[jordigh]

I work hard to block all ads, including those. It's super helpful if you can provide an HTML class to your divs so I can more easily block them, but I will keep on working on blocking all ads by all means possible. I'm thinking of building an ad extension that doesn't show the ads but reports to js that the ad is still there, so that websites think that ad is there. It might also help for some cases to download the ad contents but not display them.

I do not think this is any more immoral than you trying to make my computer display things I do not want. If you want my money, just ask for it. Don't tell me via ads to give my money to somone else. Google Contributor is a promising experiment. Bitcoin micropayments are also convenient.

[wvenable]

The only reason I know that it blocks these ads is because I also run an ad blocker.

We have a very strict ad policy; we manage all our ads internally, don't do any tracking, and all ads are 100% relevant to the content of the site. I have click-through rates on some ads types that are so far above the industry average you'd think I'm lying. We consider our ads just another service we provide on the site one that benefits us and our visitors.

The content is funded by ads and paying for content on the web to every single click you link isn't feasible. So morality aside, it's tragedy of the commons: People without adblockers effectively fund those that do. If the scales tip too far, the funds dry up and content will just go away.

[baddox]

I don't think that's the tragedy of the commons, because there is no "commons." Your website, and your time spent creating content, are not commons in the economic sense. If you want to charge people for your content, it's relatively simple to do so. I don't think you can invoke "tragedy of the commons" when you're choosing to not charge people for your content and then getting upset that some people view your content while choosing to not view ads.

[wvenable]

The commons is the web itself. This is hacker news, we click links on different domains a hundred times every day. Each of those sites could charge you for all their content but then you'd be broke or nobody would make enough money to keep the lights on.

As for the technological means to mitigate that; they aren't at all feasible yet. So the reality is most people support sites by viewing ads and those that don't view ads aren't supporting them at all. Most people, if forced to pay for certain content, just wouldn't bother because it's not worth it for them. I feel like that whenever I hit a paywall limit from a HN link; I enjoy the content but not that much overall.

[NeutronBoy]

> Each of those sites could charge you for all their content but then you'd be broke or nobody would make enough money to keep the lights on.

Indeed, there are discussions on HN that argue that it should explicitly ban paywall articles from being submitted.

[dingaling]

> If the scales tip too far, the funds dry up and content will just go away

Or the user-generated content, which fora require to attract new users to keep feeding the content-cycle, will just migrate to other platforms. Nu-Usenet, whatever it might be.

Some forum sites realise this and disable ads for top contributors, to try to keep them in the fold.

[johnward]

Stop browsing ad supported content then. It's a simple solution that works for everyone involved. Everyone says "i'd happily pay" but few put their money where their mouth is.

For the HN downvoters why is choosing not to consume the ad supported content so bad?

[freehunter]

That's like saying "stop downloading F2P games" or "don't support the RIAA/MPAA". There are really just so few sites that aren't ad supported.

"It's a simple solution that works for everyone involved."

It's literally none of those things. It's not simple, it's not a solution, and it doesn't work for anyone involved.

[johnward]

Leaching content is not much different than the early days of MP3s. So I'm hopeful we'll find a new business model that works without me having to pay for every site on the web I want to browse. I can't remember the last time I pirated an album. The ease of streaming services has made it so convenient that I don't want to manage local files.

Still I don't buy the argument that just because you don't want to pay for the content (by viewing ads) that you should still be able to consume it without ads. From a technical perspective I guess the client can do whatever it wants with the data returned but it's still not "right".

[freehunter]

We're not talking about dodging a toll booth or throwing a hat over the security alarms while walking out of a store. I ate a sample at Costco without buying the product. I got a spray of cologne at Macy's without asking what brand it was. I went to 7/11 on "free slurpee day" and got my free slurpee and nothing else. I'm an extreme couponer who walked out the door owing nothing.

I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free. Pirating is one thing. You're getting something for free that the distributor expects you to pay for. You're going out of your way to get something for free that you know you have to pay for. My ad blocker doesn't get me into Netflix for free, nor does it get past the NYT's paywall. It doesn't do anything fundamentally different from hitting "Reading Mode" built into my iPhone. Hell, it doesn't do anything fundamentally different from the Chrome extension "Cloud to Butt". It doesn't get me for-pay content for free. It couldn't possibly be any further from pirating MP3s.

[trienthusiast]

> I'm not taking anything from you because you gave it to me for free

logical fallacy. You took it for free, but it had a price. If the ad has a $3 RPM it means you seeing the ad pays $0.003 to the content producer.

The price was just to let that ad load. not even to watch it or to read it.

