"Adblocking is the modern speeding"
July 4, 2015 3:55 AM Subscribe
In this scenario, the publishers and journalists are the residents of the suburban street that has been turned into a cut-through: cars keep speeding past, ignoring them and their entreaties. Worse, the cars are driving too fast, and they pose a risk. But nobody can point to anything definite yet. And the car drivers certainly won’t – they’re too busy driving past.Charles Arthur thinks adblocking is the internet equivalent of speeding.
When internet ads are no longer one of the most common vectors for malware infection, then maybe I'll take these tearful pleas to unblock ads a little more seriously, but until then I'm not going to make myself vulnerable to random vandalism just so you don't have to find a business model that actually works.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 4:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [161 favorites]
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 4:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [161 favorites]
It's a ridiculous analogy. If ad-blocking posed a risk to the wellbeing of other internet users, it might have some merit.
In my opinion, advertisers have ruined an internet that was once based on mutuality and reciprocity. More power to the ad-blockers.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:10 AM on July 4, 2015 [119 favorites]
In my opinion, advertisers have ruined an internet that was once based on mutuality and reciprocity. More power to the ad-blockers.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:10 AM on July 4, 2015 [119 favorites]
Recently, it seems to me, there are more and more ads that can't be blocked on many more websites, and because there is so much content everywhere, it always raises the question: Do I really want to read this article so much that I am willing to watch 15 or 30 seconds of an ad beforehand? The answer for me at least is nearly alway No. So I really wonder, what better tools are there today to avoid the ads?
posted by growabrain at 4:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [38 favorites]
posted by growabrain at 4:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [38 favorites]
The ads are too annoying; ... they’re distracting.
Yeah distracting in that due to mild dyslexia animated ones make it almost impossible for me read the site.
But it looks less and less likely that the solution to this conundrum will be to produce the sort of content – jiggling adverts, autoplaying video – that people want to (or can) block
What, like those pointless animated gifs you've plonked into your article?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:12 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
Yeah distracting in that due to mild dyslexia animated ones make it almost impossible for me read the site.
But it looks less and less likely that the solution to this conundrum will be to produce the sort of content – jiggling adverts, autoplaying video – that people want to (or can) block
What, like those pointless animated gifs you've plonked into your article?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:12 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
no, it's the modern equivalent of locking your car door so thieves don't take your stuff
posted by pyramid termite at 4:13 AM on July 4, 2015 [74 favorites]
posted by pyramid termite at 4:13 AM on July 4, 2015 [74 favorites]
Proofs and Refutations has it, there are too many malicious ad servers out there.
Also "Proofs and Refutations" is the perfect eponysterical metafilter handle.
posted by subdee at 4:14 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
Also "Proofs and Refutations" is the perfect eponysterical metafilter handle.
posted by subdee at 4:14 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
Most of us by now have a kind of Adblock of the Brain anyway. We unconsciously filter out the vast majority of advertising we're bombarded with - we have to or we'd go mad. Adblocking, for a lot of people, is the difference between having someone recycle the junk mail before it reaches your house, and having to drop it in the recycling (unread) yourself. The last time I clicked on an advertisement on the web? Maybe 1997. My elderly mother probably clicks one or two, mostly by accident. That people somehow want to be advertised to is the big lie that marketers repeat to themselves over and over.
posted by pipeski at 4:14 AM on July 4, 2015 [61 favorites]
posted by pipeski at 4:14 AM on July 4, 2015 [61 favorites]
Big corporations aren't obliged to refrain from crashing the economy, undermining democracy, or destroying the biosphere. And governments aren't obliged to provide their citizens with health care or employment. But if I don't watch shitty advertisements I'm doing something unethical. I tell ya it stabs at my conscience day and night 'til I can't eat nor sleep.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:20 AM on July 4, 2015 [246 favorites]
posted by Sing Or Swim at 4:20 AM on July 4, 2015 [246 favorites]
In this analogy we're not talking about speeding through a residential neighbourhood, but rather an corporate industrial neighbourhood. You may well still argue that you will hurt some of the workers, but you lose the 'think of the children' appeal.
posted by fairmettle at 4:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by fairmettle at 4:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
The simile here is a real stretch. Ironically, it itself is advertising.
posted by clockzero at 4:30 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by clockzero at 4:30 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
it's ass backwards anyway - WE'RE the residential neighborhood and the speeding cars are the corporations playing their music too loud, revving their engines and turfing out "buy pepsi" on our lawns like a bunch of half-wit teenagers
posted by pyramid termite at 4:32 AM on July 4, 2015 [145 favorites]
posted by pyramid termite at 4:32 AM on July 4, 2015 [145 favorites]
Conventional advertising is all about interruption and annoyance. Inherently it ceases to work after a time and becomes a nuisance as the recipient is simply more offended. Because advertisers are largely a clueless group, they use essentially meaningless statistics to justify their fees and ad buys.
Ad blocking is the logical technological response to a screaming idiot. I just wish I had such an effective filter while driving, opening my physical mailbox and the numerous email and SMS spammers.
posted by Bdprtsma at 4:32 AM on July 4, 2015 [16 favorites]
Ad blocking is the logical technological response to a screaming idiot. I just wish I had such an effective filter while driving, opening my physical mailbox and the numerous email and SMS spammers.
posted by Bdprtsma at 4:32 AM on July 4, 2015 [16 favorites]
Why yes, endangering the lives of human beings is exactly like threatening a business model. Also refusing to shop in a store that only takes cash: the store might have to install a card reader in the same way some websites adopt paywalls, and the cost might drive them under. Man, consumers make me so mad with their disrespect for business. It's almost like they think capitalism is supposed to involve competition for their benefit.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:33 AM on July 4, 2015 [34 favorites]
posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:33 AM on July 4, 2015 [34 favorites]
I would be thrilled if the advertising industry collapsed along with the attendant ad-supported businesses, since it represents a huge amount of skilled labor completely wasted fighting a zero-sum or negative-sum battle for consumer attention. I assume the eventual result will be better businesses out the other end as the labor is repurposed toward actually productive things.
I use adblock since I don't want ads to exist.
posted by value of information at 4:33 AM on July 4, 2015 [42 favorites]
I use adblock since I don't want ads to exist.
posted by value of information at 4:33 AM on July 4, 2015 [42 favorites]
To internet advertisers, not all viewers the same, marketers will broadly split people into 'consumers' and 'influencers'.
An 'influencer' who links your content is far more valuable to a marketer, it directly introduces more visitors AND improves the sites Google rank.
Now imagine a website packed full of over-the-top adverts, a user thats running an adblocker is far more likely to unknowingly link or forward that site to other people than if they were seeing all the popups and autoplaying videos.
The 'influencers' tend to be heavy users of the internet, reasonably tech savvy and much more likely to run an ad blocker.
So when 'influencers' run an ad blocker they are actually helping websites get away with worse behaviour.
My own experience with alternately running and not running an adblocker is that it does affect the websites that I choose to visit, not immediately but over time there are some domains that I just start to shy away from.
posted by Lanark at 4:40 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
An 'influencer' who links your content is far more valuable to a marketer, it directly introduces more visitors AND improves the sites Google rank.
Now imagine a website packed full of over-the-top adverts, a user thats running an adblocker is far more likely to unknowingly link or forward that site to other people than if they were seeing all the popups and autoplaying videos.
The 'influencers' tend to be heavy users of the internet, reasonably tech savvy and much more likely to run an ad blocker.
So when 'influencers' run an ad blocker they are actually helping websites get away with worse behaviour.
My own experience with alternately running and not running an adblocker is that it does affect the websites that I choose to visit, not immediately but over time there are some domains that I just start to shy away from.
posted by Lanark at 4:40 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
I agree with all of the anti-ad sentiment here, but y'all do know where MetaFilter gets most of its revenue, right?
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:41 AM on July 4, 2015 [12 favorites]
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:41 AM on July 4, 2015 [12 favorites]
OK, this article has inspired me to download an adblocker. I normally use Safari. Should I get Adblock, Adblock Plus, or uBlock?
(I will continue to support Metafilter by donating, instead of ad-clicking, like a normal person)
posted by demonic winged headgear at 4:46 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
(I will continue to support Metafilter by donating, instead of ad-clicking, like a normal person)
posted by demonic winged headgear at 4:46 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
Adblock Plus and NoScript.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:54 AM on July 4, 2015 [13 favorites]
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:54 AM on July 4, 2015 [13 favorites]
So when 'influencers' run an ad blocker they are actually helping websites get away with worse behaviour.
My own experience with alternately running and not running an adblocker is that it does affect the websites that I choose to visit, not immediately but over time there are some domains that I just start to shy away from.
Though I have an adblocker installed I have it off by default and only badlist certain websites where the adverts make a serious difference. There are two websites in particular where they simply don't work unless I switch the adverts off. The owners have crufted their sites with so much adjunk that adblocking is actually the only way for me to access them.
posted by Thing at 4:56 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
My own experience with alternately running and not running an adblocker is that it does affect the websites that I choose to visit, not immediately but over time there are some domains that I just start to shy away from.
Though I have an adblocker installed I have it off by default and only badlist certain websites where the adverts make a serious difference. There are two websites in particular where they simply don't work unless I switch the adverts off. The owners have crufted their sites with so much adjunk that adblocking is actually the only way for me to access them.
posted by Thing at 4:56 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
Blame the video ads on Youtube and other sites. That's what finally made me install an and blocker.
No thank you, I don't want to watch this 30 second ad just to see a 5 second clip of kittens.
posted by ymgve at 5:00 AM on July 4, 2015 [12 favorites]
No thank you, I don't want to watch this 30 second ad just to see a 5 second clip of kittens.
posted by ymgve at 5:00 AM on July 4, 2015 [12 favorites]
Using an adblocker definitely changes my browsing. Without the adblocker I avoid YouTube videos, for example, because of those horrible ads at the beginning; with the adblocker and able to go directly to the content, I'm happy to watch. It's a bit startling to move back and forth between computers (or between browsers), to see how ad-full most people's internet experience is. It's a minority of people who bother to use adblockers, so I doubt they are about to cripple the internet economy.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:00 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by Dip Flash at 5:00 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
I agree with all of the anti-ad sentiment here, but y'all do know where MetaFilter gets most of its revenue, right?
My problem is that when I went to turn off adblocking just for MeFi, Ghostery categorized The Deck as a tracker. I would have absolutely no problem looking at ads to support MeFi, but I definitely don't want to be tracked across different websites by advertisers (not even ThinkGeek).
So instead, I'm going to keep donating money and using adblockers on my main browser. I probably wouldn't click on the ads anyway, so by donating I would hazard a guess that MeFi is getting more money from my usage than if I were to enable ads. I think that's a fair tradeoff.
posted by i feel possessed at 5:03 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
My problem is that when I went to turn off adblocking just for MeFi, Ghostery categorized The Deck as a tracker. I would have absolutely no problem looking at ads to support MeFi, but I definitely don't want to be tracked across different websites by advertisers (not even ThinkGeek).
So instead, I'm going to keep donating money and using adblockers on my main browser. I probably wouldn't click on the ads anyway, so by donating I would hazard a guess that MeFi is getting more money from my usage than if I were to enable ads. I think that's a fair tradeoff.
posted by i feel possessed at 5:03 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
Adblock Plus, NoScript, Ghostery and some additional Adblock Plus filters for domains like Taboola and Outbrain that only exist to serve up 'related content' and 'recommended links.'
posted by box at 5:03 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by box at 5:03 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
uBlock and NoScript. Done.
posted by indubitable at 5:05 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by indubitable at 5:05 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
The difficulty I see is that the usual alternative to ads is to have a pay wall with a monthly fee. Which is fair, they are hopefully producing new and interesting content or maintaining a service so a continuing revenue stream to match the continuing cost stream makes sense.
Where I have a problem is how these costs add up. I maintain a pretty tight budget because if I want to be able handle major life events in ways that minimize my risk of horrible financial doom (or even just have a choice about how I want to handle those major life events) I need to put as much of my budget as possible into savings.
I add on a couple of 'monthly fees' here and there, even small ones, and there goes my long term goals.
I'd love to be able to pay a monthly fee to access and support content and services I enjoy instead of dealing with the ads. But either the big stuff in life (education, house, health care...) would need to be cheaper or I would need to have more surplus income to spend on it.
Or maybe it would work if I only had to pay a few fees instead of lots of fees on lots of websites? After all, if everything had a paywall, and I paid for Metafilter, but nothing else, how would I read any of the links? Or if I picked one news site for example? The way everything links together is part of the challenge.
posted by scififan at 5:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Where I have a problem is how these costs add up. I maintain a pretty tight budget because if I want to be able handle major life events in ways that minimize my risk of horrible financial doom (or even just have a choice about how I want to handle those major life events) I need to put as much of my budget as possible into savings.
I add on a couple of 'monthly fees' here and there, even small ones, and there goes my long term goals.
I'd love to be able to pay a monthly fee to access and support content and services I enjoy instead of dealing with the ads. But either the big stuff in life (education, house, health care...) would need to be cheaper or I would need to have more surplus income to spend on it.
Or maybe it would work if I only had to pay a few fees instead of lots of fees on lots of websites? After all, if everything had a paywall, and I paid for Metafilter, but nothing else, how would I read any of the links? Or if I picked one news site for example? The way everything links together is part of the challenge.
posted by scififan at 5:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
This guy is either too dense or unwilling to put this issue into it's proper context: are we free to interpret the world around us, or must we consume it in exactly the way prescribed by creators?
The World Wide Web was built on the idea that information should be distributed in a device-independent manner to be interpreted for display by a web browser which formats that information according to local hardware constraints and user preferences. There is not and never has been a single, definitive way to view a web page. Users have always been free to configure their web browsers to magnify small text so it can be read more easily, omit large images while on a slow connection, or replace all mentions of the phrase "Florida Man" with "Jeb Bush".
Publishing information on the World Wide Web automatically cedes control of how that information is ultimately displayed to the user. You can't force me to view advertisements any more than you can force me to suffer with yellow text on white backgrounds, or have the MS Comic Papyrus New Amsterdam font installed on my system.
Are visually-impaired people who use screen readers that are unable to interpret advertisements also speeders? Have those of us with older hardware that's unable to support the latest video codec also breaking the social contract?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [50 favorites]
The World Wide Web was built on the idea that information should be distributed in a device-independent manner to be interpreted for display by a web browser which formats that information according to local hardware constraints and user preferences. There is not and never has been a single, definitive way to view a web page. Users have always been free to configure their web browsers to magnify small text so it can be read more easily, omit large images while on a slow connection, or replace all mentions of the phrase "Florida Man" with "Jeb Bush".
Publishing information on the World Wide Web automatically cedes control of how that information is ultimately displayed to the user. You can't force me to view advertisements any more than you can force me to suffer with yellow text on white backgrounds, or have the MS Comic Papyrus New Amsterdam font installed on my system.
Are visually-impaired people who use screen readers that are unable to interpret advertisements also speeders? Have those of us with older hardware that's unable to support the latest video codec also breaking the social contract?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [50 favorites]
I resisted using an adblocker for the longest time, because where does my money come from?
But in the end... it's that or rip your own eyeballs out. It was the video ads here that tipped me over the edge, not just the intersticials but the goddamn auto-runs. You do know I use my computer's audio to play music and radio programming, advertisers? That I do not get a warm rush of purchase-scented gratitude when you suddenly talk over a Bach prelude to sell me a car?
Yes, advertising is broken on the Internet. No, it's not my fault.
posted by Devonian at 5:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [18 favorites]
But in the end... it's that or rip your own eyeballs out. It was the video ads here that tipped me over the edge, not just the intersticials but the goddamn auto-runs. You do know I use my computer's audio to play music and radio programming, advertisers? That I do not get a warm rush of purchase-scented gratitude when you suddenly talk over a Bach prelude to sell me a car?
Yes, advertising is broken on the Internet. No, it's not my fault.
posted by Devonian at 5:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [18 favorites]
I agree with all of the anti-ad sentiment here, but y'all do know where MetaFilter gets most of its revenue, right?
Right over here. Between the small monthly automatic contribution and providing content for free, MeFi is not losing money on not showing me ads.
posted by indubitable at 5:14 AM on July 4, 2015
Right over here. Between the small monthly automatic contribution and providing content for free, MeFi is not losing money on not showing me ads.
posted by indubitable at 5:14 AM on July 4, 2015
That people somehow want to be advertised to is the big lie that marketers repeat to themselves over and over.
You know what? I actually do. But I am pretty specific about what I want. I want ads that are targeted to my needs and wants.
What I don't want? Ads that tease. Ads that lie. Ads for porn or psuedo porn. Ads for snake oil/scams. Ads for products that are out of stock. Ads for celebrity bullshit.
Guess what I get...
posted by srboisvert at 5:15 AM on July 4, 2015 [9 favorites]
You know what? I actually do. But I am pretty specific about what I want. I want ads that are targeted to my needs and wants.
What I don't want? Ads that tease. Ads that lie. Ads for porn or psuedo porn. Ads for snake oil/scams. Ads for products that are out of stock. Ads for celebrity bullshit.
Guess what I get...
posted by srboisvert at 5:15 AM on July 4, 2015 [9 favorites]
I'm surprised how much of the Internet still runs on click advertizing - the problem of ad blockers and hundredths of a penny per pageview/clickthrough existed when I was following the Rants of Lum the Mad back in '99 (and I'm quite aware of how Get Off My Lawn that sounds, kthx), and the solution then was the same as it mostly is now: find people willing to pay for your content, either through donations or a paywall.
People have never liked advertizing, but they tolerate it when they have to - commercials on the big three networks back in the day comes to mind. When they don't have to tolerate it, they don't. It really is as simple as that. The people who are going to make money on the internet (and anywhere else, in the long term), are people who produce something other people are willing to pay for.
The really chuckalicious thing to me is if I had to pay ten bucks for a comprehensive adblocker and two bucks a month to keep the filter operational, I'd do that rather than look at another banner ad or (hate hate HATE) interstitial.
posted by Mooski at 5:28 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
People have never liked advertizing, but they tolerate it when they have to - commercials on the big three networks back in the day comes to mind. When they don't have to tolerate it, they don't. It really is as simple as that. The people who are going to make money on the internet (and anywhere else, in the long term), are people who produce something other people are willing to pay for.
The really chuckalicious thing to me is if I had to pay ten bucks for a comprehensive adblocker and two bucks a month to keep the filter operational, I'd do that rather than look at another banner ad or (hate hate HATE) interstitial.
posted by Mooski at 5:28 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
Since I'm just the product being sold, why does that mean I have some kind of obligation? I'm just waiting for the next generation of ad blockers that spoofs the display of ads and so can't be detected.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:37 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:37 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
I agree with all of the anti-ad sentiment here, but y'all do know where MetaFilter gets most of its revenue, right?
*wince* Thanks for the reminder to disable my adblocker on MeFi, since the ads here are inoffensive and, well, I like the site and would like to maximize its revenue.
The problem with ads is that there are a bunch of bad actors whose ads absolutely remove my ability to enjoy a site. Autoplay video ads are especially bad for this, as are the malware ads alluded to above. And I have no way of knowing, when I visit a new site, whether it's going to be a 'bad actor' that tries to install malware on my computer or starts playing some kind of loud obnoxious video at me... or whether its ads are just text ads with minimal pictures tucked away into a corner, where I can cheerfully ignore them. So I leave my adblocker on by default.
The problem is, I like to try and toss money at sites I like, because I'm paying for stuff that is more or less free for me to use. (I'm pretty broke-ass right now, so direct donation is hard for me, but tolerating ads is easy.) MeFi is a good example of this; so's Hulu, or the to-do app I installed a while back, or my favorite podcast site, or Spotify. Sometimes I spend considerable time on a site where I'd be very happy to try and do something positive for the site by being there... but I forget to turn off the adblocker, even though I know the ads there aren't really that irritating. Conversations like this can be a good reminder to do that for good sites.
After all, even if the system is broken--internet ads are stunningly ineffective for advertising products I would actually like to buy--that doesn't mean that gaming the system towards good actors isn't worth doing.
posted by sciatrix at 5:39 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
*wince* Thanks for the reminder to disable my adblocker on MeFi, since the ads here are inoffensive and, well, I like the site and would like to maximize its revenue.
The problem with ads is that there are a bunch of bad actors whose ads absolutely remove my ability to enjoy a site. Autoplay video ads are especially bad for this, as are the malware ads alluded to above. And I have no way of knowing, when I visit a new site, whether it's going to be a 'bad actor' that tries to install malware on my computer or starts playing some kind of loud obnoxious video at me... or whether its ads are just text ads with minimal pictures tucked away into a corner, where I can cheerfully ignore them. So I leave my adblocker on by default.
