[wintom]

I know there will be a lot of heat on me fro HN users about ads but here goes anyway:

Ads are pretty bad right now but the reality is that the internet without ads would not be a useful internet. Half of the tools and the things you use all of the time could not exist without ad revenue.

The reverse of this is that Ad Blockers are much worse than the ads. They have become the Mafia of the internet!

Did you know that as a company looking to bypass adblockers you can pay ad blockers to whitelist you? That is extortion money! Google and Facebook pay. The little guys looking to aquire customers now have to pay for the ads by impression and when their ads are blocked have zero chance of showing.

I know you may not care but we are heading down to an internet where the ads are now becoming content and we are basically reading nothing but junk. The junk went from one section of the page to now being the page. Advertising has existed as long as media has and as such will never go away. There is advertising on pay to view channels like cable, companies want to sell to you and they wont just disappear.

Lets stop this, lets get rid of the ad blockers and lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology, not drain our batteries, not sell our personal info and we will have a much better internet.

[krapp]

>Lets stop this, lets get rid of the ad blockers and lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology, not drain our batteries, not sell our personal info and we will have a much better internet.

How about no?

How about we use as many ad-blocking methods as we want, and companies that depend on ad revenue either continue the cat and mouse games, find another way to make money or shrivel up and die?

Not because advertising on the web is inherently evil (I don't believe it is, although many people disagree) or because companies don't have a right to make money if they want to (sure, why not), but because the internet is structured in a way that gives the user direct control over what they see and what they don't see, which makes it by design an unreliable medium for advertisements.

The ability to block ads isn't a problem, it's inherent to the request-response nature of the web. It's not our problem that companies want ads on the internet to be as reliable as ads on television or the newspapers used to be. Doesn't work that way, and without fundamentally altering what the web is, or turning every browser into a dumb terminal, it can't be made to work that way reliably.

What companies are doing to undermine ad blockers makes sense, and it a rational response to the existence of ad blockers, but it's still a war of attrition that those companies are eventually going to lose, because the web was designed for serving documents in markup and giving the end user the ability to determine how that markup is displayed.

This aspect of the web is ignored 99% of the time but ad blocking is one example of it in action.

[syrrim]

The funny thing is that ad money doesn't just fall down from the sky, it comes from us. That is to say, it comes from people buying advertised products. If the person viewing the ad doesn't buy the product, they are contributing no more money than someone who didn't view the ad at all.

Lets say a person is a user of ads, i.e. they buy products because they see them featured in ads. This person would derive value from those ads, and would not enable an ad-blocker. If they did enable such an ad-blocker, it would be because they realized they wasted too much of their money on things they don't need, and wanted to limit their spending.

Now lets say we lived in an ad free society. Products a person buys would be cheaper - since the company selling them would no longer be paying for ads (talk about extortion). All we need to do is create a system where the money you would save is funneled back to websites.

Ads are not a good system for funneling this money. Ads reward the websites who can gain traffic from those most willing to waste their money. Ads also reward websites who can reload the page the most frequently. Ads reward pages that have as much free space on them as possible for displaying ads. Ads reward those websites whose creators care the least about workmanship and design.

We need a system that gives control to websites and users alike. The current system - sans ad-blockers - only gives control to advertisers. Websites should be able to set their prices based on their costs. Users should be able to analyze these prices and choose the websites they think deserve it. Ads cannot fulfill these properties, and need to be replaced.

[white-flame]

>> the internet without ads would not be a useful internet.

I, and many others were on the net before ad-revenue models existed. I can assure you, it was quite useful.

People build stuff because it's cool to build and useful to have. Even Google's and Facebook's origins might fall under those descriptions.

>> lets force the advertising companies to be responsible

This is the global internet. It routes around people trying to force anything.

[CaptSpify]

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...

> essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions

The Internet was great before advertisements, and it can continue to be great without advertisements. I'd personally argue that it would be much better, because it'd be people who care posting content, not people looking to make a buck.

[techthroway443]

> lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology

You are forgetting the whole reason ad blockers came to be and gained so much popularity is precisely because advertising companies are incapable of demonstrating the type of responsibility you are speaking of. You're living in fantasy land.

[milcron]

> Did you know that as a company looking to bypass adblockers you can pay ad blockers to whitelist you? That is extortion money!

Adblock does this, but to my knowledge uBlock does not.

[bigbugbag]

It's not Michael Gundlach's adblock but eyeo's adblock plus which launched the acceptable ads 5 years ago, adblock got sold in 2015 and the new anonymous owner removed Michael Gundlach's name and joined adblock plus acceptable ads.

Bette use gorhill's ublock origins instead of ublock.

[blahi]

Adblock didn't do it in the beginning either :) Just like utorrent became popular because bitcommet became slow and clunky. Have you looked at utorrent lately?

[milcron]

Ugh, don't remind me. That was a great piece of freeware before it went sour. :(

But, there are many many alternatives these days: Deluge and qBittorent are both pretty decent uTorrent replacements.

[bigbugbag]

This is business as usual: fed up with bloatware, one individual make a simple software that does the job, then said software is acquired by a company and now has to make a profit thus turns into the reason it was made in the first place.

