Some percentage of users will use ad blockers, and businesses should account for that. If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented. One thing I've been hoping for is inventing some form of advertising that was actually fun for the user -- fun enough that they would not want to block them.

Or invent a system by which 10% of the ad revenue gets cut out to the end user. That will incentivize people to unblock ads.

My eyeballs are not being loaned to you; my senses/attention is not for sale.

I'm perfectly fine with paywalls - that's the 'correct' approach as far as I'm concerned. You can decide to conceal the information you know; if it's valuable and nonexcludable (usually isn't), then hey, you have a sale. But if you don't, don't expect your deals with third parties to hold up on some promise you made to them about how I browse.

That right there is the problem, though. You are right that most information is "non excludable" (if that actually is a word).

But that doesn't mean it isn't valuable. That's an illusion, conceptually very much like clean water: almost free, but vital.

The stuff the wire services collect and sell (and that everybody republishes) does cost quite a lot to produce, and it's the backbone of the news ecosystem. It's subjective value is further diminished by its anodyne voice, making it difficult to picture the actual people reporting it.

Maybe the publishers do actually have a case for a new class of intellectual property protection. I'm horrified of the prospect, but within the current market dynamics, I don't see much of a future for quality journalism. Public opinion is critical of every and all publications, indiscriminately, and quick to use that as an argument for not subscribing. Wall Street may still pay for Bloomberg and the like, but Main Street doesn't see why. Maybe the NYT spent two or three million on some investigation. Once published, the information is delayed by little else than the time it takes the guy at BillingsMorningNews.com to switch a few sentences around.

With regards to ad blockers, you are right in that there is nothing in the law that should stop anyone from using them. But that's not really the argument. Nor is anybody disagreeing that ad tech needs drastic changes.

But fundamentally, the question is if blocking ads isn't hurting your own interests. Sure, there are many sources for the same information, usually. But the one you're reading probably has some small advantage, which is why you are using it. Once that publication folds, you have already lost something. And I'm not optimistic that the process will stop before it has drastic consequences on diversity and availability.

It also sometimes needs reminding that for an individual, news often seems like a guilty pleasure. But for a society, news is vital. Without it, you can't even keep up the appearances of democracy.

It's a tragedy-of-the-commons situation, obviously: blocking ads is vastly advantageous for the individual, just as fishing with the really big net is for the fisherman. But, thinking a bit broader, the question becomes: What's better – reading the news with annoying ads, or not reading the news?

The population pays for it by buying more or paying more of some products -- in a time and manner that provides evidence to networks, content vendors, and advertisers of business justification.

If we drill down further into the population, I think we'll find that some population of people either view or don't view ads, but don't adequately change their purchasing behavior in a time and manner so as to provide signal.

In other words, some people are takers, and some people are contributors. The people who are takers -- that is, whether or not they look at ads, click through, or whatever, they don't sufficiently change their their market behavior in a time and manner that provides evidence for business justification -- possibly detract from all mentioned parties because they diminish the business justification of the whole affair.

In tension against the takers, the people who are contributors are paying more than what they need to for the service because they're subsidizing "news" for other people.

Note that I don't really consider revenue in situations where eventually advertising clients figure out that they lack the business justification to pursue some advertising venue, such as intermediate marketing metrics that payout to businesses, but then the lack of justification for an advertising decision is later discovered. People who are marked by intermediate marketing metrics but don't go on to yada yada market behavior, are still "takers" in my view.

With that said, I think the money is there, people are already paying for news, but maybe the people who are paying should have more say than those who don't pay. Otherwise, it's the advertisers who have say, and the advertisers sponsor some pathological news outlets.

So in my view, people who argue for advertising are arguing that only advertisers can do the financing of the news world, and that contributors should continue to float takers.

It kind of seems like an arbitrage situation. But if I understand correctly, those are only good as long as they naturally "deflate" and sort restore balance back. Instead, there is some information-hiding going on that artificially props up this situation at cost for everyone but the third-party ad industry and middlemen. I think that situation is not very good.

I'm not even sure how to effect the latter without making the current fish bowl infinitly more invasive.

Even your choice of words is revelatory of a profoundly scewed perspective full of imaginary obligations. Of course those whose livelihood depends on a particular arrangement often seem to feel that the current state of affairs is necessary to the world at large as if the current good effects are both essential and couldn't be achieved any other way.

Actual news are, in essence, gossip. They destroy people's ability to think and reason.

News agencies are the worst. They define the agenda, what is important and what isn't. They pollute the "news ecosystem" right at the source.

Adblock is one way to fight back. Not the only way but a good way.

For this reason I only subscribe to weekly or even monthly newspapers. It means those journalists are not racing to be the first ones to relay any information completely raw. Instead they can take a bit of distance, take time to analyze the situation and think of its possible consequences.

I don't know what to do when I'm told that there's been a terrorist attack in a country thousands of kilometers from me. Then we get a stream of picture, and a death count updated every femtosecond. It's sad, sure, but then what? Learning about the causes and consequences of this attack and how they fit in the history and geopolitics of our societies, now that's a lot more interesting and maybe even actionable.

The problem is news agencies is the only way to get information. Spicer doesn't invite "regular dude Joe." We in an information desert.

Yes, news as we generally know it contains a lot of fluff, is almost certainly biased - whether politically or racially - and misleads through omission and incredible sources, we can go on. But, who will then do the reporting if these big news sources do not? Imagine a world without CNN or NYT or whatever. All of these sources are blamed by one political party or another to be biased and left/right/radical/whatever leaning. If we got rid of them and relied only on the smaller news entities and blogs and such, who will do the reporting on wars in Syria and Ukraine? Or who will report on whistle blowers and interview them? Why would someone of Edward Snowden's level of infamy be interviewed by a no-name news paper? Actually, on the topic of infamy, would it have even been possible for Edward Snowden to stay alive so far if general opinion was not so divided? If no one knew about him, what would save him? I would credit those same big news entities with spreading his story around and making him known. I believe that credible news sources are required for a healthy democracy, and that news organizations need to make money. Last thing we need is a government-run news entity (how can we trust one to keep us informed about grievances our governments may commit. Lets not kid ourselves and declare that the government is perfect or has the citizens' best interests at heart).

Let's also not kid ourselves about the notion of the current, big, established news organizations being independent of the same conflicting interests that ensare various parts of the federal government. No, the government doesn't control the media. Rather, big corporations and rich moguls control the government, AND the media, to the same ends.

False dichotomy.

Firstly, ads don't have to be annoying. Secondly, news doesn't have to be financed by ads.

There are lots of smaller and independent news sources that don't rely on ads for funding. The news organisation linked to in the article is a case in point. They make their money from donations. Another one is insurge intelligence (https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence) which uses crowdfunding.

Then there is also citizen media and blogs.

That data will soon enough be used to determine things like interest rates and hiring (already is in China).

I can deal with stupid ads and have done for decades reading print journalism. Unless they're animated, modal or otherwise unnaturally annoying.

Can you elaborate on that, or provide a source? I'm quite curious (and somewhat not surprised).

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-surveilla...

No. They gambled that they could make money giving their content away for free with ads on it. They were never guaranteed an income that way, and to legislate one for them is a terrible way to proceed. We have a name for those people in Australia: rent-seekers.

The other half is, that the third-party ad networks themselves are in fact already feeding a tragedy-of-the-commons situation. Somewhere in the whole maelstrom of shitty clickbait websites funded by ads for other shitty clickbait websites. I read an article recently linked here about those weird vague thumbnail image clickbait links (the ones about celebrities, diets and skin diseases, mostly) that appear below low quality articles. They followed the links, and it just led to more and more of the same, but it did so while spiraling downward into a lowest common denominator like way, way lower than I'd have imagined.

There's some really out-of-control complex systems (in the systems theory sense of the word) in the guts of the advertising industry and they are already causing tragedy-of-the-commons situations way before, and regardless of, people using ad blockers.

Disabling the ad blocker is not going to help fix those (they'll just gobble up the extra profit). And even then, to (personally) answer your question, yes I think using ad blockers is a net benefit if it keeps those systems at least somewhat in check.

It's not like they have prosthetics for blocked ads and lost revenue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excludability

Maybe do a quick search before implying someone is making up words.

That's the best for everyone involved.

Or you need to fund journalism with tax money, directly (NPR, PBS) or indirectly (BBC, ARD, ZDF, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_paper

Be it paper or as e-paper on your tablet.

