[rglullis]

I really, really don't buy the idea that I should feel bad for using adblock. The whole "ads can be a way to provide quality services, and adblock removes that revenue" is the marketer's equivalent to the {MP|RI}AA's "every pirate is a stolen sale".

The whole thing with the Internet is about desintermediation, and marketing departments are nothing but middle-men between producers and consumers. Even worse that they actually sell the idea that producers need to "build a brand". Zero actual value-add to the chain, but work to increase perceived and actual costs of the goods produced.

[bo1024]

I think this a good perspective. Advertising only has societal value when it helps connect people who want to buy something with services that want to sell it.

I can think of a couple other ways to get some sort of value from advertising. The first is using an ad to get someone to purchase something they otherwise wouldn't have. I suppose this creates societal value too, but in my opinion it mainly just benefits the advertisers. The second is to make "impressions" so that people remember your brand when they later choose (impulsively) to purchase something.

Since I don't participate in those two, I consider them pretty worthless. Showing someone like me an ad on a blog is worthless, because we have a zero percent click-through rate and a zero percent conversion rate. Showing ads on a search might actually be helpful if I'm searching for a product to buy.

Anyway, this leads me to two possible conclusions. Either we are in an advertising bubble where way more effort is put into ads than they're worth, or I just have no understanding/conception of the average Internet user's browsing and buying habits. After all, I guess enough people click on these things to make them profitable for the site, and enough of those actually buy something to make it profitable for the advertiser. So as a non-clicker, what do I know?

[awakeasleep]

I think you are right in your conclusion that you have no understanding/conception of how the average internet browser reacts to advertisements.

I was shocked to realize this about myself after talking to my ex's sister. She teaches kids in the BD class of a Chicago public school. She shared a story of her frustration trying to teach them about healthy eating. It went something like this:

"Can anyone give me an example of good or healthy food" Class Chorus: "Mcdonalds!" Carrie, taken aback: "Oh! and what makes McDonald's healthy" Class: "McDonalds makes you big and strong! You could play in the olympics"

That anecdote hit me at the same time I had been researching literacy, and it really struck me that different classes of people exist in our society who interpret symbolic content at different levels. You or I probably see a picture of an athlete on an McDonald's bag and our lip curls in contempt at the transparency of the lie. But to a different type of person with a different background, that representation is taken at face value.

It's really apparent when you see people make a living off other transparent advertising, "Teen Mom discovers weird old trick to remove belly fat." Ok, bullshit. You can't target lose weight etc, but that isn't a multinational with inefficient marketing, that's an individual identifying basic desires and exploiting certain segments of their market. And it works.

[IsaacL]

Google 2011 revenues: $37.9 billion. 96% from AdWords.

So I'm guessing someone is clicking on online adverts.

Outside of a certain segment of the startup scene, where actually spending money on marketing is uncool and you have to get customers by being viral/freemium/whatever, there's a ton of businesses that drive traffic through non-sexy means like PPC.

Re: does "branding" add value? I think it does. Keep in mind the original brands, which involved adding a name to commodity products to show customers they were trustworthy. The value of branding is it lets consumers feel trust in what they're buying. You can go in any McDonalds in the world and know that the food will taste OK and won't give you food poisoning. The food is not awesome, either, but it goes to show that often people do value trustworthiness and consistency (ie, branding) over super high-quality.

(Admittedly there is less value in situations where, say, the branded cheese is exactly the same as the supermarket cheese, just in a different packet and twice the price.)

[tomkarlo]

I agree with you that the MPAA claim is silly. But in this case, you're actually consuming the product - using their bandwidth, their servers, etc, all of which costs money - and denying them the revenue they use to support that service. The argument with the MPAA concept is that you're not denying them a sale, nor are you increasing their cost of doing business, but here you're you're doing the latter.