[touristtam]

uTorrent was great because it was optimized to be small and fast: a single exe file upx'ed.

[wintom]

That is a terrible thing and it highlights the wild west that is internet advertising right now.

Much like TV ads, internet ads have to be responsible but there has to be a place for them or dont be surprised when this sort of thing happens.

[prawn]

Ads are a security issue. I've had machines hacked in the past simply by visiting a mainstream site with advertising (NBA.com, for example). There is no chance I risk giving up ad blocking.

[blahi]

This argument holds only if you block javascript wholesale. Do you?

[prawn]

I don't and I also disagree that it invalidates the argument. Advertising scripts are a blackbox for almost every site using them. There are open bidding systems and poor checks in place to validate ads that are submitted (Flash ads, for example, in the past).

In the example I cited, I didn't get a devastating virus from boxscore Javascript on NBA.com, or from some other local script, it was a driveby from a hosted ad. Just not worth the risk.

[blahi]

The large chunk of malware distributed via websites is through hacked sites which fire the malicious scipts only a in 2-3 visits out of 100. Ads are responsible for about 20-30% of the malware distribution.

So yeah. Your argument does not hold.

[zajd]

> Ads are responsible for about 20-30% of the malware distribution

Do you have a source for this comment?

[prawn]

Ads are responsible for about 20-30% of the malware distribution.

How does my argument not hold? 20-30% is huge!

[Houshalter]

I mostly agree with you. I don't think adblocking is great. However I think for several reasons it won't be as bad as you think.

The vast majority of users use software on default settings and never change anything. IIRC only like 30% of users bother to install adblocking, and while that increases, it's going to asymptote sooner or later.

For the time being ad blocking is still inconvenient on many platforms like mobile and smart TVs. I still see lots of ads whenever I use any platform other than my desktop. And fewer users use desktop.

As technology improves, the costs of running websites should decrease. This means bandwidth, storage, open source software for running the website, etc. Many websites that required ad revenue to operate in the past, could get by with much less today or in the future. I know that's not ideal. But most of the software I use is produced open source without profit motive. Why can't the same be true for software that runs websites? Sites like HN and reddit get 99.99% of their content from unpaid users. Reddit uses entirely volunteer moderators even.

In the past newspapers and magazines required subscriptions. The worst case is we go back to that world. I can watch tons of TV ad free with a very cheap subscription to netflix, and youtube is rolling out a similar platform now. As much as I hate paywalls, they seem less sinister than advertising based models.

Adblocking will never be complete. You can block banner ads, but you are never going to be able to block someone endorsing a product in their podcast or youtube video (ok I shouldn't say never, but it seems reasonably unlikely for the near future.) Those ads also seem the least sinister and annoying to me, so I am ok with that. Websites might just put up endorsements or self serve ads, instead of relying on ad servers.

[bigbugbag]

> The vast majority of users use software on default settings and never change anything. IIRC only like 30% of users bother to install adblocking, and while that increases, it's going to asymptote sooner or later.

The day firefox will stop relying on google's advertising money maybe it will feature a fully loaded ad block such as ublock origin by default and the situation will be much different. Up until now mozilla has not delivered on the putting the user first marketing gimmick.

Hopefully at some point in a not so distant future most browser will get out of the pandora's box and block ads and tracking out of the box.

Obviously, chrome will not come with a fully loaded adblock as google makes its huge piles of monies from being the biggest ad network.

[Houshalter]

That's never going to happen because all the browsers are funded by advertising. Except maybe Safari. As you say yourself, Mozilla makes their money by getting payed by Google to not do that. Unless user donations massively increase, they'd be committing suicide.

[bigbugbag]

I'm pretty sure you are mistaken, Internet before ads was useful, internet without ads would be faster, more secure and less surveillance/tracking. A major improvement in usefulness.

I'm using ublock origins as my adblocker and there is no such whitelist scheme, it seems that you are generalizing eyeo's adblock plus to all ad blockers which is nothing like what happens in the real world. Don't want to be leveraged by a german company to get money from advertisers ? use ublock origins.

BTW what eyeo is trying to achieve with their whitelisting is what you are asking for: acceptable ads and behavior from the advertising companies.

IMHO the only way out is by making ads less profitable so they will just cease to be the business model to go to. This means the largest ads company will probably stop being a competitor which provides product and services for free.

[touristtam]

There is still the issue of founding for companies that decide to try and publish on the internet. This has been the issue for newspaper for a few decades now. Less money injected in this market == less actors.

[charonn0]

> Did you know that as a company looking to bypass adblockers you can pay ad blockers to whitelist you?

If you're referring to Adblock Plus, the majority of their whitelist got there without paying, and even those that pay have to meet certain standards.

> lets get rid of the ad blockers and lets force the advertising companies to be responsible with their technology

What leverage do we have that is as effective as ad-blocking?

Moreover, ad-blocking didn't develop in a vacuum: the ad industry created it through its over-aggressive tactics and low standards. e.g. the popup blocker was invented, and became standard-issue for all browsers, only because pop-ups were being abused by advertisers.

[codezero]

This is like saying television shows won't work without commercial breaks. It's not true.