There are so many problems with ads that I cannot in good conscience offer any other advice than "block 'em all."
• Ad networks can be, and are, used as a malware distribution vector. No one is vetting all the ads. Not the publishers, not the networks.
• They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it.
• Ads are cognitive pollution. It's possible that mass marketing largely doesn't work, but I'm wary of assuming that "ads don't work on me." What if they do? As a matter of hygiene, it's better to avoid them. No, I don't avert my eyes away from billboards (ironic next gen Google Glass application) but I do skip TV commercials.
• Even if they don't work, they're at least distracting from stuff viewers actually care about.
> They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it.
Understandable, but um, if you didn't have those ads, you wouldn't have YouTube. Oh pay for it? Who's gonna pay to watch stupid videos online? Nobody.
Ads are important. Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.
Youtube ads have gotten more and more obnoxious and intrusive as time has gone on. I remember even before adblock was a thing using Youtube and not having to wait 30+ seconds to decide if I want to watch the video or not.
This is not necessarily a reason to block all ads. But if they would make the ads less obnoxious I'd be much more likely to not worry about blocking them.
I haven't seen a youtube ad in years. And I only use Noscript which is partially disabled on youtube, because you need scripts for flash. So I should see ads.
If you could link me a video with an ad it would be awesome, I want to determine the cause.
Oh, yeah. I realize I'm freeloading here and it may not be sustainable.
Although, maybe if it wasn't for centralized video repos, we could host them in some p2p fashion? Torrent has certainly become less popular since the advent of streaming. As an added benefit, such networks would be more resistant to censorship.
> Without them, you'll be paying a membership fee to every site you visit regularly.
I, for one, would be happy to. I'd honestly pay a monthly fee to watch Youtube. I don't use it only for cat videos, I also use it to find new music from artists I've never heard of, watch recordings of concerts I've been to just to relive the moments and so on.
If Youtube would let me pay to make those ads go away, I'd do so without thinking twice. In the absence of the said option, though, yes, I block their ads.
Judging by the huge bitchfest by users complaining because they have to pay $5 a month for Xbox Live Gold just to pay $9 a month to watch Netflix on it, people won't want to pay for their internet connection, and membership fee to the hundreds of sites on line.
Yeah the internet would be better, because nobody but the people who can afford to pay for it would be on... You'd have to have a full time job just to pay the fees to your handful of favorite sites you visit.
You'd not be paying for every site you want to watch. Only those that are most important to you. Also, not everybody using the site would be paying.
If content is supposed to be available to paying and non-paying users, then maybe (in the case of youtube)the payout to content creators would be determined by the upvotes of the paying customers only.
Agreed. Since I'm given the option, I pay $5 a month to support a caster on Twitch sans ads, and I can certainly see paying some amount up to $10 a month to watch YouTube without ads.
However, I'm not given the choice, which just seems silly to me.
This is not true, sites did just fine before the advent of ads, and were actually useful. Some kinds of advertising online aren't even obnoxious, and that's fine too.
For the obnoxious stuff? We can mostly do without. If we drive them to bankruptcy even faster with adblocking, all the better! ;-)
Have you ever wondered what YouTube's bill is monthly just to give you that content for free?
I come from a group of people who run some of the biggest video based sites online, yes people want to watch these stupid videos for free, hundreds of thousands of daily visitors... One guy I know pays $1500/mo just to give stupid 30 second clips to his visitors with nothing but a few ads on the site to support it. No ads? Say bye to these sites, because nobody is gonna work a full time job to give you 30 second cat videos with no compensation at all.
If all the cat videos were to disappear tomorrow, I suspect that most of the 7 billion inhabitants of this planet would somehow manage to fill the gaping voids in their lives with other stupid things.
If we go by some guesstimates and youtube's numbers[1], if youtube were to target 6 billion in gross revenue (slightly up from 2013 gross ad revenue) each of it's one billion monthly unique visitors would have to pay 50 cents a month for youtube access. That's not accounting for the simplification of the hosting platform sans ads (but that might even out, or be eclipsed by taking payment).
So, if 1 in 100 signed up for 5 USD/month access, youtube would still make more (gross) than on ads. 1 in 100 might of course be a far too optimistic conversion rate.
