Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
So let them "hammer". If they can't access the content you've restricted them from, they're not costing you bandwidth/money. What's the big deal?
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This is why adblocking is so important
- Thread starter Christian Klippel
- Start date
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- ad blockers malware
So let them "hammer". If they can't access the content you've restricted them from, they're not costing you bandwidth/money. What's the big deal?
Pup
Philosopher
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2004
- Messages
- 6,679
I have a couple sites with Adsense ads. Their model is payment only when a visitor clicks, anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars. They also have a few pay per view ads, pennies per thousand visitors, usually.
You put in a code for a certain size ad, and they serve the ad based either on the content of your page or the visitor's prior behavior, and maybe other parameters the advertisers set like location of the visitor. There are some options--you can manually exclude certain advertisers or categories of ads--but you can't ever know what specific ad is being shown to what specific visitor because it's custom tailored.
To stop all ads, you just remove the code. It's instant.
Beelzebuddy
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2010
- Messages
- 10,921
If small operators have no choice but to offload their ads to people who serve malware, I would consider that a bigger problem than some fraction of their customer base using adblock.
Minoosh
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2011
- Messages
- 12,901
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.
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rwguinn
Penultimate Amazing
All of this, and nobody mentions the legality of offering something for free (no paywall, no subscription-just a here it is come and see) and then demanding payment (ads) before viewing.
There are some.of those on Facebook, where in order to view something, you have to "share" it first. Pig in a poke, anyone?
There are some.of those on Facebook, where in order to view something, you have to "share" it first. Pig in a poke, anyone?
I don't see a problem with legality for the usual case, and also don't see a demand for payment.
Web browsing is basically: you ask your computer to fetch a page of text from a server, and that page may contain the addresses (links) of some other pages which you're under no obligation have it fetch. They're really the same as any other links you aren't interested in following.
I feel no more guilt over blocking web ads than I do for pulling out and tossing the ads section in a newspaper, even if those advertisers paid good money to stick that in there. Advertisers have no expectations of reaching everyone, and yet they still pay because the fraction of readers they do get is good enough for them.
Mongrel
Begging for Scraps
Sounds more like a restaurant meal, you order the fish with rice and veggies but are in no way obligated to eat the tomato and parsley garnish that it comes with
quadraginta
Becoming Beth
Yes. I know all about all of that. I'm not new to this computer stuff.
You missed my point entirely (and broke the board's page formatting
).Go back and look at the post I was responding to (and quoted). Look at the part I highlighted.
"I think the problem is that the websites aren't the ones in control of the ads."
The website operator has to contract with advertisers to have the ad content on their page in the first place.
If that operator chooses to relinquish control of the space they are contracting to provide for ad revenue then they are very much in control of that choice.
It damn sure isn't my choice, or my problem if the vendors that web page operator chose to contract with put garbage or malicious code in that space.
Well, that is it isn't my problem as long as I control that content before it gets executed on my machine.
That's what ad blockers are for. And NoScript.
Frankly I don't even pay any attention to the stuff that does get let through. It isn't the advertising per se that bothers me.
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Also, I don't have to worry about blinking. NoScript lets me see all of that, whether I let it load or not. It also lets me choose which sites I let it run on, and which ones I don't.
NoScript is kind of a PITA when you first start using it, but after you build up a whitelist of the sites you frequent and which scripts you want to let run on those sites it is pretty unobtrusive.
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jeremyp
Philosopher
There is a difference though. The advertisers have already paid the newspaper for the adverts. The fact that you throw them away has no short term effect on the newspaper's revenue.
If a web site has adverts on a pay per view basis (more accurately: a pay per retrieval from the server basis), by using an ad blocker you are impacting the web site's revenue. However, it's no different to me viewing a web site that uses a pay per click model and not clicking any of the adverts.
Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
I wonder if someone could code an "ad blocker" plugin or application that basically does the same thing as ad blockers traditionally do; only instead of completely stopping the ad script from executing at all, it permits the script to execute in a kind of "closed sandbox" that the user never sees and that the code cannot access your browser or the rest of your computer from. This allows an ad to technically be "served" - it won't actually be visually (or audibly, etc) displayed for the user but the ad server wouldn't know that, it will only see business as usual. The website owners get paid for the "view", the users don't have to see the ads or deal with the effects of any other script the ads might run, and everybody's happy.
Pup
Philosopher
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2004
- Messages
- 6,679
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.
smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
Yes. I know all about all of that. I'm not new to this computer stuff.
You missed my point entirely (and broke the board's page formatting
Sorry on both counts. I guess I misunderstood the question
Fixed the formatting thing. I have a WS monitor (1920 x 1080) and I sometimes forget there are still people around using 800 x 600.
