It's painful to see so many intelligent people unable or unwilling to analyze the effects their actions cause. If you block ads on sites you enjoy without communicating with the producers of that site, you are lowering the probability that sites you enjoy will continue to be produced. There are several ways to mitigate this effect if you don't like ads:
1) Pay for a subscription.
2) If no subscription is offered, ask for one to be offered.
3) If you'd simply like less offensive ads, ask for less offensive ads.
Taking actions that in sum lower the probability of things you like being produced in the future is incredibly stupid.
"The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to."
Ars Technica doesn't expect you to look at their ads. They expect you to render their ads or pay for a subscription. If you choose to do neither of those, you are a parasite.
Do you realize, that not blocking the ads but simply ignoring them just pushes "the hurt" down the chain? In this debate let's not forget the whole point of advertising—to sell some product. So someone pays money for ads, some site gets them, maybe for clicks, maybe for just views. The point is that if I see/click on the ad but don't buy the product advertized then site owner profits on acciunt of ad buyer.
So what's next—the urge to feel guilty if you don't buy everythig you saw an ad for?
It is about time to end this obsession with ads as the only way to monetize…
Sorry, I don't buy it. Advertisers do not expect to get a purchase for every view, they're just trying to get your attention so they can pitch you their business idea. If they're able to get you to listen, and you think that the advertiser's service adds value to your life, you might pay for it. If not, your lack of a purchase is a statement to the business that, yes, you understand their service, but it's not helpful to you. If everyone does this, the advertiser's business model probably isn't very good, just like a brick-and-mortar store that lots of people walk through without buying anything. This is the way business works, if you can't get a profitable number of people interested enough to spend money, your business fails.
OTOH, every time you load an Ars page without loading the ad, you cost them money and deny them revenue. This time, Ars is the business, and you're confirming that their service provides value in your life, but you're refusing to pay the cost that goes along with this benefit: allowing an ad to load. It's definitely not stealing, but it doesn't seem that far off to me. Comparing this to "hurting" businesses by just not being interested in the product they provide seems ludicrous.
Ignoring ads doesn't hurt anyone. Ads have been ignored for centuries.
If you think a site you enjoy has a business model that sucks, shouldn't you tell them? Passively making their business model even less effective will make them less likely to exist in the future. It is a dumb thing to do.
We're all parasites of society in some sense. If we didn't have a technologically complex world, Ars wouldn't have an audience. Maybe they should be paying us for having anything to write about at all!
I think community sites and subscription sites will be there to fill the void when ad-driven sites go down in flames. Apparently Ars is still in business though.
I won't shed any tears or feel any guilt if sites fail, because I think people will produce content for free. I think creation and dissemination of information is a basic human drive for a sufficient subset of the population to keep all of us "parasites" well fed. If you can figure out a way to get paid for it, good for you, but don't think you can demand that I experience the world through your ad utopia. I refuse to live on your terms.
Taking actions that in sum lower the probability of things you like being produced in the future is incredibly stupid.
I don't think it's particularly stupid because the actions of an individual choosing to block ads will have a negligible impact on a site, whereas viewing the site without annoying advertisements will provide a more favorable experience for that user.
Hence, from the position of the individual ad blocking is a rational choice.
(I'm aware that in aggregate this leads to sites folding, but I'm talking purely from an individual perspective. Tragedy of the commons and all that.)
"I don't think it's particularly stupid because the actions of an individual choosing to block ads will have a negligible impact on a site, whereas viewing the site without annoying advertisements will provide a more favorable experience for that user."
Adblock plus gets almost 1,000,000 downloads per week (you can check this out on the Mozilla website). This is no longer just a few individuals blocking ads.
It takes no effort for you to view an advertisement. Viewing something that may only take a few seconds of your time will help the site you are visiting and keep them running. Now that you are blocking it, the site will never know if you like or hate a particular ad and will continue to show bad ads.
3rd party javascript ads hosted on ad servers should be blocked. The majority of them disrespect web site viewers, so it is a rational decision for web site viewers to block them.