But in either case, subscription costs are a lot more reasonable than subscribing to the website, and you get high quality content with only very few, handpicked, ads. Which also can't track you on paper or in the PDF

Journalism's oldest and most important role is to serve as a watchdog over government. When they start profiting from government, they'll be less likely to be critical of it.

Journalism should be supported by the free market. If people want it, they pay. If nobody wants to pay, then you either adapt or die. The really good media outlets are doing just fine (i.e. The Economist, NY Times,) those on the margins are at risk -- but that's their own fault.

State supported media has the potential to turn into Pravda (for the political party from whom they garner the most support, usually leftists,) and it generally does, albeit with much more subtlety.

Do you think the BBC is biased? ARD, ZDF? They are not.

Because they don't get paid by the government, but they have the right to collect their own taxes instead. That way they are independent, and still always funded.

How is this different than your "masters" being mega-corporations?

At least in a publicly funded organization there would be transparent checks and balances in place.

this is evidenced by Trump's foolish missile strike being so thoroughly adored in mainstream press.

Which means now we need to have some kind of legal, international safeguard to protect against content thieves, who copy paywalled content and publish it themselves. Everyone loses in that scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#International_copyri...

Whether this means that everyone loses ... I'm not directly disagreeing with that either (I don't like copyright/intellectual property rights in their current form at all), but let's get the facts straight first :)

The sites need to pay for servers somehow. Experience has proven time and time again that putting up paywalls just makes people go elsewhere.

It's the same situation with smartphone apps about now. Yes, it's an absolute mire of low quality, exploitative crap at the moment, but when developers try and avoid this by just charging full price (like Nintendo with Super Mario Run), they find their apps are significantly less popular/profitable than if they'd be 'freemium' all along and end up getting a virtual tongue lashing from audiences who expect 'mobile app' to equal 'free with ads/microtransactions'.

Unless everyone charges money for content (which is likely happening because of business reasons) or some service genuinely manage to repair the media's reputation enough people will pay for it and also offers a better, more usable product than everyone else, things aren't changing.

One way to get the charge-for-content back might be to demonstrate how much privacy people are losing and to make some noise about it.

Instead you want an immense pool of content generation for that 27c per day. Good journalism isn't cheap - that's why paper newspapers cost what they do and are full of adverts - but you want to pay rock-bottom prices to individual sources whilst still pretending that you're paying a 'reasonable amount'.

There are movies that cost hundreds of millions to make which make up just one more item in the Netflix catalogue, and Hollywood is far from hurting. It may cost enormous amounts to produce good news, but this is true of the business model I am pointing out as well.

Interesting, the ones who tried to charge seem to be dying.

Isn't Spotify and Netflix evidence that suggest otherwise. All the music on Spotify is available for free on the so called dodgy sites. Torrents and whatnot. Heck, you can even listen to it for free on FM radio! However, literally millions of people choose to pay for Spotify - because it's worth it.

The news is no different. If news content providers provide a useful service, millions of people WILL pay.

My analysis is that millions of people avoid paying because news content providers don't sell news, they sell people. They sell their readers as fodder to the ad men. When that business model changes, people will pay for news.

I have experience of this world, having worked with old-school book publishers and old-media print journalists. They are way too entrenched in their understanding of publishing/journalism to make the change. The closest I've seen anyone get to something that might work, and they're still a long, long way off, is the Guardian. At least they understand that a) they need to provide additional content, suited to the medium (e.g. quality infographics, interactive data, etc.) and b) online advertising is not enough, but current paywall implementations are a poor substitute.

Spotify is a great example to compare. If Spotify worked the same way as online news, you'd go to Spotify, browse through some skeuomorphic representation of a CD rack, get interrupted, find an album you like the look of, listen to the album with an obnoxious advert between each song, put it back in the rack, repeat. Is there a single newspaper that will allow me to even, for example, do something useful with their content by collecting it / tagging it / whatever for future reference? Will they let my contacts, or famous people, recommend content on a particular subject? Will they offer any kind of api for other publishers wishing to reference their material?

Then LinkedIn bought it and promptly ruined, then shuttered it. Still waiting for someone to release a new newsreader app with the same scrolling format. I would have absolutely paid to keep and improve that app.

I'm pretty sure that should cover their server bills.

This seems to be kind of just how technology industries work (at least right now): you don't have a broadly strong market for "social news feed", you have Facebook.

But sure, when you reduce distribution cost to zero, you remove a lot of local advantage. And this isn't new. Improvements in music distribution, starting with the wax cylinder, have been slowly killing the local market for musicians. Why wait until the evening go a few blocks and pay to hear a so-so local band when you can play an amazing one in your house right now?

I don't really disagree with you, my point was just that the fact that paywalls can work for an extremely small set of publishers does not resolve the tension in comments #1 and #2.

That fine-sounding in theory, but it seems to ignore the fact that your attention has been for sale for as long as billboards, or, heck, carnival barkers have been around.

It's great that we can use technology to un-render ads that have been delivered to us via the internet, so I fully support ad blockers, but let's not pretend that we have some innate, natural Right to never hear a sales-pitch.

If someone wants to buy their own screens and show ads on them, it's fine by me. But you don't have any right to do it on my screens.

You went there on your own free will and can leave when you want. No one is "forcing" anything on your screen.

(not saying I agree with this notion necessarily - just that your physical "property" analogy isn't very good).

That said, I do maintain that a site owner has the right to try to extract revenue from their enterprise and to a degree as visitors we have a right to not put up with overwhelming advertising. It's one of those things where we both have rights and we need to find an agreeable medium --not that everyone will agree but at least "the average person" will agree.

Maybe small enthusiast site will always be free and depend on the goodwill of the site maintainer (as in the "good old days" before ads) And maybe we'll have services which bundle premium content ala cable. And maybe there will be a micropayments aspect too. In the end, content does not come for free --someone or many people have to put work into bringing that content to light/publish.

People seem to think they exist in a vacuum. But now everyone is using ad blockers, and the dynamics have devolved to resemble the Greek tax system: "I'm not paying those taxes, they are too high" -> "We're not getting enough revenue, need to lower costs" -> "Why should I pay for the shitty service the government provides?" -> "We need to raise taxes, or close the schools" ->...

Stuff that would help:

– Publishers need to get their act together and offer netflix/spotify-style access

– Adtech needs a quality revolution

– Ad blockers need to evolve to do "smart blocking", where the tuple of (user/publisher/article/ad network/ad client/network condition) determines if an ad should be blocked, with a build-in mechanism to reward both quality content (by being more forgiving in the other dimensions) and quality ads (in terms of technology/security/interest to the user/intrusiveness)

– Users need to welcome such experiments with a modicum of goodwill and good faith, and a renewed willingness to differentiate. Right now, journalists cry themselves to sleep because even if you're just doing the crosswords at a French magazine, someone will try to stab you with your own pencil, yelling something about "Iraq" and "WMDs".

Sure, but it has needed one for circa 20 years. And quality has continuously declined over that time. To me, that indicates that generally the next increment of profit gain is not in making things slightly better, but slightly worse.

It seems like a classic tragedy of the commons to me. But good management of a commons requires people perceiving and acting on a common interest with a long-term focus. That's an attitude so far removed from what I see of the culture of advertising and adtech that I expect we'll need a major disaster to change that.

> Users need to welcome such experiments with a modicum of goodwill and good faith

That sounds like a reach to me. In a financial sense, and I think perhaps also in the casual sense, goodwill is what you get when you've spent a long time working hard to make sure your customers like you. For the whole of the consumer internet, advertisers and adtech have been pushing the line of what people will put up with. With the possible exception of search advertising, I think internet ads have earned enormous negative goodwill.

If publishers and advertisers want new experiments to be evaluated separate from the last 20 years of history, I think they're going to have either a) spend a long time undoing the damage, or b) find some way to declare brand bankruptcy for the whole notion of advertising.

And even if they try, I'm not sure how well it will work. The point of the sort of ads that publishers run is to distract you from what you're trying to read and manipulate you into buying whatever the advertiser wants you to buy, without regard to the actual utility or quality of the thing purchased. No matter how much you experiment, there will be a moral conflict at the root of advertising. New tech won't fix that.

Ads need to be curated by content providers.

microsoft tried that with bing rewards. i suspect it's not working well because i only heard of it in the context of botting it to get free money. the advertiser wants to spend as little money to gain as many sales, whereas the viewer (and blackhats) want to get as much money as possible. the two parties' objectives do not line up.