I take a carrot and stick approach to encouraging online and mobile business to stop displaying ads in favor of charging viewers. I take the paid, ad-free option, if one is available (carrot). If not, then I'm running Adblock, so I use the site anyway (stick).
No, they're not. The Internet was designed as a tool for enabling communication, not money-making. Without ads, a lot of the blog spam that exists today would go away and the Internet would be better off for it.
Yes and a lot of very talented people would not be able to focus on doing what they currently do full time (and love to do) as they'll have to worry about making money.
OR
As a content consumer, you'll have to pay for the content directly which is currently available for free.
Yes, I know everyone hates ads and I'll probably get downvoted here too but - You should punish publishers who serve malware, popups, JS & other bad stuff BUT you don't punish ALL the publishers - many of them don't do that and are just fine.
Patreon is another good example of how to survive if there are a decent number of people who genuinely like what you do. See Cara Ellison and Zoe Quinn, for example. It won't make you rich, but that's very much the point.
Also, people whose writing is good enough have the opportunity to leverage their web audiences into purchasers of paid books. For example, Joel Spolsky (joelonsoftware.com) and Michael Lopp (randsinrepose.com) have published books based on their web postings. If you have content that is consistently interesting, people might actually pay to read it. And Spolsky's unpaid writing on the web also paid off through increasing awareness of his various business ventures. Ads aren't the only way to get a return on your writing investment.
If everyone had to pay for the content they consumed:
1) People would be much more selective about their content chocies.
2) They'd likely become that much more productive, wasting less time on crap they don't really want.
3) Good content would then be at a premium (and good content producers paid accordingly).
The internet has been all about disrupting established channels of communication, making it possible for "anyone" to produce and distribute something meaningful. Advertising goes directly against this, by placing value on the "loudness" of the communication. Those with the most money, best equipment, and largest army will be the "loudest."
Don't some of the Adblock whitelists available with the plugin actually do this (Block known bad publishers but leave non-intrusive ads available)?
I'm not certain but I think there is even a checkbox for this in the options? I know I still see some of the Google search contextual ads and I use adblock.
The problem with modern day ad blockers is it is just an all out block every ad. Now if they were blacklist by default instead of whitelist, it'd be better. Nobody ever changes the default settings, so people who serve non-intrusive ads don't ever get a chance to display their ads.
Even if every ad was "well behaved" I'd still block each and every one of them. The privacy implications of being constantly tracked in order to sell me bullshit are too creepy.
Frankly, if your business depends on ads, you should think about a different business model, because the NSA spying thing is partly your fault. There are many things that I already pay for on the web, and many more that I would happily pay for if they offered me an ad and tracking-free experience
I don't consider trackers "well behaved". My reasons for adblock:
1. Security. I don't mind static image ads because the security implications are minor. But running third party code without accountability is scary. (1)
2. Performance. Loading images from a dozen different domains means many dns resolutions.
3. Privacy. This is just creepy, networks watching every page I go to.
There is nothing in advertising that requires all of that. I'm perfectly fine with static locally hosted ads. But the whole industry is based around something else. I continue to use adblock plus despite their "Acceptable Ads" program because I consider it reasonable in requirements.(2) I think there's a lot more room for compromise in allowing ads but no extension makes it easy to address my concerns.
But ABP considers Google ads to be "acceptable". I do not. Google is one of the creepiest companies on the internet to date, and I'd prefer to disappear off their radar entirely
So many comments on this thread parrot the notion that people will just pay for the things that they love, but the math there rarely, if ever, ads up. The fact of the matter is that outside a few exceptions advertising makes more money than charging to use a product or relying on donations. And revenue is necessary not only for servers, but for man hours and ability of the creators to concentrate. No one can pretend that Google would make as much money through any other means of monetization. And people don't often work for free.
There's also value in lowering the barriers to entry, and allowing all people to use or access a program. Say, for example, Google cost $20/month. Would I pay for it? Absolutely. But a lot of my friends wouldn't. My grandma would use yahoo or bing instead. And some of the value that is gained in Google's ubiquity (which is actually quite a lot) goes away. Google would make less money. We might not have gmail, or google docs/drive. Or a self-driving car. Or Google Fiber. Etc. etc. etc.
