Which is largely impossible for smaller sites. If you contact companies directly and ask if they'd like to advertise (or just have a contact page) they expect you to have millions of daily users. Not to mention that you have to build systems to track how many times the banner is shown to the users and have some way to verify this (e.g. that they are not bots/crawlers).
Saying; "just host your own ads" is a lot similar to "if you don't like the software, just make your own from scratch". It's not that easy for most people.
Oh yeah? Where do you get your research from?
I guarantee people are blocking ads because they hate ads and everything else is secondary.
You want some proof? TIVO sold millions of devices because of the ability to skip ads. People hate ads.
I know some sites have taken to showing full screen overlays and that's a lot more like a tv commercial, which I agree people hate. but for the most part we're talking about banners and their corresponding infrastructure for tracking and targeting (which is more intrusive than the actual ad mist of the time).
I disagree. Most banner ads are through some sort of service like AdSense. They don't fit the theme of the page they're on most of the time which harms the immersive experience for the end user.
People care about these details. AdBlockers are increasing in popularity every year and there are reasons for that, you can't simply disregard this fact.
There are rare sites where ads are less hated, a good example might be Penny Arcade where the ads are hand-picked by the site owners for their specific appeal to their targeted audience. Those kinds of ads are probably the least hated.
I've had this conversation dozens of times, and people are constantly insisting that advertising is going to live forever! But that's nonsense. People hate ads. Even the least intrusive ads, they hate them on principal because their lives have been ruled by ads for decades. And films like Minority Report have painted horrifying visions of the future where advertising has taken over everything. The savvy among us can see that "big data" trends are heading in that direction, and that isn't a future anyone wants. Except people who work in advertising.
What I am curious about is why people cling so desperately to this revenue model. Obviously those who rely on it for their bread and butter are going to wish it would live forever, but the other 90% of the population would realize a much better quality of life if advertisements were to die forever. Just imagine it.
The internet and digital technology is changing the world. Advertising is going to die. It's an exciting thing to bear witness to.
That's cute :-)
Edit: Ah, I just checked, uBlock apparently blocks GA whereas AdBlock doesn't.
Many business benefit greatly from some amount of advertisement and it's a practical way to monetise people's attention. What is immoral is the cohort of brilliant minds who've made the optimisation of advertisement the quest of the century.
But as it stands, even if you're willing to forgo using such sites, you have to load trackers to know that the site uses them. So an adblocker/anti-tracker is a necessary protection.
The head of the first French TV channel himself bragged that "his job was to sell available brain time".
On the the other hand if you're complaining about the shady manipulations going on behind the scenes to fuel the data driven marketing and advertising schemes then sure you have a point.
On the other hand, you don't consent to seeing a billboard whilst on public roads, so I don't think I'd object to people "defending themselves" (whatever that looks like) from billboards.
The problem with ads, and the sole reason I'm personally using an ad blocker, is tracking. For me, mass surveillance isn't an adequate compromise to make for free content.
I don't have a problem at all with classic banner ads OTOH. By merely switching off JavaScript you used to able to switch off most tracking years ago. But today's web pretty much requires JavaScript for even the simplest interactivity. Thank you W3C and WHATWG and Google for HTML5's lameness.
It misunderstands the nature of advertising and advertisers.
The kind of person/organisation who will target you with fake news and paid-for or ghost-written articles or books (which incidentally, is an increasingly large number of popular publications already these days) is not the kind of entity that says "oh, well i've got banner ads, best hold-back now in the interest of good-faith relations".
Advertising does not voluntarily stop. Advertisers do not hold back in the name of decency. It generally expands until it is either stopped (through legislative and societal bans, not having the rights to advertise in a particular place, or until it is cost-prohibitive to do so) or until the eyeballs stop looking (either because it has lost power or become so obtrusive that people either block it, turn to substitutes, turn off or push back).
As if we didn't have that already?
We already have that buddy. One problem at a time.
Is HTML5 lame, or are web developers just too lazy to learn to use it properly?