The problem is, I like to try and toss money at sites I like, because I'm paying for stuff that is more or less free for me to use. (I'm pretty broke-ass right now, so direct donation is hard for me, but tolerating ads is easy.) MeFi is a good example of this; so's Hulu, or the to-do app I installed a while back, or my favorite podcast site, or Spotify. Sometimes I spend considerable time on a site where I'd be very happy to try and do something positive for the site by being there... but I forget to turn off the adblocker, even though I know the ads there aren't really that irritating. Conversations like this can be a good reminder to do that for good sites.
After all, even if the system is broken--internet ads are stunningly ineffective for advertising products I would actually like to buy--that doesn't mean that gaming the system towards good actors isn't worth doing.
posted by sciatrix at 5:39 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Bullshit. If I'm speeding, it's not because I want to risk someone's livelihood (also: did anyone ever did that?). It's because I'm escaping a fucking avalanche. If there was such a thing as a responsible ad usage in the internet, most people would probably treat it as a newspaper ad or the minutes of ads on every hour of regular TV. But instead...
- Most of them are advertising untargeted products I wouldn't consider buying.
- A large part of them aren't even pushing products, but scam contests, "celebrity" secrets or fake pills
- A lot of pages are designed to service ads first, content second.
- Some ads have payloads
- Ads disguised as part of the content (the "click here to continue" at the bottom of content types)
- Tracking across sites
- Ads are often designed to be as loud visually as possible. Some cross into also having sound.
- Some sites have resorted to bullshit tactics such as splitting short articles into multiple pages or advertorials.
I use adblock everywhere but a few sites. I at times disable it for sites I regularly use, and if they do little of those, it gets whitelisted.
And here's an idea: instead of spending money on hacks to whitewash the current internet ad climate, get together with other media groups and start a joint Internet Advertising Standards Bureau. Pledge to run only campaigns for legally sound, target demo appropriate products (this means, among others, no 999'999 visitor contests and no pill scams, but if a site wants to run fully-law compliant porn site or dildos and bondage gear ads, it's their choice), in a manner they're visible but not obstructive of content, or allow tracking of data other than the very basic.
Then, work with companies developing ad blockers to whitelist compliant sites by default, with the user still having the option to opt-out, after being told that a lot of webpages rely on ad-revenue to pay bills, and the IASB was an effort to improve ad standards on the internet.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:39 AM on July 4, 2015 [11 favorites]
- Most of them are advertising untargeted products I wouldn't consider buying.
- A large part of them aren't even pushing products, but scam contests, "celebrity" secrets or fake pills
- A lot of pages are designed to service ads first, content second.
- Some ads have payloads
- Ads disguised as part of the content (the "click here to continue" at the bottom of content types)
- Tracking across sites
- Ads are often designed to be as loud visually as possible. Some cross into also having sound.
- Some sites have resorted to bullshit tactics such as splitting short articles into multiple pages or advertorials.
I use adblock everywhere but a few sites. I at times disable it for sites I regularly use, and if they do little of those, it gets whitelisted.
And here's an idea: instead of spending money on hacks to whitewash the current internet ad climate, get together with other media groups and start a joint Internet Advertising Standards Bureau. Pledge to run only campaigns for legally sound, target demo appropriate products (this means, among others, no 999'999 visitor contests and no pill scams, but if a site wants to run fully-law compliant porn site or dildos and bondage gear ads, it's their choice), in a manner they're visible but not obstructive of content, or allow tracking of data other than the very basic.
Then, work with companies developing ad blockers to whitelist compliant sites by default, with the user still having the option to opt-out, after being told that a lot of webpages rely on ad-revenue to pay bills, and the IASB was an effort to improve ad standards on the internet.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:39 AM on July 4, 2015 [11 favorites]
Seems to me this information superhighway was built for speeding.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 5:40 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 5:40 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Adblocking is the modern speedingpothole repair.
ftfy
posted by Thorzdad at 5:42 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
ftfy
posted by Thorzdad at 5:42 AM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
I would love an adblocker for Spotify. I certainly don't mind that I have to listen to ads in general while using it--that part's not so different from the radio (although local radio has devolved into what feels like half-hour blocks of ads with little music in between). But I think Spotify hires voice actors with particularly, pointedly, offensively whiny voices. I am not sure exactly how to describe them, but it's a little like having a child beg and beg you for something, only that child is a hipster and is trying to get you to try some sort of berries-by-mail program. The voices are so grating, I really think it's by design, to encourage people to try Premium just to escape them.
posted by mittens at 5:58 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by mittens at 5:58 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Adblock Plus allows some "acceptable ads" to go through. Surprisingly, The Deck doesn't seem to be in there.
Also it looks like there are ad blockers (or muters) for Spotify, but the labels really want the freemium tier killed so this certainly hastens its demise.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:08 AM on July 4, 2015
Also it looks like there are ad blockers (or muters) for Spotify, but the labels really want the freemium tier killed so this certainly hastens its demise.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:08 AM on July 4, 2015
OK, this article has inspired me to download an adblocker. I normally use Safari. Should I get Adblock, Adblock Plus, or uBlock?
(I will continue to support Metafilter by donating, instead of ad-clicking, like a normal person)
posted by demonic winged headgear at 7:46 AM on July 4 [+] [!]
Adblock Plus and NoScript.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:54 AM on July 4 [3 favorites +] [!]
Yep, this thread, and some really scammy-looking website I clicked into yesterday have finally done it. (But, now that I've installed them, I don't see where you control Adblock Plus in Safari, other than the Extensions tab in Preferences where I can turn it off or uninstall. Is there supposed to be somewhere I make whitelists, or is it an on/off all or nothing thing?)
posted by oh yeah! at 6:11 AM on July 4, 2015
(I will continue to support Metafilter by donating, instead of ad-clicking, like a normal person)
posted by demonic winged headgear at 7:46 AM on July 4 [+] [!]
Adblock Plus and NoScript.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:54 AM on July 4 [3 favorites +] [!]
Yep, this thread, and some really scammy-looking website I clicked into yesterday have finally done it. (But, now that I've installed them, I don't see where you control Adblock Plus in Safari, other than the Extensions tab in Preferences where I can turn it off or uninstall. Is there supposed to be somewhere I make whitelists, or is it an on/off all or nothing thing?)
posted by oh yeah! at 6:11 AM on July 4, 2015
Oh, hey, I see it in the toolbar now! Disabled for mefi now.
posted by oh yeah! at 6:12 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by oh yeah! at 6:12 AM on July 4, 2015
Just adding my voice the chorus I suppose but I genuinely believe that advertising can be a good thing. It enables lots of people to have access to things using something they can spare, a moment or two of attention, as opposed to something they may not have at all, namely money.
That said, there is a tipping point. Passive advertisements, like a magazine, are fine. Autoplay videos, especially with sound, are not. And it's just advertisers being lazy. Whereas they previously worked to come up with advertising that was interesting enough to make you want to read or watch it, now they can just force you to pay attention to the most banal, stupid shit. Screw that.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 6:15 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
That said, there is a tipping point. Passive advertisements, like a magazine, are fine. Autoplay videos, especially with sound, are not. And it's just advertisers being lazy. Whereas they previously worked to come up with advertising that was interesting enough to make you want to read or watch it, now they can just force you to pay attention to the most banal, stupid shit. Screw that.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 6:15 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
My problem is that when I went to turn off adblocking just for MeFi, Ghostery categorized The Deck as a tracker.
Incidentally, you don't have to worry about unblocking Metafilter unless you unblock some other site that uses the Deck as well -- a "tracker" can only track you between two sites where it's loaded.
But more broadly, I agree that trackers are the real issue for me -- I don't block ads, but I do block third-party trackers, and that means I pretty much do block ads after all. I wonder how many others use adblockers for similar reasons.
I'd love to see advertisers get serious about something like double-keyed cookies that would make it possible to include third-party javascript without having to share your browsing history with the world. (I am aware that there are technical objections to this proposal and I think they're workable, but it's not something that's been seriously tested.)
But what I've heard from advertisers is more that tracking and targeting is a fundamental part of making online ads profitable. In which case, I'll keep blocking.
posted by jhc at 6:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Incidentally, you don't have to worry about unblocking Metafilter unless you unblock some other site that uses the Deck as well -- a "tracker" can only track you between two sites where it's loaded.
But more broadly, I agree that trackers are the real issue for me -- I don't block ads, but I do block third-party trackers, and that means I pretty much do block ads after all. I wonder how many others use adblockers for similar reasons.
I'd love to see advertisers get serious about something like double-keyed cookies that would make it possible to include third-party javascript without having to share your browsing history with the world. (I am aware that there are technical objections to this proposal and I think they're workable, but it's not something that's been seriously tested.)
But what I've heard from advertisers is more that tracking and targeting is a fundamental part of making online ads profitable. In which case, I'll keep blocking.
posted by jhc at 6:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Even without the malicious ad servers, there are some ads that I just have to block in order to use the internet.
I do not have the connection speed or data transfer cap to download an ad video or before I read a webpage; I will simply never read the webpage. I would rather not ruin my hearing through ads that BLAST NOISE at me because I have my sound turned up to do phonetic work.
I can ignore flashing ads and ads with disgusting imagery, but I would really rather not see them in the first place.
The advertising support model is broken, and it's not just because people are blocking the ads. It's because people aren't clicking them, and so advertisers try to come up with the most noticeable, intrusive bullshit - or resort to serving malware. Sooner or later the model will collapse. Adblockers might speed it up but I don't think that getting rid of them could save it.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
I do not have the connection speed or data transfer cap to download an ad video or before I read a webpage; I will simply never read the webpage. I would rather not ruin my hearing through ads that BLAST NOISE at me because I have my sound turned up to do phonetic work.
I can ignore flashing ads and ads with disgusting imagery, but I would really rather not see them in the first place.
The advertising support model is broken, and it's not just because people are blocking the ads. It's because people aren't clicking them, and so advertisers try to come up with the most noticeable, intrusive bullshit - or resort to serving malware. Sooner or later the model will collapse. Adblockers might speed it up but I don't think that getting rid of them could save it.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
Just remembered a time when me and friend where chatting on twitter and laughing over how overtly terrible the ads were on fairly prominent website ("Go on I dare you... just turn off adblock. Just a quick look" "OK.... ARGGGHH!"). Then the editor of said website turned up and sea-lioned us about how wrong we were. Of course that really endeared me to the site.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:28 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:28 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
I tear out the ads in magazines whenever I can. I walk away from the TV or change the channel when the ads come on. Why shouldn't I be able to do the same thing on the Internet?
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 6:30 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy at 6:30 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
No, it's not. Speeding is the modern speeding.
Ad blocking may reduce someone's profits, maybe even someone I care about but don't realize I care about.
Speeding can (in some circumstances) pose an actual risk to someone's life.
Now if we're comparing ad blocking to speeding at a safe speed with no surrounding traffic in an area whose limit is justified solely by municipal revenue requirements, maybe.
But you know, somehow I don't think that was the comparison they were going for...
posted by -1 at 6:48 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Ad blocking may reduce someone's profits, maybe even someone I care about but don't realize I care about.
Speeding can (in some circumstances) pose an actual risk to someone's life.
Now if we're comparing ad blocking to speeding at a safe speed with no surrounding traffic in an area whose limit is justified solely by municipal revenue requirements, maybe.
But you know, somehow I don't think that was the comparison they were going for...
posted by -1 at 6:48 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
When Apple announced that iOS9 would have ad blocking, PCMag wrote an article about how it was a bad move. Here's what that ariticle looks like on iOS and Safari for Mac.
This is, of course, obviously Apple's fault!
No. It's not Apple's fault. The reason we're all running Ad Blockers is advertisers have frankly abused the web. If they had done things like they did on TV or Radio, or even sports, we probably could have coped. But look at those two. The only thing on IOS that I can see on that story is the headline. I cannot even see that on the Mac -- and, of course, look at those amazing ads!
I haven't EVEN gotten to the tracking and malware aspects of it. I've just gotten to the fact that I've clicked on a story about how ad-blocking may be a bad thing and I can't read it BECAUSE THE FUCKING ADS ARE COMPLETELY FILLING THE SCREEN. Wow. Such Irony. Much Annoyance. Wow.
So, yes. Advertisers? You blew it. You blew it big, you blew it hard, and you are not getting a second chance from me or anybody else with a clue. We've seen how much you can be trusted without regulation -- not one goddamn bit -- and since we've seen we can't have a regulatory body on the internet, well, we're not letting you show ads on our computers.
You had your chance and basically said FUCK YOU AND YOUR PRIVACY AND YOUR ABILITY TO READ THINGS. Now, we have our chance, and we're saying FUCK YOU AND YOUR ABILITY TO MAKE MONEY.
Tragedy of the commons, fucker!
And, you know, when you have the big "black out the window and put the ad up?" I usually just close the page. You didn't gain a mailing list member. You just lost a page view forever, and if I have to, and an email is required, I run my own mail server, and I have a nice auto-rejecting email all set up for the likes of you.
Sorry, dudes. I've been on the net longer then many of you have been alive. I may be losing, but it's My Internet Connection, My Email, My Computer, and MY RULES.
And if you don't think I'll pay for content? I don't steal music, or movies -- I have a large collection of both. I have a star on my MeFi account, and I've supported many other sites with cash. There are a number of sites that have proven responsible with ads that I've whitelisted out of adblock. They play fair, so I play fair. I'm in IT, came up as a sysadmin, I *know* what running large websites costs, doubly so large data driven websites.
But when you're insulting me with the ads, and then trying to shame me into watching them?
Well, let's just say that's ANOTHER reason I don't read PCmag.
posted by eriko at 6:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [72 favorites]
This is, of course, obviously Apple's fault!
No. It's not Apple's fault. The reason we're all running Ad Blockers is advertisers have frankly abused the web. If they had done things like they did on TV or Radio, or even sports, we probably could have coped. But look at those two. The only thing on IOS that I can see on that story is the headline. I cannot even see that on the Mac -- and, of course, look at those amazing ads!
I haven't EVEN gotten to the tracking and malware aspects of it. I've just gotten to the fact that I've clicked on a story about how ad-blocking may be a bad thing and I can't read it BECAUSE THE FUCKING ADS ARE COMPLETELY FILLING THE SCREEN. Wow. Such Irony. Much Annoyance. Wow.
So, yes. Advertisers? You blew it. You blew it big, you blew it hard, and you are not getting a second chance from me or anybody else with a clue. We've seen how much you can be trusted without regulation -- not one goddamn bit -- and since we've seen we can't have a regulatory body on the internet, well, we're not letting you show ads on our computers.
You had your chance and basically said FUCK YOU AND YOUR PRIVACY AND YOUR ABILITY TO READ THINGS. Now, we have our chance, and we're saying FUCK YOU AND YOUR ABILITY TO MAKE MONEY.
Tragedy of the commons, fucker!
And, you know, when you have the big "black out the window and put the ad up?" I usually just close the page. You didn't gain a mailing list member. You just lost a page view forever, and if I have to, and an email is required, I run my own mail server, and I have a nice auto-rejecting email all set up for the likes of you.
Sorry, dudes. I've been on the net longer then many of you have been alive. I may be losing, but it's My Internet Connection, My Email, My Computer, and MY RULES.
And if you don't think I'll pay for content? I don't steal music, or movies -- I have a large collection of both. I have a star on my MeFi account, and I've supported many other sites with cash. There are a number of sites that have proven responsible with ads that I've whitelisted out of adblock. They play fair, so I play fair. I'm in IT, came up as a sysadmin, I *know* what running large websites costs, doubly so large data driven websites.
But when you're insulting me with the ads, and then trying to shame me into watching them?
Well, let's just say that's ANOTHER reason I don't read PCmag.
posted by eriko at 6:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [72 favorites]
Charlie thinks wrong. Unless babysitting is child negligence as well.
posted by clvrmnky at 6:59 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by clvrmnky at 6:59 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
But then how do you guys engage with your favorite brands?
posted by Lutoslawski at 6:59 AM on July 4, 2015 [40 favorites]
posted by Lutoslawski at 6:59 AM on July 4, 2015 [40 favorites]
How do you block those stupid popup ads that ask you to like them on facebook or if you're against kicking kittens or whatever? I wouldn't mind some reasonable ads, but everything seems to be autoplay video with noise.
Slate has found that us international people aren't worth enough to advertisers, so after 5 articles a month you're paywalled. I particularly like how they say you'll see fewer (but not zero) ads, even though actually the advertisers don't want your views, they do.
posted by jeather at 7:07 AM on July 4, 2015
Slate has found that us international people aren't worth enough to advertisers, so after 5 articles a month you're paywalled. I particularly like how they say you'll see fewer (but not zero) ads, even though actually the advertisers don't want your views, they do.
posted by jeather at 7:07 AM on July 4, 2015
No one who's had their ears blasted by some noisy pop up is going feel the slightest sympathy for advertisers.
posted by Beholder at 7:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Beholder at 7:07 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Why do you people hate Freedom?
posted by echocollate at 7:19 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by echocollate at 7:19 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Using an ad blocker to avoid malware is, to use the obligatory car analogy, like locking your passenger-side door, leaving the driver-side swinging open, and declaring your car safe from thieves. AdBlock does nothing to keep you safe from malicious content it doesn't consider an ad, which might be a page you're tricked into loading, or even a genuine page that the attacker infected with an XSS exploit.
A better approach is to make loading any web content as safe as you possibly can. That means: keep your software up to date, disable the Java and Adobe Reader plugins, disable Flash if you possibly can (and use your browser's click-to-play feature if you really need to [Firefox, Chrome]), and that's >95% of exploits taken care of. You NoScript users are already safe from most browser exploits, especially if you're careful which sites you whitelist.
Windows users might also want to install EMET, a Microsoft tool that lets you enable certain checks that shut down the browser when it looks like an exploit is being attempted. EMET is a little complex, so I won't get into the details here, but here's a solid introduction. I've been running EMET for years with no loss to speed or stability.
posted by skymt at 7:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
A better approach is to make loading any web content as safe as you possibly can. That means: keep your software up to date, disable the Java and Adobe Reader plugins, disable Flash if you possibly can (and use your browser's click-to-play feature if you really need to [Firefox, Chrome]), and that's >95% of exploits taken care of. You NoScript users are already safe from most browser exploits, especially if you're careful which sites you whitelist.
Windows users might also want to install EMET, a Microsoft tool that lets you enable certain checks that shut down the browser when it looks like an exploit is being attempted. EMET is a little complex, so I won't get into the details here, but here's a solid introduction. I've been running EMET for years with no loss to speed or stability.
posted by skymt at 7:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Why do you people hate Freedom?
But I love having the freedom to run uBlock?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:30 AM on July 4, 2015
But I love having the freedom to run uBlock?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:30 AM on July 4, 2015
The next thing after Digital Rights Management may be Attention Rights Management (ARM); justified by the (somewhat ambitious) legal doctrine that consumers of online media have assented to a social contract to pay attention to advertising, there will be mechanisms to enforce this, and lawsuits against attempts to circumvent them. We've seen speculative patents for gaze-tracking web browsers that keep track of how long you've looked at the ads, and even the nightmarish Sony patent for the interactive TV feature that keeps showing an ad until you shout the advertiser's slogan to make it go away; and, of course, the “10 Million Merits” Black Mirror episode.
posted by acb at 7:31 AM on July 4, 2015 [13 favorites]
posted by acb at 7:31 AM on July 4, 2015 [13 favorites]
So for those who don't know, AdBlock Plus is an extortion scheme that "whitelists" certain sites and let's their ads through. Sites that pay them a lot of money.
Anyway, I've never used an ad blocker and yet somehow I remain alive. If a sites ads are that intrusive I'll just close the window and move on. It is amazing how badly some sites cripple themselves to display ads everywhere. It's not just annoying, it's actually a bad, amateurish advertising strategy.
posted by GuyZero at 7:32 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
Anyway, I've never used an ad blocker and yet somehow I remain alive. If a sites ads are that intrusive I'll just close the window and move on. It is amazing how badly some sites cripple themselves to display ads everywhere. It's not just annoying, it's actually a bad, amateurish advertising strategy.
posted by GuyZero at 7:32 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
OK, this article has inspired me to download an adblocker. I normally use Safari. Should I get Adblock, Adblock Plus, or uBlock?
Somebody on Metafilter recently recommended uBlock and RequestPolicy so I switched from AdBlock Plus and NoScript.
I don't regret the switch at all. The combination seems much more responsive and less bloated.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:37 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
Somebody on Metafilter recently recommended uBlock and RequestPolicy so I switched from AdBlock Plus and NoScript.
I don't regret the switch at all. The combination seems much more responsive and less bloated.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:37 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
>It is amazing how badly some sites cripple themselves to display ads everywhere. It's not just annoying, it's actually a bad, amateurish advertising strategy.
You know what's worse? That the editorial side of such sites frequently argues fiercely on just this point as redesign after redesign pushes ever more ads - "But everyone else is doing it, we must remain competitive", says management (who rarely have editorial experience).
Of course, engagement and effectiveness then goes downhill, by any metric, and editorial gets the blame, gets defunded (a cost centre, y'see, and revenues aren't good) and destaffed, and more ads go on the page and... well.
Here we are.