I'm reminded of the notion of App.net. Sometimes critical mass is inherently valuable, if not part of the core functionality of the product. App.net was originally a pay-to-use Twitter, that a lot of smart people started to use. But it wasn't enough for me to ever find value in it. Twitter was better and free. I'll let them throw ads at me every now and then - it's a great utility and platform. There's no way I would consciously pay enough to use everything that I use online.
It's also easy to say that "No one clicks on ads" or "I never click on ads." Even "I'd be happy to pay for the sites I use." But not everyone using those sites feels that way, so your price would likely be astronomical, or the site would collapse under its own weight. A "pay to not see ads" model might work, but a "pay to use the site" likely wouldn't.
One look at Revenue numbers of Facebook, Twitter, Google, or the recipes site my little sister built (it makes her $150/day) says differently. I admittedly click on ads at tims, especially retargeted ads. Even if you don't, someone does. And they drive sales, otherwise people wouldn't use them.
So consider yourself opted out if you like, but don't pretend like they don't make sense.
> It's also easy to say that "No one clicks on ads" or "I never click on ads."
I would add that the majority of ads in the world are brand advertising -- driving awareness and consideration and not targeting a direct response. If you're planning to watch the Super Bowl today, the Olympics later today, or just about any pro/college sport, it's been largely paid for by ads. Not to mention just about any TV show, news program, newspaper, or magazine. No one immediately runs out to Target when they see a detergent ad, but next time they're in Target or shopping at Amazon (and after receiving many more impressions), the familiarity grants it extra consideration.
Most people are familiar with keyword ads, but not as much with brand ads. There's no need to click -- advertisers pay for impressions, and sites get paid for impressions. A little less than half of Internet ads is from brand/display advertising -- about $22bn in the US alone. But globally there are hundreds of billions more from TV, radio, print, and outdoor that could potentially shift online.
While this is all true and I agree in most respects. I think it behooves the ad sellers to make their ads less obnoxious so that people would be less interested in blocking them.
Or if someone were to start making a program that blocks known bad advertisers but not others. Perhaps blocking everything that isn't text based (all flash/etc ads) so I could still get advertisements but not have to worry about Punching the monkey/kim kardashian/bush/obama/etc.
There will always be places online for people that do not like to pay. The question is, for how long will those places remain good places?
I don't use ADN either, but AFAIK it is used by a rather active "in crowd" here in Germany that is very happy about the paywall barrier of entry, since it keeps out all the spammers and most of the junk.
I don't agree with the conclusion that adblocking is leading to Upworthy style pap articles... Those are engineered for a social media world, to cut through short timelines and attention spans. The ad content is largely unchanged from any other low quality media source. Just like all the low quality how-to pages that were/are churned out to catch long-tail searches when that was the easier meat.
In a few years trends will change, habits will change, and a new paradigm will emerge to attract eyeballs. But here's the thing: the content stratification feared in this post has long since happened. It's the reality of the web, has been for some time, and it's certainly not killing anything that hasn't had the bejeezes kicked out of it by other forces already.
You make an interesting point about the evolution of advertising online... It makes me think of the situation with the recording industry and record sales/pirating.
It seems to me the advertisers are just 'screaming and yelling' that their old business model isn't working anymore and trying as hard as they can not to innovate or 'keep up with the times'.
It is not my responsibility to save your business model.
It may well be that many sites will shut down without ads. That does not obligate me to look at the ads; it only obligates me not to whine when a site I liked shuts down from lack of ad revenue.
This kind of butthurt posts pop up regularly since browser customisations became popular. The main objection is almost always towards users' freedom of choice of software to view web content. It is frightening them that some users with technical ability and will share a solution with others who lack those, often with no strings attached and free of charge, thus preventing people whose livelihoods depend on advertisements to easily dictate how anyone must consume their content. They want to limit my software choices. They want to regulate existing software. They want to decide what I get to see on the screen. Yet when they face resistance, they bring up bullshit arguments such as their content is central to the existence of the internet against all the evidence on the contrary all the while building their businesses on the software built by people who have been succesfully upholding principles such as freedom and decentralisation. No amount of sugar coating will make their arguments pallatable for purveyors of software for freedom and choice thus their feeble attemps will continue. Only way for them to win is to eliminate general purpose computing which is already struggling to some degree in the hands of our oh so totally not evil that icame darlings. If you have read this far, there is a high chance you already know how to navigate marketing bullshit and you don't need my advice anyway.
