If the ads stuck to the meatverse-equivalent style of static but attractive, I would be fine. But the overwhelming majority overwhelms the reader with animation, transitions, cover-ups, pop-over, pop-up, pop-under—how many pops do we need before we have enough?! And publishers have restored to covering up their just to force interactivity, so you can click through them and see more ads. Why is there a Read More link on this recipe page? Obviously I want to read more, that's why I visited this page!

It boils down to greed. The bar has been set so low to attract more and more advertisers to make more money. Frankly, if someone were ingenious enough to inflate the price for plain publisher-hosted ads, one to a page, that didn't overwhelm the reader, I'm pretty sure that person would soon be rich.

"Reinvent your industry with this one weird old tip."

Yes, it was greed, and yes, of course it led to a predictable outcome.

The smart thing for the industry to do would be to create a code of practice and do a deal with the ad blockers to allow - not force - people to view ads that add value to their lives. Print publishing used to make this work fairly well.

But the industry seems incapable of acting with anything that passes for strategic intelligence. If it didn't treat customers like exploitable prey, it wouldn't be in the situation it's in now.

I do know that I've been quite happy to stop visiting any site that refuses to show content to browsers that adblock. Such sites are almost always low value, and their refusal to serve webpages is a good reminder that the content isn't really a good use of my time, anyways.

If more websites I value more highly start doing this, I'll probably just end up buying subscriptions to turn off ads.

Patreon seems to be having a positive effect here, at least with some sites. Webcomics, personal blogs, and other small sites can really thrive on donations alone, and it's heartening that systems are finally arriving to facilitate that specific business model.

Off the top of my head maybe a good example is http://popville.com/ which is a local DC blog. The guy who runs it is a little controversial, but the site is extremely well-read and useful and 100% ad supported. http://arstechnica.com/ is great too. And then, ya know, stuff like Twitter wouldn't really work if you had to pay to use it. Or do Twitter ads not count?

I have no real issue with people who want to put ads on sites. My tolerance ends, however, when they try to moralize to me about how I render hypertext on my own machine. My attention and mental health are worth more to me than the ad impression ever could ever be to the marketer. Occasionally a site will refuse to serve articles unless I turn off my adblocker, and every time I just close the tab with no regrets.

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Bad actors in the advertising space rush to extract the most value out of internet ads by continually pushing the frontier of obnoxiousness. Because, 'hey if I don't do it, someone else will'. And much like the tragedy of the commons with overfishing, they have to keep increasing effort to make up for the decline in effectiveness as they 'overfish' internet users.

Even if you're an ethical advertiser you end up getting harmed by the unethical ones as wide swathes of people start using ad blockers, and the ones that don't are ad-blind anyway.

But your solution is right and that is why native ads like Taboola, Outbrain and Revcontent are winning. As times goes by having ads that are not distinguishable from content is what might help these publishers.

PS. There is one more serious side effect of small publishers dieing out. It means Facebook and Twitter might have much more influence public opinion and they may not support diversity of opinion the way an open internet did. Facebook is already taking a pro-migrants stand or Twitter is also helping censor criticism of religion. Survival of small publishers is important.

Ah yes, Taboola, that was it. About a year ago, Taboola was specifically what caused me to install ad block.

I generally didn't find ads too horrible. My browsing habits just never sent me to sites that had really obnoxious ads, and in certain cases, I specifically would avoid sites like Sourceforge, Softpedia or Download.com, because of their fake download link ads. For the most part, I tolerated (and largely ignored) the existence of ads. I've actually even legitimately clicked on ads before (fewer than 10 in my life, and only for something work-related), though I'm not sure it's ever caused a purchase.

Then these stupid "You may also like" things started appearing everywhere, very similar in style to actual real "related articles on this site" content. That's so misleadingly close to the fake download button ads that it was really getting on my nerves. Then the content quickly got obnoxious, with celebrity gossip, and the one that totally put me over the edge was some gross picture of some type of medical problem which I was seeing multiple times a day.

Honestly I even initially started out with just the intent of blocking Taboola only, but they do things to presumably make it harder to block, and so it was easier just to leave on the default blocklists (which had already done the work to block Taboola everywhere) and everything else was just a casualty of that working.

So are "native ads" like Taboola the answer? I sure hope not, because I am willing to spend a lot of energy to never see that nonsense again.

At the end of the day, it's a viable business model. It's not about the money in of itself. But if you can't support yourself and your business with the "right level" of advertising and you can't persuade people to give you their money any other way, your business model is failing, not advertising in of itself.

The (far) bigger problem will be using your friends against you[1]. Advertising by making various "credit scores" dependent on your friends using the "right" products will be very hard to counter. I suggest fighting it now.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI

Personally I don't get overly excited about the tracking/re-targeting, but what did bother me was how ridiculously intrusive the ads on some sites that totally destroyed my user experience, wasted my batteries and cellular data and at times prevented me from (on mobile) from getting to the content I actually wanted.