I was on that program, paying $10 a month. They refunded anything that was left over. IIRC think they habitually refunded $5+. They also showed stats, and IIRC the websites I frequented the most frequently (Ars Technica, multiple times a day), still received only pennies. That's how cheap ads are.

I started being a subscriber to some of those websites after.

Despite teasing a Contributor replacement "early 2017", nothing has been announced yet.

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

And what I don't understand is when I decide I want to subscribe to a newspaper, it's hundreds of dollars a year. They take pennies to serve me spam and malware, but if I want to pay them, it's 1000x the price.

And don't get me started on how the Washington Post gives a $70 annual discount on a digital subscription if you agree to receive a print copy of the Sunday edition. It sounds incredibly stupid and backward until you remember, advertising.

"If you just ask for the fucking right price, people will pay and great original content can arise"

Currently, online journalism is anchored against the price of free. So if I want to sit down with my coffee and read an article from the New York Times, another from Washington Post, and a counter-point from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and follow that up with a long-form piece from the New Yorker, I can either pay $500/yr, or remember to right click each article and open in incognito mode.

They just haven't figured out yet that on the web no-one is ready to pay 15$ for access to a single news source given that no-one is able to actually read all available content produced in one day.

New potential news customers born in the 1990 are like bees that fly from sites to sites.

Loyals customers that relly on one newspaper and are paying high fee are elderly people and they will stop paying when they unfortunately dies.

It all about not getting the demographic of you potential customer base...

But, for the individual publisher, this would mean the end of their current subscriber base and 70%+ of revenue. I'm pretty sure the NYT has a spreadsheet somewhere, and currently it's still saying that they are likely to lose out in such a model.

If they get, say, 10% of my $30, that's $3 x 12 = $36, which is about 1/10 of their current price. Could they increase their subscriber base by an order of magnitude with such a model? I'd say it's possible, but it's just too big a risk right now. And the numbers may be less favourably for smaller outfits.

It's definitely coming back, though. Just not in quite the same form.

No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware.

My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges.

I'm desperately looking for a solution to support journalism that simply lets me pay to read articles for exactly what advertisers would pay to bombard me with crap.

Google Contributor was SO close to being a solution. All it had to do was work with ad blockers.

That's a big issue. Another is that I want sites without any ads to be able to get a share of the money too.

But it's also that the bidding model is a poor way to allocate the money. I don't want the word "insurance" to randomly trigger a $50 ad slot. It's okay if there's some influence from ad slot prices onto how the money gets allocated, but the main influence should be how much I use each site.

Using the normal bidding process was a clever shortcut to get Contributor working as a 20% project, with minimal manpower. Seriously, it was just two guys at first.

It's not currently just two guys. I'll let you read that how you will.

https://blendle.com/signup/kiosk

They also have a 9.99 per month subscription, where you get 20 articles daily (I think they are selected through a recommendation system + curation).

1. I haven't resorted to pre-paid Vias cards, but it's a good idea.

2. There has been so many times when I'm thinking about signing up for a website, or service, but the fear of them being "cute", like not charging the correct amount, recurrent billing, making it difficult to quit, and lousy security prevents me from giving money to anyone, except the current monopolies., and only for stuff I really need. As to really need--I don't need that much in all reality.

3. I get those Wall Street Journal offers for $1 for so many weeks. I don't care if it was .01 cents; I don't want to have another thing in the back of my mind to worry about.

It's not about the money, it's about Trust. If I feel this way about WSJ, how are the littler sites suspose to gain trust?

4. I don't have a solution as to how online companies can make money. I just know the minute you hire the MBA, or the "expert", and start underestimating your customers; you're screwed.

Every website should give the customer the option of an immediate purge of all credit card data on the servers, at the time of registration;

"We will sign you up today, charge you $10, and purge you from our database. We would not sell your information. We won't bother you ever again. You have my word--sincerely, the Founders."

You will need to re-register next month. Big deal? Most people will opt for the easy way(keep all info on the customer on the servers), but their will be people like me, that don't want you to have that information on file.

I was just about to sign up for Republic Wireless. It might me the cheapest cell phone service out there. Then I noticed their "new, and improved" billing. It's not new and improved, it's just more money per month. I didn't bite. One lost customer, at least for now.

It's about trust, at this point, for me. I don't think getting certain people to pay is an insurmountable problem, but work on trust, and make the content something they need to pay for? In my youth, I needed quality porn, and that was my last subscription. Pathetic, I know, but even then I made sure they didn't get cute with my Credit Card.

What will be the next website I really need? Yea, it's a problem, but trust should be taken for granted.

The most extreme can give you a unique card number with an expiry date of your choosing, whenever you need one. That does wonder against shady practices.

(You is to be read as Google, not you personally)

You didn't even give me a chance! I was actively looking and you denied me, I think because I was European and didn't want to lie or something.

And seriously: I only knew of it through HN. Was there ever any campaigns to inform about it? I can't remember seeing a single ad. Never heard about a single talkshow appearance from any of your bosses.

As it was, I was the only one of the dozens of other techs/devs I know who heard about it. Most were interested once I told them! There must have been zero advertising.

Not nearly enough ads were replaced by Contributor. Worse, it was the more innocuous ones that were replaced, while the most obnoxious blared on through.

On top of that, it showed me the absolutely paltry amount paid out to the sites running the ads.

So back came adblock, and Contributor mostly just helped on my mobile browsing. I bought Contributor to contribute to the sites, and some for Google, not majority Google, dribble for sites.

That was a serious problem, I agree, and not one we could do anything about at the time. The problem was, those more-obnoxious ads were mainly not served by Google in the first place.

(There may have been a period when Contributor only worked on a subset of Google's ad products, mostly for technical reasons.)

cough

rich people don't pay, poor people pay for them.

That's the base of the free internet model.

With the Tier1 ISP billing at 95th percentile, and ISP almost illimited subscription and the close to flat rate, the contribution of small internet users in volume is the biggest in proportion of revenues.

And with people like google not paying for their transit, it means someone has to pay. Who?

Every internet users.

Internet & phone are in all developed country a must have for administrative & job related tasks. In every country it is when you are poor a substantial cost, as well as computers.

For those who are growingly poor internet is expansive.

But for the happy few with latest generation computers internet is comparatively cheap.

Being rich is the art of making the poor pay for you.

It is not people don't want to pay, the poor cannot pay, and they are the biggest population.

Me I have an adblock not because I don't want advertisement, it is because my 2007 computers cannot load a modern web page under 15 seconds with ads enabled.

The modern economy is based on the redistribution of the money of the poorest to the richest achieve by (lack) of regulations where the strongest wins.

So, my point is there is no free champagne, someone has to pay, but I don't see why it should be the one not being able to buy a bier.

And call a cat a cat: commercial internet has not yet found a fair sustainable model.

Funny, F2P gaming is all about the opposite. The whales pay for everyone.

Something like lotteries being a tax on people who don't get math.

We of course botted immediately. I am shocked they went out of business.

All large websites switch to canvas rendering (like Netflix already does). This provides scrape, adblocker, content filter, ... protection.

And of course it makes the internet completely unusable by anyone either blind or ...

You might even create a startup that makes a javascript web browser, that allows all these companies to get consistent rendering across all web browsers, prevent ad blockers from working, while enabling them to use all their current infrastructure as-is. This would work better because it would still enable ad-network providers to send their javascript to the end-user, so they can keep doing their little custom checks to verify if they're being scammed or not.

Until there's a replacement model for that lack-of-trust, ad blocking will probably be easy regardless of display technique.

You should take a look at the sponsored lenses on Snapchat. Nowhere else on the internet are ads so engaging and enjoyable. This is also why I think Snapchat had a chance to really take on Facebook, until FB sucked up and started copying everything from Snapchat.

So when I see people claiming that adblockers are immoral, it always gives me a good chuckle. Is ripping the ads out of a magazine immoral too? Is the mute button on my remote a ethnical crime against poor hapless television companies?

Which reminds me, TV/cable/et al. related services already cost money, yet they still serve advertisements. Isn't this a form of double-dipping? Shouldn't they be paying (or giving a discount) to watch advertisements?

sheezus. didn't that take a shitload of time and effort? i can't believe how many ads magazines have. they're all over everything.

Not really, back when I received the paper copy of the Economist it took me about a minute after receiving it on a Saturday morning to flip through and rip-out the double-sided ad pages. Also gave me an idea of the main stories in the issue.

