What a succinct way to demonstrate why people use Ad/Script Blockers.
HubSpot is geared towards marketers, so I can understand why they push the limits in terms of seeing what they can get away with. But, when you run a content site and you want to send anonymous users Desktop Notifications, you have to ask yourself: "is this really a sustainable way to use desktop notifications, or am I just ruining it for everyone?"
The "fake notification" at the bottom too... How is that any better than those banner ads that pretend to be OS dialog boxes?
It's a shame because it's actually a fairly interesting article with lots of data from their survey. But instead they push users away by being overly aggressive.
FWIW I didn't see the popup. I use both uBlock Origin and NoScript and there is no way in hell I will ever turn them off.
The bad part is getting the popup. Especially for first time I've ever visited their site. Maybe if I was a regular visitor, I might want desktop notifications, but please don't bother a new user with that.
Yes, ads are annoying, a security risk, and obstruct content, but: they also are a deliberate attempt to subconsciously influence my decision making. Saying, "here is this product you may not have known about, here is what it does" is one thing. Showing me pictures of attractive people to trick me into associating <brand> with <good feels> is malicious.
They aren't more malicious than billboards (which of course have been banned in some major cities [1]) or other public advertising, but they are equally malicious. [edit] Having said that, the 'security risk' angle does make online ads more malicious, potentially...
Online ads are not uniquely malicious, although they are more pervasive (even reading a magazine, the page I am actively reading will not have an ad in between paragraphs, though the next page might). I do think modern marketing firms (and often therefore web) have developed more effective -- and therefore bad -- techniques to have the effect they are paid for.
PS. I upvoted you because I don't think it was a bad question. If I had to guess, it may be misconstrued as a [bad] rhetorical question arguing that "you already have to put up with X, so it's pointless/inconsistent/illogical to reduce your exposure to X".
Billboards don't reach into my pocket and try to steal my identification, nor do they spontaneously come-alive and follow me around the city in which I saw the billboard. My TV also knows very little about me.
I work in ad-tech. Let me tell you that online advts has access to a lot of info about you. Much more than you would imagine. So yeah, nobody said TV-ads weren't malicious, but ad-tech is taking it to another level.
FWIW, I "block" TV ads by either watching the show over the internet and paying not to have ads (iTunes, Netflix, etc.), or by recording them on a DVR and skipping the ads. I avoid newspapers and magazines both because of ads and because the need for ad revenue has compromised the quality of the product.
Who says tv and billboards aren't just as malicious? Ad blockers make it easy to purge ads from my online experience. Fortunately, I just don't watch television and when I do, I always mute and look away from advertisements. Billboard advertisements is harder to control since I drive myself everywhere.
I don't watch TV (only Netflix) and wish there was an option for billboard ad blocking. It'd be an interesting art / social commentary project if e.g. Someone started draping black opaque plastic over billboards with drones and put the ABP logo on them. Feel free to steal this idea :)
You should find the support channels at any websites you visit that don't offer ad free viewing options via paid subscriptions or otherwise and encourage them to add support for that. Then you can pay each of these websites individually.
If you're not into that, give some funding to a startup which is working to make micropayments on websites viable to remove ad-enabled content.
If you're not into funding something like that, try creating your own company or means to do that or joining a company which is working to advance ad-free viewing.
Now, if you're not into that, then stop visiting any site which has ads on it.
Lastly, if you're not into that, then suck it up and just view the ads which enable revenue for these sites to run.
1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.
2) I find that ad supported content tends to be not worth paying for. I do pay for subscriptions to magazines and sites that are worthwhile (a paywall is a very good indicator that you're not wasting your time).
> 1) They don't ask for my consent, I'm not going to worry about theirs.
What's your take on this thought experiment:
Imagine a giant barrel of apples on the side of the road with a coffee can next to it. There's a sign that says "Take an Apple, Leave a Penny"
Now imagine you don't carry pennies for moral and/or pragmatic reasons. They're too heavy, or you don't want to support Big Copper, whatever. But you want an apple.
It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.
Let's do a realistic thought experiment that's actually fair:
Imagine you have a movie that you love. It's showing tonight on an over-the-air channel that inserts ads throughout it. You decide to record the show and watch it later.
> It's not really equivalent since you taking one diminishes the number left for other paying customers.
This is why I said a "giant barrel", because serving web pages does have marginal cost to the server owner, and from there you could imagine a situation where your page view does diminish the number of page views left for "paying" customers.
I might fast-forward through the ads, but I wouldn't feel good about it or try to defend it philosophically.
If a website put up an "ad-wall" (click to view!), I would not try to bypass it. Instead, they want the experience to be friction-less, subtle, (or, alternatively, overwhelming and surprising) so I don't quite notice the ad is there, or can't click away fast enough to avoid being influenced by it.