With mobile it was also the stupid number of accidental clicks when scrolling, or pop ups with really small 'x' to close that and a non-zoomable viewport.

Wasting my time (and somebody else's money) on ads I never wanted to click does't seem like a good or sustainable economic value add.

Sometimes ads can be useful. On Google search sometimes the people who will pay for ads are sometimes a better signal than those that SEO their way to the top. Similarly I have discovered things of interest in Facebook & Twitter ads where they were relevant to me.

It does seem that online advertising is in need of a bit of a 'reboot'.

That said, I think there's room for an adblocker that focuses on ads that are too intrusive and whitelists decent, static ads automatically. Currently I do that manually on a per site basis.

Are they?

If you have 2 products that sell for X, one company spends Y on ads and X - Y on product, the other spends X on product. It would seem that the second one should be SEOd (by good reviews and recommendations) to the top, and that would be the more important signal.

Until one of the news sites I regularly read was barely usable by always running on 100% CPU, which means it was not possible to open it on multiple tabs without making my computer fully unusable.

And until Google started to use video ads in my region. I figured that it would be better for the local business to block the ads as if they cluelessly start to annoy me with their video ads, they would anger and loose one of their potential and possibly already loyal customer. Beside some of the ads had very questionable moral value.

I would call this trend telefication - ad publishers want to control when people see ads and for how long. I think that this is not acceptable.

PS. Paying for content is also not an option until there is an anonymous way to make a payment and the payments are minuscule.

Otherwise we will have serious censorship issue.

HTML5 Video Ads are what finally switched me to ad blockers.

When people served static images and Adobe Flash videos, I could just disable auto-play of Flash, and voila, I see ads, but don't get obnoxious videos on random tabs. Now I have to block it all to get any peace.

Auto-playing video ads is just bad etiquette.

Send me a picture of what you're selling, or don't sell me anything.

This is the most important part of your post. I would be glad to find a way to pay for content that I value. I do in other realms (e.g., Netflix original programming).

But to me it comes back to a) ease-of-use and b) trust. On the former, there's a big opportunity in a way to make that seamless. One click and done. And, on the latter, trust is huge. People are using ad-blockers because publishers' sites have malicious ad networks. And now you want me to give you my credit card number!? It just doesn't work.

The thing is, I don't mind ads. The problem is that the people providing content should own and manage what ads they show me. This idea of allocating page space and then bidding it off? It only leads to click fraud, malware, and all sorts of other problems. Instead, write things I find useful, then provide me links -- text links -- to ways I might continue my investigation.

Ads are fine when they help people. When we start focusing on the money instead of the experience, however, it all goes to crap. I don't think ads are something you can outsource if you want to be a quality content provider. They're just as important as any other content on the page.

By the way, this also means that mostly-plain-text pages could work fine for both creators and consumers in the vast majority of cases.

It's really easy to forget this. Ads can be a good thing! Anyone ever pick up Computer Shopper magazine in the '90s? It was a giant phonebook full of practically nothing but ads for computer hardware and software. And not only did people voluntarily read it, they paid money for the privilege, because it was useful to them.

Yes that would be good for websites to do, but it also requires a dedicated ad department to organise it all, and consumers of that content that would want to buy the goods that are being sold.

I started building something that would do this, but was never able to generate any interest and gave up eventually. Do you think there is interest outside of us and I should continue that? Where would I find interested parties? Does it already exist?

Monetization from advertising must be brutal if so much content is being displayed in worse and worse ways.

The number of impressions is limited and declining (moving from the desktop where you can put 15 ads on each page to the mobile where you have max 1 or 2 ads per page) and companies are fighting for the attention of the user while content providers try to squeeze as many adspaces they can in their pages to incrase/stabilize the declining CPM (cost per thousand impression), so they ask their ad agencies to create more inventive and engaging (attention grapping/annoying) banners.

When they ask website to do their new and improved format, they usually get a no in response. Then they shove more money at the problem until some website can't say no anymore and accept the new format.

Once someone else has accepted the others can't keep saying no or the company will only do banners with the competition that actually accept the new format, so everyone does.

All new invasive formats usually start with clear and strict rules: only one each day, for a max of two per week. And we can show the ad to each users a maximum of twice a day.

But this "rules" become progressively less strict as more and more companies want to purchase the new format that has a much higher cost and some ad manager will come to you faking sadness (while actually counting his cut behind his back) and say the magic words: "I don't like it either but it's how we paid your salaries and it's too much money to pass up."

And this is how banner "standards" are born.