Put a 30cm ruler on the page near the binding, grab top, pull. Well worth it for making the magazine thinner, easier to fold into my back pocket, and more readable on the bus. Just turn the page and continue reading, no interruptions.

One time there I remove so many pages ( 20? a lot anyway ) that I actually spent money on postage and sent them back to the Editor with the suggestion that he spend his time reading them for me and provide a summary.

If you create great costs (like ripping 30 pages from a magazine) for a small gain is this a particularly well intended economic strategy?

Brendan Eich is trying to do exactly this with the Brave browser [0]. Although it is a ways away, he wants to cut out the adware middlemen and give users a portion of the revenue for ads which they view, perhaps with some sort of opt-in "watch this video and earn $x" model in which the video content is tailored to you through (local, private) browsing history analysis.

If you are interested, Software Engineering Daily recently did an interview with him about the topic:

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/03/31/webassembly-...

[0] https://www.brave.com

Unfortunately it seems they've taken an other route. If users try to actively disable ads, just hide the ads amongst the actual content of your website.

I will admit to have been tricked by that a couple of time already (that I know of, at least). You're on some kind of news website, you see a genuine looking link towards a potentially interesting article. You follow it, read a few paragraphs and then starts to notice that the tone appears completely off and way too enthusiastic about the device or service they're talking about.

Then you start looking around and you eventually find a small "sponsored content" disclaimer somewhere on the page. I've seen those types of ads on physical newspapers as well, mainly those given for free in the subway. Often the only thing that sets them apart from actual content is a think border around the page or something like that. That's super shady and a bit worrying honestly.

> If it is not sustainable, new business models will be invented.

If the ad blocking becomes so widespread that the ad-supported model becomes unsustainable, I think a lot of people will be unhappy with what happens next. There will be a lot more paywalls and a lot more native advertising, which will be fine for entrenched players but much harder for very small publishers to pull off.

The cool thing about AdWords was you could write a little blog and actually make a few dollars running ads on it just by adding a snippet of code. Maybe micropayments can take care of that some day?

...is that a competing business down the road from mine has decided to spend $20/click for my business name, so now I have to spend much more than that in order for customers who already want to make an appointment with me to be able to call my phone number consistently. Google are complete gangster at this point... "nice business you have there."

How is that not intentionally causing marketplace confusion?

Also, if you roll over and pay Google, you are damaging your ability to defend your own business name as a trademark. Trademarks are lost if you don't defend them. Talk to a real lawyer, ASAP.

We've considered seeking legal counsel. Part of the problem is that the two primary words of the business name are a generic service offered by this type of business (40 years ago SEO was not a big consideration). Also very few of our customers take the care to quote the two-word phrase, so their queries could plausibly be sent to the competitor which offers that service as well. This competitor has itself recently added the name of yet another lucrative related service to its name, presumably as an SEO measure.

That said, I'd be very eager to see any more advice you might have, or any links to resources you think might be helpful to us.

In that case, businesses exist that can help your business search for and monitor more defensible trademarks. If you are truly hurt by competitors buying AdWords, you really should thrust your hand into the fire and suffer the pain of rebranding now, because it's only going to get worse the longer you wait. Switching from "Snake Plumbing" to "Jessaustin Pipewranglers" would hurt temporarily as you trained your existing customer base to use the new name, but uncommon or newly coined words are so much more defensible.

Seriously, where's the Spotify of blogs?

It might be the best we can do, given that the price of information has plummeted, but I hope something better comes along.

Also, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people would prefer ads over paying for content directly. What percentage of Spotify users are on the free plan dispite it's disruptive ads?

Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't. By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.

Doesn't feel right to me.

No.

By replying to my browser, they're entering into an agreement to not waste my time, and give me lots of money. Oh, not that either? Hmm. Several sites detect that I'm using a malware blocker. I make no effort to obfuscate this. Some websites will ask me to turn it off, others will block me if I do not. That's fine - I've no obligation to them, they have no obligation to me. Neither of us entered into any kind of agreement.

Keep in mind - I'm even happy to unblock and click ads relevant to my interests and follow relevant affiliate links - to stuff I'm actually interested in. Webcomics in particular are my jam.

So I would likely not even bother with ad blockers if site owners were not routinely acting as a proxy for criminals in (attempting to) serve me malware, extortion-ware, pyramid schemes, and other scams - or peddling horrifically low quality untargeted advertizing that doesn't respect my time (think "same 30 second unskippable ad plays 5 times in a row" utter and other absolute garbage.)

> Legally I have no idea. But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't

If you want to talk ethics and morals, just how ethical and moral is it to leave your computer open to joining a botnet - imposing so many externalities onto other parties not privy to your "agreement" in the form of DDoS attacks and proxying to obfuscate the origins of such criminals? I think these concerns far weightier than the ethical or moral concerns of depriving a website owner a few cents for selling my time, my attention, my browsing history, etc. (even if they've outsourced that messy work to an ad company who does so on their behalf.)

Their communications are probably encrypted and their ads are probably served on the same connection as everything else. Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).

The only option you'll have will be to crack Facebook's client and modify its behavior, which will be copyright infringement.

So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement. After all, isn't opening a website just like installing an app? I don't see a difference really.

Don't get me wrong, I now have ad-blockers installed everywhere I can.

But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with, by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.

It wouldn't be. You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer, you just don't have the right to redistribute all of those bits.

Copyright is about distribution, not about modification (well, it is in part, such a modified work would be classed as a 'derived work' and that is why you can't redistribute it, just like you can't redistribute the original).

> courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.

That's utterly wrong. Copyright infringement is about distributing content, not about forced consumption of content that was freely given to you by the rights holders or their agents and associates (the ad networks).

And rights holders have plenty of options here:

  - sell ads directly rather than through networks
    (and serve them up from the same server)

  - charge for their content

  - deny you access if you use an adblocker

Of course you can't sell your soul in an EULA and there's always this gray area where users might not be held accountable for selling their souls with a single click on "I agree".

But you're saying that copyright law refers to distribution, but well, you can't have that binary distributed legally unless you agreed to that EULA. And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.

The other problem is that most users won't be able to crack their own binaries and distributing or even downloading cracked binaries from the Internet will be copyright infringement.

Even so, lets assume that an easy to use tutorial will be provided, such that somehow users aren't violating any laws. Well, this is why the industry is pushing for DRM, which ends up getting used not only for encrypting media, but also for protecting binaries. And in some parts of the world it is already illegal to crack DRM.

And if not, I see the industry winning this argument and pushing for legislation protecting them, because truthfully they can point to people that crack binaries in order to freeload and pirate stuff for free - even if such arguments will be morally and factually wrong, they'll win by those arguments with the right lobbying power being exerted. It has been happening for some time now.

> You have the right to do whatever you want with the bits on your computer

Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.

There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.

> And if you haven't agreed to that EULA, then by using the app it's copyright infringement.

No, it really isn't.

Breach of the EULA does not automatically translate into breach of terms-of-use for the service and neither of those translate into copyright infringement.

They would have a case to terminate your right to use and maybe they'd sue you for damages if you cause any but copyright has nothing to do with it (in this case, there are edge cases where copyright might be invoked but this is not one of those).

> Sure, if you don't like how the Facebook app works, you can choose to not use it.

Yep.

> There's no way you can package this argument as to make it right.

Well, the company won't like it and may sue you but they will still have to convince a judge that you caused them damage. And suing a private individual for pennies in lost ad sales is just not going to happen.

I do judge publishers by the quality of ads they accept. You cannot advertise a borderline illegal MMF scam and be considered legit. So when I see such ads I assume the news is at best a twisting of the truth, at worst completely fake. Quality editors will take less revenue to ensure that their advertising is not a scam.

I mean, this GroundUp site decided to drop Google's ads in order to improve usability for users and because the gains aren't worth it.

But this change won't get noticed by users having ad-blockers installed.

And if they'll decide to push high-quality in-house ads in order to survive, all it takes is somebody submitting a new rule in uBlock's or AdBlock's repository and then that revenue will be lost, with no discrimination.

Again, because of the status quo I too have ad-blockers installed everywhere, phone included. But it's not a win-win situation and that bothers me.

Anybody is free to disable their blocker on any site. If you want a site to be funded by mean of ads and you are fine with the ads served to you, just disable your blocker on that site.

One of the many reasons I don't install every dick and jane's mobile app. In this context, I don't even have a Facebook account.

