I appreciate that you're trying what you're trying, but I wanted to address this:

> All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.

The great bulk of advertising is built upon a conflict of interest and is essentially manipulative. Consider, for example, an article. Both the writer and the reader want the reader's maximum attention on the article for as long as the reader cares to give it. The goal of advertising is to distract from that in hopes of extracting money from the reader. Generally, ads are constructed without much regard to whether the reader was intending to buy or would really benefit from the product. The goal is to make a sale. (If you doubt me, look at how many people who create or show ads, say, test a product before putting the ad in front of people. Or just look at tobacco advertising, a product that has killed hundreds of millions.)

So I think there's an inherent lack of ethics to ads as an industry. It could be that you'll find enough people who are worried about privacy but not about the other stuff to build a business. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's no accident that this security hole is being closed not because of random miscreants but because of industrial-scale exploitation.

These are some of the only ads I see online these days (on Read the Docs, mostly). I don't use ad blockers, but I do use tracker blockers, and those block pretty much all ads, for obvious reasons. Not these ones, though. And that's how it's supposed to go.

Which ones? I think I would like to try your setup, since it sounds like a good compromise between having my data harvested and being kicked off of sites for blocking their ads.

Can you elaborate on your setup?

I'm not OP, but I have my browser setup to block trackers only, nothing that's billed as an ad-blocker.

I use Firefox with Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection [0] and Privacy Badger [1] as an extra layer of protection. Some sites, mostly news orgs, complain that I'm blocking ads, but inevitably these are the sites Privacy Badger reports 20+ trackers blocked. I'm happy to see ads online, I'm just not willing to sacrifice my privacy for them.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote... [1] https://privacybadger.org/

Why not just block ads, too? Do you really think advertising is ethical at any level? Because I do not. If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is like junk snail mail: a waste of my time and your money.

The short answer: I am not anti-advertising, so I don't block ads that respect me.

I don't love advertising in many of it's forms, but taken from the viewpoint of those who make money from ads (i.e. content creators), it is one of the best ways out there for them to make a living. Platforms like Patreon are great for some folks, but not everyone can make a living off of sponsorship from their viewers. But, I am not willing to sacrifice my own privacy to allow someone else to make money, especially given that we have tonnes of examples of non-privacy-invading advertising that works.

I listen to 8-10 hours of podcasts a week and I generally find the ads on them, usually where the host does an ad read and includes a discount code, to be far more useful and relevant to me than the hyper-targeted ads backed by 20 tracking scripts I see on news sites. Another example, many of the indie tech news sites I read (e.g. Daring Fireball or Six Colors) will have a weekly sponsor that will have an advertising post or two interspersed with their regular content. I'm happy to take 2-3 minutes out of a 30 minute podcast episode to listen to a couple ad reads or see a brief write-up of a sponsor's product as I'm scrolling through the week's tech news. What I'm not happy to do is have my web browser load a dozen tracking scripts in the background when I open a news article and have flashing pictures deliberately trying to distract me from what I'm reading.

Presumably if your adverts don't do tracking, they don't need to slow page loads down the way current advertising does either which should be a big plus.

Fundamentally serving an advert should be a light process adding only a tiny amount of overhead to the site.

Yea, we are planning to do a blog post on it, but the total overhead is in the 10's of KB. Just a single JS file, and an image. All open source: https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-client

It would be nicer if no tracking would mean no data sent to ethicalads unless user engaging with ad because we know what happen when we trust advertising companies. So a step in the right direction but i would still block impressions when hosted on another domain. Also ads should not distort users perception in order to sell but that's another debate.

We support a backend API, but it's much more complicated to implement, and the client gets more complex as well. We started out with a vision of all backend integrations, but it was impossible to sell to most publishers.

To me, there is no such thing as an “ethical ad”. You are trying to steal my attention, my time. You don’t get to do that. My time on Earth is limited and you don’t get a millisecond of it if I can help it.

If I want to buy something, I seek it out. Anything else is a waste of my time and a waste of the advertisers money.

I long ago decided to throw out every piece of physical ad mail I receive without even glancing at it more than long enough to recognize it as an advertisement.

I don’t know why you expect me to treat your digital ads any differently?

You can call my perspective extremist, but is it any more extreme than the methods used by advertising networks to steal my attention?

I'm pretty frustrated by advertising too, and some of it is particularly egregious, but at the moment, there is really no other way for many publishers to get paid.

I'm curious, how many services do you subscribe to and pay for content? I pay for a few ad free resources, but certainly a lot of the sites I enjoy don't get my $$.

Just as an example: I read some dev newsletters, they include a block of paid-for job postings. Highly relevant with the content. Together with the occasional sponsored post link (also still relevant content) this appears to fund them just fine.

This isn't "ad free" but it's close enough in my opinion. There's a huge gulf between contextually relevant content curated by the creators and the kind of shite that ad networks push.

Great morally charged argument, but I am not sure how you expect content creators to monetize.