Gord_in_Toronto
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2006
- Messages
- 26,875
DoNotTrackMe reports it is blocking the following for me at the Guardian site:
Criteo
Google Adsense
Optimizely,
Omniture
Quantcast
Twitter Badge
Google Adwords Conversion
Netratings Site Census
Revenue Science
Facebook Connect
So bite me.
They do know I am browsing from Canada -- presumably from my IP address.
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
Sorry for the late reply, was rather busy recently.
No, i am not entitled to their content. Which is why they can block me as much as they want.
However, what i _am_ entitled to is to connect to whatever server i want, because that is what i am paying my provider for. This is how the whole thing works. I request a connection to a server, the connection is established, and data is transferred. Or not, depending on what the server admin/ site-op has configured.
I am also entitled to pick & chose what of said content i want to fully load, view, or otherwise process. Or not want to load, etc.
It really is a simple concept, i'm wondering why people have a problem with understanding it. I pay for net access. Depending on the contract, i may also pay for actual bandwidth/data-volume used. I pay for whatever device i use to access the net. I pay for the electricity to power it. I am fully entitled to decide what to grab and what not to grab from the internet.
Site op's and server admins are entitled to chose who they want to allow to connect and to block whomever they don't like. They are entitled to offer whatever data they want to offer, but they are not entitled to force the user to accept any of that data.
Given the fact that they very obviously don't give a damn what stuff they pump onto a users machine, and are also very obviously either unable or unwilling to check that stuff first, they should be ashamed to even utter the words "but ad revenue! blocking ads would kill us!" As long as they refuse any liability whatsoever for the crap they hand out to users, while happily cashing in on the money that crap brings them, they are nothing but a bunch of little whiners to me.
Greetings,
Chris
Greetings,
Chris
No, i am not entitled to their content. Which is why they can block me as much as they want.
However, what i _am_ entitled to is to connect to whatever server i want, because that is what i am paying my provider for. This is how the whole thing works. I request a connection to a server, the connection is established, and data is transferred. Or not, depending on what the server admin/ site-op has configured.
I am also entitled to pick & chose what of said content i want to fully load, view, or otherwise process. Or not want to load, etc.
It really is a simple concept, i'm wondering why people have a problem with understanding it. I pay for net access. Depending on the contract, i may also pay for actual bandwidth/data-volume used. I pay for whatever device i use to access the net. I pay for the electricity to power it. I am fully entitled to decide what to grab and what not to grab from the internet.
Site op's and server admins are entitled to chose who they want to allow to connect and to block whomever they don't like. They are entitled to offer whatever data they want to offer, but they are not entitled to force the user to accept any of that data.
Given the fact that they very obviously don't give a damn what stuff they pump onto a users machine, and are also very obviously either unable or unwilling to check that stuff first, they should be ashamed to even utter the words "but ad revenue! blocking ads would kill us!" As long as they refuse any liability whatsoever for the crap they hand out to users, while happily cashing in on the money that crap brings them, they are nothing but a bunch of little whiners to me.
Greetings,
Chris
Greetings,
Chris
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
It depends. There is malware that requires explicit user interaction, but there is also malware that requires none at all (drive by downloads). The former exploits the stupidity of the user, while the latter exploits security holes and bugs in the operating system, browser and plugins.
Greetings,
Chris
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
And i pay for internet access, the computer accessing it, the electricity to power the computer. Oh, and i also pay for the ads that they want to shove down my throat. Why? Because i buy stuff. All the money that companies spend on ads is already priced into the goods they sell. In short: i already paid for it, and just decide not to see it. If they in turn screw over the site-ops, well, then it is those two parties that have a problem with each other.
Greetings,
Chris
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
Indeed. While i don't have any hard stats on that, i just look at the growth of the number of servers on the net, and have to conclude that few, if any, go out because of ad-blockers. Heck, i even go so far and say that it would be virtually unnoticable if half the servers on the internet went away in an instant. Why? Because for every website one may like out there, there are usually a dozen others that offer the same or similar content. Yes, i know that people have preferences and it's sometimes not easy to replace a particular site with another. But in the grand scheme of things?
Greetings,
Chris
You've paid for the ads for what you've bought, but not for ads for what they want you to buy. Someone out there has to buy all those Turnip Twaddlers!
elgarak
Illuminator
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2003
- Messages
- 4,472
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.
quadraginta
Becoming Beth
You've paid for the ads for what you've bought, but not for ads for what they want you to buy. Someone out there has to buy all those Turnip Twaddlers!
You've got that backwards. What you bought pays for future ads. They haven't gotten any revenue for the stuff they didn't sell yet.
We're dumping ads we already paid for.