That is malicious by any reasonable definition. They are trying to impose something on me without making it explicit. Shielding myself from such a thing is ethical. With your pennies and apples example, they are not imposing anything on me, they're not performing a bait and switch. We can both engage within the rules established on the sign.
The web existed long before ads. And it had higher quality content, too.
In this ecosystem, ads are parasites. If there is a workable method to filter out the parasites while leaving the rest of a site intact, one should use it.
Though I would like to see a search engine that only returns sites without ads. I suspect the results would be better.
You shouldn't be "forced" to see ads. Quality content can exist with and without ads. But, ads are the price to pay to visit one of these sites with ads. My suggestion was leading towards that if you don't like a site with ads, then don't visit it. As opposed to using an ad blocker as a filtering method.
With respect to "the web existed long before ads" - Water has also existed before water companies. If you don't like to pay them, you can't just hook in directly to their water lines and syphon it off to yourself and bypass payments. You could however go out and get your own. Just like you could create your own news stories, online games, sites etc without ads.
Your search engine idea is a novel one, and it'd be neat to see that exist.
End users having ultimate control over presentation of content is the price to pay for using the web. If a business does not like an end user having control, they can't expect to reject that aspect while still keeping its users. Instead, they can go create their own platform.
I can appreciate the idea that creating an economy makes for sustainability. But I just don't see the merit with regards to web ads. The most noble ad-driven business model is news media, which is already rife with paid placement (and other propaganda) despite the ads - the motivation to profit from both sides is too great. And the most prevalent ad-driven business model is to aggregate creations from users who are not paid. If we were talking about what's right, then such sites should not even exist - they should be users' individual federated websites or even a better non-centralized protocol. But amorally, those sites create needless centralization points in order to profit off being gatekeepers. So users should feel no compunction about also doing self-interested things, like running ad blockers and other privacy extensions.
Nah, it's not my job to make your business viable. Internet business models would be a lot more likely to succeed without ad blockers just like airplanes would be a lot cheaper if gravity didn't exist.
This. If a business stops working because of technological progress, it's not my problem to keep it afloat. We don't have many blacksmiths anymore, so should everyone stop using things made of metal or make their own? Ad tech has been digging their own grave since they started with crap ads, poorly-secured platforms, annoying / malicious experiences...and now they're asking everyone to feel bad for them. Google manages to make an absolute killing with ads, and those don't make my eyes bleed like the ones on most news sites. I guess ads for articles don't work; the value the viewer gets isn't worth the price. Free market blah blah ok so maybe your business isn't viable any longer. Pivot, get acquired, or die, just like everyone else.
Ads break several basic rules of social interaction, namely "Don't offer unsolicited advice to random strangers." It's simply very rude. If I haven't asked you for advice, then you shouldn't be giving any to me. End of story.
It's more like "Don't distract and try to bum money from random strangers without even trying to offer something in return."
This is something the online ad industry has never understood.
Print ads were embedded in an experience that users considered valuable.
Online ads don't even try to offer value. They just want your clicks.
Because they're so rarely associated with the content around them, they're more like idiots screaming in your ear than interesting people you might want to have a conversation with.
So of course people try to filter them out. Why should this surprise anyone?
I for one would like more individuals running their own news website. It would need only relatively few subscribers to keep the lights on in a one-man shop that only pays for the own salary and maybe a press agency subscription.
There are other options. For example, I used to be a poor college student who had no money. I listened to NPR sometimes, but didn't pay. Now I have a good job, and I pay to listen. I don't mind at all that I'm supporting people who can't pay. Some of them will pay eventually, some will continue to get it for free. It's not an either/or proposition.
Honestly I was very fine with just ignoring ads on web pages like I did for a long time, but it's gotten so out of hand in so many ways:
- Risk of downloading malware
- Having to download an additional several megabytes of content I don't even want, but must pay for
- Dark pattern UI to get me to click things I'm not interested in
- Reverse, poorly made UI that's difficult to get rid of (stupid subscription things)
You can argue the ethics of this all day with me but in the end I just don't care. I'm paying for the data pipeline, I'm paying for and maintaining the device that can be infected, and your business model isn't my problem. If you want me to look at ads, make it happen in such a way where it doesn't degrade the rest of the experience. Several websites have done it just fine.
> You can argue the ethics of this all day with me but in the end I just don't care. I'm paying for the data pipeline, I'm paying for and maintaining the device that can be infected, and your business model isn't my problem.
Why not punish those sites economically by draining their resources while providing no new ad revenue? That might actually incentivise them to come up with a better model going forward rather than letting the web slowly degrade into a malicious cesspool that no one reads.
There are several I don't go to anymore because they lock up their content behind "we noticed you're using adblock" walls. Plus, when using an adblocker it's often difficult to tell what it's blocking. Websites just don't have ads for me.
