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Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by oconnore on Thursday July 14, 2016 @12:38PM (#12095305)
Yes, ads are annoying, a security risk, and obstruct content, but: they also are a deliberate attempt to subconsciously influence my decision making. Saying, "here is this product you may not have known about, here is what it does" is one thing. Showing me pictures of attractive people to trick me into associating <brand> with <good feels> is malicious.

Why would I agree to that?

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by spacehome on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:40PM (#12095822)
I would add to that that for me, my attention is a finite resource. If I can stop your ads from taking it up, I will.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by vthallam on Thursday July 14, 2016 @12:59PM (#12095463)
If you watch TV/look at billboards, you are already being tricked everyday. Why advts online are so malicious?

Edit: This was a genuine question and I don't understand the down votes :|

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by blacksmith_tb on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:02PM (#12095490)
They aren't more malicious than billboards (which of course have been banned in some major cities [1]) or other public advertising, but they are equally malicious. [edit] Having said that, the 'security risk' angle does make online ads more malicious, potentially...

1: https://www.newdream.org/resources/sao-paolo-ad-ban

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by oconnore on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:05PM (#12095509)
I subscribe to Netflix for that reason.

Online ads are not uniquely malicious, although they are more pervasive (even reading a magazine, the page I am actively reading will not have an ad in between paragraphs, though the next page might). I do think modern marketing firms (and often therefore web) have developed more effective -- and therefore bad -- techniques to have the effect they are paid for.

PS. I upvoted you because I don't think it was a bad question. If I had to guess, it may be misconstrued as a [bad] rhetorical question arguing that "you already have to put up with X, so it's pointless/inconsistent/illogical to reduce your exposure to X".

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by vthallam on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:21PM (#12095655)
True! Guess a couple of banner advts on the side of the page wouldn't bother anyone, the intrusive one's definitely are the reason most hate advts.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by unfunco on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:17PM (#12095614)
Billboards don't reach into my pocket and try to steal my identification, nor do they spontaneously come-alive and follow me around the city in which I saw the billboard. My TV also knows very little about me.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by dudul on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:07PM (#12095533)
I work in ad-tech. Let me tell you that online advts has access to a lot of info about you. Much more than you would imagine. So yeah, nobody said TV-ads weren't malicious, but ad-tech is taking it to another level.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by charonn0 on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:21PM (#12095657)
I can ignore a billboard or mute a TV ad and the advertiser has no way of knowing.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by majewsky on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:35PM (#12095776)
They are malicious, too. But I can't block them just yet. (I'm eagerly waiting for an augmented-reality adblocker.)
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by ourmandave on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:46PM (#12095866)
That would destroy Nascar as we know it.

It would look like empty track with the sound of cars going by.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by Dirlewanger on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:39PM (#12095814)
In those cases though, they are just there. They aren't scanning my irises for how many times I've seen them Minority Report-style.

...yet.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by vitd on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:00PM (#12096777)
FWIW, I "block" TV ads by either watching the show over the internet and paying not to have ads (iTunes, Netflix, etc.), or by recording them on a DVR and skipping the ads. I avoid newspapers and magazines both because of ads and because the need for ad revenue has compromised the quality of the product.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by KurtMueller on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:30PM (#12095739)
Who says tv and billboards aren't just as malicious? Ad blockers make it easy to purge ads from my online experience. Fortunately, I just don't watch television and when I do, I always mute and look away from advertisements. Billboard advertisements is harder to control since I drive myself everywhere.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by seanp2k2 on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:30PM (#12096210)
I don't watch TV (only Netflix) and wish there was an option for billboard ad blocking. It'd be an interesting art / social commentary project if e.g. Someone started draping black opaque plastic over billboards with drones and put the ABP logo on them. Feel free to steal this idea :)
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by bigredtech on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:05PM (#12095516)
You should find the support channels at any websites you visit that don't offer ad free viewing options via paid subscriptions or otherwise and encourage them to add support for that. Then you can pay each of these websites individually.

If you're not into that, give some funding to a startup which is working to make micropayments on websites viable to remove ad-enabled content.

If you're not into funding something like that, try creating your own company or means to do that or joining a company which is working to advance ad-free viewing.

Now, if you're not into that, then stop visiting any site which has ads on it.

Lastly, if you're not into that, then suck it up and just view the ads which enable revenue for these sites to run.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by oconnore on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:10PM (#12095560)
1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.