I support makers and creators and artists. I back kickstarters. I have patreon subscriptions. I buy music and books and swag from artists I like a lot, especially those that I think need the most support. And sometimes I volunteer my time and skills. All in all I've spent or donated tens of thousands of dollars either in cash or time throughout the years to the arts.

Meanwhile, I spent 20 years browsing the web without an ad blocker. Since I've started using one last year, it's led to a much better experience.

Yet still, there are people who think that I should be burdened with some moral obligation to suffer advertising, for things that I will never buy, being shoved in my face in order to consume content. As though the business models of every single content creator on the planet were my personal problem. No, I do my part, and more. I've paid my advertising dues as well, and I'm done. If you don't like that you can go fuck yourself. You should be spending your time urging content creators to fix their broken business models, or helping them to do so, not moralizing about fucking advertising.

Only if you allow third-party cookies. I'm honestly amazed that browsers haven't moved to turn third-party cookies off by default.

Google's entire business is based on building large database of tracking (and other) information; obviously their DNS is just another data source.

Just skip the recursive resolvers and run a local caching DNS server that starts from the root zones.

And the IP may be a public network.

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/about/news/press/2013-press/med...

"As a result of the pixel-free technology partnership, MediaMath's clients will gain access to more data for audience segmentation, retargeting, and optimization, with quick and easy activation."

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/decentraleyes...

I have a flash blocker on, which I think ends up doing 90% of what I would want an ad blocker for when combined with my 'back it up on bad ads' policy.

So people do the default thing. The default thing is ads.

And the problem is that ads don't work very well, and they are working less and less well as time goes on because people are acclimating to them like a war of escalation.

To squeeze small a bit of money out of content, you run ads that are increasingly obtrusive.

If they aren't, they don't make any money at all.

There's a huge market opportunity here. It's not greed, it's an obvious outcome of incentives.

Oh no I can't read about the Model 3 on New York Times? Then I'll go read about it on LA Times, or Huffington Post, or any one of the ten thousand other news sources no doubt covering it.

Isn't what you need a security patch for your browser rather than an advert blocker?

Forbes Shuts Down Ads Serving Malware http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/09/22/forbes...

If there genuinely is an exploit, an advert blocker isn't enough as you could put it on any website as well.

Therefore I wonder if it's possible that someone has a mis-informed definition of viruses and really it's something a little different, such as a simple link to actively download malware.

Sure, but then people need to visit that website. Ad networks are a popular delivery method because it gets your code out to millions of people quickly. Putting your exploit on a new Tumblr blog doesn't get you a big botnet.

The threat is there and I'm not interested in taking the risk.

Flash. And there are a lot of unpatched browsers out there. Between the two, there are lots of users vulnerable to malvertising.

An ad blocker doesn't address the whole of the vulnerability space, but it is a significant mitigation.

I'd be curious if anyone has data, but I would guess "hacked wordpress site" is a far more common vector for spreading this sort of malware than malicious ads.

I think my point remains, however, that if your browser can be compromised by visiting a URL then you are in a bad situation ad blocker or not.

Just like UNIX-style permissions might, in theory, prevent an unprivileged user from completely hijacking the core system, the model says nothing about user-level applications manipulating user-owned data. I'd argue my data is much more important and valuable than whether or not I need to wipe and reinstall my OS.

I don't like Ads but possibly there is no general way to monetize content and this is the problem. With lot of freely available value on Internet it is really difficult to convert it to $$$.

The problems of online DRM / ad ridden websites / etc are all attempts to after the fact monetize information using obsolete IP policy while acting like there is any scarcity to it at all after its made.

A lot of people hear that first paragraph and go on a tirade about getting your brand out, but... that is the same problem, in practice, with either form of funding the creation of information, and is technically its own problem set. You need an audience whether you want people paying you up front to make it at fixed cost or try to use state granted monopolies to extort people for money after the fact.

You are underestimating the search cost problem there [1] I 100% know my company is in a niche market where our revenue can be > $ 50 million/year and where we have some unique offerings BUT the problem is how I can penetrate those companies or how they can found me, not if I can do the job.

So, what you are saying is true but how will the find you? If they try to find you by your skills how do you rank against others on a search engine/app store/etc? Even worst, probably they express the search query in a different domain that the one where you market yourself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_cost

Then, according to the laws of capital dynamics, that content should die out.

Ironically they now have a 30 article a month limit (easily bypassed by switching to private mode in your browser) which actively reduces their ad revenue and messes up their statistics tracking when people switch to private browsing...

In the meantime, Fairfax have been progressively cutting staff. Before it was outsourcing subeditors to New Zealand (and it shows, there are an unbelievable number of unreadable sentences, along with grammar and spelling errors - even in their headlines they show on their main page!) and now they are about to shed more than 100 jobs in actual journalism.