I will continue to block, and suggest anyone who listens the same, every shit someone else want me to see or run against my wishes for the health of my profession if for nothing else.
I am still amazed when I try to read a simple blog article and am greeted with a blank white page, it turns me right off the site and I go spend my time elsewhere.
I will happily shell out money for content that I like.
The insight here, which the writer doesn’t get to, is the incredible economic inefficiency all of this implies.
Ineffective ads outnumber good ads by at least an order of magnitude, conservatively. By good I mean “delivering economic value”, which might take the form of clickthroughs or general brand awareness.
If we consider clicked ads, or those that eventually result in a purchase, to be good ones, then the rest are a waste.
That waste should be understood as a degradation of the publisher’s product. We go to great lengths to get the typography and design just so – and then allow an economically worthless ad to degrade it.
The opportunity is to improve ads by an order of magnitude. This isn’t a question of eking out slightly better targeting. It means not showing an ad at all, most of the time.
Though the evidence to date is not in my favor, I have to believe that the current state of web advertising is waiting for the bottom to fall out, like print media in the last decade.
Can block, will block. I will advise people to block where possible as well. Why?
The Internet experience is universally shit when there are adverts. The 2% exception to the rule isn't a valid discussion point. Neither is the people delivering content and surrounding it with shit.
My children battling through adverts galore and pushing apps on them using dirty ad network tricks on their iPads is a fine example. Browsing on the devices is fucking horrible to the point they only want to use a desktop with an adblocker. Their school has adblockers. The local library has adblockers. Everyone I know has adblockers.
The model is over. No turd polish or new strategy will help. Advertisers ruined it.
I'd rather go back to gopher and dialups than saw a new paradigm appear.
The only ads that have ever been useful to me, even once, in my entire life, were google search ads. Contextual ads presented to me when I am already looking for something.
Coincidentally, in 2014, those are the only ads I don't block. I really cannot imagine there is any advertisement I would ever value while reading about something else.
Irony - this developer, who seems to have a good understanding of ethics and web best practices, on a post about advert blocking, has a link at the bottom of their sidebar:
"Essay shark - paper writing service!"
This is labelled in the source as an ad. Comparing DNS and IP records suggest it is very unlikely they are related services. Chris also actively lists what they work on,which does not include Essayshark.
Essayshark do, however, appear to have an affiliate scheme. This raises interesting questions given the topic of the article.
This is one of the ads I have on my blog that came through an ad affiliate program. So yes, I have ads on my blog, which is my right as a content creator. You can, of course see this as a conspiracy or something evil. :)
I don't view it as a conspiracy, only a very strange thing to observe, for a number of reasons:
1. The only thing which clearly marks this as an ad is the comment just above it in the HTML. Which is strange for two reasons...
2. The lack of nofollow strongly suggests this isn't just an affiliate link, but a 'paid link exchange'. Of course, you could just be profiting from the affiliation alone, but I'm sure you are aware as an experience web designer that most search engines tend to frown on this sort of thing.
3. By not clearly marking the element as an advert, you are effectively using one of the same tactics that the "most aggressive and horrible ads" use. Yes, plain text is small font is utter love, thank you for that, but given you've just written a blog post about ad blockers, I'm guessing you must have also carefully considered this
4. You outright talk about "dark interaction patterns" - not labelling adverts clearly is one of them ;)
5. A core theme in your post is "think about what appears on your page and how it affects your design". I see no obvious topical connection, and if anything, essay writing services exist for quite the opposite reason typically.
Yes, I'm over-analysing this, and yes, I fully support your attempts to gain a little more income. To be honest, the biggest issue I have is the nature of the link - having many friends working in academia, and being white hat typically myself, I have serious ethical issues with essay writing services, and I do think the juxtaposition of that link with your article is rather strange.
You are totally right, I have moved the blog from my old domain wait-till-i.com to my name about a year ago and realised in November that all my ads got killed that way (see how I game that system) :)
This was the first to come in, and I felt rather torn about it. It was needed to get one in to get the affiliate program (which changed owners in between, another thing that is kind of fishy) kickstarted again.