If a site is running ads that they don't mind being associated with and are worthy of reader's attention, they shouldnt mind hosting them directly from their webserver as content.
Inform sites which you enjoy of this opinion. If you don't, you're just reducing the probability of sites you like existing in the future, which is stupid.
I won't need to, technology will naturally evolve this way.
Sites will just make a simple technology switch and host ads from their own domain rather than from 3rd party ad servers in the same manner as they host content.
-The sites will make more money as there is no way to block the ads.
-The sites will make more money as they will not allow low click through spam.
-The viewers will have a more pleasant experience. The site will be less likely to host malicious ads, scams, and annoying attention grabbers on their own servers.
In conclusion, AdBlockers are a disruptive technology that are actually making the web a better place.
It's amazing the lengths people will go to in order to justify their actions. If you actually believe passively blocking ads is increasing the probability that content you enjoy will be produced in the future, you're delusional. Sharing your feelings with the sites you enjoy would clearly be a much better thing to do.
You are a programmer. If you have so much faith in the model you're suggesting, build and sell software that will allow publishers to do it.
Hmm, can't do impression-based ads because the advertiser would have to trust the website to accurately report impressions. But click-based ads should work fine.
This would all be very well, if I cared enough about the majority of sites. For example if HN would start popup ads, I might communicate. Most other sites first have to make me like them enough, and they don't do that by pushing obnoxious ads.
For what it's worth, I wish all those people complaining would indeed just block their entire site for people with ad blockers. I don't even want to see their sites anymore.
Or at least they should have a warning splash page: "warning, if you proceed to this site, you are stealing from us - OK/Cancel".
How does hosting the ad from their own website increase the chance an ad won't disrespect web site viewers? Just because the ad is hosted elsewhere doesn't mean the ads will be any better.
If thy host them themselves then the website has to develop trusted analytics on the who saw the ad. Who clicked on the ad. Who bought something using the ad.
All of these analytics are what make internet advertising worth it. Without it most companies wouldn't bother. And that just increases the cost for the content producer. Now instead of just being a content producer he has to be an advertising analytics expert. What you suggest is not a solution it's a step backward.
People seem to want to have their cake and eat it too whenever this comes up. The fact is your favorite site has to make money in 99% of the cases. It has only 2 potentially viable ways to do this. And of the 2 only 1 has been shown to be consistently viable in almost every place it's tried. That 1 is advertising. Subscriptions and micropayments have only worked in few outlier cases.
So if you like your favorite site and want to use it then suck it up and live with the fact that they have to advertise in order to be there.
They WILL advertise. Just not via ridiculously-easy-to-block 3rd party javascript streaming ads. If the ads are displayed by the same method as the content, then they are obviously unblockable.
Sites will instead become a direct seller of the commodity of time units of ad space. The buyers will be advertisers. How can commodities be efficiently allocated between many buyers and sellers? It's called a market. If you've read one economics book you'll be able to come up with 10 possible business ideas from here.
Those same economics books also will show the inevitability of middle men. The internet started with exactly the model you describe and evolved to it's current state. Expecting it to devolve back down is not a strategy I would back.
Correct by posting these comments I have been promoting the idea of middle men such as ourselves to create ad markets for direct participation by buyers and sellers (individuals and firms). I meant that the flavor, i.e. whether modelled after matchmaking services, auction sites, or the stock market doesn't matter there are plenty of options for ideas that could work.
Full disclosure: I currently although not for long work on the Google Affiliate Network which pretty much does exactly that. Most affiliates host the ad themselves.
1) Pay for a subscription.
2) If no subscription is offered, ask for one to be offered.
3) If you'd simply like less offensive ads, ask for less offensive ads.
Taking actions that in sum lower the probability of things you like being produced in the future is incredibly stupid.
"The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to."
Ars Technica doesn't expect you to look at their ads. They expect you to render their ads or pay for a subscription. If you choose to do neither of those, you are a parasite.