It was free for you because you took it, by using a browser extension that lets you watch the site in a different way than the one that was intended.

[stevenh]

All ISPs should be required to convert to nonprofit organizations, and the portion of a user's monthly bill that used to be profit for the ISP needs to instead be evenly distributed in a fair way to the owners of all sites visited by the user.

[johnward]

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not.

[WorldWideWayne]

Sites could easily refuse to serve content to people who run adblockers or who turn off Javascript.

Instead, by serving their content upon request, the sites are implicitly agreeing to my terms. So, I'm not doing anything wrong by running an ad-blocker on my computer.

I think it would be great if someone codified this too. If servers can have Terms of Service, so can users. Wouldn't it be great if my browser could send a TOS to each site once before I accepted content from them? A simple notification of my terms, via a custom header sent from a browser extension would work today, but I don't feel that I need to do this since most servers happily give me their content.

[johnward]

Actually, ad blockers work hard to make sure this can't happen. I'd like for a site to be able to identify those users and decide not to serve content but there is a reason why adblockers don't want this. If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

There is no way to identify an ad blocker in the initial request. If there was the adblocker would just spoof those params anyway. The way most of the scripts detect ad blockers is to load some JS class in an file that is likely to be blocked by an ad blocker. If the class is loaded they assume that ads are not blocked.

[WorldWideWayne]

Actually, there are sites that already can and do detect adblock so however hard the adblockers are working to stop this, it's not working. Getting hung up on the fact that you can't do it in the initial request is introducing a strawman.

> If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

Well, then you'd be an asshole. Running an adblocker on my computer is not malicious, so some site responding with a possibly illegal action wouldn't be a good solution for anyone.

[jlarocco]

Why would I do that? Helping people monetize their website isn't my problem.

If ad-blocking eventually forces 95% of "content providers" to shutdown, I don't really care. There's too much blogspam, too many pointless "me too" posts, and just too much crap out there for me to care. If the whole system implodes and goes away it really won't bother me much. The interesting content will be able to survive with subscriptions or pay-per-read or something.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people don't want to admit that most of the web is more a waste of time than anything, and given the option, nobody would pay for most it. Would I pay $x a month to read nautil.us or medium? Yes. Would I subscribe to some idiot who posts his two cents about an article and then links to medium? No.

I buy books and ebooks, pay for music, and pay to watch movies, I don't mind paying for interesting web content. But I'd be stupid to pay for it or not read it when I can easily, legally read it for free.

[johnward]

> I think a lot of people don't want to admit that most of the web is more a waste of time than anything, and given the option, nobody would pay for most it.

I kind of agree with this but yet so much content that I think is worthless still gets massive amounts of traffic. Like those stupid viral facebook lists that make you click through 30 pages, quizzes or whatever the linkbait flavor of the week is. Yet so many of my friends must find some value in them or they wouldn't keep sharing them.

[jlarocco]

But, like I said, most people wouldn't pay for any of those things. They're "valuable" in that they're amusing and silly and free. Charge anything for them, and they would practically disappear overnight. Even people who don't explicitly block the ads are used to ignoring them at this point.

I'd like to see the overlap between people who click through web ads with people who respond to or click through spam email.

[skaplun]

You dont know if target is ad supported when you click on a link.

[johnward]

I'll give you that argument. Even though people continue to return to those same sites. Then complain about sites that try to implement other means of monetization like paywalls.

[Retra]

That solution doesn't work at all for the massive numbers of people who want content and don't want to pay for it.

[baddox]

How does choosing to not consume ad-supported content help the situation? There is no difference between not viewing an ad-supported web page, and viewing it with an adblocker, apart from the extremely small cost of serving the page. And if the cost of serving the page to adblocking visitors is too high, then that's an extremely obvious flaw in the web site's business model, and is in no way the fault of the adblocking visitors.

[johnward]

Hosting is basically a commodity now but there is still cost involved. Especially if you are actually producing unique content. If I choose to steal a physical product is that an "obvious flaw in the business model" too?

Look, I'm not arguing that advertising is the only way to make money. In fact I think it's ultimately going to die or come to some form users and content producers can agree on. Especially with companies like Apple, and Google (who ironically makes a ton of money on ads) turning against ads. There are certain types of advertising that users do accept right now. Mostly things like "content marketing". Where a user reads some blog post or helpful tip which is really just a way to promote another service or product that the user pays for. Those even do well on HN. Then again HN is basically an advertisement in itself for Y Combinator startup news.

I do think the ability to make money helped the web grow and continue to grow. Advertising is and was a large part of that.

[baddox]

> If I choose to steal a physical product is that an "obvious flaw in the business model" too?