Well, to be blunt, in my humble opinion more than 90% of "content creators" trying to monetize their content with ads currently produce content of so low quality, that world would be a better place without their content. So if my ad blocker helps any of those to change their career, I am happy.

Even with ad monetization, if their content is of no use, they will disappear if they survive on said ad monetization. Content creation on the web is hard enough to suffer from removing the major monetization avenue without a suitable alternative.

Charge money, either directly for the content, or indirectly in the form of patronage or a service or other business you run.

Yep, these exist as alternatives as of now, but require an explicit payment step which might cause more friction than ads.

I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting. I can see a decentralized crypto application evolving around this usecase

> Yep, these exist as alternatives as of now, but require an explicit payment step which might cause more friction than ads.

Payment from one user produces more revenue than showing ads to hundreds of users. That should be multiplied in to any analysis of friction.

> I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting.

There have been many attempts to do that, none of which have succeeded. One major problem: they tend to track all your web activity, and the kinds of people interested in services like this are very much the kinds of people who don't want to be tracked. Another problem: it's easier to convince people to pay for a specific source of content than to amorphously pay for "various content".

That's not really my problem, is it? It is the content creator's problem.

This is great. How are the ads paid for though - is it billed per click or per impression, or is it billed per an approximate amount of time the ad will be displayed for?

The problem with charging per click or impression is that you're vulnerable to fraud which means you either lose money/trust or you have to do invasive tracking to detect & prevent fraud (which you'll be unlikely to achieve as well as the big players - Google & Facebook - do). Charging per amount of time (regardless of actual impressions or clicks) doesn't have that problem.

We are doing CPC & CPM pricing. I don't believe anyone has asked us for "time seen" pricing. I don't even really know how that would work, and why it wouldn't be open to fraud in a similar fashion.

Do you have a good example of how this is priced, and how it would work in practice?

By time seen I don't literally mean time displayed on screen but more like TV/radio ads, as in this ad will be part of our rotation of X ads for an entire months across X publishers. I think The Deck used to do this.

Determining the price will be a bit tricky (and I would expect that you'd have to lowball yourself until your platform builds credibility in terms of good ROI) but in the long run it should mean your advertisers pay a flat price to be included per week/month regardless of actual impressions or clicks (thus there's no fraud potential as only the raw profit from the ads will matter - the only "fraud" potential would be to literally buy the advertised product en masse).

Gotcha, that definitely makes sense. We are looking at doing that for some of our larger sites, similar to Daring Fireball: https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ -- which I believe is based off the old Deck model :)

Thanks for following up.

I totally read it as ethical lads.

And I read your comment as "ethical ads" and was wondering what I got wrong from the GP comment, ahah.

I think the big problem in adtech isn't just targeting, it's also fighting ad fraud. Do you have a good plan for when you become big enough to become a target for ad fraud?

There is no such thing as an ethical ad.

Advertising is a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed. Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore.

Worse yet, we don't need advertising to bolster our media. Unfortunately, the media execs don't realize this yet.

All your metrics are fuzzy, your standards ridiculous. We have far better practices we can deploy than the ones the advertisers use.

Please, stop advertising to us. If that's all you plan to do with this new company, can you please kindly go away?

I am really confused by this position.

How do you propose that companies should promote their products and services, if not through advertising?

Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted?

You say "people part with their money for things they wouldn't think they needed, Our economy can't handle this kind of reckless consumerism anymore": Surely you don't think you speak for everyone?

You certainly don't speak for me.

I am not some blind sheep who is suckered into buying things I don't need. I am a grown adult who can make informed decisions with my money, including sometimes buying frivolous or unnecessary things.

I hate these arguments that assume everyone is stupid except for the person making the argument. It feels like there's some weird savior complex at work.

People have free will and are allowed to spend their money as they wish, and I think YOU are the cynical one if you think otherwise..

> Are you somehow suggesting that they should just sit there and hope that people who have never heard of their product independently decide they happen to want or need that product and seek it out, unprompted?

Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

> Yeah, it's even got a name: shopping.

So, for direct to consumer companies who only ship online, SEO?

Here's the thing: ads can be useful.

Awhile back I got a, highly targeted, ad for high protein sugar free cereal. That's awesome! I am 100% the target audience for that product, and until I saw that ad I had no clue it existed! To find a product like that I'd have to search for it, but I would never search for an entire new category of product that I didn't know about.

Same thing for the fitness app I am using (BodBot, it is amazing!). I am quite literally healthier right now because of a targeted advertisement.

Was I aware of fitness apps before then? Sure. But the ad for BodBot was informative about what features differentiated it from the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of other competing apps.

Do most ads suck? Sure. Should ads be highly invasive? Nope. But interest tracking and basic targeting actually help me find products and services that I want to buy!

Facebook in particular, for all the things wrong with it (long list!) has some amazingly relevant ads that inform me of products that I never knew about.

So let's designate .biz as the place where advertisements live, and turn it into the online yellow pages (plus all the other scum to be expected) and ban anything resembling advertising from every other TLD.

