher gets flagged.
I doubt we'll see such a thing. On the other hand ad networks like the deck, carbon and yoggrt have done a good job filtering out bad ads. I generally whitelist sites with those networks.
The upside of those kind of ads is that they are intended to be both a useful tool for the user and a revenue source, and they must be designed carefully to remain both.
If that's the future, why are they not going for it completely before their competitors? Seems like a good strategy to me if they believe in that, doesn't it?
I avoided the adblocking discussions so far, but now that I think about it, I do think that having my adblocking software on actually helps the maintainers of websites. Since I have never clicked on an ad on the Internet intentionally (I only have Internet access for about 7-8 years, Adblock was already a thing back then and I have discovered it before anyone else I know personally), I have never purchased a thing from the Internet after clicking on an ad in my life (having only a European debit card that's not supported by the US-based services kind of helps me out in this case, but it is a huge disadvantage in every other case). By not seeing them, I'm actually improving their click rate a bit, ain't I?
Forbes "30 under 30": They don't let you read articles if you adblock... "To read this, you must disable". They create an article security nerds want to read... which then serves up a pop-under adware to steal passwords.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...
I lost my compassion after that one. (I didn't get bit... but I had disabled adblock for one or two of their articles temporarily... not again)
Allowing all that scripting to run still didn't let me access the article. I can live without ever going to Forbes.
Too late for that. People know now they can avoid getting distracted by ad with a couple of clicks and so they will not go back, profiling or not.
The way forward is clear: some sites experiment with locking you out if you don't pay up or remove ad-blockers. Others will follow if that experiment goes to plan. If it fails, hello sponsored "content".
I have recently subscribed to some serious, paid local news, though. And I pay for LWN for several years now, of course.
Not even porn can get many people to prefer a subscription model or stop using adblockers. Good luck to everybody else ...
You say this like porn viewers don't have a huge incentive to make sure PORNHUB CO. doesn't appear on their bank statement or that some shadow profile isn't tracking their viewing habits. Hell, private browsing was practically invented for porn and [insert non-porn plausible deniability excuse].
I think the porn industry is in a unique position where if their stance was that highly regulated, completely image based, ads served securely through their domain was the means by which the site was funded while maintaining the viewer's anonymity they could find themselves on a lot of default white-lists.
Do they? I mean, honestly, who isn't a porn viewer? Who on earth would you, personally, think it to be scandalous to have a porn subscription discovered on their credit card? Anybody? What is the incentive?
I thought OP's porn example was pretty good. The entire world crushes porn (even when it's taboo or illegal), and yet still refuses to pay for it.
Believe it or not, there are people who never watch porn. The industry's sleaziness turns some people off, and some people just aren't into it.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/smith-ordered-... : mostly this was about putting the cable TV bill on expenses, but all the papers were particularly outraged at finding PPV porn on the bill.
Native ads are way better ads than say Google ad-sense. I would always prefer them over any other ad format.
I’m surprised that Wired made such a prediction because to me it sounds awfully wrong. For starters, whatever is going to happen it will happen much sooner than a decade. Ad blocking adoption has already reached 35% in some countries. At 50%-60% the industry is doomed. Not to mention fake ad impressions which already amount to one quarter of all traffic. I also find it odd that the only outcome they see is sponsored content. We already have that, it’s called native advertising and it sucks. If advertisers can have a saying on the content then the quality will go south pretty fast. What about micropayments? What about serving ads from the publisher’s domain? What about stopping the damn profiling which is the root of the problem? It seems that the online publishing industry is in a bit of a shock from the way things are moving and can’t think originally.