If you give away a physical product, with an implicit expectation that each recipient will take part in some other interaction that will give you a small amount of money, then that is an obvious flaw in the business model.

If you want to apply your analogy of theft, then you need to discuss password-protected web content where people pay for subscriptions. In that case, if someone hacks your site or steals another subscriber's password, then your analogy would hold.

[joosters]

Could you give some examples of websites where there is some form of ToS that contractually disallows access without viewing the ads?

I think you'll find that the overwhelming majority of websites have no such terms of use, so who are you to tell us how we should be accessing these sites?

[johnward]

Is updating the ToS going to actually change anything?

[joosters]

Probably not, as the people who block all ads will likely continue to do so (and who reads ToS anyway?)

But without it, how can you back up any kind of complaint about someone not displaying the ads? There never was any obligation. It's like yelling at someone who leaves their lounge to make a cup of tea during a TV ad break.

[johnward]

I guess it's similar to walking away from the TV. However, DVR providers attempted to use technology to automatically skip ads and there was a huge backlash. The advertisers seem to have won the battle with TV even though you can still fast forward on DVR. Sometimes on-demand doesn't allow it. I still think users are going to win the battle on the web.

[DanBlake]

Its a race that (if the ad industry gets smarter) will be very hard for the ad blockers to match.

Because publishers have control of the website, they can do things like randomize the div name, parameter names, javascript names, javascript functions, sizes of the ad, randomize images for the ad, use dynamic JS positioning, etc..

Basically if a publisher was serving their own ads and didn't want them blocked, you would be extremely hard pressed to counteract it.

As far as building your extension- You cant build it so its automated. No matter what you build, Any publisher could bypass it within minutes. The best you can do is make it so the site doesnt work if ads are showing, but publishers are already fine with this (hence why warnings are put up saying 'disable adblock to continue')

[sheepmullet]

> Its a race that (if the ad industry gets smarter) will be very hard for the ad blockers to match.

Not really. I currently have my browser setup to strip out the main text content and display it "reader" style with images pre-loaded but requiring a click to display.

Even if you get tricky with loading of content via JavaScript trickery adblockers can always run the JavaScript etc but only "fake" render it.

[DanBlake]

Thats like saying ad blockers cant win because you browse the web from view-source:

Even in that case, If the pub wanted to, he could check to see if you requested additional ad-serving JS/images/resources from a request before showing you the html/js content. If the sites 'content' is loaded with JS rather than being visible in the static source, there is not going to be much you can do.

[sheepmullet]

> Thats like saying ad blockers cant win because you browse the web from view-source:

Personally I find most of the value is in the content and not the layout. So it's not really anything like view source which mixes them and makes it very difficult to read the content.

Of course it's a bit different with full blown web apps but I can't think of any web app I use that is supported by advertising.

> If the sites 'content' is loaded with JS rather than being visible in the static source, there is not going to be much you can do.

The problem is now two-fold: 1) You are going to hurt your search rankings, and 2) it is possible for ad blockers to get around. Like I said just get the browser to load and run the js, ads, etc, and just not render anything that's not clearly content.

Ad driven sites could up the game by requiring user interaction before they load the content, but if the interaction is simple and repeatable then its easy to tag and handle.

They could start requiring captchas etc that are integrated with the ads before requesting the content via js but at this point I'd really start to question whether your regular users will stick around.

[DanBlake]

So to be clear:

1: Search rankings not effected, because you do a "if useragent is googlebot and iprange = x, show normal site"

2: You are going to run the advertisements on the publishers site, even if they have nasty malware attached to them and use your system resources? Not displaying those ads wont keep your computer safe. Does not seem like a good idea.

3: There is so much logic capable in JS which can determine if its being hidden or not - What color is position x,y ? Its white? thats not correct... dont load the site. There could be a infinite amount of these non-interaction gotchas you will not be able to automate- You will have to go back and try to write a rule each time, and that rule will be tricky if everything is randomized.

[krapp]

>I do not think this is any more immoral than you trying to make my computer display things I do not want.

Your browser make a request to a URL, receives a response, and renders it. It seems you're trying to imply that the presence of ads in that response is somehow immoral, but if so, that argument doesn't make a lot of sense. If you don't want to see advertising, fine (I personally believe you have every right to control what you see in your browser, even if that inconveniences the site owners) but don't pretend that advertising is somehow in violation of a contract that doesn't exist.

[xbmcuser]

  Ads subsidise the internet for the people that cant afford it. Subscription models will kill off the web/internet as we have it. I don't care for ads either specially those that hamper with the viewing of the content. If you dont want to see ads just visit the sites.