If only it wasn't for the ad blockers, eh?
posted by Devonian at 7:43 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
You know what's worse? That the editorial side of such sites frequently argues fiercely on just this point as redesign after redesign pushes ever more ads - "But everyone else is doing it, we must remain competitive", says management (who rarely have editorial experience).
Of course, engagement and effectiveness then goes downhill, by any metric, and editorial gets the blame, gets defunded (a cost centre, y'see, and revenues aren't good) and destaffed, and more ads go on the page and... well.
Here we are.
If only it wasn't for the ad blockers, eh?
posted by Devonian at 7:43 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'll watch a 30 second ad to watch a video I really want to watch. But. The 30 second video will often be the same 30 second video over and over. Ads need to be unique some of the time. Dunno if Hulu's gotten better, but their insertion of ads used to be really clunky, and the ads were annoyingly repetitive.
I'd cheerfully accept ads on nytimes.com. I just turned off adblocker and got a 15 second video on top of a 'print' article. That's hostile. Then I got an ad for a product I looked at the other day, and it felt creepy. Time to delete my history. Time to re-enable adblocker.
Or, I see a link to a product that I'd like to look at. When I visit the site, I have to join the site to shop, and accept daily emails. By the time I register, I've forgotten what I wanted to look at and leave in disgust. The email goes straight to spam. I might get linked to the site again. I can't be arsed to look up the password and they're clearly a pain in the ass.
The way we get information is changing drastically, and content-providers aren't figuring it out. I'll subscribe to nytimes as soon as I'm employed again; it's a news site that justifies the cost, pretty much. newyorker.om, as well, but I'll get the print edition, which is a pleasure to read. But what I really do is visit a variety of news sites, and I'm not at all interested in subscribing to 2 or 3 and using only those few.
I almost never see sidebarred ads for Pepsi, or Minutemaid OJ, or basic consumer products that are heavily advertised on tv. Somewhere I read that just seeing the Coke logo in the convenience store makes some percentage of people add a Coke to their stuff. It surprises me how few consumer companies advertise on the web. So, my response is that advertisers can't figure out how to do ads on the web successfully. Without malware. Without being user-hostile. Without being the fucking obnoxious Hit THe Monkey ads.
You can't actually grab and chain my eyeballs. You can't glue me to your site. Content is expensive, websites cost money to run, though far less, I think, than print. Create good content and people will flock to it. Run ads that are engaging enough to make me want to click, or that remind me to buy your wonderful product that is well-made and useful. yeah, like that's gonna happen.
posted by theora55 at 7:43 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'd cheerfully accept ads on nytimes.com. I just turned off adblocker and got a 15 second video on top of a 'print' article. That's hostile. Then I got an ad for a product I looked at the other day, and it felt creepy. Time to delete my history. Time to re-enable adblocker.
Or, I see a link to a product that I'd like to look at. When I visit the site, I have to join the site to shop, and accept daily emails. By the time I register, I've forgotten what I wanted to look at and leave in disgust. The email goes straight to spam. I might get linked to the site again. I can't be arsed to look up the password and they're clearly a pain in the ass.
The way we get information is changing drastically, and content-providers aren't figuring it out. I'll subscribe to nytimes as soon as I'm employed again; it's a news site that justifies the cost, pretty much. newyorker.om, as well, but I'll get the print edition, which is a pleasure to read. But what I really do is visit a variety of news sites, and I'm not at all interested in subscribing to 2 or 3 and using only those few.
I almost never see sidebarred ads for Pepsi, or Minutemaid OJ, or basic consumer products that are heavily advertised on tv. Somewhere I read that just seeing the Coke logo in the convenience store makes some percentage of people add a Coke to their stuff. It surprises me how few consumer companies advertise on the web. So, my response is that advertisers can't figure out how to do ads on the web successfully. Without malware. Without being user-hostile. Without being the fucking obnoxious Hit THe Monkey ads.
You can't actually grab and chain my eyeballs. You can't glue me to your site. Content is expensive, websites cost money to run, though far less, I think, than print. Create good content and people will flock to it. Run ads that are engaging enough to make me want to click, or that remind me to buy your wonderful product that is well-made and useful. yeah, like that's gonna happen.
posted by theora55 at 7:43 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Let me just say, *I* am paying for *MY* connection to my ISP. And *I* decide what content *I* want to download or display on *MY* computer over *MY* connection to my ISP.
Property rights. The basis of civilization.
posted by mikelieman at 7:45 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
Property rights. The basis of civilization.
posted by mikelieman at 7:45 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
sciatrix: but I forget to turn off the adblocker
You should be able to whitelist certain sites. Check the settings for the adblocker you use.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:45 AM on July 4, 2015
You should be able to whitelist certain sites. Check the settings for the adblocker you use.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:45 AM on July 4, 2015
A key issue that nobody talks about is that advertising is bandwidth theft.
I, the internet user, am paying my ISP for bandwidth. I, the internet user, click on your website to read a 2000 word article or look at a 500kB image. I do not believe I should have to download 2Mb of advertising images and execute 25,000 lines of buggy third-party javascript to read that 11kB of text in that essay or to look at that image.
Advertising turns the internet into a sucking swamp. Part of the appeal of ad blocking is that everything loads so much faster. Whoever thinks advertising is a good business model for funding internet services is therefore in favour of slow, buggy, bloated, malware-infested junk. To use a metaphor: you can drive a car, or you can catch a bus for free—but the bus company refuses to drive above 15 km/h and plays obnoxious adverts at you the whole time to "fund the service".
posted by cstross at 7:49 AM on July 4, 2015 [60 favorites]
I, the internet user, am paying my ISP for bandwidth. I, the internet user, click on your website to read a 2000 word article or look at a 500kB image. I do not believe I should have to download 2Mb of advertising images and execute 25,000 lines of buggy third-party javascript to read that 11kB of text in that essay or to look at that image.
Advertising turns the internet into a sucking swamp. Part of the appeal of ad blocking is that everything loads so much faster. Whoever thinks advertising is a good business model for funding internet services is therefore in favour of slow, buggy, bloated, malware-infested junk. To use a metaphor: you can drive a car, or you can catch a bus for free—but the bus company refuses to drive above 15 km/h and plays obnoxious adverts at you the whole time to "fund the service".
posted by cstross at 7:49 AM on July 4, 2015 [60 favorites]
And, you know, when you have the big "black out the window and put the ad up?" I usually just close the page.
Is there any way to block these? I'm on Chrome and AdBlock does nothing. I've used NoScript in the past but it blocked a lot of things I did want to see. If it blocks these "pop-ups" then I'll use it again.
On another note, I'm always shocked when I go to my parents' house and browse the unfiltered internet. I literally have no idea how they read a website what with all the flashing colors and sounds.
posted by desjardins at 7:49 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Is there any way to block these? I'm on Chrome and AdBlock does nothing. I've used NoScript in the past but it blocked a lot of things I did want to see. If it blocks these "pop-ups" then I'll use it again.
On another note, I'm always shocked when I go to my parents' house and browse the unfiltered internet. I literally have no idea how they read a website what with all the flashing colors and sounds.
posted by desjardins at 7:49 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
I just sent MeFi a check to show that advertising has nothing to do with it.
posted by mikelieman at 7:54 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by mikelieman at 7:54 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I noticed in the author has been a journalist for 20+ years. I thought this was ironic. He'll remember when people started publishing "weblogs" and newspapers and magazines began their first experiments with going online. Now in 2015, my regular bookstore has been gone for five years. I still get two print magazines, but they come in the mail, I'm not even sure whether my city has a news stand where I could buy them in person. And the local newspaper has gotten smaller both in format and thickness and seems to get most of its news from other outlets. Disruptors gonna disrupt. These guys were the disruptors a few years ago, now they are being disrupted. Bring on the next thing, industry. I'm waiting.
posted by kovacs at 7:55 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by kovacs at 7:55 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
MetaFilter: either too dense or unwilling to put this issue into it's proper context
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:55 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:55 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's a ridiculous analogy. If ad-blocking posed a risk to the wellbeing of other internet users, it might have some merit.
Presumably the risk is less internet content for all users, much of which is dependent upon ad revenue.
posted by Jeff Dewey at 8:01 AM on July 4, 2015
Presumably the risk is less internet content for all users, much of which is dependent upon ad revenue.
posted by Jeff Dewey at 8:01 AM on July 4, 2015
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posted by DoctorFedora at 8:04 AM on July 4, 2015 [20 favorites]
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posted by DoctorFedora at 8:04 AM on July 4, 2015 [20 favorites]
But then how do you guys engage with your favorite brands?
Personally? At about 15km with heavy artillery before I send in armor and infantry supported by airstrikes.
posted by eriko at 8:06 AM on July 4, 2015 [23 favorites]
Personally? At about 15km with heavy artillery before I send in armor and infantry supported by airstrikes.
posted by eriko at 8:06 AM on July 4, 2015 [23 favorites]
I just want to know how the 'adblock is speeding' simile interacts with the 'music copying is stealing cars' simile in the bigger scheme of things. I don't think I can figure that out on my own.
And I heard if you watch too many ads you increasingly mistake all the people who don't participate in the Internet by ads experiment for bad participants. I mean, just look at Charles Arthur. It just happened to him, and in public too.
posted by Ashenmote at 8:08 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
And I heard if you watch too many ads you increasingly mistake all the people who don't participate in the Internet by ads experiment for bad participants. I mean, just look at Charles Arthur. It just happened to him, and in public too.
posted by Ashenmote at 8:08 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Facebook's next billion likes hinges on Africa
Once you decipher that gibberish headline, you see that the only market that currently might work is South Africa's. They believe they can train the next billion likes, starting with convincing companies in Nigeria and Kenya etc to pay for this. Absolutely nobody I know imagines this is going to wendell. Otoh, the drama will be worth watching.
posted by infini at 8:08 AM on July 4, 2015
Once you decipher that gibberish headline, you see that the only market that currently might work is South Africa's. They believe they can train the next billion likes, starting with convincing companies in Nigeria and Kenya etc to pay for this. Absolutely nobody I know imagines this is going to wendell. Otoh, the drama will be worth watching.
posted by infini at 8:08 AM on July 4, 2015
The way we get information is changing drastically, and content-providers aren't figuring it out.
This.
*digs out Cluetrain*
posted by infini at 8:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
This.
*digs out Cluetrain*
posted by infini at 8:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Got another window open with Deadmau5's Glastonbury performance streaming off the BBC's website and I've just noticed he's got an Angry Birds sweatshirt on... is nothing sacred?!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:13 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:13 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
"Adblocking is the modern speeding. Somewhere, we know it’s probably not right. "
Oh we do, do we?
This article is apologist horseshit of the first water. We're supposed to feel sorry for the ad agencies and the big websites with their increasingly invasive tracking and profiling and privacy invasion are we? Cry me a river.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:13 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Oh we do, do we?
This article is apologist horseshit of the first water. We're supposed to feel sorry for the ad agencies and the big websites with their increasingly invasive tracking and profiling and privacy invasion are we? Cry me a river.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:13 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
(After being prompted by this thread to do a little research on the subject, I just switched from Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin.)
posted by box at 8:14 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by box at 8:14 AM on July 4, 2015
Is this article an example of native advertising which is being touted by trendier n00bs like quartz etc?
posted by infini at 8:15 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by infini at 8:15 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Facebook's next billion likes hinges on Africa
Answer a question to continue reading this page
Question 1 of 3 or fewer:
Please select the businesses that you've had experience with in the last 12 months.
The irony... it burns!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:18 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Answer a question to continue reading this page
Question 1 of 3 or fewer:
Please select the businesses that you've had experience with in the last 12 months.
The irony... it burns!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 8:18 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I hope Charles Arthur is reading this (Hi, Charles!). My friend read that piece and just said "Ad Block? You can get something called Ad Block? Hey... those shitty YouTube ads have gone!"
Another satisfied customer! Who says online advertising doesn't work?
posted by Devonian at 8:18 AM on July 4, 2015 [10 favorites]
Another satisfied customer! Who says online advertising doesn't work?
posted by Devonian at 8:18 AM on July 4, 2015 [10 favorites]
Alternatively one could say all Advertising itself is a gross waste of resources.
posted by mary8nne at 8:20 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by mary8nne at 8:20 AM on July 4, 2015
I bet you people all fast forward through TV commercials too, igniting the cries and shouts of the people you nearly run over with your reckless remote control use.
posted by Poldo at 8:23 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Poldo at 8:23 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Seconding skymt's comment: ad blocking is not a security measure, even before you get things like most of the performance issues reported against Chrome or Firefox being AdBlock Plus. Disabling plugins entirely will make you both more secure and saves battery life, too.
The bigger problem with using ad blockers, however, is that most companies interpret low click to view ratios as a sign that they're not being aggressive enough at including ads. The current buzzword is native ads, which is a euphemism for breaking down the separation between ads and content even more.
If we want new business models I think that'll require breaking the old one so much that it's obvious that a tweak won't fix it: not using sites with invasive ads, including supporting them with comments or shares, etc. and if they're important, telling them why. Beyond MetaFilter, I think ArsTechnica.com is a good model for this, offering a clean choice between ads or subscribing.
posted by adamsc at 8:23 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
The bigger problem with using ad blockers, however, is that most companies interpret low click to view ratios as a sign that they're not being aggressive enough at including ads. The current buzzword is native ads, which is a euphemism for breaking down the separation between ads and content even more.
If we want new business models I think that'll require breaking the old one so much that it's obvious that a tweak won't fix it: not using sites with invasive ads, including supporting them with comments or shares, etc. and if they're important, telling them why. Beyond MetaFilter, I think ArsTechnica.com is a good model for this, offering a clean choice between ads or subscribing.
posted by adamsc at 8:23 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Oh, and for those websites that get around JavaScript blockers and ad blockers, your friend is Firefox with the style page switcher set to "no style".
posted by Poldo at 8:24 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Poldo at 8:24 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I am able to block many ads when I use my desk top, a Mac, but ads on IPad are truly bad. They pop up and often I simply have to close down the site and move on because I am stuck with an ad. I am told that Ipad uses Safari and that Safari does not have or allow an ad blocker for the IPad. This means I luse my Ipad a lot less than I would since the ads are so annoying.
posted by Postroad at 8:25 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Postroad at 8:25 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
I just checked the AdBlock icon on Chrome while looking at my city's newspaper and it's telling me that it's blocking 23 ads on the front page. How am I even supposed to find the articles in between all that crap? Just as an experiment, I disabled AdBlock and there are four flash ads running at the same time, all eating my laptop's battery to sell me shit.
posted by octothorpe at 8:48 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by octothorpe at 8:48 AM on July 4, 2015
I think I might be the only one here that deliberately does not use an ad blocker.
I use no ad blockers, not because I love ads (although I'm more than fine with static ads (no animation, no sound, no pop up/under, no dynamic layout)), but so that I can avoid sites whose ads I find too onerous.
(Calling advertising bandwidth theft is pretty much calling ad blocking content theft. I think it's equally silly on both counts.)
posted by The arrows are too fast at 8:50 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
I use no ad blockers, not because I love ads (although I'm more than fine with static ads (no animation, no sound, no pop up/under, no dynamic layout)), but so that I can avoid sites whose ads I find too onerous.
(Calling advertising bandwidth theft is pretty much calling ad blocking content theft. I think it's equally silly on both counts.)
posted by The arrows are too fast at 8:50 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
So for those who don't know, AdBlock Plus is an extortion scheme that "whitelists" certain sites and let's their ads through. Sites that pay them a lot of money.
This is true.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
This is true.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
The last ad I remember seeing was on a TV at my mom's house, in the last 48 hours or so. It was for "age-defying anti-wrinkle cream". Apparently if you're old and have wrinkly skin, you should feel bad about it, but if you put this lotion on your skin it'll make the wrinkles go away, by a magical process having to do with polka dots animated in After Effects; once your wrinkles are gone you won't have to feel ashamed and dirty because you're old and disgusting anymore.
Advertising is people lying to you to get your money. You don't have any obligations to these people. Any of them who feel bad that I'm not watching their ads may console themselves with the thought that I'm not stupid enough to believe most of what they tell me anyway.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:59 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
Advertising is people lying to you to get your money. You don't have any obligations to these people. Any of them who feel bad that I'm not watching their ads may console themselves with the thought that I'm not stupid enough to believe most of what they tell me anyway.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:59 AM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
I guess that I'm also a bad person because (except for sports) I never watch live TV and always 30 second skip past the commercials and only ever listen to either my own music or public radio when I'm in the car.
posted by octothorpe at 9:08 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by octothorpe at 9:08 AM on July 4, 2015
In response to the "if everyone did it argument," all I can say is: if everyone acted like I do, the world would be a much, much better place.
posted by chortly at 9:10 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by chortly at 9:10 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
Publishers and advertisers need to find the online equivalent of road calming too. It’s probably going to be content that’s so compelling that people don’t want to block it. Maybe it’s viral adverts?
Fucking hell, fish really can't see the water they swim in, even when the water is slowly turning into piss.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Fucking hell, fish really can't see the water they swim in, even when the water is slowly turning into piss.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:11 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
This blog post about reading the Chicago Sun-Times pretty much sums why adblocking is needed. Unfortunately it means the seven remaining members of the Chicago Sun-Times staff will be laid off shortly.
posted by srboisvert at 9:17 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 9:17 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
The death of an innocent pedestrian or cyclist due to a speeding motorist is in no way comparable to someone voluntarily posting something on the Internet not getting paid. I was on the Internet when it was completely non-commercial. I remember the first spam Usenet post and the first banner ads, and as far I'm concerned, they are cancerous blights. Charles Arthur can go fuck himself.
posted by entropicamericana at 9:21 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by entropicamericana at 9:21 AM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
Blame the video ads on Youtube and other sites. That's what finally made me install an and blocker.
This is an intriguing typo. I imagine a script that removes Oxford commas, or perhaps obliterates the second and subsequent items in a list.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:33 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
This is an intriguing typo. I imagine a script that removes Oxford commas, or perhaps obliterates the second and subsequent items in a list.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:33 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
It used to be you were spared most ads on the iphone (probably cos of the lack of flash). But lately, its gotten truly bad, with scrolling freezing or acting crazy, or content jumping around randomly as ads load all over the place, or content blocked by some kind of popover, or most egregiously ads overlapping ads overlapping ads. I think Apple is introducing ad blocking simply because now they have to, to protect their flagship web app from uselessness. Also, all that ad crap is constantly crashing iphone Safari. Used to never crash.
posted by jabah at 9:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by jabah at 9:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
Not only do my ad-blockers block ads but they also annoy Charles Arthur. Win-Win.
posted by jfuller at 9:41 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by jfuller at 9:41 AM on July 4, 2015
The thing I discovered from reading this article and the accompanying thread is that adblocking is way more complicated than I originally thought. I'm trying ublock for now and seeing how it does for me. I've been having slow loads lately and Adblock Plus may be my problem.
Arthur seems to be arguing for the presentation of ads as being part of the moral rights of corporate "creators", and if you find some moral rights sketchy (I do; I'm all over folk and remix cultures) and if you find corporate overreach on creator rights a problem (see: long copyright terms, the shrinkage of the public domain), you're already set up to laugh at the idea that you're entering into a contract to view ads with a corporation by clicking on a link.
posted by immlass at 9:52 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Arthur seems to be arguing for the presentation of ads as being part of the moral rights of corporate "creators", and if you find some moral rights sketchy (I do; I'm all over folk and remix cultures) and if you find corporate overreach on creator rights a problem (see: long copyright terms, the shrinkage of the public domain), you're already set up to laugh at the idea that you're entering into a contract to view ads with a corporation by clicking on a link.
posted by immlass at 9:52 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Blame the video ads on Youtube and other sites. That's what finally made me install an and blocker.
No thank you, I don't want to watch this 30 second ad just to see
a trailer for an upcoming movie, which is itself an ad.
posted by philip-random at 9:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
No thank you, I don't want to watch this 30 second ad just to see
a trailer for an upcoming movie, which is itself an ad.
posted by philip-random at 9:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
or content jumping around randomly as ads load all over the place
I firmly believe this is intentional, as it frequently leads to accidental ad clicks. Super-scummy.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:24 AM on July 4, 2015 [14 favorites]
I firmly believe this is intentional, as it frequently leads to accidental ad clicks. Super-scummy.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:24 AM on July 4, 2015 [14 favorites]
I don't think that anyone should be forced to sit through ads.
But I also don't think that I have a right to view content for free.
If the price for reading an article is looking at some advertisements, great. Fine. I will look at those advertisements. That's an exchange that seems pretty reasonable.
But yeah, I do actually think that using adblockers while consuming otherwise-free content is kind of shitty. Speeding isn't a good metaphor -- it's more like walking into a store, reading an entire magazine, and then putting it back without buying it. Like sure, it's not technically ILLEGAL, it's not the WORST THING you could do by any means, but it's not great. It's deriving entertainment from content without helping to support that content and its distribution system.