> Which means that either now or in the future you won't be able to modify your /etc/hosts to solve this problem either (assuming you have a rooted phone or tablet of course).

It's trivial to proxy your own HTTPS traffic even on unrooted phones for e.g. debugging or corporate MITM. Short of cert pinning - which is going to block some corporate users as well - it's not going to be a problem. Facebook would be able to detect I'm not consuming their ads, of course.

> So how long do you think it will take for either (1) everybody moving to native apps where ads can't be blocked

You'll want a working website if only for the search traffic. I also consume most of my content on desktops or laptops - native apps are barely a thing here (anymore.) Even for phones, Google has a powerful incentive not to let apps break the web (which would deprive Google of all that juicy search traffic) and are already penalizing e.g. "intrusive interstitals". And even for phones, I will go without sooner than I will go with people's terrible native apps.

> or (2) courts starting to rule ad blocking in browsers as being copyright infringement.

Has that stopped pirates? And reminding consumers that adtech can be regulated might not be the smartest move as well... that goes both ways after all.

It's also giving ad blockers powerful incentive to obfuscate their tracks. Right now, adtech has the option to detect and request you disable your ad blocker, or refuse to serve you content if you don't. They lose that option if ad blockers have to obfuscate their tracks as a matter of routine, just to continue operating.

> But let's not kid ourselves, you didn't have an implicit right for that content to begin with

Agreed.

> by blocking ads you won't reward the good actors (i.e. GroundUp, featured in this article) and the future isn't bright.

That doesn't follow. Several blockers have e.g. "acceptable ads" policies. Those that don't can still whitelist sites (either because they asked nicely, or because the website breaks without doing so), and you will likely not remain whitelisted unless you and your advertisers are good actors. If anything, ad blockers are about only rewarding good actors.

There's also native advertising, doing a bit for one's sponsors in a podcast or video stream, etc. which tends to be of infinitely better quality, impossible to embed malware into, actually vetted by the content producers, and which generally nobody bothers to even try blocking.

And for all GroundUp's good intentions, part of the reason they seem to be ditching google ads is because they were not being good actors by running said ads. Are you sure this is an example of a darkening future instead of a brightening one?

From the people, to the people! I don't even need movies and articles - well, I still keep a 1% interest in them, but that's all. I am sorry about them but they are so derivative and dishonest at times that I can't watch them any more.

How many times did you find more value in YC comments than the linked article?

C'mon, you know better. What agreement? If your answer contains the word "unspoken", I'll let you in on the real definition of that word in this context: "non-existent". I didn't sign anything, no notice was posted. The only agreement I have is that I ask for data, and should your server deem me worthy, it will send me some. That's what I signed up for low those many years ago. If you and advertisers would like to change the "agreement" after the fact, well, good luck with that upstream swim.

You don't like ads, I get it. You take without compensating because you want to. Don't just shrug and say, "no notice was posted." Own it. Say, "I felt like taking this so I took it."

That'd be perfectly fine. Many sites already do this - detect my adblocker in javascript and then deny me access to the content. This is also perfectly fine - I fully agree that circumventing this forcefully is immoral/unethical.

In essence - the seller (content provider) should have the option to not give me content if I have an ad-blocker. If this is possible, then I don't see anything immoral about me using an adblocker. Do you?

And in fact, it does seem to be possible - wired for example does this. And I certainly don't try to circumvent this.

Many sites manage to work around and still show me ads. I dearly wish there would be some way for me to indicate "I'd rather be denied access to the content than be shown ads." Unfortunately that doesn't technologically exist easily yet.

It's more like content-mills like adverts, so they give content for free, attach adverts and hope it sticks.

Don't just shrug and say "we have to do this". Own it. Say, "we sideloaded non-relevant content to you for profit through pipes you're paying for because we didn't want to bother building a different business model".

Did you ever get those "march of dimes" solicitations that include a dime? I know people who believe that there's an unspoken agreement of reciprocity - they sent you something of value (even though you did not ask for it) so you must give something back. But no such social contract, spoken or unspoken, exists.

Similarly, there is no such contract with respect to ads. Personally, I never watch TV live, even when the schedule is convenient, because I like to skip all the ads. Courts have held time shifting to be a right, so I can assure you I am in the right on this one, although there is zero practical difference between my fast-forward ad blocking (which is sometimes automated), and running uBlock Origin.

Adblockers didn't happen by magic, they are a reaction to advertising trampling all over the implicit social contract.

What exactly am I taking by not viewing ads? I view it the opposite, ads take away my attention and time and worst of all are generally using psychology to influence my behavior. If your site is using them to monetize, I'll be blunt, tough shit. I dislike the advertising model of shoveling malware javascript from dodgy ad companies and if blocking ads is the way to get that changed, so be it. Consider this societal protest over a business model I disagree with on its very premise. All the way back to Edward Bernays I think advertising has a rotten core by encouraging things like women to smoke, and passing off one of the most common elements off as some sort of rare thing amongst numerous other ethically questionable tactics.

But what theft has occurred when ads are blocked? What have I taken from the ad companies? From the publisher? What alternative has been given? If anything the only thing I have taken away is encouraging them to pursue better ways of monetization that doesn't treat my attention as some fungible thing for their own benefit. This company made $200 a month, donations alone could easily recoup that cost with 40 people doing $5 a month.

Also, if I go to a website and read content without viewing ads due to having an ad blocker. Well oops, but not like there is a giant banner over each hyperlink that says I can't click it without hurting someones feelings or bottom line. Block me if you want, but ironically you'd be cutting of your own nose to spite your face. I'm willing to pay for no ads, but no site is wanting to engage in what that truly means.

Point me to the ethical problem with ad blocking and maybe I'll buy your argument. But if your fundamental premise is that you need ads to publish, you're not going to convince me with $200/month arguments.

My computer is controlled by me, ads come through a programmable rendering engine, nobody owes ads the right to render unconditionally.

All that being said, the irony is I pay more out via patreon than I'm probably worth in ad revenue to all the websites I've ever visited. I do this because I hate the current model. I'm supporting the content producers that have realized this fact and are embracing it. What are you doing to change things for the better?

If running an ad blocker is stealing, then so is disabling JavaScript or using curl.

Should they download the ad and pretend to display it? Then the site still gets the impression and everybody wins.

The user uses less of her own bandwidth, but not the publisher's. Ads are served from third-party networks, not the publisher's servers.

The target of a link could still be redirected, this would not allow the ad agency to track visitors but would allow them to track the effectiveness of a campaign.

That's about as much as they should be getting anyway.

But it would kill most RTB schemes and it would get rid of the majority of the tracking, which would be a good thing.

And the world is likely to be a better place for it.

The companies who do advertise in more traditional forms of media tend to be larger and more brand focused. They don't rely on manipulating their customers in very short term, impulse situations. They rely on visibility and try to generate goodwill through elaborate PR campaigns.

If paywalls don't catch on, it's game over for he current model of societies. Because even if my contribution of a vote every four years seems quite small, it's still the currency that democracy depends on. And without an informed public, their decisions tend towards randomness, and are no longer a factor in the decision-making process.

All this isn't a new mechanism, it's basic tragedy of the commons. "It's my boat, and I'm gonna go out tonight, and fish as much as I want to. Nature belongs to me as much as to anyone else, and nobody has the right to tell me what to do, especially not in international waters".

There's nothing really wrong with that argument, except that many a fisherman has made it, and seen his haul cut to almost nothing when overfishing had decimated the population.

The media deserve their share of the blame. Besides participating in this unethical ad market, they've cranked up the emphasis on sensationalist, click bait garbage at the cost of real journalism.

To continue with the fishing/aquatic analogy: don't blame people for filtering their water or buying bottled water after all of the toxic waste that's been dumped into the river.

Who's to say paywalls will end up being the norm? And what happens if the paywall is abstracted away behind a Spotify-like news interface?

In the Netherlands there's an online subscription-based news and magazine service, it's doing quite well. It seems quite succesful in engaging their readers more than the traditional media.

I do also see that we live in a more chaotic time than say a 100 years ago. I think much of it can be attributed to the rise of fast information transport systems, computers and the Internet, but that does not mean I have an obligation to support a business model I find immoral, because it might in some way indirectly benefit journalism and democracy in general. Perhaps abolishing the advertising model will make space for interesting other models, like community-curated news, patronage, paying for archives/more in-depth articles, etcetera.