The good bit about these is that all they want is a link. No JS, no Flash, nothing, which is why I considered them in the first place anyway.
Utterly fair points though, so here's a fat header above them and a nofollow on the link.
Frankly, I just messed this up as my job takes 120% of my time and I hardly ever have a good connection to mess with the internals of the blog. I'd rather write :)
So you adblockers who think the internet should go back to 1994, never use Google? I think the article is spot on. Advertising does and has always supported media distribution technologies since we had media distribution. Today that technology is the web and mobile web, and it is a distributed technology. Either micropaymetns with a bitcoin like tech will be embedded in the browser for you to be ad free, or view ads will be a future choice.
Dodging the means people use to generate revenue - is just naive.
With the way Google has been acting over the last, oh, 5 years or so? Yeah, I try to avoid google for the most part.
I'm firmly in the camp of "You (the server) provide the content. I (my computer) decide which pieces of that content to display. You get no say in what my computer does or does not do." So yes, I block ads. I block javascript. I block flash. I override your CSS. I pick and choose which elements to display. I'm perfectly fine with doing without your content if you make it too inconvenient, because 99% of the time, I don't really need that content anyway, and the other 1%, well, the same content can be found elsewhere.
The the thing that younger people do not understand: I've lived in a pre-internet, pre-cellphone, and for the most part, a pre-personal-computer, world. I know what it's like. I know it's not the end of the world to go back to that. As a result, there's a lot of stuff I'm not willing to put up with.
This.
Anyway, we are not the target of these messages to legitimize the status quo of the ads business (or, even worse, that want to expand the influence on regulatory matters).
We are too old, well past the point where ads may have had a significant impact on our choices, and where media could change radically our point of view.
In other words, we are irrelevant to them and we can continue happily blocking everything, but younger people needs to be brainwashed to keep the current model and to mold the internet into its final form.
No, there's a big assumption that those of us who use ad blockers would miss things that are now delivered "free with ads". That may be true for a lot of people, but it isn't for every one of us.
I admit that I've had useful ads related to databases and hosting. But most of the time, the ads have been too obscene.
I almost feel like puking when I use a public computer. Google has made it better with textual ads, but they still serve those flash ones the literally flash and try to entice the same kinds of things mobile games often cater to.
There's also the past where the computers that had kids that would click on these ads would end up infested. Overall, the web ad industry has made some really dumb mistakes in the past.
Ad networks - if you have shown a heavy flash banner 10 times in a row and I haven't click on it, please get the hint and stop pushing it, I won't click it on the 11th time. Today I'm talking about a blue banner with a developer with his saliva dripping on his desk.
Honestly, Adblock is the world we live in. You can cry and complain that people shouldnt use it, but the fact of the matter is that we will. Unless you plan on somehow forcing this technology out of existence, the solution isnt to not use adblock. The solution is to come up with a better way. If I knew what that way was, I'd be a multi-millionaire at least, but I dont. My main point is that crying or complaining about it isnt going to solve the problem.
Is there seriously a business right here which works thanks to ads ? I mean, do you really know people clicking on these ads ? For me, everything here is just working because people want to pay you so you put ads on your website... But this money, at the end, does not come from money generated from ads, but from... business angels and VCs money !
well Ads are what keeping the internet alive in a very generic sense. The free services we enjoy like google, youtube, twitter, online new sites, are free because of the ads. Blocking them all is like discouraging people to actually produce good content, for eg youtube video creators get a share of money earned by youtube through ads on the video's page, what do you think happens when you watch the video by blocking all the ads? It doesnt affect youtube that much but it makes alot of difference for the creator.
• Ad networks can be, and are, used as a malware distribution vector. No one is vetting all the ads. Not the publishers, not the networks.
• They slow everything down. AdBlock and Ghostery make web browsing faster. Not to mention waiting 30s to watch a youtube video, or worse yet to realize that you didn't actually want to watch it.
• Ads are cognitive pollution. It's possible that mass marketing largely doesn't work, but I'm wary of assuming that "ads don't work on me." What if they do? As a matter of hygiene, it's better to avoid them. No, I don't avert my eyes away from billboards (ironic next gen Google Glass application) but I do skip TV commercials.
• Even if they don't work, they're at least distracting from stuff viewers actually care about.