Apparently this is all an incredibly unpopular opinion? I just don't think that we're entitled to getting other people's work for free whenever we want it, on the exact terms that we want it.
Have I ever read or watched a thing in a less than savory manner? Of course I have. But I won't defend that any anything other that moderately crappy behavior on my part.
posted by Narrative Priorities at 10:26 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
But I also don't think that I have a right to view content for free.
If the price for reading an article is looking at some advertisements, great. Fine. I will look at those advertisements. That's an exchange that seems pretty reasonable.
But yeah, I do actually think that using adblockers while consuming otherwise-free content is kind of shitty. Speeding isn't a good metaphor -- it's more like walking into a store, reading an entire magazine, and then putting it back without buying it. Like sure, it's not technically ILLEGAL, it's not the WORST THING you could do by any means, but it's not great. It's deriving entertainment from content without helping to support that content and its distribution system.
Apparently this is all an incredibly unpopular opinion? I just don't think that we're entitled to getting other people's work for free whenever we want it, on the exact terms that we want it.
Have I ever read or watched a thing in a less than savory manner? Of course I have. But I won't defend that any anything other that moderately crappy behavior on my part.
posted by Narrative Priorities at 10:26 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
Metafilter: the logical technological response to a screaming idiot.
posted by njohnson23 at 10:32 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by njohnson23 at 10:32 AM on July 4, 2015
So for those who don't know, AdBlock Plus is an extortion scheme that "whitelists" certain sites and let's their ads through. Sites that pay them a lot of money.
Yes, they basically tell you this when you download it (and I don't have a problem with them "extorting" huge corporations). But the software also allows you to turn blocking on for those too, if you choose, so you can actually block all ads -- or so they claim. Is this not true?
posted by demonic winged headgear at 10:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
Yes, they basically tell you this when you download it (and I don't have a problem with them "extorting" huge corporations). But the software also allows you to turn blocking on for those too, if you choose, so you can actually block all ads -- or so they claim. Is this not true?
posted by demonic winged headgear at 10:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
i agree with the philosophy assessed by gorhill, ublock's original developer:
it's an unfortunate fact that the internet we participate in today is deeply creepy and invasive, and advertisers are largely responsible for it. so i'll keep using ublock and won't feel much in the way of shame.
posted by p3on at 10:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [10 favorites]
That said, it's important to note that using a blocker is NOT theft. Don't fall for this creepy idea. The ultimate logical consequence of blocking = theft is the criminalisation of the inalienable right to privacy.the simple fact is that browsing the internet today means that you're being tracked by people without your knowledge or consent. there are people who are, right now, actively monetizing their ability to build dossiers on your demographics and behavior. using an adblocker to opt-out of this is necessary. and it's not just advertisers that benefit from this: the nsa piggybacks on unique identifiers associated with you by advertising networks to track individuals.
Ads, "unintrusive" or not, are just the visible portions of privacy-invading apparatus entering your browser when you visit most sites nowadays.
it's an unfortunate fact that the internet we participate in today is deeply creepy and invasive, and advertisers are largely responsible for it. so i'll keep using ublock and won't feel much in the way of shame.
posted by p3on at 10:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [10 favorites]
Nthing what everyone else says about advertising on the web being intolerable and seriously getting in the way of user experience. (The advertising on Metafilter is completely fine. It's not the sort of thing people are avoiding when they use Adblockers) Advertising on the web is completely broken. I really don't understand how they don't see this! It's ridiculous to guilt-trip people into dealing with the cesspool that is internet advertising.
I honestly believe there is a place for advertising, because it's a good way to get people to know you exist, but they can't even seem to use targeting correctly. I made a major purchase last year and then had 6 months of advertising trying to sell me the major purchase. I already bought it! I'm not going to buy another one!
There was one (and only one) time an ad was useful to me on the internet. It was for something called Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concerts, and it turned out that there was a gospel choir doing a Christmas concert at a beautiful church down the street from me. I would never have known about it if not for that ad, and it seemed like an excellent use of targeting.
Everything else is crap. For the record, I don't use an adblocker, but I have disabled flash on my main browser because otherwise most websites were unusable. If I need it then I will allow it.
posted by maggiemaggie at 10:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I honestly believe there is a place for advertising, because it's a good way to get people to know you exist, but they can't even seem to use targeting correctly. I made a major purchase last year and then had 6 months of advertising trying to sell me the major purchase. I already bought it! I'm not going to buy another one!
There was one (and only one) time an ad was useful to me on the internet. It was for something called Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concerts, and it turned out that there was a gospel choir doing a Christmas concert at a beautiful church down the street from me. I would never have known about it if not for that ad, and it seemed like an excellent use of targeting.
Everything else is crap. For the record, I don't use an adblocker, but I have disabled flash on my main browser because otherwise most websites were unusable. If I need it then I will allow it.
posted by maggiemaggie at 10:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Also, getting up to use the bathroom during television commercials is the modern machine gun bank robbery from Heat.
posted by maxsparber at 10:40 AM on July 4, 2015 [14 favorites]
posted by maxsparber at 10:40 AM on July 4, 2015 [14 favorites]
"If the price for reading an article is looking at some advertisements, great. Fine. I will look at those advertisements."
If it was just advertisements I would be fine as well but a tracking cookie is not an ad. Also the ad networks have a real bad habit of getting hacked and serving up malware.
posted by Tenuki at 10:43 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
If it was just advertisements I would be fine as well but a tracking cookie is not an ad. Also the ad networks have a real bad habit of getting hacked and serving up malware.
posted by Tenuki at 10:43 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
If it was just advertisements I would be fine as well but a tracking cookie is not an ad. Also the ad networks have a real bad habit of getting hacked and serving up malware.
I guess my point is: so why not just stop going to sites that use that tracking cookies and serve malware-harboring ads?
And again, I understand that people will use adblockers just like people will torrent the new Game of Thrones episodes, but I don't get the attitude of acting like we're the offended party. We're the ones deliberately circumventing a website's source of revenue because it's inconvenient for us. I don't see how that makes anyone a warrior for internet freedom. It just makes us a slightly different kind of content pirate.
posted by Narrative Priorities at 10:47 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I guess my point is: so why not just stop going to sites that use that tracking cookies and serve malware-harboring ads?
And again, I understand that people will use adblockers just like people will torrent the new Game of Thrones episodes, but I don't get the attitude of acting like we're the offended party. We're the ones deliberately circumventing a website's source of revenue because it's inconvenient for us. I don't see how that makes anyone a warrior for internet freedom. It just makes us a slightly different kind of content pirate.
posted by Narrative Priorities at 10:47 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I firmly believe this is intentional, as it frequently leads to accidental ad clicks. Super-scummy.
Particularly when google does it with youtube. I wonder if they detect the click fraud/ bad practices and dock themselves adsense revenue?
posted by srboisvert at 10:49 AM on July 4, 2015
Particularly when google does it with youtube. I wonder if they detect the click fraud/ bad practices and dock themselves adsense revenue?
posted by srboisvert at 10:49 AM on July 4, 2015
The chosen metaphor is horrible and a substantial argument isn't really well worked out. So defending the article involves a lot of charity. But I'm not sure it's as bad as it comes off in the responses here. Ad block users are free riders, and there's indifference to the effect it will have on the content producers.
But he's not just saying turn the adblockers off--he agrees on the jiggly, intrusive ads that give people an incentive to block them and using his metaphor putting them on a site
posted by mark k at 10:51 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
But he's not just saying turn the adblockers off--he agrees on the jiggly, intrusive ads that give people an incentive to block them and using his metaphor putting them on a site
is stupid; it’s like building a four-lane motorway through your suburb and expecting people to stick to the speed limit. The only way to stop adblocking being the answer is for the question not to be “how visible can we make these ads?”As others have said, ads are like the tragedy of the commons--sites become unreadable but no one company has an incentive to make ads less distracting. If a network of sites would guarantee to all scale back to one or two non-distracting text/static image ads most of us would be willing to turn off our blockers. And if that was the expectation then the value of those types of ads to content producers would increase (as they aren't competing against more obnoxious, attention-demanding crap.)
posted by mark k at 10:51 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
so why not just stop going to sites that use that tracking cookies and serve malware-harboring ads?
You can no longer know because there are so many ways of obfuscating links. Phone browsers often don't have a mouseover link view capability. Newsletters often use click tracking code before sending you on to the destination and so on. Plus sometimes you want to browse randomly but maybe you don't want to fall into a bucket of shit.
posted by srboisvert at 10:52 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
You can no longer know because there are so many ways of obfuscating links. Phone browsers often don't have a mouseover link view capability. Newsletters often use click tracking code before sending you on to the destination and so on. Plus sometimes you want to browse randomly but maybe you don't want to fall into a bucket of shit.
posted by srboisvert at 10:52 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I feel smug when I read articles like this because I know that they have ads that I'm not seeing.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by oceanjesse at 10:53 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I just don't think that we're entitled to getting other people's work for free whenever we want it, on the exact terms that we want it.
I don't think most people would disagree with that--it's just that advertising is a bad model for it because it introduces so many different middlemen between the payment of an individual's money and the content the individual consumes. And the work of those folks in the middle (ad content) devalues the work the individual is interested in paying for (content).
The advertising model actually debases the value of content IMO. It's what makes us used to getting articles "for free" instead of paying for them. For instance, people never knew how much journalism cost because it was always heavily subsidized by advertisements.
I guess my point is: so why not just stop going to sites that use that tracking cookies and serve malware-harboring ads?
Two reasons: you can't tell which is which without special software, which is essentially ad-blocking without the actual blocking, and also that's most of the internet these days.
posted by immlass at 10:54 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
I don't think most people would disagree with that--it's just that advertising is a bad model for it because it introduces so many different middlemen between the payment of an individual's money and the content the individual consumes. And the work of those folks in the middle (ad content) devalues the work the individual is interested in paying for (content).
The advertising model actually debases the value of content IMO. It's what makes us used to getting articles "for free" instead of paying for them. For instance, people never knew how much journalism cost because it was always heavily subsidized by advertisements.
I guess my point is: so why not just stop going to sites that use that tracking cookies and serve malware-harboring ads?
Two reasons: you can't tell which is which without special software, which is essentially ad-blocking without the actual blocking, and also that's most of the internet these days.
posted by immlass at 10:54 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
I noticed in the author has been a journalist for 20+ years.
Does shilling for Apple qualify as journalism these days?
posted by xchmp at 11:12 AM on July 4, 2015
Does shilling for Apple qualify as journalism these days?
posted by xchmp at 11:12 AM on July 4, 2015
That article was much more neutral and nuanced than I would have predicted from the reaction here. And the author predicted as much. Ha.
I wonder if Martin Bryant sits patiently through TV ads, or if he DVRs through them, or if he channel-surfs. Or if he leaves the room. Or if he talks over them. I wonder if he ever tore an annoying subscription card out of a magazine, or if he just suffered them quietly. Ad-blocking, broadly speaking, is older than the web and in most contexts isn't really such a binary thing. Are those behaviors all varying shades of immoral too? Are we all therefore irredeemable sinners, even if we don't specifically block web ads?
You don't need to attack the speeding metaphor to see the position as problematic.
posted by Western Infidels at 11:13 AM on July 4, 2015
I wonder if Martin Bryant sits patiently through TV ads, or if he DVRs through them, or if he channel-surfs. Or if he leaves the room. Or if he talks over them. I wonder if he ever tore an annoying subscription card out of a magazine, or if he just suffered them quietly. Ad-blocking, broadly speaking, is older than the web and in most contexts isn't really such a binary thing. Are those behaviors all varying shades of immoral too? Are we all therefore irredeemable sinners, even if we don't specifically block web ads?
You don't need to attack the speeding metaphor to see the position as problematic.
posted by Western Infidels at 11:13 AM on July 4, 2015
"[Advertising revenue] should derive from the consent of the governed, not from the threat of force!" - Barbie
posted by blue_beetle at 11:16 AM on July 4, 2015
posted by blue_beetle at 11:16 AM on July 4, 2015
so you can actually block all ads -- or so they claim. Is this not true?
The only places it doesn't work for me is African sites - I'm guess they're all so new and/or off the radar of developers that they don't show in any filter. So I make my own settings.
posted by infini at 11:17 AM on July 4, 2015
The only places it doesn't work for me is African sites - I'm guess they're all so new and/or off the radar of developers that they don't show in any filter. So I make my own settings.
posted by infini at 11:17 AM on July 4, 2015
Some persistent first world mega corps do get through - the FT has been most aggressively irritating of late with their *paywall in your face* model. I'm going to ignore them, but the loss is theirs, as I curate a news feed and bring more eyeballs than just my own two. otoh the even more irritating FP has stopped with the pop up nonsense and opened up their site.
What's free to read, what's not, and by whom, is in flux right now and fascinating to observe.
NoScript and Adblockplus help me 'see' all this more clearly than without.
Am interested in trying uBlock - tell me why I need to switch?
posted by infini at 11:21 AM on July 4, 2015
What's free to read, what's not, and by whom, is in flux right now and fascinating to observe.
NoScript and Adblockplus help me 'see' all this more clearly than without.
Am interested in trying uBlock - tell me why I need to switch?
posted by infini at 11:21 AM on July 4, 2015
I just don't think that we're entitled to getting other people's work for free whenever we want it, on the exact terms that we want it.
no, they've put it out there where it can be downloaded and viewed by anyone - that there's other content there that people don't want to download and view is besides the point
we have the right to choose or to use technology that allows us to choose - if that's unacceptable to someone, they can make people pay for what they download and view
posted by pyramid termite at 11:21 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
no, they've put it out there where it can be downloaded and viewed by anyone - that there's other content there that people don't want to download and view is besides the point
we have the right to choose or to use technology that allows us to choose - if that's unacceptable to someone, they can make people pay for what they download and view
posted by pyramid termite at 11:21 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
There are exactly four websites whitelisted in my Firefox privacy settings - Metafilter is one of them.
There is exactly one website whitelisted in my AdBlock Plus settings - and it's Metafilter.
I have no problem supporting websites that provide useful content and strike the right balance between revenue generation and user experience.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 11:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
There is exactly one website whitelisted in my AdBlock Plus settings - and it's Metafilter.
I have no problem supporting websites that provide useful content and strike the right balance between revenue generation and user experience.
posted by cynical pinnacle at 11:27 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Am interested in trying uBlock - tell me why I need to switch?
it uses the same filters as other adblockers but much more efficiently memory and cpu-wise, and the developer doesn't take payments to create a default whitelist like abp does. but really it's the reduced resource use that makes it worth it
posted by p3on at 11:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
it uses the same filters as other adblockers but much more efficiently memory and cpu-wise, and the developer doesn't take payments to create a default whitelist like abp does. but really it's the reduced resource use that makes it worth it
posted by p3on at 11:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
At least the dancing silhouette thing is over. Those shadows were too damn happy about their mortgages or whatever.
posted by ostranenie at 11:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by ostranenie at 11:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
uBlock doesn't have that some-call-it-extortion thing going for it. (For me, as long as ABP offers the opportunity to turn that feature off, it doesn't bother me much--though it does make me somewhat less inclined to trust them in general.) Also, uBlock appears to be faster and use less RAM.
posted by box at 11:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by box at 11:35 AM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Even when you pay for content, you still get ads. Just look at nyt, hulu, CBS, HBO, etc.
posted by Garm at 11:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Garm at 11:36 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
...with of course the entirely inconsequential distinction that it doesn't result in the death or maiming of thousands of children every year who have made no decision to participate in the transportation roulette game, frequently by being physically coerced against their will to participate for no direct benefit to themselves.
Really this analogy says much more about the author's susceptibility to the pervasive cultural blindness about what speeding really represents than anything else.
posted by lastobelus at 11:46 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
Really this analogy says much more about the author's susceptibility to the pervasive cultural blindness about what speeding really represents than anything else.
posted by lastobelus at 11:46 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
"So for those who don't know, AdBlock Plus is an extortion scheme that "whitelists" certain sites and let's their ads through. Sites that pay them a lot of money."
"Extortion" is overselling it, innit? In theory, their "acceptable ad" policy is what I want — I'm not constitutionally against ads as I recognize their utility for content I enjoy, but too many are too terrible. Having less terrible ads is a good thing and Adblock seems to encourage that.
"a trailer for an upcoming movie, which is itself an ad."
I think this actually gets to the nut of it. There are ads that I'll even seek out. But they're good content, generally.
posted by klangklangston at 11:47 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
"Extortion" is overselling it, innit? In theory, their "acceptable ad" policy is what I want — I'm not constitutionally against ads as I recognize their utility for content I enjoy, but too many are too terrible. Having less terrible ads is a good thing and Adblock seems to encourage that.
"a trailer for an upcoming movie, which is itself an ad."
I think this actually gets to the nut of it. There are ads that I'll even seek out. But they're good content, generally.
posted by klangklangston at 11:47 AM on July 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
p3on, box
Thank you. I'll check it out, I'll have to do it discretely to see if it will break my tumblr experience. Tumblr and I and my various scripts have come to a workable understanding. Also I user an older Firefox version because I just hate the newfangled design.
posted by infini at 11:56 AM on July 4, 2015
Thank you. I'll check it out, I'll have to do it discretely to see if it will break my tumblr experience. Tumblr and I and my various scripts have come to a workable understanding. Also I user an older Firefox version because I just hate the newfangled design.
posted by infini at 11:56 AM on July 4, 2015
Taboola pays to get through Adblock Plus. Ads like that are the entire reason I use adblockers--ABP is useless to me if it can't keep out visually disturbing content.
posted by almostmanda at 11:56 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by almostmanda at 11:56 AM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
"Extortion" is overselling it, innit?
I worked with large ad partners at Google. They'd (Adblock plus) send letters to big online publishers with detailed stats on the number of blocked ad impressions and their estimate of ad revenue loss. Then they say pay us 75% of that number and they'd add the site to adblock's whitelist. Adblock sent these letters to sites that you would not necessarily consider great sites in terms of ad policy, just ones where there was money to be made.
But so far as I know there's never been a formal charge of extortion, no.
posted by GuyZero at 11:56 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I worked with large ad partners at Google. They'd (Adblock plus) send letters to big online publishers with detailed stats on the number of blocked ad impressions and their estimate of ad revenue loss. Then they say pay us 75% of that number and they'd add the site to adblock's whitelist. Adblock sent these letters to sites that you would not necessarily consider great sites in terms of ad policy, just ones where there was money to be made.
But so far as I know there's never been a formal charge of extortion, no.
posted by GuyZero at 11:56 AM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Re: Taboola, I am pretty ambivalent about ads as an end user, but man, those are fucking terrible ads for terrible shit sites.
posted by GuyZero at 11:58 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by GuyZero at 11:58 AM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Postroad: I am able to block many ads when I use my desk top, a Mac, but ads on IPad are truly bad.
I use the iOS proxy server app Weblock. I hope the upcoming built-in blockers work as well.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:59 AM on July 4, 2015
I use the iOS proxy server app Weblock. I hope the upcoming built-in blockers work as well.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:59 AM on July 4, 2015
AdBlock (and uBlock) allows users to create their own filters. These can include wildcards (they use asterisks). So, for example:
*.taboola.com/*
Blocks that domain entirely. Do it--you won't look back.
posted by box at 12:15 PM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
*.taboola.com/*
Blocks that domain entirely. Do it--you won't look back.
posted by box at 12:15 PM on July 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
I don't produce content for the web, something for which I'm eternally thankful. I'm not sure that giving my implicit endorsement to diet scams, clickbait and Russian 'dating' sites is the kind of Faustian bargain I'd want to make just to be able to call myself a 'journalist' and have people read what I write. On one hand I suppose people need to make a living; on the other, maybe they'd just be making a different living in a world without all of this unproductive noise.
In some ways the conquest of the web by advertisers was inevitable. We live in an era where many of us are happy (indeed, feel privileged) to walk around with big logos on our clothes. We watch TV channels where the ad breaks take up more time than the shows they break up. We barely raise an eyebrow when our landmarks and sports venues are given ridiculous new names that someone, somewhere, thinks will make us infinitesimally more likely to buy insurance or a soft drink. We're like the apocryphal frog being slowly brought to the boil.
In the end, though, there has to be 'peak advertising'. Maybe we're already past it. We only have so much mental energy and attention, after all. I have young kids, and I can see how easily they're drawn in by advertisements, and how they're not yet able to mentally push them to the background. It worries me that they'll have to learn how to find self-worth in a world where the biggest message seems to be that our only value is as consumers.
posted by pipeski at 12:16 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
In some ways the conquest of the web by advertisers was inevitable. We live in an era where many of us are happy (indeed, feel privileged) to walk around with big logos on our clothes. We watch TV channels where the ad breaks take up more time than the shows they break up. We barely raise an eyebrow when our landmarks and sports venues are given ridiculous new names that someone, somewhere, thinks will make us infinitesimally more likely to buy insurance or a soft drink. We're like the apocryphal frog being slowly brought to the boil.
