This is why adblocking is so important

[quadraginta]

As someone who used to be a paid content provider, I appreciate this insight.

ETA: I'm a primitive. A former print journalist. You could leaf past the full-page furniture ads in the news sections, or the small and sometimes risque ads in the sports section. That financed a cadre of working journalists, many of whom were providing content of middling quality. But it also financed investigative journalism. In 2008 the ad revenue dropped off a cliff and newspapers were left with no ads while electronically they were giving away premium content.

There was something lost in that tradeoff. If people are happier without the premium content than no market for it exists. If you are interested in the harder-to-nail reaches of investigative content, it has to be financed somehow.

In my completely biased, yet relatively humble opinion.

I'm not sure print ads in a newspaper are a very good analogy to web ads.

They don't infect your house and vandalize things.

 

[smartcooky]

One additional point: The ads are commonly sent to me from a different server than the one I'm asking to connect with. For me, that's one of the essentials of adblocking: Do not send me stuff from another server you don't control.

'
100% THIS!

I get really pissed off with sites that either don't completely load or take ages to load because my browser is waiting for some ad-server that might be down or running slow. For example, http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com use to hang the browser loading a forum I use, With ad-blocking, the site loaded straight away.

 

[elgarak]

'
100% THIS!

I get really pissed off with sites that either don't completely load or take ages to load because my browser is waiting for some ad-server that might be down or running slow. For example, http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com use to hang the browser loading a forum I use, With ad-blocking, the site loaded straight away.

I told the story before: I'm frequenting a popular German news site. I was accessing it without adblocking all the time, precisely because I thought I should be a good boy and having the ads provides revenue.

There was a creep. The ads were getting bigger, and more in your face. Then there was the point where accessing the page was a pain, since there was a popup ad that wouldn't run on my machine, blocking access to the content. The ads were on a shuffle, so with reloads you could get around the offensive ones, but it was a pain.

I installed an adblocker. It's the only way you can access this particular site. By now, their quality has gone so much downhill that I don't access them often anymore. Not sure if those two things are related or not.

 

[Checkmite]

Um...

The advertisers would notice that their revenue per thousand views is dropping. They would not be happy. I've also paid to run ads, and you watch that like a hawk, because the margins are so thin. So advertisers would soon realize--even if they didn't know that 10% of their ads were actually no longer being seen by humans--that their ads were acting as if they were being shown to fewer people. A thousand ad views would no longer be worth the same, and they'd start bidding less.

Cheating advertisers works in the short run, but the market soon adjusts.

Now, that said, adblockers don't have as much effect as people fear, in my opinion, because anyone who goes to the trouble of installing one is probably not going to be clicking on ads and buying things. But at least they're fair and honest. The advertiser isn't fooled into paying for an ad view that never happened.

Loading ads invisibly, and charging advertisers per 1000 loads the same as if they were visible, is like creating a bot (or hiring uninterested humans) to randomly click on ads and charging the same for those clicks as if people were clicking out of genuine interest. Pay-per-click ad networks that don't have safeguards in place against that have lower-paying ads, because advertisers bid lower, knowing more cheating is going on.

I really can't see the difference.

As you say, a person who downloads ad-blocking software wouldn't have been clicking the ads anyway. I honestly don't see how a person running a program such as the kind I proposed would contribute to a trend of lessening ad revenue any more than if they allowed the ads to be served to them normally and just ignored them. There should not be a difference between the two activities - an ad which is served invisibly, and an ad which is served visibly but ignored.

 

[Pup]

I really can't see the difference.

As you say, a person who downloads ad-blocking software wouldn't have been clicking the ads anyway. I honestly don't see how a person running a program such as the kind I proposed would contribute to a trend of lessening ad revenue any more than if they allowed the ads to be served to them normally and just ignored them. There should not be a difference between the two activities - an ad which is served invisibly, and an ad which is served visibly but ignored.

First, because I don't know... am I correct that blocking does not serve the ad and therefore it's not counted for the advertiser? In other words, if 1,500 people view the page, but 500 have ads blocked, the advertiser would pay for 1,000 views.

But with the invisible serving, 1,500 persons would view the page, 500 would not see the ad, but the advertiser would pay for 1,500 views because that's the number of ad loads.

If that's the way it works, I can defend my position. But if the advertiser pays for 1,500 views in both cases, I'll retract my position.

However, if the goal is not to cheat the advertisers, what's the advantage over regular ad blocking? The purpose of the proposal included the provision "The website owners get paid for the 'view'," as if that was different from regular ad blocking.

Here's the problem, if advertisers are paying more. Neither the viewer nor the advertiser knows who will click or not click until the ad is shown. People with ad blockers are probably statistically less likely to click, but it's a game of odds. An advertiser might create an exceptional ad that's enticing enough for even those who block ads to click on, if they only saw it. If he's paying for those invisible "views" but his ads are hidden, he's being cheated out of those clicks.

 

[Christian Klippel]

And the malware-through-ads fun continues:

http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/youtube-ads-lead-to-exploit-kits-hit-us-victims/

I'm really wondering when the online-ads industry will finally wake up and do something about it. After all, this isn't exactly a new problem. But i guess the money to be made by extensive tracking of users is too much. Otherwise we already would have an easy fix: deliver ads, which are checked for malware and other crap, from the local server that also delivers the main site content. And that's not even a new fix, it would be the way it had been done before the ad-monkeys decided to spy on people and track them wherever they go.

Security be damned if there is some money to be made!

Greetings,

Chris

 

[Donal]

I'm really wondering when the online-ads industry will finally wake up and do something about it.

When ad blocking on mobile devices becomes functional. Like, 5 years after that and all the independent sites and developers are gone and they can only deal with major media conglomerates that could probably just do their stuff in house.

After all, this isn't exactly a new problem. But i guess the money to be made by extensive tracking of users is too much.

and the effort to do otherwise isn't worth it.

Otherwise we already would have an easy fix: deliver ads, which are checked for malware and other crap, from the local server that also delivers the main site content. And that's not even a new fix, it would be the way it had been done before the ad-monkeys decided to spy on people and track them wherever they go.

But there is a reason they stopped doing it that way. You're putting more back on the content creators.

I think we as consumers should go to the sites that only use reputable methods of revenue generating. Pay walls, approved ad networks, merchandising etc etc. But, we HAVE TO go with them. We can't be completely passive about it, otherwise, the web as we know it will change for the worse.