Seems like a losing battle for publishers. I use ad-block, and if sites try too hard to get around it (or complain too much), I just close the tab.
At this point it’s not even the advertisements themselves as much as it’s the shady behind the scenes stuff that goes along with it, and gut feeling is that the ones complaining the most about ad-block are probably the worst with tracking and private info gathering.
Every time a publication asks me to disable adblock, I close the tab. I don’t think I’m missing much. I understand that they need to make money, but that’s not my problem. My problem is that having ads degrades the experience to a level wherein I no longer wish to view the content. I’m not willing to give up my privacy in return for access to their load of clickbait crap.
What should they do? I don’t know. The position of town crier has been obsoleted by technology. I expect that in order to circumvent ad blockers they are going to start delivering content from their own domains. Hopefully that content will be more respectful of users.
This argument always annoys me. Of course I know publishers need to make money. I encourage them to come up with business plans that enable them to do so. The mere existence of a business plan doesn’t require me to support it, though. For my part, I do everything in my power to make advertising not such a plan, because it’s inherently a social ill and incredibly egregious in the modern anti-privacy era.
It also is kind of amazing how bad the ads have gotten. There are now ads on “reputable” sites that seem like they should belong on a porn or piracy site: close-ups of women’s “assets,” sexual innuendo, purposefully gross close-ups, even gore sometimes. It’s distasteful, and it degrades the content that it’s attached to. My only qualm with using uBlock Origin is that it can help shade my expectations if I can see whether these types of ads are included in the page.
maybe publishers shouldn’t use such AWFUL advertisements. If they were put on a billboard they’d be taken down but god forbid I don’t want to see that crap on a website.
There are millions of products and services out there and matching them with consumer who might benefit from them is essential. I think that advertising is very much needed. That being said … with all the technology and tracking the ad industry does they are not able to provide a service functioning at a basic level.
Let me give them a few tips:
If I’m not interested in something then it’d be rational to stop offering me it (at least for some time) and try offering something else.
Ads in printed newspapers don’t affect the reading experience as negatively as online. It might be a good idea not to distract readers from actual content and offer ads in a more gentle manner.
I enjoy a good ad even if I’m not interested. Sometimes they’re funny or carry a message.
After I bought RubyMine it was really dumb to hound me with RubyMine ads all over the Internet.
They used to be better than this (I think printed ads are of much higher quality). I think the first step to fixing this mess is understanding the cause. Is it because of the medium (web) that makes tracking easy? Is it because publishers are still learning their readers' preferences (unlike printed ads they haven’t been around for ages)? Something else?
I have no idea what the reason is but it seems like an interesting research project at the intersection of economics and technology.
A problem with web ads is that most of the time, I really am not looking to buy anything. I don’t want it. So trying to “match products” with me is a complete waste of bandwidth. They’re not even trying to solve a problem I have. They are just spamming me.
And when I am actually looking to buy something, most of the ads I get are completely irrelevant. Only Amazon occassionally comes close to offering me something relevant with their sponsored products and such, because they know what kind of products I am browsing. Unfortunately, even then I never bought one of these sponsored products. Not close enough. They don’t really know what I want.
I don’t see ads solving anything for me, as a consumer. Not before online shops first get their product descriptions and search right. A lot of the time they’re just wrong or incomplete or otherwise useless. If even a shop cannot provide me with enough relevant information about a product I am looking at/for out of my own volition, then how could an ad ever do better? Only by chance, I think. Looking for a needle in a .. fucking 20 acre hay field.
Given that on top of all that the tech is indeed annoying, distracting, tracking me, consuming resources, potentially distributing exploits, etc. then yes I will block ads. No, they don’t lose any clicks, I wouldn’t click anyway (except by accident when they pull a nasty trick on me). But it is the problem of irrelevance that is really enough to make me block ads.
What bothers me the most is that Amazon seems to have made it harder and harder to get my recommendations - it used to be easy to browse 300 recommended ebooks, now I can only see 10 (on my android phone anyway) and half of them will be the same self-published series. They actually had a form of advertising that I would go out of my way to look at, and buy from regularly - do they not want my money?
I agree with everything you wrote except the first paragraph. Are you sure you aren’t looking to buy anything? How about food, clothes, housing, transportation (be it public or private), TV, movies, newspapers, books, mobile plans, taking your significant other to a restaurant, movie theater, and a thousands of other things? Buying is so pervasive we don’t notice it. Regarding matching, would it be bad if Amazon matched you with Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security or Secure Architectures with OpenBSD? Maybe you wouldn’t buy them but I’m not sure whether you’d think it’s bad to know a book like this is out there in case you need it.