In the end, though, there has to be 'peak advertising'. Maybe we're already past it. We only have so much mental energy and attention, after all. I have young kids, and I can see how easily they're drawn in by advertisements, and how they're not yet able to mentally push them to the background. It worries me that they'll have to learn how to find self-worth in a world where the biggest message seems to be that our only value is as consumers.
posted by pipeski at 12:16 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
This article brings to mind a thought that has been bouncing around for the last decade. If you will indulge me, it began while I worked in the advertising industry.
There are a few maxims in the advertising industry. The first is from television, where if the viewer is not paying for the content, than the viewer is the item being sold... to the advertisers. The second is a study from the automotive industry, where as a company's sales sagged, often they increase advertising budgets – to boost perceived popularity and reignite sales.
Then, there were the wine studies, where people were given two wines – the first a 'low-cost' wine and the second a 'high-cost' wine. They were then put in an MRI machine, and the 'high-cost' wine produced greater activation of the pleasure centres of the brain than did 'low-cost'. The wines were the same wine.
From there, we move to conspicuous consumption, whereby walking around with fake luxury goods can create depression and loneliness. As the monograms are symbols of financial resource, the fake versions ended up being a 'lie'. So that when the wearer was complimented, they were being complimented on being of a certain status, which was functionally not true.
All of that began a line of inquiry which was about how adverting and brands work. Starting with the television example, there's obvious value in having the opportunity to create impressions in someone's mind. Moving to the car example, the more impressions a company creates, the greater sales it can generate. Moving to the wine study, it's not even about the quality of the item necessarily, as much as the perceived quality of item. And finally, the luxury brand example shows that the goods we purchase and consume have a significant impact on our sense of self.
How does that all happen?
There is a neurological basis. Basically, the human brain is always absorbing and adapting to external stimulus. The more a brand is presented, the more of a PHYSICAL impression that brand creates within the mind of the audience. And I say physical, because the brain essentially stores things in gaggles of neurones. The more times you see an Apple logo, the greater the physical presence of that Apple logo is within your brain.
That's the thought that gave me great pause – and is relevant within this discussion. Advertising has a physical expression on the brain. The advertisements that we see physically modify our brains – in essence, those advertisements create not only our experience in the world, but also our senses of self.
Now, for the piece that I haven't fully worked out yet, but I have an outstanding question on.
In advertising, one of the notoriously difficult demographics to reach are high net-worths. The more money a person makes, the more difficult they are to 'buy' as an audience. As we mused on this years ago, we considered that if you go to the average American low-income neighbourhood, there are huge volumes of advertisements, from billboards to posters to franchises. If you go to a high-income neighbourhood, there are very few advertisements. Those communities often ban billboards, they do not have public displays of advertising, and they (often) do not have large numbers of franchises.
The deeper we considered that, the more we saw it appear before us. If you are on a low-cost airline, every seat back is branded and sold as advertising. If you are in a first class lounge, the branding presented will be highly limited and curated. When you go to a mass-market shop, logos do the apparel, whereas when you go to a high-class shop, the items can be devoid of branding.
Basically, low-cost goods augment the price with advertising on the good itself. High-cost costs do not do this, they either present their own logo, or no logo at all.
Keeping in mind that advertising physically modifies the brain, I extend that to the physical world. High-income neighbourhoods are those where one's brain is NOT physically modified by the environment itself, and low-income neighbourhoods are those where one's brain IS physically modified by the environment itself.
That becomes quite a tender point when you look at why that might be happening. Basically, in low-income neighbourhoods, the real-estate is owned by someone who does not live within the community, therefore there is no aesthetic cost to selling a given surface or space as advertising. In high-income neighbourhoods, the real-estate is owned by the people within the community, and there is an aesthetic cost to selling surfaces and spaces as advertising.
Does that mean that the difference between low-income and high-income neighbourhoods is whether or not the local citizens have control of how their brains are physically modified? Perhaps. That is the crux of a viewpoint within me which says that advertising has a human rights dimension, which is basically that the brands are modifying the physical space within our brains – our real estate – without consideration. They provide consideration to a property owner, however, how to we price the fact that an advertisement or a logo changes how we think?
As far as I know, nobody in history has (yet) been compensated by an advertiser for the fact that their real estate – their brain – was modified without permission or consideration.
And that moves us into the point of online advertising, and what I see is the crux of a problem in the industry.
Basically, when an online advertise displays an ad on a screen, they are sending a stream of data formatted according to certain standards. The local web browser displays that data in a certain way, in alignment with those standards. The question is not who owns the data, but who owns the display of the data.
If someone installs an 'ad blocker', they are not technically blocking an ad, they are modifying how the data is displayed on a device that they own. They are, in essence, saying 'display data from this IP address or server. Do not display data from that IP address or server.' While the result is 'do not allow content that I do not select to modify my brain's physical real estate without compensation or permission', the reality is that the ad blocker works on the data stream level.
Now the crux. In the age of broadcast media, there was not a way to separate the content from the advertisement. You want the content, you're getting the ads. Now, with online media, the content and the advertisements are inherently separate. It is based on the user's machine to combine them, in the way that fits the contract that the content provider sold to the advertiser.
Except for the fact that the content creator does not have ultimate control over the display device.
On a side note – that is going to be the battle between Apple and Google. Apple is a brand that eschews third party advertising, for it makes it money on directly providing hardware, services, and content. Google is a brand that is based on providing third party advertising to the users of its hardware, services, and content. Will an OS provider who's revenue is based on advertising allow ad blockers? That's the only way I see it working – if the content provider HAS ultimate control over the display device. But I digress.
The fundamental issue here is similar to many in the online world, which is that online advertising is based on the principles that worked in previous business models, except for the fact that the entire paradigm of content delivery has changed. The content creator providing the content – the one selling the advertising – has no ability to ensure that advertising is displayed.
From an industry perspective, that may be considered stealing, for the user is consuming the content without 'paying for it' with their attention. How would it look if the content provider says "Bacardi would like to physically modify your brain real estate in return for an article about Catilynn Jenner. Do you still want to read it?"
But what the user of the adblock software has done is installed a software programme which displays information from some sources, and not others.
What I wonder if the industry is deathly afraid of is the point where content will be contingent upon advertising display – in other words, the browser must report back that the advertisement was accessed before the content is displayed. The problems there are two-fold, first of all, the next version of the ad-block software could easily access the content, without displaying it. The second problem is much greater, which is that how much content would be NOT consume if they were forced to watch ads to consume it?
Overall, I doubt this is a problem for the ages. Most people don't mind a bit of advertising to pay for some content. After all, no one has yet priced the cost of a neural impressions.
But the real matter here comes down to whether or not users have to display all the information that comes down the pipe, and if things have to be presented to the standard of the content provider?
Yet another leaky business model that is expiring quickly in favour of micro-payments for content.
For me, the fascination remains with the concept that there is a human rights dimension, in terms of possession and property when it comes to neurones and advertising.
That being said, a mate tells me that his adblock software has blocked 157,000 ads in the last six months – 26,000 a month or roughly 872 a day. On the average of the two hours a day he browses (thanks RescueTime!), we calculate that as 436 ads blocked a minute, or 7.2 a second. 7.2 ads per second, for two hours a day.
He is unsure of the degree to which his Bacardi consumption has changed.
posted by nickrussell at 12:16 PM on July 4, 2015 [37 favorites]
There are a few maxims in the advertising industry. The first is from television, where if the viewer is not paying for the content, than the viewer is the item being sold... to the advertisers. The second is a study from the automotive industry, where as a company's sales sagged, often they increase advertising budgets – to boost perceived popularity and reignite sales.
Then, there were the wine studies, where people were given two wines – the first a 'low-cost' wine and the second a 'high-cost' wine. They were then put in an MRI machine, and the 'high-cost' wine produced greater activation of the pleasure centres of the brain than did 'low-cost'. The wines were the same wine.
From there, we move to conspicuous consumption, whereby walking around with fake luxury goods can create depression and loneliness. As the monograms are symbols of financial resource, the fake versions ended up being a 'lie'. So that when the wearer was complimented, they were being complimented on being of a certain status, which was functionally not true.
All of that began a line of inquiry which was about how adverting and brands work. Starting with the television example, there's obvious value in having the opportunity to create impressions in someone's mind. Moving to the car example, the more impressions a company creates, the greater sales it can generate. Moving to the wine study, it's not even about the quality of the item necessarily, as much as the perceived quality of item. And finally, the luxury brand example shows that the goods we purchase and consume have a significant impact on our sense of self.
How does that all happen?
There is a neurological basis. Basically, the human brain is always absorbing and adapting to external stimulus. The more a brand is presented, the more of a PHYSICAL impression that brand creates within the mind of the audience. And I say physical, because the brain essentially stores things in gaggles of neurones. The more times you see an Apple logo, the greater the physical presence of that Apple logo is within your brain.
That's the thought that gave me great pause – and is relevant within this discussion. Advertising has a physical expression on the brain. The advertisements that we see physically modify our brains – in essence, those advertisements create not only our experience in the world, but also our senses of self.
Now, for the piece that I haven't fully worked out yet, but I have an outstanding question on.
In advertising, one of the notoriously difficult demographics to reach are high net-worths. The more money a person makes, the more difficult they are to 'buy' as an audience. As we mused on this years ago, we considered that if you go to the average American low-income neighbourhood, there are huge volumes of advertisements, from billboards to posters to franchises. If you go to a high-income neighbourhood, there are very few advertisements. Those communities often ban billboards, they do not have public displays of advertising, and they (often) do not have large numbers of franchises.
The deeper we considered that, the more we saw it appear before us. If you are on a low-cost airline, every seat back is branded and sold as advertising. If you are in a first class lounge, the branding presented will be highly limited and curated. When you go to a mass-market shop, logos do the apparel, whereas when you go to a high-class shop, the items can be devoid of branding.
Basically, low-cost goods augment the price with advertising on the good itself. High-cost costs do not do this, they either present their own logo, or no logo at all.
Keeping in mind that advertising physically modifies the brain, I extend that to the physical world. High-income neighbourhoods are those where one's brain is NOT physically modified by the environment itself, and low-income neighbourhoods are those where one's brain IS physically modified by the environment itself.
That becomes quite a tender point when you look at why that might be happening. Basically, in low-income neighbourhoods, the real-estate is owned by someone who does not live within the community, therefore there is no aesthetic cost to selling a given surface or space as advertising. In high-income neighbourhoods, the real-estate is owned by the people within the community, and there is an aesthetic cost to selling surfaces and spaces as advertising.
Does that mean that the difference between low-income and high-income neighbourhoods is whether or not the local citizens have control of how their brains are physically modified? Perhaps. That is the crux of a viewpoint within me which says that advertising has a human rights dimension, which is basically that the brands are modifying the physical space within our brains – our real estate – without consideration. They provide consideration to a property owner, however, how to we price the fact that an advertisement or a logo changes how we think?
As far as I know, nobody in history has (yet) been compensated by an advertiser for the fact that their real estate – their brain – was modified without permission or consideration.
And that moves us into the point of online advertising, and what I see is the crux of a problem in the industry.
Basically, when an online advertise displays an ad on a screen, they are sending a stream of data formatted according to certain standards. The local web browser displays that data in a certain way, in alignment with those standards. The question is not who owns the data, but who owns the display of the data.
If someone installs an 'ad blocker', they are not technically blocking an ad, they are modifying how the data is displayed on a device that they own. They are, in essence, saying 'display data from this IP address or server. Do not display data from that IP address or server.' While the result is 'do not allow content that I do not select to modify my brain's physical real estate without compensation or permission', the reality is that the ad blocker works on the data stream level.
Now the crux. In the age of broadcast media, there was not a way to separate the content from the advertisement. You want the content, you're getting the ads. Now, with online media, the content and the advertisements are inherently separate. It is based on the user's machine to combine them, in the way that fits the contract that the content provider sold to the advertiser.
Except for the fact that the content creator does not have ultimate control over the display device.
On a side note – that is going to be the battle between Apple and Google. Apple is a brand that eschews third party advertising, for it makes it money on directly providing hardware, services, and content. Google is a brand that is based on providing third party advertising to the users of its hardware, services, and content. Will an OS provider who's revenue is based on advertising allow ad blockers? That's the only way I see it working – if the content provider HAS ultimate control over the display device. But I digress.
The fundamental issue here is similar to many in the online world, which is that online advertising is based on the principles that worked in previous business models, except for the fact that the entire paradigm of content delivery has changed. The content creator providing the content – the one selling the advertising – has no ability to ensure that advertising is displayed.
From an industry perspective, that may be considered stealing, for the user is consuming the content without 'paying for it' with their attention. How would it look if the content provider says "Bacardi would like to physically modify your brain real estate in return for an article about Catilynn Jenner. Do you still want to read it?"
But what the user of the adblock software has done is installed a software programme which displays information from some sources, and not others.
What I wonder if the industry is deathly afraid of is the point where content will be contingent upon advertising display – in other words, the browser must report back that the advertisement was accessed before the content is displayed. The problems there are two-fold, first of all, the next version of the ad-block software could easily access the content, without displaying it. The second problem is much greater, which is that how much content would be NOT consume if they were forced to watch ads to consume it?
Overall, I doubt this is a problem for the ages. Most people don't mind a bit of advertising to pay for some content. After all, no one has yet priced the cost of a neural impressions.
But the real matter here comes down to whether or not users have to display all the information that comes down the pipe, and if things have to be presented to the standard of the content provider?
Yet another leaky business model that is expiring quickly in favour of micro-payments for content.
For me, the fascination remains with the concept that there is a human rights dimension, in terms of possession and property when it comes to neurones and advertising.
That being said, a mate tells me that his adblock software has blocked 157,000 ads in the last six months – 26,000 a month or roughly 872 a day. On the average of the two hours a day he browses (thanks RescueTime!), we calculate that as 436 ads blocked a minute, or 7.2 a second. 7.2 ads per second, for two hours a day.
He is unsure of the degree to which his Bacardi consumption has changed.
posted by nickrussell at 12:16 PM on July 4, 2015 [37 favorites]
the FT has been most aggressively irritating of late with their *paywall in your face* model.
Unless you come directly from Google.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:21 PM on July 4, 2015
Unless you come directly from Google.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:21 PM on July 4, 2015
Blocks that domain entirely. Do it--you won't look back.
I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful, but I know how to use custom filters and have done this. I was responding to the suggestion that ABP's pay-for-whitelist policy isn't that big of a deal. If a plugin's default setup allows the literal worst ads I have ever seen through, it's not a very good at blocking ads.
posted by almostmanda at 12:24 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful, but I know how to use custom filters and have done this. I was responding to the suggestion that ABP's pay-for-whitelist policy isn't that big of a deal. If a plugin's default setup allows the literal worst ads I have ever seen through, it's not a very good at blocking ads.
posted by almostmanda at 12:24 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Working for the interactive dept of large ad agencies put a second storey on our house. It's formed the majority of my 19 years in interactive media and programming. So I'm not against advertising per se. It's part of our economy, and when well-done, is complementary or at least benign to the content it accompanies.
So... I finally installed an adblocker when I was truly sick of those visually disgusting ads of some lady's face being stretched like Katherine Helmond's in Brazil. Or some waffle-print on a finger that made me feel physically ill.
Site owners and content-purveyors get no sympathy from me when their ads not only have zero interest for me, but make me upset or physically nauseated. WTF did they expect?
Anyone who's read a good magazine knows that the ads not only have at least some appeal to many readers, but they are usually attractive and not insulting. When was the last time you read an ad in a magazine you enjoy, that made you physically ill?
My point here - Too few online publications are curating their ads or otherwise ensuring their suitability for the viewers of that content. The web ad industry, and digital publishers need to take some responsibility for the placement and suitability of ads. A standards body maybe, so that sites have some base level of assurance that the ads are suitable and not sketchy or vehicles for malware. Or won't make me want to barf, at least.
I think it will eventually happen, and I think online advertising will still be more accepted and used than micropayments. Once the advertisers and websites get their shit together.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:44 PM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
So... I finally installed an adblocker when I was truly sick of those visually disgusting ads of some lady's face being stretched like Katherine Helmond's in Brazil. Or some waffle-print on a finger that made me feel physically ill.
Site owners and content-purveyors get no sympathy from me when their ads not only have zero interest for me, but make me upset or physically nauseated. WTF did they expect?
Anyone who's read a good magazine knows that the ads not only have at least some appeal to many readers, but they are usually attractive and not insulting. When was the last time you read an ad in a magazine you enjoy, that made you physically ill?
My point here - Too few online publications are curating their ads or otherwise ensuring their suitability for the viewers of that content. The web ad industry, and digital publishers need to take some responsibility for the placement and suitability of ads. A standards body maybe, so that sites have some base level of assurance that the ads are suitable and not sketchy or vehicles for malware. Or won't make me want to barf, at least.
I think it will eventually happen, and I think online advertising will still be more accepted and used than micropayments. Once the advertisers and websites get their shit together.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:44 PM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
If you could apply a form of ad blocker to TV, a Magazine, radio, newspaper, would you ? Why?
If ads on all things were able to be blocked, would content continued to be offered without, say, a monthly charge?
posted by Postroad at 12:45 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
If ads on all things were able to be blocked, would content continued to be offered without, say, a monthly charge?
posted by Postroad at 12:45 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't run an ad-blocker. I can't say that ads are a big deal. I do prevent Flash from running automatically, which fixes 90% of the problem.
On YouTube I skip all ads after the 5s timeout. If they don't use the timeout, I close the page. I just don't see static ads (they are there, but my brain filters them). I close any page that auto plays. If there's distracting motion, I close the page.
Basically there is absolutely nothing on the net that is worth putting up with intrusive bullshit, so I just close the page when it happens.
I don't run as-blockers mainly because I don't trust them any more than the advertisements.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:50 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
On YouTube I skip all ads after the 5s timeout. If they don't use the timeout, I close the page. I just don't see static ads (they are there, but my brain filters them). I close any page that auto plays. If there's distracting motion, I close the page.
Basically there is absolutely nothing on the net that is worth putting up with intrusive bullshit, so I just close the page when it happens.
I don't run as-blockers mainly because I don't trust them any more than the advertisements.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:50 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I have been a heavy Internet user for 22 years now. I have never once intentionally clicked an ad, I have never purchased something because of an ad, I have run at least one ad blocker since the first Mozilla plugin. Prior to that I filtered the major ad networks with my firewall's DNS server. I refuse to use ABP because of Acceptable Ads. In the extremely rare event an ad does slip through, I add it to my list of companies to never purchase from or (where possible) do any business with. If a content site combats ad blocking successfully, it too will go into the block list.
In the equally rare event I am watching television, during commercials I hit the mute button and play a mobile game (none of the ones I install have ads).
I will happily pay for content recommended by friends, but I will not be badgered or pestered. To suggest you know what I want better than I do is an insult. To beg and pander for my attention is undignified and pathetic.
Stop trying to infect my machines with malware.
Stop trying to infect my brain with manufactured desire.
posted by Ryvar at 12:51 PM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
In the equally rare event I am watching television, during commercials I hit the mute button and play a mobile game (none of the ones I install have ads).
I will happily pay for content recommended by friends, but I will not be badgered or pestered. To suggest you know what I want better than I do is an insult. To beg and pander for my attention is undignified and pathetic.
Stop trying to infect my machines with malware.
Stop trying to infect my brain with manufactured desire.
posted by Ryvar at 12:51 PM on July 4, 2015 [6 favorites]
I am able to block many ads when I use my desk top, a Mac, but ads on IPad are truly bad.
My solution for this is to install privoxy on a computer at home and configure the iPad to use that machine as a HTTP proxy. It takes a little work, but totally worth it. It works only when you're browsing from home on your network, but for me that's more than 90% of the time.
Even when you pay for content, you still get ads. Just look at nyt, hulu, CBS, HBO, etc.
That's why I ended up installing privoxy, I subscribe to The Washington Post. So I get to read it online without running into their paywall. They serve ads online, no biggie, but there was something in their ad mix that was consistently crashing safari on the iPad. So now all my web traffic runs through privoxy. That machine has a souped up hosts file also, which could be implemented into the privoxy block list but I am lazy.
posted by peeedro at 12:51 PM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
My solution for this is to install privoxy on a computer at home and configure the iPad to use that machine as a HTTP proxy. It takes a little work, but totally worth it. It works only when you're browsing from home on your network, but for me that's more than 90% of the time.
Even when you pay for content, you still get ads. Just look at nyt, hulu, CBS, HBO, etc.
That's why I ended up installing privoxy, I subscribe to The Washington Post. So I get to read it online without running into their paywall. They serve ads online, no biggie, but there was something in their ad mix that was consistently crashing safari on the iPad. So now all my web traffic runs through privoxy. That machine has a souped up hosts file also, which could be implemented into the privoxy block list but I am lazy.
posted by peeedro at 12:51 PM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
the FT has been most aggressively irritating of late with their *paywall in your face* model.
Unless you come directly from Google.