It's not a tragedy of the commons if the only "victims" are a few companies. Companies are not "the commons", or humans for that matter. Companies fail all the time, and that's OK. Business models are not sacred cows that can never be slaughtered. If one business model stops working, companies will adapt and find new business models.

On the other hand, it can be argued that advertisements can have a negative influence on their viewers in many ways.

Every year! There are elections every year! Vote every year!

I don't think this claim can be made on the basis of site traffic. You would have to compare how many people actively support the ad system vs actively support the paywall system.

Assuming people that use adblocking software, support the paywall system as a default alternative, ~22% of internet users use adblockers[0] and (let's say) support a paywall system.

I would guess that of the 78% of people that don't use an adblocker, the majority of them don't know about them, rather than make a conscious decision to not use them.

Ad revenue model is winning on traffic because of three reasons

* lots of people don't know about adblockers

* the default configuration for browsers is to not do adblocking

* most people don't change defaults

I couldn't find any studies that have specific estimates of how many people dont know about adblocking software or know and don't use.

[0]https://iabuk.net/about/press/archive/iab-uk-reveals-latest-...

Fallacy of the excluded middle: among the choices you did not accept we have the option of returning the internet back to the laws that originally governed it, that is nothing commercial.

I don't personally want this across the board, but I am not convinced that the world wouldn't be better if that rule held for non fictional content.

Could you please answer the question: are you accepting actual legal liability for users' computers you infect with malware from ads? If not, you have lost any moral argument.

No?

Then I guess this "agreement" isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on.

I call it as I see it and am not falling for, "I didn't sign anything. I'm just going by what I signed up for years ago."

For years I had "flash click to play" for usability reasons (I always have 20-50 tabs open), before ad blocking was a thing - but as a results, ads wouldn't play or show until I clicked on them. Do you think back then I had the obligation to click-to-play the ads?

It is exceedingly simple. If you don't want me to see content without ads, don't serve it to me without ads. If you don't want me to change the font size, serve it as a png so I can't change it.

The argument breaks down sooner than you think.

Well that's convenient. Next time someone does something I don't like, I'll be sure to tell them about the unwritten agreement they're violating.

As just one example: If you've agreed to meet with a friend and they don't show, without notice, you'll probably inform them that they are in violation of your unwritten agreement.

(I'm not actually in favour of this line of argument, but I believe it's pretty obvious that unwritten social norms exist, and often serve a purpose)

When they clearly and openly change those requirements, for instance by hanging advertisement banners from the walls, then you have the option of leaving. You are certainly not entitled to remove the banners from your view, not even using magic shades. The may ban magic shades in the stores or the house.

That technology makes certain things possible, even easily, does not make it an entitlement. That the other party is invisible, instead of mom and pop behind the counter of the store, does not mean you are entitled to ignore their wishes.

The day AR allows me to use a headset untethered to a desktop computer with enough battery life to last a day will be the last day I ever have to watch an ad in the real world.

How can you debate the finer points of whether accessing a website and rejecting ads is moral or not, when you haven't built a moral case for urging and tricking people into buying stuff that they don't need?

This tells me all I need to know. If this is your stance on advertising, I don't know what to tell you.

Surely the same should extend to the site, such that "visiting a site" is enough to "enter into an agreement" with the visitor to agree to show only ads that are relevant, non-intrusive, and do not contain malware.

The main short-term incentive for ad networks is to show more ads, make them more intrusive, and sell them to whomever pays the most. It's simply not in the long-term interests of a website, or a website visitor, to be part of an ad network.

When one chooses the cheapest to implement approach, one can't really complain that the cheapest ad blocking technique counters it.

That is a myth; even the US Treasury Department outright says so.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...

Emphasis added is mine. US coins and currency are valid offers of payment for debts, but for most other purposes a vendor can choose what to accept. The uniform commercial code, §3-603, then states:

> If tender of payment of an obligation to pay an instrument is made to a person entitled to enforce the instrument and the tender is refused, there is discharge, to the extent of the amount of the tender, of the obligation of an indorser or accommodation party having a right of recourse with respect to the obligation to which the tender relates.

Unless there are other statutes that apply (I'm not any kind of expert in this area), it sure sounds like if I make a valid offer of legal tender to an authorized agent of a creditor, and they refuse, I have satisfied the terms of the debt. So, if I owe someone $10,000 I can legally offer them one million pennies, which are legal tender under the Coinage Act of 1965 (perhaps I also should provide some form of proof that there are one million pennies in the truck so there's no dispute about that). They can also legally choose to reject it, but if they do then I no longer owe them anything.

This leads to the somewhat paradoxical situation where you cannot buy a hot dog on credit, but you can get a porterhouse, lobster tail, salad, baked potato, and a beer and not be expected to pay until well after the food is already beyond recovery.

So, merchants can reject cash for purchases[1] because cash is legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues, and a purchase is not one of these.

The Wikipedia page [2] for dining and dashing states that ordering a meal is a contract debt, since you are given the food before the transaction occurs, with the understanding that you'll pay for it afterwards. Thus, if the merchant, after giving you the food, informed you that they only accept credit card, that would not be allowed.

Also some good discussion on this SE post [3]

1. https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dine_and_dash 3. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/7701/is-it-illeg...

"This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor"

If that's your attitude then you should publish PDF's or create an app. On the web it's always been up to browsers to render a site how they wish.

Apparently when I take a piss during a commercial break, I'm not just voiding my bladdder... I'm breaking the social contract.

Sorry, but if you put up a website, I can render it with whatever browser I please.

Or alternatively, content providers can embrace a holistic view of their site - ads and all... just don't cry when someone tries to make a case that your malvertising is a CFAA violation :)

Newspapers have just struggled to find and adopt a similar model, I hope they find it. The common thread is that we live in an advertising saturated world and a lot of people are tired of it.

Drive down a street or highway... Ads, signage, billboards, Turn on a radio... Ads, Go online... Ads, Open a newspaper or magazine... Ads, Watch a movie... Product placements. I am waiting for them to print ads on the individual sheets of toilet paper on a roll.

Some advertising is fine but when it ruins landscapes, deafens you as you watch TV or ruins a perfectly good site layout whilst tracking and eavesdropping on you then something is wrong.

Not ad free - different types of ads. Services like Netflix have product placement.

(Which troubles me a bit since while traditional ads were irritating, at least there was disclosure.)

>hire

Well I'm not paying for my adblocker. What if this dude volunteers? What if I'm doing it for my family members? This isn't a hypothetical.

Duly noted.

> But ethically/morally, I'd argue you don't.

That has to be a first: arguing for the morality of the advertising eco system. I've seen quite a bit of it from the inside and let's just say that if there is an argument for morality it lies with the consumers, emphatically not with publishers (who have conditioned their audience first that everything should be free) or with advertisers (and that's even before we get into the content of the ads, see TFA).

> By visiting the site, you're entering into an agreement to exchange your ad views for content and you're breaking that agreement.

That sounds like a legal argument to me, about which you earlier said you have no idea. Let me summarize my answer: you're wrong. By visiting a site you do not 'enter into an agreement to exchange your adviews for content'.

> Doesn't feel right to me.

That's ok, you are entitled to your own feelings.

So you don't get to install an adblocker. Have fun with spyware, malware and being tracked from here to kingdom come.

If it was just ads, on the page itself and without any further trickery the ads would work just fine.

I really want this to be true but the elephant in the room is auditing. Without the ad network performing tracking, advertisers have no way to independently verify ad performance and corresponding payment to publishers for CPC ads. For CPA ads, the publisher has no way to independently verify the advertiser is paying out correctly for sales conversions.

You need a third party in the middle to arbitrate. AFAIK, the only way to do that at scale is with cookies from an ad network dropped in and tracked via a beacon.

I guess the only solution is for a new, non-commercial advertising network to spring up (sort of like an NGO) with a strong enough charter and ethical approach that end users (or browsers themselves?) trust limited tracking from ads served through that network. The problem is, who funds it? Not the advertisers or publishers as that would destroy the impartiality of the network.

Edit: and problem two is if such an ad network came in to existence and was successful, it would end up a de-facto monopoly for on-line ad distribution. Apart from the headwinds it would attract from Google, there are obvious issues around free-speech, mono-culture etc.