2) I find that ad supported content tends to be not worth paying for. I do pay for subscriptions to magazines and sites that are worthwhile (a paywall is a very good indicator that you're not wasting your time).

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by hsod on Thursday July 14, 2016 @03:44PM (#12096679)
> 1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.

What's your take on this thought experiment:

Imagine a giant barrel of apples on the side of the road with a coffee can next to it. There's a sign that says "Take an Apple, Leave a Penny"

Now imagine you don't carry pennies for moral and/or pragmatic reasons. They're too heavy, or you don't want to support Big Copper, whatever. But you want an apple.

Do you take one?

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by vitd on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:06PM (#12096803)
It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.

Let's do a realistic thought experiment that's actually fair:

Imagine you have a movie that you love. It's showing tonight on an over-the-air channel that inserts ads throughout it. You decide to record the show and watch it later.

Do you skip the ads?

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by hsod on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:24PM (#12096900)
> It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.

This is why I said a "giant barrel", because serving web pages does have marginal cost to the server owner, and from there you could imagine a situation where your page view does diminish the number of page views left for "paying" customers.

I might fast-forward through the ads, but I wouldn't feel good about it or try to defend it philosophically.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by oconnore on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:41PM (#12097012)
I wouldn't take an apple.

If a website put up an "ad-wall" (click to view!), I would not try to bypass it. Instead, they want the experience to be friction-less, subtle, (or, alternatively, overwhelming and surprising) so I don't quite notice the ad is there, or can't click away fast enough to avoid being influenced by it.

That is malicious by any reasonable definition. They are trying to impose something on me without making it explicit. Shielding myself from such a thing is ethical. With your pennies and apples example, they are not imposing anything on me, they're not performing a bait and switch. We can both engage within the rules established on the sign.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by mindslight on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:13PM (#12095587)
The web existed long before ads. And it had higher quality content, too.

In this ecosystem, ads are parasites. If there is a workable method to filter out the parasites while leaving the rest of a site intact, one should use it.

Though I would like to see a search engine that only returns sites without ads. I suspect the results would be better.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by bigredtech on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:02PM (#12095994)
Will address all comments here -

You shouldn't be "forced" to see ads. Quality content can exist with and without ads. But, ads are the price to pay to visit one of these sites with ads. My suggestion was leading towards that if you don't like a site with ads, then don't visit it. As opposed to using an ad blocker as a filtering method.

With respect to "the web existed long before ads" - Water has also existed before water companies. If you don't like to pay them, you can't just hook in directly to their water lines and syphon it off to yourself and bypass payments. You could however go out and get your own. Just like you could create your own news stories, online games, sites etc without ads.

Your search engine idea is a novel one, and it'd be neat to see that exist.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by mindslight on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:22PM (#12096146)
End users having ultimate control over presentation of content is the price to pay for using the web. If a business does not like an end user having control, they can't expect to reject that aspect while still keeping its users. Instead, they can go create their own platform.

I can appreciate the idea that creating an economy makes for sustainability. But I just don't see the merit with regards to web ads. The most noble ad-driven business model is news media, which is already rife with paid placement (and other propaganda) despite the ads - the motivation to profit from both sides is too great. And the most prevalent ad-driven business model is to aggregate creations from users who are not paid. If we were talking about what's right, then such sites should not even exist - they should be users' individual federated websites or even a better non-centralized protocol. But amorally, those sites create needless centralization points in order to profit off being gatekeepers. So users should feel no compunction about also doing self-interested things, like running ad blockers and other privacy extensions.

Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by coldpie on Thursday July 14, 2016 @01:22PM (#12095667)
Nah, it's not my job to make your business viable. Internet business models would be a lot more likely to succeed without ad blockers just like airplanes would be a lot cheaper if gravity didn't exist.
Re:Why People Block Ads, and What It Means for Marketers and... by seanp2k2 on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:46PM (#12096313)
This. If a business stops working because of technological progress, it's not my problem to keep it afloat. We don't have many blacksmiths anymore, so should everyone stop using things made of metal or make their own? Ad tech has been digging their own grave since they started with crap ads, poorly-secured platforms, annoying / malicious experiences...and now they're asking everyone to feel bad for them. Google manages to make an absolute killing with ads, and those don't make my eyes bleed like the ones on most news sites. I guess ads for articles don't work; the value the viewer gets isn't worth the price. Free market blah blah ok so maybe your business isn't viable any longer. Pivot, get acquired, or die, just like everyone else.