I do, Google News. But that's been sold through and through.
posted by infini at 1:13 PM on July 4, 2015
If adblocking is like speeding, then the internet ads themselves are like NYC squeegie guys from the 90s.
posted by brina at 1:13 PM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by brina at 1:13 PM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Vrooom, Vrooom!
posted by carping demon at 1:14 PM on July 4, 2015
posted by carping demon at 1:14 PM on July 4, 2015
A more accurate analogy based on the actual history of the web: There was a high-speed road. A bunch of people decided to build a suburb around it. Once they were there, they discovered that living right next to a high-speed road was unpleasant and dangerous, so they tried to convince people to stop using it.
posted by baf at 1:18 PM on July 4, 2015
posted by baf at 1:18 PM on July 4, 2015
Devil's advocate here: if the ads are so annoying, you don't have to go to the site. One way of looking at it is that the site owner is asking you to look at their ads in return for consuming their content. If you refrain from visiting, at least you aren't consuming their traffic. It's not like you have an intrinsic right or need to consume their content.
posted by Edgewise at 1:34 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Edgewise at 1:34 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
> I would love an adblocker for Spotify.
Seriously? That's one of the huge tradeoffs between Premium and Free. Are you seriously unwilling to pay $10 for all-you-can-stream ad-less music? If you are using it so often that the ads get on your nerves, well - it may be a service worth paying for. If you only rarely use it, then an adblocker may be overkill.
I know advertising gets a bad reputation, and rightfully so --- I use adblock myself. However, when a service is willing to offer an ad-free version for a reasonable fee, I'm all for it. To add to that, while the ads on spotify may be annoying, what they do NOT do is hijack your computer in any way. When it comes down to it, they are playing incredibly nicely with regard to advertising.
Asking for an adblocker for Spotify is basically saying "I don't want to pay for music." That's really an entitled place to be.
There's a real issue that has been at the core of much of the modern web for some time here -- If we want more of the services we use to be ad-free, they are going to cost somebody. There are infrastructure costs to pay, there are content production costs, and often employee salaries. Mefi has a cost to enter - Almost everyone here felt it was worth at least $5 for an account, and many donate to keep it running, yet it hasn't always been easy going financially - there have been some tough times. And this is a site that, while it gets a ton of traffic, doesn't get anywhere near as much as other sites that have yet to charge a fee. We are willing to pay for an account and donate to a community -- Are we also willing to do so for large content providers?
We are already seeing an arms race between ad-blockers and advertisers/content providers. Some of the sites we all read have "sponsored content" that is for all purposes an ad, and this is something that, as a general rule, adblock won't catch. This is something we are seeing mroe and more of, and is much more insidious to me.... but if we continue to adblock everything and are also unwilling to pay for content -- Well, someone has to pay for it.
Ads getting more obnoxious is a real problem. I'm totally OK with targeted ads that are really non-intrusive. Believe it or not, every once in a while, it actually does get my attention. I'm OK with this as well - It has lead me to a couple of things that have been really good purchases. While I agree that these are things that I likely would not have purchased because of the ad - that's actually double-edged.
A great example -- I use a camera "holster" instead of a strap. This has been a god-send, saving my shoulders, and allowing better freedom when I hike. Because of it, I've been able to enjoy two of my biggest hobbies more - I've come back with amazing photos when I wouldn't have normally felt like hiking a camera through on my shoulder, and with less strain. This is something I would likely have never known about if it wasn't for internet advertising. Was it something I wouldn't have purchased if it wasn't for an ad? Absolutely. It also solved a huge problem for me (I've had back issues most of my life) and I would have never thought to have look for it.
> Anyone who's read a good magazine knows that the ads not only have at least some appeal to many readers, but they are usually attractive and not insulting. When was the last time you read an ad in a magazine you enjoy, that made you physically ill?
I think this is a great point... but the difference with ads on the web are that there are many that pop up RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU with no obvious way to close, or right in the middle of something, often with no obvious way to move on. If you are impacting the usability of something or interrupting someone, then that is a problem - If you feel like people aren't looking at your ads, then this is not the answer - It is, however, a really good way to get users thinking "How can I never see these again..."
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:50 PM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
Seriously? That's one of the huge tradeoffs between Premium and Free. Are you seriously unwilling to pay $10 for all-you-can-stream ad-less music? If you are using it so often that the ads get on your nerves, well - it may be a service worth paying for. If you only rarely use it, then an adblocker may be overkill.
I know advertising gets a bad reputation, and rightfully so --- I use adblock myself. However, when a service is willing to offer an ad-free version for a reasonable fee, I'm all for it. To add to that, while the ads on spotify may be annoying, what they do NOT do is hijack your computer in any way. When it comes down to it, they are playing incredibly nicely with regard to advertising.
Asking for an adblocker for Spotify is basically saying "I don't want to pay for music." That's really an entitled place to be.
There's a real issue that has been at the core of much of the modern web for some time here -- If we want more of the services we use to be ad-free, they are going to cost somebody. There are infrastructure costs to pay, there are content production costs, and often employee salaries. Mefi has a cost to enter - Almost everyone here felt it was worth at least $5 for an account, and many donate to keep it running, yet it hasn't always been easy going financially - there have been some tough times. And this is a site that, while it gets a ton of traffic, doesn't get anywhere near as much as other sites that have yet to charge a fee. We are willing to pay for an account and donate to a community -- Are we also willing to do so for large content providers?
We are already seeing an arms race between ad-blockers and advertisers/content providers. Some of the sites we all read have "sponsored content" that is for all purposes an ad, and this is something that, as a general rule, adblock won't catch. This is something we are seeing mroe and more of, and is much more insidious to me.... but if we continue to adblock everything and are also unwilling to pay for content -- Well, someone has to pay for it.
Ads getting more obnoxious is a real problem. I'm totally OK with targeted ads that are really non-intrusive. Believe it or not, every once in a while, it actually does get my attention. I'm OK with this as well - It has lead me to a couple of things that have been really good purchases. While I agree that these are things that I likely would not have purchased because of the ad - that's actually double-edged.
A great example -- I use a camera "holster" instead of a strap. This has been a god-send, saving my shoulders, and allowing better freedom when I hike. Because of it, I've been able to enjoy two of my biggest hobbies more - I've come back with amazing photos when I wouldn't have normally felt like hiking a camera through on my shoulder, and with less strain. This is something I would likely have never known about if it wasn't for internet advertising. Was it something I wouldn't have purchased if it wasn't for an ad? Absolutely. It also solved a huge problem for me (I've had back issues most of my life) and I would have never thought to have look for it.
> Anyone who's read a good magazine knows that the ads not only have at least some appeal to many readers, but they are usually attractive and not insulting. When was the last time you read an ad in a magazine you enjoy, that made you physically ill?
I think this is a great point... but the difference with ads on the web are that there are many that pop up RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU with no obvious way to close, or right in the middle of something, often with no obvious way to move on. If you are impacting the usability of something or interrupting someone, then that is a problem - If you feel like people aren't looking at your ads, then this is not the answer - It is, however, a really good way to get users thinking "How can I never see these again..."
posted by MysticMCJ at 1:50 PM on July 4, 2015 [7 favorites]
So... I finally installed an adblocker when I was truly sick of those visually disgusting ads of some lady's face being stretched like Katherine Helmond's in Brazil. Or some waffle-print on a finger that made me feel physically ill.
I know exactly what you are talking about. I have never, in any other medium, seen this phenomenon. WTF is this about? I certainly can't remember what was being advertised.
I'm not against being advertised to but, yeah, this is too much.
posted by maggiemaggie at 1:59 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I know exactly what you are talking about. I have never, in any other medium, seen this phenomenon. WTF is this about? I certainly can't remember what was being advertised.
I'm not against being advertised to but, yeah, this is too much.
posted by maggiemaggie at 1:59 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I would love an adblocker for Spotify.
One option is to just pay for it. I finally caved and started paying after like a year of dealing with the ads and it is so much nicer. Easily worth the 10 bucks a month, for me.
posted by saul wright at 2:02 PM on July 4, 2015
One option is to just pay for it. I finally caved and started paying after like a year of dealing with the ads and it is so much nicer. Easily worth the 10 bucks a month, for me.
posted by saul wright at 2:02 PM on July 4, 2015
That's Taboola or Outbrain. It's basically a shock-curiosity thing to generate clicks. They're terrible.
posted by GuyZero at 2:03 PM on July 4, 2015
posted by GuyZero at 2:03 PM on July 4, 2015
Doesn't/didn't someone have an option next to ads like "Never show me this ad again" with an optional section for why? I actually really love that idea - Yes, it's refining ads to your interests, but it's also sending a large message to advertisers that you don't want to see this stuff. I'd imagine that if that was on EVERY ad, we'd never see some of those "face-stretching" ad or other body-horror like things that just casually wander into giant ad providers that are seemingly everywhere - taboola being the classic example.
I'm all for blocking that shit - it would be better if it would also send a message somehow to those who use it that they would be better getting advertising money from elsewhere. It's these advertisers (along with the interruptive ones and auto-play videos) that need to perish, and who are driving people to adblock.
posted by MysticMCJ at 2:05 PM on July 4, 2015
I'm all for blocking that shit - it would be better if it would also send a message somehow to those who use it that they would be better getting advertising money from elsewhere. It's these advertisers (along with the interruptive ones and auto-play videos) that need to perish, and who are driving people to adblock.
posted by MysticMCJ at 2:05 PM on July 4, 2015
A key issue that nobody talks about is that advertising is bandwidth theft.
Yet you assert an entitlement to consume the content provider's bandwidth for free. One is theft and the other is an entitlement. Interesting.
posted by JackFlash at 2:15 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Yet you assert an entitlement to consume the content provider's bandwidth for free. One is theft and the other is an entitlement. Interesting.
posted by JackFlash at 2:15 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Are you seriously unwilling to pay $10 for all-you-can-stream ad-less music?
Yes, unfortunately. But for what it's worth, I'm talking specifically about the annoyance of Spotify's ads in particular, not their ad model itself. I don't mind being interrupted every few songs, I just find the voice actors they choose to be incredibly grating. Their banner ads aren't a problem either, and in fact Spotify is one of the few places that occasionally serves an ad relevant enough for me to click. HOWEVER:
To add to that, while the ads on spotify may be annoying, what they do NOT do is hijack your computer in any way.
This is becoming less true with the new video ads. I'm not sure why they are trying to fit full-screen video in the ad, but they are indeed trying it, and it's essentially a loud stuttery mess. I'm seldom actually watching Spotify as I'm listening, so the video ads are both pointless and broken.
Worse still, the latest iterations of Spotify (presumably to accommodate the ad player?) are slower and clunkier, and do essentially hijack the computer for a while, while it does whatever it is it's doing in the background. Rather than leaving it running all the time, I've had to learn to shut it down when it starts hogging things too much. Which is unfortunate; then I'm not getting the music I'd like, and they're not getting the ad listening they'd like. (This unfortunately makes me less likely to try Premium in the future, for fear that even without ads, the clunkiness and system-hogging would remain.)
Asking for an adblocker for Spotify is basically saying "I don't want to pay for music." That's really an entitled place to be.
Again, just to be clear, I agree with you on this. Sorry if I came off as cheaty.
posted by mittens at 3:00 PM on July 4, 2015
Yes, unfortunately. But for what it's worth, I'm talking specifically about the annoyance of Spotify's ads in particular, not their ad model itself. I don't mind being interrupted every few songs, I just find the voice actors they choose to be incredibly grating. Their banner ads aren't a problem either, and in fact Spotify is one of the few places that occasionally serves an ad relevant enough for me to click. HOWEVER:
To add to that, while the ads on spotify may be annoying, what they do NOT do is hijack your computer in any way.
This is becoming less true with the new video ads. I'm not sure why they are trying to fit full-screen video in the ad, but they are indeed trying it, and it's essentially a loud stuttery mess. I'm seldom actually watching Spotify as I'm listening, so the video ads are both pointless and broken.
Worse still, the latest iterations of Spotify (presumably to accommodate the ad player?) are slower and clunkier, and do essentially hijack the computer for a while, while it does whatever it is it's doing in the background. Rather than leaving it running all the time, I've had to learn to shut it down when it starts hogging things too much. Which is unfortunate; then I'm not getting the music I'd like, and they're not getting the ad listening they'd like. (This unfortunately makes me less likely to try Premium in the future, for fear that even without ads, the clunkiness and system-hogging would remain.)
Asking for an adblocker for Spotify is basically saying "I don't want to pay for music." That's really an entitled place to be.
Again, just to be clear, I agree with you on this. Sorry if I came off as cheaty.
posted by mittens at 3:00 PM on July 4, 2015
Any new-media advertiser worth the name should be reading this post and the comments.
posted by Artful Codger at 3:46 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Artful Codger at 3:46 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
so why not just stop going to sites that use that tracking cookies and
well, for one thing, I like Metafilter ...
Chartbeat
Google Analytics
Quantcast
The DECK
Ghostery tells me that all three of these are currently running. I'm actually not blocking the The DECK because I read this META a while back and decided it was probably good value for the community.
Maybe if way more websites were way more open with their various ad + tracking policies and applications there would be way less adblocking etc going down.
posted by philip-random at 4:07 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
well, for one thing, I like Metafilter ...
Chartbeat
Google Analytics
Quantcast
The DECK
Ghostery tells me that all three of these are currently running. I'm actually not blocking the The DECK because I read this META a while back and decided it was probably good value for the community.
Maybe if way more websites were way more open with their various ad + tracking policies and applications there would be way less adblocking etc going down.
posted by philip-random at 4:07 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Internet adverts routinely show flashing imagery that would get the advert banned if shown on TV in the UK. For some photo-sensitive or epileptic people, it's not a case of being selfish or trying to get content for free, they use ad blockers to make the web safer to use.
Here's the guidelines PDF (old document, but the current guidance is the same) The rules in brief are:
- Don't flash images more than three times or more than three times a second
- Don't flash more than a quarter of the screen
- Don't flash to saturated red (Some people have a particular vulnerability to this)
- Don't flash repeating patterns like stripes or polka-dots.
Now as you browse the web, try counting how many websites try to stab you in the eyes with illegal adverts.
posted by Eleven at 4:34 PM on July 4, 2015
Here's the guidelines PDF (old document, but the current guidance is the same) The rules in brief are:
- Don't flash images more than three times or more than three times a second
- Don't flash more than a quarter of the screen
- Don't flash to saturated red (Some people have a particular vulnerability to this)
- Don't flash repeating patterns like stripes or polka-dots.
Now as you browse the web, try counting how many websites try to stab you in the eyes with illegal adverts.
posted by Eleven at 4:34 PM on July 4, 2015
Regarding resource consumption of uBlock vs ABP: Firefox nightlies have incorporated a change in the handling of stylesheets that saves a huge amount of RAM in ABP, enough to make it competitive with uBlock.
Basically, ABP forces Firefox to load additional identical copies of stylesheets, and the FF change allows a single copy to feed all the uses that previously needed their own copy. The change benefits lots of scenarios, but ABP is a conspicuously big winner.
That's scheduled to land in FF 41 (39 is current in the mainstream channel), so it's several weeks out, but not too far off. If you want a moderately more technical examination, you could read the relevant entry on Nicholas Nethercote's Memshrink blog.
BTW, for those advocating UBlock, do you mean uBlock or uBlock Origin? And why?
posted by NortonDC at 4:47 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Basically, ABP forces Firefox to load additional identical copies of stylesheets, and the FF change allows a single copy to feed all the uses that previously needed their own copy. The change benefits lots of scenarios, but ABP is a conspicuously big winner.
That's scheduled to land in FF 41 (39 is current in the mainstream channel), so it's several weeks out, but not too far off. If you want a moderately more technical examination, you could read the relevant entry on Nicholas Nethercote's Memshrink blog.
BTW, for those advocating UBlock, do you mean uBlock or uBlock Origin? And why?
posted by NortonDC at 4:47 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Eleven, I would love to see a Harding test legislated for online ads, but I think that enforcing Harding compliance would require a level of top-down control of the Web that most of us would find unacceptable.
posted by infinitewindow at 5:27 PM on July 4, 2015
posted by infinitewindow at 5:27 PM on July 4, 2015
I just experimentally turned off AdBlock (for the first time in 5 years) and installed uBlock. The first website I then visited, a local government mapping service I use that displays no ads, uBlock killed the site's javascript to make it non-functional.
It was easy enough to disable uBlock on this site, of course, but it just demonstrates that it's still not easy to distinguish necessary scripts from ads.
posted by Jimbob at 6:00 PM on July 4, 2015
It was easy enough to disable uBlock on this site, of course, but it just demonstrates that it's still not easy to distinguish necessary scripts from ads.
posted by Jimbob at 6:00 PM on July 4, 2015
uBlock is just a rules-matching engine, though. It reads in AdBlock rules sourced from wherever and then runs them. If it's messing up a site, the first place to look is probably the rules publishers that you've subscribed to. It is entirely possible to load the same ruleset that AdBlock uses and obtain identical functionality.
posted by indubitable at 6:50 PM on July 4, 2015
posted by indubitable at 6:50 PM on July 4, 2015
What I notice about the ads on the internet is that they have crowded out so much of the content that the internet is much less use than it used to be. When I search something the odds are now that most of the hits will be for commercial sites that don't actually offer me anything. There is a short piece of content, identical to the content on numerous other commercial sites and if it wasn't cut'n'pasted from Wikipedia, it is clearly chatty filler rather than concrete information. I can find numerous results for just about anything I want to search but the content appears to be written by someone who knows nothing about the subject and isn't interested in it either. It's like someone was paid to write 800 words on the a random subject and went to as little effort as possible.
Without Adblock I can't use the internet. There are so many links out there and sites out there and 'articles' out there that actually have no content. They want me to watch a fifty-second ad for a car I will never buy in order to watch a five second video that I do want to see.
The analogy is ridiculous. Without adblock I'm not going to drive through their websites sedately admiring every ad they pop up. I'm going to stop driving all together. Adblock isn't a throttle on a motor boat, it's the rivets in the side of the boat that holds the plates together so it doesn't fill up with water and sink.
The same thing happened to magazines. Somehow through the eighties and nineties all the content went and there seems to be nothing in magazines now except for ads. I gave up reading magazines, let alone buying them. There's nothing there. If you get a magazine from the seventies and compare it to a current edition of the same magazine the difference is staggering. Instead of multi-page articles there are single page product placement ads disguised as articles. Instead of a photography magazine being about how to use the camera it's a catalogue showing cameras and camera accessories to buy and where to buy them.
I can't watch TV. I just can't. The ads are too pervasive and intrusive and jarring. They're fast and loud and catchy. I haven't watched TV for years just in order to avoid the ads.
My guess is that in a while the internet is going to have no content because the advertisements will crowd it all out. I'm guessing this because of seeing it happen to magazines, newspapers and TV.
I've also seen it happen to a lot of consumer goods. One example is dolls. There used to be all kinds of basic dolls available - baby dolls, little girl dolls or lady dolls. But now the dolls are not generic playthings, they are branded and instantly recognizable. If you see the silhouette of a Barbie you instantly know what brand it is. Or a Bratz. They only seem to sell a very few dolls that have been uniquely distorted so that you couldn't mistake them for any other brand. It's not that this is new - Kewpie dolls were from the first half of the previous century, but rather that everything except the branded dolls has gotten scarcer and scarcer or simply disappeared.
I wonder how much this is caused by the creeping drop in our standard of living. If magazines relied solely on subscriptions to provide their revenues, almost nobody could ever afford them. Perhaps a standard glossy magazine like you see at the checkout line at the supermarket would cost 45$ instead of $4.50.
I gather that in order to not make a loss on producing and selling dolls the companies have to have a certain volume of sales - they have to sell fifteen million Monster High dolls or they will make a loss.
And if you have a website the ads are the only way to monetize it. People simply won't pay to visit your site. If I had to pay to listen to a music video on YouTube I would either not listen, or I'd steal it somehow. There's not enough consumer dollars available compared to what it costs to produce media perhaps. But the problem becomes if I have an hour to listen to music, they need me to listen to an hour and a half of their ads to make a profit. They have to stop me from actually spending my time on the content they are pretending to sell me in order to be successful. They can't make a profit if I just buy one aero postale sweatshirt. They have to offload some of the marketing expenses onto me. I have to advertise their brand for them by having its name emblazoned across my chest everywhere I go.
The internet was different. Instead of having to pay printing and postage to get your content to people like a magazine subscription, a negligible investment would make an electronic copy of that page available for millions of people. It cost so little to produce the Internet took over from newspapers and other information media. But now somehow it costs so much more than it used to, so every visitor to the site has to somehow make a payment for their visit.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:26 PM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
Without Adblock I can't use the internet. There are so many links out there and sites out there and 'articles' out there that actually have no content. They want me to watch a fifty-second ad for a car I will never buy in order to watch a five second video that I do want to see.