The problem is online ads are completely irrelevant for reasons that I don’t understand. It seems they can collect much more data than offline advertisers yet fail to capitalize on it tremendously.
Seems like a losing battle for publishers. I use ad-block, and if sites try too hard to get around it (or complain too much), I just close the tab.
At this point it’s not even the advertisements themselves as much as it’s the shady behind the scenes stuff that goes along with it, and gut feeling is that the ones complaining the most about ad-block are probably the worst with tracking and private info gathering.
Every time a publication asks me to disable adblock, I close the tab. I don’t think I’m missing much. I understand that they need to make money, but that’s not my problem. My problem is that having ads degrades the experience to a level wherein I no longer wish to view the content. I’m not willing to give up my privacy in return for access to their load of clickbait crap.
What should they do? I don’t know. The position of town crier has been obsoleted by technology. I expect that in order to circumvent ad blockers they are going to start delivering content from their own domains. Hopefully that content will be more respectful of users.
This argument always annoys me. Of course I know publishers need to make money. I encourage them to come up with business plans that enable them to do so. The mere existence of a business plan doesn’t require me to support it, though. For my part, I do everything in my power to make advertising not such a plan, because it’s inherently a social ill and incredibly egregious in the modern anti-privacy era.
It also is kind of amazing how bad the ads have gotten. There are now ads on “reputable” sites that seem like they should belong on a porn or piracy site: close-ups of women’s “assets,” sexual innuendo, purposefully gross close-ups, even gore sometimes. It’s distasteful, and it degrades the content that it’s attached to. My only qualm with using uBlock Origin is that it can help shade my expectations if I can see whether these types of ads are included in the page.
This is how I feel about pages that require me to whitelist them in NoScript, except I do make exceptions now and then.
So uBlock Origin is heads above Adblock/ABP. Color me surprised.
maybe publishers shouldn’t use such AWFUL advertisements. If they were put on a billboard they’d be taken down but god forbid I don’t want to see that crap on a website.
There are millions of products and services out there and matching them with consumer who might benefit from them is essential. I think that advertising is very much needed. That being said … with all the technology and tracking the ad industry does they are not able to provide a service functioning at a basic level.
Let me give them a few tips:
They used to be better than this (I think printed ads are of much higher quality). I think the first step to fixing this mess is understanding the cause. Is it because of the medium (web) that makes tracking easy? Is it because publishers are still learning their readers' preferences (unlike printed ads they haven’t been around for ages)? Something else?
I have no idea what the reason is but it seems like an interesting research project at the intersection of economics and technology.
A problem with web ads is that most of the time, I really am not looking to buy anything. I don’t want it. So trying to “match products” with me is a complete waste of bandwidth. They’re not even trying to solve a problem I have. They are just spamming me.
And when I am actually looking to buy something, most of the ads I get are completely irrelevant. Only Amazon occassionally comes close to offering me something relevant with their sponsored products and such, because they know what kind of products I am browsing. Unfortunately, even then I never bought one of these sponsored products. Not close enough. They don’t really know what I want.
I don’t see ads solving anything for me, as a consumer. Not before online shops first get their product descriptions and search right. A lot of the time they’re just wrong or incomplete or otherwise useless. If even a shop cannot provide me with enough relevant information about a product I am looking at/for out of my own volition, then how could an ad ever do better? Only by chance, I think. Looking for a needle in a .. fucking 20 acre hay field.
Given that on top of all that the tech is indeed annoying, distracting, tracking me, consuming resources, potentially distributing exploits, etc. then yes I will block ads. No, they don’t lose any clicks, I wouldn’t click anyway (except by accident when they pull a nasty trick on me). But it is the problem of irrelevance that is really enough to make me block ads.
What bothers me the most is that Amazon seems to have made it harder and harder to get my recommendations - it used to be easy to browse 300 recommended ebooks, now I can only see 10 (on my android phone anyway) and half of them will be the same self-published series. They actually had a form of advertising that I would go out of my way to look at, and buy from regularly - do they not want my money?
I agree with everything you wrote except the first paragraph. Are you sure you aren’t looking to buy anything? How about food, clothes, housing, transportation (be it public or private), TV, movies, newspapers, books, mobile plans, taking your significant other to a restaurant, movie theater, and a thousands of other things? Buying is so pervasive we don’t notice it. Regarding matching, would it be bad if Amazon matched you with Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security or Secure Architectures with OpenBSD? Maybe you wouldn’t buy them but I’m not sure whether you’d think it’s bad to know a book like this is out there in case you need it.
The problem is online ads are completely irrelevant for reasons that I don’t understand. It seems they can collect much more data than offline advertisers yet fail to capitalize on it tremendously.