Do you really believe that advertising (which is only part of what marketing departments do) is "zero value-add"? How do you learn about new products? How do you think the press who review products learn about them? How does a product become available for your to buy at Walgreens on the corner? All of that is "marketing"...

[joejohnson]

That argument is false for a few reasons. With many online services, who's to say precisely what the product is. Aren't we (the users) the real product for a lot of large, free services (gmail, Facebook, etc.)? And for the bandwidth, I'm paying for that too. I pay an ISP every month to browser the internet. Shouldn't I be able to control what I use this bandwidth for? When I click on a link, I don't truly know what resources resolving that address will require; it only seems fair that smart consumers can decide to black/whitelist content that they don't want.

[tomkarlo]

I don't disagree that as a consumer you should have the right to choose what gets sent to you - but generally, if you're using a site, you're also consenting to its terms of service (which generally include accepting its ads.) As such, the product IS actually defined for you, and not up for you to define as you see fit. Using it outside of those terms is theft of service.

If you don't want accept those ads, fine, but from an ethical and legal standpoint you shouldn't be consuming its content or using its service, either. This whole "the users are the product" thing sounds great but it's an oversimplification; ultimately, it's the user's consumption of advertising that's the product for an ad-supported site; the user itself (ex ads) is often worthless or less than worthless.

You're making a deal with the provider of the site that you'll consume their product in exchange for also viewing the ads; if you don't like that bargain, don't accept it and don't consume the content.

The fact that you pay for your bandwidth, btw, has nothing to do with the fact that the site also pays for its bandwidth. Your ISP is not using part of what you pay to cover the bandwidth costs of the content provider.

[gradschool]

To take this line of reasoning a step further, you're not really acting in good faith if you view the ads without ever buying the products or services they advertise. The advertiser pays the provider of the site in the expectation of a reasonable conversion rate. If you don't want to buy a certain reasonable percentage of products advertised to you, fine, but from an ethical and legal standpoint you shouldn't be forcing them to waste their advertising budget on you. Doing so diminishes the advertiser's incentive to support the site whose content you're consuming.

Here are some terms of service for you. When you enter into any business venture, you accept the risk of it not succeeding. Wishful thinking notwithstanding, the consumer is under no obligation to indemnify you against it.

[tomkarlo]

Advertisers either pay for impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC) or directly for conversions. They don't pay for conversion rates - if rates are too low, they might not buy CPC or CPM campaigns any more, but you can't generally get a refund for a CPM campaign because your conversion rate was too low (barring clickfraud.)

[klez]

It's like telling me I can't change channels during commercials when watching tv or listening to the radio. This doesn't seem reasonable.

[tomkarlo]

When you change channels, you're no longer consuming the content on that channel. It's closer to using a TiVo to skip the ads in a programming. I do it myself, but it's pretty obvious to me that if everyone did it, it wouldn't scale and they'd find some other way to create revenue like more product placements during the show (which is already happening) that's even more intrusive and obnoxious, because it's unlikely that providers or consumers are going to go a-la-carte.

(This is also why I liked paying for content on iTunes or Amazon - that seems like a more fair deal where I don't get both charged and ads (cable) and I don't have to mess around with using the TiVo to skip ads.)

[jodrellblank]

Is it legally agreed that connecting to a webserver and sending "GET /" and reading the reply is "agreeing to the terms of service"?

If the terms of service included a link to an audio advert, do I have to quiet other sound sources so I can hear the advert?

[tomkarlo]

If you're going to consume the editorial content of the site? The ethical and legal (if not practical) answer is yes. It's your obligation to understand and accept the terms of a service (not just a web site) before using it.

Is that impractical? Yes. But when I rent a car, I don't read the terms either, and they still apply. It's just a result of a world in which we undertake hundreds of "transactions" a day with business entities, all of which have to be governed by legal agreements.

[rglullis]

The thing is, if the product is actually valuable to me, I would spend more money on them that they could ever make from me through ads.