The analogy is ridiculous. Without adblock I'm not going to drive through their websites sedately admiring every ad they pop up. I'm going to stop driving all together. Adblock isn't a throttle on a motor boat, it's the rivets in the side of the boat that holds the plates together so it doesn't fill up with water and sink.
The same thing happened to magazines. Somehow through the eighties and nineties all the content went and there seems to be nothing in magazines now except for ads. I gave up reading magazines, let alone buying them. There's nothing there. If you get a magazine from the seventies and compare it to a current edition of the same magazine the difference is staggering. Instead of multi-page articles there are single page product placement ads disguised as articles. Instead of a photography magazine being about how to use the camera it's a catalogue showing cameras and camera accessories to buy and where to buy them.
I can't watch TV. I just can't. The ads are too pervasive and intrusive and jarring. They're fast and loud and catchy. I haven't watched TV for years just in order to avoid the ads.
My guess is that in a while the internet is going to have no content because the advertisements will crowd it all out. I'm guessing this because of seeing it happen to magazines, newspapers and TV.
I've also seen it happen to a lot of consumer goods. One example is dolls. There used to be all kinds of basic dolls available - baby dolls, little girl dolls or lady dolls. But now the dolls are not generic playthings, they are branded and instantly recognizable. If you see the silhouette of a Barbie you instantly know what brand it is. Or a Bratz. They only seem to sell a very few dolls that have been uniquely distorted so that you couldn't mistake them for any other brand. It's not that this is new - Kewpie dolls were from the first half of the previous century, but rather that everything except the branded dolls has gotten scarcer and scarcer or simply disappeared.
I wonder how much this is caused by the creeping drop in our standard of living. If magazines relied solely on subscriptions to provide their revenues, almost nobody could ever afford them. Perhaps a standard glossy magazine like you see at the checkout line at the supermarket would cost 45$ instead of $4.50.
I gather that in order to not make a loss on producing and selling dolls the companies have to have a certain volume of sales - they have to sell fifteen million Monster High dolls or they will make a loss.
And if you have a website the ads are the only way to monetize it. People simply won't pay to visit your site. If I had to pay to listen to a music video on YouTube I would either not listen, or I'd steal it somehow. There's not enough consumer dollars available compared to what it costs to produce media perhaps. But the problem becomes if I have an hour to listen to music, they need me to listen to an hour and a half of their ads to make a profit. They have to stop me from actually spending my time on the content they are pretending to sell me in order to be successful. They can't make a profit if I just buy one aero postale sweatshirt. They have to offload some of the marketing expenses onto me. I have to advertise their brand for them by having its name emblazoned across my chest everywhere I go.
The internet was different. Instead of having to pay printing and postage to get your content to people like a magazine subscription, a negligible investment would make an electronic copy of that page available for millions of people. It cost so little to produce the Internet took over from newspapers and other information media. But now somehow it costs so much more than it used to, so every visitor to the site has to somehow make a payment for their visit.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:26 PM on July 4, 2015 [8 favorites]
I subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle digitally. They have this really awkward third-party javascripty/Flash web viewer. And you know what? There's an ad bar across the top, and one down the right side, even though I'm paying for this. Thankfully full-screening the flash viewer makes them go away -- then you realize that the newpaper is full of ads anyway. But at least newspaper ads don't move.
posted by Standard Orange at 8:23 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Standard Orange at 8:23 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
If I can't use adblock, am I also not allowed to avert my eyes to avoid advertisements while on a site?
adblock is me simply averting my eyes, as I do as a matter of policy anyway, in a much more efficient way.
If a site can't see the equivalent overlap between these two things, they are effectively saying they have the ongoing right to try to still woo me in to some sort of financial transaction with their omnipresent advertising efforts despite all my desires to the contrary. So when I hear talk about it being immoral to block ads, I understand it to have something of that kind of motivation behind it, which I find not only kind of rude, but doubly effective for encouraging me to dig in my heels on the matter.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:39 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
adblock is me simply averting my eyes, as I do as a matter of policy anyway, in a much more efficient way.
If a site can't see the equivalent overlap between these two things, they are effectively saying they have the ongoing right to try to still woo me in to some sort of financial transaction with their omnipresent advertising efforts despite all my desires to the contrary. So when I hear talk about it being immoral to block ads, I understand it to have something of that kind of motivation behind it, which I find not only kind of rude, but doubly effective for encouraging me to dig in my heels on the matter.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:39 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
What's interesting to me is that when consuming certain types of media, I like ads. A hobby magazine, for example, often is as useful for the specialty ads that are in it as it is for actual content. But magazines are generally easy to navigate, and the ads become less welcomed if they promote a lot of "continued on page 213" type of stuff.
Ads are something I should be able to pay attention to if I want and ignore if I want. If I'm trying to read an article, having an ad interrupt me isn't going to sell me your product. But if it's an ad relevant to my interests and it's quietly awaiting my attention, I'll probably give it an eyeball.
Of course, it seems like most online ads are not trying to sell you anything other than the chance to disinfect your computer of whatever payload they installed.
As mentioned numerous times, for the amount of information these companies supposedly have about all of us, they're fucking awful at delivering ads which are at all interesting.
posted by maxwelton at 8:46 PM on July 4, 2015 [11 favorites]
Ads are something I should be able to pay attention to if I want and ignore if I want. If I'm trying to read an article, having an ad interrupt me isn't going to sell me your product. But if it's an ad relevant to my interests and it's quietly awaiting my attention, I'll probably give it an eyeball.
Of course, it seems like most online ads are not trying to sell you anything other than the chance to disinfect your computer of whatever payload they installed.
As mentioned numerous times, for the amount of information these companies supposedly have about all of us, they're fucking awful at delivering ads which are at all interesting.
posted by maxwelton at 8:46 PM on July 4, 2015 [11 favorites]
Given the intrusive almost omnipotent presence of advertising throughout many of Philip K. Dick's work, I imagine if he were still alive he'd go insane over this all over again.
with your reckless remote control use
I imagine the battery companies will receive some gifts from Big Advertising that has nothing to do with the subsequent battery shortage.
posted by juiceCake at 9:30 PM on July 4, 2015
with your reckless remote control use
I imagine the battery companies will receive some gifts from Big Advertising that has nothing to do with the subsequent battery shortage.
posted by juiceCake at 9:30 PM on July 4, 2015
I don't want the sites I visit to be unable to make their ends meet. The internet is based on an awful model, and it may be unsustainable. But I do recognize that, for the time being, I'm not compensating the vast majority of the sites and services I consume on a daily basis. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and at the very least, operating costs should be covered for sites that truly aren't awful about things. At the same time, even paying $1 a month for a site is, for some reason, a big deal. We're all spoiled by what amounts to a freemium model that we've figured out how to hack.
And as a few mentioned, there are some ads that I appreciate - they're beautiful, clever, and cater to my specific needs and wants.
I wish there was some special service that can make everyone happy. I'd be intrigued by a service that lets me spend 5 minutes here or there - not every day, necessarily, just something I can open up when I feel like it - and the service shows me ads that it's curated specifically for me, painstakingly picked out for my tastes and what I'm looking for. Then I can allocate the ad revenue for my eyeballs/attention. Either the service can allocate this automatically, or I can pick out sites I've visited recently that I think are specially deserving of a portion of that revenue.
It would be like taking ownership of my own ad experience in a way. It would be empowering in that 1) I never get to be annoyed by an unpleasant ad if I don't want to, 2) advertisers will have more incentive to compete in the marketplace by having beautiful or interesting experiences, rather than crass ones, and 3) I get to decide where my ad money goes and "donate" to my favorite sites.
I'm not opposed to advertising, when it works on my own terms. Why shouldn't it work on my own terms?
posted by naju at 10:02 PM on July 4, 2015
And as a few mentioned, there are some ads that I appreciate - they're beautiful, clever, and cater to my specific needs and wants.
I wish there was some special service that can make everyone happy. I'd be intrigued by a service that lets me spend 5 minutes here or there - not every day, necessarily, just something I can open up when I feel like it - and the service shows me ads that it's curated specifically for me, painstakingly picked out for my tastes and what I'm looking for. Then I can allocate the ad revenue for my eyeballs/attention. Either the service can allocate this automatically, or I can pick out sites I've visited recently that I think are specially deserving of a portion of that revenue.
It would be like taking ownership of my own ad experience in a way. It would be empowering in that 1) I never get to be annoyed by an unpleasant ad if I don't want to, 2) advertisers will have more incentive to compete in the marketplace by having beautiful or interesting experiences, rather than crass ones, and 3) I get to decide where my ad money goes and "donate" to my favorite sites.
I'm not opposed to advertising, when it works on my own terms. Why shouldn't it work on my own terms?
posted by naju at 10:02 PM on July 4, 2015
I absolutely hate ads and marketing in general. It's all so disgustingly manipulative. So I mute TV and radio ads and have for as long as I can remember. And happily use adblockers on the internet. There's no difference just because it's online. If I want to buy something I'll look for it myself thank you very much.
posted by downtohisturtles at 10:41 PM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by downtohisturtles at 10:41 PM on July 4, 2015 [2 favorites]
Adblock Plus and NoScript
It's worth mentioning that the developer of NoScript and the developers of AdBlock Plus got into a weird feud over NoScript's self promotion that I don't think I can unpack - but the practical upshot was that they didn't play well for a little while. If they do now, great, but I'm liking Ghostery.
Also, unrelated to ads, while you're tricking out your browser you might want to take a second to grab HTTPSEverywhere as well.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:16 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's worth mentioning that the developer of NoScript and the developers of AdBlock Plus got into a weird feud over NoScript's self promotion that I don't think I can unpack - but the practical upshot was that they didn't play well for a little while. If they do now, great, but I'm liking Ghostery.
Also, unrelated to ads, while you're tricking out your browser you might want to take a second to grab HTTPSEverywhere as well.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:16 PM on July 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
One way of looking at it is that the site owner is asking you to look at their ads in return for consuming their content. If you refrain from visiting, at least you aren't consuming their traffic. It's not like you have an intrinsic right or need to consume their content.
When I click on a link, what literally happens is my computer says to the site owner's computer, "I'd like to see that webpage, would you send me a copy?" And it's pretty trivial for the site's computer to ask mine, "Are you blocking ads?"
So I'm sending them a message that says, "Would you send me a copy of that webpage even if I intend to block out all the ads?" And while the website could easily answer, "No," they almost always answer "Yes," and send me the webpage I've asked for.
So how could this possibly be construed as me breaking some alleged unwritten agreement to watch their ads in return for reading their webpage, when they've explicitly just agreed to send me the webpage without me watching their ads?
posted by straight at 11:17 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
When I click on a link, what literally happens is my computer says to the site owner's computer, "I'd like to see that webpage, would you send me a copy?" And it's pretty trivial for the site's computer to ask mine, "Are you blocking ads?"
So I'm sending them a message that says, "Would you send me a copy of that webpage even if I intend to block out all the ads?" And while the website could easily answer, "No," they almost always answer "Yes," and send me the webpage I've asked for.
So how could this possibly be construed as me breaking some alleged unwritten agreement to watch their ads in return for reading their webpage, when they've explicitly just agreed to send me the webpage without me watching their ads?
posted by straight at 11:17 PM on July 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
BTW, for those advocating UBlock, do you mean uBlock or uBlock Origin? And why?
I use uBlock and it was the memory consumption issue that did it for me. There's only 2 gig of ram in my computer. With AdBlock Plus installed, Firefox would start by using over 1 gig and then regularly freeze or crash due to memory consumption.
Switched to uBlock and the problem was solved.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:55 AM on July 5, 2015
I use uBlock and it was the memory consumption issue that did it for me. There's only 2 gig of ram in my computer. With AdBlock Plus installed, Firefox would start by using over 1 gig and then regularly freeze or crash due to memory consumption.
Switched to uBlock and the problem was solved.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:55 AM on July 5, 2015
BTW, for those advocating UBlock, do you mean uBlock or uBlock Origin? And why?
I looked into it recently and basically: use whichever. They are essentially the same. The reason for the fork is just some bickering between two developers about who gets credit for writing the original code. uBlock Origin is the one maintained by the original developer, who at one point gave the development over to another person, who then wanted to take credit for it. The original developer then forked it to uBlock Origin, and they then settled their dispute amicably, as far as I can tell. Now they just tinker with their respective forks.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:39 AM on July 5, 2015
I looked into it recently and basically: use whichever. They are essentially the same. The reason for the fork is just some bickering between two developers about who gets credit for writing the original code. uBlock Origin is the one maintained by the original developer, who at one point gave the development over to another person, who then wanted to take credit for it. The original developer then forked it to uBlock Origin, and they then settled their dispute amicably, as far as I can tell. Now they just tinker with their respective forks.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:39 AM on July 5, 2015
I would appreciate links to material related to the physical changes to the brain caused by advertising messages.
posted by infini at 2:03 AM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by infini at 2:03 AM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
Copying is piracy! Downloading is theft! Adblocking is speeding! Blasphemy is libel! Kidnapping is murder! Tax evasion is rape! Murder is tortious interference! Rape is trademark violation! Speeding is jaywalking!
The amount of hand-wringing equivocation that goes along with people's surprise at how the Internet gets used is truly breathtaking. It's as if the moment someone finds that the rules of the new system are unfamiliar, people blindly reach behind them to a shelf of existing laws and just thrust one forward.
"There!" they shout, triumphant. "It's exactly like this one!"
And the media fall for it every time.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:10 AM on July 5, 2015 [8 favorites]
The amount of hand-wringing equivocation that goes along with people's surprise at how the Internet gets used is truly breathtaking. It's as if the moment someone finds that the rules of the new system are unfamiliar, people blindly reach behind them to a shelf of existing laws and just thrust one forward.
"There!" they shout, triumphant. "It's exactly like this one!"
And the media fall for it every time.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 3:10 AM on July 5, 2015 [8 favorites]
We're all spoiled by what amounts to a freemium model that we've figured out how to hack.
That's just you have drunk the marketeer's kool-aid. The internet has been build on the share everything model and it's the people who want to paywall it who are trying to hack it.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:19 AM on July 5, 2015 [9 favorites]
That's just you have drunk the marketeer's kool-aid. The internet has been build on the share everything model and it's the people who want to paywall it who are trying to hack it.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:19 AM on July 5, 2015 [9 favorites]
We've also gotten increasingly sophisticated. It's no longer on the scale of running a personal website from your parents' basement. The costs of a Metafilter or a Mlkshk no longer work with that share everything model we both grew up on, and the expectations have changed such that we don't expect subscriptions. Someone has to pay - who?
posted by naju at 3:36 AM on July 5, 2015
posted by naju at 3:36 AM on July 5, 2015
Copying is piracy! Downloading is theft! Adblocking is speeding!
And we've always been at war with Eastasia!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:28 AM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
And we've always been at war with Eastasia!
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:28 AM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
I used to believe this. I thought I had an ethical requirement to at least allow the ads.
I have made my income either directly or indirectly from ad supported content for much of my adult life.
But then the advertisers became unethical. Interstitials you can't dismiss, mouse-over ads that grab control of your browser that seemingly randomly invoke, autoplay (and auto-advance videos with ads longer than the content), ads that defy credibility or are disgusting eyesores, more ad space than content, distracting animated ads, so I decided they did it to themselves.
About a month ago I finally installed one after complaining to a site owner about how his site looked like some ad executives were having orgies with orangutangs.
So sites have up to 40 ad blocks or trackers installed.
I'm now trying to decide on the ethics of adding ad blockers to my builds for my users (I am a systems admin).
posted by cjorgensen at 7:18 AM on July 5, 2015 [3 favorites]
I have made my income either directly or indirectly from ad supported content for much of my adult life.
But then the advertisers became unethical. Interstitials you can't dismiss, mouse-over ads that grab control of your browser that seemingly randomly invoke, autoplay (and auto-advance videos with ads longer than the content), ads that defy credibility or are disgusting eyesores, more ad space than content, distracting animated ads, so I decided they did it to themselves.
About a month ago I finally installed one after complaining to a site owner about how his site looked like some ad executives were having orgies with orangutangs.
So sites have up to 40 ad blocks or trackers installed.
I'm now trying to decide on the ethics of adding ad blockers to my builds for my users (I am a systems admin).
posted by cjorgensen at 7:18 AM on July 5, 2015 [3 favorites]
> It's no longer on the scale of running a personal website from your parents' basement. The costs of a Metafilter or a Mlkshk no longer work with that share everything model we both grew up on, and the expectations have changed such that we don't expect subscriptions. Someone has to pay - who?
That's not strictly true. In terms of cost per viewer, the bigger sites can cost less to operate than the basement equivalent. And the share model in many cases extends to the site content and moderation, which comes from users - eg Metafilter.
Anyway, all the other media have somehow managed to come up with advertising models that work, that hit the balance between effectiveness and acceptance. I can't remember a tv, radio or magazine ad that made me want to vomit.
In business, the customer is always right, so if I'm blocking ads, it's because the sites I visit haven't figured out how to do it effectively.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:53 AM on July 5, 2015
That's not strictly true. In terms of cost per viewer, the bigger sites can cost less to operate than the basement equivalent. And the share model in many cases extends to the site content and moderation, which comes from users - eg Metafilter.
Anyway, all the other media have somehow managed to come up with advertising models that work, that hit the balance between effectiveness and acceptance. I can't remember a tv, radio or magazine ad that made me want to vomit.
In business, the customer is always right, so if I'm blocking ads, it's because the sites I visit haven't figured out how to do it effectively.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:53 AM on July 5, 2015
I can't remember a tv, radio or magazine ad that made me want to vomit.
what.
posted by philip-random at 7:59 AM on July 5, 2015
what.
posted by philip-random at 7:59 AM on July 5, 2015
poorly written, sorry. I'm repeating something I said better upthread, that some online ads have been visually offensive or disturbing to me, to the point of nausea, whereas the same hasn't happened with TV, radio or print ads.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:11 AM on July 5, 2015
posted by Artful Codger at 8:11 AM on July 5, 2015
Thing: "Though I have an adblocker installed I have it off by default and only badlist certain websites where the adverts make a serious difference."
So this thread made me go rooting around in the settings of my adblocker (Adblock on Safari which, unlike the "Plus" one, does not take whitelist money from companies). Lo and behold, there is a blacklist mode which is off by default and then you can block ads on individual sites. As an experiment, I've been running this mode for the last day, and I'm gratified that the sites I visit most actually do have unobtrusive advertising. But I've definitely added Facebook and some big news sites to the blacklist. So, I guess this terribly written article and this thread have changed my mind for now.
I still have most plugins disabled, though.
posted by bluefly at 8:31 AM on July 5, 2015
So this thread made me go rooting around in the settings of my adblocker (Adblock on Safari which, unlike the "Plus" one, does not take whitelist money from companies). Lo and behold, there is a blacklist mode which is off by default and then you can block ads on individual sites. As an experiment, I've been running this mode for the last day, and I'm gratified that the sites I visit most actually do have unobtrusive advertising. But I've definitely added Facebook and some big news sites to the blacklist. So, I guess this terribly written article and this thread have changed my mind for now.
I still have most plugins disabled, though.
posted by bluefly at 8:31 AM on July 5, 2015
MartinWisse: The internet has been build on the share everything model and it's the people who want to paywall it who are trying to hack it.
That's my view as well. Basically I haven't watched TV for 30 years because I can't stand the mind-numbing ads (this is my LIFE you're wasting). Advertising ruined TV, and it's been clear from early on that they intend to do the same thing to the internet.
Once a week we go to the pub to play music, in a "sports bar". What that means is that from where I sit I can see six to eight giant screens, and to my right there is a row of booths, each of which has its own 24" screen. Recently there are more ads for online games featuring large-breasted heroines and the kind of nonsense I never see on the internet because AdBlock, which is an interesting development. I guess tv sports watchers are used to all the rapid cuts and violent action designed to distract the viewer but man, the whole thing is crazy. It's like visual meme salad.
nickrussell: The advertisements that we see physically modify our brains – in essence, those advertisements create not only our experience in the world, but also our senses of self.
Great comment! but I too would like to see a cite for this.
posted by sneebler at 8:50 AM on July 5, 2015
That's my view as well. Basically I haven't watched TV for 30 years because I can't stand the mind-numbing ads (this is my LIFE you're wasting). Advertising ruined TV, and it's been clear from early on that they intend to do the same thing to the internet.
Once a week we go to the pub to play music, in a "sports bar". What that means is that from where I sit I can see six to eight giant screens, and to my right there is a row of booths, each of which has its own 24" screen. Recently there are more ads for online games featuring large-breasted heroines and the kind of nonsense I never see on the internet because AdBlock, which is an interesting development. I guess tv sports watchers are used to all the rapid cuts and violent action designed to distract the viewer but man, the whole thing is crazy. It's like visual meme salad.
nickrussell: The advertisements that we see physically modify our brains – in essence, those advertisements create not only our experience in the world, but also our senses of self.
Great comment! but I too would like to see a cite for this.
posted by sneebler at 8:50 AM on July 5, 2015
How do you block those stupid popup ads that ask you to like them on facebook or if you're against kicking kittens or whatever?