Edit 2: or maybe the "internet" agrees what an ethical ad network should look like and then any one is free to set one up but must submit to regular auditing by a new internet body to make sure they are sticking to the agreed "charter". That way the ad network could be operationally funded by publishers/advertisiers but still retain user's trust. A little like the CA market for SSL certs. If an ad network started misbehaving, browsers themselves could block/de-list them (like they do when they revoke root certs from rogue CAs)

A 'sample audience' such as used in TV that would willingly be tracked could then be used to extrapolate impressions.

I'd personally have zero problem with a strongly audited third party tracking me during transition from a publisher site to arrival (or checkout in the case of CPA) on an advertiser's site.

What I do object to is that same tracking info being used across every publisher and advertiser on the ad network (and tracking info persisting for months).

If there was an ad network that enforced a strict set of simple, inert advertising formats and ensured tracking was ephemeral and unique between each publisher/advertiser pair (and not capable of being used to parallel construct my browsing across the whole network), I'd happily accept the compromise. Doubly so if I knew the browsers held a nuclear option of "de-listing" the network in the event of bad behaviour.

Interesting part I got from this discourse: there is no 'one size fits all' when it comes to what is acceptable and what is not. That's yet another problem to be solved.

If that were true, it'd be built into the protocol. "HTTP GET" would require an acknowledgement of the agreement you purport exists.

Instead, it just serves the page to any requestee who comes by it, even if automated. Doesn't exactly sound like an agreement to me.

Hell, a javascript popup would be a valid test for agreement compared to that.

That's why I'm adblocking everything and I visit sites with NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies, DisableWebRTC among the others. Better safe than sorry.

And about the right to render bits and bytes however I wish, I use Stylish for those few sites that do really wierd things with their layout.

By the way, a browser renders bit and bytes as it wishes, starting from the html file and maybe stopping there or going as far as precaching linked pages.

Other people like me think we are morally bound to ignore ads as much as possible because we think they destroy a healthy capitalism and are misused to track people and distribute malware. Therefore I use an ad-blocker.

But that's only a side note. In the internet your argument is invalid because I don't know in advance whether a website uses ads or not. To discover that I would have to visit that site without an ad-blocker and let them serve ads without warning. And that would be unacceptable.

The solution for that problem is the various websites either use paywalls or detect ad-blockers and don't provide content when one is in use. In this case we really have an agreement. If I turn off my ad-blocker I'm allowed to watch the content, otherwise I'm not.

But I never ever had the desire to see content which has been hidden behind an ad-blocker blocker.

"For about R20,000 a year, it isn’t worth it to pollute our content with get-rich-quick adverts featuring Patrice Motsepe, Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey (see image at top of article)."

Moreover, the author states in the comments that their non-profit is sustained by donations, not by ads. If someone had visited this site with an ad-blocker turned on before the author stopped using Google ads, it would have improved the content (by the author's own stated standards) without endangering the site's source of funding.

Granted this may be a special case. But I think special cases are often worth the read, or at least not "just like any other kind."

I would say it should be arguably illegal to resell content with ads removed, but how something is rendered in my brain or inside the confines of my home is upto me to decide. There's nothing illegal about ripping out the ad pages before reading a magazine at home.

I can hardly see any moral advancement there.

Nope but hanging around the printing press and cutting out the ads in all your friends' papers seems unethical.

And it sounds like he agrees with you.

Are you accepting actual legal liability for malware served to me via ads on your site?

Or the user-allocated payments in the Brave browser[1].

1. https://www.brave.com/publishers.html

Previously, lots of indie games used to have serial codes which I could just get off the Internet (just more bytes), but now they act in a user-hostile manner by using debilitating spyware like Steam. It's still crackable, and some people let me play their games for free because they don't put any DRM on it so all I need is the bits and lots of people are giving me those bits for free.

Non-subscription software is my favourite. I only need to modify the check algorithm, which are just bits and bytes that I can change however I wish, but subscription algorithm often means I have to get help from the Internet to prevent the spyware phoning home.

But then they will likely start clicking on ads to increase their own revenue. Or just visit various websites in an automated way to make money.

I don't know if that would work.

That's a great idea. Is it not what the BRAVE-Browser is trying to acheive?

How is that an argument for it? Some percentage of people steal things from stores, business do account for it, but its neither here nor there in an argument about whether people should do it.

It's illegal to steal physical property (payment transfers ownership of property). It's not illegal to not look at something.

Speaking of which, I really want to write a real life ad blocker with a HoloLens or whatever AR equipment becomes popular in the future. Replace all the billboards with cat pictures.

Coming soon to a congress/senate near you : adblockers are now illegal. Why ?

Because media appear to control a decent proportion of voters and can make or break political candidates.

Just because you watched the film doesn't mean you are obliged to watch the ads.

Stores do indeed account for a small amount of theft in their budget in the way of security and special procedures, and also for actual theft. Precautions are taken, security personnel and procedures are evaluated, and there's a cost/benefit analysis on such situations. Living abroad in certain countries, it's no unusual to see even a small corner shop have a prominently displayed security personnel standing at the front just keeping an eye on things on top of an array of security cameras across the store. It's a cost of business that physical stores take, and it has an impact on their public perception, and that's a choice the store owners have to make; public perception, or the cost of theft. If websites feel that strongly about ads, then they should make it clear - an adblocker is an indication that people don't want ads. The reason could be as simple as "they're annoying" to "they're intrusive privacy wrecking tools of the devil", but it's a response to the complaint "these ads are annoying." Advertisers have very simple and low cost solutions to this; they can ask for whitelisting, they can ask to turn off the adblocker, they can use the adspace that is blocked to offer an ad-free alternative, or they can just not serve the page, something I wish more would do. Yes, such a position may harm the websites readership, but it's better than the alternative.

As for it being theft, I disagree as ads on a website are basically a unilateral agreement that I have no agency in. Making it a condition for viewing the site, whether it's a spoken or unspoken contract, means that we are in some sort of arrangement - your content for my eyeballs and privacy. I don't know what's on your page before I load it, and titles being what they are for articles, it's even harder to know if it's something I want to see. A single paragraph summary of an AP posting isn't really worth me disabling the adblocker. A conspiracy theory style rant on such a posting isn't worth my time either, regardless of the agenda. A list that is basically just copy/pasted from wikihow with some stock photos added isn't worth it, and so on. If the requirement for your page is I must watch ads, then politely let me know before you spam me with ads so I can make the decision as to whether I want to view the content or not. I have the adblocker on because I specifically don't want ads; the risk outweighs the reward in most cases. If the site operators feel that I shouldn't see the content with an adblocker on, I'm fine with that. That's their offer, and I respect their wishes. I just want website operators and advertisers to respect my wishes instead of trying to circumvent it, or flat out lie to me about why they want me to unblock ads. I don't have an obligation to view ads because I clicked on a link that I had no idea of the contents of. The agreement between an advertiser and a site isn't any of my business, and if they want to make it my business, that's fine, but they need to be upfront about it. Removing my agency in the matter is not a way to win me over as a repeat visitor.

  I have the right to render your bits and bytes however I wish. 

Some bytes you are not allowed to render them at all (and BTW, how did you get them?).

Some bytes may not be transformed into other bytes so you are able to render them (and BTW, how did you obtain the key?).

Some bytes may not be rendered in front of audiences, only for personal use.

In general: those bytes come with a copyright and a license agreement. They are my arrangement of bytes. I could easily include an explicit HTTP header saying that you may only render these bytes with unmodified browser brand X version Y.Z (or brand A version B, or ...). That that is currently unwritten in the HTTP response does not make it a non-existent agreement.

If you do something else, you violate my copyright over that arrangement of bytes.

Can websites dictate what web browsers you use? Are you violating an agreement by using a different User-Agent?

No, no and no. You are requesting data and your browser renders it. If you write your own browser to request and render the data differently, I don't see any issue with copyright.

  No, no and no.

I'll make it explicit. You can't show a Netflix show to an audience (let alone a paying audience). You may not render an e-book that you haven't bought. You may not even store that sequence bytes on a device you own. You may not decrypt an encrypted file not intended for you.

When you buy a painting, the artist may forbid you from changing it.

Why do you believe that can't be the case for a movie? Just because it is technically possible to modify only copy does not make it obvious that you should be entitled to it.

Note that I'm not asserting that this actually is the case. I'm mostly asserting it's not obviously not the case.

Originals will always have inherent differences from copies in people's minds.

Because in my example I don't even have to modify the movie. I can apply the filter while it's playing.

And besides that your examples require the presence of a contract between me and the architect/painter where I resign from my rights to change the object. Copyright has nothing to do with it.