"But wait, what about freemium? Plenty of services remove the ads for paying customers", one might ask. The problem with it is that you now a have false sense of choice:

  1) Free product + ads
  2) Paid product and no ads.

There is a third alternative: free product, adblock, no ads.

Yes, marketing is much more than advertising. But I think that the "advertising" part is what everything else is based on, when it shouldn't. To take on your example, the "press who review products" is, most of the time, dependent on eyeballs to sell ads to. This model is so broken that you either have newspapers going bankrupt or Huffington Post-style blogs, with zero actual content.

If enough people started using adblock, perhaps we would get to a point where the current model would be unsustainable, which would producers to either:

  - Get rid of ad-based services and products, and start charging directly.
  - Improve their ads to make it more relevant to consumers.

[tomkarlo]

"There is a third alternative: free product, adblock, no ads."

By that logic, it's also possible to avoid high grocery bills by sticking some things in your pocket and not paying for them. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a scalable or ethical option.

Google's core breakthrough in advertising was to close the loop and push advertisers towards ads that are relevant to customers, where they know exactly how much they're earning per dollar they spend on ads. Ads have, actually, improved quite a bit over the past 10 years. The famous line was "half of ad spending is wasted, we just don't know which half" (paraphrased)... now they know which half.

To go back to the OP's subject - the reason why retargeting has grown so popular is that it WORKS LIKE A MOFO. Retargeted ads are usually an order of magnitude more relevant and are immensely cost effective in terms of spend versus conversions. The best indicator that someone's interested in buying a Ford? They visited the Ford site.

[rglullis]

If using adblock is unethical, so is torrenting TV shows; and I thought you agreed with me that the MPAA claim is bullshit.

Google is better than the alternatives, sure. It doesn't mean that it is any good. The ads I get on my cell phone are still awful, to the point of discouraging me to use it more.

[storborg]

It's not contradictory to agree that the MPAA's "every pirate is a stolen sale" claim is bullshit, but still think that torrenting TV shows is unethical.

Some may believe that the ethical choice is just to not watch that TV show.

[niels_olson]

> Some may believe that the ethical choice is just to not watch that TV show.

Here's my dilemma: I don't own a TV, I can't be bothered to even try to download, let alone watch. I tried with The Wire, it became a suffering labor to t trough it, no matter how interesting. Mad Men? Good luck. I have no time.

[elithrar]

> There is a third alternative: free product, adblock, no ads.

You're absolutely allowed to do this if you choose, but you should also be aware that it's harming the sites/app that you're obviously visiting. If a site has incredibly intrusive ads, I just choose not to visit it. Most sites I visit respect the user enough to not have crazy pop-over/roll-over ads; as a result, I don't use AdBlock extensions and they get their CPM $.

FYI, here's the Arstechnica article RE: Ars vs. AdBlock, for those interested: http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-d...

[rglullis]

I addressed this in another comment. I have zero tolerance for ads, no matter how "un-intrusive" they are.

Also, it is a matter of signaling: I don't want to reward sites that have a business model reliant on ads. That would give them a very strong incentive to go to the lowest common denominator and just optimize all their work to increase page views.

Ten years ago, we used to complain about the state of "mainstream media" and thought that blogs would be our salvation. But instead of rewarding quality work of bloggers, we decided that it was okay to accept ads. When you get that, you get a popularity contest, and this is why we end up with crap like Techcrunch and Engadget and other AOL-owned "properties".

Ars provides the "premium" service, but what they offer for it? Full-text RSS? It is not worth $5/month. I will just adblock + readability the hell out of their articles.

To sum up: I don't want to hurt the sites, but I do want to hurt the business model. If the websites rely on this failed business model? I'm sorry, but it is just collateral.

