What's developers' general attitude towards ads?
I'm a developer who happens to do a lot of marketing simultaneously. I've been in a lot of intense debates about adblockers and how they affect publishers as well as advertisers, but also the other side, the adblocker users.
I've been in several meeting where ad tech devs were proposing all kinds of solutions, like content blocking, "encrypting" ad delivery, etc etc.
But I realize I'm talking to a very tiny niche. I wanted to ask the general dev audience who actually make cool stuff that draws the audience.. and hence the "traffic generators".
What's your take on ads? Hate it? Don't care for it? What about the people who act as middlemen (i.e. the ad networks)? What's ur attitude towards them?
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2 comments
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| on HN
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Given the privacy implications, the malware and general scuzziness of the industry I just block everything.
There is an argument that none-intrusive same domain adverts are much less harmful but they get caught in the crossfire as far as I'm concerned.
As for blocking people with adblockers installed I have zero issue with people doing that since I can see the logical position (why should we serve content to you if you block our adverts) but 99% of the time the content I want from you I can find elsewhere anyway so I'll just go there.
As for technical circumvention, that just invites an arms race and since I and others like me control the end device it's a losing arms race, given the flexibility of current adblockers lists I can block anything I don't want to see even if the source gets creative (I even use the adblocker to block non-advert parts of pages I don't care about - theguardian's "Comment is Free" section for example, is a waste of time and distracts from the bits I want to read).
Fundamentally the advert model for the internet is broken in that unlike other advertising mediums you require my opt-in to see the adverts (if I buy a magazine I have to buy the pages with the adverts, if I watch broadcast TV (I don't) I have to sit through the adverts, if I go to the cinema I have to sit through the interminable trailer adverts but on the internet I really don't).