"The effect ad blockers have had on publishers has been tremendous, with advertising organizations estimating that by 2020, $35 billion dollars per year will be lost as a result of blocked ads"
I prefer to consider the amazing things that will be done in 2020 instead of pissing away $35 billion on nothing.
As long as you have more blocking tech than the non-tech-savvy public, you should be fine. Those people now know about ad blocking (they're a little late to the party), so things like ad block killer lists and extra extensions to block blockers should work for another 15 years or so before it becomes enough of a problem that it's worth it for ad companies to respond.
I would like to take the opportunity to plug for my favorite adblocker, Ublock Origin. It doesn't have a whitelist like ABP, and has a very good picker to remove ads in case some sneak through.
Where is the "Because I want to limit what can be shown to my kids " option? Seriously, I run an ad blocker at home strictly because I want to control what advertisers are broadcasting to my children.
I thought this was an excellent discussion (and yes I told the page that it could not send me notifications :-)) I particularly liked that they asked some proactive questions about whether or not people would pay for content. I'm on record as saying that I think this Ad/Adblock war ends with the destruction of free content on the web. Basically the only "free/ad supported" stuff will be stuff that was cribbed by a wage slave in a mechanical turk like situation from other (nominally "pirated" sources). And there will be the 'pay' web which will have some way of distributing money to the decent journalism. I like the Blendle approach so far I hope it can hold up.
I also think the ads the survive are going to be product placement (for brand awareness) that will be ads intermingled with the content, whether it is a billboard being photoshopped into a music video or all the characters in the content using microsoft products, but basically blended into the story. And the other ads will switch to pay per action (CPA) rather than simply clicking.
Could be totally wrong too, we could just end up in click-counter-click hell but I just can't see that as sustainable.
Re: sustainable, it certainly was before everyone was trying to get rich from the Internet, and IMO the content was typically much better back then, since it was published not to make money but to further humanity and spread knowledge. That's the Internet I wish we could go back to, not some free-market micropayment dystopia.
My problem with online ads are that they are too cheap. The company behind the ad I am seeing may have only spent a couple of bucks to get it viewed by a few thousand people.
With ads so cheap, there is no way to distinguish between legit companies and scams/crappy products. With TV ads on popular programs, I know the company at least is good enough to afford the ad.
"Wealthy" or "big" neither equals nor implies "good". The only thing that's certain is that when you buy an advertised product, you're paying a premium to fund their marketing.
I think it is kinda like the handicap principle in biology. The fact that they can afford to waste money on advertising shows that they are 'fit'. I am not saying it is a perfect mechanism, but it does show SOMETHING.
Since it's so cheap, the thing they're good at may very well just be making an ad to get clicks to sell a junk product or service. This also scales very well. Consider Coke; bad for your teeth and causes diabetes. Expensive for what it is and made with junk ingredients. Huge hit with consumers. Advertises like crazy.
Thanks for posting that. I didn't read the article, because as soon as I clicked through, I got a notification about notifications and a banner ad. Closed the tab.
It's funny how different the reaction is on HN from the users they surveyed. Most of the ad blocker users they cited seemed like they would be happy if websites would clean up their ads and make them less prominent or annoying, while a minority would be willing to pay for the content on the site instead. Very few of the ads-are-murder zealots that we usually get around here :).
I'm positively surprised by the rather large mindshare for security concerns among adblock users. I've seen some anti-adblocking campaigns in the past (most recently the ridiculous BlockXIT bullshit from stern.de) and when they try to explain away the reasons for adblocking, they always omit the security concerns. Probably because they are the hardest to invalidate.
I thought this was going to go in a different direction based on HubSpot's ads they run in the "Embedded" podcast: in those, they say they want to get back to the story, too, and that's the extent of the messaging. I appreciate it, and it obviously worked fine for brand recognition, even if I couldn't have told you what they do for a living.
Now, if only Hubspot took their own advice... They say the reason people block ads is because they are annoying, and yet Hubspot has one of the most annoying marketing teams I've encountered. They probably think deluging my inbox with emails is effective, but the truth is, it's annoying to the point that I'm actively turned off.
>"A majority of our respondents also agree that most online ads today don’t look professional and are insulting to their intelligence (63% and 56%, respectively). Ouch. This is practical and addressable feedback: ads should look like some thought was put behind them."
What a lazy conclusion. Can't take this article seriously.
http://i.imgur.com/4hjX71d.png
What a succinct way to demonstrate why people use Ad/Script Blockers.
HubSpot is geared towards marketers, so I can understand why they push the limits in terms of seeing what they can get away with. But, when you run a content site and you want to send anonymous users Desktop Notifications, you have to ask yourself: "is this really a sustainable way to use desktop notifications, or am I just ruining it for everyone?"
The "fake notification" at the bottom too... How is that any better than those banner ads that pretend to be OS dialog boxes?