Those who want to shop know where to go. Those who don't, know where to avoid.

hey man, that's great and i'm happy you're healthier because of advertising. My experience has been the opposite (yes, advertising making me and my family UNhealthier -- mentally and emotionally). I don't want targeted ads, but I can understand that you do.

Perhaps there is a way we can both enjoy the internet in our preferred ways. Perhaps not, I don't know.

And how do you know about the existence of a product to go shop for in the first place, if not through advertising and promotion?

Or do you have infinite time to go browse every single store in your city on the odd chance that you'll see something you want?

There are these wonderful things now called search engines. And they existed before online advertising was tied to search, so before you say search engines would not exist without advertising attached to search queries, think again.

How do you know to search for something if you haven't heard about it before... via some kind of... promotion?

I get the point you're making, but I hope you realize you're just backpedaling from your original "no advertisements ever!" statement.

I believe in giving people better control over how they receive ads (I personally run an ad blocker in my browsers and a Pi Hole on my network), but you position that there should be no advertising at all, and that all ads are unethical is just silly, and you're proving that point yourself here..

It must be hard to be this naive ^^

I assume you meant to reply to sbarre

You’re proving my point.

Look at how much of a web you have to spin for yourself, just to conclude that it is indeed fine to have others tell you what you need to buy.

The false dichotomy you pose is ridiculous. People seek out information on what to buy all the time. But when I am listening to music, watching television or film, or reading a fucking news article, that is not the time I want to be given that information. It is unsolicited and I don't care about it.

Hey, I'm not sure why you're answering me from 2 separate accounts (I know it's you because you accidentally(?) replied to another post from your other account with this one, speaking in the first person about the other message).

People seek out information on what to buy because at some point they found out about it via (perhaps indirectly) the provider's promotional efforts (i.e. advertising).

We can certainly talk about the appropriateness of when an where to advertise, but that's a very different topic than your ALL ADS ARE UNETHICAL screeds that you've posted in like a dozen threads on this topic from 2 different accounts..

Never mind continuing to believe that somehow those of us who engage with advertising are lying to ourselves or somehow less in control of things than you?

Now who's spinning a web..

I like what that guy is doing, but I still have to agree with you. To me ads are just money focused propaganda, abusing human psychology to make people spend money they on crap they don't need.

If you'd like to suggest another way to make OSS sustainable, I'd be all ears.

A bit more color here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...

Rather than open source, let us return to Free Software. The point of our labor is not to ensure that we are paid; it is to tear down the systems which create inequality and scarcity in the first place.

You've obviously thought this out extensively and decided to advertise. Who am I to offer a better solution? You know your business domain, revenue needs, etc better than me or anyone else.

However, that does not mean I have to agree to advertising -- whether it is labeled ethical, green, sustainable, cage-free or whatever. If you're lucky, you won't have a lot of extremists like myself visiting your site; i.e. the advertising will be successful.

I'm working on https://snowdrift.coop for that.

We could use help, particularly from anyone who's good with css.

there is no such a thing as an ethical comment.

Comments are a cynical deployment of our knowledge of crowd wisdom, media manipulation, and statistics to make people part with their opinions for others they wouldn't think they agree with.

--

Sorry, there is such a think as "more" ethical ads. If you want to be pedantic and argue they should use "more" suit yourself. But things are not black and white, your comment is in itself "manipulating" the reader trying to convince them that ads are all the same and that they cannot be put on an ehtical spectrum which is not true: tracking ads vs billboard, I'd much rather a billboard (which I hate in and on itself as they are usually just making the place they are in uglier).

I'm not trying to manipulate anyone. I'm voicing my opinion. I don't buy anything from advertisements. Period. When I need something, I shop for it. And if you think I'm alone, you're kidding yourself.

That may be the case but you can’t discount the possibility that when you are shopping for something, your choices are influenced by advertising that you have previously been exposed to whether you are aware of it or not. Your decision to go shopping for something in the first place may be influenced by it too.

that's totally fine. I prefer a world without advertisement, ideally. I disagree with you that there is no spectrum of ad ethics.

And while you are not "trying" to manipulate anyone (maybe), I also disagree that you are not effectively influencing your reader thoughts to some degree.

The analogy I made is: even an internet comment does, on a smaller scale, less maliciously, use persuasion techniques: should we get rid of discussion forums too? I don't think so, and while an ad-less world seems like a nice experiment, sounds pretty unrealistic, regulating (outlawing would be nice) tracking in ads? More realistic and fixing 80% of what's wrong with 20% of the effort if you ask me

You're right that an ad-less world is impossible. Advertisements existed before you and I were both alive and they will exist when we're gone.

But that does not mean I have to partake in them, watch them, or allow them to consume my attention and time. I also don't need to spend my limited time on this planet trying to "fix advertising". I can simply block them and ignore the ones that slip through, and get on with my life. If this is an issue that is dear to your heart, that sentiment undoubtedly feels dismissive. I'm sorry about that.