I once subscribed to the SMH, but then the quality got so bad that I just cancelled. They can't even get their comments section right - it's barely usable, and they don't even get threading reasonably correct.

When I'm on mobile, I frequently click on ads by mistake when I'm trying to scroll. It's unintentional on my part, but I feel the web developers and ad networks are colluding to make this happen.

Doesn't mean I'm going to get fucked by ad networks without protection.

It's not worth the risk.

No, what you're doing is reformatting content that is being openly broadcast to anyone who cares to look in its direction, to best suit your interests and device capabilities and security.

If a site literally cannot survive without ads being viewed, they should block those who use ad blockers or reconsider their business model since blocking will only become more prevalent over time.

Not a bad idea on the email though.

Earlier, the websites were "pirating" his/her device & browser.

Fucking disgusting.

I will and have support people in other mediums(donations, patreon, etc), but the advertising model serving bad actor's code to my browser is not going to fly.

Such utter nonsense.

I am not sure why you use the term "cognitive dissonance" for referring to a situation where I consume without paying for something, and I don't feel entitled either. It feels very sonant to read clean websites.

If someone chooses to provide a resource it's their issue to figure out how to make it profitable. Trying to set up a fake moral pressure which requires me to listen to/watch mundane, uninspiring bullshit that I do not care about, that wouldn't make them any money from me anyhow, is kind of a strange way to go through life. If I went to your website for it's great content, why do you want to force me to look at something else instead? My brain resources are too valuable to be used to process to hear someone's lies about their products.

In essence you want me to pay for your things by quite literally wasting my time.

How did that become a thing, I wonder ...

I call it entitlement because you want, and are getting, a free lunch. I call it cognitive dissonance because as an adult with bills to pay you must understand that you are hurting a business by consuming content that costs them money to create and host without paying for it, be it with your time or your money.

Clearly there is a dissonance between the product your consumers want, your content, and the product you're willing to offer them: your content mixed with advertisement. That's an unfortunate situation.

Why does the advertisement make you money in the first place though ?

Someone out there with an actual product or service, want's to sell their product. To increase sales, they pay you an amount of money that they think represents the amount of sale they will generate from the buyers that buy based on the advertisement run on your site. Whether it's through the proxy of some ad network or not.

If I am not willing to buy any products in the first place, I don't have to be factored into the amount the company is willing to pay to advertisers, as it will not increase their sales. If, based on just viewing the advertisement, I still am, that price is slightly inflated.

All what I am doing by blocking ads is bringing that price closer to it's actual value. Now, that's not in your interest as a content producer, but you don't have to be all moralistic about it and try to make me feel bad.

You might argue that that's incorrect, and after viewing enough advertisement I might be persuaded to buy a product that I would not have wanted to by before, but I am not willing to give you that power over my mind for mundane stuff like deodorants and beverages.

- The security implications of the large ad networks (how many malware scares were the result of exploit-laden ads being served on large, popular sites?)

- The privacy implications of same (tracking all the things)

- The large ad networks attitude towards said problems. ("Meh.")

The moment the sites that show these unvetted ads take some responsibility and agree to reimburse me and my company for my time spent dealing with a security breach caused by their shitty practices is the moment I begin considering not blocking ads at the firewall, and not a second before.

They want all the benefit with none of the responsibility. And that responsibility goes well beyond "paste some javascript we gave you in your header".

As long as the transaction is that one-sided, people will continue blocking, and no amount of moralizing is going to change it. Get used to it.

And if I chose not to consume their content, how much money would it save them?

Any time you shove me down ransomware you are actively supporting crime.

If the initial html that loaded on the page also had the ads in it, it'd be much harder to block them and also make the experience of seeing those ads much less unpleasant.

As it stands what people are doing is loading the initial html and saying "no thanks" to all of the follow-on stuff.

There's two sides to every story.

The idea of a website serving ads themselves, instead of relying on a call to an ad network, is good. It means big changes to how advertising works though. The advertisers would have to give customers the ads for them to embed into the page and would need some sort of guarantee that the customer wouldn't change the ads and would pull them down when it was time to do so. I can't think of a way to check this stuff automatically that doesn't involve a call to an advertisers server, which is the whole problem to begin with.

Until 30 after 30: http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-say...

Block users who have adblock? Okay...

Serve those users pop under malware for over a week to users who was kind enough to disable ad blocking? Not Okay...

I lost my inclination to feel guilty after that... Ad Blocking is a SECURITY measure at this point, since ad networks can't seem to protect me.

I'll protect myself to the best of my ability.

They feel that they are entitled to not adapt their business model to change and will push anyone off the jungle gym who won't play by their archaic rules.

It's their right, but the only entitlement I feel I deserve is the right to ignore their childish behavior as well.