Companies need to advertise. If they don't sell their products, they go to die.
Here's some real world impact of Adblockers: Advertorials, Fake Reviews, increasily covert forum spam and Influencer Marketing. Not to mention increasing hard work of PR agencies chiseling away at reputable sources like Wikipedia. I basically can't trust anyone on the internet anymore - and this trend will only accelerate if companies can't reach interested prospects via clearly marked ad slots anymore.
All this advertising need and money isn't going away over night if banner ads are finally gotten rid of: it will simply go somewhere else.
Rather, its just the reality that you're never going to get down to zero.
But maybe if we put up enough of our own barriers, then our families can live in an environment with 10% of advertising influence and exposure instead of 60% or 80%. And i think that's a fight worth fighting.
I might not be able to get rid of advertising, but I can block ads, I can stop billboards going up, I can stop them advertising cigarettes/alcohol or gambling in certain times and places, and I can never let the tv shows or ghost-written books into my house. And overall, I think we'll live in a better world overall if people make the effort. Its the good fight.
As for ad-blockers being responsible for advertorials, fake reviews, forum spam and influencer marketing...lets just say it takes a massive leap of logic to turn a problem solely due to the behaviours of advertisers and try to level that at the feet of people trying to stop them. Wow.
Someone has to pay for content. You don't view ads, and you don't buy subscriptions. You also never donate. What do you think will happen next?
Well, some businesses die, but most don't. At the Guardian, we had to rely on three things:
1. We had to make about three hundred people redundant. (This is the human cost of the problem - not that some fatcat makes marginally worse dividends, but that a print worker who's done this job since 16 is now being turned out at 42)
2. We had to diversify our revenue streams. One way became 'native advertising': content sponsored by companies, like an article on the history of whiskey with a Jack Daniels badge, etc. Editorial hated this. Oh, boy, they objected. They fought in every principle and at every point available. They relented when they realized they were next for redundancies.
3. Then there were us, in commercial. Firefighting bad ads coming via the network, trying to resist JS hogging full page experiences, writing ads in the highest performing fashion we could to make the best of a bad situation. No-one liked us.
I didn't stay for long. I'd like to say I left because I was disgusted with the seediness of the ad industry, but the real reason was that the job was boring and depressing. We weren't saving the newspaper and we weren't making ads better.
Personally I think the only solution is the paywall. That's how newspapers worked for 250 years: you gave your dollar and you got your daily edition. You could trust your paper because it was more beholden to you than to any other interest. Will people accept this, though?
Nonsense. If I or anyone NEEDS a product or service, we'll happily go out and buy it. Ads exist purely to drive unnecessary consumption-for-the-sake-of-consumption. It's telling that even a generally capitalist, free-market demographic like HN's thinks they are a sleazy way to make money. It's not a "war on drugs" its more like a war on some disease - and those are very winnable.
This is naive. Advertisers aren't in the business of educating and informing the public. If they were most of them would say don't buy our product, you don't need it, it won't make you happy, the paid celebrity/model in our ad doesn't even use it, the people who make it don't even use it, because they know what's in it.
Like, do you think the executives at McDonalds feed their kids Happy Meals every day?
This has existed before ad-blockers and would continue to exist even if all ad-blockers disappeared overnight.
Being immoral pays more, it has nothing to do with ad-blocking.
> All this advertising need and money isn't going away over night
They could reroute that money into the products themselves. Cheaper prices, more quality, it's their choices.
Most ad-blockers I know of use cosmetic filters, which can hide any element from a page, including self-hosted and non-tracking ads (see https://www.troyhunt.com/ad-blockers-are-part-of-the-problem...). Sadly, showing ads that are respectful to the user is not that easy...
Edit: most ad-blockers don't actually block ads; they just block cross-domain, spying widgets. Nothing is preventing you from showing a self-hosted, untracked image that's actually an ad. The fact that you complain about adblockers implies that you don't do that, which implies that you're using bad practices (e.g. spying on users).