Re:BuzzFeed Says Posts Were Deleted Because of Advertising P...
by manigandham on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @02:50PM
(#9422669)
1) Please stop just assuming lots of things can "work fine behind a paywall". If you haven't run a content business then you just don't understand the costs involved and how advertising is the only viable method for lots of the sites out there.
2) If content has low value, then there wouldn't be visits. But people are still going to all these sites and still reading it so obviously there is lots of value they're getting.
3) The agreement is implicit. There are plenty of legal constructs for this, not everything has to be a signed physical contract. Our society would not exist like it does if that's the only way for binding agreements to be made.
4) The publisher is responding to your request for content with their article + ads. They already take the risk of you not seeing the ads for various reasons. We've had this in other media forever, like how you can just walk out of the room when there are commercials on a tv show. It's a priced in risk. When you actively tamper with that though, then there are problems. AdBlock actively changes what you get by going against what the publisher meant to be delivered for your request. You wanted an article for free, they agreed to give it to you with some ads included. Changing that on the fly is not "ok".
2) If content has low value, then there wouldn't be visits. But people are still going to all these sites and still reading it so obviously there is lots of value they're getting.
3) The agreement is implicit. There are plenty of legal constructs for this, not everything has to be a signed physical contract. Our society would not exist like it does if that's the only way for binding agreements to be made.
4) The publisher is responding to your request for content with their article + ads. They already take the risk of you not seeing the ads for various reasons. We've had this in other media forever, like how you can just walk out of the room when there are commercials on a tv show. It's a priced in risk. When you actively tamper with that though, then there are problems. AdBlock actively changes what you get by going against what the publisher meant to be delivered for your request. You wanted an article for free, they agreed to give it to you with some ads included. Changing that on the fly is not "ok".