[earl]

Dude, were you arsed to see what Ars offers for their $5/month? Because IN GIANT BOLD TYPE, they offer -- and I'm quoting -- "Ad free, premier page layouts."

http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/

So, to summarize:

(1) You don't want to "reward" sites that have a business model reliant on ads

(2) you want their content anyway

(3) when they offer you a trade: pay us $5 and we won't show you ads, you ignore them

Conclusion: you're a cheap dick.

[beeneto]

Please read this http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

[klez]

This is a ransom, not a business model...

[rglullis]

We both looked at the same page. But what is the point of "premier page layouts" if my preferred means of consumption is the RSS feed?

Full-text RSS is the only thing that would interest me, but not $5/month worth of interest.

Conclusion: yo mama is fat.

[dubya]

It's technically possible for sites to not serve content to those who use adblock. I remember arstechnica.com did this once to make a point. I guess if this was widespread, it would turn into an arms race though.

[throw_away]

I'm pretty sure that washingtonpost.com does this now. This URL, for example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-governments-ou... serves content if you have adblock plus turned off, but a registration page if you have it turned on.

[floomp]

I have ABP and could view the article for a few times, then I tried again and I got the registration page. Disabling ABP didn't change that. I have a feeling it's based on how many times you've viewed their site rather than ad blockers.

[zmj]

What makes you think that you're qualified to judge what's relevant to you?

[rglullis]

I hope you are joking.

I am me. I guess that is a pretty strong credential.

[Peaker]

If you just mentally ad-block, are you still denying them?

[Duff]

It's your ethical duty to click!

Seriously though, my local weekly newspaper knows nothing about my habits, but offers ads 10x more relevant than Google, who has been tracking me for a decade.

[fpgeek]

I'm sure your local newspaper offers tons of irrelevant ads as well (mine did once-upon-a-time). I suspect you've learned to pick out the relevant ones and skip the irrelevant ones - which is arguably the dead-tree newspaper equivalent of this proposal.

[zanny]

But your local newspaper is not trying to provide relevant ads. They just take ads from whoever will pay them and put those in the paper. Or am I missing something, such as sarcasm. I am bad with that.

[Duff]

Google is great at targeting with search based ads, but the site-based ads are awful. Google thinks I'm really into gold coins based on me clicking on some story on reddit several months ago.

[Kesty]

Working on a company where 80% of our revenue is because of advertising I disagree.

There are two main difference between the RIAA "every pirate is a stolen sale" and adblock.

1)When you "pirate" something it doesn't mean that you "pirate" everything, while if you install adblock you block the ads on every site.

2)When you "pirate" something it doesn't mean that what you have pirated would have been a legal purchase. But if you go to a website you would have gone there with or without ads. You can say that you won't have clicked on the ad or won't have purhcased anything. But almost 99% of our ads revenue is on impressions and not on click or conversion, so it doesn't really matter if you click or convert the ad.

But, right know, the number of people that use adblock are not that big of a deal (at least on our niche market) that you have to work on fighting it because, right know (for us), it is not worth it.

[MartinCron]

marketing departments are nothing but middle-men between producers and consumers

This is kind of tangential to your point, but a good marketing department is a lot more than just advertising. The role of marketing can include getting an understanding of the market and helping to build the right thing.

[bad_user]

Ads are a monetization platform and you as an individual are not relevant, until most people start using AdBlock.

I do agree that the argument is very similar to piracy arguments told by MPAA/RIAA. When such a thing happens, the smartest thing for businesses is to adapt.

However, for the moment I like the Internet services and websites that I'm using, while I don't like the content or the prices or the restrictions promoted by the media industry. Which is why I'm being a good citizen and so I'm not installing AdBlock.

But this issue cuts both ways. AdBlock when used by a minority, is actually beneficial to websites. Because otherwise that minority would get really annoyed with a lot of them and losing those consumers is worse than not having conversions from them.

So that's another reason why I'm not using AdBlock, because websites that annoy me to the point that I can't take it anymore do not deserve my eyeballs, while those where the ads are promoted with taste do deserve my attention.