I remembered an old maxim. Apparently, a successful copywriter was asked "How do you write a good ad?" and his answer was "Its very easy. Get the Yellow pages for this year, last year and the year before. See which ads repeat. They are repeating because they are working. Now just copy those ads for your purpose"

The point is, those shitty ads keep repeating on those websites because their ROI is positive. Google wants to help these people by providing them every imaginable and conceivable tool so they can do it better. This also answers your last question about how their business model is sustainable for the long term. It is actually really sustainable because you think Google is a search engine, and I think Google morphed long ago into an internet scale ad-ROI measurement engine which keeps improving (by violently invading privacy of course) both the measurement tools and the actual ROI itself for those who keep pouring money into these ads.

> we disabled more than 5 million payday loan ads

> In 2016, our systems detected and disabled a total of 112 million ads for “trick to click,” 6X more than in 2015.

> We disabled more than 68 million bad ads for healthcare violations, up from 12.5 million in 2015.

> We took down more than 17 million bad ads for illegal gambling violations in 2016.

> In 2016, we took down nearly 80 million bad ads for deceiving, misleading and shocking users.

> in 2016, our systems detected and disabled more than 23,000 self-clicking ads on our platforms, a huge increase year over year.

> Last year, we took down almost 7 million bad ads for intentionally attempting to trick our detection systems.

> In 2016, we suspended more than 1,300 accounts for tabloid cloaking.

> We took action on 47,000 sites for promoting content and products related to weight-loss scams.

> We took action on more than 15,000 sites for unwanted software and disabled 900,000 ads for containing malware.'

> And we suspended around 6,000 sites and 6,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, like imitation designer watches.

[1]: https://blog.google/topics/ads/how-we-fought-bad-ads-sites-a...

All of those things you described (fake virus warnings, "clean your phone", flashing yellow and red images) are against Google's policies for AdWords. See:

https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6020954

https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6021546

Nowadays, when a family member is asking which "antivirus should I pick?", my answer goes along the lines of "just install uBlock Origin, activate this and that filter and allow it in incognito mode. You can do it on your own, it's super easy and super effective". Even better, this also "fix" most of the "slow computer" complaints.

(A) The plugins do not actually have any particular philosophy. They act as facilitators for different lists which certainly have their own.

(B) The creators of the plugins' philosophies (which again, aren't actually in the plugin - usually you have to look into the creator) tend to be varied, and several of them (notably the best ones) do promote supporting content creators, either directly or via whitelist

(C) You can always control your adblocker, and many users (especially those who care about a site, are interested in related content, or so on) do disable it for their favorite sites. The extensions (that I've used, anyways) specifically account for this and remember whitelisted sites.

If your site is significantly suffering because of adblocking and you've mentioned your concerns to users, adblockers are not your problem, your users are. There's no fix for resource leeches.

My sites​ are not suffering significantly​ at all due to ad blocking, but some peers say it's a problem. It's a bummer, though, that we don't even have an opportunity to show adblock users that our ads are relevant and not too obnoxious. The filter list author has made that decision for them, and it's almost always "block every ad."

I made similar experiences in the past, to the point where our API broke because we had the audacity to call one of our API endpoints "metric" (for a metrics service), which got caught by one of the over-zealous regexes of EasyList.

[1]: https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...

There also aren't any good self hosted ad servers, among other reasons. .

> - finding a russian bride

> - getting rich through some millionaires secret

> - anti-aging remedies

> - adware

> and you realize that the ad-model only benefits Google and the peddlers pushing the dodgy adverts. Everyone else is losing.

Sorry for the shameless plug, but check out https://hotlinkx.com if you want. What you mentioned are a few of the other things it tries to address by letting publishers manually choose what they want to advertise.

<plug>

So I created a minimal blocklist for the worst clickbait (mostly Outbrain and Taboola): https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/

The list is compatible with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus. If you know of any other bad clickbait ad networks, please let me know! As the article describes, I now see clickbait ads from Google that are almost as bad, but I'm not quite ready to block all Google ads in what was supposed to be a minimal blocklist.

</plug>

https://github.com/duskwuff/syndicationblock/

Is Yavli still a thing? I had a hell of a time blocking their ads -- they served content from custom subdomains, and used class names "borrowed" from Google to evade ad blockers.

Meanwhile, duckduckgo never asked. They're pretty awesome (check their wikipedia page) so I turned blocking off.

They rewarded me with a couple subtle, text-only ads that didn't disrupt my load time or experience. <3

If we want the web to be a better place, we have to use and support companies who are making it one even if it means not getting to use the 'best'. Like Firefox. Damn I miss Chrome's performance, but the alternatives won't get better and compete unless we back them.

So the ads that do get shown are exactly the low quality crappy ads that appeal to the great unwashed.

This is certainly evident to me on Facebook for instance. The very first ads that get shown do not have the benefit of the marketing analytics about me so they're very low quality ones like the ads in the article.

The second wave (after about 5 seconds) are vastly improved and often touch on my interests or have some connection to friends interests or real current news events.

That aside, yep, it's hard to ignore how incredibly dumb the lowest common denominator appears to be - if viewed as a reflection of those ads.

Still somewhat better than creepy targeted advertising. I bought a new garbage can a few weeks ago now many sites are full of ads for garbage cans. Although this may be one example where the targeting is working. Most of the sites showing those ads are garbage.

Obviously it's usually completely ineffective. BUT I think it might make a purchase correlation score go up. Imagine that no human working for the company buying the ads is fully understanding what the correlation score means, and they are effectively using or subscribing to a machine learning model that is trying to increase the correlation score. And they're seeing the score go up.

I'm no expert in the ad targeting ecosystem, and I'm sure I'll be told that's not what it does. But I'm more familiar with systems software, databases, distributed services and such, and I've seen many things that didn't really do what they were supposed to do. It just takes a lot of smarts and a lot of focus, such as Aphyr does with distributed databases, to show that they don't actually do what they claim, due to some mundane bugs or subtle design flaws.

I think there's a good chance that the complex ad targeting ecosystem is just fooling advertisers into thinking it works, without actually working.

For several months, I saw no ads on AdSense except for those advertising the Vive. None whatsoever. I saw plenty of ads, they were just the exact same one with an attractive person doing some sort of dance in a headset and controllers.

So...okay, Google. I guess you've figured out that I'm interested in technology, graphics, games, that sort of thing? Is this all that you've got? It's creepy in that it makes me wonder WHEN you're listening to me, not if.

Below is the result of a quick scan of a few websites in private mode. I wonder why OP has such a different experience? Maybe the ad market in South Africa is very different? Or maybe GroundUp hasn't spent the necessary time to filter out bad ads?

----- New York Times:

Cycling clothing

Microsoft Enterprise

Health Insurance

Avoid overeating

Mortgage

----- Forbes:

Unfair Dismissal Lawyers

'JobActive' - Aust govt ad for employment service

Cancer council Australia - funding drive

Commonwealth bank Australia

----- Bloomberg:

Doesn't seem to use AdSense

----- Fox News:

Save the children (charity)

Find best debit card

Business Travel saver

But, what if: What if my Web server sends the actual ads, as JPG, GIF, WEBM, etc. files instead of just URLs to ad servers at some ad network? Then will an ad blocker still work?

Also, it can stop rendering, so if your ad has a custom CSS class, element name, etc then it will refuse to render that element (and children) even if it downloads the image.

It can work if you're trusted and selling influence.

Later on when we wanted to run some of the high end campaigns and exclusives we ran OpenX

I think serving your own ads is a solution to a lot of ad and media problems that needs to be encouraged. Its strange to me that so many companies hand over so much of their webpage real estate and user trust to what are often complete strangers

Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex [0] does this. I've run ad blockers for years and his ads have never shown up on the lists. I feel no urge to block them on my personal list, either, since they don't bother me. It's probably a good way to go if you've got a good sized niche audience and you don't mind negotiating directly with your sponsors.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/

Yet, I am the minority. If you serve your own images/iframes, they are likely going thru... but you have to be trusted not to forge impressions and the like.

I won't pay a cent for any site that shows me ads on a paid subscription. In fact, I'll go out of my way to cancel the subscription and block the ads and do everything I can to subvert their paywalls and read the content for free.

Similarly, Google Advertisers are paying exceptionally low CPM rates for inventory that would otherwise go unfilled.

Even a 1% click-through rate justifies the acquisition costs.

It dates back to the 1700s-era newspapers. That's... pretty old in terms of the medium.