I've been using this for a while, and it works pretty well. It's clunky but effective. Combined with AdBlock, I see no ads on FB and can hide a bunch of FB nonsense as well.
http://www.fbpurity.com/
posted by sneebler at 8:56 AM on July 5, 2015
I've been using this for a while, and it works pretty well. It's clunky but effective. Combined with AdBlock, I see no ads on FB and can hide a bunch of FB nonsense as well.
http://www.fbpurity.com/
posted by sneebler at 8:56 AM on July 5, 2015
I don't understand why I've never seen an ad for a product that I'm interested in. I'm the main shopper for my family, we're middle class, and we have a pretty standard range of hobbies and interests. If the ads were for tents, or archery targets, or graphic novels for children, or not-too-sweet milk chocolate, I'd be interested. I like reading reviews of sleeping bags. Tell me about your dry cider.
But they're not relevant; the ads are for diet pills, all of them.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:48 AM on July 5, 2015 [5 favorites]
But they're not relevant; the ads are for diet pills, all of them.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:48 AM on July 5, 2015 [5 favorites]
We've also gotten increasingly sophisticated. It's no longer on the scale of running a personal website from your parents' basement. The costs of a Metafilter or a Mlkshk no longer work with that share everything model we both grew up on, and the expectations have changed such that we don't expect subscriptions. Someone has to pay - who?Discussions about ad-blockers tend to inevitably hit that point where someone talks about cost focusing on running a basic web server, as if it's still 1994 when that was still a major challenge. I notice it most as a symptom of the tendency many IT workers have to assume that our work is really hard and deserves top compensation but most other people’s work could be replaced “with a very small shell script”, particularly when said work involves something which isn't easy to measure.
Looking at the web business model, it's common to under-estimate ongoing maintenance work (incremental change makes it easy to miss) but people tend to at least recognize its existence. One of the most frequently ignored costs is dealing with spam, abuse, and other moderation requirements which for most sites requires 24 hour coverage by skilled humans who are familiar with the community. Sure, a small community might go a long time – say the entire early days of the web – using only volunteers but that tends to break at some point as people get tired of playing whack-a-mole as a hobby. Metafilter has made the problem easier than for most sites – the signup fee is brilliant – and it still requires a solid team to actively maintain the level of quality we enjoy.
Similarly, any site which produces original content has a ton of expenses which aren't particularly visible – editing, all of the graphic design supporting modern stories, accounting, lawyers, etc. You see this a lot when people ask why any author doesn't self-publish and someone like jscalzi, cstross, etc. shows up to explain that they consider their publishing contract a good deal in exchange for not cutting their productivity in half.
The old “everything on the web is free” thinking was heavily subsidized by things like universities providing hosting, people volunteering their labor at well under market cost, news organizations publishing material online before Craigslist started chewing into their ad revenue, etc. It still continues in some places, which is wonderful, but we should recognize that this was a historical accident rather than the natural order of things. Most projects turned to ads because they need to pay salaries and the only option which has proven to reliably issue checks every month is selling ads.
The idea that there was a perfect free web before advertisers screwed it up is just “Good old days” mythology for a younger generation. Most of us want less advertising and the only way that's going to work is demonstrating that other business models are both possible and reliable.
posted by adamsc at 10:05 AM on July 5, 2015 [7 favorites]
Then those website will go away, just like drive in movies or whatever.
I wonder what will happen in the future when smart glasses or contacts are developed that let people block ads in real life. All bill boards replaced with public domain art, ect...
posted by Iax at 12:14 PM on July 5, 2015
I wonder what will happen in the future when smart glasses or contacts are developed that let people block ads in real life. All bill boards replaced with public domain art, ect...
posted by Iax at 12:14 PM on July 5, 2015
I wonder what will happen in the future when smart glasses or contacts are developed that let people block ads in real life.
This will be a freemium app. You want art? That's a microtransaction for each piece. Otherwise, the ads are getting replaced with other ads.
posted by radwolf76 at 12:27 PM on July 5, 2015
This will be a freemium app. You want art? That's a microtransaction for each piece. Otherwise, the ads are getting replaced with other ads.
posted by radwolf76 at 12:27 PM on July 5, 2015
Y'all are writing as if In Persuasion Nation is a work of fiction.
posted by scruss at 1:29 PM on July 5, 2015
posted by scruss at 1:29 PM on July 5, 2015
For people who don't want to run adblockers but who get crashed by the damn video ads, or annoyed by sudden unexpected music - turning off flash from playing automatically takes care of ALL of that. I was reaching the point where I couldn't read any of the light comedy webpages I wanted, so I started manually crashing flash (worked a treat!) and then discovered I could just turn flash off. Now when I want flash to work I enable it, and otherwise I am left alone and my browser no longer slows to a crawl as 8-10 flash video player ads start up.
Highly recommended.
Otherwise, I think the dependance of media on advertising is pretty well doomed, but I don't have a better answer. Right now money is funneling up from individuals to corporations which spend it on a variety of means, few of them in the interest of the individuals. I'd like to see a different system; no idea how to get there.
posted by Deoridhe at 6:48 PM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
Highly recommended.
Otherwise, I think the dependance of media on advertising is pretty well doomed, but I don't have a better answer. Right now money is funneling up from individuals to corporations which spend it on a variety of means, few of them in the interest of the individuals. I'd like to see a different system; no idea how to get there.
posted by Deoridhe at 6:48 PM on July 5, 2015 [1 favorite]
Wow, uBlocko is even killing promoted tweets for me. Sorry, not sorry.
posted by ctmf at 7:15 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by ctmf at 7:15 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
I'm about to take an extended time off from MeFi, but saw this tab still open and had to comment... I encourage everyone who thinks they shouldn't pay for the sites they visit in some way or another to look over the state of metafilter and recognize that this is at least a site that we have felt was worth a few bucks for a one-time cost of entry.
As far as the Internet being built on the share everything model- what you are thinking was likely the publicly funded sites and personal sites that I referenced earlier. Those weren't free or volunteer efforts for the most part, those were public funds, or tied to accounts before the days of bandwidth charges (and if you weren't paying those it was only because your ISP either was OK with it or unaware)
Even everyone's favorite free software packages and operating systems ultimately have forms of sponsorship in that many of the companies who find them useful are sponsoring development.
If you don't think that it should be paid for out of your own pocket or via some other form of sponsorship, then you are expecting that everything from the development time to the design to the hosting to the bandwidth to the monitoring and incident response and the maintenance should be unpaid efforts. Peronally, I'm not OK with that. Perhaps you are, but if so, then again - read the state of metafilter and then chime back in. It's well worth a read for anyone in this discussion-- And keep in mind that this is a site where all of the content is already unpaid labor.
posted by MysticMCJ at 10:37 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
As far as the Internet being built on the share everything model- what you are thinking was likely the publicly funded sites and personal sites that I referenced earlier. Those weren't free or volunteer efforts for the most part, those were public funds, or tied to accounts before the days of bandwidth charges (and if you weren't paying those it was only because your ISP either was OK with it or unaware)
Even everyone's favorite free software packages and operating systems ultimately have forms of sponsorship in that many of the companies who find them useful are sponsoring development.
If you don't think that it should be paid for out of your own pocket or via some other form of sponsorship, then you are expecting that everything from the development time to the design to the hosting to the bandwidth to the monitoring and incident response and the maintenance should be unpaid efforts. Peronally, I'm not OK with that. Perhaps you are, but if so, then again - read the state of metafilter and then chime back in. It's well worth a read for anyone in this discussion-- And keep in mind that this is a site where all of the content is already unpaid labor.
posted by MysticMCJ at 10:37 PM on July 5, 2015 [2 favorites]
that some online ads have been visually offensive or disturbing to me, to the point of nausea, whereas the same hasn't happened with TV, radio or print ads.
Perhaps not visually offensive, but I used to rip out the fragrance sample pages in magazines before reading them, because often enough, the fragrances were overpowering and made me feel sick. I feel like it's legally and practically the same as blocking Taboola ads. There was never a time when I felt unethical about this, even if it was a free subscription.
posted by almostmanda at 5:07 AM on July 6, 2015
Perhaps not visually offensive, but I used to rip out the fragrance sample pages in magazines before reading them, because often enough, the fragrances were overpowering and made me feel sick. I feel like it's legally and practically the same as blocking Taboola ads. There was never a time when I felt unethical about this, even if it was a free subscription.
posted by almostmanda at 5:07 AM on July 6, 2015
Adblock is the modern equivalent to trashing junk mail instead of reading it. Don't you know the USPS relies on bulk mail to subsidize residential delivery?
posted by klangklangston at 10:36 AM on July 6, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by klangklangston at 10:36 AM on July 6, 2015 [2 favorites]
Adblock is the modern equivalent to trashing junk mail instead of reading it. Don't you know the USPS relies on bulk mail to subsidize residential delivery?
It's more like a mailbox that incinerates it without you ever seeing it. Which some people like I guess. The effort for me to take the junk mail from my mailbox to the recycling bin is low, but some people seem to not want to do it.
posted by GuyZero at 10:44 AM on July 6, 2015
It's more like a mailbox that incinerates it without you ever seeing it. Which some people like I guess. The effort for me to take the junk mail from my mailbox to the recycling bin is low, but some people seem to not want to do it.
posted by GuyZero at 10:44 AM on July 6, 2015
You seem to be coyly implying that there's a moral component to not blocking ads. It's hard to discern through the flaming wreckage of this metaphor, but am I to take it that there's some inherent virtue in walking to the bin? I guess burning trash is bad for the environment...
posted by invitapriore at 1:31 PM on July 6, 2015
posted by invitapriore at 1:31 PM on July 6, 2015
I don't take any position on the morality of blocking ads. I've been looking at ads since the day I was born, well before the internet came along. I'm inured to them. I can't be bothered with installing an ad blocker. To me it's extra technical infrastructure I don't want to bother with. But if others want to block ads, go for it. I think the reductio ad absurdum is that if everyone blocked ads the internet would change considerably, but I can't say whether it would actually be any better or worse.
But my point, such as it is, is that walking your junk mail to the bin isn't the biggest deal in the world, at least to me.
posted by GuyZero at 1:35 PM on July 6, 2015
But my point, such as it is, is that walking your junk mail to the bin isn't the biggest deal in the world, at least to me.
posted by GuyZero at 1:35 PM on July 6, 2015
Evernote's Clearly browser plugin is a compromise of sorts. I can load a page without running any interference, determine that the signal::noise ratio is too low, and with a click o' the button, the page is rendered in a lovely, understated view that is a pleasure to read.
Funny enough, I still feel the need to use Clearly even though I also employ ad and Flash blocking plugins most of the time. I also tend to browse the web using lynx. And I hate all the damn kids on my goddamn lawn.
posted by Fezboy! at 3:42 PM on July 6, 2015
Funny enough, I still feel the need to use Clearly even though I also employ ad and Flash blocking plugins most of the time. I also tend to browse the web using lynx. And I hate all the damn kids on my goddamn lawn.
posted by Fezboy! at 3:42 PM on July 6, 2015
I've just loaded up uBlock(origins) and turned off adblock+, and there is a noticeable increase in browser response time, and a significant decrease in system resources. I checked a host of annoying sites: a game-focused site, CNN, Facebook, and Upworthy (gods help me), and they were all rendering well, no hiccups and best of all, no annoying, bouncing, content reloading, crap malware ads.
That said; I also run ghostery and usually noscript, but I turned off noscript to test ublock, and didn't notice any issues. So, I'm planning on running with uBlock for a bit, tweaking the filters to allow certain sites like Metafilter, and see how I like it.
When ad services stop serving malware that I have to spend a dozen hours a week cleaning off other people's computers, then I will stop using adblockers, and not a second before.
posted by dejah420 at 5:14 PM on July 6, 2015
That said; I also run ghostery and usually noscript, but I turned off noscript to test ublock, and didn't notice any issues. So, I'm planning on running with uBlock for a bit, tweaking the filters to allow certain sites like Metafilter, and see how I like it.
When ad services stop serving malware that I have to spend a dozen hours a week cleaning off other people's computers, then I will stop using adblockers, and not a second before.
posted by dejah420 at 5:14 PM on July 6, 2015
Adblock is the modern equivalent to trashing junk mail instead of reading it. Don't you know the USPS relies on bulk mail to subsidize residential delivery?
It's more like a mailbox that incinerates it without you ever seeing it. Which some people like I guess.
YES PLEASE.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:11 PM on July 6, 2015 [5 favorites]
It's more like a mailbox that incinerates it without you ever seeing it. Which some people like I guess.
YES PLEASE.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:11 PM on July 6, 2015 [5 favorites]
I am surprised no one here has talked about how much internet advertising is designed to make people, but especially women, feel like complete shit about their bodies. It's a constant barrage of "Go on a diet! Get plastic surgery! Wear more makeup!" etc. (with some "Freeze your eggs before it's too late!" thrown in for variety). To me, blocking ads is a vital tool of self-preservation, and fuck anyone who thinks we owe it to advertisers to complacently sit through their dehumanizing garbage.
posted by naoko at 6:58 AM on July 7, 2015 [14 favorites]
posted by naoko at 6:58 AM on July 7, 2015 [14 favorites]
I don't understand why I've never seen an ad for a product that I'm interested in. I'm the main shopper for my family, we're middle class, and we have a pretty standard range of hobbies and interests. If the ads were for tents, or archery targets, or graphic novels for children, or not-too-sweet milk chocolate, I'd be interested. I like reading reviews of sleeping bags. Tell me about your dry cider.
But they're not relevant; the ads are for diet pills, all of them.
This is one of the main reason I now block ads on most sites. I don't mind seeing ads for things I find interesting or want to find more out about a product. I've clicked on some of the ads that appear on Metafilter (I don't block this site.' I've white listed a couple of other sites I frequent because for whatever reason the ads on them are pertinent to the content and are useful. I'm doing more and more buying online now and appreciate ads that are helpful in finding places to get what I want.
More and more though I'm finding it's just getting crappier and crappier and so damn intrusive, that without some sort of adblock things popping and flashing in my face. I don't mind things that slide or pop in a corner side for instance as well as not shutting down the site until I close it. Right in the middle with the site dark and the close button not super obvious? Screw the fuck off ad people. And more and more some sites are just so loaded with ads and attention grabbing thingies that I just shut them right down as soon as I get a 'hang time' as things are loading in. It's ridiculous.
I'm okay with some give and take. I'm okay with some sort of balanced compromise to help 'pay' for what I'm using. I'm actually okay in principle with getting directed ads based on my history because at times I have found this sort of system useful.
As many have said already it's just gone to far. Its got to the point where I feel I have to just trash any utility I might get from the give and take and block as much as I can. It's gotten to the point where I'm happier seeing 'sponsored by ACME' taglines in the way that a site like Buzzfeed does it because at least it's not flashing and popping and it's just super obvious. It's like the site is saying 'here is one of the ways we're paying for this in a way that is less sneaky and annoying, let's just be blatant about the whole thing'.
posted by Jalliah at 9:59 AM on July 7, 2015
But they're not relevant; the ads are for diet pills, all of them.
This is one of the main reason I now block ads on most sites. I don't mind seeing ads for things I find interesting or want to find more out about a product. I've clicked on some of the ads that appear on Metafilter (I don't block this site.' I've white listed a couple of other sites I frequent because for whatever reason the ads on them are pertinent to the content and are useful. I'm doing more and more buying online now and appreciate ads that are helpful in finding places to get what I want.
More and more though I'm finding it's just getting crappier and crappier and so damn intrusive, that without some sort of adblock things popping and flashing in my face. I don't mind things that slide or pop in a corner side for instance as well as not shutting down the site until I close it. Right in the middle with the site dark and the close button not super obvious? Screw the fuck off ad people. And more and more some sites are just so loaded with ads and attention grabbing thingies that I just shut them right down as soon as I get a 'hang time' as things are loading in. It's ridiculous.
I'm okay with some give and take. I'm okay with some sort of balanced compromise to help 'pay' for what I'm using. I'm actually okay in principle with getting directed ads based on my history because at times I have found this sort of system useful.
As many have said already it's just gone to far. Its got to the point where I feel I have to just trash any utility I might get from the give and take and block as much as I can. It's gotten to the point where I'm happier seeing 'sponsored by ACME' taglines in the way that a site like Buzzfeed does it because at least it's not flashing and popping and it's just super obvious. It's like the site is saying 'here is one of the ways we're paying for this in a way that is less sneaky and annoying, let's just be blatant about the whole thing'.
posted by Jalliah at 9:59 AM on July 7, 2015
I've been looking at ads since the day I was born, well before the internet came along. I'm inured to them. I can't be bothered with installing an ad blocker.
Have you tried browsing the web with an ad blocker? If nothing else, it will make you feel like your monitor is twice as big. Imagine being able to see an entire article on one screen.
posted by straight at 10:57 AM on July 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
Have you tried browsing the web with an ad blocker? If nothing else, it will make you feel like your monitor is twice as big. Imagine being able to see an entire article on one screen.
posted by straight at 10:57 AM on July 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
The idea that there was a perfect free web before advertisers screwed it up is just “Good old days” mythology for a younger generation.
You are Laurence Canter and Martha Siegal and I claim my Green Card
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:01 PM on July 8, 2015 [9 favorites]
You are Laurence Canter and Martha Siegal and I claim my Green Card
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:01 PM on July 8, 2015 [9 favorites]
You want to know who does ads right?
Major league baseball. They have their video site where they show clips of big plays, interviews, and oddball things like the Pittsburgh Pirates ground crew losing control of the tarp and the team coming out to help them get that thing under control.
Now, to handle all this video -- and all the video of the MLB network, which includes every games, as called by both the home and visiting team's networks -- MLB has developed quite the network broadcast infrastructure. It's so good that HBO is now using it. This isn't cheap, so they use ads to defray the cost for the free stuff.
So you watch these clips and a few of them have an ad in front of them, like this one. It's six seconds long. And there's only one. And then the clip plays with no other ads, nothing on top of it. There's nothing in the frame around it.
It's basically dead identical to watching, say, an inning of baseball, where you'd get an ad during the inning break, then you watch the inning without any interruption. And then, if you have auto-advanced enabled, another short ad -- and we're talking four seconds -- and the next clip, which is like three minutes long.
It's a perfect example of how you can do ad-supported media on the web without insulting the user. Indeed, the ad to content ratio is probably *higher* than an actual baseball broadcast!
posted by eriko at 6:47 PM on July 8, 2015 [3 favorites]
Major league baseball. They have their video site where they show clips of big plays, interviews, and oddball things like the Pittsburgh Pirates ground crew losing control of the tarp and the team coming out to help them get that thing under control.
Now, to handle all this video -- and all the video of the MLB network, which includes every games, as called by both the home and visiting team's networks -- MLB has developed quite the network broadcast infrastructure. It's so good that HBO is now using it. This isn't cheap, so they use ads to defray the cost for the free stuff.
So you watch these clips and a few of them have an ad in front of them, like this one. It's six seconds long. And there's only one. And then the clip plays with no other ads, nothing on top of it. There's nothing in the frame around it.
It's basically dead identical to watching, say, an inning of baseball, where you'd get an ad during the inning break, then you watch the inning without any interruption. And then, if you have auto-advanced enabled, another short ad -- and we're talking four seconds -- and the next clip, which is like three minutes long.
It's a perfect example of how you can do ad-supported media on the web without insulting the user. Indeed, the ad to content ratio is probably *higher* than an actual baseball broadcast!
posted by eriko at 6:47 PM on July 8, 2015 [3 favorites]
University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth
posted by theora55 at 7:45 AM on July 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by theora55 at 7:45 AM on July 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth
Irony.
posted by Lexica at 9:52 AM on July 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
Irony.
posted by Lexica at 9:52 AM on July 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
It just makes us a slightly different kind of content pirate.
Pirates are perpetrators of plunder and murder on the high seas; the historical and modern practice of piracy features all kinds of horrific shit. Using the term "pirate" for stuff like copyright infringement or ad-circumvention is at best extremely melodramatic and at worst both Orwellian and kind of insulting, given that actual piracy is something that still goes on. The propaganda term "content piracy" is akin to calling unsolicited advertising "attention rape", or something; it's an inappropriately hyperbolic term.
posted by busted_crayons at 6:36 AM on July 16, 2015 [5 favorites]
Pirates are perpetrators of plunder and murder on the high seas; the historical and modern practice of piracy features all kinds of horrific shit. Using the term "pirate" for stuff like copyright infringement or ad-circumvention is at best extremely melodramatic and at worst both Orwellian and kind of insulting, given that actual piracy is something that still goes on. The propaganda term "content piracy" is akin to calling unsolicited advertising "attention rape", or something; it's an inappropriately hyperbolic term.
posted by busted_crayons at 6:36 AM on July 16, 2015 [5 favorites]
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posted by parmanparman at 4:02 AM on July 4, 2015 [47 favorites]